Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Smell Of Death

Episode Date: September 15, 2024

What is the worst thing you have ever seen on the job? This is one of the most common questions asked of Joseph Scott Morgan.  Today on Body Bags, the professor breaks down the stages of decomposition while sharing his firsthand accounts of working the scene of bodies that have been decomposing in the heat from a day to a month or more. This is a can't miss episode that provides an up close look at those who deal with death and the very natural things that take place in every person when they die.     Transcription Highlights 00:00:00 Introduction - What is the worst thing you have ever seen?00:03:45 Sensory Memories and human remains00:05:06 Talk about the "smell" of burning flesh00:09:25 Particular smells, burning tires00:15:25 Life and Death are natural00:20:18 Description of decomposing body in a bed00:25:07 Smelling coworkers for the smell of decomposition00:30:14 Different levels of decomposition00:35:38 Environmental temperature impacting decomposition00:40:36 Looking at decomposition hiding injury00:42:48 ConclusionSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Facts with Joseph Scott Moore. What do you think is the most common question that, what's the worst thing you've ever seen? And you know, worst comes in degrees. And what might be really offensive and bad to you in the realm of death might not even register on my meter. It's not that I'm some great guru or something like that. It's just that after a period of time, you're exposed to so much. And you could say that. I bet you could say that about any occupation out there.

But the other statement that is made is not a question. It generally goes like this. I don't see how in the world you can do what you do. That is the question. It's more of a statement. But I've asked myself that question because I would be around things that most people cannot even begin to imagine in their workaday lives. And I would ask that question to myself. How do I do these things? The things that you see.

But you know what it comes down to? It's all in how you frame it. Today, we're going to talk about human decomposition from the investigative perspective. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Brother Dave, let me tell you another question that I am asked many times, or statements that people make. There's two of them. When it comes to the dead,

people will say that human decay, a decaying human remain, has a very particular smell. And then they will also say that bodies that have burned have a very particular smell. How can these two things be? Because, first off, there's no scientific validation for those two statements.

There's no way that you can even qualify those. You know, what are you measuring against? Because I got to tell you i've been around decomposing hogs they really don't smell any different than human decaying remains and i've been to barbecues dave i've been to barbecues and i've got to tell you, I've smelled very familiar smells at gatherings that only exist in some people's nightmares. And I hate it when those thoughts enter into my mind because I paid a price for it over the years. Just those remembrances. And I think that any human being is like that, that you have these.

I hate the term trigger. I despise that term. It's such a generalized term. You never know really what anybody means by that. But there's something in our mind that conjures up these familiar smells. I remember the smell of my grandmother's fried chicken, which is probably as close to the ambrosia of the gods as you can possibly get in my mind, you know, thinking back.

And that's a very pleasant thing. Right. We have the sensory memories, you know, of certain times of the day and certain times of the night, especially if you have a special time of the year that you prefer over others, you know, and you have that early morning drive that reminds you of a certain time in college when you had to run the USA Today, you know, route around town to pay your college tuition and stuff like that. You know, yeah. But I wondered about you mentioned being at a barbecue and smelling something very similar to that you smelled out on the scene and i had to remember a story we did on crime stories with nancy grace where a woman cooked up her husband and served her at a neighborhood barbecue and nobody recognized

it you know and that was my first thought i thought it would smell different i thought human remains would smell different than a cattle i just assumed that but i don't remember smelling the difference between chicken and beef. Well, I got to tell you, I can't speak for everybody's experiences out there. I just know that other than people that are directly involved in my field, I've got a much larger statistical sampling. Right. So I've had it happen over and over again and um yeah that that smell that you get with both of these that were you know that we're currently discussing

whether it is burned human remains or whether it is decomposing human remains and don't get me started on burned remains that are decomposing because that's an entirely different level. If I had to rely on my olfactory senses in order to be an effective investigator, I don't know how much of a success I would be. Because, look, I don't even believe my sight most of the time. You know, I have to go back and confirm things. Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes? Your lying eyes. Yeah.

And so but, you know, decomposition is a big. It's a big part of what we have to analyze. And I have to take our friends back to a very recent episode that we did. And this is kind of how I want to frame this this episode out. We talked about postmortem change. Right. And what I think was a really good episode. I urge anybody to go back and listen to this.

It was just a couple of weeks ago. And we talked about it in a micro sense. And that's generally like when you're talking to investigators out at the scene, one of the first questions they will ask an me investigator is they always say hey doc how long how long do you think it's been you know how long do you think it's been oh yeah yeah that's one of the big things yeah that well once you've wow once you've started an exam and yeah because they they think that you're like this scientific genius right you know that and I'm not.

You show up at a scene and you begin to do all of these high-end calculations and you're looking at the body and, you know, you can look at the body and say, well, gee whiz, Jim, this guy's been dead for, you know, I don't know, three hours and 33 minutes. Yeah. You can't do that? No. Lord, no. Nobody can do that. No, Lord, no. Nobody can do that. And if they tell you they can do it, don't walk, run away from that person because they're a liar. It's an empirical impossibility.

I want to ask you something you brought up that I've got to ask. Yeah. Because you've mentioned the smell of a dead body. Yes. And you did mention that there's a difference between the smell of a dead body and a decomposing body. When people talk about the smell, a unique smell of decomposition, most of us are not around decomposition in any part of our life.

When we do smell it, it is going to be rare, and it is going to be a unique smell to us. When I reminded of Cindy Anthony, Casey Anthony's mother, when she called police because Casey Anthony had taken off with their car and hadn't returned it, and she called to report, come arrest my daughter for stealing my car. And they found out it had been towed. And she went to the place to get it back. And when they opened the trunk,

it stunk. And she said, it smells like a dead body's been in there. Now that was said in the first moments that we knew of Kaylee Anthony. It smells like a dead body has been in there and the comparison was it doesn't smell like trash we all know how bad trash can smell and this to her was different and stronger and just not trash yeah and you know with trash you'll get this kind of and of of course, this is all heavily

dependent upon the mixture that you're talking about with everyday household trash. Sometimes you can have this kind of sickening, sickly sweet smell is the way I describe it many times if you're talking about refuse. Refuse that we generate, okay? Well, that smells different than, say, solid human waste or even manure from, you know, from hogs or cattle. You know, look where we live, Dave, it's a big agricultural area. Isn't it lovely when the farmers go out and spread manure on the fields and it's liquefied

and it's going everywhere? Lord help you if you live adjacent to this. And listen, I know why they have to do it, but that is a very particular smell. It's only fun if you have a five or six-year-old boy with you that you can make a lot of unique sounds and laughs. Yeah, I know. That's the only time it's worthwhile, really. Other than that, you roll up the windows and pray the air conditioning doesn't give out. Yeah.

And look, you're looking toward the cotton crop that's going to be harvested or corn or whatever it is. And there's a method to that. But when we begin to talk about human decomposition, I've had people ask me that, and this is a legitimate question. They'll say, I've never been around a decomposing body. What does it smell like? And when you begin to think about it, the only way I've been able, and again, this is my own perspective, my little slice of the pie here from what I have observed consistently, the only way I have really been able to describe it for me, and it comes in varying degrees, it smells to me like burning tires, which is a disgusting odor to me. If you've ever smelled a tire

that has been set on fire, I know people in service, I think back to what happened in Somalia, you know, there were burning tires there. If you've ever been around a runaway fire that happens at a tire factory, which I actually experienced as a child. There was a tire company near us, and the whole thing caught on fire, burned for six months. And so that smell was always in the air, and it always hung when it's like kind of like burning rubber, I guess, is really how it smells. That's the way I've always interpreted it. And everybody will come away with their own take on it. And it's curious. You know, I've encountered individuals, witnesses, finders, you know, over the years. And they'll make these kind of passive comments like, you know, we had smelled something, but we didn't really know what it was.

Sometimes it would be stronger than other times. And a lot of that has to do with something that we talked about in our first episode relative to postmortem interval in the immediate, in the micro sense. Now we're talking macro in a broader sense. A lot of that has to do with ambient temperature. As the heat in a location rises, the smell becomes more profound at that moment in time. And then as it cools, the smell will slightly be knocked down. It'll still be there, but it's not quite as pervasive, if you will. So, it's really hard for the average person that's never been around it to kind of comprehend it. I can tell you this. Most people know it's almost a primal instinct. They know that they don't want to be around it. And that's why people ask me questions, and they're living vicariously. I know that they are.

They want to be entertained. That's why people ask me the question, what's the worst thing you've ever seen? Which in a way is kind of disrespectful because that's like me coming to somebody saying, okay, what's the worst day you've ever had at work? Tell me about it. And somebody will say, well, what's the worst thing? And many in my colleagues included, when people ask us that question, some people will just not answer it. And I have one friend in particular that will say,

it's none of your damn business. That's how they feel about it because you're asking somebody to relive an event that is so shocking and so over the top. They're not saying, well, what was it like to work a death? They will say, what's the worst thing you've ever seen? Because I got to tell you, my scale of worst is a lot different, and a lot of my colleagues is a lot different than the average person. So, and many times, particularly for those of us that have been affected by PTSD and those things that we have to struggle with in the wake of doing a job that most people don't even think about, sometimes you'll be lulled into a sense of security with people when they say, what's the worst thing you've ever seen? You think that they're asking you a therapeutic question. Well, once you unburden yourself, that's not what they're

doing. They're saying, dance for me, entertain me. And so, you know, you can get kind of riled up about it sometimes. I've developed a callous to it now, I think at this point in my life. But for a long time, particularly in the wake of everything that I went through, through therapy and all that sort of stuff before that, I would get really angry when people would ask me that question. But I got to tell you, just because something has impacted you doesn't mean that there's not value in it. And I think that that's important for us to understand when we're talking about decompositional changes, because a lot can be learned from it. And not just in the sense that it's something that is connected with a death. It's actually, when you think about it, just like birth, it's a natural biological process. Death does, in fact, come to us all. That's not just some kind of passive comment.

And certainly, Dave, as I've gotten, let's say, more chronologically mature, I've realized that I've got less life to live than I have lived. And so, you begin to think about these things. Death does, in fact, come to us. But listen, it's a natural process. It's just like birth. And I remember the birth of my kids. I remember the birth of my grandbabies and what a celebratory event that was. And people don't look at death that same way. They don't. They don't view it as a celebration.

Some people will try to say, well, it's a celebration of life when we go to a funeral. No. Yeah, it can be. It can be. They're dead. But you're still talking about the dead. And one of the things we do in our field is we try to understand when you get out beyond that kind of micro sensibility where you're talking about hours, you're in a much broader area here when you talk about the decomposition of human remains. It's an incredible process when you think about it, the changes that take place.

And there is a measurement to it, just like there is in the micro sense. There's actually a measurement to it in a macro sense. The only downside is we can't put that final point on it, Dave. You know, when you were talking a minute ago about people asking your worst, you know, tell me your best story, which means the worst moment of your life at work. What was it? And explain. And I want all the gory detail, just like in the movies. And I have to think about that and realizing that there was a first time for everything.

And I can't imagine that that was a real treat either. That has to be one of those markers in your life. It was. And it happened in the reverse for me. I was not around a profoundly decomposed body in the field. The first time I was around a profoundly decomposed body where you had these massive changes, postmortem changes that had taken place was actually in the morgue. And I was the person to open the bag on the table. And I remember, and I'd done what we refer to as fresh dead cases, you know, cases that had died within the last day or two, you know, that had come in from the field. And, of course, I started my career in New Orleans.

And let me tell you something. So there are a lot of decomposed bodies in South Louisiana, and it all has to do with the environmental factors because heat, as we know, speeds everything up. So we actually use the term decomp season down there because when you hit down there, when you hit April, your last cool day of the year is if you're lucky, it's going to be March in South Louisiana. And so, starting in April, you know, we're ahead of the curve when it comes to like Alabama or moving north. Bodies go really, really quick. And so, I got to tell you, Dave, I had, I remember opening that bag. And when I looked down on those remains and they were bloated. We're going to have to come back to that in a minute because I didn't know that. They were green in color.

The lips were protruding. Yeah, the tongue was protruding from the mouth, swollen. And you have to fix yourself. Set your face like Flint and move forward because you have to understand, and this is what I had to get past, I had to rely or lean into the science because I knew that what I was looking at, I had to try to unravel the mystery from a scientific standpoint or at least assist in this and to try to collect every bit of data I could. And I kind of knew that this was going to happen, but I didn't expect it to be as impactful for me. And so when I got out to a scene where I had my first decomposing body, and it was a natural death.

It was, I still remember it, it was an elderly grandmother who had not been seen in three weeks, probably. And the grandchildren came to the house and they had smelled something before they ever opened the door. And I remember distinctly talking to them. They were saying, we couldn't open the door. We knew it was going to be bad. And so, the police obviously took the keys from them, entered the house with their permission, and then they called me out. And when you see this decomposing body laying in a bed and these changes are taking place, it's very profound because, again, I go back to what I've said before, observing the abnormal in context of the normal. If you've got a grandmother, you've been in her bedroom, you know it looks a particular way. This lady's bedroom looked a particular way, kind of reminiscent of my grandmother.

You can't help but drag your own personal views into these things. But then you see everything that's going on, everything from the changes in the body to larval development with flies to, you know, just everything that's going on in this environment, and you can't escape it. I've described it in my writings as kind of the essence of death that leeches onto you. And I've got a great story about that that I can get into. But it's one of these things that when you're around it, you bear witness to it with your eyes, but you carry a remnant of it with you when you leave the scene. And that's something that I, you know, that I had to work through.

My family had to work through it. My wife used to make me change clothes on the backstreet of the house when I went home from work. Stayed on your clothing, your hair, all of that? Mm-hmm. My mustache, yeah, everything. I worked a, years ago, I worked a, what's called a jacket barge. People are generally not familiar with it if you don't live near the Gulf of Mexico

where there's oil refineries and offshore rigs. A jacket barge has got these huge posts on it where they can actually take this barge out to imagine one of these huge oil wells out up a derrick out there.

And they can set this thing next to it. And it's got like an old-fashioned car jack. Those legs go down to the ocean floor, and they can work on the deck of this thing adjacent to the oil rig and do all kinds of – Well, the guys that were on this rig, there was a tropical storm that came in the Gulf of Mexico and they were trying to beat it home. And this thing is real awkward, you know, when it doesn't have the same physical characteristics of like a crew boat or something like that. And it capsized and all 16 of those guys died and we got them not at one time. They were, they were fetched out of the water over a period of time. And I was, of all things, inside of a, I'll never forget this, a piggly-wiggly refrigerated 18-wheeler that I don't know how the parish got it, but we got it.

We didn't have enough room to store all these bodies. And day in and day out, I was going into this environment to do everything that we had to do to get them ID'd. And it was a long process and it was tedious. I spent a lot of hours in there. And I remember from that instance in particular, when I went home, I was single back then. And I remember, let's see, it was two days after the last body I'd worked. And I am a fool for showers. I love showers. I'll take two a day if I can. And a buddy of mine that worked with me that had not worked in there, he said, did you work at DCOM today? And I said, no. I said, not for two days. We finished up.

The guy was off. He says, you smell bad. And I'm thinking, what's going on? And after a while, you kind of get, I don't know, you get self-conscious of it. I'm like lifting my mustache up to my nose. I had this big, thick, like Tom Selleck mustache back in the 80s. And I caught a whiff of it in my mustache. And I remember going home and I write about this in my memoir, Blood Beneath My Feet.

And not since basic training had I had my head shaved. And in the Army, I went to my barber, had them shave my head, and I shaved off my mustache, plucked all of my nose hairs because it got into my mind so much. And I threw away all of those clubs. I was using a particular set of clothes. I was using a particular set of scrubs for that, that I would wash, but they still, it just reminded me of it. And you can't get away from that essence. Now, I don't know how much of that was real or how much of it was something that had happened in my brain. I've had other people tell me that. And, you know, it's weird that the culture of a medical examiner or coroner's office, we're almost, we almost have, they ought to study us like they study, you know, animals in the wild, like in the jungles. If you see like the great apes that are out there kind of picking nits out of each other's hair. We would do things, as bizarre as that is, we would – how – what rational person

would walk up to another person and as a favor, if your buddy says, do I smell bad? And it's not like you have BO. It's like they know what you've just gone through. Do you have any essence of you of what you've come from because you've been asked to go out to lunch and let that sink in just for a second. You can't avoid people. And so as a courtesy, you know, we would, we would do that for, and I remember distinctly many occasions, you know, smelling or sniffing my colleagues as weird as that sounds. You would, you know, you would smell, you'd smell their hair or you'd lean in and smell their shirt, collar. No, I don't smell anything, man.

I think you're good to go. And that was just kind of common. when you think about decomposition it's a norm for for those in our world but it's so it's so abnormal for anybody that's not near it and it's striking this goes back to the original thing that you said about people asking about the worst thing you've ever seen. It's nothing I'm ever going to be near. It's not my life. I'm not going to be the closest I'll be to a dead body is if a loved one, a very old loved one is in bed and I'm there around them. And this is somebody that is not,

they're dying. I'm not going to be around this in my life, which is why that question. But I've got to ask you, you mentioned the first body you unzipped in the morgue and you mentioned the body was green tongue. You gave a brief description. Can you compare the decomposition of a body like that versus the grandma that they hadn't seen in three weeks? What differences, what changes take place in that period of time? You don't,

you're not three days in when you come in green, swelled up and your tongue sticking out, but you're also not soiled into a mattress where you're only three inches left of body. So, and I've had that happen. Yeah. Well, we did a story about a woman who actually melted into the furniture. She died. Yeah. And that does happen. And, you know, I guess, you know, we would use the term melting. Melting implies, you know, being exposed

to extreme heat. But just so that you understand and all of our friends understand, it's just, it's a matter of the process of decomposition. You're not going to see this immediately. But again, I cannot stress to people what a huge factor temperature is on these events as you move through the process of assessing how long they have been down. So, if you take someone that's kind of outside the window of the micro sense where we're looking at hours maybe a couple of days and we're trying to pin it down we're looking at at rigor mortis and we're looking at uh post-mortem lividity and all those things are the you know are the limbs flaccid now has has uh the rigidity broken is you know, is the lividity? And we've talked about all this in previous episodes.

Is it blanchable versus non-blanchable? All those things. And what's the body temp? Well, now you're going to a different level because you begin to look at elements out at a scene where you're thinking, well, I'm seeing this presentation at the scene. Can I can I tie this back to a time, a marker in time? If I if I'm looking at a body, one of the first things that begins to occur from when you're heading down the road toward, you know, we have degrees. We'll talk about minimal, moderate to advanced decomposition in the macro sense, in the broad sense. So, if you're talking about minimal, here's an interesting little factoid. One of the things that you encounter, one of the first like observable changes, I think,

is there's a greenish discoloration that appears on the abdomen. And I don't explain, I can't explain why. I think it has something to do with gaseous buildup, you know, within the bowel. But most of the time, it's in the right lower quadrant adjacent to like where your appendix would be. You'll see kind of a green patch. I've seen this repeated over and over again. And that's in the area where you're starting to get into a macro examination of decomposition. And then it begins to spread.

Now, I think that one of the reasons you see this greenish discoloration, you know, kind of begin to take form over the abdomen where, you know, the bowel is concerned is that there's a lot of going on. There's a lot going on here internally with the body because the body has literally begun to eat itself. And this is what we refer to as autolysis. And autolysis auto means self, right? And so the body literally begins to break its or digest its own self, you know, through enzymic changes and this sort of thing and any little nasties that are indwelling in

there. And of course, our gut is loaded with these elements that begin to break down. And you think about this kind of expansion and the bloating of the body, and the body bloats in a variety of different ways. You get this kind of abdominal bloating that takes place, and some people will refer to this as decompositional distention. And the abdomen will be very very rigid as a matter of fact it will feel in certain cases it almost feels like the surface of

overinflated basketball it's not going to have the same texture obviously but it has that you know what i'm talking about that level of rigidity yeah because i've heard people talk about how they get bloated like that and it's can they pop like a balloon can a person be so bloated joe i mean i'm just we've heard jokes in movies about it you know push you know don't push him out to see but don't poke him because you don't want him to explode well yeah and you know people have and i take exception to people that say explode because I've never had a body, literally an entire body explode. All right.

A lot of old timers will say that, particularly cops. They'll say, yeah, I saw the body. They're not seeing the body explode. Actually, what they're seeing is, and this is one of the first things that happens in this stage, you get what's referred to as skin slippage. And if folks will just kind of look at your hands and, you know, you have this epidermal epidermis, which is that thin outer coating of skin on our body. Well, what begins to happen is that gas is actually beginning to build up within that space between the epidermis and the dermis. And you develop these

things that we refer to as, and it's generally associated with emphysema, COPD, doctors that deal with COPD, emphysema, you know, they talk about this. With emphysema, you get these little bumps on the surface of the lungs, and they're referred to as blebs, B-L-E-B-S, blebs. We refer to these as decompositional blebs because they look like little balloons that begin to present on the skin, this gaseous expansion has taken place. And many times, these blebs will be really big. I mean, the size of like a party balloon. And they're filled with probably one of the most disgusting substances on the face of the planet, this decompositional fluid.

And it's a mix of a variety of things, cellular decomposition. You've got, in some cases, you've got elements of various elements of blood, RBCs and white blood cells and plasma and everything, serum and everything else that's in there. And it's all kind of combining. And I can't tell you how many times I've had one of those erupt and it splashes everywhere. You'll get these large wet spots beneath bodies, that sort of thing. And that's what you're getting?

That's what that is? Yeah, yeah. You'll get that. You'll see that present many times. And sometimes it'll be very small. But the skin, we call it skin slippage, and it's a marker in time for how long this person has been deceased because they're moving into this phase. And it's something that when we see it, we can actually get an idea of how long someone has been down where they've advanced past the micro sense and they're headed into the macro sense.

There's other associated things that kind of come along with this, you know, and that's within a window of, and again, it's heavily dependent upon environmental temperature. But when you begin to think about heat, it's going to speed this process up. If you begin to look outside of that like 72-hour window, you'll see these changes that'll take place. There'll also be a greenish discoloration that's taking place. And the body also does something else that's quite interesting. You'll see an issue with what's referred to as marbling. And marbling, you know, we hear that commonly associated with, you know, you look at the marbling of a cut of beef or something, and that's generally referring to, you know, these kind of lines of fat. You know, they grade these sort of things.

But marbling in human remains is fascinating because when you see it, it looks like a spider web. And it really is striking. It's kind of a deep, deep purple color. And what is occurring is that the blood that is still contained in those vessels is decaying. And so it is presenting. it's leaching out, but it's also presenting and approximating the layout of blood vessels in the body. And you'll see it in the face a lot. You'll see it presents because those vessels are so close to the surface, like, you know,

in the cheeks, forehead, that sort of thing. And people, when they see this, and I'm talking about civilians that walk in and find someone, it's one of the most ghastly things that they can begin to imagine in their mind. And it's so horrible. I hate it for families that walk in, you know, and find their loved ones in these conditions. But we have to go in and document that and observe it. One of the, I remember very distinctly, I had a young man that was a rookie police officer. And he had contacted me from the scene of a death of a gentleman that had been found in a rocking chair.

And he was still dressed. He was, the guy was like a laborer. And he worked construction sites. He was still wearing his work boots and his blue jeans. They still had red clay mud on them, I'll never forget. But he had probably been down for, I don't know, maybe six days. And the young police officer, and it was in summertime, the young police officer called me up and said, Mr. Morgan, you have to get out here immediately. He says, I think we've got a homicide. It looks like this might be some kind of attack with an ax or something. Please, you know, I've

got CID en route. I've got ID en route. So, the detectives and the forensic technicians, you need to get out. I said, okay, I'm heading out that way. And what it turned out to be, and he was right to call us because he's a beat cop. He doesn't know any different. But there was what appeared to be blood just surrounding the body. The guy was in a rocking chair. It had leached down onto his shirt. It looked like blood. Head was swollen.

It looked like there was edema. And that's not what had happened. The fellow had been decomposing in this position and was presenting as if he had been beaten to hell and back. That wasn't the case. It was his face had begun to swell and bloat and these sorts of things. And he was beginning to purge, which is another level that you get to with decomposition. And that means through any orifice that you have, the nose, the mouth, you'll actually present with this purge fluid.

And again, this is a combination. It's kind of a mixture of all of this cellular waste that's occurring in the body as the cells begin to break down. And it'll literally drip out of the nose and out of the mouth and these sorts of things. And it will stain the adjacent surfaces. So, you can imagine this young man when he is there and he's observing this. And the poor victim had on a white t-shirt, Dave. And you can imagine the contrast here. And so, he's looking at a guy who is very dark, looks like he's been beaten, bruised, contusions, this sort of thing. And he's seeing this contrast against the white T-shirt.

And this has all taken place now, in this particular case, within only about six days. So, when you have an unattended death that occurs like this, and the subject has been down, and no one has come around to check on them, you have to, as a forensic scientist, you have to look and understand that decomposition is going on, but is it obscuring an injury? And that's tough. That's particularly tough to do at the scene. And here's the other thing. There's like that little person within you that is screaming, get me out of here. I don't want to be in this environment. I'm smelling this. I'm sensing it. I'm even having flies come off the body and land on me. And that does happen. But yet you're having to look at these cases because of the level of decomposition even more closely because things now are obscured.

So you're having to match yourself intellectually you know to try to understand this is the science it's a natural process decomposition the body is breaking down but i've got so much change that's taking place in the body as i'm looking at this is it obscuring something and am i missing uh and this is one of the reasons on body bags we you know we'll we will hear these cases where forensic pathologists even will say, the body was so far gone, we couldn't appreciate if there was any trauma in the neck. Well, what they're saying about that is that there's so much decomposition going around the head and the neck that upon initial observation, they couldn't appreciate any kind of focal areas of hemorrhage, like where somebody had grabbed somebody by the neck or used a ligature or the person been struck in the head.

You really, and it's counterintuitive because it's like the cases that as your own personal humanity is screaming to put as much distance between yourself and this offensive remain that is in front of you, you have to anchor yourself. You have to screw yourself to the floor and stand there because you have to pay more attention, Dave. You have to pay more attention in this context at the scene and at the morgue because I got to tell you something.

If you can't get past the horror, if you can't get past these natural biological changes, you are missing something. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.