Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Staged Suicide of Emily Noble

Episode Date: August 28, 2022

Emily Noble goes missing on the night of her 52nd birthday. Leaving behind her phone, keys, ID, wallet, and car, with no signs of a forced entry, and her husband claiming that he went to bed in the couple's guest room; Emily Noble has essentially vanished in the middle of the night. In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard detail the search effort, potential pathways to solve any case that begins with almost no tangible evidence, and the unfortunate scene when Emily Noble's body is finally found. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeartSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. You know, there's certain people in this life that just have an inclination toward helping those that are less fortunate. Emily Noble is such a person. She particularly had a heart for those that were aging, those that had lost loved ones that were up in age and were in declining health. And she had spent her entire adult life taking care of individuals like this. And people said that she would just light up a room when she came in and she was tenacious as well. She worked in a Medicare office and she would go to bat for people and she would look out

for them. And she still to this day is remembered for that specific trait. However, the one thing that sticks in my mind about Emily is that Emily was found all alone in a wooded area, deceased in a very unusual way. Today, we're going to talk about the death of Emily Noble. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Joining me is Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, you know, Emily, she actually went missing on her birthday, that day that we celebrate a life of an individual. I can't even imagine how this impacted the world in which she inhabited.

You're absolutely right, Joe. We do know that, as you pointed out, Emily was very highly thought of by her friends and family. And let's look a little bit at her life before we talk about her death. Emily was in her second marriage. Her first husband had died. He committed suicide and then Emily met a new person to share her life with. Her second husband is Matthew Moore and he brought children into the marriage, a 17-year-old son and the son had some emotional difficulties,

but Emily, as you said had experience with that so bringing this dynamic into their marriage was really not a hardship for Emily. She went out with her husband again Matthew Moore to celebrate her 52nd birthday in 2020. That was the Memorial Day weekend holiday. They went out, had a nice evening, party a little bit, had a few drinks, had dinner with friends, and then they went home. That night after going to bed, Matthew Moore says he got up and instead of returning to the bedroom after using the restroom, he decided to go into a spare guest room so that he would not disturb his wife's sleep. When he gets up the next morning, Emily's gone.

What do you do at that moment? You know, as an investigator, a lot of people would ask me, you know, some of the things that you're going to be looking for, you know, when you show up at a scene like this, where it seems as though the individual is just like vanished into thin air. You know, those remnants of their life. And, you know, you think about the world that we live in. You think about car keys and ID and pocketbooks and wallets and vehicles. You know, all these sorts of things that give you an indication that someone has actually left. And, you know, when we come onto a scene as an investigator, we'll look for those little points of evidentiary consideration along the way,

just to try to get an idea as to what was happening. Because understand this, anytime you're talking about a missing persons case, and to a greater degree a death investigation. You got nothing to work with other than those physical things that are either present or absent. My old adage is this, and I teach my students this in the classes, is that, you know, negative findings are just as valuable as positive findings along the way. Because, you know, if you create this huge mental checklist in your mind you're essentially knocking things off that are going to probably block or occlude your view as an investigator so you can begin to eliminate things so if you've got a person that lives at a particular residence their keys are still there their wallet's still there their vehicles their

money all those sorts of things that you need to kind of get by outside of the home, then that begins to narrow your focus down quite a bit. And then, of course, the next thing you're going to jump to are things like, you know, signs of struggle. And we've all heard this before. There's no signs of forced entry or struggle at the scene. And it's kind of, it's almost a boilerplate statement that we make, but there's a lot of depth there. You know, when you think about it, signs of forced entry. Well, we'll look around the doorframe to see if it's been pressed in in any way. One of the things that I have been witness to where you have somebody that comes into a home and actually commit some kind of horrible crime in this environment, I've seen any number of times where there is a clear footprint on the door,

generally near the latch externally where people have kicked it in. And it really, that tells a lot, doesn't it? Or maybe a location where somebody's put their shoulder into the door and you've got broken glass and the frame is kind of caved in. And then when you get inside of the home, if someone is resistant, for instance, you kind of surprise them. You might have upturned furniture where they're struggling to get away from the stranger, but none of that stuff existed. And keep in mind, she's indwelling this residence with her husband, even though he's not in the same room with her. According to him, he's gone off and slept in a separate area in order to avoid waking her up.

He would think that if something like that had occurred, he could have been alerted, you know, a high pitched scream or the crashing of furniture and all that sort of thing. None of that really existed in this environment. Emily just kind of vaporized, just disappeared. You brought up being able to hear if something happened. So you're talking eyewitness and ear witness. So did the husband hear anything? Did he hear someone trying to get into the home? And then we want to look at the eyewitness, not just did anybody in the neighborhood see something going on. But looking at what was found in the bedroom, was anything missing? Was the bed awry?

Was there blood? Was there anything broken? And those are all the things that you're talking about, Joe. So how do the investigators proceed? Since at this point, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong. Yeah, there's not. And I think that one really salient point here that would really, you know, from an investigative standpoint, that would really raise my red flags is what do we know about what was occurring that evening? Well, we know that there was a birthday celebration. And any time you have as a death investigator in particular, I've always had these kind of markers.

They involve anniversaries, birthdays, maybe anniversaries in your mind where there are benchmarks in your own life where people have passed away that you greatly love. Sometimes those are indications of an individual maybe going off to do some kind of self-harm because they're sad about getting older or they're sad because they're missing somebody in their life or they've gone through a divorce or something that happened on that particular day. And then you couple that with the fact that she and her husband had gone out that night to celebrate her birthday. And it's not like they just stopped off at a local watering hole and just kind of sat there and just talked and had a few drinks. They went to multiple locations and when you begin to talk about something as weighty as this adult woman that just vanishes off of the face of the planet you know what is it that she's engaging in at that moment time

or approximating that moment time that's different than any other time in her normal day-to-day life. Well, she's going out to these multiple locations. There's an opportunity if you have a predator out there, for instance, that will have spotted these two together or maybe had spotted her and they were going to target her. So you're going to multiple locations and you're kind of following along. And as an investigator, that's one of the things that we pick up on. You know, you're going to do a deep dive into this. Go back, look at CCTV captures, if you can, from local bars. Also from anything that's out on the street, street view cams, those sorts of things, to see if anybody was shadowing them as they're kind of walking around and moving back and forth to their car and that sort of thing. Because you have to eliminate, like I said, you have to eliminate all of the possibilities moving forward.

You know, you only get really one shot at this. say a static death investigation where you have a body and you're going out there and you're kind of tracing back from that primary scene location back to where they were living or where they had been that sort of thing this is still very dynamic because your working assumption is that at this point in time she is still alive so you throw in this idea that you're you know you're calling in missing person squad you might be calling in federal marshals or state police that are going to be on the lookout and so you've got all this other data that's coming in and you know that's all fine and good but what happens is a lot of the stuff that you're looking at forensically that a death investigator would

look at it's kind of being lost. It's being lost because your focus has shifted in this type of investigation. I know that there's not a printed list, Joe, of things that investigators go through. It's probably a list in their mind of, you know, what they're looking for in a house or in a location, rather, when someone goes missing. But here you have the evidence, her phone, her keys, Emily's wallet are still in the home. So you've got this checklist that you go by in your mind that you're checking. Has anybody seen her? Is there cameras in the house? Are there footprints outside? So many things, But if there is, as you pointed out earlier, negative findings, how do you go about setting yourself up for a

successful investigation? Well, it comes down to probability at that point in time. You begin to think, well, if she is not here in this location and there's no evidence that something has happened that is indicative of a horrific event like broken furniture, blood trails, blood spots, attempts to clean up blood, all those sorts of things, then you have to think, well, what are going to be my highest probabilities for what happened to her? And you have to follow kind of that line of logic and you know if the car is still there you think well she's walking she's ambulatory at that point in time she has wandered away from the house i don't know maybe she came home that night they'd had a lot to drink she's in the bedroom by herself admittedly according to her husband remember he said he wouldn't sleep in the other bedroom

she wakes up she's disoriented she walks out of the door closes the door behind her and wanders off maybe in her bare feet if you can't find her shoes around the house then you assume that she put them on but if she didn't maybe she's got a pair of house shoes she walked out and knows what are the possibilities and it's from that central point that central point which would be her bedroom, where she was last known to be alive, according to her husband, you would begin to use that as your investigative hub. That's the hub of the wheel. And then radiating out from that, you're going to follow every type of physical path that she could have potentially tried, if you will, to get as much distance between her and the central hub and an ending location. You know, you begin to think about things, well, is there a wooded area that she

could have wandered off into? If there is a wooded area, what kind of hazards are in there? Are we talking about that there's some kind of gulch or, you know, a cliff that she could have stepped off on if she's in rugged territory? Is there a river or body of water nearby that she could have stepped off on if she's in rugged territory is there a river or body of water nearby that she could have wandered off into and became helpless and maybe drowned in that location is there a major roadway if she was disoriented and she walked out into the roadway where somebody could have snatched her up or even worse she could have been struck as a pedestrian she's laying dead on the side of the road and And, you know, to your point, you know, we talk a lot about these checklists that we that we kind of run through in our mind. I've got to tell you, in in my time as a death investigator and when I first started as a very young death investigator, we didn't have a bunch of checklists that, you know, we could download off of something. These things were literally handed down to us verbally many times, and we would try to codify them in some way and write them down. But after a period of time, you begin to check these things off in your brain

as you're working these cases because you reflect back to earlier cases that you had handled. And hopefully, you don't do it every time, but hopefully you're thinking back, how did i screw up an earlier case or what did i miss in an earlier case where i can go back and try to do this one a little bit better now they do have checklists that will that that they will run down and i've heard a couple of people say this kind of very interesting point it's great to have a checklist but when you marry yourself to a checklist, there's a certain amount of creativity that goes into an investigation. And you kind of handicap yourself at that point in time because you're doing this thing, as they say, by rote.

And you're not thinking outside the box at that point in time. And that can be detrimental to the investigation as well. you've got someone in your life that you just absolutely dearly love. I cannot even begin to fathom, fathom the depths of pain and anguish that an individual goes through when you wake up and that person is not there. And you think, well, what in the world am I going to do? Who is there to help me? Because I can only imagine that is probably as alone as you will ever feel as a spouse. So with that said, Jackie, you know, the search has got to start somewhere and you have got to call in help at this point in time.

And help came, Joe. Help came in droves. Emily's family, Emily's friends started searching. Now, their home, there was a lot of wooded areas around her home. So, the thought was knowing that Emily liked being out in nature. Her friends said she often would take photos and that she liked to take early morning walks. So, that was the first place that her friends and family started looking, the nature areas surrounding their home. They even brought in cadaver dogs, drones, and divers for those areas near them.

Obviously, they were looking for a body or for her. What kind of clues would these three things give you, Joe? Look, you introduced canine into this environment, and we all know that when we see things, we're visualizing things. We kind of have a visual spectrum that we work on where we sense different types of light, shading, all those sorts of things. And dogs, by their nature, have great eyesight. They're, you know, they're natural hunters. But if you think their sight is fantastic, you begin to think about, and I've worked with cadaver dogs before, you begin to think about this kind of olfactory spectrum that they have, that sense of smell. It is beyond anything that we can actually fathom as humans. And so, and it's very finely tuned.

And these dogs, when you're talking about a cadaver dog, as opposed to, say, for instance, a tracking dog. We have this old image of a blue tick hound dog that they use and where prisoners have escaped and they put these dogs on the trail. The cadaver dog is specifically trained to go out and pick up scent of the dead because the dead have a very specific odor that dogs can pick up on. And, you know, interestingly enough, you know, over the years when I worked at the coroner's offices and medical examiner's offices I worked for in the past, you know, cadaver dog trainers would actually come to our facility and they would many times grab a rag, with our permission, bring a rag with them that's uncontaminated or an old sock and they would essentially scent that item with the scent of the dead it can come in a variety

of choices here you have the freshly dead to decompose severely decompose which we would have at the morgue to something as benign as skeletal remains, which you wouldn't think would have a scent, but it does. And they would have samples from each one of these, and they would take these dogs out and train them on this olfactory spectrum, if you will. And so it's quite fascinating to see these animals work. And so I think, again, you get when an investigator is in the presence of a cadaver dog, it can, I think that on one level, it can make you kind of lazy because you're sitting there and you're thinking, well, if the dog doesn't hit out here, then there's nothing to be found. Well, as great as these dogs are, they don't always find everything that there is out there.

And, you know, you have to couple that with common sense as well. The dog, the whole thing is not on the dog itself. It's on how the handler manages the animal. And then all of the peripheral people, let's think about, you know, she had friends that were out there. There were people that really loved this woman and cared about her because she had cared for so many other people. And so you had people that would go out day after day looking for her because they all knew, you know, like we'd said earlier, her her wallet, her keys, money, everything was still her vehicle still there. Where could she have gone to? You know, she just didn't, you know, kind of ascend up in the air and float off. She had to have left that location very specifically, probably walking away or having been walked away from that location. So you begin to look at this and some of the other factors that come into play. Well, do you have a person that tracks humans that's out there that can look for sign?

Things like cloth caught in trees, threads, reading sign of say footprints, disturbed vegetation, which you would look for, things that are broken, things that are pressed away. Because if you have somebody, let's just say you have somebody that is in an altered state, that altered state is going to impede their ability to find a standard path to walk down. So they're going to walk through overgrown brush areas. And a person that's keen to this, that can look at this, can understand, well, this area of vegetation has been penetrated by somebody or something. You can see these broken branches. You can see the ground is pressed down. All the vegetation is pressed down.

They're going to be really keen to follow that and see that. One of the things that you're hoping is not going to happen though is that you'll have a volunteer that might walk through the same area and contaminate the area or disrupt it from its original pristine composition you mentioned something that i found absolutely fascinating in talking about the cadaver dogs they can smell bones even when there is no organic matter remaining? Well, yeah. And, you know, bone itself is, in fact, organic. But kind of what you will have, the problem is we're influenced so much by media, you know, the things that we see on television, all those sorts of things.

You think, you know, people when they think skeleton or skeletonized remains, they see some whitewashed collection of bones that have been created on a set somewhere. That's not the reality. These bones are going to be, first off, unless they're sitting out in the desert somewhere, they're not going to be bleached white. They're going to have kind of a yellow appearance to them, and there will still be remnant of tissue that's left behind. But that remnant of tissue is not going to be as robust as it would have been in the earlier stages. And here's another thing that occurs with skeletal remains is that as bodies are left out in nature and you have all of the local fauna, which, you know which when we're talking about forensic biology, talking about flora and fauna, flora being the plants and fauna being the local animal kingdom that inhabits that particular area. The fauna, whether it's raccoons or possums or even squirrels, yes, squirrels, or certainly dogs or hogs, if you live in an area where there's wild hogs, they will root around bodies and they will drag things off. So many times you can take a cadaver dog out in these areas and they will have

multiple hits on decomposing remains, even if it is bone, because these animals will take them to their burrows and place them in these locations. So you're getting hits, multiple hits all over the place, as opposed to say something that is what's referred to as concentrically located. We've heard the term eccentrically. Well, as the body is essentially taken apart, these remains become eccentric to the initial location, the primary scene. And so, you'll have them dispersed all over the place. And this can be very, very confusing. That's why it's very important as to when you find those elements that are separate from what you believe is the primary scene, can look at it and you know you can kind of surmise what had happened is this a post-mortem event is this something where you have a remain a skeletal remain an element let's say for instance it's a vertebral body a bone from

the spine where an animal is taken at that location maybe buried it or maybe simply gnawed on it and then walked away and left that behind? Or is this something more sinister even than that, where you have somebody that has, say, for instance, dismembered a body and left that portion there. It may have never been touched by an animal, but you document it in that location. And animal behaviorists also look at these kinds of things to see what locations these animals traipse off with. And if you have, say, two competing animal groups, they're not necessarily going to go in the same location with that remain that they find. You can even see this behavior in dogs. If you have a bunch of dogs around and you give elements

for them to chew on and that sort of thing, they're going to take them off in different directions many times because that is theirs. They possess that thing. They're going to take it off. It's no different with human remains. They do the same. You'll see the same behavior. And particularly in the animal kingdom, there's a pecking order. That's why they talk about animals that are out there like bears and alligators and all sorts of things that are apex predators.

Well, smaller animals don't want to have anything to do with the bigger animals. They want to take that little piece they have and go to their location. So those are some of the things that you begin to look for out in this environment. A couple of months went by and the investigation into Emily Noble's disappearance continues. But then, as Nancy would say, a twist. A group of Emily's friends were out searching. What did they find, Joe? We're talking four months, four, count them, four months downrange since her birthday. You begin to look at this, and her friends have been searching high and low for her, have not been able to find her. I'm sure that they're just brokenhearted. But before I dig too deep

into this, just understand what these friends have been doing. They have stayed committed through this entire exercise. It's real easy for people to say, yeah, we're going to gather together and go look for somebody, but you're still doing it four months down the range. That gives you an idea as to how much they loved Emily. Four months. Four months. They just didn't quit. They just kept on.

And what is so striking about this is that when these four friends were purposefully out looking for their friend, they were out there with purpose to find her. They did. they were out there with purpose to find her they did you know being a death investigator by trade it wasn't me that generally found bodies i think maybe in the entire course of my career i found actually found maybe three bodies you're the one that is always summoned out after the body has been found. And I've always wondered about a civilian that's out wandering about, particularly an individual that might be vested, and they come across a body. It's got to be one of the most shocking things that anyone could be subjected to. It would have to be a horrifying experience, especially to find your friend in the position and the state that the body was in. As Emily's friends were out searching, they came across a decomposing body

that was found in a kneeling position near a tree, and there was a rope, what appeared to be a rope, suspended from the tree. It actually turned out that it was a USB cord around Emily's neck. They had to use dental records to identify Emily Noble. Yeah, you're talking four months downrange, as I previously mentioned. And during that period of time and in this environment remember we we've gone through the entire summer here remember let's let's reflect back just for a second she went missing back in may all right she was not found until september so regardless of what geographic

location you may live in in our country in the united states temperatures are going to begin to rise you know going into well starting temperatures are going to begin to rise you know going into well starting in april they begin to rise and and then you know they'll gradually fall off but with heat with heat as we've previously discussed on body bags with heat comes more rapid decomposition the colder it is the slower decomposition is, the hotter it is, the quicker it happens. And the fact that they were able to find her body still intact. And to say that the body is intact is in air quotes here, because it's one of the most bizarre things I've heard of in some time. They did find her remains there.

And this is not like you can walk up to emily's mortal remains and say yeah that's emily all right i've never been a fan of that i'm not a fan of showing family's bodies you know the old idea where you pull the sheet back and they look at the face say yeah that's my loved one i like scientific verification and as you had mentioned jackie just a moment ago they did use dental anti-mortem dental records you had mentioned, Jackie, just a moment ago, they did use dental, anti-mortem dental records. You have to track down a dentist because you suspect that it might be her, but you have to have a forensic odontologist who is a forensic dentist that will come in and actually do a dental chart. Just think about going to your dentist and the dentist

charting your teeth in life. Forensic odontologists, though many times they're known for bite mark examination, where they really make their money is identifying bodies because the teeth are so static. You know, they're there. It's not like other things in the body. It's as accurate as you can be without getting into the area of DNA, which they eventually did with Emily. But you compare the antemortem, which means prior to death, with post-mortem dental charting. So you're looking for missing teeth, which may have been missing in life. Say somebody had had, I'll give you an example, if someone has had their wisdom teeth extracted in life, well, if you come across a body

and they still have their wisdom teeth, automatically that person doesn't qualify. That chart that you have, that you suspect that it might be, that person's out of the bedding at that point in time. But if you see that their wisdom teeth are missing and the anti-mortem chart that you have indicates those wisdom teeth, that's one box you can check. Then you go and look at fillings to see what teeth are filled. Did she have any cavitations in her teeth? Did she have any replacements? Was there a bridge there? Did she have caps on her teeth? You know, some people will get porcelain caps covering their teeth, crowns, those sorts of things, any kind of manifestations. Teeth are absolutely fascinating in a as for their utility to identify a body. And not just that, but the position of teeth, because teeth, they have multiple planes of identification. It's the basis why people get corrective things done to their teeth all the time.

You know, when we're kids, people get braces placed on their teeth because teeth rotate, you know, along the compass face 360 degrees. Along those points, they can rotate in any number of degrees. And people want to get those shifted back so that they look, quote unquote, normal. You know, whatever that means relative to teeth. So they can be pitched forward, pitched back. They can pitch sideways and they can rotate. So those are unique to each individual. And so what makes it even more unique is that there are 32 teeth in the adult mouth. So that's what makes it so fascinating.

When you begin to do the math on this, the opportunity becomes exponential in order to identify. So that's why they rely upon this. But once they got her identified, because you could not look at her body and say that that is in fact her, then the assessment begins to, well, what actually happened to her? You talk about this ligature that was found in place around her neck or her neck area you know at first i'm sure that they thought that it probably was a rope or some kind of cord turned out to be a usb cord which is not something that's very robust you know you think about i mean how many of us out there have had to replace a usb cord because it just craps out on so you can't can't use it any longer. It becomes frayed. They're fragile, that sort of thing.

A USB cord is going to be used in order to hang yourself with because that's what they were saying. They were saying that this appeared to be, at first, a suicide. And the fact that she was down for this period of time and in a kneeling position when she was found fully clothed. Her skeletal remains were still intact, Jackie. This is mind-blowing. In a kneeling position beneath this tree with this USB cord around her neck

and then anchored to the tree somehow. The authorities had not been very specific about it. But this was entirely supporting her weight at this moment in time and you want to know something else what's really fascinating about this she had decomposed so much huh that when they got her remains back to the coroner's office her total her total body weight, including clothing, was 19 pounds. 19 pounds, but yet the body had remained intact, which is absolutely fascinating to me in this case. There's so much about this case fascinating. I am intrigued, fascinated, and perplexed by the fact that her body was in a kneeling position and remained there. Now, looking at the USB cord, I have never seen a USB cord longer a 10 feet, you know, a USB cord that's only 10 feet, then you're looking at a tree branch that's really not very high off the ground.

So most people, when you think of hanging yourself, you think, okay, my feet doesn't touch the ground. Right. So how is that possible? Yeah, that's a fallacy that people are suspended. Let's go ahead and eradicate that to begin with. That's untrue. As a matter of fact, I've had probably more people that are not totally suspended as opposed to having been suspended. When I say suspended, I mean their feet are not on the floor at all,

that their body essentially is floating in air again. We're at the mercy of the entertainment world because that's how it's portrayed that's very dramatic isn't it when you think about you know how many times we've seen a movie where a person opens a door and there's two feet dangling in the air that's just not the case i've when we begin to think about the length of the ligature you talked about the usb cord you haven't seen one that's longer than than 10 feet you know you can go into a truck stop i think about this in trips i take you can go in the truck stop and get a replacement usb cord and you're right they are very long you know you plug it in in the charger in the front of the car and you can hand it over you know over your shoulder to your kids in the back seat because they're complaining they can't charge their phone and yeah that's that's the

greatest length but you don't really need that much. I've actually had people that have hung themselves with hairdryer cords where the actual body of the hairdryer is hanging beneath the neck. It doesn't require much, but people do not need to be, and just hear me right, do not need to be suspended in order to hang themselves. I've had them in a kneeling position. I've had them in the seated position as well how does your fight or flight instinct if you were trying to hang yourself not go oh wait a minute i don't want to do this if you are able to touch the ground and save yourself how do you keep from

doing that i've i've always been fascinated by this and i think that a lot of it has to do not with the occlusion of the airway that is where the airway is being blocked where it's clamping down because you know you begin to think about well i mean any of us that have been in an environment where we lose our breath say when you're a kid and you're you know there's an old game people would play a pig pile you know everybody piles on top of one another and you're gasping for air and you're fighting because you can't breathe. It's not the same mechanism.

It's not the same mechanism at all. Remember, when you're talking about a ligature, the airway, yeah, is compromised to a great degree. But the other thing that is even more compromised, it's more greatly compromised, is your blood flow. What happens when those areas are blocked? You know, you've got your carotid vessels that are supplying your brain with oxygenated blood. Well, I'll tell you what happens. There's a sleepiness that sets in. There's a sleepiness that sets in and people will sit themselves in these positions and slowly sink to the floor. There's a lack of oxygen saturation going to the brain, okay, vis-a-vis the blood, not the airway.

The airway is the uptake, you know, you're just flying through your lungs. No, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about oxygenated blood making its way to the brain. You have a noxic event where the flow of oxygenated blood is being shut down to the brain and people become sleepy at that point in time. That's the only way I've ever been able to explain this because it's fascinating to me when I see someone that is not totally suspended. They're either sitting on their backside or on their knees and they've hung themselves this way. You know, we have this with autoerotic cases many times where people will hang themselves intentionally,

and it's ruled, of course, those are ruled as accidental deaths. And it is because the blood flow has been cut off to the brain, not the oxygen itself, not the airway. And the airway, if you're being smothered or choked or something like that, that does initiate that fight or flight. When we look at the injuries that Emily Noble had, we find that she was strangled. Yet she also had some severe injuries to her face and neck. Yeah, we do.

And that is what has led authorities to begin to question as to whether or not this case was in fact a suicide. And they've come to the made to look as though this was a hanging a self-inflicted hanging as opposed to something much more nefarious and dark and let me give you the evidence that i have for this if you think about the base of your tongue and how many times have we talked about this you know over our time together jack not just on body bags but yeah yeah that's what we're going to talk about The hyoid bone sits so high up in the neck. And again, I'll refresh everybody that doesn't remember. The hyoid bone is the only non-articulated bone in the human body. That means it's not connected to any other bone.

And its sole purpose is to anchor the tongue in the back of the throat. You begin to think about how high up in your throat the back of your tongue is. It doesn't go all the way down, you know, all the way down your throat. It's anchored in the back, and it's anchored by the hyoid very, very high up. So, you begin to couple that, and you look at the diameter, which is, I don't know, a quarter of an inch maybe for a USB cord. How's a USB cord going to break? It would have to be so high high and you would have to fall with such force and it would have to be specifically targeted and here's the thing about her fractures and i say fractured notice i say fractures plural the hyoid bone is shaped like a horseshoe or some people say

you'll hear forensic pathologists talk about it as a bird-like structure. That means it's got wings. You've got the left greater horn and the right greater horn, which are the end tips of this thing. Okay. Like just think about the tips of the wings of a bird. All right. Both of those, both of those wings in Emily's case are fractured. You know what that requires? That requires specific targeted pressure to those areas for a sustained period of time. The only way you achieve that is by either a C-clamp or a throttling. C-clamp is a single hand that goes up high on the neck and you begin to squeeze down like you're squeezing an orange or throttling where you've got your thumbs crossed

over in that kind of classic theatrical choking somebody out and you're high up on the neck and you're squeezing but not only was emily's hyoid fractured in multiple locations but also her thyroid cartilage which sits inferior which is just a fancy word for below below the hyoid it's a cartilaginous body that kind of contains you know where our airway is and everything it was fractured as well so you've got cartilage that was fractured. That's how much pressure was applied. You're not just talking about a bone, which we think about fracturing with bones. We don't think about cartilage being fractured. In her case, her thyroid cartilage was actually fractured, was fractured and snapped along the way. There's evidence that she's got damage to

her maxilla. If everybody will essentially take their index finger and touch above their upper teeth that hard area where your your teeth are implanted or set that your that's your maxilla that's the hard palate up there that was damaged as well you say well how are those two things associated well in in my, if you get trauma to the maxillary area, that's submission. That's you're going to submit. You're putting your hand forcefully over their mouth, for instance, or you're punching them in that area and you're directly causing trauma to that hard area above their upper teeth to get them to submit. And then a hand or some other item that you can direct force with is placed over their throat. And she's not a very

large woman. She's very delicate looking in life. You see her, she's very slightly built. It wouldn't take much. And you begin to apply that direct pressure. You begin to squeeze like that. And essentially what happened is that the hyoid was fractured during all of this, which led to her death. And also her airway at the top end was compromised because the thyroid cordilage was fractured. No, no, no, no. Wait a minute. Let me play devil's advocate for just a second. Could those injuries have happened after her death if she was suspended by this USB cord? Could that have happened as her body decomposed and it changed the angle of how her body was resting?

I might agree with you if we said that the USB cord was overlying one specific area and it gave way the structural continuity just it gave in to this this time that her body spent spent decomposing but two specific areas you're talking about a bone that's very isolated and with two bony prominences that are several that are probably two to three inches in width apart. Well, let's just say an inch and a half to two inches. And both of those features of that singular bone were fractured. I find that highly unlikely. It would tell me that you had to have direct pressure applied for a protracted period of time. And it would have to be an increasing pressure to get this bone in these two separate locations anatomically to snap.

That's what would have to take place. And one of the things that we look for with, and I'm going to kind of tell everybody, you know, kind of how we differentiate between a stage suicide and a real suicide. When you're looking at a ligature that is around somebody's neck that has been used to kill themselves with, a noose, if you will, because of the suspension, because of the weight of the body the body hanging down and it's being supported by this news on the exterior of the neck say the tissue that's left behind you'll have this interesting feature that will present itself that's called tinting and i like the tinting on your car windows tinting like we're going tinting tonight like like a pup tint, T-E-N-T-I-N-G, tinting feature that literally travels upward in an acute angle so that the noose forms kind of the top of the pup tint at the backside of the head. And so you'll have this deep furrow. And remember, USB cord is not very robust. It's very, very thin. So, the rule of

thumb for us as death investigators, the more narrow the ligature, the deeper the furrow, because you've got a smaller surface area to support the body weight. So, if someone used, say, for instance, a belt, say a three-inch wide belt, the furrow is going to be shallow okay it's not going to be real deep because you've got that wide surface area to support the body weight with a usb cord however it's going to dig in it'll be very very deep now if a person has been hanging for a protracted period of time they'll have this tinting feature. However, if there was other pressure that was applied below that, say like a broad area where you have hemorrhage that's not running, say, acutely upward that's associated with the tinting feature, but yet you have hemorrhage that's running kind of

parallel to the shoulders where it's going straight back in the soft tissues of the neck, that's an indication that someone has applied direct pressure downward as opposed to acutely upward, and the pattern would not match. And so, you've got these two things that are staring at you, you're trying to make heads or tails of, and that's one of the big indicators that we look for specifically in this area. There are other things you look for in staged suicide, but specifically in this area, this is one of the things that you look for to try to determine if an event was staged or not. One of the other issues, Joe, that came up in looking at this being staged, let me say now that Emily's husband, Matthew Moore, was arrested and charged with Emily's death. And one of the facts that came into play was that Moore's son, Joey, committed suicide. He hung himself. Yeah, and that, you know, certainly as an investigator, you have to look into that.

Okay. certainly as an investigator, you have to look into that, okay? That's something you're going to have to dig into because once you have an individual in a family, and listen, understand this very important point here. Many times you will have copycat events in families where there's suicide or history of suicide. People will witness this happen in their family, and then they'll follow suit. Okay, and I think that that's the first thing you're going to check off, you know, check off the list. You're going to look at this and say, well, is there any indication here? You have to explore that as an investigator. You have to look into that and say, well, is there any similarity here between what has happened to Emily

and compare that with what happened to Matt's son, Joey, you know, many months before when he died. And, you know, according to the press, you know, Joey had a tremendous amount of psychological illness that he was dealing with. And, you know, what kind of really makes this quite sad is the fact that Emily loved this kid. He became part of her family. From what we are understanding, Emily took over quite a bit of the parental role in Joey's life. I mean, he was really debilitated psychologically, and she would tend to him. She would watch after him and really apparently loved him deeply. And so you could see how his death would impact someone. And not only that, but you

begin to look at Emily's history as well. And you know that her first husband, who people have stated that she regarded as the love of her life. He had taken his life. There are not a lot of specifics as to how that first husband took his life. But her life's been touched. I mean, it's certainly been touched by suicide, like many of us that are out there in public. But in hers in particular, two people that she truly cared for had lost their lives. And as investigators, as unpleasant as it is, you have to exhaust every possibility because at the end of the day, you want to look at these cases and make sure that not only are they thoroughly investigated, but if there is evidence, they are thoroughly prosecuted as well. Matthew Moore has been arrested and charged with Emily's death.

Although, let us do point out, this case has not yet been adjudicated and everyone is innocent until proven guilty. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.