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- [00:00]
Kiana
I'm Kiana and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything. Every day I'm thinking about some other new business, but Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like I can't stop. I'm addicted.
- [00:26]
Jessica Betancourt
Start your free trial@shopify.com hey campers, it's Jan from Toyota.
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Jan from Toyota
This summer we're headed to Camp Toyota and the fun starts now. We're kicking things off by kicking up mud. Jump in campers. We're going off roading in a 4Runner. Next we're heading to the hot springs in Arav 4 and finally, park your Tundras and Tacomas around the campfire because we're roasting marshmallows. There's summer start here.
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Toyota Dealer Announcement
Dealer inventory may vary so your participating Toyota dealer for details event hands June
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Libsyn Ads Host
1st Toyota let's go places.
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DNAID Podcast Announcer
You're listening to DNAID brought to you by Abjek Entertainment. Be sure to check out some of the other great true crime podcasts from this network, including the Murder in My Family, Missing Persons, Scene of the Crime, Zodiac Speaking Beyond Bizarre True Crime, Campus Killings, Below the Surface, and Killer Communications. All of these podcasts are available for you to binge on right now. Wherever you listen to podcasts. Subscribe where you're listening to this podcast so you don't miss an episode.
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Jan from Toyota
Sa.
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Jessica Betancourt
On September 8, 1992, a north Houston resident was walking the neighborhood looking for discarded items of value. This man often walked through an empty lot in the 500 block of West Rittenhouse Road between I45 and Stubner Airline Road. At the time, this lot was an overgrown, weedy area with trash, debris and random items strewn about among the tall grasses. The man often found things dumped in the lot that he could make use of, but not today. This time, the scrounging resident found a body. Houston PD responded to the empty lot and discovered the body of what appeared to be a woman. She was significantly decomposed. The body could not be seen from the street despite the fact that she was technically in a residential area. It appeared she'd been in the overgrown lot for months, obscured by the growth, and it seemed likely that someone had put her there. The body was removed to the medical examiner's office where an autopsy was done. The deceased woman was wearing jeans, blue bikini style underwear, and a Pink bra. On her finger was what appeared to be a silver ring set with a reddish purple stone. She had no identification on her and nothing of evidentiary use was found near the body either. The pathologist noted that the woman was a 5 foot 1 inch tall female who was listed as white on the death report. She had 8 inch long brown hair still attached to her scalp. The body did have some unique characteristics. She suffered from scoliosis with notable curvature of her lower spine. She also had a temporary bridge supporting artificial upper teeth. Despite the false teeth and bridge, the Jane Doe was believed to be only 20 to 30 years old. The cause of her death was homicide by blunt force trauma. The injuries described in the autopsy report were later described by a detective to have likely been very painful. It was clear this woman had suffered. As for her date of death, based on decomposition, the Jane Doe was estimated to have been lying in the field for several months at least. The Houston PD classified the case as a homicide and began an investigation. Of course, without knowing the identity of a victim, it is very difficult to solve his or her murder. The man who found the body was interviewed extensively. Residents of the area surrounding the dump site were canvassed to see if they heard or saw anything similar. Crimes were reviewed and sex offenders interviewed. All of this went nowhere. So after no one claimed Jane Doe's body for a significant period of time, she was buried in the Harris County Cemetery. The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences retained a jawbone from Jane Doe for future identification purposes. But then she was placed in a pauper's grave and was given a simple concrete grave marker that read in very stock font unknown ml926618 unknown October 8, 1992, which I assume was the date on which she was buried. In later years, detectives revisited the case and Jane Doe was entered into NCIC and was also entered into Namus as up 2655. But no one who was missing her knew to look for her in that publicly accessible database. There were several rule outs in NAMUS but no positive hits. Jane Doe remained unnamed. In 2024, Katie Thomas, a co founder of Moxie Forensic Investigations, was browsing NAMUS and came across the unsolved Jane Doe case in her home state of Texas. She reached out to the Harris County Institute of Forensic Science and offered the services of Moxie on Jane Doe's case. A little background on Moxie the nonprofit organization was founded in June 2022 by Katie Thomas, a genealogist whose father was a police officer, in order to apply genealogy to cold case murders and Doe identifications. Her co founders were Olivia McCarter and Casey Connolly. You might recall I discussed some of the work done by Moxie when I covered the doe case of Ada Fritz. Moxie draws on a stable of 40 volunteers nationwide to assist in its cases. It raises funds for DNA testing, upload fees, and administrative costs through public donations by featuring unsolved cases on its website. The average case costs about $7,500. You can directly impact the solvability of specific cases by donating@moxieforensics.com donate so Moxie started a fundraising campaign for the Jane Doe case and it was fully funded between donations from individuals and a donation from Criminal Coffee Company, an organization started by podcasters Stephanie Hurlo and Derek Levasseur to provide funding. And In IGG investigations, Dr. Julie Fleischman at the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences sent Jane Doe's jawbone to Intermountain Forensics, who after some time was able to obtain a SNP profile for Jane Doe. This allowed the team of genealogists at Moxie to get to work. The genealogy work officially began on December 5, 2024. Eight team members joined forces to work on the Houston Jane Doe case. When they uploaded the SNP to GEDmatch, they found one very promising match who shared 185 centimorgans of DNA with the Jane Doe. This top match, combined with significantly lesser matches, permitted the genealogist to build out trees for the matches and detect seven common ancestor couples. The genealogists immediately knew some information did not add up. They had been told that the Jane Doe was Caucasian, but all the matches on both sides of her tree were Hispanic. And indeed it did turn out that the original determination that Jane Doe was white was incorrect. Nonetheless, there were ample existing records of her lineage and it turned out she and many of her family were born in the US as they built out the trees of the topmatch and the lesser matches and did descendancy work from the seven couples that had intersecting trees, they found one branch of the family that was rooted in Harris County, Texas Bingo. On January 15, 2025, the group provided the name of their candidate to the Harris County Institute of Forensic Science. The Harris county authorities contacted two suspected sisters of Jane Doe for confirmation. I don't know if they had already tested and just had to upload to facilitate kinship analysis or whether buccal swabs were collected and tested. Either way, the results were in and the public announcement came in September 2025. Jane Doe was Joanne Zamora missing since 1992. The top match was her second cousin. They shared great grandparents. I've always been into health and fitness, running or working out as part of my daily routine. But as I've aged, I've noticed my body takes longer to recover. I wanted to find out why. What surprised me is how much of what you feel during and after training actually starts in your blood with markers most people never think to check. It's important to understand how markers in your blood can impact how you feel during and after each workout, things like magnesium, iron, hormone levels. I wanted to get a handle on what my markers were and what they meant for my daily workouts as well as my everyday health and fitness level. That's why I use function. Function provides me with 160 or more lab tests a year so I can see exactly what's going on, not guess at it. If something's working against my training, I want to know that's what actually taking care of your performance looks like. Function measures markers in my blood I didn't even know mattered. And now that I have a more comprehensive view of my health, I can make informed decisions. And it's not just about working out. It's about overall health and taking control of my health. Function is beneficial for all adults 18 and over, all genders and all stages of a health journey. I use function and you should too. Check your health the way I do 160 plus lab tests a year for $365 plus the ability to dive deeper into your results through functions connections to platforms you already use like ChatGPT and Claude. Join@functionhealth.com DNAID or use gift code DNAID25 for a $25 credit towards your membership. Functionhealth.com DNAID Ryan Reynolds here from Mint
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Jessica Betancourt
Joanne Zamora was born on August 27, 1963, in Arkansas. Her mother was named Juanita, and I don't know the name of her father. She was one of eight siblings. Joanne was raised in Houston, Texas, where her branch of the family had been settled for more than one generation. Some of the physical aspects of the Jane Doe were in fact consistent with what the family knew about Joanne. Apparently, her mother's family had a genetic disorder that impacted the teeth, explaining the bridge that the young woman had implanted. But the family knew nothing about the scoliosis, and the death report described Jane Doe as white and 5 foot 1. Joanne was Hispanic and 5 foot 5. The inconsistencies are a good reminder that we should not rely on all the details in any given Doe case to be 100% accurate. Significant decomposition can throw off measurements, conclusions about ethnicity can be wrong, and overall we have to take everything in these cases with a grain of salt. Joanne's family has described her in various media articles as fun, outgoing, joyful and loving. I don't know anything about her early life, but in the second half of the 80s and into the early 1990s, Joanne was living in Texas and had six children with her intimate partner. By 1992, though, she was separated from the children's father and she was not living with the kids. They were in Austin with relatives, and Joanne was living in Houston, where she'd grown up. She did not have custody, but she called her children often and was permitted supervised visits. One of Joanne's now adult children, Spencer Zamora Graham, has been the unofficial designee of her siblings to talk publicly about their mom's case. Spencer and the rest of her siblings were of course, unaware that there was any work going on on their mother's case because no one knew that the Jane Doe was their mother. Joanne had disappeared in 1992 when Spencer, the second youngest, was just two years old. the time, Spencer and her siblings were living with their paternal grandmother in Austin. Joanne, 28 years old at the time, called and told her kids she would come visit them for Easter, and she was very excited to see them. But she never showed and they never heard from her again. Eventually, the children were told what happened after Joanne failed to show for Easter. A man Joanne was seeing, a man whose name no one recalls, called the house and spoke to the grandmother, saying he was calling to find out Whether Joanne had made it okay on the bus. He said she'd taken her things, and he gave her his camcorder and some bus money, and she went to visit the kids. When Joanne never materialized, the children were basically told, we don't know where your mom is or why she didn't show. And conclusions were drawn that she had split. The kids grew up thinking Joanne had opted for a new life, one that did not involve six children, and simply left. But she hadn't. She hadn't left them at all. Someone took her and killed her. Joanne's children were contacted once the identification of Joanne was confirmed. By comparison to their aunt's DNA, they were literally blindsided by the news that their mom had been found, she was deceased and her case was being worked as a homicide. Spencer said in an interview. It makes me feel sad that I believed what I believed for my entire life. A press conference was held by Houston PD announcing the reopening of the homicide investigation. Now that Joanne Zamora had been identified, Spencer told the media in a statement, quote, words cannot fully express what it means to finally have answers after more than 32 years. While the outcome is not what we hoped for, we are deeply grateful to those who cared enough to seek the truth about a stranger who had no name and stood alone for so long. At the press conference, Sergeant Richard Rodriguez, supervisor of Houston PD's Homicide Cold Case unit, said the biggest obstacle to the investigation into the murder had been getting the 1992 victim identified. Quote, now that we've identified her, the first thing we're going to do is recreate what we call victimology. Rodriguez said. We need to know who she is, what she was doing, when she was doing it, who she was with, what association she had. That's one of the biggest things we have to do right now in order to rebuild her life back then, end quote. Rodriguez explained that this process meant conducting interviews, talking to Joanne's relatives, children and known associates, trying to track her movements, and creating a timeline of her last days and weeks. He had spoken to sisters of Joanne and learned some information and had also tracked down reports relating to law enforcement contact Joanne had in life. He said, quote, she was not a saint. You can look up her criminal history, but, you know, just because you have a certain lifestyle doesn't mean you need to end up this way, end quote. I did look up Joanne's criminal record and noted that a charge of theft by check and an October 1991 arrest for prostitution. Of course, this latter charge could open the floodgates to the Number of suspects out there. Police have not stated that Joanne was definitively killed by a male. I'm not even sure that they know this for sure, but when I hear the cause of death was blunt force trauma, that's where my mind goes. At the press conference, a reporter asked if the man whom Joanne was seeing, the unknown man who called the house and said she had left, was a suspect. Rodriguez said if he knew the man's name, he wouldn't reveal it. But he said dryly, everyone is a suspect. Nobody's a suspect. He continued, obviously one thing that does stand out, at least for me, is the fact that it wasn't a missing persons report put out on her. That, to me, is very suspicious. That leads me to believe the person who was with her didn't want anybody to know what happened, end quote. I would venture to say that the person who called the house and separated himself from Joanne by alleging that she left on her own is where the investigation should start. Joanne's daughter Spencer said that now that she's an adult and has the capacity to question things, she wonders whether the mysterious boyfriend did indeed have something to do with her mother's murder. Unfortunately, no one seems to know who he was. Spencer told ABC13, quote, I finally have some answers I never thought I would have, but they just lead to more questions, end quote. And that raises one of the biggest questions in this case. Why wasn't a missing persons report filed for Joanne? It seems likely to me that the children's paternal grandmother and their father, who both knew about various court orders and other obstacles preventing joanne from having custody of her kids, assumed that joanne had indeed left, abdicating her responsibility for the kids. But what about Joanne's blood relatives? Her mother lived in Houston. In fact, Joanne's body, then a Jane Doe, was found two miles from the home where her mother lived. She also had a lot of other family in houston. Why did no one report her missing? If her family had done so, the finding of a Jane Doe two miles from her family home would almost certainly have resulted in her swift identification. Even though the death report stated that she was caucasian, presumably her family would have recognized her clothing ring, dental work, and Joanne would have been named within days of being located. It's also an unfortunate fact that it does not seem the finding of the Jane Doe received any. Any coverage in the local media at the time, at least none that moxie or I have been able to find. Perhaps if the murder and dumping of a young woman had been deemed newsworthy, her family would have heard the story and reached out to law enforcement. The press conference concluded with the Houston police stating that Joanne Zamora's death remains under investigation by their agency and asking the public for tips. Criminal Coffee Company has offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the person or persons responsible for Joanne's death. Speaking of Derek Levasseur years ago, Joanne's daughter Spencer, a Big Brother fan, watched him win the reality TV show. He then went on to police work and then podcasting at Crime Weekly and founded Criminal Coffee Co to fund IGG investigations. Now Spencer appeared on his show to talk about her mom's case. On it and other shows, she has discussed the emotional rollercoaster her family has been on of late, from believing for decades that her mother had abandoned them as children to learning that she was instead a murder victim who had been prevented from being a mother to them by a violent homicide. I can only imagine it's a wild swing between being devastated by the news of your mom's slaying and the guilty feeling of relief that your mother did not abandon you at all. Spencer has said there are a lot of gaps in Joanne's story that the family is hopeful investigators can fill in, not least of all who took her life. Spencer talked at length with Click2Houston, which reported, quote, visiting her mother's grave for the first time brought mixed emotions for Spencer, but she is hoping for justice. I finally got to say, we know where you are now, but at the same time, it was super heartbreaking. Spencer said it's unfair that somebody decided to do this to her, helpless to do much else. Spencer has made it her mission to speak publicly to try to bring awareness to her mother's case. And she has commissioned a new headstone for her mom, one that will finally bear her name. Of course, I wondered whether there was offender DNA in this case that might be used to identify Joanne's killer. At the press conference, Sgt. Richard Rodriguez said, quote, she was in a decomposed state. So when victims are found like that, DNA is kind of hard to get because the victim's DNA consumes any physical evidence that's on the body itself. End quote. I couldn't get anyone at the Houston PD to talk to me about this case. The detective who was working it retired just weeks ago, and my request to be connected to the newly assigned detective went unanswered. But I fear that there is no offender DNA and Joanne's case will remain unsolved forever. I hope I'm wrong for the sake of her family who has lived without answers long enough. If you have information regarding the death of Joanne Zamora, contact the Houston Police Department Crime stoppers and at 713-222-8477. Thanks for listening to this episode of DNAID. Before you leave, please let me tell you about some important things related to the show. If you'd like to support this podcast
- [20:55]
Jessica Betancourt (Podcast Host)
and in the process get access to early and ad free episodes as well as bonus content like crime scene photos, you can sign up for a Patreon subscription for only $5 a month by heading over to patreon.com dnaid of course, you're welcome to contribute more than $5 a month. We rely on Patreon funds to pay for the original source materials I use
- [21:18]
Jessica Betancourt
to research each episode.
- [21:20]
Jessica Betancourt (Podcast Host)
If Patreon isn't your thing, you can also show your support with an AbJack Insider subscription through Apple Podcasts. It costs just $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. Your Abjak Insider subscription will give you the same benefits for not only dnaid but for all of the shows on the ABJAC Network like Killer Communications and Campus Killings. Head over to Apple Podcasts and find the DNAID page or look for the
- [21:47]
Jessica Betancourt
ABJAC Network to get started. If you're on social media, we'd love to interact with you there.
- [21:52]
Jessica Betancourt (Podcast Host)
DNAID is on every major social media platform. Search your favorite platforms for DNAID podcasts to find us. We also have a YouTube channel and our website is DNAIDpodcast.com. you can find links to all of these anytime in our show notes. If you need to reach the show, contact us by emailing dnaidpodcastmail.com.
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Jessica Betancourt
finally, if you want to pick up
- [22:17]
Jessica Betancourt (Podcast Host)
some fun DNA ID merch and represent the show, visit the store at www.customedgirl.com S S DNAID podcast DNAID is researched, written and hosted by me, Jessica Betancourt. It's produced by me and Mike Morford of abjack Entertainment Music by Connor Betancourt.
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- [23:20]
Toyota Dealer Announcement
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