Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Shattered Souls: Nightmare

Episode Date: October 16, 2021

On a cold and rainy morning in February of 2005, Jacksonville, Florida forensic detective Karen Smith responded to a troubling report of a body discovered in a wooded area. The unidentified young woman was in a puddle of mud at the bottom of an embankment, adjacent to a well-traveled road. Karen and her team faced tough terrain, poor weather, and other daunting challenges before they could even hope to identify the victim. Then Karen discovered the key to this case in the strangest of places. Fifteen years later, the victim continues to visit Karen in her dreams.Subscribe to the Shattered Souls podcast and catch up on all of Season 1 available now:Apple PodcastiHeartSpotify Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is anattered Souls. I'm your host, Karen Smith. This podcast contains graphic language and is not suitable for children. This is the new real. Welcome to Shattered Souls. This is Episode 1. I chose this case for the first episode for a few reasons. It was the first time that I took a case home. I was talking to my former lieutenant about a month ago, and she mentioned this case out of the blue because it affected her really hard as well. I had no idea.

It was a really difficult case on a number of levels. I guess I should tell you first of all, in the fallout from this case, it was the first time that I had a real visceral reaction. And that happened in the form of a nightmare, the night of the crime scene. I went home. It was late at night and I had to grab a couple of hours of sleep before I went back in the morning. And I finally found sleep in the wee hours. I couldn't get to sleep. I was restless. My brain was racing.

So I put a comedy DVD into the player and hoping that that would help. I guess it did. I finally fell asleep. But a short time later, I woke with a start. And I instinctively kicked an imaginary person off the mattress. And I was extraordinarily nauseous. And I threw the covers off and person off the mattress. And I was extraordinarily nauseous. And I threw the covers off and I ran to the bathroom and got sick. And as I was holding my hair back, I came to the realization that I was home. It was in the middle of the night.

I wasn't back at the crime scene. I wasn't back in the autopsy suite, and I can hear and see the silver tools clanking in the sink, flows of blood going down the drain, and the autopsy is taking place, and everything is exactly as it was the day before. A shiny liver is thrown into a scale, and the weight is notated on a dry erase board, and all of the things that normally happen during an autopsy are going on. And I sort of walk across the room and lean against this fairly clean spot on the counter and I meet my co-worker there. And as I'm talking

with him and having some mindless banter, I looked across the room and I see my victim's body laying there on a cold steel table. Her body is just stark white and her hair is combed back and her lips are parted in a half smile. I started taking some notes and in my peripheral in my dream, I watch as her head snaps to the right and I caught her eyes and she's looking right at me and blood starts to flow from all of her wounds and her teeth un flow from all of her wounds and her

teeth unstick from her lips and she gurgles at me please help me and that's when I wake up and that's when I ran to the bathroom so it was a really horrible scary dream and it's the same one that replays itself over and over again and and I never know when to expect it. Back in real time in my bathroom, I grabbed a towel off the rack, and I wadded it into a ball, and I sat there rocking on the edge of the shower, just wondering what in the hell was going on. Why was this homicide affecting me so strangely? This had never happened before, and I'd worked dozens and dozens of murders but I'd never taken one home like this before. So it was a little bit of cause for concern but I had a job to do. So I finally fell asleep for maybe another hour and a half and I woke up and I had

to finish my job. But ever since then I never know when this nightmare is going to creep up on me again. It's happened, oh my god, countless times and it's always the same and it always scares the shit out of me. So I'm hoping that maybe talking about the case and explaining what happened and what I saw and what we dealt with would kind of help with catharsis and maybe finally make it go away. It started the morning of February 3rd, 2005. It was rainy, it was cold, and it was really murky outside. Not an ideal weather condition for a homicide. But we can't choose that, so we just go. The body was found at the bottom of a 17-foot embankment along the edge of the woods

at a new road construction site. And one of the steamroller operators spotted her body from atop of this hill and called the police. The steamroller operator could see blood everywhere so she knew instinctively that this was something really bad and that it was likely a murder. There wasn't a lot of trampling of the crime scene. Nobody went down there to see anything. Nobody tried to save her life. It was obvious that she was gone. So we had a pretty pristine crime scene, although the weather was our one holdback, the one thing that was really destroying a lot of it very quickly. So I arrived on scene and I stood outside

with the lead homicide investigator and we sort of sipped our coffee and chatted about the best way to approach this scene. The last thing that you want to do is destroy evidence trying to get there. And we had no idea what might be in the mud and dirt between us and the victim. So we made a plan to sort of traverse the area to the north of her body, but we wanted to get photographs of her body in situ or as it was before we even tried that. Well, the bad weather had grounded the police helicopter, and I was secretly thankful for that. I am a hopeless acrophobic. I wasn't going to get out of it this time. They called a fire truck ladder bucket. The ladder bucket arrived pretty quickly and backed up and parked. With the grace of an ostrich playing ping pong, I crawled up past all the gauges on the back and across this

well-stacked ladders and into this teeny weeny white bucket. And an engineer crawled in with me and he threw it in gear and he swung the ladder all the way across this berm about 30 feet in the air. And I was petrified. I was absolutely petrified. We swung, we bounced. The further the ladder extended, the more the bucket bounced. And I was white knuckling that sucker. I was scared to death. And I had my camera around my neck. It weighed about six pounds and it was swinging back and forth along my neck.

I was trying to hold the camera and trying to hold on. And we came to this undulating stop over her body. And I leaned out just far enough to snap a bunch of photographs. The ladder bucket, thank goodness, brought me back to terra firma. And once I got down, I told my sergeant and the homicide detective, I said, listen, she's got some really major injuries. I think this is probably the primary crime scene. It doesn't look like she was dumped. There's just too much blood for that. detective, I said, listen, she's got some really major injuries. I think this is probably the primary crime scene. It doesn't look like she was dumped. There's just too much blood for that. We also looked to the south of her body and it looked like some of the dirt down the hill had

been overturned. Like maybe she had run to where she was, but this was in a really remote area of Jacksonville. It was a new road. There was no reason for her to be there. So we started asking each other, what was she doing there? How did she get there? And why was she murdered at a construction site near a wood line? None of it made any sense. And at that point, we had a really worst case scenario. We had an unidentified victim.

Whodunit murder. And it just doesn't get any worse than that. So the lead detective and I made our way north of her body. And as we clumsily tumbled down this muddy embankment, we had to traverse this large area. Part of it had been pressed with the steamroller and part of it was still loose dirt and he gave me a lady's first gesture and I said no no buddy you go right ahead I'll after you he took one step into that mud and he sank waist deep into it his khaki pants were ruined he was flailing around with his arms trying to figure out how to get his leg back out and his shoe stayed in there he traversed the rest of it in

his sock so that shoe was never to be found again. But we finally made it across. When we got close to her body, there were a couple of really irky things, things that didn't sit well with me. First of all, it was February in Jacksonville and it's cold. Believe it or not, in Florida in February, it can get bitter cold. And this was one of those mornings, besides the rain and the wind and everything else. But there were blowflies buzzing around her face, which is really unusual insect behavior for wintertime. So I had made a note of that, and we could readily see she was so covered with blood and with mud that it was really hard to discern much of anything.

But we could readily see a pretty serious injury on her neck. She was fully clothed. She had on a black sweater, blue jeans, and sneakers. And it didn't look like any sexual assault had taken place, at least in that area where she was. her jeans were pretty tight and they were buttoned and they were zipped. What did have us concerned was one piece of evidence that she had gripped in her hand and it was a blue ink pen. And we couldn't understand what she could have been doing with that. Was it used as a defensive weapon? Was it just a weird thing that maybe she was carrying at the time? It didn't make any sense. And as I was taking my photographs, the medical examiner investigator showed up. Now the body is the jurisdiction of

the medical examiner. We can't touch it without their permission or without them present. So once she showed up at the scene, we were able to examine her a little bit more closely at the scene. We didn't want to disturb too much. But we turned her hands over and we could see a lot of defensive wounds along her fingertips, a lot of cuts across the pads of her fingers. So we knew that she fought back and against whoever her attacker was, she fought back. And at that point, there really wasn't much for us to do. The weather was destroying things minute by minute. So we made the decision to just flag her position, collect the other evidence

that was around her body in the dirt. And that included a purse, a cell phone cover, and the pen that I mentioned. And that was it. That's all we had. Any shoe prints that may have been discernible were nothing but oblong puddles at this point. And all we had was the overturned dirt

where it looked like maybe she had taken a tumble or had ran, and that's all. So we didn't have much to go on, but we needed to get her out of there. We kept the ladder bucket there, and what we did is the firefighters attached a rescue litter to it. We rolled her body over in order to put it onto a clean white sheet and into the vinyl bag. And when we rolled her body over, all of us collectively gasped. Because if what we were seeing weren't bad enough, on her back, all the way from her right shoulder blade across her back to the left one, was an 18-inch, 3-inch wide wide laceration all the way down to the bone. Somebody had taken a knife, plunged it into her shoulder and raked it all the way across her back.

And this was pre-mortem. It was very bloody. It happened before she died. And I looked at the medical examiner investigator and she looked back at me and we just shook our heads. And I kind of went into a silent rage. When you see something like that, your brain does one of two things. You get angry or you just shut it down because it's too much information to take in. Investigators aren't allowed to have feelings at a scene. They get in the way. We have to be objective. We have to be in the way. We have to be objective. We have to be unbiased.

We have to be clinical. But when you see an injury like that on a young woman laying in the bottom of an embankment in the mud, you can't do anything to help her other than find who did it. And my brain went from automatic rage to, okay, the only thing that I have left to do is to find the evidence

to figure out who did this. And that's where you need to focus your energy. So I switched my brain off. I pushed it aside. We placed her very carefully into a vinyl bag. We attached it to the ladder truck with straps. The bucket slowly swung her back across the dirt. And as that happened, I looked up and I could see my sergeant, my lieutenant, a couple of other police officers and the construction crew. Some of them turned away. Some of them stood with their heads bowed. Every one of the construction workers removed their hard hat in reverence. And I saw a couple of tears get wiped away and I wiped a couple away

myself so I went back across the berm after she was loaded into the van and headed down to the medical examiner's office for autopsy I went back halfway across this dirt pile and I collected her purse and I collected the cell phone cover and I brought it back up top and we went through the purse and luckily for us there were some credit cards in a wallet and a checkbook with a name. Her name was Stacy Replogle, and she was only 29 years old. So we had a name. It was the first step.

We would have to make positive ident through family members down at the medical examiner's office and through fingerprints, but we did have a jump start now. And the homicide investigators left the scene with that information to make notification of her death to her family, and I still had work to do. I had to go down to the medical examiner's office and recover anything that I could from her body. We still had no idea what she was doing at this construction site, how she got there, and what time this may have happened. She hadn't been there very long, maybe 12 or 15 hours, so we were dealing with a tight time frame. But now that we had her name and the homicide investigators were going to follow up on those leads, I had to go downtown and follow up on those leads, I had to go downtown and follow up on mine. I'm going to tell you a little bit about Stacey. Like I said, she was 29 years old,

and she was a college student, and she was working at a restaurant. By all accounts, she was a normal, everyday young woman. She was working her way up in the world, trying to better herself by going to college classes at night while she worked during the day. We had no idea who may have done this to her or why. We would have to do some victimology, find out more about her, find out who she was dating, if she'd had a bad breakup, if there was somebody who didn't like her for some reason, or if this was just some weird happenstance murder by a psychopath. When I saw her injuries at the construction site, I thought, you know, this might not be a one-off.

This might be the work of a psychopathic killer. It didn't seem like the first time somebody had done something like this, and that scared the hell out of me, and it scared the hell out of the other investigators too. The last thing that we wanted to do was wait for another body to turn up, so we had to work fast. As I went down to the medical examiner's office, I got a phone call, and it was the lead homicide detective. As he was making notification of Stacy's death, he learned that the night before there had been a hit-and-run crash at the intersection about 100 yards east of her location. Now, we had no idea if this had anything to do with the murder, but it was something that we had to follow up. What happened was a woman was sitting at the red light in her SUV, and a pickup truck careened into the back of her car, smashed

it, and sent her car careening through the intersection. The lady didn't remember anything. She didn't remember a description of the driver or anybody else who was in the pickup truck. And by the time the patrol officers got there, it had been abandoned at the intersection. The front end was completely demolished. But the truck was impounded, and it was shipped over to our processing warehouse. So I went to the autopsy with the knowledge that either that afternoon or the following day, I would have to process this pickup truck for anything and everything if it was related to this homicide. And that would give the homicide detectives long enough to secure a search warrant for it.

So with that in the back of my mind, I went to the autopsy and I met with the chief medical examiner. And I asked him for permission to collect evidence from her person that may be related to this homicide and he gave me carte blanche. So I started by just taking overall photographs and in looking at her body it was so covered in mud and blood it was still very difficult even in a controlled environment. It was hard to discern much of anything. So I started going over her body just bit by bit, and I could see that her face had some bruises, her hair was dirty and it had been tousled over her face, her clothing was still on, there were a couple of rips in the front of her sweater, and there were some curious blood stains

on her jeans. The whole front of her jeans, the thigh area, was saturated in blood and mud. But there were some areas called voids where blood should be but was not. And that was in the creases of her jeans. Those natural creases, they were pretty clean. If you follow logic, since blood follows gravity, if she had an injury above that area, which she certainly did, to her neck. If the blood flowed down, it should have been everywhere if she was standing up. So that told me that something prevented the blood from getting in those creases. And it told me she was either sitting, kneeling, or bent over when those injuries happened and that blood flowed down onto the thighs of her pants. So I made some notes and I moved on to some other areas of her body.

And I looked at her fingertips again and I photographed those defensive injuries. And as I rolled her hand over on her wrist, there was what looked to be a possible fingerprint. And I thought, wow, time to back up for a few seconds. Now remember, her body had been transported from the construction site to the medical examiner's office. So people had handled her. I didn't know if this was a bloody fingerprint from the perpetrator, if he had dragged her to where she had been found, if he'd carried her. We still didn't know how she got there. I prepared a pipette bottle of a chemical called Amido Black, and it's a dark blue protein dye,

and what it does is enhance some of the details in bloody fingerprints that you can't see with the naked eye and turns them a dark blue color. So I sprayed some of this onto her wrist very gently and I watched and I was praying for some fingerprint ridge detail to show up and as the blue liquid flowed down her skin nothing happened. You know we were back to square one there was nothing there. It was just a smear and I had nothing to go on. So I finished documenting her clothing. The autopsy technicians removed her clothes when I was finished, and they left her there naked on a steel table. And the skin of her body was so white in contrast to the dirt and mud that was caked onto her wrists and hands and under her fingernails and on her neck and on her face. And it really brought to bear the fact that it

seemed like she was either running or crawling through the mud for her life. I documented some injuries to her neck and there were two stab wounds to her chest. Once I documented all of that, I had to get her hair and her face cleaned off so that I could see the details of the other injuries. So the technicians washed her body and I had taken DNA swabs of her wrists, her hands, her neck, her face. You know, this obviously was a close quarter combat situation, so any areas that may have been touched by the suspect, I took a DNA swab in the hopes that he injured himself in the process of stabbing her. So once they took her clothes off and they washed her body,

the injury on her neck, it was so much worse than any of us imagined. The only thing holding her head onto her body were just a few ligaments and pieces of tissue. This perpetrator had almost decapitated her. And it was so hard to see with all the blood and mud caked in there that once they washed all of that away, we could see it wasn't just one cut across her neck. It was between six and twelve. This perpetrator had taken his time. He had taken his time to draw that knife across her neck between six and twelve times and then stabbed her twice in the chest and the raking injury across her back again it took me a few minutes to digest that and they placed a wood block under her head to keep it in place and as as I photographed her, I could

see the bruises on her chin and another one along her forehead hairline. And I photographed it and saw that a small chunk of her hair had been pulled out along with this bruise. And after I took all of my photographs and collected all of my evidence, and I did everything that I could for her. I took my leave and the door shut just as the chief medical examiner started his Y incision through her chest. So I took all of my evidence down to the property room and I still had to process this pickup truck. It had already been a 14-hour day and I did not have the strength or the energy to start that. So I called the lead homicide investigator and I said, hey buddy, you want to meet tomorrow morning at the warehouse? And he

said, sure, I'll have the warrant in hand. Let's tackle it tomorrow. So I went home to sleep and I woke up the next morning and headed down to the warehouse. And when I got there, I met with the homicide investigator and he had the warrant in hand. The pickup truck was by itself in the corner and the front end was completely demolished. And as I photographed all the way around, I could see the bumper and the styrofoam under the bumper had been tossed into the truck bed by the tow truck driver. And I looked through the driver's window, and the inside was littered with garbage. Cigarette packs and butts, beer cans, bottles, fast food wrappers. And I thought, I'm going to have to process and bag and tag every

piece of that evidence and I looked at the homicide detective and I said whose truck is this and he said I'm glad you asked because the VIN the vehicle identification number and the tag came back to a man named Benito Ramirez so the homicide investigator left to go find Mr. Ramirez and find out what if he knew anything about this murder. And from all intents and purposes, this truck looked like it could have been a crack rental. That is when somebody who's hooked on drugs loans out their car to a dealer in exchange for a hit because they don't have the money to pay for it. So I had no idea how many people had been in this truck, who may have been driving the night of the crash, who may have been inside. So it was a crapshoot. But I started by taking my photographs,

taking some DNA swabs, and I worked my way around to the passenger door. And I photographed the interior, and I was looking for any evidence that anyone was injured inside this pickup truck. It was a really forceful crash. This was not a gentle tap. This was a full speed collision into that SUV. And I thought somebody must have been bleeding in here somewhere. So I shined this alternate light source, a big white light inside, and I didn't see anything. There wasn't blood anywhere, not even on the steering wheel. There was no airbags. This was pre-airbag truck. None were deployed. So I looked at the steering wheel. I looked at the floor.

I looked at the seats. I didn't see blood anywhere, which wasn't very helpful. But nonetheless, I had things that I had to do. So I opened the passenger door and I looked at the windshield. And the windshield had been shattered. It hadn't been shattered by the crash. It was shattered by something or someone from inside the passenger compartment. And the convex curve showed an

impact pattern consistent with someone slamming into it, like they weren't wearing their seat belt during this crash. And I thought, well, that's really weird. You would think there would be some blood or something inside this truck if someone took a header into the windshield, but I didn't see any. And as I shined my light across the windshield, I could see the broken glass. I could see the impact pattern. And then it shone across something that would break this case wide open. And I said, oh my God. In the next episode of Shattered Souls, the conclusion of the Stacey Replogle case. This is the new real.

Opening music by Sam Johnson at samjohnsonlive.com. Underscore music by Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com. All rights reserved by Angel Heart Productions. This is an iHeart Podcast.