Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: SHOCKING Celeb Deaths By Autoerotic Asphyxia , Epstein Hanging, and More

Episode Date: July 13, 2025

AEA: Autoerotic Asphyxia - David Carradine gained fame on TV in the early 70s as Kung Fu. Michael Hutchence was the frontman for hitmaking rock group INXS. Both men died doing the same thing: Autoerotic Asphyxia. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss AEA as well as other public deaths by Asphyxia including the hanging of Jeffrey Epstein, suicide of Robin Williams, and a story about the death of a man accused of being a witch during the Salem Witch Trials and how he died  of asphyxia by "pressing".            Transcript Highlights 00:02.49 Introduction  00:39.43 "Blood Beneath My Feet" 04:48.20 Asphyxia by hanging 10:00.77 Suffocation - positional asphyxia 15:06.68 Compression of the neck 19:39.06 Hanging of Lewis Payne 24:40.59 Execution by "pressing" 30:12.40 Killed by hanging in public  35:11.67 Suspension Hanging vs Supported Hanging 39:15.66 Auto-Erotic Asphyxia 45:20.99 Strangle to point of death, and stopping, to cause more terror in victim 50:42.24 Conclusion  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. My grandmother, Pearl, who features quite prominently in Blood. Because she did a lot of my raising and still to this day there's not a day that goes by I do not think about her. And I literally mean that. I've got a photo of she and I up on my mantle. But she had all of these kind of, I guess you'd call them euphemistic terms that are, I think they're kind of unique to to the South and particularly to Southern women. And she'd say all kinds of things, you know, that you would get the drift of it, you would understand

it, but contextually it seemed out of place. And one of her sayings that she would always use, particularly in the deep south, remember, you know, my family's from Louisiana, we're Delta people, You know, it's always and superbly hot. You just learn to live with it. But if she ever got too hot, and that was rare, because she was used to heat, she'd always say, I feel like I'm smothering to death. Well, there's a lot to be taken away from that.

Smothering, for most people, you know, means that your airways being blocked and you can't breathe. In the South, it either means that you're really hot or you're about to cover something with gravy. But today, I'm gonna take you on a little journey and we're going to learn, hopefully, I'll be up to the task about asphyxial deaths. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags. Smothering, that's a big part of asphyxial deaths. And they come in all shapes and sizes, Dave,

when you begin to think about how someone dies. And the main element to this is the idea of depriving the victim of oxygen at the end of the day, because it is our life source. It's what feeds our bodies. It's what keeps our brain working, certainly our lungs process and our hearts pump out that oxygenated blood. Our bodies scream for it. If that's disrupted in the slightest way, then it's catastrophic. That's one of the reasons, like for instance, people that develop pneumonia, and we're talking about a natural disease here,

where their lungs get really heavy and they can't process oxygen the way they normally do. It's a real, real problem. I think back to COVID, where they were so anxious, it seemed like I think back to COVID where they were so anxious, it seemed like every third person was being put on a vent that would show up with chest congestion. And of course, that's almost a death sentence. Everybody uses this term, Dave, nowadays, nuanced. Out of all of the ways that people die from a traumatic situation, I'd have to say that

asphyxia or asphyxial deaths are nuanced because you can have them in a variety of categories. Just to give everybody an idea of some of these things, there's multiple modes of asphyxia. We have everything from, you've mentioned a couple of these things. There's multiple modes of asphyxia. We have everything from, you've mentioned a couple of these, we have strangulation and that can either be manual, which means by the hands. You can have ligature as well and interestingly enough, physicians many times will call that mechanical asphyxiation because you're using a mechanism to do it. You talked about a garrotte with John Wayne Gacy.

Did you know that garrotting was actually a form of capital punishment? The French used it extensively in their colonies, and they would tie a person to a chair, and they had a big twist that went on the back of the chair. It was like a gigantic key that was hooked to ligature and they turned that thing around and around until, and this is in public, until the person was asphyxiated. You have, you know, instances of judicial hanging and of course we still, you we still have people that hang themselves all the time. It's probably in my little slice of the pie as a death investigator, it was just behind self-inflicted gunshot wounds as a method for people to end their own lives. I think

one of the reasons is that everybody owns a belt. Everybody has a pair of pants. Everybody has a shirt or a towel. I've seen people commit suicide with a hairdryer before and not plugging it in and jumping in the bathtub. I'm talking about tying. And this was actually on an acute psych ward. I got called into this thing and this lady was in acute distress. She was in a manic phase.

They were giving her drugs to calm her down, things like Ativan and all that sort of stuff. And they left her with a hairdryer and she went on the other side of her hospital bed and tied the plug off onto the top rail, you know, those rails that go up and down. And she wrapped that hairdryer around her neck so that when I observed her, the hairdryer was hanging on the front of her body like a big pendant. And the cord was wrapped around

her neck and she just sat down. People don't realize you don't have to be standing to hang yourself. That's a theme. That's a recurrent theme that you have. So we have strangulations, hangings. Hangings can come about. And then you can have accidental hangings. We have a couple of those. A young kid that was trying to entertain his younger siblings because his mother was working

as a prostitute in Atlanta. And he was left with him. He was, I think he's, this precious child was only nine years old and he sat his siblings in front of him and he had a Batman mask that someone had given him and he had an old jump rope that he tied inside of a closet. And this house was really old, so he could hold on to the jump rope that was anchored on an old clothes bar in there

and swing out of the closet, bounce off the wall and swing back in. He kept telling the kids that he was Batman. And he got looped around that thing and he hung and asphyxiated in front of his siblings. And the only reason somebody found out about it is this horrible neighborhood. There was a little old lady that lived down the street and she saw a three-year-old. And it's cold, it's like in February, saw a three-year-old walking down the street only wearing a diaper and a t-shirt she was crying and she heard this child

crying this is the middle of the night and she just happened to pop out there and and all this little girl could say was I can't remember the child's first name but he's sleeping he's sleeping and so she goes the house and kids still hanging there and other kids crying in the house and the kid's still hanging there and the other kids are crying in the house. So, you know, I've had kids on tire swings that have been hung by doing the cabbage patch on top of the tire where they're holding onto the rope, I think pendulums around their body.

And that's a type of hanging you have. We, drowning fits into the category of asphyxial death. Really? Yes, drowning is because you're replacing oxygen with liquid at that point in time. So that is in and of itself an asphyxiation. Anything that replaces oxygen in the body and you have substances out there

or chemicals that are out there that are what are called oxygen depravants. I recall having a young man that was engaged in something we'll talk about in just a moment. Even further, he was engaged in autoeroticism. And he was a salesman, and he is his first job, He was a salesman selling halon fire extinguishers and they use halon on boats a lot. It's odorless and it's colorless, but it grabs the oxygen out of the air, binds with it.

If there's a fire, it immediately knocks down the fire. If you're on a ship, these things will be deployed and it jumps right down on the burning fire and extinguishes it. It's not like foam or anything else. And he was sniffing this stuff in order to get a rush as he's pleasuring himself. And he was found dead at his desk from Halon. So you have that, carbon monoxide, you know, there's a number of these agents. And then you have poison agents. There's classic image of some of the Kurdish, Kurdish occupants in northern Iraq

where, you know, Hussein had used sarin gas, you know, on the entire village and wiped them out. Picture of mother and child hunched over. Then you have suffocation. Suffocation comes in a variety of different ways. You can have suffocation where it's almost a positional asphyxia. The case that jumps to mind for me the most in my career is a little kid whose mother,

again, was off with her boyfriend, left her two older children in charge of a 10-month-old, I think the child was. The child got wrapped up in an, rolled over, got wrapped up in an afghan, and the mother had not put the side rail up, had not even attached it, just pushed the crib to the wall, and the child inverted head downward against the wall and the mattress wrapped in an afghan and couldn't break free. Well, that's a suffocation. It's positional asphyxia. And you'll get those a lot, have drug addicts that fix on the toilet,

heroin addicts because it makes you so sleepy. I've had at least three of those where they fall off of the toilet and get in between the wall and the commode. And again, their chest can't rise and fall and they're so debilitated by the drugs, it's just not happening. You have compression asphyxia and that's anything that prevents

your chest from rising and falling and believe it or not there are a lot of people Dave that die in motor vehicle accidents. We call them MVAs, die in motor vehicle accidents where yes they're traumatized but you get people that are pinned in vehicles and their chest can't rise and fall and they will they will die As a result of compression asphyxia. I've had a number of those over the years so there's to talk about asphyxial deaths and kind of

how they are examined and identified and that sort of thing is a big part of our job and kind of how they are examined and identified and that sort of thing is a big part of our job. And you might see evidence, people always talk to me many times, one of the big questions they'll ask, particularly if I'm going on television to cover something,

they'll wanna know if there were petechiae. And generally that's something something it's a common thing that you see particularly in individuals being strangled because the blood literally backs up into the head gets into that soft tissue around the eyes and gorgeous that area and those little vessels pop. Do you know who else gets petechiae Dave? That it's not associated with with some kind of asphyxial death? You don't take no idea. No idea. People that are severely constipated and that's no joke it actually happens they'll get petechiae and women in

labor. Oh okay. Women in labor because of all the strength. Yeah. And I, you know, I have a very distinct memory of Kimmy, you know, when she gave birth to Noah and Lowe these many years ago, right. And her head, you know, she's turning red as this is going on. How long does that last after you have the child? It dissipates pretty quickly. Kim had one. I remember, and that's horrible in that beautiful moment, but I remember wanting to, wanting to look at her eyes because I'd heard that for years and, uh, looked at her, looked at her eyes and she had one tiny little petechia.

I didn't mention it to her because I thought that it would rob the moment. All these years, Kim has told all of her friends, you know, right after I had Noah, Joe was just staring so lovingly in my eyes. It's like the moment that I treasure the most. And oh, it's a beautiful moment. And she's going to listen to this and go, You jerk! It was work! You just can't, you just can't escape it many times.

Dave, you know, with, I've talked about all these kind of modes that are involved in asphyxia. It's such a massive category of deaths. I don't know that many people even think about it at all. Certainly, and I don't want people to think about it. Let me think about it. I don't wanna burden people with, I wanna educate people, but this is the type of stuff that we think about in death investigation.

You have all of these modalities that will occur where in essence you're depriving an individual of oxygen. There's essentially four categories that will fit into this idea of asphyxial death. You've got multiple modes, but there's four categories. Number one is compression of the neck. Compression of the neck takes on a variety of presentations. So we've got hanging, then you've got non suspended ligature strangulation. Most of the time that's going to come from a homicide where people are using a ligature to actually strangulate the person. You can have manual strangulation. And manual is different from ligature. Manual is actually wrapping your hands around somebody's throat.

And there's two types of manuals. Well, there's actually probably multiple, but let me just give you three with compression of the neck. So if you think about like an old movie where a guy's got on a pair of black gloves and approaching somebody with two hands and they're coming at their neck, that's called throttling. And you can either do that anteriorly on the front or you can do it posteriorly from the rear. Think about all the creepy movies you've seen over the years where some dark stranger comes up behind somebody and grabs them by the neck and kind of chokes them out

like that. Then you have what's called a C-clamp where an individual will come up and grab externally, grab the trachea. Of course it's external, but they grab the trachea and they squeeze the trachea and that course it's external, but they grab the trachea and they squeeze the trachea and that's where the thyroid cartilage is and this area, this kind of cartilaginous body in the center where your tongue is attached to the hyoid, you've got an Adam's apple there and they'll squeeze down on that particular area. Is that different for men and women when you're talking about that specific area? Oh, because I said Adam's apple. Uh,

no, it's not, it's not really, women don't have as pronounced of the cartilaginous body that gives the appearance of quote unquote the Adam's apple. And that's generally a pretty distinctive marker you know for men versus males versus females something you look for and then we have you know what you may have seen on in wrestling and with cops where they'll use a chokehold and And a chokehold is where, you know, you actually, if you bend your arm and it creates a V

and you put the person's trachea right in the crook of your arm and you're squeezing, squeezing, squeezing them like that. And you're in, it's not just the airway that's being compromised. It's also the vessels that are supplying the brain. So you've got this, this double action that's going on relative to this, you know, the crushing of the airway or the occlusion of the airway from external pressure and also clamping down of the vessels. When we see that, you know, in movies or TV or professional wrestling, yeah.

Is how long does it take? I mean, when you get somebody in that kind of sleeper hold and is it reversible? I mean, if you hold it for just a few moments, the person goes out, you let them go and they return, right? Yeah. But how long, I mean, I'm not trying to figure out how to kill somebody. I'm just curious. Is there a point of no return or is it like standard or different for everybody?

No, it's standard. It's not standard. It's, it's different from everybody because a lot of people, let's say you, well, let's just take an obvious example. You've got a grown man. It's got a well muscled neck. Compare that to a small child or a diminutive person. You know, it's more, and I'll give you a great example, this actually goes to hanging. But if you ever take the time to look at the conspirators that were all hung in the Navy, old Navy shipyard of relative to Abraham Lincoln, they hung them all at the same time. Okay. There's one guy that's hanging in the captured image, and his name is Louis Payne.

And all of them, to a person, with the exception of Louis Payne, had their head turned to the side, which means that it snapped their neck. Louis Payne, if you see pictures of him in life and some people say that he looks like a guest model, you'll see what I'm talking about. Just go back and Google his name, Louis Payne. He's got a really, he's very young, he's got a well-muscled neck. When they dropped him off that scaffolding, his neck didn't break. He sat there and essentially asphyxiated as a result of the ligature around his neck

because his neck was so robust and you can see him standing or hanging fully erect, you know, like this, while everybody else, their neck is snapped and leaned over to one side or forward and they're all deceased. He ain't dead. And that really strikes me, you know, when I see that. And we're talking about the anatomical structures of the neck. How long can somebody last? First off, you don't try it.

No one should ever try a sleeper hold, quote unquote, because you're compromising not just the airway, but you're compromising the carotids, which lead up to the brain. And any compromise of that oxygen flow to the brain is you're in an unrecoverable flat spin. You're going to wind up on a vent and an ICU because you're absent oxygen. Cops, they've tried to keep cops from using it for years and years. They used to use a night stick as well. They would, and they also used an arm bar and they got away from that a long time ago where the bar of the forearm, if you imagine your forearm

is like a bar, it's placed against the anterior neck and it creates that compression on the neck where oxygen is not making it up to the brain. There was, I think it was, what was it? Were they called a P-24? I think a P-24 is a night stick cops used to use. And they had a lot of utility. It had a separate handle on the side and they could take it and use it like this. Or one of the things they would do. It's kind of a natural reaction.

They would take that old night stick that had the handle coming out of the side and they'd hook somebody with it and then put their foot on the back of their neck and pull up to get them to comply. And of course, you're asking for trouble when that happens. The neck is very fragile. The airway is very fragile. So you've got a variety of these, you know, everywhere from compression of the neck to obstruction of the airway. You know, it's why mama tells you to chew your food. I've had kids that have choked to death, you know, on hot dogs. I know it sounds like a fantasy or, you know, an old wives tale, but no, it does happen.

It's a field of dreams. Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. And the airway is cleared in that particular case. So anything, and you know, how many times, Dave, you as a dad, me as a dad, me as a grandfather, you as a grandfather, have you said the following words, get that out of your mouth? And then it's generally followed up by,

you don't know where that's been, you and but you know kids will they explore the world? Through their senses and taste and tactile and they'll put stuff in their mouth I had a colleague of mine that worked a case Involving a golf ball where kid had stuck a golf ball and they couldn't clear the airway and they died I had a kid that choked to death on a German cockroach they died. I had a kid that choked to death on a German cockroach in Atlanta and when they tried to establish the airway they were trying to intubate the child. I'll never forget this this case as long as I lived and that was an asphyxial death. The cockroach had crawled into the child's mouth. The

house was infested with them. He'd gotten in the child's airway and the child began to choke. The child was I think like 18 months old. And when the EMTs got there, they tried to intubate the kid and they destroyed the cockroach but left it in place. And so when we dissected the neck, we found the thorax, the little antennae, the legs. And it was one of the most bizarre cases that I had worked because it was so horribly tragic.

But that's actually an asphyxial death. It is an asphyxial death. And so, you know, after you get through those two categories of obstruction and compression, you have compression of the chest, which I kind of mentioned. If you have so much weight on top of the chest that the chest can't rise and fall, there's actually one of the famous executions from Salem Witch Trial where the guy refused to admit that he was a witch because he wasn't he'd been found guilty and classic line ultimate hero line they began the men of the community they tied him down and began to put stones on his chest and the preacher that was standing there said, do you confess to being a witch?

No. Add more weight. They'd add more stones and these huge stones, it took like three guys to put them up on him. Imagine like a millstone. That's about how big it was. And they got to the last one and the guy that was running the show said, will you now confess to being a witch? And he looked up and he said, more weight, more weight. And that's compression of the chest. And you can find people that will get in all kinds of odd positions that lead to their death. That's a great example of it.

I'd mentioned, you know, drug addicts that fall off toilets, people in car accidents, this sort of thing. And I think finally, probably a very broad category is this idea. And you could say that all of them are this, but when we begin to talk about exclusion of oxygen, and that is the environment in which you normally dwell. Something has happened within this environment to deprive you of oxygen.

One of the terrifying things is like grain silos. Grain silos are, first off, they're very volatile. They can explode because of the gas in there. But you also have individuals that, for a number of reasons reasons will asphyxiate in grain silos, absence of oxygen, also inhalation of the dust over a protracted period of time. I had a guy, we had guys in New Orleans, there were whole generations of families, and this is not necessarily the same thing, but just to give you an idea, there were whole generations of families that worked as sandblasters, Dave,

and they sandblasted the Huey P. Long Bridge. It's the longest railroad trestle in the world, and there's an adjacent bridge that goes over the Mississippi River, and this thing is made out of steel, and it's a constant, ongoing job because the environment's so harsh, and they would always be sandblasting.

Well, these guys, when we would get them, they would be relatively young men with no other history, they developed something called silicosis, which is deposits of sand in their lungs. And so when you ran your hand over the surface of lungs, it feels very granular. And if you slice through that tissue, you can actually see the little grains of sand that had embedded. So that's compromising the airway. And it leads to an exclusion of oxygen. Probably the most striking thing though is when,

and we were mentioning this off air you know there was PSA back in the 60s and I don't know if anybody remembers this but they used to have these horrible PSA's that would come out just terrifying you and for good reason and you hear children in the background saying three two one ready or not, here I come. And it's the disembodied voices. And it was in some vacant lot where they filmed this in New York. And it would simply say, and I think it said, don't.

And there were refrigerators that were out there. And what would happen in the old days, these things didn't have magnetic locks. You can still go to like restaurants and you'll see the big walk-in coolers that those handles that they pull on those things, they lock from the outside. Okay, now they have an escape button that you can press inside and it'll disengage. But these old refrigerators, kids would get inside of them to hide. And the problem is, is that while inside, any oxygen that's in there, the child's body is displacing that

oxygen in cubic inches. And the interior, when you go to buy a refrigerator, you look at whatever store you're going to and they'll give you the interior size in cubic inches. That's how much air you have. And then once you've taken two or three breaths and you've expelled carbon dioxide into that environment, there's nothing left to breathe. And of course one of the worst things that I can certainly imagine is being locked in what will become your coffin in life. MUSIC MUSIC I think we as a race have, the human race have tried to find for years and years the

most efficient way of depriving someone of their life. We don't want it to be messy or nasty. And for years, and still to this day, there are countries that still employ hanging as a means to killing people. I saw an image from, I can't remember specifically which Middle Eastern country it was from a few years back, where they had people tied to a bridge with nooses and had them on top of a bus. It's one of the most

horrific things I've ever seen and these people are there with the ropes hanging loosely. They're looking around, their hands are tied behind their back, and the bus begins to slowly move. And their legs are trying to stay up with the movement of the bus. And finally the bus pulls away. And you've got multiple people that are suddenly hung in spot there, where everybody can see. And of course there was a crowd that had joined to watch the spectacle. Asphyxiation has been something that is on the menu, I think, for us as a people for years and years. People knew forever that if you can

prevent oxygen uptake in a subject, that it's going to lead to death. Let me ask you about a couple of things that I haven't made note of over the last several years in the deaths of some celebrities, Joe, with what has been called or is called autoerotic asphyxia. What is it David Carradine comes to mind and Michael Hudgens from NXS, the group, but there are others I'm sure that have died from this. What is it and how do people die?

Well, we have to first look at what the word auto means itself. Okay. So, uh, auto erotic having to do with sex. Okay. erotic having to do with sex, okay, and then asphyxia. And it's not meant to be... the practice is not intended to end someone's life. It's there to enhance sexual pleasure and sensation. I think that by the time someone gets to that point, I don't know that many times people are afflicted by this. They can't receive sexual pleasure any other way. It's something that's done alone by

themselves, you know, out of out of sight of everybody else. And it what's fascinating is that the cases I've worked, and there's not a lot of them, a lot of people sold people in investigations and build goods when they started. There are seminars out there where you can go and learn about the investigation of autoeroticism. And why? I have no idea.

Because it's not something that happens every day. Once you go over it in a generalized course, you kind of get the drift of what's going on. And I always thought that it was just ridiculous. And it became to the point where it's very salacious. I think that over the course of my career, I may have actually genuinely handled four and that's over 20 year career.

And so it's not, it's not as prevalent. I think that it's probably become more prevalent because people talk about it. And you've got, you know, curiosity seekers out there that hear about it and they want to experience it. Please. Nobody tried. Let me ask you something, Joe, because this kind of comes to mind. All right.

I wonder, uh, how many times somebody was labeled a suicide when it was something other than a suicide, it was trying to achieve this type of joy and ended up in death. What brings that to mind is the death of Michael Hutchins, where some people said it was a suicide and it has been pointed out, no, it was autohorotic asphyxia. And he's, again, when Hutchins died, he was not a, um, he was not a full suspension. Okay. He was actually kind of leaning forward on his knees with ligature, you know, around his neck.

Okay. Wait a minute. Now, is that a common, cause that's something that came up with Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah. Is that common? Not, not touching. I mean, what about, oh, wait a minute. I do not, I don't mean to shotgun this. Okay.

And I apologize, but in my mind's eye, I'm thinking when I've thought of hanging, it's always been hanging, suspended in the air, but Epstein, Hutchins, Robin Williams. Yeah. Yeah. Robin, actually on a door, he's the bell. Yeah. On a door.ins, Robin Williams. Yeah. Yeah. Robin actually on a door. He used a bell on a doorknob. He did.

And you don't have to be that. That's why, you know, we draw a line. Hanging is kind of a, it's not a good term. I like, um, suspension. If you, if you're going to delineate, if you're going to use the word hanging, suspension hanging versus supported hanging, and it kind of, you begin to under it's, again there's that word, it's nuance, you don't have to be, you know, someone that is suspended and hanging like a judicial hanging off a scaffolding.

And the purpose of judicial hangings, if you will, back then was to break the neck. And for some reason, you know, like the executioner always puts the knot on the left side of the neck. This is a practice that's done all around the world. It was done in the Old West. It was done in Great Britain. Great Britain made great use of hanging because they're the ones that were responsible for hanging all of the Nuremberg trial people and they had one guy and the guy was actually the executioner to the Queen and it was a multi-generation job. I think it went back three generations. They wrote a great book about it. He would fly back and forth to Germany and he gave detailed notes, I hung three people today, you know, and he kept a diary of it.

But that's meant to break the neck, okay, like at the C1, C2 level, where you're there, you know, at the, you know, there at the base of the brain, where you're into the primal brain where you're shutting down the autonomic nervous system. But many people that hang themselves and set out to hang themselves, most of the time they don't break their neck. That's what's so odd about Epstein. Is it Epstein's hyoid was broken, which is generally something you never see it,

never see it in hangings. But you do in strangulation. Yes you do because it's so high up in the neck. It's superior to the leading edge of the noose that has been fashioned. And not to mention that he had other fractures in his the cartilage of his neck as well, the adjacent cartilage. And that requires quite a amount of force and even if you were to tie off on that bed, the second tier, you know because there were bunk beds in there, even if you were to tie off on the top, you couldn't generate sufficient energy to create that kind of trauma with ripped up bedsheets or clothing.

I don't think you could, Michael Bodden didn't think you could. He was present for the autopsy. He said that he didn't believe. But yet, you've got these people now with the FBI, I think Bongino and Cash Patel claim that they have seen the video and that they've said that this is a suicide. I'm not going to believe it until that video, which will never be released, would be released.

I'm just not buying it. But yeah, you look at those cases, compare that to auto eroticism. I kind of went for a field but with auto eroticism The rush comes about the way it's been explained is by the deprivation of oxygen to the brain So they will be stimulated many times in the old days when you go out on these cases Dave there would be open pornography like laying all over the floor. And so it's in an observable position so that they're super stimulated sexually as they're looking at images. And then to complete the act, they will suspend themselves by the neck to deprive themselves of oxygen and then touch

themselves at the same time. You actually have people that have it down to an art where they will have one guy that use Velcro cuffs, Velcro bindings between his legs where he bound himself between his legs, used a dog chain to tie off onto a door hinge in a hotel room, and he could move his hands back and forth between his legs and stimulate himself. And he had porn everywhere. The real tragedy in that case, I think, was the poor little housekeeper that had found his body. And Dave, this lady, God bless her, she was from Guatemala. She stood maybe 5'1". I'll never forget this. And it was actually on a Sunday morning. And the bath, it was a micro-tel, if you've ever heard of those,

kind of an extended stay kind of place. When you open the door to the hotel room, the first thing you see on the left is the bathroom, like many rooms, and he's hanging from that hinge and he's nude. And this poor woman who could not speak a lick of English was terrified. She had a rosary beads with her. And the reason I know this is that when I got to the scene, she was huddled on the floor. She wouldn't sit in a chair. She was just holding her rosary beads. The reason I know this is that when I got to the scene, she was huddled on the floor. She wouldn't sit in a chair. She was just holding her rosary beads.

She was praying and she was rocking back and forth. She was like saying, Hail Mary's in Spanish and rocking back and forth is so terrified her. And that's actually the response that you get because this is predominantly a male practice. There's only been a few female instances of this. One of the first was this case out of Germany. It's generally male dependent and you will have spouses that have no idea that their better half is engaged in this behavior

and they come home and they find an individual suspended and dead. Worse, and I did have a case of this, they have a hidden area that they'll go into. And this one gentleman that I had was in a garage area where he had a cubbyhole behind the garage where it attached to the house. And he had, you know, like BTK had a rat hole where he kept all of his memorabilia. Well, people that practice autoeroticism, they have certain things that really stimulate them. This guy went into this space and they couldn't find him. She thought that he had left and then they had a bad smell in the house

and they were able to go in and they found him suspended in there. He's wearing fishnet stockings, he's got a silk blouse on and he's wearing a wig. He's got this rope around his neck and he had hung himself in. He's got this rope around his neck and he had hung himself in there and there was porn everywhere and this is something that had been ongoing. Another thing that you find is they love to document too.

They'll you know do videography of himself and go back and watch it and fantasize. So yeah that's you know but those cases are so rare. They don't happen with great frequency. You have far more suicides that occur with asphyxiation and that with a ligature asphyxiation like that. And then of course, Dave, you know, as you mentioned, I can't remember which one it was, but you had mentioned particularly one serial killer that had which way John Wayne Gacy. Yeah. Yeah. But what about, you know, it's something that you and I had talked of because I made a note, but oxygen deprivation

in serial killings. Yeah. Yeah. What is, is it because it's like a, uh, you don't have to have a weapon? Well, your hands are your weapon. I, I don't mean I'm not being flippant by saying that. I know, I know, but I think that these people that are involved in serialized homicide like that, it's a very primal connection that they have to the victim because they, you know, if you stab somebody, there's a chance they're not going to die. All right.

But just imagine if you view yourself as God Almighty, which many of the serial killers do, you have the power over life and death. And they can literally choke someone to death like this. I'll give you a great example. I had a guy that only, I say only, he wasn't in the pantheon of serial killers where you've had, you know, some people, you know, they talk about Bundy, how there's hundreds and all this. This guy killed six women, certainly enough to be qualified as serial killer, but he used a garrotte and he would rape these women and sodomize them.

And he used a wire garrote. And so what he would do, talking about the power of life and death, he would tighten it down on the back of their neck, and when they were starting to convulse, he would loosen it and they would start to breathe again. And he went through this. So you would see multiple furrows on the neck where he would readjust the garrote while he was doing this.

And I think that a lot of that pathology that you see with, um, with serial perpetrators has to do with that idea that they're gods or perceive themselves to be that way. And, you know, I think I shared this maybe on an earlier episode out of all the series of serial homicides that I worked is four, maybe five, I can't recall now. You know, Dave, I never had a shooter, I never had a stabber, a cutter. Every single one of them were asphyxial deaths. And they were either with a ligature or manual strangulation.

These are all individuals that did this. So I think from a serial standpoint, asphyxiation is something where they, they, they gained great power with it, Dave. You know, I, it didn't occur to me until you were talking about that of them cinching it down, person thinks it's over and then bringing them back. And the terror that would be struck in the victim all the time, it just boggles the mind of what people will do to one another. Yeah. But yeah, there's another, yeah, there's another part of this too,

um, about being exposed to noxious gas. Is this an, uh, how, how does that come into play here? Well, yeah, anything where you're dealing with the replacement of oxygen, probably what would jump to mind for most people would be carbon monoxide asphyxiation. And that's, as a death investigator, that's what you're gonna run into the most. And it can happen in,

I've never, and I'm not saying it hasn't happened, in my life, in my practice, it's never happened. I guess you could have a homicidal application of noxious gases. I'm sure that that's something that has happened. I never personally worked one that I was aware of. Every time I've worked them, they've either been a suicide,

which I've had many. Generally it involves a car in the garage with the windows down. Or it has been an accidental death where I had one guy in particular that reversed the fan, a family member reversed the fan on the wall heater so that it actually blew so that it actually blew the waste gas into the house and it killed I think there were six people in the house that died you know which is you know beyond anything that you can imagine but you know Dave probably the saddest case that I ever worked of carbon monoxide, I had a guy

that lived in an old old home in New Orleans and it was one of these beautiful old homes on the outside. It didn't look like much, but the interior was gorgeous. And the folks that have been to New Orleans have seen some of these homes. You're gonna know precisely what I mean. It's got this ancient crown molding that goes all the way around the interior and the ceilings are all 13 feet high. He lived in this house all alone and he had a driveway immediately outside of his bedroom and he had an old truck that sat out there and it was up on blocks. Didn't have any tires on it, but the engine ran. And Dave, he had taken an old fashioned glass cutter,

cut a perfect hole in his bedroom window from the outside, put a pipe into the tailpipe of this truck, hooked a dryer, dryer vent, you know, one of those expandable hoses that comes off the back of the dryer to push the exhaust out, had taped it down, put it into the window, sealed it with duct tape, and went and laid down on the bed. And after he had cranked up the truck and he had gone into his bedroom and had these huge, as you can imagine, the doors in his room were huge. There were two and they had gaps. You know, old houses always have gaps under the doors. And he'd taken wet towels and placed them at the base of the door.

And I remember this so vividly going out to the scene. You know, suicides are always very tragic, but this one in particular stuck with me. He let that truck run and it wouldn't take too long because all that has to happen, you cannot have a flow of air. He knew that. The oxygen in the room has to be replaced with carbon monoxide.

And when we got the scene cleared and I came out and the guy was laying there and he had been down for several days, so he was in the early stages of decomposition. Dave, there were two black boxes that were laying next to his body on the bed. One on his left, one on his right. And they were the cremains of his wife and daughter who had been killed in a car accident. And he couldn't bear life any longer without them. And he told all of his friends about this. You know, and he had been just, as you can imagine, just crushing to him. And he wasn't a very old fella. And right there on that old bed,

he asphyxiated himself with carbon monoxide, the exhaust from an old truck. It struck a chord with me, as do many of these cases involving asphyxia, because there's something so, for some reason, something so very intimate, something so very personal about each and every one of them. Sometimes you're just absent the words to really describe what you've seen. But we do know this. In the world of medical legal death investigation, you need to be primed at all times to be prepared to work these kinds of cases because they come in all shapes and forms. That's why I recommend that we stay in the morgue as much as we can, we learn as much as we can, and we continue to search out these cases to see where we can improve as forensic scientists. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags.