External Exam - Geeking Out with Body Bags Host, Joseph Scott Morgan

My Feet, The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator. Joseph holds a Master of Forensic Science degree from National University and is a Board Certified Fellow of the American Board of Medical Legal Death Investigators. Currently, he's an Associate Professor of Applied Forensics at Jacksonville State University in Alabama. Joseph started working in forensics in the eighties, and throughout his career he's been involved in thousands of medical legal death

investigations and autopsies. Please welcome Joseph Scott Morgan to Mother Knows Death. Hi, Joseph, it's so exciting to have you here today.

any number of places you could go. Corners, offices many times would welcome you in these offices, and even hospitals. But now one word lawyers. That's what I think it comes down to. I think it comes down to liability, and it's it's tough to get people in the door. I don't know that hospitals in particular are doing as

many autopsies as they used to. Hospital pathologists always always kind of had a reputation that they would spend They would prefer to spend more time in front of a scope than being down and doing you know, the actual gross dissection of you know, the remains in total and you know, and my my career as a death investigator kind of leached over into that area because I would go around to private hospitals and the pathology groups and I'd say, look, you know, I'm looking to pick up

some extra change. If you guys want me to go in and do this autopsy for you and I can report what I see, you know, cutting all the tissues, you know, do everything for you, organ weights dimensionally, you know, do everything for you. If I see anything, I'll call you. And they would prefer that I didn't call them, and so it was a great It was a great opportunity for me to sit at their feet and learn, because it's always a learning opportunity.

that's the way that happens. And you can develop a private consultancy and do very well, but that has its hazards along the way. I can discuss that, you know, for you know, for people that are curious because you know, there's I have people that reach out to me because I cover all true crime stuff and they know my background. They're like, families, can you recommend a forensic pathologist to me? The problem with that is, yeah, I can recommend them, but as we say, down here in the South, there

there's rare hen's teeth. You don't you can't, you can't find them very frequently. He probably find and I'm talking about a board certified forensic pathologist not somebody that is a pathologist that claims they practice forensics. Gulf of difference, it'd be easier to find a neurosurgeon in most places.

of what we do. Uh, and obviously talks uh and then just stand their panels, you know, with everything you know that walks through the door, well rolls for the because we're I've never been a big fan of of partial autopsies. I'm of the opinion, once you break out the cold steel, everybody should go through because you're you're you're running too much of a risk by only doing

a partial autopsy. There was a whole group of people for a long time I remember that you could have, for instance, a self inflicted gunshot, one with suicide case,

and they bury bodies with bullets in the head. I've never been a fan of that at all, and I've seen that happen over and over and over again, and a lot of times it's I think that it's because of expediency, but you know, it's those cases that you're going to wind up giving a deposition on them because somebody's going to get in a twist over it, or new evidence will be being covered in in the future.

And you know in forensics, if you don't do it out of the gate, that body is going to wind up in one or two places, either bare married and vaulted and having been embombed in most cases, or cremated. And so now you're you're looking for for evidence in a case. And a great example I think that I covered for years now has been the Tammy Davell case out of Idaho, where you know, she presented early in the morning, her husband found her, found her dead on

the floor. She had some kind of frothy cone that her children actually came to the house, or adult children, and UH visualized it was issuing forth from her nose and her mouth. And most of the time, you know, we're only going to see that. You know, if we have we see it a lot in drug odes, particularly was opiates, and you see it with his six illed us and of course he was like found guilty in her case in addition to two children, they killed her

husband that is. But here's the thing. The corner rolled out to the scene and I made the determination then that she was not going to have an autopsy. And this is a forty nine year old woman that famously had been training for a marathon. It's not like she's in she's stabilitate, you know, like God called and suddenly she's gone. And you really run the risk if you're the medical legal authority and you decide not to do the autopsy. And I don't have much patience with people

saying that the family didn't want it. It's when you're in a clinical environment. And at least this is my assessment. Families will come, I think, to the clinical environment that is a hospital environment where there's a known natural, you know, pathology that's going on, and they will say we want

an autopsy. Most time, they're going to have to pay for it, unless there's some kind of overriding interest the hospital has for either research or maybe you know, liability, They want to do it, and they'll compel the pathologists to do it. But in the medical legal world, we try as best we can. I promise we really do to be as compassionate with the families that we try to extend as much compassion as we can and take

everything into consideration. But when you're faced with something that might wind up being very dark, very very dark, and you just have that gut feeling. I don't go on gut feelings. I'm a scientist for as at the time, but you just you get that feeling about a case. It's like, we really, we really need to do the autopsy on this case. Family's going to protest, well, you know, you go in and make your apologies because the authority of the corner of the medical examiner is generally going

to trump any of the families wishes. Now they can retain an attorney and they can get an injunction, and we've had that happen for in those sorts of things. But I think that it's probably in the best nentwest certainly of the courts and the community, for the autopsy to be performed.

in on my podcast. I spent time talking about the Kennedy assassination and arguably they had Yeah, I could safely say probably two of the biggest incompetents on the face of the planet that they turned that precious man's body over to after a homicide. He was a homicide victim. Doesn't matter that he was a president. There were no rules, no laws in place regarding the assassination investigations relative to the president until like sixty six. This happened in sixty three,

So he's a homicide victim. That took place in Dallas County, and there was a forensic pathologist, doctor Rose, who had done all of his training up in Iowa, and he famously attempted to prevent them from removing the president's body from Parkland, and there's eyewitnessed this, eyewitnesses saying that they pushed him against the wall, put their hand on their weapon and said, his body's going with us, and he's he's like you know, and he was newly And here's

the interesting intersection here. I love history. He was the first medical examiner they'd ever had. Texas does not have corners, and they don't take they have medical examiners. But did you know that the justice of the peace in Texas is the de facto corners. It's an interesting little law,

and you'll find those all over the country. But my point is is that you had this man who was turned out to be a very highly esteemed forensic pathologist that saw gunshot ones regularly, and he was at their disposal and they put the president's body on that plane and flew him back to BETHOSDA, and he was under the care of two people that had never they were forensic, they were pathologists, not forensic, but had never done a forensic case between the two of them, and you're talking

about obviously the biggest forensic case in I don't know. I guess you could argue us history because it's still impacting us today as we speak right now, and so his body has turned over to these people and did it in front of an audience. There's some estimates there were probably thirty people in the autopsy suite, little or no accountability of chain of evidence was not intact. You actually had FBI agents sitting there taking notes and they couldn't believe what they were seeing.

histology faster than it normally would. And then this is when mistakes happen because you're not just letting people do the proper procedure. And it happens all the time. There's so much documentation of it.

And when it comes to the courts, it comes to the courts when you deviate from your normal sop, that's a real problem if you're trying to prosecute a case or And I don't care either way, you know, even though I'm a medical legal death investigator by trade and a forensic practitioner, I'm neither pro prosecution or pro defense. I want the answers. I want those black and white scientific answers and let everybody else sort it out at the end. I'm not about seeking justice, and there's enough

people there on that train. I like my little space on my train, my little space on my train. We love to make scientific discovery and hand it over to everybody here. You can take a look, you can take a look, you can make your own assessment. But this

is the judgment that we've made. And going back to Kennedy, one of the really interesting things I think that people might find fascinating about the Kennedy case is that when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated doctor Tom Magucci, who is arguably one of the most famous forensic pathologists, American forensic pathologists ever, and he was referred to as the coroner to the stars. You know, this kind of goes along with what you were saying, but you know, stars were not for him.

You know, he had done Marilyn Monroe, he did John Belushi, he did Tate lot Bianca. He was physically the scene in those cases. But he also did the bombs, you know, he did the homeless people, the unknowns, all the serial victims that had come through during the sixties and into the seventies in the eighties. He he was no respector of persons in that sense. He viewed everybody the same. And when it came Tom in this one exception and This is a good exception. When Bobby Kennedy was assassinated

I think it was the Ambassador Hotel. Doctor Magucci said, Okay, this is what we're going to do. First off, no one is going to be allowed into the autopsy. Was sweet unless I allow them in because he as you know, I field is so small, news travels fast, and back then it was even smaller. He only allowed the technicians, the photographer, and fell a forensic pathologist in that suite.

And he personally invited one of the forensic pathologists, the guy that headed up the ballistic section for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, which by the way, no longer exists and it's old construct. It's that's the meta. It was back then considered the medical examiner for the Armed Forces. They did a lot of the ballistic studies on cadavers and that sort of thing years and years ago. Anyway, this guy headed up that program. He's a forensic pathologist boarded.

They invited him to fly out to LA and so Nogucci had witnessed everything and this is a real touched on moment in history, forensic history and forensicthology in particular. He was so impacted by what had happened to Kennedy. He was like, well, it wouldn't have happened on my watch, but by God that ever happens here, I'm gonna have eyes on this thing and it's going to be documented from stem to stern. And he did a great job of that. But guess what, there's still tons and tons

of conspiracy theories that surround Bobby Kennedy's death. How much more so if you look at his brother, where you had two people that had no background in forensics doing those doing that autopsy. Now you've left the door open even wider.

how students can't observe autopsies anymore. It's it's very difficult when you think about back in the day, there was audiences watching these autopsies, and I think that now that's part of the reason, at least I've seen in the hospital because I've been in the hospital system now twenty five years around the autopsy, and I saw it when I first started that I was able to have, you know, if there was a student that was interested in being

a nurse, they could come observe the autopsy, right. And I do think that that's important because you should really understand every aspect of life and death, if you're dealing with live patients or not. But I saw that to having med students all the time, and then at my most recent job, they just wouldn't even let medical students in to watch the autopsy. They were like, only essential personnel that needs to be there.

like that. And I was proudly a deaner because I learned from a lot of really talented old guys, guys that you know, I could tell you stories about them taking a striker saw in beveling, doing beveling on the skull cap and so they could make it perfectly lock and they would take and they could do it quickly because they had to deal with such a volume of cases. Guys that could use a handsaw to take a calvarium off where you know, it's hard, it is very hard task.

Whether it would take it would take hours. But these old guys that were so uniquely trained, where if you had an agitating striker saw, it was a luxury for them, you know, the first can you imagine the first one they ever got. And I know this seems a bit out in the weeks.

over a period of time. But you know, I think back from my experience the autopsy suite, by far in my field is a medical legal death investigator, hands down,

best classroom I've ever been in in my life. It's nothing, I mean, nothing compares to the experiences I had in the autopsy suite, and it dealt dealing with everything from just starting out as a scribe for the forensic pathologist and having I still have visions of all of those clipboards lined up, you know, on the table, and having five and six bodies laid out and ready for the pathologists to walk in and Buddy, when we're rolling, we're rolling,

we're hitting and getting it. We're going. And some of these cases, some case might take us an hour and ten minutes from open to clothes. And then you might have some young person that has died of some mysterious circumstance where you think that it might be natural, but there might be you know, other issues. And then you might have I don't know, and this is not in common.

You have somebody that is morbidly obese and they're shot multiple times with small caliber weapons and you have to track all of those rounds through the body and document that as you're doing it photographically. That case can take sometimes four or five hours, not to mention the X

rays that come along with it. And so the reason I'm saying this is that everything everything that I did in the morgue, and I think I wound up doing close to seven thousand autopsies over the course of my career, everything I did in the morgue translated to the field. And the reason it translated to the field so well is that I was the eyes in the ears of

the forensic pathologist, and I've had forgive my language. I'd had my assitude out enough that I knew what they wanted in the field, and that would translate to me clinically in my brain when when I was observing a body of a scene, whether it was a homicide, of suicide, undetermined,

industrial laxity, it didn't matter. I knew my pathologist like the back of my hand, and I could say, Okay, for this particular pathologist, They're going to want this, this, and this, and gonna want to know why I didn't get it if it was not not obtained.

the remains or what remains of the soft tissue that's there, because it's I hate this term because it's thrown around a lot, but it is nuanced. It's nuanced by the fact that are they in an early state of decomposition? Is it a moderate? Isn't advanced? Is it like super advance? Where you've got you've got sculptal remains that are visible, you know, with kind of a bit of soft tissue still left over stretched over you know, where your knee is going to be am I going to have to

cut the jaws out of this person? Am I going to have to clip their fingertips off and shoot them with tissue builder in order to get the fingertips to swell up so I can get a print off of them. You know, all of these little things that you have to learn how to do, and you have to learn to do it on the fly because you move it such you move at such a rapid pace if you're at a big medical examiner's office, there's not time to

kind of linger and think about it. You. Starting my career down in New Orleans, there was I love this by the way, the er nurses would and the er physicians in particular. I developed an affinity for them because I'd always go to the emergency room because I'd have so many traumatic cases gunshot wounds and motive a collapse.

They got to know them a lot. And so we had faculty members there from LSU and Tulane Med and they had a theme and for a while they had it up on the wall and in one of the emergency areas and it said see one, do one, teach one, and so you've seen it, now to do it now. The next person up you have to teach it to them.

He's actually from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and transplanted down here in South to go to college and became probably arguably one of the best forensic scientists I'd ever known, and I found we were working on case and I came across the horseshe kidney and I've never seen it, you know. It was amazing to me. And I said, wow, checked us out and he was like, that's a horseshoe kidney. I said, never seen none. He says, well, go ahead and dissect it out, you know, and I'll grab a camera.

And so I held it from my face like I had a big handlebar mustach and you know, that's that's typically you know, kind of how how we would you know, that was like a treat for us to do something like that, and you you know, the cool thing about it is you never know. And I don't know. Maybe I'm I'm I've always been and occupied the space in the world of the dead. But I'm also kind of sentimental,

I think, which is a dangerous combination. And one of the ways I would look at it is that every opportunity I had to do an autopsy, I would think to myself, when it wasn't going fast and furious, I would think, you know what, this is really cool because I'm seeing something that no one else has ever seen, you know, we talked about going to the depths of the ocean, or going to space, or climbing the mountain or something like that. But literally, in an autopsy suite,

you're doing an autopsy on somebody. You're opening the space up and it's being viewed. You're viewing the space for the first time. And that that's kind of an odd thing when you think about. It's a unique thing, you know. And then once you begin to do the examination, you're going to find these little anomalies, you know, like like the horse of kidney. And I got to tell you about a really cool case that one of the things that really stuck with me and will for until my

final breath. I had I'd spent time in the Army Guard, and so I have an affinity for old soldiers. And when I started my career there was still a lot of war work two vets around, And I actually played golf with a War War two vet when I was like maybe twenty three twenty four. He only had one arm and he could play golf. Wow, he was an amazing golfer. He couldn't hit it any further than about one hundred and twenty yards, but his swing was so grooved with the one arm that he would always fit

in the middle of the fairway. Neat Man lost his lost his arm in South Pacific and just you know, he didn't let anything bothering, you know. But I get a I was on duty as as an investigator with the Corner's office. I had split time. I worked as an investigator at night and I work in the morgue end of the day. And that's the way you did

it back then, very tiresome. Couldn't do it now. I got a call from a nursing home, a nursing home descert not normally reportable to the Corner of Medical Examiner nursing homes and or back then they weren't in hospice cases. But they called me and it was like, yeah, hey, how are you guys doing. Where are you calling me? He said, yeah, we've got a death of a gentleman here. And he's literally been this would have been I think

in eighty eight or eighty nine. And he said he has been under the care, constant care of a physician since nineteen forty six, like in a retirement home or in a nursing facility, and he just died. I was like okay, and said, well he sustained a gunshot wound. Well there's I was like, okay, I'm interested, what's the story. And you know, because with homicide, it's true, there is in a statute of limitations. It doesn't matter how far

out it goes. And it turned out that this guy had fought as an eighteen year eighteen or nineteen year old at the Battle of the Bulge.

I think that's what they fired, I can't recall, and took aim and shot this young kid from New Orleans when he was eighteen or nineteen, and it was superior to the umbulcus and the round tore through his bowel and lodged immediately adjacent to I don't know his the I don't know if it had the upper lumbar region, I think, And the technology was at a point and they had such a volume of cases that they were able to stem the bleeding. They did a bower section

on him, so I remember correctly. But he was essentially paralyzed from that level of his body down and had remained in that state. So this is a young man, the bloom of youth, as they say, never got to have a family, never got to have babies. And he had languished in this bed for loath these many years. And obviously, if you can live this long in the

nursing facility, somebody's taking good care of you. And I remember having him on the table and you know, his tiny asty legs, he's withered in appearance, beautiful mane of gray hair that was combed back. You know, his dentition was intact. He'd been taken well, it didn't have bed sores, which is a rarity and to have been in that long.

And we did X rays on him and you could see that round and it was deformed, and it had the bone had fused around it, and it was just this kind of ossified chunk that was adjacent to his final column.

held history in my hand for a moment. This is this is a this is a battlefield artifact that I'm holding that some faceless kid on the other side fired this weapon at this other young kid who probably in his mind, I don't know, probably in his mind he didn't think he was going to get out of there, but he did get out of there, and then he's you know, he's thinking, you know, what kind of hope that I have in the future, It's going to happen for me? And here I held it, and I want

you to know. The pathologist that I did the autopsy with, he ruled the case as a homicide. Interestingly, I was going.

we don't need that. But but your case is a little bit different because his death was ultimately caused by consequences of that initial gunshot wound.

That's the way they refer to projectile back then, to retrieve that missile. And I remember we turned it over to the State Crime Lab and they retained it, and it was just it was just part of history. And that just goes to the point you never know what you're going to see. And back to our earlier thesis here, the idea that people are not having the opportunity to come into our environment and the world that that you currently inhabit and that I inhabit because it's like gold

to me. I mean it's like gold being found on the ground. It's so sad. I've done autopsies. I remember down in years and years ago, I used to assist with the State Medical Examiner in Georgia. I was assigned to the State Medical Examiner there, and I'd have to travel a little bit and i would go about sixty miles south to Macon, Georgia, which is home of Mercer

Medical School. And I'd only do weekends. But it was a busy shop because you would you know, you might have after a Friday night and cases come in from the surrounding area, from the other counties. We might be looking at sixteen cases in one day, and we would literally have medical students from Mercer Medical College or medical school outside the door waiting for us at six o'clock just to get in because they didn't get see enough thought,

they didn't get see enough gross anatomy. They didn't have enough bodies back then to go around. That's terrifying.

These are all undergraduates on lines of languor and you know, and I try to tell them from the perspective of like a contour map, you know, because these kids, most of these kids have never had excuse me, have never had human anatomy, certainly not at the level even at the upper levels of undergraduate. And there's a reason why certain incisions are made in the body. And because if you go essentially against these contours, almost like going against

the grain. You'll get these nasty, nasty injuries, surgical injuries as a result. And I was telling them about the position of an app and decty with the primary side the McBurney incision, and how it kind of runs in this weird diagonal way. And I was twenty years ago. I would have had students in the class looking at me going, yeah, I've had an app indectomy. Well, now all the app anddctomies are done laparoscopically, so you lose.

What I'm saying is we're advancing now to the point where I've heard of medical schools that we're going to go all digital with their anatomical studies. I'm thinking, this is this is utter madness that you would do this, because the tactile when you stick your hands into that world, the tactile nature of that you're learning through your fingertips. I don't care how much AI there is or where

You'll never learn like this. You know, when you slip on the surgical gloves and you're holding things and you feel that weight, you feel the weight of a lung that has pneumonia, you know, and are you you hold somebody's heart with cardiomeg or you've got a fatty liver or cirrhosis and you feel those nodules, or you run your hand over the plural surface of the lungs and you've got the tiny blebs as a result of in

physima or whatever it is. There's something, there's something about that that translates to the brain, and it's going to be laws. It's going to be lost. I think in this world that we're heading into with AI, I know.

And I saw the transition when I was working in surgical pathology because I was the lead PA and I was in charge of training the residence, and one of my biggest things was I wanted all of the residents to do autopsy rotation first because I was like, they'll see how all the bodies are inside or all the organs right inside, because it's just different than gross anatomy,

you know, It's just it's different when it's fresh. And then because what happens was they would come into surgical pathology and they would get something called a Whipple specimen, which is a pancreas with the piece of the duodenum attached, and they wouldn't even know how it's sat in the body because you just get this organ with a giant tumor in it that's like plopped on a cutting board in front of you, and it's hard to make the of how it's sat in the body, which way is antier,

which ways post here, things like that, So I definitely think that that is something that all medical students should be heavily involved in for sure.

We have lots of posts with videos, photos, thousands of them on there, so you could really see anything that you want to see and have me explain what's going on in it. And the Grossroom's on sale right now, and we don't put it on sale too often, and it's only twenty.

this would be right up your alley. There was a case a few years ago that took place actually in Georgia, and it was then the Medical College of Georgia, which is a pretty highly esteemed one of the oldest medical colleges medical schools in the US, and there were this is in the ante bellum South, and so there were these two freemen. These are African Americans that are not slaves,

that made their living from robbing graves for the medical school. Well, there are no there were no even crappy fluorescent lights back then. You know, they did everything by whale lamps and those sorts of things. Candles. These guys would be paid right to go out dig up the fresh dead,

bring them into medical students would pay them. Some people think that it was actually some of the instructors that were paying these guys to rob the graves because it was kind of a traditional thing that had gone on. They'd have to do it in the dark of the night because it was illegal, you know, you were not It was considered to be very inappropriate to do those

back then. I think people are surprised at that. Anyway, after the students were through with bodies and after they had completely dissected them, they would take them and push them off into an aushwary that was underneath the buildings. So they're doing renovations on this building in the late eighties or early nineties, and there's there have been entire

papers written about this event. They found human remains, and remains should be emphasized here for the plural nature of that war, because they got into there and there were co mingled sculptal remains that were just piled under there.

I've made the acquaintances aside. I just recently took a trip to Great Britain and I made the acquaintance of a lave's forensic archaeologist and she's doing exhamations in Spain that are in uh part of the research they're doing on Spanish civil wars. And they had mass killings back then with big open graves that were dumping bodies in and she's exhuming those remains right now. Some nightmare because

everything's stratified and commingled. They've belt they've it's in a graveyard, so they had buried newer bodies on top of these bodies. So they have to remove those bodies and then go down to substrata. So anyway, I'm sorry I digress, but

that story is fat. It was always fascinating to me the links that people would go to because you know, they understood that if they were going to be treating people that they needed they they needed to be able to understand form and function and all the clinical stuff is great, you know where you're making diagnoses of the living, but if you don't understand our status as the dead first, it's it's a much more difficult proposition you had before you being a future clinician.

it was so big. But I spent a lot of time wrestling with the dead over their livers because it's oddly positioned, and as you said, there are multiple attachments that are there that have to be cut through. It's a very robust organ, and so when you get in there and you're trying to trim this out and dissect it out so that you can get it up onto the board intact without it being ripped, which is something I always tried to avoid doing, try to keep the

capsule intact. It's a daunting task many times, particularly if you're tired and you've done a lot of cases and this is, you know, the fifth or the sixth one that you get to. I always think that it's better to start off with the largest person first, if possible. Everything else seems everything seems a bit easier after that. But yeah, yeah, liver is, by far from me, probably the most difficult organ to get out of the body.

I have a long It took me a long time also, I would always do it by feel removal of the adrenals. That took a while to locate them, but I got I got pretty good at it towards the end where I could do I didn't have to like actualize it. I could just feel and trim it out, put it on the board. Then next go to the kidney, the

adjacent kidney, so forth and so on. I've been in environments before where you know, we were doing on block dissections where you know, we refer to it as tongue to nuts, you know in the you know, forgive me again, that's very crass, but you know, starting dissecting out the tongue and just shaving right down the spinal column all the way down, cut away the diaphragm, all the way down to the rectum, remove it. Males, you know, you're

you're taking out the testicles. And I think probably the quickest one of those I've ever done was right about two minutes.

the rear. They want to see. They want to see little focal areas of hemorrhage in their natural anatomical orientation and stuff that that cannot appreciate. If you're doing an organ by organ, they won't see it posterially. So you know, that was that was daunting. I think probably the most daunting thing that I ever had to do in the more is try to remove you know, to take out the brain and spinal cord intact.

the body that is not touched by scalpel blade. So like, for instance, the back is completely dissected out, completely opened, you take photographs exterior. Then after you open the back, you're taking pictures, detailed pictures of all the musculature all the way up to the occyput. You know, we would

just kind of peel back this way. And then the reason is we'd cut down the buttocks, down the poster, your legs, open those up, the calves, the soles of the feet, if you can imagine this, and people say, my god, this is horrible. Why would you do that, Well, they're in custody, and so one of the things that you have to do with in custody deaths is you're checking for any focal areas of hemorrhage where they could

have been abused. And again it goes back to the adage, if you don't get it right, then you'll never get it. And so we would do palms of the hands, backs of the hands, up and down the arms. Funeral homes hated it because it was an extra level they had to go to if they if if the body was going to be viewable. A lot of hats involved wearing hats and you know, trying to make the body presentable after we did it. But that standard I've done. I've

assisted in autopsies of three execution victims. I did one of the last electric electrocutions in Georgia I think when I was assigned to the GBI, and two of the early lethal injection cases. And here's an interesting little bit of trivia because a lot of people will look at that and they'll say, well, why do you do an autopsy on that? Well, it's a homicide, and people, that's not a homicide. What else would you call it? There's only five manners of death. It's literally the death of

someone but the hand of another. And so the corner can make the decision as to whether or not they want an autopsy. But is the public is going to be best served if all of these autopsies are done to completion where they are as thorough as they possibly can be. And isn't that interesting, you know, because you've got somebody who's been sitting on death row. Everything they

do is monitored, everything they do is watched. You have detailed information about their medical history, if anything they're suffering from. But yet the state still requires that there'll be an autopsy performed. I had a chance for one to go and observe the execution. But you know, I got to.

load my brain up with. I didn't I didn't need to go in there and bear witness to it and be around. You know, you're around enough sadness. As a medical legal death investigator, I spent a lot of time. I think I've done close to two thousand in person death notifications over the course of my career, and it's soul crushing. The last one was just as bad as the first one that I did when I think I

was twenty one years old. Never got easier, and so he you look at something like that, and and a lot of people out there would say, how would give youthing to be able to go see an execution? Be very careful what you wish for. There's just certain things that there's enough horror and ugliness in this world that you don't want to have to subject yourself to that one other thing. So it's just something I chose never

to do. Now was there for the examination, And I think clinically you can kind of switch that, switch that off, but you almost feel like if you're there watching it, you almost feel like you're a party to it exactly, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, And it's just kind of a you know, and I know a lot of people get bloodlust going on, you know, they see these horrible cases in the news, and I'm chief among sinners

because I cover them. And you say, well, if that was my relative, I'd throw the switch, or I push the needle or do this and do that, and that's all fine and good, But you know it wasn't my relative. You know, I don't, you know, I don't. I'm not invested in this. I'm not invested in this emotionally. I don't want to be invested in emotionally. I'm not invested in it clinically to watch the process because I know how it ends. I'll be glad to be there to

document it, even though it's rather tedious. But it's one of those moments in Tom you know that I'm glad it's it's one of those turns in the road that I'm glad that you don't regret. Yeah, I didn't.

don't believe anything I say. To look it up for yourself. That's generally how you're going to learn. But the mask is that they utilize is like, well, your your husband, who by the way, is an absolute hero. You is firefighters, So they have to use those all encompassing face mask right, you know where they can take oxygen directly in it protects their face. That's the type of masks they're using on this dude. And and he's he is morbidly obese.

As a matter of fact, they they had attempted it was either one or two lethal injections on him already. They couldn't hit a vein because he was so obese, and it didn't it didn't work well. It was allegedly a struggle because it's it's an oxygen I don't know if you can call it like an oxygen deprivant, but it's an oxygen replacement. It's not like halon with halon fire extinguishers, where it's you know, it's sucking all the

oxygen out of the air and fire dies. It doesn't quite work like that, but it's oxygen replacement and you're replacement with nitrogen. And there have been a few, and I've worked these cases. If people in the audience are not familiar with what are referred to as final exit cases, there's a book that was written many years ago called Final Exit by a guy named Derek Humphrey. Not Freeze, but Humphrey. I think that's correct, and he had started

out years ago. His wife had really aggressive bone cancer and she was as, you know, that disease is really insidious, and she was just you know, there's no position she could get in and not be miserable. And there's not enough drugs you can give someone to make them comfortable. It's a horrible way to dine. They decided a mutual agreement that he would make tea for her. He would make tea for her, and he used I think some kind of barbituate combination. I can't remember what it was,

and she died and he witnessed it well. He went on from there and wrote a book about it called Final Exit. In Final Exit, he goes through in detailed information describing how you can go about peacefully and they

don't call it suicide. They call it self deliverance. So the reason I tell you that story is that going back to the execution with nitrogen, one of the things that they would recommend, and for a while on YouTube there was actually there was a video that was up of him demonstrating this, utilizing a kid's helium tank like he would rent to blow up helium points and how to change the hardware out on it. Uh, you know, plastic back putting, using plastic bags. It was. It was horrible,

I mean just absolutely horrible. And uh, this method of self deliverance, you would take on board drugs and then you know, use the gas as an adjunct and either way it's going to bring about your peaceful death. I worked a number of those over the years, and I didn't see I didn't see struggling with those like was described relative to the nitrogen execution. However, he was not

given meds prior to it either. So he's placed in this so you know that he's going to have elevated pulse, blood pressure, is probably gonna be up through the roof, terrible anxiety, crushing chest pain, probably already as a result of that shallow breathing. And then you add the nitrogen into it. And I'm not saying that the guy didn't deserve to die, you know, it's capital punishments. Not my thing. But I have objections based on, you know, my Catholic beliefs.

But I the state says he has to die, and this is the methodology. The problem is is that with this particular methodology, I didn't see any evidence that it had been tested other than on hogs, and that's a big leap to go free, to go from hogs to humans at that point in Tom and my understanding is I think that within the last month they've just done another one with nitrogen, and I haven't heard the outcomes on it yet.

portion of Switzerland. There's like this little peninsula that kind of juts out into northern France and over in Germany. Anyway. That's this thing was out in the woods. They had set this pod up and this person goes out there and I don't even know what their diagnosis was there. I guess they had a thermal diagnoses. I don't even know if that's required anymore. But they went in and took their life, ended their life in this thing, and

the authorities were investigating it. I think there was The thing was the way the Swiss had described I think they said it was, this is so crazy. It was not approved. It was it was not government approved, so it didn't have the stamp on it or whatever, and they got all that.

could work in Yeah, was doing his thing. And interestingly, interestingly enough, the book itself this call Final Exit, but it was published by the Hemlock Society, which, of course Hemlock is the tea that was a Socrates drink where he was forced to take his own life, and is published by the Hemlock Society, which they are a society. I guess they're still in existence. I have no idea

that was dedicated to this idea of self deliverance. So, yeah, the world of medical legal death investigation, you can get off into all of these interesting areas that and be exposed to things that most even cops never see, you know, because we're doing investigations that. Yeah, some of them run parallel. But cops are really only interested in homicides. That's the only thing that's prosecutable, so everything else, and we work

homicides obviously we have to. We're interested in suicides and accidents and natural deaths, which I love working because it's so intellectually stimulating. I'd always learn something about digging into medical records or certainly undetermined us you know that are out there where you just have no raw or reason why this person died and so that would pop up on your radar.

And there's enough home. You know, if you watch the news, you think that there's people walking around with machetes, you know, cutting people's heads off all over the place, And yeah, there are really violent crimes that are out there, but you're seeing what the media chooses for you to see. You know, it's it's these really over and there's a lot of homicides that never make it through the news cycle. That's like one of my big problems with like the jan Benet case.

very well documented. But you know, there are a lot of things that never make it into the news, and one of the biggest examples, I think is Jean Benet. She fit a certain demographic. There's been over I don't know, I'm speaking out of school now, but at one time there were like twenty six books that have been written about the case. I'm sure there's probably more by now, not to mention any number of treatises that are out

there floating around, but you know, I worked. I worked a lot of cases involving little girls that died and they never made it through two news cycles and those cases are unsolved. So it's all. You know, the media sets the table for what we're going to be exposed to and what we hear about that. Going back to true crime, that's one of the interesting things that we do now because we're unfettered I think by standard newspapers

and certainly the nightly national news. I find cases for body bags, which I try to stick within the lane, you know, my lanes. I don't get off into relationship stuff. I'm not putting on makeup while I'm telling ghastly stories and all that sort of stuff. I'm not sitting around smoking cigars and drinking whiskey while I'm talking about it, though I do like a nice whiskey and a cigar.

They haven't spent time in the morgue. They've never been to a death scene. They've never been around some of the brilliant people that I've been exposed to over the course of my career, and they never will because their pastor not going to cross. They're people that keep everything running and do the hard work that you know that I don't have to do because I'm a college professor. I really don't have a real job. I'm a college professor. I used to have a real job, but you know,

so it's my opportunity. I despise it when people speak down to folks. I really hate that, and I've had that done to me. But you know, I had a few really kind people mentors along the way that were forensic pathologists that didn't treat me like I was there, you know, their servant, like a deanery. They treated me as though I were their student, and they wanted to

invest in me. And so I try to pass that along to the general public and try to take these you know, pretty high end complex scientific constructs and try to break it down so that they understand it a

little bit better. And and still, you know, we have a good tale along with it, and they come away understanding some of the stuff that can be very confusing in the news, you know, if you just kind of slip over the top of it, just kind of, you know, pay pay a passing glance to Perhaps these people have never been in an autopsy suite. Most of them never have.

They don't know what the sounds and the smells are, like what it sounds like when you drop a scalpel on a tile floor and it rings off the cabinets and off the thing will steal fixtures. They don't know what that's like in there. I do. That sounds so resonates in my ear. They don't know what it's like to have flies coming off of a body and lighting on you. They don't know what screams of families are like.

I know what that's like, And so I try to do my best to translate that those experiences and also the joy of it of actually discovering something scientifically among all the sorrow and among all the horror, that there's something that you can you know, that you can take away from it that people will be invested in. And so I'm very grateful for the opportunity I've had, you know, to do body bags. It's just every time I do

an episode, I just I'm thrilled with it. It might not be everybody's cup of tea, but you know, I just I enjoy talking about the mechanisms of death and how you work a case like this in the field and then bringing it back to the morgue. And probably one of the coolest things that I've covered that will thrill one of my greatest joys is we did Julius

Caesar's autopsy. It's the first documented autopsy that was ever conducted, and how his personal physician actually created a three D wax model to demonstrate to the crowd of what had been done to their king, to Caesar. And when he demonstrated this thing in the forum, which is where we

get forensics from, he had it on a pedestal. They describe it as an unknown mechanism that would cause this thing to turn, and so he could display it to the gathered crowd and they said that you could hear gasp go it from the crowd, and they wanted blood at this point, you know, they wanted blood. It had been a witnessed homicide with these senators. But when the people saw what had happened to and that was the first time not only was it the first documented autopsy,

but what's old is new again. You know, we used really modeling now, you know, in court, and that was that was the first Tom And that was a couple of thousand years ago that he thought about that at that moment, Tom, that scientist, that physician, that clinician thought about this time, how am I going to convey this message to these people that don't have my understanding necessarily because they haven't spent their time treating patients. How are

they going to appreciate this? I got it, he has this Eureka moment And.

they could understand it. I always like to say, it's like a third grade level.

is hard, and yeah, math is difficult. Science is hard, but the reward is almost immeasurable, you know, the knowledge that you gain and if you can plant that little seed in their brain to help them understand, okay, forum in function. This is how this works. It's kind of like when you're you know, that's why our forensics program is an applied forensics program, because we're trying to train, teach, and train people. Academics hate it when you say the

word train. When you're trying to educate people so that they can go out and be practitioners, that's the beauty of it. It's not theoretical forensic science. It's applied forensic science. And so those kids that I have walked through the door, many of them have been told that they're no good in math, or that they're no good in science, and all it takes is just a little shove sometimes and

a little encouragement. I mean, I think all of us can identify the first time that we ever walked into a chemistry class, perhaps in high school, and thought they might as well be speaking in ancient Greek. I don't understand this. Oh they let me put together models of molecules. How you know how revealing is that? But then you start to talk about quantitative findings relative to suspect a coke, suspected cocaine, you know that's recovered at crossing. Suddenly suddenly

you understand the application of chemistry. Yeah, and you know the lights go go on at that point time. Sometimes that's all it takes. That's why the STEM stuff that they do in college is now is so very important, and in high school as well.

to help get you on your way. And I think it's it's cool because one of the things I noticed when we went to crime con. Actually, one of the things my husband noticed first. He was just like, there's all women here. It's all women.

on the back burner. But there's some certain situations where women, you know, they get married and they have kids when they're in their twenties and they never get to go to college when but they probably would be really good forensic scientists, right, but they just don't have the opportunity, like you were saying, And the next best thing is for them to listen to podcasts like yours to kind of feel like they're doing.

when she retired. God bless all school teachers out there right now. I don't I don't know how they do it. I wouldn't. You couldn't chase me fast enough, anyone could

give me the job. But to give you an idea of kind of the world that that I inhabited as a practitioner, I compare myself and my colleagues to the great apes, where if you've seen stuff that that the researchers have done, where you they've got the videography in there that the apes will go about picking knits out of one another's scalps, you know to you know they're

eating them, you know they're looking to. When you work at a medical examiner or corner's office, you live in such a alternative world.

lovely perfume or cologne that I have on. It's I don't smell anything. I think you're good. And what we're smelling for is that we had to deal with so many decomps that when you go into that environment, the elements of the and this is kind of a I think it's kind of a metaphor as well, but the elements that they're attached to death they attached to you. Now that happens physically. Yeah, facial hair hair.

These bodies are coming out of Gulf of Mexico, so they're swollen and bloated. And no matter how many baths, how many showers I took, I love a shower. I love a good shower. And back then my hair was really dark. I had this great tompsilic like mustache that's big brown.

the point where you become neurotic about it. Plucking those hairs out all these sorts of things, and it sounds so absurd, I know, but that's that's the nature of what you do when you work at a medical examiner. When I would get home in the evenings, I would always have to come in through the rear entrance of our home through we had a mud room on the back of the house where the laundry is and all

that stuff. And Kim, yes, she'd meet me at the back door and she would ask me not hey, babe, I love you so good, to seek say did you have a decomp today? And that's an interesting when you think about the position that you put your spouse in. You know, you you're there and you're you're leaving this world to death, which is what you always do. It's not like being a homicide detective. It's not what it's like at all. Your death day in, day out, twenty

four to seven. You are seeking out to diad you're trying to understand what happened to them, no matter the circumstances, homicide, suicide, whatever, and you bring that, you literally bring that home with you. And so you know, my wife would I had a spot in the in the mudroom, I'd have to strip all my clothes off. She's a saint. She's a saint, she'd bag them all away.

no education. I just had tenacity. I kept coming to the more volunteering in the morgue, who does that mopping up, the more rocking, mopping up maggots, you know, And then finally the first day I'll never forget one of the most exciting moments in my life is one of the theologists looked at me and said, and I'd been scribing for him for a while. I'd sit over on the stool.

I had my own scrubtsuit, I'd sit on the stool and I would sit there and I had actually a scriptsuit and what they used for as a sectioning gown, which is like a it's a green gown that ties on the side over here, and it was it looks just like a scrubtsy. And I would faithfully wash it, you know, and I would describe for him. And then one day he looks over at me and says, do you want to close? And I thought that he meant, go get my mop and mop up everything here, you know,

which is what I was doing. It's not what he meant.

make us hug our babies even tighter. Appreciate those moments, and many times I would fail to appreciate them because I'm so obsessed and worried about having to go back to work. I'd work four days on ten hour shifts. Of course, ten hour shifts always turned into thirteen hour shifts, and it had gotten so bad at the end where I would pick up my keys at the end of my last watch that I was on a call, that I walked out of the door of the m's office. I was thinking about having to come back here in

three days. I wasn't thinking about, Gee, I'm going to go home be with my family. I was thinking I've got to come back here in three days. A snow way for anybody to live.

just like they were. They had this and they couldn't do anything to save them. But when you see kids dying in accidents and just abuse and stuff, I just was like, I can't do.

But who am I going to interdict with somebody that starved their kid to death? I mean yeah, I mean they'll hook them up on charges. Maybe. Are they going to stay in prison? No? Are people going to stop starving their kids to death or you know, beating them to death? No, they're not. It's still it's going on right now as you and I speak. You know, somewhere out there, there's kid being abused, There's kids going to wind up dying. It happens all the time. There's nothing

that we do it's going to stop that. And that's why I think there's a certain time where you have to be an adult enough to realize and you have to swallow your pride and so that can't do this anymore. It's going to kill me. It's gonna kill me, it's gonna kill my family. Uh. And it's a it's a it's a baton death march, you know, where every single day that's all your your bearing witness to and the

human human spirit's not intended to do that. It's not like working on a funeral home you know where you know, they'll say, well, we're here to serve families and provide you're there at selic casket and you're there to dress things up and make it that way, and that's all find and good people need that. People think they need that. God bless them, God speed. But you know, when you're in the field and you're working as as a death investigator,

it's it's hard. Uh. But when when you can no fine, no longer find redemption in it, that's the time you need to walk away from it. And I'm that I'm glad I didn't completely go over the cliff, you know. I'm glad that I was rained back in and my wife supported me in that, you know, because she went through it, you know, with me, she saw it all and smelled it all. And you know, would hear about these stories that if I you know, it's like I often tell people a lot of stuff that that I

saw and that I did. If you and I wrote a script together, n Cole, and we walked into some producer's office in Hollywood, they say this is too outlandish. I'd never knew it, and we're not going to sell it. There's no way anybody would believe the story, you know. But yeah, and there's a million of the stories out there like that. It's not just me. I'm very small, little guy. I just happened to be in the field

at these particular times. Right now, there's somebody out there right now as I speak, that's climbing under a house with a mag and infested body. They're laying next to the body as they examined the body in the dark, you know, damp area that no one has been in years and years. And there's people that are observing things right now that we can't even begin to fathom out here in America. Right now as we speak, they're out there doing this job day in and day out, and

nobody ever, nobody ever thinks about it. You know. My first date that I read with my wife, we'd gone to a Braves game and we went out.

what is it that you do for a living? I said, well, I said, I'm a death investigator. She said, you mean like a cop. I was like no, I said, I'm the eyes and the ears of forensic pathologists out on the field. She said, I thought they'd go out there. I was like, no, forensic pathologists don't go into the field. That's a Hollywood fiction. And they might go, but rarely, and you don't want them out there because they don't they don't know how to process crime scenes. They don't

have you know, they're good in the morgue. And so i'm their eyes and ears, and my colleagues are too. So that's what we go out and do, and we notify families of deaths, and then I'll work in the morgue and you know, all these sorts of things. And profoundly enough, and that she didn't she didn't really think about what she was saying. When she said this is a first date. She looks at me and says, until I met you, I never thought about death. It's like, wow,

I'm not I'm not going to have second chance. Here got to make She's beautiful, you know, She's sitting there and uh and I was thinking, you know, I'm uh, well, I lost this one. I'm not gonna have a chance. You know she's saying, she's making quotes like that, I never thought about death until I've met you here. I've told that story is a number of time, but it's it's a little slice of life for me that because you know, death had become my norm. It was my norm,

and that's that's no way to live. You know, that's where death is your norm. And you're right. I'm so glad you didn't go to work for the Emmy's office. I can't tell you how happy I am that you didn't make that decision. I'm glad that you took your skills and applied it to truly helping people. I mean, like helping people with the diagnoses, the sturgical diagnoses that

you can make. You know, these specimens that are coming out and you're taking a look at and what you're doing is like literally, I don't think I don't know that people fully understand, you know, how valuable an asset you are, you know, when you're talking about looking at some tumor, uh and trying to make an assessment of this thing that has been excised from somebody's you know, body, and they're trying to understand what's the course of action here,

your decision, your diagnosis as you're sitting at that scope is so valuable. And that I always wanted to be in that environment. I think that I secretly, uh you know, Harbard thoughts that I would eventually go to what was it, It was either Duke or I can't remember you, And I think, yeah, And I thought about doing the PA program there for a while. I used hope that memory

would get one. I would have loved to have gone through that program and just do nothing but autopsies, not have to deal with families or just sit in sit in a lab, you know. And and it's not I don't mean to be dismissive by saying that, but the peace of that and you know, we I heard off the conversation and it was so beautiful the way you put it about and people other than you and I and people in our field are not going to understand that. But you talked about that piece that you have in

the morgue with a body. Oh yeah, and that's a true moment of discovery in there. There's nothing that there's no cross talk, there's no phone, it's just you one on one with the body, grossly examining the body and trying to understand what happened to this person and trying to assess it in that moment, and and know that whatever you come up with is going to be invaluable.

And there is a real piece in that, you know, And you kind of leave that that morg area after you've done what you've done, you've cleaned up, and your head back upstairs, and all of a sudden the noise begins to invade again, and all the static that's around you and everything, and there's there is truly a certain piece that that happened. Most people want to stay away from the more there are people that want to be there.

But for the line's share of people's you know, they'll take the loop around the long way in the basement if they've got to go to the work cafeterias in the in hospitals, always next to the mor give or notice it, I don't.

what's this door? And they open it up, and you're always had that, you know, there was an internal lock that we could use, but and it would always seem I worked in some really old old hospitals and the way they used to be designed it You would come walking out of the moar at these hospitals and right down the hallway is the dining area, you know, and it's where everybody went to eat for some reason, and the food was always tremendous, and nobody in there other

than you know, maybe the nursing staff and people like that. They know that that's the more because that's where they take the bodies, you know, when or the transport service I take the bodies in there and you know, place them in the train and leave them and leave if But they don't know what's going on down there, you know, in that little room. You know they have no idea. But yet the cafeteria is right there. And I have to say, I'm not as a patient, but as a

person who walks into a hospital cafeteria. Some of the best meals I've ever had in my life were in cafeterias and hospitals. But yeah, it's it's kind of a Hospitals in and of themselves are weird places. They're like little cities, little islands, and there's a pecking order. A lot of people don't understand that. And uh, pathology is generally out there, you know, on a little island by itself. You have people that come in and out not always wanted to be a part of that. I could, I would,

I would just scrape the surface of it. And you know, going into hospitals and assisting with private cases and doing temporary That's how I got started. The corner's office was being renovated and we're using a brand new hospital to our autopsies, bringing in decomposed bodies into a hospital autopsy suite. I remember those days. That would never happen now. But yeah, we brought.

I'll never forget this guy. And he had a what had been in his lapel, a red carnation and the flower was completely wither, but it had stained his lapel. And the only sign of change that had occurred with him was he had a large focal area of mold that had grown on his face. Other than that, he was completely intact, so cool, no foul smell. There was no water intrusion because lots of times with the vaults, you'll get People won't realize this, but because you're subterranean,

you don't know what's going on beneath the ground. And I think people think that bodies are perfectly sealed and they're dry, and they're not. It's a nightmare scenario. And so many times detened upon the wa water table if it rises, if you've got like flash flooding that occurs in an area, you'll get water intrusion in these things in the caskets will literally float like this and then drain back out, and so you have to contend with that and talk about the smell there generally with a

truly well embalmed body. I learned this from a forensic pathologist because I for some reason, it really gave me the creeps. First time I did an exhimation to be involved in it, and I'd done a lot of other cases freshly down, I mean, people that had just been killed in the most awful ways. But for some reason I was really put off by an exhumation. The very first one, I'll never forget. It was a lady and he said, come here, I want you to smell something.

If I okay, it's not your finger or something else. No, he says, come over here, lean over next to her mouth and her nose and inhale and he said. I said, okay. I pulled down my mask and like that. He said, did you smell it? I said, I smelled something. He said, it's got almost a sickly rose like scent to it. I smelled it again. How do you tan if it

didn't and it was it had the body? You know, with these embalmed bodies, if they're done well, first off, the texture is almost I describe it to people sometimes it feels almost like the surface of an overinflated basketball. That's kind of how it feels. The tissues very very from and I have yet to have worked on an exhamation where it was like a dcomp you know, where we've taken it out of a river or a swamp or out of a home. I'd not had had that

experience before. Every exhumed body that I'd ever worked, the bodies were fantastically intact. I've had a few where I questioned how well they've been actually embalmed.

and NewsNation. I'm on News Nation a lot, but primarily I do a lot of stuff obviously with Nancy Grace, I'm on her program, which appears on Merit Merritt Street Media, which is doctor Phil's new imprint. I do a lot of work with everybody's friend of Vinnie Politan, who has a nighttime show in Court TV. He and I go back years and years and he's a dear soul, so

I like working with Vinnie as well. So, uh, you know, I'm out here, you know, knocking around most of tom and you know, I enjoy just talking about the science of death and the science of of investigation. So welcome all comers, So come on over and we'll have fun.

healthier decisions regarding their life and well being. Always remember that science is changing every day and the opinions expressed in this episode are based on my knowledge of those subjects at the time of publication. If you are having a medical problem, have a medical question, or having a medical emergency, please contact your physician or visit an urgent care center, emergency room, or hospital. Please rate, review, and subscribe to Mother Knows Death on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or

anywhere you get podcasts. Thanks