Crime, Conspiracy, Cults and Murder - Ep. 126 | Cold Cases Solved DECADES Later

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

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Learn more at VolvoCars.caps.com. Every year, people are found who cannot be identified. No wallet, no missing person report, no match in any database. Now one was a young man killed on a summer afternoon, and another was a young woman, left in a ditch beside a country road, and both had a mother who never stopped waiting. But neither mother knew her child had already been found. And for decades, the only names these two had were the ones strangers gave them. but both of them would get their real names back.

This is the story of the Grateful Doe and the Buckskin Girl. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder, all things that I love to consume, and I know you do too, you sick, twisted, beautiful, intellectually minded, and today we're talking about two different cold cases and two different people who were given their names back. So without further ado, let's unbuckle our seatbelts

going back down the highway, slam on the brakes, and bust the windshield into these two cold cases together. Let's take a quick pause to talk about one of today's sponsors. A sponsor, I have used diligently for years now, and that is Shopify. Now, if you've bought anything from our Sour Boys storefront, that store runs on Shopify. And I'll be honest about how it's been going, all right? Because I think people assume that there was, like, a plan of some sort when there really wasn't. Like, we know how to make candy. That's what we know really well. We know how to work with our employees, and we know how to make candy taste good. But getting the

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free trial today. That's Shopify.com slash cccn. Thank you so much to Shopify for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel and let's get back to it. So before we get into the Grateful John Doe, we need to talk about the actual band, The Grateful Dead, to fully understand what was going on at the time. So for 30 years, the Grateful Dead had refused to play the same show twice. Every night was meant to go somewhere the band had not been before, and that was the draw. And by the 90s, the crowds had gotten enormous, and the surge came after their 1987 hit, Touch of Grey, and by then they were filling stadiums and arenas coast to coast, playing to the biggest audiences of their career.

And plenty of those fans didn't just buy a ticket and go home afterward. They went where the band went. nothing else to do in the 80s and 90s, and whole families would pack up and travel the circuit together. Which sounds really fun, but getting to every spot was a great importance, and people got there by whatever means they had, and at whatever the lifestyle cost them. And paying for all this was its own craft. And since the late 70s, fans had been selling tie-dye shirts and veggie burritos and anything else that would move to each other and at the shows. And by the 80s, that marketplace had a name of its own,

Shakedown Street, borrowed from one of the band's albums. And what people earned out there was what kept them on the road. So these people were grinding it out to see this band play everywhere. And a mailing list had been running since 1971 to send out tour dates and ticket information, and it had grown to 40,000 names

and a newsletter of its own. And a deadhead at a show in 1974 described the community, quote, it's always a group of the same faces, basically. You know? New people can. keep coming in over the years and then older people phase off, you know? Advance onto different trips and you don't see their faces as much, but it's like a continuous trip,

unquote. So people came and went from the scene as they pleased, and the summer tour of 1995 would be the band's last, nearly two months of 26 shows, and it went wrong from the start. It opened on June 15th at an airfield in Highgate, Vermont, where thousands of people turned up without tickets and pressed against the gates until they were opened. And Dennis McNally, the band's publicist, said, quote, they were going to come through the gates no matter what. So they opened the gates and then 10,000 more people were inside than there should have been, unquote.

And Jerry Garcia, the band's frontman and lead guitarist, was an even worse shape than the tour was, with his health failing fast. And by January, McNally had stopped talking about the band's future as a guarantee. Quote, I actually do remember saying to people in January, if we get to Boston this fall, I knew his physical health was crumbling, unquote. So on June 24th and 25th, the tour reached RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., with Bob Dylan opening both nights. A storm rolled over the stadium on the afternoon at the 25th, and around 3 p.m., three young deadheads in the parking lot got under a tree to wait it out,

Kristen Daniel, Kira Lee, and John Pongle. And lightning struck Daniel, leaving her critically injured, and the next day the Washington Post reported Lee and Pongol in stable condition. Now, Daniel was still in intensive care on the respirator two days later. And back at the concert, the dead closed the night with Broke Down Palace as the encore. And of the many thousands of people standing in that stadium, Plenty would never make it to another show on tour. And the closing was something of a poetic ending for them, as the song starts with Fair You World. But things would get even worse after Washington. And at Deer Creek in Indiana, the crowd outside tore down the fences while the crowd inside

cheered them on. And afterward, the police told the band that they wouldn't work another night inside that venue. Shit was just crazy. And the next show was canceled, and McNally couldn't remember another time an audience had cost the Grateful Dead a show. And even a threat on Garcia's life was credible enough to the FBI and local police that the band played a whole show with the house lights up. And near St. Louis, a structure came down at a campground after a July show,

leaving hundreds of people seriously hurt, and one of them was even paralyzed. And Jan Simmons, who worked for the band's manager, described the summer as the tour from hell as far as we were concerned. So the tour ended at Soldier Field in Chicago on July 8th and 9th, and on August 8th, Garcia checked himself in to a facility called Serenity Knowles, and he died there in his sleep a little after for the next morning, August 9, 1995.

So without Garcia, there was no more grateful dead anymore, and the enormous traveling crowd that had built its life around the band's tour dates had nowhere left to follow. But the tour from hell still had one more death hidden within it. Now, six weeks before Garcia died, on June 26, 1995, the Monday after the RFK, show, there was a car accident.

And at about 1.30 p.m., a Volkswagen Vanigan ran off U.S. Route 58 outside Emporia, Virginia, a town down near the North Carolina line. Quote, the vehicle went off the side of the road, braked and crashed head on into two trees, unquote. As Lieutenant Ted Jones of the Virginia State Police described, and two young men were inside, and both were killed, and only one of them could be given a name. and neither of the two was wearing a seatbelt.

And Jones continued, quote, the occupants were not restrained and were both partially ejected through the windshield, unquote. And a vanigan puts whoever sitting up front right at the nose of the vehicle. Quote, it's a cab over-designed with a rear engine mount,

so they had no protection up front from anything, unquote. And both men died there of massive head injuries. Jones believed was on impact. And there were no drugs present in either of them. And there was nothing wrong with the road, necessarily. Jones looked at the tire marks and concluded the driver had just fallen asleep. Quote, that is based upon the lengthy and gradual departure of the vehicle from the paved surface, unquote. So the driver was carrying identification, and he was 21-year-old Michael Hager, a student

at the University of South Carolina, and he left his girlfriend's house in Fairfax County at about 7.45 that morning, and he stopped at his father's place in Gloucester County, but his father wasn't home. And he called. He called him around noon to say he was driving down to his mother's house in Inman, South Carolina, and he didn't mention having anybody with him. And roughly 19 minutes after that phone call, he was dead, and his family was informed, and he was buried at Good Shepherd Memorial Park in Boiling Springs, South Carolina, under his own name. Now the other man had nothing on him that said who he was.

And the report from NOMUS, the National Database for the Missing and Unidentified, read, quote, the unidentified passenger did not have any identification on him and no identification was found in the van." And none of Hager's friends or family knew him, and none of them knew Hager to be traveling with anyone. So for the first year, police worked on the idea that the passenger had been in the van since before Gloucester County. And neighbors of his father said there had been a second young man at the house that day, and a message Hager left behind put the pair of them leaving there around. noon. And Jones eventually came to believe that was wrong entirely. Quote, when he stopped at his father's house, he was alone. The theory is that the passenger was a hitchhiker, that Hager likely picked up between

Gloucester and Emporia, unquote. So everything the passenger had on him fit in his pockets, four quarters, a yellow bick lighter, and two ticket stubs. And the stubs were for the two nights the Grateful Dead had just played in Washington. And Jones traced the back to the man who'd originally had them, a reseller in Pennsylvania who bought in bulk and had no memory of who he'd sold them to outside the venue. And the unidentified body was wearing a summer tour Grateful Dead shirt, red and tied-eyed over light blue Levi's with white athletic socks and black feelless sneakers in a size 11 and a half, and a beaded necklace hung around his throat. So whoever he was, he didn't seem to be chasing the band because the next Grateful Dead

show was in Michigan and Hager was driving the other way completely. So somewhere close to the wreck, police picked up a note. And the note said to Jason, sorry we had to go, see you around, call me, Caroline O and Caroline T, bye. And the number had a 9-14 prefix and no area code, and there was a small doodle off to one side. So it wasn't established that the note was his, quote, it was found within proximity of the vehicle and may not have even been in his original possession, Jones would say. And investigators called every variation of the number they could think of, and they didn't reach anybody connected to the note. And the lab couldn't lift a fingerprint off the paper either. And neither Caroline has been identified. And the passenger's face had taken too much damage to

put a photograph in front of the public. And the coroner was only able to place him somewhere between 15 and 21 years old. He was white, brown-eyed, about 5'8 and 169 pounds, with shoulder-lithe curly hair between light brown and dark blonde. And his left earlobe was pierced, though there was no earring in it, and he had a scar on his back. And on his upper left arm was an amateur tattoo of a star with a fainter mark on the right arm that may have been another tattoo. And his teeth were seemingly well looked after, but carried no dental work at all despite the care. That's usually how they figure out who people are, so he didn't have any record of that. And this was judging by his third molars being visible.

And his fingerprints weren't in any law enforcement database either. And he matched no missing persons report. So in place of a photograph, investigators released an artist reconstruction of his face. And a year on, he had still not been buried. And he lay at the state medical examiner's office in Richmond waiting for somebody to claim him. And his description had gone into the national database, where more than 220 missing people were checked against him and ruled out one by one. And Jones worked the case until there were seemingly nothing left to check.

Quote, I investigated everything from every angle and nothing ever panned out, unquote. And somewhere along the way, people started calling him Grateful Doe. So for a long time, the only people keeping the case alive had no connection to it at all. And in the summer of 1996, a woman in Salisbury, North Carolina, named Gladysburg. Culp began mailing journalists copies of the state police sketch and a summary of the case, trying to get somebody to write about him. Quote, I just felt bad there would be somebody that young out there. Maybe he has a family searching for him, unquote. So she's just like a little guardian angel lady. And because when he died, there was very little internet and no social media at

all. So it wasn't like it is today where he'd probably be able to be identified, hopefully, pretty quickly, but in the mid-90s, it was just not the same. But as both arrived, the case moved on to forums where volunteers kept lists of the unidentified dead. And on web sleuths, two members who went by Killarney Rose and Rainwater worked it for years. And Killarney Rose described what kept her at it. Quote, he was someone's son, brother, grandson, nephew, uncle, and it is so hard to believe that in this day and time that no one can identify him, unquote. And Rainwater said, quote, Although Grateful Dead fans may not know each other's names,

at a dead concert, all are members of the same family for magical hours. We want to see this family member given back his name, unquote. And then it reached Reddit. And we all know, Reddit has been infamous for identifying people who have lost their names and have been dead for years and years and years. Shout out to the armchair sleuths. And Layla Betts in Queensland, Australia had gotten deep deep into unsolved mysteries when she came across the Virginia crash.

And she helped start a subreddit built around this one manned called R-slash Grateful Doe, and thousands of members joined. And some days, she spent 12 hours moderating, answering comments, contacting police, and posting whatever was new. Now, internet sleuth volunteer work was pretty slow and unglamorous. They called phone numbers. They chased down where the scalped concert ticket had come from. They cataloged every distinguishable mark. on him, down to the homemade star on his arm.

They hunted for old photographs of anybody who resembled the artist's reconstruction. They worked through missing persons from every part of the country and kept a public list on Nam US of all the people he was not. And in 2012, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children

built a new reconstruction of his face, and versions of it were passed around by volunteers. And in January of 2015, one of the subreditors' moderators, U-Slais gray metal, now you slash zombie gray, posted the reconstruction and other case evidence to Imger under a title written in his voice, quote, do you recognize me?

I have been without my name for nearly 20 years, unquote. And the whole post was written as though the man in the drawings were doing the asking, quote, for 20 years, no one has come forward to identify me. I have adopted the identity of the grateful dough, unquote. And it went viral across Reddit and Facebook and Imger and people started writing in. Deborah Halber wrote a book about the amateurs who work cold cases, and she was asked what pulls them into these searches.

Quote, what draws them in is the mystery, the challenge. Nobody can really resist a mystery. They're also eventually driven by compassion, a feeling that they'd like to provide closure for these families of missing people. They realize these people are someone's daughter or wife or husband or uncle, and they feel strongly that they'd like to end that agony for them, unquote. But that same impulse has done real damage as well. And after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, Reddit users went through hundreds of photographs of the scene, noting anyone holding a bag and treating them as a suspect. Not great because a lot of people carry bags.

And two innocent men wound up on the front page of the New York post under the words bag men. Salaheddin Barhum and Yassin Zamy later settled a defamation suit against the paper. And when the FBI put out pictures of the actual bombers, Reddit had already settled on somebody else. They had already picked out Sunil Tripathi, a missing Brown University student, and they turned on his family,

who were themselves still looking for him. So just an awful situation. And Eric Martin, Redditor's general manager, apologized once the damage was done. And Carol Schwitzer, a senior forensic case specialist at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, drew a distinction in what the internet had done, in the Grateful Doe case.

Quote, social media was the tool that helped bring all the pieces together. It helped spread this information out further. I would say that Reddit, Facebook, and Imger users didn't investigate the case. Social media was used as an investigative tool by the agencies who were investigating the case, unquote. And what she asked of volunteers was that they pass things on and then get out of the way. If they find new information, they need to share all of that with investigating agencies of immediately and not take it upon themselves to release new information by themselves. Everybody has good intentions, but it's important to not interfere, unquote, which I agree with.

You know, there's a, there's a line to internet sleuthing. It's like, you can help out in different ways and bring that to investigators and the police, the people, it's their job, but it's not on you to like completely solve a case, especially when it involves incriminating a potential innocent person. I think it's different if you're trying to identify somebody in this case. the Grateful Doe in a lot of ways, but in like the bombing case. That's horrible. But the Grateful Doe case is an example of this going right. And one of the people who saw one of Layla Betts update posts was a man named Steve. And he messaged Layla on Reddit to say he knew the face in the reconstruction. He had lived with him in Illinois 20 years earlier. And the man's name was Jason. And the tip

pointed south to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. And a woman posted on the Grateful Doe community Facebook page to say she knew the young man in the Reconstruction too. Quote, oh my God, this is my son Jason Callahan from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I've been looking for him all this time with no luck. Today, my other son saw this Facebook page after all the years of praying for him to just call me or come home, unquote. And people on the subreddit went back through her Facebook history

and found something from two years earlier. In April of 2013, she had written that it would have been Jason's 36th birthday and that she missed him. And her name was Margaret Evans. And she was 63 years old. So on Tuesday, January 13, 2015, she walked into the Myrtle Beach Police Department and filed a missing person report on a son who had been gone for 20 years. And she told them she had not seen or heard from Jason Patrick Callahan since June of 1995 when, quote, he left to follow the band Grateful Dead, unquote. And Lieutenant Joey Crosby of the Myrtle Beach Police said she didn't know where he had traveled

or where a report was supposed to be filed. And Myrtle Beach Police drove up to Virginia to collect DNA. And several members of the family gave samples, including a half-sister in New Jersey named Shannon. And she had first seen the reconstruction online saying, quote, I honestly started shaking. When I looked at the picture, it looked like my dad was looking back at me. He had the same face and even had a lot of my facial features. My forehead, the shape of my face, I knew in that moment, deep down, that that was Jason, unquote.

And then everybody waited while a lab at the University of North Texas worked through part of the DNA. And Jason's mother would not go on camera, but she told a reporter, quote, I am just waiting for everything to be put together to see if it is my son, to see if it is a positive match, unquote. And the answer finally came on December 9th, 2015. And our Qie Williams, a spokesman for the Virginia Medical Examiner's office, confirmed that the man who had been nobody for 20 years was Jason Patrick Callahan of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and he had been 19 years old. And the Grateful Doe community Facebook page, run by Lasha Jehannock, posted the news the same day.

And over 100,000 people saw it within minutes. Quote, because of everyone here, this man will finally make his way home. On another note, I want this story to do so much more. I really pray that the story gives an important lesson to reporting your missing loved ones or even trying to check up on them if you haven't had contact in years, unquote. And that is the hardest part of this story, I think. Because for 20 years, there was no missing persons report on Jason Callahan anywhere in the country, which is one of the main reasons every database search came back empty.

He had run away from home before, and Shannon would explain, quote, no one ever thought to report him missing because they thought he wanted to be missing, unquote. And his parents took it that he was living somewhere on his own because he was 19, he was technically an adult. Not to say that they shouldn't have filed a missing person's report, but, you know, hindsight's 2020 and I don't want to like shame anyone or anything. It's like, it was a very different time. And it's very dependent on the person. So when he moved out of the place he had been sharing, all he left behind was a phone bill and charges for the one 900 numbers that ran Grateful Dead hotlines. And Shannon's father and Jason's mother had separated when Shannon was small,

and she had never laid eyes on her brother again. And his burial details are unknown, but I think it's so wonderful he was given his name back. And his family knows now what happened and where he was this whole time. I can't imagine what that closure feels like. Obviously devastating. But yeah, I think it's wonderful how the internet actually came together to help police figure out who he was. And that brings us to our next case. Let's take a quick pause to talk about what are my favorite sponsors. Now, I spend all day in some genuinely bleak material, as you guys know. So my wind down is a non-negotiable.

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Please tell them, I sent you. Thank you so much to Lola Blankets for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel, and let's get back to it. So a young farmer in Ohio was moving to a new home. It was April 24, 1981, and Greg Bridenbaugh was hauling his things from State Route 55 over to Greenlee Road, west of Troy in Miami County. And two friends were helping him, brothers named Neil and Meele. Martin Hoffman. And on one of the trips, Brittenbaugh noticed a coat lying in a ditch.

Quote, unquote, I was like, that's a nice coat. And he kept working until he felt compelled by it, saying, quote, and I said to one of my guys, I said, you know, I'd like to have that. Lo and behold, there was somebody in it, unquote. And Neil Hoffman walked over for a closer look and turned him back around. Quote, oh my God, there's a woman in that coat, unquote. And Brittonbaugh described, she was laying on her right side almost in a fetal position. It was like someone just laid her in there. And authorities were immediately contacted, and a man from the Pleasant Hill Rescue Squad pronounced her dead where she lay without moving her. And Bob Sweitzer, the Miami County detective selected for the case, could tell the ditch was not where the death had actually

occurred, saying, quote, she was dumped there, killed somewhere else, and dumped there, unquote. And the autopsy was done that afternoon. and it showed that she was strangled. And before that, she had taken heavy blunt force to the head and the neck, and her liver had been torn. But she had not been sexually assaulted. Investigators put her death at April 22nd,

two days before the three men found her. But still, the coat was the detail people were drawn to because it was a handmade tan buckskin pullover, fringed leather along the seams, lined in deep purple. And under it, she wore a brown turtleneck with an orange crisscross across the front and a pair of blue bell bottom Wrangler jeans.

And she had no shoes and no socks on. Now, Sweetser kept that coat in an evidence bag for the next 35 years. And he said, quote, the news media called her the buckskin girl because of this coat, unquote. And though the body had no name, investigators were able to gather a fair amount

of physical detail. She was white, somewhere between the ages of 18 and 26, 5-4 to 5-6, and around 125 to 130 pounds. And she wore her reddish-brown hair in two braids, one on each side, with a part straight down the middle. And she had light brown eyes, freckles across her face, and a complexion that said she had been outdoors a great deal in her last months. And she had taken pretty good care of herself.

Her teeth were sound with no fillings and no dental work except a single porcelain crown on one upper front tooth. And there were scars under her chin, one on her wrist and both arms, and one on her ankle. And her face was relatively undamaged, which was unusual for a dough case. A police artist drew a composite of her, and on April 28th, the drawing went out in the local papers and on television, but none of it led anywhere. And the publicity brought in something like 200 leads, and detectives worked every one of them to no avail. And her fingerprints and her her dental charts didn't match any missing person in the country, and her prints matched no police

record either, which meant she didn't have a criminal record. And there was no identification on her or anywhere near her body. And nobody who saw the coat ever called to say they had seen it before. And obviously, nobody reported her missing at all. Quote, when you can't identify who the person is, you have no place to start the investigation, unquote. So Miami County buried her that year in Riverside Cemetery in Troy, and Sweetser was one of the men who carried her casket, and her headstone carried the common unknown name and date. They only believed she had passed on. Jane Doe, April 22nd, 1981. Now, the thing that convinced Swetzer she'd been killed somewhere else was the bottom of her feet, because despite no shoes and socks, the souls of her feet were

completely clean, with nothing on them to say she'd walked anywhere dirty before she died. And the ditch on Greenlee Road sat about five miles off Interstate 75. A township road located that close to a highway made a convenient and hidden place to leave a body. So the working theory from early on was that somebody had come off the interstate, turned onto a back road, dumped her off, and drove away. And the harder question, obviously, was just determining who this woman was. An investigator considered a runaway teenager, a foster child, a habitual hitchhiker, a transient wanderer who'd like not spent any real time in Ohio, but the condition she was in argued against somebody living a rough lifestyle, and a long-term wanderer would more likely have turned up along the highway

than on a township road. And some detectives looked at the fact of her missing shoes and considered an abusive partner. So police and the press floated a serial killer at work in the region, where several prostitutes of the area had been murdered across the 1980s and into the 1990s. But again, she had not been sexually assaulted. And to investigators, that argued against her having been a sex worker. And they had already looked at a murder from that February, a 27-year-old woman killed two months before she was found. But the two cases were never officially linked. So in 1985, investigators tried again, tentatively tying her to the Redhead murders, a nationwide run of killings of white women, several of them, sex workers or dancers.

And that theory, though, was eventually disproven too. So none of it moved her case forward, and it drifted into the cold case files. And her clothing and everything else recovered from the ditch was kept, and her blood sample was preserved. But still, nobody in Miami County could quite let it go, and they never closed the case. So it sat on detective's desks from 1981 and onward, and Sweetser retired and went on to run the property room where that evidence had been stored since the year she was found. And over the years, as the science changed, new pieces began to emerge. And in 2001, the Miami Valley Regional Crime Laboratory built a nuclear DNA profile out of the blood.

And in 2008, she went into NAM US, which put her fingerprints, her dental charts, and her DNA in front of any agency in the country. And it cleared 226 missing girls and young women who weren't her. And in 2009, a mitochondrial profile of her DNA was developed and sent to the FBI for Kodis. And in 2010, her NAM US file was handed to Dr. Elizabeth Murray, a forensic anthropologist and biology professor at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, who stayed on the case. And by the time Detective Stephen Hickey inherited the case binder, there was nothing inside it to chase. Quote, a victim without a name, it's a face without a name. As of right now, in this file, there are no leads, unquote. And in 2016, Miami County threw everything they had.

at the case and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children built a new image of her face. One version with the braids and one without. And it went out widely online. But unfortunately, nothing at that point came back that was significant. So U.S. Customs and Border Protection ran pollen tests on her clothes, because the clothes she had on carried pollen native to the northeast out of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New England. And the coat carried pollen typical of plants in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. And her clothing also carried heavy soot off of vehicle or industrial activity, which supported what investigators had suspected about her hitchhiking.

And a Salt Lake City firm called isophoresics went to work on her hair. His hair holds a record of the water a person drinks, which is so interesting. And hers was long enough to hold a year of that data. And one place on isoforinsics maps stood out like a bullseye, a rough circle running from Dallas Fort Worth up into southern Oklahoma. Quote, that's the only region in the United States that tapwater corresponds to those isotope values in her hair, unquote, said the senior research scientist Brett Tipple. So she had moved constantly that last year, but she'd been in North Texas twice for two months

each time at the least, which raised the possibility she had lived there once potentially, or new people there at least. And Leslie Chesson, of I, of isophoresics said, quote, she's connected to a family. We need to get her back to that family, whoever that is, unquote. So Hickey and Detective Ben Garbig walked the shoulder of Greenlee Road that summer, talking it over. Somebody knows something Garbid would say. And Hickey would say, oh, absolutely. And Garbig would answer, somebody's got a secret. So at Riverside Cemetery, Cheryl Lavin had been the clerk and caretaker for 23 years, and she'd been looking at that headstone the whole time. And she remembered the old police drawings saying, quote, she looked like

Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. She had those long braids, unquote. And when the two detectives came by, she told them, quote, I've been here 23 years and it's my greatest wish that Jane gets to go home, unquote. 35 years in, they had a region, climate, a coat, and a face. But they still didn't have her name. Let's take a quick pause to talk about one of today's sponsors that I have recently tried for the first time and I'm absolutely obsessed with. And it is Kachava. And certain flavors just put you back in your childhood kitchen. And for me, it's cinnamon. Saturday morning, French toast, an unreasonable amount of Canadian syrup because it is superior. Okay, you can't argue with me. Watching Looney Tune, just better times. So when Kachava dropped a

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So treat yourself to a childhood favorite and go to kachava.com and use code cccm for 15% off your first order. That's kachava k-a-c-v-a-v-com using code c-c-cc-cm. Thank you so much to kachava for sponsoring this video and supporting the channel and letting me have delicious shakes in the morning. And let's get back to it. So every method that Miami County had tried came up short at this point. They took what they had of Jane Doe and held it up against lists of people somebody had reported missing. But she was never going to be on those lists. And the idea that finally worked was to stop looking for her and look for her relatives instead, letting them lead the way back.

So the way it works starts with the DNA you already have. It gets processed into what's called an SNP or SNP profile, a map of hundreds of thousands of markers spread across a person's genome. The same sort of read a home ancestry kit produces. And that profile goes up on public site like GED Match, where ordinary people who have taken those consumer tests upload their own results to find cousins, or like 23 and Me. And the site sorts everybody in it by how much DNA they share with your unknown person, counted in units called centim organs, or CM.

And the bigger that number, the closer the blood relation. And then the genealogists start building from there. They take the strongest matches and construct family trees out of genealogical records. Working out how each of those people might be related to the person nobody can name. And what they're looking for is a family with somebody in it who went missing. And once there's a name to test, police collect DNA from a living relative and compare the two directly one to one. So the DNA Doe Project was founded in 2017 in Sebastopol, California, as a nonprofit set up to do one thing.

give John and Jane Does their names back using genetic genealogy. Now, co-founder Margaret Press, PhD, was a writer and genealogist, and co-founder Colleen Fitzpatrick, PhD, was a retired nuclear physicist who had moved into forensic genealogy. And this project uses genetic genealogy to help law enforcement solve crimes. So they took their first case in September of 2017 and incorporated the month after. And the work itself was done by volunteers. So the So the buckskin girl case reached them by chance at a conference. And Fitzpatrick was giving a talk on forensic genealogy at the 2017 American Academy of Forensic

Scientists meeting, and Dr. Elizabeth Murray, who had been carrying the Miami County file since 2010, was actually just in the room, and she didn't wait for the talk to end. She wrote to Fitzpatrick from her seat, saying, quote, I have the cases if you have the methodology. And Murray said, we had all the other stuff. Why not try this? quote, but there were still a problem. The only sample in existence was the blood drawn in 1981, and it had sat for 37 years in an unrefrigerated tube treated with heparin, which helps prevent blood clots, and it was somehow still liquid. And several laboratories had already

looked at it and reported that the DNA was no longer of any use. But waning Tang and AMD biotech got data out of it anyway. And Fitzpatrick described, quote, 50 to 75% of those points were left after they massaged it to get us the data we need. We got enough marbles in that jar to make it work, unquote. And press was blunt about the cost saying, quote, we threw out 99% of the genome, unquote. And what was left of it went up on GED match on March 29th, 2018, against a database of more than 800,000 entries.

And the volunteers had a candidate in about four hours, which is amazing. And the match was a first cousin once removed, and the family tree behind that match had a member in it listed as missing and presumed dead. And her name was Marcia L. King. Now, Press and Fitzpatrick both made a point of saying this is not how it usually goes. Most of their cases take hundreds of volunteer hours, and some take thousands. A close relative of kings living in Florida volunteered a sample of her own DNA to be compared against the body. On April 9th, 2018, the Miami Valley Regional Crime Lab confirmed the match. And two days after that, on Wednesday, April 11th, the Miami County Sheriff's Office,

the County Coroner's Office, and the DNA Doe Project stood up together at a press conference in Troy. And the woman from the ditch in Greenlee Road was Marcia Lenore King. And she had been born Marcia Lenore Sozeman on June 9th, 1959 in Arkansas, and she was 21 years old when she died. The sheriff's office released a photograph of her taken while she was alive. And Murray spoke at the press conference saying, quote, this is not your run of the mill,

DNA solves unidentified person. I think you'll hear today that this is really some revolutionary and ground baking work. I can't emphasize how many things had to go right for us to be standing here today, unquote. And Chief Deputy Steve Lord had been the one in touch with her family and he said, quote, her mother lived in the same house

for the last 37 years. She didn't change her family. phone number, she was hopeful that one day her daughter would return. So we've given her answers, but it's not necessarily the answer she wanted. They were hopeful Marcia was going to come home. However, they're learning at this date that that's not going to happen, unquote. And the family made no statement of their own, and they asked to be left alone, and the sheriff's office relayed that on their behalf. And what happened in Troy that day was, in the project's own words, quote, the first time in history that the world learned of the power of investigative genetic genesis.

genealogy to solve cold case identifications." And 13 days later, on April 24th, 2018, officers in Sacramento County arrested a 73-year-old former policeman named Joseph James DeAngelo, and he was the Golden State Killer. And they had found him the same way through a relatives' DNA in a public database. Which, if you'd like to watch that video,

I covered the Golden State Killer. Very interesting case. But yeah, he was full. found through the same, same method, which is so cool. And that is the arrest people remember, the one that made the technique the most famous, even though Marcia King's name actually came first. And that's why I want to do this case,

because she is the first person that was found through this method. And press said afterward that almost nobody had believed it was possible, saying, quote, we were dismissed by everybody. I think the biggest lesson was persistence because a year and three months ago, when we started talking about it, and everyone said it couldn't be done,

we'd looked at each other and say, why not? And Hickey told Forensic Magazine the case had been forensically groundbreaking. And he said to everybody else holding a file like his, quote, I encourage any law enforcement agencies who had a cold case like this to do everything they can, unquote. So the stone in Riverside Cemetery still said, Jane Doe.

And a retired Piqua police officer named Paul Selenberger ran a private fundraiser for a new headstone, with help from the county's fraternal order of police lodge. And on Friday, July 20th, 2018, the new stone went in. And they held a memorial service at the cemetery. And nine members of her family came, and about 50 people in all. And her family asked that her father's surname go on the stone with the rest. So it reads Marcia Sosemon King.

And her father, John Sosemon, had died that January, a few months short of finding out what happened to his daughter. And the Reverend Greg Simmons, chaplain of the County Fraternal Order of Police Lodge, spoke first, saying, quote, we are grateful this day has come that Marcia has a name other than buckskin girl, unquote. And her stepmother, Cindy Sousaman spoke, saying, quote, words don't describe the feelings we have for all of you. How you have loved her and taken her in your arms. People taking care of her by bringing flowers out, it's just overwhelming, unquote. And you said Marcia had been very trusting and had obviously fallen into the wrong hands.

and that afterward she was in good hands in the loving hands of people here. And she described her stepdaughter as a very sweet, beautiful, loving young girl. She loved the Lord. And Sullenberger asked everybody standing there to say her full name out loud. Her name is written in stone and etched in her hearts

in our minds. She is no longer Jane Doe. She is no longer buckskin girl. She is Marcia Sosamon King. And though there is closure on the name, nobody has ever been charged with her killing unfortunately. And the homicide file is still open and assigned to a detective with the Miami County Sheriff's Office. And Chief Deputy Lord said they were building a timeline of her last days and weeks. And then in February of 2020, the Sheriff's Office announced it was going back into the evidence

with something new. Because among the evidence held since 1981 was hair recovered from the scene. And until then, a hair was only useful to a DNA lab if it still had the root bulb attached. Because without the root there, there was no way to pull a profile out of it and run it against CODIS. But a scientific breakthrough had changed that. And the sheriff's office said, quote, with this new technology, all foreign hairs collected from a crime scene, even those lacking root bulbs have the potential to provide investigators' DNA data to query in databases, unquote. And they called it molecular witness. So what they're hoping for is a profile of whoever killed her or of somebody she had been with shortly before she died.

Miami County sent the hair to Dr. Ed Green, a paleogeneticist at the University of California. And it's not something an ordinary crime lab can do, and the cost is high enough that it gets aimed only at unsolved murders. And investigators are waiting on the results. But as of right now, we still don't know who killed Marcia. But I'm praying and hoping that they're able to find her killer and bring him to justice. And if for whatever reason, you know anything about this case,

I know it's older, but for whatever reason, please contact Miami County Sheriff's Office. But that is it for today. Those are the two cases. Please let me know what other cases you would like me to dive deep into. I always read the comments. And until then, please, please stay safe out there. Okay? I'll see you in the next one. Bye. Two and five Canadians will hear the words, you have cancer. That's why every step and dollar raised matters. On September 19th, join thousands in Toronto for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation Walk. Challenge yourself, friends, and family to walk 21 kilometers in support of life-saving research.

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