The Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan

Early in the morning on October 19, 2019, in a little town in Idaho.

A lady who was in her late 40s was found deceased and for whatever reason still remains a mystery to this day.

The decision was made for an autopsy not to be performed.

A lady's name is Tammy Debel and her case is critical and a much broader investigation that's going on.

As a matter of fact, the absence of an autopsy in that case could have severe repercussions moving forward.

Today, we're going to be discussing autopsy.

What they are, who makes a determination as to when they occur, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about my background with autopsy.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags.

I've been involved in death investigation for the majority of my adult life either working in the morgue, out in the field as an investigator or now as an academic talking about medical legal death investigation every single day that I walk into school.

And my friend Jackie Howard, who's the executive producer of crime stories with Nancy Grace Jackie, we've talked about autopsy a lot haven't we?

We have Joe and the more that we talk about it, the more that I want to know was as we laid out our plans for what we wanted to discuss today.

The questions just started pouring so I figure the best place to start is with a simple question. What is an autopsy?

An autopsy is essentially there's another way to put this it's essentially a post mortem examination and that's in a very, very broad sense, but when you hear the term autopsy, it conjures up images of an old, dilapidated morgue.

You've got more personnel running about there's coolers where bodies are stored and generally a stainless steel table and that's that's not too far off the mark.

But we have to understand that when we conduct an autopsy, we're trying to determine what exactly happened, what brought about the death of an individual that was not necessarily otherwise explained.

And so when you begin to go down this road in the autopsy suite, you know, some people interestingly enough historically they've they've referred to in the historic record is doctors that do autopsy so refer to them as surgical pathology and surgical pathology now means like you've got a doctor that goes up to surgery, this pathologist and they look at frozen sections of tumors that have been removed from people they'll look at them instantaneously and try to give you a diagnosis.

But there is a part to surgical pathology that goes along with autopsy examinations where pathologists will engage in literally the dissection or pro section of human remains to try to determine what exactly brought about the death because it absent those clinical diagnoses that you arrive at by virtue of doing these examinations.

You don't actually have a final or fatal diagnosis. The biggest questions that families have that communities have is absolutely what happened. How did they die? When did they die? What was the mechanism that brought about their death and hopefully through an autopsy can make that determination?

One of the things that you said just in general really caught my attention and it was having to do with when an autopsy is done and when is it not done.

I find it really interesting in the Tammy Daybell case as you mentioned that an autopsy was not initially done. Who determines that and why would you not?

I mean I know in certain especially in the elderly when it's thought to be natural causes they don't necessarily do an autopsy to try to figure out why this person died.

...