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Mary London

2022/7/18
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Mary London, a 17-year-old high school student, disappeared after getting off a city bus in downtown Sacramento. Her body was found the next day, brutally murdered, marking the beginning of a cold case that would remain unsolved for decades.

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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit 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. Sacramento is California's capital, but it's not the California you may think of. Sacramento is rural, hot, and sometimes can be dangerous.

In 1981, 17-year-old Mary London got on a city bus headed towards downtown Sacramento. She had plans to meet up with a friend in the city, but after Mary London stepped off that city bus, she was never seen again. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 133, The Murder of Mary London. ♪♪

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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Mary London was your typical high school student. Her morning routine on school days was clockwork. Every day, Mary London would get up for school. First, she packed her backpack with her books and binders. Then she headed out the front door to hop on the school bus. After school, she hopped back on the school bus and went home. Typical.

But on January 14, 1981, in Sacramento, California, 17-year-old Mary ran out of school at 3.30 p.m. Then she hopped on the school bus. But Mary didn't follow her usual routine. Instead of heading straight home like she did every day, she stopped at a friend's house. But when Mary arrived, she didn't stay long. She told her friend that she had plans to meet up with another friend in downtown Sacramento.

She didn't specify which friend. She simply said she was planning to see someone. She left her friend's house and got on the city bus headed towards downtown Sacramento. She got off the bus at 8th and K Street. Once she got off the city bus, 17-year-old Mary London disappeared.

The following day, January 15, 1981, shortly after 8 a.m., a utility worker was working on a remote stretch of San Juan Road in North Sacramento. During work, he spotted something on the road that caught his attention, so he decided to see what it was. But when he got closer, he found the naked body of a young teenage girl.

The utility worker immediately called the Sacramento Police Department. Within minutes, police officers showed up on San Juan Road. On the ground, police discovered a young teenage girl who had been brutally stabbed to death and her body dumped alongside the road. The girl was found completely naked except for one lone sock.

and her body was covered in stab wounds. Immediately, officers started figuring out who this teenage girl was. They noticed that the sock she wore had a small logo. It was a picture of Sacramento High School's mascot, the Sac High Dragon.

Officers went to Sacramento High School to find if any of the students were missing. A student was missing. It was a 17-year-old 10th grader, Mary London. Her foster parents had reported her missing the day before her body was discovered. Mary's life was challenging from when she was born up until she was murdered. She was born with a developmental disability and grew up in an abusive household.

Growing up, Mary's father physically and emotionally abused her mom. Then when Mary was only a small child, her mom tragically died in a car accident. After the car accident, Mary's father wanted nothing to do with Mary or her siblings. And as soon as her mom died, he left. After Mary's father left, there was no other option besides putting Mary and her siblings into foster care.

Once they entered the system, they bounced around from one foster home to the next. When Mary was a teenager, she was placed with foster parents who lived in Sacramento, California. In the early 1980s, Sacramento, California was a rural place to live in Northern California. Although it's the state's capital, it was a rural place. In fact, to this day, parts of Sacramento are still considered that way.

After the police identified Mary's body along San Juan Road, they had to do one of the hardest things that police officers do. They had to tell Mary's foster parents she was dead.

After officers told Mary's family what happened, they got to work collecting evidence. Investigators knew they needed to comb the area for potential evidence. They looked for fingerprints, blood, tire tracks on the dirt road. They searched for anything they could to help point them in the direction of Mary's killer. But sadly, they didn't find much. Her killer was careful not to leave anything behind.

Not long into the search, officers found the second pair of Mary's shoes. They found it on the ground not too far up the road from where her body was. Besides the second shoe, they also recovered a drapery cord found wrapped around her body. It seemed to the investigators that the cord was used to tie Mary up and drag her to that empty spot on the road, or the cord was used to subdue her.

The location where Mary's body was found told investigators a lot about her killer. This particular spot was a desolate part of San Juan Road. There were no businesses around, no houses. Besides the main road itself, there wasn't anything out there. It was especially remote. This detail told investigators that Mary's killer might be familiar with the area.

He knew that when he took Mary out there, no one would see them. No one would be able to hear her scream. And Sacramento police detectives believed that that's why he picked that particular spot. If Mary's killer was familiar with this part of northern Sacramento, that meant that he was likely from Sacramento.

When word about Mary's murder spread around Sacramento, people were terrified that a killer was among them. They worried if a serial killer was out there targeting teenage high school girls. First, it was Mary London, but could there be more victims? Could more Sacramento teenage girls be murdered in such a cold and callous way? Or was Mary killed by someone she knew?

At the same time investigators searched the crime scene for evidence, Mary's body was taken for an autopsy. The autopsy revealed that she had been stabbed three times to the chest. There were also signs that she'd been strangled and beaten with some type of weapon, maybe with the handle of the knife used to stab her.

The pathologist performed a basic sexual assault forensic exam on Mary's body. Because her body was found naked, investigators were concerned that her killer had also sexually assaulted her. During this sexual assault forensic exam, doctors swabbed Mary's body and clothing, searching for critical forensic evidence, including semen or other bodily fluids left behind by the perpetrator.

But those tests turned up empty. They didn't find any DNA or semen anywhere on Mary's body or her clothing. Since they didn't find anything, the forensic pathologist noted in the official autopsy report that no biological evidence from their suspect was discovered. Mary's funeral was held a few days after her autopsy. The day of her funeral was an extremely emotional day for the community.

hundreds of people showed up at the cemetery. It wasn't only Mary's family who showed up. Local Sacramento residents who didn't even know her came. The people of Sacramento were extremely disturbed about what happened to her. They wondered if there could be other victims, and they wondered if Mary's killer was among them. While Mary's funeral occurred, Sacramento detectives were busy hunting for their killer.

From the beginning, they had tremendous pressure placed on them to solve this case. Anytime you have a young victim murdered in such a brutal way, the public wants answers. They want the police to do their job and help find the killer so there won't be any more victims. So every day the police don't find a suspect, the more pressure the public places on them.

Early in the investigation, Sacramento detectives spoke with Mary's classmates at Sacramento High School. They wanted to speak with everyone who talked to or saw Mary within the last 24 hours of her life. Officers spoke with some of Mary's teachers to find out if they knew anything. Sacramento detectives knew this case was going to be difficult. They didn't think they had any forensic or physical evidence in the case.

So if they were going to find out who did this, they needed to find a potential witness. And the only way they could find a potential witness was to speak with everyone in Mary's life. They weren't even sure if Mary knew her killer or if this was solely a random attack. The interviews with Mary's classmates and teachers didn't turn up any solid leads. Police only found a few people with information about the day Mary was killed.

One of her friends said that Mary came over after school that day. When she was there, Mary said that she was planning to meet up with a friend in downtown Sacramento. But Mary never told her friend who this individual was, who she was planning to go see. And then another witness said that they saw Mary get off the city bus at 8th and K Street in downtown. But they didn't know which direction she went once she got off the bus.

and the witness didn't remember seeing anyone with Mary. After the police spoke with these two witnesses, they didn't receive any other leads. The area where Mary's body was dumped was so desolate that the police couldn't find any witnesses in the area who either heard or saw anything on the afternoon she was killed. There was also no clues as to whether Mary knew her killer or not.

The police couldn't find any enemies or identify anyone in her life who might want to do this. Without any promising leads, weeks turned to months in the investigation. Months then turned to years. And tragically, when the tips dried up completely, Mary London's murder became a cold 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. Although Mary's case turned cold, her family and the Sacramento community couldn't forget about what happened to her. For years, her murder haunted people.

They couldn't wrap their heads around how someone could do this to a young girl, a 17-year-old 10th grader in high school, who had her entire life ahead of her. For months after Mary's murder, people also worried there might be more victims. If someone was capable of doing this to Mary London, what was stopping them from doing this to someone else's daughter?

Years continued to pass, and Mary's case remained unsolved. It wasn't until a persistent district attorney heard about the case. Sacramento County's District Attorney, Ann Marie Schubert. Ann Marie Schubert has spent over 30 years in law enforcement. Throughout her career as a prosecutor, she's worked on homicide cases and cases involving kids and sex crimes.

As a prosecutor specializing in violent crimes, she's been responsible for putting some of the most dangerous criminals behind bars, including murderers, rapists, and child molesters. In 2002, Sacramento was overflowing with unsolved cold cases, just like Mary London. The city had a backlog of decades-old cases that still weren't solved.

So District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert formed the city's first cold case unit to solve some of these open cases, and she served as the unit's first prosecutor.

The unit started by searching through the county's cold cases to find cases involving female victims. The hope was that many of these female cases involved a sexual assault, and if they involved a sexual assault, there was a real chance of discovering forensic evidence or other types of DNA evidence. Over the years, tremendous advancements have been made in collecting and testing forensic evidence from rape kits.

New technology meant that old evidence could be retested. One of the case files they came across was Mary London's. Her file was only one of over a dozen cold cases in the city. When Schubert and her unit read through Mary's case file, they were surprised that there was no mention of forensic evidence in the report.

If a 17-year-old girl is raped and murdered, you'd expect the initial officers to find some type of physical evidence. But they got their answer when they read through Mary's autopsy report. The pathologist reported that no semen was found during her sexual assault forensic examination. And because they didn't find any semen or biological evidence, they didn't believe that Mary had been sexually assaulted.

After reading all of the other details from the investigation, Schubert went back to Sacramento police officers and told them what she thought about Mary's case. She said to them and her team that everything she read in the case pointed towards a sexual assault.

Even though the pathologist didn't find any evidence of that type of an assault, other things in her case file suggested that her killer had also assaulted her, like discovering Mary's body naked and finding the cord wrapped around her body. Sacramento police detectives agreed with Schubert. They also thought there was a real possibility she'd been raped.

But without any forensic evidence in the case, there wasn't anything Schubert and her unit could retest. Even if a sexual assault happened, there wasn't any evidence. Schubert and her unit decided to move on. If there wasn't any biological evidence from Mary's case, there wasn't anything that could be retested. And besides Mary London's case, the county had hundreds of other cases to investigate.

For the next 12 months, Ann Schubert and her cold case unit worked on a dozen other cases. They focused their attention and resources on those cold cases with forensic evidence and had evidence that could be retested with new technology.

But as they worked through different cases and retested the evidence, the unit noticed a pattern. Many of the cases they worked on came from the 1970s and 1980s, around the same time as Mary's murder. And they found that some of the methods and tests used by investigators and pathologists back in those days were extremely outdated, especially regarding cases involving sexual assaults.

Before the late 1970s, police and pathologists didn't have many tools to investigate sexual assaults. It wasn't until the 1970s that rape and other forms of sexual assault were widely discussed. It took the 1970s women's movement to get the discussion of sexual assault on the table in the U.S.,

But even when it was finally being talked about openly, police departments didn't have the tools or resources to investigate these crimes properly. Police departments didn't have any standardized protocols for correctly collecting biological evidence. They also didn't have reliable testing methods for evidence like semen. It wasn't until September 1978 that the first rape kit was used.

The first rape kits were the first real attempt at creating standardized protocols for cases involving sexual assault. In September 1978, 26 Cook County, Chicago hospital emergency rooms were the first to implement rape kits. The hope was that these kits would help standardize the collection of trace evidence when treating rape victims.

Initially, these kits were simply cardboard boxes containing swabs, slides, a small comb, and instructions. But even though they were basic, they were the first big step in helping law enforcement solve sexual crimes. Less than two years after Chicago introduced their rape kits, over 215 hospitals across Illinois followed their lead.

By 1982, other states, including New York, started using rape kits. And by the mid-1980s, rape kits were being included in most criminal investigations involving sexual assaults. Over the years, they went from a simple cardboard box containing a few swabs to a complete investigative tool that is now standard in sex crimes.

Unfortunately, this wasn't the case for Mary London. In 1981, rape kits and collecting evidence from possible assaults were just forming. So when they examined Mary's body for biological evidence, they didn't find anything. That didn't mean the evidence wasn't there. It just meant that the appropriate tests and methods to collect the evidence just simply didn't exist.

Sacramento DA Ann Schubert and her cold case unit decided to look at Mary's case again. Over the last 12 months, they worked on very similar cases where semen wasn't found initially. But when they retested the evidence using new technology, they discovered new biological evidence. In Mary's case, they sent all of the remaining evidence to be retested, including Mary's clothes.

Fortunately for Schubert and her team, much of the evidence from Mary's case was still stored in evidence. So when the evidence was retested, they found something. They found a semen sample on Mary's clothes. By 2005, new technology found a semen stain containing DNA on Mary's clothes.

The next step was to take the semen sample and extract a DNA profile. Once they had the profile, they took it and ran it through CODIS, our national DNA database. This was the closest that they had been to finding Mary's killer in over two decades. After weeks of waiting for the results, they were disappointed with the news.

Although they finally had a DNA profile to work with, the sample didn't match any known offender in the database. Mary London's killer wasn't in CODIS. CODIS began as a pilot project in the U.S. in 1990, nine years after Mary's murder. At first, 14 states and local laboratories participated in the pilot project.

By 1994, Congress passed the DNA Identification Act that authorized the FBI to create a national DNA database of convicted offenders. The FBI was also authorized to create a separate database for missing persons and forensic samples collected from crime scenes.

Today, all 50 states, including the District of Columbia, federal law enforcement agencies, the Army, and Puerto Rico all participate in sharing DNA profiles through CODIS.

And as of September 2020, our national database contains more than 14 million offender profiles, more than 4 million arrest profiles, and more than 1 million forensic profiles. But CODIS isn't perfect. It doesn't contain every single person's DNA. Even arrested criminals aren't necessarily required to submit their DNA to the database in every instance.

CODIS is only good as the profiles it holds. If the database doesn't have an individual's profile, it's no help to the investigation. So when investigators didn't get a hit in 2005 for Mary's killer, Mary's case once again turned cold.

Although they finally had DNA evidence in the case, they had no suspect. And without any other leads coming in, the investigation was stalled. Until years later, in 2016. In 2016, Sacramento investigators went back to square one. The discovery of the unknown DNA was a huge step forward in the case, and investigators were determined.

Although it had been over three decades since the murder, they never stopped believing that this case could eventually be solved. Shortly after Mary's murder, a source told the police that they should look into a guy named Daryl. The source told the police that they heard Mary was supposed to meet a guy named Daryl in downtown Sacramento the day she went missing.

And if the source was correct, that meant Daryl was likely one of the last people to see Mary alive. But who was this Daryl guy? Mary's foster mom had come forward and told the police that she thought Mary had a boyfriend at the time of her murder. But she said she didn't know his name.

Some of Mary's siblings also told investigators that they thought she was dating someone. Initially, the police suspected that Daryl might be the name of Mary's boyfriend. But when they investigated this tip, they didn't find anyone in Mary's life named Daryl. Over the years, investigators looked into possible suspects named Daryl, but nothing solid turned up.

To generate new information, the Sacramento Police Department issued a media advisory to the public on January 15, 2016. The day of the media advisory was significant because January 15, 2016 marked the 35th anniversary of the case.

In the news release, the police provided the public with the basic details of the investigation and asked for help in identifying Daryl. Part of the release read, quote, Detectives are asking for the community's help in identifying a friend of the victim by the name Daryl. He is described as a male black adult who would now be approximately 57 to 58 years old.

Daryl is not a suspect, however detectives would like to speak to him, end quote. It went on to say, quote, over the years, investigators have revisited this case in an attempt to identify the suspect involved in Mary's death. Investigating detectives believe there are people in the community that have information about this crime and encourage them to come forward, end quote.

It wrapped up by providing tip lines that people could call in and even offered a reward for any useful new information. But the media release didn't work. Investigators still had no idea who Daryl was or if he was even connected to Mary's murder at all.

After 35 years of searching for Mary's killer, Sacramento detectives turned to newer technology. They turned to forensic genetic genealogy. In recent years, forensic genetic genealogy has helped law enforcement agencies across the country solve old cold cases.

It works by collecting unknown DNA from crime scenes and using that profile to identify close genetic DNA profiles or matches. When detectives find unknown DNA at a crime scene, the first thing they'll do is run the DNA through CODIS or another DNA database. But when they don't get a hit from any of the databases, they start turning to forensic genetic genealogy.

If detectives have unknown DNA, they can use genealogy to help locate relatives or family members of the person they're searching for. Once they find a relative or two, investigators can create a family tree and eventually narrow down their suspect list, ultimately leading the police to their suspect.

By 2018, investigators in Sacramento were well aware of the power of forensic genetic genealogy. Detectives used it to help identify and arrest the Golden State Killer, a serial killer who eluded Sacramento police for decades and who was finally caught by using forensic genetic genealogy.

Now investigators wondered if the same technology used to catch the Golden State Killer could be used to help identify Mary's killer. They had unknown DNA from the tests they conducted in the early 2000s. So now they hoped genealogy could track down a relative of the perpetrator.

This required forensic scientists, the Sacramento Police Department, and a genealogist to work together with one goal in mind, to identify the unknown DNA collected at the scene. Ideally, you track down the unknown person's mother or father. As children, our DNA comes from our parents.

So if scientists have DNA belonging to either parent, mom, or dad, that will significantly narrow down their search. But scientists don't have the parents' DNA in cases like Mary's. In most cases, they eventually find DNA belonging to a distant relative, maybe a third or a fourth cousin, not the parents.

This makes it much harder and requires a lot more time and money to narrow the list to the actual suspect. With a distant relative, you must create an extended family tree to finally find the person you're looking for. And family trees aren't easy to create.

You've got families with different last names. You've got families who are divorced or separated. Family trees and ancestry are much more complicated than most people think, making forensic genetic genealogists' jobs that much harder. Sacramento investigators decided to send the remaining DNA sample in Mary's case to a private lab specializing in genetic genealogy.

They asked the lab not only to analyze the sample, but also to upload it to various genealogy databases like Ancestry.com and 23andMe. They got a few hits when the sample was uploaded into the database. They found a few possible relatives of Mary's killer.

But when the genealogist tried building a possible suspect list from those hits, it didn't lead them anywhere. They couldn't get close enough to their actual suspect, who was either living in or from Sacramento at the time of Mary's murder. Now, for the third time in over three decades, Mary's case was on the brink of turning cold yet again.

To prevent the case from going cold, Sacramento police detectives again turned to the public for help. Around the Sacramento area, local news stations did news segments about Mary's story. The police hoped the attention would generate fresh tips, but it did so much more.

Most people who watched the news had never heard about Mary London's case. It had been over 30 years since her murder, and the police assumed that all of Mary's family had passed away. Investigators knew both her mom and dad were dead, and because she was in foster care when she was murdered, the police weren't aware of any other living relatives.

One night while watching TV, one of Mary's cousins heard a news segment about the case. Then, sitting on her living room couch, she saw her cousin Mary's face on the television screen.

She immediately picked up the phone and told Sacramento detectives that she was related to Mary London. She told them that she had no idea that the case had been reopened. She assumed they had long forgotten about Mary and had given up trying to find her killer. She told detectives that her mom was Mary's mother's sister. When the police found out Mary still had living relatives, they were shocked.

For years, they had no idea she had any living relatives. They knew her parents were dead, but other than that, they never knew much about Mary's family. There wasn't anything listed in the police reports about the family. So the police assumed she didn't have any. Now, over three decades later, investigators learned about Mary's entire family.

Discovering that Mary still had family was a huge morale boost for the Sacramento Police Department and the Sacramento District Attorney. And within a few weeks of discovering relatives, the police got a massive break. By early 2020, Sacramento investigators received a tip from the scientist digging through genetic databases looking for relatives of Mary's killer.

After hundreds of hours of searching, the scientists informed the detectives that they had gotten a hit. They found someone's DNA that closely matched the DNA collected from the crime scene. His name? Vernon Parker. Finally, Sacramento investigators had a name. Vernon Parker. Detectives quickly discovered that Vernon Parker was no stranger to law enforcement.

At the time of Mary's murder, he'd been arrested by Sacramento police officers at least eight separate times. Since the dates of births listed were different on the police reports, it wasn't initially clear if all the reports belonged to Vernon Parker. But once detectives dug into each incident, they discovered that the police had arrested Parker at least eight times for various crimes the same year Mary was killed.

They also found that most of the crimes happened in downtown Sacramento, near where Mary was last seen. Sacramento detectives also find something else out about Vernon Parker. They learned he was known to be involved in an illegal sex trafficking ring. He had a lot of ties to prostitution throughout the greater Sacramento area.

As soon as investigators had a name, they wanted to speak with Parker. But tracking him down was yet another challenge. After searching for Parker for weeks, detectives made a heartbreaking discovery. After all these years of searching, they would never be able to speak with Vernon Parker face-to-face. Parker was killed just one year after Mary London's murder.

The similarities between Vernon Parker's and Mary's cases were uncanny. Both Vernon Parker and Mary London were killed in very similar ways. They both had been brutally stabbed to death, and they were both found murdered in downtown Sacramento. Vernon Parker was discovered dead only one block from where Mary was last seen getting off that city bus.

Finding out that Vernon Parker was dead was devastating to investigators. To wait that long to finally get a name, but not have the opportunity to sit down and speak with him, was gut-wrenching. But investigators had come too far and worked too hard to let this one get away. To prove Vernon Parker was Mary's killer, the police needed to get his DNA. And since he was dead, doing that would prove challenging.

If Vernon Parker was still alive, the police could simply go to a judge and ask for a warrant to get a DNA sample. They would then send the sample to the crime lab and have it compared to the semen collected in Mary's case. If the samples match, the police would finally have their guy. But because Parker was dead, investigators had to get creative to get a DNA sample.

Detectives turned to the Sacramento County's coroner's office. They hoped the coroner's office still had Parker's DNA from his autopsy. Since Parker was murdered, there was a good chance they still had his DNA. And they were right.

Even after three decades, the office still had a small sample of Parker's DNA. It was a small number of tissue samples they collected during his autopsy. The tissue samples were submitted to the crime lab for comparison. Just like if Parker was still alive, the lab compared the samples to the semen collected in Mary's case.

And when they compared the samples, they matched. Without a doubt, Vernon Parker's DNA matched the DNA collected in Mary London's case. After over three decades, Sacramento detectives picked up the phone and notified Mary's surviving members that they had finally discovered who killed Mary all those years earlier.

The news came as a complete shock to Mary's family, who had thought for so long that they would never find out who was responsible. Detectives informed the family that the semen collected from the crime scene perfectly matched Vernon Parker. But they also said that although they had a name, getting justice was a different story. Parker was killed less than a year after he murdered Mary.

Since Vernon Parker is dead, the police and Mary's family can only speculate about what might have happened that day in January 1981. However, here is what they think happened. Mary's foster mom and siblings always said how friendly and nice Mary was. She was the type of girl who quickly made friends, and she got along with everyone she met. Since Mary was so friendly and nice, she might have trusted someone evil.

The police theorize that she went to meet with someone she knew on the day she was killed. They believe that Mary and Vernon Parker may have known each other and had met before. Vernon Parker likely convinced Mary to meet up with him in downtown Sacramento after school that day. The police believe it's too much of a coincidence that where Mary was last seen alive is the same neighborhood where Vernon Parker was known to hang out.

Once they met up, investigators believe that Parker lured Mary into his car. They think he drove her out to that road and told her that she belonged to him. Because of his strong ties to sex trafficking, the police fear that Vernon Parker abducted Mary to groom her for prostitution.

But once they got out there on the road where her body was discovered, the police believe Mary fought back. She didn't want to go with Parker and tried getting away. Then Parker ditched his original plan and sexually assaulted her. After he assaulted her, he stabbed her to death, left her body on the side of the road, and then drove off.

After 36 years, Sacramento police detectives might not know exactly why Vernon Parker killed Mary London. They can only speculate about the motive. But after three long decades, they know this. Vernon Parker murdered Mary London in January 1981.

Forensic genetic genealogy proved that his semen was found at the crime scene. Yet for years, investigators didn't know there was any forensic evidence in the investigation.

It took the persistence of prosecutors and detectives to finally retest several pieces of evidence in the case that eventually revealed DNA. Once they got the DNA, they poured hundreds of investigative hours into genetic genealogy websites looking for a match. Finally, their persistence paid off when they got a hit. Although Vernon Parker can't be held accountable for his crimes,

Police hope this conclusion can help innocent 17-year-old Mary London rest in peace a little bit easier. We can all be thankful that a new tool, forensic genetic genealogy, caught her killer and will undoubtedly catch more killers in the future. To share your thoughts on Mary London's story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook.

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Thank you so much for joining me this week. Please join me next week. We'll have a brand new case and a brand new story to talk about. Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.

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