00:00:01
[PERCUSSIVE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: August 1977,
Everett, Washington, just north of Seattle.
00:00:19
A gruesome discovery-- the
body of a young woman found, her face disfigured with
multiple gunshot wounds.
00:00:29
KEN SEDY: That's a sight that
I never want to see again. Sorry to say it was
all maggots, flies,
00:00:35
and there was no facial feature
left on this little lady. It's just horrible
that a human being can
00:00:42
do this to another human being. NANCY GRACE: Police
can't even identify the victim, though investigators
do their very best.
00:00:51
The case grinds to a halt. KEN SEDY: We got a victim
here we can identify, and we've tried everything
we had at our disposal
00:01:02
to try and identify
this young lady. And we just come
up with nothing. NANCY GRACE: Years later,
in a review of cold cases,
00:01:11
the investigation
gets a new life. JANE JORGENSEN: We just treated
it like a brand new case
00:01:17
and we started over
from the beginning. NANCY GRACE: This is
the story of a victim
00:01:23
police cannot identify, a victim
they name Precious Jane Doe. And it's the story
of how revolutionary
00:01:32
new forensic techniques
four decades later helped police identify her. I'm Nancy Grace.
00:01:40
This is "Bloodline Detectives." [THEME MUSIC] It's a scorching hot
day, mid-August 1977,
00:02:12
when a group of residents in
South Everett, Washington, come across the body
of a young woman.
00:02:20
JIM SCHARF: A couple of people
were picking blackberries in the blackberry bushes
up a gravel road, just
00:02:27
north of Mariner High School,
when they discovered this body. She was face down and she
was decomposing because it
00:02:37
was really hot that week. The girl was wearing
pastel striped top with spaghetti straps and
real short cutoff blue jeans
00:02:51
and Mr. Sneeker boys'
tennis shoes that were blue. NANCY GRACE: They
immediately called police.
00:02:59
Detective Ken Sedy's one of the
first officers on the scene, finds the female
victim face down.
00:03:09
KEN SEDY: You could tell
that this body was deceased at the time, due to the flies,
and the markings on the body
00:03:16
was turning color. You could see that there
was a large hole in the back of her head, and that was a
telltale right there that she'd
00:03:28
been deceased for a while. NANCY GRACE:
Detectives immediately sweep the scene for any and
all evidence they can find.
00:03:38
We checked for empty casings,
beer cans, beer bottles-- anything we could find. NANCY GRACE: But detectives
find no solid evidence.
00:03:51
The local coroner arrives. So when they rolled
the body over-- KEN SEDY: That's a sight that
I never want to see again,
00:04:03
because we were hoping we
had some facial to look at and work at. But it was-- sorry to say,
it was all maggots, flies,
00:04:15
and there was no facial features
left on this little lady. NANCY GRACE: In 1977, modern day
DNA technology does not exist.
00:04:26
Police have very few
investigative tools to use. JIM SCHARF: They process
the crime scene, finding
00:04:34
as much evidence they could,
which really wasn't anything there. And they recovered the body and
took it to the coroner's office
00:04:44
for an autopsy. KEN SEDY: After the
coroner took her, we went back out the next day
with rakes and raked the area,
00:04:53
hoping to find some casings
or-- you know, find something. We're not finding much.
00:05:03
NANCY GRACE: Autopsy results
confirm what police already know is the cause of death.
00:05:08
JIM SCHARF: At the
autopsy, they realized that she'd been
strangled and that she
00:05:12
had been shot in the head
approximately seven times. However, only five bullets
were found in her skull.
00:05:21
JANE JORGENSEN: She had been
laying there about a week, and it had been a 90 degree
temperature week, so there had
00:05:28
been some post-mortem changes-- decomposition, some
insect activity. So she was not identifiable.
00:05:36
The heat speeds up the
decomposition process, so she had turned color. The skin gets very
dark, green to black,
00:05:45
and the skin starts
sloughing off, the hair starts sloughing off. The flies lay eggs in
the natural orifices--
00:05:52
the eyes, the nares,
the mouth, sometimes the ears, and also any points
of trauma, so bullet holes,
00:06:01
for example. So she was mostly
skeletonized in the face by the time we got her. It was determined that
this person was probably, oh,
00:06:15
25, 30 years old, with
what we had to work with. That-- her teeth
were immaculate.
00:06:24
And that was put out nationwide. NANCY GRACE: Police
go door to door and beg the public
for help, hoping
00:06:35
they can identify the victim. JIM SCHARF: You begin by
going to the news media and try to find out if anyone
saw this girl in the area.
00:06:45
They found somebody that
gave them a composite drawing that they made from a
Smith and Wesson identikit,
00:06:53
and they canvassed
the area, trying to see if anyone recognized
who this girl could be
00:06:59
and where she'd come from. And they didn't have
any luck at all. NANCY GRACE: Everett
police are stumped.
00:07:06
They've got a dead body-- a woman murdered,
grotesquely disfigured, and no clues to her identity.
00:07:15
As we see next on
"Bloodline Detectives," investigators will need time
and science to solve this case.
00:07:22
[PERCUSSIVE NOTE] August 1977,
Everett, Washington. State police trying to establish
the ID of a young woman who's
00:07:38
found shot dead. Her face is gone. It looks like a
calculated killing. There are numerous bullet
wounds to the head.
00:07:50
Investigators go door to
door and to local media, but still, they're struggling
to ID the female victim,
00:07:58
and leads are slim to none. The few forensic tools available
at the time are not much help.
00:08:08
KEN SEDY: We had to send
the fingerprints to the FBI because they were deteriorated
so bad, and come up negative.
00:08:17
Couldn't identify
the body at that time through fingerprints
or missing people. And we were looking
for a missing person,
00:08:26
is what we were looking for. NANCY GRACE: Police have
a victim, that's true. But practically
nothing else to go on.
00:08:34
And soon, the case
predictably goes cold. Then 11 years
later, investigators reopen the case with the help of
forensic odontologist Dr. Gary
00:08:48
Bell. JIM SCHARF: And when
he looked at this body, he realized that the two upper
front teeth were actually
00:08:58
broken off and
restored, which hadn't been noticed before, back in
the '70s when she was found.
00:09:06
So this was a new
piece of information that we publicized, but it
didn't get us anywhere, either.
00:09:15
NANCY GRACE: Then, out of
the blue, police get a break. KEN SEDY: I'm at the
office and I get a call
00:09:23
from Detective Reed at
the time, from the Seattle Police Department. And he's asking me questions
about, do you have a body,
00:09:32
and stuff like that. And he says, well,
I got a young fellow in here that has
described the scene
00:09:38
pretty much like my scene. Detective Reed said, do you
want to talk to this guy?
00:09:43
I said, yeah, I
want to talk to him. NANCY GRACE: Investigators
meet Detective Reed and the man who could
identify a legitimate suspect.
00:09:54
His name? David Roth. KEN SEDY: He was kind of a
friend of Roth at the time. And apparently David says,
you know, what would you think
00:10:08
of me if I killed somebody? And he wanted the informant to
go with him to remove the body
00:10:16
from where it was,
and they were going to take it some-- he was going
to take it someplace else.
00:10:21
Well, he didn't want
to go out with him when he picked it up, so
he says he doesn't
00:10:28
want nothing to do with that. So he was dropped off at
Roth's parents' place. He was gone for a while,
and he'd come back
00:10:35
and there was other
people in the house. David made the com--
comment, it's gone.
00:10:42
NANCY GRACE: The informant
leads detectives to David Roth. Now they finally have
a suspect for the 1977
00:10:50
murder of Precious Jane Doe. KEN SEDY: We knew
that the police department up in the east
had impounded a rifle.
00:11:00
And so we got a search
warrant for the property room so we could get it
into our evidence,
00:11:05
and it turned out it was a
Marlin with so many twists and stuff like that. So it was determined
it was the--
00:11:12
a rifle that would-- had the right characteristics,
as far as ballistics go. And then we did
a search warrant.
00:11:21
We impounded his car. We found his car and
impounded the car and took that to the garage,
where we went through it
00:11:28
and tore it apart, and
found peacock feathers and .22 shells and .22 casings. And-- and apparently, he
had gotten mad at himself
00:11:39
for something and he
shot his car up, too. So we had bullet
fragments in the car, too.
00:11:49
So now they were
excited that they had a great lead of what
happened to this girl
00:11:54
and who did it. NANCY GRACE: Police have
a strong lead and a name to go with it, but they still
can't find suspect David Roth.
00:12:03
JIM SCHARF: They put the word
out they were looking for him. They knew that he had had
an arrest for a drug charge,
00:12:12
so they flagged the warrant. In case he was ever picked
up, they'd be notified. And everything kind of
went by the wayside then.
00:12:19
You know, OK, we can't find him. We don't have enough
manpower to send out a fugitive squad like they
got nowadays to track him down.
00:12:33
NANCY GRACE: Investigators
give up on finding David Roth, and then another
break comes their way.
00:12:39
They get a call from
Port Orchard police, about 50 miles
southwest of Everett. That's next, on
"Bloodline Detectives."
00:12:48
[PERCUSSIVE NOTE] 1988, Everett, Washington. Police have a murder
victim shot so many times
00:13:03
even they can't identify her. They are now pursuing a
suspect in her murder, a man named David Roth.
00:13:11
And they finally get a call
with news of his whereabouts. KEN SEDY: It was two years later
I got the phone call from Port
00:13:20
Orchard that says, we
got David Roth in jail on your marijuana charge. Do you want him?
00:13:26
He says, I don't
know how, you know-- he bailed out on that charge. I says, I'm on my way.
00:13:33
JIM SCHARF: David was like
6 foot, 5 inches tall, and had a violent history, so
they made sure that they sent
00:13:42
two officers over to get him. KEN SEDY: He's scary,
put it that way. I was told by the informant
that he's torn cupboards
00:13:51
off the wall in the kitchen. He could bend a steel bar with
bare hands and stuff like that.
00:13:58
So if he would have
went crazy on us, I don't know what
would have happened. JIM SCHARF: And they
handcuffed him and put him
00:14:05
in the backseat of the patrol
car that had a screen in it, like a cage. But one of the detectives
rode in the backseat with him
00:14:14
to try to talk to
him on the way back. NANCY GRACE: The fastest
route between Port Orchard
00:14:19
and Everett is by ferry. JIM SCHARF: The ferry ride would
take at least a half an hour,
00:14:26
so they got him
talking by giving him some cigarettes to smoke. NANCY GRACE: It
looks like Roth is
00:14:33
prepared to open up about
what happened in August 1977. By the time we got across the
ferry, he'd admitted to the--
00:14:45
the killing. NANCY GRACE: David
Roth is very clear as he remembers what happened.
00:14:53
JIM SCHARF: He saw
this girl walking down the street on the
Bothell-Everett Highway,
00:14:58
and she was hitchhiking. So he thought, well,
I'm going to go see if I can give her a ride.
00:15:06
So David picks her
up and says, do you want to go have a beer with me? And she agrees to do that.
00:15:14
So he was able to buy
some beer and take her down this gravel road that
was in between the store
00:15:22
and Mariner High School,
and they drank some beer. He claims he tried to get
her to have sex with him
00:15:30
and she said no, so
that made him angry. And he went in the
trunk of his car, he got a couple of
peacock feathers,
00:15:39
and handed them to her
to distract her while he grabbed a black bungee cord. KEN SEDY: And while
she was sitting
00:15:48
in the passenger side,
he put the bungee cord around her neck and-- and strangled her.
00:15:54
Well, I guess one of them broke,
so he had to get another one. And he drug her off into
the blackberry bushes.
00:16:02
And she was thrashing
around, so he was afraid that she wasn't dead. KEN SEDY: That's when
he decided he was going
00:16:08
to go back and
get his .22, which had a seven-shot magazine clip. And went back and emptied the
clip in the back of her head.
00:16:20
[EERIE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Prosecutors have a
confession and what they think is a slam dunk case to
try David Roth for murder.
00:16:34
JIM SCHARF: When
he went to trial, he got convicted of
first degree murder and was sentenced
to life in prison.
00:16:40
But after a few years, he
started asking to be paroled. And after 26 years,
they felt that it
00:16:47
was safe to release him back
out into society, so they did. NANCY GRACE: Roth is imprisoned
and then eventually released.
00:16:57
But that still doesn't solve
the identity of the victim. KEN SEDY: We got a victim
here we can't identify.
00:17:06
We've tried
everything we had at-- at our disposal to try and
identify this young lady.
00:17:13
And we just come
up with nothing. Nobody still had any
idea who this girl was. They were just at a
total loss, and they
00:17:22
were hoping that someday,
somebody could identify her. NANCY GRACE: It's unbelievable
that a self-confessed killer
00:17:31
prosecuted for murder, sent
to prison, gets out of prison, and neither he nor
the investigators
00:17:38
can identify his victim. Will investigators ever be able
to give her her own name back?
00:17:46
That's the challenge
now, and that's what's next for
"Bloodline Detectives." [PERCUSSIVE NOTE]
00:17:59
2008. Everett, Washington. Investigators still
cannot identify a young woman brutally
shot, even disfigured,
00:18:09
31 years earlier. This is even though they've got
a confession from her killer, David Roth, who's
already served 26 years
00:18:19
behind bars for her murder. He's even been released. But Ross says he did
not know who the victim
00:18:26
was when he killed her. We still weren't coming
up with any identification. And then I got a call
from Detective Scharf,
00:18:39
and he says, I'm
working this case and we're doing
this and doing that. NANCY GRACE: While reviewing
evidence for new leads,
00:18:49
cold case detective Jim Scharf
gets a call from a non-profit, the DOE Network. They try to connect
missing people
00:18:58
to police investigations. The network has been
looking into the whereabouts of a missing woman named Cherry
Greenman, last seen Waterville,
00:19:09
Washington, September 14, 1976. When I was contacted by the
DOE Network to see if she was
00:19:19
Cherry Greenman, I had
a fingerprint examiner compare Cherry's fingerprints
to see if it was her,
00:19:28
and it wasn't. So at that point, I contacted
the University of North Texas Health Science Center, and they
were the agency in the country
00:19:40
that was trying
to identify bodies and compare them
to missing persons' relatives that put DNA on file.
00:19:50
So I contacted them,
and they recommended that I get a long bone, like
a femur, and send it to them,
00:19:57
and they could try
to get a profile that they could put into CODIS. So I contacted my
supervisor and asked
00:20:06
if we could exhume her body. NANCY GRACE: Jim
Scharf gets permission to exhume the remains, and
they are sent for examination.
00:20:17
JANE JORGENSEN: When
we exhumed her in 2008, we just treated it like a
brand new case, and we-- we
00:20:23
started over from the beginning. We had the late Dr.
Kathy Taylor come and do her forensic anthropology
exam, and she
00:20:32
told us that Precious Jane
Doe was a Caucasian female. In 2008, we sent a femur to
the University of North Texas,
00:20:41
and they obtained an SDR
profile that was put in CODIS. And so her DNA ran in CODIS from
2008, but there were no hits.
00:20:50
Initially, the investigators
believed that this girl was probably 25 to 35 years
old, so they had assumed
00:21:00
that she was maybe around 30. When we exhumed the
body, Dr. Kathy Taylor examined it and said, no, this
girl is more likely 14 to 21.
00:21:12
And she said that
she believed that she was probably actually 15 to 19. I realized that, you know,
this was just a young girl.
00:21:24
She was probably mixed up
and just starting out in life and was trying to find herself.
00:21:33
And to me, a girl that was
in that situation, that was strong enough
to tell somebody
00:21:41
no when they were
asking for sex, to me, that was remarkable. And I thought she
was just precious
00:21:48
for being able to do that, so
I named her Precious Jane Doe. [INTENSE MUSIC] JANE JORGENSEN: At the same
time that Dr. Taylor did
00:22:00
her examination, we had a
forensic artist, Natalie Murry, come and do a new facial
reconstruction of Precious Jane
00:22:08
Doe because just
like other science, there are advancements and
studies in forensic drawing.
00:22:15
So we thought it couldn't
hurt to get a new, updated forensic drawing. So Natalie Murry
did that for us.
00:22:22
NANCY GRACE: The sketch gets
a lot of public reaction, and police began
to rule out many
00:22:28
of the possible missing women. JANE JORGENSEN: Do they
have dental records on file that we can compare?
00:22:34
Do they have DNA on file? Do they have fingerprints? So it's just a slow process of
looking at each-- each person
00:22:42
and either ruling them
in or ruling them out, or saying we need
more information
00:22:48
to rule this person in or out. NANCY GRACE: Unfortunately,
the sketches are not as
00:22:53
helpful as investigators hoped. Now detectives decide to
try a new groundbreaking
00:23:00
forensic science brought to
them by a pioneering genetic genealogist, Dr. Barbara
Rae-Venter, known for solving
00:23:09
the Bear Brooks
murders and identifying the Golden State Killer. JANE JORGENSEN: So in
2018, Barbara Rae-Venter
00:23:19
told us about Dr. Ed Green. JIM SCHARF: And he had
learned how to get DNA out of just a strand of hair.
00:23:30
I trusted Barbara and she
said, we need to get some hair and send it to Dr. Green.
00:23:36
Well, out of sheer
luck, for some reason, we had her hair mass in the
sheriff's office property room.
00:23:47
JANE JORGENSEN: There had been
no hits in CODIS, so I thought, why not? It was actually not
known that there was
00:23:56
nuclear DNA in the hair shaft. It was known there
was mitochondrial DNA, but it was always thought
that there was no nuclear DNA,
00:24:03
the reason for that being
that as the hair shaft grows, the cells actually go through
a process called apoptosis.
00:24:11
And in that process, the
nuclear DNA gets chopped up into little tiny pieces. What Dr. Green had discovered
was that actually, there
00:24:20
was nuclear DNA. It's just that
the fragments were too small to be detected by
traditional PCR technology,
00:24:26
which is what's usually used. So they arranged to have the
hair samples sent to our lab,
00:24:33
and we took this case on
like we take many cases on, not really knowing the
details of it that were
00:24:41
not relevant for what we do. Most of the details of the crime
and the police-y aspects of it
00:24:48
aren't necessary for
us to know, so we purposefully don't know them. NANCY GRACE: When hair
belonging to Precious Jane Doe
00:24:57
is analyzed, it gives
scientists some positive clues to help ID her. ED GREEN: DNA in hair, it's
a fantastic environment
00:25:06
because it is water insoluble. It's a great preservation
environment for DNA. On top of that, hair,
an individual hair,
00:25:15
is a discrete
biological unit that can only come from one person. You never get a mixture of
DNA within a single hair.
00:25:25
So we were hopeful
about retrieving and sequencing DNA from hair. In practice, we've
retrieved DNA from hairs
00:25:35
that are hundreds and even
thousands of years old. BARBARA RAE-VENTER:
So he actually
00:25:40
uses a process
called whole genome sequencing to basically put
the genome back together again.
00:25:46
And then from there
what he has to do is he has to then run an
algorithm which then identifies
00:25:53
the SNPs that would be on a chip
if he was doing a step array. So he's pulling out
the same SNPs that
00:26:00
would be on an Ancestry chip
or a FamilyTreeDNA chip, and then that file
that he then creates
00:26:05
is then uploaded
to, say, GEDmatch or to FamilyTreeDNA, and then
the matching algorithm looks
00:26:12
for matching folks
in the database. NANCY GRACE: The case
of Precious Jane Doe is all time consuming.
00:26:24
JIM SCHARF: So it took Dr.
Green about a year and a half to keep working with
the different algorithms
00:26:31
that he was developing to
try to get a profile that could be uploaded to GEDmatch.
00:26:39
ED GREEN: The
forensics community forever basically has this
one way of looking at DNA.
00:26:45
And when it fails, the
conclusion can be that there's just no DNA in that sample.
00:26:50
Oftentimes, that's true, but
for hair, for rootless hair, there is DNA in the sample.
00:26:56
It's just that it's too short
to work with that assay. BARBARA RAE-VENTER: When we
first ran the file that we got
00:27:02
from Dr. Green for
Precious Jane Doe, we didn't get
particularly good matches. And so we tried to work with
them and-- and a part of it
00:27:12
is you don't know whether
it's the file, because you're starting off with a very
unusual file, namely hair,
00:27:18
or, you know, what--
what the problem is. Maybe we just didn't have
people from her family
00:27:23
had-- who'd done DNA
testing, and so we weren't finding very much. So we did build out
some trees, however.
00:27:31
I think we went through like
three or four different files, so sort of like we did
when we were first working
00:27:38
on this technique, we went
through trying to optimize the files that we were getting.
00:27:43
One of them might be
preferentially binding to files that had been uploaded
from people who were tested
00:27:49
at 23andMe instead of Ancestry,
and if you were seeing way more 23andMe matches
than Ancestry matches,
00:27:57
that makes you question
it, because the biggest database is Ancestry. So then we'd go back
and now rerun the file.
00:28:05
And so then we got a
new file from Dr. Green, and we had identified
some potential most
00:28:11
recent common ancestors. And this is-- this is an
important step in doing investigative genetic
genealogy, because what you know
00:28:20
is that when you've identified
some common ancestor-- so let's say we've got people who were
matching as second cousins.
00:28:27
And then our unknown person
also matches as a second cousin. So we got three people
matching each other,
00:28:34
and all matching
as second cousins. We know that there is a common
set of great-grandparents.
00:28:41
And we further know
that the person we're trying to identify, since
we've got an unknown--
00:28:46
unknown person in this mix,
must be a descendant of that set of great-grandparents.
00:28:52
And so the first step
in doing any of this is identifying who those
common ancestors are.
00:28:59
JIM SCHARF: Barbara kept
in touch with me that point and said, hey, you know,
we've got a profile now
00:29:07
that we've uploaded
that tells us that this is probably a
great-great-granddaughter
00:29:13
to a woman named Rachel Elder. NANCY GRACE:
Investigators finally have a family name to
pursue, but will it
00:29:22
lead to a breakthrough? That's next, on
"Bloodline Detectives." [PERCUSSIVE NOTE]
00:29:35
April 2020. Snohomish County,
Washington State. Police inching
closer to discovering
00:29:42
the name of the woman
murdered by a man named David Roth, August 1977. A breakthrough
looks close, thanks
00:29:52
to revolutionary
forensic technology developed by Dr. Ed Green. His new technique
enables identification
00:30:02
of DNA-based forensics
from rootless hair and other difficult sources. Dr. Green and Dr.
Barbara Rae-Venter
00:30:13
now collaborate for answers. We often don't have enough raw
data at the specific positions
00:30:22
that we want to know
to accurately call all of those positions to
make a genotype file that's
00:30:28
good enough for Barbara
to do her stuff. So instead, we
rely on data which is available-- a complete
genome sequence from thousands
00:30:39
of people around the world. The piece that was-- was
really helpful in solving the case was that there
were two women who
00:30:47
were sisters who had tested. So one of the sisters had
tested at both 23andMe and at Ancestry,
and she had uploaded
00:30:55
a file from both of those. And then her sister had
only tested at Ancestry and she'd only-- of course,
she'd only uploaded that file.
00:31:03
And what we saw was
that the 23andMe kit was matching at a lot higher
level than the two kits
00:31:11
from Ancestry. And so it helped us
that we-- we were seeing this in a
real example where
00:31:19
we knew that the
amount of matching DNA from their Ancestry kits
was lower than it should be.
00:31:25
And so we were able to use
the information from the kit from 23andMe to then finally
figure out who our person was.
00:31:36
It was kind of exciting,
because we actually had three different
lines in our tree
00:31:42
coming together in one spot. So this was basically
X marks the spot. So we go back to our tree
to see who's at that spot,
00:31:50
because this is going to
be who our Jane Doe is. And we have three little boys. NANCY GRACE: Dr. Venter knows
this tree is incomplete.
00:32:03
So there were
three little boys. Their last name was Elder. And so obviously, we had
somebody missing from our tree.
00:32:11
We had a little girl
missing from our tree, because we were
looking for a Jane Doe.
00:32:16
So we spent some time
trying to figure out, OK, how are we going to come up
with this missing person?
00:32:24
And we'd actually,
for a while, we had wondered if she was maybe
somebody who was adopted,
00:32:30
because it was so difficult
to build out trees for her. So one of the ladies who happens
to be very good at finding
00:32:38
things in obscure
places on the internet found this one
website where a family member, not even a
close family member,
00:32:46
had a tree for the Elders. And in that tree were
the three little boys and there was a little girl.
00:32:56
NANCY GRACE: The genealogy
tree is now built from a woman called Rachel Elder. JIM SCHARF: It was
about April of 2020
00:33:05
that Barbara told
me that she thought that this was going to be
a great-great-granddaughter
00:33:10
of Rachel Elder. And we were working
pretty hard for a month and a half or two months
until June came around
00:33:21
and Barbara calls me and says,
hey, I'm sure we've identified the parents of this girl.
00:33:28
It's Stanley Elder
and Mary Ganard Elder. And it has to be a daughter, but
we can only find that they have
00:33:40
three sons We can't find that-- that they had a daughter. But our genealogy shows
us that it has to be her.
00:33:50
So she started looking on
the relatives of that couple, and she was able to learn
the next day that she found
00:34:03
on another genealogy
site that they maybe had a girl by the name
of Elizabeth Marie Elder,
00:34:11
but she didn't know
how old that girl was, whether she was older than
the three sons or younger
00:34:17
than the three sons. But that was the next big
clue that she came up with. [DRAMATIC MUSIC]
00:34:26
BARBARA RAE-VENTER: How are
we going to figure out who-- who she is? How are we going to confirm
that we have the right family?
00:34:33
And so it turned out that
in talking to the family, Detective Scharf learned that
in fact, the mother had had
00:34:41
another child out of wedlock. So before she had gotten
married to Mr. Elder, she had actually had this
other child who had also
00:34:53
been given up for adoption. And so the detective was able to
track him down and, because he
00:34:59
was an adoptee, like
a lot of adoptees, he was looking for his
biological relatives.
00:35:04
And so he had done DNA testing. I had gotten a
phone call from-- from my sister Carol, and
she said she was contacted
00:35:12
by Detective Scharf
and that he'd been working on this cold case
involving a girl that had--
00:35:21
they had found before
some years earlier, and that he wanted to
contact me and see if--
00:35:29
if I'd be willing
to do a DNA test. And so I told my sister, sure. I'd just done Ancestry a
couple of months prior and--
00:35:40
and had it all, you
know, worked up already. So he gives me a
call about an hour
00:35:48
later and next thing turned into
a three-way conversation with-- with Barbara and him and myself.
00:35:56
And we worked out
the arrangement of-- of downloading my
stuff from Ancestry so Barbara can work on
the data files and stuff.
00:36:07
And yeah, within three,
three and 1/2 hours, they had a match. NANCY GRACE: Progress
now is much faster.
00:36:18
JIM SCHARF: So
immediately, I called Carol and I told her the whole story. And she says, well,
my mom told me
00:36:26
that she had a daughter
named Elizabeth that she gave up for
adoption, and I was always
00:36:33
hoping to meet that girl. I told her that I was sorry that
if this is that girl, that she
00:36:40
was a murder victim in 1977. There were a lot
of emotions that-- that had been
ignored for so long,
00:36:49
and it's still taking
time to let those out. I mean, my brother
and I, we-- we talk,
00:36:55
but we don't always talk about
this particular situation and how we feel about it.
00:37:03
And the reason for that
is it's very surreal. We didn't know her
and we both feel
00:37:10
very robbed about
the possibilities that will never exist. NANCY GRACE: Now
Detective Jim Scharf
00:37:20
must deliver the
news to Elizabeth Elder's biological dad-- his daughter is dead.
00:37:30
JIM SCHARF: Initially, it was
like it didn't register to him. So by me explaining a
little bit more to him,
00:37:38
he finally said, oh yeah, yeah. I-- it's been,
like, 43 years ago that she ran away from home.
00:37:47
He told me how the school that
she went to was kind of rough and that she'd had
problems in school,
00:37:54
and she was maybe hanging
around with some people that they didn't
really approve of.
00:38:00
And one night, they
found a little baggie with some marijuana
in their yard and they asked her about it.
00:38:08
And she ended up going out
with some friends that night and just not coming home.
00:38:14
So he went down to the Roseburg
police department the next day and reported her as a runaway.
00:38:23
They took a report,
which they no longer had, and for some reason, they
inadvertently took her
00:38:30
out of missing status the
same day they entered her, which was July 25, 1977. Nobody has any explanation for
how that could have happened
00:38:40
or why. KEN SEDY: It's bothered
me for 20 years while I've been with the
sheriff's office, basically.
00:38:49
And after that, after I
retired, Jim was keeping me up to date on what was going on.
00:38:57
And he-- he felt good about it. I mean, the things that he
did wasn't at our disposal
00:39:05
when I was in the
sheriff's office. JIM SCHARF: Any time that I
have a case that I'm trying
00:39:09
to solve, I get focused on it. And even though I get
distracted with other cases,
00:39:16
I always come back and try
to pick up where I left off and keep moving the case
forward until it's resolved.
00:39:24
This is a case that it took
me 12 years to resolve, but I had so much help
all along the way from--
00:39:33
everyone that heard the
story wanted to help us figure out who she was. NANCY GRACE: Investigators
finally know who
00:39:42
Precious Jane Doe really is. She's Elizabeth Marie Elder. Elizabeth finally has
her name returned to her.
00:39:53
Took a new technology. It took a new approach. As often is the case
in any discovery,
00:39:58
a new tool comes
along and we can do what we couldn't do before. We have an amazing human
strength inside of us to--
00:40:07
to push forward to find answers,
and this genealogy is something that-- that allows us to
get the answers that we
00:40:16
couldn't get in any other way. I don't believe
this case could have been solved without
investigative genetic
00:40:22
genealogy. There was no other way
to get to who she was. We're solving cases
that basically
00:40:30
are unsolvable by other means. Possibly there's no better
example of collaboration
00:40:38
between investigators and
scientists than this case of Precious Jane Doe. They are the
bloodline detectives.
00:40:47
Without their combination
of investigative expertise and science, the family
of Elizabeth Marie Elder,
00:40:56
and so many other
families, would never get the answers they deserve. I'm Nancy Grace.
00:41:04
Thanks for joining us here
on "Bloodline Detectives." [CLOSING THEME]