Dead Men Do Talk | FULL EPISODE | The New Detectives

In Fairfax County, Virginia, police find a decomposing body but have no report of a crime in Fort Myers, Florida, a murderer confesses to a gruesome crime, but police can't find the body. A serial killer can walk free unless police find evidence to put him behind bars. In each case, forensic scientists must find evidence of the crime in the bones of the murder victim using scientific studies of human decomposition to discover when the victim died so they can track down the murderer in hopes of proving that there is no such thing as a perfect crime and that

dead

men do speak.

In December 1993, in a wooded area near Washington, D.C., a surveyor made a gruesome discovery while mapping a new suburb in the Virginia countryside: He stumbled upon a body buried in a shallow grave, Department of State agents Fairfax County Police arrived at the secluded area where the body had been. The first homicide detective on the scene is Detective Jerry Farrell. I disagree. What do you have? There's a human skull right here. Police assume it is a homicide, but there are no immediate clues to help identify the victim and the lieutenant. Wilson, he's there, you want to take a look, what you're going to need is to start mapping the area, secure this area here and then we'll need a perimeter of at least 50 feet around this, the team of investigators will look for a Body parts have been dragged throughout the area.

Police meticulously documented the body with photographs, sketches and notes. Detective Dennis Wilson heads the cold case team that investigates crimes where the trail of evidence has gone cold in such cases, every lead, every piece of evidence. No matter how small the key to solving the crime and hair is, Detectives Wilson and Farrell are pretty sure the victim is a woman, as decomposition often leaves greasy residue. Officers take soil samples near the body. Chemical analysis could help determine when the victim was buried. Well, you only get one chance at a crime scene and you have to do it right the first time, so you slow things down.

At that point, there is no rush. The body has obviously been there for some time. We're going to try to gather all the evidence we can. May and make sure we don't miss anything, there may be a small clue here that leads to his identity or the identity of the perpetrator because the body is so decomposed that

detectives

call nearby Washington DC, dr. Douglas Owlsley of the Smithsonian Institution is an anthropologist whose specialty is identifying human remains from soldiers who died in the Civil War to modern-day homicide victims. He has testified in many criminal trials as a forensic scientist.

Meaning forensic science used as proven in a court of law receives the call from the Fairfax County Police and agrees to visit the site where the skeleton was found. In the usual case, murder victims are assigned to coroners who dissect the body to find the cause of death, but coroners are used to dealing with fresh bodies, only bones are left here to tell the story, which requires special skills of the anthropologist. It takes three days of careful excavation to remove the body from the ground and return it to his laboratory. Owlsley looks for signs of the victims, age, sex and shape. of death, it is immediately evident that the victim is a woman, the pelvic bone is wider in women to accommodate childbirth, although Osley believes the victim was a young adult, it is difficult to be more precise, she does not show any sign of arthritis, no no, severe arthritis, if you look at your spine there are only minor changes, there is no development of arthritis, your pubic bones show a stage of maturity that would be consistent with someone who is in their 30s in a person young, the skull sutures are clearly visible as a person. grows the sutures tend to fuse into the victim's skull the sutures are beginning to disappear confirming that the victim was a young adult only 5 feet 1 inch tall who had been stabbed repeatedly with the blade of the knife leaving marks in the clavicle, ribs and vertebrae.

By looking at the pattern of cuts in the bone, it can be said that the individual was behind her at least part of the time. She has knife wounds that penetrated her back and midline. The cut that is on the collarbone and collarbone. There are many different positions that could explain that, but one would be the individual approaching her and placing a name on her body. It will not be easy to shed more light on this mysterious case. Police must determine the identity of the victim in Fort Myers, Florida. The police will have the opposite problem, a crime without a body, okay, wait a minute, Mr.

Betty, I have a man on the phone informing me that someone was just murdered at a police communication center in Fort Myers, Florida, a 911 will drive to the discovery of a gruesome crime dating back to 1989 nine nine. one, what is your emergency? and you did it. The caller reports a murder he has recently committed. Why does he say that he has thought about turning himself in but hasn't decided yet? Okay, will you wait for us there? The call to 9-1-1. traced to a mall phone booth the operator tries to keep the killer on the line while a message is sent to law enforcement units in the area Lee County 211 165 a possible fire signal at the Coral Gate mall for our children Candela Orange Grove at the Pond Ella Officer Paul Rose monitors the call and finds no one at the phone booth at the mall where the call originated, but less than a mile from the mall he saw a possible suspect who the suspect had been walking hurriedly on the side of the road away from In the direction of the mall, the suspect whose name is Paul Fly quickly admits that he made the 9-1-1 call confessing to the murder.

He informs her of his rights and arrests him. The night before he broke into a house and strangled an elderly woman. The sofa where she was lying there is no sign of anything missing, theft had not been the reason. Lieutenant Jeff Taylor, upon entering the house, found the victim just as Cline described her, but would soon discover that she had not been Klein's first victim that Klein had associated with. He told me that he heard voices and the voices made him angry and every time he got angry he had to kill someone and when he said that he indicated to me that maybe there were other victims too and I asked him at that moment if he had been killed before and he said yes. , twice.

Fine had murdered another woman in a trailer a few months earlier, but his first victim had been a friend named Danny Webster, murdered a year and a half earlier, in August 1989, when Webster went into the countryside to look for aluminum. Cans Klein had beaten him to death with a lead pipe, a crime scene search unit scours the area where the murder supposedly occurred, so if I understand Wyler, we had information that we believed at the time the murder was committed. crime in the original act of A homicide was committed in this field, so we did a grid search of this entire field and in doing so located the problem.

It's too early to say now if it actually passed through the victim, which we think is a good possibility. Once we find the shoe, we have to treat it as evidence, according to Klein's confession, he had returned to the crime scene three days after the murder, arrived at night to avoid detection and swam with the body to a swampy island where he found it. dismembered the corpse with an ax and a paring knife after so thoroughly disposing of Webster's body and getting away with it for a year and a half, mine has now decided to confess that crime scene search agents find a small piece of bone photographed exactly where it is found but they will not find a body without a body the police do not have enough evidence to convict Detective Jack Shale interrogated Klein under tight security Klein had once been a stop sign with his bare hands we needed identification positive of the body although we had someone telling us who was killed and they were killed we still have to prove who was murdered how they were murdered and when they were murdered as best we can is the corpus delicti the corpus delicti we have to be able to establish that yes this person the night and that this person did it I don't know, I must hit him about I don't know maybe more than 200 times I'm not sure I kept hitting everything I didn't know what helps the arms everywhere I could understand it, just his head, his region was more or in He actually had more anything, but that was after he was already

dead

.

The confession alone is not enough to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt; police must find the body, Klein said. the swampy island where he says he left the dismembered quarters, but even if the police can find him, it will be difficult to identify him after a year and a half in the swamp, the case will go to dr. William Maples of the University of Florida, a world-renowned authority on the identification of skeletal remains, in 1991 led the team that exhumed the bones of President Zachary Taylor, who died mysteriously in 1850. Some historians say Taylor was poisoned, so that Abraham Lincoln was not the first.

The American president will be assassinated after examining the dead president's hair and nails for poison. Dr. Maples put an end to the body and killer theories. In the case of Paul Kline, it is immediately clear to Maples that he is a possible psychopath who is completely unaffected by death. Bodies in Florida tend to swell very quickly Florida is known for its sunshine and good weather, especially in the Fort Myers area where this occurred, so the first thing our killer tried to use was a paring knife, it is very flexible and lightweight. . It can be sharp, it can be serrated, and it can be very, very effective at times in cutting through bones.

The so-called Ginsu steak knife is surprisingly flexible and yet cuts through bone if used correctly, so our killer stabs the knife into this swollen body and pulls it out. pours a yellow and green discharge of a foul-smelling liquid over him and this is enough to bother anyone, even if they were not bothered at first, but the killer's use of a paring knife may be the key to identifying the remains of victims and corroborate Klein's remains. Confession, if we take a paring knife and rub a stick or a bone or whatever the case may be, we notice that the blade jumps and vibrates, this noise produces a type of interrupted cut on the surface of the bone and we look for this evidence of noise. and that tells us how flexible or inflexible the blade is, on the other hand, if we take a good sharp knife with a heavy blade and cut the bone, it doesn't break, it just cuts the bone and this is evidence of a more blade crime. heavy and less flexible.

Officers searching the scene arrived at the island where Klein left the dismembered body. If they can find bones cut with a kitchen knife, they will have strong evidence that Klein's confession is real. You'll win this one. Klein was to have accompanied the officers. himself, but on the ship heading to the island he had been too excited at the prospect of seeing the remains of his victims for his own safety, the officers decided to search without Klein's help, it is a serious mission because, unlike of his other crimes, the murder of Danny. Webster was cruel enough to send Klein to Florida's electric chair or prove beyond a doubt that he is a dangerous psychopath who should be locked up indefinitely.

He seemed like a normal person, you didn't notice any psychological problems or anything like that, but the more it happened and the more I realized that he was telling me the truth and these bloody events that he was telling me really happened and I'm starting to think that There is no real weirdo here, they can do this and

talk

about it so calmly and intelligently. Klein had a nickname that he didn't like because his arms extended away from his body as he walked. The children made fun of him by calling him Popeye. He had killed Danny Webster for insulting him by repeating it over and over again.

It was because Webster had almost harassed him. In fact, I'm a little busy. I need a little something. Take my medication. The island where Klein left the body is partially submerged and subject to tidal changes. The logistics of finding evidence are very difficult. Finally more bones are found. The body is in pieces. like Klein had said, how did you not disarm this body? The leader's response was as I always do. I cut off his left leg, left arm, head, right arm, right leg in a circular motion like that and he had used an axe, he told me where the ax was, that it was in another state, he and his father They had gone to her home in another state and left her there before returning.

Pieces of bone found on the swampy island are sent to the FBI for examination. The FBI confirms that the bones show evidence of his trauma. An ax was used to cut thebody, but according to his heartbreaking confession, Fine had reserved special treatment for the victim's head. You have to stay home with a paring knife and A head there was more or less in pieces and I threw it right on an embankment about 25 or 30 feet from the main roads and stuck it there like a seed head there for life "I guess it's something like three and a half months," he said.

He told me that he would stick his head in and save it to visit her again, he would visit her every night,

talk

to him and after about two weeks it got to the point where it deteriorated to the point that he didn't want it anymore so he discarded it Klein had carried the head with him in a paper bag, often striking up conversations with it upon seeing a police car, on one occasion he panicked and threw the head into a canal, but couldn't remember where a diving team from Police were searching the area where Klein Danny Webster's skull may have been discarded.

It is an area of ​​murky waters frequented by alligators. They find nothing but coconuts. Unless the head is found, it may be impossible to identify the remains as those of Danny Webster. Here as in the Virginia suburbs, police must team up with. science to bring a murderer to justice at the Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, tourists contemplate the wonders of the natural world little do they know that just yards away a storage area contains the unnatural work of a cruel murderer police in the Fairfax County Virginia has called in forensic scientist Doug Owsley to help identify the victim of a brutal homicide the body has decomposed only a skeleton remains House Lee has determined that the victim was a woman between 27 and 34 years old, died of repeated stabbings, but who is she and where did she come from when she works with police cases and human rights issues? identification often when the remains arrive at the laboratory or when you are involved in the recovery the identification occurs very quickly there is someone missing there are records that can be obtained dental records or medical records that you can compare with and you can find that person identified in a very short period of time, but Fairfax County police have found no immediate links to a missing person.

So, we'll need all the evidence we can find to produce a life story for the victim that will hope

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y be compared to someone who went missing. up to six years earlier the personal effects found with the victim are minimal a cheap hairpin a hair comb her blue jeans had rotted her synthetic underwear was still light the sandals indicate that the crime was committed in a warm climate her hair was a light brown color like As determined by analysis of hair found at this site, we know that our nails were painted from nails that were recovered at the site.

It was a bright dark pink color, so there is a lot of detail in the earrings found near the body. It is a fragment of human tissue. The metal of the earring had protected it from bacterial decay. The earrings are included in sketches distributed throughout the country. Slowly and pain

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y, the disturbing details of the victim's life are focusing on the spine. They are signs of Traumatic depressions in the vertebrae are evidence that the discs between the vertebrae have helped Ernie. The victim may have had a job that required heavy lifting. He once took care of his teeth, but in the last year of his life he had let them deteriorate.

He had fillings in his front teeth to maintain his appearance, but he is missing five of his molars. The black spots on the teeth are evidence that the victim was probably a smoker in general, which is the impression you would have, but it is an impression based not only on the teeth but perhaps on some of the things found in them. would suggest that he was an individual who did not have much money and rather limited financial resources. Information collected by Owsley is passed to the Fairfax County Police Department, where Detective Bruce Guth heads the homicide branch in our jurisdiction.

Murders are committed by people who do not know the victim in the normal case, once the victim is known, the police will talk to the neighbors and family about the victim's lifestyle, who were his friends and his enemies , a chain of evidence will often lead to the culprit. At that point, in this case, we don't know the identity, so it's hard to go much further until we know who it is, detail by detail. Fairfax County police re-examine evidence found at the scene, a sketch of what the victim may have looked like is distributed to police around the country along with other details of the case, although this case has two years.

I'm still actively looking for clues that have occurred. I've been getting inquiries about two or three a month recently. one from Philadelphia, New York and Ohio, despite the continued efforts of Fairfax County Police, there is no match between the murder victim and a missing person to facilitate the search for the victim's identity. Doug Owsley provides data for a second composite sketch using an FBI. computer program when you look at a skull and you are trying to evaluate what this individual looked like, the basic shape will be defined by the skull itself in relation to that, then you take into consideration the clothing that is found, for example, because the clothing helps To get an idea of ​​the size, weight of the individual, for example, starting with an image of the skull, the computer adds successive layers of detail markers that indicate the likely thickness of the facial tissue, the measurements are based on similar population studies.

The age and sex of the hair found at the scene along with the plastic clip and photo of the hair suggest a possible hairstyle. The victim had an overbite. A gap in the front teeth and a cosmetic filling, as these features would have been visible in life. The victim is shown smiling. in the final illustration but despite the efforts made to create a realistic image there is still no answer when the image is published nationally part of the problem the police are still not sure when the murder occurred when it was discovered in 1993 the bones were dried meat had rotted a long time ago, you'd have to say it would be at least a year and a half before this could have happened, but I actually think it could extend further back in time, so if we take the maximum range of the things found in a pocket was a coin dating from 1980, so if we look at the time period we are in in terms of the extremes, we are probably talking between 1991 and 1980, the problem of dating the victims of murder found long after the crime has occurred may soon have an effect response at a Tennessee body farm an unusual study is being conducted using volunteer flesh and bones from the dead in Fairfax County Virginia police continues his search for clues to identify a woman found in the Washington suburbs in Fort Myers, Florida, a confessed serial killer has led police to a headless body barely identifiable as human in both cases the work done at the research center of Tennessee anthropology or tarf will prove invaluable its director is dr.

William Bass, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, experiences the human skeleton when a person has recently died. Morphological features, such as fingerprints and palm prints, can help with identification when these features have disappeared and only bones remain. is a forensic anthropology facility that receives on average one body per week for identification. Parts of Tennessee have become a dumping ground for murder victims. We don't think of interstates as avenues for crime, but they're definitely using crime, so you can kidnap someone in Chicago, you can go down I-75, which goes through Cincinnati, through Lexington, Kentucky, into Tennessee.

The first real area you come to on I-75 heading into Florida, which is really rural, is Tennessee and we have a lot of information. Bodies lying around With so many bodies Bass has invented a boxing system for storage. Each skeleton has its own box, so we want to pack them up because if you don't, they will get lost and get dirty on the shelves around them. 2,000 skeletons sent to the Bass facility by medical examiners from across the state with the help of graduate students. Bass helps police determine the sex, race and other identifying characteristics of unclaimed bodies, but in doing his job, Bass realized there were no reliable statistics on rates. of human decomposition, he established near Knoxville an open-air preserve informally known as the Body Farm.

Here he has not planted living beings but dead human bodies left in the open air to decompose. It is an experiment that will tell you how body decomposition is affected by weather and climate. degree of exposure to the elements this is a body we are studying the effects of the body covering left by the worms this body has been outside for a year the worms have eaten the inside but left part of the skin for protection the worms No They like sunlight and what they do is leave this as an umbrella to protect themselves from the sun and this way you get bodies like this that will have the cover on.

I'm keeping the bones together even though there are no internal organs left there. At all, the specimens used for Bass's experiments come from two basic sources: those who have donated their bodies to science, an unclaimed body sent to the facility by a medical examiner after the bodies have remained outdoors for decompose, they are returned to the laboratory for analysis. The dissection will tell how your exposure to the elements has affected your skin, bones, and tissues. These statistics will help police departments determine how long a newly discovered homicide victim has been dead to keep intruders with morbid curiosities away.

Security guards keep the body farm under control. Low surveillance has attempted to duplicate all the common ways killers get rid of their victims. Well, we try to stay as honest as possible. We try not to do anything artificial. It is exactly as it is in nature. What we have here is a there are many mobiles that we have been observing the decomposition rates of people in cars, both in the passenger department and in the trunk, a body placed in the trunk has since been removed for observation, but its byproducts are still small pupils from which flies have emerged. emerged a few minutes after death occurred the flies are attracted to the body to lay their eggs the eggs will develop into larvae or maggots that feed on the decaying flesh before turning into flies we can tell you that this individual has been in this trunk in less than 21 days from the fly pupae that are present from the cases of pupils that are present here in the back seat of the car another body has been removed yes again leaving a clue about the time of death mass of hair what is flame the hair mask falls off corpse after a week vas has discovered that in closed vehicles the buildup of heat often speeds up the decomposition process some of the bodies have only been dead a week well, i hadn't gone very far, you know that They're both in roughly the same scenario, aren't they in that bunny? others are much larger, there are some worms right there, but that worm is frozen, it has moved away from the body heat and did not return to the body, so they are a couple there, I'm going to delay this a little longer here, I'm not very sure, well, you see, there's a lot of legacy, there's hundreds and hundreds of worms in there and they're slowed down, they're not. doing a lot right now because it's so cold every month bass sends bone and hair samples to the fbi for analysis the samples come from several different specimens in a variety of locations within the farm the fbi will study how weather is exposed to the elements and the environment in which a body is found can alter its DNA.

You can do a DNA analysis on the worms and they will produce the same DNA. If the individual has taken drugs, the worms will pick up those drugs. You can also tell from the analysis of the worm. the volatile fatty acids, which are the sticky stuff you see there, are what I call the volatile fatty acids that leach out of the bodies. We have now been able to take this material and analyze it and determine the time period from death to approximately two years in other parts of the facility the bodies lie in coffins the drainage tubes above the ground allow for testing of fluids and unopened air samples the coffin lid this is close the bodies are buried in coffins six feet underground with a sewer that allows access down here and his associates study how burialsunderground affect the rate of decomposition, as murderers have been known to dismember their victims and scatter them over another area reserved for body parts;

It's not always an exact science, but dr. The bass work, the first of its kind, will help police with murder victims found long after the crime. In the case of Danny Webster in Florida, police have only one part of the body. The killer has done a painstaking job dismembering and scattering the remains filling the The grisly details of the murder and mutilation will be the work of forensic science at the Lee County Sheriff's Office in Fort Myers, Florida. Paul Kline has confessed to the murder of Danny Webster, but the killer has dismembered the body and disposed of his head with the few bones found.

A Marsh Island is a year and a half old and it may be impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they are the bones of Danny Webster. Kline had been relentless in trying to hide the crime from him before decapitating the body. He had knocked out her teeth knowing that they are often used to identify the victim. He explained that instead of digging a normal grave-type hole, he dug a round hole like to put trash or something, he first placed the victim on his buttocks and pushed him into the hole from behind. shoulders, when it didn't go all the way in, he jumped up and down on the body until he could get it deep enough into the hole to think he had it hidden and he cleared brush and dirt from it and lay down on his belly and his words slipped out. back into the water like a big alligator and swam back home.

Is Kline a psychopath or is he a man who is one and planned the perfect crime? Okay, a perfect crime, let's think what about Jimmy Hoffa? Where have we come to? Jimmy Hoffa song, we don't even know where it is, how can we solve the crime if we don't know where it is? So someone, I mean, someone already thought about this, you know that if you leave the body, it's good. Chance of getting caught because there's always a hair and fiber section from the FBI and everyone's forensic anthropologist, my colleagues were out there trying to figure this out, but if you don't have a body, how do you know?

You have a criminal music detective Harry executed a search warrant on Klein's apartment, it soon became apparent that Klein may have learned the killing techniques from the books we found, probably every real life murder story ever written. written, like Son of Sam, the Hillside Strangler. It was just book after book after book of the scant remains that forensic science must identify Danny Webster's body, otherwise the case may be lost to corroborate Klein's confession and make the case stick in court. Anthropologist William Maples will try to determine the age, sex and race of partial skeletons this is the axis of the bone this is the epiphysis the end of the bone and they start from separate origins in a child and slowly change shape as As the epiphysis reaches the end of its growth, they fuse with the bone axes in the bones, in this case the fusion is not yet complete.

Maples can place the victim's age between 17 and 23, the same age as Danny Webster. Determining sex is almost always a matter of studying the pelvis. The bones are narrower in men than in women. The victim in this case was clearly a man, but determining race will be more difficult, especially since the head is missing. Dr. Maples uses the femur or femur to distinguish Caucasians from blacks. In a Caucasian, the femur is arched enough to allow his knuckle to pass underneath; in the case of a black individual the shaft tends to be much flatter and straighter and there is no anterior curvature.

The amount of curvature in the femur indicated clearly to me. that we are dealing with a white man finally the maples examine the bones as evidence of the vibration marks that a paring knife would leave if it were used to dismember the bodies. Murderers in general are not stupid enough to use peri knives, although we don't have much evidence, but the results are positive in the end. From examining him, Maples has conclusive evidence that the bones matched Danny Webster's description. The necessary corroboration of Klein's confession is available to Lt. Jeff Taylor. The case is closed. Paul Kline is currently in an institution in Chattahoochee, Florida, for the mentally ill, but in Fairfax County.

Virginia police have a tougher problem: Our murder victim remains unidentified. A murderer can go unnoticed. Free to kill again. More than two years have passed since the discovery of a female body in the Virginia countryside near Washington DC. Fairfax County investigators, including Detectives Jerry Ferrell and Dennis Wilson. have submitted extensive information about the case, including descriptions of the victim's dental charts and a description of some, but not all, of the injuries discovered by forensic expert Doug Owsley. People have been known to confess to crimes they did not commit after learning the details of the crime. from public sources by withholding certain information the police can be sure when a confession is false or genuine far from having a confession the police in Fairfax County after two years of searching missing persons files still do not know who the victim is, even today we think a lot about her and we hope that through the facial reproductions that have been made someone can recognize her and can contact the police and offer new ideas because she is someone we need to identify and we certainly need to do to prevent this from happening again discover who did this we have sent hundreds of tips hundreds of posters we will probably review this again at least once or twice a year we try to cover it on television stations to the media we try to get the newspapers interested to publish the images we want, not just the interpretations of the artists but also the photographs of the clothes, this is not a case that is just sitting on a shelf and nothing is done with a growing population and more and more people on the move many crimes may never be solved victims like the one found in Fairfax County her friends and family unaware of her death may remain unidentified her killer free to kill again I think homicide investigations are getting a little more difficult The national trend is stranger in Stranger MERS , since in previous years they were domestic murders of family members.

Nationwide, there are more stranger murders and forensic analysis becomes a very important part of the investigation. Was this the work of a serial killer? Doug Owsley thinks it's not the body. He was hastily buried, the killer lacking the tools to dismember him so he would never be found. Serial killers like Paul Klein from Florida are much more efficient, they don't necessarily get the same kind of sophistication in this case, it certainly led to a tragic end, but in terms of accomplishing what he set out to do, he was much less prepared, so On the other hand, he was able to take someone's life and he has been able to get away with it all these years, so there is a part that we have.

We have not yet been able to meet to continue this path despite the obstacles to resolving the case. Fairfax County

detectives

haven't given up. Sooner or later someone is going to talk about this, which is one of the premises of a cold case team. that relationships are changing and technologies are changing. Chazar becomes more advanced. I am optimistic that this case could be solved. We continue working on it. Destroying it. It will eventually develop. Oh yes, I'm going optimistic. We will do it sometimes. just take a little more time, that's all William Maples because you think few murderers escape detection no, of course, no, they don't follow our rules, they'll take risks, they'll do things we wouldn't do, they just don't do it. play by the rules and that is useful for us because that means they make longer bets by taking risks, invariably you know maximum excitement is an important element and excitement means they are taking risks, we should love them more chances they take more chances than we have to catch you