October 15, 2025 • 38 mins
A little girl is kidnapped from her grandmother’s yard. Her family searches for decades, hoping to find her. 62 years later, detectives call with information. But it’s not what anyone expected.
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 (00:14):
She was partially buried about four years old. She had
some slippers, no identification, no idea where she came from.
And that's where she got the name or a miss
nobody because I couldn't find out who she was.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
In nineteen sixty, the body of a little girl was
found in the Arizona Desert. Like a lot of cold cases,
there wasn't much to go on, no eyewitnesses, no overwhelming
evidence left at the scene, no clues as to who
she was or who killed her. But this case got
(00:52):
even more complicated because when DNA came on the scene,
it pointed detectives in the wrong direction, unwinding. The truth
came down to whom to trust. This is America's crime lab.
I'm Alan Lance Lesser, producer Catherine Fanlosa is here and
(01:15):
this case was almost ruined essentially by bad DNA technology.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Yeah, it's a story of what can go wrong when
technology is in the wrong hands. What's the story, so, Allen,
This is one of the oldest cases that the National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children has ever been involved with,
and it's also one that few other labs would touch.
(01:42):
It starts on a Sunday in July in nineteen sixty
and a Las Vegas school teacher is looking for rocks
with his family. They like to decorate their garden with rocks,
and they pull off a small highway outside of Congress, Arizona.
And this is a road that runs between Phoenix and
Las Vegas. But where the family stops, it's miles from anywhere.
(02:05):
It's just kind of desert sand as far as you
can see. Ooh, so very isolated, extremely isolated. And Congress
Arizona is a former mining town. It's tiny and even
today they're under two thousand residents, so you can kind
(02:27):
of picture very small. And as the family is looking
for rocks, they've sort of wandered from the highway and
they're walking through the desert sand and they stumble upon
the half buried body of a little girl. Oh no,
she's wearing a shirt and a pair of shorts. Her
(02:47):
finger and toenails are painted bright red. She's got a
pair of adult sized flip flops on that have been
cut down to fit her small feet.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
That image.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
She has a full set of baby teeth which are
in pristine condition. And her brown hair has a little
bit of like an auburn tint, which leads some people
to speculate like maybe it had been dyed. The police
are called and they go out to the scene and
(03:23):
they find a set of footprints, which they document. They
also find a blood stained pocket knife nearby, and it
looks like there are also two shallow holes that had
been dug, maybe failed attempts to dig holes to bury
her before whoever's done this half buries her in a
(03:46):
third hole. The family calls the police, and I wanted
to find out what happened next, so I called John Shannon.
He's an investigator with the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Our deputies responded and the normal processes that they would
do at the time, trying to identify her, doing an anthropology,
trying to find out what was there, wrote down her clothes,
wrote down it was a knife there, and what evidence
was collected at the time was stored at the county
(04:27):
courthouse in Prescott.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
And an autopsy is ordered and pathologists examined her body
and they determined that she probably died a week or
two before she was discovered. She had been burned, but
because her body's been left out in this intense heat,
(04:52):
it's also really badly decomposed, so they're unable to determine
exactly how she does. But in examining her, they don't
see any signs that she had been previously injured. They
are no old broken bones that have healed, like, no
other signs of like old traumas.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
At first, it was striking me that we have a
lot of information, like the color of her hair, all
of her teeth. But then when I heard that she'd
been burned, was out in the heat, was decomposing, Suddenly,
I'm thinking this is going to be hard to even
identify her.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
So initially they think she's between six and eight years old,
but then as time goes on, other reports guess she's
anywhere between four and nine. She weighed about fifty five
pounds and she was three and a half feet tall.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Why does a kid that age have to meet that fate?
Speaker 3 (05:56):
That's I know, it's horrible.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Beginning of each one of these stories.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
So they mark her death as suspicious, even though they
don't know exactly how she died. Initially, John Shannon says
investigators think they might have a lead.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
They had got that she was from al Mgirdle because
a little girl was missing at Alamgirdo, So at.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
First investigators think she might actually be a little girl
who went missing from Alamagordo, New Mexico, which is over
five hundred miles away from where this body is found.
But then the description of her clothing, her age, and
her footprints don't match up with the little girl who
was missing from New Mexico, so law enforcement dismisses any connection.
(06:42):
The local newspapers run stories about this discovery of the
little girl's body on the front page, but with really
no leads and not much evidence, the case goes cold.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
That is just, honestly so tragic to me that someone
that young either doesn't have people looking for her or
somehow they don't know where to look for her. I mean,
any case, it's tragic, but this little child, who presumably,
you know, relies on people, to not have anyone finding her.
(07:22):
It's just it just gets me that much more.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
I don't know, You're not alone.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
So the residents of neighboring Prescott, Arizona, become captivated by
her story, and the community nicknames her little miss Nobody. Oh,
I know, it kind of broke my heart when I
heard that name. Yeah, A local radio announcer leads a
(07:49):
campaign to raise money for a funeral because the other
option was her body was going to be buried in
what they called Pauper's Field, and feels we need to
give this little girl a proper burial, even though we
don't know who she is.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
The city residents of Prescott donate the money to buy
a casket and put her in the ground in Prescott Cemetery.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
The small little coffin is engraved with a note that
says God's little Child. Date of birth unknown, date of
death unknown.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
I mean, in a way, there's something beautiful about being
able to set someone to rest. But I'm also like, wait, what,
you're just putting all this evidence in the ground when
you haven't solved the case. I'm sure I'll find out Catherine, won't.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
I also remember it's nineteen sixty, right, so they're sort
of going about this by the book for the times.
And I'll get into what they do with some of
the evidence in just a minute. But they hold a
funeral and more than seventy locals gather at the kun
Gregational Church for her funeral. The pastor, doctor Charles Parker,
(09:05):
gives a really emotional speech. He says, someone somewhere is
wondering what happened to a little girl left in the desert,
and they bury her with a headstone that reads little
Miss Nobody, Blessed are the pure in heart. So for
(09:27):
over sixty years, that's how she's known little Miss Nobody.
But that starts to change in twenty eleven. So a
woman working on a completely different cold case in Colorado
turns up in Prescott, Arizona, and she's asking about little
(09:48):
Miss Nobody. John Shannon says, no one really knew what
she was talking about, because, you know, it had been
five decades since the little girl was found dead, and
the detectives who originally worked on the case had retired,
people had passed away, just institutional memory had faded. But
(10:08):
investigator John Shannon says, detectives started to look around to
find out, what is this case? Who is this little
miss Nobody?
Speaker 1 (10:18):
We had nothing to go on. Zero nobody here knew
anything about her because there was no case files. How
do we find out anything about her? And so where
do we start?
Speaker 2 (10:50):
I get that they found this girl's body in nineteen sixty,
so it's been decades, but how are there literally no
case files for this crime?
Speaker 1 (10:58):
That's a little bit hard to explaining because between nineteen
sixty two and roughly nineteen ninety whatever original files that
were ever put together were purged.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
And this isn't unusual. I mean, back then all the
files were on paper, and you know, over the years,
police departments move or run out of space for storage,
their floods. I mean, you know, things happen and files
get lost. John does find a retired detective and he
learns that evidence was sent to the FBI back in
(11:33):
the sixties, and so he reaches out to them.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
So we did contact the FBI. They had the clothes,
but they're gone, and they actually did a footprint from
a footprint in the sand and tried to identify that
determined they couldn't. And then when we went back to them,
they had no files. Their files were gone.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
So all the evidence is gone vanished.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Yeah, the detectives really have nothing.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
It was this big, gigantic puzzle that we had to
put together piece by piece.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Now John is an investigator, so naturally he's a curious guy.
So he thinks, where do I go now, and so
he heads down to the local historical museum.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Everything that we came up with was developed the research,
getting newspaper articles, and there was something like sixty five
different newspaper articles all talking about this little girl.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
John makes himself at home in the museum and he
starts to dig.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
And read all those and took all the names we
could find of the people involved. The preacher, the radio
disc jockey was involved, the deputy, retired judges, retired detectives,
and put all that into some kind of case file.
In those hours and hours and hours an hour.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
My first thought was maybe this girl is from really
far away, because I mean, if they found her body
here and they can't figure out who it is. But
then also part of me wonders, what if this was
some kind of murder, and like maybe the parents or
(13:25):
somebody is actually close by. So I don't know. I'm curious.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
She's found in the desert sand off of the highway,
But that highway, even though it's in a very remote area,
does connect to more populous areas, obviously Las Vegas and
then Phoenix, Arizona.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Someone's trying to drop a body in a remote area,
they might just jump on the highway and stop by
and keep going.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
You can see why this case is so difficult. So
investigator John Shannon now has a new case file with
old newspaper clippings, and from reading those, he's got a lead.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
And that's when we said, oh, she's buried here, and
we didn't know that either. So after we got all
the documentation together, I had your write up of justification
into the county attorney to go before the judge to
get a court order to exum her because there was
no family, you know, we didn't know who she was.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
A judge grants the request and they dig up her casket.
They're able to get her skeletal remains. Now the detectives
partner with names the National Missing and Unidentified Person System.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
And we actually end up getting her DNA, and then
from there it was okay, we have DNA, but it
doesn't tell us anything.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
So they have her DNA, but they still don't know
anything about her.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
They don't, and they developed the DNA profile and it's
given back to NamUs and it's entered into KOTAS. But
that doesn't do us any good because there was nothing
to match to it.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
John Shannon is discouraged, but he doesn't give up. Detectives
keep circling back to one idea. Aileen remember I mentioned
that back in nineteen sixty, police thought there was a
chance that little Miss Nobody was actually a little girl
who had been kidnapped in Alamagordo, New Mexico.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yeah, but I thought they rulled it out.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
They did at the time. They said her clothing wasn't
the same. They also said the New Mexico girl, whose
name was Sharon Galagos, was four and little Miss Nobody
was probably older. Michael Perry from the Yavapai County Sheriff's
office said there were also some other issues.
Speaker 5 (15:52):
They were able to get footprints off of the body,
but the FBI came back later on and said that
those footprints were not at The footprints from the body
in Arizona were not a match to the footprints of
Sharon Diego's Interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I'm kind of surprised that they're confident that it's not
the same little girl. I mean, how exactly are they
matching footprints? I'm guessing the body of the girl in
the desert has changed from decomposition, Like, how do you
measure that?
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Yeah, and even though that lead was discounted back in
nineteen sixty, John Shannon and his colleagues just can't get
it out of their minds.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
So we were kind of snooping around, actually out down
on the girdle. There was nothing that alo'girdle could supply.
They gave us any clues because all they saw was
was a girl abducted and she left town, and that's
all they really knew about it. That's all their records had.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
John decides to do a little digging on his own
to find out anything he can about the New Mexico girl,
Sharon Galagos, and he finds an obituary for her mother.
It turns out that Sharon had siblings.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
I got a copy of the obituary. It mentioned brother Johnny.
Name Us was very helpful in trying to find him,
which we did. Name Is found him in Germany and
we had the FBI go and get his DNA.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Oh wow. So this case from nineteen sixty starts in
the Arizona Desert, brings us to New Mexico and now Germany.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
So the FBI helps orchestrate this and authorities contact Johnny
with a request. And Johnny is the brother of the
missing girl Sharon.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
We believe that there might be a max cher, but
we need your DNA to compare it to the little
girl's DNA.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
Johnny gives his DNA and it's compared and a report
comes back saying this little girl is not Sharon Glegos,
the little girl in New Mexico, but the results are
also inconclusive. Basically, it says, we can't tell you who
little misnow that he is.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
This is so frustrating. I just want to know.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
At this point, detectives turned to the top forensic experts
in the country for help.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
All those organizations had a shot at trying to identify her,
and these other companies all said, we can't do anything.
We can't tell you anything about her. We don't know how,
we can't identify it. And it was it was frustrating,
(18:29):
but it seemed like every time we did something, we
got a little closer, you know, a little closer to
trying to find out who she was. And I it's sorry,
you get emotional when you get to a solution.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
The Sheriff's office has used up any money they had
on the case, Their best lead was proven wrong, and
everyone's telling them it's hopeless.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
I mean, that's very frustrating, and it's weird to think
that they have DNA from her and they still can't
even figure out who she is.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
And then one day in twenty twenty one, a guy
named Michael Vogan is watching the news and he sees
a story about little Miss Nobody and he picks up
the phone to call John Shannon.
Speaker 6 (19:27):
So here I come, calling the investigator and I'm like,
this is new, and he's like, I already tried it.
I'm like, yeah, but this is different. Why why can't
we take a shot at this?
Speaker 2 (19:59):
So remind me who Michael Vogan is.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
He works with Authram as the director of case management.
He's kind of a point person with detectives, and one day,
when he sees this news story about the little Miss
Nobody case still going unsolved, he begs John Shannon to
give it one more try.
Speaker 6 (20:18):
I said, you may have had a profile that wasn't
applicable for this type of analysis. You may have missmatches.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Michael's convinced that the DNA testing that's been done so
far wasn't designed for forensic DNA and so it could
be missing clues to her identity, or it could actually
even lead them away from the truth. I asked Chris
and Middleman from Outhrum to explain for starter. She says,
the evidence was sixty two years old and had sat
(20:46):
in the hot Arizona sun.
Speaker 4 (20:48):
There was degradation caused by the heat. There was contamination
from plants, animals, everything that is out there at that
time back to you, obviously, and that made it very
difficult to work those remains. So when they weren't able
to get enough DNA markers using the correct science, they
(21:10):
did something called imputation where they use software software that
isn't forensic, to try to impute what the DNA would
look like. And then they tried to compare the DNA
to DNA that family references had given to the case.
(21:30):
They said that little miss Nobody was not sharing Gallegos.
Let me get this straight. They had somehow filled out
their missing DNA markers and predicted the rest of the
profile through some kind of calculation or mathematical way of
guessing at the DNA, but what they inferred was actually wrong.
(21:54):
It's like if you were to read a book and
you could only see half the ages, maybe you would
infer the wrong ending to a story.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
And then there was another issue. The FBI got DNA
from Sharon Galegos's family in Germany. They got DNA from
someone who they thought was her mother's brother, but he
was actually a half brother.
Speaker 4 (22:19):
It was a half sibling relationship, which CODIS isn't good
at identifying relationships unless itself or parent child. And so
they hired a genealogy group to actually do advanced DNA
testing and to do these comparisons. And that's the report
that actually said that it's certain that Sharon Gallegos was
(22:45):
not little miss Nobody and then the case was over.
How is the detective supposed to know that there's another
lab in Texas called authorm that's going to build a
different profile.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
I completely get why the investigator is skeptical when this
guy from AUTHRAM calls him and says, hey, our lab
in Texas has technology that can work, because he's been
promised that before and it didn't lead anywhere.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
And there was also the money issue, because Yavapai County
Sheriff's office had run out of funds to work on
the case.
Speaker 6 (23:18):
I said, okay, well let's crowdfund it. We have this
group of people online that would probably help.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
So Michael from OUTHRAM calls the reporter who did the
recent news story.
Speaker 6 (23:27):
I reached out to her and I said, hey, we're
going to take a shot at this. Do you think
you guys could put us story out and help us
publicize this crowdfund? She said, I would love to because
I would love to see this little girl get her
name back.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
Alan. I should explain that authram has a website that
lists unsolved cases and anyone can go online and donate
money to have a particular case solved. And so the reporter,
Brianna Whitney puts out another story.
Speaker 6 (23:54):
And kudos to her and the Sheriff's office. They both
put out this blast and within twenty four hours we
raised the money to do it, which was still like
a record to this day. I don't know how they
pulled that off, but they did.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
Now, little Miss Nobody's remains are sent to the Texas
Lab and they pulled DNA from one of her teeth.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
The DNA worked really well in our hands, which was amazing,
and as soon as we sequence, we were able to
get a lot of markers.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
This more detailed DNA profile is uploaded to genealogy sites
and suddenly they're getting clues of little Miss Nobody's real identity.
Speaker 7 (24:32):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
That's when Michael Vogan gets a call from David Middleman
from authrom.
Speaker 6 (24:39):
David called me and he goes, hey, who did they
think this person this little girl was? And I go,
Sharon Galagos is the little girl's name from New Mexico.
And he goes, I think that's her And I go,
no way, and he goes, yeah, can we talk to
someone there? I said sure, We got on the phone.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
We talked to the investigator, and that investigator, John Shannon,
he's breaking down more clues. Outside of the family in Germany.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
We found there was other people here in the United
States that popped up.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
One name that popped up was Rinaldo Chavez. His mom
was Sharon's older sister, so the older sister of the
girl who went missing. And now the case is starting
to move pretty quickly. Ronaldo and his siblings get a
call from the sheriff's office.
Speaker 7 (25:24):
So they reached out to me, and they asked me
a lot of questions about, you know, what happened, who
was still alive? You know, they really didn't say what
was going on.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
Who was still alive. Sadly, Sharon's mom passed away in
twenty eleven and her big sister, Ronaldo's mom died in
twenty seventeen, we knew.
Speaker 7 (25:50):
That my mom's sister had been kidnapped. You know, my
mom told us that, but she didn't really want to
go into specifics because it brought up a lot of emotion.
It's still very hard for my uncle to talk about it,
and it was still very emotional for you know. He
felt helpless, he said, you know, being ten years old,
(26:11):
being you know, the boy and the family, and he
said he just felt helpless.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
Even though the family didn't really want to talk about
Sharon's disappearance, the whole community knew about it. Years later,
Ronaldo enrolled in classes at the local community college.
Speaker 7 (26:29):
And my biology teacher, missus Cassiah, when she was reading rolled,
she goes, Ronaldo Chavez and you know you raised her
hands say you were here. She said, oh, your aunt
was kidnapped in nineteen sixty, I mean in front of
the whole class, and then everybody, everybody in the classroom
in clearing. Myself was shocked and I was like, how
(26:52):
do you know about that? Oh, well, can talk about
it after class. What it happened to be is miss Messiah,
her husband was the FBI ag on the case in
the nineteen sixties. He said, it was really a hard
case for him.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
So what happens?
Speaker 3 (27:09):
So after Ronaldo and his family have the zoom meeting
with authorities in Arizona, they quickly get on the phone.
Speaker 7 (27:16):
So I got on with my other two siblings and
we're like, what do you think? Do you think they
found Sharon? Do you think they're going to tell us
that they know where she is? You know, those ideas
went through our head, but also, you know, that's a
long time in sixty two years.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
Meanwhile, Kristen says, Authram is busy testing the DNA from
little Miss Nobody's remains.
Speaker 4 (27:41):
We actually started to see that the matches we were
getting were actually consistent with Sharon Gallego's family. So we
contacted the detectives. We asked if there was a reference sample.
We were able to do a one to one match
and it worked.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
Investigator's call to set up a zoom meeting with Ronaldo
and his family, and John Shannon is on the call.
Speaker 7 (28:08):
You know, he talked to us a little bit about
it and said they've been working on this case. And
then they told us about authoram laps and then they said.
Speaker 8 (28:20):
Excuse me, and then they told us they had identified
our aunt, they had identified her remains. You know, we
were all like, what, you know, we were all kind
of shocked, and ah, you know we were you know,
(28:40):
a lot of things are going through her mind.
Speaker 7 (28:42):
They found my aunt, but you know, she's she's died.
And then we had all kinds of questions, how did
you find her? How old it was she when they
when they discovered her remains.
Speaker 8 (28:52):
And so the rest of the Zoom call was really
about explaining the whole thing, how it came about, and
how oft from lamps is really the ones who were
able to make the identification.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
Investigator John Shannon tells Rinaldo about the funeral the community
in Prescott, Arizona held and how people donated money to
buy Sharon a casket and bury her.
Speaker 7 (29:18):
That people really took care of my aunt for us.
They took care of her wanting to find out who
she was, and if it wasn't for their dedication and commitment,
probably would have never found out.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
I'm also thinking it's kind of wild that the original
investigators had that hunch that little Miss Nobody was Sharon,
but so many times they were told no.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
And the initial DNA testing proved even more conclusively that
it wasn't her, but Kristin Middleman says it was basically
all bad science.
Speaker 4 (29:51):
It was unbelievable to see that you can use advanced
DNA technology incorrectly and get the wrong answer. So that case,
to me was terrifying because it showed me that people
would go to great lengths to get an answer, but
not necessarily consider if good science was actually behind that answer.
(30:17):
And we're talking about confirming someone's identity as a perpetrator
or victim of a crime, taking away someone's name and
voice forever. It does make me think about how much
DNA is used in courtrooms and investigations, and I think
sometimes it gets simplified to the DNA says X. So
(30:38):
the answer is why, But it's actually a very delicate
science at times, and the testing methods are not all
the same. That's blown my mind working on this podcast
in general. So, now that we know that the girl
in the desert is Sharon from New Mexico, what do
we know about her?
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Actually kind of a lot. So Sharon was four years
old and she lived with her mom, her grandmother, aunts
and cousins.
Speaker 7 (31:05):
She had light brown hair, hazel eyes, and she had
a nickname my great grandmother called her Wedda, which means
the light one. She was a very energetic, feisty little girl.
She liked being by her grandmother's side. She'd just sit
(31:28):
at the kitchen table watching my grandmother make tortillas and beans,
of course, a staple in my grandparents' house. She really
loved playing with her cousins because they lived in a
multi generational home. She liked being outside.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
And then one day in mid July nineteen sixty, Sharon
was playing in her yard with some of her siblings
and cousins when an old green car pulled up.
Speaker 7 (31:57):
There was this green vehicle with a couple in it,
a man and a woman, and there was two other
children in the vehicle with them, and they had been
kind of scouting out the neighborhood the week before. Come
to find out that this couple was asking a lot
of questions about Sharon, specifically about my grandmother who she was,
(32:22):
you know, how many kids does she have. Then, on
the day that had actually happened, my aunt Sharon was
outside plane and the car drove up in an alley.
They said, hey, Sharon, would you like some candy and
we'll buy you a new clothes and she was standing there,
(32:44):
didn't want to go. The lady came out, grabbed her
by the arm and pulled her into the car. My
mom's cousins were there, and there was some neighborhood kids
and they ran inside and said, hey, you know, a
lady just pulled Sharon into car. My mom and my
grandmother were like, what call the police right away, and
(33:06):
then it all started.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
Police set up roadblocks pretty immediately, but there were no
signs of the green car or Sharon. Rinaldo's mom, Sharon's
big sister. She heads out with friends to search the neighborhood,
and the local newspaper ran stories about Sharon's kidnapping. And
then there was an interesting twist. Allen remember, investigators initially
(33:28):
thought little miss Nobody might be Sharon.
Speaker 7 (33:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
Well, Rinaldo says, police reached out to his family back
then and asked if someone would come look at this
little girl's body that was discovered in the desert.
Speaker 7 (33:41):
And it was determined that instead of having my grandmother
go to identify the body, they asked my grandmother's best
friend to go and identify the body. And you know,
she determined, oh no, this body's too big, it's not Sharon.
It was just devastating to my grandmother losing not knowing
(34:07):
what happened. It affected the whole entire family from there
on out. Everybody was very vigilant about where the kids were,
and I mean we all knew about it.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
I can only imagine growing up Ronaldo and the whole
family living with us. I mean, his young aunt just
grabbed out of the family's yard.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
And for years it was really just too painful to
talk about. Ronaldo says it wasn't until he was about
twelve when he started asking his mom more about Sharon's disappearance.
Speaker 7 (34:44):
We always hope we never gave a pope every time the.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Excuse me, oh it's okay.
Speaker 7 (34:56):
Every time the police would contact us, because throughout our life,
yes it was you know, the police would contact my grandmother,
then my mom, and then us. You know, we were
still like, you know, maybe they found her, she's still alive,
We'll get to meet her.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
Ronaldo says that knowing the truth of what happened to
Sharon did bring some peace.
Speaker 7 (35:22):
You know, we couldn't be there for her, and to
find out that, you know, she wasn't lost or forgotten,
and there was a whole community not just one person,
there was a whole community that was taking care of her.
It just you know, our family couldn't believe in.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Sharon's remains were sent back to New Mexico, Ronaldo and
the family gathered for a funeral and they buried Sharon
next to her mom and her grandmother.
Speaker 7 (35:54):
The day before, me and my uncle and my brother,
we dug that the small grave.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
We buttered it.
Speaker 7 (36:05):
We beate it ourselves. Yeah, we wanted to do that.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
John Shannon and Michael Perry and a whole team had
worked on this case for years and I was curious
how they were feeling.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Well, I think that the best way to say that
is we were invited to go to the funeral and
may treat us like family.
Speaker 5 (36:34):
And that's just a very powerful and experience to be
part of that, and just a gratitude that the family
express towards us. It was just a very humbling experience.
Speaker 9 (36:43):
The sad thing about this case is that Sharon isn't alone.
There are literally thousands of other children like her that
are unidentified. They're unaccounted for. And the truth is that,
you know, technology like ours could be aiding police everywhere
in identifying these cuts.
Speaker 4 (37:05):
Everyone deserves to be buried with their family, to be
able to be visited, to have people that know where
they are know their story. Everyone deserves their voice.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
The couple who took Sharon in the green car were
never found, so that part of the mystery is still
an open investigation.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
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
(38:08):
Katrina Norville and Ali Perry. Special thanks to Connell Byrne,
Will Pearson, Kerrie Lieberman, Nikki Etour, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank,
and the entire team at Outhrum. I'm Alan Lance lessor
thanks for listening.
She was partially buried about four years old. She had
some slippers, no identification, no idea where she came from.
And that's where she got the name or a miss
nobody because I couldn't find out who she was.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
In nineteen sixty, the body of a little girl was
found in the Arizona Desert. Like a lot of cold cases,
there wasn't much to go on, no eyewitnesses, no overwhelming
evidence left at the scene, no clues as to who
she was or who killed her. But this case got
(00:52):
even more complicated because when DNA came on the scene,
it pointed detectives in the wrong direction, unwinding. The truth
came down to whom to trust. This is America's crime lab.
I'm Alan Lance Lesser, producer Catherine Fanlosa is here and
(01:15):
this case was almost ruined essentially by bad DNA technology.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Yeah, it's a story of what can go wrong when
technology is in the wrong hands. What's the story, so, Allen,
This is one of the oldest cases that the National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children has ever been involved with,
and it's also one that few other labs would touch.
(01:42):
It starts on a Sunday in July in nineteen sixty
and a Las Vegas school teacher is looking for rocks
with his family. They like to decorate their garden with rocks,
and they pull off a small highway outside of Congress, Arizona.
And this is a road that runs between Phoenix and
Las Vegas. But where the family stops, it's miles from anywhere.
(02:05):
It's just kind of desert sand as far as you
can see. Ooh, so very isolated, extremely isolated. And Congress
Arizona is a former mining town. It's tiny and even
today they're under two thousand residents, so you can kind
(02:27):
of picture very small. And as the family is looking
for rocks, they've sort of wandered from the highway and
they're walking through the desert sand and they stumble upon
the half buried body of a little girl. Oh no,
she's wearing a shirt and a pair of shorts. Her
(02:47):
finger and toenails are painted bright red. She's got a
pair of adult sized flip flops on that have been
cut down to fit her small feet.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
That image.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
She has a full set of baby teeth which are
in pristine condition. And her brown hair has a little
bit of like an auburn tint, which leads some people
to speculate like maybe it had been dyed. The police
are called and they go out to the scene and
(03:23):
they find a set of footprints, which they document. They
also find a blood stained pocket knife nearby, and it
looks like there are also two shallow holes that had
been dug, maybe failed attempts to dig holes to bury
her before whoever's done this half buries her in a
(03:46):
third hole. The family calls the police, and I wanted
to find out what happened next, so I called John Shannon.
He's an investigator with the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Our deputies responded and the normal processes that they would
do at the time, trying to identify her, doing an anthropology,
trying to find out what was there, wrote down her clothes,
wrote down it was a knife there, and what evidence
was collected at the time was stored at the county
(04:27):
courthouse in Prescott.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
And an autopsy is ordered and pathologists examined her body
and they determined that she probably died a week or
two before she was discovered. She had been burned, but
because her body's been left out in this intense heat,
(04:52):
it's also really badly decomposed, so they're unable to determine
exactly how she does. But in examining her, they don't
see any signs that she had been previously injured. They
are no old broken bones that have healed, like, no
other signs of like old traumas.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
At first, it was striking me that we have a
lot of information, like the color of her hair, all
of her teeth. But then when I heard that she'd
been burned, was out in the heat, was decomposing, Suddenly,
I'm thinking this is going to be hard to even
identify her.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
So initially they think she's between six and eight years old,
but then as time goes on, other reports guess she's
anywhere between four and nine. She weighed about fifty five
pounds and she was three and a half feet tall.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Why does a kid that age have to meet that fate?
Speaker 3 (05:56):
That's I know, it's horrible.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
Beginning of each one of these stories.
Speaker 3 (06:02):
So they mark her death as suspicious, even though they
don't know exactly how she died. Initially, John Shannon says
investigators think they might have a lead.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
They had got that she was from al Mgirdle because
a little girl was missing at Alamgirdo, So at.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
First investigators think she might actually be a little girl
who went missing from Alamagordo, New Mexico, which is over
five hundred miles away from where this body is found.
But then the description of her clothing, her age, and
her footprints don't match up with the little girl who
was missing from New Mexico, so law enforcement dismisses any connection.
(06:42):
The local newspapers run stories about this discovery of the
little girl's body on the front page, but with really
no leads and not much evidence, the case goes cold.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
That is just, honestly so tragic to me that someone
that young either doesn't have people looking for her or
somehow they don't know where to look for her. I mean,
any case, it's tragic, but this little child, who presumably,
you know, relies on people, to not have anyone finding her.
(07:22):
It's just it just gets me that much more.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
I don't know, You're not alone.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
So the residents of neighboring Prescott, Arizona, become captivated by
her story, and the community nicknames her little miss Nobody. Oh,
I know, it kind of broke my heart when I
heard that name. Yeah, A local radio announcer leads a
(07:49):
campaign to raise money for a funeral because the other
option was her body was going to be buried in
what they called Pauper's Field, and feels we need to
give this little girl a proper burial, even though we
don't know who she is.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
The city residents of Prescott donate the money to buy
a casket and put her in the ground in Prescott Cemetery.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
The small little coffin is engraved with a note that
says God's little Child. Date of birth unknown, date of
death unknown.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
I mean, in a way, there's something beautiful about being
able to set someone to rest. But I'm also like, wait, what,
you're just putting all this evidence in the ground when
you haven't solved the case. I'm sure I'll find out Catherine, won't.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
I also remember it's nineteen sixty, right, so they're sort
of going about this by the book for the times.
And I'll get into what they do with some of
the evidence in just a minute. But they hold a
funeral and more than seventy locals gather at the kun
Gregational Church for her funeral. The pastor, doctor Charles Parker,
(09:05):
gives a really emotional speech. He says, someone somewhere is
wondering what happened to a little girl left in the desert,
and they bury her with a headstone that reads little
Miss Nobody, Blessed are the pure in heart. So for
(09:27):
over sixty years, that's how she's known little Miss Nobody.
But that starts to change in twenty eleven. So a
woman working on a completely different cold case in Colorado
turns up in Prescott, Arizona, and she's asking about little
(09:48):
Miss Nobody. John Shannon says, no one really knew what
she was talking about, because, you know, it had been
five decades since the little girl was found dead, and
the detectives who originally worked on the case had retired,
people had passed away, just institutional memory had faded. But
(10:08):
investigator John Shannon says, detectives started to look around to
find out, what is this case? Who is this little
miss Nobody?
Speaker 1 (10:18):
We had nothing to go on. Zero nobody here knew
anything about her because there was no case files. How
do we find out anything about her? And so where
do we start?
Speaker 2 (10:50):
I get that they found this girl's body in nineteen sixty,
so it's been decades, but how are there literally no
case files for this crime?
Speaker 1 (10:58):
That's a little bit hard to explaining because between nineteen
sixty two and roughly nineteen ninety whatever original files that
were ever put together were purged.
Speaker 3 (11:13):
And this isn't unusual. I mean, back then all the
files were on paper, and you know, over the years,
police departments move or run out of space for storage,
their floods. I mean, you know, things happen and files
get lost. John does find a retired detective and he
learns that evidence was sent to the FBI back in
(11:33):
the sixties, and so he reaches out to them.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
So we did contact the FBI. They had the clothes,
but they're gone, and they actually did a footprint from
a footprint in the sand and tried to identify that
determined they couldn't. And then when we went back to them,
they had no files. Their files were gone.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
So all the evidence is gone vanished.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Yeah, the detectives really have nothing.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
It was this big, gigantic puzzle that we had to
put together piece by piece.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Now John is an investigator, so naturally he's a curious guy.
So he thinks, where do I go now, and so
he heads down to the local historical museum.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Everything that we came up with was developed the research,
getting newspaper articles, and there was something like sixty five
different newspaper articles all talking about this little girl.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
John makes himself at home in the museum and he
starts to dig.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
And read all those and took all the names we
could find of the people involved. The preacher, the radio
disc jockey was involved, the deputy, retired judges, retired detectives,
and put all that into some kind of case file.
In those hours and hours and hours an hour.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
My first thought was maybe this girl is from really
far away, because I mean, if they found her body
here and they can't figure out who it is. But
then also part of me wonders, what if this was
some kind of murder, and like maybe the parents or
(13:25):
somebody is actually close by. So I don't know. I'm curious.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
She's found in the desert sand off of the highway,
But that highway, even though it's in a very remote area,
does connect to more populous areas, obviously Las Vegas and
then Phoenix, Arizona.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Someone's trying to drop a body in a remote area,
they might just jump on the highway and stop by
and keep going.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
You can see why this case is so difficult. So
investigator John Shannon now has a new case file with
old newspaper clippings, and from reading those, he's got a lead.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
And that's when we said, oh, she's buried here, and
we didn't know that either. So after we got all
the documentation together, I had your write up of justification
into the county attorney to go before the judge to
get a court order to exum her because there was
no family, you know, we didn't know who she was.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
A judge grants the request and they dig up her casket.
They're able to get her skeletal remains. Now the detectives
partner with names the National Missing and Unidentified Person System.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
And we actually end up getting her DNA, and then
from there it was okay, we have DNA, but it
doesn't tell us anything.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
So they have her DNA, but they still don't know
anything about her.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
They don't, and they developed the DNA profile and it's
given back to NamUs and it's entered into KOTAS. But
that doesn't do us any good because there was nothing
to match to it.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
John Shannon is discouraged, but he doesn't give up. Detectives
keep circling back to one idea. Aileen remember I mentioned
that back in nineteen sixty, police thought there was a
chance that little Miss Nobody was actually a little girl
who had been kidnapped in Alamagordo, New Mexico.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yeah, but I thought they rulled it out.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
They did at the time. They said her clothing wasn't
the same. They also said the New Mexico girl, whose
name was Sharon Galagos, was four and little Miss Nobody
was probably older. Michael Perry from the Yavapai County Sheriff's
office said there were also some other issues.
Speaker 5 (15:52):
They were able to get footprints off of the body,
but the FBI came back later on and said that
those footprints were not at The footprints from the body
in Arizona were not a match to the footprints of
Sharon Diego's Interesting.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I'm kind of surprised that they're confident that it's not
the same little girl. I mean, how exactly are they
matching footprints? I'm guessing the body of the girl in
the desert has changed from decomposition, Like, how do you
measure that?
Speaker 3 (16:23):
Yeah, and even though that lead was discounted back in
nineteen sixty, John Shannon and his colleagues just can't get
it out of their minds.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
So we were kind of snooping around, actually out down
on the girdle. There was nothing that alo'girdle could supply.
They gave us any clues because all they saw was
was a girl abducted and she left town, and that's
all they really knew about it. That's all their records had.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
John decides to do a little digging on his own
to find out anything he can about the New Mexico girl,
Sharon Galagos, and he finds an obituary for her mother.
It turns out that Sharon had siblings.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
I got a copy of the obituary. It mentioned brother Johnny.
Name Us was very helpful in trying to find him,
which we did. Name Is found him in Germany and
we had the FBI go and get his DNA.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Oh wow. So this case from nineteen sixty starts in
the Arizona Desert, brings us to New Mexico and now Germany.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
So the FBI helps orchestrate this and authorities contact Johnny
with a request. And Johnny is the brother of the
missing girl Sharon.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
We believe that there might be a max cher, but
we need your DNA to compare it to the little
girl's DNA.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
Johnny gives his DNA and it's compared and a report
comes back saying this little girl is not Sharon Glegos,
the little girl in New Mexico, but the results are
also inconclusive. Basically, it says, we can't tell you who
little misnow that he is.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
This is so frustrating. I just want to know.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
At this point, detectives turned to the top forensic experts
in the country for help.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
All those organizations had a shot at trying to identify her,
and these other companies all said, we can't do anything.
We can't tell you anything about her. We don't know how,
we can't identify it. And it was it was frustrating,
(18:29):
but it seemed like every time we did something, we
got a little closer, you know, a little closer to
trying to find out who she was. And I it's sorry,
you get emotional when you get to a solution.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
The Sheriff's office has used up any money they had
on the case, Their best lead was proven wrong, and
everyone's telling them it's hopeless.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
I mean, that's very frustrating, and it's weird to think
that they have DNA from her and they still can't
even figure out who she is.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
And then one day in twenty twenty one, a guy
named Michael Vogan is watching the news and he sees
a story about little Miss Nobody and he picks up
the phone to call John Shannon.
Speaker 6 (19:27):
So here I come, calling the investigator and I'm like,
this is new, and he's like, I already tried it.
I'm like, yeah, but this is different. Why why can't
we take a shot at this?
Speaker 2 (19:59):
So remind me who Michael Vogan is.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
He works with Authram as the director of case management.
He's kind of a point person with detectives, and one day,
when he sees this news story about the little Miss
Nobody case still going unsolved, he begs John Shannon to
give it one more try.
Speaker 6 (20:18):
I said, you may have had a profile that wasn't
applicable for this type of analysis. You may have missmatches.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Michael's convinced that the DNA testing that's been done so
far wasn't designed for forensic DNA and so it could
be missing clues to her identity, or it could actually
even lead them away from the truth. I asked Chris
and Middleman from Outhrum to explain for starter. She says,
the evidence was sixty two years old and had sat
(20:46):
in the hot Arizona sun.
Speaker 4 (20:48):
There was degradation caused by the heat. There was contamination
from plants, animals, everything that is out there at that
time back to you, obviously, and that made it very
difficult to work those remains. So when they weren't able
to get enough DNA markers using the correct science, they
(21:10):
did something called imputation where they use software software that
isn't forensic, to try to impute what the DNA would
look like. And then they tried to compare the DNA
to DNA that family references had given to the case.
(21:30):
They said that little miss Nobody was not sharing Gallegos.
Let me get this straight. They had somehow filled out
their missing DNA markers and predicted the rest of the
profile through some kind of calculation or mathematical way of
guessing at the DNA, but what they inferred was actually wrong.
(21:54):
It's like if you were to read a book and
you could only see half the ages, maybe you would
infer the wrong ending to a story.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
And then there was another issue. The FBI got DNA
from Sharon Galegos's family in Germany. They got DNA from
someone who they thought was her mother's brother, but he
was actually a half brother.
Speaker 4 (22:19):
It was a half sibling relationship, which CODIS isn't good
at identifying relationships unless itself or parent child. And so
they hired a genealogy group to actually do advanced DNA
testing and to do these comparisons. And that's the report
that actually said that it's certain that Sharon Gallegos was
(22:45):
not little miss Nobody and then the case was over.
How is the detective supposed to know that there's another
lab in Texas called authorm that's going to build a
different profile.
Speaker 2 (22:58):
I completely get why the investigator is skeptical when this
guy from AUTHRAM calls him and says, hey, our lab
in Texas has technology that can work, because he's been
promised that before and it didn't lead anywhere.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
And there was also the money issue, because Yavapai County
Sheriff's office had run out of funds to work on
the case.
Speaker 6 (23:18):
I said, okay, well let's crowdfund it. We have this
group of people online that would probably help.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
So Michael from OUTHRAM calls the reporter who did the
recent news story.
Speaker 6 (23:27):
I reached out to her and I said, hey, we're
going to take a shot at this. Do you think
you guys could put us story out and help us
publicize this crowdfund? She said, I would love to because
I would love to see this little girl get her
name back.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
Alan. I should explain that authram has a website that
lists unsolved cases and anyone can go online and donate
money to have a particular case solved. And so the reporter,
Brianna Whitney puts out another story.
Speaker 6 (23:54):
And kudos to her and the Sheriff's office. They both
put out this blast and within twenty four hours we
raised the money to do it, which was still like
a record to this day. I don't know how they
pulled that off, but they did.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
Now, little Miss Nobody's remains are sent to the Texas
Lab and they pulled DNA from one of her teeth.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
The DNA worked really well in our hands, which was amazing,
and as soon as we sequence, we were able to
get a lot of markers.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
This more detailed DNA profile is uploaded to genealogy sites
and suddenly they're getting clues of little Miss Nobody's real identity.
Speaker 7 (24:32):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
That's when Michael Vogan gets a call from David Middleman
from authrom.
Speaker 6 (24:39):
David called me and he goes, hey, who did they
think this person this little girl was? And I go,
Sharon Galagos is the little girl's name from New Mexico.
And he goes, I think that's her And I go,
no way, and he goes, yeah, can we talk to
someone there? I said sure, We got on the phone.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
We talked to the investigator, and that investigator, John Shannon,
he's breaking down more clues. Outside of the family in Germany.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
We found there was other people here in the United
States that popped up.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
One name that popped up was Rinaldo Chavez. His mom
was Sharon's older sister, so the older sister of the
girl who went missing. And now the case is starting
to move pretty quickly. Ronaldo and his siblings get a
call from the sheriff's office.
Speaker 7 (25:24):
So they reached out to me, and they asked me
a lot of questions about, you know, what happened, who
was still alive? You know, they really didn't say what
was going on.
Speaker 3 (25:37):
Who was still alive. Sadly, Sharon's mom passed away in
twenty eleven and her big sister, Ronaldo's mom died in
twenty seventeen, we knew.
Speaker 7 (25:50):
That my mom's sister had been kidnapped. You know, my
mom told us that, but she didn't really want to
go into specifics because it brought up a lot of emotion.
It's still very hard for my uncle to talk about it,
and it was still very emotional for you know. He
felt helpless, he said, you know, being ten years old,
(26:11):
being you know, the boy and the family, and he
said he just felt helpless.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
Even though the family didn't really want to talk about
Sharon's disappearance, the whole community knew about it. Years later,
Ronaldo enrolled in classes at the local community college.
Speaker 7 (26:29):
And my biology teacher, missus Cassiah, when she was reading rolled,
she goes, Ronaldo Chavez and you know you raised her
hands say you were here. She said, oh, your aunt
was kidnapped in nineteen sixty, I mean in front of
the whole class, and then everybody, everybody in the classroom
in clearing. Myself was shocked and I was like, how
(26:52):
do you know about that? Oh, well, can talk about
it after class. What it happened to be is miss Messiah,
her husband was the FBI ag on the case in
the nineteen sixties. He said, it was really a hard
case for him.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
So what happens?
Speaker 3 (27:09):
So after Ronaldo and his family have the zoom meeting
with authorities in Arizona, they quickly get on the phone.
Speaker 7 (27:16):
So I got on with my other two siblings and
we're like, what do you think? Do you think they
found Sharon? Do you think they're going to tell us
that they know where she is? You know, those ideas
went through our head, but also, you know, that's a
long time in sixty two years.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
Meanwhile, Kristen says, Authram is busy testing the DNA from
little Miss Nobody's remains.
Speaker 4 (27:41):
We actually started to see that the matches we were
getting were actually consistent with Sharon Gallego's family. So we
contacted the detectives. We asked if there was a reference sample.
We were able to do a one to one match
and it worked.
Speaker 3 (28:01):
Investigator's call to set up a zoom meeting with Ronaldo
and his family, and John Shannon is on the call.
Speaker 7 (28:08):
You know, he talked to us a little bit about
it and said they've been working on this case. And
then they told us about authoram laps and then they said.
Speaker 8 (28:20):
Excuse me, and then they told us they had identified
our aunt, they had identified her remains. You know, we
were all like, what, you know, we were all kind
of shocked, and ah, you know we were you know,
(28:40):
a lot of things are going through her mind.
Speaker 7 (28:42):
They found my aunt, but you know, she's she's died.
And then we had all kinds of questions, how did
you find her? How old it was she when they
when they discovered her remains.
Speaker 8 (28:52):
And so the rest of the Zoom call was really
about explaining the whole thing, how it came about, and
how oft from lamps is really the ones who were
able to make the identification.
Speaker 3 (29:07):
Investigator John Shannon tells Rinaldo about the funeral the community
in Prescott, Arizona held and how people donated money to
buy Sharon a casket and bury her.
Speaker 7 (29:18):
That people really took care of my aunt for us.
They took care of her wanting to find out who
she was, and if it wasn't for their dedication and commitment,
probably would have never found out.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
I'm also thinking it's kind of wild that the original
investigators had that hunch that little Miss Nobody was Sharon,
but so many times they were told no.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
And the initial DNA testing proved even more conclusively that
it wasn't her, but Kristin Middleman says it was basically
all bad science.
Speaker 4 (29:51):
It was unbelievable to see that you can use advanced
DNA technology incorrectly and get the wrong answer. So that case,
to me was terrifying because it showed me that people
would go to great lengths to get an answer, but
not necessarily consider if good science was actually behind that answer.
(30:17):
And we're talking about confirming someone's identity as a perpetrator
or victim of a crime, taking away someone's name and
voice forever. It does make me think about how much
DNA is used in courtrooms and investigations, and I think
sometimes it gets simplified to the DNA says X. So
(30:38):
the answer is why, But it's actually a very delicate
science at times, and the testing methods are not all
the same. That's blown my mind working on this podcast
in general. So, now that we know that the girl
in the desert is Sharon from New Mexico, what do
we know about her?
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Actually kind of a lot. So Sharon was four years
old and she lived with her mom, her grandmother, aunts
and cousins.
Speaker 7 (31:05):
She had light brown hair, hazel eyes, and she had
a nickname my great grandmother called her Wedda, which means
the light one. She was a very energetic, feisty little girl.
She liked being by her grandmother's side. She'd just sit
(31:28):
at the kitchen table watching my grandmother make tortillas and beans,
of course, a staple in my grandparents' house. She really
loved playing with her cousins because they lived in a
multi generational home. She liked being outside.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
And then one day in mid July nineteen sixty, Sharon
was playing in her yard with some of her siblings
and cousins when an old green car pulled up.
Speaker 7 (31:57):
There was this green vehicle with a couple in it,
a man and a woman, and there was two other
children in the vehicle with them, and they had been
kind of scouting out the neighborhood the week before. Come
to find out that this couple was asking a lot
of questions about Sharon, specifically about my grandmother who she was,
(32:22):
you know, how many kids does she have. Then, on
the day that had actually happened, my aunt Sharon was
outside plane and the car drove up in an alley.
They said, hey, Sharon, would you like some candy and
we'll buy you a new clothes and she was standing there,
(32:44):
didn't want to go. The lady came out, grabbed her
by the arm and pulled her into the car. My
mom's cousins were there, and there was some neighborhood kids
and they ran inside and said, hey, you know, a
lady just pulled Sharon into car. My mom and my
grandmother were like, what call the police right away, and
(33:06):
then it all started.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
Police set up roadblocks pretty immediately, but there were no
signs of the green car or Sharon. Rinaldo's mom, Sharon's
big sister. She heads out with friends to search the neighborhood,
and the local newspaper ran stories about Sharon's kidnapping. And
then there was an interesting twist. Allen remember, investigators initially
(33:28):
thought little miss Nobody might be Sharon.
Speaker 7 (33:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
Well, Rinaldo says, police reached out to his family back
then and asked if someone would come look at this
little girl's body that was discovered in the desert.
Speaker 7 (33:41):
And it was determined that instead of having my grandmother
go to identify the body, they asked my grandmother's best
friend to go and identify the body. And you know,
she determined, oh no, this body's too big, it's not Sharon.
It was just devastating to my grandmother losing not knowing
(34:07):
what happened. It affected the whole entire family from there
on out. Everybody was very vigilant about where the kids were,
and I mean we all knew about it.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
I can only imagine growing up Ronaldo and the whole
family living with us. I mean, his young aunt just
grabbed out of the family's yard.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
And for years it was really just too painful to
talk about. Ronaldo says it wasn't until he was about
twelve when he started asking his mom more about Sharon's disappearance.
Speaker 7 (34:44):
We always hope we never gave a pope every time the.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
Excuse me, oh it's okay.
Speaker 7 (34:56):
Every time the police would contact us, because throughout our life,
yes it was you know, the police would contact my grandmother,
then my mom, and then us. You know, we were
still like, you know, maybe they found her, she's still alive,
We'll get to meet her.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
Ronaldo says that knowing the truth of what happened to
Sharon did bring some peace.
Speaker 7 (35:22):
You know, we couldn't be there for her, and to
find out that, you know, she wasn't lost or forgotten,
and there was a whole community not just one person,
there was a whole community that was taking care of her.
It just you know, our family couldn't believe in.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Sharon's remains were sent back to New Mexico, Ronaldo and
the family gathered for a funeral and they buried Sharon
next to her mom and her grandmother.
Speaker 7 (35:54):
The day before, me and my uncle and my brother,
we dug that the small grave.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
We buttered it.
Speaker 7 (36:05):
We beate it ourselves. Yeah, we wanted to do that.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
John Shannon and Michael Perry and a whole team had
worked on this case for years and I was curious
how they were feeling.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Well, I think that the best way to say that
is we were invited to go to the funeral and
may treat us like family.
Speaker 5 (36:34):
And that's just a very powerful and experience to be
part of that, and just a gratitude that the family
express towards us. It was just a very humbling experience.
Speaker 9 (36:43):
The sad thing about this case is that Sharon isn't alone.
There are literally thousands of other children like her that
are unidentified. They're unaccounted for. And the truth is that,
you know, technology like ours could be aiding police everywhere
in identifying these cuts.
Speaker 4 (37:05):
Everyone deserves to be buried with their family, to be
able to be visited, to have people that know where
they are know their story. Everyone deserves their voice.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
The couple who took Sharon in the green car were
never found, so that part of the mystery is still
an open investigation.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
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
(38:08):
Katrina Norville and Ali Perry. Special thanks to Connell Byrne,
Will Pearson, Kerrie Lieberman, Nikki Etour, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank,
and the entire team at Outhrum. I'm Alan Lance lessor
thanks for listening.
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