00:00:01
Speaker 1: Body Bus. But Joseph's gotten more. You know, over the last few years, it seems as though that Kevin Costner has popped onto both my newsfeed and my social media feed more than I'd care to remember. It's not that I necessarily have anything against him. It's just like super saturation, dude, He's everywhere. And don't get me wrong, I am a Kevin Costner fan. Probably out of all of his movies, my favorite one is A Field of Dreams. It always gets me, you know, that last scene. I think that those of us that may have longed to have had a father when we were growing up, and he meets up with his dad at the end, and he merely looks at him and says, hey, Deck, can we have a catch? And inevitably I cry. I cry every time I see that scene. But for us today on Bodybags, there are tears being shed right now in Iowa, and they're not fiction. They're real. They're real because found in a field or the remains of its seventeen year old girl who has been brutally murdered. To make it all the more horrific, her mother had gone out looking for because she hadn't come home that girl's name is Michelle Luna Jackson, and today we're going to talk about her homicide. I'm Joseph Scott and Morgan and this is body backs, Dave. You know, as far as I can see around this area that I live in, up in the northern part of Calhoun County, Alabama, not Calhoun County, Iowa, where our case today takes place, not too dissimilar. Of course, the land rolls a bit more than it does in Iowa. But man, there are cornfields and cotton fields and alfalfa and all kinds of other things that grow. It's a farming community and that's really all there is up here. We have university. But you start to get away from the town that I live in in Jacksonville, Alabama, and you come after you come across farm after farm after farm, and how many of these little locations have you and I both driven through over the years. It'll be like a little crossroads and it'll be called a town. It might have one one stop light, or maybe a flashing yellow light if you're lucky. But you can look on a map and it's identified there. This location where this took place is. I don't know. It looks to be roughly one hundred and twenty miles northwest of Des Moines, and you know, you get out there, and people have described that area as just being like a sea of corn as far as I can see, and I don't know if that's the case here, but it kind of sounds like a.
00:03:29
Speaker 2: Found fewer than four hundred people. And when we first started looking at this story in particular, something caught my attention, Joe, because oftentimes when we have a story that begins with somebody missing, immediately people do things that make no sense to me. But in this one, it is exactly what I would do. When seventeen year old Luna doesn't come home as expected, it's eleven o'clock on Sunday night, mother picks up the phone and calls police. Now, in a town that size, she probably knew somebody to call directly, you know, not going through nine to point one, right, and that's what So, Hey, Luna's not home. I don't know where she is. She took off on her scooter. She wasn't running away. We were expecting her right back and please help. And so she makes the call, my daughter's missing. And then she grabs her other daughter and they go out looking. Now, they didn't hop in their car to go looking. They started walking because Luna left with her scooter, so they know, generally speaking, she's going to be in an area where she can be found by looking for her, right And that's exactly what happened, Well, not exactly, I take that back, but they did. As they were walking looking for Luna, they see a man riding Luna's scooter. Taking a closer look, they realize the man is covered in what appears to be blunt. I don't know exactly what she felt in that moment, but my heart broke. The mom seeing her daughter's scooter and a man she doesn't know writing it looking like he's covered in blood, calls police. They get involved, and immediately the guy lawyers up before they can get any information. Joe, he says, lawyer. We know his name, Nathaniel Beaver's McGivney. He's twenty one. But Nathaniel Beaver's McGivney lawyered up right away. We don't know of any relationship between the suspect and the victim here. We don't know anything yet. It's a new case, but that's where it sits right now. As the mom on that Sunday evening finds her daughter scooter the man in blood and does not find her daughter.
00:06:00
Speaker 1: Introject something here I had you you've spurred some some memories from me here, Dave, I think back. Not every case that you work is a body that is simply found. You know, some stranger in the public happens to walk along and they come across a body, and maybe the body has been there for a while. The individual is not, you know, not part of of the life's narrative of the deceased. But you know, Dave, those cases where families have been touched by death and certainly the horror, and it can be even a perceived horror. You know, just because Luna's mother saw the scooter that looked like her daughters and just because she saw a guy ride in along scooter that appears to have been covered in blood, doesn't necessarily mean the two things are are related. However, when you begin to look mathematically at the odds, and we've talked about how isolated this place is, how small of a location it is, what are the odds that, first off, your daughter would be missing, and that you've got this guy who just I got to tell you just the images that I've seen of him, he looks big and powerful. He you know, he looks like what you would think a farm boy looks like, you know, and he's got what appears to be blood on him. And it's in the evening. That's another thing. So if it's in the evening, you're under dim light, she sees what she thinks is blood. I don't know how close he passed to her, but you begin to think about this and you think, oh my word, it must have been a copious amount of blood to be able to make that recognition. Potentially in twilight, Tom, there's a lot going on here, and Dave, I got to say one more thing here. You know, this case is absolutely horrific. I hadn't heard anything about it. I didn't hear anything about until my wife mentioned it to me because she saw seventeen year old and that was the first thing for her. And any of you folks that have met Kimmy my wife, you know how she is. I mean, you know, she's like a bulldog with things many times, and you've seen her crime con and these sorts of things, and this really struck a note with her that this is something that we needed to discuss, and it hasn't been picked up, you know, broadly, I don't think in the national discourse of true crime. But a horrific case. And what makes it really striking for those of us that live in small communities is that it actually happened in a very small community where you wouldn't think that something this horrific would go down, Dave.
00:09:00
Speaker 2: No, and that's one of the safety nets we have in a small community. If you've lived in other areas, you know what it's like to be, you know, in a city versus a small town environment, and they both have their pros and cons. In this particular case, as we mentioned, I was struck by the fact that Mom did exactly what I would do. Yeah, I would take off looking just I know about where she's going to be, so boom, I'm going. And I want to point out that while she did see the suspect here with her daughter's scooter and other items of Luna's not just the scooter, but other items as.
00:09:37
Speaker 1: Well, which they have not identified yet. Just that statement alone is chilling, Dave.
00:09:43
Speaker 2: But there's no Luna and they can't find her, and he's not telling so we don't know what time exactly, Mom saw Nathaniel Beaver's McGivney. We don't know what time that was. We just know that it was after eleven pm and before nine am the next morning, and we know that police took him into custody and talked to him, which he lawyered up. And so it wasn't until the next morning. Remember eleven PM on Sunday night, my daughter's not home, she's missing. Help me find her. And then the next morning, after sunrise, they being officials looking for Luna, find her. She's not out in the open. She had actually been hidden, Joe, put away in an area where you didn't see her immediately.
00:10:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, that goes to you know, when you think about these sorts of things. They're talking about things. I think that one of the charges has to do with concealment of human remains. Well, they talk about what was it, Dave. One of the charges ABUSEI of.
00:11:04
Speaker 2: Cor abusive a corpse, and I wondered what that meant. Joe.
00:11:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, and that can come in a variety of different degrees. You know, you can, you can it's almost like almost like passive versus active. Okay, just think about it. If someone were to actively abuse a corpse. There's any number of ways that an individual can engage in that kind of behavior, you know, And I think you know, first one of the first things we think about is maybe dismemberment, okay, but then you can kind of passively do it. And I don't know if you've given any thought to this, but that law in most places is written with families in mind. Okay. So, like, let me just pose this to you. If if you have a loved one that dies, any reasonable person would have an expectation that they would get those remains back and that they could view the remains, and that they're family and friends, the extended family and friends could view the remains, that you could have awake for them. Perhaps, so if you kind of passively do this, this means that you obscure the body in some way. Well, what's going on, Well, you are allowing, through your actions, the body to become decomposed, and that in and of it that, in and of itself, in a roundabout way, you're facilitating, well, first off, almost a disfigurement of the body. And that's cruel. It's it's very cruel. And so I think that when these legislators pass these laws like that. That's part of it. It's not merely about somebody that's a necrofile or somebody that's into dismemberment or burning a body. It can be that kind of passive action, you know, where you have where when you know the family. Unfortunately had to deal with families over the years where they will ask me, and I'm no funeral director, but they will ask me, do you think you can have an open casket? You know, and I'll phrase it like, you know, look, I'm not a funeral director, but there's a high probability you would not want to subject yourself or your family or your friends to this because the body is so far gone.
00:13:25
Speaker 2: So we.
00:13:28
Speaker 1: Don't know if that is all that this entails relative to what was done with her body in the post mortem state. Was it Disgui's intent to obscure her? And so therefore they thought about what's going to happen to the body afterwards, that no one is actually taking care of the dead, and it's going to lead to the family being absent that opportunity in her death. So there's a different way, you know, to kind of to kind of look at that and think about that. It doesn't necessarily mean something more horrific that you could. You know, I think many of us could go there in our minds simply based on stuff we covered on our podcast, Dave, they felt like that they had grounds to charge him with this, Dave.
00:14:17
Speaker 2: Never occurred to me. I just never thought of it like that. I really thought abuse of a corpse would be a dramatic, you know, active And yet that actually makes sense because the way we've mentioned this is a fresh news story and a lot of information has not been released or is not available yet because we're not in that not far enough down line to get the actual police reports and search. They'll do search warms and things like that as part of the investigation, but we don't have any of that right now. We just know that he specifically and on purpose put her body in a place where it was not easily found.
00:14:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, right now at JSU, I'm teaching, actually this semester, I'm actually teaching a class called clandestine burials. And there's any number of ways that you can clandestinely bury or obscure a body. And it's not just your you're burying a body necessarily, but you are obscuring the body you're maybe placing a body in a body of water. I know that's rather redundant to say that, but that's There's any number of ways that this can take place. But here's the big thing. Was it his intent to obscure her body so that he could put as much distance between himself and the remains of a luna Dave. You know, one of the things, particularly when you're talking about a homicide, if someone were to say, well, which would you rather work? Would you rather work a homicide inside of a structure or out in the woods slash open field. I'm with the structure all day long. I'm not saying that they're not complicated, because some of the most complex cases I've ever been involved in have a card in a structure. But you have that, you have that containment. You know what I'm saying. You got the four walls. That sounds like an old country song, doesn't it. I think it actually was. You've got the four walls that are surrounding you and things are protected. Right. You've got a roof over your head. Now, I've been in some structures that no longer had roofs, abandoned buildings and that sort of thing. But you understand what I'm saying. There's an area of containment that's kind of occurring that the body is there. Start to get out into rural areas where you've got a wooded area or an open field, and it just absolutely becomes a nightmare to process the scene.
00:17:09
Speaker 2: I go back to. This is from the actual documents. Okay, the location of court documents. The location where the body was discovered suggests that Beaver's McGivney intentionally hid the body to conceal a crime, and then he failed to disclose where she was after they were talking to him. Think about it. He's been seen by her mother, you know, with the girl scooter with what appears to be blood all over his body, and he's not telling anybody where the body is.
00:17:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, the big word there is intent. Anytime you get the eye word in there, that means that the police have knowledge. They have knowledge because you know, intent is very difficult to prove, you know, It's one of those things that you know because you can say you know that you intended to do something that somebody else intended to do something. But if you're going to go into court with this element of intent, then that's kind of a a higher bar, you know, to kind of go across. So obviously they have specific information related to this. But I got to touch on something something here, Dave. I want to go back just for a second. You talked about multiple scenes, and there can be multiple scenes, and this is kind of how we break them down in investigation. So you will have a primary scene if you have a body, a decedent, obviously your primary scene is going to be where the body is found. And if you use the idea of a wagon wheel with the hub, the body is the hub. Everything else kind of radiates out from there. And then you have secondary scenes, which might be say, for instance, a conveyance like a car, or maybe the initial uh, the initial location of where they were killed. That would be secondary. And then you have we're referred to as tertiary. I'll give you an example of tertiary. You know, if you go back to the oj Simpson narrative that people put out, you know, like after the homicides occurred out there, one of the things that people had talked about was that he was in a car headed to the airport. Remember I think famously he was in Chicago when the alarm went up about this, and some people have stated that things were thrown out of the window of the limos he's going down the road that if you came across those items, that would be like a tertiary scene. Okay, so that's kind of how it breaks down. But here's the interesting thing about Luna's case for me, is that he's on her scooter. So if this guy has means, if this guy has means, Dave, why would a twenty one year old man, he looks like he's been, you know, living off of off of steaks and corn his entire life, Big fella, Why is a twenty one year old man riding up and down the road on a scooter allegedly covered with what appears to be blood. You know why? Because that's almost like a clown show to me. If you see it's some big guy riding down the road on a scooter, that's kind of odd to me. It's going to make me take notice. So and out in the middle of what would be a very isolated area. Again, you add that element to it, it's kind of a strange. If you can, just for a moment envision this big guy tooling down the road on a scooter. You know where everybody else is driving what my son likes to called broad dozers, you know, which are the jacked up you know, big old trucks and that sort of thing going down the road. This would be an odd ball and no wonder it called mama's attention. I mean, just think about it. That's what she's witnessing this in real time. She sees what she believes is her daughter's scooter. There's a big fellow on it and he's covered with blood. So how did Luna wind up in this field? She killed somewhere else, or let's just say someone may have been light and wait for her, knowing that she rides her scooter along a roadway. You know, periodically, she's known to do this. If somebody's watching, it's a crime of opportunity. This doesn't sound like something necessarily Dave that's very well planned out. The other thing to this, the other part to this that is very disturbing. I think they have referred to these items of Luna's that this fellow was supposedly in possession of. So you know, when I hear items that belong to the dead, the first thing in my mind, my mind goes to her trophies. Now, is that what's going on here or is there an attempt? Is there an attempt to try at some kind of rudimentary level to obscure not only her body, but also who Luna was. So, Dave, I've got to begin to try to understand in order to fully assess this case from a forensics perspective, just so that I understand where we are here. The accused immediately lawyered up. He's not like some font of information that's saying, oh, yeah, yeah, I saw her. That's the reason I was on scooter and yeah, she disappeared out into the cornfield like field of dreams. You know. That's not what's going on here, is it. No?
00:22:53
Speaker 2: And the criminal complaint alleges that the location where the girl's body was discovered quote suggest that Beaver's McGivney intentionally hid the body to conceal a crime, and that he failed to disclose the location with intent to conceal a crime. That's the different charges that come into play. But when they find the body. You mentioned a minute ago about the different types of the scenes primary scene, secondary scene, tertiary scene. When you're doing that, do you start at the primary scene and go out in the investigation.
00:23:30
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, you can't say that affirmatively like that that's what is going to happen, because many times you'll find the secondary or even the tertiary scene before you ever find the primary scene with the body, and it leads you to it then, and it leads you to it. Yeah, And so if you're talking about someone that has been killed, and I'll go ahead and make this big reveal here and we can come back to it. But we do know from the statements that have been made is that Luna's throat has been cut. And so when we begin to think about throats being cut, Dave, you're going to have far more evidence most of the time than you will even with gunshot wounds because the cutting of the throat, and depend upon how deep and how extensive it is, you're going to have a tremendous amount of bleeding that will take place. So you could, let's just say that she was attacked on the roadway and her throat was cut there, where you could have a blood trail leading literally from the shoulder of the road back into the field, assuming that it took place there. And since he's not driving a car, the accused is not driving a car, I have to assume that the home side more than likely took place approximating that field, unless there's some kind of abandoned vehicle somewhere that they haven't led onto at this point in time. And if that's the case, a vehicle would be super saturated with blood. So you're going to have from an evidentiary standpoint, how do you track the body. Well, with a body that has been bled like this, with this insult to the throat or the neck, you could potentially have a trail, you could have pools of blood. And then she's in a field. Well, we have some clues here because they're talking about that there has been an attempt to obscure the body. Well, if you're obscuring the body, that means most of the time there's kind of different levels to this. Have you shun up with a shovel in hand and dug a hole in the ground, maybe you've created a pressed area, it's not a six foot deep grave, it's a shallow grave. Or is it a surface disposal where you leave the body on the surface of the ground. And then let's and we don't know this for a fact. We know she's in a field, we know they grow a lot of corn, there was the corn harvest taking place. Yet, well, it's time of year at the time of this recording, we're in early October. This would have occurred at the end of September. I would probably say that if it hasn't that, if it hasn't taken place, it has at least started to take place at this point. So where are you going to have Well, you'll have discarded cornstalks perhaps and other debris. Well, was there body placed out there and then the cornstalks taken or whatever items were out there and placed on top of the Was there were there down limbs for instance. And listen, there's one thing that I would doesn't necessarily have a lot of, and that's trees. And most of the time, if you have trees, they are going to be in towns, you know, that have been planted by somebody. You're not going to have like old growth forest around there. Because we're talking about, you know, kind of the planes here. So what is the body being obscured with, How is the being obscured and how how would the perpetrator know about this specific location Dave? And how what was it that they assessed this location to be where they knew that there would be an opportunity to obscure a body, why not move it somewhere else? Why not take it to a local creek bed, or to a local quarry, or whatever the case might be. No, the body was placed in a field and left there. And this, these cases like this become a nightmare to try to process. And here's why. If we if we are to follow this line of logic where mama has seen the accused on her scooter and he's got blood on him, then let's just think about, well, if we're trying to track him to determine which way, which which location? Did he leave after he you know, how did he depart the field? Did he just leave the scooter on the side of the road after he attacked her and then went back and fetched the scooter? Did he was a scooter drug back there with her? Did she take it back there with her? We don't really know. But if he left and she's deceased and her throat has been cut, did he leave a blue blood trail leaving out? Also, he's a big guy. Are there foot impressions in this soft dirt? We're talking about a field, Dave? So is there an indication that he walked out of the field and then got back onto this roadway, which you know you said, mom, Mom and sister are on foot looking for her. This cannot be too far away from her domicile, you know, where they live. It's got to be close. In approximation, I was looking at some of the aerial photography of this place, and you've got this. You've literally got this little town that by my estimation has got one two, three, four, five six dave it's got six north south streets total for this little town. And if you break it down a grid and running east and west there are through streets you've only got like five. And you know what else in that little sea, that little oasis of the little neighborhoods, the town and everything else, it is completely surrounded by farms. You know, it's striking when you look at this on you know, on a map, a particularly satellite view, you don't have this. This town would look like an oasis. If you're kind of driving across this area, it would just like pop up and then every end then it's just engulfed in farms as far as you can see. So any any wherever she was living, wherever the mom lived. It's within easy walking distance of any field around there. That's going to key with this case.
00:30:02
Speaker 2: When the body is left in the field and they say, you know it was hidden. The body is hidden with the alleged perpetrator covered in blood, and we know that she had her throat slit. The blood normally pools on the surface, and when we're in a scene and it's in a house, in the carpet or whatever, we got dirt in a field as dirt you mentioned corn and other things. But the will the blood then seep into the ground and become part Does it make it harder to determine what happened when the body is placed in a field like this.
00:30:38
Speaker 1: Not necessarily. It all depends well with the unaided eye. What I say is the unaided eye. That means that I'm not using any kind of special lighting photography. Heck, I'm not even using a magnifying lens at this point in TOM I'm just eyeballing it. You can see a contrast in soil between the blood, the blood and the soil itself. You can get an appreciation of it. One of the things that's very important to do. As you can imagine from a forensic standpoint is you need to take soil samples. And the beauty of a soil sample is that, unlike perhaps maybe some other surface, like a hard concrete surface, you can begin to talk about saturation. How deep did this go? You know, how deep? Because you know, just imagine now that you might not give them the exact volume of it, but just imagine what kind of tool this is for prosecuting an attorney to say she bled so much that our investigators at the scene dug down one two, three four inches they were still finding blood at that level. That took samples of the soil out there, core samples where you just kind of, you know, almost like you're generating of a golf hole on a golf green, where you take out that plug like that and you can demonstrate how deep this thing went. And that's that's going to be telling. And I think, you know, for me, what would be the motivation behind this because that brings in another level of physical evidence to be left behind. And I think the most obvious thing here is this a sexual assault on bat Did he attack her, drag her out in the field and sexually assault her? And I can promise you this when Luna's body was examined by the friends of pathologists. They will have done a rape kit. And I don't even care if if she's in a state, if her clothing is completely intact, because you have perpetrators that will redress bodies, even after a sexual event has taken place. They will redress bodies. So you cannot work on that assumption in the morgue that you know, well, nothing happened, the clothing wasn't disrupted. That's one of the worst decisions you could ever made because once that evidence is gone, it's gone. So they will have done a rape kit. You know, in this particular case, when we think about the accused here, Dave, you know, we've talked about you know, kind of footprints and you know, and bloody trails and primary scene, secondary and tertiary. But here's one other tertiary element here, Dave. Where was he domiciled and what happened to his clothes? Because I got to tell you something, brother, his clothes. His clothes would have been I don't know if super saturated. It's going to be the wording that we're going to use, but he will probably have had some element of blood on that clothing. DNA alone with that, you have to be able to answer this question, how did Luna's biological signature wind up on this guy? You know? And what? How was it? Trent? Is it blood you know? Is it skin? You know? Is it hair? Well, if it's blood, how did her blood wind up on you? Now he doesn't have to answer that question. Defense doesn't have to answer that question. But that's not the important thing. What you do is you put that question before the jury, because Jerry twelve people, they're gonna be sitting there saying, hmm, yeah, how did this young seventeen year old's girl's blood wind up on his person? On his clothing? So they're going to have to search his domicile from stem to stern. I would imagine that they've done that, digging through anything that he had. I can't imagine that he just rolled into the house on her scooter and laid down the bed in these dirty clothes. I can't imagine that maybe there was an attempt to clean up after the fact. I don't know. There's there's more to dig into.
00:34:58
Speaker 2: Here, they Joe. One of things that came out in looking up who the victim is in this case, trying to find out more about her seventeen year old junior in high school. And one of the things that she loved to do was to swing, you know, a swing set. Yeah, And it was so known she would go to the park and just sit in the swing. It was just her thing to do. Everybody knew it. As a matter of fact, they're decorating one of the swings in the park in her honor.
00:35:27
Speaker 1: If you think about just the idea of an observable location, you know, where she would have been seen, She would have been known to maybe be alone, maybe she went out on her scooter, went specifically to the park to sit on the swings, and if he has a point of observation in that location, he can target her at that point. But you know, there's any number of other places he could have seen her throughout this town where he had identified her. And here's one other question I would have relative to the person that's accused in this case, Dave, I want to know if there have been any other instances that could have linkage to him and inappropriate behavior with uh with young ladies around the town. Was there anybody else that he had come across that you know, and sometimes you know people will say, you know, talk about feelings and those sorts of things about he gave me the creepy guy feeling or whatever. Was Well, that's one thing, But had he ever acted on anything? Because this is a big leap here. You know, you're not you don't have somebody that's exposing themselves or making a threatening comment, which I don't know. Maybe he did at some point in time, but what we're seeing right now now this is a huge leap. Yeah, and very personal too, man. I mean we're talking about the cutting of a throat here. That's that in and of itself is so incredibly intimate. So you know, for investigators, they're gonna digging into all of this. And again I go back to his home. One of the things that's disturbing about this again is the fact that he took her items. I want to know what other items are in that home. There are there any other items that are related to someone else perhaps in that town. It wouldn't be hard to kind of whittle this down, if you will, and narrow down your field here, you know, to kind of explore this a little bit, to try to understand that, and you know, when it's all stitched together and everything that's that's going to be of interest. But there's one more thing I think, you know, talking about creating a case that you had mentioned to me that I found kind of interesting. They initially had did the prosecutor actually recuse themselves from this case?
00:37:49
Speaker 2: When when we were looking at this this is something popped up right away and I asked you, is this common? I mean, we're in a very small area where a lot of people know you know you into It's like you're living at Cheers. Everybody knows your name kind of thing. And they filed court documents on Monday. I mean, we're talking about the day of finding her body. Okay, Sunday night, eleven o'clock she's reported missing. They find her body the next morning, eight nine am, and they're filing paperwork because they already have the suspect in custody. He's already lawyered up, and they filed court papers where Smith the town prosecutor or a county it's Calhoun County, Iowa, where he recuses himself from the case and it's given over to the state and the quote is due to a conflict of interest. However, that sat there from Monday until Thursday, and you're going conflict of interest? What the you know? But on Thursday they amended the ruling the statement rather saying that it was an air what it was was, instead of giving the case over to the Attorney General's office, Smith asked for the state to assist in the prosecution. It was an air in filing, so it wasn't a conflict of interest. Although I'm thinking this is like the hindsight being twenty twenty, I think immediately went we all know each other. We got to pull in the state for this, for cover ourselves. We want look, man, no matter how bad you think of anyone in law enforcement or prosecutorial stuff, ultimately the honest ones just want the truth.
00:39:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, you want more eyes on you than not when you're doing something like this, and this case in a town the size, a county the size, you have to I think you have to think that this is probably one of the most ghastly things that's ever occurred. This is something that's going to stay with this community for a long long time. And I'm sure the prosecutor sounds like they're very thoughtful about this. I would imagine that they would want, they would probably welcome having maybe even riding second. You know what, the people don't know this about attorneys. They talk about first chair and second chair, and that's a real thing when you see them like at a table like prosecution's table and you see defense table. If your first chair, if you're seated closest to the aisle first, that means first chair. That means that you're the lead on the case and you have second chair, and that's how they're lined up. If people have ever wondered about that. So that means that, you know, the county prosecutor might want to ride second chair on it and have you know, and have the state ag come in and send one of their prosecutors from des Moines or wherever it is that would come in and kind of take the lead on it, but with the county still having their hand on the wheel. And again, the population is so small. I hate to keep, you know, kind of going down this road, but it's an interesting piece to this case because the population is so very small and you don't have a big pool to draw from. These people know one another man, you know, it's not it's not like you haven't run across them at some point in time. And so I think that the prosecutor probably wants to avoid any kind of appearance of wrongdoing here on any level. I got to say, you know, we we were talking just a moment ago. You had mentioned that Luna was a junior in high school. Well, she's a junior in high school, Dave. Just you can only imagine her class. Her overall class size is very small. Just the impact that it's going to have on those kids that occupied her space. Maybe that same space has been occupied by the same group of people since they were all in kindergarten. That happens in any small communities like this. This is something that will resonate for years and years, you know, to come long after the you know, the last switches flipped in the courthouse and the lights go dim. This will continue in their memory. Every time you drive by that field, they'll say, Ah, that's where they found Luna, or yeah, that's where Luna lived, or that's where the perpetrator lived. More to come on this case, and we're going to keep an eye out because again it's quite shocking. It's quite shocking to the people in Calhoun County, Iowa. And we'll wait for more information to come. I'm Josephcott Morgan and this is body packs.
Speaker 1: Body Bus. But Joseph's gotten more. You know, over the last few years, it seems as though that Kevin Costner has popped onto both my newsfeed and my social media feed more than I'd care to remember. It's not that I necessarily have anything against him. It's just like super saturation, dude, He's everywhere. And don't get me wrong, I am a Kevin Costner fan. Probably out of all of his movies, my favorite one is A Field of Dreams. It always gets me, you know, that last scene. I think that those of us that may have longed to have had a father when we were growing up, and he meets up with his dad at the end, and he merely looks at him and says, hey, Deck, can we have a catch? And inevitably I cry. I cry every time I see that scene. But for us today on Bodybags, there are tears being shed right now in Iowa, and they're not fiction. They're real. They're real because found in a field or the remains of its seventeen year old girl who has been brutally murdered. To make it all the more horrific, her mother had gone out looking for because she hadn't come home that girl's name is Michelle Luna Jackson, and today we're going to talk about her homicide. I'm Joseph Scott and Morgan and this is body backs, Dave. You know, as far as I can see around this area that I live in, up in the northern part of Calhoun County, Alabama, not Calhoun County, Iowa, where our case today takes place, not too dissimilar. Of course, the land rolls a bit more than it does in Iowa. But man, there are cornfields and cotton fields and alfalfa and all kinds of other things that grow. It's a farming community and that's really all there is up here. We have university. But you start to get away from the town that I live in in Jacksonville, Alabama, and you come after you come across farm after farm after farm, and how many of these little locations have you and I both driven through over the years. It'll be like a little crossroads and it'll be called a town. It might have one one stop light, or maybe a flashing yellow light if you're lucky. But you can look on a map and it's identified there. This location where this took place is. I don't know. It looks to be roughly one hundred and twenty miles northwest of Des Moines, and you know, you get out there, and people have described that area as just being like a sea of corn as far as I can see, and I don't know if that's the case here, but it kind of sounds like a.
00:03:29
Speaker 2: Found fewer than four hundred people. And when we first started looking at this story in particular, something caught my attention, Joe, because oftentimes when we have a story that begins with somebody missing, immediately people do things that make no sense to me. But in this one, it is exactly what I would do. When seventeen year old Luna doesn't come home as expected, it's eleven o'clock on Sunday night, mother picks up the phone and calls police. Now, in a town that size, she probably knew somebody to call directly, you know, not going through nine to point one, right, and that's what So, Hey, Luna's not home. I don't know where she is. She took off on her scooter. She wasn't running away. We were expecting her right back and please help. And so she makes the call, my daughter's missing. And then she grabs her other daughter and they go out looking. Now, they didn't hop in their car to go looking. They started walking because Luna left with her scooter, so they know, generally speaking, she's going to be in an area where she can be found by looking for her, right And that's exactly what happened, Well, not exactly, I take that back, but they did. As they were walking looking for Luna, they see a man riding Luna's scooter. Taking a closer look, they realize the man is covered in what appears to be blunt. I don't know exactly what she felt in that moment, but my heart broke. The mom seeing her daughter's scooter and a man she doesn't know writing it looking like he's covered in blood, calls police. They get involved, and immediately the guy lawyers up before they can get any information. Joe, he says, lawyer. We know his name, Nathaniel Beaver's McGivney. He's twenty one. But Nathaniel Beaver's McGivney lawyered up right away. We don't know of any relationship between the suspect and the victim here. We don't know anything yet. It's a new case, but that's where it sits right now. As the mom on that Sunday evening finds her daughter scooter the man in blood and does not find her daughter.
00:06:00
Speaker 1: Introject something here I had you you've spurred some some memories from me here, Dave, I think back. Not every case that you work is a body that is simply found. You know, some stranger in the public happens to walk along and they come across a body, and maybe the body has been there for a while. The individual is not, you know, not part of of the life's narrative of the deceased. But you know, Dave, those cases where families have been touched by death and certainly the horror, and it can be even a perceived horror. You know, just because Luna's mother saw the scooter that looked like her daughters and just because she saw a guy ride in along scooter that appears to have been covered in blood, doesn't necessarily mean the two things are are related. However, when you begin to look mathematically at the odds, and we've talked about how isolated this place is, how small of a location it is, what are the odds that, first off, your daughter would be missing, and that you've got this guy who just I got to tell you just the images that I've seen of him, he looks big and powerful. He you know, he looks like what you would think a farm boy looks like, you know, and he's got what appears to be blood on him. And it's in the evening. That's another thing. So if it's in the evening, you're under dim light, she sees what she thinks is blood. I don't know how close he passed to her, but you begin to think about this and you think, oh my word, it must have been a copious amount of blood to be able to make that recognition. Potentially in twilight, Tom, there's a lot going on here, and Dave, I got to say one more thing here. You know, this case is absolutely horrific. I hadn't heard anything about it. I didn't hear anything about until my wife mentioned it to me because she saw seventeen year old and that was the first thing for her. And any of you folks that have met Kimmy my wife, you know how she is. I mean, you know, she's like a bulldog with things many times, and you've seen her crime con and these sorts of things, and this really struck a note with her that this is something that we needed to discuss, and it hasn't been picked up, you know, broadly, I don't think in the national discourse of true crime. But a horrific case. And what makes it really striking for those of us that live in small communities is that it actually happened in a very small community where you wouldn't think that something this horrific would go down, Dave.
00:09:00
Speaker 2: No, and that's one of the safety nets we have in a small community. If you've lived in other areas, you know what it's like to be, you know, in a city versus a small town environment, and they both have their pros and cons. In this particular case, as we mentioned, I was struck by the fact that Mom did exactly what I would do. Yeah, I would take off looking just I know about where she's going to be, so boom, I'm going. And I want to point out that while she did see the suspect here with her daughter's scooter and other items of Luna's not just the scooter, but other items as.
00:09:37
Speaker 1: Well, which they have not identified yet. Just that statement alone is chilling, Dave.
00:09:43
Speaker 2: But there's no Luna and they can't find her, and he's not telling so we don't know what time exactly, Mom saw Nathaniel Beaver's McGivney. We don't know what time that was. We just know that it was after eleven pm and before nine am the next morning, and we know that police took him into custody and talked to him, which he lawyered up. And so it wasn't until the next morning. Remember eleven PM on Sunday night, my daughter's not home, she's missing. Help me find her. And then the next morning, after sunrise, they being officials looking for Luna, find her. She's not out in the open. She had actually been hidden, Joe, put away in an area where you didn't see her immediately.
00:10:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, that goes to you know, when you think about these sorts of things. They're talking about things. I think that one of the charges has to do with concealment of human remains. Well, they talk about what was it, Dave. One of the charges ABUSEI of.
00:11:04
Speaker 2: Cor abusive a corpse, and I wondered what that meant. Joe.
00:11:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, and that can come in a variety of different degrees. You know, you can, you can it's almost like almost like passive versus active. Okay, just think about it. If someone were to actively abuse a corpse. There's any number of ways that an individual can engage in that kind of behavior, you know, And I think you know, first one of the first things we think about is maybe dismemberment, okay, but then you can kind of passively do it. And I don't know if you've given any thought to this, but that law in most places is written with families in mind. Okay. So, like, let me just pose this to you. If if you have a loved one that dies, any reasonable person would have an expectation that they would get those remains back and that they could view the remains, and that they're family and friends, the extended family and friends could view the remains, that you could have awake for them. Perhaps, so if you kind of passively do this, this means that you obscure the body in some way. Well, what's going on, Well, you are allowing, through your actions, the body to become decomposed, and that in and of it that, in and of itself, in a roundabout way, you're facilitating, well, first off, almost a disfigurement of the body. And that's cruel. It's it's very cruel. And so I think that when these legislators pass these laws like that. That's part of it. It's not merely about somebody that's a necrofile or somebody that's into dismemberment or burning a body. It can be that kind of passive action, you know, where you have where when you know the family. Unfortunately had to deal with families over the years where they will ask me, and I'm no funeral director, but they will ask me, do you think you can have an open casket? You know, and I'll phrase it like, you know, look, I'm not a funeral director, but there's a high probability you would not want to subject yourself or your family or your friends to this because the body is so far gone.
00:13:25
Speaker 2: So we.
00:13:28
Speaker 1: Don't know if that is all that this entails relative to what was done with her body in the post mortem state. Was it Disgui's intent to obscure her? And so therefore they thought about what's going to happen to the body afterwards, that no one is actually taking care of the dead, and it's going to lead to the family being absent that opportunity in her death. So there's a different way, you know, to kind of to kind of look at that and think about that. It doesn't necessarily mean something more horrific that you could. You know, I think many of us could go there in our minds simply based on stuff we covered on our podcast, Dave, they felt like that they had grounds to charge him with this, Dave.
00:14:17
Speaker 2: Never occurred to me. I just never thought of it like that. I really thought abuse of a corpse would be a dramatic, you know, active And yet that actually makes sense because the way we've mentioned this is a fresh news story and a lot of information has not been released or is not available yet because we're not in that not far enough down line to get the actual police reports and search. They'll do search warms and things like that as part of the investigation, but we don't have any of that right now. We just know that he specifically and on purpose put her body in a place where it was not easily found.
00:14:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, right now at JSU, I'm teaching, actually this semester, I'm actually teaching a class called clandestine burials. And there's any number of ways that you can clandestinely bury or obscure a body. And it's not just your you're burying a body necessarily, but you are obscuring the body you're maybe placing a body in a body of water. I know that's rather redundant to say that, but that's There's any number of ways that this can take place. But here's the big thing. Was it his intent to obscure her body so that he could put as much distance between himself and the remains of a luna Dave. You know, one of the things, particularly when you're talking about a homicide, if someone were to say, well, which would you rather work? Would you rather work a homicide inside of a structure or out in the woods slash open field. I'm with the structure all day long. I'm not saying that they're not complicated, because some of the most complex cases I've ever been involved in have a card in a structure. But you have that, you have that containment. You know what I'm saying. You got the four walls. That sounds like an old country song, doesn't it. I think it actually was. You've got the four walls that are surrounding you and things are protected. Right. You've got a roof over your head. Now, I've been in some structures that no longer had roofs, abandoned buildings and that sort of thing. But you understand what I'm saying. There's an area of containment that's kind of occurring that the body is there. Start to get out into rural areas where you've got a wooded area or an open field, and it just absolutely becomes a nightmare to process the scene.
00:17:09
Speaker 2: I go back to. This is from the actual documents. Okay, the location of court documents. The location where the body was discovered suggests that Beaver's McGivney intentionally hid the body to conceal a crime, and then he failed to disclose where she was after they were talking to him. Think about it. He's been seen by her mother, you know, with the girl scooter with what appears to be blood all over his body, and he's not telling anybody where the body is.
00:17:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, the big word there is intent. Anytime you get the eye word in there, that means that the police have knowledge. They have knowledge because you know, intent is very difficult to prove, you know, It's one of those things that you know because you can say you know that you intended to do something that somebody else intended to do something. But if you're going to go into court with this element of intent, then that's kind of a a higher bar, you know, to kind of go across. So obviously they have specific information related to this. But I got to touch on something something here, Dave. I want to go back just for a second. You talked about multiple scenes, and there can be multiple scenes, and this is kind of how we break them down in investigation. So you will have a primary scene if you have a body, a decedent, obviously your primary scene is going to be where the body is found. And if you use the idea of a wagon wheel with the hub, the body is the hub. Everything else kind of radiates out from there. And then you have secondary scenes, which might be say, for instance, a conveyance like a car, or maybe the initial uh, the initial location of where they were killed. That would be secondary. And then you have we're referred to as tertiary. I'll give you an example of tertiary. You know, if you go back to the oj Simpson narrative that people put out, you know, like after the homicides occurred out there, one of the things that people had talked about was that he was in a car headed to the airport. Remember I think famously he was in Chicago when the alarm went up about this, and some people have stated that things were thrown out of the window of the limos he's going down the road that if you came across those items, that would be like a tertiary scene. Okay, so that's kind of how it breaks down. But here's the interesting thing about Luna's case for me, is that he's on her scooter. So if this guy has means, if this guy has means, Dave, why would a twenty one year old man, he looks like he's been, you know, living off of off of steaks and corn his entire life, Big fella, Why is a twenty one year old man riding up and down the road on a scooter allegedly covered with what appears to be blood. You know why? Because that's almost like a clown show to me. If you see it's some big guy riding down the road on a scooter, that's kind of odd to me. It's going to make me take notice. So and out in the middle of what would be a very isolated area. Again, you add that element to it, it's kind of a strange. If you can, just for a moment envision this big guy tooling down the road on a scooter. You know where everybody else is driving what my son likes to called broad dozers, you know, which are the jacked up you know, big old trucks and that sort of thing going down the road. This would be an odd ball and no wonder it called mama's attention. I mean, just think about it. That's what she's witnessing this in real time. She sees what she believes is her daughter's scooter. There's a big fellow on it and he's covered with blood. So how did Luna wind up in this field? She killed somewhere else, or let's just say someone may have been light and wait for her, knowing that she rides her scooter along a roadway. You know, periodically, she's known to do this. If somebody's watching, it's a crime of opportunity. This doesn't sound like something necessarily Dave that's very well planned out. The other thing to this, the other part to this that is very disturbing. I think they have referred to these items of Luna's that this fellow was supposedly in possession of. So you know, when I hear items that belong to the dead, the first thing in my mind, my mind goes to her trophies. Now, is that what's going on here or is there an attempt? Is there an attempt to try at some kind of rudimentary level to obscure not only her body, but also who Luna was. So, Dave, I've got to begin to try to understand in order to fully assess this case from a forensics perspective, just so that I understand where we are here. The accused immediately lawyered up. He's not like some font of information that's saying, oh, yeah, yeah, I saw her. That's the reason I was on scooter and yeah, she disappeared out into the cornfield like field of dreams. You know. That's not what's going on here, is it. No?
00:22:53
Speaker 2: And the criminal complaint alleges that the location where the girl's body was discovered quote suggest that Beaver's McGivney intentionally hid the body to conceal a crime, and that he failed to disclose the location with intent to conceal a crime. That's the different charges that come into play. But when they find the body. You mentioned a minute ago about the different types of the scenes primary scene, secondary scene, tertiary scene. When you're doing that, do you start at the primary scene and go out in the investigation.
00:23:30
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, you can't say that affirmatively like that that's what is going to happen, because many times you'll find the secondary or even the tertiary scene before you ever find the primary scene with the body, and it leads you to it then, and it leads you to it. Yeah, And so if you're talking about someone that has been killed, and I'll go ahead and make this big reveal here and we can come back to it. But we do know from the statements that have been made is that Luna's throat has been cut. And so when we begin to think about throats being cut, Dave, you're going to have far more evidence most of the time than you will even with gunshot wounds because the cutting of the throat, and depend upon how deep and how extensive it is, you're going to have a tremendous amount of bleeding that will take place. So you could, let's just say that she was attacked on the roadway and her throat was cut there, where you could have a blood trail leading literally from the shoulder of the road back into the field, assuming that it took place there. And since he's not driving a car, the accused is not driving a car, I have to assume that the home side more than likely took place approximating that field, unless there's some kind of abandoned vehicle somewhere that they haven't led onto at this point in time. And if that's the case, a vehicle would be super saturated with blood. So you're going to have from an evidentiary standpoint, how do you track the body. Well, with a body that has been bled like this, with this insult to the throat or the neck, you could potentially have a trail, you could have pools of blood. And then she's in a field. Well, we have some clues here because they're talking about that there has been an attempt to obscure the body. Well, if you're obscuring the body, that means most of the time there's kind of different levels to this. Have you shun up with a shovel in hand and dug a hole in the ground, maybe you've created a pressed area, it's not a six foot deep grave, it's a shallow grave. Or is it a surface disposal where you leave the body on the surface of the ground. And then let's and we don't know this for a fact. We know she's in a field, we know they grow a lot of corn, there was the corn harvest taking place. Yet, well, it's time of year at the time of this recording, we're in early October. This would have occurred at the end of September. I would probably say that if it hasn't that, if it hasn't taken place, it has at least started to take place at this point. So where are you going to have Well, you'll have discarded cornstalks perhaps and other debris. Well, was there body placed out there and then the cornstalks taken or whatever items were out there and placed on top of the Was there were there down limbs for instance. And listen, there's one thing that I would doesn't necessarily have a lot of, and that's trees. And most of the time, if you have trees, they are going to be in towns, you know, that have been planted by somebody. You're not going to have like old growth forest around there. Because we're talking about, you know, kind of the planes here. So what is the body being obscured with, How is the being obscured and how how would the perpetrator know about this specific location Dave? And how what was it that they assessed this location to be where they knew that there would be an opportunity to obscure a body, why not move it somewhere else? Why not take it to a local creek bed, or to a local quarry, or whatever the case might be. No, the body was placed in a field and left there. And this, these cases like this become a nightmare to try to process. And here's why. If we if we are to follow this line of logic where mama has seen the accused on her scooter and he's got blood on him, then let's just think about, well, if we're trying to track him to determine which way, which which location? Did he leave after he you know, how did he depart the field? Did he just leave the scooter on the side of the road after he attacked her and then went back and fetched the scooter? Did he was a scooter drug back there with her? Did she take it back there with her? We don't really know. But if he left and she's deceased and her throat has been cut, did he leave a blue blood trail leaving out? Also, he's a big guy. Are there foot impressions in this soft dirt? We're talking about a field, Dave? So is there an indication that he walked out of the field and then got back onto this roadway, which you know you said, mom, Mom and sister are on foot looking for her. This cannot be too far away from her domicile, you know, where they live. It's got to be close. In approximation, I was looking at some of the aerial photography of this place, and you've got this. You've literally got this little town that by my estimation has got one two, three, four, five six dave it's got six north south streets total for this little town. And if you break it down a grid and running east and west there are through streets you've only got like five. And you know what else in that little sea, that little oasis of the little neighborhoods, the town and everything else, it is completely surrounded by farms. You know, it's striking when you look at this on you know, on a map, a particularly satellite view, you don't have this. This town would look like an oasis. If you're kind of driving across this area, it would just like pop up and then every end then it's just engulfed in farms as far as you can see. So any any wherever she was living, wherever the mom lived. It's within easy walking distance of any field around there. That's going to key with this case.
00:30:02
Speaker 2: When the body is left in the field and they say, you know it was hidden. The body is hidden with the alleged perpetrator covered in blood, and we know that she had her throat slit. The blood normally pools on the surface, and when we're in a scene and it's in a house, in the carpet or whatever, we got dirt in a field as dirt you mentioned corn and other things. But the will the blood then seep into the ground and become part Does it make it harder to determine what happened when the body is placed in a field like this.
00:30:38
Speaker 1: Not necessarily. It all depends well with the unaided eye. What I say is the unaided eye. That means that I'm not using any kind of special lighting photography. Heck, I'm not even using a magnifying lens at this point in TOM I'm just eyeballing it. You can see a contrast in soil between the blood, the blood and the soil itself. You can get an appreciation of it. One of the things that's very important to do. As you can imagine from a forensic standpoint is you need to take soil samples. And the beauty of a soil sample is that, unlike perhaps maybe some other surface, like a hard concrete surface, you can begin to talk about saturation. How deep did this go? You know, how deep? Because you know, just imagine now that you might not give them the exact volume of it, but just imagine what kind of tool this is for prosecuting an attorney to say she bled so much that our investigators at the scene dug down one two, three four inches they were still finding blood at that level. That took samples of the soil out there, core samples where you just kind of, you know, almost like you're generating of a golf hole on a golf green, where you take out that plug like that and you can demonstrate how deep this thing went. And that's that's going to be telling. And I think, you know, for me, what would be the motivation behind this because that brings in another level of physical evidence to be left behind. And I think the most obvious thing here is this a sexual assault on bat Did he attack her, drag her out in the field and sexually assault her? And I can promise you this when Luna's body was examined by the friends of pathologists. They will have done a rape kit. And I don't even care if if she's in a state, if her clothing is completely intact, because you have perpetrators that will redress bodies, even after a sexual event has taken place. They will redress bodies. So you cannot work on that assumption in the morgue that you know, well, nothing happened, the clothing wasn't disrupted. That's one of the worst decisions you could ever made because once that evidence is gone, it's gone. So they will have done a rape kit. You know, in this particular case, when we think about the accused here, Dave, you know, we've talked about you know, kind of footprints and you know, and bloody trails and primary scene, secondary and tertiary. But here's one other tertiary element here, Dave. Where was he domiciled and what happened to his clothes? Because I got to tell you something, brother, his clothes. His clothes would have been I don't know if super saturated. It's going to be the wording that we're going to use, but he will probably have had some element of blood on that clothing. DNA alone with that, you have to be able to answer this question, how did Luna's biological signature wind up on this guy? You know? And what? How was it? Trent? Is it blood you know? Is it skin? You know? Is it hair? Well, if it's blood, how did her blood wind up on you? Now he doesn't have to answer that question. Defense doesn't have to answer that question. But that's not the important thing. What you do is you put that question before the jury, because Jerry twelve people, they're gonna be sitting there saying, hmm, yeah, how did this young seventeen year old's girl's blood wind up on his person? On his clothing? So they're going to have to search his domicile from stem to stern. I would imagine that they've done that, digging through anything that he had. I can't imagine that he just rolled into the house on her scooter and laid down the bed in these dirty clothes. I can't imagine that maybe there was an attempt to clean up after the fact. I don't know. There's there's more to dig into.
00:34:58
Speaker 2: Here, they Joe. One of things that came out in looking up who the victim is in this case, trying to find out more about her seventeen year old junior in high school. And one of the things that she loved to do was to swing, you know, a swing set. Yeah, And it was so known she would go to the park and just sit in the swing. It was just her thing to do. Everybody knew it. As a matter of fact, they're decorating one of the swings in the park in her honor.
00:35:27
Speaker 1: If you think about just the idea of an observable location, you know, where she would have been seen, She would have been known to maybe be alone, maybe she went out on her scooter, went specifically to the park to sit on the swings, and if he has a point of observation in that location, he can target her at that point. But you know, there's any number of other places he could have seen her throughout this town where he had identified her. And here's one other question I would have relative to the person that's accused in this case, Dave, I want to know if there have been any other instances that could have linkage to him and inappropriate behavior with uh with young ladies around the town. Was there anybody else that he had come across that you know, and sometimes you know people will say, you know, talk about feelings and those sorts of things about he gave me the creepy guy feeling or whatever. Was Well, that's one thing, But had he ever acted on anything? Because this is a big leap here. You know, you're not you don't have somebody that's exposing themselves or making a threatening comment, which I don't know. Maybe he did at some point in time, but what we're seeing right now now this is a huge leap. Yeah, and very personal too, man. I mean we're talking about the cutting of a throat here. That's that in and of itself is so incredibly intimate. So you know, for investigators, they're gonna digging into all of this. And again I go back to his home. One of the things that's disturbing about this again is the fact that he took her items. I want to know what other items are in that home. There are there any other items that are related to someone else perhaps in that town. It wouldn't be hard to kind of whittle this down, if you will, and narrow down your field here, you know, to kind of explore this a little bit, to try to understand that, and you know, when it's all stitched together and everything that's that's going to be of interest. But there's one more thing I think, you know, talking about creating a case that you had mentioned to me that I found kind of interesting. They initially had did the prosecutor actually recuse themselves from this case?
00:37:49
Speaker 2: When when we were looking at this this is something popped up right away and I asked you, is this common? I mean, we're in a very small area where a lot of people know you know you into It's like you're living at Cheers. Everybody knows your name kind of thing. And they filed court documents on Monday. I mean, we're talking about the day of finding her body. Okay, Sunday night, eleven o'clock she's reported missing. They find her body the next morning, eight nine am, and they're filing paperwork because they already have the suspect in custody. He's already lawyered up, and they filed court papers where Smith the town prosecutor or a county it's Calhoun County, Iowa, where he recuses himself from the case and it's given over to the state and the quote is due to a conflict of interest. However, that sat there from Monday until Thursday, and you're going conflict of interest? What the you know? But on Thursday they amended the ruling the statement rather saying that it was an air what it was was, instead of giving the case over to the Attorney General's office, Smith asked for the state to assist in the prosecution. It was an air in filing, so it wasn't a conflict of interest. Although I'm thinking this is like the hindsight being twenty twenty, I think immediately went we all know each other. We got to pull in the state for this, for cover ourselves. We want look, man, no matter how bad you think of anyone in law enforcement or prosecutorial stuff, ultimately the honest ones just want the truth.
00:39:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, you want more eyes on you than not when you're doing something like this, and this case in a town the size, a county the size, you have to I think you have to think that this is probably one of the most ghastly things that's ever occurred. This is something that's going to stay with this community for a long long time. And I'm sure the prosecutor sounds like they're very thoughtful about this. I would imagine that they would want, they would probably welcome having maybe even riding second. You know what, the people don't know this about attorneys. They talk about first chair and second chair, and that's a real thing when you see them like at a table like prosecution's table and you see defense table. If your first chair, if you're seated closest to the aisle first, that means first chair. That means that you're the lead on the case and you have second chair, and that's how they're lined up. If people have ever wondered about that. So that means that, you know, the county prosecutor might want to ride second chair on it and have you know, and have the state ag come in and send one of their prosecutors from des Moines or wherever it is that would come in and kind of take the lead on it, but with the county still having their hand on the wheel. And again, the population is so small. I hate to keep, you know, kind of going down this road, but it's an interesting piece to this case because the population is so very small and you don't have a big pool to draw from. These people know one another man, you know, it's not it's not like you haven't run across them at some point in time. And so I think that the prosecutor probably wants to avoid any kind of appearance of wrongdoing here on any level. I got to say, you know, we we were talking just a moment ago. You had mentioned that Luna was a junior in high school. Well, she's a junior in high school, Dave. Just you can only imagine her class. Her overall class size is very small. Just the impact that it's going to have on those kids that occupied her space. Maybe that same space has been occupied by the same group of people since they were all in kindergarten. That happens in any small communities like this. This is something that will resonate for years and years, you know, to come long after the you know, the last switches flipped in the courthouse and the lights go dim. This will continue in their memory. Every time you drive by that field, they'll say, Ah, that's where they found Luna, or yeah, that's where Luna lived, or that's where the perpetrator lived. More to come on this case, and we're going to keep an eye out because again it's quite shocking. It's quite shocking to the people in Calhoun County, Iowa. And we'll wait for more information to come. I'm Josephcott Morgan and this is body packs.
