Introducing America's Crime Lab

Introducing the new podcast America’s Crime Lab. Each week, we meet weary detectives and family members as we run through an unsolved case that wrecked a community and seemingly hit a dead end… until, in a last-ditch effort, the evidence is mailed to Othram.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Candy was a nine year old girl. She lived in
an apartment above the grocery store with her mother. The
one solid rules she always had was to be home
before dark, and she wasn't.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
When Candy went missing, an entire community search for her.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
A patrolman noticed the little girl's knees sticking out from
a slash pile. So with that it becomes a homicide investigation.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
It was nineteen fifty nine. For sixty two years, there
were no new leads on the case. It went cold.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
If you just asked the people of any state, hey,
is you know there's like hundreds of people laying in
the cooler that no one's working the case, they would
be like.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
What Candy's name was added to a list of unsolved murders.
Some of the victims don't even have names. We have
no idea who they are.

Speaker 3 (00:56):
So you walk into the medical zoner, there's a wall
in the one walking cooler and it's just up and down,
up and down of bodies and bankers boxes. I just
think that we as society, we should send those people home.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
You know, these are the coldest of cold cases. But
everything is about to change.

Speaker 4 (01:20):
I called Zach, and I said, I think I have
a lead.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on
DNA using new scientific tools. They're finding clues in evidence
so tiny you might just miss it.

Speaker 4 (01:35):
These cold case investigators will spend their careers working on
like a few cases, and now with like just very
basic technology that we can put in their hands, they
can go on to solve dozens of cases at a time.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
And for the first time there's a solution. Even if
they burn their victim, or they pour acid on them,
or they put them in a sewage tank, you're still
going to get caught. Every week on America's Crime Lab,
we're opening cases that were so cold they were frozen
in time. We'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll
meet the team behind the scenes at Authorm, the Houston

(02:09):
lap that takes on the most hopeless cases. Using cutting
edge science, they're discovering new clues in old evidence to
finally solve the unsolvable.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
Man this guy burned alive in this boat. I was like, man,
that is heinous, right. She was pregnant, clearly murdered.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
Her body was weighed down in the lake.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
Mister Skinner discovered what appeared to be a human skull
between the studs of the wall.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
A foot washed up, a shoe with some bones in
its fleshy material. They had no idea who it was.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Every case has a story to tell, and the DNA
holds the truth.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
I said, I am a cold case detective and I
think you can help me with a homicide. The horror
is hitting her as we're speaking. It's hitting her daughter.
Her daughter eventually said, Mom, he's n needs your DNA.
It is like, holy, forgive my language. Holy, this is
that Actually the He's going to be the end of
the Candy Rogers case. We cannot drop the ball now.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Listen to America's Crime Lab starting July sixteenth on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I truly believe it's a matter of time. Every case
that is a cold case that has DNA right now
on a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.