Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Dead in a Bathtub: Warm Water, Cold Body - Suicide or Murder

Episode Date: March 31, 2024

Suicide or Murder?  Kendy Howard is found in a bathtub full of water with a gunshot wound to the head.  His body is cold, but the water in the tub is warm!  Red Flag number one.  On this episode of Body Bags Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack will take a look at all of the "Red Flags" present in the reported suicide of Kendy Howard.  Why is there so little blood in the water? Why is her ex-trooper husband arrested at the airport? The biggest question of all, is the death of Kendy Howard a Suicide or Murder? Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Transcript Highlights  00:00:27 Joe talks about admiration for Troopers  00:03:03 Discussion of law enforcement  00:05:59 Discussion of “Red Flags”  00:08:14 Talk about the water is warm, body is cold  00:12:23 Investigation of suicide/murder  00:16:33 Discussion of damage caused by gunshot in mouth  00:17:49 Talk about direction of bullet  00:21:26 Comparing murder of Travis Alexander  00:25:53 Defining different types of asphyxiation  00:30:08 Talk about injuries “frozen in time”  00:35:33 Discussion of how much blood would be expected See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Even to this day, at this stage in my life, I'm fascinated by one group of law enforcement people. And those are state troopers or state police, depending upon the jurisdiction you're in. And one of the reasons, I think it's the fact that I've got this little bitty boy that never grew up still within me. And I love seeing the uniforms that some of these state troopers wear because they're really cool. There's a couple of them that come to mind. Let's see. Rhode Island has got these fantastic looking uniforms. State of New York, really cool.

They've got kind of these slouch hats that they wear. I've always been a fan of how these things are configured, what the purpose is, because you look at them now and it doesn't necessarily look like the most efficient way to clothe somebody. But you have to understand, state troopers and state police that are out there running the roads and working cases out there, they're a different type of law enforcement. They're there to really, really set the standard for representing the law enforcement of that state. You know, when you hear those shoes clicking down the roadway,

approaching your car, there's a certain level of intimidation to it. And they take their appearance very, very seriously, like those Smokey the Bear hats that they wear. It's meant to intimidate. They almost look like Marine Corps DIs, and some of them behave that way. But, you know, even when someone is selected for law enforcement, you never know what you're actually going to get, because people on paper, people during training, look really, really good sometimes.

But the proof, as we all know in this life, is in the pudding. How do they hold together over the long term? Today, we're going to talk about a case involving the wife of a former trooper and how this trooper now has been accused, tried and convicted of murder. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Hey, Dave, let me ask you a question, buddy. Have you ever heard the click, click, click outside your window, headed up, headed up alongside your car as the state trooper approaches you? I'll confess I have. And it always, it always sends a shiver down my spine. I may not have been

doing anything or what I may not have perceived that I was doing anything wrong, but it's different than being pulled over by a local police officer because most of the state troopers I've encountered over the course of my career as a death investigator or as a private citizen, unfortunately, there was something different about them because of their appearance, the way they carried themselves. It's a different breed of law enforcement. Troopers are the sentinels. They're kind of the sentinels that are there to watch care over what's happening in their particular jurisdiction at any moment in time. And Dave, I got to tell you, if you want to think about a moral compass, I think we've got a former trooper here whose compass was busted.

But he wasn't. Was he a former trooper when this happened, Joe? Yeah, yeah, he was. Well, here you go. He actually was. Yeah, he was. And he had resigned or been forced to resign or fired back all the way back in 2014. Right. And it was because of of all things dig this falsification

of a title i think on a motorcycle and listen troopers are very well aware of title laws all right that's one of the things they do with you know that they deal with let me see your license and registration yeah that's that's the that's at the top of the list right deal with, let me see your license and registration. That's at the top of the list. And so the fact that he got caught doing that, you really wonder, and I wondered this a lot about law enforcement personnel that have gotten caught up in crimes. That's what he got caught for. What else could he have been involved in along the way and we could spend days because think about it he got caught with the one thing he knows for sure everything about all the things that we didn't catch so moving on he calls 9-1-1 and has a story that

his beloved wife the love of his, has committed suicide in the bathtub. When investigators get there, they make a couple of notes. Joe, I've never been to a crime scene like this. According to Howard here, he heard a thud. Two hours later, he goes to check on his wife, and she's in the bathtub. She's cold to the touch. And he calls nine one one when the detective gets there and there, you know, the detective shows up along with whoever was on call. The water in the bathtub is still warm.

So immediately you've got a problem. You've got a very cold body and a very warm tub. Those two seem mutually exclusive to me. So that's where this investigation began. We're with red flags. Let me give you a couple of the red flags of the scene. Less blood than expected. And that's odd because in a bathtub with water, holy moly, a little cut in water makes it look like you were attacked by jaws.

Just a little blood goes a long way in water. There was less blood than expected. There was glass found on the floor. Clothes were turning in the dryer. Does somebody commit suicide when they have all these things going on? She had just decided to move into a new home. They were going through a divorce, she and her husband. She got her nails done earlier in the day. She was scheduling appointments to begin a body transformation. And she was excitedly telling friends about her new job. And by the way, romantically, she had moved on from her soon to be ex-husband.

And already had a boyfriend who actually was treating her right, apparently. Those were all the things going along in Kendi's life at the time when she's 49 years old, getting ready to step out and start a new life. And that night, the investigator was on scene for six hours, Joe. And when Kendi's daughter came in, that would be Daniel Howard's stepdaughter, she immediately accused him of killing her. And the detective is listening to all of this. So that sets the stage for suicide or murder. I love what you said just a second ago. And this is why from an investigative standpoint, and I know that they're doing their job when you say this, they talked about the assessment of body temperature versus water temperature. And for

those that don't know, when we conduct death investigations and they happen in a tub that is filled with water, we will actually take that data. We will measure, first off, the volume of the water if it's possible. But secondly, we measure the temperature of the water as well, and we'll take readings on that because, as you know, it's like anything else. If you want to take a hot bath, the hot bath is not going to remain hot out into infinity. You have to heat the water up.

The fact that when they got there, he actually – it's very tactile, isn't it? He actually tested the water. He could appreciate, you don't have to have a specific number. I mean, all of us can differentiate between hot and cold. He said the water temp was warm. Her body was cold. So going with that and knowing what we have always talked about on body bags, my friend, is that our working assumption, even in cases that appear to be, quote unquote, suicides, our working assumption is that everything, every single case is a homicide until proven otherwise. And in this particular case, I think that that is significant. And I got to tell you, Dave, the daughter, for my money, is not far off base because the one thing that she knew about, I think, was that there had been, I'm sure hints at least, of ongoing spousal abuse in this relationship between the decedent and her husband, who she was

divorcing. So, and, you know, families get a sense of all of this. And one of the things that you'll find out in suicide investigations in particular, when people are really honest with you, they'll talk about what we refer to as the affect of the victim. They'll talk about if their affect was bright, if it was hopeful, you know, those sorts of things. Rarely do those outward appearances betray something else. You know, if most of the time you will get people that have a kind of a stormy darkness to them, particularly if they've gone into a planning phase with taking their lives. But it seems to me, Dave, that everything runs contrary to that narrative. And she's literally, like you said, getting a fresh start.

At 49 years old, she was getting that do-over. Okay, you know what? I think we all realize there are times in our life, there are markers in our life. And she'd had a relationship early in life, right after high school, that gave her a child. Then she met Dan Howard, and they got married and had a relationship early in life right after high school that gave her a child then she met dan howard and they got married and had a child and i think she just had her fill of being boy yeah i think she had her fill of getting pushed around joe i think she had spent most of her adult life trying to take care of her children and try to probably protect them from stepdad dad and she

seemed to have been taking the worst for the wearer. And now the kids were grown up and she had, you know, that $2 million in, uh, where they were worth $2 million and stuff. They had money and what have you in land. And I looked over what the defense claimed at trial. I looked over their client and they're like, how can you twist and turn all of this to say a woman that is taking care of herself and has a is trying to change the way she looks, you losing weight, what have you. Don't we all do that as we take care of ourselves? That's part of that. That's not a body dysmorphia thing. No, it's not.

And, you know, even that even that day in the immediate, you know, you talked about the body transformation thing. I don't know what she was going to get done as liposuction or one of these cold things that they do or whatever the case might be. But here's something in the fine detail here. She'd even gotten her nails done. It doesn't make sense to me that somebody who's thinking about killing themselves cares about their fingernails. Well, the thing about it is, Dave, is that you, just like the detectives, smelled a rat. They knew that something else was going on. And boy, what a tale unfolded before them. I've said this when I speak to people in my classes. I tell them this. I do a whole section in my death investigation class at Jacksonville State on the investigation of suicides because they are unique. They are

unique apart from every other kind of death investigation that you will handle as a death investigator. The nature of them is different. The way families behave are different. The life of the victim many times is guarded. You don't have a lot to work with. And unless it's an outlier, like where they're trying to make some kind of public statement, a political statement, or, you know, I don't know. Maybe they're trying to draw attention themselves. These things are done in private. So as an investigator, you're already behind the eight ball. That's why I always say I would, if I was a death investigator, I'd much rather work a homicide than work a suicide because you're

left wanting many times. And there's too many assumptions that some people make. And you're always kind of teetering on that line. You're, you're really wondering, you know, in the, in the, uh, wee hours of the morning you go, you, you get home and you're thinking, did, did I do everything that I possibly could with this case? Did I, did I look under every possible rock? And what you're looking for is some kind of rationale for why this person would have done it and in this case why would they

have committed suicide and if you ask that it's like you don't have any reasons for it but yeah you told me that the gun that was used in the alleged suicide from the Dan Howard school of troopering that the gun was given to her, to Kendi by her dad. Kendi Howard's father provided her with a weapon. And here's the kicker. He provided a weapon to her for protection from her then-husband, Daniel Howard. So that gives you an insight and gives you an insight at what the family dynamic was like.

Is it possible, based on her injuries, Joe, maybe she got that gun out to defend herself and he took it from her? Because when I look at the injuries, you're going to have to walk me through what she looked like. All we've been told so far is that when Dan Howard called 911, it was to report that his wife had committed suicide in the bathroom by shooting herself in the head or mouth. And that's what we came on the scene.

She's in the bathtub. She's got a gunshot wound to her face and she's dead. And we's what we came on the scene. She's in the bathtub. She's got a gunshot wound to her face and she's dead. And we told you at the beginning, they recognize not enough blood in the water and the water's warm. Now that gun, what other, what injuries did she have? Because if it's a suicide, she's not going to have any injuries except for the one gunshot wound, right? Yeah. And here's one of the big tales that you get with and let me explain kind of lay this out to you forensically there's a term that we use in forensic pathology and medical legal death investigation that is called intra oral gunshot wound i n t r a intra meaning

within okay don't get it confused and i did as young man, I used to have a forensic pathologist that would correct me constantly, uh, where I would always say inter oral and inter means like intersection, you know, where you're coming together to two spaces meet, but intra means that the muzzle of the weapon is literally inside. Okay. Inside of the mouth. Now, you see people in movies and whatnot that will take their life by placing, say, a weapon beneath their chin, all right? I've had hundreds of those cases over the years, but you do get people that do an intraoral gunshot wound, which means that the muzzle of the weapon is placed inside of the mouth. Now, here's what you get when you get that. If you're using a semi-automatic weapon,

which means it's got a slide mechanism on the top, many times you will get shattered teeth or fractured teeth. And that's just the beginning. One of the reasons you get that is because what you don't see when the weapon initiates and fires, that slide, which is heavy metal, slides back. And as that action is sliding back, it will slide against the teeth and it literally fractures the teeth. You'll see teeth broken off or you'll see them fractured, not to mention what happens to what's referred to as the hard palate. If you'll take your tongue and put it on the roof of your mouth, that's the hard palate. You've got a little bit of tissue that's there separating the interior of your mouth from that hard palate. The hard palate is in existence there that it's directly beneath the sinuses. Okay. And it's very thin, very, very thin. And it shatters most of the time.

What they came away with, and this is really fascinating about this case. And I think probably one of the things that really, I think from a physical evidence standpoint, other than the absence of the blood and certainly the clothes in the dryer, and it wasn't just, it was like the carpet, you know, that you find around the tub. This, the trajectory of this round is going downward, Dave. It's so, it's from above to below and from front to back. Okay. from above to below and from front to back, okay? And when you think about that, most people that take their life with an intraoral gunshot wound, the weapon just naturally is pitched upward. So, it's going to go generally through the floor or the roof of the mouth

and then into the brain, okay? And you'll have all of this nasty fracturing that's going to go generally through the floor or the roof of the mouth and then into the brain. And you'll have all of this nasty fracturing that's going on. You'll have gas fractures. You'll get splitting of the skin many times. You'll get like these, the cheeks will actually bellow out sometimes. I've seen that happen. But not in this case. You've got this kind of atypical gunshot wound where

the weapon is pointed downward within the mouth and so that leads to i think at least probably containment of any blood that may have been there uh bleeding from say the roof of the mouth the the brain in that area is so very vascular. You get tons of blood everywhere. But here's what I am thinking that the ME saw when they got in there. And again, the ME is a completely different story here because that's kind of interesting. But when you track this wound in her mouth, if it's going from above to below, that is atypical for an intraoral gunshot wound. And when we track it, it's a downward trajectory. So that means that when she would have fired it, she would have had to have flipped the weapon up, probably actuated the trigger with

her thumb more than likely. It's not something where she could invert the weapon. I suppose she could, but highly unlikely. Invert the weapon like you would if it's going up. It's not something where she could invert the weapon. I suppose she could, but highly unlikely. Invert the weapon like you would if it's going up. It's a completely different position. And how do you get into that position? How would you go about initiating this firing sequence and not leave any more evidence than you had. When they got into that wound tract, Dave, I suspect that they didn't find as much hemorrhage as you might think that you would have. And what do we know? Well, if your blood is not pumping, you're not going to have hemorrhage.

And so all those interstitial tissues along the way are actually absent a significant amount of hemorrhage. So the answer, of course, reading up on Kennedy Howard's death. I was sitting there, and I was thinking, you know, God, this smacks of another case that I've been involved in. And I had an aha moment. God, I hate mentioning this woman's name, but here we go. Forgive me, Dave and everybody else. Jodi Arias. I got to thinking about, and let's don't say Jodi Arias so much. She's the perpetrator, but let's think about her boyfriend, Travis Alexander. One of the things in that case that really stood out, a lot of it had to do with hemorrhage in that case, when they were trying to assess his injuries.

He's eventually found, kind of tossed into the shower by her, which he was convicted of. One of the things that you saw when, and we reenacted this at CNN, as a matter of fact, we even mocked up the scene. He had blood that was deposited on the laboratory sink in there, and it was fine aspirate blood that he had coughed up. That's because she nicked you know airway or his lung or whatever the case might be she stabbed him multiple times as

everybody knows ad nauseum but you know as he they believe he crawled down the hallway away from where the initial attack took place in the bathroom one of the interesting little asides about that case that not a lot of people talk about, but always found fascinating was that she'd actually popped him in the head with a smaller caliber weapon. And if you'll place your, your left index finger, I think it was, and I might get this wrong above the left eye, like superior to the left eye, that round actually tracked from above to below and from left to right. I might have my directions mixed up, but I think that's accurate. But what's important here though, is that she was in a dominant position over him. And when she fired

that round, and I remember distinctly watching that ME on the stand talking about this case, he said there was absolutely no hemorrhage in the wound track. And you're talking about going through arguably the most vascular area of the body. So what that tells me is that she shot him after he was dead. And to bring this back around to the Kendi Howard case, it would seem as though that she had already met her end. They concluded she had already met her end before that weapon was ever placed in her mouth. And given the odd trajectory where we're talking about going from above to below, you've got

this weird kind of downward angle. You know, you've got these people, these scientists that are scratching their heads over it and they're wondering, you know, well, how does this actually happen? And of course they, they kind of felt as though that he was being deceptive here because it's something just didn't marry up. And I can also tell you something else. They found over 30 bruises on her body, Dave. 30 bruises on her body and she's dead before she's shot in the mouth that's not suicide i don't know how i guess i'm just a layman i'm you know read a lot of stories about murder cover a lot of them study a lot in research and yet how do you ignore all of the wounds on her body before she ends up dead in the bathtub of warm water with her body being cold.

One of the really fascinating elements to this that has been brought out is the fact, and this goes back to him having been a trooper, in law enforcement, when you're going through the academy and you're going through ongoing training, they talk about how you can effectively restrain somebody. And one you know, one of the things that the police have gotten away from, and as a matter of fact, one of the experts that testified in the George Floyd case testified in this particular trial, and this had to do with police restraint moves and all this sort of thing. When you begin to try to assess if there's any kind of asphyxial death, the first place we go to are the eyes.

We always check the eyes to see if there are petechiae, which are the little blood vessels that build up all of that pressure from the blood backing up in the skull, essentially. And they wind up bursting. Well, there was no evidence of petechiae here, but what they believe is that there was a possibility he could have used a chokehold on her where of this pressure that's backing up in her head. He's actually doing it so that if he has her in the crook of his arm, he can diminish her ability to uptake oxygen to the point where it's almost like a sleeper hold. And he continues on beyond that fatal marker where she dies and succumbs. Maybe he suspected that they could pick up on that. From what we understand, though, there's no, what we refer to, if people will find your trachea, which is, you know, kind of that rigid area in the center of your throat there,

alongside the trachea, there are what are referred to as strap muscles. And in asphyxial deaths, many times, particularly if you're using a C-clamp or you're throttling somebody, a lot of pressure is applied. You certainly see it with ligature strangulations. The strap muscles will actually have hemorrhage in them too. I don't think that they're seeing that here. So it would have to have been a bit more subtle. Her system is clean as far as narcotics go as well. And I know that some people are probably thinking, well, did they do a GSR on her, a gunshot residue on her? Well, guess what?

Her body's been placed in the bathtub. So that complicates the matter here. Somebody that had worked in law enforcement would have been aware of that. And you still can't get past the laundry that, and I find this fascinating, one of the detectives had gone down and they have like a digital machine. And he was able to determine how long and when this thing had been set to be turned on,

which I found absolutely fascinating. I've never heard of law enforcement actually doing this and could really come up with a specific time. And I think that that was rather damning evidence. Who takes time to wash clothes or to do any of this stuff? You know, if you're going to commit suicide, like you said, that gives you an idea that you're moving on with life. You know, I got to clean my clothes. I got to do all that. No. And so the bathroom is absent of all those, you know, little accoutrements that you would have on the floor, say a bathtub rug or, I don't know, maybe a seat cover for the toilet or whatever the case might be. If you were putting a body into a bathtub with water in it and you maybe lost a little footing here or there and you knocked a bunch of water on the floor and got those all wet, then you might take them and throw them in the dryer because, my goodness, they wouldn't be all wet. You don't want it to sour.

Yeah, yeah. You don't want it to sour. You're going to be doing that. Well, if you have an awareness of trace evidence, it's also a good place to put it. Maybe you washed it and maybe you dried it. I'm just thinking that he got them all wet when he was putting her in the tub and he thought, well, this isn't going to make any sense to the investigators. Now I got to dry this thing you know but yeah and

that does that's a conundrum for him you know you get in this environment and maybe you're trying to think three and four moves ahead and you just outthink yourself yeah you really the thing that really bothered me on this joe and i the number of bruises on her chest because when i was looking through the autopsy report provided by Dr. John Howard, we had mentioned that he had been through an investigation earlier in his career about a number of cases where there were disputed manner of death rulings. And to be exact. Yeah. And in one of those cases, a woman actually I'm not kidding when I tell you this, this was in the investigation. It happened in 2012.

A woman was cut in half with defensive wounds and he ruled her death undetermined. Yeah. That led to a fight between, you know, him and, and everybody that wants the truth. Um, it's amazing, but he didn't note the bruising on her chest. And yet we have a report that she had over 30 bruises on her chest. She was beaten from head to toe. And we're not seeing that in Dr. Howard's report. Right. How could you, and you know, the thing about bruising, we've talked about this, particularly with child abuse cases as well. One of the things that we look to do, we long to have this data and that's the aging of the bruises. How long has this been

going on? Because all of us, you know, you get the greenish colored bruise, you get the yellow color bruise, you get the dark bruise, you get the stuff that's really red, which is the most recent kind. And you can actually establish a timeline. You know, if what we... Because they don't change after you're dead, right? No, they don't. They're not going to, what's referred to in medical community, it's not a resolving injury. So it's kind of, it's frozen in time, if you will. And that's a beauty thing here. And here's something else that people might not realize. Even after a body has been embalmed, if there was an antemortem bruise, because antemortem is the only way you're going to get a bruise.

You know, the dead don't bruise. Did you know we can go back and appreciate those bruises? Even after embalming, because, you know, that area, it's like post-mortem lividity. Once those vessels are broken, it goes out into the interstitial tissue, all the fatty tissue around there. There's no way to get that out. Just imagine the worst stain you've ever seen on a piece of carpet and you can't get the stain out.

Take that and think about the interstitial tissue, which is kind of the fatty area and the fascia and all that stuff that's outside of the vessels. Those vessels break. You know, you think about being impacted, you get a bruise. Well, it can only resolve on itself. And if it freezes in that moment, there's no more metabolism. It's not going to go away. So you can see these and we can actually age these.

And apparently there is a history of him being very aggressive with her over the years and making her life a living hell. And that gives you some insight. And how that might be missed by a forensic pathologist, I have no idea because it seems as though that that's a salient bit of information. What was the original? What did he rule? Undetermined?

Yeah, he left this undetermined. And, you know, we have five manners. And undetermined generally means that you don't have enough substantive data to move forward where you're going to make that ruling. Now, you can make a ruling on the cause of death, say, intraoral gunshot wound. All right. That is a cause of death. It's going to. And then there's little things that come along that come along with that.

So you're talking about the hemorrhage and all the other stuff that as a result of that initial firing sequence brings about that other trauma that leads to your death. You can label it as a cause of death, but many times, and I've seen this happen, where you'll have something that is a violent death and they won't classify it as either homicide, suicide, or anything else, even accidental. Those are really undetermined. And it kind of freezes that moment in time.

And given the history that, you know, he had been called on the carpet, you know, 18 times before on 18 different cases. I won't say he was called on the carpet 18 different times, but this investigation that was conducted cited 18 cases of where things were left undetermined. You know, that can be problematic for a prosecutor moving forward. You know, you begin to think about, do I want to get a second opinion at this point in time? And, you know, fortunately, you know, they went back and had other people review this case. And their conclusions were that this gunshot wound that Kendi sustained was actually a post-mortem gunshot wound. And that, as it turns out,

the prosecutor felt comfortable enough to move forward and think, you know, yeah, he killed her. And then he shot her afterwards to make it look like something else. That goes beyond the pale, Joe. One thing happened during trial. As we mentioned, it's already been adjudicated. Before it had been decided, out on bail, Dan Howard had been on bail since he had been put in jail and bailed out until trial, right? And during the trial, they caught him at the airport trying to leave. He claims he was just returning a rental car with a friend of his. But when you're on trial for murder and things aren't looking like they're going your way and and they're thinking, you know, they're in

Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. They're thinking that this guy is definitely a flight risk. You know, he could wind up anywhere and they don't want to lose this because this case in and of itself is so striking. And you've got a guy that's a former public official that is accused of perpetrating this thing. They want to make sure that they can keep a close eye on him as they're moving forward. And the thing about it is in the state's trial, they employed actually trauma, a police surgeon is what they're referred to as, that talked about these various grips that the police could do. They also brought in a blood expert, Dave, and brought in what a facsimile of blood. And they demonstrated how much blood should have been present. And it's a fascinating study in this thing. They actually brought in an IV bag into court with a big area

on the floor where they were draining that volume of blood. Now, that's a pint of blood, essentially. And they're draining this onto the floor. And you can appreciate the size, the size that just a pint creates. With an intraoral gunshot wound, you're talking way more than a pint. You're talking about blood everywhere. And the question would be, and would have to remain in the minds of the jurors, you know, well, if we know this being demonstrated before us, where did all that blood go? And why isn't there any evidence of it? It's

like I always say, Dave, you know, sometimes, sometimes the absence of evidence is just as critical as the presence of evidence. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.