Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Sex, Deception, and Murder The Chilling Story of Shaye Groves and the Brutal Dea

Episode Date: April 22, 2023

In this episode of "Body Bags," we unravel the harrowing story of Shaye Groves, a woman consumed by her obsession with serial killers and ultimately implicated in the brutal murder of her boyfriend, Frankie Fitzgerald. Delving into the chilling fascination that permeated her life and relationships, the hosts uncover the disturbing evidence that led to the gruesome crime. Hosts Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack explore the challenges investigators face when encountering an unfamiliar crime scene and the unsettling environment they discover including a macabre collection of serial killer images and the couple's history of violent, videotaped sex acts. They discuss Shaye Groves' possible premeditation of the murder, her manipulation and blackmail of previous partners through recorded sex acts, and her meticulous execution of the crime, such as using bleach to clean up the scene. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Shownotes: 00:20 - Intro to case. 02:10 - Dave Mack gives background and overview of case. 04:10 - What impact did having serial killer images in her home have on Shay Groves and her mindset? 05:25 - The disturbing nature of Shay Groves' obsession and how it relates to the crime and her life. 07:10 - Shay Groves and Frankie Fitzgerald's romantic relationship and Shaye's controlling nature. 09:25 - Challenges investigators face when entering an unfamiliar crime scene and disturbing evidence and how their first impressions can impact their investigation. 11:50 - The couple's history of violent sex acts captured on video and how this escalated. 14:00 - The use of bleach in morgue cleanups and how the smell of bleach can linger, connecting it to the crime scene. 15:10 - Possibility of Shea Groves planning the murder and the use of bleach to clean the crime scene. 19:50 - Shea's obsession with serial killers, dark imagery, and the types of knives used in the murder. 21:55 - JoScott talks about the differences between single-edged and double-edged knife wounds. 24:40 - The catastrophic loss of blood that led to Frankie's death and Shaye’s possible motives and methods during the attack. 26:40 - Determining if any wounds were inflicted post-mortem and whether the crime was a torture event or a dark fantasy acted out by Shaye. 28:54 - Outro.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. My wife likes to say that she loves love. And I think that all of us have this kind of romanticized view of what it means to love somebody. But for some, I guess their perception of love or the way love is expressed is in a different atmosphere from many of us. I've never thought of integrating the term knife play into an expression that even remotely resembles romantic love. But the case I'm going to lay on you today is beyond anything I've covered really. It doesn't occur here in the U.S. It's actually in Great Britain, England specifically,

which I've traveled to many times and that I have an incredible affection for. But what happened in this little town, in this space, is absolutely beyond the pale. Today, I'm going to talk about the murder of Frankie Fitzgerald and his girlfriend that perpetrated this crime, Shay Croves. I am Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Packs. Dave Mack, my good buddy, is a senior crime reporter for Crime Online. I want to apologize to you in advance for springing this case on you. There's an old saying in the South.

Some people say you get something in your mind that's so horrible, they'll actually say, well, thanks, I'm going to have to slaughter a hog to get that image out of my mind. And in this particular case, I got to tell you, it ranks right up there. All the stuff that we cover on Body Bags, I need some moral reorientation here, perhaps. Maybe you can offer that up, Dave. I don't know. I don't think I have a degree in psychology or sociology that could help break this down, Joe. But I will tell you this.

There's an old saying, pretty is as pretty does. And this 27-year-old Shea Groves is physically attractive on the outside. When you get down to the nitty-gritty of who that individual is, not very pretty. Matter of fact, it's pretty disgusting. And Shea Groves is kind of the definition of that. When we were looking at this story, big, big story in Great Britain. Not so much here. It did get some play in the U.S., but huge in Great Britain.

And it goes back to all the photos. Young people now live their lives online, and that means a lot of pictures, a lot of stories and things like that. Oftentimes, we can see somebody over the years either devolve or evolve in their thinking and how they look at themselves and the world. But in her case, just to throw it out there, Shea Groves, even by our best estimation from her friends, was always a bit of a weirdo, even as a child. Shea Groves, when she was younger, how little girls dress up in colorful outfits the fact that she is, quote unquote, obsessed with serial killers. I don't know how you go past it when somebody is obsessed with serial killers and has pictures of them framed in their home.

I'm going to tell you what, Joe, if you're that person and somebody in your world dies a violent death, who do you think the cops are looking at first? There's this fine line that is easy to cross, perhaps, where there is this fascination with the morbid. And certainly we explore many of these horrible events that have occurred and try to put some sense to it, if you will, from a scientific standpoint. I don't know that there's necessarily a way you can take the measure of it day in and day out. And what is it in your life to get you to the point where you're going to frame a picture of Ted Bundy and hang it on your wall so that every day when you get up to start your day, maybe to have a cup of coffee or, as the Brits say, have a cup of tea to get the day rolling, there you are eye to eye with a person that's arguably a monster. I've seen the pictures of her apartment.

If you're looking at Ted, you look to the left, oh my gosh, there's Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. Who does this? There's even a charcoal of Jeffrey Dahmer hanging on the wall of this home. Say what you will about the Impressionists and about reproductions, but if I had a choice, I think I'd much rather look at Lilypads by Monet, you know, to be greeted with, to sip my morning coffee with and meditate on things. So, this is what you're filling your mind with day in and day out. And people make light of this. There's any number of memes out there, little clips that are floating about on social media,

you know, where they'll say what my husband thinks I'm listening to as opposed to what I'm actually listening to. And then you hear this narrator's voice that says this person murdered her husband or whatever it is, and it's quite comical. But now you kind of have a touch of reality with this. When you enter the space, this is her private space. This is her home. And yet it is festooned with all manner of these images that are quite chilling. And if you take the totality of what each one of these monsters has done, and you were to kind of calculate that, pile it up,

and you think about all of the sorrow and the misery and the horror that's associated with each one of these people that hangs on her wall. It's quite staggering to think that an individual could, in fact, become this obsessed with these individuals who are arguably some of the most evil people that have ever entered our mind's eye. You know, I'm glad you pointed out what these pictures represented inside the home. You actually alluded to Monet and Lilies of the Fields, which is a beautiful painting. It has sold many times over for multiple millions of dollars. So you've got your choice. Do I get a reproduction of that, or do I frame photos of the nice stalker Ted Bundy and others? On top of all that,

remember this, Joe Scott Morgan, Shea Groves has a daughter. So as you're trying to raise a child, do you think it's in the child's best interest for you to surround that child with happy, wonderful, colorful pictures of beautiful things and love or of the most evil, darkest things you can find? Because what we're seeing in the life of Shea Groves is that after having her daughter, her life did not turn around and start becoming more focused on happy thoughts and a happy place, but actually continued to go deeper and deeper and darker and darker. To set this table very quickly, Shea Groves and Frankie Fitzgerald were in a romantic relationship for about six months. On and off is what it says. But in six months time to have a relationship, there are going to be a few ups and downs.

But that's really the limit here. I thought they'd been together much longer. According to her friend, Shea Groves was a very controlling person. She had very few friends. But the friends she did have, she was able to control them, manipulate them. She had power over them. And one of the things that did come up about Shag Groves is even as a little girl, she loved the Chucky doll. The crazy redheaded killer Chucky that spawned a number of movies.

She loved Chucky. Look, it's one thing for a doll to be kind of funny. You know, a horror movie with a doll named Chucky. It's funny, fine. But she started referring to some of her friends as Chucky. That was like her thing. She was always limited to a small group of friends, although she was close to them and she would manipulate them and their situations. And she and Frankie Fitzgerald, for about six months on and off, they had a very sexual relationship.

I say that because everything about what we found out in this case, it seemed to be centered on their sex life. She was obsessed with her sex life with Frankie Fitzgerald and even used his prowess in the bedroom against him later on as the police were zeroing in. Because one has to remember, if somebody you're close to dies and the police come to talk to you and they find pretty much a museum for the worst criminal killers of all time in your house, you're going to be a suspect. Here we go back to back. The Shea Grove story starts with her and Frankie Fitzgerald in a very active sexual relationship. She has videos that she is sending to friends to try to set it up that she's a victim, Joe. Actually saying that he was raping her.

He was abusing her. But even her best friend at the time saw these videos she was using to try to manipulate her friends and said this is a really bad editing job. She tried to edit it to make it look like he was raping her when in fact, it was all a stage. The whole thing was a big setup. If you're an investigator and you walk into this environment and you're trying to take the measure of it relative to what's going on, because as investigators, we walk into a location where a

death has occurred and we come in cold. There's a high probability that you've never met the person that you're about to look into their life unless you're in a very small location. You're not going to know the victim most of the time. You're not going to know the perpetrator. Every now and then, you'll have police that have particularly uniformed police officers that will have gone out to a scene where there is domestic instability and they'll have to calm things down. I've had this happen a number of times where I'll arrive at a homicide scene and there'll be a young patrol officer there and I'll go up and talk to him. Do you come to this address very frequently? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been here several times. They love to break glass and bust furniture and yell at one another. There's been a couple of

punches thrown over the years, but we could get them settled down. Or there's a domestic violence issue that has come up. They've both gone to court on it. One's had restraining orders, but yet the other one chose to move back with the individual. And you'll get this kind of long serial history that goes along with it. But for investigators, when you show up at the scene, there's a high probability you're not going to know either one. So, first impressions, right? You walk in to a location. And trust me, if you're an investigator, you've been to enough seminars over the years, even if you don't follow true crime. The stuff that we learn about, the things that we read, the old cases that we review

to try to understand how an earlier generation of investigators worked a case, you're going to be familiar with some of these images hanging on the wall. And I hate to use the word iconic, but you begin to think about you can't go anywhere without seeing a picture of Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy or Hillside Stranglers or even the Night Stalker. They're going to be there in your mind. You're going to see that. But then when you walk into this kind of domestic situation and you've got these images hanging all about and you're thinking, what does this say about the individual that lives in this environment, that exists within this environment, it kind of denotes that their mind is focused in one particular area.

Then when it comes to these two, you had mentioned the manipulation of the video. Well, how do you do that? Well, she had a camera that was set up in her bedroom where she would tape all of her sex acts with Mr. Fitzgerald. And for whatever reason, she'd go back and review them. The sex life that they had had a level of violence to it. They were into bondage. They were into sadomasochism. And maybe retrospectively, they would go back, take a look at the videos, and it would sexually excite them or arouse them or whatever the case might be. So, she apparently had a whole catalog. You'd mentioned a relationship that had

taken place over a six-month period. Just think about this for a second. You're with someone for, let's face it, a very short period of time, six months, and your situation has evolved or devolved to the point where you're engaged in dangerous behavior in the bedroom. I'd mentioned earlier, she was famously into knife play. Now, what does that mean? Well, knife play generally is where individuals will tie an individual up. And after they've tied them up, they'll take out an edged weapon, perhaps. And while they're in the midst of having sex, the blade is placed against the throat. Or maybe it's placed just adjacent to the eye in a threatening manner and this causes arousal so this is being taped over and over and over again and you really wonder

dave you really wonder what was it that of all the times out of all the times that they've engaged in this behavior over a six-month period, what actually led her to cut his throat? dave when i smell bleach i guess i could think of our laundry room here at home but one of the things i always think of is the time that i spent working in the morgue for all of those years bleach was central to what i would use in order to clean with. And that's after I'd apply detergent to the surrounding area to scrub things down. And then as a final kind of exclamation point on the morgue and kind of the finishing touches, I would wipe everything down with bleach. And that smell lingers, doesn't it? Can you imagine when the police show up at a scene and you have someone that is deceased, that smell of bleach hits you full force in the face? I would think that you

would begin to wonder what has occurred in here. I'm telling you this is a freaky story that I've had trouble just getting past, but you said something a minute ago and it kind of caught my attention. And I'm throwing this out here for you because it is body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I wonder if Shea Groves actually determined she was going to commit this murder before she ever met Frankie Fitzgerald. And the reason I say that is in six months time, she went from meeting in a pub to putting him in the ground. And we have her best friend saying that Shea Groves used these videotapes of sex in previous relationships. She used these videos of her having sex with boyfriends as a way to manipulate them. She used it for blackmail

of previous boyfriends. So she was actively filming her sex acts for many months, maybe years before she ever met Frankie Fitzgerald. Then brings him in and immediately they're down the sadomasochism path that included in writing that he, Frankie, was allowed to wake Shay up with violent sex. This is in writing in their contract, okay? The pre-planning that went in was to actually be able to videotape this act taking place and then use it against him later on saying it was rape. Again, I'm going back to this pre-planning here. Did she actually find her victim after she decided, I need these things?

Because again, we've got a woman obsessed with serial killers, obsessed with murder, obsessed with the idea of killing somebody. Then she did. So you mentioned bleach. That cover up as much a part of the murder as any part of the crime, because she knew she would be the suspect. Maybe you're right, Dave. Maybe she had thought about these things for so long where based upon things that she had seen in true crime. That she could certainly have videography. And as you had mentioned, the fact that she presented as a piece of evidence, if you will.

There's no shame here, by the way, either. See, look at this video that I've created. And you can see him clearly here being aggressive toward me sexually. He's attempting to rape me. I was in fear of my life and all of this sort of thing. So that takes some bit of planning to do and not just the planning, but the execution of just that bit there. She had also considered the idea that maybe after she perpetrates this horrible crime against Mr. Fitzgerald, that she's going to need bleach to clean up afterwards. You think about that just for a second. What did she absorb from watching true crime documentaries, perhaps, or reading about the exploits of serial killers

that, by the way, many of these individuals had gotten away with crimes for a protracted period of time before they were ever caught. And here's one more I'll throw at you if you like that one. What if this was just going to be an attempt at killing for the first time, with maybe thoughts extending out into the future, if I can do it one time. Maybe I can do it again. And she's got a child living in the house with her. Think about that when you consider what this place is populated with. It's absolutely and totally pure evil day. Investigators walk into an environment that I've often made comments about. We're always having to understand the abnormal in the context of the normal. And when I say this, this is not a battlefield. This is not a slaughterhouse. This is a home. Think about what home means and then you look at what has occurred in this home and what occurs in so many other

places that you're having to take the measure of as an investigator and trying to make sense of it all. When you see a young man whose life has just been drained out of him literally and you think about what has to occur, what was it that brought them to this point that such violence would be exacted upon someone like Frankie Fitzgerald? You mentioned a couple of things during the course of the program today, and one of those was knife play. We know that Shea Gross was obsessed with serial killers, murder. She had gone down a path of darkness on the outside. The image she projected to the outside world was of a tatted up young woman with a lot of piercings and they were not happy, polygolightly type of piercings and tattoos.

These were really dark. I'm really curious here because you mentioned knife play and the fact that shay groves actually killed frankie fitzgerald her boyfriend air quotes in bed and everything i'm seeing is that she sliced his throat and stabbed him multiple times like what 25 to 40 times but there are multiple different knives here at play four specific types of knives but one was referred to as a dagger others were referred to as bladed cutlery i'm looking at this going okay help me understand joseph scott morgan what we're actually dealing with here in terms of the knives and the actual act of slicing or punching. When you throw up the word dagger, it has a very Shakespearean ring to it because daggers were carried by people for their utility.

It wasn't just merely an implement that was used to protect yourself with. The Romans used them famously to open oysters. They loved oysters. And they were used through time for any number of things. You could carve a meal with them. But what sets a dagger apart from, say, other edged weapons is that it's a double-edged weapon. So it's not like you have this blunt spine.

Think of any kind of knife that you take out of your drawer at home. Most knives that you have in a home are going to have this kind of blunt spine that runs away from the hilt and goes out to the tip and then the tip curves back down onto the bladed surface. So you've got a sharp surface and you've got kind of a blunted surface. When you look at a single-edged knife wound compared to a double-edged wound, it is completely different. Some people refer to it as the winking eye. A single-edged weapon, when you take a look at it at first, has a sharp edge or point it comes to a very acute point on one side and then the other side is kind of blunted looking when you look at it close enough you begin to see an eye conversely when you take a look at a double-edged weapon such as a dagger it's going to have two distinct acute points on either side of it.

How these things are going to appear is going to be dependent upon where you're stabbed. We have contour lines that run all over the course of our skin throughout our body. As a matter of fact, when physicians learn how to conduct even minor surgery, they're taught about something called the lines of Langer. And the lines of Langer are these contour lines that run throughout our body, and they have to do with the tension of the skin and how we're kind of constructed. And if you go opposing to the lines of Langer, you get these really nasty-looking cuts that are open and gaping.

It doesn't mean the weapon was any larger than, say, where they're not as gaping. It's just that you've gone across the grain, if you will, and so it opens up. So, with surgeons, when they make an incision into someone, they follow the line of Langer. And if they do this, then you're not going to have as nasty a scar if they go against the grain that opens up in this very horrific kind of way. When you're reading these wounds, you have to be very, very careful. Actually, in the morgue, one of the things that we'll do sometimes is you've heard of us doing tape lifts where we're lifting fragile evidence, trace evidence, this sort of thing. What we will do many times is we've got one of these big gaping wounds. We'll actually take scotch tape after we've cleaned the wound and we'll place the scotch tape over both

sides of the wound and draw it together so that we can get an idea of the orientation of the wound. Because if it's gone across the grain, you might not be able to appreciate it as it had insulted the body initially. So you have to be mindful of that when you're in the morgue. You take a look at all of these things and it gives you an idea as to the orientation. Now, what we have here in this case with Frankie Fitzgerald is that his throat was in fact cut. And I find it interesting their language is a bit different than ours.

In the court documents, when you begin to read about this case, they state that he had a catastrophic loss of blood. That's such a very British thing to say. Here in the U.S., we would say, well, he bled to death. They're saying it was a catastrophic loss of blood. And in medical terminology, we would say that he exsanguinated, which means the volume of blood that he lost was incompatible with life is what it came down to. Is that because of the throat slash, meaning the other stab wounds? Perhaps.

That's a good point. It is a cataclysmic event from a physiological standpoint when you've got this knife being plunged into him. Now, he's obviously in a very submissive position when this has occurred. You have to imagine that she's on top of him. The question you would want to ask is, how do you perpetrate this many insults to his body? Was he restrained in some way or was he drugged? Or how did he get into this position where he could not fend her off?

That's an important question here, I think. And it goes to the lifestyle that they were engaging in. You have submissives and you have dominance. They lived by this ethos of bondage and sadomasochism and these sorts of things. So, was he in a submissive position? Did he see this on his horizon? Was he submitting to her when this happened? When you go back and you look at the injuries, in order to assess these injuries, you would have to take each one one by one and consider the location anatomically. Are they in the middle line of the chest? Are they in the side of the chest?

Also, are any of these post-mortem? And that's a big factor here, Dave, because if she's into knife play and she's into serial killers, some of the hallmarks of serial killers, not every one of them, obviously, but many of them, is what will they do with bodies after they're deceased? Well, sometimes there's a further attempt to disfigure the body or to abuse a body. So, you would want to take the measure of that to try to understand, is there hemorrhage in all of these wounds? Are all of these in the throes of death, what we refer to the perimortem state? You have this initial area where he was attacked.

How much blood was associated with this? We'd mentioned the throat being cut. So, if you're bleeding out through this insult to the throat, which most of these that you see are wide and gaping. And again, that goes to these contour lines that I'd mentioned in the body. If you're cutting across the grain, the throat will open up significantly because people can have their throat cut without it being fatal. But if you get into the area where you're down into these vessels, where you're thinking about particularly the carotids, you're down that deep, which is a couple of centimeters below the surface of the skin, and then you go across the trachea, which for lack of a better term is the windpipe, there's things that we can look for, say, for instance, in the lungs.

Well, if the throat is cut, you're still breathing, perhaps, or attempting to breathe. You're gasping. Guess what you're going to find down in the airway? You're going to find blood. And sometimes you will find blood within the lungs, depending upon how long the individual. And I'm not talking about where we have what's referred to as pleural effusion, where the chest cavity is filled with blood and the lungs are floating in it. That's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about when there's an insult

to the airway and people actually aspirate blood, where they draw it in when they're taking in their breath and it just kind of goes back into the lungs. You can find it when the lungs are dissected. That's kind of fascinating too. And all of this goes to time, doesn't it? You begin to think about how much time did this take? How much time did she spend with him? Was it a torture event? Because knives have been used over the ages to torment and to terrorize people. Think back to what our initial premise was with her, where she has stated openly that they engaged in quote-unquote knife play. Was she ultimately living out a fantasy here that, of course, wound up in the death of Frankie Fitzgerald? I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.

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