Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Home Invasion Hoax -The Death of Thomas Waddell

Episode Date: April 7, 2024

Deborah Frazier calls 911 and tells them two burglars have shot her boyfriend, and as she is on the phone, a gunshot is heard and Frazier tells the dispatcher she has been shot in the leg by one of the burglars. Police arrive and discover the first person shot, Mr. Thomas Waddell, is in the back room of his apartment, wrapped in a blanket and a garbage bag and secured with duct tape. On this episode of Body Bags Joseph Scott Morgan will explain all of the things police will have to believe for Deborah Frazier's story to be true and Dave Mack will explain how Frazier was using a second boyfriend to con Mr Waddell out of his life savings!   Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Transcript Highlights  00:00:42 Talk about everything that has to be believed for the story to be true  00:02:48 Discussion of not believing a story  00:04:20 Discussion of “victim” shooting her boyfriend in the head  00:05:53 Talk about cases too difficult to believe  00:10:54 Talk about self-inflicted gunshot wound  00:14:19 Discussion of the victim who just retired  00:18:54 Talk about determining how long person has been dead  00:23:19 Discuss investigation of digital background  00:28:34 Talk about GSR test  00:33:02 Discussion of police on scene, gunshot recorded  00:37:57 Discussion of what has to be believed by investigators  00:40:12 Talk about Pictures of a life shared, scattered on the floor   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Over the course of many years of talking to police officers, not so much detectives, but from people that have been on the beat, as they say, patrolmen, people that work a specific zone. They're called different things in different jurisdictions. You always hear them say, every single rollout, every single location, there's some in two.

Though some of the cases might appear to be the same on the surface, that they go out to work, there's nothing out there that is the same over and over and over again. Everything has some little nuance, some little change. And most of the time when you show up at a scene and you hear a lady screaming and you see blood pouring out of her leg and you walk on through the house and you see an individual that has been restrained and executed, you can't take the measure of it initially. First off, you're afraid. If you're the police off, you're afraid, if you're the police officer. You're afraid, you're afraid there might be other dangers that lurk around every corner, but you have to get her out of there to make sure that she gets some medical attention that she needs. But

when you begin your assessment of the scene, sometimes things just don't add up. Today, we're going to talk about a lady named Deborah Frazier and a tale that she told the patrolman that at the end of the day, took them down a path that I can assure you when their watch started, they had not anticipated being upon. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. I've gotten to the point in my life, Dave, where I realized that the phrase, I didn't come down with the last drop of rain, means more and more. It's

really hard for someone to defeat my so-called BS meter. That comes with age. It comes with experience. You don't have it. And I can tell you, you and I have had conversations off mic for a long time now where we've talked about this, that we're not as naive. Our muscle twitch might not be like it used to be when we were kids, might not can run up a hill as well as we once could, but there's something about your senses that sharpen and you see enough BS come across your decks. Your meter becomes, you know, acutely attuned to that. And I think that this case today is, is certainly, first off, it's filled with forensics, but it's also filled with stuff that you fertilize the garden with too, I think. It was an interesting plan that Deborah Frazier came up with. It really was. Think about it. She meets the, this man, uh, while she's working at kroger and i think about thomas waddell he's 66

years old she's 36 and they've been in an on and off again relationship for a number of years even though there's a 30 year age difference i mentioned they were working together at kroger because i always wonder how does somebody get into a romantic relationship with that big of a difference of age yeah it really comes down to she looked at him for many other things, you know, and he apparently liked helping people that were kind of down and out on their luck. And anyway, Donna Frazier and Thomas Waddell were in a relationship of sorts. And Donna Frazier also had another person she was involved with as well, romantically. I'm so glad you pointed me into the direction of

the statement of facts, because I'm going to give you the end of the story. This is the Paul Harvey, instead of the rest of the story, the end of the story, because here it is. After days of planning on the evening of August 9th, 2023, Deborah Frazier stood behind Thomas Waddell as he sat in his recliner. She raised his.22 caliber pistol, aimed it at the back of his head, and executed him in his living room. Those are the facts of the case. Those are the facts of the case, yes. But the story that she told, she calls 911.

There's a burglary happening right now at my boyfriend's house send help right away oh wait a minute pop yeah gunshot in the background and i've been shot in the hope in a small town the entire police force on and off duty showed up but thankfully the chief of police got there first so the most experienced guy at least the the most responsible i don't know how chief works but i would think if the chief shows up and takes command of the scene you've got a good investigation going on that's what i'm thinking yeah. Yeah, he can throw whatever resource. You don't have to wait around for the resources to show up. Your primary resource is there. And if the chief understands that he's out of his depth or his department, rather, is out of their depth, it's not an insult to their intelligence in any way. It literally comes

down to resources in a smaller jurisdiction. This want to get, and this case happened in Ohio, so you want to get what's referred to as BCI involved, which is the Bureau of Criminal Investigations. That's the state. And they eventually do become involved in this because I'm sure that, look, this is one of those cases that when you're old and retired from the police force, this will be one of the cases, like if somebody comes up to you and finds out you were a cop and they'll say, what's the most bizarre case you ever, you ever worked? Yeah, exactly. In this small town, I guarantee hands are going to go up and people will say, Hey, I got one for you. Wow. You know, because it is, it is that bizarre, but Dave, you know, the thing about it is this man, Mr. Waddell, was found in his apartment. And he's essentially been kind of wrapped and contained.

He's got duct tape that's wrapping him up. He's been executed. And here's – look, you know, we always say this when we're teaching or when we're writing reports. And it's rote. It's like you could take it and just kind of boilerplate stamp every report with this. Or conversely, say you did see something. But most reports are going to say we saw no signs of forced entry or struggle. They didn't they didn't to to try

to marry up with what miss frazier was putting forth here that there were two assailants she actually named them as white males so she's getting more more specific with her her descriptor it's not just two random dudes two white males they are burglarizing the place and oops i've been shot right i was going to ask you about the bushy-haired stranger and very quickly the story you're laying out that donna frazier told them i wonder sometimes how quickly do you i mean you're i put you as part of the investigation i know you're the forensic person but right ultimately you know you do have a lot of forensics here because according to Donna Frazier's story, when she calls 911, she claims to have been shot in the leg. She claims that there were two other burglars in the house that left her boyfriend, as you mentioned.

He's found in a back room of his own apartment wrapped in a blanket and a garbage bag and it's all secured with duct tape and they hear the gunshot on the 911 call this is what they're walking into and i'm thinking how did they uncover it to find out that she stood behind mr fray uh waddell and shot him in the head yeah here's here's the other piece to this is that these perpetrators apparently left their weapon behind because there's a.22 caliber revolver lying on the floor adjacent to her as she's bleeding out on the floor having been shot in the leg. One of the things that always fascinates me with these staged events like this where people will self-inflict injuries. You know, you see old movies and stuff where people try to make themselves look beat up, where they throw themselves down the set of steps or something like that to bruise themselves all up and everything. But with gunshot wounds in particular, and I know I'll get some blowback from this and say that leg shots are not fatal. They are fatal.

I've worked them. You know, if you're shot in the leg, if you clip a femoral artery, there's a there's a good chance you could bleed out. But let's let's just it's not like being shot center mass in the chest. It's you see a lot of these staged crimes where people will shoot themselves in the periphery. You know, they'll shoot themselves in the hand or the arm. There's a case in Georgia famously where a deputy sheriff had shot himself in the palm of the hand in order to make it look like he was fighting with an assailant. It just so happens that the weapon turned out to be his own weapon that, and he was a drug seeker. And isn't it amazing? They don't ever get shot in the chest or the abdomen. It's always like in the leg or the arm, or maybe the shoulder, you know, to kind of cover these things up. They certainly don't shoot themselves in the head. If somebody shoots himself in the leg and they're trying to claim that the shot was from somebody else. Can you tell how close they were? Yeah, because look, your arms have a,

if it's self-inflicted, your arms have a terminal distance. You know, you can't extend beyond that. I guess you could if you set up some kind of apparatus. And I've had people, I've actually had suicides, I've worked where people have set up a weapon that has a rather complex mechanism. When another individual opens the door, it actually initiates the firing sequence and shoots the person that's sitting there in the chair in anticipation of the person arriving. And yes, that does happen. But that requires quite a bit of planning and, let's face it, precision. And you leave behind a lot of evidence, too. Yes, you do.

You know, you've got this contraption. And so I don't know that that's necessarily set up to stage as much as it is in the case of suicide to punish the other person that's opening the door. So that's a completely separate set of facts. So you don't look at this wound in the leg and say, yeah, that didn't come from across the room. No, it didn't. Because let's just say now we're dealing with what's referred to as a 22 caliber revolver.

And we can get into that more in just a moment, but let's just say she's got something with an exceedingly long barrel length, and there's not a lot of them out there that are on market that you're going to purchase. But I suppose there's something with a really – but even if it's got a long barrel length, that powder, along with the projectile, of course, but the powder itself is what I'm interested in, it's going to be contained, and it will come to a focal point that delivers on target. So let's just say if she's able to extend the muzzle length even out to 18 inches, 20 inches away from her body, when she initiates

that firing sequence, probably pulling it, well, I guess she could take it. It all depends on where she shot in the leg, on the inner thigh. She could certainly hold it normally and fire into her thigh that way. You're going to have something that's left behind. Now, defense can argue in a case like that, don't you understand my client was struggling? Well, Dave, you mentioned just a moment ago that the report of the weapon could be heard by the 9-11 operator, that's not like a struggle ensued, a protracted, you know, the 9-11 operator saying, yeah, I heard furniture being broken and people saying, no, no, no, no. What they heard was, oh, wait, pain, you know, like this. And so that means that this thing is shot pretty immediately once this call is initiated. So that's very fascinating in this case. Yeah. And we can do

range of fire and I can guarantee you in this case, they certainly did. And what they found out just didn't quite job with what Ms.n Frazier was laying down. To this point, Dave, we've talked about the potential of a self-inflicted gunshot wound with a.22 caliber revolver. That is, as it applies to Ms. Frazier. But, you know, we're kind of dancing around this topic of this poor man, Mr. Waddell, who, by the way, I think had recently retired, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, that was the saddest part of all of this, Joe. You live your life and you get to this point. Yeah. You've got a woman in your life that on again, off again relationship, but she's considerably younger.

But ultimately in his head, you know, this man was one of those people that liked to help people. That was the one thing that was consistent. Mr. Waddell just liked helping people that needed help. But one of the things that did catch me here, Joe, and I'm curious, officers are on the scene and they immediately clear the scene. OK, we know there's no armed burglars in the house anymore. We do have a wounded victim right now. We believe she is the victim and she's hurt. But there's also the body of a guy in the back of the house back of the

apartment and he's been wrapped up as we mentioned he was wrapped in a blanket a big garbage bag and duct tape now is it it's possible that he might not be dead he's wrapped up and all of that but do the police unwrap him right there and determine what's going on with his body or do they look at him go okay this there's some there with his body or do they look at him go okay this there's some there's a body in here they're not alive i mean how how does that take place i'm curious because they got to determine if he's alive or dead yeah they have to and and they have to it all depends on what their comfort level is really with this yeah there's not an sop on that uh yeah well for me if i'm coming across a a wrapped body like this i'm going to err more toward it we at least need to assess externally if we can hear through this

the emts need to if you can find this chest see if you can listen for a pulse make sure you got your gloves are here for you know heart sounds okay uh or maybe respirations but to the emts i would say keep your gloves on because if he's wrapped in plastic all right that's a non-poor surface so that means that any kind of fingerprint latent print can be transferred onto that bag and it's not something you would necessarily want to cut through because it's so fine and so very fragile that you can take those bags. And if you take them off very carefully in a controlled environment where everybody's clubbed up, they're paying attention to precisely what they're doing, you can retrieve prints off of those bags very easily.

And you've also got this thing involving tape. And the exterior of the tape is very important as well because, again, it kind of has a plastic coating on the outside of it. You can lift a print there, but you know what's even more important is the adhesive side. And if, if you'll think of the adhesive on the sticky side of duct tape, it, it's a lot like messing around with putty when you're a kid, any kind of, you know, Play-Doh or silly putty or whatever, you're going to leave behind. it's almost what we refer to as a plastic print where you can, if you hold it just right, you can actually make out the friction ridge lines, the details of the print itself in that. And so you can, if you use something like

iodine fuming in that particular sense. Okay. You're going to have to explain what that is. Well, it's, you apply iodine or something similar to it. I think you can use ninhydrin as well as one of those things that fingerprint people use. And it will literally freeze that fingerprint in that position. It won't go anywhere. And it has kind of a brown appearance to it after they do that. If the print examiner is really good, they'll be able to pick up on what we refer to as the minutiae in the print, which are like the little details in the friction ridge lines that are left behind. You have things like pores, crossovers, deltas, ending ridges. I could go on and on and on. There's all these bits of minutiae, and you do a general classification on the print.

You know, people hear whirls and loops and all those sorts of things. And then you tighten that down as you go through your assessment of it. So you can recover that stuff off of this guy's body. And what's fascinating about this is that they had a deputy coroner out at the scene. Oh, wow. And that individual is speaking with the forensic pathologist. And the forensic pathologist tells them, look, don't unwrap the body. Bring the body into the morgue in its pristine state. The other thing that we like to do in these cases, particularly if somebody has been down,

and this is one of the things I failed to mention. I think that it's important. You're talking about after-death assessment. One of the things that we have these seven cardinal signs of death that we look for in one of those cardinal signs. Well, one is lack of respiration. All right. That's one of the cardinal signs.

But another thing that we look for are post-mortem changes. Now you can't necessarily see through a plastic bag if blood is settled on a body, but what you can appreciate is rigidity in the body. If the body is stiff, you can feel that through a plastic bag and you can say, yeah, this person's gone on to their reward. But the forensic pathologist, they requested that the body be brought to the morgue in its pristine shape, unwrapped, totally. And when you get that body into a controlled environment where you have perfect lighting, and they have have in most autopsy suites there will be surgical style lighting so it blasts out all of the shadows that are possible okay that they can possibly do because you know with surgical lighting you need you need perfect clarity so that you can see every little detail

and you bring a photographer that's in there and you can capture everything on there you can pick up on some little nuances you might not otherwise see at the scene. And the forensic pathologist is aware of that. But probably most fascinating of all, relative to the decision that this forensic pathologist made, and it's not necessarily something I would normally agree with, but I understand it. That forensic pathologist felt as though that if they could receive that body still wrapped up and in its pristine state, he could get an estimation of post-mortem interval. That is, how long had Mr. Waddell been deceased? And we all know that one of the most important points along this entire case is this interesting 9-11 call and her

statements, that is Ms. Frazier's statements from the scene. And as it turned out, the forensic pathologist was right. 12 hours. That's half a day for those of you counting. Math's hard, I know. It's hard for me, man. It really is. I was never a great math student, but I do know that 12 hours is half a day. What can you do with 12 hours? If you had 12 hours, what could you do with it? Well, if you're a scheming murderer, I suppose that you could try to get your story straight. I suppose you could kill someone maybe on the front end of that 12 hours and then contemplate how in the world are you going to handle this moving forward?

Because you're left with a body that someone is going to have to answer for. Dave, in this case, I think that the forensic pathologist made the right choice here. You know, it's amazing to me how many things have to go right in an investigation to lead you down a path. This was not something that the suspect here, Deborah Frazier, thought of in the space of 30 minutes and said, I'm done with this guy. I, you know, this was a long game here. She, during the investigation, police uncovered a number of things because the first thing they do nowadays is start looking at your, your cell phone, your computers, things like that, to find out what your history is, your search history. What have you been looking at? What have you been reading online? What are some of the things that are happening? And in this case, I mentioned at the very beginning that while

she had an on again, off again relationship with Mr. Waddell, with Thomas Waddell, she also had another boyfriend and the other boyfriend was not aware of Mr. Waddell. Mr. Waddell don't think he was aware of the other guy either. So Deborah Frazier was able to play things in such a way that she was able to convince her boyfriend to pose as a bank fraud investigator and started calling Thomas Waddell. Now remember, Deborah Frazier is 36 years old. Mr. Waddell, her boyfriend, is 66 and recently retired. And now he's getting calls from a guy about fraud regarding his account. And the man making the calls doesn't realize he is calling Deborah Frazier's sometime boyfriend. He doesn't really

know why he's doing it. The second boyfriend. So there are now three people involved in this. Debra Frazier playing her second boyfriend into doing things to terrorize her first boyfriend to get information, obviously about a bank account. And we find out that Debra Frazier created a fake fraud email account where she posed as a fraud claims representative who was reaching out to Thomas Waddell, the victim here. Investigators ended up concluding that the motive for the murder is financial gain. The second boyfriend gave Deborah Frazier rides the night of the killing. The second boyfriend did not know Frazier was in a relationship with Mr. Waddell. And the second boyfriend was manipulated by Frazier into making the calls to Thomas Waddell.

So we have Deborah Frazier with a current new boyfriend terrorizing her current old boyfriend into a financial ploy that required her to get all this information and then kill Thomas Waddell. But they found out something else, Joseph Scott Morgan. And in their online research, they call it the forensic search of Frazier's phone. Yeah. They found that she researched how to load a revolver

and how to uncock the hammer on a revolver. They also found that she researched how long does GSR stay on the skin. Joe, that was searched at 8.16 a.m. on August 10th, about five hours before she called 911.

Yeah. What is GSR for those of us who don't know the technical issues here? Yeah. those of us who don't know the technical issues here. Yeah, it's actually a test that we run to see if someone has not necessarily fired a weapon, but has been in proximity close enough to a weapon so that the gunshot residue, the GSR, essentially comes and lights on these exposed areas of the body. Most of the time, what you're going to be looking for is someone has held a weapon in their hand. If you think about the kind of U-shape that your hand makes with the thumb and the index

finger, if you placed a weapon in there, a pistol perhaps, that when you initiate the firing sequence, that there's going to be this cloud that kind of rises up and settles down. And so this agent that they're applying to the hand, what they're looking to do is to try to find the presence of barium, antimony, and lead. And all of those are components of propellant, which is what, you know, sends the projectile down range. And it's really hard to explain away the presence of those three elements of the package as it applies to gunshot residue. It's hard to, you know, you could say, well, I don't know, I was using a lead pencil and I was sharpening a lead pencil and I got lead on my hand. All right. How do you account for the barium and the antimony?

Well, they all go into the process of manufacturing, you know, the propellant. And so you, you believe that it's going to be there. Now this is superficial. Okay. This is superficial. So it's fragile. Um, one of the things we try to do at scenes is if we have a suspect, you know, we, we try to keep them away from water and prevent them from washing their

hands just until they can get that, that GSR test. And as a matter of fact, she was so acutely aware of it, Dave, that, that she kind of flipped her story around here. She tried to state that, oh, yeah, well, the reason I would have just, you know, if you're going to do the test on me, the reason that you would find it on me is that I had my hands down trying to protect myself when I was shot in the leg and that the shower of powder came down on me

and it contained the barium and the antimony and the lead. And, and, you know, that's one of the things we try to try to understand, you know, is the position. That's why it's so important to try to understand the, the deposition of say any kind of powder deposition that's on the, that's visible. Um, you know, where you get unburned grains of, of, uh, of powder, uh, gunpowder that's embedded in the skin.

You can determine a range of fire, but she's trying to account for all of this stuff as she's moving down the road in her mind. But one thing she didn't count on was the fact that go back to the forensic pathologist is that he was able to determine because they did not unwrap that body, so it's not perfect calculus, but he was able to determine that this individual had been dead for at least 12 hours, okay, when this 911 call was initiated. And so that bit of science skews the entire timeline. And he would have been assessing, well, he would have done a body temperature,

more than likely, to try to assess that, to try to understand if the person had essentially assumed a room temperature because a lot of folks don't. If they're wrapped in a blanket and a bag and duct tape, would that not hold some of the body heat? It would contain some of the heat. And so you're going to have to, when you're doing that formula and you're trying to understand that, you're going to have to do that calculation within it. And it's going to skew the data. I think it will. Because if the body was just laying out, say exposed, doesn't have to be nude, but just exposed, you know, what does mama

tell you when you're little? You got to put a hat on your head because you're going to lose heat. You got to put mittens on your pants because you're going to lose heat. You got to put socks and shoes on, you're going to lose heat. We lose it out of our extremities. You retain it in your core for the longest period of time. But theoretically, what's held forth is that we retain the longest time that we retain the heat that is generated by the energy that our body produces in life, maximum is 12 hours, Dave. After that, your body essentially becomes inanimate. It becomes like a desk or a chair or anything else that occupies a space. It's impacted by the environment in which it rests at that point in time. And so that bit of valuable information went into the police when they're examining her. When I say examining her, I'm not talking about her

physical person, but when they're doing their investigation and they're trying to marry up her alibi, that's one of the reasons I emphasize to my students all the time, it's so important for PMI, postmortem interval, that you glean that information because somebody's going to try to alibi themselves at some point in time. And when you look at a body and you see that body's at full rigidity or lividity is fixed or the core body temperature is skewed based upon the timeline they're giving you, you can look to the science and say, this is the ultimate lie detector right here. This is not a polygraph. This is a science telling me that what you're saying doesn't compute with what the body is telling me.

But don't investigators still, they look at what they're seeing in front of them, but they still have to investigate the story they're told. They have a witness and they still have to, okay, she said there were two burglars in here and that she came in. They have to investigate it based on this is what she said happened. Now, granted, nothing in here and that she came in they have to investigate it based on this is what she said happened now granted nothing in here looks legit to her story but we still have to investigate which

means as they're going to research everything they're pulling anything that could possibly have been touched by one of the two alleged burglars that were in the house it all happened bam bam bam according to her story. So there was a lot going in in this apartment before the police arrived. And in minutes, actually, because again, on the 911 call, well, what did we hear? We heard the gunshot. We've got all police on the scene very quickly, including the chief of police who arrived first. And you've got a body back there now that is wrapped up, you know, the blanket, the garbage bag, duct tape.

There's a lot happening in this apartment in a very short period of time. So what do you do? I mean, you're the forensic guy. What do you do when you walk into that? First off, you're going to be very careful in this environment. You're going to get her out of there, which they did. They essentially evacuated her out to the extractor and took her to the hospital to treat her for this gunshot wound. How bad was the gunshot wound in her leg? It was bad enough so that she was pooling blood around her.

But it's almost an elementary procedure when you go into an emergency room, particularly if you can rule out that she hasn't severely broken a bone and that she hasn't clipped an artery that can patch her up pretty quickly. So it's not as ghastly as it sounds. It's not going to be like, um, her legs been blown off or something like this. That's not what happened. And the weapon that's used is a very, it's as far as calibers of weapon, it's on the low end.

It's a 22 caliber. One step from a pellet gun. From a pellet, yeah, from a pellet gun, which is.177. And look, don't come at me with all the numbers because there's a lot of stuff that's in between there, but the most common. So the the point to two is is very small and looks small. Small is deadly as well. You can't think that it's not, but it was sufficient to the task for Mr. Waddell that when he was shot. What did they find with him when they actually unwrapped him joe

i mean now he's in the uh the morgue right or about the me's office i don't know the right term but when they start unwrapping him there's gonna have to be a lot of documentation right yeah there would be um and you know, how he was packaged. And also, I'm very curious, which they've never truly revealed in this case, that if you look at someone that has, first off, I've never heard of someone being wrapped up that is a victim of a burglary. It sounds, I've heard of people. I didn't think about that at all. I did not think about that. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's not like this is a kidnapping or a body dump. I have now, I have worked cases, some of the most brutal cases where a homeowner came home and they surprised a burglar and they were beaten to death. But the, the

burglar doesn't go to the trouble of wrapping and let's face it, packaging the body. So one of the most important things is did that round because he was shot in the back of the head. You famously said at the beginning of this episode, Dave, that they talked about how she stood behind him with his, that's the possessive, his weapon and shot him in the back of the head. Did the round pass through any of the so-called wrapping or packaging?

Because if that's the case, then you would have a grown man that was wrapped up in a comforter, trash bags with tape all around it, and he is then shot through the bag. Or was he shot first and then wrapped in the bags and was anything cleaned up afterwards? Because it doesn't matter. Look, even if you're shot in the head with a, we'll go back to the pellet rifle. If you're shot in the head with a pellet rifle, you're going to bleed. It's probably not going to break the skull, but it's going to break the scalp. And we go back to the thing I always talk about, how vascular the head is.

You're going to bleed some. So where did this actually happen in the home? Was he contained in the bathtub and had it been rinsed down? Was there evidence of bloody claws around? And who facilitated this? Because again, if you're a burglar, which by this time the police are thinking that this is a load of bull crap. Because with burglaries, unless you're going in to look for something specific and you know where it's located, they're going to participate in something called rifling. That means that they'll rifle through the desk drawers, they'll throw them all aside, kitchen cabinets, everything.

Because nothing in that house has any value to them other than those things that they're looking for. Money, jewelry, drugs, anything like that. Other than that, they don't care about the pennant that your mama passed down to you. They don't care about that unless it's encrusted with diamonds. And so. I just think, Joe, I'm not kidding. Please, I'm not trying to offend anyone, but I, I missed it. Okay.

When do in doing the story. Yeah. I missed the entire idea that in order to believe her story, you have to believe that two burglars came in there, shot a guy in the head and then wrapped him up in a quill, wrapped him up in a garbage bag, used duct tape, took him to the very back of the house because they were not in any kind of hurry at all to steal everything and get out of there. I mean, that's what you actually have to believe to believe her story.

Yeah. Whereas if you're going to kill somebody in a robbery, you're going to kill them. They're going to die where they sit. You're going to grab stuff and run and run. Yeah. Why are you going to go to all this trouble? That's why this makes this so absurd.

The police would have to so buy in to this narrative hook, line, and sinker that they're going to throw all common sense and reasoning out the door when it comes to what Ms. Frazier is laying down. And of course, in this case, they determined that this is, not only was she fraudulent in trying to steal this old man's money from a life that was spent that got him to retirement, might I add, but the whole scenario was fraudulent, everything before them. And this is truly, in the purest sense, what we refer to as a stage to death. This is something other than the way it appears. And isn't it interesting, you can have a staged homicide that's actually a result of a homicide.

Most of the time when we're talking about staging, we'll talk about suicides, homicides that are made to look like suicides. That's the most common thing. But here you have a staged homicide that was actually a homicide. And she tried to make it look like someone else committed the homicide. And she went to such a great length that she decided to shoot herself with the same weapon, by the way, that was owned by this man. And he had many weapons in this house. He had weapons. He had cash. He had other things in that home.

None of those items that were taken away. But one of the things that was really glaring in this case, and I think probably at the end of the day tells the tale, one thing that they did find in that home that was destroyed and that was lying about on the ground were images of Ms. Frazier and Mr. Waddell together. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.