Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: 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 Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 2: And I'm Bill Thomas.
Speaker 3: We've got a special treat for you here today on
mindover Murder because we have so many listeners asking, well, Kristen,
when are we going to hear about your various book projects. Today,
you actually get to hear about some of my literary exploits.
Mister Thomas will have to agree to do some of
his literary exploits at some other time, like maybe next month, Bill, possibly, maybe,
But I decided that I wanted to actually write something
long form about CODIS, to codify pardon the semi pun,
right there, everything that we know or are still trying
to figure out about the CODIS database system. It's a
pretty tricky, intricate topic, and I needed to put down
for myself in writing everything that I knew or thought
I knew about CODIS. And then I figured, if I'm
writing it down for me, and I'm writing it down
for Bill, I may as well write it down for
all the rest of you and share it with you
on our podcast episode as well.
Speaker 2: When this episode launches, which will be Monday, the twelfth
of August, will also put up a copy of your article.
I think a lot of our listeners know we've had
a lot of questions about COTIS, and one of the
things I really liked about your article, Kristin, is that
it hovers a bit about what COTIS is and how
it works. We've had a lot of listener questions about
the system, particularly surrounding the Colonial Parkram murders, which we'll
get into in a minute. I think this is a
great starting point for a good basic understanding of what
codis is.
Speaker 3: I tried to give it some context too, because some
people have asked, is your background in crime and justice
and the answer is no, it is not. My background
is decidedly not crime and justice. So I tried to
put in some context how I and how I think
a lot of us actually learned about DNA, CODIS and
various other things. Look for some brief introductory passages, and
then we get into the meat of DNA and CODIS.
I'll go ahead and do what we normally do on
episodes like these. I'll go ahead and read, mister Thomas
will provide color commentary, and we'll go from there.
Speaker 2: Sounds good.
Speaker 3: Longtime listeners know already that I'm a CSI junkie. I
know it's a glamorized Hollywood version of the painstaking work
that real life law enforcement agency and criminalists do. But
I love it anyway. I can think John Douglas and
Mark Olshaker's excellent books and the short lived NBC series
Profiler for getting me interested in matters of crime and justice.
But it's CSI that turned that interest into an unquenchable curiosity.
And I'm betting that, if we're being honest, here a
lot of you will cop to liking CSI as well,
or NCIS, Law and Order, Quantico, Criminal Minds, FBI, or
any one of the dozens of fictional crime and justice
TV shows from the last two decades. We can actually
learn a lot about forensics and criminalistics from these shows.
Some of the information is accurate, some of it is
decidedly not accurate. But I'd wager that what most of
us know about DNA came from, or at least started
with those shows. Bill. I know you're not a CSI junkie,
but does any of that kind of track for you.
Did you read any of that and go, yeah, right on?
Speaker 2: It does. And then the real life investigators and forensics
experts that we've met over the last number of years
have also referenced something which they run into, particularly when
they're presenting in court, the so called CSI effect, which
is the influence of these programs on the expectations of juries,
not judges, necessarily civilians who were in a courtroom, often
for the first time, and this idea that there's going
to be DNA in every case and it's going to
be the problem solver that it can be. So it's
very interesting how much these fictionalized shows which are incredibly popular,
and I like them too. I don't have box sets
of DVDs like you do, Christen. They have carried over,
their influence is carried over into real life.
Speaker 3: I feel like maybe I need to all so include
a photo on our social media page of all of
my stacks and stacks of Criminal Minds, CSI and Profiler
box sets, because Bill's right, I have a lot of them.
Speaker 2: The first time I visited with you some years ago,
I was very impressed by your extensive collection, which has
grown since.
Speaker 3: It has and it's just part of the even bigger
DVD collection. I refuse to give up my DVDs, even
though we're mainly digital now. But that's another comment for
another day. With recent leaps and bounds forward in DNA
testing and the use of genealogical databases to break cold cases,
the acronyms DNA, endus and codis are now buzzwords in
the media. But if you're still a little fuzzy on
the actual mechanics of all of this, let's all get
on the same page and talk about what it actually
means to test for DNA at a crime scene and
run it through courtis everyone who took basic biology in
school or who learn their forensics from Hollywood knows that
DNA stands for a deaxi rab nucleic acid, the double
helix of chemical base pairs adding gwannine, cytosine, and thymine
that make up every part of us. It is hereditary material,
which means we all share parts of our DNA with
our parents, grandparents, great grands siblings, and so on. Which
also means we can trace our ancestry back if we're
willing to spit in a tube. Witness the popularity of
ancestry twenty three in ME and other consumer grade DNA tests.
And Bill, I know both of us found some interesting
family secrets opening up to us when our respective families
did some DNA testing.
Speaker 2: Yes, that would be the understatement of the year. And
this is unrelated to the colonial park by murders or
my sister Kathy's staff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, none of us learned that we had criminals in
the family or anything like that, but we learned skeletons
that I think our respective families would rather have kept
in their closets. Is that probably accurate?
Speaker 2: Yes? And one thing I would say, I'm a big
supporter of these systems, and we can thank ancestry dot
Com in my family for discovering a sibling that we
didn't know anything about. My first word of caution, if
you will, to anyone that was thinking about looking into
their own family background, is you have to be prepared
for the unexpected. Many people, millions of people will put
their profiles into Ancestry twenty three and me my heritage.
There's a whole bunch of them and may discover really
interesting things about their families, but they may discover unexpected
things about their families. And you have to be aware
of the fact that all those cliches about DNA doesn't lie.
There's an outside chance that somewhere in your family, and
this happened in both of our families crystals and bills,
we discovered things that we didn't know anything about. There's
a potential to unbury long buried family secrets.
Speaker 3: They're really okay. DNA is contained in hair, skin, blood,
and all bodily fluids. So unless you walk around she's
in LATEX twenty four to seven, you're leaving DNA wherever
you go on whatever you come into contact with. This
is known as Lecard's exchange principle. You leave traces of
yourself on everything you touch, including a crime scene, and
you in return take something of that location with you.
The biological evidence that you leave it at crime scene
can then be collected and tested. I think we're all
pretty clear on how that works, but just in case
there's anyone out there who's joining the podcast, like now
Day one, that's how DNA works.
Speaker 2: I love the fact, and let's remember Kristin Dilley wrote this.
I love the fact that she talks about walking around
sheathed in LATEX twenty four to seven. When I read
the article for the first time, I was like, ooh,
kinky Latex twenty fotten.
Speaker 3: That is not in any way I was going with that.
Thank you, and mister.
Speaker 2: Thomas, see you're much more high minded than I am.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, sheath.
Speaker 2: In LATEX twenty four to seven.
Speaker 3: Oh God, you took it to a bad place. Bill.
Speaker 2: It might not be bad. It depends on what you're into.
Speaker 3: I guess it does. I guess it does. Let it
be known though, that he's the one who took it
to the bad place, not me. Oh. The National Institute
of Justice or NIJ offers possibly the best overview of
what DNA testing can offer in service of a criminal investigation.
The NIJS DNA Evidence page states the following quote. DNA
does more than just identify the source of the sample.
It can place a known individual at a crime scene,
in a home or in a room where the suspect
claim not to have been. It can refute a claim
of self defense and put a weapon in a suspect's hand.
It can change a story from an alibi to want
of consent. The more officers know how to use DNA,
the more powerful a tool it becomes. And that is
from the nij the National Institute of Justice, So that's
not news to any of us who are true crime enthusiasts.
We all know DNA is the silver bullet of any
police investigation. If there's DNA at the crime scene, investigators
should be able to immediately crack the case.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: No, Unfortunately that is not right, at least not always.
DNA technology is moving ahead in leaps and bounds thanks
to private labs like Othrum Body and DNA Labs International,
to name just a few, but there are still some
instances in which DNA from a crime scene cannot be tested.
The sample might be too old and has degraded over time,
or due to incorrect collection or handling. The sample might
have been contaminated in some way that wouldn't allow for
a clean or reliable result, like being stored incorrectly in
a hot warehouse or in the back of some one's car.
There are several reasons why DNA might not be the
silver bullet in a criminal investigation. As much as Hollywood
has led us to believe that DNA will always give
us an answer, there are legitimately times when it can't
or won't. We are sadly familiar with that truth. In
the Colonial Parkway murders investigation, not all sources of DNA
evidence will yield a result.
Speaker 2: This reference, Kristin, that you're making is to the recent
history in the Colonial Parkway murders. We did manage to
surmount a whole series of challenges thanks to the Virginia
State Police and the Virginia Department of Forensic Sciences. They
took on a very challenging bit of evidence in the
Robin Edwards David Nobling example. They knew that Robin Edwards
had been raped, but we had a sample that was
over thirty years old. It was extremely degraded just through
the process of time as well as being contaminated with seawater. Actually,
several labs took a run at this and were unsuccessful,
and then finally one lab which went unnamed. We think
we know who it is, but we don't want to
give credit to the wrong lab. They were ultimately able
to work with this badly degraded sample that had been
contaminated with seawater. It was also a very small amount
of DNA left. I'm really glad that the Virginia State
Police and their team made the decision to move forward
because that's led to the identification of Alan Wade Wilmer
Senior as the killer in the Robin Edwards David Nobling
murder as part of the Colonial Parkway murders, and then
that led to the identification of the killer Wilmer in
the Teresa Howell murder from nineteen eighty nine. This is
one of those situations where a kind of a Hill
Mary Pass ended up working out very well and has
provided significant answers. As we've discussed here on mind Over
Murder before. Wilmer is also strongly suspected of being involved
in the disappearance and likely homicide of Keith Colincus anddra Haley.
This long shot DNA testing has resulted in answers which
are incredibly beneficial to the Colonial Parkway murders families. We
hope that they'll be further tests and more identification, whether
it's Wilmer or another offender in the other Colonial Parkway murders.
It's a big step forward to see this happen after
more than thirty years.
Speaker 3: There are, also, however, instances in this case where we
know things have been sent out to be tested and
nothing has come back on it. When I was at
Ron Peterson's book launch party a couple of weeks ago,
multiple people came up to me and asked, did you
guys get DNA back on the hair in Kathy's hand.
First of all, I said, there's still some question as
to whether or not there was hair there. The has
giving us the run around on that, But the answer
is no, we don't have anything yet that we're aware of.
Could be the FBI isn't providing that information, but there
is still evidence in the cases that is being sent out.
Is it actually going to result in anything? We don't know.
We still hope, so we're crossing all of our various
digits that can be crossed. Okay, let's say you do
have DNA and it is viable. Then it's on to
the next step in the process and the next acronym CODIS.
CODIS stands for Combined DNA Index System, which was established
by the FBI in nineteen ninety eight. You've probably heard
the term in conjunction with the phrase let me just
run this DNA through on just about any forensics focus
TV show. So in the case of my beloved CSI,
you will have certainly heard references to COTIS from Greg Sanders,
the self described lab rat who swabs and runs tests
on all the team's evidence. When he references COTIS, he's
referring to the database that you go to when you're
looking to see if the DNA at your crime scene
matches the DNA found at another or if it matches
an individual whose profile isn't the system. Here's the part
that I think some people don't understand. CODIS is a
collection of DNA databases that are kept at the local, state,
and national level. It's an excellent tool for linking crimes
to each other or to an offender who may move
from state to State. CODIS houses the National DNA Indexing
System or ENDUS, which is the database at the national
level that contains DNA profiles. State and local labs keep
their own profiles, which are also loaded into CODIS. So
when you hear the acronym ENDUS in this article, that
is the national level database. CODIS refers to all of
the databases local, state, and national.
Speaker 2: This is really important because one of the things we're discovering.
We're pushing to have Wilmer's DNA put into the CODAS
system according to the rules in the Commonwealth of Virginia,
and this is something we're just learning in recent months.
Every state in the Union has different rules. I think
this is insane that we can't come up with a
single national standard, but it is what it is, at
least for the moment. Under the rules of the Commonwealth
of Virginia and their policies regarding their CODIS database, your
profile as an offender cannot be put into CODIS unless
you've been convicted of a felony. Now, Alan Wade Wilmer
Senior are suspect who's identified as a serial killer who's
been linked with the murders of three people. Robin Edwards,
David Knobling, and Teresa Howell. He was never convicted of
a felony because he died in twenty seventeen before he
was identified as a suspect in the Colonial Parkway murders.
So now, unfortunately he's dead and we can't put his
DNA into CODIS. Now we're not letting this go as
family members, but we're still looking for answers from the
Commonwealth of Virginia as to what kind of workarounds can
be created. I've gotten very frustrated in the past episodes
because there's something about this that I think is just
incredibly maddening, which is why are we worried about Wilmer's rights.
The man's been dead for what seven years. I'm much
more concerned, and I think most people would understand this,
I hope. I'm much more concerned about the rights of
the victims and the families in this and many other cases,
I'm much less concerned. I don't mean to be dismissive.
Wilmer had rights too, but he's dead. Yeah, And we
have a whole group of people in Virginia in this
case and many others that are looking for answers, and
I think our rights probably should supersede the rights of
a dead man. I'm just the brother of a murder victim.
Speaker 3: I agree, And there is some definitely infuriating pieces of
legal minutia that I get into a little bit further
in this. Now, I learned a whole bunch of really
great information from the FBI's website itself, FBI dec of
They have a wonderful page on COTIS and ENDUS, So
a lot of this information is from there, and I
would urge people to take a look at it. It's
heavy reading, but we'll put a link in our show notes. Okay, onward.
According to an informational article at FBI dec ofv quote,
COTIS is currently installed in two hundred and three federal, state,
and local participating labs in the US. It's used to
share DNA profiles across all fifty states, the District of Columbia,
Puerto Rico, federal law enforcement agencies, and the Department of
Defense end quote. Okay, so note that number because I
thought that was an interesting number. Two hundred and three
labs have access to ENDUS, the national level CODIS database
that is not actually terribly many, believe it or not,
Every state has a different number of and disparticipating labs.
California has twenty four INDUS participating labs, Texas has seventeen,
Colorado has ten, Florida has twelve, Maryland has six, New
York has eight. Puerto Rico has won. For our purposes here,
my home state of Virginia has four ENDUS participating labs,
which does not include the FBI lab at Quantico. That's
a whole separate thing. Bill's current state of Connecticut only
has one end dis participating lab. The DCFBI lab at
Quantico has two labs within it with access to ENDUS.
The US Army has one lab that participates. Does each
state have enough forensic labs with COTIS installed in them?
I don't think so, But that's another discussion for another episode,
and it probably encompasses budgetary things that I have no
knowledge of as a civilian.
Speaker 2: The labs that you're talking about in this article, Kristin,
are not private labs. These are public, state, local, federal labs.
Speaker 3: Yes, And there's actually an interesting little section in the
section on FBI dot gov that talks about private labs
and whether they're allowed to upload to CODIS and what
kind of access they're allowed to have to cotis. That's
a whole interesting section that I'm going to read verbatim.
Speaker 2: You're listening to mindover Murder. We'll be right back after
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Speaker 3: Okay, now, let's talk about who specifically is in the
CODIS database, as that can be a case of confusion, and,
as Bill said a couple of minutes ago, consternation, let's
start with who's not in CODIS. CODIS does not include
DNA profiles from law enforcement personnel, firefighters, or EMTs. It
does not include teachers like me or other individuals who
undergo background checks and fingerprinting for their jobs. Our fingerprints
go to IAPHIS, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. COTIS
does have a database that includes military servicemen and women
whose DNA is in the database for identification purposes in
the unfortunate event that they are killed or go missing
in action. But here's what COIs does not have. COTIS
does not contain DNA profiles for huge swaths of the population.
The DNA profiles in COTIS only account for about fourteen
percent of the total population of the United States.
Speaker 2: Now, question we've been asked repeatedly, and I still don't
know that I have a great answer. Is our military
personnel's DNA profiles in CODIS. They are as we understand it,
and that's what you just mentioned in this section. I
don't believe that unless an individual is suspected of a crime,
that his or her DNA profile which was put in
during their military service would be freely searchable by the
FBI or local law enforcement to see. Is so in
the person we need to be looking for the millions
of American servicemen and women who have served I don't
think their DNA is searchl in a criminal matter unless
there's a reason to suspect that a particular person might
be the offender they're looking for. They're not just going
to look at millions of people's DNA data right to say, ah,
there's the person we're looking for in the such and
such case.
Speaker 3: I think that's a great distinction to make. I will
admit that I am a bit of a data nut,
and I really enjoyed looking at the February twenty twenty
four statistics from the FBI and the NIJ for CODIS.
I probably gathered way more satisfaction out of it than
I should have. If you decided to look at the
February twenty twenty four stats provided by the FBI and
the NIJ for CODIS, Here's how the numbers would break
down into the following categories. In CODIS, there is a
set number of offender profiles which come from convicted offenders, detainees,
and legal profiles. There are arrest d profiles, and there
are forensic profiles, and then the statistics in those little box.
IS also include the number of ENDUS participating labs in
each state, as well as the numbers of investigations aided
by COTIS, and like I said, I spent way more
time with this data than I should have because I
found it interesting. So the FBI det Go page contains
a box containing all of these stats for each state,
and we will include a link in our show notes
to those so that you can look up your own state.
Let's just take a look at Virginia for a second.
According to these most recent stats or the CODIS system,
and Virginia, there are five hundred and one thoy twenty
four offender profiles, and offender profiles means people who were
convicted of a crime. We can go ahead and note
as Alan Wade Wilmer, Senior's profile is not among those
because he was not convicted of a crime. We would
love to remedy that. Virginia also contains three thousand, eight
hundred and eighty seven arrestee profiles. Wilmer would not be
among those either, because to the best of our knowledge,
he was not arrested at any point. Somebody knows differently,
Please correct us and let us know. There are twenty
nine thousand, one hundred twenty one forensic profiles in the system.
That's DNA profiles from crime scenes. According to these statistics,
COTIS has aided fourteen thousand, three hundred and thirty three
investigations in the state of Virginia to date. If you
look at all of the numbers altogether, that means we're
about the middle of the pack in terms of investigations aided.
The highest number by far is California, with one hundred
and twenty three thousand, one hundred and forty seven investigations
aided with COTIS. Texas, Ohio, and Illinois put up big
numbers as well. A lot of states have smaller numbers
than Virginia, So COTIS is working for us. It's not
as well as California or Texas, but they're bigger states.
Virginia's looks like it's doing a pretty good job for
us here.
Speaker 2: And much of that would be driven by population.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely. Now, if you want the actual number of
offenders in the NASH level CODIS database, it will not
keep you in suspense any longer. But if numbers make
your head spin, hang onto your hat. According to the
extremely helpful articles about CODIS and ends at FBI dot gov,
here are the CODIS database stats, and this is as
of January. CODIS contains over seventeen million, twenty six thousand,
ninety seven offender profiles, five million, three hundred ninety one thousand,
seventy four arrest d profiles, and one million, three hundred
twenty two thousand, five hundred forty three forensic profiles. I
did the math for you. You're welcome. That means there are
twenty three million, seven hundred thirty nine thousand, seven hundred
fourteen DNA profiles currently in CODIS, which represents fourteen percent
of the US population of three hundred and forty two
million people. And that population estimate is courtesy of the
Congressional Budget Office.
Speaker 2: That's a lot of number, it is, and yet at
the same time, cotis's level of hits is still quite low.
Even though there are seventeen million offender profiles in the system,
COTIS is not hitting every single case every single time.
Speaker 3: So what does all that mean? Why did I throw
those numbers at you? What are we essentially taking away
from this long explanation? Here are some takeaways. Number One,
law enforcement having a DNA profile does not mean that
they have a suspect. All those numbers only add up
to fourteen percent of the US population, So the odds
that an offender is not in CODIS is greater than
the odds that they are in COTIS. Takeaway number two,
first time offenders are not in CODIS. So if the
DNA profile at your crime scene belongs to someone who
decided to try their hand at burglary, rape, or murder
for the very first time, just to see if they
could get away with it, COTIS is very likely not
going to be all that helpful. Or if your offender
has committed crimes in another state but his DNA profile
hasn't been loaded into COTIS yet due to local or
state regulations or just a backlog, you're going to be
out of luck. There. Add to that this little wrinkle,
not all states, as Bill mentioned earlier, share the same
criteria for entering a DNA profile in COTIS, and for
more information on that particular sticky wicket, please do check
out our episode with Lindsay Wade from earlier this summer
where she talked about the COTIS gap lawfully owed DNA
and some of the major problems that law enforcement has
had collecting DNA that is owed to them to put
into CODIS. So all that basically means is you can
forget the triumphant purp walk that you see on TV
after a CODIS hit solves a case for the fifteenth
straight episode. In the real world, we do not get
that lucky, although I think most of us wish that
we could.
Speaker 2: One of the proprietors of one of the top DNA
labs in the country had said to us that what
CODIS is great at is helping confirm information that you've
already put together through traditional law enforcement methods. It's not
really that great at throwing an unknown profile into CODIS
and saying, Aha, we've identified the offender. It just doesn't
work that way. So from a practical perspective, it's much
more of a confirmation system than it is a discovery system.
Speaker 3: Here's one thing that I did not know until I
started researching this article, and I think we can blame
Hollywood pretty strongly for this one. So here's another area
where CSI and shows of its ILK earn a great,
big fail in terms of accuracy in both DNA and CODIS.
Viewers have been taught by Hollywood that getting a hit
on CODIS is as simple as turning on the computer
and putting the info from the DNA sample, waiting a
few seconds and an offender's name just pops up on
the screen. That is not the reality, again much as
we wish it was. According to FBI dot of no
names or other personal identifiers of the offenders, arrestees or
detainees are stored using the codised software, So that means
that when there is a hit on the CODIS database,
the system does not spit out a name like John Q.
Smith of Squaresville. Instead of a name, COTIS goes back
the information that is stored on the national database, the
DNA profile itself, an agency identifier, a specimen ID number,
and the name of the DNA lab personnel associated with
the case. We become accustomed to the idea that in
just five short minutes or fewer, CODIS will spit out
the name of the offender which matches the DNA and
possibly a social security number, driver's license, photo, and least
known address, which will lead to an immediate and dramatic arrest.
And that simply is not how this works.
Speaker 2: No, this is one of those things. It's just maddening
because we've had some experience now with identifying offenders through
this very valuable system, but it's not a two minute
exercise in a very colorful lab with extremely attractive lab
technicians both male and female, with no blood on their clothes, every.
Speaker 3: All of whom are very well dressed, properly and highly caffeinated,
exactly able to go into night clubs afterward.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and of course our friends that have worked for
these agencies have also said, we also don't fly around
in lear jets like they do, don't.
Speaker 3: Have big explorers that are packed with all the state
of the art gear.
Speaker 2: No, we're not saying that some elements of those pieces
of equipment aren't part of the mix, but it's nowhere
are as big, fancy, or fast as you're led to
believe from watching your favorite law enforcement procedural.
Speaker 3: Although I do think it's really cool that all of
the equipment shown on CSI does it actually works, It's
actually accurate. And our friend Jared Bradley had his wonderful vacuum,
the MVAC featured on an episode of CSI in season fourteen.
I think it was there is accuracy there, it's just
how quick the process happens that's not accurate. Of course,
if anybody can attest to that, it's us.
Speaker 2: These shows give you this super attenuated version of how
quick this process is. Remember they're trying to solve the
case in forty eight minutes. They've got to leave room
for commercials. Yeah, we can tell you for sure that
it isn't that fast. It's a slower, more methodical process.
Even the data that comes back to them if they
do get a hit, all it says is you need
to contact so and so for more information about where
this evidence there's an apparent match came from. There's going
to be a lot more research involved. So we're talking
weeks or months, not three minutes.
Speaker 3: As much as we love the idea of finding some
indiscooperating labs sneaking in there in the dead of night
and plugging in Alan Wade Wilmer's DNA into CODIS, we
couldn't do that. We have absolutely no idea how to
do that. I would not know where to get that
information if I had it. It's just not we love
this idea of immediate gratification. I do think that eventually,
if they put Wilmer's name into COTIS, it will light
up like an Ethan Christmas tree, as I believe one
of our behind the scenes friends has said. But it's
going to take some time, I think, and probably some
maneuvering on our part to find someone who's going to
be willing to take on the CODIS gap. So DNA
and all of its ins and outs is an enormously
intriguing field of study, but as I've shown you in
the last couple of minutes, it's complicated and too much
so for one episode. So we're going to wrap it
for now. But this will not be the last that
you'll hear from us on CODIS, that infuriating CODA gap,
and other issues that are important to us as podcasters,
family and friends of victims and victims advocates. So we'll
keep digging into the crime and justice topics that fascinate
us in you and bring you the inside scoop one
podcast at a time, as we've always done. We do
encourage you to take a look at the information on
DNA and CODIS that is compiled by the good folks
over at the NIH National Institute of Health dot gov
and NIJ, the National Institute of Justice. Everything you want
to know about DNA and forensics can be found on
those two pages. The FAQ section on CODIS and ENDUS
on FBI dot gov is a heavy read, and it
is a long one, but it is well worth your
time if you're interested in the ins and outs of
codis and endus. I also spend some time the Virginia
Law Enforcement Code, and that's also really challenging to read,
with a lot of different appendices and things like that.
But you can definitely take a look at all of
the different state codes for Virginia if you want to
see the ins and outs of how our state actually works.
Speaker 2: Well, if you're ever looking for an answer to the question,
how do you know when you've become a law enforcement geek?
There's your answer.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly. Anybody who's sitting and taking the time to google.
What was I googling? Oh? I was googling what crimes
in the State of Virginia are required to take a
DNA sample from you? And it sent me over to
a couple of different law pages and I ended up
sitting there swimming through all the different all the different
laws and legalities of the state of Virginia, some of
which are interesting than others. T one hundred percent.
Speaker 2: I have become a geek and some of this stuff
is a bit dry, shall we say, Oh.
Speaker 3: It definitely is for anybody who really wants to get
into the Code of Virginia go to Virginia Law dot gov.
Pay special attention to the sections labeled eighteen point two
crimes offenses generally nineteen point two criminal procedure. Lots of
great stuff in there, And if you need a way
to I don't know, combat insomnia, that'll do it. I'll
do it right there.
Speaker 2: You're well on your way to your next degree, which
apparently will be in law.
Speaker 3: Right at what point or another do both of us
qualify for honorary criminal justice degrees?
Speaker 2: And I'll ask my son Chris, who's currently in law school,
if he can help us out here.
Speaker 3: Oh, I think that's a great idea. We hope that
we've answered some of your questions about DNA and CODIS.
If we haven't, please do feel free to leave those
questions in the comment section on our social media pages,
and we will do our best too get someone who
is better qualified than the two of us to talk
about it. But we do hope that you've enjoyed this
exploration into DNA and CODIS, and if you have suggestions
for other things that you'd like us to explain to you,
really slowly, in easy to understand terms, let us know,
and we will take turns writing and turning them into
podcasts for you.
Speaker 2: We'll definitely be continuing to work on how we can
explore and use practical applications of the Code of System
to help us solve the Colonial Parkway murders and other
unsolved murders in Virginia and across the country. That's an
ongoing conversation. We've got some meetings coming up in the
next couple of months which I think could be very beneficial,
and when we can talk about those meetings, we'll be
happy to do.
Speaker 3: Absolutely We've got a whole episodes planned for those that
is going to do it. For this episode of Mind
of Murder, thank you so much for listening. We'll see
you next time.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
Speaker 1: Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.
Speaker 2: Our theme music is by Kevin mcleoud.
Speaker 1: Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with crawl Space Media.
Speaker 2: You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Speaker 1: You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway
murders on Facebook.
Speaker 2: And finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at
Bill Thomas.
Speaker 1: Five six, Thank you for listening to Mind Over Murder.