The Deck - Kellie Poppleton (9 of Hearts, California)

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

Our card this week is Kellie Poppleton, the 9 of Hearts from California. Fourteen-year-old Kellie Poppleton was brutally assaulted and murdered on December 2, 1983, and for almost 40 years, calls for justice have gone unanswered. But now, with advancements in DNA forensics, detectives are more hopeful than ever that they might be able to find their killer. They hope that the renewed interest in this case will give them the final piece of the puzzle and to bring the family the justice that is so long overdue.If you have any information regarding the 1983 murder of Kellie Poppleton, please call the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office at 510-667-3636. To learn more about The Deck, visit www.thedeckpodcast.com. To apply for the Cold Case Playing Cards grant through Season of Justice, visit www.seasonofjustice.org

Our card this week is Kelly Poppleton, the nine of hearts from California. I've been looking forward to sharing Kelly's case with you all because it is so close, and I mean like investigative inches away from finally being solved. And after almost 40 years of her case going unsolved, detectives are now ready to share new information that has never been released to the public. Information that with your help could get Kelly's family the answer to the question that they've been asking for decades. Who killed Kelly? I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck. It was about 5.30 pm on Friday, December 2, 1983, and this evening was anything but normal for a man named Hans Krueger.

Unlike every other Friday night before, Hans wasn't just leisurely making his way home. Something happened on his drive. And when he tore into the driveway of his small California mountain town home, he rushed to the phone to make this call. I live with one thousand, kill-care road in the middle. And on my way home tonight I found a body on the side of kill-care road at approximately 500. 500 right, the address. Yeah, it was about halfway between the north and my house. Here at one thousand.

Where you say it was a body? Yeah. How's the air at night? Female body with the bag over it in. Passed where I pulled out. At about 500 kilk, at about 500 kilk. After hearing this call, which was edited down for clarity, by the way, the operator wanted to dispatch an ambulance as well as law enforcement.

The thing is, Sonoma, California is a tiny town, like less than 1,000 people, so it didn't have a police department or a hospital. So in addition to sending units from the County Sheriff's Office and an ambulance from the nearby town of Fremont, operators dispatch the local Sonoma fire department. Two firefighters were the first to arrive on the scene at 540, just under 9 minutes after that call came in.

When firefighters arrived, they saw exactly what hands described. On the side of the road was a woman's body. Her blue jeans were pulled down around her knees, and there was a brown garbage bag over her head. She was only wearing one shoe, and according to firefighters, she was twisted in a weird way, almost like she'd been thrown out of a moving car. Firefighters couldn't find a pulse and immediately wanted to start CPR, which meant they needed to get the bag off her head.

It was secured with a black coaxial cable, like the kind that runs cable to your TV. When they cut it off, they found another bag underneath it that said welcome to Korea and duty-free on it. And they also found a grey men's sweater. Now, it's not clear whether these two items were also over her head or if they just happened to be inside the garbage bag, but regardless, as soon as firefighters were able to get everything off, they could see that the young woman's head was covered in blood. They quickly cut off a red polka dot neck tie that was tied tightly around her neck and started CPR. Evidence be damned.

At this point, they were trying to save her life. After about five minutes, the ambulance from Fremont arrived. They loaded her up and got her the hospital by 10 after six, where doctors continued their life-saving efforts. While medical personnel were fighting to save her life, deputies, with the Alameda County Sheriff's Office, were arriving at the scene where she was found. Since the woman had already been taken to the hospital, there wasn't any chance of preserving the crime scene. But detectives were able to catalog the evidence that had been cut off of her and left at the scene,

the two bags, the sweater, the cable, and the neck tie. They also took measurements and photos that were obtained by our reporting team, which you can see on our website, thedeckpodcast.com. It wasn't long before detectives got the news. The victim had been pronounced dead only about 10 minutes after arriving at the hospital. Patrol units went out to the hospital to see if they could identify the woman.

Unfortunately, they couldn't find any form of ID on her, so her name was still a mystery. But as soon as the deputies saw the woman's injuries, one thing was certain. They were dealing with one of the most brutal homicides the area had ever seen. The trauma to her head was severe. She had a large open cut on her chin, a skull fracture above her right eye, and several other wounds on the back of her head that were still bleeding. While they knew she'd been pretty severely beaten, they wouldn't know the full extent of her injuries until the autopsy, which was scheduled for the following morning.

That autopsy was performed by Alameda County Pathologist, and they determined that the victim's cause of death was expixiation due to strangulation, not manual strangulation, but more like with a ligature such as the necktie or the TV cable, and she had multiple blunt injuries. They also concluded that she had been sexually assaulted and while they still didn't know who the woman was, they estimated that she was somewhere between 18 and 22 years old. She had short reddish brown hair, blue eyes, she was 5'5", 123 pounds,

and she didn't have any scars or tattoos. She was wearing a red and white striped blouse and a blue jacket with blue jeans, which, like I mentioned earlier, were found around her knees. Detectives' first move was to start looking through the missing person's reports to try and find one that matched her description. While they were doing that, they sent out an extremely detailed bulletin describing her appearance and clothing to other law enforcement agencies in the area. And they sent out a slightly less detailed bulletin to the media.

That same day, the news started to break that a body of a young woman had been found on Killcare Road. Sometime after 3am, the Sheriff's Office got the call that they'd been waiting for. A woman named Teresa Rusk told the Sheriff's Office that she had seen the news stories about a girl's body being found and she was worried that the girl was her teenage daughter, Kelly Poppleton, who she had literally just filed a missing person's report for 24 hours earlier. Kelly's stepdad Tracy agreed to go down to the coroner's bureau to identify the body because Teresa didn't want to, probably because she didn't want to see her daughter like that if it did turn out to be her.

When Tracy saw the body, he confirmed their worst fears. The woman who was found on Killcare Road was Kelly. And she wasn't 18 to 22 like the coroner thought. She was only 14 years old and in the eighth grade. So now that they knew who their victim was, they needed to find out how this middle schooler ended up beaten and strangled on the side of the road. Teresa and Tracy told investigators that at 8.45 am on December 2nd,

they dropped Kelly off at the middle school that she attended in Fremont, which was basically a school for students who struggled with truancy. See, there had been a lot of turmoil in Kelly's life in the past few years, which led to some issues with school. Teresa explained that after she and Kelly's dad divorced a few years ago, and she'd married Kelly's stepdad Tracy, Kelly had been moved around a lot, bopping between houses. Teresa and Tracy finally settled into an apartment complex in Fremont that summer, but unfortunately they'd recently been evicted and just a few days before Kelly

went missing, they all moved into a hotel. And all of this moving around had definitely taken its toll on Kelly, so less than a month earlier, she'd been transferred to the Opportunity School. So on the afternoon of December 2nd, Kelly's mom was expecting that when Kelly got out of school at 1pm, she was going to take the bus northwest to the ambulance service, where Theresa and Treesa both worked as dispatchers. When Kelly didn't show up at their office a little after one, they were concerned, yes, but not panicked. They just expected that when they got off work that evening, they would go back to the hotel

and there they'd find Kelly. But when they did get off and they did go back to the hotel, she wasn't there. They still weren't super concerned, though, because they assumed that she was just hanging out their old apartment complex and maybe just lost track of time. Because even though they didn't live there anymore, Kelly had a lot of friends over there, and it wasn't unusual for her to go hang out there in her free time. But when Teresa and Tracy talked to her friends, they said that they hadn't seen her at all. And that's when Teresa and Tracy really start to worry.

They searched the area for hours and couldn't find Kelly anywhere. So that night, at 11.30 p.m., they contacted the Fremont Police Department and filed a missing person's report. By the time they saw the news, the next day, it had been more than 24 hours since they'd heard from Kelly. So that's when they feared the worst and contacted police. After getting that call, and once Kelly's identity was confirmed, detectives picked up their investigation in the last place that her mom and stepdad saw her at school. Kelly's

teacher told them that she had been at school all day and even stayed a little late to finish an assignment. And then, some of her classmates told police that Kelly took a bus to her old apartment complex. There was also a convenience store called Double O-Lickers and a shopping center in this area, so it was basically like the ideal pre-internet teen hangout spot. Some kids who knew her from her old school told police that she went inside the convenience store to get a book of matches, then she called her boyfriend from one of the payphones on the side of the building. Police thought that the payphones might have been the last known sighting of Kelly.

But then, that same day, two boys from Kelly's previous middle school came forward and told police that they spotted Kelly at around 230 walking behind them when they were strolling down Darwin dry, just north of double o'lickers. But, here's the thing. It wasn't just Kelly that they saw. These kids also reported seeing two men standing next to a cream-colored, plimmed duster that was parked on the opposite side of the same street. When the boys looked back moments later, Kelly was gone. And the men were sprinting toward an apartment complex in the opposite direction of Kelly's

old one. So, this is promising, yeah, but one problem. Since the two boys who reported seeing the guys had only seen the guys from across the street, they couldn't give a super detailed description of them. Certainly not enough that police could go looking for these two men. So, police asked around for other eyewitnesses. Specifically, anyone who was near Killcare Road or downtown Sonol around the time Kelly's body was discovered.

One witness described seeing a light-colored 70s Dodge Colt or Dotson B210 driving recklessly off Killcare Road, maybe at around 530, that was right before Kelly's body was discovered. And another witness said that they saw a black or maybe dark blue Pontiac Transampart somewhere on Killcare Road around the same time, but neither of these witnesses could describe the drivers. So police started with the only lead that they could actually get traction on, Kelly's

boyfriend. There wasn't a specific reason why they suspected him, but from what they'd been told, he was one of the last people to hear from her, so they definitely wanted to talk to him. Kelly's mom actually knew her boyfriend and approved of the relationship, so he wasn't hard to track down. He was an 18-year-old man named Mitchell Reese. Mitchell Reese agreed to an interview, and to detective surprise, he claimed that he hadn't gotten a call from Kelly that day, which directly contradicted what Kelly's old classmate told police. Mitchell agreed to

take a polygraph, and he passed, but detectives weren't fully satisfied. So they got the phone records from the payphones outside of the convenience store and determined that no calls were made to his number. He was telling the truth. So detectives moved on. For a few days, detectives thought the leads in this case might have been drying up. They didn't know where else to turn. But then, on the evening of December 9, a week after Kelly's body had been found, police got a call from a woman that led them to a shocking confession.

The call was from a woman named Pam, who said that her 13-year-old daughter, Trina Bens, had information about who killed Kelly. Investigators dropped everything and headed to their home in the wee hours of the morning on December 10th. And what Trina had to say absolutely flored detectives. And buckle up, because this story is quite a bit to unpack. Trina told police that she, Kelly, and another 13-year-old girl who were going to call Beth, all sold drugs for a man who she knew only as Mario. She told investigators that Mario lived in her apartment complex, which was right by where Kelly used to live. According to Trina, Mario, and a 17-year-old boy who also sold drugs with them and who

were going to call Chris, had recently gotten into some legal trouble. And they thought that Kelly had snitched on them. Trina told detectives that Mario and Chris asked her to bring Kelly to a location where they could get her into their car so they could, quote-unquote, pay her back. According to Trina, Kelly came over to her school, which was about a 15-minute drive away early in the morning on December 2nd, just before school started. Now, right off the bat, Trina's story doesn't really make sense to detectives because Trina's school started before Kelly's, and remember, Kelly's mom and stepdad had said

that they dropped Kelly off at her own school at 845 that morning, and her teacher said that she'd been own school at 8.45 that morning, and her teacher said that she'd been in school all day. But detectives have no reason at this point to think that Trina would lie, so they just keep listening to what else she has to say. And she continued, she told police that when they were together that morning, she asked Kelli to meet up at Double-O-Lickers after school, because that's where Mario and Chris had told Trina to take her. Trina said Kelli came to school again at around 2.15 and they took the bus to 00.

For some reason, she said that she and Kelly got on the bus at different stops, but when they got to 00, Mario, Chris, and Beth, that other 13-year-old girl, were all sitting and waiting for them in Mario's cream-colored 1973 Pontiac Grand Prix. Trina said that she and Kelly got into Mario's car and the group headed towards the Null. On their way there, Trina said that Mario and Chris started beating Kelly. Now detectives were a little confused about the logistics of this, so they asked who was driving, and Trina said Mario was.

She claimed that he was beating Kelly while driving. She said they stopped along the road at some point, and he continued assaulting Kelly outside the car. She said one was wearing some kind of weighted gloves, and they were beating Kelly with clubs. Trina said that Beth participated in the attack as well by holding Kelly down while the two guys assaulted her. She even mentioned the bag over Kelly's head

and some kind of cord or wire being tied around her neck. After the attack, Trina said that they put Kelly back in the car and continued driving towards Sonol where they dumped her and then left her to take her last breath alone in the cold on Killcare Road. Detectives were understandably flabbergasted hearing this story.

I mean, Trina was implicating four people, including herself in Kelly's murder. On top of all of that, investigators were shocked that this story of such brutal violence was coming out of the mouth of a 13 year old girl, a middle schooler. But as shocking as it was, in a lot of ways, Trina's story actually made sense. Like parts of her story were matching up,

like the locations, double o'lickers, and killcare road, even Kelly's injuries, and the bag over her head. And possibly, most compelling, Mario's cream colored 73 grand prix, which could have easily been mixed up with the Plymouth Duster that those two boys saw parked on Darwin Drive. So with information about this car and the apartment complex he lived in, it didn't take detectives long to identify the person that she was calling Mario. He was 27 year old Julian Ramirez. And listen, law enforcement wasted no time. They arrested Trina and Julian that evening, and Chris and Beth early the next morning.

That day, all three of them, Julian, Chris and Beth were interviewed separately. They all gave statements denying any involvement in Kelly's death and each provided alibis. So the next few days were go time for detectives. They got busy trying to vet these suspects alibis. So, the next few days were go time for detectives. They got busy trying to vet these suspects' alibis. They searched Julian's car and found some suspicious stains that they thought could be blood, so they sent samples out for blood typing to see if it was the same type as kellies. They also found that the trunk was wet, like it had recently been cleaned, which was obviously very suspicious.

All in all, things weren't looking good for this group. But as investigators followed up on their alibis, they found that their stories were actually checking out. On top of that, they started to see more and more holes in Trina's story. Detectives interviewed her multiple times over the following days, and as they did, small details in her story started to change. For one, she told them that instead of writing the bus to meet Mario and Julian, she and Kelly had actually gotten picked up by him, and they had all gone to double

o-lickers together. She also changed her story to implicate her boyfriend at the time, which definitely had detectives scratching their heads. So, not only was the story changing, but as detectives were trying to corroborate what she was saying, that's when they really saw that things weren't adding up in a big way. Specifically, they were looking at the timeline after school. That's what didn't make sense, because Trina's school day ended at 2.15, and her school was like 15, maybe 20 minutes away from where Kelly had last been ended at 2.15 and her school was like 15, maybe 20 minutes

away from where Kelly had last been seen at 2.30. So for Trina's story to make sense, she would have had to make the 15 minute trip, which would have inevitably been longer by bus. She meets up with Kelly and they have to be on their way in Julian's car in just 15 minutes. So it could still technically be possible if witnesses had gotten the time slightly wrong or if the bus had been running ahead of schedule or something, but it was definitely a stretch. It's at this point that police went and talked to Trina's brother, who often looked after

her. And that's when Trina's story really unraveled. He said that on December 2nd, he and Trina had gone home together after school, and they'd gotten off the bus at 305, 35 minutes after Kelly had last been seen. At this point, detectives were really struggling to make Trina's story work. So they went to go question her again and ask her, what was she not telling them? For this episode, our reporting team traveled all the way to California to talk directly

to Detective Patrick Smith with the Alameda County Sheriff's Office. He's working on Kelly's case today, and he told us what Trina told detectives this time. Now let's get down to the truth. What is really the truth, Trina, because now you're saying some other guys involved. And she says, none of it's true.

I wasn't there. The investigators were, I think, really kind of stunned. How would you have known some of these things that you've told this Trina? And she basically said, I read the news reports. I read the news articles. I read the news articles, I watched news reports. I basically just used that and the questions you asked me and the things that you said, I just made the whole thing up.

Police were not just shocked, they were a bit embarrassed. Here, they had four people behind bars based on this teenager's story, which now she said was all a tall tale. Detectives were also able to test the stains in Julian's car against Kelly's blood, and they didn't match, which just confirmed what they already knew. They'd wasted precious days on a completely fabricated story. They released Chris and Beth without charging them, but they kept Julian and Jail because of a parole violation, though they dropped the charges for Kelly's murder

against him. As detectives pressed Trina on why she made up the story, she said that her mom had pressured her to come forward, and because of some unrelated trouble that Trina had recently been in, she absolutely refused to believe that her daughter wasn't involved somehow. Trina described a really rough home life, one that law enforcement didn't feel comfortable sending her back to. So even though the other two teens were released, Trina was actually held in protective custody for almost two more months until a judge ordered that she be placed into someone else's

care on February 17th of 1984. I couldn't find any follow-up on what happened to her after that, but I can only hope that she got the help and support she needed. But after her story unraveled, they were now 11 days out since Kelly had been murdered, but they were no closer to finding out who her killer was. So detectives turned toward the physical evidence. Specifically, the items found on Kelly's body. Her clothes, a dark colored garbage bag, that white bag that said duty-free and welcome

to Korea on it, the TV cable, the men's sweater, and the red necktie. And the first thing they honed in on was something strange that the crime lab technicians found in Kelly's genes. It was in that like watch pocket, you know, that little pocket inside the regular pocket that no one really uses. Well, in there, they found a folded up piece of paper with seven numbers written on it. Their first thought was that it could be a phone number, just maybe missing the area code. So right away, they tried calling it. They reached a woman in Livermore, but when they got to asking her questions, their hopes began to fizzle.

She said that she didn't know a Kelly Poppleton, and that she lived alone, so it's not like there was anyone else around using her phone. But investigators weren't just going to drop it. They looked into the woman, they looked into the woman's boyfriend, they looked into her boyfriend's friends and associates, but they couldn't find a link anywhere to Kelly. So that lead turned into just another dead end. But they did have more info on the other items found with Kelly. Like they learned that that duty free bag originated from one of four airports in South Korea. They didn't have any Korean suspects on their radar,

so they thought that maybe the person they were looking for was in the military and maybe had a connection to South Korea. Now, they also didn't have any military suspects on their radar either, but they kept this in the back of their minds for any future suspects. As for the garbage bag, it was sent to the FBI for fingerprinting.

There were some prints from one of the firefighters and a detective, which they were able to eliminate off the bat since they handled the evidence, but there were six other distinct prints that did not belong to them. Those were entered into California's automated latent print system.

This database was relatively new at the time and it relied on police agencies in California, submitting inked print cards from felony cases, which not all agencies did. So they also searched the prints through a local automated system. They didn't get any matches from either of the databases, though.

But at least now law enforcement had something to test against any future suspects. As for the sweater and the necktie, the tag on the inside of the sweater said that it was made in Korea, but that didn't necessarily tell them where their suspect had bought it. Though it is weird, right, that this is their second link to Korea or South Korea. So since they didn't know where either of these pieces of clothing could have been purchased from, they started asking around, showing people photos of all the items to see if anyone recognized them, but got no luck.

But then, in March of 1984, this is about three months after Kelly's murder, the door-knocking efforts that they had been doing actually paid off when they got a tip that looked really promising. They were canvassing Kelly's old apartment complex again, when someone brought up a name that they hadn't heard before. A 22-year-old man by the name of Juan Perez. A witness said that Juan was known to deal weed and that he was always hanging around with teen girls even though he was married.

The witness even told police that they'd seen Kelly at his apartment before. And on top of that, Wondrobe a black trans-am, which, if you'll remember, from way back when they first started investigating, a witness said that they saw that kind of car parked alongside Killcare Road at around the time Kelly was found. Investigators brought Wondon for questioning questioning and he told them that yes, he did know Kelly, they lived in the same apartment complex after all. But he didn't know anything about her murder. He even submitted to Apollegraph, which came back inconclusive. Weirdly, Juan actually worked for the company owned by Hans, the man who found Kelly's body.

Detectives weren't sure whether that meant anything or not, but they definitely thought it was an odd coincidence. With all of the connections and inconclusive polygraph detectives really thought that this was their guy. Without any real evidence, investigators had to let Juan go. And at this point, the case was growing cold. Weeks were passing without any other leads. Winter turned to spring, and

detectives were still no closer to getting answers for Kelly's family. So detectives went back to the drawing board again, looking at the evidence and trying to connect any dots that they could. They may have had a couple of theories at that time, but what they really had was more questions than answers. They suspected that it could be more than one person who killed Kelly, because A, it looked like Kelly had been thrown out of a moving car, so one person would have needed to drive while the other person disposed of her body. And B, there wasn't any evidence that Kelly had been tied up, and they suspected that more

than one person would have been needed to restrain her. They also theorized that, whoever they were looking for could have been local. I mean, for one thing, Killcare Road was extremely remote, and there would have been no reason for anyone who didn't live there to know it, and since this was pre-GPS, it would have been really hard to find as well. But again, who these local killers could be was still a total mystery to them. So in May, detectives reach out to the Behavior Analysis Unit at the FBI, you know, the ones that shows like criminal minds and minehunter are based off of. And they

asked them to come up with a psychological profile for their killer. The BAU told them, kind of what detectives had suspected. They were likely looking for more than one offender. The offenders would be in their late teens or early 20s, unmarried, and regular users of drugs and alcohol. So I mean, this was helpful in giving them a pretty good idea of who they were hypothetically looking for, but police didn't have anyone to test this profile against. And from what it sounds like the FBI profile was actually pretty general.

But over the next year, detectives still kept up the work. They re-interviewed people. They followed any new tips that came in, but not a single one was panning out. And by this point, Kelly's case wasn't the only unsolved murder in the area. The East Bay area actually had three other cases of girls who had been murdered under similar circumstances to Kelly. The Alameda County Sheriff's Office had actually formed a task force back in May of 1984 to investigate a connection between Kelly's case and two others.

And then, when a fourth girl was killed in November of that year, they added her case to the list because they thought that they could be dealing with a serial killer. The three other girls who were killed were 14-year-old Tina Fales, who was in middle school, and two high schoolers who were both 18. Tina had been stabbed to death and the other two girls had been sexually assaulted and strangled like Kelly. All four bodies had been left in secluded areas within a 15-mile radius of where Kelly had been found, and they had clear similarities in victimology. But besides the circumstances, investigators didn't have any physical evidence to connect any of these cases together. But at this point, no lead was too far-fetched for detectives.

They even looked into the infamous serial killer pair Charles Eing and Leonard Lake. Comparing Lake's fingerprints to the ones found on the garbage bag, but nothing matched with that either. As the years passed, frustration mounted for investigators, and specifically for Kelly's family. We actually had the chance to talk to Kelly's sister Amanda for this episode, and she talked about what her family was thinking as these leads in Kelly's case dried up. At the beginning, my mom was very confident that there was a suspect I had.

She wouldn't tell me who. I don't know if it was a remorse guy. She was referring to or not. But she said that there was something happened and some, something happened and the investigation went off the rails with the whole train at bank and she said because of that, it just totally messed everything up and she lost all faith in the investigation. They've screwed up too much basically with the family thanks. And then they're going all faith in the investigation.

They've screwed up too much basically with the family thanks. But the one thing that wasn't messed up and actually became more valuable with the passage of time was the physical evidence that contained DNA. The Alameda County Sheriff's Office still had everything that Kelly had been found with in their evidence room, both bags, the TV cable, the necktie, and the sweater. So in 2004, after sitting in an evidence room for more than two decades, all of the evidence was sent to the Alameda County Sheriff's Crime Lab, where they were able to develop a full male DNA profile. Right away, they uploaded the profile to Kodis,

but they didn't get any hits. Now, this was a blow to the investigation, but not a surprise. By that point, investigators knew that their suspect wasn't just gonna fall into their laps. So from 2005 to 2014, two Alameda County cold case detectives traveled around the country, trying to find a match to the DNA, even traveling as far as Canada.

They conducted what detective Smith called a DNA dragnet, testing any past persons of interest to rule them out once and for all, and anyone else who had come up in theories or speculation throughout the decades. Even after years of looking, they still couldn't find a match. But now that they had a DNA profile, they knew for a fact that this case was solvable, and they weren't going to give up now, not when they were so, so close. By 2011, all three cases that could have been connected to Kelly's, Lisa's, Tina's, and Julie's, all had been solved using DNA evidence.

But none of the defendants in those cases matched the DNA for Kelly's killer. In fact, none of those cases even turned out to be connected. So in 2016, Detective decided to take a chance on a new way of identifying suspects through a company called Parabahn Nano-Lapse. When you conduct DNA work, say in our crime lab was to do some swab cutting, whatever it is, they end up doing the DNA processing. And getting something, they have the extracts that produce this result. A lot of times, they'll have leftover the extracts of that exam. And basically, it's a liquid form

of whatever's left over from that exam. So when we had our evidence that produced our unknown profile, we had those extracts sent to Parabond. Parabond then did something called phenotyping, where they came up with a profile of what the suspect might have looked like based on their DNA and then created a computer-generated composite sketch. And that's when investigators got back something that they had never considered. And it's something that they've never said publicly until now. Parabond comes back and with reports saying that our

undone DNA is a green male. It's kind of a huge break in the case to be able to narrow it down that way for the first time. Not knowing the suspects age at the time of Kelly's murder, the composite shows versions of the man at 25 as well as in his mid-50s. You can see both of those composites right now on our website. As far as we know, police never once had any Korean suspects or even witnesses on their radar. So for them, this result was totally unexpected. But honestly, I feel like it's not all that shocking, given that they knew the duty free

bag was from a Korean airport and the sweater was made in Korea. But hindsight is 2020. After almost 33 years, investigators finally had something solid that they could work with. Without having any computerized records, it's been hard for them to go back in time to see who was in the area that matched this profile. So instead, they put together a list of known offenders of Korean descent in the Alameda County area from around the time of Kelly's murder, doing their best to identify individuals who were living in the closest proximity to Kelly. And while doing this, they found

a promising suspect who had even lived in the same apartment complex as her. That's when Detective Smith got this other idea. Now that he knew the genetic profile of Kelly's killer, he remembered a case that had happened around the same area and the same time frame as Kelly's, that had gotten a ton of press back in the day. It was the unsolved case of Francis Rache. Francis had been killed in 1979 in Dublin, California,

which is about 25 minutes from where Kelly lived. She'd come home to find her children tied up, and while she tried to fight the killer off, her children escaped and called the police. Now, her children had seen the suspects, so they knew for a fact that they were looking for an Asian man in his late 20s, the same description of the person who had killed Kelly.

So there was a chance that the same person who killed Francis Rache also killed Kelly Poppleton. But even if that wasn't the case, Detective Smith knew that the suspect list in the Rache case file would still be full of people who matched the description of Kelly's killer. And guess what? He found something in that case file that looked really promising. There was an arrest law from October 1984 that recorded the arrest of two Korean men for kidnapping a woman in Castro Valley, just 10 minutes from where Kelly was last seen.

One of them was in his early 20s, the other in his early 30s, and one of them lived just one and a half miles from where Kelly was last seen. From the two kidnappers, detectives were able to identify another potential suspect who was a close associate of one of the men. He too matched the description and had a criminal record. So they now have three suspects from the rash case file, and that other suspect that they had found who lived in the same apartment complex as Kelly. That's four viable suspects, but Detective Smith still needed to test their DNA against the sample that they had

found in Kelly's case. In listing the help of the FBI, they gathered DNA from all four suspects. But after all that hard work, not one of them matched. And so that is where you come in. That's what we're hoping to get is with release and misinformation. Was there someone known to her, someone in that area, someone that might, all for all I know, was there a friendly maintenance guy at the Department Complex that was of Korean descent that we can go talk to, that we can at least try to eliminate or someone that no one ever thought of that had in factuation with her, who had said something to her, who never

really was necessarily looked at as a suspect, but now with this information someone says, hey, you should check out, so and so, and allow us to do the investigative work to try to rule them in or out. Detectives also haven't given up hope when it comes to genetic genealogy. Maybe if they could match the DNA to a family member or a distant relative, they could trace it back to someone who lived in or around the area where Kelly was killed back in 1983. With their full DNA profile, detectives know it's only a matter of time before this case gets solved. When we talk to Kelly's sister Amanda, she shared a little bit about what Kelly was

like growing up. She told us that Kelly was a prankster. She loved to play Dungeons and Dragons. Her favorite movie was Fast Times at Ridgemont High. She also loved to go to Oakland A's games, so much so that her family buried her in her A's jacket. And they couldn't bring themself to go to a baseball game after her death. She was kind and caring, more like a second mom to her little sister than an older sibling. And I want to leave you with a story about what Kelly was like in Amanda's own words. She was really funny, really funky. She liked to play practical jokes on my mom like, pulled her guys. The movie was a big bang back then.

And so she sent me up in front of the TV and taught me to say, you're here, but TV on a snowy channel called my mom had me to break my mom out. And she got grounded for that. The anniversary of Kelly's murder is just a few days away. And her sister Amanda is still holding out hope that someone out there will finally come forward. I hope that, you know, somebody saw something, somebody knows something. somebody saw something, somebody knows something, and I just hope that, you know, whoever that person is will find my, you know, do the right thing and give us some peace and give Kelly some peace. So please go take a look at the

composites on our website and if you know someone who could be the person in that sketch and could have been in the Fremont area around when Kelly was murdered, or if you know any information that could be helpful, please call the Alameda County Sheriff's Office at 510-667-3636. The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the Deck, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So, what do you think chuck? Do you approve? Visit thedeckpodcast.com

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