Speaker 1: There's something I don't know, almost intoxicating about the idea
of a perfect mystery, the kind that really baffles generations
of investigators. The timeline just goes cold, the evidence seems
to evaporate, and the killer, well, they just vanish.
Speaker 2: And that's the central paradox we're you going to dig
into today, because the idea of an unsolvable crime is
often just a label we put on it based on
our current limits. The most enduring mysteries, the ones that
span decades, are almost always cracked by the smallest, most overlooked.
Speaker 1: Thread, a thread that was there from the beginning, exactly.
Speaker 2: The key piece of evidence that solves the case was
almost always present from day one.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. Today, we are taking a massive
look at two dozen sources, two dozen cases where the
answer seemed completely buried forever. Our mission is to really
analyze these breakthroughs and understand not just who is caught,
but more importantly, how the impossible was actually accomplished.
Speaker 2: Right. We're looking for the patterns, what connects the science,
the persistence, and sometimes just pure dumb luck.
Speaker 1: And this deep dive is really for you, the learner
who values getting into the weeds, you know, finding that
surprising insight. We're trying to look past the sensational headlines
to find the real lessons in forensics, in human nature.
Speaker 2: And we want to know what this specific mechanism is.
What is it that breaks a thirty year wall of silence?
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's frame this whole thing around the time factor.
Many of these cases they span thirty, forty, even sixty
five years. What fundamentally changes in that time that allows
for a resolution.
Speaker 2: Well, it's not that the evidence gets older, it's that
we finally figure out how to listen to it, how
to read that specific chemical or biological or even digital signature.
Speaker 1: The crime left behind the long arc of science.
Speaker 2: Precisely, we often find the evidence was sitting right there,
you know, in an evidence box. Sometimes is mislabeled, sometimes
dismissed as too degraded, but it was scientifically unusable until forensics,
especially DNA, evolved to meet it. And that gap, that
waiting game, that's maybe the biggest test investigative discipline there is.
Speaker 1: So investigators have to believe in a future capability they
can't even imagine.
Speaker 2: Yet they do. And I think we should start right
there with maybe The ultimate test of that patience, the
sixty five year wait for answers. In the case of
the Boy in the Box.
Speaker 1: This is one of the most haunting mysteries in American history.
Speaker 2: For sure, absolutely. The victim, a young boy, maybe four
to six years old, was found in February of nineteen
fifty seven. He was in a cardboard box in Philadelphia's
Foxchase neighborhood.
Speaker 1: And the details are just grim. He was wrapped in
a cheap blanket. His body showed clear signs of severe
abuse malnutrition. The investigation was huge. Right away, police canets
coned the woods. There were public pleas everywhere. It became
this like regional obsession.
Speaker 2: But they had nothing, no identity, and critically no usable
evidence beyond the body itself. He became known as America's
Unknown child.
Speaker 1: And that's what he was for nearly sixty five years.
What's so fascinating to me is the sheer person, you know,
the investigators who kept this case alive over generations.
Speaker 2: They realized identity was the key, but their tools were
frankly hopeless back then. They even tried to collect DNA
back in nineteen ninety eight when the tech was getting better,
but the sample was just too small, too degraded. The
methods weren't there yet, so.
Speaker 1: They tried again in twenty nineteen. That's an incredible generational
commitment right there. What made that effort different?
Speaker 2: What was really a two part thing. Okay, on one hand,
you had much better methods for you know, just pulling
out these tiny, really degraded DNA fragments. But the real
game changer was the explosion of forensic genetic genealogy.
Speaker 1: FGG, which goes beyond just matching to a criminal database.
Speaker 2: Way beyond. It takes the DNA profile and uploads it
to public genealogy databases. Now there are protocols and consent issues,
of course, but they start looking for distant relatives, second, third,
even fourth.
Speaker 1: Cousins, So they weren't looking for a killer. They were
building the boys family tree exactly.
Speaker 2: The genealogists built this massive treat backward and forward, narrowing
it down until they identified his birth mother's family. And
that final crucial link came in twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1: Joseph Augustus Zarelli, that's the name they finally announced. And
the insight here is just it's profound. It's not just
about the power of modern genealogy. It's about the absolute
necessity of preserving evidence long term.
Speaker 2: Right. If that original sample, however degraded, hadn't been meticulously
stored for sixty plus years, if the chain of custody
had broken, FGG, you would be useless. It's really a
triumph of the evidence locker.
Speaker 1: It's a lesson for every agency. Right, failure today doesn't
mean failure tomorrow.
Speaker 2: It shifts the mindset from can we solve it now?
To can we make sure this evidence survives so it
can be solved later.
Speaker 1: That's a powerful idea. And speaking of genealogy changing everything,
we have to talk about the case that really put
FGG on the map for the public. The Golden State
Killer Joseph James DiAngelo.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely yeah. Dangelo is this mythical figure of terror evasion.
Between nineteen seventy four and nineteen eighty six, he committed
this unbelievable string of crimes thirteen murders, dozens of assaults,
scores of burglaries all over California, and then the crimes
just stopped, spanished completely. He had so many names, the
East Area rapist, the original knightstocker, and.
Speaker 1: He outsmarted multiple police forces for forty years, only to
be found living as a quiet, retired truck mechanic.
Speaker 2: And you have to give credit not just to the science,
but to the people, the cold case investigators and especially
the crime writer Michelle McNamara, whose work just kept the
pressure on.
Speaker 1: So the break finally comes in twenty eighteen. How did
they do it?
Speaker 2: Well, unlike the boy in the box, they were looking
from him directly, but the traditional databases you know, COTIS,
turned up nothing, so they pivoted to FGG. They used
public ancestry databases to start building out family trees from
the crimes in DNA.
Speaker 1: Okay, but let me push on that for a second.
The breakthrough wasn't just the tech, right, It was the
decision to use a public database like ged match, which
was built for hobbyists. Was it a technological breakthrough or
was it a policy and data breakthrough?
Speaker 2: That is a fantastic and critical distinction. The tech had
been getting better for years, but the data pool was
the game changer. By accessing millions of profiles that curious
citizens had uploaded, they expanded their search from direct matches
to distant genetic cousins.
Speaker 1: So they found a third or fourth cousin.
Speaker 2: Exactly, someone who provided the entry point into his family line.
Without that public contribution, the DNA profile was just a
random sequence with nowhere to go.
Speaker 1: Once they had his name, they got his DNA off
a car door handle and a discarded tissue to confirm it.
Speaker 2: It's that dual life phenomenon that I find so deeply unsettling,
The ability to maintain that facade a quiet suburban guy
for four decades.
Speaker 1: It makes you realize anyone could be hiding something, only
to be caught by a biological signature that can't ever erase.
Speaker 2: And that biological signature works just as well for identicy
fying victims, which takes us to the Bearbrook murders. This
is a case where DNA not only identified the victims,
but also retroactively identified the killer, even though he was
already dead.
Speaker 1: This one is profoundly dark. From Bearbrooks State Park in
New Hampshire, we're talking about four sets of human remains,
an adult female and three young girls. They were found
in two different years, nineteen eighty five and two thousand
and for decades they were just known as the Allenstown Four.
Speaker 2: A total mystery, but the identification web they built is
just incredible. In twenty seventeen, genetic genealogists finally identified the
adult female as Marley's Elizabeth Honeychurch, and two of the
girls as her daughters. But the real twist, the breakthrough
came with identifying the fourth.
Speaker 1: Child, Ria rasmesin right.
Speaker 2: And this is where the killer's identity finally emerges from
the shadows. Rio was the child of the likely killer,
a man named Terry Peter Rasmisen, a notorious serial killer
with a bunch of failiuses who had actually died in
prison back in twenty ten.
Speaker 1: So the DNA created this reallyationlationship map that connected all
four victims to each other and then to the one
man who linked them all precisely.
Speaker 2: It proves that DNA works across the time barrier. Whether
the perpetrator is alive or dead. You can still get
closure even if you can't get a prosecution.
Speaker 1: That's such a critical distinction, the pursuit of truth outliving
the pursuit of justice in that narrow legal sense. I mean,
imagine being a family member finally getting a name for
your loved one, only to learn the killer is already gone.
Speaker 2: You get the certainty, but you're denied that final accountability.
It's a complicated kind of piece.
Speaker 1: We see that same kind of perseverance payoff in the
Green River killer case, but this time the breakthrough was
less about genealogy and more about just the simple power
of preservation.
Speaker 2: Gary Ridgeway, he cast this chilling shadow over King County,
Washington through the entire nineteen eighties. We're talking in estimated
forty nine concerned victims. He was systematically preying on young,
vulnerable women. The investigation was massive. They even had FBI
profilers like Ryelano's tool using psychological strategies to try and
get a confession.
Speaker 1: But the psychology wasn't enough. The break when it came
in two thousand and one was purely scientific.
Speaker 2: It was, and the key was that investigators back in
the eighties, working under all this pressure with what was
then very crude DNA tech, had the foresight to meticulously
collect and preserve biological evidence from several victims.
Speaker 1: So why couldn't they use it back then? Was it
the sample size, the quality.
Speaker 2: Mostly the test itself. Back in the eighties, DNA testing
required pretty large, clean samples. They were using methods that
were destructed to the sample and needed a lot of material,
but by the nineties, the Polymberus chain reaction PCR had
been refined.
Speaker 1: And PCR lets you amplify tiny.
Speaker 2: Samples millions of times over, so that two thousand and
one lab could take a minute degraded sample like sperm
found on preserve clothing and get a definitive link to Ridgeway,
something that was just impossible two decades earlier.
Speaker 1: That is the triumph of foresight we were talking about. The
investigators who collected that evidence knowing they couldn't use it
yet are the real heroes there.
Speaker 2: They were betting on the future and it paid off.
Confronted with irrefutable genetic proof, Ridgeway confessed to dozens of
murders to avoid the death penalty. The science gave them
the leverage they needed to get the truth.
Speaker 1: Which really sets the stage for our last case in
this section, one that highlights the emotional complexity when the
evidence itself is compromised. The yogurt shop murders in Austin, Texas.
Speaker 2: This was a nineteen ninety one crime just infamous for
its brutality. Four teenage girls were bound, shot and then
left in a deliberately set fire, and that fire was
the primary obstacle. As the sources say, it left smoke
and soot on every surface, made fingerprinting kind of difficult
and understated a massive understatement, and the investigation was plagued
by dead ends and tragically false confessions that just muddy
the waters for decades.
Speaker 1: But a resolution finally came in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: What changed advances in DNA analysis and ballistics. They were
able to analyze minute traces that survived the fire, and
they identified Robert Eugene Brisher as the perpetrator, a violent
offender who unfortunately had died back in nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 1: So we're back to that same thought point from the
bear Brook case, closure without prosecution.
Speaker 2: Yes, the forensic link provided the clearest answer the families
ever had. It exonerated those who had falsely confessed. But
the family sentiment quoted in the source material is just
it's heartbreaking. I wish my father was here today to
be able to be punished for his crimes.
Speaker 1: It's a profound dilemma. You get the identity, the answer
you've been searching for, but you're denied that final chapter
of justice.
Speaker 2: So this whole first part, it's a story of patience.
It's the long arc of science finally catching up exactly.
Speaker 1: The message is clear. The most minute biological traces are
in a way immortal. They're just waiting for their moment. Okay,
let's pivot completely. We've talked about the methodical, decades long
grind of science. Now let's look at the other extreme.
Sometimes the brain has nothing to do with the technological leap.
Sometimes it's just an improbable coincidence, a ridiculously tiny clue,
or an act of pure arrogance.
Speaker 2: We're moving from the microscopic patients of the lamb to
the sheer chaos of human error and chance. And the
perfect example of this is the self sabotage committed by
the BTK killer Dennis Raider.
Speaker 1: Dennis Rader's double life is just terrifying. Starting as murders
in nineteen seventy four, he was bind torture kill BTK,
but to his community, he was an unassuming church council president,
a husband, a father.
Speaker 2: And his whole act hinged on meticulous control and anonymity
until his arrogance just got the better of him in
the early two thousands. After decades of silence, he couldn't
resist the thrill. He started sending taunting communications to the
police and media, and the fatal question came when he
sat a floppy disc asking police if it could be traced.
Speaker 1: And the police lied, They said no. That's a great
moment of investigative cunning right there.
Speaker 2: A brilliant move because they looked at the file's metadata
on the disc and traced it back to a specific computer.
Speaker 1: So what exactly is metadata? For people who might not know, It's.
Speaker 2: Not the content of the file, it's the data about
the file, who created it, when it was last saved,
and critically, the computer name it was authored on. They
found the file had been saved by Dennis and the
unique computer info pointed directly to a PC at Christ
Lutheran Church in Wichita.
Speaker 1: Where Raider was a lifelong member and yes, the church
council president.
Speaker 2: His arrogance was his undoing. He thought he was smarter
than the metadata, this invisible digital breadcrumb. Raider was so
careful about physical crime scenes, but he missed the digital
footprint on a cheap floppy disc. It shattered his public
image overnight, all.
Speaker 1: Because he couldn't resist taunting them with a piece of
technology He didn't fully understand.
Speaker 2: It's a powerful lesson. But if you want to talk
about absurdity mixed with the mundane, you have to talk
about the son of Sam David Berkowitz and a parking ticket.
Speaker 1: The gravity of his crimes versus the pettiness of the
infraction is just unbelievable.
Speaker 2: It's a classic case of luck meeting sharp observation. Berkowitz's
random killing spree in seventies New York had the whole
city paralyzed. Investigators were baffled.
Speaker 1: So in July nineteen seventy seven, Berkowitz drives to Brooklyn
for what would be his final murder, and he parks
illegally blocks a fire hydrant, I think, and he gets
a ticket.
Speaker 2: He does, and a local resident, Cecilia Davis, she witnessed
the ticket being issued, and later she saw a man
who looked like Berkovitz with what looked like a gun.
After she heard the gunshots, she put two and two
together and called the police.
Speaker 1: And this is where the meticulous police work comes in.
An investigator connects her eyewitness description with the city's database
of parking violations.
Speaker 2: Right they traced the ticket to Berkowitz's car, found the
car outside his house and arrested him right there, a dramatic,
almost anti climactic end to a spree that terrified millions.
Speaker 1: I just think the genius of the investigator who thought
to connect those two data points. That's the real skill.
We talk about high tech DNA, but this was just
low tech, meticulous cross referencing.
Speaker 2: The ultimate example, Berkovitz was caught not by some grand
surveillance operation but by his own mild convenience.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's jump back even further to the Lindberg kidnapping,
the crime of the century in nineteen thirty two. The
clue here was also traceable, but a very different kind
of currency.
Speaker 2: The abduction of Charles Lindberg Junior captivated the world. The
ransom was paid in gold certificates, a type of currency
that was just about to be recalled by the government,
and the crucial break came when some of that traceable
gold started to surface in circulation almost a year later.
Speaker 1: It was traced to a gas station in New York,
and the attendant, being incredibly savvy, noted the licensed clate
number of the man who used one of the notes,
and that plate led them to Bruno Richard Hoptman, a
German carpenter two years after the kidnapping, and.
Speaker 2: If the parking ticket was luck, the wood evidence here
was meticulous. Nineteen thirties era of forensics. Police searched Hoptman's
house and they found a missing floorboard in his attic.
Investigators took rail sixteen from the kidnapping ladder, placed it
in the hole and it fit perfectly matched the grain patterns,
the nail holes, everything.
Speaker 1: This source material calls that wood evidence one of the
nails in Hauptman's coffin. It's incredible how a physical match
like that could be the defining evidence it was a craft.
Speaker 2: It highlights the principle of linkage evidence, whether it's a
genetic sequence or a wood grain pattern. If you can
physically link the suspects environment to the crime scene, you
have an irrefutable anchor.
Speaker 1: And speaking of minute details, we have to talk about
the micro forensics that solve the case of David Guy.
This might be my favorite in terms of sheer absurdity.
Speaker 2: This case from Hampshire, England in twenty twelve is a
benchmark for trace evidence. David Guy's remains were found on
a beach wrapped in a curtain after an initial lack
of evidence, police discovered eight cat hairs on that curtain.
Speaker 1: Eight eight cat hairs and that was the smoking gun.
Speaker 2: It was they trace those hairs using the specificity of
feline genetics to Guy's neighbor, David Hilder. Mitochondrial DNA analysis
confirmed a match between hairs from Hilder's cat and the
hairs at the sea.
Speaker 1: And how specific is cat DNA?
Speaker 2: Well, this cat's specific genetic profile matched only about two
percent of the UK cat population, so that's a highly
specific anchor. It was the first time cat DNA was
ever used in a British criminal trial and it led
to Hilder's manslaughter conviction.
Speaker 1: That is just amazing. And if cat hair isn't wild
enough for you, let's talk about the finished car theft
that was solved by a mosquito.
Speaker 2: The absurdity factor here is off the charts. In two
thousand and eight in Finland, a stolen car is found
abandoned inside. Police find a mosquito that looked like it
had recently fed.
Speaker 1: And they collected it. Imagine the care that took.
Speaker 2: I can't, but they did, and the lab analysis revealed
a DNA match between the blood inside the mosquito and
a man in the police register. He denied it, said
he only hitchhiked in the car, but he was arrested
based on his blood being inside that vehicle.
Speaker 1: It's a thrilling example of how the definition of a
witness is constantly expanding. Who knew an insect could be
an unwitting witness?
Speaker 2: The principle is, if a molecule of blood or a
skin in cell exists, it can be cataloged and matched.
But I mean, you have to credit the finish officer
who thought, wait, that insect has evidence. That's the real breakthrough.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Now for a case where investigators just throughout the
rule book and went straight to the stars for help,
the disappearance of Don Sanchez.
Speaker 2: Don Sanchez disappeared in nineteen ninety one. The investigation focused
on her boyfriend, Bernardo Bass, but the case stalled due
to a lack of evidence. Years later, police suspected Bass
had buried his car in an abandoned lot.
Speaker 1: Digging up an entire lot to find a car as well,
it's prohibitively expensive, so they turned to NASA for help.
That is not a sentence you expect to hear in
a police report.
Speaker 2: It shows incredible adaptability. They leverage NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
NASA has these advanced underground magnetic rovers and ground penetrating radar.
They use it for planetary science. So they applied this
highly specialized tech to a local crime scene.
Speaker 1: And using that tech they found vehicular parts matching Bass's
car and evidence that Sanchez's body had been there.
Speaker 2: It shows that sometimes you need an almost sci fi
level of resourcefulness. Bass eventually pleaded no contest to manslaughter.
Speaker 1: So this whole section shows that while science can grind slowly,
luck can be instantaneous, whether it's the killer's own arrogance,
a parking ticket, or mosquito. Sometimes the universe just intervenes.
Speaker 2: We've covered science, we've covered luck. Now let's focus on
the human breakthrough cases solved because a person finally came forward,
a lie unraveled, or a media campaign just paid off
decades later.
Speaker 1: These are the cases where the moral weight of a
secret finally collapses, and the disappearance of Jacob Wetterling in
nineteen eighty nine is a perfect example of the cost
of those long delayed answers.
Speaker 2: Jacob Wetterling's abduction from a rural road in Minnesota was
a national trauma. He was just eleven. It led to
a massive, sustained search effort, but for decades the nation
just waited in this agonizing hope.
Speaker 1: The break came in twenty fifteen. Danny Heinrich, who had
been a person interest for years, was arrested on unrelated charges,
and investigators confronted him with new evidence, right.
Speaker 2: Forensical links from another case from years prior, and the
weight of it all just finally broke him. He confessed
in September twenty sixteen as part of a plea deal,
and he led authorities to Jacob's remains.
Speaker 1: The confession provided, as the source says, excruciating answers. It's
a painful kind of victory.
Speaker 2: It is. It emphasizes that closure doesn't negate the fresh grief.
Hope is replaced by certainty, which brings a terrible kind
of peace. It forces everyone to process the reality of
the crime, not just the mystery of the disappearance.
Speaker 1: And sometimes the resolution doesn't even require a full confession,
but just the simple identification of evidence collected early on,
like in the case of Denise Hubert.
Speaker 2: Denise Hubert was abducted in California, in nineteen ninety one
after a car broke down. The case had very few
leads at first. The break came three years later when
they identified John Femlaro, a local man with a history
of violent.
Speaker 1: Behavior, and the key was evidence longevity fingerprints. Specifically, they
were able to use prince collected during that initial investigation
to link him to the crime.
Speaker 2: It led to his conviction in nineteen ninety seven. It's
a reminder of how seemingly ordinary encounters can turn fatal, and.
Speaker 1: It reinforces the role of those criminal history databases. Famalara
was on their radar because of his past. The human
element of past behavior is so often the predictor.
Speaker 2: It is now let's look at the power of a
tip from inside the system itself. The cold case of
Susan Schwartz.
Speaker 1: Her nineteen seventy nine shooting death in Washington puzzled detectives
for over thirty years. This one was solved entirely by
human intervention, triggered by, of all things, a pack of
playing cards.
Speaker 2: Right in twenty eleven, an inmates saw Schwartz's face on
a cold case card. An initiative to keep these memories
alive in prisons and he called police. He recalled that
a man named Gregory Johnson had confessed the murder to
him years earlier.
Speaker 1: That inmate's tip was the essential thread. It led police
to a witness who finally admitted she was present during
the murder. She had been threatened into silence for decades.
Speaker 2: And the motive was finally revealed. Schwartz had helped Johnson's
wife leave him after repeated domestic violence. Johnson got a
twenty four year sentence, all based on that long delayed testimony.
Speaker 1: That's the power of conscience or maybe just someone finally
feeling safe enough to talk. It shows the importance of
just keeping the face and the facts visible.
Speaker 2: It's a compelling argument for persistence in publicizing unsolved cases.
It took thirty two years, but the photograph still worked.
Speaker 1: And speaking of public media, the resolution of a Texas
crime solved by America's Most Wanted has a level of
eerie coincidence that just sounds made up.
Speaker 2: This is one of the most serendipitous examples in all
of our sources. Yeah, a crime in rolling Wood, Texas
went unsolved until a TV segment in nineteen ninety three.
Speaker 1: So the setup is this a bunch of employees and
patrons at the Green Parrot Cafe in Salt Lake City
are watching America's Most Wanted. The segment is about a
cook who killed someone in a robbery and jumped bail
a totally unrelated case.
Speaker 2: But here's the kicker. After that segment ends, the very
next one is about the Rollingwood, Texas case, and the
runaway suspect is a man named Kenneth Lovesey, who just
happens to be the replacement cook hired at that exact
same Green Parrot Cafe after the former chef was killed.
Speaker 1: He was still in the kitchen flipping burgers when the
police recalled. The entire restaurant is watching TV, and one
of the fugitives is standing twenty feet away.
Speaker 2: The irony is just off the charts. It perfectly illustrates
the random but powerful benefits of media outreach.
Speaker 1: It really does. It reinforces that, even in this high
tech world, a sharp eyed citizen is still one of
the most powerful tools in law enforcement.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we've covered science, luck, and confession. Now let's
look at how identity itself can be lost and found
in the most extraordinary ways.
Speaker 1: We have to start with eaton pats. His nineteen seventy
nine disappearance from a Soho street in New York City
fundamentally changed how this country approached missing children.
Speaker 2: He was only sick. It was the first time he
was walking to the school bus stop by himself, and
his face was among the very first to be placed
on milk cartons across the country. That campaign changed national policy.
Speaker 1: It changed how millions of parents thought about safety that
single terrifying walk.
Speaker 2: Decades of searching turned up nothing, but in two eighty twelve,
a new tip emerged, leading investigators to Pedro Hernandez, a
former bodega stock clerk who worked near Eton's bus stop.
The tip came from a relative who had reportedly heard
a confession years earlier.
Speaker 1: And Hernandez was convicted in twenty seventeen, though the sources
do note that the conviction was later overturned in twenty
twenty five and prosecutors are seeking a retrial right.
Speaker 2: So regardless of the legal back and forth, the emotional
and social impact is permanent. The case is a touchstone
for parental anxiety. That quote, millions of parents sat at
home and thought, there but for the grace of God
goes my child. That says it all.
Speaker 1: Now, let's discuss an incredible case of misdirection leading to
a successful resolution, the kidnapping of Monica Judith Bonia.
Speaker 2: This one started with the search for a different girl,
Nileen Marshall, who was abducted in Montana in nineteen eighty three.
Seven years later, the show Unsolved Mysteries featured her case,
hoping for leeds.
Speaker 1: And the public awareness worked, just not in the way
anyone expected. A tipster called in believing he saw Nileen Marshall.
The police investigated, and they did find a missing girl,
but it wasn't Nileen. It was Monica Judith Bonia, who
had been kidnapped back in nineteen eighty two by her
non custodial father.
Speaker 2: And Bonia was reunited with her mother after eight long years.
It's an incredible unexpected benefit of publicizing these cases. The
primary mystery, Nileen Marshall's disappearance is still unsolved, but a
different family got their child back.
Speaker 1: It shows that these campaigns cast a wide net and
you never know what you'll catch exactly.
Speaker 2: The purpose is discovery, regardless of the initial.
Speaker 1: Target, and sometimes the person who solves the case is
the victim themselves. Years later, the story of Steve.
Speaker 2: Carter, this case is just a beautiful story of curiosity.
In twenty ten, Steve Carter, who was adopted as a child,
started searching for his birth family history.
Speaker 1: And this leads him to a missing children's website where unbelievably,
he finds an age progression image of himself. He's looking
at his own face, aged up, staring back at him
as a missing child.
Speaker 2: I can't even imagine that moment a DNA test confirmed
he was Marx Panama Moriarty Barnes, missing since nineteen seventy seven.
He was taken by his birth mother and placed in
an orphanage in Hawaii.
Speaker 1: And when he called his birth family after thirty two years,
they were, as the source says, absolutely positively thunderstruck and amazed.
Speaker 2: The case would have never been solved without his own
personal quest. It teaches us that sometimes the best investigator
is the person with the highest stake in the truth.
Speaker 1: Finally, let's look at the huge distance in time span
in the case of Polet Jaster, cracked by the most
minor physical detail imaginable.
Speaker 2: Pollet Jasper disappeared from Michigan in nineteen seventy nine, A
year later, an unidentified hit and run victim, a Jane Doe,
was found in Houston, Texas. The two cases were one
thousand miles apart, totally unconnected, and the Jane Doe had
no DNA or dental records at the time.
Speaker 1: The link came thirty years later, in twenty fourteen, a
forensic anthropologist, Sharon Derek cracked it based on an online
tip about the Jane Doe's autopsy pictures and the distinguishing
feature three distinctive freckles on the Jane Doe's cheek.
Speaker 2: Three freckles. Derek used digital imaging to compare the autopsi
photos to Paullette's childhood photos, and that unique trio of
pigment clusters was a perfect match.
Speaker 1: It's the power of a tiny, persistent visual detail bridging
a thirty year, one thousand mile gap. It proves that
identification doesn't always rely on cutting edge tech. Sometimes it
relies on a sharp eye seeing what everyone else overlooked.
Speaker 2: It forces us to appreciate the low tech breakthroughs right
alongside the high tech ones.
Speaker 1: Okay, we've spent most of this deep dive on criminal acts,
but the long wait for answers can sometimes make a
disappearance feel criminal, even when it isn't. This last section
is about cases where the truth turns out to be tragic,
not sinister.
Speaker 2: The disappearance of Tamila Jackson and Cheryl Miller in nineteen
seventy one is a perfect example. Two seventeen year old
friends vanished in South Dakota while driving to a party
in an.
Speaker 1: Old stewed baker Lark and for decades it was a
haunting mystery. Speculation was rampant. There was even a false
confession in two thousand and seven that collapsed.
Speaker 2: The families lived for over forty years with the constant
anxiety that their daughters had been murdered. The discovery came
in twenty thirteen, almost forty two years later, a fisherman
spotted a wheel sticking out of the water in Bruol Creek.
The water levels had dropped because of a drought.
Speaker 1: And the excavation was immense. They had to pump ten
thousand gallons of water out per minute and spent hours
digging just to get to the car, But they recovered.
Speaker 2: The rusted, stewed baker with skeletal remains inside. Forensic analysis
confirmed it was the girls, and critically, all the evidence
was consistent with a tragic accident. They likely just drove
off the road into the creek.
Speaker 1: It brought answers. Finally, it replaced the agonizing uncertainty of
a murder with the tragic certainty of an accident. It
allowed the families to stop looking for a monster and
just grieve a loss.
Speaker 2: And that really connects all the threads for us. Whether
it was DNA, a cat hair, a parking ticket, or
a car emerging from a creek, the resolution always hinged
on a single preserved piece of data that outlasted the
event itself.
Speaker 1: From a nineteen thirties wood match to twenty twenty two
genetic genealogy. The enduring theme is the human inability to
be truly anonymous. The world just retains these signatures that
time can't erase.
Speaker 2: That brings us to the end of our journey. Through
these extraordinary breakthroughs, we see the incredible patience required for
science to catch up, sometimes taking sixty five years.
Speaker 1: We've marveled at the sheer randomness of a lucky break,
whether it was a mosquito or a floppy disk, and
we've confirmed the essential role of human agency. A confession,
a long delayed tip, or a victim solving their own case.
Speaker 2: What these twenty cases teach us is that the line
between solvable and unsolvable is constantly moving. It's driven by
dedication and innovation, and the most enduring lesson is the
power of documentation. No piece of evidence, be it three
freckles or eight cat hairs, should ever be truly discarded.
Speaker 1: So, now that we've untacked how these threads were finally pulled,
we want to leave you with one final thought. When
you look at the cases solved by the most random chance,
the parking ticket, the cat hare, the mosquito, does this
reliance on sheer, unpredictable luck suggest our investigative systems need
to rely less on technology and more on simple, meticulous
police work in documentation.
Speaker 2: Or is technology the ultimate safety net, the thing that
ensures even a momentary lapse in judgment from forty years
ago will eventually catch up. The balance is difficult. You
need the science to prove the link, but you need
the human detective to notice the seemingly irrelevant detail in
the first place.
Speaker 1: Which side do you lean toward as the future of
solving cold cases? Let us know your thoughts on this
and thank you for joining us on thrilling threads.