Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Suicide by Overdose or Something Far More Sinister - The Murder of

Episode Date: October 30, 2022

On Jan. 18, 2021, 46-year-old Francis Kelly’s body was discovered. Police find Kelly on his couch, in his home, and a bag of cocaine underneath him. The unexpected autopsy says he died of strangulation. All while during a heated custody battle between Kelly and Littlefield.   In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss how Francis Kelly’s death was ultimately a staged overdose, the significant differences between fentanyl and cocaine, how the body reacts to the different drugs, why strangulation was not obvious to investigators, and much more!  Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Show Notes: 0:00 - Introduction to Body Bags with forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and producer Jackie Howard  0:36 - Brief overview of the homicide case involving victim Francis Kelly 1:14 - Introduction of CrimeOnline’s Jackie Howard 2:09 - When Francis Kelly's body was discovered, police found him on his couch in his home and a bag of cocaine underneath him 2:57 - The difference between fentanyl and cocaine 4:32 - Left ventricular hypertrophy 8:11 - Fentanyl was originally developed as a partner for surgical use 10:00 - How fentanyl works within the body vs. cocaine  11:08 - Narcan and its uses 16:03 - Questions: How did he get the fentanyl in his body? Is that a normal way of taking fentanyl? Is that way going to have a different reaction in the body? Would he have tasted it? Does ingesting it offer a different kind of effect?   19:26 - What is skin popping? 24:52 - “There is nothing as an investigator that will make you stop cold in your tracks than an unexpected result at autopsy. It's something that makes you question your abilities. It's something that makes you question the care that you took with the case because this is key: Once the scene has been left, the body has been removed from the scene, and can never reset.” 25:34 - Autopsy reports that Kelly was in fact strangled and did not OD as suspected  26:32 - Question: Kelly was strangled with a tie. Why was that not originally obvious? Specifically, because ligature marks typically leave a mark   31:51 - We later find out that Kelly's death was a result of a custody dispute between Littlefield and Kelly. Littlefield claimed Kelly was abusive 32:22 - Question: The other thing that we find out, which I find very interesting and kind of explains some things about the cocaine, knowing that he died from fentanyl and that it was cocaine that was found. We're looking at a good case of staging here, aren't we, Joe? 38:57 - The verdict is in 39:28 - Heidi Littlefield was sentenced to 115 years in a state prison, which included 60 years for murder. 20 years for attempted poisonings, and 35 years for conspiracy to commit murder resulting in a death  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. You know, I guess since about 2013, 2012, I've appeared on various television networks over that period of time. And one of the things I've taken great pleasure in is the fact that I wear ties on air. I love it. And the reason I love it is that I buy my ties at thrift stores. Because so many people spend so much money to look really good on air. I go out and I find the coolest ties I can find and I wear them on air. I think part of it just has to go with the fact that I grew up with not a lot of money

and I like to kind of display that on air that you can look good without spending a bunch of money. But the case I'm going to cover today actually talks about a favorite tie. It talks about a favorite tie that a gentleman liked to wear on a regular basis. It talks about an overdose involving fentanyl. And it talks about a relationship gone bad. Today, we're going to talk about the homicide of Francis Kelly. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Joining me today is my friend Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace.

Jackie, I don't know about you. When I was a kid, you had to get all gussied up to go to church. And part of that was wearing a tie. I've worn a tie my entire life. And it's hard for me not to wear a tie, I think, when I go out in public and that sort of thing to do appearances and whatnot. People are more casual about it. But some of us guys just like our ties. And in this particular case, this poor fellow had a tie that he loved. He loved and he apparently wore it on a regular basis. And interestingly enough, this tie actually led to his death. Well, I'm going to tell you, Joe, while I did get gussied up to go to church, I can categorically tell you I did not wear a tie.

We're talking today about 46-year-old Francis Kelly. When Francis Kelly's body was discovered, police found him on his couch in his home and a bag of cocaine underneath him. But at the time, they did observe some bruising around his eyes, elbows, knees, and hand. However, there was no evidence to suggest that foul play was involved in Kelly's death. So initially, before the autopsy, they made some assumptions that he had, in fact, OD'd because he had this bag of cocaine. The autopsy discovered that Kelly was strangled and sustained blunt force trauma to his head. And it wasn't cocaine that was found in his system, but as you mentioned, fentanyl. So let's talk first about the difference between fentanyl and cocaine and what each would do to you having that in your system.

Yeah, you know, you're not going to see a lot of differences, I don't think, externally as a result of, you know, cocaine abuse versus fentanyl abuse. There are certain things that you can look for. People that use cocaine many times will have a real wasted appearance, I guess, as a result of, you know, kind of hyperactivity. They don't keep weight on them very well. Back in the 80s, when people snorted a lot of cocaine, you'd have spontaneous nosebleeds. I've actually worked cases of snorting cocaine where individuals have eroded the septum in their nose, you know, that cartilaginous separation that you have between

both of your nostrils. And it kind of ulcerates, that sort of thing. And those are things that you look for. And you look for needle tracks as well. But, you know, you can have needle tracks associated with the use of fentanyl and cocaine as well. You know, they're both rendered down. You can put it in a liquid form and essentially inject it. So, you're not going to see a lot of differences necessarily just upon initial observation of subjects at the scene. So, you know, what do you turn to?

Well, you turn to any kind of changes that might have happened internally. And that's one of the things that we do, you know, at autopsy with cocaine in particular. You might see signs of particularly those individuals that have long-term abuse of cocaine, you'll see hypertensive changes in the heart. You get a condition called left ventricular hypertrophy, and it's just kind of a fancy term for saying that the wall of the heart thickens. Say that word again. Left ventricular hypertrophy. And so, you begin to see it with the actual wall of the heart begin to thicken. And it's as a result of individual's drug use. Sometimes it can be a natural event as well,

and there'll be this thickening that occurs. And we do measurements on the walls of the heart at autopsy to give an idea if it's in what they refer to as its normal anatomical configuration. And if you see some kind of anomaly like that, you might say, well, you know what, maybe this person has just got severe hypertension. Maybe they've got something else genetic that will genetically predispose them to some of these things. Or it could be a drug-related event like them utilizing cocaine, particularly on a regular basis. Cocaine is actually a stimulant. It's going to increase the metabolic activity in our body.

It pushes your blood pressure up, these sorts of things. But fentanyl, on the other hand, it's a synthetic opiate. That means it's created in a laboratory, and it depresses the system. So you know how we talked about the heart relative to the cocaine? If you begin to think about the lungs relative to fentanyl, that's what really gets hammered in the body. And many times when you have an individual that has died, particularly of what's referred to as acute OD and acute, you just so we understand, acute is like a sudden event as opposed to chronic, which means long-term. But if you have an acute event involving an opiate like this, you'll have people that have very, very heavy lungs at autopsy. That means that

they'll be heavily congested. They'll weigh more than they normally should because we weigh each organ in a scale. And I don't know if people know this, but it's kind of a horrible thought. The next time you go to the grocery store and you see a scale that's in the produce aisle, that is exactly the kind of scale that's used in the morgue to weigh individual organs. And there are certain parameters that we look for for organ weights. And anytime we have an organ that is over the expected weight for that particular age, that'll make us scratch our head a little bit and say, well, what's causing this heaviness? Or if it's lighter, for instance, which most of the time you find things that are heavier. And in the cases of opiates like this, opiate OD, you would expect to find the lungs being heavier, congested with fluid and blood and that sort of thing. And sometimes

that's indicative of an opiate OD. One fascinating thing that you see at crime scenes relative to individuals that have overdosed on some type of depressant like an opiate is you'll have a presentation of what's referred to as a frothy edematous cone is what it's called. And you'll see this kind of white foam looks like the head of a beard. And we've actually talked about this before on body bags. That's issues from the nose and from the mouth. And it'll be tainted in a pink, kind of a pink color. And again, that's as a result of this kind of hyper congestion that's going on where the people are really struggling to breathe. And because with this drug in particular, you begin to think about, you know, what does it do systemically? How does it affect the brain?

How does it affect your motor functions? These sorts of things. You'll see these individuals that cannot move around because folks might not realize fentanyl was actually originally developed as a partner for surgical anesthesia with other drugs. So it is meant to put an individual down into this kind of deep repose, if you will, to get them manageable for surgery. It's also used for pain relief. For years and years, kind of interesting, they developed fentanyl and placed it in a patch. People have seen nicotine patches,

for instance, that people wear to quit smoking. Well, people have had fentanyl patches as well. And the patch itself is essentially populated with a dosage of fentanyl. And then it's what's called transdermal. You put the patch over a prescribed area and that medication kind of seeps in through the skin and goes into the system and gives pain relief. People that have things like chronic back pain and hip pain and all those sorts of things that people develop over time as a result of age or injury can get relief with it. So it's a very, very powerful drug. And then when it's out on the street and it's being manufactured, say, for instance, in a clandestine lab, because fentanyl is one of those things that is just the absolute scourge of our society right now,

one of the many drugs, it's made in not very well-controlled environments. It's made in other countries, for instance, and then people smuggle it in, and you don't really know what's in it. It can make for a very, very lethal cocktail. What you're telling me, Joe, I don't have a lot of experience in what you're talking about. So if I understand you, what you're telling me is one is an upper and one's a downer. Yeah. And I'd also like to say as your friend, I'm glad you don't have a lot of experience in it, Jackie. But yeah, you're right. One is an upper and one is a downer. And when you begin to think about the fentanyl in particular, it essentially sends the victim

into respiratory failure. We hear a lot about cardiac failure, but the lungs become so heavy as a result of this congestion that's going on. Oh, so it's not that they absorb anything. It's that they can't function, so they're congested with fluids. Right. Yeah. I had an old doctor one time actually refer to it. It's like the patient's, it's the equivalent of somebody trying to run in mud. And it becomes so labored and they're struggling so hard.

And they don't have an awareness, you know, to kind of, you can't fight your way out of it at a chemical level because it's hammering the body so hard. It would be very difficult to kind of pull back from it. That's why nowadays, you know, they carry Narcan. You know, we have any number of agencies out there that apply Narcan. They have the ability and it kind of counteracts this kind of depressant event that occurs with a subject that has been found. Now, there's so many people that just kind of fall over as a result of being exposed to fentanyl, there are even cases out there, and this is how dangerous and how insidious this drug is. Our law enforcement officers can go inside of the cabin of a car many times, okay, and think about how horrific this is,

and they'll open up a bag that might contain this fentanyl that has been made in some clandestine lab. And suddenly this kind of cloud comes out and this is almost in a histamine like form. It kind of spreads into the air and the cops don't know it's there. You know, they're just kind of searching the area. It's not like they have a gas mask on or a ventilator on or something, you know, like you see with firefighters.

So they inhalate this stuff and my gosh, you inhalate this stuff in a powdered form and it gets right into the mucous membranes and it's absorbed and this is going into the lungs. So how much more so, for instance, if an individual has it mixed and you'll find people that are mixing it in cocaine, which is kind of interesting. You know, you think about cocaine, which is in fact a stimulant being mixed with fentanyl, which is a depressant. Kind of takes us back to the days of, you know, you think about how Belushi died. He died of what was called a speedball, which was a combination of cocaine and heroin.

And that was directly injected, and it just really wrecks the system. But just fentanyl by itself can even send somebody that's in a passive status that I've seen, like a police officer that's just kind of looking around, that kind of histamine that they can inhalate, it can kill you. You've mentioned a couple of times now, Joe, that fentanyl is man-made. So is this what we're hearing all the time about in the same vein that methamphetamine is made, where people are pulling things out of cold meds? Yeah, well, fentanyl itself is based on the molecule that's originally an opiate, which is a naturally occurring depressant.

We've had, for instance, we've had morphine for a long, long time. And morphine is a natural derivative that you go all the way back to the Civil War and you begin to think about people were trying to use painkillers, if you will, where, you know, they were able to essentially draw out that element of of the poppy plant, for instance, which is where heroin derives from, and applied this agent in order to reduce pain. And it has been effective. I mean, it's given a lot of relief. Famously, you can think about our troops out in the field, in any number of movies we've seen from World War II, where the troops used carry serrets. They called them serrets, the little ampules with the built-in needle of morphine. These guys would be in terrible pain after sustaining some horrific wound. Their fellow soldiers would take the serret and jam it into their leg and apply the morphine. And it gives instant relief to a certain degree. It stems the pain because it acts on the pain centers and it mutes that pain

just so the person is not suffering. But here's the key. When you're talking about a drug like this and in its synthetic form, which now you take that original naturally occurring molecule and you synthesize it and you make it a man-made substance where the molecule is very similar to that that is occurring in nature, and you adjust it. It's said, for instance, like fentanyl is, just hold on to your hat for this, is like 100 times more powerful than heroin. Just let that sink in just for a second. 100 times more powerful, that means it requires less of the substance to get the same high that an individual might get from heroin. But if you adjust that dosage just slightly and you apply just a bit more, the thing about medical death investigation

that I've always tried to drum into any investigator that I train or those just to give props to them, those that train me, is it is always essential as an investigator, you go to the scene. You take a look at the body in its context in which it is found. And in this case, with Francis Kelly, it led to some serious, serious questions that the police had. So here's my question. The autopsy found Kelly had fentanyl in his system, and yet there was cocaine underneath him. So how did he get the fentanyl?

We know that he ingested it. Now, is that a normal way of getting fentanyl? Is that going to have a different reaction in the body? We know that he was ultimately given fentanyl three times. It was in his oatmeal and put in his miso soup. And honestly, I'm not sure about what food item the third one was in, but would he have tasted it? Would he have known that he was eating this? And does ingesting it offer you a different kind of effect? Those are valid questions in the sense that, and I'll go ahead and tell you what Mr. Kelly had remarked at one point, Tom. He had made a remark that he had taken a bite of food and it tasted funny. I mean, how many of us in the audience have ever eaten something somewhere

and it had an unnatural taste to it? If it's prepared at a restaurant or something like that, it almost has a chemical taste to it. A great example for me, I don't like to use a dishwasher at home, so I'll just use dish liquid and scrub things out. And do you ever have the experience where you didn't quite get all of the dish liquid out of some type of vessel that you're cleaning, and then later you go back and you say, wow, this tastes like dish detergent? Well, think about that. It's got something that is unnatural to taste. So, yeah, he was aware of it, I think. He was aware of one of these times that someone had attempted to actually give him some type is applied. One of the great questions you hear about if fentanyl is applied or any kind of drug is applied, how is it going to get systemically into the system the quickest? And boy, I mean, I've got some incredible stories from over the years where people have placed any number of different types of agents in their body in different locations, certainly. And all have a variety of different effects and how long it takes for them to kind of be absorbed into the system. And will they totally be absorbed? You think about an individual, for instance,

that has something like cocaine or fentanyl or people have smorted heroin. That's something that has been done. Well, it goes into the mucous membrane. Well, when you absorb this, where's it going? Well, into the mucous membrane, it's also going directly into the lungs. And so, the uptake of this is going to be really quick. Another quick way is through IV injection, which I'm not talking about like an IV bag hanging in a hospital. I'm talking about intravenously, where an individual, you've seen movies where people will tie off essentially, and they'll render down whatever it is that they're injecting into their body with a spoon, heating it, rendering it down, and then they draw it up and inject it. They tie off with a tourniquet, the vessel pops up, and they go directly into the

vein. Well, that's very quick as well. There's something else that's kind of interesting. People also do something called skin popping, which is very, it's really quite disgusting actually, but they will take an injectable that they've rendered down and they'll go directly into their skin, not searching for a vessel. They'll go into what's referred to as into the sub-Q fat, which means that layer of fat directly below the skin, and it's called skin popping. And you have people that skin pop, and those drugs are injected, and they absorb a little bit slower. But what occurs is these drugs that are clandestinely made, they're cut with things. Like heroin traditionally has been cut with things like quinine, talcum powder.

It's been cut with baby formula, all kinds of things over the years so that the dealers can extend their supply of the drugs. So they'll cut it so it's like a 60-40 cut. It won't be in a pure state. And what happens is with the skin popping is that these areas will actually ulcerate because when they skin pop, for instance, if an individual is injecting something like quinine or talcum powder, it's not metabolized. It just kind of sits there beneath the skin. It becomes irritated and then you get an ulcerated area and you'll find many people that skin pop will have these huge ulcerated lesions all over their bodies and that's types of things that you've seen. And then you have

people that have, particularly in poisonings, because that's the easiest way to get it into a non-suspecting person's system. You approach somebody with a needle and you inject them or attempt to inject them, they're going to fight you off most of the time if they have an awareness that this is happening. So, many people will clandestinely put items into food and stir it around or mix it up and then try to get the person to ingest it. And then, of course, you have stories of people that mule drugs in from various countries, and they, of course, insert a variety of different types of drugs into their backside, for instance. And I had one kid that came up from South America at one point in time, from Bolivia specifically, and he had 20 condoms that were clipped with surgical staples. And he had

pure cocaine in each one of these condoms. It was about 20, I'm sorry, it was about 10 grams each. One of the condoms erupted and he got a 10 gram dosage of cocaine into his large intestine. And it like immediately, he just fell over dead. It was absorbed that quickly into the intestinal lining. I'm giving a long answer here, but it's, you never know how it's going to be absorbed. And also, you know, if you're talking about, you know, having it pass through the digestive tract in the form of food, if it's mixed in, the absorption is going to take a bit longer. It might even require higher dosage than it would, say, for instance, if it was being injected directly into a vein. So what we're seeing in this case, when Kelly was found,

he was still alive. So what you're telling me is due to the method that he was given the drug, it was not enough to kill him. Yeah. Or it could be, you know, the progression of the metabolism itself. Now, what does that mean? The progression of the metabolism. You're going to have to school me, bud. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, okay, let me back off a little bit because that's not entirely accurate. But just, okay, let's just put it in common terms relative to people ingesting food. Certain types of food make you feel different, you know, depending upon whatever it is. Say, for instance, people that don't have necessarily a real tolerance for sugar, for instance,

you might eat a candy bar and then it might taste really good initially. Okay. And then maybe 10, 15 minutes later, your body starts to uptake everything that's in the candy bar and your body's not processing it. Okay. And you start to feel really bad. Okay. Maybe people that are pre-diabetic or diabetic and they eat this and it makes them feel really, really bad. Well, that's part of the metabolic uptake of that particular substance. If somebody has applied some type of agent like fentanyl into a food source and the individual ingests the food source,

well, it passes through the mouth, down the esophagus, and drops into the stomach. Well, the stomach sits there and kind of churns this food, and it's absorbed through the stomach wall. Just because it is being absorbed and nutrients are being taken out of it doesn't mean you're getting everything out of it. Say, for instance, if you took the pure substance and injected it directly into a vein, all right, so you would either require more in order to facilitate this or it would be a matter of the type of agent that you're mixing it with,

whether it's soup, for instance, versus say oatmeal or grits or something like that, that might be a bit more dense. It might kind of shield the individual from ingestion of it totally and uptaking it. And so the longer your body goes along, it has a higher probability of ingesting it and maybe you can make it through safely. But if this is being done to you over and over and over again, sooner or later, you're going to die. There is nothing as an investigator that will make you stop cold in your tracks than an unexpected result at autopsy. It's something that makes you question your abilities. It's

something that makes you question the care that you took with the case because this is key. Once the scene has been left, once the body has been removed from the scene, you can never reset. You can never do it over. You get one shot at doing it right. And in this case, Jackie, when they got into this autopsy, they found something completely unexpected. That is true. And that was the fact that Kelly was strangled and did not OD as they initially suspected. Kelly's body was found by his former girlfriend, Heidi Marie Littlefield, and her adult daughter, Logan Marie Runyon, and Runyon's boyfriend, Robert Walker. Now, the two women had secretly got into Kelly's house and poisoned his oatmeal and some soup, as I told you, with fentanyl.

But when they went back to the home, Kelly wasn't dead. He was still grasping for breath. He was unresponsive, but trying to breathe. And at that point, they decided to finish him off. And they used a tie, specifically his favorite tie, to strangle him. Why was that not originally obvious? Because as you've talked before, usually ligature stranglings leave a mark. So why didn't they look at him, the investigators, when his body was reported, why didn't they look at him and go, oh, wait, there's marks there?

That's key. I want everyone in the sound of my voice to envision a male necktie right now. Just envision kind of a standard necktie. I'm not talking about like a, you know, a tiny little string tie or something. I'm talking about a regular necktie. They're wide. They're two to three inches, maybe four inches, depending upon the particular cycle that you're going through in men's fashion. And generally, they're smooth. Many of them are made out of either silk, the really expensive ones, or maybe some kind of synthetic version of a silk that gives the appearance of a silky fabric. And, you know, with that type of construction of this tie,

it's not like a rope. It's not like an electrical cord. Do you think about a rope or an electrical cord, how kind of narrow they are? They create, when they're used as a ligature, they create a very narrow they are. They create, when they're used as a ligature, they create a very narrow furrow. It's called a furrow, just like a furrow in a field that's being plowed. And they're deep. They're very deep with rope in particular, because if folks will think about rope, it's kind of woven

many times. Most of the time it's woven and it's made out of a lot of different materials, but it's woven. It has a very specific pattern. You know, you think about like a herringbone pattern or if you have a twist like on bailing rope, it's very rough to the touch. And when you apply it, the more tension that you put on this thing, the deeper the furrow. And it's going to leave behind an area of abrasion or we call it an abraded area where the skin is kind of burned beneath it. Depending upon how long it's been, it'll have almost a dry, kind of a dried out appearance, if you will. And sometimes if you're very, very careful and you examine it very closely, particularly with like a magnifying glass or a loop like you use to examine photos with,

you'll see the pattern actually manifesting itself over the surface of the entry. And that's really good for us in forensics, because if we find a rope, for instance, or an electrical cord, sometimes we can match those things up, at least get in the ballpark with it. But with a tie, because it's so broad and it's so soft, you're not going to leave that kind of a braided area on the outside. And, you know, as was mentioned, Francis Kelly, he's got fentanyl in his system. Remember what we had discussed earlier. Fentanyl is a system depressant.

It reduces our ability to fight back in any way. You think about the genesis of fentanyl. Fentanyl is a precursor for anesthesia. What happens when you go under? Anybody in the audience that's ever had surgery, they tell you to count backwards and you never get past about 95. It's meant to relax you. It sedates you. It puts you in a position where, you know, you can imagine, I don't care how big you are, if you've got fentanyl on board, you're not going to be able to fight back very well. You might initially,

but as it begins to take hold in your system, you're going to become very sleepy and passive. And so you take and you combine that with a smooth surface of a ligature like a tie that's not going to leave this big, bold pattern with a deep furrow. You're not necessarily going to see it at the scene unless that tie has been left in place and tied in the rear very tightly, which I've had a number of cases like that in the past. But if the tie is removed, you I've had a number of cases like that in the past. But if the tie is removed, you might see a little bit of discoloration. It might be kind of red, but it's not going to just really jump out at you. And another thing you have to think about is,

and I don't know that folks really consider this, but when you're out on the scene, when you conduct the examination of a body, you're not in the best circumstances. You're certainly not in the best circumstances when it comes to lighting, even if you are in somebody's apartment. I mean, how many of us have ever walked into a room and it's very dimly lit, depending upon what that person likes in their home. But you take a body and you go to the morgue with it. The lighting in most morgues now is surgical grade. And trust me, there are very few shadows in this environment. You have lights coming at you from all over the place.

And it's to blow out any kind of shadow so you can appreciate and see everything. It's very brightly lit in there. When you get a body back to the morgue, you're going to be able to pick up on little nuances in the morgue, in that environment. You're not going to be able to pick up on at the scene. You're also kneeling over bodies. It might be hot. You're not paying as close attention at the scene as you will. But when you're in the morgue and you have that body laid on that table in front of you, you are fully vested at that moment. We later find out that Kelly's death was a result of a custody dispute between Littlefield and Kelly. Littlefield claimed not allow him to see the daughter alone and would try to stay in his home during their visit time.

He called it parenting time. He would want to stay in his house during the parenting time. So the other thing that we find out, which I find very interesting and kind of explains some things about the cocaine. Knowing that he died from fentanyl and that it was cocaine that was found, we're looking at a good case of staging here, aren't we, Joe? Oh my gosh, you hit it right on the head. You're absolutely right, Jackie. You have a group of people, a confederacy, if you will, of three that are purposed, aren't they?

They're going out. They've entered into an agreement together in order to bring about this guy's death. And they've gone so far as to not just, you know, at the end, perpetrate a homicide here, but to set it up so that it appears as though that this man, this father, OD'd himself. And not only are there drugs involved, but we've got this mysterious bag of cocaine that's found at the scene. So, that means that somebody was purposed to go out and acquire cocaine. The investigators revealed, you know, in this particular case that these three went out. And look, the daughter, Runyon, when she's on the stand, she never, and I mean never, denies the fact that she's got a meth problem. And she's, you know, Littlefield's attorney, you know, asked her directly, do you have a problem with drug addiction? And she never

denied it at all. Never, ever. And so she's connected in this world. So, you know, what are you going to do? Well, you go out and you purchase a bag of cocaine, a one-time purchase perhaps, and you set this man up because you've been going into his house, clandestinely, by the way, and poisoning his food. So you figure you're going to finish him off and, oh, just to really drive home the point, we're going to have a bag of cocaine. you're going to finish him off and oh just just to really drive home the point we're going to have a bag of cocaine we're going to go out and purchase and stick it under his body so that when the authorities show up you know maybe the coroner you walk into the room and you start to do the examination of the body and oh wow what do we find here well you find this bag of white

powder you don't know what it is because contrary to what folks think, we can't just look at a bag of white powder and say that is in fact cocaine or whatever type of agent that we have to test it to confirm it. So you're telling me you stick your little finger in it and taste it like everybody else does on TV? No, that does not happen. My God, if anybody ever, please, nobody do that. That is the most ridiculous thing. I hate that Hollywood actually demonstrates that because some people think that they can do that. And it is not something that anyone should ever try to do at all. That has to be tested and you need to handle it with gloves. Fentanyl in particular

is nasty in a sense. Remember, they put it in patches. And we're not talking about fentanyl relative to this bag, but there's fentanyl involved in this case. It's transdermal, which means you can absorb it through your skin. Meth is the same way as well. It is transdermal. Very dangerous stuff.

And so you can actually get a dosage of this stuff just by handling it with your bare hands. And the fact that they went out and purchased these drugs to plant them at the scene relative to this man and to try to paint him in this light that he OD'd. What's fascinating, I think, to me is that, you know, I talked at length about the tie, that a tie was used. And it kind of drills down into this relationship that Littlefield had with Francis Kelly, I think. The fact that it wasn't just a tie. It was his favorite tie. And think about that just for a second. Is this a statement that's been made by the perpetrator? I don't know how many ties Francis Kelly owned.

I don't know. Maybe he only had one. Maybe it was a tie that at some point in time, someone who dearly loved him went out and purchased and gave to him. But it was identified as his favorite tie and that it was actually utilized as a means to bring about his death. And I think that when you look at this in the final analysis and you think about that,

was it used as a statement that, you know, I'm going to go to whatever means necessary to keep you separated from this child that you have fathered with me. And just to kind of put an exclamation point on it, I'm going to grab your favorite tie. I'm going to wrap it around your neck and I'm going to choke you until you're deceased. Because not only do I have the tie around your neck, I've also got fentanyl in your system now. So you're going to be manageable. And there's some indication he may have attempted to fight back because he's got some bruises that were found. It looks as though he's sustained some type of blunt force trauma. And maybe initially

he did attempt to fight back. But when you're fighting, just think about this. Not only are you fighting against this chemical that's in your system that is, by the way, compromising your ability to breathe, now you've got something wrapped around your neck that's an external factor that is preventing you from uptaking oxygen. He's in a desperate fight for his life at that moment in time. Runyon, in her statement from the stand, actually stated that when they arrived, they made entry into Francis Kelly's home. They found him on the floor and he was experiencing labored breathing. And, you know, it makes you think, did they use that tie on him on the floor in order

to asphyxiate him in that position? Or did they do it on the sofa, which they eventually moved his body to? That goes to this idea of staging. When you take a body and you place it into a position that is other than as it was initially found, and you plant cocaine beneath the body, that, of course, is a sign that there was thought that went into this, that they wanted to make this appear as something other than it was. He had enough drugs on board so that when they did enter the apartment, that it had literally knocked him down to his knees. And he was laboring to breathe at that time. And I guess it's at that time that they decided to just finish him off.

Well, the verdict is in on this case, Joe, and the daughter. Logan Runyon was charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder. And her boyfriend, Walker, was charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit murder. Now, Walker pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Logan Runyon was sentenced to 26 years in prison and another six suspended. And 42-year-old Heidi Littlefield was sentenced to 115 years in a state prison, which included 60 years for murder, 20 years for attempted poisonings, and 35 years for conspiracy to commit murder, resulting in a death. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. is body bags.