Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Heartbreaking Story of Tristyn Bailey

Episode Date: February 19, 2023

On May 9th, 2021, in St. John’s County, Florida, 13 year old Tristyn Bailey goes missing. She was last seen by her sister just after midnight and is reported missing that morning by her family. The ...police and community begin searching for her that same day and at 6 p.m. that night her body is found by a neighbor in a remote area in the woods. She had been stabbed more than 100 times.  In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and special guest co-host  Dave Mack discuss the timeline of this case, how police track and identify suspects using surveillance footage, the different kinds of stab wounds, the importance of taking photographs of potential suspects, and more.  Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 1:32 - Background and overview of case 3:40 - Thrill killing 6:20 - The timeline  8:50 - How can investigators get blood out of something that’s already been washed? 13:30 - How do police identify and track a suspect from footage used for evidence? 16:00 - Mother’s day and siblings not finding Tristyn in her bedroom 17:40 - Different kinds of stab wounds 23:00 - Presenting medical evidence in court and defensive vs. non-defensive wounds 26:10 - Tristyn attempting to fight off the killer 27:20 - Importance of taking photographs of potential suspects and all parts of their body 30:40 - Aiden Fucci 32:50 - Aspects of premeditation and Fucci’s mother’s awareness of the crime 34:50 - Fucci pleading not guilty, his story constantly changing, and then finally pleading guilty 36:30 - Wrap-up and outroSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Blood Guilty. It's one of the most brutal murders in recent memory. And I'm talking about the murder of 13-year-old Tristan Bailey. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. With me today is Dave Mack. He's a reporter, a crime reporter for Crime Online. Dave, you've at least had insight into this case.
Starting point is 00:00:55 I think the whole country has for a while now. We had an expectation that there was going to be a trial, that maybe some viable explanation could be offered up to us as to why someone would want to perpetrate this kind of act on this child. But I think that we're going to be left wanting. I think you're 100% right, Joe. Here, we're talking about a 13-year-old girl and at the time, a 14-year-old boy. And the crime is so heinous that the 14-year-old is going to be tried as an adult. He's now 16. You mentioned saying, I'm sorry. What does it really mean? Well, that's
Starting point is 00:01:41 what he did yesterday. We're getting ready for the trial. Thought we might find some answers there. But no, we have a gruesome attack. 13-year-old Tristan Bailey went out for an evening of celebration with her family. They got home around 11.45 p.m. And she was seen by a sibling around midnight. Tristan was supposed to be sleeping in her bedroom. But the following morning, Mother's Day, Tristan didn't come out of her room for breakfast. And it was discovered she was not in her room. Tristan's mother calls 911 around 10 a.m. and a
Starting point is 00:02:09 search begins. While police, friends, and neighbors search for Tristan on foot, investigators locate security videos of the area and put together a timeline of what happened in the early morning hours. Security video shows Tristan walking in the neighborhood at 12.30 a.m., about 30 minutes after her siblings saw her in her bedroom. At 1.14 a.m., Tristan Bailey is seen on video walking with what appears to be 14-year-old Aiden Fucci. At 1.45 a.m., a home surveillance camera on Saddlestone Drive captures the two teens walking east on the sidewalk. At 3.30 a.m., that same surveillance camera catches aiden fucci walking alone heading in the opposite direction carrying white nike shoes minutes later video shows aiden fucci entering his home carrying white nike shoes tristan was not with him between the time tristan
Starting point is 00:02:58 is last seen on video alive at 1 45 a.m and when Fucci is seen on video going into his home less than two hours later, investigators say Fucci attacked Tristan with a knife, stabbing her 114 times and then tossing the knife in a pond. We have a gruesome attack that happened in a quiet neighborhood. A 13-year-old cheerleader in a suburb of Jacksonville, Florida. And a boy who is disturbed. He's got drawings of crazy stuff. And he's told friends, Joe. in a suburb of Jacksonville, Florida, and a boy who is disturbed. He's got drawings of crazy stuff, and he's told friends, Joe,
Starting point is 00:03:33 he's told friends, I'm thinking about I could kill somebody, and I will take them into the woods, I'll lure them into the woods, and I will slice their throat. I will stab them to death at 14. That's how he's talking to friends. It always amazes me, I think, that looking back on my career as a medical legal death investigator and the stuff that I was exposed to, certainly from a professional perspective, but the things that I viewed out there that I would come in contact, not just on a weekly basis, but on a daily basis many times, these things that you don't want to talk about. You don't want to kind of expose, particularly your loved ones to, but yet you'll have a boy, essentially, that longs, that actually longs to perpetrate something like this.
Starting point is 00:04:20 They don't understand, I think, the depths of sorrow they're about to unleash on a family. Wise question, you know, you never actually get an answer to most of the time. But, you know, for a moment, you pause and you think, did she have an awareness? And I think that she did, obviously. She certainly had an awareness. They were walking together. They were ambling down that sidewalk, which is caught on CCTV, together, headed toward that wooded area. What, for a moment, did she think the endgame was going to be in her innocent mind at that moment in time? But yet that he has been having fantasies about this and thinking about it and expressing this to individuals within his circle goes to an entirely different level. You begin to think what seed was planted within him that would drive him to this,
Starting point is 00:05:13 where he would not just do it, but be prepared to do it in advance. You think, was he fantasizing about this for a protracted period of time? How many other people are out there that he had kind of sized up, maybe in his own way profiled, if you will? Is this somebody that I could get alone just for a moment to indulge this fantasy? And, of course, it's very primal. You don't know that he's thinking beyond that from an evidentiary standpoint. You know, things that we're going to look for as forensic scientists that would be automatic tiebacks.
Starting point is 00:05:49 He's not thinking anywhere beyond that moment, that thrill that he receives. Some people used to use the term thrill killer. That term came up, I think, in the late 50s, perhaps. We've heard about thrill killing for some time. And was this merely a thrill killing, or is it something that's much deeper and much darker? And it's certainly, I think at least, it's certainly evidence that evil certainly does exist.
Starting point is 00:06:17 You know, the one thing that we do have, Joe, is we do have a timeline. 10 o'clock that morning, Tristan's mother calls 911, reports her daughter missing. And again, remember, they thought she was in bed. So 10 a.m., she's reported missing. They start looking. Late in the afternoon, Florida missing child alert is issued. Six o'clock, a resident who had been on a run reports a dead body. Eight o'clock that night, the sheriff's office announced the body found. They preliminarily identified her as Tristan. The sheriff says her death was horrific. Joe, when the investigators search Aiden Fucci's home, they find a Buck
Starting point is 00:06:52 brand knife sheath, a pair of wet white Nike shoes with blood on them, a t-shirt with blood on it, a white piece of paper with handwriting with possible blood on it, and a pair of wet blue denim jeans in the laundry basket. They also find blood and dirt on the drain in the bathroom sink next to Aiden's bedroom. How is it possible for forensics to pull the blood and whatever out of jeans that have already been washed? Well, sometimes within the context of the structure of the jean talking about, if you don't use the right kind of detergent, something that's going to eradicate a lot of the proteins that are associated with blood, there can always be something found that is not initially recognizable.
Starting point is 00:07:40 Forensically, we talk about things relative to, and I know this sounds rather simplistic, but we talk about things from the perspective of of we can see things that can be seen with the unaided eye and then things that have to be seen with the aided eye. Not many people have heard that phraseology before, but it's certainly a term that is used regularly in the medical legal community. And what that means is that if I look at an area, a question area, for instance, on a pair of blue jeans, even if they are wet, there might be a stain there, a question stain that will stand out above the rest. Because even if you get an area that has been previously supersaturated with blood, you apply water to it, the water will have an
Starting point is 00:08:26 appearance that is specific to it in the nature of water. However, as we know, you can still appreciate an underlying stain. Now, if you apply some type of detergent to that area and begin to scrub it, how many folks in the audience have ever had the experience of saying, you know what, I can't get the stain out. It's set in at this point in time. And many times, no matter how much you scrub it, you might get it to diminish to a certain degree. But it takes time to eradicate that, the essence of the blood itself, everything that's associated with various components of blood. And it will be deep within the fibers of this material. And so the next step then, after you've kind of visualized this area,
Starting point is 00:09:13 the suspect area, you're going to apply any type of reagent that they have that is going to give you an indication that there may or may not be blood there, that's something that will be reactive. You begin to think about things like luminol, perhaps, or you think about things like amido black that are applied to specific areas. If you can get a sample that's viable and then you can do a DNA profile on it, we have the linkage of our parents and we can take swabs from the parents. We can build a dna profile and say definitively pretty much definitively then let's see what the phraseologist generally used is within a reasonable scientific certainty right and so you can actually say okay this is in fact
Starting point is 00:09:59 this is in fact tristan's blood and if's the case, the bigger question has to be asked. How in the world did this 13-year-old girl's blood wind up on this kid's pants? Or on his shirt? Or on his shoes? Maybe on the sheath? Or maybe even a weapon. There are certain cases out there as an investigator when you show up that when you see the devastation at a scene and what has happened to a young life like this,
Starting point is 00:11:01 you want answers and you want them quickly. First off, I think that if you're a parent, you look at this and you say, that could be my child. And secondly, there's an urgency to it too. And the urgency is that if someone would do this, is the rest of our community, is the rest of the city, the county, are they at risk as well? Because if they will go to these lengths to literally rip a young life to shreds, no one else is safe. And that's why there was such a push and such a concerted effort to determine what had happened and to get this person off the street.
Starting point is 00:11:47 I wanted to back up just a minute because when we were breaking down the timeline, I might have rushed over what we were dealing with there because you're starting with the first report at 10 a.m. on Sunday morning of, hey, my daughter is missing. My 13-year-old daughter, I thought she was in bed. She's not here. And so immediately, the police start pulling. The investigators start pulling everything they can along the street from the standpoint of security cameras and things like that. I'm sure they were doing cell phone tracking. You hear about that a lot. And they were able to, they being the investigators, were able to basically, using the footage from the neighborhood in this cul-de-sac, they were able to actually see Tristan walking down the street with this,
Starting point is 00:12:31 I was going to say unidentified individual, but based on the neighborhood size and things like that, they were pretty much able to zero in on a possible suspect with, not suspect at the time, but the person walking with her, they had a loose identification of who they thought it might be. So you've got the entire neighborhood out looking for Tristan and the police are bearing down on who's with her because they see them go into the woods together and they see one coming out alone and identifying who that individual is their first course of action. How do they do that, Joe? How do they track that person that they're following and try to figure out who is this person that goes into the woods with Tristan and comes out without her?
Starting point is 00:13:16 Very simply put, it's cell phone data. You know, those things that these instruments that can be used for good and bad that are tracking our movements all along the way. And so, every time you make a movement, they have this so fine-tuned now, Dave, where there are tools that you can use to identify how many steps an individual is taking. Can you imagine that? To get an idea of their progression, tracking them along a pathway. And they don't have it fine-tuned to the point where it will give you absolute data, but it will be a fantastic approximation. That was the key. You think about how all this kicked off relative to the mother calling it in,
Starting point is 00:14:00 but you have to back up kind of just a little bit before that because the way Tristan's mother became aware that Tristan was not there is that her siblings had actually gone in to the bedroom to wake her up. I don't know what her common habits were. Well, I can tell you that morning it was Mother's Day. It was Mother's Day. And they were going to cook a big breakfast for mom. Yeah, I know. And that's the heartbreaking part of it. The siblings are excited about this.
Starting point is 00:14:30 You know, they want Tristan to be involved in this. They celebrate mom. And they walk in. And can you imagine their reaction? These kids, when they walk in there and sister's not in there. Well, immediately, they're going to beeline for mom. You know, I don't know about in your family and my family when my kids were little. It was a big deal.
Starting point is 00:14:49 Mother's Day was a big deal because you want to take care of mom. You want to demonstrate to her how much you love her. Do little things for her like cook breakfast. And so, immediately, parent panic absolutely sets in. We're not talking about even a 16-year-old here, Dave. We're talking about 13-year-old. This is a child. And she's gone. She're not talking about even a 16-year-old here, Dave. We're talking about 13-year-old. This is a child and she's gone. She's not there. And there's no signs of any kind of forced entry, break-in. It's not like her bedroom window necessarily has been broken out in order for
Starting point is 00:15:20 somebody to have come in to snatch her. So So you begin to develop this narrative as an investigator. And of course, this is going to point back to this digital evidence that's there that is going to be tracking all the way along. And you begin to narrow down your list of suspects who might have had accessibility to her, who was in her friend group, if you will, who might have had the potential to lure her outside of that home, and what did they use in order to lure her? And of course, their darkest fears came to fruition.
Starting point is 00:15:57 As the investigation starts with the missing person, family members saw her at midnight and 10 a.m. the next morning, she's gone. So we already have that window. We know it took place in that time period. And then her body was found. Now, Joe, I don't even really know how to ask you this. And I don't want to offend anybody, but I'm trying to picture what it would take to actually cut a person. I've never stabbed a person. I see it in movies. We talk about it on the show.
Starting point is 00:16:30 But we've got 114 stab wounds, Joe. We've got 35 stab wounds to the head and neck. And the question I have for you is, according to investigators, around 49 defensive stab wounds on her hands, arms, and face. How do you figure out defensive wound versus non-defensive wound? When you're doing an examination of remains that have been subjected to sharp force injuries, and sharp force injuries come in three different categories. It's generally the way that we look at them. First off, you have puncture wounds.
Starting point is 00:17:11 That can range all the way from an ice pick. When I first started working in the field, old guys used to carry ice picks in their boots or in their shoes. They would carry them as primarily a defensive weapon or inside their sock. Imagine how uncomfortable that was. Well, a puncture wound can range all the way from an ice pick to somebody being impaled on a piece of rebar or on a tree branch. That's a puncture wound. And even down finer than an ice pick, we refer to needles as NPWs, which are actually needle puncture wounds. You'll see them abbreviated in medical records as NPWs. And that goes to like administration of drugs, perhaps sometimes.
Starting point is 00:17:53 Then the next category we have are incised wounds. Some people will say slices, but incised is more accurate. An incised wound can be everything from a surgeon making an incision to start some type of procedure, for instance. Or it can range all the way up to somebody being decapitated. That could be an incised wound. All right. And there's multiple little variations beneath that category. And, of course, that brings us to stab wounds. And stab wounds are a category where we term them, and this is
Starting point is 00:18:26 kind of how we separate stabs from incised wounds. Stab wounds themselves are generally more narrow and deep, okay? Slices or incised wounds are shallow, okay? Shallow and long, all right? So, that's kind of how you delineate between the two. And when you begin to think about this kind of number, when you're getting into those numbers that are above about 30, okay, and we're way in excess of that, sometimes it's very difficult. And the more to begin to understand what is and is not a singular wound. Because you can have wounds that are communicating and that's one of the like when i say communicating if you've got someone that is attacking someone they're obviously they're in very close proximity and every time that knife is driven in you'll have
Starting point is 00:19:18 injuries where the intersection of certain injuries are it's hard to delineate between the two. You can have overlapping injuries. So something that you might be counting as one might actually be two if you were to look at it in reality. And that is important. See, people think a lot of people would say, well, Morgan, why is it so essential? Well, you're telling the story of what happened to the poor victim. The victim certainly can't speak for themselves. And the accused is going to have every person in the world speaking on their behalf.
Starting point is 00:19:51 They don't have to say anything in court. But you want to be able to tell the victim's story. And that's why it's so important when we begin to count these things out in the morgue. And trust me, it's hard. You don't want to do it, but it's something that is essential. So, when you get to that point, you have to assess the injuries themselves. And we're just talking about on the surface, okay? When we open the remains and we begin to look at the track of the stab wounds, those are going to be kind of classified as shallow or deep. There can be a medium thickness to them. What you're trying to do is assess what kind of damage, because you can have a stab wound, for instance, that passes
Starting point is 00:20:31 through the top layer of skin. Obviously, you have the epidermis, the dermis, subcu fat, and then you're going through that level, maybe some muscle, and you get to a rib. Well, the stab wound itself will abruptly stop, right? Whereas if that stab wound were to be moved, say, just two centimeters, you might go through the intercostal space, which is the muscular area between the ribs, and now you're into the organs. You're into the heart and the lungs, the liver, depending upon where the wound is actually associated or identified.
Starting point is 00:21:03 And so you have to take the measure of all these and kind of an interesting method of examination that we will use. And this way, if we do this, we can avoid showing graphic photos in the morgue because, you know, stab wounds, when you're trying to display these things, they're going to be viewed by the defense and by the court, I guess, as very prejudicial because they're so very gory. But what we will do is we'll take a plastic overlay after the body is cleaned, and we will lay that over the body. And did you know that we can take a marker and we can actually do a hand rendering of each one of these injuries. And then you peel this up.
Starting point is 00:21:48 Okay. And so you have this representation on clear plastic of these injuries being drawn out. And you can overlay that on, say, an anatomical model without showing gore. Okay. Without going over the top and say, these are the injuries that this victim sustained. And you don't ever have to get into that prejudicial stuff that involves all of those gory photographs.
Starting point is 00:22:13 Now, some of them are necessary. And in Tristan's case, there's any number of things that we can probably tell about what the dynamic of this event was, and that's going to be important. You had mentioned the defensive wounds. When you say defensive wound or when it's stated as defensive wound and it is identified by the pathologist as such, there's one key thing that you have to have with it. You have to have hemorrhage. Because if an individual has a defensive wound, that implies that they are aware enough to defend themselves. So if they're blocking where they throw their arm up in the air and the blade of that knife passes through that area, you're going to have indwelling hemorrhage there.
Starting point is 00:22:58 Because you can stab someone in the arm post-mortem. There's not going to be any hemorrhage there. That's not evidence of a defensive act. That's just a post-mortem. There's not going to be any hemorrhage there. That's not evidence of a defensive act. That's just a post-mortem insult. And some of these would probably be post-mortem on her, some of these injuries that she has sustained from an overall perspective. I don't know with this many wounds how long she could have survived. And then you have this migration that takes place by the perpetrator, where once you get past her defensive ability, you're now into the torso. And then once you get past the torso, you begin to describe all of these where she's been attacked about her head.
Starting point is 00:23:39 You think about this, you think, well, was he laying on top of her? Was he cradling her while he was doing this? Did he average some type of pose while he was doing this? How much of this was done ante-mortem, which means before death? How much of it was done peri-mortem, which means during the throes of death? And how much of this stuff was done post-mortem? So there's a lot to assess on many levels when you begin to talk about stab wounds. It's not as – I hate to refer to gunshot wounds as simplistic because they can be highly complicated. But when you get up into edged weapon events, there's a certain amount of intellectual sophistication that has to be in place on the part of the individual that's making the determination about these because it's such a dynamic event.
Starting point is 00:24:28 49 defensive stab wounds means she was struggling fighting off her killer. 49. Nearly half of the stab wounds were defensive. And when you look at it like that, you realize this girl gave everything she had to take down that assailant who just wouldn't stop. We do know something about Tristan and her athletic pursuits. She was a competitive cheerleader. And she's not somebody that would have just, I don't think, just kind of gone quietly.
Starting point is 00:24:59 And that's kind of evidenced in the perpetrator and what was left behind on him because he did have marks on his hand, which some of these could be associated with her attempting to fend him off. They're out in a kind of a wooded area. So, some of that stuff might be scratching himself on the local flora that's out there, whether it's some type of thorn or something like that, tree branches, that sort of thing, low growth scrub. That's the key here, I think. And that's why it's so very important anytime the police take someone into custody, particularly this soon after the fact, you want to take as many photographs of, and I'm not talking, listen, I want all of our listeners
Starting point is 00:25:46 to understand, I'm not talking about mug shots here. I'm not talking about mug shots. I'm talking about where you have this individual essentially stripped down to their underwear and you take images of all the planes of the body. You know, you're going to take anterior shots, posterior shots. You're going to go up and down the arms. You're going to look at the neck. You're going to ask them to hold their head back if they've got long hair, which he did at that point in time. Pull your hair up in the back. We want to see the back of your neck, up and down the arms, the hands, both aspects of
Starting point is 00:26:17 the hands. I want to take detailed photographs of your nails. I want to see if any of your nails are chipped because you know they're going to be doing that at the morgue with the victim. This is the deal. This poor child, Tristan, she'll never heal. He will. And you have to capture that moment in time where you freeze it. That's the beauty of photography when it comes to crime scene and documentation of crimes is that just for a moment in time, you freeze time.
Starting point is 00:26:49 You freeze the healing process, if you will. I know some people find that ridiculous, but you're on kind of this continuum where the further the perpetrator moves down that timeline and natural healing process is going to take place. So it's so very important that you get to them early where you can document all of this stuff so that you have a record of this going back, going back to the point where when this thing goes to trial, that you can actually document it and say, this is what happened. it's hard to find the right adjective i I think, when talking about this case.
Starting point is 00:27:46 Descriptively, it's very, very difficult. I do know this. I do know this. Tristan so very viciously that when they conducted her examination, her post-mortem examination, they did post-mortem x-rays, which means that a medical examiner took a portable x-ray machine, had her remains on a table, much like they do in the hospital, and began to take full body x-rays of her. And when they developed that film. When they developed that film. They put that film up on that light board in that morgue.
Starting point is 00:28:34 And they looked at it. And there. In her skull. Was a tiny triangular shaped. Radio opaque mass. You know what that was? It was the tip of a buck knife. She was attacked with such force that the tip of this knife was actually broken off in her skull.
Starting point is 00:28:59 Sometimes things are just beyond description, aren't they? I'm speechless. It just hits your heart at such a level that I couldn't even say. I know we're doing a program and I couldn't even speak, Joe. Aiden Pucci, his friends knew about his fascination with knives. He had two that he actually named, Picker and Poker. And the one that you're talking about where the tip, the little triangle had broken off. That was from the knife he called poker. To back up and set the stage for all that occurred, they're in the same neighborhood. They go to the same private school.
Starting point is 00:29:35 They do what 13 and 14-year-olds do. They sneak out in the middle of the night, not to do any kind of crazy harm, just because they're 10 feet tall and bulletproof. They're hanging out, doing what they're not supposed to do. But Aiden has an actual plan, And once he gets her to the woods, according to his statement to police, he tried to kiss her. She rebuffed him. She pushed him back. And that's where all of what then happened began. So a 14-year-old trying to kiss this 13-year-old cheerleader. She rebuffs him. He attacks. When police went looking for evidence, they found the knife in a retention pond near
Starting point is 00:30:15 where Tristan's body was found. And of course, we talked earlier about the clothing that was found in his home. Aiden's mother was charged with trying to cover up this crime. She knew what she was doing when she washed his bloody jeans, which is why they were wet when police got there. So you've got all of this going on. The police have figured out Aiden Fucci is now their suspect. But while her family and friends are still looking for her, they haven't found her body yet. He's in the back of the squad car, and he's heading to the police department where they're going to question him. And he Snapchats. He takes a picture from the back of the squad car, and he actually Snapchats a picture, and he captions it. Hey, guys, anybody seen Tristan lately?
Starting point is 00:30:58 The level of horror that this extends to, I don't know that I can adequately describe it. Let's start with a knife. The knife itself, I think if you looked at this from the perspective of a prosecutor, which I am not, I mean, it goes to preparation. You know, you're thinking about this. You've got this with you. How convenient. And with Tristan, she's 13, as you had mentioned. There's an innocence to that. You know, at that age, many of us, including me, I'm chief of monk centers, snuck out when we were teenagers. That's what teenagers do. And there is a level of innocence to it. You're beginning to sense adulthood, and you've got a kid that's older than you that's paying attention to you.
Starting point is 00:31:41 It's no fault of hers. What she didn't realize is that this person that she was with, he wanted to use her for his pleasure in that moment to completely destroy her, and he did. And the fact that one of the more chilling aspects to this is that his mother had an awareness of this because she had talked about how the clothing was wet. They went to search the area. It's not like she just threw it in the washing machine. She took these pants over to a sink and began to scrub them. Think about that just for a second.
Starting point is 00:32:20 She knows that this 13-year-old child has been slaughtered. And here she is and i know everybody will say well you'll do anything to help your children but just let this resonate just for a moment you're now attempting to what you have to at least have some inkling of scrub her blood out of your child's pants because you want to, I don't know, protect him? Protect him or you want to facilitate him getting away with it? I think that that's a question that should be asked. I don't know if it'll ever be answered like many things in this case, Dave. And that's what happens when somebody pleads guilty. At first, he pled not guilty, getting ready for trial, getting ready to get a jury together.
Starting point is 00:33:12 You mentioned it to start everything, Joe. He said he says, I'm sorry. My bad. That doesn't explain anything. I don't know that it provides any kind of solace for the family at all. And all I'm doing is sitting here thinking, I get it that a mom protecting her son, but how can that mom who's protecting her son not think about the other family and their daughter who's not coming home? How do you not have that kind of empathy and sympathy? Because there's something really wrong there with that yeah i think that there is
Starting point is 00:33:45 you had mentioned these advances that he he alleged he attempted to kiss her she pushed him away you know the story changed he claims that she aggressively grabbed at his crotch and he pushed her down and maybe struck her head then he puts forth this idea that this child, this 13-year-old, was involved in some connection to drugs in some way, like someone would have done this to her, like this child would have owed somebody money, so they're going to make a statement. And it's so far-flung at that point in time. I can only imagine that when the police were interviewing him and they begin to get these stories and they're listening to it, they know. They know they're just waiting for him to go full in and admit
Starting point is 00:34:32 what he has done. And of course, that didn't happen. It didn't happen until he's standing in front of the judge and he admits to it all and he pleads guilty. He doesn't face the death penalty, Joe. At sentencing, the best he can get is life in prison. Or is it 40 years? Is it one of those things? Well, yeah, it's going to be 40 to life. An interesting side note here is that since he committed this brutal homicide at such a young age in Florida, he's not eligible for the death penalty. It carries a 40-year sentence minimum, 40 years to life. But here's the thing, after he starts serving his sentence,
Starting point is 00:35:11 25 years from now, he'll be eligible for review. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.