Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : The Smell of Death, Part Two

Episode Date: September 22, 2024

After responses to the Body Bags episode about decomposition called "The Smell Of Death," Joseph Scott Morgan realized he left out a couple of things that are important in the world of decomposition. Whether out in the field trying to solve a homicide, or in the cottage of a loved one who dies of old age in their favorite chair, bodies will decompose. And the rate of decomposition is dependent on many factors. Joseph Scott Morgan takes a close up look at decomposition and what it tells investigators who are looking for answers.   00:00:00 Introduction    00:02:23 Explaining skin slippage    00:05:27 Wearing skin like a glove   00:09:34 Examination of body on the scene  00:13:36 Preserving the body   00:18:39 Body decomposition inside a house       00:23:15 Landfill with everything breaking down  00:27:58 Body preserved when barely covered      00:31:24 Body preservation in frozen area , 00:34:15 Conclusion     See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Facts with Joseph Scott Moore Unlike notifying families, which I never got used to, the last one was just as bad as the first one. I can't say that about decomposition. It impacted me, it affected me. But I could explain it to myself. And isn't that the key, I think, with anything in life? If you're capable of being able to rationalize it and say, okay, this is what nature does to all of us. It is those elements that are left behind. I think the real piece to this that we have to hang on to and try to understand as practitioners and people that are into true crime are the practitioners that are working these cases, have they paid attention to detail, even in the most austere circumstances?

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Packs. On a timeline when it comes to decomposition, Dave, you're really, what we've discussed at this point, you're really only at this earlier stage, you know, where we've got, you know, we talked about blebs, these pockets that appear on the skin. We've got skin sloughing that takes place. It's skin slippage and sloughing. So, the skin will slough off, but it's easily just kind of peeled away as well. Let me ask you about that. You said when you were talking about slippage and you were actually talking to me one time about how you had to actually to get fingerprints from an individual so you could identify them, that you actually had to use that skin slippage to your advantage in trying to identify the person.

How can you actually get so loose on the top layer there that is so thin that you could actually utilize that in a way? Yeah, a lot of folks ask me about this, and I've done it. There's a lot of people who have done it. I'm not some kind of original here. All right. So, I'm not breaking new ground. This has been done for years and years. But people, I think that people in the general public can't believe that we do this. Right. But we do. And this is referred to specifically as, you're talking about the hands. This is what

we refer to as degloving. Now, you'll hear trauma surgeons, particularly with people that have been drugged behind cars and rollover injuries and all that, they'll talk about the degloving of the skin, the hand, even down to the dermis, will get so loose that we can actually, if you look at the heel of your hand, where your wrist joins into the heel of your hand, and then on the dorsum of your hand, the backside of your hand as well, you can actually take that glove of skin and gently peel the whole thing off. And it's going to come off inside out. Now, the really creepy thing, if that's not creepy enough, for me that I always had a real hard time with is that the fingernails come off with it. Okay. And so the first time you do it, it's one of these things that is so difficult to get

past. But the purpose of this is that that skin is so fragile and you don't know who the person is, you want to try to roll a print. So what we will do is we will put a surgical glove on our own hand. Okay. Then we will take the degloved, those degloved layers off of the decedent's hand and then place them over our hand. And so our hand is like in a latex glove. Then that latex glove containing our hand is inserted into the degloved hand of the decedent.

And we can actually roll a print and be more gentle with it, say, because you use what are called spoons, you use post-mortem spoons that are constructed specifically to get a print off of a dead body. But the skin is so fragile, you have to be very, very careful with it. A spoon would not normally work in this particular instance. And you're also fighting dehydration with this or what's referred to as desiccation. So, you have to be very careful. And I've met – every time I've done it, I've met with great success in rolling a print.

And just imagine, you know, you see somebody going to the lockup and you have to roll, you know, or maybe if you've ever been fingerprinted for a job, you have to roll your print. All right. And so, that's what we would do. And it's one of those things that has developed over the years in order for us to, well, first off, when you're talking about decomposing body, the question you have to ask is, why are they decomposing? Why has nobody found this person? And many times with advanced decomposition, you're talking about somebody that they're unknown, they're unidentified. And I was just literally lecturing about this today at Jacksonville State in my clandestine graves class that I teach.

If you don't know the ID of a person, you can learn as much as you possibly can through examination about the trauma they sustained and all these sorts of things. And you can look at that person and say, yeah, they met their end at the hand of another, which is the definition of homicide. But still, if you're working a homicide, that knowledge is worth nothing if you don't know who the person is. Because the genesis of an investigation is to find out who the person is, who did they roll with, who did they associate with, who are their family members, where were they last seen, when were they last contacted. And all of this plays into this big cycle.

So, it's so important for us to get these bodies identified. That's why, you know, I say that, you know, with decomposed bodies, you have to be willing to, you know, screw yourself to the floor. And as offensive as it is to you and as insulting as it is, you do your job. That's why I always find it laughable if I ever like if Silence of the Lambs is on TV and there's the one scene in the movie where Jodie Foster and they're in the funeral home and they're putting Vicks vapor up beneath their nose. And these FBI agents are actually doing the work of a forensic pathologist, which is ridiculous. Because that's what they do. Yeah, right. And, you know, the problem with that is people ask, how do you get used to it?

Well, you get used to it by indwelling the space. You don't fight against it. Did you know, Dave, when I was a very young investigator, there were still detectives that would show up at crime scenes that would have the biggest, nastiest, cheap cigars that they possibly could buy. And just listen to this. And they would light these cigars on the scene and smoke on the scene of a decomposing body. And so, you know, you're sitting there and you know, I have an affinity for a good cigar. I like a good cigar. It's something I don't do it every day, but it's something I derive great pleasure from

when I have an opportunity. So not only are you showing the fact that you're completely uneducated when it comes to trace evidence that I've seen, because you're walking in with a lit cigar, you're displaying that you have horrible taste in cigars. And so you're subjecting us not only to decomp, but you're subjecting us to the smell of the cigar. Or in the case of the silence lambs thing where you're putting Vicks vapor

rub up your nose. So now you have to smell decomp because you cannot defeat decomp. I don't care what you do. You're going to have to smell decomp compounded with Vicks Vaporub. I don't know. From childhood, Vicks Vaporub is a comforting thing. All right. But it's not two things I necessarily want associated.

The idea is that you just have to adjust to it. You understand. That's why I always say that it's a natural process. So when we're doing these examinations on the body at the scene, we have to, the best way we can, continue down the road because it extends most of these cases that we get there. They're going to extend, you know, way past blebs and skin slippage and purging and all of that stuff. You know, we go out into the woods and if you find a body out there, you're talking an individual that may be laying out in the woods, unclothed, and their skin now has gone from a greenish discoloration

to almost a black to brown sometimes. And the only way I can really describe it is the skin has a leather-like quality. And this goes to dehydration or desiccation of the skin. Now, you'll get desiccation or the drying of the fingertips. That occurs kind of early on, you know, maybe in the realm of, I don't know, four to five days. And it's like, you know, when you're little and mom, you know, is looking at your fingers, you've been in the pool too long, you know, your fingers like prunes. It kind of looks like that.

They kind of prune up like that. But when you get the entirety of the body that has become dehydrated, now you're into another realm at this point in time. And you can appreciate it because the skin, and a lot of this is dependent upon where you are um in the country like for instance if you're out in the desert southwest it has very vegas that area phoenix very low humidity or you know back in california uh particularly the desert area very little humidity, any water that is contained with, I don't care if it's a human or if it's any other, you know, item that might be there, it's going to evaporate. It's going to go

away. And sometimes you'll catch that here in the deep south. You can catch it in cold temperatures. The cold leads to dehydration many times with human remains and skin almost takes on a leather-like quality and you're you're talking and again remember we're going down this this linear timeline we we cannot narrow it down any more than say with desiccation days to weeks you see the further out you move, the broader this estimation becomes. Okay. So, it becomes progressively more difficult. And that's one of the big questions, like I said earlier, that our friends in law enforcement, they're going to ask the people in forensics, specifically forensic pathology, medical legal death investigation. How long, Doc? How long? How long? Well, the best I can give you at this point, because the body is dehydrated

laying out here in the open, weeks, maybe? Wow. How many weeks? I have no idea. I know that it's longer than a week. It has been multiple weeks, more than likely. Maybe we're looking at a couple months. With any other thing in life, the longer you wait, the less clear things are going to be. But, Joe, you're talking about decomposition, but what happens when somebody dies and they go to the funeral home? Is it the embalming that prevents the body from going through all of these things? Yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to step on you there it's it's no it's it uh and uh you know funeral workers do a fine job of um preserving the body right when that can infuse the body but here's the rub um

and this is just a cold hard fact if you're you know people can have closed caskets because of trauma, but there are many times decomposition happens with greater frequency than people realize. It's like everything in death investigation. People are not aware. I told you the story about my wife when we went on our first date and she's like, I never thought about death until I met you. Most people don't think about death like this. And they don't, you know, many times they have closed caskets because there's nothing. There's nothing that the funeral workers can do. Because once you start down this road with decomposition, if it hasn't been stopped,

then there's no going back at that point in time. Some people prefer to have a closed casket. I don't know, but I'm just saying this is one of the reasons that this might occur. So, for people that work in the mortuary sciences, they do a fantastic job considering what they're having to do, but they have to get these bodies early. This is not something, if you're a month down the road, you can forget it. It's not going to work. There's no magic that they can really, and I'm sure I'll get some pushback on that. I don't care. It's the reality of biological change. And so, you have a body that is in this state.

The big question I have as an investigator always comes back, and this always rings true in my ears with decomposing remains. Why is this person decomposing? And you said, well, Morgan, you just said it's because of science. No, that's not the question I'm asking. What about this person has left them in the state to where no one is aware of them and they have been left alone this long? Now, that is a salient question when it comes to an investigation. Why are they missing?

Or a bigger question, why is no one missing them? Okay. You know, our working premise that we've talked about before and I talk to my students about is that every death is a homicide until proven otherwise. You have to live by that rule. So, when you're looking at a body that is desiccated, once you begin to get past that point and they are under the right conditions, Dave, you will actually have a process of natural mummification that will take place with a body. People don't think about that. Most of the time with bodies that are in the state where they can naturally mummify.

You know, we think about mummies from the perspective of ancient Egypt. And even those that lived in higher elevations, and I urge anybody out there that's fascinated by burial practices and this sort of thing, take a look at these cases that have taken place that they've recovered these bodies out in Peru at those high plateau elevations where there's literally no humidity and you've got bodies there that have been dead for hundreds and hundreds of years and they're perfectly preserved. It's an amazing thing. The environment dictated that. But we can actually have mummification that takes place without a body being treated in

a specific way. Like you're not introducing chemicals, you know, like the ancients did. But once you get past this mummification, and you're not always going to get it, you'll go from a wet decomposition to a skeletonization. I was going to ask you, how do you miss that? How do you go from, okay, dead, I've gone through all the process, and now somebody's going to be a mummy and another's going to be a skeleton. How does that match up? Well, with mummification, that goes to relative humidity. You know, what kind of levels of humidity are you experiencing in that environment?

And most of the time with a body that has quote-unquote mummified, I really don't like that term, but it's the term that's commonly used. You're going to have ideal conditions, ideal environmental biological conditions where they're protected. They're in a protected space. They are in an environment, generally in a house closed up, where you're not going to have access, first off, to any scavengers that can't play into it. You'll see a progression many times of flying insects, particularly blowflies, that will set on the body. And, you know, one of the things that entomologists do, those that study bugs, they'll go through several life cycles, you know. And then there's – and insects are fascinating. We could do an entire episode.

We could do an entire month of episodes on entomology. But they have a natural order that they – like you have certain insects that will not be present in – will not be present if there is another species present. They have an order that they go in. Like you're not going to find a blowfly in the presence of a dung beetle. And it's just this order that occurs in nature. And again, that brings us back to bodies beginning to break down. When we get to the point where we have bodies that are either totally skeletonized or partially skeletonized, you're looking at a baseline of months at that point in time.

And again, that factor of time that comes in here, how have they gone this long in this location? What is it? Did this person separate themselves from the rest of the population? Did they live almost a hermit-like life where they didn't have contact with anybody and they're just kind of locked up in their home? And suddenly somebody says, hey, I haven't seen this individual in a while. And they do a welfare check. And you walk into the house.

It's got a foul odor, kind of musty at this point. It's not quite as pungent. And you have skeletal remains that are there. And it's quite striking, you know, to see this. And out in the woods, you know, we've covered on several shows where I talk about scavenger activity. And, you know, skeletal remains are scattered to the wind, you know, depending upon what species are around. You know, you have raccoons and possums that will, you know, and dogs that will carry, you know,

various elements away and bodies are not completely intact. It's a real rarity when you go out to, and it doesn't have to be a clandestine burial. Matter of fact, you're a little be a clandestine burial. Matter of fact, you're a little bit protected if there is a burial. But if you just have a surface deposition of remains that are skeletonized, you're not going to find all the elements. I mean, you're not. It's not going to happen because you can't stem the tide of nature. Everything that revolves around this, whether it's smaller animals or larger animals that are coming in or any domesticated animal that's in there, pigs rooting about or dogs that might have come from a neighbor's house over there. Isn't that interesting?

That smell that for us we find so repugnant for us as a species, and I think this comes from higher level thinking perhaps, we're not drawn to that. We might be drawn to it to inspect it, to see what it is, and then suddenly retract and run away from it or go call the authorities. That's not what animals do. They get a whiff of something like this, and they're on it. I mean, they're heading in that direction, and they are not leaving.

And, you know, but that's a natural course of things. That's where the nasty varmints come from, you know? Yeah, yeah. And that's the nature, you know, of these sorts of things when it comes to decomposing bodies. And that's essential for any of us that are out in the field. You have to do all of that in your calculations about what you're looking for, what remains, what is not there. You have to take stock, essentially. That's why you have to have some baseline understanding in my field of you need to be pretty solid anatomically. You know,

you need to be able to understand what elements are missing from the body that have to be accounted for, or you have to explain it, or you have to, you want to walk that perimeter and look and see if there are, you know, maybe some of the elements of the hands or the ankles or ribs that are missing because animals will take away ribs. They'd love to do that and to get the protein out of them. so you're you're fighting this fight and i guess for me um it was as an investigator it was uh very repugnant. How do these two relate? You know, where you're going from like a biohazard cleanup situation, and we were just mentioning it about how like in a landfill where it's constantly breaking down.

Everything there is in a breakdown mode, which never occurred to me. We've had a number of cases where men and women of law enforcement had to go to a trash dump to try to find a human being who had been thrown away like trash. It never occurred to me until you explained it, how difficult that is. And when we were talking about that

breaking down of the individual, when you get to the active decay of stage three leading into stage four, how is it? Is it possible that bones, the skeleton, actually does break down? Or what happens? Well, there's a couple of ways that bone does, in fact, begin to structurally compromise. As a matter of fact, just to paint you the picture, first off, bone obviously is very resilient. You know, we have skeletal remains going back eons, you know, that are fascinating.

We did the show about it, you know. Remember a couple of the end, it was like, I thought you were kidding with me when you told me we were going to do the show. And it's like, they're 500-year-old bones. How did they find them? Yeah, Richard III. Yeah. And look, it's still with King Richard's remains. You're able to appreciate his fatal trauma. Yeah.

Going all the way back. And a lot of it is heavily dependent upon the soil composition, obviously, where they are found, and what elements within soil, pH level in the soil. Is the soil more acidic or is it more base, for instance? And over a period of time, then you have hydrology that plays into it, the flow of water impacting the bone. So you have to have literally the perfect set of circumstances for an entombment, perhaps, where a body will be bony, structures will still be resilient over a period of time. I was actually involved in the recovery of a Confederate soldier's skeletal remains that had quickly been buried by his

comrades following the Battle of Ringgold Gap in Georgia. And this young man had died. We estimated he was probably about 18 years old. He had been shot in the back of the head with what appeared to be consistent. The defect in the back of his head would have been consistent with a 54 caliber Springfield, which is what the Union troops used. His buddies essentially put him in a depressed area in the ground and just pushed dirt over him. And we recovered his body. And interestingly enough, there was a tiny little, when we found him, and this could have been catastrophic, but there was a, somehow an acorn had rolled into the bullet hole,

and a tiny little oak tree was sprouting up. Now, this is, let's see, this would have been, let's see, 66, it would have been well in excess of 100 years after he had been dropped there. The Battle of Ringo, Old Gap, I think was in 1864. Dave, his teeth were pristine, beautifully white. He didn't have like carious dentition or anything like you think of from back then with rotted teeth. He was very young. We estimated I was with a forensic anthropologist.

Now, many of the bones were missing. We didn't have all the components, but the key one was there relative to his head. His teeth were all intact. But yet, I've seen cases where particularly if bone is compromised to the point where it's broken down, maybe there was a dismemberment in that core. The marrow of the bone has been so compromised that it's a shell of what it had been. And that would lead to the bone being compromised structurally where it's just not going to be as robust and it's not going to exist as long as say something that was encapsulated in an area

you take uh king richard iii's body and let's face it dave he was buried inside of a church an old church an abandoned church but still a church nonetheless adjacent to the choir loft and it was an entombment okay so he was partially protected um and for you know hundreds of years until the you know henry the eighth you know had the church raised during the uh protestant reformation um and you know as it turned out that's why he's famously called the king in the car park because they literally asphalted over the top of the body. Um, and, and so it was kind of preserved in there, but you can have bodies that are surface burials or surface, uh, abandonments essentially that will go down to the skeleton. And for a number of reasons, uh, you won't find any elements at all. A lot of it is just going to go to just dumb, blind luck as to whether or not you're going to find something.

Under normal circumstances, and people can't see me right now, but I've got normal in air quotes because in death investigation, there is no normal or ideal circumstances. You're always dealing in the abnormal. If you have a body in a controlled environment, say for instance, like the body farm where they can encase a body and they will start with a fully intact body that's fully fleshed out and then they will watch this body decay over a period of time and they have a method to keep vermin away. Now, you can't keep insects away. That's going to happen. But they're not going to impact the skeletal remains as much as the soft tissue.

You'll still have skeletal remains that will be there. And to kind of watch them go through this process, it's amazing when you watch like time lapse on a decaying bodying body, uh, how long it takes and it's going to be variable. I can't, you know, if anyone's wondering, well, how long does it take? I can't tell you how long it's going to take because some bodies depended upon the environment that you're in might go skeletal after six months, but you can have others, uh, like where you have the bodies in the permafrost that were buried in the, I can't remember which expedition it was, in the Arctic.

They recovered those remains, Dave. These were sailors in the British Navy. They had died probably because of lead poisoning because they had just discovered canning, and they had sealed the cans in lead. And they recovered journals from this abandoned ship where the guys were going nuts. I think it was like the captain's log where they were just going out of their mind. It was lead poisoning. But anyway, the two first guys that died, they buried them.

They dug a hole in the permafrost, covered them up. And, man, I'm not saying that you could take them out and that they would be perfect to view. But you see those. And I encourage anybody to go take a look at these images. Their bodies are beautifully preserved, not skeletonized at all. They still have the remnant of soft tissue that's left behind. All of their hair is intact. Their uniforms are intact. You can still appreciate that it is a classic pre-1850s British sailor's uniform.

That's incredible. Oh, it is remarkable. And the uniforms are made out of wool and linen, and it's all perfectly preserved. So it all depends. It's heavily dependent upon where you are. And so, it's, you know, and many times, listen, I can't tell you how many times I've been out on scenes with colleagues, and we have said, boy, we were really lucky. And generally, as that refers to decomposition, we would say that in terms of we're really lucky that we have anything remaining. It's hard for us to truly understand how this could actually still be here after all of this time. But bone is very resilient. It's

not as resilient of teeth. So, what I tell my students at Jacksonville State is that if you're looking for a carrier for DNA, bone is a leather briefcase and teeth are a steel briefcase. Really? That different? Yeah, it is. And teeth are so much more resilient. I hold that if we ever do kind of reincarnate any of these animals that, you know, mastodons and all that sort of stuff, I think that perhaps with future technology, maybe not the technology we have right now, you know, you could probably clone a mammoth or I never know the difference. You're really not going to England. You're going to a deserted island somewhere off the coast of Florida to set up your own Jurassic Park, aren't you?

No, no, I'm not. I don't have that much time nor motivation. I had no idea. That's kind of where I am, I think with with this process of of decomposition but listen it is to get past the horror of it um if you if you ever can um i love to talk about my students and their their view of the world and the world they're going to be entering into in forensics and i you know i've often told them the prize awaits those who can bear through the horror of what you have to observe. And the prize is what the science is going to tell you.

And there are not too many things more horrific. I'm talking about, you know, there are horrible things that we bear witness to in the immediate where we have, you know, poor, unfortunate little ones that are harmed. And we see those kind of traumatic events. But the horror of being present in a room with a decaying remain or out in the woods with a decaying remain. If you can get past that initial shock to your system, the beauty that exists in the perfection of nature and what it tells us is beyond measure.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.