Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Murder or Suicide - The Wild Life and Sad Death of Alex Pennig

Episode Date: March 3, 2024

A Minnesota man claims his mistress fatally shot herself with his gun. The question of Murder or Suicide plays out in this episode of Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Joe will walk you through all of the forensic problems with the story being told. And when everything is said and done, you decide, was it murder, or suicide?   Transcript Highlights  00:01:20 Would a right-handed person use left hand to shoot  00:02:19 Discuss murder or suicide  00:04:15 Talk about “accidental”  00:05:51Discuss science and determination  00:11:16 How quick does a body become stiff  00:13:50 Different jurisdictions  00:18:25 Talk about the scene  00:21:40 Difference in suicide among genders  00:26:27Discuss drying blood  00:29:31Discuss ER Nurse can’t do CPR  00:33:14 Talk about short timeline  00:38:50 Discuss can you wash away evidence?  00:41:36 Talk about skin, brain, muzzle flash   00:44:14 Discuss desire to help people and achieve and throw it all away   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I've heard it said before that the more brilliant people you get into a room, the more confusing things become. And that's the case sometimes in forensic pathology as well. Because everybody, you know, forensic pathologists are no different than any of the rest of us in that they all have their own opinions, which is good. But sometimes things can be kind of murky or confusing. And in our case here that we're going to talk about, there is a bit of confusion about a ruling relative to a death. But one thing is for certain. Alexandra Alex Penig, who is 32 years old,

sustained a gunshot wound to her head. And we do know that she didn't survive it. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Dave, you know, sometimes you and I, I know this, you're the guru. You're the guru when it comes to all things audio and production and all these sorts of things. And I got to tell you, I'm glad that there's not two of us that are brilliant because you can help me walk through these with problems with little or no no concern I know that that the content that we put out is going to sound good most of the time I think and it's because you're you're the you're the bright one when it comes to all of

that you can help walk through technical problems, but sometimes, such as in this case today, it's hard to make heads or tails of things. And I think that sometimes we just throw our hands up and say, well, I can't call it anything other than what it is, and that is undetermined. And that's what we're left with here. I don't understand how that's possible. What does it really mean when manner of death is undetermined? Now, just so you know, today we're dealing with murder or suicide. The death of

Alexandra Pinnock. She preferred to go by Alex, 32 years old. She has a gunshot to the head. Boyfriend claims she grabbed his gun, ran in the bathroom, and shot herself. Police listened to his side of the story, and it didn't match the facts, as they could see them in the earliest moments of the investigation. And so it was left to the medical examiner to tell them what happened and a medical examiner. And by the way, when you have a prosecution, you know,

the defense has their own person to come in and say whatever the defense needs to say. And in this case, if, if the defense has enough money for it, right. Yeah. Yeah.

You gotta be clear about that. Should have been very clear. And in this particular case, um, both of them, uh, the prosecution, the actual medical examiner, and the one hired by the defense had the same thing. The manner of death is undetermined. What does manner of death mean, Joseph Scott Morgan?

Yeah, well, there's only five to select from. And when it comes to violent deaths regarding firearms, which is what we're going to discuss, most of the time it's going to fit into one of those two categories. It's either going to be homicide or suicide. Accidental is an outlier. As a matter of fact, most of the time it has been my, in practice,

if someone told me that it was an accidental shooting, I'll say you have to clearly explain this to me how this was an accident before I'm going to bite on that, because those are a rarity when you compare it to the number of suicides we have in this country, because they outpace homicides. I did not know that. Oh yeah. Yeah. Firearm death, suicide outpaces homicide? Oh yeah. Wow. By, by, by quite, quite a significant margin. Um, yeah, well, a lot of people, you know, possess firearms and they see it as a quick and, and, uh, uh, uh, powerful solution to whatever is facing them in their lives. Um, and so, yeah, you, you have that. If you throw up accident, then it leaves me in a position where

you're going to have to explain that to me, or the data is going to have to play itself out where the dynamic of that event can be easily explained and we can prove it scientifically. But, you know, there's another choice here, and that is undetermined. And I've always had this kind of vision in my mind where when it's written undetermined, I always have this like little cartoon character that pops up in my brain where you got them and they're looking at you and they're just kind of shrugging their shoulders with their hands upturned looking at you like, I don't have an answer to this. I don't know. And in this particular case, that's what we're dealing with.

We're dealing with a case involving a gunshot wound to the head. We can definitively say that, but the classification of it has been left undetermined. I do know this. I do know that the two people that are involved in this case, the victim and the perpetrator, are both health care providers. They're both nurses. standpoint, the circumstantial evidence, just didn't, it didn't hold water in this particular case because there's certain things that you, as an observer, based upon what you know about people that practice medicine or work in allied health, you expect them to behave under stressful situations in a very specific manner. And Dave, that didn't happen in this case. You know, when we get into this actual story,

I want you to know the background because the background follows through. We have a number of people involved in this relationship. Uh, Alexandra, remember Alexandra Penning, Alex Penning is 32 and she is the victim. She was dating Matthew Ecker. Matthew Ecker is 45, married with four children.

Alex was also dating another man. And his name was Shane Anderson. On the night in question, Alexandra had had an argument with Shane earlier in the day about their relationship. Matthew Ecker comes to the apartment, and this is all up in St. Paul, Minnesota. Matthew Ecker lives hours away, but he goes to be at the side of Alex while she's frustrated in the relationship with Shane.

And Matthew and Alex go out for drinks that evening when they come into this one place. There is Shane Anderson with another woman. That causes Alex to be very upset. Matthew defending his girlfriend. See, this is where it gets confusing. Okay. But bottom line, Matthew is with Alex. Shane Anderson is with another woman and Matthew actually confronts Shane and Shane hits him. Probably says, you're married.

Why are you talking to me? Get out, you know, and hits him. Well, you're married. Why are you talking to me? Get out, you know, and hits him. Well, Shane Anderson and the other woman leave Matthew Ecker and Alex pinning stay at the bar for another 45 minutes, having a couple of drinks,

Alex and Matthew go back to Alex's apartment. And this is the story that Matthew Ecker tells everybody. They arrive at her apartment. She grabs a gun out of his backpack and runs to the bathroom and shoots herself in the head. He bashes through the door and calls 911, tries to stop the bleeding by holding his thumb to the bullet hole, I guess.

Police arrive a few minutes later, and she's already cold, stiff. And I want to ask you about this, Joe, because here's my question. Yeah. Based on Matthew Ecker's story, How soon does a body get cold and stiff? Based on his timeline, he calls 911 four minutes after she shoots herself. Four minutes.

Police arrive five minutes later so based on his timetable she gets shot at 245 246 in the morning at 3054 police are there and medics arrive and they declare her dead in the space of 19 minutes i think from shooting to declaring her dead and and she's cold and stiff. Yeah. As it's said, the old saying, that dog don't hunt. Okay. And, you know. Just so you know, Joe, I didn't know that.

That's why I'm asking because I think most of us don't know how quickly does a body that is dead. Yeah. It takes a, well, a lot of it is environmentally dependent, but in a course of, let's, let's, let's be generous here. Let's say that it was 20 minutes. You still wouldn't have these presentations that you're talking about physically with, with a deceased individual where they're cool to the touch. And that's the best way I can describe it because, you know, we do things like body temperatures at scenes and depend upon the jurisdiction. There's multiple ways that we can get in sometime about how we take body temperatures on the dead. But you don't expect in a 20 minute, a 20 minute time frame for a body to be cold to the touch. And look, if he's talking about stiffening or rigidity, um, and generally that's how we refer to it. And again, rigidity of the body, that means how, how, um, that goes to rigor mortis. It takes even longer for rigor mortis to set in. So any investigator

that knows what they're doing, they're out on the scene, they're making that initial assessment, and they're trying to marry this up with what he is saying scientifically. That's why I said this dog don't hunt, because you're not going to have these manifestations that are occurring. Now, things are happening at a cellular level as soon as we die. We begin to change, all right? And it's because cellular respiration has ceased. You'll begin production of lactic acid, which is actually what creates rigor mortis. I tell my students at Jacksonville State, I teach medical legal death investigation. It's this class that I've taught for years. Um, if, if you ever, not that anybody would,

but if you ever want to understand what Riger Mortis would feel like, don't work out for a while, go to the gym and get a vigorous workout in. The next morning when you wake up and you're stiff, that's lactic acid that has built up in your body. That's about as close as you'll ever feel to what Riger is. And that takes some time, though. And, you know, that's happening at a cellular level, but it's not happening this quick. There's no way. And that's how we, that's in investigations, that's how we test, at least on my side of the house, that's how we test an alibi.

Okay. If somebody is trying to alibi themselves and say, well, this is what happened. This is a timeframe that it happened in. And this is what I experienced at this moment, Tom. And then you're looking at what's left behind, all that remains, if you will, with the dead. And you know good and well that what they're saying is not valid. And that's the case here, Dave. And that's what I was really curious about, Joe, when in going over this story,

knowing we had it on our table, murder versus suicide. How quickly do the police call you to come in when they have a scene like this? Pretty quickly. Um, and again, it's jurisdictionally dependent. Okay. So, but up in, um, if you think about, uh, the twin cities, if you think about the Twin Cities, if you think about Minneapolis, St. Paul, I was friends with the chief investigator for Hennepin County for some time, a dear lady who was at the top of her game. She was a former nurse and she was the chief investigator. And that's a top flight office that they have in Hennepin County. Their response would have been, as soon as the police have visualized the scene and they know that this person is in fact deceased, they're going to say, start the ME and they're going to say, start CID. And CID is Criminal Investigation Division and start the Crime Scene Unit.

So all three of us would essentially head out simultaneously from our different offices. We'd show up pretty quickly. And the sooner that we can get there to do the assessment, the better. Because the further you move down that timeline away from when the actual event occurred, you're losing data. And then the environment is producing other data that might skew your conclusions. All right. So timeliness is a huge factor in everything that we do. Matter of fact, I think our entire existence is kind of based upon, we examine for trauma, but one of the underpinnings of what we do is we're trying to analyze time.

We're trying to analyze a timeline and trying to understand what is happening within a specific period there. And does it marry up with the narrative that we're being given. Dave, you got my head swimming, man. I often say you need a, what's that thing called? The playbill, like they use for Broadway. You need a playbill to keep up with characters. And I'm thinking about Ecker, who is a married man with four young'uns, man. Right. Four.

Four. And he's involved in an ongoing relationship with this young lady who's 32 she's i don't know what roughly 12 years younger than him which is fine i mean that's that's their thing they can do you know and but yet he stated in an interview that he had been involved for some time with her and that they i think for for two years, and that they were involved, they had an open relationship. Right. Well, it seems like he's open is the key word here. I mean, he's open to a lot of things. Right.

And it's not turned out well on either end of the spectrum here for him and certainly for Alex, who's now deceased. I don't know what was going on in the relationship because Alex is dead. What we only have, what we have left, just like his story, we have Matthew Eckers story of what he says happened. And by the way, according to police,

his story changed. We can kind of understand the relationship dynamics in that Alex at 32 and a nurse involved with an older married guy. We don't know if Matthew Ecker's wife knew of the relationship before, but we know that she did divorce him when this came out. I don't know Shane Anderson. But we know that she did divorce him when this came out. I don't know Shane Anderson. I didn't even want to mention his name, but I had to mention his name because as part of the story, you know,

there was something going on here that caused, um, or seems to have caused Alex to be upset. And the part that I have the most questions about is what happened when they got back to the apartment because matthew ecker's story and this is why i'm asking you joe about how soon a person does get cold and stiff because these are professional matth Matthew Eckert is a professional nurse. He's a nurse practitioner. He works in the emergency room. This is not his first, you know, bullet wound he's ever seen, I'm going to assume.

No, no, it's not. And the story he tells, you just say that dog won't hunt. So let's go over this really quickly. Because when police found Alex, she's laying on the floor of the bathroom. Her legs are straddling the door. The gun is placed on her chest. I say placed for a reason. And her hands are near it. By the way, Alex is right-handed.

But the bullet wound was on the left side of her head. Yeah, GSW to the left side. All right. Now, while nothing is impossible, you know, have you known of a case where somebody who was right-hand dominant do shoot themselves on the left side of the head. Also do women usually shoot themselves in the head or the heart go? Uh-huh. Yeah. That, well, let's, let's go with the first one first. Uh, the first one first. I like that. Uh, so, uh, if, if they do change hands, it is a, um, it's an outlier. It's not something you would come because it's like picking up a pencil. It's like picking up a golf club or picking up a baseball bat or picking up

your knife and fork. Um, you're going to use your dominant hand. Now, I don't know how much experience Alex had had with a weapon, but one of the questions we always ask, Dave, when we're doing a suicide investigation, which suicide investigations are, first off, I've always felt as though, for me, that suicide investigations are much more difficult than homicide investigations, because most of the time you don't have a witness to it. And so you're having to draw these conclusions based upon what science is telling you. But when we begin to interview their intimates, their peripherals in their life, we'll say, well, this is an apparent suicide.

Maybe they left a note, who knows. But was there an indication that they, were they ambidextrous? Could they use both hands? or were they left or right hand dominant and you would expect that if you're right hand dominant that the gunshot wound would be um would be on that dependent side and in this case it wasn't it. It was on the left-hand side. Now, to this question about do women shoot themselves in the head. If we were having this discussion, let's see. If we were having this discussion in the early 80s, I would say that, you know, you rarely have ever seen that.

But, you know, Dave, as my career progressed, rarely have ever seen a headshot. Yeah. With, with females and people say that there's data that backs us up. Maybe there is. Um, but as my career progressed, I began to see, um, more and more cases of females that would end their lives, much like men did, that, you know, I'd have intraoral gunshot wounds, gunshot wounds to the side of the head, you know, those sorts of things.

I think that there was this thesis that, this, uh, uh, thesis is kind of put forward in our field where it says that, you know, because of appearance that women were not inclined to shoot themselves in the head. Uh, I gotta be honest with you. I don't ever remember a self-inflicted gunshot wound by a female where they shot themselves in the abdomen. I think I had a couple in the chest, but I'd say that I probably had more headshots self-inflicted with women than I did any other location. So I just don't buy into it't buy into it. Uh, that, that, that, that idea, uh, do men and women, uh, take their lives in a variety of different ways? Yeah, they do. I don't know if that's gender dependent or not, but it's, it's one of those things that floats around. I get asked

that question a lot, you know, over the years I've been asked that question. Um, but that she had a gunshot wound to the head and they were thinking it might be suicide, at least it wouldn't be surprising, I don't think, to anybody that was out there that would be working the scene. But here's the thing that's really shocking about this. Let's go back to what you said about Eckert. Not only is he a nurse practitioner, Dave, he's working as a nurse practitioner in an emergency room setting in, let's face it, a major metropolitan area. He's going to see trauma, Dave. And I've got to tell you, I worked as an ER tech for a number of years in college. And in that environment, if you have gunshot wounds that come in, knife wounds, that sort of thing, you're going to get blood on you. You're going to have it on you. I mean,

that's the nature of what you do. You can put on gloves, but you'll even get blood up, you know, up above your wrist, onto your elbows, those sorts of things. You'll get blood if you're wearing scrubs, which everybody does. That's why you wear scrubs because they're, they used to be almost disposable. You know, you would get blood stains on you. You could go to the closet, get a fresh pair and change out. So you would expect him if he is, he allegedly attempted to stem the bleeding by placing his hand or his finger over the defect in her head to stem the bleeding. Dave, if that were the case, if that were the case, he would have blood all over his hands. There's a high probability that she probably clipped a cerebral artery in there. So it's going to be pumping blood out it could spray onto him there's

there's really no trace evidence of blood on him so i think that that's really making the cops question what's going on he ecker actually claims that he washed up now just to ecker claims that when he opens the bathroom door and sees Alex, she shot herself in the head. He claims he tried to stop the bleeding. Short of that, before he calls 911 to report what has just taken place, he took the time to wash himself up. And he tells police he did it in the bathroom sink and he washed with soap. He then calls 911 and he says he called 911 within four minutes of the shot. So you've got him coming to the bathroom, finding his girlfriend on the bathroom floor with a gunshot wound to the head. He then removes the gun.

He takes the gun and puts it in a suitcase. Then he comes back in after trying to save her life uh washes up using soap and water and apparently cleans the gun as well because he then places the gun on her chest and calls 9-1-1 police arrive minutes later and the first thing they notice he has no blood on him and the gun is remarkably clean. Yeah. Despite the nature of this scene, the gun is scrubbed clean. The fact that he uses soap and water on his hands to ostensibly clean up blood, like that would be the worry at that particular moment. Yeah.

Makes no sense. And the bathroom sink is dry. The bathroom sink is dry, but he tells them he just used it to wash his hands. By the way, blood on the floor of the bathroom is drying already. Yeah. I wonder how long it takes at a scene. Yeah, it takes, it takes, it takes, uh, it takes a while. I'll put it to you that way.

Again, I hate to kind of weasel out of the question, but it's going to be environmentally dependent and it's going to be dependent upon surface in the bathroom. Are there carpets in there? Is it a tile? You know, what what's the temperature inside of the room? What's the temperature of the floor that's going to promote this? Because, you know, when you get drying blood, you're at that point in time, and when I say drying blood, I'm talking about dried blood that's beginning to flake. of the blood surface itself has diminished to the point where it's almost at the same level as the floor that it's on or the surface that it's on. It's lost all of that, and it's beginning to almost look like paint. That takes some amount of time. I'm thinking beyond an hour, I would think, and it's really hard to judge that, but, you know, here, here's another thing with the weapon, and by the way, this is

kind of interesting, he was a licensed firearms carrier, he had a carry permit permit and he had kept this weapon, according to him, in his, in his book bag, um, which you'll see a lot of nurses that are coming in and out of the hospital that carry book bags. They almost look like students and they, you know, they've got extra changes of clothes in there. Their whatnot, you know, is, is carried around in there. He carried his weapon in there and she, Alex, according to him, him went she had an awareness of the weapon that he had one before she went into the bathroom she went into his bag and retrieved this weapon she knew it was there and went into the bathroom and showed it to him okay she grabs it and according to ecker she point has the gun in her hand and she is walking backwards telling him don't come any closer i'll shoot myself and backs herself into the bathroom, then shuts the door.

And he says within two seconds of the door shutting, he hears the gun go off, opens the door and finds her. That's why this timetable is very important to the whole story, because from the moment he calls 911 to the minute cops arrive. It's a very short window. Very, very short. There's something else that goes into this too, Joe. According to the story Ecker told police, he moves the gun and, again, he moves the gun, puts it in a bag, then brings it back and places it on her chest. He says he tried to save her life, that she was breathing when he first got there.

He tries to stop the blow of blood, but they asked him, did you perform cpr again going back to the blood that would be everywhere and he says no i did not do cpr because i didn't know what to do how does a nurse practitioner working in an emergency room not know how to do cpr you can't but and that's that And that's what's so odd about this. In order to work in an emergency room, or if you're going to be, let's say, if you're going to work in ICU or one of these places,

critical care units like this, you have to be certified in advanced life support. And first off, CPR is, that's the bottom line. I mean, these people go through such training. I mean, nurses are, you know, are the lifeblood of a hospital. You think about doctors, forget it. It's the nurses that run the show. And they control everything that's there and they are

trained. And if you're not trained, if you can't keep up in that environment, you can go find another job somewhere because they got other people that'll take your job really quick that are proficient at what they do. This, this guy would have had to have been certified in advanced life support and he would have understood the principles behind CPR. And here's another thing. If he had done compressions on her at the scene, did you know that with a gunshot wound to the head, one of the things that also happens is you'll get this fracturing of the skull, obviously, because you're creating, you know, you're cavitating the cranial vault and you've got these fractures that go on the victim as you're doing compressions

you'll actually get blood from the nose the mouth not to mention the defect in the head so yeah it would be a bloody mess i wonder if he if he had an awareness of that as well what i'm not so much concerned about the absence of blood on his hands, Dave. What I'm really interested in, since he's saying that this is, in fact, a self-inflicted gunshot wound, why is there no blood on her hands? Well, it looks like they've got quite the conundrum here, don't they? You've got a guy that I would imagine in the face of questioning by the local PD.

He ain't doing so well. But yet you've got a young lady, and we'll go ahead and say it plainly because it's already out there. She's got some real emotional issues. I mean, she's fought anxiety, depression, all these sorts of things. As a matter of fact, uh, Ecker has been providing her with, uh, with benzos for, uh, anxiety. Um, and it's also been providing her with Adderall, uh, kind of mood stabilizing. And so you, uh, you think about that. She's got all this dynamic going on with her. And you listen, you have to consider that, uh, that maybe taking her own life is on the table. As far as an investigator, you have to be able to take all of that into consideration. Uh, that

would do that would, it would behoove you as an investigator to go back and dig into her past. If she's under therapy past if she's under therapy if she's receiving therapy you'd want to question um the individual that's providing her therapy and then you got to talk to her friends you got to talk to her family members that might you know she may have confided in that sort of thing it's not just talking to ecker or to this uh this this other fellow that she's involved in a relationship with there. This is on its surface.

This seems like a very simple case, but it's like I said, Dave cases like this are very, very complex. Well, the physical evidence taking away the psychology and everything else, just the physical evidence alone, the scene of the crime or the scene of the incident, was it murder or suicide, the handgun didn't have blood on it. Now, if she takes her own life, she's right-handed, but she shoots the gun with her left hand on the left side of her head. But police get there minutes later.

By the way, back to the timetable. The phone call to 911 was made at 2 50 a.m and matthew ecker claims that he called 9-1-1 four minutes after she shot herself police arrive and she is declared dead by medical professionals uh ems workers are there and she's declared dead at 3 0 4 a.m so from the time he caught the time he calls to the time they're there and declare her dead is 14 minutes. Add another four minutes from the time he says she shot herself and you have 18 minutes from gunshot to declare dead at the scene of the crime.

You mentioned why are her hands not bloody? Um, what is the test that is done by medical experts to determine whether or not somebody has fired a gun? Yeah. Yeah. It's a gunshot residue test. It's, um, uh, there are three major components, um, in, um, in, uh, in, uh, in firearms and in the actual process of kind of lighting the fuse on a projectile.

All right. So when, if you just imagine, if you'll just imagine in your mind that when you initiate the firing sequence with, uh, with any kind of firearm, when you pull that trigger, okay.

And that, that firing pin or the hammer slams forward onto the base of that live round, you have got a primer cap. And the primer itself is a bit more unstable chemically. That is, it doesn't take much to set it off, which is what you want. Because there's like a little cap. If you look at the end of a live round, there's a little cap in the end of it, and it's called a primer cap. That's tapped off, and when that's tapped off, it creates an explosion, all right?

And that explosion sparks up through what are referred to as flash holes. And within the flash holes, the, it ignites what's referred to as the propellant that's contained within the cartridge itself. That's the gunpowder. So when you do, uh, when you do, uh, a GSR test, you're looking for antimony, barium, and also lead, those three components. Um, and primer residue is a bit different than that. So you can get an idea that if it's, if it's primer residue that you're looking for, perhaps it, it, you would expect to find it on a hand. All right. That's where it's, it's kind of got a C-clamp on the grip of the pistol in this case. And then you'll find the rest, the remaining elements there that kind of shower down out of this cloud. You know, you see the gun smoke, you know, cloud that comes out and it's kind of showering down. Um, we try to do, that's one of the reasons like

at the scene. And I would imagine in this particular scene, uh, at this particular scene, rather they would have bagged her hands at the scene. That's what we would do. Okay. And the reason is, is that when you place her body into a body bag, sometimes the bags can sweat and you have to protect those hands because you're going to do a GSR test on the victim at the morgue. Um, and we have series of swabs that we go through and, you know, that's sent off to the state crime lab and you can test to see if she's recently fired a weapon. The trick is, I wonder, I wonder if the police at that moment in time, based upon how unsteady his story was, I wonder if they said, okay, we need to do a GSR test on you. And I wonder if he submitted to that, if they actually did one, because right now at this point, we don't know if they did that. There's no indication that that has necessarily come up.

I'm not saying it didn't happen, but it's one of the things that you would do in a case like this, particularly where you're questioning the timeline about how everything went down, and it keeps getting murky because you stated, Dave Dave that he changed his story a couple of times. And for me, that's, that's a huge red flag because if you're so, yeah, go ahead.

The soap and water he claims because they noticed, Hey man, you said you tried to save her life, but there's no blood on you. And, and the gun is incredibly clean. Uh, he is that,

can you wash away like the GRS test the gun residue did i say that right grs it's gsr but gsr yeah anyway but they're going to test it if if you wash your hands with soap and water can you wash away that residue so that you do a test on me and it's like i'm sorry man it's just soap and water i had to clean up the blood it's my gun i touched the gun i mean is there a way that he now can explain any kind of residue on his hands but i use soap and water. I had to clean up the blood. It's my gun. I touched the gun. I mean, is there a way that he now can explain any kind of residue on his hands, but I use soap and water to clean them. I mean, yeah. And just because you have, just because you have these results, uh, first off GSR tests are not foolproof. People think that they are, they're not, they're not. Um, and so that's why they're not putting a whole lot of heat on that.

All right. Yeah. Yeah. That explains it. I wondered, Joe, I didn't know. I'm not going to say that GSR is in the same realm as like a polygraph.

Okay. Okay. It's not like that, but you're not necessarily, you know, they did one study years ago with people that worked in a, what was it? They worked in munitions factories and they would randomly test people with GSR in those environments and they would come back with

negative results. And these people have been handling munitions, you know, for days and days. Um, and I always found that, that kind of interesting. They put a lot of weight on these tests. But, um, you know, I don't, I don't necessarily think that GSR is required in this case because he's, he's kind of betraying, uh, you know, the original narrative here. He's, he's keeps deviating from the story and that's a circumstantial in circumstantial evidence but still he's the only witness to all of this he was an ear witness to you know any kind of statements he certainly saw what happened that evening and i guess you know you begin to think about well what would be his motivation to to do this to her why why would he take her life? And you think about maybe it all came to a head that night in the bar where he gets into this tete-a-tete with this other man in her life. He's married.

He's got four kids. Maybe he had this moment in time where he's like, what am I doing? And the only way that he can see to solve this is perhaps taking her life. I don't know the weapon itself though. When you look at it, you there's also, you know, they were talking about how clean it was many times, not every case, but many times with self-inflicted gunshot wounds,

Dave, um, you'll see, you'll see evidence of what's referred to as blowback on weapons where you'll have blood that will come back onto the surface of the weapon. And if it's a close contact gunshot wound, which I really want to get into here, uh, um, you would have, I've worked cases where I've had skin, hair, brain matter in the muzzle of the weapon, uh, where it blows back down the barrel.

Uh, you'll actually have that occur because you know, that barrel space is empty after that projectile it's, it happens in a flash, but after that projectile exits the, the, the barrel, it cavitates into the skull and you've got this energy that's forcing backwards toward the point of origin of this thing. And you'll get this kind of distribution on the surface of the weapon. They're not seeing that here. So I think that that's the position that this puts the forensic pathologist. And I say pathologist because we're plural. We've got two of them, Dave. We're talking about two highly learned, or learned, I guess they say, learned people here that are board-certified forensic pathologists.

And they both arrive at the same conclusion. They can't say that this is either a homicide, a suicide. They can't say it's accidental. So their default position here is it turns out to be undetermined in this particular case. I find that quite fascinating. But it does end up going to court. Matthew Ecker is charged. And it goes back to the reason I was hitting the timeline so hard is because you really

are dealing with 18 minutes from start to finish on her death and her his story did change it didn't make sense he's a nurse practitioner working in an emergency room didn't perform cpr or do anything he knows to do and he was clean the. The scene was clean. Blood was drying. There's nothing in the sink indicating anybody had washed anything in the sink in the bathroom like he claimed. The evidence didn't bear out his story.

So he took it to court. He was charged with her murder. It has been adjudicated, Joe. What's our conclusion here, Dave? Is he now cooling his heels in state penitentiary? Matthew Phillip Ecker, 45 years old. His wife did divorce him, by the way.

The father of four, convicted of the sole count of second-degree intentional murder, not premeditated for shooting 32-year-old Alexandra Lee Penig in the head, December 16, 2022. I've got to tell you, at the end of the day, you think about all of the effort that went into living the lives that these people lived. The desire to help people in health care, the desire to get all of the education that's required, those hoops that you have to jump through, and to throw it all away. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,

and this is Body Bags.