DNA TECHNOLOGY BRINGS CLOSURE TO 5 CALIFORNIA COLD CASES

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Cold Cases Solved Podcast, a podcast that
shares the most recent solved cold cases. Our purpose is
to help bring closure to the victims' families and hope
for those waiting for justice. Let's begin.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
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Speaker 3 (00:31):
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Speaker 2 (00:33):
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Speaker 3 (00:39):
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Speaker 3 (01:06):
This is a good story from ABC Bay Area. After
nearly fifty years unsolved and murderer has been identified in
an APTOSE cold case through DNA evidence, DNA technology continues
to crack decades old crime mysteries. In thirty days, the
company or RAM the off ram Otchram has solved five cases,

(01:27):
three of them are from the Bay Area alone. The
director of case Management, Michael Wogan, explains technology can go
and step further than what public crime labs are arbed with.
He says cases don't have to go cold anymore. What
they do is they compare DNA to databases to find relatives,
crafting a much bigger family tree than other DNA labs.

(01:50):
With traditional DNA testing, they look at twenty to twenty
four marks of testing of DNA, which is really good.
I'm telling you, if it's you or a parent, or
a child or a sibling. Outside of that, that's like
coda's texting cotis testing, they can't really tell who is there.
So when that happens, they send us the DNA and

(02:11):
instead of looking at the twenty four markers, we look
at hundreds of thousands of markers, and with the additional
data points, we can detect a sixth cousin and so
all of a sudden, there's a new road map, new
investigative leads that are delivered. The most recent case was
Karen Percyfield. Her sister Annie Gohing told the report over

(02:32):
the phone her nickname was Cookie. In nineteen seventy six,
while visiting her sister in Aptos, she went out for
a walk and never returned. Authorities say she was stabbed
to death, but there wasn't enough evidence to charge the
suspect at the time, Rissard Richard Sommerhalder. For four months
after Percyfield's death, Sarmahlder was arrested for murdering two other
women in Santa Cruz, so possibly a serial killer. He

(02:55):
only served though eight years in prison before being paroled
and moving out of state. The way the whole system
works said, the sister went very sad in that time,
and at the time the rules were not that strong.
The Cantifornia rules of punishment were very lenient. For the
fact that two women he was convicted of he could
get out of parole in eight years. Come on, she says.

(03:16):
Somrhowlder passed away in nineteen ninety four, but through the
forensic evidence the Sheriff's office submitted to auth Ram, they
were able to identify him as Percy Field's killer. ABC
News spoke with her daughter, Meadow Schamack, who lives in Washington.
She was six years old when her mother was killed.
She says, Yes, it's been a lifelong, you know, obsession

(03:38):
of mine to want to know what happened and who
did it. Like I said, your mind wanders to far
out places when you don't know the truth, so it's
like a bittersweet justice. I'm really happy that there must
be other people you know that are going to feel
the same way as me, And this is one of
the reasons for this podcast. Outh Ram is shifting from
not only doing cold cases from decades ago, but now

(04:00):
getting into modern casework as well, and hopefully this will
help others to feel closure in their lives and bring
people to justice. That's it for now.