Law enforcement descends upon the house of Dennis and Norma Woodruff - and makes a bizarre choice to document the grisly scene. Hilarie, Dan, Po, and Andrew will discuss the bizarre choice made by law enforcement as well as the evidence discovered at the scene of the crime.
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Hi guys, it's Hillary here. Just a quick note. This series does deal with a lot of tough subject matter that may be difficult for some listeners, so please keep this in mind when and where you choose to listen to these episodes. It's nighttime and law enforcement has descended upon the house of Dennis and Norma Woodrooff. They enter the house, but instead of filming the crime scene with the lights on, law enforcement decides the only light they'll use is from the flashlights in their hands, casting an eerie glow over the entire crime scene. It's a bizarre choice for law enforcement to make when documenting a murder. In the last episode, we introduced you to the people involved in this case are victims Dennis and Norma Woodroof and their children, Brandon and Charla Woodruff. We also met Dennis's mom, Bonnie, who introduced us to their world before the tragic events in October of two thousand and five. It's important to us that you get to know all of these people, not just as victims, but as people with rich lives filled with in this case, everything from horses to Dolly Parton fan clubs. This episode, we are going to be diving into the crime scene and the very peculiar choice law enforcement made. I'm Hillary Burton Morgan and this is true crime story. It couldn't happen here. Welcome to another episode of It Couldn't Happen here. I am Hillary Burton Morgan here with our amazing crew, Poe Hutcheons, Dan Flaherty and Andrew Dunn. As a reminder to the listener, what does the family know at this point when.
The bodies are discovered. The family knew that both Dennis and Norma were deceased, but they had no idea what had happened. It's the next morning. There still don't get any official word from the police except that they were deceased, that there's going to be an autopsy, and we're still processing the crime scene and we'll let you know more when we know.
Well, they didn't say crime scene. We're still processing the scene.
And seems like the question was still remained even if you knew it was a violent death, whether it was straight up homicide or murder suicide. They weren't sure if the family was like, was it suicide or was it homicide? I think that question still remained for quite a while.
Andrew did you see crime scene photos when you were doing recre uh.
Yes, a lot of crime scene photos.
They were not nice.
No, I can't imagine. You guys always send me kind of a PG version of things, and I appreciate that because it is a lot to sit with. But for the listener at home, explained to them the setup of that room and how Dennis and Norma were found.
Dennis was sitting on the edge of the couch. He had a star from cup in his hand that was used to spit tobacco juice, still clutched in his hand. Norma was sitting right next to him. Seems like she was leaning into him. Maybe perhaps she was trying to hide behind him or was just leaning against him.
They were very close together on that couch.
They're very close together on the couch. Dennis was shot once in the face and stabbed multiple times. Norma was shot three to five times. It's hard to say because entry and eggs of wounds, but she was shot multiple times and had one stab wound four inch deep, I believe in her neck.
What are the next steps for law enforcement? So what should they have done and what.
Do they do when they first arrive on the scene. They go in and they look at the bodies, and they go to make sure that there isn't anybody else in their other bodies or the perpetrator. This is a daytime. They take a look around and then they shut it down and wait for a search warr so then they don't go back in until it's dark out, and they walk in and they film it the way they found it, which was the lights were not on.
The assumption by law enforcement is that Norma and Dennis were killed sometime Sunday night between nine to twenty and eleven o'clock when they don't answer the phone.
They assumed they were killed at nighttime, so they wanted to film the scene the way it looked before anybody touched anything, so they didn't turn any lights on.
I understood that that was a deliberate choice on law enforcement's part. So basically, the investigator, wanting to make a good crime scene video, goes in there to portray it as if it was first person, as if it was all dark and a killer came in and shot them.
You know, the killer wouldn't have shot them in the dark.
Well, I think, I think, honestly, this is it's drama, it's actual drama.
But that's an assumption you're making.
No, No, we actually didn't. We talk about this was a deliberate choice by the investigator to you to make sure he had a videotape that portrayed the drama of the situation, which included drama of the discovery, not the drama of the murder.
Honestly, I believe it was a legit purpose in their minds, which was we're not going to touch anything. We're not going to turn any lights on, right, turn lights off, We're not going to mess with the scene. We're going to document it the way we found it.
What is problematic about having a crew film in a crime scene in the dark, Let's just spell it out.
They can't see, so they're gonna step in stuff, they're going to kick stuff. They tramped over a crime scene in the dark for some kakammy reason that makes no sense and created quite a dramatic video of walking through for themselves. But it's the experience of a person walking through in the dark crime scene, not a person who actually is perpetrating a crime in that house, and they may well have sullied the evidence.
Yeah, and that's a huge problem in these cases. Once law enforcement has made a misstep in processing the crime scene. It kind of starts a snowball rolling, right, because no one wants to admit that they messed up, and so then it becomes a process of validating these choices.
None of us have ever experienced something like this. They're supposed to be fact finding. The video is supposed to help fact find and help others understand evidence and facts and how things were and to preserve them. I mean a tropping around the dark in a crime scene doesn't preserve them, as we find out, but also it imbues that process with an opinion or an attitude that is completely outside of the cold hard facts that you're supposed to be looking at it.
For what do we see in this video?
We see sort of a handheld home movie creeping through the house in the dark, with a narration of the person shooting the video recounting what is being seen as he goes through the kitchen and into the living room where the bodies are, and he's recounting what you see and that they're on the couch and that there's a cup on the side, and that it's sort of a blow by blow narrating what you're seeing on this shaky, grainy, dark home video back and at and it is dramatic and it does take you into the moment.
But whether there's a roaming flashlight.
Oh yeah, there's a roaming flashlight, so you feel like you're the one discovering the crime scene rather than here's what we discovered in bright light so you can see it.
It's almost like filmmaking. It's Jaws, where what you can't see is almost scarier than what you can see. And so in giving that to a jury and letting imaginations run wild, is that a disservice to the investigation and the child?
It's a blair witch project. They're creating a sense of fear and apprehension in who the viewer is and the experience of this person creeping through a house in the dark, in a scary place where there's dead bodies.
We've seen many crime scene documentation videos, and in fairness, it is a documentation of the objects and the points of interest. But I've never seen one where where if there was a choice to turn the lights on and illuminate the scene, that any law enforcement would obviously always make that choice.
How many details did we miss because it was in the dark.
You see where the flashlight looks, little points here and little points there.
I mean, it's a bizarre choice. It's rife with potential to literally contaminate and disrupt the crime scene.
Let's talk about the experience level of the people who arrived on this scene, Dan, We had an interview with an elderly woman in roy City who said, I've lived here eighty something years and I have never heard of a murder in Royce City before. How experienced were the people who arrived at this crime scene.
Well, I mean it's the local sheriff of the county sheriff, so I don't know how many murder investigations who were in Hunt County at that time, But they immediately called in the Texas Rangers the state police. They did the right thing. I mean, the local Sherif's department's really not equipped to just even like technically, you know, with crime scene processing things like that, and the Texas Rangers came in and led the investigation.
What do we know about Texas Rangers.
These guys are famous in Texas. They walk around in ten gallon cowboy hats. They come in to the big crimes. They're the big cop in town. And they roll in and take over any major crime. As far as I know, they come from the wild West.
Right, they were at the Alamo, they served as security. They're a paramilitary organization early in the beginning. However, they have evolved into the state's investigative law enforcement arm and it does seem ridiculous that you go there and they are wearing these hats. I actually asked several rangers is it required. It is required? That is the official uniform. You cannot not wear the hat.
Really, Yeah, So it's like Canadian Mounties. Like the uniform. The presence of that is supposed to elicit some kind of like feeling within the community.
I think it does.
I mean their cowboys, they're old wild West.
I am not there for every single interview, and one of the interviews that I'm sad that I missed out on is Noel Martin, because when I did get down to Texas, you guys had already met with him and could not stop talking about him.
Noel Martin was a crime scene investigator that was called to the scene the next morning. He's a blood splatter expert, but he's local, not a Texas ranger.
Noel Martin, because we asked him. It's like, so Texas Rangers, there's sort of this mythical organization, right, there's this history and the storied past, and Nole's like, yeah, they're just like any other detective, you know, So to wear the big hat.
Says the guy with the big hat.
Yeah.
So Noel tall man then in his probably early sixties, mustache, close cropped hair, certainly cowboy boots and cowboy hat. Classic version of what you would expect a old time law enforcement man to look like in the state of Texas.
You feel like he walked out of a movie. He could have been one hundred years ago.
That's right, he could walk onto a set with his cowboy hat. Of course, during the interview or setting up the interview for me, the primary question was cowboy hat or no cowboy hat?
He asked you.
He did ask, and we thought about it and would it be distracting to have a cowboy hat on or not?
Perfect?
We'd be perfect, but then it could be distracting. I don't know. We ended up putting the cowboy hat next to him on his desk, actually oriented the proper way, which is the crown of the hat down rather than the brim of the hat down. He is one of the best law enforcement interviews I've personally done, not just because he looks the part, but his delivery, the precision of his delivery, the care of his delivery, the framing of the facts around reasoning that's easy to understand.
Let's hear from Nola.
The gunshot wounds were obviously the wounds that were fatal of the stab wounds were done after the gunshot wounds. I believe based on the evidence that I saw there, based on the way the blood spatter appeared at the scene the gunshots occurred first, it was a surprise to both Dennis and Norma. They had no time to react. That would tend to show that someone knew them and was I'm probo with him being that close to him. So that is how we developed the suspect pool that we started with. When the case proceeded.
Onwark, it was believable and it carried great force in terms of believing that everything that he is telling you is true. Not to mention, he had some very nice singers.
That's what we call him police work. That's a clue.
Did he feel rehearsed, No, God, the guy's a storyteller. He's a natural rock on tour, but in a very organized way, so he seemed prepared.
You know, this is something that happens. We're all sort of New Yorkers here.
Well, we're all from other places.
Yes, but we all live in New York and we're all working media, and we speak very quickly, and we fight for attention by speaking very quickly. We interrupt each other.
We don't interrupt Andrew Goodness.
But it's interesting when we go to someplace like Texas, people do talk slower there, and that slow speaking often seems more precise and easier to understand and more convincing. In my opinion, I understand that.
Yeah, he was clear and firm with every word I heard in his interview.
Firm. That's a good word for him.
I don't think he was rehearsed. I don't think he was giving us a line. He was giving us what he felt and what he believed and what he observed.
Want a look about. Being a crime scene investigator is solving cases based solely on forensic evidence, identifying someone responsible for a crime with nothing other than a fingerprint, tying it all together, telling them what they did at the scene, instead of them telling us what they think we want to hear. In other words, we know the story before you tell us the story. If you have a good scene that's protected. In most cases not all, but in most cases we can pretty much tell you what happened from start to finish based on the forensic evidence.
Do you feel that sometimes that the forensics are when you get to court, the forensics are, you know, more believable or they're more reliable than what the words people say?
Right, you know, I can sum that up pretty quick. The evidence never lies. People always lie. Nobody tells the truth the first time. Ever. The evidence always tells the truth. It never lies.
I mean, he wasn't there on day one. They brought him in. He's a blood splatter expert. He initial investigators saw that there was a trail of blood and they're like, there might be more. We don't know, so let's call Nol. And Nol is a specialist from another county. So they bring him in the next day to explore this, and he's really is focused on the physical evidence as far as blood splatter. He follows the trail of blood. It goes into the bathroom and into the bedroom, so it goes from the couch from.
The couch where the two bodies are.
Yeah, thick trail of blood, larger droplets right by the bodies, trails off as it goes down the hallway, looking like somebody who is carrying a bloody knife that was dripping, and it looks like somebody goes into the bathroom. This is his interpretation of the blood, right, that someone went into the bathroom and either washed up himself or herself or the knife or whatever was used. There's a little bit of blood going into the bedroom that's right there, right at the foot of the bed, and then it stops. I mean, that's about the extent of what he knows personally, except he does go to the couch, and he's the one who says, look, we should be looking for bullets here. So they go in and they dig and they find the two of the slugs they dug out of the couch, I believe. And that's important because it's a large caliber bullet and there's no casings around. So either it was the gun was a revolver, or somebody picked up the casings. But looks to him, probably a revolver was used. Large caliber forty four or forty five he's also in contact with the lead investigator.
So Ranger Collins works for the very famous, very swashbuckling Texas Rangers, you know, and hewhears a big cowboy hat, just like they're supposed to, and he really looks the part exactly.
The Texas Rangers are leading the investigation, but the county investigators are part of the investigation as well. Investigator Gibson is the investigator from Hunt County. He's working alongside of Ranger Collins on this investigation.
So as Noel is piecing together what he is seeing, he's attaching that to more information through his interaction with the investigator. He's working with a team. He's not just doing this in a vacuum, and so they're feeding each other so that they can create the story of what happened.
When Norman Dennis were found and I looked at the crime scene pictures, of course they weren't there when I arrived. It was the next day. They appeared to be relaxed, comfortable, not expecting what was about to happen to them. I'm sure they were shocked when the initial shots were fired. I know Norma raised her hand, of course, which we talked about earlier and had the gunshot went through the hand. I'm sure she was horrified about what had just happened and probably traumatized beyond all belief and scared out of her mind as to what was about to happen to her. It's very very violent, it's very very personal. It's just very very evil for someone to do that to an individual whom they were obviously friends with, related to, or even kin to. Dennis was so unaware of what was about to occur that he still had a cup in his hand that he was using because he dipped tobacco, and he didn't even have time. He didn't even have time to discard that cup or drop it. It happened so fast that the cup remained in his hand.
God, there's so many parts of that that just kind of leap out. In the span of one or two sentences, he talks about Norma's emotions in that moment. He says, she was shocked, she was horrified, she was traumatized. This was so evil. None of those are scientific words, none of those are feelings that he could know, because the only person that knows them are Norma, who's no longer with us, and the person who perpetrated this, but he says it was such authority.
I just think it's somewhat shocking that he didn't even see the bodies in the house, and yet how he conveys it as if he did. You think it's a scientific fact that the law enforcement man is telling you. That's what I'm saying, is such a departure. He is narrating a fantastical tale that he doesn't know about what is going through the minds of these people, when his job is to tell the evidence and what the evidence tells him, and he's then jumping into far more detail about an emotional state of somebody.
M hm.
He believes he's the advocate for the victim.
Yeah, And even the way he describes the bodies that are found, he says they were relaxed, they were shocked when this happened. Those are not things that you can necessarily know from the positioning of these bodies. We know they were seated next to each other, but when a body slumps over, how do you know what position it was holding before the person was killed?
Precisely. But that's why it's so effective. It's more than just information that credits are discredits.
No one's saying that it's not effective. But we're just questioned, or at least I'm questioning that level of detail of the unknowable woven into the storytelling of the crime that he couldn't possibly know. He's allowing his perceptions to become the story themselves.
I think what's really interesting is he does this combination of making assumptions that we would all assume that Norma was horrified after her husband was shot in the head. Right, It's not a leap for him to make that assumption. I would make that assumption I see a woman who just watched her husband get shot in the head, Right, it's not a big leap. But then he makes the big leap of how comfortable they were and how unaware they were taken, as if they were surprised by the gunshot. That is a much bigger leap. It starts with some small things, which of course she's horrified by what just happened. So we sort of are brought into his world of like, yes, of course, I'm with you, this makes total sense.
We can agree with the first assumption, yeah, and then it forces us to also go along with the second assumption in the third assumption, and it leads us down a really murky path when he speaks about evil.
When you shoot somebody in the face and stab them after you kill them, it's evil. I can see protecting yourself shooting somebody in self defense. I can see it in the military to walk up to somebody and shoot them in the face out of the blue while they're sitting on their couch enjoying tobacco. Obviously, based on the evidence we found there, sitting next to his wife on a weekend in your own house, is evil, plain and simple. That's the only way to describe it.
That is a broad thing for someone to bring up.
It's not evidence based.
It's not evidence based. If we're existing in a country that is supposed to separate church and state, definition of evil is relative. For him to bring up evil, what did that indicate to you? Guys?
He believes there is evil, and he is certain there is evil, and you believe that he believes there is evil.
Beyond that though he's religious, and he believes that those tenants have a place in his work and his perspective as a law enforcement authority. And that's interesting for me because it's what I was trying to say earlier about how he told a narrative around what had happened in that house as if he had been there. I mean, the bodies weren't even there when he walked through the house. He looked at photographs of the body, and he looked at the house itself. He barely had more than we have, but he completely took this liberty to walk us through like a movie of what had happened in a way that felt so believable.
Because he has that component, because he has that confidence in himself.
I think it's descriptive instead of just saying facts, it's what do these facts mean? You know?
No, but people say what the facts mean without talking about evil and some of the kind of flourishes that he puts in there.
Sure, but I think it's helpful. I think when you're looking at something like a murder like this, there's lots of reasons why somebody would want to kill somebody, right and looking at this crime scene, the brutality of it, the overkill. You know, these people were already dead or would have been dead from their wounds. Dennis shot once in the face, would have killed him, like paralyzed them right then to stab him multiple times, How do you you know, you could just say he was stabed multiple times. But the way No describes it, it's significant to the investigation in that it's not just a home invasion. It's not just oh, I want to see you dead, it's I want to see you as Knowles has destroyed.
You know.
It helps you to really understand what we're seeing, you know.
But it's putting himself in the mind of the killer, which is very poetic. His whole narrative that he is very firm and convincing about is wildly emotional. That emotion in investigations can really take you somewhere else and away from potentially the truth and certainly put blinders on you.
But our judicial system isn't supposed to be poetic. Andrew, you've seen the crime scene photos. Given the amount of the splattering of the blood throughout the house, finding it in bathrooms and bedrooms, things like that.
It's like drips, not splatters.
Really, it seems like this would be a forensic avalanche of information.
I mean, when you look at the photos and the narrative that they pieced together, it seems like a very good narrative. I mean, you know, they're making a hypothesis but it seems plausible.
Do they collect anything else from the bathroom. There's blood in there, but what else do they collect?
They didn't collect any fingerprints on any doors or light switches.
What.
Yeah, it was weird to me that there's not a fingerprint dusting through the whole house that I can see in any of the crime scene photos or in any of the reports. I've been on crime scenes with Andrew and Dan that pre date this case, and they were dusting for everything everywhere, So that stuck out to me.
This is a tricky part of our job is we have to make certain assumptions and we have to use our best knowledge. Right, as Noel says, the entire place was dusted, but he wasn't there at the beginning of the crime scene. So you have to take what he's telling us with a certain grain of salt because he wasn't there at the initial investigation. So he's assuming because that's what you do, is you would dust the entire crime scene for Prince. But we don't have a record of that, right.
Or none of the photographs given a record.
But we look at the court records and we see But.
This is the thing. You take him at his word, but then you try to find supporting evidence of it. So you dig back in and if you look in at the investigator's report, there's only a specific mention of dusting the door where it was most likely that the suspect came in and out of.
That's the only thing they dusted.
That's the only record that we see. Now they may have dusted more but didn't record it, and we don't know that. And that's the problem, you know what I mean, We kind of have to piece together what the truth is.
We have to be a little bit detectives in looking at the crime scene reports, the trial transcripts, the photographs and the interviews with people and the interrogations, all of.
That, all of those things. The next thing investigators are going to do is start collecting what was going on right before then. And so as they're trying to figure out who would have motive, who would have opportunity.
The initial assumption from looking at the crime scene was that whoever killed them was somebody who knew them. They didn't seem like a robbery. There were a computer, there were valuables, there were things that were in the house, so it didn't look like a typical home.
Invasion, robbery, no sign of breaking and entering and robbery. They were stabbed multiple times as well as shot, so there's a frenzy. They say, a crime of passion. That kind of intimacy of passion comes when somebody gets stabed multiple times, the brutality of it and the personal nature of stabbing somebody, and that they would know their way around the house by the drops that lead to the bathroom and then into the bedroom. And the family members reported that there was something potentially awry because they weren't able to reach their family member.
Okay, that's important to note. So law enforcement already has an understanding that the last person to speak with Dennis and Norma was Normou's sister at nine something, and the last person to see Dennis and Norma was Brandon, who had been helping his parents move all day on Sunday, had pizza dinner with them before leaving to go back to college. But here's where we need to discuss a really important part of this investigation. Before it is announced to the family that Dennis and Norma have been murdered, there's a phone call.
It's interesting because the very first day when the bodies were discovered They process the scene until like one something in the morning, right, and they decide, okay, well we should lock up the scene for now, we'll continue the investigation tomorrow. We'll bring in the blood splatter expert, all this kind of stuff. So the bodies are removed that night and brought to the coroner's office the next morning. First thing the law enforcement does speak to the family. The family comes in and they are not able to give them too much information. They're basically saying, look, we we're not going to reveal too much of our investigation so far. We're going to the autopsy. Now, the investigators, we're going to go to the coroner's office and observe the autopsy. And they said they would have more information at that point. So this is in the morning. The investiators go and they're observing the autopsy, they get a call that someone had information. It was a female caller. She says, there are rumors that Brandon Woodriff was leading an alternate life style and he hated his parents.
That's the seed of this entire story. It starts with this seed that Brandon Woodroff is not who he seems. He is leading an alternative lifestyle and so throughout the course of this podcast, we will discuss what that seed grows into. That's it for this week's episode of True Crime Story It Couldn't Happen Here, But be sure to join us next week as we dive deeper into the Brandon Woodrooff case.
Brandon walks into that room. I mean they should be looking at him. A bunch of people have called in. He was the last person to see them alive. He is the only suspect that's being suggested they should be looking at him.
Join us next week as we continue to roll up our sleeves and dig in. Thank you so much for joining us. If you haven't watched Sundance TV's True Crime Story It Couldn't Happen Here, you can catch all of our episodes streaming on AMC Plus. For more information about this and other cases we've covered, follow at ice HH stories on Instagram. True Crime Story It Couldn't Happen Here was produced by Mischief Farm in association with Bungalow Media and Entertainment, Authentic Management Productions, and Figdonia in partnership with Sundance TV. Executive producers are Me, Hillary Burton, Morgan, Liz Accessor Robert Friedman, Mike Powers, and Meg Mortimer. Producers are Maggie Robinson Katz and Libby Siegel. Our audio engineer is Brendan Dalton, with original music by Philip Ridiotis. We want to say a special thank you to everyone who participated, but especially the families impacted by our cases.