Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Layers of Evidence Paint, Blood, and a Courtroom Drama

Episode Date: December 17, 2023

In a chilling twist of events, Annamarie Cochrane Rintala is found dead, her stiff body soaked in both paint and blood. The spouse, Cara Rintala, finds herself in a situation that marks a legal first in Massachusetts—a woman charged with the murder of her wife. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack delve into the perplexing nature of the evidence, from the viscosity of paint and blood to the subtleties of rigor mortis. Morgan discusses the troubling aspects of multiple trials and the contentious role of so-called experts in courtroom drama. The hosts also scrutinize the telltale signs of asphyxial death and the importance of scientific validation in legal cases. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Time-coded Highlights: 00:00:00 — Joseph Scott Morgan starts by revealing his love for art and its connection to forensic science. He even touches on its relevance in motor vehicle accidents. 00:02:41 — Morgan mentions that the accused is facing trial for an unprecedented fourth time.  00:03:22 — Dave Mack announces the historical context; it’s the first case in Massachusetts where a wife is charged with murdering her wife. 00:04:31 — Mack offers a rundown on the turbulent relationship between Annamarie Cochrane Rintala and Cara Rintala, including debt, jealousy, and exhausting work hours. He describes the crime scene, which is filled with a mixture of paint and blood. 00:06:43 — Morgan delves into the injuries typically seen in cases involving falls, contrasting them with the injuries sustained by the victim, Annamarie. 00:08:59 — Highlighting the unexpected detail of the victim's body being soaked in paint, Joe Scott navigates through the signs of death, focusing on the rigidity of Annamarie's body. 00:13:05 — Likening the process of rigor mortis to post-workout stiffness, Morgan provides a relatable touch to a grim subject. He elaborates on how heat affects rigor mortis, introducing elements like metabolic activity into the equation. 00:15:44 — Morgan provides insight into the informative value of a deceased person's hand position. 00:18:50 — Morgan reiterates the necessity of considering various elements for a comprehensive death investigation. 00:19:53 — Mack stresses the role of first responders in observing and documenting vital details like blood and bruises. Morgan describes how bruises can remain on a body, offering clues into the timeline of a death. 00:28:40 — The conversation pivots to discuss the speculative act of deliberately pouring paint on Annamarie, emphasizing the need to examine her clothing for more clues. 00:29:40 — Joseph Scott Morgan draws parallels between this case and the Caylee Anthony homicide, highlighting the use of questionable scientific methods in court. 00:32:38 — Dave Mack and Joe Scott Morgan discuss the implications of the cause of death being strangulation, and what signs to look for. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I make it a practice, my wife and I do at least, when we can save our pennies enough. And we go, trust me, before I say this, I want you to think I'm some kind of rich guy, because I ain't. We save our pennies and pack a backpack, both of us, and we hop on the cheapest flight we can find, and we go to Great Britain. And we've done this a couple of times and stay very very cheap. Don't stay in fancy hotels. Hey if you're in America you can always stay in some big chain right? So we try to stay in you know in hostels for families or maybe in an

inn that's outside of town and take public transit in. And one of the things that we are prone to do while we're overseas is go visit art museums. Probably one of the things that we were prone to do while we're overseas is go visit art museums. Probably one of the most fantastic experiences I've ever had was the National Museum in London. Some of the most beautiful artistry I've ever seen. And also, particularly in Cardiff, Wales, went down there and went to the National Art Museum. And they had beautiful Monet paintings. And they're all originals there. And you walk through these things and just, all originals there and you walk

through these things and just I don't know you just stare at them for hours and the old portraits too the ones that go back hundreds and hundreds of years and it's amazing what an artist can do with paint it certainly is now in forensics we study paint we study paint as it applies to motor vehicle accidents because you know you might not know this, but when a person gets hit by a car and it's a hit and run, sometimes the car will deposit paint on the deceased body. Today, I'm going to chat with you guys about a case that involves paint, but it involves paint in a manner in which I have never experienced in all of my years as a

medical legal death investigator. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Dave Mack, good to be back with you, my friend. I have to tell you, I came across this case because actually I've had two television channels that networks that have wanted me to cover it. And I was not aware of it. There's so many things that come across my desk in media. And there are these things get put up on the shelf in my brain somewhere. I don't know where I just I forget about them. I didn't remember hearing about this case. But what caught my attention about this case is that this is actually involving a person, and dig this, man, that's going up on trial for not one, not the second time, but not the third time, but the fourth time. You talk about an outlier. This is just not something you commonly see.

Doesn't happen like this. The bottom line, always the bottom line. Why are there four trials? You always can have one. You appeal there four trials? You always can have one. You appeal it. There was a problem with this or that piece of evidence. But in this particular case, there was actually a conviction at trial that was overthrown by the state Supreme Judicial Court over erroneous evidence, which plays into your paint discussion earlier. This case also, Joe, it's the first time in Massachusetts where a wife has been charged with the death of their wife. First time for everything.

This is the first time this has happened. And to be honest with you, when you read all the reports of this couple that we're dealing with today, golly gee whiz, beef, sounds like just about every other married couple that ends up fighting over money and jealousy and childcare care, the normal aggravations of everyone else. So the one thing that makes it different actually makes them the same as everybody else.

It's funny how that works. Yeah, it is. And I think that that applies to relationships across the board. When you have two people that are in an intimate relationship, they're sharing. Look, they're sharing life. They're in a intimate relationship. They're sharing, look, they're sharing life. They're in a household together. You've got all of the stressors on you that happen to everybody. So nothing should set them apart. I would assume that from a news media standpoint, this is something that the news media

would latch onto. But at the end of the day, you got two human beings and we're flawed and we're prone to violence. I mean, we truly are. That's it as a bottom line. We all have our measures of it. You can push us to limits. You can get crossways with people, as they say. And in this case, this has apparently happened. And that's what happened in the couplehood of Anna Marie Cochran Rintala and her wife,

Kara Rintala. They had been together for several years before they actually got married. They got married in 2007. They adopted a girl, a toddler or baby at the time, Brianna. But this was a very volatile couple, Joe Scott. There was a lot of jealousy. There were a lot of interpersonal relationship issues, a lot of debt. They worked long hours, very stressful. And both of them, when you get down to the nitty gritty of what actually transpired and why we are now heading into a fourth trial, two hung juries, one conviction on erroneous evidence or the judge determined to be bad evidence. And now a fourth time. Let me give you the description. Let's just start there. Here's the description from the one on trial versus Anna Maria is the

victim. Kara is the accused. Kara claims that she and Brianna went out to run some errands during the course of the day. They've been gone for several hours. They get home around seven o'clock at night. When they arrive in the house, Brianna at this time is a toddler. She's got her in her arms. They've got some bags. She sets the bags down, but she sees our door is open towards the basement. Down the stairs, she sees Anna Marie's feet. She doesn't see her whole body. She sees her feet. That's enough for Kara to grab Brianna and the dog and go next door and say, hey, would you mind watching Brianna and our dog for a little while? And by the way, call 911 and send them to my house right now. She's doing all this based on nothing but seeing her wife's feet from the top of the stairs.

She's at the top of the stairs. Her wife is at the bottom in the basement. All she sees are her feet. They're laying down. When police arrived, Joe Scott Morgan, the description given by first responders, when they arrived at the house, they walked downstairs to the basement and they were confronted with a bizarre scene. Anna Marie is laying face up across the lap of Kara in the basement and there's paint and blood everywhere. They said that it was the weirdest

scene because there's paint, blood, and the wailing woman on the concrete floor cradling her wife's corpse. Yeah, that's kind of amazing. I've had cases over the course of my career, Dave, where you have individuals that fall down sets of staircases. And you do have multiple trauma. But here's the rub. Your body is interacting with the forces of gravity as you are being pulled down the staircase by gravity. You're free falling and you don't impact many times deep.

Now, listen, taller or the longer the staircase, the bigger the opportunity is that you're going to hammer into multiple points of contact. But with most homes, it essentially ascends to the floor above and you're not going to do much more. I don't think that these people lived in some grand palace where there's a main staircase that leads down to the basement where you're falling upon foot and rolling over like some kind of movie set. So what you would expect to see are like perhaps some bruising and it will be specifically concentrated on the body in particular areas. Remember, I use the term concentrated. You're not a large contusion on the back of your head. You can bust your chin, for instance. You can bruise your shoulder, your hip, a knee, perhaps. You can go into the wall and fracture a rib. Maybe you hit the handrail. That's going to be the extent. Dave, from my understanding, this victim had in excess of 20 different bruises on her body. And you know what? That doesn't even account for

the trauma that she sustained to both her scalp and her neck. And let me tell you something, when you take a fall and you're looking at blunt force trauma in areas of impact, the neck is not the first place you look. You know, Dave, as I'd mentioned earlier in our conversation here, I don't recall ever working a case where a body is just super saturated in paint like being put forward here. But there was something else that kind of caught my eye with this case. that as this victim is being cradled in the lap of her wife, the first responders noted that the body was rigid and stiff. What's really intriguing is that you're talking about an EMT, Dave. EMTs roll out on cases all the time. They roll out on cases where people have been found dead, and then they call the medical examiner after the EMT has been there. And one of the things that you assess in death, there are what are referred to as the cardinal signs of death. And one of the cardinal signs of death, I mean, you have non-responsiveness to painful

stimuli, signs obviously of decomposition. But one of the things that you look for as one of the cardinal signs is rigidity. Rigidity, development of postmortem lividity, the settling of blood, cool to the touch, that sort of thing. And here, oh, my gosh, this is glaring. I mean, I can only imagine what was going through maybe the EMT's minds if they know this person that is an EMT and they're thinking, how long have you been here? That was the first thing they all were going, wait a minute, they know who they're dealing with.

These women were involved as paramedics locally. That's a pretty close-knit group from one group to the next. They do talk and they know one another. They're like cops, actually. You do, but you cannot really get into their world because of the things they see. And God bless paramedics. I love them. I've had them save my life, but they are, no one can really identify with the world that they indwell. It's a different kind of life. And that's where this comes from because they were shocked. I had a question for you and I wanted, let me just share so everybody understands what they saw when you mentioned the rigidity. Okay. When they get

down, they see the victim, Anna Marie, her lifeless body face up across Kara's lap. Kara's hysterical. She's going overboard here. And Anna Marie's eyes were open. Her arms were locked in a quote unquote hands up position. position and her body was so stiff that it took two first responders to pry her off her hysterical wife. Here's what they actually said, though. Direct quote now. Her entire body moved as one unit like a board. You would call this rigor mortis. I've always heard it called rigor mortis. What is the difference? Is there? There's not. It's just a matter of how you pronounce it. Rigor, rigor, tomato, tomato.

And it all depends on where you were trained. How long does it take for rigor mortis to set in like this? It's a gradual event. And let me dispel a few rumors here. When you begin to think about rigidity in a body, people will say, well, it starts in the small muscles of the face and then kind of proceeds outward. That's not the case. It starts in all the muscle groups at one time. You just first appreciate it in the tiny muscles. So folks may not have heard about this before, but you know, you can get rigidity in the muscles of the eyelids. It happens in the jaw, facial muscles, and then it kind of extends out. You'll get it in the muscles of the eyelids. It happens in the jaw, facial muscles, and then it kind of extends out. You'll get it in the shoulders, elbows, fingers. One of the bigger

groups of muscles that it is last appreciated in are going to be kind of these real robust muscles that you have in the upper leg, like your quads and your buttocks and that sort of thing. So it's taking time to happen. And the process that it's going through is, I won't get too far off into the weeds and get too sciencey with you, but in life, we have this cycle that we study in school that's referred to as the Krebs cycle. And it's cellular respiration is essentially what it is. And just keep in mind that as the Krebs cycle spins, it creates these little balls of energy called ATP. Well, when it ceases, you begin to create ADP and ADP produces something that everybody's familiar with. As a matter of fact, let me ask you this question. If you haven't, Dave, if you haven't worked out in a while

and you decide you're going to go get on the bench press or whatever, and maybe you're going to do kettlebells and you begin lifting and man, you really put yourself through a workout other than close to death. How are you going to feel the next morning? You're going to be stiff and sore and know that you did it. Will Tylenol help you? It probably will, but you know what will happen even without the Tylenol? It will begin to recede. And the reason it recedes is that you have what's referred to as lactic acid buildup. This is as close as you will ever feel in life as to what it feels like when rigor mortis sets into a body. Now, you can tear a muscle, and that's something different, but I'm just talking about the stiffness in the joints. That's lactic acid.

But the difference between us and the dead is that we still have metabolic activity going on. So we can process that lactic acid. They can't. Their bodies can't. It has to dissipate over a period of time. And that's how we measure rigidity. So within about an hour to four hours deep, and there are some factors here, you will begin to see some stiffening, but it will not be fully developed. You're still looking

at a window, and none of the science is perfectly exact, and I can see how this might be trouble for them in court, but you're looking at a window of maybe, and this is very broad, sometimes six to 12 hours before you have full development. Some people will push it even further out. A lot of it is dependent upon environmental temperature and then what's going on internally with the person. Heat speeds up the reaction. So the hotter it is, the higher the chance that rigidity will set in. As a matter of fact, if you have a guy, say, for instance, that is running from the police and he's got meth on board and the police shoot him and kill him on the spot, rigidity will set in quicker with that guy as opposed to a grandma who's essentially in stasis that's

been laying in the bed, dies overnight in her sleep. It's cool to the touch when you touch her, but her limbs are still flaccid because she doesn't have the same level of metabolic activity. And so that's one of the little cues along the way that we look for to kind of gauge. And I can only imagine when these folks looked at this body being cradled by this person and what was kind of fascinating, the way they describe it is they say she was in a hands up position. Now, hands up means that maybe I'm surrendering, maybe worshiping God, whatever the case might be, but your hands are up. It's not extended. They're up above the head.

You know what that tells me, Dave? That when you see that position in a body and the hands are up above the head, one of two things happened. Either that person died flat on their back with their hands above their head already, or they were face down, hands extended out in front of them, and they were being choked from the rear. So you could perhaps be choked from the front or choked from the rear, but your arms are up and extended. OK, and her body, according to Kara, that her body was laying flat face down and that Kara claims that when she saw Anna Marie, that she went down to cradle her body and she turned her over. And that's how she was face up. But I've seen people love on somebody who had passed away in the moments right after. That's a given. You care about them deeply.

You know they're gone, but you just can't let go yet. I have never seen anybody cradle a stiff corpse. It's like a mannequin. I've never seen anybody that loves somebody that would want that attachment because we all want the attachment to their life. And that just shocks me right there. The hands up. That's another one. But she's so stiff that they're moving her like a cartoon. And I'm thinking, how did she get her turned over? Because according to the reports from police,

Anna Marie was well over 200 pounds. She was not a small lady. And it took two men, two grown men to get Anna Marie's body off of Kara. Yeah, it did. And here's another piece. When the EMTs, the first responders actually, are doing their assessment, they mentioned that they had to go through several steps in order to what we refer to in the morgue as breaking rigor, which means that you have to fight against the rigidity in order to loosen up the joints so that you can assess them. You know, maybe they think that she's had a seizure. I don't know. I can't imagine as a practitioner,

an EMS practitioner, what you're thinking because, you know, your job is to save life. So you're looking for a place you can put in an IV line. You're trying to assess if there's any kind of trauma that you can kind of stem bleeding from. You're looking to try to stabilize them. Look, you've got a person that is apparently found deceased at the bottom of a staircase. And one of the things that really stands out is when you think about this, you're thinking about a cerebral spinal injury. So they're taught from Jump Street, hey, look, you've got to stabilize that neck. You've got to do whatever you can. And so they're going through all of these calculations in their mind. But then at some point in time, they have this reality check where they look and they say, she's literally stiff as a board. In a death investigation, it is not that one thing. It is the sum total of all things considered that you discover at a scene, back at the morgue,

through interview of subjects and for the police interrogation, it's that sum total. But in the world of science that myself and my colleagues inhabit, we're trying to determine, Dave, what is it that the body can tell us about what has happened? And one of the biggest questions that you always get when you go out to the scene as a medical legal death investigator from police officers, they'll look at us and they'll say, how long? Because if they can establish how long relative to when life ceased, that is the beginning of the trail for them to establish a timeline. Hey, there's even a show out there that's named 48 Hours. It's one of the most popular television shows anywhere. And there's a reason 48 Hours is very important. And in my world, it's certainly important. Time is the

currency in which we work in. All right, Joe, when they got there, when first responders got there, once they realized that the person is dead, they're making mental notes about everything there, all the paint and blood. I was looking over that because they were trying to determine where the blood was coming from. Right. And they noticed the bruises. And I got a question about the bruises too, but they noticed a number of lacerations on her scalp and blood coming from those, I guess, but does a lot of blood come that way and would it mix with the paint? But other than that, the bruises, how long does it take for bruises to show up on a body if the person's dead? Oh, wow. Yeah, that's a fascinating question. And bruises, first off, let me kind of dispel this. Dead bodies don't bruise. So any kind of contusion, which is a fancy word for a bruise, a contusion, it has to

arise in an anti-mortem state. That means before death. And so if you've got a fight that's going on, when an individual is sustaining blunt force trauma, because that's where bruises come from, bruises result from the impact of being struck by something. It can be a baseball bat, it can be in a car accident, or it can be a fist or a foot or a headbutt. When that impact occurs, those little capillary beds just beneath the skin are being ruptured, plain and simple. That's what's happening.

But you're not breaking skin with a bruise. As they're being ruptured, the blood seeps out into what's referred to as the interstitial tissue. And so that's those areas that surround the vessels. And that's what creates the bruise. Well, as you know, as any person in the sound of my voice knows, once you have a bruise, it changes color over a period of time. And that's another way that we try to tell the history or tell the story of what happened. So if you've got a bruise that is red, that means that that's an immediate event. Once it goes from black to blue or blue to black, then you're talking about maybe a day up to four days. And then it goes, I think, I know I'm going to get this wrong.

Then it goes to green. Then it gets to that nasty yellow color that we all see. And then it's gone. And actually, this is one of the things we use when we're trying to assess child abuse cases, because you can have these different colors all over the bodies. And so contusions are very important as to what we do. But once that contusion is there, and it can be just immediately prior to death, it's going to be there. There's no eradicating it. Even when a body is prepared

at the mortuary, the bruise doesn't go away. They have to put makeup over it because they're infusing the vessels. They're not infusing the interstitial tissue. So you have to cover it with makeup or whatever it is that the morticians do. So that's very important. And for every contusion that you have, there is a physical explanation as to why it arose. And that means that that's a direct result of impact. Now, you mentioned that there were lacerations that were on the head. Now, lacerations also come about as a result of blunt force trauma. It's just that there's more force required. My path parts from my friends in therapeutic medicine in this area. They will refer commonly, particularly in the emergency room,

don't be mad at me for saying this, they refer to everything as a laceration and everything is not a laceration. For us, we have lacerations. Those arise from blunt force trauma and then you have sharp force injuries, which are incised areas. Blunt force trauma generates laceration. So one of the things you look for is something called tissue bridging. And they're irregular. They're very jagged. Think Frankenstein.

And so if you're struck in the head and it creates this jagged injury, when you see that gaping wound, you know that it's not an incised area because a milled blade hasn't been taken to it. You've got these little bits of tissue. If you've ever handled something like a piece of meat or something that you're eating and you pull it apart, the tissue gets real stringy. It's the same principle with a laceration. I'll have these real, they're called tissue bridges. And you can differentiate between an incised area and a laceration because it's still connected. It's not a clean slice. And you've got multiple of these. But for every laceration, every contusion,

you have to have a point of impact. They don't just magically appear. The wind doesn't create them. So it has to be a strike. It has to be a fall. And you're kind of limited if you're talking about all of these injuries, which there were a plethora of them all over her. If you're kind of limited if you're talking about all of these injuries, which there were a plethora of them all over her. If you're trying to say that this was merely caused by a fall from even the top end of the staircase, maybe if she fell down 200 steps, you might have a chance at seeing a contusion on multiple areas of the body, but just leading down to the basement, it's a horrible thing to happen. I've fallen downstairs. You've probably fallen downstairs, Dave, but you're not going to generate this number of injuries without a direct strike.

I have fallen down basement stairs, but you tend to slip on those. As an adult, we don't go end over end. Children do that, but as adults, we tend to slip, and our our feet go out and we go on our butt all the way down. And that hurts. But I know that I've been accused of sitting on my brain sometimes, but very rarely have I landed on my butt and torn a hole in my head. Got other things we've got to get to on this because we've got paint everywhere. And by the way, all the bruising, all the contusions, all the blood, none of that had anything to do with the cause of death.

Joe, you have got blood everywhere and paint. Why are we having paint and blood together? I'm really confused here. Can paramedics, do they know how to set up a crime scene so that it looks like somebody fell down the stairs? Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. I mean, could a paramedic come up with this as a reasonable idea? Because, well, by the way, need to throw this out there.

Kara, while the first responders are there, suggests that Anna Marie has fallen down the stairs. But while they're still cleaning the body, I know I'm the first suspect. Well, falling down the stairs is not a crime. So you would not be a suspect in that. So throwing out the idea that it's a criminal act when you just said she fell down the stairs. And again, remember her story. She had been gone all day, comes home with their toddler, Brianna. At the bottom of the stairs, she sees Anna Marie feet laying in the

basement in paint and leaves on that note. That's what we know. That's what she said. But then the crime scene itself, the body itself, Joe, you've already told us all the things that have happened with that body. The fact that Riker Mortis has not just sat in, but she's fixed like a board. And we've got 23 bruises. We've got lacerations of the head, which pointed out, by the way, I didn't know that about it. I really did think that when they said laceration, I kind of thought it was like a cut with a knife.

Not in the medical legal sense. So I always take exception with that. I try not to be a know-it-all, but if somebody says laceration and it's a cut, no, that's not a laceration. So you're looking at this crime scene, Joe, what is sticking out to you on the body? What is sticking out to you there with the paint? Do you see these all as factors working towards the death of Anna Marie? I think a lot of it would have to be kind of like bloodstain pattern analysis to a certain degree. Blood is viscous. It's thicker than water. We've heard that term before, haven't we? But in the literal sense, that's why they say that. It is thicker than water. It's more viscous. Paint is even more viscous than blood. So my understanding is that there was an open paint container down there.

Five gallon. It was a five gallon container. Yeah, a five gallon one. And so if what you're putting forth to me is that she falls while toting this five-gallon container, you're going to have a very dynamic event dependent upon if you can figure out where the paint can or paint container actually strikes first. And if it is kind of spinning in the air and it's kind of literally, you know, we use this term in bloodstain analysis called cast-off, where you have blood issuing off the tip of a blade or a bludgeon or something like that. We actually refer

to it as painting the walls of blood. Is it that kind of dynamic thing, or is the dynamicism of the blood limited to kind of a slow pour? And that can be assessed, because if you have blood that is thrown off of a bludgeon, it's going to have kind of an arcing appearance to it. Some of it will be the droplets will be very fine and the higher the velocity, the finer the drops. But with this, if you're talking about paint, let's just say, for instance, someone did take paint and dump it on her body, literally pouring it on her body. The dynamics of the flow, the pour, if you will, would need to be examined. I'm really wondering if they've done that.

And given the fact that she is literally covered in paint, I'd like to know how closely the clothing was examined by the criminalist back at the crime lab. Now, her body would have been transported from the scene to the ME's office. And once she had gotten to the ME's office, she would have been undressed. It's not like, hey, take these clothes and throw them in the washing machine. We're going to get the paint out. No, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what's happening. Those clothes individually, we're talking about shirt, panties, bra, socks, pants, shoes, individually packaged and taken to the crime lab for them to analyze.

And if a bloodstained person could come in and analyze that paint and give us an idea about the dynamics of the spreading of the paint over the body, that would be a fascinating issue with this. But one of the things I think, the third trial, which was mind-blowing to me, the prosecution actually brought in somebody that they claimed was an expert in determining at what rate paint dries. And this smacked of, I just have to say this, the Kaylee Anthony homicide case. And this is why. Because they brought in this fellow who testified to the smell of human decomposition. And that so-called science was thrown out the door.

And in this case, this has been overturned because the appellate court ruled that there's not enough science to back this up. You have to be able to test this thing outside the court. You know, how much, how many papers have been written about this? Is it scientifically valid in this particular case? They couldn't validate it. And that's the reason the third time they didn't get a conviction. Well, they got a conviction, but it was overturned based upon this one expert that came in to testify about the drying rates of paint. And what was fascinating to me, Joe, about the paint, just throwing this out there, because I actually went through this once, getting white paint. Sometimes when you put

white paint on a wall or a ceiling in particular, it has a pink tint to it. And the reason for that is because if you're painting a room white and you're painting on top of white, you don't know where you've been. And so it comes out of the can. It's kind of pink when you're putting it on the wall, but it dries white. And that was one of the things here because you're going, well, there is either so much blood that it tinted the paint red or it had been spilled recently to cover up a scene and it was still pink. An amazing thing. But you go, you're right about how jacked up it was when you don't have the science

backing you up and you come up with an idea. You and I could have formulated a better opinion, Joe. I think so, Dave. And the real interesting thing about this, the blood evidence that they had, they had a couple of spots that they could not necessarily tie back to the victim. And so you've got this commingling of this paint and it puts forth quite the conundrum. If you've got blood, human blood that is in fact commingled with paint, how can you go about and separate that? And does it compromise the integrity? Those things that we would use to identify the blood and then type the blood and even do a DNA analysis of the blood. We know that she has got fatal injuries and this is the way the ME had ruled. And this is what really kind of brings this home to me. She's got petechiae, which means that the little vessels in her eyes,

maybe around her lips and in her nose even, have burst. And that's because of this kind of facial pressure in the blood vessels. And they have exploded. And so that's when we see this. And that, again, is another facet. You don't get this from falling down a staircase. That's what I was going to ask you, Joe. What does the blood mean if the cause of death is strangulation? What do the bruises mean

if the cause of death is strangulation? If the cause of death is strangulation, then she could have been playing in a football game that afternoon without a helmet and gotten bruised and bloody and then came home. If none of that matters, strangulation is the cause. What are you going to find on her neck if it is manual strangulation? What are you going to see? Well, externally, you're going to see marks and they will come up as contused areas because it's not like a direct, like if you think about someone taking their hand and punching soft tissue, like punching somebody in the chest or on the arm, it's kind of a slow burn with direct pressure applied to the neck. You'll see these red areas around the neck. It's a lot more pronounced when you have a ligature, like a rope that's around the neck, but you can still see it with hands.

And where it's most mind-blowing is when you get into the neck dissection. In the morgue, we call it reflection of the neck. So the neck, the tissue of the neck, the external tissue, the skin, if you will, is literally flipped back. And we can see all of the muscles in the neck. And you look for what are referred to, these kind of interlaced muscles on the front part of the neck called strap muscles. That's what perpetrators go after. And they run on either side of our trachea. And as they squeeze down on the trachea, they're also applying pressure to the strap muscles and they get hemorrhage in them. And you don't get that from somebody falling on a staircase. You could maybe fall from a height and your point of impact would be your neck onto an iron bar. And in the old days when they had gigantic steering wheels in cars before restraints, I've seen them where I've actually seen one hyoid bone fractured from striking a steering wheel on a gigantic Pontiac sedan.

That's the only way you're going to get this other than manual strangulation. You've got this entire like cacophony of injuries on this woman's body. And it seems as though they had enough data to convince a jury with. They decided to go down this rabbit hole with the trying of paint. And I just I don't intellectually, I don't understand the value in that is what it comes down to. It sounds to me like the defense did a good job of confusing the prosecution. And I'm not being a lawyer here. If the cause of death is strangulation, why are we worrying about anything else? I really, I have no idea, but suffice it to say that Kara Rintala is currently on trial for a fourth time. And like in all cases, she is innocent until proven guilty. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. is body bags.

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