Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Man Sends Estranged Allergic Wife, Sends Her Death Flower

Episode Date: May 19, 2024

Lisa and David Hernandez had been separated for a year before he starts stalking her, showing up at her job uninvited and unwelcome. He sends his estranged wife a bouquet of flowers with Lillies, "the Death Flower", knowing she is extremely allergic to them. On this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan will explain how someone can be killed by a blunt force instrument and a sharp-edged instrument at the same time and Dave Mack will fill in the story with the creepy stalking that David Hernandez allegedly did to his wife. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Transcribed Highlights00:02:00 Introduction of Lisa Hernandez  05:12.52 Discussion of "Death Flower"  08:50.91 Talk about a tool as a weapon14:17.46 Discussion of skull injury 19:46.20 Discussion of suspect knowing victim allergies 24:28.29 Talk about a "staged" scene29:19.40 Discussion of allergic reaction 32:32.27 Discussion of blunt force and sharp force 36:26.87 Talk about tossing weapon / tool into lake41:22.33  Discussion of Searching the bottom of a lakeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I'd have to say that probably my favorite fruit would have to be strawberries. I love strawberries. I love fresh strawberries. And I haven't always loved them, but there's a place that's very near and dear to my heart where I came to love strawberries. And it's a little town called Ponchatoula, Louisiana. Ponchatoula has just finished up their annual strawberry festival and you know Louisiana is renowned for festivals. I mean you've got everything from gumbo festival, crawfish festival, catfish festival and they've been doing it for years and years and I like going to all those

things but for me there's nothing that beats the Strawberry Festival. I have seen strawberries there the size of apples. And it is a joyous occasion. They've got strawberry jam, jelly. They've even got strawberry wine. And it is just a fantastic time. You know, you've got Cajun music. People are dancing around.

And today, I want to talk about a case that, unfortunately, originated in one of my favorite places in Louisiana, Ponchatoula, Louisiana. But the subject here is not going to be about strawberries. It's actually going to be about another plant. A flowering plant that many times people associate with death. Today, we're going to talk about a nurse who was seemingly attacked with a blunt object in her Ponchatoula home, left her dead.

And we're going to try to understand how somebody could have gotten rid of the evidence involved in the case. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. My wife, and I know this because I've tested it over the years, my wife loves to get flowers. Now, some people will say that it's money. You're throwing away money when you do it. I don't believe it. I see it as an investment. Okay?

I see it as an investment in my relationship. If I get into a fight with my wife, which we rarely do, or a disagreement, let me put it that way, I don't go out and rush out and buy her flowers to try to make everything. I just will randomly send her flowers. And I love the expression I see on her face. It brings me joy. And flowers commonly do bring me joy. I like growing flowers. I like growing wildflowers, actually. Some people might know that about me. I hope you think nonetheless of me as a result of that but as a matter of fact our first date that we ever had by the way not talking about his first date with me talking about his wife i cut i cut fresh wildflowers out of my garden

at home and took those to her on our first date and i you know after that i knew i had her so uh yeah flowers have always played a big role in my life but so you're admitting you were stalking your future wife and found out that she was really it was a blind date it was a blind date i wasn't side you know we were before the days where you could really cyber-stalk anybody. Oh, my. So, yeah, I've always loved flowers. But I've got to tell you, Dave, this case is very troubling today because it does involve lilies. And, you know, I think commonly people have associated lilies with death. There's imagery out there of bodies, even I think going back to the Middle Ages, where you have bodies that are cascaded and they're laying there with their hands crossed

and there are lilies across their chest. It's always symbolic of that. I find this case very disturbing. And I'm glad you brought up the funeral with the hands crossed with the lilies, because that actually was part of the break in this case today we're talking about the death of lisa hernandez talking about a 45 year old woman who accomplishes a nurse accomplished woman she's the person everybody liked to work with you know yeah you always think about what are people going to say when you're gone? And, you know, we don't get to hear those things because we're gone.

In this respect, that was the first thing I thought of is everybody has these wonderful, nice things to say about her. And she's not here to enjoy them. She was found by her daughter. Daughter comes in, calls 911 because she finds her mom. She's not responsive. She's got blood everywhere and doesn't know what happened. It looks like maybe there was a robbery of some sort going on in here, but calls 911.

They come out, and sadly, Lisa Hernandez is dead. When everything was said and done, Joe, about her body and the damage that had been done, I wrote this down because I had to ask you. It says cause of death, blunt force instrument, and a sharp edged instrument. How do you, as somebody investigating a death and you've got these, how do you put this together? And what is something that could be a blunt instrument as well as a sharp edge? Is there, is there something that could be both? Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. There's a couple of things that come to mind. Uh, and I've had deaths involving both of these instruments i'm going to

mention and and these are just off the top of my head the first one obviously is going to be a hammer a claw hammer you know where you've got the blunt leading edge that is used to hammer nails right into a surface and then you flip it around and you've got these two, they look like big buck teeth that are coming down that have leading edges that are very sharp. And that, of course, traditionally has been used to pry nails up with, but it is one heck of a fatal instrument. The other thing that I've had, and I don't think that's what we're dealing with here, is a maul. A maul looks like a sledgehammer with a blade on the other side and you can split wood with it because it's got so much weight to it and so that that weight is transferred you know down onto a block of wood it has a bit more

utility than a standard axe for instance and you can flip it around and use it as a sledgehammer i've got one of those i did not know what it was called it's just something that somehow ended up in my garage you know m-a-u-l yeah it's real heavy it's got yeah it's a it's a weird word but yet hey you know maul itself is used to describe the individual was mauled so that gives you an indication that they're in the past there's been violence associated with it. I mean, why else would you name this instrument? I'm sure that some linguistic person that's out there will probably catch me in the lurch here some way.

But that's my assessment. I've got one, and I didn't, again, I don't know how I ended up with it. I'm sure somebody passed away, and I ended up with it. It's one of the best instruments you can have in your tool shed the only thing about it is it'll wear you out i mean real quick i used to get in shape for football during the off season by felling trees with a family member and we would split wood you know we'd cut it into sections and i had a mall to do that with also had a sledgehammer and a couple of steel wedges and all that sort of thing, but the mall would get the job done. But just understand it would,

it would wear you out. But in this set of circumstances, Dave, I cannot necessarily see someone coming in to this house. And by the way, she was found actually on the floor between the bed and the dresser, I think, and there's blood everywhere. When you're at a death scene and you've got matted, coagulated blood about, you have to be very, very careful in handling the body and making any kind of injury assessment at that time, because you will be super encrusted with blood. That's been my experience. And you're not going to be able to appreciate everything at the scene relative to

trauma. So you can say that, yeah, there is what appears to be copious red substance at the scene. Of course, that translates into blood once you've confirmed it scientifically, and you can do that at the scene. You can do an on-the-spot test to say that this is, in fact, blood and that it's human blood and all that sort of stuff. But until you can get a body back to the morgue under the white, hot surgical lights, it's best that you don't jump to any conclusions. Because I've seen gunshot wounds to the head that have generated tremendous amounts of blood, but I've also seen blunt force trauma as well. And when you get a combination, Dave, of both what they're saying is blunt force and sharp force, it gives you a sense of probably, unfortunately, God bless her, what this poor daughter saw when she got

there. I mean, I can't imagine walking in and someone seeing their mama laying on the floor and she's encrusted with blood. It would confuse the investigators out there unless they're very, very careful and be very painstaking to get the body to the forensic pathologist so they can document it with the crusted blood. Then at the morgue, you bathe the body, not with soap, but you just kind of rinse it down. We have a sprayer that's hooked to the autopsy table, and it kind of looks like a sprayer you would have on your sink. It's a bit more robust than that, and it forces water into these crusted areas, and you kind of have to wipe it away to reveal any kind of injuries. And as a matter of fact, one of the things we do that I may have mentioned before is that particularly with injuries to the head, we actually shave the head. We shave the area, you know, around there. So you got to be real careful, Dave, when you're, you know,

when you're making these assessments at scenes. Because when you go to a funeral, I mean, the, I'm sure when you're trying to figure out how a person died, what took place, you're not really concerned with what are they going to look like in the casket for their family you've got to solve this crime but i wondered about the shaving if it was uh full on got to shave everything to make sure we don't miss anything or no you'll inspect the area you'll rinse out the hair now keep in mind i know some of you guys are saying well you're watching my evidence you do this after you have gone to great lengths to collect trace evidence. Okay.

That's why you don't want to wash the body down in any way until you can do things like tape lifts and certainly do swabs. You're looking for DNA and all this sort of thing. You have to be very patient. That's why if you get these complex cases out there where you've got multiple strikes, you will literally have a layering of injuries. And it's a nightmare. I mean, it really is. It's a nightmare because sometimes if you've got multiple strikes to the head, for instance, you're going to have overlying lacerations. And the trick is, first off, when you assess those

lacerations, are they antemortem? That means that if they struck, you should have surrounding hemorrhage. But if they're postmortem, all you've got is laceration and there's no hemorrhage. There's no ecchymosis, which is a fancy word for swelling. You're not going to have that. So you have to be very careful when you're doing this assessment because as we know, I mean, you and I have covered tons of them on body Bags, where we have people that do things to bodies after death. When you're doing those assessments, and then you throw in the sharp-edged element, too, how do you delineate between all of this? And with a head strike, the one thing that you can count on that you're going to see resting just beneath the surface is going to be a skull underlying that traumatized scalp,

and you will have multiple fractures of the external table of the skull. And many times, it looks precisely like a cracked hard-boiled egg. When you're a death investigator, you don't always frame things as an investigator when you're at the scene. Sometimes your humanity will take over. And what I mean by that, if you're working a case in a neighborhood, for instance, just like the one that Ms. Hernandez lived in, I've caught myself many times with my thoughts drifting to the sight of people peeping out of their windows or coming out onto their driveway or even people taking photos and video of us working the scene. And they would gather together in clusters. And this always stuck with me. I think it has something to do

with human behavior, group human behavior. It's like you, if you have a perception of evil or harm that might be coming your way because one of your own in your neighborhood has been attacked, people that might not otherwise talk to one another gather together. And I've often thought about, you know, what would it be like to live in a neighborhood where you've got a woman who is gainfully employed, who was known, who had a family? What would it be like to find out the news that she had been literally beaten to death, Dave? It would be a shocking, worrisome time in your neighborhood. That's for sure. With Lisa and David Hernandez, they actually, they're both nurses, both in the same medical field. And they had hit the end of their relationship rope and they were separated.

They were not divorced yet from what I can gather, but they had been at least separated for a year. That's why they refer to them as exes in some states you actually have to be separated legally for a year before a divorce will be granted and anyway they had during that year though it it's interesting how investigators have pointed out that it was after about a year of separation that david hern Hernandez started stalking his almost ex-wife. They didn't say he did it right away. It was after right at the edge when it was time where it looked like the divorce was really going to happen. That's when he turns into overdrive and he starts following her.

He puts a tracking device on her car. He sends her flowers, but not just any flowers. Okay. David Hernandez knew that his wife was highly allergic to lilies. So when he sends her a beautiful bouquet of flowers to her place of work for everybody to see. And here you've got lilies that are referred to as death flowers, and she is highly allergic. So you talk about using something you know about somebody as it's the kryptonite. And on top of all that, he would randomly pop in at work. He would just, he knows what a nurse is going through at work yet he would still just randomly pop up at her work basically saying hey i'm here i'm watching i got you and by the way it wasn't until after her death that they found the tracking device on her car that's wait hang on that that to me is one of these absolutely terrifying things. I hate this crap. Yeah. I hate the idea of somebody being

able to track another individual. I think that one of these companies out there, I guess it's Apple, you know, has that Apple tracker thing that people can use. And I understand the utility of it. I mean, you know, if you've got a dog that's, you know, like I've got, I've got my Labrador Retriever, whom I love. If I could put one of those in her collar, perhaps, I could see where she is. But it's the idea of someone having the ability to do that to another person. When we were kids, Dave, that kind of technology, that's something we would have thought about with James Bond movies. It was like a video phone, you know? Yeah, exactly. And now, now everybody has access to these things, you know, they can track you. And, you know, I know Nancy, our friend is, is very, you know, she, she uses her, her, you know, locate my, you know,

yeah, my iPhone. And she uses that with her kids. She talks about the twins all the time. I understand that. And it does create maybe a level of security. But there's also a real terrifying element to this. That somebody that you no longer want to be domiciled with, obviously, has the ability that has access to the technology and that can use it uh technology's great man but i'll tell you what buddy it's really got a downside those tracker

things you mentioned i actually have done a couple of stories on this with nancy about you know people using those in a bar situation dropping in at first things like that to track a woman's movements and there are ways for you to protect yourself about it. If you don't know what we're talking about, please look it up. There are ways to protect yourself from somebody unknowingly tagging you like that. And you can prevent it from happening to you. So now with regard to her having this tracking device on her vehicle, they were able to trace it back to her husband, her ex-husbandid hernandez probably by purchasing it online they're

not cheap we'll get into that over the next couple of days i can tell you that i'll be looking it up and some of the rest of you will as well because it is not just spooky it's it's dangerous so yeah as they're investigating it joe they're putting these things together i mean we've talked about how the person you're closest to is the first suspect and it goes out from there. And in this case, you have an soon to be ex-husband in a strange situation. And he has been showing a number of behaviors that are very worrisome to probably her friends, other members that she worked with, things like that. So police have their hands full right away with who they're looking at as possible suspects. But again, it was a scene that had been staged.

You know what a scene looks like when you go to it, Joe, as a death investigator. Police know what a robbery scene looks like, and they know when something doesn't ring true. Correct? Yeah, yeah, you you do and sometimes you'll see with the staging staging scenes first off it's very difficult when somebody has got an open head injury and they're they have obviously bled out it's very difficult to kind of mask that if you're the perpetrator. However, when you have a true staged scene, you'll see many times these kind of half-hearted efforts to open drawers up, maybe pull a few things out, that sort of thing. It won't be, the individual will not necessarily be all in on it.

Because when you think of like a robbery or burglary that turns into, you know, a murder, a robbery, murder, when you see that at a scene, when it's true, you'll see all kinds of crap that's broken, turned over, busted into a million pieces where they're digging for something. And it looks like they're in a frenzy. I've had several cases where you have people that are in an addictive phase in their life, and all they want is to score. They just want to score whatever dope that they're addicted to, and it looks like a madman has gone through the house. And it's terrifying. And there have been times, I've worked these cases, obviously, where there's somebody that's not, I mean, who suspects this? Who expects it? You know, and you walk into your home and there's this raving maniac in there and they kill you with a

weapon of convenience most of the time. But police can kind of understand, I think, relative to staging. One of the first things we're going to look for is, and you hear us talk about it all the time, is, is there evidence of forced entry at the scene? Because forced entry implies that you had to gain access where you were not allowed to be accessing an area. You had a key or maybe familiarity where you could knock on the door and somebody's going to let you in. And so, yeah, the police have a way of doing that. But I got to tell you, Dave, I kind of jumped ahead a little bit. I had an idea that kind of came to mind. You had mentioned a few moments ago about the lilies that she is highly allergic to. And both these individuals are also in the medical field. Now, just give me a little rope here because I know this might run a field.

But I'm really wondering here, if you have knowledge that someone is specifically allergic to something and you send it to them, are you holding out hope that if they hold these things, if they have them adjacent to them, they're going to have an anaphylactic event where they begin to swell, their airway is going to begin to close, you'll see their face turn red. And interestingly enough, Dave, people might laugh at that. I actually had a lady years and years ago that committed suicide vis-a-vis anaphylaxis. And you know how she accomplished it? She was allergic to any kind of shellfish. And she went to a buffet with her husband and sat across the table and just jammed her face with boiled shrimp. And he knew, he was like, what, what are you doing? You know, like this. And before you knew it, she, you know, she didn't have an EpiPen. I don't even think there was Benadryl handy. And you get to that point,

I don't know that Benadryl is going to touch the situation, but she went into cardiorespiratory arrest right there and they ran a code and she died at the hospital and she'd been suffering with depression, all that sort of thing. So this is interesting. it's an interesting thought for me as an investigator i i really want to know was he trying to weaponize lilies i think that that's a fascinating point along this because if you have knowledge that she has a reaction to these is that what you're trying to do that boggles my mind i know it's bizarre isn't it when i saw the death flower headline on this story yeah okay that's kind of interesting but i was thinking it was one of those stinky flowers that when they

open up they smell bad and when you feel like you're gonna die yeah but i think those things i think they weigh like two tons they only open like every five years or something that's that's what i was thinking so is it like feed me seymour in the basement no no and i'm not saying that lilies are fatal but any kind of allergic reaction that you can have to anything. I don't care if it's car polish or bacon. Neither of us are lawyers or anything else, but it makes you wonder. If you know somebody is allergic to something and you try to get it in their face to cause them pain and whatever, I wonder if there's not an assault charge waiting to happen.

Hey, that's exactly what I was thinking about. Because if you have foreknowledge, and listen, it's hard. When you get into the realm of medicine, when you're a certified nurse, a registered nurse, you understand allergic reactions. And then on top of that, you're domiciled with this person. You're married to them. You're going to know that intimate detail so much to the point that this individual may have chosen to send i don't know maybe he thought that she liked lilies but i gotta tell you if i was a betting man and i'm i'm working

this case and she's got a history of allergic reactions to these flowers i think that it would be something worth kind of digging into. And anything else, I'm very curious about this case, which by the way, at this point, Tom, has not been adjudicated. This is a recent case. So this man is innocent until proven guilty. But I'd have to think if I were in the middle of this thing working it, I'd want to know if he had ever made any other kind of efforts at harming her in any way. It's almost like kind of a passive intimidation tactic. You know, you can imagine what she thought when she received these. Wow, I've got flowers. Oh no, they're lilies. It's so bizarre.

But you know, at the end of the day, that's not what it came down to. But I really wonder, Dave, I really wonder if those lilies were not a portent of something far more sinister and evil. Investigations are, they're not instantaneous. It's not like you've got a bowl of ramen and you pour hot water in it and suddenly you've got a meal. It's not like that. It's not instantaneous. Really good investigations take a period of time because they're so intricate. I like to compare them, in my mind, I always envision them as spider webs. And you've got all this directionality, you know, that kind of goes and it intersects with these things. And when you get that vision in your mind, it's actually helped me, believe it or not, when I can kind of sectionalize or compartmentalize investigations. Because I know what my role is in the investigation.

I don't have anything else most of the time to do with anybody else's roles. So I think that that's a valuable thing to keep in mind. But Dave, you were telling me that in Ms. Hernandez's death, that it took a little bit of time before they finally settled on a suspect. Well, they had to figure out what happened. They know they have a dead 45-year-old woman who was beaten to death. They know the weapon was that there was a blunt force instrument and a sharp edged instrument. So they're trying to put all this together. And, you know, they probably had their

eyes on the soon to be ex just because they were able to uncover fairly quickly what he had been doing in terms of stalking. And the police actually turned to that. He had been stalking. And again, this is an allegation now. This is a current case and everyone is innocent until they're proven guilty in a court of law. But in this particular case, they were able to build enough evidence over a couple of weeks to realize that, where's the, where is the instrument of death? Where is this object that we're looking for? They kind of thought it was a hammer. They kind of were leaning that way, but they couldn't figure out, couldn't find it. It was about a month into the investigation when investigators were able to get surveillance footage of Lake Ponsitrine. And I always feel like I'm mispronouncing that. No, that's right.

Ponsitrine, yeah. And I'm sure they were trying to figure out path of movement and things like that of where an individual would go. But in this particular case, a month into the investigation, they get video, surveillance video that is around Lake Ponsitrine, and they saw David Hernandez pull over on the causeway. Yeah. And they actually said they saw him. This is what the Jimmy Travis is the chief operating officer and the sheriff's office there.

And he said, you can see objects being thrown from the car you see it hit the water splashing so they know he's thrown something big enough to and heavy enough to create that type of reaction in the water so what do you think they did? They called out the dive team. Yep. And they put divers in the water. And all I could think of, Joe, I bet anybody driving along the causeway there wanting to throw something would not consider they were on surveillance camera. I wouldn't think it. They wouldn't. And first off, we're talking about literally the world's longest bridge. And that's the Causeway Bridge over Lake Pontchart. I've spent, unfortunately, more time on that bridge over the course of mybound and two lanes northbound, and it has guardrails. My family has a long history with Lake Pontchartrain. Matter of fact, my ancestors actually opened the very first ferry that ever went across Lake Pontchartrain in the late 1700s, they were bringing wood. There was no other way to get to New Orleans other than coming up the Mississippi River or down the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge or coming up through the Gulf and through the marshes.

And so my ancestors built one of the first ferries, Killian's Ferry. And there's a little village on Lake Pontchartrain called Killian is the name of it. Oh, wow. And so. I'm going to have, wow. And so, um, I'm going to have to go there and say, Hey, y'all know Joe? No, they will not. Uh, and so, and I love Pontchartrain. I fished on Pontchartrain and here's something unique about it.

And I know a lot of our, our, our friends out there have, have certainly visited it over the years and people love to drive on the causeway to say that they've been on the world's longest bridge just like just over 23 miles in length it takes oh goodness i didn't know it was that long yeah there's certain points where you can't see either shore but you just see water you see water yeah and then eventually you'll see land you know on the north shore you know kind of poking up and and everything's flat obviously it's not like there's any hills surrounding Lake Pontchartrain everything is flat in every direction

that's just scary here's something interesting about Lake Pontchartrain Lake Pontchartrain is is actually an estuary and it's one of the largest estuaries in the world and that it is a lake they call it a lake but's, it comes off of the Gulf of Mexico. And the Mississippi River has an influence on it too. And all the, all the various tributaries. Lots of life in this thing. And so you can actually find out toward the Gulf, you'll find more saltwater species out there. Redfish and speckled trout and all that sort of thing. But you go back to the west and you can start catching things like crappie

or as the Cajuns say, sacoulet and largemouth bass and all these sorts of things. And so you've got this environment. And as big as that lake is, Dave, I'm going to throw some knowledge on you here real quick that you might not have ever heard. Did you know that lake averages only 13 to 14 feet in depth? Oh, wow. As big as this thing is because it's vast. I mean, it's not like the size of Great Lakes, but it's vast.

And it's got a real muddy bottom. There is a central area that's like 60 to 65 feet. And you know what that is? That's a shipping channel that was actually cut in there. And so naturally, it's just, it's an estuary. It's not like a real deep, you go to the Great Lakes, you know, and you've got these hundreds of feet of depth up there. It's not like that.

And so you have a hurricane that comes through there. It's like the meteorologists and the hydrologist talk about, it's like having water in a saucer and the wind blows and it'll just blow water. That's one of the problems you had with Katrina. Pontchartrain played a big role in the flooding. But here's the other thing about this dive team, which I could never do diving. I'm claustrophobic. It terrifies me.

I've got a good buddy of mine, Bobby Chacon, who is, who ran the FBI dive team. And he, he is a, he's a beast. I mean, he is, he'll, you know, he's, he's done it all. He's seen it all. It, uh, it terrifies me. But you know, when you get into Pontchartrain, brother, you can't even see your hand in front of your face. You know, so the fact that they've got this Hernandez guy on video gives them an idea of where to start. And also, they did this recovery in Jefferson Parish. So he traveled

through a couple of parishes and on the bridge in order to facilitate this. And the fact that he did it out there is amazing because you have what are called the Causeway Bridge Police. And literally all these people do is police the bridge. They run radar. They're always out there. So that gives you an idea of how emboldened he was, how confident he was. And there is no room to pass on this thing, man. No room to pass. You would have to put your flashers on and say a Hail Mary and go out there and hope that you're not going to get crushed and go out there quick enough to drop it and then

scoot back to your vehicle and start heading in the opposite direction and that's the other thing you start heading in the opposite direction you got to find a place to turn around dude let me tell you this though joe yeah he stayed in his car they said he stayed in his car and tossed the items from the car well that's that's an interesting interesting point that he didn't get out no and i wonder if he actually came to a full stop to do it well you know i'm i'm wondering the same thing that's why i was curious because i don't know i'm trying to visualize this and i can't figure out how wide the bridge is so we're not talking about a wide area. No, no, no, no, no, no.

So we are telling him he stayed in the car. I'm guessing he just thought, I'm going to do it right here and just out the door you go, out the window. Yeah, and he obviously didn't do it in the shipping channel, which the causeway has got this big hump. It looks like a camel just rising up. It's this gigantic hump that's right in the center of it.

And that's so that larger ships can get through that thing and stay in the channel, can stay in the shipping channel. Now he may have had a better shot of them not being able to recover this thing if he had stopped on top of that. But the problem with stopping, and he knows this, the problem with stopping on the top, there are two towers up there. And they look like, I remember when I was a little kid and I'd see them, they look like air control towers, you know,

with the glass that goes all the way around it so that these guys that are in there can see it for miles, can see the landscape or the waterscape for miles and miles around. They've got ships that are incoming and all that sort of thing. And so, you know, you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. If he goes to that portion right there, he might hit the shipping channel where this thing's going to go down to a depth of, you know, 60, maybe 70 feet. I don't know. And settle down in that mud but they caught it soon enough so that these poor souls on this dive team had to go down

there and when i tell you this is like this is hero stuff to me because it's something i couldn't do when they're they're down underwater they're literally feeling around with their hands. And trust me, there's more than an item that this guy threw out over the edge of that bridge. Lord only knows what you can find down there. I see all these kids on YouTube nowadays, and they do the magnet fishing. Have you seen this? I love it. And it's pretty fascinating to see what they come up with and sometimes they come up with with weapons involved in homicides

but you know there's it's a heavily traveled road it's a and you think that anything that you that you toss over is gone forever and ever amen and that ain't necessarily the case and what did they wind up finding dave they found exactly what you were talking about earlier on, a large hammer. Now, they pointed out that because it was on video, this is what the sheriff actually says, he thought he was throwing away these items someplace that they would be gone forever, never realizing that the area he was in, he was in video surveillance while he was doing it so they knew exactly where he was on the bridge when he threw the objects in and they were because they saw the splash they knew where it entered the water now finding a hammer a large hammer

gonna have some weight on it it's not gonna drift a whole i don't know how the current moves but i'm guessing it's probably not moving a whole lot no and then and then once it like i said once it goes once it starts to drift down it's gonna it's going to land in this silt right and and once it gets embedded in that silt it ain't going nowhere as a matter of fact on another interesting point down on the far end of the lake uh the western end there is an entire i might be wrong i think it's an entire 707 that is beneath the water there. And it is, when I say beneath the water, it took off from what you see. It's Huey P. Long.

It's actually the Louis Armstrong Airport. Now it's what used to be called Moisan. Plane took off in 1965, went off the end of that northern runway and just nosedived right into the lake. And I don't know that they ever recovered all of the bodies out of there. And that plane is still there and it's buried in that silt. And so that's, that's how sticky this thing is.

So the fact that they did recover it is quite amazing to me. I'm fascinated, but I think that, look, David Hernandez has only been charged. He remains innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. God rest her soul, has her final fatal diagnosis was blunt force instrument and sharp force instrument related death. And David Hernandez was actually charged with a second degree murder and obstruction of justice. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.