October 25, 2023 • 37 mins
JonBenet Ramsey is 6 years old when she is reported missing from her home in the 700 block of 15th Street on Dec. 26, 1996. Tragically, she is later found dead in that house, and an autopsy revealed the cause of her death as strangulation.
In this episode of Zone 7, Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum, Mitch Morrissey, the former District Attorney of Denver, about his experience working on the high-profile unsolved murder case of JonBenet Ramsey. They discuss the challenges of the case, DNA evidence, investigative techniques, and key players. Morrissey provides insights into the criminal justice system, advancements in forensic technology, and lessons learned from his career prosecuting over 6,000 felony cases.
Show Notes:
- [0:00] Welcome back to Zone 7 with Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum. Sheryl gives a brief background of guest and former DA of Denver, Mitch Morrissey
- [2:05] “The history of crime will tell the history of our country. It'll tell the history of your town, your state, and your city.”
- [2:10] Denver District Attorney's Office: A History of Crime in the Mile High City
- [8:00] Stories of different crimes that occurred during each era of DAs that served Denver CO
- [13:00] Question: Can you tell us about the call you received on the JonBenet Ramsey case?
- [15:00] DNA evidence in the Ramsey case
- [17:37] Question: Is there any way to do ancestry on your DNA profile?
- [27:00] Question: What do you think about the line in the autopsy that says chronic vaginal injury?
- [29:28] Question: do you think you can explain for, you know, to everybody investigative genetic genealogy?
- [30:00] Use of genetic genealogy to solve cold cases
- [34:40] United Data Connect
- [35:30] Rose Andom Center
- Thanks for listening to another episode! If you’re loving the show and want to help grow the show, please head over to Itunes and leave a rating and review! How to Leave an Apple Podcast Review: First, Open the podcast app on your iPhone, Mac, or iPad. Then, hit the “Search” tab at the bottom right-hand corner of the page and search for Zone 7. Select the podcast, scroll down to find the subheading “Ratings & Reviews”. and select “Write a Review.” Next, select the number of stars you’d like to leave. Please choose 5 stars! Using the text box which says “Title,” write a title for your review. Then in the text box, write the review itself. The review can be up to 300 words long, but doesn’t need to be much more than: “Love the show! Thanks!” or Once you’re done select “Send” in the upper right-hand corner.
---
Sheryl “Mac” McCollum is an Emmy Award winning CSI, a writer for CrimeOnLine, Forensic and Crime Scene Expert for Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, and a CSI for a metro Atlanta Police Department. She is the co-author of the textbook., Cold Case: Pathways to Justice. Sheryl is also the founder and director of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute, a collaboration between universities and colleges that brings researchers, practitioners, students and the criminal justice community together to advance techniques in solving cold cases and assist families and law enforcement with solvability factors for unsolved homicides, missing persons, and kidnapping cases.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
I can remember being in college classes and professors talking
about this new thing and thinking this is just magic.
I mean, how can this even be real? So back
in the early nineteen eighties, Mitch Morrissey was working with
DNA before anybody even really understood it, he was already
(00:30):
using it to solve crime. He was the DA in
Denver County. He prosecuted now, I want y'all to hear
these numbers, six thousand felony cases and about eighteen hundred misdemeanors.
Every year. He was Prosecutor of the Year. He was
the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award. He received the
(00:55):
Patriots Award from the Department of Defense. This is an
accomplished trial lawyer. The only reason he ain't there now
is because of term limits. In nineteen ninety nine, Mitch
Morrisey was sworn in as the DA for Boulder County, Colorado,
to aid in the thirteen month long grand jury investigation
(01:19):
into the death of John Vanay Ramsay. He continued to
advise on that until two thousand and three. In two
thousand and three, he along with the Denver Crime Lab
director Greg Lebarge. Eighty one charges have come from that development.
(01:40):
Of the Cold Case Project, and they have gone as
far back as nineteen eighty. He was also a big
key supporter of Katie's Law that says convicted felons will
submit their DNA. He wrote a book, and you'll know
how I preach all the time, the history of crime
(02:01):
will tell the history of our country. It'll tell the
history of your town, your state, your city. His book,
Denver DA's Office, A History of Crime in the Mile
High City. He goes from eighteen sixty nine to twenty
twenty one, and he starts with an event where he says,
(02:24):
and I quote, hangings were popular public events, y'all. I
am so happy to introduce y'all to the genius that
is joining us tonight. Mitch Morrissey.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate being on
your podcast.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Well, this is going to be a tremendous evening for everybody,
because when you start talking in your book and you're
telling of this hanging event that was in front of
three thousand people, you say there were one hundred vigilantes.
True crime has always been in public entertainment.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean, when you think about it,
justice was swift, certainly here in Denver when we were
talking about the frontier. So usually somebody would commit a murder,
they would have a trial. Now, sometimes there were some
vigilantes that would go down to the jail and get
them out, and they wouldn't have a trial, and then
(03:23):
they usually would hang them or lynch them from the
nearest tree. But it was almost that quick. In some
of the early cases in Denver, there really was no
place to put them until the state penitentiary was open,
so they would get their trial for a murder. Usually
then they would be convicted within a day of the
(03:46):
homicide or the next day. There wasn't much of an appeal,
and oftentimes the jury were citizen jurors and it was
kind of before there were elected prosecutors. And then they
would usually hang them either in a place where they
could draw a lot of people or the place where
the murder took place, which I thought was interesting to
(04:08):
actually take the person back to where the murder occurred
and hang them there if there was a tree. Now,
I don't know if your audience ever been to Denver,
but we don't have a lot of natural trees in Denver.
We're on the plains, and so the about the only
trees were these old cottonwood trees. It would grow along
the Platte River the Cherry Creek, and those would usually
(04:30):
be the place where they would take somebody and hang them.
If they were going to use a tree to do it,
they would draw a big crowd and if there was
enough notice, everybody in the territory would show up and
it would be kind of like almost like a picnic
or a fair county fair type thing, and the main
(04:50):
attraction was the hanging that was going to happen that afternoon.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
It was the exact same way in Georgia. I worked
at Cromsain seven years after the event. That was the
last mass luncheon in Georgia. And the reason there wasn't
more evidence there is because people came and took souvenirs.
They took shellcasings, they took rope, they took clothing off
(05:15):
the victims, they took jewelry. It's nothing new. You know
another thing in your book that I found amazing. I
used to teach college and sometimes I would say, there
are no new crimes. And sometimes they would try to say, well,
what about a dry by shooting? And I would say, well,
there's evidence that Native Americans on horseback would fire eras
(05:36):
on fire into houses.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
That's a dry by shooting.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
It's nothing new, right, And sometimes they would try to
stump me. But again there was always a corresponding historical
reference to the same thing. And when you talk about
Cheap John in your book from eighteen sixty nine, what
was fascinating to me is they made a point for
everybody to know not only was he a thief, but
(06:00):
he was a pimp. And I would have students that
didn't think pimps came into play until the seventies.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
In Denver, and it's in the book, we had a
large group of French prostitutes and French men that lived
off of those prostitutes. And actually at the turn of
the last century we had a serial murderer who was
going in and killing women in the brothels that we had.
(06:29):
They would have small rooms that were right on the street,
and you know, we had three or four of them
that were murdered by the same individual. They believed. Now,
of course, they didn't have DNA and the kind of
things that we have that tie cerial rapists together. But
they all were strangulations. They all occurred on the same street,
(06:50):
Market Street. They all occurred to the same type of victim,
and then they at one point brought in a clairvoyant
to try to figure out out who was responsible for
these murders, and she ended up being strangled to death.
And that's in the book. So you know, the book
has a lot of history in it. It has some
(07:10):
interactions with Native Americans, some of the district attorneys that
I wrote about. Each chapter is a different district attorney
served in the Civil War. So we go back quite
a way.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
He's got Doc Holliday at Masterson, AJH. Holmes, Bundy, y'all
just get it and get ready because you're not going
to want to put it down, I promise you.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
And then we have some celebrities in there like Bob
Dylan who was here and Kareem Abdul Jabbar got in
trouble smoking some marijuana when he was early on in
his career and came through Denver. So it goes from
you know, right after the Civil War basically all the
way through to when I served as district attorney, from
(07:58):
I served from two thousand in five to twenty seventeen,
and then it talks about the current district attorney that
followed me in office. There were a lot of them
because they usually served very short terms. One of the
most interesting one was the second. His name was Merrick Rogers.
Merrick Rogers did just about everything. He was the district attorney,
(08:22):
He was on our Supreme Court, he was in the legislature.
When they started the law school at the University of Colorado,
the first law school in the area. He was a
law professor, just an amazing guy. And at the end
of his life, I think he was ill, and he
was up in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. He went down to
(08:42):
a hardware store and he bought himself about a quarter
of his stick or half a stick of dynamite, went
down by the river down there with a cigar, lit
the dynamite and blew himself up because I think he
was dying anyway. So, you know, there's biography of everybody
that served as district attorney, and I put in all
(09:04):
of the different police officers that were killed in the
line of duty and what happened to the people that
killed them. So really we tried to cover the different
crimes that occurred during the era of each one of
the district attorneys. It's about a three hundred page book,
but it's it's a good read.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
And you know, it's kind of funny when I hear
you talk, and you know, you sometimes refer to courtroom ten.
For me in my background, it would be courtroom eight.
But again, it's that close knit group of people. It's
that kind of coming up and learning your way in
this business. And you had a death penalty case where
(09:49):
you did not see your children awake for two years.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yeah. It was the murder of a little girl, a
little African American girl who she was killed within a
a month of John Benay Ramsay, but because of where
she was killed, in the nature of her family, he
didn't get a lot of attention. We used DNA to
solve it. Within a couple days, we caught a man
that took her and another six year old out the
(10:16):
back door of the house, kidnapped them. She ran The
brother of the other girl ran into them, was able
to get the one girl to go away with them,
but because of a promise of some candy, little Ashley
Gray stayed with a man she referred to his uncle,
John John Morris. He took her down to a loading
(10:37):
dock and brutally raped her. We were able to get
DNA blood from her pants, from his pants, her blood,
even though he had taken those pants home and had
his girlfriend wash them. And we spent about two years
then seeking the death penalty for mister Morris. You know
(10:57):
you work on those cases night. Well, I didn't work
all nights, but when you have little kids that are
four and six or two and four, you leave before
they're awake, and you get home they're asleep, And it
was pretty amazing that my wife did everything basically for them.
(11:20):
I mean I'd see them when they were in their
cribs or when they're in their bed, but you know,
I went to pretty much two solid years without seeing
them awake. We ended up getting a first degree murder conviction,
but it was a strange conviction because it was first
degree murdered felony murder where we had sexual assault on
a child as the underlying felony. But the jury could
(11:43):
not agree even though it was a strangulation where he
strangled this little girl to death, they could not agree
on first degree murder after deliberation, so they decided, hey,
we convicted him a first degree murder. We don't have
to worry about this other four and you need that
other form, or you did at the time in Colorado
(12:04):
in order to needed some mental state for the homicide,
not just the felony, and so we weren't able to
go forward on the death penalty on it. But you know,
for your listeners, and I'm not sure in Georgia, but
here in Colorado they have since gotten rid of the
death penalty, and the death penalty was extremely rare. So
(12:27):
when they got rid of it two or three years ago,
we had I think maybe four people on death row,
none of them out of my jurisdiction, but they commuted
their sentences to life without parole and we no longer
have the death penalty in Colorado.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
So y'all think about two years where you're missing birthdays, anniversaries,
just general Wednesday night being with your family. And after
that case that took him away from his family every
day from dark to dark, he gets a call and
(13:06):
that call says, we need you in Boulder to help
take over the grand jury on the job at a
Ramsey case.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
There was some problems with the District attorney's office up there,
so they brought in a former chief deputy of mine
who was working in Pennsylvania to run the grand jury.
So when you say to run it, I actually did
not run it. By the time I was asked to
be part of the team, Mike Kane had been already
(13:38):
brought in to work exclusively on that case. I was
coming off this death penalty case. And my boss at
the time was Bill Ritter, who was the DA that
was term limited before I got elected, and he said, Mitch,
I need you to go up and be part of
this Ramsey case because nobody knows anything about DNA and
(13:58):
you are the top DNA a guy in the state
of Colorado or one of the top in the nation.
And so I told him no, I said, I can't
do it, Bill. I just finished that death penalty case
on Morris and that's where I explained that I hadn't
seen my kids awake for two years, and I owed
them I did not I could not get involved eighteen
(14:20):
months after the fact, trying to put together again a
crime that I knew there was DNA, but at the
time it wasn't significant. There was really no issue with it.
A couple weeks later, Mike Kane knocked on my door,
and Mike was my first chief deputy in the Denver
(14:41):
DA's office. And when you talked at the beginning about
somebody having your back, it really was true. With Mike.
He always had my back. He was one of my
favorite people to work with and to work for. And
he said, Mitch, I need you. And there were my
two kids. My wife was out somewhere. Said Mike, look
at these kids. They need me to be around. And
(15:04):
I reluctantly decided to go there. I went to the
University of Colorado, so I had a lot of experience
in Boulder. So the first day I decided that I'd
go up to the Colorado Bureau of Investigations, which was
the lab that they were using, and since I was
the DNA guy, I'd meet with their zerologists DNA woman,
(15:27):
which was somebody that I knew. She had worked in Denver.
She was very good at what she did. Kathy Dressel
was her name. I met with her. I sat down
with Kathy and was talking about the DNA and this
little girl's underwear. I knew that there was DNA there
and there was potential mixture or contamination, and without missing
(15:50):
a beat, and me knowing Kathy for years, she said,
well what about that other stay Mitch, and I said, Kathy,
I've been on this case for less than a day.
I don't know what you're talking about. There's a second
stain in these panties and she said, oh, yeah, there's
a second stain. And I said, and you haven't tested it.
It's been eighteen months. She said no, the DA told
(16:13):
me to keep it for the defense and I said,
it's separate and she said yes, it's a completely separate
stain from the one I did test. I said, is
it big enough to cut in half? Because you know,
when you consume a sample, the defense then doesn't have
anything that they can test or retest, and so you
(16:36):
have to be concerned about that, even though we didn't
have anybody in custody or charged. She said, yeah, there's enough.
So she cut it in half and tested it, and
lo and behold, we got back those results. There was
almost a full male profile. It didn't belong to anybody
(16:57):
that we searched. We had a database all ready built,
there was enough to put into codis and it didn't
match anybody in CODIS. So I went from a case
that supposedly had no DNA issues to the issue in
that case. Is this mystery DNA, and it continues to
(17:19):
be the issue in that case to this day. I
firmly believe it was that DNA and that profile alone
that kept anybody from being charged by the Boulder DA
for the murder of that little girl.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Is there any way to do ancestry on the DNA
profile you have like any.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Other DNA method? You said, I've been doing DNA since
the late eighties, and that's true. The first case I
did was in nineteen eighty nine in Denver. But every
method that I know of that's ever been used for
forensic has limitations. And the limitations that we have when
it comes to sequencing is if it's a mixture, and
(18:04):
it's a mixture of about fifty to fifty, that's a problem.
This remember is blood. The blood is hers. The male
profile is probably saliva. The one thing I can tell
your listeners it's not sperm, but we know it's mail
from the testing because she doesn't have a Y chromosome,
so we know it's a mixture and it's about a
(18:25):
fifty to fifty mixture. That is a problem when you
start to sequence DNA because you don't know who's contributing.
What I've spoken to a group up there about what
I thought and think we could do on that case.
But I think they're doing the conservative thing. They're waiting
(18:46):
to see if there's advances. And the one thing I
always tell people about DNA, you don't know what we're
going to be doing in five years. Five years before
the Golden State Killer, I would not have told you
we would have been used using DNA and genealogy to
solve cases. The one thing I do know is this
happened on Christmas. Most people know where they were on Christmas.
(19:12):
There's photographs of them with their families. If this DNA
was deposited at some other time, most likely somebody's going
to have a pretty good alibi and an awful lot
of witnesses. That is one of the things about when
that crime took place that I think is interesting. But
the reason no one was ever charged, and if you
(19:34):
remember correctly, the grand jury wanted to indict the Ramses,
and I'll tell you I really had to sit down
and explain to some people that didn't understand DNA exactly
what the major problem was there. So you may have
probable cause that somebody did something, but that's not the
(19:55):
standard when you get into trial. When you get into trial,
you have to to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt,
and that is the highest standard in the law of
the United States. Probable cause is one of the lowest standards.
So the grand jury may or may not have gotten
it right finding probable cause. But the one thing I
(20:16):
knew was there was reasonable doubt as long as that
DNA was out there. And I sat down and had
to convince at least five district attorneys that were giving
advice on that case. And then after it was over,
I don't know if you remember, but then we sat
down with the governor of the state of Colorado, who
(20:37):
had to make a decision if he was going to
take the Boulder DA off the case and put a
special prosecutor who would have been our attorney general to
continue the investigation. And for two days we sat down
and explained everything that we had in the investigation, explained
why we could not go forward with any suspect at
(21:00):
that time, and he agreed with us, and he did
not appoint the attorney general to be the special prosecutor.
You know, it's one of those tragic cases. It's one
of those cold cases out there. It gets a lot
of attention for a whole lot of reasons. My hope
is someday that that DNA will be identified. I'd love
(21:23):
to be part of it because I was part of
it at the beginning. I was the one that asked
for the testing. I would love to work with the
Boulder Police Department again. You know, they get criticized a
lot for that case. And I got to tell you
that the individuals that I worked with on that case, now,
they weren't necessarily at the scene. They weren't the first
(21:46):
ones called. You know, I would really like to get
to the end of that mystery. If we can utilize
this technique in some way and get them answers, I'd
be real proud about that.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Well, I got a few more questions. I talked to
John Ramsey and I asked him specifically about the garage
and had that been tested for DNA. Whoever tied that
knot should have left some touch DNA when.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
I was involved in the case. There was no There
was no technique that would have allowed you to get
down to the level the few cells that they can
do touch DNA. With touch DNA, you talk about getting
DNA samples sometimes done in a half an hour. Now
that's more expensive, So I would have been done with
(22:44):
the case by the time that they would have sent
different items of clothing, not the garrote itself, but the rope.
I know that they did ask the body lab to
do additional work on different items, but I was not
involved in that, and I don't believe I've ever seen
(23:05):
the results of that work. But obviously that work didn't
lead to a solution.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
You as a prosecutor, when you look at a three
page ransom note with the word attache, you can pretty
much take Burke out of it. If the FBI says
they can't rule this person in or out. You know,
you've got this stage scene, You've got a master bedroom
that looks like one person slept in the bed because
the other half is made up. It looks like you've
(23:32):
got a nine one one call that might have some
issues to it. You've got somebody that fed the child pineapple.
They're going up and down these three stories. I mean,
it's not just a you know, like a mystery. To me,
it's one of those cases where every single thing that
could go wrong to aid the killer is what happened.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
The cause and mechanism of death was one of the
most compelling things to me. This little girl suffered a
major blof to her head, basically cracked her skull from
front to back. Didn't break her skin, so it didn't bleed.
Had she bled, we would have known where she got attacked.
We would have known you if as she was moved
(24:14):
through the house, if she was moved where she was moved.
But we didn't have the luxury of that. But she
had this massive brain. Anybody goes online, there's probably a
picture of that injury to her skull, because just about
everything about this case is online. The saddest part of
(24:35):
that case for me was that she then was never
conscious again, so there'd be no reason to tie her up.
There'd be no reason to do these slip knots or
put anything over her mouth. A piece of duct tape.
And the one thing I'll tell you, if she'd been conscious,
that binding that she had was so loose and so flimsy,
(24:57):
she would have reached up and tore that duct tape
off of her face. It was one little strip of
duct tape over her mouth. It didn't go around her head.
She would have just torn that duct tape off and
started screaming. But she was never conscious again, and then
through the mechanism death that happens when you have somebody
(25:18):
that suffers a close head injury like that. We all know,
you hit your thumb with a hammer, it's going to
swell up. Well, what happens when you get hit in
the head like this, Your brain starts to swell up.
And because your skull is so good at protecting your
brain and it contains your brain, there isn't a lot
of place for your brain to then expand while it's swelling.
(25:44):
And what happens is it goes down your spinal cord
and eventually all of those things that control the beating
of your heart, your breathing, your lungs, that's all cut
off by the swelling of the brain. And that's what
kills you. And that's was happening to this little girl
(26:04):
at the time she was strangled to death. There are
people out there that believe that, you know, she got
those things happened close in time, and they did not.
There were hours between when she was struck in the
head and when she was strangled to death.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Another thing that I picked up on in this whole thing,
you've got John Bonnet with the right accent. You've got Garat,
You've got at Jesha. There's some French influence there. I mean,
you can't miss it as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
There was a little French dog they had, it had
a French name. Uh, there was. Some of those indicators
were there. But again, you got to put up her
shut up. When you're a prosecutor and you can sit
there and opine about what you thought and what your
theory is and all of that, but when it comes
to charging parents have lost a little girl of a
(26:59):
crime like first degree murder, you better have your ducks
in the order and you better be ready to prove
it beyond a reasonable doubt.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
One last question, what do you think about the line
in the autopsy where it says chronic vaginal injury. Do
you think she was assaulted by somebody close to her
or at a school or somewhere over a period of time.
What do you make of that sentence?
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Well, there was clearly vaginal injury to her that occurred
near her death. Now, the word chronic implies that it
had been going on for some time. There were some
indications that she had started wetting the bed again after
(27:46):
being potty trained that she was having problems with that
kind of thing at school where she would have to
have accidents, and you know, there's those are indicators that's
something of a sexual nature may be occurring with her. So,
I mean, all of those things we knew about, all
(28:07):
of those things we presented to the grand jury. She
may or may not have been. But the one thing
we found was that at the time, most of the
studies around that by experts were being done on live girls,
and there were very few experts that could give us
an opinion on a girl that had died. And so,
(28:32):
you know, and with children, sometimes when you see autops
these things are a little bit different, and you've got
to look for maybe an expert, for instance, not in
this case, but for in strangulation of a child where
there isn't the common marks that you'd see when a
full grown woman is strangled to death, those kinds of things.
So when you go at the time, we go looking
(28:55):
for an expert that could tell us if there were
things about this little girl's anatomy that would indicate that
she'd been previously sexually assaulted. There was really nobody out
there that could do that. The one thing we couldn't
find was a pathologist that could give us an opinion
on if the vaginal trauma that she had was something
(29:21):
that had been reoccurring.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Sir, do you think you can explain, you know, to everybody?
Speaker 2 (29:31):
IgG Absolutely, it's the name has changed a couple of times,
and sometimes it was forensic genetic genealogy. Now it's investigative
genetic genealogy, and now some people are referring to it
as forensic investigative genetic genealogy, but it's all the same.
(29:52):
And basically what it is is that when the law
enforcement agency has done their work and they have a
profile and that profile doesn't match anybody in the case,
and they put it into CODIS and it doesn't match
any of the millions and millions of people that are
in the US codis eighteen million people, the case remains
(30:14):
cold and so the question is what are you going
to do? And what we do is we work with
law enforcement. We have a great partner here in the
metropolitan area that actually provides the funding to do our work,
and that is our Metro Denver Crime Stoppers. And basically,
(30:35):
they'll have a reward on a twenty five year old
murder and they've never solved it. They've never paid the
reward they pay us to solve the case. They pay
us about five thousand dollars a case. We get the
DNA sequenced, which is different than what they do in
the crime lab. Once it's sequenced, then there are two
(30:57):
commercial databases, one called Family Tree DNA and one called
jedmatch that allow law enforcement to search those databases to
see if there's anybody in the database that might be
related to the individual that committed this horrendous crime. And
they're brutal rapes, murders, rape murders, those kind of crimes.
(31:22):
The women, women are always the victim of these crimes
or children. Ninety percent of the cases that we solve
where DNA plays a role, the victims are women and
the ten percent that are left about nine point five
nine point eight or kids. So this is a technique,
and DNA is a technique that helps us catch men
(31:45):
that rape and murder the women in our communities. And
that's the same as in Georgia and Colorado and across
the United States. It's really important to do DNA in
cases where it's appropriate. Sequence the DNA, we upload it
and what we get are people. We don't get the
people's DNA. What we get is what they share with
(32:09):
the person that we're looking for. And we may then
have somebody that is a third cousin. And what we
start to do then with our genealogists, and that's the
genealogy part of it. We start to build out a
family tree from that individual that's in the database that
may be a third cousin, and we go up the
(32:29):
family tree. We're looking for what's called the most recent
common ancestor. And when we find that most recent common ancestor,
and it's usually a couple, maybe great grandparents, great great grandparents,
we start down the family tree looking for the individual
that was at the location, you know, in the city
(32:52):
of Denver. We've had two brothers that came back. One
had never been in Colorado and the other had been
in Colorado and actually been in a lot of trouble
in Colorado. So we come down the tree looking for
the individual, an individual that might fit, and when we
find that individual, we give that name to law enforcement
(33:16):
and they do a full blown investigation. Sometimes they get
the individual's DNA. They may get it through a court order,
they may get it through a search warrant. They may
get it through somebody taking trash, you know, taking the
trash after the person has put it out and it's
been taken to the dump, you know, a trash run,
(33:39):
that kind of thing. If somebody is a smoker throws
down a cigarette, but their DNA is going to be
on a cigarette. But so we are looking for the
person's DNA and then once we get that DNA, it
is compared to the DNA from the crime scene through
the methodology that was done at the crime lab, and
(34:01):
we'll have a hit. And when we get that hit,
the individuals then arrested and charged with whatever the crime
is that we are looking into. These databases will only
let us do violent crimes like rape, murder, some of
those types of crimes. They will not let us do
genetic genealogy on a theft case or burglary case. They
(34:23):
prohibit that. So it's a limited number of cases, but
it's a great technique. It's been utilized for about the
last five years and hundreds of otherwise unsolved cold cases
have been solved through investigative genetic genealogy. That's what we
do my companies called United Data Connect. If you have
(34:44):
any law enforcement interested in contacting me, just go to
our website.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Sir, I appreciate you so much. I appreciate your career.
I appreciate that you are a third generation lawyer. Your
whole family has been dedicated to public service, especially your wife.
I mean, taking it own all by herself is a
tremendous asset to you and the citizens of Colorado.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Yeah, my wife is incredible. She raised thirteen million dollars
so we could open a family violence center here in Denver.
We didn't have one. I was committed to getting this done,
but I could not have done it without her fundraising.
She was able to raise that thirteen million dollars and
(35:29):
we got the Roseandam Center open just before I was
term limited in the left office. Yeah, she's incredible, you know.
And of course my dad and my grandfather, I owe
a lot to them. I wouldn't have been a trial
lawyer without my father. And my grandfather was the longest
serving US attorney for Colorado. He served under Roosevelt and Truman,
(35:53):
and he had a great career. So yes, thank you
so much for bringing them up. And you know, of course,
my wife was an ally of mine throughout the political campaigns.
But she really played a significant role in helping victims
of domestic violence and their children here in Denver by
(36:14):
getting the Roseannum Center funded and running, and then she
of course served on the board for years. We're still
involved in that center. It's making a huge difference in
our city.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Well, you've got a solid Zone seven, sir, and again
I appreciate you, y'all. I'm going to end Zone seven
the way that I always do with a quote. The
greatest history book ever written is the one hidden in
our DNA. Spence, Wales. I'm Cheryl McCollum and this is
Zone seven.
I can remember being in college classes and professors talking
about this new thing and thinking this is just magic.
I mean, how can this even be real? So back
in the early nineteen eighties, Mitch Morrissey was working with
DNA before anybody even really understood it, he was already
(00:30):
using it to solve crime. He was the DA in
Denver County. He prosecuted now, I want y'all to hear
these numbers, six thousand felony cases and about eighteen hundred misdemeanors.
Every year. He was Prosecutor of the Year. He was
the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award. He received the
(00:55):
Patriots Award from the Department of Defense. This is an
accomplished trial lawyer. The only reason he ain't there now
is because of term limits. In nineteen ninety nine, Mitch
Morrisey was sworn in as the DA for Boulder County, Colorado,
to aid in the thirteen month long grand jury investigation
(01:19):
into the death of John Vanay Ramsay. He continued to
advise on that until two thousand and three. In two
thousand and three, he along with the Denver Crime Lab
director Greg Lebarge. Eighty one charges have come from that development.
(01:40):
Of the Cold Case Project, and they have gone as
far back as nineteen eighty. He was also a big
key supporter of Katie's Law that says convicted felons will
submit their DNA. He wrote a book, and you'll know
how I preach all the time, the history of crime
(02:01):
will tell the history of our country. It'll tell the
history of your town, your state, your city. His book,
Denver DA's Office, A History of Crime in the Mile
High City. He goes from eighteen sixty nine to twenty
twenty one, and he starts with an event where he says,
(02:24):
and I quote, hangings were popular public events, y'all. I
am so happy to introduce y'all to the genius that
is joining us tonight. Mitch Morrissey.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate being on
your podcast.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Well, this is going to be a tremendous evening for everybody,
because when you start talking in your book and you're
telling of this hanging event that was in front of
three thousand people, you say there were one hundred vigilantes.
True crime has always been in public entertainment.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
Yeah, that's absolutely true. I mean, when you think about it,
justice was swift, certainly here in Denver when we were
talking about the frontier. So usually somebody would commit a murder,
they would have a trial. Now, sometimes there were some
vigilantes that would go down to the jail and get
them out, and they wouldn't have a trial, and then
(03:23):
they usually would hang them or lynch them from the
nearest tree. But it was almost that quick. In some
of the early cases in Denver, there really was no
place to put them until the state penitentiary was open,
so they would get their trial for a murder. Usually
then they would be convicted within a day of the
(03:46):
homicide or the next day. There wasn't much of an appeal,
and oftentimes the jury were citizen jurors and it was
kind of before there were elected prosecutors. And then they
would usually hang them either in a place where they
could draw a lot of people or the place where
the murder took place, which I thought was interesting to
(04:08):
actually take the person back to where the murder occurred
and hang them there if there was a tree. Now,
I don't know if your audience ever been to Denver,
but we don't have a lot of natural trees in Denver.
We're on the plains, and so the about the only
trees were these old cottonwood trees. It would grow along
the Platte River the Cherry Creek, and those would usually
(04:30):
be the place where they would take somebody and hang them.
If they were going to use a tree to do it,
they would draw a big crowd and if there was
enough notice, everybody in the territory would show up and
it would be kind of like almost like a picnic
or a fair county fair type thing, and the main
(04:50):
attraction was the hanging that was going to happen that afternoon.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
It was the exact same way in Georgia. I worked
at Cromsain seven years after the event. That was the
last mass luncheon in Georgia. And the reason there wasn't
more evidence there is because people came and took souvenirs.
They took shellcasings, they took rope, they took clothing off
(05:15):
the victims, they took jewelry. It's nothing new. You know
another thing in your book that I found amazing. I
used to teach college and sometimes I would say, there
are no new crimes. And sometimes they would try to say, well,
what about a dry by shooting? And I would say, well,
there's evidence that Native Americans on horseback would fire eras
(05:36):
on fire into houses.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
That's a dry by shooting.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
It's nothing new, right, And sometimes they would try to
stump me. But again there was always a corresponding historical
reference to the same thing. And when you talk about
Cheap John in your book from eighteen sixty nine, what
was fascinating to me is they made a point for
everybody to know not only was he a thief, but
(06:00):
he was a pimp. And I would have students that
didn't think pimps came into play until the seventies.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
In Denver, and it's in the book, we had a
large group of French prostitutes and French men that lived
off of those prostitutes. And actually at the turn of
the last century we had a serial murderer who was
going in and killing women in the brothels that we had.
(06:29):
They would have small rooms that were right on the street,
and you know, we had three or four of them
that were murdered by the same individual. They believed. Now,
of course, they didn't have DNA and the kind of
things that we have that tie cerial rapists together. But
they all were strangulations. They all occurred on the same street,
(06:50):
Market Street. They all occurred to the same type of victim,
and then they at one point brought in a clairvoyant
to try to figure out out who was responsible for
these murders, and she ended up being strangled to death.
And that's in the book. So you know, the book
has a lot of history in it. It has some
(07:10):
interactions with Native Americans, some of the district attorneys that
I wrote about. Each chapter is a different district attorney
served in the Civil War. So we go back quite
a way.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
He's got Doc Holliday at Masterson, AJH. Holmes, Bundy, y'all
just get it and get ready because you're not going
to want to put it down, I promise you.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
And then we have some celebrities in there like Bob
Dylan who was here and Kareem Abdul Jabbar got in
trouble smoking some marijuana when he was early on in
his career and came through Denver. So it goes from
you know, right after the Civil War basically all the
way through to when I served as district attorney, from
(07:58):
I served from two thousand in five to twenty seventeen,
and then it talks about the current district attorney that
followed me in office. There were a lot of them
because they usually served very short terms. One of the
most interesting one was the second. His name was Merrick Rogers.
Merrick Rogers did just about everything. He was the district attorney,
(08:22):
He was on our Supreme Court, he was in the legislature.
When they started the law school at the University of Colorado,
the first law school in the area. He was a
law professor, just an amazing guy. And at the end
of his life, I think he was ill, and he
was up in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. He went down to
(08:42):
a hardware store and he bought himself about a quarter
of his stick or half a stick of dynamite, went
down by the river down there with a cigar, lit
the dynamite and blew himself up because I think he
was dying anyway. So, you know, there's biography of everybody
that served as district attorney, and I put in all
(09:04):
of the different police officers that were killed in the
line of duty and what happened to the people that
killed them. So really we tried to cover the different
crimes that occurred during the era of each one of
the district attorneys. It's about a three hundred page book,
but it's it's a good read.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
And you know, it's kind of funny when I hear
you talk, and you know, you sometimes refer to courtroom ten.
For me in my background, it would be courtroom eight.
But again, it's that close knit group of people. It's
that kind of coming up and learning your way in
this business. And you had a death penalty case where
(09:49):
you did not see your children awake for two years.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yeah. It was the murder of a little girl, a
little African American girl who she was killed within a
a month of John Benay Ramsay, but because of where
she was killed, in the nature of her family, he
didn't get a lot of attention. We used DNA to
solve it. Within a couple days, we caught a man
that took her and another six year old out the
(10:16):
back door of the house, kidnapped them. She ran The
brother of the other girl ran into them, was able
to get the one girl to go away with them,
but because of a promise of some candy, little Ashley
Gray stayed with a man she referred to his uncle,
John John Morris. He took her down to a loading
(10:37):
dock and brutally raped her. We were able to get
DNA blood from her pants, from his pants, her blood,
even though he had taken those pants home and had
his girlfriend wash them. And we spent about two years
then seeking the death penalty for mister Morris. You know
(10:57):
you work on those cases night. Well, I didn't work
all nights, but when you have little kids that are
four and six or two and four, you leave before
they're awake, and you get home they're asleep, And it
was pretty amazing that my wife did everything basically for them.
(11:20):
I mean I'd see them when they were in their
cribs or when they're in their bed, but you know,
I went to pretty much two solid years without seeing
them awake. We ended up getting a first degree murder conviction,
but it was a strange conviction because it was first
degree murdered felony murder where we had sexual assault on
a child as the underlying felony. But the jury could
(11:43):
not agree even though it was a strangulation where he
strangled this little girl to death, they could not agree
on first degree murder after deliberation, so they decided, hey,
we convicted him a first degree murder. We don't have
to worry about this other four and you need that
other form, or you did at the time in Colorado
(12:04):
in order to needed some mental state for the homicide,
not just the felony, and so we weren't able to
go forward on the death penalty on it. But you know,
for your listeners, and I'm not sure in Georgia, but
here in Colorado they have since gotten rid of the
death penalty, and the death penalty was extremely rare. So
(12:27):
when they got rid of it two or three years ago,
we had I think maybe four people on death row,
none of them out of my jurisdiction, but they commuted
their sentences to life without parole and we no longer
have the death penalty in Colorado.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
So y'all think about two years where you're missing birthdays, anniversaries,
just general Wednesday night being with your family. And after
that case that took him away from his family every
day from dark to dark, he gets a call and
(13:06):
that call says, we need you in Boulder to help
take over the grand jury on the job at a
Ramsey case.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
There was some problems with the District attorney's office up there,
so they brought in a former chief deputy of mine
who was working in Pennsylvania to run the grand jury.
So when you say to run it, I actually did
not run it. By the time I was asked to
be part of the team, Mike Kane had been already
(13:38):
brought in to work exclusively on that case. I was
coming off this death penalty case. And my boss at
the time was Bill Ritter, who was the DA that
was term limited before I got elected, and he said, Mitch,
I need you to go up and be part of
this Ramsey case because nobody knows anything about DNA and
(13:58):
you are the top DNA a guy in the state
of Colorado or one of the top in the nation.
And so I told him no, I said, I can't
do it, Bill. I just finished that death penalty case
on Morris and that's where I explained that I hadn't
seen my kids awake for two years, and I owed
them I did not I could not get involved eighteen
(14:20):
months after the fact, trying to put together again a
crime that I knew there was DNA, but at the
time it wasn't significant. There was really no issue with it.
A couple weeks later, Mike Kane knocked on my door,
and Mike was my first chief deputy in the Denver
(14:41):
DA's office. And when you talked at the beginning about
somebody having your back, it really was true. With Mike.
He always had my back. He was one of my
favorite people to work with and to work for. And
he said, Mitch, I need you. And there were my
two kids. My wife was out somewhere. Said Mike, look
at these kids. They need me to be around. And
(15:04):
I reluctantly decided to go there. I went to the
University of Colorado, so I had a lot of experience
in Boulder. So the first day I decided that I'd
go up to the Colorado Bureau of Investigations, which was
the lab that they were using, and since I was
the DNA guy, I'd meet with their zerologists DNA woman,
(15:27):
which was somebody that I knew. She had worked in Denver.
She was very good at what she did. Kathy Dressel
was her name. I met with her. I sat down
with Kathy and was talking about the DNA and this
little girl's underwear. I knew that there was DNA there
and there was potential mixture or contamination, and without missing
(15:50):
a beat, and me knowing Kathy for years, she said,
well what about that other stay Mitch, and I said, Kathy,
I've been on this case for less than a day.
I don't know what you're talking about. There's a second
stain in these panties and she said, oh, yeah, there's
a second stain. And I said, and you haven't tested it.
It's been eighteen months. She said no, the DA told
(16:13):
me to keep it for the defense and I said,
it's separate and she said yes, it's a completely separate
stain from the one I did test. I said, is
it big enough to cut in half? Because you know,
when you consume a sample, the defense then doesn't have
anything that they can test or retest, and so you
(16:36):
have to be concerned about that, even though we didn't
have anybody in custody or charged. She said, yeah, there's enough.
So she cut it in half and tested it, and
lo and behold, we got back those results. There was
almost a full male profile. It didn't belong to anybody
(16:57):
that we searched. We had a database all ready built,
there was enough to put into codis and it didn't
match anybody in CODIS. So I went from a case
that supposedly had no DNA issues to the issue in
that case. Is this mystery DNA, and it continues to
(17:19):
be the issue in that case to this day. I
firmly believe it was that DNA and that profile alone
that kept anybody from being charged by the Boulder DA
for the murder of that little girl.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Is there any way to do ancestry on the DNA
profile you have like any.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Other DNA method? You said, I've been doing DNA since
the late eighties, and that's true. The first case I
did was in nineteen eighty nine in Denver. But every
method that I know of that's ever been used for
forensic has limitations. And the limitations that we have when
it comes to sequencing is if it's a mixture, and
(18:04):
it's a mixture of about fifty to fifty, that's a problem.
This remember is blood. The blood is hers. The male
profile is probably saliva. The one thing I can tell
your listeners it's not sperm, but we know it's mail
from the testing because she doesn't have a Y chromosome,
so we know it's a mixture and it's about a
(18:25):
fifty to fifty mixture. That is a problem when you
start to sequence DNA because you don't know who's contributing.
What I've spoken to a group up there about what
I thought and think we could do on that case.
But I think they're doing the conservative thing. They're waiting
(18:46):
to see if there's advances. And the one thing I
always tell people about DNA, you don't know what we're
going to be doing in five years. Five years before
the Golden State Killer, I would not have told you
we would have been used using DNA and genealogy to
solve cases. The one thing I do know is this
happened on Christmas. Most people know where they were on Christmas.
(19:12):
There's photographs of them with their families. If this DNA
was deposited at some other time, most likely somebody's going
to have a pretty good alibi and an awful lot
of witnesses. That is one of the things about when
that crime took place that I think is interesting. But
the reason no one was ever charged, and if you
(19:34):
remember correctly, the grand jury wanted to indict the Ramses,
and I'll tell you I really had to sit down
and explain to some people that didn't understand DNA exactly
what the major problem was there. So you may have
probable cause that somebody did something, but that's not the
(19:55):
standard when you get into trial. When you get into trial,
you have to to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt,
and that is the highest standard in the law of
the United States. Probable cause is one of the lowest standards.
So the grand jury may or may not have gotten
it right finding probable cause. But the one thing I
(20:16):
knew was there was reasonable doubt as long as that
DNA was out there. And I sat down and had
to convince at least five district attorneys that were giving
advice on that case. And then after it was over,
I don't know if you remember, but then we sat
down with the governor of the state of Colorado, who
(20:37):
had to make a decision if he was going to
take the Boulder DA off the case and put a
special prosecutor who would have been our attorney general to
continue the investigation. And for two days we sat down
and explained everything that we had in the investigation, explained
why we could not go forward with any suspect at
(21:00):
that time, and he agreed with us, and he did
not appoint the attorney general to be the special prosecutor.
You know, it's one of those tragic cases. It's one
of those cold cases out there. It gets a lot
of attention for a whole lot of reasons. My hope
is someday that that DNA will be identified. I'd love
(21:23):
to be part of it because I was part of
it at the beginning. I was the one that asked
for the testing. I would love to work with the
Boulder Police Department again. You know, they get criticized a
lot for that case. And I got to tell you
that the individuals that I worked with on that case, now,
they weren't necessarily at the scene. They weren't the first
(21:46):
ones called. You know, I would really like to get
to the end of that mystery. If we can utilize
this technique in some way and get them answers, I'd
be real proud about that.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Well, I got a few more questions. I talked to
John Ramsey and I asked him specifically about the garage
and had that been tested for DNA. Whoever tied that
knot should have left some touch DNA when.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
I was involved in the case. There was no There
was no technique that would have allowed you to get
down to the level the few cells that they can
do touch DNA. With touch DNA, you talk about getting
DNA samples sometimes done in a half an hour. Now
that's more expensive, So I would have been done with
(22:44):
the case by the time that they would have sent
different items of clothing, not the garrote itself, but the rope.
I know that they did ask the body lab to
do additional work on different items, but I was not
involved in that, and I don't believe I've ever seen
(23:05):
the results of that work. But obviously that work didn't
lead to a solution.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
You as a prosecutor, when you look at a three
page ransom note with the word attache, you can pretty
much take Burke out of it. If the FBI says
they can't rule this person in or out. You know,
you've got this stage scene, You've got a master bedroom
that looks like one person slept in the bed because
the other half is made up. It looks like you've
(23:32):
got a nine one one call that might have some
issues to it. You've got somebody that fed the child pineapple.
They're going up and down these three stories. I mean,
it's not just a you know, like a mystery. To me,
it's one of those cases where every single thing that
could go wrong to aid the killer is what happened.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
The cause and mechanism of death was one of the
most compelling things to me. This little girl suffered a
major blof to her head, basically cracked her skull from
front to back. Didn't break her skin, so it didn't bleed.
Had she bled, we would have known where she got attacked.
We would have known you if as she was moved
(24:14):
through the house, if she was moved where she was moved.
But we didn't have the luxury of that. But she
had this massive brain. Anybody goes online, there's probably a
picture of that injury to her skull, because just about
everything about this case is online. The saddest part of
(24:35):
that case for me was that she then was never
conscious again, so there'd be no reason to tie her up.
There'd be no reason to do these slip knots or
put anything over her mouth. A piece of duct tape.
And the one thing I'll tell you, if she'd been conscious,
that binding that she had was so loose and so flimsy,
(24:57):
she would have reached up and tore that duct tape
off of her face. It was one little strip of
duct tape over her mouth. It didn't go around her head.
She would have just torn that duct tape off and
started screaming. But she was never conscious again, and then
through the mechanism death that happens when you have somebody
(25:18):
that suffers a close head injury like that. We all know,
you hit your thumb with a hammer, it's going to
swell up. Well, what happens when you get hit in
the head like this, Your brain starts to swell up.
And because your skull is so good at protecting your
brain and it contains your brain, there isn't a lot
of place for your brain to then expand while it's swelling.
(25:44):
And what happens is it goes down your spinal cord
and eventually all of those things that control the beating
of your heart, your breathing, your lungs, that's all cut
off by the swelling of the brain. And that's what
kills you. And that's was happening to this little girl
(26:04):
at the time she was strangled to death. There are
people out there that believe that, you know, she got
those things happened close in time, and they did not.
There were hours between when she was struck in the
head and when she was strangled to death.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Another thing that I picked up on in this whole thing,
you've got John Bonnet with the right accent. You've got Garat,
You've got at Jesha. There's some French influence there. I mean,
you can't miss it as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
There was a little French dog they had, it had
a French name. Uh, there was. Some of those indicators
were there. But again, you got to put up her
shut up. When you're a prosecutor and you can sit
there and opine about what you thought and what your
theory is and all of that, but when it comes
to charging parents have lost a little girl of a
(26:59):
crime like first degree murder, you better have your ducks
in the order and you better be ready to prove
it beyond a reasonable doubt.
Speaker 1 (27:07):
One last question, what do you think about the line
in the autopsy where it says chronic vaginal injury. Do
you think she was assaulted by somebody close to her
or at a school or somewhere over a period of time.
What do you make of that sentence?
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Well, there was clearly vaginal injury to her that occurred
near her death. Now, the word chronic implies that it
had been going on for some time. There were some
indications that she had started wetting the bed again after
(27:46):
being potty trained that she was having problems with that
kind of thing at school where she would have to
have accidents, and you know, there's those are indicators that's
something of a sexual nature may be occurring with her. So,
I mean, all of those things we knew about, all
(28:07):
of those things we presented to the grand jury. She
may or may not have been. But the one thing
we found was that at the time, most of the
studies around that by experts were being done on live girls,
and there were very few experts that could give us
an opinion on a girl that had died. And so,
(28:32):
you know, and with children, sometimes when you see autops
these things are a little bit different, and you've got
to look for maybe an expert, for instance, not in
this case, but for in strangulation of a child where
there isn't the common marks that you'd see when a
full grown woman is strangled to death, those kinds of things.
So when you go at the time, we go looking
(28:55):
for an expert that could tell us if there were
things about this little girl's anatomy that would indicate that
she'd been previously sexually assaulted. There was really nobody out
there that could do that. The one thing we couldn't
find was a pathologist that could give us an opinion
on if the vaginal trauma that she had was something
(29:21):
that had been reoccurring.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Sir, do you think you can explain, you know, to everybody?
Speaker 2 (29:31):
IgG Absolutely, it's the name has changed a couple of times,
and sometimes it was forensic genetic genealogy. Now it's investigative
genetic genealogy, and now some people are referring to it
as forensic investigative genetic genealogy, but it's all the same.
(29:52):
And basically what it is is that when the law
enforcement agency has done their work and they have a
profile and that profile doesn't match anybody in the case,
and they put it into CODIS and it doesn't match
any of the millions and millions of people that are
in the US codis eighteen million people, the case remains
(30:14):
cold and so the question is what are you going
to do? And what we do is we work with
law enforcement. We have a great partner here in the
metropolitan area that actually provides the funding to do our work,
and that is our Metro Denver Crime Stoppers. And basically,
(30:35):
they'll have a reward on a twenty five year old
murder and they've never solved it. They've never paid the
reward they pay us to solve the case. They pay
us about five thousand dollars a case. We get the
DNA sequenced, which is different than what they do in
the crime lab. Once it's sequenced, then there are two
(30:57):
commercial databases, one called Family Tree DNA and one called
jedmatch that allow law enforcement to search those databases to
see if there's anybody in the database that might be
related to the individual that committed this horrendous crime. And
they're brutal rapes, murders, rape murders, those kind of crimes.
(31:22):
The women, women are always the victim of these crimes
or children. Ninety percent of the cases that we solve
where DNA plays a role, the victims are women and
the ten percent that are left about nine point five
nine point eight or kids. So this is a technique,
and DNA is a technique that helps us catch men
(31:45):
that rape and murder the women in our communities. And
that's the same as in Georgia and Colorado and across
the United States. It's really important to do DNA in
cases where it's appropriate. Sequence the DNA, we upload it
and what we get are people. We don't get the
people's DNA. What we get is what they share with
(32:09):
the person that we're looking for. And we may then
have somebody that is a third cousin. And what we
start to do then with our genealogists, and that's the
genealogy part of it. We start to build out a
family tree from that individual that's in the database that
may be a third cousin, and we go up the
(32:29):
family tree. We're looking for what's called the most recent
common ancestor. And when we find that most recent common ancestor,
and it's usually a couple, maybe great grandparents, great great grandparents,
we start down the family tree looking for the individual
that was at the location, you know, in the city
(32:52):
of Denver. We've had two brothers that came back. One
had never been in Colorado and the other had been
in Colorado and actually been in a lot of trouble
in Colorado. So we come down the tree looking for
the individual, an individual that might fit, and when we
find that individual, we give that name to law enforcement
(33:16):
and they do a full blown investigation. Sometimes they get
the individual's DNA. They may get it through a court order,
they may get it through a search warrant. They may
get it through somebody taking trash, you know, taking the
trash after the person has put it out and it's
been taken to the dump, you know, a trash run,
(33:39):
that kind of thing. If somebody is a smoker throws
down a cigarette, but their DNA is going to be
on a cigarette. But so we are looking for the
person's DNA and then once we get that DNA, it
is compared to the DNA from the crime scene through
the methodology that was done at the crime lab, and
(34:01):
we'll have a hit. And when we get that hit,
the individuals then arrested and charged with whatever the crime
is that we are looking into. These databases will only
let us do violent crimes like rape, murder, some of
those types of crimes. They will not let us do
genetic genealogy on a theft case or burglary case. They
(34:23):
prohibit that. So it's a limited number of cases, but
it's a great technique. It's been utilized for about the
last five years and hundreds of otherwise unsolved cold cases
have been solved through investigative genetic genealogy. That's what we
do my companies called United Data Connect. If you have
(34:44):
any law enforcement interested in contacting me, just go to
our website.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Sir, I appreciate you so much. I appreciate your career.
I appreciate that you are a third generation lawyer. Your
whole family has been dedicated to public service, especially your wife.
I mean, taking it own all by herself is a
tremendous asset to you and the citizens of Colorado.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
Yeah, my wife is incredible. She raised thirteen million dollars
so we could open a family violence center here in Denver.
We didn't have one. I was committed to getting this done,
but I could not have done it without her fundraising.
She was able to raise that thirteen million dollars and
(35:29):
we got the Roseandam Center open just before I was
term limited in the left office. Yeah, she's incredible, you know.
And of course my dad and my grandfather, I owe
a lot to them. I wouldn't have been a trial
lawyer without my father. And my grandfather was the longest
serving US attorney for Colorado. He served under Roosevelt and Truman,
(35:53):
and he had a great career. So yes, thank you
so much for bringing them up. And you know, of course,
my wife was an ally of mine throughout the political campaigns.
But she really played a significant role in helping victims
of domestic violence and their children here in Denver by
(36:14):
getting the Roseannum Center funded and running, and then she
of course served on the board for years. We're still
involved in that center. It's making a huge difference in
our city.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Well, you've got a solid Zone seven, sir, and again
I appreciate you, y'all. I'm going to end Zone seven
the way that I always do with a quote. The
greatest history book ever written is the one hidden in
our DNA. Spence, Wales. I'm Cheryl McCollum and this is
Zone seven.
Host
Sheryl McCollum
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