Latest / Crime Stories with Nancy Grace / Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan:The Murders of Scott Sessions and Heather Frank

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Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan:The Murders of Scott Sessions and Heather Frank · Crime Stories with Nancy Grace

0:08
Speaker 1: Bodybacks with Joseph Scott Morgan. One of my most fond
0:19
Speaker 1: remembrances of living in New Orleans for many years was
0:26
Speaker 1: that he didn't just have to go to French Quarry.
0:28
Speaker 1: You could just be in a neighborhood down there and
0:31
Speaker 1: then off in the distance you would hear the sound
0:36
Speaker 1: of a trumpet plane. And that city is just filled
0:42
Speaker 1: with professional jazz musicians, and it's almost like a siren song.
0:47
Speaker 1: It draws you, you know, you hear that sound, it
0:49
Speaker 1: rises high in the air, becomes very soulful, and it
0:54
Speaker 1: draws you in. And when you get down to the
0:56
Speaker 1: jazz clubs and New Orleans, that doors are all open
0:58
Speaker 1: and you can hear the sounds the music emanating from
1:01
Speaker 1: the duels. That location in America has a lot of trumpeteers.
1:07
Speaker 1: But I want to tell you today about a gentleman
1:10
Speaker 1: named Scott's Sessions. He lived in a place that wasn't
1:15
Speaker 1: known for jazz. I guess it's known more for cowboys,
1:19
Speaker 1: maybe up in northern Colorado, but he was known. He
1:24
Speaker 1: was known as a fantastic trumpetier. He had played for
1:28
Speaker 1: years and years in a variety of bands and was beloved.
1:32
Speaker 1: And I mean beloved, but what happened to Scott was
1:36
Speaker 1: absolutely horrific. Scott was eventually found deceased and it turned
1:43
Speaker 1: out that it was a murder. Today, I'm going to
1:48
Speaker 1: talk about the murder of Scott's Sessions and Heather Frind.
1:54
Speaker 1: I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body guys. I
2:01
Speaker 1: gotta tell you, when you begin to think about somebody
2:04
Speaker 1: that puts so much time into everything that they do
2:07
Speaker 1: and they are truly a professional, it's almost like seeing
2:13
Speaker 1: somebody throw a brick through a beautiful stained glass one.
2:19
Speaker 1: That's what this is. Joining me today is my friend
2:22
Speaker 1: Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace.
2:26
Speaker 1: Yet again, you picked a very complicated case that's going
2:29
Speaker 1: to take a lot to unpack. This is thought to
2:33
Speaker 1: be a love triangle gone wrong. There's some indications that
2:39
Speaker 1: it may not have been a love triangle gone wrong. Again,
2:43
Speaker 1: a very very complex case. And the desks that we're
2:47
Speaker 1: talking about today Stanley Scott Sessions fifty three, the Trumpeter
2:52
Speaker 1: as you were talking about, and Heather Frank forty eight.
2:56
Speaker 1: Heather Frank was dating Kevin East for some time and
3:01
Speaker 1: by all accounts from friends and family. It was a
3:04
Speaker 1: very toxic, violent relationship, very controlling and manipulative. Then Heather
3:11
Speaker 1: Frank became interested in sessions the trumpet she has gone to,
3:18
Speaker 1: as you said, to watch him play, and a relationship
3:22
Speaker 1: blossomed from this. Given the toxic, manipulative nature of the
3:28
Speaker 1: original relationship, it was evident that Eastman was not going
3:33
Speaker 1: to let go, and often friends said that Heather Frank
3:38
Speaker 1: came to work with bruises and visibly upset. So before
3:44
Speaker 1: we get into the actual murders, Joe, I want to
3:46
Speaker 1: talk about that toxic relationship, the visibility of a toxic
3:52
Speaker 1: abusive relationship when you were on the outside looking in, Joe.
3:57
Speaker 1: Obviously we're not going to see the emotional side, but
4:00
Speaker 1: visibly we often can. What does this toxic abusive relationship
4:05
Speaker 1: look like on a body. Well, you say that you're
4:09
Speaker 1: not going to be able to see the emotion, but
4:11
Speaker 1: you can see it, I think physically manifested. If you're
4:15
Speaker 1: a keen investigator and you've been you know, you start
4:18
Speaker 1: to dig into a case, and with in Heather's case,
4:22
Speaker 1: you knows she's got these peripheral people in our life
4:26
Speaker 1: that she works with, and so she show to work
4:29
Speaker 1: and she would have bruises on her person. And the
4:34
Speaker 1: interesting thing about that, and I found this working case
4:38
Speaker 1: as many years, is that people that only see you
4:42
Speaker 1: during the day, say work, not family members necessarily, but
4:47
Speaker 1: people that see you from day to day, and then
4:49
Speaker 1: you're on a break from a weekend, they'll see this
4:52
Speaker 1: progression of injuries and they might think at first, well,
4:55
Speaker 1: maybe she bumped into something or you know, that's their
4:58
Speaker 1: first blush, if you will. But then they'll see something
5:02
Speaker 1: else manifested in another location, and then suddenly a pattern
5:07
Speaker 1: begins to develop. You know, why is this woman who
5:09
Speaker 1: seems rather stable in her gait, walks normally, she doesn't
5:14
Speaker 1: seem disoriented or you know, maladjusted in any way. How,
5:20
Speaker 1: it's not possible that she's bumping into furniture all the time.
5:23
Speaker 1: You know it's not possible, right, You're talking about the
5:25
Speaker 1: old I ran into a door excuse, yeah, yeah, And
5:28
Speaker 1: you you find that all the time. This even extends
5:31
Speaker 1: to adolescence, to children, you know, they're being abused. And
5:34
Speaker 1: so in this particular case, you would look at this
5:38
Speaker 1: and you would begin to think about, you know, the
5:39
Speaker 1: things that we talked about about aging injuries, and one
5:43
Speaker 1: of the interesting practices at my colleagues engage in that
5:46
Speaker 1: do abuse cases is that they have a scale that
5:51
Speaker 1: they grade bruises or contusions, those vocal areas of humors
5:55
Speaker 1: throughout the body with children, primarily where they're looking as
6:00
Speaker 1: the bruise begins to recede, and there's time elements that
6:03
Speaker 1: can be attached to that. So I've worked cases before
6:07
Speaker 1: where we have overlapping progressions of bruises where you'll have
6:12
Speaker 1: something that has turned that kind of discussing the yellow
6:15
Speaker 1: color as we know that the bruise is beginning to recede,
6:18
Speaker 1: and then you'll have a fresh bruise that will be
6:21
Speaker 1: immediately adjacent, and you know, you know that, you know,
6:24
Speaker 1: science dictates that those two things cannot have occurred at
6:28
Speaker 1: the same time. Hang out, let me ask you a
6:30
Speaker 1: question there, Joe. Yeah, you're talking about that the yellow
6:33
Speaker 1: green discoloration, and then you talked about looking at fresh bruises.
6:36
Speaker 1: Can you quickly run through that Are they deep purple immediately?
6:40
Speaker 1: Is that how you tell them? No? Okay, no, no,
6:44
Speaker 1: And that's an excellent question. The first thing that's going
6:47
Speaker 1: to occur, you know, if somebody slaps somebody in the face,
6:50
Speaker 1: that's kind of the classic you know, the classic thing
6:53
Speaker 1: you think about, Well, you're gonna have a red mark,
6:54
Speaker 1: and the red mark will exist for a few hours
6:57
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden and you know you
6:59
Speaker 1: have ask well, what causes the red mark. Well, it's
7:02
Speaker 1: underlying hemorrhage, particularly if you're struck hard enough. Now, the
7:05
Speaker 1: skin is going to react and turn red just by
7:09
Speaker 1: that kind of blunt contact. But when you really hit
7:11
Speaker 1: somebody hard, it'll be red. And the little capillier beds.
7:16
Speaker 1: You know, we think about patitia many times, we talk
7:18
Speaker 1: about capillier beds, but in this particular case, you'll have
7:21
Speaker 1: a broader area where you rupture multiple of these little
7:26
Speaker 1: capillier beds. The blood actually goes into the interstitial tissue.
7:29
Speaker 1: What that means is that it's leached out of the
7:31
Speaker 1: vessels and it's into that kind of underlying fatty tissue
7:35
Speaker 1: that's there, and it takes a while for it to change.
7:38
Speaker 1: The really horrible thing about this, when you see a bruise,
7:41
Speaker 1: it's actually the blood decomposing beneath that layer of skin,
7:46
Speaker 1: and it takes a while for it to kind of
7:49
Speaker 1: transition out, and the body has a way of kind
7:52
Speaker 1: of pushing that out and you know, and metabolizing it
7:55
Speaker 1: if you will, and its own way, so you know,
7:57
Speaker 1: you'll have specific grating that you can do relative to
8:01
Speaker 1: these bruises where it will go from that red that
8:04
Speaker 1: we mentioned into this kind of black blue phase and
8:08
Speaker 1: people will just make off handed remarks, you know, I
8:10
Speaker 1: was beaten to I was black and blue. You know,
8:12
Speaker 1: it's kind of an off handed remark. But that's one
8:15
Speaker 1: of the points along the continuum. And then as it
8:18
Speaker 1: progresses from that color range, which is going to take
8:21
Speaker 1: a couple of days, you're going to see it start
8:24
Speaker 1: to turn green most of the time as it's beginning
8:27
Speaker 1: to recede, and then finally it goes into that yellow phase.
8:31
Speaker 1: You can't put a specific time to it, but all
8:34
Speaker 1: in all, these things will be back to quote unquote normal.
8:38
Speaker 1: At the outer marker is going to be about fourteen
8:40
Speaker 1: days until it's kind of moved all the way through
8:43
Speaker 1: and people are gonna it's going to be as variable
8:45
Speaker 1: as people are variable, because everybody's metabolism is different in
8:49
Speaker 1: the way they react to trauma and all these sorts
8:50
Speaker 1: of things. But in Heather's case, they talk about how
8:54
Speaker 1: she was seen with these bruises, and this isn't just
8:57
Speaker 1: a passing, thinking about multiple people that saw bruising on her,
9:01
Speaker 1: so they know that something is going on domestically with her.
9:05
Speaker 1: So when you see someone with a bruise, if it
9:09
Speaker 1: is super dark in color, what you're telling me is
9:14
Speaker 1: is that the injury to that area was enough that
9:18
Speaker 1: it damaged a lot of blood vessels. Yeah, yeah, the
9:22
Speaker 1: underlying blood vessels. You know, this is not something most
9:25
Speaker 1: people think about day to day, you know, but when
9:28
Speaker 1: you look at your skin, there are a number of
9:31
Speaker 1: programs out there that you can computerize these things with
9:33
Speaker 1: and appreciate all the vessels in the body. And I've
9:36
Speaker 1: seen these things where they've got arteries highlighted and veins highlighted,
9:41
Speaker 1: and they're throughout the body, and that kind of it's
9:44
Speaker 1: kind of an exploded view of the body, if you will.
9:47
Speaker 1: That's only touching the surface of it. Because extending out
9:50
Speaker 1: from that you have capillary beds, which is actually where
9:53
Speaker 1: the blood is kind of exchanged, and it goes from
9:57
Speaker 1: arteries to arterials to the venuals back to veins, and
10:03
Speaker 1: so these things are even more complex, and there's these
10:06
Speaker 1: entire fields of these capillary bets throughout our body and
10:09
Speaker 1: so when and they're rather delicate, so when they're they're
10:13
Speaker 1: struck externally, you know, by blow blunt force trauma, these
10:18
Speaker 1: things are going to rupture and then you'll just begin
10:20
Speaker 1: to seek out blood into these particular little areas and
10:23
Speaker 1: it just it's the beauty of it from a forensic
10:27
Speaker 1: standpoint is that, you know, we're all about time and
10:30
Speaker 1: timelines and that sort of thing, and it's just one
10:33
Speaker 1: more of those elements that we can apply to understand
10:38
Speaker 1: what was going on in an anti mortem state before
10:41
Speaker 1: death with an individual that can obviously no longer speak
10:45
Speaker 1: for themselves. You don't have witnesses to these things, but
10:48
Speaker 1: you can kind of begin to develop a history they
10:51
Speaker 1: were struck in this location, this particular day, in this location.
10:55
Speaker 1: And with abuse victims in particular, one of the things
10:58
Speaker 1: that's very troubling, and you know, I'm hesitant to say this,
11:02
Speaker 1: but I'll go ahead, is that many times with abusers,
11:06
Speaker 1: they won't strike people on the face, they won't strike
11:09
Speaker 1: people on the arms. Necessarily, with abusers, many times they'll
11:14
Speaker 1: strike in particularly with children, they'll strike them in clothes
11:18
Speaker 1: or covered areas. You know, you're still getting across that
11:20
Speaker 1: point that you're in charge, you're the dominant factor here,
11:24
Speaker 1: and I'm going to bring pain upon you. But no
11:27
Speaker 1: one's any the wiser because their back is struck lower back,
11:32
Speaker 1: or they're punched in the stomach or kicked between the
11:35
Speaker 1: legs and things like that. So normal progression somebody's day.
11:39
Speaker 1: You're not going to necessarily see that in Heather's case.
11:41
Speaker 1: Though in Heather's case, she obviously had injuries maybe to
11:45
Speaker 1: her neck, her arms, So it's kind of a randomized
11:49
Speaker 1: kind of thing. It's not. It's almost gives you an
11:52
Speaker 1: impression that it's almost a reactionary kind of event. Perhaps
11:56
Speaker 1: Sessions was killed first, and the location of his suspected
12:02
Speaker 1: murder led prosecutors as they unfolded the facts in this case,
12:08
Speaker 1: to believe that he was killed at Heather Frank's apartment.
12:14
Speaker 1: So let's talk about number one, how did he get
12:17
Speaker 1: there and what happened to him? Joe, He, according to prosecutors,
12:22
Speaker 1: bled profusely, and I can't wait to talk to you
12:25
Speaker 1: about the evidence in the apartment and how they found it.
12:28
Speaker 1: But what happened to Sessions. The term that would I
12:33
Speaker 1: would apply to this is the term ambush. He was
12:36
Speaker 1: lured to Heather Frank's apartment and then he was ambushed
12:41
Speaker 1: and his life was just spilled out literally onto the
12:46
Speaker 1: floor in that apartment. And later, you know, the police
12:50
Speaker 1: found evidence of this. He was attacked with an edged weapon,
12:57
Speaker 1: which essentially means a sharp instrument. This is sharp force
13:02
Speaker 1: trauma that he sustained, and he had he you know,
13:07
Speaker 1: people really, you know, they think about you know, they'll
13:10
Speaker 1: use terms like euphemistic terms, you know, like, well, you're
13:14
Speaker 1: really cutting your own throat, those sorts of things. Well,
13:17
Speaker 1: the reason that term has kind of entered the lexicon
13:20
Speaker 1: over you know, centuries for us is because that traditionally
13:23
Speaker 1: has been one of the most fatal areas that an
13:26
Speaker 1: individual can sustain trauma in. In Scott's particular case, he
13:31
Speaker 1: actually had his throat cut. He had his throat cut
13:34
Speaker 1: almost immediately upon entry into Heather's apartment. Is that a
13:40
Speaker 1: difficult thing to do, Joe? I mean, let's just look
13:43
Speaker 1: at the mechanics, because, as we've all seen TV, somebody
13:48
Speaker 1: comes up behind you to grab you on the forehead
13:50
Speaker 1: and they slide a knife across your throat. Blood goes everywhere.
13:54
Speaker 1: Is it that easy? Well, a lot of it's going
13:56
Speaker 1: to be depended upon the strength of the individual the
14:00
Speaker 1: perpetrator that is bringing about this assault. Also, does the
14:05
Speaker 1: individual that's being an attack completely have their guard down?
14:08
Speaker 1: That means that you have to have them in almost
14:11
Speaker 1: total submission, And of course you can factor in things
14:15
Speaker 1: like skill with an edge weapon. It's dealing with edged
14:20
Speaker 1: weapon attacks is not something that is entered into lightly
14:24
Speaker 1: when you think about, well, what are all the different
14:27
Speaker 1: sets of weapons that I could bring to bear in
14:29
Speaker 1: a case like this, and you choose edge weapons. Well,
14:33
Speaker 1: one of the problems with edged weapons is that there's
14:38
Speaker 1: a high probability that the perpetrator is going to run
14:42
Speaker 1: the risk of harming themselves as well creating an injury
14:46
Speaker 1: on their own self, because you know, let's face it,
14:49
Speaker 1: if you don't take somebody by surprise, they're going to
14:52
Speaker 1: fend you off as best they can, at least at
14:54
Speaker 1: a primal level, you know, throwing up their arms and
14:57
Speaker 1: those sorts of things to give themselves a chance to survive.
15:00
Speaker 1: And you might, if you're the perpetrator, wound up being
15:03
Speaker 1: cut yourself, but in this case there's not really that
15:07
Speaker 1: much evidence of it. But if you show up to
15:10
Speaker 1: this event, you can take somebody by surprise, and the
15:13
Speaker 1: weapon is sufficient to the task. And what I mean
15:17
Speaker 1: what I mean by that is it's robust enough. Because
15:20
Speaker 1: you know, I've had cases where people have gone to
15:22
Speaker 1: discount stores and purchase state knife sets you know that
15:26
Speaker 1: are made and who knows where, and the strength of
15:29
Speaker 1: the blade is insufficient to the task. Blades break off,
15:33
Speaker 1: they don't have the edge on them. But if you
15:36
Speaker 1: have a robust weapon, and there's any number of ways
15:39
Speaker 1: that we can describe that, but the quality of the
15:42
Speaker 1: steel itself that it's made with the edge of the weapon,
15:45
Speaker 1: if there is a great edge on that weapon, you
15:49
Speaker 1: can do a lot of harm if you know what
15:51
Speaker 1: you're doing. Heather Franks was killed later, but after her
15:56
Speaker 1: body was found and investigators started going to her home
16:00
Speaker 1: and looking at what happened, they discovered this pool of
16:04
Speaker 1: blood and there was so much blood, Joe, that it
16:07
Speaker 1: seeped through the carpet, through the pad. So remind me
16:11
Speaker 1: again how much blood there is in the human body
16:15
Speaker 1: and when it pulls out like that, what are they
16:19
Speaker 1: going to find? That is a fantastic question, because you know,
16:23
Speaker 1: one of the things that we actually look for at
16:26
Speaker 1: autopsy and it's kind of a tell when your people
16:29
Speaker 1: might might think this is kind of an incidental finding,
16:32
Speaker 1: but it's actually very significant. When you're dealing with a
16:36
Speaker 1: sharp force injury attack, you're going to bleed profusely, okay,
16:42
Speaker 1: and at autopsy, and I've actually been present when this happens.
16:46
Speaker 1: I've actually attempted to do it. You draw blood out
16:49
Speaker 1: of the body, right, You draw blood, and we go
16:51
Speaker 1: in literally into the aorta, which is the big vessel
16:54
Speaker 1: that comes off the heart. I have done autopsies on
16:58
Speaker 1: bodies they bled so much at the scene that I'd
17:05
Speaker 1: literally had to truly struggle to find blood to draw
17:11
Speaker 1: out of the body just in order to get a
17:14
Speaker 1: sample for toxicology. Many times with edged weapon events, we'd
17:19
Speaker 1: have to go into the leg, into the femoral art
17:21
Speaker 1: where you've got kind of peripheral blood sources in order
17:25
Speaker 1: to draw blood because you bleed so much that these
17:30
Speaker 1: injuries are very nasty. The difference between this and a
17:33
Speaker 1: gunshot wound, for instance, gunshot wounds those injuries not all,
17:39
Speaker 1: not all, but those injuries are kind of small compared
17:42
Speaker 1: to somebody literally having their body opened up with a knife.
17:47
Speaker 1: And so you're contacting multiple vessels, all those capillary beds,
17:52
Speaker 1: the underlying vessels, and any kind of viscera, any kind
17:55
Speaker 1: of the organs that are beneath that. So you've got
17:57
Speaker 1: multiple blood you've got multiple sources of blood loss. So
18:01
Speaker 1: you know, if the human body has it's going to
18:04
Speaker 1: be variable. Again, you think about human body having you
18:08
Speaker 1: know about two gallons of blood and it is there's
18:12
Speaker 1: a chance that you can lose almost every bit of it.
18:15
Speaker 1: And again a lot of that is going to be
18:20
Speaker 1: depended upon where the injury is. Let's say, for instance,
18:24
Speaker 1: here the back of somebody's calf is cut. All right,
18:28
Speaker 1: now you're going to bleed. Obviously, that goes without stating, however,
18:32
Speaker 1: you compare an injury to the calf with a sharp
18:34
Speaker 1: edged weapon, to say the throat, there's no competition because
18:39
Speaker 1: there's so many vessels that travel through the neck. And
18:43
Speaker 1: we've talked about this any number of times, but it
18:46
Speaker 1: needs to be repeated. You've got major vessel structures that
18:51
Speaker 1: are running through the neck to supply the brain, which,
18:55
Speaker 1: out of all the organs in the body, the brain
18:58
Speaker 1: requires the most blood. So when you start to get
19:02
Speaker 1: into the complex involving the juggler veins and then the
19:08
Speaker 1: carotid arteries. You're talking about major blood loss because guess what,
19:13
Speaker 1: the heart hasn't been disrupted yet, the heart still pumping,
19:17
Speaker 1: and as the heart pumps, you're going to have this
19:21
Speaker 1: gush of blood that is coming out of the neck.
19:24
Speaker 1: And if the person hits the floor and stays in
19:27
Speaker 1: one spot, it will saturate that underlying area. And then
19:32
Speaker 1: Scott's death and when they were able to actually recover
19:36
Speaker 1: the evidence of this event at Heather's apartment, you're right.
19:41
Speaker 1: You had a layer of carpeting, the top layer, and
19:44
Speaker 1: then the pad which people are familiar with, the kind
19:46
Speaker 1: of softens, you know, softens your footfall, and then down
19:50
Speaker 1: into the subflooring that area was supersaturated. And why is
19:55
Speaker 1: this important forensically, Well, we can look at that bloody
19:58
Speaker 1: area and tie the blood. We can actually type it
20:02
Speaker 1: and loop it back to who's blood it might have
20:05
Speaker 1: been through blood type, and then of course we can
20:08
Speaker 1: collect it and perhaps that there's a viable sample we
20:10
Speaker 1: can do DNA. But it also gives us another indication
20:15
Speaker 1: that dynamics of the event. You know, you begin to
20:18
Speaker 1: look at it and you think, well, if I've got
20:21
Speaker 1: this heavy concentration of blood right here, and there are
20:24
Speaker 1: no other, say, peripheral areas of blood, like blood drops,
20:29
Speaker 1: or any kind of blood staining on the walls or
20:32
Speaker 1: anything like that. What we can opine at that point
20:36
Speaker 1: in time is that the individual that sustained this injury
20:40
Speaker 1: didn't move any further than that location. What kind of
21:03
Speaker 1: person possesses the will to perpetrate such a violent crime
21:10
Speaker 1: on another person, and not just a person that they
21:15
Speaker 1: were involved in an intimate relationship with, but a person
21:18
Speaker 1: that they didn't really know. How much anger and how
21:21
Speaker 1: much hatred would have to be brought to bear in
21:26
Speaker 1: order to take a knife and cut somebody's throat. It's
21:30
Speaker 1: absolutely startling when you think about. It's a little ironic
21:33
Speaker 1: that you say it like that, Joe, because slicing Session's
21:37
Speaker 1: throat is not the only injury that this man had. Yeah,
21:44
Speaker 1: it's really not. And as I mentioned, this is an
21:47
Speaker 1: ambush attack. There were multiple sharp force injuries to the
21:52
Speaker 1: back of his neck. According to what the courts have
21:54
Speaker 1: said and what was set a trial, it wasn't just
21:58
Speaker 1: simply the cutting of this rope. And we talk about
22:04
Speaker 1: things in forensics in degrees. Many of times sometimes we
22:09
Speaker 1: don't have we don't really have the verbiage to apply
22:14
Speaker 1: to it. Many times, it's very interesting when you read
22:18
Speaker 1: autopsy reports and you hear people in forensics talk and
22:21
Speaker 1: they're talking about injuries, they'll use the term gaping quite
22:26
Speaker 1: a bit. And I am in no way making a
22:29
Speaker 1: light of this, but if folks at home will just
22:34
Speaker 1: imagine what a sharp force injury where the edge that
22:38
Speaker 1: blade is actually drawn across the surface of the anterior neck,
22:44
Speaker 1: it creates this kind of gaping injury that looks very
22:50
Speaker 1: similar to a smile. And the reason that happens is
22:54
Speaker 1: kind of the biomechanics that are involved in the person
22:57
Speaker 1: wielding the knife and of course the surface of the
23:00
Speaker 1: x so when they cut, many times, it's not just
23:02
Speaker 1: going to be straight across the throat. And that's one
23:04
Speaker 1: of the kind of weird things that you'll see in Hollywood,
23:08
Speaker 1: you know that they'll display that kind of event like that.
23:10
Speaker 1: It's generally not it's going to be kind of elliptical
23:13
Speaker 1: in shape where we'll go from high to low the
23:15
Speaker 1: back to high. Many times if there can be direct
23:18
Speaker 1: pressure applied for the entire stroke of that blade. And
23:25
Speaker 1: one of the things that really kind of grabs you
23:28
Speaker 1: in the death of Scott and the injury that he
23:31
Speaker 1: sustained when they were finally able to assess it, is
23:34
Speaker 1: the fact that investigators had described and the pathologist had
23:39
Speaker 1: described the fact that Scott's head was almost completely separated
23:47
Speaker 1: from his body. So what that means is that you're
23:50
Speaker 1: not just going through these vessels that we've talked about,
23:53
Speaker 1: you know, these major vessels that supply the brain with oxygen,
23:56
Speaker 1: but you're also going through all the muscletachments and some
24:02
Speaker 1: of these features that keep our head upright, if you will,
24:06
Speaker 1: the musculature and all those sorts of things, until the
24:10
Speaker 1: individual would have gotten down to the spinal proceeds, those
24:14
Speaker 1: stacked vertebra in the cervical area that hold our head upright,
24:20
Speaker 1: you know, that structure that had gotten all the way
24:23
Speaker 1: down to that point to where his neck was in
24:27
Speaker 1: such a condition that when they observed his body, there
24:30
Speaker 1: was this idea that he had almost been decapitated. And again,
24:37
Speaker 1: I think that that's a demonstration of how much anger
24:41
Speaker 1: and hatred is involved in an attack like this. So
24:46
Speaker 1: would the near decapitation come from the repeated blows? I mean,
24:51
Speaker 1: let's be realistic. When you look at your neck, it's
24:54
Speaker 1: smaller than your torso than your head. So is the
24:58
Speaker 1: near decapitation from repeated cuts. We said that he had
25:02
Speaker 1: many injuries to his neck, or did that come from
25:06
Speaker 1: one long slice across his throat? It can, and again
25:10
Speaker 1: a lot of this is depended upon the amount of
25:14
Speaker 1: pressure that can be applied in one fail swoop and
25:19
Speaker 1: how sharp the edge is on the blade. I would
25:21
Speaker 1: suspect that this occurred as a result of multiple, multiple
25:28
Speaker 1: insults or strokes across that area. It would be very difficult,
25:33
Speaker 1: I would think, at least, to render this kind of
25:36
Speaker 1: injury with one blow. We're not talking about somebody swinging
25:41
Speaker 1: an axe here, okay, We're talking about an individual that
25:44
Speaker 1: is using a handheld blade where they're having to generate
25:47
Speaker 1: all of this force by moving their hand either from
25:50
Speaker 1: left to right or right to left and getting down
25:53
Speaker 1: into that tissue. I don't see that it would necessarily
25:56
Speaker 1: be possible to do that. So you have to do
26:00
Speaker 1: this multiple times, and you know, to re emphasize this point.
26:04
Speaker 1: This gives you an indication as to how much time
26:08
Speaker 1: the perpetrator would have had to have spent doing this,
26:12
Speaker 1: how much rage how much anger is driving this event
26:17
Speaker 1: that is so unimaginably horrific, And it really goes to
26:21
Speaker 1: I think it leads to the pathology of an individual
26:25
Speaker 1: that would do this, because you know, it's not like
26:28
Speaker 1: you've got somebody that is in the person of Eastman.
26:32
Speaker 1: You don't have somebody that's working, say, for instance, in
26:34
Speaker 1: a slaughterhouse. Okay, that's day after day there, You've seen
26:38
Speaker 1: blood they're used to seeing. I mean, let's face it,
26:40
Speaker 1: the death of animals. There's almost kind of a disconnect
26:44
Speaker 1: between what they're doing occupationally in the gored that they're
26:47
Speaker 1: they're subjected to. This is a guy that, to the
26:52
Speaker 1: best of our knowledge it doesn't have this level of experience,
26:56
Speaker 1: certainly not in the immediate he wasn't doing a job
26:58
Speaker 1: like that. So they have to have a very strong
27:02
Speaker 1: driver behind them that you know, we're not talking about
27:06
Speaker 1: doing this to some poor animal in a slaughterhouse. We're
27:10
Speaker 1: talking about a fellow human being. I mean, just let
27:12
Speaker 1: that sink in and resonate with you, just for a moment.
27:15
Speaker 1: And this is another point along this is that in
27:20
Speaker 1: doing this you talk about contact trace evidence. Oh my lord,
27:24
Speaker 1: this particular case, you know, he would have had to
27:28
Speaker 1: have cleaned himself up very very well, gotten rid of
27:31
Speaker 1: his clothes. More than likely that's what happened, because he
27:34
Speaker 1: would have been super saturated in blood. Because this is
27:37
Speaker 1: not something you just merely walk away from. This is
27:39
Speaker 1: not like you've taken firearm and shot somebody and then
27:43
Speaker 1: you're essentially absent visible, visible evidence on your body. And
27:48
Speaker 1: I know that people will say, well, you can get
27:50
Speaker 1: you know, blood staining that blows back on it. Yeah
27:53
Speaker 1: you can, and there's gunshod residue. But come on, let's
27:56
Speaker 1: face it, what we're talking about here is just the
27:59
Speaker 1: depths of horror. Before we talk about the discovery of
28:02
Speaker 1: Session's body, let's jump ahead and talk about the death
28:05
Speaker 1: of Heather Frank for a second. Heather Frank continued about
28:10
Speaker 1: her quote unquote normal life for a week before she
28:16
Speaker 1: was killed. How was she killed? Joe with Scott, you know,
28:22
Speaker 1: we've talked about this at nauseam relative to Sharp Hoor's injuries,
28:26
Speaker 1: but with Heather, Heather was actually shot shot twice in
28:32
Speaker 1: the chest with twenty two caliber ammunition. It's a much
28:37
Speaker 1: I don't know if the term merciful really fits in here,
28:41
Speaker 1: but let's face it, in the grand scheme of things,
28:44
Speaker 1: you're not almost decapitating her, all right, So it would
28:49
Speaker 1: have been a much cleaner death, I would think, and
28:52
Speaker 1: much less dramatic, if you will, because if she shot
28:55
Speaker 1: in the chest, there's high probability that you're going to
28:58
Speaker 1: hit a vital area, perhaps a heart, the lungs, and
29:02
Speaker 1: death would soon follow thereafter deepen upon the location of
29:05
Speaker 1: the injuries. But we do know that she was shot
29:07
Speaker 1: in the chest, and fascinatingly enough, when Eastman was discovered,
29:13
Speaker 1: he actually had twenty two caliber ammunition in his pocket
29:17
Speaker 1: and that was what she was killed with. Yeah, she
29:20
Speaker 1: was in fact killed with twenty two caliber ammunition. You've
29:24
Speaker 1: got kind of this forensic tie back. You know, that's
29:27
Speaker 1: a very specific ammunition, and yeah, a lot of people
29:30
Speaker 1: have it. I think twenty two caliber is one of
29:32
Speaker 1: the most popular types of ammunition that's out there. People
29:35
Speaker 1: use it for varmint hunting. You know, it's a very
29:37
Speaker 1: small caliber. It's probably the smallest. Now I know there
29:41
Speaker 1: are people out there to say, well, it's not smallest.
29:43
Speaker 1: There's yeah, there's these other kind of off the beaten
29:45
Speaker 1: path ammos that are out there, But I'm talking about
29:48
Speaker 1: something that is widely sold. When you know we've gone
29:51
Speaker 1: through ammunition shortages in this country, one of the things
29:54
Speaker 1: that goes off the shelf first is twenty two caliber ammunition.
29:58
Speaker 1: And it's because it's a small caliber people can keep
30:01
Speaker 1: it around. They use it for varmint hunting, they use
30:03
Speaker 1: it for what's referred to as plinking, which is just
30:06
Speaker 1: target shooting out on property and that sort of thing.
30:09
Speaker 1: A lot of people possess twenty two caliber weapons, whether
30:12
Speaker 1: it be a pistol or whether it be a shoulder
30:15
Speaker 1: fired arm. So just the fact that he had it
30:17
Speaker 1: in his pocket is not necessarily mean that he did
30:21
Speaker 1: the killing. But then when you combine the fact that
30:24
Speaker 1: she's found with these rounds that had been pumped into
30:28
Speaker 1: her chest, and that he had the same ammunition, and
30:30
Speaker 1: the fact that when she was found deceased, she was
30:34
Speaker 1: actually found in an area he had access to, wrapped
30:38
Speaker 1: in plastic and tied up with bailey and wire. So
30:42
Speaker 1: here's the point I want to make about these two murders, Joe.
30:46
Speaker 1: Given the fact that prosecutors believe that Heather Frank's lured
30:52
Speaker 1: Sessions to her apartment to make this murder happen, she
30:58
Speaker 1: was part of it. Whether it was coerced by abuse
31:02
Speaker 1: doesn't really matter. She was a part of it. So
31:05
Speaker 1: then why was she killed? If she was a part
31:08
Speaker 1: of this to begin with, why did she have to die?
31:12
Speaker 1: You know, I've had somebody else asking that question about this,
31:15
Speaker 1: because you know, you think about how some people have
31:18
Speaker 1: put forth this idea that this toxic relationship that these
31:22
Speaker 1: two had and it lasted for seven years, all right,
31:26
Speaker 1: and it was on again, off again, they'd fight and
31:28
Speaker 1: carry on and whatnot. If she was so afraid of
31:32
Speaker 1: him and she had lured Sessions to her apartment, why
31:37
Speaker 1: would Eastman kill her? Because you would think that he
31:40
Speaker 1: could control her, you know, just merely through fear. I
31:44
Speaker 1: think that and some people put forth this theory that
31:47
Speaker 1: after a time he realized that she could talk, that
31:52
Speaker 1: she would be a source of information that would tie
31:56
Speaker 1: him back. And let This is not just like you know,
32:00
Speaker 1: randomly bumping into a car when you're driving down the
32:03
Speaker 1: road and you've got a passenger that witnesses it. We're
32:06
Speaker 1: talking about bringing a man to your apartment. We're talking
32:10
Speaker 1: about you being a witness to him, literally ambushing This
32:15
Speaker 1: man is a sweet, beloved man, and you're bearing witness
32:19
Speaker 1: to him cutting his throat until he bleeds out on
32:23
Speaker 1: the carpet. We're thinking about potentially her health helping him,
32:28
Speaker 1: that is Eastman, or remove Scott's body and helping to
32:32
Speaker 1: dispose of it. All of those things in his mind
32:37
Speaker 1: at least are kind of connecting these dots, and he
32:40
Speaker 1: has maybe a moment of lucidity where he says, look,
32:43
Speaker 1: if if I don't get rid of her, she can
32:45
Speaker 1: tie me back to this murder, this disposal, and then
32:50
Speaker 1: my life is over with. So if I remove her
32:53
Speaker 1: from the equation, even though I quote unquote love her,
32:56
Speaker 1: I gotta get rid of her. I gotta get rid
32:58
Speaker 1: of her, and I gotta do it right quick. You know,
33:19
Speaker 1: when you get up there to this area of the
33:21
Speaker 1: country where these two horrific deaths took place, it's isolated,
33:26
Speaker 1: it's beautiful, it's you know, it's it's more like you're
33:29
Speaker 1: not right in the middle of the Rockies. You can
33:31
Speaker 1: probably see them in the distance in a couple of
33:33
Speaker 1: locations there. We're talking about Laramie in Weld Counties, not
33:36
Speaker 1: too far from Greeley, and for Collins in that area
33:40
Speaker 1: up in northern Colorado. What's absolutely shocking about this is
33:46
Speaker 1: that this case, these two homicides or so brutal and
33:53
Speaker 1: so horrific, and it's so isolated. I had this kind
33:57
Speaker 1: of moment of clarity when I'm going over these cases
34:01
Speaker 1: to talk about them, I suddenly came to realization, Well,
34:06
Speaker 1: County is actually where Chris Watts had killed his entire family.
34:11
Speaker 1: What are the hots I think that he would have
34:14
Speaker 1: These two completely unconnected events happened in such a rural,
34:20
Speaker 1: isolated area, that's, you know, by all accounts, a very
34:24
Speaker 1: peaceful area. What they found out at the scenes, though,
34:27
Speaker 1: involving Sessions and in front, was absolutely horrific. We've seen
34:34
Speaker 1: this over and over again, Joe on bodybags. People think
34:39
Speaker 1: that it's easy to render down a body. Let's just
34:43
Speaker 1: throw them in the fire. That's what happened to sessions body. Yeah,
34:49
Speaker 1: you're right, it was and it rendered down, and we're
34:54
Speaker 1: just talking about the lower torso. There was still sufficient
34:58
Speaker 1: remain left behind that Scott's body was found, you know,
35:03
Speaker 1: still intact to the point where they could do an
35:05
Speaker 1: assessment on his remains the upper torso, and they could
35:09
Speaker 1: assess this injury to his neck, you know that we
35:14
Speaker 1: talked about, and that was so horrific, but also one
35:17
Speaker 1: other significant finding that kind of connects these two deaths.
35:22
Speaker 1: Scott's body was found in Laramie County and then Frank's
35:25
Speaker 1: was found over in World County. Scott had plastic melted
35:30
Speaker 1: to his face, and it can be surmised that his
35:33
Speaker 1: body had in fact been wrapped in plastic, and not
35:37
Speaker 1: only wrapped in plastic, but the same plastic that was
35:42
Speaker 1: used to wrap up Heather Frank's body that was intact.
35:46
Speaker 1: Her body was intact if she had been shot multiple times,
35:49
Speaker 1: wrapped in plastic and then tied off with Baylen wire.
35:53
Speaker 1: But Scott had been placed into this burn pit and
35:57
Speaker 1: his remains were burned. It was an insufficient job. It
36:01
Speaker 1: was insufficient to the task. And we hear that theme
36:03
Speaker 1: over and over and over again in forensics, and I
36:06
Speaker 1: certainly talked about it here on body backs. And the
36:10
Speaker 1: individual that's doing this either loses the will to continue
36:14
Speaker 1: on with what they're doing, they get distracted, maybe they
36:16
Speaker 1: have to go to work. Maybe there they don't have
36:19
Speaker 1: sufficient supplies in order to keep this up, because you know,
36:22
Speaker 1: when you're burning a body, you have to keep this
36:26
Speaker 1: heat going, and it's not something that can be backed
36:29
Speaker 1: off of because you're in an open area. This is
36:32
Speaker 1: not a crematory. You're having to always stoke the fire,
36:35
Speaker 1: turn the fire, and in sense, come in contact constantly
36:39
Speaker 1: with the remain Can anyone possibly imagine what that's like.
36:43
Speaker 1: You're standing over a fire pit that you have seemingly created,
36:49
Speaker 1: and you're applying fuel, you're applying accelerant, you're turning the fire,
36:54
Speaker 1: and maybe all of a sudden you have this kind
36:56
Speaker 1: of epiphanal moment. It's like, oh my god, I'm I'm
36:59
Speaker 1: actually burning another human being's body here, and you just
37:03
Speaker 1: kind of walk away from it for a moment. In
37:06
Speaker 1: this particular case, when the fire was not tended to properly,
37:12
Speaker 1: that's the moment, you know, forensically, when you get a break,
37:16
Speaker 1: because that means that all of the evidence hasn't been
37:18
Speaker 1: consumed buy the fire. You still have this gaping wound
37:22
Speaker 1: in the neck where you can actually make the assessment
37:25
Speaker 1: that the head was almost separated from the body. And
37:29
Speaker 1: also this plastic that is a tie back, and we
37:32
Speaker 1: look for tie backs and forensics all the time. Connectivity,
37:35
Speaker 1: if you will, to send you that kind of holds
37:38
Speaker 1: everything together. And this plastic that was found on Scott's
37:42
Speaker 1: Session's body was also found wrapping Heather Frank's body. Investigators
37:47
Speaker 1: are not just going to look at that and go, oh,
37:50
Speaker 1: they're green. Plastic on both of these body must have
37:53
Speaker 1: come from the same source. They're actually going to set
37:55
Speaker 1: out to prove that it came from the same source.
37:59
Speaker 1: How do they do that? Yeah, isn't that interesting when
38:02
Speaker 1: you begin to think about there's any number of ways
38:05
Speaker 1: that like plastics sheeting like this can be tied back.
38:09
Speaker 1: We think, first off, you have to do a general
38:11
Speaker 1: overall classification, and again that's one of the things that's
38:14
Speaker 1: done in forensic practice. You look at the plastic that
38:19
Speaker 1: you have, and they've termed this as construction grade plastic,
38:23
Speaker 1: which means it's robust, and it also means that it
38:28
Speaker 1: is unique. That this is not necessarily the kind of
38:31
Speaker 1: plastic sheeting you're going to have laid around in your garage. Okay,
38:36
Speaker 1: it's not the same type of plastic you're going to
38:38
Speaker 1: put down in your garden, for instance, when people put
38:41
Speaker 1: down a barrier of plastic in order to keep weeds
38:44
Speaker 1: from from growing up through it. This is a very
38:47
Speaker 1: particular type of plastic that has specific features. We begin
38:51
Speaker 1: to think about the thickness of it, you know, how
38:54
Speaker 1: robust is it? We think about color and what kind
38:58
Speaker 1: of sources locally could you acquire this plastic from or
39:02
Speaker 1: where's it being used? Did you go into a job site?
39:04
Speaker 1: Did somebody go into a job site and steal the plastic?
39:07
Speaker 1: Was the individual that was using this involved in construction,
39:11
Speaker 1: which of course Eastman was, And then you know, when
39:15
Speaker 1: you get into more of the dense forensics here, these
39:19
Speaker 1: plastics have very specific chemical structures and if you want
39:23
Speaker 1: to go this far with it, you can begin to
39:25
Speaker 1: think about, well, if we've got plastics involved in this case,
39:29
Speaker 1: are these two things chemically related molecularly? You know, it's
39:33
Speaker 1: the same composition, that sort of thing, because these things
39:36
Speaker 1: have a formula to them that are very specific to
39:38
Speaker 1: that brand. You can also look if it's perforated in
39:41
Speaker 1: any way. Forensic scientists that are involved in trace evidence
39:44
Speaker 1: can actually match up perforations if it's torn away. You
39:48
Speaker 1: can also think about how was it cut, and again
39:51
Speaker 1: that implies the use of a blated instrument in order
39:54
Speaker 1: to facilitate that. So there's any number of ways that
39:56
Speaker 1: you can kind of tie this back. And they were
39:59
Speaker 1: able to least were actually able to kind of marry
40:02
Speaker 1: up if you will, the plastic found melted to Scott's
40:05
Speaker 1: face and that plastic that Heather Frank's body was wrapped in.
40:09
Speaker 1: Let's talk one more piece of connectivity that you're talking about.
40:12
Speaker 1: When Heather Frank's body was found, it was found next
40:16
Speaker 1: to a woodpile. Not only was it found next to
40:18
Speaker 1: a woodpile, there was a large log there that was
40:22
Speaker 1: found smoldering. And I think that one of the interesting
40:26
Speaker 1: we're talking about bodies being found. If we'll go back
40:31
Speaker 1: to the discovery of Scott's body, and Scott was missing.
40:35
Speaker 1: He had last talked to his dad in the evening
40:37
Speaker 1: preceding these events, I think by two days, and of
40:41
Speaker 1: course he didn't show up for a gig. His body
40:43
Speaker 1: was actually discovered on the tent I believe it was,
40:47
Speaker 1: and it was discovered by a snowplow driver. This is
40:51
Speaker 1: one of the coldest times of the year up in
40:53
Speaker 1: Colorado and so snow on the ground, snowplow drivers coming
40:58
Speaker 1: along and he sees these human remains out there and
41:01
Speaker 1: they burned bit. But what happened was and this is
41:06
Speaker 1: kind of fascinating, as the police began to put two
41:08
Speaker 1: and two together. In this case, they actually drew up
41:13
Speaker 1: warrants for the murder of Scott's session. They drew up
41:18
Speaker 1: warrants for both Eastman and Heather Franks. They wanted both
41:24
Speaker 1: of them for questioning in the disappearance of Scott, and
41:28
Speaker 1: they went so far as to put tracking devices on
41:32
Speaker 1: Scott's vehicle and on Heather Frank's vehicle. And one of
41:36
Speaker 1: the things that occurred is that they were able to
41:40
Speaker 1: track Eastman's location relative to Heather's body. They knew that
41:47
Speaker 1: he had visited that area, and then when they went
41:49
Speaker 1: out to conduct a search day being the police, they
41:52
Speaker 1: discovered her remains. He was actually they get this, he
41:55
Speaker 1: was actually arrested at a local filling station with a
41:59
Speaker 1: gasking he was getting ready to burn her body up,
42:04
Speaker 1: and it was just adjacent to this woodpile. There was
42:07
Speaker 1: even a large log they said, that was out there
42:09
Speaker 1: that was smoldering. So he was prepping. He was getting
42:12
Speaker 1: ready to attempt to render down the body of this
42:16
Speaker 1: woman that he had been involved in an intimate relationship
42:20
Speaker 1: with for over seven years. Kevin Eastman was subsequently convicted
42:26
Speaker 1: and is serving consecutive life sentences in Colorado State Penitential.
42:36
Speaker 1: I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Backs