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| Sheriff Chris Elliot and Investigator Danny Elliot |
Monsters Inc.
The Medical Evidence Says Natural Death, Not Abuse
The Wooley family has been through hell, falsely charged, imprisoned for eight months till bail was given, charged with sexual abuse, enabling, then with murder. The claim was that the 14th month old meth baby had been 'McDugle' raped (gotta use the code words) on a daily basis by the grandfather while watching TV on the couch with the entire family around to witness. How do we know this? Because a SANE nurse says a five year old brother named C said so, and said so in language far too sophisticated for the child to have uttered given he has a speech impediment as a meth baby himself and born to two drug using parents.
But something like five different daycares or babysitters were seeing those two kids every week, multiple times a week. And these caregivers came forward with notarized letters supporting the family and discounting that anything happened to the child nor was there any evidence of a baby being raped.
One letter was from one of the Church day care centers, where the woman changed the kid's diapers and saw no abuse of any kind but did notice that the child was unusually needy and fussy the day before the infant was found dead in its crib. The woman was trained by DHS, required in her line of work and she saw zero red flags or marks on either of the two grandkids.
Another letter was from a friend of the family, a long time nurse that had dealt with kids all her life and changed the infant's diapers on a regular basis. She reported zero red flags or signs of any sort of abuse. She did discuss the drugs that both kids had been exposed to while the mother was pregnant, along with the developmental delays that both kids where experienced due to the drugs, smoking, and lack of prenatal care .
The next letter was from another work at the Church day care and friend of the Wooley family since 2016. She considered the two boys to be extended family, had both over to visit with her own kids, changed diapers on the infant, and knew the family inside and out. She was a long time trained CASA volunteer and trained in child abuse and neglect signs.
This next letter is amazing. The woman spent 35 years in Oklahoma and Texas working for DHS, from investigating abuse including sexual abuse to supervising a team of investigators. The last of her career was running a state center that placed dozens and dozens of kids in foster homes. She was friends with the family through church and spent many hours a week with the family and kids and even attended conferences with Lisa Wooley the grandmother. The woman discussed how abusers would demand secrecy and privacy for themselves and their kids to avoid detection and how the Wooley's were very social and forthcoming about family issues, especially with the mother of the kids and her drug problem. The infant that died was subjected to meth up to one month before its birth and showed many developmental problems as a result according to the child abuse expert that knew the baby and family intimately. The letter closes by saying that this is the first time she has ever acted as a character witness for a family going through such an ordeal but believes the family to be completely innocent
Then there is the court testimony of a day care that cared for the infant on many occasions. Their policy was to change a diaper every two hours even if unsoiled, checking each infant every hour to check for soiling and changing at that time if needed but every two hours even if the diaper was clean. And despite all those diaper changes over several years, zero sign of abuse, bruising or anything remotely indicative of abuse was found.
After reading all the reports, transcripts, and reviewing the forensic interviews in this case I have a pretty good idea of what happened the night that the infant died. And it was 100% absolutely a natural cause death with zero possibility of any sort of abuse to the 14 month old child.
The night that Elijah died he was put down in his crib on a blue sheet over a white cotton mattress pad. He had a low grade fever, was drooling profusely which was put down to teething, was very lethargic and had been constipated for about three days. He had a snotty nose, some congestion of the lungs. He was being given a laxative tea and was not responding to it. He was also experiencing a rash according to one day care provider that was changing his diapers every two hours. But the grandmother had raised many kids and while concerned, she wasn't unduly concerned with Elijah's condition. The idea was that if he wasn't better in the morning they would take him back to the doctor. This was not a neglected child, this child had an amazing family that did the best possible and spared no expense in caring for these two meth babies.
The child hadn't moved at all from where they had placed him the night before, same position, blanket undisturbed, indeed the ME agreed that the child had died soon after being placed in the crib because she found 30 ml of undigested goats milk in the stomach. Yes, the family had raised both boys on goats milk as it was the only milk the kids could digest. Goats milk has smaller proteins that digest quickly so it causes less allergic reactions than cows milk. Goats milk usually leaves the stomach into the intestines in a half hour, pointing to the time of death being withing an hour of the infant being put to bed.
The symptoms point to walking pneumonia which is easily spread by kids due to day care centers. At some point after death the infant leaked large quantities of clear fluid, most likely from the lungs. The baby's face was still wet when discovered, the sheet and mattress pad and the mattress itself was soaked in the clear fluid. Despite this, Danny Elliot of the Wagoner County Sheriff Department had already made up his mind that the child was a victim of murder so the sheets, mattress pad, and even the mattress were NOT taken and turned over for testing by the OSBI. Nor was a trash can filled with diapers. Couch covers and the babies clothing were taken for testing and the grandfather who is accused of raping the child was cleared as not being a source of any of the DNA or semen found on anything, with the semen being found on the living room couch. And worse, Danny Elliot gets caught lying in court about when he sent out the items to be tested by OSBI and what he sent out to be tested. We will cover that next week.
Of course an incompetent ME with Tulsa County claims otherwise, that the baby was raped via the McDugle and had all the signs including bruising from being suffocated as part of the act. Scary stuff if true, where is my wood chipper if true? Yet another much more experienced ME said otherwise.
Meet Carl Schmidt, a doctor trained in pathology and forensics from Michigan. In fact, he is a university professor that is also the ME for two counties in Michigan, as in Detroit. His office does over 3600 cases per year with 2500 of them being autopsies and Schmidt himself handles around 300 autopsies per year. And he has been doing this since 2003 in two counties with about the same population combined as Oklahoma has citizens. He has dozens of published studies and has written entire chapters for the Atlas of Child Abuse. When questioned if that book includes sexual abuse he said no, that deaths during child sexual abuse were extraordinarily rare.
And how does Schmidt get involved? A Wolley family member is doing some research work with him and mentions the travesty and he is outraged at the incompetence and injustice.
Dr. Schmidt testified that his office does over 200 child autopsies per year with about 50 to 60 being under one year of age. He does most of the child abuse deaths as he is the leading expert on the same, around four or five cases and around 20 cases of SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome cases. Remember that both Sheriff Elliot and his employee Danny Elliot believe that SIDS isn't real, that babies don't just die.
The doctor focused on problems in the Niblo ME report. First was a lack of labeling slides as to where they came from in the body. If a half dozen were from tissue around the McDugle they don't identify which position they were taken from and the same from tissues taken from the lungs. They take tissue, turn it into slides, then stain the tissue and examine it under microscopes.
The doctor talked about how lividity forms, redness or paleness of the skin and tissues due to blood draining to the lowest point due to gravity and how that can change as the body is transported, usually on its back, face up. If the body was found face down, most of the lividity would be at the points closest to the ground, when flipped over into a body bag the blood has a chance to drain back and the lividity will be found on the back pressure points.
The doctor also discussed a contusion and a laceration that Niblo supposedly found on the mouth or inside the lips. He also discussed how common it was for a corpse to be found biting its lower lip due to muscle contractions and that it was no evidence of foul play.
But the doctor focuses on what Niblo said was a contusion on the frenulum, connective tissue between the gums and lips. But the size of the injury was an absurdly small size according to our expert. One sixteenth of an inch by one sixteenth of an inch. Normal ME practice is to take tissue samples and make slides of any areas that are abnormal, yet Niblo didn't do that. The injury was most likely caused by a toothbrush as it was extremely tiny and impossible to be a crushing injury caused by a child be in suffocated. A contusion is nothing more than a bruise, busted blood vessels releasing loose blood into the tissues. A bruise wouldn't be a pin prick the size of the end of an ink pen. Yet the frenulum was intact in any case, no damage as would certainly be done if someone was suffocated.
The second area of damage that Niblo used to determine homicide was the left upper lift mucosa contusion, and again a contusion is a bruise, burst blood vessels allowing free blood to invade tissue. What Niblo had found and documented was a couple of tiny red spots between the teeth in the gums. Not massive bruising, tiny spots that Dr. Schmidt says is from lividity, the blood draining to the lowest point of the body and most likely because the body had been flipped as part of the autopsy. The areas of gum and lips over teeth would be pressure points with the weight of the body pressing upon them, forcing the blood to recessed areas like one sees on one's own gums in a mirror.
Then there was a small red areas on the left upper lip. Dr. Schmidt dismissed that to lividity as well, explaining that if you hit someone in the mouth or held your hand over their mouth and nose to smother them, you would cause massive bruising and hemorrhaging due to the rich blood supply to the mouth.
The other clue that was missing was damage to the inside surfaces of the upper and lower lips. Pressing an infant's face sufficiently hard enough to smother it would have left imprints in the tissue and massive internal hemorrhaging or bruising.
But the most important part of Dr. Schmidt's testimony is that there were no tissue samples and slides taken from the areas that Niblo claimed were indicative of smothering. Schmidt said he wouldn't have done so either because they were so insubstantial as to be no evidence of anything worth investigating and Niblo must have agreed because Niblo took no samples from the areas.
Next the lividity on the face of the infant, again lividity from the body laying face down and allowing the free blood to settle in the forehead tissues. Schmidt remarks on the lack of pattern, faint images of the fingers used to smother a child or the images of the teeth on the inside of the lip should sufficient force be used to smother. Nor was the nose deformed which is a common evidence of smothering.
Then there was the lack of Petechiae, small red pin points in the skin, pinpoints where blood vessels have ruptured, very common when someone is smothered. It is caused by the squeezing of blood vessels that increases pressure in other parts of the body, causing the ruptures.
Then there is process or result call agonal, where injuries occur during death and your blood pressure is so low that tissues do not bruise or hemorrhage, which is how an ME knows if an injury was done to the body before or after death. The fact that the child had bitten its lower lip can be specified as part of the death throes, the pinched lip had no hemorrhaging. This lower blood pressure also ties into the pool of clear fluid found soaking the sheet, mattress pad, mattress and the face of the infant. As your blood pressure falls your mucous membranes start breaking apart and the interstitial fluid between the tissues start leaking out and dripping out, which is why funeral homes will plug the noses and mouths of corpses with cotton.
Heart failure also causes your lungs to start filling with clear fluid so this adds to the interstitial fluid but the most important thing we learn from this is that the baby indeed died laying face down in the crib because that is where all the fluid collected.
As the testimony goes through other autopsy photos we learn that the child's nose isn't deformed nor is there any bruising or imprints, the elastic on the t shirt shows a fabric print on the skin, same as when you wake up with a pattern on your face from the pillow or sheets,
Next up was the testimony on the ...McDugle, the part of the body that keeps in poop. The entire McDugle was sectioned out and available for slides to determine if any damage had been done microscopically and just to look at to see bruises or tearing. What Dr. Schmidt found was a normal McDugle, zero damage. Niblo claimed multiple blunt force traumas to the McDugle. In fact she refers to a 1/8” x 1/8” laceration of the McDugle, then multiple lacerations and describes one 1/2” x 1/8” laceration. What Dr. Schmidt finds is one laceration, actually he calls it a fissure which is a separation of the mucus membrane caused by constipation and that most people will have fissures most of the time. A laceration would have torn skin and massive hemorrhaging in the lower tissues, if you punch someone it isn't the skin that bruises, the bruise is the collection of blood below the tissue.
Dr. Schmidt went on to describe what happens when someone is McDugally raped. There would be tears, there would be bruising and hemorrhaging in the lower tissues, it will be unmistakable and he found no hemorrhaging or tears in the tissues and slides that he reviewed.
They did find one distended vein in the McDugle tissues, what we would call a hemorrhoid, and yes they are common in children. The problem is that Niblo neglected to provide keys to the locations where she collected tissue samples, a map so to speak that would tell you that the vein was at 7 o'clock or 4 o'clock or if the tissue came from the upper left lung and so on. And this is required if you are certified in any pathology field.
In the end Dr. Schmidt, the ME of Detroit Michigan, found that Niblo's diagnosis was not shown in the tissue samples and slides of the autopsy.
When asked his expert opinion of the discrepancies, Dr. Schmidt said this”No. What I have a conflict with is the description of contusion as her gross diagnosis and the unresolved discrepancy between what she -- she is describing a normal rectum and yet she's issuing a gross diagnosis of -- and she says explicitly -- she says, "Contusion of the 12:00 position of the anus along the external surface laceration off the 7:00 position, multiple lacerations of the 9:00 position to the 12:00 position of the anus." All those, whether it be lacerations or contusions -- and as I mentioned, a laceration is blunt trauma in which there is disruption of the surface of the skin -- the slides don't show that. The slides are perfectly normal rectal mucous membrane. So, there is a discrepancy between what is the gross description, the diagnosis, which is basically blunt trauma to the anus and the microscopic findings which are those of a completely normal rectal mucous membrane.
When questioned about his opinion of the manner of death Dr. Schmidt said this”A: I think that she was trying -- a narrative that isn't there. Trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. And I've seen people do that. Sometimes you have findings that don't match some horrendous story, but you have to base your conclusions on your findings. The story -- if the story doesn't match the findings, there's only one of two possibilities: either you made a mistake or the story is erroneous and does not correspond to what actually happened or is greatly exaggerated
Q: (By Mr. Copeland): Doctor, as you sit here today and what you reviewed, do you have an opinion as to whether or not this child was asphyxiated by suffocation?A: He was not.
Q: And why is that?A: Because the findings of the face are trivial. They don't correspond to a child who -- with -- who has managed to have teeth having been suffocated by especially, by pressing his face against a surface.
On cross examination by the notorious Eric Jordan, he that backs over neighbors while driving drunk and prosecutes people despite knowing that the only witness is unreliable and crazy as a loon, admits that Elijah had bronchial pneumonia. Jordan is there not for exposing the truth but to protect his star witness, Tulsa ME Niblo. What he learns instead is that 10 to 15% of the infants and toddlers that die show no signs of what might have killed them, that not all causes of death are known.
In the end we have a case of alleged daily rape of a 14th month old child, while watching TV with other adults and children observing, two forensic interviews with the five year old (at the time) where the five year old denied that anything happened or that he told a SANE nurse that something did happen, two recorded interviews that I have watched, against a non recorded nurse interview/examination where extraordinary claims came out about the daily rape of Elijah.
The ME claims blunt force trauma where there is none, claims lacerations where there is none, leaving only the unrecorded SANE nurse's testimony that anything actually happened. No semen found, no DNA, no fluids that match up to anyone much less the grandfather defendant, evidence left untested for nearly a year before Danny Elliot sent it to the OSBI, then lying about it on the stand before being caught and admitting he sent it in a few days before he was called to testify.
You have a five year old calling his grandpa “William” instead of the name Bill that he is known by, and articulate statements from a five year old meth baby with severe developmental issues including a speech impediment that would have made it impossible for him to utter those sentences to the SANE nurse.
And the one email we got on this story last week was questioning if any parents showered with their kids. We mentioned a commercial and made a mistake on the sponsor or brand. Here is the actual commercial. Yeah, we never did that with our kids but apparently someone thought it was fit for a commercial so some do shower with kids.
Next week we are going to cover the facts that show Danny Elliot, the Wagoner County investigator that accused the Wolley's of sexual abuse and murder impeached himself multiple times while testifying. And Elliot's own testimony will convince most normal people that he isn't fit to be anywhere around a child abuse investigation.
