The Botanist | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

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

In 1993, Gerald Boggs of Steamboat Springs, Colorado was found dead in his home. He’d been burned with a stun gun, hit with a shovel, and shot several times. The victim’s wife, Jill Coit, was the primary suspect, but she had an alibi for the estimated time of death: she was camping with her boyfriend Michael Backus. Investigators were at a loss, and turned to two very unlikely people for help.

Today, we know Jill Coit as the Black Widow.

Forensic Plant Science, by Jane H Bock and David Norris.

Music in the episode “Steps” by Podington Bear “Then Crash (an original song for Criminal)” by Blue Dot Sessions “As I Was Saying” by Lee Rosevere “Thirteens” by Blue Dot Sessions “Easement” by Blue Dot Sessions

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Episode transcripts are posted on our website https://thisiscriminal.com/.

Episode 78 originally published 11/3/2017 https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-78-the-botanist-11-3-2017

Brief Summary

Jill Coit, married multiple times, murdered Gerald Boggs; forensic botanists analyze stomach contents to solve cases.

Key points

Jill Coit's Marital History. Jill Coit was married 11 times to nine different men, often hastily.
The Murder of Gerald Boggs. Gerald Boggs was found dead under suspicious circumstances, with his wife as the primary suspect.
The O.J. Simpson Case. Jane and Dave offered their forensic services for the O.J. Simpson case but were declined.
Forensic Botany's Impact. Forensic botany helped solve a case involving a toddler's death, leading to a confession.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

You can do the math on that one.

0:20WatchJan 4, 2023

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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