The Autopsy Episode - A Life Among the Dead

Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan

CrimeOnline and iHeartPodcasts

True Crime

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Joseph Scott Morgan was on his first date with his wife Kim she asked him what he did for a living. When he responded by telling her that he worked for the Medical Examiner, essentially the coroner, examining dead bodies and performing autopsies, she looked at him with a puzzled expression…

We all have aspects of our lives that are unusual, whether it’s our family, our habits, or our jobs. But when we do these things every day, they become so normal to us that we don’t even question them anymore.

In this special episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard go into depth on the touchstone of forensic death investigation: autopsies. They discuss what an autopsy is, who can order one, the different kinds, and how Joe ended up in this unique profession.

Show Notes:

0:00 - Intro

2:07 - What is an autopsy?

4:10 - Who determines when an autopsy is done? Why would you not do one?

7:40 - Can an autopsy be done even if the family doesn’t want it?

9:58 - Gloria Satterfield’s cause of death

12:45 - Are there different kinds of autopsies?

17:55 - Joe’s experience in the autopsy room

18:56 - What is a full autopsy and how long does it take?

26:50 - Can certain autopsies be prioritized?

30:22 - Is an autopsy considered surgery?

34:05 - How did Joseph Scott end up working in a morgue?

38:50 - Seeing bodies in all different kinds of states

41:40 - How does Joe’s family deal with his line of work?

43:45 - Joe’s take on his career

45:21 - Wrap up

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan
0:19.4	Early in the morning on October the 19th, 2019, in a little town in Idaho, a lady who
0:29.1	was in her late 40s was found deceased and for whatever reason still remains a mystery
0:36.6	to this day. The decision was made for an autopsy not to be performed. A lady's name is
0:43.7	Tammy Debel and her case is critical and a much broader investigation that's going
0:52.5	on. As a matter of fact the absence of an autopsy in that case could have severe repercussions
0:59.8	moving forward. Today we're going to be discussing autopsies. What they are, who makes
1:08.8	a determination as to when they occur and I'm going to tell you a little bit about my background
1:14.5	a lot of times. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags. I've been involved in
1:26.0	death investigation for the majority of my adult life either working in the morgue out
1:32.3	in the field as an investigator or now as an academic talking about medical legal death
1:38.2	investigation every single day that I walk into school and my friend Jackie Howard who's
1:45.8	the executive producer of crime stories with Nancy Grace Jackie we've talked about autopsies
1:50.4	a lot haven't we? We have Joe and the more that we talk about it the more that I want to
1:55.9	know is as we laid out our plans for what we wanted to discuss today the questions just
2:02.0	started pouring so I figure the best place to start is with a simple question. What is
2:07.9	an autopsy? An autopsy is essentially there's another way to put this it it's essentially
2:14.8	a post mortem examination and that's in a very very broad sense but when you hear the
2:22.5	term autopsy it conjures up images of an old dilapidated morgue you've got more personnel
2:31.4	running about there's coolers where bodies are stored and generally a stainless steel table
2:36.9	that's not too far off the mark but we have to understand that when we conduct an autopsy we're
2:47.4	trying to determine what exactly happened what brought about the death of an individual that was
	...

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