Washington 1959 Cold Case Solved — A Sealed Glass Jar Kept His DNA for 62 Years
Um, by that point, you know, I had already looked up you know, the someone that a little girl murdered in 1959, so I knew who it was. It’s just really sad to find out that someone, not even that it’s just your dad, but just someone in your family could do something like that. And he could he committed suicide.
I had lived most my life thinking he did it because he was very depressed or something, and now I think no, you know, that’s he was uh evil. He was evil, and he couldn’t escape getting away from it, but he got to die with people thinking he was an upstanding man, and he wasn’t. >> 6:30 p.m., March 6th, 1959.
A 1953 Ford accelerates east on Maxwell Avenue, clips the curb hard as it swings north on Belt Street, and a man searching that block has to throw himself out of its path. He has been walking these streets for an hour, calling a name into the cold Pacific Northwest air, checking every yard, every porch, every face.
The car disappears. The street goes quiet. He has no idea what just drove past him. He won’t know for 62 years. That man was a grandfather. The name he was calling belonged to his granddaughter, a blond-haired, blue-eyed fourth-grader from Holmes Elementary, 4 feet, 4 inches, 60 pounds, seven boxes of Campfire Mints, a dog named Shep waiting at home.
She never made it back, and the city that loved her spent six decades trying to understand why. Welcome back to Crime Watch Central, where no case stays cold forever. Before we get into this one, drop a comment right now and tell us where you’re watching from today. We read every single one. And if you’re new here, hit like and subscribe.
It costs you nothing and it keeps us digging. Now, let’s get into this case. Her full name was Candace Elaine Rogers. Everyone called her Candy. She lived with her mother, Elaine, a high school history and PE teacher, in a half apartment above a neighborhood grocery store at 2106 and a half West Mission Avenue in the working class heart of West Central Spokane.
Her grandparents lived next door. She had a dog named Shep and a grandmother who gave her oatmeal cookies. She was shy by nature, small for her age, but she was a Blue Bird, the junior level of the Camp Fire Girls of America, and that membership meant something to her. It gave her a target. March 6th, 1959 was the first day of the Camp Fire mint selling season.
Candy left Holmes Elementary at 3:15, picked up her seven boxes from her troop leader by 3:30, and came home to wait for the official 4:00 p.m. start time. In that half hour, she sat with her grandmother. She talked through her route, which neighbors would definitely buy, which doors to try first.
She was not nervous. She was excited. She had a plan. Sell enough to earn her sales badge and get into the running for a free week of summer camp. At exactly 4:00 p.m., she stepped out into the cold March air. The timeline that followed was precise and it mattered. 6:30 p.m.
, she was last seen alive on the 2100 block of West Maxwell Avenue, confirmed by people who knew her. Seconds later, that 1953 Ford accelerated away at speed, and her grandfather had to dodge out of its path on Belt Street. Whether the driver saw him doesn’t matter. What matters is what he was carrying. 9:00 p.m.
Six of Candy’s seven mint boxes were found scattered along North Pettit Drive, climbing the hill Spokane locals called Doomsday Hill. Not dropped, scattered, as if thrown from a moving vehicle. A partial fingerprint was lifted from one box, preserved, and sent to the FBI. It was never identified. By nightfall, every person in Spokane understood what the scattered boxes meant.
This was not a child who had gotten lost. By morning, 1,200 of them showed up to find her. Marines, Boy Scouts, utility workers, mail carriers, people on horseback. Two bishops, Bernard Topel of the Catholic Diocese and Episcopal Bishop Russell Hubbard, took to radio and print, asking anyone with information to come forward to a minister in confidence, under the protection of the confessional.
Every available officer from both the Spokane Police Department and the County Sheriff’s Office was assigned. The command post sat at the foot of Doomsday Hill, right where her mint boxes had been found. Then the search compounded the city’s grief. On March 7th, one day after Candy disappeared, a US Air Force Sikorsky H-19 helicopter, flying low over the search corridor, struck high-tension power lines and plunged into the Spokane River.
Three men were killed. Airman Marlis D. Ray, Staff Sergeant William A. McDonald, Lieutenant Kenneth G. Fawstek. Two others survived. Three men died looking for one child. Spokane was now grieving in two directions at once. 16 days passed. Tips arrived from across the country. Hundreds, then thousands. Detectives followed everyone.
No arrest, no trace. On March 21st, two airmen from Fairchild Air Force Base were hunting off old trails road, about 7 miles from Candy’s home, when they came across something near a tree in the brush. A pair of small blue suede shoes. Not dropped, placed. They returned to base, reported it, and a search party arrived at daybreak the next morning.
Within minutes, they found her, buried under pine branches and brush, about 50 yards off the road, near an abandoned rock quarry. Retired Spokane police Captain Richard Obering was one of the officers who pushed the brush aside that morning. He would carry what he saw for the rest of his life. He would still be alive 62 years later when the man responsible was finally named.
The cause of death was strangulation. The ligature was torn from her own clothing. Her ankles were bound with another strip of the same garment. The medical examiner’s report documented additional injuries that told investigators this had not been her only suffering that day. Every piece of evidence was cataloged, every item preserved.
The investigators in 1959 had no concept of what future science would be able to extract from biological material sealed in glass, but they preserved it anyway. One of them, name unknown, never recorded, sealed a semen sample inside a glass mason jar and closed the lid. That jar sat untouched in an evidence locker for 60 decades.
It was the only reason this case was ever solved. For 40 years, Spokane detectives believed they had their answer. His name was Hugh Bion Morse, a serial killer, a predator of women, a man who had been in Spokane at the time of Candy’s death and who preyed on targets that mirrored her almost exactly.
A grape gum stain on her clothing, noted during the 1959 autopsy, appeared to link him to the scene. Morse was known for that specific flavor, found at multiple crime scenes. That observation hardened into near certainty over four decades of slow investigation. It was an assumption. It was wrong. There was a second name that briefly surfaced during the original search, Alfred Graves, a local man found to have collected news clippings about violent crimes against women and children.
He died by suicide the morning Candy’s body was discovered. His timing was never explained. His name was never cleared. It became one of the case’s many unanswered edges. Then came 2001. Detective Mindy Connolly submitted Candy’s preserved clothing to a forensic lab. Scientists extracted a semen sample from the preserved evidence and for the first time in 42 years, built the investigations into its first complete DNA profile.
They tested it against Morse. No match. The profile was entered into CODIS, the national DNA database. Zero results. The real perpetrator had never been arrested for anything that put his DNA in the system. He had never appeared in a single tip, a single report, a single name in four decades of investigation. The case went still again.
In 2007, Spokane Police Detective Brian Hammond sat down with a news crew and opened the binders. Boxes of tips, hundreds of statements, a pair of Candy’s shoes still tagged as evidence. The case file had grown into the largest in department history. Hammond had spent years working it.
He looked at the camera and said what every detective on the case had believed, “Some detective will solve this case someday. Not if, someday.” The file was passed forward. The real name had never once appeared. The man who left semen on Candy Rogers clothing had lived in the same city, raised a family, and died before anyone thought to look at him.
Nobody knew to look. Brittany Wright grew up in Spokane. As a child, her parents told her about Candy Rogers, not as a news story, as a warning. “Watch where you go. Remember what happened to that little girl.” The case had been woven into how Spokane parents raised their children for decades.
Wright grew up, studied forensic science, and joined the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory Division. In 2018, when the Spokane Police Department began a systematic reassessment of its cold case files, Candy’s folder landed on her desk. She was not a stranger to it. She had known its outline since childhood.
The timing was not accidental. That same year, California investigators had used a then new technique, forensic genetic genealogy, to identify the Golden State Killer, a serial offender who had evaded law enforcement for 40 years. The method worked by running crime scene DNA through consumer ancestry databases to find distant genetic relatives of the unknown subject.
Genealogists then built family trees backward until the search narrowed to a single name. The moment that arrest made international news, cold case units across the country pulled out their oldest files. Spokane asked the question immediately. There was a problem. The DNA in the Mason jar, while preserved well beyond what it should have been, had still degraded across 60 years.
In 2020, Wright submitted it to a private genealogy laboratory. They declined the case. Too degraded, they said. The case was effectively at a wall. CODIS had returned nothing. Every traditional lead was exhausted. Wright described what remained in the jar as being down to the very last drops. Then she heard about a laboratory in Texas called Othram, the world’s first private DNA lab built specifically for law enforcement work on degraded, contaminated, and near depleted biological evidence.
They had developed a proprietary method called forensic grade genome sequencing, built for exactly this kind of case. In February 2021, Wright contacted them. In March 2021, what remained in the jar shipped to Texas. Othram worked through the spring and summer. Labor Day weekend, September 6th, 2021, the case file received its first new name in 62 years.
Othram had built a genealogical profile and run it through an ancestry database. The results had narrowed to three brothers, all deceased, all from Spokane. John Ray Hoff, James Andrew Hoff, Terry Allan Hoff. Genealogy cannot distinguish between brothers with near identical DNA profiles.
To identify which one had left his DNA on Candy’s clothing, investigators needed a living relative. Only one of the three had children. Sergeant Zack Storman picked up the phone and called a woman who had spent her entire life believing her father died because he was struggling with depression. She had no idea what was coming. Within 45 minutes of that call, she walked into Spokane Police Headquarters, but she already knew.
In those 45 minutes, she had searched online. She had found the story of a 9-year-old girl murdered in 1959 while selling Camp Fire Mints. She walked through that door already carrying the weight of what she suspected. Her name was Kathy. She volunteered her DNA without hesitation. September 8th, 2021, Brittany Wright concluded that Kathy’s DNA was 2.
9 million times more likely related to the suspect profile than any random person from the general population. Her father had left that evidence. But investigators were not done. With no living suspect, no trial, and no adversarial process, the burden of certainty rested entirely on them. They needed to be as sure as science could make them.
September 23rd, 2021, they executed a search warrant on a grave at Riverside Memorial Park on the edge of Spokane and exhumed John Ray Hoff. October 1st, 2021, the result, the DNA recovered from Candy’s clothing was 25 quintillion times more likely to belong to John Ray Hoff than any unrelated person.
The number 25 followed by 18 zeros. That is not a number that leaves room for doubt. Every case on this channel is weeks of digging, records, documents, court files, real lives. If this story is hitting you, take a second to like and subscribe. It keeps us going. And now, back to the man the investigation never once saw coming.
>> John Ray Hoff was born August 11th, 1938 in Spokane, his own city. He grew up on the 2500 block of West College Avenue, less than 2 miles from where Candy Rogers lived. He was not an outsider. He was local, known, woven into the same streets and neighborhoods. And his path toward what he did to Candy was not a sudden break.
It was a line with visible points along it, if anyone had known to draw it. As Sergeant Stormont would later say at the press conference, “This level of crime, this isn’t where a person starts.” 1955, Hoff was 16. He escaped from a state juvenile reform facility near Olympia and was caught near Yakima. That arrest pushed him toward the military as an alternative.
He joined the US Army at 17 and was assigned to the Nike missile defense site protecting Fairchild Air Force Base just outside Spokane, his own city. On March 6th, 1959, he was 20 years old. He lived at 2211 West Broadway Avenue, 1 mile south of 2106 and 1/2 West Mission Avenue, where Candy had started her evening.
When the speeding Ford swung north on Belt Street and a grandfather had to throw himself out of its path, that may have been Hauth. The cold open clicks into place. 1961, two years after Candy, Hauth was arrested in the Browne’s Addition neighborhood of West Spokane. He had attacked a woman, forcibly removed her clothing, bound her with strips of it, and strangled her with another strip before something interrupted him.
She survived. The method was exact, the same garment used to bind, the same garment used as a ligature, the same choice he had made with a 9-year-old girl two years earlier. Candy had not survived it. This woman did only because he was interrupted. He served six months. The army declared him a deserter and dishonorably discharged him.
He drifted, selling cutlery door-to-door, then working at Western Pine Lumber, then a meat packing plant. He was not building a life. He was filling time. And then there is the detail about Hauth that cuts deeper than any of the others. He had a step sister. In 1959, she was 10 years old, a Camp Fire girl, one level above Candy in the same program.
She had been assigned as Candy’s big sister, the older girl whose job was to guide the younger Blue Bird through the program. She knew Candy. She cared about Candy. When Candy disappeared and the city came apart searching for her, this girl sat next to her brother, next to John Hauth, and cried.
She told him how much she missed her little Camp Fire sister. She told him how terrible it was. He sat there. He listened. He said nothing. She has been in her 70s for some time now. When the case was finally solved and Sergeant Storman tracked her down to deliver the news, she was, in his words, absolutely heartbroken.
She had carried that grief for decades as an innocent bystander, never knowing that the person responsible for it had absorbed her tears without flinching. Now, for the detail that makes the room go quiet. John Ray Hoff died in 1970. He shot himself. The date he chose was Kathy’s birthday, the day she turned 9 years old, the same age Candy was when he took her life.
Whether that was guilt working its way out or something darker, he carried that answer with him. But Kathy, who spent her entire life believing her father died because he was struggling with depression, now understands the day differently. In a videotaped statement played at the November 19th press conference, she did not look away. He was evil.
He got to die with people thinking he was an upstanding man, and he wasn’t. >> He was uh evil. He was evil and he was it wasn’t escape, getting away from it, but he got to he got to die with people thinking he was an upstanding man, and he wasn’t. >> When investigators went to locate where Hoff had been buried, they found something that made the room go still.
For 51 years, John Ray Hoff had been interred at Riverside Memorial Park on the edge of Spokane, yards from the grave of Candy Rogers. While her family visited and wondered, while her cousin JoAnn Poss stood at that headstone asking the same question year after year, her killer lay in the same ground, same cemetery, same silence, same city. Nobody knew.
When Kathy and the Hoff family learned this, they made a decision without being prompted. They arranged to have his remains moved to a different cemetery. No one asked them to. As Sergeant Storman put it, they did it so Candy could enjoy some peace. Joann Poss heard that and was overcome. She said her heart truly went out to the Hoff family, the people absorbing the weight of what their father had done, the people who had unknowingly lived beside this truth for decades.
That gesture from the killer’s family to the victim’s family was not justice, but it was the only thing they had the power to give, and she accepted it. At the press conference, retired Captain Richard Obering sat in the audience. He was one of the officers who had pushed the brush aside in March 1959 and found what John Hoff had left behind.
He had carried that image for 62 years. He was still alive when the name came. “I thank God,” he said, “that I lived long enough to see the end of this case.” When a reporter asked Sergeant Storman how many hours had been invested in the Candy Rogers investigation across six decades, Storman didn’t answer in hours.
He said, “This isn’t measured in hours. This is measured in careers. Three generations of detectives had worked this file. Three generations had handed it forward with the same unspoken agreement, don’t close it. Don’t give up on her.” The last generation did not. Candy was 9 years old. She wanted to earn a badge.
She had a dog named Shep, a grandmother who gave her oatmeal cookies, and a street full of neighbors she was genuinely excited to visit. She had a future that was hers by right. It was taken from her on a cold Friday afternoon by a 20-year-old soldier who lived 1 mile away and never once entered the investigation. 62 years, 8 months, and 13 days.
That is how long she waited. In 1961, Hoff attacked a woman using the same method in the same city and served 6 months. If that sentence reflected the true danger he posed, if anyone had looked at what he was instead of what he’d been charged with, would a 9-year-old girl’s name needed 62 years to get an answer? That question does not have a comfortable answer.
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