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Unsolved murder: Woman found dead in Suffolk cul-de-sac in 1992 · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: If you wanted to commit like the absolute perfect crime
• 0:03
  in nineteen ninety two, you wouldn't drag a body deep
• 0:06
  into the Appalachian Woods, right, Oh, definitely not. And you
• 0:09
  wouldn't drop it into the middle of the Chesapeake Bay
• 0:11
  with cinderblocks either.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: No, that's way too much effort and honestly too much
• 0:15
  risk of being seen on the water.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: Exactly. You would put it right in the middle of
• 0:18
  the street, in a brand new, half built suburban cul
• 0:22
  de sac.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: It sounds so counterintuitive today.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: It really does. But because in nineteen ninety two, the
• 0:28
  American dream had zero surveillance. Like that pristine, freshly paved
• 0:34
  promise of a new neighborhood was a complete technological dead zone.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: It's a chilling thought. Yeah, But mechanically speaking, I mean,
• 0:41
  you're absolutely right. Right. We look at suburban sprawl today
• 0:44
  and we see these digital fortresses.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Every doorbell has a camera, ring cameras everywhere.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: Everywhere, every intersection has an automated license plate reader. But
• 0:52
  back then, an unfinished subdivision was essentially a geographic.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: Ghost town, totally empty.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: It provided the ultimate cover. You have accessibility via paved
• 1:02
  roads combined with absolute impenetrable isolation, which brings us.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: To the very jarring reality of what we are unpacking today.
• 1:09
  We're opening up the files on Suffolk Police Department case
• 1:12
  number one. It on one ninety two zero zero eight
• 1:15
  four two six five.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: That's the unsolved murder of a twenty eight year old
• 1:19
  woman named Dorothy bess Wells.
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, she went by erline Dorothy Erline bus Wells. And
• 1:25
  I've got the original contemporary news reports from the local
• 1:27
  papers back in ninety two spread out here. I've got
• 1:30
  the official police statements, the enduring cold case files, and
• 1:33
  the recent twenty twenty six anniversary media coverage from outlets
• 1:37
  like WABTV.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: That WITHYTV coverage was really comprehensive, Actually it really was.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: But our mission for this deep dive isn't just to
• 1:45
  recount a tragic timeline. We need to dissect the anatomy
• 1:49
  of a thirty four year old cold.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: Case because it's complex, so complex.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: We are going to look at the severe, almost paralyzing
• 1:55
  limitations of pre DNA policing and map out exactly how
• 1:59
  a person can simply slip into obscurity. Okay, let's unpack this,
• 2:02
  and you.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Know, as we dig into the sorology, the geography and
• 2:05
  the investigative mechanics of the early nineties. We really have
• 2:08
  to keep the human core of this anchored in our minds.
• 2:11
  Thirty four years is not just a passage of time.
• 2:13
  It is an agonizing multi generational state of limbo for
• 2:18
  her family.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's such a crucial point. So I want to
• 2:21
  look at the immediate failure cascade of the physical scene first,
• 2:24
  because the location basically dictates everything that follows.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: It sets the stage for the entire investigation.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: Right, So the date is Sunday, May tenth, nineteen ninety two.
• 2:33
  It's approximately eight am. The setting is a Greenfield Crescent
• 2:37
  which is located in the south Side Meadows Subdivision in Suffolk, Virginia.
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: And just to clarify for everyone, this wasn't a lived
• 2:44
  in neighborhood.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: Yet not at all. It was completely unfinished, No homes
• 2:48
  were completed. It was just graded roads and empty dirt lots,
• 2:52
  and a passer by. The report suggest an early morning
• 2:55
  resident from the general area, or maybe someone walking their dog,
• 2:58
  makes a horrific discovery right on the open Yes, a
• 3:01
  deceased female is lying completely in plane view, right in
• 3:05
  the middle of the road. And I just I keep
• 3:07
  getting hung up on that detail.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: The total lack of concealment.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: Yes, it defies logic. I think of an unfinished subdivision
• 3:13
  as this, like liminal space.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's a good way to put it.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: It's the empty theater before the lights come on. You know,
• 3:20
  it's specifically engineered for safety for families, for minivans. So
• 3:24
  bringing ultimate violence into that space is jarring enough. But
• 3:28
  if the killer wanted to get away with this, why
• 3:30
  leave her out in the open? That's the big question,
• 3:33
  Like why not drag her into the brush behind the
• 3:35
  dirt lots. If you leave her on the gravel where
• 3:38
  construction crews or Sunday morning dog walkers will inevitably find
• 3:41
  her within hours, you are putting a massive ticking clock
• 3:44
  on your own escape.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: Unless, well unless the open placement wasn't of stake at all,
• 3:50
  but a byproduct of panic or calculated geographical.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: Advantage, a calculated how.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: Well to understand Greenfield Crescent, you have to look at
• 3:59
  the urban plan reality of Suffolk in the spring of
• 4:01
  nineteen ninety two. Okay, Suffolk wasn't this dense metropolis. It
• 4:06
  had a population hovering around fifty thousand, and it was
• 4:09
  in this massive painful transitional phase.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: From agriculture to suburbs exactly.
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: Historically it was anchored by agriculture and military infrastructure, but
• 4:18
  by the early nineties it was rapidly evolving into a
• 4:21
  bedroom community to catch the overflow from Norfolk and Portsmouth.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: Right, so it was absorbing all that suburban flight. Developers
• 4:27
  were just buying up cheap land on the outskirts, laying
• 4:30
  down grids and throwing up these insular neighborhoods.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: Which means places like Southside Meadows were architectural alliolance. A
• 4:37
  cul de sac like Greenfield Crescent is designed intentionally to
• 4:40
  limit through traffic.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: Right. There's literally one way in and one way out.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: Yes, so at night, before the homes are built, nobody
• 4:48
  goes down that street unless they have a specific reason
• 4:50
  to be there.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: There's no casual traffic none.
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: The killer knew that in nineteen ninety two, an unfinished
• 4:56
  cul de sac at two Am was safer than the
• 4:59
  deep woods. You don't have to carry a body through
• 5:01
  the brush. You can just open a car door. Wow.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: But that immediately forces us to look at the brutality
• 5:07
  of what the first responding officers found, because it kind
• 5:10
  of contradicts the idea of a simple, clean disposal.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: It does. The violence was extreme.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: Beyond extreme. The victim was a black woman, petite, about
• 5:20
  five foot three, weighing approximately one hundred and twenty pounds.
• 5:24
  She was wearing a black top with white polka dots.
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: And I think it's important to note the lack of
• 5:29
  other crimes right.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: There were no missing valuables reported, no purse was snatched,
• 5:34
  and initially at least no signs of sexual assault. But
• 5:37
  the cause of death wasn't a clean gunshot.
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: No, it was blunt force trauma.
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: Severe blunt force trauma to the head. And it wasn't
• 5:44
  just a fatal blow. The bludgeoning was so savage that
• 5:47
  her face was completely unrecognizable.
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  Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is from a behavioral analysis standpoint, that
• 5:54
  level of destruction is incredibly.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: Revealing because it takes so much effort, yes, and it's
• 5:59
  so targeted.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: In forensic pathology, when you see a face targeted to
• 6:02
  the point of obliteration, you are usually looking at what
• 6:05
  we call depersonalization.
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: Depersonalization it is an act of absolute overkill.
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: Striking a skull with a blunt object requires immense kinetic energy,
• 6:15
  like swinging.
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: A baseball bat, over and over exactly, and to do
• 6:19
  it repeatedly until the structural integrity of the face actually
• 6:22
  collapses takes a sustained, exhausting level of physical exertion and rage.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: It's not a sterile, transactional crime, not at all. Look,
• 6:31
  if I'm robbing you, I hit you once to incapacity
• 6:34
  hate you take your wallet and run. I don't stay
• 6:36
  over your body expending that kind of physical energy.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: You don't. Depersonalization usually means the killer isn't just trying
• 6:43
  to end the biological function of the victim. They're trying
• 6:46
  to erase the victim's identity.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Entirely, to wipe out who she was.
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: Right, the face is how we recognize humanity. Obliterating it
• 6:55
  suggests the killer had a deep, visceral reaction to who
• 6:58
  this specific woman was, which of course creates a massive
• 7:02
  immediate mechanical problem for the suffic detectives in nineteen ninety two.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, because how do you identify a Jane dough
• 7:08
  when you can't run her face on the six o'clock news.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: You really can't.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: They couldn't release a photograph, They couldn't even get a
• 7:14
  composite stetch artist to draw reliable approximation because the damage
• 7:17
  was just too severe.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: Which throws the investigation into an immediate bottleneck. Today, you
• 7:22
  know you'd run a rapid biometric scan.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: Or just pull a digital fingerprint on the spot exactly.
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: But in nineteen ninety two, lacking facial recognition, the police
• 7:31
  had to rely on a painfully slow analog infrastructure.
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: So what did that actually look like?
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: Well, you have to send out physical teletypes to surrounding jurisdictions,
• 7:41
  describing the black top with white polka dots. You literally
• 7:44
  have to pull physical missing persons binders off shelves.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: Just flipping through pages.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: Right, You can process fingerprints, but rolling ink prints from
• 7:53
  a deceased victim and running them through AFIS, the Automated
• 7:57
  Fingerprint Identification System, which was still quite fragmented between state
• 8:01
  and federal databases back then. It takes days if.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: She's even in the system at all to begin with.
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: Exactly, if she's never been arrested or finger printed for
• 8:09
  background check, AFIS gives you nothing, and.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: The medical examiner is facing their own archaic hurdles. Right.
• 8:15
  The estimated time of death was given as late May ninth,
• 8:18
  or the early pre dawn hours of May tenth, But
• 8:22
  I was looking into the forensics of outdoor crime scenes
• 8:25
  and determining an exact time of death when a body
• 8:28
  is left exposed to the elements is basically an educated
• 8:31
  guessing game.
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: Right. It is highly variable thermodynamics, right. A medical examiner
• 8:36
  relies heavily on the classic triad algrim mortis, rigor mortis,
• 8:40
  and liver mortise.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: Break those down for us really quick.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: So so algrim mortis is the cooling of the body,
• 8:46
  rigor is the chemical breakdown of ATP and the muscles,
• 8:49
  causing them to stiffen up like the stiffness, and liver
• 8:51
  is gravity pulling the red blood cells down to the
• 8:54
  lowest points of the body, creating that purplish discoloration.
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: But the morning do up in temperature overnight on that
• 9:01
  asphalt or gravel that totally warps the timeline, doesn't it completely?
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: Ambient temperature, wind chill, the moisture in the air from
• 9:09
  a Virginia spring morning, all of these alter the rate
• 9:12
  at which the body loses heat. If the asphalt absorbed
• 9:15
  heat during the day on May ninth, it might radiate
• 9:18
  that heat upward during the night, which slows down al
• 9:21
  Gore mortis, So the emmy can't give a timestamp. They
• 9:25
  have to give it a massive window.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: Which gives any potential suspect a giant loophole for an alibi.
• 9:30
  Huge If the police say, hey, where were you at
• 9:32
  two am? A suspect can just say they were asleep
• 9:35
  in bed, and without a precise time of death, it's
• 9:38
  incredibly hard to catch them in a lie exactly. But
• 9:41
  here's the detail on the sources that really tripped me up.
• 9:44
  I scoured these police reports and there is almost no
• 9:47
  mention of secondary.
• 9:48
  Speaker 2: Scene evidence, which is very telling.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: Right, they found her body in the open road, but
• 9:53
  they don't mention drag marks, they don't mention distinctive tire
• 9:56
  tracks pulling away from the body in the dirt, and crucial,
• 10:00
  no weapon was ever publicly.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: Recovered, nothing left behind.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: No bloody tire iron, no bat, no rock discarded in
• 10:07
  the weeds.
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: The absence of that evidence fundamentally shifts how we have
• 10:12
  to view the cul de sac. How So well, if
• 10:14
  there are no drag marks and no weapon, we have
• 10:17
  to look at the physics of blood spatter outdoors. If
• 10:20
  someone is bludgeoned to death on gravel, there's going to
• 10:23
  be massive cast off spatter.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: It's flying everywhere.
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: Blood will soak into the dirt, it will spray onto
• 10:29
  the surrounding stakes and that neon surveyor's tape. Yeah, if
• 10:32
  that secondary spatter wasn't present into massive quantities, it strongly
• 10:36
  implies she wasn't.
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: Killed there, so she was transported.
• 10:39
  Speaker 2: It's highly likely.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: That changes everything. It means Greenfield Crescent isn't the scene
• 10:44
  of a heated argument that escalated into murder right then
• 10:47
  and there. It's a calculated disposal site. Yes, the killer
• 10:50
  brought her there, opened the door, and dumped her. And
• 10:53
  the fact that they took the weapon.
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: With them, it requires presence of mind.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like after a frenzied, rage fueled attack. They still
• 11:01
  had the mental clarity to secure the physical evidence connecting them.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: To the violence, which makes the killer both highly volatile
• 11:08
  and highly organized, which is terrifying. It is a very
• 11:11
  dangerous combination. Yeah, it means they had a plan for
• 11:13
  the aftermath.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: It took days to cross that first major hurdle identifying
• 11:17
  the body, but once the police finally attached a name
• 11:20
  to Jane Doe, the blank canvas of this unfinished neighborhood
• 11:25
  suddenly became the incredibly enigmatic, confusing life of Dorothy Erline Beswells.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: And identifying her didn't instantly solve anything.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: No, her identity didn't answer questions. It just created a
• 11:37
  massive geographic mystery.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: Because victimology is the absolute bedrock of a homicide investigation.
• 11:45
  If you want to know who kills someone, you have
• 11:47
  to know how they lived.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: You map their whole life out right.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: You map their financials, their routines, their communications.
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: But tracing Erline's victimology based on the public sources we have,
• 11:57
  it's like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle, but
• 11:59
  someone threw away the box and half the edge pieces.
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: That's exactly what it's like.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: You know trauma happened, but you have no idea where
• 12:05
  the pieces fit. What we do know is she was
• 12:07
  twenty eight. She was from Grifton, North Carolina, which is
• 12:10
  a tiny rural town in Pitt County with a population
• 12:13
  of just a couple thousand people. Very small town, and
• 12:16
  Grifton is roughly one hundred miles south of Suffolk across
• 12:19
  the state line.
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: The logistics of interstate travel in nineteen ninety two are
• 12:23
  vital here. Why is that, well, one hundred miles isn't
• 12:26
  a commute. You don't just wander one hundred miles north
• 12:29
  across state lines to a half built cul de sac
• 12:31
  in Virginia by accident. Right. It requires a vehicle, it
• 12:35
  requires gas, and most importantly, it requires intent. Why was
• 12:40
  she in Hampton Roads?
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: The sources give us exactly one data point about her
• 12:44
  life one.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: That's it.
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  Speaker 1: She had recently separated from her husband. Beyond that, there
• 12:50
  is an echoing, deafening silence. The public records, the contemporary
• 12:54
  news reports. They don't mention where she worked. They don't
• 12:57
  mention if she had children, what her hobbies were, or
• 13:00
  who she was even staying with in Virginia.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: It is an absolute investigative vacuum. Yeah, and we have
• 13:05
  to look at the mechanics of why that vacuum exists.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: Yes, let's talk about that.
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: You look at the media coverage. There's a few brief
• 13:10
  writeups in the Virginian Pilot and the Suffolk News Herald,
• 13:13
  and then nothing, No in depth profiles, no family interviews
• 13:17
  on the evening news.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: I have to ask about this because it's infuriating. Why
• 13:21
  the silence? Is this just a small southern town closing ranks,
• 13:25
  wanting to keep domestic tragedies private or is this something
• 13:29
  darker about how the media operates?
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: We really have to analyze this systematically. Yeah, looking at
• 13:34
  the newsroom mechanics of the nineteen nineties, Okay, editorial boards
• 13:38
  made decisions based on subscriber demographics and narrative structures that
• 13:42
  they believed sold papers. When we talk about phenomena like
• 13:46
  missing White woman syndrome, we aren't just talking about abstract bias. No,
• 13:50
  we're talking about an editorial algorithm. A young, affluent, white
• 13:54
  victim provided a narrative structure that newsrooms knew exactly how
• 13:58
  to monetize through prolonged serialized coverage.
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: Like a real life soap opera.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: Exactly, they would build out the victim's entire life story
• 14:05
  to generate a parasocial relationship between the victim.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: And the reader, so the reader feels like they know her.
• 14:11
  But Erline Wells, a twenty eight year old black woman
• 14:14
  from out of state who was separated from her husband,
• 14:17
  didn't fit their neat profitable narrative box. He didn't, so
• 14:20
  she got a paragraph on page four and then the
• 14:23
  coverage was just dropped.
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: Dropped completely, and that editorial dilsion has catastrophic mechanical consequences for.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: The police because it dries up the tips.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: Yes, tip lines run on empathy and recognition. If the
• 14:37
  public doesn't feel a personal connection to the victim, if
• 14:40
  they only know her as the body found on Greenfield Crescent,
• 14:44
  they aren't going to rack their brains trying to remember
• 14:47
  if they saw a suspicious sedan with North Carolina plates
• 14:50
  that Saturday.
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: Night, Right they just turned the page.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: They won't call in about a strange argument they overheard
• 14:55
  at a gas station. The lack of publicized victimology physically
• 14:59
  sto the investigation of the raw data it needs to
• 15:02
  move forward.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: Because the media starved them of public tips, the Suffolk PD,
• 15:07
  led by Detective Sergeant J. D. Thompson, had to rely
• 15:10
  entirely on the standard playbook of nineteen ninety two, and
• 15:13
  that playbook said look at the spouse.
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: Statistically, it makes sense when a woman is violently murdered
• 15:18
  shortly after a separation, the estranged partner is the immediate
• 15:22
  focal point, the prime suspect. Right. The period following a
• 15:25
  separation is the most volatile trigger for intimate partner violence.
• 15:29
  It represents a total loss of control for the partner
• 15:32
  who is left behind.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: The sources explicitly state that suspects were developed and the
• 15:37
  estranged husband was definitely scrutinized. But I want to push
• 15:41
  back on this idea that the police just exhausted this
• 15:43
  avenue and had to move on.
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's look at it.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Given the racial and geographical dynamics in nineteen ninety two,
• 15:49
  how hard were local Suffolk police really pushing a suspect
• 15:53
  who lived one hundred miles away in a different states jurisdiction.
• 15:57
  The authority stated there was insufficient evidence for an arrest.
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: That's the official line.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: Were they truly stymied by brilliant evasion or are we
• 16:04
  giving a fragmented nineteen ninety two inner agency investigation a
• 16:08
  little too much credit?
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: This raises an important question, and it is highly probable
• 16:12
  that jurisdictional friction played a massive role here. In nineteen
• 16:16
  ninety two, Suffolk PD couldn't just pull cellular location data
• 16:20
  to prove the husband drove up Interstate thirteen. They couldn't
• 16:23
  seamlessly access toll booth records digitally.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: Everything was on paper.
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: If they wanted to interview him or search his property
• 16:30
  in Griftin, they had to coordinate with North Carolina authorities
• 16:33
  get local warrants and rely on physical cooperation between departments.
• 16:38
  Speaker 4: Which is never seamless, never, but beyond jurisdictional friction, we
• 16:42
  have to look at the massive gap between knowing someone
• 16:45
  did it and proving it in court.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: Using nineteen ninety two forensics, let's.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: Dive deep into that, because today the CSI effect has
• 16:54
  completely warped our understanding of evidence. We assume every crime
• 16:58
  scene comes with a barcode that lead straight to the killer.
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: In nineteen ninety two, forensic science was practically medieval compared
• 17:05
  to today medieval seriously. DNA profiling was technically invented in
• 17:09
  the mid eighties, but for a local municipal department like Suffolk,
• 17:12
  it was prohibitively expensive, agonizingly slow, and required massive amounts
• 17:18
  of pristine biological material.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: So they needed like a giant pool of blood.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: A pool of blood, a vial of semen, something substantial.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: So they didn't have DNA. What were they actually using
• 17:27
  when they processed that dirt road.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: They were like heavily on sorology, specifically ABO blood typing.
• 17:33
  If they found a drop of the killer's blood, they
• 17:36
  could identify the antigens and antibodies to say the killer
• 17:39
  has typo blood.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: But wait, roughly forty five percent of the US population
• 17:43
  has TYPO.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: Blood precisely abo typing is exclusionary. Okay, it is brilliant
• 17:49
  for proving someone didn't commit a crime. If the blood
• 17:52
  at the scene is Type A and the suspect is TYPEO,
• 17:55
  you can clear them immediately.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: But it doesn't point to one specific person, right.
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: It is statistically useless for proving someone did commit the crime.
• 18:04
  It cannot secure a warrant on its own.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: And what about fingerprints, because everyone thinks a fingerprint is
• 18:09
  the silver bullet.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: Fingerprint identification relies on the friction ridge skin, leaving behind
• 18:14
  oils and sweat on a viable.
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: Surface like glass or metal.
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: Glass, metal polished wood, greenfield crescent was grated gravel, dirt,
• 18:22
  and asphalt. You cannot pull a latent print off a
• 18:25
  rock or dirt clod, no way. And since there was
• 18:28
  no weapon less behind and no car to dust, the
• 18:31
  fingerprint analysts had absolutely nothing to.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: Work with, which means the burden of proof required to
• 18:36
  arrest a suspect, whether it was the husband or anyone else,
• 18:40
  rested entirely on the oldest tools in.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: The book witness testimony and confession exactly.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: You either need a confection, an eyewitness who somehow saw
• 18:48
  the bludgeoning in the dark, or an airtight break in
• 18:51
  their alibi. If the suspect invokes their right to remain
• 18:54
  silent and you don't have the weapon, the case just
• 18:57
  hits a brick wall.
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: The legal standard is beyond a reasonable doubt without a weapon,
• 19:02
  without DNA, and without a witness. Placing the suspect at
• 19:05
  the exact coordinates of south Side Meadows, any competent defense
• 19:09
  attorney in nineteen ninety two would tear the case apart.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: It destroyed it in ten minutes.
• 19:13
  Speaker 2: Police knew this, so suspects were developed, but no one
• 19:16
  was charged, and the.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: Moment no one is charged, the press cycle just dies.
• 19:20
  There were three articles May eleventh, May thirteenth, and a
• 19:23
  brief July update. Then total of oporation just gone. No
• 19:27
  composite sketches of suspicious vehicles, no massive reward from the city,
• 19:30
  and no press conferences. Just a file cabinet. But the
• 19:34
  detective still had to work the behavioral evidence.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: They had to look at other possibilities.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: Right, Let's break down the competing theories They were left
• 19:41
  with because they are drastically different. Theory one is the
• 19:45
  intimate partner violence, which we just discussed, but theory two
• 19:49
  is a random attack or a crime of opportunity.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: The location is really the only thing supporting the random
• 19:56
  attack theory. Greenfield Crescent was isolated, unlit, and transient.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: But the logic of a random attack falls completely apart
• 20:04
  from me.
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: Why is that.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: Erline Wells lived one hundred miles away? Why on earth
• 20:09
  would she be at an unfinished construction site in Virginia
• 20:12
  in the middle of the night. You don't go for
• 20:13
  a midnight stroll and a dirt lot in a city
• 20:15
  you don't even live in.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: You're touching on the necessity of a lure, a llure.
• 20:19
  If it was an opportunity crime, we have to look
• 20:22
  at what construction sites actually functioned as in the nineties.
• 20:25
  Lacking heavy security and OSHA oversight, unfinished subdivisions often became
• 20:30
  informal illicit gathering spots after dark.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: Like teenagers drinking or drug transactions.
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: Exactly or off the book's meetups.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: So she met someone in Suffolk, maybe a new acquaintance,
• 20:40
  who lured her to that spot under false pretenses. It's
• 20:43
  the perfect cover for a trap.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: It is a highly effective trap. But the flaw in
• 20:49
  the random or acquaintance theory brings us right back to
• 20:51
  the pathology report the overkill right. A random predator, someone
• 20:56
  committing a crime of opportunity like a robbery or an assault,
• 20:59
  uses violence instrumentally. They hit you to gain compliance or
• 21:04
  to silence you.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: They just want your purse exactly.
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: They do not straddle you and pludging your face into
• 21:09
  an unrecognizable state. That level of overkill requires a localized,
• 21:15
  intense emotional feedback loop. A stranger doesn't have the emotional
• 21:19
  fuel to sustain that kind of strike force.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: There is a third theory, which is mistaken identity or
• 21:25
  spillover crime. Hampton Rose had a growing crime rate in
• 21:29
  the early nineties. Could she have been mistaken for someone
• 21:32
  else in the dark or was she a witness to
• 21:34
  something happening at the construction site.
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: It's a fringe possibility, but it must be considered. However,
• 21:39
  investigators generally look for pattern linkage.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: Were there other similar crimes?
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: Were there other women bludgeoned in Suffolk that year? Were
• 21:46
  there other bodies dumped in new subdivisions? The sources indicate
• 21:50
  this was an isolated data point. No official links were
• 21:53
  ever made to a wider crime ring or a serial offender.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting, though. These three theories
• 22:00
  the husband, the violent new acquaintance, the mistaken identity. They
• 22:04
  have just sat dormant for thirty four years. The killer
• 22:08
  has lived with the memory of what they did, probably
• 22:11
  convinced they pulled off the perfect crime.
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: They probably feel completely safe.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: The gravel was paved over, the houses were built, the
• 22:18
  case was forgotten. But as we sit here in twenty
• 22:20
  twenty six, the entire architecture of criminal evasion has been
• 22:24
  turned completely upside down.
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: The evolution of forensic science from nineteen ninety two to
• 22:29
  twenty twenty six isn't a linear upgrade. It is a
• 22:32
  total paradigm shift.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: It's basically science fiction compared to back then.
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: It rewrites the physical laws of what it means to
• 22:37
  leave evidence behind.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: Because Case one teen ninety two zero zero eight four
• 22:41
  two sixty five is still open, it's on the Virginia
• 22:44
  State Police Cold Case website. But the real hope isn't
• 22:47
  just that WAVYTV ran an anniversary special. The real hope
• 22:51
  lies in the evidence lockers.
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: That's where the answers are let's.
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: Talk about the absolute wizardry of modern forensics, specifically STR
• 22:58
  analysis and TOUCHED.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: In the nineteen nineties, the police needed a visible fluid
• 23:03
  stain to extract DNA. Today we understand the mechanics of
• 23:08
  epithelial cells cells. Yes, humans shed thousands of microscopic skin
• 23:13
  cells every hour. If the killer grabbed erlines black polka
• 23:16
  dot topped to drag her out of the car, they
• 23:18
  left behind cellular material just from touching her. Today scientists
• 23:22
  use short tandem repeat analysis or STR. They take that microscopic,
• 23:28
  invisible trace of DNA and they use a process called
• 23:31
  polymerase chain reaction to amplify it.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: How does that work?
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: They essentially photocopy that degraded DNA fragment millions of times
• 23:38
  until they have a robust enough sample to look at
• 23:41
  specific genetic LOWCIE.
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: It's incredible. They can build a full genetic profile from
• 23:45
  a handful of cells that have been sitting in a
• 23:46
  Manilla envelope for three decades.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: But only if and this is terrifying, if the Virginia
• 23:50
  State Police lab preserved it correctly. Oh right, if that
• 23:53
  clothing was stored in a non climate controlled locker In
• 23:56
  nineteen ninety five. If moisture degraded the cellular all the
• 24:01
  PCR amplification in the world won't bring it back.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: That is the tragic lottery of cold cases. The science
• 24:08
  is ready, but it is entirely dependent on the foresight
• 24:11
  of a property clerk thirty years ago.
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: It all comes down to how it was bagged and tagged.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: But assuming they have a viable DNA profile, and assuming
• 24:19
  it doesn't match anyone in the FBI's criminal database, we
• 24:23
  enter the most powerful, disruptive phase of modern investigation, genetic genealogy.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: Which is just revolutionary.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: This is what fundamentally changes the game. I don't want
• 24:33
  to just give a basic overview of this because you listening,
• 24:35
  anyone who follows true crime knows what ged matches. Let's
• 24:39
  talk about the actual mathematics of how they hunt someone
• 24:41
  down who has never been arrested.
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: Genetic genealogy bypasses the criminal justice system entirely.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: Which is wild.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: When investigators upload a killer's DNA profile to a public database,
• 24:51
  they are measuring genetic distance using a unit called a
• 24:54
  centi morgan. Centa Morgan, a parent and child share about
• 24:58
  three four hundred centim morgan. First cousins share around eight
• 25:02
  hundred and fifty. The police aren't looking for the killer.
• 25:05
  They're looking for a distant relative.
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: Like a third cousin.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: Exactly, a third cousin who shares maybe fifty or seventy
• 25:11
  centi morgans with the suspect and who voluntarily took a
• 25:14
  commercial DNA test to find out their heritage.
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: Once they get that hit, they don't use microscopes anymore.
• 25:19
  They use birth certificates, census records, and obituaries.
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: They build a massive, sprawling family tree backward from that
• 25:26
  third cousin, finding the common ancestor from the eighteen hundreds,
• 25:30
  and then they trace every single branch forward to the
• 25:33
  present day, just.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: Doing pure genealogical research.
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: Right they look for the intersection of genetics, geography, and time.
• 25:39
  They mathematically reduced the suspect pool from the entire male
• 25:43
  population of the East Coast down to say, two brothers
• 25:46
  who lived within one hundred miles of Suffolk in nineteen
• 25:48
  ninety two.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: It is a mathematical tightening of the news, it really is.
• 25:52
  But as the technology has evolved, the physical world has
• 25:55
  evolved right alongside it. And this is the part that
• 25:58
  haunts me. The blank can of nineteen ninety two is gone.
• 26:02
  South Side Meadows is an a dirt lot anymore. Greenfield
• 26:05
  Crescent is a lived in, everyday neighborhood.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: The grated gravel where she was found is now paved asphalt.
• 26:12
  The empty steaks are mature oak trees, driveways, mailboxes, and
• 26:16
  manicured lawns.
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: I really want you listening to this right now to
• 26:20
  visualize that. Think about the families living on Greenfield Crescent today.
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: They have no idea right.
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: They are waking up on Sunday mornings, They are out
• 26:28
  walking their dogs on the sidewalk. They are teaching their
• 26:30
  kids how to ride bikes right over the exact coordinates
• 26:33
  where Erline Wells was bludgeoned, and they are completely, blissfully
• 26:36
  unaware of the history beneath their feet. This isn't an
• 26:39
  abstract story in a file cabinet. It is a profound,
• 26:43
  hidden scar buried under a modern community.
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, it forces
• 26:49
  us to confront the enduring physical reality of unsolved violence.
• 26:53
  A community pays over its traumas, but the structural imbalance remains.
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: It doesn't just go away.
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: Wills was denied her life and her family was denied
• 27:03
  the basic dignity.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: Of the truth, which is exactly why we can't let
• 27:06
  this case stay buried. The authorities are actively seeking the
• 27:09
  final piece of the puzzle. The Suffolk Crime Line is active.
• 27:13
  You can submit tips anonymously through the P three tips
• 27:16
  app or call one eight eight eight l ock uup.
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: And they don't need you to call in with a
• 27:22
  full confession.
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: No, not at all. They need the smallest, most microscopic
• 27:27
  detail from nineteen ninety two, a rumor from Grifton, North
• 27:30
  Carolina about a car that was suddenly sold or scrapped
• 27:33
  in May of nineteen ninety.
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: Two, or a memory of someone who showed up to
• 27:36
  work with scratched.
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: Arms or a bruised hand that Monday.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: Cold cases are almost never cracked by a cinematic, dramatic confession.
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: It's not like the movies.
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: They are solved by the agonizingly slow accumulation of tiny,
• 27:48
  seemingly insignificant truths. A citizen's memory combined with a seventy
• 27:52
  cent Morgan genetic match combined with a geographic anomaly. That
• 27:57
  is how the net is finally drawn closed.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: So we've tracked the entire devastating trajectory of this case
• 28:03
  from the isolated, silent dirt roads of a nineteen ninety
• 28:07
  two cul de sac, through the media's systemic failure to
• 28:10
  humanize a twenty eight year old woman looking for a
• 28:12
  fresh start, right into the infuriating limitations of blood typing
• 28:17
  and fingerprints.
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: It's a long journey.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: We've seen how justice delayed genuinely operates as justice denied.
• 28:23
  But it is public pressure. It's you listening to this.
• 28:26
  It's the renewed media push that forces the police department
• 28:29
  to allocate the budget to run those expensive str DNA tests.
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: And there is one final, incredibly visceral reality to consider,
• 28:37
  something that goes beyond the DNA testing we just discussed.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: What's that.
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: Imagine being the killer who walked away in nineteen ninety two. Okay,
• 28:44
  for a decade, two decades, the passage of time felt
• 28:47
  like your greatest armor. Memories faded, witnesses moved away, the
• 28:51
  physical landscape was literally paved over.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: You'd think you're totally in the clear, exactly.
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: But today the psychology is entirely flipped. Every time a
• 28:59
  distant come and you've never even met, spits into a
• 29:01
  tube for a commercial DNA kit, the net invisibly tightens
• 29:05
  around you. Wow, and physically, as these nineteen ninety subdivisions
• 29:09
  age contractors are digging up old driveways and laying deep
• 29:12
  trenches for fiber optic.
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: Cables, they're churning up the earth.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: They are. The physical secrets entombed under the concrete are
• 29:18
  being brought back to the surface. So for cold case
• 29:21
  killers living in the modern era, the passage of time
• 29:24
  is no longer a shield. It is a dicking clock.