Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - BODY BAGS WITH JOSEPH SCOTT MORGAN " From The Black Dahlia to Ed Gein, The Five of Dismemberment!

Episode Date: January 4, 2026

Part one of a two part episode covering dismemberment. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack talk about the Black Dahlia case that is back in the headlines again, as well as Ed Gein, and other dismemberme...nt killers we have covered. Imagine opening your garbage can to bring it back up the driveway empty, but it is too heavy, open the door and see a foot! One of the many cases covered in this episode of Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan.     See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Body facts with Joseph Scott Moore. I'm not by any means the brightest guy in the world. I think that a lot of it, any knowledge that I have that I've been blessed with comes from repetition and being around it. What I do, you know, for so long. You know, you just kind of absorb it after a while. It doesn't mean that you're intuitively, make sense there, intuitively intelligent.
Starting point is 00:00:37 It just means that you can absorb information. And my area is very specific, okay, in-death investigation. And granted, there are all kinds of subcategories within death investigation. But for me, it always has been the best way to learn things is to compartmental, them and I picked them up. I was a big advocate when I was an undergraduate in college of using index cards to run through before I
Starting point is 00:01:06 would do testing and that sort of thing. I love that because it really made me learn the information. But you know, that kind of breaking down of things lending itself to absorption of knowledge
Starting point is 00:01:22 it's certainly a way that we work in the morgue. We don't just essentially do all of our dissections at one time. We take it piece by piece and learning from each individual element of the human body what we can to try to arrive at a cause and ultimately a manner of death. But, you know, there are people out there and we've talked about them on the show who, do their own compartmentalizing of human remains. They break them down into various elements and also for various reasons, which we're going to discuss today.
Starting point is 00:02:13 Today we're going to talk about the five types of dismemberment that we come across in the field, in forensic science, in medical legal death investigation. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is bodybats. And Dave, you know you can verify this.
Starting point is 00:02:40 I had already mentioned to you that I wanted to do this going into the end of the year. Because we've talked so much about dismemberment, I kind of wanted to cap this thing off relative to what we're trying to do when we bring these cases.
Starting point is 00:02:58 And just to go ahead and get this out of the way, I do in fact believe that there is an uptick in the number of dismemberments that are being covered in the news. I can't scientifically verify that. Hopefully I can. Maybe I can get my graduate assistant on that and start collecting some data.
Starting point is 00:03:14 But people dismember for all different reasons, but the reason I'm saying to you, I need you to validate up front that I had already said this to you, maybe a week or so back that I wanted to do this episode Bodybags because just yesterday
Starting point is 00:03:32 without any prior knowledge there has been an article that has dropped that where it is, I think it was in the post, I'm not sure, I think it was in the post and maybe the daily daily, LA Times, where
Starting point is 00:03:48 they are now saying that there is a connection between the black Dahlia and the Zodiac killer. Now, I'm not here to, you know, to talk about those cases necessarily, particularly the Zodiac, because I don't know that that'll ever be solved. And certainly at this, at this distance in time, I don't know that the Black Dahlia case, but it's one of the first cases I think that many people ever heard about where there was
Starting point is 00:04:19 and really made a big splash where there was a dismemberment. Well, and it was a very particular kind of dismemberment. In the case of Elizabeth Short, who was the Black Dahlia, if you remember, Joe, this case, it's, we have on this program talked about how B-roll footage for television and pictures actually means a lot about getting coverage for a case. There are always, there are always cases. I don't want to knock any missing person's case or death or anything like that. I'll give you an example. John Bonae Ramsey, she had, granted, she's a child who is found dead in her own home. They thought she was kidding.
Starting point is 00:05:02 I mean, that whole story. But the reason it caught the attention of the world was all the B-roll video that was shown every time they mentioned the case. Here we go. We got the girl on stage. We've got her dancing. We've got her, you know, trust up, wearing makeup and all that at five and six years old. And as news people cover stories, they look for that. They look for things that will make.
Starting point is 00:05:23 their story stand out, whether it's the producer trying to make, get a leg up on the next gig or whatever. And so that actually matters in the coverage that happens, especially when a story is static, meaning there's no new information coming out. In the case of Elizabeth Short, the very first time I ever saw the story, Joe, it was photos. It pictures taken at the scene of this dismembered woman and how her body was positioned in pieces and the description of how her body was found and people were walking you know you're you are talking about in the post world war era of uh it was after world war two right 40 yeah yeah it's like 40 47 yeah it was a 47 yeah but Elizabeth short her she was called the black dahlia because she was seen by a woman
Starting point is 00:06:13 walking uh with her child in a stroller yeah um and by others before the police were ever called and you had a news person with his camera, taking photos as police arrived on the scene. Yep. So before any official photos were taken of this victim, they were already produced, they were already going through the film, you know,
Starting point is 00:06:38 and getting it on the paper the next day. Yes. So that story gained a lot of momentum because of the physical description and the pictures that fit that. Because no matter what you say, a body that is dismembered, and is sitting in grass for all to see is a shocking thing, no matter who you are or where you are. It's not something we ever expect to see in our life. No, it's not. And can you imagine
Starting point is 00:07:06 this mother pushing, you know, her baby down the street? And this is kind of a, and this is a weird thing to say now, an undeveloped area of Los Angeles. Right. Yeah. It was like, and when you take a look, you can actually see where, I'm not going to say that things had been, you know, that things had been stubbed, you know, ready to build a house over them relative to plumbing and all that, but it looked like that. You could tell where sidewalks had been poured and so forth and so on. And her body is laying out there. And she, Elizabeth Short, had been bisected. And bisected here, obviously by two. And again, this goes through. the process of dismemberment.
Starting point is 00:07:51 She's cut across, if you just think about it in the, well, if she's standing up, she's cut in the horizontal plane or, you know, around her equator of her body, okay? And so, and when you see her, her arms are actually bent at the elbow and over her head, palms up her legs are spread which i've actually seen that before in uh in a series of serial killings where the legs were always spread apart it's like uh it's like a humiliation kind of thing that's going on and you know she you're literally laid bare before the world and and the margins the margins of the incisions were very very neat what do you mean when you say margins the margins like where the dissection actually took place.
Starting point is 00:08:43 So when she's cut in this kind of equatorial position around her midline, there's not like, you know how we'll get these cases and we'll talk about them. It's like, you know, if somebody had done this like in a fever, they were using all manner of tools, this was very specific. All right. And this goes to someone that, you know, I hate to use the term training, but it was someone that had a certain level of. of comfort and probably privacy and most important time, very little blood left in the body.
Starting point is 00:09:16 So it gives you an indication the body had probably been drained. And here's something else. Did you know that her bowels were actually neatly tucked beneath her body as she was laid out? No, no, right? Yeah. Dude. But when you look at her body down the long axis, so if we're standing at the top of her head, looking down the long axis from the top of her head to her feet,
Starting point is 00:09:42 did you know that the body is actually offset, which is really weird. Like the lower tort, I'm sorry? It's on purpose? I can, I don't know. You went to, the person that did this went to so much trouble to do a need incision or a bisection, actually taking the body completely apart.
Starting point is 00:10:02 But yet you don't take the time to align the body. Right. The body is kind of offset. Now, you know, I'm not caring with a C. Stark out here. I can't sit here and as a forensic psychologist, which I ain't and don't want to be. I can't, you know, sit here and tell you what kind of profile this person had. However, I can tell you that the body is obviously a skew. The other thing, and I find this fascinating. We'll talk about movies in just a second. But when you think about her body, I think about the Batman with Heath Ledger in it.
Starting point is 00:10:38 because she actually had a smile cut into her face. Her face was actually, yeah, was just so disfigured. And it goes from the corner of her mouth up, just turning up. And I swear, Dave, it looks just like the smile that Heath Ledger had in the Batman movie, which to me in that canon of movies is probably the best. Heath Ledger was incredible as a Joker and I think very disturbing. But, you know, just that was carved into her face. I wonder if they got that idea and reflect that.
Starting point is 00:11:13 You know, you and I talk about movies every now and then on the show. I've got to tell you, there was a movie that came out in 2006, which was directed by De Palma. And it was a complete dumpster fire. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was in that movie. I was really, really hoping that it was going to be one of these things that really knocked our socks off. And it was a dumpster fire with a really bad smell to it. I don't know how else. But interestingly enough, going back to the Zodiac connection, David Fincher, who did, I think he did seven, he was slated to do that movie.
Starting point is 00:11:53 He didn't do it. He's the one that winds up doing the Zodiac movie, which was fantastic that had Jake Gillinghall in it. Right. And that movie was actually. even though you didn't see like a slash or anything, it was quite terrifying. I know, Joe, what is happening now? And we did talk about this. You and I talked about the Blancalia story like last week.
Starting point is 00:12:18 And for there to be some movement on this story now this week and today it's all over. I'm surprised at a connection between the Zodiac, which is predominantly San Francisco, northern California. And you have, you know, the Black Dahlia, which is one murder case in Southern California in the night, you know, in a neighborhood in the 40s, residential neighborhood in the south part of Los Angeles. I guess I'm trying to figure out based on a number of things that have been said about the Black Dahlia case. There's a man who has written a book about his father, believing that his father, who is a surgeon, actually was the murderer. and he has this whole thing cooked up where his dad, you know, got her home and just drain it all her blood in the bathtub kind of thing. Yeah, I know. And I actually went off.
Starting point is 00:13:16 There's a tape of me on YouTube, I think, and I was on with Vinipolitan on HLN years ago. And I don't know if it's the same guy, but I go off. I was actually, I did a phoner. I was nowhere. And they said, we want you to comment on this book that's just come out. And I said, oh, I'll be glad to. Because if you've got this much information at that time, there were still a lot of family members that were alive. I guess there still are of Zodiac victims.
Starting point is 00:13:43 If you've got this information, get an attorney, go to San Francisco, to the PD and these other associated and get in their face and say, I've got this information. What can you do with it? Let's get some resolutions for this. It just seems so mercenary. To write a book. Yeah, about, yeah, because my daddy did it. And then, of course, I get these responses like, well, he made an attempt to go to the chief of police of San Francisco. Yeah, well, nothing ever came of that.
Starting point is 00:14:12 Right. You know, because there was supposed to be DNA connectivity. But with this case, what they're saying now, and again, this is another amateur sleuth that has come on to this thing. They're opining that this case in particular is connected to the Zodiac. And the one suspect is a guy that was a combat medic. in World War II, and that he had some disturbances and this sort of thing, and he had gotten into fights and was really unbalanced. And so he actually winds up changing his name because they were initially looking at him as a witness in the Black Dahlia. And eventually he changes
Starting point is 00:14:53 his name and bounces out of town, right, and abandons like his family and everything else. well he makes his way back to the Bay Area I think in the early 60s I might be way off here but that's kind of how the story is going makes contact I think with his daughter maybe again I don't really know and he essentially has gone off his nut apparently and involved himself somehow in these so-called Zodiac killings and I still don't know that there's substance of proof that these kind of interlaced that what they have said are interlaced cases are actually connected i don't know that there's ever been positive proof that that you know it wasn't actually happened wasn't zodiac um similar to berkowitz you know shooting couples
Starting point is 00:15:45 and yeah there was elements of that you had the one cab driver that was like what's that area that's like really really ritsy in or used to be in in is it spot spyglass hill or It's like a neighbor. I can't remember that. I used to love San Francisco. But he was shot. He was a cabby. He was shot.
Starting point is 00:16:05 He was a single that was shot there in his car. And they had the lovers on lover lane, the lover's lane. Then he varies and attacks this young couple out by a lake with a knife. Right. You know, that sort of thing. You kind of changed. But with those cases, there was, this is a big standout to me, Dave. There was no dismemberment.
Starting point is 00:16:22 That's what I was going to ask you. Yeah. I don't remember anything ever being. And yet the Dahlia is a. a one-off. We don't have another case in Southern California within that same time frame where anything like what happened with Elizabeth Short was reported as happening again. And somebody who would go to this great effort to present the body in such a way where it wasn't an amateur or it wasn't somebody who didn't know what they were doing cut of her body, right? You were talking
Starting point is 00:16:52 about how her body was positioned a little off center, but still the cutting was professional or experienced draining of the blood was experienced. I mean, there was a lot going on with that one body
Starting point is 00:17:04 and it doesn't seem like people start at that level. It's like they grow into that level. Right. And a corpse is a corpse. You know,
Starting point is 00:17:15 like if you can turn someone by your own hand into a corpse, in other words, kill them. Right. That body,
Starting point is 00:17:25 that body, people love to throw around, term around objectification all the time and they use it I think incorrectly this is this is truly the epitome of turning turning a person into a doll if you will and breaking that person apart by any means necessary but it fits this case does at least the black dahlia fits into one specific category some of the stuff I'm going to reveal might just shock you I hate the Y question, but dismemberment is one of those things where you'll get that a lot.
Starting point is 00:18:17 Why? Why? Why would? And I think that it's one of these things that people cannot take the measure of, Dave. because they it's so foreign because it's so grotesque and over the top um and you and i have spoken about this in the past where um you know i'll say it it wasn't enough just to kill the person right you've got to go another step deeper into evil here and so with that said i felt that it was incumbent upon us to kind of to kind of talk about you know some of these some of these cases and you know the the first the first stop along the tour here is something that's called defensive dismemberment and most of the time this is more of a this this is dismemberment is used it has you specific utility in other words
Starting point is 00:19:18 you can't you cannot move the body you have to do something after you have killed an individual to fragment or to parse up or however you want to frame it, you have to break this body down into elements just to make it manageable. Dave, in some of these cases these people can be rather rotund because that's very difficult to manage. There's a reason they call it dead weight. And what's really kind of ghastly about, this dismemberment of a morbidly obese person is particularly nasty business and there are a multiplicity of reasons why but it just it takes it to a whole new level but I think if I remember correctly Dave there was a case that you and I and it wasn't so much this case it was out of
Starting point is 00:20:22 Oklahoma, this case had anything to do with, you had somebody that was morbidly obese. You had, and you and I were both shocked by this. I remember when we laid this down, we had multiple people that were dissected, Dave. I know. And when you're talking about four men, okay, immediately, I'm going to be honest with you, that shocks me. And I don't think it should shock me any more than any other group of four that were found. dead and are pulled from a river. But Joe, the fact that we've got four men and they were all very young. I mean, we're talking 29, 30, and 32. That just tells you a lot about the men who were killed,
Starting point is 00:21:08 but it doesn't tell you a whole lot else, Joe. Our police chief there at the time, his name was Joe Prentice. And he actually said at a news conference, all four bodies were dismembered before being placed in the river and that is what caused difficulty in determining identities and that's why it took so long so do they know were they all killed at the same time in the same place and then taken out in a john boat and tossed over the side like chum good it's an excellent question and there's not too much you know there's not a lot um you know in a river river is going to act in you know in some land-like place like Oklahoma, where this took place, river is going to primarily be used to disguise a body, all right?
Starting point is 00:21:59 Because there's not, it's not like you're going to the Everglades or South Louisiana, you know, where you've got the swamp. Crawfish will feed on bodies. Most lakes, most ponds and creeks and rivers in that area of the country. We've got plenty of crawfish. And there might be, as the body, begins to soften, you can have other scavengers that might come along, like catfish, probably to a certain degree. Other species might feed on bodies. But you're not going to have
Starting point is 00:22:32 kind of the wholesale total disruption of the body. Now, the aquatic environment is going to break these bits down quicker because the body is, in fact, dissected. If I'm not mistaken, was it in this particular case, I can't remember the guy, the guy used tools in this, and it seems like they were power tools, I'm not mistaken. And what had happened is the perpetrator in this case caught these fellow stealing from it. And he owned like a junkyard or something like this. And what's really weird is these guys had showed up on bicycles to do this. That kind of stood out in my mind as well.
Starting point is 00:23:15 It does because you're dealing with, you know what, if you're 29, years old 30 32 and you're riding a bicycle you know everybody does that when they're seven but not when you're 30 unless you're mountain biking or in a race for something unless you have you don't just tool around town right if you live in london or new york right not in oklahoma but not in rural oklahoma and i can't and these guys were these guys were big guys i mean you know they were like outdoorsy kind of guys a couple of them they're there they obviously used you know the news media use these images of these subjects wearing like utility worker vests. These guys, or like they were road crew.
Starting point is 00:23:54 These guys had worked out. They were hard workers, you know, or worked, you know, worked in the real world. They've both got those kind of farmer tans going on and this sort of thing. But apparently this guy thought that they were stealing from him. And, you know, I remember after this guy facilitated this, and I remember telling you at the time, there's no telling what type of instruments this guy had because he ran a junkyard. And, you know, if you're dealing things like scrap metal,
Starting point is 00:24:23 there's all kinds of ways to break up bodies. But this is going to be a defensive dismemberment because he's trying to put as much distance between himself and these bodies as he can. He's got to do something to dispose of them. When you begin to think about, you know, what am I going to do with four grown men and their bodies? what's kind of odd about this is that even after this had done,
Starting point is 00:24:50 he went to all the trouble to dissect the bodies. I guess he's sitting around ringing his hands because he bolts. He hops in a car and drives off to Florida at this point in time. Of course, they eventually catch this guy. But, you know, one more point I'd like to make about this case is the fact that when they're trying to put these bodies back together, you've got four guys that probably all approximate the same size and when you take four bodies and let's just say they're all bisected which just means cut in two I think that there was probably more extensive
Starting point is 00:25:28 cutting than that you still have to put pieces together to make them match and it's not like it's some kind of toy set where it's you know insert slot B into slot A and you've got a connection with this piece it's not like that because you're having to scientifically connect them together, which can be problematic. But in this case, you've got an individual that used the facility of his location in order to make this happen and try to get as much distance between him and the bodies. It's weird because many people will essentially kill people and not put distance between themselves
Starting point is 00:26:10 and leave them around. This guy made an effort to get these bodies away from him, and it's still, the wheel still came off, Dave. You know, interesting, you use that term because they never located the bicycles that these four men took out of the house. You know, they leave one of the family members' homes, and all four of these adult men go tooling at 9 o'clock at night down the road. They end up at Joseph Kennedy's salvage yard where they're up to no good. And by the way, police got this information from a fifth man who was invited onto the crime spree. And he's the one that went to police. I don't know if he came to them after they went missing before the bodies were found.
Starting point is 00:26:51 I don't know. But they did have an insider that came up and said, hey, they were stealing stuff. And I was invited, but I didn't go or I'd have been in there with them. And that's how they were able to tie this together. Because if you just find body parts floating in a river, you know, that's a tough cell. And you mentioned Kennedy, Joseph Kennedy takes off, you know, for Daytona, Florida, which is where they got him. And they rested him there in Daytona, Florida, and had to, at Daytona Beach and had to actually extradite him back to Oklahoma, where he was formerly charged with four counts of first degree murder. And they never, I don't think they ever found the gun that he, he shot them first.
Starting point is 00:27:30 Okay, he kills them with a gun, then he dismembers them. Yeah, because you can't, what's he going to do? going to try to knock each one of these guys in the head with a ball peen hammer. You have to do this quickly in order to knock these guys down and take them by surprise. And, you know, that, you know, that goes into the elements of what would be the motivation? Because I don't know about you, but I've had things stolen from me. And I do have rage. I'm sure you've had rage when you've had things that have stolen from you.
Starting point is 00:28:02 You have anger. It, you know, on the surface, it does make. you, I think, aggressive. But it's not the same as the second type of dismemberment, which is actually referred to as aggressive dismemberment. Now, you know, how do we kind of break this down with aggressive dismemberment, which is number two along our continuum here of dismemberments? It's the second most common. It's most of the time it is the, there is a little fire that's burning within somebody where they are angry over probably a protracted period of time. They might see themselves as failure.
Starting point is 00:28:50 They might not want to be held accountable for something horrific that they have done. And I say horrific. That's not the correct word. let's just say that in the case of Chandler Halterson out of Wisconsin, his whole thing was he had been lying to both his mom and dad, Dave, for a protracted period of time, deceiving them, you know, trying to, you know, trying to make them think that he was out in the job market that he's working and they're confronting him about this. And all of a sudden, this kid snaps. you have to think that, you know, was his motivation, anger, and laziness? You know, and that one moment that he decided to put forward motion into his life, he didn't do it in the area of studying to improve himself or whatever.
Starting point is 00:29:48 I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to kill my parents and then I'm going to, you know, split them up into pieces and try to get rid of their bodies, Dave. and he actually I had to cover this case and I think you run it a lot too I was I was we spent a lot of time looking at the case
Starting point is 00:30:10 piece by piece literally to try to determine what really was going on here because I think sometimes when we see especially a child that attacks parents we try to think was there something underlying was there something else here because for us we think there has to be something more.
Starting point is 00:30:30 It couldn't really have just been that he had been lying for so long and he knew he was caught and they were going to cut off funding his lifestyle, you know, that he was, the jig was up and now he's left with, well, if I kill them, I'll get all their stuff and live my life. You know, that's where we get stuck with that sometimes because we have to, we in our own minds, have to figure out why would anybody do this? Yes. And there is no rhyme or reason to it.
Starting point is 00:30:55 it really makes no sense when you've got a young person that chooses this path as a decision they think is a good way to go about life right now for them and their parents. Yeah, and I think that he, you know, I guess, again, this goes to motivation and it's not necessarily my bailiwick, but when you see what he did to their bodies, he's got them, you know, He's got them in multiple pieces. And you can tell that he's kind of frenzied because he's trying to decide how he's going to divest himself of his parents' remains. Can you imagine being that? Well, I don't think you can.
Starting point is 00:31:36 Hopefully you can't. But then hopefully neither can I. Right. But all of a sudden, you're faced with this kind of eye-popping situation where it's like, oh, okay, I've literally pulled the trigger on my parents. Yeah. And what am I going to do now? Multiple gunshot wounds, you know. Yeah, they did.
Starting point is 00:31:52 It was a hunting accident. You're not, you know, you're not out hunting with Dick Cheney. You can't say it was an accident. Right. These are your parents. They've got multiple gunshot wounds. So your next best choice. I mean, think about it.
Starting point is 00:32:03 The best choices this guy had made led him to this. So we're not dealing with a mental or mature individual. We're dealing with an idiot who chose one idiot action after another. And you mentioned frenzied in his way of dismembering. Yes. How would that be different? in terms of what you would see as you're looking at the, I hate to make it sound like you're putting a puzzle together,
Starting point is 00:32:26 but I would imagine that's what you're doing, trying to figure out everything. Yeah, you are. You're in a situation where I think that you cannot, you don't, your brain is not ordered to, to the point. And this actually goes,
Starting point is 00:32:42 I think, to the fact that he's not some psychopath, because a psychopath could actually sit there and think about very, in a very ordered manner if they're going to do this this is you know part a part B part C that's not what he did he even attempted to burn the bodies in in the I think in the fireplace in the home he winds up distributing the bodies at a cabin that was up the road you know from the family home he and you know he's lied about
Starting point is 00:33:19 what became of them. Where did they go? He reported them missing. That was all, he's the one that reported him missing. Yeah. And if I remember correctly, he walked down the road to neighbor's houses and asked them, have you seen my parents? Yeah, it was crazy. And the one thing that really stands out to me is there is that one woman, they had a video of her.
Starting point is 00:33:39 I don't know if she had her phone out or whatever was. She let him in her house. And this is in the wake of this. And he's like, I'm just here looking for my parents. Can you help me? And I'm thinking, oh, my Lord. Boy, did she dodge a bullet. This case, Dave, and I don't know if you remember this,
Starting point is 00:33:55 but this case is not too dissimilar from one other one that was an aggressive dismemberment. And it was the two women. It was a daughter and a granddaughter, and this was in Maryland. Oh, yes, I remember in the basement? Yeah, yeah, where the daughter had killed the grandmother. And they had used, or she had used a chainsaw and made her daughter act as a lookout to see if the sisters of grandmother were going to show up. And what makes this so incredible, I think that this was again another aggression related kind of thing with the dismemberment.
Starting point is 00:34:41 What are you going to do? Because they tried, this is the part that got me, not that the rest of, of it with a chainsaw and everything doesn't get me but they tried to render her down on a barbecue grill in the backyard and again that goes to you know this anger uh there's no honoring of the dead here and actually she retained the body parts they were in a basement in the basement down um down in the house where she had actually been killed she had been killed up in her room and so there was a lot of blood deposition you've got a chainsaw that generates high velocity blood deposition almost looks like high-velocity gunshot wounds and it would be everywhere one of the
Starting point is 00:35:22 most messy undertakings that you can possibly have but you know we've left you with two at this point we've still got believe it or not three more the different types of dismemberment to go hold on to your hat We've had this discussion going, Dave, about the types of dismemberment, probably one of the most chilling ones that, you know, they're all chilling by their own right, but there is, there is a type of dismemberment that is out there that actually drives a person it's i think that that the actual dismemberment of the body is the end game it's the thrill of it oh wow um because there is a sexual connotation i think that even if you look perhaps back at the gainsful ripper you know that the um the movie scream was based on there was a sexual element to that i believe um i believe there were at least
Starting point is 00:36:46 one, maybe two, I can't recall, my brain's foggy right now, the decapitations. But, you know, with, with offensive dismemberment, there's an element that they believe that is sexual in nature. The person probably has a taste of sadism that's part of who they are. It's part of the person that they are. The, you know, the case, I think, that first came to mind for me. And I mentioned this case a lot because it's so horrific is the murder of Ingrid Lynn up in Seattle, you know, where she had been on a dating app. And, you know, she was a nurse, had two small kids, had a good relationship with her ex-husband.
Starting point is 00:37:30 I think the ex-husband was. Yeah, she was gorgeous. You know, the ex-husband had the kids so she could go out on a date. They went to a Mariners ball game in Seattle. and they being the person that she hooked up with on the dating app, Dave, and this did not end well. John Robert Charlton was his name. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:37:53 Takes her out to a Seattle Mariners game. What a great first date. You know, if you're... Hey, look, I got to say that was mine and Kim's first date. Man. We went to see the Toronto Blue Jays in Interleague play against the Braves. Wow.
Starting point is 00:38:09 I took her on a Friday night. Yeah, I'll never forget. good. It was 1998. John Smoltz pitched and he lost 4-0. Wow. Dude. You should have never gone out with her again after that. Call-de-lose. Come on. At any rate. So Charlton takes her out and they go on this date. And you mentioned the ex-husband watching the children so she could go on this date, which is there are a few people that I know, thankfully, who have survived the divorce and maintained a good relationship for their children. And that's what they were attempting to do, which, That tells me a lot about the person we're talking about here in Ingrid's case because it takes a certain intestinal fortitude, but others first. And to put herself in a position with this person she doesn't know and to go to a very safe first date at a ballgame, she's reported missing the next day. And she's last seen, you know, going out on the date. the thing that got me about this one, and you might have to correct me, because wasn't it
Starting point is 00:39:14 a homeowner that had, because Seattle being what it is, not knocking, and my sister lives in Seattle, and she's a school teacher, but my sister, they have, they have cans, you know, between recycling and not recycling. And boy, if you put the wrong thing in the wrong can, you're in trouble. And that's what came to mind on this, because this had something to do with the recycling that caused this neighbor to look and go, hey, this ain't mine. I didn't put this here. Yeah. He went out there and goes to, you know, if you live in a city that does trash pickup and you go, you put your bin out by the road. When you go to pull it back in, you don't expect it to still be heavy.
Starting point is 00:40:03 No. Okay. So this guy is pulling the trash bin back in. It's heavy. He's like, what is this? He opens the lid up. If I remember correctly, he's staring down at a foot. Yes. And. Yeah, no. It's one of the most horrific things. And here's where my mind went. Yeah. When we first had this, Joe, my first thought was, okay, the case is broken because this homeowner, because the homeowner had the body was in his trash hand as he's pulling it back up. if the killer had been a couple hours or minutes earlier, yep, she would have been in the trash and nobody would have known. No, I'm so glad you said that because that's indicative of a time stamp relative when that particular remain was placed in there. So you know that he must have deposited this after the trash run had taken place,
Starting point is 00:41:01 you know, because you wouldn't have had this reaction from the, owner right so dragging it back in looks down and I can't even imagine you know I've got visions of myself walking out my bathroom with a cup of coffee in my hand and I'm walking back up the driveway you know with with the bin trailing behind me and you feel this weight and you open it up and as it turns out when she did not show up uh to pick up the kids or no wait it wasn't the way it was the husband ex-husband brought the kids back to their home she didn't answer the door and he's like one of the first people i think it was it was one of her relatives that he alerted they called the mom they made entry and she's nowhere to be found and that was just so
Starting point is 00:41:49 far outside of the norm but you know what what was eventually discovered um other than her remains after a period of time that had been you know subsequently deposited in various bins around the area, they discovered that whoever did this had actually used a limb saw, which if you think about the big curved handle, you know, with a thin blade. No, like a hand saw, not a power saw? No, not a power saw, but like a limb saw. And so, and he did this in the bathroom because you could see they still had, they had trace evidence around the drain.
Starting point is 00:42:32 to have it in the drain trap of blood and tissue because you're going to generate, if you, I urge everybody, if you get a chance to take a look at one of these saws, look down the long axis of the saw, and you'll see that the teeth are not perfectly aligned. They're kind of offset a little bit.
Starting point is 00:42:48 Well, have you ever wondered why when you look at one of these saws, if you ever sawed a limb off, there's a lot of sawdust that gets caught up in there, and that's because it's very destructive, okay? Wow. It's very, very destructive. It really goes through these limbs.
Starting point is 00:43:02 in a very efficient way. However, it gathers up all of this dust and the bark and everything else that's articulated at that point in time. It's the same thing with bone and muscle and any kind of sine you that it goes through and the skin and the hair. You know, you'll get that caught up on the blade as well.
Starting point is 00:43:19 You know, Joe, how they got him? You know how they figured out who it was? Please tell me. It was her mom, okay. When the mom is called by the ex-husband and they make entry into her house, okay, she's not, Lynn is not home. And she's nowhere to be found.
Starting point is 00:43:33 And so they look around and they find her purse and they find her phone. Mom picks up her phone and she knows who she was going to go out on a date with knowing that she was going out with Troulton. So what does she do? Using the cell phone in the residence, Lynn's mother calls Charlton. And hey, what happened? Where is she? And as soon as she hung up from the phone, she called the police. she used her daughter's cell phone to call the police and say hey or actually you know what she sent a text to Charlton that's what it was it was not voice it was text sorry and then she called the police and that's when they discovered the blood and everything else at Charlton's place yeah and they're they're trying to say you know the police are trying to pete no pun intended i keep falling in that trap they're trying to put this thing together relative to who she had finally had contact with and look at the top of the
Starting point is 00:44:31 And what's really weird, Dave, is this perpetrator was homeless, man. You know, and he, when you see him in the interviews, he looks like a kind of a well put together guy, but he's living on streets, you know, up in Seattle, unlike, you know, the case involving, and we're, I can't say we're just coming off of this. It seems like it has been going on forever and ever. And this is that damn tailorship business case as well. And again, I think this falls into the category of offensive dismemberment Because this poor guy that she just absolutely wrecked
Starting point is 00:45:08 He's kind of this to me he just he always came off in everything that I read about him Everything that I saw he kind of came off as as kind of a passive kind of guy she's 25 Shad Thyron who is the victim here is 24 you know she's actually charged in this case Dave of you know
Starting point is 00:45:37 like I said and that's why I believe it goes to this homicide obviously because she killed him but third degree sexual abuse and mutilating a corpse and you know she had she had actually done this down in the basement of his mother's
Starting point is 00:45:55 home man yeah and you know it was it was shad thurian's mom who actually discovered yeah um and parts of his anatomy parts of his body yep and um police found um that should business used knives that were found in the home okay just knives found in the home joe to dismember a body After she killed him, she continued to have sex with his dead body. Now, there are so many questions I have about that that, to be honest with you, I don't even want to ask because I don't want my brain to go down that path. Right. But immediately, I'm thinking, really, that's, I know that you cannot just say just because I don't understand the proclivity that it makes that person insane. I just can't think of a sane person who would do that.
Starting point is 00:46:52 But based on her activity and what she did after. her and the way she presents herself yep i think she perfectly knew exactly what she was doing the entire time because it wasn't oops i messed up it was you know it it wasn't hey man we're into this really ginky stuff we like to take it really close to death as the climax we it wasn't any of that joe no no it wasn't and that's why i think that she's touched by sadism here i don't mean satanism i mean sadism she has this desire i think to inflict pain, and I think through the pain and the sexual dominance that she exerted over the sky, not just in life, Dave, but in death as well, I think that that came out at the end
Starting point is 00:47:36 game here, just like with all of these offensive dismemberment cases, it plays out so that it's an event where these individuals can, in fact, bring themselves to sexual satisfaction. even if it means murder and dismemberment. That was part one of the types of dismemberment. Part two is coming up. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Bodybacks. This is an I-Heart podcast, Guaranteed Human.

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