When you walk into a death scene and see someone hanging from a tree, it would be easy to assume you already know what happened. But as a death investigator, that’s exactly what you cannot do.

In this episode, I’m talking about the death of 29-year-old Tasia Fortune, a mother of four who was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant home in Jackson, Mississippi. Investigators now believe Tasia was already dead before her body was suspended and that the scene was staged. Her death has been classified as a homicide, although her exact medical cause of death had not been publicly released when I recorded this episode. 

I’m going to walk you through this scene the way I would have approached it as a forensic nurse death investigator. What would I photograph? What would I look for around the tree and on the ground? Does the ligature make sense? Could she have reached the suspension point? What can lividity tell us about where her body was positioned after death? Are there injuries that don’t fit the scene? Could her clothing, shoes, DNA, phone records or surveillance footage tell us that she had been somewhere else?

And this case demonstrates something I learned very quickly doing this work: your job isn’t to decide what the scene looks like. Your job is to determine whether the physical evidence supports what it looks like. 

Sometimes one piece of evidence that doesn’t fit is the piece you need to pay the most attention to.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

00:06

Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies. I’m your host, Julie Mattson.

00:10

Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine-tingling, unusual, and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.

00:24

Do I have some stories for you. Are you ready? Hey, guys. Welcome back to another episode of Pushing Up Lilies. I’m so glad that you’re here to join me again.

00:37

Anyway, I wanna talk about the hanging that wasn’t the cause of death. Most of y’all know I am Julie Matson, registered nurse, forensic nurse, and retired forensic nurse death investigator.

00:52

Today, I wanna talk to you about a case that immediately caught my attention, and the reason is because it shows exactly why you can’t walk into a death scene and look at one obvious thing and then decide automatically that you know what happened.

01:09

So, when most people hear that someone was found hanging from a tree, automatically your mind goes to suicide, and most people would. I understand why.

01:22

You see a body hanging, and your brain wants to automatically connect the dots. But as a death investigator, I don’t get to do that.

01:31

The position of the body tells me just that, how I found the person, but it does not automatically tell me how that person died, and there’s a big difference.

01:42

Now, that brings us to 29-year-old Tasia Fortune. Now, I don’t know if y’all have heard this story. Tasia was a mother of four.

01:52

She was African American female, found hanging from a tree behind a vacant home in Jackson, Mississippi. Now, this happened on August 3rd.

02:02

Because of where she was found and the way her body was positioned, this case immediately generated fear and questions and national attention.

02:13

But as the investigation developed, authorities actually revealed something incredibly important. Investigators actually believe that Tasia was already dead before her body was placed in the tree.

02:25

And so according to testimony from a Jackson police detective, this hanging had been staged. And cases like this are always interesting to me.

02:36

But today, I wanna talk to you a little bit about what happened to Tasia, and I also want to approach this the way that I would have approached it working a death scene.

02:47

If I walked into a scene and saw somebody hanging, I wanna let you know, what would I be looking for? What would make me start questioning suicide?

02:58

And what could tell me that this person died somewhere else and was actually moved? And what findings might tell the forensic pathologist that the person was already dead before they were suspended?

03:13

So, this was the fun part of my job, to kinda put the puzzle pieces together. Because when you work with death investigation, you learn pretty quickly that things are not always what they look like.

03:25

So, let’s talk a little bit about her being discovered. Tasia was found behind a vacant home, and this was in the 500 block of Road of Remembrance in West Jackson. So again, we’re in Mississippi.

03:44

Now, right away, that location would make me start asking questions.

03:50

It doesn’t really mean because suicide couldn’t have happened there, because people die in all kinds of locations of suicide, but I still wanna know, like, why she was there.

04:01

Why was she behind that abandoned house? Did she have some connection to that property, or had anyone seen her there before? Did she walk there? Was she brought there? W- was there a vehicle there?

04:17

Why was she there? Was she alone? Most importantly, is it actually where she died, or is this just where somebody left her body?

04:26

So that distinction is huge in death investigation because we talk about, and I know I’ve talked about this before with y’all, primary and secondary scenes.

04:37

So many deaths have two scenes, and the primary scene is gonna be where the fatal event occurred. Now, the secondary scene is somewhere the body, or other evidence was moved afterwards.

04:51

So, investigators in Tasia’s case now believe that she was killed somewhere else before being brought to the location where her body was actually discovered.

05:02

So, if I learn that, it’s gonna change the entire investigation.

05:09

When I first go to a scene like this and I walk into the scene without knowing anything that we know now, I would start with documentation.

05:20

I’m not gonna walk up to that body and say, “Okay, suicide.” I’m looking at everything around her before anybody starts moving things. And I know we’ve talked before about moving things.

05:33

Don’t move anything. I want wide photographs showing the entire area, and then I want mid-range photographs showing the relationship between her body and the tree and anything surrounding it.

05:47

And then I want detailed photographs of the ligature and the knot and the neck and the hands and the feet and the clothing and even the ground underneath her.

05:57

And I also wanna look around for anything she supposedly used to get herself in that position.

06:03

Normally, when someone hangs themselves, there’s a chair or a bucket or a ladder or a crate or something that they could have stood on because they’re going to Tie the noose around their neck.

06:17

They’re gonna tie it to whatever they’re gonna use to hang, and then they’re gonna kick whatever it is that helped them get up there out from under them.

06:27

Is there anything that she could have stood on? If there was, where was it? Was it knocked over or was it upright? Are there any shoe prints on it?

06:37

Do the shoe prints look like hers if she had shoes on? Are there any of her DNA or fingerprints on it? And I wanna say this here, we didn’t check for DNA at the scene.

 06:50

We, in this case, would do what we call trace evidence where we wrap the body in a blanket or a sheet, and we manipulate it as little as possible so that we don’t mess up any potential DNA that our doctors could get off the body, especially if a body is dumped or if a scene appears to be staged.

07:14

So, we’re not gonna know right away if it has her DNA or fingerprints on it, but we’re gonna try to preserve as much as we can so that those tests can be done at the medical examiner’s office.

07:25

And those are the things that start either supporting the appearance of a scene or making me question it.

07:32

Now, one of the biggest mistakes that you can make as an investigator is, and we talked about this last week, deciding what happened before you finish looking at what’s in front of you.

07:43

If I decide right away that this is a suicide in the first five minutes, then I’m gonna risk spending the rest of this investigation explaining everything through that assumption.

07:56

I don’t want that theory to dictate the evidence. I want the evidence to actually build the story, and that’s how to handle a scene like this. You don’t wanna go in with an opinion.

08:08

You really need to remain unbiased. And I know I talked to y’all about how that’s what I did in sexual assault cases. No one was at fault. It had nothing to do with what you were wearing.

08:19

Same thing. Don’t go in there thinking that you automatically know what happened. Now, reports from a court hearing actually indicated that Tasia had been suspended using a black electrical cord.

08:31

So as an investigator, I would wanna know where the cord came from, and I may not ever know, but is there anything in the house resembling that cord that could indicate that it came from the home, or did somebody bring it with them?

08:48

Did Tasia own anything similar, and is there another piece of the same electrical cord somewhere else? So, if it was cut, I wanna know what cut it, and again, I may not ever know.

09:01

But if investigators later recover a tool, sometimes those cut surfaces can be compared with the tool. And I know I’ve talked to y’all about this before.

09:12

The ligature is always preserved for DNA, fibers, hair, blood, skin cells, and any other trace evidence. So, we would always leave the knot intact.

09:25

Of course, if they’re found and EMS felt like they could save them, they were cut down and life-saving measures were started immediately.

09:33

But if it was known that, hey, they’ve been there a long time, they’ve got lividity, CPR is not gonna help this person, they would leave them there. They’re trying to preserve evidence.

09:43

So, if they would’ve cut them down, then potentially DNA could be lost. So those things are really important. So, then we wanna talk about the knot.

09:54

People sometimes think you can look at a knot and automatically determine if it’s a homicide or suicide, but it’s not that simple.

10:01

But I still wanna know where the knot was positioned and how was it tied. Could it reasonably have been tied by her, or is there somebody else’s DNA present on this electrical cord?

10:15

So, then I’m looking at the tree. How high is the branch, and could she actually reach it? And is the bark damaged? Are there any fibers from the electrical cord that are caught on it?

10:28

And does it look like the cord was actually moved across the bark under weight? And so, we wanna make sure that everything physically makes sense.

10:38

Now, none of these things alone are gonna solve this case.

10:41

But when you start putting them all together, you start to get a little bit of a more clear picture of exactly what happened and exactly what’s going on. So, let’s talk a little bit about the body.

10:53

Tasia, I don’t know a lot about what she was wearing, but I’m gonna start looking at the body, and of course, I’m gonna document her clothing, if she had any on, and her shoes, if she had any on, and those are gonna go to the medical examiner’s office with her.

11:09

And in our jurisdiction, if it appeared to be a homicide, we would not remove any jewelry. Again, manipulate the body as little as possible.

11:18

So, people have that misconception that somebody has to be completely hanging in the air for a hanging death to occur, and that’s not true at all.

11:29

Partial suspension happens, and someone might have their knees touching the ground or their feet partially supported and actually still die from hanging.

11:39

So, I’m not really looking for one specific body position. I’m looking for whether the position actually makes sense in relation to everything else around it. And then I’m looking at her clothes.

11:53

Are they torn or dirty, or is there any vegetation stuck to it? Is there grass that’s not similar to the grass in the area of where she was found?

12:04

Does the dirt on her clothing match the area where she was found? And then are there any abrasions or any on her back, shoulders, legs, arms? And again, I may not completely…

12:16

Razor shirt and all in a case like this, but these are just things that are important, and I say that because it would be a trace case.

12:24

But if somebody carried or dragged her after death, there might be evidence of that movement. Her shoes could be scuffed. Her clothing might have picked up material from another location.

12:35

There might be abrasions from dragging, and then the ground itself might be disturbed. And so, it’s important to allow as few people as possible in the area so that you can visualize all that.

12:49

And sometimes the body will tell you it was moved, and sometimes the environment tells you, and sometimes both of them tell you. And y’all are familiar with lividity.

13:00

One of the first postmortem changes I’d be looking at very careful is lividity, because lividity can give you incredibly important information about body position after death.

13:14

So, we know that lividity pools in dependent areas, and after your heart stops pumping, gravity starts pulling that blood downward, and that creates that purplish discoloration that we call livor mortis or postmortem lividity.

13:33

Now, a lot of people mistake that for bruising, so remember that because it is a purple discoloration. So, imagine I found someone hanging vertically from a tree.

13:44

If that person died in that position and remained there, I would expect that dependent blood settling to correspond with that position.

13:55

Now, I would expect to see blood pooling or that purple discoloration in the hands and the fingertips, in the lower legs and feet, and in those kind of places.

14:06

Now, imagine I examine the same person and find fixed lividity across the back. When I push it, it doesn’t blanch. It stays purple or that red color.

14:18

That’s gonna get my attention because now I’m wondering whether that person spent a significant a-amount of time lying on their back after death before somebody actually positioned them upright.

14:30

Now, again, that doesn’t automatically mean homicide, but it tells me that the body was likely in a different position earlier.

14:39

And that would be extremely important in a case where somebody is suspected of staging a hanging.

14:47

Once lividity becomes fixed, you don’t just move a body and then have all of that blood suddenly redistribute into a completely different pattern.

14:59

So, when the lividity doesn’t match the position in which I find the body, I’m gonna wanna know why.

15:05

And in a case like this, it would be very suspicious if there was fixed lividity on the back indicating that she’d been lying on her back for quite some time and then was put in this hanging position where we would expect lividity to be dependent in her hands and her lower legs.

15:23

Now, as far as rigor and time of death, I’m also looking at rigor mortis, which we all know the stiffening of the muscles after death.

15:33

I never look at rigor and say, “She died six hours ago.” It doesn’t really work that way.

15:39

So, body size, history of illness, temperature, environment, many other things affect how postmortem changes develop.

15:49

But rigor combined with lividity, body temperature, decomposition, weather conditions, witness statements, phone activity, and the last known time alive actually helps us build somewhat of a timeline.

16:05

Now, when investigators say that Tasia was already dead before she was placed in this tree, this is exactly why evaluating those postmortem changes is so important.

16:18

These are things that we want to look at very closely, again, with very little manipulation of the body. But we have the neck, and obviously, this is gonna be extremely important in any hanging.

16:31

I’m gonna want detailed photographs of this ligature mark. Where is it on the neck? What direction does it travel? Does it rise upward at the suspension point?

16:43

And does the width of the mark actually correspond with the electrical cord that was found around her neck? So that’s gonna matter. Is there one mark or are there several?

16:55

Are there abrasions or any bruises or scratches or fingernail marks on her body? And here’s something else I’m looking for.

17:03

Is there another injury to the neck that doesn’t match the ligature that we found at the scene?

17:10

Because you got to remember, if there’s a wider ligature mark on her neck, wider than the electrical cord, we’re gonna assume something else was used.

17:21

But the forensic pathologist takes that examination much further during the autopsy.

17:27

They’re gonna examine the soft tissue underneath the skin, and they’re gonna look for hemorrhage, and they’ll examine the muscles of the neck and the hyoid bone and the larynx and blood vessels and all those structures surrounding the neck.

17:44

One important question, though, is whether the neck injuries show evidence of occurring while the blood was still circulating, and this is something that’s pretty interesting.

17:54

If tissue is injured while the heart is still pumping, blood can hemorrhage into that tissue.

18:00

But if similar force is applied after circulation has stopped, the tissue response is gonna look a lot different and this is a big part of where the scene investigation and the autopsy actually have to work really well together.

18:18

It’s more of a team effort, and that’s what I loved about it too. We all helped one another. Law enforcement sometimes got information that we didn’t have, and vice versa.

18:29

And then the pathologist got a whole new set of information during the autopsy. But I want that pathologist to know exactly how I found that body.

18:37

They need to understand what they found internally, and if those things don’t match, then that’s gonna be super important. So, we wanna know, was she alive when she was hung?

18:51

And this becomes one of the biggest questions in this case. Was Tasia alive when she was suspended from that tree? Now, investigators have said no.

19:02

There are several findings that a pathologist might consider when actually looking at whether or not someone was alive during suspension. But there’s not one magical finding.

19:16

They might evaluate hemorrhage in the neck tissues and petechial hemorrhages in the eyes and vascular injuries and fractures and congestion and other findings.

19:27

But even something as strange as dried saliva has historically been discussed in hanging investigations.

19:35

So, a downward trail of saliva from the mouth can support the idea that salivation was occurring when the person was alive. Its absence, though, does not prove somebody was dead before suspension.

19:51

So, all of this is all something to take into account, and that’s what people sometimes don’t understand about forensic investigation.

20:00

Very rarely do we have one finding that says, “There it is, case solved. I know exactly what happened.

20:08

I know exactly the cause and manner of this death.” If that was the case, no one would need an autopsy.

20:14

It’s usually a collection of findings that start telling the same story that lead us to discover exactly what happened.

20:24

Now, the rest of the body actually matters, too, and we can’t forget that because I don’t wanna get tunnel vision on the neck.

20:33

I’m actually examining the entire body because if this was a homicide, I wanna know if there was a struggle before Tasia died.

20:43

So, if there was any kind of a struggle, there might be injuries somewhere completely different. Now, we do know this.

20:52

The investigators have actually testified that they believe Tasia fought before she died. So, they saw something. We don’t know what it is yet.

21:00

But in a case like this, I’m gonna look at her hands and arms and the back of her hands and her palms and fingernails and knuckles and forearms.

21:11

So, if she struggled, there may be some broken fingernails, and there may be DNA under ’em. That’s why sometimes we bag the hands, especially if it’s a firearm.

21:20

But in a case where there may be broken fingernails, we don’t wanna lose that evidence. We wanna know are there bruises where someone might have grabbed her arms.

21:29

We’ve all seen that person, or I have in the ER, that has fingerprints on their arms. Are there any injuries to her face or torso or knees or legs, and is any of the injuries patterned?

21:41

And then I wanna know whether those injuries have a reasonable explanation. Does it make sense within that hanging scenario that she have those specific injuries?

21:51

If they don’t, I’m gonna start asking a lot more questions.

21:55

Now, one of the things I learned during death investigation is you sometimes cannot be so focused on the body that you forget to actually look around it.

22:07

And this is so important because sometimes your best evidence is just literally a few feet away, and you wanna remember to look at the ground around.

22:18

I’m looking for disturbed soil, shoe prints, tire impressions. Was there somebody in this car that did this to her and then drove off?

22:27

Were there any drag marks or cigarette butts, bottles, gloves, weapons, anything personal, any drugs, anything that looks out of place compared with the surrounding?

22:39

Now, we also gotta remember this was behind a vacant house, so you have to use some common sense. Vacant properties collect trash. It happens.

22:48

Every cigarette butt you find doesn’t necessarily belong to the suspect.

22:53

I know many times if I was on, like, an auto pedestrian accident, I can’t walk five miles down the roadway and assume that everything on Interstate one fourteen or Highway thirty-five was in that decedent’s pocket or belonged to that decedent.

23:09

So, you have to be careful, but you document and you preserve what looks relevant and then let the investigation sort out what belongs. So, we’re also gonna look for the primary death scene.

23:22

If investigators determine that she did not die where she was found, then the next big question is where did she die? Where did this happen at? Where is that primary scene?

23:35

And that location could contain a whole different set of evidence and- as you can only imagine. Now, maybe there’s blood, maybe there isn’t.

23:46

So, we know that people sometimes associate homicide with large amounts of blood, but plenty of fatal mechanisms do not produce a dramatic bloody scene that we see on TV or something that we would expect when we hear the word homicide.

24:03

If we find the primary scene, there might be, like, broken furniture or hair that had been pulled or cleaning supplies, any kinda evidence that somebody tried to wipe down the area.

24:16

Her belongings could still be there, and her phone actually might still be there. So those are things that we’re gonna look for at what we think might be the primary scene.

24:26

Now, the absence of visible blood does not mean that somebody was not killed there, and we know this. So, investigators have alleged that Tasia’s death followed a dispute involving drugs.

24:41

Court testimony actually indicated that she left a Capitol Street house with two men and didn’t return, and those men reportedly came back later.

24:51

And now those allegations remain part of this ongoing criminal case. So that makes it, of course, even more suspicious. Now, for an investigator, that gives you a timeline to start working with.

25:04

Who was the last person who definitely saw her alive, and where was she at? What did she have on? Did she have her cell phone?

25:14

And when they ping her phone, did it keep moving after she stopped communicating? And what vehicles were involved? When she left with these men, what vehicle was she in?

25:26

And we always talk about cameras. Were there any surveillance cameras nearby?

25:32

Now, death investigation today actually involves a lot more than examining a body, so you can see how complex sometimes these scenes were.

25:41

It wasn’t like show up, snap a few pictures, flip the body over, take a picture, we’re done, this is a suicide.

25:48

Phones, cameras, vehicles, financial transactions, social media, and other digital records often help investigators rebuild the last hours of somebody’s life. So, we can’t forget that.

26:03

That is important as well. Now, as far as the timeline, I want the last true known alive time.

26:13

I don’t want, “I think I might have heard from her.” I don’t want somebody saying, “I think I talked to her sometime Thursday.” That actually is super, super important, and the good thing is you can go back and look at your call log, and you can go back and look at your text message.

26:30

I personally never delete text messages or emails. I can’t tell you how many times they’ve saved my butt. But I wanna know when she was definitely known to be alive. Was she seen on camera?

26:41

Did she make a phone call where someone actually heard her voice? Did she send a message or did she buy something? Is there a receipt? Did somebody physically see her?

26:51

And then I kinda start moving forward from there. When does her normal phone activity stop? So, does the phone continue moving?

27:02

We also wanna know, and we may never know, does anyone else access her phone, and are there any vehicles that appear on surveillance cameras?

27:12

And do people that were questioned or that answer questions change their story, or they suddenly can’t remember what happened?

27:21

So, you start building those final hours piece by piece, and that helps you build your case and get as much information as you can for the pathologist.

27:32

And family statements matter, but they’re not the entire investigation, so we do need to remember that.

27:40

Tasia’s mother publicly said that she didn’t believe her daughter was suicidal, and that’s something else we ask about.

27:47

She talked about Tasia trying to get her life together and wanting to start a new business, and most people that talk like that and that have plans for the future are not contemplating suicide.

28:01

As an investigator, I absolutely wanna hear that information, ’cause the family knows this person in a way I never will. They know their normal behavior patterns.

28:12

They know who they have relationships with.

28:15

They know whether something actually seems completely outside of their normal behavior, and so you kinda have to trust that, and those are questions, they’re difficult questions, but they’re questions that need to be asked.

28:28

But I still have to let that physical evidence determine what happened. But it is important to get the input from family and from friends.

28:39

People sometimes die by suicide without telling their families that they are contemplating it. Some people leave notes, but not everybody does.

28:50

Some have a documented mental health history, but others don’t.

28:54

So just because her mom said she would never do that, that’s not something that she’d ever talked about, it’s important information, but it can’t be the sole reason that I go, “Oh, okay, she did not kill herself.” Now, in Tasia’s case, the medical examiner eventually classified the death as a homicide.

29:19

So, they don’t suspect that this happened, this was something that she did on her own. So, staging the death scene is a big deal, and that brings us to the question, it had to have been staged.

29:36

If this was a homicide, it had to have been staged. And when we say that, we mean that somebody actually altered it in an attempt to mislead investigators.

29:47

Maybe they tried to make a homicide look like a suicide. Maybe they try to make it look like an accident.

29:54

They might move the body, and sometimes they might even place a weapon nearby or change someone’s clothing or clean something up or rearrange the entire scene.

30:06

And so again, things like that, important. We don’t want to start moving stuff around.

30:12

Staging is hard because you’re not just trying to fool the investigator that’s standing there actually looking at the body. You have to fool the autopsy, and that’s hard to do.

30:25

These doctors know what they’re doing. And you have to fool lividity and the facts that we know, what we know based on previous death investigations. You have to fool rigor. It’s hard.

30:39

It’s hard to do, and I’m gonna say it’s almost impossible to fool the autopsy, to fool DNA, and it’s really hard to fool trace evidence, and that’s something, again, that we would do in this case.

30:54

Put the body in a sheet and don’t manipulate it. It’s really hard to fool surveillance cameras. And so those are things that when we find them are gonna be obvious.

31:09

You have to fool the phone records too, and the timeline, and that’s difficult. I know we’ve talked about this before. I like dumb criminals, but most criminals are not that smart.

31:21

You might hang somebody from a tree and hope everybody sees suicide. But what happens if lividity shows that she was lying flat for hours before she was placed there? People don’t research that.

31:36

They don’t understand. And what if there are injuries from some sort of a struggle? What if she does have some broken fingernails or some bruises on her arms?

31:46

Or what if her shoes have dirt on them that doesn’t match the actual scene where she’s found? What if somebody else’s DNA is under her fingernails?

31:58

And again, DNA is not something that you can test for, like on TV, on an iPad in five minutes.

32:04

These are reasons that we do trace to preserve those things so that they can be collected by the trace team at the medical examiner’s office.

32:14

There’s just so much to this scene, and so I love talking about it because y’all can kinda see you can’t automatically walk into a scene and go, “Oh, she’s hanging.

32:24

This is a suicide.” There’s a lot of details that start breaking apart a staged scene like this.

32:33

So, some things that would make me question a suicide, if you’re thinking to yourself, what would make me question whether an apparent hanging was really a suicide?

32:43

It wouldn’t really be one single thing. It would more be just inconsistencies, things that I’m finding at the scene that don’t match up.

32:54

Maybe lividity doesn’t match the body position, or maybe the victim has injuries that don’t fit the hanging.

33:01

Maybe there are defensive injuries, or maybe that ligature mark doesn’t really correspond with this black cord around her neck.

33:11

And maybe there are a lot of different neck injuries, and maybe the person couldn’t reasonably reach the suspension point. So, we’re looking at so many different things.

33:24

Again, the more people in the scene, the more chances of evidence being destroyed. So, drag marks, debris on the clothing from other locations.

33:37

Maybe there’s somebody else’s DNA on the ligature, and that’s why the ligature goes to the medical examiner’s office with the body.

 33:45

We’re very careful to try, I’ve done it multiple times on accident, not to cut the knot. Don’t cut the knot.

33:53

Maybe phone records contradict the stories that we’re being told, and maybe witnesses are really just giving accounts that don’t fit into all of this physical evidence.

34:04

So many things to take into account, and this is the kind of thing I’m looking for. I’m looking for inconsistencies and things that give me clues as far as what happened.

34:17

I’m looking for things that don’t fit, and that’s what makes it fun. Because when you work these scenes, the evidence usually starts lining up.

34:30

And then when one piece refuses to fit that story that everybody else is telling you, you need to pay attention to that one piece. You need to stay unbiased.

34:42

So right now, let’s talk a little bit about where the case stands. I’m running out of time.

34:48

As of late September, so today’s the twenty-ninth, multiple people have been charged in connection with Tasia Fortune’s death.

34:57

These are criminal allegations, and of course, the cases all remain pending. None of these people have really proven guilty– have been proven guilty that I know of.

35:08

Authorities, again, have publicly said that the medical examiner classified her manner of death as a homicide.

35:15

And investigators have also openly said that they believe that Tasia was already dead before her body was suspended, and that the hanging was actually staged.

35:28

So, what has not been publicly released is her exact medical cause of death. We don’t know that yet. We know that it’s important not to fill in the information that we don’t have. And y’all know me.

35:44

I’m not about making up stories to make something sound like something that it’s not. We don’t want to pretend we know.

35:53

We know that investigators believe that she was killed, and we know that they believe that she was moved. And we know they believe that her body was actually positioned in that tree after she died.

36:12

But unless and until her specific cause of death is released, I’m not gonna speculate about how she died ’cause we just– we don’t know yet. We’ve gotta wait.

36:25

So as an investigator My take is, and this is the part of the case that, like, really stays with me, is that initially when you walk into a scene like this, think about how easy it would have been to look at the scene and then stop at that obvious answer.

36:46

Oh, here’s a woman hanging in a tree. Automatically she killed herself.

36:52

But that’s not death investigation, and if you want to be a good death investigator, you can’t walk into a scene with that bias. Your job is not to determine what the scene looks like.

37:06

Your job is to determine whether the physical evidence supports what it looks like.

37:13

And so, this is, again, the part I loved about my job, because once you make that early assumption, that tunnel vision is a problem.

 37:25

Suddenly every injury gets explained away, and if the ground’s disturbed, it doesn’t seem important, and a mark on her neck kind of gets ignored because it’s, “Oh, she hung herself.

37:37

We expect a mark on her neck.” Somebody gives an inconsistent statement, and nobody follows up because everybody automatically thinks that case is solved.

37:47

And that’s why you have to remain completely neutral, and that’s my biggest takeaway from scenes like this.

37:56

When I worked death scenes, I wasn’t showing up trying to prove homicide all the time, and I wasn’t showing up trying to prove suicide. I just wanted to know what happened.

38:08

I just wanted the truth, and that’s the least that I could have done for that family. If the evidence supports suicide, then that’s where it takes me.

38:18

But if it supports an accident, then it takes me there. And if it supports homicide, you have to be willing to change direction.

38:27

So, this case also shows why death investigators and forensic pathologists have to communicate. So important.

38:36

Imagine I document fixed lividity across someone’s back even though I found them hanging vertically. That pathologist needs to know that.

38:44

That’s super important, and number one, they’re gonna get the body, so they’re gonna see it for themselves, and then they’re gonna wanna know why I didn’t document it correctly.

38:53

So, imagine the pathologist calls me and says, “Hey, these internal neck injuries don’t really match what you described at the scene.” Now I’m going back through everything again, and I’ve done this so many times.

39:07

Go back, look at my photos, re-interview people.

39:11

I’m looking for another location, and I’m actually asking different questions, and that collaboration is where a lot of cases actually start coming together. We’re talking amongst ourselves.

39:26

We’re learning new things about cases. There’s another part about this case that actually bothers me.

39:33

If investigators are correct, Tasia was killed, and then somebody deliberately positioned her body to create a false explanation for her death to make it look like that she did this to herself.

39:50

That means somebody was not only trying to conceal what happened to her, they were trying to control the story that people would believe about her final moments.

40:01

Tasia’s mother has publicly said that she did not believe that there was any kind of racial motive. Investigators have described the suspected motive as being related to a drug dispute.

40:14

But regardless of the motive, investigators still have to explain why they chose this method of staging.

40:21

Did they really think that no one would recognize injuries that were on her body or lack thereof? We don’t know why they chose that tree. We don’t know why they chose that location.

 40:36

We don’t know who moved her. There’s just a lot of unknowns right now. But what I’m gonna do, I’m gonna continue to follow this story. There’s a lot of questions that have not been answered.

40:51

But I just love explaining to y’all what we would expect to see at a scene like this, what we would look for.

41:00

It’s just fun to talk about, and I love educating about it because there’s so many different things that could have happened. So, until next week, I look forward to talking to y’all again.

41:11

Thank you so much for listening. Always feel free to email me, julie@pushinguplilies.com. Shop my Murder Merch store, and that’s on my website, www.pushinguplilies.com.

41:26

And don’t forget to go on Eventbrite and order your tickets to this murder mystery. I am so excited.

41:33

I cannot wait for this thing to take place, and I cannot wait for you to hear Jan’s story about Kelly Ann, and I know that there’s a lot of people from the Denton area who remember her homicide and remember when her body was found.

41:47

And so, I really would love for y’all to meet Jan. She’s just incredibly sweet. So, until next week, y’all take care. Be nice to everybody else, and I’ll talk to you soon. Bye, y’all.

42:01

Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies. If you like this podcast and would like to share with others, please do me a quick favor and leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

42:12

This helps to make the podcast more visible to the public. Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at pushinguplilies.com for merchandise and past episodes.