Stuff You Should Know - Selects: How Rape Kits Work

Episode Date: August 16, 2025

Rape kits are simple forensic evidence collection kits used when someone is sexually assaulted. But the story is deeper than this. Learn all about rape kits, the sad backlog problem, and what you can do to help, in this classic episode. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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To start the conversation, visit. Talk About Vaping.org, brought to you by the American Lung Association and the Ad Council. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebeney, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday I'll be sharing all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you. Every Tuesday, make sure you listen to Pretty Private from the Black Effect Podcast Network. Tune in on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, everybody. Happy Saturday, Chuck here with the Selects Pick for the week.

And this week, it's a pretty heavy one, everyone. This is about rape kits. And the episode is How Rape Kits Work. And this is from April 2, 2019. And the reason that I chose the Select is because it's just a super important topic about the funding of rape kits, the lack of funding rather for rape kits and the backlog of processing rape kits and it's something that should be known far and wide

so that's why I picked it for this week's episode Welcome to Stuff You Should Know A production of IHeart Radio Hey and welcome to the podcast I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry over there, and now whatever chipperness you might hear in my voice can decline from here on now. Yeah, man, this is another one of those that's a tough topic. It's not going to be loaded with jokes.

No. I can't, I couldn't, I can't think of a single one. And any time, like, I started to be like, oh, maybe we should come with jokes. No. It's not like we do that anyway. Right. Like, this would be a good place for a joke. Right.

Let me get our writers on it. Insert joke here in brackets. Yes, obviously, I mean, if you saw the title about rape kits, hopefully that is the trigger warning you need, but we might as well just say it out loud. Trigger warning for this one. That's all we need to say, I think, right? Pretty much.

I mean, we're talking about rape, sexual assault in general. And specifically, I want to say, Chuck, I've had on the list for a really long time rape as a topic itself. I think it definitely deserves it. But I've just been kind of walking past it every time I go down the list, you know? Right. I think it's due, especially after this one.

Yeah. But it's almost like we needed to do this one first or else it wouldn't be stuff you should know. Right. If we didn't do something tangential with a bigger topic. Sure. So we'll do that eventually. Yeah, and also this comes out.

This is one of those happenstance things. As I was researching and reading this stuff, I was like, oh, you know what? we should check and see when sexual assault awareness month is and it turned out it's April and it turned out that April 2nd the day that this drops

is day of action so they encourage people to wear teal on April 2nd which is today I'm almost and you're wearing teal today I'm wearing well it's mint green but it's awfully close to teal yeah it's weird how this is all coming together like this so you know what action day should be for sexual

assault awareness month what it should be like a purge like the purge yeah that's what it should be like I haven't seen the movie but I get it yeah I haven't either but I know the premise uh in that um sexual assault awareness month is carried out by uh nsvrc.org

the national national sexual violence resource center uh and also I know that we're doing a lot of precursoring here okay but there is one section here on what to do if you've been sexually assaulted um two dudes yeah explaining this like just do this like we're not taking it that likely you know right like it we know that

it is extremely difficult to do anything much less like follow all the exact steps so many sexual assaults and rapes get unreported for a thousand reasons so we're not taking this lightly but this is our job this is what we do and this is an important topic so sure please excuse two dudes explaining a section on what to do when you're sexually assaulted. But I think that also raises another point that I want to touch on, too, Chuck. Sexual assault doesn't just happen to women. Sure. It happens to men.

The trans community is also a big target for sexual assault, unfortunately. So while it is largely women, from what I've seen, women between 18 and 35, it hits all demographics and targets across the spectrum of human beings. right including men yeah um so i wanted to say that as well all right now on with the show uh so should we do the history part first i think i was thinking so i think we should say what a rape kit actually is oh that's something we always do wrong but we're doing it right though we've hit everything right so far i think um i think uh a rape kit and i'm so sorry everybody to keep saying rape kit they're also called sexual assault evidence collect

You can understand why people call them rape kits. Yeah. But from here on up, maybe we'll just try to say kit. Sure. They are really simply a box. I saw a shoe box size. Ed says microwave oven size. I guess it depends on the oven.

It's a big old box. Yeah. And inside this box is a, all the stuff you need to collect the evidence of a sexual assault. Yeah, that a professional uses. Yeah. This is not like a home thing. No. But it does include such thorough step-by-step directions that someone who's not specifically trained to do this can can carry out this kind of examination.

I wonder if anyone does this, like can you buy these and perform this at home if you're to a thousand reasons why you wouldn't go into a hospital? I think that you can. You can buy them from medical supply or law enforcement supply. places both of them sell kits and they're actually relatively cheap i saw between five 15 25 bucks um so yeah you totally could is it still evidence though probably not yeah the defense would just shoot holes in it all day long and the jury would be like i'm sorry which they're already looking to do part of the part of the process of collecting this evidence and combining it all together to create this this kit is it begins a chain of custody yeah and if you do it at home and then bring it in they're going to be like come on right and there are a lot of problems with the chain of custody that we're obviously

going to cover as well when you leave it to the professionals right it's just a big mess but it is a big mess but but it's still more often than not it seems to be um it seems to have been a good invention sure and that that is a thing it is an invention um and it wasn't always around it's actually a relatively new invention it wasn't until i think 1978 that the first ones actually came into official use by the, I believe, the police department in Chicago and then later on Illinois, which served as a bit of a laboratory for it. And it was so successful that within another year it started to spread around the country. Yeah. And just, I mean, it sounds like, it's hard to believe, but just collecting and having the tools in a box and collecting the

evidence and putting it in a box for storage, just that alone coming around went a long way toward helping victims be taken seriously. Yeah, legitimizing rape and sexual assault. Yeah, I mean, it's sad, but that's the case. When they were first brought out, they were called Vitulo kits in a lot of circles, V-I-T-U-L-L-O. And Louis or Lewis, I never know. I'm thinking since he's in Chicago, Lewis.

Oh, really? I thought you were going to say Louis because of Chicago. I think it'd be I-E if it were in Chicago, Louis. All right, well, we'll go with Lewis. Let's just call him Chicago Lou. Chicago Lou Vitulo. Now he sounds like a mobster. Yeah.

Chicago Lou Vitulo? I think the Vitulo is really not helping. No, but he was not a mobster. He was actually worked in the Chicago PD's forensic crime lab. He was a sergeant and lieutenant who did not invent the rape kit, but he was charged with sort of codifying it and putting his stamp because he was one of the first people in law enforcement. that was trying to create a standardized procedure. Yeah, he was already a very well-respected forensic investigator. Yeah.

So for him to say, hey, I'm a big city forensic investigator, widely respected, and this thing is the bomb. Yeah. This is a great invention. We should all start using it, and here's how. It really helped spread and give it a boost early on. But even though they were called Vitulo kits, it's not to say, like, he was like, yeah, I invented this.

Colin Vitula kids. No, not at all. I think he was just known in the mind of other law enforcement agents that, like, they associated him in these kits. So that's what everybody else called it. But really, if you want to nail down an inventor of the rape kid, it was a woman named Martha Marty Goddard. Yeah, Goddard.

And Betula, I read some interviews with his grandkids, and it's like a really proud legacy. They still get letters from people and from women. Goddard is she has unplugged like I saw one interview with her where they talked about and we're going to cover this heavily later but the the kit backlog she didn't even know about it because she's like no TV no internet no newspapers she really just sort of checked out right and she was like that's really sad to hear about that it is very sad so I saw a quote somewhere that I think is Betulow's grandkids said that he would be spinning his grave if he knew about this

backlog which we'll get to later um so goddard was uh a survivor of sexual assault and she got together with some other uh victims basically the writing was on the wall like that you know things weren't being taken seriously in many police departments yeah she saw firsthand that like that they weren't collecting evidence correctly that they weren't they weren't taking it seriously which is still a huge problem right um and she she decided to do something about it well the first questions and still in a lot of areas, probably the first question still are like, well, what was the situation? What were you wearing? And if it starts with, well, I met a guy at a bar, then you're sort of discounted, like out

of the gate. Yeah. Very, very sad and very unfair. But she formed a group called Citizens for Victims Assistance in the 1970s and went to work, like she said she was doing 16-hour days, visiting hospitals, talking to cops, going to police stations, lawyers, judges, basically learning and working on everyone she could about how to get a better system going. Right.

But she needed money. And she got that from, of all places, the Playboy Foundation. Yeah, Hugh Hefner's Foundation. His daughter, Christy, was friends with Marty Goddard. And I think Playboy gave her 10 grand, which is equal to about 42 grand in today's money. Yeah. And that was enough to go start assembling these kits. Because one of the points from the outset of these kits was that they be inexpensive

because they wanted to remove as many barriers as possible for hospitals to start implementing these things widely. And one really easy way to do it was to say, here, these are virtually free. Or in some cases, these are free because this community group raised a bunch of money to purchase the implements of these kits, put them all together, and now here, you just use them. That's all. Which is a success story in and of itself when you know how, like, big pharma works in the medical community in America. Like, I could have seen this being like, well, these swabs and envelopes and combs, this will be $7,000 per kit. Yeah.

Because we put it all in a box for you. Marty Goddard gotten the way of that from the outset. And still to this day, I mean, that's why they're not any more than $5 to $25, even from, like, a medical supplier. Yeah, amazing. Yeah, she's a hashtag hero. Were you doing that now? Hashtag in it? Yeah.

Relate to the game, my friend. As always, Chuck. Have you heard about this hashtag thing? Sure. You've got to go like this with your two fingers on each hand. Hashtag. Okay? See, I knew you'd get a funny in there.

So they were developed before DNA evidence was even around. So this was back when it was just like hair and fiber fingernails, stuff like that. still very valuable. And I think one of the kits that's sort of common these days is what's known as the Southwestern Sexual Assault Evidence Collection kit. It's like the gold standard. I guess so. And it's called Southwestern, obviously.

It was in Texas. The Attorney General's office there in 1998 kind of created this one. And that's sort of, like you said, the one that people look to or base theirs on. Yeah, because, I mean, they took the ground. that Marty Goddard came up with going from to all of what you call in the corporate world and BuzzSpeak, all the stakeholders in the process of apprehending and convicting

people who sexually assault other people. Yeah. You know, scumbags. You can just say monsters. Yeah, monsters. And she figured out exactly how to put this together and laid the groundwork. And then from what I understand in the late 90s,

the Texas Attorney General office said, let's purify as it. Let's make it even better, like using what we know. And then that's what's in use largely today. Although you're going to find different kids, there's no actual standard. It's a de facto standard. Right. And in the same point, different hospitals you go to, even in the same state, are going to follow slightly different procedures. They might use slightly different kits. But some states have said, no, this is important enough. Like, here is how you do this. Here is the law of how you conduct a rape kid examination. Yeah. And so Goddard and Vatulow, you know, his stamp of approval, her working hard to get these things, you know, built from the

ground up. The work that they did together was like really set the standard in the late 70s for this across the country, just becoming just more, a more normalized way to collect evidence and take it more seriously. Right. It was a big, big deal. Big one. Yeah. Not just literally having, you know, all of the implements you need to conduct this investigation, but just the very presence of these sexual assault evidence collection kits, the fact that they exist says law enforcement is saying, okay, yeah, this is a bigger deal than

we've been treating it. Right. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's do it. We're going to take a break, everybody. I don't know if you just heard, but we'll be right back. In 1920, a magazine article announced something incredible. Two young girls had photographed real fairies. But even more extraordinary than the magazine article's claim was the identity of the man who wrote the article, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the man who wrote Sherlock Holmes.

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was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases. But everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's crime lab, we'll learn about victims. and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, Chuck. So the very reason that these kids exist is because sexual assault is a very unique kind of crime in that the victim, the body of the victim, is a crime scene. Yeah. A walking, talking crime scene. I mean, like, if you're murdered or something and, like, your body is dumped somewhere, your body is still a crime scene. Sure. But you're walking around moving.

You can actually contaminate the very crime scene from me. your assault, just by doing things that any normal human being would want to do after being sexually assaulted. For sure. It's in that sense a very unique kind of crime scene. And that's what sexual assault evidence collection kids are for, is to step by step methodically, systematically collect that evidence and preserve it so that it can later be analyzed and using court.

Yeah, so these are the recommended steps. if you've been a victim. And like I said, there are a thousand reasons that you would not want to do any and all of these things. And we totally get that. And I think Ed puts it in a really good way in this article. He said to receive the best possible care just medically for yourself and to have the best chances of collecting good evidence.

It needs to be within a 24-hour window, ideally. It's critical. The 24-hour is critical. And then apparently up to three days, it's still viable, but after three days, most experts are like it's not going to get anything. As far as DNA, which is the real, you know, really what you're looking for. Right. You will be very upset, and you may be in literal shock.

You may have had one or more panic attacks. All of these things make it very difficult to carry out, like, logical steps. Right. But experts say that the first thing you want to do, obviously, is get somewhere safe as soon as you can. Right. get away if your attacker is around and try and find someone, you know, an advocate for you, whether it's a friend or a family member who can kind of be with you in the first, you know, hours after this horrific event has happened.

Go to the emergency room. Even if you're not injured, quote unquote, physically, like, you really should go to the emergency room as soon as you can. This is a big one, not just because the... The emergency room is where you're going to have this kid administered. Yeah. But also because it takes such tremendous reserve to draw in such tremendous reserves to take yourself out of the comfort and safety of your home, which is probably where you went, to not take a shower,

which is another huge step too. Right. And to just say, I'm going to go to the emergency room and undergo this procedure and let a bunch of strangers poke and prop me and tell them about what just happened. That's the ideal of what you're supposed to do. But if you look at it in that respect, that's just such a huge thing on top of what just happened.

Yeah. That this is required of you to catch the person who just did it. Right. I mean, from a bystander's perspective, it just makes you want to catch them even more, you know, that that's on top of the assault as well. Yeah, because it's not like the trauma is over for you. Right.

And anyway, it may never be. But go to the ER as soon as you can. If it's not right, if you go to sleep and wake up the next day, you can go to the emergency room then. Like, it's just important that you go whenever you feel like you can do so. And like you said, it's probably the least intuitive thing you could imagine to not want to shower and bathe yourself. But that gets rid of a lot of evidence.

So it's, it's taking. terrible, but they say, please do not shower. Yeah. They say please. Please, the capital P. If you should keep the clothes you're wearing on if you can. If understandably you can't or don't want to, save them. Yeah, put them in a bag and take them to the ER with you.

Oh, yeah. If you have the wherewithal to change clothes, and this is something that they will have you do in the hospital, have you stand over like butcher paper or maybe even a towel. If you have the wherewithal to do that, wherever you are, whether it's at home or in a hotel or someplace, put that in there too because when you're changing your clothes, that's when, you know, DNA evidence can fall out, whether it's a hair or whatever. Skin particles. Right. Just collect everything you can and put it in a bag. Certainly do not wash those clothes and then take those with you to the emergency room.

Yeah. And then the last thing, you should know, just because you're going to an emergency room, and even if you are tested with this forensic kit, you're not required to file a police report ever. That's a big one. But especially right away, it's not like they're going to have a cop in there grilling you. You can file this police report whenever you want to. Yeah, if you are not comfortable filing a police report right then, you can do what's called a Jane Doe or imagine a John Doe examination. where they just go through all the steps

and collect all the evidence, but you never see a cop. They don't call the police until after you've left. So that's a big one for a lot of people. Sure. Ed points out, though, in some states, there is still a statute of limitations of between 10 and 21 years,

although some states have removed the statute of limitations for a felony sexual assault. But there can be a clock ticking, but we're talking 10 years. Right. At the least, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, yeah, you don't have to, this isn't something you have to knock out that day.

Right. If you don't want to, if you're not ready to. Yeah. When you go to the ER for this kind of examination, you are signing up for a few hours. It's going to take a few hours. It's not a quick procedure. No. And there's something else that you should know that I really hope won't discourage you,

but you should go into it knowing it is a, it's an invasive procedure. Yeah. They have to collect evidence from everywhere that the guy who did this to you or the person who did this to you was. Right. And they're also going to ask you, they're going to take an oral history and they're going to ask you to basically recount the worst thing that's ever happened to you within 24 hours after it happened. And then they're going to go over all of the spots with things like swabs and tweezers and combs and things like that to collect this evidence. And it's going to take a while. but you should expect to be treated very gently

and with a tremendous amount of respect from the people who are going to administer this examination. And I would guess to a hospital, there will be counselors available there to be there with you if you don't have like a friend or a family member there with you or anything. Yeah, and rural areas are where they still need to do a lot of catch-up work in hospitals and things like that.

But if you're in any major city, there will almost 100% chance that you'll have what's called a sexual assault nurse examiner on staff. This is a nurse who has received extra training on how to administer this exam. Like we said before, like any nurse can do this and do a great job. But if you have a S-A-N-E, a sane trained person on staff, then that's who you'll be seeing. And, you know, like I said, in rural areas, they're just, it's just, tough to staff up for things like this. So they're still doing all they can to get grant money and stuff like that to get these people trained up. Yeah, it's just a question of extra funding

because if you give a hospital funding that's set aside for sane nurses, you just created a new position in a hospital that wasn't there before. You've given the nursing staff there an incentive to go further their education, invest in their education so that they can have this better job in the same hospital and help people as well. So it's really just a question of funding. Yeah. That's it. I mean, a lot of this stuff, sadly, is the question of funding. Yeah. Luckily, there is enough agitation at the bottom up that the pocketbooks have kind of loosened up over recent years.

Right. But it is something that hasn't been, it's been as a result of agitation in bad press rather than, you know, this is the right thing to do. Yeah, for sure. Consent is a big part of all the entire procedure. They're going to ask you basically before everything, like, hey, I have a speculum here. We need to do a vaginal exam. Is that okay with you? And you can say no to any and all of this stuff.

This is all up to you on how you want to proceed with this. And they're going to ask for your consent for the whole procedure first, and then step by step before each step they're going to ask for your consent as well. And they're going to explain what's coming up, like you said. Yeah. Yeah, and as far as the interview portion, this is really important stuff as far as what will eventually wind up with investigators. And the questions about, like, were you on drugs or had you been drinking? Like, this isn't to set you up for future, you know, grilling by a prosecutor necessarily. But, like, if you, you may have been drugged or you may have had a drink spiked or something like that.

Right. So all of this is, like, just super, super important. So they need to know. They need to say, hey, future lab tech test for rufanol. Right. Or something like that, whatever. If you were in a bar and you suddenly woke up on the side of the road. Right.

That's the kind of history they're taking for you for those reasons, not, not, you know, what were you doing in a bar by yourself? Yeah, yeah. That's not what this is. Again, this is not a detective asking you or performing this exam. They might not even be aware of your case yet. Right. This is a trained nurse, or at the very least, a registered nurse who is performing this with one would expect a tremendous amount of compassion and respectfulness. Yeah, absolutely.

You're going to be giving blood and urine samples. This is super important to provide a DNA baseline. They will pluck hairs from your scalp. They will swab your mouth. They will use a comb to collect pubic hair. there will be you know we already mentioned a genital exam whether it's vaginal or anal they really like you said they just they have to go over with a sort of a fine tooth comb everywhere where the assault happened yeah so they're going to ask you awful questions like where you penetrated anally was an object used

did the perpetrator lick you or kiss you or anything like that right and depending on these questions, they're going to investigate further. But they're going to follow certain steps that, no matter what. But then if you say, yes, the guy licked my face on my left cheek, there's going to be a swab on your left cheek that they otherwise may not have included in the normal steps. Yeah, and again, this is like, I mean, I can't imagine having to relive something like this. Right, within like 24 hours, ideally 24 hours after it happened. Like the worst thing that happened to you in your life, let's talk.

about it here point to where it happened yeah you know it's from a stranger well and there are plenty of interviews that that we both read where you know women said it was it was reliving it and felt like I was being even with a great care given like I was being assaulted all over again it's just so important to try and try and do if you can if you can get there if you can't there's no blame there's no judgment like it's that's a that's a normal reaction this is a lot to ask from somebody but this is what it takes to collect the evidence and preserve it in a way that you can catch the person who did this. Yeah, they're going to test for, well, it's not required, actually, to test for STDs,

but they will ask you about STDs. I would imagine ask if you want to be tested. Sure. They will offer emergency contraception as well. And you're not going to be charged for that procedure or the kit. Here's the thing. Go on. Or you shouldn't be.

No, you won't be. Not for the, not for the administration of the kit. Right. Which is, that's great. That's substantial. I mean, it's a $16 kit, but this is also four or five hours of an ER nurse's, potentially a highly trained ER nurse's time. So that's great they're not charging you.

But what's a shame, what's shameful, I should say, is that you will still be charged for any treatment of injuries, say, like you were hit. and you need to be treated with, like, stitches or whatever, you'll get a bill for stitches. If you say, yes, I do want antiviral drugs because I'm afraid of having contracted an STD, or I do want emergency contraception, they'll say, here's your prescription,

and the pharmacist will charge you for that. Yeah. That's not okay. As a society, we should not ask rape and sexual assault victims to pay for their own medical treatment directly coming from a rape or a sexual assault. We should bear that burden ourselves, and then it should give us that even slighter additional incentive

to go get the guy who did it. Right. You know what I mean? Nobody should pay a cent. And then even worse than that, and I'm sorry, I realize I'm standing on a pretty big soapbox right now, but worse than that, Chuck, prior to the Affordable Care Act, you could not, you, it was possible that you would be denied future health care coverage,

insurance, if you were the victim. of a sexual assault or rape who went to go get treatment because they treated it as a pre-existing condition. Unbelievable. A pre-existing condition was rape. Can you believe that?

Sadly, I can. No, I'm a step down. They're going to take this kit. They're going to seal everything up. They're going to store it. Everything is like, you know, all the clothing and everything and all the swabs are dried out and labeled.

And then it's sealed back. Back in that original box, as part of the, I guess, the genius of this kit was that everything that comes out of it goes right back in, and it is also the storage device. Right. Where it's, you know, labeled. And then it's all shipped to local law enforcement, and then it's stored quite possibly until the end of time, sadly. Yeah. Or destroyed. We'll get to both of those things.

And ideally, and under just about any procedure, every single. person who takes custody of that is supposed to sign the label on the outside of the box. So there's a clear chain of custody. And it goes from the ER nurse to the cops to the prosecutors, to the lab, to the prosecutors, and so on. But there's supposed to be a clear chain of custody so that there's no questions about whether it was tampered with or anything. I always, that's the one thing that weirds me out about any kind of blood sample I'm ever asked to give. any kind of procedure I'm ever tested for is when I see them take my blood

or whatever specimen and they're writing on the little thing and it leaves the room, I don't know why my first thought is always like, well, they're going to mix that up with somebody. Which is not true. But I'm always just like, all right, well, it's out of my vision, so I don't trust it. Right.

I don't know what that is. It probably stems from having been switched at birth in the hospital. That's the only explanation. All right, we're going to take a break and we're going to come back and talk after this about the horrific problem of rape kit backlog and destruction right after this. In 1920, a magazine article announced something incredible. Two young girls had photographed real fairies.

But even more extraordinary than the magazine article's claim was the identity of the man who wrote the article, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the man who wrote Sherlock Holmes. Yes, the man who invented literature's most brilliant detective was fooled by two girls into thinking fairies were real. How did they do it? And why does it seem like so many smart people keep falling for outlandish tricks? These are the questions we explore in Hoax, a new podcast from me, Dana Schwartz, the host of Noble Blood. And me, Lizzie Logan. Every episode will explore one of the most audacious and ambitious tricks in history, from the fake Shakespeare's to Balloon Boys, and try to answer the question of why we believe what we believe. Listen to Hoax on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A foot washed up. a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny, You might just miss it.

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I'm looking at this thing. See? Listen to no such thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's stuff you should know. All right. So we told you the history of the kit, how it works, your ideal scenario for what you should do if you're ever a victim. And the great ending to this story would be is, and then those kits go off.

And they all get tested. 100% conviction rate. And they have great conviction rates. And there's no more rate. It's a long rate. Sadly, that is not the case. And this is all over the news for years now, as it should be. But, well, first of all, this is what happens in the ideal scenario.

They do store this. It is tested in a DNA lab. Right. And then it's checked against the CODIS, the C-O-D-I-S, the combined DNA index system. That's the database from the FBI of DNA profiles of bad people. And if a hit comes up, then you have a pretty good chance then of finding this person. The other thing about CODIS is this. When you submit a sample, a DNA sample to CODIS from a crime like a sexual assault,

and there's not a hit. That sample, you know, you just go, okay, sorry, Kodas, can I have my sample back? Like, that sample stays there. Right. And so future detectives is say they have a suspect or somebody who, comes in, and as a matter of routine, they run the suspect's DNA, which I think like just a matter of course now, when you're charged with a crime, they swab your cheek and then run it through CODIS.

That DNA may be hit, and all of a sudden, this thing, like you got caught robbing somebody's house, but now you're up for a rape charge from two years ago because your DNA was entered through this rape kit. So even if you don't get a hit, that doesn't mean that there's not going to be a conviction that's not like the rape kit was all for naught. Yeah, yeah, for sure. sadly that's not the way it always works in the 2000s there started to be some

there were some reporters digging around found a story and found out that there are tens of thousands of rape kits all over the country sitting in warehouses and sitting on shelves for years and years and years untested it was so bad Chuck that it became known as the backlog right yeah like some dating back to the 90s where they just, like you said, sitting in warehouses untested.

And at first, when I think some reporters started digging this up and found out like, whoa, this is not okay. How widespread is this? And started looking around and found it's like everywhere. And some towns are worse than others. Like Akron, Ohio had something like 3,000, I think. 2,000 kits in Akron, Ohio alone. So Detroit had, sorry, Akron, I didn't mean to put more on you than you had.

I was confusing you with Phoenix. Phoenix had 3,000 kits. Dallas had 4,000. Memphis has 12,000. Wow. And in Detroit, a few years back, somebody wandered into a police storage facility and was like, oh, there's 11,000 untested rape kits

that have just been, that we just forgot we had. Here's the problem with that. There's a couple of problems with it. But the first one, Chuck, is that every single one of those kits represents a person who found the wherewithal to drag himself or herself to the ER and go through this hours-long procedure

and suffer a second violation basically is what it feels like in order to give the cops the evidence that they need and the cops didn't even bother to send it to the lab. Yeah. That is a third violation. Yeah, and the other problem is that this could be like while they're sitting in there, and this often, sadly, is the case,

is that these people commit more sexual assaults when they could be behind bars. Yeah. In Detroit, so there was 11,000 untested kits they found. Let's say that each one was a different perpetrator. Right. The recidivism, that's a bonehead word, the recidivism rate, they think,

for sexual offenders of sexual assault, is between 5% and 32% over a 50%. over a 15-year period. Okay. So if those kits sat there, untested, for 15 years, that means that an additional 550 to 3,520 rapes were carried out by the same people whose DNA was in those kits, untested. Unbelievable. Yeah, so that's unacceptable, right?

And as a result, Congress was like, here's $150 million to get rid of this backlog. That should solve it. It did. It helped a lot, right? It got the labs going and everything like that. It's still not enough. Right. The problem is it funded labs.

That's what everybody said was, well, the labs are overworked. What are you going to do? So they got more technicians. They got more labs. And the backlog got worked through in a lot of cases. In Detroit in particular, one of the prosecutors there named Kim Worthy, who's another hashtag hero of this story, has been like, this number is going down. We're going through those kits.

And it's systematically and methodically. That's what it takes. It takes someone or a body of people, like, not just like throwing money at something, but like specifically following up on the ground. Right, okay. So the funding went toward the labs, but that left another half of this formula,

which is a big one, the cops. Right. So this backlog got moved through the labs, but that doesn't mean that the cops followed up on the results, and including cases where there were hits in CODIS. Later research by reporters found that, like, a lot of these cases in the backlog that got working, through hadn't been followed up on.

Yeah. Which is another problem. Yeah, there have been some federal guidelines laid down since then, specifically the safer act of 2013 sexual assault forensic evidence reporting. Different states have new laws in place. Like in New York state, it is law now that requires kits to be sent in within 10 days of collection and tested by the lab within three months. And they set up a timeline for processing backlog kits.

But it's, you know, it still depends on what city you live in and what state you live in because it still happens. It still happens a lot. It says here in 2011 report from the National Institute of Justice, 18% of all unsolved rapes between 2002 and 2007 involved this kind of evidence that had never been processed. Right. 18%.

Yep. And so in the cop's defense, here, they're basically saying, most of them are saying, okay, so great, that was great. You guys funded the lab. We're still overworked and understaffed. And out of room, literally to store these kits. So here is another thing, right?

So all this stuff went, all this focus went on the backlog. As a matter of fact, the third hashtag hero from this story is Mariska Hargitay from Law and Order SVU. Yeah. Just from doing Law and Order SVU, her eyes were so open to this whole backlog problem. that she started a foundation called the Joyful Heart Foundation that is basically dedicated to getting rid of the rape kit backlog. Yeah, well, actually, that's a larger foundation, but within that is Inthebacklog.org.

And here's what you can do, everyone, since it is National Awareness Month. First, put on something teal. Put on something teal on April 2nd. Go to Endthebacklog.org and click on take action. And there are a number of things you can do, but at the bottom there is a donation button and donate. I set up a monthly today that as far as I'm concerned, I'll donate monthly till the day I die. Sure.

Which hopefully is a long time. Long, long time. Hashtag long time. Yeah, but just go to endthebacklog.org. If you don't have money to give, there are other things you can do under the take action banner. Right. For sure. Yeah.

So back in 2016, while everybody was talking about the backlog, worrying about the backlog, doing something about the backlog, The Fayetteville, North Carolina, chief of police, held a press conference and said, hey, the city attorneys told me not to do this, but I feel a moral responsibility to tell the public this. But we destroyed about 300 untested rape kits in cases where the statute of limitations hadn't run out. Yeah, this isn't sitting on a shelf. This isn't untested. Right. This is we threw them.

them away. They were incinerated. That evidence is gone forever, and it was never sent off to a lab, and the statute of limitations was not up in these cases. Yeah. And that was huge. That was a big deal, and he committed his town, his police department, to going through all those cases, contacting the victims, and seeing if they could still build a case for

all, and they made it a priority. But it opened Pandora's box around the country and seeing it. CNN got a speculum of their own and started crawling around law enforcement agencies all over the country and saying, hey, have you guys ever done that? Have you ever destroyed rape kids? What's your policy for that? When's the last time you did it? Were any of them still within the statute of limitations? And they found out that it happens a lot, actually.

Yeah. Like a lot. Police to make room in evidence rooms, they will destroy race. kits. Some of them have official policies in place. Some of them is just a detective deciding that the case isn't going anywhere and we'll say, yeah, you can destroy that rape kit. Sometimes it's a misunderstanding of what the statute of limitations is. Yes. But these kits have never gone on, have never gone, have never been tested and never will be tested. That evidence is gone forever. Yeah. And that is even worse than the backlog, everyone has concluded, and I think rightfully so. Yeah, and like you mentioned earlier, just having this stuff entered into CODIS is huge

because let's say you do nab someone and it turns out that they, it comes up with like six hits from sexual assaults over the years. Like, I mean, prison sentences aside, the value that that has for a victim to know that that person was caught and is finally going to pay for their crime is can't be measured, you know. Right. And also, like if you go through this. procedure and you still don't get a hit in CODIS

but that DNA evidence is in CODIS if this perpetrator gets caught down the line you've contributed to a much stronger conviction against them and probably a bigger sentence because you've helped establish a pattern of criminal behavior and in fact that's how they call the Golden

State killer I believe is from this backlog of rape kits being put through and that guy popped up I think they got him for like 12 or 13 rapes during his serial killer career through this backlog being moved through and that opportunity is lost

if you just destroy this evidence untested secondly it also gives it ruins any opportunity for a wrongfully convicted person who was convicted previously before DNA evidence was used yeah I mean that's happened a lot if you destroy this evidence

it may it removes that possibility as well So I think the Justice Department issued some guidelines that say you should hold rape kit evidence for a minimum of 50 years or the statute of limitations, whichever comes first. And then that's that. And everybody said that's really great. But we really only legally have to listen to our state's guidelines, which are all over the place. Yeah. I wonder if any kind of like penalty and accountability would help. Well, I think CNN, like crawling up everybody's butt is.

is helping for sure i think it's um it's kind of open some people's eyes and that was the same thing that that brought so much attention to the backlog so hopefully the same attention will come to this too and yeah we can start funding police departments around the country to like carry the carry out the legwork on yes um i just have one more thing if you just and i imagine you could do this in any given week or day now uh if you just type in rape kit and hit news on your search engine many articles will come up like that day of cases like this just today there was one austin police department could potentially reopen dozens of rape investigations after getting a backlog results from a backlog of 20 almost 2,700 untested kits i believe they got a grant

from uh new york i'm not sure how that happened but they got like a million bucks from a grant from Manhattan to Austin, Texas. They're like, we got a lot of money. You want some of it, Austin? Maybe, but that allowed them to test like almost 2,700 kits. Another story, a Tucson man was convicted of raping seven women over a 12-year period after police received a grant to test rape kits. And it said, and it changed a mindset over which kits get tested.

And then Orlando, Florida. A man is now in jail today. He fled the state and found a lot of the state. and found him in Puerto Rico and once again this was a long unsolved rape case that they finally cracked open that kit

tested it and bam this guy comes up and they got him in Puerto Rico yep it's still a territory doofus if you want to know more about rape kits just do what Chuck said and search it on your favorite search engine's news

okay yeah go to end the backlog dot org for sure even better just poke around for a while. And put on something teal. Yes. And in the meantime, it's time for listener mail. I don't think I have anything teal.

You can borrow this sweatshirt. Okay. It's mint, but it's awfully close. Yeah, I'm not good with my colors. Emily thinks I'm partially colorblind. I think you might be too. Might be. So I'm going to call this ASMR.

We've been getting a lot of follow-up on this. Oh, really? From people that get that tingly feeling and people like me that throw up in their mouth a little bit. Oh, is this one? Hey, guys, been listening for a long time. I'm always intrigued by the topics. I'm a crafter, and your show always keeps my mind moving, so my creativity can flow in the background.

Nice. That's the ideal situation. Crafting. Yeah. I seriously thought I was the only person to experience ASMR. Friends I've talked to about it in the past think I'm crazy. No one around here knows anything about it. I love the feeling I get when I can activate the sensation.

The best way I describe it is, like, for me, getting goosebumps inside. my skull. That's pretty good. That's a great one. I wish I knew what that felt like. Yeah, I do too. You know? I envy that.

I want this sensation. I don't have it. The first time I found something that triggered it, I was working in a small office in a basement of a hospital. It was getting repainted in the sound of the paint roller, and the people near me in the office set it off. First, I thought it was strange, but I really enjoyed it, as our office started to grow up again wearing headphones on a regular basis,

and listened to the entire collection of Bob Ross, painting, which I famously, or not famously, but I go to sleep to that sometimes on Netflix. So you don't have a problem with Bob Ross? Oh, no, I love it. Okay. Very soothing to me. But I don't think, I mean, I don't think he's ASMR, is he? Yeah.

Is he? Yeah, he's, we didn't say that in the episode? I didn't think so. Yeah, he's like a legendary ASMR trigger for some people. Legendary. You're right. I listened to the entire collection and found the soft sound of his voice and stiff bristles on the canvas. caused the same reaction.

Help me greatly with my anxiety and general stress in the office, actually. I even created a playlist of people painting and would listen to it when I was stuck in traffic. As I'm writing, I'm listening to your episode and yes, swallowing sounds can give me the tingles too.

Bob Ross swallows a lot when he's painting. Gulp. And his mic is on his collar. I've never noticed that. What, the swallowing? Yeah. You might have to have headphones on for that.

Okay. I'm so excited, guys. you have changed my life. Thanks so much. Goosebump-headed Candice. Tali. Or Kitali. Is a uh in there?

Yeah. That's a mere middle name. That might be her, uh, her certain name. I gotcha. Uh. I may, uh. Yeah. Bear and Mermaidart.com.

Nice. I'm going to shout out your craft site. It's like jewelry and things. Yeah. It's not Bear and Mermaid art that I could see. I gotcha. It's just a whimsical name. Gotcha.

Um, yeah. There's, like, it's something about painting, like, slows people down. Like, when you're painting and you're talking, you're just that much calmer. No one paints fast. There's this dude, like, if, like, some artists will paint, do Instagram live and paint. Oh, yeah? And I don't know if you remember him or not, but the, um, uh, Gregory Jacobson, he was the artist who came backstage at our Chicago show last time. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. He did this for years, or for a year. He had, like, some show coming. And he would just sit there and paint. And you started watching him originally, and then she got me into it. And it was just him painting. He wasn't even in the shot normally. It's just his hand painting, but he'd be talking about what he's doing

and maybe answering some questions. And I never really thought about it before, but it is like super laid back. Yeah. Something about painting makes you slow. It just slows you down. Well, you know what you... It makes you swallow loudly. You never hear from a painter and artist is like, I'm in a hurry.

I've got to go knock this painting out real quick. It's true. Let me put some... Some lens fliers on there. Or maybe, I don't know. I guess you could be under a deadline. He was under a deadline if I remember. He had some huge show coming up.

And I guess then he decided, well, I think I'll add this extra complication to this crazy deadline. But yeah, it was interesting. Thanks a lot, Candace, uh, nay, uh. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go to our website, Stuff You Should Know.com, and you can send us a good old-fashioned email to Stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. How serious is youth vaping?

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I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And we're best friends and journalists with a new podcast called No Suarez. Such Thing, where we get to the bottom of questions like that. Why are you screaming at me? I can't expect what to do. Now, if the rule was the same, go off on me.

I deserve it. You know, lock him up. Listen to No Such Thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. No Such thing. Welcome to Pretty Private with Ebene, the podcast where silence is broken and stories are set free. I'm Ebeney, and every Tuesday, I'll be sharing. in all new anonymous stories that would challenge your perceptions and give you new insight on the people around you.

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