Transcript
And also, this is one I am really excited to talk about our friend and friend of the show, Maggie Freeling, the celebrated podcast host and producer of Webby nominated Unjust and unsolved murder in Alliance, and the award winning Suave, has joined the Wrongful Conviction podcast. Brett, I'm so excited to talk about our friend Maggie Freeling because she does phenomenal work. We respect her. We've talked to her many times. We've talked about cases we disagree on, cases we agree on. And she has such insightful work that she does. The wrongful conviction with Maggie Freeling airs each Monday, with Jason Flom episodes moving to Thursdays. Both hosts share intimate conversations with men and women who have spent years in prison for crimes they maintain they did not commit. Police search, find and follow wrongful conviction wherever you listen to podcasts. The prosecutors podcast is brought to you by a progressive where drivers who say by switching save over $700 on average quote now at progressive.com progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates national annual average insurance savings by new customers surveyed who say with progressive between June 2020 and May 2021. Potential savings will vary, but I just can't get enough of podcasts. And you know what? I've often wondered which 1980's Bad Boy made a daring escape from prison and later had his freedom negotiated by a former Beatle. Or why did the father of a Hollywood A-lister confess to the assassination of JFK? These are just a few of the questions answered on an all new season of Badlands. Badlands is a true crime podcast that dives deep into the real stories of the famous at their most infamous in the newest season. They tell the stories of celebrities whose crimes and careers are as unbelievable as some of their film's plot twists. Yeah, well, as you can hear the story of Sharon Tate, who was caught up in a strange scene long before members of the Manson family came along. The story of how Judy Garland's lifelong addiction appeal sent her over the rainbow much too soon, and about how Winona Ryder was connected to a child kidnapping case in her hometown. It's all on Badlands. Get new episodes every Wednesday wherever you get your podcast, or binge the entire season right now, only on Amazon Music Badlands. Check it out. And and and and I'm Bret and I'm Alice, and we are the prosecutors. Today on the prosecutors, we conclude our look at the death of Damien. Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of the prosecutors barrette, and I'm joined, as always by my steadfast co-host, co-hosted by my steadfast co-host Alice, you don't get a do over. Everyone has to hear the way you mispronounced it last, you know, do overs in this podcast. No do overs. What is no editing? No editing whatsoever? Steadfast indeed, Brett, because you and I are both standing after an amazing weekend at Crime Con. I can't believe I'm actually coherent and like awake enough to record right now, but I it was the best weekend meeting so many of you. Man, it was awesome. I didn't know what to expect. I never been to a crime con before and it surpassed all my expectations. You guys are so great. I'm sorry those of you who we missed. Really sorry about that. I mean, we were running all over the place. It was, I mean, it was incredible if you guys haven't been to work on it. It was a joy to attend, both because of all the people who were there, the listeners and just all your kind words. And because of some of the wonderful podcasters, I mean, we met Tim and Lance. We met Heather Ashley from Big Man to crime. We were right next to dark poutine, which you talked about poutine before and dark poutine and how, you know, I told them actually that next crime on their swag should be poutine. I think they've had the most popular table that would be if they were to do this, then we would definitely be next to them because then, you know, we would be at our table the whole time we would be. And you guys, I mean, people brought gifts. Oh, Brad Alison from Ding Dong. True crime brought me a plushie. Kathy later that she crocheted system raising. Yeah, and she made these dinosaurs that knit dinosaurs that actually my older son took to show and tell at school today because he was so excited to show his friends the knit dinosaurs. People painted kindness rocks for us with like our prosecutors logo on it and dropped us off snacks to make sure we weren't hungry. And I got a box of chocolates. Mean, it was like it was like Christmas. It was so amazing. I was not expecting that at all. So if we missed you guys, it was not our intent whatsoever. We felt like we were at our table all the time. But we were also, as Brett said, kind of pulled in a few different directions. And so we're trying to run around Crime Con and it was pretty big. Just like geographically, I felt running to the bathroom and back to podcast row was like, you know, an exercise for me. Maybe that just means I don't exercise enough. I mean, somebody brought me a bottle of bourbon, which was actually whiskey, which often is very good. I mean, you even gone on bourbon crazy gummy bears, Brett. Yes, that's true. I guess we're pretty predictable, huh? We are we're pretty predictable and that's fine. But it was awesome. It was just absolutely tremendous. I mean, it's it's we may be dwelling on this a little bit, but look, here's a fact. You know, people talk about negative reviews and do they matter and should you read them and all this other stuff? The fact of the matter is that most creators are inherently, what's the word I'm looking for? We lack in self-esteem. Yes, exactly. They're inherently hard on themselves and they are full of doubt. And it doesn't matter who they are. I feel like Alison. I get slings and arrows and work enough that we're a little bit thick skinned, compared maybe to some people. But still, it still affects you when all you hear is negative. And so just to have so many of you come up and say such nice things. And then it was amazing. It was amazing and we really appreciated it. We will be in Orlando next year, and I hope you guys will join us as well. And we learned our mistake. We thought bringing like a thousand prosecutes these fantastic pun to give to you guys would be enough. But we were completely out so soon, so we tried to hold a couple back. But just say, you know, when I got home, I realized I had stuffed a couple away just in case this had happened so that we would have a go by to order more. So I, Kendall, I promised you one. I will mail you one. Everybody else, we will have more prosecutors in the future. You cannot buy them. You can only get them if you meet us in person. So that's a little bit of a carrot for you to make it to the next event so we can personally hand you a prosecutor's key. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's a cousy for the prosecutors. And give us a hug. Absolutely. Absolutely. So that's a tough on Crime Con. We'll have to get vocal later and we can talk about Crime Con some more. But I know that most of you probably didn't come here and hear us gush about Crime Con and how awesome it was, though, like I said, definitely should come to the next one. But today we're going to finish our coverage of the Damien Hurd case. I assume we'll finish it and just more of this discussion about what exactly happened to this young man, this young wrestler who was found dead in mysterious circumstances in Colorado last week. We talked about how the night that he probably died there was a fight in a party that he attended, that he had instigated a lot of hard feelings. Some point he sort of disappears into the night, is caught on camera, putting gas in his car tank. And then the next morning, a woman taking a walk on a hiking trail about five miles from campus sees what will turn out to be his body hanging from a pair of jumper cables from a tree. And the question that remains to this day is was it a murder or was it suicide? We walked through the timeline last week, and now we're going to talk about some of the the weird things about this case and the evidence in this case and sort of see where it leads us in the end. And one thing I want to start with is the police investigation. Whenever you have a case like this where there's a controversy about the cause of death, sometimes one of the criticisms will be that the police didn't really look into it, that they assumed from the beginning that it was a suicide and then moved on from there. Look, I think when the police found Damien in the circumstances, they found him. Their initial thought was probably that this was a suicide. That would have been their initial thought, even if it was a murder, because it's very clear that if this were a murder, it was staged to look like a suicide. But they certainly thought it was a suicide in the beginning. But they didn't. They did not run some sort of cursory investigation here, it's pretty clear they did a pretty thorough job. They interviewed around 45 people, including many of the attendees at the party in many of Damien's friends. The report that they wrote on this case ran a hundred and eighty seven pages. I mean, let's talk about that for 45 people in a relatively upon first glance. He is found with a cord around his neck, and his own car is there for them to then investigate further. 45 people takes a while to interview. They may be short interviews, but you have to find those people get them in and then you have to write 45 reports. Remember, there's all the paperwork that comes with the interview. You don't just interview and go on. You have to document what you've done. And so in order to do all that work, they set aside a good portion of their time to do this. And I point that out because it's not merely one minute conversations with 45 different people, but rather each interview itself comes with it. Kind of exponential work on the back end because of everything you have to do. Once you interview someone and document it within the case and the police, they're recording all these interviews. A lot of these interviews are available if you wanted to listen to them, if you have the case file. And it's pretty clear, like Alice said, I mean, this is the kind of investigation you want to have. You want to have an investigation that really digs in where you talked to a lot of people. Now, look, they didn't talk to everybody in Gunnison, Colorado, and they maybe didn't talk to everybody that you think they maybe should have talked to. That is always going to be the case. It is always going to be the case that there are people the police deem for whatever reason, it's not worth their time to investigate. Investigations are like everything else. The police have limited time, they have limited resources. And even though when we focus on a case and we put all of our effort and energy to into it, we feel like why didn't the police do the same? And you can have people who investigate cases for years. And you know, it would be great if the police could do the same thing and put the same amount of resources in every case and follow it on every single lead and top every single loose in and talk to every single person you could ever imagine that they should talk to. But that's never going to happen, and I think all you can do is look at these investigations in a realistic way. Did they really do an investigation? Were they really trying to get to the truth? Did they talk to the people that they really needed to talk to? And were they able to support whatever conclusion they came to? I think this was a good investigation. Like I said, the police was suicide and they thought it was suicide pretty early on. This was a hanging hanging is the second most popular method of suicide, particularly for men behind only firearms, and in addition to that, it's a pretty rare way to murder someone. So the only way and they're the only reason, really you would even do that probably is to cover up a suicide. So I say that because on the one hand, hanging incredibly rare way to kill someone. But if you were going to murder someone and you had strangled them and you decided, man, I got to cover this up hangings, probably what you would do. So there's a little bit of, you know, six of one half a dozen of another there. But I think the police, I looked at the scene, they did not see a lot of evidence of struggle. We're going to talk more about that. And there was some evidence that Damien was under the influence of drugs and alcohol, but not so much that he would be easily overpowered. Suicide seemed like the natural outcome. If that's the case, then the natural question is what was Damien's state of mind, especially because the universal opinion of Damien's friends and family is that he was not suicidal. His father stated that Damien was as happy as he'd ever been. You know, other friends just described him as a guy with a smile that lit up the room. He was excited. He was an athlete. He had friends. He really was liked by everyone. And you know, he'd planned a hike for the day after he died, and he'd even planned to have lunch with a girl he knew as well. You know, oftentimes we see that if someone is privately preparing to to take their own life, they don't make plans for the future. That is very common in as we see in our defendants who actually have entered pretty deep stages of depression. They don't make plans for the future. They don't care how their case comes out in the future. Now, not everyone who's depressed is suicidal, but rather we do see that that's a diagnosis and a sign after the fact. We can look back on to say while they didn't make plans in the future and this makes sense taking their state of mind that they didn't expect to be there for those future plans. And here we have Damian making plans for the very next day and fun plans that he would enjoy having lunch with a friend, hiking, being in the outdoors, and he'd even made plans with a friend to rent an apartment the next semester. Really, nothing about how Damian was acting gave any indication he was contemplating taking his own life. Nevertheless, several of the partygoers told police that Damian was not himself the night of the party and that he seemed very upset during most of the time people were talking to him. He was laying on the floor of a friend's room with a blanket over his head. There's a couple of things that I think are interesting here. The first is one of them problems with trying to figure out any kind of case when you're doing it. Not really based on evidence, but on figuring out what's in someone's head is it's really hard to do. There are a lot of cases. Alice has talked about them where suicides, when you look back on it, it's actually pretty predictable. You see somebody who's not making a lot of plans for the future who seems to be wrapping up their business. You know, the plans they are making or the plans for where things are going to go after they die, those kind of things returning things that they borrowed. I mean, these little things that happen. But there is a subset of suicide, which is almost spontaneous where the person makes a decision not based on long term thinking, but based on sort of what's happening in the moment. Right. So here you've got these sort of competing things. On the one hand, it seems like Damian is making plans for the future, so he doesn't seem like somebody who's planning to commit suicide. This is consistent with what his dad said. His father said, Look, he just he just can't believe it, that he would do it. I mean, based on everything the way he talked and and the way he was working on his wrestling and the plans he had for that and just just all these things, it just didn't seem like he would be someone who'd commit suicide. But then you have this event that night that we keep coming back to this party. This fight, which is the absolute key to whatever happened, whether it was a murder or whether it's a suicide, it's all tied to this party and you have this party, this traumatic event where. Damian, you know, he gets in this fight here, it's his hand, maybe he breaks his hand, he's embarrassed himself in front of his teammates. He's seems like he's kind of in a depression that night at least. And that makes you wonder if maybe this was the thing where whatever lingering depression Damian might have had might have taken hold. Because just because somebody seems happy and they're making plans doesn't mean that they have some things they're struggling with. And I think that's something that's easy to forget. The other thing that's interesting about this is the fact that Damian had made plans to hike the next day. One of the things that sometimes said about Damian is he couldn't have killed himself because he would have even known where this thing was. This was completely out of character for him to be outside. He wouldn't have even known how to get there. It's kind of hard to get to. But then he'd say that he was planning a hike, which seems to contradict that. It seems like actually, maybe he did know about that place. And just because some of his friends didn't realize that sometimes he liked to go off and maybe walk the trails by himself and clear his head doesn't mean it was something he wasn't doing. And in fact, he'd planned a hike for all we know. He planned a hike in the same place where he ended up. We don't know that for sure, and it's never been entirely clear where this hike was planned, but nevertheless, that's something to keep in mind. So, you know, these are the things the the sort of evidence that cuts both ways that make this case and a lot of these cases really hard to figure out exactly what's going on. 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That's code tip at Farideh FH e r t y brand.com/ TP for 20 percent off Farideh Brand.com/ TP brat. You and I know a thing or two about debt, having graduated from law school with debt and marrying lawyers who also have debt. Well, are you planning down to pay that debt or other credit card debt you have? A personal loan could be your solution. Loans usually come with fixed monthly payments, making them a simple way to help pay off your credit cards. Plus, loans usually have lower interest rates than credit cards do, and credit karma can help you find the best option for you. Credit Karma uses your credit data to find loan offers that a personalized to you so you can have a better idea of what loan amount you can get approved for. And Credit Karma will even show you your chances of approval so you can choose between loan offers that you're more likely to get approved for and apply with more confidence. So if you're ready to apply and take back control of your finances, head to Credit Karma.com/ loan offers to see personalized offers. That's Credit Karma slash loan offers to find the loan for you. Credit Karma.com/ loan offers Alison. When we were a crime con, people asked Do you really love HelloFresh as much as you say you do? And the answer is an enthusiastic yes. HelloFresh is the best way to make home cooking easy, fun and affordable, and that's why it's America's number one meal kit. HelloFresh is 72 percent cheaper than dining at a restaurant and is even cheaper than grocery shopping. That's more money back in your pocket. And, you know, our friends asked us if my kids really did gobble up those firecracker meatballs. And of course, of that night I had made firecracker meatballs and my kids definitely gobbled them up. They just love it. And the great thing is that Green Chef and every play is now owned by HelloFresh and with a wider array of meal plans to choose from. There's something for everyone. I love switching between the brands, and now all of you can enjoy both brands at a discount on us so you can pick your favorites from 50 different weekly options and skip weeks when you need to change your delivery date or update your preferences. All in the HelloFresh app, so go to HelloFresh.com/ TP 16 and use code TP 16 for up to 16 free meals and three free gifts. That's HelloFresh.com/ TP 16 and use code TP 16 for up to 16 free meals. And find out for yourself why HelloFresh is America's number one meal kit. Now, to the extent you think some of the things we've talked about today cut towards suicide, there are things that cut the other way as well. One of them is Damien's jewelry. Now, Damien was known to wear a pair of fake diamond stud earrings. Photographs from the party that night, the night that he may well have died, show that he was wearing them. However, when his body was found, the earrings were missing. They've never been found, and although these were fake, they were pretty convincing. And it's possible that someone could have believed they were real. And if they did that, maybe they've Damien's dead and they decide, Hey, I'm just going to take these as a souvenir. Moreover, both the hat and the jacket that Damien had been wearing that night of the party have never been found. There's also his money on Saturday that day. Damien took $100 out of the ATM when his body was found. He had no money in his wallet whatsoever. Now, the police have confirmed that there were at least two drug purchases that he made that weekend. It's possible he used his cash to pay for those. We believe that they were about $25 apiece, so that probably only accounts for half of the money. Now look, the money thing is a little shaky because he's going to a party. Who knows, maybe he bought some food. Maybe he gave some cash to somebody for some alcohol. There's really no telling, you know how it is. You put cash in your wallet, it disappears and you're like, Where's all of that money? Go? I just went to the ATM and I don't have any money, and it could be something like that. Both of those are really difficult because it's easy to say, Oh, some so-and-so always wore something, and even if there were pictures of him that night. I know for me, I actually have fake diamond stud earrings in right now, and they're poking against, you know, I have headphones on right now and they poke against my head. And so oftentimes, if I'm talking on the phone or if I'm frustrated, you know, anything on my skin can make me frustrated. When I'm agitated, I can. I take him off and kind of fiddle with him, even though I most often have them on and because they're studs. I lose my earring studs all the time. I stick them in my pocket. I stick them on the floor on, you know, on the console between the seats in my car, and I kind of forget about them. So it's hard to say because maybe he did wear them all the time, but he could have been the one to take them off in a fit of anxiety because there's something annoying him, whether it's the back of the earrings poking his head or whatnot. And as for the money you've, you've hit the nail on the head. He went to several parties and we know that he was buying drugs and he wasn't buying drugs for the credit card. That's not how you make those purchases. You use cash because it's untraceable, because money is fungible. And so we have an idea of what he bought, but we don't really know what happened at those purchase if if other things were bought, if he had owed money and he was paying back his friend, if he had purchased something previously and he got more than he could pay for at the time, he was paying them back. Those are all possibilities, especially when we just don't know what happened exactly at those transactions, since they include illicit activity. And look, this is not a nice thing to think about, and there's no real evidence of this because there's no real evidence of anyone being around Damien's body. But one thing that you have to consider Damien's body was outside in a fairly open area for three or four days. It is not outside the realm of possibility that there was somebody who found his body and they essentially robbed him. You know, there is absolutely going to happen to somebody found his body took the diamond studs, took the money out of his wallet and then just never said anything about it. I mean, that could have happened. Pro tip if that's you and you find a dead body and you had nothing to do with the death, don't take anything. Absolutely. What a way. What a way to implicate yourself in a murder you had nothing to do with. There's yeah. And and you know, there's probably some people in jail right now who did something like that and ended up in prison. Everybody's like, Yeah, right? You just rob them. You didn't kill them. So I just had to throw that pro tip in there. Yeah. Pro tip. That's not a that's not legal advice. That's common sense. But it certainly happens. And and we just don't know, right? And maybe you think and the weird thing about this? Damian wasn't robbed and then murdered and then staged like that didn't happen. OK, murderers don't stage suicides. That's not what they do, and they don't really strangle people to death either. That's not, excuse me, robbers don't stage suicides, and they don't really strangle people to death, either. It would be a strange robber who would strangle someone to death, particularly someone like Damian, who was a tough guy. You got to. You're going to strangle him. You better be and you better be a tough guy, too. And one of the things we're going to talk about is there just aren't that many injuries at all on Damian's body, and there's not a lot of evidence of any kind of struggle. And you got to think that if somebody came up to rob him and they're going to try and choke him to death, that there would've been a massive struggle and we just don't see that. Moreover, if someone had robbed him, they would've just left the body. They wouldn't have then driven him out to this area and staged a suicide. They wouldn't have done that to the extent the robbery is relevant at all. It's like messy staging. It's a circumstance where someone murdered him for some other reason, stage the body and then was thinking, Well, just in case they don't think it's a suicide, I'll take your stuff to. And then maybe they'll think it's a robbery, which happens more than you would think. It's like people who stage crimes are not often geniuses. I mean, people commit crimes. People think they're brilliant. They're not even the ones who get away with it or just lucky. So. In this case, to the extent you see evidence of a robbery, it's probably even that is staged. Well, then let's talk about his car. The state of his car. So we've talked about his body and how it's hard to know so many days after his death. We find him whether the missing things are in fact missing or if someone took them. But some have described Damien's car as ransacked as if someone was searching the car for something to use as a ligature. Those who think Damien is murdered believe this is significant, though is just as likely that if Damien's decision to kill himself a spontaneous, he would have been desperately searching his own car for something to use in the attempt. Imagine this this is not planned out. He did not plan for this to happen. He had planned a hike to the next day and have lunch with a friend the next day. But the fight, the mixture of, you know, drinking and drugs put him in a place that was not his right mind. And he decides, You know what? I've let everyone down. Everything is terrible. It has to end now. And he didn't plan it. So it's not like he came with a rope or something in order to carry out ending his life. So instead, he's he's essentially ransacking his own car, looking for anything. And we know that this would be out of character for him because others have said that he likes to keep his car very clean, but he doesn't care at this point. If what he's trying to do is to end his life, he doesn't care if his car is clean. This goes to the not caring about the future, right? Who cares what his car looks like? He's not going to come back to the car. You can imagine that scenario if he decided to kill himself kind of on the spot, and there just has to be what it was. I mean, if it was a suicide and that just has to be what it was, that this was basically a spontaneous act and there may be some of you who are thinking that doesn't even make sense. But it's more common than you would think. I mean, one of the common indicators for suicide is the availability of a way to commit suicide, which is strange. But some examples gas ovens and when there were gas ovens that were not safe enough. And if you open them up, you could basically use them to commit suicide. There was a high rate of suicide. There is all sorts of studies of this in England. Once they went to safety ovens, it didn't have this. The suicide rate plummeted. You're much more likely to commit suicide if you have a gun in the house because you have a readily available way to commit suicide. There are two bridges I believe in Seattle. Very similar. Very close to each other. Same height, both over bodies of water. One of them has lots of suicides associated with it. The other one doesn't. And people wondered, Why is that? And eventually someone figured out it's because one of them, the railing is about three feet high and the other one, the railing is about five feet high. And that just that little difference was enough to keep people who were depressed and who were on the bridge and were thinking about doing something themselves to stop. And oftentimes just just stopping that day when the depression is the deepest and its grip on you is the tightest is enough to avoid it altogether if you just don't have that easy opportunity. And I feel like in this case, this is there's people like if he was in kill himself, why didn't he bring rope or whatever? No, it wasn't that well thought out. I think Alice is 100 percent true. Same thing. His seat was pulled back or leaned back. I mean, he could have been laying there thinking about it. He could have pushed it back to look for something. And it's just to me, this fact tells you almost nothing. It could be evidence of a murder, or it could be evidence of a suicide, because you can imagine a very plausible scenario in either case where someone would be looking frantically through that car for something to use as a ligature. Yeah. You mentioned the leaning back in the car thing, how some have pointed to the fact that his seat was lean back, that someone else was driving it since Damien himself was a smaller guy and didn't need his seat pushed back that far. But I don't know if I'm constantly trying to clean out under my car like there's always children's food and goldfish, you know, stuffed under the seats. And I don't clean out my car until the smell gets so bad that I'm like, I got to find whatever cheese has been stuffed under there by some child. And I how I get to all the parts of my car. Imagine is trying to search every part of his car because he is desperate to find something to use as a ligature. You push back your seat, you get. That's how you can reach parts of your underneath your car. You may not otherwise be able to access. You lean back so that you can reach behind you to the seat behind you under you. In between, you know that the space in between the console and the car seat in the driver's seat is pretty tight unless you were to move the seat back and forth, because then you can have access to parts of the narrow place in between. The console and the seat, if you move your seat. Yeah, I don't think if, if, if this is a suicide, I don't think he got there knowing, well, I'm going to use the jumper cables. I think he blew through his car looking for something. And there they were. And that's what he used. Let's talk about the autopsy report. So the autopsy report, there was a toxicology report done show that Damien had LSD and marijuana in his system at the time of his death. It did not show the presence of alcohol, which was surprising to some, given that everyone agrees he was drinking at the party. Now, many people have described him as drunk. Makes you kind of wonder, was he drunk or was he higher? And maybe people just mistook that for him having a lot of alcohol. It makes you wonder if he was acting strange and people thought he was drunk if he was not only high, but also in a headspace that he normally wasn't in. Right. I think we've we've seen whether we act that way or someone else acts when they are very, very upset or kind of in a manic place or a very, just heightened sense place. Their eyes are different, they look different, and you can tell if you know someone, well, that something's wrong. And since they're at a party and if others don't know what he's feeling internally, they may mistake his emotional state as actually being drunk. And it does it makes you think it has to be something like that just because you don't think a toxicology report would miss alcohol. You might miss a lot of things and might miss other kind of substances. But alcohol is a pretty easy one, and there was no alcohol found in these tests. The family had an independent toxicology report done. It actually came back clear of all substances, which is clearly not right. Damian had purchased LSD two different times that night. It makes perfect sense that he would be on LSD. He was known to smoke marijuana. So I think I don't know what was going on with that report, but it seems inaccurate. Another thing about the LSD use is apparently there was a synthetic LSD going around, which is a little weird because LSD itself is synthetic, but this is just another chemically altered version of LSD, which we don't really have a lot of studies about how this particular thing works. Apparently, it's much stronger than regular LSD. We don't know for certain that Damien had that kind of LSD, but there's some evidence that he did. And there was at least one witness who said that Damien took two tabs and they took one. And this witness said that the one tab they took affected them more than any LSD they'd ever taken before. So it's possible and that that witnesses little unconfirmed. But it's possible that Damien was under the influence of some pretty serious LSD, at least at some point during the party. And that maybe didn't have as much to drink and what he had had to drink by the time he decided to take this action had already gone through his system. As most of you know, alcohol is metabolized at about one drink an hour or so. You can do the math on that. So Damien's hyoid bone was not broken and broken. Hyoid bone is often a sign of strangulation, though sometimes the heavyweight bone can break for other reasons, and it's far from universal that it will break when strangulation occurs. There are a couple of things to mention. Number one, younger people are less likely to have a broken hyoid bone than older people, and in fact, it only happens in around 30 to 40 percent of strangulation anyway. And hanging almost never fractures the hyoid bone, whereas manual strangulation is much more likely to cause damage to it. And that's just because of where the rope sits on your throat versus where you might strangle someone. You can sort of, you know, do them a imagination of how that works if you if you want to think it through. But anyway, there's no Highwood bone, so doesn't necessarily mean he wasn't strangled, but it's not evidence of strangulation, either. If we had found a damaged hyoid bone, that would be pretty strong evidence that there was something other than a hanging going on here. Now, one thing that was visible in autopsy photos is a long blond hair that was, on her end, Damien's hand. It was never submitted for DNA testing, and apparently it was never collected for evidence. That's just unfortunate. It would be nice if they had. Does it is it necessarily significant? Not necessarily. It's one hair. It could have come from any number of places. And I guess the thinking is that if Damien struggled with someone, it could be from them. But once again, there's no real evidence of struggle. And this is the thing when you have a piece of evidence like this and you're trying to fit it in if you had evidence of a struggle. Then this piece of evidence would seem significant. But when you don't have evidence of a struggle and you just have a hair, you could have come from any number of places. Go all the way back to the Dali ritzier case. They found a long blonde hair on the windowsill where the window was cut. And they thought at the time, Well, this is evidence that Dali cut the window because there's her hair. It turned out it was the hair of a police officer. Right. So like, this kind of stuff can come from a lot of different places would have loved them to test his hair and confirm what it was. But they didn't, and it's gone and it's gone forever. And you know, here we have the visible blonde hair to for the autopsy photo. It's not from the photo at the site where his body was found. So it's very possible that, you know, we've talked about the the whenever anyone enters into a site, they leave behind something, whether it's visible or not. But we have now, you know, moved Damian's body from the location where it was last, you know where he was found to the place where the autopsy is being done and these pictures are being taken. There's a lot of steps in between. And I don't know what the position of the blond hair was, but it's possible that it was introduced after the police took custody of his body. Let's talk about fingerprints, the police fingerprinted Damien's car. Let me stop there really quick. This is an additional step as well. We're talking about the police investigation. It may seem because you see on TV that everything's fingerprinted and it's really easy to do, but it's not a step that's taken in every single case because you can't just fingerprint something and analyze it on site, you actually have to send it off to a lab. Most places, most police departments have to send it off to be analyzed, and there's a backlog because there's only so many analysts who can report on these fingerprints. And it usually takes some time and it costs money to run these fingerprinting tests. And once it comes back, you then have to analyze and see if it matches anything in law enforcement databases. So I say this just to add to the fact that this so far is seeming like a relatively thorough investigation. So the police fingerprinted Damien's car, but no usable prints came back. This is not surprising. What this means is that if there are prints there, they're so smudged they've been wiped or they weren't clean enough prints that the the analysis can't really come back definitive to say what the prints are. Some of this can be done by wiping down, say, a car in order to wipe it clean of all evidence. And some do believe that they believe that there's no usable prints because whoever murdered Damien made sure to wipe down their fingerprints. But as we have said before, fingerprints aren't as common as people think particularly usable ones. So often we get back fingerprint reports that say no usable prints or no prints of value, and that is just a technical term for the report. That means there may be no prints or it's so smudged. Think about So I have a computer right now that lets me log in if I put my finger on it oftentimes, and I have to place my finger, you know, pretty much perfectly on it. I can't go at it sideways. I can't move my finger too much. In order for the computer to read my fingerprint correctly, think about that for fingerprint analysis. When you are grabbing a glass or a door handle of a car, you're not thinking about making sure you leave perfectly identified fingerprints, right? You don't. You grab a door handle very differently than you do when you are actually being fingerprinted, say for like your passport or something like that. You're very careful when you're at your hand and you, you know, someone usually helps you put your hand down or you press hard, stay for a moment and then your hand pulls straight back up. Careful not to touch any parts of it so that you have usable prints. That's not how we typically go about our lives. And that's why it's not uncommon to not have usable prints, and the police have confirmed that this is likely what happened here. Lead Detective Chris Dano's said quote There was lots of evidence of hand grease and latent prints, but nothing that we could pull and submit for identification. And that's not uncommon on something that is used multiple times, like a steering wheel. The police also look for DNA and found a ton of it, though they could not link it to any particular person given the substantial mixture of DNA profiles. And this probably isn't that surprising. He's a college guy. And if you have lots of people riding your car and you don't often clean it by cleaning, I mean, like DNA, clean, right, vacuuming and doing the scrub down, then you're likely to have lots of different people's DNA mixed together. For those of you who've listened to the Final Days on Earth podcast, you've heard Damian's dad talk about this, and it's one of the things he thinks is unusual because he says at one point that he had a car full of wrestlers in that car just that day, and it just didn't make sense to him that they couldn't find fingerprints. But that's actually part of the problem. Part of the problem is he had so many people in that car at various times, and that would have meant tons of fingerprint smudges, tons of DNA and actually would make it very difficult to find that sort of one magical fingerprint that you could use. You know, there are cases. I was listening to a podcast on a case recently where the reason they were able to catch the murderer is they had wiped down the car. Which means they had gotten rid of all the other fingerprints and then they left one. But because they had wiped down the car, it was easier for police to find the one fingerprint that they had left behind. And when you don't have that and when you have just a normal vehicle with all kinds of people in it, it is going to be more difficult to find a fingerprint, which is significant. So just not surprising murder or not. Not surprising that they weren't able to find usable fingerprints in that car. Alice, we've got a very different kind of sponsor today, but it's one that our listeners should know well by now. The Jordan Harbinger Show. It's a podcast you should definitely check out, since you're a fan of high quality, fascinating podcast hosted by interesting people. There is something for everyone. Go listen to Sammy The Bull Gravano, talk about his experiences in the mob, or if you're into true crime and unjust convictions. Listen to Amanda Knox. Tell her own amazing story. There is something for everyone. The show covers such a wide range of topics through weekly interviews with heavy hitting guests, and there are a ton of episodes you'll find interesting. 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He and Damien had been friends before. And Anthony thought at first that Damien was just playing around when he jumped on his back, but that Damien was a different person than he'd known before. At the time, he didn't know why Damien attacked him, though he later learned that it was because he was dating Marlena Romero. Damien's ex-girlfriend After the fight, Anthony left the party. He said he never saw Damien again. So the picture, at least we're getting from Anthony, is that he had no beef himself with Damien. And it's not like they'd been going back and forth about Marlena. He went so far as to tell police he thought that when Damien jumped on him to attack him, it was just fun and games. You know, they got rowdy at a party. He didn't really completely register at first that Damien was trying to hurt him. And in fact, Damien didn't really hurt him, as we know. Now, of course, this is from Anthony's perspective, and Anthony has an interest in telling this type of a story that shades him very well, especially if he thinks that the police think of him as a suspect since they did have this fight before Damien was then found dead. And, you know, Anthony is an interesting, interesting person, because on the one hand, he is almost certainly a completely innocent victim in this case. He can do anything. He dated a girl. And one day he shows up a party and he gets jumped and he gets beaten up. They're not that badly. And then he leaves the party. And what do you know next day or couple of days later, he finds out that the person who had been a friend of his who had jumped him has now died. And he's in a situation where he has to know that he's going to be a person of interest initially before they figure out what happened. For obvious reasons. Somebody turns up dead, one of the first people you're going to look at is somebody who had a confrontation with them, literally the night that it happened. So should we. Should we do that? Should we consider whether or not Anthony is involved with sort of one of the theories that people spin up about how this could have happened is that the tennis, excuse me, the track team goes after the other party? Anthony still angry that this happened, and he was not surprising. You know, I think if anybody got jumped and punched at a party by one of their friends, they would be irritated and that at some point they decided to sort of continue the fight. So they the track team, they get Damian to meet him somewhere, maybe out at the at the trail where his body is eventually found, they resume the fight and at some point. Damien is killed, and they have to they have to they have to stage it, they have to stage this, this hanging to cover it up. Let's just go ahead and debunk that theory now because I feel like Anthony should be able to move on his life without having this dark cloud hanging over him. We talked about the autopsy report. What you don't find is much evidence of a fight. If Damien had gotten into a fight with the track team that night or were just with Anthony before he died, you would see evidence of that. He would see a lot more bruising on his hands. You would see damage to his face where he was punched. You would see. Evidence of a struggle at the scene, you would see all of those things, you probably would see a lot more damage on Anthony because he would have gotten in another fight that night and this one would have been a fight to the death. And when you looked at Damian's body, you wouldn't see it as a strangulation, you would see it as something else, a beating or whatever else led to his death. Hard to imagine a situation in which the member of the track team would get the wrestling, yeah, the guy who's going to be a national champion wrestler and to some sort of situation where he's going to be able to strangle him to death, it's just really hard to imagine that happening. And it's certainly hard to imagine it happening with literally no evidence of it happening. So whatever your theory is here, if you think this was some sort of murder, I think you can eliminate Anthony in the track team because it's basically impossible to think of a scenario where those guys would have been involved in this. And oh, by the way, none of them ever mentioned it. For all the years that passed, they've sort of held together in this pact of silence about what they did to Damian or Anthony is carried this. The thought that Anthony could have pulled this off alone is just impossible to imagine. That's the other thing about the murder theory. There had to be multiple people involved to make this work. So you have to have a conspiracy of silence. And it's just there's even even when you consider the murder theory and the evidence that supports it, none of it points towards Anthony and the track team. Yeah. The lack of a sign of struggle is just a massive hole in the theory that this is a murder. Anthony, they had the fight earlier in the day and there were signs of that fight. Right? It was. Damian had tried to punch Anthony and punched his hand into the ground instead, and there were signs of that. And so if that was a a fight where in Damian had the upper hand because he was laying in wait, so to speak, to attack Anthony when he came, if there was that much there. Can you imagine how much more there would have been if Damian were caught unawares, if he were not on the offensive in the defense, if he would have had so many more wounds? And we don't see any of those wounds pass what he inflicted essentially on himself from earlier in the night when he was trying to fight Anthony. And I say that he'd have more wounds if he were on the defensive, because when you're in the offensive, you're the one driving. He knows this. He's a wrestler. You're the one driving the geography of the fight, so to speak. But when you're in the defensive, there's no choreography. You are reactive and you are fighting for your life. And so there's no best punch you're going for. You are clawing at whatever you can to save your own life. And that's why when we find victims who have struggled against their killer, we look under their fingernails because they caught whatever they have. You look at that the defensive wounds on their arms, because if someone's going for your body parts that are sensitive, like your organs in your face, you put your hands up in order to defend yourself. Oftentimes, stabbing victims have stab wounds on their hands through their hands. Because they put, we instinctively put our hands up to defend ourselves. We don't think about what is the best way to ward off someone, but rather instinct. Instinct jumps in and we see none of those common defence wounds anywhere on Damian. And because of what Alyssa said, because of the lack of struggle, because of that, because of the lack of defensive wounds. People have tried to figure out a way that this essentially could have been some sort of weird accident. Maybe that was covered up. Maybe it's less murder and more of an accident, or maybe a hazing. I mean, something different than an attack because we just don't see the defensive wounds we would expect. And that's led some people to an oxygen deprivation mask that was found at the party. At least three witnesses, including Courtney, who you may recall is one of the people who actually lives at the wrestling house, said that Carl, who was the captain of the wrestling team and who was also living at the house, had an oxygen deprivation mask at the party. Now, before your mind starts racing about what exactly and oxygen deprivation mask is, it's actually a training tool. It's a mask that's used to lower the amount of oxygen that athletes receive while training, and the whole point is to simulate a high altitude area where you don't get as much oxygen. As you would at sea level, and the whole idea is that your body gets better and better and utilizing the oxygen you have because it knows that it's going to have less. So you have more red blood cells, bigger red blood cells, blood cells, red blood cells that carry oxygen more efficiently. And then when you take the mask off and you go for a run, it's like your supercharged. All of a sudden, you can run further and faster, and it doesn't affect you as much because your body is used to that sort of high altitude training. Now, they're pretty controversial in the athletic community. There are a lot of people they don't think they work, and there's other people who think they actually do some pretty serious damage to your body over time, particularly your lungs, which makes sense. There's a couple of things about it. Number one, these are not like strangulation tools, right? I mean, they're not meant to cut off all the oxygen. In fact, you're meant to do some pretty strenuous activity while wearing them. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, Kourtney says that she saw Carl with the mask at around 1:45, which was after he would tell the police that he'd left. The party car's timeline is a little wonky at various times, he says he left the party to go for a walk to cool off. He then came back. He also said he went to a football players party. The one thing about this is all these parties are pretty close together, and it seems like people are kind of moving from one party and coming back. So the 1:45 thing that Kourtney says is a little off. The other thing you have to remember about all these timelines is everybody was drinking and nobody knows what time it is. But when we were at crime scene, you know, most of the nights we would hang out at one of the bars in the hotel and a lot of people from Crime Con would go there. I had no idea what time it was because everyone was there and talking, even though I had my phone on me. And when I finally pulled myself away, it was like 2:30 in the morning and I thought it was something like midnight. I had no idea was that lay? All to say is it's completely understandable that a bunch of kids at a college party don't know exactly what time it is. The fact that they have conflicting timetables is not surprising whatsoever, and I don't think the police find it surprising either. We are generally kind of bad at memory all of us, and we are not good at telling time, just as a general matter, even if we're looking at times and clocks and certainly add in the element of alcohol and potentially other illicit substances. And then it being a party with music and talking to people coming and going. Timelines are going to be rough. And we would expect that in any sort of an investigation surrounding a party. And you see this so often in true crime and podcasts and documentaries and everything else where people place so much significance on conflicting timelines. And the number of times that actually matters are so slim, unless there is something that anchors you like you always watch the same television show every Monday night and the person knocked on your door and you were watching that show, then you have an anchor to tell them what time it is. Otherwise, there's no way you're going to know what time it was when something happened at a party. It's just not going to happen. Even if you're close, you're not going to be exact. And if you're trying to decide whether or not someone's telling the truth based on 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there, it's just not going to work. It's just not going to work. The memories are going to conflict and we're not really going to know anything. And the other problem with this, imagine it is 1:45. Imagine it is 145. And for some reason, Carl wasn't telling the truth about the fact that he was at the football party and he was actually there at 1:45 with this oxygen deprivation man. Haha, we got him right. Well, Damian was already gone by then, because what we can say for certain is that he was caught on camera at 1:37 buying gas. And this fact, this one fact is so important for this case because without evidence and without facts, you can let your imagination run wild, right? You can imagine all sorts of scenarios about what might have happened. So you got this oxygen deprivation mask and you have somebody who ends up dying by strangulation and you think maybe it's a cover up? Maybe it was staged. Maybe he didn't really hang himself. Well, what could have happened? Well, maybe he's on drugs. He's been drinking. He puts on this masks for some reason. Maybe they force him to put it on as some sort of hazing thing or some sort of punishment or whatever. And because of the combination of various things, the drugs and everything else, something goes wrong and he dies from lack of oxygen and everybody freaks out and they're like, We got to cover this up. You know, it's like, you know, I know what you did last summer, we got to cover this up. And so the hanging is staged, right? But you can imagine that scenario, that is a scenario that is internally consistent. But then you have this piece of evidence that messes everything up, which is the fact that he left the party alive, walked to campus, got his car, drove to the gas station and put gas in it. Most likely, he didn't then drive back to the party. I mean, that's just something that doesn't. That makes no sense. And there's no evidence that he did it. So it seems to just blow a massive hole in this particular theory about how this might have gone down, this sort of accidental theory involving the oxygen the oxygen deprivation may ask. And this seems like just a red herring that we see in so many cases where you see a piece of evidence and it can fit into a theory that could make sense. But the problem is when you look at all the evidence, it falls apart. Well, I thought we were going to finish out this week, but it looks like we're going to finish up next week. Festivals are just too chatty, best laid plans. You know what, I think we are just, you know, like I said at the very beginning, maybe we're just at our best when we are stretched thin and tired. So we just had a lot to say when we were so tired. We had a lot to say, and there's a lot more to say. There's a lot more evidence we would just power through. But I mean, I think we got another hour here. And so, you know, we don't want you guys get bored with us. So I think what we'll do is go ahead and do another episode on this, and it's a case that deserves three episodes, frankly. I mean, you have a person here who lost their life, and there's a lot of controversy happened. And if nothing else, they deserve truth. They deserve what actually happened to be out there. And I think looking at this stuff closely is one way to get there. I mean, there is, after all, an entire podcast dedicated to this case so interesting to hear what you guys think up to this point. You know how to get in touch with us at Prosecutors Pod for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Prosecutors pod gmail.com for all your inquiries you want to make on email. Those of you who are on Patreon, you can send us a message there. Or if you want to join the discussion on the gallery, which is our Facebook page, we'll do that. Lot of awesome people there. We always have fun talking about the cases with you. Thank you guys so much for telling your friends. The number of people Akram Khan, who told us that their sister or their brother or their mother in law told them about our podcast was a lot. So we really appreciate that it is the best way to get more people to listen. You guys are our best advertisers. There's just no question about it, and we are so thankful that you care enough about the show and you think highly enough of the show to recommend it to your friends and family. Indeed, thank you so much. It was such a joy. I think we're just like infused with so much energy. Having met so many of you and hearing your stories of the podcast, we we do it for you. We've told you that in person and we really mean it. We absolutely do. And we hope you enjoy it as much as we do. Well, we'll be back next week and next week we will finish up this case. But until then, and Brett and I'm Alice and we are the prosecutors. I'm tired. I, yeah, it's like isn't working as quickly. I know, I know. But aren't we always do we? It's not time to be fair. I know that's the thing. Maybe, you know, it's like that story about the lawyer told that he's really good when he's drunk. Maybe we're only good if we're tired. Like, maybe. Maybe. Maybe I was going to say he knows how good it would be if we did it like the more time. Maybe it would just be terrible. OK. Well, I'm ready when you are. That's how many people like that post on Instagram like, oh, my goodness, that was awesome. Maybe we should show our face more often. You know, it's like absence makes the heart. And. 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