Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Mother Goose Land Murder

Episode Date: December 22, 2024

When a body is found in a trashcan by workers of the Canton Parks Department, it doesn't matter that the park is called City Field Park.  For decades City Field Park was known as "Mother Goose Land" so when the workers call 911 to report a dead body in a trashcan, they tell 911 to send help to Mother Goose Land. Joseph Scott Morgan will turn the pages of his own storybook to find out how a simple "wellness check" turns so evil, so fast. How did a 24-year-old woman wind up dead and thrown away like garbage and who is responsible for such a horrible murder.   Transcribe Highlights 00:00.00 Introduction 05:02.22 Joe relives childhood in New Orleans 10:00.21 Mother Goose Land and a body in the trashcan  15:09.92 Making a welfare check, door is open, nobody is home 20:21.00 After getting search warrant, deputies proceed into apartment, signs of bloody fight 25:09.76 Workers find body and call 911 30:10.14 Sean Goe cut holes in Raychel's car tires 34:56.46 Raychel's body wrapped in plastic 40:01.86 Raychel has 10 specific blunt force injuries, one from hammer 45:02.88 Raychel died from blunt force traumaConclusion - Sean Got convicted in her death    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Moore. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cock shells and pretty maids all in a row. I think we probably all recognize that nursery rhyme because that's what it is. I mean, kids for ages have used that over and over again. I remember, though it was many, many moons ago, being in nursery school is what they used to call it.

And we used all of these. I think that teachers, and I know nothing about teaching small children, but they use these repetitive rhymes in order to form language and get into rhythm, if you will. But you know, these nursery rhymes have dark origins. I think that many of you have heard that. With Mary Mary, quite contrary, its origin is said to go back to Bloody Mary, who was Queen Mary I of England. And it has to do with her execution of hundreds of Protestants over a very dark period in British history. know, some scholars believe that silver bells and cockle shells are actually references

to not things that might adorn your garden, but actually they're tied back to torture devices that were used in dungeons back during those days. Today, we're going to talk about a case that has linkage to Mother Goose, if you will. Seemingly innocent, a place where you can go and enjoy your children and watch them play. Mother Goose Land, actually. But like these nursery rhymes, there's a very sinister underlying story here. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. is body bags joe before we dig into the fairy tale part of this i had no idea that there were little parks all over america that had names like story time park or mother goose land until i saw the headline on this story it says mother goose land murder canton ohio there actually was a place

called mother goose land it's now known as Field Park, but it's still identified by those from the area as Mother Gooseland. And we've got Citi Field Park workers that are dumping trash cans at 930 in the morning, and they get to a big receptacle, and it's heavier than it should be. And as they look inside, it appears to be a human body wrapped in plastic has been shoved into the trash can. They immediately call 911 and the identifier is Mother Gooseland. So that's where today's story comes from. The Mother Gooseland murder. But you were telling me about places that you knew of, Joe, and in particular in New Orleans, where you grew up going to a place that was kind of like this right in the

heart of of city park in new orleans is a location called story land and it's been there since the 50s and it when you walk through the gate it's you know that that scene in Willy Wonka where they the real Willy Wonka. I'm not talking about this thing with Johnny. I'm talking about the real Willy Wonka with the great late. Gene Wilder. Thank you. The late great Gene Wilder, where they open that door and you see all of that candy. I don't know about you.

That was magical to me. That's the way Storyland was when I was little in New Orleans. And it's got all of the mother goose characters there. You've got old mother Hubbard. You've got actually mother goose in the air flying on her goose with children on the back of the goose as well. The little old man that lived in the little house, you know, the crooked house. And it just goes on and on. I mean, and you could walk and run and play through all of these things.

It's a glorified playground, but they also had like a little roller coaster. And it's not just me. If you talk to any kid that grew up, and I split time growing up in New Orleans when I was little. We lived in various locations. But those memories that you have when you're a kid, I remember going to the streetcar that runs down St. Charles and being there with my aunt. And it was the first place I ever put a penny on a track and the streetcar would run over it, you know, and crush it down. And of course that was adjacent to one of the, another beautiful park and zoo called Audubon, uh, the Audubon zoo, which again, you know, is a magical place for me. Um, and all of the kids, you know, that inhabit these spaces, but Dave brother, I gotta tell you, it's when something that is this innocent, um,

winds up in the midst of what truly is a real horror show. Um, you know, that, that imagery from your past, I think that there were probably a lot of places around the country that were similar to this because the place we're going to talk about today is it has a lot of similarity, it sounds like, to, you know, this place that's beloved to me as, you know, as a kid that grew up around it, you know, down in New Orleans. Can you kind of take us through this real quick? Because, you know, I got to tell our friends to kind of sit back. And this is something that I think shocked both Dave and I when we heard this story. You know, whenever our stories begin, Joe, with somebody calling for police to do a welfare check.

It's a pretty innocuous thing when you think about it, but in reality for us, it's usually a loved one, a friend, an employer that had an expectation for you to be someplace and you weren't. And so they pick up the phone. Let me step on you just for a second. I apologize. I want everybody to understand this. Welfare checks by law enforcement are done minute by minute all over the country. This is not something, there's not something sinister that pops up every time. And so right you are, Dave, because with this particular case, there's a big reveal here, I got to tell you. Yeah, here's your big reveal. Rachel Sheridan

doesn't show up for work and her mother, knowing the relationship with Sean Goh and how volatile he can be, her mom, Rachel's mom, calls the sheriff's department and asks them to do a welfare check on her. Deputies show up. They already know that Rachel drives a maroon Jeep Liberty, so they're looking over the parking lot to see if they see it. They don't. They go to the apartment, and the door to the apartment is open. Not just unlocked and can turn. We're talking the door is open. They go to the apartment and the door to the apartment is open, not just unlocked and can turn. We're talking the door is open.

They can see inside. But deputies don't see anything that anything that actually gives them the right to walk into that apartment right away without a search warrant. So it's suspicious. So they stay there. They called their boss. Hey, we need a search warrant. Here's why so they're waiting on the search warrant to arrive so they can go in the apartment when they see maroon jeep liberty being driven by sean go right in front of them so hey let's find out what's going on he he's driving her car he has

to know where she is so boom they they go ahead and light him up well he goes to pull over and sean go takes off and runs he flees the scene he flees through the woods and everything else and he gets away from them. They search for him for hours. Can't find him anywhere. Finally, the next morning, they do find Sean Goh at a homeless shelter and they take him into custody on some other warrants that he has outstanding.

Still, they haven't found Rachel Sheridan. They don't know where she is. Then, that's when the 911 call comes in from Mother Goose Land Park, now known as Citi Field Park, and the workers calling with, we got a body wrapped in plastic in the trash can. This Mother Goose location, this is up in, you know, adjacent to Canton, Ohio. Stark, I think it's Stark County is the location. And, you know, this park that is there, the Mother Goose Park, has roughly been in operation or was in operation. And here's the odd thing. It opened in the 50s. Dave, this thing's been shuttered since the 80s. And you can see the pictures of it online and there are all these kind of magical

looking creatures that are still existing. There's like a big whale in a lagoon with its mouth open that kids could run into. How can you resist not wanting to go into this place? But when you take a look at it, it's got kind of, because it's not being used, it's kind of got a real creepy vibe to it now because nobody's maintaining these things. These things are always brightly painted. You know, it's the type of stuff that you want to see when you're a little kid, it attracts you to it. You want to come in,

Hey mama, can we go in here and play? You know, that sort of thing. This is the kind of place that you would see though. And it's, it's in stark contrast, you know, to like what I love about Storyland in New Orleans, it's really kept up brightly colored, all those sorts of things. And I, you know, you think about the, the deposition of a body, um, it would, I think that most people would not think that, um, it's a place where a body would be found maybe because it's an abandoned location and it has been shuttered since the eighties that it's, it's, uh, uh, nobody's going to find it. And, you know, sometimes it's just dumb luck where, you know, because how many cases do we have where people just like vanish off the planet and you don't have any kind of idea where they went to the fact that they were able to find her body, I think relatively quickly is amazing. And there's a bit of,

I'm not going to call it joy, but there's, there's a bit of relief for the family because how many cases have we covered over the years where, you know, and I still, I get, I get contacted all the time, particularly over social media. Can you help me? You know, we haven't seen our, and, you know, helping people in that particular way is not really my forte. Uh, but you know, we haven't seen our, and you know, helping people in that particular way is not really my forte. Uh, but you know, there's so many people out there that want to know where their loved ones are, but I'm interested in something that you said earlier about the welfare check. Um, you know, when police typically go and they must really have put the screws down on the cops out here here because if they're not

crossing over that threshold to go into the location without a warrant and it's a welfare check um most of the time if you can if if you know that somebody's in danger as long as you don't if the door is open and you're calling out to them to check, I guess it's probably departmentally dependent. When it's health and safety is actually kind of the thread that runs through this from a legal standpoint. That's what they're trying to do. You know, you can't go looking in hidden places. And that's what the warrant would be for. But it's, again, dumb luck that when they pivot and they see her car moving down the road,

and then you got a guy, they chase this guy down and he bolts out of the car and runs off into the woods. There's your sign, as they used to say. You know, one of the questions I would ask when I would show up at a scene, because, you know, by the time the ME or coroner investigator arrives at a scene, you don't, there's so many actors on the stage by that time. Commonly, my practice, if there was some kind of domestic beef that had occurred, I would seek out the actual beat unit, like the officer that was in the patrol car, the unit that patrols this area, their beat. And I would go to that individual, not to their sergeant, not to their lieutenant who was there. It's like, hey, can you tell me something? Have

you ever rolled out here on anything? Have you ever been by here? Because you'd be surprised, you know, when people see cops, you know, just kind of and I hate this term, but they'll say cops are loitering around. Well, they're not loitering. They're sitting there and they're watching. Now, I'm not a big fan of, you know, speed traps. But if you're in a neighborhood and you see a cop, you know, that's kind of sitting there, they're watching most of the time and they know they've got their finger on the pulse. They know more than people suspect about each house on the block because they will have been called out to domestic beefs. They will be called out when children are missing. They'll be called out for an elderly person that has fallen in the house. And they know that that in some, you know, you go back to this idea of, you know, one of the things they teach is community policing. I don't know really how well that has worked, but the idea of the cop getting out of the car and just walking up to a fence and talking to the elderly people that live on the street.

Hey, how you doing? I'm Officer Mike and this is my area. I wanted to introduce myself. So cops have a lot of knowledge of that area, but you know, Dave, I don't know if they even began to suspect what they would eventually find inside of that house, let alone what they would find at the Mother Goose Park. Here we go,ilerplate statement incoming. I found no evidence of forced entry or struggle. Wish I had a nickel for every time I'd written that down. Wish I had a Bitcoin for every time I'd written that down. I'd be a very, very wealthy man. But because, you know, it's included in all of our reports. Uh, uh, if we don't see anything,

but Dave, they, they saw something at that, at that home. Uh, not only was the door open and there's no indication that it was necessarily forced open. It was just open. You know, it's not like it had been kicked in necessarily. That's an important part yeah yeah because as they arrive they're doing a i want to go back to the welfare check yeah they're already warned that this is a volatile situation mom is concerned because she didn't show up for work she always does and she lives with a man who is not oftentimes doing things in her best interest. They have had a volatile relationship. He has allegedly beaten her before enough that family and friends have been worried.

And when they get there and they're looking inside the apartment, they don't see anything that jumps right out at them that says there was a struggle or a fight in here. And as they're waiting for that search warrant to arrive so they can go in because at this point they're not seeing the whole apartment they're just seeing a living area and probably a kitchen you know yeah and it's only after they get the search warrant by the time they've already got they they know shang go has taken off he's running so what is he he's driving her car and he's now running. So she's nowhere to be found.

Right. Still can't find her. Still have not been able to verify, you know. So they go into the apartment. Now, this is after they get the search warrant. And I can't imagine, Joe, that the search warrant was very specific because it would have been. We're looking. We don't know where she is.

We're trying to find her. So would the warrant say they can go in the apartment and look under things and see if they can find Sharon, you know, can find her? Yeah, it's going to be more specific. And most of the time you have to have some kind of probable cause that's going to be an ingredient into this. But the welfare check in and of itself is not enough. They can't do that.

Well, unless here's the thing. If you if you visualize, let's just say that that you walk into a scene. I think that a magistrate or judge would bite on the idea if you see what appear to be. And remember, in forensics, we cannot say something is blood until we test it and determine that it is blood. But if you see what appears to be blood at a scene and you couple that with anything that you might find in another location like broken or turned over furniture, certainly any kind of item that might have specific evidence on it. I think that a magistrate would probably be willing to issue that warrant and you can go in and process the scene at that point in time. But yeah, you have to hold back because anything that you do absent a warrant,

you're really running the risk of that being thrown out from an evidentiary standpoint. And you never know, Dave, what is actually going to be critical to proving the case, with any type of item, let's say that you have some kind of instrument that might create a particular pattern, okay? If you discover that instrument and you don't expressly have permission to do that or the warrant is written inappropriately or whatever the case might be, then did you know that that item can't be included as part of the evidence? And so you have to, that's why they're very, very careful about these things because for so many years, you know, people would just, they would go in to a scene and, you know, with their hair on fire and not not show up with the proper appropriate documentation relative to a warrant. And a lot of stuff winds up being excluded.

And if, in fact, it is excluded, then that huge building block for your case is blown at that moment in time dave all right and in this case when they um when they get the search warrant and they go in they're able to get past the open the living area where they didn't see anything they're able to get into the apartment and it's when they get to the bedroom that they realize, OK, we got a problem. We have a major problem. Now, remember, Sean Goh, Rachel and Rachel Sheridan and Sean Goh live together in this apartment. And he has been arrested and is at jail on other charges not to do with this particular case of Rachel at the time. Remember, he was in her car

and so it's the next morning he's in jail and they've gone into the apartment and they find in the master in the bedroom that they share that something has occurred they see signs of struggle they see signs that point to a bloody fight in the bedroom. And it's from that point on. And this is my I was curious about this, because how far did they go? We people bleed. A bloody nose can cause a lot of issues. I'm also clumsy.

I tend to trip and fall. So if something is knocked over, if there's a little blood, you could explain that. But we have a violent man in jail and we can't find his live-in girlfriend. And so where do you go from here? Yeah. And blood can be easily explained by any defense attorney. We've heard this over and over relative to DNA, because if you're domiciled there, it's not unreasonable to expect to be able to find blood that has issued forth from one of the occupants that's that's also, you know, domiciled there. So and that can be explained away. Yeah, I felt, you know, like you said, I tripped. I hit my head.

All right. That explains the blood that's there. Or, yeah attorney worth their salt can make that argument, you know, if you find, but when do you have this kind of dynamic event that has occurred inside of the dwelling, particularly in the bedroom, this very intimate space, and you've got, there's a level of reasonableness that comes into this. So if you've got, you don't expect, say, cast off blood from an instrument to be on the walls if you have a bloody nose, okay? You don't expect to be, to find a mattress that is super saturated with blood or sheets

and towels and all these sorts of things. And, you know, maybe soaked into carpet or onto the hardwood floor. And the patterns themselves show that this was a dynamic event with movement and deposition and all these sorts of things that have a certain level of velocity. You know, back to the example of the bloody nose, if someone is standing there passively and that's a passive stain where it's just kind of free falling through the air and it drops onto the ground. And it's kind of a classic droplet that you would think that drops straight down and there's not much dynamicism to it, you can have actually maybe multiple of those spots, but you're not going to have it in this kind of elliptical pattern that occurs with a little tail on it, you know, where it's cast off and those sorts of things. So you have a reasonable expectation that you

would find blood there, but in an environment like this, if you've got multiple locations where blood has been shed, this is going to, you know, this is going to give rise to this idea that an attack probably occurred in this environment. But, you know, Dave, the thing about it is, is that still, even though you have this evidence that's there, you don't have a body. And that's a problem. In that moment, you don't. You don't have a body. And that's the rub. You know, you think about, you know, the absent of, and what a chill. Because if you're a police officer, you're still thinking that if there is blood and there's no body, maybe there's a chance she's still alive. Maybe there's a chance we can find her.

And unfortunately, you know, in this case, that's not necessarily true, Dave. Well, you know, they're looking uh rachel sheridan her live-in boyfriend is sitting cooling his heels in jail they find blood a mess in the bedroom and then they get the sanitation workers at 9 30 that that morning that call 9-1-1 found a body now they did not do a whole lot to look at the body. They found a body and stopped, which is incredible. I wonder, when I saw this, I wonder how many times people have found a body and immediately started poking around at it versus stopping everything and calling 911. Yeah, you know, I've had multiple scenarios that have occurred.

I've actually had civilians that have come over. I've actually had civilians do this with decomposed bodies. And don't ask me what compels them to do this, because when you're around a decomposed body, most of the time it's one of the most important things that you can encounter in life. I've had civilians that have encountered bodies like that, and they roll the body over. Whereas I've had, I remember in particular, I had an autoerotic case with a gentleman that had hung himself on a door hinge with a dog collar, nude, in a micro-tel, if you're familiar with those. And the little lady that was the housekeeper, she came to the door. And she had just arrived here in the country. I think she was from Guatemala, if I'm not mistaken.

She couldn't speak English. She's pushing her cart up and down the hall, Dave, and opens the store. And this nude guy hanging by a dog collar with his hands tied is literally staring her in the face. And Dave, when I got there, the way she had alerted that she had found the body was her screaming. And she was sitting, this poor lady was sitting on the floor clutching her rosary with her knees pulled into her chest doing Hail Marys in Spanish. And she was terrified. So you never know what anybody's reaction is going to be. It runs the gamut, just like deaths run the gamut. You don't know what you're going to find.

But if you're a sanitation worker, you come across some pretty disgusting things, as you can imagine. There's probably stuff that you and I could never fathom, that those people encounter out there in the streets, the things that we throw away that they go out and collect. And it's interesting how that initial contact might very well impact the case or affect the position of the body so that we don't necessarily appreciate it in its pristine condition. But I can tell you this, when they finally alerted the police in regards to this young woman's body, they didn't touch it. They called, and what they discovered when the ME got out there was horrific. Sean Goh, this person that I would assume at one point in time professed his love for Rachel Sheridan, uh, told her that he cared about her, told her he would take care of her. And, uh, you know, you know, who knows, you know, with these domestic cases that we catch like this, Dave, um, nobody knows anybody. You never know

the, the level of violence that anyone is particularly capable of because you don't know what their psychological history is. You don't know what their criminal history is. But Dave, I got to tell you, with Sean Goh, he had a reputation as a bad seed, if you will. Bad seed. Now, that's a dated comment, you know? I also like to use the term good egg every now and then, too. But just go with me. She was a bad egg. Another reference to Gene Wilder.

Yep, there you go. The egg decatur. So in this particular case with Sean Goh, as we mentioned earlier, as soon as police saw him, as they're standing outside the apartment, trying to find at the very beginning part, doing their welfare check on Rachel, they see Sean in her vehicle and they give chase. He takes off in bolts. They get him locked up. And this isn't the first contact that Sean Goh has had with police. At the time he's arrested, he was wanted on a number of

different issues. He allegedly stole a handgun from a residence in the North Canton area a couple of months before Rachel goes missing. He had physically threatened rachel in the past and friends and family knew about these threats because he didn't just make a threat and that was it he made threats and he actually punctured the actual story says cut holes in her tires now that i'm always picturing a puncture you know like with a knife or a screwdriver or something but cutting holes in her tires seems to take it to a different level it's a different phrase than i've ever heard but yeah it does that means that you're jamming you're probably jamming a sharp instrument in there and i'm not talking about like a piece of rebar i'm talking about like a knife and you're going you're you're carving the tires is what it comes down to like going into the sidewall so the

tire cannot be repaired it will have to be replaced which is a lot more expensive 10 bucks to patch a tire hole versus you know a hundred dollars for a whole tire oh yeah yeah and that's if you get a low-end tire right and you know these this couple is unmarried they're living in an apartment together she's driving a jeep liberty she doesn't strike me as somebody that's got a ton of money. So when you strike out at her like this, it's not just, it's not just the violence that's implied. It's also, it puts a financial burden on her. He would have known that. Yep. Cause they were living together. Yeah. They, yeah, absolutely. And you never know what's going to set him off at any particular time. What button is going to be, uh, pressed and you get somebody that has a history

of violence. I mean, violence extends for me when you go to someone's home and you actually steal a weapon. That has a flavor of violence to it in that environment. Even if you don't have physical contact or you're not threatening, you know, what's your purpose to specifically go to a location and steal a gun? And then you have this action with the tires. I can understand, Dave, I can understand why her mother would have been terrified. Can you imagine? I bet there are so many times she had probably spoken with her. And this, this again is a thread. Um, I worry about you, darling, please. Is, you know, can you break away from him? And you never know what the dynamic is. Is somebody saying,

you know, Oh, I love him. He's going to change all this. They never changed Dave. They don't. It's, it's, it's the same story over and over and over again. And you wind up with something that winds up in they find her at 930 or that's when they call. So we know we have the moment of discovery, but we don't know exactly how long she has been dead because we don't know other than the welfare check call. We know that police were called a specific time after she didn't show up for work but we don't know right now can they determine based on the body they find at 9 30 in the morning can they go back in time and figure out approximate time of death joe yeah and i and just to give you a little insight you you know, when they first rolled up on this case at the home, they the police had shown up, I think, on July 2nd at about 1232 p.m. So you're going into the afternoon hours at this point in time.

They were able to hook him up, you know, because he bolted, you know, while they were there initially, um, they actually found him on the third and they got on this pretty quick. Um, I don't know if they were able to track him somehow or, you know, where, if they were pinging his phone or what exactly happened. They got, I, that was, they got him at a homeless shelter. Right. But I'm talking about his movement relative to depositing rachel's body because they actually found her on july the third so it was it was actually less than 24 hours when they finally found her body yeah it would be she's going to be at the outer margins dave as far as uh post-mortem changes go, you know, where we're looking for the rigidity to begin to release. Also, and this is in, this is in July, Dave. And so it's, you're going to, it'll be hotter. And as I've mentioned before, when it comes to obviously

body temp and certainly rigor mortis, those are going to be slightly accelerated. And when they find her, she's actually cocooned in plastic. So he's taken time to wrap her body up in plastic and has driven out to the Mother Gooseland area and found a plastic trash can. Not unlike, you know, what we have at our homes that we roll out to the Mother Gooseland area and found a plastic trash can, not unlike, you know, what we have at our homes that we roll out to the street if you live in town and, you know, you put by the road and the garbage guys come by and pick it up. And, you know, it was just these sanitation workers, you know, that looked into the can and saw, and can you imagine their horror, you know, when they lift that lid up and they look inside and there's her body, uh, in, inside of this, uh, of a rubbish container,

you know, the things that you discard. And I think that says a lot here, Dave, it, It speaks to potentially how he viewed her as refuse, something to be thrown away, treated horribly. And it's fascinating to me, as horrific as this is, as horrific as this is, when bodies are cocooned like this, for us in forensics, it's actually, there's an upside to this. The upside is, is that there's a containment of evidence that takes place. So anything that's on the body, you have the opportunity to retain that and not just retain it. Here's the cool part. You actually keep it in place on the specific

surfaces of the body if it's deepened upon how it's secured. So let's just say you've got a bit of evidence, say a hair or something that's on the shoulder. if they're cocooned in this wrapping, you can still find that hair in place on the shoulder. And it might give you an indication as to where his hands were on her or where his head was in relation to her body. Did he slough hair? Did it fall off of his head onto her bloody handprints that may transfer to her clothes because you know you're having to manipulate dead weight here if there's been a spillage of blood that's so significant he can get blood on his hands transfer those contact points to her shirt maybe the cuffs of her pants maybe to her bare legs drag her onto the sheeting, the plastic sheeting, wrap her up in it.

The other thing that it protects, because plastic is a non-poor surface, it protects latent prints, Dave. We've recovered latent prints off of plastic sheeting before. And then if there's blood involved, that's a different type of print from, say, for instance, a latent print that's oil, that's generated from the oil in our fingertips. If he touches her body with the bare hands and he transfers his fingerprint onto that surface and the medium is actually blood, that's a different type of print that can be recovered. So the fact that her body is cocooned, even though it's in this filthy rubbish container, she's kind of protected in that sense. But that's not really what turned this case, Dave, is it?

They're able to determine, police say, that she was attacked in the bedroom and then her body was drug and placed and the damage the wounds were inflicted about her head yeah for the most part and they said she was beaten with an object and they're only willing they being police and the medical examiner they're only uh about to go as far as saying that she was hit with a hammer at least once and i find that to be an odd comment there was only of all the battering that was going on yeah one was obviously a hammer yeah they weren't all right. So if and they also believe, if I'm not mistaken, that she was probably asleep when this occurred. Sorry, I should have mentioned that. And yeah. diminutive, Dave, a young woman is asleep, and he begins to essentially wail on her.

It's not surprising that they're identifying a single hammer strike here. They found a hammer at the scene. But, you know, this is not something that is, uh, well thought out. This is very frenzied. They were able to delineate that she had been struck, that she had 10 specific injuries that apparently are all blunt force trauma. Um, and this coward could have potentially have shown up with a hammer or he could have beaten her in her sleep with his fist, striking her all about her head. And then, um, he goes and gets a hammer and And she's so wrung out. I mean, just imagine, Dave, if you're awakened from a dead sleep, and I know you can imagine this. If you have kids, you can imagine this.

You're slumbering. You finally lay your head on the pillow, and suddenly there's a scream that lets out in the middle of the night in your house. You're completely disoriented. How much more so with her if she doesn't see this incoming and she's attacked in her bedroom like this? And I guess the coup de grace is going to be to take a hammer and have the single hammer strike. The way they were able to delineate this specific injury away from the others, and I'm not saying that the others could not be hammer strikes, because hammer can be held in any number of ways. And this was, by the way, a claw hammer, which means it's got a nail extractor on the back of it with the two prongs. Very common hammer that we see and that most of us own.

This is actually the blunted end, the leading edge that she struck with. And hammer strikes are very specific when you see them in the morgue. When we're doing these examinations, what would happen is her head would be probably completely shaved at autopsy, um, because it's, it's impossible to appreciate, um, all of the injuries. And so when a body is, when you have head strikes like this, um, with women, uh, in particular, cause women commonly have more hair than guys do. Um, we actually shaved their heads at autopsy. I got to ask you something, Joe, and maybe this seems

silly and no, but would you have to ask the family about that? No. So no, I've had that question asked of me before. Okay, okay. Do you warn them? No, we'll tell the funeral director. Okay. And the funeral director generally will. Now, we've had families that will ask the question, you know, why did you do this? And here's the sole reason. It's an evidentiary search. You know, you're trying to assess. The family, I think, you know,

as time goes by, because they probably can't have an open casket. And there have been times where we've had these really traumatic events where I've seen them get wigs. And funeral homes are good about doing that. Hats, people will put hats on individuals, um, and if they're going to have a viewing, but the, your sole purpose here is I'll put it to you this way, knowing, and I don't want to put words in, into, um, this precious woman's mother's mouth, but, um, would you rather her head be shaved and us appropriately assess these insults to, uh, to her head? Or do you want to run the risk of having, um, an incomplete assessment and this guy's back out on the streets? Right.

You know, I know which if I'm a parent here. And so when we shave the head, and sometimes we'll do it selectively, we're very, very careful, though, in the morgue. And these are hard, and this is one of the problems that you run into. You'll see, like, when you get a hammer strike, you'll actually have an abrasion, okay, that you have to pay real close attention to to see because it's so ghastly, because you'll have a laceration many times that occurs. So you've got two things happening.

That top layer of skin is abraded. And you'll see the little margins of it because the skin is rubbed, because it's coming in contact with this metal object. Then the skin will split. Okay. Sometimes on the skin, you can see the pattern, like it'll look like a quarter almost if it's a flush strike. Then depending upon the level of force, and I've seen this happen, when you get below that layer of the scalp and you get onto what's referred to as the external table of the skull, you'll see a plug of bone, Dave, that's also shaped like a quarter. And it's depressed, which means the bone actually sinks in to the cranial vault at that point in time and impacts the brain directly. And many times the bone will fragment and the little shards of bone will go into the brain.

That's incompatible with life, not to mention just the concussive event of this that leads to death. The question is, was he striking her with a fist beforehand? He had the hammer at the ready and then used it? Or was he holding the hammer in a way that you couldn't really tell if it was a hammer strike or not? Like if it's on the one of the edges, for instance. I don't see that happening because even if you strike somebody with the edge of a hammer, you're going to have these kind of linear marks that occur on the soft tissue. Either way, they were able to determine that she did die as a result of blunt force trauma.

And thankfully, very, very thankfully, Sean Goh is no longer among the land of the free. He's now been convicted. And now he's awaiting sentencing. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.