Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: In Memory of Michael and Jason - The Horrors Perpetrated by Steven Lorenzo

Episode Date: November 26, 2023

Lured from bars in Tampa Bay, Florida, Jason Galehouse and Michael Wachholtz become victims of unthinkable acts of violence, torture, and ultimately murder at the hands of Steven Lorenzo and his roommate Scott Schweikert. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack dive into the harrowing details of these crimes, examining the evidence, psychology, and horrifying realities faced by the victims. As Morgan unpacks the forensic side—from GHB to blood spatter—Mack provides a chilling narrative that contextualizes the nightmare that unfolded. This episode is not just an exploration into the depths of human depravity, but also a tribute to the lives and stories of Jason Galehouse, Michael Waccholtz, Albert Perkins, and other unnamed victims of Loenzo and Schweikert. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Time codes: 00:00:20 — Joseph Scott Morgan reveals a childhood fascination with a magnifying glass. This simple tale explains his eventual career in forensics. 01:40 — Steven Lorenzo, convicted of two murders but suspected of many more, is introduced.  00:03:20 — Dave Mack asks Joe Scott to break down the substance GHB.  00:03:40 — A chilling overview of Lorenzo's methods is described. Mack succinctly recounts how the criminal drugged and tortured his victims. 00:04:40 — Joseph Scott Morgan unveils the eerie nature of GHB, detailing its street names and effects. 00:08:19 — The online meeting between Lorenzo and Schweikert is discussed. Mack introduces how they connected over shared violent fantasies. 00:11:18 — The terrifying setting of the crimes, Lorenzo and Schweikert's home, is revealed. Joe Scott explains how the drug GHB renders victims compliant. 00:13:56 — Mack goes back to 2003 to bring us the stories of the victims, Jason Galehouse and Michael Wachholtz. 00:16:10 — A vivid picture of the crime scene emerges. Mack and Morgan explore how long blood lasts as evidence. 00:20:25 — Dave Mack retells the testimony of a survivor of Lorenzo and Schweikert's, Albert Perkins, emphasizing the cold-blooded nature of the criminals. 00:28:32 — Joseph Scott Morgan explains the crucial role of insects in forensics. 00:33:40 — Justice takes time. Dave Mack highlights the delay in Steven Lorenzo's trial and eventual sentence.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I don't know about y'all, but when I was a little boy, I was given a magnifying glass, and it was probably one of the most wondrous gifts that I ever had. I would go about in my grandmother's backyard in North Louisiana, and I would look at everything from blades of grass to sand. I had a huge sand pile. I was fascinated by how sand looked under high magnification.

You pick out all of these details that exist. But you know, being a young boy, one of the things that I was also fascinated by was the ability to concentrate the intensity of the sun's light and the subsequent heat that resulted from that. I started out burning leaves and that sort of thing. And when that didn't satisfy me, I would find ants and other bugs. But there was something within me that I retreated from. And I couldn't do it over a period of time because I began to actually feel bad about burning ants. There are people among us that don't have the capacity, I think, to understand the pain of others, whether they be insects or our fellow human beings. Today, we're going to talk about one such person, a person by the name of Stephen Lorenzo, who I'll go ahead and tell you now wound up being convicted of two deaths,

but he is associated with the torture of many, many others, a few of which survived. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Brother Dave, do you ever have those cases that when we begin to kind of talk about them and read through these details, they kind of sit your teeth on edge? They kind of make you squirm a little bit. When you get into the nitty gritty, Stephen Lorenzo, every way you turn, there's something more evil than the last thing. Just to give everybody a bird's eye view, we're talking about crimes that happened in 2003 and just got a sentence this year, 20 years later. And I want to know, first of all, what is GHB? Because it plays a big role. I know we've heard it called the date rape drug, but I need to know

what it is, what it does, because this is where Steven Lorenzo and his roommate started trolling gay clubs in Tampa in 2003. A number of gay men went missing in the Tampa, Florida area in Tampa Bay. And Stephen Lorenzo and his roommate actually went, picked up these guys in gay bars, went back to Lorenzo's house and they tortured these men. Some of the men have no memory whatsoever of what took place. They just knew the after effects. They knew they had marks on their body and didn't remember how they happened. We have two of them that died. One never found and one that was basically laid out on display in his own vehicle in his apartment complex parking area.

That's who Steven Lorenzo is in terms of a murderer and damager of people. Did I just make up a word, damager? Well, okay. I'll allow it in the words of the hangover. Yeah, I'll allow it. GHB. It is a drug that really serves no purpose whatsoever. It's something that is essentially produced illegally. And the actual name is gamma hydroxybutyrate. It's something that is essentially produced illegally. And the actual name is gamma hydroxybutyrate. It's a compound that is created generally in a clandestine lab. And it has been around now for years. And let me give you some of the other. And before I get into the nature of it, let me give you some of the other names that it goes by. And this actually comes from the DEA. And these are the names that you encounter on the street. So just bear with me one second. The first one ought to give you an idea right out of, now get this one, you're ready for this one, Grievous Bodily Harm. Does that kind of paint a picture?

Liquid Ecstasy, Liquid X, and Scoop is another one. And you can find it in a powder form. It's liquefied as well. And here's kind of the insidious part to this. It has no color in the liquid form. It has no odor and it's tasteless. So you could just be hanging out in a bar and anyone that has just a dropper of this and it doesn't take much. Just put a tiny little drop into someone's drink, and what will generally happen is that the person will begin to experience some level of euphoria.

But as this drug goes to work, particularly in the long term, you develop almost a temporary amnesia, Dave. And you know what you were saying? You got these guys out there that have gotten marks all over their bodies. And can you imagine waking up on the side of the road somewhere at some point in time, and you've got marks all over your body, and you can't explain them? How bizarre would that be? If you were in a bar, and everybody's dancing and having a good time and you have this little vial of liquid, just a little bit, and somebody turns their back and you just reach over and pour it in their drink. And that's all it would take to basically render this person

within a matter of a short period of time, rendered them unable to defend themselves. Is that what we're talking about here? Yeah, exactly. And there are some people that actually take it recreationally, if you can imagine that, because the idea is that, first off, all inhibitions go out the window. The pharmacology types that study it have noted that in test subjects that there's an increase in libido, that is, you know, your sex drive is kicked into high gear. There's also, and here's another part to this, and listen to this, suggestibility. That is that if you are applied with this drug, it makes you compliant. And the person that is applying the drug has targeted

this individual, man or woman. They're watching this individual, maybe from across the room. And what they're looking for is for somebody that's not protecting their drink, because that's the easiest way to get it on board. If you're doing it and you want to go unnoticed. And maybe the more intoxicated an individual becomes, you lose a sense of awareness anyway, kind of woozy anyway. I'm not saying you're in a dream state, but you might not be as on your game otherwise. And then you've got this person that means to do you harm in the worst way possible. On top of those feelings of everything you're describing, the mood it puts you in and the physical inability you have to actually be your best version of yourself. Now you've got Steven Lorenzo and his roommate, Scott Schweikert. These two guys actually connected with one another online in chat rooms online, talking about fantasies of

rape and all this other crazy stuff online, so that when they became roommates and then got the GHB and went into the gay clubs of Tampa, holy moly, Joe, it's not just one guy at the bar talking to you. One of these guys could have been sitting off to the side watching as the drug takes effect on the victim. And when it's time to escort them out, hey, he's had one too many. Let's get him out. And then you've got a two-on-one scenario where one is totally the victim, incapable of defending themselves at all. And that's the thing about it. It's almost like, and I've got this, I'm kind of a simple-minded person. I have this vision of a pack of hyenas kind of circling a wounded wildebeest on one of those nature shows. The wildebeest, though, they'll even attempt in their own feeble way to fight back.

You know, they'll resist. But if you've got these predators that are kind of in your orbit now, they're just circling. They're just waiting. They're waiting. And you can actually get the individual under your power of suggestion. Hey, why don't we go somewhere else? Oh, man.

Yeah, that sounds great. They're in this euphoric state. And the next thing you know, you're in the back of a vehicle going to literally the pit of hell. I could rattle off names now, probably, and you'd recognize them. We could talk about, obviously, at the top list is Jeffrey Dahmer. We could talk about the alleged Lisk killer. Any number of serial perpetrators come to mind. And one of the things that is common to all of these subjects, either confirmed or alleged, is this idea of control. Control over an individual who the perpetrator has dehumanized. They're no longer human to the perpetrator. They are in a position

of vulnerability and they are malleable to anything that happens. But here's the trick. If you're going to do this, if you're going to control somebody, where are you going to take them? What are you going to do with them? Because that's the big key here. The house that Steven Lorenzo and Scott Schweiger were living in, it was just these two guys with a rape, murder, torture, fantasy world. That goes beyond the pale. That was actually their connection.

The reason they became friends is because they both had fantasies of torturing other people, of raping people and killing them. And that's where they got together and ended up becoming roommates and then had a game plan. They figured out exactly what to do and how to get it done.

They went into the gay clubs in Tampa. They picked out who they were going to get. And I didn't realize until today exactly how GHB worked. The way you explained it a few minutes ago, Joe, I didn't know that. I now know that it wasn't a difficult thing to pick out the prey and get them out and get them back to a private setting. They don't have to find a place. They're not having to pull around in a dark alley or go out there. They've got a place to go. Let's go back to my place. Let's take the party to my place. Just think about it for one second. When you think about the nature of this drug and how

it impacts the person that has been exposed to it. Because you could see, for instance, you've got three adults, in this case, three adult males, who you can imagine if you visually see them, all these, you know, you're not talking about a young kid that's screaming for their parents, you know, help me, help me. You're talking about somebody that appears compliant and is game for anything. And so, you've got this compliant subject that's being led into this environment. It's not, you know, if the neighbors see it, all right, or somebody driving down the road sees them, they're going to say, well, that's three adults hanging out. It looks like they're having a great time. But, you know, it masks the reality of what's actually going on. It's amazing when you think about it that you can give someone a substance that does, in fact, mold them into this being that is totally and completely compliant.

And that, again, going back to this analogous to the pit of hell, you're actually ushering them over the threshold into this environment. And they're not fighting you, Dave. They're not fighting you at all. They're willingly, at least from a drug-induced standpoint, willingly going in and passing through that portal. This happened in 2003. Two different men, Jason Galehouse and Michael Wachholz. They met Steven Lorenzo in a Tampa nightclub. They both were taken back to Lorenzo's house where he and Scott Schweiker, they basically kidnapped them because these guys would not have gone willingly had they known what was going to happen. But they were kidnapped, drugged, sexually tortured, and then they were both killed.

Whereas Jason Galehouse, his body was cut up and stuffed the parts into trash bags and then ditched them in garbage bins all around the city of Tampa. That didn't happen to Michael Walkholt. He actually was found in his car, wrapped in a sheet in his Jeep in an apartment complex parking area. Decomposing, mind you. He was found a particularly lengthy time later, you know, because most people don't expect to see something like that. No. And the thing that got everybody freaking out is that they weren't the only two guys that

went missing. I think there were nine guys that went missing in a fairly short period of time. And these two come up dead. One was dismembered and one was not. One was actually totally disposed of where we still haven't been able to find him. And the other was, hey, he's right there in his own car. Can I tell you what they did find of Gale House? Even though his body was never actually recovered, during the course of the investigation, what they did find at Lorenzo's home is that when they went into the garage, they actually found evidence of Gale House's blood on the floor.

And one of the things that keeps coming up in this case in particular, but in other cases as well, is the specter of dismemberment. Here we go again, Dave. You mentioned that a while back, Joe, that we seem to be getting a lot of it. Yeah, we really do. I don't know. It's probably just this idea that we're more focused on it or maybe, I don't know.

It seems to me the world, there are less boundaries now, even for killers. But that is part of, I love the Latin term, corpus delecti, because you have evidence of violence that has taken place here. And why else would this total stranger's blood be on the floor of his garage? And dismemberment, again, is something that requires some level of not just tools, but it requires prophecy. This is not something you're going to go out in the front yard and do. Can we back up to the blood in the garage for just a minute, Joe? The way it was described in court was that it was a pool of blood under the floor of Lorenzo's garage. The floor being those big brick things that you can use as a flooring area.

And I'm guessing the blood seeped underneath those and they called it a pool of blood. How long will blood remain where you can actually see was there and test it? From the time it comes out of my body, how long are you going to be able to find it in that dirt? You can find it for a protracted period of time. It's amazing how resilient it is. I sound like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth, but just bear with me. If it is in a cool, more protected area, say like under flooring like this, remember, this

is down in Tampa, all right? So, we're talking about a harsh environment, all right? You're in a semi-tropical environment down there and you're thinking about, well, it would change very quickly. You can still find some remnant of it. And here's something else. The fact that they're using the term pool associated with seepage gives you an idea of what volume that there was that after this time, they're still able to appreciate it. Now, would you be able to use it? I think many people would think, well, would you actually be able to use this degraded blood?

Would it still give up enough information from a toxicological standpoint where you could actually see evidence of GHB in that? No, I don't think to that point. However, you would still see, I think even microscopically, if you were to examine it eyes on, you could see decomposing remnant of the blood at a microscopic level. And you would probably be able to, which I think they did in this case, confirm, at least at a molecular level, that this blood was associated with Gale House. Plus, you would need the circumstantial evidence.

Would someone actually roll over on another person and confess to this? Dave, do you recall in our opening, I had mentioned the magnifying glass and seeing what it would be like to burn insects. One of the most distasteful parts of that, I think, for me personally, I can't speak to anybody else, is that even as a little boy, you look at this and you can sense that there's some level of discomfort and pain when you do this. One of the things that's quite off-putting about it. But as I mentioned, when we first set forth on this conversation, I think that some people are incapable of that. As a matter of fact, I think that some people long to see that discomfort. Recently, I had watched a piece on the Marquis de Sade. The term sadism actually arises from his name and the depths that he sunk to,

this debauchery, this horrible basement of human behavior he indwelled. And I think that there is not just a touch, not just a touch. I think that this whole series of crimes is a wash in sadism. When I read the survivor description of what he went through, I think you're exactly right, Joe. This is what Albert Perkins said. Albert Perkins was drugged and attacked by Lorenzo and was one of the few that lived to tell the tale about this. He said this, quote, I was panicked, hysterical. I remember him sitting. He turned me over. He was sitting on the side of the bed. His face, he just didn't look the same. Nothing behind his eyes. They were dark. His face was contorted, which further panicked me. Perkins said he slipped in and out of consciousness. And when he finally came to, Lorenzo was in complete control. Quote, my arms and my legs were bound and some twine

rope around my neck. I had duct tape over my eyes and mouth. I don't know that you can take the measure of that, really. I don't want to get too far off into the weeds talking about areas that psychologists would get into here. But from a forensic standpoint, you see evidence of this and you go out to these scenes and you see things like, you know, one of the things we'd look for are things like binding materials out there. And you have to address it. It's the elephant in the room at that point in time.

You've got address it. It's the elephant in the room at that point in time. You've got binding materials. And one of the things that you see with kidnap victims many times when you're looking at bodies is you'll see like adhesive residue. We all know what duct tape looks like. A strip of duct tape is put over the eyes or over the mouth. If someone has facial hair, has the hair been ripped out as a result? I have found, literally, I have found duct tape at scenes that contained human hair, where it had been removed and then maybe fresh had been reapplied, because it'll begin to turn loose as a result of the moisture interacting with the adhesive.

But you'll see that residue of adhesive. And it's something that we take note of in the morgue to try to tell the story of what's happening. And this fellow was mentioning the use of twine. And being a very narrow type of binding, it's not like you're using some kind of broad woven rope here. It's going to dig in. And if, say, for instance, we find a body that has been bound by something like twine, you'll have these very deep furrows because the more narrow the binding is, the deeper the furrow will be, and there'll be evidence of that. But here's the thing. When you begin to think about the actions of the GHB, as he has an awareness, he's in this kind of,

and they describe it like a dreamlike state most of the time. You have an awareness this is going on. Maybe in your brain, you're screaming out, this is not right, but you have no control of your body. It's almost as if people in the audience can identify if you've ever had surgery where they push that initial drug into the line and you get in this kind of milky warm state and they could essentially do anything to you in surgery, which they're going to do. They're going to do a bit of cutting and you don't want to have an awareness of that, but there's nothing you can do about it. Albert Perkins said this went on for five hours. It wasn't just a, hey, I'm tied up. It was

like you said, it's a dream state. He knew what was going on for the most part, but he couldn't do anything about it. And five hours of torture. I'm thinking about struggling from the twine because, you know, we all know what twine feels like on your skin. I can't imagine he had to have been just struggling even in that dream state to get out the pain that would have just come from that alone. But, Joe, when we're dealing with a sexual assault, how are you going to go back and determine on men what are the sexual assault kits like? I have no clue. Oh, no, there's no difference between the sexual assault kits. They're the same and their purpose the same, more than likely.

It's just that when we're dealing with a male body, I'm going to be very blunt here. We're dealing with a male body. First off, we're going to do swabs externally all over the body to see if there is any kind of ejaculate that's left behind. And this is facilitated rather easily. We have kits for this. But when we do a rape kit on males, just like with females, what will generally happen is that you will have multiple swabs that are actually placed into the rectum. And they'll be allowed to sit in there for several minutes because you want anything that is

in there, you want it to be absorbed into the tip of the swabs. And the victim who we have the intact body, which is Mr. Wachholz, who was found decomposing in his Jeep. And keep in mind, he sat in that Jeep for two weeks, Dave, for two weeks. And so, that even furthers this because at a cellular level, in the bowel in particular, you have this environment where you have the cellular breakdown that's taking place. That's one of the reasons we kind of have this liquefied event that's going on when you have what are referred to as purge that are issuing out from the mouth and any bodily orifice many times. There's kind of the seepage. It's one of the foulest substances you can ever smell in the world. Is there a chance that you could recover

some evidence of semen that's still contained in that area per a rape kit, it's going to be very difficult. So, our default position in a case like this where we have a decomposed body is we're going to look for external trauma around the anus, for instance. And here's the thing, when you begin to look for this trauma, you're looking for contusions. You're looking for tearing. And you have to have a very keen eye as a pathologist, these forensic pathologists that do these exams, but any orifice in the body during the course of decomposition, that's where flies actually first set in and lay their eggs. So you'll have the rectal area. You'll have the mouth, the ears, the nose, the eyes.

You have fly eggs in the eyes. They go for those moist and warm areas. So you have maggot development in that area as well. So they're trying to feed. They're trying to survive. So is it really a true thing, not just out of the movies, that forensic people can use fly stuff to determine how long a person has been dead or has been in the vehicle in this case?

Yeah, you sure can. Because what happens is there's, if you think of it as revolutions or cycles, which is what my friends in entomology like to, they use that term a lot, the life cycle of the common blowfly, you find maggot husk that are laying about. And that's where the maggots are going through their progression to becoming full-on adult flies. Here's another little unknown that you might find interesting, Dave. Did you know that if we have a decomposing body, that we can take maggot samples from the body and dig this, place them into a centrifuge, which is into a tube, and seal it up, place it in a centrifuge, which spins things, right? It spins it down and it spins it down until the maggots are actually liquefied.

And guess what we can do with that? We can actually draw it up, run it for drug testing. We can see if there are any drugs on board there. Now, it's kind of iffy as to whether or not you could pick up on GHB in a maggot sample, but you can find cocaine or cocaine metabolite. You can find the metabolite of heroin many times in dwelling within these liquefied maggots. That's always been fascinating to me because the bugs not only are giving you an indication of timeline, they're also giving you an indication as to what they've ingested, what they've subsisted off of, which is this human remain that's before them. being in his Jeep and decomposing over two weeks. One thing I wanted to bring out, and it goes back to the actual scene taking place, these men meeting in a bar, going back to Lorenzo's house to have a party or what have you. But we do know, because there was the specter of the death penalty hanging overhead, that even Lorenzo's partner in crime, Scott Schweikert, actually provided the prosecution. And thankfully, we got more information from him of what actually took place.

Otherwise, it would be a more of a guessing game. But he actually gave us what happened to Michael Walkholtz. And he said that Walkholtz, when this was when he was being tortured, when he was going through this hell on earth, he screamed at Steven Lorenzo, this is not consensual. Anybody tries to play, they were playing a sex game and it went too far. Just to be crystal clear, Scott Schweikert, who was there when it happened, said this man knew what was happening to him and said, this is not consensual. The other part, Joe, I have from watching television shows and movies, I thought GHB

was not detectable in the body within a matter of hours, within like 12 hours or whatever. I thought it was cleared out of the body and you couldn't find it. Is that not true? Yeah, it is because it metabolizes very, very quickly and kind of exits the body. I think that there are any number of people that are out there that kind of labor under this delusion that you can test for it and find it in a very short period of time. Now, if the person dies before the drug is actually metabolized and exits the body, you're going to have a better shot at it. So how long did this go on post-application of the drug is actually metabolized and exits the body, you're going to have a better shot at it. So how long did this go on post-application of the drug? And it does kind of wear off pretty quickly, but it leaves you in a state of misremembering things

or not just losing huge blocks of time of your life where you can't account for what had happened in these cases like this, where these fellows that did survive, in fact, they're going to wake up and they're going to have pain throughout their body because they've been abused. And I don't have to go into gory detail about that, but you can only imagine some of the pain that they would be experiencing and they don't have any explanation for it. You know, I might go back to the bar. And I think many times that victims like this are embarrassed. You know, they're embarrassed to want to go back and say, hey, did you see me leave here with somebody last night?

Because it gives you the impression that they were not in control of themselves, that they were that easily influenced, where it's not their person being influenced. It's this drug that's acting upon them. Now, we'll take samples of various tissues to see if we can find evidence, muscle in particular. But when you get a body that is so compromised by decomposition, I think that it would be quite the climb for any practitioner to try to determine if GHB is on board. The odds are against you. I'll put it to you that way. Most of the time, GHB is going to be picked up on, if I remember correctly, through the urine. And urine is the best sample to go through and to try to find it that way. So, you don't know

if it would have been expelled from the body or what would have happened. But to that point, I think that even though you have this GHB on board, and this is what I was talking about relative to a torture event, you have these two fellows in particular that are being asphyxiated, Dave. And you can see this even with someone that is in a drug state. Your body is going to react. That primal brain is going to kick in. You'll begin to struggle for air and you will fight. You'll resist. And I think that that's where this sadistic element comes in. You sit back and whether it's a ligature around the throat or whether it's a bag over the head, you will see this individual react to deprivation of oxygen. And it's a horrible thing. I'm just so thankful that this person is off the street as well as his compatriot, because as it turns out, Lorenzo has already been convicted of raping and torturing

nine men and has a federal sentence of, I think, 200 years. Is that correct? Yeah, he was sentenced to the 200 years in prison. And for many people, you think, well, he's done. We don't have to worry. Well, there's still family left that needs justice for their loved one. In this particular case, we have two young men who were murdered that their families are still suffering because of what Steve Lorenzo did. It took many, many years to get Stephen Lorenzo in court to be tried, convicted and sentenced in the cases of Jason Galehouse and Michael Wonkholz. And when that did happen, Dave, I think that it was for families, there's no replacing, you know, those that you love. But just for a moment in time, the family members of these victims actually had a chance to stand in court and tell Lorenzo what he had robbed them of, and to tell the court that Lorenzo no longer deserved to be among us.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. is body bags.