Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Exhumation of Gloria Satterfield

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

The body of Gloria Satterfield, longtime housekeeper for disgraced South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh, will be exhumed. Satterfield died after a trip and fall accident at the Murdaugh home. No autopsy was performed and her manner of death listed as natural. Now,  after the string of deaths linked to the Murdaugh name, investigators want to know more.  Exhumations are not ordered for just any old case, but when a court orders the  embalmed remains of a human being be uninterred,  everyone pays attention, including our forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan.   In this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss what exhumation is, and why exhumation must be handled with the utmost of care.   Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeartSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. We spend time thinking about those that we honor that have passed on to the other side. One of the ways we do that as a people is to memorialize them. And I guess probably for most of us, that involves a burial. That is, setting up a location, perhaps, where we can go and visit time to time, remember the people that surrounded us, people that impacted our lives.

But when it comes to death, many times, some things are hidden. We've heard that old phrase, they're going to take it to the grave with them. That's where the practice of exhumation comes in. And today, we're going to talk about Gloria Satterfield. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. is body bags. Joining me today is Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, I think one of the things I'd like to explore with you today is Gloria Satterfield and her apparent pending exhumation. The Gloria Satterfield exhumation is coming about because of the investigation into Alec Murdoch. So many deaths surrounding this prominent family in South Carolina since the death of Maggie and Paul Murdoch. Both were murdered outside their family

home, discovered by the father, Alex Murdoch. Since then, he is in jail charged with setting up a murder for hire on himself to ensure that his remaining son would get millions in life insurance policies. That hit failed. Murdoch survived. He has also been charged with stealing millions of dollars from his law firm, and that included a $4.3 million ruling award for Gloria Satterfield's children. Gloria Satterfield, she was the Murdoch housekeeper for over 20 years. She died during a trip and fall accident in the Murdoch family home. Reportedly, Gloria Satterfield fell over dogs on the outside brick stairs of the home and hit her head. Paul and Maggie Murdoch called 911 and tell the operator that while she is breathing, she is sitting up, she is mumbling, she's not making much sense. EMTs arrive, they take Gloria Satterfield to the hospital. She is in ICU for a lengthy period of time and ultimately died as a result of a stroke.

Her cause of death listed on the death certificate is natural. That's the first thing that I want to talk about, Joe. How does that happen? But now SLED officials have asked for permission, which has been given by the Satterfield next of kin, to exhume her body. So many deaths centered on the Murdoch family, and now police want to review this death. No autopsy was done on Gloria Satterfield at the time of her death, and as I just mentioned, her cause of death was listed as natural. I can't imagine that a trip and fall is a natural death. But let's talk about exhumation first, and then we'll talk about how it relates to Gloria.

What happens when you exhume a body? It's an interesting world to enter into. And for me, as a medical legal death investigator, it's one of the most fascinating because you're actually bearing witness to those things that have long since been buried. And of course, that's variable depending upon the type of case you're talking about. I've been involved in cases that go back 60 years many times where bodies have been exhumed. And let's think about the root of that word. The root, actually, it comes from the Latin, which means X, you know, out of, and then pumus, which actually means ground. So you're removing the body from the ground. There's other terms that are used that people hear, disinterred, but that's

kind of separate to this. But it's a tough thing to do. I think that many people in general public think that you can just, you know, run out, maybe grab an attorney and say, look, I want my loved one disinterred or exhumed. Or the court investigators even say, we want this body exhumed. The problem is, is that there is kind of a gatekeeper here, and that is the judiciary. There is a judge that actually has to approve this and order what is referred to literally as an order of exhumation. It's not something, you know, judges don't want to be tied to this idea that folks can just kind of willy nilly run around and crack open graves and bring out the dead. Because first off, you know, it's as I said in my opening, you know, we talk about honoring the dead. And they have a sense of that. The judiciary always has.

Because, you know, when you have people that will come along and they'll say, you know, well, I have this question or that question. Body needs to be exhumed. Well, you can't just essentially throw that out there without logical purpose in what you're doing. And that has to be presented. It has to be presented by an attorney before the judge, where there is kind of this linear logic that takes place, where it can be explained very exactingly. Because keep this in mind, every person that is buried at some point in time has kind of passed through this membrane of government approval on

some level where they have decided either by the coroner, the medical examiner, the police, that this body is good to go. We can have this individual embalmed and then placed into their grave. And so that can be problematic. It's really hard to go into a graveyard and essentially put shovel to soil. Some of those regulations that you're talking about, Joe, have to do with embalming. You can, in some jurisdictions, request for religious reasons or by explaining your reasons for wanting this not be embalmed. So how does that affect the exhumation, Joe, whether you're embalmed or not? Significantly, because the process of body prep, of embalming, you know, and preparing the body, even clothing the body, all those sorts of things, and casketing the body, all play an integral role in preservation. And absent, say, for instance, embalming, the body is going to take a normal course of decomposition and will begin to break down. People don't realize that when we die, and it doesn't matter where we are, the process of decomposition actually begins

in that moment. Once all cellular respiration has ceased, we begin to break down. Now, it might be at a molecular level. You might not can appreciate it. So time is of the essence. If there is some type of religious prohibition against embalming, for instance, then those involved in this will have the body buried in a very short order. And of course, right now I'm reflecting back to Tammy Daybell, that probably in recent memory, that's one of the most famous disinterments or exhumations that has taken place in that case is still pending. She had been buried for some time, but the key to her case was the fact that she went from Idaho to Utah in order to cross state lines. She had to be embalmed. So in that sense, the investigators were very fortunate if there was any kind of physical findings.

But when you place a body into the ground unembalmed, then there's a problem because all of that evidentiary, anything that contains evidentiary value begins to kind of wither away and nature just essentially consumes it. So you're hoping that the body has been embalmed and not just embalmed, but also to a high professional standard. I've worked many cases of exhumation where we've retrieved the body from the ground, taken the body out of the casket, placed the body onto the autopsy table. And because the embalming was so poor, you sit there and you kind of scratch your head and say, why'd you even bother in the first place? Why'd you even charge the family for this? Because you've done a very bad job.

But there are other cases out there where the preservation is so remarkable that when you open that casket up and remove the body, it literally looks like this individual just passed away within the last few days. An image comes to mind for me. I had a gentleman that was a pastor that was alleged to have been beaten by someone, and the family got an order of exhumation. And, you know, he was dressed all in white. He had a white jacket, white pants, white shirt, even a white tie, white socks and white shoes on. And he had a single carnation, a red carnation that had been placed in his lapel. And everything on his body was perfectly intact.

The only thing that had changed was the status of the carnation. And it had kind of melded into the fabric where it left this kind of dark, deep red stain, but you could still appreciate the stem. So preservation is key here. So what do you mean by it's gone wrong, that it was not done well? What does that mean exactly? Just like, you know, in any kind of professional practice, there are people that are really at the top of their game when they're doing anything. And there are those that might not pay as close of attention. Was the body sufficiently preserved? And that means were the incisions made correctly where the perfusion items were placed

into the body, and then there was a successful embalming where you're seeing that all of the tissues have been touched, if you will, by the embalming fluid. And sometimes there's not the best job that is done under those circumstances. And so any area, let's say you have one portion of the body that has been pretty sufficiently embalmed, and then another area where the embalming fluid, say, did not reach that particular area, that area will be markedly decomposed compared to the rest of the body. And so that generates a problem. If you're looking at this exhumed body from a forensic standpoint in that area that has been touched by decomposition is key to your investigation, then all is lost at that point.

But again, you have groups of individuals that do, and for the most part, do fine work. You know, it only comes to light during exhumations relative to the quality of the preservation that's left behind. Because as we know, most bodies don't get exhumed. Most people do not expect their body or the bodies of their loved ones to be exhumed. And so that can be problematic when you're faced with that. The other issue here that you're faced with in burials is when the body is placed in the ground. Remember, when a casket is placed in the ground, you don't simply just dig a hole and then drop the casket in there. There is an entire process that takes place. They actually put a crypt in the ground. And when I say crypt, I'm talking about a vault.

It's a large concrete box. And so the casket is not just set into bare earth because the earth consumes everything. It's not these caskets, contrary to what you might have heard, are not as resilient, sometimes as advertised. So the casket is actually lowered into this vault, this concrete vault that has been placed in the hole prior to the casket going in. And then a concrete lid is placed on top of the vault after the casket has been placed inside. So you've got this kind of double level of protection. But one of the things that folks don't necessarily count on, and I don't know that any of us do, is the impact, say, for instance, of groundwater, flooding, all these sorts of things. And you can't, it's really hard, if you will, to defeat nature. Many times these

vaults actually fill up with water. And even if a body has been sufficiently embalmed, then water is another factor that can impact the status of the body because with water comes in all kinds of microbial life and those sorts of things that embalming is not necessarily going to defeat. And it will just kind of spur this decomposition on. It'll just appear slightly different. And then, you know, you begin to think about, you know, the structure, the structure of the quality of, say, a vault. Has it been placed in there appropriately? Does it cave in around the thing, crushing the casket. And of course, when that happens, you're creating these huge defects in this environment. So anything that's on the outside is going to seek out those points of entry relative to, so any remains that are contained in there can be compromised greatly as well. You think about burials and our efforts to try to preserve our dead, and it's kind of understandable that you've got a lot of elements working against you. I mean, everything from weather to poor mortuary practices

to the wishes of families not wanting bodies embalmed. And even something I didn't mention earlier, you begin to think there's actually tiny little insects called coffin flies that you can't defeat them. They'll actually make their way into the coffin. So there's a lot running against you at this period of time if you're a forensic scientist and you're trying to seek out information about someone that has long since been dead and buried. You were talking about the exhumation process and once the body is exhumed and moved into the morgue for further autopsy and investigation about what the

investigators, the ME, would see. Obviously, continuing your discussion on quality versus ineffectual embalming practices, what are the investigators going to see? And I would have to imagine that because of the embalming, that any toxicological findings are basically moot because there's no blood and the body is filled with artificial fluids. Yeah, and that does certainly present a problem. And let's keep in mind that these investigators relative to Gloria Satterfield are going into this case armed with the knowledge, and keep in mind, this is a physician that has made this determination, that they're dealing with a natural death. Now, I got to go back just for a second and kind of correct something that you said, Jackie. You talked about that the cause of death was natural.

Well, natural, that's one of the five components of actual manners of death. And this is kind of fascinating in this particular case, because in Gloria Satterfield's case, they ruled her death as the manner, as natural, but they listed the cause as head trauma. And those two things don't marry up. You don't naturally as head trauma. And those two things don't marry up. You don't naturally sustain head trauma. Logic has to be applied to this.

My first stop along the continuum here as an investigator is certainly going to be the medical records department where Gloria unfortunately passed away. I'm going to want to see everything they have. And she's been in the hospital for a couple of days. By the time she finally succumbs, I'm going to want to see any kind of imaging. That means x-rays, CT scans, MRIs, PET scans. It doesn't matter. I want to see it. I want to see all of her toxicology. Because remember, anything, any blood that was drawn at that particular time and they ran hospital tests on her, that blood's gone now. You know, we got to think about this in the process of embalming. You're going from high to low. There's a gravitational element to this.

When an individual is placed onto an embalming table, the head is pitched up, feet are lower than the head. And when this process starts of drawing out the blood out of the body, it's being pushed out of the body through the pressure of the embalming fluid coming in. And, you know, once the body is embalmed, all of that blood that would tell the tale, if you will, is now gone. You can't use it. So in Ms. Satterfield's case, the issue here is what types of samples did they draw from her when they finally got her to the hospital? And did they run appropriate testing at that point in time? Looking for anything, any kind of toxicological issues relative to drugs that were on board, any kind of things like cardiac enzymes, what they call a CBC panel, all those things that you standardly do in the hospital, what they call a CBC panel, all those things that

you standardly do in the hospital, what was that telling us? Because now it's all gone at this point in time. And so that creates a problem for the investigators. And if they have an opportunity to review all of that prior to doing the examination on the exhumed body, they're going to be much better armed. So when investigators start their, I guess, new autopsy, for lack of a better way to say it, they're going to see the injuries, the cleaned up injuries that Gloria Satterfield has. How is the preparation of the body for burial going to impact that? Because we do know they do body putty. They do makeup, depending on where

her injuries are, these may or may not have had to be done. So how do they go about removing what they can to get to the actual wounds? That's an excellent question. And here's what will happen. First off, let's go back to that 911 call that Paul and his mother were involved in. And one of the things that Paul stated, of course, he's now deceased, that he stated in that 911 call was that she was bleeding from her head and where else? Her ear. So when you're looking at this, you know, for me, if you have blood coming out of your ear, you're talking about kind of a fracture potentially of the floor of the skull. It's not just simply going to be the top of the head. So she's got perhaps multiple fractures or what they refer to as communicating fracture. that was sustained creates such a fracture that the initial point of impact creates this kind of

cracking that goes all the way through to the floor of the skull. So that's going to be very important. But here's the problem. She wasn't autopsied at the time. You'd said new autopsy. There hasn't been an original autopsy. Can you imagine this, that they're taking this woman who has sustained this kind of trauma and then essentially burying her. And it's by no fault of the family. You know, families don't do this every single day. Who is to be held in account here, held responsible for this is the hospital because it wasn't reported to the coroner. The coroner can't investigate a death unless they have been summoned, unless they've been notified. And to me, that's a very,

very critical issue here that you have this multitude of learned medical individuals that know that this is a trauma-related death. And they didn't think to call the coroner because these kinds of cases are mandatory that they be reported. In her case, it was not. So now when she's going to come in after they have exhumed her body and they bring her back to the medical examiner's office for the examination, and trust me, you're going to have all eyes on her body. That room will be filled with all manner of people. You'll have forensic scientists there. You might even have a couple of forensic pathologists there. And of course, the police are going to have a tremendous

presence there. And they're going to go through everything that they can as they remove her body and try to appreciate these injuries. And one of the things that you have to cut through the veil with here is the fact that not only was there funeral or mortuary preparation of her body, but there was also medical intervention that took place prior to that. And let me give you kind of a lowdown on this. If you're talking about blunt force trauma, which we are, that means that you're looking at a potential laceration to the scalp. Well, if there's laceration, the medical team will essentially either staple or suture that up. Well, that has to be factored in to her treatment course. And then if the funeral home did anything to that

particular area, you know, as you mentioned, applying any kind of makeup, the putty that you had mentioned, those sorts of things to make her viewable, then that's also going to have to, that layer is also going to have to remove. So, you know, in my experience of working on exhumed bodies and doing their autopsies, I don't know of any other cases that take as much time as exhumed bodies do. I can recall spending up to eight to nine hours on a single body once you have it. Because listen, once that body is out of the ground, everybody's interested. You've got a lot of eyes on you at that point in time. And so there'll be a lot of post-mortem x-rays that'll be taken in this particular case. All kinds of imaging will go on. It would not surprise me if maybe they had access to a CAT scan,

that they would run the body through the CAT scan while they had the body. And all of these little nuanced areas that they're going to have to dig into because once they're complete with this, the judge is going to require that they reinter the body at that time. They're not just going to leave her there. So they're going to have to put her back into her casket and back into her burial space. And so they have to capture as much information as they possibly can at that moment in time. You said that the wounds would have been sutured, closed at the hospital after her death. Isn't that going to degrade the wound area? I mean, isn't that going to change the topography of the head of what actually happened? How does

that impact you being able to tell what happened? Yeah, it does. And this is, you've got a couple of elements working here. First off, you have medical intervention, which I'd mentioned. And when these edges, which are going to be very jagged, remember, we're talking about blunt force trauma. This is not a sharp force event. They're going to be very jagged. And so you're going to have, and people can, you know, think back to their own personal experiences where they've had some kind of impact injury on their body that required suturing. They're not clean and neat. And so it's going to take this kind of what we refer to as a curvilinear, and yeah, that's a real word that's used in forensic science, a curvilinear pattern

many times. And if she's been struck multiple times, which I don't know if she was or not, you might have multiple lacerations along the way. And all of those are going to have to be sutured up because remember, before this became a forensics case, this is a medical case. You're trying to save her life. So they're going to go to any means they can possibly i think all of us would want to to try to make sure that she is going to survive and unfortunately she didn't so it's going to change the initial appearance as opposed to if we had a body of some unfortunate person that had beaten to death out on the street, you could appreciate that readily, you know, where that body is taken directly to the morgue and examined.

But now, not only do you have the suturing that's taking place, you potentially have some healing that may have taken place as well. And what does that mean for us? Because one of the key things we're going to be looking for here are going to be evidence of hemorrhage in the soft tissues of the skull and also overlying what we call the external table of the skull and any kind of pattern that may have been there. Let's say, you know, they're saying that when Ms. Satterfield fell that, and it's kind of nonspecific at this point, but when she fell, she was on a set of stairs and they were external stairs. So we can kind of put forth our supposition is that they're either brick or they're either concrete. Either way, it's a hard surface that you're going to strike. If there

are edges there, you could appreciate a pattern of an edge, for instance. If it's blunted, say like kind of a curved concrete step, that's going to have a completely different appearance and it's blunted, say like kind of a curved concrete step, that's going to have a completely different appearance and it's going to be very rich in, say, an abraded or an abrasion that might be there where that point of impact is. All of that's going to be compromised at this point in time. So they're going to be heavily reliant upon all of the anti-mortem records, that is those records that were generated prior to her death. And then they have to factor in the treatment course along with, they're going to, they would literally, and I have to say this, they're going to have to bring in probably the mortuary science person that tended to her body and question them at length.

You have to tell us specifically what you did to her remains when you received them from the hospital, because we have to know what you saw at that point in time. Did you change anything at all? And they should have a record of their preparation at that point in time. And then what you're left with essentially is what comes up out of the burial. You know, what can you observe that can be tied back to a specific point of origin relative to this impact injury that she has sustained? This is going to be a very, very involved examination. And granted, exhumations don't take place every single day, but there have been enough of them over the years that have actually changed the course of cases that have gotten people off the streets that committed horrible crimes that they thought that they had gotten away with. And, you know, Gloria Satterfield's case is an example of having to go back in and take a look.

And they're right on the edge of this right now. But there's a few other cases that I think that we can examine. Wouldn't you agree, Jackie? I would. In those cases, obviously, Tammy Daybell, which we still don't have the resolution of this yet. You mentioned that earlier. Let's also talk about Kathleen Savio and Shelly Daniszewski. But I wanted to ask you first, Joe, who does the autopsy on an exhumed body? Obviously, performing an autopsy is a pathologist. Are there pathologists who specialize in just exhumations? You know, I can't imagine if you're just looking at it from a practical standpoint.

There's they're not forensic pathologists out there that essentially make their living doing exhumations. You probably starve to death. That was the case. However, I think that they're dependent upon how skilled the pathologist is. People have advanced skill sets in this area. And, you know, obviously, the more autopsies you're involved in, the higher the likelihood is that you're going to come across an opportunity to do an exhumation case. What I do know, and this is quite fascinating, is that the medical legal community in South Carolina, and just sink your teeth into this

just for a second, has been left completely out, completely out of the Gloria Satterfield case, period. Now, they've been involved in all these other deaths that kind of swirl around the Murdoch family. But her case in particular was not even on the radar of the medical legal community. I'm talking about the coroners, the medical examiners, the forensic pathologists in the state of South Carolina. So I can tell you this about this particular case. First off, the coroner for this particular county is going to be front and center in this. They're going to request that the forensic pathologists that they normally work with do this examination. And it would not surprise me at all if they bring in consulting forensic pathologists as well so that they've got another set of eyes

on this particular case because this thing is so very complex that you need as many professionals on this case to take a look at it with, of course, the primary medical examiner is going to be the one that is in charge, the primary forensic pathologist. But they very well might have others that are in the room just to make sure that they get everything because time is of the essence. Let's look at what might actually come out of this and any other exhumation. We know in the Tammy Daybell case, they were looking for evidence that she had been killed or poisoned by her then-husband. This investigation into Gloria Satterfield, because the manner of death was considered natural, but she had head trauma as the cause in relation to all the other deaths that seemed to be circling around the Murdoch family. Now, in the Kathleen Savio case,

she was the third wife of Chicago police officer Drew Peterson. The investigation into Kathleen Savio's death started when Drew Peterson's fourth wife disappeared. Now, Kathleen Savio died in her head, and it was surmised that she hit her head, fell in the bathtub, and drowned. But the problem was the bathtub was dry. Investigators surmised that, well, okay, the water drained out. But we find that wasn't the case, Joe. So investigators exhumed Kathleen Savio's body. What did they find?

Yeah, well, when they, you know, they didn't think that this, you know, kind of met muster, if you will. And these dry drowning cases are real head scratchers to begin with. One of the first things you're going to look for at autopsy on somebody that you are actually opining had drowned is that the water might be out of the tub. But guess what doesn't change? That's the weight of the lungs. If an individual has essentially inhalated water into their lungs, the lungs will be heavy and congested, more so than normal. So I think that that would be my first question. Yeah, she might've had a head injury that you're listing as the fatal event, but how did you arrive at this drowning proposition that you put forward? But when they finally did exhume Savio's body, one of the things that they determined was the fact that she didn't just have one blow to the back of her head. There was one significant

lacerated area, that initial point of contact. And I'm sure that it stood out. But, you know, as they were going through this case, they suddenly determined that they had at least six or maybe even seven other points of impact on her head that were not lacerated, but they had these deep bruises that were there. So, you know, you can understand, I think, and certainly our listeners can, that if you fall one time, you strike your head. That's understandable. But you're not going to fall six to seven times generating each individual bruise. And, you know, and in conclusion, that's how they wound up determining that this was not as advertised. This is not an accidental death. They knew just simply based upon these injuries that they discovered at the autopsy per the exhumation that she had been struck multiple times. And this is a fine

example of what can be left behind. Even after she had been embalmed and buried, the one thing about particularly hemorrhage that you can never get past in a case like this is it doesn't disappear. Do you know why? Well, because when, you know, we were talking about how when the embalming fluid is traversing through the body, right, it's essentially going through our vascular system. It's going through the veins and arteries and all these sorts of things. But when blunt force takes place and you generate a hemorrhage, a point of hemorrhage or bruise, if you will, the reason it bruises is because that little capillary bed area, that specific area has been compromised. It's been ruptured.

And so now it's out into what's referred to, I'm going to say this very slowly, it's called interstitial tissue. You're literally bleeding out into the soft tissue surrounding that point of impact. So the embalming fluid is not going to eradicate that. It will still be there. And isn't that fascinating with Savio's case? Because they still saw evidence of this after she had been dead and buried for some time. Shelly Daniszewski's case is very similar in that Daniszewski was found by her daughter in the bathtub, and it was thought that she had slipped, fallen, and hit her head.

Daniszewski was not autopsied either because she and her family are Orthodox Jews. So as this case progressed, investigators requested the exhumation of Daniszewski's body, and they found something totally different, that it was not caused by hitting her head and grounding. Shelley's death was caused by a neck compression, meaning what? Well, that there was direct pressure applied to her neck. And therefore, you know, this is going to be consistent with, say, for instance, someone pinning her to the floor and pressing down on her neck, perhaps a strangulation of some type where you're actually applying pressure directly by the palm of the hand. You know, any number of things can create a neck compression, but we do

know this. Again, you're back to this issue of someone slipping and falling in the bathtub. And you want to try to honor the family's wishes as best you possibly can. But this, again, goes to show if someone has sustained trauma, it needs to be further investigated because if you cannot validate the origin of that trauma specifically, I mean really scientifically validated, it's going to wind up in a problem going down the road just like it did in this case. I've actually been involved in another case similar to this that involved our Orthodox community in the New Orleans area when I was there.

And again, that case slipped under the radar and it turned out later to be a homicide. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.