Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Shocking Details! Kansas Moms Update - AUTOPSY OF JILLIAN KELLEY

Episode Date: November 17, 2024

Jillian Kelley, 39, and Veronica Butler, 27, disappeared in late March while on a trip from Hugoton, Kansas, to pick up Butler’s children. Their abandoned car was found 3-miles from their intended location and there are signs of struggle near and in the vehicle. On April 14, nearly two weeks after they went missing, investigators discovered their bodies sealed inside a freezer and buried under concrete in a remote area of a leased field. Joseph Scott Morgan will explain the details of Jillian Kelley's autopsy, what it is like to find two bodies in one location, buried together, and what new information is known after going over the autopsy report.      Transcript Highlights 00:00:11.31. Introduction - update Kansas Moms  00:01:31.84  Jillian Kelley Autopsy 00:03:18.70 Explanation of custody arrangements 00:06:47.31 Autopsy room 00:11:28.26 Freezer with bodies inside dropped into a hole that is 10 feet deep 00:16:12.44 Looking at the tracks around the area where freezer was buried 00:21:31.67 Opening the freezer in the lab 00:26:29.62 Know idea of what type of evidence will be recovered  00:31:30.98 Veronica Butler Autopsy expected later, Jillian Kelley Autopsy now 00:36:02.75 Veronica Butler body on top of Kelley. Bodies removed 00:41:04.70.Kelley has defensive wounds, grabbed blade of knife with her hand 00:46:03.01 Difficult to determine the order of when injuries occurred 00:51:02.87 Injury with hemorrhage 00:54:54.03 Conclusion: another update when Veronica Butler autopsy releasedSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Vibes with Joseph Scott Moore. Have you ever gotten a phone call in the middle of the night? And not work related, but you have somebody that at least counts you as a friend. And they say, hey, can you help me out with something? Unfortunately, I've had that call that has come to me from jails every now and then with friends that made really bad decisions. Primarily involving alcohol. However, today on Body Bags, we're going to talk about a case, actually cases, that so caught the attention of America, not merely because it was one lady helping out another.

But the absolute gruesome nature of their murders was something that most of the people around the United States could not begin to comprehend. This is a follow-up to an earlier episode of Body Bags, I think from back in April of 24. But today we have more information. Today we have the autopsy report of Jillian, Dolores, Kelly. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Dave, I know you. I know you better than you might think. I know that if you've got a friend and they called you up to say,

can you help me with something? You're the dude that would hop in your shoes, grab your keys and head out to your car and go do this. How much more so if maybe it was where you're put in almost a custodial position with people that have, you know, kind of a fragile existence, perhaps they're, they're really down and out. And the court says, we trust you to take care of this person. I know that you would do that. I, I even think that maybe you have done that. Joe, you know, I, I have been the person that gets the call in the middle of the night and I don't mind it. It's actually an honor and a privilege to be that person. It is inconvenient. You do lose sleep, but it is an honor to be there for somebody when they feel like they got nowhere else to turn because you earn the right to share the truth with them then. But I've had the opportunity to be every aspect of the case

we're dealing with today with Jillian Kelly's autopsy. I'm going to tell you what, this woman is a St. Joe. Jillian Kelly is married to her pastor husband. They got married in 2002. They have four children. Jillian Kelly works with children in the church. She's the church secretary. Just a wonderful woman. Veronica Butler has supervised visitation with her children. Veronica Butler and Wrangler Rickman have two children. Tiffany Adams is Wrangler Rickman's mom. That makes her the paternal grandparents to Veronica Butler's children. Veronica Butler had trouble in her life in the past, enough so that she lost custody of her children to Tiffany Adams. But now she's

right in her life. She's in church. She's engaged. She's got a job. She went back to school. Her life is on track, man. Veronica Butler's doing good.

So good. In fact, she's going back to court and they're going to reward her custody of her children. She's getting her children back. She's excited, but she's still at this moment has custody every, I mean,

she has a supervised visitation with her children every Saturday. And Tiffany Adams was not about to give up custody of those children to Veronica Butler. She didn't care if that's her mom. She wanted the children and that was it. So Tiffany Adams calls the woman who regularly supervises visitation for Veronica Butler and cancels it. Tiffany Adams tells her, we aren't going to need you this time. I'll call you when we need you again. Then she calls Veronica Butler and says, Hey, Veronica, um, the court liaison, the supervisor at visitation just canceled. I don't know what we'll do. And Butler says, that's okay. I've got somebody. She goes to Jillian Kelly at church. Jillian says, sure, I'll go.

They're not buddies or pals, but they're friendly. And Jillian says, sure, I'll be the, I'll go with you. So Veronica Butler gets Jillian Kelly and here they go. They are going to meet to get the children on March 30th. That is what they're going to do. It's arranged for them to meet at this, uh, well, it's a closed gas station now, but that's where they're going to do. It's arranged for them to meet at this, well, it's a closed gas station now, but that's where they were going to meet to exchange the children. Veronica Butler would pick them up there, and she and Jillian would take Kendall and the other child and go to the birthday party that was planned for Kendall.

Well, they never showed up at the birthday party, and the family starts calling. Hey, Veronica and Jillian never showed up with the kids. What's going on? That's when we first got this story. These two Kansas moms going to pick up the kids never arrived with them. What happened? I've covered so many cases and work so many cases over my career where people did not realize that that moment in time, when they walked out of the door, they looked into the eyes of their spouse or to their precious babies, that that was going to be the last time they ever saw them. And how much more so not seeing the future, not knowing that your life is

going to end literally at the hands of a mob on a dirty, dusty road in the panhandle of Oklahoma. I'm born witness to some let's just say odd and disturbing things in the autopsy suite. And you never, and I mean this with everything that's in me, you never know what's going to happen when you open a body bag, period. You

really don't. You don't know what has been brought in from the field because many times in my case, I'd work at night as an investigator. I'd be the autopsy assistant during the day. And it might not be my case. I might have read over a thumbnail description. But, Dave, when you come into an autopsy room and there has been a gigantic deep freezer that has been brought from a scene that still has straps on it, you suspect as an investigator at the scene that what you're going to have in there is going to be very bad. But when you open that door and you look inside of there, there are things in my brain right now that I'm recalling as I'm talking right now.

I can still see those images. I can still get hit. And even after all these years, I can still get hit in the face with that smell that emanates from the sealed area, which in effect is a casket for not just one, but for two women, Dave. It's a monumental undertaking. And I think people many times are shocked that we don't open things at scenes and remove the items. If you have that body or bodies contained, it's best to keep them contained. Okay. And then you bring them to a location that is well lighted. You've got primo photography. You document the steps of opening up this thing. And let me tell you one more thing that would have been done prior to them ever undoing these

large yellow straps that are on the outside, this freezer would have been thoroughly externally printed, dusted for prints, looking for any kind of latent contact prints. It's a sight to behold because you never know what's going to be contained inside of any box like this. I've had coffins. I have had not a freezer. I've had a refrigerator where the shells removed. I've had blocks of concrete that have contained human remains where you have to chisel it away. I've had cars where I've had multiple people killed in it. And I used to think being in charge,

you're literally, if you're the ME investigator, you're in charge of the bodies. And we all came to a consensus at the scene that it would be better not to remove the bodies from the car, but have them flat bedded to the state crime lab. And you cover it with a tarp. And you know, like you had this horrible thought in your brain that you're literally transporting bodies you're in and i remember in particularly i-85 in atlanta removing a car to a local lot that had five people inside of it and all we had it covered with was a blue crash tarp on the back of a flatbed. And, you know, as an investigator, you're thinking your worst nightmare is that the tarp is going to fly off.

And here you're going to have, you know, bodies. If anybody's ever driven through the hellscape that is the highway system in Atlanta, you can get caught up in traffic. They don't move out of the way for a wrecker. They don't move out of the way for cops most of the time. But how much more so than a wrecker? And the thing comes off. Can you imagine you've got kids, you know, and you kind of look and, you know, even to this day, when I see things going down the road that are strapped down on the back of a car, like a freezer or something, I'm always thinking, I wonder if

that's empty. I wonder if it's empty. And I've had a few times in my life since being on the streets where I've seen police escorting flatbed trucks and they've got a tarp over them. And I know what's under the tarp, the civilian stone around you, but you want to maintain that pristine nature. I was going to ask you, when they got there in this particular case, investigators determined where Tad Cullum, that is the boyfriend of Tiffany Adams, had dug the hole and everything ahead of time. And they found the bodies at the scene. They were 10 feet down. A 10 feet deep hole had been dug. The freezer was placed at.

Well, some items were thrown in a phone and some other items of evidence were thrown into the hole. Then the freezer was dumped in there. Then a cement block and everything else was then thrown into the hole and then dirt and everything else mashed down. When they got it dug up, you said that they're not going to, they're not going to take anything out right then, but they still have to identify what is in the freezer, even though they believe it to be Veronica Butler and Jillian Kelly. But they're not going to do a big exam out there. What are they going to do? No, no, no. And at the scene, just full disclosure here, they did briefly open it at the scene.

So they cracked the side of it. And there had been tape that was adherent on the outside. When this thing is brought to the ME, even in the report section of the autopsy report, when I say report section, it's actually the medical legal investigation subheading in the report, they allude to the fact the tape was no longer there. So that leads me to believe it had been taped shut at some point in time. Now, they had to strap this thing down. But yeah, so they would have lifted this thing at the scene, peeked over the edge into the

cooler or the freezer to assess what was in there because you you know you don't necessarily know you have your suspicions okay right and here's another thing and i know this sounds really far afield but if this thing was booby trapped in some way i mean you're talking about a double homicide okay it's not beyond the pale to think that someone that was willing to commit this kind of homicide would, you know, perhaps, uh, put other people at risk. All right. You don't know, you, you never know what you're going to get, you know, when you open any door, whether it's it's terrifying. And I've had friends that have, that have gone on to booby trap scenes where people have committed suicide and they're booby trapped with weapons. I have one friend that's almost shot in the chest with a.308 deer rifle because he opened a closet and it had a trigger on it, a line trigger tension thing. word no and he happened to be the round actually passed in front of him so my my paranoia i guess is that the right term is not unwarranted i look at all of these things as if because i want to go

home at the end of the day so you guys get the freezer back in and you're getting you're afraid as you're getting ready to open it yeah wow yeah i know it's terrifying and i was terrified by what was inside not oh yeah not a bomb, but the bodies. Listen, man, look, I don't put anything past anybody that'll commit a homicide, particularly of a stranger and then a mother. If they're willing to eradicate them off the face of the planet, my life means nothing to them whatsoever. OK, or my colleagues nothing to them whatsoever. Okay. Or my colleagues that might be there. And that's just like one of the little boxes that you want to tick and check at that point

in time and try to understand that. But once you get past that, you have to take due care because, Dave, this freezer, this deep freeze had been, it had the utility of a coffin, right? Actually, a casket. It was. Yeah. And then – I don't know. I don't know the answer to this question.

I'm just throwing this out there, all right? Let me give you the dimensions on this just so that you and our friends can appreciate it. So not only did they have this rather large freezer, okay, but you'd mentioned something just a second ago. There was a slab of concrete that was placed on top of it. Dave, let me give you the dimensions. Are you ready, brother? Yep. Okay. The dimensions of the slab of concrete are 92 inches. Keep in mind, six feet tall is 72 inches, okay? By 60 inches, okay? All right? That's width, length, width, and the depth of this thing, thickness of it dude this slab is eight inches in thickness holy moly do you realize what kind of equipment you would have to have in place in order to move a slab like that i mean you could have i don't know maybe you could have a bunch of really

robust a bunch of robust uh country boys that, you know, put, dig their hands into it and drop it down. But nah, I'm not thinking that. I'm thinking this is something, first off, you have to acquire it. Where do you even find a slab of that size? That's bigger. That's actually bigger than a slab that you would find on top of a standard grave site. You know, if you go to the, to the, to the cemetery, yeah, and you're walking along and they've got the big slabs that are laid down on the ground. There's a headstone. That's bigger than that.

This is something that you would only see probably in construction. All right. And that's one of the most striking things. You know, when they would have gotten out to that scene, to the grave site and begun to assess the scene. And remember, this is, give or take, hang on, I've got to review this real quick because, yeah, you're talking two weeks down range. Right. We don't know what the weather was like. They went missing back in March. They're found in April. April. I don't know.

What I would be really interested in knowing is, first off, what type of tracks are around the gravesite? Because if you're talking about a front-end loader or a skid steer. It was a skid steer. That's what he used. It's going to be very distinctive. That's not going to look like tire tracks, dude. Right.

And you're talking about carrying a tremendous amount of weight. Not that those things aren't made for that. But if you think about that and the pressure that's going to be applied directly on those tires, the supporting element of that vehicle and pressing it down into the dirt, if you're carrying a heavy load, you're going to come away with really good impressions from that. And that's very specific to that piece of equipment. This isn't just like a truck, Pat Ball's truck driving down a country road. This is something that's very specific.

And why would you have a skid steer out in the middle of a field like this? Well, actually, it was the area that it was about 50 feet from the dam and it there was like a shed area out there that uh tad had been working on and he notified the owner of the property that he was leasing part of it from that he was going to be doing some work out there you know that he was going to be burying some cement he had he had told that then this is two days before the bodies were the two days before Butler and Jillian Kelly went missing. He tells the guy that owns the place, you know, the work he's doing. Then after they go missing, he tells the owner, yeah, I'm a suspect.

They're missing and you're a suspect, really? And that's why this fell apart so quick. Well, you know, in your. OK, let's just say you're gonna tell anybody you're a suspect well i'm thinking let's go back before that because you know this is one of those moments where you say does your mind work uh you know you're sitting there and you're thinking about this so you're leasing not purchasing you're leasing property guess what happens to leases leases run out yep run out. The property owner still retains

this. So if he's going to go in, I don't know, and drop a crop of whatever it is they grow in Oklahoma, wheat or corn or whatever it is, and all of a sudden his plow gets hung up on the lip of this thing, in what universe do you think that this is not going to be discovered my thought was and this is so horrific but i'm going to go ahead and say it because this is what we talk about on body bags did did they have plans perhaps to passively render these bodies down inside of this thing, come back later when the heat was off, draw it up, or take out those remains and dispose of them in some other way. I toyed with that idea, you know, because I can't make sense of it. You know, just the leasing element alone. But, you know, if you're using a skid steer like this, it's not going to take too long to facilitate a big hole in the ground, if you will.

And that's certainly what happened. And again, Dave, as we mentioned earlier, what does this go to? Well, it goes to, I don't know, something called premeditation. Yep. And that's the killer on all of this. It's the fact that this was planned out, thought out, and they thought this was the best they could come up with. By the way, the location of the bodies in the freezer, eight miles from where the car was stopped. Okay.

Eight miles from where they were abducted. That's how this was all planned out joe now they've got the freezer out and you're now transporting it it's taped it's tarped and everything else it gets back to the the lab and other than a cursory perfunctory look to see there are two bodies on the inside that two bodies were looking for and shutting it they don't know if there's anything else in there they don't know if this freezer has other things other people even they just know they saw two bodies that the women they're looking for and so back at the lab when you open it up we know that they'd been in there

for two weeks at least you know we because we know when they went missing and we know when they found the freezer. So there you go. Uh, they were killed the day they were abducted. Apparently what it appears based on the road, based on the blood at the scene in the road, based on the blood in the vehicle where the vehicle came to rest a thousand feet from the road, take two and two. They were dead. And the broken hammer, which is a nice touch, right? Yeah. Chances are if they break a hammer beating you, you're not surviving that beating.

No, you're not. But once they get them back to the crime lab, where do they take these to do an autopsy with the state? Yeah, they're going to go. And it's dependent. Oklahoma does not have coroners. All right. And this is where they have. Yeah, they have. They have.

And it's a fine office. They actually have a state medical examiner. So the state is kind of regionalized. All right. And you've got the Central Division, the Eastern Division. I think the Eastern Division is based in Tulsa. And of course, the Central Division is in Oklahoma City. You know what I just remembered? What's that, Beau?

You have told me how good they are in Oklahoma in the system they use. I just remember, it just came to mind that you have bragged about how good they are before. Well, I'm a big fan of medical examiner systems, particularly statewide, that are not administered by police or the law enforcement agency. If you have a state medical examiner that is administered primarily by the health department, it turns out better for everybody. Because, you know, for us in my world, and we're not merely interested in homicides. We do, as a matter of fact, we handle more natural deaths. So that, you know, that feeds directly into the mission of public health and the state health department.

And we work, you know, they work with the police. They have investigators and all that. But their job is different. So in most places, I can't speak specifically, but I would imagine that they might have a separate decomp room, which many facilities I have been in, we kind of break it down like this, where you have a clean area and then a decomp area. And even the bodies are stored separately. You don't have decomp bodies most of the time in the main cooler with fresh dead. And you can do more in that environment. Anthropologists generally has a space in there so that they can do their exams, which are mind blowing that we can talk about it another time. But you have that environment there that has to be controlled. And when you go into this thing, everybody that is in this room, Dave, they appreciate the fragility of everything that is contained, not just within the freezer, but also externally. So kind of the cast of characters you're going to have in there is probably going to be the lead investigator. You're going to have maybe a couple of medical legal death investigators and an autopsy assistant

in there. The primary or the medical examiner, the forensic pathologist directing everything. And then there's a high probability you're going to have a crime scene tech there as well. And so what will happen is that one of the ME investigators will take photographs for the medical examiner, but the crime scene investigator will also take photographs, but for their purposes, it's for their reference. Okay. So you've got two sets of photography many times with a case that's going on like this. Not always the time. Sometimes you'll have people that have this kind of intimate sharing, you know, of the images back and forth.

No, it's on you. You take the photographs today. But, you know, the doctors, like cops are not necessarily interested in taking pictures of organs or the detailed anatomy. And there is a specific practice called medical photography that you get really good at because you have to understand anatomy. And I'm not I'm not sliding police police photographers. But in our world, in the medical legal world, you need a specific skill set in order to appreciate what the physician is talking about. Like if he says or she says, I want, please take a photograph of the right greater horn of the hyoid bone.

Wow. The crime scene detective is not necessarily going to know what they're talking about. I'm going to find that on Google. Yeah, yeah. They're just not going to do it. Now, you know, I've seen, you know, forensic pathologists that will give

almost a primal grunt and point. I used to work with one forensic pathologist in the past that would use his knife to point at everybody. He carried a huge butcher knife and it was always covered in blood. And he had this kind of primal grunting thing that he would go and he had a very interesting personality, to say the least. But that's how he would direct you. But if you have somebody that's familiar with human anatomy and all of those anatomical points or landmarks that we're looking for, not just externally, but internally when the body is open.

So that's kind of the cast characters here. And you don't know what because at this point, when you open up this freezer, you don't know what the cause of death is. You have no idea. That's why you're doing the autopsy. So, when you open this up, you could find things like ballistic evidence in there, or if there is a projectile inside of the body. I've seen medical examiners do two things. I've seen them actually, in the case of a projectile, remove it, and they take a diamond tipped pen, and yes, that's what I said, and they go to the base of a projectile that's removed, and they will actually initial it on the bottom, and that indicates that I'm the one that removed

it, and they'll include that in there, and then I've seen them take other bits of evidence, including ballistic evidence, and turn it over directly to a detective or to a crime scene technician that's present at the autopsy. It's a weird kind of orchestration that has to go on. And with this particular case, cases, this is dense material, Dave, scientifically. From a forensics perspective, this is about as complex as things can get. Because you're introducing something into the environment that is not, it's an unknown relative to the container itself. How are you going to manage this and how are you going to manage it so you don't screw

it up? Because if you screw it up with really doing the big, bold opening of the thing, you can eradicate evidence. Because you only get one shot at this. You can't go back and redo it. You're absolutely, no do-overs, no mulligans. If you're a golfer, you don't get to do it over because once it's gone, it's gone. If there is even a hair, you know, keep in mind with any kind of freezer or refrigerator,

there's a big kind of rubber, plastic, foam gasket, right? Right. Well, okay. So let's pretend that somebody has killed someone and they want to put them into this. We've already stated how deep this thing is, right? How deep this freezer is. Well, you're leaning over the side. Guess what you're coming in contact with? Your clothing. You're coming in contact with this

gasket that goes around there. Guess what you can pick up on that gasket? Well, any kind of fiber evidence, hair, anything you're shedding, skin, that could be the perpetrator or at least the person that was in concert with the perpetrator that is placing that body down into that. So you have to even be careful in that area because that freezer, first off, the freezer is unique. The brand, it's going to have a serial number. It's probably in most of those things have got like a, you know what I'm talking about? It's got that kind of aluminum tag thing that's bolted.

It has all the specifics of what it is. Yeah, and where it was manufactured even. And it probably in those little coding numbers they have, I hope that somebody will correct me if I'm wrong, but in those little, they probably had the batch that this thing came off the line with it. You know, you can look at that number and go back to the factory, Frigidaire or whoever it is and say, Hey, I've got this number. When did this thing come off the line?

Where did it go to when it came offline? Oh, it went to big box store A. You go to them and say, Hey, I've got this number when did this thing come off the line where did it go to when it came off line oh it went to big box store a you go to them and say hey i've got this you received this batch do you know who bought this well our records sir don't go back that far because i have to think my big question is is this freezer viable does it still work or is it just something that they had laying out back well if it was laying out, freezer's not something you just walk by and ignore. Just imagine the power of some witness that might have been peripheral to these people. Prosecution puts them on the stand and said, Mr. Smith, have you ever seen a freezer similar to the one pictured here in the image that you're taking a look at in the past when you've come over for picnics or whatever yeah yeah yeah i've seen i've seen one like that

it was out back of the barn they'd had it for years and i never could understand what they were keeping that thing for keeping it for a makeshift casket yeah yeah you just you never know so i hope i'm painting an effective picture here as to how critical all of this is and i'm so glad it thrills me to my core that you said that you get one shot at it dave um you know because once you crack this thing open you're bearing witness to something that the lion's share people in their entire life they live five lifetimes they're not going to see anything like what was revealed when that door was open today. Okay.

I want all of our friends to understand what I'm about to do here because we don't get cases like this most of the time. Just this past week, I came into possession of the autopsy report from Ms. Kelly. And I kind of want to break this down, break it down for those that might be curious. And I'll kind of, we'll go through the highlights of it and talk about it. With this proviso, there is a high probability that within the next couple of weeks of this recording, we're going to receive the second autopsy on Ms. Butler. We'll receive that autopsy report. It's at that point in time we'll revisit and, you know, kind of go through that autopsy as well. Because, Dave, the physical findings, you know, that you have described here, remember how we've talked about

before, the dead do, in fact, have a tale to tell. And it can be told in many ways. I think probably the first thing that you're going to look at when you have this kind of miniature, and I want to call it this, miniature crime scene that literally is delivered to the medical examiner's office. When your initial viewing of this, of the interior of this thing, this is like viewing two bodies laying on the floor in a standalone home that have been executed. But yet that dynamic is now brought into the autopsy suite. And so when we crack that door open and we look within this thing, the first thing I'm going to try to piece together here is, well, what position are they in? I think that that's probably one of the biggest tells, Dave. All right. So when they open it up, they look in and they see there's dirt, there's fluid, there's straw, and there are two bodies.

And they can tell right off that Veronica Butler is on top of Jillian Kelly. Jillian Kelly had been put in first, Veronica Butler put on top of her. Does that tell you as an investigator anything? Well, here's the thing, and you can kind of extrapolate some thoughts about this, I believe. You could say that they were killed roughly at the same time and then essentially discarded into this container. I think probably one of the more chilling views of this, because I still I don't know if there's so much hatred and uh anger uh directed uh at the target who is veronica butler you really wonder and i i'm sure that this is something that is it has been explored and is continuing to be explored i wonder if if miss. Butler, in order to terrify her in some way,

if she was forced to watch Ms. Kelly die. Ms. Kelly died pretty quickly, and I can go into that here shortly. And then following that, Ms. Butler is killed and her body is placed. And I think placed is kind of a misstatement there. I'm just going to say tossed aside like rubbish into this container. I think my big question is sequencing. I don't know that we will ever be able to address the specific sequence unless one of this, you know, this kind of twisted confederacy rolls over on somebody else that begins to, you know, as they say, sing like a bird.

Because I can tell you, I can tell you, well, I'll tell you this, though. This thing's going to be tried in Oklahoma. And Bubba, Oklahoma's got death penalty and they are not shy about using it. So they don't have to negotiate anything they've already got they already have enough evidence joe for all of the involvement of these people the pre-planning that went into it the first aborted attempt to drop an anvil on veronica butler's car while she's driving now you've got them there together with jillian jillian kelly wrong place wrong time being a nice woman she ends up dead in a freezer. Now they got to remove

Veronica to get to Jillian Kelly. They have to take Veronica Butler's body out of the freezer. Yes. Yeah. What do you do to do that? Because they've been in there for two weeks, man. Yeah. You get a big group of people. First off, you're going to document the bodies thoroughly inside. I'm talking about not just the measurements of the body, but the measurements of the interior. And this is kind of interesting. I was given this to think, um, if you've got any kind of like dynamic blood deposition that's inside of that. Okay. What do you mean by that? Well, remember we got a broken hammer, right? Yeah. And I'm not saying that I think you don't know. You've got a lot of commingled trauma here, I think, with Miss Kelly. I don't know if the hammer's been used on her as a means to kill her. It's it appears based upon what I'm seeing a sharp edged instrument was used. They don't talk about lacerations.

And as we've talked about previously on body bags, lacerations are generated by blunt force trauma. And so that is the skin being struck with something, a baseball bat, ball peen hammer, claw hammer, a lamp, I don't, you know, whatever it might be. The skin literally tears and that creates a laceration. claw hammer, a lamp, I don't, you know, whatever it might be. The skin literally tears, and that creates a laceration. A laceration is not, and let me repeat, is not a cut. That's not what they're saying about Miss Kelly. Miss Kelly has, and hold on to your hat here, Dave. Miss Kelly alone, and again, keeping in mind,

she's not who we would believe to be the primary target, Dave. Miss Kelly alone, and again, keeping in mind, she's not who we would believe to be the primary target, Dave. She's stabbed or cut. She has 16 sharp force injuries. 16. Okay. And she's not the primary. And she's not the primary. So I'm very interested to see what Ms. Butler's autopsy will reveal because, you know, they would have been doing a dual assessment at this point in time. My suspicion is, is that though we have Ms. Kelly's autopsy report released first, there's a high probability that they did Ms. Butler's autopsy. Secondly, I don't know why it would take longer to get her autopsy out to the public unless maybe there is more trauma with her body that required further assessment. I'm still not completely ignoring the hammer, you know, that was found because I don't know what Ms. Butler's injuries are at this time. When I see what they did, though,

to Ms. Kelly, nothing, and I mean nothing, is off the table. And just so, let me break this down further relative to the injury. So, with Ms. Kelly, we're talking about nine stab wounds. That means these are penetrating wounds where the knife is being driven in to an individual, stabbing, okay? Then we have seven incised wounds. So, just think about cutting an object. If you've got vegetables like they're on a cutting board, okay, you can say they're being chopped, but they're actually being incised or sliced. Well, incised injuries are slices, okay? So the general, the rule of thumb here is that stab wounds are deeper but more narrow and incised wounds are longer and shallow. Okay. Now I've seen incised wounds where they're really, really deep, but those are outliers. Okay. For our purposes. And on top of this, she's got two more incised wounds that are noted.

Well, they're in the description, but they're very distinctive. And Dave, this is a big tell here. Ms. Kelly actually has defensive wounds on her hand. Oh, wow. Where she's grabbed the blade. She's actually grabbed the blade, and the blade has been drug through her finger, and it's on both hands. I think one of the incised injuries is the left index finger, okay?

And then the one on the right hand is actually the right thumb. These are not stab wounds to the hands. This is indicative of her trying to defend herself and placing her hands up in a defensive posture, almost like a boxer. And as the knife is coming, you grab it, and then the knife is withdrawn, and it cuts that surface. Now, her injuries primarily are lateral and posterior lateral, which means on the side and then to the rear. And Dave, there's nothing other than the hands. The hands are separate. There's nothing on her injury-wise where these incised injuries extend below the level of the shoulder blades. So this is all up top.

Well, what does that tell me? That tells me that whoever did this was in close proximity to her. And you say, Morgan, that's kind of obvious. No, it's not. Because you can have somebody that's running away and is being stabbed, and they might random stab. No, these things are concentrated, Dave, and they're really concentrated heavily on the neck.

Okay. There are kill shots. They were trying to kill. Yeah, they're going right. Yeah, they're going right for the spine. And I'm not going to say luckily here. I'm going to say, how can I phrase this? Mercifully, I hope.

Her spinal cord is essentially severed where if you'll feel the back of your head, okay, find that kind of protuberant area that's on the back of your skull, that bump, that huge bump, that's actually referred to as the occipital protuberance or the occiput. It's part of the brain. It's part of the skull bone. Well, that houses right there. That houses where our cerebellum is, which is separate from the cerebrum. The cerebellum, your brainstem passes through there. That's literally where your spinal cord begins. Dave, her spinal cord, probably at about the C1, which is referred to as the atlas. The atlas is the first vertebral body. They call it atlas because it's like atlas holding up the world. Her spinal cord is cut right there. And the doctor has actually rendered an opinion here that this is a non-viable insult that

she has sustained. Non-viable, couldn't survive? Yeah, it's incompatible. The term they love to use is incompatible with life because you're now going into, at that level, that cervical level, you're going in affecting the autonomic nervous system. What does that mean? Well, your ability to breathe, your heart to function, to sense, those sorts of things. We can only hope that that was the case for Miss Kelly and, you know, under these circumstances.

I think that when, you know, you begin to do an assessment like this and she, they would have done this with both of these bodies. Okay. When her body is removed from this freezer, you can't, you could, but you're not going to be very effective. When her body is removed, the first thing you're going to do is x-ray the body. People think about bullets many times, leaving that kind of lead storm, you know, the little particulate bits of lead. Dave, did you know that when you stab somebody, particularly if you're striking bone over and over again, the blade will actually shear a bit. And I've recovered, I've actually recovered the tips of blades buried in vertebral bodies where they've been, it's been kind of snapped off.

And so you would x-ray that. And how powerful is that image? You know, when you put up bloody images from an autopsy report, sometimes they'll say, no, no, no, no, no. Can't use those. They're too prejudicial. You use an image of an X-ray and you show, well, here's a bit of steel or it's radio opaque rather that's showing up. This is tied back to a knife. This gives you an idea of placement. And you're not having to look through gore.

You're just looking at standard x-ray, you know, like you would get for pneumonia or head injury or neck injury or broken arm. It's the same thing. So there's no gore involved with it. And it's very, very powerful. So you have to be very careful. The only way, though, I think that one of the big questions here is when you read an autopsy report, you're thinking that perhaps, perhaps you can sequence these injuries. It's really, really hard to sequence, you know,

sequence an injury. And what I mean by that is the order in which these, these insults were, you know, were, were struck, you know, and what they'll do when you get a knife wound like this, they'll assign a random number. And that random number that you see is not indicative of the order in which it occurred. It's merely there as a guardrail to say, I've identified this one, and this is what we're calling it, number one. And like, for instance, the first one that she sustained, that they're calling wound number one is a horizontal incised wound to the posterior lower head, which means if you, again, put your hand back here below the occiput,

David Knife was drug over the surface of her scalp right there. Okay. And it's literally, uh, about 10 centimeters, um, below the top of the head, you know, which I think translates to roughly, I want to say about three inches, you know, down the back of her head. So, and it's, it's, that's the distance below and it's about seven, seven centimeters in length. It's three centimeters deep. This is, this is a deep wound. Okay. That's passing through not just the hair and skin and subcutaneous fat. It's going all the way through that little layer of muscle and also striking the underlying bone. And one of the interesting things I found out about this, Dave, just this wound alone, this is how complex this is,

just this wound alone generated three separate knife markings on the surface of the bone, Dave. Okay? That's how ferocious this was. And they're talking about how the lower occiput or the occipital protuberance was actually chipped. Do you realize how hard it is to chip a bone? It's so – it requires a tremendous amount of power and directed force. So this goes to the idea that I think she would have been attacked while laying probably in a prone position. So she's on her belly. They talked about how her clothes are soiled. Well, if you've got somebody and I had quoted, I'd use this term

earlier with you. I think in the Bible, there's a couple of times where they say the people fell upon an individual and when they fall upon an individual, that means that's an attack. Okay. So they fell upon this poor woman. I don't know if they've got multiple people holding her down, but the individual would have been exerting their downward weight on her back. Hence, that explains why you don't have injuries that are going any further south than shoulder blades, because they're not going to stab themselves. Okay. They're going to stab up.

Okay. Or not. They're going to be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Now, I couldn't figure that out when I was reading over this before we started taping.

I'm going through this going, what in the world? I couldn't figure that out. So it's a tight cluster that's in here. And, you know, we're talking about multiple injuries. And it looks like some of these might be misstrikes. Like if you're trying to drive the knife down, let's say you're focused on the spinal column itself. And you have, or, you know, in their mind, the brain. Okay.

Right. But you're striking the spinal column. This is not like some spy movie where some assassin walks up behind somebody and takes an ice pick or a knife and just kind of pushes it up through the bottom. You know, that classic scene from Goodfellas in the backseat with the ice pick. That's a concentrated specific area. This is a frenzied event, Dave. Again, I think you can translate that into a lot of anger, you know, and why would this precious woman have this much anger directed at her when she's, you know, she's,

she's this, you know, this angel on earth that's trying to help Miss Butler along the way. So, you know, we've got 16 sharp force injuries that run, you know, essentially from north to south. These things are highly complex. They're going through multiple areas of interest. Many of these things do, in fact, come along with hemorrhage. And as we've discussed, Dave, in the past, you know, if you have an injury and there's indwelling hemorrhage associated with it, then we know that the individual's heart is still beating, okay, that the blood is coursing through their veins. And because that it's a trauma response, when you clip a vessel, even a capillary like that, a capillary bed, you're going to bleed out into that area. So the doctor is actually seeing, with many of these, is actually seeing presentation of hemorrhage along the way.

And one of the more ghastly issues with this is that, I hate to even really say this, but Dave, four of her cervical vertebras are involved in this attack. You've got C2, C3, C4, C5, okay? You've got the bony, if you've ever seen a spinal or a vertebral process, it's got these little horns that stick off of it. Dave, in a couple of spots, those horns have been broken off. Just featured that just for a second. So this attack is absolutely vicious. She's not the intended target. And she's not even the intended target, David. I think that that's my big takeaway with this. She's also got these kind of like, she's got a superficial incised wound that's on the top of left shoulder. There's no associated hemorrhage with that wound. That's a post-mortem injury, but that's on the top.

And then if you go down slightly on the posterior left shoulder, so we're talking about the left. If you take your left hand, put it on top of your shoulder, that's the top of your left shoulder. So we're talking about the left. If you take your left hand, put it on top of your shoulder, that's the top of your left, left shoulder. If you go behind it, slightly drop down, um, just below that area, uh, you've got another, um, shoulder injury in the posterior left shoulder where there is hemorrhage. So they've been, um, they've, they spent quite a bit of time driving this knife both into her body, um, uh, slicing her body. And, you know, as a, you know, kind of an added bit here, um, uh, meeting her parry, which is, you know, when you saw sword term, you know, if you're

going to parry, it's like a defensive move. She's parrying with her hands. So they've sliced her hands as well defensively. On her part, it's defensively. So you've got all of these injuries that are specifically, you know, tied back, you know, to this poor woman and what led to her death. I think, you know, I'm hoping, I'm hoping against hope, Dave, that she did not experience the level of pain that could potentially be associated with all of these insults to her

body. I'm hoping against hope that that strike that we talked about that was like C1, C2 region there, that it was a fatal blow and that she didn't sense anything. But either way that you look at this case, the level of brutality that is involved in this thing, you find it very difficult to plumb the depths of it because it is so very extensive. We're going to wait and see what the autopsy of Veronica Butler reveals, but I can tell you this, whatever happened out there in that desolate area, it's a stuff of nightmares and things that we cannot even begin to fathom. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.