Murder of UNC Student Faith Hedgepeth: A Rum Bottle, Genetic Genealogy, and a Guilty Verdict

0:01 Body Bats with Joseph Scott Moore. Speaking for my co-host, Brother Dave, I'd have to say that we both have a true love of Jimmy Buffett. It brings me peace to listen to Jimmy Buffett. I really do, but where I kind of part ways with Brother Dave, one of the things I enjoy doing is having a nice rum cocktail and a good cigar. And in that, I can relax and forget about the trials of the day. Specifically, talking about some of the most horrific deaths now happening out there across our fair country. But today, I'm going to talk to you about a case that is in the news. And by the way, It involves rum, but it involves rum in a way that you might not think of. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.

1:17 Brother Dave, I've got to tell you, I don't, I'm not a fan of, I don't like any other kind of whiskey brand. At all, really. But I do like rum for some reason. For a moment, I'm transported to white sand beaches and beautiful clear water and just enjoying the sound of the surf. And, of course, my boy playing in the background, JB, back there. You know, you turned me on to a couple songs recently that I love.

1:47 Bubbles Up might be my favorite Jimmy Buffett song right now. And just sit there and just listen. But, you know, the thing about it is that I can't tell you how many people have often asked me. And I want to impart this to you real quick. I've never revealed this. People have told me or have asked me in the past out of all the substances that are out there that people can ingest. What is it? What's that? that one through line that you find what's a common substance out there that really impacts death investigations you've worked over the years. And it's not even close. It's alcohol. Oh yeah.

2:33 Hands down.

2:34 Right.

2:35 People talk about heroin and coke and meth and all that stuff. And all that stuff is in, you know, we think about it. People don't think about alcohol as being a drug.

2:44 Yeah.

2:44 But today we're, with this particular case, we're not necessarily talking about in ingestion of the substance as much as we are, as we're speaking to the conveyance of said substance, which is something I didn't think that we'd be talking about.

2:59 The faith hedge path case has been, uh, going around for a long time. It began in 2012 when she was murdered a couple of weeks before her 20th birthday. Uh, she was attending Carolina. And by the way, um, For those of you in North Carolina, when you say Carolina, everybody knows you're talking about Chapel Hill. When you say state, you're talking about NC State and Raleigh. It's kind of like Alabama, Auburn. You know, every state has that those two schools.

3:29 Right.

3:29 And so it's just funny because people outside of the Tar Heel State will refer to Carolina generically. You know, and it's like I remember not that long ago when NC State was making a run in the NCAA tournament in March Madness. And a friend sent me a text. Hey, Carolina's doing great. No, they're not. They suck. But anyway, whether you're a Carolina fan or a state fan, you know what I'm talking about.

3:57 Yeah.

3:59 In this case, Faith was attending UNC Chapel Hill. You're in Carolina. So she's living off campus, which is really cool because. Um, it, it's something that we don't hear. We, we hear a lot about, you know, how tough it is to go to school, how expensive it is to go to school, how hard it is to go to college these days. And I get it, but you know, there are still people who manage, you know, to work a job, uh, have an apartment and attend school. There are ways to make it happen. And that's what Faith was doing. Um, she was on scholarship where she had a scholarship that was given to her. She earned it. Uh, she's native American and, was really exploring that in her personal life, which is fascinating.

4:41 Yeah, it is.

4:42 But at the time of her murder, she was attending UNC Chapel Hill, living in an apartment off campus. And she did, it's so cool when you, or to me, okay, when college students, part of their night, when we're reviewing the night of what took place, and they were in the library studying, Joe. Yeah. Faith and her roommate had gone to the library to study.

5:10 I've got to tell you something. Still to this day, on our campus at Jack State, we've got the largest collegiate library in the state of Alabama. And when I say large, it's like the volumes that it contains. And also, you've seen it before.

5:25 It's a lot of crayons, I'll tell you that.

5:27 It certainly is. But the height of the physical building, we've got a 360-degree view of. the tail of the Appalachian chain. And it is, it's breathtaking when you get up there, but it's the inside. I loved, I loved the time that I spent in the library. I love the smell of it. And I liked, I liked being with people that were studying along with me in that environment.

5:54 And that's a, it's kind of a, it's really weird when you're on a university campus, it's kind of a place of peace for me. It always was.

6:02 Well, Faith and her roommate had gone to study at the library. They finished up and went back to the apartment, changed clothes, and then went out. Not an uncommon occurrence in a college town. And so, you know, they go out a little after midnight and just having fun. They dance, they do whatever, and they head back to the apartment.

6:24 This is where the night begins to get a little hazy when you look at the timeline here, because Faith's roommate... left the apartment and left Faith alone. She thought Faith was asleep. It was the last time anyone knew Faith Hedgepeth was alive and her normal routine. She was in bed asleep by herself. There's this window of opportunity that starts around 4 a.m. and extends out until the time Faith's roommate comes back to the apartment around 11 a.m.

7:00 All right. So There's your timetable. Faith had missed a class that morning. She hadn't answered phone calls or texts or anything like that. But when her roommate and a friend show up at 11 o'clock, they find Faith in bed under the blankets. And it's a bloody mess, Joe. And this is where the bottle of rum comes into play.

7:26 Because what had happened to Faith in those hours that we Cannot account for or cannot. We don't have cameras inside the apartment. We only know the end result. And it resulted in Faith's death.

7:40 Yeah, it did. And, you know, specifically this bottle that they're referring to is kind of wrapped within. in the comforter blanket there adjacent to her body.

7:53 The comforter is black, Joe, black in color. And I wonder, does that have, it seems to me like blood would not show up on a black comforter the way it would on a different color. When you're working, is it a problem?

8:07 Yeah, it is. It's kind of, you know, because it goes without saying, you know, if you If you've got a white floral comforter, you know, it's going to smack you in the face, you know, when you see blood deposition. But we do, if you throw enough light at something, and this has always kind of been from an examination standpoint at a scene, if you can blast enough light at a location, you can illuminate kind of the boundaries of a stain.

8:41 All right.

8:42 And you'll you'll see you'll see where this has gone from. OK, this is the fabric to this is the margin. And then you begin. It's kind of like looking at one of those 3D things they used to do where you don't see anything. You look through it for a moment. You can you have to stare at it, really focus on it. And of course, you get out a hand lens.

9:06 And I like to what's referred to as obliquely light something, which means that I don't blast the light directly down onto the surface. I take it and actually turn the light and pitch it across the surface. And that way you can kind of pick up on textures. I urge anybody to try this at home if you're using a you know, using a flashlight, or as my friends in Great Britain call it, a torch, you obliquely light it and it will shine and you can kind of see detail that you would. We actually use oblique lighting relative to photography as well to try to, you know, to try to capture certain things. And it is hard to pick up on that detail. And one of the interesting components to this is that if you've got blood deposition

9:58 on a surface, like a black comforter or dark comforter, uh, it's going to be harder to pick up on the dynamics of that. Um, when we think about blood deposition, we're thinking about low velocity.

10:14 Okay.

10:15 Which is punching. Um, And I'm just kind of framing this out. The second level of velocity is medium velocity, which you can think about a baseball bat. Something that you can have leverage over where you swing and you create enough energy to have the deposition that will be medium velocity. And within medium velocity, do you know the droplets...

10:46 The higher you go, because we're headed toward high velocity, the higher you go toward high velocity, the droplets get tinier and tinier and tinier. It's because the blood itself kind of histamalizes or fragments, if you will. It's not a really good term, but it'll shoot off these little satellites.

11:06 OK.

11:07 And so the higher the energy, the more energy you have applied to a space. the finer the droplets get. And so when you're looking at, at a, a comforter like this, and you're trying to suss all of this out, well, if someone is punched, all right, droplets are going to be bigger. If they're hit with an object, like a bottle, um, there'll be a bit smaller, and then if they're shot, like I've worked cases where people have literally been shot on beds and they're shot into the side of the head, that you'll get this fine little spray. Well, that's really hard to pick up on a comforter. And the thing about it is this. It's hard to contextualize the comforter because once you remove that comforter and you're trying to

12:00 analyze blood deposition, all bets are off. Because it really has to be done on the spot. Because once you manipulate anything in that space, like a wall cannot necessarily be manipulated, or the headboard of a bed, right? That's static. But with things like sheets and comforters, and what's the first thing anybody's going to do if they're looking for their roommate and they're trying to assess her? Oh, she's under a comforter. Guess what they're going to do? They're going to pull it back. Well, you've blown, at that point in time, any kind of opportunity in that space that to kind of track the trajectory of all of this.

12:37 And so that's, that's problematic in addition to lighting and you can take it back, hang it up in the lab. You can use alternative lighting, you know, all these cool tools that we have. But at that moment in time where she is lying there lifeless, okay. Uh, that's, that's the primo area to try to do that. But, you know, we don't work in a vacuum like that. It's like people saying, um, When we're talking about temperature changes after death, you go to these textbooks and they'll say, under ideal conditions, dude, there are no ideal conditions in forensic investigations. You know, whoever wrote this obviously has never worked in the field.

13:20 And this is a tome that has gone through. There are no, you have to adjust. The investigator has to adjust to the environment. You know, most events relative to a death investigation, most of them, not all of them, but most of them, they initiate with a 911 call. And I've got to tell you, this is going to send chills down your spine.

13:55 Ndaro 911, where is your emergency? Hi, I just walked into my apartment and my friend is unconscious.

14:05 You say your friend is unconscious?

14:08 He's unconscious. I just walked into the apartment and it looks like there's blood everywhere.

14:14 Okay, listen to me. Listen to me. Somebody's already sending me an ambulance.

14:19 Okay, I need to get some information from.

14:21 You and I'm going to tell you how to help her, okay? Okay.

14:25 Okay, how old is she? She's 19. Okay. I don't know. I don't want to touch her, but.

14:38 Listen to me.

14:39 Is she breathing? I don't know.

14:43 You need to check and see.

14:44 Is she breathing? I don't think so. I don't think so. Okay.

14:54 Listen to me.

14:55 There's blood everywhere. There's what? There's blood everywhere.

15:01 They, you know, when, when faith is, is actually found and this is really key here. When she is found, first off, she's nude from the waist down.

15:13 Okay.

15:15 Her shirt is pulled up, exposing her chest. And the one thing that, you know, I think that people recognize pretty quickly is kind of what we hinted at earlier is she's been beaten and particularly around the head and face. I mean, to the point where we're talking about major blunt force injuries. This was one heck of a struggle that took place in this environment. And I'm going to use a term here that I haven't used before. I'm going to use term savage. This is a savage event.

15:54 Would you agree with that? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

15:57 It's it's shocking the amount of damage done to a young woman. Again, you're talking about a young woman in college. And it just it shocks me that this is where we are. And by the way, the fact that we're covering it today is because everything you're about to hear about all the evidence left behind. This case went cold for a while. They couldn't. They didn't solve it. Okay, the only reason we're talking about it now, think about it.

16:26 This was in 2012, Joe.

16:27 Yeah, September 7, 2012. We're a ways down the road, brother, at this point, aren't we?

16:34 That's why it shocked me.

16:35 And I think for me, when you have something that is this over the top, as far as a homicide, first off, not only the cops, public, they're going to want answers to this. Because, you know, look, this is a reality that we live in. If this happens in any other location in Chapel Hill, like in any kind of neighborhood or something like that, you... And I'm talking about like an established neighborhood. Completely different animal here relative to how these things are investigated in a college town.

17:10 All right.

17:11 Let me explain this to you coming from a dude that has spent two decades working in college. When a student... when a student gets murdered, you're at another level here with the investigation. Because first off, it's going to draw national attention. And I'm not disparaging anybody else that's ever been the victim of a homicide in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, all right? But what I am saying is that this kicks it up another level. You've got alumni that are going to be on the phone. Hey, what in the hell is going on down there? And you know, you can have donors calling, you can have Here's the real thing, because this is a life's blood. You can have parents calling.

17:54 Or parents that are looking at this, they're on the cusp of making that decision as to whether or not they're going to send Junior to Chapel Hill. And if you want to get a university's attention real quick, go to the money source. All right. And so all of that factored into this. I'm as shocked as you that it took this long. to solve this case. And I know she wasn't on campus. She's off campus, but she is still part of the UNC family, right? Yeah. And so that's one of the things that is quite fascinating about this. And David, I've got to tell you, from the perspective of the scene, they had a tremendous amount of evidence at this point in time.

18:37 Again, why did it take so long? And I'm not knocking anybody. It's just Because of the amount of evidence, I'm seriously very curious about why it took so long and hoping you can shed some light on that. So let's start with the scene, Joe. When the roommate calls 911 and says, here's what we have, what did she describe?

19:02 What was happening in that room, in that crime scene? I know the entire apartment is a crime scene, but in reality, it is her bedroom and her bed. more than anything else, but she was found not in the bed. She was found next to the bed, leaning up, correct?

19:17 Leaning, yeah, leaning against the bed. And that gives you an indication. You know, you are so, I know this goes without saying, but let's kind of explore this a little bit. If you are in your bed, all right, you are really, All right. Now, I don't I think that this event, whatever it is, it probably led to the bed as opposed to. Well, I suppose she could have been soundly sleeping.

19:48 Okay.

19:48 But either way you're taken unawares. Can you imagine all of a sudden it's like a couple of these things. There was a case a couple of weeks back where someone comes into the house and starts stabbing the wife and the husband in the bed. I think the husband died. And, you know, you're just sleeping or you're just lying there, you know, in the bed. And even if you're not sleeping and you're lying in the bed, you're in kind of a, you're very vulnerable at that point in time.

20:18 And when these things start on a bed and there's an initial attack, you're going to see a tremendous amount of blood deposition. And it's so dynamic that the person might roll off the bed and you're going to have blood deposition and in other locations adjacent to the body, maybe on the wall. That's why we really take our time at scene to try to interpret how the blood is deposited all around that space because you only get one shot at it, literally, with a camera or your eyes on the target here. And the fact that she is found on the floor leaning against the bed, you can get an idea that That in this, there was a lot of movement, okay? That this is not something where she was unaware necessarily of what was happening to

21:16 her at that moment in time. Her shirt, you know, when you take a look at it, it's being pulled up. This is not just something that happens with sexual assaults of, you know, that turn into homicides. rip the clothing off of the the victim pulling up the shirt is very provocative because exposing the breast, you know, you can have that in an immediate sex attack. I've also had perpetrators or serial perpetrators that have exposed the body because it's titillating.

21:56 It captures captures them at that moment. And it's part of, you know, what they're doing to get sexually excited. When you consider the totality of all of the blood that is deposited at the scene, because it's everywhere. It's on the surface of the mattress. It's on the bedclothes. It's on the pillows. It's on her. The one thing you're going to come away thinking as an investigator, brother, is the fact that whoever did this has got a lot of face blood on them. You know, so points of contact when they're trying to get out of the apartment, if they're grabbing doorknobs, if they're walking away and blood has pooled, if you think that if they are in a horizontal position on the bed relative to Faith and

22:53 the attack starts there, well, if they're moving around, they'll roll through her blood. So you might have a perpetrator that has blood deposited on the back of their shoulder. the knees of their pants. And if he's taking his pants off to commit a sex act, then you've got all of the underlying surfaces that would have her blood on him as well. And also the blood will be deposited.

23:17 Like if he's just pulled his pants down to the point where they're near his ankles, you can get these real weird kind of depositions on clothing like that, where they kind of bunch up like an accordion. And it's, it can be kind of confusing and, Um, clothes are an interesting thing. You know, when we run through assessments of bodies, uh, in the morgue, for instance, because depending upon people think that clothing move, move at, um, that clothing move with the body as one and they don't.

23:52 So when your torso twist, okay, the shirt is left behind. It might catch up. But if you're blocking or anything like this, if you're trying to defend yourself, the deposition or the injury that you have on a body, a stab wound is a good example. The stab wound that you have, say, through a shirt, doesn't necessarily line up with the defect that you have on your skin because two things are not attached. They're kind of moving independently of one another. And it requires a bit of interpretation.

24:27 All right.

24:28 So, As law enforcement gets to the scene, they realize, you know, calling in the detectives and everything else. The bottles, well, first of all, with all that blood and the injuries that they see, as an investigator, what are you looking at, Joe? Because law enforcement is going to be looking, I'm guessing, for a gun or a knife. They're going to look for a weapon of some type. How does it get to the point where you're going, we got this rum bottle that's wrapped up in the blanket that is... But how do you get to that point? Where do you where does the investigation sit? Because you don't take the body out right away. She's already dead. So there's no no need for, you know, life saving actions, heroic measures.

25:12 So the investigators just begin taking their time right away, slowing things down.

25:19 Absolutely. Absolutely. That's I was just having this conversation with my class yesterday. Perpetrators make decisions to do things in seconds and commit those acts in seconds. And then they're fleeing. Baby, we got all the time in the world when we show up. So, you know, and that's the Achilles heel of perpetrators out there. Because we can take our time, you know, and work our way through a scene. And so, with Faith's case in particular, the bottle would have been Very significant. And trust me, and I think that any of my law enforcement friends out there that have worked scenes involving blunt force trauma, there's several of them out there that can testify to the power of a liquor bottle.

26:11 Because it's not like a beer bottle, right? If you take a beer bottle, they're not as robust. All right, I'll put it to you that way. Thin walls. You know, they're meant to absorb the cold like this. You put it in a cooler, pop the cap off of you, drink it, and you discard it, right? And they're, I'm not going to say that they're as fragile as an eggshell, but they're pretty fragile. And you can see when someone is struck with a beer bottle, which I've had happen, it'll kind of, you'll get those little glass fragments, you know, and whatever the point of contact is, that sort of thing.

26:47 Liquor bottles, they're more robust. They're meant to be conveyed from a shelf to a bar to be taken and either uncorked or unscrewed, poured, put back on the shelf. And the thickness of these things is rather substantial compared to, say, for instance, a beer bottle or even a cocktail glass. Do yourself a favor, if you're curious about this, just take, if you see a liquor bottle, and a wine bottle to a certain extent, not as much as a liquor bottle, but you take it and you turn it on the end, look at the thickness of the base of this thing.

27:29 This thing's a club, Dave. All right? This thing can be used as a blunt object. I have had these before where a liquor bottle was involved in an attack and And I'm sure people are thinking, well, wouldn't it just shatter into a million pieces? No, this is not a pane of glass. That's not how these things are manufactured.

27:51 It is a blunt object. And, you know, this goes to something you and I have talked about on a regular basis, and these are weapons of opportunity.

28:01 Okay?

28:02 You know, whatever you can put your hands on at that moment in time. So, you know, if you kind of Think about the dynamic that's going on here. This is not like this is someone that Faith is in a loving relationship with. This is someone she is resistant to, and she's being noncompliant, probably. Or the individual has done their deed, which is absolutely horrible because this is a sex attack. just wants to finish Faith off. And they go for this bottle that they have access to, a weapon of convenience. And they begin to beat her with this thing. And the reason I know that that's what happens, the ME has talked about that her specific cause of death is, in fact, massive blunt force trauma to her head.

29:02 So she's going to have multiple lacerations.

29:07 Okay.

29:10 And this kind of concussive thing that goes on every time you're struck, because you can be struck in multiple planes, multiple angles, is really going to be played out when you take a look at her autopsy. And if they were to open her head at autopsy, you would see the brain itself would be covered in these contused areas.

29:34 We have several layers of contusions that occur here. within our examination of the brain. You have what's called an epidural, with epi meaning above, like the epidermis of our skin. We have epidural. Dura is the sac that covers the brain, kind of floats in it, looks a lot like a placenta actually, and it's a wash with with cerebral spinal fluid, you have epi, and then you have subdural, which means beneath that sac, okay? And then we'll have things like within the brain where you have like a subarachnoid, subarachnoid hemorrhage itself. But either way, it's creating pressure on the brain.

30:18 So every time you're struck, you get this concussive event. But as that is hemorrhaging, Within the cranial vault, guess what's being applied to the brain? Well, pressure. And the one thing that the brain cannot withstand is pressure. That's why they would create burr holes, for instance, in the head of an individual to relieve pressure. You have intracranial pressure monitors because people understand that work in medicine that pressure on the brain, is deadly. So you've got the concussive thing going on. You've got the brain swelling that would be going on as a result of this attack.

31:06 And this is evident pretty quickly, I think, to the investigators out at the scene. And the only weapon that they have, you know, going back here and coming back to what you had said, is that they got this bottle. Now, I got to tell you, it would be kind of odd to look down and see this kind of It's a weird thing. It's kind of this festive looking bottle.

31:27 It's actually a Bacardi peach red rum bottle. And so it looks like it's, you know, you're at the islands. It doesn't have like skulls on it or anything like that. It looks festive. And can you imagine, Dave, looking at that bottle and looking at the label and the thing is completely covered in this young woman's blood.

31:47 And that's where investigators found the bottle inside or wrapped up in the black comforter. The visible bloodstains became a significant part of the pieces of evidence that were put together by the case. Now, DNA testing, of course, performed later, and it was obvious that it was used to damage Faith Hedgepeth. But, Joe, there's also blood on the bed, on the pillows, on the wall. We've got another piece of evidence on the bed that is.

32:21 It's a huge piece, but it's also a red herring. It's a white takeout bag, food bag. And it's got a handwritten message on it. And it says, this handwritten message says, I'm not stupid, bitch. And the word jealous.

32:39 Yeah.

32:40 This became, I mean, a huge piece of evidence. And yet during the course of the investigation, Joe. It was revealed that it was a meme. The message was a meme. It wasn't something that the perpetrator came up with and put on the bag as a message to faith. It was a meme. It was something that had been going around.

33:13 And so it became a red herring. Don't know if it's part of the crime or not now. But I thought that was fascinating because I remember reading this, Joe, when the case was first coming out and we were looking into it several years ago. We're like, why hasn't this been solved? We've got this horrible note written on a food bag.

33:32 Yeah, I love the fact that you called it a red herring because it really is. And when you see it, you know, a lot of and well, let me just say this. Given the fact of the level of violence that was perpetrated upon Faith, this all of this blunt force trauma that she has sustained, you would immediately, and I would say this, well, maybe I just ought to be talking about me instead of anybody else. I would immediately say that, yeah, this bag is attached to this.

34:02 Because anytime you have one of these attacks like this where people are disfigured, you've got multiple strikes all about the head and the face and this sort of thing, and then there's a sex attack, you think that the motivating factor is, Behind all this could be jealousy, could be rage. This idea that maybe somebody, you know, she had rejected somebody. And so, yeah, that, you know, setting the police and investigators from Jump Street down the wrong path can make a journey even longer than it should have been. Music When we think about the substance of life, which blood is, it reveals a lot. It can reveal a lot about, first off, how long did someone live by virtue of the volume of blood that is spilled

35:03 at the scene. We've talked about incompatibility with life. We've talked about that term before on body bags. And also, we can learn a lot about movement. And we talked about that as well when discussing Faith's case. But what exactly does the blood tell relative to an identity about who might be involved in a case like this, and not just blood, but any other kind of bodily fluid that may have been deposited at the scene, Brother Dave?

35:35 The case started September of 2012, and we're learning about the methodology of how the evidence was collected. One of the evidence collectors was Tamika Price, I think was her name. Tamika actually described, you know, recovering the forensic evidence. She was the forensic evidence technician. And she described at length the collection of the evidence and how important it is. Because, Joe, you know, you mentioned early on, and we've talked about it often, the rum bottle being the murder weapon. And, A, that's odd. You know, it's just strange that that weapon of convenience or opportunity was what was used as the weapon that caused the death of Faith Edgbeth. But, Joe, when they looked at the bottle, the prosecution actually presented

36:23 statistical interpretation that the DNA mixture on this bottle was from Faith, the accused, and two unrelated people. But, Joe, it's a rum bottle in a college student's apartment. I would expect there to be different DNA all over the place, wouldn't you?

36:44 Yeah. Yeah, potentially, depending upon the lifestyle that she led. And also, what people might not think about either is you can have, let's just say, you go to an ABC store, which we have here in Alabama as well. And, you know, how many people have touched this bottle?

37:05 Okay.

37:07 Okay. because you're going to have deposition of DNA. And from a defense standpoint, when you're trying to defend someone that's accused, if you've got a mixture of DNA, that's one of the ways, that's one of the first little points of contact they're going to talk about relative to, well, this explains the mix. You could even say that your defendant, yeah, my defendant liked to go to that ABC store. And he likes rum. He likes Bacardi rum. And he grabs a bottle at that point in time. It's just a bad set of circumstances. And he's been falsely accused for what the case might be. So, yeah. So you can have this mixture.

37:47 But the problem is, you know, I hadn't thought about that, Joe. I had I've been so laser focused on the people in the apartment. I didn't think about the defense being able to say, well, you know, Dave, that liquor store over here and over here and over here. They shopped at all three of them.

38:05 Yeah, it's not like a piece of furniture. If you've got a piece of furniture from some furniture store out there and you purchased it years and years ago and it's just been sitting static in your apartment, that's a different purchased item, okay? You think about the mobility of these things. And look, defense attorneys think about these sorts of things. It's like the back, right? You don't know how many hands that thing passed through. And that question is going to be asked and it's going to have to be answered.

38:31 So.

38:32 You know, when you bring a DNA technician, scientist to the stand to testify about these sorts of things, that's going to be one of the questions. But when you start looking at the numbers that are involved, where you're getting into numbers like quintillion, probability, octillion, these sorts of things, that's, you know, it's like... I've always envisioned, you know, when those numbers are initially thrown out, it would be really hard for a defense attorney to keep a poker face.

39:07 At least it would be for me. I would go. I'd have to dip my head down, you know, because I'm thinking, how am I going to how am I? The math here is just so beyond anything that most of us can comprehend. When you think about probability and statistics that are involved in those points of contact along the way.

39:27 There was something really interesting that came into this case as well, Joe. Faith Hedgepett's roommate was Karina Rosario. And, you know, when we mentioned in the timeline how they had gone to the library, came home, changed clothes, and went back out to a bar, right, just out dancing. Well, Karina...

39:45 had had a few too many in that very brief window of time, couple hours, because they were only there like two hours or so. And when she came home, whereas Faith, you know, was ready for bed, she was ready to go to sleep. Karina, well, she was ready to throw up. She spent like an hour in the bathroom throwing up while Faith was, you know, relaxing. So the reason I bring that up is the bathroom in that apartment became an important part of the prosecution and defense because photographs showed a faint red stain or plural stains around the sink. The reason I'm pointing this out, Joe, is that you have said on multiple occasions that you will not say, well, I found a spot of blood over here and over here. And you will describe it

40:34 by the color and say it resembles or it's a possibility it could be. But you never come out and say, Emphatically, absolutely, it was blood. And this is the reason, because you've got things that appear to be in that same family of colors that could be blood.

40:52 Yeah.

40:52 But it could also be a lot of other things. And that's what happened in the bathroom.

40:56 Yeah, you have to. And particularly if you're talking about like in a basin of a sink. Guess what else looks like blood that you can find there?

41:04 Rust.

41:06 And it can depend upon how old the blood is. Blood changes color.

41:10 All right.

41:11 For a number of reasons. And most folks, you know, understand the fact that blood dries. Right. And just and also something else that can affect the appearance of blood is if it's in a wet environment and you've got a stain. Right. the blood kind of migrating through being exposed to water, then drying, exposed to water, drying. So all of these things kind of play in and how, how the blood kind of interfaces with the environment that it's in, because you don't know what other kind of, uh, uh, substances might be in there that might affect the appearance of blood, stuff that you can't see if you don't clean your sink really well, that sort of thing. There are a lot of factors. So there is no way

41:59 that I would ever walk into a scene and say that is definitively blood. The reason I don't say that is because I've been burned before. One case in particular where I surmised that something was blood and it turned out to be melted chocolate. So that's, I know, right. So that's, and that's something that can, you know, that can certainly happen. So you have to consider all these possibilities and points of contact and who's, and then when you bring the, the roommate into play here, and if she is a contributor on any of the surfaces and you have to admit, these are what I would refer to as intimate spaces, right? So, you know, you have to, Understand her movements within that environment. How long she's occupied

42:49 that space. Do they share the space? All these other things. And you have to get a reference sample from her, okay, from the roommate, right? Do the buccal mucosal swab. And that way, any other profile that's developed, you can compare it against that and say, yeah, this is a roommate. This is not somebody that may have come in and facilitated this attack. Because I've got to tell you, One of the things, one of the components that comes up in this particular attack is that, as I've alluded to, is that this is a sex attack. You know how I know it's a sex attack? Because she was raped.

43:23 All right. And you've got seminal deposition. They did vaginal swabs with a rape kit, which is something that we always do. And they actually were able to recover evidence of this attack. in addition to, you know, to the physical trauma. And Dave, you know, I've kind of limited what I've said about the head to, I mean, the trauma to the head. Dave, she had other contusions, you know, that were all over her body, Dave. So this is a very dynamic event where you've got somebody that is just raging, raging at her.

43:58 One of the things that most people want to know, how did they know each other? What happened? Why did this happen? And, you know, I think that's part of the reason it's difficult in this case, because the suspect here is not somebody who had a relationship with Faith. Miguel Salguero Alvarez. OK, don't even know if they'd ever even met Joe, this suspect. And so you have, you know, I kind of broke down the timeline and I said, you know, we had the the roommate. She got sick between two and three in the morning and then. She's going through a breakup. And you know what kind of mood you're in when you've had a little too much to drink and you're sick and want somebody to talk to.

44:40 And that's what eventually happened. Rosario was just looking for a friend. Faith's asleep. I feel I'm asleep. I got class in the morning. And that comes into play because her roommate left the apartment around 425. She was picked up by a friend and taken away. Now, One thing we know that Karina Rosario said is that, Joe, she said she left the door unlocked. And that's an important part of every story about how did the perpetrator get in?

45:14 How did they access the facility to carry out the crime? In this case, apparently the roommate left the door unlocked even though Faith was asleep in bed. You know, when we're young, we're 10 feet tall and bulletproof. Something changes with time. You realize you cannot.

45:34 Yeah.

45:34 And it appears that the suspect here, Miguel Seguro Olivares, did have a connection to the apartment complex, was familiar with it through family or friends. Opportunity. Yeah, opportunity.

45:51 Yeah, and it presents itself. One other connective point regarding this. The suspect is the fact that there's actually a palm print that's found on a blue-in-color Riesling wine bottle. Somebody had an affinity for these bottles, apparently, that ties that back. Going back to the collection of the DNA, particularly as it applies to the rum bottle, I find it very interesting that this deposition that you have is particularly prevalent on the neck and the head of the bottle. Well, what, what does that mean? Well, if you just grab the bottle, turn it like this, all of a sudden you've got a club, right? You know, when you're talking about the neck, the head of the bottle, all of a sudden you can wield this thing to strike her. And she struck

46:44 multiple times. There's underlying fractures to the skull, not to mention all of the contusions. And then she's, uh, she has in fact been raped, um, Clothing, you know, her pants, she's absent. She's nude from the waist down, shirt pulled up, these sorts of things. And he has got her in this very vulnerable position. I think my question would be, as far as kind of sequencing of all this, did he beat her to subdue her and then rape her?

47:22 Or did he rape her? and then beat her with a bottle in order to finish her off. And I don't necessarily know that that is an answerable question, but it's certainly something that is certainly intriguing, I think, from one perspective. And the idea that this specter, if you will, is kind of lurching around the apartment complex.

47:55 Sometimes it's dumb luck, Dave. Who else had this individual potentially identified as a possible victim in this environment? Because, look, you know, you think about this. This is planned out in a sense that you're capturing. You've got young women living in a location by themselves. They don't necessarily have a male in there, you know, some big boyfriend that's going to protect them. You've assessed that information. You know about access. Is this guy going through the apartment and wiggling doorknobs to see what pops open? He's identified people within this complex that he knows that could potentially be vulnerable.

48:35 Maybe sitting out there to wait and see if somebody comes staggering home. Because as folks know, if you come staggering about, people are going to know you're vulnerable. They're not going to go after the person that's walking very steadily and that sort of thing. They're going to go after the person that's most vulnerable. So when I mentioned dumb luck, had he targeted anybody else in this apartment complex?

48:59 You know, if he has access to it, has he been watching? Has he been waiting and knowing? And also, does he understand the layout of these environments? Does he understand how many people are occupying the space? And I think that that's a salient question, brother.

49:13 Well, it was interesting that in everything that has gone on, we've mentioned that this case began in 2012 and that investigators did have their eyes on a suspect early on in the investigation. They just couldn't prove it, Joe. So investigators over time now, again, remembering. When we look at 2012, I guess the older you get, you know, that doesn't seem that long ago. Well, it was 14 years ago, you know.

49:40 It was a long time, yeah.

49:41 Yeah, it is, a decade and a half. But investigators, you know, they recovered male DNA from the crime scene, including Faith's body. They used investigative genetic genealogy to identify distant relatives of the unknown DNA contributor. Investigators then pursued these family members, the family connections, And that's how they were able to identify the actual suspect, Salguro Olivares, as a suspect. And they then obtained a DNA sample during a traffic stop in September of 2021. Now, Joe, you've got this traffic stop five years ago, and it still took until now to get a trial going, right? I guess I get frustrated sometimes at law and how it works, but I'm not a police officer, you know. So I know that you only get one bite at the apple.

50:42 You know, you don't get to try somebody more than once. And that's it. And when you're dealing with murder, there is no statute of limitations on murder.

50:51 There's not. And I think this is another one of those cases. And I'm glad you said what you said earlier about you're not, you know, accusing anybody or anything like that. Brother, we had to wait for the science to catch up with the scene and with samples that we had. And that's what we're looking at here. Literally, you're having to wait for this fantastic technology that we're beginning to avail ourselves of with forensic genetic genealogy, where you can go out distantly and it's going to point to some distant relative and kind of bring it all back together. And, you know, and that's what it took. And, yeah, they're trying to take their time to prosecute this thing in the most reasonable manner and also planning where they

51:48 know that they're going to have success. And none of us know what the cops are thinking or what they're doing behind the scenes. We get frustrated. many times, but that frustration is as a result of lack of information or what we think that we're entitled. We're not because the game, the game that the cops are in and the game that the public are in are two different games. Um, uh, you know, the public is thirsty for information, but I got to tell you after, after there, that need for that information is satisfied, guess what they're going to do.

52:19 They're going to move on to the next case and get all in a twist over it or whatever it is. Cops don't have that luxury. They can't get off of a case. They have to continue to watch the case, monitor the case. Also, any suspects, are they doing surveillance on the individual? All that stuff that you never know that is actually happening in the background. And that's what eventually led to an arrest and a prosecution in this case, Dave.

52:48 And as the trial went on, the reason I mentioned the forensic technician on the scene, Tamika Price, I never can remember. I'm horrible with names. The reason I remember her name is because she spent a lot of time on the stand during the trial because the defense, you know, everything was said and done, Joe. The defense did not call one witness. The defense attacked every piece of evidence that was presented at trial, challenged how it was collected, challenged what it meant. And I thought that was a fascinating move because the only time I can remember really seeing something like that play out was during the O.J.

53:26 Simpson trial. And if you remember Barry Sheck, how about that, Mr. Fong, when he said he'd never picked up something without wearing gloves. And so that was kind of where the defense was headed on this case today. attack and not attacking, but challenging is probably the better word. Every piece of evidence, how it was collected and whether or not it was reliable.

53:47 Yeah. And that's, that's what it truly does come down to. And, you know, going back to the comment that you made about Tamika at the scene, I think that, I think that she represented herself very well. And what people don't understand is that someone like Tamika that is working the scene, this is, incredibly complex stuff that you're talking about, and you do not get do-overs, ladies and gentlemen. That's why it's always important, and we need to remember the individuals that are working these scenes, because you get one shot at getting it right, okay? And any kind of move that you make at the scene when you're assessing, documenting, collecting any kind of evidence can mean that, you know, if it's catastrophic, the curtain's going to come down on

54:34 the case. You've blown it. They've taken their time with this case. Let's see what the jury has to say. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.