Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: IDENTIFIED - Green River Killer’s Final Victim

Episode Date: April 21, 2024

For years she was labeled “Bones 20” the unidentified victim of the Green River Killer. Now, thanks to police work and Othram Labs, the victim has been named as Tammy Liles. She was from Everett, Washington, and vanished in the summer of 1983. She was only 16 years old when she became a victim of serial killer Gary Ridgeway. On this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack will take you behind the headlines and into the lab that helped give a name to a young lady who spent decades being called “Bones 20." Transcript Highlights   00:0:16 Introduction – The Green River Killer last victim identified  00:02:28 Talk about age reference   00:06:32 Discussion of high-profile murders  00:10:48 Talk about the Green River Killer 16-year-old victim  00:15:56 Discussion of identifying remains  00:20:54 Discussion of the Green River Killer evidence  00:25:58 Talk about starting with incomplete skeleton  00:29:41 Discussion of Genetic Genealogy  00:34:51 Talking about Othram labs  00:37:39 Conclusion; might be the most noble of pursuits   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Years ago when I was working as an investigator, every death that occurred, I'd like to say that each death is unique, and they are. But when you're in the middle of conducting an investigation into an obvious homicide and a pattern begins to appear in other cases there's this little thing that occurs in your brain and I used to think that I would I would get distracted from other cases that did not have the same patterns. Because you get, I don't know, it's almost like in a hyper state of awareness, I think.

Because you see investigators are no different than anybody else. You begin to see the boogeyman everywhere you go, but the hard cold reality is that the boogeyman does exist. And today I want to speak to a particular case of a teenager, a teen girl, who died many, many years ago. But yet her death was shrouded in mystery for a long time. And I think that it's important that we discuss it. Because she fell victim to a boogeyman. She fell victim to Gary Ridgway, otherwise known as a Green River Killer. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. I think that, Dave, you and I kind of came to maturity as young adults.

Okay, Joe, stop. Before you guys get worried that this is going to be some kind of Summer of 42 boys becoming men show, it's not. This show today is about Tammy Lyles, directly and indirectly. Tammy Lyles was only 16 years old when she was murdered by Gary Ridgway, known to many as the Green River serial killer. Gary Ridgway killed 49 women and girls. Tammy Lyles was just 16 when she met Gary Ridgway and he killed her. It took years for her to be for her to be identified, for her family to know for sure this was our Tammy. As a matter of fact, for years she was called Bones 20. But it took the people at Authram Labs

and the work they do that goes beyond the pale. It just is fascinating, incredible work. And I think about every time they solve a case genetically, using genetic genealogy, it's another family that now has peace and comfort. Joe and I both don't like to say closure, but peace and comfort, knowing, knowing that's the key. So I wanted to make sure y'all know that's what we're talking about today.

Green River serial killer, Othram Labs and 16 year old Tammy Lyles. Now, Joe, let's go back to the summer of 42. I'm speaking to myself. I can't speak to you. We're the same age and live parallel existences in our private lives before we ever met one another.

Yeah, you're right. It's weird how people get connected that way. But we came of age, I think, at an interesting time, particularly from a crime history perspective, because it seems as though that the world that we inhabited back then, serial killers were talked about. They seem to be. I know that they talk about them now in the true crime world, but back then, I can reflect back and think about all these serial perpetrators that were out there when I was a young guy. It seems like they were everywhere. Because of Ted Bundy.

More than anything else, Ted Bundy, because he was attractive. They talked about him being very big in Washington state politics. He had been big and, you know, they, they talked about him being very big in Washington state politics. He really wasn't, but because his story was so remarkable and, and rule writing the book, the stranger beside me actually illuminated this whole world of the good looking guy that you would be happy for your daughter to date is actually killing women who look like his first real love but then we had in the 70s we had his escape from jail twice if you remember oh yeah that was the two you know run ted run kind of stuff or run bundy run whatever it was we had that all over the press and then in thes, we had all of the other things.

We had the Green River Killer in the news because they labeled it that way. But in the meantime, we had Ted Bundy reaching out to the press because he was on death row and they kept trying to kill him and he kept trying to fight it off. And so every time a serial killer started being covered in the press, Ted Bundy got his wheels in motion to get the press back on him. It was amazing. Yeah, it really was in a bad way. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, really in a reality and in a, in a realistic way. Uh, because I think that, uh, you know, it goes to people throw around the term narcissism all the time nowadays. Um, and it, it certainly, I think that it is very, uh, it's in, it is symptomatic of narcissism relative to him. And he, you know, he, uh, he, he would draw the spotlight back to him. And I think back, we had Richard Ramirez. Oh, wow. Uh wow we had the hillside stranglers it's not strangler for a while it was singular but then you've got this team of guys and then going back even further

than that um you know you you had uh tate labianca yeah tate labianca but i was thinking about, uh, uh, uh, he refused to be called Otis, but Otis tool. Oh, and, uh, Henry, Henry Lee Lucas, and they worked in tandem. And actually I had, I didn't have direct contact with, with, uh, Otis O T I S. He preferred to be called by that, but Otis, uh, Otis toolis Tool um they worked in tandem if you've ever seen uh Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer uh very disturbing uh film but that you know those two worked and interestingly enough when I was with a corner in New Orleans um they brought Otis Tool to my jurisdiction and uh one of the little traps that a lot of investigators would fall into back then was the fact that these guys would be cooling their heels in jail.

I think Otis was in the Florida penitentiary at that point in time. And they brought him to New Orleans because he claimed that he could tell authorities where bodies were. And, you know, he kind of made the rounds relative to that. And with Ridgeway, there's an element of that with Ridgeway, Gary Ridgeway, the Green River killer, because he took the authorities out to a variety of sites and he had a huge body count. I think that some people believe that he was really responsible for far more than he had claimed. to bait the authorities with that, or if it's reality. You never can tell because it's such a deceptive game that they play. But for me, what's really cool, Dave, is that I had, I'm not going to say it was life-changing, but I had a real peek behind the curtain a couple of weeks ago. And I got to go to Othram Labs down in the woodlands

outside of Houston, Texas. And they have a direct bearing on the case we're going to talk about today and the work that they're doing in forensic genetic genealogy. And so I think that it's important that we try to understand our victim today that we're going to talk about, Tammy Lyles. And she's what they believe is the youngest victim of the Green River Killer, and Othman played a big role in this today. You know, it's amazing that for those of us who watched the trial of the century, maybe one of the last trials of the century for the 1900s was the O.J. Simpson trial, where we heard a lot about DNA for the first time for many of us as observers of crime related stuff. That that story was all about DNA, it seemed at the end.

And I think there's a whole lot more that could be told. because of so many of us knowing about DNA because of the OJ trial and what has happened since then, I think it's important for you, for people to understand, to know that Othram, they're not some heavily funded government entity. That's got a staff of, you know, with billions of dollars pouring in.

They, it's amazing to me, and we'll cover this more of what they, but they actually have to crowdfund to do stories. Like if you have a loved one that was murdered and you're trying to solve it, it's been years and years and years, and there's no statute of limitations on murder, and the only evidence you have is this sample of DNA,

and they've been able to do nothing with it, and it's 20 years later, Othram can do something with it. They can try. Yeah, they can. And it kind of bifurcates in the sense of how it's utilized. I got to meet and spend time with David Middleman, who is the director and CEO, and his brilliant wife, Kristen Middleman. And they've run this thing and created something essentially from the

ground up. And wow. I didn't know that. Yeah. There's going to have to be a movie on this, you know? I think that it would be perfect and they're, they're fantastic. And David, if you ever enter, and I know that a lot of people maybe can state this, if you've never been around a true savant, somebody that if you're around them, their intellect seems to be off the scale, I'd say that David fits within that category. He is brilliant. But the thing about it is that his brilliance doesn't stifle his compassion. And it's one thing to say. We can sit around all day long and say how compassionate we are, but you and I believe that your abilities are proven through your actions.

And put the words into motion, put those, you know, what otherwise would just be worthless platitudes. His goal, which is fascinating to me, is not only to help solve crimes, which is part of it, that's why this is a bifurcated discussion, is to help solve crimes, to bring people, to hold people responsible for these horrible things that they've done. thousands and thousands of bodies that are out there identified and help families know

that have been missing loved ones, that there is always an empty chair at Christmas time or Thanksgiving or whatever holiday they celebrate. And you never know what had happened to those individuals. And, you know, Dave, I've got to tell you, I was having a conversation with David Metalman, and we were standing out on this sun-drenched porch in the Texas heat. And he looked at me and he said, you know, my goal is to get the database for NamUs, which is the database for all of the unidentified bodies that we have that are out there. My goal, and should be the goal of everyone, to clear that database out and get everybody

known to the world once again. 16 years old. No, you're not an adult yet. But you know, sometimes depending upon the circumstances that a 16 year old is in, they have to face horrors that you would think would otherwise only be reserved for adults. And of course, in the case that we're speaking of today with Tammy Lyles, she faced that horror. She faced this devil, this boogeyman in Gary Ridgeway. And it's, it's still amazing that first off that they were ever even able to get her identified. Dave, the entire spectrum of the green river killer covers so many years, so much investigation, so much press.

This was not something that was just discovered one day and they researched it back as a history lesson. This was ongoing in the moment coverage of what was happening with these women who were being killed. And Gary Ridgway, he was actually on the police radar early on but just kept on trucking they never had enough to really do anything with him but he was somebody they considered up there as we look at Tammy Lyles when her bones were I apologize if you're If you are one of Tammy's relatives or somebody that knew her as a living individual, this is no disrespect. But to be truthful, we have to describe what was found, when it was found, where it was found, how it was.

And I'm so sorry if this was my love. I don't know how I would feel about this. But in this case, she was finally identified. She was not identified for a long time. And that's why I have a question for you about that, Joe, because they have labeled her as the Green River serial killer's final victim identified 16 year old Tammy Lyles. At the age of 16, she was murdered. Her remains were known as Bones 20. Didn't they have an identity? Didn't they know who she was before they used DNA to confirm what they thought?

Yeah, they had gotten an ID on her years after she had gone missing and her remains had been recovered. Okay. There was kind of a partial skeletal remain that was found of her, which is not uncommon. Right. You know, particularly when you have what are referred to as surface remains, those remains that are not buried. Okay. You're very fortunate.

You're very fortunate to find anything at all. In her case, they did. And I think that that task was achieved through dental examination. Okay. Because Tammy Lyle's body was found, her bones, called Bones 20. She had been last seen in downtown Seattle, Washington, June of 83. At the age of 16, she was one of two unidentified women whose remains were found near Tigard, Oregon, 1985. Two years after she went, after she vanished from

downtown Seattle, her remains found near Tigard, Oregon. She had been considered one of Ridgeway's potential victims since way back, like 98 or 88 rather. So she goes missing in 83. Her bones are recovered in 85. And by 88, they did consider her part of the Green River killer victims. And that's why I was curious about the identification. It was an incomplete set of bones and teeth that were just, and if I get some of these confused too, and I am so sorry, but you know, there was one of the stories that I remember Joe,

where they were at a ball field and a dog came running up to the coach who was working on the field and had a leg bone in his mouth and can you imagine what that would be like yeah and uh for our listeners oh that's not tammy by the way i apologize no no no that's not that's not tammy but um when you have, when you have canines that are running, running a field, if you will, there are a number of cases, and for some reason, dogs are attracted to skulls as well. It's almost like they're, you know, commonly you think about dogs having long bones, they're laying in shade, maybe they're chewing on a long bone of some kind. Generally, you don't expect that to be a human bone. But I can think of two cases right off the top of my head where I had dogs that walked up in the yard of some unsuspecting person's home with a skull. And they treat them almost like balls many times.

And they'll have them poised between their paws like this. And they'll be chewing and working on those bones the entire time. And canines seem to find great joy in doing this. And so it's not unusual for an animal to come walking up with a bone. If I could have answered your question for a million dollars, I never would have guessed that a dog would be fascinated with the head. I never would have thought that. Yeah, it's like that.

I think that if anyone has ever seen a dog with a ball between their paws, um, kind of playing in the backyard with it, it's, you know, it's kind of like that. Only they see it as a source of protein. You know, that's, you know, just like we're no different. You know, our bodies are no different after death like that, that, um, wow. That's one of the things that attracts. And so you never know. And here's the other thing is that if you, if you have a skeletal remain, um, and the dog grabs a skeletal remain, brings in one element of it, you don't know where that originated from. And so with Ridgeway, Gary Ridgeway, and all of these victims,

including Tammy Liles, he perpetrated these crimes so that he had these remains spread out. And let's see how the distribution of the remains was all over King County. And so you didn't always know. He didn't have like a specific location he would go to, but he would do particular things with the bodies, some of them that they could still appreciate. Sometimes he'd line bodies up. He'd go to these particular areas where he was just kind of keeping them. And so they've got these almost like commingled remains. They even put forth the idea that he's posing some of these bodies after death.

And the fact that he would do this. And the other thing about Ridgeway is that he's not one of these brilliant guys. He doesn't have an IQ that's off the chart. He was just singularly focused on what he was doing. And he worked for years and years. And this plays into the story as well. He worked for years and years as a, not just a car painter or an automotive painter, but a painter of trucks specifically like,

you know, big Peterbilt's and Mack trucks. That's what he did. And he maintained that job all of these years while still going out and perpetrating these crimes, which is fascinating. As far as I'm concerned, he was just singularly focused on this obsession that he had with killing prostitutes and then

discarding their remains. It's still amazing to me that he was, Gary Ridgway, was a suspect early on from at least 87. And that's when we publicly knew about him in terms of the investigation, but they suspected him. As you mentioned, he was not as clever or as intelligent as some others that we have dealt with, but still he got away with it for a whole lot longer than many of them ever did. And the damage he did to families, I think of the, how one person can affect one person's death affects so many people. Now you're talking 50, you know, you're, you're talking a lot of extended people

directly and indirectly affected by what this one person did. And that's what I think is the most shocking to talk about people in bones and things like that. When you had a girl that's 16 years old, his youngest victim was 14 or the youngest one we know about was 14. But, you know, still, Tammy Lyles was 16 years old. Her her bones helped identify who she was with, as you mentioned, the teeth using those as identity, but they weren't actually able to get the whole picture pulled together on, uh, on Tammy Lyle's until they were able to get the DNA tested. And when you start with so little evidence, Joe, and you don't have soft tissue, you don't have anything except the bones. What do you do as an investigator to try to find out who this person is and how they ended up where they are when they are discovered? Yeah, well, a lot of that is going to rest heavily

upon, first off, your first stop along the continuum here is anthropology. I would imagine that many of our friends have all heard of the body farm. That's one of the reasons the body farm does the research that they do, because you're dealing with decomposing skeletal remains, and you have to be able to, these people that go out and practice as anthropologists, they can't put most of the, a real fine point on identification. So they're looking in very broad ways at the bones that they have. They'll try to categorize the bones by virtue of race. And you really need a skull for that. And of course, in many of these cases, you're not going to have a skull.

And then you try to do stature. And there's a metric that you can apply relative to like bone length. Like if you're going to measure, say, the length of the thigh bone, it's going to fit into a particular category as to what the height, the approximating height of this individual will be. But then you have to determine if the thigh bone that you're looking at is either male or female, or is it from a racial grouping that would have more, what are referred to, and this is a weird word, gracile bones, which gracile means fine, kind of fine featured, where that you found, and it could be an adult male, their bones might not be as big and robust as some, you know, big European origin guy like me. And so you can't, sometimes you'll get the sexing of the bones, as I say, you'll get those confused. You'll get racial characteristics

confused with skulls because the facial characteristics, you know, sometimes we're co-mingled. Our genetics are co-mingled now. It's not, you don't have these clear lines of delineation. So what are you left with at that point in time? Well, fortunately, the world that we live in today has brought about the idea of who are we? Who are we at our molecular core? And to our benefit, you have groups of people like Othram that are answering some of these long, long unanswered questions. The big question is, what are you left with? You know, you start off, I think, with an incomplete skeleton. And as horrible as it is, the only name that you have is Bones 20.

And you suspect that it could be one individual in particular based upon dental ID. But you need to confirm that. You need to confirm that for the sake of the family. And like you said, Dave, you don't have soft tissue. So where are you going to go? Well, you're going to take bone sample. And in Tammy Lyle's case, that bone sample actually made it to Texas. But the first stop in Texas was not Othram Labs. It's another great lab that's housed at the University of North Texas. And as a matter of fact, I've got a real good buddy of mine that just retired from there. And they do some of the most marvelous work in DNA identification. But when they played that out to the end, they were left scratching their head

thinking, we can't take this any further. We need to see who else we can source this to. And of course, that's when Othram appears on the radar and they come in to kind of complete this job. Now, when we're talking about Althram and beyond, because there is breaking down the DNA and having that map, but to find out who this person is and who they are tied to is a totally different, it's an extension of the DNA exercise because now you've got to do the genetic genealogy. You have to build a family tree. So here's our victim and we've got that victim. Boy, we got everything right here, but we have to find out other things. Who's related to this victim? There's other people, at least two.

Yeah, this is a fascinating thing. In my recent visit to Othram that I was shocked by, you go into one section of their facility, which is amazing. And you've got this very clinical environment where everything is sealed off. People are literally on the other side of the glass and wearing protective clothing, right? And they can only work for about 45 minutes at a time when they have to step out because it's such labor-intensive work. And you don't want your people to be distracted because of fatigue. So they have to take a break like every 45 minutes. So this is such a powerful thing on the brain. It is taxing your brain so much that they know after 45 minutes, you're no longer at the top of your game. It has eaten that much. Take a break.

That's remarkable. Yeah, it is. And it's the facility itself is really something to see from that perspective, but also that awareness. So if you have a case like Tammy's case that comes in and you're trying to adjust yourself to be so laser focused in your assessments of what you have before you, here's the really sad thing is that if this is a criminal case, defense attorneys will pick at that, pick at, well, how many other cases, if they're talking to the technician, how many other cases have you been working? How much time? Do you think you were too tired to be doing this? And that sort of thing. They understand that concept.

But here's the other part. They don't just have a scientific section, the genetic section. They've also got a genealogical section, which is when you begin to think about this in the world that I come from, which is, you know, morgues and crime labs and all that stuff, you don't think about, well, we've got a whole staff, a genealogist here that they can confer with. And they begin to kind of work out this big puzzle about who is this individual. And right you were, you know, when you were discussing how do you tie this back to a particular familial group, if you will. And that is, you look for these peripheral individuals that are out there within the family tree. So you're talking about cousins most of the

time and several times removed. And then they begin to kind of bring that in and tighten the focus on all of these cases. And Tammy, of course, is representative of that. And you want to be sure, you want to be sure about these cases. And so for Tammy Liles, which please keep in mind, if people are thinking, well, how did she die? There's no way to determine how many of these people die. Because when you get to the state where you're in a skeleton state, any of the soft tissue that you would be looking for, for focal areas of hemorrhage in the neck, or you're looking for, you know, the fractured hyoid,

as they always talk about, or you're looking for trauma to the skull, many times you're not going to have that. And so it's an idea of essentially a presumptive event where you're presuming that this individual died at the hands of someone like Gary Ridgway because it fit the MO of what he had done in the past. And she fits into a particular grouping. But Othram's role in this is, I think that it is, first off, it's the ultimate

in compassion, but also it is from this particular case in the series of homicides that Gary Ridgway was involved in. It is the ultimate act of compassion as well, because finally the family can move on from that point. I never use the word closure because I think that that's, it's a horrible term to use because families, you're diminishing the grief of families by saying that families never get closure from, from homicides. You can forget that. Please don't say that to people. I guess you have closure now. No, they don't. People don't get closure. It's such a weird term. And for those of us that work as death investigators, families don't get closure. They might achieve certain levels of peace i don't know i can't

speak to anybody's individual experiences but the one piece to this is that from a confirmatory stand uh offram offers that and it's it's a little slice of peace perhaps for them and that's that's what they've done in tammy law's case Dave. Well, you know, with Othram and you have like math on one side and the theater arts people on the other, because to pull all this together, to actually get answers to questions and solving crimes, this is a really an amazing world of technology because it does require some out of the box thinking besides the math. We have the math, but we've got to find the rest. And that's why Authram is so important to what's being done. And I want to go back to this idea that they are crowdfunded.

When police sent, you know, oftentimes our law enforcement agencies are underfunded, especially when it comes to investigations in what are considered cold cases. Now, because of the strides that have been made, many departments have a cold case unit and they're breaking crimes. They're actually solving crimes that have been dormant for many, many years, but now have the ability to take the technology and the skills and just the experience of investigators and actually solve these crimes. But to get to that next level, you need an author. You need a lab. Yeah. They don't have funding. Like, well, I would think, you know, I, I just assumed until you told me, I really did assume that there was federal funding, that it came in from many

different sources and they just had because of the work they are doing that. I really did assume that there was federal funding, that it came in from many different sources, and they just had, because of the work they are doing, that I really did think that it was super funded. Not a problem. Send it and we got you. You know, we're lined up for here to the moon. But it's not like that at all. That's not the way it works. You know, and it's curious to me where certain government agencies push monies towards. And I think that, you know, for me, of course, I'm partial in this area because it's a death investigation.

I think that one of the most noble things that you can do is provide a service like this to families. Hawthorne fills that gap, you know, regarding this, regarding that big unknown, because they're the ultimate key. It's, you know, at a molecular level that they're offering. Look, there's been cold case squads for years and years, and it's frustrating being on a cold case. There's a reason they're cold cases. And cold case cases that are part of a cold case packet, let's see if I can explain this correctly. They are generational. So you can

have an old group of investigators that will be on a cold case, one of many that might exist in a certain jurisdiction. And from a generational standpoint, and I'm talking generational in a very narrow spectrum here, it's passed on to the next generation of investigators that have achieved the level of skill because the skills that a cold case investigator has are a bit different than your regular investigator that's out on the street. They're dealing with things that are a bit finer in detail. And so you have to raise up another generation of police officers to be at that level or investigators to be at that level. And sometimes these cases just get handed off.

That's what that, and I really want people to grab hold of this. That's why this is such a fantastic time to be alive in forensics, to witness this. Because all of these cases, Dave, that for years and years and years that have gone unanswered, you know, the big questions that arise from these cases that have gone unanswered for years and years and years, we're finally getting to see a few beams of sunlight that are exposing this darkness, and there will finally be answers. And sometimes those answers will come about as an unidentified DNA sample that could be blood or, or semen or any number of body fluids that are found as seen that can tie back

to a perpetrator. Or it can be one of the best gifts that anybody could give to one of these families that have wanted to know for so long what happened to those that I love and striking them off of that master list that they have at NamUs. I urge you to check out DNAsolves.com and just visit the website. I'm, I don't get a nickel off of this. I don't, you know, I'm not here to necessarily sell what Authram is doing. However, I've spent more time than I can possibly express to any of you guys standing over unidentified human remains for years and years and years with no answers. Again, this might be one of the most noble things that's being done in the area of forensic sciences right now.

And I urge each and every one of you to go and visit the website and see what these people are doing because it will, it will knock your socks off. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Packs. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.