Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Hollywood Hills Homicide of Amie Harwick

Episode Date: September 27, 2022

Dr. Amie Harwick, a sex therapist and former fiancé of actor Drew Carey, is found unresponsive under a balcony in her Hollywood Hills home on the morning of February 15th, 2020. She is rushed to the hospital, but unfortunately, passes away. The evidence at the crime scene and on Harwick’s body indicated signs of a struggle and her having been thrown from the balcony.   In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss blunt force trauma, the difference between falling/being thrown from a great height, how to tell in what order injuries occur, and why a nicotine syringe became a major factor in this case. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 1:25 - Background and overview of the case 3:45 - Where do you start with a case like this? 5:10 - Amie Harwick being thrown from her balcony 7:30 - How do we know she was thrown off the balcony? 15:45 - Do the injuries differ depending on whether you are thrown from a great height or fall from one? 19:00 - Blunt force trauma 20:10 -  How does the M.E. go about examining all the injuries? 25:50 - Is it possible that Amie was beaten and that caused the injuries to her liver, not the fall? 29:40 - How can you tell what order the injuries happened in? 32:00 - If Amie fell, and was not thrown, would her death still be considered blunt force trauma? 34:00 - Suspects in Amie’s case  34:55 - How investigators suspect the murder played out 36:40 - Finding a nicotine filled syringe and what that signifies  42:10 - Harwick’s ex-boyfriend, Gareth Pursehouse, becomes the prime suspect 44:45 - Pursehouse has been charged with murder, first degree residential burglary, and special circumstance allegation of lying in wait.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I've been out to LA a few times in my career. I've had to film different things out there and interact with folks out in Hollywood. One of the odd little asides about L.A. is this location there called the Hollywood Hills. It's strange for somebody like me that lives down here in the deep south. But you go there and the roads just kind of snake around you. You never know where you're going to wind up. But I got to tell you, you know, when you begin to take it all in and you look down and you

can see the city kind of laying out there before you, it's quite breathtaking. It almost looks as though it's not real. It almost does, in fact, seem like in that setting that the city is a movie set. The views are fantastic. Today, we're going to talk about a lady that lived there, that was part and parcel of that community, that people knew, people in very high echelons out in Hollywood. We're going to talk about the death of Amy Harwick. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. is body bags. Some of the toughest scenes that I've had to work have taken place as a result of falls from great height because, I don't know, you look at it and you try to make heads or tails out of what actually happened because sometimes the trauma is just so extensive. It's very hard to kind of make your way through everything that you have to analyze.

Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, I got to tell you, this case is one of those cases for me. I can only imagine the trouble that the coroner had kind of deciphering what they were seeing before them. I have so many questions for you, Joe, about this case related to that fall. But let's look a little bit at the life of Amy Harwick. She was a well-known sex therapist in Hollywood. She was the ex-fiancé of Drew Carey, actor and host of The Price is Right.

And the night Amy Harwick died, she had gone with friends to see a burlesque show, and she had got home around one o'clock in the morning. And at that time, she texted a friend that said, send me pictures on the green couch. And the location where they had gone, there is a green couch. And I guess she wanted to see that her friend got there and she was having a good time. Amy had decided to go home. So as Amy went to her third floor apartment, she was attacked. Police theorized that the assailant had been waiting on her for hours. We'll talk a little more in depth in a minute about the scene and what was found. But Joe, Amy Harwick was thrown off of the balcony of her third floor apartment. That's about a 20 feet fall. But we also know

that she was assaulted and attacked in her apartment. How can, how does, how will this type of investigation be conducted? Because an M.E. has to distinguish between the injuries caused by the assault and the injuries caused by the fall. Where do you start? The first place you start is at the scene. You want to see if there's any kind of evidence, you know, at the scene that would give you an indication of, you know, any kind of struggle that had happened there. And that certainly, you know, was the case. There was disruption at the scene. There was evidence that a door had been breached and broken through. There was even blood on the door. They haven't released a lot of information in regards to that blood as to actually who the blood belonged to.

But that is significant. It's a significant bit of information. That's something that is totally atypical. You don't expect to walk into a well-maintained living area. And from the accounts that our friends have put forward, this apartment is absolutely gorgeous. I mean, it's beautiful. If you could see this building, it's kind of got a Tudor appearance to it. You know, high-pitched roof. It's very well-maintained and I'm sure very high-end. We talked about the Hollywood Hills.

People have talked about even her bedroom was very striking. You know, she's a sex therapist. I'm sure that it's, you know, very luxurious and all those things. She's putting forth an image in this environment. And you look for things there that are going to give you clues as to what happened. Obviously, we know where she wound up. You know, she struck a hard surface, you know, after a 20-foot fall. But how did she come to wind up there?

And it's interesting you use the term thrown off of the balcony. That's not something that we just conjured up out of the air. That's something that apparently the coroner had actually reported to the local media, thrown. That's an active word that's different than fell. You begin to think about thrown, that means that someone, in fact, has to enter into the equation and propel that individual through the air and over the balcony. And that's not something that's easily accomplished. That's something that takes strength. It's something that takes force of will in order to do. And it's something that you have to be purposed at, I would think.

You know, there's any number of other places she could have been thrown. Thrown through the floor, thrown through a window, thrown onto the bed, thrown into the bathtub. I don't know. But thrown over a balcony railing. And when you see the balcony, for folks that haven't seen it, I'll kind of paint a picture for you. It gives you the distinct impression of kind of a larger form of what's referred to as a Juliet balcony. That classic image that we think of, Romeo and Juliet, highly romanticized. It's not a place you would go out and take coffee and toast in the morning, and there's not a lot of space to it. But it does open into her bedroom. And so it's a feature of this home. And so you've got to make it through

several levels here, you know, because it's on the third floor. Her bedroom's up there on the third floor. You're not going to access it, you know, from the top floor. You have to access it down below. So whoever did this would have had specific knowledge about that area and where she lived. I think that that's quite fascinating and a very interesting piece of evidence. And evidence of a life that has been lived, that an individual would have to have familiarity with it, where to find her in this particular location.

And not a lot of people would have been out and about. This happened in the wee hours. It's after midnight. Yeah, 2 a.m. Yeah, it's at 2 a.m. And I think one little aside here that's very, very important that we can certainly address. This happened on the 15th of February. Jackie, she had been out celebrating with his friends at the burlesque show on Valentine's Night. Well, you were talking about how the M.E. announced to the press that she was thrown off of the balcony. Before we get back to the body and talk about the injuries, how would he have known that? I know it has to do with the angle of where the body is found, the distance from the building, it's good old geometry, trigonometry, all those ometries that I am really no good at. Yeah, you would think that, well, first off, did you have a witness to it?

You know, that is the font or the wellspring from where that data is coming from, from an investigative standpoint. Did somebody physically witness her be projected off of the balcony? Then you have to think about, well, at what point did she pitch off of the balcony? Did she make contact with the rail? Is there any evidence that there was any kind of blood transfer on the rail? Is there any evidence that maybe someone had put their hands on the rail, put their hands on her? Maybe if she's wearing clothing, was the back of her collar clutched with a bloody handprint?

Or maybe her backside or maybe her ankles, where you get this idea that maybe she was pitched out. A person that is just falling will not generally have the ability to project themselves. And another thing that you have to factor in here, and you had mentioned this earlier, is that the coroner actually stated that she had sustained two types of trauma. She not only sustained blunt force trauma, which is generally associated with the fall and impact injury, and we can dig into that, but also there was evidence in the soft tissue of her neck that she had been strangled or manually throttled in some way, that there was deep tissue hemorrhage there, significant enough so that the coroner made note of it and thought that it was a genuine finding,

something that's not associated with a fall. When we look at these types of injuries like this, and people that have listened to Body Bags now, they know that we talk about things like antemortem injuries before death. We talk about perimortem injuries. And then we talk about postmortem injuries. And just to kind of break that down, if you have an anti-mortem injury, that gives you some kind of indication that when the person sustained the injury, which is obviously prior to death, that there's been time for that to begin at least even at a cellular level for healing to start, okay, where the traumatized area gives evidence that,

you know, there's some type of work being done at a cellular level. With perimortem injury, what you'll have, and this distinguishes it from postmortem, perimortem, you have focal areas of hemorrhage, okay, but there's no evidence of healing. So you know the moment in time, that time when the person lost their life. You think about, you know, there's probably a lot of fracturing that's associated with this. And then you've got soft tissue hemorrhage. You begin to look at this thing as logically as you possibly can and think, well, would somebody hurt their neck, particularly like their anterior neck? And when I say anterior, I mean front, okay, below the chin. Would they have injured that area in a fall? Well, there's not a likelihood of

that, okay? You can strike something and it'll leave a linear mark, but I think what the ME saw relative to her neck is possibly, and I have no way to prove this at this moment in time, But that ME may have seen a contused area, a bruised area that may very well may have matched up with a shape that appeared consistent with the human hand. I need to back up on you for just a second, Joe, because we are going to talk very in-depth about the injuries to the body. But I got to talk about this idea of her being thrown again. The ME is going to measure where the body fell, the distance from the building. Because usually, if it's an accidental fall, if I'm understanding things, as I've learned from you and Nancy through the years and her panel of experts, usually if you fall, then you are going to propel yourself pretty much straight down.

It's not going to be 10 or 15 feet or, you know, I'm sorry, I'm distance challenged. It's not, you know, but it's not going to be at an angle from the building and at a distance, right? Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. When an individual free falls, essentially, particularly from the short of a height, and don't get me wrong, I'm not diminishing the trauma that was inflicted upon Amy's body. But when you think about, you know, 20 feet is a lot different than 200 feet, okay? So it's easier to kind of size this up, if you will.

When you begin to fall, you are doing the greatest battle in the world from a physics standpoint with one of the most overwhelming forces in nature, and that's gravity. Remember, gravity, it's not like when we talk about other elements that factor into death investigation. We're not talking about things like heat and environmental changes. We're talking about a constant that's in the universe. Gravity is going to impact us all. No pun intended. We know what it's like to fall down. Generally, when we fall,

our people pass out, for instance. Say if you're deprived of oxygen and you just kind of fall over, you're going to fall essentially straight down. But when you get this kind of projected event, you have to begin to think about, well, how far away from that leading edge of the balcony would you have had to have kind of been propelled out from in order to wind up this particular distance away or forward of the edge, the leading edge of that balcony. And I think that that's probably what they're looking at. It's going to be variable. None of these numbers are static because there's too many variables to factor into.

But I think that you can kind of classify it by looking at it and think, well, if she was pitched and we don't know what position her body was in, that's one of the reasons I was saying earlier, is there evidence that she was grabbed by her collar or by her backside and just kind of thrown up in the air like a, you know, like a bale of hay. Was she pitched outward, maybe three to five feet? And how much strength would it take to propel a woman who probably weighed roughly about 120, 125 pounds? How far can you toss someone like that and apparently it was significant enough to get the idea that she was out away from the balcony that she didn't just simply tip over

the edge and fall straight down you know with gravity having the totality of the effect relative to her death this is something where she would have had to have been propelled out from the edge and she fell through the air, perhaps, I don't know, three to four feet away from the balcony. And that's one of the things that the ME struggles with. The key here, though, and I find this quite interesting, is again, back to this idea that they released this information, Jackie, how were they able to draw these conclusions? Because guess what? When folks first arrived at the scene relative to Amy

and they did the initial assessment, she was still alive. They extricated her from that scene. They extricated her from the ground beneath that balcony and removed her from her home to Cedars-Sinai. Speculatively, how do you make that? Because it is numbers, you know, you'd mentioned trigonometry. It is numbers when you begin to think about this. How exactly do you come up with a formula when you're absent a body? Just as kind of an outside observer, it makes you think that, well, maybe the police had more information

or maybe the ME has more information than we're fully aware of. Is there a difference in the injuries from whether you are thrown at this height or fall from this height? Does the force that propelled you have any difference in the impact and the damage it makes to the body? I think that perhaps you have what's referred to as kind of inertial energy that, you know, given the mass of your body, when you tip over and fall, you generate a certain velocity, okay? And maybe that could be sped up to a certain degree if you're cast. And when I say cast, pitched, thrown, propelled, but it's going to be negligible. What's really going to dictate most injuries, and I talk about this with people that I teach my classes,

what really dictates the type of injury that you're going to have is the surface that you strike. You think about anybody that falls and they strike, say, a pile of leaves, all right? A lot of that energy is going to be absorbed by that soft surface. But if you strike, say, a poured concrete area, an asphalt area, that energy is not going to dissipate as readily. It's not going to kind of range out away from the body. is not going to dissipate as readily. It's not going to kind of range out away from the body. It's going to be self-contained and kind of focal to wherever you make these points of impact.

That's one of the ways that we tell many times when people will come up with these stories about, yeah, well, my kid, he fell and he broke his leg. Okay. You've got some person that comes in an emergency room and they make that comment about you know broken leg on a on a child or a shoulder or something like that and well okay it's pretty nasty injury they've got a compound common udder fracture you got bone protruding okay i see that maybe they fell and they struck that one location. But how do you get all these other non-associated bruises, these points of impact? Well, that means that something else has been going on.

So if it's a one-off event where, say, she falls, Amy falls, and strikes, say, the point of contact. Now, I don't know this for a fact, but the point of contact is, say, the top of her head, all right? Well, then you will have a focal area of hemorrhage. It'll be probably an underlying fracture that's going to center on the top of her head, and it'll kind of extend out. That fracture will extend out. You might even have what's referred to as a depressed skull fracture at that point in time. And it's extending out almost like a cracked eggshell. You wouldn't expect to see multiple fractures that are from multiple strikes. It's a single strike, all right?

And according to what the coroner is saying, at least at this point in time, she had trauma to both her head and her upper body. So maybe, just maybe, we're not talking about a single strike to the top of the head. Maybe when she impacted, not only did she impact the side of her head perhaps, but she also impacted her shoulder. And so these things are going to be kind of married up as the single event, those two single points of contact. And she fell with such ferocity that she sustained fractures and certainly it was enough to bring about her death. I don't think that the public at large understands that one of the leading causes of death in our country is blunt force trauma. When it comes down to traumatic events, because, you know, there are more people that are involved in fatal car accidents than just about any other kind of trauma-related event that's out there.

And so we deal a lot in the medical legal world with blunt force trauma. And car accidents in particular, blunt force trauma is, in fact, the leading cause of death. But it can be very confusing because the injuries that are sustained with blunt force trauma are so extensive. And you'll hear people describe them as being massive. I don't know at this point in time, Jackie, if I can say that her injuries are massive. Because what we do understand is that when the authorities arrived at the scene, she at least had what's referred to as an agonal respiration. She had some sign of life, enough that they tried to

resuscitate her and took her to the hospital. And of course, she eventually died there at Cedars-Sinai. Let's look closer at Harwick's injuries. She had injuries to her brain, to her liver, and to her pelvis from her fall. The apartment balcony to the ground was about 20 feet. She also had severe injuries and deep marks on her neck, indicating, as you mentioned earlier, that she had been strangled before she fell. Then you have, as you were talking about before the break, all of these injuries from the fall itself. how does an ME go about laying those out? I think that one of the things that you have to consider, because one of the questions that will come up is, you know, we're talking about these location of injuries. We talked about the head.

We talked about the liver. You mentioned the liver and certainly talked about the head. We talked about the liver. You mentioned the liver and certainly talked about the pelvis. So that gives you an indication as to perhaps how she impacted. If it's a single one-off fall, let's say that they were able to rule out that she had been, you mentioned the liver, for instance. Liver is a particular area that you can see when somebody has been beaten in the abdomen. If our listeners will essentially find the bottom of your rib cage on the right side of your body, kind of snugged up in that area is your liver. It's not completely protected by the rib cage. It's there. It's exposed.

So it's real easy to get to. And I've had cases where people have been kicked to death in the liver. Liver can be very fragile. People find this kind of odd. One of the things that we talk about in forensic pathology, medical legal death investigation, is that you'll hear pathologists or read pathologists do an examination of the organs of the body and the liver in particular. They'll refer to these injuries of the liver as a laceration, but they'll also call it a hepatic fracture, a hepatic having to do with the liver. And when you see the liver and the surface of it after it's sustained an impact injury,

it actually has the appearance, Jackie, of a fracture. It kind of radiates out. It'll be very jagged. And the gut itself will begin to fill up with blood. And people will die very, very quickly as a result of this because, you know, the liver has a tremendous amount of blood supply. So you begin to clip those little vessels in there. If you don't get treated, you'll essentially lose blood and you'll die of internal bleeding. But let's think about if this is a one-off fall where she's got head injury, she's got a liver injury, and she's got a pelvic injury.

Well, how would you sustain that in a single fall? Well, the only thing I can really think about is that if you are falling through the air, you're not tipped toward the top of your head or to the soles of your feet. You're essentially pancaking in at this moment in time. So one of two things, you will either essentially imagine somebody doing a belly flop off of a diving board, and we know what kind of impact that creates. And certainly the surface that Amy fell onto was not forgiving, that energy, as a result of that impact, would transfer to these points of contact,

where she struck the ground with her head and the hepatic region of her abdomen and certainly her pelvic region. So it would have to come about simultaneously. Some people say, well, could she have landed on her back flat and had this happen? Yeah, I suppose that she could have, but the way we're kind of designed with our spine is that I often equate it to when we curl up, we kind of almost take on a tortoise-like appearance. Our spine creates this kind of shell-like position for us. It would be very difficult, I think, to generate that kind of injury to the liver. My money would either be she would strike face down or perhaps on her right side

so that you've got involvement with the pelvis, the hepatic region, and of course, the head injury. And all of these, these specific areas, you know, I talked about how vascular the liver is, and you've got tons of tiny vessels in there that cause you to bleed out into the gut. What do you have in the pelvis? Oh my gosh, well, there's all kinds of vessels in there. And the pelvis is an odd bone. When you break it, it's oddly shaved.

It's an irregular bone. And so it fractures in these odd kind of ways, and there's a lot of vessels in there. And most obvious, you have the femoral artery is rooted up in there and kind of passes through what you call a foramen. A foramen is a $10 word that physicians and anatomists use for a hole in the bone. And it passes through these areas through there. And so the femoral artery can be clipped. And if that happens, that's deadly.

And then not to mention what's going on in the skull with a closed head injury. Again, very vascular region. You begin to bleed out. Essentially, seepage is taking place. Blood will kind of leach out into those soft tissues around the brain and within the brain, and the brain begins to swell, and the person eventually dies. So you take all of those injuries that we have just enumerated the possibility of, and then when you finally receive Amy's remains, take a look at them. They've got a devil of a job on their hands

because they begin to look at this extensive trauma that she sustained to her torso. But yet, you still have the neck. Hang on, Joe. I got another question about the liver. Is it likely or possible that she was beaten and that is part of what gave her these injuries to her liver? Or is it likely those injuries were just caused from the fall? That's an excellent question in that, you know, I talked about blunt force trauma in car accidents a little while ago. And I'd say, I know that there'll be

debate about this if people hear this, but one of the organs that's really impacted by blunt force trauma in cars many times is the liver. It's so close to the surface. And again, if you find the bottom of your rib cage on the right-hand side, it's just tucked right there. And it's essentially the largest organ in the body. It's massive, and it's got a lot of surface area. And again, a lot of vessels running, passing through it. When you have a traumatized liver, the surgeons that can get to the liver that begin to repair it have got a devil of a time. Because there are all these little micro fractures that you get in there.

You've got these little bitty vessels that have been ruptured many times. The surgeons will go back and say, well, we're still leaking blood into the gut. We've got to figure out what the origin of this is. I could do it. It's above my pay grade. I'm not bright enough to do that. So my hat's off to trauma surgeons that are able to do that, to assess it. To your point, though, I have seen people that have been kicked to death in the abdomen. And that point of impact many times has been the liver. It's an interesting proposition when you begin to think about this, that you've already got a young lady that, according to the coroner, has got trauma to her neck. You begin to think, well, gee, you know, what other kind of trauma did she sustain? Because there is an ear witness to this event that actually heard what they described as bodies, not singular, but bodies falling to the ground.

There's a struggle going on, and it's within earshot of a roommate. And they heard this, and you begin to think, to think okay well you're saying there's a struggle there's apparently an associated scream that apparently emanated from amy well what all's going on here you know how many how many layers are we going to have to peel back here to try to understand many times though when you see abdominal trauma, the abdomen is not necessarily going to be opened up. It's not like a gunshot wound where you've got an open wound. But overlying the hepatic region, that area that I talked about is right below the right rib cage at the base. Many times you'll see an overlying contusion.

You'll see an area that is red and irritated or possibly even bruised. And you can track this when we open at autopsy and reflect back that tissue that's overlying the liver. You'll see on the backside of the wall of the abdomen, there'll be a big area of hemorrhage right there overlying that area. And then, of course, it'll be lying right on top of the liver that's been traumatized. And there's a term that we use for this when the liver is like, or even the spleen too, you hear this a lot, is a term called maceration. And it just, it's a fancy term for saying that the organ has been beaten to bits. It's been almost pulpified.

You know, I don't know that that's necessarily the case in Amy's case, but she apparently sustained significant abdominal trauma. We know that. The trick here, though, I think for the pathologist is going to be able to delineate the order at which this occurred and when it occurred because this person is going to be asked these questions. If this case goes to trial, they will be asked, what order, doctor, did these injuries take place in?

You're saying you've got trauma to the neck. It looks like there's a strangulation that's going on. Are you sure that this happened before she went over the balcony, or did going over the balcony cause this injury, or was this something that happened before she went over the balcony? Keep going, Joe. How are they going to? It's like reading a mystery novel.

Don't leave me hanging. How are they going to know this? It's going to be very difficult to know it because you've got two traumatic events that by their own admission, the coroner saying that happened in a perimortem state, that it happened during the throes of death, and that's what's going to make this case so difficult, I think, for the ME to try to describe the forensic pathologist that has to sit on the stand. Are they going to be able to say definitively? One of the things that we talked about with Nancy,

he began to have forensic experts that come up on the stand. You never talk in absolutes when you're on the stand. You say absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, you know, this is what happened because that's how you get into big trouble. You have to make comments like within a degree of scientific certainty. And so I don't know that they'll be able to say definitively that they can give you the order in which these occurred unless they're seeing something microscopically. You know, again, I go back to anti-mortem injuries and the perimortem injuries. Remember, we've got an earwitness to this. It's going to be real key, I think at least, that when they have this ear witness to this event, can they measure out the time?

What was the amount of time that we're talking about in linear time, you know, from, you know, this moment in time to the last sound that you heard, how long did that take to happen? And then based upon that, because you've got a baseline at that point scientifically, you go back to the pathologist and say, okay, doc, are these injuries consistent with what you're seeing here? Demonstrate it on the autopsy table. And it's going to be, I think at least, it's going to be a point of contention if this thing comes to trial. Amy Harwick's cause of death was listed as blunt force trauma. If you have a fall like this, and I'm not talking about being thrown, I'm just talking about a fall,

would it still be listed as blunt force trauma? There's the old joke that people make about the fall. It's not what kills you. It's a sudden stop. And this is actually true. There's truth in that bit of morbid humor. And many times, particularly with motor vehicle accidents, there's a kind of a way that in medical legal death investigation, we frame these things. They're called rapid deceleration injuries. And sometimes that's associated with things like striking a fixed object as you're moving through space, you know, like in a car. If you're not belted in a car and you slam into a bridge abutment, okay, well, the car stopped moving.

Your body essentially stopped moving when you struck the steering wheel or the windshield. But guess what? Your organs are still moving. People don't think about that for a millisecond. Your organs are still moving. People don't think about that for a millisecond. Your organs are still moving in your body and they get ripped to shreds. It's this weird event that takes place. And I think that you can have this kind of event occur with a fall as well. The trick is being able to explain this in terms that a layman will be able to understand it, particularly in a court, because

that's where this really matters. How do you frame this so that people understand that it was, in fact, the fall that killed her as opposed to this manual strangulation event? Because there are going to be questions that are going to arise relative to that. And it seems like you've got all of the information here, but sometimes in cases you get such a glut of information that it can be confusing, particularly for the laymen that occupy the jury box. You know, they're going to have to be able to make a decision based on this information that's coming to them from the medical examiner and the investigators. In cases involving someone like Amy Harwick, she led a very interesting life and came in contact with a lot of people

that brought her into the lens of the public. She was strikingly beautiful and was a sex therapist. And so when you see her life coming to an end in such a violent way, you begin to think about things. Well, who would be on your short list as far as suspects? You know, who has she come in contact with? Is there a history of somebody that's out there that's lurking about in her life that's harassing her, that's making her life pure hell, that has left her in fear? Are there restraining orders? And as investigators, that's one of the first places you're going to go to

because where she died is not a place prone to this kind of violence. It almost appears like she was targeted in some way, Jackie. Well, that is exactly what investigators suspect happened. In fact, Joe, Amy Harwick told family and friends at one point, if anything ever happens to me, it's him. And that him is an ex-boyfriend. His name is Gareth Pursehouse. He has now been charged with murder and residential burglary with special circumstance allegations of lying in wait. And that comes from the fact that police believe that he was waiting for Harwick for hours.

Now, when police were called, they were called by her downstairs roommate. He tells police that he woke up and heard something. Not really sure what he heard. He just assumed that it was Harwick coming home from her evening out. Then he says he goes back to sleep and then is woken up by a woman's screams. And he was able to tell that the screams were coming from above him and that it was Amy. He tried to find his phone but couldn't, so he couldn't call the police. He tried to get upstairs and couldn't. And he ended up having to climb a fence to get to a neighbor to be able to get her some help, and when the police came, that's when they found her,

Amy Harwick, on the ground after being tossed from her balcony. Now, in the apartment, there were several things that were found. She had a rosary, and it was broken, and the beads were scattered in multiple rooms of her apartment, which tells us that this assault happened basically all over the apartment. And then there was another very potent piece of evidence that was found, and that was a syringe full of nicotine. How do you get a syringe full of nicotine when we know that Harwick did not do drugs, did not smoke? This obviously was not hers, but brought, allegedly, police say, by Purse House.

Yeah, you know, a few years ago, we would have been scratching our head a lot more over this. You know, the presence of this nicotine filled syringe is what the police have kind of identified this as. But nowadays where you have people that are vaping, they're vaping liquids, and nicotine is a component. It's

not that difficult to get. The question is, how was it acquired? From where was it acquired? And how was it drawn up? Because they specifically say syringe, which means that more than likely that there is a needle that's associated with this. And one of the things that's quite fascinating with this is that the syringe was actually located out on the balcony you know the balcony that we've mentioned now several times that she went over the side on why would it be there was the perpetrator attempting to administer this to her and jackie you'd mentioned the broken rosary beads the beads

led from what are being called her TV room through her bedroom and again out onto the balcony. So you've almost got this trail of breadcrumbs, if you will, evidentiary breadcrumbs that are giving you an indication of what may have happened. But let's get back to that nicotine syringe. If your purpose to use nicotine in order to do harm to an individual, I think that roughly you're going to need an injection of about 60 milligrams for an adult that might weigh about 120 pounds. And what kind of effect? Well, first off, with a concentration of nicotine, it's going to blow your blood pressure up through the roof, and it'll cause you to have a cardiac, potentially a cardiac event. You know, it's kind of certainly, to my way of thinking,

it's certainly kind of an interesting way of going about taking somebody's life. Nicotine is something that we do, in fact, screen for. It's in a standard panel. You hear a lot, you know, how many times have we talked about on Nancy's show where they'll say, well, it's pending toxicology. Well, nicotine is one of the things that some offices actually screen for in their standard panel. How many times have we talked about on Nancy's show where they'll say, well, it's pending toxicology. Well, nicotine is one of the things that some offices actually screen for in their standard panel. And you say, why do you need to know nicotine?

Well, it goes to the lifestyle of the individual. What are they engaged in? What are they taking into their body? And Amy had no history of cigarette use, didn't have any history of vaping. She was not a druggie, didn't use drugs, and she's also a teetotaler as well. I don't know if that's been mentioned, but she didn't imbibe with alcohol. So apparently she led a pretty clean lifestyle relative to what she was going to be putting into her body. To that point, the coroner has not indicated at all that there was any nicotine found in her post-mortem examination and certainly in her toxicology. But it does go to a bigger issue here.

That means, for me at least, that whoever this perpetrator is, they showed up prepared. They showed up to do harm and you want to use nicotine, which I'm not going to say it's something, it's an exotic toxin, you know, some exotic fish that you've drawn, you know, some kind of toxic substance from to inject somebody with. It's not exotic like that, but it's atypical. That indicates to me that you've done some study. You've thought about this, that you've kind of planned this out. Well, Joe, hang on. You wouldn't, if you brought a syringe with you filled with nicotine, you're not intending to use that to get high or experience some kind of euphoria.

That's not what that would do to your body, right? Lord, no. No. No. With lethal concentration of nicotine, it's deadly. I mean, it's deadly. I don't know for whatever purpose you would use liquefied nicotine for, drawn up in a syringe. Now, obviously, we've talked about vaping where people want that boost of nicotine because nicotine, one of the addictive factors in it is it kind of gives you that euphoric feeling when you take it on in your system, but that's in smaller dosages. When you're talking a bump of something like 60 milligrams, and again, they haven't really released how much was found, but when you start to talk about an injection of that amount, a bolus that size, I think that it would give a reasonable person

pause to think, why in the world would the syringe be in Amy's home? She doesn't have a nicotine habit. It's not like I don't think she's juicing up her non-existent vapes that she doesn't possess. So how did it miraculously appear there? And that's a huge question. Well, when you begin to think about pure nicotine, the only thing I can think of is that you're either trying to incapacitate them some way to the point where they can't fend you off, which would be an odd selection, I would think, or you're trying to kill them. We know that Amy Harwick and Gareth Pursehouse dated for quite some time. We also know that when they broke up, he began to stalk her. He began to harass her. Reviews of her business and her practice began showing up online.

Very detrimental, and she was worried about that and again I mentioned earlier she'd had told people she had told friends and family that if something happened to her it was him and in fact investigators saw that Mr. Pursehouse had similar scratches and bruises on him, and his DNA was found at Amy Harwick's home. Now, of course, they had been dating for quite some time. Still, how long had it been since he had been at the home? So how is that going to play in, Joe? I think that, like they say down south, a dog won't hunt, I think, is what that comes down to. Because, you know, there's been separation. My God, she had a restraining order on this guy.

I'm not saying that there could not be residual DNA in her dwelling. But if you've got kind of robust deposits of his DNA in that environment, and he's got a restraining order, and she is stating unequivocally that she's afraid of him you know how did it wind up in the apartment you talked about how they charged him with this idea of laying in wait if he's laying in wait at that moment in time has he been visiting her at other times you know to are there depositions there within that apartment of his dna that would give an investigator pause to think well maybe he's been in this dwelling when she's not here and kind of wandering around if you will but yeah i think that

that would be very difficult because that relationship has been ended for some time. And there was a lot of violent acting out with this. I think that there's even a couple of accounts where he may have pushed her out of a vehicle and all these other things and menacing and threatening and, you know, all that sort of stalking behavior that goes on many times with these kinds of cases. So for me, I think that that would be very, very difficult to try to say, well, yeah, his DNA, I mean, you can say it, you know, but that doesn't mean that, you know, you're going to get a jury to buy into that line of logic. Gareth Pursehouse has been charged with murder and first-degree residential burglary. Additionally, he has been charged with special circumstance allegation of lying in wait. A judge has ruled that this case can go forward.

Again, this case has not been adjudicated. Pursehouse is innocent until proven guilty by court of law. If he is found guilty, however, of these charges, he could be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of Law. If he is found guilty, however, of these charges, he could be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. you're listening to an iHeart podcast