Based on His Injuries Jeff Gebhardt Appeared to Be a Homicide Victim, or Was He? (EXCLUSIVE CLIP)

One of the most important steps in getting to the bottom of a potential crime happens in the medical examiner's office. An autopsy is an integral part of determining a cause of death, but a forensic autopsy has additional goals in mind. According to the Cleveland Clinic, they are used to estimate a time of death, the identify of a deceased person if it's unknown, and confirming or refuting the alleged manner of death.

In Season 5, Episode 15 of Oxygen's Accident, Suicide, or Murder?, the forensic autopsy of a man named Jeff Gebhardt was telling investigators one story but did they have the right information? In an exclusive clip provided to Distractify, we are privy to the disturbing details of Gebhardt's autopsy that has authorities convinced they know what happened to him. Read on for details.

On the morning of Sept. 23, 2012, members of the Wilkes County Sheriff's Office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) were searching for a missing hunter named Jeffrey Gebhardt. They eventually found his body in a marshy area near Thurmond and Clarks Hill Lakes. He had been stabbed numerous times and there were no signs anyone else had been at the crime scene.

Two days after Gebhardt died, an autopsy was performed on his body. Charla Purdue, the CSI Programmer Coordinator at Florida State University, told the producers of Accident, Suicide, or Murder? that Gebhardt had 17 wounds to his chest and one to the upper stomach. Three of those wounds were directly to Gebhardt's heart.

There were abrasions on his neck as well as a "cut on the exterior of his right hand in the webbing between his thumb and index finger," explained Purdue. Typically this type of injury occurs while someone is trying to defend themselves. This suggested that Gebhardt had raised his hand in an effort to deflect an attack.

Not only did it appear as if Gebhardt was trying to defend himself from an individual possibly using a knife to stab him, but there were no other injuries suggesting that he was incapacitated in any way. There were no signs of blunt force trauma or gunshot wounds. Investigators came to believe this was a homicide and treated it as such.

In October 2012, Wilkes County Sheriff Mark Moore held a press conference where he said, "The evidence at this time doesn't indicate that there [is] any Rambo-type murderer running in the woods."

He went on to say, "This young man that got murdered, he got lost the day before, also, and we interviewed people who saw him after he found his way out [of] the woods ... if anyone hunting in the area at that time might have some information, we'd certainly like to talk to them.""

There was definitely more information to be found, but it would certainly shock authorities and all who knew Gebhardt. For more on this story, watch Oxygen's Accident, Suicide or Murder? on Saturday, December 21 at 8:00 p.m. EST.