The Hunt - Chapter 9: Body Groovin', Body Throwin'
The unbelievable physics of throwing a human body.
How often have you thought about throwing another human body any distance at all? At first, like most white, straight, middle-aged men, Justin thought, “Fuck yeah, I can do that.”
He can’t. Neither can you, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or anyone else for that matter.
A human body of, say, relatively small size — 130 lbs. to 150 lbs — is not an easy thing to pick up, dead or alive, nonetheless throw even a handful of feet. There’s legs and arms. Humans aren’t symmetrical and their weight shifts and moves internally while being moved.
A person isn’t a kettlebell, or a nicely balanced bar with properly distributed weight, that can be cleaned and jerked with proper form. And even if there was a competitive body-throwing event, maybe – it wouldn’t be for distance. Trust us, we asked real strongmen. They laughed at us. Not even six feet was some of their estimates but no one wanted to try because the risk of injury is extremely high.
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Genna Gamble’s naked body was discovered on the slope of a ravine on Tim Bell Road in Modesto by two farm workers, who reported the incident to the police. Sheriff’s deputies arrived in their own time. Trial testimony, as recounted in the habeas petition, concerning the scene, was as follows:
The slope descending to the body angled at sixty five degrees, from the turnout on Tim Bell Road to the creekbed below, and was "very steep."
The creek was lined with bushes ten to twelve feet high, while the flat area leading to the slope and embankment below the turnout was covered with roots and dense brush.
The creek was deep enough to navigate by boat, and the vegetation included a plant known as “duckweed.”
The slope, embankment, and turnout area were littered with debris, refuse, and various matter, including abandoned vehicles.
The turnout area was cluttered with debris, shoe prints, and vehicle marks.
As to Genna’s body, the testimony was as follows:
Genna was on her back with her face downhill and her right arm outstretched at a ninety degree angle.
Her body rested against a tree and an old car which was likewise pressed against the trunk of the tree.
There was vegetation in her hair, identified by one witness as duckweed.
There was a streak of damp earth on her leg, and damp soil under her pelvis;
Her right leg was wedged between a rock and the roof of the car.
Vegetation between the creek bed and her body appeared disturbed.
Green chemical residue was found on Genna’s ankle and the arch of her foot, as well as on a clump of dirt near her body, the roof of the car beneath her, and a red rag nearby.
There was barbed wire directly above her body.
ADA Birgit Fladager’s theory of the case was that Douglas Mouser strangled Genna Gamble in the family home and transported her by vehicle to Tim Bell Road, and then threw or rolled her body – nude – down the ravine, where it came to rest against a tree.
Janet Jhoun, defense witness and biomechanical engineer, testified that Mr. Mouser couldn’t have carried Genna’s body down the ravine, without dropping it, or falling and injuring himself; and Genna’s body couldn’t have come to rest between the tree and the car, had she been “tossed” or “pushed,” down the embankment. There were no marks on Genna’s back, knees, chin, knuckles, arms, or shoulders, that would suggest the body tumbled down the hill.
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After reading through the testimony, we had a really difficult time believing that Douglas Mouser, a computer tech from Lawrence Livermore Labs, never having lifted a weight in his life, managed to throw his hundred-and-fifty pound stepdaughter over thirty feet down a ravine in a perfect 3-point shot that landed her without scuff-marks and wedged perfectly hidden beneath a car below.
It feels wrong. It feels unlikely. It feels implausible. And experts agree. But, in order to get a real picture of what would be required to do this – and to see what the jury saw – we turned to Google Earth and Google Maps to walk the crime scene. We made an even more unusual discovery in the process.
Working With Locations and Geography
We cannot stress the importance of walking a crime scene in Google Maps and other tools for every single case that you work. You may indeed be thousands of miles away from where the crime happened and decades may have passed, but it is absolutely critical that you do it. Every time.
You will learn to get a feel for the landscape, landmarks, reference points. It will start to engage parts of your visual-spatial brain that will begin marrying things from the transcripts and exhibits (the text) into real places and things. If you have to fly out and actually investigate? You’ll have your bearings.
Locating the Spot
By creating a detailed timeline of the case including all of the local media sources that we could find, we were able to find a description of an approximate location. From the Modesto Bee, October 15th, 1995:1
So what we have here for selectors are the 4000 block of Tim Bell Rd. and that it is north of Hazeldean Rd. The other important pieces of information are that the body was found in or near Dry Creek. So let’s run a Google Maps search to start:
Now let’s trace Tim Bell Rd. road north until we see where it will intersect with the creek that is mentioned, or where there is a bridge or somewhere that would be a good spot for fishers. Start scrolling the map north, staying directly over top of Tim Bell Rd., following it through any corners or bends. Eventually you should spot what appears to be a river or creek.
Walking the Scene
Now we want to walk north on Tim Bell Rd. as if we are driving up to the scene for the first time. Don’t drop your Street View right on top of the creek. As you will see, entering the scene from both directions (or more if there is imagery available) and approaching from a distance can yield clues you might not otherwise see.
I use keyboard navigation for walking around in Street View and I use the mouse to “look” around the scene. Take one “step” forward by hitting the ⬆️ on your keyboard.
Now look around. See anything strange? I sure noticed something in 2024 that wasn’t there in 2023, or before that. If you pan the view to the left a little bit you’ll see that it appears there is a sign that has been intentionally redacted. I have highlighted it for you.
Strange right? Why would someone redact a sign? Perhaps because they don’t want you or I to find the specific location of this murder?
It’s not any sign. It’s a memorial sign for Genna and it’s stood there for years and was standing in the Google Street View imagery from a few years ago. So somebody between when we started working on Doug’s case in 2023 and advocating for him and today’s date, applied to have this particular square redacted.
We have to be close to where Genna was found now, so continue walking along until you cross all the way across the bridge and then turn around and face south again, the direction we came from. You should be oriented like the image below:
Now walk southbound and keep looking around the area, on your right-hand side (West) appears to be a general matching area that fits the description from the newspaper articles. If you do further research, you can find some original death scene photographs that help us to orient a bit further, but we’ll refrain from posting them here.
Now this is a bit of a bait and switch I’ve played on you here. See the real reason I know this is the location of where Genna was found (aside from verifying with on the ground sources of course) is because last year in 2023, there was, yet again, another redaction that I captured.
Can you see it? That little blurred out square? Someone really likes to redact parts of this scene and we still, to this day, don’t know who. It is safe to say, however, that we have a pretty good estimate of where Genna was found. The news paper article tells us that she was found roughly ten feet up from the water and this appears to be close enough for me.
Now what I always like doing is creating a map in Google Earth to highlight areas that I have observed in Street View or from my top down views. The map below is publicly accessible, so please feel free to follow along for this last bit.
To open the map in Google Earth you can click the menu to the right of the map title and select: View in Google Earth as shown below.
As you can see, I have marked a rough polygon that gives me the area that I could view from the bridge (green) and then drew another one with an estimated area of where the 2023 redaction and estimated body location would be. Now we want to actually measure the distance from the approximate embankment edge to the orange area to see how far it would be.
Click the measure button which will pop open a measurement window.
Click near the black border on the polygon.
Click again near the middle of the orange polygon.
What did you get for a result? Depending on your estimated area, you’re going to get anywhere between 30 and 50 feet. It’s a very long way, when you think about the distance required to throw things.
Now before we call in some help to get all mathy, this is not the same as throwing something straight up in the air, nor is it the same as throwing it across a flat room. There is an embankment, so there is an angle to this whole thing. So how do we solve this little problem?
Simple! If you move your mouse cursor over top of the rightmost measurement line and then look in the very bottom right corner of your browser window at all of the white text. The very bottom right is telling you the elevation and if you move your mouse to the other measurement spot, you’ll see this value change.
Now if you remember back to middle school math, rise over run will give us the angle of that slope and we know the distance that the body was thrown. What we don’t know is what to do with it because we actually sucked at middle school math.
Time to call some friends.
So How Much Force Does It Take to Throw a Body?
Now let’s find something that is comparable, so we can wrap our heads around how much estimated force this would take. In review:
We have a mass of roughly 63kg.
It needs to travel an estimated 13m (~44 feet).
There is an embankment with a 6m change in elevation.
We decided that an Olympic shotput throw would be the best thing we could compare it to, since the local strongmen that we interviewed said that it was laughable that anyone could throw 63kg anywhere at all without hurting themselves.
We called in Phil Morris-Parent23 who wrote out some extremely lengthy calculations that we don’t even know how to correctly paste here without breaking the Substack fonts. They ran some more, then demonstrated a handful of scenarios.
The estimated result is not surprising:
“It would be the equivalent energy of hurling a shotput ~ 97 km/hr causing it to travel 75.5m if thrown from flat ground. About 3X the current world record.” - Phil MP
Well? There you have it.
The State’s argument that Doug hurled Genna, with wet hair, head pointing downhill with that amount of force, never scraping or scratching her, with a perfect shot directly underneath the rusted out frame of an old Mustang.
And this is somehow more probable than someone killing her near the water and placing her there.
Smells like mathematical bullshit to us.
You may note here, that the police are telling the opposite story of what they accuse and eventually convict Doug Mouser of, very convenient.
Phil also wanted to point out the many variables including air resistance, the shifting mass, and a number of other variables would play a factor into this whole ordeal. You should go check out Phil’s work: www.phil.city
Special thanks to those that helped to riff on equations, expressed horror when they got similar answers or simply said: that’s impossible, I’m not even going to bother doing the math. It all helped.