Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Homicide of Sasha Krause

Episode Date: January 22, 2023

Sasha Krause, a Mennonite school teacher in New Mexico, goes missing on January 18th, 2020. About a month later a camper goes out to Sunset Crater Visitor Center, an area 20 miles outside of Flagstaff Arizona, to gather firewood and stumbles upon a body near her campsite. After an autopsy, they identify this body as Sasha Krause. Another month later, Mark Gooch, a U.S. Air Force member is arrested for her murder. In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss the significance of how the victim’s body was found, the clothing that was missing, the temperature, and the connection between the victim and the suspect.  Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 1:25 - Background and overview of case 4:50 - Where did the investigators start? 7:40 - Setting up a timeline 9:30 - Discovering Sasha Krause’s body 10:50 - Processing the crime scene 12:35 - Drag marks 17:15 - Body position + temperature 24:30 - Finding a suspect: Mark Gooch 27:25 - Putting the evidence together  28:45 - Significance of missing clothing and lack of DNA evidence 30:50 - Fingerprints 34:05 - Gooch makes an effort to hide his movements from that night 37:10 - Wrap upSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I guess like many people my age, we grew up going to vacation Bible school during the summer and going to Sunday school on Sundays. And unlike being in school, there was something different about a Sunday school teacher. They weren't there for the pay. They were there because they felt as though that it was a calling. They wanted to teach kids right from wrong, essentially.

And I have fond memories of those that taught me as a small child. But today, we're going to talk about a woman who had essentially devoted her entire life to God and to the education of children in her community. Today, we're going to talk about the homicide of Sasha Krause. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Joining me today is Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. I can't fathom why anyone in the world would want to just randomly set about destroying such a beautiful life. But I begin to think about what happened to Sarah Krause out there in that cold desert in northern Arizona, and it conjures up images of monsters rising up out of the dark.

And I think that that is probably what happened in the case of Sarah, just living her life, not a care in the world other than taking care of these kids that were in her charge. And then suddenly she vanishes from her Mennonite community. There are so many facts in this case, Joe, that really are difficult to understand. The first thing for me that struck me, 27-year-old Sasha Krause was a Sunday school teacher, and she worked in the publishing industry, and she was shot in the head and left in the cold. She disappeared from New Mexico in January of 2020, and her body was found by a camper in Arizona. Remember, it's January. Her body was left out in the cold.

But what's surprising about this case is the man who was charged with Krause's death, Mark Gooch, and Sasha Krause didn't know each other, yet there is no sex assault that can be verified. The autopsy says it could not be conclusive, and there's no other outside relationship that can be verified between these two people. That's a curious thing because, you know, it's not like Sasha lived in an environment that was heavily populated, like where you think that there's going to be an opportunity for some stranger to cross her path that meant her harm in some big urban area, or perhaps in her little community,

it'd be very easy to narrow down anyone that might have held a grudge against her. And let's face it, she was a Mennonite. The Mennonites, by their nature, are pacifists. And so, you think, who in the world would perpetrate this kind of violence, this level of violence on this poor young woman who had lived her life by the tenets of the Bible, essentially, and the tenets of her community, educating small children. Who would seek to target her? And that makes this case all the more horrible because it's, you know, I think for the people

that lived around her, lived within this community and her family that lived back in Texas, the moment that they realized that she was missing, I'm sure that they were sitting around scratching their heads, wondering where in the world could she be? She didn't light out in her car. Her car was still there. It's almost as if she had just vanished into thin air at their community in New Mexico. So your investigative skills are going to have to be top-notch on this one because when we look at what happened, as you pointed out, she just disappeared. So when Sasha Krause went missing, the investigators really had to bring their A-game, as we obviously know they always do. But there was very, very little to go on.

As you just said, her car was still there. They had very little to go on. As you just said, her car was still there. They had little information to go on. So when this is the case, what do you do, Joe? Well, you have to start at the beginning where she was last seen and who her intimate circle is. We've talked about this before on Body Bags. It's not like you're looking for someone that is a stranger to the individual, someone that has this level of hatred. And this is a sign of hatred. You're bringing

about the death of this young woman that hasn't, to the best of our knowledge, done any significant harm to anybody. So who would lash out at her? Is there someone in the community? You know, from that point, time becomes certainly an issue because initially, when you look at this, this is not homicide. It's not. You're looking for a member of your group that has gone missing. So, the human brain does not necessarily, the default position is not homicide. They just think missing. They're going to think, well, maybe she wandered off in the scrub. Maybe she's off somewhere out in the distance and she hadn't been able to find her way back. Maybe she's injured somewhere. We want to go try to put together a team and find her.

And that's generally how these things start out. The problem is many times when things start out as a missing persons case, evidence, for instance, that could be essential to a homicide investigation might be overlooked or might be disturbed in some manner. Let me give you an example. Let's say, for instance, you've got somebody that was last known to be in a building, okay, like in a structure. They have an office or maybe it's their home or whatever the case might be, and the individual vanishes. They disappear. Well, immediately, if you begin to search that area in which they dwell, that space that they occupy normally, you're going to be in a fever to try to find them.

You're not going to be thinking about trace evidence necessarily. You'll be looking for big things. So as you kind of make your way through a dwelling, for instance, you're throwing open doors, you're touching door handles, you're scuffing on the floor, maybe you're outside and the bush is adjacent to the entrance and the exit to a building. You might be trampling on footprints, for all you know. You might be trampling on cigarette butts, anything that might give you an indication later on that someone had kind of interjected their self into Sasha's environment and had removed her from that location. Somebody that may, perhaps, have brought about her death.

At that moment in time, all you want to do is find her safe and secure. And of course, as we know, that turned out not to be the case. When Krause's car was found and the investigative teams went through it, she disappeared after eating dinner with her roommates. And she didn't have her wallet. She didn't have money. She didn't have her driver's license. And obviously, she didn't have her car. So that was a first clue, wasn't it? That's that first step that you're talking about in setting up a timeline of when she went missing. Yeah, yeah, it is.

All of those little elements that make up who we are, they come into play. Those things that we have very specific and intimate control over in our lives, identifiers, ID, for instance, a driver's license or social security card, or maybe a purse, a pocketbook, or maybe a backpack that we are known to carry. Either an absence or presence of those is going to play into the investigation. It's going to be a significant finding. If you find, say, for instance, a pocketbook that is just

laying on the ground and you can't find the person that's associated with it, then that's going to be a big tell. Conversely, if the pocketbook is gone, you would make this kind of logical assumption, well, they might not have taken their car, but they left with their pocketbook, for instance, or left with keys or left with money, that sort of thing. And so it paints it in a different light dependent upon what you find per your initial investigation into a case like this. I like to camp. I camp with my family a couple times a year. I say I like to.

My wife likes to do it more than I do, but I try to indulge her and be a good husband. So I'll go out and camp. But one of the things that we do is we go out and we gather firewood if we haven't brought our own. And I cannot imagine what it's like to be in a peaceful environment where you're trying to recharge your batteries, you're out picking up firewood, and then all of a sudden you look down and you see a body. I can't imagine what that would be like. I think that probably my gut reaction, at least initially, would be, is the person alive? And then I would begin to think, well, if they're deceased, is there a chance that harm is going to come to me?

The person who found Sasha Krause probably felt exactly the same thing, given what could be seen. Sasha's body was found near Sunset Crater Volcano and the national monuments there outside Flagstaff. That's more than 270 miles from the place where Sasha was last seen. She had on the same clothes that she was wearing when she was taken, and she had several injuries to her head and her hands were duct taped. So just seeing the duct tape around somebody's hands would be frightening enough. So investigators come and they start to process the scene. Walk me through that, Joe, because there's a lot of things going on here that they have to make note of. Yeah, it certainly is.

Duct tape, I'm glad that you brought that up because it's one of those things that it gives you pause. It's unreasonable to think that anyone would obviously duct tape their own wrist. So you know from Jump Street that something is amiss here. And this young woman who, according to the police, when they observed her body, she appeared to be dressed in homemade clothing. Now, keep in mind, they have no idea who this is. All they know is that a camper is reported finding a body out here in this wilderness area in this national park. And she's laying there on the ground. Hands are visible.

Duct tape is visible. And kind of an interesting thing, they look down and they see one of the things that kind of stands out to them. They notice that not only is she wearing kind of this homespun dress, but her hair, which is brown, is tied up in a neat bun on the back of her head. And, of course, that comes into play later. But it's just one of those identifying factors. A young lady like this that appears, I would imagine, so very passive in her appearance out there would wind up in a state like this. And this is a dirt, kind of a loose dirt surface that you're looking at here. And, you know, you have to think, were they thinking at that moment in time, did she actually walk to the spot herself? Because you would be looking certainly for footprints of any kind that might, say, match up with the shoe wear that she is currently wearing.

But one of the things that they found immediately adjacent to her body that is significant are what they termed as drag marks. Now, drag marks can come about in any number of ways, and they can present in kind of a number of ways. But if you are essentially dragging someone along, let's say you're dragging them in a supine position, which means face up, you're dragging them by the collar, there's a high probability that the drag marks that will be left behind are going to be generated from the heels of the feet because the pressure is going to adjust so that the heels make contact and the ground will kind of furrow out, if you will. Now, conversely, if you think about flipping a person over and having them almost in a prone posture as you're dragging them, of course, they would be bent at the hips. The presentation of the marks themselves will be more broad because more than likely your legs will be contacting periodically the ground from your kneecaps all the way down to the tips of your toes.

So those are going to have a different appearance. I think that what is important is you have to think about how delicate these marks are because when I say delicate, I'm talking about the level of fragility that might exist. You have to be very careful as you begin to kind of, you know, march backwards from maybe their origin. If they're found immediately adjacent to her body, you have to think about the point of origin. Is there, say for instance, a parking pad that's not too far away that you're going to drag somebody from? And are there other marks? Maybe she was able to walk part of the way and you'll see footprints that kind of fall in line with

these drag marks. And then suddenly the drag marks pick up. Maybe you have footprints again, and then you have more drag marks. And that will tell you a lot as well, because you would be thinking, well, if she's walking, she's still alive. So maybe the place where she died was where the body is found, as opposed to having been killed somewhere else and drugged to that location. So, not only are you looking for her drag marks, you're looking for her footprints, but also one thing you have to consider, you would be looking for the footprints of the person that drugged her, and they're going to look obviously completely different than hers would. She's not a large person, so her footprints would appear rather diminutive

and you would be looking for somebody perhaps that has the strength. You know, those footprints would be more robust in appearance. There's any number of different types of evidence that could be associated with this. As I'd mentioned earlier, you would be looking for things that are associated with her. If there's any kind of scrub brush that's along the way, you can look for fiber evidence. I mentioned her dress is homespun. Okay. So, that's going to be a very specific homemade creation.

It's not like you walk into a big department store and find this item that she's wearing. These things, these dresses that she is wearing, they're handmade. This is something that is unique to her and it has a very specific fabric. It has a very specific pattern. So let's just say, for instance, you're moving her through this brush and you happen to catch a bit of this fiber on a twig that's sticking out. Well, that, from a fiber trace evidence perspective, which is one of the practices in forensic science, we can actually marry that up with the clothing that she is wearing.

You know, you look for things like thread count and all these sorts of things, and the twist in the actual weave, which is significant. All of these things play in. We have fiber evidence that is to be considered. We have hair evidence that is to be considered. Remember, when they found her, when they found her, her head was bare. And we can get into that a little bit more, but her hair was exposed. It was up in a bun. So, if there's hair that you're careful to collect, maybe that's caught up in some of the brush. And again, that is a specific biological tie back to her. And I think finally, if you begin to talk about assessment of injuries, for instance, in Sasha's case, we do know that she had sustained injuries to her head. And if that had occurred somewhere back up the trail, for instance, you would have to be very,

very careful that you look for traces of, say, for instance, blood evidence in any particular spot that might be along that kind of marries up with this path that's being followed, which, of course, terminates in the discovery of her deceased person. A couple of points here. When Sasha was found, it was January in Arizona. The other point is she was laying face down in the clearing in the forest. What does that position do combined with the temperature to the decomposition factor? Obviously, it was more than a month from her disappearance when her body was found. And if it was on an average day in Arizona, say three o'clock in the afternoon, you're going to have average temperatures. But it was cold and her body was face down.

What's that going to tell us? And how does that impact the autopsy and what was done to her head injuries? She's found in Arizona. And I think that many people that have not spent much time in Arizona, which I'm proud to say that I have. I was there stationed in the Army at Fort Huachuca down in the southern part of the state. And I've traveled over a goodly portion of the state.

Beautiful place. And most people associate Arizonarizona with desert okay and there is a lot of desert people don't realize how cold the desert can be when you get up in the northern portion of the state which is near flagstaff in that area it gets very cold as a matter of fact i think if i'm not mistaken near flagstaff they actually have ski resorts up there all right and i might be mistaken but i think that's accurate. The average temperature in January for that particular area is at the low, rather. The low, average low, is about 12 degrees. That's colder, obviously, than we keep our refrigerators at home.

That's colder than our freezers for most people. So, to your point, Jackie, the idea that, yes, she had been out there a month and there will be some decompositional changes in her body. However, you have to consider because there is such a low temperature over this period of time, perhaps on average, that is going to retard the decompositional process. It's going to slow it. And as we've said on body bags before, and I will continue to say, heat speeds things up. And when you have an absence of heat and you replace the ambient air temperature with cold air, it's going to slow this process down when we begin to think about the position that she was found in. And this is quite tragic, I think, because that could be the

position she was last in in life. This is, at least in my assessment, what you would term as a classic execution-style homicide. Sasha, unfortunately, was shot in the back of the head execution-style. This is something where you begin to think about it. We've talked before about asymmetrical positioning relative to a victim and the perpetrator. So, you have an individual that is dominant over her that is literally firing into the back of her head. So, she would be in a submissive position laying on the ground, perhaps, hands restrained with the duct tape. And then this single round is fired into the back of her head, which of course ends her life in that isolated spot away from everybody else. And you think about it, and that's so sad because here this woman was that had devoted herself to living in this community, these people that she loved, and she loved these kids, and she's out in the

middle of this wilderness, and she dies all alone in fear with her hands bound. It's a horrible thing to consider. The further examination of her revealed that she had sustained blunt force trauma to her head, and that's in addition to the gunshot one. Okay. So, what does that say? Well, if there's evidence of blunt force trauma, that means that this is going to be anti-mortem trauma. That means that there would be indwelling hemorrhage. That is the body's response to any kind of impact injury she may have sustained. So, you'll have a bruise that sets in, for instance, and that's the body's response to being struck. You wouldn't have that in death. And at least, I think that in cases like this where you're trying to get somebody to submit,

where you as a perpetrator have made the decision that you're finally going to end their life. You have to get them to submit. And maybe that blow or blows to her head was an attempt to get her to submit, to lay down in that cold, cold dirt out there in the middle of that high desert. And it was at that moment, Tommy shot her in the back of the head. But what about Sasha being face down in the clearing? That contact with the ground, how does that impact knowing what happened to her? First off, we go back to the idea of preservation. And not only do we have an ambient environmental temperature, the air, the air temperature that we're talking about, but you have to think about the temperature of the earth that is underlying her body, that that space would be cold as well, which again would, to a certain degree, promote perhaps preservation of the remains.

You think about her contacting her surfaces of her body, which if she's face down, that means that she's in a prone position. So, one of the things I think would be significant here is if she was in this prone position when she was found, you have to ask the question, was she drug out there in kind of a face down position? Just imagine if she had been grabbed by the scruff of the neck, as they used to say, maybe by the shirt collar, and she's drug out there and placed in this position out there. Think about that and think about the marks that that would have relative to the soil that will present on the surface of her clothing, you know, on the front in particular, if she was brought out there in a prone position and you'll get an idea if those fibers have been scraped across their leading surfaces as a result of being drugged. And at that time of the year as well, one of the other things

from an entomological standpoint, you have to understand that at that point in time when it's so cold, there's going to be quite a bit of dormancy in insect activity out there. So, that's not going to play as big a factor that it would, say, for instance, if you were getting into the warmer months, they're going to be in a period of dormancy because it is so very cold out there. So, insect activity that might come up from the surrounding earth is not going to be as prevalent at this time of the year because they're going to be in a period of dormancy compared to what it would be like, say, for instance, when we get into the warmer months like March and April and May. When the local authorities up in northern Arizona got this phone call, I can only imagine their response. You've got the remains of a young woman that are found out there in homespun clothing in the depth of wintertime out there. I can only

imagine they're scratching their heads and they're saying, where did she come from? Because there are no cars that are associated with her out here. She's just laying here in this wilderness area and just was happened upon by a total stranger that was out gathering firewood. Police connected an Air Force member by the name of Mark Gooch to the death of Sasha Krause. And they did that through surveillance video and cell phone records.

There doesn't seem to be any connection, as we said earlier, between these two individuals. Other than the information that was revealed in texts between Mark Gooch and his brother, we find out that Mark Gooch was raised with a connection to the Mennonite community. There seemed to be a real disdain for this faith and this community. But there still doesn't seem to be a motive for this murder. And that's the riddle, isn't it? As I try to make a point of up to this point, who is she harmed? What great harm has Sasha Krause wrought upon this earth that would cause her to end up in the state?

And from an investigative standpoint, I can only imagine that that's what the police were dealing with from the beginning when they finally did track down Gooch and determine that he was responsible. You know, the pieces began to kind of fall into place. And he had an intimate knowledge of the Mennonite faith and the community. He had apparently grown up around the Mennonite community, but he chose not to join the particular group that he was associated with and went into the U.S. Air Force instead. You know, and that's what I was saying earlier that Mennonites are pacifists. You're not going to find them signing up to go and fight necessarily or to join the armed forces. It's not what they do. It's not part of who they are. And so, he made this decision that runs completely

contrary to the life he was brought up around. And I think that that goes to a bigger idea here. Why is it that your life is on track? You're not part of the Mennonite community. And I think that that goes to a bigger idea here. Why is it that your life is on track? You're not part of the Mennonite community. Why is it that you would choose and go and completely destroy the life of someone who is doing the best she possibly can and is actually helping people? And I think that when you begin to think about motivations and for someone that commits a horrible act like that, I think that you begin to do a deeper exploration of what might have been his reasoning. It took police almost two months to put together the pieces of this to track down the culprit, Mark Gooch. It was cell phone records

and video, surveillance video. Witnesses reported seeing a white SUV outside the church where Krause was involved and worked. We also know that his cell phone and her cell phone pinged in the same vicinities off the same towers. So these pieces of digital evidence is what it took for police to put this together. And it's the whole fact that there is no apparent motive other than a grudge against a faith, except there were pieces of clothing that would have been important to a Mennonite woman that were missing. There was no, according to the autopsy, conclusive evidence of a rape, although they did not completely release those details to pay respect to the family.

But the autopsy did say that it could not be confirmed that there was a rape. Yet she had no underwear and her head covering was missing, which we know is really important to the Mennonite faith. Yeah, it is. And when you see these, I term it, and I'm probably using the wrong term, but I term it as kind of a small bonnet, if you will, and it covers the back of the head. They're white. They're homemade.

It's probably something that's created with a lot of affection because it's meant to symbolize something. It's meant to symbolize modesty. Isn't that something? When you begin to think about that and you do not see women of the Mennonite faith going in public without wearing a head covering. And the fact that this individual, Gooch, had a knowledge of the Mennonite faith. Out of everything you could have taken from her other than her life, why is it that you would essentially go after two of the most intimate pieces of clothing she possesses? You'd mentioned earlier that, Jackie, that her underwear was missing. And then you take this head covering away.

You don't want to read too much into it, but out of everything that could have been taken from her, it's almost like that there's a shaming that's going on by him of her. I just thought of something here that's kind of significant. Her hands were bound with duct tape and they didn't find one wit, one sample of DNA evidence on the surface of that duct tape. They didn't find a fingerprint. And if you look at duct tape or any kind of tape, when you look at the tacky surface of it, one of the things that happens many times in cases involving tape is that you will leave behind what's referred to as an adhesive or plastic print on the surface of that

adherent, the adhesive side. You can't help but do that if you're touching it because we have friction ridges. We don't have fingerprints on the ends of our fingers. We leave fingerprints behind. You have friction ridges on the tips of your fingers, all right? So, a fingerprint is something that you leave behind. It's literally a negative image of your friction ridges on the tips or the pads of your fingers. So, when investigators and forensics experts talk about fingerprints and they say there was so many points that matched, That's what investigators are talking about? Kind of. There's multiple ways to classify fingerprints. You have

broad patterns, which you hear about whirls, fingerprint whirls. That's a particular type of pattern. You have pocket center whirls. There's these multiple classifications that you have. But when you get specific, you have these little specific identifiers that are contained within the print that's left behind. Those are referred to as minutiae. And you have all kinds of things that are in there. You've got dots, pores, ending ridges, you have bifurcations, you have deltas. There are all these things in almost an infinite combination. And that's the reason fingerprints have been used for so long, because they are unique to us. Even though there's never been like a definitive scientific study that says no two fingerprints are the same, that's been the adage for years and years,

that there are no two fingerprints that are the same. There have been cases, though, out there, famously the Madrid train bombing case, where fingerprints were mistaken for somebody else. So, you have this thing that makes you unique, and you leave a print behind. Now, most of the time, if you think about touching a non-porous surface, and the best example of that is like glass, the reason your fingerprint is visible on the glass is because you have oil on the tips of your fingers. Okay, fatty lipids are excreted through your pores in your fingers. And so you leave this pattern behind based upon the friction-rich pattern you have on your fingertips. So that pattern will show up. But in this case, the oil doesn't necessarily make the difference when you begin

to talk about adhesive. It's almost like, you know, when you're a kid and you're playing around with silly putty. If you take your thumb, perhaps, and press it down into the silly putty and you remove it, that's what's referred to as a plastic print. That means you're literally leaving an impression behind of your finger friction ridges and your print comes off in the putty itself. It's the same principle with tape adhesive. And another thing that you'll find in tape adhesive as well is you'll shed hair and you'll shed skin cells as well, which is where we get touch DNA from. Touch DNA is only a partial sample of DNA. And it's because it's coming off of dead skin cells. It's an incomplete DNA molecule.

But in this case, they found none of that. And this leads me to a conclusion, Jackie. It leads me to the conclusion that in this particular case, I think that there is a high probability that Gooch probably wore gloves the entire time he was engaged in that. And if, in fact, he did wear gloves, that goes to a broader legal issue. That means that he had an awareness. He had an awareness that he had to impede the authority' ability to be able to track him relative to physical evidence. He went prepared to do harm to Sasha. Prepared is probably the right word to use, knowing that he went to an effort afterwards to hide his movements that night. He tried to delete the cell phone service records on his phone,

the location history. He had his car detailed. And he asked a friend to hold on to his.22 caliber gun. So as they put this case together, there may not have been a motive, but there was plenty of circumstantial evidence. There certainly was. And as our friend Nancy Grace likes to say, you know, it's not incumbent upon the court or upon the prosecutor to prove motive. That's not necessarily what's here, but it is the totality of the circumstances in this particular case and another fascinating aspect of this is that back out at the scene

you know one of the things that we're always looking for at scene particularly when it comes to gunfire is ejected shell casings you know what they they didn't find one out there they did not find any ejected shell cases and i can only imagine that when they showed up to process the scene where sasha was found that they brought a metal detector with them. I can almost guarantee it's like standard fare now in any kind of crime scene response team. They will have a metal detector and they're going to sweep that area, particularly once they begin to do the exam on the body and they note that she has a hole or defect, as we like to call it, in the back of her head. That gives you an indication that she sustained a firearms-related injury. At Sasha's autopsy, one of the things that they discovered, I think probably if there's

something fortunate that can come out of this, was fortunately they actually recovered the projectile. The projectile was actually still there inside of her skull in what we refer to as cranial vault. And the reason that's fortunate is because when they finally, they being the investigators, finally got their hands on Guccia's weapon, they were able to marry that up with the round that they recovered from Sasha's body. And there was a ballistic match. So, the firearms examiner came to that conclusion within a reasonable scientific certainty. Lawyers have us say that we're on the

stand. That round was actually fired from this specific weapon that was owned by Gooch. Again, that is a bit of physical circumstantial evidence that he owns the weapon and that that weapon more than likely brought about her death or him utilizing that weapon brought about her death. But again, that brings us back to the spent cartridge. What happened to it? Did he make an attempt out there in the middle of the night? Did he search around and find that cartridge and take it with him and maybe dispose of it in some way? Again, this goes to preparation. You begin to think that he showed up with gloves, he showed up with a weapon, he showed up with duct tape of all things and took her out there in the middle of nowhere, I guess, where he just kind of thought

that no one would find her. But, you know, she was found within a month. One last note talking about Gooch's older brother, Samuel. He was arrested after he flew to Arizona from Wisconsin to pick up that rifle from Gooch's friend, and again, it was the rifle thought to be used in the killing, and he was indicted by a grand jury on a single felony charge of attempting to hinder prosecution. Mark Gooch ultimately was convicted in the kidnapping and first-degree murder of Sasha Krause. He has been sentenced to life in prison. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body iHeart podcast