Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Toes in the Ground

Episode Date: February 23, 2025

A landlord staging a property in preparation for a new tenant, sees what appears to be the foot of a child sticking out of the ground. The landlord calls police, and they find the remains of 9-year-old Zemar King III buried in a shallow grave. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss mother Brandee Pierce, who is caught in Georgia in January, where she is already in jail. She's  charged with abuse of her three-year-old days before Christmas. Joseph Scott Morgan also explains how investigators determined how Brandee Pierce "smothered" and "choked" her 9-year-old son to death before burying him in a backyard grave and then skipping town.  Transcript Highlights00:00.01 Introduction01:53.70 Zemar King, little boy left in shallow grave by his mother04:57.48 Would a human foot look different than a plastic foot in the dirt?10:25.76 Investigators benefit from "containment"14:33.47 Reactionary event, panic19:12.14 How long has it been since victim died24:41.84 What actually happened to Zemar?30:15.49 Hands and feet of Zemar were tied together36:24.94 Determining how Zemar died - smothering / neck compression39:28.72 Conclusion: Case is still active, we will updateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Moore. Over the course of my adult life, like many of you, I'm sure, I've been, I've found myself in the position of having to rent. And the rentals that I have had, it's always a mixed bag. You never know what you're gonna get, you know, and it's amazing how they can kind of polish things up to kind of draw you in, lure you in, if you will. Now, I was never one of these that was in some kind of huge apartment complex, you know, like they have today. I kind of stuck with renting even a space in an otherwise occupied home. I've had basement apartments. I've rented

entire homes. In New Orleans in particular, I would have an affinity for shotguns. Shotgun doubles is what they were called. You know, everything, as they say, you could fire a shotgun through the front door and you'd never hit a wall because it'd go out the back door. But I always liked those homes and I liked the history of them. But there are certain structures out there, I think, and locations that develop a history along the way. I've always stated as a death investigator that I truly believe that places many times are haunted. And they're not necessarily haunted by ghosts, but by memories and the horror potentially of what happened. Today, we're going to talk about one such case that has come to my attention that is absolutely horrific and

has been described that way by a prosecutor. Today, we're going to talk about a little boy named Zmar King who was left in a shallow grave in the backyard of a rental home by his mother. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Dave, I got to tell you something. You know who the, you know what the coolest place was that I ever rented? I bet you would never guess this about me because it was kind of like lightning that kind of struck. Do you remember when we were kids and one of the coolest movies that came out in the early 70s was the original Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston.

Okay. Yeah. Crashlands, Back on Earth, In the Future. And, you know, it had like Roddy McDowell in it and, you know, a whole cast of characters. Dude, I rented a basement apartment, which, by the way, is dangerous in New Orleans because everything floods. And that did happen to me, by the way.

I rented a basement apartment from an old retired guy who was actually a Marine that had fought at Iwo Jima. Wow. And he was the chief makeup artist for the Planet of the Apes. Oh, wow.

And I had no idea. I was wondering how you're fitting that into renting an apartment, man. It was, no, he purchased this place and he was not from New Orleans. Oh, wow. Yeah. He was, he was from Cali. He had grown, born and raised in Cali and wound up like many people do falling in love with falling in love with New Orleans, you know, on one of these visits. And it was it was quite amazing, you know, just to get to know him and learn about old Hollywood, because he he started working in Hollywood right after he got out of the Marine Corps in World War Two.

So he was in that the studio, you know, the studio era of time, the studio system. Yeah. And so it was pretty fascinating. And it was he was a cool landlord. I mean, it was it was awesome. But this landlord in this story is it's a shocking way that he tells this. Imagine, Joe, you're renting a property. The former tenant is gone and you've had to go in and stage the property, make it look better. Oftentimes they'll even bring in furniture and things like that. So the individual looking at the rental can get an idea of what it could look like with stuff in it. And it's while he's preparing to stage the house, the apartment that he sees in the backyard

something odd. And I cannot imagine what your first thought would be. But if I saw something that looked like a small foot sticking up out of the dirt, I would think baby doll. I would think somebody had a Halloween joke. You know, that's where my mind would go. It would not go to human being to child. That would not be part of it. And I thought, I can't wait to ask Joe this. Would a foot, a human foot sticking up out of the ground look different than a fake foot, a plastic foot?

Because a plastic foot made for a doll or a mannequin would not change based on time or anything else. It's going to be sticking up out of the dirt like a toy. But a human foot would have suffered even for a very limited amount of time, some type of decomposition. Oh, yeah. Would it be obvious to the regular person? You know, I think, and this goes back to a conversation that you and I, my friend, have had many times relative to doing the double take where your

brain is trying to say that this is something other than maybe what my eyes are telling. And with decomposition, it's kind of like one of those puzzles or one of those images that you try to stare at for a particular period of time to try to pick out what's real, what's a true feature. And because of a normal biological process, such as decomposition, um, you might look on the ground and think, um, that it's debris laying there, like a piece of wood, because it's going to have, unlike, say, for instance, and this is a great point, where you talked about a baby doll or a mannequin.

Those things are manufactured, basically plastic, and their form stays the same, other than weathering over a long period of time. But with a foot, a human foot, if you were to see it month after month, it is going to change in appearance. And it will be so modeled in this environment and also would turn to earth, which my assumption is, is that there was turned earth here. You know, our tissues blacken over a period of time as well. They will go dark, if not properly preserved. And so you'll have this thing that kind of blends into the natural

environment. So my suspicion is, is that the finder in this case, and of blends into the natural environment. So my suspicion is that the finder in this case, and of course, we always talk about the finder, don't we? We talk about how important they are because they're the first eyes on. The finder in this particular case looked down, and I'm sure that within their brain, they're thinking, okay, what precisely is this? And they're drawn in and suddenly they begin to move toward that location upon closer examination. And all of a sudden, details begin to pop out. And the foot in and of itself is highly complex as far as an anatomical structure. Each toenail, by the way, each digit of the foot has got a specific characteristic to it in size, structure, and the composition. And so when you begin, and I can only imagine, you begin to make out those details, particularly of the tips of each toe.

And if everybody will just think about how your toes are kind of graduated in size, going from the big toe to the one that goes wee, wee, wee all the way home, you know, you're looking at these and they're going to cease to blend. Now you're starting to see an outline. And I've had this happen, Dave, on scenes where I've had people that are literally melted into the environment, okay, with decomposition. And even with significant lighting that is out there, strong lighting, I've had to stare for a protracted period of time so that I could kind of outline things where I could try to understand where the outer perimeter

is of the final resting spot. And we're not even talking, and this is kind of fascinating about this case, we're not even talking about animal activity, you know, where when we get into this phase where elements of the body have been taken away. That's not what we're looking at here. This foot is appreciable. And that, as you mentioned, sticking up out of the earth is a huge benefit for crime scene investigators and for ME investigators that go out there. Because the key, the watchword here is containment. Containment. containment. Because, you know, therein, as we've talked about with human remains, human remains are the primary piece of evidence that you have at any scene, okay? These remains, Dave, are not scattered to the wind. So, you have them buried in one particular

spot. And if there's no other defect in the earth where you've got other elements of the body sticking up or where you have indication of maybe burrowing animals, that sort of thing. As far as this is, this is a goldmine for anybody working in forensics because you've got containment here. You know, Joe, when I'm looking over the story and Pierce actually dug a shallow grave in the backyard. And, you know, whenever we see something like this, usually it's, it's the end result of something that went too far. A mother, father disciplining a child and taking it a step too far, causing their death. And then a panic sets in to to get rid of the body to, you know, that's where we end up searching in trash yards and things like that. In this case, she's in a rental home, Joe, and she goes out in the backyard and digs a shallow grave to place her nine year old son.

Yeah. But then after doing that, she leaves. You have pointed out on many occasions that oftentimes the suspect will. We'll take the. The victim and get rid of them close to home. And I always thought that was so they could kind of Lord over the body. They could protect the body. And in this, and that way, Hey,

if anybody comes looking, I can misdirect them someplace else. I can protect what I've done. Nobody can find, but she didn't do that. She buries them in a shallow grave and then bolts, doesn't pay rent and leaves. And there's nobody there to prevent the landlord from coming. As a matter of fact, he has to come and stage the house. He has to go through the front yard and the backyard. He has to inspect everything.

So I guess in my head, I'm thinking she did now she there's the reason why they very close to home and stay there. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm glad you revisited that because we always, you know, I always think about control, control over, you know, I actually had a guy that that beat his grandmother to death. And interestingly enough, for those that are familiar with Atlanta, this was right in the height. I think it was probably in about 98, maybe. It was right in the height of what's referred to in Atlanta as Freaknik. I remember that.

And it's a big spring break, you know, gathering. I remember it was hot. And he beat his grandmother to death and then takes her and buries her in a clay wall beneath the house, um, of where he had beaten her to death. And I've, you can look at it a couple of ways. You can look, well, it's convenient. I can do this under the cover of darkness. I can just take her from the house and put her under the house. And I'm not going to be seen, you know, leaving the home with the body in the car so that anybody could question what I'd done. you are controlling in that sense, but in this particular case, Dave, because, and you know, you pointed this out to me yesterday when we were talking about the case, this

is a rental, this is a rental. So for me, I think I concur with your assessment that this was a reactionary event to something that had, in fact, gone horribly wrong. It was, and I hate to reduce it down to this, this was a matter of convenience for this individual. And of course, I believe that panic set in And this precious little life was taken. And they're disposed of in a property that they didn't even own. dave i'd like to know a bit more uh about this and i'll go and say this familial dynamic lord we spent a lot of time talking about this on body bags uh you know again the old trope about you have to look at those that are within the intimate circle. You know, who is it that would put their hands on, in this case, nine-year-old Zemar King to the point where he winds up deceased and buried in the backyard of a rental home? What is this familial dynamic like? If you just kind of the mother's side a little bit there actually are a couple of children in the home um she had uh you had nine-year-old

zamar and you have uh her three-year-old son that was there as well so you got a six-year age difference between the two and by the way I don't know if she has other children. Those are just the two that she had in the home in Detroit that we're aware of. She ends up leaving. The police suggest that she kills Zamar sometime in the in October. They don't know exactly the date because she killed him and then buried him in the backyard. And being that she was the sole custodian of the child, there could be days where nobody saw them together or what have you. So they're not exactly sure from that standpoint.

But they do know that she left in a hurry. She didn't like have a lease that ran out and she moved. She left in a hurry, didn't tell the landlord. And based on what we're seeing timetable wise, I'm guessing when she didn't pay the rent for November, you know, the landlord comes by, sees that she's gone. And that's when he starts making plans to rent the place again. Meanwhile, she has gone to Georgia with her three-year-old, and she's there while police are uncovering in Detroit, you know, that we've got this nine-year-old boy who was just killed, left behind. Where's the mom and yeah and so they end up she's arrested in georgia um where she had moved i mean she i'm trying to find out what she was arrested for originally in georgia joe because they had her in custody in Georgia when police began looking for her in Detroit.

It was an unrelated charge, unrelated to the murder or the death of Zamar. But she was in jail in Georgia. And then as police were doing the old be on the lookout for her, they had traced her to Georgia. And again, I don't know how all the detectives keep things straight. You know, they really are incredible at what they got to be. You got to be a great note taker. Yeah. And keep up with your notebook and make sure that everything has a time annotation on it relative because it does get very. were talking about with multiple jurisdictions involved, because, you know, the folks down

in Georgia where she wound up, which I think was Brookhaven, if I'm not mistaken, those authorities there are going to have to communicate with those individuals in Detroit where, of course, Zamar was found because they're trying to mesh all this together relative to a timeline. Now, look, they're going to come they're going to come to us in forensics. And as you well know, the biggest question that whether it's the general public or police always ask us is not, not just how did they die, but how long has it been? And we can only, you know, we can only frame these things out, um, to a certain degree where we can say, okay, this is,

this is what we believe as far as it. Now, with Zamar, he's last known or she's last known, the mother, Pierce, is last known to be present there back in October. Okay. Well, she bolts after that period of time. And Dave, one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this case today, this is a brand new case. This is something that popped onto our radar. And again, Pierce, in this case, I have to make this disclaimer, she's merely a suspect and has been charged, alleged.

And we'll get into her charges in a bit. But it was so over the top and so very bizarre, you know, considering a lot of the stuff that comes across your desk and my desk that I wanted to address it. And just just to say that she's not you know, she's not been convicted in this case. But, you know, he was found and correct me if I'm wrong. I think his remains were actually found January the 9th, if I'm not mistaken, up in Detroit or approximates that period of time. Actually, Joe, the the remains of Zamar were found on January 6th. And she was arrested in Georgia on January 10th. Now, on January 10th for the death of Zamar. But to be very careful here, she already was in the system with police on child abuse charges, alleged child abuse of the three-year-old son.

Please, Dave, please tell me that the three-year-old is alive. The three-year year old is alive. OK. And again, you're mentioning how new this story is. It is very new. We're talking a couple of weeks ago now. So to get the timeline is they believe police believe that sometime in October, Zamar was killed, that he was smothered and choked. We need to get into the autopsy in just a minute. But they believe they investigators believe he was killed in October and that she fled town after the first of November. The landlord and that's what I was looking at the dates and how long before a landlord, you know, starts the process of moving somebody out that doesn't pay rent, you know, things like that. And so she leaves his body's buried in a shallow grave in the backyard.

She's in Georgia and runs afoul of the law, allegedly for abusing the three year old. On January 6th, they find the body of Zamar in the backyard. His hands and feet are tied, by the way. And they then take her into custody for that, for the death of Zamar in Georgia. Her other child, the three-year-old, is put into foster care in Georgia. And this is all happening just last month, so a few weeks ago. And of course, they're going through the entire process now of putting this case back together. But that kind of lines you up there. Wow. This takes this to an entirely different kind of ghastly level.

First off, thank the sweet Lord above this three-year-old is still alive. Because, you know, I found, Dave, in a lot of these cases that we cover, God, this sounds horrible, and forgive me, but I'm going to go ahead and say it. I don't care. The first one's hard. But after that, there's an ease, I think, that overcomes the perpetrator. I've done this already. I can do it again. It's not a bridge too far, if you will. The initial event, you know, I've lightened my load by abstaining myself of this nine-year-old. How much easier now would my life be if I didn't have the three-year-old? And I just thank the good Lord that this child is now hopefully safe and is protected and is not,

you know, within arm's reach of this alleged perpetrator. Because, you know, it's amazing to me that a mama could harm her child. Let's don't even say harmed. Let's say killed, murdered, bury a child in the backyard of where that child probably played, probably walked over that same earth. Bolts out of town with a three-year-old. You know, they're not, where else do you have to go? You know, I talk about how there's, I've said this before, but there's, you know, there's no basement in the house of depravity. It just keeps going and going and going. Hopefully, the future is going to break a little bit brighter perhaps for this three-year-old. But still, we have to understand what actually happened to Zamar. Dave, I'm going to say something to you right now that I don't know that I've ever mentioned to you on Body Bags. And it actually applies to the title of the show.

Did you know that in medical legal death investigation that we don't simply have one size body bag? Did you know that we have children's body bags? Most people don't know that. No, I didn't. And we will, we do utilize those. And a lot of people don't understand that. And it's have what's referred to as you have freezers where you store bodies, but you also have what are referred to as cool rooms, which are these big, big walk in rooms where bodies are literally on the gurney. OK, they're on they're on a tray, but they're not like slid into the wall. And one of the doors that opens up. So when you walk in, you're surrounded by bodies.

I mean, you've got, and generally, depending upon the office and the manufacturer, you can have white body bags, you can have black body bags. I've seen them in blue as well. I think I've even seen orange. But you walk in and Dave, it's always those little tiny body bags that you see in that room that you know you're about to have a really bad day. And when you think about Zamar, and I have no way of knowing if the Detroit medical examiner used a child body bag, but he's only nine, Dave. He's probably diminutive.

He's smaller. And we carried these bags, you know, and it denotes something that's different. You know, kids are always different. I've mentioned this over and over, multiple interviews I've given over the year, over the years rather. When you see this, it's striking. And then you line all of the bodies up in the body bags, uh, at the various stations where you're about to do the examinations. And it's still, it stands out. bag that contains the remains of an adult. But when you pull down that zipper and that zipper has a very, very distinctive sound, it's very robust compared to other sounds.

The morgue in and of itself kind of echoes with sounds. And you open that bag and you see some precious little face sticking up. And when I think about Zamar and the condition, my friend, that he was left in, what type of willpower does it take for you to dig not just a grave, but a shallow grave. And then to stare down on those mortal remains of that precious little child and you start pitching dirt in on top of them. To what low do you have to sink in order to get past that hurdle? I think a lot of people think that individuals like me, you get numb to it. And I've been around dead bodies since I was 20 years old.

We're talking about an accused who I don't know how many, you know, dead bodies Pierce has been around. I cannot imagine she's been around dead bodies of her own offspring. If that gives you, you know, you can you even begin to plumb the depths of that? You know, so that's one of the things that's really striking, you know, about child deaths and about child homicides in particular and the way bodies are treated. You know, the prosecutor in this case, her name is Kim Worthy, and she actually talked about it. She said that, I've been a prosecutor for a long time, and I often say that I have seen it all.

The horrors of this child abuse case defy that. The alleged actions of this defendant are among the most callous I have seen and hope never to see again. We've got the details from Zamar being alleged, no, not allegedly killed. He was killed, they believe, in October. They believe that he was then buried on that property by his mother and the hands and feet are tied, Joe. And they're not being specific if his hands and feet were tied before he was killed. Or if that happened after. No, I read one report where it said they thought that they were done post-mortem. Okay. And Dave, that raises another specter, brother. And here it is. How long had

Zamar been deceased? And just go with me here on this line of logic from an investigative perspective. If, in fact, Zamar had been deceased for some time, this child may have very well have had And in order to accommodate this horrible task that she decided upon, she had to break Riger or at least contain the limbs. The limbs are very hard to manage. So if she if, in fact, as has been alleged, she brought about the death of Zamar, if he's in a rigid position you might have to break riger and you can't do that it becomes bodies become very stiff and then in order to guarantee that he's going to stay in this kind of uh contained easily manipulated position uh and i'm i'm not talking about some kind of psychobabble manipulation thing.

I'm talking about physical manipulation of the body. If that's the case, then the hands could, in fact, be bound and the ankles be bound. The one interesting thing is she goes to trouble, allegedly, to bind the ankles, but yet the foot is sticking up out of the ground. And so you can kind of go with this line of logic, and you're thinking, what was this dynamic that had occurred? Because if I am to believe that report about this may have been done post-mortem, then why? Why go to this trouble? And there are certain scientific, you know, certain scientific conclusions that you begin to to reach relative to this. did zamar die how does a nine-year-old child and again the mother allegedly did this she's been charged with it but she also has a three-year-old and hey back to that timeline very quickly

after leaving detroit after burying her son leave allegedly going to georgia from detroit with her three-year-old police were called to her on December 20th, five days before Christmas of alleged child abuse of the three-year-old. And it was during the time that she was in jail on that charge that the other charges came through from Detroit and things started linking up, from the investigation standpoint in Detroit and Georgia and all that. But when I was trying to figure out what was taking place in that home and thinking, you know, you mentioned, well, you know, about somebody being able to repeat the worksheet, the worst thing you can do is kill somebody, right? That's top of the line. It doesn't get any worse than that. So if you've done it once, I mean, I had never thought about that, Joe. I did it before. I can do it

again. Was that what she was trying to do to the three-year-old? You know, somebody step in. I want to find out more of what took place with that child. But anyway, the nine-year-old, after they get the nine-year-old out of the grave, and I have to wonder, and you pointed out earlier that one of the questions we always ask is when. Can you tell me when this child died? And I think a lot of times we wanted to be very specific, what day and what time of the day. And you've cleared that up for me, and I'm thankful that you have because i really i was one of the many that thought that you could do it like counting the inside rings of a tree you know that you could get me down to lunchtime on the 23rd of november you know october whatever i i thought you could i didn't realize

how tough it was to determine i had no clue i really did think it was something you guys did no no we can approximate things. And I've talked about this before, as you well know. You've heard me, you know, blather on about it. And it's because it's it's one of those things that has to be dispelled because of what we hear in in modern media and, you know, in television shows and whatnot, because people think that we're, you know, that we're magical elves where we can facilitate these sorts of things. And that is just that's not the case where we can narrow this down. Is this, you know, this dynamic of decomposition, how does that play into making a terminal diagnosis? You know, where you're actually stating not just the manner. I think the manner is pretty obvious here.

We have homicide. But how compromised were the remains, you know, as the medical examiner stood over his little body in the morgue there? Well, it's interesting because they came up with a couple of possibilities here. They're saying smothering, but they also talk about net compression. And net compression, you know, when you think about something being compressed, okay, that is a force that is being applied to a specific area. So when you say net compression, it sounds very generalized to me, because if there was, say, a mechanical asphyxia, like you're using a ligature, then why not state that? But they saw something in the structures of the neck that gave them the impression that force had been applied to the neck

where perhaps the trachea is compromised. And if you feel your trachea in the center of your neck, it's cartilaginous. And you can actually fracture cartilage. But that's not firmly stated at this point in time because we don't have the autopsy report, and we shouldn't have it at this point in time. But did they see any little fractures in the cartilage that might marry up with somebody placing a hand,

like a C-clamp or something like that, over the trachea? But then they're saying smothering as well. And I'm really wondering they're saying smothering as well. And I'm really wondering what signs of smothering they saw, because smothering is arguably one of the most difficult diagnoses to make as far as from a medical legal death perspective, because you can use a hand. You can, you know, the classic idea, you can use a pillow, you know, that's pressing down on the nose and the mouth. But here's something that I've also entertained with this case, Dave. There are abusers out there, and we know that Ms. Pierce has been charged with abuse of a three-year-old.

In charge, not convicted. But did you know that sometimes abusers, and this goes back to an earlier statement you made. I don't know if you're aware of this, and you may have made a diagnosis here. Did you know that some abusers will block the airway of the child that they're abusing to deprive them of oxygen in order to get a point across? Okay. Whether they've got, they're running their mouth or they're doing something that the individual doesn't agree with. You've got an adult lording over a small child. So I'm going to show you, I'm going to put my hand over your nose and your mouth, and

that'll shut you up. And you'll feel that horror of that. Well, I think the question is, did that occur here? And it went too far? I don't know. But I promise you this. Zemar King, this nine-year-old, buried in the backyard of a rental home and abandoned, did not deserve this. And I can promise you this.

Myself and Dave Mack will be following up on this case to find more specifics and hopefully more answers. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Packs.