Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Lawrence Anderson's Triple Murder

Episode Date: June 11, 2023

 In this episode of 'Body Bags,' hosts Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack unravel the case of Lawrence Anderson, a parolee who committed a horrifying triple murder. They discuss the gray areas of the justice system, his history of drug abuse, the controversial circumstances of his premature release from prison, and the disturbing implications of Anderson's physiological responses at the crime scene. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Time-codes:  00:00 - Episode introduction and case overview. 00:50 - Introduction to Lawrence Anderson's heinous crimes. 02:10 - Discussion on the term "criminally insane." 02:40 - Background of Anderson's criminal past and release. 05:30 - Prison overcrowding. 07:00 - Questions about the role of the parole board in Anderson's release. 08:40 - Exploration of Anderson's violent past and drug use. 10:15 - Aftermath of Anderson's release and subsequent crimes. 11:45 - Detailed description of Andrea Blankenship's murder. 13:05 - Discussion on forensic evidence and forced entry. 15:05 - Speculation on Anderson's choice of victim. 16:25 - Focus on facts over motivations. 18:10 - Recap of Anderson serving a human heart to family. 20:25 - Mention of a voice recording capturing victims' screams. 21:15 - Review of surviving aunt's injuries. 23:15 - Speculation about family's perspective and chilling meal prep. 24:20 - Highlighting surviving aunt's resilience. 27:00 - Discussion of Anderson's courtroom confession. 30:10 - Speculation on crime scene and police interpretations. 31:40 - Reflection on Anderson's confession and its community impact. 32:00 - Episode conclusion.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I've been down on my luck before. I've had hard times, just like everybody. I'm not saying something that's unique. We've all had tough times. The one thing that at the end of the day you can rely on is the love of your family, that they're going to help you.

I don't mean help you like provide everything that you need as an adult in order to survive. I'm just talking about help you with their support, with their love and their kindness, and maybe some wise counsel, particularly as it applies to the older members of your family. But today on Body Bags, I want to explore a case that's quite chilling because it involves a man quite literally destroyed his family and actually a person that lived right next door to him. Today, I want to talk about the bizarre case out of Oklahoma involving a man who committed a triple homicide and in addition to that, engaged in probably one of the most horrendous things that any human can engage in, cannibalism. Today, we're going to talk about homicides committed by Lawrence Anderson.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. It's a well-worn phrase, I never cease to be amazed. I just made that up, Dave Mack. Pretty impressive, actually. That is, isn't it? That just came to mind for me. Joining me is that up, Dave Mack. Pretty impressive, actually. That is, isn't it? That just came to mind for me. Joining me is my buddy, Dave Mack. He's a senior crime reporter with Crime Online. Dave, I hate to lay this one at your feet, man, but I got to tell you, I came across it and I had to discuss it here on Body Bags because from a forensic standpoint, I think that this case has a lot to reveal. And certainly, it's a peek inside of the mind of a very, very disturbed individual.

The criminally insane. It's a term we hear. I don't know if it's a real term or not. But I know that this guy is certainly a criminal. And based on his actions, past, present, and possible future, I'm thinking this guy is borderline insane in terms of the way you and I look at sanity. Because what he did, you mentioned it in the opening, was horrific and tore apart his family, his blood family, he destroyed. He was a lifelong criminal, just to get that right off the table. Do you want to get that out there as to who we're dealing with? Yeah, I think that it's important that

people understand, Dave. Absolutely. The guy we're talking about is Lawrence Paul Anderson. To give you the thumbnail sketch, Anderson has a criminal past that goes back many years. He actually got out of prison three weeks before this event took place that we're getting ready to tell you about. He's a convicted crack cocaine dealer. He has a laundry list of crimes that he has committed in his life and was in prison. He was freed when they were commuting sentences to free up room in the prisons in Oklahoma. He was actually not eligible for the commutation sentence, but it happened anyway. A grand jury investigation was called in based on what took place and confirmed that he, Anderson, should have never been released from his 20-year

drug-related sentence that he was supposed to be serving. So you've got a guy who's a career criminal, gets released from prison inadvertently, and then three weeks after walking out of prison, where he should have been for years to come, he commits this heinous, disgusting, despicable, violent crime spree on his own family and a neighbor. There was an old police officer I used to work with, and he was probably one of the best homicide detectives that I've had the privilege of being in his atmosphere. You learn a lot just through osmosis and being around them. And he had a statement. The reason it comes to mind is that we had a fellow that we worked a case that was not too dissimilar from this, where a guy came in, it was right at christmas time and the individual had essentially wiped out

his entire family with a deer rifle of all things which is not easy to accomplish because it was a bolt action weapon it wasn't a semi-automatic it was bolt actuated weapon and uh systematically went through the house and he he looked at me just for a moment he said you know what he said crazy is only as crazy as crazy is allowed to be. And I thought about that because it seemed, it sounded like something that Lewis Carroll would have written from Alice in Wonderland. Because many times as a death investigator, you have to check your own sanity because you bear witness to these things that are so horrific. And I remember being in that room at that night, and of course I'm focused on other things.

They've got multiple dead bodies in this room. And he's just kind of standing there very philosophically, taking the measure of it compared to the other things he's seen. And he had seen a lot by this time. This guy was probably at the end of probably a 25-year career by this time, and I was very young. And when I heard him say that, it took me a while to have that kind of seep into my groundwater so that I could begin to kind of understand it a little bit. And this case makes me reflective of that. just en masse, you're going to release a bunch of people back out into society and you cut them

loose on everybody else. It's a horrible thing. You begin to see this and government entities, many times it all comes down to numbers or the appearance, I think. If you say, well, I'm just going to do a mass release of people, there will be people saying, oh, well, that's kind. Our prisons are overcrowded. But it's a double-edged sword, isn't it? By doing that, you're going to release somebody like this guy on the rest of society. And I wonder retrospectively if this Governor Stitt, I think is his name, that facilitated this, that he signed off on this.

I wonder if retrospectively he's having thoughts. I wonder if retrospectively he's being haunted at night by this action that he took when that key was turned and that door was kind of opened, I guess, and this guy walked out into free air. He wound back up, like you said, in a very short period of time, back in the orbit of his family. This guy's literally got a new lease on life. He's a free man. But yet, he decides to do this, Dave. It knocks the breath out of me. It knocked the breath out of me when I read this. I couldn't believe what I was reading, actually. This guy has a history from drug distribution and possession charges, feloniously pointing a firearm, robbery, domestic abuse, and assault and battery. And that's why he was staring a 20-year sentence in prison. He actually moved into the home of his aunt and uncle. He put the address down. I said he

was living with his aunt and uncle. He put that address down as his actual physical address when he left prison, but he actually wasn't living there. He had only visited a couple of times, but was not living there at the time. He was only free for three weeks before this took place. You know, he had an involvement with drugs. He's used PCP, which is essentially a drug that's administered to animals, specifically horses, but yet it continues to populate because people have used it recreationally. And it's a very high-power drug. They say that there are residual effects from using long-term use of PCP, that it can kind

of alter brain function and can cause these psychotic breaks periodically. There's not necessarily any indication that you have to be using it. It's having been exposed to it over a period of time, and then maybe you'll have a break with reality as a result of past use. No one knows, but when you try to assess a situation from a medical standpoint, you really wonder, well, what kind of assessment? Because obviously, they didn't release everybody that was in Oklahoma State prison system. They selected these individuals. So, what was it about this individual that set him apart from everyone else? Did they have the full story from a psychological standpoint about this guy's

history? Had he been tested appropriately? It seems like that it was a rushed process and they essentially pushed him out the door. Lawrence Paul Anderson is 44 now. This happened February 9th of 2021. His aunt and uncle, Leon Pye, who was 67 at the time, and his aunt, Delcy Pye, she is now 66. And in their home that night was a four-year-old granddaughter. Police were called. They got a 911 call. There was nobody on the line.

Delcy Pye had called 911, but she couldn't get anything out. She left the phone where it did the hang up. But you know, when you call 911, if they don't get anything from you, they call back and then send somebody in route to make sure everything's okay. That evening, Lawrence Anderson had walked next door to the home of their neighbor, 41-year-old Andrea Blankenship. They didn't know this for two days, by the way. Nobody knew that Andrea Blankenship was Lawrence Anderson's first victim. He went to her home. He killed her. They found her stabbed 40 times, found her body, around her body,

bloody knives, broken box cutter, drill bits, screws, a sewing machine, and bloody tree branch. I can't actually say that in my experience, I have seen a case like this that is so over the top. I've worked dismemberments. I've even had peripheral experience with a case involving cannibalism. But the degree to which this woman, Ms. Blankenship, was traumatized in her home, you had mentioned that he came into her house. It appears that there's no real relationship between Ms. Blankenship and the perpetrator here, but we do know this. He essentially crashed through her door. Now, she would have been alerted to this. She would have had an awareness that something horrible was at her threshold because of the sounds that

were being created by him applying pressure to the door over and over and over again until the door finally gave way. It said he was bashing it with his shoulder. Yeah, just driving it into it. You can imagine someone showing up at a scene and just kind of planting and throwing their entire weight. And he's not a tiny guy. And essentially knocking it off of the hinges, probably cracking the frame. We talk about in forensics, we talk about evidence of forced entry. Well, there's different ways to kind of measure this.

And why do we do that, you know, when we're conducting an investigation? Well, it goes to demonstrate that, obviously, someone made entry through a doorway or through a window that was otherwise not open or not unlocked. So that goes to the mindset. They were determined to defeat something that was between them and the other side of the door that they wanted to get to. And it shows the level of effort that had to go into this. So when we talk about signs of forced entry at the scene, this is one of the things that we would document. We would see, for instance, if he had placed his foot against the door and begun to stomp on it, for instance, kicking it near where the key housing is there, the lock mechanism,

to try to knock it loose so that he could gain entry. You'd see a footprint on the door. We'd make a note of that. And also, if the door was fractured, say, up higher. When I talk about fracturing, I'm talking about the splintering of wood or breaking of glass at a level that would, say, for instance, be associated with a shoulder. We do know, as you had said, Dave, that he had put his shoulder into the door to break it open. So, depending upon how many times you throw your body into the door, that structure is getting weaker and weaker, and there'll be evidence of that. So, what does that say for us in court when we take that? And, you know, I've worked cases where we actually bring the door and the doorframe into the courtroom. We bring it in there to demonstrate to the members of the jury and to the judge exactly what this individual did to gain

entry into a particular space. And it goes to force, it goes to intent, all of those sorts of things. So, he was not going to allow this door to stand in between him and this victim. The bigger question, I think, is why this woman? Why this woman who lived in this house, apparently very peacefully, she's in her late 40s. Here's another thing, Dave. You talked about some of the items that they found in the house. This is what we would refer to as a frenzied killing. It's almost like he's in this heightened state of anger, for instance, where this is what would be referred to as a disordered event, where he's frenzied, he's looking for tools. You mentioned there's a bloody tree branch in here. Perhaps he utilized

the tree branch to assist him in breaking down the door. Who knows? You go to these ideas of weapons of opportunity or weapons of convenience. It's not just one knife, it's several knives and a box cutter that he's chosen. It's not like he had shown up to the scene fully prepared to do what he wound up doing to her. Just think about this, Dave. She's had 40 plus stab wounds or sharp force injuries that have been evidenced on her person at this particular time. This goes to show his desire to literally rip her to shreds, which of course he eventually does, because not only does he stab her and beat her, but after she's deceased, he takes an instrument, Dave. He opens this poor woman's chest up and removes her heart. I hate why questions.

You that have listened to this show for any reasonable amount of time have heard me state that very plainly. I hate why. Because why essentially can never be definitively answered. It's always so very subjective. We could chase that rabbit for a long, long time and still never be satisfied. What we can offer is what, when, where, how. I don't know that any of us would truly want to know why, Dave, in this circumstance. It might be all too terrifying. Sometimes when we have a horrific story like this, there isn't a why.

I think looking in it will be like chasing a dog chasing its tail. We're never going to be satisfied. The fact remains that he goes to a next door neighbor's house. He breaks the door. He goes in. He kills her. He stabs her at least 40 times. He then cuts out her heart. Then Lawrence Anderson leaves Andrea Blankenship's house and goes back across the street to the home of his aunt and uncle. He takes the heart and he goes into the kitchen and prepares it as a meal with potatoes to serve to his aunt and uncle. Obviously, he's got to be covered in blood. From the top of his head to all over his body, he would be covered with blood. It'd be up and down his arms.

Certainly, it would be on his hands. This guy was not dressed in a surgical gown. I'll put it to you that way. He wasn't doing open-heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic. He was in this woman's house. He did this, and then he presents with this organ and proceeds to prepare it. In the later report, he wanted to feed it to his family in order to release demons. That's the quote, Dave.

To release demons. I don't understand what his rationale was for this from a spiritual standpoint. I don't know what his perception was of his family. And be quite frank with you, I don't really care. But that's what he had stated was his intent here, was that he was going to prepare Andrea Blankenship's heart in his family's kitchen and then have them seated at the table, his elderly uncle and this four-year-old girl, and he was going to feed it to them. They weren't having any of it.

And so what happens at this point? Well, he begins to brutally attack them. He attacks his uncle. He kills this little four-year-old girl. And he actually attacks his aunt as well, who, as it turns out, is the only person at that moment in time that survived. What you just said even gets worse. Apparently, sometime during the process, Lawrence Anderson called a friend in Arkansas, and the man wasn't there to answer the phone. It went to his voicemail. Lawrence Anderson didn't hang it up. So on this recording of this man in Arkansas is an audio recording of what's taking place.

And on that audio recording that showed up as evidence, the recording of this little four-year-old girl screaming as she is killed. Delcey Pye said that he thought I was dead. God was with me. But you know why he thought she was dead? Lawrence Anderson had cut her. He had gouged out one of her eyes. He stabbed both eyes. She also had broken ribs, a broken tailbone.

Now, she did recover. She has sight in one eye, and she has hearing in one ear, but she is alive, and she said the only reason is because he thought I was dead. When you're looking at a suspect like this, when the police would have gotten to him, again, here's this word that I've used from time to time on body bags, he would have had commingled samples all over him. There would have been blood that would have been essentially mixed about as a result of all of this contact that he would have had. There's no evidence to demonstrate that between the time that he killed Miss Blankenship,

he went in, showered, prepared himself in any way, and then went back into the kitchen and decided to create a family meal. He would have had blood from the initial event, which, by the way, he would have tracked out of that house. It would not have surprised me if he had not dripped blood from his person, even coming back into the home of his aunt and uncle. I would be very curious to know if they found any trace elements of blood along the way, along what his potential path of entry was back into the house.

And here's another thing that goes to a what question. When you're there and you're peacefully enjoying your four-year-old and you're living in a house that is your protected space, that you find love with your family, how exactly do you react when this madman walks through the door and he's carrying a human heart? Do you even know that he has it? I mean, you can look at him and see that he has blood. Does that go to something else? Was he terrorizing them?

Look what I just did. And they were frozen in place. Had he been so violent toward them in the past? Had there been something that they knew was not quite right with him, but they dare not say a word to him for fear that they were just going to further inflame him. They sit there in total fear as he's going about this ghastly deed, preparing this heart with potatoes. Well, to what extent did he do this? Are you talking about going into the kitchen and you're preparing any other meal, you're having to cut up potatoes. And he's thinking about this thing all the way through.

What is he doing here in order to prepare a meal for the family that's going to affect this release, quote unquote, of demons from them? And is he explaining this to them while he's doing it? Why didn't they flee from the house? I think is one of the biggest questions I would have. Did they have the ability to flee from the house or were they so terrified? You know, the two elderly adults that are there, they know they've got a four-year-old that they've got to protect. They know that he's a madman. So, he comes walking in, maybe he's covered in blood and just the sight of him, you know, at that point in time, they're terrified of this guy. So they're frozen like statues.

And I am amazed, you know, when you mentioned his aunt survived, the fact that he would have stabbed her in the eye and that she survived that injury alone. And then I think that, let's see, Dave, you had mentioned that she had broken ribs. In addition to that, she had a fractured coccyx, which is actually our tailbone. If you go all the way down to the base of your spine, all the way down, that's a very difficult bone to actually break. As a matter of fact, the only way I can really imagine that bone getting broken is in a huge fall, for instance.

That does happen where people land on their backside, and I'm sure that many people have experienced the pain of that at some point in time. But most of the time, Dave, that happens as a result of direct blunt force trauma. You know what that indicates to me? That indicates to me that she was either kicked or stomped in order for that to happen. Because you would have to, and it's a very robust bone. It's not some kind of like little fragile bone. Like if you think about some of the bones in your fingers or maybe the flat bone of the temporal area of your skull, that's not the nature of the coccyx itself. It's very robust. And one of the reasons is that the way it's created is that it is protecting the very tip of your spinal cord.

So it has to be robust, right? And so the fact that it is actually fractured gives you an idea that she was probably either kicked or stomped or beaten with something really heavy. And it's an odd place for this to occur. It's not unusual also to see people that have been kicked and stomped to have fractured ribs. I've had these kinds of cases many times over the years. And so, why do you kick or stomp somebody? Well, most of the time,

this is going to be directly as a result of trying to get someone to submit. You're stomping on them. You're trying to keep them down. You're trying to pin them to the floor. It's an asymmetrical relationship where you have the dominant person that is hovering over. Remember, this guy's just gotten out of the joint. He's used to being in an environment where maybe he was not a dominant person. But he knows how to dominate. He's seen it portrayed for him in this environment. And by golly, he's going to dominate these individuals.

As a matter of fact, he's going to rip them to shreds. In most cases, we don't have someone that just out and out confesses to a crime, particularly one at this level. And it's quite shocking. It's quite shocking to hear someone make a statement. But let me just interject a quote real quick. And this is actually coming from Lawrence Paul Anderson. This was his admittance in court that he had done these horrible things. And I quote, On or about 9th day of February 2021 in Grady County, Oklahoma, I, Lawrence Paul Anderson, killed Chaos Winter Rain Yates

by stabbing her with malice of forethought and then he says i also with malice of forethought killed leon tie by stabbing him to death i lastly killed andrea lynn blankenship by stabbing her and inflicting mortal wounds with malice aforethought. And then finally, he goes on to state in this admission, also on or about the ninth day of February in 2021 in Grady County, Oklahoma, I stabbed Delise Pye with a knife with felonious intent and to cause her bodily harm. I also committed the crime of maiming with the intentional design to injure, maim, and commit maiming on the body of Delise Pye by gouging out the eye. Everything that we've talked about, as horrible as that is, what I just read, Dave, it doesn't

give you the full brunt of what he had done, but there's one image that's kind of captured in my mind. As you had so effectively mentioned earlier, when Miss Pye made that 9-11 call, the police wound up showing up at the home. When the police walked into that place, this perpetrator was repeatedly vomiting into pillows that they had there at the scene. I don't know if that's an admission of guilt per se, as the court would use as a standard. However, I think that there's obviously some kind of physiological response going on there. What do you think, Dave? I think it's exactly what you're saying. He was reacting to what he had just done and they took him to the hospital because they weren't sure what had happened he went to the hospital with

his aunt delci pie and it was at the hospital two days later he was still being treated that he admitted what had happened and by the way i killed my neighbor. And that's a big reveal, I think, for the police because they had no awareness that Ms. Blankenship was, you know, wild. Can you imagine? You show up at the scene, you see this guy throwing up into pillows and all of the sort of thing. You've got this just mayhem that they had walked into. And I really wonder when they were working the scene, if they saw evidence of a heart at the scene. And what did they make of that at that time? Did they think that the heart was perhaps from an animal? It's hard to say because when you take a look anatomically at a heart dependent upon the species, it's kind of difficult to tell the difference. Say, for instance, if you've got someone that there are people that eat the hearts of hogs,

hog anatomy from an anatomical standpoint is not going to look a lot different, say, for instance, from human. And if the heart has been dissected out, perhaps has been cut up into little bits, there's no way to really make sense of it. They had stated that he was actively cooking, so that's going to change the appearance as well. So I don't think that you can totally blame the police for not noticing this. They probably thought at that moment, Tom, that they were dealing with a family event that had occurred. Ms. Pye, she was certainly in no state to give a statement,

probably, at that time. She's literally had her eye gouged out, and she's got multiple broken bones in her body. I can't imagine she would be in any state to give them any kind of statement. What would have compelled him at that moment in time to have a clearing of his conscience. And I don't know that his conscience was necessarily cleared, but why would he just spontaneously make this admission that he had actually killed Mrs. Blankenship? I don't know that we'll ever obviously get a reason again that goes back to the why. We'll never understand why in this case, Dave. I do know this. I know that this is a case that is going to mark this little community for generations to come.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.