Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Eliza Fletcher Mother, Teacher, Heiress, and Victim

Episode Date: October 16, 2022

Eliza Fletcher, a Memphis teacher and mother, is reported missing the morning of September 2, 2022 after she doesn't return home from her morning jog. A search is launched shortly thereafter and comes to an end on September 5th when her body is found by police. Suspect, Cleotha Abston has been arrested and charged for her murder.  In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss what the autopsy report shows, what her cause of death was determined to be, what drugs were found in her system, and more. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 0:50 - Background and overview of case 1:42 - The autopsy report: how you read it and what you learn from it 16:17 - Eliza’s cause of death 22:16 - What the gunshot wound tells us 26:23 - Internal and external beveling 28:03 - Le Fort fracture 32:25 - Submission 34:10 - Fentanyl  40:13 - Was Eliza Fletcher raped? 43:36 - Wrap up See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Well, we've been waiting. We've been waiting to try to find out what actually happened to Eliza Fletcher. Now, we've got those answers. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. With me is my friend Jackie Howard, executive producer for Crime Stories with Nancy Grace.

Jackie, we've been waiting, haven't we? We've been waiting to finally get some detailed answers relative to what happened to Eliza Fletcher, what brought about her death specifically. We've heard a lot out there. Now we finally have some details, don't we? We do. Eliza Fletcher, a 34-year-old teacher from Memphis, went missing during a pre-dawn run, and she was killed. Her body was found four days later. What we know now

is that she died a very violent death. We already had intimations of that from the fact that her body was found decomposed. Her clothing was in a separate location from her body. So we did know that she had a very violent death. The information that's coming out with the release of the autopsy shows us just how violent that was. But before we get into the details, Joe, I went to look at the autopsy and there was so much information, so many terms.

Can you explain to me what it is an autopsy shows us and how it shows? I mean, how do you read these things? Well, you have to think of it first off as a map, I think, that allows us to determine the direction in which we're going. You can go very broadly or you can go put a fine point on it. And that's kind of the way an autopsy report works when you're starting off on a journey and you tell it in very broad strokes from the opening. And it's kind of, it almost is set up like a play, if you will, with multiple acts because every component of the body that is detailed in this document plays a part in the totality of the story. And it's even got an introduction. And then in most autopsies, they will have a conclusion. And this one does. And look, it's all over the internet now. I mean,

people can kind of take a look at it. I've been reading autopsy reports for, I don't know, 40 years, I guess. And so I wanted to take this opportunity, take Eliza's autopsy report, kind of break it down, find out what happened to her specifically. And maybe it'll be an opportunity for our listeners to begin to understand it a little bit more in context. Because listen, when the story of Eliza's death broke, to say that it was chaotic is an understatement, I think. And the thing about having something in black and white before you, this report that's been put out, it adds some level of, I think, stability and control, it's measured because it is a scientific report. Moving forward and kind of what the police and investigators have, and the DA in particular, is going to have moving forward with this case to prosecute this case. And there's certainly a ton here that we can kind of dig into. I've heard you describe before an autopsy as a roadmap.

Okay. Now, let's be realistic. When we had old-time roadmaps and not using GPS on our phones, most people couldn't read a roadmap. So, how are we going to be able to read and understand what's on an autopsy? Well, listen, listen. It is literally common sense. And if you've got a dictionary, particularly a medical dictionary, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to sit down and read an autopsy report. There's little subtleties in there. But if you take your time, I mean really take your time, sit there, analyze it, break it down. If you find, and this is how I literally learned medical terminology this way, was through reading autopsy reports and having two or three dependable medical dictionaries at my disposal.

Anytime I didn't understand a word, I would go look it up and I'd read it and I'd try to absorb it and understand the root of that word. You know, is it a Greek root or is it a Latin root? And how is it applied? And the beauty of this is that you've got this tragic case, but to a certain degree, I guess, every autopsy that is performed has some level of tragedy to it, particularly for those that are family members and loved ones. But you can learn from these things. You can extract bits of information, and as you carefully read it, carefully, this isn't one of these things you just kind of gloss over.

You take your time, and you read it, and you begin to break it down and you begin to understand it, at least, perhaps, through the pathologist's eyes and the other scientists that worked on this case. And it brings everything together. They're trying to bring you to a location. And it's not that they're necessarily forming the narrative themselves. And this is key because this is something we're always talking about in medical legal community. And you're going to know what I'm going to say. And that is we speak for those that can no longer speak for themselves. Well, this, this for the dead, the autopsy report is the codex.

It's the Rosetta Stone for them, for the dead. They're giving up their secrets here per the examination. And if you read it carefully, you'll begin to kind of understand what happened. And it breaks it down very logically. It gives you the initial diagnosis to begin with right in the very front, the front end of this thing. And then it breaks it down per each system, whether it's the cardiovascular system, the gastric digestive system, skeletal system, and it breaks it down in each one of those components. And then it finally brings it home at the end. And that's the beauty of an autopsy report. It's not like you're at a press conference and everybody's shouting questions and they try

to get a response from the person up at the podium. It's not like that. The cool thing about an autopsy report is you can quietly sit there and read it and get in kind of a meditative state, if you will, to begin to make this come to life so that you see this picture developing before you. And that's happened for me at least time and time again. Okay. So an autopsy, when you're looking at it, at first, it's going to tell you the details of how the body was found, correct? Yeah. And then from that, does it go on and extrapolate on what the medical examiner sees during his autopsy? I mean, it's laid out in detail. Yeah, it is.

And again, I say this, I've said it for years. You know, people have been so influenced by television. They assume that there's a forensic pathologist that goes out to the scene on cases like this. On all of the cases, every homicide. Oh, yeah, we've got a forensic pathologist that comes out. No, you don't. There's not enough of them. There's just not.

So you're relying upon what the investigators at the scene saw. And to that end, the pathologist needs to know what the investigator saw at the scene. And they need to have somebody that can actually communicate those findings to them. Because the pathologist might very well be back at the medical examiner's office doing two and three, maybe four other autopsies. They're not going to have time to drop everything they're doing on those cases and go out to a scene and do their own observation. So you have to have a staff that you trust. And that's where a medical legal death investigator comes in. Someone that does for a living what I did for so many years.

You're the eyes and the ears of the pathologist in the scene. You bring that data into the medical examiner's office or coroner's office for this purpose so that they can contextualize the death at the scene. And because there's certain things that you're looking for, for instance, externally that were influenced by the environment in which the body is found. And in Eliza's case, she was actually found in this thick, high grass area immediately adjacent to this old house in the back of it. You know, if you just stone cold get a body that shows up and you have no frame of reference for it, you're not going to understand, well, she was laying in thick vegetation. That might explain

some of the animal activity or lack thereof. She was obscured from view. You know, for instance, how did she come to be in this state of decomposition? She's at a house. Well, you don't understand, Doc. She was at a house. She was in the yard, but it was obscured from view. You had no points of view from this. Oh, okay. I understand now. So, she's in the back. She's in grass. She's obscured. That's why we have this level of decomposition, for instance. And so, it's those little areas that you have to have that data that comes in from the field. And that way the forensic pathologist begins to integrate that into their examination, okay, and begin to understand it.

But for the purposes of the autopsy report, the way most of the time they're handled is that when the physician begins to do their examination, they obviously do an external examination and they'll annotate everything. They'll go through clothing, they'll do weight, they'll do height, they'll look for things externally as far as injuries go. They'll look for, say, identifiers on an individual. Say, maybe they'll be looking for tattoos. Anything externally that is going to bring to life the person that you have before you on the table. And these elements are referred to, they're components of what's referred to as individualization when it comes to identification. And that's a big part of this because particularly when you have a body that has been down for a protracted period of time, you want to make sure, I mean dead on sure, that this individual

is in fact who you believe them to be. And you have to do that through scientific verification. And of course, that'll be annotated in the autopsy report as well. So what else is included in an autopsy, Joe? We hear often this is a preliminary autopsy pending toxicology. So what other things go into a final autopsy report? Let's address this issue of it being a preliminary finding. If you have someone that has, say, for instance, died of a gunshot wound, a preliminary finding, the pathologist will actually say, okay, the cause of death is, you know, a gunshot wound to the head. All right. But for our purposes, we're not going to go into the great detail now as far as like the bullet trajectory, range of fire, all those sorts of things.

And in some cases, they'll say, well, it's pending toxicology. They will give you a preliminary finding. And that paints it in rather broad strokes, doesn't it? People always, particularly in the world of true crime, they want to have those answers because people are curious by nature. However, science doesn't work that way. It's not a drive-through. It takes time to get these tests run and to do everything that has to be done because you want to make sure that all of your bases are covered before you come out with that final report. And this is critical because, you know, we can talk about all the science that you

want to and the details that are on the autopsy report, but one of the most binding things that is on an autopsy report is, in fact, the forensic pathologist's signature. And they're not going to sign anything until they know that they have all of the data that they need to come to a reasonable scientific conclusion. So with that said, there's a lot of components to the autopsy report. You can literally break it down kind of in the first round regarding the pathological diagnosis. And that'll be set up front, such as in Eliza's case. And we do have a pathological diagnosis in her case. And that is, what were your findings, you know, to begin with? And then after that is established, you would essentially go through the

report. First off, externally, talk about what the body looked like at the time of presentation when you received the body. And then you'll go into a broad area that's literally called evidence of injury, where you kind of make your way through every type of injury that you annotated at the autopsy. And when you get to, let's just say you have head trauma in a particular case, you'll talk about it, the trauma, the specific trauma. But when you get to say the section that covers the brain in the autopsy report, you'll go into great detail about how this evidence of injury that you made note of earlier, how that injury actually impacted that organ or that organ system. And so, it will break it down section by section. And sometimes you'll come across, let's say, for instance, you get to the section that is the respiratory system, okay, which is going to talk about things like the lung and the cavity that the lungs sit in. And sometimes it's kind of boilerplate. That means that they'll say that the lungs present

in a normal anatomical presentation and there is no evidence of trauma. There's no evidence of any kind of disease, that everything is normal. But they have to make note of that to state that they did, in fact, do the examination on the lungs because you have to be able to rule things out all the way along. It's not just a diagnosis of inclusion, you know, where it's some of the things have to be excluded. Well, you say that this individual died as a result of head trauma. Well, were there any other contributing factors? You know, maybe they didn't have the ability to breathe well, real well, and they had some kind of unknown lesion on their lung to compromise their ability to breathe, and so they collapsed and struck their head. And so you look at the lungs and say, well, there's nothing there that would have obstructed their ability to uptake oxygen. That has to be noted as well.

So you go through it system by system. And then after you've gone through the anatomical issues, you get off into, well, what's going on on board relative at a chemical level? You look for the toxicology report and they run a standard panel, standard things, cocaine, any kind of opiate, benzos, delta-2HC. The list goes on and on, but there's a standard panel they look for. And again, it's a diagnosis of exclusion and inclusion. So, if there's something there, you say, well, this was a positive finding, and then they'll give you the quantitative amount. That means that, yes, we found drug X, and this is how much was in it. And then you reference that and say, well, is this a lethal level? And then if they have multiple drugs in there, you say, well,

you know, is this a deadly combination? You know, one of these drugs by themselves would not do harm to an individual, but you combine it with something else like opiates and alcohol, for instance, then that can be a deadly combination. Okay. So you have this list that's going on toxicologically. And of course, if you have a case where it requires some kind of specialty science that's involved, such as in, amazingly, in Eliza's case, an anthropologist was brought in, and they will actually render their own report per their own individual examination. That's in addition to what the forensic pathologist does. They'll render their own independent report, and that will actually be placed together with the autopsy report and it paints

a very detailed picture of all that remained of Eliza in this case. I think we're all hoping for detail. And, you know, they always say the devil is in the details. And certainly I think that's evidenced in Eliza Fletcher's case. We can see laid out before us in black and white specifically what happened to this poor woman and what brought about her death. The folks up in Memphis that did her examination did a highly detailed job. Fantastic. And finally, we do have some answers, Jackie.

Eliza Fletcher, her cause of death is a gunshot wound. I think that surprised everybody. There were these issues of, you know, disheveled clothing. She was back in an obscured area, as I mentioned earlier. I think it had been stated a couple of times that people thought that this was very intimate, sexual kind of event that may have happened. And I think first blush for many folks is you think that with something like this, it's going to be an asphyxial death, maybe a choking or something like this, or maybe even a bludgeoning. And in some cases, of course, you have stabbing that's very intimate.

But in this case, it was a gunshot wound. And you can actually begin to kind of learn a lot about her position, I think, at the time of death when this gunshot wound was essentially perpetrated upon her body. In anatomy, you talk about posterior and anterior, posterior being the back, anterior being the front. So she's got a gunshot wound that is with the entrance being in the right parietal area. And if folks at home will go to the top of your ear, okay, on either side, it doesn't matter, but go to the right top of your ear and essentially diagonally from the top aspect of your ear, draw a line diagonally about two to three inches. And that's going to put you right in the area of your parietal bone. And it's a plate

that's fused together with your temporal bone and the frontal bone and all these other bones. And so it's going to be posterior, which means it's going to be to the rear. And the way this wound apparently tracks is from the right parietal. Some people say parietal, the parietal area. And it tracks from essentially above to below. That's going to be the trajectory. And it's going to exit out of the left frontal area. And left frontal, just kind of think about your forehead, if you will. And it tracks across through the calvarium. And you'll see that word in the autopsy report, calvarium. And when you see that, it's not something that most people see on a regular basis relative to anatomy. And the calvarium is essentially

the skull cap, if you will. So the totality of the skull cap, that's what we actually remove at autopsy. And so it goes through her calvarium, through the cranial vault, and it exits out of the frontal bone adjacent to her forehead. And it's on the left aspect. And you begin to think about the nature of this wound. Now, it's not going to be like this huge kind of dropping trajectory where it's going to go. Say, for instance, if you had a gunshot wound to the right parietal area and it came out through, say, the left jaw or something, it's not that acute. The angle is not that acute, but it is slightly downward in trajectory. The reason you want to know that is because it gives you not just what position Eliza was in, but perhaps what the perpetrator was in when they discharged this weapon into her skull. And I've got to say something that

is very definitive in this case, and it also goes to how long she had been down. Her body, particularly her head, was in a moderate state of decomposition. And it was to the point where there was very little soft tissue remaining. And that can be trouble for us at autopsy because on the surface of the skin and also the hair, if we're talking about, we're trying to determine what the range of fire is. Many times, if we have skin left behind, you will have powder deposition, which means powder deposits on the skin. And that is if it's in an intermediate range, which is essentially going to be about six inches away, okay, to close range to maybe a contact range. And skin will give you an understanding of how close this was because it's being distributed. And as our friend Nancy always says, I love this analogy she always draws

with gunshot wound determination of distance. And she talks about spraying a fire hose that the more you open it up, the bigger it kind of spreads. So you figure the tighter the deposition of the powder or the remnant of the powder that's left behind, the closer the individual is. It's just kind of common sense. The further away you move, the less deposition there's going to be. It'll be more sporadic. In this case, skin is essentially gone. But they were able to say that this apparently, that this was an intermediate range, which means on the surface of the skull, you're going to have some kind of deposition there that would have entered through the skin and deposited on the

exterior of the skull and giving you an indication the person was not a great distance away when they shot. And so they're right on top of her. So there is no true contact wound, as in where we've talked about before, where the gun is placed directly against the skull or any body part, but directly in this case against the skull and pulled. Yet the distribution of the powder burn means that the shooter was not very far away. So if the supposition is there, would it make you think that she is already down on the ground and it's kind of fired that way? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think so. So in autopsy, they make it pretty clear that they didn't recover a projectile from her skull. What does that mean? So, well, they didn't recover like, okay, so you've got an exit essentially.

So that means that the round passed from back to front, from right to left. Okay. And probably slightly downward. They don't go into great detail about their trajectory, but that's kind of the feel that you get for it. But we do know the projectile exited out of the left frontal bone, which if everybody will essentially go above your left eyebrow slightly up and touch that area, that's your frontal bone. Okay. So, the round would have exited through there. Now, if she's laying on the ground, which, you know, there's a high probability and that round passed through her skull, it would have been in the earth underlying her body. Now, hear me right.

The autopsy report is not the police report. So, to find out more about the projectile, perhaps, that would be detailed in the crime scene report. All right. That's not part of the autopsy report. So, they would have gone out. And in my experience, what happens is you go out with metal detectors and you sweep that specific area, paying very close attention to where, first off, where the body is found and observed. You don't find anything there. Then you kind of just imagine you're going kind of in a spiral motion with the head of the body being concentric. That means in the middle, and then you kind of go eccentrically with a spiraling, with a metal detector, seeing if you're going to pick up any metallic bodies underlying, and you have to excavate that, you know, where you kind of brush the dirt away. You take photos, measurements, and then you extricate that from its resting place and take it in. Now, we don't have that information in the autopsy report, so that would be something you look for in the police report. Now, what can be done, though, at autopsy and what is done regularly, particularly in a place like Memphis that's this size and deals in this volume and it's key, is that you do x-rays of the body before you ever do an internal examination.

Matter of fact, before you ever do the external examination, you x-ray the body first because you want the body in as pristine condition as possible. And when you do the head x-rays, one of the things that kind of jumps to life is many times bullets will fragment. Even though they exit, you'll have little bits of them that will kind of peel off, if you will. And you will see this kind of tiny, sometimes it's more extensive than other times, but you'll see this tiny little lead storm that's contained in there. And as it has passed through on this trajectory that we talked about just a moment ago,

you'll see these little dots that are moment ago. You'll see these little dots that are radio opaque. You'll see them in there. And it's a great way to document things because when you go to court many times, attorneys and judges are not a big fan of showing overly grotesque images. Well, there's nothing grotesque about an x-ray. You just throw it up there. You say, well, this is where all the lead is. We can see it demonstrated right here. And it's a beautiful way to illustrate things. And you can illustrate trajectory sometimes with it too, depending upon how good the X-ray is. So another fascinating thing about this, that if you're reading Eliza's autopsy report, it talks about

internal and external beveling. What does that mean? Yeah, I know. Isn't that fascinating? It's an interesting term because you think about beveled wood, for instance, like if you've got border on your floor adjacent to a carpeted surface or whatever, you have that piece of wood down there and it'll be beveled. That means it has a curvature to it. Well,

say for instance, let's talk about an entrance wound. Okay. If you have an entrance wound, the projectile passes through, follow me now, passes through the exterior of the skull. And as that bullet is going through that little defect that it has made, the internal table skull will literally blow out. That bone fractures. And when it does, the interior of the wound will be beveled. It'll have a curvature to it around there. And this is kind of fascinating because it's one of the ways if we just find a freestanding skull or free line skull, if you will, and we have holes in the skull. If we have beveling on either aspect, we can determine what is the entrance and what is the exit. And that's how we do that with the skull. So with the entrance wound, you'll have internal beveling where it blows out,

goes into the brain. You'll get those little bits of bone that will track along that trajectory. And then as the bullet exits, as it exits, another fascinating point here, you get external beveling. So in Eliza's case, when this projectile exited out of her frontal bone, it blew out that part of the skull and it left external beveling around that area. And that tells us that this was, in fact, the exit wound. Another interesting point that came out in the autopsy, and again, we know this poor woman suffered a very violent, brutal death, is the actual physical injuries to her body. We know that the car, when she was forced into the vehicle, it sat in the same position for about four minutes. We saw that on the surveillance video. And I guess you would have to imagine what was going on at that time. And as the autopsy shows,

she had blunt force injuries to her thighs and to her head, and her jaw was broken in several places. I think, and you know, my opinion, $1.90 gets you a cup of coffee, some places. But in my opinion, what really stands out to me is this maxilla fracture. And our maxilla is not the lower jawbone. It's actually where the hard palate is seated, you know, our upper teeth, the area below the nose. She had what was diagnosed as actually a Lefort II fracture.

And just imagine. Okay, I'm sorry. I'm going to stop you. You got to explain that. That word, where did it come from? What is it? What does it mean? Well, Lefort is just a person in the distant past that made this initial finding.

Okay. Yeah. And this is sometimes called a pyramidal fracture. And if you imagine the shape of a pyramid and being struck in your hard palate, okay, in your, well, in your maxilla, which is the upper portion of, you know, your jaw, if you will. It's not, you know, the jaw is actually the mandible. Mandible is lower than upper maxilla, max, above. Struck in that area and headlong, okay, multiple times probably, then the bones in your face that make up this maxillary area are actually going to fracture. Developmentally, starting all the way back in the womb, your body began to kind of fuse together. Your skull did. And many times you'll

have these fracture lines along these weaker areas. And if you're struck in the face multiple times, that area in the shape of a pyramid will begin to fracture. Now, this fracture itself wasn't complete, but most of the time, if somebody sustains this Lefort fracture, there's a level one, you get up to level two, most of the time they arrive, they arrive in the hospital unconscious. It's that powerful. It takes a tremendous amount of force to facilitate this. And so, she sustained that injury and it wasn't completely fractured in two, but it was fractured enough so that, you know, it had begun to separate. And, you know, when they began to examine Eliza's remains, they were able to, you know, make that assessment that that was, in fact, a tough fracture that she had sustained and that she had. And that's in addition to other things.

And again, I have to make note of this. Her body has been down in the West Tennessee heat for a protracted period of time. Protracted in the sense that, as those of us that live in the South, things don't last a long time outside, though the environment just absolutely attacks you to death. And that's unfortunately what happened to her. So some of the things that you might normally find, say areas of hemorrhage and that sort of thing,

are slightly compromised as a result of decompositional changes. I think that it would be real difficult to say, well, she was struck here, here, and here by virtue of some kind of contusion she might have had on her face. This type of injury would have to come from being beaten. This type of injury comes as a result of blunt force trauma. This is not something that just kind of spontaneously happens. And this is not a fracture in this area that would be associated, say, with the firearm's blast. This is something that would have probably happened antemortem. And we all know, you know, listening to body bags, antemortem means before death. And it's, I think at least, you know, you had mentioned that there was time spent in this vehicle.

This is a submission kind of thing. I mean, think about it. You're trying to get an individual to submit to you. You've snatched this poor woman off of the street and brought her into this vehicle where you can control her. Well, she doesn't want to be in the vehicle with you. And this vehicle where you can control her. Well, she doesn't want to be in the vehicle with you. And so how are you going to get her to submit? Well, you're going to pop her in the face. And then, you know, she's got this horrible contusion,

the lateral aspect of her right thigh. And lateral means the outside, you know. The medial is like in the middle, so like inner thigh. This is lateral. So for some reason, she has this really nasty contusion to bruise, and it existed long enough so that it was in the subcutaneous tissue, which means below the skin. This isn't just something that's kind of a surface event. This is something that has leached, the hemorrhage has leached down into the underlying tissue. And you begin to think about that. So, she's getting struck in multiple locations, I think, at least probably to try to get her to submit the injury that she has, you know, to her face, that injury that's related to that fracture. That's, you know, that's the kind of thing that you'd see with somebody, you know, being unbuckled

in a car accident and slamming their face into a dashboard or steering wheel or something, you know, or getting hit with a heavy object in the face. It takes that kind of energy. The perpetrator in this case was attempting to get her to submit to his wants. I think probably for me, the most shocking thing about this examination and what the medical examiner found was the fact that Eliza had fentanyl in her system. And I'm just blown away by that. I can't kind of wrap my mind around that. Why in the world would this mother, this wife, have this drug in her system? To explain that comment, Joe, you're going to have to explain to us what fentanyl is and what it does to a body and why this active runner who ran, if I'm not mistaken, 8.2 miles a day.

This is not something that she would be using. Lord knows. Imagine somebody that is performing physically at her level would ever have fentanyl in their system for anything. I can't imagine. Fentanyl itself is a narcotic. It's been used over the years to control pain with, essentially. And of course, now it is absolutely positively the scourge of our society at this point. We've got people dying of this stuff left and right out on the streets. There have been tales of police officers going to, and this is how deadly it is, police officers pulling over

cars that have fentanyl inside of them that open up a bag and just merely inhalation, slight inhalation of the dust that comes up out of the bag is enough to put grown men in the hospital. It is, it's a nasty, nasty drug and the stuff is being manufactured out there. And for some reason, Eliza had this, this agent in her system. And I can't, you know, begin to imagine that this is something that she's going out and buying on the street. I don't think that that's even within the realm of possibility in this case. It seems to me that this is something that the perpetrator applied to her

in some way. The autopsy report really doesn't give us an indication as to the application, if you will. It can be taken in a pill form, and certainly there are any number of cases out there that we're finding on the streets where people are suddenly dying of fentanyl-related deaths because it's mixed with other drugs that you might encounter out on the street. It's like backfilling drugs with this other drug, and it makes for a lethal cocktail. And in this particular case, she had it on board. What's fascinating about it is the fact that she had it on board to the point where it wasn't just like they had found, and you can look in the autopsy report to read this through, there was not a remnant of what they refer to as particulate pill matter in her gastric content. She had food, you know,

in her stomach and this sort of thing, but she had it to the point in her system where it had begun to metabolize. So, taking that thought, and let's kind of expand on that a bit, taking that thought, she would have had to have been administered this drug, which would arguably put her in, if not a comatose state, certainly a dreamlike state. That again, going back to this idea of compliance would make her totally and completely compliant to whatever the wishes of this perpetrator would have been. It had begun to break down. So not only did you have the fentanyl, you had norfentanyl that was in there. And the norfentanyl is actually a metabolite. This is evidence that the drug had

begun to break down and be metabolized into the system. What made this doubly difficult for the medical examiner is that, and this is a practice that we do with severely decomposed bodies, you're not always going to be able to take a blood sample that's going to be effective in running toxicology. So when it comes to Eliza in her particular case, they had to draw up what's referred to as decompositional fluid. And this is fluid that will be mixed with blood, but you'll also have remnant of cells beginning to degrade and they begin to liquefy. It's very tough to break decompositional fluid down into components so that you can begin to kind of study what's in there. But it's something that people at our forensics labs do, and they do regularly.

And they did, in fact, find fentanyl and norefentanyl in her system, along with caffeine and another component that's consistent with probably eating chocolate, more than likely. But one of the things that we do in cases of not having access to blood or maybe urine in order to facilitate a drug test is that we will take samples of the liver, spin it down. So essentially a slice of the liver, decomposing liver, will be placed into a centrifuge and it will be spun down until it can be liquefied. And that will be drawn up and then you run that for toxicology. And what's interesting about fentanyl is that for all practical purposes, fentanyl is essentially processed through the liver. And so you would have a concentration of it there. It would give

you an indication. And this is where history comes in. You begin to speak to her family. First off, who's her treating physician? Is there any history that this treating physician at any point in time has prescribed her fentanyl? The remaining finding in this autopsy that has many people confused is that the assumption had been made that Eliza Fletcher had been raped. Her clothing was found, her shorts specifically, was found off her body in another location. Yet the autopsy does not confirm or deny that Eliza Fletcher was raped. To say that someone is raped at an autopsy is not necessarily

something that you can solely confirm with the autopsy results. The physician, per their examination, will note any kind of trauma that might have existed. And if you've got a person that is essentially compliant, if they've been knocked unconscious with either through physical violence, which we've got some evidence that there was physical violence, you know, with the bruising on the thigh. And then we've got this horrible facial fracture that's taken place. And then at a chemical level, you've got a drug that would certainly make somebody compliant. You're not necessarily going to have evidence of a forced event when it comes to a sexual assault. Okay. So, it's at that point that you're still going to do a rape kit. And in her case, they did.

They were able to do swabs that are normally done in a rape kit. The purpose for the swabs is to, first off, see if there is any ejaculate at all, where you would expect to find it in the case of a rape. All right. And the swabs are immediately removed. The swabs are actually, you take and you do a smear, which goes on to a slide. And of course, you know, they're going to pop that under a microscope or the examination and see if there's any sperm that might be there. And in cases where you have an acute event, where you have somebody that comes in the hospital, let's say they've been raped, they do a rape exam and you have indwelling semen and they take that sample, you know, the semen might still be viable at that point in time. Because sometimes you can

tell a lot about the perpetrator based upon that. So, if you've got an acute event and somebody, you know, the sperm or the lack thereof, there might be an indication of impotence. And, you know, you can certainly do a DNA profile in a case like that. In this case, Liza's body was greatly decomposed. I don't know how much success you would have with that. And also, the other factor you have to think is, did a perpetrator use a condom when they were assaulting her? And that means that any kind of semen that may have been left behind would have been captured in the condom and that would have been removed and taken away. That all has to factor into your thoughts. I know that they did nail clippings and nail

scraping. So we're looking at autopsy. We're trying to find any kind of trace evidence that might be beneath the fingernails, you know, like in an attempt to fight a perpetrator off to get them off of you. And in Eliza's case, was she, you know, you have to ask the question, was she capable at this point if a sexual assault was in fact perpetrated against her? Was she conscious enough in order to be able to facilitate fending off someone? And certainly that's a question that will have to be asked and answered. A suspect again has been charged in Eliza Fletcher's murder. That case has not yet gone to trial. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.