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Aug 16, 2022 · Jurors were seated Tuesday morning in the murder trial of Matheau Moore, who is accused of killing his wife, Emily Noble.
Aug 26, 2022 · Jurors in Ohio needed just under three hours of deliberations to find Matheau Moore, 51, not guilty of murdering his wife Emily Noble, 52. Prosecutors had accused Moore of strangling Noble to death on the night of her birthday May 24, 2020.
- Overview
- Hundreds of strangulations, high-profile cases
- Standing by his conclusions
- Claims of incorrect, outdated methods
In the late summer of 2020, four months after Emily Noble was reported missing, her badly decomposed remains were discovered in a wooded area near her home in Westerville, Ohio, a town just outside Columbus. A USB cord was wrapped around her neck.
Authorities turned to a well-known strangulation expert, Dr. Bill Smock, who concluded that she’d been choked to death — and her death had been staged to look like a suicidal hanging. Noble’s husband was indicted in her murder and, in the trial that followed, forensics played a key role. Smock was the prosecution’s star witness.
When the case went to trial in August 2022, a board-certified forensic anthropologist, Heather Garvin, challenged Smock’s claims. Now, three more board-certified forensic anthropologists who reviewed reports from the case for NBC News said the state’s key expert had little evidence to support his claims and raised concerns over his role in the trial.
The three anthropologists, who analyze skeletal remains and are certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, were not involved in the trial of Noble’s husband, Matheau Moore, 52. They reviewed forensic reports obtained by NBC’s “Dateline.”
“He makes firm authoritative statements, which I do not think you can support with any evidence,” Nicholas Passalacqua, director of forensic anthropology at Western Carolina University, said of Smock’s strangulation claim.
“My biggest concern is that the opinion of someone who is not a pathologist and who is not board-certified in forensic pathology has been given this amount of weight in a court of law,” said Natalie Langley, president of the American Board of Forensic Anthropologists.
Three local women searching for Noble told “Dateline” they found her skeletal remains on Sept. 16, 2020, months after Moore reported her missing from her home in Westerville. She was discovered in a wooded area where she often foraged for edible plants. They found her in a kneeling position, suspended from a branch.
Westerville police Detective Steve Grubbs, who led the investigation into Emily’s disappearance and death, confirmed to “Dateline” that Noble was suspended by a USB cord. A water bottle containing alcohol was also at the scene, he said.
At the request of a local coroner, the Injury Biomechanics Research Center at the Ohio State University analyzed the remains and reported what Sleeper described to “Dateline” as two “major” findings: Emily Noble suffered “perimortem” trauma — or trauma from around the time of her death — to her nasal bones and throat, including bilateral fractures to her hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage.
Eleven days after the university lab filed its report with the coroner, the coroner concluded that Noble died from multiple injuries to the head and neck. The report, which was obtained by “Dateline,” was largely based on the lab’s findings and did not say if she died by suicide or homicide.
After the reports were completed, Grubbs reached out to Smock for an opinion.
“They wanted someone who has expertise in evaluating strangulation-related deaths,” Smock told “Dateline.”
In court testimony and in an interview with “Dateline,” Smock offered more details about his conclusions. He pointed to medical literature on hangings and said that a woman of Noble’s small size — she weighed less than 100 pounds — could not have suffered a quadruple throat fracture from an “incomplete” hanging, as the position she was found in is known.
“If there was anything even close in the medical literature, it’s never been reported,” he said. “No woman of her size, her stature has ever had those sorts of fracture patterns from leaning forward into a ligature. It doesn’t happen.”
But forensic anthropologists familiar with the research said that Smock’s definitive claims gloss over important gaps in the literature.
Much of it does not report body weight, “so it is hard to state with certainty that all of the literature does not support these findings,” Pilloud, the University of Nevada professor, said in an email. And much of that research is “relatively inconclusive,” Langley, from the American Board of Forensic Anthropologists, said.
In an interview with NBC News, Smock said that his students at the University of Kentucky, where he is a professor of emergency medicine, helped him review 1,400 hangings for the case. He was unaware of how many included body weight.
In an email, Garvin, the Des Moines University professor and a board-certified forensic anthropologist who testified in Moore’s defense, cited conflicting findings in the literature, including weight (some researchers have said heavier people are more prone to fractures; others have not) and type of hanging (some have found fractures are more common with incomplete hangings; others have not).
Another problem with Smock’s conclusions, the experts said, was his claim that Noble showed signs of significant blunt-force trauma — a finding that he said he based on the Ohio State University report that described facial trauma from around the time of her death.
Garvin, who reviewed hundreds of high-resolution 2D images for the case, disputed that finding. In an email, she said it was “fairly easy” to determine that the fractures were healed and from a broken nose. (Noble fell and broke her nose in 1983, according a police report obtained by “Dateline.”)
Pilloud and Langley, who reviewed a report from the lab that includes low-resolution images, also disputed its finding of perimortem trauma. Passalacqua, the forensic anthropologist from West Carolina University, criticized the lab’s processing techniques, saying it used incorrect or outdated methods — such as letting the bones soak in a hydrogen peroxide solution for 24 hours — when it examined Noble’s remains. And he said the report offered unsupported conclusions about facial trauma.
In an email, lab director and forensic anthropologist Amanda Agnew defended her lab and its practices, saying the concentration of hydrogen peroxide was low — 2% — and the goal was to preserve the skeletal remains for long-term analysis.
“This was especially difficult in this case given the condition of the remains,” which were mummified, she said.
Agnew and a co-author of the report were the only ones to examine the remains in person, she added, and other anthropologists weighing in were likely unable to see what they saw, she said.
Aug 30, 2022 · DELAWARE, Ohio — She was seated as juror no. 8 in the Matheau Moore murder trial. The Westerville man was charged with killing his wife, Emily Noble, and staging her death to look like a...
- Brittany Bailey
- 3 min
Aug 26, 2022 · A Delaware County Ohio jury decided not to link Emily Noble's husband, Matheau Moore, to her 2020 death and found him not guilty on all counts.
Aug 26, 2022 · Matheau Moore was indicted on two counts of murder and felonious assault in June 2021 for the death of Emily Noble. Moore reported Noble missing in May 2020 after he told police the two...
Aug 11, 2022 · A jury acquitted Matheau Moore of one count of felony murder, one count of purposeful murder and one count of felonious assault in the May 2020 death of his wife, Emily Noble. The severely decomposed remains of Emily Noble, 52, were discovered hanging from a tree in Sept. 2020, nearly four months after she was last seen alive.
