Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Unraveling the Gannon Stauch Case A Forensic Odyssey (1)

Episode Date: May 7, 2023

Gannon Stauch, an 11-year-old boy from Colorado, was found dead nearly two months after he was reported missing by his stepmother, Letecia Stauch. Gannon was initially reported as a runaway, but was later classified as a missing/endangered person. Surveillance footage revealed Letecia leaving with Gannon and returning without him, raising suspicions, and then Gannon's body was found in Florida. His stepmother now faces multiple charges, including first-degree murder. In this episode of Body Bags, hosts Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the timeline of the case, from Gannon's disappearance in Colorado Springs to the discovery of his body in a suitcase in Florida, the search warrants and investigation process in Gannon's bedroom, the challenges faced by the medical examiner when examining the body, and determining the cause of death. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Shownotes: Time-codes: 00:00 - Introduction. 01:40 - Overview of Letitia Stauch's ongoing trial. 03:55 - Timeline of Gannon's disappearance and investigation. 05:25 - Discovery of Gannon's body in Florida. 08:00- Difficulty in determining postmortem interval and medical examiner's ability to ascertain information. 10:10- Blood detection methods at crime scenes and investigating scenes with cleansers used. 14:20 - Role of forensic pathologists in death investigations and inspecting a child's bedroom for foul play. 17:15 - Search warrant limitations in a residence and police walkthrough. 19:35 - Blood evidence found in Gannon's bedroom and challenges faced by the medical examiner. 21:50 - Establishing identification and cause of death in Gannon's case. 24:10 - Shared jurisdiction and forensic pathologist's expertise in tropical environments. 27:40 - Establishing a timeline of Gannon's death and managing emotions during trial testimonies. 31:00 - Forensic pathologist's clinical and objective testimony and Gannon's injuries. 33:30 - Presentation of Gannon's injuries in court and quantifying drug levels in decomposed bodies. 34:25 - Testing for substances in decomposed bodies, including maggots. 35:45 - Medication found in Gannon's system and detailing his injuries. 37:30 - Differentiating between lacerations and sharp force injuries and interpreting wounds on decomposed bodies. 39:20 - Importance of medical examiner's experience. 39:35 - Outro.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I got an unusual term for you. Some of you may not have heard it if you've never lived near a large body of water, particularly down along the coast. It's called riprap. It's defined as like a collection of rock and concrete that's kind of cracked up. It forms the banks of waterways. It's something that's man-made. It's put in place to

prevent erosion and kind of delineates the shoreline of an area that otherwise might give way to the forces of nature. And it holds things. When you go, say for instance, beneath the bridge in these areas, you'll see riprap. It's not pleasant to stand on. Can't really fish from it. I guess you could, but it's very uneven. And when the tide goes out, you can see more of it. You can see what's there, lying beneath what otherwise might be covered with water. It collects all manner of things. Dead animals, vegetation, trash that's been discarded. But on a day in the blazing sun of the Florida Panhandle, a worker descended down into that uneven space, that riprap.

And there at his feet lay a suitcase. And within that suitcase were the remains of Gannon Stout. We've already talked about Gannon before on Body Bags, but today we've got more information and I wanted to provide an update. Because at this moment in time, as I speak, his stepmother is on trial for his murder. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Joining me today is my buddy Dave Mack, senior crime reporter with Crime Online, Nancy Grace. Dave, I didn't know that we would make it to this day. It seems like this trial has been off in the horizon, never seemed like it would get here.

I guess it's that way with most big cases. But I'd say that you certainly are invested in this case. I know that you've been covering it for some time. January 27th of 2020. Joe, you mentioned this case has already been covered on body bags. And I encourage you to go and listen to that show because there are things in there that will help round out your understanding of what happened. But we now have information that we didn't have until now. And so Joe, I got to be honest to get through this story

without crying is going to require more than I have because this little 11-year-old boy was left in the care of his stepmother. You know, his dad, Al, served in the National Guard. Al left January 25th of 2020 on assignment. He was leaving. And so he heads out of town. Two days later, Letitia, by the way, she is pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. So we can say she killed him, right? It seems reasonable. Of course, everybody's innocent until proven guilty, but her supposition and her defense team supposition is that she's not to be held

responsible for this. And let's just put it plainly, the brutal, and when I say brutal, it ranks up there, Dave. I have to admit, after what we found out, the brutal and when i say brutal it ranks up there dave i have to admit after what we found out the brutal homicide of this precious little boy gannon when we started covering this it was a missing person case you got to remember january 27th he's reported missing okay leticia was his stepmother she told el paso county sheriff's office that he left home between 3.15 and 4 p.m. local time to walk to a friend's house in Colorado Springs. Joe, you and I both have kids. Is there ever a time where you knew your child left the house to go somewhere else and you didn't know exactly what time it was within two or three minutes? Yeah, it's something that you always keep track of.

That 45-minute window, that was the first red flag. Yeah, particularly, you know, you're talking about a little boy. There were a couple of different stories that Letitia told. It took three days to change the classification to, hey, he left to go to a friend's house. Then they, on January 30th, said missing, endangered person. And, of course, we know what took place after that. His body was found. Now, Joe, there are two months here from January 27th to March 20th when his body was recovered

in that suitcase. And as you mentioned, the trial is ongoing. We found out a number of things this week, including the suitcase that was the body bag for this child. It was brought into court. Okay, you've got an 11-year-old child that has been dead, and I'm kind of assuming dead since January 27th. They don't find his body in the suitcase until March 20th in Florida. Yeah, in Florida. That's the big thing. Remember, this whole thing starts in Colorado, Where his body was found, though it was not on I-10, which is major east-west thoroughfare in the interstate system. And for those that don't know, with interstates, if you have an interstate that ends in a zero, those are east-west. All right, so we've got I-10, which is our most southerly major interstate that runs east and west. And it runs through the panhandle.

Anybody that's ever traveled from west of Florida that's heading in, if you're going to places like Panama City Beach or Destin or even headed to Jacksonville, you're going to be on I-10. And so off of I-10, on either side, north and south, there are little parallel routes that run. the only way I can say that he was even found. This is a vast area, Dave. If we take that idea that you're placing Gannon's body that is contained within the suitcase into a body of water that you know is heading north and south, southward, the final destination is going to be the Gulf of Mexico. The fact that it got hung up on rocks, on riprap, as I mentioned earlier, and I urge you, if you're not familiar with what riprap looks like, just go take a look. It's such an odd, odd term anyway.

But go take a look, and you'll see what I'm saying. It's kind of placed into, you have to place it in there with big machinery. I know the first time I ever heard the term was actually in association with Lake Pontchartrain. When I was living down there and they took old Tulane Stadium, which was demolished. It's actually where they used to play the old Sugar Bowl. And they took it and demolished it. And they created a riprap out of it. They created these kind of seawalls that extended out into Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans.

And you could walk out, and you could actually see the seat number still painted on the riprap. And that's big chunks of concrete or kind of deciduous rock they gather up, and they can place and create these boundaries, if you will, or walls sometimes. And so it's kind of jagged. That's the only saving grace here that kind of captured Gannon's body vis-a-vis the riprap and him being contained in the suitcase. And you're talking two months downrange from the last time he was seen. It makes it very difficult from, you know, what we've talked about a lot on Body Bags, which is postmortem interval, because the environment down in that area of the country is so harsh. It is, I can't begin to describe it if you've never worked as a crime scene investigator or as an ME investigator or a homicide investigator down those areas, things break down very, very carefully.

The only reason that Gannon's remains would have remained intact is because of this encasement that he was in contained within this suitcase. So he's literally sealed up in it his remains. And I have to say, based upon what we learned from direct testimony from the medical examiner that examined Gannon's remains, I'm amazed she was able to ascertain what she was able to ascertain. It is absolutely miraculous. That's the only way I can say it. You've got this one in a million shot that you're going to have somebody come along and find the suitcase. And then secondly, that it would be preserved to the extent that it was preserved, that you've got a forensic pathologist that can interpret all that was left behind. When you back up to where this began in Colorado Springs, Colorado,

and Gannon is murdered and placed in the suitcase, as an investigator, as somebody who does these crime scenes, Joe, her story was that he was walking to a friend's house. Granted, there were five different stories that she told, five different stories about what took place. As investigators, as you come in to start looking over a crime scene or potential crime scene, how do you find blood if it's been cleaned up? If somebody is killed and there's blood everywhere, how do they actually find it if it's been cleaned up? First off, you have to have a suspected area. You're not just going to go through what you believe to be a potential crime scene and just randomly apply these reagents to try to get the remnant of the blood to luminesce.

That's what it's referred to. It has a luminescent quality. With luminol in particular, first off, you have to be almost in total darkness in order to appreciate it. And then once you apply the luminol, it only lasts for a few seconds. So, it's a matter of application and it's a matter of somebody being quick with the camera. And it's a perfect environment in order to actualize that and to visualize it and then to capture it, to document it. Because what you're trying to document, first off, is not just that there may have been blood there, but you're also trying to interpret the dynamics of the blood.

You know, is this a dynamic deposition of blood in this area where it is sprayed or cast off in this environment? Or is it something that's passively dripping like off of the end of some type of weapon that you would bludgeon somebody with if you're standing over the body? Or maybe a knife that you're holding in your hand that, you know, you just have blood just kind of passively dripping off the tip as you're standing over that area. So, a lot of stuff has to come together in order to try to understand it. It's fascinating we're having this conversation because I was given a lecture in my medical legal death investigation class at Jacksonville State the other day on the topic of deaths

related to abuse and neglect. And I was trying to emphasize to the class that it's important that you go, even if there's not a body at the scene, and many times with children, there's not, they go into the hospital. You go to the hospital to obviously examine the body there and get the report from the EMTs and the physicians. But you need to go back out to the scene. And one of the things that we find at scenes many times, particularly with kids, I was relating to the class that I'd gone out on two scenes that I could remember

over the course of my career where you walk in and the room smells like pine salt. And pine salt is very distinctive. It fills the air. It's very aromatic and not necessarily in a good way i remember it i remember from the barracks in the army that the army had an unending supply of pine saw so you have that smell and you think well does the environment normally smell like pine saw in here well that's another thing you're looking for you're looking to go into these homes and many times or locations and you think, well, you know what?

There's a heavy smell of bleach. People think that bleach is the answer to everything. And, of course, bleach is not necessarily going to defeat any kind of stains that are left behind. So that's just one of the things that we look for. You know, it seems whether it's in a dwelling where the people are domiciled or a vehicle, for instance, you try to get a sense in that environment what is left behind. What exactly is the evidence trying to tell you, even at a molecular level, that has been left behind of what kind of violence may or may not have occurred in this location. Sometimes when you're walking through unknown territory, places you haven't been before, you need a guide.

And in my world, in forensics, one of the best guides you can have when it comes to death investigation is a forensic pathologist. And of course, in my opinion, I've been around a few in my career. The one that I saw provide testimony out in Colorado ranks right up there. What a fantastic job she did. There are so many questions I have for you that I think a lot of people wonder because we're so conditioned to what takes place on TV and in movies. We know based on the investigation and the trial that this crime scene was in Gannon's bedroom in the house. When police come in, when investigators come into a story where they're told the boy ran away or he went missing or whatever, police have red flags and they immediately know, okay, we have to go down this path because this is the story she's telling today and we have to investigate it. But aren't

they going to immediately start looking around at the house and see what is amiss? They know the house has been cleaned because her story, she had originally told them she had been raped by a man in the home and that he had absconded with Gannon. At what point do the investigators start looking for blood evidence or any kind of evidence inside the home because they know that her story is not sticking, it's not standing up to any kind of scrutiny. The main indicator here is what locations do most people inhabit within a home? And I think default, from a default perspective, if you're talking about kids, you're going to go to their bedrooms. You're going to want to know, is there anything that looks amiss?

Because you're going to spend most of your time in the bedroom. It's the place that you're most familiar with. Kids, it's where they have their toys, their gaming systems, their clothes, just their school books. Everything that kind of revolves around their little world is contained therein. So, odds are they would spend quite a bit of time there. And you're going to look. And if there's some kind of indicator when you walk it like let's just say for instance you're doing a walkthrough at a scene and you're going from room to room you know you go from one

room maybe the family room and it looks neat and ordered but then maybe you go to gannon's room and it's like really really neat it's, really clean. As a matter of fact, maybe there's an odor there of cleanser. Okay. Maybe the bed. I don't know about you. When I was 11 years old, I wasn't really good at making a bed, but you look at his bed, maybe it looks like you can bounce a quarter off of it. All right? Is this something an 11-year-old boy would have done? Is everything neatly put away, neatly folded?

I'm not saying that mom wouldn't go in behind you and do all that stuff for you. However, odds are that if something appears to be too good to be true, it probably is. So, to your original question, yeah, the investigators are going to fold over into that and really begin to dig down into this area, particularly if they have a search warrant. Just so folks understand, if you have a search warrant, you have to name in that search warrant where you're going to search, even if it's within the residence. You can't just randomly willy-nilly rip somebody's house apart. You have to be able to describe this to a judge. It has to be specifically laid out in the search warrant. And you say, we're going to search Gannon's bedroom. You know, we're going to go through all the associated articles within there,

including the closets. But you're not going to do that throughout the entire house, all right? So there has to be something that's going to lead you there. And most of the time, that's going to arise from a couple of places, either from an initial walkthrough. When this call comes out and he's missing, well, that compels the police to go to the house to do just a welfare check. You got a missing kid, so we're going to

walk through the house. Maybe initially the cops walked through and they said, wow, this really smells really like it's been freshly cleaned in here. Well, that gives you cause at that point in time to include that in the warrant. We really want to focus, Your Honor, on this specific area of the house. And so, there might be specific areas where you think something may have happened, but you can't prove it. You need to dig deeper, and that's going to require a search warrant. So, you go back, and then once you have that search warrant, you go in and you begin to do things like pull up carpet. You begin to flip mattresses, check and see if the walls have been freshly painted. I've had that happen before. You apply reagents like something like Luminol or Blue Star, those types of reagents to see

if you can make any kind of presentation where you think that blood may have been. And that's going to be a big indicator for you. Now, we do know based on the affidavit, there was a lot of evidence in Gannon's bedroom, the blood spatter on the walls. There was enough blood in that child's bedroom to soak through the mattress, soak through the carpet, the carpet pad, and stain the concrete below his bed. I have to wonder what condition his body was in. We've got a body that's not found for two months. We've got a body of an 11-year-old that was in a suitcase that was in Florida in the water. What would you expect to find? This is an interesting point with this case,

Dave, and I'll tell you why. This pathologist, though Gannon's remains were, let's face it, they're severely decomposed, all right? But she came armed with that information that you were just talking about. Even though she's down in Florida, and they come to the conclusion pretty quickly that it is Gannon's remains, I would imagine if they weren't on a plane, they were certainly on the phone. Police officers, investigators out in Colorado are speaking, all right? They're speaking to the investigators in Florida. They're speaking to the ME's office down in Florida. And what they're telling them is like, look, we've got a scene up here that looks like holy hell. We know that there's going to be,

there was a significant bloodletting within this environment. Can you imagine if she, when Dr. Ignacio opened that suitcase there at the ME's office and she's observing the mortal remains of this little boy, she had no idea who he was,

but she sees all of this trauma. She's trying to figure this out and trying to kind of work work out the calculus in her brain essentially as to how all this went down she's having to look at this and say my god wherever he was there has to have been a tremendous amount of blood. Well, guess what? She's already seemingly got an answer to this question. And that's a huge step for you from a medical legal standpoint because there's stuff that you, now you can kind of connect the dots. Whereas many times you might be at a disadvantage. And the fact that he still had soft tissue because, you know, she's going in to describe injuries here. Well, it's hard to describe injuries when you don't have soft tissue, if you're just dealing with skeletal remains.

So, we know that there was a significant amount of soft tissue left behind so that she could make this interpretation. When you're looking back and you begin to understand how much blood was in that residence at that location, it's coming into focus at that moment in time. Okay, well, this explains this at the scene, this presentation that they're seeing. Maybe you've got blunt force trauma, which he did. You've got a gunshot wound, which he had. You've got sharp force injury, which he possessed many of. That's going to explain some of the dynamics at the scene that will perhaps create some kind of correlation between what you're seeing with these decomposed remains and what you're finding at the scene.

And the fact that this doctor caught this case is fascinating to me. And I don't know. It's kind of an oddball situation because you've got a case that originates in Colorado and winds up being discovered down in Florida. And I think many people would question, well, why didn't they just take his body back to Colorado to do the exam? Well, first off, if it is a homicide. How do you not rule out a homicide? An 11-year-old is dead inside of a suitcase found at the water's edge. Well, we can't assume anything because we live in a world inhabited by attorneys.

And we have to be very, very thorough. And so the question is not Is it a homicide? The question is more Where did the homicide take place? First off, you have to establish the identification That's one of the hallmarks In medical legal death investigation

There's three principles that we work upon That's determining manner of death Cause of death And identification And you learn so much about a deceased individual when you figure out who they are because suddenly history comes pouring in at that moment in time. You can begin to track them back from where they were and where they wound up and what the family dynamic is like and what their life was like simply based on an identification. So, you have to establish that and if you remove him from that state to take him back to colorado in order to do the autopsy there's always that question is this florida jurisdiction

or is it colorado jurisdiction well it's kind of a shared jurisdiction if you will we know that the body was deposited in florida There's a huge difference between the deposition of a body and where that body met its end by law. So, I think that the working idea here to keep everybody on the same sheet of music is you don't want to destroy evidence. And certainly, that could happen because this is very, very fragile, Dave. Very fragile. We've already talked about how long Gannon had been down. The fact that they decided to do the autopsy there in that particular district is indicative of how much care they were taking. People in Colorado were like, hey, look, we're good with this. You go ahead and do the autopsy down there. And I think a lot of people get confused over this, particularly when

you've got these multi-jurisdictional kinds of things because people don't understand how the system works. And back to what I was saying about Dr. Ignacio, when she did this autopsy, did you know that she was actually covering for this district? Florida doesn't have coroners. They have district medical examiners. So you've got like

District 7 and District 8 and 9 and all those sorts of things. The state is broken down into multi-county jurisdictions. And she happened to be working in an adjacent district. And there's not that many forensic pathologists. So, they cover for one another. So, she was taking call for that jurisdiction or covering those cases while, I don't know, maybe one pathologist was testifying or they were taking some time off, which they need because there's so many cases and there's so few of them. So, it was just happenstance that she ended up getting this? Yeah, isn't that something?

And now she's in a different district in Florida than she originally was. So, she's kind of moved around within the state, which happens. She's licensed in the state, which happens. She's licensed in the state of Florida. I think she did her fellowship in forensics actually down in Miami Dade, which is a fantastic medical examiner's office for training. And so, she's very familiar with this area. And so, that's why her testimony gave so much weight. But, you know, you've got this forensic pathologist that has to travel from Florida to Colorado to offer up testimony because they've come to the conclusion, based upon their scientific assessment, that the amount of blood that they found at that residence is what we refer

to as incompatible with life. That means that so much blood was lost, that there is a high probability that that homicide took place there. And she was seeing the final results of this. And another skill set that she has that, say, for instance, people out in Colorado that maybe they've exclusively worked there, she's familiar with this tropical environment, Dave. She's very familiar with saltwater environment. Think about her training.

All of these cases that she works down there, they're subject to the environment that is dictated by what is Florida, the rated decomposition. It measures out differently than, say, for instance, in Colorado. Those are two very distinct geographic locations. So she's the best person to kind of interpret, and this is most important, I think, when we're trying to establish a timeline. How long had Gannon actually been deceased, and how long had he been in that suitcase? Because we have people that do this job, that stare down at all that remains, even in the worst circumstances,

we can kind of begin to formulate an idea. The question is, once that idea is formulated, are you capable as a forensic practitioner of expressing that in a courtroom to get that point across to a jury? Can you lay that out in layman's terms? And that's what happened in this courtroom in Colorado with this forensic pathologist, Dave. Before you go to appear in a trial where you're trying to tell the story of the victim, do you try to keep your emotions in check or do you allow that human side of things so that the jury knows you're not just teaching a course on this, but actually being emotional enough to make them realize

this is an 11-year-old boy we're talking about. This is not a 200-year-old skeleton we found in the desert. This is a child who should be playing baseball right now. How do you do that as a forensic person? Yeah, as a forensics person, I couldn't do it now. I couldn't. I'd openly weep. There's no way. But I remember the man that I was all those years ago, when I would have to give testimony about what I was finding at scenes. You do your best to remain as clinical as you possibly can and let the jury draw their conclusions. And here's the thing.

You need to remain as clinical as you possibly can before the jury because if you openly start to weep on the stand over the death of a child like Gannon, and trust me, Dave, if anybody, if any child that has ever walked this earth deserves to have tears shed over his life and the loss of life, it's Gannon, all right? But you cannot allow that to come through because that can be viewed as prejudicial. So you have to fight this fight. It's tough. I mean, it really is. So thank you for asking me that question because it's one of those things that it just punches you right in the face.

Particularly when you're reflective about it. After you've walked out of the courtroom, you've gotten off the stand, and you realize what you've just been discussing. There are those moments. And I have to believe that the forensic pathologist in this case did that. I watched her testimony, and she was very stalwart in her descriptors. You know, didn't emote a bunch of sadness and all those sorts of things. There's only so much sadness that you can respond to in your own life. And trust me, this pathologist has seen her share.

I mean, she's worked everywhere all over Florida. She's seen some really bad cases. And she did, I think that to remain clinical, people view that as cold. On the contrary, I view it as doing your best job that you can for canon. Okay? Because there has to be somebody that's willing to face the maelstrom and describe what they saw that would make weaker people fold. You know, understand what she's describing to everybody here in a very clinical sense.

Well, we've known about some of the wounds. Okay? We knew about 18 apparent stab wounds we knew about a gunshot wound to the lower left jaw we knew about cuts on the hands and arms consistent with defensive wounds but to actually share that's just the outline because i'm trying to figure out as a layperson, I need to understand what these actually mean, what the actual impact of these were. Because coming into it dry, I'm thinking, okay, she drugged him with Loracet. He was lethargic.

He's laying in bed. She cuts him. She kills him. And then she puts him in the suitcase, and there we go. That is not what happened at all. No, it's not. However, I will say that they found hydrocodone and acetaminophen in his system. Of course, it couldn't, you know, you can't at this point relative to decomposition,

you can't place a number to it to say that he had been OD'd in some way or that he was even in a state where he lacked awareness. I think that just by looking at what the forensic pathologist has interpreted as defensive injuries gives you an idea that he did not lack awareness. He knew what was going on. There's part of you, I think, that you wish that he hadn't, okay? But that's evidenced in the fact that he had some kind of response to pain because of his hands he had multiple cuts on the surfaces of his hands and his fingers you know those images were just when they displayed those in court it was quite striking and you could still this is the fascinating thing about the status of his remains is that they were still appreciable dave that like if you're in the jury and you've

never been exposed to a severely decomposed body, you can look at that image and say, oh, that's a hand. That's definitely a hand. And what she's describing, you can actually see the injuries. And then when she gets into it, you understand form and function at that point in time. That's one of the incredible things about this. Now, I think people would say, well, Morgan, if you can't quantify the number relative to the level of these drugsological standpoint in the sense of how we would normally test it. And one of the things that some folks might not be aware of that when we have a severely decomposed body, there's a couple of ways that we test for any kind of substance that's there. Go to the liver and to the kidneys. Now, they will be decomposed, obviously,

but there will still be enough of a remnant there that you can cut a section of liver, place it into a tube, a centrifuge, if you will. People have seen a centrifuge. It spins around, and it spins around to the point where it liquefies solid organ like liver and spins it down, it liquefies it, you draw it up. And then when you draw it up, you can actually test it and you can test it for the presence of any number of different substances that are contained in the system. Another thing that we do with decomposing bodies, we can actually take maggots from a body. And remember, the maggots have been

present with the body, have been digesting the body. You can collect those and spin those down as well. And in certain cases, you can find remnant of opiate. You can also find cocaine in maggots as well after you spin them down and liquefy them, which I've always found just absolutely fascinating. That's unbelievable. I didn't have any idea you could do that. Yeah, isn't that something? And so you have to bring every tool that you have to bear here. And the fact that he had medication on board goes into this narrative. Why are you applying a substance like a hydrocodone, which is used as a painkiller.

How much were you giving this child? He's only 11 years old. And as we know, it can make you loopy. Matter of fact, people die from it, die from overdoses all the time. Oddly enough, the actual medication, the hydrocodone, was prescribed to his father, Al. Al had a finger injury, and he had been given this hydrocodone acetaminophen as a pain reliever. He didn't take all of it. And the medication was in his nightstand drawer and it was the location and what was in it was only known to Al and Letitia. Nobody else knew

what was in there or where it was. So she knew where it was. They actually brought that up and actually gave it to Gannon in some way. But obviously, that was not sufficient to the task because what Dr. Ignacio wound up determining is that, and just featured this just for a second, this child actually sustained 18 stab wounds. Just let that sink in. 18. Plus he was shot. You talked about this GSW that he's got. I think it was through the left jaw. That was the coup de grace, if you will. And he's got blunt force trauma that has resulted in lacerations. Remember, we've talked about on body bags before, there's a difference between a laceration and sharp force injuries. Lacerations. Remember, we've talked about on body bags before, there's a difference between a laceration and sharp force injuries. Lacerations arise from blunt force trauma. So, you know, you can be beaten, you can be kicked, you can be bludgeoned with something, you know, like a heavy

object, and that's going to result in these lacerations, which don't have clean margins. They've got this kind of connective tissue that we call tissue bridging that are left behind. When you have a stab wound, that means that you're talking about like a milled edge that creates these margins that are very distinctive. Okay. Here's the tough thing though, Dave. When you begin to think about how compromised the body would be due to decomposition. One of the obstacles that you really have to overcome is the interpretation of these wounds. Once an area of human remain has been insulted in some way,

whether it's a gunshot wound, stab wound, blunt force trauma, you open up an area. And when that area is opened up, because it is exposed, that soft tissue is exposed, that promotes more or more rapid decomposition in that specific area. And if the body is exposed to the elements, in this case, of course, it wasn't the case with Gannon, but if you have the body out in in, say, a wooded area, just laying on the floor of a forest, you're going to have larval development with maggots and flies and all that sort of stuff. And then you have the chance that vermin are going to come by. And that area begins to break

down. So, the trick is, do you have the skill set in order to interpret what is decomposition, what we refer to as decompositional artifact versus some kind of antemortem injury or fatal injury, antemortem being before death. And so, that's a real skill set that you have to obtain and refine over a period of time. And many times, it's dictated by the environment in which you practice. And that's why it's so essential that this particular practitioner, this fantastic medical examiner, was from Florida,

that she was able to see all of these injuries and appreciate them and contextualize them from the environment in which Gannon's body was discovered. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body iHeart podcast