Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Stabbed, Set on Fire as They Slept - The Bermudez Family Murders

Episode Date: November 24, 2024

38-year-old Sara Bermudez and her three children, Madison, 8, James, 6, and Michael, 2, are viciously attacked in the middle of the night while they sleep. The murderer sexually assaults Sara and her 8-year-old daughter, with a knife and stabs the family to death before setting them on fire. Sara's father finds the carnage and calls for Help. Investigators catch a break in that the killer tried to use diesel to fuel the fire but it burned itself out before totally destroying all the evidence. Joseph Scott Morgan is going to take you inside the master bedroom and explain how investigators find a suspect from a portion of body fluid left behind at the scene. And the suspect isn't just close to the family, he is family. Transcript Highlights00:00.96 Introduction - chewing and identity04:20.45 Somebody breaks into a home in the middle of the night Slaughters the mom, daughter, two boys09:20.18 Family murdered and set on fire14:12.60 Disturbing element to the case 18:12.07 Setting up a line to prevent contamination22:57.18 Evidence of sexual assault28:07.64 Knife used in sexual attack32:56.90 Blood stains found on walls, carpet, lamp, other items37:12.63 Finding blood in the fire42:00.92 Mother defended her children44:58.66 ConclusionSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Facts with Joseph Scott Moore. You know, most people don't think about chewing. I'm one of those people that does. As I was growing up, I've got a tooth that's actually recessed. It sits back. It's actually the left upper incisor. And the reason it bothers me that I do think about chewing many times is that the tooth is so far set back that I have lacerated my tongue a couple of times.

So you kind of have, every now and then, you'll kind of have this hyper-awareness, except when it comes to my wife's cherry cobbler. I don't think about it too much then. The whole mechanism of digestion is something that most of us never consider. But for those of you that don't know, digestion actually begins in the mouth. You say, well, Morgan, that's kind of obvious. Yeah, it kind of is, but I'm talking about at a molecular level. Because there is a substance contained in the mouth that is a component of saliva that is called amylase. And it's at that moment in time where we ingest food and that breakdown begins to occur, particularly as it applies to carbohydrates. But you know what else?

Anytime a bit of saliva is left behind, therein rests amylase. And amylase is distinctive. It's distinctive and can be tied back to an individual. The case we're going to talk about today, or should I say cases, because there are four deaths involved in this episode, Amelie's comes into play. Because I got to tell you something. If it weren't for the Amelies, we might not have answers

to who brutally murdered and set on fire a family of four. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Packs. Dave, you and I have broken bread together quite a few times. We have. And I think probably our shameless plug here, I think we've been to Dad's Barbecue a couple of times, which is one of our favorite places to go. Yeah. We can kind of sit around and hang out and laugh and do those things that we do.

Not that we don't already do those things when we're taking body bags. But, you know, most people don't think about eating and the process of digestion, do they? You just go and you eat. And it's just the nature of what we do as humans. But yet we leave bits and traces behind, even with our saliva. And in today's cases, as I mentioned, there are four. This might be one of the more horrific cases we've covered in recent memory. And it involves a grown woman and three children that were found all gathered together in a home having been set on fire. And, you know, we came across this case or cases and I didn't know if I could truly take in the scope of what I was reading here.

I was shocked by the entire story because we actually have blood relatives here, too. We have Sarah Bermudez, 38 years old, and her three children, Madison, James and Michael. Their ages eight, six and two. And dad is not home. He's actually out on the West Coast for work. In the middle of the night, somebody, somebody in the middle of the night breaks into the home and murders the entire family. Sarah, the mom. Madison, the daughter. Take a particularly harsh beating and death.

They were actually stabbed violently in their private areas. And that's where the amylase, as you mentioned, comes in. I didn't even know how to pronounce that word when i saw it in the report joe but my first thought was how does this play into identifying a possible suspect because these people were found but not in what would even be called a pristine state in terms of the bodies because after they were stabbed after they were murdered in the master bedroom which by the way very quickly why would a mom and three children all be in one bedroom and sleeping and that's why because dad was away and a lot of people do this um i know we did in my family you know when i was away um mom would have the kids huddle up they'd

have a tent kind of a camp out in the master bedroom. I mean, and that's what they were doing. Yeah, lots of times I think when mom's alone and she's in the house, she wants the comfort of having her kids around her. You know, dad's not there, you know, kind of, you know, protecting the fort, if you will. And isn't it, you know, rife with irony here? Here we have them. You know, and one of the other things I kind of thought about in this case is were they actually all reposed in this area in a natural state or had their uh their remains been lined up and posed i'm wondering that's actually why i was going to ask you because i could actually understand why they were all in

the room joe yeah but this is what the not the ending of the story but after they were murdered after they were stabbed to death and after 38 year old mother and eight year old daughter are actually violated with a knife in their private areas that the killer then lit them all on fire, actually poured. And they think it was diesel, but poured some type of fuel and lit them on fire. Now, the fire was isolated to just the master bedroom. It did not go through the entire house. But, Joe, it was all over the victims here they were burned the room was burned and that also comes into play in this investigation so as we pull back the sheet on this case you've got four victims that have been stabbed to death. The girls, the females have been killed differently or to a greater degree than the two males.

Yeah, they've been attacked differently. And then they've all been lit on fire. How do you solve that one, Joe? It's a nightmare. Fire cases always are. But, you know, just like so many other things in life and particularly in the world of chemistry, when you begin to think about something like an accelerant that's being used, if this was in fact diesel and it sounds like it was, it's the nature and the composition of diesel is so divergent from what you think about standard gasoline or kerosene even to a certain degree. Diesel is a very, first off, it's very difficult to light. I don't know if you knew that. You know, if you have a gasoline, a dab of gasoline here and a dab of diesel, if you just merely strike a match over an open container of gasoline,

first off, it's going to flash. Yeah, because those fumes are igniting. But if you take a match, the same type of match, same type of container, and you strike it, and please, please, no one try this at home. Okay, just trust our experience here. You strike the match with diesel. Did you know that you can keep your hand adjacent?

You can still hold on to that match and hold it right over the top, just hovering over that collection of diesel, and it will not ignite. It has to rise to a certain temperature before ignition actually starts with it. So it's very slow burning. That's why, you know, people talk about, let me ask you this question, because I haven't. I think my wife, Kim, has early many years ago. I've never owned a diesel vehicle. Now, I have lusted after a few of these big trucks every now and then because they're really cool looking and very powerful. And diesel does, in fact, get better gas mileage, and it's more expensive.

You see the difference when you go fill up? I look at people and I think, how in the world can you afford to fill this beast up that you're adjacent to me uh in you know at the gas station because it is so freaking expensive two quick things i had a there was a sales manager at one of the radio stations i worked for in eastern north carolina back many years ago and he had a mercedes uh 450 sl convertible that was diesel right and i didn't know anything about diesel until i was in the car with him for a morning meeting. And he actually had to hit a button first to heat the gas, to heat the diesel before the car could be started. I'm like, you have to heat it before you can start the car?

And then I was— Yeah, there are no diesel vehicles in horror movies. No, none. and horror movies no none and the other part of it was if you remember back in the mid-70s when we had the first oil getting an oil thing in the u.s you know we went through the we were paying 50 cents a gallon then and there were lines stretching for miles to hoping to get a couple gallons and diesel prices were about half of what gas cost then and all of a sudden when they started using diesel engines in regular cars for the rest of us well lo and behold diesel prices went up diesel is the fuel that is not nearly as good

as the gas we burn in our car but it has to be heated to burn and so they were able to turn they being the companies that actually control such things to take this fuel that used to be half the price of gas we put in our car now and for the last 40 years costs more yeah and you have to think about this relative to first off when you begin to think about someone that would use uh a flammable and it is flammable, don't get me wrong. It's just the level of flammability is, it differs greatly than, say, for instance, gasoline. Who, first off, who has access to putting their hands on diesel because it's distinctive. Most people, when you think about it, they're going to have access to gasoline or it's going to be their first point along the

way. Because we use gasoline for so many things just around the house. If you've got a lawnmower or if you've got some kind of blower or even a weed whacker, you have to blend the gas with oil, you know, do a mix. But most of the time, you're just using regular gasoline. Who purchases diesel? Well, is it somebody that operates heavy equipment, for instance, that might burn it in, for instance, a bulldozer or a front-end loader or something like that? Or do they own a

diesel vehicle like a pickup truck or a sedan? I think Kim's, Kim's, I think her car was actually a four door Mercedes and it was used. Sure. But she, you know, she'd always talk about how in order to get up a hill, you know, she'd have to turn off the air conditioner, you know, in the summertime. But, and they do get better gas mileage. Okay. The life on these things is more so relative to fuel consumption.

But who has the wherewithal? And here's another thing about this case, Dave, going back to the salivary amylase. I would – and I think you might agree with me on this, and certainly our friends would too. When things are burned, things are burned at a crime scene, the intention of burning something is to destroy that object, that item, that evidence, maybe even that person. But to not understand the utility of it and understand the functionality of it gives us pause as investigators to wonder, does your mind work? One of the more disturbing elements to this case, not that we're really loaded with disturbing aspects. Salivary amylase was detected on both the bodies of the mother and the daughter.

And just a quick reminder here, the daughter was eight, Dave, and her mother, Sarah. Madison was eight, and mother Sarah was 38. Salivary amylase was actually detected in the private area as well, and that means that in order to achieve that, unless you have someone who is spitting from, you know, from a distance onto these specific areas, that means you've got oral contact going on and you can, you know, take that however you wish. it does go to this idea of a sexual assault. But I think, and what's very interesting about this, Dave, and you had pointed this out to me, and I'd love to kind of hold forth on this a little bit, there's one subject that showed up at the scene that is a public

official who was noted to have been spitting while they were there. And I think that as this case evolved, the defense found out about this in this particular case and made quite a bit of hay over it, didn't they? They did because there was at a scene, and you've pointed this out on a couple of different occasions, Joe, of locking down a scene and making sure that people that are going into the scene have a reason to be there and be you limited, you know, to not mess with the crime scene. And so there was an officer was stationed at the front door to be that guard. And while he was there, because he had been inside of the master bedroom where this took place and, uh, there was soot and the fire burned itself out. But what was left behind was just,

if you can imagine, uh, what that had to have been like in the air with particles and all these other things in the air with particles and all these other things in the air and um it got in his mouth and he was standing at the front door as people were coming in and not really thinking it's just a natural reaction i got garbage in my mouth i'm spitting it out which is exactly what he was doing and this became a real issue because he now is introducing something onto the ground outside. Granted, this is outside of the crime scene.

It's on the ground. But yet it is still a big issue. And they were like, why would you do that? What were you thinking? And he said, look, you know, he described the area as a horror scene already. And he actually said he was spitting particles that were floating in the air. And when he was challenged on why would you do this while you're standing guard at the door? And he actually said human error and a lack of experience.

Right. Basically, I wasn't thinking about it. I just did what normal people would do. Granted, it's the wrong thing to do at a crime scene. It's the wrong thing to do in that situation. But human error and a lack of experience. Well, here's the thing. You know, yes, the bodies are inside of the home.

But guess what the home is inside of? A temporary barrier that is created by tape. The police, you know, when we go out to a scene as forensic personnel, ME detectives, when a young officer creates this artificial boundary, if you will, with crime scene tape. We think about crime scene tape as this kind of benign thing, but it's very distinctive because you're setting up a boundary where you're saying to the public, that side of the tape is yours, this side of the tape is ours, and you're declaring the inside of that tape as off limits to everybody else, so it has to be treated as such.

Look, I've got to give this guy the benefit of the doubt to a certain degree here. He should have known better, obviously, but I have been on scenes before. And when you, once the fire is doused and is out, it's still smolders. All right. And you've got all this crap floating in the air we're not out there wearing um respirators you know like a fire firefighter is you know with the all-encompassing face shield and you're breathing pure oxygen or uh you know a certain percentage of it um your your airway uh becomes clogged many times. You sense it. And here's something interesting. Matter of fact, it's and you can identify with this.

If you've ever been to a bonfire, you might show up back home and you say, I smell like smoke. OK, well, right. You are. You would smell like smoke because it's going to leach on to you all that debris that's being kicked up and that particulate matter that's being given off within that environment. You think about the interior of a house. when fire touches like a carpeted area, that sort of thing, you start a chemical reaction that produces all kinds of noxious fumes. It's not just merely smoke.

You can actually, when you do toxicology on people that have been in fires. First off, you're going to find most of the time you're going to find a very distinctive level of carbon monoxide. But in addition to that, you're going to find elements in the air like arsenic that'll be contained in there that are essentially vaporized. And it's because of component materials that are breaking down. And this is a chemical, you know, when you see a fire, a fire is kind of defined as an uninhibited chemical chain reaction. You have to have these multiple things that are in place, heat source, fuel source, ignition source, all these things.

And it has to, it's kind of a cycle that runs through. And so it's, it's, it's burning everything up, but it's creating these elements in the air. And when these elements are created, you're going to breathe them in. So this young police officer that is, you know, standing guard outside of the home, he's going to be experiencing this, particularly if he's already gone in. If he's not used to it, how much more so? You know, for an old, you know, an old guy like me that's been out on a bunch of fire scenes, I expect that I'm going to smell the stuff. I expect that I'm going to be exposed to it. Am I going to hack and spit and do all that sort of thing? Well, if my airway is blocked, I very well might, but you have to use good judgment, particularly within the parameters of an established boundary for a crime scene, Dave. And when I was seeing this,

Joe, my first thought was what you have said on this show about protecting the crime scene. It really was. And I thought, if I know that, and how much more should an officer of the law know something like this? I understand chalking it up. Hey, you made a mistake. But this is a big mistake because you're talking about in this day and age where every bit of anything from our bodies,

we've got touch DNA cases now. I mean, this is something that goes beyond what we can even imagine. And in this particular case, you started off at the very beginning talking about a part of DNA, a part of our fluid, a part of something that I'd never even heard of until today. Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, it's a distinct component within saliva. Here's the really fascinating thing about this, though, is that the perpetrator in this case attempted to use a heat source in order to destroy evidence and did such a poor job with the selection of

the accelerant, it was not sufficient to the task, right? Because you would think that if there was evidence of a sexual assault, which by the by, there was, that you would have perhaps thought this out more clearly as to eradication of any kind of evidence. And there is an indication here that this fire did not burn over a sustained period to a sufficient level to destroy all of this, particularly when you can still appreciate the fact that the bodies are posed and arranged in a particular manner. They are their legs. Geez, I hate to say this, but their legs are spread apart. It's just the girls, though.

It's not the boys. It's not the boys. It's just the girls. And I've had a couple of other cases like this. One that we're going to cover, I'm sure, in a few months that occurred back in a suburb of Atlanta. And not to go down a rabbit hole, but we had female members of a very large family, and all of the female members in the family were brutally, brutally beaten to death and cut. There were males that were equally brutalized, but they both survived, one with a permanent brain injury.

And this attack was focused on these two females. And you start going down this road that my friend Karen Stark, a forensic psychologist, would go down. And you can read a lot into this when you begin to think about, well, why would you focus on the females? And it wasn't just merely burning the females. It was the sexual assault of these two, well, this young girl and her mother. It's also the stabbing and cutting where you have the genitalia that are assaulted with a sharp force weapon, where there's a disfigurement that's going on. And it's primarily below the waist. You know, when you think about that, that's very specific, Dave.

I looked at this case from the very beginning as odd because we're dealing with a relative being accused of this murder the murder of a family while dad's away it just seemed like there's something more at play and mentioning at first i thought you've got a chronically broke drug user who knows that he has family members where the man is not home, where they probably have money or he can get money from them. And that's what I was thinking at first. But then when we found out that there was more to the murders than just attacking, killing everybody and lighting the place on fire to cover your tracks. And that the attack was sexual in nature on the females that changed everything from the way I looked at it, Joe. And it brought about more questions I had for you about motive because

motive, I know they don't have to prove motive to prove anything, but from our standpoint, looking at a case, you kind of have to know why, or maybe don't have to prove motive to prove anything. But from our standpoint, looking at a case, you kind of have to know why or maybe don't have to feel like I ought to know why something took place. Why did this suspect target these victims? And. I what I thought was the beginning of the case, killing people because he knew they might have money for drugs ends up being something totally different. I mean, this is an actual targeted attack of a sexual nature on the girls. And it looks like the boys were just kind of killed because they were witnesses.

Yeah. They just happened to be there. And, you know, I think all of us hate to use the term. I know I do because it leaves a bad taste in the back of my mouth, uh, of collateral damage because it's the term collateral damage is dismissive of the value

that each individual human has, uh, including these, these, you know, these, these young boys that were also in their young day. I mean, they're very young. What would be the purpose of doing this? To totally eradicate. But even if it could not get more chilling, I think that it's very important to understand that the so-called sexual assault that took place was not perpetrated with the male sexual organ, but the sexual assault, so-called, was perpetrated, according to the medical examiner, with a knife. so there's certain things that we look for at crime scenes dave with uh sharp horse injuries first off um they're very bloody affairs most of the time. Yeah, I'd say that most of the time they are. And it's almost, and when you get more than one victim, obviously, percentage-wise, that's going to increase the volume of blood that you have there. It's not even like a gunshot wound, Dave, because every time

the act of stabbing occurs, you're puncturing another defect into a body. And it is rare that you go out on a sharp force injury death involving stabbings as opposed to, you know, like an incised wound, which is a cut. Do you just have one insult to the body? It's going to be multiple. And Dave, something that is quite striking about this is that actually, Lord have mercy, Sarah, 38-year-old mother, Dave, she had over 40 stab wounds. Forty. Just let that number sink in for a moment. That's stab and slice, right?

That is what you mentioned is incised is a slice? Yeah. So here's a good way to remember it. And I love, you know, using this descriptor. Our teeth have very specific names. So your two primary teeth, well, not primary. Primary is actually, when it comes to dentistry, is something that's alluded to relative to children. But the central incisors, okay, well, they're incisors. To incise means to cut. And that's the purpose. If you think about like biting a sandwich. I have no idea. If you think about biting a sandwich, you're incising the sandwich with your incisors and then you rip.

Well, an incised injury with a knife or a machete or, hey, even an ax, that means that it's a cut or a slice as opposed to a stab, which many times you're not using the full length of the knife to enter the body, but you're puncturing the body. So it's a thrust. And you can actually stab people, obviously, with things other than a knife. You can use a pencil if you've got one or a pen or a spike or an ice pick. Yeah, the old guys used to carry ice picks in their shoes for years and years. I think Bad, Bad Leroy Brown. No, that was a razor. That was a razor.

That being in size. But old guys, old guys that ran the streets, they'd carry ice picks with them many times. And those are, in fact, stabs, but they can also be interpreted as punctures as well. It's a bit different. But yeah, so for what we're understanding, you've got these multiple sharp force injuries. Dave, this is a lot of work. This is a lot of anger. And you have these insults that are occurring to all of

these bodies but it appears that sarah the mama she took the brunt of of this well and you you point out that she had 40 wounds some defensive but when they were investigating this and this kind of where the the fire comes into play there was something I wanted to ask you about because they mentioned, they being law enforcement, that the fire did not burn through. And it actually burned itself out. But they had the state forensic expert, her name is Kelly King, and she said that the fire, again, they was diesel fuel was the what big it was used and that as they were going through this scene they found blood stains on the walls they found blood stains on the carpet and they found blood stains on a lamp and some other items. And they found this even though there was fire going on.

And that to me was something my brain could not quite wrap itself around that they were able to pull this out after a fire. Yeah, that goes to the ineffectiveness of the accelerant that's being used and the amount of heat that was generated. Remember what I said early on, Dave. You can literally take a match, strike it, and hold it in like a saucer. If you just think of a saucer that might be, I don't know, less than a quarter of an inch in depth of diesel that's been poured in there. Even with that, the heat that's being generated by the match is not sufficient to raise the temperature that is required in order to ignite that diesel. Okay.

So it has to be, it's a long process in order to actually ignite diesel. It's very impractical if you're trying to start a fire with it. Even if you think about lighter fluid, like charcoal lighter fluid, it's not as unstable as gas, but it's still unstable. It's certainly more unstable than diesel. So its ignition point is much lower. With diesel, it's much higher. So what has to happen? That's why we talk about accelerants. An accelerant is that component that is placed on an item in order to initiate a fire. It's not there to sustain the fire. So what does that mean if

you're just looking at it from a chemistry standpoint? Well, whatever you're dumping it on, a human body, which they don't burn very well, they're not a good fuel source because fuel source and accelerant are two different things. The accelerant initiates the fire once it's been ignited and you want it to burn hot enough so that, let's say for instance, you throw it, let's say you've got synthetic drapes that are hanging over a window, okay? And you just choose the blend, polyester. I don't know. You choose it. Maybe it's a wool polyester blend or whatever the curtains are made out of. You douse that with gasoline and you set, you better stand back. You strike a match,

you throw it at it. That thing's going to go up like a tinderbox. And it's because the heat the heat required is much lower and it will it will burn up it will it will cause the temperature in the curtains or the drapes to rise so that the fire is self-sustaining at that point you no longer need the accelerant and the accelerant will burn off to a certain degree diesel is different uh it takes a lot just to get it going. And then the item, then you're reliant on the fuel source, which would be the drapes of the curtains, in order to sustain that. So the fact that they found these blood patterns out there is not necessarily surprising if they're looking at diesel because it's not going to be enough. You know, one comment is that they found these blood stains on a wall. Well, if they are sheetrock walls, which are made out of gypsum, it's not a good fuel source.

It's just not. It's better than human flesh, but it's not a good fuel source. So the fact that the fire didn't reach up there to destroy it, the lampshade's kind of interesting though. You would think that a lampshade would just, you know, catch fire and everything, but they found blood deposition on the lampshade as well. There's a lot of violence that's going on here. So you've got this deposition. I'm sure it's very dynamic with this kind of cast-off patterns because every time that knife is essentially just dug into these people's bodies, it's withdrawn. It's soaking wet.

The surface is soaking wet. And as it's kind of thrown back in order to generate the power that it takes to thrust it forward again, that blood is traveling through the air, and gravity is is going to take charge and it's going to fall and deposit itself in these very specific patterns. So it's fascinating in a house fire like this, I think, that they would actually find blood pattern that they could analyze. The trick is, whose blood is it? Are you able to type the blood? Well, percentages would indicate because Sarah was so very traumatized, you would think that the majority of it would be hers. If you're using the same instrument, much like I've talked about in the Idaho case now, keep that in mind, you have commingling of blood perhaps where you're using the same knife and you're moving

about from victim to victim. So you can have, you know, this kind of commingling of all of these different blood sources that are going to be very distinctive from a DNA standpoint. It's hard to know sequencing, though. Very, very difficult. But, Dave, my understanding is that the ME found evidence, oh Lord, that a lot of these wounds, many of these wounds were inflicted upon her while she was still alive. I was looking this over and saw that and thought, okay, you have children that are eight, six, and two.

Yeah. And you have mom is 38. Well, was this individual accused of this murder of murdering them did he kill the children first and then fought mom she you know or based on the fact they're all in that one bedroom did he attack the mother and keep the children somehow in the room? Wow. Did they watch their mother dies? Kind of what I'm after.

And then he killed them. Or I I'm trying to figure out when you mentioned sequencing, we don't know how it happened, but in the end we know that she had defensive wounds on her hands. We know that she had defensive wounds on her hands. We know that she had incised and stabbed wounds. And we know in the end of things that they were able, and this goes to what you started with, the amylase in the testimony that there was body fluid found on and in the females. Right.

It's hard to know the sequence. I think that probably we don't want to think about, you know, what those children bore witness to. Nobody in their right mind would want to, you know, try to envision that. However, from the perspective of an investigator, you kind of have to tease that out and try to understand it and try to understand what the status of the children were while it was going. I think we would hope that they were deceased, that they didn't, in their little mind's eyes, that they didn't have to bear witness to this horror show, and it has been described as a horror show at this scene,

of what Michaelael who was two and james who was six uh might have seen and you know uh certainly uh madison as well remember she was eight um you have a you have a mother yeah and also sexually assaulted you have a mother though that's fighting back And I think that just about any mother in the world, she's trying to protect her children. She knows that there is evil that has entered this home where her husband is not. And we look at this and we think, well, who in the world would want to perpetrate such a horrible act upon this family. Well, Dave, you said a lot when you said, you know,

the individual would have probably have had to have an awareness. Do you think he would have tried to do this if dad had been at home? Nope. I think that the odds are very, very low on that end. I don't see that at all. And, you know, because dad, you know that dad is going to fight if he has an awareness of this and he might be able to match strength for strength with the perpetrator in this case.

The dad's name, by the way, is Moses. And they may have had a chance to escape this home with this wild person inside the home with them. But now you've got a mama in there that's trying to defend these three babies of eight, six, and two. She's going to fight like Hellcat. And the fact that she's got defensive wounds is not surprising in this case. I think the most troubling thing, and to try to understand it, is what was the sequencing of the assaults relative to the sexual assault? Is this some perverted monster that is also a necrophile as well, in addition to being a killer

of children and women? Is that something else that we're going to pile on top here? Because I think that that possibility might exist. And here's something else. I've got two indications of preparation here, actually three. He's shown up armed, okay? He's shown up at a time when dad is not there, when Moses is working out on the West Coast. And in addition to that, he's brought what he thinks at least is a proper accelerant to eradicate evidence. Dave, when you begin to think about a perpetrator thinking about eradicating evidence, this is not

some wild guy that's running down the street seeing pink elephants here. This is a guy that is purposed. He's got what we refer to as menace ray, which, you know, we have talked to Nancy about that, but that's a guilty mind. You've got the actus ray, which is the guilty act, and then the menace ray, which is the guilty mind. He knows that he has to burn any kind of evidence that he may have left behind, but boy, he was really insufficient to the task, Dave. This has been a shocking case, and it has gone on for a number of years, Joe. This actually occurred in 2018, and we're now taping this in 2024, and the case is in trial right now. We'll have a decision on this case sooner than later. As you had stated, we're right in the middle of it. And the nature of this, and this case is not really one of the reasons I was interested in discussing this case is, well, first off, it's absolutely horrific.

But that horror goes to another indicator here. I cannot understand why this thing has not gotten more coverage nationwide. Because, you know, out of all the cases that we cover, something like this, which, by the way, is, like you said, up in the northeast. It's up in the Massachusetts area. You would think that certainly it would have hit the news cycle and we would have heard about it all over the place. But we really haven't. But, you know, I think that it is important that we tell the tale, particularly for Sarah, for James, for Michael, and for Madison. Because no one, and I mean no one, deserves to go through this and end up in a horror show.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan. And this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.