Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Heroin Homicide of Anjelica “AJ” Hadsell

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

College freshman AJ Hadsell returns home for spring break, March 2015. Five weeks later her body is discovered face-down in a ditch, covered by a sheet of plywood. Investigators immediately identify that foul play is involved. Deep bruises are visible on Hadsell's torso and face. Hadsell has been murdered. Detectives turn their attention towards AJ’s stepfather, Wesley Hadsell, as their primary suspect, but why?   AJ Hadsell dies of a heroin overdose, but the family is adamant that AJ did not use drugs. Here is the first connection to the stepfather. Wesley Hadsell has been kicked out of the family home by AJ’s mother due to his drug use, heroin specifically. Then, authorities find suspicious items in his car, including some of AJ’s belongings, as well as duct tape and a shovel.  In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard explore and explain the details of AJ’s murder, the difficulties of investigating a body that has been outside and exposed to the elements for weeks, and why AJ’s stepfather, Wesley Hadsell, was the first suspect in this case. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Show Notes: 01:00 - Introducing the case; 18 year old AJ Hadsell, found face-down in a drainage ditch. 05:00 - The murder investigation begins immediately upon finding AJ Hadsell’s body. 06:40 - Why it was obvious that this was a death caused by another person, from the autopsy table. 11:00 - Once a body has excessive decomposition, it can be very difficult to ascertain cause, method, and/or modes of death. 15:30 - The unique and morbid skillset that Medical Death Investigators need to have in order to be successful in their jobs. 16:00 - The mode of death in the case of AJ Hadsell.  21:00 - With three times the lethal amount of Heroin found in her body, AJ Hadsell’s life had a horrific ending. 24:00 - Heroin as a mode of murder and the search for AJ’s killer. 25:30 - Drug testing via hair follicle and how this helped authorities rule out self-administered accidental Heroin overdose. 30:00 - Who had access to AJ Hadsell and could remove her from her home without signs of distress? 31:00 - Wesley Hadsell’s history of violence against women and other evidence used by investigators to charge Wesley with the murder of AJ Hadsell 32:30 - The tragedy in this case continues to intensify as details about the positioning of AJ’s clothing on her body when she was found. 37:30 - Determining assault can be extremely difficult after weeks of decomposition. 38:00 - Wesley Hadsell was found guilty of First-degree Murder and Concealment of a Dead Body in February, 2022. He maintains his innocence. He has been sentenced to Life + 15 years in prison.    Rest in peace, Anjelica “AJ” Hadsell. 1996 - 2015.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. When you're young and you have goals of going to college, first off, the first thing you want to do is just get out of high school. But then the future is so bright because you think about where you're going to go, the path, because it's unknown, but there's a level of excitement to it. You go down that path and you kind of enter into a new world that has family at a university. You're seeking out those things that are gonna

define you as a person as you continue to grow. But what you don't expect is that when you come home on your break from college, that you'll be brutally murdered and your body left to decompose. Today, we're going to talk about the death of a young lady named A.J., A.J. Hadsall. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Jackie, A.J. was home from college. She was, Joe. Angelica A.J. Hadsall was back home in Norfolk, Virginia for spring break March of 2015. She was a freshman at Longwood University. A.J. Hedsel was back home in Norfolk, Virginia for spring break, March of 2015. She was a freshman at Longwood University. A.J. disappeared on March 2nd, and her body was not found until five weeks later near the North Carolina border.

Let's put off for just a moment, Joe, discussing what A.J. actually died from and talk about how she was found and the condition her body was going to be in and how that relates to the bruises that they found across her chin and chest. She was not found until five weeks later. She was partially buried in a drainage ditch. That implies that there would have been water there. Right, you are. Here's the problem. She's out exposed to the elements. And, you know, one of the biggest problems that you encounter, you know, out in the field as a death investigator, you have to overcome not just what the perpetrator has done and try to, you know, make your way through all of that science, but you're competing with the environment in which a body is found. And in this case, you don't have a body that's in a protected space. And, you know, we kind of break these things down.

And interestingly enough, we refer to them very simplistically as indoor scenes versus outdoor scenes. And when you begin to think about the dynamic that's going on in the surrounding environment, as it pertains to human remains. They're impacted in so many ways. What's kind of intriguing is that you have this environment in which individuals, their remains are actually impacted by ambient temperature. That is the environmental temperature which surrounds the remain. They're impacted by even things like

wind. Imagine that, you know, the wind blowing over the body is going to cool the surface or warm the surface of the body. Barometric pressure, humidity, all of these things come into place. And then you throw on top of it, you have a body that is lying in a wet environment. And that has furthermore complications that occur. And in this wet environment, the bodies may very well tend to break down a bit quicker. You know, we're talking about a case in which a body is found five weeks, essentially, after she went missing. And so, that's going to greatly compromise your ability to assess what you're seeing at the scene. And I'll tell you, you know, one of the things that we look at, and I've talked about this before on Body Bags, is the honoring of the dead. And I know that sounds kind of odd.

You know, you begin to think about funeral practices and those things that we do with the dead to honor the dead. Memorialization of the dead is what it's actually called. When you see somebody that has been left outside, how was the body treated in those moments? You know, after death, was there a hole that was dug? Did somebody actually put shovel to dirt, turn soil, do the work that's required to bury a body? Did they cover the body in rocks? Did they cover it in tree limbs? Those sorts of things. In AJ's case, you have a body, her body, that is essentially discarded. And there wasn't a lot of work that went into this because what we understand is that the only attempt to obscure her body was a piece of plywood debris, if you will, that was laid across the top of her body. So I think that we can learn a lot about the person that was responsible for this, you know, because, you know, let's face it, when you see something like this, you find a body that's

partially obscured. You're not thinking, well, this person, the deceased, did not wind up in this position of their own volition. This had to have occurred at the hand of another. And as an investigator, that's the way you're thinking. So how much time did they spend with the body? And this is kind of an isolated spot where she was found because this is behind an abandoned house. You begin to think, well, if it's behind an abandoned house, is this a location that the perpetrator actually had knowledge of? Is it in proximity to anything else, a roadway, those sorts of things? What type of vehicles travel up and down this road? Who would have the kind of awareness that it would require to know that if I'm going to deposit a body, this is where I'm going to go. And then not use the home or the structure, but to go behind it into this wet environment and just use whatever is at their ready in order to cover the body up.

Because it sounds to me like the piece of plywood that was covering AJ's remains was essentially an item of convenience. It was found there. She was found lying face down in her prone position, and then the body covered. You were saying that it was pretty obvious that this was a death that was caused by someone else. She was not bludgeoned, but they saw bruises across her chest and on her face. Number one, for those to still be visible after so many days of decomposition and across the chest shows us that these are very hardy, deep bruises.

And what kind of an injury does this indicate to you, Joe? Well, let me just kind of lay the groundwork for you here when you're talking about a body that's going through the process of decomposition. First off, the body, as I'm sure that many people understand, is going to change colors. And one of the color phases that a body will go through during this period of time is it will, and a lot of this is environmentally dependent, so that caveat, but the body will darken, essentially. You'll have the body turn a deep brown, and then it'll kind of go to black. So the fact that they were able to discern what we refer to as some kind of insult, and

insult is just a fancy way that forensic pathologists use as kind of a generalized catch-all phrase. And when they say insult, you know, how was the body insulted? They use that term without being real specific. But in this case, they would have had to have seen what are referred to as margins. And that is something that is distinguishable. It has some kind of pattern to it that varies from the normal order that takes place relative to decomposition. And so, what we're talking about here are contusions. We use the word bruises, and it's the same thing, essentially. You know, what's fascinating about the process of decomposition is that, you know, the bodies are going to change colors. That just happens.

And as bodies continue to decompose, there's a progression that takes place, and a color change will be affected. You'll see bodies that will turn kind of a greenish to black color. There's a brown shade. A lot of this is heavily depended upon environmental considerations. But what's fascinating about AJ's case is that they were able to appreciate what they're referring to as contusions on her chest, which is, again, fancy terms for bruises. And they were able to single those out when compared to the natural state of decomposition, that process. been presented is that there was apparently severe pressure that was applied, maybe impact trauma, where I'm imagining somebody pinning somebody down constantly or striking them across the chest to

gain control of them. Now, how do we discern between decompositional changes and say, for instance, antemortem, which means before death, antemortem trauma. In this case, we're talking about hemorrhage. Well, when the pathologist does the dissection, they'll take samples of those areas of contused areas at autopsy. And there's never an area that is more heavily dependent upon histological examination. That is the microscopic examination of the tissues when it comes to decomposition. So you really have to be heavily dependent upon what you're seeing in the microscope. Was there hemorrhage existing in that area prior to death or in the perimortem state where they're kind of, you know, that milky period of time

where people are going from the antemortem state to the postmortem state or after death. And that can be picked up on microscopically. But that pathologist at that moment in time, they saw something. There was a pattern there that looked completely different than the normal progression of decomposition. I don't know of any circumstance that an investigator, a death investigator, hates to face more than a decomposing body. And it has nothing to do, hear me right, it has hard to understand and delineate between trauma that may have occurred to the body and the environmental decompositional factors that are going on. With what you just said, the investigators and the ME, the pathologist, found a very distinct

pattern of bruising on AJ's face and showed the imprints of someone's hand as if they were holding, squeezing AJ's face very hard. What can you tell me about that? Yeah. You know, when, when you're, you can actually see patterns and you get, listen in the morgue and even out at the scene, you have to be very, very careful about what you're opining at that point. You know, who are you going to actually tell this to? Because you have to go through the process of scientific verification if what you're actually seeing is true.

All right. Scientifically verifiable, if you will. Because remember, you know, in any kind of homicide, you're going to go to court with that. And so will it stand up? Will it hold up scientifically? Will it stand up to muster at that point in time as these things are being judged in court? So when we see patterns on a body, we can suggest, at least in our own mind, that, yeah, that kind of resembles what might be a handprint. And I hate to use the term handprint because that implies that you're leaving behind evidence of friction ridges, you know, like with fingerprints and that sort of, that's not, that's not what

we're talking about. We're talking about direct applied pressure. And sometimes when you have this applied pressure on a specific surface, like the throat, the neck, you know, if you will, jawline, face, anybody that's ever been struck in the face by a slap, you know, you can appreciate sometimes you can make out those little areas of fingers, you know, where that has occurred. But just imagine a slap that goes on forever and ever. Well, as you continue to apply pressure, as you continue to apply pressure in that specific area, the greater the pressure, the higher the likelihood that the little capillary beds that are in what's referred to as the interstitial tissue, that is the tissue that is in between blood vessels, there are capillary beds in there. They're going to rupture. And at that point of rupturing, they will kind of follow a pattern that gives you an indication that something was there,

like fingers, a palm, the heel of a hand, that sort of thing. And so that's what they're looking at. What does this most closely resemble? Now, this is something that's key in our world of forensics. You cannot, and I repeat, there is no forensic scientist out there that can quantify this. And what I mean by that, you cannot numerically state, you know, like we can with toxicology and DNA and that sort of thing. You can't quantify this. You can qualify it. It's qualified opinion that that is more than likely caused by direct pressure of a hand. And it'll look very distinct. But here's, again, back to this problem that you encounter with decomposition, is that you have to be very careful. And it's counterintuitive when you're

in this environment because you're around human remains, let's face it, that are very unpleasant to be around in the first place because of decomposition, the smells, all of these things that are going on. But it is actually in that environment that you have to spend a longer amount of time because more stuff is obscured. Isn't that kind of interesting? You have to take more time because things can be kind of blocked out by the decompositional process. And that's one of the things that is kind of striking, I think, to a lot of people that have never been inside of a morgue or have ever been around an autopsy. Those things that we might recoil from in a normal environment, you're drawn to it as a death investigator.

You're drawn to it to stay there longer because there are these big questions that have to be asked. And let me tell you something. If they're not asked and answered at that moment of time, when that person within you is saying, I don't want to be in this environment, I don't want to be around a body that is in this condition, your feet are telling you to flee, but you have to stay planted. You have to look at this evidence very, very carefully because you get one shot at it. Joe, you mentioned toxicology, and that is where investigators had to turn to find out AJ's cause of death. Yet AJ did not use drugs. There were no needle marks found on her body. She did not have a history, according to her family, of drug use.

How does that happen then, Joe, and how does it connect with those bruises on her face? We come across a lot of modes, and when I say modes, I'm talking about a mode is that thing that brings about a fatal event. So what mode is someone killed by? What is being put forward in AJ's case is that her death was directly related to a heroin overdose. Heroin overdose, let's dwell on that just for a second. What are some things we'd look for in a heroin overdose? Well, in that population of people that use heroin, there are certain physical characteristics that we look for, wasting away because your life is spent in this kind of cycle of seeking the drug and using the drug and then kind of cycling through that event over and over and over and over again. It's a personal hell I can only imagine.

But in AJ's case, that's kind of difficult to assess, isn't it? You know, because again, we're back to this factor of decomposition, and that impacts everything in this particular case. Now, here's something that folks might not understand, that when we work drug OD cases, that is deaths that are related to a specific drug, in this case heroin, one of the things that we look for is some of the physical manifestations that you see as far as evidence of direct injection. And that's commonly how heroin is administered is, you know, classically, we look for what are referred to for years and years as railroad tracks. And those are specific injection sites. Many times they're located in the crook of the arm and, you know, from an anatomical standpoint, that's referred to the antecubital fossa. But, you know, just crook of the arm. And from an anatomical standpoint, that's referred to the antecubital fossa. But just crook of the arm is fine. And it's on that surface of the forearm where an

individual can tie off with a tourniquet. They raise a vein or a vessel, rather, and they inject directly in there. Well, in her case, that would not have been visible. But some of the things that we will do is we will actually go into those hardened areas because they are hardened. It forms almost what's referred to as a granuloma, if you will. And that arises from what heroin is cut with. You know, you can have quinine, you know, they'll cut it with talcum powder. There's all baby formula or baby powder, you know, formula that you use to create baby formula. There's any number of things that it's cut with.

And those elements will get hung up and create these little kind of hardened, it's not really a cyst, but it's just a hardened area that's referred to as a granuloma. And you can run your thumb or your index finger over that area and you can feel them beneath the skin.

And at autopsy, we'll go into those track marks and kind of dissect those out and retrieve those and look at them and those sorts of things. That's a big thing. And then when we have individuals that are found immediately after death, if we're considering that it might be an injection of heroin overdose, it's quite fascinating to see the arms of the dead many times that have died as a result of an OD. You start above that exam. You start above or superior to the elbow, and you tightly squeeze the arm, and you move your hand down, down the axis of the arm, squeezing, you know what happens? If there's an injection site there, you'll see a little dot, a little dot of blood that will appear at what we refer to as a needle puncture site. We call them NPWs. The medical community uses that term, needle puncture wound. And you'll see that little bit of blood that will erupt from that site.

Again, back to AJ's case. You don't have that advantage, but I do know this, that at autopsy or following autopsy, when they finally got her toxicological sample examined, and that is no easy feat in a case like hers. It was three times, three times the lethal limit. What would that amount of heroin do to a person who's never used the drug? I mean, I can't imagine that that would have been considered a pleasure trip, for lack of a better phrase. You're talking about if someone has just come into this cold and has never used heroin before, death is going to come upon them very, very quickly.

And it is not going to be a pleasant event. There's not going to be some kind of warm, swimmy feeling that you get, like if you're people out there in our audience that think about anesthesia. event. There's not going to be like some kind of warm, swimmy feeling that you get, you know, like if you're, you know, people out there in our audience that think about anesthesia, you know, where they give you a pre-drug and you're kind of loopy, if you will. And then they say, I want you to start counting backwards from a hundred and you start and you make it to like 98 and you just simply go to sleep. It's not going to be like that. And depending upon how it's administered, you're

talking about what could potentially have been her seizing, overwhelming nausea, perhaps just for at least in the short period. And where she's getting very short of breath. Remember, heroin depresses the respiratory system. It's like a boat anchor that's tied to your ability to breathe, you're gasping for air. It would have been horrific. I mean, absolutely horrific. It's a death that on the part of the individual that administers this drug to someone, it shows very little mercy, very little mercy at all. So then would A.J.'s heart have just stopped? Yeah. And that's the case in an event like this, because again, it's a combination of systemically of everything. When we are essentially uptaking oxygen, when we're breathing in this environment,

the normal cycle is we take in oxygen. Oxygen is processed by our body. We have the red blood cells that transfer the oxygenated blood throughout our system, this sort of thing. You interfere with that process. And just at one level, it has to do with insufficient oxygen uptake in this particular case. And there are a lot of other factors that play into this. But yeah, her heart would have, she would have gone into cardiac arrest, but this would have been a case also involving what's referred to simply as respiratory failure. And it's part and parcel of a heroin OD. Many times with, and they're countless in my experience because of the many drug cases that I've worked. One of the things that you see with drug overdoses and particularly things like heroin and even oxys and those sorts of things

that are synthetics out there, you see what's presenting on the face is referred to as a frothy edematous cone. It issues forth from the nose and the mouth. It has kind of a pink discoloration. And you see it in drownings amazingly as well. And it's indicative of a respiratory failure event where your lungs are becoming very weighted and heavy and those sorts of things. And you produce this froth, this kind of blood tinge. Essentially, it's almost like drowning. Heroin overdose. If heroin is being used as a mode in order to take somebody's life, my big question as an investigator is,

who in the world would actually have ready access, ready access to an illegal substance like heroin? Yes, the search is on, Joe, for heroin use, Wesley Hadsall. How did they do it? Well, I think that the fact that when you have a young lady's body that is in such an advanced state of decomposition because it was advanced. And, you know, listen, you know, animals had actually made their way to her remains. So this is not an easy, an easy lift, as they say. This is something that you have to do a very careful, close examination on. One of the first things that they did at autopsy was they took a

hair sample from aj's body and you think well what in the world they need a hair sample for well you know we think about hair samples relative to dna and matching hairs up and trace evidence that we find at scenes we can find broken shafts of hair. You know, when we look at them, we can see, you know, people that have colored their hair. We can see that staining on this. All those sorts of things that, you know, try to determine if a hair is actually fur

or versus human hair, those sorts of things. In her case, though, they employed a very interesting methodology to learn something about the body that they had at that time. And that is they acquired a follicle of her hair and did drug testing on it. How in the world did they do that? Now, chronic drug abusers, one of the things that you will see is that as heroin, for instance, in this case, is injected into the system, it gets into the bloodstream, right? Well, what feeds the hair? Well, it's red blood cells.

And think about a hair follicle is almost like the you cut a tree in half, you can kind of tell the history of it, you know, drought years versus wet years and all these sorts of things that botanists look at. In the short term, when you look at a hair follicle, though, you can actually test that hair follicle to see if there is heroin or some types of drugs contained within that hair follicle, and for us as investigators, particularly when you're dealing with a decomposed body, you need as much data as you possibly can have. Because, you know, we talked about the term quantitative, which means numbers. You're not going to be able to get a quantitative amount or a level of heroin, but you can qualify it. You can say, yeah, there is in fact heroin present, or there's evidence of heroin being present in this follicle of hair. And depending upon how far up the hair follicle that heroin is, and there are markers along the way, you can see that the individual has taken heroin maybe here, here,

here. So you're talking about linear time as the hair is beginning to grow out. It gives you an indication of history of this person's involvement with drugs. Well, in AJ's case, they took the hair sample and it was actually negative. It was negative because in order to get heroin into the hair follicle, it's going to take, it's not something that immediately happens. It's going to be something that's going to take four to five days. You know, as the heroin is metabolized to the body, it finally makes it to the hair follicle and begins its growth outward. So, you know, you find a young lady who is in this position. You're trying to determine what exactly happened to her. And one of the things you're going to go to is, did she have anything on board? They came to the

conclusion that it was, in fact, a heroin overdose with her. Remember, it wasn't present in her hair. So where else do you go? Well, you got a body that's decomposed, so you're not going to necessarily be able to draw blood. And in those cases, one of the things that we will do at autopsy is take organ samples generally the liver is kind of one of the best areas you can do this from liver and brain and it'll be a sample of the tissue will actually be placed into a test tube if you will and then placed into a test tube, if you will, and then placed into a centrifuge and spun at a very high rate. And the sample actually liquefies. And it's at that point, you can draw this up much like you do blood and submit that for toxicological sample. Now, it's a bit rougher as far as those quantitative numbers go, when you're thinking about urine and blood and all those sorts of things.

But it will still get you pretty close. And in AJ's case, she had three times, three times a lethal limit in her system. So that's a huge bolus, which is an individual administration of a drug for her to have to have never been around heroin, to have never used heroin. She had no prior history of drug abuse, those sorts of things. And you're thinking as an investigator, well, how did she get this much on board? And then you couple that with looking at her stepfather's drug history. Remember, he had just been kicked out of the house. Well, who in that family, who in her immediate circle, remember she's home from school.

It's not like they found her in a dorm room, okay? Who in that little circle within her home, within her environment, first off, would have access to her. And secondly, could easily make her disappear. And thirdly, that would also have access to this drug. Well, all signs are going to point toward the stepfather in this particular case because he kind of fits the bill. And that's how you build a case like this. As police investigated the stepfather and a long history of violence against women. They also had information from Wesley Hadsall's drug dealer that he had purchased heroin the day after AJ's disappearance.

And again, AJ did not have a history of drug abuse, no needle marks found on her body. Wesley Hadsall, who still to this day maintains that he did not kill his stepdaughter, he always claimed innocence. The evidence that came in that the investigators used came from his van. Yeah, that's just it. He's riding around in this van.

First off, here's some of the items that are contained in there. First off, AJ's headband that this young lady would have used to, you know, pull back that lovely brown hair that she had. And it was long. It was like longer than her shoulders. Found shovel in there. Found duct tape in there. And in addition to that, you know, and look, you you know there's nothing wrong with riding around with

a picture of your child in the vehicle lord knows i do i've got pictures everywhere but there was a picture of her no one else and i think this kicks it up to another level of horror here because this is a young lady who he came into her life he's not her biological father and he adopted her she carried his surname he had access to her and there was one part i forgot to mention relative to what they saw at the scene, AJ still had sweatpants on, but the sweatpants were in a position. Now, she's found face down at the scene, what we refer to as prone, face down at the scene. And the sweatpants are pulled down below the level of her buttocks. The horror here is incredible.

Because you have this young lady that has heroin that has been administered to her. She's apparently in the hands of someone that she trusted. Remember, this is her dad now. She carries his name. And you've got this event that would appear consistent with a forcible administration of heroin. I can't even fathom, plumb the depths, if you will, of the horror when she felt that, that little pinprick. I'm sure it wasn't that she was tied off, you know,

like heroin addicts do where they're seeking a vein with a tourniquet. This would have gone directly into what's referred to as her sub Q fat. That means that the needle was applied directly to her skin. She would have sensed that, that, you know, what's happening to me? And then to be found in this position, it implies, at least, and I think in the minds of the investigators and certainly the prosecutors, that this was perhaps a sexual assault event that was going on. That he took this young woman out there in this isolated area behind an abandoned house. He had just been kicked out of his home by his wife because of drug abuse.

And he targeted her. He was exacting punishment, I think, on her. This is not about love on any level. This is horror that I don't know that any of us can really kind of calculate when you consider how she was found. One other aside to this, her body was in such a state of decomposition. And we talked about these hand markings that are found, these, these contusions,

they could not. And the friends of pathologists actually say they could not actually rule out the possibility that she had been manually strangled at some point in time. Again, you know, decomposition playing a role. It's very tough to ascertain that. But what we do know is that she had this lethal agent in her body that was administered at the hand of somebody that she trusted,

somebody that she, I don't know, I don't know what their relationship was like, but may have called him father. Okay, Joe, I'm a little confused. I made an assumption that with the bruises on her face, that it was the possibility that AJ was administered this orally. Can you take heroin orally? I have no idea. Or are you saying she still had to be injected somewhere. That's hard to say, but I have to imagine if an individual has access to a needle, which in this particular case, you got a heroin abuser. So yeah, he's going to have what they call his works, which is a needle, a spoon, all those sorts of things, a tourniquet. He's got ready access to it. And again, this is something that you can only assume.

Look, people take heroin in a couple of interesting ways. It has been taken over the years where there are people that snort heroin. There are people that will ingest heroin. And I've actually worked cases where I've had drug mules that have had dosages of heroin inserted into their backside. And the capsules erupt. and it can be administered there. There are people that have taken heroin rectally. So that does happen. There's any number of means in which this can occur.

But when we're thinking about AJ and the position she was found in, anytime we find particularly a female subject that is deceased and her clothing is disrupted in any way, the first thing I'm thinking about is that this has the potential. I've got strong evidence now that this might very well be a sexual assault case. However, you're faced with this great obstacle in her case where when you do a traditional rape kit, we hear a lot about rape kits nowadays, the ability to assess what may have been left behind by biological sample, whether it's semen or blood or hair, it becomes greatly compromised. So I don't know that there's any way that you can actually determine that. Some of the other things that we look for are physical signs of sexual assault, and that doesn't always happen, you know, where you're thinking about tearing and those sorts of things. And again, you're faced

with the obstacle of decomposition. So it was a real tough uphill climb for the investigators, not just the investigators, but I'm sure the forensic pathologist as well that did the examination. Well, Wesley Hedsel was convicted in the murder of A.J. Hedsel and sentenced to life in prison. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. is body bags.