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Murder Sheet
The Yogurt Shop Murders and Serial Killer Robert Eugene Brashers: First Person: Steve Kramer on the Federal Bureau of Investigation, DNA, and the Golden State Killer
01:10:53
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- [00:00]
Anya Cain
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Kevin Greenlee
Content WARNING this episode includes discussion of rape, violence and murder, including the rape and murder of children.
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Anya Cain
A serial killer went to Austin, Texas on December 6, 1991. He arrived at the I can't believe it's yogurt shop in that city where he attacked the four girls inside. 17 year old Eliza Thomas, 13 year old Amy Ayers and the Harbison sisters, 17 year old Jennifer and 15 year old Sarah. He killed them all, but not before subjecting them to a night of terror. They were bound and gagged with their own clothing. They were sexually assaulted, they were shot. Then they were burned. He set the whole place on fire. The case went unsolved for years after DNA evidence cleared four young men accused of the crime Initially. Then just this past year, Austin police announced that DNA and ballistics tied serial killer Robert Eugene Brashers to the case. The Austin Police Department's Detective Dan Jackson spoke at a press conference on this case. He indicated that he and Austin authorities had some help. One of the people he thanked was Steve Kramer.
- [03:55]
Kevin Greenlee
Steve Kramer has dedicated his career to law enforcement. He started out as a Deputy county attorney for the Maricopa County Attorney's Office in Phoenix, Arizona. He then went to serve the Federal Bureau of Investigation as in house counsel for 20 years. In all his years in law enforcement, Steve has worked on a myriad of cases from espionage to white collar crimes to murders.
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Anya Cain
One of the most high profile cases he worked on was the Golden State Killer case. He formed and led the team that identified that serial killer as Joseph James DeAngelo.
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Kevin Greenlee
Like many members of that team, Steve has continued to advocate using DNA technology to solve crimes including genetic genealogy.
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Anya Cain
He's since co founded the company Indago, which works with different law enforcement agencies in order to identify violent crime suspects and victims. They specialize in trying to take on cases that were once deemed unsolvable.
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Kevin Greenlee
Today we will talk to him about his career, notebook cases he worked and his involvement in solving the yogurt shop murders.
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Anya Cain
My name is Anya Cain.
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Steve Kramer
I'm a journalist and I'm Kevin Greenlee.
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Anya Cain
I'm an attorney and this is the Murder Sheet.
- [05:08]
Kevin Greenlee
We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews and deep dives into murder cases. We're the Murder Sheet and this is.
- [05:17]
Anya Cain
The Yogurt Shop Murders and serial killer Robert Eugene Brashers first person, Steve Kramer on the Federal Bureau of Investigation DNA and the Golden State Killer.
- [05:36]
Steve Kramer
Sam.
- [06:14]
Anya Cain
First of all Steve, thank you so much for joining us today on the Murder Sheet. We really appreciate it.
- [06:18]
Steve Kramer
Great to be here. Looking forward to it.
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Anya Cain
Yeah. No, and so I guess to start off with, can you just tell our audience a little bit about yourself and your background and maybe specifically what. What drew you into law enforcement as a career?
- [06:33]
Steve Kramer
It's a long answer to an easy question, but I've been an attorney for the better part of the last 30 years. I actually never wanted to be an attorney.
- [06:45]
I was. When I was young, I actually wanted to be a doctor. And then in high school, I think that changed. At some point. I was better at. I was good at math, and then I ended up wanting to do, like, finance. I was an accounting finance major in college, and I was ready to go be a CPA and then go off to business school after that. And then my father talked me into going to law school because he had been involved in commercial real estate and then the downturn in the late 1980s, and all he dealt with was lawyers. So he's like, you got to at least get a law degree. So I got a law degree, and I had no interest in being a lawyer. And during law school, I ended up getting an internship my second year with the San Diego District Attorney's office. And I think I was the only. I think I was the only person from my school that got it. I just. It was. It just seemed interesting. I'm like, well, I'm in law school. I might as well learn what court is like. I had no interest really in it. So I was like, okay, let's go see what court is like, and walked in. The first week on the job, I was writing my own motion. I'd never written a motion before. And then I was told I was going to court and. And I would have to argue it before the judge, which I did. And it was really funny. I had a hearing, and the judge totally quizzed me on, like, what a theft was, and it was a robbery case, and it was pretty funny. And I really enjoyed it. Won the emotion. And I'm like, this is really fun. And so I spent the summer doing that, and I decided, like, you know, maybe I should try to do that for a few years. So I ended up being a deputy district attorney. I did that in Arizona. In Phoenix, it's called a county. A deputy county attorney there. I loved it. It was great. I really enjoyed being in law enforcement, and I enjoyed prosecution. I was really fortunate that the Maricopa County Attorney's office was a great office. There had been a hiring Freeze for years. And so it was great because all the young new attorneys, we got pushed up really fast. So I was doing homicide cases within two years. And that was great. It was super fun, you know, going out to crime scenes at night, you know, under the police tape, talking to detectives. I mean, for a 25 year old kid it was super, super exciting and then having big cases. So I loved that. It was really interesting. And I liked also being just with my peers, with other 25 year olds were all doing the same thing. It was a lot of fun. So that like, I kind of gave up for the moment of like doing anything in finance and I'm like, I'm going to do this. This was great. And I ended up liking the investigative part of it, the cases even better than doing trials. I enjoyed trials, you know, my first year, my very first year, I did over a dozen, you know, felony jury trials, probably closer to 20. It was great. I mean, and. But I really enjoyed the investigative part. Working with the cops, trying to find other crimes that the persons did things, things like that. Long story condensed. I ended up applying to a position at the FBI in Los Angeles where they had, they wanted an attorney, kind of like in house counsel, not an agent. At that point in time they're, you know, trying to make all the agents be agents and instead of agent attorneys. And so they wanted to bring in somebody who had been an attorney. And I had practiced both. I had done some civil law too, but also a lot of criminal law. So they wanted somebody like that. So I got the job in Los Angeles in the chief division counsel's office as an attorney there. And they also allowed us to be special Assistant United States Attorney. So I did that as a federal prosecutor for 10 years of my 23 at the Department of Justice. And that was a fascinating job. And I can give you all kinds of examples about that. But that's how I kind of got to the FBI.
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Anya Cain
Wow. Tell me about some of those examples. Some of those cases that you got to work.
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Steve Kramer
The biggest difference between being in federal court or federal jurisdiction at DOJ versus being say a deputy DA is that you have just this massive power nationwide to get information. You have a federal grand jury subpoena, which you can basically, it's such a powerful tool in law enforcement to get whatever you want from wherever you need something in Florida, you know, from some company there, a phone company, whatever it is, send a subpoena. That's great. I mean, and so that was very eye opening to see that. And a couple years after I joined the FBI. We had 9 11. And so. And I remember that really, really well. Ironically, I was actually. I've been in the FBI for about three years by then. And I was actually in business school at ucla. I was working early in the morning and then going and getting my MBA at UCLA because it was literally right across the street from the FBI office. And so I was. Because I figured I was going to transition out of the FBI even. It was fun, but I wanted to do something else. And I remember, you know, driving to work at, you know, 5:00am and listening on the radio about these planes, you know, hitting the World Trade center and going to the office. And obviously it was chaos as far as what was going on. And it was a really, it was a very. I mean, obviously there's a bonding moment within the country, you know, a lot of patriotism, you know, being attacked like that, but particularly in law enforcement. And yeah, it was amazing to sit there. I remember it really well. We were sitting in our command, the emergency operations center at the FBI on the 17th floor, watching all the planes, you know, landing at LAX, hoping that none of them were going to turn towards like our building, one of the taller buildings, you know, and near LAX like that. And it was a very moving time. And I remember I issued.
- [12:40]
Over 700 subpoenas in that case. I mean, we were trying to track down every lead. And this obviously went on for weeks and weeks and months on that. But it was a, it was a moment that, like, you know, I think I'm going to stick around here in the FBI. This is really, really interesting stuff. And you really felt like you were doing, you know, something good for society in that. And so that, you know, kind of cemented my relationship that I was going to stay in law enforcement. So I ended up working there, being both in house counsel for the FBI and also as a federal prosecutor. And I did.
- [13:15]
National security investigations prosecutions as well as like, white collar fraud, investment fraud, things like that. So like, one of the cases that, that we did in 911 kind of pushed us forward was we had a case. This is kind of a unique spot about being at the FBI in house at the FBI, as I had kind of preview of all the cases that were going on. And I also obviously had a lot of FBI agent friends that would talk to me about cases, because any FBI agent, any federal agent will tell you it's difficult to get a case charged just because you're investigating a case, whether it's a fraud, it's a violent crime, it doesn't mean that the prosecutor's office is going to charge it. I mean, they're extremely busy, you know, at the United States Attorney's office. And, you know, they. Especially in Los Angeles, I mean, they're generally, you know, because they're limited in manpower, they're only trying to take the biggest cases because where they'll have the most impact. And so, you know, a lot of agents have cases, and maybe they haven't developed a case enough or we haven't dug into it enough that it's. It's not going to get the attention of a federal prosecutor. So I was there where I could look at it. Like, I think that's a really good case. So one of those cases was we ended up prosecuting a North Korean spy that was in Los Angeles, which is kind of cool. He was a guy that was being tasked by the North Koreans. He'd fly to China, and then in from China, he'd fly to North Korea. And, you know, we had, you know, obviously, surveillance, the CIA, everything following this guy around. And so it was cool. Like, we had, like, all the photos of him, you know, on the street meeting with his, you know, Chinese and North Korean handlers. We're surreptitiously going into his office, you know, finding his code sheets, literally, like all the stuff you see out of the movie and stuff like that, you know, using fisa, court search warrants, things like that. And that was really fun. And we ended up prosecuting him. He was. We prosecuted him for being an agent of a foreign power, the criminal violation, not the regulatory violation. And I believe it was the first time that that statute had actually been used, being an agent of a foreign power, 18 USC 1951, against somebody who had not committed espionage. In other words, he was being tasked by a foreign government to commit, like, espionage. He didn't get away with it. He couldn't find any classified information. He was trying to, but he was still acting at the direction of North Korea. We had all that information, so that was a great case. And we ended up convicting him, and they ended up cooperating. And it was fun because we had, like, the South Korean Intelligence service come over and they wanted to debrief him. And so we had this, you know, very cool international relationship with the North Korean spy to gain, you know, intel on that. So, yeah, that was a. That was a really good experience. And it was also kind of groundbreaking in the sense using that statute that way. And you've seen, like, nice that that statute, as well as a regulatory violation called Farah Foreign Agent Registration Act. It's been used a lot more since then. So yeah, that was a, that was like one of, I thought one of the more interesting cases that we had done and I had been a part of. Probably the most interesting thing that I did at the FBI was, I mean, there's a lot, I mean, I could go on and on and on, but like one of the more interesting things is I was part of a, like a super, super secret squad that they developed to hunt down, you know, spies, things like that within the government and.
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Anya Cain
Oh my God.
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Steve Kramer
Yeah, it was really fun. It was, it was really interesting. And the, the idea was just pick out like a handful of prosecutors and agents and I was one of the attorneys that got selected for it. We all had to be polygraphed for it. Couldn't tell and we were just told that we're going to work in a separate squad. We had a, an off site office in la, you know, all the money that we needed. We had, you know, one executive that reported directly to the director of the FBI and it was a great experience. About a year, year and a half. Any FBI agent will tell you just all the bureaucratic loopholes and approvals they have to get to do anything, literally, like, you know, to go record somebody. I mean, mountains of paperwork approvals that you need just to turn up, literally to flip on a recorder.
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Balance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel finance agreement. 256 gigs $830 eligible for in a new line. 100 plus a month plan with auto papers, taxes and fees required. Check out 15 minutes or less per line. Visit t mobile.com here. We had none of that. You need to go someplace, you need to travel. No problem. You need to, you know, rent a hotel room, you know, expensive hotel to, you know, meet with somebody. You need to have, you know, some type of meeting. No problem. And so that was a really good experience where we ended up investigating. We ended up investigating and charging former colleague of mine, a couple of former colleagues of mine, FBI agents. One of them was, his name was J.J. smith and it made national news. He was arrested along with his triple agent girlfriend from China, I believe her, her code name. This is all public information. You can Google it. Parlor maid. But anyway, it was a very, very fun experience learning how this worked and how you could actually get stuff done when you didn't have to jump through, you know, literally like five levels, you know, of bureaucracy to get stuff done and just having a direct line, you know, to the FBI director. And it was really, it was a very successful operation. And we rooted out, you know, a lot of interesting things. I can't obviously can't talk about that, but I can talk about like J.J. smith and Parlor maid. We had a few other. One other FBI agent that was involved that ended up getting convicted of something, but it was a very good experience doing that. And, and that's one of the things I learned is like when you have just a dedicated group of very focused people and you don't have a lot of bureaucracy in the way you can make a lot of things happen. And that was like kind of my takeaway from that.
- [23:29]
Anya Cain
That's amazing. Okay. Like, I mean, were you shocked that one of your colleagues was like spying or I mean, like, that someone you knew?
- [23:38]
Steve Kramer
Yeah, I mean, it was somebody I knew. And somebody I'd worked with. Yeah, I mean, it was. It was. Of course, it was always. It's very shocking when you hear stuff like that. And the. I mean, the part of the reason for that squad was to look at ourselves and to look. That's why it was removed. It was separate. You know, it wasn't in the LA field office. It was an off site. It was, like I said, super Secret Squirrel type of stuff, you know, separate chains of command. But that's the whole reason. So we knew we'd probably be finding, you know, internal moles and things like that, so. Yeah, of course. And like. And even outside of that case, over my career and separate from that whole squad, you know, there were FBI agents that, you know, we ended up prosecuting for other things too. I mean, look, there's gonna be a bad apple in every group, so you just gotta understand that. So. But the experience I took away from actually being able to work on a squad like that, where everybody was just. Everybody was good and everybody was tasked, that was a great experience, I guess.
- [24:40]
Anya Cain
One question I would have before I want to move on to sort of how you got involved with sort of DNA, would just be like, how is working for the FBI in that capacity? How is it different than some of the sort of pop culture myths that a lot of people consume when they're reading fiction or watching shows or movies? You know, what's the reality? Like, I mean, it sounds like some of that was like, straight out of a movie, honestly. But, like, I mean, what's the reality? Lived experience. Experience.
- [25:06]
Steve Kramer
I think the. The reality is, and I'm sure pretty much any FBI employee will tell you this, is that the FBI is very constrained, very constrained, you know, by its own policies and regulations and approvals that it takes a lot, a lot of time to get things done. I had, when I was a. When I was a law clerk for the District Attorney's office in San Diego, I literally had, you know, more information a lot of times at my fingertips, you know, in terms of being able to run public information and get information from dmv, things like that, than an FBI agent would have. And as an FBI lawyer, a lot of people would ask me, they'd be like, oh, it must be so interesting. You're probably dealing with like, constitutional law issues all the time and Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment. I'm like, no, not at all, not at all. I mean, like, yeah, it's there, but we're mostly dealing with, like, internal FBI policies, which are generally much, much, much more restrictive than The Constitution in terms of what we can do. So getting through those policies and those approvals is I think what a lot of FBI employees realize is, God, we just can't go out and be an undercover agent today and do a drug deal and catch a bad guy. We can't do those type of things. It's like there's all kinds of processes that go in and approvals that take, you know, weeks, months to put together. Just to do an undercover operation, you know, is a huge ordeal that might look really simple, but there's, you know, you know, mountains of paperwork, mountains of approval, you know, dozens of meetings, a lot of times yet just a simple, you know, undercover operation going. And so that was kind of the big takeaway that you don't see in the movies on how they do it. So. But, you know, and the other thing too, I mean there's, you know, the movies always wants to make everything look a lot, you know, very confrontational, particularly like, you know, the FBI and the local police and things like that. And like, there's a lot, There's a lot. It's much more cordial in the FBI even, you know, among employees and supervisors and with local police officers. And like, we have what we call task force officers that are, you know, a local, you know, police officer or a local sheriff that's deputized and works as, as a federal agent, more or less as an equal, as an FBI agent. And it's a great process. So. But yeah, I, I can never remember a scene where like, like the FBI rolled up to the locals at a scene, said, all right, we got it, we're taking over. Like, that's never, I've never seen that in my life. You know, usually the FBI is on the sidelines and like, we're here to help. If you want our help, you know, we'll do it. You know, but for the most part, I think that's a little overblown.
- [27:55]
Anya Cain
Right, right. That's. That's a, that's a trope for sure though. That's so funny. And. Yeah, I know. I mean, it sounds, it sounds really interesting. Sounds a little byz. Bit fascinating. And would for, for the lawyers who are sort of the in house consul for the FBI and working for the FBI. Would, would you guys be like in every major field office or is that, you know, is it. How are you guys dispersed?
- [28:17]
Steve Kramer
Yeah. So there's 56 FBI field offices across the country, and every one of those field offices has an attorney called the Chief division Council. The smaller offices generally just have One chief division counsel. The bigger offices like Los Angeles and New York, they will have multiple. I think we had like five or six at any one time. New York probably had even a few more. And smaller offices, medium sized offices, might have one chief division counsel and maybe one or two assistant or associate division counsels. And I jokingly but truthfully tell people our job really is CYA for everybody. Like, agents come to us, management comes to us. You know, hey, have you had legal look at it? And they want, you know, your name and signature, you know, or approval on a memo or whatever they're doing. Like, that way they can say legal looked at it. And that's, you know, kind of what I always said our job is. You come to us and like, yeah, that looks good. Put my name down. I'm good with that. And it gives a sense of COVID I think, because like I said, the FBI rules are really set up, you know, I think more to catch agents doing something wrong. I mean, unfortunately, I think a lot of times it's used that way than to really protect any particular. Right. So there's just a lot of, I mean, the Domestic Investigation Operations Guide, I believe that's what it's called, the Diag. I mean, everybody's like, paging through it. They come to the legal office and we're paging. What do we do here? What do we do here? Okay, got to get this approval. You got to do this, you got to do that. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty crazy. It's not like we can just go out and arrest somebody today. Like. Like, you need to go through all your approvals on that. Yeah, plans, things like that.
- [30:06]
Anya Cain
Yeah, that makes sense. And so how did you, you know, you're doing all this, like, you know, espionage? I mean, well, you're investigating espionage, you're not doing espionage, but.
- [30:14]
Kevin Greenlee
Right.
- [30:15]
Anya Cain
Like, how do you then start to kind of, I don't know, get involved with, like, this kind of burgeoning DNA technology as far as a crime solving tool?
- [30:24]
Steve Kramer
First of all, when I was in law school.
- [30:28]
I was. I published a law review article. And essentially, if you're in law school and you're on law review, one of your assignments is you got to write an article. And so I wrote this article on DNA. And the reason I did that, I was working at the district attorney's office, and one of my supervisors there was a prosecutor by the name of Woody Clark. And Woody Clark was like one of the pioneers in DNA from, you know, the early 1990s, he ended up being the DNA prosecutor on the O.J. simpson case. So he represented the, you know, state of California. And he argued, you know, the DNA in that case, you know, to get it admitted to evidence in the O.J. simpson case. So I worked prior to the O.J. simpson case with him in 1993. And he's like, you got to write this article. Because back then there was a big discussion in DNA. Everyone understood DNA is this powerful tool for law enforcement where you can identify people from crime scene evidence. But there was speculation that these incredible statistics, you know, that someone could have the same DNA was the odds were just incredible. You know, one out of, you know, 20 trillion was like, it could be biased based upon racial categories. So like, you know, if you're African American or you're Asian, you're Caucasian, those odds would be a little bit different. And so you couldn't go into court and say, oh, it's going to be 1 out of 20 trillion or whatever the number was back then. So there was a lot of arguments on that. And so he asked me to write an article on that, which I did, and like I said, it got published. And then he called Woody Cole called me one day. He's like, hey, the FBI called and they want to talk to you. That was actually pretty cool. Like, yeah, getting a call from the FBI and they had some questions and they wanted to talk to me about it. I'm like, so I thought that was pretty neat and it probably helped me get a job after law school as a deputy da and so did that. And I didn't really do a ton with DNA after that. Now I was familiar with it years later. So fast forward like 20 years, and I was reading an article, this was I think 2013, and I read this article by Michelle McNamara, I think in Los Angeles magazine and talked about this Golden State Killer. And I was like, this is fascinating. Like this guy committed all these crimes all over the state of California. We didn't know about this guy. Like, we did not know we had a serial killer until almost three decades after the crimes were committed. And we had a murderer, a serial murder in Southern California in like three different counties that we didn't even realize. We thought these were 10 separate murders in Southern California in Ventura, Santa Barbara and Orange county over like a seven year period. We didn't realize until 1998 when DNA connected him and that DNA became the original night stalker in Southern California. And then we had this east era rapist up in Sacramento. And that didn't get connected to the original Night stalker until about 2001, when the DNA technology caught up where the two labs could compare their DNA. So she had written this article in 2013 about the. She called him. She's like, first of all, because when we worked on the case, we just called this the East J Rapist case or the original Night Stalker case. And so it had this great acronym called the Ear case or the Anz case. So we just called it the Ear ans, Original Night Stalker ons. So, yeah, I'm working the Ears case. The Ear ONS case. Like, she's like, that's a terrible name. And. And so she coined it in that article. Like, I think it should be called the Golden State Killer because he was all over the, you know, the state of California. We never used that whatsoever. You know, during the investigation of the case. It was always ear or ear ons. And anyway, so I read about it, and it was a Sunday afternoon, and then I, like, this is so interesting. And, like, a bunch of these murders happened in my backyard, like, in Orange county, where, you know, I work. And, you know, Orange County Sheriff, you know, is the investigating agency on a couple of those murders. And so I'm like, well, let me call Orange County Sheriff. I knew one of the task force officers was. Worked on my floor, literally like 30ft down the hall from me. And I'm like, hey, who has this case? Who has this ear case? And he gave me the name of the deputy who I knew. I called him up, and they're like, yes, Steve, you know, get on board. So he gave me access to their files. I called the FBI agent up in Sacramento. His name was Marcus Knudsen. I'm like, hey, can I just work on the DNA aspect of it? Because I figured, you know, I knew a little bit about DNA and how DNA worked, and I just figured I could maybe get the FBI lab to do something different, like maybe do a familiar search, in other words, instead of looking at the actual DNA and see, his DNA was in codis. Didn't match anybody in codis. It matched, you know, dozens of crime scenes where we'd submitted, you know, all these rapes and murders, but we didn't know who the guy was. But you can do, for lack of, a better way of explaining it, like, a more relaxed search where it might identify, like, somebody might be in that database that is a relative of his. And if we find that relative, then we can come back and go do some basic genealogy and find him. That's a familiar search. It wouldn't work. The FBI lab wasn't really cooperative with me. Some lawyer out in LA thinking he was a detective probably is what they thought. And they're like, yeah, we can't do that. We can't do a familiar search. It would crash the system. You'd give you too many false positives. And like, look, the detectives will take thousands of false positives. We can, that's, you know, a thousand leads. We don't. Otherwise we don't have. So it's easy to run those down. My favorite was, if we do it for you, Steve, we'd have to do this for everybody. I'm like, this is a really bad case. Why don't we just see if it works? I mean, what's the problem doing it for everybody if it solves the case? I just don't understand that mentality. Like, great, then we could solve the 1.4 million profiles of bad guys, murderers, rapists that are sitting in CODIS unidentified to this day. Like, why would we not want to do that? So at that point, after we had some young kids and so I wasn't prosecuting and I was looking for. I was, at that point I'd moved down to the Orange county office from the Los Angeles office and I was looking for, know something interesting to do that where I could help out on a case. That's why I wanted to see if I could do something with the DNA on the ear ons case. And over time and, you know, I got involved, I got invited to be part of the task force. We had, basically it's one task force, but we had a group in Northern California and a group down in Southern California. So I was meeting with the, at the Orange County District Attorney's office with their investigators and prosecutors, and we're trying to come up with a way to solve this case. And we're looking at the DNA and what could we do? And we, at that time, we had Y DNA of so we had codis, right? That's what they call an str. It stands for short tandem repeat. That's DNA that's, you know, used in the National DNA Index system that everyone hears about. You know, if you watch csi, that's. It's all it is. It's today. It's like it's 20 different markers on your genome. And if it's like the Powerball, like powerball is what, five or six numbers? You win a lottery, the odds are one out of 300 million to do that. Well, we have, you know, 20 numbers and then you. And to win that lottery to be the bad guy, you have to have all 20 numbers, you know, on the STR. So your STR at location one, location two, location three, you know, has to match the bad guy. And the odds of that could be, you know, one out of, you know, 50 septillion, some crazy number. So we have that DNA, it doesn't match them. There's also Y DNA. Y DNA is, it's a YSTR. It's a, it's on the Y chromosome and it's only passed obviously from father to son. And so we can do that. That's useful. It's not to give you your actual guy. It's not that accurate. What it's mostly useful for is giving you a surname for the last 600 years, particularly Western Caucasian Europe. Fathers generally give their sons the same last name and so you can follow the Y DNA like so I have the same Y STR as my father and his last name is Kramer. I have the same Y DNA as my grandfather, his name is Kramer. So you could follow. So if somebody has this particular YSTR DNA is a high likelihood their name is Kramer. And that's, I mean it's not super accurate but like it's, it's a higher probability that you're going to have this name or another, maybe a similar name, things like that. So we had that on the Golden State Killer year ons and we ran it and we were trying different things. We didn't really have a lot of success. We didn't have any particular name, we didn't have any really good matches on it. But remember I told you earlier about.
- [39:42]
When I had worked on that little Secret Squirrel squad at the FBI and one of the things that I've learned when you work cases now, particularly cold cases, and particularly if it's a high profile case where you got a lot of people, it's really important to stay focused on it. And I always like what I've learned about cold cases too is if you treat a cold case like a cold case, oh, we'll get to that next month, we'll get that later in the year. Then the cold case is going to remain cold because you're just taking your time. But if you treat it more like an active case, why can't we do that today? Yeah, we need to talk to that person. Why don't we call them right now? And so there's like treating it like that. And then also what I found was really interesting and I'm guilty of this as well. You know, cops, detectives, Everybody loves to tell war stories, you know, about cases and things like that. Hence, you know, you know, true kind podcasting, right? It's great. Like, you get a bunch of detectives, particularly old detectives that, you know, worked out on this case, you know, back in the 70s and 80s, you're gonna hear great stories. And I mean, they're fascinating. You know, stuff that's not in the police reports, things like that, probably not really relevant to solving the case today. And so you had a lot of just talk like that. And like, for me, what like I like to do is like, okay, I hate meetings. I'm like, I hate meetings. And I always, what's the point of our meeting? What's our agenda? What, what do we want to accomplish? What decisions do we want to get in this meeting? Like, I want to know because otherwise I really don't want. Just send me an email and I'll be good. And so it was funny because I remember after a couple of meetings, I had everybody's email and I'd send emails to everybody that went to the meeting, like, okay, but before we left, I said, well, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? What are you going to do before we meet three months from now? What are you going to do?
- [41:27]
Kevin Greenlee
Okay, great.
- [41:27]
Steve Kramer
I took notes and then I'd write an email to everybody and be like, okay, this is all the tasking that everybody has to do. And it was funny.
- [41:36]
The team got much smaller after that, like when you start, you know, putting accountability on it. But there was people that were like, on it, like, got this done right away, you know, a week later. And so we really developed like that as a team to focus on how to solve this case. Now, I wasn't going to go.
- [41:56]
Re interview people. There's like, that case was 43 years old and at the time.
- [42:03]
Hundreds of detectives on that case, you know, tens of thousands of pages of report. I'm not, I'm an FBI attorney in Orange County. Like, I'm not even trained on, you know, most of that stuff. I mean, I've been a prosecutor for a long time. I know how, you know, to prosecute and investigate a case. But I'm not going to go reinvent the work that these career detectives did in this case. They all did amazing work, particularly, you know, for the 1970s and 1980s, knowing what we know today. I mean, all of them did amazing work. I thought there was no point certainly for me to try to reinvent the work of these amazing detectives that a lot of them had spent Their career on this case. This case was very compelling to people. Detectives wrote books on it, talked about it, wanted to be solved, and I relied on all those people. I barely read a report at all in this case.
- [42:49]
Kevin Greenlee
Why?
- [42:50]
Steve Kramer
Because I had all these detectives. I could pick up the phone and call them. They'd say, oh, this is exactly what happened. You know, I talked to this victim, like, so I just wanted to figure out a new way of thinking about it and why DNA wasn't working. And Paul Holz, who was one of the detectives in Northern California, he and I kind of saw eye to eye on this. And we're like, the only way we're solving this is if we get the DNA and we can get it into, like, a genealogy database. And so he and I, you know, figured out, like, how to do, like, this is. This is the way we're going to solve the case. We learned a little bit about genealogy, literally watching YouTube to see how it worked. And. But the best thing I think was he and Paul will tell you this, too, is like having somebody from the FBI. I always say the most powerful thing about the FBI is those three letters, FBI. When you call somebody and say, the FBI is on the phone, they need to talk to you, they generally put you through. So, like, when I'd call, I started calling all the genetic genealogy companies, the Ancestry 23andMe, family tree DNA. And, hi, I'm Steve Kramer. I'm an attorney with the FBI. I'd like to speak to you. They usually put my call through. So I fought with the ancestry in 23andMe about trying to get in, and eventually got one of the companies, Family Tree DNA, who decided to cooperate with us and said, yeah, we want to solve this case. This is terrible. And so Paul and I were able to get DNA from one of the crime scenes at an FBI agent FedEx the DNA out to Family Tree DNA in Texas, and they got a SNP profile, which is what is different than an str. That's what you use for genealogy. And they got this SNP profile. Same thing you do when you do a cheek swab for ancestry. You get a SNP file, you got a snip file, put it into family Tree DNA. And we also put in gedmatch. And we ended up, you know, 63 days later. Literally 63 days. Our team of six, you know, solved the case. So that was. That was the amazing part. 43 years of, you know, work, you know, from hundreds of detectives. And here's, you know, six of us, you know, five of what five of us knew nothing about genetic genealogy, and we solved this major case. So that was kind of how it all came together.
- [45:05]
Anya Cain
How did that feel for you? It was like kind of jumping into this, running with it, and then, as you said, 63 days, you know, after you submit this, it solved.
- [45:14]
Steve Kramer
Yeah, it was. I mean, it was really. I mean, a bit surreal. I mean, I think the.
- [45:21]
The really interesting thing to me is once I understood a little bit about how genetic genealogy worked, and, like, there's genealogists, like my friend CC Moore, who I know, like. Like they've known this for a long time, like, how it would work and how you could solve cases, but nobody did it. Like I always say, like, I didn't come up with this great idea, and neither did Paul. We didn't come up. We did definitely did not originate the idea of trying to use genetic genealogy to solve a criminal case. We just one figured out how to do it. And we were fortunate, I think, you know, that, you know, me being in the FBI and having very little oversight is I actually ran this past DOJ and everybody. I mean, I knew legally we were fine to do it, but, like, basically, like, you know, having the FBI get involved really kind of pushed it over the edge because, you know, local departments and stuff weren't sure, you know, if they could do it. So we did it. It worked. But what I realized as we were coming to that point, you know, maybe six months prior, when I understood how genetic genealogy worked, I'm like, oh, we're gonna solve this case? No, I totally figured that out. Like, you know, it's just a matter of, you know, finding, you know, how to get a SNP and then how to get the DNA. And I told people in my office, and people thought I was totally nuts. I'm like, I'm solve 100%. Like, I got this case solving it. They're like, what? I'm like, I am going to solve it. And I remember, like, very well. Like, they're like, well, how confident are you? I'm like, I'm a hundred percent confident I will solve it within five years. 100%. I am 80% confident I will solve it in 12 months. And I ended up solving it, like, six months later. Our team solved it, you know, all of us. So. But I mean, once you understand how it works, like, oh, you don't have to be in the database. You don't even have to have, you know, your close family in the database because you have a third cousin that's in the database. And so once I understood that, I knew we'd solve it when it actually did work. And the match came back to Joe d'. Angelo. Yeah, we were ecstatic. And I had a couple of my friends that in the Orange County FBI office. My friend Chris. Kicking Chris came into my office, like, a week or so, week or two after the arrest, and he's like. He's like, Steve, like, I knew this would be a big case. We were all excited, like, yeah, we solved the serial killer case. This is great. We're cool. Like, but what we didn't realize was all the news.
- [47:55]
Wasn'T that, you know, this terrible serial killer, the Golden Sea Killer, was now in custody. The news was really how we did it. Like, how we use genetic genealogy. I mean, that quickly overshadowed, you know, the crimes of, you know, the pathetic serial killer Joe d'. Angelo. The. That. But he's like. It's amazing. Like. Like, this has really become a big deal because my phone is ringing off the hook from detectives all over the country. Like, hey, can you show us how you did that? We want to do that in our case. And so that. Yeah, it was a very surreal moment. And literally none of us had any idea that. Which seems sound silly, that the way we did it would become the bigger story and would become this big technique. And then after that, like, my colleague Steve Bush, who was on the SWAT team, he's like, okay, I'm done with the swab team. I want to do this. And, yeah, he and I got together, and we ended up solving, like, another dozen cases over the next 12 months. And we basically created this FBI genetic genealogy team from scratch right there from my office in Orange County, California, which now is a national program. 250 FBI employees nationwide, and they've solved everything from, you know, the Bryant Coburger, you know, murders in Moscow, Idaho, to the Rachel Moran case in the east coast, to, you know, a variety of other, you know, terrible cases. And so it's been. I think, you know, the FBI has the largest genetic genealogy team anywhere in the world, so it was kind of cool to be a part of all that.
- [49:33]
Anya Cain
That's amazing. I mean, it's. It's really. And. And as you said, it really opened the floodgates. I know this controversy about who did it first and what happened. And we know Golden State wasn't the first, per se, but it was.
- [49:43]
Steve Kramer
Golden State Killer was the first time that genetic genealogy had been used in a criminal case to identify a subject. A couple weeks earlier, my friend Colleen Fitzpatrick, you know, very good genetic Genealogist. They did something similar by identifying unidentified human remains. I believe it's called the Buckskin Girl. I remember reading it. I'm like, oh, that's cool. They did the same thing that, you know, we're doing, but that was the first one. And then she had also done the Miller case, the canal murders in Phoenix, Arizona. And that was done through Y DNA. Remember, I told you earlier, that was done through, like, a surname search. You know, they. She ran the Y's in that case, and the Y was one of the common names of that Y. DNA was the surname Miller. Sure enough, Miller was one of the suspects, one of the people they'd looked at in that case. It's a little bit different than, like, what we today say is, you know, forensic genetic genealogy, where you can actually take the DNA, trace it through families, and, you know, more or less identify, you know, the person or the person's close family. So it's a little bit different. But not to take anything away from Colleen, who I like very much, and I've worked with the. The Golden State Killer, I believe, certainly was the first case where somebody was arrested for a criminal, like, for crime, through genetic genealogy. Now, I should say he was identified through genetic. He was actually arrested based upon the STR confirmation. You know, in other words, the FBI CODIS profile matched him. The profile on the crime scene.
- [51:16]
Anya Cain
Absolutely. And thank you for that clarification because, yeah, they are. They are different. But, you know, I mean, interestingly enough, the YSTR profile, I understand it was quite important in another case we're gonna talk about, which is the yogurt shop murders. But before we kind of delve into that too much, can you just tell me a bit about, you know, sort of then. So you. You have this amazing success with. With Golden State Killer, and then you're doing all these other cases. Talk me through then your career progression from there. And then where we are now with, I guess, yogurt shop.
- [51:48]
Steve Kramer
Oh, yeah, absolutely. So after a couple years, a few years after the arrest of the Golden State Killer, you know, as we developed the FBI genetic genealogy team, I'm basically on the road, you know, flying around the country, giving presentations how we did it, teaching law enforcement, teaching the FBI how to do it, building up the FBI genetic genealogy team, which, despite all the success that it's had, is still. It's difficult to bring a new tool, a new technique into law enforcement. So that took quite a bit of time. And anybody that's done any type of genetic genealogy, whether you're just A hobbyist, you know, doing your own family or anything like that, or you're trying to catch a criminal. It takes a lot of time. It's, it's an immense amount of time. I think we estimated in a 63 days to catch the Golden Sea Killer. We put in over 2000 hours in aggregate. So in some of the studies have been done that it takes on average just over 12 months to solve a genetic genealogy case in terms of. That's how long law enforcement takes to do it. And so one of the things that we had looked at was like, why can't, why can't you get software? Why can't you get like AI to build these family trees? Because that's all genetic genealogy is. Like you take bad guy's DNA, you put it into a database and you get a couple of distant matches. Not a couple, you get thousands, actually. But generally you try to find.
- [53:15]
A second cousin or a third cousin and build the family tree back where they all have a common ancestor. Then you know your bad guy is descended from that common ancestor. So then you have to build down all the relatives, which takes a long time and is super, super labor intensive, mind numbing. It's interesting. Like, it's like doing a jigsaw puzzle. But like, why can't software do that? And we really couldn't get the FBI to like invest money in it. For my colleagues and I on the FBI genealogy team, we always joked we couldn't even get like whiteboards for our offices to like write stuff out literally. Like, it was very difficult to get money to do anything. So, yeah, in 2021, my colleague Steve Bush and I left the FBI and we're like, we can do this better, I think, on the outside and innovate more. And so we started a company called Indago Solutions that takes DNA, takes the snp. We work with the genealogy companies and we were automating this process to make it faster through software to do genealogy. Because the only way to get this to really take off genetic genealogy is to make it easy for cops.
- [54:26]
I don't know what the real number is. Maybe there's a thousand cases that have been solved in the last seven years. But I mean, that's great. Thousand really bad guys.
- [54:37]
The ones that are still alive are off the street. But.
- [54:42]
Every year about 80,000 profiles go into CODIS related to a terrible crime, and that person comes back unidentified so think about that. 80,000 DNA cases a year. UNIDENTIFIED so our thousand in the last seven years, I mean, we're not even scratching the surface of it. So to make. To really, you know, try to make a dent in that and actually catch these criminals before they commit more crimes is. That's why we're doing the software. So that's kind of where we are. And we work with law enforcement all over the country, all over the world, actually. And one of the agencies that we work with was Austin Police Department and the Texas Attorney General's office.
- [55:27]
So you want to know about the yogurt shop now?
- [55:30]
Anya Cain
Yeah. So yogurt shop. So. So you're working with all these different ones. And I guess how do you initially get contacted by those agencies to. To work on that?
- [55:41]
Steve Kramer
So in, I believe it was 2021, Steve Bush and I, from our company, we were invited to speak at a cold case conference in Austin, Texas, that was put on by Mindy Mofford from the Texas AG's office. And so we presented at that conference in 2021, I believe it was 21 or 22. And that's how I met Mindy. And we talked about, you know, forensic genetic genealogy and how it can be used on cold cases. And it went over really well. And we ended up developing a good friendship with Mindy and the Austin Police Department at that point in time. And it was shortly thereafter I was contacted, I believe, either by Mindy or Daniel Jackson from Austin Police Department about this case called the Yogurt Shop. And so we ended up flying out to Texas, to Austin, I believe. Colleen Fitzpatrick was there, Bruce Bodoli, who's another DNA pioneer. Basically, Dan and Mindy were trying to get all the experts from across the country together in one room. And so we were all physically in one room, and he had spreadsheets already done in excel of all the evidence in the case where there might be DNA, because we figured that really that's the only evidence we had in the case truly was the DNA. And we did have some of the shell casings, and maybe there was a way we get DNA. So it was a great way to start like this cold case. And if you recall, earlier, I said, you know, if you treat a cold case investigation like a cold case, it'll never get solved. And I totally credit Dan Jackson and Mindy Mofford that the yogurt shop from. I think Dan and Mindy both got assigned to that in 2022. That case was never treated like a cold case, like, at all. And I love that we all sat down when we had meetings, these meetings had agendas, and we had decisions to make at those meetings, and it was great. And so we sat down and started going through the evidence, all of us, about, like, what DNA we could use, what labs we send them to, what we want to do on it. And that's how, you know, my company and others, how we all kind of got involved in yogurt shop and. And we sat down and, like, came up with different strategies to try and we tried multiple strategies to get DNA, came up with, you know, with different theories how we could do it. And, you know, for the next, you know, two and a half years or so, you know, we are slowly making our way towards, you know, a solution in this case. So I think all of us knew it was going to be solved, you know, one way or the other through DNA. DNA technology, like even since 2021 has improved so much. Where we're getting DNA, usable DNA for genealogy purposes versus even five years ago is just. It's incredible what we can do today with it.
- [58:34]
Anya Cain
It's amazing. So when you talk about, like, going through with ideas, with all these different experts and people with experience in this field, you're. I mean, it's. Is it essentially sort of like, oh, we, you know, you guys should test this piece of evidence again and see if you can get DNA now that our extraction techniques are better. Is it sort of that.
- [58:53]
Steve Kramer
Yeah, absolutely. That is definitely one example of it as well as, like, just. And I think not just in the yogurt shop, but a lot of cases, whether it's an active case or cold case, it's like, where else can you get DNA from? Like, what other. It. What other items might there, you know, be DNA on? Like, like, there was a key, you know, to the yogurt shop that was in the door, you know, that locked the door. Did the bad guy lock the door? Like, can we get DNA from that key? Like, things like that, like, you know, touch DNA that you wouldn't have thought about, you know, decades ago. So, yeah, you go through, like, you're actually going through the different pieces of evidence and figuring out, like, have we tried to get DNA from that? So, yeah, a lot of it was, you know, honestly, just, you know, brainstorming. You know, different places we get DNA from or where we did have DNA is like, a lot of it is, you know, and I'll just say this about the yogurt shop, and I think it's worth saying, I mean, that's just an incredible case. Like, I, you know, and I don't know, I don't read a lot of public information on it, but I do know, like, you know, from the police reports, the crime scene photos, what happened. It's a, it's probably one of the, if not, it's probably the worst case I've ever seen, like, in my career. It's a very compelling case, you know, compelling too because particularly in 2022, I had three daughters, all teenagers. And so I know what a 14 year old girl and her, you know, 15, 16 year old sisters are like. And like I, I totally get that dynamic of these four young girls, you know, getting ready for a slumber party together that night. You know, it's going to be a great time. They're happy, they're closing the yogurt shop. And then just to have this just absolutely horrendous, you know, turn of events. And I just, you can't even imagine that, like, I mean, what these poor kids went through. And.
- [60:51]
I just have to say it's such a compelling case as an investigator to look at, to think that somebody has gotten away with this and the families don't know who did this.
- [61:05]
I literally cannot even imagine that. But I will tell you that all of us, that, like, at that meeting, like, we're going to fall. We, I mean, there was just no doubt that we were going to solve it. And, and I just, I love the fact that everybody's like, never gave up. You know, we tried to test something. No DNA or the DNA was terrible. Like, we just kept going forward. I mean, I, there, I just, there was just something, you know, underlying that, that we're gonna solve it. And you know, we, you know, Angie Ayers and Sean Ayers, I mean, I met them, you know, like a year later and I remember telling both of them, like, we'll solve this case, like, we're going to solve it. And I think they knew it too. Like, we're going to solve it. We're going to find out what happened to Sean's young sister. So that I just have to say that because that was just such a driving force on this case. It was just such a terrible crime. And I mean, if you think about it, like, here's a guy that, like back in 1991, did this, you know, lit the place on fire, you know, with the victim's remains in it. The fire department came in, hose everything, literally. Like the firemen didn't even know until they stepped on one of the bodies. Like, it's. The fact that they got any DNA from this case is incredible. And they did some amazing things back then too. I mean, I have to credit, you know, the original investigators, they actually did, like, sexual assault examinations at the crime scene and then back at the police lab. I mean, that's how careful they were. So any of these cases, you know, I always say it's always a team effort. Like, the people that, you know, preserved the evidence in the very beginning, you know, just, you know, the people who did the fingernail scrapings and I mean, there's so many. I mean, it's such a team effort. And. But in any case, getting back to, you know, where we were, you know.
- [63:02]
Frankly, I felt like I'm mostly just a cheerleader, you know, to. To Dan and to Mindy, who are both, I thought, the real heroes that, you know, really carried this over the line. And, you know, I was happy to participate. I was honored to be, you know, part of that team and, you know, come up with ideas and things like that. I will tell you, I was. You talk to anybody. I'm very good about harassing people. Like, that is, like, probably my true talent. I'm extremely impatient. I am. And, like, I just, I. I want to solve all these cases right away. In fact, my partner is the same way. And we. We were actually told by the FBI, by some high ranking person at the FBI, this is a true story. Like, you guys just want to solve all the cases right now, don't you? And we said, well, of course. Of course we do. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no. Slow down, slow down. Pump the brakes. Used to take eight or nine years to get. I'm like.
- [64:00]
Eight or nine years. No, no, no, no, no. Like, we're to solve these cases today. So I was very impatient. It was funny. I was. We had Dan and Mindy and the rest of him. We had a couple strategies we're pursuing with the DNA on this case, and that looked pretty interesting. I was actually. I was harassing Dan last couple of months, like, you know, this summer about. We were gonna get some other DNA tested. And it was funny. I'm like, I was telling Dan, like, and we're getting ready to go, you know, test this other DNA. And I'm texting Dan, you know, like, I don't know, every other week, what's going on? Why aren't we doing this? Let's get on it and like, you know, get off your butt and let's go. I wasn't saying it, but I was like, basically harassing Daniel. And finally he texted me, and his text was like, hey, I think I solved the case. I've been really busy.
- [64:55]
I'm like, like, you are such an Ass. Like, who leave. Who sends a text like that? Can you imagine this? We're working this case, you know, for two and a half years. And he's like, I think I solved this. I think, like, what? And, like, I could. And like. And that's all he did. He didn't call me anything like that. So I obviously instantly called him. And he was laughing on the end. And I'm like, you're such an ass. You're such an ass. Like, I can't believe you. Like, what have you done? What is going on? And then he explained to me that, you know, they'd gotten a hit in Nibbins on a case that's the ballistics. Like, there was. There were two in the yogurt shop. There were two different weapons used, a.380 caliber and a.22. The 380 was only used once to kill Amy Airs. And that casing came back to another case in, I believe it was Kentucky. But what was really interesting, there was a case in Greenville, South Carolina, and this is where the Y DNA came in. So one of the things. And we did the same thing, like on the Golden State Killer case, using this Y DNA. So you have. I think in this case, you generally have like 17 to 27 y markers, like Y locations on the Y chromosome, and several states. I think there's maybe a dozen states now do this familiar DNA testing, which I talked about earlier. But when you do familial DNA testing, they generally run the Y DNA if it's a male. And they have some of the states have their own individual databases. It's separate than codis. It's not like you can just go and run it and it runs it nationally. You literally have to call up each state. You know, do you have a wide. A searchable, wide database? Yeah, we do. Can you run. Here's my. My profile, you know, 27 numbers. Can you run it to see if the numbers match? And so Dan and Mindy have been doing that with different states, and when they ran, South Carolina.
- [66:59]
Got a hit to a case there. Now, that doesn't mean. Why? Just because, like. Like I told you earlier, like, my grandfather and I could have the same. Why? My brother and I have the same. Why. So it's.
- [67:10]
It was very compelling. But then I think the detective in Greenville, you know, asked Dan about when he said you had a mask in one of their cases. He's like, any chance your guy tied the victims up with their. Their own clothing and. Which is obviously what happened in the yogurt shop. And that's when Dan's like, wow, that's. That this really could be our guy. And then obviously, there's other evidence that went into it. But the. The eventual suspect, Brashers, ironically, was identified in 2018, you know, shortly after the Golden State Killer, I believe, through genetic genealogy by Cece Moore, who had done genetic genealogy on that case. And I talked to her about it, and she told me it wasn't actually tough genealogy on that case. And she was able to identify Brasher's as the guy on that case. But now, remember, you have to have a CODIS profile to match to Brasher's. So Brasher's, they exhumed his body, and they got his CODIS STR profile, and they compared it to the homicide in that case, and it was a perfect match. Brasher's DNA was in codis, but we never had a CODIS STR and the yogurt shop. And same with the Kentucky case, they didn't have one. So there was. Even though Brasher's DNA was in, at least as of 2018 in CODIS, it didn't match any crimes because, like, yogurt shop, we just didn't have that str. But now we had the why. And so then the key was, is obviously, and this is where, you know, some of the other work went onto it was, can we get an STR from yogurt shop? And this is, you know, this is what happened this summer. And that we took DNA from the fingernail scrapings. And this is what I thought was really, you know, 100% credit to Mindy and Dan. We'd already tested those for DNA six years earlier. And that DNA, I'm sorry, that fingernail scraping didn't produce any usable DNA. So this time, Dan took it out to another laboratory that we were working with, a lab in Florida called DNA International, dli. And DLI was able to take those fingernail scrapings, and they were able to develop a partial STR CODIS profile enough that they could use it to identify whose DNA that was. And so then they compared that DNA from the fingernail scrapings of Amy to the Greenville suspect at Sprashers, and it was a match.
- [69:59]
Kevin Greenlee
So.
- [70:00]
Steve Kramer
And that was very compelling. And the other thing was obviously really compelling was when they researched Brashers a little bit more. He had been arrested 48 hours after yogurt shop. Right. And the New Mexico border of Texas with a.380, you know, the same caliber and the same type. I believe it was a. I think it was like an AT backup model, ATM backup model. So a lot of compelling information. We had the CODIS match the gun and so obviously it was Brashers and I will say it was, it was a unique case where you had genetic genealogy which identified brashers originally by C.C. moore. Had we not had that not been done, you know, we just know that oh well, the Ogre Shop killer, you know, killed somebody in South Carolina. You know, that's all we, you know, or we anybody know that for sure. You just have the same why it seems pretty compelling. So the genetic genealogy was, you know, really crucial there. And even cc's like I knew that guy committed more crimes I think. And when we've looked at it now, I think there's at least eight murders attributable to Brashers in this case. But it's a unique case where you had to use y, you had to use genetic genealogy and you had to use CODIS as well as, you know, the national ballistics information Nibbins. So you took all these very modern techniques. I'll say, you know, the CODIS STR is a little more archaic. It's been around for 30 some years. But all these techniques solve the case. And like I said, you know, you got a total credit to Dan Jackson and Mindy who you know, organized the whole thing. They ran it the right way, they never gave up on it. It was just amazing. Like I said, I was mostly a cheerleader to them on it.
- [71:44]
Anya Cain
That's pretty cool. And they thanked you, Earlita. Dan Jackson thanked you in the press conference. I mean, I just think it's so cool what you said. You know, all these different techniques being employed but also all these different people and expertise is being drawn on in the kind of planning phase. I think it, I think it really is a case study of how to handle a cold case and how to not. I think what you said really resonates. If you treat a cold case like a cold case, that's a self fulfilling prophecy. If you treat it like a case and you're doing this work, you know, no matter how old it is, that's how you're going to solve it. One question for you is what's next for you? I know you want to solve all the cases now, but how are you going to try to do that?
- [72:25]
Steve Kramer
Well, we're still trying to automate. We're automating this process. It's coming along and it just costs money. So you know, we're raising more money to do that and in educating detectives on how this process works. I think the. The thing that is, I think, the most frustrating to me and also to my colleague and like Annmarie Schubert, as well as those of us, is forensic genetic genealogy is not a cold case technique. It is not. People always say, oh, you're the cold case guys. Yeah, we can do cold cases. It is for any criminal case. Like, you would never say a search warrant is for cold cases or as a geofence for cold cases. No, no, no. Those are not cold cases. Those are law enforcement techniques. Those are law enforcement tools. And genetic genealogy is just the same. And I've done presentations where I've shown. We've done a dozen different active cases. You know, Brian Kohberger, you know, the quadruple murder from Moscow, Idaho was solved by my colleague at the FBI, and he took him less than a week to do the genetic genealogy. And overall, he was in custody within 43 days of that crime through his and the FBI's efforts to do the genetic genealogy on that case. And we've done other cases, we've done cases where we've done genetic genealogy and solved it in just over 30 days. And it can be even faster than that. It should be used in every case. So to me, and that's when you ask what I want to do. I want to use this on. You have better DNA on cases that happened yesterday than you did on cases that happened 10 years ago. So we should be using this on every case. If a woman is sexually assaulted and we have DNA and doesn't match in codis, why don't we do genetic genealogy before he becomes a serial rapist or in other cases, serial killers? It's just why, like. And the. The why is. Well, because it's hard, like, in, like, there's not a lot of education on it. So that's what we're trying to do, is get law enforcement to, one, be more educated on this. This isn't a cold case technique. That's why we always get invited to cold case conferences, because it's, you know, yeah, the famous cases are the cold cases. But, like, you know, as the Brian Coburger case would tell you, it was like, yeah, it can. But it can solve these terrible cases quickly before people become serial killers. We've had numerous cases where we've solved, like the Coburger case, these random acts of violence where people break into somebody's house and murder individuals in that house. We catch that guy within, you know, a few weeks or a few months through genetic genealogy before they become, you know, a serial killer or a serial rapist. And so that's where we want to bring it. And that's trying to make this faster and easier for cops.
- [75:10]
Anya Cain
Yeah, that makes so much sense. Make it just a part of the process rather than a whole extra thing that you have to do. And you're going to have people be using it more.
- [75:18]
Steve Kramer
Right? Well, I mean, like I said earlier, remember, 80,000 profiles. So 80,000 crime scene profiles every year. There's, you know, CODIS, we always say bats, you know, around, you know, 300, you know. Yeah, it's about 333% of the cases there's a match in CODIS. So think about, you know, 60, 67% of the time there's no match. That's at 80,000. It's just incredible to me that you have 80,000 individuals. Each of those individuals might be responsible for multiple crimes. So you're not talking just 80,000 crimes. You're probably talking a lot more. Go. Unidentified and that's what's, you know, super frustrating. So that's what we want to solve all the cases.
- [76:01]
Anya Cain
I love it. Yeah, no, I, I think you will. I'm excited. I mean, it's really, it's an exciting time to be following crime. I think because of this, I guess we kind of, you kind of breeze through all my questions. Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think it's important for folks to understand any of the cases or topics we've talked about or just anything you wanted to mention?
- [76:21]
Steve Kramer
No, I think we, I think we kind of went through it pretty good. I'm good with it.
- [76:24]
Anya Cain
Just want to thank you so much for coming on the show. It's really been delightful to hear. I could hear you talk for hours, but it's really, it's really nice and thank you.
- [76:32]
Steve Kramer
Yeah, for sure.
- [76:35]
Anya Cain
Thanks, Cecil, for taking the time to speak with us. We really appreciate it and appreciate all the work he and others have done on these cases.
- [76:41]
Kevin Greenlee
Thanks so much for listening to the Murder Sheet. If you have a tip concerning one of the cases we cover, please email us@murdersheetmail.com. if you have actionable information about an unsolved crime, please report it to the appropriate authorities.
- [77:02]
Anya Cain
If you're interested in joining our Patreon, that's available at www.patreon.com murdersheet. If you want to tip us a bit of money for records requests, you can do so at www. Buymeacoffee.com murdersheet. We very much appreciate any support.
- [77:25]
Kevin Greenlee
Special thanks to Kevin Tyler Greenlee, who composed the music for the Murder Sheet and who you can find on the web@kevintg.com if you're looking to talk with.
- [77:37]
Anya Cain
Other listeners about a case we've covered, you can join the Murder Sheet discussion group on Facebook. We mostly focus our time on research and reporting, so we're not on social media much. We do try to check our email account, but we ask for patience as we often receive a lot of messages. Thanks again for listening. We've run into some pretty creepy people in our true crime journey and we've even gotten some threats as a result. Safety is often top of mind for Kevin and I.
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Kevin Greenlee
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