Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Disturbing Findings in the Death of Debbie Collier

Episode Date: March 5, 2023

Debbie Collier, a Georgia resident, is reported missing on September 10th, 2022 after sending her daughter, Amanda, a Venmo payment for $2,385 with a message saying, “They are not going to let me go, love you.” She was found dead the next day in a ravine more than an hour north from her home. The newly released autopsy report reveals that when her body was found 80% of it was covered in second and third degree burns. Which is one of many reasons why the public was surprised to hear that the death has been ruled a suicide. In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and special guest co-host  Dave Mack discuss Collier’s burns, the state of her clothing, the lack of debris found in her trachea, why police have ruled this a suicide, and much more. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 0:52 - Background and overview of case 4:45 - Debbie Collier’s clothing and what it tells us 8:45 - The autopsy report and Collier’s burns 11:30 - Burning to kill vs. burning to cover something up 13:05 - No evidence of debris in her trachea 15:05 - Police ruling this a suicide 18:25 - Carboxyhemoglobin level and hydrocodone 19:50 - Is there an indication that the burning took place after death? 22:10 - Manner of death 24:00 - Was this really a suicide? 25:40 - Do police sometimes downplay what they’ve seen to the public? 29:00 - OutroSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Debbie Collier, I can't say that name without scratching my head a little bit, because arguably her death is one of the most bizarre that certainly I've covered in the past, I don't know, two years probably. And now we have some answers. And today we're going to talk about this update involving the death of this 59-year-old office manager from Georgia. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.

Wow, am I glad to have my buddy Dave Mack with me today. Dave is a crime reporter for Crime Online. This case is something that we've covered, I don't know, for several months now, I think. And certainly, it left us all a bit befuddled, I think, because just in and of itself, the fact that her death was so closely associated with a fire, it was in isolation, kind of a very remote area. And there was nothing apparently stolen or missing from her. It was just this kind of standalone event that's had a lot of people really, really asking a lot of questions. I don't know. Do we actually have answers now?

I think we have some. She's a 59-year-old who worked as an office manager for a real estate company in Athens, Georgia. Athens, Georgia is outside of Atlanta. It's where the Georgia Bulldogs play. And that does come into play here. Okay. So from a timeline of events on September 10th, Debbie Collier sent a Venmo payment to her daughter at 3.17 PM. That Venmo payment was for $2,385, and it had a cryptic message.

They are not going to let me go. Love you. There is a key to the house in the blue flower pot by the door. It set off alarm bells because her daughter Amanda was not expecting this payment. From all we can find out, Debbie Collier had never sent a payment that large through Venmo. That's what started all of this. Amanda calls her dad, Debbie's husband. He's been parking cars for the Georgia Bulldogs football game since nine o'clock that morning.

He gets home around four and they start talking, try to figure out what happened. Around six o'clock, they call 911. We don't know where she is. We haven't seen her. And we have this crazy message. It was the next day, September 11th, investigators find her car. She had a rental van because her car was in the shop. She'd been in a car wreck. So she's driving a rental van and they used the Sirius XM radio in that rental van, the Habersham County Sheriff's office. They alerted deputies to the location of this Chrysler Pacifica that she had rented. And boom, they were able to find the vehicle.

It's about an hour, about 60 miles away from her home in an area that she didn't normally go. They find her car and then they find her body. It's down a ravine. She's holding on to a small tree branch. She's dead. There is obviously been a fire and she's partially clothed. The burn, if you remember, Joe,

we were told the burning was on her stomach. Well, the timeline of events, we know that she did stop at a family dollar store a couple of miles away from where her body was found prior to her death, obviously, and she bought some items. Those items were all found at the location where her body was. So from a timeline standpoint, we know where she was. We know what she was doing prior to her death. We don't know why, but we know what and where. So here we we go they've told us from the beginning partially burned partially clad the burning is on her stomach they released this autopsy report and

joe scott morgan i'm begging you to tell us what it means because i'm reading this and i'm going somebody's lying super bizarre stuff first off let's go back you had mentioned you know we've gotten several different reports in regards to miss Collier's death relative to the status of the clothing. You know, clothing is something that we'd look at. We begin to think about what was the status of the clothing. First off, were they clothed? And the first thing that comes up when you think about these things, and I'm not saying that this happened in this case, but when you associate someone being absent clothing, particularly a lady, you're automatically thinking, well, there was some kind of assault that had taken place, some kind of potential sexual assault. When I hear this initially and they're saying, well, she was clothed, we've heard clothed and we've heard partially clothed and we've heard naked.

And so, you know, it's hard to kind of make sense of that. What I have heard now was that there was some remnant of clothing, at least beneath her legs, possibly charred. That clothing remnant that is there, you begin to ask these questions. First off, are these trousers that she had on, pants, jeans, whatever the case might be, and can they be tied back to her? Many times when you find a body that is, say, for instance, in a prone position where they're laying on their belly or you have an individual that's in a supine position where they're laying on their back

and they haven't been moved at all and they're wearing clothing, the clothing on the top side involving a fire will at least completely or partially be burned away. But sometimes if you look beneath them, those areas are protected from the flame, the heat. And you can have sometimes tags that you can examine. You can match up sizes, all those sorts of things. But there's something else that you look for with clothing and fire. And this is significant in this case. That is when you collect this clothing

and it is associated with fire. We actually take clothing in cases of arson and that sort of thing. It doesn't just have to be clothing. It can be other items. And we put them in these, the only way I can really describe them are these metallic paint cans. And you say, wow, that's interesting. Yeah. So, we use these for evidence collection. And what happens is that if there is any accelerant, and when I say accelerant, I'm talking about lighter fluid, certainly gasoline, kerosene, any of these types of elements. As the clothing begins to settle into the bottom of the can because of gravity, the fumes, if there's anything left, begins to rise to the top of that can internally. And a big, I don't know, it's hard to kind of describe for folks, but just understand that it looks like a gigantic needle is inserted into the top of that can. And the air of that can.

And the air within the can is drawn off in the lab. And then once that air is drawn off, guess what they can do? They begin to test it. And we know that the vapors from an accelerant, I mean, we've all smelled gas, right? Or maybe charcoal, lighter fluid, maybe kerosene has a particular odor, right? So it's in a gaseous state. You can smell it. That's something that can't be quantified, smell is.

We can qualify it and say, gee, that smells like gas. But what we want are measurements. We want to get a specific chemical identity. They're talking about that there was a melted gas can in the immediate vicinity of her body. So I want to know if the gas that may have been associated with that melted gas can, if there was anything left from that, is associated with any kind of accelerant that may have been on her clothing and try to marry that up. That's one part of this along the way, the evidentiary issue. That's separate from the body itself because, you know, when you begin to look at what they're saying, at least, was revealed in this autopsy report that was released by the state of Georgia.

And this is very curious. They're saying that the burns that she has on the body, remember, you'd mentioned this Dave, you talked about how they initially talked about how she had burning on her abdomen. And it was kind of very limited at that moment, Tom. But now they're using terms like leathery skin. What they're driving at here when they're talking about leathery skin, they're talking about desiccated skin, skin that is absent any kind of moisture. It's dried out, and it's dried out as a result of being exposed to intense heat. Also, we grade burns in degrees. We've all heard about this first, second, third. You know that there's even a fourth degree burning.

You generally see it with individuals that are deceased. They don't talk about fourth degree burning in here, but they do talk about second, third, and guess where the concentration is? Well, it's her head and her face and quite possibly the upper chest. So what does that tell us? Well, it tells us that there was a heavy concentration of some type of accelerant or fuel source that was adjacent to that. Because listen, people know what it's like to actually touch a stove or get burned as a result of running your hand through a flame. You get burned, but it's not burning like when we think about something that is a continual constant fuel source for fire. Human tissue cannot sustain that. It just can't. You would have to have something else there that would

lead to a third-degree burn. This is very intense. You're starting to get down into not just the epidermis and the dermis. Now you're starting to get into potentially the sub-Q fat, which is that layer just below the top layer of skin. Her hair is probably missing. Her face is intensely burned in her upper chest. So, that means that more than likely, the accelerant was on top of her body, the top of her head. Maybe it run down her face at some point in time. I think the big question is, is this something that she did to herself sitting there on the ground where she takes a container of gasoline and pours it on top of her head and then initiates the flame by striking a match or lighting a lighter, which is something they haven't talked about the presence of? Or is this something that somebody else did to her? In cases that I've worked where I have people that have been burned,

and certainly relative to homicides, many times burning is used in order to cover up anything that is left behind. But is it actually used as a means to bring about one's own death? Well, there are cases out there like that. This is generally referred to as self-immolation. But here's the key. Most of the time when people self-immolate, they're doused in gasoline or some type of other accelerant, and they set themselves on fire. You're going to have a product that is produced relative to this burning. That's going to be your own body, where you have hair and skin that's initially burned, any clothing that's there, and any other item that immediately surround the person. Say that they've put a fuel source on top of them like wood or something like this to maintain the burning and then they douse themselves with an accelerant, set themselves on fire. You would find

remnant of that. And Dave, she was found in a wooded area. So we would expect when we open up her body at autopsy that we would find, particularly in the trachea, and that's our windpipe essentially, and into our nose and our mouth, into the windpipe, into the lungs, you would expect to find evidence of debris. Dave, it ain't there, brother. So does that mean that she was burned after she died? That's a question that has not been answered.

They're ruling it as a suicide. Yeah, they are ruling it as a suicide. We have this kind of lining. If you just think about the interior of your mouth, you just kind of run your tongue around the interior of your mouth. You just kind of run your tongue around the interior of your mouth. It's not too dissimilar from the same surface that you have down into your airway. It's mucoid, very soft and fleshy. And you look for debris in this area, but you also look for what they refer to as an inflammatory response. And they're saying that there is this area in her trachea

that would be indicative of inhalation of superheated gas. Okay. Superheated gas. So, when people inhale and there's intense flame around them, remember, we're trying to uptake oxygen every single second of the day. That's what we do in order to survive. Even in the midst of a very intense fire, you're inhaling to try to grab that oxygen that's there. And what does fire seek out? Well, it seeks out oxygen as fuel source. It thrives on oxygen.

It's consuming all of the oxygen in the environment. So was she literally inhaling the superheated gas that's being generated by the fire? The problem is this, it could not have been sustainable, all right? It would not have been a sustainable event. And so, they're talking about her inhaling superheated gas and that that brought about her death. It brought about her death that quickly. After a certain amount of time, that event is going to pass, and she would still continue to breathe, you would think, unless she went into some kind of associated sudden cardiac event.

I'm not talking about having a heart attack, a myocardial infarction. That's not what I'm talking about. But you can get yourself into this position where essentially your heart will stop as a result of being exposed to this kind of trauma. Is that what they're actually saying? Because right now, that's really the only thing they have to hang their hat on. And let me ask you this, Joe. I mentioned in setting up the timeline that Debbie Collier had gone to a family dollar store and made very specific purchases. Again, we're talking 60 miles away from her house and she's at a family dollar

store she doesn't normally go to. She buys a blue tarp, red tote bag, paper towels, a torch lighter, and a poncho. Those were the things she purchased at the family dollar store. And all these items were found in the area of her body and the fire. My question is this. They've ruled it a suicide. And as you mentioned, saying it was the inhalation of superheated gases, thermal injuries. They've also mentioned other things. But I poured gas

in my ditch to burn leaves one time, and I had a whole bunch of leaves, and I poured too much gas, okay? I let it soak in a minute. I didn't realize how stupid I was being. When I lit the leaves, it was an immediate explosion, and it knocked me down and shocked me. And had I been closer to the leaves, I would have been burned. If their theory of what happened is true, could it have been that she was in some state of mind where she bought these items? She has a gas can that is also on the scene, as you mentioned. She pours gas over something and leaning over she doesn't realize the power that this gas is going to have on her and she lights it

and does what happened to me in my front yard i guess that that that's certainly a possibility however i have to go back and state that you were talking about third-degree burns. So, this would not have been, I think that probably you might expect to see a second-degree event visualized on the surface of her skin. You're starting to talk about third-degree burning. That almost implies that there was extended exposure to the flame in order to achieve that level of trauma. And maybe that's a residual effect of if she had been doused in the flame and that there was an initial flashover where she inhalated this superheated gas, the remnant of the accelerant would still have to burn off of her skin at that point in time. Maybe that's an answer.

I don't know that there's really enough to hang your hat on. We haven't seen the actual autopsy report because it hasn't been made public at this point in time. However, there are individuals that are commenting on it in the press. Obviously, they've seen it. You think about this and you think, well, is there something else here? But according to one line in the autopsy report, allegedly, they're talking about what the police saw. And the police are essentially opining that she was there by herself. And that's really, and that that's an indication to them, at least, that this was a suicide. So, you're telling me

that that's, you're going with that, and that's what you're going to hang your hat on. And apparently, that's the decision that was made. By virtue of that, the medical examiner made that decision based upon what the police did or didn't see at the scene. One other thing that's important here to remember, at autopsy, there is a test that is run. It's called a carboxyhemoglobin level, and you do it with a blood draw. What you're looking for is the uptake of carbon in the system and how it kind of gets into the bloodstream. This gives an indication of protracted exposure because now you're beginning to metabolize some of the stuff that's in the air and floating around. And again, when they inhale, it goes systemic at that point in time. Guess what? Carboxyhemoglobin level was, in fact, be elevated because they're inhaling these

noxious gases that are in the environment in which they normally dwell. So that gives you an idea of long-term exposure. The absence of a significant carboxyhemoglobin level in her blood would suggest that this was a very quick event. One of the things that they did find in her system, and this is not completely unexpected, is that she had hydrocodone in her system. And she had been taking this, I think, if I remember correctly, as a result of some kind of back pain that she had had for a protracted period of time. She was under medical care because chronic pain from a back injury that she had lived with for a long time. And it's interesting because in

November, when all of this first came out about inhalation of superheated gases and thermal injuries and hydrocodone intoxication, that was what we were told. And now that the autopsy has come out, this is according to a source from Fox 5 in Atlanta saying, although she had a prescription for the opioid painkiller, the hydrocodone levels in her system surpassed the expected amount roughly four times over. you and I both heard the same report that they were at therapeutic levels. That's a confusion there, but I don't know how much that would come into play if you've got 80% of her body burned, second and third degree burns, as you've just indicated, that would have killed her. Yeah, so which is it, I think, is a big question relative to the levels of the hydrocodone. Wouldn't you expect somebody to be burned after they were dead that and doesn't this does is there an indication that the burning took

place after death that's hard to surmise based upon the information that is coming in if you're going to have post-mortem burning that is after death you're not going to have any evidence in the airway that they have been inhaling anything. However, the one kind of bump in the road with that is they have this change in the tissue surfaces of her trachea that gives an indication that she was exposed to these superheated gases. And that's how they're coming back to this point, that it's an exposure to superheated gases, and that she inhaled it for a moment, and this brought about her death. And oh, by the way, she's also got hydrocodone on board.

And that's actually listed as one of the contributing factors here. So you kind of pick your poison here along the way as to what you're going to call this. Their default position on the manner of death, and as we've talked about on body bags, there's five of them that you can choose from. Well, can we look at this and say that it's an accident? I don't know. I mean, is it possible that she accidentally set this fire? And what would be the purpose of her setting a fire in this location? Is there evidence that this is some type of natural event? Well, no, they're not saying

anything about that. We're not talking about heart disease or something else that you associated in the natural world and some kind of natural disease pathology, they're not discussing that. What they are saying is that she had hydrocodone on board and she was exposed to superheated gases. That's what they're going with as their cause of death. And their default position in this case is going to be suicide. They're not arriving at any other conclusion other than she doused herself apparently in gas and set herself on fire. She happened to have the substance in her system and all of those things playing together

wound up in her death and they're going to rule this as a suicide and they're going to close this case, Dave. We're not flippant in talking about suicide. If you or somebody you know is suffering through anything that leads you to think that maybe it's time to just call an end to life as it is, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK. That's 1-800-273-8255. Sometimes people will take a permanent fix for a temporary problem in this particular case joe where they've ruled a suicide saying she took her own life i have to question she's holding on to a

small thing coming out of the ground her body is found down a ways from where the fire was she's holding that tree with her hand and and she now, we're being told, burned over 80% of her body. There are certain things that stick out to me, and I'm just a journalist. Joe, you're a professional at this. Does this sound or look like anything you've ever heard would be a suicide?

I have worked cases of self-immolation, but they, Dave, I gotta tell you, as my granny would say, they're rare as hen's teeth. It's not something that you encounter. Not like when you're talking about suicides, you're talking about self-inflicted gunshot wounds. You're talking about hangings. Every now and then, you'll have drug ODs. You find more, believe it or not, self-inflicted gunshot wounds and hangings than you do drug ODs,

in my experience, in my little slice of the pie. Self-immolation, just thinking back right now over my career, working in the coroner and the medical examiner over the course of my career, two, I think. And then peripherally with colleagues, maybe in total, maybe four. So, that's what makes this so bizarre for those of us that work in forensics. When you hear that you have a case like this of self-immolation, I'll put it to you this way. This case is the type of case that you would go to a forensic conference and you would actually see papers presented on. That's how significant this is, I think. One final thing, when police are covering something like this, Joe, I mean, when you're

saying that you haven't seen that it's such a rare occurrence, when police officers are investigating something along these lines and release information to the public, as we were told at first, the burning seemed to be minor and it was limited to her stomach. And now we find out that it's 80% of her body. Her face couldn't be identified. Do police sometimes downplay what they've seen to the public to spare the family or just because it's not fitting? To a certain degree, yeah, they will. I think most of the time when police are making decisions about what will and will not be released, paramount among all things for them is to not compromise the case. If they have information

that they would not like released to the general public because they suspect that this is something other than as advertised. That's generally what their goal is, to keep it from the general public. And our working premise, and I know many people in our audience have heard this term, and I use it when I teach, our working premise is that all deaths, not some, not a few, but all deaths are homicides until proven otherwise. And we have to be we have to be skeptical. We have to assume that it is other than what we're seeing, because if you if you don't cover all of your bases and treat it with the same degree of care as you would a homicide from the beginning, you're going to miss something. You know, in early on, I think that in Miss Collier's case, you know, they did, in fact, treat it as though it was a homicide. Certainly, I think, because it's so bizarre. It's such an outlier. You find bodies that are burned. Again, I go back to my earlier supposition that you have this isolated event where you have a body kind of lying out there in the woods.

And let's face it, in a very isolated area out of view automatically you're going to think well wow somebody has brought her out here they've doused her in gas they've done something to her and they're trying to cover their tracks but apparently based upon what the police concluded from the scene and now that we've got this autopsy report based upon what the medical examiner is ruling and says, they don't think that it's a homicide. But we still don't know. No, we still don't. We don't know why she sent $2,385 by Venmo. We don't know what the cryptic message meant. They're not going to let me go. Some people have alluded to the fact that she's got meds on board and that maybe that had something to do with it.

Really? Well, I mean, she's been taking this medication regularly. Was there any other substance in her system? Was it combined with alcohol? I don't know because all they're talking about right now at this point that we can see at the time that this is being recorded is that she had hydrocodone on board. And again, the level is questionable. We have some people saying that it's above normal therapeutic levels,

and we have other people saying that, well, it's well within the parameters of survivability, if you will. So, hard to say, but I do know this. Out of all the cases that we've covered on body bags, this is certainly one more curious. If you or somebody you know is suffering through anything that leads you to think that maybe it's time to just call an end to life as it is, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK. That's 1-800-273-TALK. That's 1-800-273-8255. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.