Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Hot Sauce Bread Dinners, Ice Bath Punishments - The Shocking Life and Death of Timmy Ferguson

Episode Date: January 7, 2024

Timothy Ferguson's mother calls police. Her son is unresponsive. Timothy Ferguson is also 15-years-old weighing just 69 pounds when he died of malnutrition and hypothermia.  Join Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack as they detail -Timothy Ferguson's painful life at the hands of his evil mother and brother. The teen lives on a diet of water and bread soaked in hot sauce,  followed by ice baths.    Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Transcript Highlights 00:00:00 Joseph Scott Morgan shares memories of Grandmother cooking chicken  00:04:15 Discussion of Timothy Ferguson, 15, starved to death by his mother 00:05:37 Discussion of food being used as mechanism for torture 00:06:52 Talk about Shanda Vander Ark fled Oklahoma with children 00:08:56 Explanation of how using food as a ‘kindness’  00:11:05 Talk about dark choices made by Shanda Vander Ark regarding her son  00:13:05 Discussion of Timothy’s older brother Paul being involved in the abuse 00:14:51 Joseph Scott Morgan describes “impact: injury – slapped, punched. 00:15:28 Talk about how common that one child will be chosen for abuse while other siblings abuse victim as well  00:16:14 Discussion about abuse,  malnutrition impossible to hide 00:17:15 How to determine how long Timothy was abused 00:18:35 Description - malnutrition can “stunt growth”.  00:20:40 Discussion of Shanda Vander Ark Defense, claims she had PTSD 00:21:51 Joseph Scott Morgan explains how Timothy Ferguson was digesting his own fat cells due to malnutrition  00:22:58 Timothy Ferguson’s body already compromised  00:26:41 Timothy Ferguson was given bread and water, and hot sauce for torture  00:27:56 Talk about hot sauce “Carolina Reaper” being placed on bread for Ferguson to eat  00:29:00 Discussion of Timothy Ferguson being kept in tiny room under stairs, developing bed sores  00:30:56 Description of Timothy Ferguson breathing out of his mouth like fish out of water  00:32:09 Discussion of Ice Bath’s used to punish Timothy Ferguson  00:33:28 Timothy Ferguson never recovered from last Ice Bath, cause of death – hypothermia and malnutrition  00:36:02 Discussion of food – mother chained refrigerator and cabinets in kitchen  00:38:00 Verdict - Shanda Vander Ark, guilty of murder, son Paul guilty of Child Abuse See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. The most precious memories that I have probably involve my grandmother's kitchen. I can still see it in my mind's eye. My grandmother and grandfather were not wealthy people. As a matter of fact, they would probably be classified as lower middle class today. They lived in a little old ramshackled house.

It was windy in the house. You could hear the wind coming in. It was hot in the summertime, cold in the wintertime. But the one thing that my grandmother had was a fabulous kitchen for a house like this. Big stove, big oven. There was always something being prepared in that house. And, you know, even when it was cold in the wintertime, you could always seek out warmth and comfort in that kitchen.

There were even times, I I remember she would leave the oven door open with the oven going and you could feel the heat off of it. I still have visions of my grandfather lighting his camel cigarettes off of the stovetop. But there was a certain amount of joy, the smells that came out of the kitchen. The food was incredible. Nobody will ever cook like my grandmother. I'll argue that point till the day I die. But so much of our life is tied up in food, in nourishment, in the comfort that comes along, not just from the taking on of the food, but I think also those that love us, their love is transmitted through that food, the care that goes into it. And today on Body Bags, we're going to talk about a young man who was totally and completely dependent

upon a love that did not exist and nourishment that existed but was denied. We're going to talk about the starvation death of a 15-year-old boy. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bats. Don't know about you Dave, but I think for me, my grandma's recipe for fried chicken was probably the best I've ever encountered. I still have memories of seeing her place chicken parts into brown paper bags with gold metal flour with the right combination of Louisiana spices and shaking this bag up every day. It seemed like we had fried chicken or something like that. And the smell that came from it. And the taste.

It was never dry. It was always moist and juicy. And the crust was perfect. I don't know if you have a memory like that from childhood. I certainly do. I have no memories of anything right now. I'm starving. I'm salivating.

That's all you've done. Pavlov's dog. You mentioned food. I salivate of anything right now. I'm starving. I'm salivating. That's all you've done. Pavlov's dog. You mentioned food. I salivate. Yeah. Take me to a buffet and I will eat until they have to roll me to the juicing room at Wonka's factory. You know? Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. I can identify with that. I certainly can. It's a huge, huge deal. It certainly is. And we get comfort from it, don't we? I mean, I think we do yeah i think we do you and i could sit here and share good fun memories of growing up and food and

things like that to avoid talking about this horrible story what happened to 15 year old timothy ferguson 15 year old timothy ferguson was murdered by his mother by starving him and by the way not just starving hypothermia she would take her own flesh and blood timothy ferguson the boy weighed 65 pounds at 15 years old and the only thing he had to eat was a piece of bread and hot sauce. And then she would stick him in an ice bath. Now, if that's not the type of torture that deserves the worst punishment we can come up with, I don't know what it is. Let me add one element to that because you mentioned being denied food, which is all part and parcel, first off of malnutrition and ultimately starvation. There's a difference between those two things, and we'll explore them.

But, you know, Dave, there was another element to it. We imagine food being used as, in many times, and this is really unhealthy, as a reward. And we get comfort from it. Many of us, we take it to an extreme. I know I have. But can you imagine food being used actively as a punishment? And what I mean by that is taking an element of something that is marketed as being ingestible, but yet an individual would derive so much pain from that. And what I'm talking about is the torture of not just an ice bath or deprivation of

access to food. I'm talking about actually using the ultimate hot sauce in order to subject him to, in order to elicit pain from him. So you've got this weird thing that's working here in this environment where you've got a kid who, by the way, has some developmental issues. What do we know about that disability? Well, what we do know is that he was apparently completely and totally dependent upon her kindness. And I'm always fascinated by cases of abuse like this. Her kindness? Well, yeah. Well, whether or not she's going to choose to give him kindness. And isn't that interesting? That's an interesting thing to consider, the degree to which she is. It's the old vinegar and sugar principle, where you feed somebody a steady diet of vinegar,

and when they just get a little taste of sugar, you think that it's the entire world. And that happens with abusers lots of times times because they can do great harm to individuals. And suddenly when an act of kindness is extended, it seems like the individuals won the lottery. Suddenly they've got the approval of this monster that they're having to share a home with. And that's really what I mean by kindness in this circumstance, because you have this precious life that has been given to you, that you have charge over, but yet you're going to deny them access to things that are basic. You know, we learned this, I don't know, what was it, in freshman sociology class, you know, where you learn Maslow's hierarchy, you know, just the basic, you know, those basic things.

I see you smiling right now. Yeah, I suffered through those classes. Oh, I did too. I did too. I think that that's really the one thing that I retained out of there was Maslow's hierarchy of needs. With this being said about the choices that have been made in regards to Shanda Vander Ark, those choices that she made relative to her son, this 15-year-old. It gave me pause from a mechanism standpoint as a forensic scientist to begin to think about, you know, we talk about homicide all the time on the show. You know, we talk about homicide more so than any other manner of death. And there are two types out

there. I think that you can have people that commit homicide, which merely by definition is nothing more than, it's different than saying murder. It is death at the hand of another. You're not assigning blame. That's the idea of the clinical nature of that term homicide. But death at the hand of another, when you think about the types of homicides that there are, I think in a big category here, you have things that are, it's almost like the old idea of sins of omission versus sins of commission. When you have a homicide, you can have an actual passive type of homicide, which I think we're dealing with here. You know, the mechanism that's being utilized is deprivation of basic needs, or you can have this active track that an individual can go down, and that's any kind of trauma that may lead to someone's death like shooting, bludgeoning, stabbing. And that's not what happened here.

When Shanda Vander Ark decided to keep her 15-year-old son sequestered, locked away, and literally in a house of horrors. That term gets thrown around a lot in media, but this was for this child, this 15-year-old child, a house of horrors. When you begin to think about this, this was probably the single most unmerciful way to bring about another human being's death. You have an expectation when you have kids,

when you see them through their normal maturation through life you know from the moment that they're an infant till the time that you know no longer your responsibility you see this physical development that happens in them and I was looking back and doing a little research and you know with uh with a 15 year old, you have an expectation that that kid is probably on the low end, going to be, and a lot of it's height-dependent nutritional issues, but under quote-unquote normal circumstances, you're going to have a child that the average weight for a 16-year-old, 15-year-old is going to be about 133 pounds. That was certainly not the case with this kid. Timothy weighed 61 pounds at his autopsy. That's how little he weighed. And it's really fascinating to me that this was allowed to go on for so long and that she flew under the radar.

And I think a lot of it had to do with her legal background. She fled from Oklahoma, wound up in Michigan, and she knew how to kind of shuck and jive with the system and stay below the radar. And boy, did she ever. She really facilitated this home that they were indwelling to meet her ends, which were completely and totally evil. I'm glad you pointed out that she knew how to fly under the radar. If you've never been through the homeschooling process, you don't know what it takes.

It's not as simple as sending a letter to the elementary or high school or whatever and say, I've decided to teach my children at home. Leave me alone. That doesn't cut it because there are rules and regulations and every state is a little bit different. She knew enough to fly under the radar to keep her child in homeschool. I'm curious as to her older son, Paul. He was 19 when this came to an end. But was he homeschooled also, or did he actually attend school? Timothy was 15 when he died.

I mean, Paul is only four years older than me. So you've got a child who has been abused for many years. He's not being abused by just his mother. Paul is involved in this as well. Whether he's doing it at the direction of his mother for fear for his life or whether he enjoyed it and was piling on, don't know. I think that once an individual is in a sequestered environment, it's rife for abuse to take place. Look, I got to tell you, all my kids were homeschooled quite successfully, as a matter of fact. With my son, we had to be adherent, and he went and was co-taught with a group of other homeschoolers and had exposure to many, many

things that we facilitated. But to the degree that whoever's driving the ship, it can be a glorious thing or it can be an absolute horror show, which in Timothy's circumstances, it turned out to be because you can control what is going to occur. Listen, if you're in an environment, and this happens with abusers a lot, it happens in many ways. If you're going to abuse a child, the idea is that you want to keep them out of sight because any physical changes that might occur over the course of a year or maybe day to day, if they're suffering from impact injuries, for instance. What do you mean by impact injuries? Well, if they're being slapped around, punched, kicked, you see this with people that are trying to essentially keep the kids away from the rest of the public. They'll even keep them away from immediate family members. That's one of the reasons that abusers many times hospital shop as well, which means that if a child is injured, they will not go to the same

treatment facility in order to seek care for a child. Because if you put two and two together, then by seeing the same clinician every time, they're going to say, hey, there's something up here and they're going to report it. But this is a completely different thing that we're dynamic. Is it different that only one of the three children seems to be the victim of his mother? No, that happens with great frequency. Yeah. Picking out one and using the others to help facilitate these circumstances. Wow. And that's, that's one of the things that. That makes it worse. Yeah, it does. Because you're looking for mercy. Hopefully, if you're the victim, they're holding out hope that maybe one of their siblings

will, you know, ride in and be the hero and help maybe give them some relief, maybe get them some food. And here's the problem with Timothy's case is that unlike, you know, say for instance, he was sustaining impact injuries and he was still out in public going, that's something that you can kind of guide therition and starvation, Dave, there's no hiding this. Because suddenly you have a face that the cheeks are sunken, the eyes are sunken. They have a pallor. The color to their skin almost becomes ashen. The skin actually changes in its texture. It becomes almost like parchment paper many times.

It's easily torn and insulted just by bumping the end of things. That's one of the consequences of malnutrition because with malnutrition comes dehydration. And so you've got that working as well. Can you tell if this has been going on for like a number of years or I'm just curious because Timothy was 15 years old when he died. Was this something that can, was active in his life from the, from birth, or was this something that just happened in the last two or three years? We know, we know she got in trouble in Oklahoma, but was he living a normal life? I guess is what I'm up to until he's 10. And then for the last

five years of his life, it went bad. Is there any way to determine when the abuse began? Yeah. Yeah. I think that there is. And one, and here's the big component to this. It's a problem and it's something we have to do in forensics a lot. These are called retroactive investigations where we go back with a child in particular, we will subpoena all of their medical records, even from a very young age. And do you remember when your kids were young, Dave, and you would go to the pediatrician? I know that I got a lot of moms in the audience right now. And you remember this, going to the pediatrician. And even from the time that they're babies, they begin to take measurements on the children. They'll do what's referred to as a crown

diameter. They'll do the crown, what's called the crown rump length. They'll do the crown heel length. They'll measure the abdomen. This is when they're little babies, just to see the developmental distribution of the child, how the child is presenting. And as the child goes, matures, they get weighed, their height is taken. So one of the keys here, and one of the things that can happen with malnutrition over a protracted period of time with a child that's developing, is if you deny basic needs, like food in particular, you're going to, and this seems like something that comes from another generation, but it's true. Their growth will be stunted. Okay. You're going to stunt your growth. If you don't eat, you know, that that's something that you would hear from my grandmother's

generation. They will not be on par with the others in their group relative to how tall they are, for instance. And, you know, weight can vary from person to person. But when you're talking about a child that weighed 61 pounds when he died, I think that our big takeaway here is that this is something that had been going on for a protracted period of time. I don't think that this child had ever been in a healthy environment. Starvation is not something that just occurs overnight. It's something that is a long-term event where the individual that is perpetrating this,

and trust me, this was perpetrated on Timothy. This is something that the perpetrator has to take an active view of, and they have to actively engage in it. And what they're engaging in is denial of those basic needs that we have as a human being. It's a tough thing when you have kids that have special needs and they require a bit more care, perhaps. Certainly, if you're the caretaker, you have to extend a lot of mercy in those circumstances, and it can be very, very frustrating. The defense trying to come up with a reason for

why Shanda Vander Aert did these things to her, and she claims to have no memory of most of it, by the way, which is so convenient for her. But they claim that it really got bad for her when her husband suffered a stroke. He was already wheelchair bound and then he had a stroke. He, the husband ended up moving in with his parents. Now, when I was first looking at this, it made it sound like the whole family moved in with her, with his parents. That's not it. She didn't have to take care of her husband in a wheelchair with his other issues. His parents did. She uses that as a defense. Oh, I was just overburdened with my husband. She claimed PTSD from him having a stroke.

They gave her the full mental exam and came back with, she knew exactly what she was doing, when she did it, when it happened, she was in control of her thoughts and ideas. She's not crazy. Put her on trial, you know trial just to clear it up. So to finish up, Timothy Ferguson, autistic with some speech and motor impairment. Yeah. Well, cry me a river is what I would have to say to her and to her defense team. The whole idea of blocking memories and all this sort of stuff. Well, how much do you have blocked out? Because this is a daily exercise, Dave. Let me just say this, this process that Timothy is going through, there's a term that we use, if you ever hear the word or the prefix auto, auto means self. And so in Timothy's case,

he was going through a condition which is autophagy. And autophagy is, I'll just put it to you this way, it is the digestion, the digestion of your own tissues by your body. Because what had happened, any fat stores that this child may have had on board, we carry around a healthy amount of fat in our body. There's an obsession with people wanting to get down to low percentages with body weight.

Fat is actually good for us because it is an energy store. And when you are not replenishing that energy store that goes to long-term, long-term fuel for your body, then your body is craving to feed itself. And what happens is if this child, Timothy, was already compromised from the perspective of his motor impairment that he had, which means that he could probably not ambulate real well, couldn't move perhaps very well, couldn't take care of basic necessities like go to the mix, he's already compromised where his muscles themselves are already weakened, greatly weakened by virtue of this condition that he has. And then you have his body's need to try to survive. So it starts eating its own tissue. My God, this is a perfect storm for this child to literally waste away when the images of Timothy are so striking that the court was exposed to in this case. Because one of the things that you really notice, and I urge anybody that has not seen these images, if you go back to, you can see them to a certain degree with Holocaust survivors, but Matthew Brady from the Civil War era took these incredible images of these guys that escaped the Andersonville prison camp outside of Americus, Georgia. And Dave, one of the things that really stands out regarding these guys is how pronounced their knee joints are, their pelvises, their ribs. And you can, he took these images nude.

They have cloth over their private area, but they took these images and it's so striking. You can, you can almost visualize death. And I find it really interesting that, you know, death, death is commonly portrayed in literature as grim reaper right you know skeleton and it's almost like death is sitting on the shoulder of these people uh the entire time and that's what was going on with timothy well tell me about what he was eating what kind of food was he getting joe have you heard the term? The only thing you're going to get is bread and water. Yeah. He would occasionally get water.

And then he would get bread. And the problem with bread is bread is loaded with carbohydrates. And it is a short-term solution to nutrition. All right? You burn those carbs up really, really quickly, but for long-term sustainability, and what we're talking about is the proper functioning of your organs. One of the major problems that you have with malnourishment is that people will develop severe cardiac problems, and a lot of that goes back to, well, everything goes back to the absence of

sustainability, whether it be vitamin uptake or whether it be something that has more fat in it that is going to give you long-term sustainability. If you give somebody a slice of bread, and that is a real thing where you see these examples of people that have lived on bread and water alone, and they're completely diminished. That's what he was being subjected to. But Dave, here's the thing. This child, this handicapped child who was at the mercy of his mother and his brother, by the way, not only was he denied anything of real substance to sustain himself on, he was also, if you can imagine this, being tortured with hot sauce. And just let that sink in just for a second. So your body is screaming, feed me, feed me, feed me. And everything you see before you that is edible and some things that aren't.

I've had, I've had children that were living off of dirty diapers in cases before, eating mop strings. Anything looks good. All right. It looks like it will sustain you. Imagine for that moment in time, I don't care how compromised he might be. If he's autistic, like they're saying, he still has a need for nutrients and his body is screaming out for this. And you're handing him this piece of bread but what you've done with the bread is that you have you have saturated this bread and hot sauce and david's not just any hot sauce it's carolina reaper hot sauce and if any anybody within the sound of my voice has ever been to a mall somewhere and they have the hot sauce shops where you can go in and you can be brave enough to take a chip and they'll put these different hot sauces on there and you taste it and they'll take it up the scale, you

know, and it's based on what are called Scoville units relative to the heat. I'll give you, for instance, if you have ever had a Tabasco pepper, cayenne, or jalapeno pepper, they're at what is measured on the Scoville scale. They're measured at about 30,000 on the Scoville scale. So get that in your mind. Just think about what hot sauce might taste like. Okay. Carolina Reapers are at 1.5 million to 2 million on the Scoville scale. So it wasn't that she kicked it up a degree from jalapenos. That would be bad enough to feed somebody that's malnourished. It's that she went to the extreme. This is arguably, and I know that there are aficionados out there that will probably tangle with me over it, but

this is arguably the hottest substance that you can go out and purchase and then place on something to eat. So here he is, if you can imagine, your body's screaming, it's digesting itself, probably developing bed sores as well. Because anytime, and this is kind of a little aside, anytime you have somebody that is malnourished, fat also has energy stores for us, but you know, it acts as a cushion too for our bodies. If you have no barrier other than just this thin skin and atrophied muscle between you and bone. And you stay in one position, which he was held under the staircase in a little room and locked away under there, Dave. Was he in there for days or did they let him out?

Periodically, they would let him out. And then when and because he had to be in an adult diaper. Matter of fact, the last image that they saw and she had the house wired with CCTV, Dave. And so there is actually an image of her dragging him along on the floor and he is still breathing, but he's out of it and it is claimed in court that you that you bear witness to that last moment when his chest rises and falls he literally dies on camera there was one thing that was actually shown too where he was breathing through his mouth and you've as i was looking over the case you've explained the things that we do in our final stages as we're dying, those breaths that aren't really breaths. It's just something your body is doing.

But he was breathing through his mouth and they were short the way it was explained in court, like a fish out of water trying to get air. And his mother, if you can call her that, she sees this on the camera and goes in there to his little hovel which you mentioned under the stairs it's a small closet like place that is underneath the staircase and she grabs his mouth and all the time talking down to him and closes his mouth shut and tells him breathe through your nose see you can do that, you dummy. That's one of the reasons I kind of questioned the claim of his autistic, whatever issues they claim he had, because the way she talked to him, she talked to him as somebody who understood things at a different level than what it appears.

But anyway, she held his mouth closed to make him breathe through his nose as he was dying. Yeah, and that image that's conjured up of a fish laying up on a dock But anyway, he held his mouth closed, making him breathe through his nose as he was dying. Yeah. And that image that's conjured up of a fish laying up on a dock and the mouth and the gills are opening and you can't breathe, it would have been a struggle for him to breathe. Every breath would have been a labor for him because, yeah, we have the autonomic nervous system that controls our breathing and our heartbeat, but it's so labor, Dave. The lungs would be heavy, probably, to a great degree, because they would be so highly congested for him struggling in this environment. And to make matters, if this could get, and I don't see how

it could, but it can, I'm going to go there as part of punishment for Timothy. He was also subjected to ice baths. Now, so we go back to fat stores, right? You know, you fat. When you say ice bath, you're talking about a bathtub. Yes. Of cold water with ice. Ice in it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, that's right up there with like World War II torture mechanisms that our service people would have been subjected to, to elicit information from them. You know, what could be your motivation behind doing that? You've got a kid that is already greatly physically compromised. He's certainly emotionally compromised and scarred at this point by virtue of what you've subjected him to. Totally depended upon you. And then because he doesn't do something right in your eyes, because you can totally

dominate him, you're going to run the bathtub. Now you talk about engaging in an active event. This is not something accidental. You have to go run the bath. And his brother was part of this as well, would run the bath and place ice in it and submerge this kid in it and have him in there. When they gave his cause of death,

they listed malnutrition and hypothermia. The bath that he took was the day before he died. His body temperature never rose above healthy again after that last ice bath. I think that this was probably the coup de grace for him. That that final, finally, that final time when he was subjected to this, because this is not the only time that this happened, I think that that's what was going to push him over the edge relative to his system finally just giving up and shutting down. For a normal person, I think that if you're submerged in, say, icy waters and you're healthy, you're a healthy person, let's say you're

a healthy weight, you've got fat stores on board, you don't already have heart problems and this sort of thing, I think that if you got into an environment where you could wrap up, have a heat source, probably within a few hours, your body temperature would get back up into a normal range. I'm not saying it's going to be at 98.6 because most of us, first off, don't walk around at 98.6. I don't. I'm in like 97. So that number varies. But just to get over that threshold into what would be considered to be sustainable would take a couple of hours. That's for a healthy person, Dave. For this kid, he had no shot relative to this. All right, that explains it. That was what I was curious about because they listed it as cause of

death, as one of the causes. And I think that that's probably a chronic, a chronic thing. And when we look at causes of death, it's not just going to be the one thing that's going to lead to our deaths. And in many cases, it's a combination, particularly if you're talking about like natural disease process. If you have somebody who's got diabetes, hypertension, those sorts of things, all of those are contributing factors, okay, to maybe heart failure. In this particular case, it's like you've got this fatal mix that's going on with him with all of these metabolic problems he's having as a result of absence of food. It's a combination of everything. And then on top of it, you throw in being subjected to an ice bath. Yeah, it's going to be a recipe

for disaster i want to ask you something about the food because his mother claimed that he actually got a bag of frozen chicken out of the freezer and was going to eat it which was her reason for locking things down the cabinets the refrigerator freezer and all that and i'm not buying her argument at all but she did actually chain the refrigerator and keep it where he could not get in. Yeah, and it wasn't just the fridge. I saw the images from the scene, Dave, and this person had locked the cabinets, had locked everything. And I have this image of if he could get out and he had the available energy to do it. The idea that this craving, the starving that he would have on board that would just be gnawing at him. He would have to drag himself across the floor.

He couldn't ambulate into the kitchen. Maybe at some point in time he had done this. And it's interesting with abusers, they'll do stuff symbolically like this many times. Do you see what you've done to all of us now? Because we can't trust you around food. We're going to lock everything. And so now me, your brother, everybody in this house is going to be subjected to your disobedience, and it's all your fault. And that's the kind of thing that abusers do. And that's what she would have done with him.

It's more of a demonstration. It's not that she's discouraging, you know, trying to discourage the theft of food. It's that she flips it around. And to make matters even worse, you've got this fragile child who is totally dependent upon her. His body is screaming for nutrition. And what you're going to subject them to visually is the fact that you're going to be denied no matter what you do. And oh, by the way, if you look over your shoulder right here, I've got cameras everywhere. And the cameras are going to tell the tale.

But thankfully, at the end, Shander Van Der Ark will never see the light of day. Because she was convicted of first degree murder in Michigan. And her son, Paul, who helped torture Timothy, was also convicted of child abuse. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bats. This is an iHeart Podcast.