Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan:The Murders of Scott Sessions and Heather Frank

Episode Date: November 27, 2022

Talented and beloved musician, Scott Sessions, is found brutally murdered in an ambush attack, his throat slashed to near decapitation. Shortly afterward, his lover, who lured him to the moment of his death, Heather Frank, is also found dead with gunshot wounds to her chest. Investigators find Heather Frank wrapped in the same burnt plastic as they found Scott Sessions. The suspect? Heather Frank’s boyfriend, Kevin Eastman. In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss the horrific murders of Scott Sessions and Heather Frank. They delve into the mechanics of murder by an edged weapon to the throat, the pathology of an enraged killer, rendering a body by fire, and the connective evidence found at both crime scenes. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Show Notes: 1:00 - Introducing the deaths of Scott Sessions and Heather Frank 3:39 - The connection between Scott Sessions, Heather Frank, and Kevin Eastman 4:55 - The visibility of a toxic, abusive relationship on a body 6:54 - Anatomy of bruises and how professionals grade them in abuse cases 13:08 - What happened to Scott Sessions 14:54 - The mechanics of slitting a throat with an edged weapon 17:05 - Volume of blood within the body, types and locations of injuries that cause blood loss, and the forensic importance of a victim’s blood that has pooled outside of the body  22:14 - The horrific injuries Scott Sessions sustained  27:30 -  Pathology of a killer who is full of anger and rage 29:18 - The death of Heather Frank 31:59-  Why did Heather have to die? 34:36 - The failed attempt to render down Scott’s body by fire and the common evidence found on both victims 39:07 - Looking for connectivity/tieback in forensics: evidence found at both crime scenes 41:57 - The discovery of Scott Sessions and Heather Frank’s bodies 43:57 - The conviction of Kevin Eastman  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. One of my most fond remembrances of living in New Orleans for many years was that you didn't just have to go to the French Quarter. You could just be in a neighborhood down there. And then off in the distance, you would hear the sound of a trumpet playing. And that city is just filled with professional jazz musicians.

And it's almost like a siren song. It draws you. You know, you hear that sound. It rises high in the air. It becomes very soulful. And it draws you in. And when you go down to the jazz clubs and once the doors are all open,

you can hear the sounds of the music emanating from the doors that location in america has a lot of trumpeteers but i want to tell you today about a gentleman named scott sessions he lived in a place that wasn't known for jazz i guess it's it's known more for cowboys maybe up in northern Colorado. But he was known. He was known as a fantastic trumpeteer. He had played for years and years in a variety of bands and was beloved. And I mean beloved. But what happened to Scott was absolutely horrific. Scott was eventually found deceased and it

turned out that it was a murder. Today, I'm going to talk about the murder of Scott Sessions and Heather Frank. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags. I gotta tell you, when you begin to think about somebody that puts so much time into everything that they do, and they are truly a professional, it's almost like seeing somebody throw a brick through a beautiful stained glass window. That's what this is. Joining me today is my friend Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Yet again, you picked a very complicated case

that's going to take a lot to unpack. This is thought to be a love triangle gone wrong. There's some indications that it may not have been a love triangle gone wrong. There's some indications that it may not have been a love triangle gone wrong. Again, a very, very complex case. And the deaths that we're talking about today, Stanley Scott Sessions, 53, the trumpeter, as you were talking about, and Heather Frank, 48. Heather Frank was dating Kevin Eastman for some time, and by all accounts, from friends

and family, it was a very toxic, violent relationship, very controlling and manipulative. Then, Heather Frank became interested in Sessions, the trumpeter. She had gone to, as you said, to watch him play, and a relationship blossomed from this. Given the toxic, manipulative nature of the original relationship, it was evident that Eastman was not going to let go, and often friends said that Heather Frank came to work with bruises and visibly upset. So before we get into the actual murders, Joe, I want to talk about that toxic relationship, the visibility of a toxic abusive relationship. When you are on the outside looking in, Joe, obviously we're not going to see the emotional side, but visibly we often can.

What does this toxic, abusive relationship look like on a body? Well, you say that you're not going to be able to see the emotion, but you can see it, I think, physically manifested. If you're a keen investigator and you start to dig into a case, and in Heather's case, she's got these peripheral people in her life that she works with. And so she'd show up to work and she would have bruises on her person. Interesting thing about that, and I've found this working cases many years, is that people that only see you during the day say work, not family members necessarily. But people that see you from day to day, then you're on a break from a weekend, they'll see this progression of injuries. And they might think at first, well, maybe she bumped into something or, you know, that's their first blush, if you will. But then they'll see something else manifested in another location. And then suddenly a pattern begins to develop.

You know, why is this woman who seems rather stable in her gait, walks normally, she doesn't seem disoriented or, you know, maladjusted in any way. It's not possible that she's bumping into furniture all the time. You know, it's not possible. Right. You're talking about the old, I ran into a door excuse. Yeah, yeah. And you find that all the time. This even extends to adolescents, to children, you know, they're being abused.

And so, in this particular case, you would look at this and you would begin to think about, you know, the things that we talk about, about aging and injuries. And one of the interesting practices that my colleagues engage in that do abuse cases is that they have a scale that they grade bruises or contusions, those focal areas of hemorrhage throughout the body with children primarily where they're looking as the bruise begins to recede and there's time elements that can be attached to that so i've worked cases before where we have overlapping progressions of bruises where you'll have something that has turned that kind of disgusting yellow color as we know that the bruise is beginning to recede and then you'll have a fresh bruise that'll be immediately adjacent and you know you know that you know science dictates that those two things could not have occurred at the same time hang on let me ask

you a question there joe yeah you're talking about that the yellow green discoloration and then you talked about looking at fresh bruises. Can you quickly run through that? Are they deep purple immediately? Is that how you tell them? No. Okay. No, no, no. And that's an excellent question. The first thing that's going to occur, you know, if somebody slaps somebody in the face,

that's kind of the classic, you know, the classic thing you think about. Well, you're going to have a red mark. And the red mark will exist for a few hours. And then all of a sudden, and, you know, you have to ask, well, what causes the red mark will exist for a few hours. And then all of a sudden, and you know, you have to ask, well, what causes the red mark? Well, it's underlying hemorrhage, particularly if you're struck hard enough. Now, the skin is going to react and turn red just by that kind of blunt contact. But when you really hit somebody hard, it'll be red. And the little capillary beds, you know, we think about petechiae many times.

We talk about capillary beds, you know, we think about petechiae many times we talk about capillary beds, but in this particular case, you'll have a broader area where you rupture multiple of these little capillary beds. The blood actually goes into the interstitial tissue. What that means is that it's leached out of the vessels and it's into that kind of underlying fatty tissue that's there and it takes a while for it to change the really horrible thing about this when you see a bruise it's actually the blood decomposing beneath that layer of skin and it takes a while for it to kind of transition out and the body has a way of kind of pushing that out and you know metabolizing it if you will in its So, you know, you'll have specific grading that you can do relative to these bruises where it will go from that red that we mentioned into this kind of black

blue phase. And people will just make offhanded remarks. You know, I was beaten until I was black and blue. You know, it's kind of an offhanded remark, but that's one of the points along the continuum. And then as it progresses from that color range, which is going to take a couple of days, you're going to see it start to turn green most of the time as it's beginning to recede. And then finally, it goes into that yellow phase. You can't put a specific time to it, but all in all, these things will be back to, quote unquote, normal. The outer marker is going to be about 14 days until it's kind of moved all the way through and people are going to it's going to be as variable as people are variable because everybody's metabolism is different and the way they react to

trauma and all these sorts of things but in heather's case they talk about how she was seen with these bruises and this isn't just a passing thing. You have multiple people that saw bruising on her. So they know that something is going on domestically with her. So when you see someone with a bruise, if it is super dark in color, what you're telling me is, is that the injury to that area was enough that it damaged a lot of blood vessels yeah yeah the underlying blood vessels you know this is not something most people think about day to day you know but when you look at your skin there there are a number of programs out there that you can computerize these things with and appreciate all the the vessels in the body and i've seen these things where they've got arteries highlighted and and veins highlighted and they're throughout the body and that kind of it's kind of a an exploded

view of the body if you will that's only touching the surface of it because extending out from that you have capillary beds which is actually where the blood is kind of exchanged and it goes from arteries to arterioles to venules back to veins. And so these things are even more complex. And there's these entire fields of these capillary beds throughout our body. And they're rather delicate. So when they're struck externally by a blow, blunt force trauma, these things are going to rupture. And then you'll just begin to seep out blood into these particular little areas. And it just, it's, the beauty of it from a forensic standpoint is that, you know, we're

all about time and timelines and that sort of thing. And it's just one more of those elements that we can apply to understand what was going on in that anti-mortem state before death with an individual that can obviously no longer speak for themselves. You don't have witnesses to these things, but you can kind of begin to develop a history. They were struck in this location, this particular day, in this location. And with abuse victims in particular, one of the things that's very troubling, and I'm hesitant to say this, but I'll go ahead, is that many times with abusers, they won't strike people on the face. They won't strike people on the arms necessarily. With abusers, many times they'll strike, and particularly with children, they'll strike them in clothes or covered areas. You know, you're still getting across that point that you're in charge. You're the dominant factor here.

And I'm going to bring pain upon you. But no one's any the wiser because their back is struck, lower back, or they're punched in the stomach or kicked between the legs and things like that. So, normal progression is somebody's day. You're not going to necessarily see that. In Heather's case, though, in Heather's case, she obviously had injuries maybe to her neck, her arms. So, it's kind of a randomized kind of thing. It's not, it almost gives you an impression that it's almost a reactionary kind of event, perhaps. Sessions was killed first, and the location of his suspected murder led prosecutors, as they unfolded the facts in this case, to believe that he was killed at Heather Frank's apartment. So, let's talk about, number one, how did he get there,

and what happened to him, Joe? He, according to prosecutors, bled profusely. And I can't wait to talk to you about the evidence in the apartment and how they found it. But what happened to Sessions? The term that I would apply to this is the term ambush. He was lured to Heather Franks' apartment, and then he was ambushed. And his life was just spilled out literally onto the floor in that apartment. And later, you know, the police found evidence of this. He was attacked with an edged weapon, which essentially means a sharp instrument. This is sharp force trauma that he sustained.

And he had, you know, people really, you know, they think about, you know, they'll use terms like euphemistic terms, you know, like, well, you're really cutting your own throat, those sorts of things. Well, the reason that term has kind of entered the lexicon over you know centuries for us is because that traditionally has been one of the most fatal areas that an individual can sustain trauma in in scott's particular case he actually had his throat cut he had his throat cut almost immediately upon entry into Heather's apartment. Is that a difficult thing to do, Joe?

I mean, let's just look at the mechanics. Because we've all seen TV. Somebody comes up behind you, they grab you on the forehead, and they slide a knife across your throat. Blood goes everywhere. Is it that easy? Well, a lot of it's going to be dependent upon the strength of the individual the perpetrator that is bringing about this assault also does the individual that's being attacked completely have their guard down that means that you have to have them in a in almost total submission

and of course you can factor in things like skill with an edged weapon. Dealing with edged weapon attacks is not something that is entered into lightly when you think about, well, what are all the different sets of weapons that I could bring to bear in a case like this? And you choose edged weapons is that there's a high probability that the perpetrator is going to run the risk of harming themselves as well, creating an injury on their own self. Because, you know, let's face it, if you don't take somebody by surprise, they're going to fend you off as best they can, at least at a primal level. You know, throwing up their arms and those sorts of things to give themselves a chance to survive. And you might, if you're the perpetrator, wind up their arms and those sorts of things to give themselves a chance to survive. And you might, if you're the perpetrator, wind up being cut yourself. But in this case, there's not really that much evidence of it. But if you show up to this event, you can take somebody by surprise.

And the weapon is sufficient to the task. And what I mean by that is it's robust enough. Because, you know, I've had cases where people have gone to discount stores and purchased steak knife sets, you know, that are made in who knows where. And the strength of the blade is insufficient to the task. Blades break off. They don't have the edge on them. But if you have a robust weapon, and there's any number of ways that we can describe that, but the quality of the steel itself that it's made with, the edge of the weapon, if there is a great edge on that weapon, you can do a lot of harm if you know what you're doing.

Heather Franks was killed later, but after her body was found and investigators started going to her home and looking at what happened, they discovered this pool of blood. And there was so much blood, Joe, that it seeped through the carpet, through the pad. So, remind me again how much blood there is in the human body. And when it pools out like that, what are they going to find? That is a fantastic question because, you know, one of the things that we actually look for at autopsy, and it's kind of a tell when you're, people might think this is kind of an incidental finding, but it's actually very significant. When you're dealing with a sharp force injury attack, you're going to bleed profusely.

And at autopsy, and I've actually been present when this happens, I've actually attempted to do it, you draw blood out of the body. You draw blood and we go in, literally into the aorta, which is the big vessel that comes off the heart. I have done autopsies on bodies where they bled so much at the scene that i literally had to truly struggle to find blood to draw out of the body just in order to get a sample for toxicology many times with edge weapon events we'd have to go into the leg, into the femoral artery where you've got kind of peripheral blood sources in order to draw blood because you bleed so much. These injuries are kind of small compared to somebody literally having their body opened up with a knife.

And so you're contacting multiple vessels, all those capillary beds, the underlying vessels, and any kind of viscera, any kind of organs that are beneath that. So you've got multiple blood, you've got multiple sources of blood loss. So, you know, if the human body has, it's going to be variable. Again, you think about the human body having, you know, about two gallons of blood in it, I guess. There's a chance that you can lose almost every bit of it. And again, a lot of that is going to be depended upon where the injury is let's say for instance you're the back of somebody's calf is cut all right now you're going to bleed obviously that goes without stating however you compare an injury to the

calf with a sharp-edged weapon to say the throat there's no competition because there's so many vessels that travel through the neck and we've talked about this any number of times but it needs to be repeated you've got major vessel structures that are running through the neck to supply the brain which out of all the organs in a body the the brain requires the most blood. So when you start to get into the complex involving the jugular veins and then the carotid arteries, you're talking about major blood loss. Because guess what? The heart hasn't been disrupted yet. The heart's still pumping. And as the heart pumps pumps you're going to have this gush of blood that is coming out of the neck and if the person hits the floor and stays in one spot

it will saturate that underlying area and then scott's death and when they were able to actually recover the evidence of this event at Heather's apartment. You're right. You had a layer of carpeting, the top layer, and then the pad, which people are familiar with, that kind of softens your footfall. And then down into the subflooring, that area was super saturated. And why is this important forensically? Well, we can look at that bloody area and type the blood. We can actually type it and loop it back to whose blood it might have been through blood type. And then, of course, we can collect it. And perhaps if there's a viable sample, we can do DNA.

But it also gives us another indication of the dynamics of the event. You know, you begin to look at it and you think, well, if I've got this heavy concentration of blood right here and there are no other, say, peripheral areas of blood, like blood drops or any kind of blood staining on the walls or anything like that, what we can opine at that point in time is that the individual that sustained this injury didn't move any further than that location. What kind of person possesses the will to perpetrate such a violent crime on another person? And not just a person that they were involved in an intimate relationship with, but a person that they didn't really know how much anger and how much hatred would have to be brought to bear in order to take a knife and cut somebody's throat.

It's absolutely startling when you think about it. It's a little ironic that you say it like that, Joe, because slicing Sessions' throat is not the only injury that this man had. Yeah, it's really not. And as I mentioned, this is an ambush attack. There were multiple sharp force injuries to the back of his neck, according to what the courts have said and what was said at trial. It wasn't just simply the cutting of the throat. And

we talk about things in forensics in degrees many times. Sometimes we don't have, we don't really have the verbiage to apply to it many times. It's very interesting when you read autopsy reports and you hear people in forensics talk and they're talking about injuries. They'll use the term gaping quite a bit and I'm in no way making light of this, but if folks at home will just imagine what a sharp force injury, where the edge of that blade is actually drawn across the surface of the anterior neck. It creates this kind of gaping injury that looks very similar to a smile. And the reason that happens is kind of the biomechanics that are involved in the person wielding the knife and of course the surface of the neck so when they cut many times it's not just going to be straight across the throat and that's

one of the the kind of weird things that you'll see in hollywood you know they'll display that kind of event like that it's generally not it's going to be kind of elliptical in shape where it'll go from high to low then back to high many times if there can be direct pressure applied for the entire stroke of that blade and one of the things that really kind of grabs you in the death of scott and the injury that he sustained when they were finally able to assess it is the fact that investigators had described and the pathologist had described the fact that Scott's head was almost completely separated from his body. So what that means is that you're not just going through these vessels that we've talked

about, you know, these major vessels that supply the brain with oxygen, but you're also going through all the muscle attachments and some of these features that keep our head upright, if you will, the musculature and all those sorts of things, until the individual would have gotten down to the spinal processes, those stacked vertebrae in the cervical area that hold our head up, upright, you know, that structure that had gotten all the way down to that point to where his neck was in such a condition that when they observed his body, there was this idea that he had almost been decapitated.

And again, I think that that's a demonstration of how much anger and hatred is involved in an attack like this. So, would the near decapitation come from the repeated blows? I mean, let's be realistic. When you look at your neck, it's smaller than your torso, than your head. So, is the near decapitation from repeated cuts we said that he had many injuries to his neck or did that come from one long slice across his throat it can and again a lot of this is dependent upon the amount of pressure that can be applied in one fail swoop and how sharp the edge is on the blade, I would suspect that this occurred as a result of multiple insults or strokes across that area. It would be very difficult, I would think at least, to render this kind of injury with one blow. We're not talking about somebody swinging an axe here, okay?

We're talking about an individual that is using a handheld blade where they're having to generate all this force by moving their hand either from left to right or right to left and getting down into that tissue. I don't see that it would necessarily be possible to do that. So you would have to do this multiple times. And, you know, to reemphasize this point, this gives you an indication as to how much time the perpetrator would have had to have spent doing this. How much rage, how much anger is driving this event that is so unimaginably horrific.

And it really goes to, I think at least, to the pathology of an individual that would do this. Because, you know, it's not like you've got somebody that is in the person of Eastman. You don't have somebody that's working, say, for instance, in a slaughterhouse, okay, that's day after day, they're used to seeing blood, they're used to seeing, I mean, let's face it, the death of animals. There's almost kind of a disconnect between what they're doing occupationally and the gore that they're subjected to. This is a guy that, to the best of our knowledge, doesn't have this level of experience, certainly not in the immediate.

He wasn't doing a job like that. So they have to have a very strong driver behind them that you know we're not talking about doing this to some poor animal in a slaughterhouse we're talking about a fellow human being i mean just let that sink in and resonate with you just for a moment and this is another point along this is that in doing this you talk about contact trace evidence oh my lord this particular case you know he would have had to have cleaned himself up very very well gotten rid of his clothes more than likely that's what happened because he would have been super saturated in blood because this is not something you just merely walk away from this is not like you've taken firearm and shot somebody and then you're essentially absent visible visible evidence on your body and i know that people say well you can get you know blood staining that blows back on you yeah you can and there's gunshot residue but come on let's face it what we're

talking about here is just the depths of horror before we talk about the discovery of sessions body let's jump ahead and talk about the death of heather frank for a second heather frank continued about her quote unquote normal life for a week before she was killed how was she killed killed, Joe? With Scott, you know, we've talked about this ad nauseum relative to sharp force injuries, but with Heather, Heather was actually shot, shot twice in the chest with.22 caliber ammunition. It's a much, I don't know if the term merciful really fits in here, but let's face it, in the grand scheme of things, you're not almost decapitating her, all right? So, it would have been a much cleaner death, I would think, and much less dramatic, if you will, because if she shot in the

chest, there's a high probability that you're going to hit a vital area, perhaps the heart, the lungs, and death would soon follow thereafter, depending upon the location of the injuries. But we do know that she was shot in the chest. And fascinatingly enough, when Eastman was discovered, he actually had.22 caliber ammunition in his pocket. And that was what she was killed with? Yeah, she was, in fact, killed with.22 caliber ammunition in his pocket. And that was what she was killed with? Yeah, she was, in fact, killed with.22 caliber ammunition.

You've got kind of this forensic tieback, you know, that's a very specific ammunition. And yeah, a lot of people have it. I think.22 caliber is one of the most popular types of ammunition that's out there. People use it for varmint hunting. You know, it's a very small caliber. It's probably the smallest. Now, I know there are people out there that say You know, it's a very small caliber. It's probably the smallest. Now, I know there are people out there that say, well, it's not the smallest. Yeah, there's these other kind of off-the-beaten-path ammos that are out there.

But I'm talking about something that is widely sold. When, you know, we've gone through ammunition shortages in this country, one of the things that goes off the shelf first is.22 caliber ammunition. And it's because it's a smaller caliber. People can keep it around. They use it for varmint hunting. They use it for what's referred to as plinking, which is just target shooting out on property and that sort of thing. A lot of people possess.22 caliber weapons,

whether it be a pistol or whether it be a shoulder-fired arm. So just the fact that he had it in his pocket does not necessarily mean that he did the killing. But then when you combine the fact that she's found with these rounds that had been pumped into her chest and that he had the same ammunition and the fact that when she was found deceased, she was actually found in an area he had access to, wrapped in plastic and tied up with baleen wire. So here's the point I want to make about these two murders, Joe. Given the fact that prosecutors believed that Heather Franks lured Sessions to her apartment

to make this murder happen, she was part of it. Whether it was coerced by abuse, doesn't really matter. She was a part of it. So then why was she killed? If she was a part of this to begin with, why did she have to die? You know, I've had somebody else ask me that question about this. Because, you know, you think about how some people have put forth this idea that this toxic relationship that these two had and it lasted for seven years all right it was on again off again they'd fight and carry on and whatnot if she was so afraid of him and she had lured

sessions to her apartment why would eastman kill her because you would think that he could control her you know just merely through fear i think that and some people put forth this theory that after a time he realized that she could talk that she would be a source of information that would tie him back and let's this is not just like you know randomly bumping into a car when you're driving down the road and you've got a passenger that witnesses we're talking about bringing a man to your apartment we're talking about you being a witness to him literally ambushing this man this sweet beloved man and you're bearing witness to him cutting his throat till he bleeds out on the carpet we're thinking about potentially her health helping him that is

eastman remove scott's body and helping to dispose of it all of those things in in his mind at least are kind of connecting these dots. And he has maybe a moment of lucidity where he says, look, if I don't get rid of her, she can tie me back to this murder, this disposal. And then my life is over with. So if I remove her from the equation, even though I quote unquote love her, I got to get rid of her. I got to get rid of her and I gotta get rid of her and took place, it's isolated. It's beautiful. It's, you know, it's more like you're not right in the middle of the Rockies.

You can probably see them in the distance in a couple of locations there. We're talking about Laramie and Weld counties, not too far from Greeley and Fort Collins in that area up in northern Colorado. What's absolutely shocking about this is that this case, these two homicides, were so brutal and so horrific and so isolated. I had this kind of moment of clarity when i'm going over these cases to talk about them i suddenly came to a realization well county is actually where chris watts had killed his entire family what are the odds i think that you would have these two completely unconnected events happen in such a rural, isolated area that's, by all accounts, a very peaceful area. What they found out at the scenes, though, involving sessions and Frank was absolutely horrific. We've seen this over and over again, Joe, on body bags.

People think that it's easy to render down a body let's just throw them in the fire that's what happened to session's body yeah you're right it was and it rendered down and we're just talking about the lower torso, there was still sufficient remain left behind that Scott's body was found, you know, still intact to the point where they could do an assessment on his remains, the upper torso. And they could assess this injury to his neck, you know, that we talked about that was so horrific. But also one other significant finding that kind of connects these two deaths. Scott's body was found in Laramie County, and then Frank's was found over in Weld County. Scott had plastic melted to his face, and it can be surmised that his body had, in fact,

been wrapped in plastic, and not only wrapped in in plastic but the same plastic that was used to wrap up heather frank's body that was intact her body was intact she had been shot multiple times wrapped in plastic and then tied off with with baling wire but scott had been placed into this burn pit and his remains were burned it was an insufficient job it was insufficient to the task and we hear that theme over and over and over again in forensics and i certainly talked about here on body bags and the individual that's doing this either loses the will to continue on with what they're doing they get distracted maybe they have to go to work maybe they're they don't have sufficient supplies in order to keep this up because you know when you're burning a body

you have to keep this heat going and it's not something that can be backed off of because you're in an open area this is not a crematory you're having to always stoke the fire turn the fire and incense come in contact constantly with the remain can anyone possibly imagine what that's like you're you're standing over a fire pit that you have seemingly created and you're applying fuel you're applying accelerant you're turning the fire and maybe all of a sudden you have this kind of epiphanal moment. It's like, oh my God, I'm actually burning another human being's body here. And you just kind of walk away from it for a moment. And in this particular case, when the fire was not tended to properly, that's the moment, you know, forensically when you get a break.

Because that means that all of the evidence hasn't been consumed by the fire. You still have this gaping wound in the neck where you can actually make the assessment that the head was almost, you know, separated from the body. And also this plastic that is a tieback. And we look for tiebacks in forensics all the time, connectivity, if you will, the sinew that kind of holds everything together. And this plastic that was found on Scott Sessions' body was also found wrapping Heather Frank's body. Investigators are not just going to look at that and go, oh, there's green plastic on both of these bodies.

It must have come from the same source. They're actually going to set out to prove that it came from the same source. How do they do that? Yeah, isn't that interesting? When you begin to think about, there's any number of ways that plastics, sheeting like this, can be tied back. We think, first off, you have to do a general overall classification. And again, that's one of the things that's done in forensic practice.

You look at the plastic that you have and they've turned this as construction-grade plastic, which means it's robust. And it also means that it is unique, that this is not necessarily the kind of plastic sheeting you're going to have laying around in your garage, okay? It's not the same type of plastic you're going to put down in your garden for instance when people put down a barrier of plastic in order to keep weeds from from growing up through it this is a very particular type of plastic that has specific features we begin to think about the thickness of it you know how robust is it we think about color and what kind of sources locally could you acquire this plastic from? Or where is it being used? Did you go into a job site? Did somebody go into a job site and

steal the plastic? Was the individual that was using this involved in construction? Which, of course, Eastman was. And then, you know, when you get into more of the dense forensics here, these plastics have very specific chemical structures. And if you want to go this far with it, you can begin to think about, well, if we've got plastics involved in this case, are these two things chemically related, molecularly? You know, is it the same composition, that sort of thing? Because these things have a formula to them that are very specific to that brand you can also look if it's perforated in any way forensic scientists that are involved in trace evidence can actually match up perforations if it's torn away you can also think about how was it cut and again that implies the use of a bladed instrument in order to facilitate that so there's

any number of ways that you can kind of tie this back. And they were able to, the police were actually able to kind of marry up, if you will, the plastic found melted to Scott's face and that plastic that Heather Frank's body was wrapped in. Let's talk one more piece of connectivity that you're talking about. When Heather Frank's body was found, it was found next to a woodpile. Not only was it found next to a wood pile there was a large log there that was found smoldering and i think that one of the interesting we're talking about bodies being found if we'll go back to the discovery of scott's body and scott was missing he had last talked to his dad in the evening preceding these events, I think by two days. And of course, he didn't show up for a gig.

His body was actually discovered on the 10th, I believe it was. And it was discovered by a snowplow driver. Now, this is one of the coldest times of the year up there in Colorado. And so snow on the ground, snowplow drivers coming along, and he sees these human remains out there in the burn pit. But what happened was, and this is kind of fascinating, as the police began to put two and two together in this case, they actually drew up warrants for the murder of Scott Session. They drew up warrants for both Eastman and Heather Franks. They wanted both of them for questioning in the disappearance of Scott. And they went so far as to put tracking devices on Scott's vehicle and on Heather Franks' vehicle.

And one of the things that occurred is that they were able to track Eastman's location relative to Heather's body. They knew that he had visited that area, and then when they went out to conduct a search, they being the police, they discovered her remains. He was actually, now get this, he was actually arrested at a local filling station with a gas can. He was getting ready to burn her body up. And it was just adjacent to this wood pile. There was even a large log, they said, that was out there that was smoldering. So he was prepping.

He was getting ready to attempt to render down the body of this woman that he had been involved in an intimate relationship with for over seven years. Kevin Eastman was subsequently convicted and is serving consecutive life sentences in Colorado State Penitentiary. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.