In this episode of Pushing Up Lilies, I’m taking a deep dive into some of the most chilling cases where victims were found locked inside suitcases—an unsettling trend that leaves us all with more questions than answers. I’ll share the disturbing details of Sarah Boone, who allegedly killed her boyfriend, Jorge Torres Jr., by locking him in a suitcase in Winter Park, Florida. Then, we’ll journey across the globe to New Zealand, where a horrifying discovery was made after a Tinder date gone wrong in December 2018. Join me as I uncover the dark truths behind these heinous acts and explore the minds of those who would commit such a crime. * Listener discretion is advised.
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0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I'm your host, Julie Mattson.
0:10 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.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:31 Hey, guys, it is 72 degrees in Texas today.
0:35 I never thought I'd be able to say that at this time of year.
0:38 It's raining here.
0:40 I want to say their weather is beautiful but it's not, but it beats the heat that we've had.
0:47 I will take it in a heartbeat.
0:50 Over the Labor Day weekend, we went to the Windstar World Resort and Casino, and we stayed in the hotel there and actually spent some time outside in their new five-acre pool, which is kind of cool.
1:06 It didn't really look like it was five acres, but it had several levels and there was like a pool for kids and adults and then there were several adult only pools and then we rented our lounge chairs, and it was super cloudy, and we thought we really weren't getting a lot of sun, but everyone is burnt.
1:28 I mean, crispy, lobster, like burns.
1:31 I got it on my shoulders and my chest and a little bit on my nose.
1:35 Everyone else got it much more than me.
1:38 I think I was under the umbrella.
1:39 I had a lot of shade.
1:41 But man, so everyone was having a hard time sleeping.
1:47 You know, clouds can be deceiving.
1:49 I think that we just thought the sun wasn't getting us at all.
1:53 And then boom, the next day you notice it anyway.
1:57 I hope that everyone's Labor Day was amazing.
2:01 I wanted to share a story with you about a girl named Sarah Boone.
2:08 And this is a Florida woman who was accused of zipping her boyfriend up inside a suitcase.
2:16 They were playing hide and seek, and she left him outside in the suitcase and he died.
2:24 She is facing second degree murder charges.
2:29 And it's been more than a year since she was originally scheduled to stand trial.
2:36 Now, she was arrested.
2:38 Actually, it's been four years now.
2:40 She was arrested on February the 25th of 2020.
2:45 This wasn't that long ago in Orange County Florida, the deputies there found George Torres Junior who was 42 inside of a suitcase where he had been for hours outside of their winter park home.
3:02 Now, Sarah phoned 911 after she found Torres in the suitcase.
3:09 The morning after the two had been drinking and agreed to this hide and seek game.
3:15 I play hide and seek all the time with my granddaughter.
3:18 But I'm not going to let anybody zip me up inside of a suitcase.
3:24 I mean, number one, I'm claustrophobic.
3:26 That sounds horrifying to me.
3:29 But I can't imagine letting someone zip me up into a suitcase.
3:35 I don't even know how this happened honestly, but Torres was found dead, and Boone was charged with second degree murder in 2023.
3:45 Boone admitted zipping Torres up inside the suitcase and then going upstairs to bed.
3:52 Now she said that she believed he could free himself.
3:56 And I don't know, I mean, I don't know what kind of a suitcase it was.
3:59 I haven't seen pictures of it, but I would think that if you tried hard enough, you could break the zipper, but it might not have been a zippered suitcase.
4:10 I have no idea.
4:12 But she stated that, you know, she thought he could get out and she said that she woke up after passing out on her bed and then found him unresponsive inside the piece of luggage.
4:25 Now, Boone apparently ignored Torres's pleas for help, and he also told her that he was unable to breathe.
4:35 The sheriff's office reviewed video evidence of Torres attempting to free himself.
4:41 I'm guessing maybe the suitcase at some point in the video had overturned, making them believe that he was trying to escape.
4:51 The video.
4:51 Also included Boone laughing and saying that's what I feel like when you cheat on me.
5:00 Now, in addition, when Boone was interviewed, they asked her for her phone and of course, searched through it and they found two videos that she had taken the night of the incident that showed her laughing as he pleaded for help.
5:16 Boone, however, said that she did not remember recording those videos.
5:22 There was a delay in the case because several public defenders were assigned to represent.
5:28 Boone has withdrawn from the case.
5:30 They said that they could not see eye to eye with her on her defense.
5:35 Apparently, she could not be satisfied by an attorney.
5:39 It sounds like that she was being rather hard to get along with.
5:43 She went through several attorneys, and this seemed to be a big problem.
5:49 Now, the trial was initially set to begin in April of 2023 and then just continued to be pushed back because of the problem with all these public defenders withdrawing from the case.
6:04 Previous attorneys that she was going to use said that they had planned to use a battered spouse defense.
6:12 Now, prior to his death, Torres had been arrested multiple times for alleged domestic violence against Boone and she had also been arrested for battery by strangulation in July of 2018, which is when both Boone and Torres were arrested for domestic violence.
6:34 Her charge was dismissed, and Torres had been arrested for battery against Boone who bailed him out of jail each time she called to have him arrested.
6:48 I don't know that I would do that.
6:50 I don't think that I'm quite that forgiving.
6:53 I mean, you try to hurt me more than once.
6:59 I'm not going to bail you out of jail.
7:02 This allowed the abuse to continue and happen over and over again.
7:08 The night of the incident.
7:11 Boone claimed that she and Torres had a single bottle of wine.
7:15 She says that's all they had to drink was one bottle of wine and decided to play hide and seek.
7:21 They thought it would be funny to put him in the suitcase.
7:25 Now, I'm sure he thought that it would be funny to put him in there as long as she unzipped it and let him out.
7:34 I don't know, I just don't find that funny at all.
7:40 I mean, if my spouse and I trust him wholeheartedly, but if he said, hey, let's zip you up in a suitcase, I'd be like kick rocks because it ain't happening anyway.
7:51 They were apparently both laughing about it initially and then she went upstairs and accidentally fell asleep or as some reports say she passed out after the withdrawal of her eighth lawyer.
8:09 I mean, how can you disagree with eight different people?
8:13 And I think these are all public defenders.
8:16 I'm not sure that she was even having to pay for their services, but she now has to represent herself in court.
8:25 She is also expected to use the battered women defense at her trial, which has been set for October the seventh of 2024.
8:35 Now she did file a motion in August asking the court to dismiss her case, citing her right to a speedy trial because in Florida, a speedy trial means that a person charged with a crime has to be brought to trial within 90 days if it's a misdemeanor and 100 and 75 days if it's a felony.
8:58 And obviously it's been four years.
9:00 So it's been quite a bit longer than that.
9:02 Yeah.
9:02 It's been way more than 175 days.
9:05 She was asking for a dismissal because of that.
9:09 She didn't feel like she had gotten a speedy trial and obviously she hasn't, she was granted a request not to have to wear handcuffs or shackles in the courtroom during the trial.
9:24 She will be representing herself.
9:26 She's been through several attorneys, you know, none of them really agree with what she wants them to do.
9:34 And so they're not on the case anymore.
9:38 This will be a very interesting trial.
9:40 I wish it was one that we could watch on TV.
9:43 It'll be coming up in October and again, this happened in Florida in Orange County.
9:50 I cannot wait until this trial comes out.
9:54 I'm really interested to see what happens again.
9:59 I would never let anyone zip me up into a suitcase and then I'm guessing she maybe just carried it outside and left it, but I can't imagine forgetting about that.
10:14 And I mean, she knows that during the night he didn't come back to bed.
10:18 The next morning she found it outside, I'll give her that.
10:22 At least she called 911.
10:24 I mean, she didn't just like, take the suitcase with him in it and dump it in the river and pretend it never happened.
10:31 I will give her that she called them.
10:35 How do you explain someone being in a suitcase?
10:39 I mean, I guess she could have covered it up by taking him out and bringing him into the house and, but you know, she came forward and told the true story of what happened.
10:50 Yeah, there's that.
10:50 Another case, this one's really interesting and I don't know why I started thinking about suitcase related deaths.
10:59 I just kind of did a little bit of research on a few of them because I don't know.
11:05 It's interesting to me.
11:07 I mean, I know that not too long ago we had a homicide in our county where someone was placed inside a duffel bag and thrown in the lake.
11:17 Of course, what's always horrifying is when kids find these things and open them up to see what's inside and see hair or skull or, you know, that has to haunt them for life.
11:30 But in cases like that, I thought I would kind of give y'all a little information on how we handle them at the medical examiner's office.
11:40 Now, I did have a case once where the police called and said that they had found a yeti and that there was a very strong foul odor coming from the yeti and it was duct taped closed and they felt like there was probably a body inside of it because of the smell of decomposition.
12:01 They went ahead and opened it and used a stick to pull out some tissue.
12:08 And we sent photos from the scene to our forensic anthropologist who said that they appeared to be the bones of a deer.
12:20 Someone had probably just shot a deer and gutted it and then put all the stuff inside this yeti and dumped it, but it could have very well been a person.
12:31 So of course, those types of things have to be investigated.
12:36 The devil bag case, we do not go in as investigators and pull things out of the bag.
12:44 Number one, this is even though it was in the water, it's considered a trace case.
12:51 In trace cases, we want to manipulate and touch the body as little as possible.
12:56 And that's because we want to give the trace team at the medical examiner's office opportunity to find DNA.
13:03 That's not ours, but we do not touch those.
13:08 We do not pull things out.
13:09 We don't try to piece the body together and try to figure out if anything's missing all that.
13:14 The whole duffel bag everything in, it goes straight to the medical examiner's office and the doctors and the team there do their job trying to find trace evidence on the suitcase, on the body in the suitcase.
13:30 Just whatever they can find little manipulation.
13:35 In a lot of cases, we remove jewelry and those types of things.
13:39 We don't, in these cases, we don't dig through the duffel bag to see if they had a watch on.
13:42 This is obviously a homicide.
13:44 She didn't jump in there and threw herself in the lake.
13:47 But these cases as difficult as they are to go on, they're pretty easy cases, right?
13:54 Because we bring the person in unidentified, we don't know who they are, we can't see their face to compare it with any kind of an ID.
14:03 They come in as an unidentified person.
14:05 We don't have a race, an age, a date of birth, a home address or even next of kin.
14:11 So there's not a lot to write up other than the story of how the duffel bag was found and who found it.
14:21 And phone numbers of law enforcement who are completing the investigation, whether or not a missing person report was made on anyone in the area.
14:32 Those types of things that all goes into our report.
14:34 But these are kind of easy because there's not a lot of photos, it's just a bag with a person in it and all the information that I talked about a minute ago is missing.
14:46 So pretty easy.
14:48 Most of the work is done at the medical examiner's office to try to determine what the cause and manner of death were.
14:54 And then after that, it's kind of in the police's hands to try to find the person that did it.
15:00 Our job in these cases is relatively easy.
15:04 There is another story again and this involved a suitcase.
15:09 It was a girl named Grace Emmy Rose Millane and she was a British tourist who was murdered in Auckland, New Zealand.
15:18 And this happened back in December of 2018 26-year-old Jessie Shane Kimpson was charged with her murder on December 8th of 2018.
15:31 Now, Mila's body was found west of Auckland after he killed her.
15:37 He went on another tinder date while her body was still in his room.
15:42 Now, I'm hoping that he didn't bring the date up there, but you never know he could have had her hidden somewhere in his hotel, which is I think where he lived.
15:53 But he claimed that she died during consensual sex.
15:58 Now, he was essentially convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
16:03 He filed an appeal which was later dismissed.
16:08 Grace was from Wickford Essex, and she had recently graduated from the University of London with her bachelor's degree in advertising and marketing and she was on a backpacking tour in New Zealand.
16:21 I'm assuming by herself.
16:23 I don't know, I don't think that I would go backpacking in New Zealand alone, but some people have more guts than I do.
16:30 She was on a two week stay there after spending six weeks in South America.
16:37 And she entered New Zealand on November the 20th of 2018 and arrived in Auckland on November the 30th at 9 p.m. on December 1st.
16:48 She was seen in Victoria Street in Auckland's central business district, but she was last seen at 941 pm at the City Life Hotel with Jesse Kempson, which is again, like I said, apparently where he resided, her parents became concerned because she did not reply to birthday wishes.
17:14 This happened just a couple of days before her birthday.
17:17 She didn't reply.
17:18 They had sent her birthday wishes on December the second of 2018.
17:24 And then three days later, they reported her missing because she had not responded to them.
17:31 She had not gone to her hotel the night of her disappearance and had not been seen there until now.
17:38 Police initially said that there was no evidence of foul play but later after they gathered evidence, they felt like she was probably no longer alive.
17:49 On December 8th, police announced that they were treating the case as a homicide.
17:56 So this moved along in a pretty timely manner, but her body was found on December 9th at around four pm off scenic drive in the way to carry ranges west of Auckland and she was buried in a suitcase, another suitcase death though this was a little bit different, right?
18:17 She was strangled first and then put in the suitcase.
18:20 An autopsy was done on December 10th, a shovel that was used and the incident was found on December 13th.
18:30 Kempson had already been arrested on the eighth and charged with murder on the 10th.
18:35 But you know, they continued to search the area and found the shovel after that.
18:40 Now, Kimson was born and grew up in the Wellington region and he was raised by his father and grandfather.
18:47 After his parents separated when he was only nine, he apparently played softball and worked as a bartender.
18:55 He had since been estranged from his family and he had a drunk driving conviction in New Zealand and had also been arrested for disorderly behavior in Auckland and also in Sydney, Australia when he lived there.
19:10 He had been convicted of nine charges of rape, sexual violation, threatening to kill an assault in two sexual violence trials before a judge in October and November of 2020.
19:25 When Kemp's trial began on November the fourth of 2019.
19:32 He entered a not guilty plea apparently; he had strangled her during this Tinder date and he had conducted several internet searches on how to dispose of bodies as well as viewing pornography.
19:51 He did dispose of her body again.
19:53 He buried it in those ranges inside of a suitcase.
19:58 Three female witnesses who Kempson had also met on Tinder testified that he lacked masochistic and bondage sex including choking.
20:09 He also rented a carpet cleaning machine after her death.
20:14 Now, pathologists testified that bruising on her body was consistent with being restrained and asphyxiated.
20:22 Her blood alcohol was 106, which was over the legal driving limit of 50 which really means nothing, right?
20:29 Because just because you're drinking does not mean you deserve something like this to happen to you.
20:37 You should be able to have a couple of drinks on a date without having to worry about getting murdered.
20:42 The defense claim that Millane's death was the result of a consensual sexual misadventure.
20:49 And they claimed that she had asked Kempson to choke her and after he choked her and she passed out and quit breathing, he panicked and hid the body.
21:01 One pathologist who got on the stand for the defense claimed that her injuries were consistent with a consensual sex act due to the lack of defense wings.
21:14 I guess she didn't have any of his skin under her fingernails, no broken nails, no abrasions on her arms that made it look like she was trying to defend herself.
21:28 The trial lasted three weeks and deliberated for about five hours and the jury consisted of seven women and five men.
21:37 Now he was convicted and given life in prison, and he is not able to appeal the verdict at all.
21:47 He also lied to the police and told them that he and Grace had parted ways after just having a drink for a couple of hours and that she had left.
22:00 He was definitely trying to cover up the fact that he buried her.
22:04 But he also had used Google to browse websites for large duffel bags, suitcases and a car to dispose of her body after she died.
22:17 This is kind of creepy.
22:19 You know, and I think we've talked before about how, you know, the police will confiscate your phone and your computer, and they'll be able to look back at all of your internet searches so you can run but you can't hide.
22:32 He searched for flesh eating birds.
22:35 He did a search.
22:36 Are there vultures in New Zealand?
22:40 And he also searched for large bags near me?
22:44 I mean, you know, that pretty much proves he did it.
22:49 I'm sure some of his DNA was on the body.
22:51 There was no talk in any of the reports that I found about DNA.
22:55 But, you know, he had raped another British tourist about eight months prior.
23:00 So this guy had a history.
23:03 He'd been in trouble before and of course she was a traveler, so she didn't know she was just coming through town and met this guy on Tinder and, you know, he seemed attractive and nice and maybe after a drink she thought, yeah, I feel comfortable with him.
23:19 A lot of times you spend a couple hours with somebody at a restaurant, you know, whether or not you, I guess you think, you know, whether or not you can trust them, but she apparently trusted him, and this is what happened.
23:32 It's just scary traveling in other countries.
23:36 I always, when I hear stories of people going backpacking, I mean, even when they're not alone, it's like so much can happen and not just in a foreign country, even here.
23:47 You know, there's just a lot that can happen.
23:49 You have to be so, so careful and it's just hard to trust anybody.
23:54 I feel like I probably made my kids paranoid because you know, they heard all my stories growing up, they were probably scared, scared of their own shadow honestly.
24:05 Be sure to log into YouTube and subscribe to my channel Brains, Body Bags and Bedside Manner.
24:12 I'll be doing recordings on there soon, but you can already see some of my episodes on there.
24:19 I am happy to report actually, let's look right now at how many subscribers I have.
24:26 I looked the other day, and it appears that I am up to 30,106.
24:38 I love this so much and I love being able to look to see where everyone is listening from and what platform they listen in from.
24:50 I can also actually see analytically; I can look to see which episodes are getting the most listens.
24:59 It looks like y'all really like the body brokers episode.
25:05 And you also really liked Cody Johnson's episode when he was pushed off a cliff.
25:15 These stories, I love researching them.
25:18 They're so much fun for me.
25:21 I learn a lot and some of them I wish I could work the scene.
25:25 You know, it's like as a death investigator you're always like, oh, cool.
25:29 That would have been a cool scene.
25:30 You know, I want, I want to work one like that and, you know, you do death investigation long enough, you're going to come across a lot of different things and that's what makes our job fun.
25:42 It's never boring and every day is different, and every scene is different, certain situations are treated differently.
25:49 And so you really have to use your head, and you have to think ahead of evidence destruction and things like that because you don't want to mess anything up, especially in a homicide.
26:00 And you know, baby deaths are very difficult as well.
26:04 And in those, you know, you don't want to just assume just because the parents said a baby was found dead in the crib that that's what happened.
26:12 You have to kind of treat it all very carefully.
26:15 Every case is different.
26:17 But again, log on to my YouTube and be sure to subscribe and share with your friends.
26:25 I very much appreciate it.
26:26 I'm ecstatic that I'm up to over 30,000.
26:30 It was kind of a goal for me.
26:31 Over this past month, my husband helped me to get more followers by putting my name out there on social media, a little bit more than I was able to do.
26:42 I very much appreciate that.
26:44 I hope y'all have an amazing week.
26:47 And again, don't hesitate to email me Julie at PushingUpLilies.com.
26:52 If you have a story that you'd like to share, I am in the process of setting up a lot of interviews and I just think that'll be a lot of fun.
27:01 I'd like to do maybe a little chit chat with some of y'all just to hear what's happened in your life and what you've experienced and how you dealt with it and all those different things again.
27:11 Have an amazing week, and I look forward to talking to you soon.
27:15 Bye.
27:17 Thank you so much for joining me today on Pushing Up Lilies.
27:20 If you like this podcast and would like to share with others, please do me a quick favor and leave a review on Apple Podcast.
27:28 This helps to make the podcast more visible to the public.
27:31 Thanks again for spending your time with me and be sure to visit me at PushingUpLilies.com for merchandise and past episodes.