1606: The Grave Detector (Junk Science Bonus)

Speaker: It's been 40 years since Gina Hall was murdered in Pulaski County. Her murderer, Steve Epperly, was convicted, but a body was never found. Now, within the last few months, Gina's older sister, with the help of forensic anthropologists, has found some of Gina's DNA and remains. This is a news clip from WDBJ in Roanoke, Virginia. This local news story, without any evidence, proclaims that Gina Hall's DNA And pieces of bone have been found. Let me play you more of this horrendous attempt at journalism. WTBJ7's Anne Taylor joins us live in the studio tonight. So Anne Taylor, what is Gina's sister saying about these new discoveries? Kate, talking with Gina's sister Delaina truly gave me goosebumps. And that's when the miracles began. That's when the truth became unveiled. That's when the pieces of the puzzle started showing up and just started fitting together. And I now have the truth. 40 years after Gina Renee Hall was murdered in Pulaski County, there are new pieces that could help map out where to find her body. Gina's sister Delana Hall Bodmer says despite a conviction for the murderer Steve Epperly, she still wants closure. Delana was introduced to Dr. Arpad Voss A forensic anthropologist who had invented an instrument to detect DNA buried beneath the surface. Since then, Gina's remains have been located across eight locations throughout the New River Valley using that device. Oh, really? I think what the rookie reporter is trying to say is that R Pod Boss says that he located DNA electromagnetic waves. Not actual DNA from decayed flesh. That's a big difference. Wow, this reporting is just plain embarrassing. Here's Gina Hall's sister who truly believes that R Pod Ba's wizard machine actually works. And what we would do is take each one of those locations and start zeroing in by the miles. And I would just literally just pull over and let him out and let him just scan. And they found part of Gina's bone at Eberly's former hunting grounds. Oh yeah? Did anyone ever test that bone and confirm that it was Gina Ha, or are we just supposed to take this guy's word for it? And when people come to understand what this instrument can do, it's a world changer. You know, do you have proof? No, we have an instrument that we put in and we find her buried on a ridge near the same valley. We find her at a different location that we're currently investigating and we find her at the creek. I spoke with reporter Renee Ebersole about this. Yeah, her sister believes that it works. Um, they didn't find a full human skeleton. You know, he, he said it was in eight different locations. And, um, he, he just had like some little vials of, of dirt, basically, I think, from those eight locations. So, that would have to be DNA tested. But that so called evidence was never tested. At least, not to my knowledge. See, those are That's fly debris right there. This is audio of Gina Hall's sister and our pod boss searching for human remains in the subfloor of convicted killer Stephen Epperly's old bedroom closet. Oh yeah, I see it. But there's flies everywhere. Hunter, there's one. I don't see any worms, but I mean, if you look carefully, it's in every crevice. I mean, there's fly wings everywhere. This is literally a hundred of them. Our pod boss is excited because why would flies be down in the subfloor? See the flies lay the eggs, eggs turn the larvae, the larvae eat the tissue up. And then the, then they look for a place to pupate and migrate. I mean, literally flies will find victims within minutes of death. But all he can find are fly wings. Not an actual, intact fly. I wish I could find a good, intact one that just Could that be bones? I'm looking. I wonder if the bone's down below that. I don't know. I mean, it's weird. Then, all of a sudden, Arpod Voss hits the jackpot. Did he find skeletal remains? A body? Nope. He just found more flies. Oh, there's a couple good flies. There's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Ten in that crevice alone. Somehow, we're supposed to believe that these fly carcasses are intact 40 years after Gina Hall's disappearance, but there are no visible signs of an actual body or bones anywhere in sight. And we're talking. 43 years. Wow. Yeah, I mean, it's quite amazing that we've seen anything. I mean, you know, 40 years and all sorts of things can happen. There's one piece right there. The saddest part is that Gina Hall's sister believes her sister's body was found. And the news media is declaring that her body was found. I mean, just read the headlines. But all of this was just another spectacle by what many scientists consider to be junk science. In today's bonus episode, we are going to move our attention away from Dr. R. Podvos and talk about other pseudo scientific tools and techniques. Some of these techniques that we all accept as real are nothing more than CSI magic. I'm Javier Leyva and this is Pretend, stories about real people pretending to be someone else. We've talked about dowsing rods and the quantum oscillator. By now, most of you know that these tools are unreliable at best. We've also covered other forms of junk science on this show, like the polygraph machine to tell if someone's lying. While the polygraph does measure the body's flight or fight responses, we learned that it can easily be cheated if you know what you're doing. What about psychics? Remember the time the U. S. government funded a study to leverage psychics to spy on our enemies with remote viewing? Yep, junk science. I've also produced an episode about the use of hypnosis to help victims recover memories. Also, junk science. We heard the stories of how Texas police and prosecutors use hypnosis to send people to prison and, even worse, some to their deaths. Yeah, as silly as this all sounds, there are reports that law enforcement are still using some of these wacky techniques to help solve some of their cases. But did you know that there are actual common techniques that you and I think are real, but are actually just bogus? So let's talk about it. Let's start with cadaver dogs. Are dogs useful in finding bodies, or is this junk science too? Here's Chris Fabrikant with The Innocence Project and the author of Junk Science. If you're not familiar with cadaver dogs Um, there is a claim made by dog handlers that these animals can detect the residual scent of dead human beings many months, sometimes even years, sometimes many, many years later after there's no DNA evidence, no witnesses, no nothing to say. So, cadaver dogs come in, and they sniff an area, they bark, and then there's a, you know, claim made by dog handlers that there was a dead human being here, not a dead dog, not, you know, bloody nose, not a dying human being. But a dead human being was once in this area. The claim is really that they are detecting the volatile organic compounds of, um, dead human beings and that that's a special signature scent that only human beings emit. And really this idea is nonsense. We don't know what the dogs are detecting, what put rocket fuel into this. whole theory was Dr. Voss's testimony in the Casey Anthony trial. And the claim in that trial, which was accepted by the court for the first time where the claim was made, which is not true, that the chemical signature, the VOC signature of human beings had been identified. And you could bottle this and test it and be able to establish that a human being was in a particular place in this case. in a car, a truck of Casey Anthony's car. And you know, when, when these guys get lucky and find the body, is it, is it akin to a blind squirrel finding a nut? Yeah. You know, and I like to say like broken clocks are right twice a day. One of the most important studies that was done in dog sniff evidence, and that's just cadaver dogs, but in any dog sniff evidence was done by Lisa lit. And in that study, what they did is they took a group of, um, dog handlers and these were explosive sniffing dogs. And they did an experiment in a church and put different boxes around the church, some of which were thought to contain explosives and had little dots so the handlers knew which ones did. And then there were ones that didn't have explosives and they put them to work in the church to see whether or not the dogs would alert on the appropriate boxes and they did. But what they didn't know is that there were no explosives at all in any of the boxes and the dogs were alerting to what the handlers believed were contained the explosives. The communication between human beings and dogs is a real thing, right? You know what I mean? When I, Explain this phenomenon at a cocktail party. Everybody's minds are blown, right? So are you kidding? Dogs like years later sniffed the air and it was like, no, of course not. You know what I mean? Like that really, that was used as evidence. And it's like, yeah, it really happened. It's one thing to identify a body, which we know dogs can do. Right. And it's another thing to do the residual set. You've seen it dozens of times on CSI and other popular crime shows. Bloodstain pattern analysis has become a Hollywood trope used to reconstruct or reverse engineer a crime. But how accurate is it? In 1995, Warren Horanek was convicted of murder largely based on the testimony of a bloodstain pattern analyst who claimed that it was murder rather than suicide because a pattern of small blood was found on Horonek. The blood expert claimed that it was high velocity blood from the gunshot rather than blood that might have just gotten on him when he was giving medical aid to the victim. So what do scientists say about this? In 2019, a report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that blood spatter analysis is, quote, more subjective than scientific. And despite all this, This evidence is admissible in court. Back before DNA was a thing, there was microscopic hair analysis. Hair analysts used hair as proof that a specific person was at the crime scene. In 1982, Kirk Odeman was convicted of rape. There was no physical evidence except a teeny tiny strand of hair. Microscopic hair analysis performed by the FBI's crime laboratory, in addition to a police lineup identification, which by the way is another form of junk science, but I digress. Odeman was sentenced to 20 years in jail. Yeah, 20 years in jail for a strand of hair. Years later, DNA evidence proved that Odoman was innocent. The next form of junk science is particularly heartbreaking because a baby dies, and in the midst of this indescribable grief, A parent is arrested and charged with murder. Why? Because of shaken baby syndrome. Yes, shaking a baby can result in death, but forensically determining the cause of death is another thing entirely. Today we know that events such as falls or oxygen deprivation can be another explanation for the child's death. There's a case where a father was once on death row because of this evidence. When it comes to junk science, the stakes are high. What about bite marks? It seems plausible to narrow down a victim by comparing bite marks, but the question is, can you narrow it down to one person? Chris Fabricant with the Innocence Project says that bite marks have led to 24 wrongful convictions or indictments nationwide. He says that skin is much too malleable to accurately record any marks. That forensic dentists can't always agree on whether the mark was even made by a human. And one study shows that bite mark analysis has an error rate as high as 64%. Here's Chris Fabricant again with the Innocence Project. In my book, I devote a chapter to the Ted Bundy case. Because Ted Bundy, like what you don't, most people don't realize was a bite mark case. Right? And that was really the only so called physical evidence that they had. And it was really the Chi Omega murders, the so called Chi Omega murders were, you know, not here to tell you that Ted Bundy was innocent, but they really had no evidence. They had hypnotized a witness in that case, right? And she identified a Chi Omega employee as the person that she saw leaving the sorority house right after the murders. And it wasn't until Ted Bundy was arrested. They said, ah, no, that's the guy. So they used bite mark evidence, you know what I mean? And I've seen the injury. You can Google it. It's on the internet. You know what I mean? It could be a bite mark. Who knows, certainly the dentists don't have any idea. But they matched Ted Bundy to it and it was very effective. Let's talk about another forensic technique that's actually more art than science. Chris Severance is serving 27 years in federal prison after his gun shop caught on fire. What evidence did they nail him with? Well, sloppy burn analysis claiming to find a point of origin. But more recent evidence shows that the fire was most likely accidental. But these so called experts, well, their word is taken as facts in court. Let's get back to Dr. Arpad Voss for a moment. We talked about the claims that the quantum oscillator can find human remains with 92 percent accuracy. But what we didn't discuss is that his patent also claims that it can find gold, silver, and even detect bombs with just as much accuracy. When I asked Dr. Arpad Voss if there was any existing scientific literature or studies that support the principles of detecting materials using the quantum oscillator, Here's what he had to say. Yes, mainly on the national security side, heartbeat detectors and explosive detectors. Explosive detectors? Yeah. Well, interestingly enough, there's a British conman named James McCormick who made millions from selling a wand to security forces around the world. This device is completely useless. McCormick was later sentenced to 10 years in prison for fraud. But these so called bomb detectors are still being used as security checkpoints, with dire consequences. Back in 2016, a suicide bomber in Iraq killed close to 300 people. Here's Chris Fabricant again. Uh, in my book, Junk Science, what I write about are things like polygraphs, bite mark evidence, hair on my cross to the sea. Well, arson investigation techniques, comparative bullet lead analysis, blood spatter evidence, you know, the list of discredited forensics is very, very long. It was accepted by learned judges for a century. The FBI propagated some of the worst junk science in American history, including here my cross obscene comparative bullet lead analysis. So, you know, the, in the annals of junk science, you know, the, the, the folks that have been fooled by that are plenty of PhDs and, you know, critical thinkers and skeptics and what have you. But, you know, if you're not really focused in on what the literature says, what it doesn't say, you know, I mean, and, and not really critically thinking about the claims that are being made. Then, that's how junk science works, you know, I mean, and once it's been admitted once in court, it's very, very difficult to eliminate it any further, and you see, forensic experts themselves will claim that a technique is scientifically valid, not because it's been researched, but because courts accepted it, right? That as a, as if, you know, some judge, some lawyer, Is the arbiter of what's, you know, I mean, in reality, that's often true in criminal courts, but the, the, they're not scientists, there's widespread scientific illiteracy in the bench and in the bar and in the general public. So you've heard from Chris Fabricant, and I told you that he works at the Innocence Project, but what do they do? Chris Fabricant says that the Innocence Project's mission is to reform the criminal justice system. He says they do this by using DNA and actual proven scientific advancements to exonerate wrongful convictions. To understand the impact of the Innocence Project forensic DNA analysis, you have to go back to where we were before that. And at that time, before the the advent of forensic DNA, it was thought that eyewitness identification was Very reliable is one of the pillars of the types of evidence that we use in criminal trials. We thought confessions were very reliable and, you know, that nobody would confess to a crime that they hadn't committed. And we thought forensic sciences, you know, were objective, valid, reliable evidence. It was only, and it was really because of the intake criteria of the Innocence Project that we learned this. Because the decision was made right at the beginning to make no subjective judgments about guilt or innocence of anybody who wanted our help. The only criteria is biological evidence is available and it could be tested, would that prove innocence? And so we took cases with six eyewitnesses or all those forensic sciences pointing toward guilt or detailed confessions. And what we learned That eyewitness misidentification is a leading contributing factor to wrongful conviction. And number two, with over half of all known wrongful convictions, is junk science. The use of unreliable forensic evidence contributed to over half of all known wrongful convictions. Chris Fabricant wants us to be critical on everything we hear and read. And junk science relies on, on case studies, right? And so, These are anecdotal stories, basically, of how a particular crime was quote unquote solved using a particular forensic technique. And so sometimes they're written up kind of like literature, you know what I mean, in that they're, and they're submitted to peer reviewed journals like the Journal of Forensic Sciences. So, they'll have an article, you know what I mean, in a peer reviewed journal that talks about how this technique, this whiz bang technique, was successfully used to solve a particular crime. But that doesn't mean anything. It's storytelling, you know what I mean? But it's easy to conflate this with actual research when we're talking about storytelling. So Ted Bundy's a story that is told, Casey Anthony's a story that is told. Our pod boss probably has some successful, you know, here's, I found a body here, right? So therefore it works, you know what I mean? But that's not science, you know, that's storytelling. All right. I hope you enjoyed that bonus episode on junk science. If you want to learn more about junk science, you can read Chris Fabricant's book, Junk Science. You can find it on Amazon or wherever you get your books. All right, take care and talk to you soon.