Hey y'all, I'm Julie Mattson, and in this episode of Pushing Up Lilies, we're diving into the unsettling case of Valerie Bonner, a woman now charged with abuse of a corpse after two men were found dead in her apartment within just six months of each other. The first death raised eyebrows, but the second set off alarms, forcing authorities to look closer. Who were these men? What was Valerie’s relationship to them? And how does someone end up with two unexplained deaths in the same space, months apart? Join me as I peel back the layers of this bizarre case, where unanswered questions linger and justice may still be finding its footing. You won’t want to miss this strange and unsettling case. * Listener discretion is advised.
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00:06
Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies. I'm your host, Julie Mattson. Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
00:24
Do I have some stories for you? Are you ready? Hey guys, I'm still getting over COVID. I don't know why, but I'm going on like almost a month and I'm still blowing my nose several times a day. I don't know how many of y'all have had this last strain or whatever it is, but it's driving me crazy.
00:48
So, I want to push again the fact that tickets to the first annual Pushing Up Lilies murder mystery dinner are selling out quickly. So, if you thought about buying a ticket, go onto the website www.pushinguplilies.com and hit your tickets today.
01:07
They're selling out quickly. I’d hate for you to miss it. It's gonna be so much fun. It's going to be a masquerade party theme. Bring your friends. It's really going to be a good time. Chicken and beef fajitas, delicious food.
01:22
If you've never been to Prairie House in Crossroads, Texas, you will love it. It's going to be a great time. Also, I think I'll let y'all know, but I'm not 100% sure Pushing Up Lilies is going to have a booth for the first time where you can actually walk in and purchase these subscription boxes.
01:43
There will also be other merchandise, the same merchandise plus more, that's on our murder merch page. So, this will be something where you can walk in and get a fun gift. There'll be some skull items for Halloween just all kinds of cool, neat gift ideas and fun things that you can just buy for yourself.
02:07
It's gonna be inside the McCart Street Mercantile in Crumb, Texas, which is near where we just bought our house. So just wanna let you know that that will soon be an option. I'm in the process of setting that store up.
02:23
And what else? Oh yeah, Pushing Up Lilies is one of the sponsors of North Texas Overdose Awareness Day, August 31st on the Square and Denton, Texas. We will have some giveaways for you there. We look forward to meeting our fans and getting new fans.
02:42
Yeah, it's fun. It's fun, y'all. So, I want to talk this week about Valerie Bonner. I don't know if y'all have heard about her, but we've had a case very similar to this in our area before. Today's story comes from Foley, Alabama, which is a small Gulf Coast town known for its beaches, outlet malls, and recently for a grim discovery inside an otherwise ordinary apartment.
03:08
This one is layered with unanswered questions, two unexplained deaths, and a suspect whose silence lasted nearly two weeks. Grab your coffee or your crime notebook because we're about to dig in. It started with a call from a concerned resident to the Foley Police Department.
03:29
The neighbor lived in the Allison Point Apartments, a modest complex with beige siding, narrow hallways, and thin walls. You can't hide much from your neighbors in a place like that. But the caller told police that something fell off about the apartment.
03:48
No one had seen the man who lived there for days. And there was a smell. We all know what that means. I've talked about that before. If you don't see your neighbor for days, especially if you smell something or you see flies on the windows, call the police.
04:04
The smell was faint but growing stronger. In an apartment complex, you know, literally when these thin, non-insulated walls is all you have between you and your neighbor, sometimes those smells permeate a little quicker than they would if you lived in a home or, you know, a brick home where you had feet separating you.
04:27
Now, when police arrived, they found Valerie Bonner, a 43-year-old resident standing in her doorway. And inside the back bedroom, they discovered the body of a man, not a freshly deceased man, not a man who had only been gone for a matter of hours, but the smell told them that he'd been dead for 10 to 14 days.
04:52
And again, you can't tell that just by smell. there's a lot of different things that come into play when you're trying to determine how long a body has been dead. Now decomposition is a natural process.
05:07
We've talked about this before, it occurs after death, it involves the breakdown of the body's organic materials. So, I thought it would help y'all to kind of understand the process a little better, to give you some insights, to kind of explore the stages of decomposition on a day-by-day basis.
05:27
And that kind of helps you to understand what it would be like to be in an apartment, a small apartment, with the body for that long. Initially, day one, shortly after death, the body starts to cool off.
05:43
We call this algor mortis. Now blood settles in the dependent areas, we call that liver mortis or liver mortis if you're not from Texas. and the muscles stiffen, and we call that rigor mortis or rigor mortis if you're not from Texas.
06:04
These processes they help experts estimate the time of death however we don't always necessarily care. If it seems natural, it's not a homicide we don't really try we don't. Now I'm not saying that every office doesn’t, but we don't normally try to pinpoint the exact time of death unless we need to know and then in that case we try to get a little bit closer to the time if it's a homicide.
06:35
But in our jurisdiction the time of death is when someone's found. Now autolysis is when cells start to break down as enzymes digest all the cell structures and so this internal breakdown is when decomposition starts.
06:56
Now day two or three is what we call the bloat stage, and this is where bacteria in the intestines produce gases as they break down tissue. It causes the body to bloat because of the gas and particularly in the abdomen so that's where we see it a lot when people are starting to decompose, they look bloated, or their abdomen looks really large.
07:23
Now the skin can also take on a greenish color especially in the lower abdomen, that's where we notice it first and that's due to the breakdown of hemoglobin. Now the release of the gases and chemicals creates us very strong very unpleasant odor.
07:40
When we move somebody who is decomposed many times those gases expel. This lady had to stay in her apartment for 10 days, you can only imagine even day two and three what the smell was like in her apartment.
07:57
I don't know how clean she was. So, day four to six is the active decay stage. And this is when fluids begin to leak from the body orifices as tissues break down. This is also known as the putrefaction stage.
08:14
If the body's exposed to insects, particularly blowflies, they will lay eggs and then maggots will hatch. And that accelerates the decomposition process by consuming the soft tissue. Now the body also, while all this is going on, continues to darken with patches of red, green, and black appearing on the skin.
08:39
Day seven to ten is the advanced decay stage. So, the body's tissues start to continue to decompose. There is significant mass loss due to fluid and gas release. Bones can start to become visible and as the majority of the soft tissues are broken down, sometimes the strong odor that happens in the earlier stages actually gets a little bit better.
09:06
It diminishes just a little bit. Now, day 11 through 25, most of the skin tissues have decomposed, leaving behind bones, cartilage, and possibly dried skin, especially if someone has a fan blowing on them or has a ceiling fan on in the room, or if the heat's on, we can notice the skin to really get dry, almost a mummified look.
09:30
Again, when the environment is dry and cold, that mummification actually preserves some of the tissue a little bit longer. The body has little odor at this stage, but because, I mean, and we're talking about the body itself, but because we've already lost all the fluid from the orifices as the tissue has broken down, all of that fluid that surrounds the body still smells, so don't think that if you get in there day 11 to 25 that you're gonna be without a bad smell.
10:06
The rate and the nature of decomposition can vary widely, and this is what I try to explain to families all the time. It depends on a lot of things. Did they have on clothes? Were they exposed to heat?
10:20
Were they submerged in water? What's the temperature? Where were they found? Is there insect activity? Did they have any underlying medical problems? So, all this comes into play, and that's why it's really hard to determine exactly when someone's time of death was.
10:37
Warmer temperature accelerates decomposition, which makes sense because if we were to find a body outside in the heat, it's gonna decompose faster. Cooler temperatures are gonna slow it down. Bodies exposed to the elements decompose faster than those buried, or submerged in water.
10:57
You know, out in the heat, rain, all the things. Clothing and other coverings can also affect the rate of decomposition because it influences the body's exposure to air and to insects. And insects, of course, play a very crucial role in decomposition because the presence or absence of them can significantly impact the whole process, the whole decomposition process.
11:25
The stages are complex and it's very fascinating and that's why they call me the Decomp Queen in our office because I absolutely love to go on Decomps. To me it's so interesting to see how the body breaks down.
11:39
The smells are offensive but honestly after working in the ER for so many years you're just used to smells. But it's influenced by so many different environmental and biological factors and understanding the stages actually helps a lot in our forensic investigations.
12:00
It's a natural part of the life cycle. It's unsettling to think about. We always encourage people again to keep an eye on their neighbor. You know, if the mail is calling up or if there's such a thing of newspapers in your area still, if the newspapers are piling up, if you haven't seen them, if there's flies on their window, if their car hasn't moved in a long time and they're normally relatively active.
12:27
Then, you know, it's fair to suspect that they could be deceased, especially if it's somebody who doesn't have family that comes to visit or doesn't have friends and isn't very social, which we know sometimes happens when you get older.
12:42
And sometimes it's not because you don't want to be, it's because you can't be because your mobility's changed and all the things. Anyway, according to police, Bonner eventually admitted to what happened or at least her version of what happened.
12:58
She said the man died from a possible overdose and the reason that she didn't call the police was because she was afraid that she'd get in trouble, not afraid that she'd get in trouble for not reporting it and having a 10-day-old body in her house that would eventually have to be discovered by someone, but she was afraid she would get in trouble because he died.
13:23
Now, instead of reporting the death, she actually removed his wallet and his cell phone from the apartment and threw them in the dumpster because in her mind without ID and a phone, it would be harder for the police to connect the dots.
13:36
Well, does she think we're stupid? I mean, we're going to figure out who he is. He's in her apartment. He’s, her boyfriend. Anyway, this was not Valerie's first encounter with the police over a dead body in her apartment and that's probably why she was so afraid just six months earlier.
13:54
earlier, her husband had died, also reportedly from an overdose in the very same apartment. The case was closed very quickly at that time, but after this new death, detectives were wondering if there was more to the story, you know, if lightning really could strike twice.
14:13
Right now, Valerie is facing two charges, abuse of a corpse, because in Alabama, that's a Class C felony, which means she could face up to 10 years in prison, and tampering with physical evidence, which is also a felony for removing the victim's belongings to impede the investigation that was her intention.
14:35
Her bond was set at $5,500, but police have made it clear that the autopsy could change everything. If the cause and manner of death raises more flags, additional charges could be coming. Now, it is harder to detect trauma on a decomposed body.
14:54
And that's the reason that they all come into the medical examiner's office. To check for that, because we can't always see it on the scene. Many times, it's dark, it's a small apartment. We just can't visualize the body many times needs to be cleaned off so that you can visualize those things a little bit more.
15:16
And that's done in the autopsy suite. Like I said, the cause and manner could change drastically once they view the body, and of course, they'll do toxicology. Now, let's talk a little bit about what happens in a case like this and where forensics actually comes in.
15:33
The autopsy's gonna answer most of the questions. Was this an overdose, which they will know after toxicology comes back? What drugs are present in his system? And were they prescribed to him? Was there evidence he was moved after death?
15:51
And did he have injuries? Did he have injuries that are inconsistent with a death caused by overdose? Toxicology takes weeks, but it can reveal and will reveal exactly what substances were in his bloodstream at the time of death.
16:09
Now, if those levels are too high to be accidental, or if there were signs of bruising or restraints or asphyxiation, the case can shift from a suspicious death to a homicide really quickly. Forensic investigators will examine the time of death indicators like decomposition, insect activity, and temperature inside the apartment.
16:34
And decomposition makes the cause of death a little bit harder to determine. And remember, Valerie had two deaths in that apartment in less than a year, which is rare. So naturally, you don't even have to be an investigator to know that you need to look a little bit deeper, something could be.
16:54
a rye here. Why would someone limit an apartment with the body for two weeks? Like, would you? That's a question that I have. Would you do that? Even though the smells don't bother me, I think being in an apartment with a dead body would bother me after two weeks.
17:12
Was she afraid? Was she guilty? Or was there something else that she was trying to hide? Now from a behavioral standpoint, failure to report a death can fall into two different categories. Either she was actively trying to hide the circumstances to avoid investigation, or she was in some kind of legal trouble, she had outstanding warrants, or there were drugs involved, and she was basically in self-preservation mode.
17:43
Throwing away the victim's ID and phone makes you think that maybe she was trying to hide something or conceal something. That's not really something she did in a panic stage. That's deliberate removal of potential evidence.
18:01
The best way to make yourself look not guilty if someone dies in your apartment is to call the police and report it. You have to know that if you allow the body to be there for 10 days to decompose, eventually it was going to be discovered by somebody and it was going to look suspicious.
18:20
If someone discards a deceased person's wallet but keeps the body in their home, the reasoning can vary and that depends widely on the psychological state of the person, what their intentions are, and what the circumstances concerning the death are.
18:39
Broadly, these motives fall into psychological, criminal, or practical categories. So, let's say her motives were criminal. To hide someone's wallet is going to contain the ID, the bank cards, and any identifying information.
18:57
And disposing of that could delay discovery of who the person is. But if they're in your apartment, it's going to make that discovery a lot easier because everyone's going to know you had a boyfriend and he lived with you and he's gone.
19:10
If the death was suspicious, removing the wallet could slow law enforcement's ability to connect the deceased to a suspect or a location, which really wasn't a possibility because he was in her apartment.
19:24
If you fear being implicated, you might get rid of items that tie you to that person. And if you intend to use the deceased's identity or credit cards or cash, removing the wallet avoids suspicion because the police won't know they're missing.
19:43
Those all could be possibilities. Now, from a psychological or emotional motive standpoint, some people enter a state of denial and they try to avoid reminders, you know, she wanted to keep the body there but because of the emotional attachment she wanted to get rid of his personal fix and wallet.
20:06
They might keep the body because they can't bear it apart with it but discard items that feel final or that are distressing to look at like the body's not distressing enough to look at. Sometimes people believe that keeping certain items preserves a connection, but other items aren't bad luck like a wallet.
20:29
Sometimes there's a fear that the wallet's contents will be used for malicious purposes or that keeping the wallet will draw unwanted attention. Practically I could see where someone would discard a wallet to avoid someone else finding valuables.
20:47
In cases of decomposition items are many times thrown away due to their condition. Now, we aren't allowed to throw away property. So, if we find a wallet in the pocket of a decomposed person, that becomes property of the next of kin.
21:03
And so those items are kept regardless of how smelly they are. My coworker Bob puts them in a Ziploc bag with a fabric softener sheet, which is a great idea. But remember, and I know I've said this before, that many times that money that's in that wallet is recirculated.
21:22
Money's gross, and when you handle it, you should always wash your hands. That's another reason why we don't let kids suck on coins. That could have been in a decomposed person's back pocket. Gross. Gross shawl.
21:36
This money and many of these items are recirculated. In fraud-related cases, people try to obscure the time of death, and so they'll take paperwork and that kind of thing out of the wallet to try to hide it.
21:52
Now, investigators are going to want to look at where was the wallet when it was discarded. Was it hidden or is it visible? What was missing from the wallet, if anything? Did she take cash or ID cards?
22:05
When was it discarded? And then the behavioral history of the person. Was she a hoarder? Did she have a mental illness? Did she have a criminal record? No, but she might because her husband died just six months earlier.
22:21
I was unable to locate any information on his death, so I don't know his name or what drug he supposedly took when he quote, unquote, overdosed, so I'm not 100% sure. But it definitely raises suspicion when your significant other passes away, and then six months later, your new significant other passes away.
22:46
As of now, Foley Police are waiting for the authorities. autopsy report. If it confirms overdose and there's not foul play, Valerie's charges are likely going to stay at abuse of a corpse and evidence tampering.
23:01
But if anything suggests involvement, like anything suggests that she caused the death or did something to him, even by providing the drugs, there could definitely be more serious charges. The prior overdose death of her husband will also likely be revisited, especially if toxicology circumstances overlap and the same or similar drugs were found in his system that are found in this case.
23:33
Now, cases like this are haunting because it leaves us wondering how much more is there beneath the surface, with two deaths, the same apartment, and the same suspect present. Until the autopsy results are in, we're all going to continue to have questions.
23:52
We know that sometimes the dead speak loudest through the evidence they lay behind. I can't wait for this guy's toxicology to come back. I hope that I can view his autopsy report online because I'm curious if the same drugs that were found in her husband's system are found in this guy's.
24:13
It's mind boggling to think, and again, we've had cases like this in our area where, you know, people kill somebody and just like leave the body in the apartment and just, you know, go on with life as usual.
24:26
Valerie Bonner apparently didn't work. She probably didn't want to leave the apartment because she didn't want to give anybody the ability to gain access to her apartment without her there and find him.
24:40
Interesting story. Can't wait to see how this one plays out, but she's in jail, and that's exactly where she needs to be right now until the police figure this out. So, she will, you know, at the very least have those current charges under her belt, and that could drastically change once the toxicology report comes back and once this autopsy is done and this happened on July 29th.
25:11
So, this is a new story. This literally just happened less than two weeks ago. So, it's going to be a while before the toxicology results come back, but I can't wait. I know y'all are like me, so you can't either.
25:25
Anyway, thank you so much for listening. You all have no idea how much I appreciate you. Again, go online and buy those tickets for the first annual murder mystery dinner. I look forward to seeing everybody there.
25:36
I think it's going to be a good time. Again, I'm not an actor. These are paid actors that will be performing, and I think y'all are really going to enjoy. enjoy it. I look forward to talking to you all next week. Talk to you soon. Bye.
25:51
Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies. If you like this podcast and would like to share it with others, please do me a quick favor and leave a review on Apple Podcast. This helps to make the podcast more visible to the public. Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at PushingUpLilies.com for merchandise and past episodes.