Criminology - Joseph Newton Chandler, Buckskin Girl, and Lyle Stevik

Episode Date: November 3, 2018

In this episode of Criminology, we discuss 3 different cases where identities were matched after many years using genetic genealogy. The cases of Joseph Newton Chandler, Lyle Stevik, and Buckskin girl prove that DNA and genetic genealogy are being used to identify more than just killers. All 3 of these matches occurred in 2018. You can help support the show by going to patreon.com/criminology An Emash Digital production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you love chilling mysteries, unsolved cases, and a touch of mom-style humor, moms and mysteries is the podcast you've been searching for. Hey guys, I'm Mandy. And I'm Melissa. Join us every Tuesday for moms and mysteries, your gateway to gripping, well-researched true crime stories. Each week, we deep dive into a variety of mind-boggling cases as we shed light on everything from heist to whodunit.

We're your go-to podcast for Mysteries with a Motherly Touch. Subscribe now to moms and mysteries wherever you get your podcast. Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised. I'd like to welcome everyone to episode six of season four of criminology. So far this season, we've talked a lot about how the entire process works in using this DNA to catch killers in cold cases. But in this episode, we're going to talk about just how that same process can be utilized to, identify people whose true identities are not known.

Those procedures are the same. They're just used a little bit differently. We'll once again be joined by Colleen Fitzpatrick, who you heard from earlier this season, and she'll walk us through her work in some of these cases. But first, let's give a big shout out to our newest Patreon supporters. We had Celine Desardine, Christine Evans, Becca Casper, Monica Cates and Diane Hanson. So huge shout out for that new support. We appreciate the new support, the people that continue to support us month after month. It really goes a long way towards

helping us put out this podcast. We can't thank everybody enough for the support they give us and support on social media as well, not just the Patreon. But if you want to be a Patreon on supporter, you'll get commercial-free, early access to new episodes of criminology. If you'd like to support the show, we'd appreciate it, and you can do so by visiting patreon.com slash criminology. And just a reminder about our two books, the Zodiac and the Golden State Killer, are out right now. They're on Kindle.

They're out in paperback. And you can find them on Amazon and at many online bookseller websites. All right, Morph. Let's jump into this episode. We are going to talk about three cases that were solved in 2018 that have all been longtime favorites of online investigators and armchair detectives. These are the cases of Joseph Newton Chandler, Lyle Stevik, and the Buckskin Girl. They all were known by these names for years until DNA, was able to determine who they really were.

Two of these cases involve my home state of Ohio, so for that reason, they're of special interest to me. The first of these cases that we'll be talking about is the case of Joseph Newton Chandler III. On July 30, 2002, residents of an East Lake Ohio apartment complex in Cuyahoga County near Cleveland complained of a terrible odor coming from a nearby apartment. As the apartment custodian entered the apartment to investigate,

he found the dead body of a man in his 60s or 70s and called police. Police arrived and determined that the man died of a gunshot to the head. Officials were able to establish that the man was a suicide victim and had shot himself through the mouth with a 38-caliber charter-arms handgun that he had purchased only a month earlier. The man was identified as the resident of that apartment Joseph Newton Chandler the 3rd. Chandler had been dead almost a week,

and because he didn't have any family or close friends, he wasn't missed by anyone or reported missing. One odd thing that stood out to police was that Chandler, before taking his life, had turned off the air conditioning. The July summer heat had turned the apartment into an oven, and by the time Chandler's body was found, it was so badly decomposed that police couldn't retrieve fingerprints from it.

The possibility that the air was turned off the speed the composition was just one small piece of a suicide that would be more than meets the eye. Chandler's death appeared to be just one of tens of thousands of suicides that occur in the U.S. every year. As Chandler's medical issues came to light, it became more clear as to why Chandler may have taken his own life. Investigators learned that Chandler had recently been diagnosed with colon cancer. The authorities tried to find contact information for Chandler's next of kin, but they discovered that his emergency contacts were comprised of his coworkers at various companies he had worked for. He had worked as a draftsman, an electrician in the two decades before his death.

In 1978, he was employed by Edco Engineering in Cleveland. Sometime later, he took a job with a company called Lubrizol in Wycliffe, Ohio, where he worked as a draftsman and electrical designer. Chandler worked at Lubrizol until 1997 when he was laid off. But because authorities couldn't locate any next of kin, Chandler's remains were cremated. It was discovered that Chandler didn't have many valuables at the time of his death, but he did have $82,000 in a bank account, and authorities were required to determine who his rightful errors were, so they started talking to co-workers listed as Chandler's emergency contacts. But settling Chandler's estate would prove to be no easy task. It quickly became apparent that none of Chandler's co-workers had known him very

well. Most described him as a loner or a hermit that didn't leave his apartment unless it was to go to work or grab a bite to eat, and none of them could direct authorities to any known relatives. Chandler had told at least one co-worker that he had a sister named Mary Wilson in Columbus, Ohio, and investigators were able to identify an address given by Chandler for this sister. The only problem was the address didn't exist, and this would be the first of many red herrings that would dog investigators as they tried to find errors for Chandler. Additional questioning of Chandler's coworkers revealed that he was considered to be very odd or eccentric.

Some described him as being paranoid. They recounted stories of him coming to a company costume party where he just sat quietly. The entire night dressed as a gangster didn't speak to anyone at all. Another witness reported that Chandler had once driven all the way to Maine just to visit a very specific L.L. Bean store, but turned around and returned to his apartment after not finding an open parking spot. Still another person recounted for police that Chandler would sit around for hours

watching white noise on his TV. Essentially watching a blank TV channel with no programming on it. For investigators trying to find Chandler's family, none of this information helped them get any closer. But it did lead them to think that Chandler may very well have been mentally ill. As the authorities continued looking into Chandler's background, it soon became apparent that

before he showed up in Ohio in 1978, he didn't seem to have a real background. This led them to explore Chandler's Social Security history, hoping that it might reveal more clues. They discovered that Chandler had applied for and received his Social Security card in September of 1978 in Rapid City, South Dakota. Immediately afterwards, he left the area and headed for Ohio. As investigators looked into the Social Security application, this is where the mystery of Joseph Newton-Channler really deepened. Joseph Newton-Channler had listed his date of birth on the Social Security application

as March 11, 1937. And he had listed his parents as Joseph-Netland. The 2nd and Ellen Christina Caber Chandler. One other thing that he indicated on his application was that he was born in Buffalo, New York. Using the information from the Social Security application, investigators discovered that the man calling himself Joseph Newton Chandler the 3rd was an imposter.

The real Joseph Newton Chandler III had died in a car accident on a Sherman, Texas, Highway in December of 1945 at the age of eight. He was killed alongside his parents, Joseph Newton Chandler II, and Ellen Christina Caber Chandler, as they traveled to visit family for the Christmas holiday. Investigators realized that they had a mystery on their hands. The man calling himself Joseph Newton Chandler was not Joseph Newton Chandler, but who was he? Was he a criminal who fled from the law, or was he somebody that just wanted to start a life for himself and chose to use a dead boy's identity for his own. Police began to wonder how it

was that he may have come to know about the real Joseph Newton Chandler and his family, but the possibilities were endless. He may have been friends with the family or seen their headstones at the old city Greenwood Cemetery in Texas, or he simply could have read about their deaths in a newspaper. Either way, the authorities investigating the case were back to square one. But since the man calling himself Joseph Newton Chandler the third had conned the U.S. government and Social Security Administration, the U.S. Marshal Service became involved. Once the Marshal Service was involved, they decided to release a lot of what they did know about the man who called himself Joseph Chandler. And they implored the public to come forward with

any information. So they said that they estimated that he was in his 60s or 70s at the time of his death in 2002. He was 5'7 and 160 pounds. He had a scar on his stomach, possibly from a hernia surgery. But these clues, if you can really call them that, they didn't really add up too much of anything. Investigators found that he had called a woman in Texas shortly before his suicide, but she didn't know who he was or why he called her. Investigators then went back to his time and said, South Dakota. Around the time he received the social security card in Rapid City, using clues developed in their search in that area, they felt that the imposter calling himself Chandler may have come from California. Once all of this material was released to the public, online

sluice and armchair detectives on sites like Reddit had a field day trying to figure out who the man was. Many assume that he must have been running from a criminal past. Some people even theorized that he might be the Zodiac killer, who had created a fake identity for himself to escape capture. But in reality, people were just grabbing at straws. No one knew who the mystery man was, including investigators. But investigators had one card up their sleeve to play. They had some of the man's medical records and began to search through his medical history for anything that might give them DNA. On February 4th, 1989, the man calling himself Chandler sought medical attention for a very unusual injury. He had visited the emergency room at a local hospital with severe lacerations on his penis.

When the doctors asked him how the injuries happened, he told them he received them while trying to masturbate with a vacuum cleaner. The doctors didn't believe him. And one even noted in the medical report that he believed the man was older than he claimed to be. But unfortunately, this unusual trip to the ER didn't yield any DNA. Then investigators struck gold when they found that a medical procedure that the fake Chandler had gone through in 2000, two years before his death, led to tissue samples being taken and preserved. By 2014, investigators had compared that sample against the various profiles in CODIS and other law enforcement databases, but they never found a match. But in 2016, as genetic genealogy was beginning to really advance, the marshals hunting for the true identity of the man calling himself Chandler were ready to take advantage of the latest tools available to them.

They enlisted the help of genetic genealogist, Colleen Fitzpatrick, using her skills and the tools of the tools of the tools of her, her disposal, which included Jedmatch. Colleen and her team were able to come up with a possible last name for the Mystery Man, which was Nichols or Nicholas. The Marshall first contacted me in 2016 to work on the Y DNA in terms of the genetic genealogy databases. And by that, I mean taking the Y profile that had already been generated by the state lab and comparing it to the genetic genealogy databases that are public databases online using proprietary software we've developed. Out of that came a single match to the name Nicholas. We contacted that Mr. Nicholas. He was very interested in helping us. And he told us he went back, his ancestry went back to an

immigrant in colonial Virginia who came in 1720. We were concerned that, um, A family like that is normally well researched and has quite a number of genealogists that take DNA tests, but we had only come up with one match to that name. So it became a concern that the living Mr. Nicholas might have somewhere in his line a misattributed paternity. That is, on paper, he's related to that immigrant. But genetically, that could have been an adoption or an illegitimacy in the family. So for that reason, we went out and found another descendant of that same immigrant and had him why DNA tested, and he came also up with the name of Nicholas. And in the meantime, there was a third genealogist that appeared randomly in the database who also matched under the name Nicholas.

So we felt that that family had that integrity, that line, that male line was intact, and indeed the name associated with that family was Nicholas. We did some genealogy on that, but as you can imagine, that descendant, that immigrant ancestor has thousands and thousands of descendants, so we could not really advance and see where Mr. X fell into that family at all. Now, Mr. X could have been adopted. We can't say that, but we can say that assuming he was not adopted or he did not experience an illegitimacy or a name change in his male family, his probable last. name was Nicholas or a variation of Nicholas. Our investigation in that regard stopped. We could not go any further with that. At that time, though, I made the acquaintance of Margaret Press, and we formed the DNA Doe project that was different from identifiers under which I was working at the time.

And we discussed how we could use genetic genealogy autosomal snip testing for identifying John Doe's. This is the kind of testing offered by Ancestry.com, 23 and me and those companies, but they don't take forensic cases. So we began to develop a workaround, how to circumvent those companies and develop that data without having to go to them. It took several months to figure out how we could go to an independent lab and generate that same data set as if a John Doe had gone and tested with those companies.

We still couldn't use their database. for comparison, but fortunately there's a website called Jedmatch that is not affiliated with any of the companies, but which accepts data from all of the companies. So at that point, we had our method in place. We were interested in finding a case, a test case to work on. And when I went through my case files, we thought we would contact Marshall Elliott because not Not only did we already have a probable last name for our guy, but also we felt Marshall Elliott was forward-looking and would understand that it would take the risk of using the

new technology to try and solve the case. Once we had that settled, we had the hardest challenge of all, and that is when we got the DNA from the lab, it was severely degraded because it was extract, the DNA was extracted from tissue that had been embedded in paraffin for about 15 years and we got the very last tail end of it. The DNA, we only had 7% of his genome left. So the usual methods that genetic genealogists used to solve adoption cases really really did not apply. We had to develop new ways of looking at degraded DNA.

In some cases, some entire chromosomes were missing from this DNA. So it was very challenging and we spent a few. months, applying bioinformatics techniques to understand how to address this problem. We certainly could not predict hair, color, eye color, that kind of thing, because those markers simply were not present. And so we went forward in about, I think, July, we got the DNA from the lab, and then a couple of months later, we got it back, and that's when the genealogy work starts. That was Colleen Fitzpatrick talking about the initial work that she did on this case, trying to learn the true identity of this man, which ultimately led her to the last name Nichols or Nicholas.

But that was just the beginning of the mystery starting to unravel. By 2018, they were able to finally track down close family of the man who Colleen Fitzpatrick referred to as Mr. X. Tracking back through close family members, the true identity of Mr. X was finally revealed. So today we're here to talk about one of Northeast Ohio's biggest mysteries that has now been solved, and that is a true identity of the person known as Joseph Newton Chandler, the third of East Lake, Ohio. For those that do not know, Joseph Newton Chandler arrived in Northeast Ohio in 1978 after receiving a social security number in September of that year in Rapid City, South Dakota at the age of 41.

Is that, no, you can keep it there, but is that on that border right there? Okay. Joseph Newton Chandler began working at major Cleveland area companies as a draftsman and electrical engineer. He lived in our area from 1978 to his death in 2002. In July of 2002, Joseph Newton Chandler locked all the doors and windows in his apartment in East Lake, Ohio, turned off the air conditioning, marked off the days of the week and month on his calendar, went into his bathroom, put a gun underneath the roof of his mouth,

pulled the trigger, and committed suicide. It took about a week for East Lake Police to discover the body, which was badly decomposed. No fingerprints were attainable and the body was eventually cremated. Chandler had left $82,000 in a bank account with no next-a-kin or family listed. At the time, it appeared as a typical suicide. Co-workers of Chandler described him as a loner, no family or friends, kept to himself highly, highly intelligent, a builder of various electronic devices. you could see on that board, some of the devices that he built.

Very bizarre in his behavior, and that he used to leave the area of East Lake for periods of time of time stating they are getting close. Then he would return home days and sometimes weeks later. Co-workers thought he was just odd, isolated, and just an eccentric person. after the suicide authorities attempted to locate the next of kin of Joseph Newton Chandler, and they discovered that the real Joseph Newton Chandler died in 1945 here on this board in a traffic accident in Texas with both of his parents right before Christmas.

Joseph Newton Chandler was eight years old when he was killed while driving to his grandmother's house in Texas with a vehicle full of Christmas. gifts. He was born March 11, 1937 and died in that accident on December 21st of 1945. Joseph Newton Chandler never had a chance to live his life, but someone else would come to live it for him. In 1978, Dumpassar had acquired a social security number in Chandler's name in Rapid City, South Dakota, using a real name of both Chandler's parents as well as the real Chandler's date of birth. Many investigators worked on the initial case and were stumped. In fact, two of them are back there right now. One is Tom Doyle, Eastlake Police, and my father, who was a private investigator on the case originally. The case went cold for many, many years. Many articles and

books were written as to the possibility of the unknown story of this true identity. In 2014, at the request of the Eastlake Police Department, the United States Marshal Service for Northern Ohio adopted the case. Chandler was looked at originally for comparison to unsolved fugitive cases over the years in the 1960s and 1970s. We were able to identify that Chandler was hospitalized in the year 2000, two years before his death

for a medical procedure and a tissue sample was taken for him at that time. We had that sample tested. at the Cahill County Medical Examiner's Office who is here today to obtain DNA for comparison. A DNA profile is uploaded into national databases and systems, but provided no comparisons of value. Enter Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick and Dr. Margaret Press. In 2016, we contacted Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick, President of Identity. identifiers international for assistance.

The DNA profile from Chandler was sent to the lab in Kiowa County. Dr. Fitzpatrick and Press was sent to them for comparison in Y DNA genetic databases. Dr. Fitzpatrick and Press were able to determine that Chandler's real last name was Nicholas or a variation of Nicholas. This was the first investigation in the Marshal Service history that we utilized forensic genealogy. In early 2018, identifieders international led by Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick and Dr. Margaret Press, along with a team of investigators, were able to locate a Robert Ivan Nichols from New Albany, Indiana, if you can get board number four, who had similarities to Chandler. We then began an investigation to find relatives and find other information on Nichols.

In March of 2018, the Marshal Service located a son of Nichols who resided in Ohio. We obtained DNA from him, which we then provided to the Kyle County Medical Examiner's Office, who originally had the DNA of Chandler. That DNA sample from the Nichols son positively matched with the DNA of the person calling himself Joseph Newton Chandler III. The son stated to us that his last contact with his father was in 1965 when he received a letter from him from his father postmarked from Napa, California. We learned that Nichols was in the United States Navy World War II, originally stationed in San Francisco, and served on the USS Aaron Ward, which was bombed by the Japanese on May 3rd of 1945. Nichols was injured and later received the Purple Heart.

Nichols came back from the war and burned his uniforms according to family members. Can you get board number five, please? Handwritten letters, postmarks, and documentation that we received shows that Nichols resided in Dearborn, Michigan in 1964, then settled in San Francisco and Richmond, California areas in 1965, and possibly the Los Angeles area. He was reported missing in 1965 by his parents. and his family and numerous attempts by california authorities and indiana authorities and authorities all over the u.s failed to locate him and were unsuccessful you get the next board please sorry about all the boards this thing's just really hard to explain at some point so the family

never heard from nichols again after 1965 now the first part the first part of this mystery of who Joseph Newton Chandler is, has now been solved. But now we need the public's help to determine the why. There is a reason he went missing in 1965 and assumed the name of a deceased eight-year-old boy in 1978 and went hiding for so, so many years. There is a reason he never again contacted his family, left, $82,000 in a bank account without leaving it to his own son who resided in our state. Robert Ivan Nichols never wanted to be found throughout his lifetime, even into his death.

And someone out there may hold the key as to why. That was U.S. Marshal Pete Elliott, breaking the news of the Trump. true identity of Joseph Newton Chandler III was actually Robert Ivan Nichols. But you heard the Marshall say that although they know that Robert Ivan Nichols, born September 12, 1926, assumed the identity of Joseph Chandler who was born in 1937 and died in 1945, they really don't know much else, just that he vanished from California in the mid-1960s. So Nichols was actually a World War II veteran and hero. But sometime after coming home from the war, he changed.

And his odd behavior started sometime before he vanished. It almost makes you wonder if Nichols had some sort of PTSD from the war. The Marshall also mentioned that Nichols had a son that was entitled to the $82,000 that was in his father's bank account. His son was asked why it was that his father had run off and started a new life. And here's what he had to say. I'd really rather not speculate however if I had to come up with an answer, I think it would be caused child support because he left us in a lurch,

no money in the bank, an old beat up car, and three kids at home still in school. and this bad. Genetic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick joined us to give us the inside scoop on just how solving this case unfolded.

I worked on Joseph Newton-Channler the third through the DNA Doe project which Margaret and I, Margaret Press and I are co-executive directors and that was amazing. That was unbelievable. That was the first case that was solved using

autosomal DNA. We found out later that was a previous case that, you know, was kept under wraps, which I can't speak about, but, you know, a year or two earlier. But that was the first announced case, the first known case on March the 5th, 2018. That was a man who died of a gunshot wound to the head in 2002 in Cleveland, a suicide. They, the authorities, the agency, you know, went in, cleaned up, checked him out, but it would have been really easy to close the case, except that he had a bank account with over $80,000 in it. So that being said, they had to go out and find the family, certainly,

so that the family could inherit the money. And at that time, they found that Joseph Newton Chandler, the third, was not the man who committed suicide. He instead was a young boy that was killed in a car accident outside of Dallas in 1940. So this became a case of stolen identity. The authorities, the U.S. Marshal for Northern Ohio, who was handling it, you know, had no idea who this guy was. He did not have many friends. He left behind very few, you know, pieces of paper.

He was a temporary, a temporary like permanent subcontract contract worker for Lubrizol. He worked as a draftman, electronic draftsman. He was very good at that. Very quiet. Didn't really talk to people. Didn't go out except to eat. You know, had no really relations with the outside world. So in going back, they found out he had stolen his identity in 1978 in Rapid City, South Dakota,

that somebody had ordered the, I think, the birth certificate of the real Chandler from Buffalo, New York, I had applied for a social security number under his name, and Mr. X had then gone to Cleveland, you know, got a place to live and was there ever since. But they couldn't get behind or before 1978. They just couldn't figure out what happened. He, you know, there's no trace. No way to find him. They even went to the extent of interviewing the man who had given him the Social Security number. At that time, there was a law

that if you applied for a social security number and you were over 18 years old, you had to go through an interview and explain why you didn't have a social security number until then. So the real Joseph

Chandler being born in 37, I think, and this was 1978. So you know, the real Chandler would have been in his 40s. And so the U.S. Marshall went back and interviewed the man that had actually issued that Social Security number and he couldn't remember anything. It was a very, you know, easy thing.

It wasn't a long interview, whatever. It's just nothing. They went back to see who owned the address where he lived. And a couple of people said they recognized him, but couldn't remember anything. They had his old phone records with a couple of numbers he had called in Texas, real estate agents and those people couldn't remember anything about the calls. You know, they did everything they could. And they were going to go through the post office to get, you know, any records of letters,

whatever the post office had still available, but it was so deeply archived. My understanding is that they just couldn't access it. So it went nowhere. Nobody could figure it out. The U.S. Marshall hired me in, I think, 2015 or 16 to do the Y DNA, found out the last name was Nicholas. We thought, you know, let's say that's the name that came up. That Nicholas, the man who was alive and who had posted his DNA in the genealogy websites,

he was descended from an early colonial Virginia immigrant. and that family, that immigrant's family was very prominent in early Virginia, and in fact, Robert Carter Nicholas, the man's son, was the first treasurer of the colony of Virginia. Now, that raises a red flag because Mr. Living Nicholas is descended from a prominent Virginia family, and quite usually those families are research back and forth. you know, that they have a number of descendants and, you know, they found each other, they're fleshed out their genealogies, they have taken the DNA test, you know, they're proving out their various lines. But here we had just one match to the name Nicholas. So there was some concern that Mr. Nicholas had, you know, a non-paternity event, a misattributed paternity somewhere in his male line.

So we went out and found a descendant of the original immigrants who had different son of his own. is I think it was John Nicholas instead of Robert Carter. And that that descendant matched the living Mr. Nicholas that we had already found in the match. So those two lines quite likely were Nicholas lines. And then a third genealogist actually signed up randomly and got in a database. And he came up on the, you know, on the list of matches. So we had three people descended from that original. immigrant who all matched on the Y and whose names were all Nicholas.

So at least we had established the integrity on that side of the equation, that, in fact, that family name was Nicholas. So Mr. X, though, we could say to some degree of certainty, his name was Nicholas. But, you know, again, his legal name could have been Fitzpatrick or Morford. We didn't know that. But we could say he matched the Nicholas's and we would keep an eye out, especially for that name. But once we got that far, because the immigrant family was so large with thousands and thousands of descendants, we couldn't go anywhere any further with that.

The living Nicholas didn't recognize him. So he could have been, who knows when he could have been connected, even before the family came to America. And as a spoiler alert, in the end, we found out the connection is probably prior to 1700, probably in the mid-16-hundreds. So there was no way of doing any genealogy at that point. That's when Margaret and I, when we were forming DNA Doe, we're trying to find agencies, of all the agencies I had worked with, agencies that were forward-thinking that might want to try

autosomal DNA testing as a means of solving their cases. Now, you have to understand now we all see Jedmatch. We all, it's been in the news, we're all getting used to that. You know, we're learning, we're coming up to speed, so to speak. And but back in late 2017, you know, there was a lot of head scratching among the agencies I contacted, not really understanding what I wanted to do. But we finally, you know, this Josephine Chandler was one of the cases we looked at. The U.S. Marshal for Northern Ohio, Pete Elliott, was just great.

He said, look, you know, I got nothing to lose. I'm not going anywhere, so go for it. And we did. At the time we accepted this case, we found out the DNA we got in was highly degraded. What we do first is whole genome sequencing, which means we sequence the whole, all the DNA, and we converted to electronic format. And once we have that, we can pick out whatever markers we want. And in this case, we wanted to pick out the answer.

and 23 and Me markers we need to make a kit for Jedmatch. So we picked out the markers for Ancestry and 23 and Me from the whole genome that we needed to make a Jedmatch kit and uploaded to Jedmatch. The catch was that this DNA was derived from a tissue sample that had been in paraffin for 14 years. And the DNA we got and sequenced and used for all this was highly degraded. You would know that our very first case that we ever solved, tried to solve or interested in was the hardest you could ever possibly hope for. The situation was, now, nobody, there had been a genealogist or two that had done this on their, you know, deceased relatives, tissue, and it had worked. So that had encouraged us to go forward. But when we got that far, and we had such degraded DNA, it was like DNA no man's land,

because who knows what Jedmatch really does with degraded DNA. And in this case, the DNA had, you know, at most 40% of the genome left. We had some versions with only 12%. So we were working with, depending on, there's a lot of statistics here, but let's just end it by saying that we had between 12% of the genome in some versions and about 40% in other versions. So that's not a whole lot. how would Jedmatch operate on DNA that was in such bad shape?

You know, when you do segment matching, it depends on like how much DNA people share and, you know, where that DNA is located. So even if you don't understand Jedmatch, you can see that, you know, if I share 10% of my DNA with somebody, I'm probably more closely related than if I share 2% of my DNA. but that's all great if we're living and we give fresh DNA, but if the other guy only has 40% left of, you know, who he is, his DNA and who he is, how does that work? What 40% do you have left? What about the 60% that's missing?

How can you estimate how much we have in common if you don't have everything, you know, on the other side? So Margaret and I developed some diagnostics that we thought would give, us confidence in the matches we were coming up with Jedmatch. We did a lot of thinking and a lot of work and a lot of came up with some kind of assessment on whether we were really seeing real matches or whether they were ghosts as artifacts of the algorithms that Jedmatch uses. Now based on that of course we took the family trees we started you know fleshing out the family trees we started connecting the matches we had to each other, hoping we'd find kind of a sweet spot

where they all matched him. And what happened, we did this. First, we did whole genome sequencing. We were fine. We did the genealogy. And finally, after a few months, we really weren't going anywhere. So Margaret suggested, well, we have a little bit of DNA left. It was called a little bit of a library.

Why don't we do this again? So I said, fine. I didn't really think it would go anywhere, but we did. And we came up with just about the same match as we did the first time with a little bit of difference, maybe one here, one there, but nothing dramatic. And then Margaret had the idea put them together. So we did, which meant we doubled the statistics. You know, we had twice as much DNA than we did each of the separate times.

and when that happened, we came up with a match that had not been there the first two times, a brand new match close to the top. And this apparently doubling the DNA gave this person just enough statistics, enough of a segment, enough of a match, enough DNA to push her over the cutoff, you know, that of all the matches we were seeing. You know, it lifted her onto the list. Before that, she just, you know, there was no reason, you know, it's hard to explain, but in five seconds, but she just wasn't, you know, worth looking at.

But then suddenly when you double the DNA, it raises her just above the threshold for interest. Let's put it that way. So what happened with this new woman, we were scratching her heads because we saw, you know, there was a lot of nickels floating around in this big family tree we had done. with 15 or 20,000 people, but we had no reason to look at any of the nickels over any of the other nickels, and we didn't have any nickeluses.

But it was interesting because we had some nickels, and some of the matches we had originally went through a Silas Nichols. Okay, and when this new match came up, this new match went through Mrs. Silas Nichols. So essentially we had a match to a match to a Mr. and Mrs. Nichols, which meant all of their children matched everybody. And three of the sons had already been ruled out because we found where they died. We had death certificate.

But one son had been sitting there because we couldn't find his death certificate instead of paying more attention to him than the other 19,999 people on a tree, you know, somebody just went on to something else. But investigating this guy, it turned out, we couldn't believe this, that he had been born in 1927, 2627. When he was born, his parents lived in an address at 1823 Center Street in New Albany, Indiana. And one of our volunteers, brilliant volunteer, had noticed that Mr. X, going back to the guy that died in 2002, had signed a rental agreement in 1985. And when he did, he gave

a phony sister on that as a reference. And he said that sister lived at 1823 Center Street, I think in Columbus, Ohio. So the 1823 kind of tipped us off. We were, you know, might have hit the jackpot. And in following

that through, getting the high school graduation picture, finding everything else, we realized that last son was the man we were looking for. So Margaret and I, you know, were basically up all night doing this. And we had just an amazing call with Pete Elliott who had really even that morning had prayed that he'd solved this case. He just, it was one of those cases that, you know, you just can't let go of that are just getting to you.

And we caught him on the way in to work that morning. And we said, hey, we have, can we talk to you a minute? We got a question or two. Oh, yeah. And we said, well, we solved it. We solved it. We got it last night. You know, the minute we started filling him in, because the minute we had solved it, of course, we know his birth, his marriage, we know his kids, we know, you know, his parents, we know his whole family.

We can fill him in. On, you know, the background, we even had his high school graduation picture, which freaked the marshal out because he's not a genealogist. He doesn't know how we're coming up with all this. So his comment to us was, not only did we get in the right ballpark, we even knew what seat he was sitting in, and we even told him who bought that ticket. So we, you know, subsequently we contacted one of the sons, Philip. The marshal actually went to see him, drove four hours, and went to go see Philip without announcing his arrival or his visit. and when he opened the door, he said it was like talking to Joseph Chandler himself because the son looks so much like him.

And they put together the story that Philip had not seen his father since 1964. And the last he heard from him was 1965. And, you know, he didn't know what had happened, where he was. His mother had tried to find his father for many years because his father had a military pension and, you know, needed that to help support the family. The mother, I think she remarried later. His parents, or Phillips' grandparents, Mr. X's parents, you know, look also, you know, never heard from him again. He was very close to his mother and father, but at one point in the 1960s, he went off the radar screen. I forgot

to say that his name was Robert Ivan Nichols. And Nichols, it wasn't Nicholas, but it was Nichols and the connection between Nichols and Nicholas was back in the 1600s. So far, the investigators working on Nichols case are coming up empty with a lot of the details of his later life. But if there's a mysterious criminal career in his past for Nichols, police have yet to find it. The difference between, say, let me say a John Doe, which would include Mr. Chandler, because he was a John Doe and a serial killer, it's not so much on our end, what we do and how we work, it's more likely on the family's end because you're really walking into or you're helping with a situation, two different situations. In one case, let's say

you have a serial killer case, you're working with some police agency, and you have a bunch of victims, a bunch of families. It's in the family's best interest to keep that case in the news, to keep the authorities on track, to let people know it hasn't been solved yet. And when you do the genealogy work, let's say you came up with somebody named John Smith that solved it, you know, we always go to the agency, we let the agency handle it, but the family is going to be more than relieved. You know, the family is going to be, you know, grateful. A lot of them, you know, go on the news to say we're just so relieved.

We know who my daughter's killer is, and we, you know. hope to bring him the justice. But on the other hand, when it's a John or Jane Doe, when you identify them, the family that the agency is going to contact has no idea that you're getting ready to contact them. You know, they have wondered what happened to their family member for years and they thought everybody forgot. You know, there's a few cases say that are very interesting and the name orange socks, lavender dough, buckskin girl.

but for the most part the family hasn't probably heard too much there hasn't been too much movement on the case and when the authorities you know contact them it's a surprise

and of course they're in a different position you know it's hard it's easy to say hey we found your daughter's killer it's hard to say we found your daughter's she was strangled 37 years ago that's a shock

you know or your son hung himself in a closet in a hotel 17 years ago, that's a shock. And those people are, you know, have been hoping their family member would come home. You know, they don't expect the news they died so long ago and they've been unidentified. And those people, you know, need time. They need space. They're not on the news.

They don't want to necessarily go in front of the camera and say, hey, I'm so glad they, you know, identified my daughter, she was laying in a ditch for 37 years ago. So they don't, you know, they need time to cope. And so we have to, you know, doing the two types of cases, you have to be cognizant, not of what you're doing, but what you're going to find on the other end. You heard Colleen mention buckskin girl. And she also referred to a son hanging himself in a closet 17 years ago, which is the case of a mystery man known as Lyle Stevin. Both of these cases have been very popular.

among amateur sluice on sites like Reddit over the years. And the identities of both Buckskin Girl and Lyle Stevik were unknown for two very different reasons. But Colleen Fitzpatrick helped to solve both of those cases. Well, when we solve a case, there's nothing like it. I mean, it's Miller time, you know, to quote, you know, Margaret and I, when we did Chandler that night, I mean, in all of our volunteers, the whole group was on fire. You know, we were just so high-fiving each other over the Internet on the phone. There's really nothing like really making it work and bringing satisfaction

or bringing information to the family. And I don't want to use the word closure. We use it on our end because we would close a case. But we don't want to use it on the other end because, like Buckskin Girls' mother told us, There is no closure. You know, her daughter is never coming back. There's only information. There's only knowledge of what happened that she can now go on with her life and cope with.

Mike, I know you said that this buckskin girl case happened very close to you. Yeah, this is one that's always intrigued me, partly morphed because where they found her was about, it was probably 30 minutes north of where I live. so it's a case that you got some media attention around my area for sure. On April 23, 1981, the body of a young woman was discovered face down in a ditch along Greenlee Road in Troy, Ohio. The young victim bore signs of blunt force trauma to the head. She didn't have any ID on her, but examiners estimated her to be between 18 and 20,000.

years old. She was white between 5-4 and 5-6 with brown or reddish-brown hair that was parted in the center and pulled back into two brains. She had scars on her arm, wrist, ankle, and chin. The young woman's body was fully clothed and there didn't seem to be any sign of a sexual assault. Police assumed that this girl was a runaway and possibly the victim, of a serial killer. But other than that, they really didn't have much to go on. She was simply a Jane Doe at the time. Due to the very distinctive homemade, deerskin poncho she was wearing, she quickly became known as the Buckskin Girl. When an autopsy was performed on Buckskin Girl, the coroner officially ruled that she had actually died of strangulation, 36 to 50 hours before her body

was found. She also was found to have a lacerated liver. Her feet and body were very clean, and she showed no signs of being a transient or sex worker. Due to these findings, police felt that she may have simply been killed by somebody close to her, and her body disposed of where it was found. Fingarprints were taken, and a dental exam was performed on the body. They took and saved into evidence a blood sample from the young woman, something that decades later would wind up breaking this case wide open, but at the time, there wasn't much that they could do with it. Police circulated sketches of the victim throughout Ohio and neighboring states, but despite their efforts and hundreds of leads coming in, police didn't find any missing women who fit

her description, and she was eventually buried in the Riverside Cemetery in Troy, Ohio, a headstone that read Jane Doe marked her grave. It didn't take long for the Buckskin Girl case to go cold, and it stayed cold. It stayed cold, for decades. Then in 2001, investigators wanted to see what the latest technological crime fighting tools could offer in the way of identifying Buckskin Girl and DNA by this time was being widely used to solve crimes. Using the blood sample that was taken in 1981, a DNA profile was created for Buckskin Girl. And in 2008, that profile was entered in to the National Missing and Unidentified Person Systems, or NamUs for short, but there were no matches.

In 2009, that same DNA profile was entered into CODIS, but again, there was no match. In 2016, scientists were enlisted to see if they could help identify Buxkin Girl. Using isotope analysis, which is a scientific analysis of compounds and elements, scientists concluded that pollen found on buckskin girls jacket indicated that she had spent time in the northeastern part of the country not long before her death. Further examination of her hair found that she likely had a connection to southern or midwestern states, possibly near Texas or Oklahoma. Although these scientific tools were helpful, they didn't lead to buckskin girls' identity.

That wouldn't come until the latest DNA technology was put to use in 2017, investigators reached out to Colleen Fitzpatrick and her team to see if they could use genealogy to solve this mystery once and for all. Buckskin girls' DNA profile was loaded into Jedmatch and using family members that were found in the database, Colleen Fitzpatrick's team was able to follow the trail back to the true identity of Buckskin Girl. That identification happened in April. of 2018. Today we're all here to tell you that buckskin girl has been identified as Marcia or Marcia

as she's been called King from Arkansas. Marcia King, 21 years old. Here she is. She wasn't identified through dental records or fingerprints or her DNA in the database CODIS or her image and name us the unidentified dead database. But through groundbreak. DNA technology. We used a stored 1981 blood sample, still liquid, in a heparinized tube that had sat unrefrigerated for almost 37 years. Number of individuals had told us that we would not get DNA out of that blood because it was heparinized, and not only did we get DNA out of that blood through a lab, a private

lab of their choosing, but it led to using the genealogical. database to find relatives. Dr. Murray used the Doe Project, a non-profit initiative to identify Jane and John Doe's. The two women from California who worked on the case are not scientists. We were dismissed by everybody. I think the biggest lesson was really persistence because a year, three months ago, when we started talking about it and everyone said it couldn't be done, we'd look at each other and say, Why not? Marcia's mother has been waiting for her daughter to come home. Her mother lived in the same house for the last 37 years.

She didn't change her phone number. She was hopeful that one day her daughter would return. So we've given her answers, but it's not necessarily the answer she wanted. Marcia or Marcia Lenore King had last been seen by her family in 1981. She frequently stayed away from home for stretches at a time. so it wasn't unusual for her to be gone. She was never reported missing by her family, but they always hoped she'd come home.

It's sad that her father died just months before learning that his daughter had been identified, but her mother was happy to finally know what happened to her daughter 37 years earlier. In July of 2018, King's family replaced the headstone at her grave with a new one that read Marcia King. But we have to remember,

although it's amazing that the identity of Marcia King is now known, the identity of her killer is not. And since this is a murder case, police are still hunting her killer. They don't know much about what she was doing or who she was with leading up to her murder. They have been able to piece together that in the weeks and months before she was killed, King had spent time in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area, other parts of the Northeast, and also possibly spent time in Kentucky and Texas. It will be interesting to see how this case unfolds and if her killer is identified. While Marcia King was a murder victim that was eventually identified in April 2018,

with the help of DNA, Jedmatch, and Forensic Genealogy, another case that was solved around the same time using these same methods was a case of a suicide victim who went by the name Lyle Stevick. As in the Joseph Newton-Channler case, Lyle Stevick's suicide had people online scramble into try and identify him. On Friday, September 14th, 2001, a man checked into the late Quinault Inn in Amanda Park, Washington, using the name Lyle Stavitt. He provided the motel personnel with a home address of 1019 South Progress Avenue, Meridian, Idaho. The motel manager didn't notice much that was unusual about the man.

He had come in around the time that buses usually stop outside of the motel to pick up or drop off riders. But it wasn't known for sure how Stevik arrived at the motel. At check-in, Stevec was given the key to roommate. He then walked out of the office and headed towards his room. room. About an hour later, he returned to the office and complained that there was too much noise in his room from a nearby trailer park. The clerk felt uneasy about the lodger that something was off about him, but she gave him a different room. Room number five. Later, people would see Stevik acting strangely on the porch in front of his room. The next day,

Stevik was witnessed by motel workers and guests, walking briskly back and forth along the edge of the highway. This is something that seemed very odd to these witnesses. The next day on Sunday, September 16th, the maid knocked on the door to room number five, and Stevik opened it. The maid offered to clean the room, but he declined. He did, however, ask for more towels. On Monday, September 17th, Stevik was due to check out. The maid went to his room and knocked, but didn't get a reply. She let herself into the room and right in front of her hanging from the closet by a belt was Lyle Stevik. The maid race to alert the motel owner who in turn called police. Police arrived and determined that Stevik was dead for at least several hours. As they looked around his room,

they found eight $20 bills in a hotel comment card. Stevec had written a comment in the card that read for the room. They also found a newspaper from the day before and an empty soda can. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Finally, they found a note which simply read, suicide. Police removed the body and tried to notify next of kin. That's when things took a strange turn. The address Lyle Stevik gave when he checked in actually came back to a hotel in Meridian, Idaho. And none of the people at that hotel had ever heard of anyone named Lyle Steving. An autopsy was performed on the body, and time of death was estimated to be the day before on Sunday sometime in the late afternoon or evening. The official cause of death was determined to be suicide by hanging. The description

in the autopsy was that of a white or Hispanic male, 20 to 40 years old, although one detective in the case was very sure that he was in his 20s. He had straight black hair and hazel eyes. As police began trying to piece together who Lyle Stevick was and where he came from, they soon realized that that name was a fake. Further digging led police to realize that the name Lyle Stevick was a character in the 1987 novel. You Must Remember This by Joyce Carroll Oates. Police took Stavik's prints and searched their database, but they didn't get any. matches. Stevex's DNA was entered in a codis, but that came up empty as well. Police were at a loss to identify who Stevec really was, and he was buried in an unmarked grave at the Fernhill Cemetery in

Aberdeen, Washington. As amateur sleuth on the internet became aware of this case, people scoured missing person sites, trying to find a missing male that looked like or matched Lyle Stevin. And Morph, there are actually pictures out on the internet of Lyle Stevik hanging from that bell. They're not for the faint of heart, but they're out there. And there were all kinds of theories that made the rounds on the internet. One popular theory was that Stevik was a 9-11 hijacker that had backed out of the attacks and then taken his own life. But none of these theories really carried any weight. In this case, seemed destined to go down as an unidentified suicide.

In early 2018, Colleen Fitzpatrick and DNA Doe Project investigators worked with Graze Harbor Washington Police to have Stevick's DNA samples sent to a lab for genome sequencing. They compared the man's genetic information with a website containing information from people who had undergone genetic testing. According to his DNA profile, the John Doe was likely, at least one quarter Native American and one quarter Spanish or Hispanic. His closest DNA matches were clustered mostly in northern New Mexico, with some in Idaho. Volunteers with the DNA Doe Project spent hundreds of hours sorting through and looking up Stevick's potential DNA matches, eventually tracing the man's relatives to California.

This eventually led to an identification. Lyle Stevik was a 25-year-old man from Alameda County, California. Out of respect for his family's wishes, his identity was not released. And as powerful a tool as genetic genealogy was in solving this case, we'll likely never know why the man calling himself Lyle Stevich chose to take his own life. But I think we've seen in this episode that the technology solving crimes in 2018 isn't just used to catch an ID killers. It also helps to give names to people that couldn't be or tried to avoid being identified.

In episode 7, we'll be discussing additional cases, including that of 22-year-old Holly Casano, who was brutally murdered in Illinois home in 2009, and how a cigarette butt helped to bring down a killer after almost a decade of freedom. If you like the show, please take a minute if you haven't already. Go out, give us a five-star rating. That goes a long way towards helping other people find the show. And if you'd like to find us on social media, you can find us on Twitter with the handle at CriminologyPod,

or you can find us on Facebook by searching for Criminology Podcast. We also have a discussion group, which is called Criminology Podcast, Discussion, and Fans. As we leave you, we hope you'll take you'll check out this preview for our friend Javier's podcast, Pretend Radio. We think you'll love his show. It's very original and groundbreaking. I'm Javier with Pretend Radio.

In this season, I'm embedding myself in a cult. Throw him to the ground and get his devil. Give us Jesus! We'll turn on each other. Let me make it really clear. I am Jamie's mother. But what he says is lies. Babies?

will be ripped away from their parents. It's hurtful to see them and know that their lives could have been much different in a home outside of there. In the powerful, well, they'll be held accountable. As a district attorney, it's probably better for me not to comment. Why is that? Why is that? Survivors are not holding back, and the church is not backing down. Many in the media have tried to get in front of the accused cult leader Jane Whaley. and have failed.

We have asked you to leave. But somehow, I got in. Are you, sir? Yeah, I'm here to speak with Jane Whaley. She invited me to service today. Yeah. This season, we're going deeper into the Word of Faith Fellowship than ever before. This story is on a collision course, and it's not going to end well.

Why would anybody want to harm him? Sometimes we hurt other people by hurting people they love. Pretend Radio. Season 3, The Prophet. What's the matter?