Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Four Men on Bikes - A Mysterious Quadruple Homicide in Oklahoma

Episode Date: November 13, 2022

Four men in Okmulgee, Oklahoma leave a friend's house on bikes on the evening of October 9th, 2022. Investigators believe that these men intended to commit a crime, or series of crimes. They are soon reported missing. On October 14th, their bodies are found in Deep For River having been shot and dismembered. After looking into the case officials believe that this act was premeditated.  In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss the overt violence of the murder, how to track a bicycle, how you distinguish between blood types, how investigators retrieve body parts, and much more. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 1:12 - Background and overview of the case 3:20 - How do you track a bicycle? 9:45 - How do you calculate how far to extend your search? 12:10 - Police using tracking information to find the victims 15:30 - Bodies dumped in the river 16:15 - How is it physically possible to kill four men in a short period of time? 20:35 - What exactly is “a violent act”? 24:15 -  The steps taken in an autopsy to distinguish between blood types 29:00 - What do two different blood types look like on a slide? 30:58 - Visual deception 32:10 - Would the victim's skeleton be visible by this point? 36:10 - How does the gruesome state of the victim’s bodies interfere with being able to figure out what happened to them? 39:40 - How do you retrieve body parts and keep them in the state they’re found? 46:05 - Wrap upSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. There's not too many things in this world that I enjoy more than going fishing. And one particular type of fish I like to seek out, in freshwater that is, are catfish. I loved catfish. And you know, one of the hubs of catfishing in America is actually Oklahoma. You get up there in that red clay, those stained rivers, and they catch some of the biggest cats around. When you go fishing, sometimes you hook into things that you didn't expect

to hook into. And sometimes, you find things that will just absolutely chill you to the core. Today, we're going to talk about four men who were all shot, dismembered, and their bodies were tossed into the Grand Fork River in Okmulkee, Oklahoma. I'm Joseph Scott Morton, and this is Body Bags.

My dear friend Jackie Howard is with me today. She's the executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, you like to fish. Would it surprise you for me to say yes, I do? I like to fish, too. And, you know, the thing about Oklahoma is that all those shows that you see on TV many times, some of these shows from back just a few years ago, have you seen these guys that go into the river and they go noodling?

Oh, yes. No, not me. They dip their arms into the water and they wiggle their fingers around and some big old cat will bite their hand and arm and they just pull it out. And to me, it's terrifying because being from Louisiana, I know what else is underneath there. And it's not alligators. They don't have alligators up in Oklahoma, I don't think. But they do have snapping turtles and I'm terrified of them. You know, they say a snapping turtle won't turn loose of your finger until it thunders. So I'm terrified of that. You know, they say a snapping turtle won't turn loose of your finger until it thunders. So I'm terrified of that. Good reason to be. I'm absolutely terrifying. But I got to tell

you, this case today on body bags is absolutely horrific. I was amazed when this came up in my news feed and I began to kind of dig into it a little bit. This is another one of those cases, and I guess all of our cases are, Joe, that we just look at and it's so hard to comprehend and understand. Four friends actually two brothers and two other friends Billy Chastain 30 years old his brother Mark Chastain 32 years old Mike Spikes 32 years old and Alex Stevens 29. They left Billy's home on bicycles on the evening of Sunday, October 9th, and they were reported missing soon thereafter. They were not seen again. That's a very odd way to go missing, pedaling off on a bicycle. And then their bodies were recovered in a local river.

And as you said, they had been shot and dismembered. Mode of transportation, off the bat, Joe, how do you follow a bicycle if you're trying to track these? Let's just start there. You're trying to track these guys. How do you track a bicycle? Look, you know when I said that the case kind of shocked me when it popped up on my feed and I began to kind of dig into it a little bit. One of the reasons is bicycles. I don't know that I've ever encountered a homicide

like this, singular, much less a quadruple homicide, and that's what we're talking about here. How do you track them? And one interesting piece to this as well that the sheriff kind of let slip out up there in a news conference. And this is kind of wild, too. They were actually pulling wagons behind the bicycles. And I'm thinking, why in the world would you be doing this? And these fellows were not out on like an afternoon ride, you know, like you see these guys wearing spandex and they're riding them down the road and they're going for time and distance and no, no, no, no. That's not what this is.

These guys were using this as a mode of transportation to get to a specific location. And the sheriff has implied, at least, that their destination was to a location where they could get involved in some issue, where they were going to be involved in something that they shouldn't have been involved in. And to this moment in time, as far as this investigation is concerned, they still have yet to recover these bicycles. And I think that's going to be a big piece to this because I have to imagine that whoever wound up bringing about these individuals' deaths and their subsequent dismemberment had something to do with those bikes. And I think that as an investigator,

if you can find a location where they are deposited, it is going to give you an idea as to who was involved and at what point in time they were involved, because you're going to look for things like, you know, any kind of damage to the bikes, like were they broadsided by a car? Was any of the frame, tubular frame that they used, was it bent in any way? I think that those are going to be considerations as well. And when they do finally get their hands on those bikes, trust me, they're going to go over them from stem to stern to try to find any kind of trace evidence. Right now, I'm kind of interested in, as far as damage

goes, I'm kind of interested in, is there any transfer of paint on them? Were they sideswiped by a car, knocked off the road, you get that paint transfer. Paint is specifically identifiable in a forensic lab. You can actually trace it back to the source who manufactured the paint. It's actually a fascinating area of forensics in the trace evidence division of most crime labs. And so they can do that. And it's going to be interesting if they recover them. Can you trace a bicycle tire as you would an automobile tire? Yeah. I mean, they have, look, I mean, they are specific, two specific

types of rims and more broadly, two specific types of bicycles. And, you know, the types of tires that are on bikes are particular to a particular framework. If you're, you know, mountain biking, or if it's a touring bicycle, or, you know, have you seen these bikes that people ride at the beach that have these gigantic tires on them? Cruisers. Yeah. Yeah. Cruisers. And they're very distinctive. When tires come on a vehicle and you go to a place that might sell a bicycle or you go to a place that sells a car. The tires that that, if it's a brand new car, the tires that that individual vehicle come with are referred to as OE, which means original equipment. And the OE, the original equipment, is specific to a particular type of manufacturer.

And when you have crime labs, they have reference material there. It's one of the most fascinating. People have no idea how much reference material crime labs have. And just this is really kind of going far afield, but I'll give you an idea. Places like the FBI crime lab, they actually have millions of buttons, buttons. And they have, just to identify buttons off of clothing and zippers and fasteners and all that stuff, well, they have the same thing for tires. And so if you have a tire, for instance, you can trace it back if it is OE or if it's a replacement tire. Okay. And so if these bicycles are found and say the equipment has been changed out at some point in time,

maybe they blew out a tire or the tire became worn or something like that, you can actually go back and trace it to the replacement manufacturer. And, you know, who might distribute this particular tire in a location. And another thing with tire, with tires themselves, they leave behind a mark, okay, particularly on soft soil. We see this all the time relative to motor vehicles when we're assessing a crime scene. But tires are the same way, and they have specific wear patterns as well. And it's even more specific with bicycles because bicycles directly support the weight of an individual. Okay. And this is kind of fascinating because with cars, you know, it has a major suspension system, shock absorbers, all that stuff. So the weight of an individual is

not going to impact a motor vehicle, a four-wheel motor vehicle, as much as it will, say, for instance, a bicycle tire. So if you're riding a bicycle and you're larger, there will be a distinct heavy impression that's left behind. So if you get off of this road and you're riding on a dirt surface, maybe the tire tracks just suddenly end. Well, suddenly, you know, if you find that bike, you can marry it up to that track in particular. And that could be a piece of evidence here because we don't know where these bikes wound up. But what if the perpetrator went back after maybe, for instance, he did grievous harm to these individuals and killed them and then rode each bike down a hill into a place where he deposited them. Well, those tracks will be specific to that bicycle and also the weight of the individual

that was riding it. And it's just one of those little nuanced areas that we look at in investigations. What about the distance traveled in the search? Because obviously, you're not going to have near the mileage covered with a bicycle that you're going to have with a car. So how do you calculate how far to extend your search? Well, I think that conversely, you're not going to have as small of an area as you might if an individual was a pedestrian. So you're going to kind of split the difference. You know, you have to think you got four friends riding along on bicycles and boy, would they stand out? I just had that thought that came to me, you know, boy, would they stand out if they're pulling wagons behind a bicycle? I've seen wagons behind bicycles. You know, I've got grandkids. You go to the beach

and take bikes and you can get the little attachments that go on the back. And yeah, there are actual wagons, two wheeled wagons that you can pull behind a bike. Maybe they're homemade. They're really going to stand out. And, you know, certainly you would be able to go a greater distance if you're not pulling the load as opposed to coming back if you filled up these wagons. And I think a lot of it has to do with the physical condition that the individuals were in at that particular time, the road and weather conditions, how hot was it? Oklahoma can get pretty hot even into, you know, that time of year when you're getting into the end of September, early October. Could they have continued? Did they have any drugs on board?

Maybe that is yet to be determined. So all of those factors are going to play into this. And also how serviceable were these bicycles that they were on? Or was there sufficient inflation in the tires? Because that's a big deal with a bicycle, where they mechanically sound. How far could you go on this thing? I don't know. Maybe they're brand new bikes and you could ride from one end of Oklahoma to the other end of Oklahoma, drive all the way out in Panhandle, for all I know. But you have to take all of those factors into consideration. In addition to, are you riding on unimproved roads or improved roads? Is this an area that is a two-lane black top that's recently been topped? Or is this an area where you've got a dirt road, perhaps it's

got a gravel base to it, you're not going to be able to make as much distance? Or is this an area where you've got a dirt road, perhaps it's got a gravel base to it, you're not going to be able to make as much distance? Or is it a road that is poorly surfaced? Maybe it's eroded in some way, you're having to dodge potholes. And that takes a toll on the individual operating the bicycle over a period of time. So I think that all those factors would come into play. And good old technology plays into this too, because police turned to digital information to help track the four men's movements after they left the home. Mark Chastain's wife used an app on her phone. Her husband's phone was tracked to a salvage yard, to a local gas station and then to a second scrapyard using the data from that app on Mark Chastain's wife's phone. Good old technology, Joe. Yeah, who would have thunk it relative to a

bicycle, right? I mean, obviously it stands to reason everybody, well, everybody is kind of an overstatement, but many people carry phones now. More, I think, do than don't. And so you've got, you know, this modern technology of a phone that is essentially having an impact here relative to somebody riding a bicycle, a non-motorized vehicle going down the road. And yeah, they can track them with this. And, you know, another thing is really crucial here because with this mechanism for these phones that they're tracking, one of the things that you get say, for instance, travel up and down that road, say couriers or people that are delivery people or whatever the case might be, they have certain timetables that they stick to. And then you've got people that are going to work, coming home from work, leaving to go out and get groceries. Maybe somebody saw something during that period of time. And that's

where canvassing comes in on the part of the detectives. They would go up and down this road and they're going to visit every home along this thoroughfare and they're going to knock on doors and they're going to say, hey, look, did you happen to see four guys on bicycles with wagons behind them? And, you know, it's not that's not a passive thing. That's something that's like, yeah, I did. And I, I couldn't believe what I was seeing when I saw them. Or maybe somebody might say, Hey, you know what? Those guys are up and down this road all the time. I've seen them. They all travel together on these bicycles, towing these wagons behind them. They'll leave going down the road and they're empty and they come back and they're filled with stuff. So there's a lot of data that is going to

point you to certain points along the continuum, along this timeline, if you will, relative to activity, location, time, all those sorts of things. And I got to tell you, Jackie, one of the things that really stands out to me is that according to the police, apparently, you know, that second scrap yard that you mentioned, Jackie, that's going to be key because that is where the phone was actually turned on. And I don't know, the sheriff actually said in a property just adjacent, just adjacent to that scrap yard where that phone went dead or went silent, he thinks that a violent act occurred, and that's the only thing he said about it. A muddy river. Why in the world would you go to all of the trouble

of shooting four grown men, taking their bodies apart, and then going to a river and tossing them in there. I think that that's a head scratcher for me because we know, just as I said earlier, that people go fishing in rivers. People visit rivers all of the time. Why a river? Why not some out of the way place to bury?

Why not river? Why not some out-of-the-way place to bury? Why not burn? But for some reason, the individual that did this chose to go to the Grand Fork River. Well, before we get to the river, we know that violent event, police believe, happened next to the second scrapyard. So my question to you is, how do you kill four grown men in a shorter period of time? How do you subdue four men at once? I mean, you're looking at immediacy, boom, boom, boom, boom. For the perpetrator to be able to survive this himself, it's not like you would shoot one person, wait 10 or 15 minutes and shoot somebody else. So how do you think the shootings happened?

I got three things I want to explore here. First off is going to be speed. Whoever did this would have had to have acted in great speed because it's, you know, potentially one person that's involved in this. So they will have to be very quick with what they're going to do. And that speed is going to involve a weapon that is probably going to have a high capacity. Along with the speed, you're going to have to have a number of bullets. You know, you'll have to have potentially a lot of ammunition in the magazine. Secondly, is going to be accuracy. You got four guys, you know, after you drop the first guy,

unless they're subdued in some way that we're not aware of yet where they're tied, for instance, and they are immobile. Maybe they're laying on the ground. Maybe he has initially subdued them in some way. Maybe he shot them in a way that didn't bring about their lives immediately, but he tied them up, put them on the ground. You're going to have to be accurate with the weapon and skilled. Accuracy goes to skill in this particular case. So you would have to be skilled and familiar with the weapon that you're using. And I think third, you're going to have to have a weapon, unless you are

pinpoint accurate, you're going to have to have a weapon that potentially has a high muzzle velocity, something that's very powerful when you take them down. Because you can bring a smaller caliber weapon to bear, say like a.22 rifle, but just because you hit somebody with a.22 rifle doesn't mean that you're going to take them down. So I'm thinking maybe, maybe, I have no idea, but maybe something like a military platform type weapon that has potentially a high capacity magazine or another type of weapon platform that might be involved in this could in fact be something like a shotgun, okay, that's got, say, loaded with buckshot, where you're going to be able to maybe take out two people at one time. Who knows at this point?

For all I know, we've got a perpetrator that is a world-class pistol champion, and they're using, you know, a nine-millimeter handgun or something. We don't have quite enough information. We do know, in fact, that all four of these individuals were, in fact, shot. And in order to disable them, to kill them, and get them in this specific location, you're going to have to have a lot of factors that are going to come into play at once. This is not the movies, okay? People react to the sound of gunfire. So if you're the first guy that gets shot, there's an awareness. First off, you've heard a crack in the air. You've heard a crack So if you're the first guy that gets shot, there's an awareness. First off, you've heard a crack in the air. You've heard a crack. If you're one of the other guys,

you see your buddy drop to the ground. Maybe he's groaning in pain. I don't know. Maybe he dies instantly, but there's going to be an awareness on the other three, on the parts of the other three. So what do you do at that moment in time? Are you a deer in headlights? Are you going to bolt? Are you going to try to run for the bushes? Are you going to try to, I don't know, just get away, hide behind something? Are you going to get down on your knees and beg for your life? You know, it's hard to know what that dynamic was at that particular time, or were they just in a position where they couldn't extricate themselves from it? They were just in a position where they were just, they were going to be shot and they were going to be killed right there in that location, because like I said, they had been restrained in some way. So we'll know a bit more as this

begins to develop and as time goes by. But I find, one of the things I find very interesting about what the sheriff said, Jackie, is that this is an area where a violent act took place. And I think more than likely, it's very important that we kind of try to define, well, what does a violent act mean? It would mean to me, not just the shooting, but where the dismemberment took place. At first blush, I'm thinking the same thing. And, you know, what is, I think, you know, I don't want to wax too philosophical here, but what is violence? You know, how do you define violence and what does that mean in this context? Because if you say in an outdoor open area, and I'm assuming that that's what this is, I think probably the first thing

that everybody's mind runs to, and I can almost bet that's what this is, I think probably the first thing that everybody's mind runs to, and I can almost bet you dollars to donuts right now, is the first thing you think about is an area involving a lot of blood, a lot of blood that's going to be out there at that specific area. And maybe the ground was super saturated. Maybe it was on the surface of plastic, and the person digging rid of the plastic. Maybe it's on leaves that have fallen, and you see contact traces of blood all over the place. Maybe the ground where this event took place,

the dirt itself, maybe it's a sandy soil out there. You can actually walk over and see evidence of it. You know, I've worked cases where there was no longer a body, but there was a huge, there was a huge area of blood in that area. And you know, one of the things that I saw very commonly that people might not think about, I think the general public always associates the development of maggots and fly activity and that sort of thing can place on bodies. But did you know that in the absence of a body, but with the presence of blood, you can have maggot activity in that area as well? I've walked out to areas where people had been killed and then removed,

and there would be pools of what was blood. And of course it was turning at that point in time, and it would just be writhing with maggots and you'd have flies buzzing all around the flies will develop in those areas particularly if it's in direct sunlight you'll have ants that are in that area you'll have all manner of insect life in that area because what are they seeking out well they're seeking out the protein that's contained in that blood so you'll have this kind of larval development that's going on there even in the absence of blood not and the reason I'm emphasizing this, and I think that this is kind of interesting, is that how did the police know that this was an area where a violent event took

place? Because we kind of mentioned this early on that the bodies were found in the river. So what's going to draw them to that specific location? Was it just the sight of blood or was it the fact that you had larval development in there and you step over that area and the next thing you know, and this is very common as well, and I've had this happen, you'll have flies that are actually, you know, indwelling bodies, resting on bodies. And once you show up, they begin to light on you as well. They're coming off of those bodies or off of that body and lighting on your person. As an investigator, I don't think any people really realize that. And you'll have them crawling

all over you. And I really wonder if maybe that had happened or maybe it was smell that drew them over there because blood gives off decompositional odor just like an intact body does. You can actually catch a whiff of it. I wonder if they were drawn there by smell, but something drew them there to where they recognized that something horrible had happened in that specific location. If this is indeed the location where the dismemberment took place, you have the possibility of commingling of blood. Walk me through the steps in a lab in an autopsy to be able to distinguish how many blood types or blood sources that you have. Yeah, this is a nightmare, to say the very least.

Early on as an investigator, you learn that you just don't work on the assumption that something is what you think it is as a result of what you've observed with the naked eye. You cannot work on that assumption. And so just because you see a red dried spot or red wet spot on the surface, you can think in your mind that, yeah, that's blood. But would I write that in a report without confirming it? No way. No way. No way. You never do that.

So you have to be able to take blood samples from this location. They would have taken it. And this is assuming that there is blood there. You're going to take blood samples from multiple. Let's say we have a huge pool of blood. I love the fact that you use the term commingle, Jackie. That's fantastic because that's what's going to happen. Blood is very viscous, but it is a liquid. And so if you've got bodies that are layered on top of one another,

you will have a commingling of blood, particularly if you've got gunshot wounds where you've got seepage that's going on. And then on top of that, you may have had this dismemberment activity that was going on there. And you're going to generate a volume of blood associated with that. So when this blood is essentially collected from the scene, and it would be collected in a variety of different locations, multiple samples from all over this area, it will be taken out and it will be typed. Now, the type, when you begin to type this blood, well, first off, you have to confirm that it's blood. And there's a variety of tests that we go through to do that. Once this unknown substance that you suspect is blood is brought back to the lab and examined at that point in time, you're going to conduct a test at the lab to confirm that it is, in fact, blood. And then it's at that point in time that once you've made that determination, you're going to be able to begin the process of typing the blood.

And there's major groups that we look for. We look for O. We look for B. We look for A. We look for O, we look for B, we look for A, we look for AB. And so you can potentially have those groups. And if you have, say, for instance, two O's, you're going to try to determine whether or not it's O positive or O negative. And you'll have this commingling that's going on. And the trick is to try to separate, you know, all of these samples and see if there is, I think nowadays as well, one of the things you have to factor in here

is a recoverable DNA out of that blood, because the DNA sample that you're going to get out of that blood is going to be far more specific than just say, for instance, a blood type. Dr. Carl Landsteiner, you know, first identified how to type blood, for instance, a blood type. Dr. Carl Landsteiner first identified how to type blood back in the 1800s. It's nothing new. It's something we've been doing for a long time. It's just that it's taken a while for it to kind of develop to the point now where, yeah, the blood is essentially a medium for us to get to the DNA. And that's where the real tale is going to be told. The process itself is very, very complicated in order to separate it out to this specific point. And they will, in fact, do blood typing tests that are very specific and react to particular types of blood. So you will get a specific indicator in this test that it is in fact a APOS, a NEG,

OPOS, ONEG. The trick is to go back and since you have known victims now that you've recovered their bodies, you have to try to understand who these individuals are. If you know who they are and you already know from an antemortem before death standpoint who they are, maybe the family or maybe the hospital will know what their blood type is. And at that point in time, once it's separated out and once you identify the individual types, it's at that point that you can then tie it back to the individual bodies and hopefully you can retrieve DNA from it. Not all blood types are interchangeable. You know this from trying to give blood.

There is a universal donor. But if you were at an A, you can't give blood to somebody who's not. So when you retrieve a sample from the ground, from a body, from anywhere. And it is two different blood types. What does that look like on a slide or how you look at them? Does it separate? Does it blend? Does it, what does it do? Well, it's going to be at a molecular level and you'll be able to identify these markers

that are contained on the surface of the red blood cell itself. And this is going to what's called the Rh factor in the blood. And so they will present in a very particular way that is unique to that particular blood type. And that's the way you can identify them in testing in the laboratory. So to kind of pull them apart. And one of the problems with commingling of blood is that the blood itself begins to literally separate as it goes through the process of decomposition. So you'll have the blood cells begin to separate away, the RBCs, red blood cells, they begin to separate

away from the serum. And you'll see this kind of migration that takes place. You can see it really well on a floor, like on a solid, smooth floor surface. You'll see the serum that when it separates out, it's got kind of a yellow color to it. And there's a time factor that's associated with that. And a lot of people have opined that potentially when you have exposed blood on surfaces like this, that this is a way to determine postmortem interval, but they haven't been able to kind of lock that down to the point where they can use that as a mechanism for that purpose. But once those blood cells are separated out and they are collected,

it's at that point that the testing can be done. And then the specific blood types, by virtue of the RH factor that they're tested for, you know, where these little antigens set up on the cells themselves, you'll be able to determine what type of something out of the corner of your eye. Maybe when you're going down the road, you can't believe that possibly you just saw what you think you saw. Or maybe just walking down the street. That's happened to me many times. And it's almost like you want to back up and confirm what your eyes saw and your brain saying, no, no, no, no, no. There's no way you saw that. You want to maybe hang a U-ey and go back and see if if that was real for that moment, I can not begin to imagine what it would be like to be a civilian driving down

the road and look over maybe the edge of the bridge and look down into that muddy water and see something that just didn't fit. And that's pretty much what happened. The bodies were discovered after someone called police saying they saw something, but were not sure what they saw and they needed police to go check it out and that's how it was discovered that these bodies were dismembered paint a picture for me of what that could have possibly been joe it's not been released yet but i mean are we looking at what a bone sticking up at this point i I mean, would whatever the person saw have been skeletonized by this point? Not in this shorter period of time. Maybe what they had seen may have been a bloated torso when they looked over there, because one of the things that happens during the

process of decomposition, and you know, you hear people talk about bodies being swollen. Well, that's true. And they're swollen because there is a process that's called polysis that's going on in the body. And it's at a cellular level. And essentially, the body begins to lack of a better terminology. The body is beginning to digest itself. Well, what's the product of digestion? Well, one of the products is gas. And so bodies begin to swell. And when they swell, they float. And you look down and I can only imagine through my own

mind's eye, you're looking into this watery area down there and you see this kind of round bulbous thing sticking up out of the water. And I've come across bodies like this before. And you look down and you see this odd shape in the water. And maybe, maybe to this person, it looked like a body. They didn't know, but I do know this. They went and contacted the authorities and said, look, y'all got to get down here and check this out because it's not just one thing I'm seeing. I'm seeing several items down here.

The question is, I think, what was the depth of the water of where these remains were found? Is it shallow so that maybe part of the remain was touching the bottom and then kind of sticking up? And here's another interesting kind of proposition. This is on a river. And I wonder, the Grand Fork is like a branch of the Canadian River. and the Canadian River is a pretty sizable river in that part of the country, and I wonder if there is a dam upstream. And they had closed the dam off, perhaps, and the water level had dropped, and that's something you can't really kind of plan on. And by virtue of the fact that they saw these items from a position of height looking down on it, remember they're in a car when they see it, maybe if the perpetrator just simply went to the bridge and tossed these items over and decided to be done with it, as

opposed to say, for instance, going out into the water even further and depositing those items out there. Maybe you wouldn't have seen them as readily, but maybe it was a matter of convenience. And that can be a clue for you if you're an investigator in a case like this, because if you're in a car, maybe it's late at night, maybe you've accomplished this horrible task of dismembering these bodies and you pull up in your car or your truck and you begin to toss them out. Well, when you do that, any remnant of blood, and there would have been blood, would transfer into the vehicle. So if you find, you know, we were talking about blood just a few moments ago, if you find blood that is specific to one of these victims that's

in the car, you have a lot of explaining to do to the authorities at that point in time. You know, you don't know this guy. How did his blood make it into your vehicle? And they're going to ask you questions. Was your vehicle with you the entire time yesterday? Did you have the keys? Did you lend it to anybody? Because they're going to knock down all of those possibilities as far as an alibi goes. The cops are going to ask those questions and I'll expect to have answers to them. And the trick is you have to get your hands on that vehicle as soon as you can as an investigator so that it's not cleaned up or there's an attempt to eradicate anything in there. And then go through that vehicle with a fine-tooth comb and find any kind of human remain that might be in there, whether it's tissue, you know, we're talking about a

dismemberment here, so you can have bits of tissue, you can have bits of bone, bone dust, and of course you can have blood as well. The information released on the deaths of these four men tell us that they were shot and dismembered. Once the bodies are recovered, how does those two facts interfere with finding out what happened? It can be a gigantic roadblock for you because most of the cases of dismemberment that I've either worked or have observed as working in the morgue or certainly on the scene as an investigator. They don't come off with surgical precision. The perpetrators generally cut wherever it's convenient for them, where they think they need to do it. Now, if you have somebody, and this is a real thing, if you have somebody that has a background in butchering. They've butchered meat before, pigs, cows,

that sort of thing. They're going to know what types of instruments to show up with. But for the most part, these are not surgical cuts that are being done. There are a lot of times where you'll find, say for instance, if somebody has been blasted with a shotgun and they are dismembered. Say for instance, they're blasted in the leg. Well, automatically, if you're the person doing the dismemberment, a goodly portion of your job at that point could have already been done for you. You're just going to have to saw through the bone. You're not going to have to cut through the leg. So it'll be a very atypical kind of incision and also sawing that goes on in the dismemberment process. So it's

going to be very randomized. And so if you have wounds, bullet wounds that are tracking through the body, let's say for instance, you've got somebody that's shot in the back and it's tracking from say above to below, from right to left, it goes across what's called the mediastinum, which is like the mid part of the body, and it exits out of the rib. Well, it comes in on the right rear and exits out of the front left out of a rib cage. Then in order for the individual to do that dissection, they might say, well, hey, I'll just cut across the trunk of the body. Well, when you start to get into the trunk of the body, it's at that point in time that you've disrupted that bullet path. And so it's hard to make heads or tails out of it.

And then, you know, if you have individuals, one of the things that I've found kind of curious over the years is that with dismemberemberment cases it's amazing how many cases that we have where the heads are missing and some people will say well serial killers will do that and take them as trophies yeah they do but if you have heads that have been taken off of bodies sometimes individuals the heads will be separated in the sense that they're dismembered or removed from the rest of the body, but they'll also get separated in disposal. So if you've got a subject that has been shot in the head, you might not be able to account for that gunshot wound that they have. And that's gone. You know, it's not like it's just going to be there necessarily nestled against the rest of the remains unless, of course, they're packaged together. That harkens back to any number of cases that are out there

where heads were missing off of some pretty infamous cases. So you're not going to have everything in total. And, of course, that's going to create also another problem. How in the world do you get all of these parts back together again? When it comes to retrieving the body parts, how in the world do you get all of these parts back together again? When it comes to retrieving the body parts, how is it done? Each part is transported to the morgue or the coroner's office, wherever the autopsy is going to be done, or the body is going to be stored. But I'm confused. If you want a body part to not sweat and stay pristine, as we've talked before about bagging hands, you use paper. But body bags are plastic or rubber. What's the difference?

Wow. You just made a point, Jackie, that not many people pick up on. We do talk about using paper as opposed to plastic. And isn't it interesting? And I'm not trying to diminish the dead. But what I am saying is that with a body, the deceased or the remains of the deceased are essentially the biggest piece of evidence that you have. So what do we do? Well, practice has always been that you look for those points of contact that are the higher probability you're going to harvest evidence from. So that's why we bag the hands specifically.

I've bagged heads before that are attached to the bodies. In this case, when you have a dismemberment, my suspicion is that you would take a clean white sheet and you would individually wrap each dismembered portion of the body. at the scene that if you've got these dispersed over what would be called a field, an evidence field lying on the bottom down there, there's no way at the scene that you can kind of reassemble the body out there. The conditions are not conducive to that. And like you said, in Oklahoma, where they have a state medical examiner's office, it is going to be incumbent to get all of those pieces wrapped. I don't know if they use bags, paper bags, but you would wrap them certainly in a clean white sheet individually and then place them into a body bag.

And that's the way it happens. And yes, they are rubberized plastic. And you would get them to the morgue as soon as you can. And it's at that point in time that you can begin to try to make a determination as to who goes with what part at that point in time. And how do you do that? Yeah, it's tough. One of the interesting things here is, if we can just kind of back up a little bit, is that we know that the bodies were dismembered. Okay. That's been stated clearly. So how were they dismembered? What tool was utilized?

Let's say you're talking like with a sharp edged instrument that is more of a crushing instrument where we're talking about a maul, which is like an axe. But it also looks like a sledgehammer on one side and an axe head on the other. Tremendous crushing injury with that. Well, if you slam down onto a body with a maul, you're not going to have a clean cut. As a matter of fact, you're going to crush the bone, okay? And it would be very difficult, I think, at least just from the skeletal perspective, to marry that bone up with the attachment. Say if an arm is taken away near the shoulder, it would be hard. Say mid-humorous, it'd be very difficult to marry that up if it's a crushing type of instrument. Whereas if you used a hacksaw, it will leave specific identifying marks, and it's almost like putting a puzzle together. And you have to think

of it that way in a morgue, and you would take a lot of time to see if you can actually get this thing to kind of marry up with the marks that are left behind. And it would be that simple. Certainly a more scientific approach. And I suspect that they probably did this because the medical examiner in the state of Oklahoma is very sophisticated. I would imagine that they would do DNA sampling from each one of these remains. I mean, every single piece that has been dismembered and they would wait for those results to come back before they actually essentially marshal all of the pieces have to give a tip of the cap to police divers, particularly those that are skilled at crime scene, underwater crime scene. When you're in a river like Grand Fork up there in Oklahoma, that river, if you go into that river, I would suspect that if you held your hand up in front of your face, you would not be able to see it six inches out. It's that muddy most of the time. And these remains are kind of floating

about. Maybe some of them are resting on the bottom. So guess what the divers have to do? This is a feel event where they go in there and they are going to actually feel along the bottom and maybe they're submerged and they're kind actually feel along the bottom and maybe they're submerged and they're kind of crawling along the bottom and touching all of these spaces and they they literally have to do it with a certain amount of precision just like we do at a crime scene but can you imagine working a crime scene blind because that's what they're doing they have to document each one of these dismembered remains where they rest. And I've seen them where they'll take actual, in really deep water, what they'll do is they will attach these little flags that have little buoys on them that float on the surface.

And they'll attach them to the bottom and you'll see these flags all kind of floating out there in the water. And they'll snap a picture of that and it gives you an idea of the kind of the disbursement pattern that's going on. And then, of course, they're skilled at underwater photography. but how are you going to accomplish that task when you can't see your hand in front of your face? So, you know, this is in fact a crime scene and you have to document it. You have to document it carefully and try to determine where each one of these pieces rest out there. And once they're collected, of course, you know, you go through the process that we talked about of getting these remains back to the state medical examiner's office so they can begin the process of putting them together and ultimately trying to determine

what happened and when it happened. As it stands right now, a person of interest is being questioned, but he is not considered a suspect as yet. And that man is Joe Kennedy. Again, he is a person of interest. He has not been named a suspect. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. is body bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.