High School Sweethearts PT 2
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In June's Journey, you have the chance to solve a captivating murder mystery and reveal deep-seated family secrets. Use your keen eye and detective skills to guide June Parker through this thrilling hidden object mystery game. June's Journey is a mobile game that follows June Parker, a New York socialite living in London. Play as June Parker and investigate beautifully detailed scenes of the 1920s

while uncovering the mystery of her sister's murder. There are twists, turns, and catchy tunes, all leading you deeper into the thrilling storyline. This is your chance to test your detective skills. And if you play well enough, you could make it to the detective club. There, you'll chat with other players and compete with or against them. June needs your help, but watch out.

You never know which character might be a villain. Shocking family secrets will be revealed, but will you crack this case? Find out as you escape this world and dive into June's world of mystery, murder, and romance. Can you crack the case? Download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android.

Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. That's June's Journey. Download the game for free on iOS and Android. Listen up. I'm Liza Traeger. And I'm Cara Clank, and we're the hosts of the true crime comedy podcast, That's Messed Up, an SVU podcast. Every Tuesday, we break down an episode of Law & Order SVU, the true crime it's based on, and we chat with an actor from the episode.

Over the past few years, we've chatted with series icons like BD Wong, Kelly Giddish, Danny Pino, and guest stars like Padgett Brewster and Matthew Lillard. And just like an SVU marathon, you can jump in anywhere. Don't miss new episodes every Tuesday. Follow That's Messed Up, an SVU podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. Dun-dun!

I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime. And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them. Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes. And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st century lens. Some are solved and some are cold, very cold. This is Buried Bones. ♪♪

Hey, Kate. How are you doing? I'm great, Paul. How are you? I'm doing really good. I'm looking forward to hearing more about this case that you told me, or at least you started last week. Yep. Let's get back to Eugene, Oregon. Really, it's Lane County, Oregon.

Because we have these teenagers who are a couple, a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old, Liana and Eric, and they turn up dead at an area that they say is recreational but looks to us to be incredibly packed full of vegetation. It's at Fall Creek, which is in the Broken Bowl, which is sort of a park area. And they were supposed to go fishing, and now they are dead. It looks like a sexual assault scene.

with Liana, but we're not 100% sure what sequence of events happened. They're both shot with the .22. We don't have any suspects. And after a couple of months, you know, the police are trying to pursue this, but they're starting to run out of leads. It

You know, they have canvassed the area. They have dug into both of their lives to see if they have any enemies. They have looked up local sexual offenders. They've done a lot. And after a couple of months, Liana and Eric's families are pretty desperate. And Liana's stepmother, Virginia, eventually hire a psychic. So I want to start with, I am not going to talk negatively about psychics. I have talked about them in books before. I am...

don't ever want to judge whether or not somebody believes in something. I do wonder about psychics being involved with police investigations. Have you worked with one, number one, on anything? And number two, I'm assuming you have been solicited before as somebody who's working on an investigation, or is that just a movie thing and it never happens? No, no, it happens.

You know, with the cases that I really focused in on in terms of cold cases, of course, I was looking at cases that predominantly were happening at the same time as this case back in the 1970s. And psychics were frequently popping up in these case files on cases that I was digging into and giving their insights as to sometimes it was the location of a missing person. Sometimes it was their thoughts as to who the offender might be.

And I will say that in any of these cases in which I've seen psychics provide information, none of the information that they provided led to solving the case. I know when you start looking at cases in the 1980s, you really see law enforcement's use of psychics diminish rapidly because it just really wasn't paying off.

Now, I personally have had at least one person claiming to have psychic capabilities, you know, come forward and try to give me some information on a case. Sometimes you do have people who feel that they are sensing something, however they want to describe what they're feeling and that they feel that this is accurate information that they divulge. And that's great.

always take it. It's just, again, there doesn't appear to be any track record in which I can have confidence in the information that somebody who's claiming that they've developed information through some sort of psychic capability, that it's just like, well, how much time and effort am I going to put into that particular lead when I've got all these other leads that are coming in from maybe more proven types of sources of information?

So it's very rare today. I think families will be more likely to reach out to psychics out of desperation, but law enforcement generally will not. But psychics still to this day will call law enforcement up to try to provide assistance.

It's interesting. You know, this seems almost like a little bit of a case study of the information that a psychic would have given a family or an investigator. Virginia's husband, his name is Gaylord. Gaylord hires a psychic named Gwen Wilcox, who has worked on police investigations in the past. No word on how helpful she's been, but they're hoping that she can shed some light on the crime. They've talked to several men of interest, and they just haven't panned out.

So, according to Wilcox, she sort of spouts out this flood of disconnected details about Liana's death, which includes, this is interesting, it's a mishmash of things is the best way I can describe it. "Loud music, rock and roll, souped-up pickup, rape on mind, group of men at end of bar, single out, follow and watch, personality problem, people really don't like him."

Three more rape cases. Someone said, you don't have to do that. Seems to be throwing something in the river. Black handgun and $49.95. I mean, Gwen, I don't know. I mean, this would just drive her parents crazy, I'm sure. Oh, sure. You know, and this is, you know, this kind of stream of consciousness, I guess, in terms of the types of details that Gwen is providing.

That is often the types of information that comes in from people who are delving into this psychic world. You know, so for me as an investigator, it's like, okay, what within that bit of information gives me something where I can narrow a suspect pool? Well, pickup truck, maybe, you know, three rapes. It sounds like Gwen is indicating that this person either prior to

or contemporaneous with the crime of the double homicide of Leon and Eric, this individual that law enforcement's looking for possibly has other sexual assaults and maybe is somebody that's known to law enforcement, you know, but it sounds like law enforcement was already, which is typical. Okay, this looks like a sexually motivated crime. Who are the sex offenders in the area? You know, and let's see which ones, you know, would potentially add up investigatively.

So this is very much in line with the typical psychic information that I've seen in case files. And it really, unless there's something where I can narrow the suspect pool, it really doesn't help me advance the case. And I'll tell you, it's so upsetting to the family. Eric's biological father, Carl, kind of gets a hold of this and says, well, I'm going to do everything I can to follow up on this. He talks to Gwen Wilcox, the psychic again. He says that

she had mentioned something about a dairy barn with writing on the wall and that the killers had climbed the hill and gone back to the main highway on their way to a beer place on the outskirts of town. So he takes this information and this poor man searches every single barn he can find looking for this dairy barn with writing on the wall anywhere near the murder. He spends a huge amount of time doing this

And he tracks down a bar that seems to fit this very vague location of where these men would have gone. But, you know, he goes to the staff members and says, "This is what happened. Did three men come in here on this night?" And nobody knows what he's talking about. It just makes him look like a desperate, foolish man. He finally just gives up at that point. It's awful. It's awful. I've seen family make similar efforts on cases.

In fact, I have a case, a little 15-year-old, Cassette Allison, which is one of my passion cases, and her dad did a similar thing where he conducted his own investigation. She was missing for 10 months before her body was found.

And he compiled a very extensive notebook. And to see the types of efforts that he went through initially to find his daughter and then secondarily to find who killed her, it's heartbreaking. A lot of his efforts are kind of in the similar vein as in this case, where it's such vague information that's coming in. And the reality is, is he was just spinning his wheels. He

He's just trying to get control of something in his life at this point. So Carl says, you know, later on, he says he has spent every moment trying to think of what the motive was. Who did it? Was this robbery? Was it rape? Did it have anything to do with drugs?

And then he said, he called up the police one time and said, you need to tell me the truth. Do you think this was suicide? Do you think that they did this to themselves on purpose? He was that desperate. And of course, you know, we couldn't prove it in the 70s because there's no DNA analysis at this point. And to even...

say if there's a new person who was introduced based on the seminal fluid, but he is so desperate. Imagine to think that about your son.

that maybe he, you know, shot his girlfriend and then shot himself or there was an agreement or something must have just been awful, awful. Yeah, you know, but that's also not really understanding the crime, the crime scene, the evidence. And, you know, a murder-suicide, there would be indicators present that law enforcement would be able to say, yes, that's what this looks like.

Based on everything I've seen, the evidence that you've told me, this does in no way, shape or form have murder-suicide as a possibility. I think you're right. So now we're going to fast forward, I would say it looks like about 30 years because there are little bits and pieces of good news here. This almost feels a little bit like a history lesson as we move this case along to find out what technology was available.

We no longer have the imminent danger. The murders are happening, and we're kind of at that scene. We are now in the geeky technology part, which is, I know, one of your favorite. You have a big smile on your face that I haven't seen through this whole episode, so this is nice.

No, this case is, you know, of course, with modern technology is just very, very solvable. Well, buddy, we're not modern just yet. We're going to go to the mid-1990s. So this is 20 years after the murders, and you just have to be patient because we have a lot

steps to go through. And surprisingly, Paul, a lot of people to go through, despite the fact that we have all this technology. So in the mid-1990s, this is about 20 years after the murders, detectives do not give up on this case in Eugene, Oregon. And they think that because of the advancements of DNA technology, they are going to go ahead and resubmit the evidence of the case with updated processing. And this includes the towels that were found with seminal fluid on them.

So the state lab is able to extract male DNA from these towels, which is then submitted to the CODIS system. But there's no match with anyone in the system. So in the mid-1990s, does this surprise you that they, you know, ran this with the technology they had and nobody popped up in CODIS in the mid-90s? Well, the FBI's CODIS system went through its own maturation process. Initially, starting in the late 1980s,

FBI's CODIS was built on the initial technology, DNA technology, this RFLP technology, restriction fragment length polymorphism. And this was the very technology that Alec Jeffries et al. out there in the Colin Pitchfork case over in England had initially used for the very first time using DNA.

Well, the FBI ends up compiling a database of convicted offenders using this initial DNA technology, RFLP technology.

And then right in this mid-1990s timeframe is when we started transitioning to this PCR-based, polymerase chain reaction-based DNA technology that gave us much better sensitivity to go after crime scene samples that we couldn't use with the old RFLP technology. And then eventually we started utilizing

Using PCR, this STR technology, short tandem repeats, and this is the modern technology

type of DNA profile that is currently being used today in CODIS. But in the mid-1990s, I'm not entirely sure exactly what type of technology they did, whether it would be the old RFLP or the newer STR technology, because it's sort of in that transitional timeframe. However, the DNA databases at that time were relatively small. And

CODIS is predicated on the repeat offender. There's a reason why they're in the database and then they leave it, they commit another crime and they leave a crime scene sample and now you hit to that person. So that the fact that they didn't hit in the mid 1990s just tells me that at least at that point,

the offender hadn't been placed into the CODIS database. At some point afterwards, the offender could be identified once he commits another crime or gets arrested and a DNA profile gets put up into CODIS.

I think as we move along, I'm going to learn even more and more about this. And I know that we've talked about the evolution of this in the past, but this case really does seem to illustrate how things move forward starting from the mid-1990s, and then finally we end up with some kind of a resolution.

So now we're going to go 10 years later. There's nothing happening in CODIS in the mid-90s. Fast forward to 2005, and there is a three-person team who assembles to look at these old cases in Lane County. They're volunteers, detectives. There is a detective named Kurt West and a police department veteran from Eugene called

Kirk Engdahl and a former state and federal prosecutor whose name is Chuck Tilby. Sounds like a good team. Someone with the police department and a state and federal prosecutor. And they're all retired. But between them, they have 90 years of investigative experience. They start meeting on a weekly basis to discuss this case specifically. I thought this was interesting. Their work is funded by donations.

So does that happen a lot? Is that how some of these cold case squads come together? I didn't know you needed donations to have a squad like that. It really varies widely across the nation in terms of how, you know, resources are acquired in order to look at cold cases. And, you know, this model of using retirees that are very experienced, you

is a very good model because oftentimes they will work for free. They're just looking to basically be engaged. It's just like me. And so this is one model. Now, other departments, no matter what you do, even if you have retirees that come in

to work a case and they say, I don't want to be paid, I'll do this voluntarily. An investigation still costs money, you know, so the department is going to need within their budget, you know, to be able to, you know, pay for gas, pay for travel expenses, pay for meals. There may be, you may have to hire experts or have forensic testing done. You still have to spend money to do an investigation.

Some departments don't have that type of budget. And so now this is where, well, can you get grants? The feds have grants specifically dedicated to cold cases. But there are certain philanthropic organizations or individuals that are willing to donate money to assist investigations. And that has really taken off.

in the last decade in terms of people willing to put their own money without any recognition to help somebody work a case, to try to solve a case. And some departments, that's the only way that they would be able to get some of these older cases investigated. Experience the glamour and danger of the Roaring Twenties from the palm of your hand in

In June's Journey, you have the chance to solve a captivating murder mystery and reveal deep-seated family secrets. Use your keen eye and detective skills to guide June Parker through this thrilling hidden object mystery game. June's Journey is a mobile game that follows June Parker, a New York socialite living in London. Play as June Parker and investigate beautifully detailed scenes of the 1920s

while uncovering the mystery of her sister's murder. There are twists, turns, and catchy tunes, all leading you deeper into the thrilling storyline. This is your chance to test your detective skills. And if you play well enough, you could make it to the detective club.

There, you'll chat with other players and compete with or against them. June needs your help, but watch out. You never know which character might be a villain. Shocking family secrets will be revealed, but will you crack this case? Find out as you escape this world and dive into June's world of mystery, murder, and romance. Can you crack the case? Download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android.

Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android. That's June's Journey. Download the game for free on iOS and Android.

Will you give me a rundown? I'm just curious. How much does it cost to run a sample against a suspect or something? Like at a private lab, like what's the fastest you could do for the most amount of money? Could you get results back? And would it be a private lab or would it be a state lab or what? It could be all of it. Okay. So, well, DNA testing is very expensive. And that's just in part due to the scientific instrumentation is expensive to purchase.

Oftentimes, labs have to resort to grant funding in order to buy these instruments that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then the consumables are very expensive, where now you're looking at $5,000 to $10,000 for a DNA testing kit.

where you can run 100 samples, but a typical case with your blanks and your quality controls and the various samples that are present in a case, 100 samples may cover just a handful of cases. So you're looking at $5,000, $10,000, and then of course paying the DNA analysts and everything else.

Typically, for routine forensic testing, you're looking at several thousand dollars per sample. And so that can add up very, very quickly. And if you're a small department, you don't have the budget to, especially if you are looking for the needle in the haystack, you have a ton of evidence, you don't know where the DNA is at. A lot of people overlook the fact that

Finding the DNA from the crime scene evidence is often the most time-consuming part. Modern DNA testing can go very quickly. You can often, once you find the DNA, get a DNA result within 24 to 48 hours. But finding the DNA, if you have a sexual assault that occurred on a king-size bed...

and the sexual assault kit is negative, but there may still be DNA evidence from the offender on that king-size comforter, on the pillowcases, on the flat sheet, on the bottom sheet. You know, that takes a ton of time. And as much as DNA testing has progressed and advanced over the decades,

the searching for and identifying locations on physical evidence that contain DNA hasn't advanced. We're using the same methodologies

today that were being used when I first started back in the early 90s. It's still very man-hour intensive when you have a lot of evidence. Now, in this particular case, it's very focused. So they don't have to spend a lot of time. They know where the DNA evidence is. It's just now

Every time the technology improves, it's revisiting this semen evidence found on Liana's body or on the towel. Well, you know, this was 2005 when these guys, these old retired guys, got together and started working on this case.

And what they concentrate on is not the advances in DNA with this case first. What they concentrate on more is a little bit of, I think, criminal profiling. So working together with another detective, an active detective named Chad Rogers, this group starts to think about who

Who would have been, based on the brutality of Liana's death and the sexual assault and kind of everything that seemed to have happened, is there anyone on their radar from the 1970s that might have done this? Is there a California serial killer who came to mind for any of these guys? And they start brainstorming, and they come up with somebody. And I wonder if you, I have heard of him, but not very much.

His name was Thor Christiansen. Have you heard of him? No, I can't say that I have. He's a California serial killer? He's a Danish-- was Danish-American. He was in Isla Vista in Santa Barbara County, and this is in the '70s. So again, Thor Christiansen. Have you not heard of him before? I have not. Let me show you a photo. He doesn't look like-- he's not a Ted Kaczynski creepy-looking. He is a nondescript but very, very blond, tan-looking man.

And the police start looking at what he did to his victims and think that this sounds similar. So let me tell you what happened here.

His M.O. seems to fit what happened. He would pick up female hitchhikers. He would drive them somewhere remote. He would shoot them in the temple with a .22. Then he would sexually violate them and leave their bodies behind. Yeah, there's enough overlap with what happened with Leon and Eric where, at least from that perspective, he has to be eyeballed.

Can you place them in Lane County at the time of Liana and Eric's homicides? Yes. Oh, okay. So they find out that Christensen had been in Eugene, 20 miles from where this little area is, in June of 1977, which is when Liana and Eric were murdered.

So here is the problem with Thor Christensen as a suspect now, which is they're investigating this in 2005. So he's dead, and they want to extract DNA so they can compare it to the seminal fluid that was found at the scene and on Liana's body. But let me just give you a quick little update on what had happened with him. So he had killed four women and then a fifth woman.

escaped with a bullet in her head and later was able to identify him, and that's how he was caught. He was killing people from 1976 until 1979, and we know that Liana and Eric were killed in 1977, so right in the middle. He had entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Eventually, Christensen was found guilty of first-degree murder, and he was eventually sentenced to life in a maximum security prison

The reason that he is not useful as a suspect for them, a live suspect, is that in 1981, a year after he entered prison, he was stabbed once in the chest while walking in the exercise yard at Folsom State Prison. And they never identified his killer. So...

The police say this sounds like something very similar, except I have to ask you this, Paul. Upon looking this up, I realized that every single woman he either killed or attacked looked pretty much exactly the same. Same build, slender, but long, straight hair.

every single one of them, and you saw the photo. Now, Liana has short, blondish hair. Now, does that matter? I mean, what if he's really fixated on that woman? No, it doesn't matter at all. This is a common misperception that

that I believe kind of came out of the Ted Bundy investigation, where everybody was under the impression that Bundy was looking for, you know, these brunette women, you know, hair parted in the middle. And people got this idea that serial predators

target a specific type of victim. They may have preferences, but in my experience, that is the oddity. Oftentimes, serial predators are going after victims that they can have access to regardless of what they look like.

you know, what their ethnicity is. Many of the series that I've looked at often have victims of varying ages, of varying ethnicities, varying looks, you know, either skinny or heavier. So most of these offenders, it really is the opportunity

that drives them to offend against that particular victim versus seeking out a victim that has certain criteria that must be met. Yeah, and we have talked about that, that this could be just a... It seems likely that this is just a crime of opportunity for whoever did this. And they are thinking it's Thor Christensen at this point. But...

Because he's not around anymore, they don't have access to his DNA for comparison. So what they do is the cold case team eventually in 2018. So this team was formed in 2005. So 13 years later, they connect with, tell me if you know these guys, Parabon Nano Labs. Have you heard of them before? I'm very familiar with Parabon. Okay. So Parabon is in Virginia and they specialize in DNA.

DNA-centric therapeutic and forensic services. And one of those services is DNA phenotyping. And that's what the investigators are very excited about. So without geeking out too much, like you are prone to do in a lovely way, Paul Hulls,

Give us the very quick little summary to remind everybody. I know we've heard this before, but exactly what is that when we say, you know, DNA analysis and it feels like a big umbrella? Is DNA phenotyping different than what they do on CSI when they're trying to catch the bad guy? Yeah, you know, DNA phenotyping, phenotype is the physical expression of your genetic information.

Typically, what Parabon was doing is taking the DNA sample that an unknown offender left behind at a crime scene, like in this case with Leon and Eric, the semen, and running a specific type of DNA test. It's this SNP test, single nucleotide polymorphism test.

And then from there, they can extrapolate the likely ancestry type of information about this unknown individual. And then Parabon's claim to fame back during this timeframe was what they called their snapshot. And so they have this proprietary process where they take these SNPs that they've generated from the semen evidence

And they do a rendering of the facial characteristics of the person. This has been something that they've had some success with. And then, of course, there's also been some DNA-based facial composites that don't look like the person that ultimately is caught. It's very much a technology thing.

especially in 2018, that was in the maturing stages. So let me show you this. This is Thor. I already showed you Thor. So this is Thor. And this is what they came up with. So here is their proprietary snapshot. Looks just like him, I think. I mean...

I mean, doesn't that look just like him? Yeah. I mean, it most certainly does. Just on the surface, there's a remarkable similarity between this Parabon snapshot composite and then the photo of Thor that you showed me.

So here, so you see they have it broken down by skin color and eye color, and it tells you the confidence percentage on the right-hand side, not brown or black. I mean, it looks like 97.6% confidence in him being a blonde. Then we get down here. I mean, none of this looks even remotely helpful. Male, yes. Unknown age. Body mass, unknown.

ancestry, North and or, you know, Northeast European. So is this going to be helpful? I guess it's more, it kind of bolsters their confidence in Thor and wants to push them forward to, you know, maybe eventually coming to the conclusion that ancestry DNA is going to be helpful. Yeah, you know, and I guess when I think about where these investigators are at in terms of pursuing snapshot DNA,

Thor was stabbed in prison in Folsom in 1981. However, even then, we were collecting reference standards from arrestees back in the day. Did they not have a biological DNA sample from Thor from back in the day? And was Thor cremated or was he buried? I would guess, because I'm not reading anything about

of the body. There's none of that. Maybe it'll help you if I jump ahead a little bit. They're convinced that they found this guy based on this snapshot, but they, of course, want to confirm his involvement by comparing a DNA sample to the physical evidence. But eventually, investigators are able to get a sample from Thor's brother's blood. Okay. Not from Thor's.

So I would assume probably cremated. His brother's blood, but this is interesting, it's given to them by the medical examiner after his brother died. It was not voluntarily given by the Christensen family. So they check for familial match with the crime scene evidence, and there's no match. So it doesn't seem like this is a Thor crime.

So what ends up happening is in 2020, the detectives reroute kind of their whole investigation because there is all of this publicity around genetic genealogy and how it was used to crack the Golden State Killer case. So I guess my point with bringing that up was, was it 2020 where you actually got national attention and all of a sudden it was like, holy crap, this is available? And when all of law enforcement lit up?

with this possibility, even though you were doing this in 2018? Is that right? Well, we arrested D'Angelo April 24th, 2018. And within a few months, it blew up that we had used genealogy in order to identify him. And so there are investigators that once that

became very public. They started pursuing that on their cases in 2018. It's been an evolution, you know, so it's not surprising, like in this particular case with Leon and Eric's team of investigators, that it took until 2020 for them to start pursuing genealogy. That

You know, it's something as law enforcement is learning about this tool, they'll start implementing it when it works within their case, when it works within their agency's philosophies or within their various jurisdictions, whether, you know, there's maybe some, I know across the nation, there's some states that

aren't as open to its use on cases within those state boundaries as other states. So, you know, it is. It's just an evolving thing.

But it sounds like in 2020, this cold case team decided to pursue genealogy in Liana and Eric's double homicide. They do. So they decide to resubmit the broken bull DNA sample from Liana to Parabon Nanolabs for genealogical analysis. So Parabon would what? Take the seminal fluid and then they would submit it

to the genealogy websites that are open to that? And they would get the results? Is that what would happen? Yeah, well, because Parabon in 2018 had done this snapshot, this facial composite, they already had the type of DNA profile that could be easily converted to search DNA

Select genealogy databases, notably GEDmatch for Parabon, as well as FamilyTreeDNA is the other DNA database that law enforcement is permitted to search. So they would simply upload that and then get a list of names of individuals in that database that shared a percentage of their DNA with whoever killed Liana and Eric. Right.

And now it's just simple genealogy 101, building family trees using public record information and identifying common ancestors of people within the database. How are these people related? And if you can find, oh, these two people in the database that share DNA with Leon and Eric's killer...

Well, they have great-great-grandparents that they share, depending on the circumstances and how those two people are related. Theoretically, Leon and Eric's killer also has that same set of great-great-grandparents. And now you just identify through, again, straightforward public record information out of doing genealogy research.

all the descendants of those great-great-grandparents until you land into a potential suspect pool. And now it's investigation 101. Well, Parabon says in this case, the suspect pool is three brothers. It's not Thor Christensen. It is a family called the Shroys.

and they have close ties to Lane County. One of the brothers actually still lives there. The other two went to Mesa, Arizona. They start focusing on the local Shroy brother. They tail him for a while, and then they retrieve one of his discarded cigarette butts and compares it to their DNA sample from the murder scene. Not a perfect match, but it does help solidify that the crime scene DNA does belong to someone in that family.

The old cigarette butt, I mean, is that reliable as long as you actually see where that cigarette butt goes? Oh, absolutely. This is a common thing, getting a surreptitious sample from a suspect. And it does require, it's very man-hour intensive, it requires following that person around regularly.

and seeing when they discard in the public domain a sample of their DNA. And in most states, this is a process that's legal. I know there's a few states that it's now deemed problematic from a legal standpoint within that state. But this is a common practice, and the preference is always something you can

on view. You know, you see the Starbucks cup being discarded and you go in and it's the only Starbucks cup in that trash can. Then you have confidence that it came from that person. Secondarily, it's when people put their trash out into the public domain. They push the trash can off of what's called the curtilage.

It's outside the individual's personal property. They put it on public property. You're now law enforcement. It's now anybody could go into that trash, you know, but law enforcement can go in there. But you could have commingled items containing DNA from anybody within that residence.

But it's still, if you get a DNA sample from this discarded trash that matches your crime scene evidence, that still gives you probable cause in order to go and get a search warrant and get a direct sample from a person. The cigarette butt, absolutely. And so now, obviously, at least at the time that they do this surreptitious collection, this one of three brothers who's still in Oregon,

He doesn't match, but he obviously is, I'm assuming, a sibling. He shares enough DNA with the crime scene evidence that they go, okay, well, we got two other brothers that we need to investigate. Correct. They've got two other ones, Daniel and Ronald.

They rule out Daniel, who is the youngest of the three, because he was in the Navy. And he was not around. So now you've got Ronald Shroy. And they start looking into who he was. And he was, at the time of these murders, he was a 23-year-old resident of Lane County. And now he is in 2021, 67 years old, by the time this really comes up.

So, you know, we're talking about, what is that? Quick math, 44 years later. They look at his rap sheet, and this isn't probably going to surprise you at all. There was a sexual assault on a Colorado woman in his past. So, you know, they really start looking at him, and they have a photo. And before we get to the DNA, can I show you the photo right next to that?

I cut it out. Please do. I know. So who is this going to look like? Is this going to be this Nordic-looking guy? I don't know. It's a big mystery. I've seen this before, you know, that kind of technology just on shows. I mean, I've never been, like, involved with it. But this is Ronald. Pretty good, I think. He and Thor look alike. There is some overlap, but knowing how Parabon does their composites, because what they do is they take sort of an average person

for somebody of a certain ancestry, and then they modify that face based on the DNA phenotype evidence that they get. I can't say that Ronald and this composite, you know, that by looking at this composite, I'd be able to pick Ronald out as, oh, yeah, he's a perfect match. But I think one of the things that is being illustrated, you know, we talked about Thor and the MO overlap that Thor had with Havok,

how Lyanna was killed, sexually assaulted, and the use of a .22, and that Thor had these phenotype characteristics.

but Thor isn't the killer. This really underscores how you can have this coincidental aspect. When I'm investigating, like, Golden State Killer or Zodiac, these huge cases, you run into these types of coincidences where you think, "Oh, this has got to be the guy," and then the DNA shows it's not the guy. And so that's what's happening here.

is that, you know, you haven't told me yet, but I'm going to assume that when they get a surreptitious sample from Ronald, it's matching the semen evidence found on Leanna's body and on the towel that was found on the picnic table. Well, let me give you more information. This does not go the way I thought it was going to go. Oh, geez. I know. So they still don't have Ronald's DNA. So they start to prepare a

a case to present to the grand jury and start mulling over how they're going to be able to get a DNA sample from Ronald to confirm the suspicions.

I had wondered, isn't there enough evidence at this point? But it doesn't sound like the DA is convinced yet. So they are not able to get DNA from him just yet. And I do want to address that because that's such an important thing. Parabon, and it would have been CeCe Moore and her team, were the ones that would have done the genealogy. And so they've

focused in on these three brothers, right? And there seems to be, you know, you got one brother who's living in Lane County, this other brother who used to be in Lane County at the time of the double homicide and has sexual assault, but in no way, shape or form are you at a level of effecting an arrest. You know, you do not have probable cause. Genealogy does not give you probable cause. It just gives you a lead.

An arrest should never be made based on genealogy by itself. You need to get a direct sample from Ronald. And even though he's living out of state, he's in Arizona. Now, this is when you, as an investigator, you reach out to authorities out there or you work with the feds and you get resources in order to get that surreptitious sample.

There is enough information based on the genealogy tool that it is worth the effort to get that direct sample to see, is he truly a

the source of the semen at the crime scene from 1977? And if he's not, then who else could it be? Are you closer in your investigation? So that's the stage that they're at. I'm surprised that they're taking it to a grand jury, at least from the bit of information you've told me. We're not at a stage to seek an indictment.

At all. You know, to me, it's like, oh, no, there still needs to be some footwork done in order to close this lead out. Either he's the guy or...

Or he's not the guy. And if he's not the guy, then who is it? Well, remember I told you things take a real left turn here. And here's the left turn. While they're trying to sort this out and get things together and get ready to make a big move on Ronald, Ronald, because he's obviously a jerk, gets into a big fight in February of 2021 with his brother Daniel, the one who was in the Navy. It's a very physical fight. The police are called.

And this is, I believe, in Arizona. We don't know what this fight is about, but it's supposedly unrelated to Leona and Eric's case. It's serious enough that Daniel is injured. It's involving firearms. The detectives are excited. They've been dealing with, it sounds like, months of red tape to try to get this done. The police drive out. They're excited that they can get Ronald, even though it's not going to be for the double murder, but they get to get their hands on him.

But as the officers are en route before they get there, Ronald turns the gun on himself and dies by suicide. Yeah, but now you have a source of DNA. Well, but Justice Thwarted, yes. Okay, you want me to ruin it? Yes, they have a DNA. Yes, it's a perfect match. Everybody knows that's what was going to happen. Yes, they get the DNA, and it's a perfect match with what happened at the Broken Bowl. Sure. But that bastard...

got to go out on his own terms, you know, after all of this, after all of this. That is frustrating, for sure. You know, on one hand, and this is what I always say, you know, too many people throw around the term closure when it comes to a case being solved and how the family feels about it. Families don't get closure, you know, they get an answer, but getting them an answer does not bring their loved ones back.

Here, the family's got an answer. It's Ronald. But they're not getting justice. You know, and that's really the frustrating part because, of course, they want to have their day in court. They want to see him punished for the crimes. He stole the lives of these two teenagers. And they want to have that time to basically confront him and tell him what he did and how that impacted their lives and how they, you know, he...

prevented Leon and Eric from having their lives, you know, and all the Christmases and the birthdays and getting married and having kids and all that. So that is very frustrating. I know. And here's something that is just painted with irony all over. Listen to this.

Daniel, the brother, says, my brother was awful. He was really violent. He was abusive. I didn't know that, you know, he was connected to any homicide. But come to think of it, he says, he and his brother used to love watching true crime shows together, which, of course, meant that Ronald knew about advancements in DNA. And then Daniel says this one time.

He and Ronald were sitting there watching TV. This is a quote. And one of those ancestry DNA commercials comes on. And he said, I mentioned to Ron, hey, I might want to do that.

And he said, well, he about hopped out of his seat and blew his top. And he said, so, yeah, I didn't do it. There you go. And that is what ended up getting him. Now, I don't know if Ronald knew that the police were on to him, that they were pursuing him. I would assume he must have.

if they're forming a grand jury, but I don't know. We don't know what Ronald knew. You don't think he knew anything? No, if the investigation was conducted right, he would not have a clue, you know, that this would all be done covertly, even, you know, presented the case in front of a grand jury,

You know, that's not something that would be divulged to the suspect. You know, in all likelihood, Ronald knew that he left his semen at this double homicide. And now he's seeing these advances in DNA technology. And this is the beauty of it.

of the genealogy tool is I mentioned that FBI CODIS was predicated on the repeat offender. And even like Golden State Killer D'Angelo, you know, he knew he'd left his semen all over the state of California.

he could not risk being caught for committing another crime and then having his DNA matched to that that's in the database. So D'Angelo had control. You know, he's going, okay, I'm just going to make sure. I'll mind my P's and Q's, and I'm not going to get sampled. Now the genealogy tool, even if an offender is going, well, I'm not going to get caught. I'm going to control who has access to my DNA. But they can't control their third cousins.

And so now you have a bunch of these offenders who are paranoid. Yeah, and should be. At any moment, law enforcement can be knocking on their door. And I love that. They now are spooked. And I think Ronald, once he got into the serious fight with his brother, and now law enforcement's responding, he knows, well, I'm going to be arrested. I'm going to be having a DNA sample collected.

and I'm gonna be tied to Leona and Eric's murder, and he decided to take his life. That's what I believe likely happened in this case. I think so. So maybe that is some sort of justice, you know? And honestly, I wonder if there's any thought that the families would be spared a trial. Sometimes they want a trial, sometimes they don't, you know? Each of these families and each member of the family have their own personal thoughts on that. And there's no right or wrong thought

It's a personal decision. And what I have seen, like once we caught D'Angelo on Golden State Killer, you know, some of these victims were re-traumatized because now they know who their attacker was or they know who killed their loved one. And to go through the trial process, criminal justice system is not kind to victims or victims' families. And they suffer during that process.

You know, in some ways, the family was spared having to go through this very frustrating and re-traumatizing trial process. But again, they were denied justice. Yeah.

Just to circle back on the trial part of that, you know what I was thinking when you were saying that is that there was a woman that Ronald had allegedly sexually assaulted, we're going to presume after he left Oregon. You then, if you are having a trial, however many years later, you are also finding out all the things that happened after what happened to your family member or you. And my goodness, to have that what if game in your head has to be so incredibly painful for

for survivors, you know, maybe having survivor's guilt, all of that. So I'm not saying that this was a good ending, but I'm saying that he died scared, which is exactly the way he should have died because you know those two kids died scared also. No, for sure. The family did get an answer. It was four decades, four plus decades later. But this is what we are seeing now with this genealogy tool. You know, there are these cases that...

utilizing the previous DNA technologies and databases would never have been solved. And now that genealogy has come along, we are seeing hundreds of these types of cases being solved. And it's great. And I hope it continues and

and we'll get more families answers and we will make the public safer. As do I. Well, this is a good case. Thank you, Paul. And I will bring you one next week that I am fairly certain has no DNA evidence, probably no fingerprints, maybe no even composite sketch. Wow. Okay. Well, I'm looking forward to it. See ya. All right. Bye.

This has been an Exactly Right production. For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com slash buriedbones sources. Our senior producer is Alexis Amorosi. Research by Maren McClashan, Allie Elkin, and Kate Winkler-Dawson.

Our mixing engineer is Ben Talladay. Our theme song is by Tom Breifogel. Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer. You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at BuriedBonesPod.

Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded Age story of murder and the race to decode the criminal mind, is available now. And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now.