Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Gudino Enigma Dismantling a Drug Trafficker's Murderous Web

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

In this episode of Body Bags we delve into a baffling triple homicide case with multiple murder scenes and explore the backgrounds of the victims and suspect, Elias Gudino, who has a history of drug trafficking, and consider potential motives for the murders.  Hosts Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the challenges of kidnapping, restraining, and controlling multiple victims, as well as the significance of the chosen dumping grounds. They examine forensic details, such as rigor mortis and postmortem lividity, to determine the crime scene and the sequence of events.  Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Shownotes: 00:20 - Introduction to a triple homicide case. 01:22 - Overview of the triple homicide, including bound, gagged, and shot victims. 04:00 - Speculation on whether one individual could carry out this crime spree and comparisons to other multiple homicide cases. 05:25 - The challenge of controlling, restraining, and transporting multiple victims as a single perpetrator. 07:05 - Introducing the suspect, Elias Gudino, and examining his background, including drug trafficking past. 08:05 - Roadway access and its importance in this case, along with crime scene locations and their potential significance. 09:50 - Forensics of the case and insights on where the crime began, postmortem lividity, and rigor mortis. 12:15 - Coordination when investigating multiple crime scenes and commonalities between them. 13:05 - The ages of the victims and possible connections between Gudino and the victims. 20:00 - Exploring where the crime began and how forensics can provide answers. 22:10 - How rigor mortis and algor mortis can be indicators in the investigation. 27:05 - Timeline for a body to become flaccid again and how it can be a useful clue for investigators. 29:45 - Were the victims at the crime scene all night or were they dumped just before the call came in? 30:45 - The limited illumination at the crime scene and how darkness plays a role in the perpetrator's actions. 31:15 - Different materials used for restraining the victims, types of knots, and the type of gag used on the victims. 32:40 - Examining casings and projectiles to link crime scenes to specific weapons. 33:45 - Questioning the perpetrator count and crime sequence 33:55 - OutroSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. You take a trip sometimes, you get excited. The anticipation of seeing a new place or going somewhere. For me, many times that excitement soon turns to anxiety because I'm worried, do I have everything I need? Lots of times I have to travel to do appearances and things like that. And I'm terrified of getting my luggage lost, for one. And thinking maybe I haven't brought certain items that I might need. You can always buy those things in another environment.

But, you know, you're familiar with those things that you like. Those things that you use on a regular basis. When it comes to planning a homicide, how do you begin to formulate that in your brain? There are people that have engaged in the killing of others and they have a murder kit that they put together. How do you decide what to pack? How do you know what tool you want to bring? Today on Body Bags, we're going to talk about a triple homicide. Three men that were found bound, gagged, and shot in the back of the head in two separate locations. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Joining me today is my friend Dave Mack. He's a senior crime reporter for Crime Online.

Dave, I don't know that you've ever contemplated something like this, but you begin to think, wow, what would it take? This is a monumental hill to climb, an exercise in conducting something like this, participating in it. What are you going to need? What are you going to need before you go out and you seemingly perhaps maybe kidnap people? And then once you kidnap them, what are you going to do with them? How are you going to dispose of them? It's certainly something that would give you pause, to say the very least. It would require a lot of planning, and it would require time. It would probably require help. To lay it out for you, it's 8 30 in the morning, and a guy is walking down the street. He looks over and sees what appears to be two bodies, one laying face up, the other laying face down.

Pointing that out right now, Joe, because I'm wondering if you can help us understand if that was an actual sign of something. But both the men had been bound and gagged. And both men had been shot in the head. This is 830 in the head. This is 8.30 in the morning. About 20 minutes later, police get a call of another person found about two miles from the first, what they're referring to as the dump site,

two miles from that first dump site, they find another man and he is found the same way, bound, gagged, shot in the head. That's three that we actually can confirm are all dead, but we actually have a fourth victim as well. Somehow, he escaped. Not sure how.

He was bound, gagged, and shot in the head, but he survived. So we're unpacking three murders and an attempted murder, and one man who apparently did it all you started off talking about preparation joe scott morgan you've been in this your entire adult life have you ever seen a case where one individual could pull off this type of spree. No, no, not where you had this many people that were, and we're talking about grown men, where they're being not found in one central location, Dave. Now, I've worked a lot of cases where I had multiple homicides, but guess what? They were all located in the same dwelling. Most of the time, you have this idea of containment, where someone will walk into a residence and they'll begin to fire randomly. But you have containment. You got four walls. There's only a couple of ways you can leave. I remember many, many years ago, I worked a multiple homicide case that involved

one guy where he climbed through the window in a home where a card game was going on. He killed everybody in the room, killed everybody. But he had them contained in one tight space. How do you corral three, four? How do you corral them in one place without having another set of hands, another set of eyes to help you? If you're talking four adult males, how's one guy going to do this? And not just that, you're having to bind them. That means you're restraining them in some way, restraining their hands. And you're having to put a gag in their mouth. So you're telling me one guy can make four grown men submit to this.

You're going to tell all of them to get down on the floor? Because I got to tell you, if you're holding them at gunpoint, where are you putting the gun? Where are you putting the gun while you're tying their hands or placing the gag in their mouth? You think about that, and it just seems an impossibility. And how are you going to transport them? In the same vehicle, perhaps? I don't know. That would require, I guess you could get four adult men in the back seat of a sedan, bound and gagged. You know, I'm thinking van, because you need an ability, I would think, to not just sequester, but kind of have hidden from view. A windowless van, perhaps.

Or how are you going to get them to lay down on the floor of a vehicle as you're driving? What are you going to do? You're going to take the pistol and hold it over your shoulder while you're driving down the road? Well, it makes you wonder, were they killed somewhere? I mean, obviously, the police say they were kidnapped. They're saying straight out these men were kidnapped and then killed and then dumped. And as you mentioned, I mean, how do you control grown men? And they're all young.

They're between 25 and 35. And you've got a suspect here who is 58. Elias Gudino is the suspect. And he's able to control three grown men. Don't know if it was all at the same time. What we do know is that two were dumped in one location. I'm kind of curious as to why it took till 830 in the morning before a motorist was able to identify their bodies over here. Were they dumped in the middle of the night and people just didn't notice or were they dumped minutes before they were reported?

Because 20 minutes later, police get a call from a couple of miles away saying, hey, we got a dumped body over here. It begs the question as well, you know, who called that in, the second one? Right. You got the motorist that's going down the road and they visualize, if you will, the bodies. This is an important thing, too, that we do in investigation. We have human remains that are found in a location. You want to think about points of access. You're learning a lot about a case when you find bodies immediately adjacent to a roadway because it gives you an indication that

the subject that is conveying the individuals, whether they are alive or dead, did not go off the beaten path very far. All right, perhaps, depending upon the type of roadway it is. We're thinking hardtop, blacktop road, and then they're just going to drive to a location, park on the side of the road. You're running the risk of being seen, so you would probably have to do this in the wee hours. You're going to open up a door, take them out of the vehicle, and then take them to a location.

How do you – and here's another point. Were they killed at the same time? You've got these two guys that are found deposited, as you had mentioned. One was face up, which in our parlance in medical legal death investigation, we refer to that as supine face up. I could go on forever and ever why we would not use the term face up in a crime report because I've seen bodies that are the chest is upward, but the head is turned around. And when you get into semantics with attorneys, and that's where they dance. Wow. We use the term supine most of the time because you're not committing yourself.

Or prone or recumbent. Can we learn anything about the way the deposition occurred? You've got one that is prone and one that is supine. Were they taken out individually and shot? Because I got to tell you, Dave, unless my legs are bound, I'm hopping to my feet and I'm sprinting as quickly as I possibly can. You might get me, but I'm not going to be immediately adjacent to the person. I guess everybody kind of says what they will and will not do under a set of circumstances like that. But what we're trying to explore here from a forensic standpoint is the dynamics of the event.

Back to the roadway, I think that this is very important as well. You mentioned a key piece here where they killed somewhere else. Well, okay, let's think about the injuries that we know about at this point in time. We're talking about head injuries, right? The head, the brain, all right, is arguably the most vascular area of the body. There's a tremendous amount of blood supply that goes to that one location of the body. If you're a kid and you fall and you split your head open, sometimes it looks a lot worse than it is because you're bleeding so profusely from that location. There's a lot of blood.

If they were shot, say, in another location and taken from the car and placed out there in this location, was there any kind of detectable blood trail leading from that side of the road to the final place where they were deposited? Also, if you've killed both of them, do you have any kind of crossing of the blood trails where you've got type A that's leading away to the final deposition and you've got type B blood that is leading out there. And at any point in time, do the lines of blood that are found on the ground, do they converge and split off? Was there an attempt to clean up a blood trail? You know, did they drag soil around? Or is what you're seeing right there at that location, the extent of the deposition of blood?

If they're standing over them, the perpetrator in this particular case, and they shoot them in the head, there's a high probability they're going to drop right there. So you're not going to have blood trails leading off in any direction, that sort of thing. It's a curious, curious scene, that's for sure. I've never been accused of being the most coordinated person in the world. But when it comes to coordination, there are several different types. As an investigator, when you have multiple scenes that are probably involving the same event, it requires coordination.

Any partner that you have in the investigative world, you've all got to be singing from the same sheet of music because the slightest little variance from anything can really bespoil the investigation moving forward you need very carefully to assess both of the scenes because dave one of the things you're looking for out there at these scenes are commonalities. You're looking for things that they have in common. In this particular case, the police were able to pick up a suspect fairly quickly. What we do know is the three individuals that are dead, Emma Reyes is 25, Victor Varela Rodriguez is 31, and Domingo Castillo Reyes is 35, don't know anything about the fourth victim. So we're dealing with 25, 31 and 35 year old men and a suspect, Elias Gudino, who is 58.

Joe, I have looked this case back and forth trying to figure out how did the police so quickly go to Elias Gudino? Well, there actually is a reason. When you peel the band-aid off his life, you find out a lot of things about his past that might be part of what we're seeing here. Public records show that Goudino at one time owned a place called the, I'm going to destroy this word and I apologize, but English is my first and only language. Anything other than that is just not going to be pronounced properly, okay? But he owned a store, La Michoacana Taquera and Grocery. Born in Mexico, came to the U.S. in the 1980s, and became an American citizen. In 2009, Mr. Gudino was living in Akron. He had, at that time, a business. I think it was a landscape

business, but that was just a cover because, according to federal agents, it was a drug trafficking organization. They had information showing that Gudino had been trafficking drugs since the 1990s. He had an operation that was based in southern Mexico, but reached across the United States in Ohio, Colorado, Oklahoma, and other states, much of that investigation was focused on Akron, Ohio, where officials said he was actually supplying cocaine dealers and operating his business. Now, when investigators tapped Gudino's phone, they heard him talking to people in Mexico and other states about what he was moving through the trafficking organization.

So we had an international drug smuggling ring all out of Akron, Ohio, headed by Elias Gudino. When investigators moved in, Gudino and another man were bringing a shipment of cocaine into Akron. Court records show that they stopped a vehicle and they found about eight kilos of cocaine hidden in a compartment near the radiator. So a few months later, Goudino pleads guilty. Obviously, it was a negotiated thing. Two federal charges involving drug trafficking. He was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison, followed by five years of probation. He served his time. He was released in November of 2017. Court records say that he remained on probation until May of last year. So that brings us to now, okay, of the life of Elias

Godino. So one has to wonder, these current murders, are they part of a payback for what sent him to prison in 2009? Possibly. You have to try to understand relationships between people. You know, we were talking about Mr. Godino. He's 58 years old. Now, unless you're working for him, I got to say, I don't see a 58-year-old cat hanging out with 20-somethings. From a perspective of behavior, you begin to think about, well, what kind of connection do they have? Well, it's probably not going to be kind of this casual, friendly, let's go play darts, have a couple of beers relationship. You generally are going to gravitate toward those people that are in your age group. So what is it?

And this is another thing. When you're talking about a violent crime like homicide, one of the many motivating factors behind homicide is passion, rage, those sorts of things that are associated with kind of an intimacy. And it doesn't necessarily have to be sexual, but it has to be something so intimate, it gins up that kind of rage in an individual to want to eradicate a person. So, if we're thinking that that relationship doesn't exist on that plane, then perhaps the answer rests somewhere else. Are these, in fact, business associates? Is there something that got between Godino and his money or Godino and his freedom, as you had mentioned?

You know, that's a big piece to this. Think about messages having been sent. I think that that's certainly something because, boy, you talk about on a grand scale to send a message. You're going to wipe out three lives like this. What kind of message are you sending? Yeah, you mentioned that they might not be direct relations because of their ages. He's 58. These guys are between 25 and 35. In 2009, when he was arrested and dealt with all the charges, Enmer Reyes was only 11 years old. Yeah, how could he have had anything to do with trafficking? Maybe a parent, brother, sister. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I'll show you, you know, that sort of thing. You never know how these things can be networked

together. And sometimes you uncover some of the most bizarre types of relationships when you have an individual that's attempting to message somebody by use of this level of violence. There's another thing, too. I was just going back over the images from where these two individuals were found together. It's kind of a bucolic-looking neighborhood. It is a two-lane blacktop. The woods are immediately adjacent to several residences that look nice. They're new builds or newer builds. And then across from these homes is where the bodies were deposited in kind of a thinly wooded area.

This is a location that someone would have had to have been familiar with. And what's quite striking here is you can see houses immediately adjacent to the road that are just across the road. And then there are more houses that you can barely make out through the wood line where the bodies were found. You're going to go out there and shoot these guys? Pop them in the back of the head where that sound could be heard and not just one guy, you're going to do two guys out there. That suggests a certain level of comfort, I think, with a particular area when you're looking at a suspect and you're trying to determine what kind

of profile the individual might fit that would perpetrate something that is this heinous and would be done in an area that, I don't know, arguably, nothing like this has ever occurred in. Well, we know where it ended. It ended in two separate wooded areas. But, you know, I think the big question that just kind of hangs in the air at this moment relative to what we know about this case is where did it begin? You know, there are certain things that we can look to in forensics that can potentially give us those answers. I'm curious, Joseph Scott Morgan, it seems to me that we see things on TV where police immediately say, well, they were obviously shot over here and drug over here and blah, blah, blah. But when police come on a scene, they get a phone call at 830 in the morning.

We had two bodies over here. 20 minutes later, we got a body over here. When they start the investigation, they're looking at deceased individuals and they're marking time as to how they're how they're finding them. Can they determine that they were killed somewhere else and were placed here for a reason? Can they determine that based on the condition of the body? Yeah, yeah, they certainly can. And one thing that's really nagging me in this case, Dave, is that just given the imagery that we kind of see from the scene here, there are other locations that you could go that are far flung. You've got riverbeds, you've got gullies, you've got washes all over the place. Places that would make it

difficult for a regular person that's just going about their business to visualize a body. And of course, if you can obscure a body, that gives you time as a perpetrator to get as much distance between yourself and that body. That's not what happened here. These bodies were easily seen from the roadway. It would be no trouble whatsoever. Once the sun rose sufficiently and blasted light onto this area, you could see these individuals laying in, you know, I would describe as a thinly wooded area. Why would this individual choose this area? Were they killed there? We talked about the sound. You would have heard the sound, I think, out here. And how could we tell

if they had been killed in another location and then brought to this location? You know, I talked about the evidence of any kind of blood trail that was leading out to the body. But also, the longer we go down the post-mortem interval timeline, that's PMI, post-mortem interval, we look for changes in human remains. We look for things like rigor mortis. If someone is, say, seated in a chair, okay, and they are shot, they're shot in chest or the head,

and they're left seated in that chair, over a very short period of time, rigidity will begin to set in. If you get four hours downrange, the body will not, rugger morts will not be fully fixed, but the body will be appreciably rigid. So, if you were to take that body out of a chair, place it in a car, and then take it and deposit it somewhere, the body's going to have kind of a contracted look to it where the knees are pulled up. Maybe the arms are kind of angular. And this is something that would be associated with someone that had been seated in a chair long enough for them to begin stiffening. But the other thing that sets in a lot quicker than that is postmortem lividity or liver mortis, L-I-V-O-R, which is the gravitational settling of blood. If you've ever, when you were a kid or maybe you have kids, you take them out to the playground,

they hang upside down on monkey bars and the head starts to turn red and swell. Well, that's blood that's actually being, it's gravitationally dependent. It's pulling down to that area it's literally the same principle gravity is pulling blood which is liquid it's viscous liquid but it's it's pulling it down to that lowest point of gravity think about your the basement in your house one of the things your parents are always worried about you know is there water setting up in the in the basement though water is going to seek the lowest point it's the same same principle. So, if you have postmortem lividity, which you can actually see presenting within 20 minutes of death, Dave, that takes a bit longer for it to fix. But if you have someone, say, for instance, where they're shot in the back of the head, they're left seated in a chair while prep is

being made to transport the bodies, blood will settle to the ankles. You'll see it pronounced in the feet. You'll see it on the backs of the legs. Now, where the buttocks was touching the chair, it'll be what we refer to as blanched out. It'll still be white kind of because the blood can't get into those areas because it's occluded by the pressure of the supporting area of the chair relative to the buttock where it's touching. Also, in the back, there's pressure chair relative to the buttock where it's touching. Also in the back, there's pressure being applied to the back. You might see it around the shoulders or down at the base of the back where it has settled

and modeled there. But you'll have these indicators. So when an investigator goes out to the scene and they begin to visualize a body, they're going to say, wow, look at this distribution of postmortem lividity here. This is really odd. It looks like they had been in a chair. Or maybe if they were face up, using that term, if they were face up, supine, and you have lividity that is all on the anterior, that means on the front of the body, but yet

they're laying on their back, guess what you're going to know? At some point in time, this person had laid on their belly long enough for blood to settle to that area. And now they're being taken out of a vehicle and placed on the ground so that their back is supporting the body. That's going to give you a different presentation. Now, Joe, let me ask you this. When you're talking about rigor mortis, okay? I've always heard it called rigor mortis so i apologize in advance no no no it's two different pronunciations people say rider some people will say rigor yeah so rigor mortis all right you've got a body body shot dead boom it takes a certain amount of time for rigor mortis to even set in but then after an extended period of time doesn't

the body loosen yeah but dave you're so far downrange after that period of time, and that's called becoming flaccid at that point in time. For folks that don't know, with rigor, rigor, or rigidity, some people will use that term, what's happening? Well, in the joints in particular, you have lactic acid that's beginning to build up. We have lactic acid that's naturally occurring in the remains in our body in life. But the thing about it is that we're metabolizing that. And so, it doesn't set in. The closest you will ever understand the sensation of Riger in life is if you haven't worked out in a while and you go to the gym, you wake up the next morning, you're stiff. You'll see a stiffening in the joints and that's lactic acid. You can take

things that will resolve the pain immediately or in time, but either way, it's going to work its way out. The dead can't metabolize lactic acid. So, for them, that body is not going to be free from that rigidity. It's variable. It's very much environmentally dependent. Heat kind of speeds things up in the decompositional process. You might be looking at 36 hours plus or minus before the individual becomes flaccid again, which means limbs are flexible. They're flexible at the knees, the hips.

You can actually open the mouth. The mouth, believe it or not, is one of the most glaring examples. It's so rigid. A little piece of history here. If you've ever seen A Christmas Carol, you know, Charles Dickens, when Marley's ghost first appears in several iterations of the play and the teleplay and that sort of thing, Marley has a kerchief tied around his head.

Well, that's one of the things that they used to do, because if you didn't, the body would develop what's referred to as the O-sign. The mouth looks like an O, okay? And that's because the jaw opens and then it freezes. And certainly during Victorian times, that was considered improper. Looked like you could pitch pennies in a person's mouth if they're laying in state. So, they would take a kerchief and tie it around the head and that would lock the jaw into place. And then Riger would set in and the mouth was kind of frozen that way.

So, you'll begin to see the flaccidity, if you will, of the body after a period of time. If you get out to that point as a time marker, you're going to know that the individual has been out there for a while or they had been retained in another location for a protracted period of time. You couple that with other findings like certainly liver mortis, which we mentioned, or postmortem lividity. So, here's another term that I haven't thrown out there. It's called algor mortis. And this is the term that most people associate with postmortem interval, and that's temperature, body temperature, which is arguably the most unreliable thing that you can

use in order to determine postmortem interval. And then net autopsy, of course, we use the gastric contents and kind of the process of food making it through the digestive tract. But you couple all of that at the scene and you're trying to create a picture at that moment in time. You've got two dead guys in this one location that's easily seen from the road. You've got another person that has been deposited, what, two miles away. Are they in the same state at that moment in time? And then you've got another person that has been deposited, what, two miles away. Are they in

the same state at that moment in time? And then you've got this one survivor, this guy that seemingly played dead. Can you imagine that? Being shot in the head and surviving a gunshot wound to the head. How in the world we've got two men in a as you mentioned a fairly public place that are dumped one face up one face down and then 20 minutes later we get a call of another body dumped in a place where people could see i i'm i can't get my head around this as to these these three victims were they out there all night and they were just discovered at that time? Or was this a case of they were dumped within minutes of the call coming in? Yeah, that's a fascinating thing here.

The one thing that you have out in this location is the cover of darkness. Because as you well know, Dave, we both kind of live in rural areas. Black is pitch, as they say, at night. It literally is. If you're away from the city, you can't see your hand in front of your face on a moonless night. And on this particular evening, it had been raining. It was raining out there, Dave. Just looking at the imagery from the crime scene, roadways are wet. The sky is overcast.

So most probably there would not have been even ambient light from stars or the moon or whatever. The only chance you might have of illumination out there would obviously be headlights that might shine on the area, some type of floodlight. It would have been very, very dark out in these locations so the bet it would seem the best time to have done this would be under the cover of darkness again this brings us back to this idea of of depositing of the bodies i think another curious thing that we can discover from not just the scene but but also from the bodies is,

what have we mentioned? We've mentioned restraint because they use this term bound. What were they bound with? Well, were all four subjects, including the one that escaped, were they bound with the same thing? Are we talking zip ties here? Are we talking rope? Was it the same kind of rope? Or did they just willy-nilly grab rope from different locations and tie these individuals' wrists up? Were they tied in the front? Were they tied in the back? What kind of knot was used? Because that's going to tell you a lot about the individual that is engaged in this. If it's a knot, there are people out there that will simply sit down and they will give you a profile on an individual based upon the kind of knot that

they can tie. It tells you about what kind of background the person might have. You've got a person that is an old sailor, for instance. They're very adept at tying complicated knots, things that I could never figure out. Or you have somebody that just has basic rudimentary skills as to how to tie a knot. Or if it's a zip tie, were they purchased from the same place? Are they the same type of zip ties? Because there's so many out there. And then the gag, what's it made out of? Is it a ball gag that you purchased at a store?

You know, somebody would use in sex play, that sort of thing. Is it a rag that they tied around somebody? Or did they stuff something in their mouth and then secure it with a rag? And then the big question here, I think, is if we're talking about gunshot wounds, which we are, we've got at least a minimum of four, are there spent casings? Is there any evidence that at the scene they found spent brass laying around? And let me tell you what else they would have done out at the scene, Dave. After these bodies are removed, there's a high probability, and they could do this before as well,

but there's a high probability that if these gunshot wounds are through and through, they're going to bring a metal detector out there. If they find a projectile in the ground, or maybe two, you have to ask the question, do these two projectiles marry up with the same weapon? Or the casings, the spent casings, do they have the same breech block mark on the back of them? Or pin strikes, you know, where the firing pin hits the primer cap? Or are the extraction marks the same? The ejector marks, are they the same? Or closely resemble that they could have originated from the same weapon? All of these questions are

going to play in to this investigation and to ultimately how many people were involved. Was it a single perpetrator? Where were these individuals killed? And were they all deposited at the same time? I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.