Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags With Joseph Scott Morgan: Mariticide in Ohio - The Case of Dr. Christopher Osborn

Episode Date: December 18, 2022

Dr. Christopher Osborn is found and pronounced dead in his home in Dublin, Ohio on July 18th, 2018, just after 7:30 a.m.  He had been shot in the head three times in his sleep. His wife, Holli Osborn, drunkenly calls her father to tell him that her husband is dead. Her father calls the police and shortly thereafter they arrive at the house. After finding two guns next to the bed and seeing the state of Ms. Osborn, they take her into custody and eventually charge her with the murder of her husband.  In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss the state Dr. Osborn was murdered in, gunshot residue, how to assess a crime scene after its been altered, how the location of where Holli’s DNA was found eventually proved she was the perpetrator, and more. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 1:25 - Background and overview of the case 2:43 - Evidence from the bed 6:23 - In a case like this, what evidence do you start with first? 9:28 - Who arrived at the scene first? 12:20 - Assessing the crime scene after it's been damaged 15:40 - How to tell the difference between something that was part of the crime vs. caused by first responders when they arrived at the scene 19:40 - Does the amount of blood depend on how many times you were shot or where you were shot? 29:20 - Does Dr. Osborn’s physical state (sleeping) factor into his body’s reaction when he was shot? 34:40 - Gunshot residue 40:43 - Are all gun powders the same? 42:30 - Distribution of gunpowder 47:00 - “10 particles” 49:35 - Holli’s DNA being found on the gun and how it was proven that she was the perpetrator 50:50 - Outro  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. In this old world, there's not too many things that I value more than sleep. It seems like the older I get, the more I like it. That time that you can snuggle down in your bed, be warm, comfortable, forget the day that you've left behind, and hopefully wake the next morning, and be rested. But for Christopher Osborne,

he never woke up. He went to bed one night, and maybe, just maybe, the last thing that he heard, was that hammer dropping, on that.38 Special revolver, and his life ended. Today, we're going to talk about the homicide of Dr. Christopher Osborne.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. With me today is Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, I don't know about you, but I sure do like bedtime. I love laying down in my bed, pulling the covers up over my head and just drifting off into slumber. But Dr. Osborne, he paid a price. He paid a price for being married to Holly Osborne, I have to say that, because she ended his life as he lay there sleeping. This is a case that just kind of boggles the mind because you have a crime and a perpetrator who says she really doesn't remember a lot of it. In fact, the police became aware of what happened after Holly Osborne called her father

to tell him what had happened. And then the father ended up calling 911. And during the phone call to 911, her dad revealed that she was drunk when she called him. Police get there, and Holly Osborne was not in, I don't want to say she's not in her faculties because that's not the way to say it, but she is not sober. Police find two guns next to the bed, and there is, Joe, there's so many ways that we could go at this case. So let's start with, if you were laying in the bed and you were shot, the bed itself is obviously going to be your evidence bonanza because the blood that drains from the body is going to pull on the bed

as well as any gunshot residue, any fragments. I mean, plethora, plethora, plethora. Yeah, you're right, Jackie. Some of the most interesting cases that I've worked homicides have involved beds and bedding. I think one of the cases that really jumps to mind for me, I actually had a case where a SWAT team had come into a home and a lady was lying on the bed and she reached for a gun and she was lying on the bed or the door bust open. The problem was this. She was laying on a waterbed. They hit her with a fully automatic weapon. And there were bullets all over the place.

And not just all over the place, they were floating in a pool of water that she was in turn floating in because the bed had been perforated. And in this case, you actually have a perforation of the mattress, which from one perspective is really handy for forensic investigators. And let me kind of tie this back to what happens in the crime lab when we're test firing weapons. I think that people might not know how we capture bullets at the ballistics laboratories, but generally one of two ways. We either fire a test fire weapon into a tank of water and the bullet will float down and it's caught in a tray down there. And the beauty of firing into water is that it allows the bullet to remain in kind of a pristine state. It's not passing through some kind of solid object. It's

going through fluid. Now, other places actually, when you fire a bullet to test fire, it goes into cotton. And again, it's not, I don't think that it would be as preferable as water, but still the bullet maintains its integrity, if you will, the physical integrity. And in this particular case, one of the rounds actually did pass through Dr. Osborne and into the mattress. So when crime scene investigators were there, you know, kind of digging around, as you have to do, because you can see where the hole is in the mattress, they would have to track that round, determine what the trajectory is. You know, you place a trajectory rod in the hole first, and you take a photograph of that or use a simulator in the room like a pharaoh device they can shoot lasers in the room and try to recreate kind of a 3d environment with this thing and you would do that you know to visualize it and then you cut down into that

mattress and retrieve that cement round and hopefully it'll be intact. And, you know, the end game here is to try to match that round up with a weapon that it originated from. One of the big problems, though, is that the body in a case like this becomes what's referred to as an intermediate target. That means that the body is in between the end of the muzzle and the final resting spot of the projectile. And so as it's passing through the body, the projectile can become deformed, misshapen, that sort of thing. And it can also fragment too. It will not look the same as it does when you test fire it in a lab,

so it won't be as pristine. But it's better certainly going into a mattress than it is striking a concrete floor. Because you have so much evidence at that point to process, start from the beginning, Joe. You walk in that room, you see a body on a bed, you see guns, you see blood. Where do you start? Do you start with securing the guns that you find near the scene? Do you check to make sure the victim is alive and need medical help? Where do you actually start? Great question, because first thing that you do, look, forensics is great. It's fantastic. It really is. But in every single case, the health and safety of the public

trumps everything else. Okay. I hear people many times, cops in particular, that have worked cases where they've had the firefighters, first responders that'll run onto the scene or the paramedics that'll show up. And they're, quote unquote, according to investigators, they're trampling on evidence in this environment. Okay. Well, their goal, and this is important to remember, their goal at that moment in time is not to preserve evidence, it's to preserve life, right? And so, you have to assess the status of, at that time, would be their patient. Me, I'm a death investigator. I'm going to refer to the individual as a decedent, okay? That's not the stage that you're at at this point. You have to determine the status of the patient. Is it possible that this individual could still

be respiring, that they could still have a heartbeat, and they're going to assess them at that moment in time? They'll get out the stethoscope. They might even hook up a EKG, a portable EKG and see if there's any evidence of life at all. But in this case, Jackie, and you know, you really mentioned something just a second ago when Holly Osborne had this awareness that her husband was dead, her first inclination was not to dial 911. It was to call her daddy at that point in time. Now, one of the major problems with that is if you don't get EMTs saddled up and headed in your way in the quickest manner possible, this person is going to die. And so I think that if you look at this from not just,

let's just don't consider the evidence. Let's consider what that implies, right? That you're aware that your husband has sustained gunshot wounds. I would assume you would be aware of that. But yet you're not calling 911. And that shows kind of a callousness, doesn't it? I mean, just think about that just for a second. I don't know about everybody else listening, but I got to tell you.

If someone has the idea that I've been shot, I don't want them to call their next of kin. I want them to get on the phone. I want to hear ambulances in the distance. I want to hear the sirens. And if I can still see, I want to see those lights flashing outside my window. That's not the case with this. She called her dad. Her dad called police. So when he made that call and the dispatcher sent out the alert to all the appropriate people, personnel, who would have gotten there first? Who would have been the personnel that 911 would have informed first? Well, there's going to be a couple of folks.

The way this kind of breaks down is that, you know, I think people think, well, paramedics are going to get there first. Not most of the time. You know who generally shows up? And sometimes they'll arrive at the same time. I'm always fascinated by this because when I was a little boy, I didn't want to be a police officer. I'm going to be a firefighter. I loved his trucks. Fire stations generally have paramedics that work there as well. Now, they're firefighters and they will be on a truck that's smaller than a regular fire truck, okay? And they're standing by, right? They hop in the truck and off they go, man. I mean,

they're just blasting. Well, the police might be handling another call, for instance, and they're going to get there as quickly as they can. But the guys in the first responders in those fire trucks, and like I said, it's generally a smaller one, they'll roll up at the scene themselves. And many times they have to let their self in and you know people often talk about how dangerous it is for police officers to go to domestic calls think about an unarmed firefighter first responder showing up and they not most of the time there are certain jurisdictions but not most of the time firefighters firefighters, EMTs are not armed, okay? They're not wearing a sidearm. So, they're going into an environment where there has been gunfire. There's

been gunplay, okay? And their goal is to try to determine what has happened in this environment and try to save somebody. Just imagine how horrific this is. If you're going into this environment and you're walking in the door, you've got your medical kit with you. Maybe you're dragging a stretcher behind you and you're walking in and it's a person that's bleeding out. And guess who's standing there? The perpetrator. And guess what else? You mentioned it just a second ago. You've got two weapons in there. You've got two weapons that are in there. And you've got a person, obviously, that has had a part in the death of this individual. What's to say for these defenseless firefighters at this moment in time that they're not at risk too?

That's why they're so brave. I mean, they really are when you begin to think about what their job is to make an assessment on a patient and try to determine if, in fact, there's any hope whatsoever that they're going to survive. And it's absolutely terrifying. I've had any number of friends that are first responders that have told me just horror stories where they're having to wrestle with people. They're being threatened. I've had friends that have been shot at. I had a friend of mine that was stabbed as a first responder. And it's a tough, tough job. So as the first responders get there, no matter who it is, whether it's the firefighters, whether it's paramedics, or whether it is the police, because they have to go in and assess the scene. So basically what you're telling me is, really no matter who gets there first, your crime scene is going to be damaged in some way.

So how do you figure it out? Here's kind of an interesting part to all of this with firefighters. And I know that if there are any in our audience today, they'll understand this. Firefighters many times have to have, get this, they have to be fingerprinted. And I don't mean like in order to get their job, they will literally be printed in order to eliminate their fingerprints at a scene. Let's say for instance, they're not wearing gloves when they roll in and they touch something. And also here's something else that's interesting. What do you have if you have an individual that has

sustained multiple gunshot wounds where you just don't have defects in the body. You've probably got a copious amount of blood. And guess what happens with the firefighters when they're trying to make their way to the body? Well, they're going to step in it. They're going to step in it, and they don't have an awareness of this. They're trying to get to the person to render aid. So when the firefighter actually steps in the blood, they will transfer that bloody boot print, because most of them wear boots like this, these kind of steel-toed boots that protect their feet and all this stuff, because they go into these really harsh and hostile environments.

And they're going to transfer that print of that shoe print to the floor. I've been out on scenes many times where we'll ask the firefighters, first responders, to take their boots off, and we'll set them up, and we'll take photos of them. We'll demonstrate they've got blood on the soles of them, and you can pick up on the tread patterns and all of that stuff so that if it comes up later on down the road, you can compare those prints that you see at the scene to prints that are left behind by the bloody boots that they were wearing at the time. And it's a matter of elimination. So from Jump Street, your scene is contaminated. It's contaminated before it actually becomes an official crime scene. And all of that has to be taken into consideration.

Here's another fascinating part about first responders. Unlike even the patrol officer that's out there that shows up at the scene and kind of has security and they're in control of everything, guess who are the first eyes on the scene? Well, it's going to be the first responder. And they'll hear and see things that other people will not hear and see. Can you imagine what it's like to be a first responder and you show up and you've got a spouse that is just talking out of their head? They're saying things like, I didn't mean to shoot them or the gun accidentally went off or I'd had enough of him or whatever the case might be. Well, they hear that.

They hear that. And guess what? They're not police officers. So they're going to include that in their report. And that report can be subpoenaed, and they'll be called to the stand. The firefighter or the EMT, they can actually hear this loved one or the perpetrator, as the case might be, actually hear them make the statement, and that's going to be committed into evidence. So they play like this really key role in what they see and what they hear when they first roll up at a scene.

Okay. So you talked about bloody footprints, but one of the other things that you're going to see, especially on a bloody crime scene, if they're trying to revive the victim, it's going to disturb your blood patterns. Instead of droplets and spatters and smears, you're going to have drag marks. You're going to have, I don't know all the

terminology for them, but you're going to have marks that were not there caused by the actual incident. So how do you, as a crime scene investigator, tell the difference in something that was caused by your crime and then caused by your first responders when they pulled the body off the bed. Just picture this. Let's say, for instance, you've got an individual that has been shot in the chest, okay, and a round has punctured their lung. Well, what do they do? What do first responders do if they're trying to reestablish a heartbeat? They're trying to get them to respire. Well, they're doing chest compressions, aren't they? Well, they've covered the wound. Let's say, for instance, the old term is a sucking chest wound. If you have a wound that penetrates the

chest cavity and it goes into the lung, they'll be taking air into that space, the thoracic region there, and they develop what's called a pneumothorax, which means that the lung is beginning to collapse. So they'll try to seal that off with plastic and cover it up, but then they have to start doing chest compressions. And guess what? All I have to do is think back to that image from the crime scene with Travis Alexander, where we had bloody aspirate all over the sink where he spit it out after Jodi Harris had stabbed him so many times. The same thing kind of happens when you're doing chest compressions. The individual will be spitting up blood. Well, that's bloody aspirate that's coming out.

And sometimes that can appear to be like medium-velocity blood staining. And so it lands all over the place. Well, how do you separate that from something that was generated as a result of an attack? Well, the best way to do it is to speak to the responders. What was going on while you were doing the chest compressions? Was he spitting up blood? Because that kind of blood has a different kind of appearance. It's heavily oxygenated.

It'll have kind of a frothy appearance to it many times. And you have to try to understand, is that the source of that blood? Is it because they were doing the chest compressions? And then you talked about the movement of the body to try to examine the body because, you know, that's part of assessment. You're trying to triage somebody at a scene or do the initial examination. The EMTs are not thinking, oh my gosh, I got to leave this body in its pristine state so that the detectives, if this person dies,

can appreciate them in this original position. No, they're not doing that. They're rolling this person over. They're checking them for injuries. They're checking them for signs of life. They're going to manipulate the body. Just think of it when you go to the doctor. The doctor doesn't have you stay in one static position.

They're going to move around you and listen to your heart sounds and your breathing on your backside, between your shoulder blades. And they're going to put the you and listen to your heart sounds and your breathing on your backside, between your shoulder blades, and they're going to put the stethoscope over your chest. They'll have you lay down, do all kinds of things. They're going to manipulate you in that circumstance. The individual they're responding to is not unlike that. They are a patient. They're not a decedent at that moment.

I cannot tell you how happy I am I got to talk about EMTs. They're some of my favorite people in the world because they are so self-sacrificing in their profession. They work horrible hours. They're there for us night and day. And they certainly showed up on this scene for Dr. Osborne. But, of course, it was to no avail because, as was determined, he was, in fact, dead at the scene. Dr. Osborne was shot, and we know that he was shot by his wife by the nature of her call to her father and his call to the police. So when police get there, we know that they saw two guns, and the defendant had been shot.

If he had been shot more than once, do you get, now here comes my stupid question of the day, but there's a reason I'm asking it like this, so don't laugh at me. Are you going to see more blood the more times that you're shot, or does it depend on where you were shot? We know Christopher Osborne was shot three times in the head. So how much blood there ends up being outside the body, does it depend on where you were shot or how many times you were shot? Mama said when we were growing up, we don't use words stupid.

All right. There are no stupid questions. So you can't use that any stupid. All right. There are no stupid questions. So you can't use that any longer. All right. There are no stupid questions. And actually, it's a valid question because, you know, what the forensic pathologist identified as gunshot wound A, and I've got to be very clear about this. The letter that's assigned to this does not have any bearing on the sequence in which they were fired. Okay. But what the forensic pathologist is calling. Oh, wait, wait.

Say that again. Yeah. The letter or the number that is assigned in an autopsy report to a gunshot wound or even a stab wound does not imply the sequence. There's no way to know the sequence. But the one that the forensic pathologist is referring to as gunshot wound A, get this, and this was actually stated on the stand. This round went through his right jaw, his mandible, which is your jawbone on the right aspect, passed in the posterior neck, which means on the backside of the neck, traversed the body and was lodged in the cheek on the left side.

So it entered on the right, passed in front of the spine, okay, and clipped what they call the upper cervical spinal area, which is like C1 through C4, and then wound up in the soft tissue of the jaw. And get this, it didn't clip a single vessel. It was absent any kind of blood. You didn't have blood that was generated from that. You know, to say that it didn't clip any vessel is kind of misleading.

But what she said on the stand is that she said specifically it didn't hit the jugular vein, okay, which we all't hit the jugular vein okay which we all have heard the jugular vein you know of course you've got the carotid that passes through that area either none of the structures were struck with with bullet a so the the volume of blood has a lot to do with where you're struck anatomically because there are certain areas you can be hit in your body where you're going to bleed less than you would compared to another anatomical location. What's fascinating about this particular case is the fact that it's kind of an amazing little factoid there that this

gunshot wound A, that they're referring to as A, B, and C, that gunshot wound A, the forensic pathologist says it didn't clip any vessels. You factor that in with the idea that the head, you know, the neck through the head is the most vascular area. And what that means is there's more blood vessels that are traveling through that area because your brain requires so much oxygenated blood, more so than any other area in the body. You're going to have all of these branches of vessels that are running every which way through there. Let's say, for instance, you're struck in the temple with a gunshot wound and it passes, say, from right to left and winds up exiting out of your skull. That's going to be a very, very bloody wound. I would ask anybody

within the sound of my voice that's ever sustained an open head injury. And when I say that, it doesn't have to be severe like your skull is fractured and you have brains visible. I'm just talking about where you split your head open. Have you ever noticed how much you bleed anytime your scalp is insulted at all? As opposed to, say, a paper cut on your finger, or maybe even if you've cut your wrist in some way, or the back of your arm, or skinned up a knee. It just seems as though that you bleed so much coming from your scalp and, of course, below that area when you get into the skull. So, it is what we refer to as being anatomically

dependent upon where each one of those rounds is targeted, particularly when it comes to the head. Okay, Joe, but I got to go back to my original question because I really want to understand this. for Osborne, knowing how the body still pumps blood, would there have been, with the second wound, just more blood initially, or would there have been more pressure coming from that first wound that made a hole in the body to the exterior? Would that have seemed more blood? Do you understand what I'm trying to get at? Oh, yeah, yeah, I do. And particularly if you're talking about, let's say, for instance,

like a through and through wound. And when I say through and through, I mean that you have an entrance and an exit, an obvious exit. We talked about wound A, okay, that they identified in the autopsy. The bullet did not completely exit out of that wound. It was sitting right beneath the surface of the skin adjacent to the left jaw. Okay. But if you have a through and through wound, it's just logical. You're perforating the body through and through. So the more defects you have in the body, the more you're going to bleed. And I have folks ask me and have asked me throughout my career. Here's the one question that's posed to me, particularly when I notify families. They always say, did they suffer?

That's a relative question, okay? I think people are asking, do they have an awareness that they're dying or, you know, that they're in throes of death or whatever the case might be, if you were shot in the head, let's say you take around to the brain, well, yeah, from a neurological standpoint, you're automatically diminished, okay? But just because you're shot in certain areas of the brain doesn't mean you die instantaneously. Now, if you're talking about the brainstem is clipped, where all the autonomic stuff is going on, you know, our heart's beating and all that, you're not going to be dead instantly. Okay? So, it's, again, we're back to this idea of being anatomically dependent.

And let's say, for instance, an individual is shot in the head. It's through and through. It goes from, say, the right temporal area through the left temporal area and exits the body. Well, the heart's still going to be beating, okay? Still going to be beating, and if it's still beating, that means that blood is coursing through the system. Now you've compromised the structural integrity of all of the vascular system, okay? The little vascular pathways in the brain,

and now you've got these openings that have been blown out. So, yeah, there'll be a tremendous amount of blood that comes out. You see people that sustain, and there are many of them that sustain intraoral gunshot wounds, which are most of the time self-inflicted. You see in the movies, people stick guns in people's mouths and threatening postures and all that sort of thing. I don't know of any case I ever worked where that was a homicidal event, but you do have that with suicide. And those are some of the bloodiest cases that you can possibly work when it comes to gunshot wound-related suicides. There'll be a tremendous amount of blood, and you think, well, you know, if they die instantaneously, why is there so much blood at the scene?

Well, their heart doesn't just automatically cease beating at that moment in time. Now, do they have an awareness that this is going on? I think most neurologists would probably say no, they don't. They've lost consciousness at this point. They don't have an awareness of it, but yet the heart continues to beat because it's controlled by the autonomic nervous system. So you're still going to be pumping out blood until eventually, here's another fancy $10 word. If Nancy was here, she'd say, just start speaking English at this point.

There's a term that's used that we refer to as exsanguination. Exsanguination is very simple. It just means that you bleed out. You lose a tremendous amount of blood. They exsanguinated. And that just means major blood loss at that point in time. But to kind of tie it up in a neat bow, most of the time when you have head trauma, particularly related to gunfire instances, it's going to be a bloody mess. And it makes interpreting the scene from a bloodstain characteristic standpoint the devil. You pay the devil to do it.

Because not only do you have that dynamic event, say, for instance, where an individual is shot and that round passes through the skull. And you have high-velocity bloodstaining that goes over everything. You know, where you get that real fine particulate blood droplets that are all over the place, but yet they lay in that same spot, and they've got this secondary blood flow that kind of covers and obscures that initial blast that takes place. It can be very, very tough to kind of figure things out at that point. Does the state of Christopher Osborne's body at that point,

a state of complete relaxation, sleep, does that play anything at all into what happened in that the reaction of the body when he shot? I think that it speaks a lot to the perpetrator. It's not like the perpetrator went face to face with Dr. Osborne, where they're in some kind of dynamic fight. This guy was asleep. When the first officer rolled up, Dr. Osborne was laying face down. Now, I'm not a stomach sleeper myself. It's just something I don't find comfort in. But let's just say, let's just say, for argument's sake, that that's the position he slept in.

If you sustain a gunshot wound to the head, more than likely, you're going to die right where you're shot. Okay? You're going to bleed out in that position. And it says a lot for the, and I use this term a lot for the asymmetry in this kind of environment, this kind of violent relationship. What I mean, that moment of violence where you have an individual that's dominant, that is standing over him or immediately over him with this weapon and firing into this man's head. Not once, not twice, but three times. Three times. They're going to get the job done. And here's another thing that you can ascertain from the grouping, what we refer to if you were out on a firing range

where you're looking at the grouping of the bullet holes or defects as we refer to them. I've never been a good shot. I was in the army and I barely qualified. Firing guns, I love guns. I love to talk about guns, particularly from a forensic standpoint. I've never been good at firing guns. I come from a family that are really good. To my great shame, I was never a great marksman, but this is what I know. Anytime I had to go the range to qualify, I know that the closer I got to the target, the tighter my shot group got. So if you're scoring headshots, which this individual scored three headshots on Dr. Christopher, that implies to me that either they're a highly skilled marksman or they're in very close proximity to Dr. Osmond. So what you're telling me is the state of the body,

whether in heightened anxiety or full relaxation, changes nothing when an event like this happens. When you're shot, the amount of blood that exudes from the body doesn't change. The pressure within the side of the body about how fast the blood's going to come out, things like that. Being awake versus being asleep makes no difference. It's not a matter of being awake or being asleep. What matters is that if you're already in a sleep state and someone shoots you in the head, you're not coming out of that sleep state. As a matter of fact, you're going to drift off into death because the brain has been so damaged at that point in time.

Now, if Dr. Osborne had been shot, for instance, if he'd been shot in his back and the round had passed through his intestines, he would have come to, he would have come out of that sleep state. That might not have been for a long, long time, but he would have had, certainly have had an awareness and you would see him bleeding out, rolling around in it. The best term I've ever been able to use is writhing. We hear that associated with pain, and it is painful. You can imagine being shot in the midsection through your bowels, a very painful event, and there would be a pain response at that moment in time. If his brain's not damaged, he has an awareness of what's happened. And certainly,

he still has his faculties. If you're shot like that in the abdomen or in the back, you have an awareness because you can hear, you can see, you can smell. You imagine waking up, you've heard a loud report of a weapon and you've been shot, but you also smell gunpowder that's hanging in the air. That burned gunpowder gives off a very distinctive odor, so you would have that kind of sensory awareness to what's going on. And with the bleeding in that circumstance, you'd have them writhing around in it. Lack of movement though, many times is indicative of a shot that literally takes your lights out to the point where you're not going to move at that point in time after you've been injured. I've often thought of evidence in terms of whispering and screaming. And essentially what I mean by that is that sometimes it's very gentle. Your sensitivity to it, you have to have

your total awareness of what's going on and pick up on every little subtlety. Other times, you look at a circumstance and it is literally the evidence, the physical evidence you have there, absolutely screams as to what was the nature of the event. In this particular case, I think we've got a lot of evidence that's screaming at us. Oh, screaming indeed, Joe. You were telling me how close you thought this incident happened. And from what I've learned from you about gunshot residue, you're really not going to get it on you after 36 inches. Well, during the arguments made by Holly Osborne's defense attorney and the fact that she was found with gunshot residue on her, her attorneys were trying to claim that it was possibly transferred to her body by police contact with the gunshot residue. But this was what I found most damning and most interesting about this case. Not only was gunshot residue found on her,

Joe, it was found on her eyebrow. There's two chemical compounds that you find within a bullet. Okay, let's say live ammunition. I don't like to use the term bullet because it means a lot of different things to people. Bullet can be the totality of the live round, and you've got this lead core projectile that's going down range. Some people will call that a bullet, and then they'll look at a fully intact item of live ammunition. They'll call that a bullet. So it's variable.

But let's just say with live ammunition, you have two chemical compounds that are at work. You have what's referred to as propellant, and propellant is gunpowder, okay, where you have the gunpowder that is actually ignited, and it drives that projectile out of the end of the barrel, okay? So, the projectile itself is packed into the casing, and the gunpowder sits directly beneath the projectile. Now, how does this start? How does this mechanism start? I've often described it to my students in forensics classes. Just think of it as a rocket ignition. So what do you ignite the propellant with?

Well, you have a primer with a piece of ammunition, particularly a.38 caliber,.38 special round, you'll have the base of the live round. You'll see what it looks like if you ever look at one, turn it on its end, and look at it. It looks like a bullseye. That little brass area right in the center, that's called the primer cap. And the primer in there, when the hammer goes forward it strikes that primer well the primer is a bit more unstable chemically that means that as soon as it's touched off it fires off vigorously okay and it sends sparks up through these what are called flash holes in the base of the live round and it ignites the propellant.

So, you got several chemical reactions going on. You talked about this gunshot residue, the GSR, that's found on Holly Osborne's eyebrows and on her hands. What that means is that when that primer initiated, it creates a puff of smoke. You get two puffs of smoke. You get a puff of smoke that comes up out of the rear of the weapon. That's going to be the primer igniting when it strikes, and it gives off this cloud. Just think of, I like to use talcum powder in my descriptions a lot. If you think about talcum powder, and you open up the little vents on the top of a bottle of talcum powder

and you squeeze it and you get that little puff in the air, it's got to settle. It doesn't just hang in the air, right? So this gunshot residue is generated from this primer strike, okay? And chemically, it's very specific. So it comes to rest generally on the backs of the hands many times and if you're standing like in really close or you're holding the weapon in really close proximity to your face guess where it's going to do it's going to rain down on your face so you catch bits of it for instance in your eyebrows it'll come to rest on your skin

i'm actually amazed that they swabbed her eyebrows. I find that quite fascinating. But they did, and they were able to detect gunshot residue in these areas. It had actually deposited in these areas. The main components of the gunshot residue are going to be things like lead, antimony, and barium. And that kind of creates this chemical storm, if you will. You know, years ago, before we had scanning electron microscopes that were widely used, they used to use a very interesting test, and it's called a paraffin test. And so, if an individual had fired a weapon, what they would do, just imagine this. They would take hot wax, paraffin wax, and you'd have to set your hand in it.

Okay? You'd set your hand in it. They'd take a cast of the suspect's hand. The cast would be removed, and then they would apply what's referred to as a reagent to the actual cast, this wax cast of the hand. And you would begin to get these hits, these color hits on there. And it would give you the indication that you had these, you know, partially burned components that were left behind. And it would interact with the chemicals. But it was hit or miss.

It just wasn't that accurate. And still, some people argue with gunshot residue, whether or not, you or not they'll still doubt the efficacy of it. And that's why the defense attorney raised the suspicion that the gunshot residue was actually transferred. Somehow I've heard in this case, I've heard, well, it could have been transferred from the body because they're not denying that he was shot with this 38 caliber pistol. So it was transferred from his body or that the police had transferred it onto her in handling her, for instance. And that's kind of, that's a real reach.

I mean, the defense attorney is doing what defense attorneys do. They're attempting to defend this individual. And they'll throw up any kind of seed that will plant reasonable doubt in this case. Of course, it didn't work. Stupid question time again. Are all gunpowders the same? No, they're not. That's an excellent question.

As a matter of fact, you look at what's... Hey, I'm two for two. You're knocking it out of the park. Hey, incurables. The beauty of it is that you don't even have to do a chemical test on gunpowder to determine if it's different from the other. What's really interesting is that gunpowder, depending upon the manufacturer, you can look at the morphology of it. And what that means is the appearance of it. Under high magnification, you'll have some gunpowder that will be disc-shaped.

You'll have some of it that will be cone-shaped. You'll have some of it that are shaped into little rods, for instance. And it's all dependent upon who's manufacturing this. And, of course, they have the same basic chemical compound, but they are chemically distinct, okay, dependent upon the manufacturer because these things are, you know, they're registered. They're items that are sold, okay, depending upon the manufacturer, because these things are, you know, they're registered. They're items that are sold, okay? There are specific signatures that you can go back and look for. I've always been fascinated by that little item there from a forensic standpoint. Can you tie something back? The key is, though, how deep are the police going

to dig? How deep are the people at the forensics lab going to dig in to whatever sample they've captured at a scene? Are they going to be compelled enough and enthusiastic enough to go in and examine these things? In this particular case, they were. The other scientific reality here is that not only do we have gunshot residue in this case, but we have what's referred to as a distribution of gunpowder on Dr. Osborne's body here. Okay. What do you mean distribution? Like all up and down his body? No, not all up and down his body, but here's the key. When we take a body into the morgue, after we've done all of our primary trace evidence collection on a body, we will clean the body up. Okay. Now, that seems

counterintuitive, I know, because you want to see the body. I keep using this term pristine, but you have to be able to appreciate anything that's underneath, say, for instance, the blood that's on the body, any kind of other injuries that might be resting underneath. Let's say they, for instance, not in this case, but if you have a case where somebody was beaten down or pistol whipped, and then they were shot, okay, well, blood that has seeped out of the body could cover up, say, contusions and that sort of thing. But the thing about the distribution of powder, unburned powder specifically, from a firearms-related event is that it's not going to wash away. Unlike gunshot residue, you have to be very careful with people that you suspect. You cannot allow them to clean

themselves up. They have to stay in their current state when the police find them. Because you can rinse off gunshot residue. If you scrub hard enough and this sort of thing, you can kind of get rid of it. I'll return back to the gunshot wound in just a second. But here's another little interesting part to this. And the detective was actually asked this under cross-examination. And I found it very interesting. When Ali Osborne was taken into custody, they did not take her clothes from her for testing. So, it was kind of a moment in court, I think, for the jury. They did do GSR testing on the hands and obviously the eyebrows, which still for me is fascinating. But they did not collect her clothing, like shirt,

that sort of thing. What did I say earlier, you know, about my example with the baby powder? That cloud has got to settle somewhere and it can settle onto her clothing as she's fired the weapon. So, it's not just going to be on her hands and maybe the backs of her arms or the palmer aspects of her arms, but it can come to rest on the fabric of the clothing. They didn't collect her clothing. And that could be a problem in some cases. But when you think about the gunshot wound or wounds that Dr. Osborne sustained, what the pathologist concluded was that he had stippling patterns all over these wounds. And what that means is that the unburned powder and anything else that might come out of the end of that muzzle, it's not just a bullet coming out. You've got smoke that comes out.

You've got flame that shoots out sometimes. You've got unburned particles of gunpowder that come out. And what happens is that that literally embeds itself into the tissue. And of course, the further you move back with the end of the muzzle, the broader the distribution of that pattern will be. Okay. And so you can appreciate, you can ascertain range of fire. Now, I know that I have said in the past, when I said out to 36 inches, now let me qualify that because I heard you mention that earlier. See, I know you listen, I just know you listen. 36 inches, you might be talking about a high-powered weapon then, okay, because you would have a tremendous amount of more force.

You'd certainly have more propellant that would be coming out. But when we're talking about handguns, most of the time you're looking about an 18-inch range. Well, here's what we know. These are intermediate gunshot wounds. And the reason I know that and the reason that the pathologist knew that is because there was a distribution pattern, the spread, if you will, where it had deposited on this poor man's skin as he laid there sleeping, that would give you an indication that it wasn't 18 inches. She moved that muzzle, they believe, anywhere from six to nine inches away from his skin when she pulled that trigger. She was right on top of him.

And here's another fascinating thing. When you think about that that gunshot residue was on her eyebrows, she was very up close and personal when she fired this weapon. I mean, she drew that thing into her face, and then she leaned forward over his body. And she didn't just fire once or twice. She fired three times into this man's body that she's married to and killed him right there in the bed. Well, in shooting with the.38, of course, learning about the six inches, the first thing I thought of was how in the world did she keep from giving herself a black eye from the recoil, for one. But you mentioned something a minute ago about the residue on both of her hands. I want to read you a sentence. I want you to explain it to me that came from the report about this autopsy or about this investigation, I mean. Both of her hands had the cutoff, 10 particles. They don't go up higher than that. Okay, what does that mean,

10 particles? That means 10 points of identification relative to the chemical distribution of those items. All you have to do is find 10. You have to find 10 of those. I still don't understand. 10 particles. Is it like the ridges on your fingerprints? Yeah, exactly. So, if you can find 10 of those particles, that's the cutoff. That means that you have chemically assessed this. There are tolerance here and the's tolerance because this is passed through the membrane of scientific rigor, if you will. You know, those things that we test in court, for instance, are those things that pass through like Daubert hearings and this sort of thing. Is it acceptable science? And what they have determined is that 10 of these components are found on her. So for them, the court is saying

that the court has recognized that that is acceptable, that that is demonstrative of the fact she has gunshot residue on her and that that is solid enough to stand up in court. That's precisely what it means. 10 particles. Give me an example of what I'm just trying to understand of what a particle would be. I still don't understand what that means. Are you talking about the breakdown components of the gun powder residue itself? Yeah, yeah. And it can be the components itself. You can actually find lead that's associated with this. You can find sheared off pieces of brass in there sometimes. So you find a base number of 10 of these components present on the individual's hands when you're going to test her.

And, you know, the structure of gunshot residue is not simply lead, antimony, and barium. There are other associated elements that are considered in this. You can have things like calcium. You can have silicone in there. There are any number of other things. And so you find this combination of 10, that's enough of a baseline to establish that she did, in fact, have gunshot residue on her. In putting together the evidence against Holly Osborne,

not only was gunshot residue found on her hands, but her DNA was found on the guns. Because the guns were in her home, and you would imagine that, yes, her DNA would be on it. How did it prove that she was the perpetrator? You know, it's one thing if you just pick up a pistol, say, for instance, by the pistol grip, and you, your DNA deposited on the trigger, the trigger housing. Or when you went to check to see if it was loaded and you opened up the cylinder because this was a revolver, there's a lot of action that goes on with a revolver to kind of maintain it and see if it's a hot weapon, if you will. You're touching it all over the place. It's one thing just to kind of passively pick it up and move it to another location. But when you've got that much touching going on, it's one more element in this case

that puts that weapon in her hand and eventually has that muzzle pointed at the back of Dr. Osborne's head. Holly Osborne was convicted of murder in the death of her husband. She has been sentenced to 18 years to life in prison. I'm Joseph Scott Moore, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.