This talk will cover the Nevada offender DNA collection program and how the failure to apply the law retroactively severely delayed the identification of two serial killers.
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[MUSIC]
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Hi, welcome to HIDS.
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I want to thank Thermal Fisher for inviting me to be a part of this conference
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today.
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And I want to tell you a story about the offender program and how it impacted
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our state.
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My name is Steve Gresko.
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I'm the supervising criminalist with the Washoe County Sheriff's Office.
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And I'm also the co-disadministrator for the state of Nevada.
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So to tell this story, I think we need to start by talking about a homicide
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that occurred in February of 1976.
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As a young student at the University of Nevada, Reno, named Michelle Mitchell.
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She was coming home from class one day and went to her car and was broken down.
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So she went and found a payphone, no cell phones in 1976.
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Went and found a payphone and called her mother.
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Her mother was to the university within 15 minutes of that phone call and found
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Michelle's car but could not find Michelle.
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Michelle was found later that night in a garage of a home,
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approximately 300 feet from where her car had broken down.
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And she had been stabbed in the neck multiple times and she was dead.
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Detectives did everything they could to try and find a suspect that very little
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to work with.
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And ultimately the case went cold.
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Approximately three years later, 1979, there was a woman in a mental health
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facility in Louisiana.
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Who told one of her counselors that she had killed a woman in Reno in 1976.
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So the counselor contacted the police in Reno who were very interested to talk
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to this woman.
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This woman's name was Kathy Woods.
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Kathy Woods was brought back to Reno and she was ultimately convicted of that
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crime.
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There wasn't a lot of physical evidence to link her to the crime and she was
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primarily convicted based on the strength of her.
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She was a very good confession.
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She stayed in prison and almost immediately after being convicted, recanted.
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In fact, I think she recanted before she was convicted, but it didn't matter.
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She went to prison.
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If you fast forward to 2013, she was able to get the Innocence Project to help
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her with her efforts to try and get her a case looked at again.
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We did in conjunction with the Innocence Project.
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She went through an inventory of evidence and found that there was a cigarette,
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but that was found underneath the body of Michelle Mitchell and the homeowners
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were not smokers.
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So it was pretty good evidence.
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We were successful in getting a partial profile.
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We put that into CODIS and we got a hit to some DNA profiles out of the Bay
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Area.
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We didn't know exactly what that hit was going to mean when it happened, but
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you should know that when it
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CODIS administrator comes in, most CODIS administrators come into work in the
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morning.
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The first thing they're doing is checking their match manager to see if they
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have anything that's hit.
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We didn't get any hits within our own state, but we got one to California.
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The California people were immediately calling our laboratory because this was
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a very significant match for them.
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When we looked at it, we found out that our male DNA profile from that
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cigarette butt in that garage matched to the sexual assault.
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The sexual assault evidence from a series of rape and homicides out of the Bay
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Area.
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They'd even given this serial killer a name.
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They named him the Gypsy Hill killer.
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We knew that we had a problem because we had a woman who had been in prison for
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over 30 years for a crime that given this DNA match seemed very unlikely that
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she was the one that had killed Michelle Mitchell.
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A task force was created. The FBI got involved. They had not had any links to
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that series of homicides outside of the Bay Area.
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All of those homicides happened in the winter of 1976.
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So right around the same time that Michelle Mitchell was killed in February, it
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all fit perfectly within that string of homicides.
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Four or five of them in the Bay Area and then one in Reno.
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There was a lot in the news about that, but ultimately nothing came of it. We
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had these cases that we knew were linked through DNA, but we still did not have
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a person to match to those DNA profiles.
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And as everyone knows, a DNA profile is only as good as the reference sample
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that you can match it to.
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We knew the DNA profile of the potential killer, but we did not know his
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identity.
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So the case went cold.
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It was approximately a year out of the blue.
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We get a DNA hit to our profile from the Michelle Mitchell homicide and the Gy
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psy Hill profiles that the California people had.
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And it was to a convicted offender out of the state of Oregon.
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When we looked into this, we realized that this offender had been in a Nevada
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prison for over 30 years.
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30 years that this person was sitting right under our noses.
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And we didn't know that who he was or what he had done via his DNA profile.
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To understand how this could have happened, you really need to go back to the
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beginnings of the DNA offender collection law in the state of Nevada.
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Modern DNA technology started in the early 80s, but didn't really become
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widespread, particularly with STRs and tell them in 90s.
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But the Nevada legislature was forward looking, and in 1989 they passed the
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offender collection law.
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Unfortunately, it was very limited in its scope.
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It only covered the collection of people who were convicted of sex crimes.
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Didn't even include people convicted of homicide.
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Very limited to just people convicted of sex crimes.
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The Nevada legislature only meets every other year.
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Nevada didn't even have a DNA lab in the state, an operational one at the time.
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It wouldn't be until the late 90s that the Washoe County Sheriff's Office came
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online with DNA technology.
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We had laws that allowed us to collect these samples, but we didn't have the
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ability to get DNA profiles from them and put them into CODIS.
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Each legislative session, the politicians would get together and discuss an
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expansion of the scope of the collection.
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They added homicide in 1997. They eventually got around to all felons in 2007,
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and we actually added felony arrestees in 2014.
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When we came online as a laboratory to begin receiving these offender samples
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that were collected from the prisons and putting them into CODIS, we didn't
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know if we should be collecting everyone, or just people who were convicted
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after that law was passed in 1989.
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We sought an opinion from the Attorney General at that time, and their
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determination believed that unless the law specifically stated that we could
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collect retroactively, that we could only apply it prospectively.
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That means that if I receive a sample from somebody who committed a homicide in
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the 1980s, they don't qualify for collection because they committed their crime
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before our legislature got elected.
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The legislature got around to including it in our law. When I first started at
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the sheriff's office as the CODIS administrator, we would receive offender
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samples from people.
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We would get it in the mail and look at it. Oh, wow, this guy was, he served
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all a 30 year sentence for homicide.
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And now he's being released. He's paid his debt to society.
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And we have a DNA sample from him, but we were not allowed to put those into C
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ODIS. In fact, we had to destroy them. And that practice went on for decades.
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A lot of people got released from prison who had been convicted of very serious
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crimes, had served substantial sentences, and we didn't have a way to get their
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DNA into the system.
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That kind of explains why Rodney Halbauer was in prison in Nevada for 30 plus
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years and never had his DNA collected until he went to the state of Oregon.
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That's an interesting story in and of itself.
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Rodney Halbauer was the man who killed Michelle Mitchell. It's the man who was
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known as the Gypsy Hill Killer. His story is a pretty fascinating one.
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He is originally from Michigan. I was in and out of juvenile detention
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facilities, regular correctional facilities, and had quite a talent for
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escaping.
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He escaped multiple times over his young life until he found himself in the
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Reno and Northern California areas in his late 20s. He actually was caught
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sexual assaulting a black check dealer in Reno in November of 1975.
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He was immediately arrested for that, but made bail from November of 1975, the
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first of the Gypsy Hill killings in the Bay Area started happening the first
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week of January.
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He was raping and murdering somebody about every two weeks from January of 1976
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until he actually came back for his trial and was convicted and put in jail in
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May of 1976.
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He was very busy to say the least in that time while his trial, waiting for his
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trial to occur. Be that as it may, he went into the system in Nevada in the, I
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think it was July, June or July of 1976 he went to prison.
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And there he stayed until he escaped from prison in 1986 with another inmate.
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They stole a car and made their way up to Oregon, where four days after
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escaping he attacked the woman up there and tried to kill her.
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He survived, but they caught him and convicted him of that and he was given a
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30 year sentence in Oregon, but they sent him back to Nevada to finish serving
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his time until he had to go and pay his debt to the state of Oregon.
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It was bad that he escaped. It was bad that he attacked that woman, but it was
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good for solving all of these crimes that he had to go to Oregon when he was
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done here. Otherwise he would have just been released and we still wouldn't
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have been able to collect his DNA sample.
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For me, it was very difficult to know that we had this person sitting under our
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noses all this time. Who knows, they may have even collected his DNA sample and
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sent it to us before they sent him to Oregon.
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And we would have taken that and thrown it away. And that seemed a big problem
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to me.
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Soon after I started as the co-administrator, I had sent a letter to the
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Attorney General requesting a review of our database law and never heard back
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from that.
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And I thought, given this event, we might have a little political capital to
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try and ask this question again of our Attorney General. So we typed up a
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letter and sent it to through our legal counsel, our District Attorney's Office
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, and had them officially request an opinion,
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a new opinion from the Attorney General at the time. The Attorney General
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reviewed it, our database law, and ultimately agreed that the original intent
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of the legislators back in 1989 was that this should apply to anybody who was
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in prison and gave us the authority to collect retroactively for anybody who
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was currently incarcerated.
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He did not expand that to people who had been paroled, but this was still a big
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step for us that we could go into our prisons and collect DNA sample from folks
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who owed us one. And so that's what we did.
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We reached out to the Department of Corrections, and we trained all of their
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people.
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We got the necessary software into their facilities, train their personnel on
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how to collect, and we began the process of finding out who we still needed to
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get a sample from.
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Initial lists thought that it could be as high as 8,000 inmates that hadn't
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been collected, but through some filtering and vetting we ultimately settled on
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a little more than 1,200 people who had been in prison for quite some time,
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and still had not had a DNA sample collected. And we started collecting them in
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April of 2018. It went fairly quickly. I think we were completely done
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collecting all 1200 by the end of the summer.
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That thought that had been in my mind that whole time. What if there was
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somebody else in our database or in our prison system, who if we had them in
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our database, we would get another big hit in July of 2018.
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Before I even had a chance to sit down and make my coffee in the morning, my
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phone starts ringing, and it's a very excited co-disaminitrator in the Denver
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area.
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And wants to know about an offender hit that we had just uploaded. Sure enough,
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it's one of these retroactive offenders that we had collected uploaded the
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night before, and it hit to a massive case out of the Denver area.
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Another serial killer by the name of Christopher Ewing. He had also been given
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a nickname of the Denver Hammerslayer. This is a case that took place in the
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Denver area in the winter of 1984.
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Mr Ewing, over the course of two weeks, broke into several homes. One of the
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homes was the home of a woman by the name of Patricia Smith. He sexually
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assaulted and bludgeoned her to death with a hammer. Very brutal and shocking
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crime. Four or five days later, he broke into another home, the Bennett family, young
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daughter, seven and three years old, the mom and the dad. He sexually assaulted
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the seven year old and the mother bludgeoned all of them to death, tried to
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kill the three year old.
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Miraculously, she survived and then disappeared. Again, the police had very
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little evidence at the time, 1984. This is before DNA. Didn't have a lot to
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link or investigate this person and were truly confused how this series of
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crimes could go on and then just
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stopped cold. Mr Ewing fled the Denver area almost immediately after the last
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homicide. He made his way to Arizona. And within days of those Denver homicides
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, he broke into a home in Kingman, Arizona and tried to bludgeon a man to death
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with the stone.
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The man fought him back and was able to get Mr Ewing to leave, but he was
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caught by police. They arrested him and didn't have room for him there. So they
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transported him to St. George Utah to be held until he was ready for his trial.
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When Mr Ewing was brought back from St. George, they traveled through Las Vegas
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to bring him back to St. trial in Arizona. And while on a bathroom break in Las
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Vegas, he escaped.
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He found an axe handle.
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He found an axe husband and a wife in the Henderson area. They made a wife in
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the Henderson area.
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They were able to chase him off. He did not kill that couple, but made enough
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noise that he got scared and tried to run. The police caught him and arrested
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him.
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He was convicted and given a life sentence with the possibility of parole.
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Again, we had a situation where this guy was committing the Denver Hammer
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Slayer series in January.
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And by the summer of 84, he is arrested in Nevada and never released. He is
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convicted and sent to prison to serve a lengthy sentence, but we're not able to
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collect his DNA.
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He's able to hide in our prison system for 30 plus years until we finally get
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around to retroactively collecting these samples and putting them in our
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database.
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Rodney Halbauer was extradited back to the state of California for the Gypsy
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Hill series, and he was convicted of that and is serving time in California for
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that now.
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Christopher Ewing was convicted of the Bennett homicides last summer of 2021
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and is still pending his trial for the homicide of Patricia Smith.
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We had 10 codicids, a couple of homicides, several sexual assaults, some
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robberies that we got out of that retroactive collection effort. For me, very
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satisfying to know that we were able to finally go back in.
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And at least we know there's nobody that's hiding in our prison system for
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future considerations.
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It still bothers me that so many people were released paroled or had served all
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over their time, and we're still not able to go and collect them. So we still
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have some work to do in the state of Nevada to adjust our laws so that we're
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able to go and collect those
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examples. Hopefully we can get that effort done in this next legislative
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session. Another plan that I have is to go in and work with medical examiner's
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office.
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Anytime an inmate passes away in prison. They always do an autopsy and collect
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a blood spot card. So there's a good collection of offender samples in the form
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of blood spot cards in our medical examiner's offices that I am hoping to get a
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call going to go and collect those and get them entered into our convicted
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defender database. That's all I have to tour for the defender database. That's
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all I have today. I appreciate your time and your attention. Thank you.
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