BLOOD BENEATH MY FEET-Joseph Scott Morgan

Joseph Scott Morgan became a death investigator with the Jefferson Parish Corner's Office in suburban New Orleans in nineteen eighty seven, the youngest medical legal death investigator in the country. During the day, Morgan worked in the morgue and at night investigtion for the coroner. In nineteen ninety two, Morgan became senior investigator with the Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office in Atlanta.

Morgan is now the professor at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, where he teaches a death investigation course based on the National Standards, which he helped develop. The book that we're featuring this evening is Blood Beneath My Feet, The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator, with my special guest, journalist and author, Joseph Scott Morgan. Welcome to the program and thank you very much for a Greenness interview. Joseph Scott Morgan.

a platform form for Lorraine broco viewer. I mean listeners are might remember her from The Sopranos and of course from Goodfellows, and she's the host of the show and in the first episode, I'll actually be discussing the death death of Natalie Wood and I'm the medical legal expert on that. And then I appear on Dan Abrams Law and Crime Network out of Manhattan. I'm a commentator forends, It's commentator there. I do that two to three days a week, I guess, for about three hours at a time.

We do live court coverage there occasionally Court TV, uh, and then a variety of other you know, podcasts and this sort of thing. And then of course that's in addition to my teaching duties and my research into the corner system in America.

after him, and so he was. He was a one of one of six children on my paternal grandmother's side of the family, and her brother the oldest, the eldest, and she dearly loved him. And he was a union rep in Louisiana, and uh he was in charge of painting, uh, giving contracts for painting. And there was a bridge in Louisiana that was had a large amount of money that was attached to it, and actually it linked Faraday, Louisiana,

the home of Jerry Lee Lewis to to Mississippi. And this one fellow put in for the bid didn't get it. And so my uncle was in West Monroe, Louisiana. People might know that from Doug Dynasty at the I've ever watched that program years ago. He was back in the fifties getting his haircut on a I think it was a Saturday morning and he stepped out into the street. Fellow that felt he had been wronged by my uncle

was waiting in a barroom across the street. Walked in, walked out into the street, called his name, and proceeded to gunning down in the middle of the street with a thirty eight caliber revolver. My uncle crawling beneath a car, you know, freshly cut hair, nicely closed. And he died, you know, on that dirty street, beneath that old car he was trying to get into to escape his own death. And and you know I was named after this man,

and so it was. It was an interesting linkage for me, I think, and early on I thought about him, even as a small child. I remember thinking of him almost in heroic terms. You know that that he you know, that he died. It was striking to me as as a young child.

my family felt like they didn't get justice in this trial. Uh. This fellow was plugged in politically, and as all people are one way or another in Louisiana. And h interestingly enough, my my grandmother in her uh and her sisters would send a black wreath to this man's home every single year on the anniversary of my uncle Joseph's murder. And so that you know, that thread kind of runs through I think my family there was always a you know,

a weeping, if you will. I think that silently went on and even to the day that all those sisters died and they're all dead now that generation's gone. Uh, there was a cloud that kind of you know, hung over them because of this homicide. You know that they felt like he was never uh, he never avenged essentially, and and so that that travels down through time. My father was my grandmother's only only child, and he was born later in life to my to my grandmother, and

he he had this kind of interesting background. He was doted on by his mother and abused by his father there in North Louisiana. They had a horse ranch and farm, and he was beaten regularly. Well, he grew up mean, grew up, grew ups, you know, spoiled and mean, and that translated into his adult life. He's a very violent, very violent fellow. And he and my mother wed when they were very young. I think he was eighteen, My mother was seventeen. She by the time she was eighteen,

she was given birth to me. And there was always a residue of violence that existed with him. He was a scary you know, gary man, particularly back in his younger days, and until that that you know, that culminated. I think uh in uh uh. When I was about six five or six, he you know, he came came to my grandmother's house, you know, with a belly full of bourbon, and he had a sought off Ivor Johnson double barrel shotgun and he was proclaiming he was going

to kill the whole family. And I was in the house, actually in the backyard, playing in a sand that my grandpa had had acquired for me, a big pile of sand. What kid doesn't love that, you know, And they heard him scream into the driveway. My grandmother ran out and he was shouting, you know, calling down the thunder from God, I guess, and you know, and I have vivid memories of her pulling me in the house and locking the door,

and my grandfather was already in the house. Uh. And she thrust me under the bed, and you know, I can still have a memory and I write about it, and blood beneath my feet of looking out from beneath the bed, and you could see her knees as she was beside the bed, praying, you know, asking God to save her from her own son. And it was that imprinted in my memory, you know, long after that. It stayed with me for years and years. Then and he, you know, he was throwing heavy metal furniture, you know,

against against the back of the house. He's screaming out for his father's blood, that he was going to come in and kill us, and kill his father in particular, the man that had treated him so roughly as a child, and he blasted off the shotgun a couple of times and it, you know, in the interim they had called. Back then, you couldn't call nine to one one. This is back in the late sixties. They called zero and

the deputy sheriffs and washingtof pair showed up. And I remember them, really, you know, taking my father to school. I have an image of him with blood, you know, coming off out of his nose. I looked out the window of my grandma's living room and he was in he was handcuffed, and uh, I think I talked about stalwart men in khaki uniforms and straw cowboy hats, you know, and they became my heroes, you know. I saw what

they had done. They walked into into this situation and drug him away and uh, you know, and hauled him off to the to the parish that we don't have counties in Louisiana, parish lock up and there, you know, the rest of his life was set in motion. Back then, they used to tell tell young violent men, you got one or two choices, you know, you either go to the penitentiary he joined wrinkle, and go to Vietnam, and he he decided to join the Corps.

UH when he got out of the Marine Corps. He's going to move us to Australia. He was going to do construction down there, takes us out to la and then finally, for whatever reason, he settled on Georgia. And I had cousins that were already living in Georgia. Georgia even back then around the Atlanta area was booming and this was you know, the early seventies. It took us there, and uh, I guess probably within eighteen months of us moving to Georgia, he promptly abandoned my mother and I.

I mean, we had nothing. We were living in a trailer park run you know by this old man that you know, was an interesting character to say the least. And my mother very still, very young, very beautiful, and she was trying to make her way, you know, as best she could. And she was working for a textile company and she met this guy that was in sales that happened to be there, and he was refined. He

was everything that my father was not. He was college educated, appeared to be successful, but he had this kind of thread of hyper religiosity that ran through him. And this is kind of a theme that runs through blood beneath

my feet. There's this, you know, this kind of worrying that I do, you know, growing up as a Southern evangelical uh in that you know, in that timeframe of my life, Uh, you know, you're you're fighting to try to be obedient to your parents and to what you perceived God wants you to do with your life, and then you're fighting for your own survival. I don't know, you know, this sort of thing. I don't know if

I can endure this any longer. And so for me, he uh, you know, he he entered my world, Bruce did, and uh it was all you know, uh all fine and dandy at first. He was wound my mother, uh you know visa v you know, through me essentially, you know, promising me things that I'd never had, going to pro pro ball games and college football games and taking us out.

And we were living on Blowney Sandwich is living in a house trailer d. I mean, we had nothing, and my mother saw it as a as a way for us to kind of pull ourselves out of this this horrible situation that we were kind of living in because I mean we you know, we didn't have have dom one and hardly had any food. And uh, you know, she married him, wound up marrying him very quickly and Helson follower.

because that it's amazing. What should kind of imprint on your kids, you know when you're little, you know when you hear that or those children that are in your charge. And so that was always imprinted in my psyche, and so I always thought it. And when I took this kind of circuitous route, wound up back down in kind of where our ancestral home is, down in South Louisiana.

I was born in North Louisiana, but all of my family lived in South Louisiana, in the New Orleans area, and I had uncles down there and extended family, and I finally wound up down there, showed up in town with nothing. Essentially. I tried college, didn't do too well. I was in the National Guard and the Army and kind of transferred to Guard membership was down there with them,

and I was really just seeking. I happened to be working in a hospital and the parish at that particular time this is in I guess probably about eighty four maybe the parish was renovating their morgue and it was unsustainable,

you know, it was just horrible. It was. The morgue was actually built on the site of the old gallows and down in Gretton and Louisiana where the Jefferson Parish Corners Office was at one time headquartered, and they actually used to do at the parish level, you know, public executions there back in the eighteen hundreds, and the morgue itself was built into the prison and so you had to go through actual security to get into the morgue. Well, they were trying to renovate this thing to make it

viable more. It's very expensive and they wanted to try to maintain this thing until they could come up with a better solution. So the Corner's office started doing autopsies at the hospital that I happened to be working at, and I was working as I first started off as a security guardener I started working as an er tech while I was going to college down there, and I was very young, I guess I was twenty maybe twenty one, yes, And I just started bringing bodies in and out of

the Morgan. I became friends with one of the corner investigators. He turns out to be one of the finest forensic scientists that I've ever known, one of the finest investigators that I've ever known. He and I became fast friends, and I found myself, of all things, showing up and you know you're in trouble when you do this. I was actually showing up to autopsies on my free time. I wasn't getting paid, and I was in that morgue day in and day out cleaning. I'd just mop up

blood and maggots and you know, clean the morgue. I tell my college students, now you know, they said, Professor Morgan, I want to do what you did for a living. How'd you start? And said, I volunteered. And you can see they're countance immediately drop because they have an expectation they're going to be paid for whatever they want to do.

And so I became a deaner, which is actually translates from German to servant, and it's a term that you used for people that prosect bodies were the ones that actually put the coal stial to bodies, and it just it kind of evolved. I found out I had a natural talent at it, and they first allowed me to close bodies, which is just using a standard old baseball stitch that's putting all of the organs back in the body in a big plastic bag. I'm sure a lot

of your true crime listeners are very familiar. They've heard about autopsies before. And then finally I graduated to opening bodies, and there was a position that came open as a corner investigator and I had started doing this. I started dissecting in nineteen eighty five. And it turns out these people my life. It's weird how life is. You intersect with all of these people around along your path and you don't really realize it. And a guy that was

working there, some listeners might be familiar with him. He was at the end of his careers named doctor William Eckert, and he's one of them US renowned forensic pathologists in the country. He's deceased now and I started actually working with him as an older fellow, and he, uh, he

taught me a lot. Uh. I learned a lot from all of the forensic pathologists that I work with worked with, and I applied for a job as a corner investigator I think three times, and the two people that got the job before me only last at six months each. And dude, I was still you know, I was still going to the morgue to dissect bodies. And they said, well, let's give this kid a chance. You know, he's he's there every single day. He's not really we're not paying

him anything. And in the meantime, in addition to that, at night I would go out on scenes with the corner investigator when I wasn't working, just to carry you know, just to carry his equipment, you know, to help him take He would teach me photography, taught me everything. And of course they were using me to discut work too, because I was crawling, crawling under houses to drag out maggot infat bodies, and I just you know, and I think looking back on it, people will say, you know,

how could you do that? Well? I would always say to myself, Dan that look, uh, you know, And I think I mentioned this in the in the chapter called for Scythia in the book. You know, magn infested body, it's not Bruce. Uh, you know, brain splattered on the wall, it's not Bruce.

perspective went, and where I really gleaned my education. And even though I have a graduate grewing forensic science, the best education I ever got was the morgue. I mean it was it's you know, there's an old adage that says see one, do one, teach one, and after you've dissected, prosected as many human cadavers as I participated in and dissected, something's going to stick. And I read a lot on

my own. This is before, way before the internet, is way before people even knew what the corner did, and certainly didn't know what went on an autopsy room. I just it was my classroom, and it just opened a whole new world to me.

in time. You know that that there there was just there's nothing nothing there for many people that that resembles a living, breathing human being. And and after you've done it for a while, and it shocks your system. You begin to I think, see their world come into focus, maybe more clearly than it's ever been in focus before. It goes to a greater a greater idea. And something that that I have still struggled with day in and day out, because I've spent so much time with death,

is that death is stalking. Death is stalking us all all the time, and you never know when it's going to present itself. For me as a young man, uh when I, you know, would encounter particularly decomps. I had to get passed. I knew very early on. I had to get past my revulsion to what was being presented to me visually, what was being presented to me from an all factory sense, and you know, just you're inhaling, inhaling this, and at the end of the day, you're

inhaling part of what they are. And even from an auditory sense, you if no one has ever heard a maggot husk pop, you can literally hear this, and you hear the buzzing of the flies that that light on you, that have previously been feasting on a body, and you become kind of one in this environment, and you better show up with your a game or it will begin to kind of to eat away you. You begin to

slowly decompose, uh, you know, along with the body. You just do it at a slow rate because you still have your metabolic process, that's your crab cycle is still firing off in life. But there's there's kind of a there's kind of a lot of parallels here and and most most people in the workaday world have no appreciation

for this there. They just they don't They don't have any concept of it that this this is happening day in and day out, that somewhere out there right now, there is some young medical legal death investigator that is hovering over a decomposing human being and they're having to make heads or tails of it, and you're very confused

at that age. You feel like you don't know. And decomps are the worst because you always feel like the body is hiding something for you or that evidence has already you know, left the building if you will, because they're so far gone at that point.

for for for anyone. That is, you know, when you're when you're attempting to to try to make heads or tails out of out of what what has taken place, and you want to give you want to give give parents and people kind of the the benefit of the doubt, if you will, relative to to to you know what you're viewing, you know in real time, what what is it about about about the scene that you can draw your own conclusions but yet still remain as objective as possible.

And sometimes that is you you have hell to pay with that because you're you can't you can't just simply you know, check check your uh, you know, check your your feelings at the door, your your humanity. I think if you will uh and and you know and and and it's it's very very difficult because of of the the the you you want to try to maintain an Arab objectivity. But there are just those moments in time where you, you know, you essentially want to rid the world.

I think of of of certain people, you know, you, I think from Jump Street you you want to try to be able to you wish that your past had never crossed. Essentially, I think is is what it is. And when you're a child, a child of abuse, uh, it's it's particularly difficult in that uh in that uh you you have this uh you have this thing that you know, that kind of uh where you you see yourself as some kind of protector if you will, for for all all children, and uh, you know, to recover

those things. And if I'm remembering this, this this story correctly, uh, you know, I I roll it back to, uh, the the moment that that uh uh that my that my grandmother actually protected me by placing me beneath a bed, you know, in the face of what was happening with with my uh with my my own situation with my father, you know, protected me. But there's sometimes there's just there's there's not enough people out there too to protect them. When I was little, you know, my mother would and

you know, I had terrible uh, terrible earaches. And she would rock me, and she would sing the whole song called Down in the Valley, and it would bring a lot of peace to me and soothing. And you have children out there that as bad as my childhood was, you still come across what what remains of these children that are abused and abandoned and and people move on from them, and they they're never remembered. And and but for me as a medical legal death investigator, I do

remember them, you know, I do remember. I do remember. Uh you know what what the parents failed to do or what what they did do by uh, you know, just their their sins of uh of comission. You know that that they brutalize children and do horrible things to them, but yet they go on about their life. But that little life is snuffed out, and it's it's very hard to kind of reconcile in your own brain, I think many times. And it leaves scars. It certainly leaves scars.

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there's really no reason not to use Honey. It's free to use and installs on your computer, and just two clicks get Honey for free at Join honey dot com slash murder. That's join honey dot com slash murder now, Joseph. As you write in the book, the hardest thing to get out of your mind and the hardest thing to do as you as your role as a death investigator

is to the notification of next of kin. A particular case that that you bring up is a trip that you had with someone as a friend and a mentor named Bill Donovan and his friend, which was a federal judge named Lance Mitchell. This story clearly illustrates and demonstrates how hard it is doing this job, and especially was probably pivotable in you leaving this job sooner than you might have tell us about this.

Louisiana State University and his father. Lance's father and who was also a big influence in Bill's life, was federal judge and had was a part of a lot of the early civil rights decisions in the South of UH safeguarding uh the rights of African Americans. He'd been threatened on numerous occasions by the Klan over the years, back in the sixties, and was very stalwart. And he was just this, you know. He would his dad, the federal judge,

you know, and I write about in the book. He would he would arrive at the campus at l s U. And he was like this kind of demi god, you know, when you show up, everybody pull up a uh, pull up a chair for him and poured him a a couple of fingers of bourbon, you know, and uh the tales would start to be told. And that's kind of the part of you know, being a Southern storyteller. Uh and uh, you know, wo would like ants. I became friends with him, and Lance was somewhat of an interesting character.

He was kind of playboy judge's son, you know, and he he he he never got into you know, big trouble or anything. He was just he was one of the cool kids, you know that, but he was. He was affable, you know, and a real Southern gentleman. And uh he had finally, after all this time, had settled settled on a on a young lady, and uh we felt as though they were, you know, going to be a great match. And Bill had tiny little house that he was renting at the time, he and his wife.

But what was really great about it, particularly in South Louisiana was it so bloody hot is the fact that he had a swimming pool. And so any party that was to be had, it would be had at Bill's house. And it was a Memorial Day and we had we had gathered together and uh, Bill and I obviously were

both off duty, and Lance had come. We had hot dogs and beers and sat around and you know, just on a Memorial Day and just really enjoyed the fellowship with one another and laughing and carrying on like we always did. And it's one of those moments in time for me. I can't you know, obviously, everybody's journey is different. I can't speak for anybody else, but when I look back on it, you you know, it sounds rather Pollyanna,

you know, to talk about. You see how fleeting life is and you don't understand all these intersections and this sort of thing. And you really don't though, I mean, that's that's about as real as it gets. You don't You don't know when the last time you're going to see somebody is that that is, at least in the state of living. And so you for me, with Lance, he and Bill were like brothers, and there was a general, a general love that these two had for them. And

I happened to be on duty. I guess it was. I can't remember now, my mind fails me at this point, but it was a week later maybe, I think, And I got a call from the local hospital when I was on duty. It was in the evening and Lance had a car that had t tops in it and he straightened out a curve coming off of it in New Orleans and both he and his girlfriend were ejected from a vehicle. And what normally happens with a Corners call in a violent death is anybody that dies of violence,

you know, whether it's homicide or accident or whatever. The case of suicide, it doesn't matter that the emergency room staff has to call Corner's office and the corner investigator on duty, you know, will answer the phone and most of the time respond even to the er, not just to the scene, because we like to gather as much information.

And it was one of those kind of moments that stands still in time, and you know, I probably had I don't know, I've probably already taken maybe ten other deaks that night, you know, over the course of just doing what I did as a corner investigator. Some I had to go out on scenes. On others I did, and some I had to go to the hospitals. And for that moment time she said, yeah, we've got two

victims here, both in MBA's ejections. The male's name is Lance, and I remember writing that down and then she said Mitchell. And it was one of those moments literally where I said, can you repeat that name? And I said, he's a white male, and then she gave his state of birth and I was like, I'm I'm head of the hospital now, and I got in my vehicle and grab my thin kit,

you know, just like I was going to homicide. And I remember driving over there and and uh, you know, you walk in to these emergency room trauma rooms and then if you've never been in one, they're they're like a surgical suite. The suite almost because and this is the only reason it begins and here ends here they have these very bright surgical lights. It almost gives us

artificial luminescence. So it's kind of eerie and uh uh uh in a weird kind of way, the lighting in there, and it shows things that you don't It super enhances your vision, I think. Uh. And there he was head was bandaged, but his head was misshapen, and I knew it was Lynce. Uh. You know when I eyevollwed him uh and his his fiancee lay on a gurney in the adjacent room, and again she had severe head trauma. And I remember having to go tell Bill what had happened.

And I didn't want to have to go to the judge's home to do this because I'd been to the judges home many times and Bill was almost like family with them. But over the course of my career, as kind of an aside part of the whole process of notification of x skin, like you mentioned, it actually falls

to the medical legal death investigator. I've done I think close to two thousand by the end of my career where you physically either go to the emergency room or you go in person to a home and notify people. And these are on all kinds of deaths. It's not, you know, corners don't just simply what commid. Homicides are very small portion of what we do when people die of other reasons, and it never gets easy. The last one I ever did was just as hard as the

first one. It's not one of these things that you know, you developed special muscles for h And Bill I called him, woke him up out of a dead sleep, and I remember just telling you, man Land is dead. You know he's dead. And we had the ability to talk very frankly with one another as fellow medical legal death investigators. And immediately said I'm going to Judge's house right now. And he left, no weeping, nothing. And then the next time I heard from Bill was probably three hours later,

and he was roaring drunk. And Bill had duty, He had duty that day that means that he was going to be working as a dealer. And he called me up and through his slurred speech, he, you know, he told me at that moment time that he would not be capable of doing these autopsies, and it was that it was a crossroads in my life, both in my physical and mental health. At this point time, I made

a decision. This is one of the moments you can look back in time and say you should have chosen B instead of A. And being a stalwart, you know, flinty faced Southern mail that I was, that I could stand up anything. I said, don't worry, I'll rush in and do it. And I wound up dissecting these two people that I'd been eating hot dogs with the week before, and it affected me down to my soul more so than anything else that I ever did as a medical

legal death investigator. And I'm talking about thousands and thousands of bodies that I've stood over, either on the street as a death investigator or in a morgue as a as an autopsy assistant pathology assistant. Nothing else ever affected me like that. And I you know, when I wrote Blood Beneath My Feet, I remember reflecting back because when you use you know that you hear it in Hollywood a lot. You'll hear those high speed saws that we

use in the morgue. They're agitating saws. People have ever had a cast removed because Striker Saws, that's the brand. I like saying Scotch tape, but Striker is the most well known. And when I fired up that Striker saw to open both of their skulls or what remained, because their heads were pretty traumatized. The Striker saw creates a histamin it's a bone histe maman. It's very fine, and even if you're wearing a mask, you're still going to

inhalate it. And I remember as I was writing blood beneath my feet and kind of weeping over the keys, if you will, I remember thinking back to kind of at that moment time I was literally inhalating my friend or you know, what was left of his mortal shell. And it was very powerful for me, I think reflectively, and you know, Dan, at the time that I was doing this, it was really hard. It was harder reflectively for me. I wept. I wept for a couple of days.

I went into a really deep spot after I wrote that chapter. It was very, very difficult, very difficult. But there, you know, there's no one else. We're a very small community. Then within the medical legal community, you know, you got cops. There's a lot of homicide investigators that are out there, and God bless them, a lot of them my friends.

But you know, for people like me, I think when I left the field in two thousand and five, there were collectively, and this is counting elected corners, deputy corners, medical examiner investigators from all over the country, there's totally about six hundred of us. And we handle all of

the deaths nationwide. We're the point of contact relative to any death that occurs, not just homicides, but all the suicides, tons of suicides, tons of accidents, unexplained deaths, all these things you know, that we have to view and try to make judgments over. We're the eyes and the ears of the forensic pathologists, and there's no one else to kind of step in the gap, you know. And I know people it might be listening to this and say, well, you're an idiot. Why in the hell didn't you go

and and have someone else do this. Bill and I were the only two in that office. We were the only two autopsy assistants, and there were probably five or six other bodies that I dissected that same day. So there's just some times there's sometimes you know, when you you're forced into these positions where you have to do it, and it was it was hard. It was probably professionally one of the most difficult things I ever had to do.

and what was your incremental dissent? What did it characterize itself?

of wives and save the wives and the kids. That doesn't happen y us. Every thing we do day in and day out is death, I mean, and that's it. I mean, we're either notifying a family, or we're trying to determine what the manner cause is, or we're trying to get a body identified. And so what makes matters even worse is the fact that your boss, your boss, your boss is a physician. And for those that have

never worked for physicians, there are several different types. But when you begin when your boss is actually not just a physician, but they're a pathologist, and not only a pathologist, but a forensic pathologist. There's a reason physicians go into forensic pathology. Now they'll say, I'm a curious person, I

like the science of it and all that sort of thing. Yeah, and they're not dealing with patients, you know, they're not dealing with a living So that gives you I think, I know, I'm paining with very broad brush, but I'm qualified to do that. I've come across too many of them. They don't make the best, the best managers of people. If you will. I when I was in Atlanta, for instance, I had I had a boss that told me, because I was a senior investigator, says, I know you're having trouble,

but you need to suck it up. There's a lot of people around here that look up to you, and you know, and I look back on that now and I think about, you know, the price that I paid, you know, for being manly, you know, of perception of because look, we're talking about death, then no one beats Death is the house and you never beat the house. If you want to put it in in terms of casino,

death is always going to win. And you my you know, my issue was that I always felt as I could go toe to toe with death and and beat it in the end, and you never do. You never do. It's a cool thing, you know. I think that when you're a young man, it's a siren song because you know, you you talk about it's your on arrogance. You know, you talk about, Hey man, it's like, hey, what do you do for a living? When I'm a stockbroker or I sell insurance, or a drive a bus or whatever

it is, what do you do? Well, I'm a medical legal death investigator, Well, what is that, Well, you know, I investigate deaths. I work for the corner, and everybody's oh, you know that's that's really cool, and they want to hear all of your stories. And when you're young, you want to give them all of your stories. But then at the end of the day you suddenly realize that your stories are just vicarious entertainment for those that are

listening to you. At the end of the day, you're still left with all of the screams, You're still left with all of the emptiness. You're still with the reality that they don't know. And what they're not aware of that they go through life numb with many times, is the fact that death is creeping up on them. And as you delve deeper into these things like alcohol or sex or whatever it is that you're using to numb

yourself with throughout your life or overeating. As a medical legal death investigator, you try to numb yourself as much as you can because death is waiting around the corner. You don't feel like that you have anything to lose, you know, because you truly know the reality of what's out there, what kind of waits in the darkness for you. I think that, you know, public in general, they kid themselves in thinking that it's not going to come their way,

but it really does. And I stopped a long time ago. I hate the question why, and a lot of the stuff you see on television and you know, through whatever channel you happen to look at on a daily basis for your entertainment, or these things that you hear us talk about on air or even in podcasts, people say, well, why did they do this? Why? Is a fool's err in death investigation. You might can answer it. Sometimes I prefer science. I like to know what, you know, when, where, how,

those sorts of things. But why is so nebulous and kind of squishy, and it's it's a lawyer's word many times, and you know you it's it's kind of almost a whiny, whiny childlike term. You know why why? Sometimes you're not going to get the answer to that question. I have to try to ground myself scientifically as a death investigator and as an educator. You know, I can look to motivations, I guess to a certain degree, but does anyone ever

really know why? And then you start to get off into the you know, the more metaphysical issues with that too, and you can drive yourself to madness. And a lot of people have the question of why is as you know, we've got mental health facilities, we've got people roam in the streets day to day, we've got people suffering from depression. A lot of it begins with that core question of why.

And I'm chief among sinners, man. I mean, I've I've asked that question for many years, and I have made I've tried to make h you know, some kind of mission on my part that to extricate that word out of my vernacular. You know, you sit around, I've covered you know, I've covered everything everything from the Vegas shooting.

I was on the air the night of Vegas shooting occurred, the Olympic Park bombing, I worked at, you know, the I don't know, the Buckhead mass shooting, the day Trader shooting back in the late nineties, I worked at you know, we had sixteen people killed. I've covered you know, the mass shooting down in Orlando. And you know, if you sit there and you ask why why did these things happen?

You'll never get a clear answer to it. You never really will, nothing that'll actually satisfy because once you think you have an answer to that, the next why question shows up at your door, and so it can be very very difficult. It's a slippery slope, is what it is.

victim of autoerotic affixiation. And then the hardest thing that you have to do is well, of course there's a humor, the cops cracking some jokes about this guy, and you say, you know, I'd hate to be the butt of the jokes like this person. But then you have to call this person's mother, and this southern lady, the Southern bell says, how did my you know, how did my son die?

And then you how can you put it? You tell her this is how he died erotic affixiation, and she doesn't even know what you're talking about.

it was a scary kind of scene. You know, when you go into this thing, there's an electronic device that's still hooked up where you know, I'm looking at this and I'm thinking I'm looking at him split out on the floor and the condition that he's in, and you know, and I'm thinking, you know, they're looking to me to literally unplug this thing. I'm thinking, well, it's it's As a scientist, I understand that probably if this thing had actually caused his death, it would have shorted out, it

would have boned. But still there's that thing in your mind, I'm going to touch this thing, and this is the last thing I'm going to see before I die, And you know, I remember thinking that, and of course I unplugged it and I began to examine his body, and and then you have to think about, well, what do I tell his mom? You know, how do I say this? Well, my intellectual arrogance at the time, I thought that I would impress her with this fancy term that's now very

commident vernacular. Back when this occurred, I guess this was probably in the mid eighties, you know, there was there was not a lot of knowledge of it, you know, unless you watched I don't know Heraldo or something like that, maybe, but you know, it wasn't People weren't as educated back then. And I remember having the police up in this area in Virginia go and go to her home and tell her to call me as they stood by, and I remember telling her with the phone. She asked me, well, sir,

you know, how exactly did my son die? And I remember telling her, well, yeah, ma'am, it was autoeroticas you know. And of course the question that follows immediately after that is what in the world is that? And you know, how do you explain that to a boy's mom, you know, how do you explain that to him? You know, to

her you know how. You know, it's really easy to be at the scene and you're trying to cope with what you're seeing and then to have to shift gears immediately while you're going, you know, sixty miles per hour down the road and you kind of throw it into reverse, and all of a sudden you're dealing with a child's mother, and I say, you know, make him sound like he's

young man. Everybody, if you're a parent, everybody's you know, all your children will always be a baby's Now he's a thirty year old man and he's engaging in this behavior, but it's still a baby. You know, how how do you back off on that? And lots of times you're it's it's a hell of a job to have to do to try to grasp onto durability, to to still have enough humanity within you to walk a mile in their shoes and keep in mind, and going back to

our earlier conversations, this woman didn't ask why. She just want to know how. And you know that that's thing with a lot of families. They want to know how, they want to know where. And it's amazing how many times you get to wear a question because when you tell them their child is dead or any loved one. They'll the first thing out of their mouth is where

where are they? Where are they? They just want to flee to them, hoping, hoping, against hope, that there's something left there that they can grab hold of and and love on one more time. Of course, by the time it's too late.

the on the damer victims. He was the chief medical examiner from Milwaukee County. Very bright man, and he saw a need for kind of standardization for death investigators, medical legal death investigators nationwide, those working for corners and medical examiners, and I was chosen to be among that group, and I'm very honored, and so I attained these heights. And I had, again going back to this narrative that you

can't escape death. I was right in the middle of of death and didn't realize that he was breathing down my neck. And all the while, as highly regarded as I regarded myself, you know, which is the ultimate and arrogance, I began to develop tremors. And I think a lot of this goes back also to the things that had enco that I encountered early on in my life, you know, childhood abuse and that sort of thing. And again I'm kind of layering this thing to prove that I am

the man that I can be. I'm tougher than anything else. And at the end of the day, I wasn't tremor started. I guess tremors had probably started two to three years beforehand, and I just I continue to kind of bull rush my way through, you know, every single day. But as time went by, then I would and this is a horrible way to kind of spend your life. That we would work ten hour shifts, and when I would get off on my final I would clock out at the

Medical Examiner's office in Atlanta. I was not celebrating the fact that I was off for three days. I would be suffering from major depression, sitting in my car, knowing that I would have to come back in three days. And that's the way I lived my life. I would spend my days off, dreading the fact that I would have to come back to work. And it's an unsustainable position. And as time went by, I was gaining a lot of weight. I was eating just to, you know, just

to kind of self soothe myself. Drinking wasn't as bad as it had been previously in my life. My health was not good. I was not exercising. I worked a lot of nights, slept during the day, and I began feeling myself becoming shorter breath on a regular basis. And I wouldn't tell anybody, because you know, I'd taken out hearts out of bodies that were size of canned hands. You know, I knew what athroscriad at cardiovascular disease was. You know, I knew what I knew what strokes were.

You know, I dissected enough brains, and I knew that this was creeping up on me. And I knew that this was it was there, but I was going to continue to fight it until I guess it was probably started about six months out from my final day work. I was I had chest paints so bad going into work that I had to literally stop at an emergency room and they checked me in and they said, no,

your heart is perfectly healthier, nothing's happening here. Take these and they gave me some tranquilizers and sent me on my way. You know, after being overnight, I had to go back home, and then I was back on duty. Two days later. It happened again, I guess a month later, and again the same thing. They put me on the EKG. I did distress test. Everything was clear, and then finally

I was sitting at my desk. I'd just been out to eat with one of my closest friends from childhood who was actually an Atlanta police detective, and I sat down in my chair in the room literally began to spin. And it was the oddest thing. I'm sitting there in the medical Examiner's office. I not looking at a dead body. I'm not standing over a dead body. I'm just in the investigators area. And I remember as if I was a drowning man. I remember gasping for breath, asking somebody

to help me. And I was laying on the floor, crawling out of my cubicle. And I was on day shift at the time, and my colleague that was down down the road from me, he said, call the doctors, Call the doctors. Well, the unfortunate part of that a medical examiner's office, when you say called the doctors, you're surrounded by forensic pathologists. And this was my worst nightmare

come to come to pass. They they picked me up, a bunch of the investigators do They put me on sofa in our day room, which is kind of our ready room where there's a TV there. And it's the same room we've watched the you know, the planes fly into the buildings, you know, at nine to eleven, and

you know, we keep it on for news. And I remember every doctor in the building showed up and here I am laying on the sofa, gasping for breath like a fish on a dock outside of the water, and looking up and there are nothing but these faces of these forensic pathologists staring down at me, and I'm I'm I'm feel as though I'm on the I'm at the portal of Hell at this moment time. And then the

coolest thing happened. I remembered distinkly hearing the sound our rear gate at the Medical Examiner's office made this huge clanking noise, and I remember hearing the sound of a Grady Hospital ambulance coming down the road running Code three, I would assume to me. And the last day, literally the last time I ever left the Medical Examiner's office was in the back of an ambulance. I've never been so happy to see EMTs in my life. And you know, it was it was a hard process. We I you know,

the they wound up taking me the hospital. The young physician was there, he was a cardiologist. He said, have you ever you ever been seen by a psychiatrist? And was like, what you kidded me? No, yeah, you need to see a psychiatrist. And of course they sent me

to a psychiatrist. And she said, it's a lady that had immigrated from India many years ago and done her done her internship up in the Northeast at a veterans hospital, and she said, you're the worst case of PTSD we've seen that I've seen since my residency during the Vietnam era. And I was at a point where I was just shaking uncontrollably, almost twitching uncontrollably. She said, we've got to slow your mind down. And the only thing that could come out of my mouth was like work, work. And

she said, mister Morgan, you will never go. And she said, and if you do, I will have you judicially commit it. And when that, when she hit me with that, I knew that at the end, I thought that it was the end of my life. I really did, you know. She stocked me right in the nose with that reality, and they put me in a put me on these very very strong medications. She says, we have got to let your brain rest. She says, nobody needs to be

around death as long. And no, there were no programs in place for any kind of help for someone like myself at that time. As a matter of fact, my wife was pregnant. She was a school teacher. I think probably when I was at my worst, I was out of work. I was on short term disability, and she had contacted the county, Fulton County, and you know, through tears,

she's like, what are we supposed to do? And the person that she was speaking with that with the county at the time actually said, and this is back in two thousand and five, they actually told my wife or the phone, she says, your husband's not going to qualify for disability. PTSD is too easy to fake. And I knew at that point in time that I was either going to have to get better and pull myself up and help my family survive, or it was going to be I was going to have hell to pay. And

I was still coming through therapy. My wife was pregnant with our son, Isaac, and Isaac died. He died on September September the twentieth, while I was still recovering. And I tell you, he died in my arms. And I used to think back then, all those years ago, I used to think, when I go to make a notification to a family, I hope that I am compassionate enough with families when I'm talking to them that at some point in time, at some juncture along the way, somebody

will be kind to my family when I've notified. When they're notified of my death, maybe that'll happen. Maybe that's you never know what the future holds. And when Isaac breathed his last breath in my arms, he had a congenital defect. I literally notified myself with my own son's death. And Isaac was a real turning point for our family at that moment time. And it was hard. I mean it was really really hard. It was hard finding a therapist I think sustainable for me, because it's not like

I'm something special. It's just that not too many people have encountered, have encountered kind of the volume of things that I've seen and that I had done and in my instance, and keep in mind, not everybody's the same way. I was damaged when I showed up, you know, all those years ago as the quote unquote youngest medical legal death investigator in the world or in the US or whatever it was that the doctor had called me at

that particular time. I was young, but I was damaged when I showed up at the door, and so I was bringing baggage in with me. But still, you know, I finally found a guy that was a Vietnam vet who was a PhD actually the University of Georgia and began to see him and you know, through a lot of meditation, tried to stay away from as many meds as I could and just to kind of have a clear mind moving forward with my life. I would I would have long discussions with him about death, and he

had experienced death traumatically, you know. And he would even say, look, I did two tours in Vietnam and I had people that died all around me. He says, Still I didn't deal with the way you had to deal with it. He's right, but everybody's experiences are different. They are you just never But if it wasn't for him, I would not have been able to kind of pull my way out of it. And that's really the only way you

can do it. You can go to all the self help you want to, you can take as many men as as you want to, but at the end of the day, you have to literally will yourself to good health. And I'm still not perfectly there. There's still things that

upset me. I h. We went and saw a Joker yesterday actually, and uh, the the trailer for Richard Jewel came on and and it set me back on my heels as I'm sitting there in the previews, because it took me back to that moment in time, very real time, you know, and I remember standing over the body of Alice Hawthorne, you know, at that scene, you know, and she's kind of woodscrew in her eye and it lodged in her Sarah Bella, I'll never forget that as long as I live, Dan, you know, and that we could

have had four hundred people die that night. You know, those those types of things stay with you, my wife was saying, after which she says, Now, I don't know if we're going to be seeing the movie or not, but it might be a test of how healthy I am if I can go go and watch that movie, I think. But yeah, it is an ongoing journey for me, an ongoing journey.

a fascinating, fascinating account this journey. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about Blood Beneath My Feet. Joseph Scott Morgan. For those people that might want to take a look at other work, what else you're doing. I know that I just looked on YouTube. Can you tell us a little bit where they might be able to look at other work or about this book itself, and also tell us again about Dead Wife's Club please?

cases that are currently going on out there. You can see some of my clips from hl N. I talk about the Epstein case, I think extensively, also the trouble that was had down in done the Caribbean this past summer. Isn't that interesting how that kind of dropped off the news where everybody was dying? Yea, and yeah, it just kind of vanished. But yeah, all of the cases, Jody Arius, Trayvon Martin, everything that I've been involved in now since

twenty thirteen. Relative to that. I think there's even a book trailer on there for Blood Beneath my Feet, believe it or not, from those number of years back when the book dropped. And you know, Blood Beneath My Feet can be found on Amazon. It's in print, in print edition and also an ebook Kendall that sort of thing, so it's out there to be had. You can find it worldwide, you know, whether you're you know, listening here in America or if you're in you know, Canada or

Great Britain. It's available through Amazon.