Law&Crime Sidebar - ‘Cowards’: Dad of Slain Idaho Student Criticizes Investigators, Reveals Autopsy Information

Episode Date: December 13, 2022

One month after four University of Idaho students were murdered, the father of victim Kaylee Goncalves continues to reveal new information about the murders while criticizing investigators. The Law&Crime Network's Jesse Weber and forensic death investigator Joseph Scott Morgan break it down.LAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokePodcasting - Sam GoldbergVideo Editing - Logan HarrisGuest Booking - Alyssa FisherSocial Media Management - Kiera BronsonSUBSCRIBE TO OUR OTHER PODCASTS:Court JunkieObjectionsThey Walk Among AmericaCoptales and CocktailsThe Disturbing TruthSpeaking FreelyLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law and Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondery app Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Agent Nate Russo returns in Oracle 3, Murder at the Grandview, the latest installment of the gripping Audible Original series. When a reunion at an abandoned island hotel turns deadly, Russo must untangle accident from murder. But beware, something sinister lurks in the grand. views shadows. Joshua Jackson delivers a bone-chilling performance in this supernatural thriller that

will keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. Sometimes when new information comes forward, the people that we've spoken to beforehand may have new insight on that. So it does often seem like we're backtracking, but we're really just trying to get the most important details and the best timeline that we can come up with. A father of one of the students killed in the University of Idaho quadruple murder case reveals alleged new details from the coroner. Forensic death investigator Joseph Scott Morgan reacts and explains. Welcome to Sidebar. Presented by Law and Crime, I'm Jesse Weber.

First, when we heard of the news, I was so angry that she was taken away all these special people, and you never think it's going to happen to your family. And then I had to sit back through my tears and realized that I really was blessed. I was fortunate to have Zana live with me for a couple years. We continue to follow the University of Idaho Quadruple murder case. It's the killings of 21-year-old Kaylee Gonzalez, 21-year-old Madison Mogan, 20-year-old Zana Kernodal, and 20-year-old Ethan Chapin. Their bodies found in their off-campus home out in the college town of Moscow.

These killings happened four weeks ago, and at the time of this recording, no arrests have been made, no suspect identified, and no murder weapon recovered. But there is something that we have to talk about, and those are the new statements from Stephen Gonzalez. Mr. Gonzalez, for anybody who's been following this case, has been quite vocal with the media about this investigation since the news broke about the killing of his daughter, Kaylee. In fact, he would reveal certain things that we weren't entirely sure the authorities wanted him to share. And now he is coming out with more information regarding the wounds. And he's doing this in an interview with Fox News Digital. So let me bring in right now,

my good friend, forensic death investigator from Jacksonville State University, Joseph Scott Morgan, who is also the host of the Body Baggs podcast. Joseph, it's good to see you. And thanks for coming on again. Good to see you, brother. How are you doing? So before we get into the wounds and the revelations about the wounds, I want to start here.

So Stephen Gonzalez told Fox News that he spoke with the coroner, Kathy Mabbat. Apologies if I've mispronounced her last name. First off, before we get into the wounds, is it typical for a coroner to share this information with the parent of a victim? It depends upon the case. And yeah, I mean, I've certainly, you know, in my past, working as a medical legal death investigator, have shared some of the intimate details when asked specifically about it. However, I will say this, if there has ever been a multiple homicide case that I have worked, I've never done a compare and contrast relative to injuries that other victims have sustained to the wounds that, say, the immediate family is asking me. me about about one victim that's very bad form and i i can't imagine any any corner doing that

i'll get to get into that the comparison between kaley and the others but this is what stephen gonsalves told fox news about what was told to him by the coroner he says she says sir i don't think stabs is the right word it was like tears like this was a strong weapon not like a stab she said these things were big open gouges. She said it was quick. These weren't something where you were going to be able to call 911. They were not going to slowly bleed out. What do you make of that? I've never heard, I've never heard verbiage like that from anyone in the, in the medical legal field. And I'll tell you why. Wait, does that, does that mean that he might be getting it wrong or that there's something, if a coroner told this to him, something's off? Yeah, something would be off.

and, you know, I don't know, maybe he's not quite understanding what's being said, but he's using very specific language there, Jesse. Tears, let's just break it down real quick, all right? When you're using an edged weapon, tearing is not something that's associated with that, okay? Taring creates this, where you have connective tissue or you have tissue bridging. most of the time that's connected with lacerations and lacerations are, you know, associated with blunt force trauma. That's the coroner's never mentioned anything about blunt force trauma. So I don't know if he's misunderstanding, misremembering, but just misstating.

I don't know, but I do know this with you have two choices with sharp force injuries. You either have stabs, okay, or you have incised wounds, which are slices, Slices are longer than they are deep. Stabs are deeper than they are long. That's really your only two choices. Now, kind of an outlier in all of this is something we refer to as puncture wounds, which doesn't look anything like a stab wound. They're generally, you know, kind of circular in shape.

You see them with like people that have been stabbed with shanks, homemade shanks and prisons or people that are impaled on rebar and that sort of stuff. Now, this tearing, it just doesn't add up to me. It doesn't make sense whatsoever. But we've been under the impression that it was a fixed blade knife that was used. There was reporting that it was a Rambo style knife. There was questions if it was a K-bar-style knife. He said, Stephen Gonzalez, that the knife slashed open Kaylee Gonzalez's liver and lungs.

Again, so are we thinking it's the wrong weapon based on this, or are we still of the conclusion it's a knife, but the characterization is a bit off? Well, first off, I'm very sorry for this man's loss, but he's not the person I'm going to go to for an analysis of injuries. I'm still waiting to hear from the medical examiner who I think is or the forensic pathologist who was contracted to do these examinations over in Spokane, all right? Coroner, just so everybody knows, the coroner is not an MD here. She's not certainly not a forensic pathologist. She didn't do these. These bodies would have been transferred over there. I don't understand, you know, the genesis of a lot of this information that he's putting out

there. It doesn't make sense. And keep in mind as well, early on, do you remember back? I think that the coroner actually had a sit-down interview with our friend Ashley Banfield early on. And she was the first person to get to get to the corner. And Ashley asked very specifically in that interview, she said, were any of these victims slashed? Because that goes to another part of criminal profiling and all that sort of stuff. The coroner definitively said, no, she said these were stab wounds, and they at least had one fatal stab wound that she could identify. Now, she talked about, the coroner framed it in the sense where she talked about the chest, okay? All right. He's saying, this father is saying liver. Liver ain't the chest. Okay, as a matter of

fact, it's way south. You're talking about below the rib cage, essentially on the right aspect of the abdomen. So I don't really know, you know, how they came to that conclusion. That doesn't make sense. And again, using this term, and I think using the term, the liver was slashed, that's not what you would have in this case. It would be a stab. Remember, I gave the description of an incised wound, just a moment. This is not an incised wound. This is a stashed wound. This is a stab one. Okay. What do you make of when he says, like you mentioned, that Kaylee's wounds do not match to Mogan's wounds? So he said they may have individually died from the exact same thing being stabbed, but there are more details. They're not even close to matching. Again, do you think that this is a

situation where perhaps he's misunderstanding what the coroner saying, or is the coroner maybe get providing conclusions that the coroner shouldn't not be making at this point? Well, my default position again with this, Jesse, is what does the forensic board certified forensic pathologists say about it? Because it, wait, and just to be clear, it is possible he's right. It is possible that he is right, I would assume. However, what is he, where, what's the genesis for this? You know, how does he, how does he assess that these injuries are different? Did he see this other victim's body? Was he the one drawing this conclusion? I doubt that that's the case. So is he saying that the coroner sat there and said, your child's injuries are so much more worse than any other victim?

That's what I have a real problem with here. First off, I don't know how accurate that is. And secondly, and I think bigger, it's very disrespectful to these other victims, very disrespectful to these victims and their families to say this. Right now, we don't know what the status of the injuries are. it's been very nonspecific relative to defensive injuries who sustained the defensive injuries what the location of these so-called defensive injuries are that sort of thing so you know right now we're just kind of getting snatches from him and i don't i don't know the genesis of the information he is he is relating well he said also that the coroner told him that these victims in general died quickly and didn't suffer he said he's not convinced in fact he says it was a hell

of a battle going on down there from what the coroner told us again Again, I give your response from that. Yeah. And again, how do you make that assessment? This is this is not like a one-off event where you have a single perpetrator on a single victim. This is highly dynamic. I've mentioned the term, you know, commingling relative to evidence. And a lot of that has to do with proximity. But let me throw out another term to you.

It's called co-sleeping. And so you've got two victims. Well, both sets of victims are actually co-sleeping with one another. So you're telling me that in, I don't know, in the darkness or whatever the lighting situation was, that this individual, the perpetrator, this monster came out of the dark and was able to identify this specific individual and target her because that's what's being in point here, that she was specifically targeted, ergo, that how this is demonstrated is the fact that her injuries were so much more robust than any other injuries that anybody might have had. I just don't see how he's arriving at that. He says he has his own suspicions about what may have happened. He's not revealing at this point. What did you make of this comment? Where again, he says the coroner told him that the perpetrator was a strong individual, but we know the police haven't identified, you know, any suspect of the suspect's gender. He came out and said, Steve Gonzalez, I got outraged by them, not just coming out

and saying this was a woman or a man, because they should know by the amount of strength that took to deliver the injuries, they're just being cowards. There are girls walking around the street right now that deserve to know they should be looking out for a sadistic mail. What do you think? Wow, he's into profiling now. Okay. Yeah, that's inappropriate. He should not be saying that at all. You don't think the coroner gave him any indication about it. I don't know what she gave him, but he should not be the mouthpiece for it in putting that information out there. You know, for all I know, this individual probably is a sadist. I have no idea how to measure that. But how are you going to measure strength as well? I mean, I think that we can probably agree,

that it would have taken some level of strength, particularly with the first victims and willpower, in order to bring this about. Because you're fighting two individuals at the time. I go back to this idea of co-sleeping in this context. You've got two victims that are there before you, if you're the perpetrator, and you're attacking both of them with a knife.

Again, I don't see how you can be targeting someone, specifically physically targeting someone, and you're having to fend off both individuals because we don't know anything about the sequencing of death at this point either. Keep that in mind. That's very important here because we don't know anything about the postmorum interval. They still don't have this timeline figured out as well. We have ideas about it, right, based upon the house and who was killed. Before I have to let you go, Joseph, we have about a minute left. I want to ask you real quick about there. It seems that it's

being reported that the hands of the victims have all been bagged at the scene in an effort to preserve possible DNA evidence so that their hands were bagged up. Is that common and what could we find from that? And how long would it take to get results? Okay, first off, it's very common to bag hands. In the past, we just used brown, not sterile, but clean brown paper bags and you tape them on the hands. Now they literally have these kind of all-encompassing little bags that have a drawstring.

And kind of, again, bear with me. Let me break it down and tell you how it works. You bag the hands very carefully because there's a tremendous amount of trace evidence. One of the reasons you bagged the hands is that this is kind of a logistics issue. When bodies are being moved from one location and certainly if you're talking about traveling all the way from this location to Spokane, which is where the bodies would have been examined, there's a lot of jostling.

So things fall off. It's very fragile. When you remove these bags, they're removed very carefully, Jesse. And so anything that's contained in them, they'll be sealed up and individually labeled and sent to the crime lab for examination. Now, they're also protecting anything that's contained under the nails. You've heard me, you and I've talked many times over the years about nail scrapings and nail clip, skin, any kind of blood, anything like that's going to be contained. And also, because this was apparently

a pretty bloody scene, it's amazing how much hair will contact and stick to hands. I find that more frequently than just about any other kind of evidence, hair from perpetrator. And sometimes hair from the victim, too, because it's so dynamic. How long is it turn around? It's not surprising, first off, here we are. We're past that marker and time of four weeks now. I am sure that at least the evidence that is gleaned from the victims is at a point where they've almost assessed it, they've collected all of the DNA that they possibly could, and now it's just about running the numbers relative to it to try to determine whose DNA is there. And what you're looking for is when you go through this process of this perpetration of this butchery, person A

is going to have their DNA and possibly the perpetrators. But as you move to B, you'll take, if they're using the same weapon, you're taking the same weapon that has been dipped into the blood, A, then to B, then to C, then to D, so forth. So you've got multiple transfers. It becomes very layered, not to mention all the touch DNA as well. Forensics tell so much of the story. We see that all the time in the cases we cover, and maybe we'll see it here as well. By the way, before we let everybody go, anybody with information, they're asked to call the tip line at 208-883-7-180. You can email tipline at CI. Moscow.id.us and also you can submit digital tips at fbi.gov slash

Moscow, Idaho. Joseph Scott Morgan, thank you so much for taking the time is a really interesting discussion. You bet, buddy. And that's all we have for you here on Sidebar, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us here. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jesse Weber. I'll speak to you next time. You can binge all episodes of this law and crime series ad free right now on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.