Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags With Joseph Scott Morgan: Hospital Hides Body In Warehouse While Mom Searches For Missing Daughter

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

Jessie Marie Peterson, 31, an attorney with Type 1 diabetes, was admitted to the hospital for a diabetes-related illness. Two days later, she called her mother around 2:30 p.m., asking to be picked up and taken home. When her mother arrived two hours later, hospital staff told her that Peterson had checked herself out against medical advice. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack examine what really happened to Peterson and why the hospital claimed she left when records show she was pronounced dead at 4:27 p.m. at the medical center. While her family spent more than a year searching for her, her body had been in a storage facility. Transcript Highlights 00:05.18 Introduction 01:59.25 Hospital tells family patient left AMA 06:53.65 Family is looking for Jessie Peterson, attorney 11:48.34 Jessie is ready to leave hospital, accomplished woman 16:11.54 Lawsuit filed 21:10.19 She calls her mother at 2:30, two hours later she is gone 25:20.07 Hospital claims she left AMA 30:22.43 Mother begins looking for Jessie 35:15.51 Jessie Marie Peterson was dead and for a year the family is looking for Jessie 40:06.21 Body is placed into cold storage 45:08.31 Her body is found after a year, remains are not viewable 49:01.24 ConclusionSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Moore. I don't know of too many people that would want to be admitted to the hospital. If they, you know, if they had their way in a perfect world, it's certainly not a place where you go to rest. Because if that's what you're looking for, rest that is, you know, go buy an airplane ticket, go to some isolated location and rest there. Or just stay at home. Hospitals are one of these places that's like a beehive. I've worked in them. I've always

thought of them that way. You've got worker bees that are scurrying all over the place. They have these very specific jobs that they do. And everybody's important. It doesn't matter if you're the chief of neurosurgery or you're the janitor. Everybody has a job and if part of it breaks down, then everything else begins to erode. Well, just like any other kind of, I don't know, organization, there are problems that arise. Things that you can't necessarily foresee. Most of the time, the focus in the hospital is taking care of those that are ill,

taking care of those who are on death's doorstep and brought back. But there's another responsibility that hospitals have, and that is to take care of the dead and their families. Today, we're going to discuss a case that is shocking. It's shocking for a lot of reasons, but namely, a patient walks into a hospital to receive treatment and is not seen again until her body is discovered in long-term storage. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.

Dave, I've worked in hospitals that have really bad morgues, and I've worked in them that have state-of-the-art morgues. And that's in addition to, you know, the work that I've done with coroners and medical examiners. I've never told you this, but I don't think at least. But I used to work as a side job. I worked for private pathology groups where hospital pathologists don't like to do autopsy. So I would go to the hospital and I think there were like in the group, the group that I worked with in Atlanta, they serviced like seven different hospitals. So I travel all over the metro area, Atlanta, and go assist in autopsies. And it was I enjoyed it.

I enjoyed doing autopsies. But the doctor would just ask me, well, what were your findings? And they might not ever walk into the morgue. And it varied from doctor to doctor. So I've seen a lot of the good and the bad. You know, when you're in a morgue, you've got a cooler, maybe a couple of coolers, and you're having to handle the body by yourself, if you can imagine. I think that's one of the reasons my back is ruined now. That's where the term dead weight comes from. It is. It is. It is dead weight.

But, you know, you see all kinds of things. It really, you talk about getting into the guts operationally of a hospital. That's borne out in the way the morgue is run and the way the morgue is handled. Because I think that it's indicative of the way a lot of other things in the hospital are handled. Because, you know, let's face it. If you cannot respect the dead, that's a real baseline kind of thing. If you cannot, you know, how are you treating the living? You know, because the dead, people might not agree with this,

but the dead are the most helpless among us, right? They're totally dependent upon us and by extension, their families too. Well, you know, one of the things in a funeral home is the, you cannot leave a body things in a funeral home is the, you cannot leave a body alone in the funeral home because if something happens, if there's a fire, somebody has to be there to get the body or bodies out of the funeral home. Now, I don't know if that's still a law. In this case, we are dealing with a 31 year old, very accomplished woman. She is a prosecuting attorney, and she has some medical issues. She's diabetic and some other things. She had had an infection in her foot

one time and had surgery on it, but going to the hospital is not something she does on a regular basis. However, she did find herself in a diabetic situation where she goes to the hospital, but after two days, she calls her mom. Hey, come and get me. I need to get out of here. You know, now there's a little blurriness as to what transpired at this point with Jesse Peterson. But no matter how it happens at two thirty, she on April the eighth, she calls her mom. Would you come and get me at the hospital? All right, Jesse, I'm away. When mom arrives around 430 or so, Jesse's not there. Where's my daughter? What are you talking about? She checked herself out and left. They actually tell her that. I talked to my daughter two hours ago. She said she was leaving. Where is she? She checked herself out and left. Now, mom immediately starts looking for her because why would the hospital tell her something wrong?

You know, she can't find her calling friends, calling family, checking around, can't find her anywhere. She was in the hospital, checked herself out, and now she's missing, Joe. They actually look for her and then they do the standard. Turn her in as a missing person. She's an adult. Here's the problem. We've gone to this before. She's a 31 year old accomplished adult. She has the right to be to disappear herself if she wants to. It might not be what we'd want for her, but that's what we say happened. So there you go. For a year, Joseph Scott Morgan, for a year, the family is looking for a year. They're calling

the police for updates for a year. They're organizing people to go out and look for a year. They are talking to homeless people. And they mentioned this in some of the stories I've heard. They they went to the roughest sections of town to find out if maybe somehow she had a psychological break with reality and is lost among the homeless population. And they went there in the hours of the night when most of us are sound asleep. They went into those areas just at the thought that their daughter, their cousin, their sister would be there. And for a year, they didn't know't know Joe because the hospital said she checked herself out and left. Yeah.

How, what a, what a horrible set of circumstances, particularly, you know, this is one of the things that, you know, I think people make a sport of this comment sometimes, but there are instances where, where people will say things like, well, we need to find them because they've got medical problems, you know, and that might be a ruse or whatever the case might be, just try to get their hands, she'd been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. Can you explain that?

Just give us a breakdown of what type 1 diabetes. Okay. Well, I'll tell you. I'll tell you specifically. In other words, her pancreas would not produce insulin, period. All right? And that's at a baseline, we have to have insulin in order to survive. And her pancreas, for whatever reason, whether it's a genetic predisposition, whatever it is, when she was 10, you know, she's diagnosed with this condition and there are all kinds of peripheral medical

problems that come along with this. You had mentioned the surgical intervention for her foot. It's one thing if you injure your foot, if you don't have diabetes, okay, but you injure your foot and maybe you've got an open wound. Well, the next thing you know, you've got a doctor looking at you saying, we're going to have to amputate your foot, all right? And the vessels begin to collapse. There's cardiovascular problems that come about.

There's a real diminishment many times. The body, I've heard one person describe it at one point in time as if the body almost tries to digest itself, you know. And so they many times, if you're not real vital, you're not on top of it, this condition. It it gives you this kind of very wasting appearance, you know, drawn thin many times. You have to be really on top of the circumstances relative to your own personal health. I've got a number of friends that have type 1 diabetes, and they actually have insulin pumps that, you know, are attached to a belt loop or whatever. And you'll

see them every now and then, you know, and they have sensors, you know, that can give them an indication when they're out of balance. And they have to be very careful about what they ingest. You know, there are a lot of people that have type 2 diabetes or have the precursors, you know, those sorts of things. They'll still eat like they want. They can get a bump of insulin from an injection or however it is that they receive it, you know, put them back on balance. That's not the case with type 1. Some people refer to it as juvenile diabetes because it's something that you develop when you're young. There are people that are adults that develop type 1, but for the most part,

and she fits right in that bracket, doesn't she? She's 10 years old, Dave. This is something, going back to the family in this case, this is something that her mother, God bless her. I saw an interview. I was watching an interview with mom. This is a fight they've been fighting together her entire life. And it sounds like they were very close. Mom and daughter were.

I mean, she's calling her mom to come pick me up, you know, from the hospital. And this is a fight they've been fighting for a long time. And now the daughter checks into the hospital for what has been described as a diabetic event because sometimes it gets so bad that you need to have around the clock monitoring, you know, check your sugars and all these sorts of things. And she'd had enough. I mean, like many of us, you know, you go in the hospital, you know, after a few days, it's like, I think I'm,

and this is a person that would really know her body. This is not an idiot, Joe. This is a very accomplished woman. Now that you've pointed this out, I understand so much better because I did have some questions in my head as to what was going on. So she had been in the hospital a couple of months earlier in January. She did have a diabetic event, and I mentioned a few minutes ago. She did have surgery a diabetic event. And I mentioned a few minutes ago, she didn't have surgery, you know, a year prior.

But by the time it rolls around here and mom is coming to get her at the hospital, she knows her body. She's had her fill of being at the hospital and she's leaving. OK, I get that now. I understand. But I don't understand how mom shows up and they give her the, she checked herself out. We don't know where she is. I mean, why would we know she left on her own against doctor advice? Yeah. And when, uh, that's an interesting thing because this is what's commonly referred to as AMA. And for those of you that have never been in a hospital environment, or maybe it's a situation in your own life where you've had

all you can stand, you don't feel like you're receiving the treatments you want, or the treatment is so horrible, you're like, look, anything is better than this. I'm checking myself out. And what they will ask you to do is they will ask you to sign a paper that says, I'm leaving against medical advice or that AMA. They're saying, look, you need to stay here for your own good. And I can assume that she was probably being followed by a team of physicians. Certainly, you know, nowadays it's hard to find when you go to hospital, they're populated by what are called hospitalists now. And hospitalists are, it's not like the old days where you would have your own personal physician and they would have privileges at the hospital.

And I guess they still do have privileges. But you're going to be treated by what's referred to as a hospitalist. And they're like all things to all people. They're supposed to manage the health care of the individual that is an inpatient. And they'll be called up to ICU. They'll be called, you know, perhaps to the adolescent ward. If somebody has got their post-surgical and they're in the hospital, that doctor is physically what they refer to as being in-house. And the hospital actually pays them. Some people are fans of this some are not i've heard both sides of it over the years

because you don't you know it's one thing and plus people get used to having their own doctor you know the best doctor i ever had was this guy that was he's now retired dave he could treat just about anything and he was an old country doctor and the kind that, you know, would give it to you straight. You need to stop eating like you're eating, or we're going to do this for you. Or this is the advice or my friend over here is a great specialist. I'm going to say those, those people don't exist so much as they used to. I don't think in my opinion, but she would have been followed probably by, I hope, by an endocrinologist, who an endocrinologist is an individual,

and she would have had to have had one on the outside that's following her specifically for the treatment of her type 1 diabetes. But I know this. You're talking about a woman Jessie Marie Peterson who had a great relationship we believe with her mother a great relationship with her sisters and all of a sudden she just walks away from it all a life that had built, a life that she had struggled to form, in spite of type 1 diabetes. So let's, you know, my thought about this, Dave, you know, after, you know, doing this reading about this case, it's so bizarre. Again, this is one of these cases that didn't really, you know, it didn't hop up on my radar.

It just kind of appeared. I think it was actually where I saw it was actually a People, of all things, People magazine article. Do they still call themselves a magazine? I'm not sure. I will tell you, I've noted it. When I've seen information, I've noted People magazine, and I'm like, I don't think it's right. But you know why we saw this? It's the same reason we saw the one about the Satanist ear eater. A lawsuit was filed. A lawsuit has been filed in this case as well. I think that, you know, there are a lot of frivolous lawsuits out there. Buddy, this ain't frivolous. This is this is something that, yeah, I think that this is certainly justified. But, you know, she's this is taking place place in, uh, in California, uh, up in Carmichael,

California, and kind of setting the stage here. Jesse had previously been a prosecutor in Placer County, California. Now this is far Northern, uh, California. I've never been able to really understand how you know californians uh divide the state up you know uh they're very sectional uh but this is near the nevada border or placer county is near the nevada border where she was a prosecutor um mountainous terrain probably very very beautiful high desert maybe in some of those locations up there. But to that point, she had had all she could stand. She had been admitted back on April the 6th, 2023. And I think that it was like at 2.30 in the afternoon on the 8th, she says, you know, I'm going to call mama and have her come pick me up.

I've had all that I can stand at this point. You pointed out something, Joe, about her being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes as a 10-year-old. And we're talking about somebody who has lived with diabetes for 21 years and has been hospitalized for diabetic events in the past. So she has a much better understanding of her body and what's working and what's not. Then I would have, I think. And she calls her mom at two thirty. Mom arrives two hours later. And I need to pay attention to this. At 4.27 p.m., Jesse Peterson was pronounced dead at the hospital. Now, her mother is arriving to take her home. Jesse has called her at 2.30.

Come get me, Mom. I'm out of here. When she arrives, Jesse's mother is told she signed herself out and left against medical advice, AMA, as you mentioned. But at 4.27 p.m.,

she had been pronounced dead. Hang on. Hang on one second. Just so I can get this right in my mind. Yeah. Good luck. Give me. Can you give me the time frame here again from are we talking literally two hours from the moment?

Is it roughly two hours from the moment she called Mama? And then you're saying that she's pronounced dead at this point in time. And and mama shows up and she's being told AMA. Right. That's exactly what happened. I know it sounds messed up, but that is exactly what happened. OK, 230 phone call. Come get me.

Mom gets herself together, you know, and comes to get her at the hospital. She arrived sometime around or after 430 in the afternoon. We don't know exactly what time she arrived at the hospital. We do know it was about approximately two hours after the phone call. And we know that Jesse was already dead, according to the hospital. Let me tell you something real quick about the set of circumstances. This is not like you've got somebody that has got, say, for instance, Lord bless them, but a terminal illness all those sorts of things that come along with those unfortunate circumstances where, you know, we lose loved ones. Dave, we're talking about a woman who is verbal.

Okay. It's not like she's on ICU with, you know, a feeding tube or she's on a vent, you know, where she can't. We're talking about someone that has just called her mother, Dave. Can I tell you what's going to happen with somebody like her? Because I can't figure it out, Joe. No, it's hard. Well, let me just kind of let me kind of lay out the space and time. OK, because this is something that would be so. So.

Documented to the nth degree, traditionally. Because they would have had to what's referred to as running a code on her. Now, I know that people have seen movies and these sorts of things where, you know, you'll have like traditionally the old way of doing things was when you're in the hospital, if you ever heard the term code blue, and this is, I don't know that it's worldwide. It was certainly nationwide. You know, when you heard Code Blue, anybody that was certified in advanced life support, which is a course that you have to go through, doctors go through it, nurses go through it, everybody that is part of a team to try to keep somebody alive. And this is advanced resuscitation, essentially, is what they're doing. We're going far beyond here just doing chest compressions. that call goes out, however it's coded at the hospital, you would have a flurry of activity where these people are rushing to this location. And depending upon where she is, there would be

a crash cart. And the reason I'm telling you this is that this thing is so documented. These events are so very documented because there are doctor's notes, nurses' notes. If they've got a respiratory team there, their notes are there. And then you've got somebody that is generally going to be a nurse that's responsible for that crash cart. The crash cart is locked down, and so it's got certain drugs in it that have to be administered. And then it has to be replenished because you don't know when the next code is going to be. So you've got all of this documentation that is taking place. And mama shows up within a two-hour window.

And she doesn't, they're saying she's left AMA. This is not like some patient with dementia or something that's just wandered off the campus of the hospital. We're talking about a young woman who had had a conversation that requested her mother to come and pick her up. And then all of a sudden she vanishes into thin air. She's no longer there. I got to tell you, you know, I'm not trying to bury the lead here, but I got to tell you, if just say, for instance, someone in a similar case were so inclined to file a lawsuit about this, there is so much documentation that is going to back up the activities of those individuals that were involved in this. If you've ever been to a play, just think of the most meticulously planned play that you've ever sat in. And you're thinking, how in the world they do that?

This is like everyone on these teams knows their job. And they have specific marks they have to hit at specific times in order to facilitate the most important thing in life, and that's preservation of life. And it is so meticulously documented, Dave. That's why it baffles me that anyone would put forth the idea that, yeah, she's AMA. She walked out of the hospital, you know, I don't know if she got in a cab or called an Uber or whatever the case might be a horse-drawn carriage. I have no idea, but she's AMA. She signed herself out. She's gone. Really? You know, you're the mom.

You're thinking really? And I just talked to her two two hours ago she told me to come and get her that's why i'm here now you're saying she left it makes no sense whatsoever no it boggles the mind joe but okay here's a can i throw in one more thing here because if we're assuming that they're not using i'm assuming not you i don't want to throw you into the same kettle of fish with me. But I'm assuming that, talk about documentation. These phone calls that were made were probably done over cellular devices. Those are markers in time. You know, when this all comes down, you know, because this is a lawsuit,

they're going to pull those records and they're going to say, you know, ma'am, we understand that you called your daughter at approximately this time. We've pulled these records by the way here. Can you show us approximately, you know, when you spoke with your daughter and boom, there it is. It's a digital marker. And oh, by the way, if you pull the records for Jesse's phone, it's going to show that boom, she answered the phone call or that Jesse called her rather. I've got this backwards. Jesse calls her, come and get me, mama. And you've got these two people that are communicating that seem to line up. You take just the digital data alone and marry that up with the code information I was referring to where she goes into cardiac arrest because that's what would have happened. I don't think they just merely found her dead in the hallway.

You know, I and didn't attempt to do anything with her, they would have attempted to resuscitate her. There would have been a whole team involved. And here's the other thing when it comes down to a lawsuit, Dave. Every single person that was involved in this case will receive a subpoena. They will go into a courtroom, and they will be directly questioned by the attorney that's handling this case for the family. I don't know what their defense is going to be,

but I got to tell you, I think they're going to have quite the uphill battle here. So your child, and trust me, there's still a child, 31 years old. You're a mama. This is somebody that you love. You're invested, all right? You love them. And particularly, you've been on this journey with them of type 1 diabetes.

You understand, okay? You show up, and your daughter, who's, you know, by all indications is in her right mind when she contacts you. She's vanished. Dave, I got to ask you a question as a daddy. Let me throw this out to you. Your child calls you and says, come and pick me up at the hospital. Brother, what? And they're not there. And you know that they've got a critical medical issue that, you know, needs to be tended to.

They've also previously got a foot injury. What are you going to do? I got to ask you what, what, you know, knee jerk reaction here, you know, kind of what, what would be your, your initial response here? The same as you. I'm going to start looking. And I thought about this because mom shows up to pick her up. She's fully expecting her probably to be sitting in the lobby area ready to go or out front. I mean, she's not expecting to go to the room and find her laying in bed, not ready to go because she said, I'm ready to go. Come get me. So when, when mom shows up and she is told she's not here, she laughed.

She checked herself out against medical advice and left. Now the knee jerk is going, I believe is the same for all of us. I'm going to stop messing with the hospital. I'm going to believe that what they're telling me is the truth. And I am going to react accordingly. My first thought, I'm looking around the parking lot. I'm going to look. Is there a way she would have started walking? You know, why did she not wait for me to get here? She knew I was coming.

It's only been a couple hours since we talked. How far could she have gotten? What transpired that I don't know. But you're going to believe that the hospital is being truthful. So immediately, you're not going to start that the hospital is being truthful. So immediately you're not going to start grilling them and let me see your charts. Let me see, you know, you're not going to do that yet. You're going to do that later on, but right now you're looking, you're calling family. Hey man, she checked herself out and I can't find her. So it's going to start like

that. You're, you're really going to think I'm going to find her out here somewhere. She's just mad. I mean, those are the basic things i'm thinking as a as a parent and then it's going to go from that hey wait let me ask you a question real quick have you ever left a hospital mad guilty guilty right here yeah i i i've been in a position where i don't care if i had to drag myself out on my bloody stumps. Yeah. I'm out of this place. But yeah, yeah. I mean, and yeah, that's that's certainly plausible. You've had enough.

Yeah. So that's what I'm thinking as a parent, you know. Now, the other part of this is what we don't know. We know that the relationship between mother and daughter is very strong here because you mentioned this and it's very important. For 21 years, mom and daughter have been bonded together over type 1 diabetes. This is not something you can ignore or take a break from. You don't get a vacation from this medical malady.

You actually have this every day from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep and during your sleeping hours. As a parent, we are concerned about our child. No matter how old they get, no matter how accomplished they become, they still have this underlying medical issue that requires constant attention. So she knows all these things. That relationship is that medical drama that is an everyday thing. So mom's concerned. What happened and where is she? So you're not going to go into the hospital files yet because you're going to be looking for her right away. And after you don't immediately find this is me. You got a couple

hours tied up. Let's check all the basic places where we think she would go. Let's call all the friends we can think of that she would reach out to. But then there's going to be nobody has heard from her or seen her since I talked to her two hours before I showed up to pick her up. And so now you go back to the hospital, well, probably reported to the police missing. They get brought in fairly early on and because of the medical issue, we need help finding her. And it's only going to be after that, that you go back to the hospital and say, okay, now you're going to show me the charts and reports of everything you described a few minutes ago. And that's where you're going to actually start getting into a full accounting of a minute by minute timeline to determine where she is. And again, from the hospital standpoint, Joe, she left. We don't know. It's like a third grader

giving mom and dad an answer as to why they failed the test. I don't know. It's like a third grader giving mom and dad an answer as to why they failed the test. Let me tell you where this actually breaks down in kind of the structure, the hierarchical structure within the hospital. It's not going to be it could be the physician that reaches out. That is the attending the hospitalist. But if this is a hospitalist, keep in mind this individual moves on to the next case. Okay. And that's not an excuse. That's just the reality. You know, they move on down the line.

You know, where this really breaks down is a social worker. There's a whole group of people within the hospital that are there for the care of families and also making arrangements for individuals that have difficulties in their lives or just post-hospital treatment. They make everybody aware. And so in my experience, the social worker that works in the hospital and they are assigned, they're employed by the hospital. They're the ones that are actually tasked with contacting the family and making sure that the family understands everything. Well, we're still, we're at a point right now, Dave, where she's dead. Jesse's dead. All right. This is now you're at a point who, who did not check these boxes relative to, did, did

some people just assume that someone else was going to do this, you know, after you have this, this flourish, this, uh, um, you know, this event with a code, they're going back to restocking the, you know, the, the crash cart, they're wrapping the body in what's referred to as a morgue pack, um, which prepares the body to go to the morgue okay i was gonna say you got to tell me what that is because i don't know but just fyi joe yeah let's just let's cut to the meat of this yeah the hospital tells the family she left on her own but she didn't ever leave she's dead at the hospital. Yeah. And they start a cover up fairly early on. I'm

an alleged cover up, maybe mainly because. Yeah. Yeah. I want to be clear that the family for a year is looking for Jesse Marie Peterson, 31 year old type one diabetic lawyer. OK, they're looking for her everywhere for a year. Can you imagine that, Joe? We cover missing person stories a lot with Nancy Grace, and usually it ends up really bad where we eventually find the body. In this case, they never find her body anywhere. They're looking everywhere. It is a year and four days later that the family gets a call from a detective. Remember, I told you they did go to the police and they did report her missing. And the local police did their job at trying to find a missing adult with a medical issue.

A year and four days after mom shows up to pick her daughter up at the hospital, the detective calls and says, hey, we found her. She's dead. And the hospital knew. Now, Joe, I want you to tell me what happened to the body of Jessie Marie Peterson. At this point, when she has been declared dead, Dave, they would have prepared her body to take her to their morgue facility in this hospital. And this hospital is actually Mercy San Juan Hospital, and it's in Sacramento County, California.

And that's who the police eventually had gotten involved in this case to try to, you know, try to determine what happened to her. Because, you know, they're working this thing as a missing persons case. After they have gone through, this detective has gone through interviewing people, probably requesting medical records, trying to understand the timeline. They have this kind of epiphany, I can only imagine, where they're saying it's very dramatic when you think about it. She never left the hospital. So it kind of narrows it down as far as the search goes. You've had mom, you've had friends, you've had extended family that have been trying,

they're exhausting every possibility here to try to find her for, mind you, I have to restate what you've stated, for over a year, Dave, for over a year. And all the while, she had never left the hospital. She had not just simply gone into, and here's the real rub with this. They didn't just take her to the morgue. They took her to a location within the hospital that is a long-term cold storage unit. And that's going to be different than like if grandma dies up on ICU and you're waiting for the funeral home to come and pick the body up and remove. Okay. When you place a body into a storage, you know, a cold storage unit within the hospital, you're talking about, you have made a determination. This is an active choice that

you're making here. You're saying, well, we've, one of two things. We either, our perception is she doesn't have family and we don't know what to do with the body, which at that point in time, the coroner should have been notified and have stepped in because they would have brought all of their resources to bear. And I can imagine Sacramento County Sheriff's Office investigator had reached out to the coroner as well. Was this case ever reported to you? That would have been one of the first steps.

And then they have to make a decision about what they're going to do with her body. So after they prepared her body in a morgue pack, which sometimes they're variable. It's plastic sheeting. Sometimes the body will actually look like a mummy wrapped in plastic where the feet are tied off with external strings. The hands are tied inside the packaging. There's a gauze that goes around the head to hold the jaw in place, all of these sorts of things. And sometimes they'll just place them into a body bag. And then they're going to take them to this storage unit, which for me, if you're placing a body into cold storage, what you're saying is all hope is lost. We don't know where the family is. This individual is indigent. Or two, we got to try

to figure this out because we failed to contact the next of kin or let mama know within two hours of her having called and had contact with her. And it was just left, just kind of pushed off into the ether there where you're thinking, well, no one's going to miss her. No one has shown back up to claim her, but all the while, you know, mama's out there looking for her now along with the police and Dave, what this cold storage does to human remains, we, many people have this perception that if you, that if you take a body and you place the body into a cooler, okay, that the body goes into this kind of stasis where nothing changes with the body. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Okay, that messes with me. That really does, because I assumed that, Joe. I really did think that if you pass away and you're put in something that will keep you chill, you know, that everything stays the same and that they can look at you two years later and figure out what happened. I thought that would happen just because, you know, I just thought that.

I don't know why I'm an idiot. No, you're not an idiot. I mean, why would you know that? I mean, most people don't know. I'm glad that most people don't know it. But, you know, I've – But you're saying it's worse than that. It's the opposite of that.

Well, it is. And here's one of the big things. With cold storage of bodies, what happens, as we all know, there's limited humidity. Okay. So the body is not retaining any kind of moisture at this point. So the body begins to dry out, essentially. Now, the body is cold, all right? It's cold storage. You're not going to have the profound decompositional odor that you would if, say, someone was left out, a body was left out and was not cold stored. And it knocks that down. However, there's a price to be paid. The body will be almost, it will have a parchment-like appearance. You'll see like the fingertips,

we've talked about this with the mummification, remember? Well, it's kind of the same principle in the sense that the body, because of the lack of humidity in this cold, cold environment, which most cold storage is colder than a standard morgue crypt, because you don't want to put a body in cold storage unless they're going to be there for a protracted period of time. Remember, most of the dead that we deal with are fresh dead, and they're going to be released directly to a funeral home. And even after we're done with autopsies and things like that, the funeral home can still work with the body to get the body presentable for viewing and all that goes along with that. But with cold storage, one of the things that you'll see that's so profound, the eyes. Actually, you know, you hear about people having sunken eyes. This is the absolute truth.

The eyes do sink back into the head, and that's because there's a lack of moisture in the body. So just that in and of itself, that presentation, you would have a very difficult time trying to kind of, you know, resurrect any kind of appropriate appearance for the body just based on the eyes alone. I've seen this over and over again throughout my career with bodies that have been in long-term storage. Secondly, the color of the skin changes. You will actually have bodies that, and these temperatures can get very, very cold. They're sub-freezing. The bodies will actually develop a red hue to them that's indicative of like freezer burn.

Like you've heard the term freezer burn, you know, that you have. There's not a dime's worth of difference between something that you would put into a deep freeze and deep freezing a human remain. So when in fact her body is finally found and located in the hospital, which nowadays we're talking, correct me if I'm wrong, in excess of 365 days, we're talking 369 days since she was last known alive. Um, she will have gone a long way down the path of change. And when they found her, Dave, when they finally located her body in this hospital, her remains are not viewable. So let's think about what this mama has been through. First off, she's been through, my daughter calls me because she no longer wants to be here.

She shows up. She's told that your daughter's not here. She left AMA against medical advice. Now she's in a fever trying to find her daughter flipping over every rock that she possibly can out there this poor woman living every night thinking oh my lord has she been kidnapped has she been killed has is she wandering the street she doesn't have her medication because, again, I bring us back to Jesse being 10 years old and Mama having to watch over and take care of all of these needs. She's been wringing her hands for a year.

Oh, and then by the by, she gets the call from the Sacramento Sheriff's Office from a detective that tells her, we found your daughter. I wonder if just for a moment, maybe there was a spark of hope. Just in that little second, perhaps where Mama thought, maybe there's still a chance. She didn't realize that when the detective told her that, to add insult to injury, she discovers that her daughter's body is so badly decomposed

that they couldn't view her. They couldn't view her. They couldn't grieve her. They couldn't mourn her. She had been placed into that cold storage unit. I'd like to know what else was in that cold storage unit. I'd like to know, was she stored with other things? Was there

more than just Jesse's mortal remains contained within? There is, under the sun, there is no explanation. There is no excuse that can be made for the decisions that were made. They say that broken hearts never mend. This is soul-crushing. Absolutely soul-crushing. And like it or not, the people at the hospital,

the administrators, the medical staff, the doctor that didn't sign the death certificate for over a year, they're going to have to stand and deliver because they will receive a subpoena. They will go to a courthouse and they will have to explain themselves under oath. There will be more to come in this case, and I hope that we can follow up on it.

Until then, I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.