Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Mayhem in the Morgue: Gator Bait

Episode Date: October 5, 2025

Content Warning: This episode contains graphic descriptions of autopsy findings, decomposition, and animal predation. If you’re sensitive to these topics, this episode may not be for you. A fisherman’s disappearance, his empty boat, and circling alligators lead to a grim discovery. In a separate case, a family Labrador retriever trots home with her latest find, a human head. In this episode of Mayhem in the Morgue, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns investigates two extraordinary cases of scientific identification, showing that forensic science can reveal the truth in the strangest circumstances.   Highlights (0:00) Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns (0:15) An introduction to scientific identification and how it helps solve difficult cases (2:15) Stomach contents, swamp water, and the first clues of what really happened (5:00) A second case: Carly the Labrador retriever brings home a human head (6:15) Mummified remains are tested, and DNA reveals the victim’s connection to the U.S. Marshals’ Most Wanted list (8:15) A press conference overshadowed by an unexpected star: the dog   About the Host: Dr. Kendall Crowns Dr. Crowns is the Chief Medical Examiner for Travis County, Texas, and a nationally recognized forensic pathologist. He las led death investigations in Travis County, Fort Worth, Chicago, and Kansas. Over his career, he has performed thousands of autopsies and testified in court hundreds of times as an expert witness. A frequent contributor to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, Dr. Crowns brings unparalleled insight into the strange, grisly, and sometimes absurd realities of forensic pathology.   About the Show Mayhem in the Morgue takes listeners inside the bloody, bizarre, and often unbelievable world of forensic pathology. Hosted by Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns, each episode delivers real-life cases from the morgue, the crime scene, and the courtroom. Expect gallows humor, hard truths, and unforgettable investigations, ranging from courtroom drama to deaths that even seasoned pathologists struggle to explain.   Connect and Learn More Learn more about Dr. Kendall Crowns on Linkedin, catch him regularly on Crime Stories with Nancy Grace and follow Mayhem in the Morgue where you get your podcasts.   📣 If you liked this episode, don’t keep it to yourself—follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave us a review.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Today's episode discusses the death of individuals. If this sort of thing upsets you, this is not the episode for you. Welcome to Mayhem in the Morning with your host, Dr. Kendall Crowns. Today's episode, Gator Bate. When a body comes into the medical examiner's office, one of the first, first things we do is identify that individual, and there are two methods for doing this, non-scientific methods, and scientific methods. Today we'll be discussing the scientific methods.

Scientific methods can be one of five things. It can be fingerprints, comparison of dental x-rays, comparison on radiographic studies done at hospitals, looking at serial numbers found on medical devices that are implanted in the body, and finally DNA. The dental x-rays, the radiographic studies and the serial numbers all require you to have medical records of some sorts. So you have to have a bit of a presumptive ID to get those in the first place. Fingerprints, of course, everybody has them, everybody's are different, because they form when you're a fetus, moving your hands around in the amniotic fluid, touching your face, etc. Even if you're an identical twin, your fingerprints are different. DNA is incredibly helpful,

but it does take a long period of time. We try to exhaust all the other options before we resort to DNA. First case we'll be discussing today was that of a 62-year-old male. He was retired and enjoyed going fishing. He would often spend three to four days off on a fishing trip all by himself. Usually on these fishing trips, he would check in with his wife or talk to other family members every day. He had checked in late in the evening on the day before his death. But the next day he did not call. One whole day went by, and then on the second day, his wife became worried. She tried to call him several times without success, so she decided to drive to the area where he was fishing at and look for him. When she arrived at the boat ramp that he normally used, she found his truck and trailer.

She couldn't see his boat out on the lake, so she decided to notify the local police department. The police department arrived on the scene, and then they notified the Coast Guard and the game wardens, and then the search began. During the search of the area, they found his boat still anchored in about two to three feet of water. Inside the boat was his wallet and cell phone, and nearby was a ripped up pair of jeans, a boot, and a fish string, or belt, which is sometimes used to keep fish in a line while a person wades in the water. When they picked up the torn jeans, they also found two bones that looked like they were human, and they turned out to be human. They were a tibia and fibula, which are the bones of your lower leg. While they were searching the area, they noticed three large alligators nearby. The alligators kept tracking and watching the search party the entire time.

The game wardens decided that the alligators were somehow involved, and the decision was made to shoot them. I know for all you alligator lovers out there that this is a horrible moment, but it is what it is. The three alligators were shot, and an individual that was contracted through that county for alligator removal came in, and opened up the alligators and pulled out their stomachs, kind of like that scene in jaws.

They opened the three stomachs up, and amongst all sorts of debris, apparent soft tissue and hair and bones that appear to be human. They bagged up the stomach contents and brought them to the medical examiner's office. When we opened the bags containing the stomach contents, the first thing that hit us was an odd acid and swamp water smell. It's hard to describe, but it was pretty bad. All of the three bags contained muddy debris, grass, bits of frogs, rocks, and other random watery debris. But two of the three bags contained more. They contained hair, portions of skin with bite marks in it, decomposed bits of muscle, crushed up bones, some looking like ribs,

and some just completely unidentifiable. There was one intact bone, though. It was the hyoid bone, which is the U-shaped bone in your neck that your neck muscles attached to. So these remains were definitely human. The question was, who is this individual? We had to identify him somehow. We didn't have teeth or anything like that. We couldn't get fingerprints.

We couldn't get dental x-rays or radiographic studies because everything was so smashed up. So our only option was DNA. There was enough left of some of the bones to get bone marrow from it. And we sent it off to a DNA lab. The DNA lab got comparison DNA from family. And after a little while, they were able to determine that this person was indeed the missing fisherman. Question is, is how did he die? Did he have a heart attack and fall in the water, and then the alligators ate him?

Did he purposely jump in the water and taunt the alligators, causing them to eat him? Did someone hit him over the head with a baseball bat, and then the alligators ate him? There's infinite possibilities. You couldn't really determine how he died. So we're only left with a cause of death of undetermined, and a manner undetermined. But at least we were able to identify him. The next case of scientific identification that we'll discuss is again another DNA case. In this case, is a human head.

The head was found by a 12-year-old Labrador Retriever by the name of Carly. It was early September, and she was out playing in a dry creek bed near her neighborhood, as she routinely did. She returned home that night with her new treasure and laid down on the front porch to settle in for a good shoe. When her owners came out to see what she was playing with, to their horror, it was a human head. One of the newspapers that interviewed the family after the human head was found,

quoted, she gets out and is always bringing things home, but this is the weirdest thing she has ever brought home, though. So once they saw the head, they called the local police department. The police department came out and was like, oh, that's a human head, and they brought it to the medical examiner's office. And when we did the examination, what we found was Curley had found an intact, partially skeletonized, human head. It had remaining dark brown mummified skin on one side. The jaw was still attached with dried tissue and muscle. but just barely. Most of the teeth were gone, the eyes were gone, the nose was gone, the right ear was completely gone, and most of the left ear was gone as well. There was still some

attached, short, buzzed brown hair, and nothing else came with the head. Everything from the neck down was not recovered at that time. I was able to pull some of the hairs with the root shaft, removed a tooth, and cut out a small portion of skull for submitting for DNA. The DNA lab went about their job extracting DNA from the recovered tissues, and they entered it into the National Missing and Unidentified Person System, or Namus. The DNA profiles put into Namus then can be matched against other databases, including CODIS, with a combined DNA index system run by the FBI. And sure enough, once all this was done, they got a match. And the match turned out to be that of a 41-year-old escaped fugitive that was on the U.S. Marshal's

services' top 15 most wanted list. At the time, he disappeared. He was at a residential re-entry facility, finishing up a 13-year sentence for child sexual assault in possession of child pornography, when one day he escaped out of an emergency exit and disappeared. A few days after he escaped, there was a massive rainstorm with intense flooding in the area he was in. The theory was, he probably got swept away by floodwaters and drowned. He had been missing for six months when Carly found him. So he had had plenty of time to decompose and become mummified and be pulled apart by other scavenging animals

or be washed away in the creek bed that he was in. That's why no more of him had been found. Law enforcement made an attempt to find more of him, and they even put a tracking collar on Carly to see if she would find more. But in that time period, she didn't find any more of them, and the law enforcement didn't find anything either. Carly wasn't finding anything, and the hazards were just too much. In fact, all Carly found during that time period was a kid's baseball glove.

The rest of the fugitive was never found, but we at least had identified him. Since he was on the U.S. Marshall's Most Wanted list, and he had been featured on national TV on a show called The Hunt. It was decided to have a press conference announcing that he was found and what had happened to him and closing the case for the public. At this point in my career, I had been a medical examiner for over a decade, If I had never been involved directly in a press conference, always been kind of on the periphery, but this time it was going to be me talking to the media.

The day of the press conference, I showed up in my suit, tie in place, hair all combed, I was all ready to go. There was the marshals, the local law enforcement, anthropology, the DNA analysts, and myself. But the star of the show was Carly. Her owners and Carly were there as well, and everybody was excited to see her. Well, who wouldn't be? I was excited to see her as well. Really, no one cared that anybody else was there other than Carly. The press conference began, and each group came up and said their portion of the story.

And the one thing about the medical examiner is we're always the end. You know, because the guy died, the story ends with us, after all. The final two people that talked was the local law enforcement, and then me. So the DNA analyst had already talked about all that they had done to determine who he was. So there wasn't much for me to say there. So the local law enforcement was just supposed to talk about their portion of the story, where they had identified it as a human head and then brought it to the medical examiner's office. But the officer instead decided to also tell what the medical examiner's office found,

including the cause and manner of death, and what they recovered to give to the DNA lab. So really, he told my entire portion of the story. I had nothing to say. I was standing there listening to him talk and I was like, hey, you're telling my part of the story. what am I going to say? I was already nervous if my mouth was dry and I was becoming increasingly cold to the point of shivering because when I get nervous I get cold and I really didn't have a script or

anything to go by so I was just going to wing it which was already not a good idea so when I got up to the podium I really had nothing to say nothing to add I could have literally said well ditto and sat down because nothing was left for me to say But instead, I said, well, law enforcement has already pointed out what the medical examiner's office has done, and I will further reinforce the fact that the decedent's cause and manner of death is undetermined and undetermined, because there was not enough recovered of him for us to make a scientific conclusion. The press conference ended. My portion was edited out.

I did get a small quote in one of the newspapers, basically saying it was undetermined, undetermined. And that was it. Still, everybody was excited to see the dog, and no one really cared about me, which I'm actually okay with. I would just have to say, even if you're eaten and partially digested by alligators, or decompose, mummified, and you've been turned into a dog toy, we can still identify you. That brings us to the end of the episode. I hope you learned something, and I hope you were entertained. Until the next time. This is an I-Heart podcast.