COVERING UP BODIES, FOLLOW UP TO GSR, AND FEDS VS. LOCALS - 017
TRANSCRIPT:
This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, Covering Up Bodies, Follow-up to the Gunshot Residue Segment and Feds versus Locals.
I'm Adam Richardson, and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau. 17 has always been my lucky number. Welcome to Episode Number 17 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime-related fiction.
Recently, Joanna Penn was talking about Patreon on the Creative Penn podcast. She said, "I think patronage is one of the most powerful things that you can do to support creators that you want to continue hearing from. It's one of those ways that you can support people and encourage them to do the things that are either useful to you or just putting good stuff in the world."
Regardless of whether you support me on Patreon, I absolutely think you, as a creator of stories, should look into setting up your own Patreon account. You can learn more at writersdetective.com/patreon. Thanks to my patrons, Joan Raymond, Guy Alton, Natasha Bajema, Natalie Barelli, Joe Trent, Siobhan Pope, Leah Cutter, and the most recent patron, Ryan Kinmil for helping me keep the lights on in the bureau. You can find links to their author websites in the show notes by going to writersdetective.com/17.
I'm Adam Richardson, and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau. 17 has always been my lucky number. Welcome to Episode Number 17 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime-related fiction.
Recently, Joanna Penn was talking about Patreon on the Creative Penn podcast. She said, "I think patronage is one of the most powerful things that you can do to support creators that you want to continue hearing from. It's one of those ways that you can support people and encourage them to do the things that are either useful to you or just putting good stuff in the world."
Regardless of whether you support me on Patreon, I absolutely think you, as a creator of stories, should look into setting up your own Patreon account. You can learn more at writersdetective.com/patreon. Thanks to my patrons, Joan Raymond, Guy Alton, Natasha Bajema, Natalie Barelli, Joe Trent, Siobhan Pope, Leah Cutter, and the most recent patron, Ryan Kinmil for helping me keep the lights on in the bureau. You can find links to their author websites in the show notes by going to writersdetective.com/17.
This week's first question comes from our familiar friend, Chris Moody, at chrisamoody.com.
Chris writes, "I have two questions this time. This YouTube video purports itself to be some of the pictures and video taken during the scene investigation right after three boys in the West Memphis were found dead. The video shows the boys, who were nude by the time they were found, without any kind of cover over them. With TV always showing us the dead being covered by sheet or something, is this due to it being American TV or is it only done when the public have easy access to the scene and they can't control it, i.e., in a downtown location?"
I watched the video on the link that Chris provided, and I would say that, first, best practice would always be to leave any evidence, dead bodies included, undisturbed. But we do our best to afford the dead some sense of respect, so it's only natural for the officers on scene to want to cover up bodies from public view especially if they're naked. Now, what most of us might be familiar with are those yellow blankets that you see. Those are just cheap emergency blankets that are part of the equipment you'd find in most patrol cars right alongside our first aid kit or an evidence kit. But in this case, there was obviously no blankets covering these boys because it was in such a remote location.
This footage was filmed in 1993, and I imagine that if this happened now, they'd likely use pop-up tents over the top of the bodies especially if there's some sort of excavation going on to afford some privacy especially now with the prevalence of news helicopters. But in such a remote area where you've got that tree canopy like in this video, leaving as much of the crime scene undisturbed by blankets and pop-up tents would probably be the best thing to do, and I wouldn't see a problem with leaving the bodies uncovered while the investigation was underway.
In fact, my biggest issue with any of this is the indecency of publishing what is clearly a crime scene investigation video to YouTube. This video was only intended for the investigators and hopefully a panel of jurors intent on bringing the suspect or suspects to justice. In this era of 24-hour news and internet video virality, people seem to forget that those little naked bodies are someone's children. Chris, I appreciate you sharing that video with me. It was a good thing for me to see as far as answering your question, but I will admit that I actually flagged it for removal from YouTube just because this is not the venue for those videos to be. I should also make it clear that this is not something that Chris posted to the internet. This was some other person putting it up on another channel.
Getting back to Chris's question, yes, covering up bodies is also definitely a norm for those of us watching American television. If you watch any news coverage from Central or South America, it's actually common to show dead bodies uncovered just as they died. They do however tend to avoid showing naked bodies unlike this video. My best friend, who actually passed away last year, was Mexican American, and we had this conversation once. He explained to me that showing the bodies on the news especially in Mexico was a matter of what he called la verdad which means the truth. He said that in countries that are rife with corruption and poverty, if you said someone was dead, you'd better prove it. So that is, I guess, the motivation for them in other countries to show the bodies that are uncovered.
Chris's second question is, "As a follow-up to the episode that talked about gun residue, if the person wore gloves and an outer layer of clothing, they had no issue leaving with the victim. Would this make gun residue useless?" Potentially, yes. As the residue would be left on the discarded clothing, yeah, it would be useless, but then the suspect is potentially leaving behind a treasure trove of DNA on the inside of the gloves and the inside of that outer layer of clothing. The concept of transference is always at play. Your killer's best bet is to get of the clothing away from the crime scene. I mean hypothetically speaking of course.
Again, dumping the clothing is yet another risk that the killer would be making or taking both on the potential exposure during the process of getting rid of it, and then again making sure those items are never found by the investigators. So, yeah, gunshot residue is not the end-all be-all. It was more a matter of exposing you, the listener, the writers to the understanding that that even exists and that it could potentially play into your story. It's obviously not used in every homicide investigation, but it's just one more tool that we have in our tool box.
Thank you for those questions, Chris. Again, you can find Chris at chrisamoody.com.
Chris writes, "I have two questions this time. This YouTube video purports itself to be some of the pictures and video taken during the scene investigation right after three boys in the West Memphis were found dead. The video shows the boys, who were nude by the time they were found, without any kind of cover over them. With TV always showing us the dead being covered by sheet or something, is this due to it being American TV or is it only done when the public have easy access to the scene and they can't control it, i.e., in a downtown location?"
I watched the video on the link that Chris provided, and I would say that, first, best practice would always be to leave any evidence, dead bodies included, undisturbed. But we do our best to afford the dead some sense of respect, so it's only natural for the officers on scene to want to cover up bodies from public view especially if they're naked. Now, what most of us might be familiar with are those yellow blankets that you see. Those are just cheap emergency blankets that are part of the equipment you'd find in most patrol cars right alongside our first aid kit or an evidence kit. But in this case, there was obviously no blankets covering these boys because it was in such a remote location.
This footage was filmed in 1993, and I imagine that if this happened now, they'd likely use pop-up tents over the top of the bodies especially if there's some sort of excavation going on to afford some privacy especially now with the prevalence of news helicopters. But in such a remote area where you've got that tree canopy like in this video, leaving as much of the crime scene undisturbed by blankets and pop-up tents would probably be the best thing to do, and I wouldn't see a problem with leaving the bodies uncovered while the investigation was underway.
In fact, my biggest issue with any of this is the indecency of publishing what is clearly a crime scene investigation video to YouTube. This video was only intended for the investigators and hopefully a panel of jurors intent on bringing the suspect or suspects to justice. In this era of 24-hour news and internet video virality, people seem to forget that those little naked bodies are someone's children. Chris, I appreciate you sharing that video with me. It was a good thing for me to see as far as answering your question, but I will admit that I actually flagged it for removal from YouTube just because this is not the venue for those videos to be. I should also make it clear that this is not something that Chris posted to the internet. This was some other person putting it up on another channel.
Getting back to Chris's question, yes, covering up bodies is also definitely a norm for those of us watching American television. If you watch any news coverage from Central or South America, it's actually common to show dead bodies uncovered just as they died. They do however tend to avoid showing naked bodies unlike this video. My best friend, who actually passed away last year, was Mexican American, and we had this conversation once. He explained to me that showing the bodies on the news especially in Mexico was a matter of what he called la verdad which means the truth. He said that in countries that are rife with corruption and poverty, if you said someone was dead, you'd better prove it. So that is, I guess, the motivation for them in other countries to show the bodies that are uncovered.
Chris's second question is, "As a follow-up to the episode that talked about gun residue, if the person wore gloves and an outer layer of clothing, they had no issue leaving with the victim. Would this make gun residue useless?" Potentially, yes. As the residue would be left on the discarded clothing, yeah, it would be useless, but then the suspect is potentially leaving behind a treasure trove of DNA on the inside of the gloves and the inside of that outer layer of clothing. The concept of transference is always at play. Your killer's best bet is to get of the clothing away from the crime scene. I mean hypothetically speaking of course.
Again, dumping the clothing is yet another risk that the killer would be making or taking both on the potential exposure during the process of getting rid of it, and then again making sure those items are never found by the investigators. So, yeah, gunshot residue is not the end-all be-all. It was more a matter of exposing you, the listener, the writers to the understanding that that even exists and that it could potentially play into your story. It's obviously not used in every homicide investigation, but it's just one more tool that we have in our tool box.
Thank you for those questions, Chris. Again, you can find Chris at chrisamoody.com.
Our next question comes from Jim Heskett at thejugglingauthor.com.
Jim writes, "I attended a lecture by a DEA agent who said that the Hollywood trope of agencies fighting over jurisdiction of a crime scene is overblown, and that agencies work together when there's a jurisdictional question. But then I also attended a lecture by a former New York undercover cop who said that regular cops can't stand feds and never want them around. While I'm sure the truth is somewhere in-between, are there particular agencies with a reputation of not playing nice together?"
Like in any kind of rivalry, this usually boils down to one or two particular people rather than the agencies themselves. Often it will be a personality in the position of leadership that rubs people in the other agency the wrong way or it will be some decisions that affect the case that then ruin the relationship between the two. It's been my experience that it's more likely you'll find a problem with the feds in local police agencies that are larger. So, the agencies that aren't necessarily looking for help from the feds because they have sufficient resources, and of course, they are so large that there may be a history of not getting along with a particular agency that far outlasts the actual careers of the people that cause that problem in the first place.
That said, even agencies that, say, don't get along with the FBI very often have a great relationship with other federal agencies. I can think of one unit in particular that absolutely could not stand working with the FBI but they lived in the back pocket of the ATF. So, there are certainly different alignments, but I would say for the most part, everybody gets along with somebody in the federal agency. And then again, all it takes to correct that is having the right personalities in the positions of either leadership or even working well at the ground level where I'm on a surveillance team with a federal agent and we all get along regardless of whether the bosses get along. That can do a huge amount as far as mending fences if there's been a historical animosity between the agents.
The other thing that we see ... You mentioned the DEA, Jim, in your example. The joke amongst local narcs is that DEA stands for "don't expect anything." That's not to say that the DEA agents aren't great at what they do. They're phenomenal and they bring incredible resources. The overarching problem that we in local law enforcement have with feds is that when they come into a case to help us, and it's never that Hollywood trope of taking over a jurisdiction, but when they come in, they promise the world and they have the best of intentions, but whether the case actually becomes a federal case doesn't lie with the agency. It really rests on the shoulders of whether the United States attorney will agree to prosecute the case.
I have worked federal wiretap cases with the DEA where when push came to shove at the end of the case, even though the DEA was completely on board, they have done the majority of the spending on this case funding a task force, the US Attorney just would not file it in federal court for prosecution, and so then it kicked back to us at the local level where we then had to take our case to the local district attorney and get the case filed in a state level like a local superior court.
So, some of the animosity can come where they promise, the feds promise that they're going to take this case federal, it's going to be this big, grand case, and then when it comes down to it, they don't have the juice to actually get the US Attorney to file it. Very few cases are actually filed by the US Attorney's Office as far as the number that are presented to them versus the ones they agreed to actually take. Jokingly, if I were to present a case that had a picture of the person committing the crime, the US Attorney would ask for a video of it.
It seems to me in my personal experience that the attorneys in the District Attorney's Office are so used to prosecuting cases and going before a judge and a jury and constantly doing that that they are much more likely to be willing to fight for a case, be willing to go to trial and do what it takes to get a conviction, where the US Attorney's Office in my personal experience has been much more concerned with conviction rate percentage, i.e., so much overwhelming evidence that they don't have to fight anything in court and that they simply get the defendant to plead to a guilty ... whether that's some sort of plea bargain or what, but they end up with a guilty conviction without actually having to take it before a federal court.
There are some really topnotch US attorneys or assistant US attorneys that are in there in the trenches actually fighting court cases, but in my experience, those are few and far between where more often than not you're not going to get your case filed unless it is absolutely every single ... I won't say every single i's dotted and every t's crossed, but they don't want any kind of surprises. They don't want to have to argue anything. They want it to be open and shut. When you're dealing with a gigantic case with many defendants, many moving parts, thousands of hours of wiretap transcripts, that can be a lot to handle, and more often than not, if the option is there to kick it down to a district attorney to fight it and file it in state court, the US attorney will simply decline to prosecute the case.
So, even though that's not the law enforcement agency's fault, a lot of times, the locals will inappropriately make that assumption and kind of lump them in together so they get tainted by that. Once you work with the feds, you start to understand the things that they're hindered by and the reality of the situation. Where I work, we actually have had a great relationship with pretty much every federal agency that we have worked with. There was one in particular where we got along great with the agents in that office, but the boss was ... I'll just say was a challenge to work with, and so that certainly tainted the working relationship with the agents in that office, but then once he was gone, everything got back to a much better relationship as far as sharing information and getting along well. It was not the FBI that I'm referring to, it was another smaller agency.
Again, it really comes down to personalities more than anything else. Cops are a lot of A type-drive personalities and they don't like hearing the word no, and so any time you have any kind of confrontation like that, bad blood can be had. Some of the other problems that pop up or that will cause animosity may be the policies that the feds have to abide by that as a local being brought into a task force or being brought in to work a case together, you have to abide by those rules, and a lot of times, it's just complete BS, red tape that unfortunately these federal agents are stuck having to deal with and navigate.
I'm not talking about legal rules of evidence. I'm talking about bureaucratic BS that makes no sense whatsoever just because somebody in Washington wrote this rule that these agents have to deal with this. That drives us at the local level pretty much insane. So, we're very much can do and get out of the car and go do the job and talk to people, knock on doors, and when that gets hindered because of politics or policy rather than going out and doing your job, it can be very frustrating. Like you said, Jim, the truth certainly is somewhere in-between.
Thanks for the question, Jim. Again, you can find Jim's work at thejugglingauthor.com, and you can find links to all of these authors' pages by going to the show notes at writersdetective.com/17. While you're there, head on over to writersdetective.com/podcast where you can submit your own questions for me to answer on an upcoming episode.
Jim writes, "I attended a lecture by a DEA agent who said that the Hollywood trope of agencies fighting over jurisdiction of a crime scene is overblown, and that agencies work together when there's a jurisdictional question. But then I also attended a lecture by a former New York undercover cop who said that regular cops can't stand feds and never want them around. While I'm sure the truth is somewhere in-between, are there particular agencies with a reputation of not playing nice together?"
Like in any kind of rivalry, this usually boils down to one or two particular people rather than the agencies themselves. Often it will be a personality in the position of leadership that rubs people in the other agency the wrong way or it will be some decisions that affect the case that then ruin the relationship between the two. It's been my experience that it's more likely you'll find a problem with the feds in local police agencies that are larger. So, the agencies that aren't necessarily looking for help from the feds because they have sufficient resources, and of course, they are so large that there may be a history of not getting along with a particular agency that far outlasts the actual careers of the people that cause that problem in the first place.
That said, even agencies that, say, don't get along with the FBI very often have a great relationship with other federal agencies. I can think of one unit in particular that absolutely could not stand working with the FBI but they lived in the back pocket of the ATF. So, there are certainly different alignments, but I would say for the most part, everybody gets along with somebody in the federal agency. And then again, all it takes to correct that is having the right personalities in the positions of either leadership or even working well at the ground level where I'm on a surveillance team with a federal agent and we all get along regardless of whether the bosses get along. That can do a huge amount as far as mending fences if there's been a historical animosity between the agents.
The other thing that we see ... You mentioned the DEA, Jim, in your example. The joke amongst local narcs is that DEA stands for "don't expect anything." That's not to say that the DEA agents aren't great at what they do. They're phenomenal and they bring incredible resources. The overarching problem that we in local law enforcement have with feds is that when they come into a case to help us, and it's never that Hollywood trope of taking over a jurisdiction, but when they come in, they promise the world and they have the best of intentions, but whether the case actually becomes a federal case doesn't lie with the agency. It really rests on the shoulders of whether the United States attorney will agree to prosecute the case.
I have worked federal wiretap cases with the DEA where when push came to shove at the end of the case, even though the DEA was completely on board, they have done the majority of the spending on this case funding a task force, the US Attorney just would not file it in federal court for prosecution, and so then it kicked back to us at the local level where we then had to take our case to the local district attorney and get the case filed in a state level like a local superior court.
So, some of the animosity can come where they promise, the feds promise that they're going to take this case federal, it's going to be this big, grand case, and then when it comes down to it, they don't have the juice to actually get the US Attorney to file it. Very few cases are actually filed by the US Attorney's Office as far as the number that are presented to them versus the ones they agreed to actually take. Jokingly, if I were to present a case that had a picture of the person committing the crime, the US Attorney would ask for a video of it.
It seems to me in my personal experience that the attorneys in the District Attorney's Office are so used to prosecuting cases and going before a judge and a jury and constantly doing that that they are much more likely to be willing to fight for a case, be willing to go to trial and do what it takes to get a conviction, where the US Attorney's Office in my personal experience has been much more concerned with conviction rate percentage, i.e., so much overwhelming evidence that they don't have to fight anything in court and that they simply get the defendant to plead to a guilty ... whether that's some sort of plea bargain or what, but they end up with a guilty conviction without actually having to take it before a federal court.
There are some really topnotch US attorneys or assistant US attorneys that are in there in the trenches actually fighting court cases, but in my experience, those are few and far between where more often than not you're not going to get your case filed unless it is absolutely every single ... I won't say every single i's dotted and every t's crossed, but they don't want any kind of surprises. They don't want to have to argue anything. They want it to be open and shut. When you're dealing with a gigantic case with many defendants, many moving parts, thousands of hours of wiretap transcripts, that can be a lot to handle, and more often than not, if the option is there to kick it down to a district attorney to fight it and file it in state court, the US attorney will simply decline to prosecute the case.
So, even though that's not the law enforcement agency's fault, a lot of times, the locals will inappropriately make that assumption and kind of lump them in together so they get tainted by that. Once you work with the feds, you start to understand the things that they're hindered by and the reality of the situation. Where I work, we actually have had a great relationship with pretty much every federal agency that we have worked with. There was one in particular where we got along great with the agents in that office, but the boss was ... I'll just say was a challenge to work with, and so that certainly tainted the working relationship with the agents in that office, but then once he was gone, everything got back to a much better relationship as far as sharing information and getting along well. It was not the FBI that I'm referring to, it was another smaller agency.
Again, it really comes down to personalities more than anything else. Cops are a lot of A type-drive personalities and they don't like hearing the word no, and so any time you have any kind of confrontation like that, bad blood can be had. Some of the other problems that pop up or that will cause animosity may be the policies that the feds have to abide by that as a local being brought into a task force or being brought in to work a case together, you have to abide by those rules, and a lot of times, it's just complete BS, red tape that unfortunately these federal agents are stuck having to deal with and navigate.
I'm not talking about legal rules of evidence. I'm talking about bureaucratic BS that makes no sense whatsoever just because somebody in Washington wrote this rule that these agents have to deal with this. That drives us at the local level pretty much insane. So, we're very much can do and get out of the car and go do the job and talk to people, knock on doors, and when that gets hindered because of politics or policy rather than going out and doing your job, it can be very frustrating. Like you said, Jim, the truth certainly is somewhere in-between.
Thanks for the question, Jim. Again, you can find Jim's work at thejugglingauthor.com, and you can find links to all of these authors' pages by going to the show notes at writersdetective.com/17. While you're there, head on over to writersdetective.com/podcast where you can submit your own questions for me to answer on an upcoming episode.
So that just about does it for us this week. Thank you so much for listening. I am thankful for you. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving and survived Black Friday. I will see you here again next week. Thanks again for listening and write well.
EPISODE LINKS:
- Author: Chris A. Moody - chrisamoody.com
- Author: Jim Heskett - thejugglingauthor.com
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PATREON PATRONS THAT MADE THIS EPISODE POSSIBLE
- Joan Raymond Writing and Design - joanraymondwriting.com
- Guy Alton
- Anonymous (you may not want your name shown, but I truly appreciate your support!)
- Natasha Bajema - natashabajema.com
- Natalie Barelli - nataliebarelli.com
- Joe Trent
- Siobhan Pope
- Leah Cutter - leahcutter.com
- Ryan Kinmil - @RKinmil
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