Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Murdered While Jogging - The Death of Laken Riley

Episode Date: March 10, 2024

The senseless murder of Laken Riley on the campus of the University of Georgia has the nation talking about everything from safety on a college campus to immigration. Laken Riley didn't know the man who killed her, but she knew she was in a dire situation when they met. Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, allegedly attacked and killed the 22-year-old while she was out for a jog in Athens. Joseph Scott Morgan will explain how the evidence in the case points to Laken Riley attempting to call 911 and Dave Mack will fill in the blanks on the timeline on this edition of Body Bags. Transcript Highlights 00:15.71 Joseph Scott Morgan talks about college life 02:39.50 Talk about nursing school, education 05:33.55 Discussion of victim  09:56.27 Talk about timeline 14:03.73 Talk about seeing victim as an object 18:54.67 Discussion of blunt force trauma 22:13.70 Suspect arrives in USA illegally 31:20.86 Talk about apartment search 36:08.59 Discuss How suspect and victim were strangers 40:30.36 First Homicide at UGA in 30 years  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. When you're young and you jet off to college after you've been under mom and dad's roof for so long and you've been through the trials, those trials that define high school, you think those are trials at that particular time. Then you get to college and it's a whole new world. And I found myself in this position many times where I just didn't think I could go to another lecture. I didn't think I

could go to another laboratory meeting. I didn't think that I could be around these people any longer. And my solution to that for a good portion of my younger adult life was to go to the gym. I did run. I ran quite a bit, but I loved going out and just pumping iron, pushing iron, as we used to say, because it relieved that stress. And, you know, out of all the academic pursuits, particularly at an undergraduate level, there are not too many that are more rigorous than nursing school. And the reason is that I guess you could argue that academically, if you were in engineering or something like that, that is very rigorous, but it's the practicals, the practicums that you have to do, the rotations, all those sorts of things. And you have to stay on top of your studies or nursing is so very difficult.

You have to be able to apply yourself to the point where you are acutely aware of everything that you're learning and understand the application of it. You need time to let your mind go. And our case today that we're going to discuss involves a young lady who just wanted to have a little bit of peace, a little break, if you will, from the rigors of academia and particularly nursing school. Today, we're going to talk about the murder of Lakin Hope Riley at the University of Georgia. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this And this is Body Bags. Here we go again, Dave. Another young life needlessly snuffed out before she's come into the fullness of adulthood, where she's free of the bonds of the university life, where she's out on her own.

She's trying to apply those things that she learns in college to make her way. Lake and Riley, when you look at her timeline of life, this was the daughter every father wants to have. Lake and Riley and mother. Okay, I'm just, this is a mom and dad's dream. When people talk about Lake and Riley, they talk about how wonderful she was. Just nobody saying anything bad, just nice stuff. And they back it up with, you know, in high school, she was an honor student and ran track every year.

Loved running track, very athletic, very active in her church. And she goes off to college, and what does she do? Well, she's on the dean's list. She completes her education at UGA, and then after that goes to nursing school. And she's still living near the campus of UGA and she still runs every day. She's on the dean's list in nursing school.

And by the way, very quick sidebar, my daughter Haley went to nursing school briefly when she realized that there are two types of people that go to nursing school. Those who want to be nurses and those who think it sounds like it would be neat to be a nurse. Those who think it would be neat to be a nurse. Those who think it would be neat to be a nurse. Find out you got a lot of studying to do if you want to get through nursing

school. Oh boy. And my daughter found that out and said, I've had enough and chose a different path. Many people do. Lake and Riley was excelling at nursing school, excelled at everything she did. She goes out for a morning run and she was a pretty regimented person.

Her roommate knew to count on her, knew how long she'd be gone. You have to be, yeah. Yeah, to do the academics and to be on the dean's list and to be active in all these other things, absolutely. She didn't return in her regular amount of time. And after a little while longer, her roommate got worried. She's not answering the phone, Can't get up with her. Call the police.

This is wrong. She's been gone way too long. Hours too long. And that's when the police are on the gun. They go and they find her very quickly. Less than 30 minutes from the 911 phone call to the time they find Lake and Riley. In that time, she had been running, taken off the path, and beaten. Sexually assaulted and murdered. and left in a heap in a weed covered forested area right there at the campus of UGA near an apartment

complex that housed the suspect and his brother. I think about this, you know, for investigators, one of the things that we work upon, the kind of the underpinning is certainly time. And when you have an individual, a victim, that you can, I guess it could be argued you could set your watch by them, if you will, to use that metaphor, that you know that when they're supposed to be there,

they're supposed to be there. And if they're not there, you begin automatically to think, well, something potentially catastrophic has happened because you know that they're always going to be on time. What's the old adage? I try to teach my son this. You learn this in the military too, you know, to be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late, and be late is unforgivable. And so I've always, you know, tried to do that. I fail more than I succeed, but I set that

as my goal. And I think that Lakin, and if you're aspiring to be a nurse, first off, you have to get up and show up for your shift to relieve those individuals that are working in a clinical environment. And generally, nurses have to, interesting, a lot of people don't know this, nurses have to arrive at the hospital prior to their shift beginning because you have a nursing meeting at shift change where you have to sit down and share the notes with the other nurses that are coming off. And they'll tell you what the status of the, if you're working on, say, a med-surg floor, you have to pass on information. You know, Mrs. Smith needs this. Mr. Jones needs this. This is what we had to deal with on our shift. And so you're going to exchange this information.

And then the work actually begins for you. If you've ever had a loved one in the hospital for any length of time, you know that you got used to the nurses on your floor at the time of their shift because that's the time you spent with them. They actually were your connection to the doctor and what was going on. Oftentimes, it was the nurse who explained what was going on because the doctors were doing their morning rounds or evening rounds. They were in a hurry. They had other patients to see. And so it was the nurse who interpreted what was going on.

To be completely honest with you, I would much rather see a nurse than see most of the doctors that I've nurses. I just find that first off nurses have their feet on the ground, right? They're grounded in, in the reality of what you're facing. Most of the time they understand the winds, which way they blow. And so I've always, I've always been of a mind that first off, I was always going to be as kind as I possibly could to my nurse at any point in time, because I know they hold the key to either continued pain or relief. They also hold the key to whether or not those orders that the doctor has put in are going to get fulfilled and all of the things that come along with that.

And that's what Lakin wanted to do. That's what she wanted to do and be. And she knew that. Exactly. I don't know that I have that much of a servant's heart to be able to do that. Exactly. I don't know that I have that much of a servant's heart to be able to do that. And for her at this point in time, it seems as though she was cresting the hill, you know, academically heading into that home stretch to be able to enter into eventually enter into practice. But, you know, as we can see, you know, that that wasn't meant to be. And that brings me to this issue of this individual that has been arrested.

You said something just a moment ago that really struck me. Once the flag went up relative to this 9-11 call, they were Johnny on the spot. And I say they, I'm referring to the public safety folks. When they began to comb this area, I was really amazed because I've been appearing on news programs and all these sorts of things over this past week regarding lincoln's death and i was really captured by the idea of how quickly they showed up and found her it normally doesn't happen that way what can we learn from that well we we know that first off she had a pattern her her roommate knew that she was going to be running by the intramural fields out of UGA and by Lake Herrick.

And so they already knew the direction she was going to take from where her part, where she was living and the route it would take. And so just to give you an idea of the time, 1207, the 911 call was made at 1238, 31 minutes from the time her roommate hung up the phone with 911. They found her and were treating her. She was alive when they found her. Isn't that amazing? 31 minutes is amazing.

Yeah, it really is that there was something, there was potentially a chance at that moment in time. And how in the world this crime was perpetrated without someone having noticed. But, you know, it had to be kind of, I don't want to say the right circumstances because there's nothing right about this, but it had to be the perfect, I'll say the perfect storm relative to no one bearing witness to this event where you don't have an eyewitness or potentially even an ear witness, but I can tell you what witness they do have. The witness they do have, and I find this amazing out of all of the charges, the most intriguing charge to me that they have heaped upon this individual is this interference with a 911 call.

Because when you think about that, Dave, it goes to Lakin's awareness of her surroundings. Because if she had not made a call call that would give you an indication that this was a pure out and out ambush where she was taken unaware she had an awareness of danger within her vicinity and here's something else here's another piece they've charged this individual with kidnapping uh perhaps false imprisonment i'm not sure it's they got an aggravated battery aggravated assault false imprisonment kidnapping hindering a 911 call, concealing the death of another, meaning he hit her body, and of course felony murder, malice murder. The fact that they're charging this subject with kidnapping is fascinating because we know that we cannot kidnap the dead, right? You have to have a living person in order to do this.

So they have information about the circumstances surrounding this. I think a lot of what we're going to find out as the days and the weeks pass is once that 9-11 call is, I don't know that we'll ever actually hear the call on a public forum, but we will get a sense of the verbiage that was used in there. But I can tell you this, I'm sure that as maybe she was attempting to speak to that person on the other end of the line, it was populated by fear in her voice. And perhaps it was the last thing that she ever said to anybody. I'm not much in crime fiction. I don't read crime fiction. And big reveal here, I don't read crime fiction. And big reveal here, I don't watch true crime.

I deal with it every day. It's just not something I do. If you did watch it, you would see Joseph Scott Morgan on a lot of it. Yeah, no, and I just can't bear it any more than I have to. But with that said, when Thomas Harris wrote Silence of the Lambs and it was translated and adapted for the screenplay. There was a key, key comment that Jodie Foster's character had in there, and she's talking back and forth with one of her fellow FBI cadets. And the idea was, what do you covet?

And the answer to that is you covet those things that you see. Dave, when we're talking about the death of Lakin, Lakin Riley, you begin to think about, people talk a lot about objectifying people. She had, I think, been objectified in the sense that this individual laid eyes on her that did this dastardly thing to her and he wanted her. He did not want her for the purposes of money. He didn't want her for a quick conversation. He wanted her for something else, Dave. And he had to be able to see her. And that's the really chilling thing about this because we're adjacent to a wooded area, which she's obviously eventually found in. And when you're in a wooded area like this, you can, and if you look into the woods, if you're ever on a walking trail or anything like that, and you look off into the woods, you're in the wide open spaces. If you're on the trail, you can't necessarily see what's hiding in the brush. And I've thought about this, Dave. I really wonder if the subject had what I refer to as a hide in there, where Lakin happened to be in the wrong

place at the wrong time, but she fit a type for him, perhaps. And that if it had been any other female that was similar to her, maybe that individual would have been the target. He was laying in wait. And I think in some of the answers, if he did in fact have a hide in the brush, there might be valuable forensic evidence in there. You know, there's some things we don't know yet that we will find out later. We don't know exactly when the attack took place. You mentioned the kidnapping charge, false imprisonment. And we know that she was alive when medics got on the scene, but she died. She was declared dead at the scene. Yeah. But she was alive when medics got on the scene, but she died. She was declared dead at the scene,

but she was alive when they got there. So we don't know how long, all we know for sure right now is when her roommate called 911 and when police found her body. We know that Jose Ibarra, the suspect in this case lived in an apartment with his brother, Diego, five minutes walk, not five miles, a five minute walk from where they were staying in their apartment to where this, where her body was found in a wooded area.

And I was going to ask you about concealing the death of another. Does that take it a step further than just dragging her into the woods? Is there more involved in that? I mean, does it require taking branches and throwing it over her body and things like that? Yeah, I think that we would probably think that, but it all depends on how the attorneys, because, you know, look, you can charge anybody with just with just about anything that's reasonable under these circumstances. Is that a tell here? Does that tell us that since there was an attempt to obscure her from view, which is what that implies, was there an attempt to cover her with brush or was she taken and placed into, say, a depressed place in the earth where she would be

out of view? If that's the case, then what that means as far as what we're looking at with the perpetrator, it shows that they're purposed. And there's several things along here that we can learn about his actions, that he was purposed. He had enough sense about him at that moment, Tom, to know that he needed to hide her body to cover up this deed that he has perpetrated on Laken at this point, Tom. So it's, yeah, it's a matter of did he obscure her? And if he did obscure her, what did he obscure her with? Did he break off branches or did he have a cutting tool with him? Had he already cut off branches in preparation of this?

Or did he know where a brush pile was, perhaps? Or was it just a matter of him picking up pond straw and leaves off the forest floor and covering her body with that? That'll be sussed out, and we'll learn more about it, that specific charge in particular. Some things that we know about the crime, from UGA Police Chief Jeff Clark, he said that Lake and Riley died from blunt force trauma. And he also said that it was a crime of opportunity. He alluded to how they were able to solve this as quickly as they did to come up with a suspect and an arrest.

I mean, it did happen fairly quickly because they used video cameras all over the campus and knowing they knew her route because she was a creature of habit and was going for this very specific run. So they were able to isolate her path of where she would have gone, and they were able to track it using the cameras around campus. And they had a suspect on camera very quickly. I know we'll find out more. But the first BOLO they put out was very specific in terms of the physical, how the person looked, the suspect they were looking for. And it was so much that the first person they arrested that they detained was not Ibarra.

It was Ibarra's brother, Diego. Right. Because they look very similar, wearing similar attire and everything else. And he was. That's why there were some people who thought there were there were multiple people arrested. There were not. There is only one suspect here and they have him in custody. Yeah. When I saw the, the two mugshots and, and they famously been placed out there, you know, for us all to see there, there is a striking similar.

And you say, well, Morgan, that's kind of obvious. They're brothers, not necessarily, but in this case, these two guys do resemble one another significantly. And look, they both got criminal history, other than the fact that they are here illegally. Well, I was going to say, we can actually separate two things here. Because, yes, it is important to note they are illegal aliens in this country. And I know that's probably not politically correct this week to say that. But that's the reality of how you describe an individual who is in this country illegally. They are an alien. That used to be the proper term. Illegal immigrant,

undocumented. Those aren't specific enough for me. There are two ways to come to this country, the right way, legally, or the wrong way, illegally. If you come the right way, the legal way, you know what you can end up doing? You can end up marrying into one of the most politically active families in this country and become governor of a state you cannot pronounce the name of properly. California. Yeah. Arnold Schwarzenegger was not born in the United States of America. He has such a thick accent. The guy became an international movie star speaking English and became governor of it because he came here legally.

Right. These guys. Yeah. Now, these guys did not come here legally. They came here illegally. I say they being Ibarra and his brother Diego. Jose Ibarra came here illegally. Here's what happened.

He came here September 8th, 2022. He married a woman because the political activists along the border are telling people how to come here illegally to get money for food, clothing and shelter. They these political action people are telling them how to break our system. And that's what these guys did. So Jose married a woman. The woman has since come forward and said, yeah, they told us if we were married, we'd have a better chance of getting amnesty here. And so or asylum rather not amnesty asylum. Yeah.

So they married. They had no real relationship, but they married and they got here on September 8th. By September 15th, they had money in their pocket and they were bused to New York city where they were given a place to stay, food to eat and cars to live on. It was so tough for them in New York city that after being in the country for a week, they were able to tour all around New York City. And Jose was putting pictures of all the sites they were seeing in New York, living his best life. By the way, with money given to him by our wonderful government, that our government doesn't have any money that they don't take from you and me. So you and I paid for his vacation in New York City when he came here illegally. And he was arrested in New York City. His legal wife, actually, had a five-year-old son, not Jose's son.

He was either driving a car with this boy, an unregistered vehicle, and the boy was not restrained, or he was riding him around on a motorized bicycle of some type, a moped, without any kind of a helmet or anything else. I don't know which one is correct, but either way, he ended up in jail for a laundry list of problems with you can't put a child in that kind of danger without getting in trouble. He did go to jail on that charge.

He did bond out, and his wife divorced him, and he moved to Athens, Georgia to move in with his brother Diego. Diego arrived here illegally back in April of 2023. Diego gets here in April. He goes to Athens, Georgia to move in with his brother, Diego. Diego arrived here illegally back in April of 2023. Diego gets here in April. He goes to Athens. You got to assume they have some connection there, right? They don't just go to a map and pick out Athens, Georgia out of nowhere. But Diego was already there when Jose came from New York and moved in with him back in the fall.

Diego had already been arrested three times by the time his brother arrived in Athens. Both of them, they're illegally living in an apartment. So the local cops already knew Diego pretty well. Yeah, going back to what you had said about being what would be the commonality, I think that with Athens-Clarke County, they've promoted themselves as the sanctuary location where you can feel safe, whatever that means. And so you're there. Where illegals can feel safe?

Yeah. Well, where you're there and you can get a job, perhaps, which he, you know, I think that one, they had attempted to get a job with UGA. And did he? He actually got, Diego got a job there, but you know, when you sign up, when you fill out forms for a job, it's all your driver's license, social security card, all the things that prove you're legal to work here. But he was working conditionally. He actually did work for a week and a half, but he never got a paycheck from UGA because they said, Hey man, you need to bring us, you know, the rest of your documentation, which he never did. And that's when they found

that he had a fake green card at which he was charged with, by the way. Yeah. I mean, that's a federal offense. I mean, that's kind of a serious charge. But if you're in a sanctuary county, I would imagine they would find a better way to treat them, right? Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. But here's one other disturbing issue with this is that from a history standpoint, a criminal history standpoint, when you have this individual coming from Venezuela and into our country, you really don't know what you're getting here. You don't know if this individual has offended in an equally violent manner down there against women, which, you know, if he has that propensity in his makeup, we don't know if there are other assaults that are down there.

We don't know if there are other deaths that might be linked based upon his behavior. And of course, as part of an overall investigation, you want to try to understand that because then you begin to see how victims are chosen and then how they are treated after the event takes place that winds up in their death or permanent injury. And so it's going to be very important, I think, when all is said and done to try to understand what happened to Lakin in those moments leading up to her death. And perhaps, just perhaps, what's happened to other women who may have crossed paths with Jose. I think that right now, as we sit here and we speak, Dave, I think that the police have done a fantastic job relative to Lakin's death investigation. One of the things that really

gave me hope about this is I saw that not only was it the Athens-Clarke Police Department that was working this event, but they also brought in the assets from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. And I think some assets from perhaps the FBI. You had multiple eyes on this case on the field, on the ground. One of the really interesting bits to this is that you had these agents that were going through the dumpsters. And they're looking for items which we can only believe were probably clothing items that has been alluded to if in fact and since we don't know at this point tom anything necessarily about the status of lincoln's clothing which is going to

be key by the way if it were the perpetrator's clothes perhaps isn't that isn't that fascinating that you that he perhaps had taken his clothes and thrown them away? Well, what does that go to? Well, first off, it goes to an awareness that he has potentially some kind of physical evidence on him. Remember what they said. They said that she, Lakin, was attacked. She's sustained horrible disfiguring injuries. They talked about facial disfigurement, that sort of thing,

and that she was struck with an object. Now, we don't know what that object necessarily is, but you had alluded to in Right to War earlier that this was a blunt force trauma death, struck about the head, probably other areas on her body. Was the object something that he had shown up with? Did he have a hammer with him? Did he have an iron bar? Did he have a wooden stick? Or was it a weapon? You know, they use that term opportunity, Dave. Was there a rock that was utilized as some kind of bludgeon out there? And I've seen this happen before. Those injuries are very specific when you see how irregular they are and the damage that they can do. A rock, it's not going to have real clean margins, real clean edges.

It's going to be the surface of these little strikes will have individual little lacerations dependent upon the surface that will correlate with the surface of the rock. So within the overall strike of a single strike of this rock, you can have little tears in the skin that are within that strike zone that would be unique to the surface of that rock. And if you can find that rock, you can find contact trace on there as well. They would be looking for the rock in that area. Oh, my God. Yeah, they would be looking for the rock.

Here's my worry is that both that phone and that rock may have wound up in that lake. And that's certainly, I think that's a legitimate concern. I don't know if they have it. I hope that they have recovered it. But they referred to an object. They just didn't state what the object was. But they did say it was blunt force trauma. So they've got something to go on here. I need to ask you a question because beyond the blunt force trauma and the damage to her head, the chief of police made a comment at the press conference.

And it was they'd served a search warrant on the brother's apartment. And the chief of police said, we didn't really need that. We didn't need anything out of that apartment to prove who did this. He said to get a conviction. Holy smokes. Yeah. And it was kind of an offhanded comment. I saved it because I thought he actually misspoke when he said to convict.

He should have said arrest, but he was speaking from his heart off the cuff, disgusted by what he had seen. And he said, and the reason he said that is because they've got it on video, Joe. They have this attack on video, I believe. And that's why he said we didn't need that. Because you mentioned that all the things they might have found in the apartment, which, by the way, they had to have found things because, well, people saw them leaving the apartment with bags of stuff. So they did find things, but they didn't need that. That's just going to be the icing on the cake to figure out exactly what happened. But the bottom line is, I believe they had enough of this on video to be able to know exactly what happened and when it happened.

But when they say blunt force trauma, what are we really, I mean, are we talking about, can you do that kind of damage with a fist? Do you have to have another object could and because it's a crime of opportunity could it have been a a stick a branch something that you know you mentioned rock uh ted bundy used a log as he went into the chi omega house yeah and he he wreaked holy hell against his poor women in there and and yeah in answer to your earlier question, yeah, you can use your hands. But when they begin to talk about gross disfigurement here and this trauma that this child has sustained, first off, that's very difficult to accomplish with your bare hands. I think that many people think that it could happen. Well, yeah, if you're Mike Tyson and his prime, maybe so.

But for the average person that's out there, you can strike people. They will have hematomas. You can bloody their nose. You can break their nose. But at the level, Dave, that they're talking about here, this implies something else. So when they say object here, it smacks to me that it's going to be something that it's not going to be just some to me that it's going to be something that it's not going to be just some random stick. It's going to be something heavy. It has to have weight so that when that force, that force moving through space, actually that's powered by the hand slamming down while it's holding it and contacts that surface, that energy is transferred from the object itself onto that surface, which is striking.

And you begin to look at things like, first off, you're going to have really bad lacerations where the skin literally tears. And then there's going to be underlying, perhaps, skull fractures. And that's, I got to tell you, based upon what I've worked in the past and this sort of thing, that was what I was thinking about. And not just skull fractures, you can have what are referred to as depressed skull fractures. So if you just imagine. Yeah, what's the difference between a linear skull fracture and a depressed?

Yeah, well, if you have a linear fracture, it is literally, that's what it means. And actually the term is, I think most forensic pathologists, the diagnosis is a linear fracture, but forensic pathologists will use a term that's kind of odd called curvilinear, and it covers both. So you will have, it won't be in a perfect straight line. It will literally have a curve to it, and they've created a term like they always do called curvilinear. If you've never heard that before, it's kind of odd. But that's just kind of a crack in the bone where the bone stays even with itself, right? Yeah, it does.

And you don't have this depression that sets in. When you have a depressed skull fracture, think of, okay, I'll give you a great example. If anyone wants to understand what a depressed skull fracture looks like, take a hard-boiled egg, all right? And when you go to peel it, if you will, take your thumb and press it into the side of the egg without destroying the egg. And once you transfer that energy from your thumb onto the surface of that egg, you press just enough, that will create a depressed fracture on the surface of that egg. That's very similar to what you get with a depressed skull fracture. You will get this fragmented bone. It'll break off in multiple pieces and there will literally be a dip on the external table of the skull. Many times with depressed skull fractures, you'll see

fragmented bone that will enter into the brain, depending upon the amount of energy that is transferred from the object to the surface of the bone that causes it to fracture and shatter and go into the skull and go into the brain. So that's, I think, what they're looking at. If he is, and this is going to be, Dave, I think that we can safely say this is going to be a very bloody affair, particularly if she was still alive. You're going to have her bleeding out, perhaps, with head injuries. You have aspiration many times coming from the nose and the mouth. That would have potentially transferred on to him. That might be why they're looking for clothing,

because that's going to be damning evidence. Because these two people, to the best of our knowledge, have never crossed paths at all. There should be no reason on God's green earth that Lakin's blood or biological material should be on his person, period. Now, a defense attorney might try to argue differently, but we're not talking about him giving her a ride in a car. We're talking about a young lady out for a jog in a forested area. What are the chances that they would have had any other kind of physical contact?

None, okay? Admittedly, he's only been in Athens. what are the chances that they would have had any other kind of physical contact? None. Okay. Admittedly, he's only been in Athens for maybe a couple of months, maybe. You know, where are they going to have an opportunity to meet up? We're talking about a young girl that's not into partying. She's not going out clubbing. She's devoted to her studies. There's no reason these two should have ever crossed paths at all. He got there in November. Yeah. And so, you know, you think about that. What are the odds

that he would have her biological material? That's why, and let me go back to this quote directly because I found this very fascinating. Yeah, here it is. Chief Clark actually said, Dave, that the evidence is robust. And that really caught my attention for an official like that, at that level, to actually say, you know, he didn't say, well, yeah, we've got a few things. We've got some trace evidence. That's not what he said. He said, the evidence is robust. What does that mean? It means that it's full, that there is a lot of it. And I just wonder about the nature of the evidence, because you mentioned, you know, we've got CCTV, we've got a mute, I don't know how to say it other than an abruptly disconnected 9-11 call. Right. That's a digital piece right there he the perpetrator the alleged perpetrator would

probably have some kind of cellular device with him the odds are that he would so is he pinging in that area can you put his phone there ergo you can put him there with his phone adjacent to lakin i don't know that yet i think that we will find out. Based on the charges, you've made a lot of, not assumptions, but based on the charges, you have tied together. I wondered why the kidnapping charge, Joe. I didn't know that until today. Yeah, yeah. And correct me if I'm wrong. Isn't one of them false imprisonment kidnapping hindering a

911 call and concealing the death of another yeah so you've got all of this working together and some of those things you know it's one thing to conceal a death you know we have in this is not the case here but we have cases that you and i have covered like abuse of a corpse that sort of thing well you can't abuse the corpse of a live person. The same thing applies with kidnapping or false imprisonment. You're not going to kidnap a decedent. You're not going to false imprison a dead person. And she was alive when they got there. They said that she was declared dead at the scene.

Exactly. So you are preventing her from leaving. At that point in time, you have control over her, and she can't get away. So that's what the police are saying, and they have evidence of this. They have evidence that she was sequestered in a specific location. And then, you know, why else? Let's just say that she's in a location where she is kind of covered, all right? She's got agonal respirations when they show up. Maybe she's got branches laying on top of her and she's got this incredibly horrific head injury.

Okay. So let me get this straight. She fell down multiple times, injured her head, crawled off into the brush and covered and concealed herself. Is that what the defense might argue? I don't think so. Through her phone while dialing 911. Yeah, exactly. You can actually extract a lot of information from these charges. I just hope

that we'll continue to find out more because I got to tell you, Dave, as it's been reported in the news, this is the first homicide that's taken place at UGA in 30 years. I hope, I hope that it will be the last for many, many years to come. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Back. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.