Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags With Joseph Scott Morgan: The Autopsy Episode - A Life Among the Dead

Episode Date: January 8, 2023

When Joseph Scott Morgan was on his first date with his wife Kim she asked him what he did for a living. When he responded by telling her that he worked for the Medical Examiner, essentially the coroner, examining dead bodies and performing autopsies, she looked at him with a puzzled expression… We all have aspects of our lives that are unusual, whether it’s our family, our habits, or our jobs. But when we do these things every day, they become so normal to us that we don’t even question them anymore.  In this special episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard go into depth on the touchstone of forensic death investigation: autopsies. They discuss what an autopsy is, who can order one, the different kinds, and how Joe ended up in this unique profession. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 2:07 - What is an autopsy? 4:10 - Who determines when an autopsy is done? Why would you not do one? 7:40 - Can an autopsy be done even if the family doesn’t want it? 9:58 - Gloria Satterfield’s cause of death 12:45 - Are there different kinds of autopsies? 17:55 - Joe’s experience in the autopsy room 18:56 - What is a full autopsy and how long does it take?  26:50 - Can certain autopsies be prioritized? 30:22 - Is an autopsy considered surgery? 34:05 - How did Joseph Scott end up working in a morgue? 38:50 - Seeing bodies in all different kinds of states 41:40 - How does Joe’s family deal with his line of work? 43:45 - Joe’s take on his career 45:21 - Wrap upSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Early in the morning on October the 19th, 2019, in a little town in Idaho, a lady who was in her late 40s was found deceased. And for whatever reason, still remains a mystery to this day, the decision was made for an autopsy not to be performed. That lady's name is Tammy Daybell, and her case is critical in a much broader investigation that's going on. As a matter of fact, the absence of an autopsy in that case could have severe repercussions moving forward.

Today, we're going to be discussing autopsies. What they are, who makes the determination as to when they occur, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about my background with autopsies. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. I've been involved in death investigation for the majority of my adult life, either working in the morgue, out in the field as an investigator, or now as an academic, talking about medical legal death investigation every single day that I walk

into school. And my friend Jackie Howard, who's the executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, we've talked about autopsies a lot, haven't we? We have, Joe. And the more that we talk about it, the more that I want to know. As we laid out our plans for what we wanted to discuss today, the questions just started pouring. So I figure the best place to start is with a simple question. What is an autopsy? An autopsy is essentially, there's another way to put this. It's essentially a post-mortem examination. And that's in a very, very broad sense. But when you hear the term autopsy, it conjures up images of an old dilapidated morgue. You've got more personnel running about. There's coolers where bodies are stored and generally a stainless steel table. That's not too far off the mark. But we have to understand that

when we conduct an autopsy, we're trying to determine what exactly happened, what brought about the death of an individual that was not necessarily otherwise explained. And so when you begin to go down this road in the autopsy suite, you know, some people, interestingly enough, historically, they've referred to in the historic record as doctors that do autopsies, they'll refer to them as surgical pathology. And surgical pathology now means like you've got a doctor that goes up to surgery, there's a pathologist, and they look at frozen sections of tumors that have been removed from people. They'll look at them instantaneously and try to give you a diagnosis.

But there is a part to surgical pathology that goes along with autopsy examinations where a pathologist will engage in literally the dissection or prosection of human remains to try to determine what exactly brought about the death because absent those clinical diagnoses that you arrive at by virtue of doing these examinations, you don't actually have a final or fatal diagnosis. The biggest questions that families have, that communities have, is absolutely what happened? How did they die? When did they die? What was the mechanism that brought about their death? And hopefully through an autopsy, you can make that determination. One of the things that you said just then, Joe, really caught my attention,

and it was having to do with when an autopsy is done and when is it not done. I find it really interesting in the Tammy Daybell case, as you mentioned, that an autopsy was not initially done. Who determines that and why would you not? I mean, I know in certain, especially in the elderly, when it's thought to be natural causes, they don't necessarily do an autopsy to try to figure out why this person died. So who makes that determination and why? Well, ultimately, it's going to be the lead medical legal authority in a jurisdiction. And you've got to back up and understand that in the United States in particular, we have two separate types of systems here. You have coroner systems, which are elected officials, and they're not necessarily always

physicians. As a matter of fact, most of the time, they're not physicians. People will be surprised to hear that. And then you have medical examiner systems, which are essentially run by physicians who many times are in fact forensic pathologists. So it really varies from state to state who's going to make the determination. Most of the time, the state statute, that is the state law, will dictate who has the authority to make a decision about an autopsy. And contrary to popular belief, I hear, and famously with the Tammy Daybell case, it was stated that it was the family's wishes not to have an autopsy performed in her case. And you're kind of sitting there scratching your head and saying, I've got a healthy young

woman here that's out running every day and seems vibrant and healthy. Why in the world would you not want an autopsy? And there's many layers to that. Families don't want to think about their family members undergoing this procedure. They don't want to think about everything that's involved with it. They just want to go to the funeral home with the remains. But unfortunately, if it's not done and it's not done in a timely fashion, one or two things is going to happen. Either you'll never have answers to those questions or in Tammy Daybell's

case, she had been embalmed, transported to another state and had been buried. Even after her body is exhumed in that case, any kind of findings that there may have been originally are going to be so compromised by that time, it's really going to be difficult to make heads or tails. So, most of the time, it will be dependent upon what the medical legal authority, again, back to medical examiner corner, views as the best interest at that point in time to come up with an answer, scientific, valid answer to try to determine what brought about this person's sudden death. And it is not dependent upon what the family wants. Okay.

Now that sounds cruel, but, you know, most of the time families are in no position to make that decision and also they're greater interest at work here and we can go down the list you got a homicide that's happened family's not going to have any weight given to their their protest about an autopsy not being performed in that case because it's obvious but you have to document it if you're going to prosecute a case and then you have these kind of mysterious circumstances where you don't have any answers. Hang on a minute, Joe. Let me ask you something here in relating to what you're talking about. Can an autopsy be done even though the family doesn't want it to be?

I mean, like in this case, the family said that an autopsy was not necessary here. Could the coroner or the medical personnel have said then, no, we're doing an autopsy anyway? They have authority under the state law to do that. They can say, well, I respect what you're saying. I understand why you might not want one done, but there's bigger interest at work here. We have to make a determination about manner and cause of death here and find out what exactly happened. And there's reasons why you do that. First off, it's a mystery that you have to have an answer for. The coroner or the medical examiner is going to be the one that actually, you know, you hear the term death certificate. People don't

think about that. That means the death is being certified. Okay. Well, if you don't have a reason that is put forth as a result of a pathology finding where you're looking for disease or some kind of mechanism of death, what are you going to list as the cause of death? Gunshot wound or myocardial infarction or lung cancer or leukemia or whatever it is the person has going on in dwelling within their body or some kind of external event that occurred to bring about their death, if you don't go in and actually examine that and make a note of that and make an absolute diagnosis, how are you going to do that? How are you going to list their cause of death? I mean, you can't just like, it doesn't just come to you psychically out of the air. You have to see it.

It's a scientific procedure. It's a study. And then how are you going to list the manner of death? We've only got five to choose from. Natural, suicide, homicide, unexplained, undetermined. You've got all of those that you have to choose from as well. So if you have nothing to put on the death certificate, you're going to have a death certificate. It's going to remain probably incomplete for a protracted period of time because you're asking for the official to put down an official diagnosis and an official manner of death that they don't have any insight into. And of course, the autopsy itself is the best way to do that. Gloria Satterfield, having to do with the case of the Murdals over in South Carolina. Gloria Satterfield, having to do with the case of the Murdaws over

in South Carolina. Gloria Satterfield, the Murdaws' housekeeper, reportedly tripped over dogs going down the stairs outside the home, the brick stairway. Yet her cause of death, if I'm not mistaken, was listed as natural causes. Yeah, it is super bizarre, you know, particularly with the case of Gloria Satterfield. You've got a woman that had obviously sustained some type of very specific head trauma that brought her to the hospital. And one of the ways I teach my students, there's that old poem that we talk about. And I don't know, folks, I'm not going to recite the whole thing. I'll spare the audience that. The old poem that goes, you know, for the one of a nail, a shoe was lost. For the one of a shoe, a horse was lost.

For the one of a horse, a rider was lost. A message was lost and so forth and so on. So you have a genesis in the beginning as to how all of these dominoes begin to fall. And in Satterfield's case, well, what brought her to the hospital? Was it that she had a cardiac event? Was it that she had a stroke? Was it that she got struck by lightning? Well, none of the above.

She fell and sustained head trauma. But yet they're listing this whole event as a natural event. And here's what's crazy about that case, is that a private attending physician signed her death certificate. And this case was never reported to the coroner. Listen, if a person rolls into the hospital as a result of a traumatic event, and they don't exit that hospital, and they die inside the walls. And I don't care how long they've been in the hospital. If they come in as a result of trauma, and that trauma is directly related to their death, that is a reportable case. And it's my understanding the case was never even reported to the coroner.

And that's a problem. Because the coroner is not aware. They can't make a decision about whether or not an autopsy should be performed or she had been in for a while. So they're going to request the records and examine the records, all of the imaging, everything that comes along with that. And they'll sign the death certificate. But a private physician can't list a traumatic cause of death and they can't qualify a traumatic cause of death, and they can't qualify a traumatic cause of death. So private physician can't say blunt force trauma and the manner of death is homicide or accident. That'll get rejected. Most of the time, it's going to be rejected by the state health department or

whoever handles all of the paperwork, the public health agency that handles the paperwork for the state. And that's why it always goes back to the coroner. But if the coroner is not aware of it, the death has not been reported, that's going to be a problem going forward. So then the question begs to be answered. Once a decision is made to do an autopsy, is what kind of an autopsy is there going to be? If it's an autopsy, is it always the same? Do you start with A through Z? Or are there truly different kinds of autopsies? There are different degrees to autopsies. When you bring a body into a morgue, for instance, you can do what's called an external examination, which means that the body will be completely photographed as is upon arrival.

That means with clothing on. Okay. Some places actually do x-rays just so that they have them. You disrobe the body. The pathologist and their assistant do a complete and total examination of the body unclothed. Then, in addition to that, you're going to draw samples for toxicology. And what these are going to be is you'll draw what's referred to as heart blood. Most of the time, you're going to try to, and this is externally,

and it's drawn from the aorta. So folks will find their collarbone on the left-hand side and go down the intercostal spaces, which is kind of the muscle in between each rib group, and go down about the third intercostal space in the ribs on the front side, okay, adjacent to the sternum, there will be a needle inserted there, and it will go into the aorta, which is the big vessel that comes off, that curved vessel that comes off of the top of the heart. And it takes practice to learn how to do this. But over a period of time,

we do it by touch. It's something that we can do. And then you draw blood out of that area. And then we take another needle and we draw externally, we will draw urine. And finally, we'll draw vitreous fluid, which comes from the eye. And all of those fluids are submitted for toxicology. And we'll run the entire panel, but to the broader question here, that's the first kind of stop along the continuum where we're doing an external examination. And it doesn't rise to the same level as a full autopsy or even a partial autopsy, which I'm not a fan of, but you just do the external examination, you draw the fluids, and then those are submitted generally to either a local hospital or state crime lab, but you just do the external examination. You draw the fluids, and then those are submitted

generally to either a local hospital or state crime lab, and you run a drug panel. And you already have a suspicion. If you're going to do an external examination, you already have a suspicion that you might know what the cause of death is, but you just want to rule out everything else, any kind of external trauma. Maybe the person died and they weren't found for a while, and then you'll move forward. Maybe you can even get the private physician if it's a natural death, which if you're not doing an autopsy, it's probably a natural death. The private physician can sign the death certificate and they'll list a specific cause of death. Again, back to acute myocardial infarction, which is essentially a fancy way of saying heart attack. And that is a natural classified as a natural death.

Now, you'll have events that a pathologist will make a decision or the ME or the coroner will make a decision. We're only going to have a partial autopsy. And I have a problem with this because it's like you've got one foot in the water and one foot in the boat. If you're going to do it, commit to it, do it. And there are even cases like if you have suicides, for instance, a subject has sustained a gunshot wound to the head, they might only, in certain jurisdictions, they might actually only open the head, for instance, and retrieve a projectile. And then they don't touch the rest of the body. And that's a problem. It can be a problem.

Everybody needs to understand this. Foundationally, in the medical legal world, our supposition is this. In everything that we do, we work under this big banner that every death is, in fact, a homicide until we can prove otherwise. OK, because if you start out at that really intense high level of trying to make a determination about homicide, as you kind of make your way through these checklists that we have, you get to the next level, maybe accident or suicide. Then you get to maybe natural. And you've kind of checked the boxes along the way. You have to be able to effectively rule all these things out. So back to this idea of a partial autopsy.

If you're only going to do a partial autopsy, why? Why not go ahead and do the entire autopsy? And that way it's complete. It's only going to take you maybe another 45 minutes to an hour to get everything done. And it can lead to problems down the road. You'll have people saying, well, they had this problem or they had that problem. Why didn't you look at this? And while you have the body there in front of you, you go ahead and you do the whole thing.

I engage in these discussions many times with my students at Jacksonville State where I teach. And they'll say, you know, Professor Morgan, how did you get into this environment? How did you start doing this? How did you start working in the morgue? Why did you choose to be in the morgue? Let me tell you something. And hear me right. The best classroom that I've ever been in, and I've paid a lot of money for tuition over the years. The best classroom that I was ever in that I was actually paid to be in as opposed to having to pay tuition for

was the autopsy room. I learned more about death investigation than I ever did out on a scene with a deceased person or sitting around having coffee with an old investigator and they're telling war stories. I've learned more in the autopsy suite, actually getting my hands dirty and being there to actually see these things before me, demonstrated to see the mechanisms that are involved to see all of the underlying disease. You can't have a better environment in which to learn in.

Okay. Then lay this out for me, Joe, you were talking before about a full autopsy. Explain that to me. And how long does an autopsy take? an external examination. Now, in some cases where you have what you suspect is natural disease, it might begin and end with that, and then the body will be released. However, a full autopsy will, in fact, start with an external examination, and you go from stem to stern relative to the overall status of the body. All of this is made note of throughout the examination. I mean, measurements, we go into great detail relative to measurements. And a lot of this is actually dictated by, particularly if you've got traumatic cases. Say, for instance, like with Ellen Greenberg, where she was stabbed. Some people

have said 20 times, some people have said more than 20 times. You've got so much trauma there that each individual insult that she has externally has to be measured and oriented anatomically. Say, for instance, if someone has been, let's just say somebody has been shot to the right of their sternum, which is the heart plate of the breastbone on the anterior chest. They've been shot to the right. Well, just for that gunshot wound alone, you would have to get a measurement, first off, of the overall circumference of the wound itself.

And then you have to measure. Some people do from two points. Some people do from three. Like from if it's on the right side of the sternum, you would do a measurement from the center of the wound to the apex of the right shoulder. And then maybe from the center of the wound to the apex of the left shoulder. And then from the center of the wound to the top of the head. That takes time. And then if you have somebody that's stabbed multiple times,

shot multiple times, each one of those injuries dictates the speed at which you can do this because you want to do a thorough examination. I've had people that have been stabbed well in excess of 100 times, and you can just imagine the external examination alone. It is a Herculean task, to say the least. And then you might have three or four other autopsies that you're going to have to do that day.

But once you get done with the external examination, then the body is, of course, you're on a stainless steel autopsy table. And these are either fixed on the floor or they're on rollers. And they're kind of set at a pitch because you're going to lose fluid and the fluid will run down the stainless steel table, either into a pre-established drain that you have on a fixed table or into this big kind of catch-all sink. It's a working station that you have. And all of that fluid is washed away and you'll have multiple autopsy stations. You go to one of these really big shops in large metropolitan areas, and they might have the ability to have five autopsies, say, for instance, going on at one time,

and you might have multiple physicians, multiple autopsy assistants, photographers, everybody doing these examinations all at one time, particularly if you're talking about a mass casualty event or if it's a really, really busy day. And so after the external examination is done, essentially the chest and the abdomen are opened and we use what's referred to as a standard Y incision. And so it forms a Y where you make a diagonal cut from the apex of the left shoulder, the apex of the right shoulder, down to mid-sternum. And why is that, Joe? Well, because it enables us to effectively remove back or retract that external layer of tissue, which includes skin, the sub-Q fat, all of the muscle tissue that's indwelling, and it reveals everything.

And also the body is on what's called, it's blocked in the back. You have kind of these rubber blocks. You put them beneath the shoulder blades and it hyperextends the chest so that the shoulders kind of fall to the side. The body really opens up and you can appreciate, once you get the body open, you can appreciate all of the viscera. And that's the internal structures very well. They can all be visualized in place and you want to be able to see it. I mean, just imagine, if you will, you've got someone that has been shot.

And let's say they're shot in the left side. If people will put like their finger beneath their armpit on the left side, and that bullet travels from the left, and it travels maybe slightly upward from below to above, and it almost transects the body, which means it cuts across the entirety of the middle line of the body, and it exits out beneath the right armpit. You've got all of these structures that are impacted.

And let's think what structures might be. Well, you've got the left lung, which has only two lobes because the heart's on the left side. It may go through the heart. Then it's going to go through the right lung, which has got three lobes. And then it's going to exit through all of that tissue. And you have to track that wound and see what structures are impacted by this. Because what you're looking for is when you make that final diagnosis of what led to death, was it simply the lung that was impacted? Was it the heart?

Or was it in total all of these structures being impacted. Say, for instance, if it penetrated the heart, was that injury that was sustained as a result of that gunshot wound sufficient to cause more of an instantaneous death, or did this individual linger? What you're describing for me here is an autopsy is a lengthy procedure. Oh, yeah. Yeah, particularly when you've got these highly complex cases where you've got multiple trauma. Now, you might, if you have a

case, for instance, where an individual is, say, this is very sad, but we do more of these than anything else, I would imagine, as far as trauma goes, and those are suicides. Well, you've got a single self-inflicted gunshot wound, or at least you think that it might be. But remember, our starting point is every death is a homicide until we prove otherwise. You've got a single bullet in that case, and you track that bullet. And let's say it's a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Well, maybe they're right-handed. It went from the right side of the head to the left side of the head. Maybe it stayed in, maybe it exited. You're going to track that wound. And beyond that, there's not too much more to discover.

You're going to try to rule out any other kind of trauma that may or may not be present. And this, again, goes to another underlying principle within forensics. Negative findings are just as important as positive findings. So, an absence of trauma is significant, okay? All right? So, if I can say at autopsy that there's no trauma to the neck, well, that's something that has to be made note of. You cannot just assume that people will understand there was no trauma to the neck because if this thing were to go to court for whatever reason, one of the questions that's going to be asked of the person conducting the autopsy is, well, you don't say anything about what you saw with the neck.

Does that mean that you didn't examine the neck or does that mean that you didn't see anything? Why would you fail? I mean, the neck's pretty significant, right? And you wind up looking like an idiot on the stand. So you cover that. You have to document that there was no trauma to the neck or that there was trauma to the neck. All of it is part and parcel of a bigger picture. So, you're right when you say that these things take time. It's not just the individual trauma that you can see. You also have to document those things that are not there. And that's quite fascinating when you think about it. There's not too many other things in life that you document the absence of something in that sense. I've always been fascinated by that one little point that's very significant in forensic pathology in particular.

You were describing autopsy suites in larger areas where they can have multiple tables and autopsies going at the same time, given the amount of time that it seems to take for each autopsy and given how many deaths, unfortunately, that most cities see every day. The idea that we see in some cop shows that, hey, can you push this to the top of the line? Does that work? I'm going to be, I guess, kind of cheeky here. I'm going to say that all depends on how many politicians call the official. Most of the time, you'd want to think, no, everybody waits their turn. But if there are particular high-profile cases that are going on that particular day, you look back historically, I think, and you think about cases like Ron Goldman, for instance, and Nicole Brown Simpson.

Well, that was at the LA County coroner where those examinations were done. You would like to think that that particular forensic pathologist and their team that was involved in that case would have been on those two cases and those two cases alone and that they would have been given as much time as possible. However, I don't think that people appreciate the volume of cases that come through a shop like L.A. County. That same day, they may have had 20 other autopsies that had to be done. And there is a finite number of forensic pathologists out there. As a matter of fact, depending upon who you ask at any point in time, you'll hear numbers like 550 or 600 board-certified forensic pathologists nationwide. Okay, just let that sink in. And I'm not saying forensic pathologists are smarter than a neurosurgeon, but there are more neurosurgeons out there practicing than there are forensic pathologists. And if you want that level of skill to be performed for an autopsy, you're going to

have to really look for these people and attract them to work in a particular area. Because let's face it, you go to the large urban areas, people will apply for those jobs and they'll have availability. They'll have a need for forensic pathologists, but you go to a more rural area, they're not going to have access necessarily to a forensic pathologist because there's so very few. It just, the numbers just dictate that. And so it's really an odd position to be in. And then even if you have a full staff, you get to these areas, these big urban areas where they have huge volumes of deaths and autopsies that have to be performed. Those staffs are overworked many, many times. And it's hard to get people to come into the field.

It looks really sexy on TV and people talk about it. And I have kids that come to me all the time and say they want to be a forensic pathologist. But what's fascinating is I've talked to people over the years. And one of the interesting things is that when forensic pathologists go through their training, it's one of those unique kind of educational journeys where the more education you get, essentially, the less you get paid. Okay. So, if you just stop at a fellowship or an internship with being a clinical pathologist and an anatomical pathologist, you're working in a hospital, you're going to make a lot more than

the guy that goes on beyond that training and does a one-year fellowship in forensic pathology. And you're going to wind up working in a morgue, in a city, in an urban area most of the time, dealing with the most unpleasant cases you can imagine, and then traveling around and going to court. And you're going to get paid as a government employee. That's kind of one of the little dynamics that you're kind of faced with in the medical legal community. Joe, you mentioned surgeons just a second ago. Is an autopsy considered surgery? I think for years it has been regarded as a type of surgery, and you will hear the term autopsy surgeon, particularly going back years and years. I love history, and what's really kind of fascinating about

the trajectory that you see with gross anatomical dissection is that even up until, I guess, probably the early 1800s, the first part of the 19th century, it was illegal in many places to do dissections on human remains, period. And there's all kinds of stories about grave robbers that would go and disinter bodies and they would bring them back to medical schools. And by the light of a whale lamp or whatever, medical students, in order to try to learn anatomy, would dissect these bodies that had been removed from the ground just to try to understand anatomy. And so it has not been something that has been done for

centuries and centuries and centuries because it was so prohibited for so long. Now through the 20th century and obviously into the 21st now, autopsies are common. They are a necessity. A very small percentage of the cases that a medical examiner or coroner deal with are homicides. And that's what you always think about with people in my field. And that's not the case. It's just not. The lion's share of cases we deal with are some kind of natural event. If you don't have an interest in natural disease pathology, looking at bodies where you're trying to make a determination about manner and cause of death, it's not going to be gunshot wounds most of the time. You're going to be dealing with natural disease and trying to make a determination.

There's bigger considerations here. Number one is the community in which these people live. Did this person suddenly die because there's some kind of public health issue? I was in Atlanta when we were at the height of one of the biggest TB scares in the nation. We were like the TB capital of the nation in like the 90s or something. And we had all of these people that were homeless and other people that were dying of TB. That's a public health concern.

And then you think about broad ranging other diseases that are out there. I started my career at the height of the AIDS epidemic and we were terrified of being in the morgue because we didn't know what was going to happen if we stuck ourselves with a dirty needle or cut ourselves with a dirty scalpel. And that does happen. We've all been nicked in the morgue. It's not as clean as people think. It's not as necessarily precise as like a standard surgery, you know, when you go into these environments because you're doing multiple cases, you're doing them quickly. It's a different world to kind of be a part of, but absolutely grateful that I was part of that world because

I learned more and now I have an opportunity to teach. When people found out what I did for a living, I'd get one of two reactions. Either people would lean in and want to hear more because by our nature as humans, we have morbid curiosity about things. Or I've actually answered the question of what I did for a living at a party and had people immediately turn on their heel and walk away. They don't want to hear anything else about death. There's rarely middle ground when that conversation starts. You know, I never thought that I had a morbid

curiosity about me, but I have been proven wrong. The more I talk about you, the more I want to know. So let's play 20 questions, so to speak, with Joe Scott Morgan. What makes a person want to deal with dead bodies? And how do you get into that profession? How do you get to work in a morgue? For me, it was a curious set of circumstances. Now, it's really actually difficult to get into a morgue to even view an autopsy because of all of the health considerations and all those sorts of things. But I happened to be working at a hospital in security and working also as an ER

tech while the morgue in our parish down there was being renovated. And they started bringing bodies to our hospital to do the autopsies for the parish, which is the same as a county. And I became friends with the people at the coroner's office. And I would be the one that would shuffle bodies in and out the door. And there were a huge volume of them. And I just became friends with these folks and started, believe it or not, I started attending autopsies on my free time, not getting paid, but I was just fascinated by it because I'd always been a science guy. And the next thing I knew, I was taking notes for them. And eventually they allowed me to participate in autopsy. Okay, wait, wait, wait.

Taking notes for them. What does that mean? Well, I would work as a scribe for the forensic pathologist. If you can imagine the stupid young kid who had no background in it, but was willing to sit there with bloated, decomposing remains, horrible, traumatic cases, the worst of the worst cases you can possibly see. And I didn't necessarily retract or retreat from it. And that's not always the circumstance when people go to an autopsy for the first time. I've had one of my best friends that became a fantastic homicide investigator. I was in the middle of opening a gunshot wound victim's head

in the middle of it. And he, my friend, just to kind of back up, my friend was actually a burglary detective in the jurisdiction where I was working. And he and I had played golf together over the years and whatnot. And he wanted to transition to homicide. One of the requirements is you had to go to autopsies. He'd never been. And famously, I'd use that kind of high-pitched saw. It's called a striker saw, an agitating saw. It's like a cast saw. And I was opening his skull, and the forensic pathologist looked up at me over his mask, and he said, you better check on him. And I looked over, and he's a big guy. I mean, just really big, bold, tough guy. He's the kind of guy you'd want on your side if there was a fight. And he's always dressed to the nines and he begins to back up and retreat away

from the autopsy area down a little hallway and he collapsed and went up against a tiled wall in this old hospital and slid down the wall. I look back now and I laugh at it because I was covered. You can imagine I was doing an autopsy. He had blood on me and we used to wear these big yellow gloves that just made the blood pop even more. And he's my friend. I was concerned. I thought he'd hurt his head. And I was approaching him, walking toward him saying, are you okay? Are

you okay? And he automatically still nauseated and dizzy, throws his hands up like I'm a monster. And he says, no, no, back away, back away because I'm coming at him and I've got blood all over me. And it was just, it's one of those curious environments that only certain people have the ability to be able to go into and maintain their focus. I know which group I belong in, Joe. Well, that's the key. It's hard to kind of measure that until you've been in that environment. Some people think they want to do it, but then they get in there and they realize from Jump Street that they don't

have the, and it's not a judgment of them. It's just some people react differently to seeing a human being that is being opened on a table. And I think that that's natural. But you kind of, I think I've said that you kind of develop a callus to it. And I don't mean you become callous. You just develop almost like if you're a carpenter and you're swinging a hammer, your hands are suited

to that. After a period of time, you build up a callus on your hand so you can handle the hammer. And for us, we build up a kind of a callus to those things that are required of us to do because who else are you going to get to do it? You know, people say they want to do it, but there's one thing about saying you want to do it and there's no part to doing it. You know, over the course of my career, I wound up participating in over 7,000 autopsies. So I stuck around a little while. That is a lot of bodies. You've seen those bodies in all stages of things that would fit inside a horror movie. Yeah.

Yeah, you have. And sometimes if I happen to watch a horror movie, which I generally don't, I'll look at it immediately and say, that doesn't look real. Or I'll say, wow, somebody really did the research. This looks very accurate. It's weird how horrible kind of event where we had a barge that capsized in the Gulf of Mexico. They were trying to outrun a hurricane that was inbound and they didn't make it. And I think we had 16 men that lost their lives and they came in slowly. They were able to be recovered because some of them weren't still on board when the thing capsized. They went over. And, of course, the bodies were sitting in heat in the Gulf of Mexico, subject to everything that's in the Gulf of Mexico. And so you get partial remains.

Then you get intact remains that are severely bloated and compromised. We had a very small facility and did a high volume of cases. And we still had our other cases we had to do, but we had to bring in a refrigerated truck and store these bodies. And we had to do all kinds of intense exams. I mean, everything to removing the jaws on the bodies to do odontological examinations to try to determine who these people were. And I was around those bodies for so long. And this is not the first time that it happened to me or one of my, one of my colleagues.

I was around those bodies for so many days. And in that environment, I couldn't get rid of the smell. I couldn't, I literally wound up having to shave my entire body because no matter how much I showered and bathed and all those sorts of things, even using vinegar and all those things that they tell you, I couldn't get rid of it. I think that part of that goes to there's an actual physical thing that happens, but

there's a scarring, I think, that happens emotionally with that too, where you kind of bear that along. And we had this kind of weird culture in the medical legal community. We would walk up almost like you see these apes in these National Geographic documentaries where they pick at nits and that sort of thing. And we would check one another before we would go out. Maybe we'd gone out on a case where we had a decomposing body and we would smell each other. We'd say, I've got to go talk to a family. How do I smell? And that's a weird, just think about that dynamic within an office. And you become friends with these people and say family. How do I smell? And that's a weird, just think about that dynamic within an office. And you become friends with these people, you know, and say, yeah, do I smell bad?

And it's not because you haven't bathed or used deodorant, but if you've been in the presence of a decomposed body, you don't want to expose the public to that. And so that's kind of a weird little nuance that we have in our community. Joe, you were talking about your friends and getting to be friends with these people and how they deal with it. But how did your family deal with it? Well, interesting little aside. My wife, Kim, that you know and have met and we've hung out and y'all are friends. We actually met on a blind date. And, of course, being on a blind date, it's very uncomfortable anyway.

And when I look on a little aside here, when I saw her, she's the most beautiful creature I've ever seen in my life. And I'm thinking, you better make the most of this boy or you're never going to have another shot with a woman that is this beautiful. Okay, enough with the brownie points, Joe. Well, we went on a date and after we went to a ball game together and afterwards we go to a restaurant, actually a pizza place, and we're sitting across from one another having a conversation. And she's saying, now, tell me again, what is it that you do for a living? And I'm sitting there and I'm describing to her that I work for the medical examiner, which is like the coroner.

And we go out and examine the dead and make determinations about who they are because they might be unidentified. And we also do autopsies. That's the way we go about this. And she's kind of sitting there with this open-jawed expression on her face. And I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, I've really blown this. And then all of a sudden, she looks at me and she says, until I met you, I never thought about death. And you can take anything you want to away from that story, but it's not a good beginning to a blind date. But she found it interesting because most people, most people out there, they don't think about death.

They think about their life. And the same with my wife. She didn't think about death. But when you're sitting there with someone that engages in this work every single day, it suddenly comes to full form before you, and you have to consider it one way or another. This is the bottom line for it. It's horrible, horrible business, and you have to make a decision of your own free will if you want to be there or not. And if you decide to be there, then you do the job to the best of your ability, and you understand that you have a unique space that you occupy providing a service that few other people are equipped to deal with, it doesn't mean that

we're any better than anybody else. It just means that we have a set of skills that enable us to tolerate that environment within reason. But on the human side of it, and this happened to me, it wears on you. The human mind is only equipped to deal with so much horror. We're not created that way. We're not equipped that way. You hit tolerances. And I know personally, I can't speak for any of my colleagues, but I know personally, I where I get to talk about it, where I get to teach about it. And it is quite possibly the best thing in the world for me. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.