In April of 2019, police are investigating the death of a man named Phillip Pointer, who’s believed to have died of natural causes. When searching his property to confirm this, they stumble across a bucket, inside which they find a severed human foot. Little did they know that this foot would contain answers to a case police had been investigating for three years.

In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss the difficulties of tracking body parts found in different locations, identifying a body, phenotyping, and more.

Show Notes:

0:00 - Intro

1:25 - Background and overview of the case

2:48 - What the police found at the scene

5:00 - What do investigators do to determine if there are any more remains on the property?

8:50 - Figuring out who the foot belongs to

10:50 - Is there a database that tracks body parts and when they are found?

12:55 - Connecting the dots

17:00 - What was the purpose behind the crime?

18:25 - Cause of death and how it was determined

22:45 - Identifying the body parts

26:50 - Identifying tattoos

29:20 - Different types of identification

32:38 - Phenotyping

35:50 - Identifying the victim