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1980 the mojave desert human bones are discovered in a shallow grave near the small town of ludlow california
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there was a archaeologist out there working in the desert and had found some bones that turned out to be human
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remains police launched an investigation to identify two young victims we always had a gut feeling
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that family was going to be looking for them i didn't want to believe that she
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wouldn't come back investigators identify a suspect with a horrible history but with no hard
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evidence the case reaches a dead end i would describe anybody that can commit five murders
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bury bodies as a bona fide psychopath the young victims remain jane and john doe for decades until their killer gives
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investigators a small break so he said i had to kill him because he would have killed me
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here's a guy just making up a confession as he goes along with the evidence points to something entirely different
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this is the tragic story of pamela sally and william lane the evil they encounter
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that ends their young lives and how the bloodline detectives restore their identities after decades i'm nancy grace
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this is bloodline detectives [Music] [Applause] [Music] november 19 1980 mojave desert
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california a hiker calls police after finding what he believes to be human bones in our desert area we have a lot
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of untraveled territory that people like to go hiking on and a lot of those people are out there looking for
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rocks fossils in this case there was a gentleman i believe he's 65 70 years old
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he was out there doing that with his son and they came across a partially opened up grave that was very shallow
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and had found some bones that turned out to be human remains reported them and our department went out took the
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report they sent a deputy sheriff out there to verify if in fact that was a dead body
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which he did he then notified dispatch who then notified the homicide detail who sent two detectives out there to
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work the crime scene the crime scene was a shallow grave vast desert out in the middle of nowhere just
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above ludlow which is a very small community in san bernardino county initially when they responded there was
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remains some some bones that it looked like animals had dug up one of the shallow graves in the desert at sandy
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soil once they collected those bones they're able to determine that they were in fact
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human then they were able to determine that there was actually two grave sites it
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would appear to be a male and a female the female had long red hair and there weren't any clothes on them at
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all there were no clothes in the actual grave so it appeared they would have been buried naked
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the coroner is contacted so the coroner's office was notified the following morning
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they were notified by the sheriff's deputies that were already starting the investigation out near ludlow
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and they sent a deputy coroner to the scene in order to initiate the coroner investigation it appeared from the scene
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that the two bodies were interred in the gravesite and it was likely animal scavenging had pulled the remains from
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the gravesite out into the desert they were mostly complete they were an advanced state of decomposition they
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were partially skeletonized but there was some hair and tissue still on the remains
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the coroner retrieves the skeletal remains investigators look for other evidence
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they would have walked the area looking for tire tracks shoe prints shoe impressions
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any type of identification that may have been discarded by the perpetrators that
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would have been their course of action there at the scene there wasn't any clothing so you couldn't remove a wallet
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or id card or anything like to identify them since they weren't clothed so they
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were john and jane doe [Music] within that grave they also found shell casings and projectiles
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to a weapon that was probably the weapon that was used to kill those two people they were 22 caliber
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bullets if they find a gun somewhere that they think might have been the one they used
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they could compare the bullets they collected to test firing bullets from the gun
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they'd have and they could say yeah this gun killed those two people the two bodies are transported for
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autopsy while police gather more evidence when the bodies were taken to the coroner's office an autopsy is performed
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on both bodies all the bones are removed and actually placed on the table just as
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they would be in a normal human body the first physical examination was the following day after they were recovered
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that included an external examination at that point the pathologist noted that both remains had significant head trauma
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after that initial examination was completed the bodies had complete x-rays taken
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and a secondary exam was performed a few days later when the x-rays revealed that
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both bodies had evidence of possible gunshot wounds some projectiles were recovered from that autopsy to help the
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pathologist establish the cause of death there were three projectiles recovered from the male remains those were deemed
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to be 22-caliber fired bullets and those were collected as evidence as part of the initial investigation
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the female remains did not have any fragments or bullets recovered but there was evidence of gunshot wounds during
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their examination she was shot in the head and she'd also been bludgeoned to death probably by the
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shovel that was used to dig the grave [Music] often in autopsies like these a pathologist calls in identification
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specialists that's what happened here and these experts are able to provide investigators with a rough physical
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description of the victims at least it's a start the female was described as having
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strawberry blonde or light brown hair approximately 7 to 10 inches long the male was described as having 14 to
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15 inch long hair secured in a ponytail the color was designated as brown light brown those descriptors were observed in
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the initial investigation and then a dental examination was completed the following day
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that also helped in establishing a possible age range the odontologists that did that
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examination estimated both bodies to be in their late teens and then the forensic anthropologist was brought in
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and her examination established a stature based on measurements of both femurs the anthropologist's estimation
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was that the female victim was between 17 to 22 years old and the male victim somewhere in the range of 21 to 30 years
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old now it's critical to establish just how long the two bodies have been in the
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ground based on the coroner's report and the assessment it was estimated that they
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had been deceased for about one to six months prior to being found so areas of the bodies would have been
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exposed to the sun and due to the animal scavenging that would have increased the
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decomposition due to loss of tissue and the scattering of extremities and things
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like that investigators visit the small town of ludlow to see if anyone can help id
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these victims in the early stages of this investigation the detectives would have
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been trying to identify who the victims were and who they were associated with the people
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that live there live there because they want to get away from normal everyday life
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why were they there in ludlow where are they passing through it ludlow is a very small community nobody really
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lives there at the time there was a diner and like a rest area there no one in ludlow can help with a
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possible id of the victims investigators however do receive information that points to one man
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the owner of the gas station there in ludlow said that you need to talk to howard neal because howard was always at
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the gas station always knew the people that were coming through here because he made it his business to do so so
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basically to either rob them or pull a scam on them or anything that's going to benefit him that that's what he
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was doing there howard neal lived in ludlow with his wife at the time the bodies were found
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investigators start looking for howard neal as we see next on bloodline detectives the suspect is a man with a
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very dark past [Music] december 1980 san bernardino county sheriffs get a lead at the double murder of two
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unidentified bodies found out in the mojave desert the young victims were found near the small town of ludlow one
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month earlier police now looking for a suspect named howard neal but he is not slow to act
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howard had realized that the police the homicide detectives were looking to interview him in regards to the bodies
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that were found a short distance from his home howard and his wife quit their jobs and then left ludlow altogether
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just vanished police launched a nationwide search they tracked down the niels in stockton
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california a few months later detectives discover they're not the only investigators looking for howard neal
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so howard neal is arrested on march 6 1981 in stockton california for shoplifting
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so they routinely run his information through the system and bang a hit comes up that he's wanted in mississippi for
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three murders his half brother his niece and her cousin when investigators learned the horrible
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details of the mississippi murders they're confident howard neal is also responsible for the ludlow murders
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on january 24th 1981 bobby neal howard neal's half-brother along with his daughter amanda joy
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13 went to go collect her cousin melanie sue poke so she could spend the night and they could go to church the next
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morning the last time they were seen was in langston at 10 o'clock on saturday night
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january 24 1981 so when 12 year old melanie sue's mother realized she hadn't come home
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she was concerned what's going on so she went over to bobby neal's house
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to see if she could find out where her daughter was and what she found was bobby neal's truck parked in
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the driveway and then she went into the house let herself in and she found the house fine there was
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no struggle but nobody was there the only thing that concerned her was that bobby neal's glasses which he wore
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all the time he needed them were on the table she becomes quite alarmed by this because the glasses are so important to
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him so she calls the lawrence county sheriff's department and reports bobby neal
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her daughter and the cousin missing and they begin a search and for the next 10 days
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they find nothing no sign of them anywhere then february 6 a young girl's body is discovered
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so this man on his way to a fishing hole discovers amanda joy's body it was clearly evident she was strangled
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there was evidence she was beaten among the face and upper body she was shot with a shotgun in the
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abdomen it's clear that somebody brutalized this young child and left her on the side of the road
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and it's not long before another body is found melanie sue poke was found about 900
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yards away from her cousin and it was clear from that crime scene from the forensic
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examination that she had been shot as well it takes a little longer however to find
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bobby neal's body about a month after the girls were found bobby nail was found several miles away
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he was shot and he was bound stockton police arrest howard neal and question him about the murders in
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mississippi so after being interrogated he decides he's going to tell stockton
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police exactly what happened out there in mississippi with his half brother his niece and her
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cousin so howard neal says he went over to his half brother bobby's house and the two girls were there
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and that under their own free will they decided with him and bobby they were all gonna go for a
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ride and that the two girls sat in the front and bobby sat in the back and out they went
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he claims that bobby got upset with him because he had his hand on one of the girl's
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thigh and he demanded to stop the car so we did they get out and howard says he brought his gun with
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him and they start walking away from the car and that he shot bobby when amanda joy was found there was
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evidence on her wrists that she had been bound and restrained but now in his confession howard neal says i
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never did that when howard gets back to the car the girls immediately ask him what was that shot about he shot the gun
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in the air and that bobby decided he was gonna walk home and howard claims the girls believed
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them it's horrible to even imagine but this sick vicious suspect actually tells
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investigators the 12 and 13 year old girl victims were willing participants in his brutal sex attack on them
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howard neal tries to make police believe that these 12 13 year old girls willingly had
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sex with him that they wanted it he claims that he had sex with melanie sue poke
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and then amanda ii and that the girls liked it and they wanted it when all the evidence points to
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rape that he bound them and that he raped them and then he killed them he says he shot amanda what he believed
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was in the chest and that when he shot her melanie sue started screaming so he pointed the gun
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at her and shot her he said when he was finished with the triple murder he went back to his family
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picked them up and then drove back to texas howard neal is tried and found guilty of
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the murders in mississippi howard neal is currently serving three life sentences in mississippi he was
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given the death penalty he was mentally incompetent so he was tested and found that he was
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mentally those were the words that were used and used in court it's in the court
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transcripts basically he had no education he didn't remember going to school he was abused as a child based on
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that his lack of intelligence they reduced his crimes to three consecutive life terms without the possibility of
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parole now san bernardino investigators are eager to interview howard neal about
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their double homicide but he refuses to speak with them so they tracked down his
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wife ludlow detectives were hell-bent on the fact that howard neal killed those two people that they found
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buried so they kept pestering him and pestering the court to question him but his
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lawyers fought it off they interviewed howard neal's wife darla darla also worked as a dishwasher
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at the coffee shop in ludlow at the time where the bodies were found darla had indicated that howard her
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husband may have been responsible for hitchhikers that were passing through ludlow
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she also had said that howard drove her by the gravesite and showed her where they were buried
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howard neal is behind bars for the rest of his life but refusing to talk about the ludlow murders the victims are still
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jane and john doe detectives try other investigative methods to try and identify them
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after the initial investigation if they didn't have any good leads to who these
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victims might possibly be in this case within a few weeks they started amassing these descriptors and they submitted the
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case to the department of justice and entered the cases into the missing and unidentified person system which we
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refer to as mupps that listing in mups would indicate that the male and female were found with
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their identifying descriptors as much information as possible including their age estimation possible
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stature the dental information from the dentist's examination and then that record would be searchable
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against any missing persons that has entered into that system nationwide after the case was entered into mups
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over the course of years there were a number of exclusions based on circumstances stature dental comparisons
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to other missing persons the case is running cold there are no new leads after eliminating other
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missing person cases and in 1980 dna is not a viable option after the autopsy because the remains
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were not identified they stayed in house for a couple of years in 1983 they filed a petition with the courts to
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file their death certificates and they were buried intact in the county cemetery at that time
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someone in the office deemed it necessary to retain their skulls as evidence of the investigation and to
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assist with ongoing identification work and those skulls were retained in curation here at the coroner's office
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so because of that we had access to them to do these additional types of searches we try everything we
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do isotope testing you know we compare cases using gis mapping we use many out of the box
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techniques in order to try and identify folks when even the dna does not give us
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our immediate answers through the doj system the unidentified skulls are tested for
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dna in 2006. the bones initially were sent for dna and they were able to get an extraction
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to establish that profile in codis but codis only uses anywhere from 13 to 20 loci
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to store into their database the codis submission was initially in 2006. the other investigators that have been
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assigned to essentially what we deem is the missing and unidentified persons section here at the coroner's division
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are continually working to make sure that those samples are complete additional samples were sent in 2010
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to help establish a more clear profile for codis and at that time that was when we were
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able to make sure that they had a full codis profile but there were no hits because there was
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no exemplars or family samples in the system to compare to next almost 40 years since the two
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bodies are found in 2017 san bernardino county investigators garrett teslar and steven shumway
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finally question howard neal that's next on bloodline detectives [Music] 2017 almost 40 years after an
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unidentified pair of bodies found in the mojave desert the bloodline detectives are able to question a suspect
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that suspect howard neal he's already serving life behind bars in the brutal
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killing of two children and his own brother there's a legal complication however for
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investigators tesla and i went in to interview him and we introduced ourselves he's 64 at the
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time we interviewed him he was willing to chat he was very thankful actually somebody came to talk to him
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so we explained why we were there and what our purpose was and if he knew anything about the victims that he spent
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time with them where they were from their names anything that he could remember now granted this is 2017 you're
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talking 37 years later you know his memory is probably you never know you never know but we had
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we had to try well the sole purpose of going to interview howard neal was to get him to tell us who he thought
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those two dead people were now in order to do that we had to come up with what's called a use immunity
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agreement in other words the da's office draws up paperwork that says you can go
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talk to him whatever he tells you you can't use it against him first he denied it of course he denied
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it denied it and then he admitted to meeting them and then that they needed a place to stay they were hitchhiking
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across the country he made mention in the interview that he thought this girl was pretty well that
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kind of kind of set off a little light bulb based on his mo and what motivated him
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back in the past i think that he was attracted to that female howard neal starts opening up to
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investigators he picked him up they go back to his house and he mentions to steve and i that
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he was trying to put the move on her the male victim had gotten really upset we asked him well why did you kill him
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if i didn't kill him he would have killed me because that guy was so upset about the
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fact that he was trying to put the move on on the girl that he was with so he said i had to kill him because he
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would have killed me he killed him first shot him and then had her help him put the male's
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body in the station wagon transported that male victim to this area where they were buried
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had her help dig the grave i believe that she was pleading with howard to don't kill me because i have a
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small daughter and then he killed her and put her in the grave too investigators have no doubt the murders
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were premeditated and howard neal is the killer howard definitely was in full control
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and knew exactly what he was doing had planned what he was going to do had planned the location he was going to put
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them in because there's nobody around to see you or to hear gunshots howard did
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not show any remorse at all he's actually one of those guys he's just dead inside he killed five people that
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we know of howard neal gives investigators critical information even though they are not
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able to hold neil accountable for the murders when he said they had a daughter and it
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stuck with howard she pleaded for her life saying please i have a young daughter she knew what the inevitable
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was going to happen that's why i believed there was going to be a daughter family members searching for
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their mom the search is on with the limited information they have and the possibility of a dna match
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somewhere down the line after interviewing howard that we were going to extract dna from both victims
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and get that dna profile and then upload that into jed match ancestry family tree
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dna to hopefully have one of their relatives match what will it take for investigators to
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finally id the two young victims left dead in the mojave desert we find out next on bloodline detectives
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[Music] 2019 san bernardino county investigators identified serial killer howard neal as
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the murderer of two hitchhikers their skeletons discovered in the mojave desert almost 40 years ago
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exhausting all other avenues investigators decide to use the new crime solving tool genetic genealogy to
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try and identify the victims in this case all we had were victims we knew who the suspect was but we
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didn't know who the victims were there was dna uploaded into codis and there's no matches
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so i talked to coroner's office and verified we have bone available but it was very difficult
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extracting dna for the snip profile because they had been exposed to sunlight they've been out in the desert
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for maybe eight months or more and it really degrades dna in 2019 i was reviewing cases for the
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use of genetic genealogy for identification and reviewing this case with the ludlow
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victims it looked like we did have bone available the quotas profile is called an str
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profile and think of it as a very basic profile of dna minimal amount of information but it works very well for
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codis for direct matches and immediate family matches when you use genetic genealogy you need
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what's called a snip profile which is a lot more information and you can match up to distant cousins
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the forensic process is very complex especially on bone you have to go to whole sequencing whole genome sequencing
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and then they pull the snip profile that you need out of that whole sequence that
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can be uploaded into ged match or family tree dna and then you look at your matches and
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how close or how distant and it depends on the amount of sonomorgans matching as to how close or how distant the
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matches are so once you have so many matches you have to take those people build their family tree up
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and eventually they all intersect and you get to what's called the most recent common
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ancestor so now you know that your victim is descendant of those most recent common ancestors so then you
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have to take those people and build their trees all the way down and this can be a very detailed and
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time-consuming job and then you just have to call up people within those family lines and ask them
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to do what we call a target test where you get their dna and compare it to your victim
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and if you're in the right line the match gets bigger and bigger and you can
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narrow it down so you can finally identify their victim and some cases it can take a year or
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more the detectives agree on a plan to identify the victims we had gotten both victims extracted
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and again because of the suspect saying he talked to him for a while and the female victim said she had a daughter
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she left at home with family we decided to try her first so we had her sequence first
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and uploaded to judd match when it's uploaded in there it takes a while for the matches to populate so you
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just have to keep going back and checking then it popped up we've got a match a
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parent-child match and this has to be her daughter is her daughter is looking for her we
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can tell her what happened to her mom now we were ecstatic to hear the news that
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there was a close match and that we finally had a lead to identify this couple it was really really a great
00:31:04
thing because we knew that using this technique was going to lead us to this family
00:31:11
very often there are anxious moments for investigators waiting for a dna match and this is one of those moments when
00:31:20
investigators get their potential match it's not what they're expecting it's not
00:31:24
the match they thought it would be [Music] we pulled the profile and found out it
00:31:32
was a private eye that actually uploaded it into jet match when i contacted her she told me that
00:31:39
christine sally was her client and was trying to find her mother and she had uploaded christine's dna
00:31:47
into ancestry and then transferred it into ged match and she gave me christine's information
00:31:53
out of the blue christine sally gets the phone call so i was at work one day and i
00:32:02
got a call it says san bernardino on it and you know nowadays with all the robo calls
00:32:08
you don't want to answer all these unknown calls so i let it go to voicemail and they left me a voicemail
00:32:14
and it was detective heathley from the san bernardino county sheriff's department so i did call him back i
00:32:20
kinda at the moment kinda knew what it probably was because who from california and the sheriff's department is just
00:32:26
gonna call me randomly he answered and he was kind of confused still in figuring things out he
00:32:35
told me that there had been a dna match on jed match and that he believed it was
00:32:41
my mother and that he didn't have a lot of information he didn't even have a name to give me
00:32:47
and that's when i told him that i had a name to give him christine sally discloses the name san
00:32:54
bernardino investigators are looking for it's pamela sally her mother now christine is able to tell police
00:33:03
more about her family i was born on september 17 1979 in fort myers florida to pamela diane duffy
00:33:15
my parents divorced on december 17th of 1980 sometime after that my mother took me
00:33:23
and started traveling she was traveling north she was with a couple of guys one of them
00:33:28
was digger lane at that point they were struggling to keep me clothed and other things like
00:33:34
that they ended up staying in the back room of a pool hall and something happened with diggerland and he ended up
00:33:40
getting arrested at some point and that's when social services started to intervene thinking that a child had
00:33:46
been neglected and i was taken into foster care at that time at some point my grandmother brought her
00:33:56
from mobile back over to florida but unfortunately when pam had left the state of florida with me in december she
00:34:04
was on probation at the time so she ended up absconding from probation so when she had went back to florida they
00:34:11
had arrested her for leaving the state then in june of 1980 she was released and she signed her rights
00:34:19
to me away and that's when she told my grandparents she was going to go travel with her
00:34:24
friend digger lane across the country and they were going to go hitchhiking across the country
00:34:29
and that was the last time anyone really talked to her i do believe she did call my grandparents a few times
00:34:35
while she was out on the road but after a while the phone calls did stop [Music]
00:34:42
the challenge now is to definitively match the dna and prove the victim for the mojave
00:34:47
desert is pamela sally once you identify someone through genetic genealogy you still need to
00:34:57
obtain a codis profile from an immediate family member to get the legal identification
00:35:03
after the original first match came and then i was in got in contact with san bernardino county sheriff's department
00:35:10
later we did an official dna swap where the state troopers came out and did the whole mouth swab thing for their
00:35:17
official codis database investigators identified pamela sally as one of the two victims from a
00:35:26
40-year-old murder case but can they identify the other skeleton is it pamela's companion digger lane
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that's next on bloodline detectives [Music] by early 2021 san bernardino county
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investigators very close to identifying a skeleton a skeleton of a male victim found out in the mojave desert 40 years
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earlier the science of genetic genealogy has already identified a female skeleton
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found alongside him her name pamela sally now pamela's daughter christine is
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able to fill in the blanks for investigators in talking to christine we learned that
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her mother left with male known as digger lane and he had recently been in custody in virginia
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and that's all the information that we had at that point so we contacted the
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local law enforcement back there to review their records and they were able to come up with the name william
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lane as a probable match once we identified a possible victim as william lane we were able to determine that he was
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also missing out of florida and his family had not seen him since 1980 also in a final act detectives returned the
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remains to their loved ones once we had the legal identification for both of the victims
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then we worked with our da's office and our coroner's office to obtain all the remains from both victims
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and return them to the families our district attorney jason anderson thought it was important that we
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returned the remains to the family members we made all the arrangements to travel back east and connected with the
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families and made sure that they were delivered in the appropriate manner which was in person
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we were in contact with the airlines to see if there's any special circumstances
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or rules in place in transporting them on a plane and and so forth we had to obviously tell a security and tsa that
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we had them and they just had to run them through the scanning machine and make sure there wasn't anything
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concerning that showed up on the scan we took them out in a suitcase and made sure they
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were with us at all times and kept safe to the best of our ability being on an airplane
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they came out all the way from california to deliver the ashes and it meant so much to me to have someone
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personal come out and actually give their their condolences and sympathies and actually
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be with me as i was accepting those ashes then we continued from virginia to florida where we returned the remains of
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william everett lane to his mother sandra blair it was a very emotional time for her you can tell she was really
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heartbroken not knowing what had happened to her son and then learning that he had been murdered
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and so for her to receive the remains she was really appreciative of of that and talked about her son and
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the relationship that they had and really felt that she would be at peace now that he's
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home investigators witnessed the meaning of closure for the families now that this
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double murder is finally solved i think deep down i always knew that she had probably passed
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because i i couldn't i didn't want to believe that she wouldn't come back
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of course you always have that little bit of hope that you're wrong and that she maybe is
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in europe but yeah i always had that little bit of hope that she would always come back but
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i think deep down i always knew that she really was gone because i knew she wouldn't be gone for this long
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if it was on her terms right now i'm still mourning the loss of the little hope that i had that that
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small little bit of hope is is now gone and i think that's what i'm what i've been warning
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but i do feel that closure will come soon but right now i just i can't stop thinking about her last
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moments and how she died it hurt so bad to know those were her last moments but i'm sure closure will come soon
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it'll come soon there seems to be no limit as to how far the bloodline detectives and their use
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of genetic genealogy can reach back to solve previously unsolvable cases how far can they go four decades as in
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this case five ten families with missing loved ones please hold out hope every day the bloodline detectives get
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closer to identifying a new jane doe or a new john doe now more than ever closure could be
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just beyond the horizon i'm nancy grace thank you for joining us on bloodline
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detectives [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you