[MUSIC PLAYING]
[OMINOUS MUSIC]
Next, I take you outside my own ward
for an inside look at America's most shocking cases.
NARRATOR A grisly discovery in a b*rned out garage
leads Miami authorities on an investigation that seems
to get stranger by the moment.
Something looked really wrong here.
I'll never forget it.
He said, you're [BLEEP] me.
NARRATOR And then a rash of mysterious deaths
leaves a community desperate for answers.
It seemed as if everybody who got it was dying.
Chills just went down my back.
I remember thinking, oh my goodness, we
have a crisis here.
WOMAN ON TV This could be the biggest
serial k*ller in history.
years later, science rewrites an old case.
MAN ON TV Is he an angel of mercy or an angel of death?
MAN ON TV August st, people were brutally m*rder*d.
As a medical examiner, I see the results of tragic accidents
every single day.
But in this next case, what first seemed
like an unfortunate mishap grew into one of the strangest
and farthest reaching investigations the city
of Miami had ever seen.
[EERIE MUSIC]
NARRATOR It's just after PM on a balmy evening
in the quiet Miami suburb of Kendall,
when suddenly a terrifying noise shatters the peace.
[GLASS SMASHING, FLAMES BURNING]
WOMAN ON POLICE RADIO , repeat
the location and standby.
NARRATOR A roaring fire has engulfed a garage
and threatens to spread to the adjacent house.
But as firefighters work quickly to extinguish the flames,
a frantic man appears out of nowhere
and tries to run directly into the fire.
POLICEMAN (SHOUTING) Sir, don't go in there!
Stop! Stop!
NARRATOR Police quickly restrain him.
POLICEMAN I got him!
NARRATOR But he remains hysterical.
POLICEMAN Sir!
Sir!
He was fighting the police at the scene,
trying to get into the burning garage, which of course,
would have been impossible because of the-- the fierceness
of the fire.
[POLICE RADIO CHATTER]
NARRATOR The distraught man, Wakil,
claims that his best friend, Ezzat, a Lebanese immigrant,
is trapped inside the deadly inferno.
[POLICE RADIO CHATTER]
EDNA BUCHANAN He was so grief stricken
and upset about his friend that the fire
rescue had to treat him.
[POLICE RADIO CHATTER]
NARRATOR Finally, the firefighters
managed to put out the blaze.
And as the smoke clears, they find
a b*rned out shell of a car.
EDNA BUCHANAN The car had been so enveloped in flames--
you couldn't see what color the paint was.
You couldn't even determine what kind of car it was.
NARRATOR But it's what they discover underneath the car
that startles even the veteran team of firefighters,
a smoking human corpse.
There was very little clothing on him because the skin
was charred, seared.
The body was b*rned to a crisp.
NARRATOR Wakil explained to authorities
that he'd spent the better part of the day
helping Ezzat fix his ' Vega.
EDNA BUCHANAN Wakil said that the car was jacked up,
and Ezzat was under the car with one
when those portable lights that they use
when they're repairing cars.
NARRATOR But at around PM, Wakil left the garage
to go pick up a pizza.
And when he returned, the house was ablaze.
For this experienced team of detectives and fire
investigators, the gruesome discovery makes for a puzzle
with a simple solution.
EDNA BUCHANAN Their theory was that the car slipped off
the Jack, fell on top of the victim, who was beneath it,
and that the jack handle ruptured the gas t*nk.
And a small spray of gasoline began to land
on the burning light bulb.
And eventually, it ignited, and the whole garage
became enveloped in flames from the burning gasoline.
[MAN SCREAMING]
[POLICE SIRENS]
It just seemed it was one of those freak accidents
that sometimes happens.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
NARRATOR Still, Ezzat's friend, Wakil, isn't so sure.
He was shocked.
He thought that Ezzat was too smart and too agile to die
[ … ]
in a stupid accident.
He felt that he must have been m*rder*d.
[POLICE RADIO CHATTER]
NARRATOR Now, it's up to the medical examiner's office
to figure out what happened.
Ezzat's remains are immediately transported to the Dade County
morgue, where Dr. Joseph Davis's team is waiting
to perform a routine autopsy.
The role of the medical examiner
is ultimately to determine what happened, to determine
the cause of death, and to answer any questions that
can be answered from that body.
EDNA BUCHANAN There was nobody more experienced
in doing sudden death autopsies than Dr.
Joe Davis, a former medical examiner
for many, many decades.
The guy is a genius.
The body was extensively charred and blackened.
Parts of the underlying bone was visible as this flesh having
been b*rned completely away.
NARRATOR As the team continues to scan the body,
they discover that the deceased has fractures
on both of his forearms.
[CAMERA FLASHING]
DR. JOSEPH DAVIS That's perfectly normal.
It just shows that there's an intense fire.
The bones get brittle.
They begin to warp.
They break.
So it's common for those things to fracture.
There are many changes that occurred to the body
during an intense fire.
The muscles start to contract.
The muscles burn away and expose the bone,
causing them to fracture.
These are all things we expect to see.
NARRATOR Doctor Davis's team performs
a full autopsy, including a toxicology screening.
And when the report comes back from the lab,
they have their answer.
The carbon monoxide level was certainly
high enough that in a few minutes
that person would be dead.
NARRATOR This confirms that Ezzat d*ed in the fire
by breathing in its deadly fumes.
[MAN SCREAMING]
It was a horrible way to die.
This man b*rned alive pinned under a car.
NARRATOR Putting to bed Wakil's theories of foul play,
Doctor Davis concludes that the death
was accidental, exactly as the detectives originally thought.
Official cause of death--
smoke inhalation.
[HEART b*ating]
[POLICE RADIO CHATTER]
The detectives next step is to notify
Eat's only known relative living in the US, his sister, Ghada.
Ghada Aboul-Hosn was a nursing student in Tampa,
and she and her brother were reportedly pretty close.
NARRATOR Ghada is devastated at the tragic news.
But given the state of the remains,
it's impossible for her to identify
the body as her brother's.
Now, it's up to Doctor Davis to provide a positive ID.
And he has his work cut out for him.
We couldn't get fingerprints because the hands were b*rned.
And this is before DNA was invented.
There was no way you could look at that person
and see who it is.
NARRATOR But as is standard procedure in the morgue,
he enlists the help of forensic odontologist,
Dr. Richard Souviron, to examine the dead man's teeth.
Dental identification is the fastest,
cheapest way of identifying an unknown individual.
Dental identifications are very
common in a forensic office.
We use them all the time.
You're basically taking the deceased that you have,
charting his teeth, X-raying his teeth,
and comparing it to who you think it is.
DR. RICHARD SOUVIRON Teeth are very important because they
really don't change.
They're not like a fingerprint, of course, that is there
for the rest of your life.
Obviously, you can have orthodontics or extractions
or capping, or whatever.
But primarily, the teeth will survive decomposition.
And they survive fires much better than any other area--
NARRATOR Dr. Souviron begins by removing Ezzat's jaw
to get a closer look.
DR. RICHARD SOUVIRON In cases like this, where they are
severely b*rned, there's no way that you can go in there
and get that mouth open without removing the jaws.
The teeth, in this particular case, survived very well.
The front teeth were there.
The back teeth were there.
They were intact.
It takes extreme temperatures over a long period of time
to disintegrate teeth.
The World Trade Center is a good example
[ … ]
of where there's very little dental evidence
left because of the extreme intensity of the fire.
If it melts steel, it's going to melt teeth.
In this case, the teeth were consistent with what you would
expect with a gasoline fire.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
NARRATOR Next, he prepares X-rays of the teeth
and documents their key features.
DR. RICHARD SOUVIRON We record where the fillings are,
where the missing teeth are, if there are spaces
or gaps or breaks, or whatever.
NARRATOR And it's not long before he
reaches his first conclusion.
We were able to state that the individual
was a white male in his late teens
to mid 's, in that age range.
NARRATOR These findings seem to match the victim's
biological profile.
But in order to positively ID the body,
Dr. Souviron needs Ezzat's dental records.
They asked the sister, Ghada, if she
knew where her brother's dental records
were, where his dentist was.
And she said no.
The bottom line was, I had nothing to compare to.
There was no way that we could make
any kind of statement, one way or the other, as to identity.
It didn't bother the investigators that much.
They relied on the testimony of the neighbor of Wakil,
saying that he was under the car.
Based on the circumstances that the age, the sex,
the overall characteristics matched,
they did a presumptive identification.
That was it.
There-- there wasn't really, you know, that much more that was
going to be done on the case.
NARRATOR The investigation into Ezzat Aboul-Hosn's death
is now officially closed.
[TELEPHONE RINGING]
Until, a surprise visitor appears on the scene
and threatens to turn the entire case upside down.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Six months after -year-old Ezzat Aboul-Hosn
was k*lled in a freak fire in his garage,
out of the blue [TELEPHONE RINGING]
an insurance investigator called the Metro-Dade Police Station.
RAY NAFARIO He wanted to talk to me.
He said he was suspicious about the case.
MAN ON PHONE Yeah, so I--
NARRATOR According to the investigator,
at the time of his death, Ezzat carried
six separate life insurance policies, totaling
an astonishing $. million.
In fact, one of the six claims, in the amount of half a million
dollars, had already been paid out to the sole beneficiary,
Ezzat's sister, Ghada.
But the next insurance company thought it was pretty odd.
He's a relatively young man and has no wife
or children to worry about.
It didn't look right.
Why would he be insured for $. million
and then suddenly die in a freak accident?
[MAN SCREAMING]
NARRATOR Now, they refused to settle the remaining claims,
until the dead man is officially identified, once and for all.
Fortunately, forensic odontologist, Dr. Souviron,
saved the victim's jaws and teeth.
It was standard practice in people who were d*sfigured
to remove the jaw and keep that in case
a scientific identification can be done in the future.
Now we tend to do the X-ray, do the charting, and remove DNA,
without necessarily removing the jaws.
In this case, storing the jaw was a good forensic practice.
NARRATOR But with no dental records,
Dr. Souviron must resort to a less conventional
means of identifying the body.
There was no records of the individual,
prior to death, such as a dental chart, dental X-rays--
there was nothing to help with the identification.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
NARRATOR And he has one last trick up his sleeve,
a cutting-edge method of comparison
that could yield a swift result. His tool of choice--
a simple photograph.
At the time this was done, very few forensic odontologists
anywhere in a country were dealing
with smiling photographs.
So this was not common, by any means.
NARRATOR Investigators immediately
conduct a thorough search of Ezzat's home,
hoping to locate a suitable picture.
They couldn't find any pictures.
And they didn't find his driver's license, his passport,
or his Green Card.
NARRATOR And that's not all.
When they take a look at his Ezzat's finances,
they discover something suspicious.
They found a bank account with $. balance,
and that was about it.
Something looked really wrong here.
[ … ]
NARRATOR Now, investigators wonder
if Wakil's initial theory of foul play
may hold water, after all.
Maybe someone m*rder*d him.
[OMINOUS MUSIC]
NARRATOR As questions multiply, detectives
are more determined than ever to get to the bottom of this case.
And it isn't long before they catch a lucky break,
when they uncover an old driver's license
picture in the files of the Florida
Department of Motor Vehicles.
And that's when the story gets to be interesting.
[UPBEAT MUSIC]
The driver's license photograph was great because it
was a full, open-mouthed smile.
So you could see both the upper and lower teeth.
NARRATOR With a careful eye, Dr. Souviron
compares the victim's teeth to the driver's
license photograph.
DR. RICHARD SOUVIRON And the teeth didn't match.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
I could say without any hesitation
that they were not the same individual.
So the deceased was not Aboul-Hosn
positively, without doubt.
NARRATOR Immediately, Dr. Souviron calls the detectives
with the shocking news.
Their reaction was classic, the Detective Ray
Nasario's comment, when I told him that they're
not the same person.
And I'm going to say exactly, word-for-word.
I'll never forget it.
[MAN TALKING ON PHONE]
He said, you're [BLEEP] me.
I was confident that this was Aboul-Hosn.
Yeah, you know, I thought I had my, uh, case closed.
And it's not Aboul-Hosn.
[CHUCKLES]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR Metro-Dade detectives have just
learned that the body they pulled from Ezzat
Aboul-Hosn's b*rned out garage six months
ago was not Ezzat Aboul-Hosn.
Even more disturbing is the fact that Ezzat
carried a staggering $. million in life insurance.
Now you have / hindsight.
You say, well, if the individual underneath the car
was not Aboul-Hosn, and Aboul-Hosn had a huge amount
of insurance on his life, well, it's
pretty obvious that the person under the car
was a victim of a homicide.
NARRATOR Now the hunt is on to identify
the dead man under the car and find out
exactly what happened to Ezzat.
Detectives immediately turned to the one
person who may be able to provide some clues,
Ezzat's sister, Ghada.
But to their dismay, they learn that Ghada
has left the country.
After the first insurance pay off
of about half a million dollars, she returned to Lebanon.
NARRATOR Unable to contact her and with virtually
no other leads, investigators begin canvassing
Miami's tight-knit Lebanese community, interviewing
everyone who knew Ezzat.
And it's not long before one of them drops a bombshell.
They learned from people visiting here
from Lebanon that they had seen him
in person back in his hometown.
After the fire, he'd come back rich from America.
NARRATOR This astonishing news galvanizes the investigation.
Detectives now believe that Ezzat deliberately
k*lled the stranger in his garage,
in order to fake his own death and collect
the insurance money.
EDNA BUCHANAN He was seen alive and well in Lebanon,
living like a rich man.
I mean, that looked suspicious on its face.
It became pretty clear that fraud had taken place,
and m*rder had taken place.
What shocks me--
it's not so much that it was insurance fraud.
I think every medical examiner has had one.
It's that this innocent person was m*rder*d.
That is truly disturbing.
NARRATOR Police immediately launched a full
fledged homicide investigation.
And Ezzat, the man once thought to be the victim,
is now the suspect in a heinous crime.
He's the only one in the house other than the victim.
There's no one else there.
He's the man that we got to-- we had to go--
go get.
NARRATOR But there was a major obstacle.
There was no extradition treaty with Lebanon.
So even if the authorities there knew,
you'd have to wait 'till he went to some neutral country
and try to arrest him there.
NARRATOR With no proof that Ezzat is alive, much
less guilty of any wrongdoing, the investigation
[ … ]
grinds to a halt.
They definitely weren't going to go to Lebanon.
And Aboul-Hosn was not going to come here.
NARRATOR The Miami Herald newspaper
soon catches wind of the case and is eager to get the story.
They waste no time assigning it to their Middle East
correspondent, Dan Goodgame.
But the task is a daunting one.
Could you find him for us, somewhere in Lebanon,
a person with this name?
I laughed.
Here's a country at w*r, impassable roads,
and all I've got is one person's name.
I thought, not possible, can't be done.
NARRATOR Still, Goodgame is intrigued by the story.
And when he mentions Aboul-Hosn's name
to his local guide, he gets a whole lot
more than he bargained for.
The thing to understand is Lebanon is
a country of clans and tribes.
And if you know someone's name, you probably
know a good bit about them.
You know where they live.
You know what their religion is and what the politics are.
So when I told him, he says, oh, yes, all of the Aboul-Hosns
live in Btekhnay.
[CHUCKLES] So I said, well, let's find them.
NARRATOR The two men embark on a harrowing journey over snow
covered and treacherous terrain, slowly making their way
to the remote mountain village, located several miles outside
of Beirut.
It was quite an adventure just getting there.
NARRATOR But when they finally arrived, their luck runs out.
The people in the village asked
what our business was there.
And I said, well, I'm looking for a Mr. Aboul-Hosn.
And one of them laughed and said in Arabic,
everyone here is named Aboul-Hosn.
And I [CHUCKLES] just thought, you've got to be kidding me.
This is a village of , people,
and everyone is named Aboul-Hosn?
And he said, yes, that's correct.
So my thought was, we're never going to find him.
[OMINOUS MUSIC]
NARRATOR Reporter Dan Goodgame is
hot on the trail of -year-old Ezzat Aboul-Hosn.
Unfortunately, he has just discovered
that everyone in the remote Lebanese village
shares the missing man's surname.
I laughed.
This is a village of , people,
and everyone is named Aboul-Hosn.
So I said, well, great.
How about rich Ezzat?
And he said, oh, right this way.
And everyone knew who the rich Ezzat was.
NARRATOR The reporter is led to an extravagant house,
glaringly out of place among the villagers modest homes.
It was a steel and glass ski chalet, about three stories
high, with a peaked roof and brand
new Japanese and German imported cars
and pickup trucks surrounding it.
It looked like someone was dropping a lot of money on it.
NARRATOR It appears that Ezzat is far from dead.
In fact, he's living like a king.
But there is no sign of the wanted man himself anywhere.
My guess is that he was in the vicinity
and hiding out with friends, just to avoid being seen by us.
NARRATOR However, Goodgame does manage to track
down Ezzat's sister, Ghada.
Ghada was not happy to see me and not happy to be
filling questions for me.
She basically says, listen, I didn't
know I was the beneficiary of the insurance policy.
I thought my brother had d*ed.
I was so sad about this.
And then when I got back here, I learned that he was alive.
I felt used.
This was all his doing.
And she basically admitted that there
had been an insurance fraud and blamed it all on her brother.
[OMINOUS MUSIC]
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
NARRATOR Immediately, Goodgame is anxious to get out
of the village.
My driver became very agitated when he began to suspect
that Aboul-Hosn was nearby.
He thought he would k*ll us.
It was a very violent and unpredictable place
because there's really no law back there.
We probably never would have been found if he had k*lled us.
I mean, the mountains are very rugged back there.
It would not have been hard to get away with that.
[expl*si*n AND FIRE CRACKLING]
NARRATOR Now, there's little doubt
that Ezzat has pulled off one of the most diabolical insurance
scams ever seen.
In over years as a medical examiner, I've seen a lot.
There's not a lot that shocks me.
But this case is at a whole other level.
[ … ]
This is a case of greed.
It wasn't for jealousy, it wasn't in rage.
It was a cold blooded k*lling for money.
[OMINOUS MUSIC]
EDNA BUCHANAN There have been a number of cases
where people faked their death.
But the ones that we know of were never this slick.
Let's just be cold about this.
If you were setting out to commit this fraud,
you have to find someone your age and size, in good health,
alive, to put under this car.
NARRATOR The exact manner in which the victim was k*lled
may never be known.
But the scenario favored by authorities
is the stuff of nightmares.
I think he tied him up with his face close
to the exhaust pipe of the car and just left him
in the garage with the car running until he was
so overcome carbon monoxide.
And what's truly disturbing is that he was
alive when that fire occurred.
The body was alive when it was underneath the car.
That's the real horrible part about this.
This individual was not dead when he was under the car.
He was alive.
EDNA BUCHANAN Once he was overcome,
Ezzat could position him under the car, release the jack,
puncture the gas t*nk, and leave some kind of paper fuse, which
would ignite after he left.
[FLAMES BURNING]
And that paper fuse would disappear.
There'd be no trace of it left in a gasoline-fed fire.
[MAN SCREAMING]
And the scheme then was to collect his own insurance
and go back to Lebanon a rich man.
NARRATOR Sadly, the true identity of the victim
may forever remain a mystery.
RAY NAFARIO We have no earthly idea who he is.
We've never been able to identify him.
They went through all the missing persons' reports
they could find.
But they never were able to put them together with the corpse.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR To this day, Ezzat Aboul-Hosn remains free.
Given the lack of an extradition treaty, federal authorities
simply cannot arrest him.
There was simply nothing they could do.
He had fled to a country with which the US
had no extradition treaty and to a village
where there was no law.
He was home free.
NARRATOR Meanwhile, neither Ezzat's sister,
Ghada, nor his friend, Wakil, have
been implicated in or charged with any wrongdoing
in the case.
But if Ezzat ever sets foot on US soil again,
there is little doubt that he'll be brought to justice.
There's no statute of limitations on--
on-- on m*rder.
NARRATOR As for the fate of the cremated stranger,
according to Ghada, when her brother's friend, Wakil,
learned that Ezzat was, in fact, alive,
he apparently threw the ashes into the Atlantic Ocean.
There are now no remains of whoever the person
was who was under that car.
They're washed away by the tides.
[SEA BIRDS CRYING]
This is one of my favorite all time stories
I've ever worked on.
And I learned a lot about the best and the worst
that people are capable of.
It seemed to me that Ezzat Aboul-Hosn had probably gotten
away with the perfect crime.
[OMINOUS MUSIC]
In this next case, when a young, healthy couple
die mysteriously, what their autopsies eventually reveal
could help save hundreds of lives.
NARRATOR It's early on a warm spring morning,
and -year-old Navajo Merrill Bahe,
along with his sister-in-law Carolyn, are on their way
to Gallup, New Mexico, traveling straight
through the vast heartland of the Navajo Nation.
The Navajo Nation is in what's called the Four Corners area,
where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado come together.
NARRATOR But less than an hour into the drive, Merrill
suddenly begins gasping for air.
DENISE GRADY They veered off the road
to go into some kind of a convenience store
to use a telephone.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
I don't know what to do.
DENISE GRADY They called for an ambulance.
And the medics came, and they tried to revive him.
But by the time they got to the hospital, he was dead.
NARRATOR Merrill's mother, Annie Bahe,
is devastated by the loss of her eldest son
and can't fathom what could have k*lled a seemingly healthy
-year-old so suddenly.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
NARRATOR In the state of New Mexico, when
[ … ]
of the reasons for a death are unknown,
the Office of the Medical Investigator
must determine the cause.
Richard Malone is the agent assigned to the case.
But what he learns from Merrill's grieving family
doesn't make much sense.
Merrill Bahi was a cross-country runner
and an athlete and had no medical history, didn't use
dr*gs, didn't abuse alcohol.
We had no clue as to why he d*ed.
NARRATOR In fact, the only complaint that Merrill had
was a mild case of the flu that started three days earlier.
Baffled, Malone prompted the family for more information.
I sat down with them, and I asked
them what happened to Merrill.
And they told me that they were on their way
into town to attend a funeral.
The funeral of his fiance.
You're on your way to one funeral,
and now you have another death in the family.
And they began to describe Florena's death
with the same kind of details and the same kind of symptoms
that involved Merrill.
And as soon as they said that, the chills
just went down my back.
And I remember thinking, my goodness, we have a crisis
here.
Although it's possible that Merrill and Florena
could have d*ed from something different, highly unlikely.
They had the same symptoms.
They were in close proximity to each other.
Whatever they d*ed from is suspicious
that it's the same thing.
NARRATOR And as Malone digs deeper,
he learns of yet another unexplained death in the area.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RICHARD MALONE The -year-old female
had been rushed into the Gallup Indian Medical Center
with the very same kind of symptoms.
NARRATOR Three healthy young adults
dead with no explanation.
Suddenly, Malone and state health officials
find themselves grasping for answers and fearing the worst.
DENISE GRADY It was really frightening because they were
young, totally healthy people.
And they would have what seemed like some kind
of mild case of the flu.
And in a relatively short time, they would just be dead.
NARRATOR Medical investigator, Richard Malone,
is baffled by the sudden deaths of Merrill
Bahi and his fiancée, Florena.
And his only hope for an answer lies with an autopsy.
If there was something contagious,
then we had a much better handle on it
if we autopsy both people.
NARRATOR Merrill and Florena's bodies
are rushed to the New Mexico office of the Medical
Investigator, where Dr. Patricia McFeely
will perform the autopsy.
It was after hours, and I arranged
to have people there, technicians there,
so that we could get going very quickly.
NARRATOR Her prime suspect is an unusual, but highly lethal,
disease, [CHURCH BELL RINGING] the plague.
Between and , it k*lled roughly million people,
almost half of Europe's population.
I think when people hear about the plague,
we think of the millions of deaths that occurred
during the Middle Ages.
We still think of it as something very deadly.
But it's just a bacterial infection
that we have antibiotics for.
NARRATOR But while cases of bubonic plague
are relatively rare in the United States,
it's still a thr*at in the American Southwest.
DR PATRICIA MCFEELY It's endemic here.
I mean, every year, we have had plague deaths.
So it's something that we knew was around
and had dealt with before.
NARRATOR Still, even a single diagnosis of bubonic plague
is enough to raise alarm bells across the region.
Within days, the disease can develop
into a highly contagious and lethal pneumonia.
Every time they breathe out or cough, or something,
they're distributing all these organisms.
And other people can then obviously breed them in.
And that's how plague spreads from person to person
and can spread at a very fast time.
NARRATOR As soon as the bodies arrive,
Dr. McFeely cuts open the chest cavities
and begins extracting tissue samples from their lungs.
Then she draws blood to test for the plague bacteria.
I arranged to take specimens for culture, so that we could
get those going very quickly because that
was a high level of concern.
The cultures were one of the things we could do right away
and needed to get in process because they take some time.
NARRATOR Early the next morning,
Dr. McFeely begins the back-to-back autopsies,
starting with Florena.
[ … ]
Standing over the open chest cavity,
she carefully lifts out the lungs
and immediately discovers a serious problem.
A normal lung is filled with air, and it's light and fluffy.
They weren't light and fluffy.
They weighed two or three times what they should've weighed.
So they were heavy.
They were definitely heavy.
NARRATOR Even more alarming--
they were also filled with fluid.
There was both fluid inside the lungs
and surrounding the lungs.
And there's a lot of it.
NARRATOR But while the lungs are clearly abnormal,
the damage is not consistent with the plague
or anything else that Dr. McFeely has ever seen before.
DR. JAN GARAVAGLIA It's very frustrating
when you have a case that you know they've
d*ed from some type of infectious agent,
and you can't identify it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR Next, she turns her attention to Merrill,
searching for any sign of the plague.
But finds none.
However, she does note that his lungs
look very similar to Florena's.
DR. PATRICIA MCFEELY Obviously they d*ed because of something
that was making their lungs fill up with fluid,
so they couldn't breathe.
There was something that was affecting the blood vessels
in the membranes in the lungs, so that they, instead
of retaining the fluid that ordinarily
is normally in your body, they were leaking.
NARRATOR Suddenly, Dr. McFeely is
beginning to doubt her initial theory of the plague.
But she does know one thing, whatever att*cked or infected
their lungs was fatal.
Surely, we were concerned about something
that was extra virulent, you know, really
more deadly, or something.
NARRATOR And it isn't long before more fatalities
begin to show up on the radar.
They very quickly realized they had five deaths,
and all of them had d*ed with this awful flooding
of the lungs.
But what became more alarming were the stories that
went on over the next few days.
It became clear that there were cases
popping up in other places, and they were not all Navajos.
And there were more cases and more
cases and still no explanation.
NARRATOR Two days later, the results
from the bacterial cultures finally
land on Dr. McFeely's desk.
And sure enough, they are negative for the plague.
Meanwhile, the death toll continues to climb.
DENISE GRADY It was getting up to , , cases.
And it seemed as if everybody who got it was dying.
It's such a helpless feeling to know
that young people are dying and not
be able to identify the cause.
NARRATOR Now, the race is on to figure
out what could be k*lling so many healthy young people.
And then we really had kind of a big gap,
you know, as to what else it might
be because there really weren't a lot
of things that fit very well.
We were looking at everything at the time.
RICHARD MALONE We thought they might have encountered
some kind of toxins inadvertently,
or some kind of poisons, that none of us were familiar with.
And so the search was on.
NARRATOR Their main concerns are rat poisons,
pesticides, and possibly chemicals
used in Indian jewelry making.
RICHARD MALONE We went to the house, to the barns,
to the shed, looking for those kinds of poisons.
And instead, what we found were substances like dish soap
and deodorant and laundry, soap, and stuff that all of us
have in our cabinets and under our sinks at our houses.
We were very stumped and frustrated.
At a loss for answers, they consider a long sh*t.
Maybe it was some kind of horrible new strain of flu
that they hadn't encountered before.
NARRATOR The flu, or influenza, is a prolific k*ller.
Every year in the United States, the seasonal flu virus claims
approximately , lives.
But every decade or so, a lethal strain
emerges that has the potential to be far deadlier.
DR. BRIAN HJELLE That is the single biggest concern,
this fear that we will have a pandemic flu
that will be highly lethal and highly transmissible.
You have to look at it as a disease, where it infects
so many millions of people.
I mean, this current version will
probably infect billions of people,
when it's all said and done.
By flu's in general--
every year we typically lose thousands of people to the flu.
NARRATOR The most devastating flu
[ … ]
pandemic occurred in , at the end of the First World w*r.
The outbreak lasted nearly two years, leaving
an estimated million dead.
Mysteriously, most of the victims
were young, healthy adults.
People who were really in the prime of their health and life
were dying in droves.
NARRATOR Fearing that this is what k*lled Florena
and Merrill, the State Lab runs tests
for the flu and any other known respiratory
viruses and bacteria, with the hope that they'll hit pay dirt.
But doctors are soon frustrated, when
all results come back negative.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
Even more frustrating to medical personnel throughout the region"], index ,…}
is their inability to treat the infected patients.
It didn't seem as if there were some low level bunch
of mildly ill people out there.
It seemed like if you got this, you were just done for.
[OMINOUS MUSIC]
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
NARRATOR Merrill Bahi and his fiancée, Florena, d*ed
suddenly, just two weeks ago.
And since then, at least other healthy young people
have been k*lled and what seems to be
the same mysterious disease.
Facing a dangerous and deadly outbreak,
New Mexico State Health authorities decide
it's time to call in the CDC.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
is this federal health agency in Atlanta.
And they're kind of like the infectious disease detectives
for the United States.
NARRATOR CDC officials waste no time
assigning one of their top experts
to the case, Dr. Stuart Nichol.
DR. STUART NICHOL There was quite
a bit of fear and anxiety.
But was this something that was spreading?
How is it being transmitted?
Was it suddenly going to mushroom up
into a large expl*sive outbreak?
NARRATOR At this stage, only one thing is clear.
Dr. Nichol and his team of scientists
need to find answers fast.
DENISE GRADY It's really like a police investigation,
but a medical one, to try to figure out what possible things
they could have been exposed to that
might explain this illness.
And they start doing all kinds of lab work.
I mean, they get samples from the blood, from the lungs,
everything they can get.
NARRATOR They test each sample for a myriad of rare disease
agents, Machupo, [INAUDIBLE],, and an unusual form
of meningitis.
But all of the results were negative.
We were coming off with blanks.
NARRATOR Then, after a week of around-the-clock investigation,
a blood test on one of the deceased patients
yields a shocking result
On June th, the testing showed that what they had
was a hantavirus.
NARRATOR Hantavirus.
A deadly disease contracted from rodents.
It's spread when their urine or feces dry out
and turns into deadly dust.
DENISE GRADY It spreads through the air.
If it dries out and starts blowing around, you inhale it.
NARRATOR But this finding makes little sense.
Hantavirus almost always leads to kidney disease.
It's never been known to affect the lungs.
DR. STUART NICHOL These hunter viruses
were viruses which weren't known to be
associated with any respiratory disease problem, at all.
So it had us kind of scratching our heads as to, is this real?
NARRATOR And there's something even more
baffling about the discovery.
This disease was, namely in various areas
of China throughout Asia, known to be a problem.
Prior to the outbreak in the southwest,
it was not known to cause any infection in the United States.
NARRATOR It's a sobering notion.
If what's k*lling these folks is, in fact, hantavirus,
it will literally rewrite the medical textbooks.
But first, the team needs ironclad proof.
DR. STUART NICHOL So when we had that test result, which
suggested that maybe, maybe this is a hantavirus,
you know, how can we prove it to people?
How can we prove it to ourselves before we
announce it to anybody else?
NARRATOR Dr. Nichol and his team
must decode the virus's RNA to determine if it's a match.
They amplify a tiny genetic strand of material
to compare it with other strains of the virus.
DR. STUART NICHOL And we sequenced,
you know, the ACGTs, you know, the genetic code
of this genetic fragment.
And when we lined it up with what
was known with hantaviruses that we'd seen in the past,
we showed that, wow, it really is a hantavirus.
[ … ]
[OMINOUS MUSIC]
NARRATOR They run a battery of follow up tests.
And scientists can hardly believe their eyes,
when one result after another comes
back with a newly discovered strain of hantavirus.
Now the team has only one hope of containing the outbreak,
identify the source.
They figured that there must be some rodent
involved, but which one?
So doctors from the CDC and the state
went out to the reservation and put traps around
to try to catch rodents and then start testing them
and see if any of them came up positive for this new virus.
NARRATOR A week later, doctors finally have their answer,
wild deer mice.
Finding that the virus was in deer mice
was the worst case scenario.
Why?
Because the deer mouse is probably the most abundant
small mammal in North America.
NARRATOR Scientists now believe that this
is the reason the lethal virus spreads so quickly.
And it doesn't take long to determine
that this particular strain of hantavirus
has existed in the United States for years.
They figured that it had to have been here for a long time
because it wasn't k*lling the rodents.
They were perfectly adjusted to it.
And that takes a long time to happen.
NARRATOR But this raises another question.
If the virus has been here for so long,
why is the first outbreak appearing now?
What was special about the spring of
was it had been a lot of rainfall, a very mild window.
So, of course, you have a lot of vegetation.
DENISE GRADY And that that led to a big increase
in the rodent population, and that there were just more
mice around.
NARRATOR Authorities are relieved to have
finally pinpointed the source of the outbreak.
But unfortunately, there's still no cure for hantavirus.
There's no magic b*llet.
We don't have a wonder drug which can help these patients
who are infected.
So really, the only thing we can do
is try to prevent people from getting
infected with the virus.
And we've done that through very aggressive
kind of media campaigns--
NARRATOR The CDC and the state of New Mexico outline key steps
to follow in order to reduce the risk of infection.
Seal off cracks and holes in the home to prevent
a rodent infestation.
Set traps around the house to eliminate rodents.
Keep all food in tight containers.
Remove possible nesting spots.
And wear a face mask and use bleach
when cleaning infested areas.
So you protect yourself, you protect your airways.
And simple things like that greatly
reduce your chance of getting this virus infection.
[TRIBAL MUSIC PLAYING]
NARRATOR As a result of the public awareness campaign,
infection rates begin to drop off dramatically.
DENISE GRADY Lives probably were
saved because they started warning people about keeping
mice out and disinfecting.
NARRATOR And as communities across the Southwest
begin to breathe a sigh of relief,
Merrill's mother also finds a measure of comfort
in finally putting a name to her son's k*ller.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
NARRATOR For the medical community and the CDC,
the discovery of hantavirus closes the chapter on one
of the most high-stakes investigations
in their -year history.
The fact that we were so hugely successful
at cracking the case in record time
just makes it very, very memorable.
This case shows the crucial role of an autopsy.
Without one, this deadly hantavirus pandemic
may never have been identified.
And who knows how many more lives would have been lost?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
(WHISPERING) Atlas.
America's Most Shocking Cases - Deadly Deception
Watch/Buy Amazon
The unexplained deaths that Dr. G investigates can be attributed to various causes, such as undiagnosed medical conditions, accidents, or foul play.
The unexplained deaths that Dr. G investigates can be attributed to various causes, such as undiagnosed medical conditions, accidents, or foul play.