You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly. My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social media
manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner in
crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Ever Murderer. I'm Kristin Dilly and
I'm Bill Thomas, and we're joined today by Lindsay Wade, author of In
My DNA, My Career Investigating Your Worst Nightmares. Lindsey, thank you for
joining us in Mind Never Murdered today. Thank you so much for having me
go ahead and start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your professional
background. So I am a native of Tacoma, Washington and still lives in
this neck of the woods. I am a retired law enforcement officer. So
I worked for the Tacoma, Washington Police Department for twenty one years and spent
fourteen of those years as a detective, working primarily sex crimes and homicide cases,
some missing person cases in there, and few other kinds of violent crimes,
and then spent the last three years as our cold case detective. Then
after I left the department, I went and worked for the Attorney General's Office
in Washington State, and I helped to create the SACKI program in Washington State,
which is the Sexual Assault Kits Initiative. Worked on that project and we
had a couple of different purpose areas for that grant. At the time.
We had one purpose area that addresses the testing of sexual assault kits, and
then we had another purpose area that addressed something called lafuly O DNA, which
is a program aimed to collect DNA sample from convicted offenders who slipped through the
cracks and never had their DNA entered into CODIS. That's my background in a
nutshell. Now I no longer work for the AG's Office. I now work
for a global nonprofit. I still have my fingers involved in this world of
investigation. In my current role, because I act as a liaison to law
enforcement agencies around the country. I'd like to put a pin in this whole
discussion about lawfully oed DNA because this is an area that we both find very
troubling and something that we believe that all of us as a nation should be
focused on. Let's put a pin in that for a moment, because there's
so much more to talk about. Just in terms of introducing you and your
fascinating history. I want to start with the title of the book because it's
great. So the title of the book, as I said at the top,
is in my DNA. If someone asked you the question, Lindsey,
what is in your DNA? What would your answer be? Murder? I
think that's an orgy. Yeah, such a lovely, upbeat thing. Just
and just to give you guys some perspective. So I was at a retreat
this last weekend with a credit union that I stood on the board of directors
for, and the CEO of the credit union was asking me after our meeting
was over, what did you do today? Did you go out and go
shopping or do something fun? And I was like, yeah, I went
to the shops and then I came back to my room and started researching the
serial killer. And he just looked at me and he was like, Okay,
I like why why not? That spends like conversations I have with my
friends. What are you doing? Oh I'm I told somebody I said,
I got to go home a podcast about child murder and they were like,
yeah, did they not understand your professional background? Do they think of you
as being on the board of directors and not? Oh? No, he
knows. He knows what my background is. But I don't know. Maybe
they just think it's much more compartmentalized, like you only do that when you're
at work or something, and that's definitely not me. Would you think of
solving murder as being one aspect of your life's work. Oh for sure.
Yeah, absolutely so, like Christmas a big aspect. It's not something you
just put down. This is a passion for you. Absolutely. It's more
of a calling than I would say a job. And that's one of the
things I talked about in at the book conclusion, is that I may not
be a detective anymore. I may not be getting called out to crime scenes
anymore. It doesn't really matter because I'm always going to be interested and I'm
always going to be asking questions and probably sticking my nose where it doesn't belong.
But that's okay, because that's how you get shit done. I agreed.
So murder is in your DNA? Is there anything else that you would
say is like deeply angry you as part of your DNA? Just a sense
of justice? And I just really caring for and caring about victims of violent
crime, and I just think that too often they get forgotten and it's all.
We talk a lot about other things related to the criminal justice system,
but I feel like the families and the victims oftentimes get lost and forgotten about.
And for me, that's the most motivating part of doing this kind of
work is when I do connect with the family and the cases that I talk
about in the book, a lot of those cases were extremely impactful to me
because I had a connection with the victim or the family or it's not just
like flapping the handcuffs on somebody. That's good. It feels good to be
able to do that, but it feels even better to be able to give
a family that news that you've solved the case, or to be able to
connect with the victim and let them know that they weren't forgotten about and that
you were able to do something to help them. So what made you decide
that now was the right time to tell your story about your life as a
detective. I think that I knew along the way in my career that I
had worked on some very interesting cases and I could probably write them down and
write a book one day, but I never really thought that I could do
it while I was still working as a detective. For one thing, I
just got like one would the story actually end, because the cases just keep
on coming, So that was one aspect of it. Plus I just didn't
feel like I was in the right frame of mind or had the time.
So once I retired from police work, I felt that I did have the
time and the energy and the willingness to go back through those cases and revisit
them. And I sat down one day and mid a list, and I
wrote down the cases that I wanted to include in the book, and they
were all cases that I felt were impactful to me for one reason or another,
and I decided those were the cases that I was going to write about.
And it turned out that all of them ended up being cases involving either
women or young girls who had been to my Let's start off then with the
Jennifer Bastian case. For someone that is not familiar with their case, and
it certainly was high profile, but not everyone will know the story. Can
you tell us a little bit about that case? So there were actually two
little girls who went missing and were murdered in Tacoma back in nineteen eighty six,
and this was during my childhood, so I was I think ten when
a little girl by the name of Michelle Welch was killed, and then I
had turned eleven by the time Jennifer Bastian was killed. These were two cases
that were just completely outrageous. They shocked the community. They were cases that
everyone knew about, and still to this day, if you talk to anybody
who's lived here for more than twenty years, they know these cases. It
was just terrifying to think that two little kids, two different events, two
different days, could just be out doing what kids do, which is going
to the park riding a bike, and they go missing. And with Michelle,
she had been at a local community park with her sisters. She went
home to go get lunch for her sisters, and when she came back to
the park, they were not there. It turns out they had gone to
a nearby business to use the restroom, and when they came back from the
restroom, they saw that she was had been back. Her bike was there,
and the lunch that she brought from the house was there, but she
was nowhere to be found. They searched for her, couldn't find her,
and they ended up calling a babysitter, and then ultimately their mom and the
police were called and they initiated a massive search of the area and they ended
up bringing in search and rescue. This was middle of the day on I
believe it was a Wednesday. Later that night, close to midnight, they
finally found her body and she had been taken into a wooded area adjacent to
the park and had been sexually assaulted and murdered. So that happened in March
of nineteen eighty six. It was a big story and the people were in
fear. This is a very well to do area of Tacoma. It was
not a high crime area and this was just unexpected, this random act of
violence that just not normal. So police were investigating that case and really not
coming up with a ton of good leads. And then fast forward four and
a half months and it happens again, same area of town, same type
of victim, and in this case it was Jennifer Bastian, who was thirteen,
also blonde haired, blue eyed, out riding a bike in another park
in the same area of town. She had left a note for her dad
saying she'd be home by six pm. She was going to ride around this
paved path in the park called the five Mile Drive. She left for the
park. There were lots of people that said they saw her at the park,
riding her bike in various areas along the path, and she never came
home. Her parents searched for her, and then police were called. Police
flew into ad pretty quickly on this case because of the other case. Based
on the similarities. It was like, Okay, this does not sound good
and it sounds nearly similar to the Michello Welch case, so they also brought
in search and rescue pretty quick. They tracked from the Bastion home to the
park. The dogs picked up her scent in the park, but they did
not locate her. She was ultimately missing for twenty four days before her body
was finally located within the park in a wooded area. She too had been
sexually assaulted and murdered, and those two cases just went unsolved. So from
nineteen eighty six until twenty eighteen, they were just unsolved cases. Really,
they became urban legends in this area because they were just so horrific and it
was hard to believe that these two crimes could occur and the person could still
be out there walking around and not committing other crimes just like it. It
was definitely thought that it was the same suspect who killed both girls based on
these similarities, and we later learned based on DNA testing, that wasn't the
case. It was two separate guys, which was shocking, Like, twenty
eight years after the fact, we find out its two different guys, So
we don't know who they are because the DNA comes back and it's still no
matches and codis for either suspect. Would you say that the rape and murder
of these two little girls did that enter into your decision. You're a little
kid at this point, just a young girl yourself, and yet years later
you decide you want to go into law enforcement. Is there a relationship between
what happened to me, you know, to them, and your own life.
Yeah, I don't see how it couldn't have had some impact on my
decision making, whether it was a conscious decision or subconscious. But there were
a few things that happened along the way of my childhood that definitely led me
down the path and got me interested in law enforcement and interested in wanting to
be a detective, and specifically a homicide active. The book starts out with
me talking about waking up when I was eight years old and finding a stranger
inside my bedroom, which was absolutely terrifying. And then you fast forward a
couple of years and I talked about the murders of these two girls in my
community. And when I talked to my friends, I can talk to friends,
neighbors, I could go to a local bar and bring up the cases
and somebody would start talking about it. Everybody was impacted in some way by
these two cases. And it's hard to really describe, but it really changed
how kids were raised in our area. There was no more free range parenting.
You weren't going to walk by yourself anywhere, you weren't going to ride
your bike anywhere. Parents really kept a close eye on their kids closer than
they had before this happened, and there was a lot of speculation about who
could have done it. There was a lot of paranoia, I would say,
about who had done it, especially since they just went unsolved. So
it really had a big impact, and I think for young girl like myself,
it just scared the hell out of us. It really told us for
the first time ever that there's really bad people out there, and up until
that time that just didn't even factor into anything, didn't fact into factor into
how we lived our lives. So fast forward from there to high school.
That's when I picked up a copy of Ann ruled book The Stranger Beside Me
and started reading about Ted Bundy, who was also from Tacoma. By the
way, once I read that book, I was just hooked. That was
it. I knew I wanted to be a detective. It's funny, lindsay,
I was reading all of this and it actually sounds similar to what happened
with me. I also was impacted very strongly by Bill's sisters case the Colonial
Parkway murders, because that also took on the stature of urban legend here and
it did impact the way that people raise their kids, warned them about the
parkway, and then it wasn't and rule for me. But it was John
Douglas and Mark Olshaker's mind Hunter in all of those series. But I wasn't
brave enough to do what you did. I didn't go at a law enforcement
I went into teaching. But that's bravery on its own. I guess I
was gonna say, I don't think I could do that, so it might
have up to you a different kind of bravery. But yeah, I was
reading this and going, you know what, I get this? This is
very resonant in a lot of ways. Just while we're on the subject of
Ted Bundy, just for one second, why is it that the Pacific Northwest
seems to be a hot spot for notorious serial killers? Because you've got Bundy
and the Green River Killer, just to name two. Any insight into why
that might be is that the weather is like what is it? If I
knew the answer to that question, I would probably be a billionaire who knows.
Yes, so many different things. I've heard the weather. I've heard
the fact that we were military and Port city. I've heard that we the
terrain. Look, you got plenty of places to bury and just dump bodies
out in the wilderness here. It doesn't really correlate for those serial killers that
you mentioned, but we do have a disproportionate amount of violent crime here.
Historically, We've had, even just like in my specific area, a disproportionate
amount of violent crime because what happens is a lot of times the prisons will
just dump people in our county and in our city after they get out,
for a variety of reasons, but primarily because supposedly we have more services here
or something, or they have a better chance of rehabilitating, and so we
end up with a large proportion of people here that are not even from here,
but they committed crimes that sent them to prison, and then they get
dumped here after they get released. So that's the problem. And I think
that is less today than it was in the eighties and nineties, but it
still happens. That must mean you've got a pretty hefty recidivism rate, then,
is that right? Yeah, depending on the crime type. But yet
so that's a problem that could be a factor with some of it. But
yeah, we just I don't know. There are a lot of things going
on up here. All I can say is I'm so glad we didn't blame
the cost yeah, or all the great rock and roll that's come out of
the Pacific Northwest in the last thirty years. As long as coffee and grunge
rock are not blind, I think it will leave. Nirvana and Down Garden
and Pearl Dan They're all safe, exactly some of my favorites. The other
factors, I think the heavy military presence, and I come from a military
family, so I'm not taking a shot at anybody. The transient factor,
I think is very real because so many people come through there because of the
type of work and the ports. I think about people that have been involved
in shipping and receiving civilian and military craft coming and going, and even things
like people heading to Alaska and Canada and places like that. I can't exactly
put my finger on it, but I feel like there's a just a lot
of movement of people, and that would allow someone who who has dark predilections
to hide in plain sight, because there's always going to be a stranger in
a flannel shirt walking through town. Absolutely, in Jennifer and Michelle's case is
what kind of involvement, if any, did NECKMAC the National Center for Missing
and exploited children have in their investigations, I don't believe. So I don't
recall seeing anything in the case file that indicated involvement. Michelle was found the
same day that went missing, and Jennifer was missing for almost a month,
but I don't think so. And at what year are you finally at a
point where you're looking at their case files, which obviously are cold cases at
this point. So I first got involved with their cases, it was maybe
twenty twelve, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, somewhere in there. My partner
at the time, detective Jean Miller, he knew that I was interested in
cold cases, and we had received a grant from nij in twenty twelve to
actually reinvestigate a lot of our cold cases using DNA, and so the cases
were farmed out to detectives within the unit to look at and we all took
a case. But he knew that I was very interested in cold cases in
general. I had voluntarily taken on a cold case back when I was in
sex crimes of a missing little girl, and so it was just a passion
of mine. I don't really remember how it happened, but around twenty twelve
twenty thirteen, I was in contact with a former FBI profiler that I had
just remained friends with over the years who retired from the FBI and moved on
to nickmk We talked from time to time about cases, and she thought Jennifer
and Michelle's cases would be good cases to present at nick MEK for a full
case review. Gene and I traveled to Alexandria and did a two day presentation.
So we did Michelle's case with the first day and then Jennifer's the second
day. For that panel of experts that they pulled together, which was I
don't know, like twenty five or so experts from various fields, we walked
through the cases. So that was really like my first in depth involvement with
the cases and reading through them and meeting Jennifer's mom and dad at that time.
Michelle's family was out of state by that point, but Jennifer's parents were
still local. As I was reading through the books, some very familiar names
were jumping off the page for me, and two of those are Colleen Fitzpatrick
and doctor Barbara ray Venter. Can you talk a little bit about the roles
that they played in helping you investigate Jennifer's homicide. And I think you could
definitely say that they helped lead to that eventual closure of the case. So,
yeah, tell us about about doctor Fitzpatrick and doctor Barbara re Vennor.
They're amazing, aren't they. Oh yeah, I first learned about Colleen Fitzpatrick
in it was like twenty fifteen. There were detectives who came up from Phoenix
to Washington and they were following up on the murder cases down there, that
the two cases from nineteen ninety and ninety one, I think they were.
Yeah, they were telling me about how they had solved the case and they
were doing follow up on Miller because he was from He wasn't from Washington,
but he had been living in Washington. At some point he had attacked a
girl on a jogging trail or something, ya. And so they were up
in my neck of the woods. And I don't actually remember whats the nexus
was to Tacoma, but for some reason they were in Tacoma and needed some
help from us. We got to talking about their cases and they told me
about how they had gotten the lead on Miller's name from Colleen Fitzpatrick. And
I'm like, say, what really. Yeah, Okay, this sounds crazy
to me. I'm no genealogist, I don't It just was completely foreign to
me. I said, I'm going to need her number because I want to
talk to her. I've got these two cases, We've got DNA in both
cases, we've got no matches in totis. Let's see what we can do.
So that's how I first met Colleen. And at this time we really
had no funding for cold case investigations. Luckily, I had an FBI agent
who was working with me on these two cases, and the FBI his bosses
had basically given him permission to pretty much work full time with me on these
two cold cases and also fund some of the work that was being done because
my agency was not in a position to pay for it. Ended up paying
for the work that Colleen did because all these things are expensive, and it's
unfortunate that cost is so prohibitive for doing a lot of these things in cold
cases, but that's the reality. At this point, Colleen ended up providing
me with I think it was three potential surnames for the suspect in Jennifer's case,
and then two or three potential surnames for the suspect in Michelle's case.
At that point, it was like, all right, this is interesting,
and I'm going to file it away and add it to my list of potential
leads, but not really sure what to do with this at the moment.
It took me about three months to go through the case files and get them
organized and add all of the male names from both cases into a database so
that I could actually make sense of everyone and track everyone and organize them and
prioritize them for DNA collection, because I knew eventually DNA was going to solve
these cases, and it was just a matter of how do we get DNA
from all these people? So I just started running these individuals that were in
the case file one by one, looking at their criminal history, basically ranking
them so I would prioritize people like color coded them their high priority, their
medium, they're low. Do we already have their DNA collected either because they're
in codice already for a previous conviction, or did we collect their DNA at
some point along the way as a part of the investigation. These were all
things that I was tracking. Once I got the database in order, we
ended up doing this child abduction response team activation, and this was in conjunction
with a thirty year anniversary of the two murders. We wanted to do something
big to get the cases back out into the public eye, but also to
potentially get some new leads in on the cases. And this is like right
at the very beginning of phenotyping coming to light and Parabond coming on the scene
doing the digital sketches based on the DNA. And so I had those two
things done, so we had some new things to share with the public that
we thought would capture the interest of people but also maybe prompt people to come
forward and give us information. Did a two day exercise of our Child Abduction
Response team. Normally, when we do these things, when we do like
an exercise for KART, that's the short Child Deduction Response Team, we just
call it KART. Normally, when we do one of these, we use
a fictitious case, right, and we just do a mock drill for our
team. But in this case, I said, you know what, we've
got the thirty year anniversary, We've got these two cold cases. They're both
child deduction murders. Why don't we use these two cases and actually have the
potential of making some progress on these cases as opposed to just doing this mock
exercise. So that's what we did instead of issuing an amber alert at the
beginning. On day one, we did a press conference and we invited all
the media there and we had big posters of the two pairabond sketches. We
had visual timelines on both cases laid out for the media, and then we
announced to the public for the first time that we had two different killers which
blew people away. Wow, that was the first time you actually said that
publicly. People have floored because the assumption for thirty years was that these two
cases are linked yestally. The absolutely blew people away, and we ended up
getting i don't know over one hundred new tips that came in. One of
the other things that we did behind the scenes during that activation and over the
two days, was we went out and collected DNA from pens of people.
We had teams of detectives and FBI agents and they were all given packets of
names of people from our list that were high priority people that we wanted to
get DNA from, and so we sent them out to go knock on people's
doors and get a cheek swab tell us a little bit more about that.
Can you compel someone to give their DNA? What's the exchange like, what's
the conversation like between members of law enforcement and at least potential suspects? How
does that get? So basically, we would show up on somebody's doorsteps,
identify ourselves as the either police or FBI, whoever happened to be there,
and let them know we were investigating a cold case or a couple of cold
cases from nineteen eighty six. Your name came up in the case and we
would like to eliminate you as a potential suspect. They can either say yep,
go ahead or no, pound sand flam the door in your face.
We only had about I think we had nine people refused, and we ended
up collecting one hundred and sixty samples during that time. Show the vast majority
of people say yes, yeah, wow, And what's your investigator's instinct?
Say to you nine people out of one hundred and seventy or so people say
no, one hundred and sixty round numbers say yes. Does that make your
investigators instinct suspect the nine people more than one hundred and sixty No. That
was the bizarre thing about this case is if you look at the criminal history
of the people on this list, it would literally shock you that these people
could be out walking around in society. So it didn't know, It didn't
make me think that because you look at one person and they're worse than the
next, and then you look at the next person and they're worse than the
last. And so I really was at a point where I could not gauge
at all just by looking at someone's history, or even just somebody saying no,
because that's the right. They don't have to give DNA just because someone
said no. It would depend on why they were on the list to begin
with, as to how interested I was in that. That's the reality was,
I had so many people to collect DNA from that when someone would say
no, I would just note it and move on to the next person,
because I had so many people to try to track down. Who knows if
the cases hadn't been solved the way they were, we would have had to
go back and revisit those people and figure out is there anything else we can
do to get a DNA sample. We do want people to buy the book,
of course, I don't know how comfortable you feel about potentially spoiling the
end of Jay. Are you willing to tell us about it or should we
just say hey, if you want to know by the book, I will
just say that both Colleen Fitzpatrick and Barbara or Adventure were absolutely critical to these
cases, and I respect both of them so much because they're just they were
trailblazers. When I first started working with Colleen, this is twenty fifteen,
so this is even this is before the advent of what we know today is
forensic genealogy. She's still working with ystr profile. This is not She wasn't
even at the stage yet that she is at today. And then with Barbara.
I met Barbara Or started working with her in I think the end of
twenty sixteen. I heard about her from someone at NICMIC at a homicide conference,
and I heard about the Lisa case out of California and how she had
identified that girl, and then reached out to her to say, if you
can identify an unknown living victim, could you identify an unknown suspect using the
same method pre Golden State Killer? This is pre all of that. And
her answer was yes, theoretically it'll work. That's how we started working together,
and obviously the rest is history. But read the book. For the
book you're listening to, Mind Over Murder. We'll be right back after this
word from our sponsors. We're back here at mindover Murder. Were there doubters?
You're working with a lot of different investigators, including veterans. Were there
doubters? Were there people that said, there's no way, lindsay that this
is going to work to help you solve this In other cases, if they
thought that, they never said it to me, Not that it would have
mattered anyway if someone did say that, because I felt like, what do
we have to lose? At this point, We've turned over so many rocks,
We've collected all this DNA, We've done all these things. What else
can we do except hope that this person gets arrested and convicted for a new
crime that puts them in the database. And frankly, I wasn't willing to
sit around and wait for that day. It was my former partner, Detective
Jean Miller, when I told him about Colleen. He was scratching his head
and he was like, don interesting, but do it? Like why not?
What do we got to lose? I think that most of the people
that I worked closely with accepted that I was a very outside the box thinker,
like to do try different things, and I just I don't know,
I just look at things from a different perspective. Tell us a little bit
about Jennifer and Michelle's law that you helped to pass in twenty nineteen. Can
you give us a rundown of what does the law do? And like why
is it so very important? Yeah? Absolutely so that law. We went
down to Olympia, which is our state capital, for I believe it was
four years in a row going down and testifying in front of the legislature to
try to get some form of this bill pass. And when I say we,
Jennifer Bastin's mother in some years, her cousin, her sister Jennifer's also
lives out of state, but would write letters. They have a ton of
supporters. We had a lot of people writing letters and unfortunately it just we
didn't get any traction for the first three years. And then finally in twenty
nineteen, we had a Representative Tina Orwaal, who has been really a powerhouse
in Washington State, passing all kinds of legislation related to sexual assault, testing
and sexual assault investigations, and so she really helped to fearhead this legislation and
move it forward. Once we finally got to law passed, I'd ask that
it be named Jennifer and Michelle's Law, so that we wouldn't forget why this
is so important and these these two girls, we need to remember them.
My theory at the time that we first started pushing for this law was that
the suspect was probably slipped through the cracks somehow, was probably one of these
guys that like either died in prison or was in prison somewhere today, never
had their DNA collected. And we've seen example an example over time of this
happening all around the country. So that was my thought process and really my
motivation for trying to strive for changing the law in Washington, because what we
had was every state's got different DNA laws, and every state usually has a
continuum of the DNA law and how it changes over time. Most states passed
their original DNA laws back in the early nineteen nineties, and in Washington,
our DNA law only addressed violent crimes and sex crimes and convictions, so you
had to be convicted of a violent crime or a sex crime in order to
have your DNA collected, and then eventually the law progressed to all felonies in
two thousand and two, and then they started adding in some gross misdemeanors as
well. There are lots of loopholes in the law with regard to people flipping
through and getting convicted for qualifying offenses but never actually getting collected. The thing
that I noticed, and that what really stood out to me were people who
died inmates, who died in prison, or just really really bad serial offenders,
serial rapists, serial murderers who were dead we didn't have DNA for and
who we legally couldn't get DNA for because they didn't qualify under our law.
And that's what's mind blowing if you really think about that, because we don't
limit timeframes onto many evidence from homicide cases or sexual assault cases to CODIS,
right, Like, there's no you could go back to the forties if you
had it and submit it to CODIS on the evidence side. But for the
offender side, most states have rules that say you cannot enter DNA from offenders
prior to the DNA law taking effect, or if they're already out of custody.
Now you can't get their DNA. There's no mechanism in place to put
their DNA into CODIS. In Washington, I had come up with lots of
examples of really bad guys, really horrific offenders, who, in my mind,
should be in CODIS for the purpose of solving cold cases. Not only
were they absent from CODIS, we legally could not put them in even if
we could track down a sample of their DNA. Is what Jennifer and Michelle's
law has done. It's changed that law so that now regardless of your conviction
date, even if you were convicted in nineteen seventy five or nineteen eighty,
if your offense would qualify today, then you're eligible to be entered into CODIS
if law enforcement can legally obtain a sample and it can go into CODIS for
the purpose of solving cold cases. We appreciate you being so innovative, and
I know it's not just you, but a lot of people work on this
law. But we've talked to Rock Harman and other guests on Mind over Murder.
We are both civilians, but we are shocked at the CODIS gap.
As Rock was referring to it, the fact that there are rapists and murderers,
convicted rapists and murderers, some of whom are currently incarcerated, some of
whom may actually be out, hopefully living a reasonable life and moving forward,
but they were still convicted rapists and murderers whose DNA is not in the system.
I will continue saying this until we figure out as a country how to
fix this, much in the same way Washington State did. This should be
a national scandal. Rock feels that there are tens of thousands of offenders whose
DNA should be in the system who are not in the system right. I
don't even think that we can accurately gauge what the number is. But it's
such a convoluted and complicated issue because not all states even would allow DNA to
be collected from someone who's no longer incarcerated. Let's say you get convicted of
a murder in two thousand and ten, which is not that long ago,
and you do your time when you get out. In some states, once
you're out, that's it. If the law enforcement or the correction system had
the opportunity to get your DNA and they didn't, too bad. There's no
mechanism in place to compel people in those situations to provide a DNA sample,
and again it varies from state to state. Everyone's different, but that's not
uncommon and not unusual. It's completely unacceptable. There are a lot of things
about this country that I find very disturbing, and the fact that we've allowed
ourselves to develop a system with fifty different approaches to the same problem is insane.
And this is the kind of thing that needs to be changed at the
federal level. I'm very passionate about this. I'm the brother of a murder
victim whose case is currently unsolved. Kristin and I are working with eight families
whose loved ones were killed as part of the Colonial Parkway murders. We're living
this. This is unacceptable, and this needs to be addressed, and I'm
going to put this on squarely in the lap of the Department of Justice.
We need to fix this at a national level. It's great that you made
such strides in Washington State, and it makes me feel good to see that
the situation can be improved. We have to do better than this. The
idea that convicted rapists and murderers are walking around who still have to check in
many cases with their parole officers, So why not collect their DNA the next
time they're in for a face to face meeting with their parole officer as a
condition of their parole. And I just think that there are a lot of
assumptions made by people that, oh, if they went to prison and they
got convicted of a rape or murder, of course their DNA would have been
collected. There's just too many assumptions. There's a lot of fingerpointing that goes
on because these statutes are murky, and so if somebody gets missed along the
way, then there oftentimes is no mechanism in place to verify that the person
actually did get collected, and that's where people are slipping through. In addition
to working in these cases, which of course is very difficult, you do
have a child of your own, as working on these cases affected how you
interact with her and the precautions that you take about her safety. Yeah,
my husband and I are both retired law enforcement. It's hard. It's hard
to know what men really know, the worst things that have happened in your
community and then let your young daughter go out and have some sense of freedom.
I've gotten better over time, but it hasn't been easy, I will
say that. So what is next for you in terms of projects? Can
we expect another book? Oh goodness, I don't know if I have the
energy at this point for another book. But I do have a couple of
podcast projects in the work, ya that I'm really excited about that. One
of the projects is I've teamed up with a local journalist here in Washington and
she and I are going back and looking at some cases that happened back in
the nineteen seventies here in Washington. And they are a variety of solved and
unsolved cases, but all linked to the same serial killer that no one's ever
heard of. It should be very interesting, Okay, Yeah, Carolyn Assorio,
and she's a journalist out of Seattle. She actually has her own podcasts.
She has two different podcasts. One of them is called The Shadow Girls,
and that one is a series about the Green River the victims of the
Green River Killer. Oh yeah. Then the other one that she's currently doing
is called The Murder Chronicles, and that is I think it's a weekly podcast
where she covers different cases and I don't think they're all Washington based cases.
But she's really great She's really passionate and she's made some great connections with some
of the victims and family members in these cases that we're working on. So
I'm just really excited to do it, and I think it's going to be
really impactful. I hope that we actually get some answers for some of these
families. It sounds like the two of you would make a phenomenal team working
together. Yeah. The book is called in My DNA, My Career Investigation,
Your Worst Nightmares, Lindsay, Where can everybody find your book? My
book is available on Amazon, Barnes, and Noble, any of the ebook
platforms, and it's also available via audiobook, Lindsay, thank you so much
for joining us today on mind Over Murder. We really appreciate you taking the
time. Thank you. That's going to do it for this episode of mind
Ever Murder. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time.
Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions.
Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley. Our logo art is by
Pamela Arnois. Our theme music is by Kevin McLoud. Mind Over Murder is
distributed in partnership with Coral Space Media. You can follow us on Facebook,
Twitter, or Instagram. You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway
murders on Facebook, and finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at
Bill Thomas. Five six. Thank you for listening to Mind Over Murder