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this episode contains descriptions of violence and post-mortem forensic examinations it might not be appropriate
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for everyone please use discretion she really enjoyed getting married a lot she'd been married 11 times to nine
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different men you can do the math on that one she sometimes was a little careless
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about whether one marriage was over before she began another one Jill Coit got married for the first time
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before she was 20. that first marriage didn't last long she soon married her second husband and then her third almost
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three weeks after she filed for divorce from husband number three he was dead his name was William Clark Coit and he'd
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been shot in his home by someone who'd come through an unlocked back door police suspected that
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was involved in his death but she checked herself into a psychiatric facility and somehow avoided
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further questioning from there she somehow convinced a wealthy elderly man to adopt her he
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passed away a year later and she received a large portion of his estate she then married a Marine Corps Major
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they divorced her fifth husband was her lawyer she actually married him twice but number seven told the LA Times if
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you were to meet her and talk to her you'd think she's just the greatest person you ever met in 1991 she married
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a man named Gerald Boggs in Steamboat Springs Colorado when Gerald Boggs learned that she was also married to
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someone else he hired a private investigator to look into her past he annulled the marriage and had all of
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her assets Frozen in response she sued him for a hundred thousand dollars about two weeks before the trial was set
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to begin in October of 1993 Gerald Boggs seemed to be trying to go back to his normal life he had come in to work as he
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always did he ran the hardware store in town we're hearing the story from Dave Norris he spent more than 40 years as a
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professor of Integrative physiology at the University of Colorado and he would come in in the morning and he would open
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up the shop and his brother who ran the store with him would come in later and take over and then he would go
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to the restaurant just down the street called the shack and there he would have his usual breakfast in fact it was so
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standard that when they saw him coming down the street the waitress would even tell the cook to go ahead and
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prepare his breakfast which was always hash browns eggs and toast on this particular day Gerald Boggs wasn't
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feeling well he went home from the hardware store early the next morning when his brother got to the store he
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found it was still closed and so he opened it up and called his brother but he got no answer
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he tried several times during the data contact his brother and got no answer so at the end of the day he closed up the
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store and went to the uh his brother's home where he found him he had been burned with a stun gun he'd been hit on
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the head with a shovel and he'd been shot three times needless to say he was dead
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his wife Jill Coit was the primary suspect but she had an alibi for that evening she was on a camping trip with
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her new boyfriend more than 150 miles away investigators went around and around trying to piece together what happened
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hour by hour on the day he was killed all they knew for sure was that he'd been seen at the shack having his usual
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eggs toast and hash browns and so the question was had he had another meal before he was killed
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and in this particular case we were asked to look at the stomach contents the Wii he's referring to is himself and
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a botanist named Jane Bach they were colleagues at the University of Colorado and when they looked at the contents of
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Gerald bogg's stomach they found two things potatoes and onions now it turns out that the shack claimed that they
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never put onions in their hash browns so that could have suggested a a later meal
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that also had potatoes in it which would mean he was killed in the evening the time when his wife had her camping Alibi
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however we asked them to go and get us a sample of the hash browns from The Shack
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so the investigator went there and he had them cook him up some hash browns and he watched the chef prepare them
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and on one side of the grill he was cooking onions and on the other side he was doing hash brown potatoes and then
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he took a spatula and he turned the potatoes he took the same spatula and turned the onions
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and then again he turned the potatoes and when we got the sample of course it contained potatoes and onions which
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meant his last meal was what he eaten at the shack and that he was likely killed
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during the day a time when his wife had no alibi this was sufficient evidence to get a
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search warrant for her property where investigators found a stun gun and charged her with murder
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Jill Coit was found guilty and is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole
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incidentally about three years into her sentence she put out a personal ad to see if anyone else wanted to get married
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[Music] fave tells me we've done probably a hundred cases but I would I would guess
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it's 60 to 70 of them were stomach contents Gene Bach does digestion stop when you die yes
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this it's interesting because there's a valve that leads from the stomach to the
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small intestine and that valve snaps shut at death the valve is a band of smooth muscle and
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when it snaps shut it creates a perfect little evidence Locker for those willing
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to look inside I'm Phoebe jetch this is Criminal [Music] the first time forensic botany was used
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in a courtroom in the United States was after Charles Lindbergh's infant son was
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kidnapped in 1932. he was taken from his nursery on the second floor of the Lindbergh's home someone had placed a
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homemade ladder under the window and a ransom note for fifty thousand dollars was found on the windowsill
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the baby was found a little over two months later buried on the side of the road
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police traced The Ransom money back to a German man named Bruno Hopman a plant anatomist named Arthur Kohler
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compared the wood on the homemade ladder to the wood in hopman's attic and it was
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a match Kohler's testimony set a precedent for the admission of Botanical evidence in trial but Jane Bach and Dave
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Norris weren't trying to follow an Arthur Kohler's footsteps they love teaching love their students they liked
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mystery novels but had no interest in real detective work until 1982 Jane got a call from her Corner friend in Denver
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he played a trick on me kind of he said I'm dealing with a homicide here of a young woman
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we want to know what her last meal was do you think you could look at her stomach contents and tell me
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what kind of plant food she ate at her last meal and I said no and he said why not and I said because it'll look bad
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and smell bad that's why I'm a botanist and he said what if I just sent you slides and I said oh okay sure I love
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the microscope I'll be glad to take a look so I thought since we don't really have that varied a
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diet in plant Foods maybe 75 species at most I might be able to help him she put the
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slides under her microscope and while she didn't know exactly what she was looking for something was familiar we
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had just looked at some cabbage in one of my anatomy classes and I said Gee that's a ringer for cabbage and the bean
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was so much intact that it it just made sense that that's what it was but that was strictly hunch and seat of the pants
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stuff she wanted to be sure so she went to the store and picked up some cabbage and pinto beans and chewed them up
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herself then she made her own slides to compare and very quickly I knew I was in over my
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head because I have all these degrees in botany and I know absolutely nothing about the intricacies of human digestion
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that's when she called her colleague Dave Norris she knew plants he knew the body my first thought was uh this would
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be a very interesting uh way to help determine time of death because if you know the last known meal
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and the stomach contents match that meal you can fix time of death within two to
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four hours or maybe less on the other hand if it doesn't match you know that the person had at least
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one additional meal before they were killed and in this particular case the last known meal was with her
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boyfriend at McDonald's and often the first suspect is going to be the the male associate
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and at that time McDonald's was not a health food restaurant like it is today and uh so he thought she must have eaten
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a different meal and it turned out that in fact she had eaten a different meal that placed her time of death in the
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evening at which time he was well Alibi and so he was no longer considered a suspect in the crime
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it later turned out that she was killed by a serial killer who several years later confessed to the
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crime and indicated that her last meal had been at Wendy's which in those days did have a salad bar that was Dave and
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Jane's first case and after that the phone just kept ringing we had sort of thought this was you know interesting
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and it's sort of a one-time deal but it turned out not to be it's so you know with all of this the
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world today where DNA testing and toxicology and blood you know Sam this is one of the simplest things you you
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can do looking for the plants it seems it's it's also one of the cheapest and the irony is that there are no
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botanists on staff at the finest I think it's the finest although I have some doubts FBI lab in Quantico Virginia
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where they can do all sorts of wonderful things I keep encountering them in cases
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but they don't have any botanists and I see them do things where they have a serious lapse
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of the treating of a crime scene or even of the victims when they ignore botany [Music]
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what's your favorite part of this work wondering what in the hell kind of Pardon Me wondering what in the heck
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kind of a plant that was in somebody's stomach contents and figuring it out what what if it was a like a marshmallow
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you know something that seems so fake it's not a plant so things like that meat marshmallows no you can't tell
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nobody could I don't think and and the trick is with Meats you might say oh well they had a big
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steak and not if it's been in the stomach very long it just turns to gush because they don't have cell walls
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proteins break down but the cell walls of plants remain visible under a microscope
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they're just beautiful to look at they're like little sculptures there's nothing that's gross for a
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biologist the only times that that I'm aware that some of someone being grossed out were
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situations where we were having dinner at our house we had some guests there and and someone asked what I did and we
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had someone have to leave the table but other than that it usually people are are not obviously grossed out but maybe
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they don't want to hear about it over their dinner right in fact there was a we had a case of a person who robbed the
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poor box in the Catholic church in the in the town where he lived and he also suffered from a disorder
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known as Crohn's disease which means when you get very excited you can't necessarily control your bowel movements
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and he had a bout of diarrhea and he left behind some fecal material in the church
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which we were able to match to the fecal material that was associated with the pair of blue jeans that he threw into a
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dumpster when he was presented with the similarity he confessed that was that was kind of a memorable
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case we prefer the cases where where there are confessions so we don't have to go
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to court by 1995 Jane and Dave have been working on Forensic botany for 13 years
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and they were often frustrated that law enforcement and attorneys didn't see its
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potential and it makes me so cross there was one very famous case and Dave and I
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were actually going to call up and volunteer our services it was a TV case the entire case was on TV ad nauseam is
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this the O.J Simpson case yes it is and we called to say could we please see the
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stomach contents of the two victims that resulted from their autopsies because we
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thought maybe we could add a little something to the narrowing down of the time of death and uh
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and they weren't eligible they weren't available because they were gone there's no reason ever to throw out the
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stomach contents it might have been one more piece of evidence that at least the
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jury could understand they uh put a DNA expert in there who totally bored the jury to
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extreme they made it too complex for them to to interpret we thought that some stomach content data would have
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pinned down better the time of death it didn't matter that much to us which side
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we were looking at his stomach contents for we just wanted to see what was there
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and what it might tell about the case you're on the side of the stomach that's the most important thing absolutely
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they have worked on a number of other high-profile homicides JonBenet Ramsey Casey Anthony and in 2016 they published
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a book called forensic plant science where they describe many of the cases they've worked on over the last 30 years
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one of the cases they write about that really shows how specialized their work is happened in 2002 in California
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a 15 month old was found dead in a creek the toddler's mother told police that she'd been in a park near a fountain
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when a man came grabbed the toddler and ran off she told police She chased after the man
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until her sides hurt the forensic pathologist on the case thought there was something odd about
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the body there wasn't as much water in the stomach as you might normally see he described it as looking like a quote
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gentle drowning he asked for advice on a medical examiner's list serve and someone gave
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him Jane's number she examined the water in the toddler's stomach and found microalgae that
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matched the water in the creek where the toddler was found but she also found microalgae from the
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fountain in the park when investigators confronted the mother with evidence that the baby had ingested
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water from both the creek and the fountain she confessed that she'd killed her child and made up the abduction
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story she pled guilty to first-degree murder Jane says the story still haunts her but
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when she's in the lab she just tries to focus on the work I'm not thinking about
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some some poor soul but if you go in the courtroom you have to you just have to because there are all these people
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involved in the case and you know maybe the mother of the victim or the dad or the children of the victim
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and then the people that love the suspect and and believe in her or him oh that's that makes it very very
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hard it makes it as serious as it should should be of course no matter which side
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you're working for [Music] foreign [Music] from teaching in 2000 and devoted herself to forensic work she splits her
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time between Colorado and the Florida Keys at some point Jane and Dave stop chewing
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up food to make their slides they got graduate students to do it for them we had a grad student that got very bullish
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about chewing up what is that stuff that's in gumbo okra okra but we put the pressure on him because
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we were paying him by the hour and he he finally went along with it he didn't like okra no I I like it I I like it too
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I should have chewed it up for him well this has been such a nice talk with you and I thank you for taking all this
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time to talk with us it was really interesting good we will put this recording together to make it sound like
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you and I are kind of in the same room I wish we were Phoebe I'd love to know you
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I would like to know you I mean this is so fast I would like to be chewing up food for you
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[Music] foreign Spore Nadia Wilson and Me Audio mixed by Rob Byers our intern is Matilda fellino
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Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal you can see them at
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thisiscriminal.com where on Facebook and Twitter at criminal show criminal is recorded in the studios of
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North Carolina public radio wunc we're a proud member of radiotopia from PRX a collection of the best podcasts around
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special thanks to adserk for providing their ad serving platform to radiotopia I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal
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[Music]