Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Forensic Anthropology and the Suicide of Gabby Petito's Murderer

Episode Date: August 3, 2025

Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss Forensic Anthropology,  starting with the two questions usually asked of Forensic Anthropologists: Who are they?  What happened? Joseph Scott Morgan explains what is Forensic Anthropology and how experts in the field are able to figure out what happened in cases where only a minimum of remains are left to investigate.   Transcribe Highlights 00:10.88 Introduction- Forensic Anthropology  05:05.90 Thinking neighbor was "the" Margaret Mead 10:26.47 Forensic Anthropologists - The Body Farm 14:56.66 Training is very intense 20:01.55 Terminator the liquid guy 25:03.32 Bones that make up the human skull  30:18.10 Swampy area - what happens to bones? 35:08.07 Study of human skeletal remains 40:42.60 Suture lines in floor of skull 44:34.54 Working case of genocide  50:36.76 Gunshot wound 55:22.21 ConclusionSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Vagin with Joseph Scott Moore. It's an interesting thing, the human skeleton. Did you know that every stage of life that we go through is kind of marked by our physical support system, if you will, our anatomical support system, our framework. That framework that our organs rest within and that our skin stretches over. It marks time for us. It gives off developmental signals.

It talks about disease. And I say talk as if you can have a conversation with it. But if you read it right, you can learn a lot about people through their skeletons. And in my world, in the world of medical legal death investigation, sometimes skeletal remains are all that we have to tell the tale. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags. Brother Dave, I've been excited about doing this episode with you because I got to make a confession right here, right now, and tell you this, this dirty dark little secret about

myself. I am at my heart, an amateur frustrated, forensic anthropologist. I've always worked with forensic anthropologists. I've been in their worlds. I've been in their labs. I've been in the field with them slapping mosquitoes and fending off snakes, yes. Been in swampy waters. I've been in swampy waters. I've been in rugged terrain.

But I have always been enamored of forensic anthropologists. And every opportunity that I have, I've always welcomed that moment when I can kind of sit at their feet and learn. Because they're fascinating individuals. They're fascinating because they have to take very, very little and tell a story with it. It's not like a forensic pathologist where you still have soft tissue, you've got evidence of trauma in the immediate

with focal areas of hemorrhage and all that stuff that we talk about on body bags. No, no, no, no. That's not what forensic anthropologists do. They have to frame everything out in very broad sense and sometimes they can come up with detailed information. But it's just, it's the way they go about it, the tools that they have to utilize. And I'm not talking about stuff that they can necessarily hold in their hands as far as tools, but their intellect, those things that they bring to the table. To try to literally, and just envision this for a second, Dave, to try to fill in the

blanks where soft tissue used to be, it no longer exists. You got the framework, but the shingles are off the roof. There's no more siding on the house. All you've got is that framework that's left behind. And so as we dig into this today, dig, I see what you did there. I apologize. All right. But I noticed when you were looking and sharing some of this information with me, that you had the basic five things or 10 things, whatever, the very specific parts of forensic anthropology. Yeah. So like from physical anthropology to

linguistics. Yes. So if we carve these out one at a time, and they're all tied together, I'm already ready to flunk the first final, because having done stuff on radio and television, dealing with crime stuff forever it seems, and I've never dug this deep. I've heard things talked about,

I've heard you talk about them. But like when you get right down to it, physical anthropology. Start right there, Joe, and tell me what is that and what does it mean to you? Yeah, let's back up a little bit because you have this kind of, if you think about what's contained beneath the roof

of the house of anthropology. You know, you go back to people like Margaret Mead that were studying tribal behaviors and all that sort of stuff. And she was- I gotta tell you something real quick. I apologize for jumping in. All right, back in the day, I think I was in sixth grade,

we lived two houses down from a woman named Margaret Mead. Really? Yeah. And she was really kind of secretive, you know? She was probably in her 50s at the time. Couldn't really tell. She was just old, you know, and you're a kid. Everybody over 40.

Everybody looks ancient. Yeah. But anyway, I thought for the longest time, is that her? You know, when her name came up in like junior high or something. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you first hear about her in junior high. Yeah, it wasn't. But I would walk by her house thinking, what are the odds? Right. Yeah. I mean, it's a thought. It's just, you know, well, she's been cool.

She was part of the study of cultural anthropology. And, you know, anthro, it has to do with the study of mankind. And some people will say, well, it's the study of individual personages, or it's the study of groups. And she, you know, she's an example of kind of how all that blended, I think. But that's, you have these multiple sections within anthropology and you know one of my favorite things under the umbrella of anthropology is actually linguistics. I'm fascinated by linguistics. I'm fascinated by linguists that you know can talk about the origins of languages and

you know and all these different little subtleties relative to how we communicate with one another and the origin of various types of languages and how we're kind of all interconnected that people don't think about. But then you come to physical anthropology and beneath that umbrella, you can go down a couple of different roads. You have physical anthropology, which some would say a subset of that is archaeology and paleo, which goes back into the time of dinosaurs and all those sorts of things. But for our purposes, we have forensic anthropology. And anybody that starts off wanting to be a forensic anthropologist, which, mind you,

is a very long road, you're going to be rooted in all of those classical studies that individuals do in anthropology. You got to really want that because here's the thing, I have a lot of students that come to me and they'll say, Professor Morgan, I want to go to the body farm and work up there and I want to become a forensic anthropologist. I'm like, are you sure? Be careful what you're asking for here because it's going to be a very long road to attain the level of skill that you need. Most forensic anthropologists, they don't hang a shingle out. It's not like they've got a business, okay, where you go to and you walk into the forensic anthropologist's office and you're sitting in the outer room, you're reading,

I don't know, you're reading Red Book and you're waiting for an appointment or something. It's not like that. That's a different kind of doctor. They're consulted and guess what? Most of them work in academia. So there's not enough work out there to support yourself. Most people that are forensic anthropologists work in institutions somewhere where they teach in addition to it and then they'll consult as forensic anthropologists.

That's an amazing thing because I really did think that you have a case and you know what you need in terms of looking into this and you know I need a forensic anthropologist. I really did think that you had 10 of them and you just start top of the list and you start calling. Who's available? know, it was only after doing this show for some time that I realized that most of the people who do this very specialized work and requiring a lot of education in the classroom and even more education out in the field working with somebody who really knows what they're doing, that they are lashed to a desk and have to create the time to even go back out in the field. It's a very difficult thing to comprehend. I just thought they were... I don't know why I thought that. Most of these people that are academic anthropologists, many of them work in

large institutions and there's a term that she used in academia and you've probably heard it before but it bears repeating it's called publisher perish. So when they say publisher perish that means that you have to have ongoing research where you're essentially what it comes down to a lot of people will hold it up and say well we're studying for the betterment of academia and you know no you you're you're studying so that you can get a federal grant and bring it back into the institution and the institution needs those monies in order to continue to function and that's demonstrative of what's going on at the institution we're just putting all the cards on

table here that's the reality of it so if you're a forensic anthropologist not only are you teaching classes but you're also having to do individual research and oh by the by, you're in addition to that, you're working with a variety of different law enforcement agencies. I think probably the template for that and the best example is Dr. Bill Bass who founded the body farm up in UT, up at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. And solely for the purpose of trying to understand how human beings decay, which is something that most people in their wildest dreams would not think about,

you know, that occurring. And he created this decay lab, if you will, and now there's several of them that are out there at various institutions. One of the ones that comes to mind is the Maple Center, which is down at the University of Florida. You say, well, Morgan, why would you need two of these in the South? Well, first off, there's not just two.

I think Western Carolina has one as well now, or they did. Did you know that when we talk about decomposition and how remains are naturally rendered down, the impact of the environment in Knoxville, Tennessee is completely different than if we were in Gainesville, Florida. Those two environments are so desperately apart from one another. You're not gonna have same insects, you're not gonna have same environmental conditions. All of those considerations have to go in. And it's just like, and I submit that a lot of the data

that you might collect in long-term research at a place like UT is not necessarily going to apply if you're working a case, let's say in Bismarck, North Dakota. Wow. Okay. Because the environment is going to dictate a lot of this. You know, just what's your insect life up there?

Because it ain't going to be the same as it is, you know, in Smokey Mountains. It's not going to be the same as you're going to get down in that marshy territory down in Gainesville where it's super hot and humid and all those sorts of things. You could extend it out even further. What about... because there's a very famous entomologist, world renowned entomologist that worked at the University of Hawaii. Was it University of Hawaii or the Shamanite? I think anyway, it doesn't matter, but he was in Hawaii.

Well, his world, if he's studying human remains, desiccation human remains, that world is gonna be completely different than some other location. So you have to have a skillset where, I think as a forensic anthropologist, where you study or have an understanding of a variety of things, first off, and at the most basic, human anatomy.

You have to know it like the back of your hand, no pun intended. You have to know human anatomy. You have to be able to, here's an interesting thing, and I heard this, I got to tell you the story because it always fascinated me. There was a story that was related to me by a friend of mine that was a forensic anthropologist and had gone through the program at UT. And he did, he had to go through what was referred to as the box test was where Dr. Bass would sit on one side of the table and the student would be on the other side of the table and there'd be a cardboard box in between you

and it had holes cut in either end. You couldn't see inside the box. And Dr. Bass would insert his hand into one end of the box, student would insert their hand into the other end of the box, student would insert their hand into the other side of the box, and the box was filled with co-mingled skeletal remains. And just by touch, just by feel, Dr. Bass would pick up that element that's contained in there. It could be a raccoon bone. It could be a human finger, an element of the hand. And just by touch, you had to tell him what it was, blindly.

That's how rigorous this is. And just let that sink in just for a second. Because that's, you know, when you hit that level of where you're using kind of your tactile senses to be able to, and you know, it's amazing the training that these people receive. The people think about, well, I'm gonna go to the, I'm gonna go to the body farm, or I'm gonna go to the Maple Center

and take one of these courses. Yeah, you can do that and you have a foundation for what moves forward because there are specialized courses that civilians and law enforcement can go to. But it's not like going through a master's or a doctoral program, certainly a doctoral program when you get there. I put gummy worms in the box just to mess with them. Yeah, yeah, no kidding.

The prospect of that on one level is very terrifying to me, but you have to put on your science hat when you do that. I'm just thinking of the training and education it would take to determine this is a raccoon bone and not a foot, a small bone from the foot. Because we've got a billion bones in there and some are really small. And that, I mean, that just boggles my mind that you could do that by touch. Well, I got to tell you one other little interesting story. The same friend of mine who was from Louisiana,

but went to, went to UT for his master's and his PhD. He used to like to take back roads home. He stayed off of interstates. It was just his thing. He just liked to travel through the less populated areas of the South. And he had made it all the way from Knoxville and he was driving through like middle Mississippi, heading home to South Louisiana. And he pulled into a filling station there.

And there was a guy that was, that was the attendant, if you will. And it's a typical kind of southern image you can imagine. Benjo's playing in the background. A fellow, and overall, sitting outside in an old broken chair. And he greeted my friend, you know, as he drove up and my friend said that he noticed a guy had a necklace around him, a leather necklace and he looked at it and he said he saw a pendant on it and then further closer examination

he realized that it was not a pendant, but it was a toothpick and it was hanging. It was a toothpick made out of bone and instantaneously because of his training at UT, he knew what that bone was. It was a baculum. Do you know what a baculum is, Dave? No idea. A baculum is actually a bone that is, are you ready for this, that is contained as part of the anatomical structure of certain animals, particularly raccoons, that allows them to achieve an erection. And so, it can be taken and filed to a sharp point and I'd never heard of this before. and filed to a sharp point and I'd never heard of this before and you can drill a hole in one end of it, hang it around your neck and use it as a toothpick and this

fellow had one of those. It's that kind of attention to detail. I was with the same friend of mine one day and we were walking across a construction area to go get a cup of coffee not too far away from the medical examiner's office. And construction areas, if you're ever walking through, and I think most people can identify with this, you see clods of dirt built up, laying about, that sort of thing. And you look down at the earth and to us, we see clods of dirt. To him, it wasn't like that. My friend always walked around with his head downward,

looking. And I heard him say, hmm. And I learned a long time ago that if this individual ever said, hmm, or wow, look at that, it's something I need to take notice of. He reaches down, picks up a clod of dirt, cracks it in half, and he caught the edge of something that was abnormal in his clod. He pulled out what he estimated to be an 1890 friction match holder with the carving of a or the impression of a dog and a hunter on it where a fellow had dropped this thing where he kept his matches in and he could strike them and these are called friction matches the old kind where you can see somebody like flicking it with their thumb you know like they do in the movies and he and I never would have seen that, but it's that kind of training and attention to detail

that you want in any kind of forensic anthropologist you're going to invite onto your death scene. I think probably out of, I don't know if you guys share this opinion, but for me, out of all of the Terminator movies with Schwarzenegger, my favorite one is the second one, you know, with the liquid guy. I love that movie. I'd watch it. It's almost like a remote drop moment for me. I watch it pretty much every time that it comes on. First one's okay.

Never really watched the other ones. But there's a line in that movie involving Sarah Connor where she is holding someone against their will and she says to them, there are 200, I think it was 206 bones in the human body. And she implies at least that she's going to break every one of them if this individual doesn't comply to her. And that, you know, that ain't gonna happen. But at any rate, she brings that up. And one of the things that you think about with, with skeletal anatomy is that it's so vast. And just, you know, just indulge me here and think about this.

With skeletal anatomy, most adults do have approximately, and it can vary, do have 206 bones in the body. Babies are born with 270. It's one of those weird things where the older you get, the fewer bones you have developmentally, isn't that kind of interesting? And that goes through the process of the bones fusing and these sorts of things where you're developing along the way. And again, those numbers, many people think that those numbers are absolutely static. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes people will have more or fewer.

But on the whole, it's approximately 206. And you've got two separate, if you want to break it down anatomically so that we can understand it, you've got two axes that you work on really with the human skeleton. You have what's referred to as the axillary, which is going to be kind of the midline, the center part of your body. And then you have the appendicular. And those are like your attachments, like your part of your body. Then you have the appendicular and those are like your attachments, like your arms and your legs. You've got your center core, your trunk, which is going to be the axilla and then you're going to have the appendicular that extends

out from the body. You're working in those two broad groups when you're trying to determine, you know, what remains there are. I was thinking, Dave, and I was telling you before, um, we, we went on air today, start taping, um, taping boy, dating myself there. When Brian Laundries remains were found down there in that swamp, I'm actually looking at his report right now that the forensic anthropologist generated. By the way, it's a very well-written report. It could be. Back up very quickly. Brian Laundrie, the person who killed his fiancee.

Gabby. Gabby, sorry, Gabby Petito, and then drove her van that she paid for back to his parents' house in Florida where they had been living before they were on their trip. And then after dodging police with help from his parents, he then goes out into the woods camping and commits suicide. But after committing suicide, the area where he did it in that park got flooded.

Yeah. OK. So the reason I'm setting that scene is a lot of people don't realize what the forensic anthropologist was required to do when they got on scene. So what was different about that, Joe, that required a very, very special investigator to come in and figure out what happened?

I mean, he's got a gunshot in the head, right? Yeah, he does. And by the way, it's a very atypical gunshot wound. As far as self-inflicted, I've always kind of raised an eyebrow to that, but that's sort of... Okay. What do you mean atypical? Well, it wasn't necessarily positioned in classic location as far as an entrance wound

goes. It was more up and back, which always intrigued me intellectually. Where would it normally be? Where would you expect to see it? Well, you're thinking there are... let's just break it down this way. There are four major bone groups that compose the human skull. You got, if you'll tap your forehead, that's your frontal bone. And up above it, bilaterally on either side, you have what's referred to as the parietal

or some people will say parietal and it's kind of a curved bone. It's on both sides and it's high up and then below the parietal on either side, again, bilaterally you have the temporal bone, okay, which is a very thin bone. It's on either side, forward of the ear. As the parietal bone sweeps back and down, it marries up with the occipital bone, which is that bony protuberance that you have on the backside. And those are like the four major bone groups in forensics that we look at. You know, like if we'll, I'll give you an example why it's important. When we go to the scene,

most of the time if we're talking about an injury to the skull, we're going to say things like he's sustained a gunshot wound or a parent gunshot wound to the right temple or in the right temporal bone and it is, I don't know, five centimeters forward of the top of the right ear. It's superior to the right meatus, which is your ear hole. It's superior to that by 10 centimeters. And so it's all about orientation, where these are. With laundry in particular, if you have this baseline of number of bones,

and again, it's approximation of 206, when they went out there, Dave, to this, and I'm glad you pointed this out, you know, I completely, isn't that amazing? We talked about this case for years, right? Certainly months with Gab Petito. And it's, you know, for me, going, you know, moving forward and probably you, I hate to speak for you, but you know, it begins to fade, you know, after a while because you're layering all these other cases on top of it When they went to examine or try to recover his remains They found roughly a hundred and three bones. Okay, so that that gives you an idea

You know, you're you're literally that is literally if you're thinking about 206 bones That we're supposed to have, he had half of that. Okay? Now, what do we mean by that? Well, you know, you've got and bones can range in size, you know, I guess the smallest bone is probably the stapes, which is one of those tiny little bones that's inside of your ear.

All right. You remember that? We learned all that in school. You know, we've got the hammer and the anvil and all that stuff. Just to give you an idea, like many people listening right now, I actually probably napped for most of that.

And then the night before I broke out the book and memorized as best I could, took the test the next day. And if I got a C- I was pretty happy. So there you go. My big bugaboo was always the hands and the feet. as best I could, took the test the next day and if I got a C- I was pretty happy. My big bugaboo was always the hands and the feet. The hands and the feet are absolutely miracle creation of God. They're so complex and so a tip of the cap to any doctor that's out there that works on hands and feet because the anatomy

is so complex, the biomechanics are so complex. But you have the stapes, which is arguably the tiniest bone and then the longest bone in the human body is the femur, which is where it fits into your hip socket, if you will, extends all the way from your hip down. So with laundry, for example, he roughly had 108 bones that they recovered out there. And what made this so very difficult is that this, Dave, this was not a burial. And forensic anthropologists have to work in a variety of different conditions. This is a water environment, which they, by the way, if I'm not mistaken, I probably am. I think that the forensic anthropologist either

came from University of Southern Florida or the University of Central Florida. My money's on Southern Florida though. And she kind of led the team out there if I'm not mistaken because FBI crime scene response team was already already out there and this is very complex because once bodies begin to decay and you're in a very austere environment like this, the kind of rising and falling of tide are not tide but the water levels in the swampy area are going to be dictated by rainfall. For those of us that have spent you know, spent any time in Florida, you know that they'll get gully washers down there that will, everything will be, you'll have water standing in the streets. We'll just, and that's in a

controlled environment where you have gutter systems and all that. Just imagine you're in the swampy area back in this park, Dave, and there's nowhere for the water to really drain to in the immediate. It just kind of floats there, okay? And then it'll drop back down. Then it'll go back up. Then it'll drop back down. So in the early piece to this, when he died, he'd now become subject to that same environment. And there's even, you know, and even in the report for laundry, you know, the forensic

anthropologist goes to some length and describe that there had been, you know, carnivore activity that had been, you know, feasting on his remains. So there's no telling how many bones were essentially drug off to some burrow somewhere, taken up in a tree, which will happen. The tinier bones. And it creates a very complex environment. And some of the stuff that forensic anthropologists do, a lot of it is based on not just what they're seeing, but what they don't see.

Just let that sink in for a second. You think about other sciences that are out there and there are some that work on this idea that I'm not just looking for positive findings, I'm looking for negative findings. And I don't mean positive and negative relative to how you happen to feel about something at a moment in time. I'm talking about a presence or an absence of something. And so that's one of the things, you know, with laundry in particular, and there have been a lot of other cases like this too over the years.

So just because you go out to a scene where there are skeletal remains doesn't mean that the remains are going to be completely intact, that it will all be there. And that's where the difficulty really arises as it's applied to the skill of the forensic anthropologist. How are they going to be able to interpret what they're finding? How does it fit into the narrative of the death, and what can their assessment reveal out there.

I found that it's better for me in particular that when I am at the scene with a forensic anthropologist, no matter how much study I've done in the past, no matter how many cases I've worked, it's better that for that moment in time, when I'm in that individual's presence, I'm no longer an investigator. I'm a student that should keep their mouth shut and their eyes and their ears. People talk a lot about Dr. Bass as well as should because he is a giant in the field of forensic anthropology and in forensic science. It's not just a lot of

stuff that Dr. Bass has done has you know kind of seeped over into other practice. He's greatly influenced forensic pathology I think. He's influenced the study of ballistics relative to how bones interact with projectiles. Tool marks is one of the big areas that they investigate. He had one fellow on his staff for a long time that was one of the leading experts in the world on saw marks. All this guy did was study the different types of saw blades and what kind of impressions they would generate on bone, whether it's a circular saw or a hacksaw. But one of the more interesting characters in forensic anthropology is a guy that is

no longer with us. And I think he was at the University of Oklahoma for a long time. It's Dr. Clyde Snow. And Dr. Snow, who I never had an opportunity to meet, I wish that I could have. Dr. Snow was kind of a rotund individual that was always dressed. He always looked like he was going on a safari and smoked a lot. He came up with a really interesting term, and I still use this to this day when I teach a section at Jack State on forensic anthropology.

He coined the phrase, let me get this straight, osteobiography. What he understood that many people don't understand is that by the study of human skeletal remains, we can learn so much about bodies and not just the remains that are in front of you, but a life that had been lived prior to that. And let me give you kind you one of the big for instances here. Let's just say that you've got human remains and you're trying to do sex determination on a skeletal remain. Well, you're not just looking at the size of the bone because male's bones tends to be robust, female bones tend to be what is fertile, is a grassile, which means kind of delicate.

You're looking for any kind of disease-related changes. Well, if you've got a bone that shows an indication of osteoporosis, well, odds are that's not going to be a male skeletal element. That's going to be a female element because there's a huge industry out there that's built up on treating osteoporosis. I mean, how many times do you hear that in the news? I knew one friend of my wife who she ate Tums every single day because her doctor told her that it's a great source of calcium to knock down, use something to knock down the advancement of osteoporosis.

There's other diseases too. You have like if you're digging through older remains and they'll have somebody died of tuberculosis, there will be these changes that take place to bone as a result of tuberculosis. You have cases where I know there's a current dig that's going on over in, and I'd mentioned this I think in a previous episode, going on over in Bristol, England. And you have the bodies of children and the children who were malnourished. Well, development, that skeleton is going to demonstrate malnutrition. Okay. Trauma. I don't know about you, Dave. I think I have, playing football, I think I have broken every one of my fingers at one point in time. Most of them I would just pop and now I'm paying the price for it.

I've broken my hand, broken my nose three times. I've had, yeah, no kidding, it seems like it. But if you were to strip down all that remains of Joe Scott Morgan and you were looking at my skeleton. Well, I have an osteobiography as a result. You're going to be able to tell certain little things about me and the life that I had led. Not only are you going to be able to see, for instance, where my nose that has been broken multiple times, not only are you going to see evidence that it has been broken, but as time has gone on, you're going to be able to appreciate the, you're going to be able to appreciate

how long ago this happened, because the bone will begin to smooth. You look at, one of the things I'm always fascinated by is if I ever had a skull, I would look at the sutures on the top of the skull, which are if you – I urge anybody right now in the sound of my voice to go and look up a picture, an actual picture of a human skull and you'll see these kind of curvilinear lines that run through the middle line of the skull and they run on the backside of the frontal bone and back in the occipital area. Well,

those are called suture lines. And when we're babies and we human skull, Dave, and if those suture lines are smooth, like when you run your hand over it, you can't feel them. Sometimes they're obliterated. You know that that person was like really advanced in age. Because you think about just doing this, just imagine this. Every time you raise your eyebrows, frown, okay, smile, the overlying skin is moving and it wears on bone over a period of time. It eradicates it. And you'll have like, we call it suture obliteration. You'll also have it if you take the tip of your tongue and stick it a roof

of your mouth, that's actually your hard palate. You've heard that term before. Well, if you stripped away the skin, the tissue off of your hard palate, and you could get down to the bone, which actually is kind of like the floor of the skull, there's suture lines in there. And those sutures will, I actually did a paper on this years ago. You have suture line obliteration in the roof of the mouth as well. Then you have joint wear. You can see arthritic changes. If anybody has had a gunshot wound, a broken arm, even if it's been surgically repaired, you can still see evidence that the bone is what's called mottled. It's trying to diffuse back together. You'll get, you know, bones

will do that. You can have somebody that has a severe break and they never got it treated. You'll see some old person that's limping around for instance. And if you look at their, like if you're talking about a fractured femur that was never repaired by surgery or whatever. You'll see these kind of, I don't really know how to describe them, you'll see these kind of protuberances on the bone and it's kind of ghastly looking where the bone has fused back together and the person permanently walks with a limp probably in life. They had a hard time, but that bone wants to get back together and heal. And you can see surgical interventions as well. There's any number of bones that I've been on site with forensic anthropologists we've recovered that had screws in them, you know, where you'll have somebody that had some kind of surgical

repair and this is These are stainless steel Screws back in the day. They're probably using other types of components now to do that The original Planet of the Apes when Tralton Heston is in the cave Yeah, and he's going through the different things that he found in there. One was dental. The other was the Heart valve, you know, and he was describing the things that he knew of that person who is long gone, all that's left. Isn't that amazing? I forgot all about that scene.

And you're absolutely right. And that stuff does remain behind. I think it, the Morphe case in particular, where the port was found with her remains, her skeletal remains. And that stuff, eventually it's going to go away, but it'll hang back and there's certain things that you're looking for at the scene that'll give you an indication of this individual's osteobiography. But you know, there's so many cases over the years have required the use of forensic anthropologists.

Let me give you an example going back to Dr. Snow. Dr. Snow had quite the reputation of being, he was kind of a, I don't know if you use the term swashbuckler, I don't think he was swimming off of chandeliers, but he was a man of his time. He actually went and can you imagine doing this? Can you imagine going down to Central America in the height of all the civil wars that were happening back in the 80s? And Dave, he'd go down there and exhumed mass graves and be shot at while he's down there.

And he's standing on the edge in some jungle location, you know, in Honduras or Nicaragua or where El Salvador or wherever it is that he was and to try to make sense out of what was still in those graves. And I think a lot of people would say, and this goes to being an anthropologist, a lot of people will say, well, they're dead. What difference does it make? We know that they were all lined up and shot and pushed down a grave. You can learn a lot from, first off, what has been deposited in the grave.

For instance, if in war crimes cases, and you've seen this in Europe over the years as well, and I would submit to you in Southeast Asia, when people are killed and dumped into a grave, well, you need to have a forensic anthropologist to tell you, are they only killing males? Are they killing males? Are they killing only females? Are they killing the elderly? Are they trying to eradicate all of the children in a particular village. And from that, you can begin to kind of piece together

what sorts of people you're dealing with. And when this goes, say for instance, you're working a case of genocide like this, that information would go to like a world court or wherever it is that they try to prosecute these things to give them an idea as to who is being targeted in any particular case. There are a lot of cases where,

particularly if you have tribal issues, where they'll kill all the males and then kidnap all the women and children and try to bring them into their own community. And so that's the type of thing that you know that Dr. Snow would do. And then he would look you know he'd also try to give them an idea how were they killed? Is there an indication that they had endured torture over protracted period of time where they're being beaten they've got multiple broken bones

that occurred in life? Or was it simply they dragged them out of their homes in the middle of the night and began to pop them in the back of the head into a pre-dug grave. So you can learn a lot, you can learn a lot by what you're seeing physically manifesting itself out of a scene. With going back to other cases that are out there, I had friends that worked Waco for instance that were out there. Dave, you're talking just tens of not just skeletal remains, but you're talking skeletal remains that are skeletonized as a result of intense flame. These remains are incredibly fragile. I wrote about in my book, Blood Beneath My Feet, from all those years ago, where I'd had an episode of my... I was going through a real tough time in my life and really dealing

with certain issues with PTSD. And we had a guy on Georgia 400 that had run his car into the side of a pillar of a support pillar of an overpass on Georgia 400. And I'll never forget it was a little, I was going to say Texas, it was a little Ford Ranger pickup truck that was on its way into work. When he hit this bridge pillar, support pillar, his truck burst into flames. He was trying to get out of the car and he succumbed and his body continued to burn. To give you an idea of the fragile nature of it and what you encounter, when I was at the scene, I went to and as was my practice, I'd look inside the cab of a vehicle even

if it had been on fire and I'm looking around. This guy's hands were in what's referred to as the pugilistic condition or posture where the hands are drawn up. Everything contracts at that point in time, depending upon heat. And as I stuck my head into the cab, the guy's left hand brushed against my right cheek. And in kind of a snap move, I grabbed like this with my left gloved hand and his entire arm broke off in my hand. And when you think about the intensity of fire, for instance, like in Waco, or you think about the Twin Towers, this intense flame that's in there, these remains become very, very fragile.

So you're already dealing with something where you're trying to assess a few things. Well, first off, you want to know who they are. We've talked about this on body bags before. To me, knowing who somebody is is probably more important than knowing what caused their death. Because if I can find out who they are, I can fill in the blanks relative to the life that they led.

And maybe, in some way, the police can take that information and go find out who killed them. So you're trying to determine who they are, and then you're trying to determine what happened to them and it's only a forensic anthropologist that really has that skill set to deal with these very fragile delicate remains. And they're always fighting against the elements. That's one of the fascinating things about the practice of forensic anthropology.

All those things that they do when they go back to their lab and try to ascertain whose remains they're dealing with, who is this person, it's rather a daunting task, Dave. So the forensic anthropologist is brought in, going back to Brian Laundrie for a minute, because we find his skeletonized remains, you know, just bones. And I guess there was minimal amount of flesh. Yeah, there was a bit, so. They take the bones and they send them to the forensic path anthropologist.

And the entire point is to figure out how this person died. They already know who it is. I mean, I'm sure that's part of the process. You have to positively identify the individual, even though you know who it is. All right. But you mentioned that there was something wrong about, or not wrong, something different

about the gunshot. Yeah. So the forensic anthropologists coming into this, are they tasked with determining what happened or are they tasked with tell us the facts of this situation of what you see right here not your years of experience but just what does the bone tell you is that what they're doing i i guess i'm kind of curious because you said no no that that is what they're doing and and listen police are sitting there and they're scratching their head. Okay, because they're trying to determine What happened to this individual they might suspect that there's a gunshot wound but when you're listening if you're if you're talking about

a Remain that has been exposed to harsh elements You can have events where the skeleton will just kind of come to pieces. And you don't know, for instance, with laundry as an example, you don't know if this defect, and we'll call it a defect instead of a gunshot wound, because that's really all that you know at that point. You've got a hole. Was that hole something that occurred in life leading up

to death or is it something that occurred afterwards? Because you begin to think about, well, you've got animal activity that's occurring out there. Was there an animal that was gnawing on this remain? If you think that that's far-fetched, in my career I've had two cases involving dogs that drug skulls up into backyards and their masters went into the backyard. They were in the backyard of both homes at the same time, not same time but two different cases and the dog you know if you've ever, I love dogs by the way, but if you if you ever see a dog with a ball they'll put it between their paws and they'll play with it and

that sort of thing. When you take something shaped like a ball like human skull and they're gonna to have it between their four paws like this. And in both cases, the dog had set to gnawing on the top of the skull. And over a period of time, if they kept that skull and just kind of, they'd break the whole thing down eventually. You know, I've got a rescue Labrador retriever and she's got incredible jaw strength. I mean, she can eradicate an entire bone in no period of time whatsoever.

It's amazing what they can do. So you have to factor all that in. You're trying to give this information back to the police and the forensic anthropologist given enough time will arrive at their own conclusion about not just anti-mortem versus post-mortem, but they will also give you an idea as to things like with gunshot wounds, they'll give you an idea about directionality. Is this front to back? Is it left to right? Is it from above to below?

Trajectory of bullets. Then you get into these areas that Lord knows Dave, you and I have covered so many of them with dismemberments. You have to be really, no pun intended as forensic anthropology, you have to be very sharp relative to dismemberment because you have to understand what kind of tool could have facilitated this bone coming apart. You know that it didn't just spontaneously come apart in mid shaft of a femur with spiral saw marks on the leading edges of it.

This is something that somebody took a, you know, maybe they took a band saw or they took a circular saw and just ran it through the center of the thing. Well, what type of instrument is this? So you have to be up on tool marks to be able to assess this. And also was this done in life? Was this part of torture? Could it, you know, was some limb hacked off while the person was still alive? Or was this something that was done after the fact? So you have to be really up your game as a forensic anthropologist to not just understand the bone itself or trying to classify it anatomically, but these individuals have to be able to be able to understand what happened to the person in death. Because for the most part, when we die and you call in a forensic anthropologist, our bony

structures are all that remain. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.