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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, check us out at patreon.com slash Forensic Tales. 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. On June 1st, 1989, 14-year-old Stephanie woke up in Las Vegas, Nevada. Stephanie walked to school like she always did.
She was running a few minutes behind, so she decided to take a shortcut. A snap decision that would change her life forever. In seconds, her innocence was taken. In minutes, her life was taken. Her young dreams stolen. And behind her, not leaving a trace. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 126, The Stephanie Isaacson Story. ♪
Thank you.
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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On June 1st, 1989, 14-year-old Stephanie Isaacson woke up early inside her dad's Las Vegas, Nevada apartment located on Nellis Boulevard and Stewart Avenue. It was a typical school day morning for Stephanie. She woke up early to the sound of her alarm clock. She got dressed. She packed her school bag with the books and binders she needed for the day.
Once she was dressed and ready, she left the house around 6.30 a.m. to walk down to El Dorado High School. Her morning routine was clockwork. The walk to school was relatively short, but to save a little bit of time that morning, Stephanie would usually take a shortcut through a vacant sandlot off Stewart Avenue in Lynn Lane.
This shortcut allowed Stephanie to get to school much earlier so she wouldn't be late for her first class. At the time Stephanie walked to school, hundreds of other students arrived at El Dorado High School. Some students got dropped off by their parents, while others, just like Stephanie, walked to school.
After the chaos of school dropout finished, students were seated in their classrooms ready to start their day, and teachers began their lessons. When the school bell rang, signaling the end of the school day, the same students who arrived on campus that morning headed home for the day. Some of the students headed off to practice or another after-school program, but Stephanie Isaacson wasn't one of them.
On June 1st, 1989, Stephanie didn't go straight home after school. So Stephanie's father, John Isaacson, was surprised that his daughter wasn't home yet. He was worried because this was out of character for Stephanie. She always came home straight from school. And if she didn't always come straight home, she would always pick up the phone and call her dad. She wasn't the type of kid to just run off and not let him know where she was.
John Isaacson worked nights as a staff sergeant at Nellis Air Force, so he didn't see her that morning. But if Stephanie planned on staying home, she would have called and told him that. John waited around the house for another 30 minutes, thinking that Stephanie would show up any minute. Maybe she got caught talking to a friend or maybe a teacher. But as the minutes passed by, Stephanie never showed up.
John decided it was time to call the school to find out if Stephanie was still there. He hoped that someone at the school could tell him where she was or at the very least tell him what time she left class that day. But when he finally got someone on the phone, the school administrators were surprised to hear from him.
They said that Stephanie was absent that day, and they assumed that he knew why. But unfortunately, she never showed up to class that morning. Earlier that morning, Stephanie's choir teacher noticed she was missing. Typically, Stephanie spent the lunch hour in her classroom with a couple of her friends. The group called themselves the Little Team.
But when lunchtime came around, Stephanie never showed up to her classroom. After hanging up with the school, John immediately called around to Stephanie's friends to see if anyone knew where she was or if Stephanie was with them. But they all said the same thing. They hadn't seen Stephanie all day. She wasn't at school and they hadn't heard from her.
So they assumed the same thing that the school did, that she was back home sick that day. After discovering that none of Stephanie's friends knew where she was, John's next phone call was to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. He told the police officers that his 14-year-old daughter left the house earlier that day to walk to school, but she never made it to class.
He assured them that Stephanie was a good kid and it wasn't like her to ditch school. By early evening, a missing person report was filed and over a dozen police officers searched for any sign of Stephanie. They focused their search on the area around the typical route that she would walk to school.
At the same time the police searched, John and a few of his friends went on horseback to look for her. Again, they focused on the area that Stephanie would sometimes cut through to get to school. A few hours into that initial search, they found her school books and her backpack scattered in a vacant lot around 8.30 p.m. But no sign of Stephanie.
The search for Stephanie continued late into the night. By 11 o'clock p.m., a Las Vegas police canine picked up on Stephanie's ascent. Minutes later, they found her. But they were too late. Stephanie Isaacson was dead. The police found Stephanie's body in a sandlot only 25 yards off the trail she usually took to school.
Someone had dumped her body in a brush area near the residential area of Stewart Avenue and Lynn Lane. Her short life had ended in a way that nobody deserves. She had been sexually assaulted, strangled, and bludgeoned to death. Her black shirt had been pulled up and her denim pants pulled down to her feet.
After she was assaulted and killed, her body was placed underneath an orange piece of carpet and tossed off the side of the road. Stephanie's autopsy showed that she had suffered, quote, significant blunt force trauma injuries and that she had been sexually assaulted, end quote. The pathologist ruled that her cause of death was strangulation.
At the time of her murder, Stephanie and her dad John were only one month away from moving out of Las Vegas. Stephanie and her father John were leaving Las Vegas for Spain for John's next work assignment in only a few weeks. Instead of packing their bags for Spain, John was left planning two memorial services for Stephanie.
The first funeral was held at Palm Mortuary Chapel, and another one was held in her hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska. At the scene, there wasn't much evidence. However, crime scene technicians found a small amount of DNA on her shirt. DNA that likely belonged to her killer. The only problem was that they didn't have the technology to test it properly.
Back in the late 1980s, DNA testing was just emerging as a forensic technique in criminal investigations. Because it was relatively new, not all police departments had the technology or the equipment to be able to test the DNA.
What was noticeably missing were Stephanie's shoes. When the police arrived, her shoes were missing, suggesting to the detectives that whoever killed her might have taken the shoes as some sort of trophy. But besides Stephanie's body, there wasn't much evidence. Her killer was extremely careful not to leave anything behind. News that the police found Stephanie's body devastated her father, John.
Stephanie and her dad always shared an extremely close bond, and they did practically everything together. They liked to ride horses and motorcycles together. They camped together. They hunted. They went boating. They even got their scuba diving certifications together at Lake Mead one summer. Stephanie and John were the textbook definition of a close father-daughter relationship.
Their relationship grew stronger when Stephanie's parents divorced and she chose to live with him in Las Vegas. However, the decision meant that she was leaving behind her five-year-old sister, Joanne, who went to go live with their mom, Sharon Gares. As part of the custody agreement, Stephanie would live with her dad, but would spend Wednesdays, the weekends, and holidays with her sister and mom.
Residents of this part of Las Vegas were stunned when they heard the news about Stephanie's murder. Violent crime wasn't entirely uncommon in Las Vegas, but this type of crime to a child was. Many people worried that there might be a serial killer or a serial rapist on the loose targeting young children.
People were distraught when they found out that someone had attacked Stephanie on her way to school. Stephanie's friends at school also had a hard time dealing with her murder. They wondered if maybe the perpetrator was someone who went to or worked at the school, a concern that some teachers shared.
But the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department didn't think so. In a public statement made by one of their lieutenants, he said, quote, it appears to be a random attack while she was walking to school, end quote. But who was this mystery attacker?
For the first few weeks of investigating Stephanie's killer, the police received hundreds of tips from the public. A tip would come in, detectives would investigate it, then the tip would be cleared. The most promising lead came in from a neighbor who reported that they saw a car parked in the area earlier that morning. But when the officers asked the neighbor what the car looked like, they said they couldn't remember.
Other neighbors in the area told the police that in the months leading up to Stephanie's murder, they noticed an increase in homeless people in the neighborhood. At the time, Stephanie's neighborhood was a relatively underdeveloped part of town, which led many homeless people in the area to set up camp around Stephanie's apartment.
But after the police spoke with many of these homeless people, none of them turned up as possible suspects. Although they received a lot of tips, none of them led to any solid suspects or arrests. Nearly two months into the investigation, the tips dried up. So the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department turned to the FBI for help.
They asked the FBI to help them create a profile of who the killer might be. The hope was that this criminal profile could point them to someone in the local community. Criminal profiling has always been an essential tool for law enforcement in solving crimes.
In this case, a profile can help the police narrow the field by indicating the type of person most likely to commit a murder like this. A profile helps law enforcement focus on potential suspects' specific behavior and personal characteristics. The FBI's profile suggested that Stephanie's killer was likely in his early 20s.
He lived or worked near where Stephanie was killed and where her body was dumped. He was likely a loner whose behavior changed after the killing. He had a low intelligence level and low interpersonal skills.
The FBI criminal profiler also believed that shortly before Stephanie's murder, he would have had some type of conflict with a female in his life, maybe his wife or girlfriend or even his mom. But the FBI's profile of Stephanie's killer didn't seem to help move the investigation along. Their profile could match half of the men living in Las Vegas at the time.
Over the next several months, the police continued to hunt for Stephanie's killer. But the months eventually turned to years, and the trail leading to Stephanie's killer turned cold. Stephanie's family and friends were left wondering who brutally assaulted and killed their little 14-year-old girl for the next 10 years. People worried that Stephanie's killer would never be caught.
But a new light was shed on the case when the Las Vegas Metropolitan Forensics Unit tested the suspect's DNA from the rape kit in 1998. By 1998, huge advancements in DNA testing had been made in forensics.
By the late 1990s, DNA testing had been performed in thousands of criminal cases in the U.S. And despite earlier challenges, DNA test results were now routinely admitted into court as evidence in criminal cases. Forensic units had developed PCR DNA testing. This type of DNA testing only requires a small amount of DNA, typically only a cheek swab.
This new test eliminates the need for blood collection to test DNA. So when the Las Vegas forensics unit tested the DNA in 1998, 10 years after Stephanie's murder, investigators were hopeful that they could identify a suspect with their new DNA technology. But the test didn't go anywhere. The DNA did not match anyone in their database.
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Visit BetterHelp.com slash tails to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash tails. The DNA sample was retested again nine years later in 2007. But just like the previous tests, investigators couldn't link the sample to any known offender.
According to Kimberly Merga, the director of the forensic unit at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, the DNA profile was uploaded to a national database both times, but they never got a hit. Throughout the years, investigators traveled across the country following up on leads.
Some of these leads took them to places like Washington State, Ohio, and even Texas to investigate suspects. But after each trip, the investigators came back empty-handed. Although they considered several people as possible persons of interest, no one was ever named as an official suspect in the case, and no arrests were made.
Over the next 13 years, the Las Vegas Crime Lab compared the unknown man's DNA profile to more than 30 samples collected in the case. But none of them matched. By the end of 2020, Stephanie's case had remained unsolved for over three decades.
If Stephanie were still alive, she'd be an adult, 45 years old, maybe married, maybe a mother. There's a lot of uncertainty about who Stephanie would have become. But there was one thing certain. Her killer remained unknown.
In November 2020, Authram Incorporated, a private lab near Houston, Texas, reached out to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to see if they could offer their services to help identify Stephanie's killer. Authram, Inc. is a privately owned lab specializing in genome sequencing for law enforcement.
According to their website, Authram is the first and only forensic laboratory to vertically integrate a DNA test and human ID solution that can identify victims, find missing persons, and reveal perpetrators of crimes. This emerging technology combines molecular biology, population genetics, and bioinformatics.
What makes Authorem vastly different from a traditional crime lab is that they use cutting-edge laboratory techniques and algorithms to extract the most value from DNA evidence. Because they're using advanced techniques and machines, they can test even the smallest amounts of DNA and then use that DNA to identify a person.
Their scientists also have the tools and equipment to test DNA samples that regular labs have deemed to be too degraded or too small or too old to test. Since its beginnings, Othram has worked with many law enforcement agencies across the country to identify missing persons and solve even the coldest of cold cases.
According to the FBI's Uniformed Crime Report, the U.S. has 250,000 unsolved murders, a number that increases by about 6,000 each year. It's even more common for cases involving sexual violence to remain unsolved.
According to David Middleman, the founder and CEO of Othram Inc., about 85% of sexual assault kits tested through CODIS, our national DNA database, will not produce an identity for the suspect.
Middleman attributes this issue to the fact that there's currently a huge backlog of hundreds, hundreds of thousands of sexual assault kits waiting to be tested in this country. These figures remind us how important these types of crime labs are for solving cold cases.
But conducting this type of complex DNA testing on cold cases comes at a price. It is not cheap. Most agencies across the country simply don't have the funding to support these new DNA methods yet. Authrum is unique because it operates by using crowdfunding and seeks private donor support to help fund this type of DNA testing.
When Othram reached out to the Las Vegas Police Department to see if they could help in Stephanie's case, the department was ecstatic. They just needed to come up with the money. Enter Justin Wu. Justin Wu is a Las Vegas local entrepreneur and founder of Apollo Interactive, an interactive marketing and advertising firm based in Los Angeles, California.
He's also the founder of Vegas Helps, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting Las Vegas locals in need. So when Justin Wu found out about Othram's call to the Las Vegas police to help in Stephanie's case, he immediately got involved. Through his nonprofit organization, he donated $5,000 to help Othram and the police department retest the DNA evidence in the case.
In January 2021, Othram re-examined the DNA evidence from the crime scene in hopes that advanced DNA testing might generate new leads in the investigation and the best case scenario, the test would identify a suspect.
When the DNA sample arrived at Othram's lab in Houston, Texas, it was tiny. The remaining DNA evidence was measured at only 120 picograms. A picogram measures only one trillionth of a gram.
To put this into perspective, how exactly small is a picogram? One picogram is the average weight of the DNA inside of one cell of a hummingbird. Not the average weight of the whole cell, the average weight of only one DNA in one single cell.
According to Othram, in a typical DNA test, the collection kit will collect anywhere from around 750 to 1,000 nanograms of DNA. One nanogram is equal to 1,000 picograms.
So this meant that the DNA sample the Las Vegas police sent over to Othram was only equal to 0.12 nanograms, an amount that most crime labs across this country wouldn't even fathom about testing.
But it wasn't only the amount of DNA that posed a potential problem here. When it comes to medical or consumer testing of DNA, labs usually work with high-quality, high-quantity, single-source DNA samples. However, in forensics, a lab can't make any assumptions about the quality or the quantity of DNA.
Most of the time, investigators can only collect minimal amounts of DNA, and oftentimes the DNA is heavily degraded and it's also contaminated with other non-human sources. It can also be contaminated from other humans, like the crime scene investigators themselves, leaving behind their DNA mixed in with the DNA from either the victim and or the suspect.
Sometimes the DNA may even be mixed between the victim and the suspect. This is especially true when a case involves a sexual assault. And when the DNA sample is mixed, meaning it belongs to two or more different contributors, it makes it much more difficult for crime labs to then test the sample.
For these reasons, testing and analyzing forensic DNA evidence is far more complex than what scientists do for medical or consumer applications. Authram received the DNA sample in January of 2021, and then they spent the next seven months analyzing it and building a genetic profile.
Not only did the amount of DNA pose trouble for the lab, but they also knew that this was the last chance at analyzing it. Every time a DNA sample is analyzed and tested, parts of the sample are permanently lost.
And now, with only 15 human cells remaining, if this testing didn't work, there would be nothing left to test. For seven months, Authram performed its trademarked process of forensic-grade genome sequencing to build a genealogical profile from the sample.
According to Othram, this process applied all the power of modern sequencing to forensics, enabling human identification of even the most challenging evidence. For example, suppose they can identify a suspect's relative.
In that case, they can then build a family tree based on DNA samples from people who have already provided their DNA to genealogy websites like GEDmatch and 23andMe. From that family tree, they can then narrow down their suspect search. Through this advanced testing, Othram identified a distant relative of Stephanie's killer, a cousin.
Once they identified the cousin, they then built an entire family tree, which generated a long list of potential suspects. Once they had a suspect list, they could study where the suspect would fit in. For instance, did they live or visit Las Vegas at the time of Stephanie's murder? Were they alive when the murder took place?
Were they old enough? Were they too old? These are just a few of the scenarios that Othram considered when identifying Stephanie's killer. What Othram was doing was almost identical to what California investigators did to identify and catch Joseph James DeAngelo, a.k.a. the Golden State Killer.
Between 1974 and 1986, the Golden State Killer committed at least 13 murders, over 50 rapes, and over 120 burglaries. He wasn't caught until many years later in 2018 when investigators used forensic genetic genealogy to help identify some of his relatives.
Once they identified D'Angelo as a possible suspect, the police secretly obtained a sample of his DNA through his trash and were able to match his DNA to the DNA collected at multiple crime scenes.
Since his arrest back in 2018, law enforcement agencies across the country have started using forensic genetic genealogy to help solve their cold cases, just like with Stephanie Isaacson. Finally, after seven months of investigating, they made a match. Over 30 years after Stephanie Isaacson's murder, they identified her killer.
Las Vegas resident Darren Roy Marchand. Darren Roy Marchand was no stranger to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Police had arrested him in 1986, three years before Stephanie's murder when he was 20 years old.
He was arrested and charged with fatally strangling 24-year-old Nanette Vanderberg inside her home on February 27, 1986. In that case, the police found Nanette's naked body in the bathtub of her Las Vegas apartment.
After speaking with Marchin, detectives learned that he spent the evening with Nanette and had breakfast with her at the Nevada Palace around 1230 a.m. on February 26th. Marchin told the investigators that he left her at the restaurant that night and went home to bed. Las Vegas detectives said that crime scene technicians found Marchin's fingerprints near Nanette's body inside the bathtub.
But when the case went to trial, the charges against him were ultimately dismissed for lack of evidence. The judge in the case ruled that the prosecution didn't have sufficient evidence to charge him with murder, despite finding his fingerprints at the crime scene. After the dismissal, Marchand was a free man, free to commit another murder.
Othram and the Las Vegas Police Department compared Marchand's DNA from the Nanette Vanderberg case and then compared it to the DNA collected in Stephanie Isaacson's case. And the test revealed a match. Before this identification, Marchand was never considered a suspect in Stephanie's murder.
Although the police and Stephanie's family finally had a name, getting justice was a different story. According to police reports, Darren Roy Marchin committed suicide in 1995 at the age of 29. He died six years after he murdered Stephanie. So by the time he was identified as her killer, he was long gone.
Las Vegas police detectives believe that Marchand randomly attacked and killed Stephanie that morning while she walked to school. They think he happened to be at the exact location at the same time as Stephanie. They believe he saw her walking alone. He looked around and saw that no one was around. And then that's when he decided to assault her.
The police believe that when Marchand attacked Stephanie, that's when she dropped her backpack and books. After he assaulted her, he strangled her to death and left her body in the ditch where she was discovered by the police later that night. The attack and murder would only have taken minutes. After the attack, Marchand ran off and remained undetected for over three decades.
It's still unclear to investigators whether or not he knew Stephanie before he killed her. It's also unclear why the Las Vegas police couldn't match his DNA from Nanette Vanderberg's case to Stephanie's case years earlier. In a public statement made to the Washington Post, Stephanie's mother said this, quote,
In a separate statement reported by News 3 Las Vegas, she said, End quote.
In a July 2021 article, the BBC reported that the 1989 murder of 14-year-old Stephanie Isaacson has been solved by using what experts say is the smallest ever amount of human DNA to crack a cold case. It took investigators over three decades to identify her killer with the equivalent of just 15 human cells.
But it doesn't have to stop there. I had the tremendous opportunity to see Authorum's CEO and founder, David Middleman, alongside cold case investigator Paul Holes, speak together at CrimeCon 2022 in Las Vegas this year.
Middleman believes that they are only scratching the surface when it comes to using new DNA technology and genealogy to solve old, old cold cases. When I heard him speak, I had three key takeaways. Number one, forensic genetic genealogy is an incredibly powerful tool for cracking unsolved murder cases.
But sending DNA evidence to the wrong lab or testing the DNA with the faulty equipment can cause a case to go cold forever. Every time you test a DNA sample, some of that sample is lost and it's lost forever. And when the sample is gone or all of it is used up, it's gone forever.
So when it comes to forensic testing and forensic genealogy, sending DNA samples to the right lab is crucial. Takeaway number two, it takes a lot of public support to make this type of DNA testing possible.
If you're someone listening and you want to get involved, there are two ways that you can get involved starting today. First, you can provide financial support to Othram or other labs. There's other labs across this country right now who are doing very similar things that Othram is doing.
According to David Middleman, each case cost about $5,000 to do the proper DNA testing. Authram and many other private DNA labs almost solely rely on public support and crowdfunding to do their work. Finally, number three, you can submit your DNA profile to a national database.
Once you submit your DNA, law enforcement agencies will have access to the DNA to determine if you're a distant relative to an unknown person. And it's not simply used for murder investigations. This technology is also used for missing unidentified persons.
If law enforcement agencies across the country have your DNA, they might be able to use that data to identify someone who has been previously missing or unidentified. To learn more about different ways you can get involved, visit DNAsolves.com.
In the next three years, Authram is dedicated to helping 10,000 families affected by crime and losing a loved one get the answers they deserve. At DNAsolves.com, you can help fund a case or contribute your DNA.
Right now, you can hop on their website and order a DNA swab kit to submit your DNA for less than $15. According to the website, by contributing your DNA profile, you can help reunite unidentified persons with the family or help identify perpetrators of crime. This is your chance to do something. With your help,
Maybe, just maybe, some families won't suffer anymore. To share your thoughts on the Stephanie Isaacson 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 slash forensic tales.
After each episode of the show, I release a bonus episode where I share with you my personal thoughts and opinions about that week's episode. If you're interested in supporting Othram, please visit dnasolves.com. A link will be provided in the episode's show notes. To check out photos from the case, be sure to head to our website, forensictales.com.
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