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On a crisp fall day in October of 1991, Patricia Scoville set out for a bike ride on the scenic Moss Glen Falls trails in Stowe, Vermont. When she hadn't returned home more than two days later, Patty's roommate reported her missing, triggering a search and rescue effort that soon morphed into a homicide investigation.
The case that unfolded baffled investigators for almost two decades, but the person responsible for Patricia's death could only hide for so long. Thanks to efforts by Patty's parents, police got a new investigative tool that would lead them right to the killer's doorstep. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is the case of Patricia Scoville on Dark Down East.
Patricia Scoville, Patty to her friends and family, was just 28 years old in 1991. But after a few years of working in the corporate world, she was ready for something different. She earned her degree in human ecology and human development from Cornell University in 1986 and moved to Boston after graduating. First, landing in human resources at a bank and then a similar position at Reese Corporation, a company that made sewing machines.
In 1991, Reese Corporation closed the doors to its Massachusetts location, and Patty took it as an opportunity to find her next adventure. Somewhere she could spend time in nature and breathe fresh air and enjoy a slower pace of life away from the pressures and hustle of the city. To paraphrase the famous quote, the mountains were calling, and Patty told her family and friends that she must go.
According to Lisa Scagliotti for the Burlington Free Press, Patti said she wanted to be a ski bum, or more specifically, she wanted to teach kids how to ski and spend her winters on the slopes. She had a close friend who lived in Stowe, Vermont at the time, a prime spot for the ski bum life with plenty of mountain air for the outdoor lifestyle she craved. Now, Vermont stands as the outlier in New England. It's the only state in the region without an Atlantic coastline.
In this absence of saltwater shores, though, the landscape of Vermont, and particularly in Stowe, takes on a character uniquely its own. Stowe is like a well-loved flannel shirt, cozy and unfussy.
The charming historic village is nestled among the green mountains with quintessential New England architecture. But nature truly takes center stage in Stowe. The colors change with every turn of the season, from the fiery tapestry of autumn to the silent descent of sparkling white winter. It was Stowe's unmatched natural landscape that Patty was so eager to embrace. So in the fall of 1991, she packed up her things and headed north with her cat.
Patty had answered an advertisement for a roommate in the local paper and officially moved into an apartment in Stowe with a woman named Annette on October 1, 1991.
It was only a temporary arrangement until Patty found her own place, though. I read that Patty apparently told Annette that her cat wasn't happy there, and that's why she was going to find something else the following month. Honestly, it's so relatable. If I could sense that my pets weren't happy somewhere, I'd probably want to find a new living situation, too.
Anyway, once in Stowe, Patty spent her days looking for a job and taking full advantage of all the outdoor activities Stowe had to offer year-round. Early October would have been peak foliage season in Vermont, so Patty's hikes and bike rides were set against the backdrop of vibrant red and orange changing leaves and the steadfast evergreen pines synonymous with New England.
A bike ride through the colorful forest was exactly what Patty was planning on the morning of Monday, October 21st, 1991.
According to court documents, Patty returned to the apartment she shared with Annette early that day after being away with a friend for the weekend. She baked a batch of cookies, ate some of those cookies, and then decided to head out for a bike ride around Stowe. Patty didn't tell Annette where she was going, but sightings around town placed her at a local bank at 1.39 p.m., where she cashed a check. From there, Patty hopped on her bike and rode further into town. ♪
After 1.45 p.m., Patty's exact movements are unclear, but at some point that afternoon, she decided to take her bike through the scenic trails of Moss Glen Falls. The area was just outside of Stowe's downtown village, and she'd visited a couple times in the few weeks since she'd moved to town. Patty liked to sit on the rocks and take in the magnificent waterfall there. Now, Patty and her roommate, Annette, had basically opposite schedules, and they didn't overlap at home a ton.
That week in particular, Annette was extra busy with work and school, plus her parents were in town for a visit, so she didn't think much of it when she didn't see Patty at all on Tuesday the 22nd. Maybe they just kept missing each other at the apartment, she thought. But by Wednesday the 23rd, Patty's absence was starting to seem really weird to Annette.
At first, Annette thought maybe Patty went to stay with a friend while Annette's family was visiting. But then people started calling the apartment looking for Patty. She hadn't shown up for plans she'd made, and she missed appointments. Annette decided to try and contact the friend she thought Patty might be staying with, but Patty wasn't there. Annette's next call was to area hospitals, checking to see if Patty had been admitted. But again, Patty wasn't there either.
Around 8.30 p.m. that night, after more than two days since she last saw Patty, Annette called police to report Patty missing. Court records indicated that almost immediately, a description of Patty and her bicycle were broadcast on area news stations.
And that same night, police received a call about a bicycle leaning against a tree in the Moss Glen Falls area, and officers confirmed the bike was Patty's. While in the woods, they also found a pair of gloves, similar to what Patty wore when she biked. Despite the discovery of her bike and gloves that night, the search for Patty didn't begin until dawn the next day.
Tom Hacker for the Burlington Free Press wrote that more than three dozen searchers from local and state police, as well as the Stowe Hazardous Terrain Evacuation Team, New Hampshire-based search dogs, and aircraft from the Vermont Army National Guard and the Civil Air Patrol assisted in the effort. This was a rugged area of densely wooded forest, varying elevations, and rocky terrain.
It was a true haven for hikers, mountain bikers, and outdoor enthusiasts, but it was not without its hazards. The environment first led law enforcement to surmise Patty had gotten lost or injured on her bike ride, so those first days were considered a search and rescue or recovery effort. But four days into the search, there was nothing to show for it.
It was beginning to get difficult to ignore the sinking feeling that Patty might have met with danger that had nothing to do with the landscape. Additional detectives were put on the case because at this point, law enforcement couldn't rule out the possibility of foul play. Detectives started calling up every single person in Patty's phone book to see if anyone had heard from her in the past few days, but no one had.
It seemed like Patty just vanished, leaving only her bicycle and gloves behind in the woods and no other trace. Day five left searchers just as empty-handed as the days before it. But on day six of the search, everything changed.
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A Norwich University cadet was scanning a wooded area above Moss Glen Falls around 8 in the morning on Tuesday, October 29th, when he noticed an odd-looking pile of leaves and branches.
The placement of it all seemed unnatural to him, like the leaves didn't just fall that way. So he went to take a closer look. That's when the realization hit him like a ton of bricks. The pile of leaves and brush that the cadet found were concealing the body of Patricia Scoville. Soon, the scene was buzzing with activity. Police sealed the area as Vermont's state medical examiner made an initial assessment of her remains.
Mike Donahue reported for the Burlington Free Press that the medical examiner confirmed Patty hadn't met some terrible accidental fate. Her death was being treated as a homicide. Much of the detail about the condition of Patty's remains, evidence collected at the scene, and other critical aspects of the case were kept confidential at the time to protect the integrity of the investigation.
However, later court documents disclosed that Patty was found face down, and the pattern of dried blood on her face indicated to investigators that she'd been in a different position when she was actively bleeding. Though she was fully clothed, her clothing showed signs of being dragged, and it looked as if her shirts, pants, and underwear had been removed and then repositioned.
While she had severe lacerations and bruises indicative of blunt force trauma, the medical examiner determined that Patty ultimately died by asphyxia due to manual and or ligature strangulation. The autopsy also determined that Patty had been sexually assaulted. Patty's remains were located just about 25 yards away from where her bike was found by police the same day she was reported missing. Right off the bat, this detail raised eyebrows.
How did they not locate her sooner if the area was teeming with searchers with all kinds of expertise for finding someone in the wilderness? Well, the fact that police started off with a search and recovery effort, not a homicide investigation, could have been why.
Stowe Police Captain Ken Kaplan told Rutland Daily Herald writer Bernie Dagnais that, for the first few days at least, they were looking for Patty out in the open, not a body that had been intentionally concealed. And there are different methods for those different types of searches. Even the search dogs were given commands to search for a living person. Whatever the root cause was, a delay like this can cause all sorts of roadblocks for an investigation.
If the killer was just passing through town, for example, they could be long gone by now. And the same goes for potential witnesses. And Patty's body was exposed to the elements for over a week by the time she was discovered, meaning shoe prints, fingerprints, and other vulnerable evidence was degraded to the point of being useless.
However, investigators were able to collect some undisclosed evidence, including biological samples. Those samples were sent off for testing as law enforcement put boots to the ground for some old-fashioned police work, making calls and conducting interviews.
A little over a week later, on November 7th, police announced that they had a list of possible suspects and were focusing on four or five individuals for Patty's murder. They didn't say anything about who the suspects were or how they identified these individuals, but the quote-unquote usual suspects you'd typically see police look at first, like a partner or a boyfriend, for example, didn't exist in this case.
Patty was not reported to have a romantic partner at the time of her murder, but she did have a close guy friend from college that she stayed in close contact with. She was known to spend time with him at his family's vacation house, and that's actually where her roommate Annette thought she might be when Patty didn't come home for two days.
However, police squashed that theory pretty quickly, saying this guy was nothing but a friend to Patty, and they checked him out, confirmed his alibi, and crossed him off the list of possible suspects early on.
Police didn't give even a crumb of a detail about who was on that early suspect list, but a total of 12 local detectives were assigned to the case at this point, with six of them focusing exclusively on narrowing down the suspects while the other half sifted through the new information that poured in every day.
The phone was ringing non-stop with hundreds of reports about cars seen in the area and suspicious people and just a whole host of other details for detectives to check out. Everything was being documented in a program that could identify similarities and give law enforcement some direction to follow.
In early December, it seems they found a direction because police announced they wanted to speak with the occupants of three different vehicles in the vicinity of Moss Glen Falls on the day Patricia was killed. They were looking for a female driver of a red hatchback or station wagon, the driver of an older tan and white Volkswagen van, possibly without estate plates, and the occupants of a midsize white vehicle without estate plates.
Mike Donahue reported for the Burlington Free Press that police were also looking to interview anyone camping, hiking, biking, or otherwise visiting the Moss Glen Falls area between October 18th and the 23rd, which would have been a few days before and after Patty was killed. These people weren't necessarily involved, but they were possibly witnesses with crucial information.
Despite the dedicated effort to bring a swift resolution to Patty's case, the following six months were full of leads that went nowhere. As winter became spring again in northern Vermont, police had sorted through more than 800 leads and conducted upwards of a thousand interviews.
By May, a $1,000 reward for information had increased to $10,000, causing a surge of even more tips to come in, yet there was still nothing conclusive. And actually, some of the tips were based on some pretty far-fetched rumors. For example, one tip said Patty was in witness protection, and another claimed that she was an informant for the DEA and was killed by the mafia.
Stowe Police Detective Bruce Merriam said to Paul Teeter for the Burlington Free Press that there was no indication Patty was an informant of any kind. The rumors seemed like harmful distractions in a case that desperately needed clarity and direction.
Detective Merriam said the department had never seen a case like Patricia Scoville's murder. But even though they were stumped so far, investigators remained committed to finding answers for Patricia's family and for the Stowe community, who had felt a growing sense of unease knowing that a killer could very well still be lurking in their quaint New England town. It had been more than a half a year, but police were confident that it was only a matter of time before they made an arrest.
Detective Merriam disclosed at the time that they actually had DNA evidence from the scene, and they were comparing the DNA from Patty's case to samples from each of their suspects. But it was a slow process of elimination. Some suspects gave their samples voluntarily, but others had to be obtained by court order, and it could take several months to get a sample from a single suspect.
Slow as it was, it was a critical step to narrowing the pool of potential killers, and so the case trudged forward. Early the next year, in 1992, there was hope for a breakthrough when a violent offender was arrested in a nearby Vermont town for an attack on another woman.
In February of that year, police arrested 30-year-old Rolf Huesbo in Winooski, Vermont, after he allegedly beat a woman and held her captive in her apartment for 10 hours. Also as part of the arrest, Rolf was charged with violating a restraining order, which was a condition of his release on a previous domestic violence conviction.
It appeared Rolf's history of violence against women stretched back years, long before his most recent arrest. He was even suspected of murder in another state.
You see, Rolfe had actually been on the run since July of 1986 after he was questioned about the beating death of his girlfriend, 24-year-old Shelly Webster in Corpus Christi, Texas. After his arrest in February of '92, he was arrested in Vermont again in June of the same year on fugitive from justice charges relating to the Texas case.
After that June arrest, investigators on Patty's homicide had reason to believe Rolf was in Stowe when Patty was murdered, and his violent propensities landed him on the list of suspects for her death. Law enforcement obtained warrants for the collection of Rolf's blood, handwriting, and fingerprints to compare to everything in evidence in Patty's case, but the comparisons were expected to take months.
Meanwhile, Rolf Husebo returned to Texas to face charges for the 1986 murder of Shelley Webster. At his trial in 1993, the jury found Rolf guilty of murder and sentenced him to 10 years probation with 60 to 120 days in jail.
Yeah, probation for murder. I'm not even sure what to say to that. But for context, there are a few reports that the jury was unsure if Rolfe actually did kill Shelley Webster, and they felt the state did a poor job presenting their case against him. And since juries in Texas were also apparently tasked with sentencing at the time, they opted for a lighter sentence for Rolfe since they couldn't decide if he was actually guilty or not.
But anyway, in the midst of the Texas court proceedings, it seems the comparison tests on Rolfe's DNA samples in Patty's case came back without a match. Although it's not reported anywhere in so many words, Rolfe was never arrested or charged in connection with Patty Scoville's murder. So that big, encouraging lead withered on the vine.
But with at least one suspect eliminated, the scope of the investigation narrowed as the effort to solve Patty Scoville's case widened. In late 1992, an Associated Press report in the Rutland Daily Herald announced that Crimestoppers had created a new video reenactment of the crime to stir the recollections of potential witnesses who were perhaps holding vital information unbeknownst even to them.
So police appealed to the local media for increased coverage around the anniversary of the murder. The goal was clear, to cast a wider net in the hopes of unearthing fresh leads that could crack the case wide open. But it didn't matter how many newspaper articles ran or how dedicated the effort to bring the case to a close. Each tip that trickled into the hands of investigators proved to be nothing more than a series of disheartening dead ends.
Years passed while the case grew as cold as a northern Vermont winter, but Patty's parents weren't about to let their daughter's memory get lost with time. On October 19, 1996, David and Ann Scoville joined friends and family in recognition of the first official Patty Scoville Remembrance Day in Stowe.
It was an opportunity to share and celebrate in Patty's honor with a bike ride and balloon release at Moss Glen Falls. It had been half a decade since Patty was killed there, her murder in shocking juxtaposition to such a beautiful and serene setting. David and Ann remained steadfast in their efforts to keep Patty's case and memory alive.
And in those five years that Patty's murder remained unsolved, her parents were on a mission of their own that had the potential to solve not only Patty's case, but identify suspects and bring closure in other cases across the state and country too. At the time of Patricia's murder, Vermont did not allow investigators to compare DNA evidence from one case to samples on file for other unrelated cases and offenders without a court order.
Police had to present their case in court, and a judge had to rule if their case was strong enough to compel a suspect to give their saliva, blood, or other biological sample for comparison. The process could take months to obtain a court order for a single suspect. And the Combined DNA Index System, otherwise known as CODIS, it had only just begun as a pilot project in 1990, the year before Patty was killed.
It wasn't until 1994 that the Federal DNA Identification Act established a national database of samples for law enforcement purposes. But when it was finally up and running, Vermont happened to be one of eight states that didn't join the national DNA network. And the state didn't have a DNA database of its own either.
This meant Vermont investigators didn't even have access to the tech that would allow them to run samples from evidence in Patty's case against known offenders within Vermont or in other states. Her killer might be sitting in prison for an unrelated crime already, unbeknownst to police.
Ann and David Scoville wanted that to change, and they made their voices heard alongside Vermont lawmakers and law enforcement, testifying in support of the creation of a DNA databank and for Vermont to join the national network. It wasn't an easy sell, though. There was funding to worry about and potential privacy concerns.
A bill to establish a DNA databank in Vermont passed in the Vermont Senate in 95 and then died in the House. But it didn't end there. In 1997, a new bill was before the House Judiciary Committee.
Ann and David Scoville made yet another one of their countless trips to Vermont to support the legislation, which would create a DNA database using federal funding and FBI software that would finally allow Vermont to compare samples with others on file across the country.
The bill would also give law enforcement the authority to collect DNA samples from violent criminals and those with sexual offenses who were convicted after July 1, 1997, or who were still under state supervision as of the same date. At long last. In 1998, Vermont passed a genetic testing law which included the creation of a DNA database at the Vermont Forensic Lab.
Nancy Remsen reported for the Burlington Free Press that the law mandated every violent criminal give DNA samples, including those convicted of murder, assault, sexual assault, kidnapping, robbery, and burglary. By May of that year, the lab had already started collecting blood samples, and the Vermont database was expected to be linked up with the national system by early 1999.
Vermont Governor Howard Dean said of the new law at the time, quote, The Scovilles are more responsible for this law than anyone else. They kept the pressure on the legislature until it got done, end quote.
Throughout the years, Ann and David had often expressed their belief that Patty's case would be solved with the help of DNA evidence. So I can only imagine how they must have felt when seven years later, the very DNA database they fought for led to an incredible breakthrough in their own daughter's unsolved homicide.
Just before noon on August 19th, 1996, district sales manager for the Burlington Free Press, Karen Curran, knocked on the front door of 50-year-old Howard Skip Godfrey in Morristown, Vermont. According to reporting in the Free Press by Mike Donahue, Skip had previously been a substitute paper route driver for the paper, and he had talked about wanting his own route, so Karen was there to sign him up.
As they were chatting inside Skip's house, he excused himself for a glass of water. Karen was seated facing away from Skip when he returned to the room. Out of nowhere, Skip raised a wooden mallet-like object and struck Karen in the back of the head. When Karen turned around to face Skip, her head already bleeding, Skip was holding a shotgun to her stomach and threatening to shoot her.
Karen attempted to fight Skip off, and the two of them struggled, falling to the ground with a loaded gun in the middle of it all. Here's what's absolutely wild, and something that no doubt saved Karen's life. She was a former police officer.
Karen was able to convince Skip to unload the gun, and as soon as those shells were out of the firearm, she grabbed them and sprinted out of the house and down the street to a convenience store where a clerk helped her call 911. Karen was transported by ambulance for treatment of a deep cut on the back of her head, while officers from four police departments responded to Skip's residence. The front door was open, but Skip was nowhere to be found inside the house.
Eight hours later, he emerged from the woods where he'd been hiding out and surrendered himself at the police station. He was immediately taken into custody on two counts of attempted homicide. Skip would ultimately face two lesser charges of aggravated assault because a judge found there wasn't enough evidence that Skip intended to kill Karen. If convicted on the aggravated assault charges, Skip faced a possible 15-year sentence for each count.
According to court documents obtained by the News & Citizen, Skip's motive for attacking Karen that day was likely because he was upset about his past failed relationships and he said he was angry at women. In a taped interview, Skip told an officer that he, quote, was thinking about women and became bitter and women tick him off in restaurants but he doesn't say anything, end quote.
Five months later, in January of 1997, Howard Skip Godfrey pled no contest to the aggravated assault charges and was sentenced to six to 12 years in prison.
So, Skip was in state custody when the genetic testing law passed in Vermont and the DNA database was created to store samples from convicted violent criminals like him. But here's the thing. Due to the massive backlog in Vermont while the DNA database was getting up and running, it wasn't until 2000, three whole years after Skip's conviction for the attack on Karen, that his sample was actually collected. And it was
Five more years after that, when Skip's DNA profile was entered into the federal DNA database, where samples from Patty Scoville's case had been waiting for a match. In that long gap, Skip Godfrey did his time and was released after six years in 2002.
Andy Netzel wrote for the Free Press that Skip moved to a region of Vermont known as the Northeast Kingdom and rented a place in the town of Kirby. He ran a window and door installation business and quietly went about his life there. But Skip's quiet life was totally upended when the fog over the 14-year mystery of Patricia Scoville's unsolved homicide finally began to dissipate.
Skip Godfrey's blood sample, that was collected all the way back in 2000 while he was incarcerated, was finally added to the federal database on February 23rd, 2005. A mere five days later, the federal lab got a hit. Skip's DNA matched hair and semen found on Patricia Scoville's body and at the scene of her murder.
Court documents indicate that the DNA match in 2005 was the first time Howard Godfrey was identified as a person of interest in Patty's homicide. This was a potentially groundbreaking development for a murder that had long baffled investigators. But it was only just the beginning. Over the next month, state police and Stowe authorities worked together to further investigate and build their case against Skip.
After the DNA match, police brought Skip in for a formal interview. During that conversation, Skip said he didn't know Patty, he didn't date her, and he never had sex with her. But of course, police had his DNA at the crime scene, so Skip was placed under surveillance in order to obtain another primary DNA sample to corroborate the match made via the database.
Skip was a smoker, so investigators waited for him to snub out a cigarette butt outside his business one Saturday in March of 2005. They secretly collected the cigarette butt without Skip's knowledge, and it was sent for testing and comparison against the DNA samples in Patty's case.
When those results came back, they once again confirmed that Skip was the contributor of hair and semen collected as evidence in her case. The chance of the match being a coincidence was 1 in 230 quadrillion, aka basically impossible. With that, on March 30th, 2005, police arrested Skip Godfrey for the murder of Patricia Scoville.
Prior to his arraignment, police interrogated Skip again about Patty's murder. According to court records, after he was read his Miranda rights but without an attorney present, Skip contradicted his previous story and admitted to having sex with Patty. He said, quote, You obviously have the evidence that I had sex with Patricia Scoville, and that was my concern up there. If I admitted to that, then automatically you were going to charge me with murder because
because I knew that was the outcome of that situation, end quote. He stopped talking at that point and asked for a lawyer. On April 1st, 2005, Skip pleaded not guilty in a courtroom packed to the gills with Patty Scoville's family, friends, and supporters, including her parents, David and Ann.
Attorney General Bill Sorrell was not short on praise for Patty's parents and their support of the DNA database because their efforts made a clear impact on actually locating a suspect and bringing him to face justice for Patty's murder. A.G. Sorrell is quoted in the Burlington Free Press saying, End quote.
Over the next three years, lawyers for the prosecution and defense fought over what would and wouldn't be allowed as evidence in the trial. According to a timeline by the Stowe Reporter for the Vermont Community Newspaper Group, Skip went through five different lawyers as the defense fought to suppress the DNA evidence and taped interviews.
The judge ultimately ruled that the DNA evidence could be presented to a jury, but many of the statements Skip made to police could not be used at trial. As ruled by other pre-trial motions, the defense was prohibited from introducing evidence from 12 alternate suspects, while the state couldn't reference Skip's previous conviction for the 96 aggravated assault on the newspaper salesperson.
With the pretrial hearings complete, the murder trial of Skip Godfrey finally began in January of 2008. By then, it had been almost 17 years of waiting for Patty's family, and they were in the courtroom when the jury returned with a verdict after less than three hours of deliberation. The silence was heavy as Skip stood to hear the foreman read the jury's decision. Howard Godfrey, guilty of aggravated murder.
At a later hearing, he received a mandatory life sentence without possibility of parole. When Skip was first arrested for Patty's murder, the people of his small Vermont community where he had made a new life for himself were in disbelief over the charges against him. They just couldn't reconcile the quiet but friendly man they knew with the horrible crime committed so many years ago.
Skip had become a regular at a local pizza joint in town, and one of the employees there, a 19-year-old woman, said that she remembered Skip as a serious guy, but he occasionally joked around with her. Like he'd go to hand her cash to pay his tab, but then would quickly yank it away, leaving her hand awkwardly lingering in the air as he cracked a smile.
Knowing what we know about that man now, his self-admitted hatred of women, his propensity for fatal violence, this joke sends shivers down my spine. In the years following the trial, Skip appealed his conviction, arguing that the evidence against him was circumstantial and there were no eyewitnesses to the crime. His appeals were denied.
In a decision affirming his conviction, it reads, "...the defendant is correct that the evidence against him was circumstantial, but this does not mean that the evidence was insufficient. Many crimes occur without eyewitnesses or other direct evidence, and the state is allowed to rely exclusively on circumstantial evidence in proving its case." Howard Godfrey remained in prison until his death on Christmas Eve in 2013.
Reports say he died of natural causes. He was 67 years old. If not for the DNA database that David and Ann Scoville fought for, and for the developments in forensic DNA analysis, Skip Godfrey might have flown under the radar of the investigation for the remainder of his life.
I could be telling you the story of Patti Scoville's unsolved case right now instead. But thankfully for Patti and for her family, her case does have an ending and some version of justice. However, David Scoville has said that there will never be such thing as closure for them because their daughter will always be gone.
The Scovilles never relented in their pursuit of answers for their daughter, and their grit as they pushed for a DNA database had a far-reaching impact. Keith Vance wrote for the Rutland Daily Herald that other unsolved homicides in Vermont were solved as a result of DNA evidence matched to samples in the database. And with over 10,000 samples on file at the time, the promise of a resolution and many more was tangible.
In May of 2008, a special ceremony was held at the State House to honor the memory of Patricia Scoville and celebrate all the contributions her parents made to the development of that database in Vermont. At the ceremony, the Vermont DNA Lab was formally named the Patricia Scoville Memorial CODIS Laboratory.
In an Associated Press article in the Bennington Banner about the laboratory dedication, Ann Scoville expressed her gratitude that Patty's memory was kept alive so many years later. Quote, End quote.
But Patti Scoville is not forgotten. Her story and legacy lives on with the laboratory named in her honor, and it continues to be a vital investigative tool that has no doubt saved lives and brought justice for others lost to violent crime. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. You can find all source material for this case at darkdowneast.com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at darkdowneast.
This platform is for the families and friends who have lost their loved ones and for those who are still searching for answers. I'm not about to let those names or their stories get lost with time. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East. Dark Down East is a production of Kylie Media and Audiocheck. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?