Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Unearthed in Vegas - The Esmeralda Gonzalez Story

Episode Date: June 4, 2023

A young Instagram model, Esmeralda Gonzalez, disappears in Las Vegas. In this episode of Body Bags, hosts Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack examine this chilling case reminiscent of old school "Mob justice,"  but this is a cover-up involving a U-Haul, 300 pounds of Quickcrete, lime, and a large water tank.  All-in-all the set up reveals the peculiarities of a crime scene that mirrors a Hollywood thriller.  Hear the harsh reality of forensics as it unravels the effects of the desert environment on human remains, the recovery of the victim's jewelry, and the painstaking process of identification.  Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Time-codes:  00:00 - Introduction. 01:20 - Case of Esmeralda Gonzalez: introduction and discussion. 03:05 - Esmeralda's life, circumstances, and disappearance. 04:00 - Vulnerabilities and dangers in Las Vegas. 05:45 - Predatory tactics towards individuals with mental illnesses. 07:15 - Introduction of felon Christopher Prestapino and his criminal background. 09:25 - The ordeal Esmeralda faced in Prestapino's house. 10:25 - Discussion on the effects of acute mental illness and methamphetamine. 12:10 - Conditions under which Esmeralda was kept and her experiences. 14:15 - Analysis of Prestapino's fear, paranoia, and further criminal acts. 15:30 - Prestapino's dilemma after Esmeralda's death. 17:30 - Effects and application of pool cleaner injection. 20:40 - Timeline of Esmeralda's disappearance and discovery of her body. 21:35 - Prestapino's attempt to dispose of the body and suspicious activities. 24:15 - Analysis of Prestapino's thought process and planning of the crime. 26:30 - Gruesome details of how Esmeralda's remains were encased. 27:45 - Actions leading to Prestapino's downfall. 29:10 - Challenges faced by forensic scientists during the case. 30:15 - Discovery of Esmeralda's jewelry and its implications. 31:45 - Discussion of the brutal nature of the crime and attempts to hide it. 32:35 - Decomposition and identification challenges in the harsh desert environment. 33:20 - Resolution of the case and the pursuit of justice. 33:30 - Outro.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I guess some folks might think that given my profession as a medical legal death investigator that I have a morbid fascination with death. I wouldn't say that. I certainly have a fascination with the science. Something I have always had an attraction to, and I mean that in the purest sense, are graveyards. There's something about the way the dead are remembered.

Stone monuments that are created, that are left behind by those that once walked among us. And they're to different degrees, aren't they? You can actually learn a lot about maybe a family history based upon how much money was spent in memorializing family members. But stone says something. It has a permanence to it. You know, if you think about a wooden cross, it just doesn't hold up like stone. I want to talk about a tomb that was created in haste for a young woman who lost her life in a most horrible way.

Today we're going to have a discussion about the kidnapping, murder, and concrete encasement of the remains of Esmeralda Gonzalez. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Dave Mack, I want to ask you something. I'm from New Orleans. We're famous for our graveyards down home. People take tours, you know. I'm sure many of our listeners have been to New Orleans. And I've spent time just walking through the graves because it's amazing. It's like walking through a huge kind of museum, if you will, an outdoor museum that never seems to diminish. Everywhere you turn, there's beauty to it. But as case today, there's not much beauty involved in this. Matter of fact, it may be one of the more horrible things we've covered in some time.

When I think about forensics, Joe, and I think about it, oftentimes when we cover stories and the crime, you cover a lot of background. When we get into the forensic, the body bags part, it oftentimes would not make sense if you didn't have more of the story like knowing what the significance is of a person being placed inside a cement tomb that boggled my mind when it comes to the death of esmeralda gonzalez there are so many aspects of this particular story and if any of you have followed it if you didn't follow each step along the way, you missed a major thing. Starting right off the bat, a beautiful 24-year-old Instagram model. Okay, that's for starters. 300,000 followers. That's nothing to sneeze at. I don't know if you do Instagram and stuff like that, but having 300,000 followers, that's good. You're onto

something there. Her family said that Esmeralda had gone to school and was looking forward to going to law school. Beautiful, smart, but she did have a few issues along the way that brought her into a situation in Las Vegas, in the suburbs of Vegas, that it's just heartbreaking. The family is crushed. They oftentimes looked at Esmeralda Gonzalez. She was so smart and looked at her as somebody they needed to protect from the world and the craziness in the world. And in this particular case, they were unable to protect her from herself and the crazies that she ended up with.

I don't think she became involved with them at all. I think she ended up with them purely out of happenstance as much as anything else. Yeah, and they don't call Vegas Sin City for nothing. Look, I mean, who am I to throw stones at Vegas? I've enjoyed myself in Vegas many times. But you have a lot of hustlers out there. You have a lot of people that are trying to make a buck any way that they possibly can. And sometimes, you know, you get off into these very dark areas. In Esmeralda's case, we use a metaphor, her tiny little ship, the rudder on her ship, it was impacted by mental illness. She, according to her family, was dealing with multiple

issues, everything from schizophrenia to bipolar. I'm glad you brought that up because it was her brother that said this early on in the investigation, Joe. He's the one that said it. And oftentimes that's not something people lead with because immediately, if you say this person is living with mental illness, okay, immediately, and I guess we're bad like this, but we immediately say, oh, it's her fault. Yeah. You know what? Nobody deserves to have what happened to her. Mental illness is something that needs to be treated. It's not something that needs to be used as an excuse for bad behavior of others. No, absolutely not. As a matter of fact, it's even more striking when you consider that you've got someone that is essentially this handicapped in a world that's

very dynamic, moving quickly. You're surrounded by people that are predators. And look, predators can spot folks that are weak in particular areas if you know people that have drug addiction problems predators can take advantage of that by enticement and those sorts of things if you have an individual that is suffering from some type of mental illness particularly that makes them paranoid you can threaten them and then promise to protect them from those things that they think they're seeing or that they're hearing. And that can be easily manipulated. Or if you have a sadistic streak running through you, you can use that to your advantage to terrify the person and keep them in a state of terror.

And I got to tell you, that's essentially what happened with Esmeralda, Dave. When we think of Vegas, oftentimes we think of the Vegas Strip and movies about Vegas. I've never actually been, Joe. Knowing myself the way I do, that's not a good place for me to go. I'm that guy that would lose $5 on a slot machine and mortgage my house trying to get it back. So I avoid that. In this particular case where Esmeralda Gonzalez lived in Las Vegas, and she was an Instagram model, as we mentioned, on May 31st, which in

the desert of Vegas, it gets hot early. It's not like in other parts of the country where late May can oftentimes be like springtime. It's dead summer in Vegas at this time. And Ms. Gonzalez, as we mentioned, she had some mental health things going on. She had been seen wearing lingerie and high heels, trying to work a deal on a car at a car dealership. Not something people would normally do. But in the pre-dawn hours of May 31st, she was seen on surveillance cameras, walking in her neighborhood, wearing the lingerie and seemed to be unsteady on her feet and she knocks on the door of a house and I don't know who she asked for or what she said but the people living in the home said you're at the wrong house dear when she left that house in the pre-dawn

hours of May 31st she went to another house what she ran into was not somebody who said no you're at the wrong house. It was somebody who said, I'm the devil, come in and let's party. And this is where the kidnapping comes in. When she knocked on that wrong door and was taken into Christopher Presapino's house, where all of the evil that can befall any one person began with a five foot tall, 24 year old Instagram model. Yeah. And the thing about this Presbyterian character is that he's a felon who has previously been hooked up on drug charges, certainly been on probation, and has been associated with cooking meth.

Actually, that was one of his charges. He had gone to jail as early as, I think, 2000, 2001 on drug charges. And in 2005, he actually was convicted. He was actually far deeper into it than most people would ever get as a small-time drug dealer. But he did have a job too. Yeah, yeah, he did. And I got to say something about this. I was amazed just this past year, this last iteration of CrimeCon, we were actually here. He worked for Bally's Paris. They're both connected. We were walking these same hallways at CrimeCon this past year and where we were doing presentations and everything relative to True Crime. Body Bags had a table set up there on Podcast Row. And when I saw that he worked there as a stagehand and had been working there, Dave, for a while, I think he got his first gig in like 1999.

So, it's not like this guy is not familiar with the environment, like he just kind of was plopped down in the middle of it. He understands the guts. He knows how the sausage is made in this environment. And more than likely, he can spot people a mile away and know who is easily preyed upon, perhaps. And that's probably the exact explanation of what happened to prey upon. When somebody shows up at your house in the pre-dawn hours dressed in lingerie and high heels and doesn't know where they are and they're at the wrong house and you say, no, this is the right

house. Come on in. They tied her up. It's important to understand that this guy has actually got a girlfriend as well who was involved in this with him. And I don't quite understand the degree of her involvement. But I do know this, that once he got her, Esmeralda, fragile, probably not taking medication. Once he got her inside this house, Dave, all hell broke loose. Because he gave her meth, he tied her to a chair. Then, he said, she started speaking with the devil's tongue. A little known fact about your host. When I was in college, I actually worked as a psych tech.

And it's not that I had special training in psychology. I was an undergraduate student. But what I did have was I was a bigger guy that was kind of quiet. I could work on the psych unit and particularly they had me working with acute patients that and what that means is that patients that had a tendency toward acting out and violence and that sort of thing. So essentially I became a person that would restrain individuals. I witnessed a lot even in that short period of time that I worked in that environment and what And the conclusion that I arrived at was that people that are suffering from acute mental illness, in particular,

those that are not taking their medication, first off, they're fragile. And secondly, they can act violently when they're confronted or cornered in any manner, you take a drug like methamphetamine and you apply it to someone, Dave, and you talk about a recipe for disaster. You talk about a violent reaction. It's something that I don't know if anybody can really understand unless they witness it. It actually is something that goes beyond what the, I say normal, but I don't want to act like what you'd have done in your life is abnormal, Joe. It's just, we don't have that experience. We don't have the same experience you have. I've been in radio and television my entire adult life. So I can talk about camera angles, lighting, microphones, and things like that.

Whereas you can talk about the inner workings of the body. And as it starts to break down after death and how it can lead you back to the guy, the person that did the crime. Everything you say is foreign to me. My question here is that this young woman, 24 years old, five feet tall, she knocks at the wrong door in the pre-dawn hours and is invited in. She's fairly quickly, according to prosecutors, tied to a chair by Christopher Prestapino. He ties her up to a chair, feeds her methamphetamine. That's when you mentioned the other issues that she, Esmeralda, dealt with. Esmeralda Gonzalez, according to her family, was bipolar, schizophrenic, and she started saying things that just sounded crazy, evil.

And in his own psyche, thought he was dealing with somebody who was speaking the devil and he ropes in his girlfriend and his roommate to now help him deal with the problem. He decides to undo her. According to prosecutors, he kept her tied up for a few days, Joe. What would that do to somebody being tied up? Not just for a couple hours, we're having fun playing games. We're talking about a number of days of being tied up. You don't know what's going on. What would that do to a person who already is walking a fine line of mental health? We all have this kind of sense about us where you get the hair, you know, that'll stand up on the back of your neck if you feel uncomfortable. You know, it kind of is like this kind of indwelling thing that tells us, beware, there's a danger ahead. Imagine if you live in that heightened

state all of the time. If you're paranoid, for instance, you believe that people are after you, and then you couple that with some of the other issues that come along with schizophrenia, like auditory hallucinations, maybe visual hallucinations, it makes for a horrible set of circumstances. And if somebody has given you methamphetamine, which is going to ramp you up at a baseline physiological state, where profuse sweating, heart palpitations, shallow breathing. The world is racing anyway. I've always kind of envisioned it to be like a horror show, which is really amazing because it's so highly addictive. And then can you imagine being caught in that loop? So you take someone that has this kind of mental illness and then apply this drug to

them. Yeah, they're going to start probably, at least in your perception, speaking with the devil's tongue because they can't get loose. And the critical error that was made here is that she threatened to call the police about the drugs, I guess, in some lucid moment. And this is a guy that, keep in mind, he's been hooked up on felonious charges before. He is a felon. He is a felon. He's a felon.

And he knows what's going to happen to him because he's looking at this. He's been around other people that have been charged and probably convicted of kidnapping. He knows that he's involved in a kidnapping event at this point in time. And he's had this girl restrained. Now he's getting off into the area of torture, Dave. Obviously, there are sexual elements to this. He's probably sexualized her in some way. I don't know if he actually, and I don't know that we will ever know if he put his hands on her, if he raped her, or whatever the case might be. Now, I don't believe that he was actually charged with that,

but one never knows what has happened. And this goes more toward her state of mind. But what he did understand is that, at least in his mind, he had to find a way to make her be quiet. And secondly, once he kind of crossed that Rubicon, if you will, he had a dead body on his hands. Now, what in the world are you going to do? And backing up, Dave, on top of it, he injected this poor woman, allegedly, with pool cleaner. And there's any number of compounds that are out there that pool cleaner is made from. None of them are compatible with life. But apparently, what happened was that it didn't kill her. So now he's got to close in and he's got to finish her off. What is believed to have happened at this moment with all the screaming, the shouting, the torture, she's been restrained for all of these

days in a place that she just walks up to the door as you painted that picture. She walks into hell, essentially. And now he's faced with having to quiet her in an attempt to take her life, I would assume. He injects her with a pool cleaner, doesn't do the job. So now he does have to put his hands on her. And it's at that point in time that he asphyxiates her, Dave, asphyxiates her. Now, she's sitting in a chair. She's been tied up. One thing I did want to bring up, okay, but you said in a lucid moment, she said, I'm calling the cops. In that lucid moment,

okay, they untied her hands. She hit him. Esmeralda was lucid enough to try to get away. She hit him right in the face as soon as her hands were free. She wanted to get away. I want to make sure everybody knows that in that moment, she knew what had befallen her and she tried to get away. She fought back. That's when they injected the pool cleaner. And I've got a real question for you about that. And according to the police, she was strangled. Okay. Now she's five foot, nothing, 24 years old, faced with a convicted felon who doesn't want to go back to prison, and two other women who are out of their minds helping him. What would pool cleaner do if you injected it into somebody? It's a horrible reaction because let's just say that the base element is, in fact, chlorine.

We know what the purpose of chlorine is. It's to essentially shock the environment of the pool to get rid of any of the nasties that are indwelling in here. But just exposure to just say chlorine, because they're very nonspecific about what has been applied or the compound specifically, but in many pool cleaners, one of the base elements is, in fact, chlorine. There are different forms of it. And actually, chlorine gas has been used. And to give you an idea of how horrific this is, if this kind of frames it for you, chlorine gas has actually been used as a tool of war. And it's horrible.

I mean, absolute horrible way to die. All the mucus linings of your airway are going to become inflamed. Your throat will swell. Your ability to uptake oxygen is going to be greatly compromised. You're struggling to breathe. And there's burning that's associated with this. And on top of it, there is violent fits of vomiting as well. So, you've got all of this going on as this is raging through your system

on top of methamphetamine, on top of all of the mental health issues that this poor woman is suffering from. It's not necessarily a merciful event. I don't know that she could have recovered from this. It would have eventually killed her, but he saw that it wasn't working. He wrapped his hands around her throat and choked the life out of her. For a moment in time, I can imagine, and these are merely my own thoughts here, that Brasputino wished that he had never opened that door. Because now, after having this poor young woman, he's kidnapped her.

He knows by now, at least he has a perception that she's got mental illness. He knows that he's got to talk her by the tail, essentially. He's ended her life now with his bare hands. What are you going to do? That's the amazing thing, Dave, about people that take the lives of other folks. They do these things in a heat of passion, and then they look over what has resulted from their actions, and they say, what next? What next indeed? What could you do? In her case, she was reported missing May 31st, Esmeralda Gonzalez, and they did not find her body until October. We know that

she was injected with pool cleaner. We know that she was strangled. When her body was found, it wasn't found out in the open. It wasn't even found in a hole. It was actually found in a tomb. And it was when they were undoing the tomb. That's why I have all these questions, Joe, because I'm trying to figure out what damage the pool cleaner would do to her internal organs in causing her to decompose. You know, we hear about bodies being wrapped up

and put in holes and things like that and unless you've seen it, you don't even know what we're going to be looking at. Are we going to be looking at skeletalized remains or are we going to look at somebody who's fairly well-preserved after 90 days? In this particular case, Dave, you're talking about Vegas. And we're going into one of the

hottest times of the year, and it doesn't matter how you're entombed in that environment. The body's going to begin to break down. But here's the interesting thing. Back to Presbyterian. He's actually visualized going into a store and buying. Now, dig this. Buying five, five 60-pound bags of concrete. Well, let me do the math real quick. That's 300 pounds, man. 300 pounds of quickcrete, which if you've never seen it, if you're going to put up a, I don't know, a mailbox in your yard or something like that, you're going to pour it into a form and you set

the post and and it it's very heavy there's a reason you use it because it ain't going nowhere at least for a while right so you've got 300 pounds of just these bags alone what are you going to do with this because you're living inside of a residence. He took off work. And here's where investigations come in, really. And one of the things that we were going to look at with an individual that might be associated with a crime, are there any kind of gaps in time here? Well, there were because he took a week off when she disappeared. I think that you and I can probably come to an agreement here why he took that time off. He's thinking, isn't he?

He's thinking, how am I going to deal with this? How am I going to get her out of my residence and put as much distance between myself and her? Well, not only did he take time off from work, but in addition to that, he rented a U-Haul, Dave. He rented a U-Haul. And I got to tell you, I've spent more time driving U-Hauls in my life than I care to remember. If I never get inside of another one, nothing against U-Haul company. It could be anybody. I'm sick and tired of moving in my life. I've had to move a lot, but that's what he did. You look at somebody from an investigative standpoint,

you try to think, well, why are you renting a U-Haul? Did you suddenly have this moment in time where you decide I'm going to pick up and leave town? There's no indication of you actually leaving town. So, why do you need a U-Haul? Where are you moving? And those are questions that any investigator would begin to ask. You know, it's like that old proverbial thread on the sweater that's hanging down. You pull on that sucker and the thing becomes unraveled and the picture begins to become a bit more clear when they start at the end okay and start backtracking and they're able to see the ending and try to figure out how it got there when he buys the 300 pounds worth of quick creep

it means very little if you don't know the rest of the paul harvey the rest of the story but once they know the rest of the story and they're backtracking, okay, you're right. He's got 300 pounds of quick create. He's got a U-Haul. Obviously, he's going to be moving something very heavy. I don't know where his mind was in the thinking process. And I have to think this was something he had thought of before in his crazy life, because you said he took a week off of work

to figure out what to do and what he came up with. I'm going to be honest, Joe, from the outside looking in, not knowing anything about forensics really, I thought what he did in trying to cover up the crime by trying to put the body in a place, in an area that would not be found and also would not create the odor of decomposition, I thought it would work from the outside looking in. Every time a perpetrator takes a step, any kind of step, in any direction, you're going to begin to leave that trail of breadcrumbs behind. So, yeah, I mean, in theory, you would think, yeah, okay, let's get quickcrete and entomb a body in it and put as much distance. Well, look, man, if you're mixing quickcrete, first off, you've got to purchase it.

Then you've got to mix it. It's a bloody mess. I mean, it truly is. You know, if you've ever dealt with it, you're leaving dust behind. If you're in an environment, say, for instance, where one would not normally expect to be mixing quick-crete, because if you're dealing with a dead body, you're going to have to do it in a sequestered area. There's no way you can go out in the front yard and do this and wave at everybody as they're going down the road. So, when investigators get to a location, they begin to kind of dig. They're walking through an individual's house per a warrant, and they see evidence of something that has occurred. Yeah, in principle, it seems like a jam-up idea. But at the end of the day, it goes to a bigger picture.

There's one other thing I forgot to mention that he purchased. In addition to this, you were talking about knocking down the odor of decomposition. He also bought lime as well, which is something you see in the movies where people will throw lime on graves to knock down the smell. Some people claim that it promotes decomposition for the body to decompose quicker. And you see this played out in the movies. And it's almost like this guy has taken notes from Hollywood here as to what he's going to try to do. But once you've created this huge block of concrete, and I'll go ahead and bury the lead here and say that her remains are now entombed inside of this block of concrete, which is also inside of a tank. It's like an old water tank with a wooden frame that has been created for this purpose. You got to move it.

So what are you going to do? It's a 250-gallon tank. It's a big tank. It's a big tank. Yeah, and I'll give him this. A water tank being moved out of your house doesn't look like a dead body being moved out of your house. All right? That would obviously give you the idea you're going

to be able to transport without maybe drawing as much attention, okay? But still, you've got one thing that you've got to account for. You've got a missing young woman. So, the last place she is perhaps seen is at his house. The next thing you know, he's rented a U-Haul, he's bought Quikrete, he's bought Lime,. He's bought Lime. And he's got this tank. Maybe he just had it laying around. And all of that's gone now along with the U-Haul. And no one knows where Esmeralda is.

He has the body encased in the cement inside the 250-gallon tank. We know he's got the U-Haul. And we know, as the police like to say, it's a big desert out there. As most drug addicts do, they talk. As most drug addicts do, especially with meth, they get paranoid. Prescottino, he needed help to get this done. And he was his own worst enemy in helping the police solve the entire crime. What's the old adage about one person can keep a secret? When you begin to involve these other people, a girlfriend in particular, a lady named Lisa Mort, that she would, look, have an awareness of what he was doing with her,

but then she would enter into an agreement with him to help him cover this crime up. It's just, it's mind-blowing. But we've covered on Body Bags, we've covered other cases involving the desert out there, and it is just seemingly endless. But again, this water tank and wooden structure that's really, I urge anybody that can go online to take a look at this thing, it's just sitting kind of like on this rise out in the middle of the desert, it is an entombment that's not buried. It's just right there. And for me, I've worked cases similar to this. I've also had friends that have had to, if you can imagine this, dislodge a block of concrete that literally had to be lifted up with a crane because you had individuals that were buried

within an entombment like this. And then this is where it gets really fascinating to me. You're dealing with something that is outside of your depth here as a forensic scientist. Contained within here is more than likely human remains that you're looking for. And if you, for instance, with those that are buried in the ground, you can actually use ground penetrating radar, even on a concrete surface. You know that something is in here. How are you going to be able to appreciate it, visualize it? Where are you going to know to go so that you don't destroy anything that's contained in there? So it's a painstaking process. It's not like the crane can place this onto the back of a truck and you're

going to take it to the morgue and put it up on a table in your autopsy suite and begin to knock away all of the concrete. You're going to have to use heavy equipment to do this. You're going to have to bust this up in order to get to the body that is contained therein. And you don't want to destroy any kind of evidence. And with Esmeralda, you'd asked me the question about decomposition. I wanted to kind of revisit that a bit. There was probably some tissue remaining, but a goodly portion of all that remained with her was bone. But there was something else.

Her jewelry was actually still there. And I'm not talking about just common everyday jewelry. There was actually a Rolex watch that was found entombed with her that belonged to her. That's something that if you're looking at, say, a crime, a property crime where maybe a robbery has gone bad, you're not going to have somebody that's perpetrating that kind of crime that's going to leave a Rolex behind. That's going to be at the top of the list. You're going to take that. Well, and any kind of gold and their necklaces, rings, all kinds of stuff. They're in this mix that had contained her remains and essentially her skeletal remains. The trick is this, when you have a death related to asphyxia, and we've seen this played out a lot recently in the news, and you have decomposition, it's really, really difficult, Dave, to try to

understand what exactly was it that brought about this death because there's no soft tissue. You can't look back and say, well, we've got hemorrhage here. We've got hemorrhage there. All that remained were the bones. And so it's going to require some circumstantial evidence to come into play, some testimonial evidence from somebody that may have had direct knowledge of it. And, of course, that's what happened with these associates that Presbyterian had. I'm shocked, okay, about the jewelry. When I saw the police had taken pictures of the jewelry and that Rolex and things like that, I thought, okay, this criminal had the presence of mind to say,

do not keep any of this because girls like jewelry and it was girly jewelry. It was a girly Rolex. He had to have the presence of mind to say, no, you can't go walking around with her jewelry. You can't go walking around with her Rolex. Put that in there. But Joe, these criminals, they kill this 24-year-old woman, a beautiful young woman. They kill her with their bare hands. They figure out a way to put her in a 250-gallon water tank, pour quick-create all over. They wrapped her body up first in a blanket. In blankets from the home, yeah. When they did that, this is what I was thinking. And that's why I'm kind of shocked when you say that her body was pretty much just going to be bones because i thought wrapping her

up in the blanket putting her in the tomb and then covering her up with 300 pounds of click i thought that would seal in her body you know and prevent that from happening that's what i was thinking i had no idea that they would have to use bone marrow to get her dna and match it with her parents because there wasn't anything left of her. I just assumed putting her in that way that her body would have been well preserved. You think about it, anytime you have this kind of environmental temperature, the desert around Vegas is so hostile. I mean, it truly is. And you're going to have remains that are out there that are literally cooking in this heat. And the body will begin to render down, essentially. You know, the human body is very fragile.

We think of ourselves as being very robust. But in death, you know, after all this metabolic activity has ceased and everything else, you're subject to the environment in which you're in. So you have this encasement that's going to be superheated out there on the floor of the desert. Bodies are going to break down. But we do know this. All that remained of Esmeralda wound up telling her tale and eventually wound up seeing Presbyterian going to prison.

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