Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / Murder of 25-Year-Old Mother In Northern Indiana Solved After Nearly 30 Years

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Murder of 25-Year-Old Mother In Northern Indiana Solved After Nearly 30 Years · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I want you to just picture a bustling downtown club
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: right in the days just before Christmas.
• 0:05
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. That is always such a chaotic time. Right.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: You have the lights, the chaotic energy, people rushing around
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: with all those last-minute holiday plans.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: Everyone's just trying to get things done.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Exactly. There's just this undeniable feeling of life moving forward.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: But now I want you to contrast that with a desolate,
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: freezing reservoir just miles out in the country.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: It's a really jarring image.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: It is. Because on December 21st, 1997, that is the
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: exact geographic and, frankly, emotional void where Angela Sacco's story stops.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: And it's where a nearly 30-year mystery begins.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it is a devastating juxtaposition, honestly. I mean, you
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: have a season that's entirely defined by anticipation, by gathering
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: with people.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Wait, the holidays.
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: Right, and it's instantly shattered by a landscape that is just, well,
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: it's entirely desolate. Yeah. We are looking at a story
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: today that really forces us to examine the physical and
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: the psychological realities of what happens when a community's expectation
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: of safety is just ripped away.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Completely ripped away.
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: And then the justice system, you know, the very system
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: tasked with restoring that order, it just simply hits a wall.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: And that is the exact mission of our Deep Dives today.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: We are pulling from a really powerful source text. It's
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: a May 27, 2026 article by Tom Powell.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: From WPTA News, right?
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. From WPTA News. And it details the cracking
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: of a 1997 Huntington County coal case.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: Which is just a massive breakthrough.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: It really is. So for you listening right now, we're
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: going to journey from that heartbreaking discovery just days before
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: Christmas through the agonizing wall of silence that trapped a
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: family for decades.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: A literal lifetime for some of these family members.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, all the way to a cutting-edge scientific breakthrough.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: And we are going to explore the mechanics behind that breakthrough, too, because,
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: I mean, this isn't just some procedural timeline.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: No, not at all.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: It is a profound look at how time degrades memory,
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: but paradoxically, it advances technology.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really good way to put it.
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an exploration of how the physical artifacts of grief,
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: how they intersect with the eventual and incredibly complex reality
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: of a delayed resolution.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this by grounding ourselves in the stark
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: reality of the victim and, you know, the environment of
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: the initial crime.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: Because the environment is key here. Right.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: So the victim is Angela Sacco. She was a 25-year-old
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: woman living in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: Just 25.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: Just 25. And her final known movements put her in
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: the early morning hours at her workplace. This place called
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: Poor John's Club.
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: And that was located right in the heart of downtown
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: Fort Wayne, right?
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: Exactly. Right downtown.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is that urban center is crucial context.
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: Downtown Fort Wayne in the late 90s, I mean, especially
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: right before a holiday, that is a dense, busy environment.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: Oh, totally. People everywhere.
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: You have potential witnesses. You have people with varying schedules,
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: just a lot of transient foot traffic. But the grim discovery,
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: it completely shifts the geographic footprint of this crime.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: It's like a completely different world. Right.
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: On December 21st, hunters who were out in the elements
• 3:16
  Speaker 2: found her stabbed to death.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: And the source is highly specific about this location, too.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: It is.
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: She was discovered on the Huntington County Reservoir property. Specifically,
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: it was off County Road 100 East, just north of
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: County Road 100 South.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: The distance between Fort Wayne and that reservoir, I mean...
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: It isn't just a drive on a map.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: No, it changes everything.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: It completely fractures an investigation. We often hear news reports
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: rattle off these discoveries as just, you know, dates and
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: cross streets.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: Right, just data points.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, just data. But I want to push back on
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: that framing because think about the investigative nightmare of this.
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: We often hear about these discoveries as just dates and locations.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: But what does it mean for a family to have
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: the anniversary of a loved one's murder forever tied to
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: the week of Christmas?
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: It ruins that holiday forever.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: Forever. And Practically speaking, the killer moved her from an
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: urban center in Allen County to a completely isolated rural
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: environment in Huntington County.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: Which means law enforcement immediately lost the concept of a
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: single controlled crime scene.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Right, because now you have two. Or more.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: Exactly. When a crime spans multiple jurisdictions like that, you
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: are no longer just looking at a room you can
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: tape off.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: You can't just put up yellow tape and dust for prints.
• 4:30
  Speaker 2: No. You have an unknown abduction site. You have a
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: transit route that probably spans miles of highway. And then
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: you have a disposal site out in a winter reservoir.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: And the weather in Indiana in December.
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: Oh, the elements themselves become a primary adversary for the investigators.
• 4:46
  Speaker 2: In late December in Indiana, you are dealing with freezing temperatures.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: You're dealing with moisture scavengers and the eventual freeze-thaw cycle.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: Which just destroys evidence.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: From the very second she was left there, the environment
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: was actively degrading any physical evidence they might have found.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: And that brutal, chaotic reality of the crime scene, I
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: think it really explains why the police response in 1997
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: had to be so massive.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: They had to cast a huge net.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: They did. But yet, it was ultimately unsuccessful. Our sources
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: outline the sheer volume of the early police work, and honestly,
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: it is staggering.
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the numbers are huge.
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: Investigators interviewed nearly 100 people in their attempt to find
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Angela's killer.
• 5:29
  Speaker 2: A hundred interviews. I mean, in a 1997 context, that
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: is a monumental cognitive load for any investigative department.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: Because they couldn't just check a phone.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Today, a detective might rely on a victim's smartphone
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: location history or, you know, automated license plate reader.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Cameras, all that stuff.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: Ubiquitous security cameras, yeah. They use all that to establish
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: a baseline of truth. But in 1997, without that digital footprint,
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: investigators were forced to rely almost entirely on human memory
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: to reconstruct the timeline.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: And human memory is so flawed, which makes me want
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: to ask you, I mean, if you are interviewing nearly
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: 100 people, you're gathering a mountain of statements, alibis and rumors.
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: Oh, so many rumors.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: Right. Is it possible that the sheer volume of information
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: without physical proof actually paralyzes an investigation?
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: It absolutely can. I mean, it creates a classic signal
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: to noise ratio problem.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: Just too much noise.
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: Right. When you are sifting through a hundred subjective narratives,
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: cognitive bias easily creeps in. And legally, it brings us
• 6:34
  Speaker 2: to a massive barrier that's explicitly mentioned in the source text. Right.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: The legal hurdle.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: Despite this massive dragnet, police couldn't establish enough, quote, probable cause, unquote,
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: to make an arrest.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: This is a concept we really need to dissect. Yeah.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: Because probable cause is tossed around in legal dramas so
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: casually that I think it loses its weight.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: Oh, definitely. People think it just means having a good hunch.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: Exactly. A listener might think, well, you talked to 100 people.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: How could you not know who did it?
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: But knowing who did it and proving it are two
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: different things.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: Right. Having a suspicion is a completely different universe from
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: having the legal authority to actually deprive someone of their freedom.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Exactly. The Fourth Amendment requires probable cause before an
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: arrest warrant can even be issued.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: It's a high bar.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: It is. It means law enforcement must have objective facts
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: and circumstances within their knowledge that would lead a reasonable
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: person to conclude that a specific individual committed this specific crime.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: So it's not just a gut feeling.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: No, it is an evidentiary threshold. You can sit across
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: an interrogation table from someone in 1997, listen to their alibi,
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: realize they were totally lying to you, and have a
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: profound gut feeling that they are the killer.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: You just know it in your bones. Right.
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: You know it. But if their DNA isn't on file
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: and you have no physical evidence tying them to that
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: specific reservoir in Huntington County.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: Then what? You can't do anything.
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: Your suspicion is legally useless. The noise of a hundred
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: circumstantial interviews can easily drown out the one piece of
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: actionable truth. And without the DNA technology we have today,
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: A case relying entirely on circumstantial interviews can easily stall.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: Man, that lack of physical evidence paralyzes the police. But
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: the clock doesn't stop for the family left behind.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: No, they are stuck in it. Right.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: When the investigation hits that wall of silence, the loved
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: ones are essentially trapped behind it. Which brings us to
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: Angela's mother, Brigitte Sacco.
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: Right. She lives in Paulding County, Ohio.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And her story illustrates something deeply profound about human grief. Because...
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: For nearly three decades, Brigitte has kept a physical chest
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: in her home.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: A literal chest of memories.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: Yes, containing her daughter's favorite jeans and her school pictures.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: The psychology behind preserving those specific physical items is incredibly complex.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: I can only imagine. It's like a time capsule.
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: That's exactly what it is. In the field of trauma psychology,
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: when a family member is murdered and the perpetrator remains unknown,
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: the survivors experience something called ambiguous loss.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: Ambiguous loss. That makes sense because there's no ending.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: Right. There is no closure. There's no narrative resolution to
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: the violence. So families often create these physical time capsules.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: To hold on to something real.
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Those genes and those school photos become an anchor
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: to reality. They are a way for Brigitte to exert
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: some tiny fraction of control over a universe that violently
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: took her daughter.
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: Because the system couldn't give her any control.
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: Right. When the justice system cannot provide a name or
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: a reason, you hold on to the tangible proof that
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: your loved one existed, that she mattered, and that the
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: crime wasn't just, you know, some dark fantasy.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: The source material shares Brigitte's reaction to getting that initial
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: phone call in 1997. And the raw devastation is just palpable.
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: It's hard to even read.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: It really is. She recalled, and I'm quoting here, I
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: cried and I cried and I cried and I almost
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: had a nervous breakdown.
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: Any parent would.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: But this ends the next detail that shifts this from
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: a tragic event into a generational catastrophe, honestly.
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the part that really hits hard.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: Angela had a five-year-old son at the time of her murder.
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: Just five years old?
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: Brigitte recounts taking this little boy to the viewing where
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: he looked at his mother in the casket and said,
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: quiet people. My mommy's sleeping.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, it is
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: a devastating image.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: It breaks your heart.
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: It perfectly encapsulates how a child's brain attempts to process
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: the incomprehensible finality of death. A five-year-old does not have
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: the cognitive framework to understand murder.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: They just think they're asleep.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: Right. But I want you to imagine the passage of
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: time here. That event happened in 1997. Right. That five-year-old
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: boy is now.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: A man in his mid-30s.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: When you put it like that, it's just, it's a
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: whole lifetime. It is.
• 10:54
  Speaker 2: The ripple effect of this one violent act defined the
• 10:57
  Speaker 2: entire architecture of his life. His developmental years, his understanding
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: of safety, his relationship to the world, all of it
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: was fundamentally altered by a killer who remained a faceless ghost.
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: And while he grew up in the shadow of that ghost,
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: Brigitte held fiercely to the core truth of who her
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: daughter was.
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: She never let that go.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: No, she didn't. She described Angela by saying she was
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: a beautiful, beautiful person. She would never hurt anybody in
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: this world.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: It's a mother's defense of her child.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: It is the desperate plea of a mother demanding that
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: the world recognize her daughter's innocence in the face of
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: such profound brutality.
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: So you have this heavy, frozen reality. A family suspended
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: in time for almost 30 years. But the ice eventually breaks.
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: It does break, but, you know, a breakthrough of this
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: magnitude doesn't just happen spontaneously.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: It takes work.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: It requires a systemic catalyst. In 2024, the Indiana State
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: Police officially formed a cold case unit, bringing a renewed,
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: hyper-focused attention to Angela Sacco's murder.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: Which is huge, getting that dedicated focus.
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: It is. However, the formation of the unit is only
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: half the equation. The source text highlights a crucial detail—
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: Evidentiary items collected and preserved at the crime scene.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: That is the unsung heroism of the 1997 investigators, honestly.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: Truly.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: Despite hitting a dead end with their hundred interviews, despite
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: dealing with a freezing reservoir and degraded conditions, they executed
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: their crime scene processing meticulously.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: They did everything right at the scene.
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: They collected and stored that biological evidence, likely knowing that
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: the tools they had in the 90s weren't enough.
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: Right. DNA tech was so primitive back then.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: But they were hoping the future would eventually catch up
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: and provide a solution.
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: And that chain of custody, the preservation protocols for biological evidence,
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: they are incredibly delicate.
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: Because it can degrade so easily.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: Exactly. DNA degrades when exposed to moisture, UV light, or
• 12:53
  Speaker 2: bacterial growth. The fact that the 1997 technicians properly dried
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: and stored these samples in a climate-controlled environment for nearly
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: three decades.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: It's a miracle, honestly.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: It is the entire reason this breakthrough in 2026 was
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: even possible. It's the only reason the 2024 cold case
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: unit had anything to work with. They built a bridge
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: across time for the science to cross.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: Here's where it gets really interesting. Because the science crossing
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: that bridge is nothing short of revolutionary.
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: It feels like science fiction sometimes.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: It really does. The Indiana State Police took that preserved
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: evidence and submitted it to Identify News International.
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: That's a forensic genealogy company out in California. and it's
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: founded by Colleen Fitzpatrick.
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: She's a pioneer in this space.
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: She is. And the source outlines a very specific two-step
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: technological process that ultimately solved this case.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: Which is important to break down.
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: Let's do it. First, a DNA profile was developed using
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP, DNA testing.
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: SNP testing, right.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: Right. Which forensic genetic genealogists used to identify a suspect
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: in February of 2026? Then, the ISP confirmed this suspect
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: as the contributor of the crime scene DNA through STR testing.
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: To truly appreciate the magnitude of this breakthrough, we really
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: need to understand the distinct mechanisms of these two tests.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: Because they aren't the same thing.
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: No, they are not doing the same thing at all.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: They are complementary tools that solve entirely different problems.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: Let me see if I can translate this based on
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: how the text describes the sequence playing out. It sounds
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: to me like the SNP testing combined with the genealogy
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: acts like a highly advanced compass.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: Okay, I like where you're going with this.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: It points you to a specific neighborhood and eventually a
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: specific house, but you can't arrest someone just because your
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: compass points to their house.
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: Right, you need actual proof they were there.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: Exactly. So the STR testing acts as the key that
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: proves you've actually unlocked the right door.
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: That is a phenomenal analogy. Let's dig into the mechanics
• 14:51
  Speaker 2: of that compass first.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, how does the SNP testing actually work?
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: So SNP testing single nucleotide polymorphisms It looks at hundreds
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: of thousands of genetic markers across the entire genome.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: Wow. Hundreds of thousands.
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: Yes. It is incredibly dense, granular data. This is the
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: exact same technology that consumer DNA databases use to map
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: out your ancestry.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: Like when you mail in a cheek swab to find
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: out where your ancestors are from.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: Exactly. In forensics, they extract this dense SNP profile from
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: the crime scene evidence. and upload it to specialized databases
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: designed for law enforcement, like GEDmatch.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: Okay, but the killer probably isn't in GEDmatch, right?
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: Right. The goal isn't to find the killer directly. The
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: goal is to find the killer's distant cousins.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: So genealogists like Colleen Fitzpatrick's team... take those distant matches
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: and begin the agonizingly slow process of building massive family
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: trees backward in time.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: Looking for a common ancestor.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: Exactly. They look for common ancestors, great-grandparents from the early 1900s,
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: for example.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: That sounds like it would take forever.
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: It is incredibly tedious. Then they build the tree forward
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: in time, tracing marriage licenses, birth certificates, and census records.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: Oh, I see. So they narrow down the branches.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: Right. Narrowing down the descendants until they find a single
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: person who fits the demographic profile, the age, and the
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: geographic location of the murder.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: So that is the SMP compass pointing to a single name.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: Yes. But, as you said, the compass isn't enough for
• 16:16
  Speaker 2: a courtroom.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: Right. It gives you a lead, but you still need
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: the key?
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: To establish legal probable cause, you need the key. That's
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: where STR testing comes in.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: What does STR stand for?
• 16:27
  Speaker 2: STR stands for short tandem repeats. This is the traditional
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: DNA profiling method used by police databases, like Cody's, since
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: the 1990s.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: Okay, so this is the older tech.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: Older, but highly specific for identity. It doesn't look at
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands of markers. It looks at a very small,
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: specific set of locations on the DNA, usually about 20 loci.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: Just 20.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but is designed solely for direct one-to-one identity matching.
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: Once the genealogist gave the Indiana State Police a name,
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: the police acquired a direct biological sample from the suspect.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: They got his actual DNA.
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: They ran the STR test and it definitively legally proved
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: that the DNA left at the Huntington County Reservoir belonged
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: to that exact person.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: The precision of that is just staggering.
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: It really is. I mean, Colleen Fitzpatrick is quoted directly
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: in the article saying, this case is another example of
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: a case that would have not been solved without the
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: use of forensic genetic genealogy.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: And she's absolutely right. The boots on the ground policing
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: of 1997, all those traditional methods, They failed to find
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: him in a crowd of 100 people.
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: They did everything they could, but it wasn't enough.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: But nearly 30 years later, genetic mapping succeeded. It cut
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: through all the noise. So the science provides a name.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: And when we look at who this person was, the
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: timeline intersects with Angela's in a way that is incredibly disturbing.
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: It is deeply unsettling. The name provided by the compass
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: and confirmed by the key was Stephen L. Schlater.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: Stephen L. Schlater. Yes.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: Yes. And the demographic and criminal history facts laid out
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: in the source paint a very dark picture. At the
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: time of the December 1997 murder, Schlater was 50 years old.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: So he was double Angela's age.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: And the background we have on him makes this even worse.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: According to federal court records cited in the text, Schlater
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: was a convicted felon.
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: He wasn't a first-time offender.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: Far from it. He had been convicted of extortion. But
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: the most chilling detail is the timeline of his freedom.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: This is the part that is just so hard to accept.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: He had been released from federal prison just five months
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: before Angela Sacco was murdered.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: Just five months?
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: He was actively on supervised release when he stabbed her
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: to death.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: Which completely shifts the narrative from, you know, a random
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: act of violence to a systemic failure.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: I mean, he was theoretically being monitored by the justice
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: system when he committed this brutal crime.
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: Right. And an extortionist is a very specific type of offender.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: Extortion requires calculation, it requires manipulation, and the threat of
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: harm to gain leverage over a victim.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: It's premeditated.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: It is a predatory crime. When you release a 50-year-old
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: predatory offender back into society, supervised release is supposed to
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: act as a buffer to protect the public.
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: This is exactly where I struggle to comprehend the reality
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: the family is facing.
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: It's enraging.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: It really is. I want to look at this through
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: Brigitte's eyes for a second. It is agonizing to lose
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: your daughter to a completely random stranger who slips through
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: the cracks.
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: Unimaginable pain.
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: But to find out decades later that the man who
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: took your daughter's life, the man who fundamentally ruined your
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: grandson's childhood, was a federal convict supposedly being monitored by
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: the system at the exact moment he committed the murder.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: That isn't just grief anymore. No.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: It's a profound sense of institutional betrayal. Mm-hmm. How does
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: supervised release fail so catastrophically?
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: To understand the failure, you have to look at the
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: mechanisms of federal supervised release back in the late 1990s.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: Because it wasn't like it is today, right? Right.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: Today, we have GPS ankle monitors. We have continuous alcohol monitoring.
• 20:05
  Speaker 2: Instant digital check-ins.
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: They know where you are all the time.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: Exactly. In 1997, supervised release largely consisted of scheduled in-person
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: meetings with an overworked probation officer, maybe some random phone
• 20:17
  Speaker 2: calls to a landline, and urine tests.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: So it was a system built on trust, basically.
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: Trust and routine. If an offender like Schlater maintained a
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: facade of compliance during those brief check-ins, he had massive
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: amounts of unmonitored time.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: He could just slip away.
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: He was free to travel from his residence to downtown
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: Fort Wayne, commit a murder, dispose of the body in
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: a rural reservoir, and return home without setting off any
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: institutional alarms.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: And because he didn't set off those alarms, he evaded
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: the radar during those initial hundred interviews.
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: He just blended right back in.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to the final, profoundly cruel irony of
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: Stephen Schlater's timeline. The source reveals that Schlater died in 2021.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: And where did he die?
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: In Huntington County.
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: The margins of that timeline are so difficult to stomach.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: It's sickening.
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: He lived out his life, apparently freely, in the very
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: same county where he abandoned Angela's body. He died of
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: natural causes in 2021.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: And the Indiana State Police cold case unit that ultimately
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: tracked him down. It wasn't even formed until 2024.
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: He escaped earthly justice by a margin of just three years.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: Three years. Huntington County Prosecutor Jeremy Nix made it incredibly
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: clear in the article. He stated that if Schlater were
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: alive today, he would absolutely be charged with murder.
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: The STR match is conclusive. The legal threshold of probable
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: cause has been met.
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: But the suspect is dead.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: And that forces us into a very murky, deeply uncomfortable aftermath.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: We have to synthesize what this conclusion actually means for you,
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: the listener, and more importantly for the Saka family.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: Because they finally have a resolution, on paper at least.
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: Right. They know the who, the where, and the how.
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: But is it actually justice?
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: That is the core philosophical conflict of a post-mortem identification.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: A name fulfills the investigative mandate, right?
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: The police did their job.
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: They closed the case.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: But it rarely answers the human questions. No. Brigitte Sokoa's
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: reaction to the news, as detailed in the article, perfectly
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: captures this void. Because a name doesn't answer all the questions,
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: she is left holding the most painful question of all,
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: which is the why.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: I want to read Brigitte's exact words from the text
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: because the raw frustration is just... It's heartbreaking.
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: It really is.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: She says, and I quote, Why he took her life,
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: I don't know. She must have trusted that lousy creep.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: Why on earth did you murder my daughter? And you
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: didn't have no right.
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: You can just hear the visceral need to look the
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: killer in the eye.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: Yes, to demand an explanation, to force him to acknowledge
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: the human being he destroyed.
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: But she's directing that anger at a headstone. Right.
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: He's not there to answer for it.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: This raises an important question, though, and it is a
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: suspicion that Brigitte herself voices in the article.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: About other victims. Yes.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: She says, I really wonder if he murdered other people before.
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: I really wonder sometimes.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: Do you think she's right to wonder that?
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: From an analytical standpoint, her suspicion is highly warranted. When
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: you look at the criminological profile of a 50-year-old man
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: recently released from federal prison for a predatory crime like extortion,
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: who immediately escalates to a vicious, stabbing, and successful disposal
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: of a victim?
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: That doesn't just happen out of nowhere.
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: No, it rarely exists in a vacuum. Violent behavior of
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: this magnitude usually has precursors. It naturally forces investigators to
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: wonder how many other unsolved cases in Indiana, or wherever
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: he lived previously... might be tied to his DNA. Oh, wow.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: I didn't even think about his previous residences.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: Right. But because he is dead, the investigative avenues are
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: drastically narrowed. You cannot interrogate him.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: You can't search his active digital footprint.
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: Exactly. And you cannot leverage a plea deal to force
• 24:01
  Speaker 2: a confession about other victims.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to this concept of incomplete closure.
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: It's a very real phenomenon.
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: The article ends on a very poignant note. It states
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: that the family is grateful for the answers... But they
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: will never get the day in court they hoped for.
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: They will never see him face a judge. Right.
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: And I want you, the listener, to really think about
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: what that word closure actually means in our society.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: We use it so casually in media, don't we?
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: We really do. We say, oh, the family finally has closure.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: But when the perpetrator is already in the ground, can
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: a family truly heal just by knowing a string of
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: letters that makes up a name?
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: I don't think so. They are denied the public reckoning.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: They don't get to see him put in handcuffs.
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: They don't get to stand in a courtroom and read
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: victim impact statements while he is forced to listen to
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: the wreckage he caused.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: They just get a sterile phone call confirming that the
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: monster was real, but he's already gone.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: It is an incredibly hollow victory. On one hand, it
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: validates Brigitte's long wait, right? It proves that Angela mattered,
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: that the evidence was preserved, and that she wasn't entirely
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: forgotten by the system.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: The scientists remembered her.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: Yes. But it denies the family the societal ritual of justice.
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: A trial isn't just about punishment. It is a public
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: declaration of the truth. Without it, the mechanics of the
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: crime are solved, but the scales of justice remain permanently unbalanced.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: So what does this all mean? If we step back
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: and survey the massive landscape we've covered today.
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: It's been a lot of ground to cover.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: It really has. We started at a desolate freezing reservoir
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: in 1997. We broke down the cognitive and legal walls
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: of 100 dead-end interviews, exploring why probable cause requires so
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: much more than just suspicion.
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: We looked at the legal barriers.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: Right. We sat with the mother's ambiguous loss, manifested in
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: a physical chest of jeans and photos kept in an
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: Ohio home for nearly 30 years, while a five-year-old boy
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: grew into a man under the shadow of an unsolved murder.
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: The human cost is just immense.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: And then? we witnessed the relentless, meticulous march of forensic science.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: We saw how the preservation of biological evidence allow a
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: 2024 cold case unit to partner with genealogists.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: Utilizing the microscopic compass of SNP testing.
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: And the definitive key of STR profiling, right? To point
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: directly at a recently paroled federal extortionist named Stephen L. Schlater.
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: It is a story of incredible scientific perseverance.
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: It is, but it ends with a name, a timeline
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: full of bitter ironies, and absolutely no trial.
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: And as we conclude this deep dive, I want to
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: leave you with a final thought to mull over, one
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: that builds on the tragedy of that timeline.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: Okay. What is it?
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: Think back to that physical chest of memories that Brigitte
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: Sacco kept in her home.
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: The jeans and the photos. Right.
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: For three decades, those jeans and school photos were evidence
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: of a terrifying open-ended mystery. They were artifacts of a
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: predator who was still out there somewhere living a life
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: he didn't deserve.
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: They were proof that the danger was still real. Exactly.
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Now, with the killer identified but deceased, the mystery
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: is technically solved, but the grief obviously remains. The provocative
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: question for you is this. When science finally solves a
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: mystery but time denies us a trial, do those physical
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: artifacts of our grief become heavier with the weight of
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: unserved justice, or do they somehow become lighter because the
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: truth is finally known?
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: That is a deeply complicated question.
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: It is.
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: And it opens to the kind of unresolved tension that
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: stays with you long after the facts of the case fade.
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on this journey today. Keep questioning,
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: keep seeking the deeper stories behind the headlines, and we
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: will see you on the next Deep Dive.