Sex Lies & DNA

This is Marshawn Lynch.

But on prize picks, being right can get you paid.

So I'm here to make sure you don't miss any of the action this football season.

With Prize Picks, it's good to be right.

With millions of members and billions of dollars awarded and winnings, Prize Picks is the best place to put your takes to the test.

The app is really simple to use and available in 40 plus states, including California, Texas, and Georgia.

Just pick two or more players across any sport.

Pick more or less on their projections.

And if you're right, you can cash in.

With simple stats and fan-friendly policies, PrizePicks is the best place to make your picks.

Most importantly, they don't play about your paper.

All transactions on the apps are fast, safe, and secure.

Download the Prize Picks app today and use code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup.

That's code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup.

PrizePicks, it's good to be right.

Must be present in certain states.

Visit PrizePicks.com for restrictions and details.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians.

These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds.

Visit progressive.com to see if you could save.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.

Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations.

While Earl Morris was vacationing in California, he learned his wife had been reported missing from their home in Arizona.

What?

Mom's missing?

What happened?

The search for Ruby Morris involved dozens of police investigators, forensic scientists, DNA testing, and even the Coast Guard.

I'm heading home.

The results of that investigation surprised everyone, especially Earl Morris.

Ruby and Earl Morris were partners in both business and in marriage.

They had been married for over 20 years and were the parents of three grown children.

The Morrises were both accountants and operated their own accounting and tax preparation firm.

They had had it for years and years, and they built it up, you know, together from scratch, and it was doing very well.

Their business made them millionaires, and they raised their three children in this luxurious mountain home just outside of Phoenix.

On June 4th, 1989, Earl Morris headed to California to see his oldest daughter, Donna Kaye, perform in a concert.

She was a country singer with a promising career.

Ruby decided not to join her husband on that trip, planning instead to go shopping with her other daughter, Cindy, for some furniture for her new home.

But Ruby didn't show up on Sunday morning at Cindy's home for the planned shopping trip.

So Cindy drove out to her parents' home.

That's totally unlike her mom.

I mean, her mother kept every, you know, date that she ever had with her, and unless she called her and canceled, and she didn't do this.

Ruby Morris wasn't home.

The burglar alarm was turned off.

Ruby's pocketbook was missing, but her car was still there, although it wasn't parked in its usual spot.

Ruby Morris was a neat, meticulous person, and her daughter noticed right away that things were out of place.

A faucet was dripping in the bathtub.

Dirty clothes were piled high inside the washing machine and hadn't been washed.

A carpet shampoo cleaner was left out.

But the most troubling discovery was that a.22-caliber pistol, usually kept in a closet, was missing.

Cindy Morris immediately called the police.

And that's really all I expected it to be, was another missing person's case that this person would be found in a couple of hours.

When Earl Morris heard the news of his wife's disappearance, he told family members that he would head straight home from California.

If Cindy Morris was right and something happened to her mother, investigators hoped to find some clues to her whereabouts inside the Morris home.

It took Earl Morris longer than anticipated to drive home from California, but when he arrived, the police were anxious to speak with him.

So have you ever had any fights?

Earl Morris told police that their relationship was basically a good one with occasional arguments, but nothing out of the ordinary.

Has she ever done anything at all like this before?

I mean, left and...

Yeah, she's done it before, but she usually calls, you know, or gets mad or something.

Morris also confirmed.

that the.22 caliber pistol the couple owned was not in the closet where he last saw it.

We were going in several different directions with this, that the possibility of that she was missing, possibility of a suicide, possibility of a homicide, when the car broke down.

Earl Morris told police that his car broke down on the drive home from California and that he rented a car to complete the trip.

But Detective Lugenbue noticed something suspicious when he looked inside the trunk of the rental car.

Attached to Earl's suitcase was was an airline luggage tag for a recent flight from San Diego to Phoenix.

A search of the passenger list from that flight did not include the name of Earl Morris, although there was a G.

Norris listed.

Police put together a group of photographs, including one of Earl Morris, and showed it to the airline crew members to see if anyone recalled seeing Earl on that flight.

One of the flight attendants remembered him distinctly because of the poor quality of his toupee.

Faced with this inconsistency, detectives decided to search the Morris home further to see if there was any evidence of foul play which might have been overlooked during their first visit.

So what we did is we called in our ID techs to give us a hand and we asked them to do luminol.

When luminol is sprayed onto an area, a black light is used.

The luminol will actually glow when it comes into contact with the blood enzymes.

Forensic detectives began their search in the master bedroom, spraying luminol on the headboard of the bed.

An area instantly turned blue.

It was a very fine mist pattern, one they immediately recognized.

To me, upon looking at it, you could determine because of the distribution, the shape, and the size of the droplets, that it was high velocity from gunshot.

Only a bullet produces a fine mist of blood similar to that found on the headboard.

A beating or stabbing produces a much different blood spatter pattern.

On the surface of the mattress, they found tiny bloodstains, and they also found blood inside the mattress itself.

Next, investigators sprayed luminol in the bathroom.

The entire shower stall lit up basically with the luminol.

Luminol tests also revealed blood on the cement patio outside the master bedroom as well as on the master bedroom carpet.

We noticed that the whole bedroom floor which was carpeted started to glow and we knew that from what we were seeing that we did have a violent crime scene maybe not a death but somebody had suffered some pretty good injuries at that point.

But detectives had no idea to whom the blood belonged.

To find out, scientists conducted a DNA test on the bloodstain.

The results of that test shocked everyone.

A deep, dark family secret would soon be revealed.

My very last words to her were, I love you.

And not a lot of parents ever get to say that, you know.

In 2010, Aubrey Sacco vanished while hiking in the Himalayas.

Now, after 15 years of searching, her parents share what they've uncovered in a three-episode special of Status Untraced.

Dads are supposed to find their daughters when they're in trouble.

Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Police suspected that the bloodstain found in the Morris's bedroom belonged to Ruby Morris, but there was no blood from the body to match the blood in the bedroom.

But science can often identify a bloodstain by using DNA testing.

By analyzing the DNA from children, for example, scientists can tell whether the bloodstain would have come from a parent.

In the case of children, 50% of the DNA from each child will come from one parent and the other 50% will come from the other parent.

Since children get half of their DNA from their mother and the other half from their father, a DNA profile of the children and from one of the parents can give scientists enough genetic information to identify the DNA profile of the other parent, even without a blood sample.

If the DNA profile of the missing parent matches the DNA profile of the blood stain, scientists will then analyze the DNA from a missing person's siblings to confirm their findings.

When scientists compared Cindy Morris's DNA to the DNA from the bloodstain, they found one matching band.

They also found one matching band when comparing the DNA profile of Ruby's brother to the bloodstain.

It's highly probable that those bloodstains came from Ruby Morris.

But scientists noticed something peculiar.

When they compared Earl Morris's DNA to the DNA profile of his daughter, Cindy,

there were no matching bands.

Earl Morris was not Cindy's biological father.

When they compared Earl Morris's DNA to his oldest child, Randy, they discovered the same thing.

Earl was not Randy's biological father either.

Randy's DNA matched that of his grandfather, his mother's father.

When law enforcement authorities in Tennessee learned of these DNA results, Ruby's father was charged with incest.

According to the DNA tests, Ruby's father had sex with her when she was just 15 years old.

Well, we had a surprise, and we felt that perhaps the family would be surprised by it, and that Earl Morris himself was surprised by it.

The Morris children had another family secret to reveal.

They admitted that their mother had been depressed recently since she learned her husband Earl was having an affair with her sister, Peggy.

In fact, Ruby and her daughter Cindy once caught the two together at the Phoenix airport when Peggy secretly flew to Phoenix to meet with Earl.

Ruby confronted Earl about the affair, but he reportedly refused to end it.

Also looking at Peggy, the sister,

she had motive and opportunity to be involved in this, too.

She lived in Louisiana at the time, but we discovered that she had a planned vacation going to San Diego that weekend.

We discovered phone calls that Earl had made to her.

Peggy admitted to police that she had planned to meet Earl in San Diego shortly after Ruby disappeared, but missed her flight.

But police knew Earl had been in San Diego, not only because of the baggage claim tag on his suitcase, but they also found his car in the airport parking lot.

The car appeared to be clean.

But when luminol was applied to the inside of the vehicle, the floor of the passenger side revealed a huge bloodstain.

So much blood that the individual it came from would almost certainly be dead.

A DNA analysis of the blood in the car revealed that it matched the bloodstain found in the Morris's bedroom, which scientists concluded belonged to Ruby.

We didn't know where the body was.

We didn't know if he would transport the body to San Diego, why would he transport them?

We had no real clue.

The clue was here in a San Diego marina.

The Morrises owned a boat which was stored there.

Marina employees told police that Earl Morris was at the marina on June 5th and had taken the boat for a ride.

When police went to search the boat, they discovered it was missing.

The Coast Guard was asked to help locate the missing boat, and they told police about a mysterious fire on a boat about the same size, which burned and sank 13 miles offshore from the San Diego Marina.

This is actual footage of the fire taken by a television news crew.

There were no survivors, no people anywhere in sight.

The first thing that was unusual was the way it burned.

It burned pretty much from the center out, and normally the fires started either in the engine room or in the fuel compartment.

It just looked very suspect right from the beginning.

So the things that stood out were the fact that there was like a lantern right in the middle of the boat, right on top of the melted fiberglass, which looked like somebody had thrown it there and possibly started a fire.

Records indicated that Earl Morris rented a small boat on the morning of June 5th and returned it around 12 noon, about the same time the Coast Guard discovered the burning boat.

It was beginning to appear that the body of Ruby Morris was on that burning boat, which sank to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

But prosecutors believed that they still had enough evidence to prove Ruby Morris had been murdered.

You start building all those together, then what you have is Ruby Morris's blood, Ruby Morris's bed, Ruby Morris with a high-velocity gunshot wound

that killed her her in her bed at her home.

Who was there?

Earl Morris.

Earl Morris was charged with the murder of his wife, Ruby, but the case was far from over.

Investigators were in for another big surprise.

Earl Morris's defense would be a challenge for forensic science.

In 1991, Earl Morris went on trial for the murder of his wife.

The prosecution first had to convince the jury that a murder had taken place since there was no body.

We had to build the case from scratch.

We had to prove a corpus delecti that, in fact, a murder had occurred without the physical evidence for someone to look at.

According to the prosecution, Earl Morris entered the master bedroom early on Saturday morning,

dragged her body into an adjacent bathroom, removed her clothing, and put her into the bathtub to remove the blood.

He then dressed her body in a jogging suit, covered her head wound with a baseball cap, and carried the body to the garage.

Since his car didn't have a trunk, he had no choice but to place the body into the passenger side of the front seat.

Earl then cleaned all of the blood from inside the house, from the headboard, the bathtub, the carpets, all later revealed by the luminol.

Earl began his journey to San Diego, driving nearly 400 miles with his wife's body in the seat next to him.

Blood continued to drip from the head wound, falling to the floor beneath the seat.

Earl stopped once for gas, and no one noticed that his passenger was dead.

When Morris arrived in San Diego, he towed his boat to the launch

and in broad daylight placed Ruby's body on the boat along with some of the bloody sheets and the murder weapon.

He also took along a lantern and some gasoline.

After renting a smaller boat, he set off to sea, towing the rented boat behind.

13 miles offshore in the Pacific Ocean, Earl Morris prepared the boat for destruction, hoping to bury not only his wife's body, but all of the remaining evidence of his involvement.

After dousing the boat with gasoline, he stepped into the rental boat, lit the lantern, and threw it onto the deck.

He left before being spotted by the Coast Guard.

Neither Ruby Morris nor the boat was ever recovered.

During the trial, Earl Morris delivered a surprising defense.

He admitted that his wife was dead.

and that her body was indeed on the boat that burned and sank.

Morris also admitted to setting the fire and sinking the boat.

But Earl Morris insisted he did not kill his wife.

He said she committed suicide because of guilt and depression, guilt over the fact that her husband wasn't the father of two of their children and depression about Earl's affair with her sister Peggy.

My first thoughts were that I would be blamed for

Ruby committing suicide.

After you had those thoughts,

did you make any decisions?

Yes, I did.

What decisions did you make?

To hide the fact with what you'd done.

Up until that point in time,

we had circumstantial evidence that she was dead.

No one to say, I saw Ruby Morris's body.

Earl Morris testified that he discovered his wife with a gunshot wound in her left temple and that she used the couple's.22-caliber pistol.

He said he found her body after the suicide and feared he would be blamed.

So he disposed of the body by sinking the boat.

But the forensic evidence proved otherwise.

The blood spatter evidence told forensic detectives that Ruby could not have committed suicide.

Earl said the gunshot wound was in the left side of her head, but Ruby was right-handed.

It would have been impossible for a right-handed individual to shoot herself in the left temple using her right hand, especially with the long-barrel.22 caliber pistol the Morris's owned.

But the strongest argument came from the blood spatter evidence on the headboard.

The blood patterns revealed two layers of spatter, one on top of the other.

This told forensic experts that there were two shots.

One shot could not have caused the distribution of two separate patterns.

There were actually two separate patterns going at two different angles that are not,

you cannot create that in one shot.

And a person committing suicide does not shoot twice to the head.

The jury saw Earl Morris's last-minute claim of suicide as just one more lie.

He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years to life.

He dropped traces of Ruby Morris, and that was Ruby Morris on the floor.

That was Ruby Morris in the El Camino.

That was Ruby Morris in the bed that was saying, this is what happened.

That was our read on it.

So Ruby Morris was actually telling us what happened to her.

Nobody,

no gun, no confession.

The science gave us Ruby Morris and gave us the corpus delectae.

If it had not been for the blood in the car and the DNA testing,

I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you today.

Earl Morris would be a free man.