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Today, we are covering five cold cases solved decades later.
For the friends and family members
of someone who is murdered, the pain and despair
of watching their loved ones case go cold
is second only to the pain of losing that person.
As the years pass and the killer walks free,
the frustration and sadness only complies.
Some police departments put together teams
to solve cold cases.
Many simply have a stack of cold case files
that detectives can volunteer to work
during unpaid overtime.
Cases that do not get continued media coverage
often fall by the wayside.
If a family doesn't have the resources
to keep the case in the news,
or the detectives do not have the resources
to keep working the case indefinitely,
especially when there are no new leads,
a case could go unsolved indefinitely.
(ominous music)
In this video, we're not going to talk
about cases the remain unsolved.
Instead, we're going to talk about five cold cases
that finally, after years of diligent work
by family members, detectives
and amateur sleuths, were solved.
Number five, Tanya Ethridge McKinley.
In the first few hours of the year 1985,
Tanya Ethridge McKinley,
a mother of a young son, was murdered.
According to those interviewed
about her activities prior to her death,
she had been drinking at a local bar
and grill in Pensacola, celebrating the new year.
Around 1:30 in the morning after the drinking,
singing and celebrating died down, she left the bar,
and was never seen alive again.
Before the sun rose on New Year's Day,
her body was discovered in an empty lot.
She had been assaulted, strangled and left half-clothed.
Police arrived quickly, collecting hair,
bodily fluids, and a single cigarette butt from the scene.
But in 1985 there was no technology
for analyzing the DNA contained in that evidence.
And there certainly were no databases
to compare those results against.
Instead, the cops were left with some scattered
eye witness accounts of Tanya at the bar.
They said she hadn't left with anyone,
no one reported seeing her after she left the bar.
There were few leads to follow
even without reliable eye witnesses, as there always are.
They believe that the person who assaulted
and murdered Tanya had likely done it before.
So they called in the usual suspects.
None of them were good for it.
Though the leads dried up, the Pensacola Police Department
did not give up on Tanya.
Over the last 35 years, they would occasionally get
a new lead, and they would run it down until
it was clear it was a dead end.
As the original team of detectives retired
they passed the case on to a new team.
When that team retired, they passed it down again.
It was the capture of The Golden State Killer,
also known as the original Night Stalker,
and by the acronym EARONS,
that breathed new life into this case.
GSK was caught because one of his family members
submitted their DNA for lineage analysis.
Those results are stored in a huge database,
and on occasion can be subpoenaed
by police departments for comparison
to DNA obtained from crime scenes.
Some databases are entirely open sourced,
and can be accessed without a warrant.
The detectives are not looking specifically
for the perpetrator or a crime,
but for family members of that person.
If they can make a familial match,
they can find the criminal.
This is exactly what happened in Tanya's case.
It had been years since the evidence gathered
at her crime scene had been tested for DNA.
There was enough DNA recovered from the cigarette butt
that police could compare it to other samples
and potentially make a match.
When the detectives partnered with Parabon NanoLabs
and ran the DNA from this case
through their genealogy database,
the records of several distant relations were returned.
That was enough for police to find the man
who murdered Tanya Ethridge McKinley.
His name was Daniel Leonard Wells.
Over the last 35 years he had been picked up
on a few charges, assault, solicitation,
but had never served any substantial time.
He had walked free for decades.
But justice was finally served,
and Tanya would be able to rest in peace.
In a statement posted on Facebook after Wells was arrested,
Chuck Mallett, the Pensacola Police Department captain said,
"This was a case that spanned
three generations of detectives.
I know it took a long time, but it was one
of those cases we never, ever gave up on."
Number four, Lorraine Snell.
Lorraine Snell was only 19 years old when she was murdered.
On the 25th of September 1980,
she left her home in Brooklyn, New York
and headed towards a catering hall.
She was planning a party for her boyfriend
and wanted to rent the space.
She met the husband of her cousin there
who helped her reserve it.
The next day she was found strangled
in the trunk of a station wagon parked
in front of a grocery store.
Suspicion fell almost immediately on her cousin's husband,
a man named James Burrus.
His alibi, however, was that he was committing
another crime at the time.
He told police that he had been robbing a taxi stand,
and couldn't possibly have killed Lorraine.
When they examined him, looking for scratches,
or bruises that would have indicated a struggle,
they reported that they didn't find any.
The robbery earned him a prison sentence.
And it was in prison that he turned to religion.
Upon his release, he became a street preacher.
Many people knew him only as Bishop.
Even though the station wagon was found
in the parking lot of Burrus' former employer,
and the station wagon was once owned by Burrus' boss,
the police claimed there was not enough evidence
to charge him with the crime, until March of this year.
It was the scrapings from underneath Lorraine's fingernails
that finally clinched this case.
DNA recovered from her fingernails
was conclusively matched to Jame Burrus
nearly 40 years after this horrific murder.
Number three, Naomi Sanders.
Our third solved cold case is Naomi Sanders.
The winter of 1973 was particularly cold
for some parts of the United States.
But, not for Naomi, who lived in temperate San Francisco.
She was having steak for dinner.
Her window was open, a sign propped in between
the window and the sill read open.
She managed the apartment building
and would often show potential renters
around the property no matter the time of day or night.
She had a pure breed poodle she had named Cindy.
The police guessed because she was making two steaks,
that one of the steaks was for Cindy.
Sometime on the evening of February 27, 1973,
Naomi met her death.
Like the other cases on our list she was strangled
left lying on her bed.
From the beginning, police knew
this would be a difficult case.
While the majority of murdered women
are murdered by someone they know,
Naomi didn't have any vindictive ex-boyfriends.
As far as they could tell,
she didn't have any enemies at all.
In discussion with her friends and family,
no one reported that Naomi had told them
about any suspicious men.
The police collected stains from her bed.
But at the time there was nothing
that could be done with that evidence.
With no leads, the case went cold almost immediately.
In 2014, detectives at the Vallejo Police Department
extracted DNA from the available evidence.
But when they ran the profile through
the official databases, no matches were found.
Over the next few years they would continue
to run the DNA as new banks opened up,
even expanding their reach beyond California.
Every test came back negative.
That was until 2019, when Parabon NanoLabs ran
the DNA through their collection of open source databases
and got two matches.
Detectives were able to eliminate one
of the leads right away.
The other however, was dead.
He'd asked for his body to be cremated,
perhaps to make it impossible for DNA analysis
to ever conclusively link him to a crime.
However, part of the report provided about these matches
indicated that the second lead had a son.
Police reached out to him and he willingly gave his DNA.
It was from that DNA that they determined
that Robert Dale Edwards, the second lead
was Naomi's murderer.
He'd had a string of assaults, thefts
and domestic violence charges
before he finally overdosed and died in 1993.
Number two, Christie Witcher.
Christie Witcher had just turned 24.
On the 30th of July, 1993, she left her trailer
in Scottsville, Kentucky and disappeared.
Her sister said she was headed to her job
at a nearby carnival, though she never arrived.
At first, Christie's family wasn't that worried.
Her sister reported that sometimes she would just leave.
She said, "My sister was always a wanderer.
She would go and she would stay gone
for a couple weeks, but she'd always come back."
But this time she never came back.
For years, her family waited with bated breath hoping
that their daughter would return safe and sound.
It was difficult to believe that she would disappear
of her own volition, but that was preferable
to believing that she was dead.
It was due to the hope that she would
just show up again, that they did not report her missing
until the next year.
They would have to hold onto those hopes
for more than 25 years.
In the Summer of 1995, a pair of hunters walking
through a patch of woods in Pulaski County, Kentucky
discovered a dead body.
The coroner discovered that the body
was that of a young woman, her throat cut,
her body beaten before she died.
For months, the pieces of this body
lay unidentified in a morgue.
Eventually, the case was submitted
to the National Missing and Unidentified Person system.
It wasn't until 2020 that DNA taken from this body
was matched with that of Christie's living relatives.
And they discovered that this identified person
was their missing daughter and sister.
Unfortunately, though the police were pleased
to be able to hand over Christie's remains to her family,
they still have no idea what really happened to her.
The wounds inflicted indicate homicide,
but there was no physical evidence.
And the family could not provide any leads.
Number one, Mark Ashland.
The last case on our list is that of Mark Ashland.
In October of 1984, the body of a 30 year old man
was found hanging in Carkeek Park near Seattle.
He had no identification, and despite their best efforts
without a shred of evidence pointing towards
who this man was, detectives labeled him John Doe,
and his case was shelved.
Hopefully, they thought, someone would come forward.
Somewhere out there someone had to be looking for this man.
He was young, he seemed healthy,
someone must know who he was.
They took his fingerprints and ran them
through their database.
As databases expanded, they continued to run them
hoping for a hit.
Every few years they would cycle the prints
through every available database.
They had no luck.
For over 35 years no one came forward to claim him.
When the National Missing and Unidentified Person system
was established, a sketch of the man
and a general profile were added.
It wouldn't be until 2019 that someone reached out
to the medical examiner's office in King County.
They had seen the profile on NAMUS,
and believed this John Doe was her uncle, Mark Ashland,
who had disappeared in 1981.
Both the medical examiner's office
and the family wanted to be sure.
DNA would not be an option this time.
Mark had been buried 35 years prior,
and no samples of blood, skin or even hair
had been taken before his burial.
Remember, this was 1984,
long before anyone knew how to extract DNA
and compare it to other samples.
Instead, they turned to fingerprints.
Dr. Cathy Taylor at the MEO asked the family
if they had any letters from Mark.
Luckily they had.
Mark's sister in fact had preserved
the last letter she ever received from her brother.
They were able to lift two fingerprints
from the letter that was quickly approaching 40 years old.
When compared to the prints that the detectives
had been running through fingerprint databases
since the discovery of Mark's body they found a match.
One of the prints from the letter
was a definitive match to Mark Ashland.
He'd finally been found.
While there is of course renewed sadness
when a cold case is solved,
justice for the victim and peace for
the family and friends can be
a powerful antidote to that heartbreak.
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