A word of warning this podcast explores graphic and disturbing stories and includes some strong language it therefore may not be suitable for our young listeners or other folks who may find it disturbing hello and welcome to true crime dailies my favorite case i’m your host anna garcia and everyone in the world of true crime has a story to tell about a case that they worked or that they lived through some are high profile some you’ve never heard of but they are all absolutely fascinating today’s case is about a nine-year-old

girl who went missing while going door-to-door selling mints for campfire girls of america two weeks later she was found murdered and she had been sexually assaulted for 60 years that little girl’s killer got away with murder until finally dna evidence identified a suspect surprisingly the killer’s own daughter helped authorities obtain that dna our guest today is kristin middleman the chief development officer at othram labs authorum is a private dna lab based out of houston texas they are known for being able to analyze human dna from the

tiniest of qualities in the most degraded form ever kristin we are so thrilled to have you we are huge fans of the work that other labs does here we’ve had your ceo david on who also is your husband and we’re just thrilled we are so thrilled to discuss this case with you welcome thank you so much for having me on the show i really appreciate it uh you know right before we started recording you were telling me that you and david you know you’re the two chiefs of other lab that you all met um in a lab yourself at

baylor medical school unbelievable yeah so 20 years ago we were at baylor college of medicine it was the beginning of our medical career and we were both pursuing phds we were trying to see gene therapy would work in neurons i made blind mice and david cured the blind mice and in the process of that project i realized that we were a great team and we could probably solve any problem together and so here we are 20 years later working on dna repair still and trying to figure out how to piece together our identities

and bringing closure to people it’s extraordinary i mean you all take the dna that other labs cannot process and can’t do anything with and it’s like this niche and as i’ve said to you and and people who are regular listeners to our program know i am a huge fan of other labs because i’ve seen the work that you’ve done um case after case after case so i can’t wait to get into the details of this case with you kristin and we’re so thrilled to have you guys back on the program thank you so much i i do think that it’s

not justice unless it can provide be provided to everyone and for every case and and that’s sort of our our mantra here at other and we we purpose built so that the cases that seemed impossible or intractable to other labs in the past are now possible to solve and there’s hope for everyone and and it took a long time to sort of figure out it took decades of of research that came from the medical field that we then transposed into forensics over the last three or four years but the whole purpose of what we do is to be

able to give people answers and closure on cases that they thought would never be solved or on evidence that they thought would never be able to be used to get answers from it’s extraordinary and part of the process is we find out a lot sometimes not only do you identify a killer but you also rule out maybe the person who was suspected in top of the list for decades and had absolutely nothing to do with it so it’s um it’s really fascinating the effects that your work has not only on those who are most likely guilty but on those who are

innocent yeah the blast radius on these cases is huge and and one of the reasons i picked this case to speak about today or we chose this case is because it does have that huge blast radius when we tell the story we’ll talk about the suspect that they thought was the perpetrator in the case that wasn’t the law enforcement agents that were affected by the case the family members that were affected by the case it just it’s an entire community it’s not just a few people and even when someone isn’t prosecuted for a

crime many times they’re a suspect for that crime and if you’re a suspect for a horrible crime like this one like a rape and murder of a young child your life isn’t the same in that community we have met people that were on the suspect list for 46 47 years and had run away and and couldn’t live a normal life and then when we identified the actual perpetrator they told us that they could see the sun for the first time and felt like their life had just started over it it really really does affect so many people and without true answers and

closure it’s very hard to close these investigations it really is it just this case is amazing not only because of how heinous it was but also how long ago it happened so let’s talk a little bit about the details candice candy rogers was nine years old she was a fourth grader who lived with her mother in spokane washington she was a member of the blue birds and that’s the younger member of a younger group of the campfire girls of america so on the afternoon of march 6 1959 she left her home to sell mints door-to-door

very innocent of course you can picture her she had seven boxes to sell she was confined to her route in her neighborhood and then within a few hours of leaving to do this her family became very nervous because she didn’t come home and remember we have to all remember it’s 1959 not only isn’t there dna technology there are no cell phones there’s no internet i mean you basically you call on a landline or you holler to your neighbor or you drive i mean that’s i mean that’s it there’s nothing else and so all the neighbors joined in the search

police joined the search by 9 pm that night they found some boxes and abandoned boxes of the mints that she was selling and they found it on a road near the fort george wright bridge but there was no sign of candy um the next morning again more searches continued a lot of volunteers joined the air force the marine corps i mean everybody who could possibly search for this child did and there was a disaster um in the air because there was a sikorsky helicopter that was being used at the time to search for the child

and it crashed killing the five air force airmen aboard so there was tragedy upon tragedy we’re painting a picture here so everyone can understand what was going on in real time so two weeks after her disappearance two people hunting in the area found a pair of shoes that belonged to candy rogers and the next morning her body was found but they never found her killer it’s almost as if this story to a degree and the case to a degree ended there kristen how well preserved do you believe again 1959 totally different even policing is

different how well preserved was the evidence of what evidence was there so i think the detectives must have done a great job of collecting the evidence especially because like you said this was 1959 and there was no no dna technology available at the time and absolutely no idea that they would ever be able to use some of this evidence some of this dna to actually track down the perpetrator in the future yet um the dna sample that we received here at authrom later on it was extracted and in their state lab but the dna sample that we received was

actually in very good condition meaning that this sample was i think what’s extraordinary about it for us is that it was a completely ordinary sample it was from 1959 yet with our process and yet our process is purpose-built for forensic samples and we do take into account all of the different um variables that could occur for example degradation severe degradation when something is 62 years old especially dna it is degraded into tiny fragments othram’s process is insensitive to dna degradation contamination from non-human components

i mean she was found out in the wilderness so obviously there were other components that contaminated that sample those are things that arthrum is purpose-built to avoid but with our process the sample was able to be processed quickly and without any um major hurdles or delays and we were able to build a very good dna profile that eventually led to the identity of the perpetrator it’s interesting in the sense that from my understanding that you don’t extract the sample that the dna sample has to be extracted generally it’s

either a state lab a police lab you know whoever the the police department contracts with and then that is sent to you that you don’t do the extraction you do the analysis is that correct no we do both and so many times we do the extraction if the extraction is from something very difficult or it’s very minut amounts of dna that people haven’t worked with in the past we do the extraction from the actual evidence here at othram but there are many investigations that have been ongoing for years and years this investigation really plagued the

community in washington and when we went to the press release at the end the detective said that for 62 years they worked an investigation actively so when dna technology had initially started coming into play they extracted that dna for testing then and then when advanced dna technology came into play they tried again and this is one of those cases that went to multiple labs before it came to other and no one could use the dna or build a profile from it but when it did come to our lab thankfully there was still

enough dna and i think this is the part of the story that is that is the most important for me for everyone that’s listening to understand dna is consumable so every time you run the wrong reaction or send it to somewhere where they may or may not be able to provide answers it unfortunately destroys that dna and with it goes the last chance of having someone identified or getting justice for someone that you love because they’re tiny pieces sometimes and there is actual destruction of that piece of physical evidence to get the dna correct it’s

consumed and so you’ll run the reaction and then you may not get a profile and then that evidence is gone so by the time we got the evidence there was very little left and it was sort of the last chance that this case had to to identify someone and and we actually have a very stringent qc process we won’t consume evidence unless we’ve done it’s gone through our qc process and we know we can build a profile but most places don’t have this sort of qc step in advance and they would just consume evidence hoping that they will

be able to get an answer i think that in the future i hope that in the future there are standards created in forensics that require everyone to know that they can bring value before they consume the last bit of evidence that’s that’s honestly that’s just a basic moral thing if you know that this is the absolute last shred of evidence and your testing of it will destroy it you better be damn sure that yeah nothing is worth risking that because these answers are needed and as we talk about the end of the story and

how it resolved you’ll hear of so many people that were affected by finally figuring out who the perpetrator was and that’s something that you know would have been lost in time people would you know people wait for these answers for decades and decades and decades but no one lives forever and it’s it was absolutely necessary that someone got the answer for them investigators determined that the little girl had been strangled to death and that she had also been sexually assaulted strips of her clothing had been used to restrain her

and also to strangle her and this is going to be very important when we look into who the suspect ends up being the investigation into her murder spanned decades and honestly the careers of of many detectives over that time so then in the early 2000s kristen you were kind of referring to this so dna technology is changing and um there was a breakthrough in the case when the forensic scientists in washington were able to isolate what they believed to be a semen sample from her clothing so this would have been the

first attempt at some kind of dna analysis however you all were not in existence yet and dna technology in the 2000s was in its infancy compared to where it is today i would say yeah correct it was codis testing and codis testing is incredible at being able to tell you if a person is in the known perpetrator database but that known perpetrator database wasn’t even in play until the 1990s so obviously the person that was the perpetrator for this crime couldn’t have been in the known perpetrator database so it’s almost

impossible to get those matches for older cases such as candy rogers case yeah so what’s interesting here and i’m gonna i don’t know what this is apparently um an str profile uh was created what is str so those are markers that are found in our dna genome and so code is testing so i’ll start from that because it looks at 20 different markers in your genome and it compares your known locations these of these markers and these markers are unique enough to where i can tell if it’s me that’s in a database or not or

if it’s you that’s in a database or not and so they’ll do a one-to-one match and you can see if if the perpetrator is is known for a previous crime or is linked to previous crimes unfortunately codis cannot identify someone we look at hundreds and hundreds of thousands of markers on someone’s dna genome that’s that’s the difference in the technologies and by looking at hundreds and hundreds of thousands of locations we’re able to upload this dna profile to genealogical databases consented for law enforcement use and were able to piece that person’s

identity back on a family tree and figure out who the dna actually belongs to and that identifies who the perpetrator is and then coda’s testing comes back in because it’s the standard and it’s what’s been used for decades and decades and it confirms this identity so in the case of candy rogers because this case was so high profile and because they had gotten it wrong in the past and because they just weren’t sure about this technology working on something that is that old i think this is one of the oldest sex assault murders

ever um solved using advanced dna testing um they actually exhumed the body of the perpetrator and did a codis test at the end to confirm that we actually got the right person amazing it’s just it’s it’s really amazing and how that came about as well so as we said in the early 2000s police do come up with a dna sample but they are unable to figure out who it is and nothing’s coming up on the database what is interesting in the process as this goes through even you know while you’re working with while they’re working with

other is that there had been someone who had been identified by the authorities early on and he was already someone serving a life sentence for two other homicides the man’s name was hugh morse and so the two homicides had been committed uh from 1959 to 1960 so again in that sweet spot of time area and he is not ultimately he’s not the one who was responsible for candy’s death so it was interesting while because when authorities have in their head they think oh it could be this person that doesn’t mean they don’t look at others

but it also means they focus a lot of attention on that one person and this one was truly not the suspect so then in february of 2021 now we’re really i mean now we’ve moved almost two decades in dna technology the spokane police department reached out to you all at other labs to ask if you could assist now um so you get the sample march of 2021 and as you were saying you all were able to not only come up with the profile but then you searched all these databases and you narrowed it down to three brothers it’s unbelievable and the

reason i would presume that it’s three brothers is because my guess is that the dna for the three was very similar and would need further investigation so yeah so you when you when you’re trying to figure out where they fit on a family tree it’s almost if you can imagine it’s like a puzzle piece that is a certain distance from this match and a certain distance from that match and then this match it’s like little sonar waves and you’re trying to fit the puzzle piece in the exactly right place on that tree and those three brothers

are the same generation very similar age they would have had the same grandparents the same great grandparents the same relationships and so we knew that one of those three brothers had to be involved and that’s why here at author and we say that we provide back investigative leads we do not provide back solves we don’t solve cases ourselves we provide the investigators with the names of people that were involved or could have been involved in the crime and then they have to continue the investigation and they have to

figure out through their normal and investigative ways how each one of these people were or were not involved in the crime so now empowered with these new details the police department starts their search and what they found is that one of the brothers had died in 1970 at the age of 30 and was survived by a wife and a daughter investigators reached out to the daughter to see if she would be willing to at least help confirm if they were on the right track so at this point they’re having a conversation because i

don’t think they’re far enough in it to know you know what how far can we take this and to this woman’s credit um she participated and gave a dna sample because what they said was we’re trying to figure out could it have been your dad or was it one of his brothers here’s what we’re trying to do and the amazing thing is that when her dad died i believe she was about the same age as candy was when she was murdered so that really you know there’s just something very powerful there about the human spirit so the daughter provides the dna swab

and then the forensic team was able to establish in their opinion strong enough paternity between the unknown male in the dna sample you all processed and their labs had processed so then a search warrant was served and as you mentioned that made it possible for the authorities to exhume this man’s body the woman’s dad to exhume the body and how unbelievable he’s buried at the same cemetery as candy is i mean what are the chances right now and then the forensic team was able to confirm that the dna found on candy matched this man john

huff hofff hoff was never previously suspected or connected to the case in any way he died by suicide in 1970 he was 31 years old now at the time of candy’s murder john would have been about 20 years old and the possible connection as people are trying to figure this out is that he had a younger stepsister who was also in campfire girls so that’s a possibility right um it’s hard not to look at that and again by the time this was solved by the authorities with the help of other labs candy’s relatives have passed you know

they didn’t survive to find all this information out and then you know the killer’s widow then police have to go to the killer’s widow and then the four children that she has and tell them the truth about who this man was which i can’t even imagine what that was like how jarring is that to find out the truth about your dad so the the daughter um who assisted with this i mean she really is um she’s really remarkable i think you know because there she could have thwarted this but instead of that she cooperated and

helped another family which is a gift and so she told the new york times that she thought that her father was depressed and now she knows why and now she knows well she called him evil for killing candy and she also said she was very sorry for what he had done to candy and her family um then it’s determined as they as police are trying to go through this to figure out okay so who is this john you know what’s the possible connection and they determined that about two years after candy’s murder john hoff was convicted listen to this of grabbing a

woman undressing her tying her up with her own clothes and strangling her he ran off before killing her so she survived he ends up serving six months in jail for that crime it’s unbelievable but back then you wouldn’t have had an internet you know you wouldn’t have had for example let’s say whoever the arresting officer in that case if that officer didn’t know the details of candy’s case and using the clothes to tie up and all that there’s no way this would have been pieced together back then that’s correct there was no way to put the pieces

together unless you were working both cases and that’s the that’s the unfortunate technology wasn’t there yet to help investigators be able to link cases together now it is and like you said they when they investigators tend to focus on the person of interest and in this case there was a person of interest that made a lot of sense he had committed other crimes that were very similar at a similar time frame he was in the area and he hadn’t been arrested and there had been no one else in that specific area that they knew of that was

committing those types of crimes at that time frame and so um they they did think that it was him and i think that led to wanting to close the case and and trying to figure out how to link the clues together what’s really exciting about dna technology is it doesn’t have context we don’t see what’s in a case file we don’t know anything about the evidence that we receive in the lab all we know is here’s the dna and this is you know perpetrator dna or victim dna and it’s found on this object or it’s an extract of dna from this object we don’t

have no idea what’s going on in the investigation and so when you’re able to build one of these profiles no one will match at hundreds of thousands of markers and be a false positive so there is no risk of a false positive you identify a person that was found that left dna at the crime scene whether they were the victim or the perpetrator and it’s just fact it’s science and like david says it’s not science fiction it’s science fact and that leads to being able to truly bring answers and sometimes the answers are

hard answers to hear like for example like you said um his daughter who was an incredible human for for participating in the investigation and um i don’t think that she should have had to say sorry i felt that way but she was and she was very happy to help and bring closure to these other people um and in fact one of the detectives said that she was not surprised when she got that phone call which is sort of a an odd statement to make she was willing to participate and felt like maybe it would give her some answers as

to what had happened with her father and maybe why he was so depressed or why he committed suicide and so maybe closure comes in the way of answers you don’t want to know or you don’t want to hear but it’s still the truth and i think the truth sets us free i think the truth is something we need to know in order to move forward almost all the cases that we’re working here at often people tend to pause their life when they lose their loved one when something terrible happens to their loved one and they try to figure out about anything else what

happened to them who did this to them and and their whole focus becomes trying to get answers and their life really does stand still until they get those answers people ask me all the time why why is it a rush why do you have this turnaround time and you’re focusing on rushing solving these cases that have been unsolved for decades and decades and decades like why not just not worry about turnaround times and the reason is just like you said candy’s family her immediate family passed away before they were able to get these answers

that’s why it’s a rush people need these answers to move on and unfortunately no one no one’s here forever and so she had some family that attended the press release cousins that were quite affected by what happened to her but her immediate family didn’t find out what happened to her and i can’t imagine um passing away with that burden of not knowing what happened to my loved one the new york times had this beautiful photo of candy sitting holding her her dog and when i saw that you know when you put a face to the name

and the case and the story it just completely changes everything it really does the innocence the idea that she’s selling mints i mean you know i’m sure she set out happy and innocent and excited to sell her boxes and and it ended ever so tragically for her so tragically for her and again i just think it’s amazing how you all are working on these cases and and and your technology is also being used like i i know this happens all the time with all of you you’re even identifying people who like how were found dead right

20 30 40 years ago but nobody knew who it was and there are all these families out there wondering like you know you’ve been able to answer the question what happened to my mother my aunt my dad my brother it’s it’s extraordinary you’re also doing that not just solving a murder case but solving the identity of a person who was found dead and who are they that’s absolutely true and most of the time that we’re able to identify a victim it leads to an open investigation into the crime by being able to provide that identity of that person the

investigators can go out and piece together the last few weeks of their lives talk to their family find out where they went i mean i’ll give you an example we um there was this 19 year old girl she was nine months pregnant her name was evelyn colon and she was found her remains were found cut into pieces in a suitcase at the bottom of a lake and we were able to identify her from those remains and she was never even reported missing so investigators were kind of puzzled when we gave them the identity of this person and they were like you know she’s

not a missing person she was in a completely different state um so they contacted the family and the family said no she’s alive she writes us letters she she’s happy and the perpetrator was sending letters home telling them that she was fine living with him and then they were able to go find him and arrest him he was a taxi cab driver and now he’s standing trial for his crime but that would have never been solved had we not been able to identify who she was oh my god that case really gave me chills i can’t believe it

it is crazy that is really crazy maybe after the trial and he gets sentenced we should we could actually do the whole story that would be great that would be great uh because that’s extraordinary extraordinary to me we see like in cases where people go missing in those first few days um text messages will be sent from their phone and family members feel like you know that’s just not the way my relative talks therefore we don’t think it was her or him but the fact that this person was like writing letters and just

keeping this whole pretense up is extraordinary no it’s it’s more often than you think even the case the latest case we broke the mammoth lake case um she they had a forward letter to her family saying don’t look for me and that forge later came from her perpetrator um i mean often these perpetrators if they know the victim right to the families or tell the families not to worry or give them a reason for why the family member went away somewhere and so they’re not looking for them and until we’re able to identify that victim

they’re not able to pursue the investigation because there’s no missing record to connect it to i mean even though there’s databases and technology that missing record isn’t even there sometimes people don’t even know they’re missing someone and they just think their family member is estranged and doesn’t want to be in their life we solved the case where a wife and a husband had an argument and he left and never came back and she thought he left because he was angry she left her at the hotel with their child and then she found out that the same day

he was actually murdered and right down the street 40 years later um you know but that’s that’s closure that she probably needed because she thought this person just left because a relationship wasn’t great right um you know you don’t want to find out that your loved one is missing or your loved one is deceased no one wants to find out better information or that your loved one is is a perpetrator in a crime but figuring out the truth i think sets everyone free and i think it’s so important and i think it’s the only way

to tell everyone’s story a candy deserves her story told she deserves justice for what happened to her um evelyn colon deserved to to be pieced back to her family and for her family to know she didn’t just not want to be part of their lives you know these people they deserve their stories told in full and i think that’s the most meaningful part of what we do here at other we piece families back together and we bring the closure to cases that would otherwise remain as just question marks forever do you have a huge

backlog or or is it like is everyone like banging on your drawers saying you must test this you must test this which is kind of what i do you know to your husband now i’m going to be doing to you i’m like going to be calling saying oh my god this is the case for you any time um so we do we do we are very grateful to be scaling the way that we’re scaling we’ve moved into a new facility today that’s five times larger than the facility we the lab facility we had before we are getting to a capacity where we can run you know thousands and thousands

of cases at once and not just hundreds or a few um i think um david announced at crime con that he believes we’re going to help 10 000 families get answers over the next three years um that’s huge and i think that we’re scaling this impact quickly very very quickly um that said we are still the only lab in the united states that is purpose-built to use advanced genomics and the most powerful sequencer on earth for forensics and it’s not even just using the sequencer we’ve spent 20-something years building or creating the processes that are used

to to sort of work through this technology and we’ve now tailored it all to forensics and i feel like if this is going to change the world and solve all 250 unsolved cases 250 000 unsolved cases in the united states and 40 000 unidentified remains i mean that’s that’s known as a silent mass disaster it’s horrible and in order to be able to do that more people will have to start adopting this technology and using it just like we did in medicine we set the path and created the ways and i’m hoping that one day this advanced forensic

testing will be done correctly in all these forensic labs all around the country and then we’ll live in a world where there are no more backlogs where people know who committed a crime the first time they committed a crime you don’t have to wait for the second third and fourth time and where people know where their loved one is they don’t have a cold case where they’re missing someone and they don’t know for decades what happened to them again extraordinary work that you do and while there are tons of detectives out

there and families you know banging on your door saying we’ve got the next case for you what troubles me more would be the cases that are truly sitting ice cold meaning it’s been a cursory look maybe they never ran any of the existing evidence for dna and you know that that’s the case that that especially for the cases that were for the crimes that were committed before there was dna technology and the collecting of dna evidence that to me is i feel where where we need to we we need the biggest push right there has to be something

that we we can do to help and i don’t know what that is other than public pressure which is kind of what i do with this podcast and and do in my own life in advocating for victims because the families if they are still alive they are the ones who have got to push the prosecutors and the police departments to open those cases to start testing to get a dna sample in order to get it to the others of the world that’s right and what you’re doing is so hugely important because there’s a lack of education out there people don’t know

how massive this problem is how many cases are unsolved how many cases sit in backlogs and then people also don’t know that there’s this new technology that’s not fiction it exists here today it’s able to work we were able to solve a sex assault murder of a 14 year old girl in vegas with 0.

12 nanograms of dna that’s the equivalent of 15 human cells if i had touched my hand i’ve left hundreds of cells 15 human cells from 32 years ago of a mixture of perpetrator and victim and we were able to identify that perpetrator so you don’t need a large quantity of dna we’ve worked dna and bodies that were found in sewage tanks for decades imagine the contamination there you can’t even imagine it right we’re able to separate that contamination we’ve worked with charred remains we’ve worked with all sorts of things that people would think

are intractable inputs the technology works almost every time today but unfortunately there’s no awareness there’s no federal funding for this technology yet all the federal funding is still guided or most of it is still guided towards legacy technologies and there’s no understanding that testing the backlog doesn’t mean that you’re actually going to solve the backlog so they’re working a lot of these cases using legacy technology or maybe a lab that isn’t purpose-built for for this maybe a medical lab medical labs or

consumer labs they run dna that is fresh it came out of someone’s mouth today and and that’s the complete opposite of forensic dna so we are the only lab that’s tailored our process to actually work on forensic evidence and unfortunately when you run forensic evidence through other processes you consume it with no result when you run it through older techniques that may or may not provide an identity you consume it with no result so what we do most of the time for unidentified remains codis only works one percent of the time so 99

of the time you you run the test you’ve consumed the dna and you’re not going to get that identity for sex assault it’s about 15 of the time one five 85 percent of the time you’re running the test but you’re not getting that investigative lead to solve the case so what are we doing we’re going from an untested backlog to a tested backlog where you’re not getting a solved case or you’re not getting that investigative lead right because the universe is not the universe you should be testing it you need something much wider than the

limited codas you know right the criminal dna so it’s time to take this new backlog of tested kids that have no results that have no leads and capture their their value by creating one of these more powerful profiles that allow you to identify the perpetrator in a forensic environment and so i think that’s what we’re here to do i’m working really hard to try to explain the differences and explain the value that can be captured if this technology could be funded with federal funding and that it should be funded with federal

funding and i think we’re getting there um we’re at the early stages of sort of pilot programs people trying to see can you do this um if this amount of money is given how many cases can be solved but i do really believe that in the next few years we’ll live in a world where this is standard and it’s going to be standard done right because like i said early on it’s terrifying to leave the kids on a shelf but at least those have a hope of being solved one day it’s even more terrifying to consume the dna with technology that doesn’t work or may or

may not work thereby consuming someone’s last chance of figuring out where their loved one is or catching a perpetrator of a crime it’s incredible you you are truly changing how cases are being solved and it’s extraordinary and you are disruptors and you are at the forefront of this and that is so important it is so important i’m so thrilled so thrilled of that you came on the program thank you for everything that you all do i’m so glad that you’re a friend of this podcast and that we can always like call you up with cases pushing buttons here

and there um you push from your side i’ll push from our side you are incredible and i thank you for bringing awareness thank you for for bringing up technologies on your podcast i know you know sometimes people are more interested in the stories and the science but the science is necessary in order for these stories to come into light and so absolutely what you’re doing yeah so kristin where can people find out more information on other as far as your digital footprint anything like that because i know you all are

constantly updating your social media absolutely so dnasolves.com is our site you can go we now have a map of the united states on there you can click your favorite area and look at the cases we’ve solved there you you can go to cases look at solved cases you can look at cases we’re trying to crowdfund where we’re crowdfunding until we can bridge to the federal funding for these types of cases there are so many cases out there that will never get worked only because of funding um there you can share cases where we’re

working you know we’ve had a case solved without any dna testing at all our advocacy group dna salt advocates on facebook shared the case on their social media and someone recognized the person and called law enforcement to solve the case we did it one to one how do i join this group i want to join this group dna solves advocates it is such a cool group i think we have um like over 8 000 people already and and these people they just tell all these stories and they share these stories and they try to find other cases that may be

good candidates for the technology and it’s probably one of the most encouraging groups i’ve ever been part of and we couldn’t do what we do without the support that we have from people like you in the media from people um in this group that truly have become advocates for the technology a lot of them are family members that got answers because of the technology so they’re there to tell their story and how this has affected them and pay it forward um it’s a very organically built coop and it’s it’s incredible and it honestly

makes me want to go to work every day and do it over and over again a thousand times so that i can give more people the same kind of answers because i know how much it means to them oh that’s fantastic i can’t wait a new group yay honest i can’t wait either you can find me at energy news anna with 1n on all social media platforms you can find this episode and all of our podcasts wherever you get your podcast subscribe to true crime daily’s youtube channel if you want to watch rather than just listen and of course sign up for

our newsletter truecrimedaily.com i’m your host anna garcia this has been a special edition of true crime daily the podcast from the my favorite case series thanks everyone bye kristin bye thank you so much i really appreciate it you