Transcript
A (0:00)
When you run a business, there are a lot of boxes to check.
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Let's see, Payroll, Check. Inventory, Check Insurance. Ugh.
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Well, good things. Simply Business makes getting small business insurance fast and easy. Just answer a few questions, review your quotes and get covered in under 10 minutes. All online. It's that simple. Check insurance off your list@simplybusiness.com There's a.
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Fire inside you you can't ignore. Stand still. Not a chance. You're a lifelong learner who's come this far. Now we are here to help to help you keep going further. Capella University what can't you do? Visit capella.edu to learn more.
D (0:38)
A heavy breather on the line? Or maybe a hang up phone call? A cold letter mailed to taunt police or a victim's family? A mean spirited email meant to inflict pain on its recipient. What do all these things have in common? They're all various modes of communication connected to shocking crimes going back decades. I'm Mike Morford, host of the podcast Killer Communications, and in every episode I tell the story of a case involving some form of sinister contact, whether it's to a victim, their family, police, or the press. For the senders of these communications, it's bold and brazen. For the recipients, it can be frightening or downright terrifying, and you won't believe just how often it happens. Check out Killer Communications right now, everywhere you listen to podcasts and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.
B (1:27)
You're listening to dnaid, brought to you by Abject 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, Citizen Detective, and Campus Killings. 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. On February 16, 1993, a man was out for a walk at tucked away Trinidad Head beach in Trinidad Harbor, Humboldt County, California. The small beach is nestled among rocky promontories and has a bit of a wild feel with large rocks jutting from the water, untamed seagrass surrounding the small semicircle of tan sand, and a rustic pier extending into the shallow water. The walking man saw something on the ground at the shoreline that stood out. Picking it up, he noted that it very much looked like the top of a human skull, and that's exactly what it was. The man turned the piece of skull into the Fortuna, California Police Department, who in turn handed it over to the Humboldt County Sheriff's office. It was 1993, still early in the DNA era. But even though the skull fragment did not include any teeth, within a short time an STR DNA sample was obtained from the skull. The profile was entered into both the California Missing Person DNA Index and the National Unidentified Person DNA Index, but no match was made. Of course, given that the Humboldt authorities had no idea who the piece of bone belonged to other than the DNA extraction and entry that told them the bone belonged to a woman, there was not much they could do to identify its owner. They checked missing persons reports from the area, but none panned out. Eventually, the bone was shelved and was forgotten for 31 years. In 2013, Humboldt county elected a U.S. congressman to represent that district who was committed to clearing the county's unidentified human remains cases. Federal funding was obtained by Representative Jared huffman and in 2024 the Trinidad head skull segment was submitted to Othram Labs in Texas to see if an IGG analysis was feasible. OTHRAM was able to develop a SNP profile from the bone and began the genealogy analysis. The top match in the open source databases was a male who shared 290 centimorgans of DNA with the skull owner. I was told that the Otham report named this top match and stated they believed his ancestry intersected with the DOES at the third great grandparent level. The report also named a woman who might be a daughter to the DOE Cold case Detective Mike Fridley of the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office called the top match hoping to fill out his tree. But his messages were not returned. It's unclear how this came about, but then Detective Fridley got a call from a woman with the initials K.A. she said my mom was murdered in 1987 and not all of her was found at that time. KA believed the piece of skull belonged to her mother, Kay Adams Medine. Kay willingly gave a DNA sample for a direct comparison to the DNA from the skull and the California Department of Justice did the comparison testing. The results showed that KA indeed shared an amount of DNA with the DOE consistent with a parent child relationship. Who was Kay Medine? Humboldt investigators only had to look at the unsolved case files from nearby counties to find out. Kay Josephine Weber was born on October 1, 1938 in North Dakota to father Arthur John Valentine Weber and mother Grace Ellen Latshaw Weber. I found a photo for her from Moorhead State College in Morehead, Minnesota dated 1959. When she was a junior, Kay graduated and took a job teaching second grade at Clara Barton School. She married Navy vet Edwin George Randall in November 1959 in North Dakota. Their daughter K A, was born in Minnesota and their son SD soon joined the family which lived in Moorhead. This marriage ended and Kay married Phillips Stiles in September 1970 in Los Angeles. They divorced in December 1973. I could find nothing about this next marriage, but Kay married a man named Adams and took his last name. This marriage didn't last either, and Kay Married again on November 1, 1984 in Trinity County, California. This time her husband was Nicholas Medine, five years her junior. The couple lived in the tiny several hundred person town of Highampum, 300 miles north of San Francisco. Kay continued her career as a schoolteacher and she looked the part with her warm smile and somewhat prim hairstyle, complete with headband. She taught at Highampum Grammar School and also managed a childcare program. She ran for a school board in 1985 in Higham Pum. But there was a lot of competition and I don't know whether she was elected, although I didn't see her name in the paper again until the coverage of her missing persons case. Kay was 49 years old when she vanished in August 1987. She was living in Southwest High Ampalm with her husband, Nick Medine. His story was as follows. He was out of town on a prolonged business trip to the coast. He last saw his wife on the day he left, Monday, July 20, 1987. That day he saw Kay in the morning and then he went to run an errand in Hayfork. He came back to pick up their dog to bring him along on his trip to the coast and Kay wasn't home. Then he left for 11 days. When he got home on Friday, July 31, he reported to police his wife was gone. The house was empty. Since he was a member of the local search and rescue squad, he told detectives he searched for his wife on his own, thinking she must have gone out for a hike. According to Nick, Kay was an avid hiker and loved to hike the hills near their home. But he didn't find her. So on Monday, August 3rd, Nick filed a missing persons report that initiated a large scale search for the missing teacher by the Trinity County Sheriff's Office. That week, Trinity county authorities organized searches using Trinity county search and rescue teams, search dogs and a California Highway Patrol chopper. The police let the dogs take the lead, hoping they would track Kaye's scent from the house into the terrain. Where they thought she'd likely gone. One dog caught a scent and ran down the long dirt driveway from the house but then lost the trail in a culvert. After that, the searchers initiated a grid search of the property and surrounding areas. Sheriff Paul Schmidt told the Record searchlight that nearly 100 volunteer searchers had looked for Kay for several days alongside sheriff's office personnel. The area around the house was hilly and wooded, brushy, rocky and steep and the terrain described as rugged. To set the scene, the rustic home without electricity or a phone was past the old Hyampum mill. The three quarter mile long driveway ran uphill and was so steep it required four wheel drive to navigate it. There was a large ridge behind the property and a creek running through a crevasse with very steep sides. The sheriff's mountain search and rescue team and the mounted sheriff's posse and other volunteer riders came in on horseb to aid the effort. U.S. forest Service personnel joined in and volunteers that included explorer Scouts and others from High and Pump, Hayfork and Weaverville eagerly joined the cause as well. The community was heavily involved with local merchants providing food and water for the searchers and small planes piloted by citizen pilots transporting people and supplies between Weaverville and Higham Pum. The surge was so all encompassing and so many involved that a local, Pat Garrett, wrote a letter to the Trinity Journal praising the massive effort as, quote, a thing of beauty, compassion, hope, perseverance and dedication. End quote. There was one worrisome moment when a tipster called in a shallow grave in Peanut, but the resident of the grave was a cat, not Kay. An exhaustive search turned up nothing. By Midnight on Thursday, August 7, it was called off. Sheriff Schmidt said, we don't have any real direction. Well, that's not good. Trinity county deputies searched the Medine home. They found it very concerning that although nothing seemed amiss, Kay left behind all her things, including, including her purse, eyeglasses, hiking pack and car. Trinity County Sheriff Schmidt said the fact that she didn't take personal belongings like her purse and glasses leads me to believe she had every intention of coming home. They knew Kay had vanished before July 24. That day there was a massive rainstorm in the area and quote, everything was water spotted and it appeared there was no activity around the home since the rain. End quote. That from the Trinity Journal. Trinity County Detective sergeant Dave Lafroncini said, quote, there was always the possibility that she left without telling anybody, but it didn't seem likely, especially without these crucial personal items. Kay could not just walk away from her home. The couple lived in a remote area that required a vehicle to access. The whole thing was odd and suspicious. DNA ID Listeners we all know Father's Day is coming up, and let's face it, it's exhausting trying to come up with the latest gadget or novelty gift that will be put aside and forgotten. How about something the dad in your life will actually use? That's where Masterclass comes in. Not to be sexist, but we all know what dad's like. Manly stuff. 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