August 6, 2025 • 29 mins
Emergency crews responding to a boat fire discover the badly burned remains of a person onboard. With little evidence and no identification, the remains are buried in an unmarked grave. Years later, DNA gives cold case detectives hope to identify who he was and to track down his family.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
People are laying in a freezer for decades. They've been
sitting in the walking cooler at the medical examiner's office,
and it's just up and down, up and down of
bodies and bankers boxes. And I just think that we
as society, we should send those people home. You know,
(00:32):
ultimately this effort, especially in unidentified human remains, is about
people and human dignity. I mean, bodies need to be
a returned to their families.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
There's a silent epidemic in this country. Every year, thousands
of people die and we have no idea who they are.
There's no identification found with a body, no family claim them.
The remains are often reduced to a box of bones
and stored in a medical examiner's office. And the longer
(01:10):
the human remains sit on the shelf, the less likely
it is that will ever know who they are. This
is America's crime Lab. I'm Alan Lance Lesser. Our producer
Catherine Fenalosa is here. So Catherine, what case do you
have for me today?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
So, Aylen, I want to talk about a case from
nineteen ninety two. It's springtime April and firefighters are called
to a fire in a field in Ogden, Utah, which
is about forty miles north of Salt Lake City.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
So this is Mormon country and it's I'm guessing one
of the most beautiful places in the world where mountains
in the background and just expansive land and red rocks.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
It's beautiful. There are snow capped mountains sort of surrounding
this very historic old town, which if you picture like
old westerns, right, and the area was actually known during
the Prohibition for having these speakeasies. So there's a very
like wild West vibe of this town.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yeah, and like you kind of feel like you're in
the middle of nowhere, but also things are happening here exactly.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
And so the area where the firefighters are called to
is actually a field which is next to one of
the main highways and it's behind a gas station and
truck stop. Firefighters get there and they realize it's actually
kind of a large fire at this point, and there's
(03:02):
a boat in the middle of the field that is
also fully engulfed in flames.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
A boat.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
A boat, so it's not like we're near a body
of water as far as first responders can tell. Maybe
this boat has been in this field abandoned for quite
some time.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
So I was.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Curious to hear about the original crime scene, so I
called Detective Tye Hebden. He's with the Weber County Sheriff's office.
Speaker 5 (03:34):
So initially it was just a grass fire or a
field fire. That then as they got there and saw
that it was a boat, and then that's when they
notice that there's actually a burned body within the fire itself.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
There's somebody on the boat. Oh my god, Suddenly this
has gone from a somewhat routine fire call to a
possible homae side investigation.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
WHOA.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
So detectives collect whatever evidence they can find. Now, since
this was a pretty large fire, there's really not that
much that they can find. There are some beer cans
that are scattered in the field.
Speaker 5 (04:16):
They brought in some canines to kind of comb through
the weeds and the trees seeing if there was any
other persons or people in the area. But no other
person was located and most everything was burned up pretty
good from the fire. That not a whole lot was
salvageable or recognizable.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
They don't find any id nothing that tells them, you know,
who this person might be. They go to the gas
station and the truck stop nobody saw anything suspicious. The
body was burned beyond recognition, so they're completely confused, right,
They now are looking at a potential homicide. They have
(05:01):
an unidentified victim, and they have zero leads.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Gosh, I mean, that's such a nightmare. When you can't
even identify the victim, where you possibly begin. And there's
something so tragic to me about someone who has passed
away and nobody knows their family, their friends, everybody has
no idea what happened. That that's one of the worst
(05:29):
kinds of stories to start out with.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
They're trying to figure out was this an accident, was
it intentional? Did this victim actually die on the boat?
Did they die somewhere else in the body was placed
on the boat and then the boat was set on fire.
I mean, there's so many questions and there's so few
answers at this point point. The one thing that they
(06:03):
can do is they send it for an autopsy, and
the autopsy determines that the victim is a male approximately
six feet tall, and they estimate he was between the
ages of thirty and forty five when he died.
Speaker 5 (06:22):
They were able to determine that he did have some
smoke inhalation. They were able to see that in his
lungs to show that he would have been alive at
the time of the fire based on the fact that
he was breathing in smoke.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Oh so now this is definitely suspicious death. In the autopsy,
they do collect a few things. Now remember this is
nineteen ninety two, so there is some very basic DNA
testing happening. They're able to collect his teeth. They match
the dental records with missing person's databases, and there are
(07:00):
no links made, so that doesn't lead them anywhere.
Speaker 5 (07:05):
They did put him into the national Missing Person's database,
and nothing ever came back as a match.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
The police reach out to news stations to publicize the case.
You know, they're hoping that someone will come forward and say,
oh my god, yes, I happen to be getting gas
in that gas station and now I'm realizing I did
see something or my uncle went missing.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
There wasn't really anything to do except, you know, hope
that maybe someone would come forward or something, you know,
as soon as we could identify and then that would
give us, hopefully some people to go talk to. But
outside of that, without without anything else, there was there
was kind of nothing to do. There's a possibility that
(07:54):
it is a homicide, that someone did this, there's a
possibility that it could have been self initiate, or there's
also the possibility that it could have been an accident.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
So with no leads about the victim or the circumstances
of his death, the case goes cold.
Speaker 5 (08:11):
I definitely definitely always kept homicide there on my mind
as a strong possibility.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Now, in twenty twenty four, the Weaber County Sheriff's Office
in Ogden, Utah, creates a cold case unit for the
very first time, and Detective Hebden is looking through the
twenty cold cases they have and this one, the body
on the boat, catches his eye.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
What intrigued him was you could really be solving essentially
two big mysteries at once identifying the victim. Yeah, so
solving an unidentified human remains cases and also solving a
potential homicide.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Yeah, double whammy.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Double.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
So he starts to look into the evidence that was collected.
Luck is kind of on his side here.
Speaker 5 (09:02):
They laid out kind of everything that they had, and
so we were seeing all of these kind of burned
and charred things that were collected. Some of the burned
and charred ashes and stuff or collected were sealed in
paint cans.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
When the autopsy was done because the body was so
badly burned, there was no tissue to test or take
samples of.
Speaker 5 (09:28):
But then we actually had the vials of his blood
that were collected by the Medical Examiner's office. We still
had them as well as you know, a bag with
the pubic hair.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
And Detective Hebden is thinking, I have some usable DNA
from the victim, and if we can figure out who
he is, maybe we can also solve the mystery of
his death.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Was it an accident or was it a homicide? So
now detective had de noos he has in blood and
hair he can test.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
Yeah, So he reaches out to agent Steve Okam, who's
an investigator with the Utah State Bureau of Investigations. Steve
Ocam has a history in investigating sex crimes. Now he's
helping smaller police departments with their cold cases.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
He's like, Hey, we've got this old case from nineteen
ninety two. Do you think we could maybe solve the case.
And I'm like, Eh, tell me about what happened. So
I got a copy of the death report, and man,
this guy burned alive in this boat. I was like, man,
that is heinous, right, Like there was no ifans or butts.
(10:56):
He burned up alive, whether it was an accident or
a homicide. So that we got to solve this case
for these guys. So leyeah, let's collaborate and see what
we can do.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Detective Heptin fills them in on what evidence is available,
namely the vials of blood and the bag of pubic hair,
and now Steve o'cam is even more invested in solving
this case.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
One of the most unique factors of this case was
the forward thinking of the Medical Examiner's office. In nineteen
ninety two, they drew some fluids. The victim was burnt
so severely that there maybe wasn't any viable tissue right
to DNA test, so they just thought, buying the day,
let's draw some of these fluids anything we can from
(11:41):
inside that was protected from the fire, and they have
that evidence still on file.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
It kind of reminds me of the Carla Walker case,
where they were really good at preserving so much of
the evidence that clothes she was wearing, and they were
able to get DNA off of those clothes because of
how they were stored. It shows how valuable that foresight
and correct storage can be.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
And to your point that agent o'cam said, just the
fact that they still had the adence, He's like, you know,
we all think that evidence is perfectly collected, stored, preserved, labeled,
(12:30):
kept track of. You know, there are so many things
that happen. Yeah, like there's a flood, there's a fire,
a police department or medical examiner's office, moves, things get
lost in moves, and.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
The reality is that also affects whether you can convict someone.
And I mean I even think about the OJ case
and how they were able to poke holes in just
chain of custody. Did someone plant the glove, did someone
plant the blood? I mean yeah, the reality of humans
interacting with evidence inevitably questions arise that have real world implications.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
And there's another thing to think about. Steve o'cam said,
it used to be fairly routine that if a body
went unidentified for a while, it was donated to a
medical school to be used as a cadaver.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
They could literally donate it to do tests on, like
to have their medical school learn how to work with bodies,
and then they for a while they buried them all
in unmarked graves, right, and then there was a while
where they just cremated them all and they don't exist.
So the challenges with these uhrs is to really see
(13:42):
where is the body? Do we need the bones to
be analyzed? Do we need to consider exhuming someone if
they were a victim of a homicide.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
So if unidentified human remains were donated to science or cremated,
there's no chance we'll ever know who they are.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
No, Thankfully those practices are much less common now.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
So I have a question. I know early on detectives
did check the National Missing and Unidentified Person System, which
is also called NamUs, and there were no hits. But
what about CODIS, So.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
I asked eve O Kim about that. He said it
has its limitations with missing persons or unidentified remains. In
Utah right now, there are roughly one hundred and fifty
missing persons in their database, and.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
I don't think a third of them have any DNA
in CODIS, Like no one the missing person, they're family
members anything, So there's a sixty seven percent chance right
out of the gate someone's not going to hit to anything.
And I would argue it's even higher than that because
tons of missing people aren't even listed in names. So
(14:48):
if our in our state at any given time, you've
got runaways, you've got adults who just you know, have
got mental health or some type of substance issues, and
they're in, they're out, they're in there out in terms
of missing people.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
And because of that, Steve said, they're probably closer to
four hundred and fifty missing persons in Utah at any
given time.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
And if you only have a third of the people
have DNA in there who are in the database, I
mean your chance as mathematic is going down down. And
I think our experience and our results and our success
with the testing we've done so far absolutely reinforces that
you're not going to get a code of set, so
you have to do your due diligence and follow the steps.
(15:28):
So once tied Doug through the evidence room and found
the actual vials of the fluid that had been extracted
back in the day, and we were right to roll.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
So what happens now, well, Steve helps to find funding
for cold cases when there are deaths under suspicious circumstances,
and this is also a passion project for him.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
In the last probably eighteen months, we've really been hitting them.
The unidentified remains hard. In Utah, people are laying in
a freezer for decades just because no one knows how
they died. Literally in bankers boxes, because once all of
the flesh and everything's gone from our bodies, most of
(16:08):
us will fit in a banker's box. So you walk
into the medical z owner, there's a wall in the
one walking cooler and it's just up and down, up
and down of bodies and bankers boxes. It's almost unconscionable.
If you just asked the people of any state, hey,
is you know there's like hundreds of people laying in
(16:29):
the cooler that no one's working the case, they would
be like, what what ultimately happens and happened in Utah
is no one tested them, No one did anything with them.
They literally tried to identify a body and if they
didn't figure it out, they just went in the cooler
and case closed like nothing's been done. And some of
the agencies, like Weaver County, thought, you know, let's give
(16:51):
this a shot now.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Steve Okham's office has a relationship with authorm of the
labs that works with the state of Utah to test
crime scene evidence and human remains. And remember the burned
body on the boat of course, well, Detective Hebden has
bials of his blood and some pubic hair from the
autopsy thirty two years ago.
Speaker 5 (17:14):
We sent them the blood because that was what we
found to be probably the highest or strongest DNA standard.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
And about six weeks later he hears back from authorm
with the name Kevin Capps.
Speaker 5 (17:29):
So they sent me a document with all of the
genetic makeup of the individual, and they gave me like
family relatives, people that were still alive. Was a pretty
cool report that they give just of tracing down that
family tree of this relative and this relative, and he's
got all of this genetic makeup that brings it back
(17:51):
to a pretty solid match that it was him.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
The fact that they can identify a solid match like that,
like it's out of nowhere, it's really shocking. I mean,
this body was a person and that person can actually
be found.
Speaker 5 (18:06):
He still has family here in Utah, even not even
an hour drive from me. What hit me hard was
realizing that he also had a daughter. They told me
that he had a daughter that would have only been
four years old at the time of his death, and
so that's when I immediately just kind of started thinking, like, man,
does she even know does she know where her dad's
(18:28):
been this whole time?
Speaker 2 (18:52):
So after thirty two years, there's a lead on who
this victim is, and I'm guessing this is where the
investigation shifts back into the hand of the detectives because
they have a name. But how did he end up
burning in the middle of a field.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Well, first, Detective Hebden's got to find family members of
Kevin Capps.
Speaker 5 (19:10):
Yeah, as I'm starting to kind of imagine this guy
and his life and the people that were in it
and the questions that they've had for the last thirty
plus years.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Allen, this is where Detective Hebden said he had to
adjust his investigative process because if someone goes missing today,
I mean, you could just check their online social media.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Yeah, Facebook, Instagram, things like that to see if there
are any photos or messages. You can probably find clues
on what they were up to before they went missing.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
But since this victim went missing in nineteen ninety two,
you have to look for newspaper articles, police reports, marriage certificates,
you know, stuff like that, And he does find some
previous police reports involving the victim from before ninety two,
nothing after, so that supports the information he got from
Authrom this guy is actually Kevin Kapps, and Detective Hebden
(20:03):
decides to reach out to the daughter. That's a big call,
it is, and with these kinds of cases, the calls
are always a little tricky because they need to get
fresh DNA swabs from living relatives to fully confirm that
the body in the boat is actually Kevin Capps. But
then there's also the fact that they may be revealing
not only that somebody's died, but that that person may
(20:23):
have been murdered.
Speaker 5 (20:24):
And then also just because we always have to kind
of question and keep on the mind of, you know,
if this is a homicide or if there is any
other persons involvement. The four year old daughter is the
least likely suspect, you know, if there is any sort
of family involvement in that regard, I imagine she'd probably
be the one kind of question the most of what happened.
Speaker 4 (20:53):
I get a knock at the door, and it's kind
of funny because I didn't want to answer it the
door because I thought it was the Mormon missionaries. But
it wasn't the Mormon missionaries, it was the Weeber detectives
from Ogden, Utah.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Wait, is that his daughter?
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah? Her name is Chelsea Laroux and she's thirty seven now,
but the last time she saw her dad she was
only four.
Speaker 4 (21:24):
And they're like, we need to talk to about a
family member. And I said a family member? Like what
a family member? And he's like, we need to talk
to you about your dad. I looked at him and
I was almost drew a blank. I said, are you serious.
Speaker 6 (21:43):
They're like yes.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
I said, okay, you can come in, and so I
yelled to my mom and I'm like, mom, guess what
you know?
Speaker 2 (21:54):
They have information about my dad.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
And we were just blown away, absolutely blown away.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Hang on. I mean, you get a knock on the door,
thinking maybe someone selling something, and this is what you
hear after all these years, that would be jarring.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
I was a little taken back by that, because this
whole time I thought that my dad was alive and
he was no longer with us, which brought peace. The
not knowing of where Keaven was my whole life. To
(22:34):
know that he had been in heaven this whole time.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
What did she know about her dad.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Well, Chelsea grew up with her mom as an only child,
and she'd seen pictures of her dad. She was actually
really close to his parents, but since she was so
young when he disappeared, most of what she knew were
stories that her family had told her that he was funny,
he liked to play soccer. She still has a purple
teddy bear he had given her. She did know that
(23:06):
he'd had some brushes with the police and he'd spent
time in jail.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
But as far as she knew, he just disappeared.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
Yeah, Chelsea says her grandmother, Kevin Capp's mother is the
last person in their family who saw him alive.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
So my dad was getting into trouble and my grandma
just couldn't really handle him anymore, and so she dropped
him off down the street from their house with one
hundred dollars and just told him to go live his life.
(23:43):
And unfortunately, he never came back.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Chelsea thinks that was April of nineteen ninety two, the
same month his body was found on the boat, and
over the years, Chelsea's family was always searching for Kevin.
Detective Hebden says Evan's sister would drive around. She was
just constantly on the lookout for him.
Speaker 5 (24:05):
You know, kind of every time she saw a homeless
guy on the street corner, she would be kind of
jumping out and being like, hey, are you Kevin? Are
you Kevin, Like just wondering, you know, is he here.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
At one point, Kevin's sister saw a photo of a
man named Kevin Capps. I think it may have been
in the newspaper or a police report, who was living
on the streets in New Mexico. And she becomes convinced
that this is her brother. So she tries to track
him down and she can't find him, but she carries
(24:38):
that photo around with her for years. And Chelsea says
the hardest part was wondering where her dad was and
why he wasn't with her.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
I did always wonder what it would be like to
have a dad in my life. The daddy daughter dances
that he missed my soccer games. I mean, he missed
my whole life. So for me, it was really hard
not having him around. It's relieving to know he didn't
(25:20):
abandon me, to know that, you know, he really did
love me. You know, growing up you think there's something
wrong with you, you know, like, gosh, am I not
good enough? You know, struggled with you know, daddy issues forever,
you know, being more attached to men than women. So
(25:47):
it's relieving. It's a big weight off my shoulders. It
is such a blessing. It is a close of a
chapter that needed to be closed a long time ago.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Wow, and how did authorm even find Chelsea?
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Yeah? I was curious about that too.
Speaker 4 (26:13):
In twenty twenty, something just came to me that I
needed to take my ancestry. And so my Mom's like, ky,
ch else, what would you like for Christmas? I was like,
you know, I would love to do my ancestry, thinking
that I was going to maybe find a brother, sister,
(26:38):
extended family, you know, and lo and behold, I got
a different treat. My treat was that I got to
find out what happened to Kevin's.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
So Detective Hebden and the investigator Steve Ocam solved one
big part of this mystery who the person found burned on.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
The boat was.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
But there's also this question of how he ended up there.
Was it an accident or was he murdered?
Speaker 3 (27:26):
So it is still an open investigation. And detective Hebden says,
there were actually a lot of other mysteries too.
Speaker 5 (27:34):
One of the things with dealing with a body that's
burned up to that extent is it makes it very
difficult for us to be able to determine if there
were other injuries, right, if he had some sort of
blunt force trauma, or we still had the bones that
we could look at. Was there a knife wound or
this or that or something that we just weren't able
(27:55):
to really say for certain, if there was other injuries
that contributed to his death.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
He says his office has new information, but they're not
ready to release it to the public yet. But after
thirty two years, Chelsea finally knows what happened to her father,
and you know, knowing who he is, heats the case
up even more.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Next time on America's Crime Lab.
Speaker 5 (28:30):
He takes a rock and bashes in her head and
leser to die.
Speaker 6 (28:33):
This person has left DNA at a crime scene that's
unsolved and has committed another crime, and now their DNA
has been collected directly from them.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
There's a little blood spot on the jacket.
Speaker 4 (28:46):
Whose DNA do you think that was?
Speaker 1 (28:48):
It was the victim's DNA.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
America's Crime Lab is produced by Rococo Punch for Kaleidoscope.
Erica Lance is our story editor and sound design is
by David Woji. Producing team is Katherine Fenalosa and Jessica Albert.
Our executive producers are Kate Osborne, Mangesh Hadi Kadour and
David and Kristen Middleman, and from iHeart Katrina Norville and
Ali Perry. Special thanks to Connell Byrne, Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman,
(29:16):
Nikki Etoor, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank, and the entire team
at Outhrum. I'm Alan Lance Lesser. Thanks for listening.
People are laying in a freezer for decades. They've been
sitting in the walking cooler at the medical examiner's office,
and it's just up and down, up and down of
bodies and bankers boxes. And I just think that we
as society, we should send those people home. You know,
(00:32):
ultimately this effort, especially in unidentified human remains, is about
people and human dignity. I mean, bodies need to be
a returned to their families.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
There's a silent epidemic in this country. Every year, thousands
of people die and we have no idea who they are.
There's no identification found with a body, no family claim them.
The remains are often reduced to a box of bones
and stored in a medical examiner's office. And the longer
(01:10):
the human remains sit on the shelf, the less likely
it is that will ever know who they are. This
is America's crime Lab. I'm Alan Lance Lesser. Our producer
Catherine Fenalosa is here. So Catherine, what case do you
have for me today?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
So, Aylen, I want to talk about a case from
nineteen ninety two. It's springtime April and firefighters are called
to a fire in a field in Ogden, Utah, which
is about forty miles north of Salt Lake City.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
So this is Mormon country and it's I'm guessing one
of the most beautiful places in the world where mountains
in the background and just expansive land and red rocks.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
It's beautiful. There are snow capped mountains sort of surrounding
this very historic old town, which if you picture like
old westerns, right, and the area was actually known during
the Prohibition for having these speakeasies. So there's a very
like wild West vibe of this town.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Yeah, and like you kind of feel like you're in
the middle of nowhere, but also things are happening here exactly.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
And so the area where the firefighters are called to
is actually a field which is next to one of
the main highways and it's behind a gas station and
truck stop. Firefighters get there and they realize it's actually
kind of a large fire at this point, and there's
(03:02):
a boat in the middle of the field that is
also fully engulfed in flames.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
A boat.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
A boat, so it's not like we're near a body
of water as far as first responders can tell. Maybe
this boat has been in this field abandoned for quite
some time.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
So I was.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
Curious to hear about the original crime scene, so I
called Detective Tye Hebden. He's with the Weber County Sheriff's office.
Speaker 5 (03:34):
So initially it was just a grass fire or a
field fire. That then as they got there and saw
that it was a boat, and then that's when they
notice that there's actually a burned body within the fire itself.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
There's somebody on the boat. Oh my god, Suddenly this
has gone from a somewhat routine fire call to a
possible homae side investigation.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
WHOA.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
So detectives collect whatever evidence they can find. Now, since
this was a pretty large fire, there's really not that
much that they can find. There are some beer cans
that are scattered in the field.
Speaker 5 (04:16):
They brought in some canines to kind of comb through
the weeds and the trees seeing if there was any
other persons or people in the area. But no other
person was located and most everything was burned up pretty
good from the fire. That not a whole lot was
salvageable or recognizable.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
They don't find any id nothing that tells them, you know,
who this person might be. They go to the gas
station and the truck stop nobody saw anything suspicious. The
body was burned beyond recognition, so they're completely confused, right,
They now are looking at a potential homicide. They have
(05:01):
an unidentified victim, and they have zero leads.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Gosh, I mean, that's such a nightmare. When you can't
even identify the victim, where you possibly begin. And there's
something so tragic to me about someone who has passed
away and nobody knows their family, their friends, everybody has
no idea what happened. That that's one of the worst
(05:29):
kinds of stories to start out with.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
They're trying to figure out was this an accident, was
it intentional? Did this victim actually die on the boat?
Did they die somewhere else in the body was placed
on the boat and then the boat was set on fire.
I mean, there's so many questions and there's so few
answers at this point point. The one thing that they
(06:03):
can do is they send it for an autopsy, and
the autopsy determines that the victim is a male approximately
six feet tall, and they estimate he was between the
ages of thirty and forty five when he died.
Speaker 5 (06:22):
They were able to determine that he did have some
smoke inhalation. They were able to see that in his
lungs to show that he would have been alive at
the time of the fire based on the fact that
he was breathing in smoke.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
Oh so now this is definitely suspicious death. In the autopsy,
they do collect a few things. Now remember this is
nineteen ninety two, so there is some very basic DNA
testing happening. They're able to collect his teeth. They match
the dental records with missing person's databases, and there are
(07:00):
no links made, so that doesn't lead them anywhere.
Speaker 5 (07:05):
They did put him into the national Missing Person's database,
and nothing ever came back as a match.
Speaker 3 (07:14):
The police reach out to news stations to publicize the case.
You know, they're hoping that someone will come forward and say,
oh my god, yes, I happen to be getting gas
in that gas station and now I'm realizing I did
see something or my uncle went missing.
Speaker 5 (07:29):
There wasn't really anything to do except, you know, hope
that maybe someone would come forward or something, you know,
as soon as we could identify and then that would
give us, hopefully some people to go talk to. But
outside of that, without without anything else, there was there
was kind of nothing to do. There's a possibility that
(07:54):
it is a homicide, that someone did this, there's a
possibility that it could have been self initiate, or there's
also the possibility that it could have been an accident.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
So with no leads about the victim or the circumstances
of his death, the case goes cold.
Speaker 5 (08:11):
I definitely definitely always kept homicide there on my mind
as a strong possibility.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Now, in twenty twenty four, the Weaber County Sheriff's Office
in Ogden, Utah, creates a cold case unit for the
very first time, and Detective Hebden is looking through the
twenty cold cases they have and this one, the body
on the boat, catches his eye.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
What intrigued him was you could really be solving essentially
two big mysteries at once identifying the victim. Yeah, so
solving an unidentified human remains cases and also solving a
potential homicide.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Yeah, double whammy.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
Double.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
So he starts to look into the evidence that was collected.
Luck is kind of on his side here.
Speaker 5 (09:02):
They laid out kind of everything that they had, and
so we were seeing all of these kind of burned
and charred things that were collected. Some of the burned
and charred ashes and stuff or collected were sealed in
paint cans.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
When the autopsy was done because the body was so
badly burned, there was no tissue to test or take
samples of.
Speaker 5 (09:28):
But then we actually had the vials of his blood
that were collected by the Medical Examiner's office. We still
had them as well as you know, a bag with
the pubic hair.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
And Detective Hebden is thinking, I have some usable DNA
from the victim, and if we can figure out who
he is, maybe we can also solve the mystery of
his death.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Was it an accident or was it a homicide? So
now detective had de noos he has in blood and
hair he can test.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
Yeah, So he reaches out to agent Steve Okam, who's
an investigator with the Utah State Bureau of Investigations. Steve
Ocam has a history in investigating sex crimes. Now he's
helping smaller police departments with their cold cases.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
He's like, Hey, we've got this old case from nineteen
ninety two. Do you think we could maybe solve the case.
And I'm like, Eh, tell me about what happened. So
I got a copy of the death report, and man,
this guy burned alive in this boat. I was like, man,
that is heinous, right, Like there was no ifans or butts.
(10:56):
He burned up alive, whether it was an accident or
a homicide. So that we got to solve this case
for these guys. So leyeah, let's collaborate and see what
we can do.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Detective Heptin fills them in on what evidence is available,
namely the vials of blood and the bag of pubic hair,
and now Steve o'cam is even more invested in solving
this case.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
One of the most unique factors of this case was
the forward thinking of the Medical Examiner's office. In nineteen
ninety two, they drew some fluids. The victim was burnt
so severely that there maybe wasn't any viable tissue right
to DNA test, so they just thought, buying the day,
let's draw some of these fluids anything we can from
(11:41):
inside that was protected from the fire, and they have
that evidence still on file.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
It kind of reminds me of the Carla Walker case,
where they were really good at preserving so much of
the evidence that clothes she was wearing, and they were
able to get DNA off of those clothes because of
how they were stored. It shows how valuable that foresight
and correct storage can be.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
And to your point that agent o'cam said, just the
fact that they still had the adence, He's like, you know,
we all think that evidence is perfectly collected, stored, preserved, labeled,
(12:30):
kept track of. You know, there are so many things
that happen. Yeah, like there's a flood, there's a fire,
a police department or medical examiner's office, moves, things get
lost in moves, and.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
The reality is that also affects whether you can convict someone.
And I mean I even think about the OJ case
and how they were able to poke holes in just
chain of custody. Did someone plant the glove, did someone
plant the blood? I mean yeah, the reality of humans
interacting with evidence inevitably questions arise that have real world implications.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
And there's another thing to think about. Steve o'cam said,
it used to be fairly routine that if a body
went unidentified for a while, it was donated to a
medical school to be used as a cadaver.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
They could literally donate it to do tests on, like
to have their medical school learn how to work with bodies,
and then they for a while they buried them all
in unmarked graves, right, and then there was a while
where they just cremated them all and they don't exist.
So the challenges with these uhrs is to really see
(13:42):
where is the body? Do we need the bones to
be analyzed? Do we need to consider exhuming someone if
they were a victim of a homicide.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
So if unidentified human remains were donated to science or cremated,
there's no chance we'll ever know who they are.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
No, Thankfully those practices are much less common now.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
So I have a question. I know early on detectives
did check the National Missing and Unidentified Person System, which
is also called NamUs, and there were no hits. But
what about CODIS, So.
Speaker 3 (14:16):
I asked eve O Kim about that. He said it
has its limitations with missing persons or unidentified remains. In
Utah right now, there are roughly one hundred and fifty
missing persons in their database, and.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
I don't think a third of them have any DNA
in CODIS, Like no one the missing person, they're family
members anything, So there's a sixty seven percent chance right
out of the gate someone's not going to hit to anything.
And I would argue it's even higher than that because
tons of missing people aren't even listed in names. So
(14:48):
if our in our state at any given time, you've
got runaways, you've got adults who just you know, have
got mental health or some type of substance issues, and
they're in, they're out, they're in there out in terms
of missing people.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
And because of that, Steve said, they're probably closer to
four hundred and fifty missing persons in Utah at any
given time.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
And if you only have a third of the people
have DNA in there who are in the database, I
mean your chance as mathematic is going down down. And
I think our experience and our results and our success
with the testing we've done so far absolutely reinforces that
you're not going to get a code of set, so
you have to do your due diligence and follow the steps.
(15:28):
So once tied Doug through the evidence room and found
the actual vials of the fluid that had been extracted
back in the day, and we were right to roll.
Speaker 3 (15:37):
So what happens now, well, Steve helps to find funding
for cold cases when there are deaths under suspicious circumstances,
and this is also a passion project for him.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
In the last probably eighteen months, we've really been hitting them.
The unidentified remains hard. In Utah, people are laying in
a freezer for decades just because no one knows how
they died. Literally in bankers boxes, because once all of
the flesh and everything's gone from our bodies, most of
(16:08):
us will fit in a banker's box. So you walk
into the medical z owner, there's a wall in the
one walking cooler and it's just up and down, up
and down of bodies and bankers boxes. It's almost unconscionable.
If you just asked the people of any state, hey,
is you know there's like hundreds of people laying in
(16:29):
the cooler that no one's working the case, they would
be like, what what ultimately happens and happened in Utah
is no one tested them, No one did anything with them.
They literally tried to identify a body and if they
didn't figure it out, they just went in the cooler
and case closed like nothing's been done. And some of
the agencies, like Weaver County, thought, you know, let's give
(16:51):
this a shot now.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Steve Okham's office has a relationship with authorm of the
labs that works with the state of Utah to test
crime scene evidence and human remains. And remember the burned
body on the boat of course, well, Detective Hebden has
bials of his blood and some pubic hair from the
autopsy thirty two years ago.
Speaker 5 (17:14):
We sent them the blood because that was what we
found to be probably the highest or strongest DNA standard.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
And about six weeks later he hears back from authorm
with the name Kevin Capps.
Speaker 5 (17:29):
So they sent me a document with all of the
genetic makeup of the individual, and they gave me like
family relatives, people that were still alive. Was a pretty
cool report that they give just of tracing down that
family tree of this relative and this relative, and he's
got all of this genetic makeup that brings it back
(17:51):
to a pretty solid match that it was him.
Speaker 2 (17:53):
The fact that they can identify a solid match like that,
like it's out of nowhere, it's really shocking. I mean,
this body was a person and that person can actually
be found.
Speaker 5 (18:06):
He still has family here in Utah, even not even
an hour drive from me. What hit me hard was
realizing that he also had a daughter. They told me
that he had a daughter that would have only been
four years old at the time of his death, and
so that's when I immediately just kind of started thinking, like, man,
does she even know does she know where her dad's
(18:28):
been this whole time?
Speaker 2 (18:52):
So after thirty two years, there's a lead on who
this victim is, and I'm guessing this is where the
investigation shifts back into the hand of the detectives because
they have a name. But how did he end up
burning in the middle of a field.
Speaker 3 (19:06):
Well, first, Detective Hebden's got to find family members of
Kevin Capps.
Speaker 5 (19:10):
Yeah, as I'm starting to kind of imagine this guy
and his life and the people that were in it
and the questions that they've had for the last thirty
plus years.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Allen, this is where Detective Hebden said he had to
adjust his investigative process because if someone goes missing today,
I mean, you could just check their online social media.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
Yeah, Facebook, Instagram, things like that to see if there
are any photos or messages. You can probably find clues
on what they were up to before they went missing.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
But since this victim went missing in nineteen ninety two,
you have to look for newspaper articles, police reports, marriage certificates,
you know, stuff like that, And he does find some
previous police reports involving the victim from before ninety two,
nothing after, so that supports the information he got from
Authrom this guy is actually Kevin Kapps, and Detective Hebden
(20:03):
decides to reach out to the daughter. That's a big call,
it is, and with these kinds of cases, the calls
are always a little tricky because they need to get
fresh DNA swabs from living relatives to fully confirm that
the body in the boat is actually Kevin Capps. But
then there's also the fact that they may be revealing
not only that somebody's died, but that that person may
(20:23):
have been murdered.
Speaker 5 (20:24):
And then also just because we always have to kind
of question and keep on the mind of, you know,
if this is a homicide or if there is any
other persons involvement. The four year old daughter is the
least likely suspect, you know, if there is any sort
of family involvement in that regard, I imagine she'd probably
be the one kind of question the most of what happened.
Speaker 4 (20:53):
I get a knock at the door, and it's kind
of funny because I didn't want to answer it the
door because I thought it was the Mormon missionaries. But
it wasn't the Mormon missionaries, it was the Weeber detectives
from Ogden, Utah.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Wait, is that his daughter?
Speaker 3 (21:16):
Yeah? Her name is Chelsea Laroux and she's thirty seven now,
but the last time she saw her dad she was
only four.
Speaker 4 (21:24):
And they're like, we need to talk to about a
family member. And I said a family member? Like what
a family member? And he's like, we need to talk
to you about your dad. I looked at him and
I was almost drew a blank. I said, are you serious.
Speaker 6 (21:43):
They're like yes.
Speaker 4 (21:44):
I said, okay, you can come in, and so I
yelled to my mom and I'm like, mom, guess what
you know?
Speaker 2 (21:54):
They have information about my dad.
Speaker 4 (21:57):
And we were just blown away, absolutely blown away.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Hang on. I mean, you get a knock on the door,
thinking maybe someone selling something, and this is what you
hear after all these years, that would be jarring.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
I was a little taken back by that, because this
whole time I thought that my dad was alive and
he was no longer with us, which brought peace. The
not knowing of where Keaven was my whole life. To
(22:34):
know that he had been in heaven this whole time.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
What did she know about her dad.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
Well, Chelsea grew up with her mom as an only child,
and she'd seen pictures of her dad. She was actually
really close to his parents, but since she was so
young when he disappeared, most of what she knew were
stories that her family had told her that he was funny,
he liked to play soccer. She still has a purple
teddy bear he had given her. She did know that
(23:06):
he'd had some brushes with the police and he'd spent
time in jail.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
But as far as she knew, he just disappeared.
Speaker 3 (23:14):
Yeah, Chelsea says her grandmother, Kevin Capp's mother is the
last person in their family who saw him alive.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
So my dad was getting into trouble and my grandma
just couldn't really handle him anymore, and so she dropped
him off down the street from their house with one
hundred dollars and just told him to go live his life.
(23:43):
And unfortunately, he never came back.
Speaker 3 (23:47):
Chelsea thinks that was April of nineteen ninety two, the
same month his body was found on the boat, and
over the years, Chelsea's family was always searching for Kevin.
Detective Hebden says Evan's sister would drive around. She was
just constantly on the lookout for him.
Speaker 5 (24:05):
You know, kind of every time she saw a homeless
guy on the street corner, she would be kind of
jumping out and being like, hey, are you Kevin? Are
you Kevin, Like just wondering, you know, is he here.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
At one point, Kevin's sister saw a photo of a
man named Kevin Capps. I think it may have been
in the newspaper or a police report, who was living
on the streets in New Mexico. And she becomes convinced
that this is her brother. So she tries to track
him down and she can't find him, but she carries
(24:38):
that photo around with her for years. And Chelsea says
the hardest part was wondering where her dad was and
why he wasn't with her.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
I did always wonder what it would be like to
have a dad in my life. The daddy daughter dances
that he missed my soccer games. I mean, he missed
my whole life. So for me, it was really hard
not having him around. It's relieving to know he didn't
(25:20):
abandon me, to know that, you know, he really did
love me. You know, growing up you think there's something
wrong with you, you know, like, gosh, am I not
good enough? You know, struggled with you know, daddy issues forever,
you know, being more attached to men than women. So
(25:47):
it's relieving. It's a big weight off my shoulders. It
is such a blessing. It is a close of a
chapter that needed to be closed a long time ago.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Wow, and how did authorm even find Chelsea?
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Yeah? I was curious about that too.
Speaker 4 (26:13):
In twenty twenty, something just came to me that I
needed to take my ancestry. And so my Mom's like, ky,
ch else, what would you like for Christmas? I was like,
you know, I would love to do my ancestry, thinking
that I was going to maybe find a brother, sister,
(26:38):
extended family, you know, and lo and behold, I got
a different treat. My treat was that I got to
find out what happened to Kevin's.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
So Detective Hebden and the investigator Steve Ocam solved one
big part of this mystery who the person found burned on.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
The boat was.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
But there's also this question of how he ended up there.
Was it an accident or was he murdered?
Speaker 3 (27:26):
So it is still an open investigation. And detective Hebden says,
there were actually a lot of other mysteries too.
Speaker 5 (27:34):
One of the things with dealing with a body that's
burned up to that extent is it makes it very
difficult for us to be able to determine if there
were other injuries, right, if he had some sort of
blunt force trauma, or we still had the bones that
we could look at. Was there a knife wound or
this or that or something that we just weren't able
(27:55):
to really say for certain, if there was other injuries
that contributed to his death.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
He says his office has new information, but they're not
ready to release it to the public yet. But after
thirty two years, Chelsea finally knows what happened to her father,
and you know, knowing who he is, heats the case
up even more.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Next time on America's Crime Lab.
Speaker 5 (28:30):
He takes a rock and bashes in her head and
leser to die.
Speaker 6 (28:33):
This person has left DNA at a crime scene that's
unsolved and has committed another crime, and now their DNA
has been collected directly from them.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
There's a little blood spot on the jacket.
Speaker 4 (28:46):
Whose DNA do you think that was?
Speaker 1 (28:48):
It was the victim's DNA.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
America's Crime Lab is produced by Rococo Punch for Kaleidoscope.
Erica Lance is our story editor and sound design is
by David Woji. Producing team is Katherine Fenalosa and Jessica Albert.
Our executive producers are Kate Osborne, Mangesh Hadi Kadour and
David and Kristen Middleman, and from iHeart Katrina Norville and
Ali Perry. Special thanks to Connell Byrne, Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman,
(29:16):
Nikki Etoor, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank, and the entire team
at Outhrum. I'm Alan Lance Lesser. Thanks for listening.
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