PebHmong Discussion Forum
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: theking on July 11, 2021, 11:20:45 PM
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..so DON'T BE THAT GUY:
Murderer Allegedly Prayed To 'Alligator God' That His Victim's Body Would Never Be Found
The Everglades is a vast area of wetlands in Florida, much of it isolated and teeming with wildlife. As such, bodies have been dumped in the Everglades, in the hope alligators will eat them and destroy evidence of a crime. In one 2007 case, though, somebody spotted the remains before they could be lost forever.
On April 28, 2007, a local fisherman contacted police after spotting a human head wrapped in a bag in the water being circled by alligators. Authorities retrieved the head, but had little to go on. They couldn't even determine the age and gender of their victim.
"[In] this case the only thing we had were the pieces of the periphery of the puzzle. We didn't have the cause of death or the manner of death or the location of death -- all things that have to be answered to properly prosecute a homicide," Gregg Rossman, a former Broward County prosecutor, told Oxygen's "Florida Man Murders."
The blood-splattered plastic grocery bag, however, provided a vital clue. It came from a chain of grocery stores specific to New York. Investigators sent word up the east coast to see if anyone else had found a headless body or other remains, but no viable matches emerged.
Eventually, they sent the head to a forensic anthropologist named Dr. Heather Haney Walsh.
"My task at that point was reading the bones of the skull to figure out if we had a male or female and see if there was anything unique we had," she told producers.
Haney Walsh eventually determined the victim was a younger white woman, anywhere from her 20s to 40s. She had received a blunt force impact to her head and it had been dismembered from her body -- when she was still alive.
"She was still alive when somebody started to cut her neck. She may have been unconscious and we hope most likely unconscious but she was still a living being as she suffered horrible, horrific injuries to her neck," Rossman said.