Criminology - Kim Bryant

Episode Date: December 12, 2021

In 1979, 16-year-old Kim Bryant was abducted and murdered on her way home from school in Las Vegas, Nevada. She called her boyfriend to come to pick her up, but when he arrived Kim was gone. Several factors delayed the search for Kim. Someone found her backpack but didn't know she was missing. Her boyfriend didn't come forward for days. The police believed she was a runaway. They also had a lot on their plate as Las Vegas was experiencing a high number of unsolved murders. Join Mike and Morf as they discuss the abduction and murder of Kim Bryant. The police had very few clues in Kim's case even after it was discovered that her backpack had been found. There were some eyewitnesses who saw some men in a vehicle talking to Kim. Years later, killer Ronnie Lee Fain became a suspect after he murdered Bobby Gene Thomas, who he said confessed to him that he murdered Kim. Recently, DNA from Kim's case was tied to a man named Johnny Blake Peterson. You can help support the show at patreon.com/criminology An Emash Digital production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 187 of the Criminology Podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson. And I'm Mike Morford. Morford, what's going on with you, buddy? Not too much. Just getting closer to the holidays, trying to get some shopping done, and trying to just get to the end of the year where we hit the reset button and get to do it again.

What's new with you? Yeah, no same. My daughter is getting ready to come home from college. She's finishing up her exam. So I'm excited about that because she gets about a month off and is home. And it's really the biggest time other than the summer that we get to see her. So excited about that. Yeah, that's what's great about the holidays, all the family togetherness.

And, you know, unless you have the younger kids and they start screaming and going crazy and it's a little bit chaotic. And then at the end, you're just like, oh, let me sneak off. into a different room. Sneaking off. Sneaking off the record a podcast. All right. So we have Patreon shoutouts. Let's do those. We had Aila, Colleen Holt,

Chloe Helms, Amanda Cornwell, and Derek Faff. So some great new support. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks so much to all the people that decide to support criminology. It means a lot. And if there's anyone up there that would like to support the podcast, you can go to Patreon.

drown.com slash criminology. Just a reminder, time is running out to get your passes to CrimeCon 2020 in Vegas, April 29th through May 1st of 2022. If you want to come out and say hi to us, we'll be on podcast row at CrimeCon, and we'd love to see you. If you are going, visit CrimeCon.com to make your arrangements to get your pass and use our promo code criminology at checkout to save 10% on a standard batch. And CrimeCon Vegas is kind of the perfect segue into this episode because it just so happens that everything takes place in Vegas.

Las Vegas, Nevada is well known as a place to have fun and let go. Its nickname Sin City and its slogan, what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, help set the tone for the city itself. Clearly, Vegas is where you go when you want to get wild. After the city was established, population growth was slow. because of its location in the harsh Mojave Desert, and also because it was more of a place to go gamble and drink than to find a job or raise a family. But starting in the 1960s, the population quickly started growing thanks to the hotels and casinos that were built. This brought jobs and families to the area. But like any growth in population, it also brought in bad people.

Of course, organized crime is no stranger to Vegas, and there's also many unsolved homicides from the area. But investigators are working to close cold cases and find some semblance of justice for the families left with heartache. On January 26, 1979, 16-year-old Kim Daniel Bryant registered for her upcoming classes at Western High School in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was a Friday, and many teenagers were registering for their classes and then heading home or out with friends. Kim and one of her friends walked from the high school to the nearby Dairy Queen to get picked up. Even though it wasn't open yet for the day, the two weren't the only ones who thought the Dairy Queen would be a better place to hang out and kill some time during the wait than the high school.

There were several other people from the school also waiting in the parking lot. It was just across from the high school on Decatur Boulevard, a very busy main street in Las Vegas. At 10.10 a.m., Kim's friend was picked up by her parents and went on their way. They offered Kim a ride, but she declined and instead used a pay phone to call her boyfriend to tell him that she was ready to go. Kim stayed behind and waited for her boyfriend to arrive, but by 1045 when he pulled in, Kim was nowhere to be found. He looked in the area around the Dairy Queen, but there was no sign of Kim. When Kim missed a planned 1230 p.m. shopping trip and still didn't return from school an hour after the sun went down. Her mom and stepfather drove to the

police station, report Kim missing. It wasn't until four days later that Kim's boyfriend called the police to tell them she had wanted a ride home from the Dairy Queen just across from the high school's football field. Someone driving by reported seeing a backpack on the center median in the area near the Dairy Queen reports vary as to whether this was the day Kim disappeared or days later. This person stopped to look at the backpack and saw Kim's ID in it. All of her belongings appeared to still be inside. It looked like someone had thrown the backpack out into the middle of the road while driving away from the Dairy Queen. But police didn't learn this information until about a week after Kim went missing. Because on the day the backpack was found, the driver had called Kim's

home. From a pay phone, no one answered because they were out searching for Kim. At the time, the person that found Kim's backpack didn't know she was missing. They were simply trying to let her know that they had found her backpack before this clue came in. Police believed that Kim was a runaway. This stem from the fact that Kim had apparently had an argument with her parents the night before she disappeared. And investigators looking through her journal found entries about running away. So she was not considered an endangered missing person. It seemed like she would just come back home when she wasn't angry at her parents anymore,

like some teenagers do. So more if there's a little bit to unpack here. First of all, I think there's the timing of everything. There's the boyfriend. who, you know, for whatever reason, doesn't really come forward for about four days. You know, I think that kind of jumps out right away. We don't have all the information around it. Was he someone that was not all that well known to the parents?

Was it more of a secret relationship? That's a long time. Four days for your girlfriend to be missing before you come forward and kind of say, something about it. My first thought was that the parents would have reached out to him immediately. And that's why I kind of go to maybe more of a secret type relationship. Maybe they didn't know all that much about him or even who he was. So they didn't know to reach out to him to ask him about Kim. Yeah, I think it's a steadfast rule that that first 48 hours after someone goes missing is crucial. and when you have that lapse of four days and you touched on it,

whether it's because, you know, the parents and him weren't really associated, it was a secret relationship, they lost that time. And who knows what things were lost during that time because they could have focused right on that dairy queen around that time. So that's unfortunate. And then you have the timing of the found backpack. You know, that one's a little easier to dissect because, hey, the person finds a backpack.

They don't really think it's all that urgent. They've tried to call. They can't get a hold of anyone at the house. But there's no urgency there because they don't know anything's wrong. And to me, it's really kind of confluence of some of these different factors that have the police believing that maybe Kim was a runaway. now let's face it the runaway theory is something that we've talked about many many times i think police were pretty quick to go to that back in the day you know much quicker than they are today you know if i called and said that my daughter has been missing for x amount of time my 16 year old

daughter that's going to get a response from the police that is much different than i i think it would have been in a lot of situations back in, let's say, the 1970s. It's just taken much more seriously today. Yeah, I think we live in a different era as far as, you know, right down to technology today with social media and electronics and cell phones, stuff travels in a millisecond. So it would be much easier to, you know, rather just say, okay, she's a runaway, you could jump on social media and start, you know, plugging away, trying to get help finding someone in your family that's missing.

But obviously, we didn't have that. And another thing, you know, the technology back then ties into the person finding her bag because they did the right thing. They made a phone call, but there wasn't much else they could do back in the day besides, you know, are they going to drive it all the way to the house and drop it off? Are they going to mallet? I think what they did was what was the easiest thing. What a lot of people probably wouldn't even take the time to do, but this person did it. They made the call and said, hey, I've got your book bag, but didn't get an answer. And so they sort of sat on the bag.

Unfortunately, that cost, again, more time. That was crucial. The belief by police that Kim would return home after a few days proved to be wrong, and she didn't come home. The backpack clue made them think differently about their theory. They had no other clues or evidence to work with, and there was no sign of Kim for a month. On February 20, 1979, her body was found in the desert near the intersection of West Charleston Boulevard and South Buffalo Drive. Three children shooting BB guns in the desert found her remains. She was nude from the waist down, lying face down and covered with debris.

The children raced to get help. When investigators arrived and began to assess the scene, they determined that Kim has had been hit in the head with a rock that was still near her body and an examination would reveal that she had been sexually assaulted. It appeared that Kim had put up a real fight against her attacker. There were bruises on her hands. A rabbit fur coat that she had been wearing when she disappeared was found nearby. Seaman was recovered during Kim's autopsy. But at the time, DNA was still over a decade away. So they obviously couldn't use it to conclusively match it to anyone.

They did save it into evidence. Police began searching for anyone that might have had an issue with Kim. And they looked at violent people in the area, but they came up empty. Up until August, there were absolutely no leads. Las Vegas, even in 1979. And particularly on Decatur Boulevard, was a very busy place full of people and tourists who by that point may have left the area. Police knew that they had to reach out to the public.

After a long article detailing Kim's case was run in the paper in August, people started to remember things. Two of Kim's classmates believed that they remembered something from that morning. Kim vanished. They told police about two men in a mid-to-late-50 Chevrolet with silver primer paint and later spots of primer on it. The men in the Chevy, which had Nevada plates, and raised back wheels,

had cat called to Kim at the Dairy Queen. Kim wasn't interested and told them to go away. The men quickly drove off down to Cater Boulevard. The driver of the Chevy was described as being in his early 20s, with medium brown hair and a mustache. The passenger, who both of the girls

got a better look at, was about 19 years old and had longer hair that was blonde, which they described as scraggly. Kim's classmates told police that the reason these two men stood out to them was because these same two men had also cat called to them at some point earlier in the week and tried to get them into their car. So when they saw the men talking to Kim, they already recognized them.

The men had offered to sell the girls some jewelry, telling them that they had some in the back seat, but when the girls peaked in, there was nothing back there but a large speaker, and they stepped back from the car. This made the men angry, and much like after Kim told them to go away, they sped off south down to Cater. The girls had also seen them approaching other male students from Western High School in the parking lot around the same time. Investigators created a sketch based on the eyewitness descriptions of these two men. The composite described the two men as grubby hippie types, and many people since noted that that wouldn't have narrowed it down a lot,

because apparently back in Las Vegas in the 70s, there were a lot of men that looked like this. In the end, these two men may have had nothing at all to do with Kim's murder. Police simply wanted to question them, but they were never located. No other persons of interest were identified, because none of the teens who had been hanging out in the Dairy Queen parking lot had seen anything suspicious. But police did receive a tip from someone that Kim had been taken by multiple men driving a Jeep. Police were able to track down the drive of the Jeep and other individuals connected with him,

and they were all cleared as being involved in Kim's death. There really was very little movement on Kim's case, and the police did not have much to go on other than these two mystery guys in the Chevy. They also had a lot on their plate. On January 27th, just one day after Kim's disappearance, a local roofer 37-year-old Bobby Jean Thomas was murdered. In 1980, a man named Ronnie Lee Fane was arrested for his murder. But Fain claimed that he had a good reason for killing Thomas. He claimed that he, along with Thomas, and two other men had driven up to Mount Charleston where they had all been drinking until it got dark and then they headed home.

They had dropped off the other two men when Thomas drunkenly admitted that he had sexually assaulted and killed Kim Bryant. Fain said that he was enraged by the confession and in his words he simply gave him what he deserved for murdering a teenage girl. Bobby Jean Thomas had been stabbed about three dozen times. But the coroner couldn't determine exactly how many times. He was then dumped in the desert on an access road about a mile from the Hoover Dam. There was evidence he had been sexually assaulted after his death.

This story sounded far-fetched to police, but Fane passed two lie detector tests when questioned about his friend's murder. Bobby Jean Thomas was definitely not a model citizen. He had been convicted of multiple crimes, including the assault on 20-year-old Christine McKinney in January 1970, when she was stranded late at night, trying to start her car on the side of Las Vegas area road. And January 1972, just two years after the attack on Christine McKinney, Bobby Jean Thomas drugged and sexually assaulted his own 14-year-old step-sister, Helen Hines, using Seco

barbitol and ammo barbitol. The combination of drugs he used on Helen resulted in her. death. For this crime, Bobby Jean Thomas pleaded guilty to statutory rape in order to avoid manslaughter charges. He was sentenced to only 10 years in prison and incredibly was released after serving just a few years. And more of I'm going to tell you right now, this is something that continues to infuriate me about these cases that we do going back to, let's say, the 70s and and sometimes even before, this was a very serious crime that resulted in the death of a 14-year-old girl. Now, I don't always understand the behind-the-scenes legal maneuvering, but to boil it down to statutory rape, which in and of itself is a horrible charge, but it's not murder.

It's not even manslaughter. and then to be sentenced to 10 years and be let out, you know, after serving a few, I just don't understand it, man. I don't know what we were doing back in the day. Yeah, I think those rules were definitely pretty lenient. I know we talked about, like, especially in the Golden State Killer case, a lot of the rape charges went away after a very short time and was really insane to learn that. but and not to say today that there's still not bad people on the street.

When they're arrested, you hear all these charges they have and you say, why are they out? That still happens today. But back then, it seemed prevalent that you would see cases of people arrested and then find out they've got this horrible background. But I'm with you. A few years in prison after drugging, raping, and murdering essentially someone and you're out on the street in a few years. It just, I can't comprehend that. Well, the one thing that has always jumped out of me, you know, in the cases that we research was just how little emphasis was placed on the crime of rape.

You know, 40, 50, 60 years ago, it's appalling when you look back on it and see what some of these men were sentenced to for, you know, what are really very violent. sexual crimes. Now, this one also resulted in a death. So, I mean, I don't know. It ticks me off and I get worked up about it. But I think we all probably do and should because it just wasn't right, man. And I think, you know, to further it, then you see oftentimes that, you know, these guys went on to continue to do very bad things after serving, you know, a year, two years, whatever it was, they got a slap on the wrist, and then they were out to continue committing very heinous crimes. As mad as you and I are about the late sentences and the fact these guys were out on the streets, just imagine how all the families of the victims and the victims that survived felt about

that. Just the system back then just surprised me. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. With Bobby Jean Thomas's troubling and violent history of attacking women, along with the fact Ronnie Lee Fain passed two polygraphs, they had to take his claims of killing Thomas after he confessed to Kim's murder serious. He also apparently knew the brand of a beer bottle that was found near Kim's body, which investigators took as further proof that he was telling the truth. While some investigators felt that Fane may have taken out the guy that murdered Kim Bryant, there were still quite. questions. It was reported that one or more witnesses had seen Kim in a car with four men. This was sort of at odds with the possibility that two men in a Chevy may have had some responsibility for Kim's murder. But I think either way you look at it, whether Kim was really in a car

with four men or if the two men in the Chevy who police had been looking to identify, have something to do with Kim's death, then even if Bobby Jean Thomas was one of the men in either or both of these scenarios, that would mean that there were other people involved. In the suburbs of D.C., a woman fails to show up for work and is found brutally murdered. I wonder what's emergency. We just walked in the door and there's blood in the foyer. For the next two decades, the case remained unsolved until new technology allowed investigators to do what had once been impossible.

A new series from ABC Audio in 2020. Blood and Water. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. Bobby Jean Thomas owned a Jeep. And one witness came forward and told police that he saw Kim get forced into a vehicle that day. But it wasn't a Jeep. The witness had not called it in at the time because he thought it was a prank.

Some high schoolers were pulling on each other. And he didn't realize what he had witnessed until after Kim's Bob's body had been found. But let's get back to the polygraphs that Fain was given and reportedly passed. Some investigators seemed to think that the tests only indicated that Fain himself did not kill Kim and that he also believed that Thomas had admitted to assaulting a female, not that Thomas had specifically hurt Kim Bryant specifically. So, you know, I think some of this has cast doubt on whether or not Bobby Jean Thomas was really involved in Kim's murder. Later, Fane tried to recant his confession and wanted to be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

I think this proved to some investigators that their doubts were warranted and someone else was responsible for the murder of Kim Bryant. And more of you and I have talked about polygraph tests quite a bit. This one though, you know, kind of leads me down a different area, not just about the validity of polygraph tests themselves, but really kind of dissecting the questions that are asked and, you know, what the examiner is trying to get to. And obviously, I don't have a list of the polygraph questions and answers, but I think you can see how the questions matter greatly. Are they focused on whether Fane himself killed Kim or are there other questions that are

trying to delve into, you know, his involvement in some other way, Bobby Jean Thomas's involvement. I think it's a really interesting area. You know, just thinking about how the questions are prepared ahead of time and what they're really. trying to get to the bottom of. I think it's important to remember, too, there's a, you know, a reason that polygraphs are not admissible in most courts because they're not something that can be proven to be 100% accurate. But obviously, we know that police rely on them a lot and use them as one of their tools to help rule people in or out.

And for their part, there was no denying. They felt that the polygraph shows. that Fane was telling the truth and that whatever questions they did ask him, he seemed to be relaying what he believed to be true. Although those polygraph tests showed that Fain himself wasn't involved in Kim's murder, there are some things in his past that parallel clues in Kim's case, leading some of the speculate that he may have been responsible for Kim's murder. Police connected Fane to another murder that occurred only a month before he killed Bobby Gene Thomas.

Fain had stabbed another man named Wayne Rutledge almost three dozen times, sexually assaulted his body after he died, and left his remains with a brick on his head in the downtown area of Vegas in December 1978. The brick left near Rolich's body was reminiscent of the rock, thought to be the murder weapon in Kim's case, being found near her body. While that was an interesting similarity, Fane's known victims were both males, and both had been stabbed where Kim wasn't. In the end, the connection between Bobby Jean Thomas and Ronnie Lee Fain to Kim's murder was tenuous at best. Prosecutors allowed Fane to plead guilty to second-degree murder on April 22, 1980, for the murder of Bobby Gene Thomas. In 1992, Fane pled no contest to the murder of Wayne Rutledge, although later on his legal team fought to get him out of jail on technicalities. But I will say this, Morph, Ronnie Lee Fane and Bobby Gene Thomas, this duo, this pair, and what happened between them is, you know, kind of just interesting on its own.

You know, the polygraph tests and all that, you really have to wonder what was the real reason that Ronnie murdered Bobby? Did it have anything to do with Kim's murder at all? So it really makes me wonder, you know, whether Fane used the fact that Kim had been murdered. murdered as kind of his reasoning behind killing Bobby Jean Thomas when it could have had nothing to do with it. It could have been for a completely different reason, but because he knew about it or he knew of it, he used it. Yeah, I think police, they had to do their due diligence with this whole scenario between these two guys and explore that. but that meant pouring time, resources, whatever, into investigating them and maybe took them

away from other possible avenues to explore. I think it's worth mentioning that there were many more women murdered in Las Vegas around the same time as Kim. In general, there was a spiking crime, particularly homicides in 1979 by March of that year. With only nine detectives on the homicide squad, the same. city had seen 25 murders. This increase in crime led to many murders growing cold as detectives were forced to move on to the most recent case in order to interview people while their memories were fresh and

evidence was fresh. It wasn't long before investigators started to consider whether it was a possibility that a serial killer was responsible for Kim's death. In January 1980, 18-year-old. Susan Blote disappeared around 4 p.m. from the parking lot of the Al Phillips cleaner where she worked, just five miles down the road from Western High School. Susan's body was found on May 26, 1980, in St. George, Utah, off I-15, but it would take six months before authorities positively IDed her. Susan had been strangled to death. On June 27, 1980, at around 1230 a.m., 19-year-old Cheryl Daniel

vanished from a grocery store parking lot while her boyfriend ran inside to buy something. When he came back out of the store, their car was parked in a different spot, then he had left it, and Cheryl was gone. Her purse with $40 inside of it was still inside the car. Police believe that Cheryl had offered to jumpstart someone's car and parked across from them. This car was described as a maroon Ford ran chair. with a white camper shell.

A white man in his 30s was driving the Ford. Cheryl's body was later found just three miles away from Susan Balot's remains. Cheryl had been shot in the head. Investigators came to believe that a man named Stephen Peter Morin was responsible for Susan's and Cheryl's murders and possibly Kim's. His wallet had been found with Cheryl's body in the desert. Morin was called the chameleon because he often changed the way he looked. as he changed his location.

He lived in Las Vegas from 1977 to 1980, just 10 miles from where Kim's body was found. But he lived a transient lifestyle and was looked at for murders in Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Washington, Idaho, Idaho, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Texas, New York, and California. He was convicted of only a few of the murders he was suspected of. In 1981, Morin killed 23,000.

year old Sheila Wayland in Golden, Colorado, 21-year-old Jana Bruce in Corpus Christi, Texas, and 21-year-old Carrie Ann Scott in San Antonio. Moran was suspected in Kim's murder for multiple strong reasons. Police found a macromay belt, similar to the belt Kim was wearing the day she disappeared, in his storage unit off of Valley View Boulevard that had not been recovered, with Kim's remains, Kim's ex-boyfriend also remembered Morn coming to the skating rink with Kim as her date, just two weeks before she disappeared. He remembered this because she asked him for a ride home, stating that Morin had made her feel very uncomfortable. And according to the boyfriend, Morn had even followed them home in a Ford Ranchero, the same type of model that

was seen at the store when Cheryl disappeared. In late March, 1980, another teenager was abducted from the side of the road, sexually assaulted, had dumped in the desert where Kim's remains had been found. She survived and was found the day after she had been left for dead. After news of her survival was announced, Morin drastically changed his appearance. Despite police suspicion, Warren wasn't charged with Kim's murder because there was just not enough evidence. he was arrested for the other two murders and the attempted murder of the third teenage girl. And despite not being able to link him to Kim's case, he apparently dumped one of his victims

at the same place where Kim's remains were found. After Moran was arrested, police looked at a number of murders, many of which matched the circumstances of Kim's. This list included the murders of Linda Jenkins, Cynthia Dane, Norma Gonzalez, Gina Capizoli, Karen McLaughlin, Diana Hansen, Phyllis Brown, Audrey Walts, Laura Marie Callan, Mary DeVitt, Kimberly Jameson, Christy Midcif, Nancy Hockaby, Melissa James, Krista Elliott, Tammy Wood, and Shauna Urbane. They also looked into the murders of high school students, Kim Ellingsen, Eve Provenzano, and Catherine Ty, as well as University of Nevada

Las Vegas student Christina Burlingham, and 12-year-old Sheila Joe Keister, as well as housewife Terry Dietrich. All of these women and girls had been killed between 1979 and 1984 and were considered as possible victims of the same serial killer. or killers. And Las Vegas has a history of serial killers using the city as a hunting ground and the surrounding desert as a place to dump bodies. But Morph, let's just go back. I mean, that was a long list of names. Now, I understand five years is a long time. There are going to be quite a few unsolved murder cases, especially in a city like Las Vegas. But that's a lot of work, right? To try to attach more and in some way to all of these different murders.

Yeah, that number of victims that you just went over is pretty staggering. And it's probably not all of the victims that were out there. I'm sure there's other women and girls, perhaps, that were never found, that were out there someplace, which is, that's pretty disturbing. More murders would follow. At 6.30 in the morning on June 1, 1989, 14-year-old, Stephanie Ann Isaacson, left her home in Las Vegas, and headed to El Dorado High School. In the afternoon, Stephanie never came home, so her father called the school and was shocked to find out

she never made it to school that day. Her books were found scattered on the ground in the desert, just half a mile from her home, near Lynn Lane and Stewart Street, along the normal path she took to school. She often cut through the desert on her route to school, just 25 yards away from her books. Her body was found by police canines. Stephanie had been sexually assaulted and killed by strangulation. Her body was covered with an old orange carpet, much like in 1979. Police were swamped with unsolved murders and missing people. DNA matching still wasn't widely in use yet, so a lot of investigating mostly consisted of a lot of man-hours, looking for hard evidence, and getting eyewitness accounts. There were no leads in Stephanie's murder, just heartache.

Whoever had killed Stephanie attacked her suddenly. She dropped her books and her keys, and then her killer dragged her into the brush. There was still a zigzag pattern trail that ended where her body was found. As the years went on, Kim's case as well as Stephanie's and so many more in the Las Vegas area grew cold. There were no solid tips, no good leads to hunt down, no CCTV to scour, and witnesses and potential perpetrators were all aging. and possibly passing away, 42 years after Kim Bryant's murder. Her case was no closer to being solved, but a break in Stephanie Isaacson's case made news.

A donation was made to Authrum Labs from Henderson, Nevada resident Justin Wu in November 2020. The donation was specifically for use in Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, cold homicide cases with small amounts of DNA available for testing. So investigators had to try to decide which cases would benefit the most from this new round of testing, which in most cases would destroy the remaining evidence. It could be the final chance to solve some of these cases. Investigators had to choose wisely, which cases to take on, and they eventually settled on Stephanie Isaacson's.

In July 2021, Offram Labs in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department announced that they had identified the killer of Stephanie Anna Isaacson using forensic genetic genealogy. They were able to take an extremely small sample of DNA found at her scene. A man named Darren Roy Marchand was identified as Stephanie's killer. And as it turns out, Stephanie wasn't as an only victim. Marshane had been arrested for the 1986 murder of 24th, Nanette Vandenberg, but the case was dismissed because there wasn't enough evidence to convict him.

A fingerprint was all they had to directly connect him to the scene at the time. In 2021, a DNA sample from evidence in that case was compared to the tiny bit of DNA available from Stephanie's case, and it was a match. It was revealed that just months before Stephanie's murder, Marshan had exposed himself to five different women. He pleaded guilty to just one of the exposure incidents as the other four charges were dropped. On August 29th, almost three months after Stephanie's murder, Marchand was sentenced to one year of probation for open and gross lewdness. Marchand, who had lived in the Las Vegas area, took his own life in 1995 when he was only 29 years old. So this places him at 23 years old.

when he assaulted and killed Stephanie. We mentioned it, right? This testing also directly linked him to the murder of Nanette Banderberg, who had been strangled to death, proving that police had arrested the right person for her murder. And really, morph, when you think about it, this match is incredible. It was found using what has been described by the media as the smallest ever amount of DNA used in testing. In fact, it was less than 50.

human cells. This was about 0.12 nanograms of DNA. So just for reference, when you submit your own DNA sample to sites like 23 and me and ancestry, you're submitting about a thousand nanograms of your DNA from saliva because these tests need much more than 0.12 nanograms of DNA to work. It was welcome news. After, decades that technological advancements had brought answers to Stephanie's family who had been waiting 32 years and more, you know, we cover all kinds of cases, solve cases, unsolved cases, you know, especially in the unsolved cases, you know, at the end, you're always left with that feeling about, you know, the family of the victim. Well, oftentimes they've been waiting 10, 20, 30, 40.

sometimes even 50 years to get answers, to find out not only what happened to their loved one, but who was responsible. And I don't know about you, man, but this gives me such a warm feeling. And I know we're talking about a murder, but it's a warm feeling when you think about this family who had been waiting 32 years to finally get the answers after such a long time. Yeah, I think it's very encouraging, too, that we're seeing older and older cases getting solved with the DNA. It's not just more recent cases. And I think it comes down to a question of, you know, hopefully a lot more, these departments had stored things properly and preserved them

well enough to do this forensic genealogy that they're doing. But it's just, it's very encouraging to see that if that's been done properly and there's DNA that can be used, they are are using it and they are identifying people from all these old crimes. Yeah, well, to me, this is a very exciting time in crime fighting. It really is because, you know, in some of these older cases where witnesses have died, most likely the perpetrator has died years ago, I think most people would say, there's no way that they're ever going to solve it now. right because so much time has passed well you can throw all those old notions out the window because

the new technology with DNA and especially with the genetic forensic genealogy it blows those doors wide open man kim brian had been killed 10 years before stephanie died and her killer was still unidentified it was a bittersweet moment for the las vegas community who were thrilled to see a resolution in stephanie's case but they couldn't forget that there was more work to be done. Fortunately, resolution in Kim Bryant's case was on the horizon. On November 29, 2021, it was announced that a DNA match had been found in connection with Kim Bryant's murder.

The same donation from Justin Wu that allowed Las Vegas police to test evidence in Stephanie Isaacson's murder, enabled police to pay to test DNA recovered from a seaman sample, left at the scene of Kim Bryant's murder. And there was a match. the DNA belonged to Johnny Blake Peterson, who was 19 years old at the time of Kim's murder. Unfortunately, as was the case with Stephanie Isaacson's killer, Peterson would never face justice. He died in 1993. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department's homicide lieutenant Ray Spencer said that Peterson was never on their radar in Kim's case.

Like Kim, Peterson had also attended Western High School at West. one point, but there is no evidence that he knew Kim. He was probably just familiar with the area where Kim vanished from and knew where students might be found. And he made his move on Kim. All of the rumors, the witness sightings, the account of Kim being forced into a car, you know, we just don't really know if all or some of that was the case of red herrings or or if somehow Peterson had an accomplice, what is clear is that Peterson's DNA was the only DNA found in Kim's case. Las Vegas police are now looking to Johnny Peterson and Darren Marchand and trying to figure out whether they're responsible for any more unsolved crimes in the area. And their efforts are paying off.

Literally, as we were prepping this episode, another murder was linked to Johnny Peterson via DNA. and the announcement came in early December 2021. 22-year-old Diana Hansen vanished on New Year's Eve in 1983. She was found murdered on West Spring Mountain Road, about one and a half miles west of South Buffalo Drive. Like some of the other victims we discussed, she had been sexually assaulted. As we mentioned earlier in this episode,

Diana was one of the many women who authorities thought might be the victim of a serial killer. Justin Wu, the philanthropist who donated, the funds that enabled these two cold cases to be solved, launched an organization called Vegas Helps in December 2020 to assist local Las Vegas residents. Las Vegas police say that anyone who is interested in making a donation with a designation similar to Justin's to help solve cold cases with new technology

can go to LVMPD Foundation.org and make the donation to the homicide coal case. Seeing Las Vegas area cold cases like Kim Bryant and Stephanie Isaacson's solved after decades of being cold had to inspire Vegas area investigators to keep digging. And it's a good thing as there are a lot more coal cases left to be solved. And more if this is something that, you know, I really think is extremely important. And you and I have probably touched on it. I know Gibby and I talk about it quite a bit.

There is evidence in so many evidence rooms around the country that could solve a good number of cases. The problem is that the testing of all of that evidence takes time. It takes money. And, you know, this donation by Justin Wu kind of kick started the, testing of the evidence in these specific cases, and I think it's something that we should all be looking into. I know there are a lot of good, extremely worthy causes to donate to,

many of us donate to one or, you know, quite a few of them. This is one, you know, when you look at it from the true crime perspective, it's one that I think is absolutely worth it. And I'm not just talking about Vegas. I'm just talking about these types of donations in general to solve some of these old cold cases. It's amazing. And I do think it's going to take some money. It's going to take some donations.

It's going to take people like Justin Wu stepping up and saying, all right, I'm going to help. I think we could definitely use some more Justin Wu's in the world. Because there's 200,000 cold cases in this country. So just imagine the amount that probably could be solved if money and budget wasn't an issue. I mean, not all of them have DNA or DNA that can do genealogy on, unfortunately. But for those that do, if money wasn't an issue, should I guarantee we could cut out a huge portion of those unsolved cases. Yeah, I agree with you 100%.

You know, if time, money wasn't a factor, I think we would see even more of these cases being solved. The problem is we live in the real world and time and money is always a factor. So morph as we wrap up this case, it is heartwarming to see, you know, after so many years, Kim Bryant's case, Stephanie Isaacson's case solved. We listed out a lot of names of victims whose cases still have not been solved. There was talk of a serial killer. Well, obviously, we know it wasn't one person who murdered all of these women.

But there were, in my way of thinking, a lot of bad people operating in the late 70s into the early 80s. I mean, we talked about a couple of them who were identified. Those were bad people. I mean, there's just no way around it. Now, someone or multiple people killed all of the other individuals that, you know, we talked about. Will those cases at one point be solved? I think it goes back to what you said. Not all of these cases have DNA and even some of the cases that do have have DNA, it may not have been preserved to the degree that it's usable or they may not have enough to do DNA testing. I don't know. I'm just extremely excited that we're at a point in time with this technology that they're really making some unbelievable breakthroughs in some of these

cases. Yeah, it was really good to see some of these cases that we mentioned today being solved, in particular, Kim's and Stephanie's. And it just proves that good police work and doing the little things of saving evidence, even at the time, they didn't know about DNA. They didn't have the forethought that that was going to be a thing down the road, but they knew that collecting and storing evidence properly was important. And all these years later, because of doing little simple things like that, good police work, It brought resolution to these cases.

You know, they didn't have the technology, the tools at their disposal that we have today. They just did good old-fashioned police work. I want to give a special shout out to Megan and Anthony Smith at the True Crime website, Mayhem in the Desert.com. They cover true crime in the Vegas area. They have a very detailed and lengthy article about Kim Bryant's case on their website, which was a big help in putting this episode together. Be sure to check out their stuff.

site if you want to learn more about Kim's case. Thanks also goes out the Sunny Landon for writing and research assistance in this episode. As always, if you love the show, but you haven't done so yet, take a minute, go out and give us a rating. Keep telling your friends who are into true crime about the criminology podcast. That word of mouth really goes a long way. If you want to find us on social media, we're on Twitter with the handle at criminology pod. You can also find us on Facebook by searching for criminology podcast or by joining our Facebook discussion group, Criminology Podcasts, Discussion and Fans. So that's it for our case on Kim Bryant.

We also talked about a number of other cases as well. But Morp, we'll be back with everyone next Saturday night with a brand new episode of criminology. So until then, for Mike. And Morph. We'll talk to you next week. Take care, everyone.