Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Jospeph Scott Morgan: Joshua Drennen's Murderous Rampage

Episode Date: September 17, 2022

First responders arrive at a “battle scene” in 77-year-old Barbara Steele's West Virginia home. Her body is beaten, eviscerated, and positioned on a makeshift altar by 28-year-old Joshua Drennen, who after leaving her residence, continues his string of assaults on unsuspecting civilians, until immobilized by a Charleston police officer.  In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss the antique item used in the physical attacks and injuries sustained by Barbara Steele and two other individuals in the community. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 2:46 - Description of an antique iron owned and utilized by 77-year-old Barbara Steele 6:47 - Police are alerted to a criminal act committed by Joshua Drennen inside Barbara Steele’s home 8:03 - Joe describes the crime scene, the assault on Barbara Steele’s vehicle, and her participation within the community. 10:45 - Jackie and Joe discuss the continued acts of violence by Joshua Drennen against a woman inside her parked vehicle 9:23 - An explanation of cubing injuries to a body from an explosion of safety glass and how investigators use that information to determine a body’s position within a vehicle 13:31 - Joshua Drennen’s continued acts of violence throughout the community  17:29 - Charleston Police Patrolman Terrence Casto stops the threat by Joshua Drennen 18:24 - Joe describes the violent crime scene and the horrendous blunt force trauma Barbara Steele’s body experienced 26:21 - Beyond the trauma to her face and head, the police noticed Barbara's body had been eviscerated, as well as sexually assaulted post-mortem 31:33 - Joe and Jackie discuss the way Barbara Steele’s body was positioned and items located near her after the attack 35:49 - Why Barbara Steele and the woman in the parking lot? 37:24 - Overview of Joshua Drennen’s trial and convictionSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. As I've gotten older, I think that one of the things I enjoy doing more than anything on weekends with my wife, I can't believe I'm saying this, but is actually going antiquing. I love to go to old junk stores and I love to go to antique shops and just look at things. It's not that I'm necessarily going to buy anything. I like, I think because I'm a frustrated historian at heart and every item in every one of these stores has its own tale to be told. And it's fascinating, particularly when you walk through an area of a store and you see

tools that are left behind that people find useless nowadays. But it's things that meant something to people in their workaday life, things that they used on a regular basis. And it draws you in. You can learn a lot about a person and the life that they have lived, I think perhaps, by those things that they utilized. And that brings me to what we're going to talk about today. The lady that had lived a full life,

had made it into her 70s, had retired, and was now just wanting to live at peace, working on clothing, working as a seamstress, and using an old-fashioned iron, a steam iron. And then all of a sudden her world exploded in Charleston, West Virginia. My name is Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. I was very hesitant to talk about this case today.

However, I think that it's emblematic of how quickly terror can fall upon us at any moment in time. And I had to talk about this case with my friend Jackie, Jackie Howard from Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, I don't know that over the course of our discussions I've encountered a case like this, but it really kind of punched me in the gut when I began to think about you live your life and you just want to be at peace. You just, you want to love those that are around you and enjoy your years that you've worked so hard for to live in this kind of environment where you don't have to get up and do those things that you have to do. You do the things you want to do. I don't know how it affected you, but this case, when I read it, it was just horrifying. We have talked about so many things that we as humans can do to each other, but this is one of, well, of the worst that we've talked about. 77-year-old Barbara Steele was in her home just enjoying and doing the things that she wanted to do when Joshua Drennan, 28 years old, entered her home and attacked Barbara Steele,

let me warn you now, not that I think that you're listening to this podcast with children in the room, but if you have someone who is sensitive to rough content, let me advise you now, this is a rough podcast to listen to. Very heinous things were done by Joshua Drennan and multiple. He went on a mini crime spree attacking multiple victims, but it started with Barbara Steele. He went into her home and attacked this woman. The piece of equipment that you're talking about, Joe, the antique here, is an iron. You know, there's a term that people that study artifacts use, and I've always been fascinated by this term. It's called patina. gives you an indication that the appearance of an item, a work of art, or whether it be an instrument of some kind,

that over the years, the decades perhaps, it has aged in a particular way. And it takes on these different characteristics where almost the item itself is kind of morphing as years go by. And we would expect that. And it seems kind of obvious, but I've seen images of this steam iron, and if I can just kind of describe it, it looks like an old-fashioned iron that you

would place, say, for instance, on a stove. It's not an electric iron. It's something that you would place perhaps on a stove and heat the thing know, something like a great-grandmother would have used. My grandmother actually had a couple of old-fashioned irons that you would put on the surface of a wood-burning stove, a pot-bellied stove. And, you know, you don't really give it a second thought, but this one looks a little bit different. It's got a kind of a bulb on the front of it and a metal handle. It's kind of rusty in appearance, I guess. And the bulb itself apparently is where water is contained. And it's an early iteration of what we would refer to as a steam iron. So that when it's heated, the little bulb that contains the water heats up and it transfers that steam to the item, to the item that you're ironing, you know, pressing. It's fascinating to see that someone would still use this to this day. But from what we understand,

this item was in fact utilized by the victim in this case. She worked as a seamstress and would still utilize this iron, something that she preferred. You know, even her children said that they had seen it in the house for years and years. It was just part of who she was. She liked it. I don't know what the origin of this item is. Maybe it's something that had been passed down through her family, you know, because this is an art form, working with clothing and doing alterations. And it's something that maybe she had had in her family for a long time. Maybe it had been passed on from, you know, almost from master to apprentice, you know, as it were. And something she had held on to.

And so, the iron itself becomes part and parcel of the story. It's kind of what the whole thing centers around because it's an item that is what we would refer to from a forensic standpoint is a weapon of convenience. It's something that a perpetrator does not come armed with. It's something that they utilize that is within arm's reach. That's something that is part of that environment in which they kind of invade and step into. And in this case, it was utilized in the most brutal way that I think that anybody could imagine. Police were made aware of what was happening inside this home, or what did happen inside this home, by neighbors who witnessed Joshua Drennan exiting Barbara Steele's home.

Now remember, Barbara Steele is 77. Joshua Drennan exiting Barbara Steele's home. Now remember, Barbara Steele is 77. Joshua Drennan is 28. The owner of a business that was located across the street from Steele's home, and he had known her for quite some time, was the first person to find her. He said he looked through the screen door and could see down the hallway, and he described it as looking like a battle zone. He said there was broken glass everywhere. Things were toppled over. It basically looked like a tornado had gone through.

So, forensically, Joe, what do we see here? What can that tell us? How many times have we talked about over the course of our years together jackie on nancy's show and any other kind of medium that we're on you know when they come to me and they ask me about promising assessment it's our it's kind of our our fallback position we say you know there was no signs of forced entry or struggle, all right? In this case, this is a classic sign of struggle. You've got items that are randomly broken, shattered glass.

I think that was the most striking thing about this, that there was broken glass. People kept implying that. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that in addition to what had gone on inside of the home, Ms. Steele's vehicle that was parked at her home there, the police described it in an interesting way. They said that her vehicle had been attacked. And when I was reading over the police reports in this particular case, that was an interesting, you know, kind of turn of the phrase there. Her vehicle was attacked because you think of people or, you know, an animal or, you know, being attacked. You don't think of a car being attacked, but that's the way it was described. that had drawn the neighborhood's attention to this because when drennan left her house he has this steam iron that we talked about in hand and he's essentially pounding on the outside of her

car and breaking the windows and all the sort of thing And he met with a certain level of frustration where he couldn't gain access to it. So you can imagine that in this environment, which the neighbor had talked about, you know, he'd known her for years and years. And Ms. Steele was known as somebody, first off, she retired from local school board, had put in her time there. She was highly regarded. And, you know, the thing that you come away with when you read back through the interviews of witnesses and people that were in her circle, they talked about how gentle she was and how kind she was. She had a lot of kids that she, I'm sure she had touched their lives in this community. She lived on the west side of Charleston, West Virginia, in just a modest wood frame, white wood frame home. She was widowed and just living this kind of peaceful existence.

And then all of a sudden her world explodes with this guy that there's no indication that they had ever crossed paths before. And that's what makes this all the more horrific. Why, of all the people in the world, would you, in fact, target a lady like this, who is obviously going to be weaker than you, who's not posing a threat in any way? There's no indication, you know, that she was screaming at this guy as he's walking down the street, you know, engaging with him in any way. He just burst into her life and just absolutely just ripped to shreds. Besides the assault on Barbara Steele, the assault on the car,

Joshua Drennan continued his crime spree going through the neighborhood and ultimately assaulted at least two other people that we know of. One was a woman sitting in a drugstore parking lot. What happened to her? Again, somebody just randomly sitting. Can you imagine? And all of us have done this. Hopefully nobody's texting while they're driving.

This lady had pulled over into a local drugstore's parking lot and was sitting there. She's like in a 2004 Honda CRV. You know, her back is to this guy as he's approaching her car. And she's sitting there and she's texting. You know, and you think, well, what would she be texting about? And you can kind of superimpose your thoughts about it. But maybe she's at the drugstore. She's trying to contact her family saying, look, I'm at the drugstore.

Is there anything I can pick up for you while I'm here, this sort of thing. And then all of a sudden, her driver's side window just explodes in a hail of glass. This iron that we talked about is being wielded by Brennan. He drives this thing through the glass and begins to pummel her with this iron and beat her and then doesn't open the door. He drags her out of the car through the broken window and onto the ground adjacent, you know, to the vehicle and he hops in the vehicle and drives away. And I can only imagine, you know, her, it's not, surprise doesn't even begin, you know, to kind of describe this. You're minding your own business, and all of a sudden the world just explodes in the shattering of this cubed safety glass, which is what, you know, we have, you know, in these windows of the sun.

If you ever see a car, the glass on either side shatters into these little cubes and she probably would have wound up with tiny little lacerations as a result of the glass fracturing into these little bits it comes across these little cubes they make these little l-shaped lacerations as they strike skin that's one of the reasons that's kind of how in motor vehicle accidents, for instance, we can tell which side of the vehicle an individual is positioned in. Were they a passenger in the front seat? Do they have these cubed, they call it cubing injuries, on the right side of their face? That gives you an indication they were adjacent to that window. And on the left side, you know, of the face, that would give you an indication that you were on the driver's side, either in the front or the back seat.

And then she's drug out there, and she's probably dazed in a state of complete and total confusion. And then she looks up, and her car is just gone. Total stranger has just driven off with this vehicle. And this guy is in kind of this amped up state. He's driving along the road, and According to what the police reports are saying, he wound up striking another vehicle that a gentleman was driving. And I don't know if the CRV that he had stolen had become disabled, but he decides that he's going to try to commandeer the vehicle that he has just struck. But suddenly, reality sets in. I think a lot can be learned about the nature of this fellow.

It's at this point he approaches the driver of that vehicle, and the next thing you know, he's staring down the muzzle of a gun because this guy's a concealed carry guy. And he draws his weapon, and all of a sudden drennan suddenly i guess he he has a a lucid moment he realizes oh this guy's a threat now keep in mind the two people that he has brutally attacked so far have been women unarmed women and now he comes face to face with a person that is prepared to shoot him. And he runs away at that point in time.

The next person that Drennan runs into, Joe, is a police officer who by now are made aware that this has happened in Barbara Steele's home. Witnesses saw Drennan leaving and reported it to the police. Now you have a second woman injured, as you said, and then he runs into a police officer. The police officer, this gentleman, he is aware, you know, there's radio chatter at this point, you know, something ain't right. I can tell you, you know, they probably don't have this kind of thing. You know, Charleston is not a tiny town, but I can tell you, you know, they probably don't have this kind of thing. You know, Charleston is not a tiny town, but I can tell you they don't have some maniac running down the street every day with an antique iron, pummeling people with it. He's aware now. It's gone out on the radio. Can any of us

imagine how terrified you are? You're seeing this, and there are calls that are coming in to the 9-11 Center. You know, people are seeing this. One guy even, I think, he videotaped a goodly portion of this at a distance, this confrontation that Drennan winds up having with the police officer. He begins to, again, pummel this police officer with this iron. I mean, look, cops are set up, they're trained to have situational awareness. That is, those things that are occurring in the environment around them. I don't know if in the academy, you know, they prepare you for, you know, what do I do if a guy shows up with an antique iron? I'm sure the police officer is shocked, but he reaches into his belt, his service belt, and pulls out his what's referred to as an asp. It's a deployable baton. People have seen these. They're telescoping and they're very heavy. You extend it by popping

it out and then you go into position to strike, you know, the person that's advancing on you. The problem is, is that apparently as the officer is set, Drennan is advancing on the police officer with the iron and begins to swing it wildly at him. And the police officer backs up and trips. Now, this is horrifying when you think about trips backwards over a curb and he drops his ass. And in the meantime, Drenna just descends on him i mean he begins to pummel him again with the iron beating him all over the only thing the police officer can really do is just kind of contract into a ball on the ground i'm sure he's got his vest on but that's not protecting his head it's not protecting his hands his hips hips, that sort of thing. And you've got this wild man just assaulting you.

And it's at this point that the police officer, his name is Casto. Officer Casto, you know, was able to draw his weapon and shoot Drennan in the chest and the neck area. Now, amazingly, Drennan survived that. Two gunshot wounds at close range. You survive them. But it stopped the threat at that moment in time. They were able to, you know, pack Drennan off to the local hospital where he was treated and arrested there and spent some time in the hospital. Obviously, the guy's been shot, so they had to do surgery on him. But all of this

happened in a very short period of time, where this perpetrator traveled just a few blocks, and in his wake, you know, he just left absolute horror. so many times it's the quietness to get you when you're at a crime scene. It's really kind of hard to put into words, but it used to be when I would get a call to roll out on you. You get this sudden, I don't know, jolt of adrenaline, the anticipation of what's going to happen. You show up and there's lights flashing. There might be fire trucks there there's people crying and and carrying on and you're standing there and you're about to make entry into the scene and then all of a sudden the outside chatter begins to die down and there's this kind of uneasy peace that kind of settles in the environment.

Things get really, really quiet. You no longer hear the chatter. And you stand there just for a moment, and many times I found myself, I'd be there by myself in a room with a decedent, and you are able to begin to see what had happened quietly. Consider what had happened. Just for a moment. To the victim lying there.

And what the police saw when they walked into Ms. Steele's house, I can't even begin to fathom what kind of course through their bodies at that moment in time. I would imagine that the police officers had never seen anything like this. Well, I would certainly hope not, Joe, because this scene is just absolutely horrendous. The indignities that this poor woman suffered. Let's take them one by one. First, we know she was beaten with the iron. You think about this item, and I urge anybody that wants to research this case, please take a look at the pictures that are available. And when you see this thing, it's not like you're looking in one of the things that we talk about in forensics, blunt force injuries. Okay. And I think many people think blunt force injuries,

automatically their default position is something like, say, for instance, a club, a baseball bat. And yeah, those do generate, obviously, blunt force injuries. But there are a myriad of other items that can do this as well. And when you're trying to interpret blunt force trauma, you're having to assess it on various levels. You want to try to understand how old the injuries are. You know, if somebody's sustained a contusion or bruise, you want to know if it's recent or if it's in the distant past. And then you try to determine, is there a pattern to the item that was used to strike somebody with?

Let's say, for instance, the example I gave a baseball bat. When you see somebody that is struck with a baseball bat, they're going to have these very kind of defined linear margins on either side that would give you an indication that you've got this surface that has contacted the flesh and it's left these kind of lines of demarcation if you will running parallel to one another and you'll have you know an associated bruise with it but with this item this iron you look at the surfaces along the edges of this thing and And there are multiple. You've got kind of the base of the thing that's got a sharp leading edge. It comes to a point. And then you have all of these other elements to the structure of this thing that are kind of protruding from it. So just imagine it's being

wielded by holding this handle that's in the superior portion of it, just like you think about an iron. It has an old-fashioned handle, though, that's kind of got a curved appearance to it, and it's being brought down. Now, the totality of the weight is going to be in the base. Remember, the purpose of an iron is to place a heated surface that has weight to it that will essentially run all the wrinkles out of anything that you're pressing, if you will. And so there'll be a lot of weight that is going to be associated with the base of this thing. It looks like it's made out of some type of cast iron, more than likely. So when you're delivering that strike with this thing, the energy that is transferring from this element, from the iron to that surface that you're striking, in this case, Masteel's head, you're going to get these

really deep gash-like injuries. But you'll also have to try to pick out all of these little attachments that are along the side of this thing because they're going to generate a different type of injury and they're going to impact the body in a very specific way so it's it's going to be very difficult to kind of interpret these along the way and the pathologist would have had to have made sense of this and he said well morgan why is it why is it important you know we know that she's been beaten to death. Well, it's important because you begin to understand that for every one of these strikes, there's a readjustment perhaps of the victim and of the perpetrator relative to one another. So

did he hold her down? Did he put his foot on her chest and begin to strike downward at her? Was he chasing her about? Because those types of strikes are going to look different than, say, somebody that's in a static position. What we do know is that when they observed her, they noticed that these insults that she had sustained, these injuries she sustained, you had total involvement of both the head and the face on her. And she was greatly, greatly disfigured. When you talk about something that has this kind of concentrated weight to it, like this old-fashioned iron, with a single blow, you could strike lethally. Because the surfaces that you're going through, the skin, the muscle, and of course the table of the skull, with that energy transference, you can collapse all of that with one strike.

And it's that transference of energy that can essentially render that person incapacitated with one blow. Now, you might not necessarily kill them with one blow, but you're going to have high probability with something that's heavier as opposed to something that's lighter. In that same vein, I'm thinking that this would be, we throw around the term, throw around is not really an accurate way of saying it, but we do use the term a lot, overkill. I think that that's when you see this case where she is struck so many times with this item over and over again, you begin to think, why was this done and why did you do this? Because you go from the point of killing, which in and of itself is horrible, to mutilation at that point, you know, because you're doing it over and over and over and over and over again,

which is, again, so horrific in this particular case. And it would be absolutely horrific no matter who it happened to. But in this case, we're talking about Mestil. And Mestil was a very affable passive gentle kind of person you think what would drive somebody to to do this to her a knife was also used to kill miss steel and the damage that was left behind well it's just nightmarish i cannot imagine if you're not used to seeing this sort of thing, if you're a patrol officer and you walk in and I've heard patrol officers say

this, you know, have stated this to me, you know, and they'll say, I don't see how you do what you do for a living. And of course, on my end, it never got easy, but it's very difficult for say, a police officer that walks into an environment and they see not just this general soul who has been beaten you know um about the head and face with heavy object but now they they notice that her clothing is in disarray and it's in disarray to the point where when they look at her abdomen she's been partially eviscerated and for those that don't really understand that term,

and it's by no fault of your own, trust me, I wish that no one knew what this term meant. But in our world, in the medical legal world, and specifically in forensic pathology, one of the things that takes place is that when we remove organs, that process is called evisceration. And evisceration means to expose and remove. Well, I don't know that they were necessarily removed, but her bowels were essentially outside of her body. And in order to accomplish this, this is not something that you could have done, obviously, with this iron. It would be a Herculean task to do that and would take a protracted period of time. So then you begin to think about, well, was there an opportunity to, again, use a weapon of opportunity? That is, those things that are at his, at Drennan's reach,

or did he have a knife on his person in order to go through her abdominal wall and essentially create a situation where she had loops of bowel resting outside of her body. Now imagine that. You've beaten this woman to this point with this antique iron and now you have, you know, essentially opened up her abdominal cavity to expose her intestines. When we're in the morgue, we have specialized tools that are created for this purpose. You have the scalpels that are so sharp, they're disposable, not the handles, but the blades themselves. They're so sharp, you can essentially only use them that one time. Some people are amazed that we have to change them so frequently, but the edge is so fine on the things and it's so very sharp that it dulls very quickly. And the reason it dulls is that you're going through

multiple different types of tissue to get down through the abdominal wall in this particular case to go through that layer of skin and then what's referred to as the subcutaneous fat and then down through the abdominal muscles, which is an entire complex in and of itself, just to expose the bowel. This is quite messy work as well for someone that is not clothed for it or prepared for it. There's no way to avoid getting blood on you. So you will, if you are perpetrating this crime, you will essentially be awash in blood. You'll be speckled with blood all over your body. You'll have great, you know, kind of swaths of blood that have been smeared upon you. And for us, forensically, when you begin to look at this, that type of blood or transfer of blood from an abdominal injury as you're opening up the bowel is going to appear completely different than the dynamic kind of injury that you have when an individual is being beaten with something like this heavy iron.

That's going to have a completely different appearance to it. It's very important when you get an individual who is clothed still with the clothing that they were wearing at the time, that you secure that clothing, because you can really begin to tell the tale as to what happened and the dynamics of this environment. At least it will give you an indication as to what may have happened. Even more disturbing than what you've already told us, Joe, Barbara Steele was also sexually assaulted. Yeah, she was. And I think that just out of a sense of propriety, I'm not going to go too deeply into this. Just suffice it to say that she was, in the most horrific way, sexually

assaulted. And I think that this extends out into a bigger, a broader narrative when it comes to Trennan, where his mind was, perhaps, where you would feel compelled at whatever level to do this to this dear woman. What would be the driver behind obviously assaulting her, not just in life, but I have to put forth my opinion of the fact that this was done post-mortem. So you've got a degree of post-mortem activity that has a sexual connotation to it. And I think that that's just absolutely, it raises it to an entirely different level if this can get any worse at all. Forensic psychologists, many times, they'll talk about the ordered mind and the disordered mind, or disorganized events versus organized events.

In the case of Mrs. Steele's attack and the others that were attacked at the hands of Drennan, there is apparently no rhyme or reason to a lot of this. Jackie, you had mentioned just a moment or two ago, you used the term tornado. I think that one of the witnesses saw that. And having lived through a tornado, I have to say that that kind of sums it up because everything is in disarray. Everything is thrown about. There are no patterns to it. And many times as investigators, that's kind of what leaves a scratch in our heads.

In addition to an iron, we assume and suppose that it was a knife. And then we have the sexual assault. But the last part of this case, Joe, is how Barbara Steele's body was positioned and left. We know that his attorneys during his trial said that they attributed his crimes to mental illness that included methamphetamine use and that Drennan suffered from religious delusions. And we kind of see a little bit of that inference in how Barbara Steele's body was positioned after the crime. Yeah, I can only recall I was thinking about this when I was reading through her case, and a couple of points kind of struck me. And I was thinking, had I ever worked anything that had a religious connotation to it? Yeah, I have. There were a couple of cases along the way. Obviously, you're going to have these kind of people that are in

spiritual conflict and that sort of thing, and they wind up taking their own lives. And you'll get these very involved suicide notes and all those sorts of things. And I've had, I think to the best of my knowledge, I've that when they observed her body, her body had been positioned. And I think that that's very important here to use the term positioned on her coffee table so that, you know, coffee tables are not very big. You know, you have to think that, you know, her goodly portion of her body, particularly the appendages, the appendicular areas of the body, the arms and legs are hanging off and the trunk of the body is essentially supported. So the chest is kind of thrown upward. It would seem as though that the coffee table had been used almost as if it were an altar, you know, with kind of the hyperextended chest and the abdomen. Remember, we talked about the trauma she had sustained.

I hate the word why, and you've heard me say that before, because why is so highly subjective, particularly in a case like this, because you'll drive yourself to madness if you try to understand why or try to figure out why. It's much safer, at least I think intellectually, to stay with what happened and maybe if we can explain that. But sometimes things are just beyond the pale, if you will. In this case, with this kind of hyperextended posture that she's in, it was important to note, and I found this kind of fascinating, that a clock had been taken off of the, I guess it was the adjacent mantelpiece there in her home and placed upon her chest.

There was no indication, at least per the police reports, that she had been beaten with a clock. The clock was essentially placed on her chest. Why would you do that? You know, again, there's a why question. I don't know that there is. You can never answer that but i do know that another item that they found immediately adjacent to her body was a bowl from within her house and contained within that bowl was it's been described in a couple of locations as either a cross or crucifix you know but again you've kind of got this heavy religious overtone here. I find it kind of fascinating when people

go down this road of mental illness, you know, with people where they say, well, they were affected by drugs or they've got this kind of hyper-religiosity thing going on where they're delusional and all that. When you look at that, you think, well, why didn't he go to the home if he's so, you know, out of his mind? Why didn't he go to the home of, say, a 250-pound auto mechanic and walk into their house and do this to them? That gives you an indication that maybe he had targeted her for whatever reason. It's disordered as an environment was. He picked somebody that was weaker than him. It was a completely asymmetrical attack.

He didn't pick anybody. He did it twice. Yeah, he did. And that was the other thing. You know, the woman in the parking lot, what did we say about her? He snuck up from the rear with her. It's not like he approached her from the front and was menacing her, where she could have given her an opportunity to drive away.

No, he snuck up from the rear. And when he crashed that vehicle what did he do he came face to face with a guy that was prepared to kill him and what did he do he ran away so he has some inkling of self-preservation if you will he's picking out people that are weaker than him where he can dominate over them and in miss steel's case i mean's case, I mean, you know, God bless her family. I can't even begin to imagine the depths of sorrow that's associated with it. 28-year-old Joshua Drennan was convicted of killing Barbara Steele, 77 years old, and injuring a police officer. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of

parole and an additional 92 years on the other charges for the other crimes, including attempted murder, robbery, malicious wounding, assault, stealing a car, and larceny. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.