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Bloodline Detectives - Season 2, Episode 7 - The Murder of Siobhan McGuiness - Full Episode

June 01, 2022 / 41:47

This episode covers the tragic case of Siobhan McGinnis, a five-year-old girl who went missing in Missoula, Montana, in 1974. It discusses her disappearance, the community's response, and the decades-long investigation that followed. The episode highlights the use of forensic genealogy that eventually led to the identification of her killer, Richard William Davis.

Siobhan was last seen on February 5, 1974, playing near her home. After a frantic search, her body was discovered two days later, leading to a complex investigation that included multiple suspects and numerous leads over the years. The case remained unsolved for decades.

In 2004, DNA evidence was collected from Siobhan's autopsy, but it did not lead to any matches in the CODIS database. The episode details how advancements in forensic science, particularly genetic genealogy, provided a breakthrough in the case.

In September 2020, investigators identified Richard William Davis as the likely suspect. The episode discusses the challenges faced by investigators in confirming his involvement, including the need for DNA from his family members.

Ultimately, the episode concludes with the emotional impact of solving the case for Siobhan's family and the importance of forensic science in bringing justice to cold cases.

TLDR

The episode details the 1974 murder of Siobhan McGinnis and how forensic genealogy led to identifying her killer, Richard William Davis.

Episode

41:47
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february 5th 1974 missoula montana a five-year-old child reported missing it's every parent's worst nightmare what
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happened to siobhan mcginnis she was last seen with the neighbor who literally said goodbye to her like a
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half block away from her house her little body is found violated left in the snow her murderer leaving the
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community in shock it rocked the community and changed the way people acted with their children or
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let them roam about an investigation that will last decades is launched detectives review the evidence hoping to
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bring siobhan's killer to justice this is 40 years of dog and police investigation of following up every lead
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looking everywhere even though they didn't have dna at that time they were still wise enough to
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collect that evidence knowing that down the road that might be something important
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but when a cold case team decides to use forensic genealogy they finally get the
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break they've been waiting for it has unlocked the ability to use dna as an investigative tool and that's the
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game changer this is the tragic story of siobhan mcginnis how her murder was never
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forgotten and how the bloodline detectives solve her case after four and a half decades i'm nancy grace this is
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bloodline detectives [Music] [Applause] [Music] february 5th 1974 police in missoula
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montana get an emergency call from a woman her five-year-old little girl siobhan
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mcginnis never came home on tuesday afternoon siobhan mcginnis went to go play with some friends of
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hers who lived near the elementary school which was right in her neighborhood around 6 30 her mother called and said
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it was time to come home because they were going to go out to dinner and so they began searching the
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neighborhood kind of the family and friends looking for her and they couldn't find any side of her so then
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her mother contacted the police police immediately start looking for siobhan mcginnis she's only five and it
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is well below zero degrees outside it was clear but cold i mean it's montana in february and there was some
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urgency because it was cold they thought perhaps with any lost child she had wandered into a shed or a
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parked car and couldn't get out so they started searching kind of the neighborhood contacting knocking on
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doors saying could you look in your out buildings and they looked at all the different cars and they couldn't find
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her anywhere her house where she lived and then where her friend's house was
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was maybe two blocks and and it's local blocks it's not you know like new york
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city blocks so you know it's not that far away from her home she lived on the north side of town
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some of the hippie counter cultural community gravitated to that neighborhood which was a large part of missoula
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missoula is a very diverse community it's a liberal arts college drew a lot of artistic types of folks
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1974 at that time you felt okay to just walk home from your friend's house you didn't
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think there was a danger it just was a place that you always felt safe as police searched for little siobhan
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they learned from neighbors she's well known in the community for her big personality
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they hope she's just visiting a friend and maybe lost track of time talking to people she wasn't wanting to
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sit in her room and and play with her dolls she was out playing at the parks playing with friends
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she was vivacious outgoing sassy was what people had said and she was just always happy
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and loved people because she was an only child with two parents very involved in the
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arts she often attended things like gallery openings or poetry readings and was the only child present
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in many instances and there are many people still in missoula that remember her being at a poetry reading and she
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had collected all this all the plastic spoons for the coffee and she was selling them to people for a
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nickel a piece so they could stir their coffee just silly little things like that but
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she was very much an extrovert um not not really scared to interact or talk to him to too many people
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you know in the summertime she wouldn't have shoes on she'd be out walking the
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neighborhood and and just doing what she wanted to do just having fun and and playing like most kids should be able to
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do by now police have a snapshot of siobhan she may just be five years old but this
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little girl has a big smile she's confident around adults and very independent
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but hours go by with no sign of siobhan police talk to mommy again they want to learn about her family situation
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she was interviewed and her home was searched by local law enforcement and she was very cooperative
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there was a lot of people that came and left from her residence and some people she knew some people she
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didn't and so there was a lot of that kind of activity the early 70s you know where
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people would crash at your house and you might not know who they were siobhan's father was notified and his
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wife at the time and it was just hard for everybody because it was two different families
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it was a different time [Music] the search picks up pace when it becomes apparent five-year-old siobhan mcginnis
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is really missing everybody was involved neighbors family members law enforcement
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strangers just trying to help when you have a young child missing i know that even now all hands are on deck
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you know if i'm sitting at my desk and if i hear that go out we're going to get
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in a car and go and start looking um time is of the essence when anybody is missing especially a young child
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the search expanded beyond the north side obviously there's a concern with the
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interstate being right there that she could have been abducted and traveled along the interstate to who knows where
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as word spreads that siobhan is missing two people come forward with information
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on her way home she passed one neighbor and she said she asked him um would you walk me home and he said well i'm
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walking to the store and then he went into the store and then another person had come out of the store
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and another adult woman and she walked with her back towards her house and she was about a block and a half
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away from her home and the woman had to go the opposite direction and so she left her at that
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street corner and told her just to go home and siobhan walked down this alley and then was not seen again after that
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police also get a disturbing call from a woman whose child has been assaulted there was a mother a few blocks away who
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contacted the police and said her daughter had told her that previous day that tuesday around 3 p.m her young
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daughter who was about 7 or 8 had been molested by a teenage boy a younger boy older than her
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obviously had taken her into a local park bathroom area and he had sexually assaulted her
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this was two blocks from where siobhan was last seen and what four hours before so he became kind of the prime suspect
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he was known to law enforcement so they knew where he lived he lived with his mother
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and they went to interview him and search his room and let his mother know what was going on
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and why they were interviewing him he was brought into the police station and during that time one of the methods
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of questioning was to give you know a truth serum whether it's sodium pentathol or different type of drug but
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he was administered that that's in the record it's in the newspaper he admitted to molesting the other
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little girl but said he had nothing to do with siobhan's case or siobhan's
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disappearance and they found no evidence to support that he was involved with siobhan at all he did admit to the other
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little girl in the bathroom in the park but there was no connection for him at that time involving him with siobhan's
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disappearance [Music] the local newspaper in missoula publishes a story that siobhan is
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missing the thursday morning paper the missoulian published an article about siobhan missing and that newspaper went
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out kind of community-wide so instead of just that neighborhood knowing about it
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now everybody in the town was aware missoula police and the entire community on edge
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what happened to little siobhan mcginnis their worry turns to fear when a missoula roads worker contacts police
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he's made a heartbreaking discovery next on bloodline detectives [Music] thursday february 7 1974
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missoula montana police investigating the mysterious disappearance of a five-year-old little girl siobhan
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mcginnis this outgoing child with a big smile missing two days when they get a call
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from a montana roads worker named vern he was driving home and when he came down the off ramp
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there was a vehicle parked on the side of the the off ramp and he thought it was odd because it would look to him and
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he described it as a a cadillac that was green that had new york license plates on it
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was parked in an area where they had had trouble before with people doing illegal
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dumping so he saw this he pulled over and he was watching the car to see what this person was doing and what he said
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he saw was a single kind of middle-aged adult man about six feet tall just standing by the rear of the car
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and he looked like he had snow around maybe like um leftover snow on the on his boots
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that he had been in the snow standing by the trunk of the car fiddling with a few
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things then he got in the car and drove away and so he vern didn't see him do
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anything but as after he drove away vern pulled up to where the car had been parked kind of looked around saw nothing
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and decided okay that it was just somebody had pulled over before getting on the freeway to you know adjust
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something and so vern went home that night vern read that article in the morning
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paper that siobhan had gone missing and it's just something kind of twinged saying
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what if you know it's kind of the worst thought the worst nightmare what if that
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was somehow related so that morning on his way to work vern stopped there at the spot and went kind of exploring went
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over the berm and down into the snow and that's where he saw the body of a child
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siobhan was found just east of missoula her body was found in all respects just somewhat abandoned
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police gather what evidence they can and siobhan's body moved for autopsy they took photographs they collected
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everything they possibly could they collected samples of blood that they found in the snow
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and all those turned out to be siobhan's blood they went out with metal detectors
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to be able to look for if there was any sort of evidence there was a deputy coroner there that was also there from
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the sheriff's office examining things before you know the body was taken into
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custody and then taken to the lab for testing siobhan's body is found by an interstate
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by the missoula city limits it's a major freeway that essentially goes coast to coast along the northern
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reaches of the united states so he could have gone to washington state or all the
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way to new york it kind of would go state to state but the way he left had to be heading into the town of tura
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which is a small town near missoula in missoula county or he was going westbound towards the state of
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washington and idaho detectives are present when the autopsy on siobhan is performed the medical
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examiner discovered there was numerous stab wounds to the chest with a small knife two of those had pierced the
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heart javon had been struck on the head there was a wound on her head indicating
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kind of the impact of a of an unknown you know maybe it was a tire iron hammer and also they did discover that there
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was some semen on her abdomen that was also collected by the investigators at that
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time siobhan's condition is shocking for police on the case it's made even worse because now
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officers have to do what they find the hardest tell a family their beautiful child is dead
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i can't imagine hearing those words that not only that your your child is dead but how that happened and imagining
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of suffering and how you move forward in life how you don't think about that every day
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the montana rhodes worker named vern is able to give police a description of the
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suspect and his vehicle police then create a sketch of the suspect and put out a bolo
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be on the lookout the description of the man was somewhat generic he was white he was six feet
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tall he was middle-aged um he was wearing a cap sort of that description could fit just
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about anybody but the key point was he saw a car with new york plates he described it as like a 1958 59 1960
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cadillac the vehicle was really the key so that's where the bolo which is the be on the
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lookout was put out to all law enforcement across the state there were a number of leads that came
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in were cars that were stopped that might fit the description but those people were discounted either they were
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not in montana at that time or they were traveling in a different direction everybody none of those leads turned
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into something that was really worth anything police get hundreds of leads most of
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them go nowhere except for two tips about the same person people were looking at each other you
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know quite frankly and and wayne nance was an odd enough guy making some pretty bizarre statements
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it was a red flag two different tips came in saying you really should look at him you know he's
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into devil worship and he was overheard by one person saying he should have hid the
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body better he was the weird kid who carved a pentagram on his arm was it shock value it's like people
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you know who try to say things or do things to get attention or to deflect attention and so it was considered he
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was just the weird kid and then after graduation he joined the navy and he left town
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by the mid-70s detectives exhaust all leads it was months to years that they finally you know had
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no further leads to work with but the case remained open it was just closed until further leads were obtained
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[Music] in 2004 investigators retrieve a semen sample from siobhan's autopsy and send
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it away for analysis they're hoping against hope that new forensic science may
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give them a break we were able to submit the dna through the crime lab and get the dna type the suspect dna
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from the semen that was recovered from her body in 1974 it was a male profile and that was put
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into codis and so knowing that that dna sample is in codis if there's another
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crime that is committed and that sample gets put into codis there would have been a match so if
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there were any other crimes anywhere in the nation that occurred with that same dna profile there would have been that
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notification investigators are disappointed no direct hits emerge on codis the national dna data bank
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but as we see next the bloodline detectives look to a new forensic weapon called genetic genealogy and it's about
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to provide a breakthrough in the investigation [Music] it's been more than 25 years after the
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brutal savage murder of a five-year-old little girl siobhan mcginnis in 1974. now missoula montana police are using a
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dna sample to try and crack the case there was no hits on that dna sample but it was entered into the database so if
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something did come into that database it would then ring an alarm and we would be notified
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that there was a possible hit thanks to knee forensic science investigators look again at an old
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suspect wayne nance he's been questioned before in 1974 through the dna process
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in the examination of that we were able to determine that the semen that was found on her body did not belong to him
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we now know nance has committed a number of crimes and murders in missoula books have been
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written about him 1986 wayne nance was killed during a home invasion attempt where he was it
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was an attempted murder of the husband and the wife was upstairs tied to the bed but the husband was able to kill
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nance before he made it upstairs he did have some friends that he kind of ran ran over and ran through and
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he was kind of the the leader of that group there's a lot of people who knew him in
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high school and he scared the socks off of him just the things he said and did and so
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if you're friends with this guy who is weird and talking violent thoughts and
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you stay friends with him to me that kind of puts you in the suspect pool so we kind of wanted to
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track if if nance's dna wasn't a match did that necessarily mean he wasn't
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there maybe it was his friend's dna so that was kind of theory one and theory two was you know
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let's check to see what the children might know we were just tracking down any theory we could to try to find a
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fresh lead on the suspect his best friend was referenced and the name was always a little bit of a
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variation so we dug through all the yearbooks to try to identify anyone with that similar name
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we ended up with two potential people one had been killed in a car crash in the 90s
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in washington state and the other was in town so we contacted him and said you know long shot would you mind if we
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collect your dna and we collected his dna wasn't a match with no match on codis the case goes
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unsolved for years in a cold case like this there was one last resort for investigators don't give
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up detective dean christensen would not he uses the media for any information that
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could give him a break part of the cold case investigation every now and then they would put out a
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press release and talk about the case and bring it back and people would come forward and say
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during that time in the 1970s i was being abused by my uncle or my father or a neighbor
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so many people wanted to come forward and help and it was difficult for some of them because they were sexually
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assaulted by people they were wanting to still help even though it brought up some terrible memories for
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them we had childhood friends of siobhan that came forward who are now adults and
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wanted to talk to us about it because they remember clearly the children she was playing with the day she went
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missing you know obviously it's it struck them hard all these years and so it's a fine dynamic you know you
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have to get the case done and you have to be thorough but you also had the dynamic of where you had to take their
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um their feelings into consideration that you did the investigation [Music] over 40 years after siobhan mcginnis's
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murder a cold case unit is created by missoula county one of the first cases they investigate is the brutal murder of
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the little girl with the big smile the missoula county cold case unit was stood up by a group of retired
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volunteers one of the cases that they took on was the siobhan mcginnis case this is a missoula city police
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department case but they requested our unit take a look at it and see if there was any investigative leads they could
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develop or any new technology that would be beneficial in the investigation the chief of police at the time for
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missoula police department was preparing to retire and this is one of the cases that had really bothered
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him because of you know siobhan's age being a young young child at five years old when she
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was raped and murdered really you know obviously stuck with him and gave me the opportunity to work with some senior
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detectives who were mentors of mine to help see if we could do anything with the case with the changes in science
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the team flies to california to meet with the fbi forensic genetic genealogy team leading experts with the technique
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talked with the fbi's forensic genetic genealogy team which was kind of the forefront and talk to them about how do
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you do it what's the policy we want to make sure we did it by the book and make sure that we did it
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correctly siobhan mcginnis case when i first heard about it i was just heartbroken i mean
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the the it's every parent's worst nightmare what happened to siobhan mcginnis
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and i heard about it through a contact at the behavioral analysis unit at quantico
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when i heard the facts of the siobhan mcguinness case it just broke my heart and
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i want to help solve every one of these cases and so of course we said yes we would do anything we could in order to
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help them make the case and use genealogy to figure out who did this forensic genetic genealogy is a process
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that came onto the map in 2018 after the golden state killer case was solved and
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it's a process where you take the suspect's dna from a crime scene from a
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rape kit from blood that was left at the scene and you develop a profile a special profile that's called a snip
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profile you take that profile and you upload it into commercial genealogy databases like
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ged match or family tree dna and from that you're able to determine who the relatives are of the person whose dna
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that is and by taking those relatives information their public record information you can build family trees
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and you're able to reverse engineer who the person is that contributed that dna
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one of the other big hurdles for departments with these cases especially these cold cases is funding you know
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where are they going to get money in order to pay for this because you know a snip profile if you're if you're using a
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micro array on average it might cost a thousand dollars to fifteen hundred dollars depending on where you go to get
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it if you're going to use sequencing to get your snip that could be a little bit more
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three thousand four thousand dollars depending on where you go so initially the department didn't have any money and
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so i told sue and diana i said hey there's a grant opportunity the sexual assault kit initiative the sake grant as
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it's known in the industry you might be able to get funding through sake if you
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guys aren't able to to fund it through your department or it's also possible
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that the fbi could pay for it so we had to work out initially you know now that we know we have suspect dna where are we
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going to get the funding in order to pay for this in 2019 the missoula city police
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department received funding from the montana sexual assault kit initiative to have
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whole genome testing done on the dna that was collected or the stains that were collected from siobhan's
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clothing our cold case unit sent that sample which resulted in developing a whole genome sequence dna profile
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to do forensic genetic genealogy you need what's called a snip sample it has
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hundreds of thousands of markers and you take for dna amplification you take the
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sample and there's an entire process that starts to amplify to build out these dna profiles
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and in this case the degrading introduces a little bit of bacteria so what you kind of end up
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amplifying can also be the dna of the bacteria so in this particular case using the normal snip process it created
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a dna sample that was not able to be used for a forensic genetic genealogy it was degraded slash
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contaminated this sample is not going to be useful for a forensic genetic genealogy
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investigation a dna sample that cannot be used and once again a disappointment for investigators
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they've got one final option that's next on bloodline detectives [Music]
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2020 missoula montana the missoula county cold case unit trying to use the latest forensic science to crack open
00:27:52
the 1974 case of five-year-old siobhan mcginnis it's important to understand that
00:28:00
suspect dna is finite meaning if you have five nanograms of suspect dna once you use a portion of
00:28:07
that to try to get a profile that dna is gone you can't get it back you consume
00:28:12
the dna in the process of trying to get the snip dna is typically measured in nanograms
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well what is a nanogram well a nanogram is one billionth of a gram okay one billionth
00:28:25
meaning 10 to the negative ninth power that's that's nine zeros okay one
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billionth of a gram so i always ask myself well what is a gram what's a common thing that weighs a gram well in
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the united states a dollar bill weighs about a gram you were able to determine that there was not adequate quantity or
00:28:46
quality of dna in the siobhan mcguinness case in order to get a profile by using
00:28:51
a microarray and so we then turned to another lab othram laboratories which is in the
00:28:57
woodlands texas and we called it and said hey is this something you guys think that you can
00:29:02
get a profile off of this and if my recollection is right the amount of dna was under a half a nanogram i think it
00:29:10
was somewhere in the in the 350 to 400 picograms range which a picogram is 1 1000 of a nanogram which is even more
00:29:19
insane how small of an amount of dna that was in june 2020 the dna profile is uploaded
00:29:27
to ancestry databases it was uploaded into two different databases where consumers have uploaded
00:29:36
their own dna with the with an opt-in to share with law enforcement it's not ancestry it's not
00:29:42
23andme it's an actual database where people know that they're sharing this to
00:29:47
share that's that's the goal they've said i want to help law enforcement
00:29:51
solve these so we first looked at ged match and we looked at family tree from one data set we found a very good
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match it was actually the fbi said it was one of the best matches that they've
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seen and so we started building out the family tree of that person and then just
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to kind of be on the safe side we also started building out like the top 10 matches with the idea we'd be able to
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layer them over to to help us hone in [Music] they were able to track that down to a
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close relative which was our first major breakthrough in leading the case [Applause]
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[Music] he contacted the fbi in missouri and they go interview this person and just
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ask him voluntarily you know hey we we'd like to rule you out as a suspect in a
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case that happened back in 1974 and he was cooperative one thing that's helpful with that was we're then able
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with his consent to use his dna to see how closely or distantly he is related to the suspect and so that narrowed the
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pool uh even further with his dna and that's where we started to focus on uh
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richard william davis as really a a potential suspect in this case after all these years after all these
00:31:07
leads do the bloodline detectives finally have the killer of five-year-old siobhan mcginnis we find out next
00:31:18
[Music] september 2020 the missoula cold case team and the fbi identified richard
00:31:32
william davis as the likely suspect in the murder of five-year-old siobhan mcginnis back in 1974
00:31:41
investigators using a forensic technique called genetic genealogy to match the suspect to the killing
00:31:48
and now the bloodline detectives begin to realize little siobhan may not be richard william davis's only victim
00:32:00
the genetic markers were pretty clearly pointing at richard william davis but we
00:32:04
looked at his geography and he did not have any geographical connection to missoula
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investigators know the attack on siobhan is not likely to be richard william davis's only crime
00:32:19
we identified richard and then built back a timeline the best we could to try to determine
00:32:24
where he'd been where he'd been living where he'd been working cars that he had
00:32:30
people he associated with and in in so doing potentially linking him to other crimes
00:32:39
certainly of a concern was that he was working in these different jobs where he did have access to
00:32:44
vulnerable populations um the little rock school of the deaf and blind particular
00:32:50
you know certainly that would be a vulnerable population he worked in ministries with
00:32:56
disadvantaged people who were down on their luck worked with youth so he certainly had
00:33:03
various access to to kids and and vulnerable adults even a couple red flags that popped up in
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richard william davis's background the first of which was an instant an incident in 1973 when he was in bath new
00:33:20
york in june 1973 there was a physical police log where a woman had come in in june of
00:33:27
1973 saying that her daughter her eight-year-old daughter had been walking through town through bath on the way to
00:33:33
the store and a man parked in a truck had tried to lure her into the truck to come into the truck and you know give
00:33:40
her a ride home give her candy whatever it was he was trying to lure her in and so the woman brought her out of the
00:33:45
police department and said that guy is still parked there he's parked in front
00:33:49
of hatfields um and so the police log says i went down i got this guy i asked him to come
00:33:54
to police station so we could clear this up he came in and it was richard william
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davis what was really scary i guess is his statement to the police was there was nothing untoward
00:34:07
about what he was doing he it was hot he was offering he arrived and he often offered children rides home
00:34:16
and that was chilling investigators decide to speak with davis's family to learn more about him
00:34:25
and to see if he could have been in missoula at the time siobhan was murdered at that point the decision was made that
00:34:34
somebody was going to have to go to arkansas and figure out you know if his family members would
00:34:41
cooperate richard william davis was dead he had been dead for for many years and he was not buried he
00:34:48
was cremated you have to compare the suspect's dna to the crime scene dna and it must match in
00:34:55
order for you to confirm that he is your guy in this case that wasn't an option
00:34:59
okay so the secondary option that you have is to find family members close family members of this person and you
00:35:06
can do what we would basically refer to as reverse paternity testing we prepared
00:35:11
to travel to arkansas to interview his various family members including his children his ex-wife
00:35:18
anybody we could surface um as it was it turned out richard kept to himself he didn't have many friends
00:35:24
we know he was working in in jobs where he was traveling and had the ability to pick people up in in different vehicles
00:35:31
he had a number of different vehicles over the years he would take trips randomly leaving his family at home and
00:35:38
bath and travel the country apparently looking for work at the conclusion of any interview
00:35:46
you always ask the question is there anything that i haven't asked you about
00:35:49
that you think might be relevant to this investigation because even the best interviewers and interrogators don't
00:35:54
always ask every question every correct question and so at the end of this interview i asked that question i said
00:36:00
is there anything anything else that i'm not asking you about that you think might be relevant
00:36:04
to this investigation and that's when they said well you know there is this letter that we
00:36:09
have that our you know that our father wrote years before probably a decade before um
00:36:16
her father had sent out a letter kind of a testimony he became a born-again christian and he
00:36:22
um sent out a letter and in that letter he said he had committed a number of crimes
00:36:30
he wrote it and then he photocopied it because we obtained the same letter from a couple
00:36:35
different sources and it's identical but at some point in his life he clearly
00:36:40
was reflecting on his past in his own writing he had written letters to his daughters and he had
00:36:48
written a journal at one point that his then wife had seen where he said he would never be forgiven
00:36:55
and then he also wrote some notes to his daughters that indicated that he has done many terrible things to people
00:37:02
adultery rape drug abuse and other crimes i'm too ashamed to admit and again that was one of those things
00:37:12
if you're admitting to rape um and adultery the other crimes you're too ashamed to admit
00:37:20
that was again one of those moments where like yeah it didn't say that you know he killed
00:37:26
siobhan mcginnis but it did have some admissions to some very dark uh things that he was involved with
00:37:32
and once we once we saw that letter and read that letter it was it was obvious to us that
00:37:38
he was the person that did this i felt bad for the family in this instance because you know i'm showing up
00:37:47
and i'm asking them some very very hard questions and to their credit they were
00:37:51
very cooperative and they wanted to see justice they wanted to see this horrible
00:37:56
case solved they agreed voluntarily to give their dna over even though they realized and we were very upfront with
00:38:04
them this is your father your husband your grandpa that we're focusing on and no
00:38:10
one wants to think that their family member is capable of something as horrible as what happened to siobhan
00:38:16
mcginnis but nonetheless they they cooperated and they helped and it was their dna
00:38:21
ultimately that allowed us to uh to determine that richard william davis was in fact the the perpetrator
00:38:31
investigators call siobhan's family with the news my father was just so amazed that it had
00:38:37
been solved he just it was just so unbelievable to finally see a photo of the person that took your child away
00:38:49
and just for him to know that it was nobody in the community not one of a friend of a friend of a friend or
00:38:56
somebody that lived in the neighborhood just to know just to actually physically
00:39:01
lay eyes on an image of the person you know somehow even despite the fact that he will never face justice
00:39:10
there's so much peace and just knowing what happened you know it definitely tore
00:39:21
a lot of people apart for years richard william davis would never have been identified
00:39:29
but for forensic genetic genealogy the fact that we can bring closure to cases like siobhan's
00:39:38
is so important and to also shine a light on richard davis he may have committed other crimes
00:39:46
and if we could solve other unsolved cases because of the work that was done on this case you know i think that that's
00:39:52
icing on the cake of obviously a difficult situation javon mcginnis didn't get to live the
00:39:58
rest of her life she didn't have the ability to be free that was taken from her and to know that we got to the end
00:40:03
of that and we figured out who did it and although he wasn't able to be held
00:40:07
accountable it still feels good to know that you can bring justice and closure to a family like that
00:40:14
closure we hear that word all the time especially when we talk about these horrific and unsolved crimes but what
00:40:22
does closure really mean for the family of siobhan mcginnis it means the riddle of who would be so
00:40:30
cruel to such a beautiful wonderful child is solved to the bloodline detectives it
00:40:37
means their unrelenting efforts and their science can be used again and again to help solve the unsolvable
00:40:47
crimes most of all closure in this case could simply mean the memory of the little girl with the
00:40:55
big smile stays alive on a cold montana day i'm nancy grace thanks for being with us on bloodline
00:41:05
detectives [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

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  • 90
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  • 85
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Episode Highlights

  • The Disappearance of Siobhan McGinnis
    Five-year-old Siobhan McGinnis goes missing in Missoula, Montana, sparking a frantic search.
    “It's every parent's worst nightmare.”
    @ 00m 24s
    June 01, 2022
  • A Heartbreaking Discovery
    Two days after her disappearance, Siobhan's body is found, shocking the community.
    “Her little body is found violated, left in the snow.”
    @ 00m 36s
    June 01, 2022
  • The Heartbreaking Case of Siobhan McGinnis
    The investigation into the tragic murder of five-year-old Siobhan McGinnis reveals the emotional toll on those involved.
    “It's every parent's worst nightmare what happened to Siobhan McGinnis.”
    @ 24m 00s
    June 01, 2022
  • Breakthrough in Cold Case
    In September 2020, investigators identified Richard William Davis as the likely suspect in Siobhan's murder.
    “After all these years, do the bloodline detectives finally have the killer?”
    @ 31m 10s
    June 01, 2022

Episode Quotes

  • It's every parent's worst nightmare.
    Bloodline Detectives - Season 2, Episode 7 - The Murder of Siobhan McGuiness - Full Episode
  • Her little body is found violated, left in the snow.
    Bloodline Detectives - Season 2, Episode 7 - The Murder of Siobhan McGuiness - Full Episode
  • I can't imagine hearing those words.
    Bloodline Detectives - Season 2, Episode 7 - The Murder of Siobhan McGuiness - Full Episode
  • It's every parent's worst nightmare what happened to Siobhan McGinnis.
    Bloodline Detectives - Season 2, Episode 7 - The Murder of Siobhan McGuiness - Full Episode

Key Moments

  • Child Missing00:18
  • Community Shock00:42
  • Investigation Launched00:55
  • Cold Case Team01:19
  • Heartbreaking Discovery24:00
  • Funding Challenges25:20
  • DNA Breakthrough29:23
  • Closure for the Family40:03

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