True Crime & Forensic Pathology with Patricia Cornwell & Dr. Jonathan Hayes

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Check it out. Welcome to Star Talk. You're a place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. Dark talk begins right now. This is Star Talk.

Neil the Grass Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we're going to talk about forensic pathology, not only the real thing, but what happens when it becomes novelized, and becomes fictionalized storytelling.

Chuck, are always good to have you.

Always good to be here, alive, alive. I think I'm just talking. We're going to need some serious levity. Nothing like that mean. Yeah.

What do you call it when it's already done? Now, Gallo's humor is when you're about to die. What do you call it when you're already dead? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know if I want to know. So we have a fascinating pair of guests on this episode. First, we have Patricia Cornwell. And we've actually had her on before. And she has another novel she's going to tell us about.

And she not only talked about dead people, talked about dead people, and the science behind the crimes that are involved. She also took that to space. Wow.

“And so that's why we've got her on this show.”

But she's a novelist. And she came to the subject as a journalist. But now we have a novelist who started writing novel, because he was actually a medical examiner. All right.

This is his guy's expertise. Jonathan Hayes. Dr. Jonathan Hayes. Welcome to Star Talk. I see.

Yeah, it's pleasure. Wow. Now, so you came to the writing profession. Having started as a sort of professional of dead people. What is your official sort of title,

other than sort of, you work in the medical examiner's office. But what does someone call you as a profession, as a scientific profession? My scientific type is, I'm a forensic pathologist. And the thought is, is a physician who makes diagnoses,

by examining samples, taking plantations. And that may be a blood sample. If you have a weird motive, you can buy up see it. And the thought is just to look to them, the microscope. The thought is just the source of the positions you do for toxies.

The more toxies, the examination of the body after death, it's kind of interesting as much information as possible, rather close to the certain senses of that death. And so it's going to be the outside of the body. The body is examined for scars, or tattoos, or identified marks,

and for evidence of disease, or injury. And the body is open to the examine internally. When examine all the organs, the remains of the organs back in the body, and we may do some additional testing, for example, looking for drugs, or we may do CTNA testing.

If there are any injuries internally, we'll document those two. And then we'll perform aeronautopsy report.

So that's basically what we're looking for.

Just as now, I'm a forensic pathologist. And that's a subspecialty of the project. And forensic pathologists do autopsies, and the victims of violent, unnatural, and suspicious deaths. So on a daily basis, I examine wounds, and I interpret wounds.

So if you could shop or stab, and when you get to the ER, the ER docs are going to just be examining you to try and translate your life. They're not going to interpret the wounds. They may have guesses at what's in there from what's next in there. But that's the area where it's the tears of the pathologist, the forensic pathologist.

And so on a daily basis, I'm looking at wounds and trying to interpret those wounds, and what actually happens to me.

“Now, how often, doctor, do you examine someone who has been felled by gunshot?”

And your determination is, oh, they didn't die of a gunshot wound. That is yet to happen. Kosher... Kosher wounds tends to be fairly lethal. But gunshot wounds are far more likely to be lethal than most other types of injury.

For example, if you're five times more likely to die of shock, and if you're stabbed. Wow. Look at that. Okay, but so that brings to, that puts on the table, the very question. Let's say it's not a gunshot wound.

We have that sort of the easiest statistics on that.

If two people just sort of got into a fight, and then one person ultimately dies,

is it important that you find out the actual thing that killed the person,

No, it's sort of lead up to it.

“It's critically important that we find it exactly why the question is dead.”

That's our case on death. We have to know exactly why the person died. Because you'd be surprised at the complexities of the questions that arise. The legal questions in the medical questions, when someone dies, particularly in an altercation, are a fight. So, we spend a lot of time getting it right, and we have endless debates about the exact wording of the death certificate.

And what you do filmed? No, it's, we document our findings photographically. I mean, occasionally you'll find the video documentation of a prime scene. The video walks through, but what the autopsy itself is not filmed. Why not?

Because I really don't know, and I'm sure there's a lot of extreme auditions. Tradition? Sure, there'll be a lot of extreme auditions. The autopsy can be long, for example. A typical autopsy saying you have a 40-year-old man who's robbing on a treadmill at his gym and collapses.

At all, the autopsy sees you need something straight forward, like hard to see, is which is the most likely cause of death. That autopsy will take about an hour. But if you have a complex case, like a child abuse case, a fatal child abuse case, there's going to take a couple of days. So it's an long period of time. Well, I don't think anyone likes to be closely monitored while they're doing whatever was sitting here.

Well, no, here's why I ask. I mean, presumably forensic pathology has come a long way over the decades. There might be things in 10 years, someone would know to look for that you don't yet know to look for because the field has not advanced to that point.

“Wouldn't it be good if we could reopen the videos and have a third party do with the autopsy based on the video as though they were your eyes looking at the same body?”

I understand what you're saying, but the thing is, when you say that, you know, forensic bodies come a long way, it really hasn't. I mean, a stab wounds is done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's done. It's

talking, it's a stab, it's been 32, 21, it's like a stab wound in 1921 or a stab wound in 1821. And we do document things very thoroughly. We take a lot of photographs. I mean, I suppose you put on some of the virtual reality headset and video recording and have some sort of three-dimensional interactive thing going on there. But I don't think that sort of, well, I can't, you know, that's what we're saying, you're not talking about unknown unknowns, so I don't really know the answer to that question, but I think it would be terribly common to try and have a video camera augmenting every single step to be able to do this. So, so it's what you're saying that, for what you do, it really is the fact that we continue to kill each other kind of the same way.

But we don't really get that creative when it comes to killing each other. But you know, you'd be surprised. And one of the things that we did this we have for 30 years now, and every week I see something I've never seen before, it's not so much in terms of the homicide. It's also much the murder, it's in a manner, it's murder, it's knife and guns and baseball bats and whatnot. It's more just a peculiar circumstance, particularly things that people get in a position that people get themselves into.

There will always be something at a death scene that you've gone to explain.

Ooh, that's fascinating actually. Now, I don't know that you can major in forensic pathology in college, so what does one major in?

“Is it pre-med? What are some of the trackings that get to where you are?”

It's to become a forensic pathologist, you go to college, you do pre-med, go to medical school, then after graduating medical school, you do three years of, at least three years, three to five years of pathology residency. Then you do a one-year forensic training, which I did in Miami. Wow. And then all of a sudden, 12 years after you began your forensic pathologist. Now, I work in a medical exam in a system, a medical examiner is a physician who's specialized in forensic pathology. It's not an elective position, and we investigate death, violent and critical, suspicious deaths.

You're a coincident. You're a coincident. I actually never watched that.

Man, I used to watch that show when I was a kid, man. Quincey was the best. Jack Cluglin, man. He used to walk around. He would eat sandwiches. He would eat sandwiches during the autopsy. The guy was great, man. I enjoy a good sandwich, but no one eats to the autopsy.

And it's not sort of a place he's set to go. This is an appetizing place to enjoy. So, what of this training and your life experience did you feel compelled to put into your novel?

Pressure's blood was the first one, and a hard death was the second.

“The first is, like I think, in most novelists, it's a very autofabagraph.”

I should say, it's set in New York City after 9/11, it's a serial call of story. But I used a lot of my day-to-day experiences. I can't really talk about our cases and it's natural medical privacy. But I want to talk about things I've seen and things to disturb and upset me. So I put a lot of atoms that entered into the book.

9/11 was one of the things that disturb and upset me. My work after that, I worked in this office for eight solid months, and I tried to identify people. That was the hardest part of my life. Absolutely. But I tried to make the description of, you know,

what friends exist and what it feels like to be an animal and the smell and the sights of death. I tried to make them realistic.

And I think I did a pretty good try.

So, let me ask you this. Since you just brought this up, I don't want to get super personal, but you kind of broke the subject here. How do you deal with all this kind of mirrored

“just depressing information that you're absorbing almost daily?”

Well, the last few years have been have made it pretty hard to stay positive about anything. But I think, you know, it's been my experience that human beings do do terrible things to each other. But also, for the most part, when given the opportunity, people do the right thing. And I recognize that the mode, as I see, then the exceptions, and though there may be horrible crimes in the, on a daily basis,

most people would try to do the right thing. Well, okay. All right. It's hope prevails, I think, is how we think about that. So, what's interesting if we contrast Jonathan,

your pathway into writing novels with that of Patricia Cornwall, who is shared with us some of what inspires her when she approaches a novel that needs a bit of forensic pathology to make it run, let's check it out. What we're really talking about is ex-exploration,

we're exploring, which is exactly why we want to go to the moon and do all those cool things is, and when, if you're going to be an artist, you need to explore and go out and let it tell you what the story is. Let it tell you what the painting is like James McNear Whistler. He had this boat when he would take him out in this flat bottom boat

and the tembs at dusk, and he would look. He'd stand there on the filthy tembs in the Victorian era and look at what the light was doing.

“He'd remember that, and then he would go back and he would paint something”

evocative because he was there. And you feel he was there, you feel Hemingway was in the places that he's talking about, and I'm very much encouraged to people. Here's my, I have three words for everybody, just show up.

Never know what you might find.

So, I like that because what you're saying is that to really, not to put words in your mouth, but to infuse a story with that certain authenticity. It can't be just things you've read about or heard about. If you experience them firsthand,

they manifest differently even in your sentences and in the words you choose. And your emotional investment becomes that much deeper. Is that a fair accounting of what you just told me? That's absolutely right.

You want to invoke your senses. I mean, why go into a more, if you can just see a video of an autopsy. Because when your senses are assaulted by everything in there, it is a totally different thing. It's as different as reality from virtual reality, probably even more so.

And for example, I can remember, I can remember how shocked I would feel when I would go down there described for the medical examiners, and I would put on the gloves, and this was back in the day we didn't get in space suits like they do today with hazmat and all that. And I would put my hands on the body on the table, where I'd lean on it

while I'm jotting down whatever they're telling me. And it's like as cold as marble. Because in you would be amazed over and over again about things that you would not have emotional reactions to it if you didn't feel it and you weren't there.

Are you didn't see it or you weren't standing there and the state trooper is looking through the woman's wallet. And she was hit by a car on a way home from the bar about three o'clock in the morning. And nobody really knew what she'd gone there for.

And she was by herself such a bad hour. And he's going through a wallet and he finds a little fortune from a fortune cookie that she had saved. And it said, you will soon have an encounter that will change the course of your life.

And you look at these things and you don't know whether to laugh or to cry. But you do know, I feel this. If I don't go and see those things, I have no right to write about them. So Jonathan, you probably feel the same way, right?

Because you're writing emanates from your first hand experiences.

Good hand band. Yeah, I think that in terms of the sensual aspects, the smells, the sounds, the sights, yeah. There's no substitute for first hand experience. Then again, I mean, look at speculative fiction.

And science fiction people use their imagination and think what would it be like to see this or to experience that. And I think that's really rich too.

“And somebody's knowing what the truth is,”

kind of at some level, deadens the fantasy. You know, I don't take any, in my own writing. I don't take any liberties with the science because I can't. I wouldn't lie about it. And that limits what you can do with the set of facts in front of you.

And so what's one of the reasons I really enjoy it,

show like CSI, where it was just a set of four.

It's not so much forensic science, a forensic science fiction. I think they take the principles of forensic science and they make it more glamorous and they speed it up. It's sexy lighting on it. And they end result.

I think it may not get the technical accuracy of the forensic science. But it gets the romance of the science. And I really do like that. And it's for that reason I think CSI has been great. Because it's attracted most of people to forensics.

And this is a field that really needs good people, but smart young people. So what you're saying is you,

“when you're exploring the fiction of your storytelling,”

it's in the whatever relationships led to the crime. You're not in a position to sort of stretch any other science. I say that only because we look at a Stephen King novel, often he touches on supernatural forces. And it can leave them a little bit cloaked,

but something manifests. And it adds another dimension that people seem to like but to watch and even read about. But you're sticking to the facts on this one. That's just the right thing.

And I would like writing that to see a horror novel, something like that. But even if I'm to have like the will of custom and throat, I want to make to accurately depict the spray of blood. And so when I watch a lot of like crime stuff. Sometimes it's at a procedural level.

Like the cops wouldn't do that. I wouldn't say that. For example, when I'm watching a horror movie or a crime movie. And like the visitor crime scene three days later, or the blood is still bright red, that's upsetting to me.

Because blood goes brown and then it goes black. It just looks so thin. Right. But I mean, I don't understand. I mean, since I've written fiction myself,

I understand the challenges of creating something interesting, and limiting. And I understand people taking liberties with the facts. And I think that's normal, that's that. Because she, she too knows what it's like.

So guys, you got to take a quick break when we come back. We're going to find out how Patricia ends up putting her crime in space. Apparently earth wasn't good enough. Let's put people in space and have the commit crimes there where you then need some more forensic pathology

to figure out what the hell is going on. We'll end the start-off return. I'm Ali Khan Hemrodge, and I support Star Talk on Patreon. This is Star Talk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. [MUSIC PLAYING]

We're back, Star Talk. I'm tired of forensic pathology with best-selling author, Patricia Cornwell. And we have an authentic medical examiner in the house. In the house, we've got Dr. Jonathan. Dr. Jonathan Hayes, who's not only medical examiner for New York City

of all places, but also a novelist in his own right.

Chuck, right before the end of the second segment,

“look like you want to slip in a question. What was that?”

Well, because he talked about how when you write forensic science fiction that it makes it kind of sexy and it draws people into the field. Can you say sexy said romance itself? It's different.

I think sexy is right too. And I'm sorry, Neil. I'm fortunate. Unfortunately, for me, my romance leads to sexy. But what I'm interested to know is, do you find the same thing in your field of astrophysics?

Do you think science fiction causes people to now pursue the science of the cosmos? Yes, it does. So that's why even though just like Jonathan,

But I say the overall impact is positive that,

because what people can do now is they can get interested. And then they say, "I like that. Let me read some more about it." And then the reading some more about it actually brings them into an anchored state of understanding,

whereas the fantasy sort of tickled their interest up front. And Jonathan, I heard anecdotally that biology and chemistry professors in college found an increase in women taking courses that were sort of pre forensic, inspired by the actors who you want to be like them

in the series crime scene investigation in CSI. Did you find this as well coming up?

“Well, I think that increasing the forensics is becoming a matriarchy.”

There are a lot of women going into the field. I certainly in my field. My office I would estimate is probably more than 50% female. And I come to prevent it exactly exact in the stock. And I think that's common in other areas too.

But I don't think it's just that they're impressed by the actors. I think they have the minds that are interested in problem solving and figuring out how to bury a body. I grew up at a time when no scientist was portrayed as anything you'd want to be.

If you were cool and you saw a movie that had scientists in it, the scientists were not cool. And so there was no draw. There was no pop culture force operating on how you might align your life's ambitions.

And CSI, all the actors are beautiful. The men, the women, the storytelling, what they're wearing, plus they're shown with real life problems, right? The boyfriends, girlfriends, relationship problems. So they're fully fleshed out characters.

“So Jonathan, are you a fully fleshed out character?”

Idea, go on. That's a difficult question too. How does that work at the bar? I'm so excited. What do you do?

I studied dead bodies. That's a short conversation. It might seem to be. Because there is this interest. The New York Magazine, a few years back, that set the forensic

pathologists of the new superboggles. You turn on your TV set any hour of the day or night. You're going to see a forensic show. Whether it's like true pride, or whether it's true there, whether there's someone's bearing a body of the basement and whatnot.

But the way my career in forensic and general is portrayed in pop culture. It really catches the imagination of people. And I think it's because it's some level. In the old days, the hero was a guy with muscles. You had to handle a gun.

And forensic is an area where a nerd with a brain and a sharp insight

is able to be even more powerful with that.

“And that's why the forensic science, I think,”

makes it a forensic scientist. Well, let's pick up with my interview with Patricia Cornwall, who, in her next book, there's like crime in space. Let's see what she says about that. I think that I might be the first author that has written

about a case of violence in low earth orbit in microgravity and space in other words. To do it in the credible way that it's not science fiction. I mean, everything that I have in that scene that scarped a has to remotely work from the situation room in the White House

to get, I mean, it's all within the realm of possibility. And the physics of it, what would happen when there's blood or the type of projectile somebody might use if you were going to do that? And look, you know, as well as I do the Russians have carried guns up there to the space station.

They don't, you know, NASA don't advertise that, but it's true. And the whole point is, my little mantra these days is from earth from space to ground to six feet under. Because wherever we go, we will export what we do, whether it's in orbiting laboratories down the road,

or when people actually go to the moon and try to set up habitats or Mars or it's going to happen. And we're also going to have death, you know, we're going to have things that we don't like to think about.

And for me, I'm always wondering, what are you going to do about that?

So people will be people, whether they're on earth or in space. And you're there to tell that kind of story. Well, you know, the thing that's kind of fun about it, because I talked to the real people, I talked to NASA people about this. You know, I talked to Jack Fisher, the astronaut who was up there for a while.

And we talked about what blood would do and fluids and-- It's just to be clear, blood that's not in your body. That's true, blood that's not in your body. Blood that has spilled out of your body. What will it be?

And then what happens, you know, if where you've got to see and where something like this is occurred and some astronauts come and we'll use the dream chaser.

And they, you know, they get to this, this orbiter that's in peril.

Well, if you've had anything where you have death inside and a violent death, what's that going to be like? And how does a medical examiner work that? Yeah, Johnson, this brings up an interesting question. We're completely trained for earth-based crimes that is a crimes operating under

sort of laws of physics as they manifest in one g here on earth. Can you imagine a future where if we have colonies on the moon or Mars or beyond or hotels in space? Can you imagine a branch, a sub branch of your field, that then has to sort of learn space physics to do your job?

You know, I don't know how much space physics there's going to be involved.

The time that man is going to spend in zero gravity, you're going to be fairly limited. And perhaps not when it comes to things like the space station. When you're looking at actually larger colonies where people would actually live,

“which is where I think violence is mostly like it's layout.”

I think there'll be a normal gravity and, you know, the traditional medical examiner role that's going to be pretty much the same. I think it'll be fairly specialised the cases like where the like pattern is talking about like a, I'm assuming a some sort of violent blood spillage murder takes place in microgravity, it was your gravity.

And I don't know if that's going to be a frequent enough occurrence that is going to develop into a certain full-fetched specialty. But it's going to be, you know, not. [laughter] [laughter]

That will be a double-key challenge. And when I think it was thinking about that too, it would have could mean it for the crime scene in zero gravity.

The first thing that struck me was to put the pattern was talking about with

blood drop that's scattered dynamics going to be different. Because you know, you've probably seen you when you walk along after you've caught yourself, you can see that the shape of the blood spatter on your floor or whatever. And you can interpret those of the way you're moving. And if you're standing still, if you're standing still, the person is standing still

and dripping blood from, say, I'm wrapping up the floor. It tends to have a round appearance. Whereas when you're moving it, it tends to have a tear drop appearance. But that's going to be different in microgravity or zero gravity.

“And so I think there's going to be some interesting science that's probably going to evolve because of that.”

But I have to say, I'm in this question for you, just to have realistic things. And we talk about colonizing distant planets. What are in a large scale? How realistic is it? I mean, we have the Concord in 1965 or something like that.

We are supersonic travel available to get again the very wealthy man. But it's gone now. And so how realistic are these dreams of colonizing the phone planets? Yeah, I think if I'm, I'm tend to be a little on the, the skeptical side that any of that is going to happen any time soon. But that shouldn't prevent people from getting ready for it either legally or medically or the, or the like. A little things, for example, as I understand it from movies I've seen.

If you die while you're seated, then blood collects in your butt and in your feet or something, right? Because there's, you don't have this sort of action, this vascular action to keep blood circulating. And if you're in zero G, the blood doesn't collect anywhere. So a lot of your cues you would use to judge how long a body's been dead are not available to you. Yeah, it's a fascinating thought.

If you're absolutely right, I'd have to put people believe from an open movie because they're in gravity. Right, right, right, that's, that's all of that. And what, so let me ask you this from, I was just going to ask from a forensic standpoint because one of the things that happens in spaces like a common death is like soup malfunction or something. And the person freezes solid because they're in space.

“Now could, would you be able to do an autopsy on like if if the person died, would you be able to do an autopsy on a solidly frozen body?”

It's, it's like, you know, what do you have a frozen body? It's like trying to chip into an iceberg. You're not going to get very far. So we have to do this for the body. And of course, as you fall the body, the body begins to break down fairly rapidly. Of course, it's space, I think, that may also be issues of desecation, the body drying out very quickly. And there are questions of barrel form and being in this final round out is the idea where the body is subjected to tremendous pressures out in the vacuumless space.

So it would be, when it, when it, when we do start to see it, it would definitely be interesting, but I think I may have retired before that. I have to ask, you know, how often am I hanging out with a, with a forensic pathologist? Could you explain exactly what rigor mortise is? Yes, rigor mortises is stiffening over the muscles that occurs after death. The muscle proteins gradually kind of coagulate and as they coagulate, they stiffen up the muscles stiffen. And we first detect it in, well, the first place you can detect it is with goose flesh because you have tiny bit of the muscles that raise and lower the hairs and your body to trap air and keep you warm or not.

You will start to see a little bit of goose flesh developing when you see these tiny little muscles pulling out.

Well, wait, just to be clear, you're on a first name basis with rigor mortise. Okay, you call it rigor sets in rigor.

Yeah, rigor mortises. Yeah, rigor. Yeah. I'm not on a first name basis. I'm sorry, maybe I'll warm up to that. But go on.

But then you test the rigor by trying to bend joints and fairly small joints like finger joints that come stiff first because it takes a lot of muscles to stiffen the hip joint or the knee joint. So you test in the fingers first and we test in the jaw and then they're the arms that that cut. And so from the amount of rigor that's present in the body, you get some soft sense of how long the person has been dead to get that degree of stiffness. And now if someone, a lot of it relates to the body temperature of the time of death, when someone is a seizure at the time they die, if violent seizure say they're doing cocaine or something like that, they're the seizure and they die.

“That that was raised the body temperature and the person are going to rigor mortise faster. So you have to be very careful.”

In fact, the time since death is one of the hardest things we do as far as the size that's closest to an art. But wait, and so then I heard that rigor mortise eventually goes away. So what happens there? Because the muscle pregnant begins to break down again and the rigor slackens. But now you're starting to get on to, you know, the body is beginning as about to begin to break down.

So typically you can feel rigor mortise by about six hours after death.

Instead of being there by about 12 hours and goes off by about 36 hours. Wow. Okay, so that whole expression, there was someone you refer to a dead body as a stiff. That's a temporary condition. Yeah, but I think stiff sounds better than temporary stiff.

We need to, we need to, we need to, we need to, we need to use that expression. You're actually be surprised. I mean, it's supposed to see death the whole time. We're not alarmed or surprised. There's not necessarily intense emotional reaction.

There's not intense emotional reaction to it unless it's the death of a child or something to be tragic circumstances. So we don't say the word cadaver, we don't say groups, we just form them bodies. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's very politically correct. I'm just going to say, Jonathan, I don't think they'll be offended.

And if they are, who are they going to tell? So how about this? It's not just before we go to break. If a crime is committed in a distant place, again, I'm thinking space here because Patricia's novel was in space.

“If a crime happens in space, are you able to talk someone through an investigation of a scene?”

If let's say they're just generally scientifically literate, but they have no medical background, such as what you have. Can you talk them through it and then have them submit a report on your behalf for having done so? I think I could, I could tell them what to look for. I could tell them how to tell the body and what to check for. I think I could do that.

I mean, I want to talk to Sarah as they could, whether you know, photographs or videos. I could see for myself. Yeah, exactly. So you could do this from the beach while they're up there. I'm doing it.

I can hear you.

There's never a substitute for seeing with your own eyes.

That's actually the one top scene is all top scene in own eyes. This is having your own eyes looking at the body and seeing it's going on inside it. Wow. I haven't thought about that. Look at that.

All right. All right. And another thing, all right.

“I got one, what is the temperature of the, of the, the slidy things that you put the body in down in the morning?”

I was wondering what that is. We don't use this anymore. There's the, I'm sorry. Oh, come on. No, no.

Bring them back. We need them. The other superstitions have to be disposed of. No. I mean, it's like, and you could clean the floors of those refrigerators.

You know, because of the, you know, slided and up things. And they began to weaken and build up fluid. So it's a horrible thing. It's just walking refrigerator. It's like you have a new local restaurant.

And a system of goodies for transportation and babies. The other time we see those cool type. He means meat locker. Chuck it. I hear him say meat locker.

That's exactly what he said. Yeah. I was going to say, I hope to God is not like my local restaurant. Yeah. We got a slab of steer right here.

And we got Ernie. Yeah. Ernie didn't make it through. Yeah. We're going to take a quick break.

But more on forensic pathology with a two guest for Trisha Cornwell. And Jonathan Hayne from Star Talker. We're back with Jonathan Hayne's medical examiner of New York City. Jonathan, what? Right before we took a break, you were about to tell a story.

Because we were talking about meat lockers. Yes.

Well, no, we do.

Modern storage of bodies is in walk in coolers, which is just very efficient and way to handle the space and in very easy to clean.

But, you know, in terms of meat lockers. During the cocaine wars of the 1980s and into that 1990. In Miami, there were so many homicides that they weren't able to hold all the bodies in the more refrigerators. And so what they were forced to do is to let trucks. And they rented some refrigerator trucks.

And some of them had the Burger King logo on the outside of this. And we're working. Oh, oh. When we're getting out, the bodies were being stored in Burger King refrigerator trailers. Apparently, there was such an outcry amongst the population that the agency got a large amount of money to build this beautiful new state of the art facility with a period quality storage.

So that was a really off-site of that. That sounded tactical, actually. Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce and the dead guy. Thanks.

“Well, I think the medical examiner's office is really only sort of rapidly improving when there's been a scandal.”

I mean, when the sad truth, they tend to be fairly neglected politically.

No one wants to talk about the no one wants to fund them. And so he tends to jump forward when there's something terrible like that happens. Well, so I have to ask in these meat lockers and in refrigerator trucks. How are the dead human stored? Are they on meat hooks like slabs of beef?

No, actually. They're not the meat hooks like substances. I am so disappointed now. This has really been dissolutioning for you. I know.

Really. Look, I'm sorry. We interviewed you. We'd rather just imagine this stuff don't give the ruin it all with facts. That's what I'm saying. My own boss talked to Charles that she says they have an expression to slay an ugly theory with a beautiful fact.

Yes.

To slay a beautiful theory with an ugly fact.

Right. I'm sorry to make this such a sad thing. I mean, no more body's hanging on meat hooks in there.

“But you have to at least store them horizontally, right?”

Otherwise, it won't work. Yeah. Well, I suppose you could just store them vertically, but the blood in the pool as you talked about earlier. Yeah, no, but the body is a store in a shelving system with it. And it's all very modular and very efficient.

I know. There are also some systems for mass storage of bodies and all agencies are prepared for mass fatality events. Wow. So can I ask you this? A long time ago, I interviewed a police officer and he talked about a person who was murdered and they found him in his apartment in New York City.

The way they found him is he leaked through the ceiling. You. So what would that be? What would cook? Yeah.

My question is, what happened if that's the case or was this guy messing with me? No. I'm sorry who's telling you the truth. What happens is after death. The body begins to break down.

There's no immune system anymore.

“The white cell style of the bacteria and the rage throughout the body.”

And the bacteria continues gas. They cause the body to bloat. And they break down the blood and cause it to go red and green. And create a lot of discoloration. And as the pressure in the tissues builds from the the gas as the body swells. The body will exude fluids as it's tissue spread out.

And I've slowly called purge fluid. And that will spill out around the body. And sometimes it'll throw it so through the ceiling. Holy crap. Yeah. That's terrible.

So the the bloating that makes the body much less dense than it once was. Because it's the same mass now occupying a bigger volume. This would then cause the body to float. If it was dead and at the bottom of any any in the river. So that's why you need cement boots.

Right. That's exactly why it needs cement boots. But it's also why. If someone goes into the water into the eastern rotors. That has to do with the winter.

It may be a few months before the body develops enough gas from back to overgrowth. But it actually starts to float up to the top. There may be delay between some drowning and us actually finding the bodies. This is popular notion that when spring comes and the weather warms up and the water texture warms up. Then you're going to harvest the bodies popping up to the surface.

It's not quite that extreme. But yeah. And we don't. We don't. The bodies that are floating tend to people.

But sometimes they, you know, they're clothing traps and air. Or they may have swallowed some air and they can float because of that. Okay. So just just to be very precise. This because you're you're breaking down this whole.

The whole evolution of a dead body. So so the river mortist that gives us the language. Where's the stuff, right?

And then that makes you buoyant. So that gets us the cement boots part of crime. Right? And okay, I just I'm just flushing out the full picture here. So this is highly illuminating for me.

Thank you. Yeah. Now I've been telling you on top of this stuff. Sure. All right.

It's a forensic medicine. You're often master of this. You're going to use people like you.

“So, oh, a dovetailing on what Neil just said, could you commit the perfect murder?”

You mean in terms of killing someone and getting away with it? Oh, yes. Jack. Oh. Leaving, leaving behind no evidence or no discernible cause of death or no way.

I mean, forget alibis and all that kind of police work stuff.

Just like they would never be able to trace it back to you.

Could you do that? So we put Jonathan together with the TV series. Uh, how to uh, what's it called? How to commit a program or how to get away with murder? How to get away with murder?

How to get away with murder? There it is. So the two of them because they know what everybody's looking for. Yeah. So Jonathan.

Jonathan. I better never see you having lunch with violin. David. Is there planning? Well, a day is the star.

Somebody's going. Somebody's going down. Totally David the star of how to get away with murder.

“So that wouldn't that make you a prime suspect in a murder where there's otherwise no evidence?”

I don't know. Good answer. You should just stop there. Don't say anything else. I think it is possible to be possible to kill something without leaving any clues or trace.

Let's not go. Okay. All right. But it is true. It is true.

It's very hard to dispose of a dead body. That's the problem. It's not killing people. It's getting rid of the body. We had a case where a man murdered his wife and then he buried her in the basement.

And then for the next couple of weeks he sat there watching endless repeats of CSI. And then finally he went to the police station and says, look, you're going to get me separate later. I'm going to tell you I murdered my wife and I buried her in the basement. One. Wow.

Wow. So CSI solved the crime. Even though. So it's a great problem. Because now for a while at least when the show is, you know, on the air all the time and

everyone loved it. There's six different variations.

“I think the CBS is actually bringing it back.”

But the jury's began to demand higher levels of visual proof. They wanted mostly glamorous. Wow. Your animations.

And like the critical cutting edge sciences, as I said, is in the border of science fiction.

Right. Right. And by the way CSI wasn't just medical. There was also some physics involved in thermodynamics. I mean, not in every episode, but they would bring in, you know,

some of the physical sciences when they related to the crime and the murder. So that there was some scientifically literate people there. CSI had a traveling museum exhibit where you would then solve your own crime. The kids are kid exhibit where you go step by step and they give you clues and you have to figure it out.

So it was a big force on the television landscape. So I was very impressed to watch that unfold. Well, how about the future of AI? AI is going to touch all of us in every way. It already has in some professions.

But Patricia thought about that. And she was very impressed with what the future of AI might bring. So let's find out what she tells us.

What's happening today is so amazing.

And the line between what's real and what isn't. And assuming we even know the difference between the two. The line is getting blurrier and blurrier. And so basically when you think of an Alexa or these devices that we have, ultimately everybody is you're going to have artificial intelligence assistance.

Even if even if you don't know you've got it. And that's the thing that's both good and bad about it is that we can't be without it. I mean, we can't manage this world, in my opinion, without artificial intelligence, especially think of air traffic control when you have drones buzzing around and things like that. Oh, wait, wait, wait.

You just said something very important. You're suggesting that the complexity of the world we are building for ourselves may one day require AI just to navigate it. Well, look at what's happened with their mobile phones. I mean, we've created many computers that people really almost can't function without. So Jonathan, is there, can you picture a day where AI conducts the investigation and not you?

I think the system would be because I don't think AI will ever be, for example, things like an autopsy. Not all bodies are the same, everybody has numerous different idiosyncrasies.

And actually, examining the body is a very complex thing.

It's visually sometimes or factly. And then it's the touch and the feeling of actually putting your hands in and examining the length of the world, et cetera.

“I think there'll be a long time before there's road loss or whatever that is sensitive enough to be able to do that.”

With the discrimination a human can do that said, when they do I expect they may have a slightly higher degree of accuracy. I think there's less room for observer bias than. But for a long time, those robots will have to be overseen by, you know, someone human to see if they're, if they haven't gone hopelessly up for rails. I think the AI will be useful.

There's really things that can occur in a crime scene that there's a thousand, there's a million things going on in a crime scene.

I think the big problem is trying to decide what's relevant to the crime and what's more. For example, if you have a dead body lying in the floor, there's blood spatter over the place. There could be a thousand blood spatter droplets distributed about the few animals even the ceiling of the apartment sometimes. And if you think, at some point, the killer stood with his knife over the victim or was carrying the knife and they have left his own blood on the scene.

“How do you figure out which of all those pops of blood is significant?”

Which relates to the killer is not actually the victim's blood. And I think with pattern recognition and, you know, that's the sort of thing that I think that AI would down the road might be able to look at, like a dense information field.

Look for patterns and find out the subtle exception that would escape the human eye.

But I do think it's a long time, and I do think it's a long time before we'll be able to rely on AI. For example, if the moment there's not a discussion in forensic technology about stopping doing an autopsy isn't just doing it all virtual. The autopsy is an examination of the body using a T-S-S-S-CT scanner. And the sweat is very keen on this, and they feel that it completely replaced doing your autopsy itself. They don't. They still do autopsys. But I think increasing them moving towards virtual autopsys in the legal system, your lawyers are not going to say, you know,

and not going to just sit back and accept that the virtual of the CT scan is accurate. And then there's a subtoral hematoma rather than say meningitis that you're looking at. So I think it's going to be a while before that sort of technology comes in and plays a specifically a guiding and controlling part. Well, you sound like Chuck, because I said this, Chuck, you said, no, comedy is too complicated for AI to take it off. So Chuck, Chuck just wants to make sure he's still employed going into the future.

Oh, absolutely. There's no way. There's no way they could tell a joke, not not not with all the nuance that a comedian does. And by the way, if they ever do, you can rest assured a glass of water inside their circuitry is waiting. That's coming right there. That's called murder Chuck, yes, but it will bite aside. We'll bite aside, we'll bite aside, we'll bite aside, we'll bite aside, we'll bite aside, we'll bite aside, we'll bite aside. That's a philosophical discussion for another four of my things.

“But I think you're right. I think that gets it in because if someone, can you imagine a robot can be trying to handle a heckle?”

You know, the complexities involved in that and how this is what was being said, which will have probably obscure cultural references, if you're a silicon based machine. Right. And then actually trying to have to formulate a response. But it's a really good example. I think I mean, just in the touring task, if you're computed to pass the touring test. So, oh, that's our localest challenging minute. That reminds me there's a brief moment in the movie Terminator where he's repairing his injured arm in a hotel room.

And the someone knocks on the door. And he has to figure out what response to give him. So you see this, you see through his mind's eye. I mean, through his computer eye, you see a multiple choice. It's a go away on busy or come back later or you asshole. He goes, yes.

Jesus, that response. So it could be, if you have an AI comedian and there's a heckler, they can decide whether they're nice to the heckler or not. It's a, it's a, it's a knob that you turn. But Jonathan, you said something very important, which I am very sensitive to just in my own field, where pattern recognition humans are good at it, but we can be very biased. If you take an unbiased pattern recognizing AI, it can, for complex things, just like you said, the splatter pattern of blood or the pattern of, of, of, of, of casing shell casings, where they landed and how they might be able to do a back extrapolation into where the gun was when it was fired.

And there could be some interesting sort of three-dimensional analysis that AI could perform that we couldn't.

we'd be investigating detectives with shock, like six or seven cooler rates of the crime scene, poor resolution, not ideally, furniture growth, not ideally lit, and it just wasn't great, and then we were fast forward, you know, whatever 30 years, and we've got, you know, video, we've got high resolution. Even the photograph you're on your iPhone takes, it's just amazing. And we've just really cool machine now that you put it in the center of the room, and it just scans the entire room, very blatant of a machine, scans the entire room, and measures all the distances, and can rebuild the model of that room.

And that's fascinating technology, I think that's where things are going, I mean, you see it in the real estate market, now we know when people are selling the house, they can have a virtual walkthrough using this thing, but you can measure accurately down to the centimeter, discriminating between what's real and what is irrelevant to this really, it's a big problem in physics, and it's brought to me the things that frustrates me, and like CSI, killing the personnel walking to the scene, and then he'll pick up a single fragment of glass, and I'll feel it filled with glass, or this is just a fit, this is the problem, and that is the answer, and it just doesn't work like that, sadly.

“But if that were Sherlock Watson, the A-haw, Sherlock Watson, the A-haw, would be able to do that. Yeah, they would. Sherlock Watson, Sherlock Watson, would walk in and just be like, this man's been dead for 12 hours.”

Oh, I was in 36 minutes, yeah, so, right, they're like, yeah, but the rigor, rigor mortises him right, and he'd be like, "Rigger please, no, this man, I can tell you, has been dead." Sherlock Watson, okay, that's a good one.

Sherlock Watson, the A-haw, very good.

I mean, that's actually actually going in, but you know, you know, I found a little computer saw, you know, it's still, they still depend, I still think for a very long time, and maybe they're going to need the humans to sign off on them, but they haven't gotten the stick on them, and of course that may introduce the question of bias, just the part of the big challenge. Yeah, of course, of course.

“Well, once again, Sherlock Watson sends another black man to jail, that means it's time to end.”

Jonathan, it's been great having you on, you're the first forensic pathologist I've ever had a conversation with, and maybe it showed for better or worse. But he's been delighted with the forensic pathologist or something. No, I just haven't. It's just a non-overlapping van diagrams in my life, but it was delighted to have you on, but I want to thank you for taking time away from your important and busy schedule to join us in my interview with Patricia Cornwell, and delighted to hear that you have a knock, two novels out there, precious blood and a hard death, and I will look for them.

However, it books are sold, of course. And so, Chuck, thanks for being here, as always.

Oh, Lisa, pleasure. Always. Yeah, and Jonathan, we're going to try to find you again, because this topic has no end.

“Good. It doesn't. I was really interested to hear your thoughts about the future of space colonies, because that's something I think about a lot.”

I've been lost a few months, as we've watched the private head crisis taking over in the space. I'm just curious. Yeah, here's a quick one for you, are you ready? So if you bury someone on the moon, there are no microorganisms there to decompose the body. So if the only organism or the microbes that were in your body when you were buried, but there's nothing exterior to that. So the whole decomposition arc will be very different because of that, because it's not really soil. So that's all you need though. We carry, if this is some sort of horrific statistic about what percentage of our body mass is bacteria, and it's a significant portion, that would be enough.

Yeah, I just looked at it, we have more bacterial cells in our body than we have body cells. So that's pretty good. The great limiting thing there is going to be cold, and it's also going to be water bacteria, most bacteria, like a little bit of warmth and water to germinate.

Jonathan, delight to have you on. Thanks for taking time out. Jack, Jack, always good to have you. This has been Star Talk.

Forensic pathology edition. Meal the grass Tyson here. You're a personal astrophysic. Keep looking up. [BLANK_AUDIO]