RedHanded - Episode 22 - How Ancestry.com Solved a 32 Year Old Cold Case

Episode Date: November 30, 2017

Abandoned at age five, Lisa never knew where she came from. It was her quest to uncover her birth parents via sites like ancestry.com that unraveled a chilling quadruple homicide that had been left unsolved for 32 years. Be careful who you send your DNA to.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hannah.

I'm Saruti. And this is Red Handed. Welcome to episode 22. We would like to jump right in with our five-star review. Thank yous. So DGI297, informative and entertaining. It says that they listen to many podcasts of this genre, but this is the best of them all. It's well-researched, humorous, and sweary, but still sensitive to all victims. Thank you. Sounds like a robot but yes is that is that a bot have you left we don't get them to capture anything so could be a bot but if not thank you i've got another one

from i couldn't find the name you left the review under but i know your real name is nicola because you work with my mom at the gp surgery and she'd never listened to a podcast before and she thinks it's just the right amount of swearing so welcome to the podcast universe and then we never listened to a podcast before and she thinks it's just the right amount of swearing so welcome to the podcast universe and then we also want to now thank all of our Patreons because you guys have been amazing, we've had so many more of you

come on board since we recorded the last episode and Hannah and I set the goal of getting to $150 a month and we would do a live episode with Q&A where you could ask us anything I'd know flippantly put that out there to hannah that we should do it because it would take us ages to get there and we'd have loads of times to figure out exactly how we do a live episode and then you guys are getting us dangerously close to that point so we're gonna have to figure that out probably this week yeah we're gonna have to do it so i genuinely have no

idea we'll figure it out before we get there i'm sure unless you guys keep going at this speed in which case we might not but i want to thank hey why the face we see you sarah and jill foster vicky sydney smith shona ray allison ernst linda cardinal i'm gonna say nicole shepherd mandy baxter and lydia camp Campbell and we've got one more five star review thank you which is from rough giraffe who I think actually do their own podcast have I got that wrong they do they do their own podcast yes you guys should check them out part of the hashtag Brit pod scene they say the chemistry is great and we're funny without being disrespectful to the story highly recommend hands down brilliant Hands down brilliant. Which is high praise.

I absolutely love this week's social media moment of the week. It's been one of my favourites that we've had for a long time. And it's from AdancerDay17. That's the Twitter handle. Who called us out on the mispronunciation of the town to modern. To modern? I still don't know how to say it properly i still don't understand i felt like how they said we should say it is how i thought we had said it

it's a mystery they were kind enough to send us a link on twitter which is a guide on how to pronounce northern towns which really entertained us because i'm not sure if it's a he or she but they called us Southern Softies. And they said, you Southern Softies don't know how to pronounce Northern English names. And I guess you're right, we don't. Thank you, everyone. Patreons, keep them coming. Reviews, please keep them coming.

And social media, we love it. So today, we are telling you the story of how an adopted child on the hunt for her birth parents helped to solve a 32-year-old cold case. Now this is a twisty-turny one, as loads of names so be it warned. On the 10th of November, 1985, a hunter was out walking through the woods in Bear Brook National Park in New Hampshire. And he found, on this walk walk on his hunt a 55 gallon barrel something possessed him and i don't know what because i wouldn't do this to look inside this barrel and inside unsurprisingly because this is why i wouldn't look he found two dismembered bodies wrapped in plastic i mean what else were you expecting to see in there? I'd almost be like, oh yeah, there it is. That's exactly what I'd find. I just don't understand why you would look inside

because it had a lid on too. It wasn't just like open. So he opened it. Oh yeah, yeah. It's like he went through quite a bit of effort to look inside those barrels. Don't look in barrels that aren't yours. Even if they are yours, someone else could have put a body in them in the time you weren't looking at them. How many barrels do you have? So don't look in barrels, basically. But the bodies that were in there were that of an adult woman, estimated to be between 23 and 33 years old, and a child that could have been anywhere between 5 years and 11 years old. Now the police were able to prove via DNA analysis that the pair in the barrel were mother and daughter. Both were killed by blunt force trauma to the head but they have never been identified and due to the rate of decomposition of the bodies it was impossible to ascertain the time of death or have any idea as to how long the bodies had actually even been in there and we know

if you've listened to the costume cupboard corpse episode when a body is enclosed the decomposition process happens at a very different rate and very differently and makes identification of the body and the time of death hard if not basically impossible to accurately pinpoint so with absolutely no leads the bare brick murder case remained open so as late as 2000 so this is only 17 years ago and it's 32 years after the original barrel was found. The case was assigned a new detective team and the crime scene was re-examined and they found another barrel with two more bodies in it.

And this time the bodies were both small girls. One was between two and four. The other was between one and three years old. They had also been killed in the same way as the mother and daughter, so blunt force trauma to the head. So yeah, the same way as the mother and daughter in the barrel found in 1985. The police are almost certain these bodies were killed at the same time as those found 15 years before.

And they were right. Three out of the four bodies in the barrels were related. That's crazy. The youngest child was related to the first two bodies in the first barrel. She was also the daughter of the adult woman in the 1985 barrel and the sister of the 9 to 11 year old. So it was a mother and two children who had been killed in the same way at the same time and disposed of in this awful way. But strangely, the child in the second barrel, the child who was between two and four years old, was found to be absolutely no relation to the other bodies. It did

appear that the four victims were killed at around the same time. the police just couldn't identify the bodies so essentially a family of four had not been reported missing at any juncture between 1985 and 2000 that's so strange to me it is isn't it so it's literally a woman and three girls it's as if they never existed like nobody missed them that's what's so bizarre because yes sometimes when you come across these cases when it's someone who was quite transient or not connected to their family in some way goes missing and no one reports them it makes sense but a family of four go missing mother children and nobody notices that they've gone that's so odd you know the police that did the best that they could at the start with this case.

It was a difficult one, but they put together forensic reconstructions and these were sent out all over New Hampshire, but no one recognised them. And I don't know how much that surprises me because, firstly, they weren't great. And we've spoken about this before in previous episodes. We're not sure that either of us would be able to recognise someone from a forensic reconstruction like i honestly think if someone did a forensic reconstruction of you i'm like unsure i would be able to be like that's the route i mean it's an art and i do appreciate how they do it it's really interesting how they build the face up but they just don't seem to be that effective they never are they're just they just always look seem to be that effective. They never are. They just always look like super genomes.

And, you know, that must have been the case here. But then saying that, no one even reported them missing. So how closely connected was anyone to them? In any case, nobody recognised it. But in October 2016, DNA tests revealed that the three related victims were all of Native American descent and the one who wasn't related was from the Wisconsin area. But one of the children also exhibited signs of pneumonia.

Could this have been evidence of some sort of transient lifestyle? I think that kind of explains why nobody missed them. I was going to say, is that why nobody reported them missing or was able to identify them? Basically, remember this one, put a pin in it because we're going to come back to it and it will all become clear as we go. So we're going to start with a different story. So in the summer of 1986, a five-year-old who we'll call Lisa showed up at a trailer park in Scotts Valley, California. She slept in the back

of a pickup truck under a camper shell with her father gordon jensen what is a camper shell i actually so i had to look up what a camper shell was it basically can turn your truck into a caravan it's just this like thing you put on the back of a pickup truck and it encloses it and makes it like a house i in my head i had like this like tarpaulin thing but it's not that at all it's like a metal thing you put on the back of a truck and it makes it into like oh okay cool that's pretty handy so they were they were living basically in this pickup truck under this camper shell it's almost like a little put up a little convertible hood over your pickup truck yeah it's like that yeah

so jensen was uh an electrician and a general handyman and while he worked little lisa would go next door to katherine decker's trailer, where Lisa would spend hours playing with Catherine's grandson. Lisa's father told Decker that his wife had died when Lisa was a baby, and that he was really struggling to bring Lisa up alone. Now as time wore on, Decker felt more and more sorry for Lisa. After all, no child should have to live like that. Just living off the back of a truck, and basically while her father works all day just finding things

to do on the streets and just being lucky enough that Decker lives next door and is a kind person yeah it's really sad like all of the descriptions of her when she's that young it's like just looking a bit grubby not really having proper clothes which is like it's just really sad like no kid should have to live out of a car so one morning gordon jensen knocks on the decker's door and he said that he thought it might be best for lisa to go and live with katherine decker's daughter initially on a three-week trial and if that went well an adoption could be drawn up did he even know decker's daughter i think she must have been around because Lisa played with her son, I think. Yeah, yeah, of course, of course.

But I don't think they were in the trailer park for that long. So he must have met her maybe a handful of times. But he knows the grandmother. He knows Catherine Decker-ish. Decker was completely ecstatic with this news because she really wanted another grandchild and she loved Lisa. So she went straight out and bought Lisa new clothes and new shoes for her move to her new house. And this really hurts me.

Lisa was so excited that she slept in her new shoes. She couldn't take them off. And the next day, Catherine Decker drove Lisa to Chino Hills to her daughter's house, which was six hours away. Her daughter did live in an actual house, not a trailer park. Just putting that in there. No shade against trailer parks, I'm sure they're fine. The trial three weeks went incredibly well, and excitedly, the Deckers returned to the trailer park to move forward with the official adoption. But Gordon Jensen was nowhere to be found. He had abandoned his child and Lisa would never see him again. I do wonder though, I would assume that Catherine Decker is in touch with her daughter who lives six hours away. How did she not notice that he was gone? If her trailer's right

next door to his truck. Yeah, that's a really good point. I don't know. It's really weird. Unless, I don't know, she just thinks he's out for work now that lisa's not there he's able to do more like go places to to work i don't know very very that's the only thing i could think of was that maybe katherine obviously he would come and maybe he came and went quite a lot and then she just yeah just didn't notice yeah but even more concerning were the things that Lisa was saying about her father to the Deckers. They were so concerned that they began to suspect that Lisa had been molested by Gordon Jensen. And they alerted the police. The police interviewed Lisa and they too became convinced that she had been sexually abused.

And as a result, the police took her from the Deckers and placed her in state custody the deckers and lisa were never reunited this also confused me because i don't understand why this family happily would have taken her they clearly love her why was she then put into the state system i know i do think it's really sad they did everything right they took this child in they they did the three-week trial period as the father had requested. They even took it straight to the police as soon as they had suspicions and concerns about what may have been happening to Lisa before they got her. But at the same time, remember, they never actually officially passed over adoption papers, anything like that.

There was no actual record apart from their anecdotal evidence as to what had happened and how they had happened upon this child. Yeah, that's true. The police just have to take their word for it that they took this child away from this man who had given her to them and then disappeared. They don't actually know anything. It really is sad, but I think probably just in the best interest of Lisa,

taking her away. The police also questioned Lisa about where she came from, because she's just this wastrel. She just turns up out in the middle of nowhere and is abandoned. And Lisa told the police that she had had brothers and sisters, but they had all died from eating grass mushrooms whilst they were camping. Which is, that's weird. Like, how? i don't have any

idea what that means it's very odd why would all of her brothers and sisters and not her not her dad why were they all eating different things that makes no sense like i'm just i'm calling it that didn't happen no i mean it's not even the fact that they'd be eating different things like what is she talking about when camping and all my brothers and sisters died from eating grass mushrooms no but then there is just such and this will become more and more obvious as we go through this case actually is just how much of a mystery lisa is and how little they anyone knew anything about her at this point the police concerned by the grass mushroom story and by the potential sexual abuse allegations, they scoured the trailer park for anything that can lead them to Gordon Jensen.

Finally, the police found a single fingerprint on a hi-fi system that he had installed. This fingerprint ran a match for a man called Curtis Mayo Kimball, who had been arrested in Cyprus, California for a DUI in 1985 in May. Cyprus is over 400 miles from Scotts Valley, and when Curtis Kimball was arrested, he had a young daughter in the car with him. So Lisa's father, Gordon Jensen, was not who he said he was. But it is so, so much more complicated than that. It's not just a fake name to escape a conviction. Oh no. In 1988, the man who called himself Gordon Jensen and Curtis Kimball was pulled over by the police again in San Luis Obispo. He was driving a stolen car and using yet another fake name. This time it was Jerry Mockerman. I feel like that's a bad fake

name. It is a bad fake name. It was like when we did the Bible John one and it was like John Templeton, John Sempleton, Jerry Mockerman. Maybe it's a double bluff. Yeah, maybe. But anyway, during this arrest, Jerry Mockerman was fingerprinted and identified as the same man who had abandoned Lisa Jensen in the Scotts Valley trailer park two years before and he was taken to trial astonishingly the charges of child molestation were dropped and guess why you got it our favorite a plea deal vomit I hate them I hate them so much I hate bail I hate deals. I guess at least they caught this guy. They took him to trial on, as I said, the charges of child abandonment. So Jensen, Kimball, Mockerman, whatever we want to call him, pled guilty to child abandonment and he was given three years in prison. The authorities at this point, though, still had no idea what this man's real name was.

They don't know his date of birth or where he came from. And he isn't giving anything away. He served 19 months and the second he was released in 1990, guess what, he violated his parole, skipped town and disappeared. Now until 2002 he managed to keep a low profile in Richmond, California using yet another alias, Larry Vanner. As we did with Billy Joe Jenkins' case and the overuse of the word clarinet. In this episode, we could probably be playing a fake name drinking game right now, but it is about 12 o'clock in the afternoon on a Sunday and we'd be absolutely trashed if we were playing that. I feel like I'm still a bit trashed from last night if i'm honest but when when larry vanna arrived in richmond california he was homeless but he picked up odd jobs i guess he was an electrician there's always

a need for that and eventually moved into the back room of a supermarket now the locals remember him being six foot tall with piercing blue eyes and one hell of a drinking problem so how exactly was this man keeping a low profile a six foot tall piercing blue eyed alcoholic he didn't get arrested for anything he was just you know picking up odd jobs not really getting in anyone's way the supermarket he lived in he'd like done a job for them he'd like refinish their floor or something and he was just like can i live here oh that's yeah interesting but in 2001 he married a woman named yun sun jun and shortly after he moved into her home now the next year guess what yun sun jun disappeared without a trace now veteran cold case cracker roxanne grunheid was put on this case. When she interviewed the man of many names, he remained calm and collected, patiently explaining that his wife was in fact living in Oregon, receiving psychiatric

treatment. He even recited her doctor's phone number by heart and volunteered to have his fingerprints taken. But of course the fingerprints proved that he was Curtis Kimball, or Jeremy Mockerman, or by default, Gordon Jensen. So Grunheide arrested the mystery man for parole violation and went to search Jensen Jones' house, where the couple had been living together just a few months before their backyard wedding. And strap in, guys, brace yourselves, because this is where it starts to get pretty fucking dark.

Grinheid and her team made a gruesome discovery at the house. In the basement, they discovered an enormous pile of cat litter. And under this pile was the partially dismembered body of Jönsson Jön. She had been killed by blunt force trauma to the head months before they discovered her body. And that must have been what the cat litter was for, to absorb the smell of this rotting body under the house. Because cat litter is really good at sucking moisture out of things. It's actually better than rice when your phone goes for a little swim in the toilet, as mine has done sometimes. Top tip.

It is a top tip, Cat Litter. Grinide was certain that this murder was too calculated, too cold to be the man with many names' first kill, and she vowed to prove it. It does seem, I just, if it's your first kill, partial dismemberment, I could sort of buy. I don't think you'd keep it in your house if it was your first kill. But then, you know, people do kill their spouses. But then I guess, come on, you arrest this guy,

he's already on parole violation, then his new wife turns up dead, and all the lying. And like, oh, you know, she's having psychiatric treatment in Oregon. She's not dead, she's just vanished. And no, she's not vanished or dead. I know exactly know exactly where she is like it's all of those things put together that really make it seem like this is not a man who was killed for the first time so going on her hunch grunheide started with lisa jensen the little girl who'd been abandoned in the trailer park 15 years before she found that the mystery man had reported many conflicting stories about the cause of his wife's death in the police records. It stated that she's died during childbirth, she's died of cancer, she's been shot, or she died in a car crash. Like, he gives different stories depending on whoever he's speaking to. And no death certificate ever surfaced. Neither did Lisa's birth certificate. And still, Grinheid and her team

had absolutely no idea who this man really was but Grinheid was convinced that whoever this guy was there was absolutely no way he was Lisa's father and she found in the old police records that Lisa's blood had been taken for a paternity test but it had never been carried out can you imagine working your heart out on a case and then you're like oh my god amazing there's a paternity test and then you find out that it was just never never done that's crazy the mystery man at this particular time i think he was going by the name of it was larry vanner the mystery man was found guilty of the murder of eunice in june and was sentenced to 15 years to life in june 2003

but even with him behind bars grunheide stayed on the case. Months after he was put away, Grunheide proved via a DNA test that she had been right all along and the man of many names was not Lisa's biological father. This meant that Lisa Jensen's case was no longer child abandonment, it was an abduction. When questioned, the mystery man had absolutely no memory of Lisa at all, and right up to his death in prison in 2010, he gave nothing away. Whoever he really was, whatever his real name, he took it to his grave. We'll never know.

And that's what I think is so interesting about this case, and it'll become clearer as we go on, but this guy is a mystery. Nobody knows. Nobody knows where he came from and i just find it a really bizarre idea that you can just you can live like that that people can just appear from nowhere so what had happened to lisa jensen before she showed up at the scotts valley trailer park that summer in 1986 remained a total mystery. She genuinely could have been taken from anywhere. Peter Headley, the deputy of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, felt that the case

was next to impossible to solve. They didn't even have a geographic area to start them off and as for the mystery man of many names, they had no idea who he was even stating this guy is a ghost and referring to lisa as a living jane doe and i that's really chilling it's horrifying and of course rightly so as you can only imagine while all this is happening lisa never stopped wondering where she came from who she really was and after she had been taken from the deckers at age five, she was adopted by a loving family and grew up just outside of Los Angeles. But those questions would never really go away. And in 2015, Lisa decided to find out who her parents were and bought a DNA kit from Ancestry.com. I'm Jake Warren. And in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest

to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health.

This is season two of Finding and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come.

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When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get

your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. I know the website that pops up on ads and is like, are you related to a king? Isn't it always funny when people are like, oh, I used to be a Chinese princess when they do those past life regressions, and it's always, oh, I was related to William the Conqueror or a king. Yeah, no one's ever like a peasant, are they? I'm from peasant stock.

No one's ever that. I read that, obviously, the farther you go back, I think everyone of Caucasian European descent, if you go back far enough, is a relation of Charlemagne. Just because the sheer amount of people who would potentially be in your family tree exceeds the amount of people who have ever lived ever. Oh, yeah.

And there's a number of people of Asian and, like, Eastern descent and the crazy high percentage of men of that descent, particularly who are related to Genghis or Genghis Khan. I was just trying to look it up while you were speaking, but I can't remember. It's something insane, though. Yeah, because Genghis Khan I was just trying to look it up while you were speaking but I can't remember it's something insane though like yeah because Genghis Khan was like a mad shagger it shagged everyone he had like hundreds of children yeah so it basically says here that the Y chromosome lineage present in about eight percent of men in the region of Asia stretching from northeast China to Uzbekistan which is about 0.5 percent of the total world population which

would equivalent to about 16 million men at the time of this data's publication would be directly descended from jengis khan that's insane i there's an article that i read about him when i was reading about this and i can't remember i think it was like the guardian or something and it was like calls him like a fucking lothario or like a playboy or Romeo I was like he was a fucking rapist he wasn't going around like dating and courting all these women and like taking them out and making them fall in love with him so he could plant his seed in them and sow his wild oats what the fuck don't call him don't call him Romeo or whatever stupid thing they called him if I find it I'll post it on the Facebook group what a moronic thing to call him he raped and pillaged his way across the world

and that's why so many people are related to him not because he was one hell of a guy top real top bloke and that's why all these women fell for him I've literally just had like a flash of what if Genghis Khan was a competitor on The Bachelor. Oh my god, yeah. That's basically what I'm thinking. Can you imagine? That's great. Or like, what's that horrible show that's on ITV? Oh, Take Me Out.

Take Me Out. You just see him come down the lift. Apparently, according to the article, all of those women would have left their light on for him. But I don't think that's what was happening. Anyway. Oh, what a lethargo. Oh, hi, Casanova. Oh, my God.

Absolute revisionist history right there. Thank you, Guardian. I might be slandering them. It might not be them. I will find the article. So anyway, this DNA kit, which I can understand more so than like a regular person doing it. Lisa wanted to do it not to see if she was related to Charlemagne, but in fact, what her actual lineage was and where she was from.

I can imagine the people who don't have that, why that question would never go away from them and why they would need to know the answer. So the DNA test comes and it works by you spitting in a tube, you send it off, they analyse it and they search their existing database for matches. So obviously it is really limited, not everyone is going to be on the database and only people who have agreed to be in there will be in there. But it is a good start and the results come back and in fact Lisa's DNA was a very close match with that of an 81 year old man living on the west

coast who was of Canadian descent. Now the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department had also had a team working on Lisa's ancestry and they determined that this man on the west coast must share a common female relative and to find out who this was they needed to be able to identify more relations. So Lisa sent off DNA samples to more genealogy websites. One came back with another match, a 42-year-old man living in San Francisco named Adam Keim. Now Barbara Rae Venter, who was a volunteer working on Lisa's family, wrote to Keim and told him that she believed he was a cousin of a child who had been abducted who now wanted to know where she came from. But unfortunately Keim had no answers

because he himself had been adopted as a baby. He had sent his DNA off to the genealogy website's database for the same reason as Lisa. He wanted to find his biological family. So Barbara Ray Venter promised Keim that in return for his help with Lisa, she would locate his birth parents too. With that, Keim agreed to share copies of the closest matches he had received on the various ancestry websites. And he also knew his mother's original surname and the date he was born in San Diego.

So that's enormous help. That's way more than Lisa has. And Ray Venter found Adam Keim's birth name by searching California birth records. And she found a brother that Adam didn't know he had, and just months later, they were able to locate his birth mother, living just hours away. And the information that Adam Keem had shared with Ray Venter

and the team working on Lisa's lineage meant that they were able to prove that the 81-year-old man living on the East Coast was related to both Adam and Lisa. This 81-year-old man was their grandfather, and he had an astonishing 18 children. So now, the team working on Lisa's case, they can focus their search a little bit, but it's still an enormous task to get through. I mean, if you think about it, so he's got 18 children, what if they have three children each, and this is a generation back, so it's just an enormous amount of people. But, undeterred, the team set about tracing each one of these 18 children and

building a family tree, searching for any living relative who could provide DNA that could help them. And eventually it was established that Lisa was descended from a line of French Canadians. Who had settled in New Hampshire. And they found an obituary for one of her relatives. A Georgette Bowden who had died in 2008. Survived by her only daughter Denise. But when looking for anything on Denise. Whether she was still alive or where she lived,

nothing could be found. So the trail went cold. And Denise was the only woman who could have been Lisa's mother. Denise had gone missing in 1981 from her home in Manchester, New Hampshire. She had vanished after a Thanksgiving dinner with her parents, her six-month-old daughter, and her boyfriend, who is a man called Bob Evans, and Denise, were never seen again. This has to be Lisa. The six-month-old daughter who goes missing after Thanksgiving has to be Lisa. And Lisa's birth name was Dawn Bowden. They found her birth certificate.

And Lisa finally found out when her birthday was. I hadn't even thought, until researching this one, I never even thought about not knowing when your birthday is. Poor Lisa. Everything that happened, but just having absolutely no idea what her name was. Lisa was just the name. This guy, whatever had happened, whoever she ended up with, this Jensen, quote unquote Jensen guy, could have just been what he called her.

To not know what your parents called you. That's just so sad. And actually, when Lisa found this out, when she found out that her real name was Dawn, she was speaking to the people working on her case and she was like, what do I do? Do I change my name? Oh, that's so sad. I know, isn't it?

So the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department dug out a mugshot of this Bob Evans who had gone missing with Denise from 1980 because he had been arrested for numerous petty crimes crimes including diverting electrical currents in order to steal it. I'd never thought of stealing electricity. But this guy, Bob Evans, was an electrician by trade and they compared the mugshot to the man who abandoned Lisa in the Scotts Valley trailer park in 1986 and you guessed it, it's the same fucking guy. But there's even more to come because remember the unsolved Allentown Bear Brook murders? They happened to be in the

same area of New Hampshire, just 15 miles away from Manchester, where the man with many names had been living with Denise before she went missing. Also remember that two of the bodies in the barrels had been partially dismembered, just like Yoon Seung-jun. And Grunheid was certain that Yoon Seung-jun was not this man's first kill. And the DNA proved that the mystery man of many names

was the father of the child in the barrel that was not related to the other victims. So whether he killed them or not, he was the father. This is really bizarre yeah so there's the mother and the two children that are hers and then there's the unrelated child who is now his child exactly yeah and there they were the ones that were all dead and in the barrels but the woman in the barrel was not denise it wasn't lisa's birth mother it was someone else entirely now this man

he absolutely fits the profile of a serial killer just traipsing around the country living this transient lifestyle he's a drifter killer just wanders around if denise was in the barrel it would kind of tie it up with a really nice bow wouldn't it like it would just be the a complete case but that's not what it is there it's a completely different set of people absolutely that potentially had nothing to do with lisa at all this is the thing that's so weird he disappears with denise when lisa is six months old all three of them go missing then they're completely off the radar then he's with l Lisa in this trailer park when she's, what, five or six? Which is when they run into the deckers. But in that time, that barrel

of bodies has been found, which contains a woman that isn't Denise, so isn't Lisa's mother, two of her children, and this guy, Jensen's child. But he's out there in this trailer park with a five or six-year-old Lisa, who isn't his child. And Denise is nowhere to be seen. So in that time, Denise has gone missing. He's been with another woman. And who's the mother of that child? Because it wasn't the other woman in the barrel. It's just so bizarre. He's an absolute drifter killer, which is why he was able to get away with this for so long, changing his name, transient lifestyle. He had a job that allowed him to kind of just move from town to town doing odd jobs. He had this drinking problem. He's just such a archetype of a serial killer. But there were murmurs also that he may

have even been a military man at some point. But I don't know how much stock I put in that because literally no one knows anything about this guy. Yeah, like when I read that, I was like, you can't know that. Also, if he was in the military, there would have been a paper trail. His details would have been on profile. His DNA, his fingerprints, all of that would have been part of the government database. They would have been able to identify him sooner. But it seems that what is so strange about this man is not just how much of a mystery he is, but that literally anyone he touches just goes missing. Could the family that were in the barrels, as we said, just be another one of these wives that he killed?

Lisa said, remember, that she had brothers and sisters who had died. But there was only female bodies in the barrels. And we know that this woman was not her mother. Because so she said she had brothers and sisters. Where were the brothers? What was going on? It's all a bit Mick Philpotty, don't you think? Oh, it completely is.

It's so confusing. And also you've got to remember what the police are going on is the testimony of a five-year-old girl who's suffered abuse. You know, it's not going to be necessarily the clearest thing to follow. I mean, it's hard to get a straight answer out of a child at the best of times. So it's quite difficult to know what you can trust and what you can't. But I genuinely am astonished,

and I guess that maybe it's something we don't have a grasp on in this country because comparatively the UK is peanuts compared to the side of the United States. But I'm always fascinated by the idea that people can just disappear and reappear and the crossing of state lines playing such a major role in whether you can be caught or not.

They have crazy rules on the way jurisdiction works across state lines, things like that, and the lack of kind of information sharing. We even have that here, the lack of information sharing between different counties and how much they're willing to tell other police forces. It's weird and it is an absolute failing in the majority of law enforcement when that doesn't happen properly if hypothetically the man with many names did kill the family in the in the barrel i think yes we have no way of knowing whether it happened before or after he abandoned lisa with the deckers i think it was probably before. Yeah. I don't think that, I just, I don't think it could have been after.

I think he skips town, he goes and does something else. I think, I don't know whether Lisa was there though. That's something I can't square in my mind. I don't know whether she was like the saved one, you know? Well, I think it was before because, you know, she was aware of having had other people, like other siblings even though they weren't related to her in her life and i think she was just the one that ended up escaping that death or that i don't think the people in the barrels are the brothers and sisters that

lisa's talking about i think there are other i think there are more but i think that he was with these people because his own child was there. Why would he have left his child somewhere else with this woman, taken Lisa to go be in a trailer park, come back, kill them and then abandon her with the Deckers? I mean I have no real logic. There isn't any information that we can absolutely say this was the timeline and I don't know how important it is. At some point I think he definitely killed the people that were in the barrels. There's just too much of a close link to him. They died from blunt force trauma to their head. They were dismembered. It fits with his MO of what he was doing. And I definitely think that he did kill the people who

were in the barrels. Whether Lisa knew them or not, I'm not sure. Fair. We don't know. We don't know that. But she was with him from, potentially from the age of six months old. She disappeared with him and Denise when she was six months old and then she's still with him at five or six. I don't know, I feel like if Denise, if he kills Denise immediately after, he keeps, say he keeps Lisa, either one of two reasons or three reasons.

I don't know how much I believe the first one, that he has some empathy or some compassion for this child. He kills the mother, but he decides to keep Lisa alive. I don't know. He doesn't seem to be a man who is filled with that kind of sentiment. Point two, it could be it gives him an air of credibility. You have a child with you. People are going to ask fewer questions,

maybe even give you more sympathy, give you more leeway than if you're just a solo rogue man on his own. Or third reason, he was sexually abusingusing her and that's why he kept her i did think about that which is just it's horrific isn't it is horrific but i feel like those are the only that's what i mean though i think that after maybe he kills denise he finds this other woman and he somehow has a baby with somebody else these are the two other kids that are hers he kills them all leaves with lisa i think lisa would have known them because she like i said she was with him from six months to five years and if we say that this happened before he abandoned lisa

then she must have known them but then why is the kid that is jensen's son daughter even i could understand if all of the children in the barrels were related to the mother but they're not no one of them is his and has nothing to do with her so they they've got this weird merged family of all of these kids that would have been the case with lisa as well that he was with denise he uh lisa's not even his so he meets meets Denise when she has this baby. He takes them on. They disappear together. I think Denise is probably dead. And then he moves on to this other woman. He brings a child in with him, probably tells her that Lisa's his. Then maybe he fathers a child with some other woman. I don't know. It's all very, it's all very odd. But you know, they're

not living a nuclear family life. Like they have some sort of weird... No, they're not living a nuclear family life like they have no they're not but i just i wonder with his sort of transient lifestyle it's odd that he would father a child and then take it with him it seems odd that just because the the lifestyle he was living you would think that if he's fathering a child with a woman that he's not with it's it just seems very unlikely to me that he would take the kid. No, I know. I don't know why that child was there that was his and why that child was dead in the barrel. And the deaths of the barrel bodies

are thought to have taken place in the early 80s when Denise was living with this man in 1981. They went missing in 1981. What I wonder though, where is Denise? I think she's dead. Because she's not in the barrels. No, she's dead though, where is Denise? I think she's dead. Because she's not in the barrels. No, she's dead. But where is she? Oh, I don't know. And then if we don't know where Denise is, like there could be countless, because I mean, he's got form, hasn't he? Like he's killed at least three women. There's no way that Denise is alive. But she could

be anywhere between being under a pile of cat litter somewhere or being in a barrel partially dismembered like she could be anywhere he was so transient who knows what he did i do wonder whether barrels was his like choice method of disposal like are there i mean potentially however many barrels full of bodies because he i think they've tracked him in at least 11 states using about 15 different names so there could be hundreds she could be anywhere she could be absolutely anywhere and you know that those barrels were found in a national park there are there's countless acres and acres and acres of america that is just covered in national parks like who knows she could be absolutely anywhere.

She doesn't even need to be in a barrel. She could just be in a shallow grave somewhere. Denise, Denise is definitely dead. Oh, she's dead. What I wonder with Lisa, it is funny though of like, why was Lisa spared? Because, I mean,

Lisa says that she thinks that this man spared her because he believed her to be his child. But he killed a child who was 100% his child. So I don't think I buy that either. I don't buy that. So I think, I mean, as horrible as it is, I think you're right.

I think he kept her because he was sexually abusing her, because he was raping her. Yeah, I think having one child would give him that kind of, like I said, maybe a bit of credibility, no questions asked. If there's a guy living next to you, next door of like i said maybe a bit of credibility no questions asked if there's a guy living next to you next door maybe you watch him a bit closer if he's doing anything odd but if he has a child it's like oh he's just a struggling father trying to get by with his child i think maybe the reason the other child was dead was because maybe lisa just fitted

with the sexual abuse side fitted more into his into his type of what he wanted but then what i wonder why did he give her up then i think it probably got to a point where the pressure was building i can't maybe i don't want to take this child with me anymore and maybe to be absolutely horrific she was no longer fitting into his preferred age group but But then why wouldn't he just kill her? Like, the rest of them? That's what doesn't make sense to me. The Deckers had seen her a lot, and, you know, she played around there all the time, and he thought, you know,

the daughter lives six hours away, go take her for a three-week trial, I'll disappear. How would you, like, don't need to. Don't need to kill her. Let's just get rid of her this way. I'm done. I'm out. A small shred of humanity through his own

convenience at that point probably but i think don't be in any doubt that if there had been no convenient way to get rid of lisa that he absolutely wouldn't have hesitated to kill her i don't think no i think you're right and actually earlier this year so 2017 the san bernardino county sheriff's department announced that they believed that the man with many names, who they call Bob Evans, was responsible for at least six murders. So that's Yoon Seung-joon, the four bodies in the barrels found in Bear Brook National Park,

and Denise Bowden. Absolutely. And I wonder how many more there actually are out there. But we'll never know. There has to be. There has to to be more that can't be it but how traumatic for poor for poor dawn but use her actual name her mother named her we'll never know really what happened to her but it's such a sad case that's the story of how ancestry.com helps a whole uh decades old murder 32 years it is years cold case.

It is a cold case, yeah. And actually with this, with the title of this episode, like I said, and the case that we've covered here, we've done them a solid in terms of PR. But I'm going to do a little bit to tear that down in a special mini video slash audio for Patreons this week that I'm going to record later today. We'll put it out at some

point next week. And it's about the use or misuse of familial DNA testing by law enforcement. Now, if you're not familiar with it, the running of familial DNA search is a technique that allows investigators to identify suspects who don't have DNA in a law enforcement database, but whose close relatives have had their genetic profiles catalogued. And how are these profiles being catalogued? Well, through the boom in the private sector of collecting masses of our DNA through companies such as Ancestry.com. And what we're going to talk about in this is the kind of dangers that could arise from their misuse. And I'll cover a couple of cases in which this idea of kind of familial DNA search testing has led to definitely some miscarriages of justice that's terrifying but i do think though if you're obviously things like

ancestry.com and there's loads of these websites they must be under some sort of data protection act however i do think if you are sending your dna off to a website you should know that that means that your dna is up for grabs basically don't give anyone your dna because i just think it falling into the hands of government institutions people that would that aren't to be trusted anything like that you don't know what could happen you could land yourself in court or in jail for having sent your DNA away. We don't want to freak people out. Obviously, it's a fun thing to do. I get why people do it. But I do think that the fewer places your DNA is, probably the better. Not to be totally conspiracy minded about this, but there are actual evidence cases of this. And the thing with things

like familial DNA testing, why that is allowed to happen is because once a website, not website, once an organization like Ancestry.com or whatever gets hold, and, you know, we're not just going to keep talking about them. There's loads of these websites and loads of these organizations that do this. Once they have your information, they make it publicly searchable. That's the whole point. And law enforcement can also access that database. I actually, I sent my DNA off this week.

Uh-oh. Not to Ancestry.com. Me too. I joined the bone marrow register. Well, that's, that's like a good thing. And that's legit. I think that's legit. Yeah, it still means my DNA is on a fire.

I think it's in Peep Show when like Jez is like, I'm not giving a sperm sample, that'll come for me. Then they've got you. No, but I feel like things like maybe the NHS, that would be secure because it's not being publicly searchable for a reason. The reason Ancestry.com would make you publicly searchable is because the point is that people are trying to track their ancestry yeah yeah i get that whereas in this the nhs would control if it comes up as a

bone marrow match so that's fucking painful you're gonna do bone marrow yeah it's not they don't drill into your bones anymore they just do big needles i give blood that's about it i feel like i'm quite a useless blood type though because i'm like a really rare blood type but it's at the same time i'm like then how many people actually need this i'm ab positive but that basically like bruce almighty oh was he no maybe that was ab negative for him because that's the rarest i may be positive which is the second rarest i don't know someone tell someone tell me. I give blood regularly. How helpful am I being? Is it too rare to be worthwhile?

I think it makes it more worthwhile. The universal, they could just take the universal one. But I don't think bone marrow is a blood type thing. I think it's more of a genetics thing. Yeah, so that's it. Thank you very much for listening and keep doing what you're doing and we'll do the same.

So until next time. And you can follow us on all of the social medias at Red Handed The Pod and we will see you next week. Bye. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't.

I didn't either until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained.

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