Decompositional Changes: Rookie Cop Thinks Man Was Murdered with Hatchet!

I think that what defines my profession. The first thing that pops onto the radar is not necessarily injuries. You know, horrible trauma, sadness, grief, all of those sorts of things. The one question that people seem to ask me all the time is how is it that you deal with being around decomposing human remains. That's not necessarily a one size fits all question. It is something that I learned to do over a protracted period of time. Now, don't

misunderstand me. I never got completely used to it. I think that all of you out there would probably think that I was an absolute lunatic if I said that I had. However, you do build up somewhat of a callous to it after a time. But today we're going to discuss human decomposition and I'm going to kind of give you an insight from my perspective of death investigation. So hold on to your hats, because classes in with Professor Morgan. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body

Backs Brother Dave. Good to be back with you, man. I've been on my world tour man all over Europe

and hitting spots and Paris and Amsterdam and Liverpool.

was enjoyable, it was refreshing. I'm glad to be back home and uh, certainly glad to be back with you, brother Dave. I've missed being on the air with you and uh and uh, you know, spent time over in Crime Con Crime Con UK in London. So that was that was a blast, and we're going to talk about that more another episode. But I thought, coming back, you know, we continue our series of forensic education with your humble host here and you know, try to go down this line.

seven forty five in the morning when she was taken. Okay, yeah, And there were two different spots of blood in the garage and Nancy was asking, what did that mean, And I thought, I'm not the right guy to answer this, but I do know because of Joe, you know, And so I actually broke it all down and I said, well, a forensic person would say, and I was like, this blood droplet is different than this blood smear, right, And it was really cool to be able to bring that

to the discussion because then, you know, it means something. Everything that you talk about on this show with regard to crime and it's body bags, but it actually helps all of us to have a better understanding of when the crime happens, how does it get solved? Ultimately, you and I talk about the victims every day and how do you It's never about closure, but it is about finding some resolution, some finality, and finding the justice that

that person and their family deserves. And it all comes together forensically. You have to prove it. You know, you can actually convict a person of murder without ever having a dead bos.

the person. You know, you have a finite amount of blood in your body, and even that finite amount that within the ranges of blood that you have within your body, is going to dictate whether or not you're going to survive or not, you know, whether it's it's going to be sufficient to the task of providing yourselves with oxygenated blood supply.

normal biological process, almost like birth. And I've been present for the birth of my children, and people will go on and on about what a beautiful thing birth is. It is. It is a beautiful thing, you know, when new life comes about. However, it's an ugly thing too if you've never been present for a birth and you see what occurs in the midst of all of this, it's a very bloody affair. And so but that's a

natural biological process. And I've always tried to understand it from that perspective, if I could ever get my because look, you know, death investigators have bad days too, obviously. You know it's like you're standing there. You don't want to be around a decomposing body. But I have to You always kind of have to anchor yourself in the thought that, Okay, if I'm going to be here, I'm going to set my feet in stone. I'm going to understand this is

a normal biological process. I have to get past the odor and the things that you see that surround the body in order to find the truth. And of course, in science, that's that's all I'm interested in. I'm not interested in all this other you know, peripheral stuff that a lot of people go after, you know, in the criminal justice system. That stuff, to me, uh is outside

my wheelhouse. I like to understand what science is trying to tell me and listen, decomposition in human remains, Dave is one of the finest teachers that it's out there.

it immediately. And we're going to get into another episode where we're going to be talking about immediate kind of of post war changes, but we're kind of taking a broad view. You're not going to get like, within within minutes of death, you're not going to have a foul

odor emanating from the body that's associated with decomposition. Now, you can't have a foul odor that's emanating from human remains save for instance, if they soil themselves right during the throes of death, and that does, in fact happen. It doesn't happen every time.

of times bladder releases happen. I found when they're in the perimortem, say, when they're in the throes of death, you know that that will occur, but you know you you don't have it every single time. I think a lot of people labor under this idea that it occurs in every single event like this, and it just doesn't.

their entire large bowel with fecal impaction. And it's a miserable existence because they can't they can't pass, you know, anything. And plus they most of the time they don't eat healthy foods anyway that keep the system rolling. And they're they're hydrated either, which plays a big role into it. So it doesn't happen every single time But interesting fact

about about Elvis with his death. You know his I think, and I know that you're going to know this, but I think his last his last words were I'm I'm going to the bathroom to read. I think it's what he told his girlfriend at the time. Yeah, I need that. And so he's he's on the toilet or as my grainyused saying, the code, uh, he's on the commode, and

and he dies. And did you know that there is a significant number of people, such a significant number of people that are found dead on toilets that we actually have a term, a kind of a euphemistic term that we use in death investigation called toilet sign. And here's why. Many folks that do die while seated on the toilet, they have mistaken this urgency to go to the bathroom that that is masking an m I they're actually having

a heart attack. So they will go to the bathroom, sit on a toilet, and many times the strain of being on the toilet will push them over the edge. So yeah, wow, we literally have I can't tell you it's a countless number. At first that you know, when I was a young investigator, I didn't think it was a real thing, and the older guys had told me that it was a real thing. And so you know how older guys, you know, they they talked to us

knuckleheads that are young. You don't believe anything until it's proven to you, right, trust me, I've got a twenty three year old son, and so when it's demonstrated, you say, oh my gosh, they were right. You know, Yeah, I've been catching all these cases is their natural desks, but I've been catching these cases within visuals on toilets, and so yeah, it's legitimate. I don't know if there's ever been a definitive scientific study about toilet sign but it's

a real thing. It's something that we talk about and we talked about it for years and years in the field, and you know, we'll just say, yeah, we have a toilet sign case today.

of us who follow crime report on crime cover, you know, crimes that most of us only know the scientific aspect of things when people like you are talking on a crime show, because most of us are not in an academic area. We're not taking you know, your class at school, and this is the only way we find out is by you sharing your knowledge. Because I don't know what happens. I mean, I really don't. I know that the men that I die, that everything stops living because I'm dead.

And obviously if you're not living, you're dying, which means you're heading back to dirt eventually. Yeah, that's all I know. I don't know the speed that it happens. I would think it'd be very quickly, you know, in a broad sense. It look, everything is environmentally dependent, you know. And I've mentioned this countless times on.

four guys that had transported dope from Mexico. They were in a van and they were tasked with meeting person they were gonna to exchange with in a warehouse area in Atlanta, actually not too far from Six Legs, Atlanta, in a industrial park.

decompositional fluid. And so they'd been there for two months. I've had them even worse than that, where bodies will. They don't turn into puddles necessarily, but the skin becomes

very soft and spongy. It's much like a sponge, and you can feel it kind of when you place your hands on the decomposing tissue, it feels like it feels almost like the crackling of bubble wrap many times, and that's because the cells in that area in some of these cases, they kind of expand with these decompositional gases that are contained within that area, and you can almost feel it crackle beneath your fingertips. I've had friends that have said that, and this has never happened to me.

But I've had people that have said that bodies when they go to pull on them literally come apart it joints. Now, that's never happened with me. I've had I've had the manifestation was referred to as skin slippage. And you'll hear

this in trials. Many times they'll talk about skin slippage, for instance, and that's where the epidermis, that top layer of skin, even down to the dermis below, the epidermist will literally peel off, you know, in your hand and that but that takes time, you know, it takes a certain amount of time. There's almost like this kind of tenderizing factor. If you will give me a little latitude

there with that that that has to take place. Eventually the bodies will in fact dry out, but before they dry out, there's a whole process that occurs before you ever get to that market. I think it's important to understand that, you know, decomposition can mean a variety of different things to folks. You know, when when I was a kid, I had to build a composting bind in the backyard. My mother is. She loves gardening, she always

has and so everywhere she's lived she's had a composting bent. And well what does that mean. Well, you in the composting bin, you're gonna plow organic materials in there. I remember her putting coffee grounds and eggshells and everything else, and not to mention all of the leaves from the previous spall. And you have to turn it. You have to turn it. Some people put earthworms in there, all

kinds of things going. But you're trying to break down that organic substance that's in there, and it creates this rich, you know, kind of rich stirt. And it's interesting, Dave, that you said a few months ago that we that we turn you know, we turned into dust. And you know, there's that old Bible verse that, you know, what was it from dust you came, and from dust you shall return, And that that is truly the definition of what happens. It just takes some time. It's not it's not some

kind of fantastical movie event. You have to you have to be down for a long time. But what kicks this whole thing off is heat, heat and absence of life. But you know, kind of the functional definition for decomposition, how do you define it? Well, it's a disintegration of

body tissues after death is known as decomposition. And I'd mentioned to you just a moment ago that one of my one of my favorite characters in Looney Tunes, in the Looney Tunes universe is the Martian that you know, he's got the disintegrator array that he uses, and of course Bugs always turns it around on him. I don't think any good Bugs money cartoons ever were made after probably about nineteen seventy by the way, just my thoughts.

But anyway, you know what does disintegration mean? Well, we know what integrated is That means to blend right, or if you have integrated circuits. You know, for instance, if you're talking, if you're speaking to somebody that's like an electrical engineer, well we're we're actually integrated. All of our

systems are integrated. Well, once that spark of life has left the body and you no longer have this process of keeping cells oxygenated, you have cellular respiration that's going on, these things over a period of time will actually begin to pull apart, and they naturally fall apart. And so that's that's part of the process, and it's something that we you know.

if you know that you're getting something bad. So when you're talking about this beginning stages here where it's starting to break down, what does that tell you when you're coming in as an investigator and looking at things as you are studying that individual. Because all the time we want to know, well, we always want to know the motive, why did this happen? But when when did this happen? You know, I've talked about that. You've got to tell me exactly when this person died, Joe. I need to

know was it before or after dinner? Did they eat dinner at ten o'clock or eight o'clock? Yeah, And sometimes those things can't be told by the contents of your stomach. There's got to be more.

within a three hour window. Most of the time, I think it's going to be about four to five. If you cover all your bases. When you have something, yeah, if you.

have skeletonization. So you've got kind of that spectrum of four things there. When one of the things that you have to consider is that there's actually two processs of decomposition going on, and kind of the way in my simple mind, the way I like to look at it, you have autolytic changes in auto mean self, right, So you have autolsis that goes on, which is kind of

body breaking down from within. And if you think about it from the perspective of a body literally digesting itself, that's autolysis. Okay, So you know everything that is contained within life when you have cellular respiration on the systems or firing ceases to be at that point in time, so the body begins to kind of from an enzyme standpoint,

begins to kind of digest itself. Then you have future faction that goes on, and then you know, in very broad terms, you begin to you know, think about changes that are produced by you know, the action of bacteria and micro organisms, and that can that can come like in an external manifestation. And then you have, you know, if you think about even more broadly, you you have the introduction of animals or even insects that are attacking the body externally, and then you know, and that's going

to promote decomposition. So there's you've got a lot to kind of consider when you come across a body that's bloated and rotting and kind of you know, coming to part one of the things that's always fascinated me. And uh, in my my students at JSU, I'll ask them this question and uh and of course I'll get this resounding

sound you know when I give it to them. If you've ever seen one of these uh steakhouse commercials where they'll say we've got beautiful dry aged beef or we do wet aging process, you know what they're talking about. They're tenderizing those steaks that they have through the process of decomposition, you know, and you can have dry age, which if you go to if one of my goals in life is to try to get a reservation at

Luger Steakhouse in Manhattan. It's supposed to be the best steak in the world, because I think I know where the best steak in the world is, and that's Charlie Steakhouse in New Orleans. So I want to see what Lugers is. But they have a.

it decompose. And that's that's and they don't use the term decomposed. They say age. You know, it's it's much more mellow, you know, it's like a it's like an aged whiskey or wine of vintage wine. They try to put it in those terms, but what it comes down to is decomposing so that we can eat it, you know, so that it's tender for us to eat.

my eggs. That's not going to be worth eating compared to something that.

to do what bodies do. And look, this can be stemmed through the process of what mortuary scientists do, and that is infuse the body or profuse the body with embalming fluid and they cease that process you know of, or slow it down decompositional process. It kind of freezes it for that moment. And with decomposition, though, you have to get there early in order to stop it, because this, I can tell you, with decomposition, once it starts, it's

like a barreling freight train. It's really hard to get to handle on it. Okay. And so when you hear people say, well, and this is non trauma related. You have some elderly person that has been not found for a week or two weeks in a home and the mortuary says, well, you're gonna have to have closed casket.

People say, well, why would you have to have closed casket? Well, it because the body has been decomposing for that period of time, maybe under the most adverse conditions. You can imagine where you know there's no there's no air con that's that's operating. Maybe there's subject to I don't know, flies and everything else that's in, and there's there's no

amount of restorate of work. I guess there is. You'd have to pay a lot of money, but there's really no amount of restorated work that you can go in and you can patch this person up so that they're presentable for an open casket. So the absence of an open casket does not necessarily mean this is a trauma related event. Many times it can be decompositional related.

we understand is that sometime between four and four thirty in the morning, all four of these students were murdered by knife. But their bodies were not found by law enforcement until eight hours later. All right, is there going to be I mean, is there going to be significant changes in the body during that eight hour time period?

in there. However, I think that it's key that we come back and address that the Idaho killings when we discuss the micro the micro sense of decomposition and those changes within that eleven hour framework you're not going to see or eleven to twelve hour framework, you're not going to see much happen. It's with how can I say this with an external manifestation which can be appreciated with

the unaided eye, you know, where you're examining the body. However, within the twenty four to thirty six hour and again, these these brackets of time are very very broad. One of the things that will happen and something that kind of manifests itself if everybody that's listening to me will take your right hand and place it above the level of your pelvis on the right side of your app to when that approximates the area where your appendix is.

No one can really explain it. But one of the things that we see manifested in decomposition, like an external manifestation, is that that area you'll get a focal area of greenish discoloration that will occur there, and it truly is. It turns kind of a green color, and that many many times doesn't happen in every case, but many times it'll be you know, that's generally about twenty four to

thirty six hours. Well, Morgan, why is that important? Well, it's important because if I have that manifestation that is occurring, that's a marker in time. Okay. So if I look at the body and I have no other information, if I'm just visually eyeball in the body and I see I see you know, this greenish coloration on the abdomen, I can say, Wow, this might be an indications person's been down at least twenty four to thirty six hours. And you roll that into the idea that maybe their

limbs are flaccid, and flaccid means flexible, okay, or bendable. Well, that means that riger's already left the body.

soft enough to get in the top. If they just waited, how long would they have to wait for the body too?

upon another person. They're not wanting to hang around and be patient about it. The body's become flashed again. They become what's termed malleable again, so that you can bend them, you can contract them all. You know, Roger Morris doesn't hang around forever and ever eight minutes just not one of those things that occurs, particularly in an unembalmed state. So you know, it will leave, it dissipates over a period of time. But when you're looking out over you know,

kind of broadly over this the spectrum of death with decomposition, you you look for other signs as as you march down that timeline, Like after you get beyond that that greenish discoloration that takes place on the abdomen, you're talking about thirty six to forty eight hours, Uh, the body will become or start to distend, which means it'll you'll see the first signs of bloating. You know, the abdomen begins to swell up well, and and the face will

swell too. You know, you'll see the face beginning to kind.

side of the versus body, and then it traverses from the uscending large vowel to the where it crosses over into the descending bowel and eventually it is eliminated for in the body. I don't know if that plays a role into it, but you know, you couple that and you go to another stage where you've got this kind of slight bloating that's going on and with and particularly the facial notice it. You'll get kind of the face, we'll have a swollen appearance, and you'll also see the

first signs of something. Here's another term they use in in butchery with with beef. It doesn't mean the same thing, but you'll we use this term called marbling. And marbling if you imagine if you've got a spider web that would normally be I don't know, spider webs are gray white. If you imagine a black spider web superimposed upon a body and it's got these kind of weird lines that

run all over the place. It's it's black, dark, dark black. Well, that's like blood that is decomposing in the vessels, and it's showing through the face. So you'll see it first manifest kind of around the jowls and the cheeks and that sort of thing the neck, and that'll extend out as time goes by, so you'll have these kind of curve linear lines you know, that run over, you know, all over the body. And that's actually what we refer

to as marveling. But again, Dave, that brings us back to this benchmarking of time that's you know, you're going to talk about top end. That's that's going to take about forty eight hours, you know, with an unattended body that's found ideally in a protected environment, you know, like in a house where you know, you don't have any kind of postmortem feasting that's going on with animals or

things like that. And again, the more of these little markers that we can get as death investigators, it allows us, through science and the natural biological process, to tell the story of the dead. I know a lot of people are fans of dried fruit that are listening out there. I see it everywhere I go, you know, in various grocery stores and this sort of thing. I've never really developed a taste for it. It's kind of like when

I was a kid. I don't know about you, Dave, but when I was a kid, I was made to eat beef liver. I can't do it anymore. And the reason I can't do it anymore is that beef liver looks just like human liver to me, you know, and not participate in all those autopsies for all those years. But with the dried fruit, one of the things I think about when I see it is a term that we refer to is desication, because I call it desiccated.

You know, it's dried, you know, and desiccation or the drying of limbs and particularly our penages like our feet, your toes, feet, fingers in your hands. The more peripheral you are to that kind of center core in a body, the higher the probability is that area is going to dry out. And that's what desiccation is. So if you're if you you know, you couple that with the the

bloating that you see, and that's the next step that you move on to is going to be manifested. The idea that the extremities and I'm talking about it, if you'll just touch your fingertips or tips of your toes right now, those areas out of every other location in the body will become dry first. And so the fingers, the fingers actually take on an appearance like you know, when you're little and your mom tells you, you know, let me look at your hands, how long you've been

in the pool. You get this kind of shriveled appearance here. That's basically the way it looks. The only difference is is that with the tips of fingers and decomposition, and it happens to the nose as well. It'll turn, it'll turn kind of a black discoloration and it's dried out. There's no more moisture, you know, left in that environment. And so if we benchmark that time, you know, you're talking about probably about forty eight to sixty hours down

range after death. At that point in time when you're you know, you're kind of pacing yourself through the scene. That's why it's important at a scene that you you

don't want to miss anything. But at the scene, particularly for the purposes of contextualizing things, it's important to be able to see to see it for what it is, you know, at the scene, and be able to document that you observe that there, you know, before you remove the body at you know, at the scene and take take the body to the corner's office of the medical examiner's office where it's going to be examined.

they're shriveled at the ends. They almost have like a claw like manifestation. What's really interesting, as fingers shrivelled and toast rivel, the abdomen actually begins to bloat. So you've got this kind of juxtaposition. And with the bloating of the abdomen you're talking, you know, seventy two hours, that

begins to happen. So the body is swelling, and what's happening is all this gas is building up in the body, and as it builds up, one of the foulus substances known to man begins to exude from the body, and it generally will any orifice in the body it'll come through, and you see it a lot in the nose, the mouth, and it's it's called purging. So you've got this cellular substance where the cells are breaking down and it's a combination of blood and other elements and it creates this flow.

And I think i'd shown this image to you, Dave, of this fellow that city in a chair. Uh, and he's swollen bloated. And you know that guy, Dave in life, he only weighed about one hundred and sixty pounds.

picture and I'm not kidding. I thought the guy had been shot because and that he was discovered a day or two later. I didn't realize that this was a fairly small guy and died of natural causes.

You seeing the image, you're still wearing T shirt with jeans and work boots. And he sat in his chair and had a heart attack and died. Well, the young cop. And I'm not judging this guy because I would have thought the same thing. He called me from a landline at that time. This was many years ago, and said, yeah, we need you out here immediately. I think we've got a guy that has been beaten to death. And he even said at that time someone may have used a

hatchet on him or an axe. And when you see this it's so grotesque and over the top, that's what you're thinking. You know, your mind automatically goes to that, because where could all this the staining come from. And it's even contrasted by the fact that the guy's wearing a white T shirt. Well, the guy has no trauma to his body. That's all decomp fluid that it's It is one of the most disgusting substances known to man.

And once it makes contact with anything you're wearing, your clothing or anything like that, go ahead and start the bonfire and burn those clothes because you'll never they're unusable

after that point. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body