Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - BONUS PODCAST: The Jane Doe Murders On Oxygen

Episode Date: December 28, 2020

Nancy Grace and former death investigator Joseph Scott Morgan preview Oxygen’s gripping new special “The Jane Doe Murders.” With nothing but bones, renowned forensic specialist and former Las Vegas crime investigator Yolanda McClary and her team of genealogists work feverishly to piece together the answers in a 23-year-old murder. Can McClary reveal the identity of a woman left for dead in the remote woods of Polk County, Oregon? “The Jane Doe Murders” premieres this Sunday at 7/6c, only on Oxygen, the true network for crime.   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hi guys, Nancy Grace here. Thank you so much for being with us on this special bonus podcast of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. We are previewing an upcoming Oxygen special called the Jane Doe Murders. And having prosecuted a Jane Doe murder myself, they are very, very difficult to handle. Our team at Crime Online and Crime Stories, we're thrilled to partner again with the true crime TV network, Oxygen. Oxygen has so many awesome true crime specials and series, including our program

Injustice with Nancy Grace that I adore making and feeling that we are making a change in this world. And I'm thrilled to tell you about their upcoming two-hour special, The Jane Doe Murders. It premieres this Sunday, January 3, 7 p.m. Eastern and Pacific on Oxygen. You know, I've covered a lot of investigations where the victim of a violent crime remains unidentified. A John Doe, a Jane Doe, a baby Doe. Did you know in the U.S. alone, there are nearly 40,000 open cases where investigators are unable to identify the victim. Can you even imagine someone you love deeply going missing and you never see or hear from them again? You're left wondering what happened to them. Are they alive? Are they dead? Have they started a new life?

Do they just not care about you enough to even let you know they're alive? And then the awful specter that they are in fact dead and have met with foul play. Without identification, there can really be no justice for the victim's families. And these cases often go unsolved because with every crime you start with who is the victim now in oxygen's new special the jane doe murders yolanda mcclary a renowned forensic specialist and a former las vegas crime investigator who specializes in recovery of dna makes it her mission to help give janee's their names back. Using groundbreaking new forensic technology, DNA databases, Yolanda and her team of genealogists

set out to help local law enforcement solve a 23-year-old murder and reveal the identity of a woman left for dead in the remote woods of Polk County, Oregon. They've got nothing but bones, but Yolanda works feverishly to piece together what happened to Jane Doe and hopefully somehow uncover clues that will help open new roads in the case. Joining me right now is our friend, forensic specialist, death investigator, Joseph Scott Morgan. Joe, I know I'm watching the Jane Doe murders. Hey, listen to this trailer, Joe Scott. They came out on this clearing and here set this skull all by itself. For 23 years, we haven't been able to figure out who this lady is. We're lucky she was

ever found. How do you start an investigation when that's the biggest roadblock? These victims and their families deserve answers. They lost their lives, not their names. This kind of investigative work is very different than just genealogy. We have no clue who this person is. We looked at birth records, marriage records, employment records. So it has to be the daughter of one of those remaining siblings. Her family needs to know what happened to her because without her name, her killer's name remains unknown. She was someone's mother, daughter, or sister. To be able to give them back their name means everything to me. The Jane Doe Murders, a one-night special event.

Sunday, January 3rd at 7, only on Oxygen. True crime, 24-7. You know, you're hearing from our friends at Oxygen and their upcoming two-hour special, The Jane Doe Murders. It premieres Sunday, January 3rd at 7 p.m. Eastern and Pacific. Let's go to Joseph Scott Morgan, professor of forensics, Jacksonville State University, author of Blood Beneath My Feet on Amazon. Joe Scott, I will never forget the Jane Doe murder I prosecuted. And her face still haunts me. The guy, we believe, is a serial killer,

and I had to have a facial reconstructionist work on what she would have looked like in life. Now, she was only partially skeletonized. There was part of her left to work with, but in this Polk County case, I mean, they've got nothing but bones, Joe Scott. Yeah. And that makes it particularly difficult, Nancy. You know, some of the things that we'd look for in a regular investigation where, you know, we have someone that is recently deceased, you're completely absent this in this context. You don't have a fleshly body before you. You don't have somebody that you can actually look at and say, yeah, this person fits into this particular group. They're wearing these

types of clothes. They have this hair color, eye color, that sort of, you're absent all of that. And the only thing you're left with- Now, wait a minute right there. I just want to put that theory that you're correctly, of course Joe Scott to reality here's a way to bring it home for instance when Lacey Peterson's body was found they tried to determine was she wearing the same thing she had worn the night before I believe Scott Peterson got his hair cut and Lacey had been with him and they were trying to figure out, did the clothes match up? That's important to a timeline because it can help place. Had she gone home? Had she put on her PJs before she was killed? Was she wearing something different the next day to walk the dog

McKenzie in the park, but without clothes or ID or anything? That's just what you're saying. It makes it so much more difficult, Joe Scott. Yes, it does. And, you know, the first thing you think about when you find the body, particularly of what appears to be a young woman and they're nude, the first thing you're thinking about is very sinister things. Like you mentioned, serial killers, bodies that are completely stripped of clothing. Maybe they've taken them as trophies.

Or maybe animals have walked off with the clothing, or maybe... Wait a minute. Hold your horses when you say they took them as trophies. Break it down, man. Come on. Not everybody's investigated thousands of death scenes like you. When you say trophies, for instance, I remember a case where the killer would try to keep the driver's license of every victim. Hello, the cops found it.

Who else would have all those driver's license except the killer? He kept it like trophies. Like, what are you doing? You know, we were talking about clothing. Did the killer, of course, it's a man, take any trophies? And I'm not a man-hater. See, I've got Joe Scott right here. I love him.

I love my husband. Point is, statistically, we know it's a man. And not only that, but the MO, the modus operandi method of operation, the way her body was left. But we don't know any of those details, Joe Scott, because all we've got are bones. Yeah. And, you know, Nancy, for me, working a lot of these cases like this over the course of my career, one of the biggest pieces of information that you have coming out of this is where they are found. Who had access to this particular area? Is it immediately adjacent to a roadway or did they go deep, deep, deep into the woods to discard the body? So that is a big

first step that you have to take with this case. And one of the things that I was taught early on in my career was you have to be able to explain the reason why someone has been left to die and decay for this long period of time. How is this person not popping up on the radar? How are people not out scouring the woods? How are people not engaged with actively trying to find this person? And that is one of the biggest mysteries of all. Mm hmm. trying to find this person. And that is one of the biggest mysteries of all. And I'm just thinking back on the Jane Doe murder I prosecuted and how difficult it was

and that her face, as I know it through reconstruction, still haunts me. What can you learn from just the bones? Isn't it true, Joe Scott, that you can tell the sex general theory about the age, ethnicity? For instance, you can tell if the person is a white female, a Hispanic female. I think you can tell if it's an Asian female, a black female. I'm not quite sure how they do that, but I understand that you can. Is it based on the teeth or the pelvic bones? Well, yeah. For sex, for instance, you can actually, it's the pelvic girdle that, you know,

folks at home will just think about the width of their pelvis itself. And traditionally with women, when we look at the pelvis, the pelvis is wider. It has to accommodate a birth canal in order to facilitate the birth of a child. Men tend to be more narrow. But you know, Nancy, there's something else that was always more striking to me when I looked at a skeleton. You can tell all those kind of general generalities with the body. But what's really fascinating is actually you can tell about their level of health care. You can tell about their age. How much bone wear is there? Are there arthritic changes in the joints, that sort of thing? Is there actually bone loss that you get with osteoporosis many times? How about their teeth? Did you know, Nancy, that we can actually look at the teeth and determine what side of an individual's mouth they favored while chewing?

I tell my students at Jacksonville State, take your tongue, run it around your teeth. The area where your teeth are actually the least sharp or the more dull, that's your dependent side of chewing. That's the things that we look at. And it's those little passing things, isn't it, that we notice about those in our immediate circle. Somebody might have said at some point in time, what side of your mouth do you chew on?

Or, wow, you always chew the right side of your mouth. I actually just got nobody to ever ask me that ever until right now. And I'd like to point out that I was carefully watching Jackie as you said that. And she absolutely was figuring out which side of the mouth. Okay, your right side sheets on the right thank you okay now so back what with finding nothing but bones determining cod cause of death much less manner of death it's going to be very difficult unless you can see a broken bone or a nick on a bone from a knife or you find a bullet nearby or you find a bone that has suffered a gunshot wound other than that with jane doe totally skeletonized you're not

going to find cod no you're not and this why, Nancy, because commonly in traditional deaths where we have bodies that are fully intact, we have what is remaining. We refer to it as soft tissue. And you can see things like hemorrhage. You can appreciate gunshot wounds or knife wounds or maybe some other trauma, blunt force trauma, for instance, with bruising and hemorrhage. You can even age those injuries, but not with a skeleton. You know, one of the biggest things that we look for, for instance, are the skulls. If you're fortunate enough to find the skull, many times you just find bones just lying about. But if you do have a skull, you can look for things. We call holes in skulls defects.

So you're looking at, for instance, an entrance wound for a gunshot wound or maybe an exit wound. You're looking for a depressed skull fracture or maybe the face has been pounded in. You'll see those fine facial bones that have been fractured. Those types of things are indicators. And, of course, like you mentioned, if you're fortunate enough to find, like, a rib bone, maybe a knife has passed through, and you can look for a tool mark on that, a scratch, a nick, or maybe even a groove. Or in the case of where you have a dismemberment,

you can actually find dismemberment marks left behind by saws and those sorts of things. I'm just thinking about the emotional toll it has taken on this woman's family. For all I know, she had children. And, of course, you can tell a lot about the person by the length of their leg bones or their arm bones. When you try to extract DNA, how long can you get DNA, let's just say from teeth or, I mean, when you think about it, there's not always teeth in a skull or from a bone. Let's just say your leg bone or your hip bone. How long can you still get DNA from your bones? I'm glad you brought this up.

This is the fabulous word picture I came up with to help my students at Jacksonville State. Think of a long bone like a leg bone, which is where we would generally harvest, say for instance, mitochondrial DNA out of the bone if it's still viable. Think of that bone as a leather briefcase. Now, leather briefcases seem kind of sturdy, don't they? It's going to contain that information for a while, but leather in and of itself will wear down after a while. But if we think about the teeth, Nancy, we think about the teeth, think about the teeth as a titanium briefcase. It holds on to things longer and better because teeth are in fact not bone. They are something else. They are this really strong composite. And so if we can get into the tooth, if we can get to the pulp, we can

extract DNA from there. But again, like you said, with skulls laying on the, you know, out in the woods, many times they get knocked around by animals or just over a period of time, teeth fall out of those sockets. You have to be very careful at the scene if you can, in fact, recover to, sometimes that can be a DNA goldmine. Wow. DNA can even be extracted from ancient bones and teeth specimens. It's a very, very difficult process, the extraction of DNA. But there's so much more to identifying someone than just trying to get DNA. But there's so much more to identifying someone than just trying to get DNA. And I'm not really sure how many bones were found in Jane Doe. I know there's a skull. What does it tell

you, Joe? Scott tells me a lot that her skull was found in the woods, but easily, easily, you know, identifiable. It wasn't buried. It was right there on the surface. That tells me a lot about the killer, unless it's there because of animal activity. Yeah, it could be as a result of animal activity. If there are no surrounding bones, I'll tell you this. Dogs in particular love skulls. I've found I've had countless cases, Nancy, where dogs will literally walk up into just some citizen's yard with a skull. Can you imagine how horrifying that is? And I'll have terrified people that used to call the medical examiner at the coroner's office and say, oh, my God, we've got a we've got a skull here.

You know, and you you go out there and dogs, you know, dogs are simple creatures. They it's like playing with a ball. They see this kind of spherical object. They like to play with it, carry it around. And so but let me tell you something else, Nancy, that's kind of sinister about this. And I actually work a series of serial killings that were kind though, to pose bodies. He loved to have them exposed and take these women and just kind of lay them out. And so they're not necessarily going to the trouble taking the time to dig the hole because they want people to be shocked by finding these remains. Now, that does tell us a lot. It can also say, if you find a body just on the surface, for instance, that they were rushed. They wanted to just dump the body and get as much distance between them and the deceased.

Or in certain cases, you'll have people that maybe are injured, and they just kind of, you know, sadly just walk off into a desolate area and fall down in one location, and they succumb at that point in time. So you have to weigh all of that down. You know, Joe Scott, I don't think Jane Day wandered out into the woods and had a heart attack, if that's where you're going with this. No, I'm not. However, as you know, and we've covered so many cases together, there are those times when people are injured. Maybe they've escaped. Maybe they've escaped a killer and they were so horribly

injured, disoriented, or maybe they died as a result of the elements. After they had been abandoned by somebody, they escaped. They just tried to get to a point to be saved. And it just so happens the next person that finds them is some hunter walking through the woods that might just see a skeleton laying on the ground. It's a very sad circumstance. I just hate it for this family out there somewhere that never knew what happened to their daughter. Guys, we are talking about a so-called Jane Doe. Don't miss it. The Jane Doe Murders, a brand new special premiering on Sunday, January 3rd, 7 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on Oxygen.

My TV home, the true network for crime. Joe Scott, thanks so much for breaking it down, putting it back together for us. Thank you, Oxygen and the Jane Doe Murders, for being our partners here at Crime Stories. I'll see you Sunday night, 7 o'clock Eastern. Goodbye, friend. This is an iHeart Podcast.