Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: SHOCKING Crime Scene Photos Tell New Story About Gypsy-Rose Blanchard

Episode Date: August 11, 2024

Some people say Gyspy-Rose Blanchard is Munchhausen-by-proxy survivor, the victim of her own mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. And they would be right. Some people say Gyspy-Rose Blanchard is a murderer, and they too, would be right.  After lifelong physical, mental, and medical abuse, Gypsy-Rose Blanchard met a disturbed young man online and concocted a plan to getaway from Dee Dee Blanchard and begin her life as an adult. But Dee Dee would have to die. The crime scene was shocking, and now the pictures are out in the public. On this episode of Body Bags,  Joseph Scott Morgan is going to explain why the photos were taken to begin with and how pictures at a crime scene actually do more than just document what has happened, sometimes they can help investigators discover a lot more.     Transcript Highlights 00:00.01 Introduction, taken advantage of a storm03:07.93 Talk about Dee Dee Blanchard, opportunist08:13.54 Discussion of Dee Dee claiming Gypsy-Rose was sick as a baby10:37.33 Discussion of crime scene photos released15:04.43 Talk about the story of Dee Dee and Gypsy-Rose20:08.29 Discussion of using hurricane Katrina   25:05.99 Discussion of surgeries not needed29:54.59 Talk about Gypsy-Rose and boyfriend34:14.12 Discussion of Gypsy-Rose "story" about death of Dee Dee39:50.66 Discussion of crime scene photos of Dee Dee Blanchard murder40:59.73 Talking about photographic documentation of crime scene47:38.96 ConclusionSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Facts with Joseph Scott Moore. A few years ago, my wife and I, we lost our home in a tornado here in Jacksonville. We lost everything. It was, I'd never experienced anything like that in my life. Of course, we live in Alabama, and Alabama is known, I think, right in the heart of the southern version of Tornado Alley. And the thing about a tornado is you don't really have much of a warning. That's the way it was with us. But there is one meteorological manifestation you do have warnings for and that's hurricanes

and being from louisiana and my family being from there we have over the generations written out a number of hurricanes but you know you can kind of see it coming can't you you can see it coming from a great distance and it's up to you to get prepared to do what you need to do to take care of you and yours. Today, I'm going to delve into a story that's been talked about quite a bit and it does have to do with Louisiana, has to do with a hurricane, and it has to do with a mother and daughter who I believe took advantage of the system and gained it and of course it wound up resulting in one of the most brutal murders in recent memory. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags.

Dave, can you believe that it has been almost 19 years since Katrina? You know, Joe, 19 years since Hurricane Katrina. And because the media likes a round number, next year, for probably three months before August and up until the 20th anniversary of that hurricane, there will be a lot in the media. Not so much this year, but next year there will be. But that hurricane plays a central part in today's episode about the death of Dee Dee Blanchard. A lot of people, when you say Dee Dee Blanchard, they kind of go, I kind of know what you're talking about. Maybe I remember Chubby Woman. And it's like, if I say Gypsy Rose Blanchard, now we know. Dee Dee Blanchard was the mother of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.

And at this point in time, Joe, when you brought up Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Katrina was what allowed Dee Dee Blanchard to leave the area where everybody knew her to go because she had to. Hurricane Katrina caused her to flee everybody she had to hurricane katrina caused her to flee everybody she knew and she landed in missouri and oh my gosh without hurricane katrina pushing her out and with gypsy rose i don't think the con would have ever gone as far as it did with what dd blanchard did and what her daughter gypsy rose blanchard eventually did to her there's so much psychological stuff here but today we're dealing with the forensics and joe when you see somebody like this that they just find a way to take advantage of things that are devastating to others. Opportunistic comes to mind.

There are opportunists everywhere you look. And I don't know that I could magnify that any more than turning the spotlight today on D.D. Blanchard, the mother of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, because you talk about a gamer. You talk about somebody that knows the system, knows how to weasel their way around the system, and that will turn anything within her realm into a utility that she can use to not just survive, but literally to enrich herself at the expense of anybody else. It's arguably one of the most disgusting things in the world.

And of course, what's really bad is she's the victim of our story today. Yeah, she is the victim of the story. And in the sense that, you know, she's, she's a homicide victim. And obviously one of the most talked about cases, you know, within, I don't know, the last two decades, three decades, one of them, I mean, we've got a whole pantheon of cases now, but this kind of sticks out. I mean, there's been, I wish you and I had a dollar for every, every television show that's been done, you know, about about these circumstances, articles that have been written, books that have been written, all these sorts of things. But when it comes down to it, you've got the genesis of this twisted tale that starts off, obviously it starts off when, you know, when Dee Dee gets pregnant

with this fellow Blanchard's child. And she's, you know, she's living down actually on the west side of the city or the metro area of New Orleans, down toward the swamps, that area that people generally associate, you know, with, you know, like that show that people generally associate you know with uh you know like that show that's on television where they were going out hunting gator you know chewed them chewed them all out uh that that area down there which i have an affinity for it's quite beautiful if you've never been to the swamps and seen it down there but you know that's kind of what she you know comes from that environment down there. People are very poor.

They don't have a lot. And she found herself pregnant. Now, she's, I don't know, several years older than the guy that she got pregnant by. They got married before she was pregnant. I did not know that 17 when they got together. He was 17 when they got together and they did get married. That just shocked me. I just assumed he got her pregnant and they got married or they got, you know, any number of things, but not got married and then got pregnant.

So do you know where the name Gypsy Rose comes from? There's an actual real reason. And I. I assumed it was something else, but it's not right. No, it's not. It's kind of disappointing. Yeah. Rod. Rod Blanchard was a big fan of Guns N' Roses.

Yeah. That's where the rose part came from. I had no idea. And mom liked the name Gypsy. And, of course, now Gypsy is like a pejorative term that people get in a twist about. I don't know if that population, that segment of of the world population actually is offended by it. But there's people out there that are professionally offended by everything. And so, you know, she said it was a term we're not supposed to know.

Yeah. Yeah. And so she saddled with this name to begin with. And that's, you know, that's essentially how this child starts her journey in life. To back up just a little bit, when we mentioned the stories about the murder and aftermath of Dee Dee Blanchard, when Dee Dee Blanchard and Rod, well, when Dee Dee married Rod and they had Rod had already decided to leave before Gypsy Rose Blanchard was born. They were no longer cohabitating together. He had left, and when, and the reason was real simple. Dee Dee, you mentioned a minute ago, was an opportunist. She was a con woman. She was a con artist, and he realized that fairly early on, this is not an honest person that I want to be with.

So even though she's pregnant and even though they're married, Rod got away. And Dee Dee did what she pretty much she became the victim. Professional victim. By using her daughter from her infancy, claiming that Gypsy had sleep apnea as an infant. That she had sleep apnea. That was the first trek into the hospital. And in a matter of months, anything, and she was a nurse's aide. Dee Dee Blanchard knew of plenty of different issues,

medically oriented, that she could utilize to make claims that you don't have to, you can't really prove. Kind of like if you're kind of a, if you're a rich bum, you know. You come from a family of wealth, but you don't really prove. Kind of like if you're a rich bum, you know? You come from a family of wealth, but you don't really have a job or a career. You can claim to be a photographer. You can claim to be a writer. You don't actually have to prove anything to claim those as careers. A filmmaker?

Yeah. There you go. A film producer? There you go. And that's what D.D. Blanchard realized. There are a number of medical ailments, maladies that one can say their child has based on symptoms that only you can see and require treatment. And that's what she did. specific diagnosis, which, by the way, they never could confirm this, this nonspecific diagnosis of seizure disorder. Oh, yeah.

Well, you know, seizures have there's listen, I could sit here for hours and we could literally talk about all the variety of seizures that are out there. Right. It's not all epilepsy. There's a variety of things that seizures can arise from. And so, you think about this, it's very nonspecific. You get this kind of sense for this. And write your R.D. about Dede Blanchard. She had a peak, if you will, behind the curtain relative to the medical world and the world of medicine

and treatment. And listen, I don't doubt that probably in her work as a nurse's aide, she had encountered people that were, in fact, gaming the system. They're everywhere. But I can tell you this. After much planning, she played the medical community and even more broadly, the communities that she landed in

like a fiddle. Friends, I'm sure that you will, you're scratching your head right now and you're thinking, Morgan, have you lost your mind? Why are you talking about this case? Because it's old now. It is an old case. Well, the reason I'm talking about this case today is that, and I've told you about this, Dave, my inbox, my email from all of these news outlets, I started getting hit, I guess it was this past Monday, because people were losing their minds over the fact that these crime scene photos from the D.D. Blanchard homicide had apparently been kind of, I don't know, re-injected into the public forum, into the conversation. They've been re-released and now they're making circulation around. And so people, you know, I had these folks reaching out to me about the graphic nature of them. Some people even want me to hold forth on the idea of why people want to see these images and um so you know it really made me begin to think well what's what's the purpose behind all this and and look i know that gypsy rose who obviously now is famously out

of prison my god you know uh they uh they have anointed her you know as like she's in the zeitgeist, as they say. She's everywhere. You can't get past her. She's out there. She was with a boyfriend. She thought she was pregnant. Then she's going to get some kind of television show. She's had a nose job.

Now she's getting married. Now she is pregnant. You know, and all of this stuff. And, you know, Dee Dee's. I'm going to make a really dangerous comment here right now. Are you ready for this? Hopefully this doesn't collectively end our careers. Dee Dee's no longer around.

She's a homicide victim. So I guess my question is, who is it that's out there that is now using Gypsy Rose for their own benefit? Because I can tell you this, it's not little old Gypsy Rose that's pushing her out and making her part of the national conversation again. This person, she has utility for other people, just like she had utility. I submit to you just like she had utility for Didi. And now she's out there and people are drinking this in day in and day out. They can't get enough of it, Dave. So you're suggesting that Gypsy Rose is taking advantage of what she did?

Yes. what she did um yes and also i would tell you that people that have a lot of money a lot of money in media and entertainment also see the opportunity oh yeah to exploit this situation i think that two words there opportunity and exploit those are two things that Gypsy Rose learned early. And those are two things that are learned in media and those who take advantage of certain stories and exploit them. And I don't know why people want to look at crime scene photos, but I know this, Joe. We go to movies all the time to see the gore. We see fictionalized gore. And now, over the last however many years, we see more reality.

Not me. I only watch rom-coms, Dave. Yeah, and you only read Playboy for the articles. we watched this child that we thought was sick that had all of these issues and her single mom just struggling to make things work. And we saw the video. She was named, you know, queen of this and king of that. I mean, the awards came in from experts. I was fascinated.

And, you know, I don't think I remembered that necessarily because this stuff gets so piled on and layered. You forget that every little spot that she kind of inhabited, Dee Dee would use that opportunity to insert this child into these environments. And all the while, hey, get this. You talk about a lot of activity going on behind the scenes. So as she's outwardly promoting the horror of all of these so-called ailments this child had, she's backstage telling them to do things like, yeah, well, she's drooling really bad. Let's go ahead and take out her salivary glands. Right. Just let that resonate with you just for a second.

There's a term that's used, and it generally applies to people that work, that are former military types that go and hire their self out, and it's called mercenary. Mercenaries have more honor than this. Mercenaries are going out selling their skill set to the highest bidder. She's literally using her daughter as a product at this point in time. And Gypsy Rose knew it because while her mother, just to give you a very quick look at this, Gypsy Rose Blanchard was honored as the 2007 Child of the Year by this only foundation that promotes they're advocating those who have to use a feeding tube. Now, I don't know that this is a huge deal. Like, do people that have a feeding tube get picked on? I don't know. I just know that this group raises money to raise awareness for those who have to have a feeding tube. And Gypsy Rose Blanchard was the foundation's child of the

year because she had a feeding tube. This is a girl whose mother lied about her age so that she would be younger and had her use a feeding tube that she didn't need to get her nourishment gypsy rose blanchard was on a liquid uh pedia lab sure yeah pedia sure pedia care things you give a child that is sick you know that they can she had that tool she was in her 20s this is how deep this went and by the way when gypsy rose blanchard was told by her mother you have muscular dystrophy or muscular sclerosis you have to use a walker because your legs don't work right and even the little girl's going they seem to work fine to me you know she's raised on this going but they could give out on you at any moment. You need to use these, you know.

Then she is in this little girl who's so sick, is in a motorcycle accident with her grandfather when she's seven or eight years old. She skins her knee. Skins her knee. Her mother takes her to the emergency room because she has all of these other issues. They admit her, you know, to take a look and make sure she's okay. She's there for a skinned knee, Joe. But because of the other issues, she's checked in. Now, what happens when you leave the hospital? When you're a patient at the hospital and you are leaving, what do they do? They wheel you out in a wheelchair. Gypsy Rose Blanchard's mother convinced her after the skinned knee. The doctor gave her a wheelchair because that's what she needs to use now.

That's when Gypsy Rose ended up in the wheelchair. That's why. And you think about the utility of a wheelchair. Listen, I'll be the first one to admit it here. I'm chief among sinners. I stare at people that are in wheelchairs. I can't. I mean, I'm not going to turn away.

Because when I see, if I'm in a location, I'll look and see if someone is actually riding about in a wheelchair. I want to know, well, what happened to them? What's going on with this? Don't think for two seconds that DeeDee did not look at the wheelchair and see that as an outward manifestation or an outward demonstration, rather, of what was going on with this child. If she would go to the lengths of having a feeding tube in his child, to have unnecessary surgeries and these wild, wild diagnoses that were being made, which, by the way, the lion's share of them were made in Louisiana.

And this brings us to Katrina. You put forth this supposition that she's been diagnosed with MS and that now, because of Katrina, they have to be evacuated. Where they were living in Slidell, Louisiana, which is just, if you follow I-10, it's just to the east of New Orleans. You have to cross a part of Lake Pontchartrain to get there. They were living in public housing there. And granted, Slidell got hit. They got hammered by Katrina. And they did lose things. And then they moved to Covington, Louisiana, which I have a lot of relatives in Covington. And there was a special facility where if you

were handicapped in any way, you could stay there. And so they move into this and it's it's where this is where the sea got planted by the the the therapist, the physician that was actually treating them and said, hey, I'm from the Ozarks. I'm from the Ozarks. Maybe you guys ought to give that area of the country a try. Really? That's where that came from? Yeah. Yeah. It came from someone within that clinic that recommended.

Yeah. You need to. I wondered how. I wondered how. How did they. Yeah. Why of all the places in the world that, you know, why Southwest Missouri, which is a beautiful place.

I've been there many times. My wife's family is from up in that region. And, you know, it's gorgeous. It's the Ozarks. But, you know, the one thing that it doesn't have is knowledge. They didn't have knowledge of what had been going on with these two to begin with. So they get to show up. And there's, you know, it's like now they're going to tap into a completely new vein of gold that they've discovered.

They've kind of exhausted everything in South Louisiana at this point. You know, how many more crowns can you put on the little girl in the wheelchair? Well, let's go somewhere else where there are more crowns. And the crowns are just merely representative of all of the bounty that's going to be afforded to them in this location. And reinforces the fact that she truly is a sick little girl with a lot of issues and a mother struggling to take care of her. Yeah. And we have to go back to Dave. You have to understand as well. And there was all kinds of fraud that went on as a result of Katrina. Yes. This is merely, and I can't say that this was fraud on her part relative to Katrina.

It's an opportunity, though. The nation is glued. I don't know if you remember. The nation is glued to this drama day in and day out, watching people on the roofs of homes. Helos coming in to try to evacuate people out of there. There's imagery of the dead. And, you know, my friends at the Orleans Parish Coroner's Office down there, they had to relocate. Can you imagine? And they couldn't deal with the volume of bodies.

They had to have refrigerated trucks where they could transport the bodies to a location once they were recovered because you didn't know who they were. It was madness, absolute madness. And everybody's drinking this in. So, if you're up in southwest Missouri, all the way away from south Louisiana, and she shows up, and she's got this child in tow, by the way, in a wheelchair. Yep. With a feeding tube. And they say, you know, more porridge, please.

You know, they're there in this environment where they can leverage every bit of this. And these people, oh my God, these people from South Louisiana, they've been through Katrina. Oh my gosh, they've been through the ringer. Let's open our hearts. And God bless them. I mean, the people up there just gave and gave till it hurt. And she saw the advantage in that. And she saw when people had questions because experts in the field know how this plays out and they know what somebody with these issues looks like, acts like, talks like, sounds like. And yet when questions came up about previous diagnosis, previous health surgeries, what have you. Yeah.

Sadly, you know, it was all lost in Katrina. And so you have to trust this woman who has gamed the system to tell you what's really going on with her daughter that you see is certainly in bad shape. She's in a wheelchair. Her hair is a lot of times her head was shaved and her mother claimed it was from chemotherapy or chemotherapy. Yeah. Yeah. And this is the term. This is what she had.

If I remember correctly, let me say it was we're going to go ahead and shave your head because you're going to lose your hair anyway. It's best that you go ahead and get used to that I would imagine that that Gypsy Rose, you know, she's starting to go into her teenage years now. She's, you know, like all teenagers, you're going to rebel. She's starting to understand that she's being played, I think, to a great degree. And that creates a perfect storm, if you will, for somebody who's got this little flame that's burning inside of them that doesn't want to be a part of this. I can't look. I can't imagine everything that she went through. I don't know.

Nobody could. I don't think unnecessary surgeries and all this stuff, you know. But there was one physician up there in Springfield that and he was a neurologist, I believe, that was taking a look at labs and doing all this stuff. And he's thinking, this doesn't marry up with what I have been trained to look for as a clinician, you know, as far as this manifestation with the MS and all of this. He makes a phone call back to New Orleans where this diagnosis was actually made.

And they did a biopsy of muscle tissue on her. And there's a manifestation that you can see if you have this condition where it presents at a cellular level. And you're looking in the microscope at this. And they said, yeah, we never did make that diagnosis there was no evidence of it there and so he's thinking oh no this guy was actually told that you need to tread very carefully here if you're going to call her out you know and say that she's lying wow because you know she had gamed everybody to this point.

And I think that Gypsy Rose, you know, was certainly aware that she was, you know, she she had grand utility, I guess, if you will. She could walk. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just it. And so when you move forward in this case and you begin to understand that she had, in fact, run the course, I guess, she came to the conclusion that she wanted to be free of this. But how do you do this? How do you do this when, and

I had this vision, I can't remember, one of these cartoon things that my kids watch, one of these movies where you've got the princess in the tower and there's a dragon guarding the tower. You know, how do you get past, if you want to save, how do you get past the dragon that's guarding the tower? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's what it was. And so, you know, you're thinking about this and you're thinking, you know, how do they get access? You know, how does she escape access? How does she escape this? How does she escape it?

And that's when this Gautamjana person makes this presentation in her life. And I've got to tell you, dude, hell followed after it. Who's going to be the white knight here? Who's going to come riding in to save the little girl in the wheelchair that's had her salivary glands surgically removed? Who's been told that she's got cancer or that she's been told that she has these other horrendous diseases. It smacks of, people throw around the term Munchausen by proxy syndrome. And there's a part to that for me with Munchausen's. It's generally the mother trying to get attention. But it doesn't seem like a pure Munchausen's because Munchausen's people are not there to necessarily profit financially.

Dee Dee is a scam artist and she's profiting off of her child's illness. So you can say Munchausen's if you want to. But it's not just about the attention that she's getting. It's about everything that comes along with it, Dave. Her financial survival was based on the illnesses suffered by Gypsy Rose, the daughter. Gypsy Rose was 21 and playing much younger than her actual biological years. And she was using the Internet. And this is 2012.

We're not talking about a time using the Internet. And this is 2012. All right. We're not talking about a time before the Internet. We're talking about somebody who is inside their home with access to the Internet and a phone and everything else. And that's where she meets. You mentioned his last name, GoToJohn. Nicholas GoToJohn. Right? GoToJohn. Yeah.

All right. Nicholas GoToJohn. Gypsy Rose communicates with him online through a Christian singles website. Innocent enough. He's from Bend, Wisconsin, and she's there outside Springfield, Missouri. As they meet and develop an online relationship, Gypsy Rose is starting to confide in people, in particular, a next door neighbor who's a friend of hers kind of talked to her like a sister. And she's talking to this neighbor about eloping with Go To John that they've communicated at this point where Go To John has, you know, you mentioned the white knight who's going to get her away from this overbearing

mother. Obviously, Gypsy Rose knows she doesn't have all these maladies. Who's going to get her away from this overbearing mother? Obviously, Gypsy Rose knows she doesn't have all these maladies that she's pretending to have. She does her squeaky voice. Granted, she doesn't have much education. Word is that she probably only completed maybe first grade, maybe not. But she didn't go to school, so her education is not there. She talks like a child. She uses the wrong verbs and things. So she sounds like a child who has a lot of issues but she's really an adult woman who's now in her 20s

so she has adult feelings and everything else and that's where nicholas go to john comes into play they're talking online um there are aspects of the flirting that become very sexual. And some see that Gypsy Rose, God bless her, in terms of her growing up years being taken advantage of by her mother. Some suggest that Go To John, Nicholas Go To John, was a sexual predator. And he was preying upon Gypsy Rose. I don't know if that's true or not. I don't know.

I wasn't there. And to be honest with you, there's so much to this story to unpack, Joe. We would need Bethany Marshall and a few other psychs, you know. But ultimately, she and Nicholas come up with a plan to get rid of Dee Dee Blanchard. They can't see any other way. I guess Gypsy Rose feels trapped. So they beyond the loping and anything else that she could be drawn back to her mother.

And I'm sure Nicholas is there helping along the way because we know what happened, but they decide to kill Dede Blanchard while she's asleep. So Nicholas Goodyear travels from Wisconsin to Springfield, Missouri. By bus. Yeah, by bus. I think she had sent him the money in order to facilitate this. And here's the thing, Dave.

So when they had gotten past, you know, kind of the, the whole online thing where they're getting to know one another and they get off into this kind of sexual deviant kind of thing that that's going on in the world of the internet sense. Um, Gypsy Rose had told him that if he showed up, she would have everything set up for him. Now, he was familiar with the home.

Obviously, he had been there. But here's the thing about it. Timing had to be just right. So people that say that go to John, who has some pretty serious mental issues to begin with, and has an IQ that is in the low end, all right? I think that he could probably be pretty easily manipulated. She's furnishing everything. I mean, everything from duct tape to a knife, all of these sorts of things. But she's also furnishing him with, with a timeline and, you know, when,

when mom is going to go to bed, right. It's the best time to do this sort of thing. And this is played out very distinctly. And this brings us back to, you know, our conversation today about the photography here. When you see when, you know,

I've seen this myriad of photographs that have come out, this crime scene photography has come out and it's, it's really, really it's, it's very graphic stuff. You know that he had to have an awareness of what was going on. So to say that he did this solely on his own, he may have been the perpetrator as far as it goes to plunging this knife at least 17 times into Didi's body as she lay there in bed. Don't think that her hand, her hand being Gypsy Rose's hand, was not in this.

And, you know, she's portrayed herself as having gone into the bathroom, sat on the floor, covered her ears so that she didn't have to hear mom screaming and this sort of thing. You ever wonder how much truth there is to that joe yeah no i i've i have and and here's here's something and actually my my wife had uh kim had pointed this out to me she he was she was like wasn't dd like a kind of a big robust robust woman yes yeah and he's he's not a tiny tiny fellow and so i'm thinking i'm thinking, did he truly pull this off by himself? Did he facilitate this? And I got to tell you, Dave, one of the things that really struck me from a forensic standpoint, and that's why photographic documentation is so important in our field.

Right. Is that there are a couple of places on DeeDee's bare back because he her her nightgown was raised up to. Before we get to that, Joe. Yeah. We kind of skipped. Go to when Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Didi go to a doctor's appointment. Nicholas go to John comes into Springfield. Gypsy then Rose hands him the packet of gloves, duct tape,

and knife, and wait for her to go to sleep, the timeline. They know what time Dee Dee's going to sleep because she's on a regular routine. Once she's in bed asleep, that's when Gypsy Rose claims she goes to the bathroom and covers her ears

while Nicholas goes in and stabs Dee Dee Blanchard 17 times at least while she's asleep. As you mentioned, Dee Dee is not a small woman. She is a handful and then some. So the idea that unless his first strike, unless his first thrust of the knife somehow unless his first thrust of the knife somehow made it impossible for her to fight back, Joe. Yeah.

I'm not picturing it. And because she does have some extra weight on her, some extra bulk, I'm not guessing that first knife is enough to take her out. Yeah. I think that it would be, it's certainly, it would be a mammoth undertaking, I think, for him to, well, first off, it'd be dumb luck, I think, to have a lethal strike. To make that first strike, right. Yeah.

And of course, she's got, she does, in fact, have a very nasty injury to the back of her head. And some people have, are to the back of her neck. And some people have characterized this as almost a decapitation. I've seen this injury. And you can see down through the layers of fat to the subcu fat in the back of her neck. Dave, this is not a stab wound. This is an incised wound.

Okay. So, now there might be stabbing that's associated with it within the wound, but the back of her neck is literally opened up. And then she's got multiple stab wounds. And interestingly enough, the medical examiner slash coroner that was present at the scene, they have a gloved hand on in the photograph. And they're pointing specifically to the insult at the back of the neck. You can see them there. You can't see the person. You just see their gloved hand pointing.

And that's something that we do at crime scenes, you know, because we're not going to clean it up there. You don't want to do that. You want to have it in pristine condition, untouched in that environment. Because if you wash, and you and I have talked about this, if you wash or wipe away anything, you're destroying evidence there. You have to be able to contain it. And that's what they were doing.

And they're pointing to the number and the clustering of these injuries. But Dave, you know what? One thing that's really fascinating about this that I saw, I think I saw two of them. There's a transfer bloody handprint on her back, her bare back, where you can see that a hand has been placed. And I've seen this happen before. I famously had a domestic abuse case many years ago where this,

this guy was, he would take his belt, he'd get drunk, he'd take his belt off and he would beat his wife with it. And then he drank and well, she, he passed out on the sofa drunk. He had beaten her with a belt.

The belt was still laying on the floor and she got on top of him and she, there were bloody handprints all on his back. She broke the knife blade off in his back. Wow. As a steak knife. I'll never forget that. But you could actually make out. And I use this to teach my students about trace evidence and transfer evidence and this sort of thing.

You can actually see this on her back. But I think you could see the handprint on dd blanchard yeah you can yeah clearly clearly demonstrated now you mentioned that dd blanchard has been stabbed at least 17 times she's got the wound to the neck but was her body then positioned or was what else was going on because the entire focus of today is about the photographs that were taken at the scene of the crime which have now been released and i do not know what type of value they have other than prurient interest that these photos could possibly have to anyone other than again i don't see this as a teachable moment here, but the photos that are taken.

Yeah, it's teachable in the sense that if you're running a forensic science program or crime scene program somewhere, and they're not the best quality photos that I've ever seen generated from a crime scene. All right. It's not like I would. But how important are these photos? How important are crime scene photos? I'll tell seen generated from a crime scene. All right. It's not like I would. How important are these photos? How important are crime scene photos? I'll tell you how important it is.

It's important in the sense of you've frozen that moment in time. You've captured it where, let's just say, for instance, and I'd love to talk about forensic photography this way. You're there, you're eyes on as an investigator where you are snapping these photographs to tell a story about what actually happened. This case, let's just say a case like this might go uns solve for 50 years. Well, by the time the case makes any headway, everybody that worked that case is either retired or dead. So, all we have to rely on is the photographic documentation, any kind of notes that were taken at that moment in time that can take us and transport us back to that moment in time.

That's why it's so important when you do crime scene photography that you have frozen those moments, Dave, to the point so that, and you make it so, dude, you make it so clear that when these new investigators get their eyes on all of this documentation, you literally transport them back in time, Dave. Just think about how powerful that is. One of the things I think about is like the Hindenburg blowing up, that film reel, which is like the first time something like that ever happened, like documented in real time, you know what I'm saying? Yeah.

And how horrific that was. But you get a sense for that moment in time, you're transported back. Well, with crime scene photography, one of the things that we do is just so that to give people kind of a primer about this, you imagine Dede Blanchard's body as the center of a clock face, okay? Or the center of a compass is actually a better example of this. If possible, I'm going to start off on all four points of the compass, taking what's referred to as macro photographs.

That is in the broadest sense where I'm going to be extending out to the most distal western, eastern, northern, and southern perspective of this body, then I'm going to move in about half that distance and do it again, and then half that distance again and do it again, all the while kind of tightening down that focus. Because if you think of yourself as observing something, let's say you've got damage to your car and you walk out. You don't just look at the damage to your car that's in your driveway and say and walk right up to it and say, that's it. You're going to get a wide, broad ranging perspective because your perspective might change. And every view that you have of the scene is going to be lost after that body is gone. Maybe long after this little, you know, habitat for humanity home is taken down to the ground at some time in the future.

You are frozen in that moment in time. And so when you get down to the nuts and bolts, when you get into the micro photography here, and I say micro, I'm using that very, very loosely. It's not like we're using a microscope. I'm just talking about macro broad, micro small. And you begin to look at those little details. That's why I wanted to point out the handprint to you or the nature of the stab wounds. You know, I can see that stab wound at the scene, even though it's crusted in blood, I can appreciate the scene that this is a single edged weapon. OK, well, if I can delineate that, I know that I'm not looking for a dagger.

I know that I'm looking for a blade, for a knife, for a sharp instrument that only has a single edge to it. So that that kind of narrows things down, doesn't it? At that point in time and any of the other associated uh you can tell it from a picture uh yeah yeah pretty clearly you see it better in the morgue once it's cleaned up but for our purposes there might be that moment in time where you're standing there with a detective and if you're doing the examination say look at this and you see that it is single-edged. And single-edged, I always tell people a knife wound looks like a winking eye.

And it kind of does. If you imagine the outer portion of the eye is where the actual blade is, the inner portion of the eye is kind of the blunted backstrap of the knife itself. And so you're looking at this, and then you can get an idea, Dave, also in the orientation of how the weapon was held. Now, I'm not saying people always ask me, can you tell if the individual is left-handed or right-handed? That's very difficult to do. There are people out there that say that they claim they can do that.

I'm sure that there are. It's not something I would want to try, but I can tell you the orientation of the knife. I can tell you that they were holding it so that the blade, the sharp edge, was oriented to the left or to the right. And if it's oriented to the left and the right, because you're talking about 17 injuries, you have to, the idea is that they changed their position relative to the attack. They maybe changed hands, went to the offhand, they got tired. Stabbing somebody is something that is physically taxing to undertake. And so you're documenting that all along. I guess the question that I would ask is,

what's the public's need to see this? Right. That's my whole point, Joe. When you told me these pictures were getting out there, I thought they were like pictures that had been edited, that things had been blocked out. And we're talking about real crime scene photos that have made their way into the public on purpose, apparently. Yeah, they've been released on very broadly. I mean, they're worldwide now. I mean, they're on a Google Drive that somebody just kind of released.

And it's my understanding they have been released before. But again, we go back to this idea. Doesn't this come full circle? Yeah. We go back to this idea that it's all a show. It's all a show, Dave, because now we're super saturated in the media with Gypsy Rose Blanchard. We're following her life.

We're seeing everything that's gone on. And let me throw this out to you. As kind of the cherry on top of the sundae. Not only do we get to see Gypsy with her plastic surgery on her nose, not only do we hear about her breakup with her boyfriend, not only do we hear she's getting married, not only do we hear

that she's pregnant, but to round it all off let's show the images of her slaughtered mother regardless of how you might feel about

Dee Dee Blanchard ask yourself this what's the purpose I know it has nothing to do with forensics what's the purpose? I know it has nothing to do with forensics. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Packs. This is an iHeart Podcast.