Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Man Found Dead in Sleeping Bag at National Park Identified Nearly 30 Years Later

Transcript

Man Found Dead in Sleeping Bag at National Park Identified Nearly 30 Years Later · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: You know, today is Saturday, July eleventh, twenty twenty six.
• 0:03
  Speaker 2: It is.
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: And I really want you listening right now to just
• 0:08
  hold that specific date in your mind for a second.
• 0:11
  Let's let's do a little bit of time travel.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: Oh I'm always up for that, right, So.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: I want you to jump back exactly twenty six years.
• 0:17
  It is July eleventh, the year two thousand.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: Wow, Okay, that feels like a lifetime.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Again, it really does. Just think about what the world
• 0:25
  looked like on that exact day, the whole y two
• 0:27
  k panic It completely fizzled out.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: Right, So everyone was just kind of breathing this huge
• 0:31
  sigh of relief.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: Exactly. The dot com bubble was just you know, starting
• 0:35
  to show its cracks, and you probably couldn't even turn
• 0:37
  on a radio without hearing Santana's Smooth or like something
• 0:41
  by Matchbox twenty.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: Absolutely it was everywhere, it really was.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: The world was loud, it was getting connected, and it
• 0:47
  was moving just incredibly fast into this new millennium. Right
• 0:51
  But on that exact same day, in the deep, just
• 0:54
  completely silent backcountry of Washington's Olympic National Park, a discovery
• 0:59
  was made that completely contrasted with all of that noise.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: It was incredibly quiet.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was quiet, and it was devastating, and it's
• 1:08
  set off a mystery that has literally taken until right now,
• 1:13
  this very summer to resolve.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: It's an eerie coincidence of the calendar, absolutely, but a
• 1:18
  really poignant one, definitely, because what we are exploring today
• 1:21
  in this deep dive is the complete investigative file and
• 1:26
  the recently released data regarding someone who is known for
• 1:29
  a quarter of a century only as the soul duke
• 1:32
  John Doe.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: And our mission for this deep dive it isn't just
• 1:36
  to walk you through the standard beats of a true
• 1:38
  crime mystery. We really want to get into.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: The weeds here, right, There's so much more to it
• 1:42
  there is.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: We want to look at how this massive collision of factors,
• 1:45
  like the hard limits of forensic science at the turn
• 1:48
  of the century which were significance huge, plus this sheer
• 1:51
  investigative stubbornness that spans literally generations of detectives, and of
• 1:56
  course the incredibly unforgiving, almost predatory nature of the America wilderness.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, how all those things just collide.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: It exactly, and how those factors eventually finally gave a
• 2:06
  man his name back after nearly three decades in the dark.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: The stakes here are just fascinating to me because they
• 2:12
  operate on two completely different spectrums. What do you mean, Well,
• 2:16
  on one end, you have the emotional stakes, right, the
• 2:19
  quiet human tragedy of a man who sought total isolation
• 2:23
  in one of the most remote, overwhelmingly beautiful places on
• 2:26
  the planet. And then on the other end you have
• 2:29
  the scientific stakes. We are going to explore the absolute
• 2:34
  hard limits of traditional forensic.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: Biology, which we're going to get into because it's wild.
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: Oh it really is, and we'll contrast that with the
• 2:42
  truly revolutionary mechanics of modern genetic genealogy. We're talking about
• 2:47
  technology that essentially allows scientists to act as time travelers.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: Okay, but before we can even begin to understand the
• 2:54
  scientific marvel of how this case was actually solved, we
• 2:57
  have to understand the physical reality of the scene.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: You have to know what they were up against.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: Exactly, because if the environment destroys the body, the only
• 3:04
  thing investigators have left to tell them who this person
• 3:07
  was is whatever they brought with.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: Them, right, the artifacts of a life.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: So what exactly was found and where on that July
• 3:15
  day in two thousand let's let's paint the picture for you.
• 3:19
  Olympic National Park is vast.
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: Vast almost feels like an understatement.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: It really does. We are talking about nearly one million
• 3:28
  acres of wilderness on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's massive.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: It is home to these rugged, glacier capped mountains, alpine meadows,
• 3:37
  and most importantly for our story, ancient temperate rainforests.
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: And specifically, we are zooming in on the Salduke River drainage.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Right, and that specific terrain. It's kind of the primary
• 3:49
  antagonist in the early years of this investigation, isn't it.
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: It absolutely is. It is vital to understand why this
• 3:54
  case went cold for twenty.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: Four years because it's not just a normal forest, no.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: Not at all. When you hear temperate rainforest, you have
• 4:01
  to understand the sheer volume of moisture we are actually
• 4:03
  talking about. This sol Duke Valley receives roughly one hundred
• 4:07
  and forty inches of rain every single year.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: One hundred and forty inches that is, I mean, that's
• 4:11
  almost twelve feet of water.
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: It's staggering. It is a hypersaturated ecosystem. Every surface is
• 4:17
  covered in thick moss, lichen ferns, and these towering old
• 4:22
  growth conifers.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: It sounds beautiful.
• 4:24
  Speaker 2: Oh, it's breathtaking to look at. But functionally it is
• 4:28
  an environment that is incredibly efficient at breaking down and
• 4:31
  reclaiming organic matter.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: So it's not just that the dense foliage makes it
• 4:36
  easy to physically hide a campsite from, say, search helicopters
• 4:40
  or casual hikers. Right, the environment itself is actively destroying
• 4:44
  the evidence exactly.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: It's an accelerated decomposition machine.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: An accelerated decomposition machine. Wow.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: Think about it, between the constant rainfall the acidity of
• 4:54
  the soil because pine forests have very acidic soil.
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: Oh, I didn't even think about the acidity.
• 4:59
  Speaker 2: It plays a huge role.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: Plus the fluctuating temperature is in the aggressive scavenging by
• 5:03
  local wildlife and insects. Anything left in the salt duke
• 5:06
  drainage is quickly consumed by the forest.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: The moisture just infiltrates everything everything.
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: It rocks fabric, it rests metal, and crucially for this case,
• 5:14
  it actively degrades human tissue and bone on a cellular level.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to July eleventh, two thousand. So there
• 5:22
  is this researcher who is working deep off the beaten path,
• 5:26
  completely away from the designated tourist trails.
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: Right, They're really out there.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: They are bushwhacking through this dense, wet terrain and they
• 5:34
  stumble upon a camp site. And I want you to
• 5:36
  picture this campsite because it is incredibly minimal, very sparse. Yeah,
• 5:40
  it is a single green, black bivvy style tent, and
• 5:44
  inside that tent is a sleeping bag and inside that
• 5:48
  sleeping bag or the completely skeletonized remains of a human being.
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: Just pausing on that specific type of shelter for a second.
• 5:56
  A bivy chant or a bivy sack, That is a
• 5:59
  very specific choice of gear.
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: Right, It's not something you just buy on a whim.
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: Not at all. It is a tiny, low profile, single
• 6:05
  person shelter. It's essentially just a waterproof shell that you
• 6:07
  slide a.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: Sleeping bag into, almost like a cocoon.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: Exactly like a cocoon.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: Sometimes it has a single small hoop over the face
• 6:14
  so you can breathe without the wet fabric resting right
• 6:16
  on your nose.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: That sounds incredibly claustrophobic.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah it can be. Yah, it is not a sprawling
• 6:22
  Coleman family tent you buy for a fun weekend at
• 6:25
  a campground. It is designed for minimalist, lightweight survival. It's
• 6:30
  often used by serious mountaineers or extreme backpackers.
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: And the colors matter too, right.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, The fact that it is green and black means
• 6:38
  it completely camouflaged into the forest floor, so.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: You would really have to be right on top of
• 6:42
  it to see it.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: You would, And finding an abandoned bivvy in the deep
• 6:46
  backcountry it immediately signals to whoever finds it that a
• 6:51
  catastrophic event has occurred.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: So we have this skeletonized person in a bivvy sack.
• 6:55
  And this is where the physical artifacts become so incredibly
• 6:59
  vital to the story, because old is all they had,
• 7:02
  right right, Let's look at the inventory of exactly what
• 7:04
  they found with him, because the contrast here is really striking.
• 7:06
  They found a pair of binoculars, a danceport day hiker pack,
• 7:10
  a blue shoulder bag, a folding saw, a space blanket,
• 7:15
  small to medium size winter gear, and around the neck
• 7:18
  of the remains a rosary.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: When you laid all those items out on an evidence table,
• 7:22
  a very specific profile begins to emerge. But it's just
• 7:26
  full of contradictions.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: It is. It's almost like looking at an ancient Egyptian
• 7:30
  tomb where the artifacts are left there to tell a
• 7:33
  story of preparation for a long journey.
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: That's a really good way to put it.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: I mean, he had a folding saw. You don't bring
• 7:39
  a folding saw on a casual afternoon day hike. You
• 7:42
  bring it because you plan to process firewood or build
• 7:46
  a semi permanent shelter. Right, and he had winter gear.
• 7:50
  These are items meticulously chosen for survival and utility in
• 7:53
  really harsh conditions. Yet he died inside the tent, which.
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: Is what makes the inventory so Revealing the gear definitively
• 8:01
  rules out certain scenarios right away, like what, Well, we
• 8:04
  can instantly dismiss the idea of a casual tourist in
• 8:07
  sneakers who maybe took a wrong turn off a paved
• 8:11
  trail near the visitor center, got turned around and succumbed
• 8:15
  to exposure a few miles in.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, this wasn't an accidental day trip gone.
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: Wrong, not at all. The deliberate nature of the campsite,
• 8:22
  the BIV tent, the folding software, clearing brush, the heavy
• 8:24
  winter clothing All of this points to an intentional, highly
• 8:28
  planned presence in a remote area.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: He knew what he was doing.
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: He did this person intended to be there and intended
• 8:36
  to survive there for at least a specific duration of time.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: But the most important item in the campsite isn't what
• 8:42
  they found, it's what they didn't find. Right amidst all
• 8:45
  this carefully chosen utilitarian survival gear, there was absolutely no wallet.
• 8:50
  There was no ID, no driver's license, no credit cards,
• 8:54
  no personal papers, no journal, nothing that could give authorities
• 8:59
  a name.
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: Ack of identification. It immediately plunges the National Park Service
• 9:04
  and local authorities into this massive logistical nightmare.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: Because where do you even start exactly.
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: The remains are carefully recovered from the forest floor and
• 9:14
  they are transported out of the woods to the King
• 9:16
  County Medical Examiner's office in Seattle, Okay. The forensic anthropologist
• 9:20
  there they do their initial assessment, but they have very
• 9:23
  little to work with. Based on the skeletal structure, they
• 9:26
  determine it is a male, and based on the fusion
• 9:29
  of certain bones and dental wear, they estimate him to
• 9:31
  be somewhere between thirty and fifty years old.
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: That is a twenty year age gap.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: It is a massive window for an investigator.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that doesn't narrow it down much at all, And it.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: Gets even wider when they try to determine the time
• 9:43
  of death. The pathologist concludes he has been dead for
• 9:47
  somewhere between six months and four years.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: I really want you, the listener, to just try and
• 9:52
  conceptualize that for a second. Up to four years.
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: It's hard to fathom, it really is.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: Imagine lying completely undiscoed a sleeping bag and a tiny
• 10:01
  green tent in the damp woods for four entire years.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: Well, everything else keeps moving.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: Yes, the seasons are violently cycling around you. Torrential winter
• 10:11
  rains are falling, the snowpack builds up and melts, the
• 10:14
  summer bakes the forest floor. The world is entirely moving on.
• 10:18
  The late nineties are transitioning into the year two thousand.
• 10:21
  People are celebrating the new millennium, and you are just
• 10:25
  there waiting in the silence.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: It's haunting, it is.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: He is officially designated as the Salduke Backcountry John Doe,
• 10:32
  and he gets logged into the system with this cold
• 10:35
  bureaucratic identifier nom use number up one one eight.
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: Eight and for a very very long time, that alphanumeric
• 10:43
  code was his entire identity.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: Because they couldn't get anything else right.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: The physical evidence hit a complete dead end because the
• 10:50
  environment had done its job way too well.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: But it wasn't just the environment, was it.
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: No, it wasn't. As the investigation moved into the early
• 10:57
  two thousands, the detectives hit a second, much more frustrating wall,
• 11:01
  which was the strict technological limits of that specific eras
• 11:05
  forensic science.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's get deep into those cold years and the
• 11:09
  agonizing limbo that followed. So the Washington State Patrol Crime
• 11:13
  Laboratory took all those items from the tent, the saw,
• 11:16
  the binoculars, the bivisac.
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: And they desperately tried to process them.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: Right, they were hoping to pull latent fingerprints from the
• 11:22
  smooth surfaces of the gear.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: But again we returned to the hostility of the environment.
• 11:27
  Water is the absolute enemy of a latent fingerprint. Why
• 11:31
  is that, Well, a fingerprint is essentially just delicate oils
• 11:35
  and sweat left behind by the ridges of human skin.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: Oh so just washes away exactly.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: After months or years of one hundred and forty inch
• 11:43
  annual rainfall and massive humidity fluctuations, those fragile oils were
• 11:48
  completely washed away or broken down.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: So even with the best tech of the year two thousand,
• 11:53
  they got nothing.
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: Nothing usable emerged from the cyanacrylate fuming. That's the superglue
• 11:58
  method they used to reveal prints.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: Man, and with no fingerprints, they are forced to turn
• 12:03
  to the other traditional methods of the time. They run
• 12:05
  his dental charting against National Databases standard procedure. Right, They
• 12:10
  manually comb through thousands of missing persons reports from the
• 12:14
  late nineteen nineties and the year two thousand, hoping to
• 12:17
  match a missing thirty to fifty year old male with
• 12:19
  a penchant for the outdoors. But absolutely no match is.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: Made, so inevitably they turned to DNA.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: Right, And let's really unpack this early DNA technology, because
• 12:30
  I think a lot of us have a very distorted
• 12:31
  view of this.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: We really do. Thanks to pop culture.
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: Exactly, we watched so many crime procedurals on television, we
• 12:37
  just inherently assumed that DNA in the year two thousand
• 12:40
  was this magic bullet. You run the swab through a
• 12:43
  glowing glue machine, the computer beeps, and a driver's license
• 12:46
  pops up on a screen. If only it were that easy, right,
• 12:49
  Why didn't that happen here?
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: Because the reality of turn of the century forensic biology
• 12:53
  is vastly different from television. To understand why it failed,
• 12:58
  we have to look at how the standard f B
• 13:00
  IDNA database, which is called Cody's actually functions. Okay, traditional
• 13:05
  forends of DNA profiling from that era uses a specific
• 13:08
  method called STR analysis STR right. Stier stands for short tandem.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: Repeats, short tandem repeats. Okay, break that down for us.
• 13:16
  What is that actually doing on a physical level.
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: Think of your entire genome, your DNA as a massive,
• 13:22
  sprawling library filled with thousands of books.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: Okay, I'm picturing a massive library.
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: STR profiling doesn't read the whole library. It doesn't even
• 13:31
  read a whole book. It just goes to very specific
• 13:33
  tiny location, say page forty two of book seven, and
• 13:36
  it looks for a stutter in the genetic code.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: A stutter.
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it counts how many times a specific word or
• 13:42
  genetic sequence is repeated in that tiny section.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: Oh, I see.
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: It's an incredibly accurate way to confirm identity if you
• 13:48
  are comparing two pristine samples side by side, but it
• 13:52
  has two massive crippling limitations in a cold case like
• 13:55
  the sol ducto, and the.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: First limitation is the physical condition of the sample.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: Xactly. Str analysis requires relatively long, intact strands of DNA
• 14:05
  to work properly. You need the whole sentence in the
• 14:07
  book to be readable. But remember that hypersaturated, temperate rainforest
• 14:13
  water doesn't just wash away fingerprints. It chemically destroys DNA
• 14:17
  through a process called hydrolysis.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: Hydrolysis, Okay, how does that actually work? What is the
• 14:22
  water doing to the DNA On.
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: A molecular level? The water molecules physically insert themselves into
• 14:29
  the DNA strands and snap the chemical bonds that hold
• 14:33
  the DNA backbone together. Oh wow, Yeah, it literally chops
• 14:37
  the long, elegant strands of DNA into tiny, fragmented, completely
• 14:41
  unusable pieces.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: So if SDR is like trying to read a whole
• 14:45
  sentence in a specific book in the library, hydrolysis is
• 14:48
  like taking that book and running it through an industrial
• 14:50
  paper shredder.
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: That is the perfect analogy.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: Yes, you can't read the sentence anymore because the paper
• 14:55
  is in a thousand pieces.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: Exactly when you try to run an str profile on
• 14:59
  heavily degraded, shredded DNA. The machine basically just returns static.
• 15:04
  It can't read the repeats because the sequence is broken.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: That makes total sense.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: But even if by some absolute miracle they had managed
• 15:12
  to extract a pristine str profile from those bones in
• 15:15
  the year two thousand, they would have slammed into the
• 15:17
  second major limitation.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: Which is the database itself, right.
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: Because COTIS isn't a magical directory of every human on Earth,
• 15:24
  not even close right far from it. Cotis only works
• 15:28
  if the person you are looking for is already in
• 15:30
  the system, and in the year two thousand, you generally
• 15:33
  only got into COTIS if you would have beendicted of
• 15:35
  a felony.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: Okay, so if he didn't have a criminal record, he's
• 15:37
  just invisible to the machine exactly.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: Furthermore, str analysis is incredibly narrow. It only provides a
• 15:44
  direct one to.
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: One match, so it can't find family members.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: Not distant ones. If the dough isn't in the system,
• 15:51
  or if an immediate first degree relative like a parent
• 15:54
  or a child, hasn't submitted a sample specifically looking for him.
• 15:58
  The system is completely blind. It can't tell you who
• 16:01
  a person's second cousin is. It can't build out a
• 16:03
  family treat It just spits out an air message saying
• 16:06
  no match found.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: Which leaves this massive, invisible human toll in its wake.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: It really does.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: While these bones are just sitting in an evidence box
• 16:15
  in a sterile Seattle medical Examiner's office, there is a
• 16:19
  family thousands of miles away in Hawaii. Yeah, and we
• 16:22
  now know that this family's last contact with him was
• 16:25
  all the way back in nineteen ninety eight.
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: And the psychological reality for that family is just staggering
• 16:30
  if we connect this to the broader field of psychology.
• 16:32
  They are experiencing what researchers, specifically Pauline Boss, termed ambiguous loss.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: Ambiguous loss.
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: Yes, it is widely considered one of the most traumatic
• 16:42
  and complicated forms of grief a human being can ever endure.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: I really want you to put yourself in the shoes
• 16:47
  of that family in Hawaii in nineteen ninety eight. Right,
• 16:50
  because it is entirely pre social media, the Internet is
• 16:53
  barely in its infancy, right, people could and very frequently did,
• 16:57
  just fade from contact. You don't have Facebook to check
• 17:00
  their last log in. You don't have Instagram to see
• 17:02
  a timestamp photo of them. At a coffee shop in Seattle.
• 17:05
  You don't have GPS trapping on their cell phone. You
• 17:08
  just stop getting phone calls exactly. The letters just stop
• 17:11
  arriving in the mail. And without that constant digital tether
• 17:14
  that we completely take for granted today, families were left
• 17:18
  in this agonizing, unending limbo.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: Ambiguous loss is so destructive because it denies the brain
• 17:27
  the closure it desperately needs to begin the morning process.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: It's like a cut that won't heal exactly.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, if you lose a loved one in a car accident,
• 17:35
  the grief is horrific, but it is concrete. You have
• 17:38
  a body, you have a funeral, you have a grave
• 17:41
  to visit, you have a socially recognized process for morning.
• 17:44
  With a missing person, you have absolutely none of that.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: You nactually assume the worst, right like an accident in
• 17:49
  the woods, a violent crime, maybe a voluntary disappearance, but
• 17:53
  you have absolutely zero.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: Proof, and the human mind just tortures itself with hope.
• 17:57
  Imagine it's Thanksgiving in nineteen ninety nine. Oh man, there's
• 18:01
  an empty chair at the table. Do you set a
• 18:03
  plate for him? Do you talk about him in the past?
• 18:05
  Can so of the present tense.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: That is heartbreaking to think about.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: The years just compound the grief. The silence stretches from
• 18:12
  weeks into months, and months into years, and years into decades.
• 18:16
  You are completely suspended in.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: Time because you can't move forward right.
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: You don't know if they are actually gone or if
• 18:22
  they're just suffering somewhere needing your help. The family's grief
• 18:26
  is frozen, exactly like the case file itself.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: But and this is a really crucial detail to emphasize,
• 18:32
  the case was never actually forgotten.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: No, it wasn't.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: The National Park Service Investigative Services Branch, working alongside the
• 18:39
  King County Medical Examiner, they never officially closed the file.
• 18:43
  It stayed open on.
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: The books, which is a profound testament to the persistence
• 18:48
  and the institutional memory of these investigators.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: Because they could have just moved on.
• 18:52
  Speaker 2: It would have been so incredibly easy, bureaucratically speaking, to
• 18:56
  just write this off as an unsolvable wilderness mystery, to
• 19:00
  stamp it closed unidentified and move on to the dozens
• 19:04
  of fresh cases hitting their desks every single month.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: But they didn't.
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: They didn't. They carefully maintained the physical evidence. They essentially
• 19:12
  parked the file in a state of suspended animation, explicitly
• 19:16
  waiting for science and technology to catch up to the mystery.
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: They were safeguarding those fragmented bones for a future they
• 19:22
  couldn't quite see yet precisely, and that future eventually arrived,
• 19:26
  which brings us to the science of resurrection.
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: Yes, the turning point.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: The case set ice cold for over two decades. But
• 19:34
  while those remains waited quietly in an evidence locker, a
• 19:37
  scientific revolution was slowly brewing in laboratories across the country
• 19:41
  that would literally rewrite the rules of forensic science.
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: Calling it a revolution almost understates it honestly, really yeah,
• 19:48
  the leap in biological capabilities from the year two thousand
• 19:51
  to the year twenty twenty four, it is equivalent to
• 19:54
  going from using a handheld magnifying glass to looking through
• 19:57
  the gems web space telescope. Wow, it is a fundamental
• 20:01
  paradigm shift in how we read the human body.
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: Okay, here's where it gets really really interesting. Jump forward
• 20:08
  to November twenty twenty four. A forensic anthropologist working with
• 20:12
  the King County Medical Examiner decides that the technology has
• 20:16
  finally matured enough it is time.
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: They're ready to try again.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: Right, They take a small sample from those highly degraded
• 20:23
  skeletal remains that have been sitting in storage since the
• 20:25
  Clinton administration, and they submit it to a facility called AUTHRUM.
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: AUTHRAAM is a specialized private laboratory based in the Woodlands, Texas,
• 20:33
  and over the last several years they have become the
• 20:35
  absolute gold standard and pioneers in a field called forensic
• 20:39
  genetic genealogy or FGG.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: Okay, wait, I have a question here. Sure if the
• 20:44
  rain in the Saldeuke rainforest chemically snapped the DNA strands
• 20:48
  into tiny pieces via hydrolysis for years, Like we just.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: Talked about, right, the paper shredder.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the shredder. How on earth is a lab in
• 20:54
  Texas reading it? You just told us you can't run
• 20:57
  a shattered, shredded strand through a standard STRM. Sh How
• 21:00
  did AUTHRM do the impossible?
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: This is where we completely abandon the old str method.
• 21:06
  AUFERM doesn't use the standard code as system at all.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: They don't know.
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: They use a proprietary process called forensic grade genome sequencing
• 21:15
  And instead of looking at those tiny, long repeated sections
• 21:18
  of the DNA library, this new technology looks at something
• 21:21
  called SMPS that is spelled SNIANP, which stands for single
• 21:26
  nucleotide polymorphism.
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: Single nucleotide polymorphism. Okay, we need to break that down
• 21:31
  for everyone listening. What actually is a nucleotide.
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: If you picture the classic image of DNA the twisted ladder,
• 21:37
  the double helis that nucleotides are the RUMs of that ladder.
• 21:41
  They are the four fundamental chemical bases that make up
• 21:43
  all genetic code AD nine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine acgn T.
• 21:50
  Got it. A SMP is a tiny single letter variation
• 21:53
  in that sequence. For example, where most people might have
• 21:55
  an A at a specific spot in the ladder, you
• 21:57
  might have a C. That single letter difference is SNP.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: So instead of looking for whole repeated paragraphs like the
• 22:02
  old system, they are zooming into the absolute microscopic level,
• 22:06
  looking for single specific letters.
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: Exactly, and they aren't just looking at a few locations.
• 22:11
  Forensic grade genome sequencing analyzes hundreds of thousands of these
• 22:15
  single letter SNPs across the entire human genome.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: Hundreds of thousands.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: Yes, it is a wildly robust, comprehensive reading of the
• 22:24
  genetic code.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: Which completely solves the paper shredder problem.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: You see it now.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Because even if the water chopped the DNA up
• 22:31
  into a pile of paper confetti, you aren't looking for
• 22:33
  a whole sentence anymore. Even on a tiny shredded piece
• 22:36
  of confetti, you can still find and read a single letter.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: That is precisely the mechanism because they're looking for single nucleotides.
• 22:44
  They can handle DNA that has been heavily degraded, shattered
• 22:47
  by hydrolysis, or broken apart by time and soil acidity.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: That is incredible.
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: They run this pulverized bone through sequencing machines that read
• 22:55
  all these tiny fragments, and then incredibly powerful bioinformatic software
• 22:59
  pieces the shattered puzzle back together digitally. It creates a massive,
• 23:03
  comprehensive SNP profile.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack the next step of this. So they
• 23:07
  have this amazing ultra detailed SNP profile, But unlike the
• 23:12
  old system, they aren't just crossing their fingers and looking
• 23:15
  for a direct one to one match in a police
• 23:17
  database full of felons. What do they actually do with
• 23:20
  this data?
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: They essentially cast a massive digital net into the public domain.
• 23:25
  How So they take this SMP profile and acting strictly
• 23:29
  within specific legal and terms of service guidelines. They upload
• 23:33
  it to consumer genealogy.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: Databases like the ones you see on TV commercials.
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: Exactly, databases like ged match or family Tree DNA where regular,
• 23:42
  everyday people have willingly uploaded their own DNA profiles, usually
• 23:46
  just to find out where their ancestors came from or
• 23:48
  to build their own family histories.
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: So they are throwing this genetic profile into a sea
• 23:52
  of millions of regular people.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: Yes, and the software compares the dose hundreds of thousands
• 23:58
  of smps against the database and they wait for a hit.
• 24:01
  Exactly Eventually, the genetic genealogists sitting at a computer at
• 24:04
  Authrum get a pin. The system says, hey, this unidentified
• 24:09
  person from Washington State shares three point one percent of
• 24:12
  their DNA with this random person living in Ohio. That
• 24:15
  amount of shared DNA means they are approximately third cousins.
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: That is absolutely mind blowing. They bypass the immediate family
• 24:22
  entirely and just find a distant relative who happens to
• 24:25
  be curious about their ancestry.
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: It is brilliant, and once they find that distant cousin,
• 24:30
  the biology stops and the historical detective work begins.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: Oh, this is the genealogy part right.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: The genealogists that Outhrum act like time traveling detectives. They
• 24:39
  start building massive family trees. They work backward in time
• 24:42
  from that random cousin in Ohio, digging through historical records
• 24:46
  looking for a set of common great great grandparents from
• 24:50
  the late eighteen hundreds or early nineteen hundreds.
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: And this is not easy work. This isn't just clicking
• 24:54
  a button and letting the computer do it.
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: Oh, not at all. It is incredibly tedious. They are
• 24:59
  combing through through amazingly dense historical data, handwritten census records
• 25:04
  from nineteen ten, ship manifests, misspelled birth certificates, marriage licenses, obituaries.
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: Just hours and hours of reading old documents exactly.
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: And once they identify those common great great grandparents, they pivot.
• 25:18
  They start building the family tree forward.
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: In time, tracing everyone down.
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: Yes, tracing every single descendant, every single branch of that family,
• 25:26
  moving down through the twentieth century to the present day.
• 25:29
  They map out hundreds of people.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: And what are they looking for.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: What they're ultimately looking for is the missing branch, the
• 25:35
  one son or brother or uncle who fits the demographic profile.
• 25:39
  Mail born around nineteen sixty and who seemingly vanished off
• 25:42
  the face of the earth in the late nineteen.
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: Nineties, and by early twenty twenty five, Authrom's exhaustive genealogical
• 25:48
  mapping pointed directly to a specific family line in the
• 25:51
  state of Hawaii.
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: They found the branch.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: They found it. And this is where the sterile, high
• 25:55
  tech lab work transitions back into a boots on the
• 25:58
  ground investigation.
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: Right this work starts again.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: The National Park Service takes this lead and they run
• 26:03
  with it. They coordinate interviews, they physically track down the
• 26:07
  living relatives in Hawaii and other states.
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: And to definitively confirm the match, they collect reference DNA
• 26:14
  samples from these living family.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: Members just to be absolutely sure exactly.
• 26:18
  Speaker 2: They use a specific technology called kin SNP rapid relationship
• 26:22
  testing to compare the fresh reference samples from the living
• 26:25
  relatives directly to the reconstructed profile built from the remains.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: And finally, after twenty six long years of silence, the
• 26:33
  genetic data, the genealogical paper trail, and the circumstantial timeline
• 26:37
  all aligned perfectly. Science gave us a name.
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: But and I think it is really vital that we
• 26:43
  pause here and remember this, a name is not just
• 26:46
  a data point to be celebrated now, It's not. A
• 26:49
  name represents a life actually lived, and with that name
• 26:52
  came a profoundly tragic story. We have to move out
• 26:55
  of the triumph of the Texas Laboratory and step back
• 26:58
  into the very human reality of who this man was
• 27:01
  and the agonizing truth of how he died in that
• 27:04
  green tent.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: Let's officially introduce you to the man that His name
• 27:07
  was Joseph Louis Araud Junior. He was born on December third,
• 27:10
  nineteen sixty in Hawaii. He grew up in the Islands.
• 27:14
  When you look at his lifetimeline, a major fracture happens.
• 27:17
  In nineteen ninety three, his father, Joseph passes away huge loss,
• 27:23
  and based on the newly estimated timeline of his death,
• 27:26
  he was only around thirty eight years old when he
• 27:28
  passed away in the Salduke backcountry.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: Which brings us to the most sobering aspect of this
• 27:32
  entire case, the manner of death. While the initial press
• 27:36
  releases from the National Park Service understandably focused on the
• 27:40
  triumph of the identification and omitted this specific detail out
• 27:43
  of respect for the family. Subsequent case documentation confirms the
• 27:47
  reality of what happened, what did happen. The cause of
• 27:50
  death was a gunshot wound to the head, The manner
• 27:53
  of death was ruled a suicide, and they were able
• 27:55
  to narrow the estimated time of death to roughly nineteen
• 27:58
  ninety six to late nighteen ninety nine.
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: That completely changes everything, It really does. It totally shifts
• 28:04
  the lens through which we view that entire campsite, doesn't it.
• 28:07
  Speaker 2: It radically alters our understanding of the scene. Wilderness suicides
• 28:11
  are a deeply complex, often misunderstood sociological phenomenon.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: Why do people go to these places for that will?
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: National parks hold a very specific, deeply symbolic place in
• 28:23
  the American imagination. We traditionally view them as places of
• 28:27
  ultimate freedom, a vigorous recreation of self discovery, of getting
• 28:31
  back to nature to heal right.
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: The whole John Murror Transcendentalist idea of the woods being
• 28:36
  a place of salvation exactly.
• 28:38
  Speaker 2: But for some individuals who are experiencing profound psychological pain,
• 28:43
  these vast wildernesses are also places specifically chosen for.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: Final acts because they want to be alone right.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: People seek out that overwhelming solitude. They seek the sublime
• 28:53
  beauty of the landscape, or perhaps they are seeking a literal,
• 28:57
  physical return to the earth, entirely sopated from the noise
• 29:01
  and pressure of human society.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: When you look at the inventory of the gear, now
• 29:05
  knowing it was a suicide, it just breaks your heart.
• 29:08
  Speaker 2: It reframes all of it.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: It does. Initially I asked if it was like an
• 29:11
  Egyptian tomb of survival gear. I wondered, was he planning
• 29:14
  an extended escape from society that just accidentally turned permanent
• 29:17
  because of a sudden winter storm or an injury.
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: A tragic accident, right, But knowing.
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: The manner of death, you have to look at the
• 29:24
  folding saw, the winter clothing, the carefully pitched BITV tent,
• 29:28
  and you have to ask, was setting up this quiet,
• 29:32
  meticulously prepared, isolated camp part of a deliberate final plan.
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: It seems like it to.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: Be warm, to be comfortable, to be completely alone, and
• 29:41
  to be at peace before the end.
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: It raises a really profound question about human intention in
• 29:46
  our final moments. We will never truly know what was
• 29:50
  going through Joseph's mind in those final days or hours
• 29:53
  as he hiked deep into the soul dick drainage.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: Oh, we won't.
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: But the meticulous nature of the camp heavily suggests a
• 29:59
  deep desire for pride to see. The incredibly remote off
• 30:02
  trail location may have been chosen precisely so he wouldn't
• 30:06
  be found by a casual hiker, or so he couldn't
• 30:07
  be interrupted in his final moments.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: I just keep coming back to the rosary. They found
• 30:11
  a rosary around his neck.
• 30:12
  Speaker 2: That detail is so striking.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: Amidst all this purely utilitarian survival gear, the metal saw,
• 30:19
  the crinkly space blanket, the binoculars, the heavy pack, there
• 30:22
  is this incredibly profound layer of personal spiritual intimacy. It
• 30:27
  is this incredibly sparse, lonely scene in the middle of
• 30:31
  a million acres of towering, dripping rainforest, and he has
• 30:35
  this delicate symbol of faith or perhaps a connection to
• 30:38
  his family draped around his neck.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: It speaks to the deeply human element that forensic science,
• 30:44
  for all its miracles, can never fully quantify.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: Science can only tell us so much exactly.
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: The DNA gave us his name, the medical examiner gave
• 30:52
  us the mechanical cause of death, but the rosary gives
• 30:55
  us a fleeting glimpse into his state of mind or
• 30:58
  his spiritual grounding. The very end, it represents a seeking
• 31:02
  of comfort.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: And the family's response reflects that human elements so powerfully.
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: It really does.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: When they were finally contacted by investigators after twenty six years,
• 31:10
  their priority wasn't seeking publicity, It wasn't about cast and
• 31:14
  blame on the Park Service for not finding him sooner.
• 31:16
  One family member indicated that their primary overwriting concern was
• 31:20
  simply bringing him home to Hawaii.
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: There is such quiet and credible dignity in that.
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: Just the profound relief of having the ability to finally
• 31:28
  properly mourn.
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: But we also have to acknowledge the extremely complex, multifaceted
• 31:34
  grief this brings to.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: A family because it's not a simple happy ending.
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: Not at all. For decades, they lived with the ambiguous
• 31:41
  loss we discussed earlier. They wondered if he was alive
• 31:44
  out there somewhere, maybe living off the grid, maybe starting
• 31:47
  a new life. Now that ambiguous loss is resolved, they
• 31:51
  have the relief of knowing exactly where he is and
• 31:54
  what happened. Right, But the confirmation of the suicide introduces
• 31:58
  a completely new set of for ever lingering questions, the
• 32:01
  agonizing why.
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: Could we have done something if we had.
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: Known exactly what specific pain was he running from? That
• 32:09
  is a heavy, complicated burden the family now has to carry,
• 32:12
  even as the burden of his simple disappearance is lifted.
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: So if we zoom out from Joseph for a moment,
• 32:17
  what does this all mean for the bigger picture. Joseph's
• 32:21
  story is resolved, but it is clear that his case
• 32:23
  acts as a window into a massive, ongoing national crisis
• 32:27
  and the ethical frameworks we are currently building to try
• 32:30
  and solve it.
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: The scale of the missing and unidentified problem in the
• 32:33
  United States is just staggering.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: How big are we talking?
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: If you look at NAMEZ, which is the National Missing
• 32:39
  and Unidentified Person System, the database where Joseph was listed
• 32:43
  as up one nineteen eighty eight, there are currently tens
• 32:46
  of thousands of unidentified human remains sitting in evidence lockers,
• 32:51
  medical examiner offices, and unmarked graves across the country.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: Tens of thousands, yes, and.
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: Our national parks contribute a very disproportionate share to that track.
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: Number because of the terrain, like we talked about with
• 33:02
  the sal Duke.
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: Exactly, national parks are magnets for the Lost Olympic National
• 33:07
  Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is an International
• 33:10
  Biosphere Reserve. Is a place of unparalleled natural wonder, but
• 33:15
  it's dangerous very because of its sheer, immense size, its
• 33:19
  rugged topography, and its environmental lethality. Is also functionally a
• 33:23
  vast graveyard for unsolved mysteries. People vanish into the landscape
• 33:27
  and nature efficiently hides the evidence for decades.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: Solving these cases takes a monumental sustained effort. I want
• 33:33
  to highlight a quote from Daberflowers, who is the Deputy
• 33:36
  Chief of the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch.
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: She made a great point.
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: She heavily underscores the sheer persistence involved in this specific case.
• 33:45
  It really took an entire village spanning a quarter of
• 33:47
  a century. You had the National Park Service maintaining the
• 33:50
  administrative file and refusing to give up right. You had
• 33:53
  the King County Medical Examiner properly preserving the physical remains
• 33:57
  so they didn't degrade further in storage. You had authorms
• 34:01
  private scientists developing the SMP technology over years of research.
• 34:05
  And you had a family in Hawaii willing to participate
• 34:08
  face their grief and give their DNA.
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: And this reliance on DNA brings up a fascinating point
• 34:13
  about the broader ethics of genetic genealogy.
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: Ah, this is a huge debate right now.
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: It is. Over the past few years, there has been
• 34:20
  a massive intense public debate about the use of consumer
• 34:24
  DNA databases by law enforcement. When police use these databases
• 34:28
  to catch living criminal suspects, the most famous example being
• 34:31
  the Golden State Killer, it raises huge Fourth Amendment privacy
• 34:35
  and ethical concerns about informed consent, genetic privacy, and government overreach.
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: Right because people submitted their DNA to ged match or
• 34:43
  twenty three a meters to find out if they were
• 34:45
  twenty percent Irish or if they had a predisposition to
• 34:48
  a certain health condition. Exactly, they didn't spit in a
• 34:50
  tube with the intention of sending their third cousin to
• 34:53
  federal prison.
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: Precisely. The debate over genetic privacy is incredibly complex. But
• 34:58
  what's fascinating here is the sharp distinction that general public
• 35:02
  makes when this exact same technology is used purely.
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: For identification, like in John Doe cases.
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: Yes, using forensic genetic genealogy to identify John and Jane
• 35:12
  Doe's to Name the Dead enjoys incredibly broad bipartisan public support.
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: It seemed differently completely.
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: The ethical calculus completely shifts in the public mind. It
• 35:23
  is viewed not as an invasive criminal investigation into a
• 35:26
  suspect's privacy, but as a fundamental humanitarian obligation to a
• 35:30
  victim and their grieving family.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: And you listening to this right now, whether you are
• 35:35
  driving or making dinner, I really want you to think
• 35:37
  about what that means. Every single time a sophisticated SMP
• 35:42
  profile is successfully built from degraded bones, another family somewhere
• 35:46
  in the world might get that life changing phone call.
• 35:49
  Speaker 2: The closure they've been waiting for.
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: Yes, the agonizing decades of ambiguous loss are ended. John
• 35:55
  Doe becomes Joseph again. A cold case file number in
• 35:58
  a dusty cabinet becomes beloved son. It restores profound human
• 36:03
  dignity to someone who died completely anonymously.
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: It is the ultimate application of hard science for the
• 36:08
  sake of deep empathy. We are taking our most advanced,
• 36:11
  cutting edge biological tools and using them not just to
• 36:14
  prosecute the living, but to heal the living. By naming the.
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: Dead, to briefly recap this incredible emotional journey. We have
• 36:21
  a man, Joseph Luis Siraud Junior, who loses contact with
• 36:25
  his family in Hawaii in nineteen ninety eight. He hikes
• 36:27
  into the brutal, beautiful wilderness of the Olympic Peninsula and
• 36:30
  passes away.
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: He is found in a sleeping bag by pure chance
• 36:33
  in the year two thousand, and.
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: He has finally given his name back in twenty twenty six.
• 36:38
  And it only happened through the sheer, stubborn refusal of
• 36:41
  investigators to close the file and the absolute miracles of
• 36:45
  modern genomics reversing the destruction of nature.
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: It is a profound, sweeping arc of history, human psychology,
• 36:53
  and science.
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: But I want to leave you with a final, chilling,
• 36:56
  yet oddly beautiful thought that we haven't really touched on
• 36:59
  yet in the entire discussion. Okay, I want you to
• 37:02
  think about the incredible, fragile serendipity of the initial discovery itself.
• 37:07
  Consider that unnamed anonymous researcher who was bushwhacking through a
• 37:11
  million acre wilderness on July eleventh, two thousand.
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: The statistical odds of a human being intersecting with that
• 37:18
  exact camouflaged green bivy tent and a million acres of
• 37:22
  dense rainforest are astronomically low.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: Exactly. Think of the butterfly effect. If that researcher had
• 37:28
  taken a slightly different path that Tuesday morning, if they
• 37:30
  had looked left instead.
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: Of right, just a few feet in the other direction.
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: If they had decided to turn back ten minutes earlier
• 37:36
  because it looked like rain, Joseph's remains might have sat
• 37:39
  undisturbed in that damp, acidic rainforest for another ten or
• 37:42
  twenty years. And if that had happened, if that had
• 37:45
  happened by the time Authoram's incredible SMP technology actually existed
• 37:49
  in twenty twenty four, the Pacific Northwest soil and the
• 37:53
  relentless water would have degraded those bones so completely. Hydrolysis
• 37:57
  would have shattered the genetic code so thoroughly that no
• 38:00
  DNA could ever ever be extracted, not even by the
• 38:04
  best scientists in the world.
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: Nature would have permanently, irrevocably erased the data. He would
• 38:09
  have been lost forever.
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: In a very real way. A single random footstep in
• 38:14
  the year two thousand is the only reason a grieving
• 38:17
  family in Hawaii got their answer in twenty twenty six.
• 38:20
  Nature almost kept the secret forever, but pure blind chance
• 38:24
  preserved just enough of him for science to finish the job.
• 38:27
  Speaker 2: It's incredible to think about, it, really is.
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us on this deep
• 38:32
  dive into the sources today. The next time you look
• 38:34
  out at a vast, beautiful wilderness, I want you to
• 38:37
  think about the names still waiting to be found out there,
• 38:39
  waiting in the silence for science to finally bring them home.