Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Love Turned Lethal, Buried Alive

Episode Date: September 3, 2023

1-year-old Jasmeen Kaur is stalked and abducted from her workplace, subdued and placed into the boot of a car, transported along gravel roads to an isolated area, and buried alive by her ex-boyfriend, Tarikjot Singh. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack unravel the harrowing story of Jasmeen Kaur, a young nursing student, whose body is found in a shallow grave in South Australia's Flinders Ranges. Delving deep into the chilling facts, they highlight the disturbing acts leading to the crime captured by CCTV, the terror and uncertainty experienced by Jasmeen, and the signs of her desperate struggle while entombed. As they navigate the dark labyrinth of abusive relationships, police involvement, and the physical and psychological traumas endured by the victim, Joe Scott and Dave underscore the grave importance of recognizing and addressing signs of domestic violence. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Time-codes: [00:00:20] Joseph Scott Morgan opens the episode with a narrative about the importance of breath and introduces the topic of the episode, the horrific case of Jasmeen Kaur, a young woman who was buried alive. [00:01:32] - Joe Scott Morgan and Dave Mack elaborate on the eerie sensation of breathlessness, linking it to Jasmeen's case. [00:02:08] - Dave Mack dives into Jasmeen's background, her relationship withTarikjot  Singh, his descent into obsession, and the complaint against Singh for stalking her, which led to a police warning. [00:05:12] - Mack postulates on how police intervention might have aggravated Singh, precipitating Jasmeen's abduction.  [00:07:20] -The chilling recount of Singh's audacious kidnapping of Jasmeen weeks after the police complaint, including the CCTV footage and the haunting sequences leading to the crime. [00:09:00] - A grave discussion on the sheer horror of the act of burying someone alive. Joe Scott Morgan touches upon Jasmeen's deep understanding of breath, drawing from her career as a caretaker.    [00:10:15] - An intriguing detour by Morgan about Australia's distinct geography with a description of the soil and terrain where the crime took place, and speculation on Kaur’s experience as she lay buried alive. [00:13:00] - Exploration of the physical bindings that added to Jasmeen's torment, the jarring journey she endured before the crime, and the fear she would have felt during her transport to the burial location. [00:17:29] - The hosts discuss the nonsensical theory of Jasmeen committing suicide and subsequently burying herself, and provide insight into the victim's relationship with Tarikjot Singh, the man who traumatized her and eventually caused her death. [00:19:40] - Joseph Scott Morgan explains the superficial cut on Jasmeen's throat, provides details about her's burial, discusses the crime scene, and explains how the location of the grave was discovered.  [00:24:34] - Dave Mack seeks insights into Jasmeen's agonizing physical experience during her burial. Morgan underscores the irrefutable proof of Jasmeen's struggle, revealed through the presence of dirt in her respiratory system.  [00:29:06] - Updates on Singh's legal situation are shared, followed by a call for awareness and action against domestic violence. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Take a moment. Take a deep breath through your nose. Let that breath out. A breath is something that most of us just take for granted. It's a wondrous thing. The ability to process oxygen.

The ability to derive life from our environment just by simply breathing in and breathing out. That mechanism, that marvelous mechanism, that thing that is occurring at a molecular level within our lungs to keep us sustained. Now imagine just for a moment that breath perhaps you've taken for granted your entire life. That ability to take in that which keeps us going is suddenly, as we say in the South, cut off. Today, we're going to talk about arguably one of the most horrific ways to die. We're going to talk about a young woman who was buried alive. Yasmeen Carr was being stalked, and just one month after reporting it to police, Carr was abducted and killed.

Australian police say Carr was bound with tape and cable ties, blindfolded, and superficial, non-life-threatening cuts were made to her throat. She was then buried alive. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Dave Mack, have you ever been punched in the gut and have what they say had the wind knocked out of you? I think it's happened to everybody. Maybe you fall on your back. Suddenly that breath is gone.

And you get just for a moment, you get that sense of what it would be like to not be able to catch your breath. And I think that all of us can understand that horrific terror that kind of grips us. But, you know, the thing about it, getting your breath knocked out, for most of us, it's going to return. But in this particular case today, it didn't. You have a young couple, Jasmine Kaur and her ex-boyfriend. He is one of these guys that if I can't have you, nobody will. And so when Jasmine Corr broke up with Tariq Jat Singh, he didn't take it well. As a matter of fact, he was so bad about the breakup that he was following her around. He was really creepy stalking. We don't know the depth of stalking that went into it, but it is a proper term to the point where Jasmine Corr at 21 years old, this is a woman that works at a home for the aged heart of gold. Everybody loves her. And this guy is terrorizing her.

So she finally goes to the police, filed a complaint detailing all of the things her ex-boyfriend, Mr. Singh, had been doing to her. And it was enough. It was enough that police went out and warned him about stalking her. I just want to bring this to the surface. How many of these cases, and I want to qualify this by saying our case today, it hit the international wires, and of course, it made it here to America. This just has really occurred very recently. And it was such a horrific case that it kind of caught the

attention of everybody around the world. There's something about this behavior that Singh displayed that knows no geographic boundaries. Think about how many cases over the years that you've covered and that I've covered where we hear this same old refrain, where you've got this terrified young woman who has been in a relationship and maybe not even in a relationship. It's a matter of perception on the part of some psychopath out there that thinks they're in a relationship, it's a matter of perception on the part of some psychopath out there that thinks they're in a relationship. You do everything that you possibly can do. You go to your family and say, hey, look, this guy won't leave me alone. What do I do? Well, honey, the next thing we're

going to do is we're going to go to the police, to the local constabulary, and we're going to ask them, you know, what do we do? Or to the local prosecutor, what do we do? Well, the best we can do is get a restraining order. And of course, in this case, it just, you know, it just didn't, it fell flat. More than fell flat, I think it actually pushed Tariq Jat Singh over the cliff. I mentioned that Jasmine Kaur, 21, Tariq Jat Singh, 21. We've got two young people that have been involved in a relationship that finally got to the point where she said, enough's enough. I can't handle you.

Let's break up. Time to see other people. It's not you. It's me. He didn't take it. He's terrorizing her to the point where she goes to the police. When the police talked to him was lighting the fuse. That's all I could think of because what happened next, Tariq Jat Singh made a plan. I don't know the amount of time he spent planning it. I don't know. But there was enough. And we have the CCTV cameras to actually track what he did, where he went, and all the things leading up to abducting this woman he said he loved. Think about that.

All of these horrible things that are about to happen, this guy claimed he loved her. That's the thing about this. How do you express love? It's often said that love and hatred are just different sides of the same coin. But that doesn't quite get it, does it? You look at Yasmeen's parents. You look at those that loved her. You look at those that looked to her for comfort. You talked about the agent that she was taking care of. That doesn't quite cut it, does it? That's not enough to, I don't know, find some kind of comfort in, some kind of understanding in because at the end of the day she's at the total and complete mercy of someone who turns out to be a complete monster in this particular case i'm wondering

what she was going through at the moment she sees him because she has gone to the police she has reported it she has given them enough information and evidence that they agree with her. They're going to put a stop to him. She does all the right things. And here he is showing up just a couple of weeks. We're talking a very short period of time between the time that she reports him to police and he shows up at her place of work and kidnaps her. Based on some of the video evidence we have, we see Singh driving around town and heading out of town, but we see him in the driver's seat, but there's nobody in the passenger seat, and it appears that there's nobody in the back seat. So what the thought is,

is that Singh kidnaps the woman he loves, Yasmeen, and he ties her hands with cable. He uses duct tape and he, I think, put her in the trunk of the car. They're not even sure, but he blindfolded her, handcuffed her, taped her up, put her in the car and took off. And she has no idea what's going to happen next. As I mentioned, the CCTV cameras showed everything. They showed him actually going to the store and buying the materials he would need, including a shovel. They show him driving around town where you only see him in the driver's seat and nobody else. And then, of course, we know he drives out into the middle of nowhere. I don't know if he dug the hole before that he kidnapped her or after she was

there. I don't know if he removed the blindfold to let her see the hole. I don't know. None of us know. We do know that she had to have been terrorized at a level in depth that one can never, you don't even want to imagine. Worse than everything else, Joseph Scott Morgan, after kidnapping, traveling around, blindfolding, and taping her all up, this 21-year-old man takes the love of his life and throws her in the hole and buries her while she's still alive. And she would have known what was coming, Dave. And here's the rub.

You had mentioned earlier that she was a caretaker for the agent. She knows the value of breath. She understands the physiology behind what goes into providing oxygen. She would have placed, probably gently, a cannula in somebody's nose that had COPD or some kind of breathing condition, she would have known the level, the rate at which oxygen is forced through that cannula. But yet for her, it ended in a very dark, isolated place, and there was no one to hear her cries for help. I'd like to say that Australia has always been a place that I have dreamt of going.

I'm terrified of the plane flight. It's not that flight terrifies me. It's the pain associated with it, having to sit there for so long. But to behold what is down under, to see that country down there, I've always wanted to go. In particular, the interior, many people talk about going to the coast, and I know that it's quite beautiful. I've often wondered about the nature of things there, both literally and figuratively, what it looks like. Almost, you know, you see these images, the interior with that dark red clay-like sandy soil that they have that seems like permeates everything. I've seen the images of Ayers Rock and these locations. But where Singh took Yasmin is a place called the Flinders Ranges. F-L-I-N-D-E-R-S, not Flanders, but Flinders Ranges. And it is truly an isolated location.

And when they say ranges, there's actually a small mountain range that runs through there and one of the highest peaks in the country called St. Mary's. When you see it, it looks similar to our desert southwest, only a bit more colorful. But the soil itself looks compressed, compacted, if you will, and red. And I can just imagine that every time you put a shovel to that dirt, you can actually hear that kind of metallic clink as it goes in. And you're having to force that soil out of that space. And I'm wondering, Dave, I'm just wondering, as Yasmeen laid there, perhaps in the darkness, she could still hear. Does she hear the sound of that shovel going into the dirt as each shovelful is pulled out of that hole and thrown to the side?

I don't believe that he had pre-dug this hole. He is seen on CCTV going to purchase a shovel. So he was armed and ready, but not completely prepared. He knew where he was going. And just to kind of frame it for our folks, if you think about it, it's like 450 kilometers, they're saying. Yasmeen particularly lived in Adelaide, which is in the southern portion of Australia. They had to drive 450 kilometers, which is over 200 miles. All right. This is a destination that he had an idea about and he knew that it was isolated. I don't think that he had gone up there and pre-dug a hole. And this is what I do believe. I think that digging the hole, Dave, was part of the

terrorizing. She would have had an awareness. She could not move. She couldn't free herself. She's bound with cable straps, zip ties, if you will. And also what they found was that she was also secured with duct tape they're using the term gaffer tape as well which is very similar gaffer tape duct tape so he's got her bound up but she could hear every time that spade went into the dirt and turned another shovel full a sad and scary thought that this is what a man did to the woman he said he loved he loved her so much the stalking and everything else i'm just baffled by what was going on with mr sing he could do this to somebody that he said he cared about which just goes beyond the paling we got to get into this okay what did her body go through? After all of the fear, after all the terror leading up to it, Joe, we know she has no way to free herself.

She has sat there for hours. And I believe you're right that he actually dug the hole and was talking to her the whole time. We know she was blindfolded. We don't know if she was gagged at the time. She was thrown into the hole with no way to get herself out. And then she had to feel the dirt on her body. Yeah. And I think that it's important to back up a wee bit here and think about, you mentioned

you were on target a moment ago when you had mentioned that you couldn't see anybody in the backseat. And as our friends in Australia and Great Britain, they refer to the trunk as the boot. You've got her in a position so that you could subdue her at home, perhaps. She's terrified. He's threatening her. He gets her subdued. He gets her secured in the sense that he's got her bound up. Then he puts her into this car. And keep in mind what I was saying about the Flinders ranges. This is an isolated area and if you and I've seen the crime scene images from this location this is not what

we would refer to as an improved road where she was found. This would have been not only would she have heard the road noise while she was in the boot and you can imagine how uncomfortable that drive would have been, bouncing up and down, maybe taking up a little bit of carbon monoxide as she's laying in that trunk, perhaps pounding headache. She's totally disoriented to space and time. She feels every pothole on the improved road surfaces, perhaps every turn. She can feel this. Her equilibrium is still working. She can sense when she's moving to the left or to the right. She knows when there's an incline or a decline coming up in the road. She can feel the change in speed of the vehicle.

Perhaps, possibly, she can hear him shouting at her. or perhaps he's turned the music on in the vehicle and is playing it very loudly you could hear it through the rear speakers all along she's completely disoriented it's almost complete and total sensory deprivation so the terror is rising within her and then when he comes off of this improved road surface, you know, where it's black topped and he has to go down into this area that is certainly unimproved. You're going to hit every washboard in the road. You know, those ruts that you feel is the shock absorbers in the car trying to maintain the vehicle in its orientation and you're bouncing down the road. Maybe the road is completely uneven. Maybe he's speeding up. Maybe he's slowing down. He's trying to seek out this location.

Remember, we don't believe he pre-dug this hole. And then finally you arrive there. I can't even begin to imagine the fear that had arisen within her when she is traveling to this locale because she's got to believe, Dave, that nothing was alleged that she had committed suicide. And Dave, I don't know about you, but I don't think I've ever heard of a case where someone committed suicide and then buried themselves in a shallow grave. I don't want to laugh because it's not a laughing matter. It's nonsensical. Yeah. But it is not. Yeah, that's a great term. It is nonsensical. But Joe, this story that police were told didn't make sense to them.

And you know how they are able to get confessions out of people, and they did. I want to find the right way to phrase this, Joe. As I was reading through this story and doing some background on it, I was thinking about how this Tariq Jat Singh had traumatized Yasmeen Kaur. At 21, they're both 21, both young people. But he consistently badgered her, even while they were dating. The term by her family, he tried to forcibly marry her. He tried to forcibly keep her in the relationship. And she really was done. So all the way through, he was consistent, thinking she didn't matter what she wanted, what she thought.

None of that mattered. It was what he wanted. And you've described the traveling, the things she went through in the back of that car. And as you were talking about it, I was thinking, I wish the carbon monoxide had rendered her unconscious so she wouldn't have to deal with what she was going to deal with. Most of us, you mentioned at the very beginning of this show today, having the wind knocked out of you, not being able to breathe. And as she was thrown into the hole, and then dirt is put on top of her, that was not the end.

By the way, before she's put in the hole, somewhere in the course of this crazy day, Singh tried to scare her by cutting her throat it wasn't deep enough to do anything it didn't have anything to do with her death i think he did it just to scare her even more yeah to terrorize her and i think that as well and it was she had an anterior which means the front of the neck so across her throat, she had what appeared to be an incised area. But according to the ME, I say ME, according to the coroner, they have coroners in Australia, when they examine this injury after the fact, it's what they have termed as superficial. However, do not be mistaken in this. Just because they say that something is superficial doesn't mean that it's not painful and that it wouldn't further inject terror.

And I think that you and I can agree that that's probably what the purpose was here, where he holds her tight, perhaps, against his chest as he takes a sharp instrument and drags it across the surface of her neck. And Lord only knows, maybe this was one last attempt on his part to try to elicit from her a promise of love. Can you imagine? And he's going to do this utilizing this knife to try to get that from her. And apparently the answer was insufficient. But we do know this, and this is quite fascinating. One bit of information that came out as a result of the autopsy, it is opined by the forensic pathologist that she had died within essentially 24 hours of having been placed in that grave alive. Now, when we think of a standard burial where we have a grave site where there's been a hole dug in the ground and you have a

vault that's placed in the ground and then the casket is placed within it, you have this kind of indwelling support, right, where it doesn't touch the body. And it won't for years and years and years. She was placed in the ground like this, alive. And after having heard the sound of that shovel striking earth, probably unturned soil, it was a struggle. And she is placed into this hole. And they're describing this hole as a shallow grave, which to my way of thinking is probably no more than maybe two feet, perhaps. But when you take a look at the crime scene images, you can see evidence

markers all over the ground. Now, a lot of this is going to be indicative of probably tire tread, where he has passed over an area. They're marking that area out. And when I say that this was immediately adjacent to the road, it was immediately adjacent to the road. And we can kind of surmise a few things based upon that. He didn't take the time to travel off in the brush with her to do this. He literally stopped in this one location. And we know this because we're seeing the markers on the ground where the tire tracks would have been left behind. They don't get a lot of rain there. So those tire tracks would probably still be appreciable.

He took them, the authorities, to this location and pointed out where he had buried her. And it wouldn't have been very difficult for the crime scene investigators to have figured this out because, as we've talked about previously on Body Bags, there is a big difference, a gulf of difference between where you have untouched soil that hasn't had a tool placed to it and recently turned soil. It will be kind of mounded up. There's no way, even if you had every bit of dirt that would have been pulled out of this and placed back in there, there's no way to get it so that it looks like the rest of the environment. You can appreciate turned soil very well. And so they were able to kind of brush this away and examine her there. But here's the thing that they discovered at autopsy.

She was dead within 24 hours of having been buried. And what that tells me is that, first off, they were able to determine she was not dead when she went into the grave. How do we know that? Well, just like if you will imagine, really the closest thing I can give people an idea of, if you're around smoke, for instance, next to a fire, if you've ever been to an outdoor fire, and you breathe in, you have the smell of the smoke that's entering your nasal passages, your mouth. You can kind of taste it, if you will. That is being literally uptaken in your body. That's the closest I can come to describing this, because what they would have found at autopsy, when they did the internal examination,

the first thing that they would have done before they went and opened her body is they would have looked in her nostrils. You would have seen the same dirt that was on the ground. Let me ask you about that. Singh puts her in the hole. In my picturing, I'm thinking if I was in a hole, I would be moving dirt around my face to create a little area around my nose and mouth, thinking in those terms. But in this case, her hands were tied behind her back. We know she was blindfolded and we know based on what you're telling us that her mouth was not covered.

So she's in the hole. She can do nothing to maneuver the dirt away from her mouth and nose. She has no way of getting a clear breath. What is her body going through as the pressure of the dirt even if it's not that much it's still on her body she can't get a clean breath of air if she opens her mouth dirt goes in she would have been trying to wiggle and this is just kind of a a natural response you're trying to get air as best you can and the tighter he he packs the soil, you know, and any of us that have ever seen anybody dig a hole with a shovel, you go back and you tamp it down with the back of the shovel most of the time. The tighter this is, the less of a space she's going to have in order to move about and to turn her head from left to right in order to gain a breath. And this soil that she is uptaking through

her nostrils and into her mouth is steadily replacing any oxygen that might be there. It becomes a matter of time at that point because her brain would have been screaming for oxygen and she could not have gleaned any oxygen from that environment whatsoever because it's quickly dissipated. If you're placed into a vault in the ground, you're going to run out of air eventually. Okay, provided that it is airtight, you have to assume that it might be. But in this case, oxygen would have been in very short supply in this environment. Remember, oxygen, you know, if we talk about, say, for instance, a refrigerator or deep freeze, you go to purchase one, the space

within that environment is measured in not cubic feet, but cubic inches. And you feel that invisible space, you know, when we're looking at that with a body, and then you think about, well, how much oxygen would there have been within this environment? Well, in a tightly packed environment with all of this dirt, not much. So, what's going to happen? Well, you're still going to have this respiratory event where you're intaking what you believe is, it should be oxygen. You've done this your entire life, but it's not. It's dirt. It's dusty dirt. So, it'll be oxygen you've done this your entire life but it's not it's dirt it's dusty dirt so it'll be very particulate now when they would have gotten in to the internal examination first off they would have seen and they kind of go into graphic detail about this

which was i was kind of surprised and this is quite horrible d Dave. They found dirt almost the entire length of her esophagus. That means she's swallowing dirt. That means that as she's trying to uptake oxygen through her mouth, she's also getting mouthfuls of dirt. It's like attempting to breathe underwater. You know, those two things don't happen. And, you know, many times you'll find water in the stomach of a drowning victim because part of it is going to be ingested. But then also you're going to find it down the trachea, which is our windpipe, and that splits off into the bronchial tree. And it's nothing to find particulate bits of. And again, I go back to my example of

fires. When you have a house fire, for instance, you'll find, remember we talk a lot about was there soot in the lungs? That's how we determine if someone was alive during the time of the fire. There's really no difference here. The trick here though, and what makes this all the more horrific when you have a fire you've kind of got this uh horrible chemical reaction that's going on because of all this stuff that's burning in the air and it's giving off these noxious gases and this sort of thing there's no noxious gas here you actually

have oxygen being replaced by dirt and because that is occurring, you can, when you dissect the lungs at autopsy, you go down the bronchial tree, you'll actually find dirt contained in there because the body is still doing its best to try to process what's available to survive on. Singh has now pled guilty and his sentence, which has been recommended to be life in prison, will be imposed next month. If you know of someone, a friend, a family member that is now dealing with issues of domestic violence, please, please reach out for help. There's a number here in the U.S. that you can call. It's 1-800-799-SAFE. S-A-F-E. That's 7233. That's 1-800-799-SAFE. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.