Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: A Pink Hammer's Dark Secrets -The Mysterious Death of Leon Hignite

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True Crime, News

3.9 • 7.6K Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of the Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack delve into the chilling case of 76-year-old Leon Hignite, who is found abandoned in his home with gruesome injuries. They explore the forensic details of blood spatter patterns, analyze the severity of Leon's injuries, the challenges faced by the medical team, and the disturbing circumstances surrounding the incident.

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Time Codes:

0:00 - Introduction

01:17 - Overview and background

04:28 - Dave questions how the blood on the ceiling and wall could have resulted from Leon's supposed fall in the bathroom.

05:07 - Leon's limited ability to communicate due to his blindness and hearing impairment.

06:17 - The autopsy reveals that Leon sustained at least 30 blunt force impacts to his head.

07:42 - Paramedics find Leon in a deplorable state on the bedroom floor, surrounded by blood and waste.

09:46 - Leon’s feelings of helplessness and hopelessness.

10:10 - Leon is found after three days.

10:41 - Leon's medical condition, age, blindness, and other health issues.

11:04 - The police arrive to serve a search warrant and discover the house set on fire.

11:56 - Medical intervention needed for Leon's head trauma.

13:14 - Carol Hignite's claims she gave Leon ice chips to hydrate him.

14:39 - Were the injuries Leon sustained typical of a fall?

16:10 - The forensic implications of overlapping contusions and fractured areas.

18:05 - The pink hammer.

20:47 - The forensic challenges of blood being found on the hammer.

22:14 - The differences between blood spatter from impact vs. cast-off.

24:01 - Blood velocities and their relation to various weapons.

25:30 - What happened those 3 days before 911 was called?

27:40 - Outro

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Transcript

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0:00.0	BODY Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan
0:19.8	Down here in the south we have some interesting names that we call our grandparents.
0:24.8	Maybe that's the case all over the country, but for me, spending my entire life down here
0:29.2	that's kind of the norm. I call my grandfather Pappal. I love that man or anything.
0:34.2	I had two Pappals. But the one I'm thinking about right now was what's referred to as a
0:39.7	finishing contractor or finishing carpenter. And he ran a crew guys, it would actually
0:44.7	frame houses. He was not a big man, but he had gigantic hands and he had forms that
0:51.0	are remembered as a small child that look like Papa. And the reason I bring this up is
0:55.5	that he always carried a hammer and he had a wide variety of hammers. I think probably
1:01.1	the one that everybody knows about is a claw hammer. That means that you've got the
1:05.4	blunted side where you're driving nails and you got the other side that's a little
1:10.0	loud. Today we're going to talk about a case that involves a hammer. And it's a hammer
1:15.5	that my grandfather probably never would have been seen with. It's actually a pink claw
1:20.4	hammer. But we're going to talk about its involvement in the alleged homicide of an elderly
1:27.1	man of 76 years of age. His name was Leon Duane Hignight. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan. And
1:34.9	this is Body Packs. My buddy Dave Mack, he's a reporter for Karamon Line. He's joining
1:44.6	me today to help me make sense out of this case and break down the forensics. Dave,
1:48.8	there are just certain cases out there that he think when you've heard the worst that
1:52.6	humanity has to offer you come across a case like this and you think, wow, can it go
1:57.8	any deeper and any darker? And I think this is pretty dark.
2:01.9	This is one of those situations where you've got an elderly couple, Carol Hignight 69
2:09.1	at the time that this took place. Husband Leon is 76 at the time. You know when you
	...

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