April 20, 2025 • 55 mins
A teenager in Wisconsin is accused of killing his mother and his stepfather, then living with the decomposing bodies for weeks before he finally leaves the family home. Joseph Scott Morgan explains how difficult it would be to remain in a home with two decomposing bodies and he breaks down the types of guns and ammunition available to 17-year-old Nikita "Nikki" Casap. Dave Mack explains the family dynamic and how Nikki is also charged with identity theft for trying to pretend he is his now dead stepfather, as well as being charged with murder and more.
Transcript Highlights
00:10.61 Introduction
01:01.83 Spending more time with the dead
05:41.51 Teen kills mom, stepdad, lives with bodies
09:52.98 Making mistakes in murder
15:20.17 Pulling back the blankets
20:51.75 Mother is found in hallway
25:10.98 Backing out of crime scene
29:50.56 Dividing up responsibilities on scene
34:00.22 VERY nice house
39:56.04 Doesn't have to be a body part
43:53.57 Removing each layer
47:45.42 Size of Round and type of stippling
53:28.71 Getting hit with a sledgehammer
55:09.61 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quality times, but Joseph's gotten more. When people meet me
many times that have heard me on a podcast or
seen me on television, one of the first questions they
asked for. One of the first comments they make is
I cannot begin to understand how you did for a
(00:24):
living what you did for so long. And it always
comes back around to the fact that I essentially lived
with the dead. Now, yeah, I understand. I'm a forensics guy,
and i'd go out and I work cases, I interacted
with my colleagues, but I got to tell you, there
(00:47):
were many weeks when I literally spent more time with
dead folks than I did with living folks. And there
were many times in my life I preferred being around
the dead. They generally don't give you any issues at all.
There's no surprises with them most of the time. I mean, yeah,
you'll find pathology, but you know, the dead or dead
(01:14):
and the living going about their lives. But every now
and then there's a case that occurs where the living
and the dead just can't seem to go their separate ways.
(01:39):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Backs, Dave.
I'm thinking back in time right now, and I wrote
about it. I wrote about in my memoir. I wrote
(02:02):
a story about a case that I'd worked many many
years ago, that I spent a protracted period of time
with a literally a refrigerator truckload full of dead bodies
from a capsized vessel. And we were real busy that
summer when that happened. And so just because you have
(02:26):
a major loss of life incident in a medical examiner
or corner's office, does that mean does not mean that
the everyday other cases stopped coming in. It's kind of
like and I wouldn't presume to necessarily compare myself literally
to my colleagues that worked nine to eleven at the
(02:46):
OCME in New York. But you have to understand, you
had the Twin Towers collapse, other buildings collapsed, you had
thousands of dead, but Dave homicides didn't stop, you know,
you didn't have fatal events that just ceased because that
one moment in time we had a major loss of life.
Things happen, and sometimes you get stacked up with the dead,
(03:10):
and in a way you become numb to it. I
think the dead, and I mean no disrespect by this,
but the dead just they're part and parcel of your
daily existence when you when I would walk into a room,
into the autopsy room, for instance, and I would have
(03:31):
somebody literally with their head blown apart. Then next to
them on another table would be a horribly decomposed body.
And then you might have a grandma that just passed
away in or sleep, and they're all lined up on
the table. I didn't pay any more attention to that
in a Man in the Moon. I mean, it just
you get numb to it when you're going through it. It
doesn't mean that you're not paying attention to detail. But
(03:53):
there's this thing that comes about where as part of
your occupation and part of what you do, you're able
to create this kind of weird membrane that kind of
buffets any kind of trauma you might have. What's really
odd is that when people that are not used to
being around the dead suddenly insert themselves into an environment
(04:17):
where they they not only are around the dead for
a period of time, but they might live with dead
bodies for a protracted period of time. And it took
me a long time professionally to build up that callous,
and it is a callous. It's like swinging a hammer.
You know, you just you get to the point where
it's it's it doesn't impact you the way that it
(04:40):
did when you first started. But for somebody just to
end dwell a residence, a structure with dead bodies and
not think anything of it, it's kind of odd. What
say you, my friend?
Speaker 2 (04:50):
But the first questions I had about the story, Joe
is we're going to talk about Nikita Nikki Cassop and
he is seventeen years old, and he is accused of
killing his mother and his stepfather and staying with their bodies,
their dead bodies for at least ten days, probably longer
(05:17):
than that, maybe fifteen days. It could be somewhere but
a week and a half to two weeks worth of time.
This seventeen year old person stayed in the home with
two dead bodies. And we're not talking about people that
he just saw in a battlefield, you know, We're talking
about his mother and stepfather. We're talking about people he
(05:38):
has a long relationship with that he allegedly took their
lives for whatever reason. We still don't have a true
motive here. But he actually was cohabitating, He was sleeping, eating,
in this house with both of these bodies. That's why
we're doing body bags on this episode, on this particular story,
(05:58):
because we don't know what was going on in this
person's life that brought him to the It wasn't just
enough to kill and leave, which we see that a lot.
You know, we see people kill and get rid of
a body. You know, that's where we catch them getting
rid of the body. Not here. You've got a kid
(06:20):
who never missed school, Joe, and one of the ways
he got caught, well, he didn't show up for two weeks.
The school was concerned, school resource officer reaches out, you know,
that's where this kind of came from is And of
course his stepfather's mother she hadn't talked to her son
and she was concerned as well. So you had two
different calls for a well being check again, I know,
(06:47):
isn't It's so weird because they don't used to call
the welfare check, but because of people getting a welfare check,
they don't call it welfare check now it's well being check.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Yeah, and that's what they actually did change the verbage
for that purpose. Yeah, because I found that so odd.
I know, it'ally odd.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
It's like, you know what when President Ronald Reagan was
shot by Hinkley back in nineteen eighty one. Yeah, March
of eighty one. Okay. The Gilligan's Island franchise had become
a movie of the Week kind of thing where they
were doing your Return from mcgillian's Island Escape from Gillian's
Island like Battle of the Apes. But from the very
(07:27):
first episode when they announced the names of all of
these passengers on the ses meno, they gave you the
name of the professor. His name was Professor Roy Hinckley.
When John Hinckley tried to kill Ronald Reagan for the
next I don't know, Harlan Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island or
whatever it was, they changed the name of the professor
(07:47):
to Hinkele for that reason or that very reason. Yeah,
And I think about that when these things come up.
So instead of saying it's a well being, we're checking
on their well being.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Right, it's no longer welfare check. Yeah. So the verbiage changes,
you know, day in and day out, and it's everybody
likes to engineer language, but you know, the one thing
you can't engineer is outcomes. I think relative to the
consequences of living with a dead body, and I was thinking,
you know, you and I both and please, you know,
(08:21):
don't misconstrue what I'm saying here. I am not comparing
our sons to this individual. What I'm doing is comparing
teenage boys. You and I both have had the adventure
of living in a household raising teenage boys, and teenage
(08:41):
boys do really stupid things. Not the most the world,
yeah they're not. And I were one at one point
in time, and I do remember doing really stupid things.
And I got to thinking about this kid who is
is actually living in this environment with these two individuals,
(09:04):
one of whom is his own mother, the other his stepfather,
And I'm thinking, did they did he have like a
brain freeze, you know, at that moment time where it's
like I I have done this and now I don't
know where to go, and I really wonder many times
(09:27):
if And it's not that doesn't necessarily just apply to
teenage boys. I think it applies to a lot of
perpetrators out there, because we see it, Dave. I mean,
you know, every week we cover cases and we see
these individuals that make really stupid, you know, mistakes along
the way. If you want to call it a mistake.
(09:48):
It's not like they're following their taxes and they've you know,
mis entered something. It's it's actually a they didn't think
the process through. I think it's really easy, you know.
I think that when you react, and all of us
have reacted in anger to things many times. I know
I have, I'm chief amongst sinners. And then you go back,
(10:13):
you have a quiet moment or two, and you sit
back and you shake your head and you say, I'm
such an idiot. Why did I say that? Why did
I do that? I know that there are going to
be consequences for this, and I'm just going to have
to sit down and take it, you know. And I
wonder many times about these individuals that perpetrate crimes and
(10:35):
they just kind of freeze and they can't move move
beyond that to make some better decision about how they're
going to handle something.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
You know. The headline on this story, yeah, I was
looking at several because a seventeen year old killing his
mother and stepfather is a that's a big deal. That's
a big story. But the headline's on this one. It's Wisconsin.
Tine killed mother and stepfather and lived with dot dot
dot teen lived with bodies of mom and stepfather after
(11:10):
killing them. Dot dot dot teen killed mom and stepdad,
then lived with bodies for dot dot dot. It's all
about oh in this one. I love this one. Teen
charged with killing parents lived with rotting corpses dot dot dot.
That's what we're actually doing today is getting to the
(11:30):
most explosive ending. It's not bad enough that the guy
killed his parents at seventeen years old, but now the
real headline, the real shock is he didn't get rid
of the bodies. He didn't chop them up and try
to get rid of them like so many we've had recently.
He's got two dead bodies in different parts of the house, Joe,
and basically he threw blankets over the top of them.
(11:52):
So I'm wondering, very and I know we'll get to
this right, right, But how long does it take before
or the body start to decompose and give off this
odor of death? And that's what this seventeen year old
is living with. I can't imagine that it's going to
(12:13):
be a pleasant thing to live in.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
By the end of day two, he would have he
would have had an odor in the air. I can
almost I can almost guarantee that. So you're talking about
if that's the case, if that's our benchmark for starting
from I'm not talking about the appearance of post warm
changes and decompositional changes. I'm talking about that that smell.
(12:41):
It's like a phantom that comes out of the dark
and kind of slaps you in the face the first
time you smell it. We would be talking about the
line's share of the time that he was living in
this home. He would have smelt this, and he made
no effort to take them out into the yard or
(13:01):
disposed of them in the basement, or even removed them
to the attic. Do you remember the case that we
had which, by the way, that reminds me did do
follow up on this? The case from from was it
in gross Point? It was? It was in Detroit the
wealthy surgeon that was found wrapped up in his attic.
(13:23):
Do you remember that case? And he had been killed,
and they have arrested somebody with that. But you know,
even in that case, the perpetrator, to the best of
my knowledge, didn't hang around, but they still wrapped the
body up, took the body into a sequestered area in
the attic, and put him up there. Well, that guy
would have been smelling, you know, pretty quickly. These bodies,
(13:45):
and particularly the mother, and this is and we can
dive into this a little bit more, but the mother
had had multiple layers placed upon her. And we've talked
about this before. When you layer a body like that,
that's essentially like placing an item in a crock pot. Uh,
(14:10):
it's the heat that's being given off, you know, just
just as a result the heat that is generated. And
there is a certain amount of heat that is generated
from cellular decay where you have the cells, the actual
cells and our bodies begin to break down and kind
of leach out there. There is a certain amount of
(14:33):
heat that is given off in that process. Well, it's
further exacerbated by doing these lay the layers like this,
and so the body is slowly kind of rendering down
throughout the entire period, and you can actually think of
it as almost like a tenderizing moment. So the body
at a cellular level is that's expedited as a result
(14:54):
of this this layering of blankets all on top of
the body. So when you finally pull back these blankets,
it's going to be something that is so disgusting and
so insulting to your senses. But you know, there's a
lot to be said about the nature of a scene
(15:15):
like this, particularly when you consider that the victims are
those individuals that held the title of parents. And how
much even more so when one of the victims has
been so brutalized at the hands of her son and
(15:37):
then left to right in the floor of their home
without any consideration or desecration of her remain So, brother Dave,
(16:02):
you mentioned that, you know, our our favorite term welfare
check or what's the new term now being check? The
well being check? Yeah, the wellbeing Yeah, the well being
check had been requested on February the twenty eighth of
(16:25):
twenty twenty five. And this isn't actually in Waukeshaw, Wisconsin.
And what kind of prompted this, you know, kind of
moving for it was?
Speaker 2 (16:37):
There were two things. It was a two pronged thing. One,
you have a student who has a perfect record for
attendance and and his name is Nikiki nik Kiki Nikita
Cassop and he goes by the name Nikki Nicki had
perfect attendants and all of a sudden he misses two
(17:01):
weeks out of school, that was from the school standpoint.
They're like, hey, something's wrong, and they're trying to call
the house. They're not getting anybody on the phone. So
finally the school resource officer he calls the police and says,
we need to do a well being check. We've got
a student. He hasn't been here. We can't get in
touch with anybody on our records. Well. At the same time,
(17:21):
while that is happening, on the twenty eighth of February,
the stepfather's mom, Donald Mayer's mother, Dorothy, she actually calls
and asks for a well being check because she hasn't
talked to Donald in a couple of weeks. And oh,
(17:42):
I need to add something and I apologize for missing this.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Hush, that's okay.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
There were a couple of instances of odd text messages
being received. One in particular was Donald Mayor the stepfather.
His boss, his supervisor at work, had gotten text messages
from him during the course of the time leading up
(18:07):
to February twenty eighth, and one of them was I'm
still sick, going to need another week And it wasn't
normal for him to text in that manner, And one
of the text messages has said I'm sick and I
can't talk, so I otherwise I would call you, but
I have to text I can't talk. So as adults,
(18:27):
we know, what are the odds of this happening. You know,
this is not something in our lifetime we have ever
really heard of. It happens on sitcoms, you know, and
things like that, but not in real life. And so
those that text message was one and the other one
was at the school, So they had some suspicious meanderings
going on with these text messages. But either way you
look at it. On February twenty eighth, the police show up,
(18:49):
and that's when this case hits the media because when
they first walk in, and Joe, this is something that
I've asked you before, and I wonder if there's a
difference in communities and towns, county, states and things like
that on when you're doing a well being check. As
(19:11):
an officer, you walk in, you know you're not getting
anybody at the door, you're not getting anybody on the phone,
and you know you're looking for ways to get inside
the house, you know, to see in what's going on
in there. And when they do, when police do finally
get inside, they find a body, right, They don't find
(19:32):
a body sitting out in front. What they do is
in the garage. They find the mother's BMW is in
the garage, but the father's stepfather's VW atlas is not
in the garage. There's no dog. They have a dog
named Toby. Toby's not there either. But they do find
(19:53):
miss Cassab. What is her name to I apologize to that, Tachiana, Yeah,
Tatiana Cassab. They find her body in a hallway adjacent
to the kitchen, and it's covered in blankets, towels, things
like that. And I'm wondering, Joe, when police see that,
they have to determine that there's Oh, by the way,
(20:15):
when they got there, they could when they opened the door,
they smelled death. That's what they smelled this And so
it's the twenty eighth of February in Wisconsin and they
smelled death. Now when they walk in, the police find
this area in the hallway that it's got clothes and
(20:36):
things piled up, blankets and what have you. But there's
a body underneath. I'm going to guess you could pretty
much tell based on things happening in that general vicinity
of a body is there because it's deteriorating enough that
they smelled it.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Right, Yeah, well you'd have to confirm. And these are
excellent questions. And this is actually the type of thing
that that we teach each at Jack State with my students.
And I'll let me just kind of break it down
to you this way.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
I need you to because I'm serious. Well, Joe, I've
been on scenes where there were bodies and things, okay,
but I'm not the officials. I'm there after the fact
as a journalist usually you know, or a family member,
And so I was confused as to what would be
the first step. I mean, even if you're the police officer,
how far do they have to go? Because do they
(21:27):
call you first, say I think we got a dead body.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Or well, they will call still generally call. What will
happen is the call will go out. And by the way,
Wisconsin is a corner state, so they still have corners
in Wisconsin, and you know, it is one of those
states that still elects a county corner and I've met
some of them over the years. They're fine people. They
go through pretty extensive training, but you know, it's like
(21:52):
anything else in life, you don't know what you're going
to get from county to county, but the corner is
somebody that you have to rely on in a set
of circumstances like this. What the Uniform Division would do
is that once they determined that they at least have
this one body. First off, just because you smell something
(22:15):
does not necessarily mean that it is human. Remember you
talked about Toby the missing dog. Well, dog's going to
give off a foul oat or two. It would appear
that Tatiana. I've seen the images of her. She's not
a very big person. As a matter of fact, there's
one great family image of her with their son and
(22:39):
the stepdad and they're standing there and you know, both
these guys tower over her. You know, she's tiny. So
you would have to confirm that you do in fact
have a human body. You would do as little as
you possibly could to disrupt those layers, because Dave, every
(23:02):
strata of garment, blanket, I don't know, tablecloth, towel, each
one of those has evidentiary value. The reason it does
is that if you believe this is a homicide, which
(23:23):
remember our working assumption that not some, but all deaths,
until proven otherwise, are in fact homicides. Each thing that
the perpetrator, and you have to assume that it's the
perpetrator that covered the bodies, has put their hands on
each one of these layers. So each layer has evidentiary
(23:44):
value to it. Once the police had very and I'm
talking about the uniform division. Once the uniform division, and
hopefully there was a supervisor out there. That supervisor would
look at anybody in a uniform in that house. Stop
what you're doing. Do turn around, exit out through this door.
(24:05):
No other doors. Don't touch anything else. Pay attention to
where you put your feet, be fully aware of your surroundings.
Get out of this house. We're shutting the door behind us.
We're calling CID Criminal Investigation Division, crimes against persons. Because
not all police departments have a homicide division. The guys
(24:30):
that work in crimes against persons will handle rate assault,
AG assault, they'll handle homicides. It all kind of gets
lumped in together. You go to a bigger department and
they'll have specific homicide investigators, but you're going to call
(24:51):
CID and you'll say, get CID in route out here.
You'll also say we're going to have to get forensics
en route, which means the crime scene unit is going
to come out and oh, by the way, get the
corner and the rout as well. But before any of
those people can enter the house, you're going to have
to go to a magistrate. The sea the detective will
(25:14):
they will go to the magistrate that's on duty or
the judge, and they'll say, look, we've we've got to
get a search warrant. We've got a lady laying in
a hallway covered by all manner of clothing and you know,
blankets and everything else, and it looks like we've got
a homicide. Because you don't want to You do not
(25:38):
want to go into that house and start processing that
scene and not have all of your bases covered, because
anything that you find in that house that does not
have and I'm talking about absent a warrant, anything you
find in that house like that's in a hit in space. Say,
(26:00):
if you if you just kind of arbitrarily walk over
and open a closet, you can open a closet door
if you think there might be a body in there,
maybe you see fluid leaking out from under the door,
maybe it's blood which you think is blood. You can
open the closet. But if you get in that closet,
you start digging around, you find some kind of valuable
piece of evidence. Guess what, Without a warrant, there's a
(26:23):
high probability that whatever you find in that closet, it
could be a kilo of cocaine, can be excluded it.
So you have to be very very careful. That's why
and a lot of people scratch their heads, why do
you need a warrant? I mean, this is this might
this is probably a homicide. That's all the more reason
(26:44):
that you want to warrant because you're going to be
backstopped by that legally, and that way you can do
and it's not going to hurt anything for you. If
you secure the seing, then you're there's nothing, there's no
harm that's going to come. And there let me tell
you one other thing. In this case, they were able
(27:06):
to find mom and they were able to find stepdad,
but they couldn't find the dog, they couldn't find the car,
and they can't find the son. Well, there's two parts,
two major parts of this investigation. You've got the bodies
(27:28):
in the house which appear to be homicide. You know,
the victims of homicide. And then you've got a son
that's vanished and who's seventeen. By the way, he's a kid,
and the car is missing. You don't know that he
hasn't been kidnapped. You don't know that you know he's
(27:49):
being held somewhere. You also don't know if maybe he's
a suspect. I mean, for me, being the jaded old investigator,
I am he's at the top of the list. I
got to tell you that. But your other part of
the investigation is find this kid and find him immediately,
because the further away he gets, there's a higher probability
(28:12):
that evidence can be destroyed or he might escape capture.
You do, he's somebody you do want to talk to
because he is domiciled at this location. You got two
dead bodies and he's missing, and one of the family
cars is missing. So you've got to do everything that
you can to secure the scene so that CID can
(28:35):
get out there in the corner and everybody. And oh,
the other part of this is you got to track
this kid now, and there's no you don't need a
warrant for that necessarily. You don't need a warrant to
go to the school and maybe talk to the principal
the counselors, and that would be a separate set of
investigators that are going to go out and do that,
and you're going to be handling this. There will be
(28:56):
one lead investigator that'll be in charge of everything, and
they'll be the point of contact for the DA as well,
and they'll kind of overlord the whole investigation, all right,
finding him and understanding what's going on the seeing and
then once you get that kind of steadied, get the
(29:19):
ship steadied, then you can begin to process the scene
after you get that warrant, Because Dave, this is going
to be a highly complex situation that you're walking into
because you have no idea. You've got a decomposing to
decomposing human remains here, you have no idea what the
(29:41):
cause of death is, and you've got to kind of
narrow that down as quickly as you possibly can, first off,
to see if you're actually dealing with a homicide or
maybe something different. There's probably no greater iconic figure in
(30:14):
motion picture history when it comes to playing the cop
against the system than the character of Dirty Harry played
by Clint Eastwood. And he famously said, and I think
that It was actually in the first, the first Dirty
Harry movie, which is called Dirty Harry, that the forty
(30:38):
four magnum was the most powerful handgun in the world.
That's no longer true. There are other ones that are
more powerful now, but yet it's still formidable. But it's
not really practical, all right. It's a huge weapon. It
was never practical really for anybody to carry. But one
weapon that is not quite as powerful but is revered
(31:03):
is three point fifty seven magnum. And three fifty seven
magnum is an interesting weapon in the sense that it
it is zero point three point five seven caliber in
a magnum load, which means that you've got this chunk
of lead in the end of a bullet alive round
(31:28):
and you've got a magnum load of propellant in here.
So you've got this thing driving it down the muzzle
of this weapon, and when it slams into anybody, it's
like being hit with a sledgehammer. Very powerful, and interestingly enough,
(31:48):
in our case today that we're discussing, Dave mister Mayor,
the stepfather of this young man, had recently purchased a
three point fifty Evan magnum and guess what it's missing.
It's missing from. Not only is the car missing, Toby,
the dog is missing, the teen is missing, the reach
(32:11):
is recently purchased three point fifty seven magnum is missing
as well.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Now we've got, as we mentioned before, we actually have
a little bit of a time frame between the last
time anyone recalls hearing from Donald Mayor or Tatiana Cassop
and her son attending school. And we also know that
when police arrive, they find her body under a bunch
(32:38):
of clothing. Now what they've told us, Joe, is that
they've got multiple gunshot wounds to her and Donald Mayer
was found in an office in the home.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
By the way.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
This is a three thousand square foot home, four bedroom,
two and a half back. Big, I had some picture.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
I urge anybody out there go take a look at
the picture.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Interrupt you now, buddy, beautiful house, nice neighborhoo. And again
you know the dog is missing, and so is the
VW Atlas that is owned by Donald Mayer. Anyway, police
get there and they find her in the hallway. That's
when they walk back out. Let's get the search warrant.
They come back. Now they know they don't have the sun,
and they don't have a car, and they don't have
(33:19):
a dog. So those three things are things they're looking
for right now. They find Donald Mayer in his office
in an office in the house, and he's been shot
once in the back of the head with that three
point fifty seven magnet. Well, I don't know how soon
they figure that out, but based on the wound as
it's described, But as they're trying to figure everything out,
(33:40):
Joe and I'm I asked you early on about the smell,
how long would it take before the smell hit Because
we are dealing with a number of days here between
the time that they the police believe the killings took
place and the day they were the body's found. But
(34:01):
we have a seventeen year old who is not in
the home. Dead, cars missing, dogs missing, and so they
put out they're doing a they're on scene at the house,
they're examining the bodies, and we got to find this kid,
find that car, look for this kid, find the dog.
So anymore, we have these license plate readers, they're everywhere.
(34:22):
We got surveillance cameras, they're everywhere. It's amazing. If you
haven't kept up with the Times friends, you are being
tracked all day. Every day they were able to find
they were able to find Nicki, and he was not
near home. They found Niki the same day they found
the body's show. They find Nicki eight hundred and fifty
(34:45):
miles away from home. The same day they find the bodies.
They find him at eleven twenty at night. And by
the way, he's not dead. Obviously, we're doing the show
about the son killing his mom and his stepfather, but
I wanted to go back to the house. Now. Inside
that house, they find that his mother has been shot
(35:05):
multiple times. Yep, there's four wounds caused by three shots. Now.
One of the wounds was to her right hand. Yes,
and I was wondering, because you've got two shots to
the abdomen. One to the neck. Was the wound in
her right hand caused by her a defensive move, her
putting her arm up.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
It could be you could also have with the abdominal
wound as well. And I've had this happen and it's
kind of a it's an odd it's an odd thing
to see, but it does happen. You will have a
and I don't. They have not released the autopsy report
on the case. But you can have a situation where say,
(35:47):
for instance, someone is turning and I'm talking about the victim. Okay,
let's say the victim is kind of rotating at the
waist and now the shooter is obliquely oriented to the
so they're on the side. I've had cases where in
the abdomen, in particular, where it's kind of flabby, you
can have around that initially enters kind of laterally okay,
(36:14):
goes through exits and re enters the body, and you
can yeah, and this happens with some frequency. It's not
like if you saw it in the morgue, you wouldn't say, Wow,
what a finding, because it happens more than you know.
You know, people people see old Western movies and I
(36:34):
guess even movies today where people are shot and it's
they people many times appear to be static when they're shot.
If you know that you have a weapon pointed at
you and they're firing, or you sense that they're going
to fire, people will flinch, they'll turn. Nobody's going to
stand still most of the time to be shot. They're
(36:56):
going to react to the site. And can you imagine
with a three point fifty seven magnum. If she sees
this thing, the muzzle on this thing is it's going
to look like, you know, you're looking down inside of
a peach basket. It's that big. Of course it's not,
but it's it's rather imposing. Well, she's going to react
to that. Now, back to what she said. Can she
(37:19):
be shot through the hand. Let's say that she raises
her hand to her neck in where the palm is out. Okay, yes,
you can have around that will go through and through.
It's called a throw and through wound. It would pass
through the palm of the hand or through the fingers,
out through the back of the hand, and then back
(37:40):
in to the neck. That can happen as well. And
those injuries are rather interesting because let's just say, for instance,
and we don't know this for a fact, but let's
just say, for instance, everybody at home kind of feel
the palm of your hand right now, and you can
feel the bony structures within your head hand. Okay, Well,
(38:02):
if you're shot through your hand, that projectile, that lead
core projectile that is passing through the palm of your hand,
there's a high probability it's going to strike bone. When
it strikes bone, there's going to be potentially deformation to
the round. So when it exits out of the hand,
(38:22):
it enters the hand, strikes bone, there's a wind track
through the hand exits. The bullet is not going to
be pristine, Okay, when it comes out, it's going to
be oddly shaped and you'll get kind of like in
the neck, you'll get these kind of weird looking injuries
where you have and it's what is referred to as
we use a term for it, it's called an intermediate target.
(38:45):
And it doesn't have to be a body part, like
if somebody is shot through a wall or shot through
a piece of glass, or shot through the door of
a car. The bullet has changed forever. The projectile has
changed because it becomes shredded, it becomes even more jagged,
so we get these really nasty looking wounds.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
And so if they're in exacting November twenty second, nineteen
sixty three in Dallas, Texas, ideally there and Governor Connolly
was shot through the wrist and everything else, and it
was a pristine bullet that landed next to his thigh
on the gurney exactly.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
And again, the pristine bullet theory and of course that's
it's utter nonsense.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
I had to throw it in there.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Sorry, well, I'm glad that you did, particularly in the
wake of everything that we're seeing. Now we need to
do another episode, I think anyway.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Thank You're right? All right?
Speaker 1 (39:33):
So yeah, you have you have this and and then
she's got multiple gunshot wounds. But she's got multiple gunshot wounds.
And this is really interesting. Mister Mayor has got one.
And I got to tell you, Dave, this goes back
to the old the old adage theory or you know,
(39:56):
the way we view these things. Why do you need
to take a three point fifty seven magnum and shoot
this diminutive woman multiple times? Can you explain? And I'm
this is hypothetical. Can you explain that to me? Most
(40:17):
people would look at this. I think behaviors might look
at it and say, well, this borders on overkill. It
borders on overkill.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
And that's where Joe as I was looking at this
in my mind, because you know, you started off the
show talking about being around bodies, you know, and over
a period of time you can see different types of
bodies in different stages of decomp what have you. Yeah,
when I do stories even now, I still have that
(40:48):
hope when a child does something, or when a parent
does something that the victim doesn't know that the victim.
In the case of mister Mary, I'm thinking, Okay, he
was shot in the back of the head with the
fifty seven magnum. I'm hoping it was by surprise that
he never knew it was coming. Boom, he's gone. I'm
guessing if that were to happen now, the mom knows
(41:08):
something bad is happening and she's coming, and that's why
she gets shot multiple.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Times, and she's in a different area of.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
The house, right in the hallway. And then my thing is,
I hate to think that the last thing this mother
knew was that her son was doing this horrific thing allegedly.
But I want to go quickly to when the police
arrived and we have both the bodies were covered with
different things, and you covered how that has to be unlayered.
(41:36):
When the bodies are taken out of the home. Are
they taken up as a lump with the blankets, covers,
or whatever's on them, or are those removed and the
bodies are placed in a bag? How are they transported
so they don't lose all the possible forensic evidence in there.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
I got to tell you, in a case like this
where you've got loose blankets, if it were me, I
would document let's just take Mom's body. I would document
her body so well, or the location where she is seen, okay,
(42:13):
or reviewed here at sight. I would go into pains,
taking detail about every aspect of this. And because I
don't want to lose anything or transfer anything to the
outer layers of the blankets that might be contained therein
because you're going to run that risk and a body back.
(42:35):
I'm not going to say it's like a tumble dryer,
but you can have things that are mixed up in
there as the body is bouncing down the road. I
would take each layer off if it's not secured, if
the say the perpetraary hadn't wrapped it with anything. If
you're talking about wrapping a body, uh this cocooned in blankets,
(42:55):
that's a different story. But if you've got them just
laying I'm going to take up each individual blanket one
by one, put it in a separate paper container, seal
it up, label it, and it's going to go in individually.
It's not going to accompany the body. It's going to
(43:16):
go with the crime scene tech back to their repository
so it can make it out to the state crime lab.
And I'm talking about layer if I've got look, and
I don't know that this is the case, but let's
just say I'll pick an arbitrary number. Let's just say
we've got twelve layers. You're getting twelve backs from me. Okay,
(43:38):
you get twelve backs. Yeah, and I want each one
of them to be examined. And here's one more thing
that you got to think about. Was she covered in
blankets and then shot? Or was she shot and then
covered in blankets? And you say, well, got that that's
kind of obvious. No, there's nothing obvious in depth investigation,
(44:03):
you know your assumption. You have to consider all possibilities,
and it gets very complex. I mean, can you imagine
how much more complex this would be if he I
don't know, some weird, bizarre set of circumstances happened and
he tackles mom. He puts blankets all on the top
of him because he's seen a movie that thinks it's
going to muffle the sound. He starts firing through multiple
(44:25):
layers of blankets into her body. Well, that's even going
to make the rounds more deformed. You're going to get
fiber evidence. I've actually recovered bullets projectiles from bodies, Dave
that had bits of fiber twisted up in jagged edges
of the projectile that are embedded in the body because
it passed through. Again, one of these intermediate targets went
(44:47):
into the body and then it's there. I found wood
embedded in bodies that you know where you've got like
particle board, where you've got rounds that pass through particle
board and that kind of splinter and goes into a body.
There's all manner of things, and it tells it tells
a very specific story about this. But David, you know,
(45:09):
I'd I'd be very curious to understand. I think with
the stepfather in particular, you had mentioned that you were
hoping that he didn't see it coming. I hope that
he didn't either, to be honest with you, but I'm
one of the things they would have to figure out
with him. I think particularly this is kind of curious.
(45:31):
This is this sounds like a classic execution style killing.
I'd like to know if they were able to determine
a range of fire if the muzzle was placed directly
against the back of his head. This kid just walked
up the guy you said, he's in his office, maybe
you see it in a chair. He didn't know what
(45:52):
was coming, walks up behind him, pops him, you know,
right in the head. Or did he say, gee, stepdad,
you know, I'd really like to handle that new three
fifty seven magnum that you bought. Can can I see it?
And he hands it over to him and things loaded,
and he looks at him and shoots him in the face,
you know, because you say, or shoots him in the
head while he's not suspecting that. You know, it can
(46:17):
go either number of ways. You know, how did the
kid know that the weapon was in the house? How
do you get access to it? Okay, then with mom,
where were her wounds oriented? And what range of fire
would there be? Because you're going to have with three
fifty seven magnum in particular, it's a magnum round, so
you're talking about a lot of propellant, Dave, and you
(46:40):
will have stippling. You know that where this gets embedded
into into the skin and onto the clothing. We can
determine range of fire based upon how far out it's
spread on the remains are on the clothing, and that
gives us an idea, and all of a sudden, you know,
(47:01):
the focus on stories becoming a little bit tighter now,
you know, once you kind of establish the physical relationship
between the muzzle of that weapon being held allegedly by
a son and the recipients of the rounds that you know,
these bodies that the rounds were fired into.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
You know, when they actually were able to get to
the sun, Yeah, and have I mentioned earlier he was
eight hundred plus miles away. They used a number of
different things, surveillance cameras to cell phones. When they did
track him the sun, they found him, Like I said,
you found the bodies early in the day, you know,
with their well being calls, and this is now twelve
(47:41):
hours later and they already got him, you know, eight
hundred plus miles away. They were able to track this
his behavior using his parents' credit cards and things like that,
starting on February twelfth, all the way through the twenty eighth.
The gun, the three fifty seven magnum matching the description
of donald marriage gun that he had just bought, is
(48:01):
found in the floorboard of the well when they caught
Nikki driving the VW Atlas owned by his stepfather. That's
who they caught him driving his car. And the three
fifty seven magnum is on the floorboard along with unspent
and spent shell casings. Yeah, and you have bullets in
there and spent shells. Do you think he picked them
(48:23):
up in the house and left with him?
Speaker 1 (48:24):
I don't know, No, no, no, because three fifty seven
magnums of revolver. Okay, so the gun, oh yeah, and
he probably dumped them. Which when you open up the
gate on a revolver and and the cylinder spins out,
because it I say spin out, you press it out.
There's an ejection rod on the thing. So you press
(48:47):
the ejection rod and all of those spent well anywhereund
that's in there. It doesn't matter ifest live or spent
are going to drop out. Now here's here's the interesting thing.
Can we go back to the mom just one second. Wow,
how many injuries did you say that she had sustained?
Speaker 2 (49:02):
And they think three gunshot wounds? Four injuries?
Speaker 1 (49:06):
Okay, so she's got three gunshot wounds, four injuries. Mister
Mayer has got a single gunshot wound. Okay, so three
fifty seven magnums. These revolvers can come in in a
(49:28):
configuration to hold five rounds in cylinder or six. Now,
just so we all understand, because I know I'm going
to get blowback on this. There is a semi automatic
three fifty seven out there. It does exist, but the
line share people do not possess these. Most of these
platforms with three fifty seven magnums are revolvers. So if
(49:52):
it's a semi automatic, like you had said, you know,
did he pick up the rounds at the house or
the spent casings, then yeah, if it's a semi automatic.
But my suspicion is is that traditionally the three fifty
seven magnum is something that you have in a revolver configuration.
And I actually owned one or was issued one at
(50:14):
one point in time years ago. That was a cult lawman.
I loved that weapon. It was a actual a snubnose
weapon and it was only five shots. The cylinder only
held five rounds, but you can have the more robust
and for years, cops there were some cops that still
(50:35):
carried thirty eight specials, but you had those that actually
opted for a three point fifty seven magnum. This is
before the days of police officers being issued semi automatic handguns,
you know, with the Barrettas and the glocks and you
know every six and all these other brands that are
out there now. There were some police officers that prefer
(50:58):
the three fifty seven because they you that the energy
they were going to put on target if they had
to use this thing was going to be substantially more
significant than the thirty eight special, all right. They knew
that it would have more power to it. That's originally
everything that we do in firearms, and this is kind
of interesting, most in the civilian world, even in policing,
(51:21):
has its origins in the military. You go all the
way back to the turn of the twentieth century, from
you know, from the late eighteen hundreds, before the invention
of the nineteen eleven forty five caliber side arm that
our military carried. Our officers and NCOs used to carry
(51:43):
thirty eight specials, and those rounds were insufficient, We'll put
it to you that way. That's why they you know,
when they could get up to a forty five caliber
semi automatic handgun, they went to it because again it
was like, you know, it's getting hit with a forty five,
(52:03):
which is even more robust than three point fifty seven magnum,
is like getting head with a sledgehammer.
Speaker 2 (52:09):
So that's what we've got, that kid using that on
his stepdead in the back of the head. All right,
But let me go back to something else, Joe. Because
the bodies were so decomposed that they could not be identified. Now,
how is that in the space of two weeks time
inside of a home, out of the elements, How is
that a thing I would have thought that. Granted I
(52:29):
understand odor, I understand that and decomposition, but talking about
two bodies inside of a home decomposing at such a
rate that they could not be identified in two weeks time.
Speaker 1 (52:40):
Well, we're talking about Wisconsin. We're talking about the wintertime.
And guess what you got going on in the house.
You're running the heat, baby, And so there's constant heat.
And for everyone that has to fight this fight that
lives in areas where it turns off cold. You know,
our friends down to Florida might not have to deal
with this too much, but where it's always having to
(53:02):
fight that fight, that heater is always competing with the
external temperature, and you know it's you know, if you've
got a drafty house or whatever, thermostat is going to
indicate that, you know, you've got the temperatures decreasing, so
it's going to kick back on. So it's always in
a state of having warmth. And also here's here's the thing.
(53:24):
You know, you're the the heat in a house varies
from location to location. I mean, that kind of makes sense.
But let's just say you're talking about Mom's body being
in the hallway where she's laying next to a vent,
and on top of that, she's got these layers of
fabric that are lying on top of her. That's going
(53:46):
to further exacerbate. There are actually cases out there day
where you will have people that have been homicide victims
in homes where because of the location within the structure,
one body decomposes quicker than the other body because of
(54:07):
the relative position to like heating vents or cooling cooling.
It can work conversely as well. We saw this not
exactly the same thing, but we saw with Gene Hackman,
which you and I have talked about extensively, where Betsy's
body was found. They talked about her being mummified. But
(54:27):
you know, mister Hackman had probably walked through that house
for five days I think, you know, before he finally
succumbed to you know, and of course he had advanced Alzheimer's.
But yeah, you think about just even the variation in
the location within a structure can impact the rate at
which bodies decompose. The fact that this kid stayed in
(54:49):
this house for as long as he did, the fact
that he allegedly tried to feign the still living existence
of his parents through text messages and these sorts of things.
The fact that he ran up almost ten thousand dollars
(55:14):
in the use of credit cards and debit cards, and
the fact that he stole that car and ran off
with it. There's more to be revealed in this case,
I can tell you that. But when you've got a
young man who's seventeen years old, who allegedly executes both
of his parents and in dwells a house with their
(55:39):
rotting corpses for this long, these still waters run very
very deep. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is body
Backs
Quality times, but Joseph's gotten more. When people meet me
many times that have heard me on a podcast or
seen me on television, one of the first questions they
asked for. One of the first comments they make is
I cannot begin to understand how you did for a
(00:24):
living what you did for so long. And it always
comes back around to the fact that I essentially lived
with the dead. Now, yeah, I understand. I'm a forensics guy,
and i'd go out and I work cases, I interacted
with my colleagues, but I got to tell you, there
(00:47):
were many weeks when I literally spent more time with
dead folks than I did with living folks. And there
were many times in my life I preferred being around
the dead. They generally don't give you any issues at all.
There's no surprises with them most of the time. I mean, yeah,
you'll find pathology, but you know, the dead or dead
(01:14):
and the living going about their lives. But every now
and then there's a case that occurs where the living
and the dead just can't seem to go their separate ways.
(01:39):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Backs, Dave.
I'm thinking back in time right now, and I wrote
about it. I wrote about in my memoir. I wrote
(02:02):
a story about a case that I'd worked many many
years ago, that I spent a protracted period of time
with a literally a refrigerator truckload full of dead bodies
from a capsized vessel. And we were real busy that
summer when that happened. And so just because you have
(02:26):
a major loss of life incident in a medical examiner
or corner's office, does that mean does not mean that
the everyday other cases stopped coming in. It's kind of
like and I wouldn't presume to necessarily compare myself literally
to my colleagues that worked nine to eleven at the
(02:46):
OCME in New York. But you have to understand, you
had the Twin Towers collapse, other buildings collapsed, you had
thousands of dead, but Dave homicides didn't stop, you know,
you didn't have fatal events that just ceased because that
one moment in time we had a major loss of life.
Things happen, and sometimes you get stacked up with the dead,
(03:10):
and in a way you become numb to it. I
think the dead, and I mean no disrespect by this,
but the dead just they're part and parcel of your
daily existence when you when I would walk into a room,
into the autopsy room, for instance, and I would have
(03:31):
somebody literally with their head blown apart. Then next to
them on another table would be a horribly decomposed body.
And then you might have a grandma that just passed
away in or sleep, and they're all lined up on
the table. I didn't pay any more attention to that
in a Man in the Moon. I mean, it just
you get numb to it when you're going through it. It
doesn't mean that you're not paying attention to detail. But
(03:53):
there's this thing that comes about where as part of
your occupation and part of what you do, you're able
to create this kind of weird membrane that kind of
buffets any kind of trauma you might have. What's really
odd is that when people that are not used to
being around the dead suddenly insert themselves into an environment
(04:17):
where they they not only are around the dead for
a period of time, but they might live with dead
bodies for a protracted period of time. And it took
me a long time professionally to build up that callous,
and it is a callous. It's like swinging a hammer.
You know, you just you get to the point where
it's it's it doesn't impact you the way that it
(04:40):
did when you first started. But for somebody just to
end dwell a residence, a structure with dead bodies and
not think anything of it, it's kind of odd. What
say you, my friend?
Speaker 2 (04:50):
But the first questions I had about the story, Joe
is we're going to talk about Nikita Nikki Cassop and
he is seventeen years old, and he is accused of
killing his mother and his stepfather and staying with their bodies,
their dead bodies for at least ten days, probably longer
(05:17):
than that, maybe fifteen days. It could be somewhere but
a week and a half to two weeks worth of time.
This seventeen year old person stayed in the home with
two dead bodies. And we're not talking about people that
he just saw in a battlefield, you know, We're talking
about his mother and stepfather. We're talking about people he
(05:38):
has a long relationship with that he allegedly took their
lives for whatever reason. We still don't have a true
motive here. But he actually was cohabitating, He was sleeping, eating,
in this house with both of these bodies. That's why
we're doing body bags on this episode, on this particular story,
(05:58):
because we don't know what was going on in this
person's life that brought him to the It wasn't just
enough to kill and leave, which we see that a lot.
You know, we see people kill and get rid of
a body. You know, that's where we catch them getting
rid of the body. Not here. You've got a kid
(06:20):
who never missed school, Joe, and one of the ways
he got caught, well, he didn't show up for two weeks.
The school was concerned, school resource officer reaches out, you know,
that's where this kind of came from is And of
course his stepfather's mother she hadn't talked to her son
and she was concerned as well. So you had two
different calls for a well being check again, I know,
(06:47):
isn't It's so weird because they don't used to call
the welfare check, but because of people getting a welfare check,
they don't call it welfare check now it's well being check.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Yeah, and that's what they actually did change the verbage
for that purpose. Yeah, because I found that so odd.
I know, it'ally odd.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
It's like, you know what when President Ronald Reagan was
shot by Hinkley back in nineteen eighty one. Yeah, March
of eighty one. Okay. The Gilligan's Island franchise had become
a movie of the Week kind of thing where they
were doing your Return from mcgillian's Island Escape from Gillian's
Island like Battle of the Apes. But from the very
(07:27):
first episode when they announced the names of all of
these passengers on the ses meno, they gave you the
name of the professor. His name was Professor Roy Hinckley.
When John Hinckley tried to kill Ronald Reagan for the
next I don't know, Harlan Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island or
whatever it was, they changed the name of the professor
(07:47):
to Hinkele for that reason or that very reason. Yeah,
And I think about that when these things come up.
So instead of saying it's a well being, we're checking
on their well being.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Right, it's no longer welfare check. Yeah. So the verbiage changes,
you know, day in and day out, and it's everybody
likes to engineer language, but you know, the one thing
you can't engineer is outcomes. I think relative to the
consequences of living with a dead body, and I was thinking,
you know, you and I both and please, you know,
(08:21):
don't misconstrue what I'm saying here. I am not comparing
our sons to this individual. What I'm doing is comparing
teenage boys. You and I both have had the adventure
of living in a household raising teenage boys, and teenage
(08:41):
boys do really stupid things. Not the most the world,
yeah they're not. And I were one at one point
in time, and I do remember doing really stupid things.
And I got to thinking about this kid who is
is actually living in this environment with these two individuals,
(09:04):
one of whom is his own mother, the other his stepfather,
And I'm thinking, did they did he have like a
brain freeze, you know, at that moment time where it's
like I I have done this and now I don't
know where to go, and I really wonder many times
(09:27):
if And it's not that doesn't necessarily just apply to
teenage boys. I think it applies to a lot of
perpetrators out there, because we see it, Dave. I mean,
you know, every week we cover cases and we see
these individuals that make really stupid, you know, mistakes along
the way. If you want to call it a mistake.
(09:48):
It's not like they're following their taxes and they've you know,
mis entered something. It's it's actually a they didn't think
the process through. I think it's really easy, you know.
I think that when you react, and all of us
have reacted in anger to things many times. I know
I have, I'm chief amongst sinners. And then you go back,
(10:13):
you have a quiet moment or two, and you sit
back and you shake your head and you say, I'm
such an idiot. Why did I say that? Why did
I do that? I know that there are going to
be consequences for this, and I'm just going to have
to sit down and take it, you know. And I
wonder many times about these individuals that perpetrate crimes and
(10:35):
they just kind of freeze and they can't move move
beyond that to make some better decision about how they're
going to handle something.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
You know. The headline on this story, yeah, I was
looking at several because a seventeen year old killing his
mother and stepfather is a that's a big deal. That's
a big story. But the headline's on this one. It's Wisconsin.
Tine killed mother and stepfather and lived with dot dot
dot teen lived with bodies of mom and stepfather after
(11:10):
killing them. Dot dot dot teen killed mom and stepdad,
then lived with bodies for dot dot dot. It's all
about oh in this one. I love this one. Teen
charged with killing parents lived with rotting corpses dot dot dot.
That's what we're actually doing today is getting to the
(11:30):
most explosive ending. It's not bad enough that the guy
killed his parents at seventeen years old, but now the
real headline, the real shock is he didn't get rid
of the bodies. He didn't chop them up and try
to get rid of them like so many we've had recently.
He's got two dead bodies in different parts of the house, Joe,
and basically he threw blankets over the top of them.
(11:52):
So I'm wondering, very and I know we'll get to
this right, right, But how long does it take before
or the body start to decompose and give off this
odor of death? And that's what this seventeen year old
is living with. I can't imagine that it's going to
(12:13):
be a pleasant thing to live in.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
By the end of day two, he would have he
would have had an odor in the air. I can
almost I can almost guarantee that. So you're talking about
if that's the case, if that's our benchmark for starting
from I'm not talking about the appearance of post warm
changes and decompositional changes. I'm talking about that that smell.
(12:41):
It's like a phantom that comes out of the dark
and kind of slaps you in the face the first
time you smell it. We would be talking about the
line's share of the time that he was living in
this home. He would have smelt this, and he made
no effort to take them out into the yard or
(13:01):
disposed of them in the basement, or even removed them
to the attic. Do you remember the case that we
had which, by the way, that reminds me did do
follow up on this? The case from from was it
in gross Point? It was? It was in Detroit the
wealthy surgeon that was found wrapped up in his attic.
(13:23):
Do you remember that case? And he had been killed,
and they have arrested somebody with that. But you know,
even in that case, the perpetrator, to the best of
my knowledge, didn't hang around, but they still wrapped the
body up, took the body into a sequestered area in
the attic, and put him up there. Well, that guy
would have been smelling, you know, pretty quickly. These bodies,
(13:45):
and particularly the mother, and this is and we can
dive into this a little bit more, but the mother
had had multiple layers placed upon her. And we've talked
about this before. When you layer a body like that,
that's essentially like placing an item in a crock pot. Uh,
(14:10):
it's the heat that's being given off, you know, just
just as a result the heat that is generated. And
there is a certain amount of heat that is generated
from cellular decay where you have the cells, the actual
cells and our bodies begin to break down and kind
of leach out there. There is a certain amount of
(14:33):
heat that is given off in that process. Well, it's
further exacerbated by doing these lay the layers like this,
and so the body is slowly kind of rendering down
throughout the entire period, and you can actually think of
it as almost like a tenderizing moment. So the body
at a cellular level is that's expedited as a result
(14:54):
of this this layering of blankets all on top of
the body. So when you finally pull back these blankets,
it's going to be something that is so disgusting and
so insulting to your senses. But you know, there's a
lot to be said about the nature of a scene
(15:15):
like this, particularly when you consider that the victims are
those individuals that held the title of parents. And how
much even more so when one of the victims has
been so brutalized at the hands of her son and
(15:37):
then left to right in the floor of their home
without any consideration or desecration of her remain So, brother Dave,
(16:02):
you mentioned that, you know, our our favorite term welfare
check or what's the new term now being check? The
well being check? Yeah, the wellbeing Yeah, the well being
check had been requested on February the twenty eighth of
(16:25):
twenty twenty five. And this isn't actually in Waukeshaw, Wisconsin.
And what kind of prompted this, you know, kind of
moving for it was?
Speaker 2 (16:37):
There were two things. It was a two pronged thing. One,
you have a student who has a perfect record for
attendance and and his name is Nikiki nik Kiki Nikita
Cassop and he goes by the name Nikki Nicki had
perfect attendants and all of a sudden he misses two
(17:01):
weeks out of school, that was from the school standpoint.
They're like, hey, something's wrong, and they're trying to call
the house. They're not getting anybody on the phone. So
finally the school resource officer he calls the police and says,
we need to do a well being check. We've got
a student. He hasn't been here. We can't get in
touch with anybody on our records. Well. At the same time,
(17:21):
while that is happening, on the twenty eighth of February,
the stepfather's mom, Donald Mayer's mother, Dorothy, she actually calls
and asks for a well being check because she hasn't
talked to Donald in a couple of weeks. And oh,
(17:42):
I need to add something and I apologize for missing this.
Speaker 1 (17:44):
Hush, that's okay.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
There were a couple of instances of odd text messages
being received. One in particular was Donald Mayor the stepfather.
His boss, his supervisor at work, had gotten text messages
from him during the course of the time leading up
(18:07):
to February twenty eighth, and one of them was I'm
still sick, going to need another week And it wasn't
normal for him to text in that manner, And one
of the text messages has said I'm sick and I
can't talk, so I otherwise I would call you, but
I have to text I can't talk. So as adults,
(18:27):
we know, what are the odds of this happening. You know,
this is not something in our lifetime we have ever
really heard of. It happens on sitcoms, you know, and
things like that, but not in real life. And so
those that text message was one and the other one
was at the school, So they had some suspicious meanderings
going on with these text messages. But either way you
look at it. On February twenty eighth, the police show up,
(18:49):
and that's when this case hits the media because when
they first walk in, and Joe, this is something that
I've asked you before, and I wonder if there's a
difference in communities and towns, county, states and things like
that on when you're doing a well being check. As
(19:11):
an officer, you walk in, you know you're not getting
anybody at the door, you're not getting anybody on the phone,
and you know you're looking for ways to get inside
the house, you know, to see in what's going on
in there. And when they do, when police do finally
get inside, they find a body, right, They don't find
(19:32):
a body sitting out in front. What they do is
in the garage. They find the mother's BMW is in
the garage, but the father's stepfather's VW atlas is not
in the garage. There's no dog. They have a dog
named Toby. Toby's not there either. But they do find
(19:53):
miss Cassab. What is her name to I apologize to that, Tachiana, Yeah,
Tatiana Cassab. They find her body in a hallway adjacent
to the kitchen, and it's covered in blankets, towels, things
like that. And I'm wondering, Joe, when police see that,
they have to determine that there's Oh, by the way,
(20:15):
when they got there, they could when they opened the door,
they smelled death. That's what they smelled this And so
it's the twenty eighth of February in Wisconsin and they
smelled death. Now when they walk in, the police find
this area in the hallway that it's got clothes and
(20:36):
things piled up, blankets and what have you. But there's
a body underneath. I'm going to guess you could pretty
much tell based on things happening in that general vicinity
of a body is there because it's deteriorating enough that
they smelled it.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Right, Yeah, well you'd have to confirm. And these are
excellent questions. And this is actually the type of thing
that that we teach each at Jack State with my students.
And I'll let me just kind of break it down
to you this way.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
I need you to because I'm serious. Well, Joe, I've
been on scenes where there were bodies and things, okay,
but I'm not the officials. I'm there after the fact
as a journalist usually you know, or a family member,
And so I was confused as to what would be
the first step. I mean, even if you're the police officer,
how far do they have to go? Because do they
(21:27):
call you first, say I think we got a dead body.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Or well, they will call still generally call. What will
happen is the call will go out. And by the way,
Wisconsin is a corner state, so they still have corners
in Wisconsin, and you know, it is one of those
states that still elects a county corner and I've met
some of them over the years. They're fine people. They
go through pretty extensive training, but you know, it's like
(21:52):
anything else in life, you don't know what you're going
to get from county to county, but the corner is
somebody that you have to rely on in a set
of circumstances like this. What the Uniform Division would do
is that once they determined that they at least have
this one body. First off, just because you smell something
(22:15):
does not necessarily mean that it is human. Remember you
talked about Toby the missing dog. Well, dog's going to
give off a foul oat or two. It would appear
that Tatiana. I've seen the images of her. She's not
a very big person. As a matter of fact, there's
one great family image of her with their son and
(22:39):
the stepdad and they're standing there and you know, both
these guys tower over her. You know, she's tiny. So
you would have to confirm that you do in fact
have a human body. You would do as little as
you possibly could to disrupt those layers, because Dave, every
(23:02):
strata of garment, blanket, I don't know, tablecloth, towel, each
one of those has evidentiary value. The reason it does
is that if you believe this is a homicide, which
(23:23):
remember our working assumption that not some, but all deaths,
until proven otherwise, are in fact homicides. Each thing that
the perpetrator, and you have to assume that it's the
perpetrator that covered the bodies, has put their hands on
each one of these layers. So each layer has evidentiary
(23:44):
value to it. Once the police had very and I'm
talking about the uniform division. Once the uniform division, and
hopefully there was a supervisor out there. That supervisor would
look at anybody in a uniform in that house. Stop
what you're doing. Do turn around, exit out through this door.
(24:05):
No other doors. Don't touch anything else. Pay attention to
where you put your feet, be fully aware of your surroundings.
Get out of this house. We're shutting the door behind us.
We're calling CID Criminal Investigation Division, crimes against persons. Because
not all police departments have a homicide division. The guys
(24:30):
that work in crimes against persons will handle rate assault,
AG assault, they'll handle homicides. It all kind of gets
lumped in together. You go to a bigger department and
they'll have specific homicide investigators, but you're going to call
(24:51):
CID and you'll say, get CID in route out here.
You'll also say we're going to have to get forensics
en route, which means the crime scene unit is going
to come out and oh, by the way, get the
corner and the rout as well. But before any of
those people can enter the house, you're going to have
to go to a magistrate. The sea the detective will
(25:14):
they will go to the magistrate that's on duty or
the judge, and they'll say, look, we've we've got to
get a search warrant. We've got a lady laying in
a hallway covered by all manner of clothing and you know,
blankets and everything else, and it looks like we've got
a homicide. Because you don't want to You do not
(25:38):
want to go into that house and start processing that
scene and not have all of your bases covered, because
anything that you find in that house that does not
have and I'm talking about absent a warrant, anything you
find in that house like that's in a hit in space. Say,
(26:00):
if you if you just kind of arbitrarily walk over
and open a closet, you can open a closet door
if you think there might be a body in there,
maybe you see fluid leaking out from under the door,
maybe it's blood which you think is blood. You can
open the closet. But if you get in that closet,
you start digging around, you find some kind of valuable
piece of evidence. Guess what, Without a warrant, there's a
(26:23):
high probability that whatever you find in that closet, it
could be a kilo of cocaine, can be excluded it.
So you have to be very very careful. That's why
and a lot of people scratch their heads, why do
you need a warrant? I mean, this is this might
this is probably a homicide. That's all the more reason
(26:44):
that you want to warrant because you're going to be
backstopped by that legally, and that way you can do
and it's not going to hurt anything for you. If
you secure the seing, then you're there's nothing, there's no
harm that's going to come. And there let me tell
you one other thing. In this case, they were able
(27:06):
to find mom and they were able to find stepdad,
but they couldn't find the dog, they couldn't find the car,
and they can't find the son. Well, there's two parts,
two major parts of this investigation. You've got the bodies
(27:28):
in the house which appear to be homicide. You know,
the victims of homicide. And then you've got a son
that's vanished and who's seventeen. By the way, he's a kid,
and the car is missing. You don't know that he
hasn't been kidnapped. You don't know that you know he's
(27:49):
being held somewhere. You also don't know if maybe he's
a suspect. I mean, for me, being the jaded old investigator,
I am he's at the top of the list. I
got to tell you that. But your other part of
the investigation is find this kid and find him immediately,
because the further away he gets, there's a higher probability
(28:12):
that evidence can be destroyed or he might escape capture.
You do, he's somebody you do want to talk to
because he is domiciled at this location. You got two
dead bodies and he's missing, and one of the family
cars is missing. So you've got to do everything that
you can to secure the scene so that CID can
(28:35):
get out there in the corner and everybody. And oh,
the other part of this is you got to track
this kid now, and there's no you don't need a
warrant for that necessarily. You don't need a warrant to
go to the school and maybe talk to the principal
the counselors, and that would be a separate set of
investigators that are going to go out and do that,
and you're going to be handling this. There will be
(28:56):
one lead investigator that'll be in charge of everything, and
they'll be the point of contact for the DA as well,
and they'll kind of overlord the whole investigation, all right,
finding him and understanding what's going on the seeing and
then once you get that kind of steadied, get the
(29:19):
ship steadied, then you can begin to process the scene
after you get that warrant, Because Dave, this is going
to be a highly complex situation that you're walking into
because you have no idea. You've got a decomposing to
decomposing human remains here, you have no idea what the
(29:41):
cause of death is, and you've got to kind of
narrow that down as quickly as you possibly can, first off,
to see if you're actually dealing with a homicide or
maybe something different. There's probably no greater iconic figure in
(30:14):
motion picture history when it comes to playing the cop
against the system than the character of Dirty Harry played
by Clint Eastwood. And he famously said, and I think
that It was actually in the first, the first Dirty
Harry movie, which is called Dirty Harry, that the forty
(30:38):
four magnum was the most powerful handgun in the world.
That's no longer true. There are other ones that are
more powerful now, but yet it's still formidable. But it's
not really practical, all right. It's a huge weapon. It
was never practical really for anybody to carry. But one
weapon that is not quite as powerful but is revered
(31:03):
is three point fifty seven magnum. And three fifty seven
magnum is an interesting weapon in the sense that it
it is zero point three point five seven caliber in
a magnum load, which means that you've got this chunk
of lead in the end of a bullet alive round
(31:28):
and you've got a magnum load of propellant in here.
So you've got this thing driving it down the muzzle
of this weapon, and when it slams into anybody, it's
like being hit with a sledgehammer. Very powerful, and interestingly enough,
(31:48):
in our case today that we're discussing, Dave mister Mayor,
the stepfather of this young man, had recently purchased a
three point fifty Evan magnum and guess what it's missing.
It's missing from. Not only is the car missing, Toby,
the dog is missing, the teen is missing, the reach
(32:11):
is recently purchased three point fifty seven magnum is missing
as well.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Now we've got, as we mentioned before, we actually have
a little bit of a time frame between the last
time anyone recalls hearing from Donald Mayor or Tatiana Cassop
and her son attending school. And we also know that
when police arrive, they find her body under a bunch
(32:38):
of clothing. Now what they've told us, Joe, is that
they've got multiple gunshot wounds to her and Donald Mayer
was found in an office in the home.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
By the way.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
This is a three thousand square foot home, four bedroom,
two and a half back. Big, I had some picture.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
I urge anybody out there go take a look at
the picture.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Interrupt you now, buddy, beautiful house, nice neighborhoo. And again
you know the dog is missing, and so is the
VW Atlas that is owned by Donald Mayer. Anyway, police
get there and they find her in the hallway. That's
when they walk back out. Let's get the search warrant.
They come back. Now they know they don't have the sun,
and they don't have a car, and they don't have
(33:19):
a dog. So those three things are things they're looking
for right now. They find Donald Mayer in his office
in an office in the house, and he's been shot
once in the back of the head with that three
point fifty seven magnet. Well, I don't know how soon
they figure that out, but based on the wound as
it's described, But as they're trying to figure everything out,
(33:40):
Joe and I'm I asked you early on about the smell,
how long would it take before the smell hit Because
we are dealing with a number of days here between
the time that they the police believe the killings took
place and the day they were the body's found. But
(34:01):
we have a seventeen year old who is not in
the home. Dead, cars missing, dogs missing, and so they
put out they're doing a they're on scene at the house,
they're examining the bodies, and we got to find this kid,
find that car, look for this kid, find the dog.
So anymore, we have these license plate readers, they're everywhere.
(34:22):
We got surveillance cameras, they're everywhere. It's amazing. If you
haven't kept up with the Times friends, you are being
tracked all day. Every day they were able to find
they were able to find Nicki, and he was not
near home. They found Niki the same day they found
the body's show. They find Nicki eight hundred and fifty
(34:45):
miles away from home. The same day they find the bodies.
They find him at eleven twenty at night. And by
the way, he's not dead. Obviously, we're doing the show
about the son killing his mom and his stepfather, but
I wanted to go back to the house. Now. Inside
that house, they find that his mother has been shot
(35:05):
multiple times. Yep, there's four wounds caused by three shots. Now.
One of the wounds was to her right hand. Yes,
and I was wondering, because you've got two shots to
the abdomen. One to the neck. Was the wound in
her right hand caused by her a defensive move, her
putting her arm up.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
It could be you could also have with the abdominal
wound as well. And I've had this happen and it's
kind of a it's an odd it's an odd thing
to see, but it does happen. You will have a
and I don't. They have not released the autopsy report
on the case. But you can have a situation where say,
(35:47):
for instance, someone is turning and I'm talking about the victim. Okay,
let's say the victim is kind of rotating at the
waist and now the shooter is obliquely oriented to the
so they're on the side. I've had cases where in
the abdomen, in particular, where it's kind of flabby, you
can have around that initially enters kind of laterally okay,
(36:14):
goes through exits and re enters the body, and you
can yeah, and this happens with some frequency. It's not
like if you saw it in the morgue, you wouldn't say, Wow,
what a finding, because it happens more than you know.
You know, people people see old Western movies and I
(36:34):
guess even movies today where people are shot and it's
they people many times appear to be static when they're shot.
If you know that you have a weapon pointed at
you and they're firing, or you sense that they're going
to fire, people will flinch, they'll turn. Nobody's going to
stand still most of the time to be shot. They're
(36:56):
going to react to the site. And can you imagine
with a three point fifty seven magnum. If she sees
this thing, the muzzle on this thing is it's going
to look like, you know, you're looking down inside of
a peach basket. It's that big. Of course it's not,
but it's it's rather imposing. Well, she's going to react
to that. Now, back to what she said. Can she
(37:19):
be shot through the hand. Let's say that she raises
her hand to her neck in where the palm is out. Okay, yes,
you can have around that will go through and through.
It's called a throw and through wound. It would pass
through the palm of the hand or through the fingers,
out through the back of the hand, and then back
(37:40):
in to the neck. That can happen as well. And
those injuries are rather interesting because let's just say, for instance,
and we don't know this for a fact, but let's
just say, for instance, everybody at home kind of feel
the palm of your hand right now, and you can
feel the bony structures within your head hand. Okay, Well,
(38:02):
if you're shot through your hand, that projectile, that lead
core projectile that is passing through the palm of your hand,
there's a high probability it's going to strike bone. When
it strikes bone, there's going to be potentially deformation to
the round. So when it exits out of the hand,
(38:22):
it enters the hand, strikes bone, there's a wind track
through the hand exits. The bullet is not going to
be pristine, Okay, when it comes out, it's going to
be oddly shaped and you'll get kind of like in
the neck, you'll get these kind of weird looking injuries
where you have and it's what is referred to as
we use a term for it, it's called an intermediate target.
(38:45):
And it doesn't have to be a body part, like
if somebody is shot through a wall or shot through
a piece of glass, or shot through the door of
a car. The bullet has changed forever. The projectile has
changed because it becomes shredded, it becomes even more jagged,
so we get these really nasty looking wounds.
Speaker 2 (39:04):
And so if they're in exacting November twenty second, nineteen
sixty three in Dallas, Texas, ideally there and Governor Connolly
was shot through the wrist and everything else, and it
was a pristine bullet that landed next to his thigh
on the gurney exactly.
Speaker 1 (39:18):
And again, the pristine bullet theory and of course that's
it's utter nonsense.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
I had to throw it in there.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Sorry, well, I'm glad that you did, particularly in the
wake of everything that we're seeing. Now we need to
do another episode, I think anyway.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Thank You're right? All right?
Speaker 1 (39:33):
So yeah, you have you have this and and then
she's got multiple gunshot wounds. But she's got multiple gunshot wounds.
And this is really interesting. Mister Mayor has got one.
And I got to tell you, Dave, this goes back
to the old the old adage theory or you know,
(39:56):
the way we view these things. Why do you need
to take a three point fifty seven magnum and shoot
this diminutive woman multiple times? Can you explain? And I'm
this is hypothetical. Can you explain that to me? Most
(40:17):
people would look at this. I think behaviors might look
at it and say, well, this borders on overkill. It
borders on overkill.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
And that's where Joe as I was looking at this
in my mind, because you know, you started off the
show talking about being around bodies, you know, and over
a period of time you can see different types of
bodies in different stages of decomp what have you. Yeah,
when I do stories even now, I still have that
(40:48):
hope when a child does something, or when a parent
does something that the victim doesn't know that the victim.
In the case of mister Mary, I'm thinking, Okay, he
was shot in the back of the head with the
fifty seven magnum. I'm hoping it was by surprise that
he never knew it was coming. Boom, he's gone. I'm
guessing if that were to happen now, the mom knows
(41:08):
something bad is happening and she's coming, and that's why
she gets shot multiple.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
Times, and she's in a different area of.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
The house, right in the hallway. And then my thing is,
I hate to think that the last thing this mother
knew was that her son was doing this horrific thing allegedly.
But I want to go quickly to when the police
arrived and we have both the bodies were covered with
different things, and you covered how that has to be unlayered.
(41:36):
When the bodies are taken out of the home. Are
they taken up as a lump with the blankets, covers,
or whatever's on them, or are those removed and the
bodies are placed in a bag? How are they transported
so they don't lose all the possible forensic evidence in there.
Speaker 1 (41:52):
I got to tell you, in a case like this
where you've got loose blankets, if it were me, I
would document let's just take Mom's body. I would document
her body so well, or the location where she is seen, okay,
(42:13):
or reviewed here at sight. I would go into pains,
taking detail about every aspect of this. And because I
don't want to lose anything or transfer anything to the
outer layers of the blankets that might be contained therein
because you're going to run that risk and a body back.
(42:35):
I'm not going to say it's like a tumble dryer,
but you can have things that are mixed up in
there as the body is bouncing down the road. I
would take each layer off if it's not secured, if
the say the perpetraary hadn't wrapped it with anything. If
you're talking about wrapping a body, uh this cocooned in blankets,
(42:55):
that's a different story. But if you've got them just
laying I'm going to take up each individual blanket one
by one, put it in a separate paper container, seal
it up, label it, and it's going to go in individually.
It's not going to accompany the body. It's going to
(43:16):
go with the crime scene tech back to their repository
so it can make it out to the state crime lab.
And I'm talking about layer if I've got look, and
I don't know that this is the case, but let's
just say I'll pick an arbitrary number. Let's just say
we've got twelve layers. You're getting twelve backs from me. Okay,
(43:38):
you get twelve backs. Yeah, and I want each one
of them to be examined. And here's one more thing
that you got to think about. Was she covered in
blankets and then shot? Or was she shot and then
covered in blankets? And you say, well, got that that's
kind of obvious. No, there's nothing obvious in depth investigation,
(44:03):
you know your assumption. You have to consider all possibilities,
and it gets very complex. I mean, can you imagine
how much more complex this would be if he I
don't know, some weird, bizarre set of circumstances happened and
he tackles mom. He puts blankets all on the top
of him because he's seen a movie that thinks it's
going to muffle the sound. He starts firing through multiple
(44:25):
layers of blankets into her body. Well, that's even going
to make the rounds more deformed. You're going to get
fiber evidence. I've actually recovered bullets projectiles from bodies, Dave
that had bits of fiber twisted up in jagged edges
of the projectile that are embedded in the body because
it passed through. Again, one of these intermediate targets went
(44:47):
into the body and then it's there. I found wood
embedded in bodies that you know where you've got like
particle board, where you've got rounds that pass through particle
board and that kind of splinter and goes into a body.
There's all manner of things, and it tells it tells
a very specific story about this. But David, you know,
(45:09):
I'd I'd be very curious to understand. I think with
the stepfather in particular, you had mentioned that you were
hoping that he didn't see it coming. I hope that
he didn't either, to be honest with you, but I'm
one of the things they would have to figure out
with him. I think particularly this is kind of curious.
(45:31):
This is this sounds like a classic execution style killing.
I'd like to know if they were able to determine
a range of fire if the muzzle was placed directly
against the back of his head. This kid just walked
up the guy you said, he's in his office, maybe
you see it in a chair. He didn't know what
(45:52):
was coming, walks up behind him, pops him, you know,
right in the head. Or did he say, gee, stepdad,
you know, I'd really like to handle that new three
fifty seven magnum that you bought. Can can I see it?
And he hands it over to him and things loaded,
and he looks at him and shoots him in the face,
you know, because you say, or shoots him in the
head while he's not suspecting that. You know, it can
(46:17):
go either number of ways. You know, how did the
kid know that the weapon was in the house? How
do you get access to it? Okay, then with mom,
where were her wounds oriented? And what range of fire
would there be? Because you're going to have with three
fifty seven magnum in particular, it's a magnum round, so
you're talking about a lot of propellant, Dave, and you
(46:40):
will have stippling. You know that where this gets embedded
into into the skin and onto the clothing. We can
determine range of fire based upon how far out it's
spread on the remains are on the clothing, and that
gives us an idea, and all of a sudden, you know,
(47:01):
the focus on stories becoming a little bit tighter now,
you know, once you kind of establish the physical relationship
between the muzzle of that weapon being held allegedly by
a son and the recipients of the rounds that you know,
these bodies that the rounds were fired into.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
You know, when they actually were able to get to
the sun, Yeah, and have I mentioned earlier he was
eight hundred plus miles away. They used a number of
different things, surveillance cameras to cell phones. When they did
track him the sun, they found him, Like I said,
you found the bodies early in the day, you know,
with their well being calls, and this is now twelve
(47:41):
hours later and they already got him, you know, eight
hundred plus miles away. They were able to track this
his behavior using his parents' credit cards and things like that,
starting on February twelfth, all the way through the twenty eighth.
The gun, the three fifty seven magnum matching the description
of donald marriage gun that he had just bought, is
(48:01):
found in the floorboard of the well when they caught
Nikki driving the VW Atlas owned by his stepfather. That's
who they caught him driving his car. And the three
fifty seven magnum is on the floorboard along with unspent
and spent shell casings. Yeah, and you have bullets in
there and spent shells. Do you think he picked them
(48:23):
up in the house and left with him?
Speaker 1 (48:24):
I don't know, No, no, no, because three fifty seven
magnums of revolver. Okay, so the gun, oh yeah, and
he probably dumped them. Which when you open up the
gate on a revolver and and the cylinder spins out,
because it I say spin out, you press it out.
There's an ejection rod on the thing. So you press
(48:47):
the ejection rod and all of those spent well anywhereund
that's in there. It doesn't matter ifest live or spent
are going to drop out. Now here's here's the interesting thing.
Can we go back to the mom just one second. Wow,
how many injuries did you say that she had sustained?
Speaker 2 (49:02):
And they think three gunshot wounds? Four injuries?
Speaker 1 (49:06):
Okay, so she's got three gunshot wounds, four injuries. Mister
Mayer has got a single gunshot wound. Okay, so three
fifty seven magnums. These revolvers can come in in a
(49:28):
configuration to hold five rounds in cylinder or six. Now,
just so we all understand, because I know I'm going
to get blowback on this. There is a semi automatic
three fifty seven out there. It does exist, but the
line share people do not possess these. Most of these
platforms with three fifty seven magnums are revolvers. So if
(49:52):
it's a semi automatic, like you had said, you know,
did he pick up the rounds at the house or
the spent casings, then yeah, if it's a semi automatic.
But my suspicion is is that traditionally the three fifty
seven magnum is something that you have in a revolver configuration.
And I actually owned one or was issued one at
(50:14):
one point in time years ago. That was a cult lawman.
I loved that weapon. It was a actual a snubnose
weapon and it was only five shots. The cylinder only
held five rounds, but you can have the more robust
and for years, cops there were some cops that still
(50:35):
carried thirty eight specials, but you had those that actually
opted for a three point fifty seven magnum. This is
before the days of police officers being issued semi automatic handguns,
you know, with the Barrettas and the glocks and you
know every six and all these other brands that are
out there now. There were some police officers that prefer
(50:58):
the three fifty seven because they you that the energy
they were going to put on target if they had
to use this thing was going to be substantially more
significant than the thirty eight special, all right. They knew
that it would have more power to it. That's originally
everything that we do in firearms, and this is kind
of interesting, most in the civilian world, even in policing,
(51:21):
has its origins in the military. You go all the
way back to the turn of the twentieth century, from
you know, from the late eighteen hundreds, before the invention
of the nineteen eleven forty five caliber side arm that
our military carried. Our officers and NCOs used to carry
(51:43):
thirty eight specials, and those rounds were insufficient, We'll put
it to you that way. That's why they you know,
when they could get up to a forty five caliber
semi automatic handgun, they went to it because again it
was like, you know, it's getting hit with a forty five,
(52:03):
which is even more robust than three point fifty seven magnum,
is like getting head with a sledgehammer.
Speaker 2 (52:09):
So that's what we've got, that kid using that on
his stepdead in the back of the head. All right,
But let me go back to something else, Joe. Because
the bodies were so decomposed that they could not be identified. Now,
how is that in the space of two weeks time
inside of a home, out of the elements, How is
that a thing I would have thought that. Granted I
(52:29):
understand odor, I understand that and decomposition, but talking about
two bodies inside of a home decomposing at such a
rate that they could not be identified in two weeks time.
Speaker 1 (52:40):
Well, we're talking about Wisconsin. We're talking about the wintertime.
And guess what you got going on in the house.
You're running the heat, baby, And so there's constant heat.
And for everyone that has to fight this fight that
lives in areas where it turns off cold. You know,
our friends down to Florida might not have to deal
with this too much, but where it's always having to
(53:02):
fight that fight, that heater is always competing with the
external temperature, and you know it's you know, if you've
got a drafty house or whatever, thermostat is going to
indicate that, you know, you've got the temperatures decreasing, so
it's going to kick back on. So it's always in
a state of having warmth. And also here's here's the thing.
(53:24):
You know, you're the the heat in a house varies
from location to location. I mean, that kind of makes sense.
But let's just say you're talking about Mom's body being
in the hallway where she's laying next to a vent,
and on top of that, she's got these layers of
fabric that are lying on top of her. That's going
(53:46):
to further exacerbate. There are actually cases out there day
where you will have people that have been homicide victims
in homes where because of the location within the structure,
one body decomposes quicker than the other body because of
(54:07):
the relative position to like heating vents or cooling cooling.
It can work conversely as well. We saw this not
exactly the same thing, but we saw with Gene Hackman,
which you and I have talked about extensively, where Betsy's
body was found. They talked about her being mummified. But
(54:27):
you know, mister Hackman had probably walked through that house
for five days I think, you know, before he finally
succumbed to you know, and of course he had advanced Alzheimer's.
But yeah, you think about just even the variation in
the location within a structure can impact the rate at
which bodies decompose. The fact that this kid stayed in
(54:49):
this house for as long as he did, the fact
that he allegedly tried to feign the still living existence
of his parents through text messages and these sorts of things.
The fact that he ran up almost ten thousand dollars
(55:14):
in the use of credit cards and debit cards, and
the fact that he stole that car and ran off
with it. There's more to be revealed in this case,
I can tell you that. But when you've got a
young man who's seventeen years old, who allegedly executes both
of his parents and in dwells a house with their
(55:39):
rotting corpses for this long, these still waters run very
very deep. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is body
Backs
Host
Nancy Grace
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