her mission. so how many names did you have? about 2,300 names. could cutting-edge technology crack an ice-cold case? i was like, no way. i believe in the devil, and people that don t believe in the devil, i think, they re in for a big surprise. hello and welcome to dateline. michella and jenni were just like most kids their age. they loved riding bikes, and playing outdoors. the fun-loving girls didn t know each other. but they would be forever connected, through tragedy. decades later, a detective would leave no stone unturned, on a quest for justice. and in the process, uncovered a twist that left investigators speechless. here is keith morrison with evil was watching. again and again, she came here. stood under the ancient canopy. walked the damp, narrow paths, to the places the killer used to hide what he had done. as if looking, once more, after all these years would tell her something. as if the dense undergrowth would part and finally reveal a name
and we just hit it off. she was so supportive and so positive. and just volunteered for anything she could do to help us make our jobs easier. around then, detective wade decided to try something new. with the crime-scene dna. she consulted this woman. dr. colleen fitzpatrick. an expert in something called forensic genealogy. an informal sense, it s been referred as csi meets roots. maybe you have taken a home dna test. a lot of people have. you can sometimes track down distant relatives by uploading your dna profile to public genealogy websites. dr. fitzpatrick searches all that dna data, to find, not necessarily matches, but telling similarities. it s really the first big development in human identification, i think, in years, in 20 years. her method can link an
we had a new lead. the dna from jenni s swimsuit. a brand new piece of evidence. it might lead them to her killer. but when they entered that into the national database, no match. once again, they seemed to be right back where they started. you re just in the hurry-up-and-wait mode. you re waiting for your offender to get their dna in the database, because of a conviction or whatever. and that could be a long wait. in 2014, gene miller retired. leaving detective wade in charge of the cold-case unit. and she had a new helper. jenni s mom, pattie. 29 years after her daughter s murder. my career was winding down. i thought i should probably do something. and so, i volunteered to help. pattie wasn t allowed to touch the two girls murder files, but she could help in other ways.
people, like him. but, even after she joined the tacoma police department, and earned her way through patrol and narcotics and sex crimes. she never forgot about jenni and michella. and the summer of 86. i would have a suspect, that i was working, and i would wonder, okay. could this guy be responsible? the mystery kept its grip on gene miller, too. inspired him to start a cold-case unit, here. i mean, things have changed, dramatically, in in how cases are investigated. there s so much more that can be done. eventually, in 2013, detective wade joined him. eager to dig into the case of michella and jenni. binders and binders of police reports, and interviews and leads. 27 years of dead ends. and point defiance. like a giant, ever-present question. so, her bicycle was back here, in this area. and it was lying on its side. the suspect had taken some of these fern frauns and ripped em out. and then, laid them across the top of the bike, to camouflage it. and further down th
same person, because he actually looked so much like the sketch. but when they checked him out, they eliminated him as a suspect. so much for new approaches. detective wade, once again, looked at the huge lists she d made. 2,300 men, connected to the two cases. she couldn t test all of them against the crime scene dna. but there were several hundred that really did stand out because they did have documented history for violence and sexual assault. so, she set out to collect the dna of those men. she called them high-priority suspects. she also, included one guy who wasn t a suspect at all. the witness, washburn. and though they were scattered all over the country, with the fbi s help, one by one, she tracked them down. we asked people. knocked on their door. literally, told them we were investigating a