8 Bodies Dismembered and Dissolved in 6 Barrels, Found in Bank Vault, Killer Set Free!

0:01 Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan.

0:10 From September the 2nd, Missing Women, Philly House of Horrors, Dissolving Bodies, and Snuff Films. September the 2nd, the reason I said that is that is our episode for Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan that released on that date. And of course, we're referring to This horrible situation that is currently going on and continuing to develop, even as I speak right now, in the city of brotherly love.

0:41 But today, I want to talk to you about some other cases that in some ways have a striking, striking similarity. Not so much in maybe the motivation, but the means by.

0:56 Which bodies are gotten rid of.

1:01 I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Brother Dave, I reached out to you regarding this topic that we're about to have a conversation regarding because I was struck by it relative to the, I.

1:25 Don't know, it.

1:27 Was hard for me to understand the depth and the breadth of of the bodies involved in this particular case, just as in Philadelphia. Look, I don't even think they've scratched the surface yet, really, with this thing.

1:42 In Philadelphia.

1:43 In Philly. Right.

1:44 And when the cases we're going to be talking about in just a bit kind of landed on my desk, I was sitting there thinking, what kind of world are we in right now? And you and I see the most horrific things. And we talk about them every day. Um, and I still could not get the measure of it because even, even as jaded, as jaded as I am, I was thinking, you know, the old, the old comment that my friend used to make, uh, does your mind work? Uh, I just can't understand, you know, uh, kind of how authorities arrive at certain, certain conclusions or certain outcomes relative to certain cases and how they're disposed of, I think.

2:36 Well, disposed of, probably not the right term to use today.

2:38 It's probably not.

2:40 You know what? Here's what we're dealing with. Bodies in barrels. All right. 11 bodies in barrels. Well, not eight bodies in six barrels, three others and probably more buried in traditional means. Well, traditional for killers, I guess. At any rate, here's what we're dealing with, friends. we have a serial killer, a mass murderer, however you want to label this individual that is being released from prison after admitting, okay, he pleaded guilty to killing four people, to being involved in the murders of four people. Now, we mentioned, look, we could play a math game here, and you would go nuts.

3:23 I was thinking the same thing.

3:24 Yeah, it's not.

3:25 This case is much bigger than the one person we're going to talk about today. And we probably will go back at a later date and revisit. But as Joe started off the show, we've been talking about this house of horrors in Philadelphia where we have murder, mayhem, pictures, videos, and barrels of chemicals for dissolving human beings, probably. And that is what got a lot of people's attention. And in this case, Joe, it got a lot of people's attention.

4:01 The murders that took place were in the late 90s. And that's why this person, after 20-something years in prison, is being let out to walk amongst the free, even though he fully admits his involvement in the murder of individuals for money. And, well, they try to play this card of, well, why would you do this? Well, you know, because everybody wants to know, why did you do it?

4:33 Yeah.

4:33 In this case, the killers, John Bunting and Robert Wagner, are the two headlines here, the killers. The guy we're talking about today is James... Is it Vlasic or Vlasas?

4:47 I think it's Vlasic, like the pickle.

4:49 We will call him Pickle Man, Vlasic. So James Vlasic admitted to participating in the murders of all these people, being involved in one way or another. Bunting and Wagner, they will never be released from prison. They were sentenced to life without parole. But Vlasic took a deal where he became the state's best witness on the stand for in exchange for the possibility of parole after serving a specified amount of time, which in his case was 26 years.

5:23 Serve 26 years and we'll let you walk.

5:26 All right.

5:26 That was the deal, believe it or not. And that deal has come to fruition. So the bodies and barrels, Joe, by the way, this story became the subject of books, articles, Movie. Movies. At least one movie called Snowtown, right?

5:43 Yeah, yeah.

5:44 Because that's the actual town here where the bodies were found in the vault of a bank, which we'll get into in a minute. But bottom line, Joe, we will talk specifically about the four victims of the man who is walking amongst the free again. Only 26 years. Think about it. For those of us at a certain age, what were you doing in 1999? Where were you working?

6:13 What were you doing? You know, think about that for just a minute. Now I know a lot of you are younger than that. You know, that maybe you were born in the late nineties and hey, good for you. But this guy, Joe admits to the most heinous.

6:29 Yeah, he does.

6:30 Of crimes.

6:31 Yeah.

6:31 I can't figure out how they solved it with bodies and barrels.

6:34 Yeah. Very difficult.

6:36 I think. And, Listen, I've always been of the opinion, and it's not like this is some kind of new kind of thing out there, right? The more people you get involved, you know, if you have this kind of confederacy of dunces, let's say that, you know, they get involved in some of the most horrific things throughout time, the higher the probability is that you're going to get caught because you can't judge human nature or what someone's motivation is. Because here's the problem. If somebody is involved in nefarious activity that reaches these heights, other stuff in their life that they're going to get involved in pales in comparison to this. If you can get away with this for a period of time, yeah, all this other

7:21 stuff that's maybe a lesser offense or whatever the case might be, you think you can get away with it. Well, the trap with that is that those things that you do maybe in a lesser sense, can put you in a position where you are going to get caught and you need the leverage. If they're trying to explain something or the police, that is, that are conducting an investigation, if they're trying to run down leads, hey, yeah, I'm going to try to save my skin. And I'm not saying that that necessarily happened in this case, but the more people that you have that enter into an agreement to participate in this sort of thing, the higher the probability is you're going to get caught. How do you come across that? a group of people that will agree

8:07 to engage in this level of horror, brother. I mean, just think about that. If you've got one person that's out there that is willing to torture, kill, and I'm talking about torture in some of the most horrific ways possible, like using electricity, and then dissolve a fellow human being in a barrel, I understand you got one person. How do you get a collection of people that will agree to involve themselves in something like this? And I know, you know, there's many answers to a question like that.

8:48 You know, people will say, well, all you got to do is, you know, look at, you know, the Nazis or look at, you know, how the Japanese behaved in World War II relative to torture and, you know, cutting off the heads of people and all that stuff and maybe even some of our behaviors. That we've engaged in over the years as a country. You look at all that and you could say, OK, well, and here's the thing.

9:11 These people and this is quite interesting. You had mentioned this. You have to seek out a justification for why you're doing it.

9:19 Yeah.

9:20 Right. Yeah. And, you know, I guess you can think in. one of these instances, the idea that's being pushed forward is that, well, we're trying to get rid of child molesters.

9:31 Yep, that was the reason. That was the overall reason that John Bunting and Robert Wagner said that they actually were doing good. They were taking out child molesters. And look, man, when you look at what they did, I.

9:50 Don't know.

9:51 I mean, if that was their rationale... It was actually said, hey man, we went to the police. We told them what was going on. They did nothing. So took it into my own hands. This is why you don't take things into your own hands. You lose credibility. But what they did was just horrific. So let's get into this, Joe.

10:08 We're going to talk about four. Knowing there are many more people and we're not dismissing or discounting those lives. It's just that the fella getting out of prison admitted to being involved directly and indirectly in all of the murders, but in these specific four, okay? So we have victims. Fred Brooks. Fred was 17 when he was murdered. Gary O'Dwyer was 29. David Johnson was 23. And Troy Udy was 21. So we're dealing with young men. And in this regard, Troy Udy was.

10:51 Half-brother, step-brother somehow involved with the killer. And I don't know why we get so confused over this. There are so many things about this story, Joe, that are not as specific as you and I are used to working with, including birthdates and death dates. You know, when did a person die? You know, we really don't know because these guys couldn't, they didn't keep records. You know, they didn't have a written record. PAD saying, oh, today, you know, September 17th, 2026, we murdered, you know, Joe Schmo. They didn't keep those types of records. So in some cases, we actually have a person died in the fall of the year or in the spring of the year or late in the year. The thing is that they were

11:38 put into barrels after they were killed. And so there's a lot of trouble here. And I'm wondering how you're going to explain the forensics on people that are murdered chopped up and placed into barrels so that they can dissolve. By the way, I thought when we saw the case in Philadelphia, Joe, and I think you mentioned it, that the TV show Breaking Bad, where from the very first episodes, dissolving human beings in plastic barrels with chemicals was a thing.

12:12 It became a real part of the first two or three episodes of the series. And I thought, okay, the guy in Philadelphia took his cue from that show. But these murders took place a decade before Breaking Bad.

12:30 We cannot blame all the horrors in the world on entertainment. Now, the entertainment actually will draw upon these horrific cases. and, you know, create a narrative within, you know, their fictional space and, you know, to tell the story from their perspective.

12:49 I am curious. I got to ask you this, Joe, because I would have assumed, okay, because I'm not a scientist. I am not. I don't have a brain like yours. That's why I didn't go into that field. But it seemed to me that if you had chemicals that were strong enough to eat through a human being, through bone, flesh, and all of that, and dissolve it, that... you would have to use some type of a metal container or like a bathtub or something like that. But this stuff would eat through that as well. Are you going to really tell me that the chemicals used that could dissolve a human being would not dissolve a thin plastic tub?

13:29 No. Or barrel? They don't.

13:30 Yeah. And in this case, we're talking about hydrochloric acid. So hydrochloric acid reacts very poorly with metal. And what I mean by that is that it will create, well, first off, it'll eat through it. But secondly, it also, when interacting with certain types of metal containers, it creates a very dangerous vapor, if you will. And so you're around it, and it stands to reason the larger the volume of hydrochloric acid that you have, And, of course, the larger the container that you have, let's say you put it into a 50-gallon old abandoned oil drum, right?

14:17 It ain't going to do well. You're going to have this kind of vaporized event that's going on. And if you get around it and you start inhaling it, it can be lethal for the individual that does it or that is interacting with it. So that's why hydrochloric acid– and hydrochloric acid has– has multiple utility to it. Interestingly enough, you can use it pretty effectively to clear out a drain because it'll eat through a number of organic substances that might be clogging a drain. You don't want to be around with water with it. Again, it's a bad reaction that you'll have.

15:00 You say a bad reaction.

15:02 What does it do?

15:03 Well, again, it vaporizes. And it also, the other thing you don't want to do is have it interact with your skin.

15:13 I couldn't mix.

15:13 Oh, my gosh.

15:14 Yeah.

15:15 So you've heard of, like in the past, or at least referenced, you know, that there are certain torture methodologies that people have used over the years called an acid drip, where, you know, you can take an actual eyedropper of this stuff. and drop it onto somebody's skin. And I always think of, you remember the movie, movies, Alien, and Alien part, you know, where they're seeing the, when the alien, it bleeds, it essentially drops through the hull of the ship, you know, it just kind of eats through multiple levels until it kind of runs its course. I always think about that, you know, on the surface of someone's skin, you can get these little blistered areas, And incredibly painful stuff because

16:05 they are chemical burns is what it comes down to. But the fact that someone, I think, interestingly enough, how do you acquire this much of this stuff without drawing attention to yourself? So there's any number of industries that use it. It has been used in the past from a metallurgical standpoint. and in multiple industries. So if you can demonstrate that you can at least say, particularly because we're going back to the 90s now, yeah, you know, this is what I need it for, you're not going to draw as much attention. Nowadays, I think that if you start buying it in bulk like this, particularly from an investigative standpoint after the fact, you're going to have a much clear, you know, kind of connective line that

16:57 goes to you relative to this. You know, what's your purpose for this? Because you're not working in the petroleum industry. You're not doing this. You're not doing that. What do you need this much hydrochloric acid for? And the fact that someone would do this and that they would think it up among a group of these individuals is the stuff of absolute nightmares. And I got to tell you, We haven't even begun to pull the curtain back on the true horror. Brother Dave, you know, I hate the word why almost as much as I hate the word closure.

17:44 Because they're unanswerable and they're unattainable, alright, in that order. And we don't ask why. Most of the time in investigations, because you'll wind up chasing your tail, as I have stated, lo these many years. That's just my humble opinion. Everybody has their own. Okay. But I got to tell you, when I began to think about these four victims, okay, that we're focused on right here, I have to say that what.

18:19 What would be your motivation?

18:21 Because, Dave, we kind of start off at the top of the list with Fred Brooks. This kid's 17 years old. Now, the rationale that has been put forward by the investigators in this particular case is that he, for whatever reason, he had something that the perpetrator wanted. And That is his welfare payment. He's 17 years old, Dave.

18:56 Yeah.

18:57 So that begs the question, what in the hell would a 17-year-old have that someone else would put them through this level of.

19:07 Torture and pain?

19:10 Fred, he did get a monthly check and. It was due to, as you'll find in all of our victims, they all had something that the suspects were after. Fred got a monthly check. He dealt with some mental disabilities. And at 17, he was getting a monthly check. And that's what the suspects here were after. The killers were after that money. And, you know, at the very beginning, we were talking about how it was either about money or about... The bad guys tried to sound like good guys by saying, well, they were child molesters. Well, I don't know if Fred was. They wanted Fred's money. And they being this entire confederate confederacy of idiots, of killers.

19:58 And so Fred was targeted for that reason, to get his money. But Joe, what these criminals had to do, and you have to remember that All of us have, well, not all of us, most of us have a bank account and we have, most of us have a card associated with that bank so that we can get money out 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And that's what the killers had to get because it's not enough for somebody to have a check every month you want access to. You have to have a means of getting said money out of that account. And so that's where the torture comes in with almost all of our victims is is the torture was about getting the right information to access the bank accounts. And the accessing of the bank accounts continued well after the individuals were dead

20:51 because they weren't reported dead. So that's where Fred comes into all of it. He had a monthly check. And so in order to kill him and get his information, the torture. And by the way, we found out the information from The guy, Mark Vlasic, who's getting out of prison now. So think about it, Joe. He was not just involved in knowing about these murders. He was actively involved in luring the victims to their death. He was actively involved in the torture. And then to get his to have a chance at parole, he ratted on everybody.

21:31 That's the only reason we have a lot of this information is because the guy, not only is he a murderer, he's also a rat.

21:38 Over and over again. Yeah, yeah.

21:40 And when you have to consider what kind of process went into this in order to elicit this information, we talked about torture. Now, one of the consistencies, we're kind of thin on information when it comes to the death of Fred Brooks. But we do know that with other victims, we do have significant information relative to how this information was elicited. Now, if Fred Brooks was 17 years old and he is mentally handicapped in any way, I cannot imagine that it would take a lot to get that, kind of leverage that information out of him. But we know what happened with some of the other ones Fred, they believe, died back in September of 1998. Now, you jump forward just a couple of months as the year

22:35 of 1998 was coming to a close. Vlasic actually targeted Gary O'Dwyer at that point in time, or the group did. And we do know this about O'Dwyer. They actually hooked up electrical current to him. as he is strapped down and they're applying this to him in order again, to elicit information from him all the while, even going back to Fred Brooks, once these individuals are dead, they're scratching their heads and they're saying, well, what do we, what do we do with the remains at this time? Cause they got a mess on their hands. Um, so they're accruing bodies as they go along. You know, it's one thing, you know, people, you know, what's the old saying, you know, People think they want to be gangster until it's time

23:26 to do gangster stuff.

23:28 Right.

23:28 And so you don't really realize the depth and the breadth of what you're engaging in here.

23:34 So what are you going to do?

23:35 Well, after these bodies, and they are bodies now, you're going to have to dispose of each one of them. And so that's going to require you dismembering these remains. And then going back to what we had earlier stated, how are you going to Get rid of them. And this kind of rendering down that's going to have to happen, and it is called rendering, by the way, for folks that don't understand. It's something that we– I've got to tell a little inside right here. Did you know that at the medical examiner in Atlanta, when we built the new medical examiner building there, and I was part of helping design that, we had an anthropology lab. And Dave, did you know contained in there, we had these big stainless steel pots. I hesitate calling them cauldrons because it's

24:30 got such a sinister little touch to it.

24:34 I think of witches with cauldrons.

24:36 I know, right?

24:39 But we would use these stainless steel pots to render down decomposing remains that still had soft tissue on the bones so that the anthropologists, could actually examine the bone without the tissue being there. Do you know, I've actually been in locations in labs before where there are crockpots. There are crockpots.

25:06 Yeah.

25:07 So that you can take an element, you can take an underlying bony element and get rid of the tissue. That's one of the dirty little secrets, you know, that, that has been utilized over the years because you don't want to damage the bone at all. And that's the reason why you do this. So you, because you want to maintain the integrity of the bone as a structure so that you can examine it. And you're trying to do things like stature and age and any kind of injuries that might be on the surface of the bone. Uh, the problem here is that if you're trying to render, uh, render a body down so that they get to the point where you can literally take it and dump it somewhere, I think that they're probably insufficient to the task, brother.

25:58 Because all we have to do is look at the case in Philadelphia, right? One of the things that we have heard about that case is that we don't know all the details yet. Okay. And I'm anxiously awaiting to find out, you know, what they're going to say. This may have been piped out somewhere. maybe into the sewer line.

26:19 And brother, if it's going out into the sewer and this has been setting up for a while and you're rendering it down, you don't have much hope of recovering. And to date, to date, they don't have, from what we're hearing right now, they don't have remains in Philadelphia.

26:36 Okay?

26:37 With this case, though, these idiots, these idiots, just like Jeffrey Dahmer did, held onto these items in their space, and they're trying to render down with hydrochloric acid, which in and of itself is incredibly dangerous. What you're in the game here, if you're going to try to render down the remains and then get rid of them, but you don't get rid of them. That's one of the odd things about.

27:03 This, Dave. I'm glad you got Brooks and O'Dwyer, the victims, out in this section. Let me give you guys something very quickly, because in the case of Gary O'Dwyer, and Fred Brooks, the prosecution was trying to show that these victims were, were picked for a reason and it was financial and, uh, they were the victim in terms of maybe mental acuity, you know, um, with O'Dwyer, he was, um, his mother still had to help take care of, you know, he, O'Dwyer was, um, He was an easy target, Joe, is probably the best way because very trusting, lacking intellect. And the public reports on this that he was tortured with electricity, with electrical current to get information from him. He was deliberately selected as an easy target because they wanted to

28:07 get money. And. the murder matters. Okay. Everybody's life matters in terms of the case. Oh, Dwyer was very important, not just to Vlasic's case, but to the overall, uh, conviction on the 11 murders. But we're dealing with these four because they all are rooted in the same thing. Money, um, and a way of continuing to get money. You know, with Fred Brooks, Joe, very quickly, and I apologize for dragging this out, but there was financial exploitation attached to the death of Fred Brooks. Now, you know, we talked about he was tortured, right? Well, Brooks, and this is so jacked up, man. These suspects, these guys, with Fred Brooks, they actually told his mom that he was working a job And he just wasn't in contact because he was busy.

29:04 He was working out of town, right? And Vlasic maintained contact with her. And they were able to get, she sent clothing. She believed he was alive. So she got clothes together. Just, hey, give these to Fred. He needs some new clothes. Get these to Fred. Meanwhile, they're zapping money. You know, Fred's dead. His body parts have been put in a plastic drum with hydrochloric acid. And they're getting his mom. Well, believe it or not, She was a single mom, right? One of the killers was having an affair with her. All under the guise of, hey, we're helping Fred. They've already killed her son. They're already taking his money. And now her soul, you know, it's just, it's crushing.

29:47 Yeah, just when you think that it can't get any darker.

29:52 And you talk about victimization here. You know, there's a lot of people that go around beating their chest about how they're a victim. Let me tell you something. If you've got a story, let me tell you this story, because you look at this, the carnage that's left, literally left along this kind of crooked and twisted path. And you think about the motivation that's going on.

30:16 You know what?

30:17 What did these two guys do to anybody at any particular time other than being born the way they were born? And, you know, just trying to scrape by, you know, in life, trying to get, you know, whatever government assistance they can, this sort of thing. And you notice it's not like these perpetrators went after some gigantic construction worker out there that's out there just grinding every single day. They didn't do that, somebody like that. They specifically chose individuals. that we're lacking, to say the very least, because they're so easy, such an easy target, you know, to victimize along the way.

31:07 Brother Dave, you know, I'm sitting here and I'm trying to consider how, at what point in time do you stop with this? You know, what's your What's the point at which you stop? Because it's like, how callous are you? Because you're witnessing what you're doing with somebody that cannot defend themselves. You would think that for most people, after the first one, there would be like a big stop sign. Morally, I don't know. You know, for whatever reason, saying, I can't do this. That's not what happened. It's like they were Because it's not like they.

31:53 Stopped with Gary O'Dwyer.

31:56 No.

31:57 They didn't.

31:57 And looking at just these four that we're talking about, and we're going to tell you more specifically why we're talking about in just a minute. You go on to Dave or David Johnson. Again, we've gone from the end of 1998 with Gary.

32:13 Now we're into May.

32:18 OK, now we're into May of 1999. And Vlasic, he actually lured David Johnson to Snowden. And it's at that point in time he's going to try to again get his financial information. He actually he actually lures him in. under the pretense of buying a computer.

32:46 Yeah.

32:47 Got a great deal on a good computer.

32:48 Yeah, I know.

32:49 And do you remember back in the late nineties when everybody was getting home computers, you know, um, and you know, you would, and I guess I still do today. I don't really know. It's not something I engage in, but you're thinking, wow, yeah, I need, I need so much more Ram and, you know, and that sort of thing.

33:06 And so this is very plausible, very, very plausible. But with David Johnson, of course, um, The goal was to get into his bank account specifically. And that's what they did with.

33:19 Him, Dave.

33:20 And, you know, Joe Johnson, David Johnson did not fit the overall category. Category probably not right. But, you know, I mentioned that profile profile. OK, there you go. that Bunting and the two guys, okay, at the top of the chain of the horribleness, okay, John Bunting and Robert Wagner, again, these guys sentenced to prison for the rest of their lives with no parole. They were in charge of the killing machine here. And James Vlasic, he was involved at every level. of these crimes. And the reason we're doing the show is because he became a rat for the government and they copped a deal that allowed him to walk out of prison. Personally, I thought he was going to be killed in prison. I didn't think he was

34:07 ever going to see light of day as a free man, but he is. And that's the reason we're doing the show now. So in the case of Johnson, David Johnson, he did not fit the profile of anybody they could label as a pedophile.

34:18 Okay.

34:19 Or, you know, like with the other killer, they were able to say that they targeted younger people, girls or boys, you know, whatever. And they were able to rationalize it in their minds that they were doing something good. In the case of David Johnson, Joe, he was targeted because they had research to believe he had money. And Vlasic lured him to the town with the idea of a computer, which even back then, they still were pretty expensive, you know.

34:47 And Once he was there, Joe, they tortured this man. They tortured David Johnson in order to get his banking information. Then, and if I'm wrong on this, correct me, but they then, while they're torturing him, sent James Vlasic crosstown to a bank to test out the bank card and the information that they had been given through torture. You know, give us your number. What do you call that? Your PIN.

35:17 PIN number.

35:18 And so they had to test the pen to make sure that it worked. And so while they're torturing David Johnson, James Lasek leaves to go and test out the banking information to make sure they can pull the money out of the account. Once that was confirmed that they could do that, all the while they're telling Johnson probably, oh, we're going to cut you loose. As soon as this turns out, you're gone, man. Well, he was gone. All right.

35:40 That's when they killed him. Once they proved to themselves they had access to his bank and his, you're done. And They're at trial. This was the one where they had the most documented chronological event of what took place in the death of Mr. Johnson. And again, Joe, I'm looking over all of these people and he's the one guy that what type of evil exists, you know, killing for money.

36:12 Really? Yeah.

36:13 That's the only reason he was really killed for money.

36:16 Yeah, for money, that was the motivation of it. And I guess that, you know, the whole idea is, do you, with, you know, with people that are mentally disabled, it might be very, very easy to keep up a ruse relative to, yeah, they're still alive, we're taking care of them, whatever, however you're going to kind of insert, if anybody asking questions, how are you going to insert yourself into that individual's life to make a justification for it? With David Johnson, that's a bit more, That's a bit more tricky, isn't it?

36:48 Because he's got an outside life. He's not dependent upon anybody for caretaking. And so this is problematic, I think, for them.

36:58 There's one little thing to add to Johnson's case, is that when Vlasic and Wagner drove across town to the other bank to try the PIN number on the card and all that to prove that it worked, while they were doing that and confirming it before they could get back to the bank where they were holding money, They're in the closed bank. OK, that's where they had their little hideout at the time.

37:18 Yeah.

37:19 While Vlasic and Bunting were Wagner were away. Once the number was confirmed, Bunting then killed Johnson by using his belt to strangle him. But Johnson put up such a fight that he kicked and damaged Bunting's ribs so that when Vlasic and Wagner got back to the closed bank, they see Johnson is dead on the floor and Bunting is holding his ribs.

37:48 Yeah, and he's been injured at this point. And that goes to the level of violence here. Because a belt, and I've seen this done before, I use this term every now and then people always gig me for how I pronounce it, but it's almost like the belt is used as a garrote or garrote, uh, where the belt is wrapped around the neck and it's, it's tightened like this.

38:14 Most of the time with a, uh, a garrote, you have to have, uh, it many times it's conceptualized as two separate sticks that are pulling a posing like this, uh, where you're, you're actually, you know, uh, choking the life out of somebody.

38:28 With, with.

38:31 Whatever ligature that you're using, the belt in and of itself, if it slipped around the neck via the buckle where you pull the belt through the buckle, right, you can actually take it and do the tension on it like this. And with that kind of injury, not that you can necessarily appreciate it in the wake of being dipped into hydrochloric acid, but it would The abrasion, what we call a circumferential abrasion, which means it goes around the neck, like circumnavigating, going around, this is going to be rather significant.

39:13 And of course, the wider the belt, the wider the abraded area would be, the more narrow, the narrower it would be, and probably a little bit deeper. It all depends on how long it took. Since there was a struggle going on, And he actually winds up, he. being the victim, Mr. Johnson, he injures this guy because when they walk back in, you know, the testimony revealed that he's literally holding his ribs. And, you know, you're kind of, if you can cheer, you know, you're kind of cheering, you know, over this, that it happened like this. But, you know, for the most part, you're looking at this and you're thinking, well, can it get any worse? You know, killing, killing somebody like this and this other victim, again, a

40:01 1999 victim, Dave, Troy Ude, which I guess is how we're going to pronounce it, is he, again, his remains are found inside of this, inside of this barrel. But Dave, I got to tell you, With this final victim, when Troy was killed, the perpetrator, who is now going to be walking free, he describes looking into the eyes of these victims as they're being essentially strangled, asphyxiated. And Dave, did you know you can see color changes in the eyes, the whites of the eyes?

40:46 Really?

40:46 Yeah. They become highly congested. You'll see the vessels below the surface in the eyes. You'll see them begin to turn red significantly. You'll see color changes in the face. The face actually, they become cyanotic, which means they're going to have almost like a red to purple discoloration. Here's another thing that you'll see. You'll see the tongue begin to protrude. And the gasping, such as it is, there's going to be very little vocalization because any kind of ligature that you're using, okay, if it's a ligature strangulation, I think probably to a certain extent, if they're using a C-clamp or if they're throttling, you're over the top of the voice box at that point in time. So you're putting the pressure. You can't get air out. to

41:44 pass over the vocal cords. So you'll hear these kind of primal moans, essentially. That's the way I've always kind of envisioned it, considering some of the trauma that I've seen in a lot of these cases to the throat. That's why it's impossible for somebody to scream. I mean, just imagine if anyone out there has ever ingested something and it went down the wrong way, and you're trying to indicate, like, you ever notice how people Yeah. They'll do like this. They can't say, help me. I'm choking. Right.

42:13 Right.

42:14 So you'll have these kind of guttural moans that might be produced.

42:20 OK.

42:21 And all the while you're seeing these physical manifestations, you know, on the surface of the face, the eyes, eyes are bulging, tongue sticking out, protruding. And this person is in absolute terror because they can't breathe.

42:34 And so this is what. you know, is being conveyed in court, Dave.

42:37 Yeah. And that's what you pointed out. John Bunting, you know, was the guy who said he liked watching in the eyes. James Vlasic, in the killing of Troy Ude, he was the stepbrother or half-brother of James Vlasic, who's walking amongst us as a free man now after 20-plus years in prison. But this is the kicker, is because James Vlasic says that Troy Ude, his half-brother or stepbrother, sexually molested him as when he was 13. All right. And that that's why this killing took place. Not financial, but because of what the victim, well, the victim killer, James Flassie, claims that you'd said molested him. Now, John Bunting, one of the killers who is never getting out of prison, he's the one who stared into their eyes. And Joe, until

43:32 you said that a minute ago about eyes changing color, I didn't know it. I did not know that was a thing because Bunting actually says that he knew when life left the body. He could see it in their eyes.

43:47 I'm sure.

43:47 And that's a level of evil that I had never heard before. And after all we've done, all the work, that's the first time I've heard this. Yeah.

44:00 Yeah. And so what you're going to have in addition to that, yeah, he could see it.

44:04 You know why?

44:05 Because if you're actually looking in someone's eyes as they're dying, the pupils are going to blow out. So they'll be wide open at that point in time. I'm not talking about the eyelids. I'm talking about the pupils because they're no longer responsive to light. You know, you've noticed that one of the things that's done, actually, this is one of the seven cardinal signs of death, actually. You shine a light and, you know, neurologists use this, ER physicians use this, this sort of thing to see.

44:33 How reactive the pupils are.

44:35 Well, if you're face to face with somebody like this and you're squeezing the life out of them, you'll see their pupils blow. And it's at that point they're non-responsive. That means that there's no more brain activity because the brain is not getting a sufficient amount of oxygen to function. And that's what makes this all the more terrible. Here's the other thing that is another level of horror is that as you're doing this, there are other people watching you, you know, do this. And I'm thinking, are you cheering each other on? Maybe in the beginning, everybody was like, and now it's like, you know, go, go, go, you know, like this. And it just, it kind of feeds into this thing to take it to even a further level.

45:27 Who was present in the wake of doing dismemberment? Okay. Because, you know, let me tell you how that process is going to have to work. First off, you're going to have to take the individual out. You're going to strip them of their clothes.

45:43 Okay.

45:43 Because if you're trying to dismember a body that is closed, very, very difficult. So my, I'm thinking that you take off the clothes in death and And then what do you do? You stand around with one another and you're thinking, huh, what would be the best tool to facilitate taking apart a fellow human being? And I think that this is a key bit of data here, because from an evidentiary standpoint, if you're doing the dismemberment, first off, do you know enough anatomy to go to the weakest points of the body?

46:19 Are you going to the joints to begin dismembering? to begin the dismemberment? Are you going mid-shaft? We've talked about this before. Are you going mid-shaft with things like the femur and the humerus? Are you going to the joint, where it's much easier to disarticulate a body? Down to the ankles, at the knee, at the hip, which is very difficult to do, even though that is a joint.

46:48 And then what are you doing with The axillary skeletal portion of the body, you know, the axilla, like where all of your organs are contained. Are you essentially cutting them in half? Are you leaving this portion of the body intact? And you got to jam this into a drum and then pour hydrochloric acid. Or maybe you already put the hydrochloric acid in. And then, you know, you just kind of top it off at some point in time.

47:16 How long would it take? To render it down?

47:19 Yeah.

47:20 It all depends on the solution that you're using, how if it's diluted to any to any degree. And also, how many elements are you putting in there? How many anatomical elements are you putting in there? And how long is it sitting there? What in with what I have seen over the years where you have a fluid, a fluid medium that a body is is in.

47:47 OK.

47:47 And you're talking about a rendering process. This goes back to, you know, using kind of slow heat in order to render down a body. Now, this is in an aqueous like water, which is what's used, you know, in the world of forensic anthropology. What happens is, is that as the tissue is being dissolved or comes off of the bone, it floats to the top. Bones sink to the bottom because of their density. And you get this kind of soup.

48:22 How can I describe it? You get this. Oh, I'll tell you exactly what it looks like. The next time you open up a can of Campbell's soup, mushroom, mushroom, Campbell's soup.

48:35 That's the color.

48:36 And you'll see that on the surface of this aqueous, you know, you know, solution in it.

48:45 We're going to put a chef's hat on Joe and we're going to have a can of soup and it's going to be Joe Scott Morgan's diet of the dead.

48:52 No, no, no.

48:53 I'm just thinking, you know, thinking back to all that. And I describe things in terms of food many times.

48:58 Yeah.

48:59 But, you know, so that everybody understands that's kind of the color that it is. And that's all of this kind of rendered soft tissue that floats through the top. And the skeletal remains sink to the bottom. Okay. Okay. So it begs the question for me, what did they see, you know, when they finally popped these things open? But Dave, you had an interesting insight. I would love for you to tell our friends about these bodies have been moved around a little bit, haven't they?

49:31 That's what I was going to ask you because, all right, well, like when we were talking about being in the vault, the bank vault, that's where everything was found inside this closed bank, a bank that had been closed for a while. And these idiots or these criminals, these killers use this closed bank as kind of their headquarters. And the vault of the bank is where they set up shop to store the barrels. But the barrels have been moved around.

50:00 They were not always at this one location. We know that one of the murders or more than one took place at the home of John Bunting. And as we mentioned, there are a lot more people involved in this case than we're talking about today. We're just talking about the four murders associated with James Vlasic that he admitted to in court to get a better deal. But you had a lot more killing, and you had a couple of bodies that were not disarticulated in a barrel, or so we understand. But the barrels had to be moved from one low end again, six barrels moving. eight people, that's a lot of material moving around. How do you get a barrel filled with hydrochloric acid and a couple of bodies that are in various stages of dissolving? How do

50:52 you move them? And what is the dangers inherent in doing that?

50:57 Well, obviously, one of the things that you're looking at depends upon how you're conveying these. And, you know, the first thing that comes to mind for me is either a van or you know, a pickup truck, you're not going to turn this thing on its side and place it into the trunk of a car. Because if you did, and even the van is difficult as well, because you would have to so secure this, because if you're, you remember the gas I was talking about? Okay, so if you're If you're in a van, for instance, and you're transporting a body in a barrel that is saturated in hydrochloric acid, if this thing tips over and you're in the van with it, or even if it slops over in any way, this is going to come in contact

51:51 with surfaces inside of the van that ain't plastic, okay? Suddenly, you're going to be driving down the road with this kind of cloud, you know, in the van of this noxious gas that there's a high probability it could potentially kill you, certainly burn your airway significantly. So they would have to take care in doing this. And just think, if you're in a rural area that would not improve roads and you're bouncing down the road as you're going, this is a heck of a risk that you're that you're taking all along the way and the movement of it.

52:32 And it goes back to something I think that we, we talk about every now and then about the, about these kinds of cases. Perpetrators cannot help themselves. You know, the old adage about the, you know, the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime. That is not entirely inaccurate to say that because it's, it's like a kid picking at a sore. they always go back to it. OK, they not always can't say always, but many times they do get to the point where they're thinking about this.

53:10 And they've thought about this a lot. As a matter of fact, Dave, in the court testimony, they had created their own vernacular.

53:21 Yeah, because.

53:24 What was really strange about this is that they actually used the term 2-T-O, play. Like, let's go out in the sandbox and play, Jimmy. You know, to play meant that they were going to engage in torture and killing, all right? That's how kind of callous.

53:43 These people are.

53:44 And so they're moving these fellow human beings around after having dismembered them, you know, put them into an acid bath, essentially, And they're just kind of conveying them around to get them back to the central location, which is inside of the vault, which I think that they had actually used this vault space as a murder room at one.

54:08 Point in time.

54:09 For at least two of the murders and maybe more. And so, yeah, they ended up back in the vault, which is where the barrels were eventually found that landed these guys in court and in prison. But, Joe, James Vlasic, he was sentenced. to prison for 26 years, you know, life with the possibility of parole after 26 years.

54:33 Okay.

54:33 That was the term. Now, Bunting and Wagner, they were sentenced to life with no parole. There was one other fellow that was charged. He was a part of this. He helped organize things and help map out where the, I'm trying to find the right term. He was involved in helping move the bodies around. His name is Mark Hayden.

54:54 He was a logician.

54:56 Yeah.

54:57 Yeah. He's the logistics guy. OK. Gotcha.

55:00 And he was sentenced to life, but with a non-parole period of 25 years. So he actually already got out of prison. Mark Hayden did. He was involved. He wasn't as involved as James Vlasic or the other two, but he was involved. So he's already out. Now, James Vlasic, he was given a life non-parole period of 26 years.

55:22 After the 26 years served, he was up for parole. And he was granted parole, but it was pulled back. And it had to undergo another, because there were people on the board, parole that just, they couldn't go along with it, Joe. And one guy in particular said, I'm not signing off. And so it went back into the system.

55:42 It was reanalyzed and they determined that James Vlasic was not probably going to be a terror for the community. And he was released. In the last days, Joe.

55:56 So not going to be a terror for the community. And by the way, folks, I got to tell you, this on so many levels is disturbing. That this individual who, by the way, was 18 when he became involved, involved in this horror show. This person now has a chance to go out and live a life. And create a life among the rest of the folks that populate that area.

56:31 Not going to be a risk.

56:33 Hmm.

56:34 I wonder how you take the measurement of that.

56:38 I don't know. We'll see. Because I.

56:42 Wouldn't want to live next door to him. Got to tell you. I mean, what's he going to do when he starts to run short on cash?

56:53 Points to ponder. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.