Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Deadly First Date Dinner, Drinks, Dismemberment- The Sade Robinson Murder

Episode Date: April 28, 2024

Sade Robinson is having fun on her first date with a new guy. They pose together and post the picture to social media. Sade has no idea she only had hours to live. On this episode of Body Bags Joseph Scott Morgan will explain how the killer sealed his fate trying to destroy evidence with fire.    Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Transcribe Highlights  00:22.97 Introduction Milwaukee  05:01.65. Talk about Jeffrey Dahmer  07:29.72 Discussion of dismemberment  09:53.60 Talk about getting rid of smell with tires  14:06.81 Discussion of finding leg   20:10.93 Talk about remains being compromised   25:18.19. Breaking down the timeline   30:30.67. Discussion of other women missing  34:38.48 Talk about fire inside a car  36:38.64 Discussion of witness who saw person use lighter to start car fire  39:33.42 Conclusion – how remains will tell what really happened to Sade See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. In 1994, I had the good fortune of being tasked with being part of a group. It was a group that was actually established by the National Institute of Justice through the Federal Justice Department. And what we were tasked with was designing the national standards for medical legal death investigators nationwide. And I got to tell you, out of everything I did in my career, pretty doggone proud of that. You guys can go look at them. They're available there.

Just go to NIJ.gov and you can search it out. It's there. But you know, part of that journey to developing those standards which was roughly about a I don't know probably about a three-year process was the travel that I had to do and out of all the cities that I traveled to while I was developing these my favorite soon became Milwaukee Wisconsin and Milwaukee for those of you that don't, is a neat place by virtue of the fact of there's so many cultures there and particularly German and Polish culture. And growing up in the South, I was never really exposed to their food that much. And boy, was food great. I really enjoyed it. And I enjoyed the people too and the beauty. We were like actually on the shore of Lake Michigan.

I'd always been to the ocean, you know, through. I'd never seen, even seen the, that was my first introduction to the Great Lakes. And it's just so gorgeous. The water was so beautiful. But, you know, around that same time, there was a real evil that had occurred in Milwaukee in the form of a person named Jeffrey Dahmer. And the guy that headed up the committee, who was the chief medical examiner for Milwaukee, had handled those cases. Today on Body Bags, I want to talk about something that has just occurred in the last few days in the city that I really love, Milwaukee. And it is a horrific case, a horrific case involving a young woman who was right on the cusp of entering into full adulthood, making her way in this world.

And unfortunately, she died at the hands of an apparent monster who wasn't just satisfied with killing her. He also felt the need to dismember her. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Dave, you've been to Milwaukee. I have not. You have not? No. It's a cool trip. I felt, I've been to Chicago. Chicago felt a bit overwhelming to me. It's so spread out. It's really big. I don't think people really realize how close Milwaukee and Chicago are. It's so spread out. It's really big. I don't think people really realize how close Milwaukee and Chicago are. It's literally travel northward on the interstate and you will eventually hit

Milwaukee. And it's, uh, it was constant itself is a beautiful state, green, lush, rolling Hills. I found the people to be very friendly. And if you enjoy beer, it's a great place. And if you enjoy beer it's a great place and if you enjoy german food oh my lord it is incredible very rich right and since this time since back in 1994 i've been back up there many times and have just fallen in love with the place love going up there and checking it out you have to wonder how can a place that is so beautiful that you have such fond memories of that has so much history, how can it be home to two of the sickest murderers, Jeffrey Dahmer and now Maxwell, allegedly Maxwell Anderson? Yeah. How is that possible? Yeah.

I think about that as well. We know that there's evil out there. But you know what, Joe? Until this evil took place, it was exactly as you're explaining. It was for Sade Robinson. She was excited about a first date with the guy. Sade is a wonderful, smart, a person everybody liked. The person who never called out at work.

Everybody liked work. Everybody felt like the world was a better place with her in it. And she was excited. She was talking to people about this date she was going going on when they were texting back and forth between her and Maxwell Anderson, you know, about where to eat. She said,

I'm feeling seafood, feeling seafood. So he takes her to a place he used to work. That's where they went to eat seafood. And she goes on this date, just like anyone else goes on a date. They had a fun time. They eat dinner.

They then go and have a couple of drinks. Just being together, getting to know one another on a first date, it seemed like they're having a great time. I think actually the bartender saw these two at the bar, didn't they, Dave? Yes. They weren't fighting or anything, were they? No. Again, it was a great

first date it was it was a great first date on every angle except for how it ended and how it ended was they go back to his apartment now i point this out it was a great first date they hadn't they they didn't meet it wasn't a blind date i mean it wasn't like they had no communication beforehand they had you know they had built up a time together communicating with one another to leading up to this first date and then the first date goes well and they end up going back to maxwell anderson's place that's how so you know the date wasn't crazy they weren't violently fighting with arguing or anything else they well they don't have any history they don't have any history i mean you have to have history most of the time in a relationship right fight about something. I mean, where are you going to find common ground to fight on? You know, I mean, this is a first date. You wouldn't with it. Yet it can, it can also have this type of behavior that goes well beyond anything you and I would

ever imagine. But now Joe, ever since we went to crime con last fall and did the show about people being dismembered, right? And you talked about this is really becoming common. And here we are again with another episode where a person is accused of luring somebody. And I don't know how else you can prove because of what happened. It's like he had to have been putting a different face forward to her to lure her through the whole night. Very engaging,

very nice. And they go back to his apartment where he then kills her and cuts her up. Very engaging, very nice. And they go back to his apartment where he then kills her and cuts her up. Allegedly. Allegedly, yeah. And then, wait a minute, that's not where the shock ends, Joe. No, he doesn't just leave her there.

He doesn't just go and dig a hole in the backyard and put, no, he then allegedly starts spreading her body parts around to just be found by people for a shock value. Is the guy writing a script for a horror movie? What makes somebody Joseph Scott Morgan get to the point where it's no longer just enough to cut a body up as somebody you've just had a great date with to cut them up and then make sure that regular people walking the street can find or walking certain areas could find these body parts. And Hey, let me draw a little of attention to myself and set the car on fire so that that can draw attention back to her. That's a fascinating point. It makes me, you know, first off I've covered dismemberment cases and many times dismembered

parts will be packaged somehow and then they'll be deposited into some kind of waste bin. And, you know, where you can have a passerby or a homeless person that's digging in a waste bin and they find this part, you know, it's a big shock. And many times you think, well, the perpetrator is obviously trying to obscure what they've done and they want to put as much distance between themselves and those dismembered remains. But what you're talking about, it actually makes me reflect back to a series of serial killings back in New Orleans many years ago that I worked. I think I caught two. This guy killed a whole series of people, but I caught two. And Dave, this was a really interesting finding. When he would kill, he would but I caught two. And Dave, this was really interesting, interesting finding. When he would kill, he would kill prostitutes. And when he would kill them, first off, he would redress them and only in their underwear.

And the underwear was always turned inside out. And forgive me, I can't remember the diagram, the name of the diagram, but do you know the drawing that Leonardo da vinci did that shows anatomical man with the arms spread upward like this and the body makes kind of an x at the big circle and yeah yeah yeah well each one of these bodies dave was in that position leg spread arms extended diagonally upward and he would surround the body with tires. And here's the one thing about that case, and I came to the same conclusion that you just came to about these deposition of remains. He did not want individuals to smell the bodies because you can't smell anything if you've got a huge collection of tires. All these bodies were found in like industrial areas where there'd be like a big deposition of old tires.

So someone would have to visually find these bodies and to a person that discovered these bodies, they were shocked because the body's decomposing and you can't smell it. Past the tire, I actually remember conducting an experiment. We were along an industrial canal in New Orleans and there was a rotten dead catfish. This was on the second case and I picked up the catfish and I put it into the center of a tire just to test this hypothesis. And the more tires are stacked, that I stacked with the catfish down at the bottom. You couldn't smell the catfish, and rotten catfish stinks. And so I think that a lot of this goes, the deposition of remains here, there's no rhyme to it necessarily.

I'm really interested if they're going to do like a geographic profile in this case. I think that this is ripe for this, that try to understand where these remains are deposited and what knowledge would the perpetrator have about the location. Are you selecting these because people walk their dogs, take their kids to play in the park? You know, there's a nice bench where you're going to sit down. Is that the case? Because if it is, this is how bleak this becomes really, really quick, Dave. The idea here is that not only do you want to murder Sade, but you want to take her body and use it to terrify an entire city with. My brother Dave, educate me, man.

What's the Leonardo da Vinci diagram called again that I could not remember? The Truvian Man. The Truvian. V-I-T-R-U-V-I-A-N. The Truvian. Listen, everybody, well, you can't say everybody. The lion's share of the population has seen this. I knew what you were talking about.

I had to Google. I had to hit it. And all I could think of when I was looking at it is, Joe, I'm glad you walked away from doing what you were doing. And I'm glad you're teaching now because people like me that have reported and investigated things have no idea about the things that you talk about on a daily basis and explain. And I know that I appreciate being a part of this because it gives me a different look at things. And I'm not saying it's bad. It's just, I had no idea how people really, I'm not as shocked at things anymore. I'm more shocked. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, it does. And I think a lot of it is, and with Sade's case, you think that it's

kind of this progression into hell, if you will, and it's in degrees, okay? And you begin to think about it. You sit around, it's like, you think about how much more evil can this get? And that's a terrible thing to throw out there because the world will say, OK, I'll show you how much more evil this can get. Every time. Every single time. And I really think from an academic standpoint, I really need to start doing a study about these dismemberment cases. We've talked about it several times. There seems to be an uptick and this is happening.

And I think that it goes to a level of callousness that perhaps that we haven't experienced in modern times, certainly in ancient times, perhaps. But it is the most evil thing that you can do. And, you know, just the other day I had the privilege of appearing on Nancy's program on Merritt Street Media with her. And, you know, Dave, my heart was breaking because Sade's mom was on there with us. And I can't and I don't know that any of us can actually begin to fathom the depths of grief and pain. It's hard enough. And this is real. I know this is rote to say that it's hard enough to lose a child.

But when you lose a child in this manner and you don't have your child whole, think about that just for a second. And you're getting notified by the police. Her body is being discovered piecemeal. And every single time it's, it's almost like Shadi's mother is having to relive this notification over and over and over and over again. It is absolutely heartbreaking. Please take me back to that period where they made the first discovery

because one of the things I was hearing was they had discovered a foot with pink toenail polish on it. You know, when you were talking about them continuing to find an, and her, uh, her mother doing the, the show with Nancy, you know,

she has refused all other, uh, invitations for interviews. She only did the show with Nancy because she thought one, she loves Nancy. She'll do one national show. And if y'all want to know what I'm thinking, use that interview with her.

And that's what they're doing in coverage. But the fact that it's gone on for almost three weeks now is we're taping this and they're still finding body parts in the last 18 hours. The shock goes beyond anything I can imagine. In looking at when this took place, Sade would have graduated from college in May with her associate's degree. And she was a month away from being 20, 19 years old, getting ready. I mean, not even a, not even a totally legal adult yet. Right. And goes out on this date with Maxwell Anderson.

Now we got two ways of going through this. Let's start with her car found burning. Okay. Let me start right there because that's when the attention started to get drawn into somebody's gone. Shawty Robinson's car is found burning 730 in the morning. It's a blue Honda Civic. A witness sees a man with a tan backpack get out of the car. Man throws a lit lighter inside the driver's side. Car ignites. Man walks away towards a bus stop. The witness flags down a passing car. Say they call 911. Meanwhile, Maxwell Anderson is seen carrying this tan backpack on a bus camera because there are cameras everywhere.

The next day, April the 2nd, her right leg was found at Warnemont Park. The leg was found by a civilian on the beach north of the pump house. There is a cliff leading down to the beach and the leg appeared to have been sawed off at the hip. Now, according to what we were told from the very beginning, the leg appeared to belong to a black female about five feet tall, still had pink nail polish on the toes. Joe, the femur was snapped off. Yeah. The bone was sawed halfway through. And all I could think of, and I hate to even say this, but for anybody who has ever had to cut a tree. Yep. You're cutting a tree limb.

You get halfway through it and you're tired and you just snap. Yep. Is that what they're saying happened with her femur? Yeah. Yeah. That would approximate it. And it's, look, it's the same principle here. And is, is, you know, it's set your teeth on edge. You know, when you hear this, here's the thing, when an individual would attempt, first off, most people,

and we've talked about this, Lord help us. When most people, I think, endeavor to do, to do a dismemberment, they don't think about having to get through the soft tissue. And it gets very frustrating, particularly if you're using, and at this point, we don't know what type of tool was used. And I've had cases involving, I think of this young lady out in Seattle I covered a couple of years ago. He had used a bow saw, like you trim your bushes with, and done that in the bathtub. And it's very rough going. If you, you know, in the morgue, we have scalpels, you know, and these sorts of instruments, very sharp scissors, and we can go through soft tissue to get to the bone. But if the only instrument that you have is in fact a saw, and it can even be a power saw, that is not created in order to go through soft tissue. And so when you get down to

the actual shaft of a long bone, you had mentioned the femur, what you have many times is that it's just like sawing wood. Forensic anthropologists study these things where, and there are some forensic anthropologists, believe it or not, that specialize in dismemberment. That's all they study. They study tool marks on bones. It's a fascinating field. It's gruesome, but it's a fascinating field from that perspective. They'll have these stop starts, and you can identify with this with sawing a piece of wood.

Have you ever sawed and then gotten out of the groove? Well, every time you do that, you put an additional mark on the piece of wood. Same thing applies to bone. It's hard work. Make no mistake about it. If you're so frustrated and you've gotten down, and this is just one limb we're talking about, Dave. One limb. It has to be then, if you get frustrated, you got to snap it off and then detach the rest of the soft tissue.

You're frustrated. You've burned up all of your energy. Now, what are you going to do? Well, maybe the perpetrator is thinking about, you know, I'm going to take these items out, these elements of the body and deposit them in various places as I build back up my energy. Then you go back and you do it again. You do it again. You do it again. And then every time you're moving out of the house or whatever, you're redepositing. Maybe at some point in time, he sawed off two appendages and in one run, he deposited them in various locations. Who knows? We're going to find out, but there will be a tremendous amount of evidence, I think, in the basement of this home. What really kind of piques my curiosity

about this is not so much the dismemberment, as ghastly as that is, are they going to be capable of determining her cause of death? We know the manner is homicide, but how degraded were the remains, how traumatized, post-mortem trauma I'm talking about, were the remains? If there's a bullet hole, if there's an injury to the neck, this sort of thing. Is it going to be compromised so that you're not going to be able to make out truly what happened? I think that that's going to be difficult. And, you know, the folks at the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner's Office, they could do this one of two ways. They can say, okay, we're going to take this recently arrived remain and set it aside. And before we do the totality of the examination, because they know

that they've got this young woman missing, they're finding parts. So they wait until everything comes in. Or a question to ask is, are they examining each remain as it comes in? My suspicion is they're waiting until they get the body in totality, you know, until they've recovered as much as they possibly can, I think, Dave. With the leg being found, we didn't think of the first leg being found being the first body part deposited and that's not always the case it just happened to be the first one that was found found yeah but there are things that they were talking about where it was found are we talking about the alleged perpetrator throwing it in the water and it floating up on the shore are we can you imagine what is he doing i mean is he trying to hide it what's he

trying to do is he trying to set it so people will find it are you trying to get rid of it i mean yeah to me i mean look uh allegedly again allegedly here we go one one of the things that's been put forward and i find this quite fascinating that is that there was a hole dug in his backyard of that home and this home by the way when you see the images of it, is neat as a pin. The grass is very well groomed. The house is very well kept, it would appear. And you look at this and you think, okay, you've dug a hole in the backyard and you're thinking, does this go to premeditation? You know, what's the purpose of having this hole? Are you going to, you know, it's springtime, are you thinking about putting in a flower bed or putting in tomatoes?

Because I don't know. Maybe that's what a defense attorney would say. And, you know, it's a free country. You're welcome to dig as many holes in your yard, I guess, as you want to. point if I'm seeing this I'm thinking well maybe he thought it wasn't such a good idea to have this deceased young lady on his premises in the wake of the fact that he has been spotted in a bar and a restaurant with her he's the last person that was seen with her alive they're going to come asking questions and he doesn't want to have to explain why she is buried in his backyard Years ago, I actually had a case, actually it was a colleague of mine, that had a case where a plastic grocery store bag was found and contained within the bag was a head. And I remember the feeling

that I had in the wake of that discovery. And all of us did. I think many of us at the ME's office had that feeling, the same, the same idea. Well, when's the rest of the body going to show up? And in that case, all we were left with was a head. Nothing else ever showed up. And that does happen. It does happen. So you take that idea, and I'm thinking about the investigative staff at the ME's office, and of course, the police that are working this case. And I'm thinking, Dave, well, are they sitting on pins and needles? Can you imagine being a homicide detective assigned to this? And you're thinking, okay, let's take an inventory of what we have at this point. Where else can we look?

Is the body ever going to be reconstituted to some level? Because I got to tell you, just listening to Sade's mother the other day, she ain't going to have burial until she has her baby back. And that's just, that's the reality of it what what do we have up to this point and when when were these items discovered two things that got me joe one was the fire man we'll come to that but my first thought when i heard the car was on fire i thought he did it to get rid of evidence the perp the alleged perpetrator did it to get rid of evidence but if you've listened did it to get rid of evidence. But if you've listened to Joseph Scott Morgan long enough, you know that the perpetrator, by lighting it on fire, didn't destroy evidence.

He actually probably locked some evidence in. We'll get into that. April 1st, Sade Robinson has disappeared. Had a date that evening. April 2nd, 7.30 a.m. Her car is on fire. It's found burning in an alley. 5.30 that afternoon.

Her car is at 7.30 a.m. her car is on fire. It's found burning in an alley. 5.30 that afternoon, her car is at 7.30 a.m. on fire. She's missing. 5.30 the afternoon, the human leg with the pink toenails is found in Warnemont Park. Two days later, Maxwell Anderson is brought in for questioning because they know that he was last on with her. The next day, April the 5th, three days after the first body part was found, another body part found, this time near 30th and Lisbon. The next day, human remains located near 31st and Galena. April 7th, more human remains located near 31st and Walnut. The next day, April 8th, officers are still combing

the park for evidence and collected more items, but when police find it, we don't know exactly what they found. The only time we know what is actually found is when a civilian finds it, and they tell us before the police do. I'm sitting back, and I'm thinking, my Lord. I mean, what else could there be? Torso, arm, how about that? That was found, Joe, just the other day. We are three weeks now away from this almost and her torso and arm

of shawday robinson washed up on milwaukee beach so that that begs the question doesn't it is he why why would an individual who is randomly doing these these deposits why would he choose some of them to be because you know if we go back to the leg that's on the beach, was this something that he had walked out into the water or did he? And if you've never seen the Great Lakes, they do have, look, it's not like going to Hawaii, but there is kind of a surf that's there. You know, the current will push things into the beach. You can see breakers, you know, on the shore,

particularly if the weather's stormy, it looks like you're at the beach. You can see breakers, you know, on the shore, particularly if the weather's stormy, it looks like you're at the ocean. Did he not walk the remains out there or did he take the remains and put them into a tributary and have them wash down the tributary and they wind up flowing back into the shore? I think that that's certainly something, you know, to be considered here. Are these placements random? Well, one of the things that keeps going through my head, Dave, about this case is that, is this the first time this individual has done this? Because you're talking about, brother, you're talking about going from zero to a thousand. This is not like you kind of slipped into these waters and you're doing things that you shouldn't be doing. You begin to think, has he attacked other people? Is there this level of violence? Has he used sharp instruments on anybody, even in a fight? Has he threatened to carve somebody up? Here's another big one.

Are there any other women in Milwaukee that fit the description of Sade that are missing? And I think that that's certainly something to consider. Where this would have to have been done, you know, when you talk about dismemberment, you have to have privacy. There's no way you're going to roll out into the backyard and start doing this. You have to have privacy. And from what I am hearing, there's been a considerable amount of blood deposition in his, in his basement apartment, essentially, or basement living space. Actually in the hallway leading down on the stairway. Yeah. And so was he dragging body parts up there?

And, you know, and what else is in there? Here's the other thing. When they sweep this area, when law enforcement, and I can assume that they have done this, when they bring in that team of forensic scientists, the random sampling in that environment, you expect to find his DNA. You're going to find probably, I think his parents actually own the home and they've relocated to Florida. They're going to find their DNA. Any of his buddies, you might find theirs, but is there any unidentified DNA that's down there? Is there any DNA that they could perhaps profile where they could do phenotyping or get an idea as to who this individual may have been, who it belongs to? Because look, that question has to be asked.

And I think that the people in Milwaukee would want an answer to that. Because if they've got young women that are missing, your boy right here, he moves up to the top of the list for me. I want to look through that home, any kind of vehicle he has, anything that he has. I want to search it. Joe, okay. Just to give you an idea. His dad's very wealthy, a rich businessman.

Maxwell Anderson was a high school football star. He didn't really amount to a whole lot. He's worked for his dad a couple of times, didn't really work out. He's ended up as a bartender pretty much, working as a bartender and what have you, in and around Milwaukee. He did run afoul of the law with family members. He's acted out a couple of times where police had to be called.

I'll give it that. But nothing like this. Right now, don't know if we have any other women who have come forward to talk to police. We don't know that yet. Mainly because they have Maxwell Anderson in jail. They've charged him with Sade Robinson's murder. And now they're putting the case together

and they'll reach out. And if any women have come forward with other stories, they're probably looking, you know, that's when we'll, yeah. Buddy, let me tell you,

he's, they're going through his phone. They're going through his social media, any kind of dating apps that he has there. Um, they're going to be looking and say, look, have you had contact with him?

How did he behave? And they'll be bringing each and every one of these points of contact along, not to mention all of his coworkers, you know, the people that were in the bar. Did, did he ever get spicy with any of the patrons that came in there? You know, it was fascinating. Yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry. The night they were out, the night that he was out, it was like, they went, he went overboard to make it not just a routine first date, but a good first date because halfway through the night, they took a picture and sent it out. They're sending out Instagram photos on their date.

I mean, this guy was, he, he planned this out because look at what happens next. Follow this timeline, Joe. It's very tight. Robinson and Anderson, they go out to eat at a bar. He had a restaurant he used to work at. Then they sit at the bar and eat their food. Everybody sees him being pleasant. They leave that restaurant.

They go to Duke's on Water. A pole camera actually picks them up. And Robinson's Honda Civic is parked at 633, 634. Robinson and Anderson get out of the car. 904, Robinson and Anderson return to the car. Robinson and Anderson are seen at Anderson's home by a neighbor's camera at 9.24 p.m. There are two figures seen entering Anderson's backyard. This one made me think about the hole that you said he dug. living room light is turned on inside the home. At 1125, 1125, a figure coming in and out of the home into the backyard on and off until 1245 a.m. At 1247 a.m., Robinson's car departs Anderson's house. That would mean Shaw Day Robinson's Honda Civic leaves Maxwell

Anderson's home at 1247 a.m. We know they arrived and she was fine, alive, well, assuming it's her, two figures entering the backyard at 924 p.m. at 1125. One person is seen going in and out of the house for the next hour and so man you know delhi leaves so she's dead by 1125 two hours dead yeah yeah and uh if he had the tools at his disposal at that point in time and he had a location where he could do this effectively and efficiently as mechanical as that sounds did he use the car in order to transport these remains and deposit them? Was this a one-time deposition thing where he's just making the rounds to all these various locations? And that does, in fact, bring us to the car because my understanding is that they have also found gasoline containers that he had at home. And here's the thing.

What people don't understand about using accelerants, I think that it's fascinating, first off, that he strikes a lighter. And this is witnessed. He strikes a lighter outside of her car and walks away. And the next thing you know, the car is engulfed. And, you know, I'm always picking on hollywood i know on on the show but um cars just don't explode all right like that now you can have problem you can have it does happen but that's the exception as opposed to the norm all right particularly from within the

cockpit of the car itself within where the driver seat sits and all of this sort of thing. So there has to be an accelerant at work. What's going to happen with all of the material in that car that they can save? And this is kind of fascinating. When the arson investigators work that car, they're going to take samples from within that car, and they're going to put them into this. They're going to put it into a paint can.

Okay. And what will happen is those items settle, like if it's a cloth off of the seat, for instance. Well, the paint can, you're going to put it in a paint can. What's in the paint can? Well, I say paint can. It's a can that looks like a paint can. They're all silver, and they're used for collecting arson evidence. And so what happens is as gravity takes hold and that, that item

settles to the bottom of the can, any fumes that are contained on that item rise within that can, and they're going to take a big plunger and they're going to stick it in there and they're going to draw off that gas. And then they're going to walk over to a GC mass spec, which is a gas chromatograph that's attached to a mass spec machine. And they're going to begin to take that sample and run it through the machine. And it gives you a chemical signature. All right. I'm not going to go into all the details, but with the GC, you begin to kind of formulate what, what is present. Okay. Within the sample, you can kind of get a generalized idea when it's drawn over to the mass spec, we're talking about spectrometry. And so every, every element that you have out there bends light in a certain way. And so when you're talking about something like gas or, you

know, ethanol, it's going to refract, I guess is the best way to put it. It'll bend the light and it gives you a specific readout on this thing. All gas, like you draw up at the gas station, is pretty much the same. What separates it though is the detergents that the individual companies put in there. So if we look at something like BP or Texaco or Gulf or Shell, Chevron, it doesn't matter. They all, you know, we see these things, you know, with, I don't know, and they're not sponsoring the show, but whoever it is, it says, you know, our gas has Tecron in it. Well, Tecron is some kind of substance they have in there that is supposed to reduce gunk. Okay. Well, it has a very specific signature that's different than the gasoline. And so if, if this suspect has taken those gas cans and gone to a local filling station, well, that's an old term people don't use anymore, gone to a local filling station

and filled up these cans with it, there's going to be a very specific chemical signature that goes back to that gas if that's what he used as the accelerant. And so that's what I mean, Dave. You know, when I talk about things like, yeah, you're trying to destroy evidence, and maybe there was blood evidence in that car because, you know, maybe if he's using it to convey this precious girl's remains all over the place, maybe he got rid of the blood evidence but he's not going to get rid of that accelerant that was in there and that's going to be his undoing i think whoever i thought as soon as i heard fire that was the my first thought

was joe scott said that he just burned himself by setting that fire that's what i heard you say you know because i've heard you talk about what a fire does. Well, look, you and I have both been around. We grew up in the 60s, right? We've both been around cigarettes our entire lives, one way or another. We smoked or we didn't smoke. Certainly our parents smoked. I can't count how many times I've been burned by a cigarette. Not on purpose, but, you know, parents used to smoke around us all the time.

And, you know, they burn you, you know, when they're lighting up or whatever. But have you ever seen somebody drop a cigarette onto like the surface of a seat in a car? Well, it smolders. It catches if it's fabric or I guess it could be pleather or whatever it is in your car. It's going to burn a hole in it. But guess what it's not going to do? It's not going to explode and envelop the car. Okay, that just doesn't happen.

And you have to have an initiate with him striking that lighter. What's really fascinating about this, Dave, is that we've actually got a witness that saw this person strike this lighter. And I've got visions of Zippos coming into my mind right now. And, you know, a lighter that would stay burning and take it and toss it like some movie into the cockpit of the car. And suddenly the thing's enveloped in flame. And you might think that you're going to get rid of everything, but I can tell you science in the end is going to get you.

And you can say that not only about the fire. You can say that about the blood that was left behind at his scene. You can say that about the CCTV. But you know what else you can say it about? Out there, her remains are pointing a finger back at this perpetrator. And her remains in the end will tell the tale of Sade's death. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.