Court reporter Nancy Bennallack was found brutally slain in her apartment in Sacramento in October 1970. Her killer had stabbed and cut her dozens of times, and taken precautions to ensure that he was not identified. No suspects stood out, but a possible link to another murder led many to consider whether Nancy could have been the victim of an infamous serial killer; the Zodiac. When Nancy’s murderer was finally identified by forensic genealogy, he turned out to be someone police had spoken to – someone who was hiding in plain sight. Although we know his name, the question remains – why did he kill Nancy?

When more than 2 dozen male bodies were unearthed in the crawlspace of serial killer John Wayne Gacy's home in the Norwood Park suburb of Chicago in the late 1970's, Gacy's gruesome and twisted crime spree came to an end. But just because the killer was behind bars, the work of the investigators continued as they painstakingly tried to identify all of the remains. Over the years, most of the victims were identified, all but a handful. As DNA science evolved, it soon became clear that forensic genealogy may be able to help ID the rest, and in this episode we cover the case of one of those victims who was given his name back thanks to this technology. For years he was known as 'Gacy Victim 5'. We now know his name to be Francis Wayne Alexander, and this is his story.

Sylvia Quayle was a creative and artistic young woman who loved life when hers was brutally taken from her in August 1981. Sylvia’s was the first murder on record in bucolic Cherry Hills Village, Colorado, and police were stumped until, two years later, they thought the case was solved. But then that suspect was exonerated, and ten years later, the cold as ice case was back to square one. Ample DNA evidence left by a single male perpetrator did not get investigators anywhere – it simply served to rule out suspect after suspect. Finally, forensic genealogy finally pointed in the right direction – to a suspect who lived nearby and targeted Sylvia. He got away with it for decades, but finally, justice came for him