Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Double Murderer Executed by Firing Squad. Why?

Episode Date: March 23, 2025

Brad Sigmon was sentenced to death in South Carolina for the double murder of his ex-girlfriend's parents, David and Gladys Larke. He confessed to killing both of them with a baseball bat, then attempted to kidnap his ex-girlfriend, Rebecca Barbare, using a gun stolen from David Larke. Barbare jumped from a moving car and ran to escape Sigmon. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the crimes that led to the confession, conviction, and ultimate sentencing to death of Brad Sigmon, and how Sigmon's own protest over lethal injection caused him to be put to death by firing squad   Transcript Highlights 00:00.06 Introduction 02:05.23 Double murder with a baseball bat 05:03.73 Description of injuries caused by baseball bat to the face 10:06.12 Talk about Brad Sigmon 14:55.81 Sigmon uses bat to kill both parents of girlfriend   20:09.81 Joseph talks about "Paths of Glory" - movie 31:31.60 Military executions 36:12.67 Discussion of execution methods in USA 41:40.28 Conclusion  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Facts with Joseph Scott Moore. As of right now, I'll go ahead and give this to you because I need to have a chronological time frame so you can appreciate what I'm saying here. It's March 9th. So all major league baseball teams have reported. And what that means for those of us that are baseball fans, you know, the pitchers and the catchers show up early, the rest of the team shows up, and I think they've already started playing games to this point. You know, opening day is in April. And, you know, one of the things

that is, I think, is most difficult in baseball is not so much what the pitchers have to do, but it's the timing that the batters have to re-prepare themselves for. Now, a lot of them play in other leagues during the offseason, but some of them, I would imagine, many of the really wealthy ones just walk away and say, I'll do it in spring. Timing is, in fact, everything. Just imagine, if you will, though,

that a bat, a baseball bat, is a weapon and it has a certain amount of utility to it. You know, we have all manner of weapons out there, things that might not necessarily normally be weapons, but are used as weapons of convenience. Today, I want to talk about a brutal double homicide that involves a baseball bat and also the death of the person that perpetrated that double homicide at the end of a.308 rifle. I Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. With today's case, Dave, we've got, I don't know that you and I have covered, in my memory at least, a double homicide involving a baseball bat. Now, I gotta, let me back off just for a

second because I got a story to tell you, and you're not going to believe this because I was sitting here, I kind of meditated on this case earlier today because it's important to talk about. Did you know that the very first homicide case I was involved in when I was 20 or 21 years old in New Orleans. I was an autopsy assistant. It was a homicide involving a baseball bat. And it was a guy that beat his brother to death in the front yard with this thing. And I remember a guy that wound up being a really good friend of mine. He was a detective and he showed up for the autopsy. And this guy was in the tray, right? In the morgue. And we had yet to get him out. And I pulled the tray out. And it's not like a typical tray that pushes into the wall from going from feet to head. This is the kind of tray where this door lets down on this gigantic stainless steel box

and you pull the entire tray out towards your waist and the person is sitting there or lying there and you can just kind of pull them over onto a gurney and then get them on. And I remember, um, on unwrapping this guy because he was not in a body bag. He had been brought into the emergency room. And for those that don't know, emergency rooms and hospitals use something called a morgue pack years and years ago. And they literally used to wrap bodies in plastic and then send them down to the morgue. And it didn't matter what the case was.

You know, hospitals didn't necessarily back then in particular, they didn't really, their goal was not to preserve evidence. I'm not saying that out of spite or meanness. It's just they've got to go on to the next case, particularly in the emergency room. So they wrapped the body up, taking the morgue, you know, it shows up there. And I remembered this detective that I was talking about. And he looked at me, we were standing there because he wanted to get a Polaroid. That's how far back this goes of this guy's face. And

I said, man, this guy, he just looks evil. just looks evil. He looks evil. And I remember distinctly him saying this. He actually crosses himself by the crypt and says, please don't say that. You're going to curse this case. And I'll never be able to fully investigate this thing, even though it was a justifiable homicide because his brother was attacking him.

And brother picked up a baseball bat and dispatched his brother in the front yard. And he had, I'll never forget, this guy had these kind of spider webbing lacerations all over his skull, Dave. And they were, if you imagine what a spider web looks like, where you've kind of got a bullseye right in the second, forgive me, right in the center, and the little support lines on a spider web kind of extend outward to the outer fringes.

It almost looks like fractured glass, only skin. He had multiple of these lying over his scalp. And then when we got the scalp reflected, which means to incise the scalp and pull it forward over the eyes and then pull it backwards so that the skull, did you know that those lacerations, and you don't see this every single time, but those lacerations, which there was probably about five of these spider webbing, there were concurrent spider webbing fractures to the external table of the skull that matched up almost perfectly.

So my thought was, and I think the pathologist came to the same conclusion, the first strike was to the temple. And the guy goes down to his knees. Now, he had hit his brother in the face multiple times. And the brother had raccoon eyes. He'd broken his nose. And the brother had raccoon eyes. He'd broken his nose. And the brother was furious. He didn't just lay there. He ran in the house, got this baseball bat, and begins to attack his brother and beat him to death with this thing.

And these injuries are fascinating because that's really it's really, that's really the only one. And that came from his statement. That's really the only one that we could sequence, you know, because he said, I struck my brother or hit my brother on the side of his head. And then as he is down on his knees, he's on top of him striking downward. And we believe that he actually took that baseball bat almost like as kind of the piece de resistance stood over his brother's body and almost like the sword and the stone and only the reverse drove the long axis of the barrel with the blunt end right down into the other temple of his brother's head. It was it was absolutely brutal. So that was kind of my, that was, first off, it was the first case that I ever worked as a new medical legal person of a baseball pad.

I had others afterwards. But it was also my very first case I ever worked, a blunt force trauma. So when we came across this case, cases, I was intrigued by this day because it made me go back in time, begin to think about kind of what happened here. before about how when when the murderer when a killer uses something like strangling you know killing somebody with your bare hands kind of thing a knife that those are more personal than you know using a gun and in this case where you're using a bat would you equate that with the kind of personal contact they may have with the individual as strangling or using a knife or would you put it in the gun side of things? Yeah. Because in both these cases, you're talking about brothers here.

We're talking about, you know, in-laws here. Right. I'm not trying to be a smart aleck by saying this. It's certainly a lot more personal than shooting them at a great distance. Right. And anything that puts the, this is the way I look at it. Anything that puts the, let's a greater risk of bodily harm, to me, that kind of fits within those parameters. Because let me tell you something, it's just like with a knife. If you show up with a knife or a bludgeon, and there's actually a weapon out there.

I think it goes back to the days of the knights that they refer to as a bludgeon. And there's actually a weapon out there. I think it goes back to the days of the knights that they refer to as a bludgeon. It's a specific, but that's where the term comes from. But if you use a bludgeon, you're in great danger of having that thing taken away from you and you're going to be beat to death with it or have your throat cut or whatever the case might be. But in this case, this was so personal. You know, you're talking about brothers here and there's a lot. Brothers love one another. But boy, when you talk about getting into another territory where hate kind of takes root,

you know, when it comes to brothers, there's a lot of passion. And boy, those fights can be something to behold. But when you're an individual who has been cast aside by your girlfriend, and you think perhaps her parents had something to do with it, remember this. No one likes rejection. And in this case, Brad Sigmund could be the poster child. Joe, as we get into this story today, we were talking about executions and a lot of it has to do with the nationwide discussion because of the chance of Brian Koberger's trial, the case has been huge. And Koberger has already they've already talked about the type of sentence. If it was a death sentence, how would it be carried out?

You and I have done stories about the carrying out of death sentences, you know, through lethal injection and other means. And now they've actually worked on getting legislation passed in Idaho that firing squad would be the primary method for execution and everything else after that, not making it a secondary option, making it the primary option. And in this case today, where Brad Sigmund is accused of dating Barbara and being boyfriend, girlfriend for a significant enough time that they had been together for a while that when she broke up with him, he was mortified, horrified, terrified of himself. And he took it out on her and her family. His goal wasn't just to kill his her parents. Her his goal was to kill all of them. But what he really wanted to do. So he says, OK, and we got to I always wonder about this,

Joe. You've been on this side of things for a long time as an investigator and seeing the aftermath of heinous crimes. When somebody tells you, even though they didn't do it, that my idea was I was going to kill her, then kill myself. Yeah. Do you believe them or is it because they're alive? They're able to tell that. Did they not have the guts to go through with it? Yeah, I'd refer to that as a lack of commitment to the task, in my opinion, at least in that.

Not that we're encouraging people to commit suicide, but after you kill somebody. No, they'll sit around and they'll talk about this sort of thing. You know, and I think many of, many times that's a sympathy grab. It's also something that they use in order to try to leverage the court to bestow mercy, perhaps from the perspective of that I'm mentally ill. And with Sigmund, you know, there was a lot, there was a lot of hay made over his mental illness, quote unquote, you know, in the wake of all of that. Look at what he did, Joe. Yeah. He actually goes to their house with a baseball bat.

Yeah. He finds the victims here, Mr. and Mrs. Lark. Okay. These are Barbara's mom and dad his ex his girlfriend of her is now ex-girlfriend for a week okay but he finds david lark in a room in the house and he finds uh gladys lark he finds david in the kitchen and gladys in the living room now we know this because he beat them to death with the baseball bat separately. He attacks David in the living room and beats him with the bat, gets him

down, then runs into the kitchen where he beats Gladys. He then comes back to David and beats him some more, then goes back to Glide. He's going. Have you ever in your life of investigating murders, Joe, ever come up with somebody going back and forth? I don't think I was trying to do my recall on that and how much effort I'm thinking, you know, this kind of thought passed through my mind just a moment ago. How absent of mercy do you have done the time before, you're not stemmed in any way. You're still all in. And here's an interesting little side fact here, Dave. Did you know that he struck each victim precisely nine times each? So let's just think about this. Just think about it. Let's go back to baseball. If you're in the

cage and you swing the bat 18 times, I don't know if in a regular practice, that's a lot of swings that you're taking up at pitching or whatever they call it, hitting practice. I would think you'd be exhausted and this guy ain't no pro baseball player. His tongue's going to be dragging he's he's pumped full of adrenaline and hatred at this point in time and perhaps panicked as well. I can only imagine because here's the thing. If he had and we'll get to this in just a moment, if he had used a pistol to kill both of these people, he would not have borne witness to the volume of blood that he saw. This scene is going to be something that would be very difficult to work, particularly if you're trying to assess blood pattern deposition. You know, you think about the one victim in the kitchen, and this kind of comes to mind because I've had cases like this, where if you got the adjacent cabinetry right there, you're going to have when that bat strikes downward.

It's almost like, and I'm not trying to be flip here, but it's something that many people can't necessarily identify with. Think about Gallagher, the old watermelon, you know. The sledgehamatic. Yeah, the sledgehamatic routine. And every time, you know, and people would have to literally they would come to the audience and hold up a sheet of plastic. I mean, they paid for this. I mean, you know, God bless you. Go in peace. It's

what you do. But every time he would strike that watermelon with the sledge matic, which was this gigantic oversized mallet, it would spray outward and deposit on all of those people. And so if once you get that and remember when Gallagher would do that, it's one strike. That was one strike per watermelon. Does that frame it for you? This guy's striking the husband and the wife nine times individually, and he is traveling between the two. I can only imagine when they're documenting this thing, because the DA is probably not at the scene. All right. I can only imagine when the DA gets this case file from the police, Dave, and he's got the forensics people explaining this to them. And you've got these overlapping fan patterns like this. And

the blood guy is like saying, yeah, see these convergent lines right here from this particular pattern? That's one strike. That's two strikes. That's three. That's four. That's five. That's six. That's seven. And all the while, all the while, the. is thinking, OK, yeah, this this might be the most horrible thing I've ever seen. And when I go to grand jury, I'm going to nail this guy to the wall. As a matter of fact, we're going full on on this. All right. Well, let me ask you, we've talked about how Nancy Grace says that you can in the blink of an eye, you can form intent. In this case, we've got a man who, the way it sounded, the way it was described, taking turns, hitting the husband, then hitting the wife, then going from room to room. Is that something that is argued by the prosecution to make it seem worse than it is? I mean, it's horrible as it is.

But, I mean, I'm trying to figure out because they each had exactly the same number of hits and they're in different rooms of the house. So it didn't happen like a cartoon. It actually happened where they were both down and he had to have had them both down with injuries at some point. But taking turns or, you know, I hit Gladys one time, hit David one time. They're both on the ground. Now I sit here and pound David eight more times and I go in and pound Gladys eight more times. I'm not trying to be flipping, as you mentioned a minute ago. I'm just trying to get down to how does one actually go about using the same weapon and they can determine that that was the same baseball bat used on both individuals, correct?

Well, oh yeah. And what you're going to have, that's an excellent question. Let's just say that we've got two buckets of paint. We've got a blue bucket and we've got a red bucket. Okay? So if you take the analogy of dipping the bat in red paint and then in blue paint, you're going to have a commingling of blood in that particular case. I know that's rather elementary, but it's the same principle. And if you think, okay, well, for the sake of argument, one individual has OPOS, the other one has ONAG. Well, those blood types, which they would have gotten their blood type,

perhaps at the morgue, they didn't know it already from their attending physician, then you've got a big tell there scientifically. Now, this was back in 2001, Dave, and we used DNA back then. But I really wonder if they used DNA in this case because they've got a suspect at that time. He's no longer a suspect. He's been convicted and sentenced, and we'll find out what actually happened to him. But you've got a guy that's trying to paint this impression that he's sick in the mind.

Well, Dave, this is where we get the information from about what specifically happened. You know, because if you're trying to paint the story, I often drift back to Kenneth Bianchi from the Hillside Stranglers, where he was feigning multiple personality disorder. And it's one of the most fascinating interviews you've ever seen of somebody feigning psychopathology. It's a black and white CCTV interview that he does, that they do with this guy. And suddenly this other person appears. You've got Kenneth, who was very sweet and mild mannered. And you got this other guy, and I can't remember what the name of the guy was. And he's referring to women as broads and all these sorts of things. Yeah, I killed her.

We raped her, you know, so forth and so on. Well, he's trying to sell a bill of goods here. It's no different with this. This guy's trying to sell them on the fact that he has some kind of psychopathology. It's not just simply, well, you're a murderer and you took a bat like a petulant child and you threw a temper tantrum and you beat these poor people to hell and back who you know they had probably fed him over the years they probably celebrated holidays with this guy yeah joe okay he and barbara have been together for three years they have been living together

when she gets done with okay she didn't just walk out of a wonderful relationship obviously okay think about the end result and this is only a week in the week that she breaks up with him. She moves back in with her parents. He then for that next week, apparently stalks her, terrorizes her, trying to figure out if she's seeing somebody else doing all those crazy things that men do when they're possessive like this. And he goes and kills her parents. His goal is to then lie in wait to kill her, to kill Barbara. I don't know what his other plan was to go from room to room waiting for them to be dead. You know, he made sure they were both dead. Then he laid in wait for his ex-girlfriend to arrive. And then he does something different with her, Joe. He actually steals David's gun. He knows

David has a gun. And so he steals his gun. And when Barbara gets home, he kidnaps her at gunpoint, puts her in the car. Now, Barbara is an interesting, unique, strong woman. I don't know what kind of guts it took for her, but he's driving down the road. She knew if I don't, if I don't get away from him right now, I'm dead. She jumped out of a moving car and ran through a field for her life. And that person of Brad Sigmund tried shooting her, tried following her. He couldn't. She got away from him.

I'm sure just I'm getting away. She is the hero of her own life story in that moment and i pray that she has recovered from what took place that night yeah well he did he did actually hit the target one time because she wound up having to get surgery she right he popped off a single round or multiple rounds but popped off around and it she got shot in the foot can you imagine well first off the pain of that. If you've ever broken your ankle, twisted your ankle, and now you've got a lead core projectile slamming into your foot. That's one of the most painful things.

But yet you're pumped with adrenaline. You know that there's a homicidal maniac behind you. And you're trying to get as much distance between yourself and that individual. And thankfully, you know, she did get away. But can you imagine what she's had to live with all of these years? Because she's had to look back, I would imagine, many times in those still quiet hours of the night and think, only if, only if her path had never crossed with Sigmund all those many years ago. But here we are. It did. Her path had never crossed with Sigmund all those many years ago.

But here we are. It did. And as it's turned out, his case in particular, and I'll go ahead and give you a peek, his death has made national news. I'm a fan of Stanley Kubrick. I think I've actually mentioned him before on Body bags. And I think the reason I'm a fan is that he's a detailed person and I'm not, and I know it sounds weird since I'm in forensic science and, you know, I'm supposed to be looking for evidence, but with him, every thing, every frame that he shot was planned, everything. And with that said, there is a movie that came out, uh, that starred Kirk Douglas. And, you know, I like Kirk Douglas as much as the next person, but, and he was front and center, you know, that's how you get, as I say, butts in

the seats to buy tickets, but he was not really the star of that movie, Dave. The movie is actually Paths of Glory. And it takes place in World War I, France. And it is about three soldiers in the French army. And it is one of the most gut-wrenching movies you have ever seen. I mean, it is so, so powerful. These guys, because of the failure of their commander, they did the trench warfare, going over the top, and these guys were brave.

I think a couple of the characters have been awarded medals. The commander was forced to select three guys as examples. And all three of them were shot by firing squad. And the scene where they're walking down, it looks like they're at Versailles, the scene where they're walking down this long avenue, and the soldiers there are long lines of soldiers. Every time they pass a group of soldiers, they do an about face and turn their backs to these guys. There's a priest, you know,

speaking to each one of the men as they're walking along. One guy is just out of his mind. Another guy is got his chest poked out. He's going to his end bravely. And the other guy is on a stretcher and unconscious. And they strapped him to a post and shot him. They shot all three of these guys. I don't want to spoil it for you. But for me, when I see that movie, I think about Firing Squad. And it really got my attention. One of the reasons it's so powerful is that out of all

execution methods that are out there, that are still being used in Western countries, I guess, the firing squad, in my opinion, is the quickest. I mean, is in fact the quickest. You know, one of the big things that has gone on and on for years is this debate over lethal injection because, you know, the drug cocktail quite seem to get it right. And then the thing goes to court and they have to adjust it. Then pharmaceutical companies, they don't want to be part of it. So it's hard. They claim that it's hard to get the meds and that sort of thing. And then there have been some horror stories that people have written about. Labored breathing, takes a long time to die. It's not necessarily effective in every case. Then you go back to the electric chair before that. And you think about just the images. If you ever get a chance, by the way, if you ever get a chance to look at the images of Ted Bundy's body down in

Florida after they've removed him from the death chamber. You'll see what I'm talking about because his head is shaved and he sustained second, third degree burns to the top of his head. And I know what many of you are saying. He deserved every bit of it. I'm, you can tell that it takes, for some, takes a bit. Because what they'll do is they'll bump it. They'll bump the person, hit them initially. And you'll see the body tense up. Then they'll relax.

Doctor will come out, check for a heartbeat. And they'll say, still breathing. And then they hit it again. Okay. And there are any number of stories where they actually have fires that start in the skull cap. You can smell the flesh burning, all these sorts of things. It's very, very unpleasant. But, you know, Dave, with firing squad, it's something completely different.

And we've wound up in this position. It's one of the reasons I want to talk about this case. We've wound up in this position because Sigmund protested so much about the barbarity of the ancient electric chair, which this is in South Carolina, where they'd had a lot of these cases that went sideways, that he talked himself into a firing squad. And the state, I think it was a few years ago, they went ahead and mocked one up and then built it. And it's a heck of a thing. I think that they are now, South Carolina is one of, I hope I get this right, five states now that have it on

the books. Um, most, most of America's experiences with firing squads go to the military and many of them war too. I think we had, let me get this straight. We had many that were in theater, you know, like over in Europe. There were a few in Southeast Asia. There was one in New Zealand that our guys did. And this variety that's out there, you know, there was a movie that was famously made about Eddie Slovak or Slovak. I can't remember. Martin Sheen played the character. And he's the only person in U.S. history or in World War II, rather, that was executed by firing squad for desertion.

Everybody else that was executed by firing squad was, it was rape or murder. So he was kind of this outlier. But, you know, firing squads are something we've been familiar with. The first settlers, there's, in the early 1600s, there was a captain in Her Majesty's military when they settled. I think it was Virginia. And he was in violation of some law. And they found they think his remains buried in one of the walls at Jamestown. And it's got multiple gunshot wounds.

And he had been sentenced to death by firing squad. So it goes all the way back to the 1600s for us. I don't know about the Brits. You know, if they've ever used firing squads, uh, I'm sure that they probably did. Uh, they really, they really like hanging or used to in great Britain. That was, that was their thing. Great book that's out there about the Queens executioner. I mentioned that before too, but with Sigmund, you know, he, he was like one of, I think five. Is that, is that right, Dave? In the last, maybe last 15 years, maybe one or three. I can't remember. It was until I started looking

into this. I wasn't even sure of how many I, cause I was thinking Gary Gilmore, that's the name that came to mind. Um, you know,, he he was convicted of two murders and demanded it be carried out and that it be by firing squad, you know, and they made what was the movie The Executioner's Song with Tommy Lee Jones. And it was a TV movie and got a lot of attention. But since 1977, there's only been three other prisoners in the U..s that have been executed by firing squad now there is another one out and by the way i think two of those were utah one was a guy named um ronnie lee gardner in 2010 and i didn't you know i remembered him being put to death i did not remember it being firing squad i know it's just so off of our radar because we keep arguing over whether or not lethal injection is this heinous crime committed on somebody who's been sentenced to death.

And I'll be honest with you. I think waiting is the real crime. When you tell somebody you are sentenced to death for your crimes and then you make them wait. I think it's I think you're adding further punishment to the victims as well because you're making them wait. This man, they were Degman or, uh, oh, good grief. Sigmund, you know, the guy was 43 years old when he committed this crime in 2001, when he beat two people to death with a baseball bat. Um, he was a 43 year old man. Well now, you know, we're talking 24 years later, Joe, 24 years later, for 24 years, everybody that knows what happened is having to suffer through.

Why are we feeding this guy? You know, why? Why do we have this? Another show, another debate. But when it gets right down to it, the victims here had no choice. They were going to get their heads bashed in by a baseball bat. They didn't have any choice. They didn't know when their time was coming, but he's had time to fight for his life even after admitting this heinous crime. So I think that we need to put a cap on it before we discuss lethal injection or firing squad or guillotine. You know, I don't know the right answer. And listen, we famously covered, Dave, and boy, we got a lot of responses from that episode here in Alabama. You know, we had the nitrogen case, the first one. Now they've had a couple of other ones that are used in various places with the, you know, the exposure to nitrous oxide, but nitrogen gas in the death chamber.

I have a solution. Yeah which I have a solution now. Yeah. I have a solution. A good one. Here's what we do. We have a doctor use propofol to put you to sleep. It's a very gentle way to go to sleep. You start counting at 100.

Once they start the propofol, the little white milk, the milk starts coming down and they'll say, OK, Dave, start counting back from 100. And you're like, why do you have that blanket on your shoulder? because you're going to be on my shoulder by it before you get to 96 and okay 199 bam they're out they're out they're asleep chop their head off what do we care what do we care the means of the day you know the way of doing it our worry if our rule if we're really really worried about putting them to sleep and causing problems, okay, let's put them to sleep and chop the head off. We're done. Pinch it off like you would a bug.

Yeah, it would be sufficient. And, again, I don't know that going to the guillotine, for instance, as France had, I think they had their last guillotining, you know, obviously in the last century. There was one public one, I think in the 1920s, there was a thief, you know, that they guillotined back then. And they had become quite exquisite at doing this, you know, and this all goes back to, you know, to the French Revolution, because this is a death machine, you know, that they've used. And there's any number of ways, you know, methodologies that are out there. And this, I think, I think for me, what's going to be very interesting, particularly in light of, you know, you mentioned Koberger, which is brilliant because this is something that's on the table right now. You know, they've been talking about extensively.

You talk about Coburger with the firing squad. I think that given the reaction, and I'll talk about this a little bit by the press, at Sigmund's execution just a few days ago, they talked about how quick and sudden it was. And so just kind of let me lay the picture out for you. The first thing you have to do, I was talking about all these methodologies, the first thing you have to do if you're going to do it, if you're going to build a house, there are a few tools that you need, right? So you have to decide on the tools that are going to be sufficient to the task. Well,

South Carolina actually settled on a 308 cartridge,.308, which is a cartridge that has been in use forever and ever. Well, 308 was used in what's referred to as the M14, which was kind of this gap weapon. Not many people like it. Some special operations people still use it. Before we started using the M16, and that evolved into the M4, which we've used for years and years.

Anyway, they had to have a specific type of ammunition for this, and I really want you to grab hold of this. They're using what's referred to as a flangeable round, and this is a round. It's a Winchester round, and my suspicion is it's probably made by the Hornady Company, which is famous for tactical rounds. They're great hunting rounds as well for taking game, big game or medium-sized game and big game too. And so this flangeable round, what happens, Dave,

is that when it is fired, instead of a standard ball round, like where you have a chunk of lead that has a bow fin design on it, which means it comes to this so they don't kill anybody else in the house or at a location, that round splinters. It showers the target with these little fragmented flechettes almost where it kind of shatters. So when they took Sigmund and they strapped him to a chair, put a hood over him and their sandbags behind him there, they have him seated. They've got him strapped down and you've got the audience there, you know, in the death chamber and they can't the audience, cannot see the shooters. They're behind a partition, but the barrel is poking out. So the order is given. These guys, it's a three-man team, and there's an old, people have done this for years where they talk about there are,

if you had a five-man firing squad, one person would get a blank, and you didn't know the weapons were loaded by somebody other than the shooter, okay? That is, if this starts going through in somebody's mind, they can say, well, it wasn't me. I had the blank round, okay? They didn't say anything about this. And the thing about it is there were only three shooters and all three of these guys volunteered, Dave. They were all members of the South Carolina Corrections Department. And the assumption is that they're all really good shots. So what they did is they had a white target on Sigmund's chest. Now, he's not going to be seeing this.

He's got a hood over his head and he's strapped to a chair. And there's a red mark in the center of this target. And allegedly, this red mark is directly over the heart. So actually, it would seem as though that he died instantaneously. Because, you know, there is no more blood coursing through his body. The heart has essentially become mincemeat. No longer functioning. And he slips off. Into, I don't know, whatever is the next life for him.

But I do know this. There were two people, and a third as well, that had expectations of their life that were never, ever fully fulfilled because of that one evening in 2001 where he took a baseball bat and beat to death the parents of the person that he said he loved. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.