Investigating true crime in the animal kingdom

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0:16This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and this is the story of a murder that couldn't be solved by humans alone.

1:01Just a warning, there are some graphic descriptions that may be hard to hear for some people. It all starts with a man who'd gone missing in Wynn Parish, Louisiana. It was in the summer of 2013. I was called in the evening hours. This is Bradley Marr. He was the lead detective on the case. There was a possible kidnapping. That's how it came in and that's how it first got involved. Detective Marr soon learned that the victim's roommate had evidence. He had a video camera system at his house, so he reviewed the video camera and saw the victim getting taken from the house at gunpoint. At that point, all hands on deck, I was the detective on call, so I got called and immediately went to the scene.

1:52Thanks to that video surveillance, the detective and his team quickly tracked down the alleged kidnapper. But the victim? He was nowhere to be found. We were searching hard. You know, we're sending out teams and basically just looking, looking for tire tracks, looking for evidence, looking for anything. And we're talking about an area here that was miles and miles and miles across. No clues, nothing. By now, Detective Marr felt pretty sure that the victim must be dead. But he refused to let the trail grow cold. We were desperate. We were looking for a body. We had a family that wanted some closure.

2:38So at that point in time, I said, what the heck? Let's call her and she may can tell us something. Detective Marr called on the one person whom he thought might be able to help him find the body. Hi, yes, my name is Lauren Parks, and I am a forensic scientist, but specialize in avian scavenging, especially vultures. Okay, basically, you are an expert on vultures and crime. Is that fair to say? Yes. Vultures feed on decaying animals and humans, which is why they can help lead people to a crime scene, or so Detective Marr had heard. You know, you watch the old Western movies of the guy laying in the desert and the vulture circuit.

3:33Here's the email he wrote to Lauren. Lauren, I'm a detective with the Sabine Parrish Sheriff's Department. I'm wondering how many species of vultures we have in Louisiana. Of those, will all the species eat human remains? We are working a kidnapping and haven't found the body of the victim. He has been missing since Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. We have the suspect in jail on the kidnapping charge. Thank you, Detective Marr. And so how did you respond to the detective? So he's thinking that the victim is dead, but I told him, you know, don't be looking for vultures that are circling per se. She explained to me, stop looking for vultures riding on air currents.

4:18When you see a circling vulture, they are typically riding a thermal because they are so big. They are too big to flap their wings like normal birds. So they use thermals to soar around. So you're going to be looking for vultures sitting in a tree, Sitting on the ground, sitting on fence posts, whatever. And if they have scavenged the body, they're going to leave feathers at the scene. If the body's exposed, they'll often leave the spinal column intact. So we did put that word out to every single person that was searching. This is what we're looking for as far as culture activity. Detective Maher's unorthodox idea was exactly what this case needed.

5:05And it's exactly what we love about true crime. Some of us can't get enough of thrillers and mysteries, cold cases gone hot again, and whodunnits. But what if humans can't sniff out the clues? What if the suspect has claws? On this episode, we're giving true crime a wild twist, with stories about animals who perpetrate, solve, or are victims of various crimes. like vultures who can act as winged coroners, the first to arrive at the site of a murder. So Detective Marr needed to find a body. It was a very wooded area. And soon he did. It was a shallow grave that was located in a lake bed. But sure enough, vultures had beat him to the crime scene.

5:57There was a portion of a hand exposed from that grave. and that's where some scavenging occurred with the vultures. There was a skeletonized arm sticking up out of the grave. But it was defleshed and then when they dug up the body, the head of the victim was in pieces, but the body itself, it had still all the flesh on it. So just the arm had been pulled out of the grave and scavenged. We thought we could see a faint drag mark, but, you know, five days has passed. And I start taking photos and then kind of start trying to put everything together. And I send Lauren those photos that we had taken.

6:44And she was like, whoa, wait a minute. That's a vulture feather. Forty yards away, they had found feathers and a bloody pine cone and a bloody stick 40 yards from where the body was found in the grave.

7:06Okay. So a bloody pine cone and there were feathers at the crime scene. Right. But they were 40 yards away from where the body was found, you said. Correct. And that didn't mean anything to the detective at the time, but that meant a lot to me. And it meant a lot in the sense that it didn't add up. And by that, I mean that 40 yards, that's a tremendous distance for a vulture, and they're not attracted to blood. Lauren Farr-Parks picks up the case from the TED stage. There appeared to be a problem because the feathers were located 40 yards from where the body was found. The feathers were next to a bloody pine cone.

7:52Vultures aren't attracted to blood, and they typically don't wander. They might wander 40 feet, but they're not going to wander 40 yards. That would be a waste of energy for a bird that doesn't know when it will get its next meal. So why in the world would a vulture wander 40 yards? One of the reasons I love vultures is because they tend to operate in a manner that can be explained by biology and physics. I started mentally going through the numerous baiting experiments I had conducted at a body farm in Texas. A body farm is a place where you can donate your body to science. Next, I brought up my field notes and had an aha moment.

8:30I knew of two things that would lure a vulture 40 yards from a body. Guts and brain matter. Guts and brain matter were the clues. How did that help them figure out what the heck happened to this poor guy? So they came to the conclusion that the victim was led into the forest at gunpoint. Then rather than shooting the victim, the victim was bludgeoned with a baseball bat. And then the victim was, once deceased, dragged 40 yards to a grave. And the thought was that a baseball bat was used so that no one would hear the gunshot. We got the autopsy report and knew that we had a blunt force trauma to the head.

9:22And she was able to actually pretty much narrow down the actual scene of the homicide and show that this body had not been here longer than five days. We put together the timeline and then immediately we were able to secure an arrest for the suspect for first degree murder here in the state of Louisiana, which can carry the death penalty. It's an awful story, Lauren, but kind of fascinating to think that understanding vulture behavior helped them solve the case. Yes, I think I was very helpful in being able to say that their theory is supported by the avian evidence. So they thought that maybe this individual had been hit over the head elsewhere.

10:09And the avian evidence definitely supported the theories of the detective. I've always been that police officer that says, every time I can put another piece of that puzzle together, that helps me when I go before a jury. So if you take what Lauren had given me, it made perfect sense. Everything lined up. And it just kind of was that last piece of the puzzle that really tied everything together.

10:42Did they ever find out the motive? Yes. It was over a woman. So there was jealousy. Wait, it was a crime of passion? It was a crime of passion. Yes. Do you ever think, like, there must be so many cases out there where the detectives never considered that vultures might have a role in helping them piece together? A crime? Oh, I do. I think there's a tremendous number of skeletal cases. Some may have gone and solved because the timeline is off because animals, and especially vultures, were not considered as a factor in the decomposition. Detectives are starting to become aware of the role that animals have in forensic science.

11:33And I think that if detectives can just know, hey, let's look for like a feather or if there's exposed bone, but there's also tissue and maybe an animal was here. They don't always leave the gnaw marks on the body or the bloody image that you see on TV. So sometimes it can be a lot more subtle than what you might expect. hmm lauren i have to ask you when you tell people what you do like you know how do they respond or react usually some people ask questions like how how did you get into that or oh my goodness and then some people just looked at me like look at me with a um a confused face wait are you like agatha christie meets hitchcock's the birds essentially as those are the things that come to mind for me yes and then i always you know i want to um tell people about what i do but i've seen it so much that i forget that this is usually a shocker to other individuals and so i have to be careful to not scare people away yeah

12:49That was forensic scientist Lauren Farr-Parks. You can see her full talk at TED.com. We also heard from Bradley Marr, the lead detective on the case. Today on the show, crimes in the wild. I'm Manoush Zamarodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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14:49And when it comes to business insurance for midsize and large businesses, they know just how complex it can be. And businesses rely on them to make the complex challenges less so. That's why at each step, from quotes to claims to everything in between, The Hartford is devoted to making it easier. Connect with your underwriter at The Hartford or visit thehartford.com. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And on the show today, crimes in the wild. Which brings us to our next case. A burglary in Aspen, Colorado. We're up in the hills above the town. Prime real estate. Nice houses.

15:37This was a house that kind of spilled down the hillside three stories. And from a couple days' observations, it appeared that it was an empty house. Now, each story had a deck. So the bottom deck was right off of a bedroom. And there's a big window. And when we arrived, the screen was still lying on the floor. It was bent as though hit with some force, lying on the carpeting, wall-to-wall carpeting, white carpeting. No mud on the carpeting. Nothing in the bedroom is disturbed or stolen. And then we get to the kitchen, and it is chaos. Yes. All over the floor, the contents of the refrigerator and the freezer.

16:30We have ice cream cartons. We have cottage cheese. We have a broken bottle of honey. We have eggs. Everything on the floor. Definitely knew what he was going for. Oh, I definitely blew his cover. Yes. Unless it was a ravenously hungry burglar, all signs indicated it was a bear. A bear who got away with the crime. And there, surveying the detritus, was author Mary Roach. I write nonfiction books, and the latest one is called Fuzz When Nature Breaks the Law. This latest book is about animals who commit crimes. And bears feature heavily, because they're just so darn hungry. They're omnivores in the truest sense of the word.

17:18Do they really go for the honey? They go after honey. They go after beer. They like craft beer. They do not like the cheap stuff.

17:29They don't eat crappy ice cream. There's a brand called Western Family that bears will eschew in favor of Ben & Jerry's or Haagen-Dazs. Curtis Tesh, the wildlife officer who had come with me to the site of this break-in, he said that a bear had unwrapped the foil on a Hershey's kiss and eaten the kiss. Wait, with his bear claws? Oh, yeah. Maybe he did it in his mouth, kind of like the way people with very dexterous tongues can tie a cherry stem. Who knows? These bears are good at getting what they want, huh? Yeah, there have been instances also where a family will be sitting down to dinner. The food is on the table.

18:13The bear comes through either the window or the door, grabs something off the table and leaves. Don't want to stay for dinner? Okay, bye. Can you imagine? You know, you're sitting down to a meal with your family. A bear's like, I'll take that chicken. Thank you. And then just takes it to go. And just takes it to go. So Mary, bear-human conflict. I mean, this is not exactly new. We have been asking animals to abide by our rules for a very long time. That's right. The 1800s manifest destiny, this sense that the land belongs to us. It is ours to take and is ours to use. And the wild animals were perceived either as varmints or they were something that you could profit off of.

18:58And there was really a cultural consensus. Use them or just kill them. There were bounties on all of the large carnivores, bears, wolves, coyotes, mountain lions. You would show up with a pair of ears or a scalp at the local wildlife agency and collect your pay. And that knocked back the numbers tremendously. And that persisted through, you know, straight around the middle of the 1900s. There were two forces for conservation. Earlier on, it was hunters setting aside land for parks and preserves, so there would always be wild lands to hunt in. And then moving forward, the animal welfare and the environmental movement, which really caused a shift in how we perceive these animals and how we feel they should be treated.

19:47And you write that that shift, I mean, essentially, it worked. Conservation efforts worked. Wild animals like bears are back. Yeah. These animals, these large mammals made a terrific comeback since, you know, the middle of the last century through now. It's to the extent that now they're so, the populations are thriving and now we're starting to have a lot of conflict. We and we are moving into their territory, you know, suburbs and ex-burbs keep expanding. So you're getting more and more human wildlife conflict and then people's tolerance starts to erode and their attitudes start to shift back a bit and they start to see these animals as either a threat to their pets or to their comfort.

20:30So things are kind of moving back the other way a bit. So let's go back to Aspen then. How is that playing out in this one city in particular? Right. Aspen is a well-to-do city with a lot of very good restaurants in a dense area downtown. And I was traveling with Stuart Breck, who works for the National Wildlife Research Center. And I said, Stuart, we both set our alarms for 3 a.m. and let's see what's going on in the alleys behind the restaurants. We get in his truck, we drive down, we just look down the first alleyway and there's a large white hefty sack split open with all of this food coming in, pretty good looking food too, spilled out and I was like, oh, we just missed them.

21:24He said, let's just stand over here. And within three minutes, here comes one bear, just kind of going down the alley, heading back to the bag. And then five minutes later, a second bear. And so we had just shown up. It wasn't like we spent the whole night waiting and hiding. We're like, oh, we might catch a glimpse of a bear. It's like he just turned down an alley. The first one we turned down. It's a bigger party, late night party scene. Late night party scene. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And it was so surreal because it's a very upscale town. This one bear, when they were kind of done with what they were doing, we sort of followed along.

22:05And this last glimpse of this bear was in front of the Louis Vuitton window. It's just the weirdest, most surreal sight. This little bear had a little bit of burrata on his snout. He's kind of standing in front of the, as though window shopping at Louis Vuitton. Celebrity bear. Bears, they're just like us. The bears, they're just like us. All right, so Mary, we would love to have you read a particularly wild section from your book. Sure. You have the book right there, right? Yeah, absolutely. The lighter-colored bear is working a crab leg while its colleague noses through cabbage leaves. What have these bears just learned?

22:48Stuart Breck is saying. I can eat garbage with people standing and watching me and nothing bad happens. We've just given these two a little less reason to worry about humans. As a result, they may start coming into the alley earlier or standing their ground longer. Odds are, they'll end up like the bear that dined out at the dumpster behind Steakhouse No. 316. One night not long ago, the restaurant's manager, Roy, came out to roust the animal. Because the dumpster was set in an alcove, the bear's escape was blocked on three sides. On the fourth side was Roy. With only one way out, the bear lunged and, quoting Charlie, bit Roy in the ass.

23:32According to University of Calgary professor emeritus and bear attack researcher Stephen Herrero, 90 % of black bears that injure humans are bears that have habituated to them, that is, accustomed to their presence and lost their fear and developed a taste for their foods. Based on the description of the bear that Roy provided, the animal was found, trapped, and, because it had injured someone, put down. What the description said, beyond dark hair and heavyset, I can't imagine. However, DNA from saliva on Roy's pants was a match with the bears. Roy and his staff could have been more careful about keeping the dumpster locked, and that too bit him in the ass.

24:13Townspeople picketed the steakhouse following the bear's death. People don't want bears destroyed because of other people's neglect. If anything, they want them hazed or relocated, the two non-lethal approaches you hear about most with conflict bears. There's also electric fencing, but the prison camp look doesn't play well in residential areas. You mentioned that if they hurt a human, the bear is put down. But what about these other problem bears? In most cases, the bear is put down, as they say. You can translocate a bear. Sometimes that's done, particularly in cases where there's a lot of media attention.

24:54Yeah, I can't imagine that moving a bear tens of miles away is an easy thing to do. Well, it's not so much that it's difficult, it's that it doesn't, often it doesn't solve the problem. Bears have made their way home, I think the record is something like 140 miles. They're very good at finding their way back to where they've been hanging out. The other thing, a bear that's used to eating human-sourced food will make its way to the closest human community and start doing the same thing. Depending on the study, between 40 and almost 70 % of bears will be involved in a quote-unquote nuisance event within two years.

25:38So there's a lot of recidivism. There is another, a third thing that we humans try to do to keep bears away, right? And it sounds kind of funny to me. You use the word hazing. Yes. Talk to me about what they're trying to do. Sure. Hazing is just to create an unpleasant but not harmful situation. hopefully they'll run off and won't come back. They'll associate that behavior and that place with negative consequences. So it may be rubber bullets, it may be pepper spray, it may be, there's a certain kind of dog called a bear dog. And they do work to scare the animal away. But there was a study in Nevada, 62 bears were hazed with rubber bullets and pepper spray, And all but five out of 62 came back.

26:30So there's too much gain for the bear in a place like an alley in Aspen, where people are routinely leaving bags of restaurant food scraps in an unsecured dumpster. You know, that bear is going to go, you know, those rubber bullets, they're kind of smart, but the food is so good, I don't care. I mean, it seems like a lot of us wouldn't have enough experience in the wilderness or dealing with wild animals to even know to follow the rules. Like the bears that I know best are like Yogi and Pooh and I guess Baloo, you know, like the entertainment industry has really changed our perception of wildlife.

27:16And for a lot of people who live in dense areas, wildlife are the mice that they find in their kitchen or the roaches. Yes, I think that's really true. And a large part of preventing human wildlife conflict situations is education. Also making people aware that there are resources, the places that they can turn to to get helpful information about what to do without just calling an exterminator. But yeah, I mean, there's Yogi Bear, but the other side of that is any time there's a person that's killed by a bear, it's major headline news in the sense that, and the word attack is always used, even if it's a defensive scenario.

28:01That has created this sense of bears as these monstrous kind of killers. So people have a, you know, some people are scared to death of them. Other people think they're kind of bumbling and cute and they'll walk up and take a selfie. and in both cases it's like no somewhere in between is where you want to land folks alright so where is that in between Mary give us the bear basics the best thing that could happen with bears in America is for people to understand as cute as they are and as much as you want to get close to them do not feed them, do not leave out bird seed or dog food, just do not encourage them in any way to come into your yard and your home, because that's a situation that's going to progress to the point where somebody's going to get hurt.

28:55And usually it's the bear. That's author Mary Roach. Her book is Fuzz, When Nature Breaks the Law. You can watch Mary's talk about her previous book, Bonk, at TED.com.