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Bloodline Detectives Season 6 Episode 6
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FunTranscript
00:01Seattle, 1967.
00:03A young woman is found murdered near the Seattle Space Needle.
00:08When they looked at who the victim was and then looked at her identification,
00:12they were shocked to see that it was 20-year-old Susan Galvin
00:16who worked for the Seattle Police Department.
00:19It's just shocking.
00:21You're going to work in the police department.
00:23It should be a safe environment,
00:24and our records employees that are working the night shift
00:27aren't walking the length of downtown Seattle to get to work anymore.
00:33Despite an extensive investigation and multiple suspects,
00:37the case goes cold for decades.
00:40A case may be old and it's unsolved,
00:43but that doesn't mean it's not being worked.
00:46Something could come about tomorrow that could change everything.
00:50In the 1990s, DNA forensics brings new hope.
00:54Detectives track down the list of suspects.
00:58You go through that murder book from page one to page 200 or whatever,
01:03and your head's buzzing.
01:04You're like, wow, there's a lot here.
01:07And that's good, because that means there's a lot to work with,
01:10but it's also a little bit overwhelming.
01:13I developed this mail profile from the underpants,
01:17put it into the CODIS database,
01:19and we didn't get any hits to the database.
01:25But investigators refused to give up on this half a century old case.
01:30When we were using CODIS and we weren't getting any hits,
01:34I personally thought that that was the dead end.
01:37I didn't see that genealogy was on the horizon
01:40and was going to burst open and provide another tool
01:44for solving these old cases.
01:46Criminals who have hidden in the shadows for years
01:49find there's no escaping science and their own family DNA.
01:53Welcome to Bloodline Detectives.
02:16Seattle is a major city in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States,
02:28located between Puget Sound and Lake Washington.
02:31I grew up in Seattle.
02:33It's a great city.
02:35It's beautiful.
02:36I love that it has the water.
02:39The mountains are nearby.
02:45You're not too far from the ocean.
02:47And it's just a really nice place to live and grow up.
02:52It's still kind of the heart of the counterculture.
03:00There are a lot of arts and sporting events and things of that nature,
03:04but it's really become known as a hub for technology.
03:11Everybody's planning to see Seattle's spectacular $100 million World's Fair.
03:18In the beginning of the 20th century,
03:20there was a space of land in downtown Seattle
03:23that was used as just a public event space.
03:25And in 1962, this six block by six block area
03:29was chosen to be the home of the World's Fair.
03:31It brought the monorail, the iconic Space Needle,
03:35and 10 million visitors to the city.
03:38That area of the Seattle Center would host all sorts of events,
03:42and eventually part of it became an arena
03:44where the Beatles would play a $5 concert.
03:48They have a lot of play areas for the children.
03:55They had a lot of games.
03:57At the time, it was like an outdoor fair.
03:59There's a big park with a big fountain that runs,
04:03as well as a children's museum.
04:05There was just a place to go and gather
04:08and spend time with friends and family.
04:10But on July the 13th, 1967, a discovery in the Seattle Center car park
04:20sends shockwaves through the city.
04:23In the morning hours of July 13th, 1967,
04:26a parking attendant went to the Seattle Center parking garage
04:29off of Mercer Street and was unlocking the elevators.
04:33When one of the elevator's doors opened, he was shocked by what he saw inside.
04:38A young woman was clearly deceased, and it was just a grisly, horrible scene.
04:47Investigators quickly arrived and they cordoned off the area
04:50and then went to the elevator to start processing the scene.
04:53When they looked at who the victim was and then looked at her identification,
04:58they were shocked to see that it was 20-year-old Susan Galvin
05:02who worked for the Seattle Police Department.
05:04So this case took a serious turn right away.
05:08Primary detectives were Archie Porter and Dave Grayson,
05:14and they started working on the crime scene
05:23and processing it using the strategies available to them in 1967.
05:28They called out our criminalist section
05:31who actually dusted the elevator for fingerprints.
05:35They actually took the handrails out of the elevator
05:39and submitted them into evidence.
05:41They searched the pit, the area below the elevator,
05:44for any pieces of evidence,
05:46photographed the scene, measured the scene.
05:49They created a history of what they found
05:52so that future generations of detectives
05:56could continue to work on this case.
05:59They knew that they had a Seattle Police Records employee,
06:03one of their co-workers who had been murdered,
06:06and they were gearing and gunning to get to the bomb of that right away.
06:10One of the worst parts of a first responder's job
06:15is notifying a family when someone has died.
06:18And this case was even more difficult
06:20because, again, we're talking about the late 60s.
06:22We didn't have cell phones or Zoom calls.
06:25And Susan's family was about 300 miles away,
06:28almost to the Idaho border in Spokane,
06:31and her dad was living down in Portland.
06:33So not only did the investigators have to find out
06:37who her family was and where they were located,
06:39they had to notify them,
06:41and then they had to make the very long trip into Seattle
06:45to get Susan.
06:47The city really reacted to this murder
06:54because it was just so unexpected.
06:56And her youth and the fact that she was a police department employee,
07:01and it happened at Seattle Center,
07:04just so many things about it, I think, really affected people.
07:08She was very young and really liked her job
07:12and liked to go out with her friends.
07:14She had a pretty big family
07:16and was just getting started in her career,
07:19and it's a shame that this took place.
07:25Susan Galvin moved to Seattle from Spokane
07:28just about a year before her death.
07:30She had been born in Massachusetts
07:32and was the oldest of all of the children in the family.
07:35After graduating from North Central High School,
07:37she attended Spokane Community College,
07:39and even though it was the Northwest
07:41and it was deeply in the 60s,
07:43she was far from a counterculture kid.
07:46She was not interested in breaking the rules
07:48or being a hippie.
07:49She was very straight-laced and career-driven
07:52and focused on her future,
07:54and that included a job in law enforcement.
07:57And once she got to Seattle,
07:58she was able to get a job with a Seattle PD as a clerk.
08:02Susan was thriving in her position with the Seattle PD,
08:06which was unusual.
08:07Not only was she a female, but she was only 20 years old.
08:11But she fit with this job perfectly.
08:13She was known for how focused she was for her work
08:16and that she had perfect attendance.
08:18She took her job very seriously.
08:20Susan loved Seattle as much as she loved her job.
08:23She worked the night shift, which she really enjoyed
08:25because it was peaceful and quiet
08:27and she could focus on her work.
08:28But even though she was working at night,
08:30it didn't keep her from living her life.
08:32She was often out with friends.
08:34She enjoyed hanging out in the Seattle Center.
08:37She enjoyed going to restaurants
08:39and just exploring what was now her new home.
08:45Police begin their investigation by building a timeline
08:48of events leading to the discovery of Susan's body.
08:51She didn't come to work the night of July 9th going into July 10th
08:57and then she didn't come to work the next day either.
09:00On July 12th, her friends and coworkers
09:03made a missing persons report
09:05and that investigation began.
09:07And detectives actually on July 12th,
09:11they went to her apartment on Lower Queen Anne
09:14and took a look around and didn't find anything suspicious.
09:19There was no sign that something horrible had happened.
09:23So the missing person investigation continued
09:27until 6.40 p.m. on the night of July 13th.
09:33Susan's common route to work going from her apartment
09:37on Lower Queen Anne would be to walk to the Seattle Center,
09:41take the elevator up to an elevated crosswalk bridge
09:45that goes over Mercer Street
09:47and then she would either walk from Seattle Center
09:50to police headquarters, then called the Public Safety Building
09:54or she would take the monorail, which is an elevated train
09:57that goes from Seattle Center to West Lake Park.
10:00And this was her route every night.
10:04And that night, July 9th going into the morning of July 10th,
10:10she was supposed to be at work at midnight.
10:12She had excellent attendance.
10:14She showed up on time consistently.
10:17She didn't come to work.
10:22On July 9th, the Sunday before Susan's body was found,
10:26there had been an event at the center.
10:28And for whatever reason,
10:30the garage was actually going to be shut down
10:32and the elevators were going to be locked.
10:34They remained open because people were still parked there
10:37and needed to access their car to leave.
10:39But that did help investigators
10:41because it really narrowed the timeline
10:43and they were able to surmise that
10:45she must have been walking to work like usual
10:47and like she usually did,
10:49used the garage as a shortcut to get to the office.
10:52Some point while walking through the garage,
10:55she was either ambushed or approached by someone she knew
10:58and that was when the attack happened.
11:00She was then locked into those elevators
11:03for the next four days.
11:07The next step is to conduct an autopsy
11:09to determine the exact cause of her death.
11:12She had been raped and strangled.
11:16In this case, all of the victim's clothes were preserved
11:24and submitted into the Seattle Police Department's evidence fault,
11:28which is really impressive going back that far
11:31because that didn't happen every time.
11:34Investigators compile a list of suspects
11:37and quickly locate one individual
11:39who raises more suspicions than the others.
11:42Police are investigating the 1967 rape and murder
11:57of 20-year-old Susan Galvin,
11:59whose body was discovered in the Seattle Center.
12:04Investigators are now searching for witnesses
12:06and potential suspects.
12:08In this circumstance, she was found in an elevator,
12:13an elevator that had been closed for several days.
12:15So there wasn't immediate people waiting to talk to them
12:19that can say, this is what happened.
12:21So they started a canvas
12:23and there was a lot going on at the Seattle Center
12:26and there was a lot of people to talk to.
12:28And that was just a matter of going person to person,
12:31establishment by establishment,
12:33and just saying, hey, do you know anything about what happened?
12:38Were you here on the night of July 9th?
12:43Have you seen Susan Galvin?
12:45Do you recognize her?
12:47About a week prior, she was seen on a double date.
12:50Her and a friend had actually paired up with some local sailors
12:53and they went on a date, had a nice time.
12:56They were kind of talks of a follow-up date,
12:58but that never really came to fruition.
13:00Officers did actually go to the naval base they were located
13:04and checked when...
13:06and talked to them about where they had been
13:09when Susan was murdered, checking their alibis.
13:12They eventually took polygraph tests.
13:15They had no information about what happened to Susan Galvin.
13:19They had not been with her or around her that weekend
13:22that she went missing and they were eventually cleared.
13:25Most violent crimes tend to be between people that know each other.
13:31People that we are closest to are usually the ones that hurt you the most, right?
13:34So that's usually the person you're going to look as to.
13:38There could be some sort of disagreement, some sort of fight,
13:42some jealousy, who knows what could be going on.
13:45And so your instinct naturally is to look to family members,
13:51especially significant others.
13:54Anybody that's around them quite a bit,
13:56but especially a significant relationship.
14:03Detectives zero in on one man who had been working near the crime scene.
14:08When detectives were canvassing the Seattle Center,
14:11they ran into witnesses who thought they saw Susan Galvin
14:14on that Sunday, July 9th,
14:16and several witnesses came forward
14:18and said they saw her with the Seattle Center clown,
14:23who was a young male whose job was to dress like a clown
14:26and made his rounds in and around the park.
14:29There is kind of a silly stereotype about the evil clown committing evil deeds,
14:37doing bad things, dressing up and being there to entertain children,
14:42but living a second life, right?
14:44And so when this lead came up, I'm sure there was a little bit of,
14:50well, number one, trepidation,
14:52but number two, kind of like, what are we doing here?
14:55This is like a bad movie.
14:56We're really investigating the clown.
14:58The clown was immediately identified,
15:00and it turns out that he worked the night of July 9th,
15:04then he was off July 10th and July 11th,
15:08and then on July 12th he came to work and abruptly quit.
15:11And then he skipped town.
15:13This was obviously incredibly alarming to the police.
15:16They were able to track him down,
15:18and they asked him about Susan in that day.
15:21He was kind of aloof about it and vague,
15:24and he was starting to really look like
15:26the most likely suspect.
15:28With all of this information,
15:30the clown was given a polygraph test,
15:32and he didn't pass, he didn't fail.
15:34It was inconclusive,
15:36and there just wasn't enough evidence for any arrest to be made.
15:40But he remained an important suspect in the case.
15:43Despite early efforts, the case stalls and all leads are exhausted.
15:48If you were to ask the Seattle Police Department,
15:53they would probably say that Susan's case never went cold
15:56because they were always working on it,
15:58and they didn't want to let one of their own down.
16:02But it didn't take long for all of these suspects and leads to go nowhere,
16:07and they really didn't have anything to go on,
16:09so the case went cold pretty quickly.
16:12It wasn't until the early 2000s
16:14that the case was really reopened and reviewed again,
16:18and that's when they started to realize
16:20maybe technology would be able to help them solve it.
16:27In 1967, no one was talking about DNA.
16:30In 1977, no one was talking about DNA.
16:33In the late 90s, yes.
16:38And in the early 2000s,
16:41we assigned a couple detectives to go through all our unsolved homicides
16:45and pull out the cases that were clearly sexual assaults
16:50that would have the most potential for identifying suspect DNA,
16:54left either at the scene or on the victim or on the victim's clothes.
17:00In 2002, detectives McSell and Gagnon reopened this case,
17:07and they submitted items from the autopsy of Susan Galvin
17:11to the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory.
17:14The scientist assigned to the case was Lisa Caraba,
17:18who now is Lisa Collins,
17:20but she was the DNA scientist from the beginning.
17:25The evidence being from 1967,
17:31and over time, DNA degrades,
17:34and so you never know when you're going back to evidence that old
17:39if you're going to be able to get any usable DNA.
17:42I had the background information.
17:45I had a pair of underpants,
17:47and I knew that she had been sexually assaulted.
17:50And so I was looking at the pair of underpants for the presence of semen.
17:56And so I first looked at the underpants with what's called a forensic light source,
18:00and I'm looking for any areas where there would be fluorescent staining.
18:04So body fluids will fluoresce when exposed to this light that we use.
18:09So I found areas of fluorescence in the crotch area,
18:13but also on other parts of the underwear.
18:16And so I ended up taking samples from those areas that I had seen fluorescence,
18:22and I was looking for the presence of spermatozoa.
18:26And so one of the samples that I collected from the crotch of the underpants had spermatozoa.
18:31So I only went forward with that one sample.
18:35But from that sample, I was able to develop a male profile.
18:40And the reason this case was submitted in the early 2000s
18:44is we had just started using CODIS database.
18:47So CODIS stands for Combined DNA Index System.
18:50And so we were going back to these old cases
18:53and seeing if we could develop a DNA profile from a perpetrator
18:57that we could then put into this CODIS database
19:00and see if we could identify any possible offenders
19:05that are in that database that could match this evidence profile.
19:09So I put it into the CODIS database,
19:12and we didn't get any hits to the database.
19:16And essentially, there weren't any other crimes that were linked to this case,
19:21and then there weren't any offenders that were identified to this case.
19:25And so I personally thought that that was the dead end.
19:31Decades pass without a match.
19:33But in 2016, the case is taken over by Detective Rolf Norton,
19:36who is convinced this case will be solved.
19:39Seattle, 2016.
19:53Detective Rolf Norton and his cold case team
19:56reopen the 1967 sexual assault and murder of Susan Galvin.
20:00After decades without answers,
20:04new forensic technology offers a renewed chance to identify her killer.
20:09Ralph and I were in the academy together.
20:12I've worked with him my whole career.
20:14We've worked pretty closely now that he's been in homicide,
20:18and me and CSI have been in CSI for 20 years.
20:21He was a great fit in our cold case unit,
20:24because those are the most difficult.
20:26And he just has the tenacity for those cases.
20:30For someone who started working on this case in 2016,
20:33to go and find out that those clothes from 49 years ago are still there,
20:40people are doing their job, and they're looking out,
20:43and they're creating a work product
20:46that allows future investigators to be successful.
20:51I can't tell you how many people came to me
20:55once I started working this case that had been around forever
20:58and said, hey, Rolf, that could have been me.
21:01People that weren't around when Susan Galvin was murdered,
21:04but were working in records would come up to me and say,
21:08that could have been any of us.
21:11It's just shocking is what it was.
21:14You're going to work in the police department
21:16at the public safety building every day.
21:18It should be a safe environment,
21:19and our records employees that are working the night shift
21:23aren't walking the length of downtown Seattle to get to work anymore.
21:27Her death, her murder affected people in the department
21:31to a great degree and was never forgotten.
21:34Detective Norton believed that one suspect
21:38who had inconclusive results on the lie detector test
21:41should be first on his radar,
21:43the clown who performed at the Seattle Center.
21:47People said that clown was with Susan Galvin,
21:51and then inexplicably he quits,
21:54and his behavior after the fact just didn't make sense.
21:57Kind of raised the hackles a little bit,
21:59and, you know, he peered very, very suspicious.
22:04And immediately after I finished going through everything,
22:07I was like, I need to go talk to Punchy the Clown,
22:10and I actually wanted to get his DNA,
22:14and I got a search warrant within a couple days
22:16of going through the entire case,
22:18and it was signed in King County Superior Court,
22:21which is our jurisdiction here in Seattle,
22:24and I started looking for this clown,
22:27and he was still alive.
22:29He had an address up in North Seattle,
22:31and after knocking on a few doors,
22:33I learned that he had moved away the year before,
22:37and ultimately I was able to figure out
22:39that he was residing in Salt Lake City, Utah.
22:43So I reached out to a homicide detective,
22:46Corden Parks, down in Salt Lake City, PD,
22:51and collaborated my warrant with their process
22:55for getting a search warrant,
22:57and we got one for that jurisdiction, and I flew down.
23:00And we served that warrant on the clown in November of 2016,
23:05and I sat down with him and interviewed him in his apartment.
23:13All right, this is Detective Norton with Seattle Police.
23:17You know that I'm recording this, right?
23:19Yes.
23:20Back in 1967, were you employed as a clown at the Seattle Center?
23:25Yes.
23:26Okay. Do you remember working there?
23:28Of course.
23:29How old were you when you first started working as a clown?
23:32Seven years old.
23:34Wow.
23:35So at the Seattle Center back in 1967,
23:39a young woman was killed.
23:41Do you remember that happening?
23:44It was in the elevator across the park in the village.
23:49Exactly.
23:50What do you remember about that incident?
23:54Just it was on the news.
23:56Okay.
23:57Do you remember being interviewed by the police detectives?
24:03It's barely.
24:05Do you remember taking a polygraph test, a lie detector test?
24:09No.
24:10Do you remember the girl's name who was killed, the victim?
24:14Do you remember her name?
24:15No.
24:16Did you know her?
24:17No.
24:18Okay.
24:19Were you in that elevator with her?
24:21No.
24:22Did you have anything to do with her death?
24:24No.
24:25Okay.
24:26Did you have her have sex with her?
24:28No.
24:29Okay. Are you sure about that?
24:30Positive.
24:31Absolutely.
24:32500%.
24:33100%.
24:34This is a really old grainy photo.
24:36And that's the picture of the woman that was killed.
24:43You recognize her at all?
24:44No.
24:45Okay.
24:46And you remembered that she was in an elevator.
24:49Is that right?
24:50Yeah.
24:51I heard it on the news or something.
24:53Okay.
24:54That was a long time ago.
24:55That's interesting that you could remember that.
24:57Well, bad things remember.
24:59Yeah.
25:00Stay away from her.
25:01So this incident happened on a Sunday afternoon.
25:06And you ended up quitting your job a day or two later.
25:09Do you remember that?
25:10Yeah.
25:11I was going on.
25:13I had to go somewhere else.
25:15Move away.
25:16How come?
25:19It's time to move.
25:21It changed.
25:22Mm-hmm.
25:23But it seemed kind of abrupt to me as I was reading kind of a chronology of things.
25:28Yeah.
25:29Did you leave because of that girl's murder?
25:32No.
25:33Wow.
25:34It had nothing to do with it.
25:36So just to be certain, you don't think you knew the victim at all?
25:40No, I didn't.
25:41And you certainly never had sex with her?
25:43Of course not.
25:44Okay.
25:45It's not what clowns do.
25:47Working two or three jobs, you do something just to bring them a laugh.
25:52Yeah.
25:53Okay.
25:54And the reason why I've asked you that multiple times now in different ways.
25:58So what I'm going to do is I'm going to test the saliva from your swabs, and I'm going to
26:03be able to determine whether you were involved or not, okay?
26:05Of course.
26:06So if there's anything you're holding back on, I want you to tell me today, okay?
26:10No.
26:11Nothing?
26:12I did the DNA analysis, compared the DNA profile from this individual to the crime scene profile,
26:24and the profiles did not match.
26:27So that was, he was excluded as being a possible suspect at that point.
26:32I was disappointed.
26:33I know that he was disappointed, because you're always hoping that you're going to find the
26:38answer to the question of who did this to this victim.
26:42When the clown was cleared of involvement, my first reaction was, okay, the name's in that book.
26:53I just need to find it and match that name with that genetic profile with the DNA we have.
26:59And that was going to be my plan.
27:02But it turned out the name wasn't in that book.
27:06And it turned out that other investigative strategies became available that I wasn't even imagining in 2016.
27:19In 2018, news comes out of a major breakthrough in solving cold cases, a novel tool that could change the future of crime fighting.
27:32Interestingly enough, I was working on another case, and that detective had started asking about genealogy.
27:39And he started asking questions about GEDmatch database and the ancestry process.
27:47And I didn't have any familiarity with that.
27:50But then the information came out about the Golden State Killer.
27:56I remember exactly where I was when I first heard about that case and how it was solved.
28:00I was traveling in the Midwest and had a long drive and I was listening to the radio and kind of a coverage of how this went down.
28:08And I just about pulled over and started yelling because I was like, I have five cases right away that we could use this strategy on.
28:16That maybe could get us there.
28:19And the first one I thought of was Susan Galvin.
28:25So we started looking more into it.
28:27So I had a case, not this one, but a different case in 2018 that we sent a sample out and identified a possible suspect and got a sample from that suspect.
28:40And so solved that case.
28:43And that was when my eyes were just completely open to this absolutely amazing new tool that could be used to provide investigative leads for these old cold cases.
28:55This new tool is known as forensic investigative genetic genealogy.
29:02Genetic genealogy is the combination of traditional genealogy and DNA.
29:10DNA.
29:15And so we are using people's DNA to learn more about their family history, to extend their family trees in some cases.
29:22And in the application of investigative genetic genealogy, we are using that combination of genealogical records and genetics to help identify violent criminals.
29:34And to bring the names back to people who died without their identification, Jane and John Doe's.
29:41Although there are over 50 million people who have taken direct to consumer DNA tests for law enforcement cases, we are limited to the two smallest databases.
29:49And those are FamilyTreeDNA and GEDmatch.
29:52Those are the two databases that have agreed to work with law enforcement and have alerted their customers to this and allowed them to opt in or opt out of being compared against law enforcement cases.
30:08Unfortunately, the biggest databases, AncestryDNA, 23andMe, and MyHeritage, have terms of service that bar law enforcement's use.
30:17And so this means we are often able to only compare against 2 million or less profiles and it can make our work very challenging.
30:30Genetic genealogy is used to reverse engineer the identity of a DNA contributor, whether that's a violent criminal who's left their DNA behind at the crime scene or whether that's a person who died without their identification.
30:45And so we're using that combination of public records such as vital records, census records, marriage records, obituaries, newspaper archives, and social media to learn about these families and document them.
31:00But we only know which families that we should be researching because of who they're sharing DNA with, who that subject that we're trying to identify is sharing DNA with.
31:15And so that's a lot of people that we're trying to identify with.
31:18And so that's a lot of people that share your common ancestors.
31:19And the closer that common ancestor is in time, the more DNA that you will share.
31:24We measure that in a unit called centimorgans.
31:27So the more centimorgans you share with the person, generally the closer your relationship is.
31:32So with your parents, you'll share about 3,600 centimorgans.
31:37Whereas with your first cousin, you'll share about 850 centimorgans.
31:42In genetic genealogy cases where we're working with law enforcement, we're often working with people who share less than 1% of their DNA.
31:51Now that would typically mean that they might be third cousins, for instance, which means they share a set of great, great grandparents.
31:58Then we have to reverse engineer that work in that family tree and identify the descendants of those common ancestors.
32:09And from among those descendants, we should be able to identify our DNA contributor or what we call the subject.
32:16I knew that there was some extracted DNA remaining that we had retained at the laboratory.
32:25So I went back to the sample and evaluated it to see if it could be used for the genealogy testing.
32:33And determined that it would be a good candidate for that.
32:36So then that sample was sent out to have the different type of DNA testing that's called SNP, single nucleotide polymorphism.
32:45And so they used that type of testing on the same sample that I had developed from the crime scene evidence.
32:52Once that SNP profile is created, it contains about 850,000 genetic markers across the genome.
33:01When that SNP profile is uploaded to GEDmatch, it's compared against everybody else in that database who has opted in to law enforcement matching.
33:11And that means they are allowing their DNA file to be compared against the unknown subject's file or suspect's file.
33:20What happens once that DNA file or that SNP profile is uploaded to the database, it's compared to everybody else's SNP profiles that have been uploaded to that database who've agreed to be compared against these law enforcement profiles.
33:37From that, we're looking for people who share long segments of identical DNA.
33:43These are not single marker matches.
33:45These are long stretches of hundreds or thousands of genetic markers that two people share in common.
33:51If they have that significant shared DNA, it means they have a common ancestor in their family tree.
33:57So that's really the basis of investigative genetic genealogy.
34:02We are lucky if we get a second cousin or closer.
34:05We're often working with third cousins and more distant.
34:10Parabon NanoLabs gets straight to work uploading the killer's DNA profile to public databases.
34:17It doesn't take long before they begin receiving hits that could lead to the identity of the killer.
34:27Detectives are reinvestigating the 1967 rape and murder of Susan Galvin, whose body was found at the Seattle Center.
34:42The killer's DNA was recovered at the scene, but for five decades no arrests were made.
34:49However, the Seattle Police Department has just teamed up with Parabon NanoLabs, experts in forensic investigative genetic genealogy,
34:56who could help them finally crack this case.
35:01We started on Susan Galvin, and the first thing that needs to happen is our scientist needs to take the sample and it needs to get reformatted into an SMP file.
35:14And that file then can be entered into a genealogical website.
35:19And again, you need DNA left, you need extract, it cannot all be consumed.
35:26And again, the mixture cannot be too complicated.
35:30Both those criteria were met in this case, and the DNA was sent to Parabon.
35:35It was sent to Parabon in July 2018.
35:39In August 2018, the lab work was completed, and that SNP profile was created.
35:50At that point, it was very important for our bioinformatics scientists to work with that sample in order to deconvolute it.
35:59It was a mixture between the victim and the suspect.
36:04And so I didn't see the match list until September.
36:12So in September, I was alerted to the Susan Galvin case and asked to look at the match list in GEDmatch.
36:21I determined that it was definitely viable for genetic genealogy research.
36:26So our case manager reached out to Detective Norton to get approval to start that genetic genealogy research.
36:33Then we were able to upload to GEDmatch and my work could begin.
36:42And almost immediately, results confirm a match.
36:46So the common ancestral couple that I identified for those top two matches was Jeremiah Huffman and Nancy Tate.
36:55They were born in the 1820s and 1830s, respectively.
36:59Unfortunately, they had 16 children.
37:02So I knew that the suspect had to descend from this couple because he was carrying DNA that he clearly inherited from them.
37:10And I found that at least 12 of those children had children of their own.
37:15So that meant that this couple, this Huffman couple, had hundreds or thousands of descendants living at the time that Susan was killed.
37:26I needed to find somebody who had Native American ancestry and somebody who had Eastern European ancestry.
37:34When I built the trees of the very distant matches, I was seeing Polish.
37:40Many of these people had Polish ancestors.
37:43So I hypothesized that our suspect was going to be about half Polish and it was likely to be on his father's side.
37:52And somebody who descended from them had to have a child with a person of Native American ancestry.
37:58So as I built forward, I found that one of their descendants married a woman who was half Native American on paper.
38:08Her mother, Katie Jack, was a tribal member.
38:13And so that gave us the right ancestral mix.
38:17That meant that the Huffmans, who were of Northwest European ancestry, one of their descendants, married and had children with a woman who had Native American ancestry.
38:30So then I continued building forward and I found that one of their children married a man who was of full Polish ancestry.
38:39His parents were both born in Poland and so that was extremely promising because out of all those hundreds or thousands of Huffman descendants, this was a unique mixture of ancestry.
38:54And so I zeroed in on that couple and found that they only had one child and it was a son.
39:01His name was Frank Edward Wippich and he had the correct ancestral mix to potentially be Susan Galvin's killer.
39:17Frank Wippich was born in Seattle in 1941, making him 26 at the time of the murder.
39:24However, obtaining his DNA poses a serious challenge.
39:27When I heard the name Frank Wippich, I also learned the information that he died in 1987.
39:36So I started researching.
39:39We needed to do a couple of things.
39:41We needed to confirm that we believed there was a link between the Wippich group and our suspect.
39:48And then if that was proven, then we needed to more narrowly focus it down and see if we could positively identify Frank Wippich as a suspect.
40:00So the first thing we attempted to do was to obtain DNA via consent from a family member of Frank Wippich.
40:08This jaunt to this location where possible relative was not simple to get to.
40:18And I was having a hard time finding the person, even though I believe I had the right location until finally I was able to have an audience with the family member.
40:28And that's a strange conversation to have.
40:34Thankfully and gracefully, this family contact listened to my story.
40:39The person said they understood and the person provided a sample.
40:43So that sample then was sent back to Lisa Collins at the crime laboratory.
40:49And she came back within a few weeks and said, yes, there's a very strong likelihood that this sample you just collected is a direct descendant of individual A.
41:03So we're getting closer.
41:05And now it's a matter of getting Frank Wippich's DNA.
41:09And so I did DNA testing on the suspect's son and compared that profile to the profile from the crime scene.
41:18And it was consistent with a parent child relationship.
41:22So that told us that we were on the right path.
41:30The first time I heard Frank Wippich's name was on that phone call in December of 2018.
41:34I spent the next weekend going through every page of that homicide file again saying his name's got to be in here.
41:42His name's got to be in here.
41:44It wasn't.
41:46His name never came up.
41:50Frank was born in 1941 in Seattle.
41:54At the time of Susan's death, he was fairly newly married.
41:56He had one child.
41:57Another child would be born two years later.
42:00He was an army veteran and was just kind of known for being in the area.
42:06He worked as a security guard for Seattle Center.
42:09So he knew the area quite well.
42:11He would have a second child two years later.
42:13In 1971, he was charged with larceny.
42:16And in 1975, he had a weapons charge.
42:18That was actually a lesser charge from what he had actually been arrested for, which was impersonating a police officer and using a gun to stop people on the side of the road.
42:31To confirm it beyond doubt, detectives take the next step.
42:35Then it was just a matter of getting a sample from him.
42:40At that point, they determined where he was buried.
42:43And so they started looking into exhuming his body.
42:47We were told that his body was buried in a wooden casket, but it had been encased in concrete.
42:53So it was quite a process to exhume that once we had the search warrant.
42:58Now it's 2019 and this is a fairly wet climate and water pools.
43:09Decompensation occurs and there's no guarantee that there would be samples to collect that would be DNA rich.
43:16We learned right away he had no teeth.
43:19So that was out, but we recovered several leg bones.
43:22We now have Frank Whippage's DNA.
43:26And there's just one more step.
43:28That DNA has got to go back to Lisa Collins for analysis and comparison to individual A.
43:37Lisa Collins received the profile in April 2019.
43:44And within that same day, she called me and said,
43:47It's confirmed. Frank Whippage is your suspect.
43:49After more than 50 years, the case is finally closed.
44:01This case was now solved.
44:04It was really exciting to be able to share that information with them.
44:08The day Lisa called me, yeah, it was like it was a long journey.
44:12It was relief more than anything and it felt good.
44:15But I think you have to temper all of this with a lot of grace and humility and recognize Susan Galvin because this is not her.
44:26I think we did our job, but we should do our job and it's kind of what you expect.
44:34And even though there's so many cases where you don't get there, you need to expect that you are going to get there.
44:41So that was also a huge part of my takeaway and also just, you know, them beginning the process of reaching out to the Galvin family and, you know, realizing this isn't, you know, just investigative challenge to them.
44:58This is their life. This is the worst thing that ever happened to them.
45:03I spoke with her brother and he said that the mother and the family were just so grateful that this was finally over and they didn't have to wonder about this anymore.
45:13This becomes one of the longest cold case murders solved through forensic investigative genetic genealogy, a landmark investigation driven by the determination of detectives and the power of science.
45:31With the advances in DNA technology, the secrets are coming to light. So I don't think that you're going to be able to get away with it much longer.
45:42I am proud, but I'm also humbled. I'm humbled by the work that occurred before me. I'm humbled by the people that I work with on this case. And I'm humbled by the Galvin family and the legacy of Susan Galvin.
46:31You
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