July 16, 2025 • 36 mins
After 46 years, detectives reopen Carla Walker’s murder, and an investigator who helped find the Golden State Killer wants in on the case. But will DNA testing of the cheerleaders' clothes help solve the case or kill it?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:12):
A code.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Case by definition is code because there's no more leads. Please,
you know, have nothing else to look at. Right Rodney's
story it actually had some question marks on it, and
(00:33):
I do understand why Rodney became a suspect.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I'm Alan Lance Lesser and this is America's crime Lab.
This is Part two of the Carla Walker case. If
you haven't listened to part one yet, please go back
and listen. It has some really important information that'll bring
you up to speed. It's twenty twenty in Fort Worth, Texas.
(01:03):
It's been forty six years since Carla Walker was abducted
at gunpoint from a Bowling Alley parking lot, and a
cloud of suspicion hangs over Rodney, Carla's boyfriend at the time.
Other people are convinced that he's innocent. Teams of detectives
have worked on the case, but after decades of searching,
(01:24):
they're no closer to finding who killed Carla Walker until now.
Producer Catherine Fenalosa is here to pick up the story.
Hey Catherine, Hey, Alan, So what evidence do the police have?
Speaker 4 (01:38):
So they have a few things. They have the powder
blue dress that Carla was wearing the night of the
dance and they have her underwear and bra. They also
have Rodney's shirt which is covered in blood, and they
have the magazine to the gun that was found in
the parking lot of the bowling Alley.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
But we're not sure that the magazine is related to
Carla's murder.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Right, yeah, yeah, I mean you have to remember this
is the nineteen seventies in Texas, so it is not
crazy that someone else could have dropped part of their
gun in the parking lot, but the police do collect
it as evidence. The last bit of evidence that we
have is Rodney's story, and.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Are people believing Rodney's story? At this point?
Speaker 4 (02:17):
The town is really torn apart over this. So Rodney's
friends and the people that know him well are like,
there is absolutely no way that Rodney did this. He
adored Carla. He's a gentle guy. You have to remember,
Rodney is a senior in high school when this all happens,
and the police are showing up at his baseball games
to question him. Everywhere he goes in town. He feels
(02:41):
like eyes are on him, and this is you know, Rodney.
He's lost his girlfriend tragically, but he's also lost the
Walker family. Everybody that I talked to described how Rodney
had been really adopted by Carla's family and taken in.
Especially Carla's father, who is this former military just this
(03:07):
very big guy, essentially adopts Rodney. And after this he's
lost that connection to the Walker family. The stress of
everyone in town looking at him finally gets to him,
and he actually leaves Fort Worth and moves to Alaska
just to get out of town.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Yeah, is it stressful or is he escaping?
Speaker 4 (03:31):
Nobody knows. Jim, Carla's brother, really does every and anything
he can to keep this case in front of detectives.
So when the detectives keep circling back around Rodney, Jim
admits he's like, I don't know, Yeah, let's look into Rodney.
Maybe he did it. His story does seem a little strange.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
I started remembering that cut on his right cheek, and
it wasn't fresh, vishly bleeding, it was coagulating. And remember
me saying that.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
There are a few things about this case that do
raise a lot of suspicion. One, Rodney doesn't show up
at Carla's parents' house for a long time after he
says that she was abducted. How long it's at least
an hour after he says she was taken from the car.
Now Rodney will say that it's because he was knocked unconscious,
(04:28):
but who knows.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
What's more believable that someone randomly came across their car
in a place they didn't necessarily plan to be attacked them,
abducted Carla, left Rodney her boyfriend alive, and then just
disappeared into the night. I mean, it just all sounds
a little sketchy to me. But at the same time,
(04:52):
if he didn't do it, I mean, what a horrible nightmare.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
Please start looking into the Gruger twenty two, which is
sort of a unique kind of gun. Why so is
the way that the magazine attaches to the rest of
the gun. There is a release button so that it
you know, you can take it off and put more
bullets in and put it back in. And where this
release button is is at the bottom of the shaft
(05:20):
of the gun. So if you believe Rodney that he
was being beaten over the head with the gun, it
could make sense that the attacker's hand accidentally press the
button and the magazine falls out onto the ground of
the parking lot.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I feel like one
could argue that the fact that it was there might
even support Rodney's story.
Speaker 4 (05:49):
So I'm going to sort of fast forward to twenty
nineteen and Carlo's case catches the attention of Paul hole.
Speaker 5 (06:02):
I was suspicious of Rodney. His statements were goofy. He
every time he said something, he said something different, like
dramatically different.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
I'm guessing as a true crime fan yourself, you probably
know who Paul Hols is.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Oh yeah, he's the detective involved in solving the Golden
State Killer case. So how does he get involved in
Carlo's murder?
Speaker 4 (06:27):
Actually, can we take a quick second to talk about
the Golden State Killer case?
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
So that was in the seventies and eighties in California.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Right, Yeah, And wasn't there a rash of rapes and
murders happening pretty much all through southern California up to
the Bay Area, which is why he ended up being
called the Golden State Killer because he covered such a
huge part of the state.
Speaker 5 (06:57):
This is a case that has over high hundred and
sixty known crimes across fifteen different law enforcement jurisdictions. It
was unsolved for forty four years. Millions of dollars had
been thrown at it, hundreds of investigators had worked on it.
We have over fifty sexually motivated attacks in Northern California.
(07:18):
Husbands were bound up while their wives are being raped
in the next room. And then he moves down to
Southern California and starts bludgeting couples to death in a
couple of cases, single females to death in their own bed.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
So initially in the Golden State killer case, police thought
they were searching for two different attackers. They didn't have
any solid leads, but what they did have was evidence
collected from all of these crime scenes. So in the
early stages of DNA technology comes along, investigators upload a
DNA profile from one of these crime scenes into the
(07:58):
federal system, which is called CODIS, and that's basically a
database that can link DNA from crime scene evidence to
a known offender.
Speaker 5 (08:08):
As I go, our serial rapist in northern California from
the nineteen seventies is a serial killer down in southern California.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
So they know they were looking for one perpetrator, not
too exactly.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
But the problem is is that CODIS doesn't tell them
who that person is, just that there is this one
person on a killing and rape spree across California.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
But that's also kind of depressing in that it's like
you can only identify the person through DNA with that
system if they've already committed to crime. So it's like
you're not necessarily catching them if they haven't been caught before.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
But things start to change around twenty eighteen with something
called forensic genetic genealogy, Paul Holes and a team of
investigators take evidence from a rape kit that was collected
from one of the Golden State crime scene forty years earlier.
Speaker 5 (09:02):
In nineteen eighty Charlene Smith was one of Golden State
Killer's victims out of Venta, and her sex kit was pristine.
A coroner's office had kept it, and we were able
to get a ton of Golden State Killer DNA from
her vaginal swab.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
And they're able to create a DNA profile of the
attacker from the seamen and they upload that profile to
genetic genealogy databases to find people the attacker may be
related to.
Speaker 5 (09:32):
And we started doing the genealogy process and ultimately found
a second cousin.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Huh. So this is similar to doing your own genetic
genealogy on a commercial site to find out who your
relatives are.
Speaker 4 (09:46):
Yeah, and in both cases, you start building out family
trees and usually the information leads you to like third, fourth,
or fifth cousin. So it's somewhat distant relationships, but it's
creating a puzzle, and you're trying to find different pieces
of the puzzle to lead you closer to the person
that you're actually looking for.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Yeah, I can imagine.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
So investigators also dig through public records like wedding announcements, obituaries,
things like that to fill in all these missing pieces
of the puzzle. And after doing all of that research,
Paul Hols says, they narrow in on one family tree
in particular.
Speaker 5 (10:25):
Ultimately, an investigative assistant out of sack DA's office sends
me an email on my fiftieth birthday and was like, Hey,
here's somebody in the family tree. Its former Auburn police
officer Joseph Dangelo. And I was like, no, there's just
no way.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
And here's the crazy part. He was never even a suspect.
I mean they would have never found him essentially, and
he goes on to plead guilty to thirteen murders and
thirteen rapes, but he also confesses to dozens and dozens
of other violent crimes. And Allen, I have to tell you,
(11:04):
when I went back and really read about what the
Golden State Killer had done, it is like beyond horrific.
This new DNA technology absolutely blows Paul Holes away, and
(11:25):
he's realizing that DNA could hold the answer to solving
lots of other cold cases.
Speaker 5 (11:34):
This was the first time it had been used in
this type of investigation, and it really wasn't until several
months later when I was just sitting, you know, in
my man cave and I was sipping bourbon and I
pulled up a photo of DiAngelo. He was slumped over
in the interview room, just absolutely depressed. He never thought
(11:56):
he was going to get caught. And I just looked
at my computer screen. It was just like a gotcha,
you know. And that's really the moment that I finally
had that realization, Okay, we accomplished something pretty big here.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
It seems like this is a massive shift in the
way crimes could be solved. So how does this connect
to Carla Walker's murder?
Speaker 4 (12:21):
Paul hols now retires from law enforcement, and the Golden
State Killer case really puts him on the map. He
has a TV show, he has a podcast, and he
ends up speaking at crime Con, which is this big
conference for true crime enthusiasts, and one particular year it's
held in Nashville.
Speaker 6 (12:48):
Across the concourse over there is Paul Holes and he's
got his hands on his hips like he just got
there and he's just taking it all in. And so
I made a b line for Paul Holes.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
So this woman who makes a beeline for Paul Holes
is Diane Kirkandaal. She is at crime Con because she's
part of a group of friends called the Cowtown Cold
Case Checks. It's four women who did not know each other,
but they all grew up in Fort Worth and during
COVID they connected online.
Speaker 6 (13:24):
There was a Facebook page that was about four Memories,
and there was a group of us on there that
we're talking about some of the all murders, and we
got to talk in and carrying on, and somebody said,
wouldn't it be fun if we got together and had
dinner and talked about all the murders.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
So they met at a local pancake house and pretty
quickly they found themselves talking about the murder of Carla Walker.
Diane actually went to high school with Carla.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Really small world.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
Yeah, I mean they weren't friends because they were a
couple grades apart. But Diane remembers seeing Carla in the
hallway by the lockers and said she was always bubbly
and smiling. And Diane actually lived in the same neighborhood
as Carla's family. Another woman, Kathleen Barnett, is married to
Rodney's best friend. You know, Rodney was Carla's boyfriend at
(14:22):
the time, and Rodney was the best man at Kathleen's wedding.
And there are two more women in the group, Mary
Kay Krueger and Rose Morlock. And Kathleen says they are
all longtime crime junkies.
Speaker 7 (14:37):
When I was a little girl, us in all the
neighborhood kids would sit out on our porch and my
dad would tell us all these horror stories about things like,
you know, the man with a claw coming and getting
you know, at least half of his stories had to
do with couples on lover's lane, and so when it
(15:00):
happened to Carla and Rodney, it was just like the
worst not mayres coming true.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
So after a meeting in person at the pancake restaurant.
These women decide to investigate Carlo's murder on their own. Now, Allen,
true crime is what bonds them, but they will be
the first to tell you that they are wildly different
from one another.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
I love it when unsuspecting people connect, you know, when
they're drawn to each other.
Speaker 8 (15:26):
I know.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
Diane is a retired postal worker and the hippie of
the group. Kathleen is a lawyer. Rose is a self
proclaimed conservative with very salty language, and Mary Kay worked
at radio Shack for years. They love to meet up
for drinks, but they have some unofficial rules. They do
not discuss politics smart but any murder is fair game.
(15:51):
Mary Kay says. They each quickly found their roles in
the group.
Speaker 8 (15:55):
We've got our attorney and she does great research. We
have Diane who keeps this organized and on track. Rose
is fearless, and I'm just really nosy. I can't just
speak out and say so, I understand you, you murdered
your neighbor.
Speaker 6 (16:12):
You know.
Speaker 8 (16:13):
Rose can do that. I can't. But I can sit
with the other neighbors and listen to what they had
to say about it all.
Speaker 4 (16:20):
And then one day Diane hears about crime Con.
Speaker 6 (16:23):
And I had just retired, and I said, you know,
I think I'm going to give myself a little present
and I'm going to go to Nashville.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
I can see why Diane made a bee line for
Paul Holes, because I'm guessing after the Golden State killer
was caught, they're thinking, can we do the same thing
with Carla Walker's case?
Speaker 4 (16:47):
Yeah, exactly. So they put together a folder with all
the details about Carlo's case, and Diane sets off on
this mission to crime Con to get this folder in
the hand of Paul Holes.
Speaker 5 (17:03):
And a woman had come up to me and handed
me information on the Carla Walker case.
Speaker 6 (17:10):
Then I kind of challenged him at the end and
I said, you know, somebody just needs to work this
case and do the DNA on it because it can
be solved.
Speaker 4 (17:20):
And their timing actually couldn't have been any better, because
the TV show that Paul Hole's host is actually looking
for a new case to investigate. Paul's like flipping through
this folder that Diane has handed him and he thinks,
you know what, Carla Walker's murder is pretty interesting.
Speaker 5 (17:39):
This very brazen abduction, you know, to take seventeen year
old woman, this girl basically away from her boyfriend who's
a star football player. And sure enough I read into
it and I was like, yeah, I want to see
if I can help out on that case.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
So Diane and these women are successful in pulling Paul
holes in the case. So then what happens.
Speaker 4 (18:21):
Paul reaches out to Detective Jeff Bennett. Detective Bennett has
just been assigned to the cold case unit in Fort Worth,
and Paul tells Jeff he has a pretty enticing offer.
He says, if he can feature Carla's case on his
TV show, that he'll pay for the DNA testing of
the evidence in Carla's case. And so that's what happens.
(18:43):
Paul heads down to Fort Worth. He visits the crime scene,
and he starts pouring through all of the police reports.
Speaker 5 (18:51):
And then I'm looking at the crime scene. I'm looking
at Carla, where her body was found. I'm looking at
where she was abducted, her boyfriend that she was out
on a date with that night, Rodney, you know, I'm
looking at him and reading his statements. Rodney was first
hand witness, but his statements were goofy. Every time he
(19:16):
said something, he said something different, like dramatically different He
initially said he was shot by this guy who abducted
Carla right out of the passenger side of his car.
Rodney doesn't show up to Carla's house after she was
abducted for an hour and a half, and it was like, well,
where do you go? Why did it take him so long?
(19:37):
And so there has always been a cloud of suspicion
around Rodney, and I was suspicious of Rodney. Yeah, but
it's like, well, let's get to the bottom of this.
Was it Rodney or was it somebody else.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
Meanwhile, Detective Bennett is looking through the evidence boxes in
Carla's case.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
The original police reports, autopsy, crime scene reports, detectives notes, interviews, polygraphs,
you name it. It was in there.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
And is he finding any red flags in the police reports?
Speaker 4 (20:18):
Actually he does. The first thing that he notices is
kind of a strange detail about how Carla's body was found.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
She was in the callvert, she still had her dress on,
had been lifted up. All of her jewelry was intact,
except for one unusual aspect of the case. Rodney had
given Carla a promise ring a couple of months prior
to this, and Carla's promise ring was found just outside
(20:52):
the in the dark. Why is this promise ring off
of Carla's hand and why is it in the dark.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
So it's not looking so great for Rodney. There are
questions about a story, the timeline, and now the promise ring.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
Yeah, and I don't know if you know what a
promise ring is. Not entirely no, it is basically stating
your intentions to one day get married. They're still both
in high school, so this is sort of a like,
I am committed to you, Carla, and one day I
will put an engagement ring on your finger.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
So they were pretty serious. Yeah, and I feel like
the fact that the promise ring is the only piece
of jewelry taken off Carla's body and tossed in the dirt,
that could be a message like maybe they got in
a fight or something, Carla takes off the ring or
he takes off the ring. I mean, there are all
kinds of things that could have happened that could have
(21:51):
made Rodney angry that leads him to snapping in some way.
Speaker 4 (21:55):
And as he's reading through all of the original police reports,
the case kind of seems to get even stranger.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
When Carlo's toxicology came back, she had morphine in her system,
So the question was did the killer inject her with morphine?
Why is there morphine in Carlo's body?
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Morphine? Wait, that's a whole other can of worms then,
because then you wonder whether it was premeditated in some way,
which again it's like who besides Rodney or his friends
would know where they were going to be in the
parking lot that night unless someone secretly followed them there.
Speaker 4 (22:33):
I told you, this case gets weirder by the minute.
Detective Bennett now needs to start his own investigation, and
the first thing he does is he makes a whole
new suspect list.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
And a lot of individuals had been eliminated because they
passed a polygraph. And I think we know today the
dependability of these polygraphs, especially then, not something that you
can really rely on. So if there was no other
reason that somebody was eliminated, they went back on my
(23:08):
suspect list.
Speaker 4 (23:10):
He ends up with eighty five people on his suspect list,
and he goes out and he interviews every single person
that he can find again, and he collects DNA samples
from every single person that he talks to.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
We still had Carla's clothing, her dress, her bra, her peonies.
Rodney's shirt was still an evidence, very bloodied. So it
was that was exciting to see all of that evidence
and know that we've got a possibility to get some
(23:52):
DNA off of this clothing.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
And what clothing do they decide to test?
Speaker 4 (23:58):
They decide to test Carlo's brass.
Speaker 5 (24:01):
And so I ended up having fort Worth send that
sample to a lab that we had used for the
Golden Staate killer case. This analyst found this semen stain
off of Carla's brastrap. There was only one person, one
DNA profile in that and it was enough to be
(24:22):
able to search Codis, the FBI's DNA data bank.
Speaker 4 (24:28):
So they run the DNA.
Speaker 5 (24:31):
And there's no hit.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
Okay, hang on a second. We know the genetic makeup
of the mystery person who killed Carla, but because he
hasn't been caught for a crime before, his name isn't
in the FBI database, so we don't know who he is.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
Frustrating. That's why this tool is not great for finding
an attacker. It's great for confirming who they are, but
this doesn't discard Paula. He stays optimistic because the DNA
on Carlo's brasstrap was really well preserved and it wasn't contaminated.
Speaker 5 (25:08):
It was an amazing sample. Ten nanograms. This is a
huge amount of DNA relatively speaking for a forensic sample,
and I was excited. I was like, let's get that
off and do genealogy, kind of like in.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
The Golden State killer case.
Speaker 4 (25:23):
Yep, but there's a problem.
Speaker 5 (25:26):
They had consumed the entire sample and didn't get a result.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
So every time you test DNA you destroy it in
the process, so it's a one shot deal.
Speaker 5 (25:42):
My god, the best sample in the world was completely
consumed and no result was obtained, and at that point
I thought I had killed the Carla Walker case.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
I have to tell you. It was devastating because I
had had full hope that this lab was going to
be able to yield results and do the genetic genealogy
and give us a lead on an individual, and it
didn't happen. Now you're told the usable DNA that you
(26:18):
have is exhausted, it's consumed, and I mean, it's a
gut punch.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
So does Carla's case go back to being a cold case?
Speaker 4 (26:30):
Not exactly. I mean Paul's show about Carlo's murder airs,
but they leave it kind of open ended because it's
not solved yet. But there are two really important people,
a husband and wife who see the program.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
Wait who are they?
Speaker 4 (26:44):
So their names are David and kristin Middleman, and they're
actually watching the show embed at home on a laptop
and they are just completely struck by this show because
they also happened to be the founders of a lab
Texas called Authorm. Their lab specializes in testing DNA evidence
(27:05):
from crime scenes.
Speaker 9 (27:09):
We're parents of children around Carla's age at the time,
and so it was really difficult to process what it
would feel like if you were her family. I think
the episode just left me wanting to help. That's what
I felt most is can we help?
Speaker 4 (27:47):
After watching the episode, Kristen's husband, David, calls Paul and
he says, look, I've developed this new DNA technology and
it's called forensic grade genome sequencing, and I think we
can work on Carla's case.
Speaker 9 (28:02):
I think that was one of the hardest phone calls
I heard, because Paul just lost his voice and you
could hear he was shaken, and he said it didn't work.
We ruined the case. The evidence was consumed and there's
not enough left to test again. And David said, well,
how much is left?
Speaker 5 (28:21):
And I was like, okay, this is what I've got.
I had found a second sample off of Carla's dress,
but it was a mixed sample. It had a male
DNA plus Carla's.
Speaker 9 (28:35):
DNA, and David said, well, I would like to give
it a try. What do you have to lose?
Speaker 3 (28:46):
Tell me about this second DNA sample they found in
Carla's dress.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
Unlike the semen that was found on her bra strap,
which was a single source of DNA, her dress has
DNA from both the killer and from Carla. So you
can kind of imagine how that would make it a
lot more difficult to get a DNA profile of just
(29:12):
the assailant because it's mixed up.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
Yeah, I mean that would sound almost impossible to me.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
Okay, So it gets even harder because the second sample
was incredibly tiny. It was just a few nanograms. You
can't even see it with the naked eye. So if
I touch your arm, Alan, I'm essentially leaving a couple
hundred of my cells on your arm. Wow, We're talking
about a handful of cells that they are testing.
Speaker 9 (29:43):
How do they Wow?
Speaker 3 (29:45):
I can't imagine even being able to collect that.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
That's incredible, And I think Paul was a little concerned
about leading us down a bad path because he knew
that this is all we had left. But he said,
you can call David, you can talk to him. He says,
he has technology that can work with really small amounts
(30:09):
of DNA.
Speaker 4 (30:11):
So you have to remember that Detective Bennett has already
been burnt once before when the other lab used up
the entire DNA sample when testing it. So he knows
that this is his last chance, and if this does
not go well, he literally has no DNA evidence left
in the case before working with Authorm. He says, listen,
(30:36):
I need to come down there and see the lab
for myself.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Yeah, I mean, I completely understand why he's so nervous.
Everything is writing on this It's it's high stakes to
solve this case.
Speaker 4 (30:47):
It's totally high stakes. And what David and Kristen are
doing in their lab is also pretty much brand new.
This is a major gamble that he's taking. The easiest
way to understand it is that other labs are generally
using the technology that's similar to the commercial genealogy sites
that we were talking about before. Like I want to
(31:09):
figure out, you know, where my long lost relatives are.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
That kind of thing, right where you send in DNA
samples like a mouth swab, and then they tell you
who you're related to.
Speaker 4 (31:19):
That kind of thing exactly, and when you do I
don't know if you've ever done that, but that's taking fresh,
single source DNA. So you swab your mouth, you place
it cleanly into a sealed container, and you send it
off to be analyzed by the lab. And then when
it gets to the lab, it's properly stored in a
temperature controlled setting under like the perfect circumstances.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
Yeah, I can imagine that's far different from what they're
dealing with here.
Speaker 4 (31:46):
Exactly, because, as Kristen Middleman says, crime scene evidence, especially
in Carla Walker's case, is the exact opposite.
Speaker 9 (31:53):
Her body was found outdoors. It was found outdoors three
days after she was abducted, So there was plant DNA,
animal DNA. The DNA at the crime scene had been
subjected to heat in Texas cold, that is degraded DNA,
(32:13):
And if you apply methods that are purpose built for
fresh samples, you often just missed the answer.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
On top of all that contamination Carla's case was more
than forty years old, so when they collected the evidence,
no one's thinking you can even test for DNA one day,
So I'm afraid to ask, but how is it stored.
Speaker 4 (32:38):
In brown paper bags?
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Ugh?
Speaker 4 (32:41):
I know, but it was actually completely standard at the time.
And there's something else that Detective Bennett learns when he
visits Kristen and David in their lab. So codis looks
at twenty DNA markers to build a profile, but Kristen says,
this new method that they've developed looks at like one
hundred one thousand, up to one million DNA markers.
Speaker 9 (33:04):
We knew we were working with the last bit of
sample that was left. We were going to be the
last chance, So it was it was a heavy moment
for sure. If it didn't work, Carlo would never get justice,
her family would never find out the truth. Perpetrator would
have gotten away with the crime. The whole community would
(33:25):
have been less safe because that perpetrator continued to live
in that community. The stakes are huge every single time.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
After its visit to the lab, Detective Bennett decides that
this new technology is literally his only hope, so he
ships off the final tiny bits of DNA evidence from
Carla's dress to the lab and then he just has
to sit back and wait to hear from David Middleman.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
He called us a few days after receiving it and said, hey,
it's not for Nana Grim, it's less than that. We
were sitting on pins and needles. And I remember it
was July fourth. I get a phone call and I
see that it's David Middleman calling. So I knew that
(34:14):
if he's calling me on a holiday, I knew that
he had an answer. And I could not answer the
phone fast enough, and David says, well, Jeff, we got
a profile from your DNA. It was a goose bump moment.
Speaker 3 (34:42):
Next time on America's Crime Lab.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
I'll never forget being able to call Jim and tell
him we arrested the individual who murdered your sister. A
case closed.
Speaker 5 (34:58):
I still was unconvinced we were led based off of
a DNA technology, but this was the first time it
had been used in this type of investigation, So how
much confidence could I I put into it.
Speaker 9 (35:10):
Detectives don't have a scientific background in training, and they're
somehow supposed to decipher whether or not someone's telling them
the truth or a lie.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
One of the first things he did is he lifted
up his hands and he goes, I didn't do it.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
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 and
Jessica Albert. Our executive producers are Kate Osborne, Mangesh Hadi
Gadour and David and Kristin Middleman and from iHeart Katrina
Norville and Ali Perry. Special thanks to Connell Byrne, Will Pearson,
(35:55):
Carrie Lieberman, Nikki Etour, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank, and the
entire higher team at Authorm. I'm Alan Lance lessor thanks
for listening.
A code.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Case by definition is code because there's no more leads. Please,
you know, have nothing else to look at. Right Rodney's
story it actually had some question marks on it, and
(00:33):
I do understand why Rodney became a suspect.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
I'm Alan Lance Lesser and this is America's crime Lab.
This is Part two of the Carla Walker case. If
you haven't listened to part one yet, please go back
and listen. It has some really important information that'll bring
you up to speed. It's twenty twenty in Fort Worth, Texas.
(01:03):
It's been forty six years since Carla Walker was abducted
at gunpoint from a Bowling Alley parking lot, and a
cloud of suspicion hangs over Rodney, Carla's boyfriend at the time.
Other people are convinced that he's innocent. Teams of detectives
have worked on the case, but after decades of searching,
(01:24):
they're no closer to finding who killed Carla Walker until now.
Producer Catherine Fenalosa is here to pick up the story.
Hey Catherine, Hey, Alan, So what evidence do the police have?
Speaker 4 (01:38):
So they have a few things. They have the powder
blue dress that Carla was wearing the night of the
dance and they have her underwear and bra. They also
have Rodney's shirt which is covered in blood, and they
have the magazine to the gun that was found in
the parking lot of the bowling Alley.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
But we're not sure that the magazine is related to
Carla's murder.
Speaker 4 (01:59):
Right, yeah, yeah, I mean you have to remember this
is the nineteen seventies in Texas, so it is not
crazy that someone else could have dropped part of their
gun in the parking lot, but the police do collect
it as evidence. The last bit of evidence that we
have is Rodney's story, and.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Are people believing Rodney's story? At this point?
Speaker 4 (02:17):
The town is really torn apart over this. So Rodney's
friends and the people that know him well are like,
there is absolutely no way that Rodney did this. He
adored Carla. He's a gentle guy. You have to remember,
Rodney is a senior in high school when this all happens,
and the police are showing up at his baseball games
to question him. Everywhere he goes in town. He feels
(02:41):
like eyes are on him, and this is you know, Rodney.
He's lost his girlfriend tragically, but he's also lost the
Walker family. Everybody that I talked to described how Rodney
had been really adopted by Carla's family and taken in.
Especially Carla's father, who is this former military just this
(03:07):
very big guy, essentially adopts Rodney. And after this he's
lost that connection to the Walker family. The stress of
everyone in town looking at him finally gets to him,
and he actually leaves Fort Worth and moves to Alaska
just to get out of town.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
Yeah, is it stressful or is he escaping?
Speaker 4 (03:31):
Nobody knows. Jim, Carla's brother, really does every and anything
he can to keep this case in front of detectives.
So when the detectives keep circling back around Rodney, Jim
admits he's like, I don't know, Yeah, let's look into Rodney.
Maybe he did it. His story does seem a little strange.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
I started remembering that cut on his right cheek, and
it wasn't fresh, vishly bleeding, it was coagulating. And remember
me saying that.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
There are a few things about this case that do
raise a lot of suspicion. One, Rodney doesn't show up
at Carla's parents' house for a long time after he
says that she was abducted. How long it's at least
an hour after he says she was taken from the car.
Now Rodney will say that it's because he was knocked unconscious,
(04:28):
but who knows.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
What's more believable that someone randomly came across their car
in a place they didn't necessarily plan to be attacked them,
abducted Carla, left Rodney her boyfriend alive, and then just
disappeared into the night. I mean, it just all sounds
a little sketchy to me. But at the same time,
(04:52):
if he didn't do it, I mean, what a horrible nightmare.
Speaker 4 (05:00):
Please start looking into the Gruger twenty two, which is
sort of a unique kind of gun. Why so is
the way that the magazine attaches to the rest of
the gun. There is a release button so that it
you know, you can take it off and put more
bullets in and put it back in. And where this
release button is is at the bottom of the shaft
(05:20):
of the gun. So if you believe Rodney that he
was being beaten over the head with the gun, it
could make sense that the attacker's hand accidentally press the
button and the magazine falls out onto the ground of
the parking lot.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I feel like one
could argue that the fact that it was there might
even support Rodney's story.
Speaker 4 (05:49):
So I'm going to sort of fast forward to twenty
nineteen and Carlo's case catches the attention of Paul hole.
Speaker 5 (06:02):
I was suspicious of Rodney. His statements were goofy. He
every time he said something, he said something different, like
dramatically different.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
I'm guessing as a true crime fan yourself, you probably
know who Paul Hols is.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Oh yeah, he's the detective involved in solving the Golden
State Killer case. So how does he get involved in
Carlo's murder?
Speaker 4 (06:27):
Actually, can we take a quick second to talk about
the Golden State Killer case?
Speaker 3 (06:31):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
So that was in the seventies and eighties in California.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Right, Yeah, And wasn't there a rash of rapes and
murders happening pretty much all through southern California up to
the Bay Area, which is why he ended up being
called the Golden State Killer because he covered such a
huge part of the state.
Speaker 5 (06:57):
This is a case that has over high hundred and
sixty known crimes across fifteen different law enforcement jurisdictions. It
was unsolved for forty four years. Millions of dollars had
been thrown at it, hundreds of investigators had worked on it.
We have over fifty sexually motivated attacks in Northern California.
(07:18):
Husbands were bound up while their wives are being raped
in the next room. And then he moves down to
Southern California and starts bludgeting couples to death in a
couple of cases, single females to death in their own bed.
Speaker 4 (07:36):
So initially in the Golden State killer case, police thought
they were searching for two different attackers. They didn't have
any solid leads, but what they did have was evidence
collected from all of these crime scenes. So in the
early stages of DNA technology comes along, investigators upload a
DNA profile from one of these crime scenes into the
(07:58):
federal system, which is called CODIS, and that's basically a
database that can link DNA from crime scene evidence to
a known offender.
Speaker 5 (08:08):
As I go, our serial rapist in northern California from
the nineteen seventies is a serial killer down in southern California.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
So they know they were looking for one perpetrator, not
too exactly.
Speaker 4 (08:21):
But the problem is is that CODIS doesn't tell them
who that person is, just that there is this one
person on a killing and rape spree across California.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
But that's also kind of depressing in that it's like
you can only identify the person through DNA with that
system if they've already committed to crime. So it's like
you're not necessarily catching them if they haven't been caught before.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
But things start to change around twenty eighteen with something
called forensic genetic genealogy, Paul Holes and a team of
investigators take evidence from a rape kit that was collected
from one of the Golden State crime scene forty years earlier.
Speaker 5 (09:02):
In nineteen eighty Charlene Smith was one of Golden State
Killer's victims out of Venta, and her sex kit was pristine.
A coroner's office had kept it, and we were able
to get a ton of Golden State Killer DNA from
her vaginal swab.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
And they're able to create a DNA profile of the
attacker from the seamen and they upload that profile to
genetic genealogy databases to find people the attacker may be
related to.
Speaker 5 (09:32):
And we started doing the genealogy process and ultimately found
a second cousin.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
Huh. So this is similar to doing your own genetic
genealogy on a commercial site to find out who your
relatives are.
Speaker 4 (09:46):
Yeah, and in both cases, you start building out family
trees and usually the information leads you to like third, fourth,
or fifth cousin. So it's somewhat distant relationships, but it's
creating a puzzle, and you're trying to find different pieces
of the puzzle to lead you closer to the person
that you're actually looking for.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Yeah, I can imagine.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
So investigators also dig through public records like wedding announcements, obituaries,
things like that to fill in all these missing pieces
of the puzzle. And after doing all of that research,
Paul Hols says, they narrow in on one family tree
in particular.
Speaker 5 (10:25):
Ultimately, an investigative assistant out of sack DA's office sends
me an email on my fiftieth birthday and was like, Hey,
here's somebody in the family tree. Its former Auburn police
officer Joseph Dangelo. And I was like, no, there's just
no way.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
And here's the crazy part. He was never even a suspect.
I mean they would have never found him essentially, and
he goes on to plead guilty to thirteen murders and
thirteen rapes, but he also confesses to dozens and dozens
of other violent crimes. And Allen, I have to tell you,
(11:04):
when I went back and really read about what the
Golden State Killer had done, it is like beyond horrific.
This new DNA technology absolutely blows Paul Holes away, and
(11:25):
he's realizing that DNA could hold the answer to solving
lots of other cold cases.
Speaker 5 (11:34):
This was the first time it had been used in
this type of investigation, and it really wasn't until several
months later when I was just sitting, you know, in
my man cave and I was sipping bourbon and I
pulled up a photo of DiAngelo. He was slumped over
in the interview room, just absolutely depressed. He never thought
(11:56):
he was going to get caught. And I just looked
at my computer screen. It was just like a gotcha,
you know. And that's really the moment that I finally
had that realization, Okay, we accomplished something pretty big here.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
It seems like this is a massive shift in the
way crimes could be solved. So how does this connect
to Carla Walker's murder?
Speaker 4 (12:21):
Paul hols now retires from law enforcement, and the Golden
State Killer case really puts him on the map. He
has a TV show, he has a podcast, and he
ends up speaking at crime Con, which is this big
conference for true crime enthusiasts, and one particular year it's
held in Nashville.
Speaker 6 (12:48):
Across the concourse over there is Paul Holes and he's
got his hands on his hips like he just got
there and he's just taking it all in. And so
I made a b line for Paul Holes.
Speaker 4 (13:01):
So this woman who makes a beeline for Paul Holes
is Diane Kirkandaal. She is at crime Con because she's
part of a group of friends called the Cowtown Cold
Case Checks. It's four women who did not know each other,
but they all grew up in Fort Worth and during
COVID they connected online.
Speaker 6 (13:24):
There was a Facebook page that was about four Memories,
and there was a group of us on there that
we're talking about some of the all murders, and we
got to talk in and carrying on, and somebody said,
wouldn't it be fun if we got together and had
dinner and talked about all the murders.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
So they met at a local pancake house and pretty
quickly they found themselves talking about the murder of Carla Walker.
Diane actually went to high school with Carla.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
Really small world.
Speaker 4 (14:00):
Yeah, I mean they weren't friends because they were a
couple grades apart. But Diane remembers seeing Carla in the
hallway by the lockers and said she was always bubbly
and smiling. And Diane actually lived in the same neighborhood
as Carla's family. Another woman, Kathleen Barnett, is married to
Rodney's best friend. You know, Rodney was Carla's boyfriend at
(14:22):
the time, and Rodney was the best man at Kathleen's wedding.
And there are two more women in the group, Mary
Kay Krueger and Rose Morlock. And Kathleen says they are
all longtime crime junkies.
Speaker 7 (14:37):
When I was a little girl, us in all the
neighborhood kids would sit out on our porch and my
dad would tell us all these horror stories about things like,
you know, the man with a claw coming and getting
you know, at least half of his stories had to
do with couples on lover's lane, and so when it
(15:00):
happened to Carla and Rodney, it was just like the
worst not mayres coming true.
Speaker 4 (15:06):
So after a meeting in person at the pancake restaurant.
These women decide to investigate Carlo's murder on their own. Now, Allen,
true crime is what bonds them, but they will be
the first to tell you that they are wildly different
from one another.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
I love it when unsuspecting people connect, you know, when
they're drawn to each other.
Speaker 8 (15:26):
I know.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
Diane is a retired postal worker and the hippie of
the group. Kathleen is a lawyer. Rose is a self
proclaimed conservative with very salty language, and Mary Kay worked
at radio Shack for years. They love to meet up
for drinks, but they have some unofficial rules. They do
not discuss politics smart but any murder is fair game.
(15:51):
Mary Kay says. They each quickly found their roles in
the group.
Speaker 8 (15:55):
We've got our attorney and she does great research. We
have Diane who keeps this organized and on track. Rose
is fearless, and I'm just really nosy. I can't just
speak out and say so, I understand you, you murdered
your neighbor.
Speaker 6 (16:12):
You know.
Speaker 8 (16:13):
Rose can do that. I can't. But I can sit
with the other neighbors and listen to what they had
to say about it all.
Speaker 4 (16:20):
And then one day Diane hears about crime Con.
Speaker 6 (16:23):
And I had just retired, and I said, you know,
I think I'm going to give myself a little present
and I'm going to go to Nashville.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
I can see why Diane made a bee line for
Paul Holes, because I'm guessing after the Golden State killer
was caught, they're thinking, can we do the same thing
with Carla Walker's case?
Speaker 4 (16:47):
Yeah, exactly. So they put together a folder with all
the details about Carlo's case, and Diane sets off on
this mission to crime Con to get this folder in
the hand of Paul Holes.
Speaker 5 (17:03):
And a woman had come up to me and handed
me information on the Carla Walker case.
Speaker 6 (17:10):
Then I kind of challenged him at the end and
I said, you know, somebody just needs to work this
case and do the DNA on it because it can
be solved.
Speaker 4 (17:20):
And their timing actually couldn't have been any better, because
the TV show that Paul Hole's host is actually looking
for a new case to investigate. Paul's like flipping through
this folder that Diane has handed him and he thinks,
you know what, Carla Walker's murder is pretty interesting.
Speaker 5 (17:39):
This very brazen abduction, you know, to take seventeen year
old woman, this girl basically away from her boyfriend who's
a star football player. And sure enough I read into
it and I was like, yeah, I want to see
if I can help out on that case.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
So Diane and these women are successful in pulling Paul
holes in the case. So then what happens.
Speaker 4 (18:21):
Paul reaches out to Detective Jeff Bennett. Detective Bennett has
just been assigned to the cold case unit in Fort Worth,
and Paul tells Jeff he has a pretty enticing offer.
He says, if he can feature Carla's case on his
TV show, that he'll pay for the DNA testing of
the evidence in Carla's case. And so that's what happens.
(18:43):
Paul heads down to Fort Worth. He visits the crime scene,
and he starts pouring through all of the police reports.
Speaker 5 (18:51):
And then I'm looking at the crime scene. I'm looking
at Carla, where her body was found. I'm looking at
where she was abducted, her boyfriend that she was out
on a date with that night, Rodney, you know, I'm
looking at him and reading his statements. Rodney was first
hand witness, but his statements were goofy. Every time he
(19:16):
said something, he said something different, like dramatically different He
initially said he was shot by this guy who abducted
Carla right out of the passenger side of his car.
Rodney doesn't show up to Carla's house after she was
abducted for an hour and a half, and it was like, well,
where do you go? Why did it take him so long?
(19:37):
And so there has always been a cloud of suspicion
around Rodney, and I was suspicious of Rodney. Yeah, but
it's like, well, let's get to the bottom of this.
Was it Rodney or was it somebody else.
Speaker 4 (19:55):
Meanwhile, Detective Bennett is looking through the evidence boxes in
Carla's case.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
The original police reports, autopsy, crime scene reports, detectives notes, interviews, polygraphs,
you name it. It was in there.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
And is he finding any red flags in the police reports?
Speaker 4 (20:18):
Actually he does. The first thing that he notices is
kind of a strange detail about how Carla's body was found.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
She was in the callvert, she still had her dress on,
had been lifted up. All of her jewelry was intact,
except for one unusual aspect of the case. Rodney had
given Carla a promise ring a couple of months prior
to this, and Carla's promise ring was found just outside
(20:52):
the in the dark. Why is this promise ring off
of Carla's hand and why is it in the dark.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
So it's not looking so great for Rodney. There are
questions about a story, the timeline, and now the promise ring.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
Yeah, and I don't know if you know what a
promise ring is. Not entirely no, it is basically stating
your intentions to one day get married. They're still both
in high school, so this is sort of a like,
I am committed to you, Carla, and one day I
will put an engagement ring on your finger.
Speaker 3 (21:29):
So they were pretty serious. Yeah, and I feel like
the fact that the promise ring is the only piece
of jewelry taken off Carla's body and tossed in the dirt,
that could be a message like maybe they got in
a fight or something, Carla takes off the ring or
he takes off the ring. I mean, there are all
kinds of things that could have happened that could have
(21:51):
made Rodney angry that leads him to snapping in some way.
Speaker 4 (21:55):
And as he's reading through all of the original police reports,
the case kind of seems to get even stranger.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
When Carlo's toxicology came back, she had morphine in her system,
So the question was did the killer inject her with morphine?
Why is there morphine in Carlo's body?
Speaker 3 (22:17):
Morphine? Wait, that's a whole other can of worms then,
because then you wonder whether it was premeditated in some way,
which again it's like who besides Rodney or his friends
would know where they were going to be in the
parking lot that night unless someone secretly followed them there.
Speaker 4 (22:33):
I told you, this case gets weirder by the minute.
Detective Bennett now needs to start his own investigation, and
the first thing he does is he makes a whole
new suspect list.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
And a lot of individuals had been eliminated because they
passed a polygraph. And I think we know today the
dependability of these polygraphs, especially then, not something that you
can really rely on. So if there was no other
reason that somebody was eliminated, they went back on my
(23:08):
suspect list.
Speaker 4 (23:10):
He ends up with eighty five people on his suspect list,
and he goes out and he interviews every single person
that he can find again, and he collects DNA samples
from every single person that he talks to.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
We still had Carla's clothing, her dress, her bra, her peonies.
Rodney's shirt was still an evidence, very bloodied. So it
was that was exciting to see all of that evidence
and know that we've got a possibility to get some
(23:52):
DNA off of this clothing.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
And what clothing do they decide to test?
Speaker 4 (23:58):
They decide to test Carlo's brass.
Speaker 5 (24:01):
And so I ended up having fort Worth send that
sample to a lab that we had used for the
Golden Staate killer case. This analyst found this semen stain
off of Carla's brastrap. There was only one person, one
DNA profile in that and it was enough to be
(24:22):
able to search Codis, the FBI's DNA data bank.
Speaker 4 (24:28):
So they run the DNA.
Speaker 5 (24:31):
And there's no hit.
Speaker 3 (24:36):
Okay, hang on a second. We know the genetic makeup
of the mystery person who killed Carla, but because he
hasn't been caught for a crime before, his name isn't
in the FBI database, so we don't know who he is.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
Frustrating. That's why this tool is not great for finding
an attacker. It's great for confirming who they are, but
this doesn't discard Paula. He stays optimistic because the DNA
on Carlo's brasstrap was really well preserved and it wasn't contaminated.
Speaker 5 (25:08):
It was an amazing sample. Ten nanograms. This is a
huge amount of DNA relatively speaking for a forensic sample,
and I was excited. I was like, let's get that
off and do genealogy, kind of like in.
Speaker 3 (25:22):
The Golden State killer case.
Speaker 4 (25:23):
Yep, but there's a problem.
Speaker 5 (25:26):
They had consumed the entire sample and didn't get a result.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
So every time you test DNA you destroy it in
the process, so it's a one shot deal.
Speaker 5 (25:42):
My god, the best sample in the world was completely
consumed and no result was obtained, and at that point
I thought I had killed the Carla Walker case.
Speaker 1 (25:55):
I have to tell you. It was devastating because I
had had full hope that this lab was going to
be able to yield results and do the genetic genealogy
and give us a lead on an individual, and it
didn't happen. Now you're told the usable DNA that you
(26:18):
have is exhausted, it's consumed, and I mean, it's a
gut punch.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
So does Carla's case go back to being a cold case?
Speaker 4 (26:30):
Not exactly. I mean Paul's show about Carlo's murder airs,
but they leave it kind of open ended because it's
not solved yet. But there are two really important people,
a husband and wife who see the program.
Speaker 3 (26:42):
Wait who are they?
Speaker 4 (26:44):
So their names are David and kristin Middleman, and they're
actually watching the show embed at home on a laptop
and they are just completely struck by this show because
they also happened to be the founders of a lab
Texas called Authorm. Their lab specializes in testing DNA evidence
(27:05):
from crime scenes.
Speaker 9 (27:09):
We're parents of children around Carla's age at the time,
and so it was really difficult to process what it
would feel like if you were her family. I think
the episode just left me wanting to help. That's what
I felt most is can we help?
Speaker 4 (27:47):
After watching the episode, Kristen's husband, David, calls Paul and
he says, look, I've developed this new DNA technology and
it's called forensic grade genome sequencing, and I think we
can work on Carla's case.
Speaker 9 (28:02):
I think that was one of the hardest phone calls
I heard, because Paul just lost his voice and you
could hear he was shaken, and he said it didn't work.
We ruined the case. The evidence was consumed and there's
not enough left to test again. And David said, well,
how much is left?
Speaker 5 (28:21):
And I was like, okay, this is what I've got.
I had found a second sample off of Carla's dress,
but it was a mixed sample. It had a male
DNA plus Carla's.
Speaker 9 (28:35):
DNA, and David said, well, I would like to give
it a try. What do you have to lose?
Speaker 3 (28:46):
Tell me about this second DNA sample they found in
Carla's dress.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
Unlike the semen that was found on her bra strap,
which was a single source of DNA, her dress has
DNA from both the killer and from Carla. So you
can kind of imagine how that would make it a
lot more difficult to get a DNA profile of just
(29:12):
the assailant because it's mixed up.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
Yeah, I mean that would sound almost impossible to me.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
Okay, So it gets even harder because the second sample
was incredibly tiny. It was just a few nanograms. You
can't even see it with the naked eye. So if
I touch your arm, Alan, I'm essentially leaving a couple
hundred of my cells on your arm. Wow, We're talking
about a handful of cells that they are testing.
Speaker 9 (29:43):
How do they Wow?
Speaker 3 (29:45):
I can't imagine even being able to collect that.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
That's incredible, And I think Paul was a little concerned
about leading us down a bad path because he knew
that this is all we had left. But he said,
you can call David, you can talk to him. He says,
he has technology that can work with really small amounts
(30:09):
of DNA.
Speaker 4 (30:11):
So you have to remember that Detective Bennett has already
been burnt once before when the other lab used up
the entire DNA sample when testing it. So he knows
that this is his last chance, and if this does
not go well, he literally has no DNA evidence left
in the case before working with Authorm. He says, listen,
(30:36):
I need to come down there and see the lab
for myself.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Yeah, I mean, I completely understand why he's so nervous.
Everything is writing on this It's it's high stakes to
solve this case.
Speaker 4 (30:47):
It's totally high stakes. And what David and Kristen are
doing in their lab is also pretty much brand new.
This is a major gamble that he's taking. The easiest
way to understand it is that other labs are generally
using the technology that's similar to the commercial genealogy sites
that we were talking about before. Like I want to
(31:09):
figure out, you know, where my long lost relatives are.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
That kind of thing, right where you send in DNA
samples like a mouth swab, and then they tell you
who you're related to.
Speaker 4 (31:19):
That kind of thing exactly, and when you do I
don't know if you've ever done that, but that's taking fresh,
single source DNA. So you swab your mouth, you place
it cleanly into a sealed container, and you send it
off to be analyzed by the lab. And then when
it gets to the lab, it's properly stored in a
temperature controlled setting under like the perfect circumstances.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
Yeah, I can imagine that's far different from what they're
dealing with here.
Speaker 4 (31:46):
Exactly, because, as Kristen Middleman says, crime scene evidence, especially
in Carla Walker's case, is the exact opposite.
Speaker 9 (31:53):
Her body was found outdoors. It was found outdoors three
days after she was abducted, So there was plant DNA,
animal DNA. The DNA at the crime scene had been
subjected to heat in Texas cold, that is degraded DNA,
(32:13):
And if you apply methods that are purpose built for
fresh samples, you often just missed the answer.
Speaker 3 (32:23):
On top of all that contamination Carla's case was more
than forty years old, so when they collected the evidence,
no one's thinking you can even test for DNA one day,
So I'm afraid to ask, but how is it stored.
Speaker 4 (32:38):
In brown paper bags?
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Ugh?
Speaker 4 (32:41):
I know, but it was actually completely standard at the time.
And there's something else that Detective Bennett learns when he
visits Kristen and David in their lab. So codis looks
at twenty DNA markers to build a profile, but Kristen says,
this new method that they've developed looks at like one
hundred one thousand, up to one million DNA markers.
Speaker 9 (33:04):
We knew we were working with the last bit of
sample that was left. We were going to be the
last chance, So it was it was a heavy moment
for sure. If it didn't work, Carlo would never get justice,
her family would never find out the truth. Perpetrator would
have gotten away with the crime. The whole community would
(33:25):
have been less safe because that perpetrator continued to live
in that community. The stakes are huge every single time.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
After its visit to the lab, Detective Bennett decides that
this new technology is literally his only hope, so he
ships off the final tiny bits of DNA evidence from
Carla's dress to the lab and then he just has
to sit back and wait to hear from David Middleman.
Speaker 1 (33:53):
He called us a few days after receiving it and said, hey,
it's not for Nana Grim, it's less than that. We
were sitting on pins and needles. And I remember it
was July fourth. I get a phone call and I
see that it's David Middleman calling. So I knew that
(34:14):
if he's calling me on a holiday, I knew that
he had an answer. And I could not answer the
phone fast enough, and David says, well, Jeff, we got
a profile from your DNA. It was a goose bump moment.
Speaker 3 (34:42):
Next time on America's Crime Lab.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
I'll never forget being able to call Jim and tell
him we arrested the individual who murdered your sister. A
case closed.
Speaker 5 (34:58):
I still was unconvinced we were led based off of
a DNA technology, but this was the first time it
had been used in this type of investigation, So how
much confidence could I I put into it.
Speaker 9 (35:10):
Detectives don't have a scientific background in training, and they're
somehow supposed to decipher whether or not someone's telling them
the truth or a lie.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
One of the first things he did is he lifted
up his hands and he goes, I didn't do it.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
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 and
Jessica Albert. Our executive producers are Kate Osborne, Mangesh Hadi
Gadour and David and Kristin Middleman and from iHeart Katrina
Norville and Ali Perry. Special thanks to Connell Byrne, Will Pearson,
(35:55):
Carrie Lieberman, Nikki Etour, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank, and the
entire higher team at Authorm. I'm Alan Lance lessor thanks
for listening.
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