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up next a human skeleton is found in the marshlands of north carolina the longer
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a body's been dead the harder it is to determine how long it's been dead we
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don't know who she is we don't know why she was killed but it tells a story all
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its own whatever happened to pre-sea death it probably was sexual a story of anger and
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hatred at what point does a person realize that you know they're dying and a violent end
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had this person remained anonymous we would have had nowhere to go [Music] [Music]
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on a cold spring afternoon in 2004 rayleigh jacobs found what looked like human bones in the backyard of the home
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he rented in wilmington north carolina it was kind of gruesome we came across these bones it was horrible first we
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seen her leg bones and then we came across her skull you know and ribs and you know then we realized you know it
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wasn't fake it was real you know so it was was terrible he called authorities who moved quickly
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to collect the remains and any possible forensic evidence the bones that had been scattered by the
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animals and maybe about a tide coming in because that was a marshland it was a dump site
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and there's a lot of garbage back there anthropologist dr midori albert and her
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team of student volunteers recovered about 160 bones or 80 of the skeleton [Music]
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the victim was a caucasian female about 30 years old and from the length of her femur about five foot four inches tall
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the amount of decomposition indicated she'd been dead for approximately 18 months
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and it was clear the woman died violently when i see injuries that were as extensive as this particular case
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i'm sort of perplexed by what the individual what the victim was going through while sustaining these injuries
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and how long death might have occurred the woman had a broken nose broken ribs and had been stabbed with a sharp object
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numerous times in the lower abdomen it indicated to me somebody who might have been stabbing or mutilating this
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individual stabbed 50 times at what point do you just not feel any more stab wounds
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the lack of clothing found near the remains was also telling the nudity would indicate
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a certain behavior pattern they would indicate that whatever happened to precede their death
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it probably was sexual fennel believed it was a clear sign of rage and a possible indication the killer
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knew the victim he also believed the killer was familiar with the area someone knew that they could get back
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there and hide this body there without being seen while they were hiding the body
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because ray jacobs had lived in the rental home only a short time he wasn't considered a suspect in the homicide
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whoever put the bones there or done this you know i was afraid that they would probably come back or
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you know show up unexpectedly and you know so i didn't really know what to think at the time after that
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the first order of business was to identify the victim a task that wouldn't be easy
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according to the doe network an organization that tracks the number of unknown victims there were 100 other
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cases involving unidentified victims in north carolina alone investigators hoped that forensic
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anthropology could narrow the search obviously in order to do any kind of investigation you have to start with
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figuring out who this person is the victim found in the north carolina marsh had suffered a violent death
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she was beaten stabbed and her nude body left in the marsh in the cold of winter
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but who was this person her remains were laid out in the lab and she was somebody i saw every day every
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day i go in the lab and turn the lights on and work on another case or we hold a
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class in there i would look over at her and often wonder how long it was going to take to get any kind of confirmation
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investigators had a theory that the killer was local it had to be someone who had some
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familiarity with that particular plot of land and if the killer was local the victim
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might be as well so investigators searched missing persons reports for caucasian females
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living in a 50 mile radius who disappeared in the last 18 months this yielded a number of possibilities
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but the closest match was 31 year old scarlett wood she was unmarried and living at home so
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she could care for her mother who was suffering from liver cancer on the night she disappeared she told
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her mother she was going to a party with friends it was in january it was cold and um i woke up at the
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funniest feeling you know you have a superstition and i said scroll i got a bad feeling
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something's gonna happen i said you just stay here tonight she said no i'll be
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all right but scarlett never returned she was always good about checking in with them saying where she was going to
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be if she wasn't going to be home at a certain time investigators hope to compare scarlett's
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dental records with the unknown victim but their attempt was unsuccessful she had dental records but they were 10
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years old and i couldn't find any dentists that kept their records that long
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and initially scientists couldn't use dna testing either they couldn't pull the dna from
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the remains from the bones apparently the bones are too dried out investigators were facing the very real
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possibility that their victim would never be identified then forensic anthropologist dr midori albert
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had an idea i've been familiar with a procedure called skull photo video superposition
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where you take an actual skull and you can take a photograph of a person and actually blend the two images together
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and what we tend to do with that is we look for different anatomical landmarks and points of similarity
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unfortunately the university of north carolina didn't have the facilities to perform this
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procedure the hardware and software can cost as much as thirty five thousand dollars
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so dr albert did the next best thing she asked one of her colleagues to improvise
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i went to shane baptista on campus who is a computer guru and is very familiar with open source software which is
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software that is available to anybody as a free download baptista found a free program called
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[ __ ] or gnu image manipulation program [ __ ] is an unfortunate acronym pretty
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much feature for feature and equivalent of adobe photoshop to see if it worked he performed a
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forensic test on himself i sat myself down and set up a web camera on a computer and
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took some photographs of myself at what i tried to get to be the same orientation
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he superimposed his photo over a plastic skull he separated both images into quadrants
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and looked for consistencies in the images as he expected there were none i was able to get a creepy image that
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showed that that wasn't my skull which we pretty much knew baptista moved on to the ultimate test
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pictures of scarlet wood were superimposed over the skull of the murder victim the similarities were immediately
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apparent when i started messing around with the scarlet woods it kind of lined up pretty
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quickly and so it was the ease of the fit got me pretty confident at the outset that we were on the right
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track it's never 100 conclusive but it was fantastic because a lot of the anatomical landmarks were
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very consistent it seemed possible that the victim was scarlet wood although investigators still weren't 100
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certain but at least they had somewhere to start [Music] with the skeleton found on private
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property investigators first turned to the property owner and the residents as potential suspects
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investigators learned that there were two tenants living on the property at the time of the murder both men in their
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mid to late 20s they both had some histories with the law enforcement of questionable
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character the landlord told police the men moved out a year and a half earlier which would have been around the time of
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the murder they have left in a hurry leaving behind furniture clothing there was some
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women's clothing left in the house some underwear that kind of thing hoping for answers
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police found one of the men in hampstead north carolina 28 miles away and brought
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him in for questioning everything did you guys have parties after the house what kind of road
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that's got anything to hide well the man said he knew nothing about the murder and never met scarlett wood
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he said he and his roommate weren't getting along and they moved out of the rental property after living there only
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a few months just roommates breaking up money issues police weren't so sure and sent a forensic team to search the
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house all of the floors walls and ceilings were sprayed with luminol but they showed no signs of blood
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after interviewing the tenants and the previous tenants we were pretty much at a standstill
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next investigators interviewed all of scarletwood's friends and her best friend lynne bollinger said
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she knew where scarlett was headed on the night she went missing she said scarlett spent every friday
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night at a local motel where there was usually a party they were at a motel partying drinking
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drinking beer and just having a good time i believe it was scarlet and three out of three or four other people
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police interviewed several individuals who attended that party they said everyone left around 2am
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except scarlett and a friend of hers 47 year old john wayne boyer [Music] boyer is a
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truck driver he actually worked at a different couple of different locations here in wilmington
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boyer no longer lived in the area he had been interviewed by police after scarlett disappeared
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they were partying and drinking scotland wanted to leave and he said he didn't want to leave and
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she left boyer said she left around 3 a.m on foot at the time no one really believed boyer's story
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that scarlett would have walked home seven miles away in freezing cold temperatures
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she was not equipped for the cold it was about 17 degrees at night i believe she
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had on just a pair of jeans and with a light coat but john boyer had no criminal history
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and he and scarlett were acquaintances she used to babysit his ex-girlfriend's
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children so we had a personal relationship with her scarlett's friends however despised him
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my father had his own trucking business so we we knew about this man he was really big
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he drank a lot and he just he acted he acted fine but i just there's something about him i just
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didn't like i didn't trust investigators were able to locate the minivan boyer owned at the time of
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scarlet's disappearance we ended up finding that van and doing a search on it and we had to find nothing
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in it they also searched the hotel room where the party took place the room was examined for blood we used
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the luminol to determine if there was blood unfortunately they had redecorated that particular hotel room so some of
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the furniture was new but there was no evidence found of any kind of bodily fluids or blood or anything like that
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unsolicited a psychic called suggesting scarlett's body was dumped in an industrial area about a block away from
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the hotel myself and my partner at the time went out to the scene when i looked around
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kicked the bushes that kind of thing didn't locate anything again investigators were at a standstill
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they had no dna proof that the skeleton was scarlet wood they had no blood evidence to prove that there had been
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violence in the hotel room or in john boyer's van in fact they had no evidence at all
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[Music] using a technique called facial photo superimposition a forensic anthropologist made a
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preliminary finding that the unidentified skeleton was 31 year old scarlet wood but this wasn't an identification that
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would hold up in court investigators had sent the remains to an outside forensic laboratory hoping to
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get a dna profile but for reasons no one can quite understand the lab was unsuccessful
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[Music] we would never know for sure who our victim was without the dna i'm not sure what that
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is but they just couldn't pull the dna from the bones so they just advised us like almost a
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year and a half later that just couldn't do it just couldn't find dna nothing seemed to be coming of the
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analysis and after the first year passed we were we were quite disturbed and very upset
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about it undeterred investigators sent the skeleton for a forensic second opinion to a private
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laboratory this one in pennsylvania there scientists tried drilling into a tooth
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and found just enough tooth pulp to generate a dna profile within three weeks they came back with a
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positive identification and with more digging sergeant john leonard discovered that
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scarlet wood had surgery performed on her finger just before she disappeared and
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that a biopsy was performed by law i guess medically they had to keep these things for seven years i was
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told i spoke to a doctor who did the operation on her and he advised me that that i could you know go to go to the
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place that stored this this uh this biopsy and i was able to get it incredibly dna testing of that biopsy sample
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matched the dna profile from the victim's tooth it was the best news i'd heard in a long
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time it's a long-awaited conclusion to a mystery and a very tragic death when the
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dna came back and it confirmed that my victim was scarlet wood and that john boyle was the last person to be seen
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with her we ended up going to augusta georgia and interviewing john boyer at first
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boyer repeated what he told investigators several years earlier that scarlett grew impatient waiting for
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him to give her a ride she decided to walk home instead and left the motel room around 3 a.m
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sergeant leonard didn't believe it i've been talking to you since 10 o'clock this morning all we've heard is
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live okay john because i have a body i have a body now okay so i'm gonna be able to tell if he lied to me right okay
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and with that his story changed that's when he told me he wanted to have sex
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she said okay but he couldn't perform we had a little sex a little bit we tried to she got pissed off because i
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couldn't keep it up with her and she told me oh you you're just an old old
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man she was belittling him about him not be able to have perform they end up pushing
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her he wasn't bleeding i know that she wasn't bleeding no she was not bleeding after you pushed her and she
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hit the nightstand yeah yeah boyer said scarlett hit her head accidentally against the nightstand but
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dr midori albert believes it's more likely her head was pushed into the table forcibly
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prosecutors also believe boyer broke her ribs since it was late boyer was able to carry scarlett's body
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outside to his truck without attracting notice [Music] he then took her to the marshy field
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near the trucking company where he worked the evidence shows he used some sort of
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sharp object and repeatedly stabbed her going so far as to mutilate her and then
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he left her there i learned a lot from her skeleton and i believe in death she made significant
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contributions some of the information boyer gave police in his so-called confession
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was corroborated by the evidence and i got scared and i picked her up on my shoulder and
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put in the truck took me down there in the woods okay now do you understand that that that that's a really different
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that's a little bit different story than what you told us 10 minutes ago and a
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big different story than what you told us three hours ago but not everything he said was true
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he wasn't bleeding i know that she wasn't bleeding no you were not bleeding
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in april of 2007 john boyer pled guilty to a charge of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 12 years in prison
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scarlett's family still have problems accepting the enormity of the crime he never gave her true stories as to
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what really happened so i don't guess we'll ever really know i still don't think miss woods has
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got it in her mind her daughter's not coming home investigators also suspect
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boyer was involved in the murder of 26 year old rose marie mallett which took place about a year before scarlett wood
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was murdered when he saw the photo he stopped everything and said i know her she's a prostitute i've had sex with
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her i want an attorney so based on based on that we're on that um that utterance um he's a suspect in this
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homicide also but john boyer is now behind bars because simple technology available to
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anyone identified the victim of his crime without the initial understanding that
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we were dealing with a female of european descent of an adult age the investigators wouldn't have known how to
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target that group of missing people and certainly without the trauma being evidenced on the bone such that it was
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i'm not sure that there would have been a conviction we'd never known that was
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her if it wasn't for forensic evidence we've never known i'm glad we got this guy i was really
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still am honored to have been a part of the process and pleased with how the system can stay
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with it to to help this unidentified person gain some justice to give the family
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some peace and to take this bad guy off the streets so that you know he's not able to do it
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again you