Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - MEDICAL-EXAMINER'S NIGHTMARE: WOMAN IN THE FREEZER

Episode Date: May 7, 2021

31-year-old Elizabeth Sullivan was reported missing in 2014. Her body is found two years later in the San Diego Bay. Where has she been in the meantime? Investigators conduct a thorough search of her home. Forensic tests find Elizabeth Sullivan’s blood soaked into the wooden floor in her bedroom and the carpeting.  A major clue however, a police cadaver dog reacts to a spot in the Sullivan garage where a refrigerator-freezer stood for several years. Joe Scot Morgan, Professor of Forensics at Jacksonville State University, and former death scene investigator explains how this discovery impacted the investigation. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. I'm executive producer Jackie Howard. 32-year-old Elizabeth Sullivan was last seen October 13th near her home in San Diego, California. She met with an attorney that day, arranging to visit the lawyer's office the next day. That night, Elizabeth Sullivan called a friend in Virginia, then never used her cell phone again. She also did not show up at the attorney's office the next day. Two years later, the police get a phone call.

Listen to NBC7. Big mystery tonight in the waters of San Diego Bay. Police found a woman's body on the shore of the Liberty Station channel. NBC7's Dave Summers is there with what might make this investigation quite challenging. Dave? Yeah, well, the channel runs along NTC Park, Mark and Catherine. It's a popular spot to walk your dog, cycle, play soccer, just about anything outdoors. But San Diego police were called here on a grisly errand.

A woman's body was found in the water behind me. Elizabeth Sullivan's decomposing body was found just half a mile from her home, floating in the San Diego Bay. She had been missing for two years, but a former San Diego County deputy medical examiner who helped conduct the autopsy says decomposition made it difficult to narrow down her time of death. It also led to another conclusion. The medical examiner did not believe that Elizabeth Sullivan had been in the bay for the two years she was missing. He said the decomposition would have been more advanced. The autopsy showed that Elizabeth's body was decomposing in a way

that indicated that she had lain for some time on one side. Elizabeth was identified through dental records. Joining me right now, Joe Scott Morgan, professor of forensics at Jacksonville State University and author of Blood Beneath My Feet. Joe, there is so much going on in this case, but before we get to her actual cause of death, let's talk a little bit about what's going on right here. Elizabeth's body is found in the water. So number one, she is dead. Number two, her body has been in the water. And number three,

she has been missing for two years. Where do you start? Well, I can tell you this, Jackie. In an aquatic world or an aquatic environment where her body was actually found, this is a saltwater environment. This is not like a freshwater pond or something like that. This is a saltwater body. So you're going to have all kinds of different marine life that are there. Most notably, particularly in cases like this, you're going to have crustaceans, particularly crabs to be very specific. And folks don't want

to hear this, but crabs have a proclivity for feasting on human remains. That's what they do. I worked for a long time in New Orleans, and one of the fights that we had down there when we were trying to get bodies identified and trying to frame a time of death was the fact that we would always recover these bodies and there would be crustaceans all over them. We'd have crawfish, we'd have crabs, this sort of thing. And in this particular case, I would imagine that when the medical examiner found her body, and the body, though decomposed, was so relatively intact, they could surmise just based on the fact that you didn't have some kind of post-mortem feasting by crustaceans and that the body was relatively intact, she had not been in there for that protracted period of time. After two years, just the sea life itself would have essentially made her body disappear.

She would have been ingested and then dispersed throughout the waterway. But then, you know, we think about this environment. This is a very harsh environment. Remember, it's a saltwater environment. You've got bodies, particularly with the rising and falling of tides, they're banged up against rocks, all these sorts of things. There's no evidence that that had occurred, and her body was not actually out in the middle of the bay, but on an adjacent canal. And interestingly enough, if you go back and you take a look at some of the crime scene images they have, you can tell that the tide was actually down.

I suspect that that's how they were able to notice, first off, that there was a body down there. The water has slipped down. She's just kind of caught up in this eddy along this canal. She never made it out into the open water. Joe, if Elizabeth Sullivan's body had been in the water for two years, would it have been skeletonized? And what would we have actually expected to see? Yeah, in answer to your question, Jackie, there is a high probability that her body would at minimum have been skeletonized. In my opinion, you would have had a completely disarticulated body. That means that at all of the joints, the body would have essentially fallen apart by this time.

And that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the marine life that you're encountering. It has to do with the intense environmental conditions like heat that the body is exposed to over a period of time. It's almost like, and I hate to be this graphic, but it's almost like the body is in a slow-heating crock pot over this period of time. And the body literally falls apart, particularly at the joints, and then it will just kind of disperse out. And you don't have to have marine life in order to affect that. And also, one other thing, when you're talking about sea life that feast on human remains, something that they go for in particular are the appendages. It's not like a wild animal that's going to go for the throat or something like that.

A mammal, say, for instance, that we have on dry land, they love to get after the appendages. Many times we would have bodies that I have worked cases on out of saltwater where the nose is gone, the lips are gone, the ears are gone. Certainly the fingers are almost completely gone. And these animals kind of work their way up, the marine life that is, up to the torso. So in this particular case, you're not seeing that. So for us in the forensics world, that's a big clue that something's not right here. Can you imagine showing up at the scene and you might have an indication that it might be a particular person you know they've been missing for two years, perhaps, but yet the

body is intact. It's intact and within a couple of miles of where she formerly resided. So if I understood what you were telling me just then, Joe, you were saying that the body would have been dispersed. Are you telling me that basically the body would have been dismembered? Not dismembered in the classic sense when we think about someone taking, say, for instance, a saw or some type of power tool and literally dismembering the body, taking it apart piece by piece. This happens over a period of time where bodies actually just kind of come loose and fall apart, particularly at the joints. You'll have, and this is without interaction with sea life. This is just simply something that heat and time play a factor in when you have bodies that are decomposing. And there's something else that's going on, too.

There is also an internal event that's going on, which we refer to in forensics as autolysis. And to make it very simple, to get past all the scientific mumbo jumbo, think of it in this terms. Bodies actually begin to digest themselves. The cells break down and the body almost begins to consume itself. The tissue becomes very soft and rendered and literally falls apart over a period of time. So when you're talking about a force as powerful as the Pacific Ocean, keep in mind this is not too far away from where the Navy SEALs train in Coronado. They have to deal with these tides that are remarkable in this area. They want those guys that are going through that training to be subjected to this.

We know there's strong tides. She's held in this particular area. You would think that if she had been deposited there for, say, a couple of years, her body would have long been swept out to sea, but that just wasn't the case. crime stories with nancy grace we now know that elizabeth's husband has been arrested and convicted matthew solomon he's now serving 16 years to life in prison for the second degree murder of his wife but as the forensic technicians were making their investigation, especially in the home, they found a significant amount of blood. What does that tell you? Well, I tell you, Jackie, one of the most fascinating things about that that they uncovered

about the perpetrator now, he can be named as Matthew Scott Sullivan, her husband, is the fact that he actually went out and bought a carpet cleaner. Now, you know, we would think that if you buy a carpet cleaner, it superheats water and then the detergent that's used, and it literally sucks everything up. He had allegedly purchased one within short order of her disappearing. Can you imagine using this thing and not getting up the blood that was left behind? And my hat's off to these technicians because this area that you're talking about, it actually was found in the carpet. So just think about this.

There's a lot of things that if a perpetrator, I guess anybody, is going around cleaning up, you're cleaning up, and you think you've done a fantastic job. When you begin to apply the chemical tests that are applied, you know, things like Blue Star and Luminol and all these sorts of tools that they have, all of a sudden that area luminesces, doesn't it? It means that you haven't gotten anything up. He did not do the amount of work and certainly apply the amount of elbow grease that would have been necessary in order to, you know, kind of lift that stain out. Probably retrospectively, he would have been much better served had he essentially gone and taken up that carpet and replaced the carpet. And probably

at the end of the day, no one would have been any of the wiser, at least from looking for trace evidence, that blood evidence that was left behind in the carpet. But still, after all those years, those forensic technicians who did a bang-up job on this case actually went out, even after this guy tried to clean it up with superheated liquid, and they still discovered. And like you said, Jackie, they identified a large pool of blood, very specific, and they were able to actually tie that blood back to the victim. The coroner's report laid out a pretty grim death for Elizabeth Sullivan. The coroner discovered that she had been stabbed to death, and he found five different ribs on the left side or her back that had nicks or cuts to them. That tells us that this was a pretty violent episode, wasn't it?

Yeah, it would have been. And the language in this is very curious when you look at it, Jackie, because you're thinking about, well, they're saying that most probably these were consistent with stab wounds. That gives us an indication of how decomposed her body was at this particular time. And we're talking about nicks. If people will just think about, if you'll envision in your mind the letter V, okay? The letter V. And when a knife actually passes between the soft tissue, which is called the intercostal space between our ribs, that's where the actual muscle is, and the bone itself, the blade actually nicks that bone. And microscopically,

when we look at that bone under magnification, it looks like the letter V. It's this kind of carved out area where you can see the knife has passed through there. What's really kind of gruesome about this is that many times you can appreciate even in the bone, you can appreciate if there is a focal area, what we call focal area of hemorrhage, even into the bone. This gives us an indication that what? Well, simply, if you have blood within the bone, you know that the individual was still alive while they were being stabbed.

However, if you had a dismemberment case, for instance, you're not going to see any kind of indwelling blood that's left behind on that bone. So that gives them the indication that, yeah, these were probably fatal injuries that she sustained. Not only that, she had sustained pretty significant fractures to both her jaw and her nose, which means that she was pummeled. She was beaten by this individual as well. And maybe not just beaten, she may have been stomped,

because let's keep in mind, in order to kind of knock her down and keep her in this position, you would have a perpetrator that's dominant over her if he's stomping on her face. If he's using, it takes a tremendous amount of force with a fist to break a fist to break a nose and break a jaw. I know we think that in the movies that it's real easy to do. It's really not. But two, the jawbone is very resilient. I would lean actually in a case like this of somebody stomping on them. And one of the reasons is, is because they're identifying all of these stab

wounds. It seems to me that this might be a case of impassioned overkill. So, Joe, there's one more component to this that is probably the crux of the entire case. Where was Elizabeth Sullivan's body for the two years she was missing? So when the forensic technicians and investigators came into their home, they also brought a cadaver dog. That cadaver dog hit on a location where a freezer had been in the home for a very long time. So we now know that Sullivan's body had been in the freezer for two years. Matthew Sullivan had only moved the body because he himself was moving to a new town with his new fiance and their new baby and his children, his two children with Elizabeth Sullivan. So the freezer, what does that do to a body?

How does that affect the investigation? Does it change the investigation? One of the most compelling things and one of the big mysteries that always surrounds cases involving bodies that have been placed in freezers. I think one of the cases that comes to mind to me is the case that made the movie Bernie quite popular with Jack Black. And I think Matthew McConaughey was in it. And it was based on a true story of a woman in Texas who had been shot multiple times and then stuffed down into a deep freezer. That's a true story. And that's not the only time it's happened. My Lord, Jeffrey Dahmer did it. And there's been any number of cases over the years where this has been facilitated. One of the big problems that you run up against are actually

one of the clues that you can look for. It's not something that you're going to see with what we refer to in forensics as the unaided eye. This is something that you have to look for microscopically. And keep in mind, we already know that the coroner and the forensics technicians are already on to something here. They already suspect she could not have been in that body of water for that period of time. So it's going to give them an investigative direction to go in. They're going to look at her slides very carefully. What are they looking for? Well, there will be changes, particularly in what we refer to as the gut. And I'm talking about like the stomach and particularly in the intestines. When you take sections of those, and that's one of the things that we do at autopsy, we take big sections of tissue and store them, you can actually see where in the first stage of decomposition at a cellular level, the cells begin to break down. Remember

what I talked about autolysis earlier, that just means that the body is just kind of vis-a-vis the enzymes in all of these cells. They're beginning to break down and you'll have this kind of cellular debris that kind of leaches out. Okay. Now that's something that you would expect to happen in a body that was perhaps decomposed, found in the woods, you would find it. But in the case of deep freezing a body, for a moment in time, you actually retard that process and you freeze that moment in time. So when, and there's evidence of that microscopically, and that's one of the big things that they look for. These cases are not solved by looking for frost on the eyebrows or on the tip of the nose. They're actually solved by looking actually through the lens of a microscope to see what

has happened to this tissue. And the tissue will tell the truth in these cases consistently throughout when decomposition is essentially frozen in time, you'll get this kind of abrupt ending to this cycle of autolysis that has begun, and then all of a sudden it stops. So that's what they're looking for microscopically, and that's where they'll make that diagnosis. Thanks to Joe Scott Morgan, professor of forensics at Jacksonville State University. You can check out his book, Blood Beneath My Feet, on Amazon. For more information on this case, you can go to CrimeOnline.com. For Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, I'm Jackie Howard. This is an iHeart Podcast.