Transcription
[Music] On November 17th, 1978, a person cutting firewood near Lake of the Woods and the dead Indian Highway in Oregon stumbled upon human remains. Clamoth County Sheriffs were notified and began their investigation and determined the victims were 19-year-old Kirk Leonard Weisman and 17-year-old Cynthia Lynn Fraer. They had both been shot and Cynthia had been sexually assaulted. Remains of a small dog were also found along with a dog carrier.
It was determined that the couple had been hitchhiking through the area and had a sign that read K Falls, which stood for Clamoth Falls, but investigators were unable to find any connection they had to it. They were originally from the suburb of S Pulva in Los Angeles, California, and had hitchhiked all the way to Everett, Washington to visit relatives. On September 23rd, 1978, they boarded a plane in Everett along with their dog and flew to Eugene, Oregon. From there, it's believed they hitchhiked to Roseberg, where they stayed the night in a motel. They were then picked up by someone that claimed to have dropped them off at a Grant's Pass restaurant.
One of the few items recovered from the scene was an unmiled letter written by Cynthia, addressed to her mother, which mentioned the fun they recently had in Washington State, and spoke of their hopes and dreams. Evidence collected from Cynthia was stored with hopes of later processing it with advancing technology. In 2018, they would try to identify a suspect by submitting multiple items to the Oregon State Police Crime Lab. In 2019, the lab was able to obtain DNA from an unknown male. The DNA recovered was entered into Kotus, but did not return any confirmed results.
The lead detective reached out to Parabon Nanolabs for assistance regarding DNA forensics, a rather expensive request with a price tag of $8,000. A sample was produced in coordination with Marshall University that Parabond could analyze. In 2021, using genetic genealogy, CC Moore of Parabon was able to find a viable suspect. His children agreed to give their DNA for comparison and confirmed it was definitely a match. The viable suspect was confirmed as Ray Witson Jr. who died in Texas in 1996 due to medical reasons.
The detective spoke with his family and learned that Witson had lived in the Clamoth Falls area from 1976 to 1982 and his children had gone to school in that area. In that time, Witson worked at a lumber mill near Clamoth Falls and owned a small caliber pistol, the same type of caliber as the murder weapon. The area where the couple was found is the same route that he would take his family on camping trips and visit friends in the Ashlin area. Through the investigation, it was determined that Witson had no criminal record. And it remains unclear how the incident even happened, whether the victims were hitchhiking from Ashlin to Clamoth Falls or back. It is believed that Witson came upon them and offered a ride. Detectives were able to finally return evidence to Cynthia's family, including the letter she had written and a pair of her earrings.
[Music] On New Year's Day of 1985, at 5:00 a.m., a family taking their sick dog to an allnight vet clinic found a woman's body in an empty lot at the corner of Peacock Drive and Kraton Road, just one block off Scenic Highway in Pensacola, Florida. Investigators were able to collect physical evidence from the body and the crime scene that showed the homicide was sexually motivated. DNA found on the victim would also match DNA found on a nearby towel that also had blood on it. The body belonged to Tanya Ethridge McKinley. Tanya was born January 25th, 1961 and was 23 years old with an 18-month-old son at the time of her death. She was last seen alive around 1:30 a.m. at Daryl's Bar and Grill in Pensacola. Her sister Renee said she loved the band Kiss and Rod Stewart and was trying to make a better life for herself when she was killed. She loved her little boy Timothy Davidson Jr. that the family called Timbo.
The case would go unsolved for 35 years until Parabon Nanolabs began working with law enforcement. Fairbond ran a DNA sample from the crime scene through an open-source genealogy database and identified several different possible distant cousins of the suspect. They then began creating a family tree, which eventually led them to the suspect. Police began surveilling him and gathered his DNA from a cigarette he threw out of the window while driving, which was tested and matched to the DNA found at the crime scene. The suspect was Daniel Leonard Wales of Milton, Florida, and he was charged with firstdegree murder and sexual assault. He was arrested on May 20th, 2020 and placed in the Escambia County Jail. His DNA was again tested along with fingerprints found on items in Tanya's purse left at the scene. 2 weeks after his arrest, he hanged himself in his jail cell days before he was supposed to appear in court. Tanya's son, Tim, called him a coward for not facing trial and became very emotional when investigators called him with the news of the arrest. But I want to let you know that I just made an arrest um on your mother's murder. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Your mom's murder back in 1985. I just arrested a guy. I'm sorry. Hold on. Oh my god. Wait, what? So I picked up the about a year ago. We worked with some God, dude. We worked some genetic genealogy identify a suspect. We identify him through DNA. Oh my god. Um, we just brought him in and are you serious right now? Yes, sir. Serious. Oh my god. I know it's been a long time, but yeah, man. I'm sorry, dude. I'm sorry. I'm freaking I'm freaking out right now.
According to court records, Wales was arrested in Pensacola in 1987 on battery and witness tampering charges, but the witness tampering charge was dropped after he pleaded no contest to the battery charge. In 1988, he was arrested on suspicion of solicitation or prostitution in Pensacola. Court records did not indicate the outcome of that case, but at the time of the murder, he lived on Elmrest Drive, less than a mile from where the victim was found. Her father passed away in 2000, and her mother currently lives with Tanya's sister, Renee. Her family said they are happy in knowing that Tanya can finally now rest.
[Music] Tina Fails was born April 27th, 1969 to Shirley and Steven Fails. At the age of 14, she was a student at Foothill High School in Pleasanton, California. On April 5th, 1984, Tina was walking home from school on a path that connected through Asher Court to Lemonwood Way and through the I680 underpass to her home in Valley Trails. She usually took the bus home, but she wanted to avoid some girls who were bullying her and had even thrown rocks at her. Instead, she took a shortcut through a drainage culvert close to the freeway that students would often walk through. After walking into the culvert, she was never seen alive again. At 3:25 that day, fellow students would find her body in the culvert. Sadly, with no witnesses or leads to follow, police were unable to make any progress in the case, and it would go cold.
27 years later, in 2011, it was announced that DNA linked a spot of blood found on her purse that was left hanging on a branch to Steven Carlson. Carlson was 16 years old at the time of the murder and was already in jail for unrelated crimes when he was charged with Tina's murder. During Carlson's trial, a former friend testified that on the day Carlson murdered Tina, Carlson was bullied and tossed into a dumpster at Foothill High School after a confrontation with members of the football team. He was also known to be into morbid things and at times it involved animal cruelty. He was convicted of firstdegree murder in 2014 and sentenced to 26 years to life in prison. Three years later, a threejudge court of appeal panel reduced the conviction to seconddegree murder, saying prosecutors hadn't proved the element of premeditation and deliberate intent needed for a first-degree murder conviction, which decreased his sentence by 10 years.
Carlson has a criminal record that includes convictions for drug and sexual crimes and now murder. He denied any involvement until 2020 when he finally confessed to her murder in a nine-page letter sent to her family. He also wrote a letter to Tina and the state parole commissioner. In the letter, he apologized and said he didn't intend to kill her. He recalled seeing Tina walking from school in the field across the street from his house. At the time, he was in a drunken rage over being bullied and laughed at by his classmates that day. He was also anticipating his parents coming home and seeing the damage to their room from a party he had thrown and believed his dad would attack him. He said he grabbed a knife from the kitchen and it all happened very fast. Before later moving away from the Pleasanton area, he had told peers that he had committed the crime which made him a suspect but could not be linked to the crime and he said he had just been joking. He also had severe problems with alcohol and drugs, which only increased after Tina's murder, especially since he dropped out of high school. Tina's remains were cremated and scattered over the Yoseite National Park. While it took 27 years to solve the crime, at least her family now has some closure.
[Music] Darilyn Renee Johnson was born September 24th, 1972 to Deanna and Dennis Johnson. At the age of nine, she lived in Nampa, Idaho at 552 Green Leaf Street, and was a fourth grade student at Lincoln Elementary School. She was on the Optimus Club soccer team, loved animals, and her family. She was described as a good student, and a little shy until she got to know you. On February 24th, 1982, she left home at 8:00 a.m. and began walking to school, which was about six blocks away. She only made it about half a block to the intersection of Green Leaf and High Street when she was abducted. Some school children told detectives at the time they'd seen a suspicious vehicle in the area.
It would take 3 days of extensive searching before her body was found by a group of fishermen in a shallow drainage ditch in Melba, Idaho along the Snake River. While her death was ruled a homicide, the actual details are way too brutal for this video. Not even a year later, her neighbor Charles Irvin Fain was convicted of her murder and sentenced to death. He had owned a vehicle matching the description of the suspicious vehicle which had been seen by the other children who were playing near where Daryl had disappeared. Even though he passed a polygraph test, it wasn't admissible in court. A forensic expert from the FBI claimed that three hairs found on Darilyn's body were probably Fain's. Also, two jail house informants claimed that he had confessed to them about the murder.
As the years went by, Fain always maintained his innocence and never gave up on trying to prove it. Finally, in 2001, nearly 18 years after his conviction, he was exonerated and released from death row and the case reopened. 6 years later, Fain was issued nearly $1.4 million in compensation because of the Idaho Wrongful Conviction Act. The FBI has formerly acknowledged that for decades, examiners from the FBI laboratory's microscopic hair comparison unit provided flawed forensic testimony to favor prosecutors in over 90% of their cases. Today, microscopic hair interpretations are rarely used as corroborating evidence. Nowadays, if a hair has an attached root, nuclear DNA can usually be obtained. A hair without a root, for the most part, can only produce mitochondrial DNA, which is much more challenging and less detailed.
Years later, forensic testing showed that those three pubic hairs on her body belong to convicted sex offender David Allen Del Rimple. Using the DNA profile, a genetic genealogologist was led to a Dale Rimple family tree branch of four sons and two daughters. After ruling out five of a set of six Drimple siblings, the remaining David Daimple could not be excluded. He was living in Nampa at the time of the murder, which he denied during questioning. He also said he was in the military, but investigators knew that he was discharged in 1981, a year prior to the murder. He refused to give a DNA sample, but a warrant ordered the DNA collection, which matched the hair found on Darilyn's underwear.
Investigators believe that Dell Rimple may have had additional victims. He was a violent man who had even told one of his sexual abuse victims that he would make her disappear if she ever went to the police. At the age of 62, he was charged with Daryl's sexual assault and murder. He was already serving time for kidnapping, lewd conduct, and sexual abuse involving a minor in 2004. That same year, he was also convicted of secondderee kidnapping in a separate case. More than a decade earlier, in 1991, he was convicted of battery. His victim reported that she was assaulted and told she deserved to be killed. In 1991, he had choked a woman, but the aggravated assault charge was later amended to misdemeanor battery. These are just a fraction of the assaults he committed on women and minors. Police believe he has more victims and have identified at least two other young girls who say they were molested by him but never reported it. Darilyn was loved by many, but her life was tragically taken. Thankfully, her real killer now remains behind bars and I personally hope that one day someone will take that smirky ass grin off his face.
Candace Elaine Rogers was an only child born to Elaine and Carl Rogers and was known by her family as Candy. At the age of nine, she was a fourth grader at Holmes Elementary School, lived in Spokane, Washington, and was described as friendly, shy, and well-mannered. On the afternoon of March 6th, 1959, she set out walking to sell mints for the Campfire Girls near her home at 21106 and a half West Mission Avenue. This was the last time she was ever seen alive. After she went missing, six boxes of campfire mints were found strewn along Pettit Drive. Over the next 2 weeks, more than 12,200 searchers scoured the area for her.
Three Fairchild Air Force Base airmen searching in a helicopter for candy tragically died the day after she went missing when they accidentally flew into high voltage lines over the Spokane River. Meanwhile, two other airmen hunting in some woods found a pair of girls blue suede shoes about 7 mi from Candi's home, leading to a more extensive search of that area. The next day, March 22nd, 16 days after Candi went missing, her body was found. She was found about 3 and 1/2 miles northwest of Spokane Falls Community College, about 200 yards from an abandoned rock corey and 130 ft off Old Trails Road. Her death was ruled a homicide and would go unsolved for 62 years.
Grape smelling gum found on her clothes appeared to link her murder to Hugh Bayion Morris, a serial killer known to chew that flavor, who had allegedly killed at least four women. He was the suspected killer until 2001 when DNA evidence would clear him. Another potential suspect was 50-year-old Alfred Graves, who lived on North Canon Street and was found to have collected clippings about women and children who had been sexually assaulted. Strangely, the day Candi's body was found, he committed suicide in his car by way of carbon monoxide. Another potential suspect was James Howard Barnett, who hanged himself in jail in 1960, 4 days after he was arrested on suspicion of a sex crime against a child.
In 2021, the Spokane Police Department enlisted the help of Aram Incorporated, who was able to take the degraded DNA of the killer and create a genetic profile. It was then uploaded to online genetic databases, and the genetic genealogologists were able to narrow the match down to three brothers. One of those brothers was John Ree Hoff, who was 20 years old at the time of the murder and lived near Candy, but was never a suspect. However, they were unable to immediately obtain his DNA because on June 30th, 1970, he committed suicide. But thankfully, his daughter assisted police in solving the case by submitting DNA samples. The results showed it was 2.9 million times more likely that Hoff's daughter's DNA was related to the recovered specimen than the general population. This allowed investigators a warrant to exume his body to collect DNA. His DNA indicated with a probability threshold of 25 quintilion that the semen found on Cand's clothing came from him.
In 1961, 2 years after Cand's murder, he was arrested for strangling and robbing a woman in Brown's edition and served 6 months in jail for the assault. He used the same MMO as Candi's killing. He was also an army deserter who became a door-to-door salesman. He was previously buried in the same cemetery as Candi, but his family moved his remains to another site after learning he was responsible for her death. Candi's parents were divorced at the time of her murder. Her father killed himself in June 1963 in a hotel in Walaw Wallala, Washington, and sadly her mother died in September 2006, never knowing who had taken her daughter's life.
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