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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, check us out at patreon.com/forensictales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. The 1950s were different times. You knew your neighbor. The kids played outside. Life was simple.
So when nine-year-old Candy set out to sell her cookies, it was no big deal. Until she didn't come home. A parent's worst nightmare in any era. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 112, The Candace Rogers Story. ♪
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.
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The year is 1959. Alaska and Hawaii joined the United States Union and became the 59th and 50th states. Mattel created the first Barbie doll. Fidel Castro rose to power in Cuba. And a gallon of gasoline would cost you 25 cents. But for the people in Spokane, Washington, life was very different.
On the afternoon of March 6, 1959, nine-year-old Candace Rogers returned home from school to her mom's house in Spokane, Washington. Candace, who went by the nickname Candy, was an only child and a fourth grader at Holmes Elementary School.
When she got home that afternoon, the first thing she did was something that she did every day. First, she ran to play with her dog, who was just as happy to see her as she was to see him. Then, she grabbed her afternoon cookie from the kitchen. Candy had plans that night to sell mint candies around the neighborhood as a part of her commitment as a bluebird with the Campfire Girls.
Like Girl Scouts, the Campfire Girls was a sister organization to the Boy Scouts of America that did after-school programs and camping trips. It was an organization aimed at building confidence and leadership in young girls. And instead of selling Girl Scout cookies, the girls sold mint candies. After playing with her dog and finishing her afternoon snack, Candy went door-to-door selling mints.
Because this is the late 1950s, Candy's mom didn't think twice about letting her daughter go out alone. Back then, parents didn't worry about their kids being outside by themselves. Her mom knew that she would just be around the neighborhood and that her daughter would be home before it got dark. But then dark came and no Candy.
Candy was only supposed to be out for an hour, two hours max. Candy was always supposed to return home before it got dark, a typical household rule for kids. As a kid, you see the streetlights come on, that's your signal, it's time to go home. Where was Candy? Candy was responsible. She was trustworthy. She wasn't the type of kid who broke the rules or didn't listen.
Candy's mom immediately picked up the phone to call the Spokane Police Department. She told the officers that her nine-year-old daughter left the house to sell candies to the neighbors, but she never came home. Within minutes, a dozen Spokane police officers arrived at the house.
In cases involving missing children, every second counts. The chances of recovering a missing child decreases as the seconds turn to minutes and minutes turn to hours. Within moments of Candy going missing, every available police officer within the Spokane Police Department joined the search. They were joined by dozens of neighbors and even strangers who wanted to help.
Fairly quickly, hundreds of people started canvassing the neighborhood looking for Candy. The hope was that maybe she got lost on her way home. Or, worst case scenario, she got hurt somewhere and was just simply waiting for someone to come find her. Then, officers made a chilling discovery. They found six boxes of mint patties thrown on the ground along Peckett Drive.
But no sign of Candy anywhere. Over the next few days, over 1,200 volunteers and 250 police officers gathered to help find her.
Hundreds of tips poured into the Spokane police station. Tips about the possibility of skid row bums being involved. Tiefleaf readers called in claiming to have information about what happened to Candy. But none of the over 750 tips led anywhere. Many volunteers and police officers centered their search on the canyon below Candy's house, a perfect location to dump a person or a body.
But the Canyon didn't turn anything up. They also searched the Spokane River for any clues. Nothing. They went door to door, knocking on homes, asking if anyone saw Candy the night she went missing. But no one saw anything. The search for Candy caught the attention of the U.S. Air Force. After learning about a nine-year-old going missing, the Air Force sent a five-man helicopter crew to Spokane to get a bird's-eye view of the search area.
Unfortunately, and this is heartbreaking, while flying over the Spokane River, the helicopter unexpectedly struck a high-tension power line, causing it to crash in the Spokane River. Three out of the five crew members on board tragically died, including airmen Marlise Ray, Sergeant William McDonald, and Lieutenant Kenneth Fautik. The two other airmen on board miraculously survived.
The search for Candy continued for the next 15 days. On March 21st, about seven miles away from Candy's house, two airmen from Fairchild were out hunting in a remote area off Old Trails Road. 19-year-old Howard Lawrence and 21-year-old Richard Bergen were walking to their hunting spot. They stumble upon a small pair of blue suede shoes.
They had seen the news about the missing girl, so they wondered if maybe the shoes could belong to Candy. As soon as they arrive at their base, they phone the tip-in to the Spokane police. Officers talk to Candy's grandfather, who confirms that she owned a pair of similar blue suede shoes.
As the sun rose the following morning, a half-dozen Spokane officers organized a search party of the area. Within minutes into the search, they made a horrific discovery. Officers spotted a knee sticking out underneath a shallow layer of pine needles and brush. It was the deceased body of Candy Rogers.
The location of Candy's body was about seven miles away from her house and a few miles northwest of where the search party had concentrated the search for the last two weeks. Evidence from the body showed that she had been brutally sexually assaulted and strangled to death with a piece of her own clothing. There was also an indication that her killer used her clothes to both bind her hands as well as her feet together.
The news about Candy's brutal assault and murder sent shockwaves through Spokane. People desperately wanted to find out who could do this to an innocent nine-year-old little girl. There needed to be justice, and the person responsible, they needed to pay.
Police Chief Clifford Payne told the Daily Chronicle, quote, We'll put every available man on the case and keep them there till this thing is solved. We know what we're looking for now. We're looking for a maniac, end quote. In the days and weeks following the discovery of Candy's body, the police received thousands of tips and leads.
People called in saying that they thought their neighbor was guilty. Others called in saying that the weird guy they saw at the grocery store could be the guy. As the police received more and more tips, they felt like they were going to identify their suspect any day now. Surely one of the thousands of tips that were coming in would lead them in the right direction. Sadly, that wasn't the case.
How someone sexually assaulted and killed Candy suggested that this was the work of a sex offender. And this probably wasn't their first and only victim. This person has probably either killed before or has committed a sexual assault, likely a minor. But back in 1959, at the time of Candy's murder, detectives didn't have the luxury of looking at registered sex offender databases anymore.
There were no lists of sex offenders in the area. So what they had to do instead was simply look at every person arrested in Spokane, find out what they were arrested for. If they had a previous sexual assault involving a minor, then they interviewed them. They also looked at individuals who had similar criminal histories.
a process that unfortunately took Spokane investigators months and years to comb through. But their diligence paid off. They got their first suspect, Hugh Bynum Morse. Hugh Morse was no stranger to the Spokane Police Department. He was known as one of Spokane's most notorious serial killers who claimed the lives of at least four women.
Not only did he pop up on the police's radar because of his criminal record, but also because of the grape-flavored chewing gum found on Candy's body. Hugh Morse was a huge gum chewer who preferred one particular flavor, grape, and one type of gum. The police found the same flavor and same brand of gum on Candy's clothing when they discovered her body.
So Spokane detectives thought that Morse was their guy. He's a convicted serial killer, and he is known to chew the same type of gum, same flavor, that great flavor that was found at the crime scene. By the time they identified him as a suspect, he was already serving time in prison for the murder of at least four people.
When detectives questioned him about his possible involvement in Candy's murder, no shocker, he denied it. He said he had nothing to do with it and he had never met the girl before.
And with only gum possibly linking him to the crime scene, Spokane detectives didn't have any real evidence against him. So they let Morse go. Well, technically not go because he was already serving time in prison, but there was nothing they could do about him involving Candy's case. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash tails to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash tails. What felt like an open and shut case was turning into something entirely different. Months turned into years, and detectives were still no closer to making an arrest. But then, Alfred Graves came along.
Several years into the investigation, detectives found out that 50-year-old Alfred Graves killed himself the same day Candy's body was found. Graves, who lived in the same neighborhood as Candy, had been accused of inappropriately touching women over the years. He kept a collection of newspaper clippings about rapes of women and children inside his bedroom. He also had bits of rope and bobby pins inside his truck.
But because he had committed suicide on the day Candy's body was discovered, the police couldn't interview him. Then there was 49-year-old James Howard Barnett. For a brief moment, the police considered him as a possible suspect. Like Graves, he also committed suicide one year after Candy's murder in 1960. He killed himself after being arrested for alleged sex abuse of a minor.
His own wife told investigators that she believed he could have killed Candy. But once again, detectives were at a dead end. Because their suspect was dead, he also committed suicide. And without any forensic evidence linking him to Candy's murder, they essentially had nothing. Years eventually turned to decades in the investigation. The 60s came and went. So did the 70s and 80s.
As the decades passed, the case was handed down from retiring investigators to the new generation of police officers. The retiring investigators made sure that the rookies knew about Candy's case, and they told them, do not give up on this one. Although it had been decades since her murder, the community of Spokane deserved to find out who was responsible.
They needed to solve what many called the Mount Everest of cold cases. Back in the 1950s, forensic science was around, but it was nowhere where it is today. In 1950, the American Academy of Forensic Science was officially formed in Chicago, Illinois. That same year, they published their first publication of the Journal of Forensic Science.
Four years later in 1954, the first breathalyzer to be used for field sobriety tests was invented by the Indiana State Police Department captain. Then, there were advancements in DNA testing. In 1958, we discovered the O blood type. In 1959, one year later, we identified DNA sequences.
But the DNA testing available to investigators back in 1959 was limited. And when I say limited, I mean non-existent. All investigators could do back in 1959 was collect evidence. In this case, it was Candy's clothes, store them, and then hope that years later they could test the evidence for DNA.
So although investigators knew about DNA back in the 1950s, they wouldn't use it to solve criminal cases until decades later. In 2018, the investigation approached the 60th anniversary of Candy's death. It had been over six decades since someone kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and killed her.
By then, both of her parents were dead, her dad committed suicide four years after her death, and her mom passed away in 2006. So both of her parents passed away not knowing who killed their daughter.
Candy's relatives, who were still alive, remained hopeful that someday they would see the case be resolved. Her cousin, Penny Metchler, who was only a teenager at the time of her cousin's murder, told KHQ news station, "...the shock goes so deep that you can only start to deal with it in bits and pieces. She was very, very pretty and so nice."
By 2021, the case reached its 62nd anniversary. Spokane Police Department investigators working with the Washington State Police learned about state-of-the-art DNA testing that was happening in a Texas crime lab. The testing is called genetic genealogy.
It simply involves taking a DNA sample and entering it into a genetic database. Then, investigators can look for a DNA match or possibly find relatives from that DNA profile.
This testing simply involves taking a DNA sample and then comparing it to other samples already uploaded to these databases, including ones like 23andMe, GEDmatch, all of the ones that you hear commercials about.
Now, I don't think everyone knows this, but you essentially agree as a consumer, as a customer, when you purchase one of these genetic kits like 23andMe, GEDmatch, you are agreeing to have your DNA profile uploaded to a database when you buy one of these genetic testing kits. You're purchasing the kit, you're agreeing to have your DNA stored in a database, and
And this database can be accessed by law enforcement when they are investigating certain crimes. So not only are you submitting your DNA to find out a little bit more about your ancestry and where you come from, but you're also submitting your DNA to a genealogy database. Let's say that you buy one of these kits. You maybe get it as a gift. You send in your DNA profile.
You find out a little bit more about your ancestors. And then in five years from now, you find out that you've got a serial killer in your family because investigators were able to link your DNA to a DNA sample collected at a crime scene. Well, let's just hope that doesn't happen to you. So back in Spokane, Washington, investigators read more and more about cold cases being solved through genetic genealogy.
This method really started to take off when police departments around the country heard about how the state of California caught the Golden State Killer through genetic genealogy. California investigators had his DNA from multiple crime scenes over the decades, but they never had a match until they ran the DNA profile in a genetic database and found relatives.
So when they had that hit, they created a family tree to generate a list of possible suspects. And then bingo, the Golden State Killer, a.k.a. Joseph James D'Angelo. So investigators in Washington wondered if they could do the same thing with their Candy Rogers case.
So Spokane investigators pulled out all of the evidence collected at the crime scene. Again, this is over six decades later. The evidence that was collected was primarily Candy's clothes. So they took dozens of samples from all of her clothes, hoping to find DNA in at least a few of these samples. Although it had been over 60 years ago,
they still had a chance at finding DNA somewhere on them. One particular piece of clothing the police were interested in was Candy's underwear. Because her killer sexually assaulted her, there was a really good chance that he left behind a DNA profile, probably through semen. So investigators swabbed the inside of the underwear and sent it to the forensic lab for testing.
And they got a hit, a full DNA profile belonging to an unidentified male. Once they had a DNA profile, they sent it over to the Texas Crime Lab specializing in genetic genealogy. They uploaded the sample into several genetic databases. Now, the match didn't have to be the suspect. They didn't have to find the suspect's profile in these databases.
If investigators could at least find one relative, a cousin, an aunt, a brother, a sister, anyone, they would be headed in the right direction. If they just found a relative of Candy's killer, they could create a family tree and then using this family tree, they could narrow down their search from there.
The Texas Crime Lab uploaded the DNA profile to a genetic database. And when they did, they got a hit. It wasn't an exact match, but investigators identified three brothers, all of whom could be Candy's killer. After conducting an extensive background check into all three brothers, investigators learned that all three were dead.
Remember, this testing took place in 2021, over 60 years after Candy's murder. So when investigators decided to try genetic genealogy to find her killer, they knew that it was possible that their suspect wouldn't be alive anymore. So from the three brothers, they narrowed down their list to find out which of the brothers was Candy's killer.
After looking into all three of them, as well as their connections to Candy at the time of the murder, they ruled out two of them. Two of the brothers were nowhere near Spokane, Washington at the time, but not the third brother, John Rain Hoff. Detectives tracked down Hoff's daughter, Kathy.
They told her right away that they needed to find out if her father was connected to a six-decade-old cold case murder. And as soon as they spoke to her, she dropped everything and cooperated. She provided the police a sample of her DNA to compare to her father's as well as the semen sample collected from the crime scene.
The testing showed that she was 2.9 million times more likely than anyone else in the world to be related to Candy's killer. Authorities obtained a search warrant to exhume John Huff's body to test his DNA against the DNA pulled from the crime scene. In an ironic twist, Huff was buried at the same cemetery as Candy.
And the results spoke for themselves. The results showed a match between John Huff and the semen sample from Candy's underwear with a probability threshold indicating it was 25 quintillion times more likely the sample came from Huff than anyone else.
In case you're wondering just how big 25 Cantillion is, that is 18 zeros. So without a doubt, without question, John Huff left his semen on Candy's underwear over six decades earlier. After learning that her father was Candy's killer, his daughter Kathy spoke out.
Kathy, who was only nine years old at the time, told reporters that finding out that her father was Candy's killer was devastating. She said in a police report, quote, It's just really sad to find out that someone, not even just your dad, but someone in your family could do something like that. End quote.
She explained that she and her siblings believed that he committed suicide because of his depression. But now they know that he may have committed suicide because of what he did to Candy. So who is John Hoff?
According to Spokane detectives, Hoff was 20 years old at the time of the murder. He lived a little over one mile away from Candy's mom's house. He was a Spokane, Washington native who grew up there until he turned 17 years old and joined the Army. He was stationed at a missile site surrounding Fairchild Air Base in the Army.
It's unclear exactly how Hoff knew Candy Rogers or why he selected her as his victim. The only connection the police made was that Hoff's younger 10-year-old stepsister was Candy's big sister in the Campfire Girls. He may have seen her around the neighborhood since he only lived about a mile away.
In 1961, two years after Candy's murder, the army kicked him out after discovering that he'd been arrested for a sexual assault. A woman accused Hoff of kidnapping her, taking her clothes off, and then using her clothes to bind and choke her before running off. Fortunately, the unidentified woman survived the awful attack and then was later on able to identify Hoff.
Now, if this sounds familiar, what happened to this woman? Well, that's because it is familiar. Candy Rogers was also found bound with her own clothes before Hoff sexually assaulted and then killed her. So it seems like John Hoff has a consistent M.O. with his victims.
After the police arrested Hoff for the sexual assault in 1961, the army kicked him out and he was sentenced to six months in jail. Now, I know, not a very long sentence for someone convicted of kidnapping and tying a woman up, but six months is all he got.
Then, after getting out of jail for serving six months for this assault, he worked as a door-to-door salesman in a lumberyard until he committed suicide in 1970. He was 30 years old. Once detectives finally identified Candy's killer through DNA, the next question became, why?
Why did John Hoff kidnap Candy and murder her while out selling Candy? The short answer is, we have no idea. By the time they identified Hoff, it had been over 60 years. We don't know if Hoff knew Candy because of their connection to the Campfire Girls. We don't know if this was simply a crime of opportunity.
Maybe he simply saw a young girl walking by herself and decided to kidnap her, sexually assault her, and then ultimately murder her. Or maybe he did know her. He could have watched her for a few weeks, maybe even months, until he finally got his opportunity to get her. The details surrounding how and surrounding why he kidnapped and murdered her remains a mystery.
The only person who knows the answer to these questions is John Hoff himself. And he took those answers to the grave. In a November 2021 press conference, Spokane detectives officially announced that they had solved Candy's murder through genetic genealogy. Her killer was identified as John Hoff.
At the press conference, Spokane's sergeant, Zach Stormant, told reporters, quote, We are very fortunate that the detectives that came before us and everyone that handled that evidence did a good job preserving it so that we could be where we are today, end quote. When reporters asked him how many hours his department had invested in Candy's case over the years,
His response was this, quote, this isn't measured in hours. This is measured in careers, end quote. A relative of Candy, identified only as Cheryl, also spoke at the press conference. She told reporters, quote, Candy was an only child. Her mom was an only child.
And so that's really sad that they passed away not knowing who had taken their granddaughter and daughter's life. I hope everybody's at peace now, end quote. When John Huff's body was returned to his family following the DNA testing, they decided to bury him in a different cemetery. He would no longer be laid to rest at the same cemetery as Little Candy.
A case once known as the Mount Everest of cold cases was finally solved with the help of genetic genealogy. And Candy Rogers' case is only the beginning. Genetic genealogy is being used right now, being used today, across the country to solve the coldest of cold cases.
So don't be shocked when you check your ancestry and the police show up on your doorstep. Surprise, you're related to a killer. To share your thoughts on the Candy Rogers story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com forward slash forensic tales.
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