Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Teen Kills Mom, Stepdad, Lives With Bodies for Weeks!

Episode Date: April 20, 2025

A teenager in Wisconsin is accused of killing his mother and his stepfather, then living with the decomposing bodies for weeks before he finally leaves the family home. Joseph Scott Morgan explains how difficult it would be to remain in a home with two decomposing bodies and he breaks down the types of guns and ammunition available to 17-year-old Nikita "Nikki" Casap. Dave Mack explains the family dynamic and how Nikki is also charged with identity theft for trying to pretend he is his now dead stepfather, as well as being charged with murder and more.   Transcript Highlights00:10.61 Introduction  01:01.83 Spending more time with the dead 05:41.51 Teen kills mom, stepdad, lives with bodies 09:52.98 Making mistakes in murder 15:20.17 Pulling back the blankets 20:51.75 Mother is found in hallway 25:10.98 Backing out of crime scene 29:50.56 Dividing up responsibilities on scene 34:00.22 VERY nice house 39:56.04 Doesn't have to be a body part 43:53.57 Removing each layer 47:45.42 Size of Round and type of stippling 53:28.71 Getting hit with a sledgehammer 55:09.61 ConclusionSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Moore. When people meet me many times that have heard me on a podcast or seen me on television, one of the first questions they ask or one of the first comments they make is, I cannot begin to understand how you did for a living what you did for so long. And it always comes back around to the fact that I essentially lived with the dead. Now, yeah, I understand. I'm a forensics guy, and I'd go out and I'd work cases. I interacted with my colleagues. But I got to tell you, there were many weeks when I literally spent

more time with dead folks than I did with living folks. And there were many times in my life I preferred being around the dead. They generally don't give you any issues at all. There's no surprises with them most of the time. I mean, yeah, you'll find pathology, but, you know, the dead are dead, and the living go on about their lives. But every now and then, there's a case that occurs where the living and the dead just can't seem to go their separate ways.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Dave, I'm thinking story about a case that I'd worked many, many years ago that I spent a protracted period of time with literally a refrigerator truck load full of dead bodies from a capsized vessel. And we were real busy that summer when that happened. And so just because you have a major loss of life incident in a medical examiner or coroner's office, does that mean, does that mean that the everyday other cases stop coming in? It's kind of like, and I wouldn't presume to necessarily compare myself literally to my colleagues that worked 9-11 at the OCME in New York, but you have to understand,

yeah, the Twin Towers collapsed, other buildings collapsed, you had thousands of dead, but Dave, homicides didn't stop. You know, you didn't have fatal events that just ceased because that one moment in time, we had a major loss of life. Things happen. And sometimes you get stacked up with the dead. And in a way, you become numb to it, I think. The dead, and I mean, no disrespect by this, but the dead just, they're part and parcel of your daily existence. When you, when I would walk into a room, into the autopsy room, for instance, and I would have somebody literally with their head blown apart, then next to them on another table

would be a horribly decomposed body. And then you might have a grandma that just passed away in her sleep and they're all lined up on the table. I didn't pay any more attention to that in a man on the moon. I mean, it just, you get numb to it when you're going through it. It doesn't mean that you're not paying attention to detail, but there's this thing that comes about where as part of your occupation and part of what you do, you're able to create this kind of weird membrane that kind of buffets any kind of trauma you might have. What's really odd is that when people that are not used to being around the dead suddenly insert themselves into an environment where they not only are around the dead for a period of time, but they might live with dead bodies for a protracted period of time.

And it took me a long time professionally to build up that callus. And it is a callus. It's like swinging a hammer. You know, you just you get to the point where it's it's it doesn't impact you the way that it did when you first started. But for somebody just to indwell a residence, a structure with dead bodies and not think anything of it is kind of odd. What say you, my friend? One of the first questions I had about the story, Joe, is we're going to talk about Nikita, Nikki Kasap, and he is 17 years old and he is accused of killing his mother and

his stepfather and staying with their bodies, their dead bodies for at least 10 days, probably longer than that, maybe 15 days. It could be somewhere, but a week and a half to two weeks worth of time. This 17 year old person stayed in the home with two dead bodies. And we're not talking about people that he just saw in a battlefield. You know, we're talking about his mother and stepfather. We're talking about people he has a long relationship with that he allegedly took their lives for whatever reason. We still don't have a true motive here, but he actually was cohabitating. He was sleeping, eating in this house with both of these bodies.

That's why we're doing body bags on this episode, on this particular story, because we don't know what was going on in this person's life that brought him to the, it wasn't just enough to kill and leave, which we see that a lot. You know, we, we see people kill and get rid of a body. You know, that's where we catch them getting rid of the body. Not here. You've got a kid who never missed school, Joe. And one of the ways he got caught, well, he didn't show up for two weeks. The school was concerned. School resource officer reaches out. That's where this kind of came from.

And, of course, his stepfather's mother. She hadn't talked to her son, and she was concerned as well. So you had two different calls for a wellbeing check. There's that term again. I know. Isn't it? It's so weird because they don't use to call the welfare check, but because of people getting a welfare check, they don't call it welfare check.

Now it's wellbeing check. They actually did change the verbiage for that purpose. Yeah. And I found that so odd. I know. It's like, you know what? When President Ronald Reagan was shot by Hinckley back in 1981. Yeah.

March 81. Okay. The Gilligan's Island franchise had become a movie of the week kind of thing where they were doing a return from Gilligan's Island, escape from Gilligan's Island, like Battle of the Apes. But from the very first episode, when they announced the names of all of these passengers on the SS Minnow, they gave you the name of the professor. His name was Professor Roy Hinckley. When John Hinckley tried to kill Ronald Reagan for the next, I don't know, Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island or whatever it was, they changed the name of the professor to Hinkle. For that reason.

For that very reason. And I think about that when these things come up. So instead of saying it's a well-being, we're checking on their well-being. Right. It's no longer a welfare check. Yeah. So the verbiage changes, you know, day in and day out. And everybody likes to engineer language.

But, you know, the one thing you can't engineer is outcomes, I think, relative to the consequences of living with a dead body. And I was thinking, you know, you and I both, and please, you know, don't misconstrue what I'm saying here. I am not comparing our sons to this individual. What I'm doing is comparing teenage boys. You and I both have had the adventure of living in a household, raising teenage boys and teenage boys do really stupid things. Not the most people in the world. Yeah, they're not. And I were one at one point, Tom, and I do remember doing really stupid things.

And I got to thinking about this kid who is, is actually living in this environment with these two individuals, one of whom is his own mother, the other his stepfather. And I'm thinking, did he have like a brain freeze at that moment in time where it's like, I have done this and now I don't know where to go. And I really wonder many times if, and it's not, that doesn't necessarily just apply to teenage boys. I think it applies to a lot of perpetrators out there because we see it, Dave. I mean, you know, every week we cover cases and we see these individuals that make really stupid, you know, mistakes along the way, if you want to call it a mistake.

It's not like they're filing their taxes and they've, you know, misentered something. It's actually a, they didn't think the process through, I think. And it's really easy. You know, I think that when you react and all of us have reacted in anger to things many times, I know I have, I'm chief among sinners. And then you, you go back, you have a quiet moment or two and you sit back and you shake your head and you say, I'm such an idiot. Why did I say that? Why did I do that? I know that there are going to be consequences for this and I'm just going to have to sit down and take it, you know? And I wonder many times about these individuals that perpetrate crimes and they just kind of freeze and they can't move, move beyond that, um, to make some better decision

about how they're going to handle something. Um, yeah. You know, Joe, the headline on this story, I was looking at several because a 17 year old killing his mother and stepfather is a, that's a big deal. That's a big story. But the headlines on this one, it's Wisconsin teen killed mother and stepfather and lived with dot, dot, dot. Teen lived with bodies of mom and stepfather after killing them. Dot, dot, dot. Teen killed mom and stepdad, then lived with bodies for dot, dot, dot. It's all about. Oh, and this one.

I love this one. Teen charged with killing parents lived with rotting corpses, dot, dot, dot. That's what we're actually doing today is getting to the most explosive ending. It's not bad enough that the guy killed his parents at 17 years old. But now the real headline, the real shock is he didn't get rid of the bodies. He didn't he didn't chop them up and try to get rid of them like so many we've had recently. He's got two dead bodies in different parts of the house, Joe. And basically he threw blankets over the top of them. So I'm wondering very and I know we'll get to this.

Right, right. But how long does it take before the body start to decompose and give off this odor of death? And that's what this 17 year old is living with. I can't imagine that it's going to be a pleasant thing to live in. By the end of day two, he would have had an odor in the air. I can almost guarantee that. So you're talking about if that's the case, if that's our benchmark for starting from, I'm not talking about the appearance of post-mortem changes and decompositional changes. I'm talking about that smell. It's like a phantom that comes out of the dark and kind of slaps you in the face the first time you smell it. We would be talking about the lion's share of the time that he was living in this home.

He would have smelled this and he made no effort to take them out into the yard or dispose of them in the basement or even remove them to the attic. Do you remember the case that we had? Which, by the way, that reminds me to do a follow-up on this. The case from, was it in Grosse Pointe? It was in Detroit of the wealthy surgeon that was found wrapped up in his attic. Do you remember that case? And he had been killed. And they have arrested somebody with that.

But, you know, even in that case, the perpetrator, to the best of my knowledge, didn't hang around. But they still wrapped the body up, took the body into a sequestered area in the attic and put him up there. Well, that guy would have been smelling pretty quickly. These bodies, and particularly the mother, and we can dive into this a little bit more, but the mother had multiple layers placed upon her. And we've talked about this before. When you layer a body like that, that's essentially like placing an item in a crock pot. It's the heat that's being given off, you know, just as a result, the heat that is generated, and there is a certain amount of heat that is generated from cellular decay where you have the cells, the actual cells in our bodies begin to break down and kind of leach out.

There is a certain amount of heat that is given off in that process. Well, it's further exacerbated by doing the layers like this. And so the body is slowly kind of rendering down throughout the entire period. And you can actually think of it as almost like a tenderizing moment. So the body at a cellular level, that's expedited as a result of this layering of blankets all on top of the body. So when you finally pull back these blankets, it's going to be something that is so disgusting and so insulting to your senses. But, you know, there's a lot to be said about the nature of a scene like this, particularly when you consider that the victims are those individuals that held the title of parents, and how much even more so when one of the victims has been so brutalized

at the hands of her son and then left to rot in the floor of their home without any consideration for desecration of her remains. So, Brother Dave, you mentioned that, you know, our favorite term, welfare check, or what's the new term now? Being check. The well-being check. Yeah, the well-being, yeah. Yeah. Um, the wellbeing check had been requested on February the 28th, uh, of 2025. And this is in actually in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Um, and what, what kind of prompted this, you know, kind of moving forward.

It was, there were two things. It was a two prong thing. One, you have a student who has a perfect record for attendance and all and his name is nikiki nikiki nikita kasop and he goes by the name nikki nikki had perfect attendance and all of a sudden he misses two weeks out of school. That was from the school standpoint. They're like, hey, something's wrong. And they're trying to call the house. They're not getting anybody on the phone. So finally, the school resource officer, he calls the police and says, we need to do a well-being check. We've got a student. He hasn't been here. We can't get in touch with anybody on our records. Well, at the same time, while that is happening on the 28th of February, the stepfather's mom, Donald Mayer's mother, Dorothy, she actually calls and asks for a well-being check because she hasn't talked to Donald in a couple of weeks.

And, oh, I need to add something and i apologize for missing this gosh that's okay there were um a couple of instances of odd text messages being received um one in particular was donalder, the stepfather, his boss, his supervisor at work, had gotten text messages from him during the course of the time leading up to February 28th. And one of them was, I'm still sick, going to need another week. And it wasn't normal for him to text in that manner. And one of the text messages said, I'm sick and I can't talk. So I, otherwise I would call you, but I have to text. I can't talk. So as adults, we know, what are the odds of this happening? You know, this is not something in our lifetime we've ever really heard of. It happens on sitcoms, you know, and things like that, but not in real life.

And so those were, that text message was one and the other one was at the school. So they had some suspicious meanderings going on with these text messages. But either way you look at it on February 28th, the police show up and that's when this case hits the media, because when they first walk in and Joe, this is something that I I've asked you before. And I wonder if there's a difference in communities and towns, counties, states, and things like that on when you're doing a wellbeing check as an officer, you walk in, you know, you're, you're not getting anybody at the door. You're not getting anybody on the phone. And, you know, you're looking for ways to get inside the house you know to see in what's going on in there and when they do when police do

finally get inside they find a body right they don't find a body sitting out in front what they do is in the garage they find um the mother's bmw is in the garage but the father's stepfather's uh vw atlas is not in the garage there's no dog they have a dog named toby toby's not there either but they do find um um miss cassab what is her name i apologize for that tatiana yeah tatiana cassab they find her body in a hallway adjacent to the kitchen and it's covered in blankets towels things like that and i'm wondering joe when police see that they have to determine that there's oh by the way when they got there they could when they opened the door they smelled death they that's what they smelled this and so it's the 28th of february in wisconsin and they smelled death now when they walk in the

police find this area in the hallway that it's got clothes and things piled up blankets and what have you but there's a body underneath i'm to guess you could pretty much tell based on things happening in that general vicinity of a body is there because it's deteriorating after they smelled it. Right? Yeah. Well, you'd have to confirm. And these are excellent questions. And this is actually the type of thing that we teach at Jack state with my students. Um, and I'll, let me just kind of break it down to you this way. I need you to, because I had, I'm, I'm serious. Well, Joe,

I've never, I've, I've been on scenes where there were bodies and things, but I'm not the official is I'm there after the fact as a journalist, usually, you know, or a family member. And so I was confused as to what would be the first step. I mean, even if you're the police officer, how far do they have to go? Because do they call you first? Say, I think we got a dead body or, I mean. Well, they will call us. They'll generally call. What will happen is the call will go out. And by the way, Wisconsin is a coroner state. So they still have coroners in Wisconsin. And, you know, it is one of those states that still elects a county coroner. And I've met some of them over the years. They're fine people.

They go through pretty extensive training. But, you know, it's like anything else in life. You don't know what you're going to get from county to county. But the coroner is somebody that you have to rely on in a set of circumstances like this. What the uniform division would do is that once they determined that they at least have this one body, first off, just because you smell something does not necessarily mean that it is human. Remember, you talked about Toby, the missing dog. Well, a dog's going to give off a foul odor too. It would appear that Tatiana, I've seen the images of her. She's not a very big person.

Matter of fact, there's one great family image of her with their son and the stepdad. And they're standing there and, you know, both these guys tower over her. You know, she's tiny. So you would have to confirm that you do, in fact, have a human body. You would do as little as you possibly could to disrupt those layers. Because Dave, for every strata of garment, blanket, I don't know, tablecloth, towel, each one of those has evidentiary value. The reason it does is that if you believe this is a homicide, which remember our working assumption that not some, but all deaths until proven otherwise are in fact

homicides, each thing that the perpetrator, and you have to assume that it's the perpetrator that covered the bodies, has put their hands on each one of these layers. So each layer has evidentiary value to it. Once the police had very, and I'm talking about the uniform division, once the uniform division, and hopefully there was a supervisor out there, that supervisor would look at anybody in a uniform in that house, stop what you're doing. Turn around. Exit out through this door. No other doors. Don't touch anything else. Pay attention to where you

put your feet. Be fully aware of your surroundings. Get out of this house. We're shutting the door behind us. We're calling CID, Criminal Investigation Division, Crimes Against Persons. Because not all police departments have a homicide division. The guys that work in Crimes Against Persons will handle rape, assault, ag assault. They'll handle homicides. It all kind of gets lumped in together.

You go to a bigger department and they'll have specific homicide investigators. But you're going to call CID and you'll say, get CID en route out here. You'll also say, we're going to have to get forensics en route, which means the crime scene unit is going to come out and, oh, by the way, get the coroner en route as well. But before any of those people can enter the house, you're going to have to go to a magistrate, the detective will. They will go to the magistrate that's on duty or the judge, and they'll say, look, we've, we got to get a search warrant. We've got a lady laying in a hallway covered by all manner of, of clothing and, you know, blankets and everything else. And it looks like we've got a homicide because you don't want to,

but you do not want to go into that house and start processing that scene and not have all of your bases covered. Because anything that you find in that house that does not have, and I'm talking about absent a warrant, anything you find in that house that's in a hidden space, say if you just kind of arbitrarily walk over and open a closet, you can open a closet door if you think there might be a body in there. Maybe you see fluid leaking out from under the door. Maybe it's blood, what you think is blood. You can open the closet. But if you get in that closet and you start digging around, you find some kind of valuable piece of evidence, guess what? Without a warrant, there's a high probability that whatever you find in that closet, it could be a kilo of cocaine can be excluded. So you have to be very, very careful. That's why, and a lot of people scratch their heads. Why do you need a warrant?

I mean, this is probably a homicide. That's all the more reason that you want a warrant because you're going to be backstopped by that legally. And that way you can do it. And it's not going to hurt anything for you. If you secure the scene, then there's no harm that's going to come. And let me tell you one other thing. In this case, they were able to find mom, and they were able to find stepdad, but they couldn't find the dog.

They couldn't find the car, and they can't find the son. Well, there's two parts, two major parts of this investigation. You've got the bodies in the house, which appear to be homicide, you know, the victims of homicide. And then you've got a son that's vanished and who's 17, by the way. He's a kid and the car is missing. You don't know that he hasn't been kidnapped. You don't know that, you know, he's being held somewhere. You also don't know if maybe he's a suspect. I mean, for me, being the jaded old investigator I am, he's at the top of the list. I got to tell you that but your other

part of the investigation is find this kid and find him immediately because the further away he gets there's a higher probability that evidence can be destroyed or he might escape capture uh you you do he's somebody you do want to talk to because he is domiciled at this location. You got two dead bodies and he's missing. And one of the family cars is missing. So you've got to do everything that you can to secure the scene so that CID can get out there in the corner and everybody. And oh, the other part to this is you got to track this kid now. And there's no, you don't need a warrant for that necessarily. You don't need a warrant to go to the school and maybe talk to the principal, the counselors. And that would be a separate set

of investigators that are going to go out and do that. And you're going to be handling this. There'll be one lead investigator that'll be in charge of everything. And there'll be the point of contact for the DA as well. And they'll kind of overlord the whole investigation. All right. Um, finding him and understanding what's going on at the scene. Um, and then once you get that kind of steadied, get the ship steadied, then you can begin to process the scene after you get that warrant. Because, Dave, this is going to be a highly complex situation that you're walking into. Because you have no idea. You've got two decomposing human remains here. You have no idea what the cause of death is.

And you've got to kind of narrow that down as quickly as you possibly can. First off, to see if you're actually dealing with a homicide or maybe something different. there's probably no greater iconic figure in motion picture history when it comes to playing the cop against the system um than the character of Dirty Harry, played by Clint Eastwood. And he famously said, and I think that it was actually in the first Dirty Harry movie, which is called Dirty Harry, that the.44 Magnum was the most powerful handgun in the world. That's no longer true. There are other ones that are more powerful now, but yet it's still formidable.

But it's not really practical. It's a huge weapon. It was never practical really for anybody to carry. But one weapon that is not quite as powerful but is revered is.357 Magnum. And.357 Magnum is an interesting weapon in the sense that it is.357 caliber in a magnum load, which means that you've got this chunk of lead in the end of a bullet, a live round, and you've got a magnum load of propellant in here. So you've got this driving it down the muzzle of this weapon. And when it slams into anybody, it's like being hit with a sledgehammer. Very powerful. And interestingly enough, in our case today that we're discussing, Dave, Mr. Mayer, the stepfather of this young man, had recently purchased a.35 magnum and guess what it's missing it's missing from not only is

the car missing toby the dog is missing the teen is missing the reaches recently purchased 357 magnum is missing as well now we've got as mentioned before, we actually have a little bit of a time frame between the last time anyone recalls hearing from Donald Mayer or Tatiana Kasap and her son attending school. And we also know that when police arrive, they find her body under a bunch of clothing. Now, what they've told us joe is that they've got multiple gunshot wounds to her yeah and donald mayor was found in an office in the home by the way this is a 3 000 square foot home four bedroom two and a half bath it's big i urge anybody out there to go take a look at the picture i'm sorry i didn't mean to interrupt you no buddy beautiful house nice neighborhood yeah and again you know the dog is missing and so is Go take a look at the picture. Beautiful house. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt you. No, buddy. Beautiful house. Nice neighborhood.

And again, you know, the dog is missing and so is the VW Atlas that is owned by Donald Mayer. Anyway, police get there and they find her in the hallway. That's when they walk back out. Let's get the search warrant. They come back. Now, they know they don't have the son and they don't have a car and they don't have a dog. So those three things are things they're they're looking for right now they find uh donald mayor in his office in an

office in the house and he's been shot once in the back of the head with that 357 magnet well i don't know how soon they figure that out but based on the wound as it's described but as they're trying to figure everything out, Joe, and I've I asked you early on about the smell. How long would it take before the smell hit? Because we are dealing with a number of days here between the time that they the police believe the killings took place and the day they were the bodies were found. But we have a 17 year old who is not in the home dead. Cars missing, dogs missing.

And so they put out they're doing a they're on scene at the house. They're examining the bodies. And we got to find this kid, find that car, look for this kid, find the dog. So anymore, we have these license plate readers. They everywhere we got surveillance cameras they're everywhere it's amazing if you haven't kept up with the times friends you are being tracked all day every day they were able to find they were able to find nicky and he was not home. They found Nicky the same day they found the bodies, Joe. They find Nicky 850 miles away from home the same day they find the bodies. They find him at 1120 at night.

And by the way, he's not dead. Obviously, we're doing the show about the son killing his mom and his stepfather. But I wanted to go back to the house now. Inside that house, they find that his mother has been shot multiple times. Yep. There's four wounds caused by three shots. Now, one of the wounds was to her right hand. Yes.

And I was wondering, because you've got two shots to the abdomen, one to the neck, was the wound in her right hand caused by her a defensive move, her putting her arm up? odd it's an odd thing to see but it does happen you will have a and i don't they have not released the autopsy report on the case but you can have a situation where say for instance someone is turning and i'm talking about the victim okay let's say the victim is kind of rotating at the waist and now the shooter is obliquely oriented to them. So they're on the side. I've had cases where in the abdomen in particular, where it's kind of flabby, you can have a round that initially enters kind of laterally, okay, goes through, exits, and reenters the body. And you can, yeah, and this happens with some frequency. It's not like if you saw it in the morgue, you wouldn't say, wow, what a finding, because it happens more than you know.

You know, people see old Western movies and I guess even movies today where people are shot and people many times appear to be static when they're shot. If you know that you have a weapon pointed at you and they're firing or you sense that they're going to fire, people will flinch. They'll turn. Nobody's going to stand still most of the time to be shot. They're going to react to the sight. And can you imagine with a.357 Magnum, if she sees this thing, the muzzle on this thing is going to look like you're looking down inside of a peach basket.

It's that big. Of course, it's not. But it's rather imposing. Well, she's going to react to that. Now, back to what you said. Can she be shot through the hand? Let's say that she raises her hand to her neck where the palm is out, okay? Yes, you can have a round that will go through and through. It's called a through and through wound. It would pass through the palm of the hand

or through the fingers, out through the back of the hand, and then back in to the neck. That can happen as well. And those injuries are rather interesting because let's just say, for instance, and we don't know this for a fact, but let's just say, for instance, everybody at home kind of feel the palm of your hand right now, and you can feel the bony structures within your hand, okay? Well, if you're shot through your hand, that projectile, that lead core projectile that is passing through the palm of your hand, there's a high probability it's going to strike bone. When it strikes bone, there's going to be potentially deformation to the round. So when it exits out of the hand, it enters the

hand, strikes bone, there's a wound track through the hand, exits, the bullet is not going to be pristine. Okay. When it comes out, it's going to be oddly shaped and you'll get kind of like in the neck, you'll get these kind of weird looking injuries where you have, and it's what it's referred to as we use a term for, it's called an intermediate target. And it doesn't have to be a body part. Like if somebody shot through a wall or shot through a piece of glass or shot through the door of a car, the bullet is changed forever. The projectile is changed because it becomes shredded. It becomes even more jagged. So you get these really nasty looking wounds. And so if they're... Except for November 22nd, 1963 in Dallas, Texas, a dealing class when Governor Conley was shot

through the wrist and everything else, and it was a pristine bullet that landed next to his thigh on the gurney. Exactly. And again, the pristine bullet theory. And of course, that's it's utter nonsense. I had to throw it in there. Sorry. Well, I'm glad that you did, particularly in the wake of everything that we're seeing now. We need to do another episode, I think. Anyway, I think you're right.

All right. So, yeah, you have you have this and right. And then she's got multiple gunshot wounds, but she's got multiple gunshot wounds, and this is really interesting. Mr. Mayer has got one. And I got to tell you, Dave, this goes back to the old adage theory or the way we view these things, why do you need to take a.357 Magnum and shoot this diminutive woman multiple times? Can you explain? And this is hypothetical. Can you explain that to me? Most people would look at this. I think behaviors might look at it and say well this borders on overkill it borders on overkill and that's where joe as i was looking at this

in my mind um because you know you started off the show talking about being around bodies you know and over a period of time you can see different types of bodies in different stages of decomp what have you yeah when i do stories even now i still have that hope when a child does something or when a parent does something that the victim doesn't know that the victim uh in the case of mr mayor i'm thinking okay he was shot in the back of the head uh with the 357 magnum i'm hoping it was by surprise that he never knew it was coming boom he's gone yeah i'm guessing if that were to happen now the mom knows something bad is happening and she's coming

and that's why she gets shot multiple times she's in it and she's in a different area of the house right in the hallway yeah and then my thing is i hate to think that the last thing this mother knew was that her son was doing this horrific thing allegedly but i want to go quickly to when the police arrived and we have both the bodies were covered with different things and you covered the how that has to be unlayered when the bodies are taken out of the home, are they taken up as a lump with the blankets, covers, or whatever is on them? Or are those removed and the bodies are placed in a bag? How are they transported so they don't lose all the possible forensic evidence in there? I got to tell you, in a case like this where you've got loose blankets, if it were me, I would document, let's just take mom's body.

I would document her body so well or the location where she is seen or viewed here at sight. I would go into painstaking detail about every aspect of this. And because I don't want to lose anything or transfer anything to the outer layers of the blankets that might be contained therein, because you're going to run that risk in a body bag. I'm not going to say it's like a tumble dryer, but you can have things that are mixed up in there as the body is bouncing down the road. I would take each layer off. If it's not secured, if the, say the perpetrator hadn't wrapped it with anything, if you're talking about wrapping a body, uh, this cocooned in blankets, that's a different story. But if you've got them just laying, I'm going to take up each individual blanket one by one, put it in a separate paper container, seal it up, label it, and it's going to go in individually. It's not going to accompany the body.

It's going to go with the crime scene tech back to their repository so it can make it out to the state crime lab. And I'm talking about layer. If I've got, look, and I don't know if this is the case, but let's just say, I'll pick an arbitrary number. Let's just say we've got 12 layers. You're getting 12 bags from me. Okay. You're getting 12 bags. Yeah. And, and I want each one of them to be examined. And here's a, here's one more thing that you, you got to think about.

Was she covered in blankets and then shot or was she shot and then covered in blankets? And you say, well, God, that's kind of obvious. No, there's nothing obvious in death investigation. You you say, well, God, that's kind of obvious. No, there's nothing obvious in death investigation. You know, your assumption, you have to consider all possibilities.

And it gets very complex. I mean, can you imagine how much more complex this would be if he, I don't know, some weird, bizarre set of circumstances happened and he tackles mom, he puts blankets all on the top of her because he's seen a movie that thinks it's going to muffle the sound. He starts firing through multiple layers of blankets into her body. Well, that's even going to make the rounds more deformed. You're going to get fiber evidence. I've actually recovered bullets, projectiles from bodies, Dave, that had bits of fiber twisted up in jagged edges of the projectile that are embedded in the body because it passed through, again, one of these intermediate targets, went into the body,

and then it's there. I found wood embedded in bodies that, you know, where you've got like particle board, where you've got rounds that pass through particle board and that kind of splinters and goes into a body. There's all manner of things. And it tells a very specific story about this. But Dave, you know, I'd be very curious to understand, I think with the stepfather in particular, you had mentioned that you were hoping that he didn't see it coming. I hope that he didn't either, to be honest with you. But one of the things they would have to figure out with him, I think particularly, this is kind of curious, this sounds like a classic execution style killing. I'd like to know if they were able to determine a range of fire. If the muzzle was placed directly against the back of his head,

this kid just walked up, the guy, you said he's in his office. Maybe you've seated in a chair. He didn't know it was coming. He walks up behind him, pops him, you know, right in the head. Or did he say, gee, stepdad, you know, I'd really like to handle that new.357 Magnum that you bought. Can I see it? And he hands it over to him and the thing's loaded and he looks at him and shoots him in the face, you know, because you say, or shoots him in the head while he's not suspecting that, you know, it can go either number of ways. You know, how did the kid know that the weapon was in the house?

How do you get access to it? Okay. Then with mom, where were her wounds oriented and what, what range of fire would there be? Because you're going to have with 357 Magnum in particular, uh, it's a Magnum round. So you're talking about a lot of propellant, Dave. And you will have stippling, you know, where this gets embedded into the skin and onto the clothing. We can determine range of fire based upon how far out it's spread on the remains or on the clothing. And that gives us an idea and all of a sudden you know the the focus on the story is becoming a little bit tighter now you know once you kind of establish

the physical relationship between the muzzle of that weapon being held allegedly by a son and the recipients of the rounds that you, whose bodies that the rounds were fired into. You know, when they actually were able to get to the sun and have, I mentioned earlier, he was 800 plus miles away. They used a number of different things, surveillance cameras, cell phones. When they did track him, the sun, they found him, like I said, you found the bodies early in the day, you know, with well-being calls. And this is now 12 hours later and they already got him, you know, 800 plus miles away. They were able to track this, his behavior, using his parents' credit cards and things like that, starting on February 12th all the way, the three 57 Magnum matching the description of Donald mayor's gun that he had just bought is found in the floorboard of the, well, when they caught Nikki driving the VW Atlas owned by his stepfather, that's who they caught him driving his car.

And the three 57 Magnum is on the floorboard along with unspent and spent shell casings. Yeah. You got bullets in there and spent shells. Do you think he picked them up in the house and left with them? I don't know. No, no, no, because.357 Magnum's a revolver. Okay. So what he did.

So they're going to be in the gun. Oh, yeah. And he probably dumped them, which when you open up the gate on a revolver and the cylinder spins out because it i say spin out you press it out there's an ejection rod on the thing so you press the ejection rod and all of those spent round well any round that's in there doesn't matter if it's live or spent are going to drop out now here's here's the interesting thing can we go back to the mom just one second well how many how many injuries did you say that she had sustained?

Three gunshot wounds, four injuries. Okay. So she's got three gunshot wounds, four injuries. Mr. Mayer has got a single gunshot wound. Okay. So.357 Magnums, these revolvers, can come in a configuration to hold five rounds in cylinder or six. Now, just so we all understand, because I know I'm going to get blowback on this. There is a semi-automatic 357 out there. It does exist, but the lion's share people do not possess these. Most of these platforms with 357 Magnums are revolvers. So if it's a semi-automatic, like you had said,

you know, did he pick up the rounds at the house or the spent casings, then yeah, if it's a semi-automatic. But my suspicion is that traditionally the.357 Magnum is something that you have in a revolver configuration. And I actually owned one or was issued one at one point in time years ago that was a Colt Lawman. I love that weapon. It was a actual snub-nosed weapon, and it was only five shots. The cylinder only held five rounds. But you can have the more robust, and for years, there were some cops that still carried.38 specials, But you had those that actually opted for a.357 Magnum. This is before the days of police officers being issued semi-automatic handguns, you know, with the Berettas and the Glocks and, you know, every SIGs and all these other brands that are out there now.

There were some police officers that preferred the 357 because they knew that the energy they were going to put on target if they had to use this thing was going to be substantially more significant than the 38 Special. All right. They knew that it would have more power to it. That's originally, you know, everything that we do in firearms, and this is kind of interesting, most in the civilian world, even in policing, has its origins in the military. You go all the way back to the turn of the 20th century from the late 1800s, before the invention of the 1911.45 caliber sidearm that our military carried, our officers and NCOs used to carry 38 specials.

And those rounds were insufficient. We'll put it to you that way. That's why they, you know, when they could get up to a 45 caliber semi-automatic handgun, they went to it because again, it was like, you know, it's getting hit with a 45, which is even more robust than 357 Magnum is like getting hit with a sledge hammer. So that's what we've got. Got that kid using that on his stepdad in the back of the head. All right. But let me go back to something else, Joe, because the bodies were so decomposed that they could not be identified. Now, how is that in the space of two weeks time inside of a home out of the elements? How is that a thing? I would have thought that granted, I understand odor. I understand that and decomposition, but talking about two bodies

inside of a home decomposing at such a rate that they could not be identified in two weeks time. Well, we're talking about Wisconsin. We're talking about the wintertime. And guess what you got going on in the house? You're running the heat, baby. And so there's constant heat. And for everyone that has to fight this fight that lives in areas where it turns off cold, our friends down in Florida might not have to deal with this too much, but, uh, where it's always having to fight that fight, that heater is always competing with the external temperature. And, you know, it's, you know, if you've got a drafty house or whatever thermostat is going to indicate that, you know, you've got the temperatures decreasing, so it's going to kick back on. So it's always in a state of, of having warmth.

And also here's, here's the thing, you know, you're the, the heat in a house varies from location to location. I mean, that kind of makes sense, but let's just say you're talking about mom's body being in the hallway where she's laying next to a vent. And on top of that, she's got these layers of fabric that are lying on top of her. That's going to further exacerbate. There are actually cases out there, Dave, where you will have people that have been homicide victims in homes where because of the location within the structure, one body decomposes quicker than the other body because of the relative position to like heating vents or cooling. It can work conversely as well. We saw this, not exactly the same thing, but we saw with Jean Hackman, which you and I have talked about extensively, where Betsy's body was found. They talked about her being mummified.

But Mr. Hackman had probably walked through that house for five days, I think, before he finally succumbed to, and of course, he had advanced Alzheimer's. But yeah, you think about just even the variation in the location within a structure can impact the rate at which bodies decompose. The fact that this kid stayed in this house for as long as he did, the fact that he allegedly tried to feign the still living existence of his parents through text messages and these sorts of things. The fact that he ran up almost $10,000 in the use of credit cards and debit cards and the fact that he stole that car and ran off with it. There's more to be revealed in this case, I can tell you that. But when you've got a young man who's 17 years old,

who allegedly executes both of his parents and indwells a house with their rotting corpses for this long, these still waters run very, very deep. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.