Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: From Manson Family Murders to Beheadings - Truth About Sharp Force In

Episode Date: July 20, 2025

Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the Manson family murders and the real injuries suffered by the victims,  as well as beheadings carried out hundreds of years ago in an effort to explain the difference in the type of injuries created by all manner of weapons that can be used to stab, slice, carve, and disembowel. Professor Morgan explains the difference between the facts of a case and how injuries and weapons are shown in film and how difficult it is to determine the source of a sharp force injury.  Transcript Highlights 00:13.87 Introduction - Sharp Force Injuries  01:11.86 Description of a beheading 04:56.77 Sharp force injury 10:02.83 Executioner refusing to execute 14:59.68 Stabbing injuries 20:27.08 Studying the margin - edges of injury 24:48.30 Always look for the "winking eye" 29:58.47 Thorough autopsy - tongue comes out 35:03.25 First documented autopsy, Caesar 38:58.59 Manson family knife attacks, Sharon Tate 45:03.35 Manson Murders shown in movie shows fork bouncing up and down, ridiculous 46:2 9.07 Conclusion  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body bags that Joseph's got more. It was a really cold morning. Matter of fact, folks around town said that there would be ice that day. It was the morning of January the 30th, 1649. January the 30th 1649 and the head of state the King of England walked across the banqueting floor in the main chamber at the banqueting house part of White Hall Palace in London literally right down the road from present-day Parland. It wasn't a normal straw.

He was walking to a window and outside of that window there had been built a scaffold and as he stepped through the window, cold wind cut through. He had asked for extra clothing that morning so that the crowd could not see him shivering because he didn't want to give the impression that he was afraid. For a moment he looked out over the crowd. He knew that the crowd was so vast, they'd never hear what he would have to say. He looked at the two attendants and the executioner, told them that he was not guilty of the charges of which he had been found guilty of.

And then he turned to the executioner and says, when I kneel down and lay my head on the block, I'm going to pray. And when I extend my arms, that will be your signal to swing the axe. In that one moment, Europe changed. changed because it was viewed that all power derived from God through their sovereign. And as Charles' head rolled over the surface of that wig, picked it up, displayed it to the crowd, and then tossed it to them. In that one moment a simple tool was used, a beheading axe, weighted on one side, blunt, but on the other side, a crescent shaped blade razor sharp had cut through the neck of the sovereign of England. Today, we're going to learn a bit more about sharp force injuries

and people die as a result of them every day, not just monarchs. and people die as a result of them every day, not just monarchs. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags. I tried to find the banqueting house many times. I finally found it when I was walking down the streets of London day because I'd heard the story for years and years. A man for all seasons if you've ever seen that movie, down the streets of London, Dave, because I'd heard the story for years and years. A Man for All Seasons, if you've ever seen that movie, Richard Harris and let's see,

what's his name? Alec Guinness played the king. Powerful movie. There was another generation of it that came out with Tim Roth playing the part of Oliver Cromwell. Can't remember who the king was. But it was, I'd heard about it for years and years. I'd seen the movies and it was a seminal time.

But you know, Dave, over a long period of time in Europe, heads were rolling off everywhere. Right. and in Europe, heads were rolling off everywhere. Right. You know, all the way up, you know, through the French Revolution, they became, I think, dissettled over the guillotine for a very short period of time and then reinstituted it as a humane way of bringing about death. Okay. It seems like it's a pretty humane way.

You know, the guillotine, okay, look, you know it's coming. Lay your head down, pop, it's over. Yeah, yeah, and to me it does, I think it's the spectacle of it all. And as a matter of fact, if you go and search last guillotine execution in France, there is an image, and it's real grainy that pops up a photograph was taken in a courtyard of the last guy to be executed by guillotine

in the 1920s. Wow. And yeah, you can see the length of his body and he's like laying on a board because they, you have to kind of, you know, shimmy up this board and lay there. And I don't know if they, you know, some images I've seen show them strapping you down to this thing and whatnot. But yeah, their head would pop right off. And you've got this delivery of energy that transfers from that back

weighted blade to that fine, thin edge that has been honed down so that's razor sharp and it passes right through the tissue and the bone and the musculature but you know that's that's an example of what we would call an incised injury it's not a stab obviously, and it's not a puncture wound. That's for sure. And sharp force injuries coming up in a variety of. Of. Of styles, I guess you could say.

And you can you can arrive at them with any number of instruments that are out there But going back to the guillotine, you know, we did an entire episode on Putting people to death, you know, yeah, yeah, and I don't understand that I'm missing something here, you know, we we have the Putting them to sleep thing with chemicals, right? putting them to sleep thing with chemicals, right? And we've got people fighting over that one's inhumane. And then we've got the gunshot where we had the guys miss, you know, firing squad.

It seems like, I mean, really, was there ever a failure where the guillotine didn't actually chop the dude's head off? I don't know about the guillotine, however, there were several failures relative to what we refer to as long swords. If you go back in time, like during the time of Elizabeth I, and I urge anybody, if you've, Buckingham Palace is all cool and everything, but if you're going to go to one royal spot

in, in Great Britain, in London rather, Make sure that you go to the Tower of London because you say the Tower of London, you think it's a standalone tower. It's not. It's a palace. In the courtyard there, where the famous ravens are that have had their wings clipped and the beef eaters, the soldiers, retired soldiers that walk around in those really cool, odd looking uniforms. It's still an active part of the royal family, and that's where executions were taking place.

As a matter of fact, where they took place, I think if memory serves me correctly, almost all of Henry VIII's wives were killed there, including Anne Boleyn. Their bodies, as it turned out, were actually buried in a chapel that's adjacent. We've been in the chapel and have seen that area. Back then, during that period of time, they used longswords. for an executioner that did not do their task to the point where it was a death that was met quickly. And one of the things that's interesting about blade executions is that with axes, axes and blades in Great Britain in particular, those types of executions were considered to be swift and painless and they were held, they were set aside for those individuals that were of rank, that were nobility. The rest of everybody would be hung or drawn, quartered and hung, which if you've ever seen

Braveheart, there's a description of that. You can see the ending scene with Mel Gibson being essentially cut into small pieces. Not much of that movie was historically based, but that part was actually true. So, you know, it's been an evolution. It's been an evolution of these events over a long period of time. And going back to the executions with longswords in Great Britain, Dave, they didn't use, during the time of Elizabeth and Henry VIII,

they didn't use English swordsmen. They actually employed French swordsmen that would come over and do the execution because they were considered to be better at it. Kind of crazy when you start thinking about being better at being a swordsman for cutting up a head, you know? Seems like something my grandson Braylon would probably be pretty good at it, you know? Yeah, wielding that sword. I can't imagine that it would be very fulfilling work.

As a matter of fact, with Charles I, they had to find somebody else to do it because this idea that all power derived from God for the head of state, no pun intended, and the executioners refused to do it because they felt as though that the individual that they would be killing was appointed by God. And so there's been a lot of stories, no one actually knows who the executioners were,

but there was an executioner and an assistant and they actually were paid a hundred pounds in order to do this. And a hundred pounds during that period of time was a monumental fee to do this. But you have to understand, whoever decided to wield that sword, did it under penalty of pain that could come about at any moment in time. They themselves could be killed by loyalists

to the royal family. They would be known, their families would be known for years and years to come. So kind of an interesting, interesting turn. But for me, when I began as a death investigator, I think that some of the most fascinating cases that I ever worked Dave came about as a result of sharp force injuries and Not all sharp force injuries are ruled as as homicides You know we think about sharp force We think about individuals that are being Stabbed and cut and all these sorts. And yeah, there's tons of those.

Knives in particular are easy to get your hands on. People can carry them. They're easily concealed. But for the most part, you know, I had a lot of self-inflicted injuries using knives, slashing of wrists, that sort of thing. I had one guy that cut his throat with a straight razor to take his own life. And then I've had tons of accidental deaths that involved sharp force or penetrating injuries. I've had people that have been run over by lawnmowers, had their feet cut off and bled to death.

One case in particular involved a guy that got caught up in the prop of a boat. Until you've seen those kinds of injuries, you can't really appreciate how horrific a sharp force injury is, the way it literally, the mechanical nature of it, the way it chews up the body. And even if you had had with that guy with a prop injury, even if you had had a team of surgeons standing by, I don't think that his life would have been salvageable. It's important to understand that with sharp force injuries, you come away with an appreciation that probably in cases of homicides next to firearms related deaths, Dave, I'd have to say that sharp force injuries are the number two. They're number two when it comes to committing murder. And again, it goes to this idea, you know, that we've

talked about over, you know, years now, that many deaths are rooted in some kind of relational thing. And when you have domestic events that occur in particular, and you've got a kitchen. You're looking for access and opportunity. And one of the, you know, kind of fallback positions is I'm going to go get the kitchen knife and I'm going to go to work. And that's what happens many times. Wow. You know, Joe, one of the things about using a knife that petrifies me, it's not, it would not be my go-to weapon because of the idea of slipping. You know, like, and we have this all the time in stories we cover where the person using the knife, if unless they're experienced with them, they cut themselves and knowing how

bloody scenes get when you've got cuts going on. That'd be my one big fear. You're not wearing gloves, your hand's slipping on that knife. Yeah, you know, there's a, the nature of blood for me at least, because I've had this happen in the morgue, you know, utilizing scalpels and even needles.

I've cut myself multiple times in the morgue over the years. Really? Yeah, I've stabbed myself with needles. And terrifying, you And terrifying when this happens because I came of age during the height of the AIDS epidemic. And we were always getting tested and those sorts of things. And it's quite terrifying. There's something about the nature of blood though

that people think blood is like really tacky and it is, you know, it gets real sticky. But there's something, it's almost a fat-like quality so that whatever you're holding onto becomes almost lubricated with blood. It's not like water. There's a different sense to it. And so yeah, you're right on point. We have a lot of cases where people will cut themselves as they're wielding some type of sharp instrument and of course they wind up co-mingling their blood and from a bigger picture their DNA with that of the victim. That's one of the reasons that if you have a suspect in beatings and stabbings and that sort of thing,

you're always gonna look at their hands to see if they have injuries. If they're wearing some type of bandage on your hand, gee man, how'd you get that? Are you okay? Do you need us to get you medical help? No, no, no, no, it's just a wound. Hey, do you mind taking the bandage off

so we can see it? And you look at it, it ain't healing, it's fresh. And they've never gotten help for it, or they haven't been given help for it because they look at it, it ain't healing. It's fresh. And they've never gotten help for it, or they haven't been given help for it because they haven't asked for it because they're trying to disguise it. That would be OJ Simpson and his first discussion with police after arriving back from Chicago, less than 24 hours after the death of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson. And hey, OJ, well, what, what you got going on there on your finger?

Yeah. You know, the infamous cut. Yeah. On his finger. I don't know if that's, you know, just saying it just seemed obvious, but it was in an odd place on, on the outside of the left hand, you know, that's what I always seem to think that it would have to be if you, if you're trying to stab somebody or slice, I guess, you know, it's not a weapon I would choose to use

so I can't really get a good handle on how it would be used no pun intended so no and the left hand is not an odd odd place because if you're if you're trying to restrain somebody and holding them down with your left hand and your right hand and your willed in a knife you You know, there's a high probability you could nick yourself. And look, I mean, even guys that are special operations people that are trained in sharp force or sharp force instrument use, you know, in a combat situation. Most of them, that's not their first choice. As a matter of fact, it's generally a last resort. They'd much rather be shooting people than trying to go head to head with somebody with a knife.

It's the last resort that you're going to reach down, you're going to have a knife at your hand to try to keep people away. I'm thinking about what's, what's the, what's the, uh, uh, Clintney, the case out of Miami with the only fans model. Yeah. Courtney Clintney, uh, heard a, uh, a special operations guy talk one time, many years ago, somebody had asked him a question about is there any truth to people that are expert with knives and throwing knives and he said why in the world would you if that is your last weapon why are you gonna take it and throw it at somebody he's like we're gonna hold on to it and we're

gonna carve you up and and I think about her scoring that shot in the subclave on that poor young man and he bleeds out. The odds of that happening are slim and none, both in the same sentence. And it's just, it's highly implausible. But when we think about sharp force injuries, here's kind of how we examine them and the annotations that we make. First off, with sharp force injuries, how do we define them? Well, they're going to have clean edges.

What does that mean, Morgan? Why are you saying clean edges? Well, if you're hit with a baseball bat and it tears the skin, that's a laceration. And we're going to do a whole another lecture on blunt force trauma. Clean edges implies that you've got a milled weapon, something that has got a mechanically created blade with an edge on it. And when a slice is made, if you think about slicing something, if you look at whether it's a package you're going to open at home with a knife or if you're cutting into a steak, if you look at the edges or as we refer to them the margins of the injury, they're going to be clean. You're not going to have interconnecting tissue there. So you've got this clean edge.

That's one of the first things we look for. Generally, there's no what we refer to as ecchymosis, which is a fancy term for bruising around that area. So it's not like somebody has been pounded on, where if you pound somebody, you've got the blood that's leaching out into the interstitial tissue. You're gonna have cut and it will be bleeding, but you're not gonna have this big mass

of hemorrhage around there. The one exception though is if you have somebody that's wielding a knife and generates a stab wound and it's got like a big hilt on it with a handguard and they drive that into the body, I've seen the handguard generate a contusion or create ecomosis. But that's really the only time you, if you're going to use a steak knife on somebody, you're not going to see it. And then again, going back to the clean edges, there's not going to be any tissue bridging. And that's what I was referring to is those kind of thin little lines of tissue that still connect one side to the other. That's something you see in

lacerations and cuts or incised injuries are not lacerations. The medical community for years has, you know, they'd love to throw around the term, particularly in the emergency room, the term LAC, which is an abbreviation for laceration. They'll call everything a LAC and that's not the truth. That's an incised injury. Laceration is generated by blunt force trauma. So that's the way we basically look at them and try to describe them. So for us, there's three groupings with sharp force injuries.

The first is going to be a cut or an incised injury. Remember how I mentioned about the guy that cut his throat with a straight razor? Well that's an incised injury. If you've ever been cutting something, like using a cutting board to cut up vegetables, most of the time you're not going to stab yourself with a knife that you're cutting with. You're actually going to incise a finger. And so that's this kind of linear cut that you get that can be really nasty. And then I think third, we've got what are referred to as penetrating injuries. And most of the time, they're going to be a puncture wound, okay? So you can have somebody, it's not a bladed instrument, but if you think about a piece of rebar,

like a piece of iron, I've had people, or an impalement, for instance, that's a puncture wound. I've had, I think probably one of the most bizarre cases I've ever had was a young man, there were five people riding a car in New Orleans and a guy was driving they were in bucket seats in the front seat guy was driving his girlfriend was in the front passenger there were two girls sitting in the back seat and a dude sitting in the center between the two women. And this guy was drunk that was driving the car, ran off of the service road, running next to I-10,

and hit the chain link fencing. And the support post for the chain link fencing began feeding through the car, and it hit this guy right in the center of his forehead. I remember we had to go almost 10 yards back with a settling torch and cut out that core sample of his skin, skull, brain, and skull and skin and had a little patch of hair on there. I'll never forget it had a little patch of hair on it. It actually taken a core sample out of his head. That's a puncture wound. Okay. And that's how it would be, you know,

be classified. So those are the three main- If I was an attorney, and you were on the stand, I'd say, I'm going to have to see that for myself. You bring that into court. I want to see a little evidence there. Well, I think it was brought into court and certainly in a civil action because I think that insurance company was in fact sued. And we spend a lot of time in in medical examiner's offices. We probably spend is probably more time in civil court giving depositions and that sort of thing than we ever do in criminal court because there's so much that arises in insurance

claims. So yeah those are like you, kind of the three big categories, you know, that we come up with. Stab wounds in particular are quite fascinating. And I've used this term before. I want to throw it out to those that haven't heard me say it. When we're trying to identify stab wounds, I was taught by a forensic pathologist years ago that was this kind of salty old fella,

and he said, always look for the winking eye. And I've used that term forever. And when you see a stab wound, you know, where the instrument is not in place, it's been withdrawn. When you look at a single-edged weapon or the injury that's left behind by a single-edged weapon, it'll come to a sharp point where the actual edge of the blade is, and then it's more blunted on the other side because that's like the back strap of the knife.

And if you look at it long enough, it looks like an eye that's squinting. And he always told me, you know, look for the winking eye. And when you roll up on a scene and you're trying to examine a body and they've got, I've had cases where, you know, people have had 50 and 60 stab wounds all over the bodies. I think the most I've ever had was well above 200 on one person. Because once somebody count. Well, I certainly didn't count a lap, right?

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of overlap. I didn't count them, obviously, at the scene. But once the body is undressed, and the body is washed at back at the morgue right before you're going to do the autopsy, you have to track all these wounds. So you know, we would actually use probes to insert into the injuries and photograph it to give an idea of the literally the path of the wound. And they're fascinating to see, but you kind of get tired when you're having to enumerate all these things, you see in movies and whatnot

many times people being shot multiple times. Shooting tracking wounds with firearms related deaths can be tedious. However, stab wounds in particular because it's almost like when people get started stabbing, they don't want to stop. It almost reminds me of my grandma's old Singer sewing machine. The needle that's going up and down, and it's only the needle moves with this.

It's all over the place and they're randomized. And then you'll have stab wounds that are blended with incised wounds, particularly if you've got an event where someone is attempting to disfigure somebody where they're trying to Mark up their face in some way, you know the old adage if I can't have you no one will have you You know you have people we've covered oh my lord Dave, I don't know how many cases of dismemberment Just in the last two years, you know, where you've got bodies that are, you know, you'll

have, you know, events where people have ears removed, noses removed. I actually had a case, a drug case one time where a guy had his testicles removed and placed on the bed next to him. And you couldn't see it when you arrived at the scene. All you saw were these two ovoid shapes that were lying and had been padded down so they didn't have a lot of blood. But when you pull the comforter back, the bed is just like super saturated with blood underneath him, whereas testicles had been removed. And that was in the middle of a gang war

that that had happened. Never seen anything like that, it was quite amazing. The one troubling part to that was this, there was an EMT that was still at the scene, and he looked at us as we're standing there, and he sees those two ovoid objects laying on the bed, and quietly says, are those his eyes? And I remember saying to him, where does your ambulance operate? Because I don't want to be

anywhere near you if you're going out with people. Man, Joe, think about the meeting. Okay. All right, guys, we got it in with this other gang. We're going to take it to them. Yeah. After you've destroyed everything, after you've taken their money, after you've taken and they're all dead before you leave, here's your initiation. This is the new guy. Here's what you're going to do. You know, who comes up with this? And I have my mind, Joe, is there a people who want to be part of that? I think I'd like to be in a gang. I think I'd really like to be in a drug gang.

That's what I want to do. I think, you know what? It sounds like a fun thing to do. Well, here, take a look at this picture. Cause this is you in about six months. Well, I got to tell you, uh, you know, infamously there's, there's the old, uh, and I've never seen one myself. I've had people claim they've seen them,, and again, this is reaching back into history

here with the drug wars that went on back in the 80s with the Colombian, the infamous Colombian necktie where they would slice the underneath of the chin and pull the tongue out through the base of the floor of the soft palate. They would pull it down after incising that area. Yeah, I think it's possible. No, because we remove tongues at autopsy all the time. As a matter of fact, if you're going to do a thorough autopsy, tongue comes out. We used to refer to it as tongue to testicles is the way we would refer to it as tongue to tongue, tongue to testicles. It's the way we would refer to it.

And that's particularly if you're doing an own block dissection. Yeah. Things that I think I would really like to do with you. Yeah. One would be to get you drunk and have you telling stories and record it all. And the other is to get you with a couple of your favorite fellas and start sharing war stories, you know, that I can just record because I'm telling

you there's a TV show waiting to happen. Well, there is. And you know, it's sometimes you have to, you try to block all this stuff out of your mind. And you do want to particularly block out sharp force injuries because I got to tell you friends out of all of the injuries that you encounter in the field sharp force injuries Stay with you forever and ever We're all about defining things in forensics. And the reason is, is that if you're involved in sciences, you have to have an understanding of the data that you're trying to assess. And I know people think of data from the perspective

of maybe information systems, computers. But no, I mean, we collect data too. We collect data in the field and we collect data at autopsy. And so let me just give you a brief rundown of injury characteristics, just so you can frame this out in your brain, particularly if you're watching some true crime story or you're hearing about something on a podcast somewhere,

even though we'd appreciate if you listen to body bags, but we know that you listen to other ones. So let's just kind of go through these real quick. Cuts or incised injuries tend to be longer than deep. There's the old adage, I think it might be from the bard, death by a thousand cuts. And what he meant by that, what they meant by that, is that you can slice somebody multiple times,

and it takes a longer period of time for them to die. Okay? So death by a thousand cuts, and of course that's an alliteration to something else, but then you have stab wounds, and stab wounds tend to be deeper than long. So just because somebody is stabbed doesn't mean that they're going to die if it's a single stab wound, because there's no guarantee that you're going to hit a vital organ or that even if you do hit a vital organ that it's going to be a terminal event, okay? Because there are people out there that have had their lungs punctured and got on quite

well afterwards. And then we think about puncture wounds. And puncture wounds as a classification, the one thing you have to keep in mind is that many times they very well might imitate gunshot wounds because most of the time they're round, circular defects in the body. And I know I've referred to rebar a lot

and rebar is something you saw on the streets a lot with the homeless because they could take it, file down one end of it, make a shiv or shank out of it like it's used in prison and wrap one side with duct tape and carry it in their pocket. And I've had cases where people have been stabbed multiple times with a piece of rebar and it looks just like they sustained center mass gunshot wounds multiple times in the chest. If you didn't know that it was something other than as advertised, you might say, yeah, this is a multiple gunshot wound case. That's kind of the brief rundown.

But Dave, we've had actually, I wish I had them at my fingertips right now. The number of dismemberment cases we've actually covered, but we actually did, I think a couple of years ago, we did a special show at CrimeCon. Because we'd had so many stories. So many stories. And look, just because these people are dismembered doesn't mean that that was their cause of death. And I think in most cases it was not. You know, you had people that were shooting individuals, you had people that were suffocating

and choking people out. And then- They were just trying to get rid of a body. Yeah. And then they're just trying to get rid of a body. But what we have covered in the past, I know, and one of my, you know, I don't know, I'm not one of these people that say, well, they and one of my, you know, I don't know, I'm not one of these people that say, well, they're all like my children. They're not. These episodes

are not. What a ghastly family. But one of my favorite episodes is our Julius Caesar episode. I learned more in that episode than, I mean, I'm in a purely educational sense. I encourage everyone listen to that. Cause wasn't that like one of the first, you know, it was the very first documented autopsy. And it was his private, private physician that had done it. And you know, Caesar was stabbed multiple times, I think upwards of 20, if I'm not mistaken, when they all kind of, they loved, they used to love to use that term when they all fell

upon him with their, with their daggers and began to stab him. We learned in that that there was probably an attempt to emasculate him. Many of those stab wounds that he had sustained were in the groin area, which if you're an emperor, that's one of the things that you would try to do to try to demonstrate you're robbing him of his manpower and of his ability to rule effectively. And being able to track those wounds and understand what he went through. And he had an awareness, he actually cried out.

And of course, you know, there's the old and I think Shakespeare made this popular, you know, when he did play Julius Caesar at to Brutus, you know, you to Brutus and Bruce was like his his his best friend. What was really probably said was, my child, why are you doing this? And because he, you know, for whatever reason he didn't understand, maybe he should have, why, you know, this was occurring. But, you know, these go back forever and ever. There have been, you know, cases of people being stabbed and brutalized. I go back, we did an episode on the king in the car park

with Richard the third, where they discovered his body and he had been brutalized after death, but he had sustained a sharp force injury to the back of the skull. It was, as a matter of fact, it was probably a halbert that did it, which is kind of one of these long pike looking things. It's got a blade on it and it's meant is kind of one of these long pike looking things.

It's got a blade on it and it's meant to, you do it in Calvary charges and you can slice with it. It's kind of a crescent shaped blade. It's a crazy looking weapon is what it is. I've never even heard of it till you talked about it. It's a nightmare, man. It's an absolute nightmare. It's like death at the end of a stick. Yeah, it really is. And you know, they, they shaved off, you know, essentially like the parietal and into the occipital area of his,

of his skull and it exposed his brain. So, you know, and that's, that's something that, that was quite remarkable. But interestingly enough, you know, Dave, he had a puncture wound too, because when they had him trust over a horse after death, and they saw evidence of this on his pelvis, on his pubis, I think, someone had taken, there's a dagger that is used in battle with helmeted soldiers back during the time,

and it's four-sided. And they would take this thing and hold it over a head and drive it through because it would actually penetrate armor. And some of the scientists believe that this thing was done to desecrate his body, this puncture wound was inserted between his legs as he was thrust over this horse where they were going back into town with his body. Who else have, well, Sharon Tate, for instance, Tate Lobbianca murders, vicious killing.

She stabbed multiple times. She's pregnant. Eight months pregnant, Joe. Yeah, and no, they did not, you know, remove the baby at the scene. That did not happen. But in, they did not remove the baby at the scene. That did not happen. But in she's pleading for a life, please don't kill me.

I have a baby. And again, very brutal blood deposition all over that scene, which is something that you see consistently in sharp force injury cases, where you will have super saturated areas in the floor, all about the place where people have had great harm done to them. And it can be even, you know, like I mentioned earlier, it can be even slices in sized areas. Yeah, they're not deep, but you're bleeding out because all of these vessels have been, you know, have been compromised. Let me ask you a question about the Tate murder.

Yeah. Sharon Tate. Okay. Because you had a group of individuals. There wasn't just one on one. There was a bunch of people there that night. But you had a gun used on the kid sitting out front. When they first came over, Tex Watson shoots one of the guys in the car, Stephen Perrin, I think it was his name, anyway, he gets shot. But then inside the house, you know, it's knives and chasing down Wojtek Prakowski to stab him, Abigail Folger, they chased her 50 yards

and stabbed her multiple times. I mean, just this constant hacking of people. Sharon Tate, again, almost a tortured time, you know, of killing, of her begging for the life of her unborn child. Jay Sebring was there because he was still in love with Sharon Tate, even though she had married Roman Polanski. But then they tied a rope to the neck of Sharon and dropped it over a beam and tied it to

Jay Sebring. A lot of it was for show. But many times when a crime is taking place, don't they just stay with one method of destruction, meaning a knife? There's not usually a blurring of weapons. Yeah, that's a good point. Well, if you have multiple actors, bad actors at a scene, they might show up with whatever makes them feel comfortable. Tex Watson preferred to have this revolver with him. If I remember correctly, he handed out knives.

Remember what they said? They even use this quote, I think, Tarantino lifted this for Once upon a time in Hollywood. Manson had told them to make it look witchy is the term that they had used. And of course they famously wrote, and I can't remember, was it pigs? I think on the wall, pigs and rise, you know, which obviously we just have covered Jeffrey McDonald. I think I probably failed to mention this, but in their home at Fort Bragg, the word pigs was written in there too, again, echoing the Manson murders that had taken place.

Which, by the way, there was an article in Esquire magazine in Jeffrey McDonald's living room right next to the couch he was sitting on that had been open to an article about the Manson family murders, and it mentioned the word pig being written in blood. That was one of the things that tied Jeffrey McDonald to that crime where they were like, well, dude, wait a minute, you know, you've got it right from here. Yeah. Yeah. That there's wild hippies running all over the place. Yeah. And that was to still fear. And I think that, you know,

the McDonald case had occurred prior to them affecting an arrest in the Tate-LaBianca cases. It was before a lot of the info. Actually, McDonald was February 17th of 1970. You had the Tate-LaBianca murders in August of 69, but the arrest came in October, November. It was kind of scattered before it all came together. The prosecution of that case was much later. It took time, so I'm not sure of the exact dates. I was a little kid, but yeah, it was enough that there was information coming out, but

copycat stuff was going on. And that's where the whole McDonald thing got in. And you think about, well, if you're going to go in and commit a mass killing, by the way, they didn't know that they, the Manson family, they didn't know that the Polanskis were occupying that space. They thought that it was still the Beach Boy guy, I think, or the manager. Actually, they thought it was Doris Day's son. Doris Day's son, that's right. It was Terry Melcher's home at Cielo Drive.

And Terry was the one who had actually had Charlie Manson come in and play a song. And we went out and heard him because Manson had this idea that he was going to be this big rock star. And Terry Melcher went out and heard him and went, nah, I don't think so. But Dennis Wilson had befriended him. And as a matter of fact, you know, the beach boys recorded a Manson song. Do you know that? They did. I forgot.

So, you know, you've got this place out of all the places, you know, they show up and these four people are just there, uh, you know, just hanging out in this poor kid out in the car. He was just a random kid with a transistor radio that he was trying to sell. Yeah, trying to sell a radio to the kids that lived there. Just two guys doing guy stuff. Yeah, I know. But when you think about the Manson, I think probably the Manson killings were famously, for years, the most prominent when it came to sharp force injuries, people thinking about it because you know, they did that ridiculous movie that was based on Bugolosi's

book, Helter Skelter, which I think, you know, he's full of it in the first place. And then, by the way, he also wrote a book about Kennedy assassination that says Oswald did it. Just so, just so you know. Yeah, I know. And again, he's full of crap. But you know, in that movie, I think that they actually portrayed a serving fork being inserted into the stomach and it infamously bounces up and down. And it's, some of the stuff is absolutely ridiculous.

Trust me, the scenes are horrific enough when it comes to sharp force injuries and kind of what is revealed to you in these environments. And it is literally as old as time when it comes to sharp force injuries. Because you don't know what what form they're going to come in. You don't know what instrument might be used. In many ways, I think that it's probably easier

for us to ascertain firearms related deaths and the origins of the projectiles than it is relative to knives. So sharp force injuries, again, some of the most difficult cases to interpret, but it's something that we do in the medical legal community every single day. It's something that we view. And here's what we can take away. We can get an idea of the relationship, and I don't mean like in a societal sense, I'm talking about a physical relationship between the perpetrator and the victim. We understand that they were very close.

We understand that there can be transfer of evidence. We understand that it's gonna be very brutal. And generally, the more stabs or cuts that a victim has, the more passion comes along with it. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.