sampling. so these individuals had no chance of identification. so my colleagues and i in texas, we thought that we could provide some assistance and try to figure out where migrants are buried, exhume them, take dna samples, work with thon governmental organizations that could help us with identification. so how do you do that? how do you organize the students and the volunteers? we go into counties and ask a lot of questions. we heard you have received a lot of unidentified remains. what happens to them? what s your process? there s no federal guidelines for what to do with missing remains. it s handled on a state by state basis. in texas, it s county by county. we figure out what is happening. then we work to do these, but we
entire family completely overwhelmed. back in august of 1971 melissa highsmith was picked up at her apartment complex where she lived with her mother at the time. she s 22 months old. the mom needed a babysitter because she had to work. the babysitter shows up and then disappears. they never get another call, they never hear another word about her. this goes on for more than five decades, 51 years, until a few weeks ago the parents had submitted a dna sampling and the family members submitted that as well, and it came back as a match with melissa highsmith, who is now 53 years old and has children of her own. the dna came back matching one of her children, so they were able to reconnect through that. at first melissa highsmith said when the family reached out, she thought it was some sort of hoax, a prank, and then it all started unraveling. she questioned the woman she believed to be her mother and
so much the work now is processing all of the evidence and for that there s a lot of forensics work dna sampling, even things like determining if the killer is right-handed or left-handed based on the and iphones also kind of shoes he was wearing as he walked through a very bloody crime scene. police are keeping most of what they know close to the best they don t want to tip off the killer as to what they know. we don t put our best to gauge and by releasing what we have. we told the public very clearly from the beginning that were looking for a knife. matilda public very clearly in the beginning that we believe it was a targeted attack. to be honest enough to just trust us on that. police are also looking into maybe there might be a connection to a similar fatal knife attack last year in salem, oregon, about 400 miles away from here. this couple was ambushed at 3:00 a.m. while they slept by a mask wearing stranger with a long knife no suspect is ever been caught.