Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Nose Job Murder- 6 Shots To The Face in Self-Defense?

Episode Date: November 10, 2024

Shayna Hubers calls 911 from Ryan Poston's condo in Highland Heights, Kentucky, and tells dispatch "I killed my boyfriend in self-defense". Hubers tells police Ryan Poston had been beating her all day long, tossing her around like a rag doll, and when he pulled out his gun, she grabbed it and shot him in the face. Police read Shayna Hubers her "Miranda" rights, and Hubers asks for a lawyer.  Even though Shayna Hubers has just been told she "has the right to remain silent" she lacks the ability, and tells investigators that she shot him twice in the face, then, as he was twitching, she said she thought he was going to die anyway or his face would be really deformed so she shot him 4 more times to make sure he was dead. Shayna Hubers tells police "I gave him the nose job he always wanted."  Joseph Scott Morgan explains how the crime scene and Ryan Poston's clothes tell a different story than the one Shayna Hubers is telling and Dave Mack digs into the background of an 18-month relationship that ended in the murder of a man who seemed to be everyone's favorite person.     Transcribe Highlights 00:03.40 Introduction - Rhinoplasty 04:55.81 Hammers, Chisels, and black eyes 09:27.14 Hubers gave boyfriend the "nose job he always wanted 14:58.88 Shayna Hubers and Jody Arias 20:15.42 What happened when Ryan Poston was murdered 25:04.98 True case of domestic abuse 30:20.01 Difference in bullet size 35:01.84 Stippling present on Ryan Poston 39:38.81 Hubers claims of abuse unfounded 44:21.70 Blood on shirt and pants indicates Poston seated 48:14.50 ConclusionSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Moore. You want to hear a horrible term. I've always hated this term when it comes to medicine. I don't know. It's always made my skin crawl. It's actually the word rhinoplasty. A rhino, of course, referring to a rhinoceros and the idea that they've got the big horn, you know, sticking out of their nose.

Plasty goes to a surgical intervention, perhaps, that is going to alter one's appearance. Rhinoplasty, we might otherwise know it as a nose job. And there are many people who have had nose jobs because of serious cosmetic issues. And they look so much better. And at the end of the day, you know, it all depends on your own personal perception of yourself. Maybe it needs to have a medical intervention that requires rhinoplasty. Then there's others, I think, that we can go back in time and look that have had rhinoplasty and probably ill-advised.

But today's case, today's case is a case that involves an individual who, according to her, administered a nose job. Only this was not a surgical intervention. This was murder. And the instrument was a.380 caliber pistol. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Facts. Brother Dave,

I'm going to tell you something about myself today that I have never told you. Uh-oh. I know, right? Hold on. Friends, in case you don't know it, Dave and I are actually, we do our tapings actually looking at one another. We can see one another. Scary sometimes. We're having a conversation.

It is scary. It is scary. We see ourselves in all sorts of dishevelment. And other days we'll come in and say, hey, what did you do? Take a shower today? But Dave, did you know I've broken my nose four times in my life really actually and i no no uh but and i think uh the first time i fell at a skating rink and my face uh was used to catch myself uh first time I'd been on skates,

I think I was probably eight. Wow. Terrifying. Uh, the other one, uh, actually had a dear friend of mine. Uh, I was at a church, the church we attended when I was a kid, I was coming out of what we call the game room. This church is really old. So every door in the church was solid oak. And she had come running down the hallway as I was walking out of the door, grabbed the solid oak door and slammed it on my face. I never saw it coming. And that broke my nose. And then I broke my nose in football. I actually had a face mask that, that gave way and caved in on me, um, took a shot to the face. And then the other one I think might've been a broken nose. Uh, I'm not going to go into, but suffice it to say,

I have now rather a, uhoscis, as you might say. Yeah, Jimmy Durante. I've got a big ridge in my nose. My nose generally arrives at a location a couple of seconds ahead of the rest of me, so I'll put it that way. If it were raining outside, people could take shelter wow it was just dry so never knows who knows being large well it is rather robust but that's okay um there are many people that uh that do go uh under the knife if you will for rhinoplasty one of the things that's always always kind of put me off about the process is that hammers and chisels are used many times.

Now there's surgical hammers and chisels, you know, to knock off edges and whatnot. There's something kind of ghastly about it. You know, we do ghastly things in the morgue, obviously, but you know, I'm just thinking about, you know, the breaking, you know, in order, you know. What's the old adage? You've got to break some eggs to make an eye. You've got to break the nose. That's why you see the bilateral raccoon eyes with people that have undergone rhinoplasty because you're fracturing the skull.

Is it true that once you have a nose job, that your nose doesn't keep growing? I know when we get older, our nose and our ears continue to grow, correct? Yeah, the soft tissue does. When you have a nose job. Not the underlying skeletal structure. Okay. But when you have a nose job, does that prevent your nose from getting longer as you age?

I'm going to tell you right now, I'm going to say it plainly. I have no idea. I don't have an answer to that question. But I can tell you this. I would think that it would disrupt it to a certain degree here here's a kind of a little bony fact if you will um did you know that in your throughout your skeleton um you have what are referred to, medical types refer to it, and anatomists refer to it as foramen. Now, foramen are these tiny little holes that are in bone, okay?

All right. As a matter of fact, the largest foramen that we have is what's referred to as the foramen magnum, and it is at the base of the skull. It's the biggest bony hole in your body and it's where your spinal cord emerges comes out of that hole you know from beneath the brain and you've got tiny little foramen that surround it and that's where blood vessels pass through day so if you've got like a foramen in your, you know, your facial structure that is a blood supply to the soft tissues around and to the bone too, if you get it altered

surgically, I really wonder how surgeons go in and account for that because those vessels have to go somewhere else or does it diminish the supply of blood? And I know that there's people out there that are surgeons and work with surgeons, and they could probably have the answer to that. But it is interesting, to say the very least. And you have to account for that. And, you know, people that want to improve their appearance, you know, they pursue these types of things. And that's kind of at the heart, at the center, I think, at least a comment that's associated with this case. It is referred to as the nose job murder. Yeah, yeah, it is. And look, all aside, I've covered this case.

I've covered it in the news. I've covered it with Nancy. I think I covered it probably on law and crime network, um, when they were still doing the daily court coverage. And, you know, I would be one of the, it's almost like being a color commentator. It's kind of a strange thing. Um, I'm almost sure that, and we're, you know, we're talking about the Shannon Hubers case. And you had questions for me about this case.

And I was like, okay, well, I'll revisit this with you because you've got questions. I want to try to answer them as best I can. You know, Joe, it is called the nose job murder because Shanna Hubers claims she shot her boyfriend in self-defense. And during her interview with police, she said that he was very vain and that she had a friend who was a dentist. And he, uh, the Ryan Poston, the victim here that Ryan, uh, wanted to get veneers for his teeth. And he also wanted to get a nose job. And in this interview with police, after Ryan Poston has been shot six times in the face, Shana Huber says, I gave him the nose job he always wanted. That's why this case has been called the nose job murder.

Because who would say that about somebody they claim to love? Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. And it's a, it's a, I use the term chilling a lot. It goes beyond chilling. It's,

uh, this is, this has got a level of disgusting to it. I think. And I think that it's important that we remember the victim, Ron Poston here and what he did for a living. I mean, he,

he was an attorney. Okay. Most people think of attorneys and the criminal sense where you're in trial and you're in this big courtroom and you're presenting to the jury, and that's very typical. You know, you can practice law in any number of ways. Contract law, you'll never walk inside of a courtroom, you know, to try a case. That's, you know, that's not what they do. But for him, I think, uh first off he's he's a good-looking cat i can say that you know to begin with handsome uh had a lot of friends that

really loved him and thought he was a really cool dude he had gone to i think he he went to university of indiana or indiana university undergraduate was a triple major there. It was an eye toward going to law school. And I think that he wound up going to the University of Northern Kentucky for his law degree. I'm just trying to think a triple major. Do you know the brainpower that requires? Yeah, you got to stay on. You got to stay on top of it. That's beyond me.

Yeah, it's like a normal degree is like i think it at jack state it's a hundred you know average it's going to vary but it's like 120 hours right all right roughly 120 24 hours that's for an undergraduate degree. Well, you still have to do all of the major requisites for, if you're majoring in political science, which I think he was, geography, which I think he was, and I can't remember what the other one was, but there were like three. He might walk out of the door with 165 undergraduate hours. And you say, well, what would be the point? Well, he's trying to be well-rounded, I think, you know,

before he sets himself up to go to law school, be able to write effectively and do all those things. And he was apparently quite the success, Dave. He was. He was out of Cincinnati where he practiced. And, you know, you mentioned a minute ago about his friends really caring about him him Ryan Poston was a well-thought-of individual at 29 years old a very accomplished young man and he kind of had his uh he had his pick of the women he would see you know he was like I mean obviously smart obviously attractive attractive, and a good guy.

Here's the problem. He and Shana Hubers dated for 18 months, and it was an on-again, off-again relationship. I've poured over some text messages between the two of them, and it's interesting if you realize that, first of all, Shana was 21 years old, and she was in college at the time. No slouch intellectually, you know you have people that are street smart and yet they lack in other areas of maturity or you know street smarts and things like that and she was lacking in social graces and being able to be um somebody that people would really like she had a lot of edges on her. Again, very smart and very attractive, but there were parts of her

that were really unappealing to people who got to know her. And in this case with Ryan, they dated at 18 months. They met online, as many people do these days. Ryan actually saw a Facebook picture that she posted of a spring break trip she had

he liked the photo that led to communication online they met they went out and it was a hot hot relationship at times there was a lot of intensity there and here's the part about ryan that i think his friends were i'm glad they shared it with us he didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings he he really was that guy he didn't want you know some people just they don't care about others feelings they don't and they just go through life like that ryan did he cared so much about other people's feelings, in particular with Shana. He wanted to break up with her. He needed to break up with her. But he didn't want to hurt her feelings.

So he would do it in soft ways, not very direct and not final, and always left this door open. And she would come back. She was relentless. Yeah, the number of text messages i think is something that really and this is we have to go back this is this case originated in 2012 i think it was uh and you i look back in time um interestingly enough i gotta say guess what else was in the news at this particular time uh that kind of parallels this case and something Shana Huber's actually referenced. And that's that's Jody Arias trial.

Yeah, this was actually the trial itself was going on during this period of time. I know because, you know, I'd been I was at HLN at the time, you know, covering the scene with Vinny and the guys, and we covered it for a long, long time and it's striking parallels, you know, in, in this case and with Jody Arias, um, I don't know, can you say unrequited love or, you know, wanting to distance yourself from someone, you've got this highly charged relationship that's, you know, you've got these people that are deeply intimately involved. I was listening to an interview regarding this case, and a lady that was speaking, I believe she was one of the former prosecutors, had said that this victim, Ryan, would come home, Dave, and somehow Shana would get into his apartment, and he would walk through the door, and she would be lying on the sofa, nude, smiling at him when he walked in. Now, look, I'm,

I'm a red blooded man. I'm not saying that I, I have an aversion to that when it comes to my wife. However, I have to say, uh, you've got someone that has come into your space and feels that very comfortable in an intimate setting, that very bold like that, and you know that they don't necessarily want you any longer, and you're going to literally bear yourself to them, you're really in a very, very difficult area. It's an emotionally charged charged situation and it can only get worse

during the time of their relationship um ryan would text shana it's over as you think about how bold it would take for somebody to be to you know sneak into the house break into the house and be laying there on the couch nude when the man comes home. Shana was aggressive and relentless when it came to Ryan Poston. She was there constantly, even when he said, stop, please stop. But Joe, one thing I did notice, let me share, February 2012, he sends her a text. You can tell people you broke up with me. He's negotiating here. You know, she won't stop. She won't leave him alone. Look, tell people you broke up with me. He's negotiating here. You know, she won't stop. She won't leave him on. Look, tell people you broke up with me that I'm good with that.

March of 2012, the next month, Ryan to Shana, stop texting me. April, I no longer have the patience to deal with you. So three months in a row, he is sending very specific things to Shana, but she won't give up. Relentless. Investigators found hundreds of thousands of text messages between Ryan and Shana. And again, remember, their relationship only lasted a period of 18 months for every one message that ryan sent to shana shana probably sent 50 to him wow what a ratio she could not stop herself and when it came right down to it ryan had been chased out of his own house

and it ended up at his stepfather's house in the middle of the night because she wouldn't leave his place. She would not leave. He had to he had to leave his own condo because she wouldn't leave. You want to get physical with her. Now, she claimed he was, Joe. She claimed he was physically abusive to her. As a matter of fact. She showed bruises on her arms to a next door neighbor claiming that

ryan did that she confessed later on that she bruised herself now i'm no lawyer you're no lawyer but we hang out with a lot of lawyers yes we do what does that seem like to you joe that she was playing she was playing a long game to get him back? After he had said, stop, leave me alone, and she wouldn't, that now she's turned the tables and now she's planning something else maybe? Yeah, and I think that many people would in a knee-jerk manner probably say that she's simply crazy and dismiss it. But let me tell you this. Just because somebody actually behaves in a manner in which you see as quote-unquote crazy does not necessarily mean that they're insane.

However, what it might mean is that they are pure evil. Who actually makes a comment that is so callous when speaking of the dead. And again, I want to, as an advocate for the dead here, I got to say the dead can't offer up any testimony on their own behalf. We need to keep that in mind. But what kind of person and what context was this comment about nose jobs made, Dave? Well, on the night in question, October the 12th, 2012, Shana Hubers is at Ryan Poston's house.

They spent October the 11th together and had actually gone to Shana's mother's house. Ryan was trying to ease her out of the relationship. He told Shana, I have a date tomorrow night on the 12th at 9 30 PM. I have a date. By the way, his date was with the reigning Miss Ohio USA. Her name is Audrey Bolt. He has it. And he's telling her this now he's trying to be nice to Shana so that he can leave with class, but they go to Shana's mom's house on October 11th. October 12th or October the 11th. She spends the night.

She will not leave Ryan's house. After everything he's trying to do, she still won't leave. So on October the 12th, he's telling her, I have a date. I'm going out. You need to leave. And she won't. On October the 12th, 911 gets a call. Emergency Medical Services

called to the scene because Shana Hubers says, I shot my boyfriend in self-defense. That's the case. I shot my boyfriend in self-defense in this 911 call. It's hours later

when she's being interviewed by police and she explains the shooting and by the way, six shots in all. And she says to the investigator, a female investigator. She's sitting in the room and Shana Hubers says he's vain. He wanted veneers and he wanted a nose job. So I gave him the nose job. He always wanted by shooting him in the face, Joe. That was, that's where the nose job murder comes from. I shot him in the face and I gave him the nose job he always wanted. Wow.

You know, it's not, it's not too often. I think a lot of people, uh, again, uh, uh, forgive me, Dave. You know, I'm always referring to things that we see in Hollywood, things we see in movies, uh, as kind of a point of reference. But we feel as though I'm compelled to do that because they get so much wrong. And, you know, from a forensics perspective, how we handle cases and probability and all those sorts of things. First off, headshots are very difficult to score. Really?

When you think about it, yes, they are. Yeah. You know, when you're firing, it's a smaller object. You know, if you're in the military, if you worked in law enforcement, or if you just enjoy weapons and you go out training and you have an instructor, the one thing they're always going to tell you, particularly when you're thinking about firing from the perspective of an aggressor coming at you, you always fire for center mass.

Center mass means that essentially if you think about from the shoulders to the abdomen, well, that's a much bigger target than the head, right? So it's – and Hollywood loves to deal in fantasy, okay? And it's fantastical many times to think, well, they scored a headshot from a great distance. I love these movies that show someone firing a pistol and it's from yards and yards and yards away. And they score, you know, a center mass. I mean, they score a headshot as opposed to firing at center mass to knock the person down. And those are the exceptions, not the rules.

Okay. However, if you do score a headshot, the first thing as far as range of fire goes that I like to think of is that I think about proximity because most of the time when you fire a weapon, it's different firing at static targets. You know, if you've got a paper target that's hanging up or if you're shooting, you know, I don't know, old coffee cans off of a fence post, which my grandfather used to do, taught me how to shoot that way with a BB gun, actually. That's completely different than working in a dynamic environment where you have an individual advancing on you. You know, say you've got this woman who is being abused and she feels threatened and she shoots. Do you want to hear literally right now? I want to tell you about this. One of the most fantastic, I say fantastic, one of the most unbelievable shots that I have ever borne witness to as an investigator. And again, now this is a true case of domestic abuse.

There was a case that I worked many, many years ago immediately adjacent to the New Orleans International Airport. And there was a trailer park underneath an overpass, if you can imagine that. So you're living beneath an underpass, an overpass, in trailers immediately adjacent to the airport, which is an international airport. And it's busy. So you've got the sound of traffic over you, and you've also got the sound of jets taking off and landing there at Lou Armstrong Airport. Dave, there was this man and a woman that lived together in this trailer, and the trailer itself had a set of concrete steps that you would push up to the side, you know, prefab steps.

That was the single entrance into it that actually had steps. And they had a screen door on the trailer, and they would leave the primary interior door open. Well, he had beaten this poor woman over and over again. He'd get hammered drunk. He'd raise his hand to her and then he would have these, you know, uh, bold things that he would get out in the yard and start screaming at the trailer at her, you know, calling her names and just continuing to just act like a wild man after he beat her. They'd had the police that

had rolled out there a couple of times. The, the locals that live there, they saw it happen. You know, they saw him demonstrating out there outside of the trailer, you know, I guess like marking his territory or something after he would hit this poor woman. Well, he did it one too many times, Dave. And this comes down to the idea of the most incredible shot that I've ever seen. According to witnesses, now I saw the aftermath, okay, but according to witnesses, they heard arguing going on, or they heard him screaming. He had walked out of the house, off those concrete steps.

The screen door was closed behind him. And he said something to her to the effect um i'm gonna come back in there and beat your ass again and he had said that and he's screaming this and he's screaming it over and over again and this poor and she was a little bitty tiny thing she retrieves a 25 caliber pistol, which is one of the smallest caliber handguns you can have. Uh, some people refer to it as a pocket pistol or a belly gun. Um, he is at the base of the stairs, Dave, and he's yelling at her. And somebody says, they heard him say, oh, you've got the gun. You've got the gun. Go ahead.

Go ahead. I'm a man. I can take it. And he made that pronouncement one more time. I'm a man. And it cut off, and it was replaced with the sound of pop. Dave, she shot this guy through an intermediate target, which is the screen door on a downward trajectory. And Dave, here comes the big finish. His mouth was

open. He was in mid sentence. That round passed through his open mouth and actually lodged, actually lodged in, uh, in the base of his brain at the stem, at the stem of the spinal cord there, at the brain stem rather, and dropped him immediately to his knees. Now that goes to range of fire and proximity. How do you score it? Well, that was a one in a million shot through a serene door, through an, into an open mouth and lodging in the brain stem when we look at the uh this hubris case involving you know ron potts and these shots that were fired and i think they've given me correct me if i'm wrong how many were there there were six six there were two right away and your witnesses two quick shots and then quiet for enough time to be noted by the year witnesses next door and then a succession of

four more shots so bam bam bam bam bam and that and it was a three 80 pistol, uh, that she had. And that's, that is like in, when we think about these belly guns, as I've mentioned just a second ago, uh, pocket pistols, you've got, you've got three. There used to be four, uh, and you can still find the fourth caliber, but it's rare. 22 caliber. Okay. 22 caliber pistol. And this is, you can hold it in the palm of your hand and people wouldn't know that you have it. A 25 caliber, the aforementioned caliber I was referring to with this, this miraculous shot. And then 380. The 380 is.380 caliber. It's just like a.38 special, but it's not the 380 caliber is not as robust as a.38 special, which COPS used to carry. The diameter of the projectile of a.380 versus a.38 Special is not as robust as a.38 Special.

But you'll see people that want to have a concealed weapon on them carry these things. And Dave, you have to be in close proximity for these things to be effective. Okay. Now, you can score a shot from a distance, but with those smaller calibers like that at a greater distance, it's as much luck as it is skill. So this tells me about this case that you had to have very close proximity when this weapon was being fired. And here's another bit about this. The assessment

of Ryan's injuries indicated that he had stippling on his face, all about, as a matter of fact, associated with these rounds. And I got to tell you, for those that don't know, those bits of evidence that are left behind by unburnt gunpowder, for instance, will always tell the tale. ballistic fingerprints i think that that that's a term that is thrown around frequently and it's it's kind of broad ranging depended upon uh how it's being applied because you have markings on bullets, you have things that are kind of left behind by projectiles, and even by weapons themselves that we'd look at that are going to paint the picture when a firearm is involved, Dave. Now, I've got questions about multiple things here, Joe. So, one, Shanna Hubers from the very beginning claimed it was self-defense and we also know that before she called 9-1-1 she called her mother all right so yeah now i want to get back

to the shooting you said stippling on uh on our victim here ryan had stippling we know there were six shots we know that shannon hubers claims that he was standing coming towards her uh the story is that he pulled a gun on her that he had been beating her all day like a rag doll throwing her around and that yeah and that he pulled a gun and she fearing for her life grabbed the gun and shot him six times in the face and that's her story and she's sticking to it so if he's standing and she shoots him only because he's coming at her and she fears for her life i'm going to assume and i want you to correct me that there's going to be indications of that based on blood on him and surrounding areas prosecution claims he was not standing they claim he was sitting

i've got to assume here that we've got a lot of differences between somebody standing being shot in the head and sitting being shot in the head and you just said stippling so yeah there's a whole lot to unpack here joe yeah yeah there are and let me let me kind of lay this out to you. When we say stippling relative to our findings in forensic pathology, and stippling will be you look at the skin and bits of unburned gunpowder will actually be with great force, slam into the skin, and it kind of buries itself there. And what it looks like, okay, this is what it looks like. Just imagine if you will, you had a handful of black pepper, okay, and you just kind of take it and slap it onto a particular surface. You're not kind of tossing it out, you know, like shaking it out of a shaker. You've got a handful of it, okay, and you lay it down on a surface, and you'll see if you did that, you would see it kind of concentrated in a particular area, and as it begins to extend out from the center, it becomes

more widely dispersed, all right? That's kind of what stippling looks like extend out from the center, it becomes more widely dispersed. All right. That's kind of what stippling looks like. Most of the time, you'll have a defect, which is just a fancy term that forensic pathologists use for hole. All right. So when you're talking about firearms-related deaths. So you got the hole that's generated by the projectile. And that's called a defect. And then extending out from it, you'll have these little bitty dots that look like black pepper.

Well, those dots are stippling. That's unburned propellant or gunpowder that comes out of the end of the muzzle when the weapon is discharged. So you think that everything is burned up because, you know, it's like when you fire a bullet, I was actually just teaching this the other day in my intro forensics class. When you fire a bullet, okay, a live round, it's almost like launching a rocket. You have a primer cap in the bottom, okay, that's got an – it's less stable than gunpowder itself, the primer, because what you want to do is you tap it. It's actually a cap that's below there.

It sends a spark through the flash holes in the base of the projectile. The powder is seated on top of the flash holes, and the powder powder ignites and it drives out the projectile. And so just because this thing ignites and it burns off and you hear the loud pop that comes along with a weapon being fired doesn't mean that all that powder is consumed by the fire. Some of it just gets blown out through the explosion. And it's not what an engineer would call efficient. So people want to have a propellant or the gunpowder. They want to have it to the point chemically where you're going to get literally the most bang for your buck. Sometimes it just doesn't totally ignite. That powder's driven out of the end of

the barrel and it's got to go somewhere. Here's the trick though, Dave. Powder, if you think about talcum powder, for instance, and you just put it in your hand, you blew it out, what's it going to do? Well, after a few feet, the blown air that comes out from between your lips is going to be insufficient to drive that powder any further down range away from the palm of your hand that you've blown it out of. It's going to drift down to the earth, okay? Gravity is going to take over or pull it down. Well, just like that gunpowder is not very aerodynamic. Okay. It bleeds off that energy really quick. And after that initial blast, it drifts away. So once you get out outside, I think in my opinion, particularly with a 380, once you get outside of about 18 to 25 inches with this particular caliber, there won't be any evidence of it more than likely.

You might have a bit of it kind of float down and whatnot, but that kind of concentrated blast of fire, we're going to look at the distribution pattern of the stippling. So the further out it is that it extends from that little central hole that the bullet has made or projectile has made, the greater the distance because it spreads out. Almost like if you're firing like birdshot out of a shotgun, it kind of spreads. Well, same principle. It spreads. And the further out it spreads, you know that the individual firing the weapon was further away. So the tighter the concentration, the closer it is. So you can tell by these shots whether or not Ryan was standing or sitting yes whether he was charging forward what did the blood

tell you because i know that they actually discussed where the blood was on his shirt and undershirt and his uh i guess he was wearing sweatpants where the blood was from him because shana hubris was not bleeding by the way her claiming that she had been slung around that condo like a rag doll and all that, when police got to the scene, that's not what they described seeing. What did I tell you? I think it was just a couple episodes ago. We had the same discussion about what's our canned line. Let's see if you remember it. We go to the scene and are there any

what's it sign what do we say were there any signs of joe i'm a nut i can't figure it out i'll give it to you any signs of force entry or struggle thank you that's that's kind of our that's ground zero for what we do and And if I've got a victim saying, he has been beating my tail all day as a matter of fact, she goes into great detail. He has been throwing me around like a rag doll. Slung me into the TV. Yeah. And guess what? TV's still functioning.

With dust on it. It's got dust on it. His dad, I mean, family members said he was kind of a slob. Okay? They're not being mean to say that. It's just, yeah, he was kind of a slob. I'm a slob. And that's the fact that they pointed out on the TV.

She specifically said, he slung me into the TV. And when they looked at the TV, there was dust on it. And that's something that we would notice very quickly. Because, and I've actually, I don't know if I've ever had a television. I have had a door, though, where an individual claimed that they had been thrown into. And there was a dusty, it was covered with dust. And I've seen a point of impact in dust. And you can almost make out an outline on the door where you can see like the lateral, like the right lateral side impacts.

I've seen this on cars, Dave. Dusty cars that people are hit by. I saw a guy that was almost bent like a pretzel that his, the impact was like in his hip of the bumper, but he bent to the point where you could see his arm catching himself on the hood of the car. I actually had it happen on a MARTA train one time. I had a guy that committed suicide by throwing himself in the main, the main, what's called little five, or it's called actually five points, little five points, another location in Atlanta, but in the five points area, which is the main hub where you get onto the MARTA trains and you could see his arm, the outline of his arm, where it hit the dust. And you could see his fingers even extended when he was impacted by

that train. So that kind of disturbance or lack thereof is going to tell us a lot. If you're telling me that you've been slammed around this apartment, I'm not just going to look for disturbed dust on a television. I'm going to look for any kind of knick-knack that has been busted or broken. And there's a big difference. Listen, I don't know about you, but I am a slob. I am a slob. I freely slob. I freely admitted I'm part of the slob kingdom. So for me in this environment, I can walk into a hoarder's home,

which I've walked into a lot of these homes where people have died. And I can tell what was naturally, not naturally, that makes it sound like nature had a hand. But what items have been placed in a location and have been there for a protracted period of time as opposed to somebody being in an environment where a tussle has taken place or maybe they've fallen over and knocked something over. It just looks different.

It looks different than sloppiness. And so I think that that's, you know, you're right. You know, that's what his dad was saying about this, that, yeah, my son's a slob. That's okay. You know, he is a slob, but there's a big difference between being a slob and having, you know, a busted TV or maybe broken furniture or anything like that. And that was their point is that, okay, he's a slop fine, but there's no indication that a violent struggle happened in this condo. And this is all in the first minutes of the investigation

where they see the scene, you've got the 29-year-old dead, and she's claiming he was standing, charging towards her when she shot him. The physical evidence does not show that. The prosecution claims he was sitting at the table, Joe, at the dining room table, sitting at the table in a chair when he was shot. How are you going to prove that? I mean, you talked about the stippling, so I understand being close, but what about the blood on the shirt and on the sweatpants? Let me tell you what's going to happen when, you know, I was talking about rhinoplasty earlier and

kind of the tools that they utilize. One of the things you find out with the head, human head, it's very vascular. Probably out of all of the regions of the body, you've got more vessels that pass for the size, relative size of the head, more vessels that pass through it than any other location of the body. It's because the brain demands so much blood, okay? So when you're slammed in the face with a projectile, one of the things that's the mouth, you're fracturing the floor of the skull, essentially, and all of the associated support structures, facial structures. And they have so many vessels that run through them. That's why you'll see like a tremendous amount of blood

that issues forth from the body almost immediately. And if you are in a seated position, okay, so you and I are sitting across a table from one another. If we're in a seated position and a projectile hits you center mass in the face say right in the nose for lack of a better uh you know anatomic position uh blood is going to almost immediately begin to gush out of your nose and your mouth i've seen this happen both ways well where does it wind up well obviously it's going to to be on the front of your shirt. If you're seated, it's going to wind up staining your lap.

But here's the thing. When you get the body in a position where you can examine it and say you've extended the legs, like on an examining table and you're looking at the clothing, did you know that you will see a big blood stain on the lap, then probably on the upper chest, maybe running down the abdomen, but when the legs are extended, you'll see a big gap in the waist between where the blood starts on the tops of the thighs and where it ends at, say, the abdomen. When you spread the body out, you'll see a gap. And that gives you an indication that perhaps a person was in a seated position. Now you have to couple that when you begin to talk about her relationship relative, and I'm talking about physical, dynamic crime scene relationship. We're not talking about Dr. Phil here, where, where you're, you also have to factor in trajectory because it's not just his position, it's her position as well. So if you look at where positionality relative to the end of the muzzle, was she firing from above to below?

And remember, when you read a lot of these autopsy reports involving, and you and I certainly have, you begin to describe these injuries. The physician will always talk about it's left to right, front to back, and either from below to above or from above to below. That gives us, that's a three-dimensional portrait that you're painting there relative to trajectory. And that's important as well. So it's not just a range of fire, it's also their trajectory. But I got to tell you, I want to conclude by saying this, a quote directly from my good friend, Nancy Grace. And hopefully she won't come down too hard on me for, you know, borrowing this.

But she always says, if you want to know the horse, check its track record. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.