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I'm Kiana and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back.
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I can create a site with my eyes closed.
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Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know,
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and it thinks about the customer more than anything.
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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.
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I'm addicted.
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Start your free trial@shopify.com you're listening to DNAID, brought to you by Abjack 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. On July 15, 1980, irrigation workers were working in an almond orchard at Merced Avenue and Zuerker Road near Delano in Kern County, California. Walking between the neatly planted shady rows of almond trees, they found a woman's body lying right out in the open, 13 almond tree rows from the roadway on a muddy tract between the rows. The workers called the local authorities, the Kern County Sheriff's Office. When deputies arrived, they found a woman lying on the ground with visible stab wounds in her chest. She was clothed, wearing a pink blouse, blue denim pants, size 28 blue socks and size 6 white Keds style tennis shoes. Tire tracks were found 5ft from the body, but no footprints. The murder victim had been driven to the almond Orchard after being killed elsewhere. A Michelo beer bottle on the ground was collected in case the killer had discarded it. An autopsy determined that the woman, who had no identification on her and no prints on record, had been stabbed 29 times in the chest and upper abdomen. She had nine defensive wounds to her lower arms and hands, indicating she fought back and had thrown her arms up to protect her face. She also had human tissue under her nails and she had been raped. Jane Doe had been dead for about a day when she was found, and she had not been killed in the Almond Orchard. The forensic pathologist seeking clues to Jane Doe's identity concluded that she had Hispanic or Native American heritage. She was 30 to 35 years old, 5 foot 4 inches tall and 115 pounds. She had brown eyes and black or dark brown hair with a few grays more distinctive features were that she had previously been pregnant with at least one live birth. She was missing all her top teeth, although the bottom teeth were well cared for and one of her legs had surgical rods and pins inserted. She had a 4 inch scar on her abdomen and she was clean and well nourished. However, her blood alcohol content was 0.30, consistent with intoxication. This was someone a family must be looking for. Kern County Jane Doe also had some very distinctive tattoos. This was somewhat unusual. At the time, professional tattoos on women were much less common than they are now. One tattoo had the name Shirley inside a heart with the words Love you over it. Another said Seattle in artistic script. On her other arm a rose tattoo was encircled by the words Mother, I love you. The Kern county investigators tried to follow up on the tattoo lead. They brought photographs of the tats to tattoo artists in Bakersfield and Los Angeles, but no one knew who had done them. According to King 5, several of the LA based tattoo artists told the investigators that the artistry did not reflect work commonly done in la. Investigators contacted other agencies, including in Washington because of the Seattle tattoo, but no missing persons report matched up. I'm not sure how investigators got this lead, but they spoke with two women at a bar in Delano, California who said they recognized Kern County Jane Doe's tattoos. They thought her name might be Rebecca Ochoa or Becky and she was possibly a migrant worker who had done jail time. Investigators could find no records of this person even though they sent that name and Jane Doe's fingerprints to the states of Washington and Nevada in case she was a seasonal harvest worker moving from state to state. Nothing panned out. The Kern County Sheriff Coroner Division set up a tip line and circulated a lifelike composite drawing of Kern County Jane Doe based on photos of her taken at her autopsy. She was featured in the media in the Kern county area, but no one ever called in any concrete information. Within months of her discovery, Kern County Jane Doe was buried in a California cemetery under the name Kern County Jane doe. And then three days later, it happened again. On July 18, 1980, at 12:40pm Ventura County Sheriff's deputies responded to a report called in by school maintenance workers at Westlake High School in the hills of Thousand Oaks, 40 miles from LA, in Ventura County, California. The maintenance workers arriving at the school found the body of a young, partially clothed woman lying on a dirt hillside abutting the parking lot above the Westlake High School football field. The woman appeared to be in her 20s and she had blood all over her, matting her hair and Staining her white T shirt and red corduroys. Stab wounds riddled her body. The woman was barefoot, but a pair of black platform sandals had been thrown into the brush near the body. Drag marks in blood told investigators that the woman had been dragged, already bleeding from a vehicle to her resting spot. An autopsy on the dead woman discovered no identification on her. Her cause of death was exsanguination from 16 stab wounds in her chest, stomach, buttocks and abdomen. She also had defensive wounds on her arms and hands, and fingernail scrapings showed evidence of human tissue. Marks on her neck showed she had also been choked. And there was evidence of rape. Horrifyingly, Jane Doe was five months pregnant with a baby boy when she was killed, just hours before she was found. The fetus did not survive. Indicators on her body were that she had also been pregnant in the past. Ventura County Jane Doe's clothing was inventoried. She wore a white T shirt, black bra, red corduroy pants and white underwear. I'm not sure why all the descriptors are that she was partially clad, unless they're referring to her being barefoot. A forensic anthropologist examined Jane Doe to gather any identifying information. She was Hispanic and or Native American, quite young at 15 to 25 years old, 5 foot 2 and just 110 to 115 pounds. She had brown eyes, dark brown, shoulder length hair with bleached tips, shaved eyebrows with penciled brows above and some small moles on her face. Her fingernails were red and extensive dental work, her healthy and nourished physique, and evidence of prenatal care of her baby all pointed to Jane Doe being someone loved and cared for. Yet investigators could not identify her. No missing persons reports matched her description, and she had no prints on file. Circulated sketches and media appeals by the Ventura County Sheriff's Office, Special Services Division and Major Crimes Bureau went nowhere. A month after she was found, Ventura County Jane Doe was buried at Conejo Mountain Memorial park in Camarillo. The separate cases of Ventura County Jane Doe and Kern County Jane Doe were dormant for decades. Although the cases were similar, no one in the disparate counties connected the two cases as the DNA era took hold. Like most agencies, the Kern County Sheriff's office and ME's office revisited some of their unidentified human remains cases and commenced DNA testing in efforts to clear some of those cases. One of those was Kern County Jane Doe. DNA testing on semen on her clothing, her fingernail scrapings, and saliva on the Michelob beer bottle found near her body was conducted in the mid 2000s. A consistent male STR DNA profile was obtained and was entered into CODIS. And in 2008, it hit to a convicted kidnapper and rapist named Wilson Tuest. Because Chouest was already in prison and they had no idea who this victim was, Kern county decided not to prosecute him. But in 2011, Ventura County DA's office cold case investigator Greg Hayes requested testing to be conducted on the pants and underwear that had been collected from the body of Ventura County Jane Doe in 1980. And indeed, a male STR DNA profile was obtained from a semen stain on her clothing and from under her nails. In 2012, the lab entered the profile into CODIS hoping for a hit. And they got one. The sample hit to the unidentified male STR DNA sample collected from Kern County Jane Doe killed just three days before Ventura County Jane Doe. The unknown male DNA profile had been found on her body, her clothing and the Michelo beer bottle located near her. Both Jane does had been killed by the same man. This made a lot of sense. Both women were petite, Hispanic or of Hispanic heritage, young and both had been stabbed to death with a similar weapon and dumped in outdoor settings without attempts to hide the bodies. The cases had a lot of parallels and indicated a possible preferential offender. With two kids in college, my husband and I are looking for any ways we can find to save money. That includes revisiting all our plans, services and subscriptions. And cutting the fat, getting rid of stuff we don't need and finding ways to pay less for things we do need. That's why I'm so thrilled to be a sponsor for Mint Mobile. I switched to Mint Mobile for my wireless service and the savings are significant. With our old service from one of the big three, we were overpaying for the exact same thing Mint offers. Mint offers premium wireless plans starting at 15 bucks a month. All plans come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Of course, I could import my own phone number and activate with ESIM in minutes and start seeing savings immediately. No long term contracts and no hassle. I switched to Mint Mobile and you should too. If you like your money. Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans@mintmobile.com dnaid that's mintmobile.com dnaid upfront payment of $45 for three months. Five gigabyte plan required equivalent to $15 a month. New customer officer for first three months only. Then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. All of a sudden, Ventura county and Kern county had connected cases and newly revived parallel homicide investigations. And in 2013 the Ventura county investigators learned that the unidentified male str DNA profile obtained from the bloody clothing of Ven Ventura County Jane Doe had hit in CODIS to a convicted offender. This was Wilson Shueest. He was serving a life sentence in California for some horrific crimes he'd committed in 1980, right after the murders of Ventura County Jane Doe and Kern County Jane Doe. Before that conviction he had done prison time for previous crimes committed in the 1970s. He was a very bad dude. The Alta Journal provided some very good coverage of Wilson Schuest. He was born in New Orleans in 1969 and was an altar boy at his Catholic school until he beat up an epileptic altar boy and was expelled. He became addicted to heroin and enlisted in the army as soon as he turned 18 but was discharged as unsuitable for service a year later. Sometime around 1971 or 1972, Shewest relocated to LA married and had a daughter named Bridget. In October of 77 he committed his first known crime. The 25 year old 5 foot 6 long haired shoest offered a 20 year old woman walking on Topanga Canyon Boulevard a ride. This from Ulta. The woman got into the car then noticed there were no door handles on the passenger side. She drove her to a bushy area in the Santa Monica mountains, kicked her in the head, strangled her to unconsciousness, raped her and left her in the dirt. He was arrested the next day in exchange for his pleading guilty to kidnapping and assault. The LA county authorities dropped the rape charge and he was sentenced to four years in prison. A probation report described him as extremely dangerous and as demonstrating no remorse. Nonetheless, he was paroled in June 1980, a month before the Ventura and Kern county bodies were discovered. End quote. All that from the Alta Journal. So Joest was on parole for the 1977 attack and was living in Limor Kings county when he killed Venterra County Jane Doe and Kern County Jane Doe in July of 1980. But that was not the end of his violent crime spree. He terrorized women in Tulare county in August and September of 1980. In August he pulled a knife on a woman in Visalia and ordered her into his vehicle. She refused and he somehow ran away with her $30 in cash and her ID from Ulta Journal quote. The next day he called her to say I got your money last night, didn't I? Next time it will be your p word. I can't say that word. She thought she saw him ride past her house on a motorcycle. A week later, Shueest forced a woman into her car at Visalia's College of the Sequoias, took her cash, bound her wrists with duct tape, and drove her into the countryside, where he raped her. End quote. Shewest was quickly apprehended for these attacks and pleaded guilty to robbery, kidnapping and rape. He was sentenced to 12 years to life with the possibility of parole. But in 2004, the parole board approved his release. Thank goodness this decision was rescinded after California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger convened a hearing and the California Supreme Court denied Schuest's appeal of the rescission. His next parole hearing would be in 2016, and parole at that time seemed likely. Now, in 2013, Wilson Shoest was linked to two murders, Ventura County Jane Doe and Kern County Jane Doe. Ventura County's Major Crimes Division DA's office investigator Steve Rhodes interviewed Shueest in prison in September 2013. Rhodes showed Shoest a photo of Ventura County Jane Doe and he denied knowing her. He was interviewed multiple times and his stories changed. Schuest at once denied knowing both does and also acknowledged possibly picking them up hitchhiking. The Ventura county authorities started to put together their case against Shoest, desperate to identify their victim. In April of 2013, the Ventura County Cold Case Task Force issued a release with a photo of Ventura County Jane Doe, seeking information from the public as to her identity. Investigator Rhodes also worked with the Kern County Sheriff's Office Homicide Unit in trying to identify Kern County Jane Doe, releasing a a composite image of her and photos of her tattoos. When both efforts failed, Rhodes put together the evidence they had against Shuest for the Doe murders and sought an arrest warrant for Shouwest from the Ventura County DA's office. The DA's office initially declined to prosecute since the Ventura victim was unknown and it seemed impossible to prove at trial that she'd been raped and killed by Shoest rather than just had sex with him incidentally and then was killed by someone else. But Rhodes persisted, showing through documented reports that Ventura County Jane Doe had seminal fluid linked to Shue through DNA pooled in her vagina, meaning she had not stood up after it was deposited and was therefore killed by the depositor. Rhodes also found a witness, which I will get into in a bit. The Ventura County DA's office greenlighted the prosecution of Wilson Shoest. Prosecutor John Barrick wanted to prevent Wilson Shoest from being paroled in 2016, so they moved forward with a rare prosecution of homicide of unknown victims. The ALTA Journal interviewed Barrack, quote, kern county didn't want to prosecute the case unless they knew the name of the victim. I was like, there's evidence. There are people. They're dead. Let's go. Victim of these horrendous murders in the last moments of their lives suffered horribly. They deserve justice, even if we don't know who they are. Shoest was arrested in prison and charged in 2015 with three counts of murder for the two does and the baby boy in Ventura County Jane Doe's womb. After Shueest's arrest was publicized, his adult daughter, Bridget took her own life by jumping off a Hollywood rooftop. Any connection is unknown. Okay, let's talk about the trial. There was, needless to say, overwhelming evidence against Shuest with his DNA found on both victims, including in their fingernail scrapings and in the form of semen. But of course, since no one knew who the victims were, the prosecutors could not tell their story, could not really humanize them to the jury. Further, there were no witnesses to showest being with either one of them. The prosecution had to be sure to tie everything definitively to Shueest with incontrovertible evidence. Because Schuest had been convicted of multiple crimes against women in the past with similar MOs, prosecutors were permitted to present witnesses to testify about these crimes. This from the Ventura County Star. Quote, three women testified about robbery, kidnappings, and rapes they had suffered at the hands of Wilson Shoe West. The victim in the September 1980 crime told jurors about being kidnapped at knifepoint as she returned to her car from a night class at College of the Sequoias in Visalia. She said she made her give him the $10 she had in her purse and then bound her hands behind her back with tape and demanded she perform sex acts on him. They drove around Tulare county, but he eventually parked in a remote area near a cornfield and forced himself on her. She said, I remember thinking, they're going to find my body in this cornfield tomorrow. She told the jurors the sexual assault in the car was brief, and she told Schouest afterward that her husband would worry if she didn't get home soon. He then drove her back to Visalia, apologized, and then let her go, she said. The August 1980 victim also said she was approached at knifepoint by Shoest while leaving a night class at the Visalia Community College. She testified she refused to get into his car when Shoest told her to do it. Then he demanded her purse, but she didn't give it to him, she said, instead giving him the $30 she had in her wallet. A couple was walking by, so the defendant fled, the September 1980 victim said. In the 1977 Los Angeles county rape case, the victim told jurors she accepted Schuest's offer for a ride up to Topanga Canyon on October 12. But when she got into his car, she noticed the handles that opened the passenger door and window were missing. She said he bound her hands with tape behind her back, and with her promise of compliance, she talked him into throwing the knife out of the car window. She said when they stopped driving, she found herself on a remote hillside and he forced her onto a blanket. She kept trying to talk him out of whatever he planned on doing, but found herself face down in the dirt, being kicked in the head, then strangled, according to her testimony. The woman said she passed out, and when she awoke, it was dark outside and she was naked from the waist down. Her purse was also gone. That from the Ventura County Star. Then the witness that Steve Rhodes had found that I mentioned earlier, testified as well after being released from prison for the 1977 crime. In the summer of 1980, Wilson Jewest was living in Kings county with a woman named Carolyn Bell and her teenage sons. He had met Carolyn through the pen pal section of a biker magazine he accessed in jail. This from the Ulta Journal, quote. Bell took her three teenage sons with her when she picked shoest up at a Reno bus station after his June 1980 parole from the California Correctional center in Susanville. When she entered an alcohol detox in July, she left the boys with him at her house in Lemore, a small, dusty city not far from Fresno. Patrick Scott Bell was 13 that summer, in his 40s, when Rhodes contacted him. He said that shewest had disappeared one night, returned the next morning and asked the older brothers to vacuum blood from the back footwell of his green Chrysler. A lot of blood, according to Scott. Shewess said he'd hit a deer and put it in his car to get it off the road. But he confided to Scott that he'd, quote, met some broad in a bar and killed her. Scott Bell testified to all this at trial. It wasn't a smoking gun, but pretty damn close. Shewett's trial wrapped up in May 2018 with a jury convicting him of the rape and murder of both Jane Does. Unfortunately, the jury was unable to convict him of the murder of Ventura County Jane Doe's baby because California law at the time 1980, required that the baby be viable outside the womb in order to order for murder charges to attach. Evidence at trial showed that Ventura County's Jane does baby was on the edge of viability. They really wanted to convict him of killing that baby, the prosecutor Barrack said. But they couldn't agree. For the two murder and rape convictions, Judge Wright sentenced Shoest to two consecutive terms of life without the possibility of parole. Your last breath is going to be taken in state prison where you deserve to be, he said. Senior Deputy District Attorney John Barrack participated in a press conference after the conviction. He said of the verdict achieved for the does, this was a long time coming. I hope that someday soon we're able to find out at least who these women were, district Attorney Eric Nazarenko later said of the unconventional conviction. Quote, unlike many murder trials where there are family members sitting in court and hearing the evidence, that didn't happen in this case because the victims identities were still unknown. Not only had the defendant taken their lives, but he had also wiped away their names, leaving family members longing and waiting for decades for answers. Yes, we secured convictions. Yes, we ensured the defendant would never walk free again. But we did not know the victims names and had no means of notifying the families to help them bring some measure of justice and closure. This guy is a true monster, ventura county undersherif Gary Pentas said succinctly, literally the day after Shuest was sentenced and started getting cozy in prison, Detective Rhodes and ADA Barrick visited him and tried to extract information about the two does he had been convicted of killing. He wasn't exactly forthcoming, but he said he thought he had picked up Kern County Jane Doe at the pub now called the Wrecking Ball on North Limoor Avenue in Limoor, where he was living with Carolyn Bell and her sons. And he thought he picked up Ventura County Jane Doe on Mooney Boulevard in Visalia where she was hitchhiking. Failing to obtain information from Schuest about who his victims were, the California authorities initiated a massive push to identify the does with help from the public. This from kget. Quote they started a missing mom hotline with this announcement. Wilson Shoest, now 66, has been convicted of two counts of murder in the brutal stabbing deaths of two young women during separate rapes in July 1980. One woman was pregnant. That's only half the mystery law enforcement needs your help to solve the other half. In the 38 years since the killings, no one has been able to identify either victim, but investigators believe one was kidnapped in Limor and one in Visalia. End quote. Working with the investigators, KGET ran a massive PSA with links to all information known about the women, and Telemundo ran it in Spanish. KGET shared it with every other station that wanted it without copyright and pledged to run it every day for a year. The PSA said in part, DNA has proved ineffective. There are no fingerprint matches. Dental records have not helped. The best efforts of two generations of detectives has not been able to bring the missing moms home. That's what prompted this crowdsourcing effort. We want you to share the stories of the missing moms on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, everywhere. Someone somewhere knows who these women were. End quote. Warning the following ZipRecruiter radio spot you are about to hear is going to be filled with F words when you're
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Additional attempts were made over the next few years to identify the does. In 2021, two images of Ventura County Jane Doe were released, one by famed forensic artist and Doe advocate Carl Kopelman and one by NCMEC based on a post embalming photo of Ventura County Jane Doe that the agency released to the public. Detective Rhodes personally pleaded with the public to call in a tip if they recognized her. In a very progressive tack, the investigators made use of the DNA profile extracted from Ventura County Jane Doe's unborn baby to try to identify his father, which they hoped would lead to his mother. And they were successful. Sort of. Genealogists from the DNA Doe project were able to use the DNA from the baby to trace it back to his father, a Honduran immigrant who was a member of a community of Central American immigrants in the Koreatown District of Los Angeles. According to K E Y T, the man agreed to take a DNA test and it confirmed that the baby was his. The man, who has not been named, was married with a daughter on the way in 1980, according to the Ulta Journal. When he was confronted with the DNA results over the phone by Detective Rhodes, he denied it all, saying he did not have an affair and did not know who Ventura County Jane doe was. When IGG hit the scene in 2018, it seemed as though this wondrous new tool might provide the answers that had been eluding the investigators trying to identify Both does since 19 in July of 2018, Kern County Coroner Dawn Ratliff acted on the suggestion of Ventura County Investigator Steve Rhodes and contacted the DNA Doe Project to request their help in identifying Kern County Jane Doe. The DDP accepted the case and Ms. Ratliff provided Brenda Smith, supervising criminalist at the Kern County Crime Lab with Kern County Jane Doe's bloody blouse, which had been sitting in evidence storage for decades. The DNA on the blouse was highly degraded since so much time had passed and the blouse was almost certainly not maintained in cold storage until recently. It required several rounds of extraction and DNA sequencing by Othram Labs and Bioinformatics by Full Genomes Corporation over a year's time to obtain a SNP profile. It was delivered to the DDP in May of 2019 and they uploaded it to GEDmatch. Back then the DDP issued progress reports on their cases. Here is their report from July of 2019. Genealogical research is ongoing. Kern County Jane doe has about 60% Native American ancestry and her DNA matches suggest recent Cree and Metis descent. Native Americans are very underrepresented in the open source DNA databases and as DNA Doe Project team leader Gina Rather noted, this case was particularly challenging because Indigenous family histories are usually relayed orally, so there is little written genealogical documentation available. So identifying Kern County Jane Doe was going to be an uphill battle even with IGG. APT News interviewed Ms. Rather after Kern County Jane Doe was identified. Quote when we first uploaded her, she had zero matches in the database, she said. In September 2019 we had a new top match of 103 centimorgans upload to GEDmatch, who turned out to be a half second cousin, meaning they shared one great grandparent. She said that once they had that lineage they found that second cousin had one indigenous great grandparent. They were able to tell she was descended from the Cree Nation in Canada and they narrowed things down further to pinpoint that Kern County Jane Doe's parents very likely hailed from the town of Meswakis in Alberta, Canada. They knew they were close, but after 2000 hours of research they had hit a brick wall. So they decided to put out a plea for information on Facebook and hope that it went viral and the right Indigenous family would see it. Here is the post from February 2020 DNA Doe Project Case Kern County Jane Doe Kern County, CA 1980 this Jane Doe needs your help for better familial matches. From the results of the genetic genealogy research, DDP has determined that Kern County Jane Doe is of Indigenous Canadian first nations ancestry. At present, her closest identified ancestor is believed to be a Cree band member who lived near Habamaw, now known as Masswaukeis in Alberta, Canada. Kern County Jane Doe also appears to have ties to Indigenous ancestors in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Canada, as well as Montana, USA. She has 5,837 matches in the GEDmatch database, of which only 1,035 or 18% are opted in to law enforcement matching and are visible to researchers. The vast majority of these matches are very distant and difficult to leverage towards identification. DNA tested Individuals with similar ancestry are encouraged to upload their raw DNA data for free to GEDMatch.com and FamilyTreeDNA and opt in to matching to assist with this identification. Please share this post among your communities so as a result of this Facebook post, the DDP got more than just some people who shared Centimorgans with Kern County Jane Doe. They got her niece. In 2020, a woman named Violet Sousay saw the post on Facebook seeking information on a Ms. Woman that the DNA Doe Project had tracked back to Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba as well as Montana. I'm like, oh my God, that's her, Suse told the CBC. Having spent 40 years looking for her aunt, a member of the Cree Nation who was missing, Violet got in touch with the DDP and they facilitated her uploading her previous ancestry DNA results to GEDmatch. There, the results showed the genetic relationship between her and Kern County Jane Doe was consistent with aunt and niece. Kern County Jane Doe was her missing aunt Shirley Sousay Shirley Ann Suse was born in 1945 to Mother Teresa Sousay of the Haboma Reserve of the Sampson Cree Nation in Alberta. She was 35 when she was killed by Wilson Shoest, Shirley's News Violet told ATP News Canada. Her reactions were shock, she said. Then a whole range of emotions. There was anger, there was happy, There was relief. There was sadness and grief. CBC Canada interviewed Violet she said her aunt was a free spirit who loved to laugh and cared deeply about her mother. As a teen, Shirley had been sent to live in a residential school where she suffered abuse. She returned to the Cree reservation at age 18 and then moved to Edmonton in her early 20s. Her first job was catering for the city of Edmonton, and then she worked as a domestic helper in Vancouver. She lived and worked there for some time, sending money home to her mother and staying in regular touch with her family. Shirley had two young sons who were removed from her care by the child welfare authorities, per the Ulta Journal. This was a result of a vindictive father who had reported her as unfit, Shirley told her niece Violet. One boy went into foster care, the other was adopted by a white family. Devastated, Shirley turned to alcohol and drugs, and then her baby daughter was removed, too. She was not your regular addict. She didn't go on the streets, violet said. Violet had tracked down Both sons in 2006, now adults, none of them knew, of course, what had happened to their mother, Shirley. Violet revealed to APT News that the last time she recalled seeing Shirley at home was when Violet was 17 at her brother's funeral in 1977. I asked her if she was going to come home now, she said. She said she was going back to Vancouver and to visit someone in Seattle. The last time anyone in Shirley's family heard from her was in 1979, Violet told APT. My grandmother, her mother used to receive birthday cards and Christmas cards from her, and then they just stopped. My grandmother knew something had happened. Susei said she made a promise to her grandmother, Shirley's mom, to never stop looking for Shirley. Violet said that she and her aunt Bella, Shirley's sister, would periodically drive 13 hours to Vancouver to search at hostels, graveyards, police stations and so on, looking for Shirley. Bella died in 2011, and Violet continued the quest alone. Shirley has been so difficult to find because we never thought she would be in California, she said. There are a lot of unanswered questions as to how she ended up down there. Once Shirley was finally identified in 2020, it was very important to Violet to bring Shirley's remains home, to give her a proper ceremonial burial according to the beliefs of their people. She told CBC Canada, quote, not one human being deserves the end she met. In our culture, there's still unfinished business until she's home and a ceremony is done, then I can rest. There was a lot that had to be done before that could happen. The investigation had to be wrapped up, a death certificate for Shirley issued and so on. Finally, in May 2022, Shirley was exhumed from the cemetery in California where she'd lain for 42 years. Dawn Ratliff, coroner division chief for the Kern County Sheriff's Office, told CBC News that staff from the coroner's office and two cemeteries gathered to say prayers at Suse's graveside and by her casket. We were all emotional, she said. Before the body was disinterred in California, the Tule river tribe performed a ceremony there with prayers and drumming, she added. To be able to restore her name has really been tremendous, she said. Shirley's remains were flown from California to Alberta and arrived on May 27, per CBC quote. She will permanently reside at the family's resting place at Riverside. Ceremony in Meskwakis Once that's complete, I know the weight of the world will be off my shoulders, violet Souse said. A group of about 25 indigenous motorcycle riders outfitted in indigenous attire accompanied the body in its procession to the graveyard. Violet told Apt News of this long awaited resolution. Most of all, today is relief that I'm able to ensure the promise I made to my grandmother who is the matriarch on my father's side, that to find her and bring her home. This is the final step. Bringing her home is today. Today is that final step. There's no more not knowing. It's no more uncertainties, she said. We're certain she is home now and we are certain that we can visit her gravesite, even though spiritually she is already with the Creator and our ancestors of Wilson Schuest, her aunt's killer, violet told CBS Canada. Initially I had a lot of anger and hatred and that's not who I am. So I had to process all that. Now I don't give him any energy at all. Smart lady. As hard as it was to identify Shirley Sousay, Ventura County Jane Doe would prove even more difficult. The DDP began working her case in October of 2018. Funded by donors, Fulgent Genetics conducted the DNA extraction and sequencing. Once her SNP was obtained, Jane Doe's admixture indicated she was approximately 60% Native American and she had significant Hispanic and European ancestry with very minor Asian component. Uploading to GEDmatch resulted in one top match of about 80 centimorgans and quite a few lesser matches. Many of these led the genealogists to recognize that Ventura County Jane Doe had some Mexican ancestry. The DNA DOE project spent seven years building a massive family tree of over 125,000 people to narrow down Ventura County Jane Doe's identity. The DDP later said, quote, solving this case became the largest and most labor intensive endeavor in the history of the DNA DOE project. Over 40 DNA DOE project volunteers worked on this case, devoting thousands of hours of their own time pro bono seasoned IGG. Rebecca Somerhalder became the DDP's team leader on the Ventura County Jane doe case in 2019. She and I spoke extensively about the process of identifying Jane Doe and the amount of work that went into it. That interview is included at the end of this episode and I strongly encourage everyone who is interested in IGG analysis to listen to it in its entirety. In short, in building out the trees of the various matches, the volunteers were able to trace Jane Doe's ancestral line specifically to the Mexican state of Zacatecas. The genealogists believe Jane Doe was descended from third or fourth great grandparents, Ponciano Monteano and Feliciano Rojas. The couple had seven documented children whose trees all had to be constructed. Ms. Somerhalder explained to me how the DDP genealogists focused in on one of Feliciana and Ponciano's daughters, the ancestral Mexican couple of Caterina Montegliano, born in 1853, and Martine Parga, born circa 1847. These were likely Ventura County Jane Doe's great great grandparents. Well, Katharina and Martine had 18 children. You heard that right, 18 children. Not all of them had lived past childhood, but of course, all the ones who did had to be mapped out. The investigators began tracking down Katerina and Martine's descendants, chipping away at the massive family tree, hindered significantly by multiple adoptions in the family. One documented child of the couple could not be located, a daughter named Soterra, who had been informally adopted out when Kanarina died in childbirth with twin children, numbers 17 and 18. That child, Sotera, was the key. When the DDP figured out who she was, they knew from a new top match of about 200 centimorgans that had uploaded that they were on the right track. The DDP made a recommendation to the Ventura investigator who had replaced a retiring Steve Rhodes, Araceli Ruiz Avicedo, that she contact a living relative of Sotera, a male who lived in LA who was in the right place on the family tree to be a cousin to Ventura County Jane Doe. That cousin contacted his male cousin in New Mexico and said, hey, I got a call from an investigator in Ventura county who's looking for a missing family member. I don't know of any, do you? He did the man the Los Angeles cousin had called was named Reynaldo Rocha, and he had a missing sister. Satera Parga was her great grandmother. Reynaldo called Ventura county investigator Araceli Ruiz of Savedo on December 9, 2025. This is from a DDP release. Reynaldo's sister, Marisela Rocha Parga, had been missing since 1980. Following her disappearance, her siblings spent years looking for her, but they were never able to find out what had happened to her. After speaking with investigators, two of Maricela's siblings immediately booked flights and flew to California the next day, where they provided DNA samples and their missing sisters dental records. End quote. In January 2026, Ventura County Jane Doe was definitively identified by kinship testing as Maricela Rocha Parga. Maricela was born on March 12, 1958 in Monterrey, Mexico, but she later moved with her family to Los Angeles. She was living there, working as a waitress and taking night classes in nursing when she disappeared at age 22. She was five months pregnant at the time and also left behind a two year old daughter. Her family noticed she was missing when she failed to show up with the birthday cake she had bought for her younger sister Alma's 10th birthday party. When Maricela was identified decades later, her sister Alma Braden spoke at the press conference. She said of her sister's disappearance, quote, I remember knowing back then that there must have been something wrong for her not to come because she loved us, she cared for us, she looked out for us. Maricela's sister, Rosalinda Vega later said, quote, we were waiting for her and she never showed up. So another week passed. She didn't show up then and two weeks. So we started looking for her. Years passed and we didn't know nothing about her. You know, every time that I go to the streets and see a homeless person, I was looking to see if they were her. I thought maybe she fell down or she had an accident or something and she just forgot everything. But nothing. The press conference announcing Maricela's identification was held on February 23, 2026. Ventura County Sheriff Jim Freihoff, Ventura County District Attorney Eric Nazarenko and Rebecca Somerhalder of the nonprofit DNA Doe Project all participated. Sheriff Freihoff said, we are here to share news that is 45 years in the making. Our cold case unit has finally given a name to a woman who has been a Jane Doe for decades. Her case was never forgotten. Today we are here to announce Jane Doe, Ventura county is Marisela Rocha Parga. She was 22 years old at the time of her death. She was the second oldest of nine children. She left behind a two year old daughter. I want to extend my deepest condolences to Maricela's family. We hope today brings some measure of closure and comfort knowing that she was never forgotten and that her name, her story and her life matter. District Attorney Eric Nazarenko spoke about Wilson Shoest. He laid out his known crimes in 1977 and the fact that he was on parole in July of 1980 when he killed both Shirley Sousay and Maricela Rocha just three days apart. He said. Maricela was a daughter, a mother, an aunt, a sister and a niece. Her family described her as caring and loving. Her life was taken violently and suddenly, but now after 45 years, her name and her identity are finally being restored, nazarenko said. Rebecca Somerhalder, the DDP team leader on the case, said Maricela's was the toughest and most intensive identification in the history of the nonprofit. Her case consumed seven years and involved 40 volunteers and a tree of 125,000 people. QUOTE this case touched the hearts of many people over so many years and we are very proud to have helped give Maricela her name back, she said. Reynaldo Rocha and Alma Braden, Maricela's brother and sister, had flown in from Texas and from Florida, respectively, for the press conference. Although they chose not to speak, they were children. It was Alma's 10th birthday celebration when Maricela was taken. Reynaldo shared his memories of his big sister with the Ventura County Star. She was a joyful soul and she was very, very caring to us, he said. He and his sister said Maricela always had a smile on her face. This from the VC Star article. Quote they said their other sister never moved out of her house in hopes Rosha Parga was still alive and would one day remember. She had a family who loved her, they said. Their mother died not knowing what happened to Rosha Parga and the uncertainty haunted her until her final moments. She can be at peace and rest finally because we found her and we know what happened, brayden said. This case really illustrates the importance of our societal commitment to identifying John and Jane does in this case. The killer of Maricela and Shirley had been named, prosecuted and convicted. Legal justice had been served. But despite the authorities having fulfilled their duties as members of law enforcement and as prosecutors, everyone agreed to that. There was really no justice for these women as long as their killer had deprived them of their identities and deprived their families of resolution. In the interests of undoing this injustice, untold resources were expended to identify the does simply for humanitarian reasons. Reinstating the names of Marisela Rocha Parga and Shirley Sousay was of paramount importance, restoring their dignity and allowing their families to start to heal. Speaking of healing, the family of Marisela Rocha Parga received a Resilience Award in April of 2026 from Ventura County District Attorney Eric Nazarenko, who featured Marisela's case in an annual National Crime Victims Rights Week event open to the public. Maricela's sister, Rosalinda Vega, said, it's like a miracle to find her after all these years. The volunteers at the DDP who identified Maricela also received an award from Nazarenko's office. Please continue listening to hear my interview with DDP Project Manager Rebecca Somerhalder. I found it fascina. Here it is. Picking up mid conversation.
- [43:58]
B
You're an entirely a volunteer. So this is. This. You must basically do this full time though, right?
- [44:04]
D
Yes, I wear some other hats now. And even though I started in 2019 just as a genealogist. Yeah. And I basically came out of it as a hobbyist. I mean, literally, I was doing my own family tree work and, you know, identifying my own cousins. And then occasionally because my tree got so big on ancestry, I started getting requests from people like I'm adopted and but I match you and can you tell me how? And I started actually doing some. Some what I call search. Search Angel.
- [44:38]
A
Yeah.
- [44:38]
D
I never became. I never got involved in any of the other groups. And DNA Doe project came to my attention on Facebook and because they were working on a case out of New Mexico and I am a big New Mexico researcher. My mom is from New Mexico. And it turns out little did I know. And actually most people in New Mexico don't really know. Little did I know that she actually on all her lines from both her mom and her dad go back to the original founders of Santa Fe. Oh, wow. That's, Yeah.
- [45:17]
B
A nice claim to fame. What a beautiful town.
- [45:19]
D
Yeah, right. Well, Santa Fe was founded in 1598.
- [45:22]
B
Wow.
- [45:23]
D
And that was with the Onate expedition. So it gave me a lot of practice in reading Spanish records. But my mother, you know, she. Her whole family grew up in New Mexico and they didn't have any idea where they came from. Right. Until I started doing the genealogy and figuring this stuff out. So that's. So to get back to the story, I saw that they were working a case in New Mexico and it was in 2011, or it would have to been early 2019 when I saw it. And I could. I. I looked them up. I made a phone call. I talked to this lovely woman named Margaret, who turns out to be Margaret, and, you know, let her know I had this big, giant tree. And, you know, if there was any time, any time I could help them, I'd be happy to. And I gave her. Okay. I gave her my gem match kid number. And it was like, you know, and my mother's. And I said, you know, if you want to run it against your doe, you know, maybe you'll find them in my tree. I was like, great. And the rest was history because about, I don't know, six, eight months later, they called me. I worked on a Puerto Rican case as my first case. And then in 2019, I came on this case. And yeah, end of 2019, I came onto this.
- [46:43]
B
Okay. But I have the DDP. Started working this case in October of 2018. Right?
- [46:47]
D
Yes.
- [46:48]
B
So. So what happened initially?
- [46:50]
D
From the beginning. Okay. I came onto the team as a. Essentially a resource to help them with the genealogy. Okay. And then it worked into. I'm still with them.
- [47:02]
B
Right. Well, congratulations.
- [47:04]
D
Right. Oh, but that. But that also leads to what you asked me to begin with. So I, you know, I was a newbie. I was a baby igg. I became a team leader. I've now led I don't know how many cases now, but I've been on, I think almost 30 cases.
- [47:24]
B
Wow.
- [47:26]
A
And.
- [47:27]
D
And then I am on the member. I'm a member of the board for the ap. Great. And I am in right now. I am interim volunteer coordinator.
- [47:37]
A
Wow, you're busy.
- [47:38]
D
Yes. Yes.
- [47:39]
B
So they uploaded to GEDmatch. Was this a GEDmatch only case?
- [47:44]
D
It started out as a gem match only.
- [47:46]
B
Okay.
- [47:46]
D
And at some point, probably fairly early on, they also uploaded to ftdna. Okay.
- [47:53]
B
All right. And I understand the initial matches were disappointing.
- [47:57]
D
Right.
- [47:57]
B
It was basically nothing.
- [47:59]
D
Right, Right. So I went back and checked, and the. The earliest kit that I found was from 2018. And I saw that the top match was 85.5 centimores, which is. It is disappointing, but everything else after that goes, you know, lower.
- [48:18]
B
Right.
- [48:19]
D
So it was disappointing, but they were able to get a little bit of traction on family. In. In my best Hispanic case, I would like to see at least a couple of 100centimorgan matches. It makes it a little bit easier. Right.
- [48:33]
B
Okay, so then how did they progress? How possibly would you begin to progress from there? I mean, that is that you just start making this family tree that ended up being 125,000 people.
- [48:43]
D
Yes, yes, yes. Just short. Short of that is. Yes.
- [48:47]
B
Wow.
- [48:48]
D
So when you get a list like that, the matches cluster. Okay. So a cluster means you've got maybe 10 or 15 people matches that are on the same chromosomes, and they match each other, which means they triangulate. So you start there. What you're looking for is. Let me see how these people on this match list relate to one another. And that way you can start to find family groupings. If the matches are triangulating, meaning they match each other and they match doe, that's a good indicator that the common ancestor between all of them is also an ancestor of the do.
- [49:33]
B
Okay, yeah, Great. So, and then were you finding that these. These people were easy to trace? Were they mostly us, or were you having to go into Mexico, which I. Where I understand some of the records are a little bit sparse.
- [49:47]
D
Definitely we had to go into Mexico. Yeah, definitely. You know, once you get past, you know, determining who the match is. Right. And start building that tree and we're not contacting them. Right. So we're basically identifying who that matches through databases and whatnot. We start building the tree. I would say within a couple or three generations, we were into Mexico almost consistently. Okay. Okay. Now, some other places did come up, obviously. I mean, Hispanic genealogy is pretty consistent that you're also going to find matches in Texas. That's going to confuse you. We did find a large group of matches out of New Mexico, which was also confusing. And I will say right off the bat, for future genealogists who are doing this work and getting involved in Hispanic cases out of Mexico, you probably will always find a group of matches out of New Mexico because they have the same founders. The same founders that, you know, came into Mexico through Veracruz in what would it have been about 15, early 1500s, if Columbus went through the Caribbean in 1492. So we're in the 1500s. It's the same founders.
- [51:10]
B
Okay.
- [51:10]
D
So the founders of Santa Fe have connections. So even though we had that cluster, that wasn't where we were going to find out, because the larger clusters were families in Mexico and specifically in San Contendos. Okay. Okay.
- [51:24]
B
So that's how you get to Zacatecas.
- [51:25]
D
Right.
- [51:26]
B
So and are the Mexican records. Are they. Were. Are they. First of all, are they easily accessible by you? And second of all, were they pretty well maintained?
- [51:36]
D
Oh, absolutely.
- [51:37]
B
Okay.
- [51:38]
D
That's the fun part about doing Hispanic genealogy is the prediction whether the priests are in Puerto Rico, or they're in Zacatecas or they're from Santa Fe. They did an excellent job of maintaining the records. Original handwriting, scribbly in Spanish. And they also are fairly consistent in. When you read them, the placement of the genealogical information give is very consistent. Like a baptism record is always going to give you the name of the child, name of the parents, where the baptism happened. In some cases, they're going to give you the grandparents and the godparents. Right. So you know what to expect when you're researching. Now, not every location, though, has good records. Or the church, the main church that they went to or had baptisms done might have been many miles away from the actual town that they were living in. So you'd have to find. We did have to do a lot of searching to find the actual parish and to actually access the baptism records. But I will say FamilySearch has a really good handle on that.
- [52:52]
B
Oh, great.
- [52:52]
D
Okay.
- [52:53]
B
I mean, I can see how this took seven years.
- [52:55]
D
Right.
- [52:56]
B
So I have. That you were able to. You get to Zacatuckus, and then you found a couple that you believed might have been her third or fourth great grandparents. And this was Ponciano Monciogliano and Feliciano Rojas. I probably mispronounced all those. So you came down to that couple specifically. You knew that she had to be descended from them somehow. Right. At that point.
- [53:20]
D
Okay.
- [53:21]
B
But it looks like they had seven children, right?
- [53:24]
D
Well, yes, I think they had seven children. But then the next generation, which is the generation of real importance is their daughter Katerina. Right. And Katerina and her husband, Martin Parga, had 18 children. What? Oh, yes. Okay. Wow. So. So. So now not all of them survived out of childhood. I mean, out of infancy. There were a lot of infant deaths. And. But those records became the most important in the case from pretty much from the very beginning. The issue with that is you were. At the time, let's say at the beginning, we didn't know how important. We knew we were getting a lot of records there. But the matches didn't say that. It didn't scream saying, okay, this is where you need to be. Because we had other groups, other clusters that were also, you know, related and similar a manner.
- [54:29]
B
Right.
- [54:29]
D
But over time, it just. This couple became very, very important.
- [54:34]
B
Katerina and her husband Martin. So you were able to basically single out that couple versus the other six children of Ponciano and Feliciana, because the matches seemed to cluster. They had to be related to Martin also, obviously. Right, right, right.
- [54:48]
D
They also had to be and this. And in this case, yes, they were related on both sides. Okay. So that. So that actually complicated things as well. Right. It's not a clear path. Right. You're starting to find family connections, but when there's connection on both the husband and the wife's side, then you've got to figure out why.
- [55:13]
B
Is that because of intermarriage, like in small communities?
- [55:17]
D
Yes. And so, you know, that's. That's the word endogamy. Yeah. And small communities are famous for that. Take Santa Fe, for example, which started out with about 300 founders. Essential 300 family founders. Eventually, you know, they start marrying each other, start having children, and then those children end up. Right. They're all from the same basic core family. Sure. I would. I would say in New Mexico, somos, primos. We're all cousins. And somehow, if you go. If you go, you know, back that far, founders effect says you're probably related to those founding. In my family, I know probably 15 different ways or more down my family line. So some of the same thing happened in Zacatecas, which is, you know, it's not first cousins marrying each other, but you might have a third great grandparent that's the same. So you might.
- [56:18]
A
Got it.
- [56:19]
D
You know, fourth cousins to each other. Like, my grandparents are.
- [56:23]
B
Right.
- [56:23]
D
Fourth cousins to each other.
- [56:24]
A
Oh, wow.
- [56:25]
B
Okay. Interesting. Okay, so, all right, so you get down to Katerina and Martin, and they. You think they're probably about the great grandparents of your Doe based on ages. So then how many descendants were there from that union? You said 18 children. And so did you have to build the tree down from every one of those 18 kits?
- [56:46]
D
Yes. Oh, geez. Yes. And then that particular family had a very interesting genealogical puzzle to solve, and it became super critical to this case. So Katerina Monte, she died in childbirth with the last children, a set of twins.
- [57:08]
B
Wow.
- [57:09]
D
And she. So she died in, like, early 40s. So she had a child that we couldn't find. We knew the name because we had the birth record. Her name was Sotera. And. But we couldn't find her. And. And it was critical for us, too, because we have even. I'm looking at the final diagram that we were using. We have 18 matches, DNA matches, current day DN match, DNA matches that come down from Ponciano Monteano. Okay. And. And then specifically coming down from Katerina and Martine, we had 1, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, or 13 actual matches that come down from that couple alone. So we knew that, at least on that side, this was significant. And we needed to find Soterra. Okay. But we couldn't. And so anyway, it wasn't until, I want to say, maybe two years ago, three years ago, one of our researchers figured out that Sotera was only five years old when her mother died and she went to live with her aunt Paula Montiano, which was Katerina's sister. Okay, well, what happened is she got blended into the family and carried a surname that wasn't hers. Right. Because she got blended in with all
- [58:48]
B
the other kids, sort of an informal adoption.
- [58:50]
D
Right. So we had no idea that that is how it happened. And also with all the other family members. I mean, yes. In your mind, you go, okay, mom dies young, might be living in another family. Yeah, that's not, that's not that unusual. But when you have, what did I say, 17 siblings, 18 uncles and aunts or whatever. 17 uncles and aunts where she could be living. Yeah, it took us a while to figure it out. And we did figure it out. And actually that ended up being the next generation direct line to do. Oh, okay.
- [59:27]
B
So that was my question.
- [59:28]
D
But of course. Right. The person you can't find. This is. Right.
- [59:31]
B
You don't know like one.
- [59:33]
D
The person you can't find is going to end up being the ancestor.
- [59:36]
B
So what was her name again?
- [59:38]
D
Sotera.
- [59:39]
B
Sotera.
- [59:39]
D
Sotera Parker.
- [59:40]
B
So was she, was she your Doe's mother or grandmother? No.
- [59:45]
D
Turned out, let's see, she was Doe's. Let's see. Mother, great grandmother.
- [59:50]
A
Great grandmother.
- [59:51]
B
Okay, so, so, okay, so she was Katerina's missing daughter. Is that what you said?
- [59:58]
D
She was Katarina's missing daughter?
- [59:59]
B
Okay, so Katerina and Martine then were actually Doe's great, great grandparents.
- [60:05]
D
Correct. Okay.
- [60:06]
B
All right, so I want to make sure I get that. Right.
- [60:08]
D
Yes. We follow Satera's line down. Now, remember, going back to what we were talking about, families being interrelated, we've got Pargas and Monteana. Well, we've got Pargas on both sides of Doe's grandparents. Right. So Pargas are on both sides. So just to complicate matters a bit further, you have all these family lines developing, but you've got Pargas here and Pargas here. So you're working your way down and you're trying to kind of work through the complications of that. Yeah. And, but so, so after you get past Sotera, she had a daughter named Angela Ramos. Okay. But Angela Ramos married another part of.
- [61:06]
B
Oh, geez.
- [61:07]
D
Okay. Right. And now, of course, Satera also had one, two, three, four, at least five children. Okay, okay. So, you know, you're working many, many lines. But the reason that we stuck with that family.
- [61:25]
B
Yeah.
- [61:26]
D
Soterra. Is because one of the matches that we found that we got later, Much later in the game.
- [61:34]
B
Right, A later upload.
- [61:36]
D
Right, A later upload. So we had a lot of people, once we started actually putting it out there that we were working on case. Oh, great. For the families of interest, people would come forward and be willing to actually upload their DNA or take a test just to, you know. And one of those was a fairly high match. And so. And. And not, I mean, 200. Okay. Does. Okay. Yeah. But. But that one being 200 and coming down from that particular family, Sotera said, okay, we need to keep looking here. And we did. So that. But still. Still, there's an awful lot of cousin lines that you have to actually rule out. Yeah. So anyway, over time, and I will say this happened what, October of last year. Okay. The Ventura County Sheriffs were amazing. I mean, first with Steve Rhodes, and then Araceli was our last agency contact. And super, super, like, spot on, knowing exactly what we were doing when we would get close and try to try to figure out these cousins. We gave her a list of individuals, and she actually flew out to Texas and talk to two groups of cousins. A group in El Paso and a group in Wichita.
- [63:10]
A
Wow.
- [63:11]
D
And they were very generous. They took DNA tests, and while they weren't Maricela's direct line, those matches were close. So we were. We knew by September or October last year that we were getting really close.
- [63:28]
B
Okay, great.
- [63:29]
D
Yeah. And. But there's still work to do. And. And. And Araceli came back and said, you know, these cousins don't know with anybody missing. They, you know, they. They know their cousins, some of them, but the cousins in Los Angeles, they just say, you know, we know we have cousins in Los Angeles. Here's some Facebook people. Right.
- [63:52]
B
Right.
- [63:53]
D
Here's some Facebook people. These are. These are, like, friends with my mom on Facebook, and they're all pargas. So, you know, it's like, basically start there. So it's still. It's still like hunting a needle in a haystack, Right?
- [64:05]
B
Yeah.
- [64:06]
D
Just you just basically trying to make those contacts. But the breakthrough came, and this was. Oh, my gosh. Would have been. I think in January, the breakthrough came that we found a par. Gum in this family that had married kind of an unusual Hispanic name. Not one you see very often. I can't even pronounce it. Okay. Starts with an I.
- [64:36]
B
Unusual is good in these cases.
- [64:38]
D
Right, right, exactly. Because. Because we found a cousin. Well, we knew it was a parga.
- [64:45]
B
Right. Yeah.
- [64:46]
D
So that would make it a cousin. But he was carrying that unusual last knee, and it's like, okay, well, what are the chances that he might be a descendant of this family? And so we gave that information to Araceli, and she said, well, I'll make a phone call. Let me see if I can, you know, get some information maybe. And. And they didn't answer the phone. Well, which is. You know, that's not. That's not unusual.
- [65:17]
B
Yeah.
- [65:18]
D
You know, but apparently the message that Araceli left for him had some very specific family names that probably only the family of Maricela would know. Okay. And that's what happened. These cousins actually had stayed in touch somewhat with their other cousins. And the gentleman that we suggested that Araceli contact contacted his cousin in El Paso and said, they're asking these, you know, this question about, you know, our. Our.
- [65:57]
B
My.
- [65:57]
D
My mother, your aunt. Okay. And. And they. They know that. That my mother was a parga. And anyway, Maricela's brother, it turns out to be that person in El Paso was Maricela's brother.
- [66:14]
B
Wow.
- [66:15]
D
And he was like, that's very unusual. And the cousin in California didn't know that they were missing their siblings? Sure. Yeah. He didn't know. He just said, they're calling from Ventura County Sheriff's Office, and they've got these names, and her brother, and his name is Ronaldo. And I generally don't use people's names, but that. This has been publicized.
- [66:40]
A
Yeah, I have that.
- [66:41]
D
Yeah. So anyway, so it was her brother, Rinaldo. He started making, you know, putting the dots together, and he immediately called Ventura county, and Araceli was able to give him enough more information that he felt certain that there was a good possibility it was his sister. And he flew the very next day to Ventura.
- [67:04]
B
Wow.
- [67:05]
D
Incredible.
- [67:06]
B
What a story.
- [67:07]
D
But it simply. It was simply a matter of just pulling. Pulling every thread that we could find until we finally found Maricella.
- [67:18]
B
So that must have been an incredible feeling for you when you finally learned Maricela's name.
- [67:24]
D
Absolutely. The. We talked about it in team meetings all the time. You know, when we solve this case, when. When we solve this case, it's going to be the biggest tree ever.
- [67:37]
B
Yeah.
- [67:38]
D
And I mean, we. But we knew we were going to.
- [67:42]
B
Yeah. And then it turned out that she, you know, she wasn't, like. She wasn't living in Mexico. She wasn't obscure, you know, somebody that it Was hard to. She was a. She was living in Los Angeles and living and working and taking classes and a mother, and it's. It's just incredible that she was unidentified for so long, in a way, if you think about it that way.
- [68:01]
D
46 years.
- [68:02]
B
Yeah.
- [68:03]
D
Yeah.
- [68:03]
B
Her.
- [68:04]
D
One of her sisters never moved out of a family home in Los Angeles because she felt like her sister would come home, and she did. And she wanted there to be somebody there. Yeah. And. Yeah, it just. I was with them yesterday for February. They did the press conference, and I met a good number of Maricela's siblings and then met one more yesterday. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it was very. It's very, very nice.
- [68:37]
B
Were you involved at all? I was really interested. It's the first time I've had this happen with the fact that they used the DNA from the fetus to figure out who the baby's father was.
- [68:49]
D
Was.
- [68:49]
B
Were you involved in that at all?
- [68:52]
D
I was working the case when that happened.
- [68:54]
B
Okay.
- [68:54]
D
That is unusual. That is unusual. This case was so complicated and so difficult that that was one possibility.
- [69:08]
B
Was it as hard to figure out who he was as. I mean, clearly not, because it didn't take as long. Right. Were there more matches to him? Like, is. How. How did that work?
- [69:19]
D
Yeah, I didn't. I didn't actually work those matches.
- [69:22]
B
Okay.
- [69:23]
D
So I can't tell you, but I would suspect it was just as complicated. Yeah, we. But it did. You're right. It didn't take very long. And the other. The other aspect of this case, which is unusual, is most of the time when we get matches for a doe, we get matches for both the father and the mother of the doe. And in this case, the matches for the father are completely underrepresented. We actually thought, as we were working this case, that I told you, we have, like, two sides represented. We knew we had two sides represented, but those two sides ended up being the grandmother and the grandfather. Okay.
- [70:11]
B
On the maternal side.
- [70:13]
D
On the. Only. On the maternal side. Right. So we were. What we. What we turned out to have, which we thought potentially could have been the maternal. Maternal mother, father, union couple, turned out to be grandparent union couple. And so once we got. Once we figured that out, we realized we had little to no matches on Marisola's father.
- [70:39]
B
And that remains the case.
- [70:40]
D
Right. And it still remains the case, even though we built out that side.
- [70:45]
B
So do you know who he is?
- [70:48]
D
Well, from the family, yes. That told us. They told us who their father was.
- [70:52]
B
Yeah.
- [70:54]
D
And so that. They're curious, too, because They've never done that. Genealogy as well. Sure. We. We did work it back, and it did not land in any. Any matches, even though the name is kind of well represented in the genealogy and in the matches. Genealogy. We just didn't have any matches that we know of on the father's side.
- [71:17]
B
Strange.
- [71:18]
D
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it made. But it happens.
- [71:21]
B
Was the father also from a Mexican heritage?
- [71:26]
D
He was. But out of San Luis Potosin. Oh, okay. Okay. And not at his architect. And we did actually have a. A group of matches from that area. Absolutely. Lots of them. But we were never able to bring them into the tree and say, aha, there we go. That's where that came from. Right. Remember I was telling you about how New Mexico founders actually end up in clusters in Mexican genealogy? My mother is a X match to Maricella. Oh, what? Yes, yes. And at about a little bit more than 7 centimorgans, but it's in a cluster with a whole bunch of other New Mexico matches, so. And obviously, we know it's on Maricela's mother's side right now, so that X match, you know, makes sense. And that particular segment must. Must be really, really old. It's justice for Victims award that was given yesterday in Ventura county, and we each got a plaque.
- [72:39]
B
Amazing. That's incredible.
- [72:41]
D
Congratulations for this case.
- [72:43]
B
Yeah, that's. I. It's. That's awesome. That must make you feel really, really good.
- [72:49]
D
Yeah, it is. It definitely. The whole. That whole case was a labor of love. I mean, it. You just. When you work on something that long, you just. I mean, you're just not gonna give up. Yeah.
- [72:59]
B
And the fact that you guys are all volunteers, just truly, it's incredible. Testament to people's dedication to, you know, solving these answer riddles and providing answers to the families. I'm sure Reynaldo was. I can't even. I mean, he spoke publicly about his feeling about finding his sister, but just. What. How amazing for them to finally know, you know, I mean, and unfortunately, we know her fate, but at least that guy's in prison.
- [73:24]
D
The law enforcement, the detectives that were there that day at the press conference were just amazing. They reassured the family that this was indeed a very bad man who did this, that she had. That it had to have been an entirely random occurrence, and that from the testimony of a survivor, they knew how he. How he did what he did. Yeah. And. And they. Because, you know, they had. They had thought that there was a possibility. Did she know him? Did they. You know, how did they meet? It had to have been entirely random. Yeah, that I think as much as, as much as that can give you some sense of, you know, like I, at least I know, at least I know something about what happened on that day. That she was just a random victim chosen. You know, I know the senselessness that's just so terrible.
- [74:25]
A
Yeah.
- [74:26]
B
The senselessness of those random crimes, it's literally just you're walking down the wrong street at the wrong time and it's, that's what's hard to wrap your head around. You know, I mean you can be very risk averse person, lead and be safe and lock your doors and you can still fall victim to the a predator like him. Okay, Rebecca, thank you so, so much. This was amazing. You're wonderful to talk to and I really appreciate you taking the time.
- [74:51]
A
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 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 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 to research each episode. 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 abjack Network like Killer Communications and Campus Killings. Head over to Apple Podcasts and find the DNAID page or look for the ABJAC Network to get started. If you're on social media, we'd love to interact with you there. 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 DNAID podcast.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 finally, if you want to pick up some fun DNAID merch and represent the show, visit the store at the www.customizedgirl.com s DNAIDpodcast. 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.
- [76:43]
E
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