November 5, 2025 • 19 mins
Othram began to realize that a lot of unidentified remains cases languishing on shelves in law enforcement offices belonged to children. Children that remained unidentified for decades. Meanwhile, loved ones never gave up hope. There is a solution to this issue, and it’s less of a lift than you would think. In this episode, families finally find answers, and get a chance to say goodbye.
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 (00:07):
Who as.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
I think many of us started to realize as we
worked these unidentified remains cases that many of them were children,
and unfortunately, with children, the people that harm them are
usually the people that would report them missing. So they
were never reported missing.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
For ten years, the world did not know her name.
For ten years, she was known as Opahlikah Baby Jane Doe.
On January twenty eighth, twenty twelve, police responded to a
call from a trailer park in Opelika, Alabama. A child's
pink shirt, a small bundle of hair, the bones let
(00:58):
them know she was probably between four and seven years old.
There wasn't enough left to build a DNA profile. Law
enforcement was stuck. This is the kind of case Kristin
Middleman says. Authorm's project five to two five was designed
for cases involving children that have reached a dead end,
(01:22):
where traditional DNA testing methods come up short, where the
remains have been sitting in an evidence locker somewhere for years.
Today we talk about Authorm's quest to solve five hundred
and twenty five cases of missing or murdered children, the
cases they've solved, and the names that have been given back.
(01:43):
This is America's crime Lab. I'm Alan Lance Lesser. Kristin
Middleman is the chief Business Development Officer at AUTHRM. She
is a soft spot for Project five two five, maybe
because she has five children of her own.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Project five two five is a mission to identify five
hundred and twenty five missing and murdered children in the
United States and give them their name back.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
We picked five two five because.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
May twenty fifth is Missing Children's Day in the United States.
Every time we found one of these skeletons of an
abused child, a murdered child. Once we identified, then we
realized that they weren't even a case on someone's desk.
And we all sit here and we talk about the
backlog of cases getting bigger and bigger.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
It's even worse than that.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Some of these victims, especially these young children, they're not
even on a backlog.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
The case is just lost in time.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
They have been taken out of reality and harmed in
the most terrible way by the people they trusted the most.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
To me, that was a devastating concept.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Christian knew AUTHORM could make a dent in solving these
cases because authrooms to discovered many ways of cracking these
cold cases. Open In January twenty twelve, a child's remains
were found near a trailer park in Opahlika, Alabama. She
became known as Opahika Baby Jane Doe because no one
(03:16):
could find out who she was.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
She was found in a riverbed and Opalaika, Alabama, and
her bones were beaten so many times that she had
hundreds of breaks that had healed over and over and
over again at different times, knocked out teeth.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
It's one of those cases you see and you get sick.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Ten years after her body was found, authroom scientists took
a look. They extracted DNA from the girl's scalp.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
We were able to build a profile for her that
led to the identification of her parents, and the mother
was still under the impression that she was fine and
living with a father that had gained custody and was
paying wild support. Eleven years after this child was murdered,
every two weeks to the person that actually murdered her
(04:07):
and left her under that river. No Plaika. These crimes
don't stop. They continue until someone has an answer, until
that victim gets their name back, their story back. Her
name was a Moor Wiggins and she has been buried
now her mom got to go to her gravestone and
at least pay respects and know where her child is.
(04:28):
She's no longer paying child support to the monster that
did this. He's confessed to the crime and his wife
at the time is undergoing trial for necessity to murder.
But this story is one that happens all too often.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
This is what motivates Kristen, giving victims their identity back
and giving families answers seeing justice served.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Some of the cases, they're older and they're murdered by
a boyfriend, and even in those cases sometimes are not
reported missing. I have one I can tell you about.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
December twentieth, nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
She was known as Beth do Her body was found
in the bottom of a lake. She was pregnant, fifteen
years old and pregnant.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Over forty years later, a DNA extract from Beth Doe's
bone was sent to Authrum. There was a lot there
to work with, but there was also a lot of
damage from degradation and bacterial contamination. But by then Authorm
had special tools and equipment to analyze the sample. Soon after,
local law enforcement found a close match with a relative,
(05:44):
a nephew. It turns out that side of the family
had been missing an aunt and a sister since the
mid nineteen seventies. Her name was Evelyn Cologne. The nephew
had uploaded his DNA profile to many genial logs sites,
hoping to reconnect with his aunt Evelyn. The family had
lost touch with her, but assumed she was alive because
(06:08):
they had received a letter from Evelyn around the time
they last saw her. It said that she and her
boyfriend had welcomed a new son. It turns out the
boyfriend had written the letter after her murder.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Evelyn was dead.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
It wasn't the news the family was expecting, but now
they had the truth. Evelyn's boyfriend was arrested and charged
with her homicide. Walker County Jane Doe was found on
(06:58):
November one, nineteen eight.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
She was thirteen fourteen years old when she was found
on the side of the road on Halloween Day. That
file is one of the most horrendous files I have
ever read in my entire life.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
There were so many details at the crime scene. A
rectangular brown pendant with a smoky glass stone that hung
on a thin gold chain around her neck, red leather
heels with light brown straps, pierced ears, pink painted toenails,
light brown hair with a reddish tint. Multiple witnesses claimed
(07:43):
to have seen a young girl carrying strappy, red high
heeled sandals. One witness said the girl had asked for
directions to a nearby prison. Her naked body was discovered
by a truck driver in a grassy area off a highway.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
In Huntsville, Texas.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
She'd been brutally sexually assaulted and strangled. There are so
many specific details that it's hard to imagine how she
remained unrecognized and unclaimed for so long. Her tombstone red
unknown white female.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
That child was tortured and left disfigured at the side
of the road.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
No one was able to identify her, and somehow the
evidence in this case went missing, So all that was
left was an autopsy slide.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
An autopsy slide, a sliver of tissue preserved on a
glass slide designed for viewing under a microscope.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
That's all there was.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
And when there is such scarce DNA evidence, author must
sometimes hesitant to run the technology. DNA is tested, it
is destroyed in the process, So Kristen says, unless authorm
is confident they can build a profile, they have to wait,
She says, they pause about twenty five percent of cases.
They decided to pause the Walker County case. But when
(09:17):
they pause a case, that doesn't mean they give up.
They have other methods.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
We actually do mock case work in the research lab
with DNA that doesn't belong to a victim.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Basically, when the DNA evidence is scarce, they start with
a different DNA sample and they put it through the
same conditions that affected the limited DNA evidence. Maybe they
expose it to extreme temperatures or certain chemicals to mimic
the original DNA properties that they can test their technology
on first, and that's led to some breakthroughs. But on
(09:53):
the Walker County case, they attempted something they'd never done before.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
So it was a paraffin embedded form aldehyde fixed block
FFPE block, they'll call.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
It, Kristen says. In this new technique, human tissue is
immersed in a solution of formaldehyde. This stabilizes the cells
and allows the sample to be preserved and tested at
a later date.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
And we started to create FFP blocks in our research
lab with fresh DNA and try to figure out can
we actually ever do this? Can we reproduce it, and
within about six months we were able to reproducibly get
sequencing results from this type of DNA.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
All of this testing happened over months in author's research labs.
Once they perfected their new method, Kristen says, they were
ready to call detectives in Texas.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Within a year.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
We had brought it into our forensic protocol and the
lab and we took the case back and actually we're
able to give Shery Ann Jarvis her identity back.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
Forty years after her murder, Sherry Ann Jarvis's family finally
knew the truth.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
She was a girl that was reported missing in Minnesota.
She was found here in Texas. No one would have
connected the two cases.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Shery Ann Jarvis, Evelyn Cologne, Amoor Wiggins. These are just
a few cases AUTHOROM has helped solve over the years
of the youngest victims.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Now bear with me.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
I'm about to tell you about a database, but it's
a key component of Project five two five. It's called
the National Missing and Unidentified Person System or NamUs. It's
a federal database that houses twenty four thousand missing or
unidentified person cases, and about twenty four percent are children.
(12:01):
Kristin has raised money that allows Authroom to partner with
NamUs to work on these cases, but for it to work,
they need buy in from local police departments.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
The case might be a NamUs, but the evidence is
still with local law enforcement, and they are the ones
that help us collect the sample for confirmation. And if
there's an investigative lead, for example, when we're able to
help identify what family this person belonged to, we give
that information back to law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Kristin estimates that it costs eight to twelve thousand dollars
to solve these cases from start to finish, no more
than a detective salary to work a case for a
month or two detectives who have already dedicated years and
years to these cases. With the funding in place, it's
hard to imagine why a police department would turn them down,
(12:49):
but they do.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
I don't know, fear of new technology, fear of failure.
Sometimes people out there tell law enforcement they can do
things they can do, and law enforcement has tried and
they've been burned. And so when someone else comes and says, look,
I have a predictable way of testing DNA, let us
help you, they don't think that we're any different, And
(13:12):
unfortunately that's a big hurdle in DNA testing, and so
it's not even necessarily that the detective doesn't want to
work the case. They just don't trust the technology to
work the case.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
October nineteen ninety nine, twenty three month old Andrea Michelle
Reyes was abducted. The investigation began in new Haven, Connecticut,
where she was last seen. Her father suspected that Andrea
was taken to Mexico by her mother, who did not
have custody of her.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
When he went to law enforcement, he provided that theory
and they looked and they tried to figure out if
they could find where a non good studial parent was
living or where she could be in Mexico, but they
couldn't find her, and they ended up closing the case.
And then years later, recently one of the detectives at
(14:09):
New Haven actually reopened the case and started looking in
Mexico to try to figure out if he could find
any information about the non custodial parent, and in doing
so he actually made contact with the child. She was
twenty seven years old at the time.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
That's when Authurm was looped in The twenty seven year
old woman provided a DNA sample which was compared to
Andrea's father's DNA profile with KINSNIP rapid relationship testing. This
allowed them to link them as father and daughter. This
young woman was indeed Andrea Michelle Reyes.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
She's not the first. She's actually the second child to
be found alive.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
Since initiating Project five two five about a year ago,
Authormis helped solve five cases of missing or murdered children.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
And I don't think it's going to take that long
to get through five hundred and twenty five cases. I
think that as we start to solve these cases that
were previously completely unsolvable in a routine way and show that,
you know, we can take in five hundred and twenty
five cases and give five hundred and twenty five answers
and the only thing that's missing is funding, then I
(15:42):
think that people will think twice before they commit those
types of crimes in the future. I think it becomes
a deterrent to people murdering their own children. If you
have a child's remains sitting at an evidence locker and
no one saw the child be placed. Wherever you found
that child, it could be in a field under a riverbed,
(16:05):
like we spoke at the bottom of a lake, at
a house, inside of a TV.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
I've seen it all.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
When that's all the information you have, there's no other
test to be done. What are you waiting for to
solve that case? You're waiting for someone to knock at
the police station on the door and say I saw
something that day, or I saw someone bury this person.
But unfortunately, decades and decades go by and no one's
(16:31):
come by with any eyewitness information. You can't ever solve
a crime, and you don't know who your victim is.
You can't piece together the last few days of their lives.
That's why I think this project is necessary to show
that there is hope. The evidence right there can give
you the answer. It can give you the lead to
(16:52):
the identity of this person. And once you know the
name of the person that was in the TV or
at the bottom of the lake, you can figure out
who saw them last, where they were, You can figure
out who to question to actually start that investigation.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Authorom's David Middleman also says arriving at an answer doesn't
cost as much as you'd think.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
At this point. Most unsolved crimes are a choice. We've
got the technology, it's been validated in the scientific literature,
it's stood up in court. These tools have been used
to solve thousands of cases. It's just a matter of
prioritizing the cases, the effort necessary to solve them, and
the funding. And we've had a really great support from
(17:37):
the community DNA Solves the Project five through five community,
and this has allowed us to get many of these
cases that otherwise would remain unsolved. Now to the finish
line victims identified, crime solved. But to really scale this
for everyone and for every jurisdiction, we will need support
from the local, state, and federal government to prioritize, fund
(18:01):
and an otherwise resource this kind of work. And when
we get to that point, we won't have these backlogs
of unsolved cases.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
It's not that the detectives aren't investigating, they have no
one to investigate. They're stock and this technology helps unstick
those cases from DNA DARENZ to actual answers. And it's
just the beginning, but it's a necessary beginning.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
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 Finalosa, Emily
Foreman and Jessica albert Our. Executive producers are Kate Osborne,
Mangesh Hadigadour and David and Kristin Middleman and from iHeart
(18:56):
Katrina Norville and Ali Perryial Thanks to Connell Byrne, Will Pearson,
Kerrie Lieberman, Nikki Etour, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank, and the
entire team at OUTHRM.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
I'm Allen lance lessor. Thanks for listening.
Who as.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
I think many of us started to realize as we
worked these unidentified remains cases that many of them were children,
and unfortunately, with children, the people that harm them are
usually the people that would report them missing. So they
were never reported missing.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
For ten years, the world did not know her name.
For ten years, she was known as Opahlikah Baby Jane Doe.
On January twenty eighth, twenty twelve, police responded to a
call from a trailer park in Opelika, Alabama. A child's
pink shirt, a small bundle of hair, the bones let
(00:58):
them know she was probably between four and seven years old.
There wasn't enough left to build a DNA profile. Law
enforcement was stuck. This is the kind of case Kristin
Middleman says. Authorm's project five to two five was designed
for cases involving children that have reached a dead end,
(01:22):
where traditional DNA testing methods come up short, where the
remains have been sitting in an evidence locker somewhere for years.
Today we talk about Authorm's quest to solve five hundred
and twenty five cases of missing or murdered children, the
cases they've solved, and the names that have been given back.
(01:43):
This is America's crime Lab. I'm Alan Lance Lesser. Kristin
Middleman is the chief Business Development Officer at AUTHRM. She
is a soft spot for Project five two five, maybe
because she has five children of her own.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Project five two five is a mission to identify five
hundred and twenty five missing and murdered children in the
United States and give them their name back.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
We picked five two five because.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
May twenty fifth is Missing Children's Day in the United States.
Every time we found one of these skeletons of an
abused child, a murdered child. Once we identified, then we
realized that they weren't even a case on someone's desk.
And we all sit here and we talk about the
backlog of cases getting bigger and bigger.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
It's even worse than that.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Some of these victims, especially these young children, they're not
even on a backlog.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
The case is just lost in time.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
They have been taken out of reality and harmed in
the most terrible way by the people they trusted the most.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
To me, that was a devastating concept.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Christian knew AUTHORM could make a dent in solving these
cases because authrooms to discovered many ways of cracking these
cold cases. Open In January twenty twelve, a child's remains
were found near a trailer park in Opahlika, Alabama. She
became known as Opahika Baby Jane Doe because no one
(03:16):
could find out who she was.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
She was found in a riverbed and Opalaika, Alabama, and
her bones were beaten so many times that she had
hundreds of breaks that had healed over and over and
over again at different times, knocked out teeth.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
It's one of those cases you see and you get sick.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Ten years after her body was found, authroom scientists took
a look. They extracted DNA from the girl's scalp.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
We were able to build a profile for her that
led to the identification of her parents, and the mother
was still under the impression that she was fine and
living with a father that had gained custody and was
paying wild support. Eleven years after this child was murdered,
every two weeks to the person that actually murdered her
(04:07):
and left her under that river. No Plaika. These crimes
don't stop. They continue until someone has an answer, until
that victim gets their name back, their story back. Her
name was a Moor Wiggins and she has been buried
now her mom got to go to her gravestone and
at least pay respects and know where her child is.
(04:28):
She's no longer paying child support to the monster that
did this. He's confessed to the crime and his wife
at the time is undergoing trial for necessity to murder.
But this story is one that happens all too often.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
This is what motivates Kristen, giving victims their identity back
and giving families answers seeing justice served.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Some of the cases, they're older and they're murdered by
a boyfriend, and even in those cases sometimes are not
reported missing. I have one I can tell you about.
Speaker 3 (05:09):
December twentieth, nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
She was known as Beth do Her body was found
in the bottom of a lake. She was pregnant, fifteen
years old and pregnant.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Over forty years later, a DNA extract from Beth Doe's
bone was sent to Authrum. There was a lot there
to work with, but there was also a lot of
damage from degradation and bacterial contamination. But by then Authorm
had special tools and equipment to analyze the sample. Soon after,
local law enforcement found a close match with a relative,
(05:44):
a nephew. It turns out that side of the family
had been missing an aunt and a sister since the
mid nineteen seventies. Her name was Evelyn Cologne. The nephew
had uploaded his DNA profile to many genial logs sites,
hoping to reconnect with his aunt Evelyn. The family had
lost touch with her, but assumed she was alive because
(06:08):
they had received a letter from Evelyn around the time
they last saw her. It said that she and her
boyfriend had welcomed a new son. It turns out the
boyfriend had written the letter after her murder.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Evelyn was dead.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
It wasn't the news the family was expecting, but now
they had the truth. Evelyn's boyfriend was arrested and charged
with her homicide. Walker County Jane Doe was found on
(06:58):
November one, nineteen eight.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
She was thirteen fourteen years old when she was found
on the side of the road on Halloween Day. That
file is one of the most horrendous files I have
ever read in my entire life.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
There were so many details at the crime scene. A
rectangular brown pendant with a smoky glass stone that hung
on a thin gold chain around her neck, red leather
heels with light brown straps, pierced ears, pink painted toenails,
light brown hair with a reddish tint. Multiple witnesses claimed
(07:43):
to have seen a young girl carrying strappy, red high
heeled sandals. One witness said the girl had asked for
directions to a nearby prison. Her naked body was discovered
by a truck driver in a grassy area off a highway.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
In Huntsville, Texas.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
She'd been brutally sexually assaulted and strangled. There are so
many specific details that it's hard to imagine how she
remained unrecognized and unclaimed for so long. Her tombstone red
unknown white female.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
That child was tortured and left disfigured at the side
of the road.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
No one was able to identify her, and somehow the
evidence in this case went missing, So all that was
left was an autopsy slide.
Speaker 3 (08:43):
An autopsy slide, a sliver of tissue preserved on a
glass slide designed for viewing under a microscope.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
That's all there was.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
And when there is such scarce DNA evidence, author must
sometimes hesitant to run the technology. DNA is tested, it
is destroyed in the process, So Kristen says, unless authorm
is confident they can build a profile, they have to wait,
She says, they pause about twenty five percent of cases.
They decided to pause the Walker County case. But when
(09:17):
they pause a case, that doesn't mean they give up.
They have other methods.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
We actually do mock case work in the research lab
with DNA that doesn't belong to a victim.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Basically, when the DNA evidence is scarce, they start with
a different DNA sample and they put it through the
same conditions that affected the limited DNA evidence. Maybe they
expose it to extreme temperatures or certain chemicals to mimic
the original DNA properties that they can test their technology
on first, and that's led to some breakthroughs. But on
(09:53):
the Walker County case, they attempted something they'd never done before.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
So it was a paraffin embedded form aldehyde fixed block
FFPE block, they'll call.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
It, Kristen says. In this new technique, human tissue is
immersed in a solution of formaldehyde. This stabilizes the cells
and allows the sample to be preserved and tested at
a later date.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
And we started to create FFP blocks in our research
lab with fresh DNA and try to figure out can
we actually ever do this? Can we reproduce it, and
within about six months we were able to reproducibly get
sequencing results from this type of DNA.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
All of this testing happened over months in author's research labs.
Once they perfected their new method, Kristen says, they were
ready to call detectives in Texas.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
Within a year.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
We had brought it into our forensic protocol and the
lab and we took the case back and actually we're
able to give Shery Ann Jarvis her identity back.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
Forty years after her murder, Sherry Ann Jarvis's family finally
knew the truth.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
She was a girl that was reported missing in Minnesota.
She was found here in Texas. No one would have
connected the two cases.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
Shery Ann Jarvis, Evelyn Cologne, Amoor Wiggins. These are just
a few cases AUTHOROM has helped solve over the years
of the youngest victims.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Now bear with me.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
I'm about to tell you about a database, but it's
a key component of Project five two five. It's called
the National Missing and Unidentified Person System or NamUs. It's
a federal database that houses twenty four thousand missing or
unidentified person cases, and about twenty four percent are children.
(12:01):
Kristin has raised money that allows Authroom to partner with
NamUs to work on these cases, but for it to work,
they need buy in from local police departments.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
The case might be a NamUs, but the evidence is
still with local law enforcement, and they are the ones
that help us collect the sample for confirmation. And if
there's an investigative lead, for example, when we're able to
help identify what family this person belonged to, we give
that information back to law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Kristin estimates that it costs eight to twelve thousand dollars
to solve these cases from start to finish, no more
than a detective salary to work a case for a
month or two detectives who have already dedicated years and
years to these cases. With the funding in place, it's
hard to imagine why a police department would turn them down,
(12:49):
but they do.
Speaker 2 (12:51):
I don't know, fear of new technology, fear of failure.
Sometimes people out there tell law enforcement they can do
things they can do, and law enforcement has tried and
they've been burned. And so when someone else comes and says, look,
I have a predictable way of testing DNA, let us
help you, they don't think that we're any different, And
(13:12):
unfortunately that's a big hurdle in DNA testing, and so
it's not even necessarily that the detective doesn't want to
work the case. They just don't trust the technology to
work the case.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
October nineteen ninety nine, twenty three month old Andrea Michelle
Reyes was abducted. The investigation began in new Haven, Connecticut,
where she was last seen. Her father suspected that Andrea
was taken to Mexico by her mother, who did not
have custody of her.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
When he went to law enforcement, he provided that theory
and they looked and they tried to figure out if
they could find where a non good studial parent was
living or where she could be in Mexico, but they
couldn't find her, and they ended up closing the case.
And then years later, recently one of the detectives at
(14:09):
New Haven actually reopened the case and started looking in
Mexico to try to figure out if he could find
any information about the non custodial parent, and in doing
so he actually made contact with the child. She was
twenty seven years old at the time.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
That's when Authurm was looped in The twenty seven year
old woman provided a DNA sample which was compared to
Andrea's father's DNA profile with KINSNIP rapid relationship testing. This
allowed them to link them as father and daughter. This
young woman was indeed Andrea Michelle Reyes.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
She's not the first. She's actually the second child to
be found alive.
Speaker 3 (15:10):
Since initiating Project five two five about a year ago,
Authormis helped solve five cases of missing or murdered children.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
And I don't think it's going to take that long
to get through five hundred and twenty five cases. I
think that as we start to solve these cases that
were previously completely unsolvable in a routine way and show that,
you know, we can take in five hundred and twenty
five cases and give five hundred and twenty five answers
and the only thing that's missing is funding, then I
(15:42):
think that people will think twice before they commit those
types of crimes in the future. I think it becomes
a deterrent to people murdering their own children. If you
have a child's remains sitting at an evidence locker and
no one saw the child be placed. Wherever you found
that child, it could be in a field under a riverbed,
(16:05):
like we spoke at the bottom of a lake, at
a house, inside of a TV.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
I've seen it all.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
When that's all the information you have, there's no other
test to be done. What are you waiting for to
solve that case? You're waiting for someone to knock at
the police station on the door and say I saw
something that day, or I saw someone bury this person.
But unfortunately, decades and decades go by and no one's
(16:31):
come by with any eyewitness information. You can't ever solve
a crime, and you don't know who your victim is.
You can't piece together the last few days of their lives.
That's why I think this project is necessary to show
that there is hope. The evidence right there can give
you the answer. It can give you the lead to
(16:52):
the identity of this person. And once you know the
name of the person that was in the TV or
at the bottom of the lake, you can figure out
who saw them last, where they were, You can figure
out who to question to actually start that investigation.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Authorom's David Middleman also says arriving at an answer doesn't
cost as much as you'd think.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
At this point. Most unsolved crimes are a choice. We've
got the technology, it's been validated in the scientific literature,
it's stood up in court. These tools have been used
to solve thousands of cases. It's just a matter of
prioritizing the cases, the effort necessary to solve them, and
the funding. And we've had a really great support from
(17:37):
the community DNA Solves the Project five through five community,
and this has allowed us to get many of these
cases that otherwise would remain unsolved. Now to the finish
line victims identified, crime solved. But to really scale this
for everyone and for every jurisdiction, we will need support
from the local, state, and federal government to prioritize, fund
(18:01):
and an otherwise resource this kind of work. And when
we get to that point, we won't have these backlogs
of unsolved cases.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
It's not that the detectives aren't investigating, they have no
one to investigate. They're stock and this technology helps unstick
those cases from DNA DARENZ to actual answers. And it's
just the beginning, but it's a necessary beginning.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
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 Finalosa, Emily
Foreman and Jessica albert Our. Executive producers are Kate Osborne,
Mangesh Hadigadour and David and Kristin Middleman and from iHeart
(18:56):
Katrina Norville and Ali Perryial Thanks to Connell Byrne, Will Pearson,
Kerrie Lieberman, Nikki Etour, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank, and the
entire team at OUTHRM.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
I'm Allen lance lessor. Thanks for listening.
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