The Trans Doe Task Force

In honor of Pride Month, Chris illuminates a 40-year-old case that was recently solved with the help of The Trans Doe Task Force. 

Episode Transcript

(00:01):
People just want to know whatit's like to be me. How does it
feel to see a dead body? Tell afamily their loved one has been
murdered, talk to a rape victim,catch a killer and get them to
confess. Hold on tight, myfriends. Get ready for the
journey and welcome to murderwith Mannina.

(00:22):
Hello everyone and welcome toanother edition of murder with
Mannina. How's it going,Colleen?
Great. I just got back from NewYork and I followed your advice
because I was on the subway andthese two hoodlum kids got on
and they were fully masked.
We're not talking about COVIDMask, no. Masks are wildly just
the eyes. So and they had aboombox. And they had it at the

(00:46):
loudest volume. And they were itwas violent rap music, violent
rap lyrics. And they were justthey're shifting their eyes. And
I immediately thought and Icould see it made everyone
uneasy. But I immediatelythought of your words, when
something doesn't feel right.
It's not right. 100% of thetime, I don't need any more

(01:08):
evidence than this. It justdoesn't feel right. And my first
thought was, why do they notwant to be recognized? Right
could be a reason. And I don'twant to stick around, find out
so I got off the subway. As soonas it stopped. I got right off.
And I waited 10 minutes for thenext subway train and I saw it
the whole time. Your your yourwords were echoing in my mind.

(01:32):
If it doesn't feel right, it'snot right. Get the hell out of
here. And I did follow youradvice. Yeah, good. Okay, so the
moral of the story is one personlistens to my advice.
At least I know one person.
Alright, so we're gonna talk.
This is an interesting,interesting kind of case. And

(01:52):
then this task force that Ididn't even know existed, and
they helped solve a, a case inIndiana over over 40 years ago,
but it's a trans led task force.
So crazy. I had not heardanything about this. Oh, 440
years ago. Interesting. Yes. Sohere we go. We're going to talk

(02:14):
about this. Okay. So by the timethe police had found a young
man's body, he was rotting on anon a neglected plot of farmland
off the Rensselaer highway in1983. And it appeared that he
had been dead more than a year.
And this is country land, we'retalking. The man had been found

(02:38):
by a hunter laying down trapsfor foxes. Authorities thought
at first the school might belongto a monkey. And then closer
examinations found a bundle ofskill teeth, jaw burns, jaw,
bones, femur, tennis shoe andbits of reddish hair recovered
from the scene proved to be theremains of a man they thought

(03:00):
was between 18 and 26 years old.
And the police at that timebelieved he was a victim of
homicide. So it's so funnybecause I had been I've been on
a lot of calls where people aredigging in their backyard or
whatever. And they find bones,you know, they're just digging,
whatever and they find somebones. And he get there and most
of the time, it's animal bones.
But like always call so ifyou're ever digging and you find

(03:24):
bones always call because theycan kind of look the same. Like
I remember being on the streetand I got a call and and these
bones look like oh my god thathad to belong to you know a
person. And then we get theright authorities out there and
they're like, No, it's adult.
And I'm like, okay, even whenyou see schools, right, like it
just it was crazy. So alwayscall moral of that little

(03:47):
comment. But yeah, sure,especially, especially with the
advancements in DNA and how theycan go Yeah, through DD ology.
That's why it's more importantthan ever now. Absolutely. So
unfortunately, the remains wouldstay locked and not necessarily
examined anymore in the JasperCounty Coroner's Office, and it

(04:09):
was in there for over twodecades. Okay.
But a gentleman by the name ofAndy Boersma took over the
coroner's position in 2000. Andhe had inherited the case of a
young man whose identity you hadhaunted three corners before
him. The case remains unsolved.
But he was unsatisfied. I likedthis guy. He was just not taking

(04:30):
no for an answer. He was quotedas saying I just wasn't about to
leave this kid laying in a boxin the evidence room without
trying to put forth some effortto locate his family and return
his remains. Somebody out thereis looking for their son and
somebody has to take theinitiative. I love that right.
So he reopened the case and forthe next 20 years he would pour

(04:54):
through evidence about anychance so he got okay was doing
his job as acorner but he was still working
on this. A thick bindercontaining case information was
hauled into his truck on fishingtrips, his spare time was spent
going through Namus, which isthe National Resource Center for
missing an unclaimed personsrecords hoping to find a match.

(05:15):
He said he's quoted as sayingeverything sat at a standstill,
other than what identifiedmarkers we had, which was
cricket teeth and the jaw, asilver crown or cap, that stuff
was entered into the databasethat the state police in the FBI
had but none of the family hadentered anything like that in
his missing persons report.

(05:38):
Without the resources or fullinvestigative unit, which is so
common.
Giving the young John Doe hisidentity back was workforce man
and his wife mostly took onalone. So he got his wife to
help him. Interesting and hiswife I like that. Yeah.
Somewhere he felt a family whodid not know was mourning the

(06:02):
loss of this young man. Hewanted to piece it together and
pester any law enforcementagency that could make an
identification. So this was likea 1983. And then like in 2000,
where, you know, the coroner's,you don't hear of the coroner's
doing that a lot anymore aboutinvestigating cases, they'll
come out. They'll kind of tellyou that, you know, initially

(06:22):
what the cause of death is andtake the body. Alright, so
somewhere he felt that thefamily needed closure. Some of
the state police officers andsome of the county sheriff
deputies know that I'm a pain inthe ass. And I don't let
sleeping dogs lie. I got thekick. I got to kick the can
every now and then. I love thatsuch an old term in homicide
kick the can be for that beforeRight. Right. Right. Right. It

(06:46):
means progress. Yeah, I use thesnowball effect, right? You
start a snowball and you keeprolling it gets bigger, but
yeah, kick the can. Okay, so anintern who worked at a trans led
forensic genealogy nonprofitbased in Massachusetts called
the trans doe Task Force. Theyspecialize in finding and

(07:07):
research in cases of the LGBTQplus missing and murdered people
to make positiveidentifications. And we're
interested in assisting with theJasper County John Doe case.
He had been worked at they hadbeen doing for years as part of
the DNA doh project beforebranching off to create a unit

(07:27):
dedicated to identify missingpeople in the LGBTQ community
with a specific victim victim orI'm sorry, specific focus on
victims who may have been transnever even heard about this. And
it's so crazy because we'retalking like a long time ago,
right? It's it's not greatlyaccepted. Exactly. That's the
most impressive part of it tome, right. So cared that long

(07:51):
ago. Yeah, make a special unitfor it. So there they said while
we're working with them doinggenealogy, we asked each other
could we find trans cases? Couldwe be able to go out in our
community through this work thatwe're already doing? And we
thought maybe we could find acouple cases. And now we found
about 175Anthony Redgrave is the for

(08:13):
forensic genealogist who helpedfound the nonprofit and it's
only been going on since 2018.
The team leverages the scienceof genealogy to solve decade old
cases using family genetics topiece together mysteries. Here
we go. With that genealogy law.
It's the same technologies thatwas used to identify the Golden
State killer. And locally whatIndiana detectives used to

(08:37):
identify the so called i 65.
Killer as Harry EdwardsGreenwell right in Ohio, right.
Was that? Oh,absolutely. Okay. Yep. And he
was killing girls at truckstops.
prostitutes. Yeah. So that'sYeah. Yeah. Okay, so instead of
having the information from anadoptee of their birth date, and

(08:58):
roughly where they were born,what we have instead is
information from anthropologiststhat gives us post mortem
interval and age estimate, whichgives us a broad range of how
old the person might be. I lovethat they're using so many
people Oh, so they assist lawenforcement departments medical
examiner's and forensicanthropologists with getting
their cases worked on byforensic genetic. Geologists,

(09:23):
geologists, okay. So they saythey can't really overstate the
importance of the grassrootswork that they do. They are like
a complete workhorse and theyactually get things done. A
biological anthropologist at ofNew Hampshire, who assists the
task force that's what she saidabout them.
Their team also established alamp l a MP database a free

(09:47):
service which allows people tosubmit case information about
missing people who may have beenLGBTQ or whose case requires
requires LGBTQ informed care andconsideration a
It's fantastic from the stars.
In this case, the Jasper CountyJohn Doe, was a speck on the
map. Although they couldn't knowfor sure whether the young man

(10:07):
belonged to the LGBTQ community,there was one brutal fact about
the case that motivated thetrans doe task force to take it
on. While the Jasper County JohnDoe's identity remained a
mystery, his killer was wellknown. Here we go. The many
crimes of Larry Isler between 82and 84, Larry Isler terrorized
the large swaths of the Midwesthe was dubbed as the highway

(10:32):
killer. He'd pick up transientpeople or people who were
hitchhiking, he would drug themand offer to do other things,
and then he would murder them.
In 1994, Eyler was dying inprison ahead of a scheduled
execution for the death of a 15year old boy. He made a deathbed
confession to the lawyerrevealing a list of at least 20

(10:52):
men who had killed over theyears. And I think it's so
interesting, because thathappens. That seems to happen a
lot. And then you have someserial killers that even on
their deathbed, they're nottelling you or even right before
execution is so crazy. So mostof these victims were part of
the LGBTQ community. It was ahorrific tendency of preying on

(11:15):
gay men almost exclusively thatwas enough to motivate the
transpo Task Force to help solvethe Jasper County John Doe case.
They said they had been awarewere of Larry Eyler and his
unidentified victims for a longtime and we'd been wondering,
why haven't these been workedon? That's the great thing about
it. I love it. When people startto ask questions, they find out

(11:38):
there's not a lot of answers andthey just start doing it right.
They just form their own taskforce and they just freakin
start doing it. So Eiyer didadmit to picking up young man in
1982 along US 41 near Vincenz insouthwestern Indiana, and he
admitted to killing him thandumping his body about 70 miles
south of Chicago.

(12:00):
Whether Eiler actually knew theJasper County John Doe's
identity or not still remains amystery, he was going to take
that one to his grave.
If the young men had indeed beena member of the LGBTQ community
in life, he would have beenmurdered during a time when
career people were not alwaysaccepted by the broader
community, or even in their ownfamilies. still dealing with

(12:23):
that issue today, as we know, aneditor in chief at the World
Magazine, one of India's onlyLGBTQ magazine in the early 80s.
It was at the time when multipleyoung men from the queer
community went missing and thenturned up murder. There was that
was sometimes at the hands ofLarry Eiler, whose total victim
count in Indiana remainsuncertain.

(12:47):
People preyed on the fact that alot of these people had nobody
at home looking to see wherethey were, if they were if they
disappeared, it would be weeks,and weeks or longer before
anybody would say they weremissing. And we talked about
that a lot was runaways, right,or prostitutes? And now of
course, we're hitting this thispart of the community which man
talk about like, right, if thereare in this is the 80s.

(13:10):
Right. Wow. Right. It's justyeah, it's just so the transpo
task for knows when they take oncases of homicide victims in
this community, they may be theonly ones looking for them.
With regular John or Joe,regular John or Jane Doe case,
you can say to yourself, oh,this person might have family
who's looking for them. WithLGBTQ cases, you don't have that

(13:32):
guarantee, because sometimespeople specifically have left
because a family didn't supportthem. And other people are going
to be looking for them and thepeople who have no rights, okay.
So, the same year, they took upthe Jasper County, John Doe
case, the Human Rights Campaigngroup revealed that there had
been a record 57 known murdersof transgender people the most

(13:53):
since 2013.
Despite the continued prevalenceof violence against trans and
queer people in the US, the taskforce remains one of the only
agencies that can apply a queerlens to cases that need them.
You It's so crazy, I've neverheard of this. No. Have you ever
heard of this? No, I have not.
So I'm so happy to hear of it.

(14:16):
As members of the community,we're pretty much constantly
aware of the fact that we're notthat far removed from being in
that position we could at anyturn in our life have ended up
in the same place because that'swhat the world has done to us.
Taskforce members take greatcare to ensure mistakes made by
other law enforcement orinvestigative agencies, dead
naming or misgendering victimsthat can cause further harm to

(14:39):
that person does not happen. Andright how timely is that when
we're in this world now wheregender has become a big issue
and you know, sex changes andall these things that are
happening? How crazy will thatbe if you go missing, because
you could have been missing andidentified as a woman? Oh my
gosh.
Right, right. I mean, it's justmind boggling. But when they

(15:03):
know from the bone structure ifa surgery had happened or not,
well, you would hope Yeah, youwould hope so. But it would
still but you have to havepeople that are willing to do
it. Right. And we're willing tolook at it and and hope you
know, and it's the thing withthese task forces is that like
they're third doing the workof people that aren't even
asking for the work to be done.

(15:25):
Right. Like do you always say ifthere's not family advocating
for an investigation, it's sooften just becomes a cold case
on the shelf? Yes. Yeah.
It's just horrible. Okay, so ashe is Burke's have lived in
these bodies, and having to dealwith this kind of level of
violence and bias towards ourpeople need to be the one spear

(15:45):
handed in these initiatives. Noone knows this content like we
do, no matter how well meaningthey are, or experienced, they
are in related fields. Theywould take the same care with
the case of the young man foundin Rensselaer, right. So it's
like, again, it comes back downto race and sex and how
motivated the detectives are.
And if there's family, that's,you know, putting pressure on

(16:09):
the detective and the departmentto do something. So here we are.
In January 2020. One's coroneraccepted the task force help and
identification of the JasperCounty, John Doe. While awaiting
DNA data, Anthony Redgrave wasprovided photos of the victim's
skeletal remains to produce asecond piece of forensic art

(16:29):
that could help lead to hisidentification. From January to
September in 2021, the victim'sDNA was processed and uploaded
to G D match a free DNA sitebuilt for genetic genealogy
research. So that's free. That'sfantastic. In just six days, the
team of forensic geneticgenealogists and student interns

(16:51):
found a potential candidate.
Under the direction of thiscorner, and his wife, team
member Katie Thomas was grantedpermission to make contact with
the candidate's family in orderto obtain DNA sample and gather

(17:18):
further information God the workethic and motivation. Kudos to
you guys. We were involved inmore in a more unusual way and
finishing out a case we aren'tusually there. So that was very
emotional experience for theteam. The DNA sample collected
from a full sibling of thecandidate was compared to that
of Jasper County, John Doe. Itconfirmed the two were siblings.

(17:42):
And how great was that the taskforce was right there when this
when it happened, his name wasWilliam Lewis. So Jasper County
finally was able to call JohnDoe, William Lewis.
A few days before Thanksgiving,and then Andy Boersma the corner
and the transpo Task Forceannounced publicly that after so

(18:05):
many years, a young man foundnearly 40 years ago had been
identified. His name again wasWilliam Bill Lewis in life. He
was a quiet person who playedfootball in high school. He was
last seen by relatives inHouston, Texas in February of
1982. The 19 year old, attendeda friend's funeral in Indiana
and never made it back home. Hewould be 58 years old if he

(18:29):
still were alive today. Wow.
That's crazy.
For the corner current membersof the task force who worked to
make the identification theannouncement was not at a time
for celebration or to applaudthemselves through years of hard
work coming to an end. Whencases are closed. A somber

(18:50):
reality is reiterated there arefamilies like Lewis who prayed
he would one day come home, butnow they know for sure that he
won't.
However, his parents didn't livelong enough to learn what
happened to their son.
Here's a little bit of historyon the family. He was loved. A
great deal. His parents lookedfor him until they passed and

(19:12):
then his siblings had picked upfrom where the parents left off.
They said, as far as I couldtell, Lewis was not a part of
the LGBTQ community. He was ayoung man caught in the wrong
place at the wrong time, whoselife ended on the side of the
road by hands. Police had triedto track before for the transpo
Task Force though it does notmatter if a missing or murdered

(19:34):
person was actually part of thatcommunity or not. As cases
continued pouring in from acrossthe country in the work expands
to countries like Canada,Argentina, Finland, and live or
Libya. They refuse to let thesevictims who may have been
forgotten in life remains so indepth. There's this concept of
chosen family who was takingcare of these cases if they

(19:56):
won't look for you, LisaI definitely feel like we adopt
people until we can, until wecan find out where they go
beautifully. That crazy iconwe're in this world now, it's
like I don't know of any othertask force that just, you know,
specializes in this community.
But man, do we need it right,because as we know, in June

(20:18):
being Pride Month, and all ofthat, as you know, more and more
people are coming out and, andhopefully their families are
okay with it. But if they'renot, a lot of times, they run
away, and then that's thehorrible cycle, then they get
into, you know, anything drugs,or they get into slavery,
whatever, whatever it is, butjust that whole idea of having

(20:39):
to leave your home, and leavethe people who you think love
you.
And then, you know, can end upbeing murdered or hooked on
drugs or whatever. So, kudos tothis task force. And that's
exactly Wow, so heartwarming anduplifting to know that there's
people out there who have caredfor so long shout out to the

(21:02):
trans doe Task Force. That wasestablished in 2018. And I love
theirI love their quotes in there
talk about look, you know, youdon't have any idea what it's
like to be trans or to be gay,or anything like that. So they
they have people that live thatlifestyle, helping to solve
these murders. How fantastic isthat? You know, and like they

(21:25):
said, they're getting more andmore cases, you know, you have
people who, like, start theseorganizations, and those are the
people that have an unbelievableamount of passion. And, you
know, they may have no lawenforcement experience, but
passion and just the will todig. And, and then they're
living in that lifestyle aswell. Like, I just hope that law

(21:47):
enforcement will just learn toplay a little bit well with
others, because we just don't,and I think it's ego driven. And
I think it's oh my god, if Igive it over to the task force,
they might solve it. And whatdoes that look like? And what it
looks like is that you're opento keep the main prize at the
center stage, which is to solvethe case, who the hell cares?

(22:10):
who solves it? You know, like,who cares? Let's just get it
solved. And, gosh, I wish thatmentality of thinking because,
you know, if you can pair lawenforcement with community
groups that live in thatcommunity, right, live in the
community, or live that type oflifestyle, and you can combine
those two, you really I justthink that the amount of cold

(22:31):
cases that we have in anylifestyle is so astounding, in
this country. But man, if wecould just get a better
partnership where we worktogether, right? Like, that's
just the key, it's just the key,we can get the soft in. So kudos
again, to this to this taskforce. So with an Indiana, you
know, connection, just had toget it out. So it's June Pride

(22:52):
Month. Soyou know, kudos to everyone.
That's been a part of that.
Again, you guys, thanks. I'mgetting more and more email
messages about cases that wantto be talked about. And I really
do appreciate that. Reallypositive comments. Again, like
always, we always ask that youshare and review and just get

(23:13):
the word out about us. Becausewe're trying to get these cases
out there and there's so manygood people doing so much good
work. Make a difference. We canmake a difference. Let's make a
difference. everyone and thanksagain for listening and we will
see you next time on murder withmannina.