Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Genetic genealogy breakthrough solves 20-year-old Portland cold case

Transcript

Genetic genealogy breakthrough solves 20-year-old Portland cold case · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Right now, sitting in a digital database somewhere there is
• 0:04
  a tiny string of biological code that could solve a
• 0:08
  decade's old murder.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, or identify a nameless victim exactly.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: It could give a grieving family the exact answer they
• 0:15
  have been waiting for, you know, since the early two
• 0:18
  thousand and.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: The wildest part about all of.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: This, you might actually be the one who uploaded it.
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: It's true.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: So welcome to our deep dive today. We're looking at
• 0:26
  some incredible source materials, official statements, forensic case files, genetic
• 0:31
  analysis report.
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: All surrounding the newly identified remains of a man named
• 0:35
  Robert Lee Horton.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: Right, but before we get to the science, I want
• 0:38
  you to picture this. It's December nineteenth, two thousand and four.
• 0:42
  You're in the Pacific.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: Northwest, specifically southwest Portland, Organ.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's that time of year where the damp
• 0:47
  coal just it just bypasses your jacket, it seeps right
• 0:51
  into your bones.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: The fog rolling off of the Wolamette River there is
• 0:54
  just incredibly thick.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: So if it could practically swallows the landscape and right
• 0:58
  in the middle of this bustling city, they're these really dense,
• 1:01
  rugged woods hugging the edge of Riverview Cemetery.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: It's this place of absolute quiet isolation, just tucked away
• 1:09
  from the daily commute of thousands of people.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: And on this specific December day, two hikers are pushing
• 1:14
  their way through that heavy, wet underbrush, and well, they
• 1:18
  stumble upon.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: Something, something that would stay a secret in those woods
• 1:21
  for the next twenty two years.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Right, they find this makeshift fabric lean to there are
• 1:26
  a few cooking pans with old residue, discarded clothes, some
• 1:29
  food wrappers.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: And lying right there among it all fully skeletonized human remains.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and a scene like that, it communicates a very specific,
• 1:40
  tragic reality right away.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, we are looking at a life lived entirely on
• 1:45
  the margins, someone who had to carve out a precarious
• 1:48
  existence in the literal shatters of a major American city, only.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: To have that life end in complete anonymity exactly. And
• 1:55
  so the mission of this deep dive today it isn't
• 1:58
  just to recount how a twenty two years cold case
• 2:00
  with saulved.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: Right, because it's much bigger than that.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we are going to explore this quiet, almost invisible
• 2:06
  revolution happening in forensic science right now.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: It's called investigative genetic genealogy or IgG, and we're.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Going to look at how the answers to these haunting
• 2:15
  mysteries are no longer found at the actual crime scene.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: They're increasingly hidden in the genetic code of distant oblivious
• 2:22
  strangers exactly.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: And by the time we finish this journey, it is
• 2:27
  going to totally change the way you view your own biology.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: Oh, without a doubt. It'll change how you look at
• 2:33
  your family tree.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: And it will definitely change how you look at those
• 2:35
  consumer ancestry kits that might be, you know, sitting in
• 2:38
  your bathroom cabinet right now, seriously, Okay, so let's unpack this.
• 2:42
  We have to start back in that foggy forest in
• 2:44
  two thousand and four. The hikers call it in.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: Right and the Portland Police Bureau, along with a Moltnoma
• 2:50
  County death investigator, rushed to the scene.
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: But the first hurdle is immediately obvious. This is not
• 2:55
  a fresh.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: Scene, no, not at all. The remains are fully skeletonized,
• 2:58
  meaning they've been out there for months, totally exposed.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: And there's no wallet, no ID card.
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: No obvious signs of foul play. Either no weapon or
• 3:07
  obvious trauma.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: Right, So the autopsy comes back frustratingly vague. White male
• 3:14
  forty five to fifty five years old, five foot six
• 3:16
  to five foot nine.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Cause of death undetermined, Manner of death also undetermined.
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: To me, this feels like a classic locked room mystery,
• 3:26
  except the locker room. Here is this sprawling, exposed urban wilderness.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: It's a great way to look at it.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: But here is my immediate pushback on this part of
• 3:34
  the narrative. Why couldn't they figure out more from the
• 3:37
  scene itself. Well, because we've all watched endless procedural crime shows, right,
• 3:43
  we assume forensics in two thousand and four were basically magical.
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: Right. Television really skews our perception there.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: On TV, they have lasers, black lights, a tiny fiber
• 3:53
  from a jacket instantly identifies a guy's whole life story.
• 3:57
  Why did a major city's investigative team hit a dead
• 4:00
  so fast?
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: We really have to dismantle what's often called the CSI
• 4:03
  effect here. Television has trained us over the last two
• 4:06
  decades to believe science gives you an immediate, hyper specific
• 4:09
  answer in.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: Like a forty five minute window before the commercial.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: Exactly, But the biological reality of death, especially with skeletonization
• 4:17
  and outdoor weatering, is just profoundly.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: Different because of the environment in the Pacific Northwest.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: Yes, when a human body is left exposed there, you
• 4:26
  have relentless winter rain, massive temperature fluctuations, highly acidic soil
• 4:32
  in pine forests.
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Oh right, the soil acidity.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: Plus rapid insect activity and local scavenging animals. The soft
• 4:39
  tissue degrades at an astonishing rate.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: And once that soft tissue is gone.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: You lose every traditional primary means of identification. You lose
• 4:48
  facial features, you lose tattoos, which are normally the easiest
• 4:52
  way to identify an unknown person.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes sense. Birthmarks, scars from past surgeries all gone.
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: And crucially, you lose fingerprints. The entire canvas that tells
• 5:02
  the story vanishes.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: The official report actually notes that investigators tried really hard
• 5:06
  to pull fingerprints from the campsite, from the cooking pans,
• 5:09
  the packaging, but.
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: The environmental degradation rendered everything useless. The dampness just destroys
• 5:14
  the oils and ridges left behind.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: So without that soft tissue, investigators are essentially flying blind, right, pretty.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: Much, they have to rely purely on forensic anthropology, the
• 5:23
  study of the bones themselves.
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: Which is incredible work, but it has limits.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: Strict biological limits. You mentioned the height estimate five foot
• 5:31
  six to five foot nine. They get that by measuring
• 5:33
  the long bones like the femur or tibia.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: And they plug those into mathematical formulas.
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: Right, based on human variation, But it remains just an estimate.
• 5:42
  And to guess the age, they look at degenerative changes
• 5:46
  like joints wearing down exactly. They look at the pubic synthesis,
• 5:50
  a joint in the pelvis that wears down predictably over
• 5:52
  a lifetime. They look at cranial sutures fusing dental enamel wearing.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: Down, and all that complex math gives more window forty
• 6:01
  five to fifty five years old, right, which I mean
• 6:04
  in the city the size of Portland describes millions of men.
• 6:07
  It doesn't narrow it down, No, it doesn't.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: And the most critical limitation here is that all those
• 6:11
  physical clues are completely useless for a definitive identification unless
• 6:16
  you have anti mortem records.
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: Anti mortem meaning before death.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: Yes, if you suspect the remains are John Smith, you
• 6:22
  request John Smith's medical files, you compare his X rays
• 6:25
  for a healed colorbone fracture against the skeleton.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: Or dental records matching fillings to the skull exactly.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: But if you have absolutely no idea who the person is,
• 6:34
  you have nothing to compare the bones against. Those clues
• 6:37
  exist in a vacuum.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: You're holding half a puzzle and the other half is
• 6:41
  in a random dentist's filing cabinet somewhere.
• 6:44
  Speaker 2: Perfectly said, and we also have.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: To factor in the societal context of Portland in two
• 6:49
  thousand and four, because that makes breaking out of that
• 6:52
  vacuum even harder. Definitely, the city was already dealing with
• 6:55
  intense urban challenges, specifically a growing unhead housed and transient population, and.
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: The investigators recognize that context immediately at the scene.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: Right the fabric lean to cooking pans with residue food scraps.
• 7:09
  It paints a picture of someone adapting to survival on
• 7:12
  the margins.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: So, following standard procedure, police canvas, local shelters, soup kitchens, missions.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: They talk to known transient communities, but missing persons data
• 7:21
  shows these vulnerable populations are the most likely to slip
• 7:25
  through the cracks of a neighborhood canvas.
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: They slip through because traditional tracking mechanisms just don't apply.
• 7:30
  People experiencing homelessness often move.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: Frequently between encampments or shelters based on the weather or safety.
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: Exactly. They might actively avoid official institutions out of distrust,
• 7:42
  but more importantly, they often lack a stable social network
• 7:46
  that would instantly flag their absence.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: Right if someone with a nine to five doesn't show
• 7:51
  up on Monday, an alarm is raised by noon.
• 7:53
  Speaker 2: But if a transient individual moves to a new part
• 7:56
  of the woods and stops showing up to a soup kitchen,
• 7:59
  people might just assume they traveled to another city.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: The absence doesn't register as a disappearance exactly, So the
• 8:05
  environment washed away surface clues. Anthropology hit its limits, and
• 8:09
  investigators were forced to turn to biological markers.
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: They needed DNA.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: They needed DNA, but looking at the source material, the
• 8:17
  technology of the early two thousands was about to hit
• 8:19
  a massive, impenetrable wall.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: A wall built of scientific limitations and just immense bureaucratic
• 8:26
  red tape.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Let's trace this timeline, because the journey of this file
• 8:30
  is a masterclass in frustration. The initial efforts fail. No fingerprints,
• 8:35
  no dental matches.
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: They enter the broad physical description into NUMIS.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: The National Missing and Unidentified Person System, They wait for
• 8:42
  a hit, and they get absolutely zero matches.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: The case goes totally cold for years until we hit
• 8:48
  a milestone.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: In twenty ten. A DNA sample is finally extracted from
• 8:52
  the remains.
• 8:53
  Speaker 2: Sent off to the University of North Texas Center for
• 8:55
  Human Identification.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: And the lab performs short tandem repeats sequencing str They
• 9:02
  upload this genetic profile into CODIS, the FBI's massive DNA database.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: And the grand result of this cutting edge twenty ten.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Science zero matches, nothing, not a single ping. By twenty fifteen,
• 9:15
  the case is officially archived. Just gathering dust. Yeah, okay,
• 9:18
  let's unpack this because to me, it's like having a
• 9:21
  highly specific, perfectly cut key, but the government only lets
• 9:24
  you test it on a handful of heavily guarded doors
• 9:26
  in one specific hallway.
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: That's a great analogy, and if.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: Your unidentified person doesn't live behind those exact doors, the
• 9:32
  key is useless.
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: To grasp why CODIS failed, Robert Lee Horton, we have
• 9:36
  to look at what CODIS actually is and what it
• 9:38
  was never designed to be. CODIS is populated almost entirely
• 9:42
  by genetic profiles from convicted offenders, arrestees, and unknown DNA
• 9:47
  from crime scenes.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: It's a law enforcement database, not a general population database, exactly.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: It's a very specific subset of humanity, people who have
• 9:56
  interacted with the criminal justice system in a serious.
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: Way, and beyond who in the database, the technology that
• 10:03
  STR sequencing creates another bottleneck.
• 10:05
  Speaker 2: Right, a massive bottleneck. STR is designed for finding exact
• 10:09
  one to one matches. They aren't looking at the whole genome.
• 10:12
  They look at roughly twenty specific targeted locations, so.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: They count how many times a tiny sequence of letters
• 10:18
  repeats at those spots. Right.
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: It's perfect for proving a drop of blood at a
• 10:22
  scene belongs to the suspect in the interrogation room.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: But terrible for finding distant relatives.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: Exactly. If Horton had never been arrested for a qualifying felony,
• 10:30
  he wouldn't be in CODIS. If his immediate family hadn't
• 10:33
  committed crimes, they wouldn't be in it either.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: The system was completely blind to his existence. Completely, And
• 10:38
  as we move from twenty ten to twenty fifteen, we
• 10:40
  have to talk about how these cold cases are actually
• 10:42
  managed behind the scenes.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: The painful bureaucratic reality.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: Right, the source file mentions that by twenty fifteen the
• 10:49
  case was archived, deprioritized. It's easy for us to sit
• 10:53
  here and say, why didn't they keep trying?
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: Why not run the DNA every day?
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: Exactly? But the reality inside a major city these medical
• 11:00
  Examiner's office is brutal. It's a game of agonizing resource management.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: It is entirely a matter of triage, driven by extremely
• 11:09
  limited funding and manpower.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: Because homicide units are juggling dozens of active cases.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: Right when a department has unidentified remains with no obvious
• 11:17
  indicators of homicide, no bullet holes, no blunt force trauma,
• 11:22
  that case inevitably gets pushed to the back burner.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: The active cases, with living victims in danger or fresh
• 11:28
  homicides with viable leads, they demand the funding and detective hours.
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: It's a terrible calculus, but a necessary one. So Horton's
• 11:35
  file literally gathered dust on a shelf, frozen in time
• 11:38
  by pre genomic science limitations, trapped.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: But to thaw it out, investigators didn't need to go
• 11:44
  back to the Portland Woods for a missed clue.
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: No, they needed a fundamental shift in how we read
• 11:48
  the human body.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting. In twenty eighteen, there
• 11:53
  is a massive paradigm shift. The Moltnoma County Medical Examiner
• 11:57
  gets a federal grant from the National Institute of Just.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: The NIJ grant that was the catalyst.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: It lets them bypass local budget limits and do something
• 12:05
  totally different.
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: They go back to the skeleton, but instead of trying
• 12:09
  to pull DNA from degraded soft tissue or marrow, they
• 12:13
  extract it from incredibly dense bone tissue.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: And they completely abandon STR sequencing. They shift to SNP
• 12:19
  testing single nucleotide polymorphism.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: And because local labs can't do this, they bring in
• 12:25
  Parabon Nano Labs, a Virginia based forensic genomics company.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: So let's break down this leap from STR to SNP,
• 12:32
  because it's the core of this whole revolution.
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: It really is.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: The way I see it, SDR testing is like looking
• 12:37
  at a blurry, heavily pixelated eight bit photo. You say, well,
• 12:41
  I can tell that person has a nose in two eyes.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: Right, just enough to match them if they're right in
• 12:45
  front of you.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: But SNP testing is like suddenly upgrading to a four
• 12:48
  K ultra high definition image. You can count their freckles,
• 12:52
  see the exact shade of green in their eyes, trace
• 12:54
  their jawline.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: The jump in sheer, volume and clarity of data changes
• 12:58
  the game. Where S looks at runny spots, SMP looks
• 13:02
  at hundreds of thousands of markers across the whole genome.
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: Wow. But before we get to the data, let's talk
• 13:08
  about the biology the extraction. Yeah, because that grant funded
• 13:12
  a really difficult procedure.
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: Very difficult and expensive. Human bone is remarkable. The outer
• 13:18
  layer of long bones, like the femur is called cortical bone.
• 13:21
  It's incredibly dense, hard, non porous.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: It has to be to support the weight of the
• 13:26
  human body exactly.
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: But for forensics that density serves a secondary purpose. It
• 13:32
  acts as a biological.
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: Fault, shielding the DNA from the weather.
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: Yes, while soft tissue rots and marrow turns to dust,
• 13:39
  the bone cells inside that hard matrix osteocytes are protected
• 13:42
  from acidic rain, temperature swings, bacteria.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: But getting that DNA out requires specialized equipment.
• 13:48
  Speaker 2: It's time consuming and destroys the bone sample. Standard police
• 13:52
  labs don't have the machinery for it. That's why they
• 13:54
  needed the grant.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: Well, once Parabomb broke into that vault, they found a
• 13:57
  pristine genetic sample, even after fourteen years they did. So
• 14:01
  they have this pristine sample and they run it through
• 14:04
  SNP testing For anyone who hasn't taken biology in a while,
• 14:08
  What is a single nucleotide polymorphism? Why does it give
• 14:12
  us that four K image?
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: Think of human DNA as a massive instruction manual written
• 14:16
  with just four letters ACTNG. It's about three billion letters.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: Long, okay, three billion.
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: Mostly your manual and my manual are identical. That makes
• 14:26
  us human. But roughly every thousand letters there's a variation
• 14:30
  where mine has an A, yours might have a C, and.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: That single letter variation is the SNP.
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: Exactly. By mapping hundreds of thousands of these single letter
• 14:38
  variations across the genome, scientists build an unbelievably detailed genetic profile,
• 14:43
  and this lets.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: Them do two revolutionary things. First, DNA phenotyping.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: Right predicting what the unidentified person actually looked like in
• 14:50
  real life.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: So companies like Parabond use technologies like snapshot to read
• 14:54
  those smps and predict physical.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: Traits with astonishing statistical accuracy, not just broad racial categories,
• 15:01
  but specific eye color, natural hair color, skin tone, freckles,
• 15:04
  face shape.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: It literally reads the genetic code and rebuilds the face
• 15:10
  that the weather washed away. It gives them a face
• 15:12
  for a missing person's poster.
• 15:14
  Speaker 2: Yes, but the second process is even more profound for
• 15:17
  cold cases, kinship.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: Inference, meaning figuring out the web of people this unknown
• 15:23
  person is biologically related to.
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: Because smps look at the whole genome, they can identify long,
• 15:30
  continuous segments of DNA shared between two people. The length
• 15:34
  of those segments tells you exactly how closely related they are.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: So not just a parent or child, No, it has.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: A resolution to find a second, third, or even fourth
• 15:42
  cousin who shares a tiny fraction of DNA from an
• 15:45
  ancestor one hundred years ago.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: Which is absolutely mind blowing. So authorities have this high
• 15:49
  resolution map, a predicted face, the capability to find distant cousins.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: But they still need a database to plug it into.
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: And they don't go to the FBI, they don't go
• 15:58
  to CODIS. They go to the public web.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: Which is one of the most significant and controversial pivots
• 16:03
  in forensic history.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: We really have to explore that pivot. This is where
• 16:07
  investigative genetic genealogy IgG takes the stage. The files show
• 16:12
  IgG leverage is massive public genealogy databases.
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: Platforms millions use every day, Ancestry, DNA twenty three a
• 16:19
  meter ged match.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: Data pools built by regular people voluntarily uploading their files
• 16:25
  because they're curious about family history. Right.
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: So paramond takes that SMP profile, anonymizes it into a
• 16:31
  string of code, and uploads it to search for distant cousins,
• 16:35
  and once it.
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: Finds a match, the deep traditional genealogy research starts using
• 16:40
  census data, obituaries, social media.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: It's incredible work.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: I just have to marvel at the scale of this. Wait,
• 16:46
  so someone casually spitting into a plastic tube in their
• 16:49
  living room to see if they're twenty percent Irish could
• 16:51
  and it certainly be the final puzzle piece for a
• 16:53
  twenty year old gold case.
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is that the answer is absolutely, unequivocally yes.
• 16:58
  That person spitting in a tube has no idea they're
• 17:00
  contributing to an active investigation.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: They just want to build their personal family tree.
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: But by taking their raw data and uploading it to
• 17:07
  an open source platform like ged match, they become a
• 17:10
  node in this massive genetic network. Now it's vital to
• 17:15
  emphasize the tedious reality of IgG people. Picture a Hollywood
• 17:19
  scenario where a detective types on a computer and it
• 17:21
  just flashesch with the name and address.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: Like an instant Google search for humans.
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: Reality is grueling. It's a fusion of cutting edge molecular
• 17:30
  biology and dusty library research. When Parabond uploads the profile,
• 17:35
  it doesn't spit out a name. It spits out a spreadsheet,
• 17:37
  a list.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: Of genetic matches represented by aliases yes, with.
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: An estimated relationship based on shared DNA. A genealogist might
• 17:45
  see user blue Eyed Hiker ninety nine shares fifty cent Morgans,
• 17:49
  with the unknown remains cent.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: Of Morgan's being the unit of measurement for genetic linkage exactly.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: Think of it as the currency of inheritance. We inherit
• 17:57
  DNA and chunks, which have every generation due to recombine.
• 18:00
  So fifty cent of Morgans correlates to a third or
• 18:03
  fourth cousin.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: Okay, So that means Bloyd Hiker ninety nine and our
• 18:05
  John Doe share great great grandparents from the late eighteen hundreds.
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: Right, and now the painstaking work begins who is Blue
• 18:12
  Eyed Hiker ninety nine. Once they get a real name,
• 18:15
  they build the family tree backward, generation by generation to
• 18:18
  the eighteen hundreds, coming.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: Through census tracts, old obituaries, marriage certificates.
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: Tracking property records, checking modern social media.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: They're basically mapping an entire historical dynasty from scratch.
• 18:30
  Speaker 2: A massive one, often hundreds of names, because once they
• 18:34
  find those great great grandparents, they have to build the
• 18:36
  tree forward again, every descendant, every child, grandchild, trying to
• 18:41
  find the one branch that leads to the skeleton in
• 18:43
  the woods.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: Tracking marriages, divorces, migrations.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: It takes immense patients.
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: And this mythodology exploded into the public consciousness in twenty
• 18:51
  eighteen with the Golden State killer case Joseph James Dangelo.
• 18:55
  Speaker 2: That was the watershed moment. Genealogist C. C. Moore, who
• 18:59
  later worked with Parabond, used ged match to link crime
• 19:02
  scene DNA from the seventies and eighties to distant relatives
• 19:06
  of DiAngelo.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: Completely unprecedented strategy at the time.
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: It solved a horrific string of crimes that stumped detectives
• 19:12
  for decades, and that success opened the floodgates.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: Law enforcement realized they had a master key.
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: By twenty twenty six, IgG has solved over five hundred
• 19:21
  cold cases in the US, major suspects, but also identifying
• 19:25
  nameless victims like the Buckskin girl in Ohio in twenty twenty.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: But the moment law enforcement steps into a consumer database,
• 19:33
  we cross a massive societal boundary, a huge one which
• 19:37
  brings us to the controversy. The sources are clear that
• 19:39
  this practice has serious ethical debate. Privacy advocates raised alarms
• 19:44
  about police accessing consumer DNA without explicit consent, and.
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: In response, g dmatch had to fundamentally change its terms
• 19:51
  of service stricter opt in policies. You have to check
• 19:54
  a box actively allowing police to see your data.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: Some states started requiring judicial oversight or limit IgG to
• 20:00
  violent felonies like murder and rape, ancestry and twenty three
• 20:04
  enemy actively resist subpoenas without warrants.
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: Yes, the industry had to react.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: Now I have to play Devil's advocate. Here are we
• 20:10
  creating a genetic surveillance state by accident? Does solving crimes
• 20:13
  justify surrendering our families genetic privacy to the government.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: This raises an important question, and it's arguably the defining
• 20:20
  bioethical debate of our century. We have to impartially weigh
• 20:24
  privacy risks against the justice benefits.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: Because my third cousin who I've never met, can opt
• 20:29
  me into a police search just by taking a test.
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: Exactly, DNA is inherently shared. It's not like a password.
• 20:36
  If you compromise your genetic privacy, you compromise your parents, siblings, children,
• 20:40
  and cousins you've.
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: Never met, because your code is their code.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: Right now, Privacy advocates point to the fear of familial searching.
• 20:47
  If law enforcement has unregulated access, they might put entirely
• 20:52
  innocent family members under surveillance just because they share DNA
• 20:55
  with a suspect.
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: Right. Imagine detectives tracking you pulling your trash just because
• 21:00
  a distant cousin's DNA was at a crime scene. It
• 21:03
  turns a family tree into a suspect list, which is.
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: The core of the Fourth Amendment argument against unreasonable searches.
• 21:09
  That's why the industry response was so swift.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: The oft in boxes.
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: And private companies like Parabond establish strict ethical guidelines. They
• 21:17
  only accept serious violent offenses or the identification of human remains,
• 21:22
  and they use anonymization.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: The lab text just see strings of code until a
• 21:27
  familial match is confirmed exactly, And this brings us back
• 21:30
  to why Robert Lee Horton's case is the textbook clean
• 21:33
  application of this technology.
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: The ethics are almost non existent here because there was
• 21:37
  no suspect involved.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: The police weren't hunting someone down. They were just trying
• 21:42
  to return a lost son to his.
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: Family, purely humanitarian, no risk of falsely implicating an innocent
• 21:48
  relative because there was no crime. It's the highest and
• 21:51
  best use of IgG bringing peace to families suffering from
• 21:55
  not knowing.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: So with these guardrails in place, they aim this extraordinary
• 21:59
  tool at the two thousand and four John Doe, let's
• 22:02
  look at the timeline of the final push.
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: It really is a testament to perseverance.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: In twenty twenty two, Parabond delivers the snapshot report. They
• 22:09
  find abundant matches, but they're distant third and fourth cousins
• 22:13
  geographically clustered in Hawaii in the Pacific Northwest.
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: Progress is slow for a few years as genealogists build
• 22:19
  those massive trees backward.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: But then late twenty twenty five, the medical examiner revisits
• 22:24
  the file with updated kinship algorithms, and early twenty twenty six,
• 22:28
  the breakthrough happens. The name Robert Lee Horton's surfaces.
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: They start building his timeline. Born nineteen fifty seven in Hawaii,
• 22:36
  moved to Portland in two thousand and four, mail when
• 22:39
  unclaimed phone calls unanswered.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: And here's the detail that completely stopped me in my tracks. Yes,
• 22:45
  a missing person report was actually filed for him in
• 22:47
  Portland in two thousand and four. Yes, but it was
• 22:49
  never ever connected to the skeleton in the woods that
• 22:52
  exact same year. So what does this all mean. It's
• 22:55
  this tragic mind bending irony. It's like having a lock
• 22:58
  and its exact key in the same city, but in
• 23:01
  different filing cabinets they never touch for two decades.
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: It's deeply heartbreaking, but it's a common symptom of the
• 23:06
  pre database era of law enforcement. You have to put
• 23:09
  yourself in the mindset of two thousand and four. Data
• 23:11
  sharing was highly fragmented, exactly paper files, faxes, manual searches.
• 23:15
  The report was filed, but Horton was a forty seven
• 23:17
  year old adult. Adults are legally allowed to go missing
• 23:20
  cut ties with families.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: So without evidence of a crime, a report for a
• 23:24
  transient adult doesn't trigger a man hunt.
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: It goes in a drawer and across town. The medical
• 23:29
  examiner has a body, but no id. The physical description
• 23:34
  a broad age and height range, was just vague enough
• 23:38
  that a manual search didn't trigger a link for a
• 23:40
  detective flipping through a binder.
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: The system failed to connect the dots.
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: So what is truly remarkable and a model for the
• 23:46
  future is the interagency mechanics required to fix that failure.
• 23:51
  In twenty twenty six, right.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: The official statements highlight this teamwork.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: Doctor Haley Collared Stallder, Oregon State forensic anthropologist, pointed out
• 23:58
  the seamless casework Queen, the state Police, the medical examiner,
• 24:02
  Portland Police Bureau, and parabon.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: It took an entire coalition of experts to match that
• 24:07
  lock and key.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: It did because genetic genealogy only provides a lead, it
• 24:12
  doesn't provide legal certainty. A genealogist pointing to a name
• 24:16
  isn't enough to sign a death certificate.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: The Portland detectives had to put boots on the ground
• 24:20
  and do the human work. They had to locate surviving family.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: And the emotional gravity of this timeline is staggering. In
• 24:26
  February twenty twenty six, detectives contact his elderly mother.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: They ask for a direct DNA sample to confirm the
• 24:32
  IgG lead.
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: She provides a cheek swab parabon rushes the extraction. By
• 24:37
  April twenty twenty six, the Kinship report confirms a one
• 24:40
  hundred percent probability the remains are indisputably her son and.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: The tragic code to here. She passed away shortly after
• 24:49
  the confirmation. It was literally a race against time. She
• 24:52
  learned her son's fate in the final months.
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: Of her life, which underscores the profound urgency of this work.
• 24:58
  For twenty two years, she woke up not knowing where
• 25:01
  her child was, and right at the end, detectives knock
• 25:04
  on her door and offer the truth.
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: The advanced science gave him a name, but it is
• 25:08
  our responsibility to look at the human behind that name.
• 25:11
  What his story reveals about our society. Absolutely from the files.
• 25:15
  He was forty seven, a native of Hawaii, navigating life's challenges,
• 25:19
  seeking a fresh start on the mainland, part of a
• 25:21
  broader migration pattern seeking economic opportunities in the Pacific wenty west.
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: But instead of a fresh start, he lived in a
• 25:27
  fabric lean to in the dense woods, cut off from
• 25:30
  the world, and.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: The circumstances of his death are still full of agonizing questions.
• 25:34
  Cause of death is still undetermined, exposure to freezing rain,
• 25:37
  tragic accident, untreated illness.
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: We might never know.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: This case is an incredible blueprint for solving hundreds of others.
• 25:44
  But I have a philosophical pushback here. Does knowing his
• 25:48
  name actually change the core tragedy?
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: That's a profound question.
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: A vulnerable human being still died alone in the freezing
• 25:55
  woods of a major city, miles from warm homes. Does
• 25:58
  the advanced science change the fundamental societal failure that led
• 26:02
  him there?
• 26:03
  Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, your point
• 26:05
  is completely valid. The brilliance of the science does not
• 26:08
  absolve the failures of the society. Portland, like many cities,
• 26:12
  is forced to confront the vulnerabilities of transient populations living
• 26:16
  on the margins.
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: His quiet death is a stark reminder of that human cost.
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: However, to answer your question, does knowing his name change
• 26:24
  the tragedy for the family left behind? Unequivocally yes. In psychology,
• 26:29
  there is a term for what his family endured ambiguous loss.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: Ambiguous loss meaning a loss that has no closure exactly.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: It's a unique trauma. A loved one is physically absent
• 26:40
  but psychologically present because there's no verification of death. Originally
• 26:43
  studied in families of mia soldiers.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: Psychologists consider it one of the most paralyzing types of grief.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: Because there's no resolution. The family is in an endless
• 26:52
  cycle of hope and despair. Every phone call late at night,
• 26:54
  every man with a similar build on the street. Is
• 26:57
  it him? Is he suffering? Did he forget us?
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: They are paralyzed by what ifs. The grieving process can't
• 27:03
  even begin.
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: So while the science doesn't change the lonely circumstances of
• 27:07
  his death, it obliterates that ambiguous loss. It replaces twenty
• 27:11
  two years of agonizing uncertainty with undeniable truth.
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: Answers, even painful ones, provide peace.
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: They allow the grieving process to move forward, and, most importantly,
• 27:22
  naming him reclaims his dignity. For two decades he was
• 27:25
  a case file number unidentified remains. Today he is Robert
• 27:29
  Lee Horton again.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: That is an incredibly powerful way to frame it. The
• 27:33
  fundamental value of human identity and the broader impact of
• 27:36
  this case is undeniable. The interagency model use here, combining
• 27:40
  local medical examiners, dedicated detectives, federal funding, private lab innovation.
• 27:45
  It's a blueprint for the country.
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: Paarabon alone assisted in over two hundred case resolutions by
• 27:50
  twenty twenty six. The FBI is expanding genetic genealogy units.
• 27:55
  The infrastructure of human identification is changing before our eyes.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: We are witnessing the dawn of a new era. The
• 28:01
  ongoing integration of massive SNP data into national tracking systems
• 28:06
  means the net we cast for the missing is wider
• 28:09
  and finer than ever.
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: It proves no cold case is truly frozen forever. When
• 28:13
  science evolves at this pace, it.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: Is an incredible journey just to summarize what we unpack today.
• 28:18
  We started with a nameless lean to in the Figy
• 28:20
  Portland Woods in two thousand and four, walked through the
• 28:23
  failures of early forensics, the limits of anthropology, the walls
• 28:27
  of codies.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: And saw a triumphant breakthrough in twenty twenty six, powered
• 28:31
  entirely by the public web and investigative genetic genealogy.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: But before we wrap up, I want to remind you
• 28:36
  the listener that you were an active part of this story.
• 28:39
  The genetic data in your cells, those casual ancestry kits
• 28:42
  you submitted, They're part of a beautifully interconnected human tapestry.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: Your specific DNA might one day hold the missing key
• 28:48
  to returning a lost loved one to a waiting family.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: Which is a powerful, almost overwhelming responsibility.
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: It's a reminder that our biology connects us far more
• 28:56
  deeply than we realize. The past is never truly lost.
• 29:00
  It's encoded in our DNA, just waiting for the tools
• 29:02
  to read it.
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: Which leaves me with one final, truly mind bending question
• 29:07
  for you to ponder long after this is over. Given
• 29:09
  the exponential growth of these consumer DNA databases and the
• 29:13
  constant refinement of kinship algorithms by artificial intelligence, Yeah, are
• 29:17
  we rapidly approaching a future with the very concept of
• 29:20
  a John Doe becomes scientifically impossible? Could future generations look
• 29:24
  back at the idea of unidentified remains as an archaic
• 29:27
  relic of the past, simply because the entire human genetic
• 29:30
  web has become fully, brilliantly eliminated