Burned, Fragmented, and Submerged: Murder Through Forensic Brilliance

a man retrieves the burned remains of someone who may be his brother but how can he really be sure under the rubble of a burned down house investigators find the shattered remnants of a body [Music] can they piece together what happened a scientist must identify a woman from scraps of burned bones weighing less than three paper clips will he be up to the challenge the fate of a murder investigation hangs in the balance for centuries killers have relied on fire to conceal their crimes but today science is catching up with them the consuming flames are powerless to destroy the burning evidence [Music] fire medieval alchemists saw it as a tool of transformation used correctly it could turn dull led into gleaming gold fire does transform but not in the way the alchemists hope it is a process called oxidation the speedy marriage of convenience between oxygen and another substance the union creates new compounds like carbon and water while releasing enormous amounts of energy in the form of heat and light all fires need an initiator a spark to get them going it's a little boost of energy that sets off the chain reaction then the fire burns until there's nothing left to burn in Ohio in 1994 Danny King started a fire initiating a chain of events that transformed his entire world King had a fiery relationship with his live-in girlfriend Marilyn Garland they had been together on and off for years and had a three-year-old child but one March night things spun horribly out of control Danny Kings shot and killed Marilyn Garland [Music] then he tried to hide every trace of his crime he set the body of fire and kept it burning in a metal drum for two days occasionally he'd stir the brittle bones with a stick burning them until they would burn no more he took what was left and smashed it into little pieces with a hammer [Music] he gathered the remains and dumped them in the river he may have thought that without a body there could be no proof of murder [Music] then he ditched the drum behind a warehouse in town a place where similar drums stood certain he had gotten away with his crime Danny King waited six days before he called the police to report garland as a missing person lieutenant ray Todd worked on the case Danny King reported Maryland missing on the 26th okay and said that she'd been gone for a week well it wasn't unusual for Maryland to just take off for a few days at a time and go party in his office lieutenant Todd reviewed Kings missing-persons report despite Garland's reputation he had to take it seriously he was joined on the case by detective Gregory maca maca found that Garland's family was taking the disappearance very seriously we talked to other family members getting conflicting stories some saying there's this is not her this was her years ago when she was wild and free but now she had a little boy she wouldn't do this she wouldn't leave the little boy behind something's wrong they didn't believe that she just up and packed up and left they actually believed it's something that happened to her detective mecco began investigating more thoroughly it was standard procedure to interview the person who filed the report so they called in Danny King for questioning he's a boyfriend he's going to be a suspect and our thinking was let's eliminate him immediately that wasn't how it worked out the interview took an unexpected turn after that interview process we asked him if he would be willing to take a polygraph lie-detector test and he kind of hedged on it at first so it just threw red flags they arranged the test for the next day and dismissed King King should have gone home but he didn't he went to a bar concerned about the polygraph and began drinking he met a drinking buddy there and confided that he was worried about the test the more he drank the more he talked soon he confessed to killing Garland his friend could tell King was serious he felt he had no choice but to go to the police he proceeded to tell me that he just left the bar where him and Danny King were drinking for a couple of hours and that Danny King had confessed to him now the police had three facts to go on a missing woman a secondhand barroom confession and a suspect who was nervous about a polygraph test in terms of evidence it was shaky at best but detective Macko and lieutenant Todd felt it was enough to arrest King on suspicion of murder King lived with a small child and a large dog so the police felt uneasy about arresting him at his house they decided to wait it out and apprehend him in the next morning [Music] they had no idea how violent he might be but if he did commit this crime they knew they were dealing with a dangerous man police called in the SWAT team for backup as king went off to work they forced his truck into a roadblock and made their move [Music] [Music] after King was safely in custody the police began to build their case for that they needed more evidence they obtained a search warrant and inspected Kings house but they found nothing incriminating they had divers searched the river and the canal for remains they came up dry without a body a weapon or any other evidence against him lieutenant Todd didn't have a case and Danny King would go free if King truly did try to destroy the evidence in a metal drum they reasoned the drum must be around somewhere but all they had was a burned patch of grass the police placed an ad in the paper to find the drum soon after the ad ran police received a call from a local businessman one of his employees noticed a suspicious-looking barrel behind their warehouse lieutenant Todd went out to inspected you could see some debris inside the bottom reached in and picked up what I believed to be was a bone friend when I saw that I just knew that this was the barrel that was used to burn the body Todd shook the drum to remove more debris clinging to its interior out came nails scraps of wire some fabric and a seedpod there's one seed in this vial here and this was found in the barrel okay we didn't know where it may have come from later we had it identified as a Catawba seed it's kind of an unusual tree and there's not that many in the area and there is a catalpa tree at 125 Canal Street which is where the murder took place and where Danny burned Marilyn's body in the barrel but potentially the most damning evidence pulled from the drum was also the smallest tiny shards of bone if Todd could prove they were the victims he'd have a case he sent them to the coroner for analysis the coroner was fairly sure the bones were human however he wanted them looked at by a top forensic anthropologist okay he contacted Doug's owlsley of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC Asli has built an international reputation by identifying human remains this wasn't the first time house Lee had worked with the Summit County coroner's office a few years earlier he helped them analyze the remains of Jeffrey Dahmer's first victim we've had cases where they involve dismemberment where they will dismembered parts of the body and then put them in different locations we've had cases where they've used acids and corrosives and disfigurement of the body to try and make it difficult to say who that person is they all tell you something about the individual behind that process and in the same sense they all leave different kinds of evidence in the case of Maryland garland Osley was literally scraping the bottom of the barrel the evidence he had to work with consisted of 2.9 grams of bone fragments about the weight of three paper clips he also had three tiny shards of tooth enamel all had been on fire for two days and were shrunken and distorted by the process could house Lee make sense of the paltry slivers forensic scientist Doug Owsley faced many challenges in his work on the Maryland garland murder the first was confirming whether the bone fragments from the metal drum were human in this instance we got really lucky because one of the fragments that was preserved with his finger bone and if you think about it different animals out there have very distinctive foot and hand bone structure think of a hoof for instance circle or what the foot of a dog looks like it's very different than what we see in the human and we've got not a complete bone but actually just half of it but it's enough of us it's enough of the bone for us to actually be able to look at that and say well that's human morphology I was Lee's next task was more daunting could he tell if these were the remains of Maryland garland with burning it takes maybe more time to analyze it and you really have to know exactly what you're looking for but you still with the fragments of the bone male skeletons tend to be bigger females tend on average to be smaller and so how it is burned and the size that is the result of that process is still going to tell you often something about sex will still tell you something about age and so it may make the identification much more difficult more time-consuming maybe more tedious but there's gonna be a lot of evidence there at the outset of the identification process i was lee knew nothing about the victim's physical features that's the way he prefers to work on a case the ideal circumstance often is not to know a great deal about it it's better to be a little bit in the dark on that sort of thing or a lot in the dark about that let the bones talk to you in terms of what they have to say well say what the evidence is from those from the remains house Lee identified two rib fragments the largest was a half-inch long he could tell one came from near the breastbone perhaps the fourth or fifth rib it provided the key to unlocking secrets about the body it came from as we age the rounded ends of our bones become more cup-shaped the ribs cupped end suggested the person was between 24 and 40 years old it was three point four millimeters thick by 13 millimeters wide Housley considered that small even after assuming it shrunk up to 25% in the fire you can never on a piece of bone that size bet everything but on the other hand you can turn around and say in terms of probability in terms of comparative data that we have it's likely that this is a very small person the size suggested the victim was either a female or a small male to determine which he compared the bones height and thickness against a standard chart of rib measurements in females a fifth rib is gonna have an average width of four point six five millimeters males fifth rib is going to be six point seven eight so it's it's much larger in terms of its thickness so you work it through as best you can and try and characterize for the entire rib cage male and female values and what the difference is with this bone the answer was clear by all standards the person it came from was petite very likely a female the bones had told him all they could it was time to take a look at the tooth fragments Housley had only three to work with there were little more than chips of enamel by examining the thickness of the enamel Osley could tell they were from adult teeth their shape suggested their approximate position in the victims mouth they had telltale grooves that suggested dental work but it wasn't enough he needed some high-tech help to expose traces of fillings then he could match them to Garland's dental records House Lee sent the teeth to the Smithsonian's conservation analytical laboratory there they underwent a process called energy dispersive spectroscopy or EDS most dental fillings are a combination of silver tin mercury and copper they melt in the heat of a fire leaving behind invisible traces the EDS brings them out the tooth fragment is put into the chamber then the air is drawn out creating a vacuum an electron beam bombards the sample it can be aimed very precisely the EDS provides a 3d image so the operator knows where to point the beam the stream of energy excites electrons in the sample causing some of them to fly off some elements give off more electrons some produce fewer by measuring the electrons spewing from the sample the EDS determines what elements it's made from the results come out as a graph of peaks and valleys each peak represents a different element its height corresponds to the amount of the element in the sample the graph was printed out and given to Owsley to analyze this is an area here on this count fragment one where we're scanning on the two surfaces you can pick up the peak for calcium peak for phosphorous and those are normal tooth enamel on that same fragment if you go to a different location here now we're starting to get a peak 4/10 indicating the presence of tin on that on that tooth surface the EDS showed that two of the fragments had traces of copper and all three had traces of 10 because the metals were found only on specific parts of the teeth Housley concluded that they were the remains of fillings not contamination from the metal drum he had already determined from their shape that he had fragments of premolars now he knew they all had fillings with this information he was ready to compare his findings against Marilyn Garland's dental records so working with a dentist I sat down we went through and figured out which teeth she lost in life which teeth had fillings what types of fillings they were and we would prepare a dental chart and this is a basis for comparison with the dental fragments that we had most of Marilyn Garland's premolars had fillings so the fact that all of the fragments also had fillings was consistent with her dental records so I can never really say that it was absolutely this tooth or that tooth but I could say that she and life had those teeth and of those seven of those eight teeth had fillings and I've got three fragments of those teeth and all of them have fillings so it's it's a consistency there it's it's a point that that seems to support this association so it's just one bit of evidence those bits of evidence added up to create a portrait of a victim that was alarmingly similar to Marilyn Garland Marilyn Garland age 35 stood 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighed 115 pounds obviously they couldn't positively say that it was her but he was able to say that it was a petite female possibly white female between the ages of 25 and 35 I mean it really narrowed it down which was you know surprising to me just to find some remains charred remains to be able to look at him and obtain that much information from him that was surprising awaiting trial danny king learned that he'd left enough evidence for scientists to come so close to identifying marilyn garland rattled by the news he made one more mistake danny king confessed a second time this time to an inmate at Summit County Jail and the inmate ended up telling us about it and Danny can't even told him where he had disposed of the gun King admitted stashing the gun in a storm sewer behind a restaurant detective Todd drove to the location and found it immediately police had all they needed the confessions the burned barrel the weapon and Doug Owsley who turned a handful of splintered bones into rock-solid evidence I've been involved in a number of cases where you're searching for a missing person you know that person in your heart you know that person is dead and they may even have good strong evidence as to who's behind this but without that body being recovered and without that physical evidence you still could go to trial but he gets much more difficult it gets uh it's you know you need a lot of good physical evidence and skeleton or a body is going to be a critical thing Danny King was found guilty of murder he was sentenced to 21 years to life generations of murderers have relied on fire to hide their crimes but some little detail always lingers for those who know what to look for in Tennessee investigators depended on sports bones to divine not only a dead man's identity but also the strange circumstances of his death on January 15th 1981 a house burned to the ground in Kingsport Tennessee before the fire department could save it the owner James grizzle hadn't been seen since the blaze nobody gave it a second thought because grizzle spent much of his time in Virginia then detective James Moffett of the Kingsport police received a call from Grizzles mother in Virginia she was concerned because she hadn't heard from her son in several days Moffett smelled trouble he knew that grizzle had hired a live-in handyman named Stephen Leon Williams to help renovate the house Williams was not a model citizen I knew Stephen Leon Williams and I was investigating him on some burglaries and I knew that mr. Williams was living with mr. grizzle and Hawkins County I talked to mr. grizzle probably about a week before his house burned about Leon the fire department didn't look for a body once the blaze was out but after hearing from Grizzles mother Moffett began to suspect something more than a house fire if grizzle was in the house when it burned his remains would still be there Moffett would need an expert to determine if Grizzles death was an accident or murder he called state forensic anthropologist William bass it's an interesting case because most houses that have burned down the fire department's been there lots of people walked through the area this was one of the few cases at which nobody had walked into this house at all so you got there and the house had burned down and there were no footprints in the house at all so we were the first ones in there the undisturbed condition of a site assured vast that any signs of foul play would still be there Moffat pointed out the locations of the bedrooms kitchen and living room so bass could get his bearings as with any archaeological excavation he and his team carefully sifted through the debris with trowels and brushes they moved one brick at a time searching for the all-important remains a little over an hour after they began bass found some human lower leg bones on the concrete basement floor before long scattered bones started coming out of the rubble and with them a horrible story began to emerge the body had been lying on its back but the legs were up over the body as if you lay down and take your feet and pull it up to your head however there was no hit the victim was separated below the shoulders and the upper and lower halves of the skeleton were 12 feet apart that wasn't entirely unusual a skeleton may become jumbled if the victim had fallen through the floor and landed in the basement but bass knew that wasn't the case here at the body fallen he would have found debris between the skeleton and the concrete bass found no debris in fact the victim was fused to the floor it's like taking a piece of meat and putting it in a in a hot skillet that meat will sear onto the hot surface in this case the fat running out was so hot that they literally solidified the what clothing remain so we had to scrape off the and there was no debris between the floor and the bones the condition of the clothing told bass the victim was in the basement when the fire began if the body didn't fall from a height vast knew of only one other way to explain how the bones became scattered an explosion neighbors reports confirmed basses conclusion they heard a blast shortly before the fire judging from the way the upper torso was separated bass suspected the center of the explosion was on the victims chest it might have been some freak accident but then bass found another clue the flattened remains of a spent bullet lay upon the basement floor just below the victims heart bass could tell from its mushroom shape that it had traveled through the victim and flattened against the concrete at first glance it looked like homicide but homicide cases are won on hard facts not speculation to prove murder he needed all the evidence he could muster in his lab at the University of Tennessee bass has teased the truth from countless human remains here he took a closer look at the bones pulled from Grizzles house he would try to determine what events caused the destruction of a home and the death of a person with burned remains it's not always easy when a body burns much of it is destroyed the arms and legs separate fluid in the head turns to steam and bursts the skull as bones burn they retain their shape but they shrink up to 33% depending on the temperature of the fire how long they were exposed to it and which bones they are fire turns them brittle they shatter while they burn and can crumble if they're touched or moved afterward collecting a complete skeleton is nearly impossible because burning disfigures bones it's a common way to hide the cause of death investigators must learn to distinguish the subtle differences between damage caused by fire and damage from a murder weapon bass demonstrates that even a bullet in the head can go undetected unless the forensic investigator knows how to find it material all of these pieces were all together in a jumble we x-rayed this and there is little flakes of lead in the bone indicating hey this individuals been shot then we wonder can we determine where this individual was shot so we set out and party started putting the skull together all these pieces and sure enough here comes your entry wound right there Joanne Bennett a student of dr. bass is hoping to find a more efficient way to recognize injuries not caused by fire in her research she experiments with bone scraps from pigs first she damages them to simulate foul play then burns them to see how they change we designed several different traumatic events to address to address the trauma that anthropologists recognized Bennett and other graduate students saw strike and stabbed a variety of pig bones the bones are then photographed x-rayed and sketched to record every nuance of the damage once the bones have been catalogued the students burn them if they're lucky they use a house scheduled to be torched for fire training the goal is to simulate as closely as possible a real-world situation after the smoke clears the students pick through the rubble to retrieve as many bone fragments as they can find they take the bones back to the lab and examine them to see if they can detect the marks they made the marks made by a scalpel or saw blade survived the fire with no problem the fine striations of the saw can even be seen with the naked eye the marks made by the hammer are less easy to discern Bennett is just starting her research as she and her colleagues experiment with a wider sample of bones she feels confident they'll come up with some guidelines forensic investigators can use in the future with the remains in his lab bass pieced together the sari events that transpired in James Grizzles house the flattened bullet and scattered bones suggested murder the color of the bones backed that up as bones heat up their color changes forensic investigators depend on that to estimate the fires temperature especially hot flames suggest an accelerant like gasoline was used and that means arson at about five hundred forty five degrees Fahrenheit bones turned reddish or grayish brown between 970 and 1,200 degrees they turn black over 1,200 degrees all the organic material burns out leaving a white shell of calcium the remains in Grizzles house were white they must have burned at about 2,000 degrees indicating the use of an accelerant vas concluded the fire was deliberately set now bass was sure he could prove homicide the burned remains told him that the victim was shot to death the body blown apart and the house set on fire to hide the crime but who was the victim though reasonably certain it was James grizzle bass had to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt without naming the victim Moffat couldn't catch his murderer to identify the victim bass first examined seams in the skull called sutures they slowly closed as we grow older and are gone by age 40 inside the skull of the victim the sutures had disappeared on the outside they were almost completely gone as well this would indicate that he was not only 18 but was you know middle aged at least 30 so so forth age can be determined another way by looking at the joint surfaces of the bones as people age the body deposits more bone around the joints causing a condition called arthritic lipping it begins in the late 20s or early 30s and increases with age the lipping was consistent with someone in his mid 30s James grizzle was 38 years old bass next examined the external occipital protuberance the bulge on the back of the head to determine the victim's sex the structure is larger in males than in females it left bass with little room for doubt that the victim was male this is one of the best ones I've ever seen this is a classic textbook case of external occipital protuberance which would indicate that this individual was was a male so by just this little piece you could get not only sex but age with with that right there from the evidence bass determined the victim was a white male in his mid 30s a description consistent with James grizzle but not close enough to hold up in court to be absolutely positive bass relied on grizzled dental records you have this tooth with a filling that's attached to the tooth after the fire so we asked the police if they could find from the family a dental record of him when you'd been to the dentist because you could see there were fillings in here bass compared the structure of the tooth and the shape of the root from Grizzles dental records he was able to make his final determination this was the skeleton of James grizzle the teeth provided bass with a quick and easy way to make a difficult identification but it was important that he first tried to make the ID using the bones otherwise he'd have no way of knowing if more than one victim was buried in the rubble if the bones and teeth all suggest the same person bass can be confident only one victim was buried there that person was James grizzle based on this information detective Moffat had a case against Leon Williams it was further bolstered by the discovery that Williams had stolen James Grizzles truck and forged his checks faced with the evidence Leon Williams confessed in his confession he confirmed basses careful reconstruction of the crime he shot James grizzle in the basement poured gasoline throughout the house strapped an explosive to the victim and when it went off it set the house on fire for his crime Leon Williams was sentenced to life you don't destroy the evidence if you don't know Branden bulldozer and clean it all off or something like that the evidence is there if you know what to look for takes your file but we were able to reconstruct the events that occurred in this case exactly the way the individual who was charging and convicted said it happened William bass unmasked a killer who went to great lengths to disguise his crime elsewhere a man went to greater lengths to bring the bones of his missing brother back from guatemala guatemala 1985 a country caught in a civil war between the government and communist guerrillas in the outlying villages the government appoints civil patrollers an armed militia made up of civilians everyone must serve one day a week the government provides guns but no training it instructs the militia to patrol for communist rebels but nobody patrols the militia for hungry young journalists 1985 was an exciting and dangerous time to be in Guatemala freelance American journalist Nick Blake and photographer Griffith Davis underestimated that danger in their pursuit of a story they headed into a remote part of the country and vanished Nik Blake's brother Randy did all he could to uncover what happened my brother disappeared in March of 85 I've been doing requests with the State Department and four or five other federal agencies who would be in a position to know things such as the CIA and the National Security Agency and others for ever since you know probably 1987 Randy Blake found only dead ends then a year and a half into his search he heard an unconfirmed story from an American teacher in a village in Guatemala we would go to little fiestas with him and so forth and he got to know them and they would talk about the gringos that got killed by the soul patrol piecing together the details the teacher believed the Civil patrol shot the journalists in 1985 a ravine became their makeshift grave the Blake family kept pressure on the US and Guatemalan governments to find Nick to hide the crime the civil Patrol retrieved the skeletons and burned them in a raging bonfire the flames split and shattered the bones beyond all recognition or at least that's what the patrollers thought but the Blake family persisted the patrollers were pressured into sending the remains to the United States they arrived in 1990 but an analysis uncovered a deception the crate did not contain human remains convinced they had exposed to cover up the Blake's and US authorities demanded the truth Felipe Alva the regional commander of the Guatemalan Civil Patrol refused to talk about the incident until the Blake's offered an incentive and he was going to be offered a $10,000 reward and so but it was going to be paid to him in allotments as he performed along the job akiaki enticed by the offer alva agreed to send the real remains to the US so long as the family promised not to prosecute he came out with a partial unearthing of remains from the site and he brought them back in two boxes very curious things they were essentially little caskets mini caskets square pine boxes that were velvet lined and it was a strangest thing because they had dirt in them from the site with little bone ships salted throughout them and so forth because that's essentially what was remained and my brother and his friend [Music] the grim homecoming occurred without ceremony at a loading dock behind the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC the unmarked remains had traveled over 3,000 miles to get there navigating through a maze of deception and lies but more work lay ahead before the Blake's could put their loved one to rest and find the closure they sought this time they had to be certain the bones in the crates were truly Nicks and Griffiths for the delicate task of identifying the remains they pinned their hopes on forensic anthropologist Doug Owsley when the crates arrived they were x-rayed to see if they required special handling to avoid damage [Music] they contained no surprises mostly soil ash roots and bits of bone [Music] then how's Lee and his team sorted the bones it was immediately apparent the remains were human they also found a duplication of parts and a color difference how's Lee was certain these were the remains of two people out of 150 pounds of dirt and debris they recovered about two pounds of incinerated bone the largest of the more than 1600 fragments was just three inches long but as Lee was fortunate some of the fragments came from the occipital protuberance at the back of the skull the large size of the specimens indicated both were male but they could have been almost any two men then he found a nickel sized piece of bone that made all the difference it was a fragment that fits in the forehead and forms a ridge or crest for the sinuses inside the skull it's called the frontal crest now this is a really unusual configuration of the frontal crest here usually this is a solid prominent Ridge but in the small percentage of the population we can get a double Ridge morphology like that so we had this piece and based on that I had a microfilm of an x-ray that was taken in Griffith Davis house Lee compared the crest with an x-ray of Davis's head taken after a car accident the unusual structure of the bone fragment from Guatemala matched the x-ray but did that prove the fragment came from Davis's skull not unless Housley could first prove that its structure was truly rare to see how often the crest structure occurred in the general population house Lee referred to a group of skeletons known as the Terry collection the more than 1,600 skeletons of the Terry collection were donated for medical research from the 1920s to the 1940s they represent a cross-section of the population the medical history of each individual is part of the record house we used the Terry collection to see what percentage of the population shared Davis's frontal crested structure if only a few people had that bone configuration and if it was shared by the Guatemala sample and Davis then owlsley could reasonably conclude the bones could belong to Davis if you look at this cranial vault for instance one of the things that you've got is here's the cribriform plate frame and cecum and then you've got the standard type of frontal crest and it's a very prominent ridge that occurs in 88 percent of white males now in contrast you see how you've got again the same structure but now we've got a double Ridge and a groove this is the type that we see in in Griffith Davis's cranium this occurs 9% of the time Davis and the remains from Guatemala shared the same rare anatomical feature thousand Lee felt confident the skull fragments could belong to Davis but were the remaining bones Nick Blake's the limited sample enabled Owsley to perform only one more test determining the relative age of the bodies for this he relied on the sutures in the skulls in the specimen that owlsley thought to be Griffith Davis the sutures showed advanced closure suggesting a man in his 30s the sutures on the other remains were still open indicating a younger man so that helped differentiate the two two males were differing in age by about eleven years and this helped me determine if this is the older person at the time of his death Griffith Davis was 38 Nick Blake was 27 how's Lee's calculation was right on the mark - Randy Blake owlsley's identification was encouraging but nagging Lee inconclusive if these bones were truly the remains of his brother he needed to be absolutely sure as long as a shadow of doubt persisted the Blake's could not give up their search but Osley had reached his limit he could go no further without more remains we set ourselves you know I mean it's probably neck but you know D'Arnot we want to get up to that side and we want to determine definitely that this is Nick and let's let's let's let's just make a trip down there we've got an opportunity going to Guatemala was the only choice the Blake's had if they wanted to honor their brother but Osley had to accompany them only he could provide the assurance the Blake's had waited so long for together they would retrace the final steps of Nicholas Blake and Griffith Davis with forensic anthropologist Doug Owsley 'he's help Randi Blake felt he was close to finding his brother he knew that the only way to claim Nick's remains was to retrieve them himself [Music] Randee his brother Sam Osley and a colleague made the trip to Guatemala in June 1992 there they met regional civil patrol commander Felipe Alva he took them to the remote mountain location of the remains but owlsley wasn't buying it I take my trowel and do a little scraping I'd cut down to about 15 centimetres and I come up and say this is the wrong site I say there's not enough ash there's no bone fragments here there's there's none of the red soil that I'm looking for there I just looked at this all of this two containers a a couple months before and and there's no no none of the routes that were found in any of that then sheepishly Alvez assistant reached under a log and removed a green plastic bag that contained a handful of human bone fragments and some soil and in this 8 ounces a saw that's got the right color has got the charcoal it's got root fragments and I say this is from the right side he says I got it right here the assistant told him these were the last of the remains the Americans demanded to see where they came from we went back to our little hotel in in nabob and we we basically grilled i mean grilled felipe Alva for three hours that night with a guatemalan colonel u.s. embassy defense attache u.s. army colonel a couple of other people in the room and basically sediments a tell that you lied to us under duress Felipe Alva agreed to take the team to a site he swore was the actual location of the remains when they arrived two days later Osley looked it over with a skeptics eye we could see the indentation where the soil had been taken out we worked around the perimeters and we found a lot of things one of the things we found lots of was metal well here's part of an eyeglass frame part of the eyeglass piece and the frame and it's a circular circular type of pattern it's one of the things that when we first picked it up one of the brothers of this man said that looks like his glasses so we knew what they were in a very significant spot now certain they had the right spot the team collected all they could and headed home it was almost like tailor-made for Doug Owsley I mean it was like it was so it was so perfect because he he you know we were so lucky to have him in that one day because clearly a deception was was planned and what was about was being executed clearly and and and he just totally blew it out of the water by by being there and allowed us to have the ammunition to get this guy to come clean among the bones Doug Owsley carried back with him were fragments of a shattered jawbone they still held some of the teeth and all the roots they would enable him to make a direct comparison to Blake's dental records from the dental records that we had of him in life we knew that he had impacted third molars and they had come in in an angle where the third molar has bumped into the second and have gotten locked up and so what it had actually done is wore contact or a wear faceting to the side of the second molar and it had a very distinctive root associated with it from the shape of the teeth and roots owlsley was able to positively identify Nick Blake for the Blake family it marked the end of a grueling emotional ordeal now they could grieve Nick's loss and give his remains a proper burial that meant everything to repatriate his remains and bring them back and bury them in a cemetery and give him a grave marker which we did not enough remains of Blake or Davis were recovered to confirm they were shot for the Blake's and the Davis's that was no longer important bringing Nick and Griffith home was enough from the ashes of murder rise lingering Clues transformed but never erased as scientists learn to read they're meaning they can restore what the fire has taken them and by doing so find a loved one or catch a killer [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Real Responders

Views: 255,794

Keywords: arson evidence examination, arson evidence preservation, arson forensics technology, arson investigation, arsonist behavior analysis, crime scene analysis, crime scene documentation, criminal evidence, criminal forensics, detective work, fire investigation techniques, forensic DNA analysis, forensic anthropology, forensic examination, forensic fire examination, forensic science methods, forensic technology, police procedural

Id: WTl4OiVeTcg

Length: 51min 53sec (3113 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 17 2020