At long last, Canadian listeners who have been requesting a case get their wish!  There was a horrific series of murders of girls and young women in the Calgary area in the 1970s and early 1980s.   In particular, teenagers Patsy McQueen and Eva Dvorak, and young women Barbara MacLean and Melissa Rehorek stood out.  There was no overt evidence of rape.  Some of the deaths weren’t even certain to be homicides.  No one was sure which cases, if any, were linked.  All the cases fell in RCMP jurisdiction, and thousands of hours were spent investigating them.  Task forces were formed and folded, wagons were circled… it was all for naught. Until a genealogy team and some dedicated CPS detectives partnered up … and what they uncovered was shocking.  In this case, Jess gets unprecedented cooperation from the RCMP about the cold case investigations and the yearlong inquiry into the unmasked killer.

On July 19, 1972, the body of an unidentified woman was found by a young boy in Hernando County, Florida off of State Road 50 and High Corner Road in Brooksville. She had been dead for a few months. It was immediately clear to investigators that she was a murder victim who had been strangled to death. The victim was described as between 30 and 40 years old, approximately 5 feet tall, weighing between 125 and 145 pounds, with short brown hair, and they noted she had only six upper and six lower teeth. Police were searching for a mysterious White 1961-1962 Ford Fairlane that they may be connected to the murder. Police didn't have much else to go one other than the bedspread her body had been concealed in. It was described as  a “Pineapple Damask” print, and it had three square corners and a rounded corner. The case went cold and the Jane Doe was buried in a Pauper's grave. Decades later, police felt that they could ID their 1972 Jane Doe using forensic genetic genealogy. They exhumed her body, but was in very poor condition, and they were worried that they would not be able to extract a DNA profile. After much effort, they were able to obtain a file and finally identified the Jane Doe as Peggy Joyce Shelton.

In February 1977, 14 year old Maria Honzell was babysitting for two little boys in her apartment complex.  While everyone thought the boys were asleep, someone stabbed her to death and left he bloodied body in the bedroom.  But the boys weren’t asleep – and one of them witnessed the crime.  His description of the killer drove the investigation for years to come – but didn’t help solve the case.  It took CeCe Moore and forensic genealogy to do that. When the police learned the name of the killer … it did not answer a lot of questions about what led up to the murder of Maria Honzell.