Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Massacre Unveiled - Angela Rowe & Her Children

Episode Date: October 8, 2023

Angela Rowe and her three children are executed in a night of terror, where the sanctuary of their home becomes the site of a horrifying massacre. The crime scene, locked from the inside, bears the marks of stealth and calculation, painting a grim picture of the final moments of this family's life. The bullets that ended their lives set off an intricate and multi-layered investigation. In this episode, Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack unravel the complex forensics, dissecting elements such as the significance of the murder weapon, the absence of rigor mortis, skin slippage, and even the thermostat's role at the crime scene. The name Leonard Taylor surfaces as a suspect, leading to a discussion of his self-defense claims, the chilling methodology of his crime, the calculated nature of his acts, and his execution in the Missouri State Penitentiary on February 7th, 2023. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Time codes: 00:00:20: Joe Scott Morgan introduces single motherhood's struggles and potential dangers. He reveals the focus on Angela Rowe's homicide case and her three children. 00:03:00: Dave Mack discusses the tragic outcome of Angela Rowe's case and the uncertainty surrounding the time of death. 00:05:06: Morgan explains the time lag in discovering the bodies. 00:08:28: Dave Mack questions how investigators maintain their composure and the emotional impact of dealing with child victims.  00:11:20: Joe Scott explains the process of decomposition and how it is affected by factors such as temperature, and discusses the importance of observing the thermostat at a crime scene to understand the ambient environmental temperature 00:14:40: The terms “skin slippage” and “marbling” are explained. 00:16:39: Details about the locked house and the perpetrator's escape through a window are shared. 00:18:45: The focus on building a timeline leads to the mention of Leonard Taylor, and his claim of self-defense. 00:21:40: Morgan reveals the gruesome details of the autopsy report, explaining the multiple gunshot wounds each victim sustained. 00:24:51: The disturbing scene with the children as earwitnesses is described. 00:25:34: Joseph Scott Morgan reveals that the perpetrator was witnessed discarding a revolver into a sewer, a crucial piece of evidence that was never recovered. Challenges in determining the caliber are explained due to the absence of the weapon. 00:27:13: Dave Mack questions the importance of the missing murder weapon in the eyes of the jury. 00:28:29: Circumstantial evidence such as uncollected newspapers and mail is pointed out. 00:29:46: Joe Scott Morgan reveals that on February 7th, 2023, Leonard Taylor is executed in the Missouri State Penitentiary.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Some folks say life is hard. Don't do anything to make it any more difficult. One of the things that I do know from experience, because I was raised by a single mom for a period of time in my life, life is particularly difficult for a mama who is raising babies and is trying to make ends meet. It's particularly hard when you might feel lonely and you feel like you need somebody in your

life. Problem is, is that there's not a lot of folks to choose from out there. If you've got three kids, who's going to take on that burden with you? It's a big ask. But loneliness abides in that world, and it's hard. It's important to remember that you never know who is going to enter your life at any point in time. It could be a saint, or it could be somebody that has very, very bad intentions. Angela Rowe lived with her children in a St. Louis suburb. Her family became worried when they hadn't heard from her and asked police to make a welfare check. Doors at her home were locked, so police climbed through a window. Angela Rowe was found dead, covered by blankets. She had been shot four times. Her three young children were also shot,

their bodies left lined up on a bed. Today, we're going to talk about the execution, homicides of Angela Rowe and her three children, Alexis, Acria, and Tyrese. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Single motherhood, Dave, it's a tough thing, even under the best of circumstances, to try to make ends meet and to take care of them babies all the way to adulthood. And when you've got kids that are ranging in age from 10 to 6 to 5, what a thing to have to juggle. What a dynamic to have to juggle to make sure all those needs are being met. When you said it's a big ask, I was thinking along the same lines. This is a woman who has three children. She's on her own children, are murdered and you cannot come with any certainty of what day or time they were actually murdered? you look to the science. And sometimes there are so many variables. And let's think about this.

If you do a scientific experiment, you can change the outcome of that experiment by adjusting certain variables within the formatting of that experiment. And maybe you're trying to, I don't know if you want to get sinister about it, maybe you're trying to influence outcomes in a way that you want them to be, and you're not doing true science at that point in time. You just kind of let the cards fall where they may. However, what we do know is that when it comes to things like interpretation of postmortem interval, PMI, there are any number of factors along the way that are going to impact how bodies change after death. case, if you were to qualify numerically, they claim that if you start to get up into the range of three and then you go to four, you can technically begin to use the term mass homicide. Now, let that sink in just for a second. A mass homicide, because it is not to diminish

other people that have lost loved ones as a result of violence. But when you start to rise above a single individual and you start to get up into the three, the four, the five, those counts like that, if this had been, say, in an environment like a public gathering place as opposed to a home, you would hear the media throwing around mass homicide. But this is contained within a home. And containment within the home goes to this idea of trying to measure how long someone has been down in a particular case. The bodies are protected from view. So you don't have, say, as opposed to a public place where a mass homicide would take place. These bodies are all laying

together, contained within a physical structure that is, in fact, locked from the interior, this home, and you can't observe the bodies going through these physical changes. You're essentially there to see what all that remains. And in this case, which I find quite fascinating, this event is actually occurring in November of 2004. These bodies of these four victims were not found until December the 3rd of 2004. So you've got this huge lag in time. And you begin to think about what was occurring relative to the environment in which they were found, what was going on from a decompositional perspective as to their placement, the internal factors that are affecting the changes of the body, and also, are you losing

evidence over a period of time? And so, those are all things that are considered when we're assessing a scene. And sometimes it's that idea of the further you move down that linear timeline as you're heading out away from that critical moment in which these people lost their lives, everything is changing all the while. That dynamic is changing all the while. So it has an impact as to how you're going to assess the while. That dynamic is changing all the while. So it has an impact as to how you're going to assess the scene. And in this particular case, it certainly did, I think, Dave. You know, I'm looking at the actual temperatures for November 22nd, November 23rd, in that time period we're looking at of 2004 in St. Louis, Missouri. And I'm wondering, Joe, I thought, and it's because of television,

I know this, that I thought you guys, you go up on the scene and you make a few notes and yeah, they based on stomach contents and whatever. This person died at 9.58 PM three weeks ago on a Tuesday. I thought that was something you guys did, but I find out now, of course, having been together with you for so many cases, that there is so much more involved. From a temperature standpoint, we know that the bodies were not fresh. Is that the right term? No, it's a term we use. Actually, let me, I'll go ahead and plainly state it in my own verbiage.

And with many of my colleagues, we refer to the fresh dead. So yeah, you're absolutely right. They have been dead for at least a little period of time. And you have to figure out when this occurred. And in this particular case, date and time really mean a lot. I wonder when you get to a crime scene like this, how do you move forward to find the things you need forensically when you're looking at a mom and three children? Now, look, the mom's an adult and she has more wounds than the children, but how do you maintain your composure when you're looking at children, a five-year-old, a six-year-old, and a 10-year-old? It's almost as if you stand there. First off, it's very surreal. It's very surreal. It was

always very surreal for me. I can't speak to other investigators, all right? But when you begin to try to take in what you're observing relative to the victims, that part of your humanity is looking at these children. We're talking about kids that are 10 and 6 and 5 that are laying immediately adjacent to their mom's body. It's a surreal moment many times. It's kind of trite to say you soldier on and then you deal with all of that in the aftermath. But I have found myself over the years as a death investigator being very, very distracted. When you're on a case like this, if you're talking about a singular adult, all right, and you're working the case, it's very easy to kind of adjust your mindset to being very clinical.

But there's that one little thread of humanity as you begin to look and you're trying to take in everything that you're seeing. And it's almost as if, Dave, the angel of death has walked through this place and has reaped this grim harvest because it's hard to set aside what you're witnessing and rely completely on the science. And in this case, you certainly had to. No scene is the same as the other ones. Keep that in mind. As an investigator, you always have to be clear-headed.

I don't like to say open-minded. There's an old phrase that I heard many years ago. It says, beware the man that claims to have an open mind. There's a high probability his brains landed on the floor some time ago. You have to remain objective and clear-minded when you walk into a scene. And certainly, you have to get past all of those factors that would negatively influence your ability to assess the scene. And assessment is key here because you know that when you walk in to a scene like this and there has been a lapse time, you've got your senses being affected. There's the sense of smell. There are visual changes. So you've got the smell of decomposition in the air, and that's by a

factor of four. Let's keep that in mind. When you think about for each body that is there, they're decomposing because their proximity to one another, they are decomposing at probably the same rate. Does temperature in the room or in the building have freeze it. You know, decomposition never fully stops, but you can retard its development by application of cooler temperatures. So in this case, when the investigators arrive at the scene, and look, I've been to St. Louis over the years many, many times. And in late November, yeah, it can get warm during that period of time. But most of the time, you need a jacket, all right? And maybe a sweater. It's going to be really cool. And they can have days when it really, really gets cool. And in this particular case, the daytime high, 50 to 54. And when they walked in, the temperature setting, and I'm saying they, you know, one of the things that you observe at a crime scene is you want to look at the thermostat. People don't think about that, but we do. We actually check thermostats and houses to see,

first off, if the air is functioning, and then secondly, to see what the current temperature is, because that's going to give you an indication of what's referred to as ambient environmental temperature. And that is going to directly impact the rate at which a body decomposes. And so we're faced with four. The interior temperature in this home, I think, was probably close to about 50 degrees. Now, that is not going to slow decomposition down to the point where it's non-existent. Remember, that doesn't happen anyway, even if bodies are frozen. There's still going to be something going on, but it will slow it. What they were able to assess at the scene with these victims is that the bodies had actually gotten to the point where

rigor mortis was no longer present. Now, that's key because we're not just talking about body temperature. We're talking about rigidity. And if you're out past a marker in time, that means that you're probably past that 36-hour mark if bodies become what we refer to as flaccid, which means that if you grab the forearm or the wrist of the deceased and you attempt to manipulate the arm and it just kind of easily is moved back and forward, you can move the shoulders because rigor really sets in the shoulders very tightly. You can bend the legs at the knees and all those sorts of things. That means that certain time has elapsed in order to facilitate that.

All of the lactic acid that had built up in the joints has now begun to dissipate. And so you no longer have that rigidity. You combine that with the fact that you can visually see that there are color changes going on in the body, which happens with decomposing bodies. You look for things that are referred to as marbling, skin slippage, all of these other things that happen over a period of time. Joe, when you say skin slippage, what exactly is that? Well, with skin slippage, the body, bodies in particular, and this would have been the case here, the bodies, that top layer of skin, the epidermis, begins to peel. It literally begins to peel. And so when you touch the body, even with a gloved hand, and this is probably

going to set some people on edge when they hear this. But if you touch a bare arm where there's skin slippage, you wrap your hand, your gloved hand around the wrist, and you go to move the body so that you can either place it in a bag or examine the body, the skin will almost always kind of move. That epidermis will move away and you'll begin to see down into the dermis. And when I say move, just imagine if you've ever been sunburned and after a period of time, you begin to peel. Okay, that's the epidermis coming loose. Well, it happens as a normal biological process in decomposition. And again, that's another time marker. So you have bodies that begin to have skin slippage. You have marbling, which occurs in decomposition, which is, and this is kind of an interesting

manifestation. You have, when we say marble, just imagine the lines that you see in a block of marble. Okay, those little dark lines that run through it. You'll see this marbling where the blood that is contained in those superficial vessels has begun to actually decompose within the vessels. The blood decomposing in those vessels will actually begin to make them stand out externally so that you can kind of follow them. So you get these kind of curvilinear lines, if you will, that run through the body. And that's actually another sign of decomposition. So all of these things are markers along the way. In the case of this family with Angela Rowe, she's been shot multiple times. Her children

have been executed. You begin to try to take the measure of what you're seeing. And you understand that this is not something, as an investigator, that happened recently, that someone was able to have access to her. And by the way, the house was locked from the interior, and there was an open window on the back of the house that whoever left that house that perpetrated this crime exited through a window. And they would not have been seen necessarily walking out the front door. It was done in stealth and probably under the cover of darkness, more than likely. You have this instance where the bodies are there and you're trying to understand the dynamic of

what's happened. And here's the chilling thing as an investigator that you've got a family that has been wiped out in that moment. And all along, the further you move out in time, more evidence is being lost. Physical changes are taking place and nothing ever appears as it did on the day that the event occurred. Dave, you know I hate the question why. I think here, though, it's more important to try to understand who would want to eradicate a mother and her three kids. And, you know, this name arose in this case, Leonard Taylor, the mother's boyfriend. And this thread that runs through Angela Rowe's life seems to be connected to this man. Leonard Taylor was arrested in the deaths of Angela Rowe and her children, but the case became a he said, she said situation.

Taylor says he was in California when they died. Taylor left St. Louis on November 26th. He had plane tickets to California. The reservations for that flight were made on November 25th. But then there's information coming from some of Taylor's family members saying he confessed and saying that he was seen disposing of a gun in a sewer near a family member's home. Taylor repeatedly told police that he did not kill his girlfriend and her children. Why I was asking you earlier about the temperature and what it would have to do with decomposition because of when the when this family was found versus when the crime occurred, when were they killed?

And building that timeline is what detectives have to do to make sure they can get the right person. All I can think, Joe, from a forensic standpoint, there's a lot of pressure on you to tell the detective, where's that window that this event happened? At the time, what was Leonard Taylor doing? He was dating Angela Rowe. He had a relationship with her in St. Louis. But this man also had a wife in California, another girlfriend in Kentucky, and he was juggling these relationships. Leonard Taylor, according to his brother, claimed that Angela Rowe was coming at him with a knife. So he shot her and more than once because he couldn't get her to stop. That's what his brother told us about Leonard Taylor on the night this happened. So to get right down to the bottom line, Leonard Taylor was married to Dabreen Williams in California. He called his brother from Angela Rose Place and told him that he had killed Angela. He said, I didn't mean to kill her, but she came at me with a knife and I couldn't get her off of me.

He says, I shot her two or three times. I got to ask, were the 10 year old, the six year old and theyear-old also coming at him as well. I'm wondering, Joe, what were they possibly doing other than none of this makes sense from his standpoint. You got to remember, he's telling his brother the story that he thinks will make him look the least evil. But it's evil. When you kill a mother and her children, you are the definition of evil. And even if she was chasing him with a knife and the children were all coming

at him with knives and his only defense was to kill them, you'd have thought he would have had some wounds, some injuries, but none. Let me kind of frame this for you, too. If you think that's bad, let me throw, I got another one for you. When the examination was performed on these victims, these victims of this massacre, it was determined that Angela, the mother, had multiple gunshot wounds. So she's got four gunshot wounds. She's got two to her left arm, one to her chest. And I guess what people would refer to as the coup de grace is a GSW to her head, which they believe is what finished her off. And that makes sense. You've got Alexis, her 10-year-old, and they've both sustained gunshot wounds to the head. And then Tyrese, a five-year-old, has sustained a fatal gunshot wound to the head. One thing to point out, Joe, is that 10-year-old Alexis was shot twice in the head. And then Tyrese, a five-year-old, has sustained a fatal gunshot wound to the head.

One thing to point out, Joe, is that 10-year-old Alexis was shot twice in the head. Six-year-old Acria was shot twice in the head. And Tyrese, the five-year-old little boy, was shot once. Is there any significance to that in terms of forensics when you look at this? When you're looking at it, why did it take two here, two here, and one here? Or is it just that's the way it was? No, I think probably the more substantive consideration we have here is the fact that the forensics revealed that this was either a.38 caliber revolver, remember I'm saying revolver, or a.357 revolver. And when you look at this and you know what a standard revolver holds, are six rounds. Just with Angela alone, she was shot four times. And you've got Alexis, who shot twice. You've got Acrea, who shot twice. You're seeing a pattern here. Now we're at six, we're at eight rounds.

And then you get up to Tyrese, the five-year-old. He shot one more. Dave, whoever did this, when it's not like a semi-automatic weapon where you've got a magazine that fits into the weapon. People famously see these. You've got the slide that you charge the weapon with and fire it. And maybe you've got 14 rounds depending upon the weapon, you know. And it's ejecting shells.

That's not what happens. With a revolver, you've got six shots. So you have to literally open up the cylinder, dump out the expended rounds, then purpose to reload the weapon and fire it. So that makes this all the more ghastly when you think about it. I worked many years ago a case where three men were placed on a sofa, and they were all shot multiple times with the same weapon, and it was a revolver. And I'll never forget, they were interlocked in their arms. They were forced by a drug gang to hold, to interlock their arms at the elbows. And those were reloads as well. And here's the image that is kind of painted.

Something horrible is happening. If this is a.38 caliber or certainly a.357, which is a magnum load, you can't get past the sound. You got these three babies, Dave, that are listening to this. They're hearing the screams. The mom has raised her arm, apparently, because she's been shot twice in the arm. She has an awareness that this is the end. She screams out. And you've got these three babies that are bearing witness to this.

And certainly, if they were not necessarily eyewitnesses at the time, they were certainly earwitnesses. You can't escape the report of this weapon contained within this home in there. The sound travels everywhere. During the time that he had to reload, who was still alive? That's a question that only the sweet Lord above has the answer for, because we don't know. But we know that and that adds to the level of horror here. We know that somebody had to have been alive to bear witness to this because it appears that they were all shot with the same weapon.

And as it turns out, the perpetrator in this case was witnessed throwing away a revolver into a sewer to get rid of it. And that was one of the problems that the forensics had is that they could never get their hands, I think, on this weapon to determine if it was a .38 or.357. These rounds are akin to one another in the sense that.38, it sounds counterintuitive. It's.38 caliber is smaller than.357. And when I say smaller, the actual cartridge for the.357 is bigger. Remember, I said it's a magnum. You can actually take a.38 caliber round and fire it out of a.357 magnum revolver, but you cannot do that with a.357 magnum and place it into a.38

caliber revolver and fire it because cartridge is too big. But these rounds, when you're examining them in the ballistics lab, these rounds will come apart many times, and it's hard to determine exactly what caliber it is. And if the rounds are deformed, it's hard to kind of put your finger on that. Now, Joe, you've been through a lot of crimes over the years in terms of testifying and research. But when you don't have the murder weapon as evidence, when you don't have that, do you think sometimes we get lost on trying to prove 38, 357 versus what the jury will see? We don't have a gun. We've got four dead people who shouldn't be dead. And we've got one suspect to the crime and no others. Does law enforcement get wrapped up in the gun when it

doesn't mean that much to the jury? When you don't have the weapon, how much does it mean to the jury? I think that juries probably, if you're saying that you're dealing with a homicide, one of the things that prosecution has to do is to try to explain to the jury, just as you had just mentioned, that you do have these four individuals that are dead at the hand of the accused, and that wherever that weapon is, he wielded it. So a lot of that, you have to combine the data that you do possess with the circumstantial evidence that they were able to develop along the way to try to understand this horror show. Because at the end, that's what it all comes down to. And it's a combination of all of the information. You go to someone physically setting the thermostat in

the house in order to drop that temperature down. And there's another little piece to this. There were newspapers deposited in the front yard that had not been being picked up. And that's another thing that you look for. You look for stacked mail, you look for newspapers, that sort of thing that are being collected and you don't have evidence of an individual coming out of the home, collecting these things, and then they disappearing from sight. That means that it jumps outside of the norm. That's another circumstantial element to this. Then you think about the people that are contained within the intimate circle. Certainly make no bones about it. Mr. Taylor,

though he had a wife in California and he's got a girlfriend in Kentucky, he's spending time in this home. He's cohabitating here, at least for some period of time. Well, he vanishes off of the face of the planet at this moment in time and beats feet for California. And you have to explain, well, what was your motivation for leaving this home? And then, oh, by the way, the four people that are domiciled there with you, at least part-time, all have multiple gunshot wounds and you're nowhere around. And so you begin to pile on those circumstances and combine that with physical evidence. And you think about access and opportunity and motive. It paints a very

bleak picture for him. And of course, as it turns out, on February the 7th, 2023, Leonard Taylor was executed in Missouri State Penitentiary. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.