Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: DNA and The Murder of Nancy Anderson

Episode Date: October 23, 2022

On January 7th, 1972, Nancy Anderson, 19, is found dead in her Waikiki apartment with over 60 stab wounds. The case goes cold for fifty years until new DNA technology and detective work leads to the arrest of a suspect: Tudor Chirila Jr. In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss the lack of evidence the crime scene, why Nancy’s roommate thought this might have been a suicide, distinguishing between stab wounds, how phenotyping lead to the breakthrough in this case, and much more.    Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 2:37 - Background and overview of case 4:15 - How do you investigate a case once it's gone cold? 7:20 - Stab wounds 11:30 - No evidence of foul play at the crime scene 15:45 - The roommate and thinking Nancy had comitted suicide  18:40 - Water running in the bathroom 21:00 - How do you distinguish between wounds? 24:40 - The salesman as suspects 26:35 - Bathrooms as a popular crime scene 30:05 - Blood testing process 35:35 - How do you preserve evidence? 41:17 - What is Phenotyping and how did it help the investigation? 47:55 - Genealogy and a son 49:20 - The suspect is found 50:43 - Wrap up See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Back in the late 60s, probably my all-time favorite television show premiered. I was a little boy. I'd wait on those certain weekday nights for the show to appear. I knew it was coming on because of the music, and then the visuals would just kind of burst on the screen. That tiny TV that my mom and I had in our house trailer. Gigantic waves crashing.

Exotic land. A place I didn't think I'd ever go. Still haven't to this day, but that show was called Hawaii Five-0. I was amazed by it. And you know what? At the end of each show, Jack Lord, he was the detective. He solved every one of those cases, it seemed like.

But you know, for almost 50 years, there was an unsolved homicide in Hawaii. One that was so brutal they would never portray on that television show from back then. I'm talking about the homicide of Nancy Anderson. Today, we're going to talk about it and how that case has been solved finally after all these years. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. I got to tell you, when this case came across the wire and I began to read about it, it turned up all kinds of memories from childhood for me. Because, you know, you always felt like that the police in Hawaii were going to solve these cases that they're confronted with. But you realize that your idea that you have from Hawaii Five-0 from when you were a kid, that's merely fantasy.

That it is the real world out there. And sometimes cases just go unsolved. But now in the world that we live in with all of this technology at our disposal, things are changing. And they certainly did in this case. Joining me is Jackie Howard, executive producer for Nancy Grace's Crime Stories. Jackie, I'll tell you what. I know that the family of Nancy Anderson is just beyond excited, probably sad, but excited because finally, after all these years, they appear to have some answers. Nancy Anderson was one of nine children. It was a large family. So I'm sure, Joe, that you are absolutely

correct. And going back to what you were saying in your opening, you're telling our age because I did the same thing. I watched Hawaii Five-0 religiously when I was growing up and never in my life imagined that the kind of things that were on that show were real, that actually happened in the real world. Covering this case, 19-year-old Nancy Anderson moved from Michigan to Waikiki after graduating high school. She was 19 years old. She was working at a McDonald's. And when she died, when she was killed, it really put a scare in her neighbors in the apartment complex because they had no idea what was going on. Was there a serial killer running around? Was there a killer amongst them? Was somebody else going to be targeted next? The leads in this case dried up quickly after looking at boyfriend, salesman, neighbors,

co-workers. The tips dried up and you're right, it took over 50 years to solve this case. What happens, Joe, when a case goes cold like this? Obviously, technology has grown tremendously in the last 50 years, but how do you mount an investigation when there really is nothing to go on? It's almost like a ghost appeared in Nancy's life and ended it. And this is not something, just so that we understand that the brutality that was involved in this homicide, I can imagine by those standards during that time was absolutely shocking. They were in Waikiki. This is a location that for the most part, people go for vacation or maybe if they have the ability, you know, maybe someplace to retire. But young Nancy,

and she was just out of high school, I mean, I think less than a year at that point. And she had made a decision during that period of time, which is something you kind of hear a lot about now, taking what's called a gap year. I'm a college professor now, and there are kids that take gap years. And that is that period of time between the end of high school and generally you go off somewhere, you get a job, maybe you travel. And some people think that it's a good idea because you mature a little bit during that period of time before you actually start your college years. And that's what she had done. And from what we understand, you know, it was her dream. But it was an absolute nightmare because if you're a police officer and you walk into

this apartment after the roommate has essentially found Nancy deceased and, you know, the roommate, the roommate at first thought that this was a suicide. Isn't that amazing? She thought that it was a suicide. So, you know, when this call comes out over the radio, and we have codes, actually, you know, where you'll hear a radio code that'll come out. And I'll give you an example. When I was in New Orleans at 29, if a 29 came out over the radio, that meant death. Okay? That means it's a code for death. And then if it was a 29S, that was code for death, suicide. And so can you imagine you're a beat officer and maybe this came up as a death, maybe suspected suicide.

You roll onto the scene and it is far from a suicide. You've got this young woman who has absolutely been brutalized and she's only been there for a short period of time. You know, first glance, you know, she's living with a roommate. She's got a job. She's gainfully employed. There's no signs of forced entry or struggle. And you're thinking, well, what kind of enemy could she have made that would absolutely rip her to shreds like this? And I can only imagine that the local police were scratching their heads in this case.

Once the autopsy was done on the body, I would have been scratching my head too. The information that was released found that Anderson was stabbed at least 63 times. 63 separate wounds were visible. Now, as you and I have talked a lot, that number can actually be deceiving, Joe, because depending on how and the position the stabs were made, you may not be able to really count them. You're absolutely right.

There's a big difference between stab and slice. The boilerplate for it, when we're describing them in terms of forensic pathology, the stabs tend to be narrow and deep, okay? And we can imagine that. Just imagine a steak knife in your hand. You're going to plunge it into a target, if you will. So, it'll be narrow and deep, okay? And if it's a slice, which is different than a stab wound,

you're cutting across the surface, and those are more shallow and they're longer, all right? So you just think about, you know, in the idea of you're slicing something, okay? You're slicing a piece of paper. It's going to be shallow and it'll be long. So the fact that they said that these were stab wounds, they didn't say that they were sharp force injury. They didn't say that there was a mixture of these wounds. Gives you an indication that they

saw evidence of stabbing. Now, to your point, and this is, you're right on the money here because with a stab wound and you have this many, you'll get this mixture of these things. And it's hard to try to understand where one ends and one begins because you have to think. First off, if it is sharp force, that means that you're in a very tight personal space with the individual. So if you have an attacker that has an individual, the victim, on the floor and they're on top of them, these wounds tend to be highly concentrated. That means like right on top of one another. Imagine, if you will, an old-fashioned sewing machine with the needle in place. You're moving that needle or that needle is, you know, is going up and down at a rapid motion and striking very precise areas because of the

close proximity to it. The only thing that changes is moving the cloth beneath the needle in the same principle with a stab wound. It's over and over close proximity. You've got this kind of piston like action of the individual that is withdrawing the blade and then reintroducing the blade into the body. And not all of these injuries are going to be the same depth, which know, every time you plunge a knife down into someone's chest or their back or their abdomen, these wounds are going to be striking different anatomical structures beneath the skin. You might, say for instance, strike the abdomen and you're just going to go through the abdominal wall, which is made up primarily of the skin and subcu fat and the underlying muscle. But if you move up the torso, now you begin to get into the area where your organs are protected by your rib cage, your anterior ribs.

So unless you make it in between the ribs, which is that's called the intercostal space. You have muscle that's in between the ribs, then you're going to strike bones. So that wound is obviously not going to be as deep as say, if you plunge the knife into the, into the abdomen and the same is true with the back. And as a matter of fact, you're dealing with even more structures back there because you have the scapula, which are the, the, the shoulder blades. And then you're also talking about the bony prominences of the spine. So you begin to think about how many of these wounds were actually fatal. And that's one of the issues that the forensic pathologist has to deal with when they're

doing this examination. What vessels are clipped? What organs are impacted? And then ultimately, you know, you begin to measure the amount of visible blood that you have contained, say, for instance, in the abdomen or in either side of the chest, the left chest or the right chest. And you begin to appreciate maybe what organs were impacted to the point where it was no longer compatible with life. And you can also get a sense for how much blood free flowed through those spaces. Another surprising finding of the pathology report is the absence of any drugs or alcohol in Nancy Anderson's body and the fact that she had not been raped.

There was no sexual assault. So if you take out two likely scenarios for Nancy's death, that is in something happened while she's intoxicated or an assault, this makes this a really strange circumstance. You throw around words like sadistic. You know, sadistic kind of falls under this kind of psychosexual motivations for killings, you know, sadism, all those sorts of things. Not Satanism, but sadism. You don't have to necessarily have, and you can talk to most forensic psychologists that are out there, you know, you don't necessarily have to have what would be considered a classic sexual assault, you know, where clothing is ripped away and you have evidence of sexual assault

through rape and these sorts of things, to have something that is motivated by lust, okay? Because part of this, on this kind of spectrum, you can have an individual that will attack someone and rip them to shreds, and they receive some kind of gratification out of this. What's fascinating about this is you begin to think back then, Honolulu, we mentioned it being portrayed on television. It's very exotic. And you see, this is not a tiny, tiny town. This is a place where, you know, we've been there. Our nation has been there for years and years, occupying space, a lot of military personnel, a lot of people coming and going out of this area. And so when you see something this brutal as an investigator, you begin to think, well, do I have any other cases that might fit within this category?

Because I think most of us that are or were investigators, we don't think that this is going to be a one-off event. Somebody that would rise to this level and attack a total stranger. A young woman that has just graduated from high school. You have to think that, well, are there more victims out there? Do you have some type of killer that is roaming about that takes pleasure in absolutely just ripping a young woman to shreds like this? So it makes you examine the evidence very hard. And I think that on one hand, if you're looking for physical evidence, certainly sexual assault can be rich with that because you can find all kinds of things relative to a sexual assault that you might not find in another case.

Say, for instance, if you have a sexual assault, there might be an opportunity if you're going to do what are called pubic combings, which is something we do as part of a rape exam. You might find a pubic hair that's not associated with the victim. You might find seminal stains, for instance. And back then, one of the things that we look for in cases because we didn't have DNA that we would turn to was if you had saliva or if you had seminal stains, you would look for someone that's referred to as a secretor. And there's just less than 50% of the population, and I don't know the figure exactly off the top of my head, are secretors. And what that means is that when you test those samples from either saliva or from semen, and there are other elements of the body as well,

but in those in particular, you can actually find red blood cells contained in those areas. So back then, with the absence of DNA, you can actually type the blood based upon those secretions that you might find. And of course, as you mentioned, in this case, there was no evidence of that. It goes without saying, 1972, boy, that was a different time than present day. So much has changed since that time. But you know what? Basic crime scene investigation has not changed.

Has not changed one whit. And in this case, I think that the police actually had more to go on than they thought. A lot of that information came from Nancy Anderson's roommate. So one of the things I've learned from you, Joe, is like, let's start at the beginning and set up our timeline. So we know that Nancy Anderson was talking to, believe it or not, two door-to-door knife salesmen. The afternoon when her roommate came home, she told police she saw Nancy talking to these two gentlemen in the living room. Now, from there, she went into her room, and that time was around two o'clock that afternoon. And the body wasn't found for approximately three hours later that afternoon after the roommate went to take a nap. The body was found around 5.15.

The roommate found Nancy Anderson's body in the bathroom. So I've got a couple questions about that, but my main question is, we know with over 60 stab wounds that this was a very, very violent death, and she moved from the living room, where she was originally talking to the salesman, to the bathroom. How could, even if the roommate, when she first woke up she thought that Nancy had committed suicide because of how she was in the bathroom but if this had been a very violent attack as we believe it was how could she not have heard it how is that even possible and I want to visit this idea of thinking that it was suicide my thought on this when I first read this, because the room, the bathroom that is, has been described as, you know, almost being bathed in blood, super saturated with blood.

I think there's something within us in our mind, and I'm talking about from the perspective of the roommate. I think her initial reaction was probably suicide because it's almost like she's protecting herself. You know what I mean? I mean, it's like you think about it, you think, I cannot imagine, maybe at an unconscious level, that a homicide has taken place in my presence. You were talking about just a second ago where how could she have not heard this? And I think that there's almost this safety switch that flipped on possibly with her. She's saying, well, it had to be a suicide, you know, because I can't imagine the homicide has been perpetrated. And to this degree, when I am asleep, just right down the hall from where this horror show takes place.

And so her initial reaction was, yeah, this is a suicide. She noticed. And you know what queued her is that when she woke up, and this is a very important piece of information here from an investigative standpoint, she heard water running. The water was running in the bathroom adjacent to where Nancy's remains were found. And that gives you an indication after, of course, you've inspected the scene as the investigator, gives you an indication as to what was going on potentially. That maybe, just maybe, there was an attempt by the perpetrator to clean himself up at that point in time, that they were making some kind of effort to get rid of evidence that they may have on their body. Because if the room is bathed

in blood, this is not something that this individual is going to get away with cleanly. They will concurrently be saturated in blood, particularly over the surface of their hands. If they're wearing long-sleeve shirts, it'll be up to the elbow, perhaps. If not, if the lower arm is not protected, you're going to have bloodstain on both the palmar aspect of the forearm and probably the top side of the forearm as well, even beneath the fingernails because blood is so tacky. It's kind of the way that it transfers to the body. So with the water running, I would suspect that if there had been a bar of soap sitting there, remember this is before the days of where you've got some kind of pump bottle of liquid soap. They didn't do that

back then. You would have a bar of old-fashioned hand soap that was sitting there perhaps, and the individual was washing their hands or making an attempt. And soap is – there's been any number of cases where people have transferred blood from their hands to soap. And, you know, of course, we collect that. And you can get valuable evidence off of the surface of soap because it has such a tackiness about it. It'll hold on to a number of things. You can find hair on there. You can find dead skin cells.

You can also find blood that'll transfer over there as you're holding this. So the thing that you're attempting to clean up with can actually be the thing that trips you up. I think that probably what it came down to is that within this environment, I found a number, I mean, a number of towels that had been used. And of course, there was blood on the surface of that. So that's going to be a big starting place for the police in this case. You were talking about the wounds, Joe. There were lots of injuries that the pathology report, the autopsy described as defensive wounds on her arms and her legs. How do you know the difference? How can you tell the difference

in these kind of wounds? Excellent question. And one of the reasons is that I call this an excellent question is that if you're targeting an individual as an aggressor driving a knife through either the palm of someone's hand or through the back of someone's hand or through the webbing you know where you slice through the webbing folks will look at their index finger and their thumb and that that area right in between there that's often where we'll see a slice injury because people will grab hold of the blade you'll see it on the palmer aspect or on the palm itself of the hands where the knife will kind of pass over that surface and cut the hand right there as well. Those are atypical, what we refer to as atypical injuries

because you think of an attacker, an aggressor, if you will, moving forward toward a target. Well, where are they going to try to stab? Well, they're not looking down at the sides of the body where they're going to aim for the hands or maybe the arms. If you throw your forearm up in a blocking motion, that's not what their target is. In kind of this defensive posture that we naturally go into as a response to something that's oncoming, whether it's a car, a knife, or somebody has thrown a gun up at us to shoot at us. You know, people throw their hands up and arms up as a defensive posture. It's just kind of discern between these types of injuries is the fact that the typical attacking area is going to be the neck, the face, maybe certain areas of the head, and certainly the

chest and the abdomen. I mean, that's what the attacker is going after. And you know, what's really curious about this case as well, and I've got my thoughts about this, I'm glad you brought up these injuries on the legs. You don't commonly hear of defensive injuries to the legs. My thought is, is that he had Nancy in a submissive position, probably on her backside on the floor. And she is attempting to kick him away with her legs and he's just flailing at her with his knife. And so, as she is kicking at him, he's flailing with a knife, he's actually attempting to stab at her legs. And this is my other thought. You know how we talked about there was an absence of evidence of a sexual attack, okay? Maybe this was an incomplete attack. Maybe something spooked this

individual because let's think about it. The individual has got Nancy on her back in a submissive position. He's dominant. I've used the term asymmetrical before, and this is an asymmetrical attack where you've got someone that's in a dominant position above and they're striking down. You can have it in bludgeoning cases. You can have it stabbing. Hell, you can even have it in shooting cases where you're in a dominant position above the individual. And so maybe, just maybe, the individual's goal was to perpetrate a sexual attack, but they couldn't complete the action.

Maybe they got spooked in some way. Maybe they heard something. I'm thinking that this individual had to have known that the roommate was there. But wait, Joe, if we were to make an assumption that the killer was one of the two salesmen, which would seem to be an obvious jump since they were just there and the roommate saw them, then we would know the person knew that the roommate was there, right? Quite potentially. And isn't it odd, too, these two salesmen that the roommate witnessed, they're selling silverware.

You know, you got a figure that contained in the silverware, you've got sharp instruments, right? Any kind of knives, I would imagine. Maybe you have, you know, some people call them case knives, butter knives, you know, that sort of thing. You might have steak knives. You have all of these sharp instruments, not to mention you've got serving forks. You've got regular forks, salad forks, anything that has a point on it like that.

And they're selling this. And these are the last two people that the roommate saw in connection to Nancy. And I find that so odd in this case. What are the odds of that? That those would be these two individuals selling these types of items would be part of the story. It's super bizarre. And of course, as investigators, you're going after these people. And they will be known because back then, during that time, you and I had an off-air discussion about experiences that we had, particularly when we were younger. Vacuum cleaner salesmen would come by the house regularly. I mean, people sold encyclopedias. They'd come to your door and sell them.

So you'd have salesmen, traveling salesmen that would come about. And if they'd gone to these two young women's apartment and knocked on the door, guess what? They'd knocked on other people's doors as well. They probably left contact information with people. So they would be easy for the cops to track down at that point. And you're on an island. You ain't going nowhere. So they can track them down. I would imagine that early on in the investigation, they were able to kind of strike these two individuals off the list.

Joe, I am fascinated by the bathroom yet again because the bathroom seems to be a place where a lot of people end up and getting murdered in the bathroom. Do we have a tendency to think that the bathroom is some kind of, I don't know, you see it in horror movies, you see it when we're talking about hurricanes or, I mean, tornadoes or bad weather, the bathroom is safe, the bathroom is safe. Is that kind of just something that's ingrained in us? If I can get to the bathroom and shut the door, I will be safe. Yeah, it's a point of retreat. And I got to tell you, there's an interesting little aside here as well. And I've posed this question to my students a lot and people that I talk to. And you talk to other people that were in my profession, medical legal death investigators. You ask them and say, well, where do you generally

work the most deaths in a home as a death investigator? And automatically, hands will go up and they'll say the bathroom. Well, it's for a different reason, though, than this, okay? And it's kind of odd. Most people don't think about it, but we have something that's referred to actually as toilet sign. And it's just a term that we use because we find a lot of people deceased on the toilet because one of the leading cause of death in america is heart disease and of course people have mis or heart attacks and they will have a need to go to the bathroom you'll find them deceased on the toilet many times but people do in fact retreat to bathrooms i you know it's seemingly

and there's also another piece to this i think that many times perpetrators will do great harm to people and then to cover their tracks. The bathroom is what you refer to as a wet room, right? So what is the best area other than, you know, running the risk of taking someone outside of a freestanding dwelling and rinsing the body and the evidence off in the yard? The best place you're going to have protection where you have access to water is going to be the bathroom. You can put potties and tubs. You can wash your hands in the sink. You've got tile floor. Many times you think that you can rinse it down. It's not going to soak through wood or carpet or whatever. So it's an environment in which I think is a natural place for perpetrators to go. And for some reason, many times, it's a place for people to retreat to.

I don't necessarily know that that was the case in Nancy's death. Maybe she had the thought that she could put distance between herself and her attacker after she was initially attacked in that front room and retreated to the bathroom. But too much harm was done at that point. She couldn't get this guy off of her. I will never stop mentioning Edmond LeCard on this show. He is the godfather of all things forensics as far as I'm concerned. And, of course, we go back to LeCard's exchange principle where he said, every, not some, but every contact leaves a trace and in this case the one thing that the perpetrator left behind was an essence of themselves there at that scene

and that essence of course was blood there was lots of blood found in this apartment and blood-stained towels. Whether that was from trying to clean themselves up or trying to quell the spread of the blood from the wounds, it ended up being a wealth of information. It just took a long time to figure out the information that they needed. Talk to me a little bit about the blood, Joe, because what kind of testing does it go through to begin with? I'm not even talking about getting to the DNA. I'm just talking about in general, do they break it down in some way? Yeah, yeah, they do. And so when you begin to think about this with blood, and I want our listeners to really understand that because you walk away, hopefully,

every time you listen to Body Bags with a little bit more information. When we go out to a scene, we might see a crusted red stain somewhere. Now, you might suspect that that's blood, but you never say that it is blood, not until you can confirm it. And so there's a series of testing that's done even to this day. Just because you see something red doesn't mean that it's necessarily blood. And, you know, just because something is another color doesn't mean that it's not blood. Well, let me test what I've learned from you, Joe. Sure.

Yeah. A fresh blood stain will be bright red. However, a blood stain that's been there for a while as it oxidizes begins to turn a darker brown color? Yes, it does. I got an A. You're absolutely right. You did.

Hey, and let me give you, this is for extra credit. Do you recall what happens if you have a pool of blood over a period of time? What begins to happen there? Oh, I'm not getting any extra credit. Okay, well, what begins to happen there? Oh, I'm not getting any extra credit. Okay. Well, what begins to happen is that after blood has been pooled for a while on the ground, you'll see the red blood cells begin to migrate away from the serum. Wait, wait, wait.

Explain that. Migrate away from the what? Yeah. Blood is not a standalone liquid. It's not like you've got water, which of course water has got two components, hydrogen and oxygen. But with blood, it has multiple components. So as it's not circulating through the body, it'll separate out into various components. And one of the things that you see happen is that the serum, which is clear, will begin to separate from the red blood cells and

you'll see it and it migrates away. So you'll have this stain that actually changes color. But to a bigger issue here, one of the things that we do, we have to confirm whether or not something is in fact blood. So there's a test you can do in the field to determine if it is in fact blood, because you don't want to waste your time on something that's not blood, but you have to eliminate it, right? If it is blood, you have to determine, well, is it animal or human? So, we then do another test, a confirmatory test in that area, and then it's at that point that you begin to do blood typing. That's kind of where things kind of froze back in 1972, if you will. And what they determined is that the blood that they had at the scene, obviously, there was a lot

of Nancy's blood that was spilled. You know, God rest her soul. She went through a horrible event here. But they found the essence of somebody else. And that individual happened to be A positive. And we know our blood groupings, you know, we've got A and B and O, and then you've got positives and negatives and all these sorts of things. But A pos is actually the second most frequent blood type. And this is kind of how we used to narrow down who perpetrated a crime or who we would have interest in speaking to. So if it's the second most frequent blood type, it doesn't do a lot of good.

It doesn't help you as much as you would like for it to. Say, for instance, if you had AB POS or AB NEG, which tend to be more rare, you got APOS, which is the second most frequent, which about, I don't know, 34% of the population has. But it's a place to start, right? And that's what you're looking for. Because right now, you don't have anything, or the police didn't. And so, what I'm just fascinated by in this case, and if I could shake their hand, I would

do it to this day. The crime scene investigators that were at that scene on that fateful day back in 1972, they did something that many departments cannot effectively do even today. And that is the blood evidence that they had at that scene. They preserved it. They preserved it so that 50 years later, imagine that, 50 years later, they were able to take a blood sample off of a towel that was evidence in arguably one of the most brutal homicides up to that point that had taken place, and certainly unsolved hom point that had taken place, and certainly

unsolved homicides that had taken place in Honolulu at that point in time. And they were able to actually get a DNA profile off of this unknown blood sample, this A-positive person that was just floating around out there that no one knew. Okay, I've got my hand up, Professor. I know you can't see me because we're in two separate locations. But how did they actually preserve that? In moving a body from the death location to the morgue, if there's a suspected murder or attack, the hands are covered with paper bag as opposed to plastic. Because as you've taught me, plastic makes the hand sweat, which can change your findings. How do you preserve that type of an evidence?

A towel, which number one, possibly could be wet because we know there was water running, is wet from the blood in it. So how do you keep it from molding? How do you keep it from degrading? How do you keep it from degrading? How do you store it? Well, it has to be dried. And I can't speak to what technology they had at the police department in Honolulu back in 1972. But I can tell you this, if the towel was wet, which obviously we know that there was blood on it, so it had to have been wet. First off, you're right in remembering back, we don't put plastic bags on hands because it makes things sweat. I mean, listen, forensic science is not rocket science. We're not going to Mars here.

Anybody can understand this. It's actually common sense is what it comes down to. If you don't want something to sweat, don't put it in plastic. And you have this wet sample. It has to go into a conveyance like a paper bag, just like we put on the hands. I've actually put paper bags over heads before because you've got valuable evidence that's there and you don't want to make that area around the head sweat with plastic. It's certainly not something that you would do. But if you're trying to preserve, for instance, firearm evidence, I've had projectiles that are barely, almost about to fall out of the side of the head that's just beneath the skin.

So I will not remove it at the scene. You don't want to do that. You want to be able to document it. I'll put a paper bag over the head. And it's the same principle even with these towels. They're damp. So what they would have had to have done is take them back in an environment that is conducive to dry this item out. Because once you dry it out, once you dry it out, it's kind of frozen in time at that point in time.

And then you have to store it safely so that all of these years later, first off, it's not going to degrade to the point where you can't get a usable sample off of it. And it's not going to be exposed to changes in relative humidity, you know, where it's going to rise and fall. And where it's a predictable environment where you can go back and you can actually access this and cut a sample out of it and test it, which is eventually what has happened in this particular case. They did such a fantastic job all those years ago, all these years ago, where the scientists, the modern scientists, were able to go back and snip some of that area, because you don't want to use all of it, but snip some of that sample area and use it and apply modern scientific technique to it. And, you know, now we have evolved to such a point in our technology where we don't need as large a sample any longer in order to generate a biological or DNA profile on an individual.

You know, we can do smaller and smaller now. We don't require as large of a sample of blood in order to facilitate this. Not just blood, but any kind of biological sample that we might can harvest DNA from. But how would you do it? I mean, if that towel is wet with blood, like we know, it's not like you're going to put it in the dryer. I mean, do you? No, you say that. You say that. But did you know that there are actually forensic evidence dryers and they're not tumble dryers?

These are, yeah, they're actually glass boxes that are utilized. We have them in morgues. They have them at forensic laboratories where you just knock down all of the humidity in the environment and the thing just dries out. It dries in place. And so you can go back once that is preserved. And let's say blood, for instance, it doesn't have that tackiness to it any longer. It's actually a dried sample that you have there. You can preserve it.

It's not going to modify it to the point where someone that knows what they're doing can't grab a sample off of it that's going to do a trimming, where they're going to go in at a very minuscule section of that sample, clip some of it out. They can actually produce a sample from that that they are able to examine and to develop a profile out of. And one of the things, for instance, that we do at autopsy, we'll take what are called blood cards. And it's kind of interesting. They'll preserve at autopsy a tiny blood droplet, and it'll go onto a specially treated card, and that card is actually filed away. And we can hang on to that blood sample for a protracted period of time, a long, long time. But, you know, we're not necessarily talking about a card here.

We're actually talking about an unknown blood sample on this towel. Now, here's what's key. They were able to preserve enough of it even in the face of having previously identified. Let's don't forget, they previously identified this blood droplet as what? AB positive at that point. So, they had already sampled it before, way back when. When they sampled every region on that towel, they were able to go through it and eliminate Nancy's blood type out of there.

But somehow they were able to find that sample on there way back when, sample it and type it and come back with AB Paws. And they saved enough of it after all of these years to go back and create a DNA profile off of that droplet of blood. You were talking about being able to rule people out. We talked earlier about the traveling salesmen, and they were ruled out. They passed a polygraph test, as well as their fingerprints did not match what was found on the murder scene. So, years pass, storage of all this important, delicate information that

you're talking about, and technology improves. And all of a sudden, we've got all these big words thrown about Joe that I'm going to let you choose which one you want to talk about. We've got phenotyping. We've got genealogy. We've got the new DNA testing. Pick one. No, let's start. I know I'm going to pick one. Let's start with the phenotyping. What is it and what good did it do with the investigation? Well, the phenotyping is quite fascinating because you can take a sample of blood in this case, and you can actually begin to run a test in order to develop a snapshot, if you will, of a probable suspect. And when I say probable suspect, this is the beauty of it. And isn't this amazing?

Can you imagine, you know, five generations ago, maybe even four generations ago, actually telling somebody back in time that we would be able to do this with the phenotyping based upon their DNA profile. You can develop a pretty good guess about what race the individual is, what their hair color is. And in this case, in this particular case, they were able to, as a result of this phenotype, determine that the individual at 25 years of age would look like an individual with average body mass had a BMI they estimated with a phenotype of 22, which is kind of on the average size for an individual. This individual had fair or very fair skin, And they created a composite of this individual. Now, how powerful is that when you're going back in time as a result of this phenotyping, where it leaves behind this kind of fingerprint of what the individual would look like, where you can create and forensic

artists can go in based upon this and create a template, if you will, of an individual and what they might look like with these characteristics. Now, obviously, it's not going to be absolutely dead on spot on this individual when you find them, but it's going to put you in the ballpark. And you know, for instance, that out of this grouping, you're going to look for somebody that had fair or very fair skin, that has dark hair and is going to be about this size at this particular age in life. And that person, for that moment, when that droplet of blood was spilled, they kind of froze in time at that moment in time. And that's absolutely fascinating. And you take phenotyping, you take phenotyping technology, and you marry that up with what eventually

brought this case to a resolution, and that's forensic genealogy. Let's recap the numbers, Joe, because you were talking about the confidence that could be gained from this phenotype report. The report said with 82% confidence that the skin color was fair or very fair, 99% confidence that it was not brown or dark brown skin. The eye color, 97% confidence that it was brown or hazel. 97% confidence that it was not green, blue, or black. Hair color, 99.8% confidence that it was black or brown. And what I found really fascinating was that even with the phenotyping, they could determine whether somebody had freckles. 91.7% confidence that this person had no freckles.

How does phenotyping determine whether or not you have freckles? Well, it's this unique recipe that we have that's given to us vis-a-vis our parents' DNA, the merging of our mother's DNA and our father's DNA that is going to dictate our appearance moving forward. And those probabilities can be estimated essentially based upon what was going on at the time of when this individual developed. And early on, I mean, that stamp is on us early on in our developmental stages, even in the womb. And so that's something that you carry with you. And it's fascinating to me because this kind of blueprint that we have now through phenotyping is something that is changing the way we approach crime scenes and the way we approach unknown circumstances where

some biological element has been left behind. It's like almost as if nature has given us the playbook, if you will. It's literally caused us to leap ahead light years as far as this technology is concerned. You take phenotyping and you combine that with the technology of a full-on DNA profile and you begin to look at familial connections where you have someone that has taken, say, their DNA and submitted it into an open source database for the purposes of genealogical study, where they're trying to determine who their ancestors were, their points of origin, and all these sorts of things, who they're related to, all of these. And once you start to hit on those peripheral areas, where if you have an individual that might have a third or fourth cousin out there that has submitted a sample, say a buccal mucosal swab that's gotten from inside of the mouth from the gum line, and they've submitted it, or maybe they've spit in a little tube and they've sent this off to be examined.

Suddenly, you've got a whole new world that opens up to you. Because if you've got an unknown, which in the case of Nancy Anderson, we have an unknown suspect here, an individual that we think was probably involved in it because we've got this blood sample from way back. Then all of a sudden, that that was very, very fuzzy for a long, long time suddenly comes into focus. And in this case, that happened all the way across the board. It's almost like Nancy's case intersected with science at the right time where they were able to pin an individual down regarding their DNA makeup, their genealogical profile. And boy, did it pay off.

It did. The link here came from, as you said, genealogy, and the link was found to be a son. Yeah, you're right, Jackie. It was the son. When they began to look at the DNA profile that they had, they saw that through forensic genealogy, they had a third or fourth cousin out here. They began to do this study relative to the probability would be. And once you have that information, you can begin mathematically to narrow this thing down to a

very fine point where you can go back and look for what are referred to as common ancestors. You know, if you have cousins, that means that you've got aunts and uncles that are connected. And then you take that, narrow it down even further to where you have not just aunts and uncles. Now, you have brothers and sisters. And when you begin to narrow it down to brothers and sisters, you come down to mom and daddy. And in this particular case, they were able to narrow this down so tightly that they zeroed in on this one young man. And the authorities actually went to his home and said, we'd like to get a DNA sample from you. And of course, their rationale was, is that they believed that this young man's father

could potentially be the suspect they'd been looking for for 50 years. That suspect ended up being Tudor Chirilla, a former attorney living in Reno. It was discovered that at the time he was living in Hawaii in the 1970s, and he was a University of Hawaii grad assistant. You begin to think about, you know, those old tomes that we go back to in investigations where we think about, you know, motive and opportunity and accessibility and, you know, all of those sorts of things that kind of, you know, play into this. At this point, we don't know what a motive would have been. And the police believe that this individual was involved in Nancy's homicide. And I think in this particular case,

what happened was that the perpetrator actually sliced their hand or cut a finger. And as this occurred, there's a natural inclination to grab the closest thing you can in this case a towel and stem the bleeding and that's what he did he took that towel placed it around his hand in order to stop the bleeding and when he did that he sealed his fate he transferred that droplet of blood to that towel that was preserved after all those years. And ultimately, that provided them with a DNA profile. Chirilla has been charged in Nancy Anderson's murder. This case has not yet gone to trial.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.