Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Mansion Murder Mystery - The Homicide of Dr. Devon Hoover

Episode Date: July 23, 2023

In this episode of the Body Bags, hosts Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack unpack the chilling homicide of famed neurosurgeon Dr. Devon Hoover, who was found in his Detroit mansion. They discuss the details of the murder, the physical evidence, the complexities of the gunshot wounds, the forensics, and theorize about the identity of the murderer and their familiarity with the residence.  Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Time-codes:  00:00 - Introduction. 01:20 - Dr. Devon Hoover. 02:45 - of Dr. Hoover's grand home and his profession. 05:30 - The demanding path to neurosurgery. 07:40 - Skills required for neurosurgery. 08:10 - Dr. Hoover's personality and devotion to work. 10:00 - Introduction to "crawlspace" in relation to the murder. 12:15 - Discovery of Dr. Hoover's body in the attic crawlspace. 13:00 - Peculiarities in the murder scene. 15:30 - Postmortem changes and body positioning. 16:40 - Importance of postmortem interval in the case. 17:15 - Speculation on potential suspects and motives. 18:55 - Dr. Hoover's attic. 20:00 - Forensic analysis of Dr. Hoover's gunshot wounds and the intimate nature of the crime. 23:20 - Evidence suggesting the perpetrator's familiarity with the house. 26:10 - Detailed impact of a close-range gunshot wound. 28:30 - Examination of the array of forensic tests. 30:30 - Observations indicating the murderer might be known to the victim, such as lack of forced entry. 31:05 - Perpetrator's meticulous body cover-up, suggesting a personal connection. 32:55 - Outro.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. One of my favorite things to do, particularly when I'm back home down in New Orleans with my family down there, is if I ever have an opportunity, I love to go visit old homes, particularly those that are opened during the holiday season. You really get to appreciate the beauty of them because the homes down there are so very old. And you can tell that people loved them at one point in time or loved the idea of them. They dumped a lot of money into them. Maybe 100, 150, maybe 175 years ago. It comes through.

It kind of echoes down through time. And you can see where people lived a life. And I think that that's quite remarkable. It really is. It's not like something that was thrown up recently, you know, and has no, I don't know, I guess the word is patina on it. You know, it's a dwelling that people existed in. But today, I got to say, there is a homicide that has occurred in arguably one of the wealthiest areas in the metro Detroit city area up there.

And it involves an old house, a house that was renowned, a house that was loved, and a house that was known for hospitality. And, you know, I think truly that's one of the great things that truly makes a home an inviting place. We're going to talk today about the homicide of Dr. Devon Hoover. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Dave, I started reading this story about Dr. Hoover up in Detroit and we hear a lot about Detroit and how dangerous it is and for a long, long time. I feel sorry because Detroit is one of the grand cities of America. It was for a long time. And there was a lot of wealth up there for a long, long time. And you can still see remnants of that. If you ever visit Detroit, you go out by the lake and you see some of these mansions that people indwelled all those years ago that had just wealth that many of us cannot even begin to

imagine. And I think that that's what we're dealing with here. We're talking about, I don't know if the term palatial is appropriate here, but it's certainly striking. This home is, it's up there. As my granny used to say, I wouldn't want to have to push a vacuum cleaner through it. Boy, oh boy. Nine bedrooms, 12,000 square feet, beautiful home. But it is not a new mansion that was thrown up in the last six months. Dr. Devon Hoover is one of these men that people have nothing bad to say, nothing. You can find something negative about anybody, but when it comes to Dr. Devon Hoover, he was loved by his

patients. He was loved by his neighbors. One of his neighbors said that when he first bought the house, that it was Dr. Hoover who came over and introduced himself and said, you know, if you haven't owned an older big home before, there are some things you need to know. And he said that they became friends because he hadn't owned a home like that. And they do require a lot more attention than you're used to doing around a home. The payoff, of course, you mentioned palatial. That was actually how the home was referred to. And Dr. Hoover opened it up to the community to raise money for all types of charities and things that needed attention. He opened his doors and said, do it here. It's my place. And Dr. Hoover, he's a neurosurgeon,

which Joe, just give me the run of the mill Hoover, he's a neurosurgeon, which, Joe, just give me the run-of-the-mill explanation of what is a neurosurgeon. The way I look at specialties in medicine, one of the ways that many people that either work in medicine or work around the periphery of medicine, when you hear what the occupation is of any particular physician, you want to know what their specialty is. So, you can have internal medicine people. You can have emergency room doctors, you can have psychiatrists, you can have orthopedic specialists. But when it comes to neurosurgery, if you're measuring it by the length of time that it takes to make it through your postdoctoral training, your residency in medicine, it's probably, to say the very least, the most robust. So, just imagine it this way. You've probably done four years as an undergraduate and you got a bachelor's degree and more than likely pre-med or biology or chemistry or biochem or some science. Then you go to medical school. Well, that's going to take you four years, right? Well, dependent upon the program at minimum, when you're talking about

neurosurgery, now this is after you've completed your four years of medical school, you're staring down the barrel of at least at minimum six years. Just wrap your brain around that for a second. You're talking about six plus years and some do subspecialties once they are complete with an actual neurosurgery residency. And there are some people that will do, let me see how I can kind of break it down. They'll do like a general surgery residency, which is a few years in and of itself. It's rather robust itself. And then they'll go into neurosurgery. There are some people that will do neurosurgery, and there are certain people that are also neurologists,

which is different as well. They treat people externally for head trauma and spinal trauma and those sorts of things, kind of measuring if you've ever had concussion or something like that, and a doctor comes in, and they're checking your neuro responses, and they'll say, here, squeeze my fingers. How many fingers am I holding up? And they'll do all these measurements and they'll do imaging and all that sort of thing. Well, Dr. Hoover, he would have had to do all of that. Plus, he's actually the guy that goes in and operates on the brain. And in his particular case, he specialized in the neck and in the spine. And so, that's his

area. So, if you had any kind of spinal trauma or neck trauma, which spine, neck, essentially the same thing where you have the brain stem that comes out of the backside of the brain, all right? And then it turns, literally turns into the spinal cord that extends down through the cervical vertebra and then through the thoracic vertebra, the lumbar. And so, it controls, it's kind of like the neuropathway. It's the big highway that controls all of the little nerve endings that extend out through the body. So, at any of those levels, you've seen people that are, say, paraplegics or quadriplegics, and depending upon where those injuries have taken place on the spine, dictates how their

body is going to be compromised. So he would go in, and these people are fascinating to me, and they're having to do like microsurgery on these very, very delicate tissues. That's how skilled this guy was. All I can think of is when Judge Smiles looks at Danny in Caddyshack and says, well, the world needs ditch diggers too, boy. That's where I am. If I was faced with those choices, Joe, I would be on the ditch digger side. I don't even understand two-thirds of what you just said. There's nothing wrong with ditch diggers, man.

And as Judge Smiles says, the world needs them. But the thing about Dr. Hoover, the fact that he did this, he was essentially married to his work. And you'll find many people that are like this that operate at that high level. There's no way I could do it. I don't have the intellectual capability. And, you know, sometimes this is what's amazing about him. I'm not saying it's the case with every neurosurgeon. Don't get me wrong.

Don't misquote me. Many times they're so very intense. Have you ever met somebody that's so very intellectually intense that it almost seems like they'll brush you off or they don't have time for you or maybe they don't have a good bedside manner if they're a physician? That's not Devon Hoover. He had a way about him that his patients, these people that he treated, genuinely liked this guy. And by extension, he's got this beautiful home that he's probably dumped. You can only imagine how much money, because it's not just, once you have an old home, just the upkeep alone, and can you imagine on 12,000 square feet, just the upkeep alone is a real burden.

But he's inviting people to his home. He was regarded as kind of a warm, hospitable person. And the horror of this case is the fact that the house is the site of this, a place that probably brought a lot of joy. I can only imagine just looking at this place externally, how beautiful this thing would have been decorated probably at Christmas time. I'm sure it was striking. It was probably, if they have a tour of homes, it was probably on the tour of homes, warm and inviting. And it's something so horrible could happen to this man that was so beloved and so skilled at what he did.

And it's not just hospitality and his outreach to the community. It's the fact that Dave, he could go in and he could actually aid in the repair and recovery of people that had sustained catastrophic injuries. Every article that I have read about Dr. Hoover's homicide has included the word, and it's a compound word, crawlspace. That word sends a chill up my spine every time I hear it. Because I got to tell you, the first thing I think about when I hear crawl space is John Wayne Gacy. I always think about the bodies that were buried beneath his house in the crawl space when he victimized all those young men for so many years. But that's not the case in Dr. Hoover's homicide. He's actually found Dave in a unique location in this beautiful home. He's found in the attic crawlspace.

This is a man who lives alone. 53-year-old. He is single. He's a single-minded kind of fella. He was born in Indiana. He was the fourth child of seven. And he was the only boy in his family. Before he went to college, he worked on a dairy farm,

the guy that became one of the best of the best neurosurgeon. His family and friends were a priority in his life. There was a quote from his obituary. He rarely missed a Hoover family event and made the drive to Indiana frequently to visit his parents and sisters, often playing with his many nieces and nephews. He spent quality time with many friends and enjoyed traveling with them to unique places around the world. Now, when you put that with what we talked about, how his neighbors talked about him, one neighbor actually said, for a man small in stature, he was indeed larger than life. Yet, he didn't show up for a family event in Indiana as expected. And because he was always in tune with his family,, he didn't show up for a family event in Indiana as expected. And because he was always in tune with his family, when he didn't show up, the family called for the police to go

by. Police show up at this palatial home, this 12,000 square foot, nine bedroom estate that was their show place. And they saw enough that led them to find him you mentioned crawl space in the attic how does a 53 year old man with no enemies end up dead in the attic crawl space at the time of our taping here we still don't know who did this okay they released a bit of tantalizing information here and i'm so glad you picked up on this. They said that he was not just dragged to this location where his body was finally found. Dave, they said he was dragged face down. And you're thinking, well, how can you actually arrive at that conclusion? That information is actually coming from the Wayne County Medical

Examiner's Office, which, by the way, is one of the most storied offices in the history of forensic pathologists. This is actually the place where Dr. Werner Spitz did a lot of his work. And Dr. Spitz is one of the co-authors of what we regard as our Bible in forensic science, medical legal investigation of death. And it was first published back in 1966. So, the place that did his examination, that did the examination on Dr. Hoover's remains is a top location for assessment of trauma, okay, as it applies to post-mortem assessment. And what they're saying is that he was found in this crawl space, but he had been drug there face down. So, when people are saying drug face down, first off, what are we thinking?

Well, we're thinking that perhaps there was some kind of manifestation on his body that would give an indication, first off, that he was drugged. Well, how do we conclude that? Well, if blood is streaked in a particular way, okay, perhaps that's the case. Say that it's on one contact surface and not on the other, and you have this kind of striated appearance of, say, for instance, blood that's been left behind. And when I say striated, that literally means streaks, okay, or kind of linear streaks. Another thing, was there any kind of post-mortem trauma to the body? Well, what would that mean?

Well, the body can be scraped in a post-mortem state. You can actually knock away the top layer of skin that won't have the same kind of abrasion appearance that we have during life, where it becomes red and irritated. And we've all fallen at some point in our time and skinned our knees or skinned our elbows, and we know what an abrasion looks like. And of course, we know that the dead don't bruise, but you can have markings on a body that would give you an indication of some kind of what we refer to as post-mortem trauma. Now, a third way that this could happen, and perhaps one of the most chilling, is that we wonder, well, had post-mortem changes begun to take place to the point where there was

a reorientation of the body from where it had initially laid and to where it was finally found resting. And what I mean by that, one of the things that we would look for is deposition of postmortem lividity. In other words, that settling of blood. Did you have, say for instance, a presentation where the blood had settled on the front side of the body, okay, what's referred to as the anterior aspect, and maybe there was no presentation on the back, but yet you've got postmortem trauma on the back that gives you an indication that they were initially laying in one position and then drug

vis-a-vis the other side of the body. It could be flip-flopped either way. So, we don't know a lot right now at this point to kind of put a fine point on that. But the reason that's so chilling is you begin to think, well, whoever did this to him and what they did to him was quite shocking. Whoever did this to him, did they sit there with a body while post-mortem changes began to take place? And that there was evidence regarding that upon the examination of the body at the scene. Was that measured in any way? Because what's key here is kind of, and I always fall back to this, is the postmortem interval.

That time that has elapsed since Dr. Hoover, unfortunately, drew his last breath to the point in which he was moved. And then beyond that to the point in which he was discovered, and then beyond that to the point in which he was discovered. How long had he actually been down? And that's going to be key in this case. Who would have access to him in this grand home in which he dwells? Who would purpose to do this kind of harm to this man that had done so much for so many people over the years, who was beloved, who would traumatize him to this degree. We do know this, whoever perpetrated this crime felt comfortable enough to take a handgun and shoot Dr. Hoover execution style in In the head. Twice.

When you see a big house, you ride by it, you look at it, at least I do, and I think, you know, what in the world goes on in there? You think, what kind of history indwells those walls? What has that structure borne witness to over the years? And when I think attic in a big home like that, you always think of some kind of scary movie or something where you've got mannequins, you know, dwelling the area and old boxes and all that sort of thing. But, you know, I think that the attic in this place was probably a storage location that Dr. Hoover would have gone into regularly. He's probably always decorating his home. Certainly, you think around the holidays, he's going to be inviting people over. Maybe he kept his Christmas decorations or Easter decorations or those sorts of things up in the home. Certainly, you think around the holidays, he's going to be inviting people over, maybe kept his Christmas decorations or Easter decorations or those sorts of things up in the attic so he'd have easy access to them. Joe, let me back up for a second. Let me get back to this. I'm curious as to how this happens, and you're going to have to fill in the blanks. All right,

we've got Dr. Hoover. His family asks the police to go by and do a welfare check. When they get there, we don't know if there was anybody there when they got there. We know the police to go by and do a welfare check. When they get there, we don't know if there was anybody there when they got there. We know the police said there was no forced entry and they believe that Dr. Hoover knew who did this to him. So staying with that, I'm trying to picture what did the police see when they got in there that led them to the attic? Because obviously you mentioned the person that did this, they felt comfortable enough in the home to shoot him dead in one place and to drag his body. You mentioned face down. I mean, who does that?

If you care about somebody, even if you have done this, all I could think of is dragging this person upstairs with his head hitting every stair along the way. You know, you hear us talk a lot in forensics about drag marks and those sorts of things. As I had mentioned or I had alluded to, Dr. Hoover sustained massive head trauma. He actually sustained two gunshot wounds to the head. One of those wasn't close and the other one was. How do they know that, Joe? How do they determine this? The way this is determined, first off, if you look at the one that they're referring to as an indeterminate distance, which what that means is it's dependent upon the weapon that's used. You have to kind of qualify that when you say that. Anything that's essentially about 18 inches away from the point of impact, you're not going to have any kind of soot deposition or

powder deposition around the wound. You're certainly not going to have what's referred to as like a gas injury where you'll get kind of a stellate wound that you see with like press contact. Stellate, like stellar, okay? That's where it comes from, star-shaped. Here people say star-shaped wound because the skin kind of tears when that happens. Well, you're not going to have that presentation with indeterminate range. That means that they will be shot from some distance. And you don't know, you still don't know anything about sequencing. Some people will say, well, they were shot at a distance and then someone moves in and shoots them close.

Well, you don't know that. You can have individuals that are actually executed with a contact gunshot wound, and then just for the coup de grace, if you will, in this person's mind, they're going to shoot them again, and this is as they've moved away from the body. So you can't, there's no way you can go back and look at this and say, well, this was actually the sequence of events, unless you just have somebody that just pops up and says, well, this is what happened. But no evidence of that distant wound.

But the other wound that they talk about, there's actually a muzzle imprint that's left behind. And what that means is that when the muzzle of the weapon, that means the end of the barrel, actually contacts the surface of the skin, you will get an impression. And it's really impressive to see from a forensic standpoint. You can actually see an impression of the structure of the barrel underneath many times. And sometimes you'll actually see a circular ring around the area as well that will lead you to conclude that this weapon was so close that when it was discharged with such force, it actually left an imprint on the skin of the end of the weapon. And it's almost like a negative image, you know what I'm saying, like a photograph.

And so, that gives you proximity, doesn't it, in that particular case. And it also gives you an indication of intimacy, that this individual who ever fired this weapon had the ability to get that close to Dr. Hoover when they discharged the weapon. And when you begin to think about things like intimacy, here's something that's quite interesting from an investigative standpoint. When he's found, he's found unclothed. Now, he's covered in several layers of blankets. I think there's a carpet that's involved that he was covered with. But when we are nude, we are at our most vulnerable because you're not covered, you're shame involved perhaps, or they've made you take your clothes off at gunpoint. And this is kind of a dehumanization

thing that takes place many times. So, you've got him in the state and he's in the state when he is found. Back to how they began to understand what the point of origin is, and that is where the event may have taken place. There's no indication of that, but they know that he was drugged. So, that tells us that there's evidence that there is perhaps a blood trail leading to the attic. And one thing that really resonates with me, Dave, and correct me if I'm wrong, didn't you make reference to the fact that he was diminutive in size? He was kind of a smaller guy? A neighbor had said that for a man small in stature, he was indeed larger than life. So that makes you assume he was not a big man.

Yeah. So where are you going to drag him? Unless perhaps you've dehumanized him, where you're going to treat him like an animal that you shot, or that the person that did this may not have the physical strength to put their hands or put their arms beneath them and cradle them. Or maybe they just find this level of trauma and gore, because it would have been a significant amount of gore. And when I say that, I mean, because anytime there's trauma to the head, where you have blood, and certainly many times you'll

have brain matter that's actually extruding through the head, through the injuries, people might not want to get that on themselves. So maybe that's the reason you drug him up there. Here's the thing. Whoever put him in that location, they knew about that location. They knew that that attic crawl space existed. That's intimate knowledge. That and the fact that I want to go back to the gunshots to the head, because you made a couple of statements there. And I'm curious because we do have two shots. And according to the police report or the autopsy, he had abrasions on his face, suggesting he was in a prone position with the left side of his face resting against some kind of surface when he was shot. Could they determine, based on this and other factors, were both of these shots potentially fatal or was one shot, could you determine that this shot wounded him but this was the kill shot? Yeah, perhaps.

Anytime the head is involved and gunfire is involved, you're going to have certainly the potential for fatal trauma. It's the one area of the body where even a glancing gunshot wound to the head can lead to a fatal trauma. It's the one area of the body where even a glancing gunshot wound to the head can lead to a fatal outcome. The trick is, and kind of the measure that forensic pathologists will look at this on balance, most of the time they'll say, well, what created the most trauma in this particular case? They'll look at one injury and they say, is this potentially a survivable injury? Say if it just clipped one area of the brain, if he had gotten medical treatment, could he have survived this? Whereas with the other one, maybe it passed through an area that controls the autonomic nervous system, okay? Where you just know that heartbeat is going to cease, respiration is going to cease.

It's so traumatic. And not to mention, if there's a muzzle stamp on this one injury, you're not just going to have, Dave, the gunshot wound, which is bad enough that you're dealing with, that's going to create this channel through the brain. You're also going to be fighting against things like, say, for instance, the bone being blown apart in there, and it creates

additional little satellite fragments or shrapnel, bone shrapnel, actually, is what it turns out to be. And so, it injures the brain in that way. And also, you have to factor in, if it's that close, you might have gas injuries. So, with the gas injuries, you have hot gas, and we all know what hot gas does. It rapidly expands. It goes into the cranial vault, and you'll have this massive fracturing that takes place in the skull. So, you've got multiple things at multiple layers here that are occurring that any number of these things could be fatal in and of themselves.

Now, we know that he was wrapped in a blanket. You mentioned this. In the actual order, they said that he was wrapped in a sheet, then carpeting or no, then a rug. And then carpeting was laid over the top of his body in that crawl space. So and we know that he was shot and killed when he was naked with one sock, dark sock on his foot. You mentioned being humiliated by being nude and being taken down like this. Would there have been when the police are on the scene trying to figure everything out,

would they be taking clippings under his fingernails to see if there was a little bit of a fight or anything? Yeah, they would. And typically that's going to happen at the morgue. People will see us at scenes where we bag the hands. And we've talked about that in previous episodes. But our hands are those things through which we defend ourselves. It's

those things through which we, just from a tactile sense, that we sense the world around us. I mean, even as small children, we're touching things, okay? It's an extension of our brain, essentially. We're touching things, and that information is coming in. So, the hands are bagged traditionally at the scene, and then when we get the body into a controlled environment at the morgue, we'll do nail scrapings. Okay. We'll do the nail scrapings. We'll catch all of the debris that are under the fingernails because this is very intimate event. Remember, he's nude. And then we'll do nail clippings to look if anything is there in the clippings themselves. And they will probably, believe it or not, they would probably do a gunshot residue test on his hands. People might not think about that,

but we actually do to see if, for instance, if there was any way, let's say, for instance, the gunshot wounds to the back of the head, which we think that it approximates those two gunshot wounds are essentially in the rearward areas of the head. If he's got his hands up, okay, behind his head and he's shot in the head, that can be a valuable piece of information as to his posture, what his relationship was with the individual that shot him, a physical relationship from the end of the muzzle to his body. And you might have soot deposition on the hands. So you'll do that. And of course, here's the most glaring thing. Many people don't actually think about Dave.

I don't know if you've thought about this, but even though he's a male, he's nude. Guess what we're going to do? Actually, we're going to do a rape kit. We're going to do a rape kit on him. And some people don't think that we do those on males, but we do. We actually do. It actually makes sense when you think about the fact that he is naked and rolled up in a blanket. If he was shot in the back of the head due to a bad debt and left, they wouldn't take trouble to hide him or anything else. Because obviously whoever did this, Joe, did not take a lot of time to clean up or anything else because police were able to go there on a welfare check and find

his body in the attic. They were able to do that in a welfare check. So, obviously, they didn't walk in and go, hey, everything looks fine here. And turn around and taking it on the heel. No, no, no. They saw evidence of something had occurred in this environment. I'm sure it was quite horrific. When these police officers showed up and they're looking through the house, they're doing a safety check. It's a welfare check. Can you imagine if it's two of them? I have this vision in my mind, this image in my mind of one guy looking at the other guy and saying, uh-oh, this doesn't look good. And then they follow the blood trail and it leads into some small door up in the attic area.

And there they find his remains in there. And here's a big piece. Remember what you said early on? They said there was no signs of forced entry at this place. So that gives you an indication that the individual may have been there before, that they knew the doctor. And also, we go back to this idea of covering up the body. Why do you want to cover the body? What's your purpose for covering? You've just executed this man. Why do you want to cover the body? What's your purpose for, you've just executed this man. Why are you going to go and not just cover him once, you're going to layer him. It's almost like you're tucking him in. Why are you going to put all these layers on top of him? What's your purpose? You're trying to hide him? Well, we know that you've

taken him to the crawl space up there, but why go to all of that trouble? Again, if his face was covered, we can assume that it was. Many times face covering is associated with an intimate act because the individual does not want to look the individual in the face that they've just done this great harm to. Oh, now that makes sense. I was confused about how a guy that is naked with one sock on shot twice in the head, then drug on his face up to his, what will be a temporary final resting place. But then the perpetrator takes the time to roll him up in three layers of blanket and carpet, and then placing him in this crawl space so that he's covered up after this humiliation and devastating act.

Yeah. And I got to tell you, Dave, I have real hope in this case that they're going to find out who did this. I know that they have taken somebody into custody. They had to release them. But they have taken one person into custody and questioned them and subsequently released them. What's this area like? Well, we've determined that Dr. Hoover's home is quite fine. It's quite palatial, as we said when we started this conversation. I would think that there would be security cameras around this area. And I would think that if the police went around and they were to collect footage, now a lot of this is going to be dependent upon the time of day when it happened, they might be able to collect an image. And of course, as we know in all cases like this, that as you begin to work the case, you extend outward.

Who are the intimates in his life? Who has he had recent contact with? Who has he had a beef with? Who has he maybe been in a relationship with? Who would want to absolutely destroy this fine man. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. you're listening to an iHeart podcast