Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: "Lye, Legacy, and a Lethal Birthday - Unraveling the Imirowicz Mystery"

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

Konrad Imirowicz becomes the unfortunate victim of an explosive family dispute, enduring devastating and life-altering injuries that encompass his entire body from head to toe. His prolonged suffering and eventual death are caused by an unsuspecting household item: lye soap. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack dive into a chilling case surrounding the brutal death of Konrad Imirowicz, allegedly at the hands of his daughter, Megan, on her 18th birthday. As they unveil the shocking crime scene, Morgan and Mack navigate the intricate dynamics within the Imirowicz family, shedding light on Megan's discontent and the tragic escalation of a family dispute into murder. With a focus on the damning evidence, they provide a glimpse into courtroom proceedings and the bone-chilling verdict.    Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Time-coded Highlights: [00:00:20] Joseph Scott Morgan shares a nostalgic memory about his grandmother's butter churn and scrub board, unraveling the historical importance of lye, commonly used in soap-making, setting the stage for the episode's focus. [00:02:20] Introduction of the dreadful case of Konrad Imirowicz and Megan Joyce Imirowicz, setting the stage for the familial dynamics in the case. [00:04:53] Discussion on the harsh reality of chemical burns and their often irreversible effects. [00:10:00] Reflection on the shock experienced by medical personnel while treating severely burned Konrad, and discussion on the turbulent family dynamics, revealing Konrad's drinking problem and its impact on Megan's birthday.  [00:12:31] Mack discloses the horrific aftermath of the lye attack, painting a haunting picture of Konrad covered in drain cleaner. [00:17:00] The psychological implications for Megan are discussed, highlighting her decision not to return to the crime scene and instead send her friend. [00:18:20] Morgan talks about the possibility of the victim being hit with multiple items, and how this contrasts with the actual crime scene evidence, focusing on a large plastic container and the presence of a white powder. [00:20:00] The discussion turns to the victim's state of consciousness. [00:26:00] A shocking revelation is made about Megan's behavior post-incident, displaying a lack of concern for her father's critical condition. [00:27:20] Mack reveals an overheard conversation that brings the Michigan State Police into the picture. [00:28:00] Morgan and Mack dissect the improbability of Megan's defense, casting doubt on her innocence. [00:32:40] The host explains the contributing factors to Konrad's death, highlighting his compromised health conditions. [00:33:40] Megan Imirowicz's guilt is confirmed, with potential life imprisonmSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Anyone that's read my memoir, Blood Beneath My Feet, Journey of a Southern Death Investigator, you might remember the name Pearl. Pearl's my grandmother, and she practically raised me. I miss her every single day of my life now. There were two things that Pearl kept on hand that tie her back to her childhood. And she was very proud of these items, kept them in the house.

One was her mother's butter churn. I'll never forget it. She wasn't one of these grandmothers that would say, don't touch that. She would actually encourage you. And I would ask her questions about it all the time. How did this work? Did you ever do it? Did you ever use it? And she'd tell me about milk and cows and that sort of thing and churning butter but the other thing that

she had was a scrub board and many people don't know what a scrub board is but a scrub board is something that you would actually do your laundry on you would wash the laundry and then you'd boil it many times and then you'd scrub it out with a bar of soap. And that bar of soap was not something you went down to a supermarket because where my grandmother lived, there were no supermarkets where she grew up. As a matter of fact, she still remembers the night to the day she died. She remembered the night that World War I ended because the men rode up and down the streets of their little village on horses firing pistols in the air to celebrate the end of the war.

And it was a simpler time, but they had to make their own soap. And they made their own soap by using lye, L-Y-E. And the case that we're going to discuss today involves lye. L-Y-E. And the case that we're going to discuss today involves lye, this chemical substance. And it might be one of the most horrific ways that I have covered regarding the death of a man who had what appears to be lie applied to his body. Five months he lingered before he finally died. Today, we're going to talk about the homicide allegedly committed at the hands of a man's daughter. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Day back when my grandmother would talk about having to produce lye soap in their little village that they lived in, in the backwoods of North Louisiana. Where, by the way, there were no improved roads where she lived. It was essentially very few people had cars. They still use wagons,

that sort of thing. Even into her teen years, it was nothing for them to see that. Horses up and down the streets. Didn't get electricity until the 30s. There were really no stores to go to to buy soap as we think of it today. They would have to produce this at home. And there's a very specific formula. But, you know, I even remember as a small child, my grandmother talking about how dangerous lye soap was and the production of lye soap. And she had even mentioned that her mother had gotten burned a couple of times by making lye soap. And so it has always kind of hung in the

back of my mind why people would choose to use the substance, but it was highly effective. Matter of fact, it's been stated by many people that there was no kind of clean, like the clean you would have on clothing that had undergone treatment with lye, lye soap in order to get rid of stains and freshen things up and that sort of thing, but very powerful substance. We're talking about Megan Joyce Emirates. She's 18 at the time, her 64-year-old dad, Conrad Emirates. It is mentioned that lye soap, and you broke it down as to making lye and talking about how strong it is there's no clean like you get clean from lye and I had the same stories from my mother and grandmother as well in looking this up found out that a

lye powder is often used in drain cleaner so we might even have this in our home right now. Lye powder is often found in drain cleaner, and it has the ability to corrode things on contact, including metal, paint, cloth, and skin. Here's the kicker, though. Lye, again, lye powder, it's even more dangerous when it's wet. Yes, it is. And you can come in contact in a powdered form. You can come in contact with it with your skin and you can get a mild irritation.

And that happens as a result of the substance itself coming in contact with the moisture that's contained on our skin. But it really kicks into overdrive. There's actually a catalyst has to occur. And the catalyst that flips a switch on this thing is the direct application of water as it applies to this particular case. Because without those two components, you're not going to get the horror that actually occurred. And to give you an idea, okay, because I had to look it up. I didn't know. It says that the water creates an exothermic reaction that actually causes the temperature to increase.

And water that now, in particular in this case, on the man's skin with the lye and the drain cleaner, it could actually go up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Imagine that on your skin, 200 degrees. 200 degrees. Yeah. And that's powerful stuff when you think about it. I mean, okay, let's just, let's look at it from a practical standpoint when we're getting into summertime. And we know what precautions we have to take when we go outside and we're maybe laying out in the sun or working outside in the yard or whatever the case might be. You go out there and you know how hot it is. Okay, well, let's think about the ambient air temperature when you step out, particularly down here in the deep south in the middle of summer,

we're talking about above 90 degrees. And you know how miserably hot that can be. Well, think about if you had a substance on your skin, okay, that heated up to 200 degrees. It would be almost like if you think of a burner on a stove, thinking that not like a gas burner, but I see that right now, right now I'm visualizing the glow of a coil on an electric, electric stove. You apply your forearm or your hand, the palm of your hand to that. And just imagine there's nothing you can do to quench that.

There's nothing you can do to get rid of it. Because guess what? If you apply water to it, it's going to get worse. How do you clean it up? If you've got this just today on your arm, you've spilled a little drain cleaner on your arm, and now you've got water mixed in and it's starting to burn. How do you get it off there? How do you clean it up?

How do you prevent it? To be honest with you, it's something that an individual would have to seek medical attention for immediately because until this chemical reaction actually stops, the upside, I guess, if there is an upside, as long as you're not feeding it, feeding it with more lye and more water, it's going to hurt and there's nothing you can really do about it. You would have to go to a physician, have to get to an emergency room or clinic as soon as you can so that they can stop this from happening any further and treat the damage that's being done. Because look, once it starts, there's really nothing that you can do to kind of prevent

it from acting out the way it normally acts. It's the nature of the chemical reaction itself that is going to bring about this continued injury. It's almost as if it is a matter of containment. Imagine people, and we've heard a lot about these in the news, particularly over in Europe, my friends over in Great Britain, we have these public acid attacks. Acid is tossed on them. There's nothing you can really do about that to get the acid off the individual. It's just going to have to work itself out, and hopefully you can contain it and treat the injury itself. It's one thing I think for those of us that have been burned by fire.

Most people probably have, or at least you've touched something hot and you've retracted. I remember my son, when he was a little bitty thing, he stepped on a stainless steel plate outside of a swimming match where my daughter was competing. And he burned his little feet. And it was on the stainless steel plate and immediately start screaming and he jumps off and I'm having to help him. But there's nothing I can do about the burn because the burn has already happened and all you can really do is treat it. And the case of Conrad Emirates, my Lord, it's hard to even fathom what the medical personnel were faced with when they were staring down what had occurred. I can only imagine their shock when this guy shows up at the emergency room and he is just riddled.

I mean, riddled with burns. To set the stage, Megan Emirates turning 18. And she had plans that day that she needed and she needed her dad, 64-year-old Conrad Emirates, to be a part of. She had a big plan. And Conrad Emirates had a drinking issue. And I only say that because it actually plays into what took place. Conrad Emirates was on the couch, either passed out. And the reason I say it comes into play is we react differently. If you're just simply asleep and something is thrown on you, you wake up. But when you have imbibed and now you are a little more than just asleep,

it takes longer to react. And when Megan Emirates, that morning, was prepared for a day, she needed to go to the salon. She needed to go to the hotel to pay for the room that she was going to have for her 18th birthday party. All of this was her plan. She was so zero in focused on it that anything that derailed from that plan made her mad. And her dad, Conrad Emirates, laying on the couch asleep, derailed her plan and she was mad. She was so mad, in fact, that she took a picture of herself crying and sent it to a friend saying that I had all these plans and he just ruined them. What happened is, allegedly, Megan got really mad and started throwing stuff at her dad. She's trying to wake him up. She's doing everything

she can and he's not waking up. He's not responding. And depending on how you look at it, and as I stated at the beginning, I tried to figure out, did she concoct this lye, soap, water, poison burning? Or did it just happen based on the things she was throwing at him? We don't know. But what we do know is that around where Conrad Emirates was laying on the couch she was throwing at him. We don't know. But what we do know is that around where Conrad Emirates was laying on the couch, there was a lot of white powder that was some type of

drain cleaner. There was water splashed all over him and there were other things there. And he, Conrad Emirates, said that he only remembered waking up as the rescue squad was loading him into the ambulance. He didn't remember anything that took place during this. And what I can fill in the blank here is that allegedly Megan Emirates, when her dad would not get up to take her to the salon and then to the hotel. She got mad. She threw a bunch of stuff on him and then she took off anyway and was gone. He is on the couch covered in the drain cleaner that included lye soap and other assorted goodies, including the water that was burning him. And five hours later, five hours go by and Megan is at the hotel. She needs her dad's PIN number on his credit card so that she can pay for her hotel room for her birthday party. And she calls her friend next door and her friend goes over and she finds Conrad Emirates on the couch and her description.

He looked very bad. He looked very out of it. This is Kayla Busquets who discovered him. He had burns or blood or bruises or something on him. His head, chest, hands, stomach, his legs looked green. That's a direct quote from Kayla Busquets, the neighbor that discovered Conrad Emirates five hours after when Conrad Emirates wakes up enough as they're getting him onto the ambulance. That sets the stage for what happens next, which, Joe, I wanted to go back because the description of Conrad Emirates is beyond anything that I can imagine. That Caleb Busquets said that it made her physically ill when she saw him. She said her his fingers were red and purple. And this is what got me the fingernails. His fingernails were curled. What would cause all of this damage?

Joseph Scott Morgan? A trauma response. And also it's a response, an inflammatory response that his body is reacting to. And kind of add another layer of horror to this is that he had been drunk and passed out, apparently. And to this point, they have not released what his blood alcohol level was. And we could go down that road for some time about how you're dealing with the issue of chronic alcoholism in your life and you're ingesting alcohol regularly. It's going to take more for you to, say, put you in a state of being unaware of what's happening.

Because this is, trust me, this is horrible. I've had one case in my career of suicide by drain cleaner. Actually taking, I won't mention the brand, but actually taking drain cleaner, ingesting it. And what happens is that this compound within the drain cleaner begins to work with the moisture within the digestive tract. It is an erosive event because you have to think about the purpose of the drain cleaner. You have organic substances that are in the drain that are blocking, say, in your sink and in your kitchen or maybe in your bathroom where you've got hair, you know, that's clogging up the drains. And they sell this stuff so that, you know, you'll apply it directly in here and it'll begin to eat away at these organic substances.

That's what it does. And it's activated by the moisture and the indwelling moisture. So you think about somebody just ingesting this internally. And I remember the one case that I had of someone ingesting the stuff. And when the dissection was done and opened up, I stood there in amazement looking at the esophagus. It was all hemorrhagic. There was an inflammatory response that was beyond anything that I had seen in my career. The stomach was literally eaten through because of the interaction with the moisture within this person's system. So you've got this going on externally. When this young lady goes there, this is really kind of what she had done, but yet she's not going to go there and retrieve this.

She's going to ask her friend to go and do this. You have to sit there and kind of begin to think about this just for a second. She's subjecting her friend to the sight that she wound up beholding in this environment. And it would have been absolutely horrific. This guy would have had burns, which he did, all over his body. They would have been absolutely ghastly. There's not going to be any uniformity to them either. It will look like something out of a horror movie where you'll have these little islands of flesh that might still be indwelling that are completely surrounded by this kind of eroded area of raw tissue that would go all the way down to, say, the layer of the muscle. It would have gone through probably the epidermis and down through the dermis through the sub-Q fat. I've seen actually images of lye burns where you have

what are referred to as fourth-degree burns where you get down to the level of the skeletal structure where you can see bone. It's a vicious, vicious way to die. And that brings me to another point here. If she is alleged to have taken, and the way it's kind of framed, taken multiple items, random items, and say, threw them at him. Okay. People do that out of frustration. They're angry. She claims that he's an alcoholic. He was supposed to take her somewhere. It's her birthday. She's fed up. She's irritated. It's one thing if you walk in and you see maybe you picked up a shoe or a vase or anything within reach and you busted furniture and you've got all this. It's not what we're talking about. I've seen the crime scene images from here. You're talking about a large plastic container that the lid has been screwed off of. And I'll tell you what this container looks like. If you'll imagine, if you go to a big box store where you're going to buy like an industrial size, I don't know, thing of like mayo, like you would use in a restaurant, it's about that size. It's

got a screw onon plastic lid. This thing is open, laying on the floor, and you can see this white powder that's lying all about. Of course, at this point, the body, you lose context for this crime scene image because the body is not there. But it's not like it impacted him, and then some lye may have fallen on him, and it just got away. That's not what happened. As this witness has stated, she saw injuries to his head, his torso, his arms, and his legs where this guy has been burned and his fingernails have curled up at this point in time because of this chemical reaction that is occurring. And he is still

conscious or regains consciousness. When Mr. Emirates was actually questioned by, there was an attending physician assistant PA that was taking a history from him. He was still lucid enough to give it. He says, I don't know what happened. I've got bugs. I think he said, bugs or fleas in my house and a bug bomb my house. Maybe I passed out as a result of that. Well, as toxic as the substance of a bug bomb can be, it's not going to generate this kind of insult to the body. Right.

And that's why when he said the bug bomb thing, I looked at that, Joe, and I thought, why would he even think that? But it's because he doesn't realize what everybody else is seeing. He doesn't. He is not in that state of mind where he's lucid. He can talk, but he doesn't realize how bad it is. That's fascinating. That's the thing I got to tell you about health care workers.

They're such, you know, they throw around the term hero a lot nowadays. But you look at folks that are doing initial triage and assessment on patients. How do you stand there as a clinician and not wince when this man is talking to you? I mean, just imagine the intestinal fortitude that you have to have as a clinician to stand there and listen to this man. And he's trying to make sense, and he's probably completely disoriented. He doesn't have a clue as to what's going on with him. First off, with this chemical burning, he's going to have pain. But also in some of these areas, he'll have less pain. You know why? Because a lot of the unnervated areas are gone at this point in time. He's not going to sense how bad maybe it is.

And so this clinician is standing there trying to take the measure of what they're seeing. This is not like the typical kind of thing that a clinician is going to see every day. Now, they see burns. Don't get me wrong. Don't mail in. They see burns on a regular basis. But to this degree, it's not a traditional thermal burn like you see with direct heat, this chemical reaction that has taken place. And it is one of the most horrific things I think that any physician or any PA or nurse practitioner or nurse could bear witness to.

But here's the thing. Mr. Emerson's life didn't end there in the emergency room. He languished on ICU for almost five months. I hated working burn cases. I hated fire deaths. They were horrific. Some of the most horrible things I've ever borne witness to is a medical legal death and investigator war burns. And they come in all shapes and sizes.

I've had people burned in car accidents that died, obviously. House fires. I've had people that were set on fire. But there's something about it. It's the treatment that people that live through the initial thermal assault, that treatment course that they have to go through. If you've never seen it, it is unbelievable. And it's excruciatingly painful. many people are not aware of. When people are burned, one of the first things that clinicians really have to watch very carefully are your kidneys because the kidneys begin to fail many times and you can't process waste, liquid waste in particular, out of the body. As a matter of fact,

burn victims begin to swell. They swell so much, and this is really gruesome, but physicians will have to make long linear incisions over the surface of the body, running north and south. They'll do it down the legs. They'll do it down the arms. They'll do it down the abdomen. So it would be nothing to see someone come off of a burn unit that had 30, 35 incisions running great lengths over the surface of the remains. And this is done in an attempt to keep the skin from actually splitting.

That's how painful this is. And I don't know if I can express it in any stronger terms, but Mr. Emirates, Dave, he endured for five months, I think. When we first got this story, I looked at it because I didn't really know what we were getting into. And as I was reading through it, I didn't grasp it with a first read through. It was the second time when I started trying to figure out about the lie and the water, because I don't know. In my head, I was thinking, what do I have in the house? But then I read her brother, Austin Emirates. I read what he said about the couch and I saw the picture. But when I saw his description of the amount of powder around

the couch, because on the couch, you mentioned that we didn't see we don't have pictures of Conrad Emirates on the couch in misery. We see the couch after the fact. And you can see where he was laying because there's no powder there. The powder is all around it, especially at one end that appears to be where his head might have been. And there's a lot of white powder. And assuming that that is from the drain cleaner that had the lie in it, that's a huge volume that wasn't on his body. And based on the injuries, he had a lot going on.

But one thing that really struck me, Joe, and this is what I need to get this out. Megan Emirates was celebrating her 18th birthday. And there's some discrepancy here I've seen some reports saying that her birthday had been two days before others saying it was that day it's really not germane to the topic it's just a matter of clarity but she was having a party her 18th birthday party to celebrate and part of that celebration was a hotel room and she needed her dad's credit card number and pin number to pay for the room and so when she needed her dad's credit card number and PIN number to pay for the room. And so when she called her friend Kayla Busquette, next door neighbor, to go and get the credit card

number, and that's when Kayla Busquette finds Conrad Emirates in dire straits and calls 911. Well, when Megan Emirates is reaching back out to Kayla Busquette, She calls her because she still wants the credit card number. She wants the PIN number or what have you. And when she calls Kayla Busquets, Kayla Busquets is at the hospital with Megan Emirates' father because of the damage that had been done to Conrad Emirates. And she tells Megan on the phone, I I told her this is a direct quote from Kayla Busquets. Quote, I told her we were at the hospital. Her dad was in the hospital and she hung up on me, hung up when she found out that what she had done to her dad caused him to be in the hospital. What we also know is a nurse allegedly overheard Conrad Emirates telling his son, Austin Emirates, that Megan was the one who caused his injuries.

And the Michigan State Police was then called in because of what the nurse overheard. They interviewed Megan Emirates at the hotel, not at the hospital. Right. Not there with her dad, but at the hotel where she's going to have her party that her dad's paying for. Yeah. And the fact that she has admitted to allegedly taking these items, multiple items, and throwing them at him, it doesn't stand up, I think, logically when you begin to look at this. Oh, by the way, Joe, I believed that story. I believed her when she said she threw a bunch of stuff at him until you explained earlier what had to have taken place. And then I went, oh, this was way more direct than I thought. Yeah, there's actually a switch that has to be flipped chemically here in order to initialize this chemical reaction. Let's just look at it this way. You take this substance and you distribute it over an area,

and then you activate it with water. That's simply what happens. And I was thinking when I was reading through this, I was thinking one of the things that arson investigators look at, by the way, I think arson investigators are some of the unsung professionals that are out there in forensics and people don't normally refer to them as forensic scientists. I submit that I think that they're fantastic forensic people. But that aside, when arson investigators look at, say, fires that are set and they're in a home, for instance, in a structure, they look for what are referred to as

splash patterns. Say if someone takes a can of gasoline and kind of throws it or spreads it all over a room, you can actually see where the fire tracks as a result of the pattern, this liquid splash pattern. You're a radio guy, Dave. You look at, you guys have all of these monitors and things you look at. You've seen kind of sound waves before. And for me, for me, that's not the way my mind works. I'm trying to make it in my simple way. It looks like a wave pattern many times. And you'll see all these really weird patterns that come out relative to the distribution of, say, an accelerant like gasoline where a match is applied. And it'll burn. And you'll see the margins of it. With this, it's not exactly the same. However, you begin to think about distribution of the substance of this drain cleaner over the surface of the body, of the skin.

And you know that this is not something where, say, for instance, okay, let's just give people the benefit of the doubt. Let's just say that he had a bit of it that wound up on the back of his hand. Okay. And then somehow, miraculously, water got applied to it and he was burned in that one area. Okay. I'll go with you there, logically. We'll have that discussion. But when you talk about his hands, his head, his torso, his legs, you know that that is not quite as randomized. Say, for instance,

if you just come in contact with it and get it wet on your hand, because what are you going to do? Well, automatically, you're going to retract from it. It's something that's going to be very unpleasant. You're not going to want anything to do with it. No, no, no, no. That's not what we're seeing here manifesting physically. You've got this distribution from literally head to toe with him. But unfortunately, with Mr. Emirates, he no longer had toes. Do you know why, Dave? Because as a result of being subjected to this kind of trauma, after he is in ICU and he's being treated. And it's a 24-hour course with him. And they had to bilaterally amputate his legs. So both legs were literally taken off

surgically. And that's how extensive this was. Not only that, we talked about the contact surfaces with this event involving the substance. Did you know that one of the other things that can happen is to inhale the stuff as well? And as we found out from the medical examiner in Mr. Emirates' case, his lungs were damaged. He actually had to have a trach in place to help him breathe. So now that he's in intensive care, they've had to place a breathing tube in his throat. Is that what the trach is? When you say trach, okay, that's a breathing tube? Yeah. And it goes actually right in the midline of the throat. So if you'll find, if people anatomically, if you'll find where that little cartilaginous body, some people refer to as Adam's apple, just inferior to that, they'll make an incision in there and they'll insert this breathing tube.

And so he's having to have help just merely to survive. And of course, the big thing that happens with people that are burned is that they're going to kidney failure. And that's the kiss of death. As he is being treated in the hospital, one of the other things that's going on with him, he's in a state of kidney failure all the time. So now this man has had to go on to dialysis, which is further impacted by the fact that if we are to believe what we have heard, that he had a problem with chronic alcohol consumption, his kidneys may have already been compromised to a great degree. It wouldn't

be like a guy that's walking around just on a daily basis with a healthy set of kidneys. Okay. So he's got a lot of things that are working against him at this point in time. The nature of this death is not, there's no hint of mercy here. It's not like it was quick. This is a long, slow, agonizing death. Right now, his daughter, Megan, 19, of Groveland Township in Oakland County, Michigan, has been found guilty. She's been found guilty of murdering her father by use of harmful devices, irritants causing death, and domestic violence. Her trial only took four days. She faces up to life imprisonment when she is sentenced. That Sentencing is scheduled for July 25th, 2023. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.