Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Teen Missing Two Months, Found Naked, Shot in Back of Head

Episode Date: June 23, 2024

Recorded LIVE at CrimeCon Nashville, 2024, in this Episode of Body Bags,  Joseph Scott Morgan explains how he challenges his class at Jacksonville State University to try and solve a cold case. Two years in a row, two different classes and students choose the unsolved murder of Blake Chappell. Blake Chappell tells his mother he is having the best night of his life with his girlfriend at the East Coweta High School Homecoming Dance. Within a matter of hours, Blake will find himself chased out of his girlfriend’s house in the middle of the night, walking down the road at 5 a.m. texting his girlfriend, and telling her police just stopped and talked to him. One last text to his girlfriend that he is getting cold, and his phone goes quiet. Blake Chappell is 17 and he never makes it back to his friend’s house. He just vanishes into thin air. It is October 16, 2011. Two months later on December 17, 2011, his nearly naked body is found floating in a creek, he has been shot in the back of the head. The case is still unsolved. But new search warrants were served in March 2024, will there be justice for Blake Chappell?      Transcript Highlights  00:00:13 Introduction Blake Chappel Case  00:04:40 Discuss of family financial issues  00:08:28 Blake finds ex-girlfriend who ran away  00:10:32 Blake beaten up by ex’s stepfather  00:12:26 Blake put in jail for finding his ex  00:17:35 Mother takes Blake and date to homecoming dance  00:20:48 Discussion of Blake activities walking in the night  00:24:24 Talk about Blake walking miles to see girlfriend  00:28:08 Talk about Blake texting girlfriend  00:31:49 Talk about Blake doesn’t make it back to Austin’s house  00:37:36 Discussion Blake shot in back of head  00:43:22 Discussion rumors about Blake’s death  00:48:12 Discussion Blake found wearing underwear, no shoes  00:52:34 Conclusion Joseph Scott Morgan lets his JSU class pick unsolved crime to solve  Two years in a row the case of Blake Chappel is chosen for the project See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Three years ago, I was asked at my university to start a cold case class. And knowing what I know about cold cases and knowing where we are in this world that we inhabit now in forensic science and in investigations, I felt that it was incumbent upon me, someone that had been on cold case squads in the past, that I should initiate this class and introduce my students, at least in an undergraduate level, to the process of cold case because it is highly complex. And for me, I wanted to introduce my children, my kids at Jacksonville State University, I fill out my children sometimes,

to the methodologies they're employed. And I've got to tell you something. Two years in a row, independent of one another, my students selected the same case without knowing about the other group to present in class, to run down the leads, to try to understand it, to try to make sense of it. And I knew at that moment in time when I had a second class that chose this same case, I knew that it was something I needed to talk about on Body Bags.

And it's an absolutely heartbreaking case. So today, we're going to talk about the death, the murder of Blake Chappelle. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this... Welcome to CrimeCon 2024 Nashville and thank you to our host here at Gaylord. I really appreciate it and thank you for all of our fans that have turned out, Dave, all of our friends. We'd like to call you guys friends as opposed to fans. We get such great comments from you all, encouragement which we need on a regular basis. And today, Dave, I want to discuss a case that is actually not too far away from where we live in Alabama, just literally across the state lines over in a place called Coweta County. And it might be a case that I

think that if we have, if we have parents in this classroom, I mean, in this, boy, I guess I need to- He is a real professor. I am a real professor. He doesn't just play one on radio. If we have parents, which I know that we do here, we can identify with the struggles of life. We can understand what it's like not to have much money at the end of the month. And are we going to be able to provide a living for our children? And today I want to talk about Blake Chappelle and his life with his mama that he had been with for all of these years. And they were on hard times. Just so you know, this case has multi-levels to it.

It's the murder of Blake Chappelle. It starts in 2011 with his murder. And it just had an, it's unsolved, but a new break in the case in March of this year. So we're talking a couple of months ago, police were serving search warrants on this case. When we were prepping for CrimeCon, we saw this and went, holy moly, good timing. Maybe we'll have something to add, which, by the way, we'll get into in a minute. But somehow Blake Chappelle and his mom, Melissa, and they didn't have much money. To give you an idea, Blake found it very important as a teen to help his mom in any way he could.

So this is a kid who didn't complain about it. He went to a convenience store on his way to school and bought monster drinks because parents say your kids can't have them, but when they get to school, hey, who's got one? And what he did, he marked them up. So he's picking them up at the old convenience store and upselling them by a buck a piece, and he's making money that way. I don't know about you, there aren't too many kids that think that way.

Blake did. He's also one of those kids that everybody liked. Nobody ever said anything bad about Blake, and they said he liked everybody. So we've got a kid, and by the way, his mother, she couldn't have been 40-ish, right? She had a stroke. So we're already impoverished. My mom has a stroke. I'm selling monster drinks at school to have some spending money and buy some shoes. That's the kind of kid Blake Chappelle was. When he's in 10th grade, he writes an essay called Poverty. And he said, most of you don't know this, but I used to not have a place to live. I'm paraphrasing. He's been three months homeless. And yet,

they had overcome that. And that was a perspective he was writing from. And his perspective as a 16, 17-year-old kid was that sometimes people end up impoverished through no fault of their own. And now he has sympathy and empathy for that because he's lived it. But he'd already grown the maturity in that essay was phenomenal. And all I could think of, this is the kid I would want my kids to hang out with. And to see what happened to him breaks your heart. The fact that all these years later, we're talking about this and his mom doesn't know who did it. The police don't know who did it. The only people they've ever even thought about, they haven't even told us their names.

And they've cleared two of the three people. The third person they know wasn't there. So they got three persons of interest. They've cleared two of them. And the third one they know wasn't there. That's how unsolved this case is. So. We're coming into it cold in this sense. And it is a cold case. And to go ahead and kind of give you a little preview,

Blake's body was actually found tossed away like garbage in a stream, in a creek adjacent to, and this is kind of the irony of it, I find, it's a relatively affluent area where he was found. As a matter of fact, the little road, there was a little bridge where his body was found adjacent to, it was adjacent to a golf course. And, you know, Blake is probably the kid that would never have an opportunity to join a golf club. But here he is, his mortal remains are found there and they're in a state of decomposition and uh here we have this young man whose life has been snuffed out but i think that it's important to understand as well you know kind of how it all started

relative to when he disappeared uh when bl actually, this whole thing starts, you know, like we'd mentioned. It actually begins way before that. It begins, the story that we have to break out. And the reason it's so confusing is Blake had a girlfriend that ran away from home in May. This happened in October. And if you back up to May, that's where one of your suspects comes from. Yeah, it does. And here's the rub, if you will. This young lady, Skyler, that he was involved with, had a stepfather who was a convicted felon. This is the guy you see on TV shows where you go, you know, that's the guy that did it. Yeah. You know, you're 10 minutes into the Lifetime movie going, okay, he's the one going to jail.

That's him. Yeah. Is the news coming on now? Yeah. Oh my gosh. What trailer park are they hiding in now? Yeah. Is this guy packing a gun and, and what he, oh my gosh. That's why the girl ran away. Yeah. And if you can imagine, Blake was not the biggest kid, but she had, he was trying. 59125. She was trying to track, he was trying to track her down. And he was essentially trying to inject or interject himself into the situation to get her safe. And he finds her. He did.

Well, they actually had been dating, but they had broken up and she had run away from home. This shows you the heart of Blake. They're not even an item. Blake goes to find her. He knows pretty much the places she would probably go. He finds her. He's trying to convince her to go back home because this doesn't end well when you're a runaway and your parents are looking for you, even if it is a bad stepfather. Problem is, stepdad and two of his buddies are also looking for Skylar and they find her and Blake. Because Blake found her first, stepdad and two of his redneck buddies show up at the same time. And this stepfather proceeds to beat this 16-year-old kid. And I said 5'9", 125. That's a very slight young man. That's not a heavy guy. And this man beat him. And then this stepfather filed charges against Blake. It was custodial interference. The stepfather

convinced the police that Blake convinced Skylar to run away with him, and he was hiding her from her parents, and they arrested him. And because Blake was in such a financial situation, not very well off, the kid spent 16 days in jail because he couldn't make bail. When it finally got in front of a judge, they dropped the charges. But this 16-year-old spent 16 days in jail because the stepfather was never charged. No, he wasn't. And if memory serves me correctly, he had actually presented with a weapon at one point in time. Don't be me, sorry. And if you can imagine this, just imagine, think back to that period of time in your life. You know, when you were 16, you thought you knew everything, but you really didn't.

And sometimes life will throw you curveballs on it. And suddenly the big curveball in Blake's life is the fact that he's got this ogre of a guy that's there. Convicted felon. Convicted felon. I'm sure he knows this guy's history because it's coming from his girlfriend. And this big, robust guy pulls up his shirt like this, and he's demonstrating a weapon to Blake. Now, Blake later relates all of this, but he's, he's beat, he's beaten significantly by this man. And it was at that point in time that this guy actually has a nerve to go and file charges against Blake. And as Dave had mentioned, and we have to go back to the situation with Blake and his mother.

I don't know if any of you guys have ever experienced poverty in your life. I come from a family that's like that, that's broken. We've had nothing, me and my mom. And I understand what it's like to live off of bologna sandwiches, if you have that. Or a sandwich. You ever have a sandwich? Where you have two pieces of bread and nothing in between it? Can you imagine?

Mom has a stroke five six years earlier she's got a son who desperately loves her wants to provide for her he hears how i don't know if we're going to be able to make the note on the rent this month i don't know if we're going to be able to keep the lights on this month you can can forget about internet. Oh, and your phone, you can't have a phone. He didn't get a phone until sometime later. And then it was a pay as you go text phone. It was text only. The phone we're going to talk about in a few minutes was text only. It was text only. So they're scraping by. Can you imagine what it would be like for, to be a mama that is greatly debilitated as a result of a stroke and she has no way to really truly take care of her son there's not a dad necessarily in the picture but yet her son

becomes almost like a surrogate husband at that point in time where he's trying to provide and you know the best way he can do this is to try to scrape together any kind of pennies that he can. And I think that, you know, when you have a child like Blake, Dave, that they they want love, they want adoration so desperately. They go around and they try to find families that they can integrate into where they can just feel that. And unfortunately, it seems like Blake is certainly the first run, at least with Schuyler's family, chose the wrong one in the bunch. And to give you an idea, his bail was $2,500. It's $250 to a bailman. They didn't even have that. So he spent 16 days in jail rather than come up with $250. Now, we tell you all that because that happened in May. After Blake gets out of jail, and again, like I told you, as soon as it got in front of a judge,

the charges were all dropped and everything went away. But his mom realizes what, first of all, her son was beaten by a man, and nobody charged him with a crime. Her son spent two and a half weeks in jail, so she moves. She's like, we're out of here. Now, things had gotten a little bit better for them financially. But, you know, paycheck to paycheck, moving, not a cheap thing to do on a good day. And she did it anyway because she was worried about Blake's physical safety from a man who beat him up and then got him put in jail.

To be honest with you, I understand that. Yeah, I do, too. And she's trying to protect it the best way she can. And they move from, if you're not familiar with kind of the metro Atlanta area, if you think about Atlanta on a clock face, down at about the 7 o'clock position, I guess, they lived where this initial incident took place in an area called Clayton County that's immediately due south of Atlanta. She decides, and probably the best that she could do, because any kind of little network of support that she would have would still be kind of accessible to her, they moved to Coweta County at that point in time.

And this is where, so not only isake having to contend with being in jail being beat up by a felon who you know demonstrates a gun to him um he's broken up with his girlfriend his mother's had a stroke they don't have any money oh he's got to integrate into a new school right and so and if any of you guys have ever been the new kid in a school, can you imagine to show up in this set of circumstances? But yet from everything that we can surmise from his history, he's making friends everywhere he goes. He has this kind of bright affect. He gets along with people. He integrates into this environment. But unfortunately, I got to tell you folks, when they moved to Coweta County, it seemed as though that Blake's death warrant was served.

For everybody in the audience, close your eyes and just think back to what it was like in high school. And maybe you can still remember the excitement of prom or the excitement of homecoming. And those moments in time that, you know, you're excited about the possibilities that were going to occur that night hanging out with friends going to dances uh you know back in my day we used to give corsages i don't know if they do corsages i think it might be a southern thing you know the women is homecoming a big deal like outside of the southeast okay it's a big deal no matter where you are no matter where you are but i don't think they do corsages anymore. Really? Oh, look at me. Okay, wait a minute. Now it's become bigger than when we were in school.

Yeah, I guess it is. Okay. They have limos now. They take them to homecoming. Oh, my word. Yeah. Well, that's right. Oh, yeah.

The girls don't have to. It's unaccompanied. Yeah. But, you know, I mentioned, there you go. I mentioned limos, right? Yes. What do you think the chances are that Blake Chappelle had a limo that was going to pick him up and was going to take his date? You know who his limo was? Mama. Mama was his limo that night. And it was October. OK, to make sure we're on the same page here.

You know, we told you about Skyler, the ex-girlfriend who ran away and led to the beating that led to the move. Now we're in October. He's in a new school. He's got a new group of friends that they love him. They talk great about him. And he's got a new girlfriend named Ryan. It's spelled R-I-O-N. Why do parents do that to their kids?

I don't know. But I'm just thinking, I wish I'd done that to mine. you know, so they'd have a real reason to be mad at me instead of just making stuff up. But Ryan, R-I-O-N, and they just clicked. They just, in a good way, they really clicked. And now, I don't know if Melissa was giving them a ride or if it was Ryan's mother. It depends on there's a lot of mixture here. But the bottom line is that Blake didn't have a car. His mom was his car and mom took them to eat. They went to this really nice Japanese steakhouse. Mom picked them up after dinner and then took them to the dance, which was at Kawita High School.

East Kawita. Right. Yeah. He's quite Kaweta High School. And they went in, and the best part of all is I became a DJ because I have no rhythm, can't dance. And the only way you're going to meet girls if you can't dance is be the guy playing the music. And back when we played records and stuff, that was pretty cool. It's different now when you're a DJ.

Back then it meant playing records. Now it means making up music as you go. But he could dance and he did. And I'm watching this. There's videos of him online, you know, from the dance. And he's he had such a great time that night. This is a kid that is not pretentious by any stretch of the imagination. His mom, he's so close with her, he shares with her these videos of him dancing and telling, this is the greatest night of my life. That's probably one of the things I wish my children would have said to me if they had gone to a high school event. I've had so much fun. This is the best night. On top of everything else, they have to get, you know, mom comes and picks them up after the dance, and they go back to Ryan's house to watch a movie. Now, while they're at Ryan's house, it's still early, okay, they left the dance. Remember, it is a high school homecoming dance, so they're done by about 10 o'clock or so.

Yeah, she actually picks them up at 10 30 p.m., exactly. And they go back to Ryan's house to watch a movie. Now, already ahead of time, he was planning on going to his buddy's Austin. After going and hanging out with Ryan for a while, he was going to go back to his buddy's Austin's house. And so Ryan's mom took him from Ryan's house to his friend Austin's house. Once there, that's when he actually, it was then when he actually told his mom, this is the greatest night of my life. Thank you very much. Thank you, mom. You know, and he actually talked her into letting him spend the night at Austin's. It was something they had discussed earlier. And according to Melissa, after talking to him about how great

of a night it had been, she said, sure, you can spend the night with Austin but Austin did not go to the homecoming dance that night he was not there so he's introduced into the picture now right deducing this it's important when you know everything else that comes next it's important no he did not go to the dance yeah he did not and here here's something interesting what do teenagers have a proclivity for doing when they say that they're going to spend the night at somebody else's house? Yeah, well. May as well say they went to a Bible conference, you know. They didn't do that. It wasn't Bible study, that's for sure.

But Blake, Blake went to Austin's house. Mom dropped him off. So guess what Blake does? He doesn't have a car. He starts walking. Well, first, they walk to a convenience store to get a pack of smokes. A pack of smokes, and the place was closed. They go back to Austin's at this point in time, and it's from there that they depart,

that he departs on foot, and guess where he's going? He's going back to Ryan's house, his date from that night. And that's where things really take kind of a sinister turn because it's at this moment in time that when you graph this out and you begin to understand that this child is on foot. It's several miles too. It is. Okay. After they went to the convenience store first where they were going to buy smokes, but it was closed. It was what a mile and a half. So you, you know, that's nothing for a couple of kids this age to walk back and forth, but walking from Austin's house to Ryan's house. Yeah. Three miles. Yeah. It's at least

three. Uh, there's one estimate depended upon the way he went. It could have been four. So he's got it bad. He wants to go back to Ryan's house and he is there. He sneaks into her home. In her bedroom. In her bedroom. Middle of the night. Yeah. And well, there you go. As the father of two daughters, I can tell you, the three o'clock in the morning outfit of every dad with the daughter, underwear and a Louisville slugger. That's what you're seeing. You're going to see an overweight middle-aged guy that doesn't fear prison anymore. You know?

Grab a shovel. I got your property. You're done. And he knows me, so there you go. And that's what happened. But it wasn't the dad that made the discovery. It was grandma who lived. So we were told. And grandma, of course, is shocked, as you can imagine.

Now, how dumb are kids? This shows you how smart 16-year-old kids are. He snuck in, but they make so much noise, they wake up Granny. Granny, yeah. He snuck in through her window. Yeah, I know. Granny catches him. He dives.

This is like a Beverly Hillbillies episode or something, man. He dives out the window. We don't even know if he has his clothes on because he's out. He is. And then he starts on this journey where he's leaving. But he's got this phone that we had mentioned that is a text-only phone. And guess who he's texting? It's not his mother.

It's not Austin. It's actually Ryan's mother. And what he is attempting to do is to apologize he's apologizing for disrespecting their home for behaving like this he actually said I'm sorry I broke your rules that's the character of Blake Chappelle I'm sorry I broke your rules he's acknowledging he knew the rules, that they had acknowledged it with him, and he broke them. I thought, I don't know too many adults that take that kind of accountability anymore. No, I don't either. But, you know,

I think that in a world like this that he occupies, where every relationship that Blake has along this continuum that he lives in is valuable to him. He doesn't have much in the way of material items. So every relationship that he has, to me at least, is an indication that there is value there. Even if you go back to the relationship that he had with Skylar, now they were no longer an item, but yet they were staying in touch and he wanted to find her because she had run away. And there's an undercurrent with that relationship relative to her family situation. I didn't really think about how important that was to him. I didn't think about it until right

now that that's why he was reaching out because he wanted to mend that fence before it got totally torn down. Yeah, I know. You're talking about a kid that just has been introduced into this environment. It's new. He's trying to make friends. He's been at the home. And can you imagine going to the heights of joy, of being able to express this out on the dance floor to enjoy your friends, you're decision where you're going to say, you know what, I think I'm going to push all in here and see what happens. See what happens. Can I make it back to her house and engage in whatever kind of activity they were engaging in at that moment in time?

This is what happens when you do Nancy Grace's show so often. You have to act like you don't know what they were really doing no they were they were telling stories they were trading jokes that's what they were doing dave talk to me in normal normal people speak i'm just a jd i'm not a p yeah so we're he's in this position where he's having, he's literally pleading to be in her life. He's made a friend. He's made probably an intimate friend at this moment in time. And that's the one thing in value, these friendships that he has. But here's the problem.

When he exits that house, when he starts back on this journey, this trek to his home, he's never seen again alive. If you are in a situation where you don't know where your child is, and I think that all of us have experienced this over the course, courses of our lives collectively. I know where my son is. He's here on the front row right now, but I don't have to worry about him anymore because he's an adult. But those moments and times reflect back just for a second when you have children and you have this overwhelming fear that kind of seeps into your soul. It kind of corkscrews into your spine where you're thinking, oh my gosh, where's my child? Where's my child? And no matter how much

you scream, how much you plead, there's no bringing them back at this point. And I think that most of the time, and I think that this is the way the police began to view this, Dave, is that when you have a 16-year-old that admittedly has this kind of unbalanced life, I won't necessarily say troubled. Now, he spent time in jail, but that doesn't mean he's a bad kid. No, he's fine with that life. But for a mom trying to find her child, I think that the authorities, and we know this for a fact, they viewed this, they viewed his absence as a runaway. And so you've got a 16-year-old that, and there are many of them, you hear about them here at CrimeCon, that are missing out there, that no one knows where they are and everybody's searching for them. But in

this particular case, uh, people for the longest period of time thought, um, thought that Blake was actually a runaway. And I remember he left the house sometime around four 30. You know, we've gone through this timeline of when they got back home, when he left to go back to Ryan's house, when dad or grandma caught them, and when he left. But what we do have is text messages. You know, he had the phone.

We mentioned it was a prepay, text-only plan at the time. This is 2011. And he was texting Ryan. After he had left, he texted texted the mom I'm really sorry I broke your rules texting Ryan he actually texts her between 5 and 5 30 that morning while he's walking and he tells her I've been stopped by the popo around five o'clock he says the police now there are two different things serving that area one is the county sheriff's department Coweta

County and then there's the police department that could have also been stopped, but nobody has a record of that. Nobody. And that's, that's one of the striking things about this case is that why, why would a 16 year old state that he had been stopped by the police at that time of day? Why would they have a record of that? But yet the police, I mean, who would even begin to that up yeah unless it's just this fanciful thing that he's he's talking to Ryan about to try to I don't know get sympathy or whatever the case might be but he did complain in that text about being cold yeah he's walking think about it now we're talking in the middle of October in the south I mean it does get cold here and October 15thth yeah october 15th yeah that's they'd be chilly you know it's not gonna be freezing but yeah he's not wearing well we know that he left

um his overcoat and jacket we know the only thing he wore when he went to ryan's house was this long-sleeved shirt he left his other stuff at austin's house so when we're kind of assuming here because we don't know we have to put pieces together because we know that the police and sheriff's department don't have any record of an officer coming into contact with any teenager that time. No, no record of that anywhere. We just have the text messages between Blake and Ryan. And procedurally, what in case you're not aware of it, any time and you see these only these uh procedural shows well procedural but let's just say that it's uh cops or something like that where if a police officer pulls somebody over and in this case they're stopping a pedestrian most of the time they'll say uh you know the

police officer the traffic would go something like uh yeah uh headquarters be advised. I've got a young white male. He's a pedestrian. I'm going to step out and talk to him. Yeah, because what if the guy pulls a gun and shoots him? If he doesn't call it in, nobody knows. And there's a record of that most of the time. But, you know, you can have these events where a police officer might see somebody walking down the street. And just keep in mind, every time that you record that many times, depending upon the department, you're going to have to write a report. All right. So did a police officer pull up adjacent to him and say, hey, son, why are you out at this time? What are you doing out here? Because it doesn't make sense. There's no one around here. Why are you here? This sort of thing. And, of course, there's no record of it.

And that's where, you know, I mean, that's where Blake at this point in time, except for this interaction that he had with Ronnie, kind of falls off of the face of the planet. We don't know what's happened to him. It's done. At that moment, all contact with Blake ceases. And, by the way, from that moment on, nobody talked to him. Nobody saw him.

There was no text message. Nothing after 530 in the morning on that time. Right after he said he saw the police. Yeah. And so this is October. We've gone into the morning from October 15th, which the dance was on that night. Now we're into the morning of October 16th. He's not seen.

So they put out a bolo for him. Well, and it actually starts with the family, remember? Yeah. Because first it's like, yeah, they're checking because, well, Brian, we know we pushed him out of our house before the sun was up. Did he make it back to Austin's house? He didn't make it back to Austin's house. So now Ryan and her parents know that, where's Blake? Now they don't call his mom right away. And this is a little frustrating for me as a parent. You don't know where my kid is and he was in your

house and you're telling me at 1130 in the day? It took hours before they notified Melissa that they didn't know where he was. Matter of fact, Ryan's dad went out hunting at eight o'clock that morning. I don't know about you being in the Southeast. I've talked to Joe about it. Men don't go out hunting at eight in the morning. You go out hunting at four in the morning. You don't leave the house at eight in the morning, but that's what Ryan's dad did. He went hunting at eight in the morning. He's already out there when they call him and say, hey, we can't find Blake. You need to come home. They still haven't called Melissa. All the talking has been between Ryan, her mom, grandma, her dad,

and Austin. And that's all we've got. Then they finally, when they can't find him, you know, they drive the route between the houses, can't see him anywhere. Then they notify Melissa. She finds out and immediately calls police. Hey, my son is missing. Go find him. And to be honest with you, for the next six weeks, seven weeks, eight weeks, they're not really even looking for him. Oh, they did the basics, right? They checked the route that he went on. They might've walked it. They drove it. They didn't see anything. He ran away because he had been involved with Skyler six months earlier and she had run away and he was with her. And oh my goodness, he's probably just running away from a bad situation. That's how they played it. He was not a bad kid. December rolls around. Yeah, December 19th rolls around, and you have pedestrian traffic that's adjacent to this golf course and to the driving range. And someone happens to look down over this tiny little bridge that's in this kind of bucolic-looking setting.

It's beautiful. The leaves are changing. In December, you still have leaves on the trees in this area of the country. It's cool out. They look over, look down in the creek, and there they spy something that doesn't quite fit with the rest of the scenery, if you will. And that's where they found this young man's body adjacent to the shoreline of this little creek. It's hung in brush. He's only wearing an undershirt and a pair of underwear, his pants.

I'm sorry, his shorts. And he's absent everything else. There's no phone. There's no money. There's no ID. There is absolutely nothing. Now, at this point in time, no shoes whatsoever. And this is a big question, I think, from a forensic standpoint. When I began to contemplate this and kind of the actions that go hand in hand with this, would you dump somebody right there? Or could they narrow down the location where he was last seen?

Is this part of the route? There's all kinds of things that play into this because, you know, I've worked cases over the years where people have just taken bodies and thrown them into bodies of water. What do you think the number one, I'm asking this question, truly this is not rhetorical, what do you think the number one reason is that people like to take bodies and toss them into water? They need a bath. No, to get rid of evidence, to get rid of evidence, and to make that trace evidence or anything that's there disappear, essentially. And I've contemplated this about Blake's case, and I've really wondered, had someone taken him and driven him about?

Had someone, you know, attempted to terrify him or terrorize him because, you know, when they finally got his body back to the state medical examiner's office, Blake had an intermediate gunshot wound to the back of his head. You say intermediate. How far are we talking, John? Yeah. Well, with an intermediate, it's really we measure it in inches. So when you begin to think about firearms, and a lot of it, you can't, this is not a static number, all right? So people will have, there's variability here.

When someone is fired upon like this and they're shot, the projectile is not the only thing coming out of the weapon. You guys have been at CrimeCon long enough to understand that. You also have what remains behind as far as unburnt powder, any kind of other debris that might be in the barrel of the weapon. And so you're going to have this deposition on the area that is being struck by the projectile, and it will kind of rain in. It loses velocity really quickly. So if you're thinking about perhaps unburned powder, which leads to stippling, you've heard that term, that surrounds the injury, it doesn't have the same aerodynamic qualities as, say, for instance, a projectile, lead core projectile. And you can do this at home.

If you'll just take a bit of baby powder and put it in your hand like this and blow it, and particularly in front of a mirror, you'll see it begin to kind of rain down. You think, God, Morgan, that's kind of simplistic. Well, it's science, and it's very simplistic it's we understand this there are dynamic qualities of this powder kind of drift down so you have to be close enough and get a hold of this concept you have to be close enough so that when that weapon is initiated it's going to imprint imprint that unburned powder onto the surface of the skin.

Okay, so it'll be just underneath. You'll see these little flecks of powder that are there microscopically. We can take them out. We can also take tissue sections and take a look at this. And depending upon how close it is, you'll have like within underneath the scalp, you can actually see smoke that's there that's deposited. Sometimes you'll have a greasy ring. Sometimes you'll have this kind of staining that goes on. So dependent upon how far away you are is going to dictate the amount of this debris that winds up on the skin. So with an intermediate

round you've got a projectile that's entering the head and the rest of the debris is falling away, but there is essentially enough there to get an idea of range of fire. That's why they're calling it an intermediate round. Now, to this date, the police have not released the actual caliber of the weapon that was used. I think one of my big questions, because they haven't released the autopsy report on Blake's remains, is, well, what type of caliber was this? They're saying pistol caliber, so that can mean anything from, you know,

a.22 caliber pistol all the way up to, you know, there's.50 caliber pistols. So you've got that broad of a spectrum here. Now, if I were a betting man, I'd say, you know, you're probably one of the most common caliber relative to a semi-automatic is going to be a nine millimeter. That's what most, most people are going to carry. You'll have forties. If people still carry revolvers, you might have a 38, but that's a very common round to have. Um, so did they recover, uh, around out of Blake's skull? They haven't stated.

Is it a through and through wound? It was just one shot though, right? It's a, it's a single shot. Isn't that odd though, that somebody that is shot and not right up against the head, but you're talking a little distance away. Normally we have multiple shots, even if it is to the head, just to make sure, you know, could you always talk about the kill shot? Yeah.

But not in this case. Yeah. And this is proximity. Where's he shot? In the head? Yeah. Shot, shot, shot in the is to the head, just to make sure, you know, because you always talk about the kill shot. Yeah. But not in this case. Yeah. And this is proximity. Where's the shot? In the head? Forehead? Shot in the back of the head, from what we understand. And so you've got this, and I always talk about in relation to firearms, I always talk about asymmetry. So if you've got someone that is actually being killed, you will have the perpetrator, and this is kind of obvious, you have them in a dominant position over the victim. So they're firing down many times. So you'll have these trajectories that enter on the posterior aspect of the skull, for instance, and they proceed, you know, forward. So you'll have this kind of above to below, front to back, and then you can

say whether or not it's from left to right or from right to left directionality. But why is that important? Well, it's important because it gives you an insight into the intimacy of the relationship between the victim, in this case Blake, and the perpetrator. So who would have the ability to take this young man, this 16-year-old, and put him into a position where they are dominant over him with a weapon. We already know he's had one weapon presented to him at some point in time within the last few months in his life, okay? So there's probably an indwelling fear. I don't know about you guys, but I can speak to myself. If somebody presents with a weapon in my face or adjacent to me, there's a chance, you know,

a lot of us can be real bold and we can say things, but when you're staring down the barrel of a weapon, you're going to, at least to a certain degree, you're going to submit. Okay. And you're talking about a 16 year old kid. So what do you do? Do you take him and put him on the ground and stand over him and fire into him? Do you have him in the backseat of a car? Do you go into the backseat of the car with him and fire into him? Do you take him to some other location, perhaps, shoot him there, maybe leave a casing, maybe you're smart enough to recover the casing, then you put him into a vehicle and you transport him to that location? Either way, I think that there is probably, we can surmise that there's probably a vehicle involved in this. And what would be really interesting, and we're so far

down the road now, I don't know if it would be possible to recover this, but any kind of biological evidence or firearms evidence that you could find in a suspected vehicle. But, you know, we're, I don't know, Dave, we're many years downrange now. Thirteen years. Yeah, thirteen years. It'll be 13 this October. All I'm thinking is if he's in the car and, well, first of all, time of day. Okay. You're talking about controlling somebody that for no reason, I mean, again, talk five o'clock in the morning. Let's just use that as a time, okay? Yeah.

Between 5 and 5.30 a.m., who knows he's walking on the road at that time? Yeah, who would know that this child... Yeah, is going to be alone. Yeah, is going to be alone, that there's not going to be anybody else around him. He's already been in a very distressing... Can you just vision this for a moment? You've got a kid, and I know I mentioned this earlier, but just imagine he's at the height, he's at the ultimate ecstasy in his life relative to this dance, right? We already know that he's at the height he's at the ultimate ecstasy in his life relative to this dance right we already know that he's he's reached out to mama and told her this best night of my life and then all of a sudden you know he makes this decision with this young lady goes into a room he's horribly

embarrassed have anybody in here ever been embarrassed like this i have you're in these circumstances you're humiliated now you're you're hoping that you can just hold on to some semblance of this new life it kind of depends on when they got interrupted as to how he really felt about it i mean yeah i know exactly and you don't know i gotta tell you a little bit earlier then it's a little different than if it's later i mean right but either way you've got you've got somebody from an older generation that comes in, into this room. How embarrassing. I forgot about granny. Yeah. There you go. And so you imagine that scream. I know. And he's totally, he's totally humiliated at this point

in time or relative to relative to what has occurred in his life in this very short period of time. And now he's cast out of the house. He's on his own. He's reaching out to this young lady and to her mother. And then he vanishes off the face of the planet here. You know, there's all kinds of rumors that have kind of floated around about, about Blake's death.

And Dave laid this one on me real quick. You had mentioned this. There's actually this blurb that came out. What was it that said that? There's a podcast, and this is why you kind of have to be careful of what you listen to. There's a podcaster who's claiming that the autopsy report that the police said the body had only been in the creek for a week. Now, if Blake's body had only been in that creek for a week, where was he for the seven weeks between the time he was last heard from until the time they found him? Now, I'm telling you this because I hit him up with it this morning when we were just, you know, you want to get updated. I don't want to come in here and not

have the most current stuff for you guys. And I saw that. I said, hey, have you seen this anywhere? So I spent an hour today trying to verify this. I'm talking about calling the police, calling the sheriff, calling anybody I could at the GBI. And I can't find anybody that'll verify. They said the autopsy report hasn't been released, period. So whoever is claiming this in a podcast is making it up. So we can throw that out the window. It doesn't make sense that because you realize that if that's the case, then somebody had his body stashed for seven weeks and then decided to kill him. I think most of us would believe that he was probably killed the last night he made that last text. Yeah. And what we have learned is that his body was actually beginning to change colors. And that's a marker for us from a medical

legal perspective. There's desiccant, even though he's, just follow me here just for a second, give me some rope. Even though he's in a water, an aquatic environment, and he's not fully submerged. He was floating. And he was caught on the brush there in the brush yeah he is um oh and by the way the location where he is found is not a location that you would walk down to the bank and the reason i know this is that the first group the first group of my students that that uh presented this case two years ago now, they physically drove out there. They went to the site. My students did.

And you can't access the water this way. You would have to go through so much brush in order to do it. So that leaves us with one conclusion, right, relative to the bridge, that more than likely there's a high probability that he was what? William Williams. Yeah, pushed off the bridge, and he's there's a high probability that he was what? William Williams. Yeah. Pushed, pushed off the bridge and he's there in the water and he is hung in the brush

and his body is in a state. If, if we are to believe what has been reported that the body is decomposed so badly, he had a lip ring that was right here that he got into a lot of trouble over with his mother. And additionally into that, he had gotten a Playboy bunny tattoo. It was one of the ways they identified him. And he was really not happy about that. And I think that it was an older brother that was not in his

life that had signed for it. And so he's undressing at one moment in time. And she's like, what, what is that? What is that on you you know and he's like oh you know i went and got a tattoo so that's how they had to identify him okay a chrome ring in his lip and also the fact that he had this tattoo on his person and that's what they went with i think they bolstered that with uh records later. But it puts them on the right path at that point in time relative to who they thought this might be. And there were posters about it, this sort of thing, and this sort of thing relative to they were looking for him. But here's the thing. When he's found, and going back to the condition of the body, he's only found in his underwear, and he has no personal belongings with him, including shoes, which I think is really something to look at.

And cases that I've covered in the news and also things that I have worked, we talk about embarrassment just a little while ago. Is there any other kind of situation, I know that there are many, but where immediately you could really humiliate somebody and threaten them by making them strip all of their clothes off? Because you feel very vulnerable before the world. And that's an active event that has to take place. Take your clothes off, take your shoes off. That's an action event where you're having, and you're essentially putting him into submission at that point in time. And I guess, and I could say, I could say they stripped the clothes off the body, but why leave the underwear? So when you see this young man humiliated like this, and his body is dumped

off like refuse off of this bridge, and he's found floating out there in the water, it really gives you insight into, I think, the person that may have done this. Go ahead. What if dad caught him after grandma caught him in the bedroom with his 16-year-old daughter? And dear old dad, he's got his underwear on. He's able to pull that up. He's barely got his shirt on. He doesn't have nothing. And dad loses it and takes him off.

He loads him up in the truck, dumps him over the side of the river. He gets rid of the clothes because he didn't have them on to start with. He just finished up with my 16-year-old daughter. You're dead. And then I'm going to stage all this in case they decide to test me for GSR, and I'm going to go hunting at eight in the morning. And that's certainly something that has to be, and I hope that that is something that's being factored into the investigation. He passed a polygraph test, so did his wife, so did Ryan, and they searched their house. No evidence of anything however i have to say this to you when my kids chose to do this case dave was in this past january that's when this

this semester started this previous semester thank god it's over with now when in january when i had my kids go through the process of selecting the cold case they were going to cover, they chose Blake's case. As we were walking, and you kind of gave a hint at this earlier, as we were working our way through this case, my kids were at the time. They came to me and they said, Professor Morgan, you're not going to believe this, but they served search warrants in a place called Sharpsburg, Georgia. And this was back in March. Yeah, this is when we were talking about the newest evidence. Yeah, this came out. And if you can expand on that.

March 24th. They had, there have been two things that have happened since this case. Okay. Two big things. One, in 2011, so it has to be between December 19th and the end of the year, police have said in 2011, they received an anonymous tip that had information about the murder. Actually, real information.

Years later, they received a second anonymous tip letter. They believe it is from the same person. And I believe it is the combination of these tips that have led them to what they have done in the most recent search in March. They searched three separate locations in Sharpsburg, Georgia, and it wasn't in any of the places that you would think. And Joe and I were looking at this going, well, wait a minute. Do the same people live in those homes, in the places that were searched, that were there in 2011? If they're not, they're searching the backyard. What would be buried in the backyard?

What could they recover back there? How much effort does it take to get rid of a young man's clothing and also a phone? Not much. I mean, that could have been burned up. It could have been disposed of in any other number of ways. But why go to that location and say that this does, in fact, have something to do with the death of Blake? But for now... The students did such an incredible job on this. I have to tell you that for those of you who have come to me and asked me about forensics at JSU, the work, I had a chance to look over this work that Joe sent me that they did. I do it for a living. And I went to school on the report they did. That's how good this was. It was very thorough. It was professional. It was wonderful. I thought, okay, I'm hiring one of these cats. It was good. Well, I'm very pleased. I'm very proud of my students for bringing this case

to us. And I felt it again, you know, the fact that two years in a row, I had a group of students that chose this particular case. And trust me, we've got a lot of cold cases in Alabama there's a lot of cold cases in Georgia but you know this is not too far away from our campus in in in Jacksonville Alabama and to have this happen two years in a row and actually I have students that have the students from the first group came to a few different conclusions than second group so So they weren't, you know, kind of feeding off of one another. It really kind of gave me, I don't know, it kind of gave me a chill thinking, this is probably something that I need to explore with all of our friends that are fans of Body Bags and certainly everybody here at CrimeCon.

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