Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Sinister Fantasy, The Unveiling of Kensie Aubry’s Horror

Episode Date: December 24, 2023

Kensie Aubry, a 32-year-old woman hungry for a new chapter in her life, tragically finds herself the victim of a man's nightmarish fantasy, leading to her horrific murder. As her last known whereabouts in Independence, Missouri become the center of a desperate search, Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack delve into this unsettling case. They unpack the haunting realities that blur the lines between dark fantasies and unspeakable actions, exploring how one individual's twisted imagination led to a gruesome reality. The episode navigates the complexities of the foster care system, highlights the courage it takes for survivors to speak up, and provides an intricate look at the role of body identification in solving missing persons cases. Whether discussing the gruesome details of chainsaw dismemberment or the intricacies of matching tool marks on bones, this episode is a sobering reminder of the urgent need to bring justice to the lost and give voice to the silent. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Time-coded Highlights: 00:00:00 — Joseph Scott Morgan introduces the episode by exploring the human fascination with dark fantasies. He unpacks the depraved fantasy behind Kensie Aubry’s murder. 00:03:00 — Dave Mack elaborates on Kensie's last known whereabouts. 00:04:00 — Missing persons' reports and their intricacies are discussed. 00:05:00 — The conversation continues on the importance of intricate physical details for identification. 00:07:21 — A brave abuse survivor’s role in solving the case is revealed by Dave Mack. 00:09:12 — Joe Scott emphasizes how crucial revelations were for the investigation. 00:10:56 — The twisted relationship between Maggie Ybarra and Michael Hendricks is dissected. 00:14:00 — Dave shares a chilling confession leading to Michael Hendricks’ arrest. 00:15:20 — Morgan explains how X-ray machines can aid in identifying dismembered remains. 00:16:00 — The process of revealing tattoos on decomposed skin is shared. 00:16:40 — An in-depth look into the permanence of tattoos. 00:19:00 — Joseph Scott Morgan ponders the changing significance of prison tattoos for identification. 00:22:45 — Joe Scott recalls a haunting tale of a murder involving a frozen body. He speculates on why murderers might opt to freeze their victims. 00:27:20 — Dave and Joe ponder the logistics of dismembering a frozen body versus a non-frozen one. 00:30:03 — The investigation challenges are highlighted by Joe Scott Morgan. 00:33:34 — The episode concludes as Dave Mack heralds the hero who provided crucial information for the case.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Los Angeles is famous for the always captivating entertainment industry, some of the most famous sports teams, and incredibly expensive smoothies. But beneath the glamour, it's also a breeding ground for bizarre, historic, and unforgettable crimes. My name is Madison McGee. You might know me from my podcast Ice Cold Case, where for the last three years I've been investigating my father's murder. But now I've embedded myself into the LA Times crime beat to bring you not only some of the juiciest cases, but what it takes to be a gritty crime reporter in a giant metropolis.

From LA Times Studios comes its latest series, LA Crimes. From deep dives into the Menendez brothers to conversations about why Bravo TV seems to be a hotbed of white-collar criminals, we'll cover it all. The solved, the unsolved, the love triangles gone wrong, you get the idea. Tune in every Wednesday starting May 21st, wherever you stream your podcasts. You can also watch the episodes on YouTube and Spotify. You don't want to miss this. body bags with joseph scott morgan every one of us and i mean every one of us, have some fantasy.

We have a fantasy to involve ourselves in something that we think is going to bring us joy, peace, bring us maybe for a moment some area of safety. But you know, there are people out there where they have fantasies, and these fantasies extend into very, very deep, dark places. I've borne witness to the outcomes many times of actions that people have taken as a result of some kind of fantasy that they might have. But I can't remember a case that is any more horrific than the one that we're going to talk about today. It involves a young lady by the name of Kinsey Aubrey, and her life became intertwined with a fantastical narrative that a monster created and brought her into, and she wound up dead. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.

Dave Mack, I know that all of us entertain some type of fantasies. As I've said, most of us, the fantasies that we have, I think, are good ones. We're seeking out to get away from whatever our mundane humdrum lives are, or maybe we're going through some tough times in our life, and we just want to escape even just for a moment. And we fantasize about having a bank full of money or living on an island somewhere or in a mountain cabin with a rushing stream, someplace where we can find peace. But isn't it amazing that some people, when they entertain fantasies, they're not necessarily seeking peace. And the case that we have today, I have to say to you, the individual that is responsible for the homicide that we're going to talk about, it's

actually two people, but one primary, their fantasy actually involved arguably one of the most horrific things that someone could conceive. Kenzie Aubrey. Kenzie is 32 years old. She is looking for a fresh start. She was looking to live out her fantasy of life. At the age of 32, a lot of us have made a number of mistakes in our 20s. It's almost like, you know, your friends, when you're in your 20s, a friend calls you up and says, hey, Joe, let's go to the beach for the night. Okay. In your 30s, you're like, really, what car are we taking? In your 40s, you're like, I got to plan that. Yeah. I got to make sure all my prescriptions are filled.

Yeah. And in the case of Kenzie Aubrey, she was looking for a fresh start. And that's what brought her to impact with this other man's fantasy. Her fantasy is to begin her life over again. Kenzie last seen in October in Independence, Missouri. She was from Kansas City. And her mom said she just wanted a fresh start in life. That's all she wanted. And so she went with some friends. She didn't go on her own. She had a plan. And she leaves home to start a new life. And she ends up running into somebody who also had a dream, a fantasy. Hers was to live a simpler life, to get her ducks in a row and move forward with life. His, not so much. I always go back to the very beginning of the missing persons report to find out who we're looking for. What kind of person are they? Oftentimes, you can find out

a lot about where you're going to find them when you know the end by their missing person. That's not indicated here. Her missing person report was very simple, Joe. Mom hasn't seen her. Family usually has a lot of contact with her. Last had contact October 7th, last known to be with two men and a woman, Kansas City. And we don't know where she is. That's actually something, you know, at the medical examiner's office, people think about the police. You go to see the police and you file a missing persons report. In a lot of big cities, Atlanta being one where I used to work, we actually had a missing person's file as well. And that information did not come to us from the police. We would have

family members that would reach out to us because many times family would assume the worst. And sometimes it actually came to fruition. And we would have a mom or a dad or even a spouse that would literally show up at the ME's office. I've had them come in, Dave, at two o'clock in the morning and they'll say, I'm looking for my husband or I'm looking, we're looking for our daughter. They just could not take it any longer. there at a table with a family who has either been to the police and they didn't receive satisfaction or they completely skip the police and they come directly to you, to the morgue. And we used to have a saying that many times, particularly with spouses, people would, we always felt like there was that one group of people that would come to the medical examiner and say, have you seen my wife? Have you seen my husband?

Knowing full well that the person will come back home. And then when the person does show back home, they can actually say to them, I even went to the medical examiner's office to look for you, that kind of thing. But when we would sit down, you actually have a checklist that you go down because the information is so very detailed for us. And it is equally for the police. But from a forensic standpoint, what we would have is we would have this questionnaire that we would run through with family members, and it would cover everything from shoe size to any other clothing articles.

What did they tend to wear? Hair color, eye color. Have they had any surgeries, or do they have surgical scars, do they have any kind of surgical replacements like hips, or do they have pins in their joints, have they ever had a heart surgery, have they had any kind of dental work whatsoever, because many times that's what everything hinges on. Unfortunately, many of the cases that we get kind of arise out of a set of skeletal remains that we will find.

And one of the most resilient items there is going to be the dentition because it survives even beyond bone many times. And so if you have somebody that has a restoration of some kind, or maybe there is a tooth that is missing in an antemortem state out of a skull, that's going to be a specific indicator. So we would have this long list that we would go down and then we would list the person's name. And then the family would leave us with that data. And it's a great place to start from.

So if we ever got an unidentified body that came in from the field in some way, they found a skeleton or maybe just a decomposing body, we would go back through our files first off and say, well, has this person been reported missing? The police are much broader because most of the time they're looking for a living individual that may have on their own free will and volition just decided to shake the dust off their sandals and go somewhere else. And you have no idea where they are or where they wound up. And that's just the way it works. I'm glad you said it that way, because that's kind of what it was here. You know, because mom was like, Kenzie left. I know she had a rough life growing up. She's trying to find her own way now as an adult. She's 32. She can go wherever she wants. Last seen with this

two men and this woman in Independence, Missouri. Would somebody please help me find my daughter? And as you were talking about that, I was thinking, you know, she did have some tattoos, five foot three, 130 to 150 pounds. They had all that in the descriptor of what to be looking for, but they didn't know it at the time, but they weren't looking for her anymore. It came to us from a teenager, a teenager in the foster care system had been sexually molested by a 40-year-old man. That's what broke the story. A teenager who actually had the wherewithal to stand up and say, this person abused me and you're not going to believe what else he told me. You're not going to believe what else I've seen.

Look, foster care is great. And there have been some fantastic success stories. But I can tell you this, from an investigative standpoint, I've heard a lot of horror stories too. And you never know where one of these poor kids is going to land and then what is going to suddenly appear before their sight, what's going to be injected into their already troubled life. This is a child, Dave, which we can't reveal their name, but this is a child, like many foster children, who want a home, who want to be loved, who want to be taken care of, that want to give love in return. But yet, when you enter into this environment, many times, trust is betrayed. And then they're left broken. But you talk about courage. I cannot imagine the courage that this young person had

to come forward and reveal one of the most evil things that has ever been reported to that police department. I don't know about you, Dave, but when I've lost something, I have to have a place to start. I have to have some kind of information. And most of the time that information arises from my very faulty memory. But other times, I'll have other people in my life that will say, last time I saw you, you had this here or you had this there. When you're talking about something as big as a missing persons case, can't tell you how many times investigators have scratched their heads over cases where they don't ever find anything.

And to have a young person, a teenager, come forward with information that is so incredibly troubling, disturbing, and mind-blowing, I can only imagine the response that these officers had when they were told this tale. People in the foster care system, young people, we know that there's a lot of bad situations there. They're oftentimes taken out of a bad situation and placed in foster care where they become a victim again of another predator of a different type. Here's the case of this unnamed teenager. She actually knew this woman named Maggie Ybarra, the teen that we're talking about. She had been removed from a home that Maggie Ybarra was in. I don't know what their

relationship is, but the teenager knew Maggie and she was living in foster care. She went looking for Maggie. They had a relationship to when she was a small child. Now, Maggie Ybarra is 30 years old. We know this girl's a teen. We don't know how old, but she knew Maggie Ybarra as a child, and she went looking for her as a teen. She found Maggie Ybarra, and Maggie Ybarra was involved romantically with a 40-year-old man named Michael Hendricks. Michael Hendricks and Maggie Ybarra had a really wild sex life, if you want to call it that. It was violent. It was fantasy of stuff. I don't know how people fantasize things.

I know there's different strokes for different folks. But this teenage girl who looked up a woman from her childhood and it opened the door to Satan's hell itself because Maggie Ybarra showed this girl a picture of a woman who was being sexually abused. She had photos on her phone of a naked, bound, and gagged woman. And there were other images on the phone depicting dismembered human remains. Now, I don't know if Maggie Ybarra showed these pictures to the teen as a threat. This could be you. I don't know because we haven't had a chance to find out who she is.

I just know that she's braver than I would have been in my teens. Yeah. And I think that part of this, you might be right. Those were being used as leverage, perhaps, or if it can get any sicker, maybe as an enticement. And I can't imagine how someone's mind would work if you're trying to entice someone into a specific behavior. But isn't it correct that Michael Hendricks actually wound up abusing, I think sexually abusing this teen as well? Did he not? She tells police that while he was sexually abusing her, while he was set, while my 40 year old Michael Hendricks is sexually abusing this teenage girl, he is telling her what

he has done. He likes killing. He has a sexual fantasy. And she actually said to police that he likes killing. He gets excited. It gets him off to kill. That's what he told this girl while he was sexually abusing her. That's what she was hearing. It all leads to a missing person because the photos on that phone were of the missing woman we told you about at the very

beginning. It was the woman whose mother called police and said, I haven't heard from my 32-year-old daughter. She left Kansas City. She was headed to Independence to start a new life. And I haven't heard from her in a while. Can you help me find my daughter? And Joe, they couldn't find her. And even when they found something and they got the information from this unnamed teen girl, we know she's been threatened with abuse. We know she's been abused.

We know she's seen horrible photos. She's seen a naked woman bound and gagged, sexually abused. We know the girl is sexually abused. And we know that she's been shown pictures of a dismembered woman. The teenage girl told the police that 40-year-old Michael Hendricks molested her and told her he killed a woman. He put her body in the freezer and then cut her up and buried the remains. A lot of data there to try to understand and understand the scope of it. From an investigative perspective, it's important to understand how I was talking about the questionnaire that we fill out for the medical examiner when we would interview family members, for instance. One of the key things is that we look for any kind of specific identification on an individual.

And we do know that Kenzie's body, when the body was finally recovered, had been dismembered. And it's difficult to try to get a body identified anyway that's in a state of decomposition. But when you have a body that has, in fact, been piecemealed out like this, and I'll get into that in just a moment, how this was achieved allegedly, then you have to look at the individual elements of the body that are left behind to try to understand who they might be. Well, what are you going to look for? A person as young as Kenzie, you're not necessarily going to see a lot of surgical events that have taken place. You know, that's one of the things that we commonly look for. You might have evidence of bone breakage, and we can actually pick up on that on x-ray

because we will, in the morgue, we have our own x-ray machines. We will x-ray the individual dismembered remains. So if you have an arm, a lower leg, and an upper leg, maybe even a head, you will x-ray those items individually to see if there's anything that you can see without the aid of something you would not otherwise see. So, if you've got an old fracture line, that can be identified. But even with decomposing remains, it's kind of fascinating if you've got, for instance, still soft tissue on a human leg or arm or maybe even the back. Did you know that as decayed as the body might be, that top layer of skin on the body, the epidermis, you can take the edge of a scalpel and begin to scrape away the epidermis.

And all you see is this kind of black, greenish discoloration. But you might, just by eyeballing it, you might be able to see something just beneath it. And I cannot tell you how many times I've actually done this with a scalpel blade where you just kind of scrape away. It almost looks like you're shaving. But as you begin to scrape that away, suddenly you find a tattoo. It's a pretty profound moment for you from an identification standpoint where you can remove that top layer of decomposing tissue and still appreciate that's how resilient tattoos are. How deep do they go? They go pretty deep. I mean, well down into the dermis. And so that's why it's such an arduous task to have them removed. It's not as bad as it used to be, but it is still something

that procedure in and of itself is not something that's pleasant to have to go through. But the skin is essentially inked and stained, you know, now forever, amen. And as you scrape away that top layer, many times you can truly appreciate a tattoo. And if you apply, I think that it's hydrogen peroxide, we would do that in the morgue and kind of let it bubble to get out a lot of the dirt that's in there. Sometimes you can kind of bring them back to life and see some level of vibrancy in the midst of all of this decay. You can even go back as far as, and I urge anybody, because I've told you before, I'm a history guy. You go back and you look at the bog bodies that were recovered out of Denmark and I think some in the British Isles.

They had rudimentary tattoos on the body. And this was back in the Copper Age. They had tattoos. You can still see those on some of those bodies now because the bodies are so well preserved out of the bog. You can still pick up on a lot of indicators that might tell you what the point of origin is. Here's the problem with tattoos nowadays, though, because everybody has them. It used to be where when you were using a tattoo to specifically identify a body, many tattoo artists came from particular schools of training. And you can actually kind of trace

a familial lineage to the training. Nowadays, there are tattoo shops everywhere. You don't necessarily have to sit at the feet of a master to learn. And many times, tattoos all look the same to us. I'm no aficionado, but it's not as distinctive, say, for instance, that it once was. When we're trying to get a body identified, there's any number of things that we're going to look for. And when you're standing over a grave, a clandestine grave, as these investigators were out there in Missouri, they had, when they cracked open the ground, they certainly had more questions than they did answers. So many times during my career, I stood over severely decomposing human remains. And I would think, and this is back at the morgue even, I would think to myself, how in the world are we going to make sense of this?

And I don't want to screw anything up relative to examination or collection of evidence because everything just appears so fragile. And isn't it great, though, just like anything in life, where you have a few answers prior to setting out on this kind of intellectual voyage of discovery if you're a scientist? The teenage victim here is where we get a lot of our information. First of all, I want to go back to the original relationship, because as I was digging deeper, where we find out that this teenage girl that we found out all the info from, that she actually looked up Maggie Ybarra. Maggie is the 30-year-old girlfriend of 40-year-old Michael Hendricks, who actually is charged with, they're both charged by the way. But I found out this teen girl, when she was a younger child, was actually in the care of Maggie Ybarra. So she had that type of relationship dating back to her childhood. She tracks Maggie Ybarra down. She's looking for that. This is a foster care child who's looking for her home. She's looking. And that's why I think there's some relationship here. The reason

the girl was removed from Maggie's care as a child is because one of Maggie's boyfriends at the time sexually molested this girl who is now a teenager. The teenager now tracks Maggie down. Maggie shows her these pictures of a dead body. And we know that Michael Hendricks sexually molested the girl, the teen girl. And while he was doing it, he told her that he got off on killing people, that it got him excited sexually. Now, the teen girl tells the police that she was told that Michael Hendricks choked the woman out, that he killed, that he choked her out and then stuffed her body in the freezer and cut her up with a chainsaw before burying her. And Joe, I want to go right back to the very beginning on this. A, why put a body in

a freezer? Isn't that going to make it even more difficult to cut up? And we're told the girl was that the girl was told that she was choked out, that she was murdered by choking. But we don't. Is there a way to prove that after the body's been frozen and cut up? Yes. And yes. Let me kind of break this down to you. And I'm going to start off by telling you a very brief story. When I was still working in New Orleans, I had a case that I'd never had ever before encountered anything like this. I had a guy who was a cook's first mate on an international oil tanker. It was a Korean crew. And he got into a fight with the chef on the ship. And the chef took a meat cleaver and hit this guy. I think if I remember correctly, the count was like in excess of 160 times.

And they were coming around the horn in South America. They took the victim's body and put it into the deep freeze. And they've got like this super duper deep freeze on the ships, which I was not aware of. The first port that they put into was actually in my jurisdiction on the Mississippi River. And so we caught the case and it was something, I mean, we had to get like the Korean consulate involved in it and all sorts of this ship had a Liberian registry. But we kind of got things figured out. But when we got this guy's body, there was a scene in Goodfellas where they said when they got Carbone's body, it was frozen so stiff they had to wait for three days before they could do the autopsy.

That is the truth. This guy's body was frozen so thoroughly that we had to allow him to thaw out before we could do the autopsy. However, it was an experience because everything in a literal sense was frozen in time. So all of those injuries that this person had sustained as a result of that attack remained in place. They didn't change. They didn't change as a result of decomposition. So with our victim here,

with this young woman who has now been killed, and we have information that she has been strangled, essentially, she's placed in a deep freeze. Those insults that she sustained to her body are paused. Now, bodies never completely cease decomposing, even in cool temperatures. It just, it kind of retards the progression of it. So in this particular case, it's going to slow it down. It's not going to go at as quick a speed. Remember, we talked about heat bringing about decomposition in a very quick manner, but it will slow this process down. And so those marks that you might see around the neck, if you're talking about a manual strangulation, those contused areas are still going to be there.

But I had a real thought about this. What would be the utility and why would you freeze a body after you have taken this poor girl's life? And here's what I came to a conclusion. This is the conclusion I came to, you know, from an investigative perspective. First off, you're trying to think about what to do with the body. You know, can you imagine, and I hope you can't, but just imagine, if you will, you've just killed a human being in this fever that you're in because of this fantasy world in which you're indwelling. And now you have this, oh my God, moment where it's like, okay, I finally fulfilled this fantasy. Now, what am I going to do with the remains? Now, this Hendrix guy, he lives, and this is just outside Kansas City, by the way,

where they finally recover her body. He's got a fantastic property. I'm looking at pictures of this thing and it's absolutely, it'll knock your socks off. I mean, it's gorgeous. Very pretty, very big, beautiful house, an outdoor workshop, beautiful green grass, rolling hills. He has got enough land, it would appear, that he could get rid of a body. He has access to this property at least. And you look where the body is actually found and it's immediately adjacent to one of the buildings. So it's almost like he didn't go to a great deal of effort to try to find some isolated rural area to get rid of her in. My assumption was it was convenient and he had nothing but time on his hands. So let's just say that he's killed her and he makes the decision,

I'm going to freeze the body. That way I can have a pause so I can decide. I can get all of my tools together. I can make up my mind as to how I want to handle this. Well, it's a rural setting. You're not going to really raise an eyebrow if you hear a chainsaw going off, right? You think about a body that would be just the skin. It would just be torn, that the chainsaw would just be gummed, and I don't mean to make light of it, but gummed up with the body part, the skin and the tissue and the muscle. It's a big mess. It is a big mess, but not with a frozen body. It's not. A frozen body literally becomes frozen to the core. It's almost, Dave, like you're dealing with a piece of wood. Wow. With the body, once you freeze the body, it would make it easier to cut up than if it wasn't frozen. Correct.

Absolutely. If you have a tool like a chainsaw or a skill saw, perhaps, or a bandsaw of some kind, yeah, it would make it very easy to do. All right. But we all know that decomposing bodies smell, that they have a very distinct odor. I promise you, if you've ever smelled this, you will never forget it. It will always come back to you. And you know, immediately, by the way, I think people know what the smell of decomposing flesh is even before they've ever smelled it

before, because it is so unique to human beings and what we smell like when we are decomposing. Does freezing stop that process? And will the body still, as it thaws out, once you've cut the body up and you're going to bury it, would it then, as it thaws out, once you cut the body up and you're going to bury it, would it then, as it thaws, would it start to have an odor or would it have an odor when it's frozen? No, it would, in my estimation, if her body went into that freezer as soon as she died or within, say, an hour, all right, and she shut up in there. The really pronounced decompositional odor that you get with advanced decomposition, that is not occurring at this point. That's why I say that it retards the process. It literally backs it up. And that's why it's so difficult many times

to try to pinpoint. There are a number of cases out there where people have killed individuals and placed them in a freezer, and then they go to thaw them out later. So that decompositional process, as the body thaws, it kicks in as if the person has just died. I think one of the most entertaining movies I've ever seen is this thing with Jack Black called Bernie. And it's based on a true story about this funeral director who killed this woman in Texas. I recommend this movie to anybody. It's absolutely fascinating. It's got Matthew McConaughey in it and Shirley MacLaine. It's a fascinating movie. It really is. And it's really based on a true story. And

the victim in this case was actually placed into a deep freeze. So it facilitates mainly not creating a mess. Because if you think about this high-speed blade of a chainsaw, and it is a chain with tiny individual little blades on it that's literally grinding through tissue, if you do this with something soft, you're going to have this tremendous amount of cast-off, high-speed cast-off that's going all over the place. I've actually got a colleague of mine who, within the last couple of years, has worked a case where an individual was dismembered with chainsaw on the back of a pickup truck. And it was a bloody mess, literally. And there was blood cast off that went, and it was done in the bed of the truck.

It was cast off over the cab of the truck, down the front of the truck, and even onto the leading edge of the truck where the grill is. And and even onto the leading edge of the truck where the grill is. And so it's a fascinating dynamic because it's a high-speed event. But if you now have frozen tissue, it's like I was saying before, when you're going through this tissue and it's frozen solid, it's like going through a piece of wood. So you're really, you're encountering something here as an investigator. If you're trying to pin down a timeline, the data that you're working with is going to be greatly skewed if you're looking to get some kind of indication from a biological marker here, because decomposition has been thwarted at this point. Now, once these individual remains are placed into the ground,

all bets are off because you will get decomposition going on and it will pick up pretty quickly. And if the body is not in a sealed state or a cocoon state, it's even going to probably speed this along as well. And you have to think about another thing. Was the body clothed or unclothed? Because now after I find out as an investigator, this young girl is relating to me the story that she's heard. Hey, I was told that this body was dismembered with a chainsaw. Let that sink in. Well, I want to do everything I can on my warrant. When I draw up this warrant, I go search this guy's property, which they wound up doing, I'm looking for that chainsaw because I'm going to try to find a couple of things from a perspective of fiber evidence. I want to know if there are any

bits of cloth that are caught up in here. And you can clean an item to a certain degree, but you're always going to miss something. And then from there, I'm going to look for things like hair. I want to know if there's any hair left behind. I want to know if underneath and in the edges of any of these little saw blades, if there's any skin at all, period. I want to know if that's there, if I can find any skin cells. Then I'm going to look for muscle. And all of these tissues microscopically are specifically identifiable. If you can find a bit of that on there and you can look at it under scope,

you can get an idea. It's one of the things we learned in microscopic anatomy. You can tell the difference between skin cells and muscle cells and bone cells. And there will be bone cells as well because the bone is being pulpified at the same time because it kicks up and it creates almost like a histamine mist. If you've ever seen an animal that's been butchered and has been placed on a bandsaw, it almost looks like sawdust, Dave. And so it leaves behind that residue as well. So you've got all of these bits of trace evidence that can be tied back to that chainsaw, not to mention the unique tool marks that are left behind on these bones.

When you get the bone out of the grave and that chainsaw is in your possession, if you really want to try to prove this thing, you send this to a tool mark examiner. And what they'll do is they'll take like a bovine, a cow bone or pig bone, and they will try to duplicate these marks on that bone with said chainsaw and find out if they can duplicate those marks and if they marry up to the marks on the bones they recover from the grave. And you've got ownership of the chainsaw, but can you put that chainsaw into his hand? Well, we've got circumstantial information from this young girl that says that he admitted

or that this woman, this other party, had stated that the body was in fact dismembered with a chainsaw. One of the things we found out as this case has gone on, this 13 year old girl that we've talked about, she's the hero in this case. You have a mother looking for her daughter, woman's looking for a new fresh start, and she ends up in the hands of these evil people. That 13 year old girl that talked about seeing the pictures, she was sexually abused by this 40-year-old man who told her that he gets off on it. Found out at trial that, believe it or not, Ybarra's mother, whose name is Ruth Lones, she knew about the body being cut up. She was shown pictures and she testified that these people actually tried to get rid of the

body by putting it in plastic totes, taking it up in a helicopter and dumping it over water. But the plastic totes floated. So they had to get the totes of the body parts out. And that's when they said they were going to bury it on the property. And that's why it took time. They tried several different things to get rid of that body before they buried it on that man's property. But we have a 13-year-old girl who was sexually abused by this man. and I'm assuming her mother at this point. Think about it. She's 30. The girl's 13.

The girl was taken away from Ybarra when she was a small child because Ybarra's boyfriends were sexually abusing her as a child. She tracks her mother down. Mom shows her pictures of the dismembered body. I mean, all of it kind of comes together, Joe. Yeah, it does. And isn't it very sad that she cycled back into this horror show at such a very young and tender age? What she has borne witness to from just the perspective of horror, most people could live

three lifetimes and never be exposed to anything like this. But at the end, both Ybarra and Hendricks have both been convicted. They're going to be in jail for a long, long time. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. We'll be right back. But beneath the glamour, it's also a breeding ground for bizarre, historic, and unforgettable crimes. My name is Madison McGee. You might know me from my podcast Ice Cold Case, where for the last three years I've been investigating my father's murder. But now I've embedded myself into the LA Times crime beat to bring you not only some of the juiciest cases, but what it takes to be a gritty crime reporter in a giant metropolis. From LA Times Studios comes its latest series,

LA Crimes. From deep dives into the Menendez brothers to conversations about why Bravo TV seems to be a hotbed of white-collar criminals, we'll cover it all. The solved, the unsolved, the love triangles gone wrong, you get the idea. Tune in every Wednesday starting May 21st, wherever you stream your podcasts. You can also watch the episodes on YouTube and Spotify. You don't want to miss this. This is an iHeart Podcast.