#337 - Cutting Open 7,000 Bodies, Epstein Autopsy & Kohberger Idaho 4 Massacre | Joseph Scott Morgan

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Joseph Scott Morgan Scott Morgan is a death investigator who is considered one of the leading experts on the Coroner System in the United States. He also hosts the "Body Bags" podcast. SPONSORS https://hellofresh.com/danny10fm - Get 10 Free Meals + a Free Item for Life! https://www.amentara.com/go/dj - Use code DJ22 for 22% off your first order. https://www.bruntworkwear.com/danny - Use code DANNY for $10 off BRUNT workwear. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off EPISODE LINKS https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-body-bags-with-joseph-sco-87375583 https://www.instagram.com/josephscottmorgan https://x.com/joscottforensic FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - coroners vs. medical examiners 05:53 - what happens to unidentified bodies 15:23 - performing autopsies at 21 years old 20:34 - Sharon Tate's coroner 24:48 - hardest thing a death investigator has to do 35:06 - the toll of being a death investigator 42:23 - seeing ghosts of the dead 52:25 - PTSD & recurring nightmares from seeing death 01:04:05 - first thing a medical examiner does at a death scene 01:13:23 - most disgusting death of Joseph's career 01:22:32 - the death penalty & prisoner autopsies 01:34:02 - attending death row executions 01:45:06 - analysis of George Floyd's death 01:52:50 - the Idaho 4 murders 02:11:49 - why Bryan Kohberger left some roommates alive 02:20:20 - the death of Danny Casolaro 02:24:06 - problems with Jeffrey Epstein's autopsy report 02:37:36 - Jeffrey Epstein's noose mystery 02:50:23 - what happened to Epstein's victims Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:07Speaker 01

  Welcome to the 50th Hunger Games.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Filmed for IMAX.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Make them remember you.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Weeping, November 20th, rated PG-13.

• 1:29Danny Jones?

  What's a death investigator?

• 1:30Speaker 03

  A death investigator? Well, we investigate all manner of death. So it's not... Most of the time when people think about death investigation, you tie back to that idea of investigations. They think of a criminal act. Well, not all deaths are related to criminal activity. So you begin to think about homicide detectives. Well, what's the focus of a homicide detective? Well, is it... Is it dealing with the body specifically?

• 2:06Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  Or is it from a police perspective, trying to track down someone that committed a crime? That brought this individual to their end?

• 2:18Speaker 03

  For us in the medical legal world, I don't, I mean, yeah, I'm just like anybody else. I don't want to see murderers walking up and down the street. But our spectrum is very broad, so we do homicides, accidental deaths, suicides, undetermined, you know, so accidental, I think I mentioned accidental, but natural deaths. And for me, you know, working in this, in the world that I inhabited for so long and now teaching for so long, I always found that the natural deaths were probably more intellectually stimulating than homicides most of the time.

• 3:02Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:03Danny Jones?

  So what is your job when you get to a crime scene?

• 3:05Speaker 03

  We are the eyes and the ears of the forensic pathologists in the field. So if you work for a coroner's office or a medical examiner's office, which they do the same thing, but they're distinctly different. Okay?

• 3:21Danny Jones?

  The coroner and the medical examiner?

• 3:22Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yeah. And like in Florida, they have, they don't have coroners here, they have medical examiners. As a matter of fact, the medical examiners in Florida are regionalized. So you've got various regions throughout the state and each one of those offices is headed up by a forensic pathologist, whereas if you go to a state that still has a coroner system, which there's approximately 24, I think, they're elected officials and they may or may not be physicians. So you come to someplace like Florida where the person running the office is actually not just a physician, they're a board certified forensic pathologist.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  I started my career in Louisiana, way back when, when dinosaurs were on the earth. And in that world, the parish coroner was elected, but in order to-

• 4:20Danny Jones?

  Steve, that's really loud, bro. You're chewing. Really? Yeah.

• 4:27Danny Jones?

  The chewing returns. It's kind of-

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. You're masticating over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  Um, in, in order to run for the office of coroner in Louisiana, you have to be a physician. But if you go to, say, another state that has a coroner's system, you don't even have to have a high school degree. You can just merely have a GED. And look, some of the brightest people I've ever met are, don't have formal education. All right. I come from a family that doesn't have much of an education, educational background. Right. So, but you, you lack an understanding of, I think, basic, uh, basic human disease pathology. You know, understanding that. How does the mechanism of death work?

• 5:17Speaker 03

  If you're absent that, that kind of foundational training. And the way I've always looked at it is, is that

• 5:28Speaker 03

  we, we give a lot of lip service in this country to, you know, what we're going to do for our kids educationally, you know, or some special project and, uh, that the government wants to fund. You know, a new after-school program or a new playground and that sort of thing. Where you've still got coroner's offices that don't have coolers that function. And people don't think about the dead. They never have. They don't want to think about the dead. They want to think happy thoughts. Hmm. But the dead are probably, in many places, one of the most underserved populations that are out there. And by extension, their families are underserved.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Let that sink in just for a second. I mean, I don't know how many folks that are watching this conversation right now, but everybody can kind of tie back to that moment in time when you found out you had a loved one that died. And you,

• 6:33Speaker 03

  you don't, you, you're in a vacuum with that. It's something that's very personal.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  It's something that's very, very personal to that individual. And it's a hell of a burden to bear. You know, it's a final moment that you can't retreat from. They're gone forever and ever, amen. There will always be an empty chair at Thanksgiving. And most governments that fund these kinds, you know, whatever their medical legal system happens to be, whether it's corner medical examiner. They don't, people don't understand, you know, the politicians don't understand the dead and they don't understand their families. And they'll go pay lip service to it and they'll say, well, we've had another person shot down in the street.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  You know, this, this scourge can't go on. You never think about what happens to the body, how that government agency is going to handle the body, how they're going to take care of them, how they're going to get them identified, which has always been a major problem right now. You know, the NamUs list, which is the database that we have nationally is filled with in excess of 30,000 unidentified bodies, you know, and going back ages and ages, you know, people that have remained unidentified for years and years.

• 7:57Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's quite striking when you think about it. And it's, it's a real shame. I mean, it's heartbreaking.

• 8:06Danny Jones?

  So what typically happens to bodies that are recovered that are not identified? What's the, what's the standard protocol?

• 8:13Speaker 03

  Well, up until a few years ago, many medical legal organizations would merely have the body cremated, you know, after they had done a dental exam, perhaps had taken some kind of biological sample that could be retained for the purposes of DNA in the future. But there's kind of this seminal moment that took place in South Carolina where the body of a decomposing African-American male was found in a creek. And that creek cut through Marlboro County, South Carolina, that on the other side of

• 8:56Speaker 03

  the creek was North Carolina, but the body happened to be in Marlboro County. And the body was severely decomposed, obviously a homicide victim. Couldn't get him ID'd in the little coroner, little coroner's office that was in Marlboro County. Didn't have space for the body.

• 9:14Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  None. They didn't have a cooler or anything. Well, they had the body cremated. That was Michael Jordan's father.

• 9:22Danny Jones?

  What?

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you can imagine the Jordan's family, you know, Jordan's family, um, how taken aback. But, you know, because you hand them over, you know, some type of receptacle containing ashes. And that's all you have left, even if the body is decomposed. I can't necessarily fault the guy in the coroner, you know, what's he, he can't take the body home with him.

• 9:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  You know, what's he going to do with the body? They just didn't have the resources for that. And that's, that's not an isolated event. I mean, that happened, you know? But now I think that people, that was kind of a wake up call. Um, I think.

• 10:06Danny Jones?

  How long was his body out there before they found it? For like, do we know?

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it, it was long enough for him to be in a moderate to advanced state of decomposition. And if you remember, he was, he was essentially carjacked.

• 10:21Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  And his car, and it was that luxury sports car looking Lexus thing that he did a two door thing, you know, that he drove.

• 10:29Danny Jones?

  This was early nineties?

• 10:31Speaker 03

  No, no, this is back in the two thousands, early two thousands.

• 10:35Danny Jones?

  This is that late?

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:36Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow. I thought it happened way earlier than that.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  So.

• 10:39Danny Jones?

  So it's ninety three here. Maybe that's wrong. Oh, his body was found August 3rd, nineteen ninety three?

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm sorry.

• 10:46Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Nineteen ninety three.

• 10:47Danny Jones?

  Right, okay.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  So, you know, it's problematic, uh, it's problematic when you begin to think about, um, and it would take a case like that, I think, to give a wake up call to some of these isolated locations. But again, yeah, they could, you know, they could be facing the same thing. You, you never know where death is going to visit.

• 11:10Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  At any moment in time.

• 11:13Danny Jones?

  Now, I want to talk about, I mean, I want to talk about the Kohberger stuff. I wanted to ask you about the Epstein stuff.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:19Danny Jones?

  But before we do all that.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:22Danny Jones?

  Can you sort of walk me through how you got from your upbringing in, I think you were like raising like a trailer park in Florida, is that right?

• 11:32Speaker 03

  Louisiana.

• 11:33Danny Jones?

  Louisiana, oh, it was Louisiana.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then another trailer park in Georgia.

• 11:36Danny Jones?

  So like, start like from there, leading into, how did you get interested into doing this stuff, investigating these homicides and even working in like a coroner's office and all this?

• 11:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I kind of came, I fell backwards into my career, I think, and a lot of it had to do with, to a certain degree, my upbringing, I think. Early on, when, when, you know, when I was born, I was actually named in honor of a great uncle that was homicide victim. And he was shot down in the streets of West Monroe, Louisiana. And his name was Joseph. And he was the brother of my paternal grandmother who I adored, that essentially had a big hand in raising me. And when my father got home from his service in the Marine Corps, which

• 12:34Speaker 03

  was mandatory, by the way, because he had, he had attempted to kill our whole family.

• 12:40Danny Jones?

  What?

• 12:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, my grandmother hid me beneath a bed. And I write about it in my memoir from several years back. But he was, there used to be this kind of rule, you know, back in the late 60s, early 70s, you know, Vietnam had spun up. And it's like, all right, you're either going to go to the penitentiary, or you can join Marine Corps. And he chose Marine, he chose Marine Corps. And so, but as soon as he got out of the Corps, he promptly picked me and my mother up. And we headed out to Georgia, left Louisiana, which I am a proud Louisianian, my home state. When he got to Georgia, he

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Lived there with us for about a year and then abandoned me and my mother again in another trailer. And so he's off. I don't really see him again. And my mother remarried. To say the very least, very interesting person. And it set a fire within me because of the experience I had with stepfather. Because I was, as a child, I was always told that you're, you're going to turn out just like your dad. You're going to be him. That's, that's what was going to happen. And it's kind of funny. I had this revelation many

• 14:11Speaker 03

  years later. I was a Seinfeld fan, still am. And the episode where George is going to do the opposite. And in there, he'll do the opposite of anything else he's ever done, his life will work out. Well, I'd been doing the opposite for years and years. I that, and I think a lot of people that come up in, you know, these worlds of abuse and all this sort of stuff. They say I'm not going to be like that. But I was purposed in my life that I was not going to be like him, that I was going to achieve something that I was going to set a standard, you know, perhaps for myself, most importantly. And but more importantly, I was going to be a good husband and a good father, you know, in addition to being a success.

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• 16:30Speaker 03

  And the fatherhood and, you know, and marriage were down the line for me. Um, when I finally got back to Louisiana as a very young man, I happened to work, be working in a hospital,

• 16:52Speaker 03

  doing orderly work as I was attending a, a, a junior college, a community college down there, Delgado. And, um, the parish morgue was being renovated, parishes instead of counties. And the coroner's office was coming there to do autopsies and I happened to meet the coroner investigator for that office, happened to meet the forensic pathologist. And I was a guy, I was just like an orderly and I was bringing the bodies in and out of the morgue.

• 17:26Danny Jones?

  They just asked you one day?

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I mean, it was just kind of what you did and. They took a liking to me. I started attending autopsies on my own in my free time in between working and going to school. And I was studying criminal justice and biology, which is kind of an interesting mix. And I started attending autopsies on my own, even I never got paid for it. And then I started volunteering to clean the morgue, which if you think you've ever had a mess at your house, just imagine sweeping up maggots and cleaning up blood and decomp fluid and all that. But I just kind of immersed myself into this environment

• 18:06Speaker 03

  because as horrible as those things are, I began to realize that I had an opportunity to sit at the feet of these very learned people and do essentially their bidding in that. But it's this kind of transactional relationship where I was gaining knowledge. And they didn't mind me asking questions, man. You know, and the next thing I know, you know, one day they're like, you want to close? And I was like, yeah, close it down every day. And they're like, no, we, we want you to close. We want to teach you how to close. And they hand me the

• 18:48Danny Jones?

  Close up the body.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And I'd seen them string needles, you know, it's not like doing suturing, you know, if you're, if you've ever been in an emergency room and gotten sutures.

• 18:57Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  It's not like that. So you use a baseball stitch with a big S needle.

• 19:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  And you're using kite string. So, you know, you're sewing the body up with the standard wine, you know, the wine scission they make to open the bodies. Everybody's seen this on TV shows, references made to this. And I had to close the head up, you know, had to bag the organs. All the organs go into one bag and they're placed down into the chest cavity and then everything sewed up.

• 19:25Danny Jones?

  God.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  But you know, while I was doing that, because they saw that I had a willingness to, to learn, and then I was doing a good job cleaning up. Eventually, the pathologist looked at me and said, you want to open? And I was like,

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude. Sure. I'll give it a shot. So here, here I am, this, you know, 21 year old kid with no real formal education or training. They hand me a scalpel and I've never been so terrified in my life when I was opening a body for the first time because first off, the one thing I kept thinking about, I'm going to cut myself. And then the other thing that comes into this is you don't know how much pressure to apply. You know, how, how much pressure do I apply to this fine edge of this scalpel to press down and initiate that?

• 20:24Danny Jones?

  Do you use a marker and draw out where you're gonna cut first?

• 20:27Speaker 03

  No.

• 20:28Danny Jones?

  You just freehand it?

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Freehand it. Yeah. Because you've been watching him do it. And, you know, in forensic autopsies in particular, you don't want to make any marks on the body whatsoever, other than to facilitate the opening of the body. And that's after you've completely examined the body externally. Because if, if you make any kind of marking on a body, that you might be disrupting evidence. So it's not like you're going to make a dotted line on the body and follow that. But after a while, you get grooved with it. And, you know, I've, I've done thousands. I've participated in thousands of autopsies. But Danny, I'll tell you this, man, out of all of my education I

• 21:10Speaker 03

  received subsequent to that, the best classroom I was ever in and will ever be in was autopsy suite. It made me, it made me a really good death investigator because I, in, in that environment, you begin to learn what the forensic pathologist wants.

• 21:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Okay. And contrary to what you see, you know, these new TV programs, forensic pathologists don't go out to crime scenes. They just, you know, they show them, you know, these shows showing up. They will if there's like some kind of like mass fatality event or something that's going to be really high profile. You know, you take a look at,

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Tom Noguchi, Dr. Noguchi, who was the coroner medical examiner in, in, in LA for years and years. He was called the coroner of the stars because he did Belushi's autopsy. He did Sharon Tate's autopsy. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Bobby Kennedy's. I mean, the list goes on and on. An autopsy of a pregnant woman. Yeah, I know. Isn't that something? Oh, my God. And I participated in many of those over the years. Yeah. And you're doing, you're doubling up at that point because you're doing two autopsies. See, most people can't plumb the depths of this most of the time. And he, Dr. Noguchi, unlike many of his colleagues, you know, he even writes about going out to the Tate House and seeing things.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  And I learned, he wrote a book, maybe 83-ish, I think it was called Corner at Large. And it's kind of a quick read. It's interesting. And he talks about some of these cases. Noguchi? Yeah, Noguchi, Dr. Thomas Noguchi. Fascinating character. As a matter of fact, recently someone has, there you go, has recently written a biography about him. He's still alive to this point. He's one of my heroes. I've had an opportunity to meet him a couple of times. Dr. Noguchi passed on a bit of great information and it's, it's applicable to anybody I'm teaching nowadays.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Our tendency as humans, when you, even as a death investigator, even as a homicide investigator, if you have a deceased individual in a room, in a space, our eyes are drawn to that body. And he realized, he stated this kind of plainly, he realized that the body is intellectually distracting. And so it's a very eastern way of thinking. He trained himself that he knew that the body was going to be there when all is said and done. So he trained himself, if he would go out on scenes,

• 24:09Speaker 03

  he would force himself to look up. He would look up and he would start in the superior space like this and he would begin to kind of pivot around, look at the ceiling, the walls. Being able to contextualize body in, in its environment. And then finally, his eyes made it to the body. He wasn't distracted by the body and then everything else becomes an adjunct to it. Yeah. And, you know, there are cases out there where people get so laser focused on the body, they don't, they don't appreciate the periphery. And many times the tale is actually told in the periphery. When, you know, you begin to think about

• 24:49Speaker 03

  blood spatter, uh, blood splatter deposition, or, uh, you begin to think about, um, broken furniture or broken window and all those sorts of things. And you haven't really, or an empty pill bottle, that may be because you're so, your brain is so affected by that information that's coming in from this person that's, this life has ended in such a horrible way. Rather distracting. And he understood that. But he's the exception relative to forensic pathologists. The line share of them do not go out to scene. So for me, as a medical legal death investigator, first off, I understood my place in the pecking order. They're the

• 25:28Speaker 03

  boss, but we're the eyes and the ears of that person at the scene. And we collect the data, contextualize the body, examine the body at the scene, uh, take all the preventative measures, um, that, where we can guard any kind of trace evidence or contact evidence that's on the body. We have to make sure that the body remains as pristine as possible. And then we relate that information to the forensic pathologist. Um, because they might be back at the shop doing autopsies, you know, they're, you know, elbow deep in maybe five cases that day. And just because they're doing cases, uh, doesn't mean that death

• 26:13Speaker 03

  stops. It continues on. It's 365 days a year, brother. It never stops for Christmas. Does stop for Thanksgiving. Doesn't care if you got a birthday party for your kids or baseball or dance, you know, whatever. It just keeps coming day in and day out. And that's kind of where my varies from like policing.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  There's no getting kitty cats out of the trees. There's no reuniting a lost child with a parent. None of that stuff exists in our world. It's death day in and day out. And if it's not about the body, it's trying to find out who they are. And getting the families notified, which is one of the worst aspects. In my world, because I did, I don't know, roughly 2000 in person. Death notifications as well.

• 27:00Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  And so that that. Weighs really heavy on you. Uh, because the first one I ever did, I still remember it to this day. And is the last one was just as bad as.

• 27:16Danny Jones?

  That almost has to be worse than dealing with the dead bodies.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  It is because, you know, at that point, they're inanimate, you know, they're.

• 27:22Danny Jones?

  Changing their lives forever.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, you are. It's I've I've equated it to. Um, pulling a pin on a grenade.

• 27:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  And throwing it into the room, shutting the door behind you.

• 27:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 27:31Speaker 03

  And you hear the yells and the screams and. And that's where thing. And, you know, there's an old saying in the South where people say it's all over but the shouting. Well, the shouting never ends. And even for these families years later.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  That's screaming in their brains. It's always screaming and you'll.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Uh, I'll tell you a quick story, something that um, I've related before, but. Uh, I had a young man that was. Just absolutely high off his ass. He had been smoking weed, you know, all morning long. He had a dirt bike. And in New Orleans, they have what's referred to, people outside of New Orleans don't really understand this, but they have a. The center of the road, which most people call the median, they call it the neutral ground. There's a long history behind that term. People can look it up. But he was, he was on his dirt bike on this. Uh, four lane road. That is separated by canal, you know, eastbound lanes are separated from westbound

• 28:37Speaker 03

  lanes by canal and there's power line that runs, you know, following the canal. And he's just racing up and down.

• 28:44Danny Jones?

  So in Louisiana?

• 28:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is in the New Orleans metro area. And this kid was on this bike, he's in his early twenties and he hits a guide wire that comes, you know, comes down to hold these power lines in place. And it diagonally decapitates him. And there were a group of kids standing there and they watched this whole thing. We interviewed them and they were, they gave a great description, but they talked about the bike tumbled, his body tumbled, and then his head kind of rolled behind it. And that's literally the position, you know, that I found him in when I got there.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  Well, I went and examined his body, pulled out his wallet, found his driver's license, and, you know, we collected all of his remains, took our photos and measurements and all this stuff. And I grabbed a deputy sheriff and I said, this isn't too far away, let's roll over here and notify, you know, see if anybody's at home. Rolled up and it's kind of a typical, much like Florida, it's kind of a typical New Orleans home, there's a boat in the driveway on a trailer, you know.

• 29:59Danny Jones?

  Very Florida.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  Live oak tree in the front yard. Get out of my car, got the deputy with me, I go up to the door, pull out my badge, badge him, you know, knock on the door, badge him. This lady comes to the door and I said, ma'am, I need to talk to you. Are you related to this kid? And she said, yes, that's my son. And immediately she's, you know, she goes into, what's wrong? What's happened? You know? On and on. Her husband comes down and he immediately screams out, what are you doing here? Why are you asking about her son? I said, we need to sit down. I go in, I said, and this is kind of the way I notify, you can hem and haul around it.

• 30:46Danny Jones?

  So you go inside and sit down?

• 30:47Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I sit down and I tell them, you know, your son has been killed in an accident. And of course, she's screaming, carrying on.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Which is understandable. And you know, you leave them with a card. That's what you do. You know, your business card and it has here, call this number. This is where his remains will be. You don't need to make funeral arrangements. We're going to take you back to the office. We're going to do an autopsy, do an examination.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  That went in that direction and it was probably six months later, I was on duty. I got a call from police, we need you out at this address. And this address was on Airline Highway in, in New Orleans. And if anyone's familiar with Airline Highway, this is where all the motel motels are. It's where famously Jimmy, Jimmy Swaggart just gacked out a couple of weeks ago. That's where he got caught with the prostitutes. Uh, he'd come down to New Orleans, he, you know, he'd pick up a prostitute. Mm-hmm. Really disgusting stuff. Uh, it's that same collection of these, these motel motels.

• 32:01Speaker 03

  And a guy had barricaded himself in a room and um, he was apparently a deputy sheriff. And they'd caught SWAT out. Um, he popped himself in the head. He died, right? So I go out and I'm looking over the scene and this is one of these little slices of life, you know, that you don't really get in any other context. His badge case is there, which commonly if you're in law enforcement, you'll put your license in your badge case so you can get out a ticket. And you know, you put, oh yeah, well, yeah, my license is in here somewhere. And they see the badge. Oh, well, who do you work for? Just go on.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  And so, and he had a Beretta, nine millimeter pistol. It was his service weapon. He was a reserve deputy in an adjacent parish. And this guy was just like super jacked. It turned out he had had roid rage. You know, he just, he was always angry, aggressive and all this sort of thing. Suffered also from depression, shot himself, pulled out his driver's license and the address was familiar. And I grab a deputy and off we go. Now, this is pre Katrina. So New Orleans was in excess of a million people at this time, the New York, greater New Orleans area and

• 33:22Speaker 03

  pull up at the house, boats in the driveway, live oak trees in the front yard. And this was probably about 11 o'clock at night. Was it dad? Uh, mom, mom and dad were both there and I knocked on the door and this is not the greatest face in the world, but you would think that she had seen a demon rise from hell. This, the scream that went out and I put my badge up and I said, need to talk to you.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  That's, that's the kind of thing that happens when you notify families. You never know where it's coming from. So this, who, who was the cop? He was the brother of the guy that got his head cut off. Older brother or something? Uh, yeah. Yeah. Both sons. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. So you, you work in this world where you never really know where anything's going to come at any point in time. You know, it's, it's a, you know, where it kind of intersects reality intersects with these kind of, I don't know, it's almost like a weird spiritual kind of thing, you know, because you kind of have to rise above it and understand that

• 34:37Speaker 03

  the thing that tried to, that I had to do and didn't do it very well was that I had to convince myself that this is not my grief. It's not my kinfolks. And you can only do that for so long.

• 34:49Danny Jones?

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• 35:32Danny Jones?

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• 36:16Danny Jones?

  That's M N N I C E E T H N O dot com slash DJ and use my code DJ22 for 22% off your first order.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  It takes toll. Death always takes toll. Death. When I wrote that book many years ago, I, you know, I

• 36:34Danny Jones?

  Blood Beneath My Feet, is that what it was called?

• 36:37Speaker 03

  Anthropomorphized Death. And I talked about how death was actually a figure in my life that rode along with me. And it got so bad, particularly toward the end of my career, where it would, you know, death would be there whispering in my ear, "You see this boy? I can do this to you anytime I want." And I bear witness to death, day in and day out. And listen, I'm not alone. There, right now, as we speak, nanny, there are people that are out there, they're doing this job, they've been doing it for years, and they're going out on some of the most horrible things that you can imagine. Decomposed bodies, abused kids that have died, some grandma that has died in the house

• 37:19Speaker 03

  where the kids didn't give two hoots in hell about her, and she's found decomposing in her bed because no one's visited her. You know, and so they're bearing witness to all of this horror, day in and day out. And they're trying to, you know, they're trying to cope with it, but it's really hard if you have, if you don't have somebody to, to talk to about it.

• 37:41Danny Jones?

  When you were a kid, did you think about death often?

• 37:44Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I did. I thought about it first off because named after homicide victim.

• 37:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  And that was a big deal in my family. Well, your Uncle Joe would be real proud of you. You know, and then the event with my father. Um, and, um, and then reinforced by my stepfather who I thought was gonna kill me. Uh, you know, so.

• 38:09Danny Jones?

  Did he actually try to kill you physically?

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Uh, I got beatings every week and they were on a schedule.

• 38:17Danny Jones?

  Jesus Christ, man.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I used to tell myself when I was kid that, um, I'd, I'd, I'd say to God, okay, God, I'm getting all the bad stuff out of the way. Early in my life, I don't know how I had the ability to do that. Um, because next part of my life is gonna be great. It's gonna be great, man. I'm, I'm getting past all this, but the next part of my life is gonna be great. No matter what, because I've, and listen, you know, everybody's got a somebody done somebody wrong song, you know? But in my, in my world, uh, that's kind of how I, I looked at it and tried to rationalize it and try to understand it. And.

• 39:02Danny Jones?

  It was something to do with you being named after the great uncle.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 39:09Danny Jones?

  And the abuse you had to suffer under your stepfather, something flipped a switch in your brain, rewired you, wired you in a way where you were just drawn to this, this stuff.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. And first off, I've always been curious. I've got a scientific mind. I enjoy scientific inquiry. Particularly when it comes to the biological sciences and trying to understand the mechanism of death.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  And I was able to function in the morgue. Very, morgue's easier to function in than being out on the street as an investigator. And so I had to do both those things. So I would be in the morgue during the day and then at night, I would be investigator. And so I would take call at night and run all the cases. There we, and back then we had a really small office. There were only, when I started, we only had three investigators.

• 40:07Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 40:08Speaker 03

  Um, and then two of us worked in the morgue. So you'd have one week off, one week off from working in the morgue. And then at night, you know, you're rolling on cases and you have to get that, that body into the morgue. You have your livery service that takes a body and you're having to fill out paperwork because you don't, most of the time you don't go to the morgue with the body, uh, because there are other calls holding.

• 40:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  And it can be anything. It's a grab bag. You never know what's, and that's, that's one of the things. First off, when you're young, it's exhilarating. You know, you get a call from dispatch that they need you at this.

• 40:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  You don't know what it is. And you know, you're jacked on that, you know, when you're, when you're a kid. Um, after a while it gets rote and then after even further down the road, it's horrific. I, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to do it.

• 41:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah. I've always looked at people who do this kind of thing, this kind of type of stuff, whether it be what you did, or even firefighters who see some terrible stuff.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:10Danny Jones?

  As like a different breed of human, you know, because I could never, I could never see myself not in my wildest dreams, like ever. I would do, I would do anything in my power to not do this kind of stuff. Like I, I want to be nowhere near anything like this.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I, huh, you would think that, I think the, you'd go to a default where you would recoil.

• 41:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  But that flame that had started in me and that was further, um, exacerbated by what I went through. Um, you know, growing up through my teenage years.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  I could go out on something because I was trying to prove myself. You know, I was trying to prove that I was, you know, I was capable of handling anything and that I was going to shine through and be a real success. I could go out on some of the most horrific cases where you've got like multiple homicides or you've got, you know, um, uh, you're inside of a, a piggly wiggly refrigerated truck with 16 unidentified bloated bodies and you're having to take the jaws out of all of them because a jack up barge in the Gulf of Mexico was trying to outrun a hurricane or a tropical storm and you wind up getting these bodies and you're in there and you smell like the

• 42:32Speaker 03

  dead and that happened to me in the back of a refrigerator pick, piggly wiggly truck because we didn't have enough room for the bodies.

• 42:39Danny Jones?

  Oh my God.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. So next time you see a piggly wiggly truck going down the road, a refrigerator truck, just think about that.

• 42:45Danny Jones?

  I will.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, but yeah, so based upon that and based upon that, what that was that I, I went through as a child, I could look at that and, um, my stepfather's name was Bruce. And so I would, I would look at a maggot infested body, bloated, dead for a protracted period of time. And I would look at it and I'd say, this is bad, but it's not Bruce.

• 43:14Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  And that, that's kind of the way I, I marked myself relative to that same Bruce. It's not Bruce. I can do this. And so when I could flip that switch in my brain and I could make detailed notes, I could go and sit down with a forensic pathologist and engage in conversation, passing information on, receiving information back. That's kind of the, the marker that I would use for that. And it wears thin after a while.

• 43:45Danny Jones?

  Are you, how do you compartmentalize this stuff that you see on the job when you were doing it every day?

• 43:52Speaker 03

  You don't.

• 43:52Danny Jones?

  From going home at night?

• 43:54Speaker 03

  You don't.

• 43:54Danny Jones?

  Never?

• 43:55Speaker 03

  No.

• 43:55Danny Jones?

  Do you, do you constantly have these images flashing through your, your mind?

• 43:59Speaker 03

  Particularly when you're in practice with, yeah. As a matter of fact, your family gets drawn into it. When my wife and I first got married, um, it's kind of an interesting story.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  Let me back up a second. I've got the best wife in the world, Kimmy. And she, we went on our first date, it was a blind date. And we were in Atlanta and we're sitting across from one another at this pizza joint in Atlanta. And she was a teacher by trade, public school teacher. And she's like, now, what is it you do for a living? And I was like, well, I'm a medical legal death investigator. That's what I do. I work at the medical examiner's office and I go out and examine the dead and try to, you know, determine what their manner and cause of death are.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  And as we're leaving the pizza restaurant, see, she's absolutely beautiful. And I'm thinking, you know, my scruffy ass is not going to get another shot at a woman that looks like this. And so I'm thinking, I gotta make the most of this. And so we're, we're, we're going to the car and we get in the car. And she said, you know, I never thought about death till I met you. And you can take that any number of ways. It's like, I've had enough of this date. I'm going to go in my life, you know? Or it's like, most people don't, you know, they kind of, they don't really know what happens to the dead after they're gone.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  And so you, the world that, that we inhabit, most people cannot, when you try to talk to them about it, if you're at a cocktail party or you're having dinner, they, they want to hear your ghastly stories, but they don't want to hear the price that you've paid for those ghastly stories. So back to my wife, once we got married, to give you an indication as to what it was like.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  When I would get home in the evenings, we had a laundry room, kind of like a mudroom on the back of the house. I'd park in the back of the house, I'd walk up to the steps, and she would meet me at that back door, and she would say, "Did you have a decomp today?" And this is a common occurrence, a common conversation. "No, I didn't have one today." Um, next day, "Did you have a decomp?" "Yeah, okay, go ahead and take your clothes off." And I'd take my clothes off on the stoop. And she, you know, she- Burned them? No, she'd clean them for me. Wow. And so with, you know, the spouses, they're, have, have a loved one that are involved

• 46:47Speaker 03

  in this, you can't escape it. It's like, you know, when we were dating, um, we'd ride through Atlanta, and I wouldn't say, "Hey, look at that beautiful building." I'd say, "I had a homicide there, had suicide there, I worked a multi-car fatality right there." Um, one of the original Krispy Kremes in the South is located on Ponce, Ponce de Leon Avenue. And like many people, I enjoy hot fresh now. So there you go, free plug. Uh, we would, in our dating years, we would go there and watch them come off the line. And I would sit there and I'd get these donuts off the line, and across the street from

• 47:27Speaker 03

  where we were, I'd had, on one street corner, I'd had two homicides, and I'd had a motor vehicle accident where a guy was driving- Oh, God. -a Ferrari that had, him and his girlfriend had wrapped around a pole, and they'd both died. So that's just inhabiting that one geographic location. And so you're, when you live in a place like that, your brain is populated, for lack of a better term, with cases, or if you want to go more spiritual, ghosts, ghosts of all of these cases. So-

• 48:01Danny Jones?

  In the area you lived, obviously, you would like, what's the farthest you would travel out to go to a crime scene or something like this? Would you go? Did you have like a 10 mile radius, a 50 mile radius?

• 48:14Speaker 03

  No, Fulton County is huge. I work for Fulton County. So in, well, in Atlanta, well, New Orleans as well, I worked in Fulton County and to drive on a non-trap, I mean, Atlanta's notorious for traffic, right? So if you went from the most distal location in the north part of the county, which in north part of Fulton County, you can almost see the Blue Ridge Mountains.

• 48:37Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  If you wanted to drive all the way to the most distal southern portion of it, even at midnight, it would take you,

• 48:50Speaker 03

  I don't know, maybe

• 48:53Speaker 03

  an hour and 45 minutes.

• 48:55Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  No traffic. And then in New Orleans,

• 48:59Speaker 03

  where I worked in Jefferson Parish, Jefferson Parish Coroner's Office, which is the parish that's immediately adjacent to Orleans Parish.

• 49:09Speaker 03

  We went from half, you've heard of the world's longest bridge, the Causeway that goes across Lake Ponchatrain. So it's 26 miles long.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Halfway on that bridge is our northernmost portion of the jurisdiction

• 49:30Speaker 03

  all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. And so there were certain parts in that environment where I've gone out on an airboat just to get to a body, to a homicide victim's body. So it's a vast area and you're servicing.

• 49:43Danny Jones?

  But you live in this area. This is like.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  There I lived, I lived, yeah, I lived right there. In Atlanta, there's no way. I didn't live in Atlanta. I would lived a great distance out. I'd drive 60 miles one way to get to work.

• 49:56Danny Jones?

  That's because that's got to be a crazy thing because doing this kind of stuff in the place you live in.

• 50:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:03Danny Jones?

  To where like you can't go anywhere for fun or recreation without associating some terrible crime scene with where you're at. I mean, that's an interesting thing about memory. I'm reading this book about memory and they, there's this ancient Greek writer who wrote about a memory palace, how you can create memory palaces. And,

• 50:27Danny Jones?

  The story goes, they were in a big dining hall in ancient Greece and the place collapsed. And he was trying to rescue everybody that got trapped underneath rubble and underneath parts of the building. And he used his memory to sort of like play the event backwards so he could remember who was trapped under what, so he could help rescue people. And that's how they coined this term "memory palace." And now what these memory champions do, where these kids who compete all around the world in memory competitions, where they can memorize like a deck of cards backwards, just looking at it once, is they create these memory palaces where they associate memories, visual memories, with specific physical locations.

• 51:11Danny Jones?

  So they can like go to a building, right? Like a building like this. And they start at the front door and they place, they intentionally place a memory right there at the front door. Then they'll move into the building and take a left and like walk down a hallway. They'll place another memory right there and they'll do, put these memories in specific orders. So now like they, all they have to do is once they do that once or twice, and think about, think about walking through that building and where they placed each memory physically, associating an image with it. Now, whenever they just visualize the interior of that building, those memories just come right to them.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  So do they anchor it with like a red chair, even though a red chair might not be in that space? Or how do they anchor that memory in place so that they can go back and recall it? I think would be my biggest thing to try to understand.

• 52:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of the things they would do, like if you wanted to remember, like you said, like a red chair or whatever, they would say, like if the, if the red chair is the first part of the memory that they have to recall, they would put the red chair by the front door and they would do something. Animate it somehow, like, think of something novel or unique that you could do with the red chair in your mind's eye to make it stand out more, or to make it memorized, like anthropomorphize it, give it two eyes, whatever, cover it in blood, that would be a great way.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:35Danny Jones?

  A big bloody red chair, like, you're never gonna forget that, right? And that's the first part of what you have to recall about the memory. So that was like, just say, the first card out of the deck of cards.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:44Danny Jones?

  So you're always gonna remember that and associate it with that being the, the front door, it's gonna be that red bloody chair, it's like, just gets seared into your memory. So anyways, that, you know, that idea and of being, of experiencing all these crazy homicides and suicides and, and these just awful scenes and living in the same town.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:09Danny Jones?

  And being there all the time has to be, has to be so traumatic for you.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, nothing personal against Atlanta, but it's like, I don't, I go there to catch planes, that's the only reason I go to Atlanta. If somebody gave me, um, tickets behind home plate for a Braves game, I wouldn't take them.

• 53:30Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 53:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just, and of course, I say that now, Braves don't play in Atlanta anymore, they play up north. So yeah, maybe I'd take those tickets, because I haven't worked in that area. But there's like, it, it's so, um, and you know, the really insulting thing, Danny, was that when I had, like, the major break, um, that, you know, kind of put the stake through the heart of my career, I left, I left the office in an ambulance, thought I was having a heart attack.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  My wife, I was infantile, I mean, I was shaking all the time, it was just, it was horrible, it was a horrible period of time, real dark, very, very dark, uh, just total mental collapse.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  When my wife, and this is before it was cachet to talk about PTSD, all right? So this was like, 2004, 2005, people were talking about, but not like the, it seems like everybody in the world's got, I've got PTSD.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  She called up, you know, to try to get, try to understand what, what kind of services there were for me. And this is kind of seared into her brain. Lady she was talking about, she said, well, I can tell you this, you're not going to get any disability for PTSD through Fulton County. Too many people can fake it.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  You know, and maybe they can. I, I don't know. I know in my case though, you know, kind of left us, you know, in the lurch as a family. How did you end up dealing with it?

• 55:21Speaker 03

  Started, started therapy. I went through three different therapists and one therapist was so, when I began to tell, I had reoccurring nightmares where I was, I was on the Mississippi River nude on a barge that had broken away and I was almost tied, frozen to the deck of this thing, surrounded by decomposing bodies and I can't close my mouth. Flies are coming off the bodies and they're crawling in my mouth. And that was a reoccurring nightmare. And the first therapist that I had said, I, I don't know that I'm going to be able

• 55:59Speaker 03

  to help you. And second therapist I had, kind of stared out the window. Third guy I hit was a PhD psychologist that was a Vietnam vet. And he helped significantly. He's, he's kind of the guy that got me prompted initially toward writing. Cause I'd, look dude, I'd always written like technical stuff, you know, forensic reports, you know. I was one of those kids in school. I detested when the teacher said, okay, we're going to journal. I was like, I hate that crap. I have no interest in doing this.

• 56:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  But it planted a seed in me. And so the best thing that happened, one of the best things that happened for me was I began writing this book. We lived in a little cabin up in the mountains. And I'd gotten an appointment academically. It was my first stop at a college that was up in the North Georgia mountains. And I did it. He was not pleased that I took the job in academia. Because he said that, because they hired me to start a forensics program.

• 57:16Danny Jones?

  Who was not pleased?

• 57:17Speaker 03

  Uh, my therapist.

• 57:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, gotcha.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was not pleased with that. And he said, you're gonna go back through this again and again and again. And of course, you know, I started teaching a course that I designed called Medical Legal Death Investigation at this college. And he's right, I did relive it. But you know, it turned out that along with writing the book and talking about this to these kids where it drew me back to the science of it.

• 57:44Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 57:46Speaker 03

  And I knew that I didn't have to go back to the office. My office now was on campus in this bucolic, beautiful campus, place gorgeous. And I landed there and there were still the nightmares that didn't subsist for quite some time. There was the agoraphobia, you know, someplace like Walmart, complete no-no, you know, because, or even in restaurants where you, you.

• 58:13Danny Jones?

  What do you call it, agoraphobia?

• 58:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, agoraphobia, fear of like crowds and being crowded and kind of herded into places. You don't, and I'm from New Orleans, baby. I've been going to Mardi Gras for years. And you can, you know, for me, it unnerves me. Like if I'm.

• 58:26Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 58:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, still to this day, if I'm in the bathroom, like at the mirror, my wife walks in the door in the bathroom just to talk to me. I can't stand there. I have to, you know, I'll shuffle outside the door and, you know, go into a bigger space and talk to her, you know. Never shared that with anybody. But yeah, that's just like.

• 58:44Danny Jones?

  Is this similar to claustrophobia?

• 58:46Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, it's claustrophobia and agoraphobia has to.

• 58:52Danny Jones?

  You have to have people there.

• 58:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:54Danny Jones?

  So you could be in a small room by yourself and you're not bothered by it.

• 58:57Speaker 03

  If no one else is there, I'm okay.

• 58:59Danny Jones?

  Wow, that's funny.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  You know, like the space we're in right now, I'm cool, man. I'm cool. You know, I know the exits there, there, there. You know, I have no problem. Um, but yeah, it's a combination of the agoraphobia and also being claustrophobic as well. I think, uh, my biggest, uh, my biggest, and tip of the cap to them, my hell for me would be on a submarine. I don't know how people do that.

• 59:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God, I know, right?

• 59:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I couldn't, there's no way I could do that. Uh, I was in the National Guard, the Army National Guard.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  The reason I joined the Army instead of the Navy is I felt like that I could always run. I can always get away from somewhere. But yeah, I could, there's no way that I could, I could.

• 59:42Danny Jones?

  Especially one of those tiny submarines, like the one that went to the Titanic?

• 59:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that, uh, yeah, that this thing collapsing in around you. That's, that's the ultimate, and that's a nightmare. That's a reasonable fear for everybody to have, right? But, you know, my fear, this is what my fear was rooted in. My fear is always the fear of death.

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  And it, it comes on you, starts here in the chest and you shallow breathe.

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  You start to sweat, get palpitations. You think you're having a heart attack. You get lightheaded, dizzy. And you feel like you're smothering, you know, like you can't catch your breath. And, um, again, I go back to the idea of anthropomorphizing death, you know, that, that specter is kind of not as much today as it once was, but that specter is always there. You know, I can do this to you anytime I want to.

• 1:00:41Danny Jones?

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• 1:02:08Danny Jones?

  Well, there's that, there's that famous psychologist, Ernest Becker. Have you ever heard of him? Yeah, where he talks about like the fundamental, the fundamental driver of the human psyche is the fear of death. Yeah, that's what, that's what drives humans to do everything they do and create, create art and to leave things behind them that are, that have this symbolic immortality, right? Kids, art, all kinds of things like that.

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  It's interesting you should say that. I hadn't really thought about this too much, but I, I tell my, where I teach now at my university, Jacksonville State, I, I tell my kids there, you know, you teach them the science of death and you talk about it, you walk them through it, you know, you walk them through, you know, kind of a imaginary crime scene, or you demonstrate images to them, things that you experienced. But one thing I always come back to is it kind of dovetails with what you're saying here. I tell these kids, look,

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  No matter what you do, the quality of the report that you write, your observations that you make, a hundred years from now, they're not going to view you as a scientist or an adjunct to a scientist, or whatever the case might be, they're going to view you as a historian. Those things that you write down, those things that you communicate to other people about this death that happened in a very quiet place that no one else took notice of, that the rest of the world probably didn't even know this person was alive. That's what you're going to leave behind, and whoever goes back to read that report

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  for whatever reason, maybe it's a cold case, or maybe they're doing genealogy research just to try to find out about their family. They're going to learn a lot about you as a person by the level of attention and respect you pay to the dead. That's forever emblazoned on whatever data source that you're, whatever platform they'll be using then, it'll be, it's a recollection of that. And that's, you know, we, in the medical legal world, we, there's this kind of trite term that's used, that, it's kind of trite, I guess. We speak for those that can no longer speak for themselves. You know, how many times have you heard that term?

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  There's a lot of truth in that, though, because we, I don't, I don't view myself as an advocate for justice, all right? There's tons of other people that go out screaming about justice, they want to do this. I advocate for the dead, to try to tell their stories scientifically, and let the chips fall where they may. Right. But they deserve to have a story told about them. Mm-hmm. And there's a fine line to walk here, because, are you writing a...

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  Scientific report or are you writing a narrative about their life? But you you honor them through how how much attention to detail? You know, what what draws your eye? What are you up? Are you up on your training? Do you? Do you pay attention to everything that's in that environment? Because

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  you you only cross a threshold at a death scene for the first time once. That's it. You you can't go back and put the genie back in the bottle. Whatever decisions you make before you enter that space are made. Period. End of paragraph. You have to be so up on your game and paying attention. It again, it doesn't matter what you got going on at home. It doesn't matter. Do you have enough money in your checking account? Doesn't matter. Oh, yeah, I gotta get my oil changed. None of that stuff matters. It all all that matters is in that moment. And can you summon the will to be in that moment? People always talk about be in the moment. Well, for we've been doing that for years, you know.

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  Are do you have the capability of being present in that space and and appreciating the environment? And appreciating? You know, I don't know what the dead went through. Can you tell their story?

• 1:06:23Danny Jones?

  How much do you know about how the death happened before you get there? Like, does anyone like to say, hey, Joseph, this guy, he was trying to some some girl. And the dad came and blew his brains out or something like that. And then, like, you get there and you kind of already have a preconception of like, who this guy is? This guy was a scumbag, you know? Or this guy was trying to save somebody's life. He was a hero.

• 1:06:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. I used to I'm glad you brought that up because I used to have this. This idea in my mind when I when I would show up at a scene. It's like you're getting bombarded with information. They're like lobbing grenades at you. And whether it's the youngest uniformed cop or it's a salty detective. They're throwing information at you and it's like, it's kinda like Naguchi, you know, looking up the ceiling. Hmm. I, I would just as soon go into a scene and not know anything. Right. I, I don't, I don't wanna know what your opinion is. I don't want you to tell me that this is, yeah, he took the gun, stuck it in his mouth, you know, end of story. I don't wanna know that at all. You can tell me there's a gun there, you can tell me there's a dead

• 1:07:30Speaker 03

  body there, but other than that, keep, keep your worldview to yourself, whatever has been passed down to you. I wanna see it with my own eyes. I wanna observe it. I wanna photograph it. And then afterwards, we have conversation. We'll, we'll have a roundtable discussion. Hell, we'll hop in the car and go to Denny's or wherever it is and hang out in the back. You know, we, I say that because we used to do that actually in New Orleans. There'd be an area where we would leave a homicide scene and we'd gather together and talk about what we'd seen and that sort of stuff. And you don't have time for that most of the time, but I, I, I wanna be as uncorrupted as I possibly can. Sure. You know, before, because what, again, it goes back to how thorough am I gonna be with what I'm documenting?

• 1:08:15Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. Um, and passing that information on to whoever wants to use it because in the, again, back to the medical legal world, I don't care if you're a prosecutor or a defense attorney, we're unbiased. I, I, you know, I don't have a dog in the fight with trying to, uh, get somebody that has been accused of something off the hook and I don't have a dog in the fight with the prosecutor and they're wanting to seek justice and put this person away for a thousand years. Um, that's, that's not my job. That, that's, that's somebody else's job. My job is to be focused on the body and relate that information. Hmm.

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  But your flesh becomes involved. You know, you, you see things, you know, the...

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  You know. Yeah, how does it, how does it change your views or your world? Really, it makes you hug your kids a lot tighter. And then they don't understand why you get quiet. That, that's, you know, when you see a kid, which I did, family, had two kids, family had moved 24 times in one year and the oldest kid was, I don't know, I, I don't want to state the age, but it was, they should have been up thriving. They were living off of dirty mop strings in, in one instance, they were eating actually dirty diapers. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah, and you know, you, you look at that and you. Is it in New Orleans?

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  That one was in New Orleans, or you look at, you know, the, the grandmother who's, you know, that's locked in the basement and she's got a roasted breast cancer, so much so that, you know, when I went to examine her body, the intercostal spaces, the, you know, lack of a better term, the rib meat, you know, if you've ever pulled an intercostal muscle, you know, working out or whatnot. Yeah. Completely gone, that was in life, you can actually see her lung. So she was rotting while she was alive? Yeah, yeah. And the daughter kept her in the basement, both of her breasts were completely gone. She kept her mom locked in the basement? Yeah, yeah, and to collect her money. Oh, my God.

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  You know, and you tell people those kinds of stories and they don't, they think that it's, it doesn't happen. It, it does happen. It's a reality of the world, you know, death is a reality of life. Yeah. You know, I had one old pathologist I used to work with says, he used to call me Joey, he'd say, Joey, he said, the moment you come screaming into this world, you start dying.

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's kind of true, man.

• 1:11:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  You, you know, and um, that's why at this stage of my life, you know, I'm, I'm so very thankful for every single breath that I draw right now, because I don't, you know, I got, I've lived more life than I have to live. Okay. You gotta look at it that way. That's the reality of it. Um, and you have to embrace that, uh, because I, I worked so many cases, Danny, where the, the person got up in the morning, they had a bowl of cornflakes or made an omelet, maybe sat around the table with their, their wife, walked out the door and they never walked back through the door again. It ends that quickly and you see it in a flash on the news.

• 1:11:44Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:45Speaker 03

  And, but for the family, that, you know, that continues on, you know, for years and years to come. You know, it does.

• 1:11:55Danny Jones?

  Man, when I had my first kid in like 2019, there was this weird thing that happened to me. For like the first couple of months, I was constantly just thinking about my own death.

• 1:12:08Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:12:09Danny Jones?

  It didn't happen with my second or third, just my first. I would be like, I'd be like, it'd be the middle of the night, I'd be in his room, like feeding him a bottle or like trying to rock him back to sleep.

• 1:12:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:20Danny Jones?

  And I'd just be thinking about like what, what it's gonna be like when I'm dead or like, what if I die tomorrow?

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:12:26Danny Jones?

  And I just couldn't shake this. I was in this weird funk for a couple of months.

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  I think it's kind of normal.

• 1:12:31Danny Jones?

  You think?

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so, particularly for new dads. You, you feel, you feel that need to, you're the provider. You want to provide for your kids, make your family safe, all these sorts of things and all this stuff comes rushing in.

• 1:12:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah. It's like a flip got switched in me.

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You, you're world all it.

• 1:12:49Danny Jones?

  A switch. I said it backwards. A switch got flipped in me.

• 1:12:52Speaker 03

  All that crap that seems so very important beforehand is, it's nothing. It absolutely means nothing. And, um, you know, when you're, when you're notifying families, you witness that.

• 1:13:08Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  You witness that. You witness that switch being flipped in families. And it's, it's on the, it's, it's not as deep as it's gonna go. But you're, you see them.

• 1:13:22Speaker 03

  In, in kind of a moment where they're sitting there Danny and they're, they're thinking, they're not coming back. They're, they're not coming back. And this is kind of third party, you're, you've delivered this information. You're chatting with them or you're trying to chat with them. You know, they say there was a study that was done years and years ago. They said, when you go out to notify a family, they literally only hear about 10% of what you say to them. Yeah. And then That makes sense. And let me tell you something, bro. When it was inevitable, I would be on duty the next day and they'd have my card. They would call and they'd probably been calling through the day till I got back. And they would say, look, you, you told me something yesterday.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  You came to my home and told me my son died. I can't remember what you told me. And that's like this thing that happens, you know, they, all they hear is dead. And then almost everything else is static afterwards because you've traumatized them so desperately in that moment.

• 1:14:30Speaker 03

  And again, you, you know, it's this kind of messenger of death, you know, where you're, you know, you're going across the countryside and you're delivering this information. Uh, and listen, it's really hard to know when to kind of peel it back a little bit, you know, how much information I had a, had a, a case where I had a guy that was found decomposing in his home. He had, uh, I don't know how gory I can be with this, but let's just say that he was involved in auto erotic activity. What is it? Auto erotic, you know, like, uh, getting himself off by asphyxiating himself.

• 1:15:11Speaker 03

  And so he, yeah, and there's been, most of the time people associate with like hanging.

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  But every now and then people will use like an oxygen deprimant. And he had, uh, an aerosol can that used a compound that in the past dentists had used for a deadening of an area around a gum. And they actually sold it in, uh, for a time they'd been selling it in sex shops in New Orleans. Oh my God. And I'll never forget the name of the, the name of this stuff was called Gaz. It had a big laughing face on the front of it and it's G A Z Z. We arrived at the scene and there's like

• 1:15:55Speaker 03

  fruit that's laying whole pieces of fruit and it's covered with this kind of slimy fecal residue. Cans of Crisco that are everywhere. He's bent back on his knees. He's wearing fishnets, nine inch heels. He's wearing what I came to find out was a widow's bra. I didn't know what a widow's bra was, but it's, you know, like a corset with a bra built in. He's got pantyhose stuffed in it, a blonde wig and he's got a, a, uh, a plastic bag over his head that has a can of this stuff and he spritz it. And oh, by the by, he's got a hand massager which is plugged directly into the wall, not

• 1:16:37Speaker 03

  battery operated and it's got two, um, it's got two elastic straps. The theory is you're supposed to use this to, you put this thing on the back of your hand, you massage somebody's back. That's not what he used. He had taken his testicles, clamped them off with one of the straps, wrapped the other strap around his penis. And he'd been down for days. His penis looked like a piece of bacon. It was about that thick. And so he dies in this environment, squalid environment.

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  You know, fecal covered fruit everywhere.

• 1:17:12Speaker 03

  And it was, it was one of the most disgusting things I'd ever seen, even by my measure. And I was young, very young as an investigator when I worked that case. And Scott was a computer engineer, is highly educated.

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  And he's from Virginia originally and graduated from Virginia Tech, if I remember correctly. And I had to get his mother notified and she lived like in the tidewater area of Virginia. And she had that kind of soft gentle tone, you know, when she talked and she was an older lady. And I'd sent a police officer out to her house, had her get on the phone. So that I can, you know, notify her over the phone, but with a police officer there. The ideal thing is.

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  How old was this guy?

• 1:18:03Speaker 03

  How old was he? Uh, I guess he was probably in his late 30s, probably. This is back in the eighties in New Orleans. And I'll, and in my arrogance, I'm talking about giving people too much information. In my arrogance, I guess I wanted to impress this little old lady that I just told her son had died. She says, what, how did he die? And I made the mistake of saying, well, it was autoschotic asphyxia. She didn't need that information because you know what the next question was? What you just asked.

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

  What is that?

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  What's autoschotic asphyxia? So now I have left her with this scarring stain in her mind of her son being found decomposing on the floor. With this vibrator attached to, plugged into the wall.

• 1:19:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:02Speaker 03

  I had a moment where I remember, you know, of course, all the cops are standing around and they're like smiling. The thing was still going when I got there. They were not going to touch it. And, um, and they were all like, looking at me like, who's going to do this? And I remember thinking in my mind, please dear God, don't let this be the last thing I see. Because I don't know, it wouldn't have been running, I guess, if it had shorted out. But I had visions for a millisecond that I was going to grab a hold of this wire and then plug it. And I'd be electrocuted. This would be the last thing I'd see. But, you know, it was, it, there, yeah, it would, it would have been.

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  I guess after a period of time, she wanted to ask that question. It would have been appropriate to give her that information, but it's like, you know, the term pablum, which is something you feed a baby. She needed pablum at that moment in time, just enough to sustain her.

• 1:19:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  Before you move her up, and it's hard to understand because families will come at you. They'll say, you tell me how he died, you know, tell me.

• 1:20:04Danny Jones?

  I can take it.

• 1:20:05Speaker 03

  Huh?

• 1:20:06Danny Jones?

  Like, I can take it.

• 1:20:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can take it. You tell me. And, you know, I've had people, they want to see the body. You know, I want to see my family's body. You know, I've had people throw punches, push, all that stuff because the body's in the morgue. And you tell them, look, you're not going to see the body here. You need to go ahead and make arrangements at a funeral home. And I've had on two occasions where I've had families reach out to their attorneys and threaten us if we don't allow them to see the body. And we acquiesce, okay, but you're going to sign a whole harmless agreement. And, you know, two of those cases, families said, guess what they said? I wish you hadn't let us see the body.

• 1:20:45Danny Jones?

  Because the body was just ravaged.

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And, but people don't, they.

• 1:20:50Danny Jones?

  You don't want to remember this person that way, right?

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  Personally, you don't want to subject them to this. I, it's cruel. I would not want them to do it. But, you know.

• 1:21:00Danny Jones?

  The craziest thing to think about for me, which I've been thinking about a lot lately, is like, when you see people like that guy who just explained that Otto was fiscated himself to death, you know, wearing what he was wearing.

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:12Danny Jones?

  When you see stuff like that.

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14Danny Jones?

  Like, just imagine. There was a day in a hospital delivery room.

• 1:21:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:20Danny Jones?

  Where that person was born and people were so excited. They just, like, this baby just was born into this world.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:21:25Danny Jones?

  And it was like the best day of these people's lives.

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, and this

• 1:21:28Danny Jones?

  And it ends.

• 1:21:29Speaker 03

  Mother that I just assaulted

• 1:21:32Speaker 03

  held him close to her chest and she felt him breathe. She heard his first cry. She fed him.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, that's somebody's child, you know, and it, it's a that, that's why death investigation is an interesting space to enter into because you're seeing, you're seeing this.

• 1:21:54Speaker 03

  Huge finale.

• 1:21:57Speaker 03

  You don't have privy to the prelude.

• 1:22:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:22:01Speaker 03

  You know that there was a prelude, but you're seeing this huge finale. And many times it's this fantastical crash. On the other hand, I've had, I've had a lady, I wrote an article, I saw you had Gavin from Vice a couple of weeks ago, wrote an article for Vice. I didn't know what Vice was. This is back in 2014. I told, I told my students at the time, I said, I got a, an email from somebody at a place called Vice and they want me to write an article.

• 1:22:35Danny Jones?

  How long ago was this?

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  2014. And they were like, yeah, I think Gavin.

• 1:22:39Danny Jones?

  That's when they were still cool.

• 1:22:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. And they were like, Vice contacted you, Professor Moore? And I was like, yeah, who are they? Then I went and looked at it and I was like, I don't know if I want to write, you know, write this, but they did a true crime edition. And I wound up, you know, writing that article. And in, in doing so, you know, I kind of opened up my life to them, people that hadn't read the memoir and, you know, just kind of talked about what it was like, you know, out in the field, you know, being a death investigator and the scars that come along with it, the things that you see, the things that you, you know, you kind of carry,

• 1:23:23Speaker 03

  you carry around with you, you know, forever and ever.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  And it, you know, that I think they wound up republishing the thing like in seven different languages and, you know, that sort of thing. And so it, and I didn't expect, you know, what was going to happen, happened, you know, with it. And a couple of that with the book, and that's how the news media kind of found out about me. And I've been, you know, kind of in dwelling that world ever since, you know, since that period of time.

• 1:23:54Danny Jones?

  What are your thoughts on the death penalty?

• 1:23:58Speaker 03

  My thoughts?

• 1:23:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Do you think about it much?

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. As a matter of fact, I actually do episodes on my, my show about death penalty and about, but here's kind of the thing.

• 1:24:18Speaker 03

  When.

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  When someone, it's announced that someone is going to, is facing, you know, whatever it is,

• 1:24:29Speaker 03

  nitrogen deprivation, which they're using now. Oh, really? Yeah, and they used it in, in Alabama recently, or a couple of times. Nitrogen deprivation? They put them in a room and suck. It's like, it looks like a firefighter's mask they put on their face. Wow. Yeah, and. Is that more humane? They never can get the damn formula right for lethal injection, or people are always protesting about it. It's not a very pleasant way to die. And I know there's people say, well, it shouldn't be pleasant, you know, they did, and, you know, you return, and then, you know, you've got these people that are using firing squad now, and I think they. Who's using that? South Carolina, I think. They, they tried it, and the guy eventually died.

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  There were some shooters that missed the mark. I don't know how you can miss it. Right. Because there's a patch. You're pretty close up.

• 1:25:23Speaker 03

  Here's the thing about the death, death penalty, and I've actually assisted in three,

• 1:25:31Speaker 03

  three autopsies on people that were executed. So, one was an electrocution, and two were lethal injection. Why would you do an autopsy on somebody? Because they're in state custody when they die. Let me ask you this, how do you classify the death? Is it an accident? That's a good question. No, it's not an accident. Is it suicide? It's a murder. It's homicide. Yeah, it's a homicide. It's done at the hand of the state. It's a legal homicide. Yeah. I, I'm not a big fan of the term murder. Murder is a lawyer's word, it's very dramatic. So homicide's very clinical, you know, and that's one of the five manners of death.

• 1:26:11Speaker 03

  And so they're in state custody, and as a matter of fact, autopsies on any prisoner, but particularly when it comes to executed individuals, are more detailed than anything you can possibly imagine. I'm talking about the soles of the feet are dissected. What? Palms of the hands, up and down the arms, the back is completely dissected out, yeah. Yeah, everything stemmed to stern, because what their, their goal is, they want to, you want to be able to prove this person wasn't tortured in any way, prior to, prior to the state killing them. It, it's, it's an interesting thing.

• 1:26:49Speaker 03

  So, yeah, so anyway, I

• 1:26:51Danny Jones?

  Who, who, who makes the call? Who dictates that autopsies for these people who have been executed by the state? Who made the law or the rule that you have to do such an extensive deep dive on the autopsy?

• 1:27:06Speaker 03

  You know, I don't know that they, most states say that they have to be autopsied. The extent of autopsy, I think traditionally has been dictated by the forensic pathology community. Because they know where problems will arise. It's like if you, if you have someone that dies in the back of a cruiser, all right, and they're in custody. All right.

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  There will be so much more detail given to that autopsy.

• 1:27:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:27:34Speaker 03

  Than any, any other kind of case. And the same kind of dissection will generally be done on those individuals that die in police custody. Even if you have someone that dies in custody of, you know, an apparent cardiac event, there's still gonna be autopsy. Because, you know, you can't, you can't go back and wish that it had been done. All right. It, it has to be done. If you don't do it at that moment in time. One, they're either gonna be buried and vaulted down in the ground. So you're gonna have to have them exhumed. If it comes, or they're gonna be cremated. There won't be anything left at that point in time. So they're gonna do it.

• 1:28:12Danny Jones?

  So if somebody dies in the state's custody or in the government's custody.

• 1:28:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:17Danny Jones?

  You have to be absolutely sure there was no foul play, if there was no

• 1:28:21Speaker 03

  You don't want there to be any question whatsoever. That's why, like, so many offices will do things like

• 1:28:29Speaker 03

  partial autopsies where they might only open the head or they might only open the chest. I'm not a proponent of that. I've always felt like in for a penny, in for a pound. You got one foot in a boat and one foot in the water. Make up your mind. Either do the autopsy or don't do the autopsy with an external exam. And they'll rationalize in a variety of ways. But if you're gonna head and, gonna go ahead and put the cold steel to, to a body. You need, you need to do it as thoroughly as you can because we've seen people, cases where people have been bitten by that. I covered, you know, the, the Daybell cases

• 1:29:05Speaker 03

  up in Idaho, um, which you had two kids that were murdered. Um, one of the kids was, um, there we go, use the word murdered. Um, um, brutally murdered. I'll put it to you that way. One of the kids was cocooned and buried on a piece of farm, farmland. Um, Cocooned? Yeah, cocooned, like wrapped. They're wrapped in plastic. The body was? Yeah. And we view that as, um, there's a certain way we view how people, how perpetrators treat bodies after death. Like cocooning of a body, burying a body, that's memorialization

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  of a body. That means that you have kind of a tie. Even the most brutal murder, they're trying to, in their own way, first off, they might be trying to hide the body, obviously, but they're honoring the body. Whereas this kid's sister was within 50 yards and they used a pickaxe to break her body apart as she's been thrown onto a fire and tried to render her down. Oof. Well, the same guy that did this is now on death row, um, in Idaho for killing his wife as well. And they went out to the scene when she died. She had a frothy cone. She had a frothy cone that was coming out of her mouth, which means she was in some

• 1:30:30Speaker 03

  kind of congestive failure. You see it a lot with drug, drug ingestion. And they were like, yeah, we're not going to do an autopsy. Well, it turns out that was homicide. Wow. And they transported her from Idaho to Utah. Where she was buried there and you had to get the Utah State Medical Examiner involved in this thing and her grave was also compromised. So there'd been some water, I think water intrusion and that sort of thing and she'd already been embalmed. So my point of my rambling here is the fact that you need to go ahead and do it. If you're gonna do it, do it. You don't want to dilly-dally around with this because you get, that's the thing, you know, death is final

• 1:31:13Speaker 03

  in many ways. It's final because it ends somebody's life, but it's also final in a sense from an investigative perspective that if you do not strike while the iron is hot, you're gonna find yourself wedged into a horrible position down the road if somebody comes forward and says, "Yeah, well, you know, they may have died at somebody else's hand or they may have died in a, in a manner in which is not consistent with the story we were initially given."

• 1:31:39Danny Jones?

  The crazy thing is so many people get exonerated off death row from new evidence.

• 1:31:44Speaker 03

  I know.

• 1:31:44Danny Jones?

  DNA evidence.

• 1:31:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, and again.

• 1:31:46Danny Jones?

  That's the only thing that I would say.

• 1:31:47Speaker 03

  Well, with the technology that we have now, I, I am not as inclined as I once was towards it because there have been screw ups in the past where we know for a fact that people have been executed that were not responsible.

• 1:32:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:32:09Speaker 03

  And it's, you can dismiss that if you want to. I don't mean you, I mean like universally. You can dismiss that if you want to. However, you can't reclaim that life, can't bring it back. And I've actually heard people make the argument, they'll say, "Well, I'm sure they were guilty of something." Really? That rose to, rose to the, to the death penalty, that you're gonna kill them. So I think that it is warranted, it is warranted, but it has to be very specific and, but it better be very, very thorough, the investigation.

• 1:32:46Danny Jones?

  Do you think it helps victim, families of victims when the, the guy who committed the crime gets executed?

• 1:32:55Speaker 03

  I have never, well.

• 1:33:02Danny Jones?

  Do you think it like psychologically closes any doors?

• 1:33:07Speaker 03

  They'll say, they'll say, well, we can close that chapter, but they're always left wanting. And here's the other thing, if you try to make the argument for deterrence, that argument is facile. It's doesn't exist. You, you can't.

• 1:33:21Speaker 03

  There, there's no deterrent, you know, that you can connect. Oh gee whiz, you know, that guy got executed.

• 1:33:29Danny Jones?

  Oh, I better not do this.

• 1:33:30Speaker 03

  For 25 years later. So how's it act as a deterrent? I always cite, uh, just having this discussion the other day with somebody, there's this, I urge anybody to look this image up because it's a classic image. It's, uh, from the old west. Everybody's dressed in black, you know, the black broad clothes, cloth, you know, jackets and all that sort of thing. And it's a huge crowd that's in the center of this town and there's gallows there. And

• 1:34:01Speaker 03

  you can see fathers in the image. They're, I guess they're fathers. They're grown men and they have the kids up on their shoulders.

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  And they're facing the gallows. You don't see the accused on the, I don't think you see the accused on the gallows. But people would bring their kids to these things. And in our mind, you know, it's like

• 1:34:22Speaker 03

  clutch of pearls, you know, that's horrible, but I don't know for a fact, I can actually probably say that the dad was saying, boy, let me tell you something. If you do this, cause and effect, this is where you're going to wind up.

• 1:34:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:34:37Speaker 03

  Um, and or just the average citizenry, you know, yeah, I guess it's a, I guess it's a blood sport, you know, you, you know, people want the gore of it, you know, kind of like, uh, um, you know, the terror in France where everybody show up for the guillotining of, of everyone.

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  It wasn't necessarily, well, I guess you could drive people with fear that, you know, this can happen to you, but in to my way of thinking, none of these executions have ever, you know, in, in modern times have never been done. So that the public can see it. And again, it's like, it's like anything else with death. Most people don't realize the reality of death until it happens in their little space.

• 1:35:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:21Speaker 03

  They, they don't think it's going to visit them.

• 1:35:23Danny Jones?

  That's the weird thing about the executions too, is they put you in a little theater.

• 1:35:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:27Danny Jones?

  They put the guy, they strap him to the chair, whatever, in this room surrounded with, covered by, or with a glass separator. And these people are sitting this little.

• 1:35:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:36Danny Jones?

  This little peep show. It's like a little death peep show for the people. It's such a weird thing.

• 1:35:40Speaker 03

  It is weird. I got invited to one, um, when I was assigned to the state medical examiner in Georgia for a while. As a liaison, a long story, but anyway, that's where, you know, I participated in these autopsies.

• 1:35:56Speaker 03

  And, um, I had the sense about me at that moment in time.

• 1:36:04Speaker 03

  That I knew that I didn't want to subject myself to it. And the, the way the law is, I think, I'm not sure, don't quote me on this. The medical examiner for the state in Georgia, I think, uh, will actually attend the execution. And I got invited, you know, like, you want to come, you know, it's like, I don't want more of that. I got enough horror. You know, kind of rambling around in my brain. I don't want to watch this. It's kind of like people that sit around and watch beheading videos. Why are you doing that?

• 1:36:38Danny Jones?

  I, yeah, no, yeah. Um, I went to a, I have a friend who is a lawyer around here. Who, um, represents a lot of murder suspects, a lot of people who committed murders. And he defends them for whatever reason. He's, he's drawn to this kind of stuff. And, um, there was one specific guy who he was defending, who was on death row. He's been on death row since 1990.

• 1:37:12Danny Jones?

  And his name was Ray.

• 1:37:17Danny Jones?

  I can't remember his name. Um, Steven, search Bjorn Brunvand. B J O R N B R U N V A N D. That's the lawyer. And then search, uh, Ray murder death row. His name was Ray. He was on death row. This was, um, I went, this was like 2015. I remember anyways, um, he was Ray Crone? Huh? Ray Crone? No. Um, he was at the prison in Stark, Florida, where is one of the, I think, one of the two prisons in Florida that they still do executions. And he was scheduled to be executed

• 1:37:56Danny Jones?

  that evening that we drove up there, me and my friend with cameras. We were doing a documentary on the whole process of him defending this guy. And he was like, yo, there's going to be a crowd across the street. He's like, come on, if you want to come interview people, he's like, go ahead. I'll be there. So, so we went and there was this big empty field on one side of the field. They, or they, first of all, they had giant field. Two specific segments of the field were roped off with caution tape. One big area that was, uh, caution taped off was the people who were basically protesting the execution of the guy. Yeah. And there was a couple of people there who had previously been on death row, who had just been exonerated.

• 1:38:38Danny Jones?

  Basically, people who were against the death penalty in general, had no direct connection to the case or the, or the guy. The other side were friends and family of the victims, uh, that the guy had allegedly murdered. And, um, it was such a crazy experience going back and forth, talking to both of them. Yeah. And there was one guy on the pro death, um, crowd who had his daughter, his daughter was like murdered by a guy and he This was like 10, 15 years before this. He went there for that execution for that guy. And every single execution he goes to, to like help the families and like, like be there with the families.

• 1:39:23Danny Jones?

  But it's like, these people aren't even in the little room on the prison. These are, they're across the street, just like looking at the prison. And um, like it's crazy. There's news cameras everywhere, interviewing people, interviewing the lawyers. And like, the guy is strapped up on the gurney in that room, in that prison, while they're waiting for the call from the Supreme Court. Whether or not they're going to stay the execution or not. And sometimes they'll be there for like 10 hour. I mean, we were there for like probably six hours. And eventually they, they said, kill him. They, they executed him.

• 1:39:58Danny Jones?

  No, this guy wasn't falsely, this guy.

• 1:40:02Danny Jones?

  No, that's not the same guy. This guy was actually executed.

• 1:40:07Danny Jones?

  And they don't know whether it's going to be stayed or not. So they're literally in that room, I guess, strapped up, getting ready to be injected. While they're waiting for the Supreme Court to come down.

• 1:40:14Speaker 03

  No, no, no. They're, they're in an ante chamber. Uh, they're not gonna leave them because that would be considered to be cruel and unusual. So they will, once the call goes in, they'll actually leave them in. And once the final call has been given.

• 1:40:29Speaker 03

  They're not gonna leave them strapped down for 10 hours or whatever like that. They're gonna put them in a holding cell. Now, I don't, you know, procedurally, you know, corrections is outside my realm, but I do know that.

• 1:40:42Danny Jones?

  That's gotta be so psychologically torturing. To like, I'm sure they, I don't know if they give them the last meals anymore or whatever, but like.

• 1:40:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, they do.

• 1:40:49Danny Jones?

  Have your last meal. You're, you're gonna be executed at 10 PM tomorrow unless they stay the execution. And you're like, you're in limbo.

• 1:40:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, you are. And you don't know if it's, and I, I think that everybody has this idea that there's gonna be this white knight riding on a horse that's gonna. You know, if you're, if you're uh, against the death penalty that they're gonna exonerate this thing. Or somebody, you know, the, the families might actually see, you know, the, the governor as being their, their white knight, you know, that's gonna. You know, uh, get vengeance for, for their family. I, I don't.

• 1:41:28Speaker 03

  I have to be, I have to be very frank with you, with the advance of.

• 1:41:33Danny Jones?

  That's him, Oscar Ray Bolan. That was the guy.

• 1:41:36Speaker 03

  With the advance of technology that we have now and what we can learn and what we've learned particularly about the way certain investigations are conducted.

• 1:41:47Speaker 01

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  Witness the beginning of the revolution.

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  The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, November 20th, rated PG-13. Now streaming on Paramount Plus.

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• 1:42:27Speaker 02

  Dexter Resurrection, new season now streaming on the Paramount Plus Premium Plan.

• 1:42:33Speaker 03

  Um, it gives you pause. What, one of the things that I do, uh, I was, I got sidetracked. I was rambling, but with, I will cover executions from the perspective of the deceased. Because most of the time when these things splash across headlines, it's always about the person that's about to be executed. So, um, we'll go back and, and cover what happened. You know, like who were the victims? We'll give their background story about the victims and what they were subjected to. Right. How this was handled, uh, what kind of conclusions that the police reached at that

• 1:43:17Speaker 03

  point in time. Cause that's, that's what I do with my show. You know, I try to teach, I use these real world cases. Yeah. Try to teach basic forensics to people that are interested in it, in the true crime world. So, um, for me though, I just, I know, because I've seen what's happened. I'll give you for instance, I see what's happening in real time right now with like my friends at Othrum Labs down in Texas that are, their goal is to- Clear out that list. I was telling you about the Namus list where their goal is to try to upend that list and get people identified. That technology has not existed before. And what they're doing, I think they've gotten just under 500 people identified now that

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  have been moldering somewhere for years and years. Their bones just setting up. Because they're using forensic genetic genealogy in order to facilitate this. And they're using open source, open source databases where they can go in and essentially, and this is not about crime. This is not about, you know, like the Golden State Killer, which was a big deal. They used forensic genetic genealogy to catch this guy. But what I'm talking about is just somebody that's found out in the woods. And I've had tons of these cases that haunt me over the years. Where you never know who they were. Oh, you might find a single bone. You might find a skull. Who knows? You might have a clandestine burial

• 1:44:47Speaker 03

  where somebody just stuffed somebody in the ground and walked away from it. And they've been there forever and ever. But to be able to find out who they are and then pass that information on to the family and say definitively scientifically, we've identified your loved one. This, do you have somebody missing in your family? Well, yeah, we had a rumor. They dropped off the face of the planet. We'd, well, his body is so and so. It's in this location. And we've confirmed this. And that person is taken off the list. So, and it's, it's an amazing technology. So, I'm, what I'm saying here is that just like that technology is being used in, in the case of these unidentified bodies, there's new technology that's out there, generally has to do with DNA, where you have to do a deeper dive with some of

• 1:45:32Speaker 03

  these cases to make sure that everything is above board, up to speed. That everything was done. From an investigative perspective back then, that it would still, it would still stand a scientific test at this point before you push the plunger, pull the trigger, or, you know, turn on the gas.

• 1:45:52Danny Jones?

  I wonder how they could use AI to do this stuff?

• 1:45:56Speaker 03

  No, there's been, there's been a lot of talk about that, that, um, and it certainly would shorten, you know, these numbers that you deal with in DNA are so mind blowing, you know?

• 1:46:09Speaker 03

  You begin to think about the expanse of that and how quickly it could be done with AI, you know, applying this and this things and they never, it doesn't sleep. It's always working. And that you have a human that can go back and fact check it.

• 1:46:24Danny Jones?

  Now with cases that come up still today, obviously you're not in the field doing this stuff anymore. You're, you're teaching and you're, um, getting the word out about it. But when, when stuff comes in the news, like this thing we had that happened with this Kohberger guy in Idaho, like what prompts you to get involved in it? And, and, and do you actually get involved with them? Or do you just sort of like analyze them?

• 1:46:47Speaker 03

  Analyze.

• 1:46:47Danny Jones?

  And, and, and how do you analyze this without being hands on or without?

• 1:46:52Speaker 03

  It can be difficult and I try to talk about it in as broad a terms as I possibly can without pointing the finger. I try to remain a neutral force in this.

• 1:47:03Speaker 03

  Anytime you get into

• 1:47:07Speaker 03

  the news, um, media coverage, you're, it's like, um, I covered the Chauvin case, Derek Chauvin.

• 1:47:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:47:17Speaker 03

  George Floyd, yeah. And, um,

• 1:47:20Danny Jones?

  That was a controversial one.

• 1:47:21Speaker 03

  Oh my God. Yeah. I covered it, um, on air. Did it for 18 days. Always on air. I think it was like four hours a day for 18 days.

• 1:47:35Danny Jones?

  Interesting. What did you come up with on that one?

• 1:47:38Speaker 03

  It was horrible. I, I hated covering it and this is just my personal perspective because the network that was covering it with at the time, they would bring in essentially attorneys that wanted to fight. I'm kind of the one constant right here on the science guy, you know, kind of talking about, talking about what, trying to explain what they're talking about on the stand from a scientific standpoint and trying to remain as neutral as I possibly be. Can be because so many people had an opinion about that case, you know, one way or another.

• 1:48:11Danny Jones?

  It was ideological.

• 1:48:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was ideological and that's a weird place to be in from a forensic standpoint, you know? And so I tried to walk that line to be very, very careful and purposed in what I was saying. So that, you know, if you want to go back and look at it scientifically and understand that, you know, with Floyd's death, it was a perfect storm, I think. Um, you know, you think about the drugs that he had on board. Uh, and then you think about the actions that were taken with him. Um, and it, it wound up bringing about his death, regardless of how you, you know, you might personally feel about it from a political standpoint or whatever your worldview is.

• 1:48:53Speaker 03

  Um, and, but the most important thing was, are the scientists that are on the stand, how's this going to impact the jury or the judge in making a decision? Is what they're saying actually, is it feasible? Okay. Because, you know, both sides have their own, um, have their own, um, their own group of scientists that they're going to call upon. Uh, the defense was at a real disadvantage, I think, because, um, they had very, very little resources to call on relative to medical experts that could address this. It's the only case that I've ever seen, I think, when it comes to the prosecution,

• 1:49:36Speaker 03

  when it came to the medical examiner, that one medical examiner did the autopsy. And then the same prosecution offered up, I think it was a total of two other, um, two other opinions by forensic pathologists, one of which used to work at the same office, that differed from what the actual prosector of record said. Um, that was a real weird kind of thing to observe there, you know, just trying to take it all in and understand that, you know, what would, what would possess the prosecutor to want to bring in, I think a total of three forensic pathologists? And then?

• 1:50:16Speaker 03

  They've got a guy that deals with cardiorespiratory stuff, you know, this thing was an Irishman, you know, that had appeared. He was for the prosecution. They threw a lot, you know, in that case for the for the jury to take a look at and understand. And it was really hard kind of cutting through, you know, a lot of the minutia that was out there.

• 1:50:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's the thing that like what the phenomena that happens over time with things like this is like, you remember when it happens. Like, I remember watching the video, right? And then afterwards, after that happens, then you have everyone's opinion online.

• 1:50:54Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:50:54Danny Jones?

  And then you have time goes by and time goes by and people's, when you start reading these opinions, everyone layering their opinion and this happened now, what was it, five years ago, something like that?

• 1:51:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:07Danny Jones?

  Six years ago, whatever it was. And now it's like you're so far removed from it and you want to remember something that happened. It's like, well, I remember watching the video for 10 minutes, five years ago, and I also have like hours and hours and hours of reading, people talking about it and people's opinions of it.

• 1:51:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:25Danny Jones?

  That are have nothing to do with what actually happened.

• 1:51:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:51:28Danny Jones?

  You know?

• 1:51:29Speaker 03

  Just trying to understand the facts.

• 1:51:30Danny Jones?

  The narrative evolves.

• 1:51:33Speaker 03

  Yes, it does.

• 1:51:34Danny Jones?

  It becomes so disconnected from the reality of what actually happened. And when I saw it.

• 1:51:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:38Danny Jones?

  I saw a dude with his knee on the guy. I don't know if I remember it was on his neck. I don't remember exactly, but the cop had his knee on the guy's neck forever. And he was like saying, you know, like, let me go, let me go. I can't breathe, can't breathe, whatever. And then eventually the guy stopped moving, right?

• 1:51:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. He arrested there at that moment and.

• 1:51:55Danny Jones?

  And was he dead on the ground? Did he die right there next to the car, next to the car on the ground?

• 1:52:00Speaker 03

  They rolled him, they rolled him into the emergency room. And if I remember correctly, I think he still had like agonal respirations, you know, it's like.

• 1:52:11Speaker 03

  You know, kind of like this and they called it, you know, um, they called it there in the ER, but I think for all intents and purposes, he was probably gone at that moment in time. There in that, you know, that gutter, you know, adjacent to the sidewalk.

• 1:52:23Danny Jones?

  Right, right next to the tire of the car.

• 1:52:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, right there. And, um, you know, there, and you never know about restraint deaths because they, they, they happen, they used to happen a lot more frequently. I, I don't, uh, you would get, you know, we kind of evolved, um, and I'm saying this from the medical legal perspective. I'm not saying this from a police practitioner perspective. I'm talking about what, what we observe because we have to handle these cases in our field and be as objective as we possibly can.

• 1:52:54Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:52:55Speaker 03

  You know, form function, what was, what was, what were the mechanics involved in all of this?

• 1:53:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:53:00Speaker 03

  How did it actually go down? And then that's what I'm talking about trying to remain neutral in this world and present the, the findings as to what the mechanism of death actually was, well, or any other contributing factors.

• 1:53:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:53:12Speaker 03

  You know, drugs, that sort of thing.

• 1:53:14Danny Jones?

  Well, there's two camps. There's the, it's binary with George Floyd. It's either, it's either the camp where he, he only died because he was high on drugs, on fentanyl. And there's a, there's another camp that says, no, the cop basically strangled him to death and he, he died because of the cop was, had his knee on his, on his neck.

• 1:53:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:53:30Danny Jones?

  Um, but there's also like, some people are saying, maybe it was a combination of the both.

• 1:53:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that it probably was, you know, here's the question, uh, and you can't get past this, uh, if he were, if, if Floyd had those substances on board, would he otherwise have died while he was walking down the street?

• 1:53:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:53:51Speaker 03

  Were they at lethal levels at that point in time? And I think if remembering back.

• 1:53:55Danny Jones?

  Was it just a perfect coincidence that that was the one time he was about to overdose was when the cop put his knee on his neck?

• 1:54:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you, and then, you know, because here's the thing, if, uh, if you've got these drugs on board, they're going to compromise your ability to uptake oxygen anyway. And so you get this individual.

• 1:54:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:54:13Speaker 03

  In this asymmetrical position where they're, you know, they're flat on the ground. You've got, um, you know, just the chest being able to. And fall is going to compromise their ability to process oxygen. You've already got a system that's being affected by substances that's, you know, bounding through your system already.

• 1:54:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:54:32Speaker 03

  It is, it's a perfect storm. And, you know, it was very unfortunate that it happened. I don't, I don't know, you know, and it's not really my place to know whether or not they got it right or not. I know that had, had that, those two individuals not met at that point in time, it'd probably be a different story.

• 1:54:55Danny Jones?

  Hmm, totally. Now, when did you, why did you decide to do a deep dive on the Idaho, this Idaho case?

• 1:55:03Speaker 03

  It was a number of reasons. First off, the, I started covering Idaho on national news platforms. I've been on, I think, every single one of them. You know, I'm pretty sure I've been every, every major network, I think, over, over that period of time. I started covering this thing the day after it happened. I think I was up at probably, matter of fact, there's like a show that Fox does, that's a precursor to Fox and Friends. I don't even know if they still do Fox and Friends, but.

• 1:55:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I didn't know anything about this case until a couple of weeks ago. I started seeing the guy's face on TV and I guess it happened a long time ago and.

• 1:55:46Speaker 03

  Two thousand two, November.

• 1:55:47Danny Jones?

  Two thousand two, and then I, like, I knew nothing until I, until Julian told me about it. Shout out to, by the way, shout out to Julian.

• 1:55:53Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:53Danny Jones?

  Introducing us.

• 1:55:54Speaker 03

  Bless him, yeah. Please check him out.

• 1:55:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he's amazing.

• 1:55:57Speaker 03

  He is.

• 1:55:57Danny Jones?

  And he knew everything. When I, I listened to you guys discuss this and he knew every single detail. He knew like the kid's fricking first, last and middle name, every single one of them. He knew what they all had for breakfast that morning. I, I don't know anything about this case.

• 1:56:11Speaker 03

  From a personal perspective, let me tell you why this case affected me. And I cover a lot of cases, all right, in the news. This case affected me personally, which is not a good idea. Because I'm a college professor and my son at that point in time was a sophomore in college.

• 1:56:35Speaker 03

  And the university where I teach in Alabama, Jacksonville State, was,

• 1:56:42Speaker 03

  it's roughly the same size as their university. It's a rural university.

• 1:56:51Speaker 03

  Many first generation students, you know, those sorts of things. We have that commonality. These are not kids that

• 1:57:01Speaker 03

  are striving to get into Harvard. These are kids that are looking to get a degree so they can go out into the world and be a nurse or a teacher or, you know, they just want to live that solid middle class life.

• 1:57:17Speaker 03

  Or business degree, you know? And so we had a lot of similarities with that. And when I, the information began to kind of leach out, if you will,

• 1:57:32Speaker 03

  regarding the suspected brutality that had taken place in this house. And no one knew who did it because this place, Danny, this place is in such an isolated spot that

• 1:57:49Speaker 03

  they don't have this kind of thing happen. It's not like it's in downtown Philly, all right? No insult to Philly, but I'm just saying, it's not like you've got this huge population of suspects that are out there. You're going to have kind of a very narrow, you know, spectrum here, who would do this? And, you know, there are all kinds of things that were floating around at that point in time that it was, there was allegedly had been a fight at a fraternity, which this house, the off-campus house was not too far away from fraternity row.

• 1:58:26Speaker 03

  Then we heard about stalkers. Then we heard about jealous boyfriends. We heard this litany of who people thought that it could be.

• 1:58:39Speaker 03

  But for me, I began to look at this thing and

• 1:58:43Speaker 03

  It broke my heart for these families and all the kids, but the families, because families are left behind and you send your kid off to college, you don't expect them to be stabbed 50 times, which it turns out one, one of these victims was. One of them was stabbed 50? Yeah, another was stabbed over 30 with disfigurement, blunt force trauma to the face and sharp force injuries to her, her face as well. You just, it's hard to comprehend that, that that's going to happen and in this weird house that they lived in, you know, it's like, if you go to any college campus, pretty much, you're going to have weirdo housing that surrounds it, you know, you're going to have,

• 1:59:24Speaker 03

  you know, these, uh, these rental, off-campus rental homes that have been lived in by generations of people that have gone to school there and they do these weird add-ons. This thing was particularly weird because it was, it was built, the original house was built where it was kind of carved into a bank, like a hill. Right. And it was originally a two-story structure, um, and then they added a third layer. I, I'd actually been on the air on one program with a gentleman who was the former Attorney General for the state of Idaho, as well as former Lieutenant Governor of, of Idaho.

• 2:00:05Speaker 03

  And dig this man, he had actually been, he'd actually been to this house before because his, one of his fraternity brothers, he was there for homecoming, one of his fraternity brothers was, his kid was living in the same house years ago, when it was only a two-story structure. And he was even telling us in, it's like, yeah, it was kind of a weird, you know, but you expect that at a college, college town because landlords want to try to squeeze as many butts into these places as they can to make a dime. Exactly. Nothing wrong with that, brother. And so they added this third floor. Landlords. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I began to think about it from, you know, how, how did this person know?

• 2:00:53Speaker 03

  The layout of the structure because it's this weird thing where they've got on the what would be called the ground level. There's a parking pad where you can park your car. There's a digital pad to gain access to the bottom floor door.

• 2:01:10Speaker 03

  Apparently, everybody knew the passcode for this thing.

• 2:01:13Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 2:01:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's it's college, man.

• 2:01:15Danny Jones?

  Right. Kids are going in and out, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends.

• 2:01:18Speaker 03

  Ex-boyfriends, party, you know, showing up for parties and whatnot. And the second.

• 2:01:22Danny Jones?

  Drug dealers.

• 2:01:24Speaker 03

  No comment. But yeah, you're you're right. Anybody that wanted to come in there, hey, there's gonna be a party at so and so. You don't know who's gonna be in the house.

• 2:01:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:01:30Speaker 03

  I mean, it could be anybody.

• 2:01:31Danny Jones?

  Sure, of course.

• 2:01:32Speaker 03

  Second floor had sliding glass doors and that that was facing the remainder of the hill. You can step off of that second floor through the sliders and walk up the hill behind the house.

• 2:01:46Danny Jones?

  It was like woods behind the house or something?

• 2:01:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's kind of like a tree line. If you imagine kind of an amphitheater style, this way I've always envisioned it, you know.

• 2:01:52Danny Jones?

  Steve, Steve, you can find a diagram of the house to give us a cool visual or like a, I'm sure there's been like recreations or animations of the whole thing that shows like the house on the hill with all that and the bedroom layout.

• 2:02:05Speaker 03

  You look at this thing and when we first, I think my first true view of it was a Zillow, an old Zillow view of it where, you know, you're trying to rent the thing. People, you know, they had this this view of all of these rooms. I say, geez, man, in the dark of night, somebody's gonna negotiate this thing when all the lights are off in the house. When all the lights are off in the house, how how do you have that kind of information?

• 2:02:36Danny Jones?

  Steve, that's like one floor. See if you can find like a side view of the whole. There we go. That's like a 3D view right there.

• 2:02:44Danny Jones?

  Okay. We'll keep looking. Finds it. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Continue.

• 2:02:47Speaker 03

  How are you gonna know how to navigate your way through this? Because the, if you enter on the parking pad, you go up, there's a landing, you kind of switch back, go up, and there's a second floor up there. Then, once you get to the second floor, which you've got two bedrooms in the bottom, you've got two bedrooms on the second floor. In addition to that, you've also got like a great room that's a dining area, kitchen. It's like a fireplace, so it's like a gathering area. As a matter of fact, there's kind of this famous shot where you can look through the window and see the table in the dining area. It's covered with solo cups.

• 2:03:26Danny Jones?

  Beer pong.

• 2:03:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, you're thinking, well, these kids, you know.

• 2:03:31Danny Jones?

  There we go.

• 2:03:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, when you look at that, you can see the interior of the place. And in addition to that, you appreciate that there's another staircase that goes up internally where you're going to have to negotiate that third floor and try to understand who's up there.

• 2:03:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:03:53Speaker 03

  How are you gonna be able to do that without having prior knowledge of this place?

• 2:03:56Danny Jones?

  Pause it on the view of the house, Steve, that you were just on.

• 2:04:02Danny Jones?

  Okay. So, it's a maze. It's a, for somebody who's not familiar, intimately familiar with the house, who hasn't been there before, it would be tough.

• 2:04:09Speaker 03

  That hasn't been there before, it would be tough, yes. Yeah. And what's really kind of chilling about this, and again, this is one thing that really kind of,

• 2:04:21Speaker 03

  really impacted me, there's this TikTok that these girls that lived here put together, and they're imitating one another. You know, like, it's a comedy kind of thing that they're doing, where they're imitating, you know, how the behavior of their roommates, you know. This one is very stoic, this one is like always anxious, you know, this sort of thing. They're imitating one another. And then the entire time, this thing is like panning around, and everybody had access to this. It's like panning around, and you can kind of see the layout of that second floor. And it was so chilling to me in the world that we currently live in. I don't know about

• 2:05:01Speaker 03

  you, man, but it's like place I lived in in college. You wouldn't know anything about the interior of my house unless I specifically invited you over. Maybe you were one of my buddies came over. We drank beer together, you know, hung out. Other than that, it's not gonna be broadcast to the entire damn world. And so you have

• 2:05:19Danny Jones?

  And they were posting these TikToks before the murder happened.

• 2:05:22Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:05:22Danny Jones?

  I'm sorry. What year was did this happen again?

• 2:05:24Speaker 03

  Uh, 2022.

• 2:05:25Danny Jones?

  2022. Okay.

• 2:05:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. 2022. So you've got this environment and people have an awareness of the interior of this thing. I think the big question, and maybe one of the things that is going to be, I don't know if it'll ever be answered at this point, but what, what knowledge, what foreknowledge did he have of this place, this reptile that went in there and did this?

• 2:05:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:54Speaker 03

  You know, what kind of knowledge did he have, the layout of it? And there's been a lot of talk about this individual had cruised by this house multiple times in the preceding weeks. They pinged his phone at a variety of locations or found it, you know, that he's kind of circling, circling this, circling the area. Did he ever make his way in there? And if he is in a hide above the house, okay, and I dig this, he's in that back area, he's in that brush line. At night, it's like going to a drive-in movie.

• 2:06:38Danny Jones?

  Cause the house is all lit up and it's glass walls.

• 2:06:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. And so Kaylee and Matty that are in the top bedroom, it's believed that one of the two of them were his actual target. Most people believe it was, it was Matty.

• 2:06:57Danny Jones?

  Do we have any idea why he would have targeted one of those girls? Again, for people who are familiar with this case, I'm sorry for the dumb questions.

• 2:07:03Speaker 03

  No, no, no. He's a vegan and there's a restaurant in, um, in Moscow, which I found out you have to pronounce Moscow, not Moscow. They take exception of that. So you have to think Costco, so Moscow. Um, she, she worked at, um, the Mad Greek Restaurant and some people believe that he had contact with her there, saw her there. That's just one theory that's been thrown out. There's multitude of other theories, everything from.

• 2:07:30Danny Jones?

  He was a vegan?

• 2:07:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was. And he makes a big deal out of it, you know, the old adage about how do you know somebody's a vegan? They tell you. Yeah. And so, um, they had a vegan menu. The question is, I think one of the big questions is, um, this lizard was a, uh, was a, a student in Pullman, Washington at Washington State University, which by all accounts is only 10 miles away. When the hell are you doing in Moscow, Idaho?

• 2:08:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:08:01Speaker 03

  And he's a, he is at the beginning of his, um, of his PhD program.

• 2:08:11Speaker 03

  For people that are not familiar with PhD programs, particularly if you're thinking about like something like criminology, which he went there to study, for your first year, you're like an indentured servant and you have a supervisor. You're assisting with teaching, which he was a TA. Um, you're meeting with an advisor. It's very labor intensive, but yet he's got enough time to go to, and again, it's only 10 miles away. Some people say eight, 10, drive across state lines and then kind of orbit this one location over and over and over again.

• 2:08:52Speaker 03

  You know what, uh, what, what's, you know, what's, what's up with that relative to his behaviors? Uh, because if he is in a PhD program, he's committed to it.

• 2:09:05Speaker 03

  Um, how do you have time to do this?

• 2:09:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:08Speaker 03

  Because the work is so very intense.

• 2:09:09Danny Jones?

  This guy had no history of any weird stuff, nothing?

• 2:09:12Speaker 03

  Uh, he was a former, uh, heroin addict.

• 2:09:16Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 2:09:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess, I don't know if that, that feeds into it. I know former

• 2:09:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah, me too.

• 2:09:21Speaker 03

  heroin addicts that don't go in and commit mass murder. Uh, some of the most gentle people I know had a problem with heroin in the past and they kicked it.

• 2:09:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:30Speaker 03

  Uh, so that's not, you know, I don't think you can use that to indict him.

• 2:09:35Danny Jones?

  Definitely not.

• 2:09:35Speaker 03

  But he, you know, he sent out questionnaires. He had gone to undergraduate and graduate school at the Sales University in Pennsylvania, which is where he hails from. And he had sent out this questionnaire to violent offenders in prisons. And it's, you know, and I mean, really violent offenders, asking them questions about, what did you feel? What'd you feel, you know, before you committed this act? What did you feel after you committed this act? Oh, by the way, what did you do to clean up? What did you do to, you know, get any evidence, get rid of any, and that was kind of the nature of, of this questionnaire.

• 2:10:16Speaker 03

  And the thing about it is you can take that and kind of mask it in academic pursuits and push that thing out there like that. And it was great, um, great talk about that, you know, that's kind of floated around for, for some time as well.

• 2:10:30Danny Jones?

  Steve, let's go ahead and play this. I want to watch this video from the top and just see, uh, is it like play through the whole thing?

• 2:10:37Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, it's like a diagram.

• 2:10:38Danny Jones?

  Okay, play it. Yeah, play it from the beginning real quick.

• 2:10:43Danny Jones?

  You gotta, uh, bring, yeah, there you go. All right, go ahead and hit, hit it. Give us some, give us some audio.

• 2:10:49Danny Jones?

  Is there no audio? I can't hear anything.

• 2:10:52Speaker 03

  I guess it doesn't have any audio.

• 2:10:54Danny Jones?

  You gotta turn it up. Is there a volume on the other stuff? Okay, there's no audio. Maybe that's for the best.

• 2:11:01Danny Jones?

  Puppy in one room.

• 2:11:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:03Danny Jones?

  Okay, so there's one, two, three, four bedrooms with people in it.

• 2:11:09Danny Jones?

  Four A, four oh four AM on camera parking.

• 2:11:14Danny Jones?

  So he just drives his car to the driveway and and gets in the house at four oh nine. He leaves the house at four eighteen. He's only in there for nine minutes.

• 2:11:24Speaker 03

  Nine minutes, dude.

• 2:11:27Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:11:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:11:30Speaker 03

  And he came.

• 2:11:34Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 2:11:34Danny Jones?

  So, okay.

• 2:11:35Speaker 03

  Three slaughter. Enters on the second floor, goes up.

• 2:11:38Danny Jones?

  Walks right past the first bedroom.

• 2:11:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, goes up staircase.

• 2:11:45Speaker 03

  Landing.

• 2:11:48Speaker 03

  Now that bedroom is empty. There's just a dog.

• 2:11:50Danny Jones?

  Did he, did he mess with the dog?

• 2:11:51Speaker 03

  No, dog stayed in there. And that's, uh, Kaylee's dog, by the way, she was visiting. She, she had already finished up her requirements for school. She was coming back to, to visit Nets.

• 2:12:07Speaker 03

  If I'm seeing this correctly, um, that's Dylan, I think, hearing something.

• 2:12:15Danny Jones?

  On the bottom floor, directly below them.

• 2:12:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:12:21Danny Jones?

  Four thirteen, he goes to the bottom floor room with two people. There was a boy and a girl.

• 2:12:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, Xana and Ethan are in this room.

• 2:12:28Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:12:29Speaker 03

  Xana fights like a wildcat. Um, he's cut. She's grabbed hold of the blade of this K bar and it's cut all the way down to her tendons and she's, she is stabbed fifty times. Um, at least that we know of.

• 2:12:45Danny Jones?

  The girl on the bottom floor.

• 2:12:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, second floor. Yeah, Xana is.

• 2:12:49Danny Jones?

  The second floor.

• 2:12:49Speaker 03

  Her boyfriend has got multiple injuries to his neck. As a matter of fact, the complex, the where the subclav artery is, you've got a subclavian artery that runs here. There's also the jugular vein that's in here as well. He's injured right here. They don't believe he ever got up out of bed. And there's the infamous image that they'd been showing for some time of what appeared to be blood coming out of the house, and it's on the foundation of the house. As a forensics guy, if someone would ask me on air, is that blood? I'd say, I have no idea. They haven't released information for all I know. It could be rust.

• 2:13:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:13:31Speaker 03

  But as it turns out, it's typed back to him, to Ethan. So he was stabbed in the bed, and it's so, he's bleeding so profusely, it's leaching down the wall, and it's, it's actually presenting itself.

• 2:13:45Danny Jones?

  Coming out of the wall.

• 2:13:46Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Yeah, it's, it's leaching down the side. So it's on the cinder block. There's, there are tons of these images that you can actually see. This is going to be, for lack of a better term, it's going to be a bloody mess. Dylan, the gold figure that they have in this diagram that's right there, she's the one that saw him. She made the description. Now, kind of infamous description of him being the guy with the

• 2:14:17Danny Jones?

  Bushy eyebrows.

• 2:14:18Speaker 03

  Bushy eyebrows. Interestingly enough, when

• 2:14:23Danny Jones?

  He's wearing a mask, right?

• 2:14:24Speaker 03

  He's wearing a balakava. It's one of these things, a balakava that you pull over your head, and all you can see are the eyes.

• 2:14:30Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:14:30Speaker 03

  You know, hunters wear them.

• 2:14:32Danny Jones?

  Like a ski mask?

• 2:14:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, kind of like a ski mask, but it's made out of, it's not neoprene, whatever, you know, like Under Armour.

• 2:14:39Danny Jones?

  Like rash guard material.

• 2:14:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Here's an interesting thing that in the victim impact statements.

• 2:14:48Danny Jones?

  And she, she was in the doorway, standing there, and he looked at her and just continued to walk right past her.

• 2:14:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I've got

• 2:14:54Danny Jones?

  Strange.

• 2:14:55Speaker 03

  Well, I think that, first off, remind me to come back to the eyebrows, but let me, while we're on this topic, just let me tell you what had happened, in my humble opinion. This is a

• 2:15:10Speaker 03

  What in the old days they would refer to as a lust murder. I think that probably he had set his sights on one of the young women up in that top room. He did not expect to find the other one. And he attacked her on the bed. He probably had some kind of fantasy worked out in his mind where he's going to sexually attack her. He didn't count on two women being up there. I don't, not that he's in his right mind, but I don't think anybody in their right mind would go into that environment armed only with a knife. And you've got to go head to head with two people, even if they are smaller than you and they're women. Right.

• 2:15:52Speaker 03

  He is sexually stimulated before he goes in there and it doesn't, you don't. How do you know? Because I think that this is one of the drivers behind what he had done. I think that that's the only logical conclusion that you can reach. A lot of people have stated over the years, not just me, but the fact that it doesn't necessarily have to do with this case, but stabbings in particular, when you get multiple stabbings, the knife actually substitutes as a phallus. So as this knife is being driven in over and over and over and over again, there's like some kind of psychological release. Right. I think that he was probably sexually stimulated.

• 2:16:37Speaker 03

  He went up there. He's got this adrenaline bump that he goes up on. And as he, you know, he didn't count on the other person. So he's now murdered two people face to face with them with this really robust combat knife made specifically for this purpose. Marine Corps has used it for years and years. As he descends, he is spent. Well, Xana, who was in bed with her boyfriend, Ethan, some believe that she heard Kaylee

• 2:17:22Speaker 03

  cry out, there's somebody in the house. She gets up, she's just taken a food delivery, Jack in the Box food delivery from one of these food delivery services.

• 2:17:34Speaker 03

  She's up. She hears something upstairs, comes to the staircase, and walks partially up it. As he's exiting that top bedroom, he sees her.

• 2:17:46Speaker 03

  And then he proceeds to chase her back into her bedroom, stabs her over 50 times. I mean, she is just decimated. She's grabbed the blade multiple times. She's tried to parry his thrust, you know, with her arms. She's got slices on her arms.

• 2:18:06Danny Jones?

  Good lord.

• 2:18:08Speaker 03

  Goes over, kills Ethan. Ethan's asleep in bed. We don't know what, I think a lot of people are wondering, because they'd been out partying, they're wondering what his blood alcohol level was.

• 2:18:16Danny Jones?

  He must have been killed first, right? Because he would have woken up.

• 2:18:19Speaker 03

  Either that or inebriation. Don't really know, because they haven't released any information. You, you have to be able to explain it scientifically, though, and that's, that's the two. That's kind of the supposition here was, the question to ask is, was, what did he have on board? He's underage, you know, he's not old enough to drink. So we don't think that he's probably got a long history of drinking.

• 2:18:44Speaker 03

  I don't know about you, but you know, the first time alcohol passes your lips when you're young, you know, you don't have the same tolerance, say for instance.

• 2:18:51Danny Jones?

  He's blacked out.

• 2:18:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I don't know that for a fact, but maybe, and maybe to the point where he has no awareness that what's going on, but she's struggling in there, man. Xana is. And he's finished that brutality off. As he's exiting, he's gotten another adrenaline bump. It's his survival mode at this point. I've got to put as much distance between myself and this house as I possibly can. He steps back out. Dylan gets up out of bed again. She came to the door a couple of times. This is when she meets him eye to eye, and she sees over the balakava, or within that framework of the balakava, the bushy eyebrows. And he did have bushy eyebrows.

• 2:19:35Speaker 03

  Keep that term in mind, because I said, did have bushy eyebrows. When Kaylee Gonzalez's sister got up, and this is one of the most powerful moments, her name is Olivia, spelled, spelled in A, Olivia.

• 2:19:51Speaker 03

  She asked him, and it's a rhetorical question because she's addressing him directly. She says, "When did you start plucking your eyebrow, when did you start pulling your eyebrows out?" Because if you see him now, he's kind of very thin. Her, her thought was, was that he sat there just plucking his eyebrows out by hand, over and over to try to, you know, knock that down in some way. She, you know, she had insight into him. She really made him squirm, squirm, squirm as he's sitting in that chair and he's having to listen to all of this. And she just knocked it out of the park. I, I recommend anybody go and listen to this impact statement she's made. It's, might be one of the most powerful things I've heard.

• 2:20:36Speaker 03

  Olivia? Yeah. Olivia Gonzalez, that I have heard in a courtroom. And I've been covering cases, live trials for a long time with Court TV and Law and Crime Network. Uh huh. I've never heard anything like- This is where she's questioning him in the courtroom? Well, she's not questioning him. She's direct and she has planned these things out. I mean, she's got a- It's a statement. Yeah, it's a statement. How, you know, victim impact statement. And, you know, because he's, he's rolled over on this. He said that, yeah, he pleads guilty to four counts, four counts of homicide and also an additional count of burglary. Hmm. With the intent to commit homicide, by the way. Ooh. Yeah. And it was just for so, it, it took, you know, the whole thing, I think

• 2:21:21Speaker 03

  a lot of people really got antsy over this, over this case. First off, that you had a madman running around the countryside here. It couldn't be solved or resolved fast enough. You add the inner internet into this, the digital world. And so, it, it's really weird with these cases, Danny, that you, you see, there's like a fire that has lit in like the true crime, crime community or people that are just curious, "Why haven't you done anything yet? Why haven't you..." They, they catch this guy within six weeks. All right? Um, there are a lot of cases out there that are unsolved to this day that may have happened several years back. It, it couldn't happen fast enough for people. So, I mean, law enforcement really did their job here. Yeah.

• 2:22:05Speaker 03

  And then, you know, they tie him back through his- Through forensic genetic genealogy through the trash pull that they did at his house there in the Poconos at his, at his parents' house. It came back to his dad. And so, you know, by process of elimination, it was him.

• 2:22:27Danny Jones?

  Have you ever heard of the Danny Castellero case?

• 2:22:29Speaker 03

  I have not.

• 2:22:30Danny Jones?

  He was a reporter who was murdered in Virginia, I want to say, West Virginia. Oh, no, I'm sorry. It was a suicide. But there's a huge, there's a huge conspiracy behind it that people, there's a whole documentary called The Octopus Murders that was on Amazon, or on Netflix, rather, where they do a deep dive into the history of this guy and who he was connected with. And he was, you know, basically like shaking the wrong trees of like people in government and in intelligence. And there's a theory that he was actually murdered. He was found in his bathtub, in a bathtub in a motel room with his, both of his wrists slashed. And the wrists were slashed, there was multiple cut wounds on

• 2:23:12Danny Jones?

  his wrists, and they were all, all the tendons were severed.

• 2:23:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:17Danny Jones?

  And somebody made the case, and it was with glass. It was, it was a broken glass bottle.

• 2:23:21Speaker 03

  Oh, my Lord.

• 2:23:22Danny Jones?

  So the case is basically, one of the, one of the biggest pushbacks against this case is that in the documentary, they said that if people are going to commit suicide and cut their own wrists, it's going to be almost impossible for the tendons on both wrists to be completely severed. Because how do you sever the tendons on one wrist?

• 2:23:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:43Danny Jones?

  Then go use that hand and do the same thing on your other wrist.

• 2:23:46Speaker 03

  Very difficult. And that's, that scenario has been floated for years and years that, and you know, you don't get many wrist slashings, just so you know, in methodology. They're, they're not real common. I've had them, but they're not as common as maybe you see in movies and that sort of thing. So it's, it's kind of...

• 2:24:08Danny Jones?

  There it is.

• 2:24:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:24:08Danny Jones?

  Don't, don't show that on the podcast, but it's good for us to see.

• 2:24:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's quite striking. And yeah, this, these are deep injuries. I don't see how anybody could self inflict on both hands with these injuries.

• 2:24:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:24:21Speaker 03

  Because, you know, just structurally, you're, you're compromising your ability to, to actually grip anything.

• 2:24:31Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:24:32Speaker 03

  And certainly facilitate. I had a, I had a kid one time that was a paranoid skits that lived in his... Mom and dad's attic and they it was a full-time job to take care of him. He's very paranoid. He thought the CIA had put a listening device in his forearm.

• 2:24:51Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:24:52Speaker 03

  This is kind of thing that we we kind of do mental gymnastics with in the medical legal world. Is this a suicide or is it an accident?

• 2:24:59Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:24:59Speaker 03

  So he took a fili knife in order to find the microphone and sliced from the base of his hand all the way up to his left ACF and cubital fossa thirty-two times. Just like this, his his arm looked like a book that you could flip through the pages.

• 2:25:20Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:25:21Speaker 03

  And he obviously he bled out, but unlike this, you know, that's in the that's in the vertical plane as opposed to in the horizontal plane where you're going across this way.

• 2:25:34Speaker 03

  You do see lethal, but it requires if you're going to go in the horizontal plane slicing a wrist, you're gonna it's gonna require a lot of force because you're gonna go across tendons here and tendons are not like cutting flesh. It's not like going into really soft tissue. So it's almost a sawing mechanism that takes place and you're using it with a piece of glass. This case is fascinating. I'd love to look into it.

• 2:26:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I highly recommend the documentary. It's called The Octopus Murders on Netflix. I want to talk to you about Epstein.

• 2:26:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:26:08Danny Jones?

  I want to take a leak real quick, though.

• 2:26:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:26:10Danny Jones?

  All right, we'll be right back.

• 2:26:11Speaker 03

  All right.

• 2:26:12Danny Jones?

  All right, so the Epstein case is fascinating and it's a hot topic right now. Everyone debates about it. It always comes up right now, especially because of this. Everyone talking about these Epstein files.

• 2:26:29Danny Jones?

  But and the footage that recently came out as well of the

• 2:26:32Speaker 03

  The orange blob.

• 2:26:33Danny Jones?

  The yeah, the orange blob, the footage in front of his cell.

• 2:26:36Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:26:36Danny Jones?

  There's all kinds of conspiracies about this. But when this thing first came out, allegedly, he was in a maximum security prison in New York.

• 2:26:47Danny Jones?

  And he was on suicide watch, I think.

• 2:26:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:26:50Danny Jones?

  Or no, they had recently taken him off.

• 2:26:52Speaker 03

  Recently taken him off, yeah.

• 2:26:54Danny Jones?

  And, um, and, uh, you know, there's, there's all kinds of things that outside of the actual like what happened in the cell, there, there's all sorts of things that were happening. Like he was meeting with people and he was looking at doing, um, getting another hearing really soon. He was filing for, um,

• 2:27:15Danny Jones?

  for something in, in the court where he was going to go back to court and try to fight it again and, and get off. And it seemed like he was optimistic about getting out of there still. And, you know, that, you know, you don't even have to mention the fact that, you know, he was obviously a narcissistic sociopath who had lots of money and probably thought that, you know, he probably wasn't suicidal if I was to guess. Um, but one of the biggest pieces of evidence that I've been aware of about Epstein's case is that he had the hyoid bone fracture in his neck, right? And that's one of the bones where I could be wrong, but I think they did like, uh, I read one time there was a study across all the hanging, hangings across, they took a bunch of hanging victims.

• 2:28:00Danny Jones?

  And that hyoid bone was only broken in like a small subset of those hangings.

• 2:28:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:28:05Danny Jones?

  And, um, I guess there has to be a ton of trauma for the specific bone to break. And in his neck, it was broken.

• 2:28:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was. And it's not just his hyoid bone. He's got two, uh, fractures of his cartilage. Um, in his larynx, which if you find your Adam's apple, it's like right in, in its bilateral. So you've got a fracture. And again, using this term, they're both in the, they're both in the vertical plane. So you've got one here, you've got one here and then the hyoid, hyoid's an interesting bone. It's a.

• 2:28:41Speaker 03

  It's the only bone in the human body that does not articulate with another bone. Just let that sink in for a second. It's stationary? Yeah, in soft tissue, its sole purpose, actually, it anchors our tongue in the back of our throat. It holds it in place and it's bird. Oh, wow. It's kind of bird-like in shape. And it's got, it's got two greater horns and two lesser horns. And some people describe it as a bird-like structure. Some people say that it's got a, the appearance of a horseshoe. I've heard that. But it's kind of crescent shaped. Okay, so it's anchoring the tongue back here.

• 2:29:23Speaker 03

  The, the, one of the, let me just run down the list. Yeah. One of the problems is, is with hyoid, one of the reasons you don't see it commonly fractured in, in hangings, is that it's so high up in the neck. Right. I mean, it is superior just about to everything else right here.

• 2:29:46Speaker 03

  I borrow this cord real quick. Of course. If it's not anchored in something. Mm-hmm.

• 2:29:51Speaker 03

  Sorry. So, let's just, let's just think about for a second, classic hanging. Okay? So, classic hanging, you have to be most of the time suspended or partially suspended. So, if you think about noose, it's better if you use your hand. Think about a noose that runs up like this. Okay? Now, it goes up generally behind your ears. Okay, and it comes to an apex back here. That's what, in our parlance, is what we refer to as a tenting feature. It's T-E-N-T-I-N-G. So, you get this apex at the top, right here.

• 2:30:36Speaker 03

  It travels upward, comes to apex right here. And all your body weight essentially is being supported.

• 2:30:46Speaker 03

  By this location, right here. Mm-hmm.

• 2:30:50Speaker 01

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• 2:31:35Speaker 03

  Suspended. Now, you can have a partial suspension, okay? The medical examiner in New York OCME referred to it as a soft hanging, which to me implies that you're not suspended like classic. You can sit and, yes, people hang themselves by sitting.

• 2:32:01Speaker 03

  Aside from gunshot wounds, relative to hanging, in my little slice of the pie, was the most frequent mode, because everybody owns a literature. Not everybody owns a gun. Everybody owns a literature. You can make them, I've seen them made out of Like a rope or something. Rope, belt. Belt is very common. So, with that said, how do you get the hyoid fractured so high? And particularly so that you, you have to have enough velocity

• 2:32:37Speaker 03

  to drop and get this thing to fracture. Now, one of the things that she said was that he, due to his age, that she believes that his hyoid had ossified to the point where it was fragile.

• 2:32:51Speaker 03

  Okay, I'll go down that road with you, but how are you going to explain these fractures here in kind of the soft, more malleable cartilage? And it's running, Danny, it's running bilateral. They're running north and south, vertical plane, right here, and they're on the other side. It takes that kind of pressure in order to do that, or maybe a readjustment. Also, the ligature mark that he has on his neck.

• 2:33:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:33:20Speaker 03

  Does not go up and down.

• 2:33:24Danny Jones?

  It's horizontal?

• 2:33:26Speaker 03

  Running parallel to the shoulders.

• 2:33:28Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:33:30Speaker 03

  You don't have this thing that's going up behind his ears like you normally see. I've got to tell you, when I'm just looking at the images, and anybody can see these images.

• 2:33:42Danny Jones?

  These are just public images that you found?

• 2:33:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know where they come from? The 60-minute special that was ran back in, what was it, 19 or whenever it was?

• 2:33:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:50Speaker 03

  And I was, you could knock me over with a feather, because you got to see all of these images and the interior of the cell. They're out there. Just check them out for yourself. Don't believe a damn thing I say.

• 2:34:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:34:01Speaker 03

  Just go look at them. So if you're trying to sell me on the idea that, first off, he has hung himself and you're absent the tenting feature, what did he do? Did he lay down flat on the floor and the ligature went around his neck? And it looks like the ligature's been readjusted, because you've got this kind of deep, it's a braided furrow. Yeah, there you go, right there. This braided furrow.

• 2:34:27Danny Jones?

  Again, Steve, don't put this on the podcast.

• 2:34:30Speaker 03

  That's running parallel, as you can well see. Do you see how one mark is low, right there?

• 2:34:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it looks like it was adjusted.

• 2:34:38Speaker 03

  And then, another one, and then you've got another one that is superior, that comes to like a little point right there. The sink's been moved in some way, and it's more dependent on his right side as opposed to the left side.

• 2:34:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And there's another mark up there by his jaw.

• 2:34:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll give you another one, and this is available out there. Do you know he's got a deep tissue bruise right here? His trap.

• 2:35:02Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:35:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's right here. You can see it, it's out there on the images too. How did, because I got to tell you, I've... I don't know. What did he do? Bump into a wall backwards? I don't know how you get this manifestation. Yeah, that's it right there. I don't know how you get that manifestation right there. Cause it doesn't correlate with what you're seeing on the front. I just have, you, you, you mentioned the study about the fractured hyoids.

• 2:35:30Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:35:33Danny Jones?

  Why is he, why does he have facial hair in the second one? Not the first one?

• 2:35:37Speaker 03

  No, that's the back of his head.

• 2:35:38Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's the back of his head.

• 2:35:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's like descending down the back right there. Um, I've had one fractured hyoid, uh, that was not related to manual strangulation. You know what it was? A guy went over a three-story, uh, off-ramp in New Orleans, three-story, two-story, doesn't matter. But in like a 1968 Pontiac that had the gigantic steering wheel, you know, like Mamaw drives, you know, like this.

• 2:36:07Danny Jones?

  Oh, clothes lined himself on it?

• 2:36:09Speaker 03

  Non-belted, he nose dived into the ground and the 12 o'clock position of the steering wheel hit him right here and it fractured his hyoid. It doesn't mean that it, it does happen. Okay. Again, it's just my, my little slice of the world. But again, how do you account for this injury? Here, it's almost like there were two modalities being, being utilized here, or methodology for that. Um, a ligature and possibly either throttling, this is, this is throttling. Okay. You can do it either anteriorly, okay, or you can do it posteriorly.

• 2:36:53Speaker 03

  Um, this is C-clamping where you do this, like this.

• 2:36:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:57Speaker 03

  So do you have some kind of fight that's going on, uh, with, I don't know, himself? I have no idea. How do you get these manifestations injury wise?

• 2:37:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:37:07Speaker 03

  In the neck, you know, Bodden was present, Dr. Michael Bodden was present for the autopsy.

• 2:37:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:37:12Speaker 03

  He is.

• 2:37:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah, explain who he is.

• 2:37:14Speaker 03

  Retained by Mark, I think it's Mark. Hope that's right. Mark Epstein, who is

• 2:37:20Danny Jones?

  The brother.

• 2:37:21Speaker 03

  This guy's brother. So he was physically there, um, and his conclusions varied from hers. Uh, you know, you can say, well, yeah, Mark's got a, a, a dog in a fight.

• 2:37:36Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 2:37:36Speaker 03

  I don't, he's not. I don't think it's a matter of him looking for money or anything like that. He thinks his brother was a victim of homicide. That's the reason he retained Dr. Boden. You just don't go off the street and say, "Hey, want to go to an autopsy, Dr. Boden?" He's been retained, okay? So, he's working for Mark, or he's Mark's eyes and ears at a very high end. He's worked multiple over the course of his career. He was the chief medical examiner for the state of New York. I think he was either the deputy or chief medical examiner for the city of New York for a time. He consults on cases all over the country. I don't agree with everything that, all of the conclusions he's reached in his life. The Michael Brown

• 2:38:18Speaker 03

  case in particular comes to mind. But he is respected, and he was physically there to watch this autopsy being performed, this examination.

• 2:38:28Danny Jones?

  So, he just watched it?

• 2:38:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's not like he's participating. And I've been present for autopsies like that, where you have an interested third party that will be there. And most of the time, there'll be some chatter, but most of the time, they're merely observing. It's not like he went in and actually did the dissection of the neck, okay, where you're taking out the organs of the neck, as they're referred to. That's going to be part of OCME's team that does that, and they'll retain them. I hope they've retained them. I hope they've retained the larynx. I hope they've retained the hyoid bone. I hope that didn't go with his body, you know, to be cremated, which it has been, and then placed in, there's

• 2:39:12Speaker 03

  a, you know, a cemetery here in Florida where his remains are.

• 2:39:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:39:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're in a vase, vase, you know, stuffed into one of these places. Stuffed, that's not accurate, but it's placed in there, and it's unmarked. So, yeah, I hope that those essential elements were retained, so that, I don't know, if it comes up again, somebody else, another person can take a look at it. But you kind of lose, you know, we were talking about a little while ago, how, you know, you've... You don't have a sense for what happened, you know, five years ago or whatever.

• 2:39:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:51Speaker 03

  That's, that's the way things work out in forensics. Many times you have to go back and review years and years and years from now. And I don't know whether kind of conclusions they'll draw.

• 2:40:02Speaker 03

  I haven't personally seen the autopsy photographs at all. I think that that would be quite interesting, you know, to see. Who do you try to understand?

• 2:40:13Danny Jones?

  Are they, I'm sure they're still somewhere where you can get, if you wanted to get access to them, could you?

• 2:40:18Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't know how the laws are set up with state of, state of New York. I don't know if you can, uh, file a FOIA request and, and actually get those or not.

• 2:40:28Danny Jones?

  What other elements of this murder, uh, do you find most interesting?

• 2:40:35Speaker 03

  The ligature they're trying to sell me on.

• 2:40:37Danny Jones?

  The ligature?

• 2:40:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, that piece of cloth, uh, which the, the corrections officer claimed that, he claimed, not Morgan.

• 2:40:46Danny Jones?

  The corrections officer.

• 2:40:47Speaker 03

  That he cut it away. Well, the ligatures that you, that you see like this.

• 2:40:52Danny Jones?

  Go to, go to that orange thing. Yeah.

• 2:40:53Speaker 03

  It has, it has no tool marks on it at all. It hasn't been cut. All right. So I don't know. And you can see the base knot right there is tied. It's still intact. I'm assuming that he used some kind of odd slip knot there. I can't manipulate it to hold it to try to understand it, but, um, that's not, that has not been cut. This guy claims that it had been.

• 2:41:20Speaker 03

  Again, how are you, where are you going to tie off from in there in order to generate this kind of force in order to have this level of trauma that was supposed to be inflicted by that thing there? And was it collected? Was it collected and that there was transfer evidence on it that's indicative of in multiple locations? So if it's going circumferentially, you know, going around the neck, are there multiple points where you're collecting DNA specific to this injury? You look at that. The area on his neck and Dania's abraded, it's like an abrasion. So it's very deep.

• 2:42:01Speaker 03

  Not only just trace elements or touch DNA, I'm talking about, do they actually have, did they actually find skin? Did they actually find hair, you know, from facial hair from his neck? Is, was any of that stuff retained? Did they examine all of that? I'll, inquiring minds want to know. I want to know about this, you know, and try to understand it and try to understand it. And then you got the time element that's involved, you know, when they got to his body, he was cool to the touch. You know, he'd been down for some time.

• 2:42:34Speaker 03

  And he's cyanotic, you know, you can see, they've actually got photos of him being wheeled in, if my memory serves me correctly. And he's got kind of the eggplant head, which you see with people that are in a cyanotic state, you know, where they're turning purple, you know, like this. So something has happened that's compromised his airway. Could it be suicide? Yeah, sure. It could be. But if I were a betting man.

• 2:42:59Danny Jones?

  You would say murder?

• 2:43:01Speaker 03

  At this point, I'd say undetermined, perhaps. I'd have to know more information. Problem with working anything in a correctional facility is that it's very difficult. I've worked, I've worked cases in correctional facilities. And it is not the most ideal set of circumstances to be in.

• 2:43:21Danny Jones?

  Have you ever seen another hanging like this in a correctional facility, in a prison?

• 2:43:27Speaker 03

  Not like this, no.

• 2:43:28Danny Jones?

  Do you know what the most common forms of, of suicide are in prisons?

• 2:43:33Speaker 03

  If I were betting on it, I'd say probably.

• 2:43:36Danny Jones?

  The same thing?

• 2:43:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:43:37Danny Jones?

  That's the most common?

• 2:43:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. There's something else that, here's something else that, that was fascinating to me about this whole circumstance. We had this, okay, I think most of us, I love, I love the movie Shawshank. I love that movie. It's like, where they call it a, a remote drop, you know, it doesn't matter where it's at in the movie, I'm gonna watch Shawshank Redemption.

• 2:44:00Speaker 03

  I know that this is a Hollywood Hollywood depiction. But every prison I've ever gone in or correctional facility I've ever gone into work a case. There was a certain level of order. When you go into the cell. Have you seen the images from inside this guy's cell? It looks like a pigsty.

• 2:44:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:44:18Speaker 03

  There's ripped up material all over the place. He's got a bunk. He's got a bunk that's absent a mattress. And there are drugs. Prescription meds. They're all on the top. You can see the the med vials, you know, most of the time with. If you're on medication in a prison, first off, you're in custodial care of the state. All right. I say state, I mean. You're in custodial care of right there, the one to the left, you can see it. The. Yep.

• 2:44:47Danny Jones?

  Oh, it's, oh, my God, look at that. That's crazy, just a bunch of prescription drugs and stuff on the top bunk like it's a like it's a little pharmacy up there.

• 2:44:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, precisely. And so. There would be like a nurse that would come by and they'd give you the little white paper containers. That contain your meds, they keep control of your meds, they watch you take your medication. You wash them down. This guy's got and. I have yet to be able to determine what all of that stuff is. But there is a slew of it that's up there. Um. The floor is littered with these ripped up bits of cloth.

• 2:45:24Danny Jones?

  What's that photo on the top left, Steve? Has three photos, yeah, zoom in on that one on the left.

• 2:45:38Speaker 05

  Oh, it's a YouTube.

• 2:45:40Speaker 03

  It's a screen capture.

• 2:45:41Danny Jones?

  Well, there's there's another picture of it. There you go, zoom in on the one on the left. Wow, look at that. It's a mess.

• 2:45:47Speaker 03

  Do you notice what's down the right hand corner there, Danny?

• 2:45:53Danny Jones?

  Like a boombox?

• 2:45:55Speaker 03

  It's a CPAP, I think it's a CPAP machine.

• 2:45:57Danny Jones?

  A CPAP machine?

• 2:45:58Speaker 03

  And he's got that in there with an electrical cord.

• 2:46:02Speaker 03

  That's an electrical cord. I've had multiple homicides over the course of my career that have been committed with

• 2:46:11Speaker 03

  utilizing some type of cord that comes off of a device or like a drop cord, like an extension cord. It creates kind of a more narrow furrow. They're abrasive.

• 2:46:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:26Speaker 03

  When you apply them to the skin. How does this guy even have access to all this stuff? And I understand if he's got sleep apnea, he has to be on a CPAP machine. Okay, that's cool. But that should be integrated into the investigation. Was that thing collected? Did they run down the length of this cord just to look for DNA? And yeah, by virtue of the fact that it's in his space, his DNA is going to be on it. But what areas of that cord is his DNA in? Okay? It's not just saying, well, yeah, his DNA was in it. That's intellectually lazy.

• 2:46:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:00Speaker 03

  Were there particular areas where it was concentrated along, you know, along the cord? You know, that sort of thing, you know? Just looking at this. And look, again, I've got folks I teach with that are correction specialists, you know, that teach corrections. I've actually talked to them about this and one of the things that you

• 2:47:25Speaker 03

  you want in an environment, a corrections environment, is you want order. Because if you have chaos in that environment, that chaos spills over to other inmates and, you know, the staff and everything else.

• 2:47:39Speaker 03

  Who's watching over this guy? Because this thing is squalid. I mean, it's absolutely positively squalid. He has no order in this environment whatsoever. And he's just come off of [BLEEP] side watch. How does he have access to this stuff? And if he's, if he's got these problems, there was-

• 2:47:57Danny Jones?

  It was like a day before, I think, that he was taken off [BLEEP] watch.

• 2:48:00Speaker 03

  Precisely. And there was some other, it has been alluded to that there was some kind of- You know, Donny Brook with somebody else at some point in time that I've heard people talk about, well, did he, was his, was his hyoid fractured prior to this event? And because he was cellies with somebody else, or he had a confrontation with somebody else, couldn't, is that a survivable thing? I don't, I can't answer that question. I think that I would want to know, I think that I would want to know, was there any focal areas of hemorrhage where this thing had hemorrhaged out? And if there were signs of the bone, you get this kind of modeling that goes on with

• 2:48:41Speaker 03

  bone, even kind of in the immediate, if, if you've got this pre-existing fracture, which I'm highly doubtful of this, where the bone is trying to heal itself and you can see evidence of that. So how fresh was this? You know, did it happen as a result of this? Does he have, and again, this stray mark that's on, you know, back here at the base of his neck is an odd, odd finding as well. There's a lot, lot here that doesn't marry up. Timing is a big element here, a lack of accountability. And, you know, if we were, in my field, if we were working, working this case, we would

• 2:49:21Speaker 03

  want to be very, very exacting about who saw him, what was his affect like at that point in time? Was it down, up? Was it flat? You know, how was he behaving? Had he requested any kind of special treatment? Gee, I'm feeling really blue right now, even though I've just come off the sidewalk. You know, how, because even in a case like this, in the medical legal world, we're going to track down psychiatrists, we're going to have a conversation with them. Because we, we want to know everything about this guy. And so far, it's such a damn muddled mess at this point, and has been since, since the beginning. You know, if you do your job in the beginning, and you stay the course, and you keep things really, really simple, it-

• 2:50:07Speaker 03

  You're able to kind of cut through all of the static. The problem is, uh, this is a monster of their own making because they failed so miserably.

• 2:50:21Speaker 03

  The prison system failed, I think, monumentally. Where he was housed, uh, which I think if he, if he is this valued, uh, why do you have this guy in this particular location? Why has it been moved somewhere else where he can really be watched carefully? I've been on air with guys that practice in, uh, not forensic scientists, with attorneys

• 2:50:49Speaker 03

  that practice in New York that would go and visit clients that were housed here. I've had multiple of these people say, "We were terrified to go to this place. It was like Thunderdome." Yeah. And so you're gonna stick him in here? Okay, well, it's your business, but it just, you know, I don't know. It just, it doesn't add up to me.

• 2:51:10Danny Jones?

  And the other thing that's very odd is that I believe Bill Barr, uh, officially labeled this thing a suicide before the forensic analysis was even done.

• 2:51:18Speaker 03

  He did. Yeah. And I gotta tell you-

• 2:51:22Danny Jones?

  Is that normal?

• 2:51:23Speaker 03

  An attorney is probably the last person I'm gonna go to for, uh, an opinion about manner and cause of death.

• 2:51:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:51:31Speaker 03

  You know, I don't care, you know, what kind of sheepskin they have hanging on their wall, they're not qualified to do that, particularly something that is this delicate. Now, I think that he even stated that he had watched the video. You're talking about the one with the orange blob? Or the minute that is allegedly missing or all the, you're talking about that video?

• 2:51:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:51:52Speaker 03

  Cause you know, it was implied that, you know, you kind of saw what happened. Well, that's an empirical impossibility. You cannot see what happened in there. Unless there's some other kind of videography that they have access that we don't have access to.

• 2:52:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:52:09Danny Jones?

  It's all very odd. Do you think there, has there also, has there ever been another case where somebody, where a, a high level murder or suicide like this with like a, a person of his notability was, where it was labeled to be either a homicide or a suicide before the medical examination has been done?

• 2:52:30Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm sure that they exist.

• 2:52:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but it's not common?

• 2:52:34Speaker 03

  No, it's not. But anytime you get bureaucrats or politicians involved in anything in my experience relative to our field, it's a dangerous mix. You know, you're, you're, you're running your mouth before your brains in gear at that point in time. And that, you know, that happens. It has happened in local, local cases. And then, you know, if, if you come back and say something to the contrary, then you have these little stories that begin to bubble up. Well, there's a conspiracy or, you know, this and that. And again, do your damn job on the front end. You won't have to go back and clean up messes at the end.

• 2:53:14Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah. It's craziness, man. I don't know. I think they just moved, they moved Ghislaine to a, a camp, a low level security prison in Texas.

• 2:53:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, they did.

• 2:53:28Danny Jones?

  And, you know, who knows what's gonna happen to her?

• 2:53:31Speaker 03

  Well, you know, they.

• 2:53:33Danny Jones?

  I mean, if they, I don't know if, if you want to go with the conspiracy route and they say that he was murdered to protect billionaires and powerful politicians that he would have had blackmail on to cover up for those people, if you want to take that crazy route and believe that's true, which I don't think is that crazy. To think that they would be arrogant enough to do the same thing to Ghislaine Maxwell is, it's a stretch. I don't think they would do it, but who knows?

• 2:54:05Speaker 03

  Well, you want to go down a real rabbit hole?

• 2:54:07Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 2:54:10Speaker 03

  Epstein's one thing, okay? Here's my question.

• 2:54:16Speaker 03

  Because I am, I'd like to know the information about Epstein, just to, I don't know. I don't know, personal curiosity, I don't know who it's really gonna aid. The, the people I'm really interested in are the victims. And the victims from the sense, from this perspective, we've heard about this, you know, collection of all of these women that have talked about. This is who I want to know about. It has been alleged that there are many Eastern European girls

• 2:54:55Speaker 03

  that materialized at somebody's hand, you know, in his space. Okay? You're talking about non-English speakers. You're talking about allegedly they are underage.

• 2:55:10Speaker 03

  Where are they? Did you just go from your mansion? Which, I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who lives in Manhattan, and it's like, yeah dude, it's actually the largest house in Manhattan.

• 2:55:26Danny Jones?

  There's a photo of, I should send it to you Steve, so you can pull it up. There's a photo of me standing in front of it.

• 2:55:32Speaker 03

  I did, I saw it.

• 2:55:33Danny Jones?

  Did you see it, did Julian show to you?

• 2:55:34Speaker 03

  I did.

• 2:55:35Danny Jones?

  Me and Julian Doy took me there. Julian showed it to me. I was like, if there's one thing I gotta see while I'm down here, I gotta see that fucking mansion.

• 2:55:42Speaker 03

  Dark tourism, man.

• 2:55:43Danny Jones?

  It's like a mansion townhouse.

• 2:55:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, and it's, uh...

• 2:55:47Danny Jones?

  It used to be a school.

• 2:55:50Speaker 03

  Did they just cut them loose on the street of Manhattan? Uh, what about any kids he took to New Mexico? Where are they? What about any girls that went to Little St. John or St. James? Where, where are they? Did you put them back on a plane? Did you fly them back to Eastern Europe? Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old? Do we have? Kids that young, I've heard people in the media say those ages.

• 2:56:13Danny Jones?

  Well, there was the Epstein Fund that Nick Bryant told us about. It's the compensation fund for the victims where they basically, they had a pool of money that they were going to give all the victims of Epstein for all of his crimes. And one of the contingencies for that compensation for the victims was that they had to sign NDA to never talk about it again. A lot of them got that, some of them didn't, but.

• 2:56:43Speaker 03

  Well, I can't imagine that a

• 2:56:47Speaker 03

  that a child of 13 or 14, 15 years old can enter into a contractual agreement with anybody and be binding. So, that's, look, if, if you, if you view his alleged behavior,

• 2:57:06Speaker 03

  to me, it smacks of devaluing life and the lives of these people.

• 2:57:12Danny Jones?

  Totally.

• 2:57:13Speaker 03

  They're essentially disposable to him.

• 2:57:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:18Speaker 03

  So what's, you know, where did they wind up? I just, inquiring minds want to know because we keep hearing about these vast numbers and this had gone on for so long, all the way back from the early 90s, we've heard, you know, these things. Where did they wind up? You know, what happened to them? Because it's not just ones that are so high profile that have retained legal counsel and this sort of thing. You know, these, these kids that can't even speak English.

• 2:57:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:57:48Speaker 03

  And I think that even.

• 2:57:49Danny Jones?

  There's so many of them, yeah. Where, where.

• 2:57:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, DeFrayne, actually, is that how you pronounce her name, Virginia Roberts?

• 2:57:55Danny Jones?

  Gouffray.

• 2:57:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, DeFrayne.

• 2:57:56Danny Jones?

  Gouffray, Gouffray, yeah, yeah.

• 2:57:58Speaker 03

  We'll just call her Virginia Roberts. She actually talked about

• 2:58:03Speaker 03

  that she bore witness to.

• 2:58:07Speaker 03

  Young women that would be qualified as children.

• 2:58:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:11Speaker 03

  That were physically there while she was there and that she actively participated in activities.

• 2:58:15Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:58:15Speaker 03

  With these children.

• 2:58:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:58:19Speaker 03

  I don't know. It's, it's, uh, well, it's more than water cooler talk. I, I think that it's something that.

• 2:58:25Danny Jones?

  What do you think happened to them?

• 2:58:26Speaker 03

  I don't know. I, I really don't know. That's, that's why I asked the question. What did happen to them? Where, where did they land? What, what became of them? I don't know. It gets really, really dark, really, really quick. And all of this stuff has been dark for a long, long time.

• 2:58:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, the darkest part about, I mean, it's all terribly disturbing.

• 2:58:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:58:46Danny Jones?

  And evil at every level. But when you start to learn about the connections to like the criminal underworld and the espionage underworld, and there's very, there's a very blurry line between the two. Um, they work hand in hand. Um, if you want to talk about things like the Iran contra case and how they were basically working with organized crime to do things and how he was working with them. And I mean, there's endless amounts of documentaries and podcasts and books you can read about, about all this stuff. But he was, you know, deeply connected to the people that run the world. And that's the scariest part about the whole thing.

• 2:59:21Speaker 03

  It's absolutely terrifying. And he's, he, he just happens to be one little space that a crack of light has kind of blasted through. And again, I'm really getting outside of my sphere. Um, but you know, I am interested in, I'm interested in the dynamics of his death.

• 2:59:38Speaker 03

  Can we, uh, can you empirically prove that this was in fact something other than suicide? I think there's enough information there, enough data, uh, observable data that you, that question should be asked and it should be answered. Um, and again, if he's associated, um, with this type of behavior, and there are so many alleged victims, they didn't just fall off the face of the planet. You gotta, gotta try to figure out where they are.

• 3:00:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:00:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:00:12Danny Jones?

  Well, Joseph Scott Morgan, this has been a fascinating conversation, man.

• 3:00:15Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:00:15Danny Jones?

  I really appreciate you taking the time to come down and chat.

• 3:00:17Speaker 03

  I'm glad that Julian connected us, man.

• 3:00:19Danny Jones?

  Me too, man.

• 3:00:20Speaker 03

  I've been a big fan of yours.

• 3:00:21Danny Jones?

  It's been a long time coming.

• 3:00:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I'm flattered that you would even ask me.

• 3:00:25Danny Jones?

  And there's a lot of stuff I know we haven't covered that we should definitely do a part two and cover. I know there's a lot of stuff about JFK.

• 3:00:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:00:31Danny Jones?

  That we can go down that rabbit hole. I've been geeking out on all the JFK history for years. So I would love to.

• 3:00:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would love to go down that just the medical legal perspective on JFK and how that's arguably one of the most botched, high-profile autopsies that has ever been conducted.

• 3:00:49Danny Jones?

  A hundred percent.

• 3:00:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:00:50Danny Jones?

  We should do that. But tell people out there listening or watching where they can find more of your stuff. Get in touch with you, find your books and all that good stuff.

• 3:00:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm on Instagram. You can find me there, Joseph Scott Morgan. I'm on X. Just Got Forensics, I think is it. My podcast is Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan, platformed on iHeart, Apple, Spotify. You can find me there. And then, of course, check out my university. I teach there. I teach forensics there. I'm the distinguished scholar of forensic investigations. Jacksonville State University in Alabama, not Florida. People think that it's Jacksonville. But it's Jacksonville State University in Alabama. We've got a fantastic program there. Actually got a cadaver lab this year, so we're going to be having cadavers for our students.

• 3:01:44Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 3:01:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, and chroming house and all that good stuff. So really proud of the work we're doing there. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, check me out there. I'll be around, always around.

• 3:01:54Danny Jones?

  Well, we'll link it all below. And I look forward to doing part two with you, man.

• 3:01:57Speaker 03

  Let's do it, Danny.

• 3:01:58Danny Jones?

  All right. Good night, everybody.

• 3:02:25Speaker 05

  He's back. I'm older. I'm wiser.

• 3:02:30Speaker 05

  And sharper than ever. Things are gonna get messy. But if I can't believe in myself, I can't believe in anything. Dexter: Resurrection. New season now streaming on the Paramount Plus Premium Plan.