Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Inside the autopsies of Cult Mom Lori Vallow's children, JJ and Tylee; and was the Tammy Daybell investigation botched?

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

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This is an iHeart Podcast. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. I'm Dave Mack with CrimeOnline.com. Joining us right now is Joseph Scott Morgan, Professor of Forensics at Jacksonville State University, the author of Blood Beneath My Feet. We're going to take a look at what happened to J.J. Vallow and Tylee Ryan, as well as the investigation into the death of Tammy Daybell. Joseph Scott Morgan, I want to start with J.J. and Tylee.

And if you can, let's start with what happened to Tylee Ryan after she was killed. Well, you know, when you begin to look at Tylee's remains, you're looking at this heat-related, what we refer to as artifacts, left behind on the body where there is some type of attempt. We don't know to what degree, okay? Let's just face it because the reports haven't been released. But she has this heat artifact, this heat artifact that's left behind. And that means that the tissue on her body, not only, you know, as we talked about, has been decomposing, but it is also compromised as a result of exposure to this flame. And again, we don't know how long this lasted. You know, the further you go down this road relative to attempting to cremate a body, the longer the body is subjected to the fire and to the heat source, the more compromised it will be. And also the big thing here is the

level of compromise of any kind of evidence that's left behind. You know, we're not, I'm not simply talking about the cause of death, you know, a bullet holes or, or knife wounds or even toxicology. I'm just talking about basic evidence that we look for, things like trace evidence. That's probably a goodly portion of that is gone. We begin to think about things like DNA evidence. Well, where are you going to recover? It's all been burned away at this point, depending upon how much of her body was directly exposed to the flame or to the heat source.

The one saving grace here, Dave, that I have to say, and my mind keeps going back to this, is that we understand that her body was subjected to fire. I think my hope is, is that if she had some type of remnant of clothing left behind on her body, that if she was doused in an accelerant like a kerosene, a gasoline, diesel, or even some people have used oils of some types, anything that's flammable as a fire starter, if she had clothing on her body and it was still on her body when they found her, some residue of that accelerant might be left behind. Now, if that is the case, each accelerant that is out there, let's just say you go to a local gas station. Well, the formula for that particular gas station is a

trademarked formula for that particular gas. So the molecular structure is unique to that. So if you think about that, if you can capture that, that accelerant, you might be able to trace back that accelerant. And let's just, let's just kind of really, you know, expand our thought here. If in fact, they used gas from station A and doused her body in it, and you have the remnant of that accelerant left behind, what if you can tie it back to a particular manufacturer, and then you go to the local stations that sell that gasoline? What if we've got video evidence at that station of somebody filling up a gas can? Wouldn't that be remarkable? So that's my one hope with Tylee, okay? How can you determine whether or not her body was dismembered post-mortem?

Well, okay, let's just say this. Assuming, you know, if what we're being told is correct, just like the burning, if she was in fact dismembered, and I'm believing that she has been, what you would be looking for in sharp force injuries, and I can get into that a wee bit as well, you're going to look for in the tissue, you're going to look for hemorrhage or absence of hemorrhage. Remember, I teach my students at Jacksonville State that as investigators and as forensic scientists, negative findings are just

as important as positive findings, okay? And it's kind of a weird way of looking at the world, but from an investigative standpoint, if I'm absent something, that means a negative finding. Let's say, for instance, in her case, if she's dismembered post-mortem, there won't be hemorrhage in the tissues, okay? So you're not going to have these focal areas of hemorrhage say where somebody put a knife to tissue and cut through it. Like in life, obviously, if you, if you cut somebody while they're alive, you're going to bleed into that soft tissue. If she is deceased, when this happens, that's not going to occur. So that's kind of how we delineate and the morgue between post-mortem versus anti-mortem, which means before death and injuries. All right. So already through an autopsy, you can determine that her body was cut up after she was dead, that they tried to burn to get rid of the evidence, yet even with the burn, you can determine what type of gasoline

was used and maybe determine what gas station sold that gas, and then we can go and find the video evidence to prove who bought it. Now, what about J.J.? We know that Ty Lee was buried in a different area than J.J. With J.J., you know, this, it's remarkable. If we could just kind of take a pause here and talk about the psychology of this. Think about just for a second what we've discussed relative to Tylee and her body. Her body was literally ripped to shreds, Dave. Okay, I mean ripped to shreds. You know, you're talking about dismemberment. You're talking about burning. You're talking about not even really honoring the dead. You kind of got her buried there where I think there might be a mix of animal bones and these sorts of things in a hastily dug grave.

But then you flip that. You flip that and you look at where J.J. was found. He was found immediately adjacent to an old empty pond, if you will. It's like a retention pond or something. Hey, if our listeners will just look at the aerial photographs, you'll see what I'm talking about. It's a big hole in the ground that's, you know, I guess I can't say for certain, but I'd say it's within 20 yards of where Tylee's remains were. His body was treated with care, Dave.

If we are to believe what we're being told at this point. And again, we don't have anything in, you know, in black and white, but you know, his head, J.J.'s head had been wrapped in a bag, which is kind of an interesting thing. We can get into that. And then on top of that, the rest of his body was, I like to use the term cocooned, cocooned in more plastic and then taped. Let's think about his head. Well, many times what you will have with an individual that kills another person that has like an intimate relationship with them, And I'm not talking about sexual here. I'm just talking about, you know, your, your familial relationship or, you know,

very friendly, intimate, that sort of thing. There's a, there's something called face covering that occurs many times. And what happens is, is that the perpetrator will look at the individual and, you know, even though the individual's dead, they still literally, that person's face that's deceased is reflected back to them. They still see them in life, and so many times they'll get blankets, they'll get pillowcases, they'll get plastic bags, which I think in this case is what happened, and they will cover the face and then, and then, you know, proceed from there. I think one of the other things we need to consider, and, and this is, this is kind of interesting. What if,

and since we don't have the autopsy yet, this is all speculative. What if they had to cover his head because his head had sustained some type of trauma. Say he was bleeding out, and they didn't want to get blood everywhere. They put a bag over the head to contain blood, for instance. And then you cocoon the body and the rest of the plastic. You dig a grave, then you place the body inside of the grave, and you take care to stack things on top of it so it doesn't create kind of a as big of a depressed area when you step on it so there's evidence that things have

been stacked on top of it like stones and this sort of thing and then the body is essentially covered up at that point there there's kind of a lot to unpack here relative to the way both of these bodies have been treated in death, I think. And it speaks volumes maybe about the family dynamic here. So with J.J., we've got a little boy who was treated with care after death. And with Ty Lee, we've got a young woman who was destroyed. Yeah, ripped to shreds. All right, now, with the evidence left on J.J. because of the way he was wrapped after death, would that preserve evidence that would help

in the autopsy? I think, you know, Dave, I think that it could, and this is how, because look, you can't, you know, it's like my analogy of spitting in the ocean a little while ago, you can't hold back nature. You can't, it's, you can't, the body is still going to decompose and that can impact, I think greatly, the packaging in which his body was cocooned in. However, this is what I would really be interested in, you know, as an investigator. Let's take a look at his body. First off, was he clothed? Even in decomposition, that clothing is going to potentially be an area to harvest evidence off of. Obviously, if he's been traumatized, say he was shot or stabbed, you will have blood staining that's

separate from decompositional staining that's on that clothing. Not to mention if, say for instance, somebody, and I've worked cases like this, an individual is shot in the chest, it has to pass through the clothing. You can get everything from range of fire, you know, the distribution of the powder on the, you know, the area surrounding the defect, or or in stab wounds you can see that kind of slit-like mark that a sharp or a sharp instrument creates that's important and also any contact trace evidence that means things that were transferred from a particular environment or a particular person onto the clothing now another thing here that we really have to keep in mind is that what we know is that plastic was used. And we also know that tape was used. Let's talk about the plastic.

The plastic is essential because it is a non-porous surface. That means that it's not exactly smooth as glass, but it ain't wood either. You know what I'm saying? So it's kind of smooth now what if they take that plastic and very very and I mean very carefully handle it and examine it you might be able to find latent prints on that plastic particularly on the inside of the plastic that was against the body now keep in keep in mind, decomposition has been going on, so you're going to have a certain level of relative humidity in this environment that will compromise fingerprints

sometimes, but you might get lucky. The key piece here, though, Dave, is I keep hearing this information about tape. Listen, if someone used tape to wrap this body and they did not use gloves, for instance, there can actually be a transfer print, a latent print that you can find on the adhesive side of that tape. Say just if a perpetrator is not using gloves and they peel off a piece of tape, we all know what this is like. And, you know, think about wrapping a package at Christmas time. You pull off a piece of tape and it gets stuck to your fingers and you're clipping it with a pair of scissors and you're going to apply it. Well, where do you grab it in order to do that? Well, sometimes you'll grab the adhesive side and, you know, you don't think about it.

Most criminals don't. You transferred a piece of yourself onto the surface of that tape, and then you apply that adhesive to hold it on. That adhesive glue that's left that is on this tape is much more resilient than people think. And so you can leave a latent print in that area also contained in there. Remember, we lose hundreds of thousands of dead skin cells every single day of our life. Okay, Dave. So what if there's contact DNA or touch DNA that's left on that tape? That's important too. So where, you know, where we really have to go to war here as forensic scientists, you have to be very very careful

in the lab when you're handling all this stuff because when i say fragile um i'm talking incredibly fragile they have to take such care with this to preserve anything that might be there Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Let's move on to the other part of this case that we've been following. We're talking to Joseph Scott Morgan. He's professor of forensics at Jacksonville State University, author of Blood Beneath My Feet. Tammy Daybell passed away, and she was 49 at the time she passed, and they ruled it just natural causes, that she went to bed, had a slight cough, and the next morning she's gone. The police that arrived on the scene said that Chad Daybell was acting as a grieving husband. He didn't say or do

anything that caused them to have a red flag go up. And so there was minimal investigation done into her passing. But when the man gets married, Chad Daybell marries Lori Vallow within, what, two weeks of her passing? Well, that's a red flag and the behavior since then. Tammy Daybell's body was exhumed in December. Tell me what we know and what wasn't done in the, with what happened with her death. There, uh, let me, let me take you back in time a little bit. Many, many years ago, I was part of a national task force for medical legal death investigators. I was one of 12 nationwide. And we set forth back in the mid-90s, following the O.J. Simpson case, to establish national guidelines for medical legal death investigators. In other words, it's like a recipe.

Our theme was every scene, every time. That means that if you have a found body, when that person is found, regardless of what you suspect might be the cause of death, you're going to attend the scene. That's a baseline minimum, Dave. And that's recognized as a national standard by the National Institutes for Justice, and it's also through our national organization called American Board of Medical Legal Death Investigators. It's just what you do. You're elected official. You get paid. They pay for

your gas. Go to the damn scene. In this particular case, when Tammy Daybell died. And as you were right to say that she's 49, Dave. She's 49. If she's a male, I'm going to buy into the fact that maybe she succumbed to some kind of heart ailment. Rare, but it does happen at 49. With females, not so much. She suddenly dies. And from our understanding, at least, the coroner doesn't even make a scene visit. Doesn't even make a scene visit. They leave it up to cops who say, well, yeah, everything looks normal out here. Well, the funeral home comes, picks her body up, takes the body to the funeral home facility. And it's at that time we understand the coroner may have gone to the funeral home facility and taken a look at her body. At that time, there was not, there's no photographs that we know of of her body there.

Okay, wait a minute, Jessica, I've got to ask you something. Yeah. Police go to the scene and they make a report, but the person who actually is supposed to determine cause and manner of death doesn't even go to the scene of where she passed away to even look at what was going on? Not at all? I wish right now I knew off the top of my head what the population of this county is in Idaho, because I cannot imagine in my wildest fantasies that there was something more important at that particular time going on than the death of a 49-year-old mama. What else is going on? I mean, do you have a mass homicide

that's taking place in town? Is there a critical incident that you got a plane crash that's going to trump any of this? No, you don't. You've got a 49-year-old woman. This fits to a T, your job description. You get in the car. You go to the home. You take a look at the body.

The cops are not going to take a look at the body. This isn't TV. It's not part of their job. You know a look at the body. The cops are not going to take a look at the body. This isn't TV. It's not part of their job. You know what cops are going to look for? They're going to look around if they do their job and see if there's any forced entry. If there's a sign of struggle. Other than that, they're not going to walk over and do the kind of examination that medical legal death investigators are trained to do or are supposed to be trained to do. They're not going to do that.

And so the problem is this. Once you lose that moment in time, you cannot go back and reclaim it. That's why it's so important that we go out and we assess bodies at that particular time. Level of rigor mortis. Was there a frothy cone coming out of the person's mouth at the scene? Which now we're getting some indication from people that were present at the scene, her children, that she did have something coming out of her nose and her mouth. Well, that's an indication of some kind of congestive event. That means something's going on with her lungs potentially. Was it some kind of agent that was applied to her?

Was it a poison? Was it some kind of medication? Well, I don't know. And guess what? There's a high likelihood we will not know. Okay. So no, in answer to your question, I'm sorry, I get fired up about this. The coroner did not go to the scene and examine the body in what we refer to as in situ. That means in place, in its pristine condition, where it's surrounded by the environment in which the body passed away or which the person passed away. If you take the body out of that context, now you're going to put them into a car, roll them to a funeral home. You've taken the body completely out of context. The observable things relative to the body, if there's blood, if there's medication, temperature changes,

you can't appreciate that at the funeral home. So our understanding is even at the funeral home, there was no blood drawn. There was no urine drawn. There was no vitreous fluid, which comes from the eyes. None of that was drawn. So at that point in time, her body was essentially embalmed because remember, she was not buried in Idaho. She's got to cross state lines, Dave. So they put her embalmed body into a car, drive her to Utah where she's buried very hastily, I might add. And she's not recovered for months at that point in time. Finally, somebody says, hey, you know what? We probably ought to exhume

this woman's body. And finally they do. But now you're so far down range, you're so far down that timeline, that where are you going to find at this point? Well, I'll tell you what you're going to find. You're going to find the body of a 49-year-old woman who has been in the ground and embalmed for this period of time. So if you're going to go back and try to draw blood, which there won't be any because it's been replaced by embalming fluid that's compromised so you can't go back to that are you gonna do tissue examinations to see if there's eight well the body's been embalmed again so the soft tissue that was once soft is now hard because that's what embalming fluid does to a body it hardens the. Now that's going to be compromised at a

microscopic level because, you know, not only do we do toxicology examinations where we're looking at the chemicals in the body, we do something that's called histological examinations, which is we take slices of tissue from autopsy and look at them under the microscope and tissue can change as a result of being subjected to certain kinds of drugs and, and circumstances. So all of that's gone, Dave. And here we are, we're sitting, well, we're saying, you know, I had an autopsy report been released yet. I'll tell you why it hadn't been released because all the way back, all the way back in time, when they had an opportunity to take a look at her body at that scene, a critical mistake was made. Now you're talking about a case that's right in the middle

of, I think, arguably one of the most complicated layered criminal enterprises, potentially, that I remember in a while involving multiple deaths around the country. And I've covered a lot of them. This thing goes from state to state to state. Out of all the cases you could have chosen to, I don't know, cook breakfast, work on your nails, file your income taxes, whatever the coroner was doing, out of all the cases that you could have chosen to blow off and not do your job, this was the wrong one to do it on.