August 13, 2025 • 35 mins
In 1959, nine-year-old Candy Rogers went missing while selling mints in Spokane, Washington. The city mounted one of the largest missing persons searches in state history, yet the case remained unsolved for more than 60 years. This episode traces the start of a mystery investigators called the “Mount Everest” of cold cases, one that DNA would eventually help crack.
America’s Crime Lab is a true crime podcast about how science solves cold cases, missing persons, and other unsolved cases. Hosted by journalist and clinical psychologist Elin Lantz Lesser, and powered by Othram’s forensic DNA lab, the show connects the science to the story, revealing what really happens in the lab and why it matters.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is a case that we had supervisors, We had
people here who said, quit wasting time on that case.
This is not going to be solved. I got nervous
about being the one carrying the ball right there on
the one yard line, because, oh God, I got to
go through something that really good detectives have already failed
(00:21):
that and hope that you can somehow find that needle
in a haystack.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
In March of nineteen fifty nine, police and spoke Hanne
Washington began searching for nine year old Candy Rogers. The
investigation would turn into one of the largest in Spokane's history.
For sixty two years, no one knew who had taken
her and dumped her body in the woods. Local law
enforcement call it the Mount Everest of cold cases. It
(00:52):
was the crime that every officer was desperate to investigate,
but no one could solve. This is a mayor is
Crime lab. I'm Alan Lance Lesser, producer Catherine Fanalosa is here.
This case really affected generations of people who lived in Spokane.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
So Alan, this is one of the oldest sexual assault
cases ever to be solved with Authorum's new DNA technology,
and it's a case that no other lab would touch
because of the age and condition of the evidence, which
I'll get to in a second.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
So what's the story.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
This is nineteen fifty nine, Spokane, Washington. Candy Rogers is
a nine year old girl and she lives with her
mother above a grocery store, and her grandparents actually own
the grocery store and they live next door.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
I love when the family can be all close together
and convenient to have the grocery store there. I can
picture it. It's friendly, probably more rural than it is today.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Yeah, and Candy was an only child. Her mom, Elaine,
was a high school teacher and she also co the
boys tennis team. Candy's grandparents were super involved in her life,
really helping to raise her. People describe Candy as kind
of small for her age. She was just shy of
four and a half feet tall. And Candy is a
(02:15):
junior member of the Campfire Girls of America. Her group
is called the Bluebirds.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Oh yeah, the Campfire Girls. I think my mom was
a part of that back in the day. It's kind
of like the Girl Scouts.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Yeah, and just like the Girl Scouts, they have a
program to sell Instead of cookies, they sell mints. So
she has seven boxes of mints to sell, and she's
super excited. She's come up with a plan with her
mom that on the very first day of mint sales,
she's going to go door to door after school. So,
(02:49):
you know, you can kind of get the picture. I
don't know if you're a girl scout.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
I did brownies and then quit, so oh kind of
in a sense failed.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
So the Bluebirds are sort of the brownies. I think
of the campfire girls.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Oh okay, so I can relate. Yeah, it's too perfect
that her name is Candy too, and she's selling mints.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
I know. It's very sweet. So she goes to school
and on her way home she sees some neighbors. She
gets home.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
They have a dog.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
She plays with the dog in the backyard. She has
a little snack, and they have a rule with the
campfire girls. I think that you're not allowed to sell
mints before four pm. So even though some of the
neighbors on her way home who saw her were like, hey, Candy,
we want to buy mints, she sticks to the rules
and she's.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Like, I will come back after four.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
So four o'clock comes around and she heads out and
she starts going door.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
A woman of her word.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
She also has a rule with her mom that she
needs to be home before dark, and at this time
of year, dark is sort of five thirty five forty five,
so the sun is setting and Candy does not come home,
and it's getting later and she's still not home. Her
grandparents and her mom obviously are very worried, and they
(04:10):
start going door to door. They find a neighbor who says, oh, yeah,
she came by and we bought some mints. They go
to some other houses where they're told, oh, a little
girl came, but we didn't buy any mints, so she's
definitely been in the neighborhood. But they still can't find her.
And now Candy's family is really worried and they call
(04:32):
the police.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
So her family felt in their good that she wasn't
like hanging out at a friend's house.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Yeah, I guess she was really good about being home
before dark, the whole rule she had with her mom.
But I called Sergeant Zach Stormant with the Spokane Police
Department to find out more. He said, once police got
the call from Candy's family, they pretty much immediately started
canvassing the neighborhood.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Initially, patrol officers respond and they recognize this as a
big deal right away. So they do a pretty good
job tracking the homes that where she showed up. They
found a home where she did sell a box of mints.
They found others that where she tried and they said no.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
So police are trying to create a map of what
route Candy may have walked, and they establish a command
post in this area of town called Doomsday Hill, where
they actually set up a roadblock to stop cars.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Seems like very quick action by the police.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
And within hours they have hundreds and hundreds of people
looking for her. They're volunteers on horseback, motorcycles, they're police
cars going around. There are no signs of Candy, but
eventually they do find boxes of the mints that she
was selling, and they find them scattered on the side
(05:58):
of the road, and based on what they find and
how many homes they know she went to, they can
determine that these are the mints that Candy was selling.
They don't know why they were scattered.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
That's so haunting to imagine we have a crumb of
her path or what happened to her. But she's disappeared.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
So night falls and there's still really no sign of Candy.
For the next two days, more people turn out to help.
At one point there were like fifteen hundred people involved
in the search. There's the Marines, air Force, veterans, the
postal workers, police are even ferrying neighbors on the backs
(06:42):
of motorcycles and dropping them off to conduct grid searches.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
WHOA, I feel like it just shows how difficult these
types of searches can be.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
And every morning the two local newspapers are running front
page stories on Candy's disappearance. Basically, all of Spokane is
searching for this little girl, and then Sergeant Stormant says
something happens.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
As bad as it was, things got worse. The Army
sent a helicopter to help.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
So the Spokane River cuts right through the city, and
it's really impressive. Allen parts of the river are really wide,
with these steep, rocky banks, and there falls that tumble
over rocks right in the heart of Spokane. And so
the thinking is maybe Candy walked down near the river
and she could have possibly fallen into the water. So
(07:36):
the military deploys a helicopter to search above the river
and its banks.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Everybody that knows this area knows that that river. One
of the features of it is high attension power lines
crossing it because there's so much hydroelectric power in this area.
The helicopter hit those lines went down into the water.
(08:03):
There are a lot of people out searching the river
banks already, and they saw it and described it as
an explosion. When it hit the power lines.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
The helicopter tumbles down into the river. There are people
searching along the river banks for Candy and in boats
on the water. So they quickly rushed to the crash site.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Were they okay?
Speaker 3 (08:28):
So there are five airmen on board and only two survive.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Oh god, yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
And it seems like everyone in Spokane either has a
connection to Candy or to one of the airmen. And
now the entire city is grief stricken and there's still
no signs of Candy.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
It makes me think that she's somehow hidden, or she
was taken sore and is being held by someone. You know,
if they're searching that thoroughly with that big of a team,
it's kind of spooky.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
About sixteen days after Candy is last seen, there's a
break in the case.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
There's a couple of airmen from Fairchild Air Force Base
who decided to go hunting.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
So a couple of guys from the nearby base head
to a wooded area to hunt, and it's about seven
miles from Candy's home. And as they're making their way
through the brush and pine needles, they notice a pair
of girls shoes.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
I feel like, it's surprisingly common to see random things
when you're on a hike.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Yeah, and actually these airmen don't really think anything of it,
and so they go on hunting. But at the end
of the day, one of the airmen is like, you
know what, that's kind of bothering me. And these two
shoes are placed very neatly and perfectly next to each other,
(10:08):
and they airman think, okay, that is super odd. They
definitely did not drop out of a bag.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
That is so creepy.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
And they were aware of what was going on enough
that it concerned them. They didn't report it immediately, but
as the day progressed, they thought, we need to call
somebody about that, so they called police and graveyard officers
went out for first light to search in that area.
The search did not have.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
To go far, so the police go to search this
(10:57):
area in the woods where the hunters found a pair
of very carefully placed girl shoes.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
Yeah, and Sergeant Stormant says, officers from the overnight shift
were the first ones to arrive, and they start looking
around the area, which was covered in like a bed
of pine needles and brush.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
A patrolman noticed the little girl's knees sticking out from
a slash pile, and this was in the immediate vicinity
where the shoes were found. So with that it becomes
a homicide investigation.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
The autopsy shows that Candy has been strangled with a
piece of her own slip, her feet are tied together,
and she has been savagely raped.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
How horrific. We've done so many of these cases, but
it still gets me. Are there any clues at the
crime scene?
Speaker 3 (11:57):
This is nineteen fifty nine. The evident that they have
to work with our Candy's clothes, They can't find any
evidence of who may have done this. One of the
investigators working on the case at the time decides to
put Candy's underwear into a glass mason jar to store
(12:20):
it in the evidence room. The detectives I've spoken to
said that was really a stroke of genius. It's not
how evidence was stored at the time, but the fact
that somebody did that enabled the evidence to be as
well preserved as it possibly could be.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
It's just by chance, in a way, I'm guessing.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Just by chance. Yeah, isn't that wild?
Speaker 2 (12:49):
And also in general, it seems like it strikes me
that this whole community is invested in what's happened with Candy.
Point In some ways, it seems like a lot of
things have gone right because you always hear about how
when a child goes missing, those first few hours, those
first twenty four hours are so critical, and it sounds
(13:12):
like everyone jumped to looking for her, and in a
lot of ways things were done thoroughly. People lost their
lives in the search for Candy. It was quite a search.
But then where do you go from there?
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Sergeant Stormant says, the entire community is determined to find
out who killed Candy.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Everybody has complete vested interests in this, and there's no
issue in who's going to work it. Everybody's working it
for quite a while and they followed up on many
mini leads. Tips came in from as far away as Florida.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
So they start by looking at convicted sex offen but
two people that pop up on the authorities radar, they
each end up taking their own lives. Then detectives focus
on one suspect.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
But eventually a character named Hugh Morris became interesting, and
for good reason because he was, in fact a serial killer,
did live in Spokane, and did kill women in Spokane
proximate to Candy's death.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Oh, he sounds like a prime suspect.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
Yeah. Before Candy's murder, Hugh Morse have been picked up
for indecent exposure and a string of burglaries in California.
He spent six months in jail, and after he's released,
he lures two eight year old girls into an alley
with the promise of ice cream and he molests them.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
That sounds like a story you hear as a kid
to scare you, but he's actually doing it.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Yeah, no kidding. He's eventually declared a sexual psychopath and
he's hospitalized, but then he's released a few years before
Candy disappears, and that's when he shows up in Spokane.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
So the timing lines up.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
The timing totally lines up, and within a year of
Candy's murder, Hugh Morris is suspecting of raping and murdering
at least three women, and then he's all over the place.
He moves from Spokane back to California, then Georgia, Ohio, Alabama.
All along the way he's breaking into women's homes, raping
(15:31):
and beating them to death, though a few women do survive.
He's eventually put on the FBI's most Wanted list.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
WHOA, Yeah, it feels like he's totally unafraid to commit
a slew of crimes. He's clearly a really dangerous person.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
He's finally caught two years after Candy's murder for the
rape and murder of a woman in Minnesota, and he's
sentenced to life, and that's where investigators in Candy's murder
can with him.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
He became the best suspect for a long time, and
they interviewed him in Minnesota, who was eventually caught in
serving time, and he acknowledged doing a lot of bad things,
including victimizing children and women and murder, but he would
not admit to Candy.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Hmm, So maybe he didn't do it if he's willing
to admit to all these other things. But then again,
I mean, maybe he somehow doesn't remember, considering he's committed
so many crimes, or you just never know what people's
underlying motivations might be for lying about something like this,
(16:50):
So who knows.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
And I'm thinking of Carla Walker's case from our first
four episodes, you know where initially Glenn mccurly says he
didn't do it, and then he just gets confused about
all his various suspected victims.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
That whole concept is so dark that you've committed so
many violent crimes you're mixing them up, or you can't remember,
or you can't keep them straight. Although I guess we
don't know what's happening here.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
So with few other suspects, no one is charged in
Candy's murder, and the case goes cold.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
I mean to know that this clearly innocent sweet girl
is gone, knowing also that she was brutally raped and
then killed. I mean it, It's one of the most
violent crimes you can imagine.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
And you hear about detectives saying, you know, there was
a cold case that they always wanted solved before they
were tired. Candy's case became that case for every detective
that touched that file, it becomes the largest case file
and spoke can history. So we're going to jump forward
(18:03):
to two thousand and one, DNA testing is becoming more
of a thing with crime scene evidence, and the detectives
in Spokane decide, hey, listen, let's give this a shot.
So they had Candy's underwear preserved in a glass mason
jar and they send some of that off to a lab,
(18:23):
and the lab is able to do the standard DNA testing,
which is basically they can pull DNA markers from the evidence,
which was semen on her underwear, and they're able to
develop a profile and they load it into the Federal
(18:43):
FBI database CODIS. But it's only helpful if you've committed
a crime before and you've been identified. Yeah, and there
are no hits in CODIS. It's a setback for everybody
because every time you test DNA, you essentially destroy it.
So now they have less evidence to work with, and
(19:05):
they really have not advanced the case forward because they
still don't know who this is.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
That's so frustrating.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Yeah, the case essentially sits cold again. Now we're going
to jump forward again twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen to.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Wait, how long after Candy went missing? Is that?
Speaker 3 (19:25):
So we're like roughly sixty years? Oh my goodness, And
Sergeant Zach Stormant with the Spokane Police Department. He's picked
up this case. He hears about the Golden State killer
being identified through DNA, and he starts to think, you
know what, DNA may have advanced so much, we have
(19:45):
a chance to maybe solve this case. So Sergeant's Stormant
reaches out to the same lab as before. They basically say, look,
we just don't think that we're going to get anything
more from your evidence. The that they have left is
a mixture of candies and her assailants. We don't know
(20:07):
exactly how long she was left out in this wooded area.
There's plant DNA on it, there could be animal DNA
on it. You know, it was exposed to the sun
and to the elements. We just don't think that we
can work with this degraded DNA. But it turns out
(20:30):
that Paul Hols, who worked on the Golden State Killer case,
he actually has a connection with the Spokane Police Department.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Of course he does.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
He's everywhere, and he says, you've got to call this guy,
David Middleman. He runs a lab called Authorm and I
think he might be able to help you out.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah, And as we're starting to realize not all testing
is the same when it comes to dealing with degraded
or really old evidence.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
And so Sergeant Stormant reaches out to David and Kristen
Middleman and he fills them in on the case, and
Kristen says, Candy's murder immediately hit home for them.
Speaker 4 (21:05):
We started looking into the case. Our daughter was nine
years old at the time, so reading about and she's
real tiny, and they kept describing Candy Rogers as so
small that she could only take a few of the
mints at a time when she was delivering them. It
just brought chills to both of us, and we knew
(21:26):
we wanted to try to help.
Speaker 5 (21:28):
There's like sixty years of investigative work going into figuring
out what they can learn from that crime scene, and
none of it led to the answer.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
But even David Middleman has some initial questions about the
quality of the evidence.
Speaker 5 (21:40):
The challenge here is that the crime happened more than
a half century ago. There's not a lot of DNA
left that's in any decent condition. They had been shopping
around the details of this DNA evidence to other groups.
Nobody would accept the DNA.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Surprisingly, I got a call from David Middleman. I think
that day or the next day really caught me off guard.
I'm concerned about sample size and I don't want to
consume it. I won't do that. He was very confident,
he said this isn't going to be a problem, and
given the fact he was willing to work with partial samples,
I didn't see any reason not to try it.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
So what does Sergeant Stuermant send?
Speaker 3 (22:20):
He sends Candy's underwear, which remember had been stored in
that glass mason jar. But Alan I was really curious
how he sends the evidence, because this is like a
really big deal.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Yeah, I mean, I'd be very nervous, but what else
can they do?
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Yeah, he's incredibly nervous, and he and Brittany Wright, who's
a forensic scientist with the State Police, they really have
to brainstorm on how to get the DNA to author
them safely.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Britney built crazy containers, you know, almost like a kid
in elementary school. At the egg drop competition, we talked
about just putting it on a carry on bag and
flying down and just a it that way, but Brittany
had confidence with her shipping container we could send it
that way. We did worry about that a lot because
it's a it's a terrible responsibility knowing the time is now.
(23:14):
This does look like the technology is finally here to
solve this case, and worrying about the be the one
to screw it up with a stupid air like shipping.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
Thankfully, the evidence arrives at the lab and ailen all
of it is treated just like it's at like a
state crime lab. It's immediately entered into their system and
their chain of custody. And you know, especially in cases
like this one where the evidence is so small and
so fragile, authoram really has to be precise about everything
(23:47):
because you know, remember once they test the DNA, it's destroyed,
it's gone forever. So all of this is why Kristin
Middelman from authorm says, forensic scientists open and the boxes
of evidence in a special section of the lab and
it's a highly controlled environment.
Speaker 4 (24:07):
In these vestibules, air is filtered, they dress from head
to toe, and then as they go through they have
the negative air that makes that room even more style.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
I get why they're being so careful because not only
is this maybe the last chance they have to solve
the case, but I mean, if this becomes evidence in
a trial. You don't want any contamination or concerns about
tampering chain of custody, that type of thing.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
Yeah, I mean, authoram really has to prove that their
methods will stand up in a courtroom if that's where
it ends up. And now that the evidence is cataloged,
David and his team go to work.
Speaker 5 (24:46):
So we got a lot of really great data in
spite of the fact that the quantity and the quality
of DNA was very limiting. And once we got that data,
we built a SNIP profile. This is literally a file
that just has a list of all the different markers
of DNA that we had collected, hundreds of thousands of
these markers.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
Then the DNA profile is uploaded to genetic genealogy databases
that agree to forensic investigations.
Speaker 5 (25:12):
And so once we did that, we were able to
identify distant relatives that were both genetically related to the
sample that we were trying to identify and also consented
for being used in a forensic investigation. And that led
us to a key number of individuals.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Hey, it was labored a weekend, I got a couple
emails from Mittleman saying, Hey, can you look into this
look into that small little details that to me, they
were completely in a direction the case it had no
information on.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
David Middleman wants Sergeant Stormant to investigate something.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
He asked me to look into a boy's home in
the Shahalis, Washington area and see if I could find
a roster for it for that timeframe.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
And immediately Sergeant Stormant knows, Oh my god, Authorm is
on to a completely different suspect path than decades of
detectives were.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
What do you mean by boys home?
Speaker 3 (26:15):
So it was a bit of like a juvenile home
for boys who were getting into trouble.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Got it. So the DNA led them there was it
like a specific boy who is staying there?
Speaker 3 (26:25):
The DNA profile that they had built out as they
start looking for people who are as closely related to
the DNA that they've extracted from her underwear, and some
names start popping up. And a boy, young man who
attended this home maybe related to whoever killed Candy.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
I see.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
But by the time Sergeant Stormant has looked into the
records of who attended this boy's home during these particular
years that David Middleman was interested in, David calls him
back and is like, listen, Zach, forget that.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
And the phone call came on Labor Day, and I
want to say, it was around six pm. And for him,
the CEO of the company be calling me on that
time of day, on that type of weekend, this was
going to be a big deal. And it was one
of those tingly tingly neck moments. I'm expecting a big
(27:35):
family tree, I'm expecting a lot of work to do.
Speaker 5 (27:37):
I called Zach and I said, I think I have
a lead.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
He gave me three names, three brothers, and I felt
pretty confident. I think we have the name of Candy
Rogers killer.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
In this group, Sergeant Storman is listening to David Middleman
(28:16):
and the three names all brothers, and one of them
might be Candy's killer.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Oh my goodness. It also just strikes me that this
is sixty years after Candy disappeared. So even if Candy
were still alive at that point, she would be about
sixty nine years old. Yes, And so I'd imagine a
lot of the people who are around and deeply affected
(28:43):
by this have since passed away or have aged a lot.
But the fact that people are still actively trying to
think of creative new ways to solve the case. Just
shows what a deep impact this case has because it's
almost like a generational thing. Now it's the sons and
(29:05):
daughters who have heard this story that are still being
affected and still wanting to have answers.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
Actually, one of Candy's cousins, a woman named Penny, is
still alive.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Her health was fading fast. I actually drove to her
house that night to make sure she got to hear that, Hey,
we're going to figure this out, and she was so
so relieved. It was pretty incredible to see that. The
next morning, I go in and start doing research on
those three brothers.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Now it's on Detective Storman. He needs to find out
whether these three brothers are still living and if they're not,
if they have survivors children who are alive. And you're
absolutely right, this is a very old case, but some
of the detectives that had worked on this when she
(30:01):
was abducted are still alive. I mean, it's just incredible.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
It's been following them around for decades.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
So Sergeant Stormant learns pretty quickly that the three brothers
had all lived in Spokane, but they've all since died.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Oh, so they can't ask them for DNA, are there
like any relatives they could check with.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
So he learns through the family tree that one of
the brothers, John ray Hoff, had children.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
And they were all local. Authorm had the names and
actually contact information for three of the four. They didn't
for daughter named Kathy, which made her a little more
interesting to me.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Yeah, I could see that the one that's the most
mysterious catches his attention.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Yes, So Sergeant Stormant decides to call Kathy, John ray
Hoff's daughter.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
First, she didn't answer, and her voicemail struck me as
a super kind person because it simply said I'm not available,
I'll get back to you, and something the effect of
God bless you have a great day.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
This is not a call I'd want to make. I mean,
you have to call a woman you don't know out
of the blue and say, hey, I think maybe your
dad might have been involved in a murder sixty years ago.
Oh and it's also the rape and murder of a
little girl. I mean, you're about to potentially ruin someone's life.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
Yeah, completely, I mean, he said he absolutely dreads these calls.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
I've done a number of them now. They're stressful for me.
If you run into the wrong person, They're going to
alert the entire family and essentially circle the wagons against you.
That's my fear, so finding that right person to be
the introduction to this and let them know we're not
going to view you as evil. You are the good
guy in this and you're actually a victim too, and
(32:04):
that I'm about to tear down. Your impression of a
loved one and what you thought of them is going
to be changed forever.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
But there's something about Kathy's voice and the way she says,
have a great day. She just feels approachable. So he
leaves a message with his phone number.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
I was very vague in it. I said, I'm a
detective of the Spokan Police Department. Would you please give
me a call back. I have something interesting I want
to talk to you.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
If I got that voicemail, I would be calling that
number right away.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Well, you're right, because Kathy calls back pretty quickly, and she.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Happened to be at a scene on nearby.
Speaker 3 (32:45):
Sergeant Stormant asked Kathy if she'd come by the police
station so they could talk in person.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
She brought her daughter with her, but she did come
down to the detective's building right.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Away, so Sergeant's Stormant sits down with Kathy and her daughter,
and he's asking her questions, but he's really careful not
to tip her off right away. He does mention this
has to do with an old cold case.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
It's hard. It's hard to be vague on a nineteen
fifty nine case. She knows it's older than her dad's death,
and she's very she's struck by this.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
Kathy's daughter has her cell phone with her, and Sergeant
Stormant can see she's actually doing an Internet search for
cold cases from nineteen fifty nine.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Oh my god, so much tension in this room.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
I don't want to reveal details of the case. I
still have that concern that they'll circle the wagons and
make it very difficult for me. The horror is hitting
her as we're speaking, it's hitting her daughter. Her daughter
eventually said, Mom, he's needs your DNA next time.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
On America's Crime Lab.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
It does not take a lot to turn one of
these from stone cold. No one's ever going to solve this.
To red Hot, here's a list of names.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
It takes a while for it to sing in and anger, sadness.
Speaker 4 (34:22):
Someone that a little girl murdered in nineteen fifty nine,
so I knew who it was.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
There's going to be a moment in time or use.
The cold case detective are the only person in the
world that knows who killed that person. This is It.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
America's Crime Lab is produced by Rococo Punch for Kaleidoscope.
Erica Lance is our story editor and sound design is
by David Woji. Our producing team is Catherine Fedalosa, Emily
Foreman and Jessica Albert. Our Executive producers are Kate Osborne,
Mangesh Hadigadour and David and Kristen Middleman and from iHeart
(35:05):
Katrina Norville and Ali Perry. Special thanks to Connell Byrne,
Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, Nikki Etour, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank,
and the entire team at OTHRM. I'm Alan Lance lessor
thanks for listening.
This is a case that we had supervisors, We had
people here who said, quit wasting time on that case.
This is not going to be solved. I got nervous
about being the one carrying the ball right there on
the one yard line, because, oh God, I got to
go through something that really good detectives have already failed
(00:21):
that and hope that you can somehow find that needle
in a haystack.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
In March of nineteen fifty nine, police and spoke Hanne
Washington began searching for nine year old Candy Rogers. The
investigation would turn into one of the largest in Spokane's history.
For sixty two years, no one knew who had taken
her and dumped her body in the woods. Local law
enforcement call it the Mount Everest of cold cases. It
(00:52):
was the crime that every officer was desperate to investigate,
but no one could solve. This is a mayor is
Crime lab. I'm Alan Lance Lesser, producer Catherine Fanalosa is here.
This case really affected generations of people who lived in Spokane.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
So Alan, this is one of the oldest sexual assault
cases ever to be solved with Authorum's new DNA technology,
and it's a case that no other lab would touch
because of the age and condition of the evidence, which
I'll get to in a second.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
So what's the story.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
This is nineteen fifty nine, Spokane, Washington. Candy Rogers is
a nine year old girl and she lives with her
mother above a grocery store, and her grandparents actually own
the grocery store and they live next door.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
I love when the family can be all close together
and convenient to have the grocery store there. I can
picture it. It's friendly, probably more rural than it is today.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Yeah, and Candy was an only child. Her mom, Elaine,
was a high school teacher and she also co the
boys tennis team. Candy's grandparents were super involved in her life,
really helping to raise her. People describe Candy as kind
of small for her age. She was just shy of
four and a half feet tall. And Candy is a
(02:15):
junior member of the Campfire Girls of America. Her group
is called the Bluebirds.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Oh yeah, the Campfire Girls. I think my mom was
a part of that back in the day. It's kind
of like the Girl Scouts.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Yeah, and just like the Girl Scouts, they have a
program to sell Instead of cookies, they sell mints. So
she has seven boxes of mints to sell, and she's
super excited. She's come up with a plan with her
mom that on the very first day of mint sales,
she's going to go door to door after school. So,
(02:49):
you know, you can kind of get the picture. I
don't know if you're a girl scout.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
I did brownies and then quit, so oh kind of
in a sense failed.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
So the Bluebirds are sort of the brownies. I think
of the campfire girls.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Oh okay, so I can relate. Yeah, it's too perfect
that her name is Candy too, and she's selling mints.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
I know. It's very sweet. So she goes to school
and on her way home she sees some neighbors. She
gets home.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
They have a dog.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
She plays with the dog in the backyard. She has
a little snack, and they have a rule with the
campfire girls. I think that you're not allowed to sell
mints before four pm. So even though some of the
neighbors on her way home who saw her were like, hey, Candy,
we want to buy mints, she sticks to the rules
and she's.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Like, I will come back after four.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
So four o'clock comes around and she heads out and
she starts going door.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
A woman of her word.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
She also has a rule with her mom that she
needs to be home before dark, and at this time
of year, dark is sort of five thirty five forty five,
so the sun is setting and Candy does not come home,
and it's getting later and she's still not home. Her
grandparents and her mom obviously are very worried, and they
(04:10):
start going door to door. They find a neighbor who says, oh, yeah,
she came by and we bought some mints. They go
to some other houses where they're told, oh, a little
girl came, but we didn't buy any mints, so she's
definitely been in the neighborhood. But they still can't find her.
And now Candy's family is really worried and they call
(04:32):
the police.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
So her family felt in their good that she wasn't
like hanging out at a friend's house.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
Yeah, I guess she was really good about being home
before dark, the whole rule she had with her mom.
But I called Sergeant Zach Stormant with the Spokane Police
Department to find out more. He said, once police got
the call from Candy's family, they pretty much immediately started
canvassing the neighborhood.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Initially, patrol officers respond and they recognize this as a
big deal right away. So they do a pretty good
job tracking the homes that where she showed up. They
found a home where she did sell a box of mints.
They found others that where she tried and they said no.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
So police are trying to create a map of what
route Candy may have walked, and they establish a command
post in this area of town called Doomsday Hill, where
they actually set up a roadblock to stop cars.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Seems like very quick action by the police.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
And within hours they have hundreds and hundreds of people
looking for her. They're volunteers on horseback, motorcycles, they're police
cars going around. There are no signs of Candy, but
eventually they do find boxes of the mints that she
was selling, and they find them scattered on the side
(05:58):
of the road, and based on what they find and
how many homes they know she went to, they can
determine that these are the mints that Candy was selling.
They don't know why they were scattered.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
That's so haunting to imagine we have a crumb of
her path or what happened to her. But she's disappeared.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
So night falls and there's still really no sign of Candy.
For the next two days, more people turn out to help.
At one point there were like fifteen hundred people involved
in the search. There's the Marines, air Force, veterans, the
postal workers, police are even ferrying neighbors on the backs
(06:42):
of motorcycles and dropping them off to conduct grid searches.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
WHOA, I feel like it just shows how difficult these
types of searches can be.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
And every morning the two local newspapers are running front
page stories on Candy's disappearance. Basically, all of Spokane is
searching for this little girl, and then Sergeant Stormant says
something happens.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
As bad as it was, things got worse. The Army
sent a helicopter to help.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
So the Spokane River cuts right through the city, and
it's really impressive. Allen parts of the river are really wide,
with these steep, rocky banks, and there falls that tumble
over rocks right in the heart of Spokane. And so
the thinking is maybe Candy walked down near the river
and she could have possibly fallen into the water. So
(07:36):
the military deploys a helicopter to search above the river
and its banks.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Everybody that knows this area knows that that river. One
of the features of it is high attension power lines
crossing it because there's so much hydroelectric power in this area.
The helicopter hit those lines went down into the water.
(08:03):
There are a lot of people out searching the river
banks already, and they saw it and described it as
an explosion. When it hit the power lines.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
The helicopter tumbles down into the river. There are people
searching along the river banks for Candy and in boats
on the water. So they quickly rushed to the crash site.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
Were they okay?
Speaker 3 (08:28):
So there are five airmen on board and only two survive.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Oh god, yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
And it seems like everyone in Spokane either has a
connection to Candy or to one of the airmen. And
now the entire city is grief stricken and there's still
no signs of Candy.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
It makes me think that she's somehow hidden, or she
was taken sore and is being held by someone. You know,
if they're searching that thoroughly with that big of a team,
it's kind of spooky.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
About sixteen days after Candy is last seen, there's a
break in the case.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
There's a couple of airmen from Fairchild Air Force Base
who decided to go hunting.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
So a couple of guys from the nearby base head
to a wooded area to hunt, and it's about seven
miles from Candy's home. And as they're making their way
through the brush and pine needles, they notice a pair
of girls shoes.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
I feel like, it's surprisingly common to see random things
when you're on a hike.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Yeah, and actually these airmen don't really think anything of it,
and so they go on hunting. But at the end
of the day, one of the airmen is like, you
know what, that's kind of bothering me. And these two
shoes are placed very neatly and perfectly next to each other,
(10:08):
and they airman think, okay, that is super odd. They
definitely did not drop out of a bag.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
That is so creepy.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
And they were aware of what was going on enough
that it concerned them. They didn't report it immediately, but
as the day progressed, they thought, we need to call
somebody about that, so they called police and graveyard officers
went out for first light to search in that area.
The search did not have.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
To go far, so the police go to search this
(10:57):
area in the woods where the hunters found a pair
of very carefully placed girl shoes.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
Yeah, and Sergeant Stormant says, officers from the overnight shift
were the first ones to arrive, and they start looking
around the area, which was covered in like a bed
of pine needles and brush.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
A patrolman noticed the little girl's knees sticking out from
a slash pile, and this was in the immediate vicinity
where the shoes were found. So with that it becomes
a homicide investigation.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
The autopsy shows that Candy has been strangled with a
piece of her own slip, her feet are tied together,
and she has been savagely raped.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
How horrific. We've done so many of these cases, but
it still gets me. Are there any clues at the
crime scene?
Speaker 3 (11:57):
This is nineteen fifty nine. The evident that they have
to work with our Candy's clothes, They can't find any
evidence of who may have done this. One of the
investigators working on the case at the time decides to
put Candy's underwear into a glass mason jar to store
(12:20):
it in the evidence room. The detectives I've spoken to
said that was really a stroke of genius. It's not
how evidence was stored at the time, but the fact
that somebody did that enabled the evidence to be as
well preserved as it possibly could be.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
It's just by chance, in a way, I'm guessing.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Just by chance. Yeah, isn't that wild?
Speaker 2 (12:49):
And also in general, it seems like it strikes me
that this whole community is invested in what's happened with Candy.
Point In some ways, it seems like a lot of
things have gone right because you always hear about how
when a child goes missing, those first few hours, those
first twenty four hours are so critical, and it sounds
(13:12):
like everyone jumped to looking for her, and in a
lot of ways things were done thoroughly. People lost their
lives in the search for Candy. It was quite a search.
But then where do you go from there?
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Sergeant Stormant says, the entire community is determined to find
out who killed Candy.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Everybody has complete vested interests in this, and there's no
issue in who's going to work it. Everybody's working it
for quite a while and they followed up on many
mini leads. Tips came in from as far away as Florida.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
So they start by looking at convicted sex offen but
two people that pop up on the authorities radar, they
each end up taking their own lives. Then detectives focus
on one suspect.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
But eventually a character named Hugh Morris became interesting, and
for good reason because he was, in fact a serial killer,
did live in Spokane, and did kill women in Spokane
proximate to Candy's death.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Oh, he sounds like a prime suspect.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
Yeah. Before Candy's murder, Hugh Morse have been picked up
for indecent exposure and a string of burglaries in California.
He spent six months in jail, and after he's released,
he lures two eight year old girls into an alley
with the promise of ice cream and he molests them.
Speaker 2 (14:46):
That sounds like a story you hear as a kid
to scare you, but he's actually doing it.
Speaker 3 (14:52):
Yeah, no kidding. He's eventually declared a sexual psychopath and
he's hospitalized, but then he's released a few years before
Candy disappears, and that's when he shows up in Spokane.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
So the timing lines up.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
The timing totally lines up, and within a year of
Candy's murder, Hugh Morris is suspecting of raping and murdering
at least three women, and then he's all over the place.
He moves from Spokane back to California, then Georgia, Ohio, Alabama.
All along the way he's breaking into women's homes, raping
(15:31):
and beating them to death, though a few women do survive.
He's eventually put on the FBI's most Wanted list.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
WHOA, Yeah, it feels like he's totally unafraid to commit
a slew of crimes. He's clearly a really dangerous person.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
He's finally caught two years after Candy's murder for the
rape and murder of a woman in Minnesota, and he's
sentenced to life, and that's where investigators in Candy's murder
can with him.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
He became the best suspect for a long time, and
they interviewed him in Minnesota, who was eventually caught in
serving time, and he acknowledged doing a lot of bad things,
including victimizing children and women and murder, but he would
not admit to Candy.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Hmm, So maybe he didn't do it if he's willing
to admit to all these other things. But then again,
I mean, maybe he somehow doesn't remember, considering he's committed
so many crimes, or you just never know what people's
underlying motivations might be for lying about something like this,
(16:50):
So who knows.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
And I'm thinking of Carla Walker's case from our first
four episodes, you know where initially Glenn mccurly says he
didn't do it, and then he just gets confused about
all his various suspected victims.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
That whole concept is so dark that you've committed so
many violent crimes you're mixing them up, or you can't remember,
or you can't keep them straight. Although I guess we
don't know what's happening here.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
So with few other suspects, no one is charged in
Candy's murder, and the case goes cold.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
I mean to know that this clearly innocent sweet girl
is gone, knowing also that she was brutally raped and
then killed. I mean it, It's one of the most
violent crimes you can imagine.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
And you hear about detectives saying, you know, there was
a cold case that they always wanted solved before they
were tired. Candy's case became that case for every detective
that touched that file, it becomes the largest case file
and spoke can history. So we're going to jump forward
(18:03):
to two thousand and one, DNA testing is becoming more
of a thing with crime scene evidence, and the detectives
in Spokane decide, hey, listen, let's give this a shot.
So they had Candy's underwear preserved in a glass mason
jar and they send some of that off to a lab,
(18:23):
and the lab is able to do the standard DNA testing,
which is basically they can pull DNA markers from the evidence,
which was semen on her underwear, and they're able to
develop a profile and they load it into the Federal
(18:43):
FBI database CODIS. But it's only helpful if you've committed
a crime before and you've been identified. Yeah, and there
are no hits in CODIS. It's a setback for everybody
because every time you test DNA, you essentially destroy it.
So now they have less evidence to work with, and
(19:05):
they really have not advanced the case forward because they
still don't know who this is.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
That's so frustrating.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
Yeah, the case essentially sits cold again. Now we're going
to jump forward again twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen to.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Wait, how long after Candy went missing? Is that?
Speaker 3 (19:25):
So we're like roughly sixty years? Oh my goodness, And
Sergeant Zach Stormant with the Spokane Police Department. He's picked
up this case. He hears about the Golden State killer
being identified through DNA, and he starts to think, you
know what, DNA may have advanced so much, we have
(19:45):
a chance to maybe solve this case. So Sergeant's Stormant
reaches out to the same lab as before. They basically say, look,
we just don't think that we're going to get anything
more from your evidence. The that they have left is
a mixture of candies and her assailants. We don't know
(20:07):
exactly how long she was left out in this wooded area.
There's plant DNA on it, there could be animal DNA
on it. You know, it was exposed to the sun
and to the elements. We just don't think that we
can work with this degraded DNA. But it turns out
(20:30):
that Paul Hols, who worked on the Golden State Killer case,
he actually has a connection with the Spokane Police Department.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Of course he does.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
He's everywhere, and he says, you've got to call this guy,
David Middleman. He runs a lab called Authorm and I
think he might be able to help you out.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah, And as we're starting to realize not all testing
is the same when it comes to dealing with degraded
or really old evidence.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
And so Sergeant Stormant reaches out to David and Kristen
Middleman and he fills them in on the case, and
Kristen says, Candy's murder immediately hit home for them.
Speaker 4 (21:05):
We started looking into the case. Our daughter was nine
years old at the time, so reading about and she's
real tiny, and they kept describing Candy Rogers as so
small that she could only take a few of the
mints at a time when she was delivering them. It
just brought chills to both of us, and we knew
(21:26):
we wanted to try to help.
Speaker 5 (21:28):
There's like sixty years of investigative work going into figuring
out what they can learn from that crime scene, and
none of it led to the answer.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
But even David Middleman has some initial questions about the
quality of the evidence.
Speaker 5 (21:40):
The challenge here is that the crime happened more than
a half century ago. There's not a lot of DNA
left that's in any decent condition. They had been shopping
around the details of this DNA evidence to other groups.
Nobody would accept the DNA.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Surprisingly, I got a call from David Middleman. I think
that day or the next day really caught me off guard.
I'm concerned about sample size and I don't want to
consume it. I won't do that. He was very confident,
he said this isn't going to be a problem, and
given the fact he was willing to work with partial samples,
I didn't see any reason not to try it.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
So what does Sergeant Stuermant send?
Speaker 3 (22:20):
He sends Candy's underwear, which remember had been stored in
that glass mason jar. But Alan I was really curious
how he sends the evidence, because this is like a
really big deal.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Yeah, I mean, I'd be very nervous, but what else
can they do?
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Yeah, he's incredibly nervous, and he and Brittany Wright, who's
a forensic scientist with the State Police, they really have
to brainstorm on how to get the DNA to author
them safely.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
Britney built crazy containers, you know, almost like a kid
in elementary school. At the egg drop competition, we talked
about just putting it on a carry on bag and
flying down and just a it that way, but Brittany
had confidence with her shipping container we could send it
that way. We did worry about that a lot because
it's a it's a terrible responsibility knowing the time is now.
(23:14):
This does look like the technology is finally here to
solve this case, and worrying about the be the one
to screw it up with a stupid air like shipping.
Speaker 3 (23:25):
Thankfully, the evidence arrives at the lab and ailen all
of it is treated just like it's at like a
state crime lab. It's immediately entered into their system and
their chain of custody. And you know, especially in cases
like this one where the evidence is so small and
so fragile, authoram really has to be precise about everything
(23:47):
because you know, remember once they test the DNA, it's destroyed,
it's gone forever. So all of this is why Kristin
Middelman from authorm says, forensic scientists open and the boxes
of evidence in a special section of the lab and
it's a highly controlled environment.
Speaker 4 (24:07):
In these vestibules, air is filtered, they dress from head
to toe, and then as they go through they have
the negative air that makes that room even more style.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
I get why they're being so careful because not only
is this maybe the last chance they have to solve
the case, but I mean, if this becomes evidence in
a trial. You don't want any contamination or concerns about
tampering chain of custody, that type of thing.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
Yeah, I mean, authoram really has to prove that their
methods will stand up in a courtroom if that's where
it ends up. And now that the evidence is cataloged,
David and his team go to work.
Speaker 5 (24:46):
So we got a lot of really great data in
spite of the fact that the quantity and the quality
of DNA was very limiting. And once we got that data,
we built a SNIP profile. This is literally a file
that just has a list of all the different markers
of DNA that we had collected, hundreds of thousands of
these markers.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
Then the DNA profile is uploaded to genetic genealogy databases
that agree to forensic investigations.
Speaker 5 (25:12):
And so once we did that, we were able to
identify distant relatives that were both genetically related to the
sample that we were trying to identify and also consented
for being used in a forensic investigation. And that led
us to a key number of individuals.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Hey, it was labored a weekend, I got a couple
emails from Mittleman saying, Hey, can you look into this
look into that small little details that to me, they
were completely in a direction the case it had no
information on.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
David Middleman wants Sergeant Stormant to investigate something.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
He asked me to look into a boy's home in
the Shahalis, Washington area and see if I could find
a roster for it for that timeframe.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
And immediately Sergeant Stormant knows, Oh my god, Authorm is
on to a completely different suspect path than decades of
detectives were.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
What do you mean by boys home?
Speaker 3 (26:15):
So it was a bit of like a juvenile home
for boys who were getting into trouble.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Got it. So the DNA led them there was it
like a specific boy who is staying there?
Speaker 3 (26:25):
The DNA profile that they had built out as they
start looking for people who are as closely related to
the DNA that they've extracted from her underwear, and some
names start popping up. And a boy, young man who
attended this home maybe related to whoever killed Candy.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
I see.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
But by the time Sergeant Stormant has looked into the
records of who attended this boy's home during these particular
years that David Middleman was interested in, David calls him
back and is like, listen, Zach, forget that.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
And the phone call came on Labor Day, and I
want to say, it was around six pm. And for him,
the CEO of the company be calling me on that
time of day, on that type of weekend, this was
going to be a big deal. And it was one
of those tingly tingly neck moments. I'm expecting a big
(27:35):
family tree, I'm expecting a lot of work to do.
Speaker 5 (27:37):
I called Zach and I said, I think I have
a lead.
Speaker 1 (27:43):
He gave me three names, three brothers, and I felt
pretty confident. I think we have the name of Candy
Rogers killer.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
In this group, Sergeant Storman is listening to David Middleman
(28:16):
and the three names all brothers, and one of them
might be Candy's killer.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
Oh my goodness. It also just strikes me that this
is sixty years after Candy disappeared. So even if Candy
were still alive at that point, she would be about
sixty nine years old. Yes, And so I'd imagine a
lot of the people who are around and deeply affected
(28:43):
by this have since passed away or have aged a lot.
But the fact that people are still actively trying to
think of creative new ways to solve the case. Just
shows what a deep impact this case has because it's
almost like a generational thing. Now it's the sons and
(29:05):
daughters who have heard this story that are still being
affected and still wanting to have answers.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
Actually, one of Candy's cousins, a woman named Penny, is
still alive.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
Her health was fading fast. I actually drove to her
house that night to make sure she got to hear that, Hey,
we're going to figure this out, and she was so
so relieved. It was pretty incredible to see that. The
next morning, I go in and start doing research on
those three brothers.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Now it's on Detective Storman. He needs to find out
whether these three brothers are still living and if they're not,
if they have survivors children who are alive. And you're
absolutely right, this is a very old case, but some
of the detectives that had worked on this when she
(30:01):
was abducted are still alive. I mean, it's just incredible.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
It's been following them around for decades.
Speaker 3 (30:11):
So Sergeant Stormant learns pretty quickly that the three brothers
had all lived in Spokane, but they've all since died.
Speaker 2 (30:21):
Oh, so they can't ask them for DNA, are there
like any relatives they could check with.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
So he learns through the family tree that one of
the brothers, John ray Hoff, had children.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
And they were all local. Authorm had the names and
actually contact information for three of the four. They didn't
for daughter named Kathy, which made her a little more
interesting to me.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Yeah, I could see that the one that's the most
mysterious catches his attention.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Yes, So Sergeant Stormant decides to call Kathy, John ray
Hoff's daughter.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
First, she didn't answer, and her voicemail struck me as
a super kind person because it simply said I'm not available,
I'll get back to you, and something the effect of
God bless you have a great day.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
This is not a call I'd want to make. I mean,
you have to call a woman you don't know out
of the blue and say, hey, I think maybe your
dad might have been involved in a murder sixty years ago.
Oh and it's also the rape and murder of a
little girl. I mean, you're about to potentially ruin someone's life.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
Yeah, completely, I mean, he said he absolutely dreads these calls.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
I've done a number of them now. They're stressful for me.
If you run into the wrong person, They're going to
alert the entire family and essentially circle the wagons against you.
That's my fear, so finding that right person to be
the introduction to this and let them know we're not
going to view you as evil. You are the good
guy in this and you're actually a victim too, and
(32:04):
that I'm about to tear down. Your impression of a
loved one and what you thought of them is going
to be changed forever.
Speaker 3 (32:11):
But there's something about Kathy's voice and the way she says,
have a great day. She just feels approachable. So he
leaves a message with his phone number.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
I was very vague in it. I said, I'm a
detective of the Spokan Police Department. Would you please give
me a call back. I have something interesting I want
to talk to you.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
If I got that voicemail, I would be calling that
number right away.
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Well, you're right, because Kathy calls back pretty quickly, and she.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Happened to be at a scene on nearby.
Speaker 3 (32:45):
Sergeant Stormant asked Kathy if she'd come by the police
station so they could talk in person.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
She brought her daughter with her, but she did come
down to the detective's building right.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Away, so Sergeant's Stormant sits down with Kathy and her daughter,
and he's asking her questions, but he's really careful not
to tip her off right away. He does mention this
has to do with an old cold case.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
It's hard. It's hard to be vague on a nineteen
fifty nine case. She knows it's older than her dad's death,
and she's very she's struck by this.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
Kathy's daughter has her cell phone with her, and Sergeant
Stormant can see she's actually doing an Internet search for
cold cases from nineteen fifty nine.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Oh my god, so much tension in this room.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
I don't want to reveal details of the case. I
still have that concern that they'll circle the wagons and
make it very difficult for me. The horror is hitting
her as we're speaking, it's hitting her daughter. Her daughter
eventually said, Mom, he's needs your DNA next time.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
On America's Crime Lab.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
It does not take a lot to turn one of
these from stone cold. No one's ever going to solve this.
To red Hot, here's a list of names.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
It takes a while for it to sing in and anger, sadness.
Speaker 4 (34:22):
Someone that a little girl murdered in nineteen fifty nine,
so I knew who it was.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
There's going to be a moment in time or use.
The cold case detective are the only person in the
world that knows who killed that person. This is It.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
America's Crime Lab is produced by Rococo Punch for Kaleidoscope.
Erica Lance is our story editor and sound design is
by David Woji. Our producing team is Catherine Fedalosa, Emily
Foreman and Jessica Albert. Our Executive producers are Kate Osborne,
Mangesh Hadigadour and David and Kristen Middleman and from iHeart
(35:05):
Katrina Norville and Ali Perry. Special thanks to Connell Byrne,
Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, Nikki Etour, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank,
and the entire team at OTHRM. I'm Alan Lance lessor
thanks for listening.
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