Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Death Investigator on The Most Bizarre Deaths He's Investigated

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Death Investigator on The Most Bizarre Deaths He's Investigated

Those of us that inhabit this space are very well aware of death of weights around any corner. It's like everywhere it goes populated by ghost. Look, as we're having this conversation, there are people out there right now. Right now, as we speak, that are standing over a dead body and they're faced with these same questions. Not a lot of kids grow up thinking, hey, medical examiner, coroner, coroner, that's what I'm going for. So how did you end up, you know, what was when you were in school, you know, you were born and raised? Like, what was your goal? To be in the military, that was my whole goal, eventually just to get away from my home life.

My mother was married twice, married to my biological father. My dad never graduated from high school. My mother had to go back and get her college degree. But, you know, when I was, I guess, five or six, my father tried to murder my family, including me. So my grandmother hid me beneath a bed. And that, as you can imagine, had a lasting effect on me. I knew, even as a small child, whatever he was, I didn't want to be that. And as time went on, my mother married a person that was equally as horrible.

I knew that I didn't want to be that either. And so I purposed in my life to try to do something else. And I was out on my own by the time I was, I don't know, I guess I was, well, I joined the National Guard in high school. And so I went off to basic training. And I was 18, you know, when I left, celebrated my birthday in basic training. And it was a way for me to escape. But I didn't have a dime to my name. And so after failing out of college, I'm a college professor now, but I actually feel.

failed out of college. I've landed in back in New Orleans. I have to back up. I grew up in Georgia. My father had gotten home from the Marine Corps. And the reason he had been in the Marine Corps is that back then in the 60s, if you

committed a violent act, they used to give these young men a choice. They'd say, you're either going to the penitentiary or you can join the Marine Corps during the Vietnam. And he chose the Marine Corps. And when he got back, of course, he wasn't any better. her. And he proceeded to take me and my mother to Georgia and then abandon us there. We had some

cousins that lived there. So I knew early on that as soon as I could get out of Georgia, I would leave and probably go back home to New Orleans where my family is. And I started working in a hospital while I was going to college and a community college. Happened to be the hospital where the parish had, they were using the morgue in the hospital to handle all of their cases because their morgue, the parish morgue is like a county. The parish morgue was having to be renovated. And there's not a lot of renovation you can do. I can tell you all about the morgue. It was actually built on the side of the old gallows down in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. But I became fast friends with a forensic pathologist. And here I am. I'm some stupid kid that has

no idea. I started going to autopsies in my free time and cleaning up around the morgue and eventually one of the pathologists, the guy that kind of wound up taking me under his wings said, because I'd just show up. I'm not getting paid to do this. It was just intellectually stimulating for me. And he looked at me one day because I'd been scribing for him, which means that I have a notepad and he's covered in blood. So I would sit there and I would take his notes, organ weights. measurements, you know, all of these sorts of things that were, you know, kind of going on in that that world. And I began to see it from the ground up. And I understood form and function what they were doing, even though my education had not risen to that level. And he looked at me one day

and said, do you want to close? I was like, yeah, sure, I'll close. And so. Yeah. Yeah, I was sitting there, and you get this needle that's shaped like an S. It's about this long, and it's shaped like an S. And it's actually threaded with kite string. And it's like sewing up a turkey, you know, at Thanksgiving, your stuff in a turkey or something. And you sew the bodies back up that way. You know, the, you hear people hear about the Y incision that bodies have, and that's, well, you've got to close that back up. And, you know, the organs are all placed into like a plastic bag and set into the open cavity, the brain included, and you have to stitch it up. Now, the funeral home's going to rip all that stuff out anyway, and some funeral homes

will incinerate the organs or they'll be buried with the bodies. You know, it's going to be dependent. But anyway, I did that for a while and got good at closing. And then one day he looked at me, I was still there, like a hair in the biscuit, as they say in the South. Do you want to open? I was like, yes, sir, sure do. I hand me the scalpel.

And I was terrified the first time because I, You know, first off, I'm worried about cutting myself. I'd watch them do it. And, but I took to it like a duct of water and just started opening bodies and taking out the organs. Can I ask a question real quick? Sure. Did you just say that they take the brain and they put everything in the incision and the cavity? Yeah, after it's dissected.

Like when the- So they don't put the brain back in your head? No, the heads are empty, you know, if they've been autopsied. And we, we, the skill of opening ahead is something you have to work at. It's not an easy task. You have these ad, you hear in TV they make, you know, there's a lot of stuff they do in media, you know, that you know, and you hear that high pitch buzzing sound that zz, you know, sound like, well, that's, that's an agitating bone saw. Stryker, it's like, say, saying the striker saw is like saying Kleenex. strikers, the oldest company, they make gurneys and all that stuff, but they're, you know,

in our world, they're known for their bone saws. It works like a calf saw. It just agitates, got little tiny teeth, but to be able to manipulate the same because you have to pull down the scout, you have to incise the scout, pull it down, take off the temporal muscles, and then you have to make the incision with a bone saw. And so, and there's a very particular way you have to do it. And there's, you also have to have an appreciation of depth because if you're talking about a gunshot wound case and it's a through and through gunshot wound you don't want to disturb

the track so you have to be able to open that skull without disrupting the bullet track and it's it's labor intensive to be able to do that some skulls are thicker than others and then once you get it open you know all that has to be photographed with all photography is a big big part of what we do and so you take out the brain and then it's weighed separately and it's dissected separately as each organ system is heart, lungs, liver, everything. And then once we're done with that, it goes back into a bag altogether. They take sections of all these organs and they put them in, it looks like a bait container.

Like a, well, and if formalin is poured in there, which is a form of formaldehyde. So they go back later and they trim the organs, the little samples, and put them on microscopic slides and take them. look at them. So it's a very involved process and it's case depended upon, you know, I've worked on, I've done autopsies before, assisted in autopsies that one single case took us, you know, 13 hours to do because it was so complicated. But, you know, average autopsy, we can be in and out in, you know, I don't know, probably 90 minutes. That's from the first photo that we take to stripping the body down to doing the opening, the closing and getting the body off the table. And you say

next and you bring the next one up. So you're you're now opening bodies, but do you have like, I mean, it's almost like a, it kind of, you kind of start like almost an apprenticeship. For me, I did. You haven't gone to school. You haven't gone to school for this. I was going to school, but no, I had not ascended to the levels of, of an anatomist or anything like that. I was Right. Did you switch at that point? Did you say, hey, this is definitely interested in this and switch like your classes, your, I don't know, start going for a degree in? No, no, I always stayed. It was interesting. I had an interest in the law and then I had an interest in biology. So I studied both. And it just, it was a natural fit for me. Um, you know, when I finally got to my cat dissection in college, I, you know, I did it like I was doing an autopsy. Probably by that time I'd already participated in, you know, I don't know, probably 300 autopsies. So dissecting a cat in human, human anatomy class, which is primarily what they have. You dissect. You work on it as a team. It was kind of very easy for me to do. And, um, um, I, um, um, But yeah, the best, I got to tell you, Matt, the best classroom that I was ever in was a morgue.

I learned more. I learned more in the morgue and visually seeing things, kind of form and function, the dynamics of injury, all that sort of thing. I learned more in that setting than I ever did in some classroom. is to say you're never going to beat experience. I mean, experience is just going to beat the hell out of a degree. You know, hands down. Hands down. You know, it's, you know, and there's many things.

There's, you know, it's the same thing. You know, you'd mention the term apprenticeship. You know, I've got a master's degree and not that that means I'm special. I just, I jump through the hoops of getting a master's degree in forensic science. forensics is interesting though if like my friends that are in ballistics okay that do studies of bullets even if you have a master's degree in forensic science you're still going to do an apprenticeship it's going to take you about two years you know that's after you're done with your graduate training because you have to be spun up so that you understand the nature of cases

you understand the nuances of it and then you want to be board certified and you just to get ready for the test for that particular area is, you know, daunting. Same thing with toxicology. You know, you can go be a chemist. You can get a chemistry degree, but that doesn't mean you know anything about forensic toxicology. Is it a doctor? I mean, you know, just because you get at your medical degree doesn't mean they release you on to patients. You know, they...

Some of the dumbest people I've ever met have MD after their night. Right. So, yeah, I just... You have to do a two-year apprenticeship, right? Yeah. Yeah, well, you know, you'll do an internship. And then you try to get into a residency and dependent upon what that area of that you're studying. You know, in our area, in forensics, it's forensic pathology. And so just to kind of break it down, here's a good lesson relative to coroners as well.

And people will kind of understand this. Depended upon the state that you're in, you can run for the office of coroner. and the only educational requirement would be that you have a high school degree and that's it and you're the certifier of death whereas if you go to a jurisdiction that has a medical examiner if ideally if you're going to be a medical examiner you have to be a physician an MD then you have to do a five-year residency in anatomical and clinical pathology which is literally five more years of school after you finish medical school and then if you want to be a forensic pathologist, you have to do one more year in a forensic fellowship somewhere.

Now, when I was in Atlanta, we actually hosted two slots for forensic fellowships, and they're highly competitive. One went to an international student, one went to someone from the U.S., and those spots are highly competitive. But, you know, in forensic pathology, it's one of the few medical practices where the more education you get, the less money you make. Because the only place you're going to practice forensic pathology, unless you become an independent consultant, is for a government agency. So if you just stopped at being a clinical pathologist or anatomical pathologist where you're

working in a hospital looking at amputated legs or, you know, trying to make tumor diagnoses and all these sorts of things, you'd be doing really well. You know, $350,000 a year, whatever it is. if you're in a group, if you're head of a group, even more than that, to, you know, you're working stiff. If you're, no pun intended, if you're a forensic pathologist, because you're going to work for a county government. And, you know, you're not going to make that kind of dough as, so, and the hours are long, and you've got to travel to testify, and you're around seeing horrible things, screaming families and decomposing bodies and all that stuff. And we don't have that many forensic pathologists in the country. And the ones that we do have that are, they're going to go to the major population areas, right? That's where they're going to practice most of them.

You know, the little county that I live in in Alabama, we don't have a need for a forensic pathologist. But if we want one, our location, the bodies, literally, if we have something happened here, the bodies here have to be taken almost two and a half hours away to be autopsy by a forensic pathologist and so it's it's an interesting world to to inhabit most people don't think about it my wife even said that on our our second our first date we're sitting across the table from each other a pizza joint she says you know until i met you i've never thought about death you can take that however you want to take it because most people don't most people don't yeah yeah there's all kinds a job that you just don't really realize they even exist, but then when you start thinking about

it, you're like, oh, well, yeah, you're right. Somebody has to do that. Yeah, yeah, you're right. And it's, but anyway, I, I prattled on about that. I hope that people, you know, kind of understand that and the dynamic of it, but it's a fascinating world. If you're intellectually driven, you know, by science and understanding, you know, the science of death and trying to make sense of it and you know you try to help the families understand what happened because it's not you know people always think about because of television when you hear coroner medical exam or they automatically think of homicides that's just not the case man uh you know only about one percent of all the deaths that we investigate are homicides we investigate all the homicides that occur in a jurisdiction but you know

we've got four other manners of death you know you got suicide which generally outpaces homicide two or three to one, you've got natural deaths that most of us are going to die of heart disease. That's the normal one killer from a natural perspective. You've got accidental deaths, car accidents, you know, probably kill more people in this country than anything else from a traumatic perspective. And then you've got undetermined deaths. So those are the five categories that we work on. And then all the various causes of death kind of fit under that umbrella. The umbrellas of manner. So if you've got suicide, homicide, accidental, natural, undetermined, if you've got a gunshot wound case, well, that can fit under homicide, suicide,

accidental, or it can be undetermined. So, you know, the cause can fit under any number of those categories. You can have a hanging. It can be an accidental hanging or it can be a suicide. It could be a homicide. Those are rare, but you can have a homicidal hanging. So, you know, it's, it's, you're really going through mental gymnastics every day when you're working a case that keeps you intellectually stimulate. I don't know I keep saying that, but it does. It's one of the things that keep you coming back in a very horrible situation.

You've got to look for something good. And that's really the only thing that I could ever find that really caused me to get in the car and go to work every day. So I was going to say, like the, I was thinking of accidental hanging. I interviewed a police officer, Well, former detective, actually, I shouldn't say that because I think he ended up great.

He retired as a supervisor, but so he was over the detective. So anyway, he, he would go out and he was telling me about a case where the guy was, I'm not going to get it into it. He was had a sexual issue and he was hanging himself while auto eroticism. Yes, well, you know, pleasuring himself. And he ended up, and it went too far. And he hung himself. Yeah. I just, you know, and he was like, listen, this guy, like, when he explains what they found the guy wearing, what he's, I mean, it was just the most bizarre listening to him.

It was just like, what, what went wrong in your life that this is where you're at, that this is how you're, you're getting off. And, and it ends up killing himself, like, so, but yeah, so I can see how sometimes it's, it's like, you're right, it could be accidental, you know, or so could a gunshot wound. You could, you know, absolutely. Generally, I don't buy in when I have, I always take a long look at cases where I hear people trying to sell me on the idea that something's an accidental gunshot wound, particularly when it comes to people that work in law enforcement or our former military that have been around weapons their entire life. And you're telling me that they accidentally shot themselves. I'm going to look at that case a lot harder and try to see if there's something. else going on here like you know I don't know maybe some element within their intimate circle wants to make sure that the family gets insurance money and this person's got suicidal ideation and all those sorts of things that wind up killing themselves well it was an accident and I've had people approach me about that and say well how can you ever prove it will prove to me that it was an accident because chances are you know when I dig back into the history and I find out they

got a history of suicidal ideation which is just thinking about it and And then they've got action. Sometimes they've previously attempted. They've threatened. They're on a myriad of psychotropic medications. They've got a problem with alcohol. They're up to their eyeballs in debt, bad marriages, bad relationships. Sickness, you know, bad health.

You know, all these things come into play and you have to look at it in totality before you can really pull the trigger. No pun intended on the diagnosis or the final determination on manner of death. Yeah, I had a, um, it's fun. Funny you ever, you'll, you'll see on TV, of course, everything on TV is ridiculous, but, you know, it's, it's whatever sums it up as quick as possible, I guess, is that somebody will take a gun and place to their head and pull the trigger. And, and, you know, I always love it when they're like pointing the trigger right here. I'm thinking, he's not going to hit his head. He's going to, you know, I actually had a buddy whose father committed suicide, took the gun, fired the gun. It went through his, what, ocular cavities and came out the other side. So now he's, and he knocked. knocked him out. So now he woke up blind. He's got to now search around blind, bleeding, find the gun and shoot himself again. And this time he actually like went behind his ear and fired and he did kill himself. But it's like they always make it look so easy. Yeah. It's not. And

you know the thing about it is when you're working those cases, I think many in the public think that suicides are far more difficult to investigate than anything else. I'd rather handle you know, a bunch of undetermined cases with decomposing bodies with the most horrible things you can imagine than a single suicide. First off, you're going to have, many times you're going to have a family that's lobbying you to tell you that it's not a suicide. And so you don't know if all the data that's coming in is going to be truthful, okay, and I understand completely, all right.

But then your primary witness, because most of the time suicides are done in private, they don't want to be stopped, those that truly want to. I do it. And then I think this idea that everybody leaves a note, notes are the exception. They're not the norm. I equate it to, if you've ever been to

a location that's got a high cliff and you're there with a bunch of buddies and you're at a river or a lake and, you know, who's going to go first? Who's going to jump off the cliff into the water? And suddenly somebody says, screw it, I'll do it. And I think that for a lot of people that are looking to take their own lives,

it happens that quickly. They will have been ruminating over it for a period of time. And then all of a sudden, they're not going to sit down to take time to write a note because they might talk themselves out of it. And I've actually encountered that where I found multiple suicide notes at a scene that were from previous days where they had started it, didn't finish it, finished the note itself. They'd scratched through it and they kept, it was like they were keeping drafts of it, like you're writing a book. then I've had people that have journaled I remember going through I think it was like a 10-volume journal

one time with a lady that took her life and the whole 10-volume journal was specific to her death talking about all the nuances in her life everything that had happened to her and she had proclaimed in the very beginning you know this is my final writing I'm going to take and it it wound up you know the composition books

that are black and white had the spine in them she had filled up 10 of those and so in front and back pages just writing writing writing um and you know she finally took her life uh i think it was that was actually uh an overdose in a bathtub um warm bath taking and you know there's a whole group of people out there that believe in what's referred to self deliverance you hear about them final exit cases we work those. The guidebook written by this guy, Derek Humphrey, many years ago, where, you know, he gives you methodologies, you know, for people taking their lives. His stuff was on YouTube for the longest time and demonstrating some of the most ghastly things and, you know, how to go

through painful self-deliverance. So there's a whole culture, you know, built up about the same and people latch onto it. And as investigators will see that and we'll look at it and will say, this is a final exit case because it's almost like you're looking at a recipe you know they did this this this and this and they had to learn it from some some location so it's a doctor kivorkian too didn't he have a book that or like a pamphlet that actually would tell you how to do it i mean i know he assisted suicides but yeah he created a suicide machine uh i had an interesting uh conversation and forgive me i cannot remember this gentleman's name he's a fascinating character though and he was the, I think it was the Oakland, Oakland County Medical Examiner, whatever's immediately adjacent

to Detroit. I can't remember which county, forgive me, but he's this Polish guy that's very Catholic. He's got a gigantic family, and he was very stridently anti-suicide, you know, assisted. And Kovorkian picked him out and would do things to. poking and he he actually he actually I don't know if it was once or twice had a patient in the back of a van they left in the parking lot at the medical examiner's office and he hooked up his machine his his death machine you know the drip and said you know you initiate this thing whenever you're ready set the person up and they initiated it I never heard that did that on the

parking lot and so there was you know there's that element to it too. So it's a little dark. Yeah, it's very, oh, look, it's death, man. You know, it's very dark. It's reality. And I think most people won't try to stay away from it, but they, they love to hear about it, you know, but they don't want to hear too much about it. So you, I mean, so you, you, you, you, you continue going to school, you know, you're, well, I guess, I don't know, at some point, did they hire you in the medical exam? Or did you just keep going there just, just for the, practice. No, no, it took me about a year. And I started doing volunteer work for the corner down in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana. And there were, I kept applying. I was so very

young, but I was still showing up to the Morgan working and working a full-time job and going to school. I just knew that that's what I wanted to do. And so as I, as time went by, they had an opening for an investigator and they hired two older guys ahead of me and neither one of them lasted more than six months and they said okay let's give the kid a shot why didn't they last they just they just couldn't do it they was just like I can't I can't be a part of this or chronic alcoholism oh okay yeah which is an issue right yes it is in that industry I only know that because I I spoke with that New York I'm going to say New York, somewhere up north.

They want to say it was New York. A woman, I can't believe I should have written her name down, that she was the medical examinal. I think she was the first medical examiner in New York. I'll send you her information. Was she the chief on your show? Chief of investigations for the office of chief medical examiner? I think that's it, yes.

Yeah, I can't remember her naming. either. I'm going to be with her in Long Island and. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At very in the Hamptons. Very pretty lady, well spoken, but she had a, um, she's funny, my father was an alcoholic and he, she said the same way my dad would. He's like, she's like, oh, I was a drunk. She's like I was a drunk. You know what I'm saying? Just the blatant. It's like when you get to that point, you've gone to AA and you've really just accepted it as opposed to, well, I have a problem. People have downplay. Once you've 100% accepted it, these guys are just like, you know, yeah, Oh, no, I was a drunk.

Like, they don't, they don't try to make it sound sexy or nice or, oh, I have a slight issue. No, no, no. She did the same thing. She's like, oh, I was a drunk. Yeah, we, and you have all manner of addictions in our field. It's not just limited to alcohol. There's drugs, sexual addictions. All these, and one of the things I think that people are trying to do, I'm not saying

that they would not have inclined themselves to those behaviors, were they not in death investigation, however. it's a huge catalyst for it because in our world this is what many people don't understand with cops and we're completely different than cops in our world there's no getting kitty cats out of trees there's no finding lost kids everything is death day in and day out 365 days a year we're notifying families which is a big part of what i did we're trying to assess the dead dead at at scenes then we're participating in autopsies there's there's very little joy to be had and so just imagine getting in your car every day and you're driving to that job i'm not complaining i chose

to do it i'm a creature free will okay i'm not looking for anybody's damn sympathy i did what i did okay um but it is the reality of the world that we look in and look at and i think that as people we don't want to be faced with the end every single day. And I try to convince people to let that sink in. If the totality of what you're doing as an occupation every day has to do with being around death in that context. I'm not talking about being a funeral director, where there's no easy answers and you're bearing witness to arguably some of the worst things that you can imagine. something's got to give.

We're not structured to do that. I went way too long. The last time I left the medical examiner's office in Atlanta was in the back of an ambulance. I thought I was having a heart attack. I thought I'd been having a heart attack for eight months. And I was quivering. Stress, stress or, okay. I mean, I was a panic disorder and got diagnosed before it was cachet with PTSD.

And they put me on really strong medication that the psychiatrist told me, you know, at the time, she said, you know, we've got to slow your mind down. You know, we've got to give you a break for a second. I was just quivering all of the time, shaking uncontrollably, horrible agoraphobia. I couldn't go into big crowds. I always saw the potential for death everywhere I went. Forget walking into a Walmart, you know, or going to, can you imagine going on a Mardi Gras parade if you're, you know if you've got agoraphobia because in our sense you think that you always think that something bad is about to happen because it's it's it's replicating day after day you're seeing these these cases

and then you begin to superimpose yourself upon the dead which is kind of unfair to the dead right to their families but you're the only one bearing witness to it and so after that seed is planted that you're going to die. And, you know, when I wrote my memoir, blood beneath my feet, I kind of anthropomorphized death in that book where kind of having a conversation with death. Death is always on my shoulder. You know, there's one line in there where I say, see this boy, I can do this to you anytime I want. And so you're always traveling with that specter of danger and that.

And right she was, you know, because we're, those of us that inhabit that space are very well aware of the potential that's out there, death, death of waits around any corner. And how do you keep your head clear just to, you know, kind of interpret things? Because that's your job, right? And this is labor-intensive work that you're talking about, where you're having to suss through all this stuff and try to make sense of it. some of the stuff is highly complex scientifically. And, but yet you're fighting, fighting this voice in your head all the time.

And you've got to depressurize. You know, it's really weird. I remember toward the end of my career, I was, we were working 10-hour shifts, which was four days a week. So you work for 10,

and 10-hour shift doesn't mean 10-hour shift because if you catch a case at the end, you're going to be there for 14, 15 hours total. But the, day that I would go on my three-day break dude when I was walking out the door at the Mee's office with my keys in my hand to go get my vehicle

you know what I was thinking about that I was going to have to come back to this damn place in 72 hours so I would go home I couldn't enjoy my wife couldn't enjoy my kids I couldn't enjoy life there's not enough church in the world there's not enough counselors in the world there's not enough damn alcohol in the world I was just thinking there's not there's not there's not um and so you you go out there and then

that's this kind of cycle I'd go on vacation and the first day of my vacation I'd be thinking about that I had to go back and that that's a that's a terrible existence yeah that's a shitty way to live that you know it is and there's people look as we're having this conversation not about me it's just this is where I've come from there are people out there right now right now as we speak that are standing over a dead body and they're faced with these same questions because they're invisible to the rest of the world

it's like the comment that my wife made you know on our first date or second date I never thought about death tell them at you there are people out there doing this there's somebody out there dragging a maggot infested body from beneath a house right now it's been under there for ages and they're the only ones bearing witness to this

and you know they're going to have to bear witness to it do it because nobody else is going to do it yeah i was going to say it's it's like um you know cops that have obviously such such issues you know interpersonal relationship issues and you know and you know and you know you know they'll they'll they'll have you know they always they've got chips on their shoulder well they also see people that they're absolute worse yes i do every single day so you know when you when they approach you and they've got a you know they've got their guard up in there, giving you, looking at you sideways and everything, and you're thinking, what's his

problem? Well, his problem is that, you know, four days ago, somebody shot at him or one of his buddies got shot at or he went and some guy had, you know, stuck his child in a microwave or, you know, he's, he's seen the absolute, he sees periodically, maybe not every day, but every other day, he's seen the absolute worst of people showing up for domestic violence to somebody's house for the third time, you know, so. yeah and it's a treadmill that that never ends you know just it continues because death never that's even that's foolish for me to even say it just it never it never takes a holiday it never ceases and you know sometimes it's even worse on the holidays you know where you you walk into you know home where an entire

family's been wiped out at Christmas Eve and you know and I'm reflecting back to a case right now you know it just came to mine so that's a That's a weird thing when you're around people that do it for a profession. If you go to their home, not their physical home where they live, but their home base, wherever it is that they work. If you're riding a car with them, they don't reference things by streets or businesses. They'll say, I had a suicide there. I had a homicide there.

I had a natural death there. Man, I pulled a guy of a chimney over here that had been in there for three months. Or, you know, I had a car collapse on a guy in this garage. and that's that's the lens that we view the world through uh i hate to go to atlanta you know i hate to go to i hate going there i had to generally fly out of Atlanta um because it's not that i necessarily hate Atlanta i hate the traffic but um it's like everywhere i go it's populated by ghost you know everywhere you go and and i'm sure that if you had an investigator from dallas or la or it it Bismarck, you know, it doesn't matter. They would tell you the same thing that when they see

the world that they inhabit, it's populated by the ghost of these cases, not the people themselves, but just those things that are, you know, kind of, and it, you know, snaps in your mind and you reflect back to that moment, and it's weird, smells a big part of what we do. I can, there are smells that will conjure up things, and it's not necessarily bad smells that most people would associate you walk into a house and you can there's an aroma that people have been cooking in the house and something that's and you your mind will trigger back to that moment time's like that smell of fresh baked bread that's in this house you know i remember that now because a husband walked in the kitchen and killed his wife with a claw hammer you know or

something like that you know it's really weird the kind of imprint that it leaves leaves on all of us And I'm not unique in that. It happens to all of us. I would say that's vastly different than when I was in real estate and I would drive through Ebor City. And I'd say, I own those three lots. I sold that house. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, that's a vet.

I have a much different. I do the same thing. But it's, you know, it's all of those are good feelings. Even if it's a bad feeling, it's not that bad. Yeah, yeah. It's like where I live now, I'm so glad that I never practiced as a death investigator here. Because I can ride around, you know, I've got an old pontoon boat that I go out on one of the local rivers, and it's the most peaceful thing in the world to me. I've never, I never had to drag a body out of that river.

Never, I never bore witness to anything horrible. And I don't want to bear witness to anything horrible where I am. It's my little slice of heaven here that I occupy with my family now, and I'm very grateful for it. And you, you just, you know, it's weird. I don't, it would be hard for me to imagine working as a death investigator for 20 to 30 years, retiring and staying in the same location. You would need a change of pace because it's always going to be there as a reminder, you know, no matter what you do, you're taking your grandkids out to a ball game,

or maybe you're going to a little league game and you're thinking about, well, yeah, I worked a case immediately adjacent to this field. You don't want to think about that. But you can't, you can't help it. You're not, you're not, you know, a, you're not a robot, you know, you're not, you're human, your flesh and blood. So you, you became an investigator. How old were you when became the investigator?

I went out on my first scene when I was 20 and became an investigator when I was 21. I was at the time, yeah, at the time I worked, uh, where the, guy named William Eckert, folks can look him up if you want to. He was at the end of his career, and he was like in that, if you've heard of Dr. Bodden, Michael Bodden, many people have. He did like, he was present for Dom. I mean, for Dommer, for Epstein's autopsy. He represented the family.

Okay, so you've got that generation, Bodden, you've got Cyril Weck that's up in Pittsburgh. he, Dr. Eckert preceded that generation. He would have trained that generation of people. So I was with him at the end of his career. And he had told me at that time, he said, you're the youngest medical legal death investigator I know of in the country. I didn't really, I couldn't take the measure of that at that moment, Tom. But, you know, when I look back now at what I was trusted to do,

because it is a sacred trust. because you're talking about death and you're talking about having to deal with families and get families answers. I had no business doing what I did. But early on, I learned a particular way to handle death investigations. It all rooted up from the morgue

and learning what the needs are of the forensic pathologists in the field. And so that served me well when I finally did, you know, put a badge on and start going out as a medical legal death investigator. I was already armed with knowledge of, okay, this is the question that the forensic pathologist is going to ask when

this body gets back to the morgue, I have to find these answers out at the scene. Because, again, back to the template of television, forensic pathologists commonly don't go to crime scenes. You don't want them at crime scenes, right? Why not? So they don't know what in the hell they're doing. Okay. They're great in the morgue, but it's not something, you know, if you're an M.E. investigator, a coroner investigator, you do this day in and day out. You are the eyes and the ears, the eyes and the ears of the forensic pathologist in the field. You're gathering that data to bring in so that they can make their determinations based on what's on the table before them when they walk in. And look, in defense of the forensic pathologist, they don't have

time for this because they're going to have, you know, potentially body stack to the ceiling that they're going to have to go through and do the autopsies on. And for every, autopsy if they do, even though, say, one, you know, I'd give you the time of 90 minutes. Maybe they did one 90-minute autopsy. They still have to examine talks reports, histo reports, get the history, integrate all that in, and then they have to dictate their final findings. And that's just a very simple case that they might have to do that on. If you can imagine, say, for instance, we had a guy that was way,

I don't know, maybe 400 pounds shot in a house trailer in the back bedroom with a 25 caliber pistol. They reloaded seven rounds, dropped the mag, and then reloaded again. He shot a total of 14 times. This guy had this fat thickness that was probably abdominal fat was probably,

I don't know, maybe 11 inches in thickness. And of course, he's large all over. you've got these multiple intersecting bullet tracks that are running through his body and this is obviously an execution style thing guy was in his bed had to cut the wall out of the back of the trailer to hoist him out of that place

that's a complicated case very complicated case and you know and I could cite multiple of those types of things so you're as an investigator you have to be armed with the knowledge of the needs of the forensic pathologists in the field because you get one shot at collecting that data in its pristine state and you want to do the best job you can

because you can't go back to it you know the old adage that that attorneys use about unringing the bell you can't unring the bell you get one shot at visiting that scene for the first time so you got to get it right um and so yeah i was i was a very young man um when i first became an investigator wound up staying in the New Orleans area for about six years. And then inexplicably, I took a position in Atlanta. The state that I swore that I was going to escape, wound up going back there. And I was there for, I don't know, 14, 15 years as a senior investigator with the ME in Atlanta. And so, yeah, that was kind of my trajectory, you know, still dabbled in the morgue, kept my hand to the morgue, you know, working down there, attending autopsies.

it keeps you sharp in our field it does, at least. You know, I think the best captains of vessels are not necessarily the ones that stay up in the steering room all the time. They're the ones that go down in the engine room and understand the guts of how the thing operates. So you have to understand everything that revolves around the death investigation completely, if you're going to be a good one. And you were there, you said 15 years. Yeah, 14 to 15, yeah. What, I mean, was this just any interesting cases in Atlanta that you? The Olympic Park bombing.

Oh, okay. The Buckhead Massacre. We had 16 people kill there. 16 people? Yeah, day trader, actually. You might find that kind of interesting, given, you know, your kind of connection with financial. You remember day trading centers. This is before Scott trade and things like. that he walked in mark barton's the guy's name he walked in he had already killed his wife and two or three kids in a Jason county beat them to death put them in a in a closet and then went to the day trading center had one in buckhead which is kind of the the high end area in Atlanta

and just walked into a day trading center and was this in I think this was in 99 and walked in and just started killing people just randomly and it was it was kind of surreal and that's one of the things that I had buddies of mine that were at Columbine for instance that were corner investigators had one in particular that was from the Denver office that went up and worked he he and his partner did nothing but work cleopold and Harris's bodies that's it and they didn't work the rest of the scenes or the rest of the cases and that's one of the things that I like to talk about. If you're trying to understand the world that we inhabit, it's, I use this phrase. I say, we're always having to view the abnormal in the

context of the normal. So if you walk into a day trading center, you know, a lady might come to work. She might have a nice business suit on. but underneath the desk she's taking those high heels off and she's put on her house shoes because it makes her feel comfortable. We walk into that environment and she's got

a circular defect in her back in her pink business suit and blood has streamed out of it and she's laying there laying there in a pool of her own blood she's aspirated it out and the computer screen is still glowing

in front of her and her colleagues are dead around her as well. That's what I mean by observing the abnormal, the context of the normal. It's one of the things that's so shocking to the system, I think, for most of us, where you're in that, you're in that environment and those things that are otherwise normal are, it's not like death occurs in a vacuum in some kind of pristine, clean space. It doesn't.

It happens in people's kitchens. It happens in the rumpus room. It happens on a boat. It, you know, it can happen in any number of locations. And I think for us, that's one of the things that makes it difficult sometimes because we can all identify with us human experiences. It's just that death is the experience in this particular case. So the day trader thing, I mean, this guy was what, like a broker, a stock broker? Yeah, he would go there.

He would go there to do just day trading. You know, like I said, it was before the days of, of, you know, these online stock trading. platforms that exist you would have to go to a location with a with a bank of computers and you would essentially I got the impression the way it worked was that you would buy time at this computer so that you have access to all the tickers and being able to do all the exploration and it's hardwired in there it's you know even though we had internet you know back in 99 it was dial-up and so you could this is kind of a real-time environment you know that they could work

in I'm not gonna say like it's like being on the street in New York, but it was the closest thing that you could have. And I think that some people did well. Some were hobbyists. Some people were full time. But, you know, he drugged his psychopathology into that environment. Those people had no idea that that was coming. And so he goes in. He executes, what, 10 or 12 people? Because he said he executed his family already. With what? A handgun. And then by that point, the police show up, or does he take his own life. No, he, that was, that was kind of the thing that terrified everybody. Um, he bolted out of there, hopped in his minivan and was on the run for the rest of the day until they caught up with him

north of Atlanta, uh, along I-75, a little town up there at a gas station and SWAT. Police had surrounded his vehicle and he capped himself in the front seat of his, of his car. Um, and interestingly enough about that fellow Mark Barton, that was his name. He was suspected in the murder of his first wife and mother-in-law. I remember beat him to death with a hatchet

in a camper out by a lake years earlier and they never could hang that on him. That was over in Alabama, actually, where that happened at State Park or someplace like that. So, yeah, you know, you see things like that. And it kind of sometimes, it's very, you have those very surreal moments where you're standing there and you're thinking it's, it's almost out of body.

You know, you're kind of thinking, you know, it is, is this really happening? Am I, you have like a lucid moment, you know, where your humanity rises to the top and you're standing in the middle of this chaos. And you're thinking, am I really? really here is this really occurring and you have to kind of stop yourself you know if you're if you're there and somebody is you know you know they've dismembered somebody and you're standing there over a dismembered corpse you've got broken saw blades that are laying around there's blood everywhere there's an attempt to clean up you have all of that and you're trying to look at that with a

very as clinical view as you possibly can but your flesh is with you at all times and so you're you're process, I think, within the context of who you are as a person, and every now and then, and sometimes it doesn't, it doesn't always happen when you're at the scene. You'll shake your head and say, you know, everybody else will say, I've never seen anything like this, and you go about your business. But it's when it's in those, you know, the we small hours, you know, those images come back to haunt you, or you're sitting in your car and you're sitting there thinking, I can't do this anymore. I had a dear colleague of mine that this individual and great investigator, and they had caught over a period of, I think it was, dang, I'm going

to get the numbers wrong. It's either like a five or six week period. They caught five separate baby deaths over that period of time. And it hit this individual very hard. And we worked the overnight shift together. I was a supervisor. And I remember this individual would get to work early every night. And I could look down from my desk into the parking lot. And I would see them pull up in their car. And you could see the glow on the dashboard because the radio was playing.

And they would get to work 30, 40 minutes early, but they would never walk into the office until that last minute. And so finally one day, my colleague came in and their eyes are swollen. I'd seen this couple of times, red, and they looked at me and said, I can't do this anymore. I can't look at another dead kid. I just, I can't do it. And for good reason, you know, again, it goes back to what you're equipped to do. And there's no, for years, there's been no mental health care for people that work in

my field. When I went through what I went through, my wife, who was pregnant at the time, we were faced with the reality that I was going to not have a job because the psychiatrist they had sent me to, the county had sent me to, told me that, that, you know, if you try to go back. I'm going to have you judicially committed. And it was a real eye-opener for me. And you're sitting there and you're thinking, well, what in the hell? This is all I know. I mean, I don't know any, I don't have any other skill. I don't have any other trade. You know, I don't know what to do. This is. And that reality hits you of what you, of what you are, what you've, you know, become, you know, at that period of time. And your own humanity kind of

grabs you by the throat at that point, Tom, and drags you kicking and screaming into reality. And your reality changes. It certainly does when you get out, you get out, and you're now faced with a proposition that, you know, there's not going to be going back to the morgue or anything like that or seeing dead bodies, which it sounds insane because I think a lot of people would say, well, that's a good thing. You don't want to.

It's all I knew. It's all I knew how to do. And I felt as though I was really good at what I did. And, you know, I developed training for investigators nationwide that was approved by DOJ. And we set up certifications and did all that stuff. And it was in, it was in ruin for me. I didn't know what I was going to do. And thankfully, academia came calling.

I was just going to say, was this in Atlanta? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And the lady had, I remember my wife, because I was just this quivering mass. I can't really describe it any better than I was almost child. of like.

And my wife contacted the county, which interestingly enough is Fulton County, which is in the news right now. And I remember my wife saying, weeping and telling me, you know, that she was told that, yeah, even though I was diagnosed with PTSD, that back then the lady had told her, she said, yeah, he's not going to get any disability for this because to mean people can fake PTSD. and so you know you got a man up at that point in time you know i was a dad i was a husband i was a provider and you got to do what you got to do man and that's what i did wound up going into academia it's the best decision i made yeah i was going to say was this like a um like a full-blown

just panic attack that was multiple panic attacks right yeah i went to three the psychiatrist that they had sent me to i didn't stay with that individual. I didn't want to go to a psychiatrist because I knew that they would just put me on a regimen of drugs forever and ever amen. You know, there's very little therapy that comes along with that. Farm of therapy, I guess. I went through three therapists before I got to one that I could settle on the first two. When I began to tell them the stories and the nightmares I was having, they didn't have any point of reference for it. I had a reoccurring nightmare where I was on a barge

in the middle of the Mississippi River and I'm nude. I'm laying on a barge on a steel deck and it's like my body's glued to the thing. I can't move and the barge is spinning out of control the middle of Mississippi. I'm surrounded by decomposing bodies and the flies were lighting on me and they get in my mouth and I couldn't move my head and that was a reoccurring nightmare. And I remember this one therapist that I went to, they're sitting there, and they had, their mouth was, you know, open. They, they had no response to that. Right. You know, normally the therapist is the one saying, so how'd that make you feel? Right. And, and finally, I settled on a guy that was a Vietnam vet that had PhD and had been through quite a bit of, quite a bit over a period of time. And over, and over, and, and,

He began to work with me. And that's kind of how my memoir came forward because it was a therapeutic memoir. And I was one of those kids in school. I hated, if you ever had one of those teachers in high school, said, we're going to journal today. I hated that crap. But they said, you need to start writing these stories down. You need to start writing about this. And I wrote and just wrote literally one reviewer said it's like the old adage about you bleed on the keyboard.

They said that he took the, he took the Grim Reaper scythe and cut his throat on the, on the keyboard and just bled. And I did. I wept as I wrote. And I'm not a, I'm not some, I wrote technical stuff all the time, you know, forensics reports. Best thing I ever did, therapeutic novel, therapeutic memoir. Yeah, I definitely, I definitely think, right, because I was, when I was incarcerated, I wrote my memoir. And going through that was extremely therapeutic, you know? It really helps you work out things and face things that you, you don't think about.

You just, you know, like I used to say, you know, like I would tell somebody something, be like, you never think about that, but like, well, no. And I said, well, I mean, I, I acknowledge that it's there and that it happened. But I used to say, you know, but I, they're like, what, how do you, how do you disassociate yourself with that? I was like, well, it's like, I take it and I put it in a body. And I close the box and I put it on the shelf and I know it's on the shelf, but it's in the box on the shelf. So it's there, but I don't think about it because I know it's over there. And when you were talking about panic attacks, I was thinking prior to being incarcerated, you know, I used to get panic attacks all the time. Like I'd been given, oh shoot, what is that? They give you a Xanax. I'd been given Xanax for it. And, you know, and it's so funny that when they would hit. It would never be during a stressful time.

It was like I'm walking through the supermarket doing the most mundane thing. And then suddenly this wave would come over me. My whole body would get tingly. And I remember thinking the most irrational thing, which was that I was about to die. It was almost like God is about to reach down and just snuff you out. And I would immediately have to just sit down. And I would like sit down on a case of, you know, two or three, you know, six packs of Coke or something. and just sit down.

And even though I knew it was irrational, I knew you're having a panic attack. You're not going to die. There was a whole other part of me that was saying, you're about to die. Yeah. It's over. You know, and it's so funny because there was these two. For a limited time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash brown and a small iced coffee for five bucks plus tax.

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Sometimes I'd be standing there and tears are rolling down my eyes. I have no idea why. And then I'd stand up and I'd keep shopping and go about my day. And it was just, it was, in explaining to to somebody who's never had a panic attack, it sounds insane. And even going through it, because rationally, I knew this is what's happening right now. It's not rational. What you're thinking is not rational. It was still an overwhelming experience every single time. Every single time. Yeah. And that's, and you wait for the next shoe to drop the next time it's going to happen because you don't, early on, you don't really know what that mechanism is that's going to set this thing off. With me, I knew it was crowds. There were certain things I couldn't watch on

television. And what was really weird, man, is that I remember being in the middle of going through therapy and the therapist, telling the therapist that I, you know, had taken a position as a college professor. Where are you going to teach? It's like, I'm going to teach forensics. And they were like, well, was that a good idea? And I was like, well, it's the only idea I have and it's all that I know to do, it's a natural evolution, you know, from what I, because I'd always taught, you know, one way or another, whether it was young doctors that were coming in trying to learn how to go into the field or crime scene technicians or, you know, cops at the academy or, I don't know, the garden club. I would go and speak, you know, places. But it turned out

that for me it was the most therapeutic thing and when I was around these college kids because I could talk about these cases and it was look I was at a beautiful location I was up in the Blue Ridge Mountains and North Georgia University of North Georgia is where I was and I'm forever grateful to them for the opportunity they gave me when I got up there and I began kind of in a very academic way I mean it's still being an instructor but it was I was purging before these kids. They had no idea that this was occurring, but I would talk about cases

and kind of the practical application of forensic science to these examples I could give them. And it was over a period of time, those attacks began to lessen and lesson and lesson and the more distance I could get

from them. And also movement, you know, getting out in movement. And then realizing that, hey dude, when I shut my office door on Friday. I don't have to come back until Monday. And guess what? The semester's not going to last forever.

We're going to have a midterm, then we're going to have final, then I get a break. And that's a weird place to be in when all you've done, all those years is be around death, and it just never stops. It's kind of like a really sinister version of that, of the Lucy show, you know, with her and, and Ethel or whatever, and they're in the candy shop. And she's sticking candy, you know, down in her bra, and they're trying to package the candy. keeps coming and coming. It's a more sinister type of thing like that. You just imagine the dead bodies just keep coming and coming and coming. And so for me, it was academia was the best thing.

And then when academia, after I'd been there for, I don't know, maybe six years, that's when the media started. And blood beneath my feet was published. And then I started appearing on, you know, on all of these television shows and rendering, you know, not rendering, but offering up. a view of death relative to these cases. You know, Jody Arias was roughly the big, the first big case that I worked on.

And I did that with HLN in Atlanta. Back when HLN and CNN had money, they'd send a limo to come pick me up and take me to Atlanta. It doesn't happen now. They wouldn't even reimburse you for a bicycle ride at this point. I was going to say, yeah, and it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist anymore in Atlanta anyway. But that's kind of how I,

I got my start and, um, and it's just been, I've been going, you know, nonstop ever since then. You know, it just, it's, it's morphed into this other thing that I never thought that I would have because I've just got this unique skill set and, you know, and I offer commentary on all these cases, you know, that occur all over the country and I've been doing it now for Lord, I don't know, I guess 13 or 14 years, you know, doing media appearances. and now it's just it's every single day I'm on some news platform and then with the podcast you know I just talk about these cases and I use I use a platform to try to teach people is really is really what I'm doing basic science you know and understanding of science basic science to the application of trying to solve crimes and it's it's it's invigorating for me I enjoy doing that and you know, I try to be as, I don't know, unbiased and try to stay right in the middle with everything I do, you know, just try to present the facts as I see them.

When did you start your podcast? I've been at it for about a year. Well, I'm on the 175th episode right now, I think. I'm actually laying down two this afternoon. So do two episodes per week. So do the math, I don't know, I've been in it for probably about a year and a half, maybe coming up on two years. Sorry, I was going to say, do you interview other people? No.

I have a partner that I'm on air with, and we take a case. A current case most of the time, I try to do, I do a lot of adjudicated cases, but recently adjudicated cases where I can get access to the data, autopsy reports, that sort of thing, and kind of break that case down. Because people have been following these on the news and in court, you know, because I, That's a big segment that I serve because I appear on court TV twice a week. And then I'm on Law and Crime Network, Dan Abrams Network. I'll do that generally twice a week as well. In addition to the stuff that I do with Nancy Grace because I'm on her platform as a forensics guy with her, that'll generally happen a couple of times a week.

And then, you know, last night I was on Fox about the case in Athens at the University of Georgia with the young lady that was killed by the immigrant, the illegal immigrant. And she was beating the death. That's, of course, been in the news. And it's always, you know, there's always another case that will pop up. And, you know, there's always something to talk about relative to, you know, cases there. But I try to break down the forensics. there's there was you know for the longest time you know they talk about what was referred to as the CSI effect really influences courts in a very bad way they had gotten to the point during the

void year when they're picking a jury they'll say do you and it was an involved forensic case they'd say do you watch do you watch CSI that was actually one of the questions they would ask potential jurors and how how ridiculous is that and so they would gauge, you know, whether or not to have someone on a jury or not or exclude them based upon, you know, their consumption of crime television. And so it was just saying it was getting to be a problem, though, wasn't it? Because like, you guys are asking for, do you have DNA? You have every single time.

Right. Yeah. And they don't have understanding. I had a suicide that I worked toward the end of my career. right at the very, very wealthy fellow that shot himself in his study. I don't know about you. I don't know too many people that have a personal library room. And this guy had this fantastic home, big oak door.

He locked it from the interior, had psychological problems way, way back. And shot himself with a skeet gun, killed herself in a locked room. And the wife was just in the house when it occurred, you know, and she was just going on and on about, you know, well, This is, how do you know that this is a suicide? I was like, well, ma'am, your husband's been in our therapy for years and years. He's on these medications. He's talked about suicide in the past.

Yeah, but how do you know? I was like, well, I don't know, but I can tell you the forensic pathologist. He's probably going to rule this as a suicide. So I'm exiting the house and I'm going down the driveway heading toward my vehicle. The driver has already removed the body. And she came out of the house yelling to me. It's not at me, but to me as I'm, you know, Investigator Morgan, Investigator Morgan.

I was like being as patient and polite as I can to turn around and say, yes, ma'am. She says, you said that you had ruled out everything, but did you sweep the room from mitochondrial DNA? I'm thinking, how in the hell do you even know about mitochondrial DNA? And it's because of television, you know, I, you know, and I'm sitting there, you know, it was hard to kind of take the measure of that at that, and how much more so? Because this is now years and years later, you've got true crime everywhere now. And that's made up crime, you know, when you think about the fictionalized things that they have on televisions, you know, NCIS and all the stuff, really gave me a pause to think, you know, show NCIS is kind of funny.

I was thinking, God, Navy must be a very violent place. They've got naval criminal investigator service, you know, and how many homicides do they actually work, you know, and that sort of thing. It's kind of comical, you know, but it has, it's changed the conversation over a period of time. And so what I do with my podcast is that I chat about the science and try to educate people as best I can in, you know, 30 to 40 minutes, you know, twice a week and talk about those sorts of things. I try to do the same thing on television as well as best I can. Okay. Yeah, I was just thinking about all the things like I had spoken with somebody one time. he was a doctor or something he was talking about just the inaccuracies there's like like a bullet

like a a gunshot wound he's like like they always make such a huge issue that you have to remove the bullet yeah we almost never remove the bullet he's like you know he's like you're not digging back in there to find a bullet and do more damage when the bullets probably find where it is yeah unless it's next to he's like unless it's in your spine or next to your a nerve or you know it's not bothering you we leave it alone he's like but that's always the thing lay him down And we've got to get the bullet out. Yeah. And you're going to wind up, they'll wind up doing more damage than they will.

You know, all the little micro vessels that they'll clip and all that stuff. And if they can stem the bleeding and get this person on the road to recovery, maybe down the road, they'll consider extricating thing. But, you know, the idea, a lot of these ideas are translated, they're translated for the screen. And I take a lot of pride in the fact that I've never watched a full episode of, of, CSI. Is it just too hard? Is it too hard to watch? No, no, no. I just try to keep myself because I would I would find myself, my daughter watched it when she was still at home and she would ask me questions about it. And I would try to not watch it on, I never watch shows like that. I only watch history stuff and reruns a Seinfeld primarily. And, you know, history stuff on YouTube is what I

dig, you know. But I would, I would try to keep my, mind as pristine as I possibly could away from the stuff. And one of the big, I would hear from colleagues that would talk about it. And they would be in different types of practices in forensics. It could be anything from handwriting to DNA to toxicology to ballistics or anthropology even. And one of the biggest knocks against the show, the whole series, was that you had individuals that would be essentially an amalgam of multiple practices within. So if you're,

you've got somebody that's a, a ballistics expert and, oh, by the way, they also know stuff about DNA. Well, those, you might know stuff, but you're not going to be an expert in both those fields. It's like saying, you know, you're a master ironworker and you're a master furniture maker. You can't be a master in both those areas.

You pick one and you choose to do it. And, of course, the counter argument to that is, well, it's TV. only got 40 minutes, you know, if you take out the commercials, you know, in order to get storytelled. But, you know, they, they would have, you know, there's so many practices within forensics now that if you say that you're a forensic scientist, it's like saying I'm a doctor. Well, the next question be is, what kind of doctor are you? What kind of physician are you? Because I'm not going to go to a psychiatrist for a broken leg. They're not all

the same, you know. So you have to be very specific. And there's a lot of snake oil that's out there too. There are a lot of people that claim or proclaim that they're an expert in multiple areas. And my contention has always been, you can't be. I know a lot about some things, but I'm not going to sit on a stand and proclaim that I'm an expert in a particular area. And the area I dance in is medical legal death investigation. So back to your podcast. Is it audio only? Yes. Yes. It is audio only. And Um, you know, it's, uh, you know, it's, it's on all of the platforms. But yeah, it's, it's audio only at this particular time. Um, uh, there have been people that have tried to get me to make the move over to, uh, to a video pod. Uh, um, but that, you've got a setup. It just hasn't. It hasn't happened yet. Um, and that, that, that day might come sooner than later, perhaps. it's intriguing to me because I got to tell you one of the things that say for instance if I could be on air and I could do say for instance a demonstrative you know this is a 40 caliber pistol round okay right and I would you know I'd want to talk to them about well do you guys understand where the primer cap is well it's at the end that little silver disc right there how does it function you know what what is a primer strike you know what's the difference between is is a

bullet, the same thing as a projectile, no. What's the difference between a live casing and a spent casing? This is brass. You know, what were you looking for in gunshot residue? You're looking for barium, antimony, and lead if they're doing gunshot residue test on people. And so there's a lot of demonstratives that I could probably do in a very tight space that would help, you know, people, because people, most people are visual learners, I think. It's really hard to understand some things, you know, just by a chatting about it. So that element, hopefully it might be introduced

at some point, Tom. I'll have to see. Yeah, I was going to say that Spotify now is allowing you to upload a video also. Yeah. So, and I think that they're paying more

for the video uploads. So I was going to say, I guess they're trying to maybe compete. I mean, you know, I didn't get a memo or anything, so I have no idea. But I'm assuming the only reason

they would do this is they have a huge following. People are using it more and more. And they're trying to kind of, you know, cut into some of, you know, that YouTube money. The YouTube money, yeah. And, you know, and it's like you don't know, again, I think that this is pretty well understood. You don't know when anything on YouTube might be demonetized for whatever reason. And it's a grand mystery, all of my friends that, you know, have interest on YouTube and that sort of thing. That's one of the big head scratchers, you know, where suddenly just this beast rises up from

nowhere and you don't know why you're not getting views you don't know why you know the the revenue stream is you know it's down to a trip at that point in time um there's no predictability to it and life is not predicted but there's certain things you should be able to count on particularly when it comes to you're producing the same thing so you yeah you would think but yeah and so i haven't i haven't concerned myself with that portion of it yet and i do i do obviously do a lot on television. I've got the camera set up in the background and all that stuff. And that's kind of

where my interest lay right now and then doing the, and then I appear on a lot of other podcasts, particularly with KT Studios, that's done the Piked and Massacre. Murder 101. There's Death Island. There's a bunch of those that I've appeared on. And then the television

shows that have come along with them. Pikes and massacre is certainly something I've been involved in for four years. years now. One of the most fascinating cases in America that no one's really heard of or talked about that much. Family up in Ohio killed an entire other family, eight people in one night at four separate scenes. So that was the number one podcast in the country for a while, and I was part of that. Really enjoyed that and wound up being on the oxygen special where I went up to Ohio and visited all the crime scenes or where they were. They were all killed in trailers,

mobile homes, and they're not there any longer. But, I mean, it took. It took. It took a lot of the measure of it, you know, and really kind of translated what people have been hearing on a podcast to video in that sense. And of course, Oxygen did a beautiful job as beautifully filmed by a lady named Catherine Park.

Why? Why did they? Well, no, there was some drug elements, but the biggest thing, and here's the really sad thing is very sad. It was all over a child custody issue about the son of the

the family of perpetrators, the son of which was one, and he's been convicted now. It was over a child that he had had with one of the young ladies that was part of the other family, and he actually shot her in bed adjacent to the child that she had recently had by another guy, and that child was found the next morning still alive, but covered in smothers on blood. and that happened at another one of the scenes where he shot the father shot a father and another young mother left their newborn in bed with them and actually nuzzled a baby adjacent to the mother's breasts so the baby could feed off of the dead mother. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's a super, super sick case. And actually, the last case is about to be taken to trial. May up in Ohio. The father, the father that was the wife, he and his wife and his sons planned all of this

together and they actually went out and perpetrated it in one night. Well, the father's finally coming to trial. He'll be the last one. And that's happening in May, May 4th or May 8th, I think is when his trial was scheduled. Just when you think your family's screwed up. Yeah. You can't take the big. The measure of it, dude.

Yeah. There's always another train wreck around the corner. Wow. Yeah, you're right. And then you do stuff with Nancy Grace also, right? I do stuff with Nancy. Yeah, I sure do. I have for a number of years.

She was actually with the prosecutor's office in Atlanta when I was with the M.E. Our past didn't cross that much. But, yeah, we were, we occupied that same space for some time. I've been with her. Actually, I was on her last broadcast with HLN. before she hung it up with Warner. And so, and of course she's had the big,

it's been all over the news. You know, she's entered into an agreement with Dr. Phil now. And he's starting his own network. And she's going to be a big part of that. Yeah. And so it's called the Merritt Street Media, I think,

or something like that. And I had appeared, I'd actually appeared on Dr. Phil show, I think, and I'd never been around Dr. Phil at all. But when the Idaho case happened, they had me out for that and appeared, I think, three times in regards to those cases and then two more. And just hell of a nice guy. I mean, very, very friendly fellow.

And, you know, he completed, you know, a 20-year run, which is unheard of. I mean, absolutely unheard of in that space out there. anything about Hollywood and kind of the way those things work. And what was really amazing about it when I was out there was, I was there the day that they announced that he was shutting down. So it was a very sad day for all the crew.

People don't think about everybody that makes the show happen. For that person that you see up on the stage, there's huge collection of producers and technicians and costumers and all that stuff. And what was really weird was the fact that a lot

of these people had been with him for the entire time out there and that's unheard of in LA they'd worked with this man for all this time and they you know they many of them I'm sure that their every organization has sour grapes but they they were just going on

and on about what a kind solely he is and you know how kind and generous he had been with them over all the years and it was it was a weird kind of a weird space to be in that particular day when they announced that um so it's kind of a

Is it five layers of Kevin Bacon? What is the term? Seven layers of kids? Six degrees of separation. Six degrees. Yeah. So I wrote a story because when I was incarcerated, I wrote true crime stories. Like I would meet you, you hear guys stories, right?

And you're like, how is this not a story? Like how is this not a, yeah, but you know, most inmates. And it's not because they're necessarily inmates, but just most people in general. Right. And I'm sure you realize, you know, you don't really see yourself. the way you truly are so it's difficult to write a memoir you know it's it's a lot of introspection where you're you know and people would read it well that's not that's not how people see you um so you know that takes a lot and then people also they get they get bogged down

in these little minute details or they skim over things you know there's just it's just difficult to do so guys would tell me their stories and i would write like a true crime story about them. And, you know, it would be. So if a Rolling Stone story is 6,000 words, an average true crime Rolling Stone article is about 6,000 words. So mine would be eight to maybe 12,000 words. You know, it's not a 90,000 word book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 10,000 words, 12,000. Because I don't really, I'm not rolling stone. I don't have, I don't have the problem with, you know, space, right? Like I can just write. Right. I was locked up and I'm just, I can write. I figured when I get out, I'll put these

all on a website or something. Not that I knew what a, you know, I, I didn't, there was no YouTube when I, you know, I think it'd been out for like a year when I, and I don't think, when I got incarcerated. I'd never actually been on YouTube. Yeah. So I went in there and I ended up getting some guys. I actually got some guys in Rolling Stone. Like I actually contacted a reporter, sent him my stuff that me and the reporter worked together. We ended up writing an article in Rolling Stone magazine. Oh, he smokes. I option the life rights for those guys story. Got to ended up getting a book deal for them. Well, not four. them for me where I wrote that story um what else uh ended up right I ended up writing several books I wrote like seven books actually were like five books and I I wrote another two when I was out but I'd already written written the synopsies so I ended up writing a bunch of true crime stories like synopsies and it was like 20 24 so I just signed a deal for 12 of them with uh law and crime holy smokes really isn't that funny I've actually Kevin Bacon I'm actually going out to meet one of the head guys. I have his name down.

He's been texting me. So I'm scheduled to have lunch with him. I think whatever the fourth is. Is that Monday or whatever? On the fourth in L.A., and I'm in Tampa, so I've got to fly there. Yeah.

Which is funny. And then you meant the Nancy Grace thing is funny because one of the guys that I wrote a story about was in Atlanta. and Nancy Grace tried to indict him. She actually held two, according to him. So she tried, she held two grand juries and couldn't get him indicted. So she handed to the feds and they, of course, indicted him immediately because they can indict anybody. Yeah, yeah.

And so they indicted him and he ended up going to trial. So whenever I hear Nancy Grace, I was saying, hey, she tried to, she tried to indict Frank. There you go. Yeah. And yeah. And the thing about it, I think that a lot of people miss with the media. is that particularly if you get on the new side of things, it's a very small world.

I mean, I can't tell you how many like bookers, you know, people that book individuals that come on air and that sort of thing that I've come across over the years that have moved from CNBC to Fox to ABC to CBS and all points in between. And so it's,

and you come across that with producers as well. You know, they just kind of and it's you know and you can just say well do you know this person oh yeah yeah I worked with them for a time they all have worked with one another um and of course that it's interesting you know a lot of that stuff is is kind of I'm not going to say dying on the vine but they've got to reinvent themselves because when you look at what news nation has done which if you're not familiar with them up here on their shows with Ashley Banfield and a couple other people, Como's on there, and I was trying to think of a couple other was, Vargas, Elizabeth Vargas, she's on there.

They've taken that template and blown it up in a way that, you know, they're svelte, they're lean, they can do things at CBS and those other behemots can't do. And so you have them, you have law and crime and all the stuff that Dan's done with that platform that's just absolutely amazing. because I've been with them since the beginning, you know, just doing trial coverage. It's kind of like it's weird. You sit, you know, sit in this chair and I'll cover a trial live. And it's almost like your commentator or ballgame, you know, because they'll cut to you and say,

well, what do you think about that? You know, if they've got like the ME that's testifying or the criminalist or somebody, you know, and I'll offer commentary. I'll sit there for three hours, you know, and watching the trial. And, you know, and I kind of get hooked on these trials as well. You know, you're watching it.

And then there's people, millions of people. everywhere around the world you know i get stuff from people in great britain i get stuff a lot of people in australia new zealand that watch these trials either over the internet or they'll be broadcast in their countries because you know nobody does it like america when it comes to crime and you get the same thing with with with court tv as well and it's amazing the number of fans that are out there and so it's it's different you know the network those network shows that we were talking about earlier like CSI and all those other things that are out there. It's really weird how that stuff has been kind of supplanted by actual true crime.

There are two different animals completely. And people will sit and they will watch a trial. And obviously you've been inside of a courthouse. It's arguably, I can't speak for you, brother, and I never would. But I'm just saying if you're, I can't imagine. imagine what it would be like sitting at the table and you're on trial. I feel like your experience is vastly different. Yeah, I'm sure that it probably is.

But even for me, you know, when I go into a courtroom, it's tedious. And they're speaking in a language that no one understands. And they're, it's weird. You know, it's a, you've got a guy in a dress. Right. A big elevated table. And everybody's scared of. And everybody's terrified.

And you're damn right. You better be terrified of them. Yeah. And it's a weird world when you think about it. But now people watch this, and they'll consume it. They'll watch these trials. And, boy, are they invested in it? They know all of the players, even the minor ones that come onto the stand, offer their testimony.

They'll critique the attorneys, the prosecutor, and the defense. You know, I remember when what's his name was on trial, the guy that, you know, that showed the jinx. the guy that, you know, the rich guy from New York that he, you know, apparently they charged him with killing a girlfriend out in L.A. His wife, his wife from 82 was missing. He chopped up another guy down in Texas. He had that weird, dyed perm and he had come up with some, he was famous for being, had something to do with music. No, no, no, no, that's Phil Spector. This is the guy. Yeah, yeah. This is a completely different, different fellow. know his name anyway that you know and because of the success of the movie or the show on

Netflix the jinx um it was amazing how many people knew all of the ends and outs of this and for me you know as a commentator I come on and there's not a lot I can say about that case because this lady was executed shot one time at the back of the head not a lot of forensics there but yet I would go on and do commentary and it was amazing the feedback that you get from people all over the world where they're measuring, you know, now the attorneys that try these cases have become stars because of these broadcast cases that are occurring. That's one of the things that's going on in Idaho right now. You know, they're trying to decide if cameras are going to be allowed in the court.

And whoever, if they do finally allow that to happen, whoever's representing Coburger and whoever's representing the state, their name's going to be out there forever and ever, amen. It's going to be a big deal for them. And so all of a sudden, you've got this dynamic where you've had this horrible massacre that has occurred in this little bit of college town in a location that not many of us had heard of before, very peaceful. And suddenly, because of the cachet that comes along with this, suddenly the victims begin to take a back seat. And it interesting, you know, victims can be diminished like that. We know their names now, but, you know, it's because it's been in the news for so long. them, but it will be those people that enter onto the stage.

I was going to say the Casey Anthony case, you know, Jose Bayo, like, who knew, who would have known? And honestly, he was, you know, nobody prior to that. But then he went, he, you know, I don't say conducted that trial, but whatever. He was, you know, he represented her and he was, you know, and he was arguably, you know, really pretty dynamic, you know, especially in front of the camera. And he played it up, and now he is a huge defense attorney. Yes, he is.

And he probably has to turn away business. But, you know, he did what a good defense attorney should do. He won a trial. Doesn't mean that he liked his client. I don't know how he feels about her. I know the half the world, probably over half the world, really despises her. But that's beside the point. It's not the way the justice system works.

It's dependent upon the counsel that you have. You can't throw people in jail because they're assholes. No, you can't. You know, and a lot of it goes to, you know, in my area with forensics, you know, what kind of money do defendants have to be able to present a proper defense? You know, they say that we're all entitled to a proper defense. But, you know, let's face it, if you're some guy that's from a poor family, and you're accused of committing a crime that, in fact, you know, involves complex scientific constructs, you know, forensically. Are you going to be able to pay, I don't know, whatever it is,

that the expert is charging you $350 an hour, first class? Perificly, unfair. Yeah, and so the playing field is not. And, you know, you think about the resources the state has. And when I say the state, I mean, the government, you know, even if it's a state, a state event, state law enforcement has the FBI lab at their disposal. So, oh, okay, we can't get it done here. listen to the boys of the FBI lab they'll work it out for us and so you're you're up against

that that force of nature too yeah I have I'm sure you've got thousands of examples of this but I actually have a buddy of mine named Wade Williams I think he's pushing the pushing the nickname Hollywood Wade but anyway he he runs a a YouTube channel called crime and entertainment and the reason he started it was he and his wife had separated they started seeing other people well then maybe a year later or six months later they decided to give it another go so his wife tells the guy she's saying look I'm going to get back with my husband well the guy's not happy about it so at some point he contacts Wade and this is a very short I'm taking a very complex version but he ends up talking to Wade

with another that one a mutual friend they just have a couple of beers and they talk because the guy the guy genuinely is you know he's like look he was heartbroken yeah he's in love with or he wanted to know, like, was this real? Like, did she really care about me? Have you been seen her the whole time? And he's like, look, and I'm, you know, I'm telling them what he wants to hear. He's like, because the truth is, he's like, I don't want to hurt the guy. I understand it.

He didn't see this coming. He's like, neither did I. So he said, they had some drinks. They end up going back to his place and he's going to drop him off at his house because he's had a few drinks. He's, we're in the house. We're talking. And the guy attacks him. So the guy attacks him in his own house.

Wade is a concealed weapons permit, has a concealed weapons permit. And he said, the guy knew I had my weapon on me. Because, like, when they went to meet, Wade brought it. He said, I didn't know what was going to happen. And he said, but everything had been funny, it had been hours. The guy attacks him in his kitchen. His kitchen has one entry in and out. That's it.

Just one. He said, so I can't get away from the guy. He's like, and then the guy is an ex-marine. Like, he's pulled me up, yanked me. I say he's yanking me around, slams me into the cabinets. I mean, it's, it's not going well. He's, I'm kicking him back, pushing him. He said, we're knocking stuff over.

Like, he's this clearly, if he's punched me in the head a bunch of times, he's got, I've got a bruise on my head in my hairline, but it's there. And so Wade ends up, he said, finally he pushes the guy back. The guy charges again. He said, I pull my gun out and I shoot him. He was, and I even told him at one point, he said the guy had, like, had him by the neck. And he's like, he was, bro, he said, I'm going to, he's, I'm telling you. He said, I'm going to fucking kill you if you, if you don't, you know, he's, we're both

drunk because we're struggling you so i end up pushing him back again the guy charges me again i pull my gun out i shoot him you know i immediately call the police the police come a day or two later they arrest wade and wade says i'm in my house he attacked me yeah i have a concealed weapons permit what are you talking about well when they got they did their forensic report their forensic report said there was no signs of struggle There was no injury on Wade. There was no, there was all kinds of stuff. So Wade, luckily, they end up arresting him.

He gets out on bond. He said, luckily, I had about $100,000 in my 401k. So he was able to hire an attorney and they were able to get their own forensic report done by an expert that cost like 15 or 20 grand or whatever. He's like, if I didn't have that money, he said, I'm going to, I'm done. Yeah. So theirs comes back and they show bruises. on the scalp they show the struggle they even use the police's own body cams to show that you can see on the body cam you can see all the glasses knocked over you can see

like it there's a clear struggle but on their version they said there was no they had pictures of the kitchen only pictures where there's nothing really knocked over like it's very cherry picked yeah yeah which which he felt like he was like like really they were setting me up but But when they end up getting the body cam and they get all the photographs and they get everything done, he's like, ours clearly shows that there's bruising on me, that there's a struggle, that there's scrape marks on the tile on the, and he said, so after the new district attorney comes in, he says it's like a year, 18 months later, he comes in, they drop, they drop the case. They go, yeah, no, you're right. It's, it's, oh, they did a white paper. They, his lawyer went in, laid everything down and said, look, here's what we've got. Do you want to go to trial?

And he looked at it in like three, four days later, he came back. He said, now you're right. He said, I'm dropping the charges. This is had Wade, and Wade will tell you, had I not had the resources to put up an adequate defense, he goes, I'd be in prison right now. He said, looking at it from their point of view, he said it looks drastically different than what actually happened. Of course. Of course it does. What if you're just some poor kid and you're a public defender?

You don't have any money. You're on a budget. I mean, it's grossly unfair. It's daunting. And, you know, and now the science has become much more complicated because the big thing that everybody talks about is DNA, and DNA don't come cheap. And so if you're trying to get that, those elements examined or re-examined, you have to have somebody that has a lab, a private lab, in order to facilitate that for you. It's, you know, you can't go down to the FBI and said, well, look, I'm trying to, I'm trying to put forward a fence. Can you run this for me?

They'll laugh at you. You know, the state crime lab is not going to do. So you have to find somebody that has a private lab. And then they have to be validated professionally. You know, you can't just go to, you know, as my friend, you say, Joe shit the ragman and go down the road and have him say that, yeah, he's a DNA expert. No, these people have to be bona fide. And so that's what you're faced with, you know, because their education didn't come free.

their expertise didn't come free. The lab doesn't come free, all of that stuff. And so, and the technology that's out there now is so much more exacting, precise, and very costly, as opposed to maybe what it would have been, say, 15 years ago, if you're just asking for a crime scene reconstructionist to come in. Now you're really talking about high-end, a high-end purchase, as it were, if you're looking to make a defense. well hopefully i'm not never there again let's hope not um well listen i i i really appreciate

you taking the time to talk yeah yeah um time will spend i enjoyed it