Julian Dorey Podcast - 🫢 [VIDEO] - Murder Scene Expert Reflects on Living w/ The DEAD | Joseph Scott Morgan • #146

Episode Date: May 14, 2023

BUY Joseph’s Book, “Blood Beneath My Feet”: https://amzn.to/3Ob3Upt  Support Our Show on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey Subscribe To Our Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChs-BsSX71a_leuqUk7vtDg  (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Joseph Scott Morgan is a forensics expert, author, and TV personality. After a 20-year career as a nationally-renowned former death investigator in Fulton County (Atlanta), Georgia, Morgan became the chief forensics correspondent for Nancy Grace, Dr. Phil and many other prominent media titans. His book, “Blood Beneath My Feet” is considered by many the greatest forensics memoir ever written. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Intro; How Joe got his TV name 3:44 - Separating death from the job; Memories & Murder Scenes 9:03 - Joe’s Dark times 11:14 - A Somber Process: Notifying the families of the murdered 15:50 - Woman whose husband died w/ “lady of the night” story 21:55 - The primal reaction to death 25:14 - Desensitization of death via True Crime genre; Elise Fletcher Case 31:04 - Gabby Petito, Bryan Kohberger - Idaho case 37:20 - How media decides what murders to cover; “Did they suffer?” 45:31 - Why closure doesn’t exist; The father who called Joe for 7 yrs after son’s death 51:55 - Elephants grieving; Human grief 55:02 - Joe recounts the death of his son, Isaac 1:00:52 - Why Joe hates the word “Why” 1:05:11 - How Joe got into forensics 1:10:01 - Opening up bodies 1:18:02 - OJ Simpson Case Medical Examiner 1:22:04 - What forensics experts do at murder scenes 1:30:06 - Getting to murder scene; The victim’s family notification process 1:35:08 - Detectives vs Medical Examiners 1:39:04 - That unlimited variables of evidence at crime scenes 1:42:00 - Post-Mortem Interval; Algor Mortis; Determining if body was moved 1:47:04 - Rigor Mortis & Body Temperature 1:52:44 - Nancy Solomon’s coverage of Sheridan murders 1:59:10 - The Stabbed Old Lady Hidden Murder Scene 2:06:47 - Does life & death of job make you more focused? 2:09:05 - Joe took the darkness of the job home with him 2:14:46 - Joe’s horrific childhood 2:20:51 - The end of Joe’s career after son’s death 2:25:28 - Joe’s bad relationships w/ his father and stepfather 2:32:15 - Julian’s theory about Joe; Why Joe loves teaching 2:41:15 - Why Joe’s panic attacks started 2:48:24 - Revisiting Joe’s son’s death: “Be careful what you ask God for.” 2:56:04 - Julian gives his opinion about Joe 2:57:34 - Is Joe afraid of death? 3:03:04 - Joe’s book & podcast ~ Get $150 Off The Eight Sleep Pod Pro Mattress / Mattress Cover (USING CODE: “JULIANDOREY”): https://eight-sleep.ioym.net/trendifier Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey ~ Music via Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, guys? If you're on Spotify right now, please follow the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave a five-star review. Thank you. When you say you notified yourself, I mean, I could imagine what you meant by that, but take me to that moment. What is that? Do you say out loud? A scientist in myself looked down at that little baby, and I validated at that moment in time without anybody else telling me that he was in fact deceased. And I knew it at that moment in time without anybody else telling me that he was in fact deceased. And I knew it at that moment in time as I held him and I looked at him. And I remember looking at my wife as she was weeping in bed and telling her, he's gone. And I handed him over to her and we wept. I still wept today. Still weep today. I still weep on his birthday every year,

24th September. so she started literally started calling me Joseph. And I've got friends from high school and decades back in my life, and people still call me Joe. And it's like a shock when I hear it now. Because everyone I have met for the last 25 years since I've been married to my bride calls me Joseph now. And so it's just one of those things. And then when I got into the atmosphere of Nancy Grace, it's that very abbreviated thing.

She's very staccato when she talks. And it's very – she has an economy with things many times and she just started calling me just got and that's the way it was hey just got and you don't know if if there's anger involved in that you don't know if there's warmth you don't know how that's how that's going to come off so she started calling me joe scott and everywhere you know i go you know i'll i'll have some news anchor now that will refer to me, yeah, well, we've got Joe Scott Morgan here. It's like, how the hell do you know Joe Scott? I mean, it's a weird kind of thing.

It really is. Well, you've got to get used to being a media star now. You've been at this for like a decade. Yeah, yeah, I have. It's a weird thing. But yet, I still have not gotten to the point where I've had it happen a couple of times. It's kind of strange when you're in a public place and people say, hey, I know you. I've seen you somewhere. My wife gets it more than anybody, she'll say. Somebody will say, aren't you married to Joseph Scott Morgan? And she's like, yeah like yeah oh my god we were watching television last night there we go yeah it's it's kind of it's it's it is a bit surreal it's it's a bit weird there's something that happens though with people specifically from tv i find where especially

when you're used to seeing them with just kind of up close shots or something like that maybe like in the suit they will look a little different when you see him in person like i knew you were walking towards me today because i'm picking you up at the airport i know they are but as i'm seeing you come towards me i'm like looks a little different than he does on tv like it's not i wouldn't if i were just a normal passerby i probably wouldn't yeah wouldn't have known and i know your face yeah facing the crowd you know you just want to blend in yeah exactly but I I had actually seen your face before you followed me on Twitter like months and months ago I was like wait I know this guy and it's because you're all over TV as you've been saying and you're all over all these shows because of this whole wave of people being so into true crime

yeah these days but what I really admire about you is that, you know, you keep, and you and I were talking about this in the car on the way here, you keep at the forefront what all this amounts to at the end of the day, which is that when you're talking about these cases and these bloody homicide cases and stuff, you're talking about a life lost. You're talking about people who are never going to see their family again and their family's forced to live with that and you keep an air of

the gravity in the situation and so what what i'm always wondering about when i meet someone who does like a crazy job that i'm not i have no understanding of or that seems like something morbid is you know how do, how do you separate that? Did it take years before you could walk into a case and know that like, hey, this is my job. My job is to tell the story of what happened to this body I'm going to look at and that's it versus like, oh my God, this is a fallen human being. Right. It's a difficult thing. I think that anybody that says that they can purely do that is lying.

To be blunt, you can't. Because, you know, there's this thing, and I think that it's probably, Julian, it's even primal. I think that when you're put in a position where, even if you're seeing the dead on a daily basis, which I did as a medical legal death investigator, you still – your humanity is reflected in them. And I know that sounds kind of new agey, but no, when you're physically there in the room, you're in that space in which they indwelled. If you're in a home, you know, I'm making a big assumption there because obviously all cases that I worked were not in homes. But when you occupy that personal space that someone indwelled in, one of the things I always tell my students, and I've said it in media, is that for medical legal death investigators and forensic scientists to a lesser degree, you're always having to try to understand the abnormal in the context of the normal.

It's like if you're in your mom's kitchen, all right, you associate that with beautiful things. Hopefully, you know, good smells, happy memories, maybe making Thanksgiving, Christmas dinner. You know, you never know. You know, all those celebratory times. But can you imagine walking in and somebody's got a butcher knife buried in their neck in that same space in which celebrations have taken place? And that's what you're kind of faced with, I think, in our world. And it's hard. Like even when you're talking to hardened police officers,

they have a difficult time kind of understanding the world that I formerly inhabited because we deal with all manner of deaths. It's not simply homicides. It's suicides. It's accidental deaths. You know, people, you know, unless it's Robin Williams, you don't hear about suicides, do you? You know, you look in the obituaries and papers and it'll say died suddenly. And that kind of gives you, that's kind of a snapshot of what our world is like. You know, in a lot of places, suicides outnumber homicides two or three to one.

And for me, they're more difficult. They're more difficult to work with because you're not typically going to have a witness, but yet you still have a violent death. I found myself in incredible places that other people would not have had an opportunity to go as a result of my occupation as a death investigator, where I've gone into the very bottom of a supertanker, for instance, moored on the side of the Mississippi River because a drunk deckhand was coming back from a bar and they left one of the hatches open. He stepped in it and fell, I don't know how many stories inside of this thing and it fortunately

it had been emptied and he struck an i-beam rib on the bottom of it and no one else was going to go down there i had to go down there and you know you think about that and some of that that craziness you know particularly when i was you know really young and and and doing this work, you know, you get a view of the world through a cracked lens, I think. And it's my lens, but it's cracked. It's different than everybody else's. It's unique in that sense because most people don't think about death and death impacts everything that we do as medical legal death investigators. But you're also like such a gregarious, outward, happy, fun, go lucky guy. And, you know, in our heads, we start to think someone like this has to be a little more

completely introverted, almost like cold towards stuff. But you maintain such a great level of humanity. I mean, is that, was it always that way? Because that's just who you were? Or did you have times where it was maybe early on in your career where you're like, shit, this is just, I can't even deal with this? Yeah, yeah. I had a lot of dark times, many, many dark times. And I'm, you know, I'm the way I am now. I think that this person was probably buried in there, no pun intended, by all of the death that I witnessed. And I'm, listen, I'm no superstar. There are superstars out there that are still doing this job, even as we're chatting right now, Julian, there are people that are doing what I did. It never stops. Death never stops. It never pauses. And you have to deal with it in your own way.

Most people are, there are exceptions. I think I was an exception. I stayed with it for two decades. But there are some people that can't go beyond about seven years because, you know, people, most of the time I found that, as in many areas of life, death investigation is greatly influenced by the entertainment media. They have this idea of what we do and who we are. And, and of course that that's not the reality, you know, we do everything. And I certainly did many things as a death investigator, everything from, from, you know, responding to scenes and, you know, doing my own investigation as an adjunct to whatever the police were doing. Then going back, working in the morgue, participating in over 7,000 autopsies over the course of my career.

And then the other big thing that I think people believe that law enforcement does is notify families, and I made close to 2,000 in-person death notifications. And it's a skill set that you develop, and trust me, the last one was just as bad as the first one. 2,000? Yeah, it just never gets easier. Never gets easy. Sometimes you have to do it, which I absolutely despise. You have to do it, which I absolutely despise. You have to do it over the

phone. You try to reach out and find a local law enforcement agency to go to the home, say, make them call me or have them hang on the line. You stand there with them. As I tell them over the phone, I have to guarantee that that individual has been notified. And then, you know, you begin to count up all the ones that you go and you visit homes and you make those notifications. And it's a skill set that you develop. It's not a muscle that you use a lot outside of that context. I've had to deal with high-stress situations, you know, obviously in my personal life. And I think that that kind of equipped me for some of that because I knew that it would come to an end.

And, you know, there's nothing you can do to assuage a family after you've told them this. It's almost like you pull the pin on a grenade and throw it into a room and close the door behind you. A total stranger, mind you, that does this. And you've just wrecked their life. Certainly at that moment in time, because it comes out of the blue. They didn't expect this to happen. You don't know these people. You don't know them. I don't wish people ill will. It's not my intention to do that. But someone has to do it. And I found obviously through my own

experience that the best way to do it is not to hem and haw about it. You have to get right to it because people are always keyed up and they're keyed up anyway. You badge them. You know, when you show up at the door, they know that no one generally shows up at their door with a badge and they're bringing great tidings. So you get right to it. And because there's nothing you can do to stem the, you know, the gnashing of teeth and the rending of clothing and everything else that goes on that accompanies that task. Yeah. I had Laura Spaulding in here. You're just kind of making me think of her a little bit as well she runs the company crime scene cleanup which is now in i think like 46 states or something like that but she was a cop and she

sometimes was required in these various homicides to deal with the family or inform them and what struck her early on was maybe it was one of her first times doing it the the family or at some point a family member asked So who you sending to clean this up? Yeah, and she looked at him and she had never really thought about it, but she's like, oh We don't we don't send anybody right like that's on you And so, you know You're coming on to sometimes as you've described some scenes earlier like these brutal scenes in a place that you have great memories of yeah potentially as a family member and they're forced to clean it up and i think people like you and laura in a lot of ways could qualify without an education for being some level of a psychiatrist because you have

you have seen the most vulnerable intense moments over and over and over again from so many people across so many different backgrounds you do and that's an interesting insight i was talking to somebody not too long ago about you know how you hear a lot about the stages of grief that people go through it's uh and and they are real um you know you get denial and anger and all these other things that come along with it it's really weird when you first make a notification to a family um you will see those stages played out almost in a microcosm, like in a millisecond where you'll have this reaction, this immediate reaction, and it spans. And that's evidenced for me because I've had a variety of different reactions,

responses from people. I've been attacked. I had one lady actually fall on the floor, grab my ankle, and bite my leg. That was a curious position to be in. I had one lady that I'd written about this a few years back, and this was one of the most oddball things that ever happened to me. I was with a colleague of mine. We went out to notify this lady. And her husband had died in the company of a lady of the night. I'll put it to you that way.

And actually, it was adjacent to people watching this might recall Jimmy Swaggart and his infamous romp with prostitutes down in New Orleans on Airline Highway. It was adjacent to one of the hotels that he would frequent. Who was Jimmy Swaggart? He was a televangelist that got caught with prostitutes. I know. God sent them. Yeah, God sent them. And so in this particular case, I'd gone out and I'd worked the case. The guy actually had an MI. It was a heart attack. While he was in the process of engaging this young lady's services, and she came running out of the room nude because he – I don't really know what i'm allowed to say but he you can say whatever

uh he began to gasp and uh fart and vomit all over her simultaneously and then turn purple which is um what we see when somebody goes into uh congestive failure they're essentially they look like an eggplant essentially from the nipple line up. And it's, you know, he's got frothy cone coming out of his mouth when we got there. And we're talking to this young lady. They've gotten a sheet and wrapped it around her. And I'll never forget, she was smoking this gigantic Virginia Slim cigarette. And she's sitting there and she's like shaking. And she gets to describe the story to us.

And it's horrible. I mean, it's absolutely horrible. And, you know, you can look at the guy and tell that, you know, he's not in the best of health. So we roll out to his home, which is a typical New Orleans home. It's like a two-story kind of adobe, not adobe, but, you know, plastered side home. There's another name for it.

I can't remember right now. At any rate. And it's got the Blessed Virgin in her little hut here and Sacred Heart of Christ on this side of the steps. And we go up the exterior

stairwell to the house and we knock on the door she comes to the door uh and it's it's a a metal cage door so that you know screen behind bars and she opens the interior door pull out our badges we need to speak to you ma'am and um you know she didn't have like a shocked look she said sure come on in open the door and as soon as we walked in before we could even say anything she looks at us and says he's dead at me ma'am we need you to sit down so that we can chat with you he's dead at me ma'am, we need you to sit down so that we can chat with you. He's dead, isn't he? Ma'am, can we just sit down? And she says, out of her mouth, she looks at us and says,

he was with a whore, wasn't he? Oh, my God. Ma'am, I need you to sit down. Are you the wife of so-and-so and so-and-so? Yes, that's my husband. And it's like, Junior, it's like she was sitting on a spring. When we told her, confirmed to her that her husband was in fact deceased, she shot up straight in the air, came off the floor. And she's a little bitty woman, round, throws her hands up in the air, she says praise God I'm delivered she says so are you telling me I'm off my cross in this life no ma'am I'm telling you that your husband's deceased and

she's celebratory she's dancing and I've never gotten this response from anybody hey guys we're going to be dropping a bonus Patreon episode with Joseph Scott Morgan probably on Monday or Tuesday this week. He stayed for a while after we wrapped and we continued the conversation. So you can access our Patreon by hitting the link in the description. And I want to thank everyone who has already gone over there in the first couple months and supported the page because it helps support this show. Also, if you haven't already shared this episode on social media or with your friends, please take a second to do that. It is a huge, huge help. Reddit and Twitter especially gets the word out, drives people to this platform,

YouTube I'm talking about in particularly, very, very well. And it helps us in the algorithm. So please continue to do that. And thank you to everyone who already has. And here's the kicker. We, you know, we both looked at one another after this had occurred and, you know, kind of shaking our heads, thinking about it. Two weeks later, we received an invitation in a black envelope emblazoned in gold writing inviting us to a celebration of death party still to this day i regret that i did not attend that party i just couldn't do it in good taste i couldn't bring myself to do it but you know he it turned out that he had you know he had contracted and passed on several stds to this poor woman her entire life.

She'd been fateful. She would go to church. She'd pray for him. You know, all these sorts of things. And, of course, I guess she'd been waiting for years and years for something horrible to happen. And, of course, it happened. He died doing what he loved, fucking a hooker. Well, there you go.

Got no debate there. I mean, it speaks for itself oh my God I can only imagine because the range is I mean that's an absurd story it is absurd yeah but you know someone biting your your your leg and everything yeah yeah you use the word primal a little bit ago talking about something and I think when faced with death itself that's where that's where we are reminded that we are animals and there are things that you know even you know someone getting notified is is capable of that that is they probably never imagined you know you kind of lose i don't know it's it's a strange. You lose all concept of reality when you're trying to grasp the reality that something, someone you love or cared about or in this case didn't care about, you know, is in the case of your last story, is now gone.

And you can't talk with them again. You can't – you're never going to interact with them. It's something I'll probably never – I don't know if any of us ever truly understand it the the sound that notification elicits out of out of a person um it's it's kind of i i know the sounds so dramatic, but I've heard it so many times, it is this kind of guttural, deep in the stomach sound that they get. Because they're coming to this realization, if just for a second, that they're never going to see this person again. And I've seen this played out time and time again, and you're delivering this news to them.

And I've had a variety of people that will react in a variety of different ways. I've had people that look like that they're suffering from catatonia, where they get the thousand-yard stare, and they're nonresponsive because it's so numbing at that moment in time. And you cannot elicit a response to them no matter what you're saying. And here's something interesting that we found out relative to notification of next of kin. Did you know that most of the time when you're initially talking to a family and you tell them that they have lost someone, that they only hear about 10% of what you say. Only about 10%. And, you know, you hand them a card or do whatever, you know, write down your number here, call me, this is where, you know, your loved one's remains will be, we're going to

do this, this, and this. And without fail, they will always call back to the office and say, look, you told us what was going to happen. Can you please speak to that again and tell us again? I think that's rather simplistic. People could probably understand that, but it's that thing. It's like getting hit in the chest with a 10-pound sledgehammer, and that's probably an understatement for most people. Um, and there's, there's so much sadness that's associated with it because, uh, there's, um, they have an

understanding, at least at a base level that they're, that person's never going to walk through the door again. And there's always going to be an empty chair at the table. Um, and, and that's, that's their current reality, uh, that they're going to be faced with from here on out. Yeah. Yeah. And knock on wood, hopefully no one listening has ever had to deal with that or will ever have to deal with that, let alone the two of us. But, you know, it's also a bizarre time in a lot of ways for guys like you to be living in because you know this has been your world for 30 40 years whatever it's been a long time and now over the past five to ten years especially there's like

this whole genre called true crime right and people it's not like we haven't been infatuated with cases for a long time we have i mean the oj trial definitely changed a lot in this country and you know people followed the ted bundy stuff back in the day like it's always been a thing but especially with the rise of the internet and social media you now have i mean christ you have cases they're getting cracked by fans and i use that word deliberately there you have people who are like yay fans, fans of this genre, where, you know, sometimes I do feel like, wow, there is something very, very interesting about talking about this stuff. And I do talk about it with people and I do follow some of these cases and in that way, I'm a follower of it. But, you know, it seems like it gets desensitized. Right, and it does. And many people who had no previous awareness of or an inkling of anything to do with death investigation

and certainly forensics, now they're acquiring knowledge. It's not like the days where you have to go and sit in a classroom or study at somebody's – sit at somebody's feet and learn. They pick this stuff up on their own many times I've seen, but sometimes it loses context if you don't understand how everything kind of fits together. And it's intricate work. It's detailed work. But there have been cases, cold cases in particular, that have now been solved as a result of what they refer to

as citizen detectives. They love to use that term quite a bit. And, you know, I find it interesting when the term true crime is used because, you know, that's relative. You know, what do you mean by true crime? And, you know, we could go off in any number of directions to discuss that. Go for it. Well, I'm just saying there there's uh you know it's very popular for people to say well you need to speak your truth well your truth is not necessarily the damn reality of what's going on and just because you have this perception of what you think is reality don't make it so because you don't see those hidden things you don't see those

things that these investigators see out there on a daily basis. You're not looking at lab results. You're certainly not out there standing over a maggot-infested corpse. And you do not understand the full depth and breadth of everything. So there's two sides to it. I think that there's a very positive side when you begin to think that some cases have been solved but there are other cases where you peop you see people that do harm they they do harm to the case they do harm to survivors that are out there the people that are left behind i think some people oversell themselves as to what they can do. They begin to sell families who, listen, man, their currency is hope. Yeah. And there are any number of snake oil salesmen out there that will sell them false hope and tell them that, yeah, yeah, we can get this solved.

No, they're not going to solve this case. No more than a man in the moon. But yet that does happen. So you have to be very, very careful in this area and try to understand what kind of impact your words are actually having and it's it's when you have a family that has suffered through a homicide and they don't have answers it's almost like a homicide is occurring again they're having to cycle through this, Julian. Every now and then, they'll get a glimmer of hope and they'll cycle through it, cycle through it, cycle through it.

And now it's intensified as a result of everything that we see in the media. And, you know, the media will go from, you know, we were talking just a second ago about how, you know, we had Elise Fletcher that, you know that died in Memphis several months back, and it was the story all over the country. It was just everywhere. What happened there? She had been jogging early in the morning right off the campus of the University of Memphis, and she just vanished.

She was a mom, married, from a very wealthy family, and just vanished. She's a mom, married from very wealthy family, and just vanished. And she was eventually found deceased behind a house, an abandoned house there in Memphis. And it's, you know, the public couldn't get enough of that case. I defy you to find one bit of information about her in the last couple of months. It's just not going to happen. Because the news cycle is no different with individual cases. The news cycle moves from one thing to another. So why would it be different with dead people?

But again, to your point, and it's not like you couldn't say this about some of the regular news too when they're reporting on tragedies and stuff like that, but you are monetizing and then discarding real people. down this road I go and I'm asked to come in and talk about forensic issues relative to these cases I have never seen anything that really captured the country's attention like Gabby Petito and I was around for everything from Jody Arias to Trayvon Martin that's how you know I kind of cut my teeth with HLN and was appearing on shows that they had and discussing these things on the news, on the air. Jodi Arias' case, I remember one night we were doing her case on HLN. I think we had 4 million viewers that one night on a particular day.

This is 2014-ish? Yeah, yeah, approximating that. But when the Gabby Petito case hit. For our international listeners out there, can you just describe exactly what the case was? Yeah, Gabby Petito and her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie. Gabby had a van. Hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play on your next adventure. Stay three nights this summer at Best Western and get $50 off a future stay. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western.

Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. It's truck month at GMC. Tackle the open road with added confidence in the 2025 Sierra 1500 Pro Graphite at 0% financing for up to 72 months. With an available 5.3 liter V8 engine, 20 inch high gloss black painted aluminum wheels, off-road suspension with available 2 inch factory installed lift kit, plus a towing capacity of up to 13,200 pounds, you'll be ready for anything this truck month. Truck month is on now.

Ask your GMC dealer for details. That she had fixed up and they were going to set up a travel log. Truck Month. Truck Month is on now. Ask your GMC dealer for details. That she had fixed up. And they were going to set up a travel log, you know, travel across the country and, you know, do the whole Instagram thing, you know, and show these beautiful images. And they were gorgeous images. And things went south on that trip. And Brian Laundrie wound up um killing her he wound up killing her even though they'd been documenting their life and it seemed very uh i don't know surreal i guess kind of the world that we live in now you know when you have these instagram images of perfection

and she had this sweet little smile i think a lot of us could identify you know even my wife looked at me and said, God, she looks just like our daughter when our daughter was that age. And she did. And, you know, people see that image and you don't know what is happening. You know, the old adage, still waters run deep. You don't know what's going on just beneath the surface there. And, of course course she was found out

in Wyoming and she'd been killed and he left her there in the wild and then got in her van promptly, returned back to Florida where they were from using her credit card to facilitate that and wound up holding up at his parents' house. His parents weren't offering any assistance to the Petito family. So bizarre. And it was this long drama that played out and it just captured everybody because people were invested. I think people could see her and maybe they thought, wow, that's a life I'd like to lead. You know, the beautiful picture, she's beautiful, they're beautiful. And then all of a sudden the plane, you know, crashes into the side of the mountain with this thing and it just captured. And so we were covering that day in and day out. Um, you know, you had drama set up outside the laundry

home. Uh, there's been lawsuits that have flown back and forth. Of course, Brian laundry's body is eventually found not too, not too terribly far away from where he lived, where he grew up there in his parents' home with a gunshot wound to his head, his decomposing remains out in the swamp. And he leaves this note behind admitting that he had done this. And it just captured the country's imagination. Well, we go from that, and there are a couple of blips along the path, and then all of a sudden, Idaho hits. And we've got these four students that are just butchered in this apartment right off campus from the University of Idaho. This is the Kohlberger one? Yeah, Kohlberger, Brian Kohlberger. And again, you're feeding this the entire time. And, you know, the news media is covering it day in and day out. I mean, I'm chief among centers. I'm there,

and I'm talking about the forensics behind this, what you can expect. And it's a never-ending cycle when it comes to this because people want to know about these things, I think. They want to try to understand it. I think that, and I've run across this a lot throughout my career, starting down in New Orleans and eventually winding up in Atlanta as a death investigator. People want to know these things. They want to know them. They want to know what you've seen.

They want to know what happened. They want to brush just enough up against it so they can get a taste of it. But they don't necessarily want to do what it would take to be out there in the middle of it. They just kind of live peripherally in this world. Why do you think that is? I don't know. It's as old as time. These are our ghost stories. You know, going back years and years ago, millennia, you know, we're sitting around in a campfire somewhere and we're telling stories about things that terrify people. They're part of our history. You know, I've been involved in a case in Ohio now that's probably one of the most bizarre cases. is certainly my recollection relative to the Rodens and the Wagner families,

where you've got eight family members that are killed all on one night in four separate locations. When was this? This happened, I know I'm going to state this wrong, I think it was 16 or 17. And now the trials are just starting to happen. Well, one just finished up. And there's another one upcoming. You know, that's the kind of story down in rural Ohio where you've got, you know, right at the confluence of where Kentucky and West Virginia come together. It's Appalachia.

And they're not going to, this is something that will always haunt that community. You know, kids 50 years from now, 100 years from now, they'll tell ghost stories about this. And that's part of who we are, I think, as people. And people, they want to hear about the horror of it, but they don't want to get so close to it that they're part and parcel of it. Well, the other underlying phenomena here is how they're decided, meaning like how certain stories are decided to be put at the forefront. I mean, unfortunately, it's a big country. People get murdered every day. Yes.

Right? And so there's plenty of cases that right here as we sit, well, maybe not because it's Saturday right now, but if it were Friday, there'd be a case somewhere getting adjudicated or finished off, whatever the official term is, for someone being convicted of a murder. And maybe some of the locals around there will be aware of it and maybe some won't but you know it's not national whereas the case that you first got involved with the media jody arias that was national international right trayvon martin shortly after that international in a way these cases you just referred to the coberger case this one is it the pike county shooting in ohio is that what you're referring to yeah right so these cases are they the petito case that that was a phenomenon that gripped the entire country because they weren't sure she was dead for a while and he

was in his parents house so it was like a an active manhunt type thing but you know these are the ones we choose and i do hear people question a lot online and i think it's a fair very fair question you know okay we we have these sometimes maybe it's a cute young girl or uh the wife of of a of a husband who is the murderer or the other way around or something where it could be a bizarre one like this like the pike county shootings where they happen in four different places at the same time, and we hear about all these, but then someone gets gunned down in the hood, no one ever hears about it.

Nobody. That's one of the reasons, and I'll state it boldly right now, I refuse to talk about JonBenet. I'm sick to my back teeth of that case. I'm sorry it happened, but when I was working as a death investigator, I had a lot of little kids that died under suspicious circumstances,

and some of those cases remained unsolved. That's the plain truth. But yet, you know, you have, you know, this very tragic case that occurs out in Colorado all those years ago, and still people are writing books about it. You know, they're still talking about it, you know, and maybe that's their thing. I don't know, but I don't understand how we assign value because we hope at least, I think, that everybody's loved by somebody. It's kind of an odd thing, you know, how producers go about choosing what stories are going to make it into the cycle. And, you know, you can – there are certainly – from a scientific standpoint, there are certainly intellectually stimulating cases that have great forensic value that, from my perspective, and again, I'm talking from forensics perspective, that, yeah, I'd like to study and try to understand the science behind it a bit more. But in media, you know, it's that cycle that has to be fed,

you know, constantly. And, you know, listen, whether people want to admit it or not, you know, there will be another gruesome case that's going to capture the attention. It's always been that way. Go back to Leopold and Loeb. I mean, and even before that, you know, I mean, for years and years, you've got, you know, people still talk about Jack the Ripper. In my hometown in New Orleans, there's an infamous New Orleans axe murderer. That took place back in the 1880s, I think, and again remains unsolved. People go back and revisit that all the time. It's this indwelling need that we have to visit these cases and try to understand, I don't know, how somebody could do it,

or maybe people are just stimulated by it at some level in their brain that they feed off of it and want to try to maybe solve it, figure out the puzzle, or maybe they just like the salaciousness of it. I think people also want to know how, like you talk about how they do it, but they want to know how it happens so that they can also understand how, maybe how capable they would be of it. Wow. Right? So, like, not, and that's a really dark thing to think about, but, like, think about some of those husband-wife cases where the wife kills the husband or husband kills the wife maybe someone's in a bad marriage and they they get encaptured by a case like this because they go well i would never kill my wife or something but would i right you know it's that it's that place people don't talk about at dinner parties no no they really don't or if they do it they if they

do talk about it you know they'll make some some funny quip afterwards, you know, to kind of dismiss it. And look, I mean, it's things that people, people entertain dark things all of the time, but people are, they also have an awareness of death. I've found it quite interesting for me going back just for a second to making next of kin notifications I've stated this plainly in the past as well when I was a very young investigator and I'd go out and notify families families would look at me consistently particularly with violent deaths and they would say did they suffer and being the young young, inexperienced person I was, I would say, oh, no, no, no, it was quick. They passed very peacefully and all that sort of thing.

And suddenly there was something within me that I realized I was lying. Of course. I was lying. And I got to the point where I would consistently begin to say, I don't know. I can't answer that question. That's not for me to answer. That certainly isn't. And it's not for me to –

Then who does answer it? I don't know. I think that you have to arrive at that conclusion in your mind, you know, as an individual relative to this loved one that you have. It's just that's not something that I am equipped to tell them, to try to buffer them from the pain that's involved with death. Sometimes pain and grief go hand in hand. You need to experience that pain. And it just happens that me, formerly, was the person in the room that would be the first point of contact relative to that. And they're looking to you to try to to calm them to try to

soothe them to try to give them some reassurance and I it one other thing I think and there's a real essence to this I think that sometimes when people say did they suffer they're also asking by extension, am I going to suffer? Because they're connected biologically or maybe romantically or however it is. It's an intimate relationship, you know, and you begin to think because there's so much tied up in a relationship with these people. And you think in many circumstances, did they suffer? I think that they're actually saying in some cases, will I suffer?

You know, because just think about how destructive this news is when it arrives on their doorstep. This is intimate. It's personal. It's dirty. It's hard. And their world has been rocked. And many times, particularly when they're in an intimate relationship, that relationship's suddenly been physically severed forever and ever. Amen.

And a part of them is dying. They want to know if they're going to suffer. I've never heard that before, but that is some deep shit right there. Wow. When you're sitting out in a car and you're sweating and you're crying after you've done this, you have a lot of thoughts about those sorts of things. You sit there for a moment and you think, well, I've just destroyed this person's life, at least for the time being. I'm a total stranger and I've wrecked their existence for right now. It's your job to do that. It is your job to do that, but still you are that instrument at that moment in time.

And so for me, as a death investigator, I would try to equip myself as best I could in order to perform that task. And my fallback position was always the science, to try to understand what had happened, where it happened, when it happened. You know, all of those sorts of things, because therein, for me, the science rested. I found peace in that. And but when death, you know, when death is, you know, your constant companion, it's very difficult to find peace because you're you're always ramped up. You know, when that that call comes in and you have to roll out on something, you know, well, you don't know. You have no idea. You have no idea what you're about to walk into. It can be some grandma or grandpa that's just peacefully passed away in their sleep or they haven't been seen in a couple of days.

The child comes over, the adult child comes over and finds them. Or you might show up at a home in New Orleans on Christmas Eve and dad's gotten drunk and he's killed everybody in the house with a damn deer rifle. And you don't know how you're going to process that because you go from zero to a hundred in just the blink of an eye. And then you might

close out that case and the next thing you're on to is a suicide or a motor vehicle accident. And you try to you know, and you kind of file these things away. And that's why I say with medical legal death investigation, it's not like you're working a homicide and then the body gives you the information if you're a detective that you need. And then you move on to try to process the case and try to hold somebody responsible. That's not the way it works in our world.

With forensic pathology and medical legal death investigation, you literally go on from death to death to death to death that's why you don't get your you don't involve yourself in things like seeking justice and all those sorts of things that's somebody else's that's down the hall and to the left that's not our department it's not what we're there for you're there to give concrete answers so i mean true answers so that if people want to move on, if they want to begin to put their lives back together after this devastation, then they can, and they can use that scientific data any way they choose to use it. But you're not, in your mind, you and I were talking in the kitchen before this, you're not giving them closure because you you believe that that doesn't really exist no

with this stuff no as a matter of fact I think that when people say I think it's probably one of the most insulting things you can say to a grieving person you'll have closure someday so in other words shut your mouth don't tell me anything else about your grief. I don't want to hear it. You'll have closure. So they use the word closure as a substitute for that because closure is never really, you know, what is closure? It's a very formal word, too. Yeah, it is, and it sounds very academic.

Yes. You know, and there's no, you cannot quantify closure. You know, at what point along the way do we have closure? No, you don't. You know, when I left the ME's office in Atlanta, I had a guy that I had worked his son's suicide seven years before. And he would get drunk and he would call me generally about once a month. And at first it really irritated me, but his wife had died. And he would just, because he thought that he had a connection with me because he had met me out on the scene that night, his son had

hung himself. And I tried truly, I was as kind as I could be, certainly that night when that happened. He was just wracked by grief. And after a period of time, he felt comfortable enough at least to pull a cork and start calling me. And I worked overnights much of my career. And I went from mildly irritated to really irritated where I would be curt and cut him off until there was this point in time when he called me up. He said, I got that moment all those years back before with this guy, you know, after he's the one that walked in and found his son hanging in the closet because he couldn't find him anywhere in the house. And he had witnessed that. I'd witnessed that. And, you know, most of these cases, I try to brush them aside and forget them. But, you know, with his case in particular, I still, you know, I can still reflect back today. You know, I've worked tons of hangings.

But I still remember that kid. I still remember him hanging in the closet in his bedroom. And that dad, I don't know whatever became of him, but for seven years, you know, he would call me. And he never got closure. I mean, that didn't, that didn't happen for him. And I guess, I guess somebody could easily say, well, he should have, you should have directed him to the appropriate grief counselor. Really? Really? Okay. So that's, that's how that works. I'm going to direct, you know, he has to have the notion upon himself to want to recover and seek closure, whatever that means. Maybe he doesn't want closure. Maybe he wants to continue to grieve. Sometimes grieving is not necessarily a bad thing.

No, it's one of the most human things we do. I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen some of the videos of elephants grieving. Yes, I have. Yes. So think about how remarkable like scientists and the general population like me or you sees that like, oh, my God, another animal truly outwardly like metaphysically goes through the grieving process it's so profound because we can relate to that and it says something about how important in my opinion that is to us as like a human race being you know if life were just all great it wouldn't be any fun because you don't have there's nothing to go after. There's no struggle to go through. And one of the most morbid things about that is when the struggle involves something that no one should ever have to go through.

Your kid commits suicide. Your spouse is murdered. Your parents are gunned down. Things like this, no one should ever have to go through that. But it's a part of what makes as a whole the human race resilient and so i think you're right about the closure thing and and i appreciate how you put that because you never do truly close the door on someone close to you who's not here anymore but there is also the aspect that you're the way to i don't want to use like the term like oh achieve happiness or something like that but the way to maximize being a human and being lucky to be alive here

is that you do have to continue to live at some point you know you do have to not necessarily move on or have closure but like you're here and you have to – if you're going to go find something for yourself and be able to have some brightness in the future, you have to open yourself up to that. And I'm not saying, by the way, that like, oh, I'd be able to do that if I found my kid hanging in a closet. This is one of those way you're said and done type things but i think when sometimes when people hold on to grief as the forefront of who they are forever it's a very very as an as a person observing that it's a very sad thing to see it is sad and it's unhealthy um and you know people should certainly people should seek help but they have to have an awareness to seek help. And I think that to a certain degree people find comfort in grief because they're holding on those threads that bound them together with this individual that they're grieving for.

That's really all they have in that memory. I look back and I think about – I do some genealogy stuff, and I look back at some of, and I know other people have made this comment, but I have to say it personally. I look back at some of my ancestors, and when you're looking at these families that lost, I don't know, five or six kids. Right. None of them made it to adulthood. But yet your familial line continued on after that. What is it that they did in order to get through all those points along the way to survive? How do you get past that grief? I lost a son. My wife and I lost a son. Yeah. And I was holding him in the hospital when he took his last breath. And I was going through, it's literally literally a lot of it's tied back to the

period that period very dark period of time in my life with the Emmys office and and in a weird way at that moment time when Isaac breathed his last I I notified myself. I notified myself. And I used to, I remember for me, one of the things I would do when I was going out to make a notification, I would make a deal with God. And I would say, please help me extend some level of mercy to these people. And I hope that mercy will and kind be shown to me and my family at some point in time. And it was a weird thing. It really was. When he passed on, he didn't live very long.

And we knew that he would probably not survive. And we were just wrecked I mean absolutely wrecked and we you know and the all this other stuff was going on with my job at the time I just seen too much death at that point in my life and then that was in 2004 when Isaac died. I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, and still to, no, I mean, people need to hear it because it's part of who I am and it's part of what they see if they see me on television. It's my grand hope. Anything, any word that issues forth from my mouth is done in kindness and compassion.

Because sometimes those lessons are hard learned, you know, in a very hard world that some folks are not fully aware of. They're not. On a lighter note, when my wife and I first met, I love to tell this story. I was working for the ME in Atlanta Atlanta and we went out on a blind date you keep saying ME by the way this is a dumb question that's the medical examiner one of the things I study in academia

is actually the coroner system and we can get off into that but I started off in a coroner system wound up in a medical examiner system, but I was working for the medical examiner. I was a senior investigator. And we went out on a blind date, went to a Braves game,

and we went to a place called Fellini's. I'll never forget it, Fellini's Pizza. And after the game, and we were sitting there and we had ordered a pie and sitting there and chatting. And this was 25 years ago. I'll never forget my wife. She was sitting across the table from me and she looked at me and she said, you know, because she's a school teacher, public school teacher. All right. And she said this in the most sincere way.

And when you think about the statement, she looked at me and said, you know, until I met you, I never thought about death. Oh, wow. And you could take that any number of ways. If you're on a blind date, you know, you can could take that any number of ways. If you're on a blind date, you know, you take that in any number of ways. But, you know, she said, I'd never, I'd never thought about death. And, and there's some, there's some truth in that. You know, you, I think that most people, first off, people don't want to, I don't think, admit that death occurs. occurs they they just kind of

go on about their business because and i agree with them man i mean i'd rather be thinking about fishing you know or laying out on the beach or you know hanging out with my grandkids or something like that that's cool stuff man but you know death is the space that i occupy and i can understand why people wouldn't think about death but it is is coming. For all of us. For every single person, it is. And we live our lives, you know, like we're 10 foot tall and bulletproof, and that's just not the case. And I've seen mighty, mighty men fall over the course of my career and have documented their deaths. And, you know, my wife's innocent little statement there, she's speaking truthfully from her heart because she, you know, you don't, who goes around, you know, thinking, you know, she doesn't even know that people like me exist.

From an occupational sense, you know, you're thinking about, you know, who is it that goes out and deals with all this? I just thought you called somebody and- You never want to meet them. No, you never do. You never do. But isn't it funny? When you do meet them, people have all these questions to ask. Yeah, they do. Because whenever you're dealing with something related, well, in this case, you're dealing with death.

But think about health. Someone will make a doctor their best friend the minute that they have a problem they never thought about before that day. You know, this is, it's a human reaction because now you're like, well, wait, this is the expert. This is the person I got to go to. So tell me what to do, you know? And, and it's, it's just something we jumped to do, but you're, you're tasked to do it at a particularly difficult time where, you know, hope is lost. You know? Yeah, it is. And you're there to, I don't know, you're not there picking up pieces. And I've certainly done that literally, but it's, you're there to try to make sense of what's going on. And the one word I try to avoid, as a matter of fact, it's obscene to me.

I hate the word why. Why is a petulant, childish word in my world, and you can drive yourself to madness by asking why about a lot of things in life, but particularly in life as it applies to death. You're much safer, I think, and you're going to have better resolutions come about as a result of asking what happened. When did it happen? How did it happen? You start asking why.

I have a question on this, though. Are you referring specifically to when it comes to cases where the murders happen, people asking why? Or are you saying why like completely in general as a word and asking why things happen, period? I think that why is getting stuck in the mud linguistically for us. I think because you sit around and you ponder why long enough. It's a very philosophical thing, and it doesn't apply to science very well because you can drive yourself to madness, I think. You're looking for outcomes to try to understand the process in which something occurs. What brought you to this point in time relative to this event that you're documenting?

What was it that brought about the end of this life? And can I factually explain that? You start to get off into why it's very esoteric at that point in time. Because it's, and for those that grieve, I think, you'll never get an answer to that question, particularly if you have an unknown that's out there. You know, why me? Why them? Why did this happen to my family? I think that for me, at least, it's better to try to understand what happened.

You can make better sense of it because it's such an open-ended thing. I've had people ask me so many times, why, why, why? I've asked myself why, you know, relative to my profession and many times in the positions I'd find myself in, you know, bearing witness to these horrible things, you know. When I wrote my memoir, I went home to New Orleans to visit my family and down there. And my uncle, excuse me, my uncle wanted to, uh, to take me to lunch, to eat with his, his, uh, boss and his boss is very wealthy man. He, he owns a fabrication company or did he's deceased now. And, uh, he, I, when I wrote Blood Beneath My Feet, he had gotten a copy of it, and he had read it. And this man loved to meet authors, and I was not anybody of consequence. But we're eating at this restaurant, and he's sitting there, and we're chatting and he said what what made you write write this book what what was your motivation behind it it's like I was angry very angry I was angry at death

because of what I felt like that it had taken from me and the state that it had left me in at that point in time in my life. And he said, well, why were you angry? You chose to do this. And, you know, immediately I looked down at the fork and I was thinking, could I get this through the frontal bone of his skull? Could I generate enough energy? And then for that moment in time, after I'd written blood beneath my feet, you know, after Feet, after I'd calmed down and I was sitting in the car, I was thinking, you are a big baby. I did subject myself to this. I did.

And yeah, I mean, I can say that I did something that not many people have done. How did you get into it? Because again, you don't strike me, and I've seen some of these guys have to testify or talk on TV as well about this stuff. You're a little different. You are not the type of personality that I would have expected to do this job, which is maybe why you great I was at it I I had endurance I had endurance and and not a lot of wisdom on certain certain fronts I was I was attending college in New Orleans and I happen to be working at a at a hospital as an orderly while I was going to college, worked as an ER tech, I worked as a psych tech, and as a security guard, did all these different jobs in the hospital. And it just so happened that the coroner's office in my jurisdiction, which is Jefferson Parish, was in a horrible state.

And they wound up having to bring all of the bodies for the parish to this brand-new hospital I was working at in order to do the autopsies while they could get the morgue repaired. Now, compared to New York, this is not going to seem like a big number, but for a shop, we call them shops, a shop our size where we only had essentially one forensic pathologist, we were doing roughly a thousand autopsies per year. ama are who is it the the american association of pathologists they recommend that no forensic pathologists do more than like 260 per year thousand a year yeah yeah yeah at that time and that's just the autopsies that you know there's it's like four

a day on a work day basically yeah yeah and it was nothing real cramped space so anyway you had to have a place to still do this um and that didn't last for long because in south louisiana you get a lot of decomposed bodies because the environment's so harsh bodies break down really quickly the hospital didn't tolerate this for very long but i became fast friends with uh one of the investigators with the coroner's office, who was also a deaner, an autopsy assistant. And he was actually from up, well, I say up this way. He was actually from Scranton, Pennsylvania and had come back south to go to college, went to Ole Miss and got a degree in forensics at Ole Miss, which back then was one of the most

highly rated programs in the country. And we became fast friends. And I started, even if I wasn't on duty at the hospital, talk about morbid fascination, I started going to autopsies in my off time and not getting paid for it by the way and I started out as what's what's termed as a scribe so I would sit there with a clipboard as the doctor would do the autopsy and they would dictate to me contrary to what people think you know they don't use a microphone hanging down. That's kind of passe.

It's not very effective. So I would write everything down. You have to learn to speak the language of the physicians while you're doing this. Great schooling. I mean, it's fantastic. And it comes at you hard and heavy. There's an old adage in medicine, in particularly big general hospitals where they say see one do one teach one and so you had to learn you had to stay up i mean you could not fall behind because there's other bodies coming in so you know you learn you just kind of learn through osmosis and

then finally one day i i was kind of like as i say in the south i was like a hair in a biscuit i just didn't go away and i hung around long enough and finally looked at me and said uh you'll learn how to close i was like yeah sure why not so they taught me how to stitch up a body it's just a standard baseball stitch with kite string with an s-shaped needle start whipping it out and the next thing i knew uh they were saying, do you want to open? I was like, yeah, give me the blade, man. Let's do it. Cold steel. So you were never a squeamish type ever?

Initially, I was. I had to get past it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had to get past it. But again, I think that it was the fallback. Let me describe it to you this way. And this is kind of people might, this conversation is kind of. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life.

But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. So you've always been picky about your produce, but now you find yourself checking every label to make sure it's Canadian. So be it. At Sobeys, we always pick guaranteed fresh Canadian produce first. Restrictions apply.

See in-store or online for details. Strange anyway for most people, but here's another layer of strange. unique opportunity because every time we would open a body, I saw myself as on an exploratory journey because I was seeing something that no one else had ever seen. As it applies to that person at that moment in time, we were opening up their body and I was going to see a space in there that no one else, you never know what you're going to find. I know that's, it's not necessarily morbid, it's scientific curiosity. And you do find these interesting anomalies. You learn a lot about trauma. You learn about wound tracks and range of fire estimations on bullets. And you track sharp force injuries. you understand what's happening, or you discover some young person that has died suddenly and you suddenly realize that they've had a CVA, had a

stroke, and no one saw it coming. And you find that and you can pass that on to a family or you find that somebody's got a normal size person's got the size of a canned ham. It's a genetic anomaly. You get that information back to the family as soon as you can. I'll never forget the first time I ever saw a horseshoe kidney, for instance, which is a set of kidneys that never disconnected from one another, and it looks like a gigantic horseshoe. I actually held it up in front of my face like a big handlebar mustache,

and they took a picture of me like this. It was that exploration, I think, in that environment where you – every single day – imagine going to a lecture in college where it's just the same droning on over and over again. Every lecture, every autopsy was like the first day of class, every day, because there was this excitement that kind of drove the process where I knew that I was going to learn something new and I'm acquiring all of this knowledge, and I'm not having to pay tuition. And the more skilled I've become in that environment, I can show that I can, in autopsy pathology, they refer to it as prosection as opposed to dissection.

You're prosecting, opening these bodies, weighing the organs, dissecting the organs. You're learning about the anatomy, how they function. And you're putting it into context. If you've got massive trauma, you're putting everything, all the organ systems, how are they all impacted. You're documenting fractures, bullet holes, the tracks of the wounds. All of this stuff comes into play. And, oh, by the way, I'm learning how to collect evidence at the same time.

Doing tape lifts off of bodies, doing rape kits. comes into play and oh by the way I'm learning how to collect evidence at the same time doing tape lifts off of bodies doing rape kits all of these things that in the morgue this is all thrown at you at one time it's not like you're in a crime lab where you're doing these specializable things where you're studying DNA or you're studying serology or you're doing fingerprint we're doing everything I'm taking prints off of the dead. You're always partnering up with a doctor doing this. Always, always, always, every single day. And, you know, when you're standing there, there's only so much you can endure in that environment

where you're faced at looking. Let's say you walk in on a day, and I'm thinking back to the days when we were working in New Orleans. You might be staring at five cases that day. Well, each case is different. Each case you might have an unexplained natural death. You might have a motor vehicle. You might have a suicide.

Oh, and you might have a multiple gunshot wound homicide where you have to track all of those wounds. I reflect back. I know, you know, like one case where I had a guy that weighed close to 500 pounds, and he was shot with a.25 caliber pistol, dropped a magazine, and it reloaded and fired another magazine. So you've got, I can't remember, I think it was seven rounds. So you've got a total of 14 rounds with a variety of different tracks, and you've got layers and layers and layers of fat that you're having to track these wounds through.

Direction and all that. Yeah, and to try to relationship between the end of the muzzle to the point where he was engaged on his body, what organ systems do they pass through? What, what actually killed him? Um, you know, you look at those cases and some of those things will be very, very complex and other ones will be just, you know, um, it's, it's really quite amazing when you think about it. And, you know, the thing about it is, is that people don't go to autopsies anymore. They kind of shut the door on that. So I have kids that I teach nowadays, you know, gee, Morgan, can you take us to an autopsy?

No, it doesn't happen anymore. You know, they just don't let you. Why is that? I think a lot of it has to do, obviously, with a lot of the OSHA nonsense. ocean nonsense and then uh and then on top of that um on top of that um they um they're looking to protect evidence because you know yeah you can have natural deaths but three bodies down the line you're going to have homicide too and that that body involved in that homicide is the biggest piece of evidence that you have and you can't afford to bring somebody into that environment and contaminate it. But I've seen kids that are going through medical school,

they're so starved for actually having contact with human remains to just kind of understand form and function. I won't state the name of the medical school, but I've actually shown up at a morgue ready to do autopsies, and I've had a line of medical students waiting outside the morgue because the medical school didn't have sufficient cadavers. And they would just stand around and just watch us do these autopsies, these greatly traumatized bodies. They didn't have an opportunity to do anything necessarily, but they were just in the presence. Even the medical students understood how important it was to be in the presence of the anatomy. But when you're – and maybe I'm understanding this incorrectly.

I just want to make sure I have this right because you're always working with a physician, but you talked about like closing wounds and opening up the body and stuff. Like you're doing that too then. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, there's two. Meaning you're not sitting, I just want to make sure I got this. You're not just sitting there while they're doing it right next to them and going, okay, let's check out that.

Like you're literally doing this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that's the way it works. You know, you have, if you have, there's very few, you know, people think about this idea of forensic pathologist. Um, you know, when they see it in the media, they've got this, you know, some hot, sexy character. That's a forensic pathologist that goes out on crime scenes and they do all the autopsies. That's a bunch of garbage. It doesn't happen. Um, there's not that many forensic pathologists out there. It's, that's a bunch of garbage. It doesn't happen. There's not that many forensic pathologists

out there. It's probably one of the fewest medical specialties where the more education you get, the less you get paid. And you're going to wind up being a government employee. So if you just stop at being a hospital pathologist, you're going to make more money. And so that's the type of people. So, you know, people like me that are lay investigators, you know, because I have a master's in forensic science. But I'm trained specifically in medical legal death investigation so that I worked as a path assistant as well. And so it just – you get into a space where the doctor trusts you, where you might have three autopsies going on in one time. I've actually been in a room where we've had seven bodies open at one time, and you've got two physicians, and they're moving between the bodies. Oh, I'll – if you like –

Playing like house music and dancing around. Yeah, no kidding. If you like that one, I'll give you even a better one um i was at a conference one year and um happened to be seated next to the guy that did uh that did the autopsies on nicole brown and ron goldman and the oj simpson case i was fascinated by this i was working in atlanta i think at the time i don't think i was still in New Orleans. I was working in Atlanta, and I was seated next to this guy. He's a forensic pathologist. And there were two, I'll never forget,

there were two investigators from the ME's office in Dallas that were seated across from us. And I was fascinated by this guy because he was from L.A. County. And I had met Tom Noguchi, and I recommend anybody that wants to read a great book, read Tom Noguchi's book, Corner to the Stars, or Corner at Large is the name of it. He did the autopsies on Belushi and Marilyn Monroe and Sharon Tate. But this is the first person other than Dr. Noguchi that I had met that was from there.

And, you know, I met him the year before he did, before the O.J. Simpson case happened. Oh, wow. So we just happened to be at a luncheon, and I remember looking at him, and he was just, like, staring at his food. He wasn't looking up or anything, and he kind of acted like,

well, I felt sorry for him because nobody was talking to him, for one. I saw an opportunity to chat with this guy because he worked at a really big shop, and I just wanted to try to understand for one. I saw an opportunity to chat with this guy because he worked at a really big shop, and I just wanted to try to understand the volume. I said, hey, Doc, I was just curious. I work in Atlanta. I was just wondering, what's your average day like at L.A. County when you're on duty?

I said, what's your average number of posts like? Thirteen. Thirteen a day. 13, yeah. That's what he said. Now, I can't validate that. And that's just one shop. They probably have multiple set up.

No, I think they have – that's the singular shop for them. And, you know, they deal in a – For LA County? Yeah, I think so. That almost seems low then, 13. Well, yeah, but you don't know if he's got other colleagues that are on duty as well and they've got a whole staff of forensic pathologists you go to the office chief medical examiner in new york talk about a high volume shot yeah it's very high volume and there's

a lot of other places like that where it's nothing you know to walk in and you know you've and you have to do it i mean there's you have to get the bodies in and out, get them processed in and out. And then you have to understand there's so much static that's involved. It's almost like landing airplanes because there's so much data coming in for each one of these individuals. Go back to what you had said about each one of these people is significant. Each decedent is significant. They're a life that has ended. So you have to be sure that you have been as thorough as you possibly can.

And it's hard for people to fathom the intensity that you have to work out, the level of intensity where you're having to pay attention to everything that is occurring. If you're talking about a really highly involved technical case where you've got individuals that have sustained maybe sexual trauma, where you're having to swab for DNA, you're having to do rape kits, hair pluckings, nail trimmings, nail scrapings, nail trimmings, everything that goes along with that, and you haven't even gotten to the autopsy yet. That's just the initial collection of evidence. And then the clothing that comes in with them. So I'm not going to say it's a high-wire act, but it's a routine that you get into,

and you begin to, much like they do in an emergency room with the living patients when you triage these people, you begin to do that initial assessment and understand what you need to put the most force behind it. Who's going to be there for it? What resources do you need? All of those sorts of things. things one thing i keep thinking about as you've been talking all day today and going through different parts of cases that you work be it notifying the next of kin or working in in the actual in the coroner's office and going through the bodies or trying to reassess the scene and everything is the actual role that like the forensics investigator plays like what part of the chain food chain they're

on here in the investigation so like we all know the detectives they're trying to solve the cases they obviously have contact with everybody right we understand as we've reiterated today there's always a doctor who's involved in the actual autopsy and going through it to be able to determine official cause of death and then somewhere somewhere in the middle, you have you, you have the forensics guy. So you're, you're not a detective, but I mean, you're doing all detective work. So are you like a partner with them from step one through the rest of the process? Or are you more independent? Like, how does it work? Yeah, we are independent distinctly. We're not there to arrest people. We're not there to, you know, see that, you know, the bad guys are caught and all that stuff. You know, I hope that bad people

are caught, you know, and if what I do contributes to that or what my colleagues do now contributes to that, then more power to them. But yeah, again, that you have to tightly define what you do and understand your position and your role. And so when it comes to – this is the neatest and cleanest way to understand this. The medical examiner or coroner are not – they are not interested. They're not in the business of prosecuting people. The police are part and parcel of the process of prosecuting people. The police are part and parcel of the process of prosecuting if there's a crime that has been committed. So just think of it this way. The police, in a way, are kind of the eyes and the ears of the prosecutor or the district attorney or the

solicitor or whatever anybody has in their particular jurisdiction. Their end game is to, you know, find out who committed a homicide or find out who's responsible for a motor vehicle accident. For us, because I mentioned earlier that there's not enough forensic pathologists to go around, they don't go to scenes. There are those rare occasions where they do. We, as medical legal death investigators, are the eyes and the ears of the forensic pathologist on the scene. So we're bringing our own sensibilities to the scene. And, you know, homicides were physically there, working the case the way we work it, trying to understand the environment in which the body is

found. And, you know, that goes to things like determining what we refer to as PMI, postmortem interval, which is the question we always get asked. How long has this individual been deceased? And that's where things like rigor mortis, rigor mortis, some people say, post-mortem lividity or liver mortis, algor mortis, which is body temperature, all come into play. And so we're trying to assess that. We're also, to a limited degree, at the scene. We're trying to assess injuries out there so that we understand it and we understand it in context to the environment in which the body is found. Because you can have an individual lying on the floor that appears to have a defect

in their chest that might be a gunshot wound and there's a hole in a glass that's immediately adjacent to them that overlooks the street and you're trying to understand that relationship is it possible is it within the realm of possibility that this person prior to being dead was standing up erect in the space in front of that glass or on this side of glass round pass through the window and struck them in the chest in front of that glass or on this side of the glass, round passed through the window and struck them in the chest. It's all about the relationship between them. So you're trying to determine what the possibility is of the trajectory of the round,

the range of fire. Did the round pass through what we refer to as an intermediate target? Because if it passed through an intermediate target, even like glass, that's going to deform the bullet. So in that particular instance, if you have a round that has passed through glass, it could change the configuration of the round. It can change the trajectory of the round, and it's going to give you kind of an oddball injury. It'll look different because the round is deformed.

So let's take that example, and you bring this victim into the autopsy room the pathologist who was not at the scene has no context they're looking at it and they're trying to understand why is this why is this defect in the chest so oddly shaped i don't understand why why is this oh well doc uh apparently this round may have passed through an intermediate target. Maybe it was drywall. Maybe it was a piece of glass. Who knows? Maybe it was another person.

And so that's kind of a nuance that the police are – they'll look at it and they'll form their own opinions about it. But that's something that is not necessarily that they're as much interested in as we are. The dynamics of how this impacted the body, because at the end of the day, the forensic pathologist is going to be the one that's going to have to get up on the stand and try to help the jury understand what happened at the scene. And we're, in our world, we are, we're agnostic when it comes to prosecution and defense. You know, we talk to them equally, okay? And we're talking strictly about homicides right now, which is only one of the things that we do. I'm just as comfortable talking to a defense attorney as I am talking to a prosecutor. I'm not on anyone's team other than

my team, which is the medical legal community. And you have to have that unbiased view of what you're trying to examine the science that's out there and bring that data in. If you don't effectively examine that person as thoroughly as you can within reason, because for instance, if you've got multiple gunshot wounds that appear to be gunshot wounds, because you can't call a gunshot wound a gunshot wound at the scene. And there's a reason you don't do that. I call them circular defects, for instance. Really? I didn't know that. Yeah, and the reason is is that if I write that down in a report

and I make that assessment at the scene, I don't know for a fact that that's a gunshot wound. So if we get them back, and we're talking, let's just say you've got a body on a street outside that's in a completely unilluminated area. You're going to trust yourself to use a handheld flashlight to make that kind of assessment and annotate that in a report prior to having a board-certified forensic pathologist get it into an environment that is surgically lit to make that assessment so if you have these two conflicting assessments you know and i take issue with people that call things entrances versus exits um you can make that assessment in the morgue you don't want

to do that at the scene you can kind of opine about it maybe this could be it couldn't be so you like the scene to have observations without opinions absolutely absolutely because that's that's that's that's the essence of what we do it's it's scientific discovery you you you qualify it and then when you get back you quantify it and it's like any other kind of scientific testing it takes a little bit of time so when you just for like the timing of things here so i can understand it yeah sure because you you said obviously you're independent of the detectives right right and these are whole different ball games but when a crime scene is found and someone's dead let's say let's stay with the homicide example just to keep it simple and you know they were shot a bunch of times whatever it was they're dead it's a bloody scene

there's no like emt coming on like they're gone the police get called the first beat cops if you will come down there they then contact the detectives to come down right Are you contacted at like the same time or like who who calls you? If it's a homicide, most of the time it will be CID, the Criminal Investigation Division, which is comprised of the detectives. Right. But if you if you know, if you if you know that you have multiple deaths, for instance, most of the time a beat officer will go ahead and say, you need to roll the ME out here. You need to get them in route too. And we'll stage behind them. Because this is the thing.

I don't want to get in anybody. I hope that no one wants to get in the way of a detective that's trying to do the job. Give them enough time to assess the scene where they can get in there, make all of their observations. You're going to have to wait anyway because of all of the photography and measurements that go on relative to what they do. And we'll kind of duplicate that as well because I do my own photography or did in practice. And we take our own measurements most of the time. Sometimes we'll work with the police in that and sharing measurements. But we want an independent assessment of this environment relative to what we're seeing

and try to understand where all these bits of evidence are. And look, man, the old adage about too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the soup. You don't want anybody inside of that yellow tape that doesn't have to be there, period. You get out, particularly in locations that are more political where you have elected officials that seem they have the desire to be seen walking under the tape, and they have no good reason to be there whatsoever. You let the detective be in charge to run that scene. But as long as a body is there, the medical examiner corner has control.

And so you have to work together. Once the body is gone, then all bets are off. It's going to be up to the homicide detective to process it from there and their people are going to do what they do. And it's very important that you keep an open door for the medical examiner to the detectives to come to autopsies. There are certain jurisdictions. I think New York used to be this way. I don't know if they're the same. They have an entire squad that is dedicated to having investigators

from the PD that go to autopsies because they have deal in such a volume of cases i don't who knows what manpower is like now but that's the way it used to be so that they could get the straight dope from the medical examiner uh the pathologist that's doing the autopsy and talk to him immediately and get that back to the investigators that are handling the case well quick side point before i ask the next question why are you the guy that back to the investigators that are handling the case. Well, quick side point before I ask the next question. Why are you the guy that goes to notify the next of kin as opposed to the detective? Well, because the lines here, only about, I don't know, 1% of all the deaths that occur are homicides. So, you know, you're not going to be getting a detective involved in a suicide or a motor vehicle accident. You might have state police that will go out and make a notification,

industrial accidents, natural deaths, undetermined deaths. It just falls to us. It's something that we study within the medical legal realm. It's something we're trained to do, and it's something that we go out and document. Because we have to assure that or ensure that notification has been made. You cannot imagine how many times we've been put off scent at scene by somebody that claims to be a next of kin. You can't,

people don't think that people would be this cruel, but there are people that will show up at scene and say, yeah, that's my brother. Oh, okay. that's my brother oh okay that's your brother and there are people that will bite on that and just assume that they've notified the brother well it turns out that that's just somebody that was there to create mischief and horrible mischief at that because it's like the lowest thing oh it is it's horrible and it does happen

so i have to verify that because we're going to be in possession of the remains. And the police have enough to worry about most of the time. Now, there are those certain circumstances where you'll have a familial involvement with a case where the police might want to make the notification because they think the family's involved and they want to eyeball and see what the reaction is. And sometimes that does happen as well. Got it. Okay. But back to what you were saying about the crime scene and the process, I think the hard part for the layman like me to put together is it almost seems like what you do overlaps so much with the detectives. It does. And then the difference is you guys actually hold

the scapel in the back room yes whereas they don't but a lot of times like just thinking about like watching tv which you really got to be careful with that because a lot of it's hollywood but i thought all that was true i'm not talking about the tv you're on i'm talking about law and order and stuff it's like you will see the detectives you know they'll arrive and be like all right john tell me what we got and john's like the medical examiner saying i see a bullet possible hole right there and if you look at the glass over here kind of like the example you were giving so it's almost like the detective's job is to be the manager of the evidence that's no that's very well said okay they certainly are because they have

they have they have the most to gain and lose in in those critical moments and again you don't want to be an impediment to their job you're adjunct to what they're doing you have a sub specialty in the investigation that is critical to try to determine what happened. Just like anybody else, any other technical person that were to show up at the scene. If you think about a trace evidence person that's out there, maybe you've got an individual that's good at impression evidence. They're collecting shoe prints. Maybe they're collecting latent prints. Maybe you've got a tool mark guy that's going to show up.

Well, he's looking how a lock was jimmied. He's looking how if a pry bar was applied to some window to get access to the environment. There's any number of subspecialties that come out. Some of my longest lasting relationships as a medical legal death investigator have been with forensic anthropologists. They are, again, another subset of the big picture because you bring them out because they have certain expertise that applies to human skeletal remains that no one else can bring to bear. You know, when you're doing a recovery of a clandestine burial site or maybe remains that are scattered around an area that animal activity has been involved in. Or maybe you find a single bone that's out there.

You know, that happens a lot. You know, you find some skeletal element that's out there and people think that they found, you know, Jimmy Hoffa. And it turns out that it was some hog that had been butchered and they barbecued it you know because you see the spiral marks on the end of the bone where it had been butchered so you know there's multiple specialties that come out and it gets very confusing for people that are just kind of passively watching this stuff and they think that it's the gospel truth if it's coming out of hollywood and certainly it's not yeah and and one thing that strikes me when i hear you talk on tv and the clips I see on social media and then on your podcast, Body Bags, by the way, great podcast. Thank you. And that's available on all platforms? All platforms, yes. Cool. So,

and we're going to get you doing a YouTube channel at some point. Okay. We're working on that. I hear you, bro. But, you know, I'm never less amazed by how many variables you so easily come up with. Now, I understand, okay, you've seen crime scenes. Yes, there's basic things. You look for footprints. You look for residue. You look for directionality, stuff like that. But every crime scene you go to is different.

Yes, it is. Every – like a basic – two basic houses right next to each other, same design, similar types of families living in there. One could have this type of glass with their water and the other could have this type of glass. And the way that a bullet or the way that a knife – I'm making shit up right here. But the way stuff goes through something is different scientifically. Yes, it is. So you are seeing – I mean just doing decision trees in my head, I'm seeing tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of permutations. Permutations, yeah.

There you go. Every crime scene that perhaps half of them you've never seen before. But you have to be the guy that puts it together to then arrive at the result where you get to say that 10% area where it's like, okay, now we have the right idea. So we're going to be close enough to be able to make a case. case. How the fuck do you do that? It's hard. It is. And now you're going to make me self-conscious because now you got me thinking about it. It's like when I was flying in today into Philly, you were kind enough to fly me up here, Julian. We were fighting thunderstorms all the way here. I think we orbited the city of brotherly love probably for about 25 minutes. And I'm actually sitting there with my eyes closed thinking, I hope this guy knows what he's doing.

You know, and he has to think about all of these different things. And now that you say this, you know, obviously we're in a more static environment than a pilot. You know, so we have the luxury of time to a certain degree when we're processing the scene. That's why it's – the younger you are, the more chomping at the bit you are. That's why it's so important when you have a group of people that are there to process the scene is that you stay outside the tape as long as you can and you formulate a plan. That seems rather rote, but nothing could be truer because you have to,

there are certain things that are going to occur that are going to be different than anything else you've seen before. You talk about, you know, you gave this example of window panes, for instance, you know, whether you buy from Lowe's or Home Depot or, you know, the helpful hardware man at Ace, your window, your glass, it might be completely different. Maybe you've got more money to spend on glass. Leaded glass is going to act differently than, say, really cheap old glass that you've got. And so you begin to think about all of these sorts of things. And yeah, it can drive you to madness if you allow it but you sit there and you try to collect every bit of data along these data points that you can and collect everything that's another

key here how much do you collect you know i've left scenes i've left scenes where i have assisted crime scene investigators which are different than the homicide detectives. I have left scenes before, Julian, where I've seen three white panel vans drive off loaded with evidence that they're taking back, you know, from some scene that they felt the need to collect everything. Then I've seen other people just walk out with a couple of bags of evidence. It's hard to know where the line is. And you have to react and act according to the environment you find yourself deployed in. Yeah. I mean, you talk about the line though, it's like you get one shot at this. You do. And I also always think about something you brought up a little bit ago, and maybe we can talk about it more now, but the the timing of it too especially with homicides like when you're when you're trying to figure out how long ago someone died and the fact is you were telling me before

we were on camera it's really hard to get it past like within three to four hours of potential variability which is unfortunately like a fuck ton of time as far as like when a crime could be committed. But to get, when you get to a body, the sooner you're there, I got to think the better determination you can make that then can be the difference between whether or not you could place the killer there or not. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. PMI is something that I kind of focus on and talk about a lot in my classes that I teach. And I think that it's a valuable asset.

However, you have to take it with a grain of salt. I gave an interview a few years ago. I think it was Law Enforcement Technology Magazine. Most people don't know that something like that exists, but it does. They do now. Very nice people. They asked me to hold forth on my thoughts about PMI, postmortem interval. And they actually asked me an odd question.

I was surprised. The interviewer said, what's your favorite way to determine postmortem interval? And without hesitation, I said postmortem lividity or liver mortis. And that is the settling of blood. Because no matter where you go on earth, and I know that there are physics people that are out there that will debate this, gravity really doesn't vary that much. I know that it does. Please don't reach out. But yeah, I mean, gravity is gravity is gravity. So where a body winds up falling, you know, the blood is going to be drawn to that lowest point. And we

can actually see a demonstration of postmortem lividity pretty quickly after death, because once the heart stops pumping, that fluid, just like water or anything else, blood is more viscous or thicker, is going to seek that lowest point of gravity. And once it sets in and it fixes, and it takes a prescribed amount of time for it to fix, then wherever it is, if the body is moved after it's fixed, that's one of the things we'd look for. We know that somebody has had contact with that body after death and has tried to manipulate the body. And maybe you've got it. If you've got post-mortem lividity between the shoulder blades, you know that they've been laying in a supine position or face up and then lividity sets in and then the body is moved and it's placed in a prone position and it's completely

blanched right on the front, but you got lividity on the back. We know that somebody has messed with the body at that point in time. Now the least reliable and what everybody turns to, and even again, our friends in Hollywood, this is their device. People put a lot of stock in the temperature of bodies. That's one of the things that is so variable and so environmentally dependent, and it is dependent, it is physiologically, or what was the former physiology of the individual, dependent upon them. The body type, the density of the body, if there was illness going on, somebody's's got a high temp, um, uh, that's going to, you know, skew your data.

And, you know, if we're, if we're outdoors, uh, you know, we're, we're going to have so many variables and this is what always strikes me is, is kind of interesting. People that have tried to do studies relative to, uh, algor mortis, which is the body temperature, their ideal temp is 72 degrees. Now, I got to tell you, up here in Pennsylvania, I can only imagine if you're outdoors in the middle of February, a 72-degree day up here is going to be such an anomaly, and it's going to be so perfect. People are going to want to get the sticks out and go play some golf or whatever. It just doesn't happen. On the flip side, I live in Alabama, man. You think we ever see any 72-degree days in the middle of summer down there?

No, it's boiling. Absolutely. We might see 72 degrees at one o'clock in the morning. There's too many variables to go along with that. And then we have rigidity, rigor mortis. You know, we try to measure it. It takes a bit of time for it to set in. And again, it's temperature dependent. The hotter the temperature, it's just like any experiment that you do when you're a kid. You know, we either use an alcohol burner or Bunsen burner, even, you know, maybe when you're

first exposed to that in the eighth grade in physical science, you know, heat speeds things up. So it could harken the onset of rigor mortis. The body gets stiff quicker. What happens for that? That's something I really should look at on Google more and really go down the rabbit hole. But what are the main things that happen when a body goes into rigor mortis? Well, first off, if anybody's ever worked out, the closest I will tell you in life that you will feel what rigor mortis is like is if you haven't worked out in a while and you go hop on a bench and you do some bench presses, maybe you do pushups, that sort of thing, and the next morning you wake up and you're all stiff, that's a buildup of lactic acid.

And you can go take Tylenol for it. You can do all these sorts of things. But look, it's going to metabolize. It'll get out of your system. The dead don't have the ability to metabolize. So when you get this rigidity in the jaw, you get it in the fingers, you get it in the elbows and shoulders, and we measure it in various areas. It is because that lactic acid builds up as a result of this decompositional process that's starting, and you have this rigidity that sets in in the body. There's a classic photo that comes out of what we consider in forensic medical legal death investigation that's referred to as Spitz and Fisher.

We use this text, and there's a great photo in there if anybody ever sees it. It was taken at the office of the chief medical examiner. This book first came out, I think, in 1966. As a matter of fact, the forward was written by Ramsey Clark, who was the chief prosecutor, the U.S. attorney general at the time. That's how old this this book is but there's this great photo of a guy guy's body in full rider at the office of chief medical examiner in new york and he is behind you let me see right here yeah no that's not it okay i was trying to pull it up while you were talking and he's

he's in it's in black and white and the back of his head is supported by the edge of a chair. And his heels are supported by the edge of a chair. And there's nothing beneath him. You could iron a shirt on this guy's chest. That's how rigid the body is. And that gives you an example of the level of rigidity. But one of the ways we mark this is that once you get up to about 36 hours after death, rigor will begin to dissipate.

And again, that's one of the markers in time that we use. So once it's starting to dissipate, we know, and the body becomes what we refer to as flaccid, means that you can move the limbs around again. We know that as far as the timing goes, we know that we're out past that marker. So the person's been dead. And there's other things that we look for. You know, the body going flaccid. Levitity is set in.

It's fixed. It's not going anywhere. But with temperature, once you get out past 12 hours, it's useless. It's absolutely useless. That data that you would collect and the way people collect the data is wrong. Famously, in the recent case, in the Murdoch case, it came up that they did what's called an axillary body temperature where you take a thermometer and you put it in the armpit, and people believe that that's the best way to get a body temperature. Well, no, it's not because you're not getting a core body temp.

Well, there's one person that says that you should do a rectal temperature on the dead at the scene. The problem with that is that lawyers are involved. And if you change the methodology that you employ to get a body temperature, for instance, I'll just throw this out as an example. You're going to tell me that that data is so important that if you have a rape case, you're going to take a foreign object and place it in a location like that to get a body temperature where you might disrupt evidence in a rape case. It's not worth that. And then there's another group of people that talk about core body temperature. And let me lay this on you. and go just beneath the right rib cage where your liver is seated.

You make an incision there, and then you take a digital thermometer and you place it into the liver core. That's the densest organ in the body, and you get a body temperature. Okay, so you're telling me, oh, and then on top of that, they want you to put a circle around it with a mark slot and initial it to say that you did it so let's just say that that's your standard that you're adopting in your office so if you've got a multiple stab wound case this data is so important that you want to introduce a scalpel wound to the deceased and you might have multiple because if

that's the standard when you go to court they'll say well you employed it in all these other cases why in the hell didn't you do it in this case how are we this data skewed we don't know what the body temperature is so you see it's sorry it's one of those things that's that's absolutely nutty when you begin to think about is that data so important and people make such a big deal out of it, that I question the validity or the reason why you would need it. I think that post-mortem lividity is probably about as good as it gets, and maybe to a lesser degree, rigor mortis.

God damn. There are so many. I know I already said it, but there's just so many i mean i know i already said it but it's like there's just so many small variables like i had this woman nancy solomon in here who's an amazing reporter who has unearthed this old probably the coldest case in the history of new jersey and it's it involves potentially politics and power and the whole bit and it's the sher murders. I don't know if you ever heard of these ones. I have not, no. So back in 2014, September 2014 to be exact, you had a husband and wife, John and Joyce Sheridan, who were brutally murdered in the bedroom of their home. Before sunrise, a neighbor, next door neighbor, smells smoke and he goes

outside and he thinks he can see smoke coming out of the Sheridan house. He calls 911 and they send out fire and police right away. What they found was Joyce Sheridan had been stabbed multiple times. She was dead. She was lying on the floor. They find John Cheridan under the armoire. He's stabbed and on fire. John Cheridan had worked basically his whole career in New Jersey politics, and he was sort of an informal advisor, if not an official advisor, to several governors. So the detectives and the prosecutors sit down and meet with the brothers and they say, well, look, your father killed your mother and then tried to stab himself and couldn't do it. Then the brothers get access to the house and they just can't believe what they find. Like the rug that their father died on, that is a bloodstain stain is sitting rolled up in the hallway there's no

fingerprint dust how soon did they start looking into a guy like boden immediately yes that week now what did he find well see this is super interesting right now john was a long time new jersey political deal maker he was a moderate guy in a blue state he was a red guy and like very well liked by both sides and he had done that for i don't know fucking three four decades or something and at this point he was 71 72 somewhere in there years old his wife was a similar age and he had spent the last i don't know several years of his life maybe he was five maybe he was seven as the ceo of cooper hospital in camden new jersey right and he was a guy who really helped grow the hospital and into into a serious place and so when when they were found

in their home in a very remote town skillman Jersey, which they don't let people like me in Skillman, New Jersey. It's very nice. Oh, I see. There's like an alarm bell that goes off when I enter the zip code. I've been to places like that before. Right. So anyway. Or tried to go to places like that.

Not that I was allowed in the zip code, but he and his wife were found with the house on fire Stabbed to death in their bedroom and I won't go through the entire crime scene was very complex But basically he had an armoire on top of him. It was blocking the door for a while he had been stabbed she had been stabbed and They were taken out of there. Their bodies weren't fully charred at all. They were very recoverable, but they were taken out of there dead and it has turned into this whole thing they they declared it a murder suicide when it happened which everyone was like no way like there was no signs of that whatsoever it has since been changed to undeclared three years later they they changed his death certificate to whatever the

official term is undeclared and unclassared undetermined undetermined that's it and nancy is actually responsible for getting the case opened back up because she did an unbelievable podcast called dead end it's available on all the platforms breaking down the case in eight parts where it was like wait there's so many things they didn't look at and the reason i'm bringing this up is because the nature of the fuck up at the crime scene cannot be understated all the details that that that you and i have talked about that you have to take into account these guys basically like you talked about the three vans leaving a scene versus like two bags leaving a scene these guys were like a fucking little peanut butter and jelly bag leaving the scene right right They missed all the residue they like the blood splatter

They missed where the body was moving she and I didn't even talk about these terms rigor mortis or or was the other one liver mortis Yeah, a lot more a lot more stuff like this because they never even got there You know and so you it just goes to show you and this was a high-profile murder too. This wasn't some neighborhood where they're taken less seriously by the news because it happens all the time, which we also already talked about. But like it just goes to show you every one of these little things can set off a slippery slope. Like you miss – maybe you mis-evaluate the live or mortis, and you don't take that into account. So now you're not taking into account that the body moved from here to here and now you're not looking at the spot where originally was so maybe you didn't get all the blood splatter there and you assumed it was just like dragged from the person having you know some sort of like fight against it and now the entire

case is blown it's done yeah yeah yeah and that that that is a. And this is quite fascinating. You can be – and again, I'm chief among sinners. I've screwed up so many times on scenes over the years, things that I've forgotten to do or missed because there's so many acrobatics that you can do. Your brain can't function at the level that it needs to function if you're getting slammed with cases. People miss things. But then you have to understand, are these sins of omission or commission? You know, you begin to think about that and try to understand, is this something that, you know, is just, we just forgot? Or is it something that, ah, you know, we don't need that?

You know, that sort of thing. That's why the underpinning of everything that we do in a medical legal sense goes back to the science. We try to treat each case, no matter if it's an 88-year-old mama that passes away in the middle of the night, you try to treat each case as if it is a homicide until proven otherwise. Period. End of story. As you said, you get one shot at doing it, and you can be tripped up very easily. I have been tripped up.

Do you have an example of that? Oh, yeah, yeah. I have a great example, as a matter of fact. I had a little old lady, actually, lived in a trailer not too far away from the Atlanta airport, and she lived alone. Her adult son drove a taxi, and he would make the big loop from Atlanta Hartsfield down into the hotel district in downtown Atlanta. So he'd be picking up people off of planes that are getting off at Hartsville. You know what they say about Hartsville and Atlanta. If you're going to hell, you've got to change planes in Atlanta.

So you hop in the cab. He takes you down, and he just makes a big loop back and forth all day long. Well, his mother lived in a little trailer park. And nice, neat little home. Very clean, orderly. And he would stop by every day and have lunch with his mom. Okay. And you could tell the guy, you know, really cared for his mother. He was religious. He would come by and check on her every day. Well, he shows up and mom was laying on the sofa in the front room, and he is, she is, just kind of reposed there.

And her, she had a, I'll never forget, she had a white cotton ankle-length nightgown on with a little embroidery on it. Just looked perfect. And her hands were actually crossed, like you'd see in a casket, which is something that you don't see. And no, not all dead people close their eyes. So, you know, there's just certain things that you look for. And it was on a Memorial Day. It was on a Memorial Day weekend.

And I remember complaining to the young police officer that was there that rolled out on this thing with me because we thought it was a natural. We were complaining that we were having to work and no one else is having to work. Everybody else is off. And I was having to cover the whole county and the city of Atlanta by myself. I was the only investigator on. We were just belly aching. And I'll never forget this. This is back in the days when we were still, we were using 35 millimeter and Polaroids. And it's for the days of digital, but with Polaroids were really cool because you could snap and get an instantaneous,

you know, captured image. And I'm steady. You know, we're gabbing back and forth going, going on and on. And here, this woman is deceased on stuff. We just, we're gabbing back and forth, going on and on. And here this woman is, deceased on the sofa. She had a heart history, all these other things.

Son's out in the yard. And I take a photograph, and then I've got my gloves on, so I walk over and I said, well, let me take a look at her, and then we can call the funeral home to come out and pick her up. Pulled up her gown, Julian, and she's lying so that her right side is against the back of the sofa, and she's lying like this. And I pulled up her nightgown. She didn't have underwear on. No big deal. pull it up and along the adjacent to the right breast laterally oriented what you have you know you you have intercostal muscles that it's the meaty portion of your ribs

all three of those ribs are completely separated and wide open you could look through to the side and see her lung she'd been sliced open on the side her body but there was no blood okay her body had been cleaned and redressed and if i'd taken the time to pay attention to my job at that moment, Tom, I would have thoroughly searched the residence, gone back to the bedroom, found the blood-soaked towels and blanket that they had used to soak up all of the blood. I would have looked in the bathtub to see a little bit of ring of red substance around the drain before I ever opened my mouth by complaining about that I had to work that day. See, I am chief among sinners. I have made mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. Now, as it turned out, I was able to back the officer out of the room. I backed out. We called CID, came out and perpetrator was soon caught. It was a local prostitute and her pimp that had done this. And this little old lady

lived in this house. And you know, when you're growing up in a neighborhood, you're around other kids. There's always that one elderly person many times that lives in an area that people will start rumors about and they'll say she she doesn't use a bank she keeps all of her money and that's what they were working upon and they were able to get a conviction but you know and i could have train wrecked the whole thing how long from getting there on the scene to you finding that approximately was that to you pulling it up and finding that uh probably within i'd say probably about 35 minutes okay so that's still pretty quick so it is quick but here's the problem i didn't treat this like a homicide i treated it

like this this fellow's mother who has a heart history that just simply died. I did not take due care when I entered that scene. I took a half-ass approach to it. And that's the one thing you have to check yourself on constantly in our field because not every death, as we have stated, is the same. Everything's variable. I can't, you know, thinking back, I don't recall other than a series. I worked a series of serial killings. One of the series that I worked, particularly,

this was a grouping in New Orleans where we had a perpetrator that was redressing bodies. But I've never had it to this extent where they went to the trouble to clean her essentially bathe her with towels and wipe all the get up all the blood and everything they left that there and they left yeah they left it there and then redressed her and into a nightgown seems like so much effort for like a really stupid mistake yeah the criminals are equally as stupid as i am on certain days you're not giving yourself enough credit but still so that's i mean my question would be though when you come upon that i guess if she was redressed

that curves the bleeding but like is there if if someone had significant blood loss when they die as opposed to like oh they had a heart attack or something does their body not look like a lot whiter or lighter in color than yeah it can that's an excellent question uh you can have uh you can have if you appreciate it long enough that is uh view it long enough and take a long enough view of the remains and if you have the correct lighting you might can appreciate kind of a washed out appearance but again there's a there's a power change that occurs anyway with the dead you know they it's it it would be a very fine line that you would walk to try to assess that well when when you tell a story like that and and you highlight the point that like you're a human

being and so is everyone else doing these investigations like there are no matter how great you are there are mistakes that are made it does bring a few thoughts to mind first i don't know if the psychology of doing a job like yours or doing a job like being a surgeon something like that where there's like you know life and death like shit's on the line i don't know if that is like a hack to make you more focused whereas like if you are even if you're an accountant right where numbers gotta line up and everything you know you're an accountant right where numbers got to line up and everything you know you're an accountant you're going through the same return of someone that made a hundred thousand dollars last year the next person made 80 you can make mistakes right because yes you can it's kind of

more droning on did you the fact that you're facing like dead bodies and like this was a life and and you're highlighting that is that does that make you a lot more focused would you say like you understand what i'm asking there yeah yeah i i do completely uh probably not as much as you might think uh somebody i would say that earlier on in my career i had much more of an awareness of being with the dead than I did toward the end of my career, if that makes sense. What do you mean by that? I'd be standing there over a dead body and trying to take the measure of everything that I'm seeing and thinking that I'm about to do to document the existence of this person. And I might be the only person that ever documents their existence. Or that they ever lived.

Or that they died. And it would become more of a... Almost... I hate to say this. It has more of a spiritual context to it. Where you're really focused on it in that sense as opposed to further on down my career. I never got completely desensitized to the dead, which I'm so thankful for. But I did become more mechanical, I think, and I didn't hold it quite as reverential as I may have at the beginning, at the front end of my career.

Do you find yourself, or did you when you were actively doing this, like how much did you take it home with you? A lot. A lot. Yeah, yeah, too. More so than it was noncompatible with life completely. There were many times I would sit there and stare at my gun, many times over the course of my career because I knew how to do it. I'd seen it done so many times and I just wanted to be freed from it. And when it's a weird thing, you sit there and you try to make sense of these things that you see. sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors.

So, what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. And there's nobody, people might, you might have a casual conversation with someone and they will ask you a question about what you have seen or did you work this case because I saw it in the news and this is back then not now and yeah yeah I worked it and they would say wow how'd you deal with that what What was that like? See, they're not asking that question of me because they give two shits about me. They're living vicariously through me. Right.

And that's something I learned early on. I remember being a very vain young man when I first got my job. I had no business doing the job that I was doing at the age that I was. And I'm talking about in my very early twenties. I had a, an old forensic pathologist who's quite famous actually telling me that I was the youngest, the youngest medical legal death investigator in America at that time. And, um, and I don't know even how you would go about quantifying that. That's just something that he said. And, and when, you know, he it, because he'd been around so much, it was kind of striking. He may have just been trying to stroke my young ego, threw me a few crumbs of kindness.

I remember distinctly going to a cocktail party in New Orleans right off St. Charles Avenue at this very wealthy home. And it got out at the party about what I did for a living. And here are all these beautiful people around me. And I gather this crowd. And it's intoxicating stuff. You gather this crowd around you, and people are asking you about cases. You know, you could have somebody that's, say, for instance, a fabulously wealthy stockbroker that might be there and might be a multimillionaire. But I got stories about dead bodies, you know, and really over-the-top stuff. And so I'm holding court, right?

You're the popular guy at the point. Yeah, I'm the popular guy and I you ever have you ever been at that point in your when when you're young and you lock eyes with some beauty across the across the room and there's just something there you see it and there was this thing going on with this girl that I kept looking at her and she'd look at me and that sort of thing and I was holding court and as the evening came to a close um these people walked away the crowd kind of parted she eventually walked over to me in engagement conversation and said what what do you do for a living and i said well i'm an investigator with a coroner's office

i deal with the dead she didn't say another word she turned on her heel and walked away really yeah woman did yeah they're the ones into this shit uh you said that i did not say that but you know you know the thing about it is is that that many people will they'll be very intrigued by uh the nature of what you do, the things that you see. But if you're looking for somebody that wants to hear your sad tale of woe, they don't have time for that. They're looking for a story. They're looking for something. Hey, man, let me tell you something. You might think you've seen a thing or two.

I was just talking to this guy over here. Let me tell you what he said. Let me tell you what he said. Let me tell you what he saw. And so they're getting information from you and they're going on. And here, you know, your mind is in turmoil with everything that you're seeing and everything that you're experiencing day in and day out. And there's no real respite for it. And I was such a knucklehead as, you know, very young, early on. I didn't see the early damage that was being done, I think, even at a spiritual level or, you know, in between the years with me.

I just, I saw myself because of things that really impacted me as a child growing up. I saw myself as achieving something that no one else had achieved, that I was doing this day in and day out, that I had a skill set that no one could ever say, that I had not done something with my life, that I was even at my own personal expense. And you can't see that when you're young, I would go out and say, you know, you guys might do that for a living, but let me tell you what I'm going to go do tonight. Let me tell you what I did last night. You're not going to believe this. And somehow that kind of validates you, and you do that at your own peril. Like a gamesmanship with it a little bit. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. You might think you've seen a thing or two. Let me tell you what I've seen. Right there there's always somebody that's seen something more you know there's you never see everything you talk about like your childhood though yeah and and insinuating that there were some tough things there what do you mean specifically if you don't mind me asking? I grew up in an environment where I had teenage parents, and there's nothing wrong with having teenage parents, particularly when I came up. That was very common.

My mother was very young when she had me. My father, to say the very least, was off the beam, as they say, had a tendency toward violence um and i could go into a lot of the the gritty detail about that even even what happened during my mother's pregnancy with me but i survived and um And I guess probably I was living primarily with my grandmother. You never knew where my father was, really. And when he showed up, he showed up mean. And I guess I was five or six. And my father came to my grandmother's house, which is his mother, drunk,

and he showed up with a shotgun, and he said he was going to kill everybody in the house. My grandmother hid me beneath the bed, and one of my earliest memories was the feeling that this was all going to end because I could look beneath, looking out from beneath, you know, my grandmother's bed. I could see her knees where she was praying and still remember her calling out to God to protect us. And my grandfather had called, back then he called zero.

There wasn't a 911. And the operator and uh the uh police came and uh he was throwing furniture he had a sawed-off shotgun he was calling for his father wanted to kill his father wanted to kill all of us he's banging at the doors and everything else and you imagine a child you know you six years old yeah and it stayed with me it still stays with me today i'll bet um so that was one of my first i i guess i don't know if you could say it's a brush with death uh i guess maybe something i think it is yeah um they they hauled him off at that point in time and back then during vietnam um the i think this happened around the country quite a bit, they would

give people a choice. They would say, all right, boy, you need to go to the penitentiary and join the Marine Corps. So he obviously had the skill set. So he joined the Marine Corps. There's a lot of jokes coming to my head right now, and I'm backspacing all of them. He went off, and of course, he came back and he was even further, more damaged than he had been previously. Oh, my God. Yeah, when he did get home, you know, I love my grandmother dearly. I write about her pretty significantly in my memoir.

As a matter of fact, her brother, her oldest brother, who was a union leader in Louisiana, ran the Painters Local. He was a homicide victim, and that's who I'm named after, as a matter of fact. So I've got this kind of lineage that goes back. He was a homicide victim 13 years before I was born. His name is Joseph. And so I've kind of carried that. You kind of, I don't know, some people think they're marked in one way. It's an interesting thing to consider. But jumping ahead, my father got home from Vietnam or from service, promptly grabbed my mother and I and removed us from the only home that I'd known in Louisiana and took us to Georgia and kept us there for, we stayed there for probably a year and a half, and then he abandoned us,

left me and my mother to live in a trailer house there. We had no, nobody around us had nothing. And so, you know, it's, look, everybody's got somebody done somebody wrong song, you know, it's look, everybody's got a, somebody done somebody wrong song, you know, and everybody's got trials in their life. Mine are no greater than anybody else's, but I'm just trying to establish the fact that this, I think this is, this is one of the things that happened with me that kind of triggered in my mind that I was set on a course to do the job that I wound up doing. And when my mother remarried, she married a sadist. And he was a sadist. He was a horrible human being and beat me unmercifully. And so that, you know, and he was, you know, he would constantly pound into my head

that I was going to be just like my father, that I was going to be. Jesus Christ. And so, you know, you go through these things and they form you. And my only goal, first off, was to escape, to escape and to try to do better for myself. Because I know guys that are my age that went through not the exact thing, but through terrible circumstances, and they wound up going down another road. Some of them are dead now.

But for me, when I found something that I could do, where I could exercise what brains that I have and try to apply that through just hard nose application for some twisted reason in me, it, it validated me. It validated that I'd arrived. And so I just tried as hard as I could to be the best medical legal death investigator that I could. I read just incessantly. That's why I would go to autopsies all of the time. I'd want to absorb and learn as much as I could because therein, you know, I thought that that kind of, you know, therein rests my salvation, I think. And it was to my great peril at the end of my career. Last time

I left a medical examiner's office, as a matter of fact, was in the back of an ambulance. I'd been suffering from the same heart attack for six months. You had a heart attack? didn't it was panic attacks i thought i was having a heart attack i went to doctor three separate times and then finally i just collapsed and they had to remove me and i never went back after that in 2005. um and it was a horrible time my wife was pregnant with isaac at the time um and i was finishing up my graduate degree in forensic science I'll never forget that when did when did Isaac pass away uh Isaac passed away in five he did it all it all happened at the same time I'm sorry he passed away in the fall of four in the fall of four I was officially separated from the me's office in the february of five i think

so this you had a panic attack shortly after his death another one yeah another one multiple yeah and they you know they uh and when i went to see the psychiatrist that the county had sent me to um first off she she had a hard time taking a measure of where I was. She was this lady that was older, Indian lady named Dr. Rowell. Never forget her. She saved my life. She said she was in that stage in her career where early on she was old enough to have done, and I found this interesting thing about my father, she had done her residency in Washington State dealing with what they called battle fatigue with incoming Vietnam vets.

And I was a quivering mass by this time. I mean, I couldn't process things. All I wanted to do was get back to work. And when I think it was the second meeting, she had put me on these really strong psychotropic medications. I slept for days. She said, we have to give your brain a rest. I was like, yeah, no shit.

So they put me on this medication that they normally use for schizophrenia. It's called Seroquel. And it's a horrible drug just to make me sleep. And I think the second time I went back, I was trying to form the words to ask her about when I could go back to work. And she said, not only are you not going to go back to work, if you try to go back to work, I'm going to have you judicially committed. And when that hit me, this is all I'd ever done, Julian, since I was very young. You're like 20 years in at this point. Oh, yeah, yeah. And it's all I'd known.

And it's all I was. It was my sole identity in this environment. And that was just like the beginning. And it was within a few months of that that I was actually offered an academic position at my first stop along the way. And I remember thinking how terrified I was going into that classroom because here I was. I'd just gotten out of this mess dealing with dead bodies and experiencing everything. And here I am, I'm going to go to this classroom and teach these kids about death because I started up the forensic science program at this college or forensic investigations program. What college was that again? University of North Georgia. Okay. As a concentration in forensics. And the funny thing about it is, is that it turned out to be therapeutic.

I'll bet. Yeah. And that doesn't surprise me at all. I found myself advising students. And I had a lot of – North Georgia is one of the six senior military colleges in the nation. It's like VMI and the Citadel and Virginia Tech and Texas A&M, only it's strictly an army college. As a matter of fact, it's in the same location where the Army Ranger Mountain Phase is. It's in Dahlonega, Georgia. And I had a lot of kids that were going through, I had kids that

were coming in that were National Guard members. This was at the height of the war that had done three and four deployments. And I was seeing these kids coming in that had that – Thousand-yard stare. Yeah, they did. And I remember actually kids would come up to me and say, Professor Morgan, I want to do what you did for a living. And I would find myself in my office talking them out of it.

You don't need to do this. Let's find something else. You need to be a fingerprint analyst or something. You don't need to mess with the dead. Well, you were telling a very deep and wildly twisted story there that I did not want to stop you on. I had a lot of questions along the way, so I want to unpack that a little bit. Yeah, sure. If you don't mind. I did not want to stop you on it. I had a lot of questions along the way, so I want to unpack that a little bit. Yeah, sure.

If you don't mind. First of all, when your father abandoned your family, did you ever see him again? Yes. Yeah, he tried to enter my life a couple of times, and it turned out to be a complete train wreck. And being the people pleaser, I think, is the way to put it, that I was. I wanted to try to engage with him, but it always ended up in a very scary place. Even as an adult, I wanted him to meet my children, and that wound up being a very scary place to go to as well with them. And I realized suddenly that I'd put them in an environment with him that was not healthy. And so I've completely disengaged from that.

Is he still alive? I think so, yeah. And your mom? Oh, yeah. Yeah, we have a pretty good relationship. I talk to her. We have a great relationship. As a matter of fact, I talked to her.

She texted me when I got here and wanted to know if I'd made it safe. You're going up there to Philadelphia. Shout out to Mom Morgan. Hey, Mom. Mom, it's the city of brotherly love. And, you know, so yeah. But the man that she chose to marry is deceased now. And he also was, that was the next question.

So he was, you called him a sadist. That's a term I haven't really heard. I mean, I know what it is, but that's it. He took great pleasure in the pain that he could inflict over and over again daily. Did he do it to your mom too? No. I always viewed myself as kind of a a, he got my mom who was absolutely gorgeous. Um, uh, described her in blood beneath my feet as a, she had the skin of an English

milkmaid is pure white. Um, uh, you know, untouched by the sun, blonde hair, you know, blue eyes and, uh, gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. And, you know, I was just kind of a, um, um, an adjunct, I think. And I think that there are a lot of kids out there that find themselves in that position. An adjunct? Yeah. Just something that, uh, uh, happens to be there, you know, that may or may not serve a decent purpose. Because, you know, it's an interesting thing, you know, when you think about it, how people come in and out of your life. And you don't, you know, no kid asks for it. There's no kid out there that asked for um you know to come face to face with a monster um and um i i tell you what

it it did it it did do for me though um is it really ingrained in me kind of the George Costanza attitude. I was doing George Costanza before he was doing it on air where I was going to do the opposite. I had focused in my life that, and I failed many times over, but I had focused in my life that if there was something that was going to occur in my life, this is how my brain works, I would ask myself, you know how people walk around with bracelets

and say, what would Jesus do? I had in my mind, I had, you know, what would my father or my stepfather do? And then I would do the opposite. I would do the opposite. You know, how do you respond to your spouse? How do you respond to your children? How do you respond to other people?

And so when I started applying that, I found out that it actually worked quite well. And it's very simplistic. It's the way my mind works. I mentioned trying to eradicate the word why out of my lexicon. If I were to sit there all day long, and I've been guilty of it in the past, but to sit there all day long and say, why me? Why me? You drive yourself to absolute madness. Do you still hold a lot of anger towards your father?

Or have you – I mean, he's not in your life, as you said, but have you i mean he's not in your life as you said but have you forgiven him or would you want to forget like how do you how do you treat that relationship i don't know i think that i think that probably from just again i go back to what's going to be at this stage of my life, the stage of my life, the stage of life that my family is in right now. What does it profit? What does it profit us from a health standpoint, mental health standpoint to reengage at any point in time? I'm sorry. I'm not saying reengage. I'm saying for your own peace without seeing him, without bringing him towards your family or anything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that something that, like, do you have that anger or are you at peace with the fact that he exists and this is what he was and you have righteously lived your life to be everything that that's not in a great way? And so you got something from it for yourself. Yeah, I think so. I don't have near the level of anger that I once had toward him. I think that this other person, even though he's dead and gone, I have a lot of anger toward that individual. Still? Still to this point. And I think that many years later, you know, we

found out that he had been previously treated in a psychiatric hospital and he had hidden it from everybody, had lost his first marriage as a result of that. And, uh, try to understood, uh, try to understand, you know, why, and he was hyper-religious too, and try to understand, you know, why did he hate psychiatrists so much? He would go on and talk about that. They were the, you know, the devil's tools and all these sorts of things all the time. And, you know, anytime somebody makes a big stink out of something like that, there's something they're projecting. Yeah. And so, you know, anytime somebody makes a big stink out of something like that, there's something... They're projecting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so, you know, it started to make sense many years later, you know, retrospectively, but that still doesn't, it still doesn't heal any of those wounds. I'm just glad

we're all shed of him now. Well, I think, and I'm just live putting two and two together here as best i can because when when i sit in a seat and i have special people like you come in here who just you know really no pun intended spill their guts with with how they feel and shoot it to you straight which i've been very lucky i've had a lot of people who do that so i appreciate you doing that but you know i'm constantly just naturally psychologically trying to evaluate you know what where people are coming from and why and i think i don't know i

could be wrong about this but you choosing the career you did to prove your point make something of yourself which you did obviously you you you didn't go to Wall Street, though. You didn't go, like, start a business. No. Wow. Thanks for telling me, Julian. Wow. You didn't do these, like, the normal run of the mill, like, I'll show you.

You didn't, like, become a great basketball player. Hey, how do you know? I know you're a big fan. I can knock the tray down, man. Still? Thursday you ran i'm just kidding i'm just kidding just kidding but like you didn't take one of the more like stereotypical hollywood pass you went and you learned how to how to assess what happened to the dead to provide the story of of someone who was taken and i can't help but think about having not done it myself at all but like imagining the situation when you are sitting in a room with a

dead body even if they obviously have next of kin and the next kin are sad they're gone and you've already informed them or going to go inform them that body right there has a story and let's go the homicide or suicide route something happened to them that only they know right now and so in a way and they're not here to tell you and they don't have any choice in the in in the matter so in a sense their soul has been abandoned right and you are there to re-sew them back together in a way that will provide some sort of, not closure like you said, but some sort of understanding of what happened to this person. You are there, you and the coroner and the detective, that team is the last group of individuals who has not abandoned what is now a dead person and I can't help but think it that a part of that psychologically could come from the fact that whether you were alone under a bed staring at your dad trying to kill your whole family or getting beat by your

stepdad while your mother couldn't do anything about it after your your real dad had abandoned you twice over going to Vietnam slash prison and then leaving the house all together I can't help but wonder if there's a piece of you that is that is trying to make that right with With your maker or the universe or whatever you want to say I think to a certain degree Potentially I love Johnny Cash Mmm, love Johnny Cash and I love Even as a small boy, I love I love the song Boy Named Sue And the reason is and it's a comedy song, but it's really not.

Everything that I went through was much akin to that storyline that Cash wrote about in that song where he was given this name. And at the end, at the conclusion, when he's telling the story, he's able to say, the father's saying, it's because I knew I wasn't going to be there, I gave you this name, and that you would have to grow up tough. And for me, I was given this gift to a certain degree of, I don't know how to say it, this degree of, I guess in my case, abandonment and abuse and these sorts of things. Because I could go into these environments for a time,

and I could look at some of the most horrible things you can imagine, and I could say, it's still in him. I can do this. It's still in my stepfather. I can do this. And it would, in some way, it would measure out for me. It was never quite enough because you can never escape death you you think that you can i certainly thought that i could and you know kind of the the icy fingers as they say you know they they go everywhere no one can avoid it the reality

of it but you you think you can and in my, I kind of danced around it a lot. And I accomplished a lot of great things that I'm very proud of relative to my time as a medical legal death investigator. I think back when I got into the field, there were no national standard guidelines that were used to train people in my field. And as a result of a guy named Dr. Jensen, who was the chief medical examiner of Milwaukee, and he's actually the guy that did all of the autopsies on Dahmer's victims, victims. He understood that there was a need to standardize national practice for people in my field. And so from him, we formed what was called the Milwaukee Task Force. There were 12 of us, Atlanta, New Orleans, I won't get them all, Atlanta, New Orleans, Nashville, New York, D.C., Chicago, L.A., Seattle, Vegas, wasn't there?

I can't remember. There was 12 of us. And we started meeting in Milwaukee to try to come up with a way to do training for medical legal death investigators. And we started before the days of PowerPoint. And you would use index cards, and we would just come up with random ideas, and they'd be glued all on these walls. I mean, just covered. And we met for a period of two and a half years. We literally created a text that way.

And now, as a result of what we did there, the American Board of Medical Legal Death Investigators exists. And it's a registry certification and a fellowship certification that they have. I'm no longer, you know, because I'm not practicing, I'm no longer, I'm inactive. But that's something forever and ever, you know, that I'll be proud of. And to be able to go around and I've trained coroners all over the country and still get to have the privilege of trying to make sense out of the nuttiness that we see in the news. And one of the reasons, you know, obviously, I'm not a complete altruist here, obviously. I have my own motivations for having my own podcast and going on air and everything else.

But I saw a need that I'm this phase of my life that the way I try to do my podcast is I try to pretend that, first off, I'm having a conversation with a friend. Yes. And secondly, I'm trying to teach. It's what I have somewhat in my little field a gift for, you know, to be able to talk about these horrible things that I'm born witness to and what kind of practical application can you take away from it and you know that when i came up with body bags um the idea for the podcast it's it's merely an extension what i do in the classroom my wife actually came up with a name for it so wife's smart she's great she is very smart and uh the reason that we settled on that name is that body bags, and some people have found it offensive, but everybody finds everything offensive. Yes, they'll find something. Can't worry about it.

God. But the reason body bags is the name is that that's one of the ways I used to keep count of how many deaths I'd worked because our vehicles were all stocked with body bags and so as as the number of body bags would become diminished in the vehicle you'd have to go back and restock and for each body bag that that you use that represents one person. And each person that we talk about, each person that we talk about on, on body bags was, was a person.

They have loved ones that are left behind at some level and they sustain horrific trauma. And, you know, I, I feel like that at least in my little way, I can be trusted to try to interpret that and try to help people in the true crime community understand it. Agreed. And once again, as I said at the outset of our conversation, like you do an amazing job of keeping the priorities and the gravity of the situation at the forefront at all times, which is really really important but you talk about how the second half of your career here

where you become a professor and then later on a big-time media personality on all this stuff it seems to be very rewarding and that's why it wasn't surprising to me for you to say like i found it early on like therapeutic for myself to go through this but you you seem to have made the transition obviously very well and effectively but that transition point where it happened what you talked about is that it's at a very curious place because you've been in the in at in this job for two decades i think you'd said you'd done 2,000 notifications at this point. And then at some point, obviously, you're not desensitized to it as we've already laid out. But you're used to this job.

You have an understanding like we have a job to do. Our job is to tell a story here and get it done. But as you also laid out, it does come home with you. And you do have heaviness. And there are so many times today where you were just on a roll and i didn't want to stop you so i'm jumping back on something so forgive me for that but you had said something about you were getting these panic attacks because for the first time you were like acknowledging or maybe not the first time i'm trying to remember exactly i said it but you were like acknowledging or maybe not the first time i'm trying to remember exactly i said it but you were like acknowledging what you were doing and it was also coming at a high

stress point for you do you think it was it wasn't so much like you had never like you had never acknowledged it but you understood what you were doing but you just kind of accepted it and now for the heaviest time of all when you started getting these panic attacks you were weighing the gravity of that and that's what you were acknowledging i think it was my body responding to it i truly do because i was too thick-headed to understand where i could i was still, you know, my mind was still willing to drag my bloody stumps through the meat grinder of this thing. But my body was shutting down. You understand what you're involved in. Finally, after some woman you've never met in your life tells you she's going to have you judicially committed, and then all of a sudden it's like that was the first shock to my system. I realized that because my total identity was tied up in this thing. I mean, it really was.

There's no reason. I would have been better renting umbre know, down on the beach somewhere. You know, how cool would that have been? I couldn't see that back then. That was beneath me because that doesn't, you know, arise to the same level as being a death investigator. Really? What's more valuable, dude? You know, your life.

You know, who you are. Your precious children. Your wife. And, you know, and you talk about bringing it home, you know, and it's again, it's things that, you know, with people that are involved in these various fields, you know, you've talked to. Oh, my God, the people that you've you've engaged with, the folks that are in their lives and mine, my wife in particular, can you imagine being married to a man that when he comes home from work, you meet him at the back door of the house every day? And the question that she asks you is, how was your day? It was not, how was your day? It's, did you work a decomp?

And then she says, if you did, go ahead and take your clothes off right here. And I take my clothes off in the backyard. And you leave them there at the door. And then while she's taking care of the household and she's taking care of your kids, she's washing your filthy clothes that just the day before you were in some run-down shabby hotel or boarding house or beneath a house where you had to dig up somebody that had been buried or you were in some shooting gallery with a bunch of junkies that had or you know had murdered one of their fellow um you know drug addicts you do bring that home with you you know and it it impacts it impacts everything that you do bring that home with you, you know, and it, it impacts, it impacts everything

that you do. I think one of the, the really sad things about it, you know, I remember to, right at the end, is that this is, this is really pathetic. We worked – for a while, we worked 10-hour shifts, so four days a week, 10 hours. And 10-hour shifts, not a 10-hour shift because catch case. You're going to be – you're going to be 14, you know, whatever. And I remember – can you imagine this? So you've worked four days. You've put in a lot of hours. You live 60 miles away from the

office so you got a commute too so you're spending about that much time with your family and then the moment that you've got your keys in your hand you're walking toward the door to go outside to get in your car you know what would suddenly inhabit my brain at that moment in time when I sat down. It was not, oh boy, I'm going to go home and see my wife. I've got to be back here in 72 hours. And that's all you focus on. You never get out of that. I didn't.

I can't say about anybody else, this is just my little slice of pie. You never get out of that state that you're in because you just don't have the tools. I didn't have the tools to deal with it at that time. And there was no care. My wife, at the time, PTSD was not something. It was out there and people talked about it, but it was a couple years later when it really burst on the forefront when they got the diagnosis from the psychiatrist that this was PTSD. My wife went to talk to the county where I was employed in Atlanta.

And, you know, here she is. She's dealing with a pregnancy with an infantile husband at this point. And she's looking to get disability. And the people that she spoke with at the county actually said, yeah, he's not going to get disability for PTSD. Too many people can fake it. And so, you know, if you're looking for a sign as to, well, maybe this is, you know, evidence that you're going to have to pull yourself up by

your bootstraps, Morgan, and do what you got to do as a man and provide for your family in another way. You know, you've got, you got to leave this behind. There's a couple of ways you can look at it. You can get us be a sad sack about it and sit around and woe is me, or you can, you can stand up and start putting one foot in front of the other. And it was hard, man. It was hard stuff. But, you know, everybody has hard times. Everybody does.

Nobody gets out of this unscathed. Well, your hard time is also coming. It sounds like, I haven't asked specifically, but your son Isaac was relatively newborn, is that right? Yeah. When he passed? About a day old, I guess. Okay. So that's like, I mean, I've never had kids, but I know this.

That's like the worst thing that can happen to somebody is having to bury a child. So that is a significant traumatic event for anyone. Yeah, and it was all layered. It was all layered. was all right on top yeah but all occurring at the same time you had said really early on in our podcast and i mean i didn't even know what to say to it because it was very very heavy but you said when he passed in your arms you notified yourself and i'm just thinking about that because that is when this all you know Mm-hmm. Yeah. you can't be on this job. But when you say you notified yourself, what did, I mean, I could imagine what you meant by that, but take me to that moment. What is that? Do you say out loud?

The scientist in myself looked down at that little baby and I validated at that moment in time without anybody else telling me that he was in fact deceased. And I knew it at that moment in time as I held him and I looked at him. And I remember looking at my wife as she was weeping in bed and telling her, he's gone. And I handed him over to her and we wept. I still weep today. I still weep today.

I still weep on his birthday every year, 24th September. There's not a day that goes by because there's part of me that thinks that what I put our family through relative to the stress and the strain and everything that was upon my wife, that in some way it impacted. It impacted our trajectory. But I learned more, I think, in that moment, I guess. First off, I learned very carefully, be careful, and this is an old adage, be careful what you ask God for. Remember I said that when I talked about extended to me and mine.

And as it turned out, I was the one that was going to have to extend mercy to myself in a weird way. It was, you know, the world's that way, I found, at this stage in my life. You learn these lessons along the way, and they don't necessarily come back to you like you think that they, like in your mind, you think that they should or would or whatever. You learn these little lessons along the way, and that was certainly a lesson for us that we learned that day, particularly me. I'm the one that truly needed to be schooled in that area and need to be humbled. You know, because, look, it's one thing to sit around and complain about how bad you were treated as a child, but at some point in time, you have to put aside childish things

and as horrible as it might be and accept that you are a man and set your face like Flint and you move on and you do what you have to do for your family. And that's, that was the position. And I'm glad I just, you know, I truly am. I'm so thankful that I just didn't sit down in the middle of the metaphorically in the middle of the damn road of life and just weep incessantly. I'm glad that there was something within me that just pulled myself up and, and moved on and was able to, you know, to prove to myself, I think that I, you know, that I was something more than, you know, just a medical legal death investigator. I became a better husband, a better father, and, um, I became a, um, a better, maybe a better employee, whatever that means.

But certainly I've tried real hard to perfect my craft as a professor and as an expositor, I think, on air. Relative to these things that, you know, people see on television. They kind of gloss over them. A lot of the folks that sit at home and they view this as entertainment, and it is, it is true crime, they're looking to that to escape the life that they have. They're looking for something else, and they don't need to be insulted. I'll never forget when I first appeared on HLN.

It was early on. As a matter of fact, it might have been my first hit that I did with them. I had a producer that came up and said, I know you're nervous, but you teach. She says, just pretend you're teaching and pretend that you're teaching to um pretend that you're teaching um 11 year olds that are in special ed that's how she said it yes it's an interesting way to put it. Yeah, it was. And I found that very – it was – you know, suddenly the lights of the studio that you get when you walk in that environment, suddenly it becomes a bit more dim at that point in time. You realize that, you know, the blush is off the rose, as they say. But I use that as an opportunity to try to talk to everyday people about these, you know, these higher level scientific constructs to try to break them down so that everybody can understand them. And, you know, I think a bigger hope is that by explaining some of the science behind forensics, forensics is a great way for people to understand practical scientific application because it is applied science.

So there's multiple ways in which it can be applied. People that are terrified, that have always been told that they're no good in math or they don't understand physics because it seems so complicated or chemistry or even biology to a lesser extent. You know, that through practical demonstration as opposed to like in the academic sense where it's theoretical demonstration type of things. Forensics is something that they can grasp. You know, when you begin to talk about drug panels and you begin to talk about – you start talking about bullet trajectories and all those sorts of things. And you start talking about the mass of rounds and velocity and all those sorts of things. Suddenly you have something that's tangible you can demonstrate to them. And something might click.

You never know. Yeah. Well, you're doing an amazing job with it. And your career has these two clear acts to it. And I think that's a really cool thing to bring it full circle. And once again, as I said before, I'm always very grateful when people really go there and open up with things. And you've done that significantly today. So I think that in addition to the expertise that you're providing and can provide so many people to be a good voice for this space, if that's what you want to call

it, you know, putting a human face behind that is always so important because people can see, you know, you're not, you're not a robot who shows up to a crime scene and says, all right, let's assess the evidence. You know, you're you're you're a living breathing human with a hell of a backstory if i might add and and i think it's i think it's an awesome thing that you have clearly have such a great family have a great marriage too heard you talking to your wife earlier here you weren't even away from her for like three hours you know that's that's a great thing and and it gives a lot of people out there hope to see the strength and courage that you can have because it's not like, you know, the two of you haven't endured some awful things. To say nothing of also the things that you endured growing up. I mean, to be the type of guy you are with the personality, I think you talk about proving people wrong through a job.

I think you've proved people wrong through your life and how you live it and how you treat people. And I think that that's the best thing you could be as a person. I'm not God or anything, but that's certainly something. When I have kids one day, I would want my kids to be like Joseph Scott Morgan. I mean, for sure. For sure. You're a great guy. But this has been a lot of fun for me. I know I got to get you out of here in a few minutes to get you to your flight. But before we do end this one, the question that's been lingering in my head all day and I've avoided asking it is probably one of the more obvious ones to ask a guy like you. So it's a little cliche. But nonetheless, I'm curious about your answer. Do you fear death?

Yes. Yeah, I'd be a fool to say that I didn't. I don't, I fear it from the perspective of what it's going to do to my family. That's what I fear about it. Um, um, I, I know what it's like to be laying in a bed and gasping for air like a fish up on a dock because I thought that I was dying and that's the way this anxiety related to PTSD works. I have such a good life. I do. I do. I mean, I think about where I came from as a child. The odds of me getting to the point that I'm at right now are astronomical. I'm very grateful for what I have. And it's made me all the more thankful that every single morning that I get up, I've got a son that's going to call me sometimes irritatingly frequently, but I never, I never deny his call. And a wife that has been through the worst of it with me, because we were a partner through all this.

She said that I was not going to let you go. I was not going to let you go. I was not going to let you slip off. And she said that she knew the moment when something had turned in me, she saw it. It was like the spark of life had left my eyes. There was a, you know, she talks about this, um, abiding loneliness that just kind of overtook me. And it was this, um, this thing that, um, that just kind of haunted me day in and day out. And she witnessed that and she said that she would cry every night when I would leave for work because she knew that there was nothing she could do to assuage that. And I would come home and I would tell her about these horrible cases.

And this is a sad thing and the thing that I hate that I did to her. She says to not be regretful about this, but I hate what I subjected her to by virtue of what I told her about what I saw. Because the things that I saw, she should never have been exposed to, period. End of story, end of paragraph. Because they were horrible things, but I had no one else to share them with. And that's what she says she signed on for, and I'm so grateful for it because she was that, it's cliche to say rock, but she really was.

She was that anchor in the storm, in the harbor. She was that lighthouse for me that i could hold on to and know that you know everything was going to be okay um that it it would that it's a passing storm and sometimes the storm just seems like it lasted forever and ever and ever but the clouds finally broke um and i'm i'm so thankful for that but yeah guess I'm sorry. I didn't mean to go down this rabbit hole. No, this is great. Yeah, I don't fear death as much as I fear what it will do to my family, I think. Hopefully. And I think a lot of that, again, this comes back to this theme of living a good life.

I think if you live a good life and you're truthful and you're kind, there's nothing else you can do, Julian. There's nothing else. There's nothing else that the good Lord above could expect out of you other than that. And I've done my best to be that at this point, to try to make up for what my family, you know, had to see and, you know, the sadness and the distance in my eyes. And I'll leave you with a real quick story to give you, to kind of frame it for you. I was so acutely aware of death when my kids were little, my girls in particular, that there was one occasion, my daughters brought this up to me on several occasions, and it's weird being a death investigator's child. She said, do you remember that time that we were at the restaurant

and you had ordered us all all steak and we were so happy to have steak and mama had cut the steak up from me and suddenly you began shouting at us telling us to chew our food because that you had worked a case of an eight-year-old girl that had choked to death on a piece of steak. So chew your food. That's how it impacts you. What person in their right mind would say that to their child? You know, I don't know. It comes from the right place, though. It's not a bad thing.

It's not a bad thing, but it's just a thing that's rooted's rooted in fear yeah i'm glad that she didn't choke on her steak truly me too i truly am well that's that's that was a great great answer to that i really really enjoyed this and i definitely would like to do this again because there is there are so many questions today that i went unasked because i didn't want to stop you. Oh, yeah. You're an amazing speaker and a great storyteller, and I think people will really appreciate hearing what you have to say. So thank you for doing it.

Thank you. And look forward to having you up here again. You bet, bud. All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.