Dr. Cogswell
Appearances
SEQUESTERED Podcast
BONUS Q&A EPISODE: Your Questions, Answered
We have, again, a clear plastic bag with the medical examiner's office label marked as Shackles Jasmine Paste.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
BONUS Q&A EPISODE: Your Questions, Answered
They're, again, the sort of novelty type of
SEQUESTERED Podcast
BONUS Q&A EPISODE: Your Questions, Answered
cheap chrome plated steel and you can see that it's basically also a lamp chain as opposed to an LED chain and these would fit together like that so the chain length isn't very long and these
SEQUESTERED Podcast
BONUS Q&A EPISODE: Your Questions, Answered
This is actually showing, as you can see, this is the left side of Jasmine Pace's body. The stab wounds are virtually all on the other side of her body. And when we look at the other side of her body in this position, basically we just rolled her over. All of those stab wounds and size wounds are clustered in the area of her head, neck, shoulder, and upper torso.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
BONUS Q&A EPISODE: Your Questions, Answered
They're just all on the other side of the body. So this side of the body, as you can see, basically has no injuries. In a fetal position, by tucking our legs up and getting ourselves into a small ball as possible. Some areas of our body are protected, relatively speaking. Others are exposed.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
BONUS Q&A EPISODE: Your Questions, Answered
And if you have your knees drawn up, obviously she's not quite as tightly compacted as she was inside that suitcase. If you have your knees drawn up, you're basically protecting your abdomen and the lower part of your chest. exposing your shoulders and your back. So the stab wounds clustered on the other side of her body are all in that area that is exposed if she's in that position.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
BONUS Q&A EPISODE: Your Questions, Answered
And they're all pretty much about from the area of where your rib cage comes together and your solar plexus. In fact, there's very little that's even below the level of, say, the armpit. So this is all from head, neck, shoulder, upper chest, well, upper back really, and virtually nothing below that except for that free left arm.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
BONUS Q&A EPISODE: Your Questions, Answered
Because that free left arm, if we roll her over, that free left arm is up here. The right arm is way down here, as you can see, tucked in between the legs. and there's no injury down there on the legs. So that's protected, it's out of the way. The left arm, however, is not. It's free and it's folded up across the chest.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
In the position the suitcase is right now, her body is with the head upward, facing toward the courtroom. Thank you. Sir, I'm now showing you 2032. Could you orient us to this photo, please? This photo is moving over a little bit to, if I could point the suitcase to this area here. that were x-rayed.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
You can see the kneecap here and the lower leg, the shin, and the fibula that goes along with it. This is the thigh bone. Here you see a hand, or the bones of a hand, and you can see the top of the skull as well here. Now two, three, three. And we're moving downward on the suitcase in basically counterclockwise fashion to this area down toward the wheel on the side closest to the courtroom. And
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
We see, again, that reinforcing rib, zippers, rivets, etc. But we also see handcuffs and shackles, as well as another metallic device here, which is actually a bracelet. But you can see on this one, there is a chain that extends here, and there is no chain coming off of this particular one. And we're down here two feet. These are the foot bones, feet and ankle bones down here.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
So we have forearm here, two forearm bones, and arm and forearm bones here. And so we're down here. This is her buttocks. Two, three, four, sir. And we're moving over, obviously, to the last part, which is down here. And again, we have all the hardware of the suitcase. We see a bit of pelvis bone here, the lumbar spine here. Again, one of those shackles that we saw in the previous x-ray.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
And so we have basically, by going counterclockwise, we have a complete picture of a small, male or female, still inside the suitcase, still inside those black plastic bags.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
They are still wrapped in the surgical towel that came from the medical examiner's office. Again, these are not the typical law enforcement handcuffs. They're simply cheap steel, chrome plated. Thank you. Are those the same cuffs that you saw on the screen? Yes, sir. That's correct. It's the same cuffs that you can see here. Here's the right hand, right foot.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
In the case of the shackles, it was not to the left arm, but it was to the right elbow or forearm just below the elbow. So her left hand and arm were actually free. They were not bound. I'm sure when you made his evidence, his 204-19, could you tell us what was on the ice in the snow ground? This is Jasmine Pace's right elbow area. You can see this with the tattoo on her shoulder.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
This is her actual elbow here. And you can see two lines of rust, basically, along with the pattern of that chain, again, with a rust pattern showing where the shackle was. And in fact, you can see, I think, where the double part of the shackle is over here, right at the inside part of the elbow.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
Is there any medical significance to the stain that we see in item 127? to the physical evidence that we have as 158 at Harvard? When I first saw this photograph, it immediately struck me, and I think I actually blurted out, that looks like a Shroud of Turin. And what I saw here was basically a recreation of the bloodstain pattern, or a bloodstain pattern that I would expect to see
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
if someone is bleeding in that fetal position that we saw, because we have the feet and legs down here with the knees drawn up, arm down here, other arm here, head here. Now, obviously it's not exact because it's being absorbed and spread a little bit, but the shape is very, very consistent with not only the positioning of Jasmine Pacey's body, but also the size of her body.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
And so if we look at the size of her body, the positioning of her body, and look at the stain, they overlay fairly well. Actually, very well. Now, can I say that's absolutely her body? No, I don't know what. testing was done to match that to her. The staining is extremely consistent with her body as found.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
Well, everyone has to comport themselves with maintaining the court for this particular proceeding, so that includes counsel, defendants. However, this is going to be very graphic and personal testimony, so everyone needs to maintain their composure, courier questions,
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
At the end of your testimony there, you talked about how long Jasmine may have been alive. Well, it sounded like more than three seconds, and the father less than five. Is that fair to say? That's fair, yes. But that's the time of death. That time of unconsciousness could be different. Well, in fact, she may have been unconscious before she was stabbed. There's no way to tell that from an autopsy.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
But if we're talking about just bleeding, roughly half of she would be potentially conscious.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
that the injuries were inflicted in the position in which she was found. That does not preclude some of those injuries being inflicted elsewhere in the apartment or that when her body was being moved that some blood leaked out and was found elsewhere in the apartment.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
I found no carpet fibers in the wounds themselves. Some hairs were recovered off of her clothing and her body. Those were all submitted to Chattanooga PD. As to what the test results showed, I don't know. Does it appear that all the wounds were inflicted by the same knife? It is certainly likely, but it is not impossible that a second knife was used. However, the dimensions of the wounds
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
don't say categorically, this is two knives. So there's going to have to be some overlap. For example, a significantly smaller knife, like a pocket knife, would not be involved in this.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
No. The amount of blood collected is sufficient to run the test. If it's an insufficient quantity, then the toxicology lab will tell us it's not sufficient to run the test. We suggest doing targeted testing or this. They actually don't need anywhere near the amount of blood you give them. They can actually make do with two milliliters of blood
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
We usually said a 10 million or two, but as you saw in this particular case, it was just under 6 million. So there was plenty of blood. More blood would not actually have changed the results at all.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
Obviously there were quite a few law enforcement vehicles and off to the side of the road adjacent to the river was a hard shell suitcase just off the shoulder of the road near that area there were actually a couple of gear boxes that had been tossed out there after butchering but in particular this suitcase was basically the time that you would take on a fairly extended trip.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
The cover of the suitcase, the lid was open. Inside was a black plastic trash bag. And so using basically just hands, I could feel along the contents of the bag and say, yes, this is not animal or something. This is a human being inside of it. At which point, then, The suitcase was closed back up. It was transported to the medical examiner's office.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
And at that point, they would further examine not just the suitcase, but also the contents.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
Then we're going to start doing photographs and x-rays because we're going to document everything we're doing as we're doing it in a stepwise fashion because we don't want to lose evidence.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
And looking at those x-rays, it was evident that there is a deceased person inside of
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
In addition, along with all of the hardware in the suitcase that shows up on x-ray, there's also a triangular metallic density piece that showed up in the area of the chest and
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
And then I proceeded to cut each of the black plastic trash bags along one side and along the bottom and remove each of those in turn. Turns out there were three. And that happens to be fairly common, at least
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
In this case, it turns out it was exactly the same way.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
So each of those bags is cut off, removed, and that reveals the body of a young woman who is in a fetal position, has no clothing on the top half of her body, and is shackled and handcuffed.
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
So in a person who is the size of Jasmine Pace, just under 100 pounds,
SEQUESTERED Podcast
Episode 05: The Body in the Suitcase
Until you have found all that blood, you don't really know where the bleeding occurred.