Anatomy of Murder - Flashback (Jessica Baggen)
Episode Date: November 7, 2023When a 17 year old is murdered in her Alaskan hometown, the community wants answers. It would take years to get them. The wonders of DNA and its advancements are on full display in this case.For episo...de information and photos, please visit https://anatomyofmurder.com/ Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc
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The totality of events became obvious pretty quickly that this was suspicious.
This was totally out of character for her to disappear like this
and not check in with family or friends.
As I recall, from pretty early on, they believed something had happened to her. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor
and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murph.
When a violent crime occurs, of course we want and need answers. Whether you're the law
enforcement being counted on to solve it or a family member that deserves the truth,
it's incredibly hard to be patient.
But in reality, many cases require some amount of time spent waiting for the answers,
whether that be days, weeks, months, years. Today's guest knows that firsthand.
Yeah, my name is Randy McFerrin. I was with the Alaska State Troopers from 1986 until 2012.
Retired from active service then.
And in 2013, was hired with the Cold Case Unit as kind of like a special commission officer.
And that's all I did was work cold cases.
These kinds of cases can take decades to solve.
And sometimes those files never get closed.
With today's episode, answers weren't easy to come by.
It took years of investigative work, science, and hope to get them.
For this story, we're going to Alaska.
The year was 1996, and at the time, there were about 8,400 people living there
in a remote coastal town called Sitka.
It's on an island. You can only get there by boat or plane.
People make their living off of commercial fishing and tourism and stuff like that.
It's a beautiful place. The climate's pretty wet.
You have to get used to a lot of rain in southeast Alaska, but like anything, you adapt to it.
It's a remote place, maybe because of that.
It's a community known to be close-knit with people who have lived there for generations, like the Baggin family.
Vicki and George Baggin had four girls, one of them was 16-year-old Jessica.
Jessica's been described as a typical Sitka kid, meaning a kid who loves the outdoors,
was independent, and tough enough to brave those harsh winters with limited daylight,
who could also fish with the best of them. And like most Sitkins, Jessica and her family were
entwined in the local community. Her father ran a tugboat and barge business, a somewhat prominent
family in the town. Everything I've heard of,
just, you know, your average nice kid growing up in a little town in Alaska.
Jessica made the wild state her backyard. She fished with her sisters, cooked with her mom
while Willie Nelson crooned in the background, and loved photography so much she was thinking
about studying it in college. College wasn't that far off. Jessica turned 17 on Friday, May 3rd, 1996, a milestone she celebrated at her sister's house.
That gathering didn't wind down until the early morning hours around 1.30 a.m.
That's when Jessica left to walk home.
At that time of year, it's still relatively light out in Alaska,
and no one thought anything strange of a young woman walking home in a place like Sika.
She was on a paved bike path that went around along one of the main streets in town, Sawmill Creek Road.
And then on the other side of the path was this patch of woods.
There weren't houses in a lot of buildings immediately there. The area is kind of
crisscrossed with trails through the woods. And then right next to it, it's a, it was a small
college, Sheldon Jackson College. So people traversing the area and worn down footpaths
through the woods. So at a normal time of day, those paths were trafficked by students and
workers moving between housing near the college and work in town. After one in the morning, of course, even with that spring twilight,
it was deserted. Still, the walk was short, about a mile. And like Randy said, it should have only
taken about 20 minutes or so. But when her parents woke up the next morning, Jessica still wasn't
home. You know, initially, I believe they thought, well, maybe she just stayed with her sister.
So throughout the morning, they started calling friends and family and say, have you seen her?
This is before cell phones were real prevalent.
And it really shows just how much we take for granted this almost instantaneous being
able to reach one another because back then,
people just didn't have access to that instant communication we have today.
We have really become tethered in a way to our loved ones because of the use of cell phones,
and not just because we're able to easily dial their number and hear their voice, but also
technology gives us an opportunity with permission, of course, to track them.
We've become really used to it.
And there are arguments on both sides of whether it's good or it's bad.
And all that's to say, it took time for Jessica's parents to rule out any possible explanations for their daughter's absence.
They're calling around on landlines, just tracking down friends, seeing if anybody's seen her.
But by that evening, they finally realized something's wrong.
So Jessica's parents reported her missing to the Sitka Police Department, who agreed that her disappearance was concerning and that early police involvement was the best
course of action.
While Randy didn't work the case initially, he remembers these early days.
I was in Sitka in 96 working on another homicide.
So I was aware of the bagging investigation and what was going on.
But at the time, I had no real involvement in it. I don't know all the details about the initial report, but it did appear to be pretty suspicious by then.
Sitka Police Department acted pretty quickly.
They alerted their on-duty officers.
They started looking around, contacting people that may have seen her, tracing her last contacts.
I think it was the next day that they actually started calling out the search teams and homing the area. Police initiated a local search and rescue focusing on the woods between the college
campus and Sawmill Creek Road, where Jessica would have walked home.
Now, search and rescue is something that this area knows quite well.
They do a lot of search and rescues in the Sitka area just because of the remoteness
of the area.
And people do a lot of boating,
a lot of camping, a lot of hiking. So it's a pretty common thing.
Now, remember where we are for this story. It's Alaska. It is vast and full of untamed wilderness
with glaciers and gullies and thick impenetrable mountain ranges. It's a place where it's easy to get lost, either accidentally
or sometimes intentionally. On average, about one in 1,000 people go missing in Alaska each year.
Now that might not seem like a lot, but it's about double the national rate.
So this search party did know what they were doing and they scoured the area looking for Jessica.
Two days later, they found their first clue.
That was a shirt she'd been last seen wearing.
There's actually a photograph of her at her birthday party wearing that shirt.
So they quickly identified that this was hers.
I think it was turned inside out and kind of lying in a clump there in the woods near a trail.
It's a big development.
In a search area as vast as the landscape of Alaska,
where the wooded areas may stretch for hundreds of miles, this is huge.
Narrowing down your field, providing an opportunity to set up a tight grid search.
And let me just add, locating an item of clothing opens up the possibility
of deploying a canine dog utilizing a base scent, that shirt, to track.
I think hearing that it was Jessica's t-shirt that they found right away gave me that pit in
my stomach. It makes more sense to me that that inside out means haste and likely by someone else. For me, my mind right away went to those various scenarios, which were all criminal and all horrible.
Two hours later, searchers found something else.
The body was found within a few feet.
17-year-old Jessica Baggin was found just 70 feet from the bike path which would have been on her route home.
We do want to warn you that some of the following description is graphic and that there is a sexual assault component to this crime as well.
She was underneath a fallen tree trunk and partially covered in dirt.
As I recall, she was nude.
Her shoes and jacket and pants were found nearby.
She may have had a sock on or something like that, but that was it.
The body was partially buried in earth and mud and vegetation,
so as I recall, it wasn't readily apparent what the cause of death was,
but it wasn't until the body was actually taken to Anchorage for an autopsy
that they concluded she was suffocated.
There had been some kind of a struggle, and she'd been held down,
and dirt and mud had gotten into her mouth and nose.
That's what blocked the airway and eventually caused her death.
During the autopsy, traces of semen were found on Jessica's body,
and coupled with the fact that her clothing had been removed,
it was determined that Jessica had been sexually assaulted.
The examination of her body also revealed some forensic clues
that her killer had left behind.
I know there were some hairs found on the body and clothing.
They were inconsistent with hers.
It belonged to a different person.
It was determined to be reddish blonde hair.
Blood was collected from Jessica's clothing,
which did not match her blood type,
meaning it may well have been left by whoever had attacked her. While investigators were gathering initial evidence, the town of Sitka
was reeling. It was very shocking. Something really shocked the community to a core,
just the sense that stuff like this doesn't happen in a place like Sitka.
Her family, of course, had to be completely stunned and gutted and the
town was there to support them about 1,500 people showed up for a memorial
March led by Jessica's family into the woods where their daughter died on a
footbridge there flowers replace and 17 balloons were released into the air one
for each year of her life later Later that month, a rehabilitated eagle was freed into the wild
by Jessica's sisters to honor their sister's memory.
You know, Anna Seeger, redirecting some of that grief
into a mission of remembrance is a powerful way
to honor the people that you've lost.
When I was even reading those facts, I can't explain it,
but there is a happiness within this horrible thing
because these are beautiful moments.
And I really do think
there's something to
those momentary escapes
that are needed
during these very dark times,
especially for loved ones,
but likely for this community
at large as well.
But Sitka residents
wanted more than catharsis.
They wanted answers.
This kind of violent crime is rare in Sitka.
Not only do Sitkins want Jessica's murderer held accountable,
they're also terrified that there's a killer on the loose in their safe, quiet town.
The Sitka Police Department was all hands on deck.
They were doing everything they could to try and solve this case
and putting forth their maximum effort towards it. One of the first steps was to follow up on the clues they had.
The reddish blonde hair is discovered on Jessica's body. Investigators looked through Department of
Motor Vehicle records to see if any men had similar hair color, but they didn't find anyone
who fit the bill. Remember, this is 1996. It's before national databases and DNA testing is
still developing as a useful tool for law enforcement. And especially in a small town
in Alaska, they're mostly relying on traditional methods of investigation.
They're looking at everybody who knew her, may have had any contact with her that night. That's normally where you start out.
Most times, homicide victims know who killed them,
and it's figure out what the relationship is,
try to determine who would want to harm her and for what reason.
Their initial inquiries included a young man who Jessica had been seeing,
a sort of on-again, off-again relationship.
He was able to provide an alibi and was quickly eliminated.
They were definitely developing suspects,
and for one reason or another, the suspects were eliminated.
They were definitely working hard on the case.
And as with many smaller jurisdictions,
they sometimes looked to larger agencies for additional support.
That is how the Alaska State Troopers ultimately got involved.
Alaska has no counties, so there's no county sheriff's department or anything like that.
So outside of the municipalities and federal jurisdiction, we're the only agency in the state.
We've got an enormous area to cover. We have to be jacks of all trades. We also provide a lot of support for the smaller
police departments for things like homicides. They don't have the resources to do them themselves.
But then, about a week into the investigation, a man literally walked himself into the police station. On May 15, 1996, 34-year-old Richard Bingham got in touch with investigators.
He came in. He started making statements to them. He seemed to have some kind of knowledge of the case,
and they started focusing on him as a potential suspect.
Richard Bingham was a custodian at the local college
and had a reputation as being a heavy drinker.
He'd been drinking on the night Jessica was killed.
When he came into the station,
he told police he was having flashbacks about that night, which worried him.
As I recall, it was kind of subtle.
It was more of a, I have this vision or I have this dream that I was involved somehow.
And he started to give details that seemed to fit the surroundings of the incident and the circumstances.
Bingham said he'd seen Jessica days earlier
wearing a black dress, a sighting that was confirmed. And as far as his flashbacks went,
he said he remembered being in a forested area similar to where her body had been found.
But there were details that just didn't add up as well. He also said Jessica was wearing sweats
that night. She wasn't. And that there was red clay where she was killed.
Again, there wasn't.
Were these inconsistencies due to his drinking and a fuzzy memory?
Or did they signal something more?
As I remember, they basically continue to question him.
And he makes more and more statements that seem to be consistent with him being involved with the sexual assault and the murder. As the questioning went on, Bingham demonstrated how he believed he'd choked Jessica and how he hit her body.
He eventually confessed to her sexual assault and murder, saying, and I quote, yes, I guess I did it, but I want tests to verify it.
Shortly after that, he was arrested and charged with Jessica's murder.
Richard Bingham spent the next 13 months in jail before his trial started in Juneau, Alaska.
Sitka is such a small place. Everybody knew about the incident. It was such a shocking,
shocking incident. I'm sure his attorney felt that he could not get a fair trial in Sitka,
so they moved it to Juneau. The trial lasted for two weeks, and the defense asserted that
Bingham's confession was false. They put experts on the stand who testified that Bingham was known
to be highly suggestible. The defense also claimed that Bingham was fed information and then redirected when he didn't give investigators the answers that they wanted.
Defense called some of Richard Bingham's friends, who testified that they would play a game where they tell Richard he committed minor crimes during alcohol-induced blackouts. As an example, they heard at a police report
that some salmon had been stolen from a local fish processor
and convinced Richard he had done it.
Richard brought a replacement fish to the business,
only to be told by them that nothing had been stolen.
Another friend admitted that they had joked around with Richard,
suggesting that he may have killed Jessica Baggin during one of his blackouts. However, it also remained unclear if Richard
was the one who had first suggested this or the friend. Multiple people said Richard had an alibi
for that night. They were with him fishing from midnight until sunrise. But the thing that really
broke down the case against Richard Bingham was forensic evidence.
Red hairs from the crime scene did not match his DNA.
I wasn't involved in that aspect of the case.
All I remember is that he was eventually acquitted.
The jury deliberated for around two hours before finding Richard Bingham not guilty.
Once the trial was over, he relocated to Washington state.
Jessica's family, they think that finally at least the criminal justice piece is going to be over.
And boom, it's not.
And this case is now wide open once again.
Yeah, the results are that Richard Bingham is released and Jessica's case remained unsolved.
They determined, well, if it's not Bingham, then who is it?
And they kept looking.
It was kind of jointly with the Sitka Police Department and the Alaska State Troopers.
A lot of it had to do with just contacting individuals that were in Sitka at the time,
male individuals, and getting DNA samples from them to compare to the suspect sample.
Approximately 100 suspects were looked at and cleared in the years that followed,
which was progress, but it wasn't providing investigators with the big break that they
needed. Luckily, in the early 2000s, there were huge leaps forward in forensic technology.
DNA evidence was changing real rapidly and new procedures were coming in.
It required less and less DNA and were more and more accurate. So they're switching from
the initial processes to more advanced processes and eventually that led to the creation of CODIS.
CODIS is the acronym for Combined DNA Index System. Its development provided a local, state, and national aggregate place
to upload DNA from convicted offenders and crime scenes
so that jurisdictions across the country could compare their samples
to a broader swath of people and evidence.
This was big for law enforcement because even though DNA had been used in forensics prior to CODIS,
you had to actually have a physical person to compare your DNA sample to,
which wasn't always helpful in cases that hadn't been able to yet pinpoint the suspect.
So now, once you had a suspect sample, you could compare it against the known samples in the database.
And if someone else was a prior offender,
then you could get a match that way.
To have the ability to take a DNA sample and run it through a database
and have it spit out a name,
potentially somebody who was never on your radar,
someone who may have just been passing through town
and randomly committed a crime
is something which is a complete game changer.
And it's so interesting. You think about here that this was this huge breakthrough. And by the time that I was prosecuting, and randomly committed a crime is something which is a complete game changer.
And it's so interesting.
You think about here that this was this huge breakthrough.
And by the time that I was prosecuting homicides, this is something we relied on.
I mean, countless cases came through with CODIS matches,
sometimes right away and sometimes years later.
I saw firsthand the game changing technology that this proved to be.
Back at Sitka, this meant Jessica's case wasn't ready to be shelved. Remember, they collected tangible DNA evidence from her crime scene. And with the
rapid advancements in forensic tech, it was only a matter of time before it led investigators to
her killer. In 2007, someone else realized this too, an Alaska state trooper by the name of Dave Tugman.
Dave had transferred from the Sikha Police Department
into the state troopers, promoted,
and just eventually got involved in our criminal investigations unit.
He was very familiar with the case,
and new DNA procedures were coming along through this time.
Somewhere around 2007 or so
was when mitochondrial DNA analysis
was coming online. Now, we don't want to get too deep into science here, but what you need to know
is that mitochondrial DNA is, of course, a type of DNA that everyone has. What makes it unique
is that it's matriarchal, meaning it's inherited from your mother.
And because of this, it can be useful in identifying relatives.
The FBI was building a database for mitochondrial DNA to both identify human remains as well as suspects in criminal cases.
The Baggins case is one of the first cases that they tried mitochondrial DNA analysis with here in Alaska.
Dave spearheaded that, but unfortunately it didn't generate any new leads.
That's because if there was no one in the database that shares a maternal ancestor with the person who killed Jessica, there isn't going to be a match.
But even so, Dave's efforts were only the beginning. And that's where Randy finally comes in.
Randy had retired from the Alaska State Troopers in 2012, but only a year later,
he found himself back in the force in the cold case unit.
Initially, 2013, we had four investigators, two stationed here in Anchorage. One was in Soldot and one was
in Fairbanks. 2015, the unit was disbanded for budgetary reasons. In 17, I came back and I was
the sole investigator in the unit. And as the sole investigator, Randy was tasked with solving
Alaska's cold cases. By this point, he was already well-versed in DNA and knew
how quickly it was evolving. So in 2018, when he read about a solved double homicide in Washington
State, his ears perked up. They'd broken the case using a process called genetic genealogy.
Which is essentially tracking down a suspect's relatives in the genetic databases like GEDmatch and family tree DNA and so forth.
And then piecing together a family tree from all these different profiles to try to figure out who the suspect is.
This process uses a different type of DNA than the CODIS database does.
And I hope we're not going too far down the scientific rabbit hole here.
But you hear these terms all the time.
But some of you might not know exactly what all this means.
And it really is super interesting.
So we're going to give you a bit more background on it today.
What's used in CODIS is like a genetic fingerprint of you.
It's your DNA data and only you.
Whereas genetic genealogy uses a profile called a SNP,
an S-N-P, and it contains the DNA that you share with your relatives. It's amazing stuff. I mean,
I'm not a DNA scientist at all, but it's fascinating how they were able to come up with
this. A SNP profile, I think it stands for single nucleotide polymorphism. It's like the blueprint
of you. It's all the genetic information you share with your parents, your grandparents,
your siblings, cousins, and so forth and so on, on generation after generation.
Seeing that the case had been solved using SNP and genetic genealogy
was an energizing moment for Randy.
This could be a real game changer for us.
Let's see if we've got any cases that have DNA left that we can have analyzed and see if it generates any leads.
They focused on a case from 1993 where a University of Alaska student was murdered in her dorm room.
Through DNA analysis and genetic genealogy,
the cold case team was able to finally identify her killer. The Sophie Sergi homicide from 1993
was kind of our test case to see how the process worked. Once we determined that the process
worked, we started applying it to other cases that we had DNA to work with. Now remember, he was looking for cases that had enough DNA to create a SNP sample.
Getting usable DNA from cold cases can be tricky.
Sometimes crimes predate DNA advancements.
So the investigators at the time didn't know how to store forensics properly to prevent degradation.
DNA is also used up each time you run a test on it.
So Randy needed to find a cold case with enough DNA to create a SNP sample.
That's when he picked up Jessica's file.
We looked at this case and others to see how much DNA we had to work with
and if it was a sufficient amount to generate a SNP profile.
And we concluded that
there was enough DNA there. So we submitted it to an outside laboratory. They were able to use the
blood found on Jessica's shirt to create the SNP profile. Then Randy and his team uploaded it to a
genetic genealogy website. You've probably heard of these websites, maybe the most well-known are
23 and me or ancestrycestry.com.
If you haven't, they're companies that allow people to upload their genetic profiles to connect with distant family members, locate relatives, or learn more about their heritage.
While genealogy is a hobby for some, investigators have turned to these sites as a tool in testing crime scene DNA against a larger swath of the population.
We should note that use of these websites to investigate crimes isn't without controversy.
Regulations on how easily law enforcement can access these databases are still developing,
and some users worry about privacy protections as a result.
But regardless of where you fall in this debate, it is an incredibly effective tool in locating
criminals and solving crimes.
Still, it's not as easy as uploading your sample and getting a name.
We were able to identify a large number of relatives of the suspect, but unfortunately they weren't real close.
Many generations removed. Essentially, if Randy was to hit on a first cousin,
narrowing down their suspect pool would be considerably easier
because those relatives are close enough to have a shared grandparent.
The further away their relation, the more family branches investigators have to go through.
And the way the process works, if you can identify multiple individuals
that share large amounts of the same DNA and then
use just standard genealogy research methods to build family trees and family connections and so
forth. Those standard research methods Randy's talking about can include birth and death records,
marriage licenses, social media, census reports, and so on.
Then you start physically building a family tree so you can find common shared ancestors.
You start filling in the blanks and figure out who potentially your suspect is.
And you can sometimes identify a specific individual or at least whittle it down to a small group
of individuals. As all of you will likely remember, this process was famously done to
identify the Golden State Killer, Joseph DeAngelo, who had murdered and assaulted
dozens of people across California. But each case has its own challenges,
and finding the identity of their suspect was hampered by the unique location of the
killer's origins. Based upon all this other genealogy analysis, his family had come from
western Tennessee. There'd been a lot of pedigree collapse. People had unknowingly married their
relatives, like their third cousin or something, just because, you know, it was a
very rural area, the gene pools were relatively small, and that further complicated the process
because all these individuals are sharing the same amount of DNA, so there would be a
disproportionately high amount of DNA. And with these sites, unless investigators have a search
warrant, they're at the mercy of what's uploaded to the site publicly. So while they're chipping away at that family tree,
they're also hoping that the right person gives them access to the right set of data.
It involved a lot of work and a lot of waiting too.
It was several months of analysis. We had submitted the DNA sample for processing in, I believe it was 2018,
and we got results back in like mid-2019 from the lab. It was months and months worth of DNA analysis.
Finally, their patience paid off.
After months of painstaking family tree building,
a genealogy website provided a major break in the Jessica Baggin case.
It was just a matter of time.
The more people that put their
DNA into these genetic genealogy databases, and the more people allow these profiles to be accessed
by law enforcement, which is an option you can choose when you do this, the greater the chance
we'll figure this out. And that's eventually what happened. An individual elected to make their profile public
and it immediately gave us a connection that we didn't have before.
And we were able to connect this individual to other family members
and build a very large family tree that went back to an ancestral couple
that we then, from there, were able to work our way down.
And then all of a sudden, we started finding people with connections in this family tree to Sitka.
This meant that Randy now had a suspect pool.
The next step was to eliminate people from that pool based on what they knew about the perpetrator,
which was pretty simple.
We knew the person was male, so obviously we were able to
eliminate his sisters as suspects. And as I recall, he was the only son in his family.
This gave them a name, Steve Branch, who by this time was 66 years old.
Then from there, we just did some legwork and determined, yes, this individual was living in Sitka at the time.
I think he was an auto mechanic or a truck mechanic, something along those lines.
He'd lived in Sitka for over 20 years.
Not only that, but he'd lived at several different addresses along the Sawmill Creek Road, the very same road where Jessica was killed. When investigators dug into Branch's
background further, they found something that I refer to as big red flags all over it.
He was a suspect in another sexual assault that occurred prior to Jessica's. I think it was March
of 96 that it occurred. Victim was another young woman. I believe she was an acquaintance
or a friend of Branch's son. She worked at a local Sitka grocery store and was encouraged
by a co-worker to report Branch after disclosing that she had been assaulted. Sitka police attempted
to get a confession by having her record a conversation with Branch, but he didn't admit to anything,
even so that June, he was arrested and charged.
Eventually, the case went to trial,
but he ended up being acquitted.
He claimed that the woman consented to having sex with him.
He claimed it was consensual.
Obviously, the woman claimed it was not,
but it essentially boiled down to a
he-said-she-said kind of situation,
and apparently just they did not have enough to convince the jury that it was not a consensual act.
After the incident, Branch ended up living in Sitka for another 15 years or so before moving to a small town in Arkansas, northeast of Little Rock.
It's not clear if he had ever previously been looked at as a suspect in Jessica's murder.
Steve Branch had reddish blonde hair, and they also had a sample of his blood from his arrest. Now, we don't want to play the what-if game here, but it's too hard not to wonder
what would have happened if they tested his DNA against the evidence from Jessica's crime scene.
Remember, it was only about a week after Jessica was killed
that you had Richard Bingham walking into the precinct
and soon after that, making a confession
and was now on trial for the murder.
So it's also very possible that police aren't looking for anyone else
because at least at that time, they believe that they had their killer.
Yeah, it's easy to look at it in hindsight now.
It's also obvious that investigators had real tunnel vision
by somebody walking in and confessing to the crime.
Still, it is notable that two such similar attacks
occurred so close together in a town
that had such a low violent crime rate.
This was just very interesting.
Wow, the number of similarities to both victims, given their age. This was just very interesting. Wow, the number of similarities to both victims,
given their age, it was just very striking.
But the main evidence was the DNA evidence.
On that front, Randy and his team still had work to do
because they couldn't solely rely on the genetic genealogy results.
In order to prove Branch was indeed the perpetrator,
they needed DNA directly from him to confirm it.
They asked the Arkansas State Police for assistance in getting a discarded sample.
This is anything that the suspect has thrown away that may have his DNA on it, like a coffee cup, tissue.
I think you get the picture.
And it's a pretty common theme that has been seen in television and movies for years.
You know, there's a coffee cup on a table and investigators take it and boom, they get their DNA evidence.
It really is very prevalent in practice.
And yes, it's legal.
You know, the example that is used so often in law school is that, you know, someone takes their garbage and puts it on the curb.
Well, you no longer have legally a right to privacy in that.
So that is why investigators can use those samples.
However, I will point out that that is not something we can use in court.
And even if we get a match, we now have to get an actual known sample
with the person right in front of us later.
Recently, in the Long Island serial killer case,
they collected his DNA from discarded pizza in a box.
I mean, it is a controversial tool, but I always say to people, listen, it's confirming
a whole lot of information that you're adding to another piece of puzzle in your investigation.
But in this case, Arkansas police weren't able to get a sample from Branch at all.
So Alaska investigators now looked at available options a little closer to home.
The Sitka Police Department was able to get a discarded DNA sample from a sister that still
lived in Sitka. Sitka PD went through her garbage, found some stuff that she had left DNA samples on,
and we were able to collect a sample that way. Then through kinship DNA analysis,
they determined, yes, your suspect is a brother to this woman. It was a huge moment for a case that had been gestating
for so many years. It was just elation. It's great news. I just wanted so much to share
this with people like Dave Tugman and others who had investigated it and been involved in it before.
But initially, of course, we had to keep things pretty quiet.
Because even with a lead from Branch's sister, Randy knew he had to get further confirmation.
He still needed DNA directly from Steve Branch. This was in, I think, the spring of 2020, when we finally got the news that this is probably our guy, or maybe it was the early summer.
So once we had this information, we're like, this is great.
Go down there and contact him, see what he has to say, and then get a DNA sample from him that we can do a direct comparison and hopefully prove that he's the guy.
And of course, this was smack dab in the middle of COVID, so traveling was problematic.
But two other trooper investigators who were very familiar with the case went down to Arkansas.
On August 3rd, 2020, investigators approached Branch at his home.
They told him the state of Alaska has uncovered information
that indicates you were in Sitka at the time this occurred.
What do you remember?
And he told them, yeah, I was there, I remember it,
but I had nothing to do with it.
I mean, they didn't accuse him of being a suspect or anything at that time.
They just said, would you be willing to give us a DNA sample
to eliminate you as a potential suspect?
He refused, so they left to go obtain a search warrant to get one from me.
Meanwhile, Randy was back in Alaska waiting for news,
and he did finally get that call.
What he heard was completely shocking.
I was back in Alaska still,
and the investigator down there at the time called me
and told me that Branch was dead.
About a half hour after investigators left his home,
Steve Branch shot himself.
His wife came home and found her husband dead in his truck.
I was just amazed.
Initially, I thought he was joking me.
We had no information that he had been suicidal prior,
that he was depressed or anything like that.
His family did not indicate to us that there had been any problems
or any concerns prior to this.
They were as surprised as we were by his actions.
For an investigation that moved so slowly for so long,
you know, Scott, this development feels, I don't know, just very abrupt.
The other thing is that with Branch's death,
so too goes the hope of getting him to explain what happened that night.
It would have been better if he would have confessed
and provided some details about what actually happened and why.
And if we would have gotten a trial, it would have been a better ending to it. It was pretty disheartening that we couldn't go the full distance and take it to trial and get
a conviction. But just as Jessica's body held clues that pointed towards her killer, Steve
Branch's held one last answer. A few weeks later, investigators were able to obtain a search warrant that allowed them to retrieve Branch's DNA during his autopsy.
They were able to get a DNA sample from the body,
and it was brought back to Alaska and compared to the suspect samples,
and we got a positive match.
More than 20 years after Jessica's death, DNA analysis matched Steve Branch to the
blood found on Jessica's shirt. Now, because of his death, this was never proven in court,
but police did feel confident that he was Jessica's killer, so much so that they officially
closed the case. It was great news. We can definitely let
Jessica's family know
that we believe this is the guy
and the case is finally closed.
They can finally put this behind
them and not continue to wonder
about it anymore.
They were incredibly relieved and very
grateful that she hadn't been forgotten
and that we hadn't given up on her.
Even though Branch would never be brought into a courtroom, I would think it was cathartic in
some way to at least finally have an answer that had just been this, what I can only describe as
maybe an open wound for so long. When you think about collateral damage in this case, you also
have to think about Richard Bingham. False confessions do happen for all sorts of
reasons, from inadequate or aggressive interviews to people confessing to crimes they didn't commit
due to mental health reasons. The system does have fail-safe measures in place, but the system
is far from perfect. And at ASEGA, we talk about this a lot.
So you had in this case, answers long denied, a man falsely accused.
What fortunately worked with Jessica's is not always the outcome of cold cases.
Some of them stagnate forever.
Cases go cold just because, you know, they tried their best but couldn't put it together.
Or in this case, the initial defendant was acquitted.
And then you have to move on to the next case.
And you only have so much time to devote to things.
And months turn into years.
People retire, people transfer.
Things just slowly start to get neglected and forgotten about.
But just as we've learned with Jessica,
solving these kinds of cases is certainly possible.
It just requires a special set of circumstances.
At least with the state troopers here in Alaska and a lot of departments in other places in the country,
they realize that you need to have a very specialized unit and you need to focus on these type of cases.
You know, you can solve them if you have the time
and effort and the tools to do it. I was very grateful to be working at a time when this new
technology came along to make this happen and take advantage of it. Obviously, it was a game
changer. I mean, Branch was never on anybody's radar, had never been developed as a potential
suspect. I'm sure he would have never been found
had it not been for the DNA analysis. And this is why it is so important that cold cases have
champions that can push them through the stagnant years to ensure that no victim is ever forgotten.
Because at the end of the day, these cases are all about people, and this one about Jessica.
When her dog Sam went missing, Jessica spent hours combing the wilderness to find him.
Remember, she's been navigating the wilderness all her life,
and while they were setting up camp to work through the night,
Sam simply appeared, almost as if he knew where she was.
On that night, the wilderness reunited two best friends.
The tragic murder of Jessica Baggin is a somber reminder
of the vulnerability that exists in even the most close-knit communities.
Her untimely death shocked and saddened many,
underscoring the need for vigilance, community solidarity,
and even though some may feel this case is the true example of justice denied, we are reminded
to cherish the moments we have with loved ones, to never take our safety for granted, and to
continue to advocate for justice. That's why we're here. A bright spitfire of a teenage girl
with so much life ahead of her,
killed by what seemed to be just
a violent crime of opportunity.
The answer that we had to have patience for,
well, that answer was all for her.
And hopefully that answer also gave her family
at least a small bit of peace.
Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder.
Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original. Produced and created by Weinberger Media and Frasetti Media.
Ashley Flowers is executive producer.
So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?