Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Murder of Tammy Jo Blanton

Episode Date: July 17, 2022

Tammy Jo Blanton's body is found in her bathtub by police responding to a welfare check request. Just the night before, September 10th, 2014, Blanton called 911, saying that her ex-boyfriend, Joseph Oberhandsley, would not leave the front of her home. The welfare check had been requested by Blanton's friend and co-worker when Blanton did not show up for work. When police arrive at the home, Joseph Oberhandsley answers the door, covered in blood. Police find signs of a forced entry, and ultimately Tammy Jo Blanton's body. She has not only been stabbed repeatedly, but her body mutilated and also cannibalized.  In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss the differences between dismemberment and mutilation, the perspective of the judge and jury when it is revealed that injuries to the body are post-mortem, and the horrific details in the case of Tammy Jo Blanton’s murder. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Show Notes: 0:30 - Introducing Tammy Jo Blanton’s murder 1:30 - Tammy Jo Blanton calls the police because her ex-boyfriend, Joseph Oberhansley would not leave her home 3:00 - Describing the initial murder scene 5:00 - Cause of death: sharp force injuries. Multiple stab wounds all over her body. 10:00 - How exactly does the body stop functioning when you are stabbed to death? 12:30 - Post-mortem vs Antemortem  13:30 - The additional “twisting of the knife” when injuries to a deceased body are post-mortem 14:00 - Section 2: Walking into the crime scene 16:30 - A section of Tammy Jo’s chest is open, a parts of her heart and a lung are missing 18:00 - The differences between dismemberment and mutilation 20:00 - A jigsaw was found on the scene. This continues to show evidence of how much time it took to mutilate the body 23:00 - Section 3: Joseph Oberhansley’s mental state and the trial for this case 27:00 - Oberhansley’s criminal record included shooting his own mother, shooting and killing the teenage mother of his child. He had also shot himself, attempting suicide in the past. 29:30 - An exploration into the different types of cannibalism 33:00 - Joseph Oberhansley was sentenced to life in prison, without the possibility of paroleSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. As time goes by, if you're all alone, you long for companionship. Many of us do, I think. And it's tough. It's tough to try to discern who you're going to let into your little bubble. You don't know, particularly in the world that we live in nowadays, you don't know who's going to show up at your door.

You don't know who's on the other end of the line. You don't know who's going to show up at your door. You don't know who's on the other end of the line. You don't know who you're texting with. Today on Body Bags, I want to talk about a young lady, Tammy Jo Blanton. I want to talk about her murder. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Joining me is Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Scary world out there, Jackie, when it comes to dating. Wouldn't you agree? Oh, absolutely, Joe. Tammy Jo Blanton was dating 41-year-old Joseph Oberhansley. And it was a very volatile relationship, and she broke up with him.

She was so afraid of Oberhansley that she had the locks changed on her home. And here is an example of why. The day before Tammy Jo Blanton was found murdered, she had made a call to 911 at 2.52 a.m. She made the call reporting that her ex-boyfriend, Joseph Oberhansley, was outside her home and wouldn't leave. When officers arrived, Joseph was still outside. He said that his key would not work. When police asked to see Oberhansley's identification, it listed a different address than Tammy Jo Blanton's home. Tammy Jo Blanton explained to police that she had ended her relationship with Oberhansley, had her locks changed again, and that she wanted him to leave.

He did. But the next morning, officers came back to Tammy Jo Blanton's house. That's because her friend and colleague, Sabrina Hall, had called police to ask them to do a welfare check on Tammy Jo Blanton. Tammy worked with Sabrina and was supposed to work that day, but when she didn't arrive to the office, Sabrina called her phone and a man answered. The man told Sabrina that he was Tammy's brother and that she was caring for their ill father.

Sabrina Hall did not believe the man and made the phone call for police to check on Tammy. At that point, when the officers showed up at Blanton's home and knocked on the door, Oberhansley answered the door. The detectives noticed a cut on Oberhansley's hand and they searched him and at that point, they found a brass knuckle knife in his pocket that appeared to have hair and blood on it. At that point, investigators obtained a warrant for the home, and inside is where they found the body of Tammy Jo Blanton in the bathroom, and police at that point described it, this is their words, not mine, a big bloody mound of

something in the bathtub. That phrase right there tells me that this poor woman's body has just been mutilated terribly. Yeah, that's a big indication there because, you know, you should not just, if you're a young police officer that shows up, and these are what we refer to as beat cops. They're the folks that are out riding around their car. They're patrolling. They're responding to a call. It's always amazed me with these cases that I've worked and I've covered now in the media for a number of years where you're a beat cop and maybe you've gone out to a noise disturbance or police officers, my friends that are police officers, one of the

biggest annoyances that they have are responding to alarms on buildings. You hear it all the time on police radios. It turns out to be nothing most of the time, the winds blowing a door. Imagine coming off of a call like that and you're summoned to this location and you've just been doing something that seems so innocuous in your standard workaday world. And we're not talking about a place that's huge urban center here. We're just talking about suburban America. And you walk in to an environment that is bathed in blood. And you're thinking, what planet am I on all of a sudden?

And that's the world that cops live in, where they just kind of have to throw the brakes on and readjust very quickly, and they begin to assist. When they showed up at the door and he wouldn't show the hands, that's a big indication for them. They call it putting the bracelets on. Bracelets are going to come out, the handcuffs, and you're going into custody at that moment in time.

You're going to be arrested at that moment in time because you're noncompliant with a lawful order. And I got to tell you, thank God that they did. Because as was mentioned, he had these, I've heard people refer to them as a knuckle buster knife, which is, it's kind of a, if you think of what a brass knuckle looks like, it's something you can have your fingers going through. And there's a contact edge where you can strike an individual with this metallic surface. But in addition to the brass knuckle, you've actually got a sharp-edged instrument on the other end of it. And this is a highly lethal weapon. He could have, at that moment in time, with these police officers, he could have attacked

them. He could have ripped them to shreds or done great bodily harm. And thank God that they weren't hurt. I can't say the same for Tammy Jo Blanton. As investigators are starting to look at what had happened to Tammy Jo Blanton, they discovered that she had been stabbed repeatedly. So is this her cause of death? Absolutely. Her cause of death is sharp force injuries. That is this knife being driven into her body, not just once or twice or three times. I'm talking multiple times. She had multiple stab wounds all over her body and it is absolutely horrific. And I've said this over and over again, and I'll never tire of saying it, but out of all of the causes of death that are out there, sharp force injuries, when you take that in a homicide, in the context of a homicide as the manner of death,

it is the most personal. It is the most personal thing that can happen with maybe the exception of strangulation. But there's a level of violence that goes in to sharp force injury, particularly stab wounds. Because it's an action where, and particularly in this case, and you begin to think about how this weapon is set up, where your fingers are threaded through this thing. And you've got this blade, so you've created a fist where you're gripping this blade with this brass knuckle handle, and you're driving it over and over and over. There's a tremendous amount of force. Here's the key, though. With stab wounds, it's not like you're one and done.

In many of these cases, this is a frenzied event. You're withdrawing the blade, and then you make a conscious effort. That's important to emphasize here. You're making a conscious effort to now reinsert this weapon into someone's body. It's not like you strike them a single time on the head with a club or something like that. It's not like you shoot them a single time. This is withdrawing an edged weapon and then reinserting it. Withdrawing, reinserting it. And there's a pain response if you're face-to-face with this victim that should potentially register with you.

You're witnessing their life just kind of fading away before you. Maybe they're gasping. Maybe they're fighting you because in a normal primal response, you're going to try to fend this person off. But yet that knife is being plunged into this individual every single time. Lots of times with sharp force injury victims, we examine the palms of their hands very carefully. And this is absolutely horrific, but it's reality. The individual, in order to fend off the subject, will grasp the blade and the perpetrator, again, will withdraw the blade from the individual's hand. And you'll have these large slice marks that you can appreciate on the palms of the hands

and between the fingers. Particularly one of the biggest area is the webbing between the thumb and the index finger. You'll see that sliced down to the bone many times. And that's the individual trying at that primal level to try to fend off this attacker. I've seen blades actually pass through hands, all the way through hands, and then into bodies. Because the person is putting their hand up in response, but this amount of force. And I think that it's interesting in this case because of the structure of this weapon that he could generate a lot of force as he's driving this into her body. He's in a dominant position over her. My assumption is that she would be essentially in a supine position,

which means face up. He's face to face with her. He's on top of her. All right. And straddling her perhaps. And he's plunging this knife over and over and over again. There's nothing she can do to escape this event. But from a forensic standpoint,

every time this occurs, this event, there's a transference of evidence. You have her bodily fluids, the blood transferring onto him, perhaps her hair. We talked about there was actually hair that was found on the surface of the knife. And many times the perpetrators will in fact cut themselves. This is not like shooting where you're at a distance, you pop off a round at somebody. No, you're up close and personal, and as they're fighting, you're fighting. And many times, the perpetrator will cut themselves. And so, that blood leaches onto the body of the victim, and also all of the surrounding

area on the floor, the surfaces of any kind of furniture that happens to be there, a sink, a toilet, or a sofa even. You'll find what's referred to, and this is an important word, a commingling of blood that occurs. And so we have to kind of separate that out. And you begin to look at that, and suddenly a narrative develops, scientifically at least, because we're not there to witness this event, but we can understand this narrative as it's being played out of what the dynamics of this event were. The dynamics. I want to talk about that a little bit, Joe, because I don't understand, and you and I have talked about blunt force, sharp force injuries often, but when you are stabbed like this so many times, is it a process of you bleeding out over time or did they actually hit the heart and your heart stopped immediately? I mean, is there ever

a way to know which incident actually caused the death knoll? I absolutely love this question. This is why. I urge anybody that's truly interested in medical legal death investigation, find an autopsy report that involves multiple stab wounds. The pathologist will say something like, even though these injuries are enumerated, you know, one through, I don't know, 26 or one through 100, this does not imply sequencing. There's no way to tell. that you have in these kind of cases is, is there hemorrhage associated with this injury or is there no hemorrhage? And again, that's our big demarcation there between life and death. That means that if there is hemorrhage present, we know that the individual was insulted prior to death. That means their heart is still beating and you've got blood coursing through the body

and you have this kind of hemorrhage that's into the soft tissues. And then we look at it from the other perspective where we have injuries where there is no hemorrhage whatsoever. And so you have to divide that. So how can that be? How can you have an injury and there not be a hemorrhage? Well, you can have a post-mortem

injury. You can have a post-mortem injury. You made a good point just a second ago when you talked about you plunge the knife into the heart and suddenly, because there's mechanical damage to the heart at that point in time, the individual is going to go into arrest. They're going to die, all right, and it will be immediate in that case. So anything that might follow after that, and I know some people will argue with this because there's this kind of agonal thing that goes on, but if the heart mechanically is damaged to the point where the individual goes into rest, the logical assumption is that there's no longer blood coursing through the body. So you're not necessarily going to present with hemorrhage in any kind of post-mortem

wound because you're not going to have no longer the physical facility to hemorrhage into that specific area. And that's very important because it goes into when you begin to look at this from the perspective of not just the forensics, but also kind of the mindset of the individual that was perpetrating this crime, because these are going to be questions that you're going to be asked on the stand if you're a forensic pathologist or forensic specialist. They're going to ask you, well, in your opinion, how many of these injuries were antemortem before death, and how many were after? Well, if you've got anti-mortem which means before

death you're talking about bringing about the the death but then from a lawyer's perspective if they can demonstrate a prosecutorial perspective they can demonstrate that there's all these post-mortem injuries suddenly suddenly the accused becomes such a bigger monster at that point in time. Because now you weren't satisfied with killing or ending this person's life. You went to rip them to shreds and destroy what was left of their body. When you walk onto a scene involving sharp force injuries, I got to tell you, out of all the cases I've worked, when you're in this environment where there is so much blood, it's very perplexing. It's a daunting task because you're sitting there and you're saying, oh my Lord, where do I begin? Where do I begin? Because everything is literally, and I mean this in the literal sense,

our friends in Great Britain use this term all the time, but in the literal sense, everything is a bloody mess. I don't even think that begins to cover what went on in this case, Joe. This is going to be so disturbing, and I want to warn people now, what we're going to talk about is truly disturbing. If you have children in the room, I can't imagine anybody would listen to us with children in the room, but if there are children in the room, you might want to put on some headphones because this is truly disturbing. Tammy Jo Blanton's body had been heavily mutilated. Not only was she stabbed in the head, chest, and neck, the front portion of her skull had been opened. A portion of her brain, lungs, and most of her heart had been damaged or removed

joe i i really don't even know what kind of question to ask you about this because how can somebody do that and what kind of force would it take to crack open somebody's skull to remove the brain it's important that you and you, and this is easier said than done. Trust me. The people that go out on these scenes, we're not super people. We're not. We're not immune to the things that we're seeing. Because at that point in time, you've checked your humanity out a long time ago.

We're still impacted by this. But you have to be focused on this scientifically and to try to understand what you're seeing relative to the findings, the physical findings that's seen. You can't just check out and say, I'm not going to do this. I mean, you have to do this. You have to understand what's going on. You mentioned that, yes, the frontal portion of her skull is missing at this point in time when they observed her. But also, we have to explain that her chest was open to the point where the majority of her heart was absent, as well as a segment of her lung.

I believe it's probably the left lung lung probably the upper lobe of the left lung because it's immediately adjacent to the heart and so you have a large gaping area there because it's not easy to get to i mean it's you might think that it would be you see movies and all that stuff forget all that nonsense it's not an easy undertaking. This takes work. It takes a determined person in order to do this, particularly if you're not equipped with the tools, say, for instance, that you might find in surgery or in the autopsy suite. Remember, when they're doing surgery, they actually have an instrument that's referred to as a rib spreader. All right.

And these things have been developed for this particular type of event as it applies to therapeutic surgeries that take place. Not in this sense, though. This is a mutilation. I'm hesitant to refer to this as a dismemberment where the body is taken apart in segments necessarily. This is an attempt to remove specific parts of the body. All right. When I think of dismemberment, I think about essentially taking apart at the joints, the wrists, the elbows, the shoulders, those sorts of things.

That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a mutilation at this point. We're talking about a mutilation. And to your point, you would have to sit there and think, well, what in the world am I looking at here? Because with a dismemberment, for instance, you're thinking if there is obviously a homicide that's been committed, well, why would somebody dismember somebody? Most of the time, people dismember bodies in order to make it easier to transport individual pieces so that they can dispose of them in a manner in which they put as much distance between themselves and the bodies. They can make it easily transportable, those sorts of things. You've entered into a different sphere here when you begin to think about mutilation and you're facilitating this.

To get someone's skull open, when I use the term daunting task, it's something that I worked for many years as an autopsy assistant, a path assistant, and participated in roughly 7,000 autopsies during that period of time. And if you do a complete autopsy, you open, I'm going to be very frankly, you open the skull. That's what you do. But we have a very specific instrument that we use for that. It's called a bone saw, and it's an agitating saw. So you hear it in the movies, they use this high-pitched buzzing sound that'll simulate one of these saws being used on bodies and that sort of thing. And it agitates. If people have ever had a cast removed, okay, if you've ever had a cast removed, you had a broken bone, that's very, very similar to this agitating saw. So just think about that for a second.

That's not what was utilized here. Kind of a reveal here is the fact that they found a jigsaw, a jigsaw present scene. And this is not something with a big, robust blade. And it's something that's normally placed on a flat surface. You think about the shape of the skull. The shape of the skull is rounded. So if you're using a jigsaw, say, to cut a piece of plywood or something like that, you place it on the edge and you move forward with it and you can cut out and that sort of thing. But you've got that under control. To utilize a jigsaw in this particular case in order to open, say, this frontal bone, which is arguably the most robust bone in the human skull, you just tap your forehead, that sort of area, area very thick very hard to get an edge on it

you've got this this saw blade that is going up and down kind of like the only thing i can really equate it to is almost like the needle on a sewing machine that's going up and down like that as opposed to the agitating saw that's used to remove a cast or a bone saw it kind of goes backwards and forth like that and then the blades are rounded. It's easy to use. In this case, this would have taken so much time. I mean, it would have taken a protracted period of time. And again, there's a certain amount of soft tissue dissection that would probably have

to go on. That means you have to remove most of the time any kind of soft tissue that would impede that blade's ability to cut through that bony surface and then once you have at least made a single entrance into that bony surface how how exactly what direction are you going to go now are you going to take the tip of this you know remember it's acting like a sewing machine going up and down up and and down, up and down. Do you insert it into this little defect that you've created and then kind of buzz it out along that area? If this is something that you have no experience with, and let's face it, I can't imagine there's a lot of people out there

that have experience with mutilation of human remains. What do you do as you're sitting there in this world that you have painted with another human being's blood and you're holding this individual's head in your lap as you're doing this? Do you have it braced in some way? When she was found, she was actually found in the tub covered with what turned out to be a tarp. And so the workings of the scene are going to be very complicated from a forensic standpoint to understand what was physically done there, what the position of her body was at that particular time,

what the position of the perpetrator's body was relative to her body and the rest of the environment. You're going to have a lot of transfer of blood evidence and trace evidence and everything else. It would be an absolute nightmare to figure this out. In my wildest dreams, I can't even begin to kind of understand how you prepare yourself if you're the perpetrator of a mutilation.

How do you prepare yourself? How do you determine what tools to show up with? How do you figure out the logistics of it? Is this just something that is done at the spur of the moment and you grab whatever is handy? Or is this something that you're pre-prepared to do at that given time? I don't know. It boggles the mind. It does. And I think the jury and the judge, when Oberhansley was charged in Tammy Jo Blanton's death, it was something they truly had to consider because Oberhansley claimed to be incompetent and, in fact, was deemed incompetent

to stand trial. So there were claims that Oberhansley was schizophrenic. He had, in the past, Joe, you can kind of weigh in on this here in just a second. He had been accused and convicted of shooting his high school girlfriend. She died. He had also shot his mother. So he had been convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 12 years where he had killed the mother of his child. He said he was in a meth rage. He also shot his mother. And ultimately, though, Oberhansley was deemed sane at the time of Tammy Jo Blanton's murder. But here's the truly horrendous, as if we've not crime here, Joe. Joseph Oberhansley was a cannibal. He ate Tammy Jo Blanton's brain, parts of her heart, and parts of her lung. I'm really, truly

at a loss for words, Joe. Yeah, talk about plumbing the depths of depravity. You begin to think about this and you say, well, we've got a mutilation. Now we've got an individual that has taken organs from somebody that they were involved in a relationship with. And not only had he eviscerated her, which means removal of organs, but he had prepared the organs. He essentially prepared them on the stove and then he ingested again i think our our default position here has to be the science behind this what because i don't know

that it is even possible to explain the rationale for having done this but what we do know is that these elements were in fact consumed and i there's one part to this is kind of fascinating to me, I guess, as fascinating as it could possibly be, was the fact that he had claimed at one point in time that the removal of the brain, essentially, was his attempt to find her third eye and this is a very metaphysical thing and it's not something i fully grasp but the the at a base level the third eye is this metaphysical presence that's within the brain and can see things on a different plane and these sorts of things i do know that some of the items that were found at the scene included tongs and they were covered with blood. And I think these are tongs very similar to maybe salad tongs or tongs that you would use when preparing a meal on a grill, this sort of thing. And you have to understand with human anatomy, if you're opening up just one portion of the skull and removing that and then going into that, there is an attempt on the part of the person because you can't remove it the way we do at autopsy. There is a process where you would literally have to dig out the brain or scoop out the brain in order to make this happen and then purpose to prepare the brain so that you can ingest it. And one point that we need to go back to here is that at a very early age,

when he was still in Utah, he had demonstrated a very violent behavior. If you're to the point where you can shoot the mother of your own child, and she's just a teenager, she's just a teenager, he cold-bloodedly shot her and then shot his own mother. And then I guess when he began to assess that at that particular time, decided that he was going to take his own life and shot himself as well. So that gives you an indication as to mindset, you know, because people, I hate the word why it's, I don't,

I don't particularly like it because it's not very scientific most of the time. Cause you know, why is, is there many degrees to why we'll just say that it's hard to to quantify why um but you sit there and you you begin to think well why i think that we have to fall back to how how was this done or how could he have done this and we have indications that he was very violent in the past but But yet, here he is. He's out. He's out of incarceration. He's made his way to Indiana. And when his trial was going on and when he was initially charged, there was some indication that he was perfectly lucid. He had attempted to have a spontaneous news conference at one point in time. As he's shackled, walking around, I can only think, can you imagine being the deputies that are having to escort this guy around?

You think he's in shackles there and what he's perpetrated, you're conveying this guy from one area to another. And again, it goes back to the people that initially showed up at the scene of Tammy Jo's homicide. I think that that would transfer over to these individuals too that are having to deal with him on a regular basis. And he seemed perfectly lucid. He's saying that he is not in fact insane, that there are other people to blame. He even stated that he gave them an alternative reason for what happened,

that he was knocked out at the scene and there were two people that entered her home and did this horrible deed to Tammy Jo, but yet they let him survive. Okay, so you're going to have to teach me here, Jo, because I'm hearing everything that you're saying, but I

can't get past the part of the word eat. Okay? He ate her organs. So so cannibalism why i get well i can't ask you why because you don't like the word why tell me about cannibalism is it just you people who do this have a desire to taste the flesh do they have a desire to taste the flesh? Do they have a desire to, you know, I understand in some other cultures in ancient times, the idea was if you killed someone, a warrior, and you ate their organs, that it gave you power. I mean, what is it with cannibalism?

Yeah, it's from an anthropological standpoint when these people are studied, you have what's referred to as kind of a ritualized cannibalism, like you had mentioned, where you're going to eat a portion of your enemy's body and it gives you strength and all those sorts of things. I think, if I'm not mistaken, I think that there's one tribe that still participates in cannibalism in New Guinea, a very isolated group of people. And again, it's a form of ritualized ingestion of human remains. You have a separate section that is survival. You have people that are dependent upon another human being's body as sustenance. We think back to the Donner Party. That's many people for them. That's their default position back in the 1800s when they were trying to get across the pass and they were frozen in and they had nothing to nourish themselves with. There's a number of people that have been at sea, I think, that had to resort to cannibalism.

And of course, famously, we've got the athletic team that crashed in the Andes back in the 70s. The book was written about them alive, I think. But that's for survival, all right? What's the really curious group here are these homicidal cannibals? And how do you study this? Because, yeah, there are stories of this. There are certainly cases. I guess famously the most obvious one is Dahmer that comes to mind in the last 40 years. And again, the reason he made the

news like he did, I think, is because it was so shocking. So shocking. And the public couldn't get enough of it. They were watching this day after day. I had friends that were involved in the investigation up in Milwaukee in this case. And yeah, it was absolutely horrific. But he was very systematic about this. He would choose victims and this sort of thing. And there's all kinds of psychopathology that went on with him. But still, he was deemed sane. He was deemed sane.

He wasn't a raving maniac. He was very much in control. It's very difficult, I think, for us to get past this as well it should be, past this idea of consumption of another person's body. Again, back to the why question. I don't know that we will ever have an answer to why that is purely definitive. I would think at least that there is some kind of power thing that's going on. Not only am I going to stab you to death, not only am I going to sexually assault you. And again, that's another piece to Tammy Jo's case. There's also evidence that he sexually

assaulted her. And again, we don't know if that was anti-mortem before death or if it was post-mortem where you have a necrophiliac event that's going on. And again, that's something that Dahmer did. He was a necrophile, which means he had a sexual orientation toward the dead. We don't know what the status was with that. Again, power, control, and then total dominance maybe in these individuals' minds is the consumption of the remains. They've dominated this individual in every other way possible. And I'll show you, I'll even bring it down to the point where I'm going to ingest your mortal remains. I don't know that there's any kind of peace anybody could have over this, but just know this. Joseph Oberhansley was convicted. He was

convicted, and he's been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body iHeart podcast