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The DNA That Waited Nine Years: The Faith Hedgepeth Case · Crime Incident

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: At three minutes before 11 on the morning of September 7, 2012,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: a 911 dispatcher in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, took a
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: call from a 19-year-old college student who could barely form sentences.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: There was, she said, blood everywhere. The body in the
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: second-floor bedroom belonged to Faith Danielle Hedgebeth, a junior at
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: the University of North Carolina, beaten to death with what
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: investigators concluded was an empty liquor bottle. The killer left
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: behind semen, a palm print, fingerprints, and a handwritten note.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: And then, for nine years, nothing. No arrest. No name.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: No match. This is a story about evidence that waited.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: About DNA that sat in an evidence room while roughly 2,000
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: people were interviewed. And about 750 of them were swabbed.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: And none of them fit. And it is a story
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: about what finally ended the waiting. Not a confession. Not
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: a witness. But a family tree. A technique that did
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: not meaningfully exist when Faith died. Applied to a sample
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: collected the week she died. Before this episode is over,
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: you will know exactly how that happened, and you will
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: also know why, when the case finally reaches a jury
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: on September 28, 2026, that jury may never be told
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: how the police first found the man they accuse. But
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: before the evidence, the person. Because the evidence only matters
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: if you understand who was taken. Faith Hedgepeth was born
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: September 26, 1992, in Warren County, North Carolina, and she
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: grew up in Hollister, a small town on the Warren-Halifax
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: County line, in the homeland of the Haliwa-Saponi, the Native
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: American nation her family belongs to. Her mother named her
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Faith for a reason her family has told reporters plainly.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: Raising a fourth child in a hard season of life
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: required exactly that. Her parents divorced when she was only
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: a couple of months old, and her father moved four
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: hours away to Hickory, but Faith kept him close anyway.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: She was texting him from a university library on the
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: last night of her life, telling him about a sorority,
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: She was raised by her mother, Connie, and her older sister, Rolanda,
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: who remembered her the way almost everyone did, full of life, outgoing, smart,
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: and obsessed with helping people. A cousin put it this
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: way in the days after her death. She was intelligent,
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: she had everything going for her, she knew what she
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: wanted in life, and she was going for it. And
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: what she wanted was specific. Faith was an honor student,
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: a cheerleader, active in clubs, and she earned a Gates
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: Millennium Scholarship to attend UNC Chapel Hill the same university
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: her father had attended but never finished. She would have
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: been the first person in her family to graduate from college.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: Hold on to that. She was not just a student.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: She was the hinge on which a family's story was
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: supposed to turn. She wanted to become a pediatrician, or
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: maybe a teacher, and she wanted to give back to
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: her tribe. On the evening of September 6, 2012, she
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: went to a rush event for Alpha Pi Omega, the
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: nation's oldest Native American sorority, hoping to join. She left
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: at 7.15 p.m. and her reason tells you everything about her.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: She had a paper to write. The paper was about
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: the history of the Haliwa-Saponi people, her people. The sorority
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: would induct her the following year as an honorary member, posthumously.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: Now walk the last night with me, because the timeline
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: is the spine of this case, and nearly every hour
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: of it comes from court records and security footage. Around
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: 8 o'clock that Thursday evening, Faith went to Davis Library
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: on campus with her roommate and close friend, Cornea Rosario.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: The two had been friends since freshman year and shared
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: a second-floor apartment at a complex called Hawthorne at The
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: View on Old Chapel Hill Road between Chapel Hill and Durham.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: A complex investigators would later describe with an ominous precision,
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: surrounded by trees at the end of a road one
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: way in and one way out. Between 8.30 and 9.00 p.m.,
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: Faith texted her father about the sorority. Around 11.30, the
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: two women left the library, got back to the apartment
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: around midnight, and then did what 19-year-olds do. They went out.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: Around 12.30 a.m., now the early morning of Friday, September 7th,
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: they left for The Thrill, a nightclub in downtown Chapel
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: Hill that let students under 21 into dance. At 2.06 a.m.,
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: the club's security cameras recorded Faith and Karna leaving. Remember
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: that timestamp. It is the last visual record of Faith
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: Hedgepeth alive. They returned to the apartment around 3 a.m.,
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: and here the record fractures into fragments that investigators have
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: argued about ever since. A downstairs neighbor who was awake
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: later reported hearing three thumping noises somewhere in this window.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: Faith's Facebook account was accessed. At 3.40 and 3.43 a.m.,
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: two texts went out from Faith's phone to a man
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: named Brandon Edwards, an acquaintance of Karna's. Hey B, can
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: you come over here please? Rosario needs you more, aha.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: At 4.16, Edwards texted back asking who this was. Nobody
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: has ever established who actually typed those messages on Faith's phone,
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: and the question is still contested as the case heads
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: to trial. Then, at 4.25 a.m., Cardinal Rosario left the apartment,
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: catching a ride with a fellow student named Jordan McCrary.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: She would later tell investigators she believed Faith was asleep
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: in the bedroom. She left the front door unlocked. Think
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: about what that means. For some stretch of the hours
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: that followed, the medical window runs roughly from 3 in
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: the morning to 11. Faith was alone in an unlocked
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: apartment at the end of a road, in a building
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: surrounded by trees. Somewhere in those hours, someone entered that
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: bedroom and beat her to death. The autopsy found blunt
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: force trauma to the head, cuts and bruises across her body,
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: and blood under her fingernails. She fought. Investigators would conclude
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: she had also been raped. Whoever did this did not
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: slip away invisibly, either. He left more of himself behind
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: than almost any killer you will hear about on this show.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: There is one more fragment, and I owe you both
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: sides of it. A friend later turned over a voicemail
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: from Faith's phone, an accidental pocket dial, garbled and hard
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: to understand, timestamped 1.23 a.m. Outside audio experts who analyzed
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: it believe it may capture moments of the assault itself.
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: The Chapel Hill police disagree, saying the recording does not
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: date from the attack and pointing to problems with the timestamp.
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: 13 years later, that disagreement has never been settled, and
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: I am not going to settle it for you. What
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: I can tell you is that if the outside experts
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: are right, the attack began while Karna was still in
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: the apartment, and if the police are right, it did not.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: That is how much is riding on a timestamp. Shortly
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: before 11 a.m., Carnet came back with a friend, Marisol Rangel,
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: to pick something up. They found Faith on the bedroom floor,
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: partially unclothed, bloodied, wrapped in a quilt. Blood was spattered
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: on the wall and a closet door, and then Carnet
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: made the call you heard about at the top of
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: this episode. Before we open the evidence bags, note what
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: did not happen in those first hours, because it will
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: echo for 14 years. Police sealed off the four-unit building and,
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: According to a later long-form investigation of the case, they
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: never searched the surrounding woods and never canvassed the neighbors,
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: even though that downstairs neighbor had been awake and had
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: heard those three thumps. An apartment complex with one road
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: in and one road out, ringed by trees, and the
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: trees were never searched. Whatever was or was not out there,
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: nobody will ever know now. Keep that in a corner
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: of your mind as you hear how carefully the same
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: department handled everything else. Now, the scene itself. This is
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: the part of the story that separates the Hedgepeth case
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: from almost every cold case you have ever heard, so
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: listen closely to the inventory. Investigators recovered an empty rum
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: bottle they concluded was likely the murder weapon, carrying two
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: fingerprints and a palm print. They recovered semen from the
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: sexual assault examination. They found male DNA, the same male profile,
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: in multiple places, including on Faith's body. Ultimately, DNA was
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: pulled from 52 separate pieces of evidence. This was not
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: a whisper of a killer. This was a full biological signature,
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: left at full volume. And on the bed, they found
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: the thing this case will always be remembered for. A
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: white fast food takeout bag with a message scrawled on
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: it by hand. I'm not stupid bitch. Jealous. Five words,
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: in ink, left on the bed beside a dying or
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: dead young woman. The pen used to write it was
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: found at the scene. And here is the detail that
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: should make the hair on your arm stand up. The
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: DNA on that pen matched the DNA found on Faith's body.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: The writer and the attacker, investigators believed, were the same person.
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: A police commander said it plainly. Obviously big evidentiary value.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: So put yourself in the investigators' chairs in the fall
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: of 2012. You have the weapon. You have prints. You
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: have semen. You have what may be a handwritten message
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: from the killer and the pen he wrote it with.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: Every detective will tell you this case should have been
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: solved in a week. It took nine years. And the
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: reason it took nine years is the engine of everything
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: that follows. The DNA was perfect. And the DNA was useless.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: because a DNA profile only convicts when you have someone
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: to compare it to. And the man who left it
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: was in no database on Earth. The machinery of a
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: high-profile case spun up fast. Within days, the university's trustees, Crimestoppers,
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: the apartment complex, and the Haliwa-Saponi tribe had pooled a $ 29, 000 reward.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: The governor's office added 10,000 more, bringing it to 39,000.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: Chapel Hill had seen this work before. In 2008, the
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: murder of UNC student body president Eve Carson, was solved quickly,
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: with reward money leading to arrests. The same town, the
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: same university, applied the same playbook to Faith. It produced nothing.
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: And it is fair to notice, as advocates for missing
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: and murdered indigenous women have noticed, that one of the
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: highest-profile killings of a Native American woman in the American
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: Southeast waited merely a decade for an answer, while the
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: earlier case took days. The investigators never stopped working, that
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: much the record supports. But the contrast sits there in
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: the file, and it should sit with you too. The
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: early suspect work was fast and, in a sense, cruelly efficient.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: Police looked hard at men close to the two roommates,
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: including a former boyfriend of Karna's who, according to case summaries,
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: had expressed anger toward Faith and had reportedly even threatened
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: to kill her if he could not reunite with Karna.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: A textbook suspect, motive, proximity, rage. His DNA did not match.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: Neither did anyone else's. Interview by interview, Swab by swab,
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: the pool that began with roughly 2,000 names was tested down,
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: about 750 cheek swabs, and every single one came back
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: negative until investigators were left holding a perfect genetic portrait
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: of nobody. You should also know how the public learned
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: most of this, because it was not volunteered. The note
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: on the bag, the single most arresting fact in the file,
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: stayed secret for two years, and it only came out
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: because a group of local news outlets took the police
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: to court. and won the release of a large batch
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: of case documents in 2014. Search warrants surfaced the same way.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: It set a pattern that never really broke. A department
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: convinced that silence protected the case, and courts and reporters
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: prying the record open one filing at a time. You
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: are hearing this story at all, because that fight was won.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: So they tried to make the DNA itself talk. In 2014,
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit built a profile. The killer
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: likely knew Faith. may have lived near her at some point,
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: and may have made comments about her to people around him.
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: In 2016, a company called Parabon Nanolabs took the crime
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: scene DNA and generated something that had barely existed before.
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: A computer-predicted composite of the killer's face, built from his
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: genetic traits, predicting mixed ancestry, olive skin, black hair. Police
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: released it to the world on national television. Tips came.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: None of them landed. By 2018, Investigators were telling reporters
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: they worked the case every single day and were confident
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: it would break, because the evidence, the note, the broken bottle,
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: the assault kit, was simply too good to stay silent forever.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: They were also, quietly, doing something new, working with geneticists
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: to compare the killer's DNA against public ancestry databases. Here
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: is where the case turns, and where this episode earns
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: its title. The technique is called Investigative Genetic Genealogy. and
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: you probably know it from the Golden State killer arrest
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: in 2018. The idea is almost absurdly simple. Even if
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: a killer has never been swabbed, his relatives may have
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: mailed their DNA to an ancestry website. You do not
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: search for him. You search for his family, and then
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: you build the tree until the branches converge. In Faith's case,
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: investigators cross-referenced the crime scene profile against more than 200
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: distant relatives. Think about the shape of that work. Hundreds
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: of strangers, most of whom had never heard of Faith
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: Hedgepeth each one a data point narrowing a circle. Family
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: members were identified, interviewed, quietly swabbed, and according to warrants
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: unsealed later, the circle eventually closed around one name, Miguel
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: Enrique Salguero Olivares, a man who, per arrest records, had
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: been living in Chapel Hill at the time of the murder.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: Pause on how strange that work is compared to everything
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: the first nine years looked like. The old investigation moved
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: outward from Faith. Her friends, her classmates, the club, the complex,
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: and drowned in negatives. The genealogy moved inward from strangers.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: People connected to the crime scene by nothing but chromosomes,
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: and it converged. 200 branches, pruned one by one. Police
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: have never publicly detailed exactly when the name first surfaced,
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: or why the final step took as long as it did.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: The warrants that would explain it were sealed for months
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: at the department's request. What the record does show is
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: the ending. What happened next reads like a screenwriter lost
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: their nerve. except every detail is from court records. In
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: August 2021, Salguero Olivares was found by a Raleigh officer
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: asleep in his running car with an open container and
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: was charged with driving while impaired. He missed his court
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: date on September 3rd. An arrest order went out on
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: September 7th, nine years to the day since Faith's body
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: was found. And on September 14th, during the traffic stop process,
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: investigators from Chapel Hill and the State Bureau of Investigation
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: collected his DNA without his knowledge and drove it to
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: the state crime lab in Raleigh, where it was compared
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: against evidence collected in 2012. Prosecutors allege it matched. They
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: allege his prints matched a palm print on the bottle too.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: Two days later, on September 16, 2021, he was arrested
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: without incident in Durham and charged with first-degree murder. He
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: was 28 years old, 19, the same age as Faith,
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: on the night she died. At the announcement, with Faith's
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: parents standing there, her mother Connie described her reaction to
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: the news in nine words, I didn't do anything but cry.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: And thank God. Now I need to slow down and
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: say something clearly. And you will hear me hold this
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: line for the rest of the episode. Because it is
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: not a formality. It is the entire posture of this case.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: Miguel Salguero Olivares has pleaded not guilty to every charge.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Nothing you just heard has been proven to a jury.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: The DNA match, the palm print, the theory that he
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: entered that apartment. All of it is what prosecutors allege.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: And he is presumed innocent unless and until 12 jurors
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: say otherwise. Even the police chief, on the day of
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: the arrest, warned the cameras, Patients will be asked of you.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: This story will take time to completely unfold. He had
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: no idea how much time. Because the years since the
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: arrest have complicated this case in ways almost nobody expected,
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: and the complications cut at the police, not the defendant.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: In November 2024, prosecutors amended the indictment, adding first-degree rape,
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: first-degree sexual offense, and first-degree burglary to the murder charge.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: The defense pushed back on the forensics, and in pretrial
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: hearings in the summer of 2026 under oath, the record
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: produced some genuinely stunning admissions. A bloodstain had been collected
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: from a bathroom doorframe in Faith's apartment in 2012. It
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: was swabbed, bagged, placed in a truck, and then it vanished.
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: The department's own head forensic technician testified she never updated
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: her report to document the loss. Her words to the
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: court were, I presumed it would turn up. It never did.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: It was never tested and there is no record of
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: it in the evidence system. The judge, Keith Gregory, refused
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: to dismiss the case over it, but put his assessment
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: on the record in one word, absurd. Prosecutors themselves called
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: the loss unfortunate. Meanwhile, defense filings have pointed at inconclusive
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: DNA results on Faith's fingernails, her underwear, and that famous pen,
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: and have even raised questions about Karina Rosario's conduct that night,
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: including a claim about blood reportedly seen on her hand.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: Be careful with that one. It is an unproven defense allegation.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: She has never been charged with anything. and the judge
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: has already limited how far that line can go in
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: front of the jury. But it tells you the shape
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: of the fight coming. The state will argue the biology
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: speaks for itself, and the defense will argue the people
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: who handled that biology cannot be trusted. And then there
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: is the twist that closes the circle on everything you
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: have heard. The judge has excluded evidence about investigative genetic
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: genealogy from the trial. Read that again. The method that
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: found the defendant, the family trees, the 200 relatives, the
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: entire nine-year miracle, will not be presented to the jury.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: The jurors will hear about a DNA comparison. They will
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: not hear the story of how police first landed on
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: this man's name. The DNA that waited nine years for
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: genealogy to give it a name must now stand in
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: court as if the genealogy never happened. So here is
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: where the case stands, concretely, as of this recording. Jury
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: selection begins September 28, 2026, about a month from now,
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: in Durham County Superior Court, before Judge Gregory, The charges
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: are first-degree murder, first-degree rape, first-degree sexual offense, and first-degree burglary.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: The district attorney's office is not seeking the death penalty.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: If convicted of first-degree murder, Salguero Olivares would face life
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: in prison without parole. He has pleaded not guilty to
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: all of it. Karna Rosario is expected to take the stand,
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: cameras rolling by the judge's order. Nineteen pretrial motions have
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: already been fought over. The state is paying more than $ 16, 000
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: to bring in out-of-state witnesses. And Faith's father, Roland, the
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: man she was texting from the library that last night,
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: told reporters after an August hearing that the proceedings were
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: going better than he expected. 14 years of waiting have
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: taught that family to measure hope carefully. Whatever a jury decides,
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: one thing is already permanent, and it is where I
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: want to leave you. Faith Hedgepeth was 19 years old.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: She was going to be the first in her family
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: to finish college. She spent her last ordinary evening at
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: a native sorority's rush event and left early to write
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: a paper about the history of her own nation. a
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: young Haliwa Saponi woman doing the exact thing she said
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: she wanted to do with her life, learning her people's
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: story so she could give it back to them. Her
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: tribe helped fund the reward. Her sorority made her a
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: sister forever. Her name now appears in every serious accounting
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: of missing and murdered indigenous women in the Southeast. The
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: man on trial is, and must remain until a verdict,
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: an allegation. Faith is a fact. She is the story.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: Next time, we move from a case where the killer
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: left everything behind, to one where he left almost nothing.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: No DNA, no prints, no note. And the entire investigation
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: came down to a single question. How do you prove
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: someone was in a room he was never seen entering?
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening.