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Teen Set Out to Travel the World—Then Vanished · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I want you to imagine, just for a second, that
• 0:02
  you're at a wedding. Okay, it's September in the early
• 0:06
  nineteen seventies. You are surrounded by your family. There is
• 0:10
  music playing, glasses are clinking, people are dancing with.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: Classic joyful family gathering.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Exactly, and you are looking at a sibling, a brother.
• 0:20
  He's nineteen years old, he is wearing a suit, he's
• 0:24
  smiling this big, confident smile, and he looks, you know,
• 0:27
  like he has his entire life.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: Ahead of him, full of potential.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you hug him, you say goodbye, expecting him to
• 0:34
  go off on a grand adventure. You're expecting a postcard
• 0:37
  in a few weeks, or maybe, I don't know, a
• 0:39
  phone call from a payphone somewhere down.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: The coast, because that's what people did back then, right.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: So you watch him walk out the door, and then
• 0:45
  you never hear from him again. Wow, Not the next week,
• 0:48
  not the next month, not for the entire rest of
• 0:51
  the decade. I mean, you wait through the nineteen eighties,
• 0:53
  you wait through the nineteen nineties, the two thousands.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: It's just it's unimaginable, the wait for fifty one years.
• 0:59
  It really is staggering amount of time. I mean, you
• 1:01
  are talking about an entire lifetime of waiting, of not knowing,
• 1:06
  of holding your breath every single time the phone rings
• 1:09
  late at night. The human brain is simply not wired
• 1:12
  to process a half century of unresolved.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: Absence like that, fifty one years. That is the reality
• 1:18
  of the story we are plunging into today.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this. Today we are looking at the
• 1:24
  story of Mark Smith, right, a nineteen year old from Billings, Montana,
• 1:28
  who vanished without a single trace in nineteen seventy four
• 1:31
  while traveling, only to have his remains positively identified in
• 1:34
  February of twenty twenty six.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: It's a profound timeline. We are looking at a disappearance
• 1:40
  that happens in the era of you know, physical maps
• 1:43
  and payphones fly off to grid, and a resolution that
• 1:46
  relies on the absolute cutting edge of genetic sequencing and
• 1:50
  crowdsource DNA.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and we are pulling all of our insights today
• 1:53
  from a really incredible in depth article. It's titled The
• 1:57
  Boy from Billings, A fifty year Forensic Home.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Such a great piece of journalism, it really is.
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: And our mission for this deep dive is clear. I
• 2:04
  want to emphasize to you listening right now, this isn't
• 2:06
  just a true crime.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: Mystery, No, not at all. We are not just looking
• 2:09
  at the mechanics of a disappearance. We are going on
• 2:12
  a journey through the evolution of American culture.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the whole landscape changed.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: We're going to look at the agonizing, almost unimaginable realities
• 2:20
  of pre digital missing persons cases, and we are going
• 2:23
  to trace the magic city.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: In the early nineteen seventies, this was a city of
• 2:28
  about sixty to seventy thousand people. It was a major
• 2:32
  economic hub, driven by agriculture, oil refining, and coal mining.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: So very blue collar, very grounded, exactly.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: This is a place built on industry and the energy
• 2:42
  boom of the American West.
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: That industrial working class foundation is crucial context here. Yeah,
• 2:47
  I mean Billings was an environment of hard work, of
• 2:50
  tangible physical.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Labor, real salt of the earth stuff.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah. But juxtaposed against that grounded reality, you have the
• 2:57
  cultural backdrop of the entire country at that time. Time
• 3:00
  mark is coming of age in the shadow of the
• 3:02
  Vietnam War, which officially ends in nineteen seventy five. Right,
• 3:06
  the mood of the nation is shifting dramatically.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: You have this profound, lingering influence of the hippie movement.
• 3:11
  I mean, the Summer of Love had peaked a few
• 3:13
  years earlier, but the ethos of it had trickled down
• 3:16
  into mainstream youth culture.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Even all the way out in places like Montana.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: Right, there is this widespread distrust of government, a deep,
• 3:25
  pervasive yearning for personal freedom, and really just a complete
• 3:28
  rejection of the traditional stationary American dream.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, we have
• 3:34
  to realize what traveling the world actually meant for a
• 3:37
  teenager from the Mountain West in nineteen seventy four.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: Right, It's not what we think of today exactly.
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: It did not mean buying a plane ticket to Europe.
• 3:45
  It meant the vast, sprawling American Highway Interstate nineties.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: Just getting out there.
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: The open road was a powerful, almost mythological force. Back then.
• 3:56
  You had the radio playing America's Ventura Highway, the omen
• 4:00
  putting out these road anthems.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: It was a whole esthetic, it was.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: The Highway was romanticized as the ultimate path to self discovery.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: That yearning for freedom is perfectly captured in that last
• 4:11
  photograph of Mark, that wedding photo from September nineteen seventy.
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: Three is such a poignant image.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: He's smiling, surrounded by his family. It is the last
• 4:19
  image his loved ones would ever see if I'm alive,
• 4:22
  because shortly after he packs light announces he is leaving
• 4:25
  home to travel, and just steps out into.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: The unknown, just like that.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: I think about that nineteen seventy four journey compared to today,
• 4:32
  and I look at the modern equivalent, right, the gap year,
• 4:35
  right right, But the modern gap year involves infinitely lower stakes.
• 4:39
  I mean, today, a nineteen year old has a smartphone.
• 4:42
  They have GPS tracking.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: They have digital bank transactions, daily.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: Texts, location sharing. On their devices. You can literally watch
• 4:50
  their little dot move across a map. They are tethered
• 4:53
  to their family through this invisible, unbreakable digital cord.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but in nineteen seventy four, there was no tether.
• 5:00
  The moment Mark walked down his driveway, he basically belonged
• 5:03
  to the road exactly.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: It was just a teenager, a thumb out on the
• 5:06
  side of the highway and the horizon. He stepped into
• 5:09
  this romanticized version of the open road, chasing the fading
• 5:13
  echoes of that counterculture dream, but.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: The reality of the nineteen seventies Highway was incredibly unforgiving.
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: Right, which brings us to a really dark aspect of
• 5:21
  this era. Hitchhiking was incredibly common. It was just how
• 5:24
  young people with no money got from say the Rockies
• 5:27
  to the Pacific and.
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: Carried this aura of adventure shore. But it was becoming
• 5:31
  increasingly risky the nineteen seventies, so a terrifying rise in
• 5:34
  crimes against transients.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: The serial killer boom basically exactly.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: You had predators operating along these exact routes, specifically targeting
• 5:43
  vulnerable travelers. Ted Bundy was highly active in the Pacific
• 5:47
  Northwest during this exact time period.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: It's chilling to think about.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: The Highway was essentially a hunting ground for killers who
• 5:54
  recognized that these young people were completely off the grid.
• 5:57
  Nobody knew where they were between point am points be.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: I want to push back on that narrative a little bit, though, sure,
• 6:03
  because it is very easy for us sitting here in
• 6:05
  the twenty twenties, with all our true crime deep dives
• 6:08
  and our retrospective awareness of serial killers, to look back
• 6:11
  and say, well, hitchhiking was obviously a death.
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: Wish, right, we have twenty twenty hindsight.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: But wasn't it essentially the uber of the nineteen seventies
• 6:20
  for a teenager with no money?
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: That is a critical point of nuance. Actually, yes, the
• 6:25
  high profile predators existed, and they fundamentally altered the cultural
• 6:29
  memory of hitchhiking.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: We only remember the tragedies, it's.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: Exactly, but statistically, the vast majority of these journeys ended
• 6:36
  perfectly safely. Millions of young people thumbed rides coast to
• 6:40
  coast and live to tell the tale. It was a
• 6:42
  completely normalized mode of transit for a certain.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: Demographic right, and Mark had no known enemies, no history
• 6:48
  of trouble. He was just a kid seeking the world
• 6:51
  beyond the Yellowstone River Valley.
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: The sheer normal sea of hitchhiking at the time is
• 6:55
  really what makes the random misadventure of Mark's case so haunting.
• 7:00
  Wasn't some reckless death wish. It was a societal norm
• 7:03
  that just happened to carry a hidden lethal lottery.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: And we don't even know as road. The sources indicate
• 7:09
  it is entirely speculation.
• 7:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, completely unknown.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: He might have caught a ride from Billings towards Spokane, Washington,
• 7:15
  and then headed south into Oregon. Or maybe he was
• 7:18
  aiming for California and somehow veered inland. We just don't know.
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: Because Mark vanished without a digital trace in a pre
• 7:25
  database era, the timeline essentially freezes for his family.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: Right there, But the physical reality of his journey didn't freeze.
• 7:32
  It bended violently against the geography of the Pacific Northwest.
• 7:36
  When he failed to return, the Smith family had to
• 7:38
  navigate a missing person's landscape that is almost incomprehensible to
• 7:42
  us today.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: The profound difficulty of finding someone in the pre digital
• 7:46
  era requires us to completely forget how modern law enforcement operates.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: Right erase all of it from your mind.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: Today, if someone goes missing, authorities immediately ping their cell
• 7:57
  phone tower. They pull financial records to track atm withdrawals.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: They run license plates through interstate readers.
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: They scraped CCTV footage from gas stations. But in nineteen
• 8:08
  seventy four, absolutely none of that infrastructure existed. A person
• 8:13
  could simply cease to exist on paper the moment they
• 8:15
  crossed state lines.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: The searches relied entirely on physical analog methods, the family
• 8:21
  printing flyers and mailing them to police departments in other states.
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: Literally hoping a desk sergeant would bother to pin it
• 8:26
  to a bulletin board.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, just hoping someone glances at it. And the databases
• 8:30
  that did exist were severely fragmented.
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: Very much so. The National Crime Information Center NCIC was
• 8:37
  in its infancy, it was far from the comprehensive, interconnected
• 8:41
  national database it is today.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: Local jurisdictions were notoriously.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: Siloed, oh completely. To put in perspective, namis the National
• 8:49
  Missing and Unidentified Person System, which is the centralized gold
• 8:53
  standard we rely on today, that didn't even launch until
• 8:55
  two thousand and seven.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: Wow, two thousand and seven. So if in nineteen year
• 9:00
  old with no ID meets with a tragic end one
• 9:02
  thousand miles from home, connecting a Jane or John Doe
• 9:06
  in one state to a missing person's report in another
• 9:08
  state was essentially relying on a bureaucratic miracle.
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: The systems simply did not talk to each other.
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: Because Mark had no ID and because he was out
• 9:16
  of his home state, his eventual discovery didn't bring any
• 9:19
  answers to his family. Instead, it created a massive forensic
• 9:22
  lunder that would bury his identity for decades.
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: The devastating irony here is that Mark was actually found
• 9:28
  relatively quickly in the grand scheme of things.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the crazy part, just.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: Four years after he vanished. Yeah, but the scientific limitations
• 9:35
  of the time completely failed him.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: So let's look at that timeline. It's May ninth, nineteen
• 9:40
  seventy eight. Four years have passed since Mark left Billings.
• 9:43
  In a remote forested stretch of Josephine County, Oregon, a
• 9:47
  logging crew is working near Holcombe Peak. Now, this is
• 9:50
  a five two hundred and sixty eight foot mountain outside
• 9:53
  the tiny community of Williams. They are working the timber
• 9:57
  and they stumble upon human remains.
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: To understand the condition of the evidence, we have to
• 10:01
  look closely at the geography. Josephine County is in the
• 10:04
  rugged southwest corner of Oregon, in the Siski.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: Yu Mountains, very intense terrain.
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: Very this is dense, unforgiving logging country, steep ravines, deep
• 10:13
  old growth forests, heavy precipitation. In nineteen seventy eight, Holcomb
• 10:19
  Peak was incredibly remote, accessible really only by specific logging roads.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: It's an environment designed to swallow a person hole.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: It really is.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: When the logging crew found the remains. They didn't find
• 10:28
  a pristine, complete skeleton. They found a skull, a scapula,
• 10:32
  some scraps of a brown sweater, and a piece of
• 10:34
  a shirt. That's it.
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: No wallet, no backpack, no.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: Jean's, no other skeleton remains, just those fragments.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: The partial nature of the discovery tells a clear biological story.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: Here.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: Over those four years, the local fauna coyotes, bears, rodents,
• 10:48
  and the relentless organ weather had completely scattered whatever was
• 10:52
  left of the body.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: Right, nature takes its course exactly.
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: The steep terrain and dense underbrush made a comprehensive forensic
• 10:59
  excavation virtually impossible for a local sheriff's office in the
• 11:03
  late nineteen seventies.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: So the Josephine County Sheriff's Office collects the skull and
• 11:07
  the scapula, and here is where the trajectory of the
• 11:09
  case takes a catastrophic detour.
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: This is the critical moment.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: The remains are examined by a forensic pathologist and an odontologist,
• 11:17
  and they conclude definitively that the remains belonged to a female.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: Between sixteen and eighteen years old.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: Yes, they log the case as an unidentified Jane Doe.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: This reason is an important question. This is the crux
• 11:30
  of why this case went cold for half a century.
• 11:33
  We have to examine how forensic science gets the biological
• 11:36
  sex of a skull completely wrong.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting, and I want to
• 11:40
  stop you right there, because this is the part of
• 11:42
  the forensic report that genuinely baffled me. It's confusing, right.
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: They possess the skull and the teeth. In modern forensics,
• 11:49
  getting biological sex wrong from an intact adult skull is
• 11:53
  incredibly rare. So what specific blind spot existed in nineteen
• 11:57
  seventy eight anthropology that allowed two dental professionals to check
• 12:01
  the female box for a nineteen year old male.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: It requires us to contextualize the state of morphological analysis
• 12:08
  in nineteen seventy eight, without DNA testing and without advanced
• 12:12
  three D scanning or the massive comparative databases anthropologists used today.
• 12:16
  Determining biological sex from skeletal remains relied entirely on a
• 12:21
  visual assessment of specific osteological markers.
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: So they are just looking at the shape, the thickness,
• 12:26
  the angles of.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: The bone exactly, just using their eyes and maybe some calipers.
• 12:29
  In adults, the skull is generally a very reliable indipater
• 12:33
  of sex. A fully developed adult male skull typically exhibits robust.
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: Features rolks, meaning thicker, heavier.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: Right. Anthropologists look for a pronounced super orbital ridge, which
• 12:42
  is the browbone.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: They look at the mastoid process, which is the bony
• 12:46
  projection behind the ear. It's usually much larger and thicker.
• 12:49
  In males. They look at the neutral crest at the
• 12:51
  back of the skull where the neck muscles attach, and
• 12:54
  the mental eminence, which is the squareness of.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: The chin got it and for females.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: Female skulls conversely, are generally more grassile, meaning slender, with
• 13:02
  smoother features, less pronounced brow ridges, and a more rounded jawline.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: But the key variable here is age. Right Mark was
• 13:10
  only nineteen.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: That is the crucial biological factor. He was a very
• 13:15
  young man. The robust, definitive skeletal features they characterize male
• 13:20
  morphology often don't fully develop until a man is in
• 13:24
  his early to mid twenties. Uh At nineteen, his skull
• 13:27
  was likely still somewhat grassile. Add to that the fact
• 13:30
  that the skull had been subjected to four years of
• 13:32
  severe weathering freestyle cycles and acidic forest soil.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: So the pathologist an odontologist in nineteen seventy eight look
• 13:39
  at this relatively smooth grassal weathered skull. They don't see
• 13:43
  the heavy browridge or the thick mastoid process of a
• 13:46
  thirty year old lumberjack.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: No, they wouldn't.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: They make a judgment call based purely on the visual
• 13:50
  evidence in front of them, and they classify it as
• 13:52
  a teenage female.
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: It was an error, yes, but an understandable one given
• 13:57
  the severe limitations of the era's skeletal announce The science
• 14:01
  simply did not have the resolution required to distinguish between
• 14:05
  ag gressol nineteen year old male and an eighteen year
• 14:07
  old female based on a weathered skull alone.
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: But the bureaucratic consequence of that understandable scientific error is staggering.
• 14:16
  Mark Smith is filed away in an organ evidence room
• 14:19
  as a female Jane Doe.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: It changes everything.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: Think about the implications of that single check mark on
• 14:25
  a form. Even if a brilliant, hyper dedicated detective in Billings,
• 14:30
  Montana had somehow managed to call Josephine County, Oregon and ask, hey,
• 14:34
  are you holding the remains of a nineteen year old
• 14:36
  boy who went missing in nineteen seventy four.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: The Oregon police would have checked their filing cabinet and said, no,
• 14:41
  we only have a teenage girl here.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: Exactly. The misidentification severed the only possible thread connecting the
• 14:47
  remains to the missing person's report. Mark was swallowed by
• 14:50
  a vast bureaucratic void.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: He became just another box on a shelf, joining the
• 14:55
  thousands of unsolved unidentified remains scattered across the American West.
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: And with Mark filed away as a female Jane Doe
• 15:04
  and Oregon, the Smith family back in Montana was left
• 15:07
  to endure decades of agonizing, suffocating silence. Let's talk about
• 15:12
  those decades.
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: The human toll of this is immense.
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: The nineteen eighties arrived, the nineteen nineties, the two thousands pass.
• 15:20
  The source material notes that the family experienced all of
• 15:22
  life's milestones. There were marriages, the births of entire new generations,
• 15:27
  career changes.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: Retirements, Life kept moving.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: But every single one of those milestones was permanently tinged
• 15:33
  with Mark's absence.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: His sisters shared with investigators that the family thought of
• 15:38
  him every single day. The passage of time did not
• 15:41
  dull the pain. It merely institutionalized it.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: It became the background radiation of their family dynamics.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: That's a good way to put it. Birthdays came and went,
• 15:49
  holidays permanently featured the empty chair at the table.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: In spirit, I was trying to conceptualize what that specific,
• 15:54
  unending type of waiting feels like. And it's like leaving
• 15:57
  a porch light on for half a century. You know
• 16:00
  the bulb is going to burn out, you know it
• 16:02
  is costing you energy, but you keep walking out to
• 16:05
  the porch, you keep replacing the bulb, and you keep flipping.
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: The switch because the alternative, right.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: The alternative is actively turning it off, unscrewing the bulb
• 16:12
  and accepting the total, permanent dark. And that is psychologically unbearable.
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: That is a beautiful illustration of what psychologists term ambiguous loss.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: Ambiguous loss.
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: It's a specific, deeply traumatizing form of grief that occurs
• 16:29
  without closure or clear understanding. When a loved one dies
• 16:32
  and you have a body, there is a funeral, there's
• 16:35
  a grief.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: It's final.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: The grief is sharp and terrible, but it has a
• 16:38
  defined geography, it has a proper place. But when someone
• 16:42
  simply vanishes, the grief cannot anchor itself to reality. The
• 16:46
  family is trapped in a permanent state of limbo.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: Their brains are constantly trying to solve a puzzle where
• 16:51
  half the pieces are missing. They're forced to live in
• 16:54
  a state of perpetual hypotheticals. Did he settle down in
• 16:58
  California under a new name.
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: Did he find a lucrative job in the timber industry
• 17:02
  and just decide to severtize with his past?
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: Or did he meet with violence on the side of
• 17:06
  a lonely highway?
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: The human mind of horrors of vacuum. When you deny
• 17:11
  it answers, it will manufacture them endlessly. The uncertainty itself
• 17:16
  becomes a chronic psychological torment.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: And what makes this specific story so striking is the
• 17:21
  visual of the parallel tracks.
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: What do you mean?
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: You have the Smith family in Montana navigating the eighties, nineties,
• 17:28
  and two thousands, frozen in this agonizing state of ambiguous loss,
• 17:33
  and one thousand miles away in a sterile, climate controlled
• 17:37
  evidence room in Oregon. The physical answer to their suffering
• 17:40
  is just sitting in a cardboard box gathering dust.
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, that juxtaposition is chilling. But while those remains
• 17:47
  were sitting in storage. The outside world was not static, right,
• 17:50
  Science was slowly methodically advancing in the background. It was
• 17:54
  building the tools necessary to finally catch up to Mark's case.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about those tools, because the techno logical leaps
• 18:00
  during those decades were foundational.
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: Oh absolutely. In the nineteen nineties, we saw the advent
• 18:04
  of PCR polymerase chain reaction, which allowed scientists to amplify
• 18:09
  tiny amounts of DNA.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: Like molecular photocopying exactly.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: And we saw the creation of CODIS, the Combined DNA
• 18:15
  Index system, which allowed law enforcement to run genetic profiles
• 18:19
  against a national database of offenders and missing persons.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: But even those monumental advancements in the nineties and early
• 18:26
  two thousands weren't enough to crack a case involving highly
• 18:29
  degraded bone from nineteen seventy eight.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: No, they weren't.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: That physical decay in the Oregon soil was the exact
• 18:35
  hurdle that the science of the time couldn't clear. It
• 18:38
  wasn't until the forensic paradigm shifted completely in twenty twenty
• 18:42
  that the Oregon State Medical Examiner's Office decides to pull
• 18:45
  this old Jane do box off the shelf and send
• 18:48
  the remains to the University of North Texas Center for
• 18:50
  Human Identification, And.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: This is where the nineteen seventy eight morphological error is
• 18:55
  finally definitively rectified. Thank goodness. The UNT center success extracts
• 19:00
  DNA from the bone and the genetic test reveal something
• 19:03
  startling that morphological anthropology missed the presence of a Y chromosome.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: The bones belong to a male.
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: Yes, After forty two years, the initial miss sexing is corrected.
• 19:14
  The Jane Doe becomes a John Doe.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: But the timeline doesn't resolve there, does it. Knowing he
• 19:18
  is Mail doesn't tell.
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: Them his name, not at all.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: The text notes that the nuclear DNA they extracted was
• 19:25
  insufficient for a full CODIS profile. They ran what they
• 19:28
  had against the national databases and they got zero hits.
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: This is a critical mechanical distinction in forensic biology that
• 19:35
  we need to dissect. Please do why does a DNA
• 19:38
  test fail to yield a match in a police database.
• 19:42
  It comes down to the difference between nuclear DNA and
• 19:44
  mitochondrial DNA. Nuclear DNA is the genetic material you inherit
• 19:49
  from both your mother and your father. It contains the
• 19:52
  unique sequence that makes you you.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: It's the full blueprint, right.
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: This is the gold standard for law enforcement. Is what
• 19:59
  CODIS rely on on to make a direct, conclusive match
• 20:02
  with a specific missing person's profile.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: But you only have two copies of nuclear DNA and
• 20:07
  every single cell in your body.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: Right exactly, And nuclear DNA degrades relatively quickly when exposed
• 20:13
  to environmental stressors.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: Like being outside an organ for four years.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: Precisely, Mark's remains had been lying on the forest floor
• 20:20
  in the wet, acidic environment of the Oregon Mountains, the
• 20:24
  cellular structure breaks down. The nuclear DNA literally shreds into
• 20:28
  fragments too small for the specific type of str analysis
• 20:32
  short tandem repeat analysis that CODIS requires.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: So they hit a hard wall with traditional law enforcement databases.
• 20:38
  The nuclear DNA is just too fragmented.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's basically useless for CODIS, But.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: The Medical Examiner's office refuses to put the box back
• 20:46
  on the shelf. Still. In twenty twenty, the Human Identification
• 20:49
  Program partners with a private laboratory called DNA Labs International
• 20:54
  or DLI. DLI agrees to take on the case.
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: Pro bono, which is incredible them.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: It is, and simultaneously, the National Center for Missing and
• 21:03
  Exploited Children commissions a forensic artists to create a facial
• 21:06
  reconstruction from the skull.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: They are attacking the mystery from multiple angles, but the
• 21:10
  true heavy lifting, the paradigm shifting work, is happening in
• 21:13
  the lab at DLI. They realized cotis is a dead end,
• 21:16
  so they pivot to a completely different scientific approach, forensic
• 21:20
  genetic genealogy.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: I know exactly what you're going to say next. This
• 21:24
  is the exact same methodology that famously brought down the
• 21:27
  Golden State Killer in twenty eighteen. That's the one the
• 21:30
  process of using consumer DNA databases to leapfrog investigative dead ends.
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: It is the same underlying philosophy, but the mechanical challenge
• 21:39
  here is vastly different. The Golden State Killer investigators had
• 21:43
  relatively fresh, well preserved DNA from crime scenes from.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: The seventies and eighties, but kept safe.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: Exactly, DLI is working with bone that's sat in a
• 21:52
  forest for four years and then in an evidence locker
• 21:55
  for forty more to build a genealogical profile. They cannot
• 21:59
  rely on the shredded nuclear DNA. They have to turn
• 22:02
  to mitochondrial DNA and advanced autosomal single nucleotide polymorphism or
• 22:06
  SMP extraction.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: And mitochondrial DNA is the key here because of the
• 22:10
  sheer math of cellular biology. Right right, while you only
• 22:13
  have two copies of nuclear DNA per cell, mitochondria are
• 22:17
  the powerhouses of the cell. You have hundreds, sometimes thousands
• 22:20
  of copies of mitochondrial DNA in every single cell. So
• 22:23
  when a bone degrades and the DNA shreds, the math
• 22:26
  is simply on your side. With mitochondrial DNA, there is
• 22:30
  vastly more of it to survive the decay.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: Perfectly stated, and mitochondrial DNA is passed down exclusively along
• 22:37
  the maternal line, which makes it incredibly useful for tracing
• 22:40
  deep ancestry.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: That makes sense.
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: By combining these advanced extraction techniques, DLI manages to build
• 22:46
  a genetic profile. But this profile isn't designed for a
• 22:50
  police database looking for a direct match. It is designed
• 22:53
  for a genealogical database looking for cousins, and it is
• 22:56
  a grueling process.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: It takes years. By around twenty twenty three, the genealogists
• 23:01
  at DLI produce an ancestry summary. They determine that this
• 23:04
  unknown male has a blend of North Atlantic, Baltic, and
• 23:07
  Western Mediterranean heritage, which aligns with many European American families
• 23:11
  who settled in the Mountain.
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: West Pioneer families basically right.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: And then they get their first real hit. They traces
• 23:17
  DNA to a distant ancestor born in the early eighteen hundreds.
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: But this is where the investigation hits what genealogists call
• 23:23
  a brick wall. Why is that, even with whole genome
• 23:26
  sequencing providing these distant leads, the family tree stalls in
• 23:30
  twenty twenty three.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: I need you to explain the mechanics of this stall
• 23:33
  for a second, because when a lay person hears they
• 23:36
  traced him to an ancestor, the immediate assumption is great,
• 23:40
  case solved. Just follow the family line straight down to
• 23:42
  nineteen seventy four.
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, people think it's a straight line.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: So why does finding an ancestor from the eighteen hundreds
• 23:48
  not instantly solve the case.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: It is a problem of exponential mathematical expansion and genetic
• 23:53
  Greek combination. Okay, like the dam when you identify an
• 23:56
  ancestor from say eighteen twenty, you have to realize that
• 24:00
  this person likely had multiple children. Those children had children
• 24:03
  who had children who had children. Over the course of
• 24:06
  a century and a half, that single nineteenth century ancestor
• 24:10
  could easily have thousands or even tens of thousands of
• 24:13
  living descendants by the year twenty twenty three.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: You are building a massive, sprawling family tree downward from
• 24:19
  the past rather than upward from the present.
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: Yes, and compounding that difficulty is genetic recombination. Every generation,
• 24:27
  you inherit fifty percent of your DNA from each parent,
• 24:30
  which means the specific genetic markers tying our John Doe
• 24:35
  to that eighteen twenty ancestor dilute by half with every
• 24:39
  single generation.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: It's getting fainter and fainter.
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: Exactly. The genealogists have to identify every single branch, every marriage,
• 24:45
  every child across six or seven generations, looking for a
• 24:48
  male descendant who vanished in the nineteen seventies.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: That has a lot of paperwork.
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: It's massive, But if the modern descendants of that eighteen
• 24:55
  hundreds ancestor haven't voluntarily taken consumer DNA tests, the genealogists
• 25:01
  have no genetic anchor to narrow down which specific branch
• 25:04
  of the tree are John Dope belongs to Wow, you
• 25:06
  have the root of a massive oak tree, but you
• 25:08
  are trying to find one specific leaf among ten thousand
• 25:11
  without knowing which main branch it grows on.
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: That perfectly clarifies the sheer scale of the challenge. They
• 25:16
  have the route, but they desperately need a modern genetic
• 25:19
  anchor to pinpoint the exact branch.
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: So they wait.
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: They wait for two more years, the case stalls again,
• 25:25
  and then in September twenty twenty five, the pivotal moment
• 25:28
  finally arrives. The intricate, impossible web of distant cousins and
• 25:33
  nineteenth century ancestors suddenly snaps into sharp, undeniable focus.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: The catalyst is incredibly mundane, yet profoundly powerful. A newly
• 25:43
  uploaded consumer DNA.
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: Kit, just a normal kit from the mail.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the genetic genealogy industry is exploded. Millions of people
• 25:50
  are spitting into tubes sent by companies like Ancestry and
• 25:53
  twenty three Enemy, simply to satisfy their curiosity about their heritage,
• 25:57
  just for fun, right, And in September twenty twenty five,
• 26:00
  an individual, likely completely unaware of the massive investigation occurring
• 26:03
  in Oregon, uploads their DNA profile, and that profile provides
• 26:07
  the exact missing link the genealogists that DLI needed.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: It provides the modern anchor. It bridges the gap between
• 26:13
  the eighteen hundred's route and the present day.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: It's the missing puzzle piece.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: It allows the genealogists to instantly bypass the thousands of
• 26:19
  irrelevant branches and zero in on one specific family tree.
• 26:23
  They trace the lineage down to a family residing in Billings, Montana,
• 26:27
  a family with several siblings.
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: And this is where the public records come.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: Into play, right because as the genealogists meticulously cross reference
• 26:35
  the public records for this family, they notice a glaring,
• 26:38
  tragic anomaly. One of the brothers in this family simply
• 26:42
  ceases to exist in the public record in the mid
• 26:45
  nineteen seventies.
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: It stops.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: There is no marriage certificate, no property deeds, no voter registration,
• 26:50
  no death certificate, just a bureaucratic ghost.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: It is a masterclass in modern forensic synthesis. You have
• 26:57
  the traditional physical anthropology of VNA, correcting the sex of
• 27:01
  the bones. Only getting that right, you have the cutting
• 27:03
  edge extraction of mitochondrial and autosomal DNA from degraded remains
• 27:08
  and you have the brilliant, painstaking mathematical work of genetic
• 27:11
  genealogists navigating massive consumer databases.
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: It's incredible.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: It requires an extraordinary level of interagency cooperation and scientific patients.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? Which brings us to
• 27:22
  the final emotional culmination of this fifty one year journey
• 27:26
  bringing Mark home. It is late twenty twenty five. A
• 27:30
  death investigator from Josephine County, Oregon picks up the phone
• 27:33
  and reaches out to the Smith family in Billings, Montana.
• 27:36
  You know, I don't want you to truly try to
• 27:38
  put yourself in the shoes of Mark's sister or brother.
• 27:40
  Receiving that phone call fifty one years after you hugged
• 27:44
  your brother goodbye at a wedding, an investigator from a
• 27:47
  state you may have never even associated with his journey
• 27:49
  calls to say, we think we finally found him.
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: The emotional shockwave of that moment is immeasurable. The family
• 27:56
  confirmed the biographical details they told the investigator. Yes, our
• 28:01
  brother Mark Smith born October fourth, nineteen fifty four, left
• 28:05
  Billings in nineteen seventy four to travel and was never
• 28:08
  seen again.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: So the story matches.
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: But to be absolutely scientifically certain. The siblings provided buckle
• 28:14
  swabs cheek swabs so their direct DNA could be compared to.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: The remains, and the mechanism for that final test is fascinating.
• 28:22
  They didn't just retest the degraded bone. The investigators utilized
• 28:26
  a single tooth from the skull that had been held in.
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: Storage, a very smart move.
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: A tooth provides a sealed protected environment for DNA, shielding
• 28:34
  it from the external degradation that ruined the poorest bone.
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: The pulp inside a tooth is offered the last fortress
• 28:40
  of intact DNA in skeletal remains. It's perfectly preserved in there.
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: On February twenty five, twenty twenty six, DLI confirmed a
• 28:47
  definitive sibling level DNA match. The science was irrefutable. The
• 28:52
  Oregon State Medical Examiner's Office formally identified the remains.
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: The Jane Doe from nineteen seventy eight was finally officially
• 28:59
  Mark Smith.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: The Oregon State Police announced the identification to the public
• 29:03
  in March twenty twenty six.
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: Forensic anthropologist Hailey Colored Stallder released a statement that perfectly
• 29:10
  encapsulated the massive effort behind this singular identification.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: What did she say.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: She praised the years of persistence, scientific collaboration, and the
• 29:19
  evolving power of forensic genetic genealogy. She emphasized how profoundly
• 29:24
  grateful the team was that Mark could finally be returned.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: To his family, and inevitably, with the confirmation of his
• 29:30
  identity comes the agonizing question of what actually happened on
• 29:32
  Holcom Peak in nineteen seventy four. The investigators emphasized in
• 29:36
  their release that there is no evidence of foul play.
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: That's important to you.
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: It's all the condition of the remains, the lack of
• 29:41
  paramortem trauma to the skull or scapula, and the remote
• 29:44
  location are consistent with what law enforcement terms misadventure.
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: If we extrapolate on the conclusion of misadventure based on
• 29:52
  the geography and the era, we are likely looking at
• 29:54
  a deeply tragic, solitary end.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no foul play, just nature.
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: Holcome Peak is rugged, unforgiving terrain. Mark was a nineteen
• 30:04
  year old kid from the relatively dry, open prairies of Montana.
• 30:08
  He was potentially completely unfamiliar with the specific subtle dangers
• 30:11
  of the dense, damp, rapidly changing environment of the Oregon Wilderness.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: It's very easy to get lost there.
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: Misadventure in that context doesn't necessarily mean a dramatic fall.
• 30:21
  It often means getting turned around just a few hundred
• 30:24
  yards off a logging road as the sun goes down.
• 30:26
  Disorientation it means a sudden drop in temperature. It implies
• 30:29
  exposure to the element's hypothermia setting in before he could
• 30:33
  find his way back to the highway.
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: It is a heartbreaking reality to visualize a young man
• 30:38
  seeking freedom quietly succumbing to the sheer scale of the
• 30:42
  American wilderness. Investigators are technically keeping the case open in
• 30:46
  a specific capacity, attempting to retrace possible routes, putting the
• 30:50
  information out there to see if anyone miraculously recalls a
• 30:54
  young hitchhiker from Montana in the mid seventies trying to
• 30:57
  fill in the final days of his timeline.
• 30:59
  Speaker 2: Just crossing theirs and dotting their eyes, but even.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: Without knowing the exact final moments. The broader legacy of
• 31:05
  this case what it represents for forensic science is monumental.
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: It represents a fundamental paradigm shift. The National Missing and
• 31:13
  Unidentified Person System estimates that tens of thousands of Americans
• 31:17
  currently remain unidentified and hundreds of thousands are missing.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: Those numbers are staggering.
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: The transient populations of the nineteen seventies, combined with the
• 31:24
  incredibly limited record keeping and the vast role expanses of
• 31:28
  the country, created a massive backlog of these John and
• 31:31
  Jane Doe cases.
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: But the resolution of Mark Smith's case proves that the
• 31:34
  word unsolvable is rapidly becoming obsolete in the forensic vocabulary.
• 31:40
  Advances in DNA extraction mean that a highly degraded bone
• 31:43
  sitting in a box since nineteen seventy eight can now
• 31:46
  yield a complex genetic profile.
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: It's changing everything.
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: Genetic genealogy is clearing hundreds of cold cases. They are
• 31:53
  combining these DNA techniques with isotope analysis, examining the chemical
• 31:57
  signatures and teeth to determine exactly what what region of
• 32:00
  the country a person drank water in during their childhood,
• 32:03
  and AI assisted database sorting to bring the lost home.
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: For families like the Smiths, the application of this science
• 32:10
  brings profound life altering relief.
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: It really does.
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: It does not erase the fifty years of suffering. It
• 32:16
  doesn't answer every single excruciating question about how his final
• 32:20
  hour is unfolded, but it provides the concrete certainty that
• 32:24
  their loved one is no longer an unknownt.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: The waiting is over.
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: It violently pulls them out of the permanent limbo of
• 32:29
  ambiguous loss. It finally allows their grief to anchor itself
• 32:33
  to a reality. It allows the grief to find its
• 32:35
  proper place.
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: I constantly reflect on the sheer emotional weight of that
• 32:39
  physical reality. Think about that skull sitting in a cardboard
• 32:42
  box on an evidence room shelf in Oregon. For four decades,
• 32:46
  it was just a file number, a misidentified Jane Doe,
• 32:50
  a bureaucratic error, waiting in the.
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: Dark, forgotten by almost everyone.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: But because of the relentless, compounding progress of science, the
• 32:58
  stubborn persistence of investigators, and the quiet love of a
• 33:01
  family that never stopped looking, that skull is now a
• 33:05
  named son. He is a brother.
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: He's an uncle.
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: He's an uncle to nieces and nephews he never got
• 33:10
  the chance to meet. His remains are finally returning to Montana.
• 33:14
  The family can hold a proper burial, they can have
• 33:17
  a memorial service.
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: They get to say real goodbye.
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: They can display that nineteen seventy three wedding photo not
• 33:23
  as a haunting symbol of an agonizing, unsolvable mystery, but
• 33:26
  with a profound sense of peace. The nineteen year old
• 33:30
  boy who left to see the world is finally definitively
• 33:33
  coming home.
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: It is a testament to the enduring power of family bonds.
• 33:37
  The family never stopped holding space for him, and eventually
• 33:40
  the science evolved enough to catch up to their hope.
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: So as we wrap up this deep dive, let's take
• 33:45
  a macro look at the incredible fifty one year journey
• 33:49
  we've traced today.
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: It's been quite a journey.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: We started in the bustling, industrial magic city of Billings, Montana,
• 33:55
  and followed a young man out onto the romanticized but
• 33:59
  fundamentally danger open roads of the nineteen seventies. We explored
• 34:03
  the mechanics of how a person vanishes into a pre
• 34:06
  digital black hole, succumbing to the unforgiving remote peaks of Oregon,
• 34:10
  only to get lost in a bureaucratic forensic error regarding
• 34:13
  skeletal morphology. And then the breakthrough right and then we
• 34:17
  witnessed the slow, triumphant march of scientific progress from the
• 34:21
  extraction of mitochondrial DNA from weathered bone to the brilliant,
• 34:25
  mathematically complex navigation of massive genetic family trees reaching back
• 34:30
  half a century to pull his identity out of the dark.
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: What's truly fascinating here is that the resolution wasn't the
• 34:35
  result of one brilliant detective having a sudden Eureka moment
• 34:39
  or one lucky break at a crime scene.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: No, it wasn't like a movie.
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: It was the compounding effect of decades of incremental scientific advancement,
• 34:47
  seamless cross country collaboration between state and private labs, and
• 34:51
  a family's quiet, enduring vigil Science, persistence, and love were
• 34:57
  able to interlock and reach across half a s entry
• 35:00
  to deliver answers.
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: I want you to think about the piece this brought
• 35:03
  the Smith family. After fifty one years, they can finally exhale. Now,
• 35:08
  think about the tens of thousands of families still waiting.
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: For their phone call, still leaving the ports light.
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: On, the family still walking out every night to leave
• 35:16
  that light on. This science, this genetic genealogy, it isn't
• 35:20
  just raw data sitting in a computer server. It isn't
• 35:22
  just a cheek swab. It is the literal manifestation of closure.
• 35:26
  It is the absolute end of ambiguous loss in is.
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: A quiet, incredibly potent revolution that is actively rewriting the
• 35:34
  tragic endings of thousands of American stories, and it leaves us.
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: With something really profound to consider as we close. We
• 35:40
  tend to think of consumer DNA kits as a fun,
• 35:42
  trivial way to learn about our personal heritage, right.
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Like, look, I'm twenty percent Irish exactly.
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: We spit in a tube to find out what percentage
• 35:51
  Baltic we are, or to see if we have a
• 35:53
  distant cousin living in another state. But every single time
• 35:57
  someone spits into one of those tubes, they are knowingly
• 36:00
  building a massive, interconnected biological.
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: Net, a net that catches the lost.
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: A net so incredibly vast and so mathematically powerful that
• 36:10
  it can reach back fifty years into the middle of
• 36:12
  a remote Oregon forest and pull a lost boy out
• 36:16
  of obscurity. It makes you wonder, in an era where
• 36:20
  our very DNA is crowdsourced, or our genetic code is
• 36:23
  interlinked with millions of strangers, does true anonymity even exist anymore?
• 36:28
  Or are we all just waiting to be found?
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: It is a remarkable, somewhat staggering thought. The very act
• 36:33
  of seeking our own individual roots is what is ultimately
• 36:36
  helping to bring the lost ones home.
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on this deep dive into
• 36:40
  the story of Mark Smith. We invite you to keep
• 36:42
  questioning the world around you, keep exploring the science that
• 36:44
  connects us, and stay insanely curious. And the next time
• 36:48
  you are at a wedding or a family gathering and
• 36:50
  you hug a sibling or a friend goodbye, take a
• 36:52
  second to truly appreciate the certainty of knowing you will
• 36:55
  see them again.