Criminal - Call Your Mom

Episode Date: March 28, 2014

There are plenty of things we don't share with our mothers. Dark, sad things. Unless of course, you both speak the same dark language. Kathleen Vernon is a coroner in Albany County, Wyoming, the youngest ever, in fact. But she didn’t come to this preternatural curiosity just on her own; the business of death runs in the family. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family.

Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Your own weight loss journey is personal. Everyone's diet is different. Everyone's bodies are different. And according to Noom, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Thank you. for a healthier lifestyle. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your free trial today at Noom.com. There was a gentleman who had been living there for quite some time and had been without heat since the previous November, and that was actually around the last time that he'd been seen live.

This is Kathleen Vernon. She's the coroner for Albany County in southeastern Wyoming. In 2012, she was called to a small cabin out on the prairie, not far from Laramie, where she lives. And one of his family members had finally called in to the sheriff's department to go check on him. And they had found that he was no longer living. It was January and 32 degrees inside the cabin. What they found was basically a mummified body. When Kathleen got the body back to the lab and began the autopsy, things got even more bizarre.

It looked like the man had been getting hypothermia and then somehow surviving it over and over again. Which seemed crazy, like something out of a movie. Until Kathleen remembered seeing something unusual in his house. In the refrigerator of his home, there had been a bottle of antifreeze next to a drinking glass. You know, it's kind of a weird place to keep antifreeze. I don't generally keep things like that in the fridge. And as it turned out, he had ethylene glycol crystals in his kidneys, which is what happens when you consume antifreeze.

The active ingredient is ethylene glycol. So the theory that we came up with was that he had been intentionally consuming antifreeze to keep himself from freezing, from dying of hypothermia, and that for at least a while it had probably worked. What did you do when you figured this out? So I called my mom. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Kathleen, do you remember the call when you said, I'm going to call my mom? And the police officers around you laughed?

And one of them said, you don't know her mom? Yeah, one of the officers was like, oh, well, it makes sense. Her mom's an investigator too. It was also three o'clock in the morning. Well, yeah, I mean, that's when this happens. There are only three female coroners in the entire state of Wyoming. Kathleen Vernon, or Casey, as her family calls her, is one of them. She's 25 years old and has been working with the coroner's office since she was 21, her first job out of college. Which, it goes without saying, isn't exactly something you learn about at a career fair. So you can't help but wonder, how did she get to this point? We perhaps exposed Kathleen to life situations that 99% of people never see or hear about. This is Linda Vernon, Kathleen's mom. Linda spent decades as a homicide investigator and coroner in California. Kathleen's father, Bill, is an investigator for the state of

Wyoming. Growing up in Cheyenne, the Vernon family surrounded themselves with other people in law enforcement. It's a pretty small town. And when the Vernons had a party, most of the talk was about cases people were working on, bad guys they had just caught. And when the Vernons had a party, most of the talk was about cases people were working on, bad guys they had just caught. So when Kathleen started showing an interest in death, something that would scare a lot of parents, the Vernons took it in stride. Like one time, when Kathleen was about four years old and found a dead gopher in the backyard, she spent a weekend crouched over its body, watching flesh-eating beetles take it apart. I've always really liked bugs.

Like, I really like bugs. And I think they were red or orange and just the coolest things I'd ever seen. And then, when she was 11, Kathleen took it a step further and began raising beetles for a science fair project. Linda was all for it. You know, in museums, they usually have tanks of beetles that they can debride flesh from bones with

and end up with perfect specimens for display or study. And she said, I want to do that. So I called the Museum of Natural History in Denver and got a hold of the curator. And he kindly sent her a box of beetles from his tank. And so for many weeks, we had a 20-gallon aquarium in our living room full of bugs and dead things. And you would just, would you all just sit around watching it kind of on the couch like it was television? No. But she had to keep track of what they were doing and watch very carefully

because one of the specimens that she put in there was a bird, and they have very tiny bones and these bugs will completely consume the tiny bones on a small specimen like that. And we also did not kill anything for her to do this. A bird flew into our living room window as happenstance, karmic happenstance, I think. And so she collected that and put it in there first. And then we contacted a local taxidermist and he was kind enough to give us a skull. I believe it was a fox skull, Casey? It was a fox. And then we tried, that Thanksgiving, we tried a turkey neck, but it was cooked and the beetles apparently don't care for their specimens to be cooked.

They didn't do as good a job on that as they did on her other things. After the science project ended, Kathleen, 11 years old, made a special box to preserve that little bird carcass. And even today, the bird skeleton lies in its box in her mother's sewing room. When Linda gave birth to Kathleen, she stopped working as a homicide investigator and coroner. But she couldn't actually give up the work she loved so much. So she began writing for police trade publications like Police Magazine and Police Chief Magazine. Once, Linda was writing about blood spatter and recreated a crime scene in the house with real blood, her own blood. I went to visit our family doctor. I explained what I was doing and asked him if he would draw a vial of my blood for me to use

because I certainly wouldn't have wanted to use an unknown specimen of blood, for example. And you get best results with the real thing. So my blood was the best way to do this. So he drew me a vial of blood and I set up a crime scene in the back hall of our house and did the blood spatters and one-to-one photographs while Casey was gone from home. And when she came home, I think everything was pretty much gone. And what did you say to her? What did you say to Kathleen when she was a little kid? How did you explain to her that there are people who do bad things sometimes and they can result in terrible injury or in death.

Pretty much exactly that way. My husband and I both strongly believe that if a child is intelligent enough to formulate a question, they deserve a truthful answer. And that is what she always got. Life is often not very pretty, but by the same token, it is often extraordinarily beautiful. And we tried to impart both those things to her. Eventually, Kathleen moved out. She went to college. But unlike a lot of kids, Kathleen didn't leave her childhood interests at home. When she was in school, she called up the county coroner and told him she wasn't afraid of gruesome things. She said, I'm not afraid of death, and I'd like to go out on a call with you.

I had just turned 21. It was like six days after my 21st birthday. And he called me. I was at a concert in town. And he said, you know, we have a call. Do you want to go? And of course, I think I knocked my chair over, getting up to leave. That night, she saw her first dead body. The coroner gave her a camera and told her to take photographs of the scene. It was a man who died of a stomach bleed. And I thought it was just the most fascinating thing I'd ever seen because I realized that you could piece together what this person's life had been like from the things that were in his house.

From, you know, his life in a holistic sense, what day-to-day life was like down to what was that last night like. After that first body, she was hooked. Now she works for the county. The coroner is an elected position, and she's serving her first term, about to run for re-election. Kathleen says she gets about 80 bodies a year. But the weird thing is that the work isn't steady. She'll have multiple bodies in the same day, and then nothing for a month.

It turns out that people die in groups. And I know that there are smarter people than I who've tried to figure out why this happens. I think the old wives' tale is that it's the moon. And there may be some truth to that, or it could be complete hocus-pocus. Maybe it's the barometric pressure or the tides or who knows what. But there seems to be some sort of grouping that happens. She says a lot of people in her field don't talk about their work with outsiders. It's just too sad, too morbid and depressing.

So Kathleen feels lucky she can turn to her mother for support. And while Linda's tough, there have been cases that even she can't shake off. One in particular was the only child of a farm labor family. And the father was gone. It was Christmas morning. The baby was three months old and it was probably the hardest day to have to be there with that woman until I could find someone who could come and be an advocate for her. That was a very tough day. I was directly involved in the investigation of the homicide of two FBI agents, and I remember that day very vividly. I was on scene when two El Centro police officers were murdered in the line of duty. I remember that day. But you keep those things, like I explained to Casey,

you keep those things in little boxes and you shove them down as far as you can. And every once in a while you take them out and look. And I think it keeps you honest. Kathleen, your husband is also a coroner, is that right? Yes. Okay, so basically everyone you're surrounded by is in some way involved with law enforcement or death. I wonder, what do you talk about at Thanksgiving? If I can interject. Yeah, please. Casey came home when she was a teenager and looked at me after having spent a weekend with a friend, I think,

and said, Mom, do you have any idea how profoundly different our dinner table conversation is than anyone else's? It's an abiding thing I mean it's something we've talked about all of her life and the cycle continues apparently so much of what you do as a parent has an effect on your kid and when so much of the family is in the business of death well your kid becomes a coroner and then gets

married to another coroner. It's a little unclear how Kathleen feels about being so exposed to crime and death as a kid. You know, I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with the way that I was raised or with how I turned out. I mean, I have a career. I'm relatively well adjusted for a person of my age and so forth. Whatever you do, when you're a parent is going to have some kind of impact on your child. And at some point in that child's life, they're probably going to think that the impact is negative. All you can do is do the best you can. So the big question now is, how much will Kathleen expose her own child? And it's not hypothetical.

She's eight and a half months pregnant. She's due next week. Thank you. on iTunes. You can get in touch with us at thisiscriminal.org or on Twitter at Criminal Show. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is Criminal. Support for this podcast comes from Anthropic. It's not always easy to harness the power and potential of AI. For all the talk around its revolutionary potential, a lot of AI systems feel like they're designed for specific tasks performed by a select few. Well, Claude by Anthropic is AI for everyone. The latest model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, offers groundbreaking intelligence at an everyday price. Claude Sonnet can generate code offers groundbreaking intelligence at an everyday price.

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