- 19 hours ago
- #bloodlinedetectives
- #realityinsighthub
#BloodlineDetectives
#RealityInsightHub
🎞 Please subscribe to our official channel to watch the full movie for free, as soon as possible. ❤️Reality Insight Hub❤️
👉 Official Channel: https://www.dailymotion.com/TrailerBolt
👉 THANK YOU ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00October 2003, a maintenance worker in Rancho San Diego makes a bone-chilling discovery.
00:09He was clearing out trash in the area, was trying to organize the dumpster, and noticed a green duffel bag.
00:18I think police were shocked. Something gruesome has happened, but you don't have the whole story there.
00:25The San Diego Sheriff's Department launched a murder investigation.
00:30We had a crime, clearly, but we don't know who the victim is, and without knowing who the victim is, it's unlikely we're going to find out who the killer is.
00:44Investigators are unable to identify either the victim or the killer, so the case sits on the shelf for years.
00:51That is, until they hear of forensic genetic genealogy.
00:55It's something that's been done for decades, and it's been used for adoptees to identify their parents.
01:03It's not new technology, it's just a new use of it.
01:07Criminals who have hidden in the shadows for years find there's no escaping science and their own family DNA.
01:14Welcome to Bloodline Detectives.
01:16Bloodline Detectives
01:46San Diego is a suburban community located in eastern San Diego County, California.
01:52Known for its quiet neighborhoods, rolling hills, and peaceful atmosphere, it's generally considered a safe area to live.
02:01San Diego is a city by the ocean.
02:05It has great weather, great people.
02:12There's a lot of different things that you can do.
02:14We have a lot of diverse microclimates.
02:17You could be at the beach, and then later in the day, you could be in the mountains snowboarding, depending on the time of the year.
02:22The Rancho San Diego is an unincorporated part of the region located just east of the city of San Diego.
02:33It's an area that has experienced tremendous growth over the last couple of decades.
02:43Very rural, and it butts up right against some areas that are still very rural.
02:48But it has experienced a lot of growth, a lot of single-family homes, but also a lot of very large apartment complexes, which are more affordable.
02:56Quite complex. There was not a lot of criminal activity in that area.
03:08Individuals that lived there would usually call and report suspicious circumstances that happened.
03:13For all appearances, it was a quiet neighborhood.
03:16But that all changed on October 5, 2003, when a horrific discovery is made at the Country Hills Apartment Complex in Rancho.
03:26In October 2003, 911 Center received a call from a maintenance worker who was employed by one of these large multi-unit apartment complexes.
03:39He was looking at the dumpsters, and he happened to see what looked like a brand-new bag.
03:49Looked new, looked closed, or at least the contents weren't initially visible.
03:56Maybe, you know, I can't believe someone's throwing this away.
03:59So he went and got the bag.
04:02When he looked inside of it, he found a severed pair of legs.
04:08For this maintenance man who is thinking, hey, that this is just a bag that maybe has got discarded, whatever, from a, you know, person who's moving out,
04:16this is an absolute shock to him.
04:18Obviously, you're going to be a little sick to your stomach.
04:26You're going to turn around and really, you know, be in a panic.
04:31The crime scene is secured.
04:33Investigators begin by looking into who may have had access to the bins in the time leading up to the discovery of the severed legs.
04:40This is a public dumpster for the apartment complex, and it was accessible by anybody who could actually access that apartment complex.
04:53So not even individuals living there, but if an individual was able to get inside the complex, he would be able to use this dumpster.
05:01When he made the initial call to 911, he wasn't even sure of the discovery he made.
05:06The San Diego Police Department, they arrived first.
05:12And when they realized that what they were dealing with was definitely a homicide, that's when they had the detectives come in.
05:20Usually we have forensic technicians who are on scene with us.
05:24They take every precautionary measure to not cross-contaminate DNA.
05:28They'll wear gloves, oftentimes body suits when they're handling DNA.
05:33They specify each evidence item.
05:39I think police were shocked.
05:42Obviously, you see something gruesome has happened, but you don't have the whole story there.
05:48So you're missing huge pieces to the puzzle.
05:51When they're looking for evidence, they are always going to dust for prints.
05:58They're going to go through every item that is in that one specific trash bin and document everything that was in there.
06:10So they know, because if they can find a piece of paper, a discarded cloth, gloves, anything that may have DNA on it that would have been related to this crime.
06:22A lot of attention is placed on the surrounding area and less so on the physical evidence, which we'll be able to take at some point and examine in a more controlled atmosphere.
06:35Normal protocol is that you're going to dial 911 and the police are going to come.
06:41You're not going to get a homicide team until the local patrol arrives on scene first to verify what has been found.
06:48Once they see what has been found, that's when detectives will come in.
06:54They're going to cordon off not just that one dumpster area, but now they're going to start looking the entire apartment community and then each bin area that's there.
07:07So each dumpster area and trash receptacle, they're going to cordon those off and look through those to try and find more body parts.
07:15We rely heavily on the deputy's response.
07:19They need to set a perimeter and forbid anybody from coming into that scene to contaminate that scene for DNA evidence.
07:27It's important to secure the evidence and secure any possible witnesses so they can be interviewed separately to get individual accounts of that scene.
07:36So it starts on the deputy level.
07:37It's important that those deputies also brief detectives when they arrive on scene important and pertinent information so that detectives can move quickly to try to both process that scene and discover new evidence and witnesses that could help in that investigation.
07:53Since the crime scene is outdoors, you've really got to think outside the box because you need to see if there's any fingerprints on the dumpster.
08:03Was there anyone who saw anything suspicious?
08:06So you're also talking with residents.
08:08You're looking for blood spatter.
08:10Anything that can tell you where did this even occur?
08:15Casting a wide net and going through every dumpster on the apartment community site, of course, you would hope that there's a lot of information.
08:23They would hope that they would find something, but in this case, they didn't.
08:26It doesn't mean that that was a wasted time, but it means that now for detectives, being able to solve this case gets to be really difficult.
08:38It appeared to be a Caucasian female from the appearance of it, but they weren't able to locate anything that they could correlate with that bag and set of legs.
08:48When they initially looked at the legs, they could tell that these were freshly cut.
08:53There was barely any decom with them at all.
08:56So they knew that this was placed within a certain time frame.
09:00When they took a closer look, they could tell that it looked almost maybe like a surgeon or a doctor.
09:06It's somebody who knew how to work with tools.
09:09We couldn't be prejudiced in our thinking of who may use this.
09:14Any individual could go out and purchase a military duffel bag.
09:18But on the other hand, too, that because it's a green military duffel bag, it is in the back of detectives' minds.
09:26Could this possibly be an individual that was in the military or would use these types of bags daily?
09:32That really is what made this case very difficult because police immediately are going to look at those missing person reports.
10:01And in this case, there hadn't been one.
10:04No one had reported her missing.
10:07And to even know or to raise the alarm bells that something had gone wrong.
10:12This was huge in the media because this wasn't a normal case, especially for the area.
10:18It's not every day you find legs.
10:21So people were scared.
10:23Was there a serial killer out and about?
10:26What was going on?
10:27People wanted answers.
10:28Investigators have a DNA sample from the woman's legs, but no idea who she is.
10:36They hope that by identifying this Jane Doe, they'll uncover the person responsible for her brutal murder and dismemberment.
10:44October 5th, 2003, a maintenance worker in Rancho San Diego discovers a pair of severed legs in a duffel bag in an apartment complex.
11:07Police arrive on scene and send the body parts for further examination.
11:12They appear to be freshly cut and belong to a female.
11:16Investigators are hoping that the identification of the woman will also lead them to her killer.
11:23The pair of legs are transported to the crime lab to undergo further testing by forensic scientists.
11:28Once everything's collected, the evidence would go to the crime lab and be stored until it's ready for analysis.
11:38In order to test if they're from the same individual, samples would need to be taken from each leg independently.
11:46And then we could perform DNA analysis on the sample from each leg and see if we get the same results.
11:53Our crime lab was able to process actually a toenail from this set of legs.
11:59And that toenail led to a DNA profile to a Caucasian female.
12:05And a profile was developed and actually uploaded to the DNA index in CODIS.
12:13CODIS is a law enforcement database that was developed by the FBI.
12:20There is a national CODIS database.
12:22Each state has their own database and there are local CODIS databases.
12:26And the DNA from crime scenes, whether they're suspect DNA or victim DNA, and also the DNA from arrested offenders, goes into this database using the SDR profiles.
12:41And in the same way as it works in commercial databases, those profiles are constantly bouncing around all the other profiles in the system.
12:51And when there are matches, then the crime labs are alerted to the fact that this profile that matches a DNA profile from a murder scene in California.
13:02And oftentimes cases are solved by that kind of work.
13:06So there was an SDR profile of the victim created and uploaded to CODIS in the hopes that this victim's DNA was already in there.
13:15Perhaps she had been arrested for some other case, but there were never any matches.
13:22It's a frustrating result for investigators.
13:25The case has stalled yet again.
13:27Now that they have been able to identify that these legs did belong to a female, it's who was she?
13:37Where's the rest of her?
13:38Do you know why was she left here?
13:41Why were the legs discarded here?
13:44Where's the rest of the body?
13:47First thing you think is, is this a resident of the complex?
13:50Does something terrible happen to somebody who lived there?
13:54She's found in a dumpster.
13:55Or was she killed elsewhere and then placed in the dumpster?
13:59If so, where is the rest of her body?
14:01Are they in other dumpsters, other locations?
14:06They had to check with all the residents to see if anybody was missing in that sense.
14:11Does anyone know of anyone who might have been hanging around that didn't belong?
14:17Did they belong to somebody who did belong?
14:20And nobody had anything to report.
14:21Well, you always try to connect a crime with familiarity with the area.
14:27So that's always in the back of detectives' minds.
14:30Does this individual live here?
14:32Does this suspect know this area?
14:35Why would he choose this specific area to place these legs in?
14:39Usually suspects of crimes that commit homicides are familiar with the areas in which they place either body parts or dump a body that has been murdered.
14:49That is something that detectives look into very heavily.
14:52So detectives would talk to all the neighbors in the area and even tips were developed from neighbors who had saw something suspicious in the prior night and that tip was followed up.
15:03However, because the legs were severed and placed in there, it's unlikely that the crime occurred there.
15:10It's unlikely a homicide occurred right there in that area.
15:14It's more likely that the individual was killed prior to this and then her body was dispersed throughout the county.
15:23The dumpster was completely analyzed for other evidence and there wasn't anything other than what we already knew from the bag and from the...
15:38Now, there were prints, interestingly enough, but again, like the DNA, never associated with any known person.
15:45Investigators theorize that this was not a random attack.
15:49For somebody to go through and actually dissect a body, that is a rare thing in any type of murder case within the United States.
16:00You don't see it very often.
16:01So that leads detectives typically to know that when there is that level of violence, that there is going to be some connection to the victim.
16:14Detectives are going to listen to tips and witnesses that may possibly come forward about individuals who have bragged about killing individuals or even bragged about killing and dismembering individuals.
16:29That kind of profiling was done, but there wasn't any other crime that jumped up as, oh, this could be part of a series or maybe this is a suspect who's kind of developing a calling card where this is what he does to bodies after he's killed.
16:51There was lots of attention in the local press, which you would think would then lead, and this happens with other cases, lead somebody to let us know that, oh, that might be this person or that person.
17:05This was a difficult case.
17:08There's no full body.
17:10So when there's been a murder, typically you can go through and identify the body based on dental records.
17:18But when you don't have the upper torso and you only have the legs, it makes trying to solve this case that much harder.
17:26Once the potential witnesses in the area were interviewed and unless we discovered they were somehow connected to the crime, then it really kind of went cold after those first few weeks because we didn't know who she was.
17:41Investigators run out of leads to pursue.
17:44Locals are uneasy that no arrests have been made and the victim remains unknown.
17:50I think the community never forgot it because of the brutality of it.
17:56People wanted answers.
17:58So I think it was always in the back of their mind, the detectives, that if progress ever made it to where there's a chance that maybe they could solve this, that it was going to be one of the top in their list.
18:13Within a year of the discovery of the legs, the case had gone pretty cold.
18:22There had been a lack of new clues, even though, you know, you look at the evidence and you relook at the evidence, you look at it a third, fourth, fifth time.
18:32At some point, you have to set it aside because other cases are demanding your attention.
18:38And so I would say within the first year, it had gotten pretty cold.
18:42And over the intervening almost two decades, little new information came to light.
18:47Every detective that has to sit here and shelve a case and say this no longer goes from active and it becomes a cold case, they take it personal.
18:59It is something that is deeply personal because these police officers, these detectives are trying to solve the mystery.
19:07And that really becomes something that they're going to repeat over and over evidence in their head.
19:14Was there something missed?
19:16They will, even while working other cases, look to try and go, hey, wait a minute.
19:20We have this in another case.
19:21Is there something I'm missing?
19:23So they're always asking questions.
19:25It's always going to be in the back of their head.
19:28When a case goes cold, it disappoints the active investigator because they're the ones who want to solve the case.
19:35But they understand at a point in time that there are no more active leads that they can pursue.
19:41The case goes cold in our office, not over a specific timeframe or specific set of circumstances.
19:48But when the active detective can present that every active lead has been pursued and gone cold and we're unable to identify a suspect at that time.
20:01The case went cold as a Jane Doe unsolved homicide.
20:08Weeks turn into years without a single DNA match.
20:12And San Diego's sheriff's investigators begin to fear the case will remain unsolved forever.
20:19But what they don't yet realize is that a groundbreaking technique, one that would later unmask a notorious serial killer, could also crack this case wide open.
20:29A method that could finally reveal not only who the woman was, but who brutally took her life.
20:42In the autumn of 2003, a maintenance worker at the Country Hills apartment complex in Rancho San Diego makes a terrifying discovery.
20:56One that would stump investigators for years to come.
21:00Progress in the case stalls for more than a decade.
21:03But then another cold case, one of an infamous serial killer, is solved using a cutting edge method.
21:11In 2018, the Golden State Killer was identified through genetic genealogy methods.
21:17And that was the first I had ever heard of it.
21:19It was a big break in multiple cases that were occurring throughout California.
21:24And so once that broke, everyone started to look at that method and begin to use it for investigations.
21:32From the minutes they found the legs and they were notified, it is an, oh my goodness, how are we going to solve this?
21:43We have to find the rest of the body.
21:46And when so many years go by and you're not finding any new leads, the biggest break in this case was the fact that the DNA testing had come out and the popularity of it.
22:00And for the San Diego Police Department to sit there and go, you know what, let's run our sample against this database and see, you know, it's a needle in a haystack moment.
22:13But we're wanting to see, can we find a match?
22:17In 2020, the San Diego County Sheriff's Cold Case Team decide to utilize forensic genetic genealogy on this case.
22:29Through familial DNA, family members upload their DNA to these databases.
22:34They will check off saying that they do want their information shared with law enforcement.
22:40So we are able to access their DNA database.
22:44Once they do that, we're able to try to match the DNA profile to a family member.
22:51We don't know what kind of match we're going to get or who's uploaded their DNA and shared that DNA with law enforcement databases.
22:59So sometimes we will reach distant cousins or distant family members that we then have to reach out, communicate with and try to build family trees through either their knowledge or their family members share DNA in these databases.
23:17We waited anxiously for that result.
23:20They uploaded the profile, the SNP profile, and then the next day we open up our account, our family tree DNA account, and we see all the people that are related to this unknown victim.
23:35We moved the profile also to GEDmatch and we got the same results there.
23:40A laundry list of people who were genetically related to our victim.
23:46So the first thing that we want to do is we examine how close genetically in terms of centimorgans are these people.
23:54When you're doing investigative genetic genealogy, kind of the measure of closeness of how close a relative is, is with a centimorgan.
24:04And so the greater the centimorgan match, the closer of a relative they're going to be.
24:11The first one they have was 85 centimorgans and they realized it belonged to a grandfather.
24:19This was a really interesting mystery that took us quite some time to figure out.
24:24But it turned out that our high matches grandfather was adopted and it took us a long time to figure that out.
24:31He had one name when he died.
24:33He had another name when he was adopted.
24:36And then he had his original birth name.
24:39If we could figure out his birth name, then we could perhaps figure out the rest of the tree that will lead us to our victim.
24:46I was doing some research about this man and their names and I came across a small article in a 1930 Milwaukee, Wisconsin newspaper.
25:02Somebody named Zolendek was suing a man named Hubert because his wife obviously had an affair and there was some sort of civil suit.
25:13Very interesting but very quick four or five lines.
25:17So at this point I said, what if there was a child born out of wedlock to this couple?
25:24That's why Zolendek was suing because this woman got pregnant.
25:29So we investigated that theory and spent quite a bit of time in developing the Hubert tree.
25:37Learned obviously the identity of the man who had been sued, the Hubert.
25:42Learned that he had a whole bunch of children himself and then chipped away at the trees identifying people
25:51and to see if they might have some sort of blood relationship to our victim.
25:57And we got to the point where we had exhausted eight of the nine children's trees.
26:03We got to the ninth one and then with that we hit a home run.
26:10We contacted a man named John Carlson because we thought he was part of the Hubert tree
26:25and we wanted to know if he would be willing to contribute his DNA so we could see how close,
26:32how far away or maybe not related at all.
26:35Well in the course of that initial conversation, he let us know that he had not seen his mother in several decades.
26:44And then he said he very much would be interested in helping us and we sent him a kit.
26:50And then we waited for the results from the company that developed his kit.
26:56Once he got his profile, then he moved it over to Jet Match to see if there was a relationship
27:04between him and our unknown victim and it was at 34, 3500.
27:13A DNA match of approximately 3520 points to an immediate family connection, almost always a parent and child.
27:23So we knew at this point that even though we had just contacted John Carlson just to get some information about the Hubert line,
27:33what we ended up discovering was his mother.
27:36The man's mother is a woman called Laurie Diane Potter.
27:41Investigators now believe it was her legs which were discovered in the duffel bag in 2003.
27:47When Laurie Potter's son was identified, he was an adult at the time.
27:53When he was notified of his mother's legs being discovered in 2003, he was in shock.
27:59He had a bad relationship with his mother.
28:03He didn't speak to her often, but he communicated with detectives that the last time he tried to get a hold of his mother was through her husband at the time, Jack Potter.
28:14And Jack had told him that his mother didn't want to ever speak to him again.
28:19And that is the last communication he had tried to reach out to his mother.
28:23We're at the point where we have identified the mother of John Carlson.
28:29An extensive interview with John, his ex-wife or his wife at the time that he'd last seen his mother,
28:34to fill in as much of the history of her life as we could get.
28:39Laurie had a rough life. She was married four times, had two children, two boys.
28:46The second boy, the youngest boy, actually died of cancer.
28:50And that's when they think her mental status kind of went off the deep end a little bit.
28:55She had a really hard time accepting that.
28:57So that's why, like, neighbors would say that she didn't really come out of the house much.
29:02She was more of, like, a homebody.
29:06Laurie's mental state had started to decline.
29:09This is where she pulls away from interacting with people.
29:13There seems to be some abuse that went on then within a couple of her marriages.
29:18And she's pulled away even from her one remaining son.
29:22All of a sudden now, her focus has really just begun to,
29:25hey, I just get up and I stay inside.
29:28She's not interacting with people.
29:30She's not out with friends.
29:32She is really becoming a recluse.
29:34So that brings us up to, you know, 2003 when she was killed.
29:39Well, where was she living in 2003?
29:41That's the biggest thing.
29:43So I did an extensive review of as much of her geographical history as I could.
29:50She was not from San Diego.
29:52She was born and raised in Fresno,
29:55but only had been in the San Diego region the last decade or so of her life.
30:01So one of the things that I learned, and this was incredibly important,
30:04was that at the time that she was killed,
30:07she was living in Temecula, California.
30:10That was point number one.
30:12She was living there at the time of her murder,
30:14as near as we could tell with her husband, Jack Potter.
30:18We also discovered that prior to them having this house in Temecula,
30:24they lived in the same apartment complex where her legs were found.
30:30Could this be coincidence that where part of her body was found
30:35was the same complex that she and her husband had lived in a decade before?
30:42What are the chances that this is just merely coincidence?
30:45We don't believe in coincidences in law enforcement.
30:48There had to be some sort of connection with that.
30:51The one thing that neighbors were telling detectives was the fact that,
30:55you know, normally you would see people open their blinds, their house,
30:59you know, there would be some kind of life coming out of it.
31:02There really wasn't any life other than occasionally watching Jack come and go from the house.
31:07Laurie, on the other hand, the windows, the curtains, everything was closed off to the outside world.
31:13You really couldn't see what was going on in the house.
31:16And so you really didn't see Laurie herself coming out of this.
31:21She really just kind of shut everything down and stayed in.
31:24And that just, you know, neighbors chalked it up again to her mental health,
31:29not thinking that maybe something was wrong.
31:32We searched not only Laurie's life,
31:35but we became increasingly interested in learning more about her husband, Jack Potter,
31:41and about his life.
31:42Who he was, where he worked, where he lived.
31:45What has he been doing since his wife's death?
31:49Why is it that he never filed a missing person report?
31:52Obviously, we know that her son didn't, but why didn't he?
31:58Investigators now need to locate Jack Potter to see if he had anything to do with his wife's murder.
32:07The fact that it took a couple of years before he even filed for divorce against Laurie,
32:13just, again, these are things that become red flags for homicide detectives to look at and investigate.
32:20Why? Why didn't he file this report?
32:23Why did he not file for divorce immediately, you know, and say, I'm done?
32:29As we identified Jack Potter as a person of interest,
32:33we did a deep dive investigation into his background, his whereabouts,
32:38and his movements around the time of 2003 and beyond.
32:42What we learned was Jack filed for divorce from Laurie in 2008.
32:48So this is five years after her pair of legs are found in this dumpster.
32:53He cites that she was physically served with the divorce paperwork,
32:58and there's a signature of hers on the divorce paperwork that she was physically served.
33:04We know this is not a possibility because she's deceased in 2003.
33:09We also learned that Jack was making large purchases.
33:14He was purchasing vehicles and boats, and he was also taking out credit cards in Laurie's name in 2004,
33:22a year after the legs were discovered.
33:24Investigators are steadily building a case against Jack Potter.
33:29They now suspect he murdered and dismembered his wife before assuming her identity and taking control of her assets.
33:37But before they can act, they must uncover the full extent of his past.
33:41Rancho San Diego, 2021.
33:5918 years after a pair of severed legs were found at the Country Hills apartment complex,
34:04investigators used forensic genetic genealogy to identify the remains as Laurie Diane Potter.
34:12At the time of her disappearance, Laurie had been living with her husband, Jack,
34:16who never reported her missing and later accessed her finances.
34:21He started visiting strip clubs, and he fell in love with a stripper who was also named Laurie.
34:31Jack had went through and sold the house that he and Laurie had had,
34:36and then take that money, and he was spending it on luxury items,
34:42things that wouldn't have been normal as part of his day-to-day expenses.
34:46He rented her an apartment.
34:50He bought her a Hummer SUV.
34:52He bought her jet skis or jet boat.
34:55He even gave her a credit card with a $30,000 lemon.
34:59So he was giving her all this lavish stuff, trying to keep her happy.
35:05He eventually got an official divorce from Laurie,
35:10took possession of the house, sold the house, moved into an apartment, continued to work.
35:15But there were some elements of his life that never fit together,
35:18which sort of fit with this pattern of lying and obfuscating the truth.
35:27While Laurie was deceased, he opened up numerous credit cards in her name.
35:32And that's how he funded this other lifestyle for his other Laurie.
35:37The court proceedings were sending things to the house because she's not paying the credit card bills.
35:43And so he's telling the courts that, oh, I'm telling her about all these court dates,
35:48and I'm sorry if she's not appearing.
35:51But it was a lot of fraud, a lot of fraud.
35:54Detectives uncover further evidence that suggests Jack murdered Laurie.
36:00Another factor that played into the investigation was there was a profile developed from the green duffel bag,
36:09a profile different from Laurie's.
36:12So we had that profile saved, and that profile had never been identified as well.
36:18So we knew that we wanted to at least get Jack's DNA to test against that profile.
36:25Through probable cause warrants, we're going to make sure that a judge agrees that we should try to take his DNA and compare it to that bag.
36:33From detectives on scene, they described Jack's demeanor as calm.
36:38He didn't admit to his guilt, and he appeared calm when detectives questioned him, searched his residence and vehicles, and obtained his DNA.
36:48The crime lab was able to test his DNA, and it was a match to the green duffel bag that was found with her legs inside.
36:56We had a lot of circumstantial evidence, but we had some other things that were found.
37:01They found his fingerprint on the zipper of the duffel bag, and that was really a key evidence.
37:08They were able to then cross-reference those prints with what had already been in the criminal database,
37:15and at that point, they found a match, and that was to Jack Potter.
37:19A defense attorney may say, well, yeah, maybe that was his bag, and that's why his fingerprints are on the bag.
37:25We had all the circumstantial evidence behind his filings for divorce years later from Laurie,
37:31and the fraudulent nature of that, the quick claim on the house.
37:35So essentially, he got control of the whole house with Laurie, supposedly Laurie's signature on there.
37:41That turned out not to be true.
37:43And there were all kinds of pieces that pointed to him as being the individual responsible for Laurie's death.
37:53For circumstantial evidence to get a grand jury to issue an arrest warrant and to say that there's enough evidence there that could make this person your prime suspect.
38:10Because normally, in any case, if you don't have direct evidence tying the person there, it's all circumstantial.
38:18Well, that's exactly what defense attorneys want, is they want to have a case that they can challenge the circumstantial evidence for a spouse,
38:26for Jack to not file a missing persons report.
38:30But also the fact that it took a couple of years before he even filed for divorce against Laurie.
38:36These are things that become red flags for homicide detectives to look at and investigate.
38:41Why? Why didn't he file this report? Why did he not file for divorce immediately, you know, and say, I'm done?
38:49There were some neighbors who still lived there that lived there when Laurie was alive.
38:54And they said that they did notice some weird things.
38:57She didn't like to go outside. You know, she wasn't real talkative to everyone, but she had a routine.
39:03She would open the blinds. They'd see her walking around the house, little things like that.
39:09That all stopped. There was no more opening the blinds. The blinds were always closed.
39:14And neighbors would ask him, you know, where's Laurie?
39:18And he would just tell them that she ran off with somebody else.
39:21I don't think that Jack ever thought he would get caught.
39:25The amount of time that had went by, you know, he really thought he had gotten away.
39:33He had told people that he was, you know, a Vietnam vet.
39:37He had been a sniper and that he could kill people.
39:40He used intimidation. So when people started asking questions,
39:43he knew how to redirect or shut them down through a little bit of intimidation.
39:48So it appeared in his mind he thought he was going to get away with it.
39:54It is true that he was in the service during the Vietnam War, but was never shipped overseas.
39:59There was never any evidence that he was a trained sniper.
40:02We also believe that the people that he told that to were ones who also knew Laurie,
40:07and perhaps he didn't want them poking too far and thought this would keep them at bay.
40:14And it did.
40:18He didn't really have a life where the absence of Laurie or the absence of Jack
40:24would send up any alarm bells.
40:26So I think it was the confluence of a number of different things
40:30that ultimately led to Laurie kind of disappearing
40:35without anybody thinking something was amiss.
40:41Detective Dugal gathered enough information
40:44that he was able to make an arrest
40:47of Laurie Potter's husband, Jack Potter, for her murder.
40:54Just one month before his trial, Jack Potter admitted
40:57that he had killed his wife Laurie, then 54, by smothering her.
41:04In February of 2025, you finally get Jack Potter pleading guilty to the case.
41:10It doesn't even go to trial again.
41:13He, during this process and his arrest, he's had multiple attorneys in there
41:19and eventually comes up with, I'm going to plead guilty.
41:22And for him to plead guilty, he'd get that 15 years to life
41:26in prison.
41:27Mr. Potter admitted to his guilt through his lawyers, agreed to plead to the charges.
41:33He didn't come with specifics of the crime, but did plead to his defense attorney
41:40and to us of the charges.
41:43I can't attest to his mind frame of why he would plead guilty.
41:46All I can say is an individual who pleads guilty is usually guilty of his charges.
41:51He knows that the evidence that's going to be presented is going to get him convicted.
41:57In this case, I know he pled to second degree murder.
42:00It's a lesser charge.
42:02For detectives, for the prosecutor, this was a win when they said,
42:09we have enough evidence that we can convict.
42:12And the fact that his attorney at the time had convinced him, you know what,
42:17you're better off to plead guilty in what you did.
42:20He was in his 70s by the time that they'd convicted him, but he got 15 years to life.
42:26So even if he only got the 15, he's thinking, okay, I can still maybe have some kind of life.
42:33Justice, that's a hard word.
42:35Kind of like the same thing with closure.
42:37That's tricky because your loved one is never going to walk in that room again.
42:43So in that sense, no, there's no closure.
42:46But I think the closure comes to the family knowing she didn't abandon them.
42:51She didn't say, I don't want anything to do with you.
42:55And they now know that she's just not here anymore.
42:59I think the son was so distraught from all of this information coming forward to him in a short timeframe.
43:06He was not associating with his mother, not speaking to her.
43:10He was lied this whole time about her whereabouts and her not wanting to speak with him.
43:16I can't attest to his demeanor, but I can say that he probably came to a little bit of peace knowing that his mother didn't not want anything to do with him.
43:29This was a crime perpetrated against her, and that's why she hadn't reached out in all these years.
43:34And it wasn't because of her son.
43:36I'm grateful that we're able to hold Jack Potter accountable for the crime that he committed.
43:43And then most likely he will spend the rest of his life in prison.
43:47But in the sense that he was able to live almost 20 years after Laurie's death, enjoying his life, I'm not sure that's very just.
44:00San Diego County Sheriff's investigators reflect on all the hard work put into solving this case and the power of forensic genetic genealogy in bringing long-awaited resolution.
44:13Genetic genealogy is at the forefront of cold case investigations today.
44:20It has opened up a whole different way of looking at how to solve a cold case, especially with Jane and John Doe individuals who have never been identified.
44:30victimology plays an incredible part in finding out where that individual was, who they were associated with, and who may want to cause them harm at that time.
44:43So to use genetic genealogy to discover who these victims are is a huge relief to both detectives and helps the victims of these families find some resolution.
44:55IgG has been a game changer for a lot of cold cases that haven't been able to be solved through the normal methods, including traditional DNA analysis.
45:08And it's been really helpful in some of those older cases that were closed and perhaps considered, you know, not able to go back to in the future because what are we going to do?
45:21And now we have this new method or new application of a method that can open up cases and hopefully solve them.
45:30When there is a DNA collection at any homicide, any crime scene, it is automatically checked against these databases.
45:42Modern technology and being able to use the DNA and the different forensic testing that's going on, you will always get caught.
45:52You may hide in the shadows for some time, but eventually they will get you.
46:22Once a year, we will focus on the DNA collection.
46:36The DNA collection here is the DNA collection.
46:42The DNA collection on the DNA collection.
Recommended
46:38
|
Up next
46:37
46:40
46:37
46:45
46:29
46:36
29:01
28:37
0:40
0:45
0:42
0:44
2:18
36:50
46:57
3:15
1:09:05
58:51
1:01:02
59:00
Be the first to comment