Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - 14-year-old raped, murdered Thanksgiving day

Episode Date: November 23, 2020

Wendy Jerome was last seen alive delivering a birthday card to a friend who lived nearby, but the 14-year-old misses her curfew. Less than three hours later, Wendy’s body is found behind a school near her home. She had been raped and beaten to death. That was 1984. Thirty-six years later, her murderer has now been identified.Joining Nancy Grace Today: Phil Vetrano - father of Karina Vetrano Wendy Patrick- California prosecutor, author “Red Flags”, Host of "Live With Dr. Wendy" on KCBQ Radio www.wendypatrickphd.com  Dr. Bethany Marshall - Psychoanalyst, Beverly Hills, ww.drbethanymarshall.com Joe Scott Morgan - Professor of Forensics Jacksonville State University, Author, "Blood Beneath My Feet" featured on "Poisonous Liaisons" on True Crime Network  Dr Pamela Marshall, Duquesne University, Director and Associate Professor Bayer School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, Forensic Science and Law Master's Program, Expert - DNA Interpretation, Forensic DNA Analysis  Tony Destefano, Journalist for Newsday Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Thanksgiving. A beautiful, young, 14-year-old girl goes to deliver a birthday card to a friend, and she is never seen alive again. Needless to say, we want justice. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Wendy, just 14 years old. Now think about it. Think about it. When I prosecuted cases, it was and still is the law that you, the prosecutor, may not ask the jury to place themselves in the shoes of the victim or the victim's family.

But luckily, those rules of evidence are not binding me right now. And I want you to think, place yourself, if you dare to do it, in the shoes of the mother and dad that are waiting for their 14-year-old girl, Wendy, to come home. This little girl, just one year older than my little girl Lucy and my big boy. John David, I can't imagine them not coming home from something so simple as dropping off a birthday card, but that is what happened. And this is the story. Take a listen to this. From what we can gather now, she left a friend's house around 730 at night in Root Home, and she never made it home. And about 20 minutes after her body was found, she was reported missing by her parents. She'd been returning home from a visit with friends Thanksgiving night when she was murdered. Jerome had been beaten, raped, and slashed, her body dumped in

the courtyard of school number 33, just blocks from her home. Police have questioned one suspect in this case so far. On the night of the murder, detectives picked up a man near the school who was covered with blood, but after hours of grilling, the man's story rang true. He'd been assaulted and the blood on the clothing was his own. What a letdown. Police think at the get-go they've immediately solved the murder of 14-year-old Wendy, but that was not the case. Let me introduce to you an all-star panel. And when I say all-star, I really mean it.

First of all, Wendy Patrick, California prosecutor, author of Red Flags and host of Live with Dr. Wendy on KCBQ at WendyPatrickPhD.com. Got to get that PhD in there, Wendy. Work it, girl. Dr. Bethany Marshall, renowned psychoanalyst to the stars, joining me from Beverly Hills, of course. She's at DrBethanyMarshall.com. Professor of Forensics, Jacksonville State University, author of Blood Beneath My Feet on Amazon, now the star of a hit series on True Crime Network called Poisonous Liaisons. New guest joining us today, Dr. Pamela Marshall from Duquesne University, Director and Associate Professor of the Bayer School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, Forensic Science and Law Master's Program, That's Not Easy,

Expert in DNA Interpretation, Newsday Reporter, you know his name well, Tony DiStefano, and very special guest joining me, longtime colleague, now friend, Phil Vetrano. You know his name well, I'm sure. longtime colleague, now friend, Phil Vetrano. You know his name well, I'm sure.

Phil and Kathy, the parents of the so-called Long Island jogger, Karina Vetrano. But first of all, I want to go to Tony DiStefano. Tony, joining me, Newsday reporter, tell me about what we just heard from Ann Sperling at News 8 WROC. We're hearing about how this 14-year-old girl goes out to deliver a birthday card, and by the time her parents report her missing, a couple of hours later, she was already dead. Well, that's true. It was Thanksgiving Day of 1984, and Wendy goes to deliver a birthday card, as you said, and never made it back. She had a curfew and, of course, never made it back in time for that curfew. She was found by a dumpster in a schoolyard area adjacent to a schoolyard not far from her home. And she had been severely beaten, and there were obvious signs of sexual trauma.

This case, you know, shocked and rocked Rochester, New York, and it stayed. You know, it became a quest to find the killer. But this was not something that was going to come easily. No, it really was not. Let's start at the beginning, Tony DiStefano. Tell me about Rochester. I know a fair bit from living in New York City for so long. My sister lived with her family in Mount Kisco for a while. Tell me about Rochester. Rochester is a major upstate New York City.

I used to be home to Kodak, the camera and film people, and maybe I still be for all I know. It's on the shores of the lake. And it's, you know, a town that's gone through some changes, but it's a substantial metropolitan area for upstate New York, Rochester, Buffalo, that sort of quadrant. So it's not an insignificant place. It's not like a country or farmland. Do people commute in and out of New York? Well, they don't. No. Well, you can. In fact, I did it once.

It's like 45 minutes by plane, but normally you don't. Normally you don't. It gets a lot of its own internal commuter traffic from the suburbs around Rochester, but it's not really a place where they come into New York City. I've got a question for you. Isn't that where the Dick Van Dyke show was supposed to be set in Rochester? Now you're going to show my ignorance of popular TV culture. I'm going to investigate that immediately. I'm going to put a crack investigator on it.

Brett, that's you. Because I think that it is, and it was portrayed as this idyllic community, almost like a bedroom, a sleeper community of Manhattan. I don't think geographically that's correct, but the way people think of it is like that. Now it's taken on a whole new significance. This girl's body was found just blocks away from her own home beside a dumpster. A dumpster. And to you, Dr. Bethany Marshall, it reminds me of a couple of cases in the past where I've referred to the

way a killer disposed of a body as if it were trash. And I'm thinking specifically of Nicole Lovell, the little girl, she was 13, that was lured out of her home by a engineering student at Virginia Tech, David Eisenhower, and his freaky sidekick, Nicole Keepers, both engineering students that lured her away from her home and then threw her off by the side of the road like she was trash. And this dumpster thing really sticks in my mind, Dr. Bethany. What does it tell you? Nancy, do you remember Chanel? Chanel Petro Nixon. Yes, I do remember Chanel? She was a little crow. Chanel Petro Nixon.

Yes, I do. I certainly do. That's right. She was taken from her apartment or was raped, beaten, tortured, strangled, all of that, and was literally put in a trash can just like this victim. What it tells me is that the perpetrator had such little thought about the victim. The victim was an it or a thing, or there was no value to human life other than the momentary pleasure of whatever the perpetrator wanted to do with this young woman. The idea that she had parents, siblings, friends, she was carrying a birthday card,

she had come from a friend's house, that she was in her neighborhood, her community, that she was only 14 years old was completely inconsequential to the perpetrator. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. We are talking about a beautiful young girl whose name I have not forgotten, Wendy Jerome. This little girl goes out to a friend's house with a birthday card and she never comes home. And my question is, why, why did the case go unsolved? You've heard that she was sex assaulted. That means raped. Let me just boil it down for you. And murdered, left by a dumpster. Well, I'll tell you why. Because even with a rape, even with DNA, cops couldn't solve

it through no fault of their own. Listen to our friend Nikki Rudd, WHEC 10 Rochester. Wendy Jerome had just turned 14 years old. She was a freshman at Edison Tech High School and one day wanted to become a cosmetologist. It hurts. It will never go away. Nobody knows why Wendy Jerome was at school 33 on Webster Avenue last night. I know she was beaten very badly. She was partially dressed. We determined it was in fact a body. It appears at this point that it's a white female, early teens. Whoever it was covered her face with a jacket.

Wendy was Marlene Jerome's firstborn. I want to go to a very special guest joining me. I got to first meet him, I think, Phil, through Dr. Oz. And you were, and your beautiful wife, but especially your daughter, Karina, has been a huge inspiration in my life. And I draw upon her life and your story in my new book, Don't Be a Victim. Phil, as I'm listening to Wendy's mother speaking, all I could think about is the way you spoke about Karina after her murder, the shock. Karina was so close to home, and it's almost unfathomable that this could happen, so close to a loving home where mom and dad are there waiting for her to come home,

and she doesn't come back. But you had a feeling that day when Karina went jogging, almost right after she left, that something was going horribly wrong. That is true. That is true. I call it intuition. You know, a parent's intuition, a father's intuition. Just the feeling that something is amiss. And that's how it all started. And that clip that you played of the mother, it almost brought tears to my eyes

because I know exactly, exactly how she feels. You know, you know, Phil, you just gave me chill bumps all up and down my arm when you said that. Because when I was trying to start the program today, I actually choked up thinking about my girl, Lucy, and my boy, big boy, John David. And you don't know the suffering until it happens to you. And it did happen to Wendy Jerome's parents. Phil Vetrano is not here just as a crime victim that has lived through what Wendy's parents lived through, but for a very important forensic reason. Why did this case go unsolved? You know, I noticed there that the reporter said the killer covered her face with a jacket,

and we see that quite often, Joseph Scott Morgan. Yeah, we do, Nancy. And, you know, one of the reasons this happens is that if you just imagine the perpetrator has not dehumanized the person that they have victimized to the point where they don't still see them as a human. They see, allegedly, this individual that they have so traumatized and beaten down, literally staring back at them. So there's this effort to cover the face. And I've seen this over and over and over and over again. Me too. Wendy Patrick, California prosecutor, author, Red Flags host, live with Dr. Wendy. I've seen it many, many times. Even sometimes I've seen bodies, their face covered up with leaves if the attack was out in the open. Have you ever seen that in your days as a prosecutor? Absolutely. And, you know, we used to wonder early in our careers what the point of that would be.

And as we've gained a little bit more maturity and experience, it does seem that even for the most horrendous attacks and the most brutal murders in cold blood, it still seems that many killers tend to at least have some sort of way of obscuring the body. One wonders whether it's for their own edification, feeling better about what they did, making some sort of unaccountability by somehow obscuring the identity. But it's one of those things that just is nowadays with the forensics that we have really only has that very minimal value because it's just too easy to find out who it is, how they killed, how they were killed, and everything else regarding how do we find the killer. You know, I still have a Jane Doe that was part of a serial killer case I prosecuted.

I think I am hearing Dr. Bethany. Jump in, Bethany. Nancy, I've often thought about the serial killer who actually removes the victim's head. That's a step further than what we have here. But there's an attempt to dislocate the thinking mind and the humanity of the victim from the body, which is just a sexual object, like literally severing and taking apart human mind from sexualized body. And I think this is just one step down from that. I'm trying to take in what you just said and wrap my mind around it.

Guys, listen to our friends at WHEC News 10. Who do you think killed Wendy Jerome? Somebody close with the devil. This was bad. This was a child. After Thanksgiving dinner with her family, Wendy got permission to go to her best friend's house in their Beachwood neighborhood. She left there shortly after 7.30 last night, and that was the last time she was seen. She never made it home.

Her battered body was found in an alcove alongside the school. That's School 33 on Webster Avenue in Rochester, just a quarter mile from Wendy's house. And we have a picture of the school at the time. Rochester police investigator John Brennan showed us some pictures from the crime scene. But most of them? They're too brutal and I wouldn't dream of showing them. She was raped? Yes.

Her throat was slit? Yes. But that's not what killed her? No. She would be pretty bad. You would think with all that evidence, there had to be DNA evidence from the defendant, the killer. Now, keep in mind this triangle. What does it mean that these three

locations were in such close proximity to each other? School number 33, where her body was found in an alcove near a dumpster, her home just a few blocks away, and the home of the friend where she had visited, just turned 14 years old. Take a listen to Nikki Rudd. That night, Wendy had asked to visit her friend Susie, who lived just a few blocks away. Her father, Wayne, said she could go, but her curfew was at eight. Wendy never made it home. Her battered body was found in an alcove alongside the school. She was found by a man taking a shortcut through the school's yard. Did you think the case would be solved by now? I would have hoped so because we had DNA. Rochester police investigators still have the suspect's DNA from Wendy's underwear, but DNA did not match anyone in CODIS, the FBI's combined

DNA index system. Now investigators are hoping a new tool will crack the case, a familial DNA search. This was approved by New York State in 2017. DNA can be submitted to the state crime lab to see if any offenders in the state DNA data bank could be related to the suspect. And that is where Phil Vetrano and Dr. Pamela Marshall come in. Phil Vetrano, the father of the Long Island Jogger, as she is now known, Karina Vetrano, fought valiantly to allow the use of familial DNA in court. Phil Vetrano, why were people so resistant to using familial DNA? Well, there was a lot of reasons that I was told.

Target certain minority groups, it infringes upon the civil rights. But to me, it was all bull. Now, I didn't even know what familial DNA was until Tony wrote an article in Newsday. And I saw it, and I started to push for it. And I was told by the upper echelon of the police department, forget about it. It's not going to happen. Never pass New York.

And with that, I dug in my heels, put my nose to the grindstone, and I went to war. I posted on my GoFundMe, which I had 750,000 followers. And I said, send Mike Green, who was the head of the New York State Department of Criminal Justice, an email saying we want FS testing. Within a half hour, I got a call back from the DA, the Queens DA. He said, Phil, you got to tell everybody to stop. He just blew up my green server. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Guys, I'm talking to Phil Vetrano, the father of the so-called Long Island jogger, Karina Vetrano, who was murdered the one time, practically, that she did not go jog with her dad, Phil, a firefighter.

She was attacked brutally and murdered. I have Phil with me right now. I'm not going to go into the details of Karina's murder, but it was brutal. And at that time, he started a war to allow familial DNA as a crime-solving technique. And we saw it work in other cases, like the famous Golden State killer case. Jackie, if you would play our cut number one, this is John Blackstone speaking with CBS News. Handcuffed to a wheelchair, Joseph DeAngelo was arraigned on charges for two murders in 1978. He was barely audible answering the judge. Investigators found DeAngelo using DNA

from crime scenes decades ago, which they submitted to a publicly shared genealogy website called GEDmatch. Cold case investigator Paul Holes. We were able to do this without seeking the legal authority in terms of getting the federal grand jury subpoena or the search warrant that we would need if we wanted to search the other types of genealogy sites. GEDmatch users submit DNA profiles they buy from sites like Ancestry.com and 23andMe. They plug their data for free into GEDmatch, searching for distant relatives. Within days, investigators found distant cousins of the suspected Golden State Killer. We literally went back to the great-great-great-grandfather with individuals that were born in the early part of the 1800s. You know, I spoke to the investigator in that case, Paul Hulls, in person to get him to explain to me how familial DNA works.

And it's not like, oh, we got a hit on your grandma. No, you go all the way back. In that case, the only state killer, Joseph D'Angelo, they went back to the 1800s. And you go, this one married that one. And this one was the cousin. This goes down. That's the nephew. To finally get down to the DNA of the perp.

And hey, you know, you heard them say Joseph D'Angelo was rolled in, wheeled in, in a wheelchair in a court. Don't worry too much about him because later video shows him working out and doing calisthenics at the jail. Okay. So you can only surmise why he wanted to be rolled in in a wheelchair into court. Familial DNA works. And in this case of Wendy Jerome, that is what was needed. And it took a soldier like Phil Vetrano to go to war to allow familial DNA into court. But he was sparked by an article written by crack reporter Tony DiStefano. Tell me about your article, Tony, that started this whole thing, ignited it. Well, it all started with what essentially was a mistake by a police official in New York City.

I asked during the pendency of Karina's investigation, well, have you tried familial DNA? And the official said, yes, we have, but it came up with no hit. So I wrote that in a story and of course i got an email from somebody on california or renowned uh... expert in the field and why peter the use of the o t and a you can't use it in new york uh... so they give you a line of malarkey so i i

checked in with them i said well what's this all about familial DNA? And he told me. And it's one of those situations where you say, okay, explain that again, because it was one of these complicated but interesting forensic facets that I had to deal with. So I was going to do a story about it and raise the question, why wasn't it used in New York State? And there are all sorts of bureaucratic reasons why that wasn't. It needed state approval. The commission had to... Let's just boil that down, Tony, to what Phil Vetrano said. BS. That's a

technical legal term. And believe me, as a trial lawyer, I see it all the time and yes it stinks so to you phil vitrano why did this ring pull at such a chord in your heart to make dna familial dna allowed in court why were you so invested well at that time we did not know who killed karina and i got national attention with you when we were both on Dr. Oz. And once we were on Dr. Oz, it took off. Okay.

That's when I started to get backing from the all five DAs and we got a hold of Mike Green. We had a special meeting. And before that meeting, we did find Karina's killer through no, not familiar DNA testing. But me and Kathy felt like if we could get this passed, there's other families out there that don't know who killed their child, their loved one, their mother, whoever. We could help them put this to rest.

So we continued our fight. It got stronger and stronger and stronger. And it was actually passed in five months from when we had that meeting. And that usually takes two years. We had it done in five months. At least, believe me, listen, Phil, when I first went to the DA's office, one of my tasks was that I had to go be a, let me just say lobbyist for anti-crime issues. I went up to the Georgia assembly. I couldn't wait for those three months to be over with. The level of BS, I mean, you'd wade through it every day. I remember trying to get the rape shield law passed. You have never seen

the politics behind doing what's right. Same thing here. Now, here comes another star guest joining us, Dr. Pamela Marshall, Duquesne University. Man, if I were to read you her resume, it would take the rest of the hour. Dr. Marshall, thank you so much for being with us. Now, Dr. Marshall, we do not all have your kind of education, and I'm sure you've written tons of, well, very interesting articles, but could you just dummy down for us, for me, I'll speak for myself, and explain how familial DNA works and why it is so important in the Wendy Jerome case. So one of the things that we have is we have this national DNA database where we are able to link crimes across the country. And when everything works well, we're able to find those matches to correct and find the true perpetrator of a crime. Unfortunately for Wendy's case,

they uploaded a semen sample in 2000, because remember 1984, DNA technology was not where it is now. And CODIS, the DNA data bank, was kind of a pipe dream at this point. So the semen sample- Wow, you just made me want to wheel around in my chair to think of a time, and I was there prosecuting in these days, where we didn't have CODIS, the National DNA Data Bank, but you're right. It didn't even exist then. Okay, sorry for that, Dr. Marshall. Go ahead. No, no, that's all right. I like how you get excited. So they uploaded the semen sample from the underwear, which didn't result in any CODIS matches. And unfortunately, as Phil has pointed out, it takes a lot of legislation. And even New York was only the 11th state in the United States.

But what is familial DNA? How does it work? Why did Paul Holes have to go back to the 1800ss to catch Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer? So that's actually a little bit different. So for the Golden State Killer and Joseph DeAngelo case, that's the use of a public database. What makes familial DNA searching stand out is the use of our own DNA law enforced database. So being able to go in and so what typically happens is crime scene evidence comes to the crime lab. We create a DNA profile and we upload that profile to the database. And looking at maybe 13 locations. If you have a match, that

means that the profile from the crime scene evidence and the profile from the suspect match at all 13. What familial DNA searching does is it shows profiles that share enough similarities. So we know that we get half of our DNA from our biological mother and half from our biological father. We also share those DNA markers with full siblings and half siblings. So it's allowing an active search for these family relationships through software. And that's how we get this familiar DNA. So you're not just looking for a match to the DNA at the crime scene. You put it into dataanks of all of these ancestry, usually public ones, to see if it even remotely hits on a family member, even if a distant family member. crime stories with nancy grace guys we're talking about the murder of a 14 year old girl listen to

this we spoke with wendy's mother marlene jerome she's frustrated the man who raped and killed her daughter has never been caught. Is the guy still alive? Is he dead? All these questions that go through my head. I'm just disgusted with the system. I think it's a joke. Investigator Brennan is also frustrated, and here's why. They have the suspect's DNA, but they've been waiting on the state police crime lab to test it. A piece of evidence that could possibly point us in the right direction to get the animal that killed this young woman. They have it. They have it. I need an answer. I want to know.

Here's the deal. It's not your average DNA test. The DNA in this case didn't match anyone who has submitted DNA from past crimes, but... The state just started within the last couple years testing DNA to see if they can connect it to a family member. A family member who may have DNA in the system. Okay, guys, go with it to try to untangle this ball of string, which is the Wendy Jerome murder. Listen to Arquita Costa, WROC. Over the years, there have been hundreds of leads, but every time technology advanced, someone would review the case again.

In 2017, New York State approved the use of familial DNA testing for law enforcement, which helps investigators find relatives for someone they're trying to identify. the traveled to Melbourne, Florida earlier this week. On Wednesday, September 9th, with the assistance of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, we arrested Timothy Lee Williams at his home and charged him with the brutal rape and murder of Wendy. That's right, a Florida man aged 56 arrested for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl all the way up the country in Rochester to Phil Vetrano, the father of the Long Island jogger Karina Vetrano.

Can you imagine the parents waiting all these years, over 30 years, to find out the truth? I can't imagine that. I mean, we found within four months. But when I heard that, that we did find a person who met the DNA specifications and crime was solved using familiar testing, I started to cry. It was such, it was bittersweet because I was so happy and so glad that Karina was instrumental in getting this case solved. But then it brought back those memories again. But we're not done.

We're going to find more. We're going to help other people. And, you know, Phil, I remember the moment you called me when Williams was arrested. May he rot in hell forever. I was with my children, the twins, and we were out in the middle. We were under a bridge clearing brush for an Eagle Scout project. And the phone rang. I went to go look at it. I saw it was you and picked it up.

And you gave me the news that the first case in New York had been solved through familial DNA. To Tony DiStefano with the Newsday Reporter, how do you feel since you set a fire with Phil Vetrano and it ignited into this, solving Wendy's case? Well, you know, Phil was the catalyst. Kathy was the catalyst. It took a long time. It took longer than I expected for this to get a hit.

But then again, you know, there was some sense of satisfaction that I felt that that little thing we'd had back way back when, when Karina died and we sort of wrote about familial DNA sort of came to fruition and got some results and got some uh uh closed the circle and a very horrible crime um you know the defendant you know presumed innocent of course but uh hey you know this gave a lot of satisfaction sense of satisfaction to a lot of people, myself included. Speaking of people satisfied, take a listen to our cut nine, Kayla Green, WROC News 8. In 1999, police were able to build a DNA profile from semen that was collected from an autopsy. They gave that DNA to CODIS, an FBI system that compares DNA from known offenders. It didn't get any hits. In 2017, New York State approved the use of familial DNA testing, which searches DNA in a database to find blood relatives of the person they're trying to find. This June, investigators on this case received those search results. This led them to confirmed by the hospital. The hospital said the DNA test case

received those search results. This led them to further DNA evidence and ultimately to Timothy Williams. I know I would see this. Hey, I was here. I just wish my husband and then like to see this. He passed away in 2011. And I know he's up there with her. And here's my little thing.

It's over. It's finally over. You know, I'm comparing Joe Scott Morgan, the mother's voice in the news reports at the time her daughter went missing to now. She's an old lady. and Wendy's father is dead, and she's talking about how she wished he had been alive to see this day. You and I have both handled cases that were cold cases, and the victim's family spend their whole life seeking justice.

And it's debilitating. It is, Nancy. And, you know, not only did this animal murder this poor angel, Wendy, on a Thanksgiving night, he murdered her father as well. He is still killing this mother.

You can only begin to imagine the years and the toll this has taken on this family after all these years. But everyone in this case has persisted. All the way back in 1984, Nancy, when they took those samples, they protected that. And because of what they had done in the past, we were able to take that data, that evidence, and process it and bring this to a conclusion. That's why people like myself and Pam, when we teach our college students that are going to go out and work for police agencies, we tell them, you're not only working in a crime scene, you're a historian. You're documenting things that are going to ring through time, and you never know how this is going to impact. And all the way back then, those actions they took at that morgue and at the crime scene at that point,

they caught this guy. They caught him. To Dr. Pamela Marshall, joining me from Duquesne University, Dr. Marshall, when you are teaching or when you are researching your many works, do you ever allow it to get to you that what we're talking about when we say familial DNA and DNA at the scene, we're talking about real people, in this case, a little girl that had just turned 14. Because it's hard for me sometimes to keep laser focus when I personally identify with the victims, which is always. Absolutely. important for me is to not only teach and develop the passion for forensic science for my students, but also the compassion for each and every victim. I am very honest and upfront with my students that cases involving children were always the hardest cases for me personally to deal with, but we all have to find outlets and someone has to do this job. And as my good colleague Joe just pointed out, you know, this is a result of all of that dedication to preserving that evidence because they they had to go back and do another layer of DNA testing all the way back in 2020. July 2020, they had to do additional DNA testing. So the fact that they have preserved

the sample for 36 years in a way that still was able to bring Wendy Justice and any other victim that Timothy Williams may have, you know, participated in the deaths of those individuals as well. It's hard for me to imagine that this could have been a one-off. I agree. Truer words were never spoken, Dr. Pamela Marshall. And while we are passing credit around, I just want to point out none of this would be possible. Wendy's case would not be solved if it were not for Newsday reporter Tony DiStefano and my dear friend Phil Vetrano. And let me remind you that trying to solve Corrina's case, investigators pulled Phil out of his daughter's funeral to get his DNA.

They didn't want to do it, but they had to do it. And because of his fight, they went national on Dr. Oz. Wendy's case has been solved. May she rest in peace. Nancy Grace, Crime Story, signing off. Goodbye, friend. This is an iHeart Podcast.