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True-Crime Investigations That Took a While to Solve · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: Imagine, imagine committing the perfect crime back in say nineteen eighty, right,
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you planned it flawlessly, you wor gloves, you know, you
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make sure you left absolutely no fingerprints. And then you
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move to a totally different state a week later, assume
0:14
this quiet life and you just watch the news slowly,
0:18
stop talking about what you did.
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Speaker 2: You're just a ghost exactly.
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Speaker 1: For forty years, you are completely safe. But then your
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second cousin, who you haven't seen since you were both kids,
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decides to you know, spit in a plastic tube to
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find out if they have Irish ancestry.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, just a fun little mailing kit, right.
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Speaker 1: And suddenly, four decades later, the police are knocking on
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your front door.
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Speaker 3: It's I mean, it's a profound shift in the architecture
0:42
of criminal justice. Like we are looking at a landscape
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where the primary threat to a perpetrator is no longer
0:49
their own mistake. Wow, right, it's the curiosity of a
0:52
distant relative.
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Speaker 1: And that brings us to the mission of today's deep dive.
0:55
We have this massive stack of sources here, case files,
0:58
forensic research papers, and investigative reports, and they are all
1:02
documenting what I think is the ultimate true crime revolution,
1:05
It really is. We are unpacking how a combination of
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microscopic evidence, relentless investigators, and well highly controversial era of
1:15
consumer DNA databases has effectively rewritten the rules of law enforcement.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, we are talking about the end of the cold
1:23
case as we know it.
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Speaker 1: So to really understand the magnitude of this shift, I
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think we have to look at the baseline.
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Speaker 3: Oh. Absolutely. If you look at criminal investigations before the
1:31
nineteen eighties, police were operating with tools that I mean,
1:36
looking back, they feel agonizingly.
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Speaker 2: Limited today, totally primitive, right.
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Speaker 3: They relied on fingerprints, which you assumes they could actually
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lift a clean one from a porous surface.
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Speaker 2: That's just hard enough.
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Speaker 3: And they relied on eyewitness accounts, which cognitive psychology has
1:49
since proven are honestly incredibly malleable and unreliable.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, human memory is terrible.
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Speaker 3: Under stress, exactly. And they relied on localized, literal footwork,
2:00
pounding the pavement. But those tools routinely hit brick walls
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when they were matched against predators who understood how to
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exploit borders or know how to blend into the background.
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Speaker 1: Right, how to just stay quiet. It was a game
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where the predator had a massive structural advantage. So okay,
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let's unpack this. We are going to move from the
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atmospheric dread of these unsolved mysteries into the rigorous underlying
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mechanisms that are currently solving the unsolvable.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, we're getting into the weeds.
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Speaker 1: We are going to look at the science, the psychology,
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and the deeply complicated ethical trade.
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Speaker 3: Offs because the sources highlight several core themes. Here we
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see the fragility of investigations, just how easily a case
2:41
stalls out due to jurisdictional silos or primitive technology. Yeah,
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but we also see this triumph of scientific persistence. I mean,
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science doesn't operate on a human timeline.
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Speaker 2: That's a great point.
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Speaker 3: It doesn't rush. It just waits for the technology to
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catch up to the evidence.
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Speaker 1: So as we take you on this journey today looking
2:59
at cases that fied time, and we're starting with a
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heartbreaking nineteen fifty six double murder and going all the
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way to some of the most notorious serial killers in
3:08
American history, I want you to keep one fundamental question
3:11
in mind.
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Speaker 3: This is the big one.
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Speaker 1: How much of your own personal privacy and the privacy
3:16
of your extended family are you willing to trade to
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catch a monster.
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Speaker 3: That is the defining tension of modern forensics. It's that
3:22
balance between collective safety and individual genetic autonomy.
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Speaker 1: So let's start by looking at what might be the
3:29
ultimate waiting game. We're going back to January of nineteen
3:32
fifty six. Okay, the setting is Great Falls, Montana, and
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the story involves an eighteen year old young man, Lloyd
3:39
Dwayne Bogel, and his sixteen year old girlfriend, Patricia Kolitzka
3:44
so young. Right on January third, three boys make this
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horrifying discovery on a rural road. They find Dwayne's body
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near his car. His hands had been bound behind his
3:55
back and he had been shot in the head.
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Speaker 3: He was I mean, it was a methodical execution of
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a teenager.
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Speaker 1: And the or only deepened because Patricia was missing. But
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her body was found the very next day, discarded in
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a snowy ditch nearby. She had been shot and the
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physical evidence indicated she didn't have been sexually assaulted. Yeah,
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a crime of this sheer brutality. I mean, it completely
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paralyzed that small community in nineteen fifty six.
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Speaker 3: You can imagine, and when you review the initial investigation,
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it's actually quite remarkable how well the local police handled
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the scene given the era.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, they didn't mess it up.
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Speaker 3: Right, they didn't trample the evidence. They were covered a
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twenty two caliber shell casing, and crucially, they preserved biological
4:34
evidence from the scene a semen exactly. They secured it
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on glass lines. But the tragedy here is that nineteen
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fifties forensics offered them virtually no way to use it.
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Speaker 1: Right, because what was the cutting edge of biology back then.
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Speaker 3: Blood typing.
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Speaker 1: Blood typing, And if you think about blood typing in
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the context of a murder investigation, it is incredibly broad.
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Speaker 3: Oh completely.
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Speaker 1: It's like imagine trying to find a specific person in
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a complempletely packed one hundred thousand seat stadium, and the
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only clue the police have is the color of the
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suspect's shirt.
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Speaker 3: That's a perfect analogy, Like it might let you rule out.
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Speaker 1: The people wearing blue or green, and it narrows it
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down to the thousands of people wearing red.
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Speaker 2: But it does not give you a face. No, it
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doesn't isolate an individual at all.
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Speaker 3: Because blood typing is an exclusionary tool. You can definitively
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say a suspect with type A blood did not leave
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a typo sample. But if your killer has typo blood,
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well so does nearly half the human population. Exactly. So,
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the detectives in Great Falls chase leads the interviewed locals.
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But within months that trail just froze completely solid.
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Speaker 1: And it stayed cold for sixty five years. Wow, for
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six and a half decades, those families waited. Generations of
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detectives inherited the file, They stared at the exact same
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dead ends, and then they retired.
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Speaker 3: File just gets passed down.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, it wasn't until twenty twenty one that the breakthrough happened.
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And this is where the science feels almost.
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Speaker 3: Like magic to me, It really does.
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Speaker 1: So Detective Sergeant Matt Lennox teams up with a genetic
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genealogist named C. C. Moore and the DNA dough Project.
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But wait, I have to ask, how does this actually work?
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Because the evidence from nineteen fifty six wasn't some pristine
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vial of blood sitting in a modern freezer. It was
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a sixty five year old slide. Doesn't DNA degrade into
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useless fragments over that kind of time.
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Speaker 3: It does, yeah, degrade significantly. Environmental factors like heat, light, moisture,
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they break down long chemical chains of DNA. So what
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the scientists in twenty twenty one we're facing wasn't a robust,
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complete strand at all. But forensic technology, specifically a process
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called polymerase chain reaction or PCR, had evolved.
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Speaker 2: Okay, PCR.
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Speaker 3: Think of PCR as a molecular photocopier, a photocopier. Yeah,
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they were able to isolate a single, barely visible sperm
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cell from that decade's old slide, just one cell, just
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one cell, and using PCR, scientists take the tiny frag
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men of DNA from that one cell and subject it
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to cycles of heating and cooling with specific enzymes. Wow,
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and this forces the DNA to replicate itself millions of
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times over. So it takes this microscopic, basically unusable spec
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and turns it into a massive, readable genetic profile.
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Speaker 1: So they literally forced the ghost of a cell to
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clone itself until it's loud enough.
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Speaker 3: To be read. That is a great way to conceptualize it.
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Speaker 2: That's insane.
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Speaker 3: Once they had that amplified profile, they bypassed the traditional
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police databases entirely.
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Speaker 1: Because traditional databases wouldn't help here, right, Traditional police databases
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like COTIS.
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Speaker 3: They look as short tandem repeats or STRs. They're basically
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matching twenty specific markers. Think of it like a barcode
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to see if a suspect already in the system matches
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the crime scene.
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Speaker 1: Like standing an item at the grocery store exactly.
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Speaker 3: But if the killer was never arrested, CODIS gives you absolutely.
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Speaker 2: Nothing, It's just a blank.
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Speaker 3: Yeah. So instead, investigators turned to consumer genealogy. These platforms
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look at single nucleotide polymorphism SNPs. Okay, they look at
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hundreds of thousands of markers across the genome, not just twenty,
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which allows them to see not just exact matches, but
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familial relationships based on shared blocks of DNA.
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Speaker 1: And so by uploading this amplified profile, they found distant
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relatives of the unknown killer.
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Speaker 3: Yes.
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Speaker 1: From there, Ccmore and her team worked backward right. They
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built these complex family trees based on census records, birth certificates,
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marriage licenses.
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Speaker 3: It's incredible historical word.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, they were looking for the specific branch of this
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massive tree that would place a male in Great Falls,
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Montana in nineteen fifty six, and all of that painstaking
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mapping finally pointed to one man, Kenneth Gould.
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Speaker 3: And Kenneth Gould's life trajectory perfectly encapsulates the horror of
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the cold case. How so because he was not a
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drifting phantom. He was a man who stayed relatively close
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to a normal life.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, here is the deeply unsettling part. Kenneth Gould died
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in two thousand and seven at the age of seventy nine. Yeah,
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for his entire life, he flew completely under the radar.
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He married, he raised children, He lived an unsuspected, perfectly
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ordinary existence.
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Speaker 3: Law enforcement confirmed the match by obtaining DNA samples from
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his living relatives, which sealed the case with scientific certainty.
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Speaker 1: It validates the methodology completely. But man, it leaves the
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families with a highly complex emotional resolution. Well without a doubt,
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because hold on, he lived to be seventy nine, He
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died peacefully, He avoided a courtroom, he avoided a prison cell,
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and he never once had to look the families of
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Duayne and Patricia in the eye. Yeah, as a society,
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are we just accepting that knowing what happened is an
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adequate substitute for actual justice?
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Speaker 2: Is closure enough?
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Speaker 1: When the perpetrator escapes all earthly consequence.
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Speaker 3: It's a philosophical void, honestly that science just cannot fill.
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The source material notes the family's profound relief, but it
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was inextricably tangled with grief over the decades he stole
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and the punishment he completely evaded.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, it's bittersweet.
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Speaker 3: But however, if we look at the systemic impact, Gould's
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posthumous exposure established a terrifying precedent for perpetrators.
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Speaker 1: Everywhere, terrifying for them. Yeah, how so it.
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Speaker 3: Proved that the clock is no longer a shield. At
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the time, this was believed to be the oldest cold
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homicide ever solved using genetic genealogy. It fundamentally altered the
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psychology of law enforcement. Right, a case is no longer
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dead just because the original investigators are dead.
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Speaker 1: So no case is unsolvable if the science evolves faster
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than the evidence degrades.
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Speaker 3: Exactly.
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Speaker 2: But what is really.
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Speaker 1: Vital to understand here is that this specific technique, you know,
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this ability to upload crime scene DNA and trace it
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through a web of distant cousins, it wasn't invented just
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to solve sixty five year old mysteries in Montana it wasn't.
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It was pioneered and honestly weaponized out of pure necessity
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to stop a much darker, much more expansive reign of terror.
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Speaker 3: Which brings us to the catalyst for this entire forensic revelation.
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We need to examine Joseph James DiAngelo.
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Speaker 1: Universally known as the Golden State Killer. The sheer scope
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of DiAngelo's crimes is staggering. From nineteen seventy four to
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nineteen eighty six, he committed at least thirteen murders, over
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fifty rapes, and well over one hundred burglaries across California.
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Speaker 3: His methodology is a terrifying study in the escalation of
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a predator. He didn't emerge fully formed as a killer
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between nineteen seventy three and nineteen seventy five, operating in
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the Central Valley. He was the Visalia ransacker.
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Speaker 2: Okay, so that was the first phase, right.
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Speaker 3: He committed over one hundred and twenty burglaries. But he
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wasn't just stealing valuables. He engaged in deeply intimate vandalism.
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Speaker 2: What do you mean by intimate?
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Speaker 3: He would steal single earrings or personal photographs. He would
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eerily rearrange the victim's belongings in their homes like it
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was an exercise in invasion and psychological control, just to let.
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Speaker 2: Them know he was there.
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Speaker 1: And the escalation from that was rapid because by nineteen
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seventy six he moved north to Sacramento and the media
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dubbed him the East Area rapist. This is where his
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tactics became highly formalized. He stalked middle class neighborhoods for days,
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learning the layouts, learning the routines of the residents.
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Speaker 3: He was incredibly patient.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, he would enter homes in the dead of night,
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and he specifically targeted couples.
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Speaker 3: The psychological torture he inflicted was so methodical. He would
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bind the couples with shoelaces or cords, using highly distinctive
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diamond knots.
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Speaker 2: The diamond knots right, Yeah, he.
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Speaker 3: Would blindfold and gag them. He would then rape the
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women while forcing their husbands to listen, completely helpless. He
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would balance dishes on the husband's back, threatening to kill
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everyone if you heard the plates rattle.
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Speaker 1: He was a psychological terrorist like. He would taunt them,
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whispering do what I say, or I'll kill you and
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be gone in the dark. He reveled in the terror.
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He made obscene phone calls to the police and to
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former victims. He tracked them down even after they had moved.
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I mean, in December of nineteen seventy seven, he literally
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called the authorities and sneered, I quote, You're never going
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to catch me East Area rapist, you dumb fuckers.
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Speaker 3: He wanted the community to know he was absolutely untouchable. Yeah,
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and the trauma he inflicted was generational. You look at
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survivors like Chris Padretti, who was only fifteen years old
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when she was assaulted in nineteen seventy six. Fifteen, right,
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she lived with the agonizing memory of being left bound
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in the cold, waiting for a killer who promised he
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would return.
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Speaker 1: And then by nineteen seventy nine, he shifted geography again.
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He moved down to southern California, escalating to what the
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media called the original nightstalker. Yes, in this final phase,
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he basically dropped the sexual assaults as his primary objective
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and moved directly to bludgeoning and shooting couples in their beds.
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Speaker 3: The ultimate escalation.
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Speaker 1: But wait, how did this guy operate across Visalia Sacramento
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in southern California for over a decade without getting caught.
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It's a great question, because California had massive police departments.
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How did he slip through the cracks for forty years.
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Speaker 3: Well, wasn't just his cunning, though he was cunning. It
13:54
was the structural limitations of nineteen seventies and eighties law enforcement.
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He operated in a perfect blind spot created by fragmented jurisdictions.
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What does that mean practically, Well, you had police departments
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in Visalia, Sacramento, Contracosta, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Orange Counties.
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They were all operating complete paper based.
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Speaker 2: Silos, so they weren't talking to each other.
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Speaker 3: They literally couldn't, not in an efficient way anyway. Before
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digitized centralized databases, A detective in Sacramento investigating a rape
14:26
had almost no way of connecting it to a strange
14:28
burglary pattern down in Visalia.
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Speaker 1: Right because the information was trapped in physical filing cabinets
14:33
hundreds of miles apart.
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Speaker 3: Exactly, detectives communicated via teletype or physical bulletin boards. And
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DiAngelo exploited those county lines intentionally.
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Speaker 1: And the bitter irony of his identity is just infuriating
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Joseph James DeAngelo was a Navy veteran. He was a
14:49
former police officer. He actively worked as a cop in
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Exeter during the early part of his crime spree. He
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was eventually fired in nineteen seventy nine, not for being
14:57
a predator, but for shoplifting a hammer and dog repellen.
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Speaker 3: The irony is sickening.
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Speaker 1: After that, he worked for decades as a truck mechanic.
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He lived quietly in citrusites. He blended perfectly into the
15:09
very communities he terrorized.
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Speaker 3: And it wasn't until two thousand and one that DNA
15:13
testing proved the East Area rapist and the original nightstalker
15:17
were definitively the same person.
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Speaker 1: Right biology linked the crime scenes across the state.
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Speaker 3: But again, because DiAngelo's DNA wasn't in any criminal database,
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the trail just vanished.
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Speaker 1: Which brings us to the twenty seventeen twenty eighteen breakthrough.
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Here is where it gets really interesting. An investigator named
15:34
Paul Holes, who had spent a massive portion of his
15:37
career hunting this phantom, teams up with a genealogist named
15:40
Barbara ray Venter. Yeah, and they try something totally unprecedented.
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Speaker 3: They took the killer's genetic profile, which they extracted from
15:47
a preserved crime scene kit, and they uploaded it as
15:50
a digital file into gd.
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Speaker 1: Match, which is an open source consumer genealogy database.
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Speaker 2: Which is just wild to think about. People use ged
15:59
match to find a.
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Speaker 1: Long lost cousin or build a cute family tree, and
16:04
Holes is uploading the DNA of California's most prolific serial killer.
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Speaker 3: It was a massive gamble.
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Speaker 1: But how did they actually narrow it down? Because if
16:12
you upload a profile and it matches, say a third cousin,
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you're looking at a family tree that could have thousands
16:19
of descendants branching out over a whole century.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a huge data set. The trade craft is fascinating.
16:25
When ged match returns a list of distant relatives, genealogists
16:29
look at the amount of shared DNA, which is measured
16:31
in senta Morgans centa Morgan's okay, Right, the more Cena
16:34
Morgan shared, the closer to the relative. Rayvenders team essentially
16:38
became forensic historians. They found a cluster of relatives and
16:42
built these massive family trees backward backward, tracing the lineage
16:45
all the way up to great great grandparents. In the
16:47
eighteen hundreds, they found the common ancestors of all these
16:50
distant cousins.
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Speaker 1: Okay, so you find a couple who lived in the
16:53
eighteen hundreds, Now you have to trace every single one
16:56
of their descendants forward to the present day to find
16:58
the killer precisely.
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Speaker 3: And they used a strict process of elimination. How so, Well,
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they knew the killer's DNA was male obviously, so they
17:08
eliminated all the female descendants.
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Speaker 2: Okay, that cuts it in half, right.
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Speaker 3: They had an approximate age range based on victim descriptions
17:15
and the timeline of the crimes, so they eliminated men
17:17
who were too old or too young, makes sense. And
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they knew the geographic location, so they focused on men
17:23
in this family tree who lived in California, specifically near
17:26
Sacramento in southern California during the years of the attacks.
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Speaker 1: It's literally like a massive, high stakes logic puzzle, it
17:33
really is. And eventually, all the branches, all the demographic filters,
17:38
points squarely at a seventy two year old retired truck
17:41
mechanic in Citrus.
17:42
Speaker 3: Heights, Joseph James DeAngelo.
17:44
Speaker 1: But they can't just arrest a man based on a
17:46
genealogical theory. Right, They need absolute legal proof, correct.
17:50
Speaker 3: They needed a direct one to one DNA match. So
17:54
law enforcement set up covert surveillance.
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Speaker 2: On DiAngelo steakouts.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, they watched him waiting for him to discard something
18:01
with his DNA on it in a public.
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Speaker 1: Space, because once it's in public, he has no legal
18:05
expectation of privacy exactly.
18:07
Speaker 3: So they swabbed the door handle of his car while
18:10
he was in a store. They collected a tissue from
18:12
his trash on the curb. Wow, and they tested the
18:15
DNA from those discarded items against the nineteen eighty double
18:19
murder crime scene. It was at one hundred percent match.
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Speaker 1: Incredible, So on April twenty fourth, twenty eighteen, they arrest
18:27
him to avoid the death penalty. In twenty twenty, DiAngelo
18:31
actually took a plea deal. He stood in a courtroom
18:34
looking like a frail old man in a wheelchair and
18:37
admitted to everything, including dozens of rapes that were way
18:41
past the statute of limitations. He was sentenced to multiple
18:44
consecutive life terms, and after destroying hundreds of lives, his
18:48
final statement was this curt almost dismissive apology. He just
18:52
said I'm truly sorry to everyone I've heard.
18:54
Speaker 3: It was a profoundly anti climactic end to a forty
18:57
year nightmare.
18:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, it really was.
18:58
Speaker 3: But the Golden State Killed Investigation officially launched the era
19:03
of forensic genetic genealogy. I mean, it proved that massive
19:07
consumer data sets could completely override jurisdictional blind spots and
19:11
the limitations of twentieth century policing.
19:14
Speaker 1: But you know, Diangelos survived for decades largely because he
19:18
stopped right, He went Dorman, He kept his head down,
19:20
and he stayed utterly silent.
19:22
Speaker 3: He never bragged that psychological discipline is what kept him hidden.
19:26
Speaker 1: Right. But what happens when a killer's ego is so massive,
19:30
so needy, that they simply cannot stand to be forgotten?
19:32
Speaker 3: Yeah? Biologically speaking, are there killers whose own psychological pathology
19:37
makes silence impossible?
19:38
Speaker 1: And that brings us to Dennis Rader, famously known as
19:40
the BTK Strangler. We are moving from California over to Wichita,
19:44
Kansas to examine the psychology of the Ultimate Taunting.
19:47
Speaker 3: Killer BTK bind Torture Kill. Yeah, it is a moniker
19:52
he gave himself, which I mean that tells you everything.
19:54
You need to know about his narcissism right there. Absolutely,
19:57
between nineteen seventy four and nineteen ninety one, murdered ten
20:00
people in and around Wichita.
20:02
Speaker 1: His crimes were deeply intimately horrific. I mean, in January
20:06
of nineteen seventy four, he broke into the home of
20:09
the Otaro family. He bound, suffocated and hanged Joseph Senior,
20:13
his wife Julia, their young son Joseph the Second, and
20:17
their daughter Josephine.
20:19
Speaker 3: He targeted entire families, entire family. He derived this immense
20:23
sadistic pleasure from absolute control. He murdered Catherine Bright, Shirley Ryn,
20:29
Nancy Fox, Marine, Hedge, Vicki Wiggerle, and De Lauris Davis.
20:34
He would pose their bodies. He took trophies like what
20:37
kind of trophies, driver's licenses, underwear items he could use
20:41
to relift crimes later in secret.
20:42
Speaker 1: And if you look at who Raider was in his
20:44
daily life, it presents a really stark contrast to DeAngelo's camouflage.
20:49
Speaker 3: Oh definitely.
20:49
Speaker 1: D'Angelo was a mechanic who blended in. Raider was aggressively visible.
20:53
He was an Air Force veteran. He was the president
20:55
of his church council, the Cubscot leader, the Cubscout leader.
20:57
He was a municipal compliance officer, literally a guy who
21:00
walked around giving people citations for their grasp being too high.
21:04
He was the definition of an upstanding, rules obsessed citizen.
21:08
Speaker 3: Which was the perfect shield. But beneath that shield was
21:11
an insatiable craving for the spotlight. Right. If we connect
21:14
this to the bigger picture, Raider didn't just want to
21:16
commit murders. He wanted the public to fear him, and
21:20
he wanted the police to know how much smarter he
21:22
thought he was than them.
21:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, he constantly sent letters to the media. He wrote
21:26
bizarre taunting poems, like he wrote one called Shirley Locks
21:30
after murdering Shirley Viann. He claimed responsibility for these crimes
21:34
and basically demanded attention.
21:36
Speaker 3: But after nineteen ninety one, he goes completely silent.
21:40
Speaker 1: Right for thirteen years, the letters just stopped. The BTK
21:43
case goes ice cold, and the general consensus was that
21:47
he had either died or was locked up somewhere else
21:49
for another crime.
21:50
Speaker 3: But in two thousand and four, the ghost comes back
21:52
and why.
21:53
Speaker 1: On the thirtieth anniversary of the own Harrow family murders.
21:56
A local newspaper ran an article basically saying is forgotten
22:01
He's probably dead, Oh wow, and his ego couldn't handle
22:04
the insult. He re emerged sending packages to local media
22:08
outlets just to prove he was still.
22:09
Speaker 3: Around, and the sheer arrogance leads directly to his downfall. Yeah,
22:14
I mean, it is one of the most stunning unforced
22:17
errors in criminal history.
22:19
Speaker 2: It really is.
22:20
Speaker 1: It's like a hacker pulling off the heist of the
22:22
century only to leave their home address on a post
22:26
it note.
22:26
Speaker 2: At the scene.
22:27
Speaker 3: That's exactly what it is.
22:28
Speaker 2: So it's February two thousand and five.
22:30
Speaker 1: Raider wants to send a document to a local TV station,
22:33
but he wants to use a floppy disc. He's paranoid
22:37
about being tracked, so he communicates with the police through
22:40
a classified ad in the newspaper.
22:42
Speaker 3: He leaves a message asking, essentially, if I send a
22:45
floppy disc, can you trace it to a specific computer.
22:48
Speaker 1: He literally asked the police for technical advice on how.
22:51
Speaker 2: To evade them.
22:52
Speaker 1: It's astounding, and the police take out an ad and
22:55
they just lie. They say no, it's totally safe. A
22:57
floppy disk cannot be traced, and he believed them. When
23:00
the TV station received that disc, the police immediately handed
23:03
it over to digital forensic analysts because.
23:06
Speaker 3: Raider thought that by simply deleting his old files and
23:09
saving a new document on the disc, he was safe.
23:12
But he fundamentally misunderstood how digital files work.
23:15
Speaker 2: He didn't understand metadata.
23:17
Speaker 3: He didn't understand metadata at all.
23:19
Speaker 1: Wait, let's break that down for a second. What actually
23:22
is metadata in this context? Like?
23:24
Speaker 2: How did it trap him?
23:25
Speaker 3: Okay? Think of a floppy disk like a physical notebook.
23:29
Even if you rip out a page and write on
23:31
a new one, you leave indentations on the paper underneath.
23:34
Speaker 2: Ah okay.
23:36
Speaker 3: Digital metadata works similarly. When you create a document in
23:40
a program like Microsoft Word, the software invisibly embeds information
23:45
into the files code without you knowing. Right. It records
23:48
the data was created, the time it was last modified,
23:51
and crucially, the registered name of the user and the
23:54
organization on the software license. Oh no, So, even when
23:57
Rader deleted a file to make room for his taunting
23:59
life letter, the physical magnetic space on the disc still
24:03
contained fragments of that old data. Wow, analysts recovered the
24:06
metadata of a previously deleted document. It was the agenda
24:10
for a church council meeting.
24:11
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
24:12
Speaker 3: The author of the document was listed as Dennis and
24:15
the location where the software was registered was Christ Lutheran
24:18
Church in Park City, Kansas.
24:20
Speaker 2: Dennis Christ Lutheran Church.
24:23
Speaker 1: I mean, at that point, the police just look up
24:25
the church, find out the council president's a man named
24:27
Dennis Raider. They check his vehicle registration and he drives
24:31
a black Jeep Cherokee.
24:33
Speaker 3: Which perfectly matches surveillance footage of a vehicle dropping off
24:37
a recent BTK package. It's over the circumstantial and digital
24:41
evidence was overwhelming, but they still needed biological confirmation to
24:45
tie him to the physical murders.
24:47
Speaker 2: Right to prove he was in the rooms exactly.
24:50
Speaker 3: Back in nineteen eighty six, when BTK murder Vickiy Wigel,
24:54
she fought back. She left microscopic traces of his DNA
24:58
under her fingernails. The police had that profile, but they
25:02
didn't have Raider's DNA to compare it to.
25:04
Speaker 1: And this is where the story takes a turn that
25:06
perfectly illustrates the privacy questions we mentioned earlier. Because the
25:09
police knew Raider had a daughter, who had attended a
25:11
university in Kansas.
25:13
Speaker 2: Yes, so law.
25:13
Speaker 1: Enforcement obtained a warrant for her medical records at the
25:16
university clinic. Specifically, they seized a tissue sample from a
25:21
routine PAP smear she had received five years prior.
25:24
Speaker 3: They tested the DNA from the daughter's medical sample against
25:28
the DNA found under the victim's fingernails. And it wasn't
25:31
a direct match to the killer, of course, because it's
25:33
his daughter, but it was a perfect familial match. It
25:37
proved with absolute scientific certainty that the killer was the
25:41
biological father of the woman who gave that.
25:43
Speaker 1: Pap smer Let's pause on the legal mechanics of that.
25:45
I mean, how does a judge sign a warrant to
25:48
seize an innocent woman's deeply private medical sample without her consent,
25:53
just to investigate her father.
25:54
Speaker 3: It relies on the concept of third party doctrine and
25:58
the specific wording of me medical privacy loss, which often
26:02
have exemptions for criminal investigations. When a warrant is secured
26:05
the clinic, a third party held the physical sample, the
26:09
police demonstrated probable cause that the sample would provide evidence
26:13
of a crime, specifically identifying a serial killer. The courts
26:17
upheld it, prioritizing the massive public safety interest over the
26:21
daughter's medical privacy.
26:22
Speaker 1: Wow. So, on February twenty five, two thousand and five,
26:26
police arrest Raider. His reaction is almost comical in its narcissism.
26:30
He was actually hurt that the police had lied.
26:32
Speaker 2: To him about the floppy disk.
26:33
Speaker 3: He was offended.
26:34
Speaker 1: He confessed to everything, referring to his murders as projects.
26:38
He received ten consecutive life sentences.
26:41
Speaker 3: Raiders capture is a testament to how shifting technology catches
26:44
up to arrogance. For three decades, he hid behind the
26:47
shield of perceived normalcy. But at the end it wasn't
26:50
brilliant profiling that caught him. It was his inability to
26:53
remain anonymous in the digital age.
26:55
Speaker 1: So BTK is brought down by his ego. DiAngelo is
26:59
brought down by Jeanette genealogy.
27:01
Speaker 2: But ego is one thing.
27:02
Speaker 1: What happens when the delay isn't caused by a killer's arrogance,
27:05
but by the sheer, overwhelming volume of victims and the
27:09
tragic reality of societal glindspots.
27:11
Speaker 3: That brings us to Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer,
27:14
universally known as the Green River Killer. Yes, and we
27:16
have to look at the profound impact of marginalization on
27:19
criminal investigations.
27:20
Speaker 1: Here, Ridgeway is America's most prolific convicted serial killer. Between
27:25
nineteen eighty two and nineteen ninety eight, mostly in Washington State.
27:29
He pleaded guilty to an astonishing forty nine murders nine
27:33
and investigators strongly suspect his true victim count is between
27:36
seventy and ninety women.
27:38
Speaker 3: The scale of his violence is almost incomprehensible.
27:41
Speaker 1: How did a man kill nearly one hundred people over
27:44
two decades without being stopped.
27:45
Speaker 3: You have to look at the socio political climate of
27:47
Washington in the nineteen eighties and specifically who Ridgeway was targeting.
27:52
He preyed upon marginalized women. He targeted sex workers, teenage runaways,
27:57
women struggling with severe addiction. These were women who lived
28:00
on the extreme edges of society.
28:02
Speaker 1: And the tragic reality of the nineteen eighties is that
28:04
when a sex worker disappeared, the immediate police response in
28:08
media coverage was vastly different than if, say, a middle
28:11
class suburban housewife had vanished.
28:13
Speaker 3: Exactly, Ridgeway weaponized society's apathy. He knew exactly who the
28:17
system was willing to overlook.
28:19
Speaker 2: That is so dark.
28:20
Speaker 3: He would pick these women up, strangle them, sometimes commit necrophilia,
28:24
and then dump them in remote wooded areas or in
28:26
the Green River. By the early nineteen eighties, bodies were
28:29
turning up so fast victims like sixteen year old Wendy
28:33
Coffield and Debrah Bonner, that it prompted the formation of
28:36
the largest serial murder task force in US history at
28:39
the time.
28:39
Speaker 1: But the sheer volume of the bodies completely overwhelmed the system.
28:43
The task force was drowning in thousands of tips and
28:46
an ever growing list of victims. And the most frustrating
28:49
part is that Gary Ridgeway was on their radar almost immediately.
28:53
Speaker 3: Yes, he was.
28:54
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty two and nineteen eighty three, police interviewed
28:57
him because his truck was seen near where victims had vanished.
29:00
In nineteen eighty four, they gave him a polygraph test
29:02
and he passed it, which is.
29:03
Speaker 3: Another reminder of how unreliable polygraphs are, especially for sociopaths
29:08
who don't exhibit normal physiological stress responses.
29:11
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty seven, police actually served a search warrant
29:14
on his home, they took samples of his hair and
29:16
his saliva. They had the killer's biological evidence in their
29:18
hands in nineteen eighty seven, but they couldn't arrest.
29:21
Speaker 3: Him because the science wasn't ready. The GENA technology of
29:25
the late nineteen eighties was simply not sophisticated enough to
29:28
link the saliva and hair they took from Ridgeway to
29:31
the degraded seamen samples found on the victims. Wow, the
29:35
evidence was there, but the lens was too blurry, so
29:38
Ridgeway went back to his life as a truck painter,
29:40
hiding in plain sight.
29:42
Speaker 1: Until the year two thousand and one. Advancing DNA technology,
29:46
specifically the ability to analyze much smaller and older samples,
29:50
allowed the Washington State Crime Lab to go back to
29:52
those exact samples taken from Ridgeway in nineteen eighty seven. Yeah,
29:56
they finally generated a clear profile and it matched the
29:59
semen found on multiple early victims. Plus trace evidence played
30:03
a role in microscopic spheres of specialized paint found on
30:06
the clothing of victims matched the paint Ridgeway used at
30:09
his workplace.
30:10
Speaker 3: He was arrested in two thousand and one confessed to
30:12
forty nine murders to avoid the death penalty and is
30:14
serving consecutive life sentences.
30:16
Speaker 1: But the Green River case is a stark reminder of
30:19
how early DNA limitations combined with a marginalized victim pool
30:23
allowed a monster to operate.
30:24
Speaker 3: For decades, and that dynamic, the vulnerability of marginalized communities
30:28
and the slow churn of justice brings us directly to
30:32
another devastating case, the case of Lonnie David Franklin.
30:35
Speaker 1: Junior, known as the Grim Sleeper Right.
30:38
Speaker 3: Franklin murdered at least ten women, predominantly black women, many
30:41
of whom were sex workers in South Los Angeles.
30:45
Speaker 1: His crimes started in nineteen eighty five. He earned his
30:48
moniker during a massive gap in his known timeline, a
30:52
fourteen year sleep between nineteen eighty eight and two thousand
30:54
and two where the murders seemingly stopped before starting up
30:57
again until two thousand and seven.
31:00
Speaker 3: Like the Green River case, the Grim Sleeper investigation languished
31:03
for years. South LA in the eighties and nineties was
31:05
dealing with intense crime waves, the crack epidemic severely strained
31:10
relations between the community and the LAPD.
31:12
Speaker 1: And the fact that law enforcement was simultaneously chasing several
31:16
other active serial killers in the area.
31:18
Speaker 3: Right, the resources were spread incredibly thin, and again the
31:20
victims were from a demographic that historically struggled to get
31:23
overwhelming police protection.
31:25
Speaker 1: But how they finally caught Franklin in twenty ten introduces
31:28
a completely different, highly controversial forensic method. They didn't catch
31:32
him using consumer databases like ged match. They caught him
31:36
using the state's own criminal database through a process called
31:40
familial DNA searching.
31:41
Speaker 2: Right, walk us through the science of that.
31:43
Speaker 1: How is a familial search and a police database different
31:47
from what they did with the Golden State killer.
31:49
Speaker 3: In a standard cut is search, investigators input a crime
31:52
scene DNA profile and the algorithm looks for a one
31:56
hundred percent exact match across all tested low side or markers.
32:01
Speaker 1: So if it's not a perfect match, it's nothing.
32:03
Speaker 3: Right if the killer isn't in the database, it returns
32:06
zero results. But familial DNA searching alters the algorithm. Instead
32:10
of demanding a perfect match, it looks for partial allele
32:13
matches that indicate a close biological relationship.
32:16
Speaker 2: Like what kind of relationship.
32:18
Speaker 3: Specifically parent, child or full sibling relationships?
32:21
Speaker 1: Oh, I see, it's like a search engine. If you
32:23
type a typo into Google, it doesn't give you zero results.
32:26
It says, did you mean this?
32:28
Speaker 3: That's a good way to put it.
32:29
Speaker 1: Familial DNA does the same thing. The algorithm says, we
32:32
don't have John Doe, but we have a genetic profile
32:34
that shares fifty percent of the alleles across the specific
32:37
low side.
32:38
Speaker 2: It's a parent or a child of your suspect.
32:40
Speaker 3: Precisely and in twenty ten, Franklin's son, Christopher was convicted
32:45
of a felony weapons charge in California. A felony conviction
32:49
requires your DNA to be entered into the state database.
32:53
Investigators ran a familial search using the grim sleep or
32:56
crime scene DNA. The algorithm hit on Christopher Franklin. One
33:01
the DNA from the murdered women was a partial familial
33:03
match to the young man who just got a weapons.
33:05
Speaker 1: Charge, which means the killer is either Christopher's father, his brother,
33:09
or his uncle. Detectives quickly zero in on the father,
33:12
Lonnie David Franklin Junior. He lived right in the epicenter
33:15
of the murdered geography, so.
33:16
Speaker 2: They set up a sting.
33:17
Speaker 1: They tail him to a local pizza parlor.
33:19
Speaker 2: They watch him eat.
33:21
Speaker 1: When a buzzboy clears the table, an undercover detective intercepts
33:24
the trash.
33:25
Speaker 3: They snagged his guarded pizza crust. Wow, they extract his
33:28
DNA from the saliva. Compared to the crime scene evidence
33:31
and Boom exact match.
33:33
Speaker 1: He was arrested in twenty ten, convicted in twenty sixteen,
33:36
and died in prison in twenty twenty. It was brilliant,
33:40
relentless police work, but man, it sparked an immense legal
33:44
and ethical fire store.
33:45
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely, this raises an important question.
33:47
Speaker 1: I have to stop here because this is the core
33:49
of the privacy debate. In the Grim Sleeper case, police
33:53
used a son's felony weapons conviction to catch his father.
33:57
The state compelled the son's DNA for one crime and
34:00
used it to investigate his relatives for another. At what
34:03
point does the DNA of our family make us all
34:05
legally compromised? If my brother commits a crime, should the
34:09
government be allowed to use his compelled DNA to effectively
34:12
put my entire bloodline under surveillance.
34:15
Speaker 3: It forces us to confront the nature of genetic data.
34:18
Proponents of a milial searching argue that the state has
34:20
a compelling moral interest in solving horrific crimes. If a
34:23
legal database holds the key to stopping a serial killer,
34:27
ignoring it is indefensible to them. But civil liberties advocates
34:30
argue that familial searching effectively turns individuals into genetic informants
34:35
against their own families without their consent.
34:37
Speaker 2: Which is a heavy thought, and it.
34:39
Speaker 3: Disproportionately affects communities that are already heavily over represented in
34:43
the criminal justice system. If a certain demographic has higher
34:47
rates of felony convictions, that entire demographics, extended families are
34:51
now subject to a higher degree of genetic surveillance.
34:54
Speaker 1: It is a massive ethical trade off. We are trading
34:56
biological privacy for public safety. But what's fast sinating is
35:00
that we've been talking about finding known suspects or matching
35:03
crime scenes. What happens when you don't even know who
35:06
the victims are right? What happens when the DNA reveals
35:08
that the killer and the people he murdered aren't who
35:11
we thought they were at all.
35:12
Speaker 3: That brings us to our final case study, the unmasking
35:15
of a chameleon in Bearbrook, New Hampshire.
35:18
Speaker 1: The details of this case are deeply chilling. We are
35:20
in Allenstown, New Hampshire and Bearbrook State Park. It's a
35:24
dense wooded area. In nineteen eighty five, a hunter makes
35:27
a gruesome discovery an overturn fifty five gallon industrial drum
35:32
in the woods. Inside the barrel are the heavily decomposed
35:35
remains of an adult woman and a young girl. The
35:38
police investigate, but they can't identify who they are. The
35:42
case stalls completely, and.
35:44
Speaker 3: Then fifteen years later, in the year two thousand, investigators
35:48
return to that exact same area in the woods and
35:51
they find a second fifty five gallon barrel located roughly
35:54
one hundred yards.
35:55
Speaker 2: From the first one second barrel.
35:57
Speaker 3: Inside the second barrel are the remains of two more
35:59
young girls.
36:00
Speaker 1: Four victims, three children, one adult woman stuffed into barrels
36:05
in the woods. Early DNA testing showed that the adult
36:08
woman was the biological mother of the child found with
36:11
her in nineteen eighty five and one of the children
36:13
found in two thousand okay, but the third child was
36:16
not biologically related to the others. Despite having their DNA,
36:19
their identities were total ghosts. Nobody knew who these victims were,
36:23
and nobody knew who killed them.
36:24
Speaker 3: This represents the ultimate investigative void. You have a crime
36:28
scene completely divorced from any context. Yeah, the police were
36:31
starting from below zero. But between twenty seventeen and twenty nineteen,
36:34
the same forensic genetic genealogy techniques used on the Golden
36:38
State Killer were applied to the Bearbrook.
36:40
Speaker 1: Barrels, and what the genealogists unraveled was a web of
36:44
deception that almost defies belief, because.
36:46
Speaker 3: They weren't just looking for a killer who was hiding.
36:49
They were looking for a killer who constantly erased his
36:51
own identity.
36:52
Speaker 1: Right, genetic genealogy eventually identified the man who murdered the
36:57
people in the barrels as Terry Peter Rasmussen, but for
37:00
decades nobody knew him by that name.
37:03
Speaker 3: He was a true chameleon. He traveled across state lines,
37:06
constantly changing his name, picking up vulnerable women and children,
37:09
and leaving a trail of bodies behind him.
37:12
Speaker 1: In New Hampshire, around the time the victims disappeared, he
37:15
was known as Bob Evans.
37:17
Speaker 3: Genetic genealogy didn't just point a finger at him, it
37:20
reconstructed the entire erased history of his crimes. Because of
37:24
these databases, authorities were finally able to give names back
37:28
to the victims in the barrels.
37:29
Speaker 2: Who were they.
37:30
Speaker 3: The adult woman was identified as twenty four year old
37:33
Marlse Honey Church. She had vanished from California in nineteen
37:36
seventy eight, following in argument with her family. She left
37:39
with a man her family knew only as Bob.
37:42
Speaker 1: Evans, and two of the children in the barrels were
37:45
her daughters, Marie Vaughan and Sarah McWaters. The ability to
37:49
untangle aliases using genetic distances allowed investigators to map Rasmussen's
37:55
movements across the country over decades.
37:57
Speaker 3: It's just the tragedy of mart Lise's family wondering for
38:00
forty years what happened to her, only to find out
38:02
her path ended in a barrel in New Hampshire awful, and.
38:05
Speaker 1: The identification of the final child is perhaps the most
38:08
astonishing feat of this science. For years, the third little
38:11
girl in the barrels remain unidentified, yeah, but genetic genealogy
38:15
determined that she was actually the biological daughter of the
38:18
killer Terry Peter Rasmeisen, and just recently in twenty twenty five,
38:23
she was finally given her name back Rhea.
38:26
Speaker 3: He murdered his own daughter and discarded her with the others.
38:29
Speaker 1: Wow.
38:29
Speaker 3: What is unique about Bearbrook is that justice in the
38:32
traditional sense was already completely out of reach. Terry Peter
38:36
Rasbiesen actually died in prison back in twenty ten oh
38:39
he'd been convicted of a completely separate murder in California,
38:42
living under yet another alias. He dies long before anyone
38:45
knew he was the Barbrook killer or what his real
38:47
name was.
38:48
Speaker 1: But the success of the science in this case is profound.
38:52
It proves that this technology isn't just a tool for apprehension.
38:56
It is a tool for historical reconstruction. Absolutely untangled aliases
39:01
connect disparate crimes across state lines, and restore the stolen
39:06
identities of victims who were completely erased from the world.
39:09
Speaker 3: If we look at all these sources together, we see
39:12
a massive shift in the balance of power. For decades,
39:16
time was the killer's greatest ally. If you could just
39:19
make it out of town, if you could lay low,
39:21
the biological evidence would degrade, the detectives would retire, you'd
39:25
be safe.
39:25
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean That is no longer true.
39:29
Time is no longer a match for scientific persistence, jurisdictional silos,
39:34
the limitations of nineteen eighties crime labs, the anonymity of
39:37
fake names. All of those shields are being systematically dismantled
39:40
by massive data sets, PCR amplification, and relentless genealogists. Families
39:46
who have lived with empty chairs at their tables for
39:48
half a century are finally getting the answers they deserve.
39:51
The Cold case as an unsolvable mystery is slowly becoming extinct.
39:56
Speaker 3: But these triumphs do not exist in a vacuum. They
39:59
force us to grapple with the reality that solving the
40:02
crimes of the past requires compromising the genetic data.
40:06
Speaker 1: Of the present, which brings me to one final provocative thought.
40:09
It's something we've touched on, but it deserves your full attention.
40:12
We used to think of our DNA as our most intimate, private,
40:16
entirely individual possession. It was yours and yours alone. But
40:20
the era of genetic genealogy proves that your DNA doesn't
40:24
just belong to you. It belongs to your third cousin
40:27
you've never met. It belongs to your entire extended family tree.
40:31
Speaker 3: It is a collective, shared asset.
40:33
Speaker 1: If a distant relative takes a mail in spit test
40:36
just to find out where their ancestors are from. They
40:38
might unknowingly submit the exact puzzle piece needed to put
40:42
you or someone you love in prison without intending to.
40:45
We have essentially crowdsourced criminal investigations. We have turned every
40:50
single family tree in America into a potential permanent police lineup.
40:54
Speaker 3: It's wild to think about.
40:56
Speaker 1: Is the end of the cold case also the end
40:58
of genetic privacy. It is a question that science has
41:01
already answered, and now the rest of us are just
41:03
racing to catch up. Thank you so much for joining
41:06
us on this steep dive. We will see you on
41:08
the next one.