It was one of those Monday mornings where nothing seemed to be going Julie Mattson’s way.
She couldn’t find her keys — she had left them in a co-worker’s purse — or the battery to her strapless camera, which meant she had to use one with a strap that kept falling into the camera frame every time she snapped a picture at the crime scene.
Then, Mattson, a forensic nurse death investigator for Denton County, went to get her thermometer out of her bag to check a body surface temperature — only for the batteries to fall to the floor.
“I’m looking at everybody. ‘What the heck? Can I start over? My Monday morning is not going well,’” Mattson recalled to her podcast listeners over spring break.
Mattson’s Monday didn’t improve. She told her listeners she and her co-worker had to work several deaths that day, including a possible overdose, a hanging and a self-inflicted gunshot death.
“We have Kroger, and I absolutely love it,” continued Mattson, transitioning into the reason for the episode. “We have a ‘MILF Kroger’ where all the attractive people supposedly shop, and we have a ‘Murder Kroger.’ I don’t know if you all have a Murder Kroger. I know there are Murder Krogers in other cities. They are all Murder Krogers for different reasons.”
So sets the scene for Episode 137 of Pushing Up Lilies, a true crime podcast hosted by Mattson, who records her episodes from her Denton home. A nurse for nearly 30 years, Mattson also has experience in the emergency room and as sexual assault nurse examiner. She has been hosting the weekly podcast on Wednesdays for three years now.
Last week, Mattson announced on Facebook that her podcast had reached more than 50,000 subscribers. She also started a YouTube channel, “Brains, Body Bags and Bedside Manner,” where she shares episodes of Pushing Up Lilies, offers glimpses into her work and provides information and resources for people interested in forensic nursing and sexual assault examination.
She avoids discussing current cases that she is investigating and is careful not to reveal details that have not been made public from previous cases. She’ll discuss cases from other places that made the news and “dissect the science behind some of the most spine-tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true crime stories,” as mentioned on Apple Podcasts, where she has received five stars for her content.
“It’s not like the way TV makes it look,” Mattson said. “TV takes out the sadness and smells. When I met my husband, he said, ‘You smell terrible.’ ‘Yeah, well, I sweat all day and have Off on and have a maggot in my hair and swallowed a fly and smell like a dead person, and that is not a barbecue smell ...’”
She’s a podcast host, but first, Mattson is a death investigator
The victim had been stabbed more than 80 times.
Blood was everywhere inside the Houston home in the mid-2000s. Bloody fingerprints were on the wall and the front door. The children were sleeping in the next room. Mattson said they found their mother and went to the neighbor’s house and told him they couldn’t wake their mother but failed to mention the blood.
The neighbor thought the mother might have passed out after drinking too much and went to check on her. He didn’t know her ex-husband had discovered she had a boyfriend, Mattson said.
It was one of the first homicide cases Mattson worked as a forensic nurse death investigator in Houston.
“It made me realize how evil people can be,” Mattson said. “I felt bad for those poor kids. That is something they will never get out of their head. They didn’t realize what had happened. It’s amazing that they slept through it all.”
Mattson grew up in Valley View, about 20 miles north of Denton, went to study nursing at North Central Texas College and the University of Texas at Arlington, where she is currently pursuing her nurse practitioner degree. She received her certification as a forensic death investigator from Saint Louis University School of Medicine and went to work at the Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office in 2006.
She got interested in the forensic death field while she was working as a sexual assault examiner in Denton County. She had been doing forensic examinations on women, children and men and offering expert witness testimony in court for local law enforcement.
“I saw how much forensics can help solve crimes,” Mattson said.
As Mattson mentioned earlier, TV crime shows have made crime scene investigations kind of glamorous. Everybody wears nice clothes and shoes. The swarm of corpse flies never appear, and the smell doesn’t bother the investigators — nor anyone else at the crime scene. There’s not a lot of blood. They also don’t deal with the sadness that follows when, Mattson said, they have to notify the victim’s family that their loved one has died in a plane crash.
The glamorous TV image fades into a much messier reality: slime and maggots, the smell that sticks to your skin and clothes when you pull a body out of the water in 110-degree heat, for example.
The odor and the gore don’t just remain at the scene, as her husband, Michael Mattson, said he quickly realized when they started dating about seven years ago. He works as a territory sales representative and married Mattson three years ago.
“Some of the things she sees are gory and disgusting,” he said. “I admire her ability to turn it on and off. She could be out scraping body parts and sifting through a pool of blood or working on kids who tragically died in an accident and not thinking about her own kids. She is able to turn off the switch and go into work mode. That would be hard for me to do. She also has a strong stomach.”
Taking listeners inside true crime
Mattson decided to host a true crime podcast because people would always ask her about her job, wondering if it was like the TV shows. Others wondered how they, too, could become a forensic nurse death investigator.
She has spent 14 years as a death investigator for Denton County. She splits her time between her work as a investigator and at her medical spa, The Filling Station, which she opened in 2019.
Capt. Orlando Hinojosa from the Denton County Sheriff’s Office has known Mattson for more than 20 years. Hinojosa first met her when he worked at the Denton Police Department. He called her “very precise and energetic,” someone who is funny and sees the positive in every negative situation.
To be a good death investigator, Hinojosa said, requires someone who knows what she is looking for. He stressed that a person can’t make the wrong decisions on the cause of death.
“She wears many hats and gives 100% all the time and loves to help people,” Hinojosa said. “Whatever hat she is wearing, she gives 100% of her attention and time to do the right thing.”
A spa client who worked as a podcaster put her in touch with a podcast editor from California, who explained how it worked. The editor designed a website for Mattson, who began recording content for the podcast. She records the files at her home and sends them to the editor, who puts the podcast together and uploads it to various platforms, including Apple, iHeartMedia and Spotify.
Given her background and experience, Mattson was in a unique position to host a true crime podcast. She is also a member of the National Association of Medical Examiners, the International Association of Coroners & Medical Examiners, the International Association of Forensic Nurses and the International Homicide Investigators Association.
Since she started her podcast in 2022, Mattson said she hears from a lot of people now, like nurses who want to further their careers and families who want help investigating the death of loved ones.
Mattson hopes to monetize the podcast. It’s the reason why she started her YouTube channel in June, since it allows YouTubers to earn money based on views. She also created the “Serial Box,” a monthly true crime subscription box filled with crime-themed items. She said she has been trying to find sponsors, but it has been difficult.
She also advertises the podcast. Mattson said she recently filmed an appearance on a reality show called The Blox, an entrepreneur competition show on Amazon Prime. She is appearing on Season 21 as an entrepreneur of the medical spa but made sure to mention the Pushing Up Lilies podcast.
“It’s costing me monthly, but I love doing it,” said Mattson, who’s also writing a book. “It’s like being a schoolteacher: Don’t make a lot of money but love what you do.”