Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Life and Loss of Connie Cuesta, A Wine Bottle's Fatal Blow

Episode Date: December 31, 2023

Connie Cuesta's life is violently cut short; her body is discovered with numerous lacerations, inflicted by the unlikely weapon of a wine bottle. The room shows signs of struggle; every organ in her body bears a mark, and multiple wine bottles are scattered across the scene. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack guide listeners through this bewildering episode of Body Bags, meticulously dissecting the elements that make this case so extraordinary. From the anatomy of a wine bottle's lethal potential to the significance of the victim's state of undress, the episode is a masterclass in forensic investigation. Listen in to uncover the intricate web of forensic details that could play a crucial role in the ensuing legal process. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Time-coded Highlights: 00:00:20 — Joseph Scott Morgan introduces the episode, hinting at a murder case involving a wine bottle as a weapon. 00:01:36 — The oddity of a wine bottle as a murder weapon is discussed. 00:02:39 —Joe Scott Morgan and Dave Mack delve into the impact of a head strike with an object, providing insight into the potential deadly force of the wine bottle. 00:03:00 — Dave Mack shares information about the murder case. 00:08:20 — Drawing a parallel between the design of a bottle and a baseball bat, Joe Scott indicates how they can be similarly weaponized. He then reveals that a woman's life ended due to an impact from a wine bottle. 00:10:20 — Joseph Scott Morgan describes the signs of a struggle at the crime scene. He emphasizes the importance of understanding those signs when investigating. 00:13:48 — Discussion of the role of the medical examiner in the investigation and the importance of the body’s temperature at the crime scene. 00:16:49 — Joe Scott and Dave discuss the victim's state of undress, considering whether it indicates a sexual assault or is a result of being dragged. 00:20:58 — Discussing the severity of the victim's injuries, Morgan notes that every organ in her body sustained a laceration.  00:25:11 — Detailing how a knife was driven into the victim's temporal bone four times, Morgan indicates the force required for such an act. 00:27:54 - Joseph Scott Morgan makes a crucial point about Sean Cuesta's current legal status, reminding listeners that he is still considered innocent as he has not yet been taken to trial.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. In vino veritas, in wine, there's truth. I don't necessarily know if there's truth, but I think that consumption of a nice bottle of wine may loosen you up to speak of things that otherwise might not be said in any other circumstance. And as a vessel, there are not too many other things out there that function that are quite as exquisite as a nice wine bottle. There's all kinds now that are out there in different colors and shapes, certainly. They all retain kind of a basic, their own basic anatomy. But today, I want to talk about a case that you're not going to believe, where a wine bottle actually is used as a weapon to take the life of an elderly woman. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.

Talk about the grapes of wrath, Dave. This case that we've got today is, I'm really not trying to be funny, but it is quite striking. It's something that I haven't come across. I've worked a number of bludgeonings over the course of my career with heavy objects and this sort of thing. But you generally don't think of a wine bottle as being resilient enough to impact someone, to bring about a death. And it's not just a single blow and it is not just a single injury. It is multiple injuries in today's case. I wanted to add one more thing to Joe. The idea is that the wine bottles are empty. I don't know if that means anything to you, but it makes a difference to me because I thought if you were hitting somebody with a bottle, if it had something in it, it would be more deadly than it would be if it was empty. It seems like it would be more apt to crack and be

useless if it was empty, just a shattered glass. But that's the TV and movie person watching that, the breakaway glass. In real life, glass doesn't break away and go on and people, it's kind of like if you've ever been hit in the head in a fight, you don't get up and take three more. If you get a good hit to the face, I'm telling you, the fight's pretty much over. Particularly with a head strike and with an object in particular, it'll take you to your knees. I mean, you might get back up, but you're not going to be the same person as when you went down, or at least for that moment, Tom. Now, in this particular case, we have a 36-year-old man, Sean Cuesta, and we have his 64-year-old mother, Connie Cuesta. And according to a neighbor, there had been arguments and loud arguments in the past, so much so that a couple of weeks prior

to the moment we're talking about, this same neighbor went next door and actually stopped the two of them from arguing. So it hadn't gotten violent yet, but it had gotten loud enough and enough noises being made that the neighbor was worried. But when it got really bad this time, Sean Cuesta, the 36-year-old son of Connie Cuesta, according to police and according to the neighbor, there was at first a verbal argument. That verbal argument became physical. And at first it was throwing objects. There are several different objects that were apparently thrown. It was when they got Bay, obviously it's a fight. It's not just one-sided. It's not just the son

throwing things at the mother who's dodging them. She actually was fighting back. She had to. When the son got to the wine bottles, that's when he decided this is the weapon. According to a neighbor, it sounded like they were tearing the building down. By the time the neighbor got there, and you and I were talking about this before, because there's been some mention of Connie Cuesta's spouse. They're not naming him. And I don't know why that is, but they've named the son who's been some mention of Connie Cuesta's spouse. They're not naming him. And I don't know why that is, but they've named the son who's been arrested, but they haven't named the spouse.

They call him the spouse. But anyway, when he got, he wasn't home when all this is going on. A neighbor told him, hey man, this is, it's bad. That's when they went in and found Connie Cuesta on the floor in the master bedroom. When they found her, shirt was off and her panties were down to her knees. And the police found blood in the living room, substantial blood in the living

room. And of course, in the master bedroom where they found her body face down. A lot of dynamics here. Let's go back to the bottles real quick, because this is significant when you're talking about kind of this impassioned and you see it a lot with familial cases. People are always terrified of stranger-on-stranger crime. That's not what terrifies me. And it is scary. You know, if you're walking down a darkened street, you come across an alley, the hair on the back of your neck stands up, you don't know what's down the alley, who's down the alley, in more danger with the people that are in your intimate circle than you ever will be out on the street in most cases. And when you're talking about an intimate environment, when something as odd as a wine bottle is retrieved and is used as a weapon in investigations, that's something that we call a weapon of opportunity. We know the

arguing started early in the day around 10 a.m. and continued all day long, enough so that the neighbor was bothered by it. And when the victim's spouse came home, the neighbor went out and got him and said, there's something bad that's been going on all day. Now, according to police, the investigation reveals that apparently Sean Cuesta was throwing stuff at Connie first, his stepmother or mother, and then started beating her in the head with the wine bottles. I'm going to use plural because I got to assume the bottle's going to break, Joe. The head is not soft tissue, is it? Have you ever dealt with this?

Joe, a wine bottle? I have had, no, I have not had a wine bottle. I have had a whiskey bottle, several whiskey bottles, one in particular where it was in fact broken and the remainder of the bottle was used to cut with. And that was a very brutal case. But where you're talking about someone utilizing a wine bottle, which I have to say, you were talking about kind of the robust nature of glass. It seems to me at least wine bottles tend to be, again, and I know that it's

going to be heavily depended upon manufacture, they tend to be a bit more robust than, say, a standard whiskey bottle. For me, they do. Now, you can have decorative whiskey bottles, that sort of thing. I'm sure they are more robust. But on the whole, they are. All of these bottles have a very specific anatomy. You have the mouth or the opening and then the neck, which is generally used, if you're going to use it as something to weaponize it, it's going to be used as a handle to grip it with. But as the neck descends down into the bottle itself, it turns into what's referred to as the shoulders. And then you have this kind of cylindrical area that makes up what's referred to as the shoulders. And then you have this kind of cylindrical area that makes up what's referred to as the label field on these things. As it curves down, the base of it is called the heel.

And around the heel, if you'll notice, there are these little, many times these little ridges. And when we talk about pattern injuries, we talk about pattern injuries. You can actually, with something like this, particularly if it's used on the long end, you can see a pattern. And here's a little unknown factoid. The indented part at the base of the bottle is actually referred to as the punt, P-U-N-T. And the glass appears to be thicker. I think that that probably in the manufacture of this thing, that's probably where they close it off more than likely. So the bottle itself has

a very unique form to it. And it's certainly in wine circles, it has a very unique function to it. They talk about things about like the poor and all these sorts of things, these people that are wine aficionados, not casting aspersions. It's just, it's all part and parcel of what they do in this world. When it's weaponized, if we look at the design of a bottle like this, it's not too dissimilar, I think, in certain forms as the form of a baseball bat. How kind of the tapering kind of increases, it expands out as you move away from the handle. So you can probably leverage it in the same manner and deliver the same amount of injury. But I do know this, Dave, in this particular case, a woman's life ended because of an impact from a wine bottle. When Ms. Quester's husband found her, it's often hard for me, even though I've seen so many of

these cases, to try to put myself into what we refer to in death investigation as the finder's position. On a little aside, you know, I still remember the first time I ever found a body. I was never the finder. I was always the person that would come out to the scene because someone else was the finder. And I actually discovered a body in a house subsequent to an ongoing investigation into another death. And I entered a bedroom and found a guy wrapped in a carpet that had been beaten to death with a crowbar. And what a way to start off with the first one you ever find is a guy that, interestingly enough, was bludgeoned to death. So it's really hard for me to put myself in the position of the finder to think about what they're experiencing in their mind. When you walk into the

home in which you've occupied with your wife and your family all these years and you look around and you know that there's a lot of destruction in here. We're talking about a fight. And the reason I know this is that police have said that you've got blood that is essentially in the living room. And we know her body was found in the master bedroom. So you've got a fight that initiated somewhere and continued on. That's one of the reasons when you hear us talk on television in particular and reporters talk to people like me or police officers, they'll say, well, was there any sign of a struggle? Our standard format is, well, there was no signs of forced entry and struggle.

And it's almost boilerplate. We say that all the time. It either is or it isn't. In this particular case, there was a sign of a struggle here, Dave. Right. And oddly enough, we have a backup just a little bit to the neighbor. The neighbor who he's feeling a lot of guilt. I saw an interview that he did.

And because he's the neighbor who actually broke up an argument between the mother and the son weeks before this happened and was aware there was an ongoing stressor here. The son said he had lived with the mom on and off of the last several years. Now, in this particular case, the neighbor told police that they heard arguing and noises all throughout the day, starting at about 10 o'clock that morning until early in the evening. By the time police were there, it was nine o'clock at night. So you've got a fight that began an argument at 10 a.m. roughly and continued all the way and kept escalating to the point where we know it went from verbal to physical, where the wine bottles came into play. And we know that it was actually finished off. The day was not finished off with a wine bottle. It was finished off with something else. But before we get to that, according to the neighbor, they heard arguments

from 10 o'clock in the morning. They heard loud banging and yelling coming from the apartment. When the victim's spouse arrived at the scene, the concerned neighbor informed him about the commotion. The commotion had been going on for some time and immediately called 911 then. Now, the spouse then goes into the apartment where he finds his wife on the floor of the master bedroom face down and she's cold to the touch. Then call 911, sends the fireman, paramedics, whoever else shows up and they declared her dead on the scene. Is that a situation where the coroner, somebody in your position would then come out to the scene because you do have a death scene here. They're not taking her to the hospital to see if they can save her life. They've tried. They know she's gone. And that way you can get a look at the whole scene to try to figure out where these injuries came from. Yeah, it is. In most jurisdictions,

here's a little unknown fact that people might not be aware of. The coroner, where you still have coroner systems in place, Florida is not one of the states. They have district medical examiners down there. Well, and even in city, in Miami-Dade, they have their own medical examiner. But where you have a coroner, did you know that if there is a body on the scene, the coroner is actually in charge of the scene until that body leaves? Didn't know that. Yeah. The presence of a body trumps everything else that's going on now. Look, you can take that kind of power and you can be a real jerk about it. That's not good. You need to play nice with everybody. And generally the coroner will acquiesce and say, yeah, you guys do what you need to do, but let me know what you're going to do because I have to still take this body back and have it

examined and I need it. I need all of the context of the body there. Now that makes sense. That's the whole thing about to whom much is given, much is required. And yeah, you've got all this power, but you better darn well know exactly what happened. Yeah, precisely. And so you have to have kind of an understanding of that. You have to sit back and just kind of understand how the rattling hum of a scene goes. But in this case, the coroner or the medical examiner down there, it would have been an ME investigator more than likely that had shown up at the scene.

Here's something else I know, and this is quite critical. When her body was observed at the scene, one of the key things that stood out to me about this case is the fact that they stated her body was cold to the touch. And when somebody says a body is cold to the touch, first off, that's not vernacular that the public generally uses. Again, that goes back to boilerplate. When we in the medical legal field make an assessment of the body, we're not going to give an actual body temperature. We'll say the body is cold or cool to the touch. And it's just something, it sounds like that whoever wrote that for the news media got that information from the police more than likely.

And that was the origin of that. And so you would have to work this thing bit by bit. And because there's so much what I would think at least, what I would refer to as particulate evidence here, we've probably understated this. This isn't just one wine bottle. There were multiple wine bottles that were found at the scene and utilized. And I'm with you, Dave. When I hear about an empty wine bottle, I'm thinking, well, why would you have empty wine bottles? Well, let's consider the probability here because this plays into the investigation.

Had there been a big party, you had mentioned a critical piece of information. This fight had been going on for some time. Well, were the parties involved drinking with one another? Because as you know and I know, liquor many times is devil's fuel. And so the more you consume, the more dicey things can get. And then it comes to this horrible crescendo at the end of the day. Or did somebody like to collect wine bottles? And some of these wine bottles look like art. You see lights made out of them and all kinds of stuff. And they have beautiful labels. And I've got friends that collect wine bottles. Do they just have a collection of wine bottles? Because to the eye,

aesthetically, they're pleasing. So you think about all of these things. And when the son is looking for something to utilize as a weapon, this is the first thing he's seeing after he's allegedly being assaulted in all of this. They're throwing something. That's the whole point is it went from a verbal altercation. The verbal was loud enough that neighbors heard it. The neighbors heard the arguing at 10 in the morning. Then it escalated to the throwing of things. And that's where I wonder if there were other things thrown first and if it was mom and son. Now, you and I both have noted there have been a couple of reports here saying that this was that Connie Cuesta is the stepmother. It was reported that

in a headline. Now, Joe, when you have a victim who is found without a shirt and with panties pulled down to her knees, does that immediately tell you there was a sexual assault or do you look at it as maybe she was down in the living room and the suspect drug her into the master bedroom and in the process of dragging her, the shirt pulled up and the panties pulled down? That is a possibility. But from an investigative perspective, I'm treating this like a sexual assault. Anytime I see a female, well, male for that matter, with their pants down around their knees and their genitalia is exposed, and with women in particular, where a shirt is

pulled up and their breasts are exposed. Look, if I don't treat this as a sexual assault, I'm falling down the job as an investigator because I'm going to lose fragile evidence. If I have like seminal deposition on a body and I just go ahead and just kind of treat the body carelessly when I'm moving it and all those sorts of things, there's a probability that I can lose evidence. Also, if it's a sexual assault, there could be very intimate transfer that's going on here with touch DNA from the perpetrator onto the victim's body. And conversely, in addition to that, you can have hair transfer. And think about this. What kind of surface was she found on? Was she found on a carpeted surface?

Let's say that she's got carpet fibers on the front, the anterior aspect of her legs. And then she's found in the bedroom and she's got carpet fibers on the posterior surface of the legs. And there's a different carpet in the living room than there is in the master bedroom. So you get an idea. Maybe she's being assaulted all over the place. Maybe it's an ongoing thing. We're talking about hours that elapsed here, Dave. So you've got a big gap in the information here.

And you're kind of trying to understand what the body is going to reveal to you in this period of time. When they did finally track him down, they found this knife. That weapon in particular will tell a tale at the end of the day. When you examine that knife in the crime lab, you will find all that remains of this poor victim. So come to find out, this knife, which is eventually found on the alleged perpetrator's person in his backpack, nonetheless. And it's going to be covered in blood and I think to a certain degree, probably bone once this thing's taken back to the state crime lab. You're in the circumstance, you know that you've just beaten and stabbed in the skull, nonetheless. These injuries were in her temple,

the knife wounds. What do you do? Where do you go? Where does your mind go at this point where you're going to say, OK, I'm going to leave. I've got my backpack and I'm taking it on the road. And before he did that, he tried to clean up. He actually did try to clean up the bloody scene. They actually said that he used a towel and a green rag to try to clean up the scene and then gave up through the rags down at her next to his mother. And he left with his backpack. And this is before they recovered the knife or anything else. He took off. Sean Cuesta took off and went to his aunt's house in Hialeah. It was there that he allegedly

admitted, I killed my mom and was acting really weird. He was acting weird enough that the family, even though they couldn't confirm what he was saying, they called police. They were worried. So they call police, the police show up and they did what they call a Baker Act. What's the Baker Act? It is bottom line, a 72 hour mental health hold. Okay. Psych hold. Yeah. It's a psych hold. And when they say they Baker acted him, that means that they can hold him for up to 72 hours without any charges. And that's what they did. And then they say they Baker acted him, that means that they can hold him for up to 72 hours without any charges.

And that's what they did. And then they were able to find the knife in the backpack and go back to the crime scene and figure everything out. I came across something in this case that I don't know that I have ever heard the police or medical examiner state before. Now, I got to tell you, that's saying something. You never hear everything. But when I heard this, first off, I knew that this victim had not been in a car accident. I knew that this was a person-on-person attack. I knew that there were wine bottles that were being used to strike

her multiple times, blunt force trauma. But Dave, according to the reports, this victim, they said, not some, they said every. Now, I wasn't there. I can't verify it. But they said that every organ in this woman's body sustained a laceration. Now, we've talked about lacerations, I think, recently on an episode, the difference between incised wounds and lacerations. Here is a perfect example because, you know, with lacerations, that's something that only arises from blunt force trauma. And let's consider very briefly, let's just consider the organs that we're talking about. When you say organs now and you say every organ, all internal organs. So we're talking, we're probably, are they saying the bowel, the small bowel and the

large bowel? I don't know. They're saying all organs were lacerated. We do know that we have a liver. It's the largest organ in the body. And if you'll feel just beneath the base of your right rib cage, it's right there. You slide on over on the other side, and you've got your pancreas and your spleen right down there. Spleens sustain, and there's a lot of people that have splenectomies over the years. And many times, those arise from motor vehicle accidents. They're very fragile. And they sit on the left aspect of

the abdomen, the upper abdomen. I can understand that. But then you have the pancreas that stems off of the spleen. I'm thinking, was the pancreas also lacerated? You're saying all organs now. And yeah, I've seen lacerated pancreases. But again, most of the time it comes from a fall from a great height or comes from a motor vehicle accident. Then we go superior to the diaphragm. We've got both lungs. Are we talking about both lungs are lacerated? Then we go to the heart.

Has the heart been lacerated? You're talking about all organs, all right? All internal organs. And then it brings us to the brain. I think that we can probably explain the brain pretty easily. And yeah, blunt force trauma will, in fact, lacerate a brain. It has to be pretty significant. Most of the time, you're going to get evidence of what's called coup or contra coup injuries,

where you'll get these big hemorrhagic areas where the brain kind of sloshes back and forth. I'm taking it at face value. When they're saying all, I'm including the brain in this as well. To have this level of trauma on a body where every organ is in fact impacted, it would take first off time. Then you would have to have an instrument that is so very resilient. You'd have to be able to put it into the hands of someone that could wield it with the appropriate amount of force or the needed force in order to direct that energy at that specific organ system. And you would, in the case of utilizing a bottle, you're going to have to have more than one, Dave.

Well, you mentioned the other day when we were talking about this, and I didn't know the laceration term, blunt force trauma. That was all new to me. And this actually says, I'm reading the report, it says the victim died of internal bleeding resulting from all internal organs being lacerated from blunt force trauma. Now, if the victim had one blunt force injury that caused an internal organ to be lacerated. Wouldn't that pretty much debilitate a 64-year-old woman? Just one. Yeah. Any one of those organs would be sufficient to bring about death. And here's another thing. We go back to what we had said in an earlier segment where her body was cold to the touch. I really have to think here that when they're doing the examination on her,

how many of these lacerations took place anti-mortem and how many took place post-mortem? You've got two things that are going on here. If this was, in fact, a sexual assault, because when you have a body demonstrated with no shirt on, pants pulled down, for any investigator worth their salt out there, they're going to, that's the first thing they're going to think of, that this is some kind of sexually motivated assault that has occurred. And is that something that took place post-mortem? And then on top of that, you begin to think about a knife. Now, this knife was not driven once, not twice, not three times, but four times into her temporal bone, actually the left temporal bone. So if you take your left hand and put it up just posterior to your left eye, that's going to be your temporal bone. And it's one of the thinner bones of the skull. It's not impossible to have a knife driven through there. And as a matter of

fact, even though it is, and we've talked about sharp force injury versus blunt force, depending upon the knife that was utilized in this case in his passing through bone, you could make an argument that if he buries the scene down to the hilt of the knife or the hilt guard, or if it's like a flip knife, like a buck style knife to the body of the knife, that the body of the knife or the hilt, the hand protector can actually work as a blunt instrument. So you can get underlying fracture in there. But either way, you would be looking for hemorrhage in that area. protector can actually work as a blunt instrument. So you can get underlying fracture in there. But either way, you would be looking for hemorrhage in that area. And if it's absent hemorrhage state, this means that this was done post-mortem. So they've got so many injuries to

kind of analyze and assess throughout this thing. They're trying to determine order. And orders, you can't determine actual order like A, B, C, D, like that. The order I'm talking about is postmortem versus antemortem or perimortem, which means in the throes of death. It's kind of that middle milky ground. So that's the order that you're looking at here. And then they're going to have to, and I can tell you for a fact that they will have done a rape kit on this lady as well. We haven't heard anything about that, but we are just now hearing all of

the details. But Joe, to stab somebody in the temple with a knife four times, what are we talking about in terms of force? You have to be close up. The other ones, you could be a little bit far away. I mean, you can strike somebody with a bottle at arm's length, but I'm thinking to actually put a knife into the temple of somebody you love. Yeah, it's very personal. And again, you're getting into that area where a person's identity is tied up in their appearance. And it goes to a tremendous amount of anger. I'm fascinated by the fact that the father was not present in the house when this had occurred. And also, in order to shore the head up to the point where you could drive a knife through it,

you would literally have to be on top of this person in order to do it with, let me get my orientation right here, with the head or the face, if you imagine the face, turn to the right so that the underside of the right cheek is actually shored, what they call shoring, against the surface, the harder surface underlying that, so that you can position yourself over the body and you're driving this knife down into the temple multiple times, not just one time, but over and over and over and over again until you're done. Now, obviously, that in and of itself would have been enough to have killed somebody. It sounds like there's a lot. I have to at least propose the thought that

there was a lot of anger that was being taken out on this woman's body, perhaps in a post-mortem state. But I also think that it's important that we remember that to this date, Sean Cuesta is innocent. He has not been taken to trial, but he has been charged with second-degree homicide. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.