Numbers Game: 1978 Murder of Girl, 16, Solved in 2026, With 1982 Fingerprint Card!

0:01 Body Bags with Joseph Scott Moore. You know, you don't think about certain things regarding your person. You just, you know, you're just kind of going about life. And in forensics, we do think about your person, particularly if you might be involved in a major crime. You know, there's things that we leave behind, and we've talked about my hero, Edmond LeCard, many times on Body Bags. But today, I've got an interesting case for you. As a matter of fact, this case, this case in and of itself, might give us an indication that we're on the cusp of something new in forensic science. And that's not something you hear very often. And what do I mean by that? I'm talking about fingerprints, but not in the sense that you

1:04 might commonly think about fingerprints.

1:09 I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Hello, Brother Dave. Good to see you, my friend.

1:20 And right back at you, boss. How are you today?

1:22 I'm doing good. I'm doing good because.

1:24 I got to tell you, I feel a little bit, I don't know, intellectually stimulated today as a result of this case that we're about to talk about. Because I got to tell you, I get excited about science. I get excited about new tech. However, the case that we're going to talk about today actually takes old tech relative to fingerprints. and brings it forward into a modern context that I have not thought about before.

1:56 Joe and I talked about this last night and we were kind of going over some of the background information because it's a big case, but he goes, I'm such a nerd for this stuff. And it is, it's amazing. Here's what we have. We have a murder that took place in December of 1978 and it went unsolved for decades.

2:14 And it wasn't due to a lack of work from police. It wasn't due to a lack of interest from the public. It was just a case that in 1978, the necessary science, science hadn't caught up with what they had.

2:38 Okay.

2:39 And we're dealing with a 16 year old girl who was murdered. I mean, stabbed 18 times, Joseph Scott Morgan. And It was about 11 miles outside of Billings, Montana. That's where her body was found, just to give you a heads up. And, you know, when we look at a case like this, where you're going, it's 1978, it's an unsolved murder. Why are we talking about it now? Well, because science has developed in such a way that people who got away with murder and other crimes back in the day.

3:18 Are being.

3:19 found out nothing hidden won't be revealed friends. And that's the case we have here. Only this one was solved in the most unique way.

3:28 It is the.

3:30 First time that this particular piece of evidence has been used in this way to solve a crime. I looked it up, Joe, never been used before. This is the first time and it will not be the last.

3:44 No, it won't be because now, uh, Well, I'll give you a fishing analogy. If you're fishing in a pond somewhere and you're not catching anything, but there's a path that leads to another pond, you keep seeing people pass by you and they got stringer of fish, people are going to jump all over this. They're heading. We used to call it down in South Louisiana, we'd go fishing.

4:07 I love this term. They call it brother-in-law fishing. And so if you're on a boat with somebody and the guy on the other side of the boat cast out and he starts catching fish, well, everybody adjust and get a cast over there with a brother-in-law.

4:21 Brother-in-law fishing. I've never heard that term.

4:23 I love it.

4:25 Well, the thing about it is, is that we have now tapped in, I think, through this case, through this case, we've now tapped in to a whole new source, and I'll go ahead and say it, for DNA. Okay. And isn't it interesting, you know, we've talked a lot, you know, over the years. I teach it, you know, that sort of thing about the connectivity, those things that make you unique.

4:56 And these friction ridges that we have on our fingers where we can touch a surface, particularly, you know, because we have what are referred to as you have fatty lipids.

5:09 On your skin.

5:10 All you got to do is, if you don't believe me, just rub your forehead at some point in time and then look at the tips of your fingers. Some of us have dry skin, but you'll see kind of a sheen that's there, right? Well, that oily medium exists on your fingertips. And anytime you touch a surface, okay, particularly if it's, let's say, a non-porous surface like glass or steel or something, You might not see it, but you're going to leave behind the latent print, those things that are unseen. And in this particular case, it's not a latent print that led to an answer in this case.

5:55 It's actually a fingerprint card, which I am just, I can't contain my excitement about this because it is, you know, we try to find new areas in forensics that we can source our science from, all right, or at least explore it through science, right? And many times you think you're at a dead end, and then all of a sudden a case pops up that is, it has this magical key. I don't know how they're going to get this whole thing organized going forward in the future, but it is significant. It's significant in the sense that they're I think that there will be many, many cases that are, that could potentially be solved as a result of these new findings. So I'm, I'm very excited, but we first, we have to talk about this young girl that she's

6:51 16 years old and she, you know, she died.

6:54 She's from a big family too, Joe, that, that comes into play because you have Karina Contreras, she's 16. Her, her, The last 90 days of her life on this earth was shocking, devastating to say the least. The family had moved from Cleveland, Ohio in the early 60s and had moved to Billings, Montana area. This is a family, a blended family, a Hispanic and Native American background associated with one of the Native American tribes in that area of Montana.

7:29 That's why that her case, Karina Contreras, comes up, because there has been a real movement afoot to solve some of these murders of indigenous women and children. If you look it up, it's big. And there are a number of groups that are working towards solving these crimes. And, you know, on Nancy Grace, Joe and I have both been on a number of episodes dealing with Cases that have gone cold that involved a young woman or teen child from the Native American communities across the country.

8:07 So, yeah, listen, I I was I was part of the team that did murdered missing Montana. And we focused on four cases up there adjacent to a couple of the reservations. And listen, Dave, I had no idea. Before I got involved, I had no idea that these young and their girls, these young girls and women, but young girls are victimized like they are. And you know what?

8:40 I mean, it's bad enough that you've got a group of people that are, in fact, victimized. But here's the thing about it. Native Americans traditionally, first off, they're kind of a closed loop. You know, it's hard to get in to get information. They don't trust a lot of people.

8:57 Rightly so.

8:58 Yeah.

8:59 And with reason.

9:00 Yeah. With really good reason.

9:02 Yeah. But the problem with that is that they try to handle things on their own because they don't get satisfaction in other locations. And so they don't have they won't tell, you know, they won't impart things to like the feds. And, you know, the FBI has always had kind of a peripheral interest in What they refer to as Native American or Indian affairs. But, you know, when things happen on a reservation, you're not going to get a lot of outcoming information. And that's very frustrating. And the sad, tragic thing is I think that there are a lot of these young women up there. that have gone missing, that are in fact dead, and their cases may never be solved. And this is a case going all the way back to 1978, the ones that we

9:57 were working on the oxygen space those are relatively new. But this gives you an idea that there is nothing new under the sun.

10:07 And when I was digging into the research on this one, found a couple of others that I actually made notes on that we're going to go back to later on that might have direct ties to this case. But with Karina Contreras, OK, we're dealing with December 22nd, 1978. It's a Friday morning. A school bus driver. Now, think about this.

10:26 December 22nd, 1978. It is the Friday before Christmas. Kids are going to be out for the next couple of weeks.

10:32 They're excited.

10:32 So we have the school bus driver at seven o'clock in the morning. And as he is turning, he sees what appears to be a bag of garbage. Eleven miles outside of Billings, Montana, driving to pick up children for school, and he sees this garbage, but it's different. It's out in the open for all to see, and it's different than a normal bag of garbage. So he takes a closer look, and he finds a shoe. He finds a leg and a foot inside the shoe and pants and the area. And he says, OK, this is a body.

11:09 I need to do something. In 1978, there were not cell phones like we have now. And so this bus driver, the school bus driver, he drives two and a half miles to a ranch and goes inside, tells the guy, hey, man, I need help. We need to call the police and we need to go and guard this body.

11:27 And that's what they do. They call the.

11:28 Police from the rancher's house and the rancher goes back to the scene with the bus driver. Now, this bus driver, Joe, he knows I'm going to be making a loop. I'm going to be picking up a group of kids and driving right by here in a couple of minutes because I got to get them to school. I don't want these children to see this dead body.

11:48 Wow, what a conundrum.

11:49 I know.

11:50 It's like the bus driver then covers the body with a blanket. This is something that when it happens, you know it can disturb evidence. But he's not thinking like a cop or anything.

12:01 No, of course not.

12:02 He's thinking about a busload of children that do not need to see a dead body.

12:07 This does not stand by me.

12:09 So the bus driver, and by the way, the rancher stays with the body while the bus driver leaves, picks up his kids and goes on his way. The rancher waits for police to arrive. That's where this investigation began. Side of the road, by the way, this bus driver was pointing out how this particular area, oftentimes people dump trash in, you know, just off on the.

12:32 Side of the road.

12:34 This body was dumped and I say dumped because that's what it was. It wasn't pulled off away from the road where you couldn't see it, you know, where you'd have to.

12:44 Look for it.

12:45 It was like, open the door, toss it, and keep going. It was that close to the road that it just meant whoever was unloading this body was not concerned about anything.

12:57 No, they weren't.

12:58 And here's the thing, and we've touched on this several times, but I think you can learn a lot about a perpetrator and their mindset relative to how they treat human remains. And, you know, in this particular case, when we're thinking about Corinna, you know, she's diminished to the point by this individual that did, in fact, dump her. There were two things that were involved.

13:29 Speed, right?

13:31 Speed and a diminishment of her humanity. Because it's in that that you can learn that she was at this point used is nothing more than something to satisfy his evil whims. Well, Dave, the interesting thing about this, as is in most of our cases, we know that the victim didn't just wind up there of their own volition. Um, she wound up there at the, you know, at the hands, um, or at the hand of, of this evil person that did, that committed this horror upon, and she's a child, she's 16 years old. All right.

14:27 Oh my gosh.

14:28 And, um, you know, and, uh, again, you were talking about how devastating her life was leading up, you know, one of, You know, what a horrible exclamation point to put on, you know, this journey that she's been on.

14:41 Okay.

14:42 In the fall of 78, in September of 78, Corinna Contreras' mother passed away.

14:48 September.

14:49 There are nine children involved in her family, by the way, and two grandchildren, all living in one home.

14:56 The mom passes away in September due to chronic illness.

14:59 Her father is disabled, and he's overseeing this large number of children who that he he's disabled joe and now you have katrina's sister gets hit by a car she's walking in a crosswalk and gets hit and killed by a teen driver okay mom dies in september november her sister dies in an accident not her fault and that's pretty devastating to a family you know that's just My goodness.

15:32 And so here we have the trials of Job at this point.

15:35 It is what's next, you know?

15:37 So by the time December 22nd rolls around, Karina, the family has been through the ringer and Karina is seen at three o'clock in the morning leaving a friend's house. We do not know 3 a.m. to 7 a.m.

15:52 7 a.m.

15:53 Is when the bus driver found her body. Now, between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m., that's when death came to But here's the deal, Joe. Where her body was found was not where she was killed. She was dumped at that site. So as investigators began looking at this case, they had to determine a couple of things. If this is not the crime scene, if this is not where the crime took place, where did it take place? And what are we looking at in terms of evidence at the scene?

16:27 Yeah.

16:28 Now, You know, you've shown me so many times how.

16:31 A body is investigated in autopsy and all that.

16:34 Well, when you're at the scene like this, Joe, where you know that this is not where the murder took place, but where it ended, because what they did determine, she bled out. where her body was found. She was stabbed 18 times and bled out. Is that an accurate statement?

16:53 Yeah, it is.

16:54 And that's, you know, that goes to, we throw around these terms, you know, anti-mortem and post-mortem, which we get about peri-mortem, where an individual is in that twilight space. And with this many insults, this many defects in the body, and that's generally the term that's used in forensic pathology to describe an injury without kind of, say, how can I say this? Without painting ourself into a corner, we'll use the term defects. In the case of a stab wound, we would say linear.

17:23 Defects, right? As opposed to circular defects, it might be consistent with a gunshot wound. Thanks, lawyers, for making us have to adjust our vernacular.

17:35 But I want to add something to that, because Joe, you were talking, we did a show one time, we were talking about different ways of death and things, and you mentioned how At one point, there was a scene where it appeared that a person had been shot in the chest. And a rookie cop would have said, shot in the chest. But it was a stab wound. It was not a shot.

17:57 It was a stab wound.

17:59 And at the scene, things can never– they're not always what they appear to be.

18:02 No, they're not.

18:03 So what would they have seen with her, with Karina?

18:07 Well, a copious amount of blood, a lot of blood. probably any clothing that she may have had, any of the surrounding area, it would have been super saturated. And here's the thing about it. The assessment of 16 stab wounds would not probably have been done at the scene under these conditions.

18:29 I don't know.

18:29 I mean, Montana has coroners. It's a coroner state. So the coroner may have come out and made that assessment out there. I suspect that her body would have been removed to Billings where she would have been examined. And it's you can only make that kind of assessment. You don't want to make that at the scene. OK, because there's you'll always miss something because you're not in ideal conditions.

18:58 You're you know, you think about, you know, trying to examine the body on the dirty shoulder of a road, for instance, and you don't want to disrupt the clothing. And even in seventy eight, You know, we had an understanding of transfer and disruption of scene and those sorts of things. Now, not everybody was wearing gloves back then.

19:15 Imagine that.

19:17 There were people that would still examine bodies, you know, not wearing gloves. I actually knew a forensic pathologist that did barehanded autopsies. And that's certainly something that I would not involve myself in. But, yeah, I mean, that was the times that we were living in, you know.

19:35 Back then.

19:36 And I think that that's certainly critical here to keep that in mind. They would have not have done this kind of enumeration, if you will, relative to to these insults that she would have sustained but you know back to.

19:51 This area what did i say we we've got um.

19:55 A speed element here and then we've got an element of an individual that totally disregards you know uh this poor young girl well speed if we're talking about speed and we're in a vast area, which I've always wanted to go to Montana, never been able to go. Someday I will make it there. This is a vast area.

20:19 You know that the person's not on a bicycle on foot. You're in a car, all right? And there's a high probability, I think, that the car, to my way of thinking, is probably a mobile crime scene, which is, you know, that really gives you an idea because you never know what goes on inside the cabin of a car. You know, I've, I've worked cases, uh, um, you know, where cars have been left. I've worked cases where I had two guys that were found in Ohio. Um, they come to Atlanta for the final four and they, they robbed a guy and literally blew his brains out in the backseat of the car and they dumped him out on 285. And two days later, they were pulled over by the Ohio state state police up there and his brain matter was

21:12 still on the ceiling and the car, they had not bothered to clean this up at all. And they're traveling down the road.

21:20 Cars are beyond the gross, beyond the gross factor, Joe driving down the road with a dude's brain splat. It goes beyond the pale of anything a human being can even understand about, you know, I.

21:32 Agree with that. And I think that these people get panicked. I really do.

21:36 Because they're thinking, if I let this go, somebody's going to find it. But as long as I'm in control, it's like people that kill people and bury them in their backyard. You know, you think, why wouldn't you.

21:49 Get rid of the body?

21:50 But there is that significant percentage of people that perpetrate crime, and they don't necessarily put space between themselves. But, Dave, I've got to tell you, in this case, we— It's important that you identify the vehicle here or at least get an idea as to what you're dealing with in order to put you on the track. Because right now they've essentially got bupkis, as my friends in New York say.

22:14 There's no cameras anywhere.

22:16 No.

22:17 At this point, when they find the body at 7 o'clock in the morning, they only know that she is dead and she's on the side of the road. And so as the investigation begins, they start tracking final moments, and they find out 3 a.m. So they know that her murder took place between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m., and they know where she was last seen is several miles away, back towards Billings, Montana. The body is found 11 miles outside Billings, Montana, right next to I-95.

22:51 And as you... I guess it's State Highway 95.

22:54 Anyway... But where this body is found is several miles from where she was last seen. And based on the time she was seen, time she was found, and condition of her body, you're looking, as you mentioned, a mobile crime scene.

23:07 So where do you start, Joe, with the body?

23:12 I'm going to assume you're looking for some type of car print or something to do with a vehicle near or around the body.

23:23 Yeah, you are.

23:23 And again, we're talking about a conveyance here. And with a motor vehicle, you're talking about a very heavy conveyance. Particularly back then, you know, cars were very heavy back then, even more so than today.

23:40 So if you have a car that rolls over a soft surface.

23:43 And we still do it, I'm just kind of... joking around there a little bit. Cars are still heavy. But, you know, you can remember, you know, us riding around when we were little kids in the backseat of a car. And it was like being in grandma's living room with that big rear bench seat in the back, you know.

24:00 And we're not strapped in. We're just playing with our cars around in there and sleeping in the backseat and that sort of thing. So you would want to look for any kind of soft soil near this area. And what you're going to do is look for any what would appear to be fresh tracks. Now, how do you delineate between that? Well, fresh tracks, first off, they will present in a way that the older ones won't. They're not going to be brittle, kind of falling apart. There will be a specific depth that you will be able to perceive at the scene, whereas older tracks might have more of a shallow appearance to them. And that could be as a result of Any kind of washing or rain that has.

24:47 So.

24:49 We've captured this moment in time relative to this child where we've got this three-hour window, right? So any car tracks or any tire tracks, rather, that would be adjacent to her, you kind of got to look at it and say, this... We know that this perpetrator was driving a vehicle. We know she's right here. She was deposited right here. And my, oh my, look at these tire tracks that are left behind. These are going to be significant and you're going to have to cast them. Okay. So, and that, that means mixing up, you know, you go out and you mix up what's called dental stone. And yes, it is used for creating dentures. It's the same substance.

25:29 We use it with our kids at Jack State. And you go out and you do a cast of those tread marks that are left behind. What can we tell? Well, we can begin to get an idea of the size of the tire. People don't think about their tires and how unique they are to their particular vehicle. People can have mismatched tires. People can have what's referred to as OE, which is original equipment. We like to use little abbreviations like that. You know, and if you have OE, then you can get to branding. Because with OE, original equipment, there are certain manufacturers that will source their tires from a particular manufacturer. And those tire treads are unique to that manufacturer. And so you go back, is this OE?

26:23 Are these tires original equipment on this car?

26:26 Well, no.

26:27 That narrows your field down investigatively, doesn't it? You can actually go back and say, oh, well, yeah, this is sold on such and such and such. And this is not a replacement tire. This is an original equipment. And we can also tell a lot about the wear of the tire and the surfaces that it's traveled on prior to that. So you can get an idea if the tread is not manifesting in like a really robust sense.

26:54 You know that it's not a brand new tire, right? It's worn down. Just think about an eraser, you know, on a pencil. That wears down over a period of time. So this is a significant piece of information, Brother Dave.

27:07 And, you know, Joe, as we're looking at this case, you know, as the investigation began, identifying the person, identifying what happened, where it happened, two main things.

27:17 Well, they found out, of course, that she'd been stabbed.

27:21 She had been sexually assaulted, and investigators were able to determine where she started her adventure that, in the last four hours of her life, I hate to say adventure, that's the wrong term, but she left a home of friends, okay, walking to home of another friend just a couple blocks away. So whatever happened to Karina happened after leaving one home before she made it to the next home a couple of blocks away. they know, investigators know that she was not killed where she was found. She was killed in between.

27:56 So at this point, you're kind of looking at, well, where is that crime scene? Where was she killed? And you mentioned the tires. We're going to try to track tires. We're going to look for evidence. We're going to look for eyewitnesses that could tell us something about what they saw. You know, really, as you look at this, you've narrowed the time down between 3 a.m.

28:16 And 7 a.m.

28:17 Well, at 7 a.m., somebody might have seen something around that intersection.

28:23 I think I said I-95 a minute ago. It was I-90, okay?

28:26 I-90, yeah.

28:26 Yeah, not 95. I knew 95 couldn't be right. That's, you know, from New York to Florida. We're in Montana. So it was I-90. And at that big intersection, you got a lot of traffic. So, yeah, there's a possibility that a witness might have seen something.

28:43 And, Joe, they did.

28:45 Now— Through the investigation, police were able to identify a type of vehicle that could have been seen at the time. And that car was a 1975 Buick LeSabre. And they had a color, Joe, green. So as the investigators start looking, they're looking at the life of Karina Contreras, looking at the location of where she was and where she was found.

29:12 And now we have a 1975 green Buick LeSabre. Does this car.

29:20 Have tires that match the cast of the Prince we now have of the tires? Remember in my cousin Vinny, how he came down to try a tire tread?

29:29 Yeah.

29:29 All right.

29:31 Pontiac Tempest. Yes.

29:33 Never be confused with Corvette. Yeah.

29:36 Not to be mistaken. Yeah.

29:38 And so there is a car that is found in this particular case, Dave, and it's been abandoned. And when the thing is impounded, they're able to actually match up the treads. Do you know how we do this? or my colleagues that work in imprint and impression evidence, what they'll do is they will ink the tires, just like an inked fingerprint. Or, yeah, an inked fingerprint.

30:09 Okay.

30:11 I always catch myself, I try to be very careful about saying fingerprints versus friction ridges. But think about the tires being friction ridges.

30:20 So they will.

30:21 Ink that tire, and what they will do is they'll lay down a medium, like a white piece of paper, and they will take that car and they will slowly drive that tire over the surface of that paper.

30:38 Well, what do you get? Well, you get a print. Does it marry up.

30:44 With what you cast with the dental stone back at the scene?

30:48 Guess what it did.

30:50 So they've now got a car, but here's the interesting thing, Dave, about this is the car was a full on crime scene because you could see there was evidence inside this car. I mean, we had blood deposition, um, they're dealing and, you know, the blood turns out to be her blood that is inside of the vehicle. And I would imagine it was a, um, a tremendous amount because, you know, they, they go back to referring, um, that, um, that the There was like a tremendous amount of blood. I would imagine when they got her back to the autopsy suite, it was hard to draw blood on her because, I mean, she had been stabbed so many times. And you've got blood that is. And here's the other thing. If you're stabbed multiple times and you've got a lot of blood

31:43 on the outside of your body, guess what? It's like you mentioned a second ago. You're bleeding out there. So you're leaving all this blood behind. It's a term that we refer to as exsanguination. And it just means, it literally means you are bleeding to death. So she would be coughing up blood. She'd have blood coming out of all these defects of her body, in addition to the fact that she's been beaten. And they believed that she had been strangled as well. So this is like, when you begin to look at this, I had, you know, I was talking about the big seat in the back.

32:18 And if anybody remembers what a LeSabre looks like, a 1975 LeSabre is like a land yacht.

32:25 I mean, it is a very large vehicle.

32:31 You could easily facilitate a sexual assault and a homicide inside of this vehicle with no problem whatsoever. Plenty of room to move around in. And then, once you're done, you take this poor victim and you dump her on the side of the road like garbage. Dave, you know, this begs the question, was the owner of this car involved in her homicide at all?

33:12 It'd be the first thing you would think. Hey, we got the car because it's in an impound lot. Well, the reason the car was towed to an impound lot is because it had been found abandoned in Billings, and I believe it was South Billings, Montana. The car had been reported stolen by its owner before this took place.

33:34 So that owner, he or she, is not considered a suspect based on when the car was reported stolen and the condition it was found in later and when it was found. So starting at the tow yard, they're able to determine, as you said, that that car is the crime scene. And they don't know. who was in it last because it was stolen. So stolen and abandoned. So you're really starting. You're not starting at zero, but you're starting close.

34:07 Yeah. Yeah. Really close. And no CCTV.

34:11 No, no.

34:12 You know, we are so dependent upon that now. Wow. And, you know, all the cameras that are in place and all that sort of thing. And this is back when, you know, as old detectives say, you had to live in your shoes. sleeping in your shoes. You're out there working it hard, going door to door, trying to chat with people and see if anybody saw anything at all. Dave, I find it interesting that they had multiple suspects in this case.

34:41 They did.

34:42 And none of them panned out.

34:44 Well, they had one in particular that was of real interest because Karina had a boyfriend. who lived 23 miles outside of town, and Karina was known to hitchhike to his house.

34:56 Again, we're talking about 1978.

34:58 While that wasn't the safest time in the world to be hitchhiking, it wasn't like it is now. So she was known to do that. So that was one of the many things that they considered, but he had an alibi. So they had four people that they really had a good eye on, investigated totally, and in each case, they were, the investigation was able to eliminate these four people as suspects.

35:21 And Joe, even though you've got blood, even though you've got a body, even though you now have a crime scene, this case went cold.

35:29 You know, after everybody is in fact eliminated, you know, where do you go? I mean, we're talking about a case from 1978. Dave, this is, you know, the people that were born in 78 have gray hair now. You know, I mean, it's, It's a tough thing to try to solve this retrospectively. And here's one other little aside here, and you kind of lightly touched on this. In this same concentrated area, this particular area, is it correct that there were like two other, like, violent homicides involving young women at the same time?

36:15 Of what we're called vulnerable women.

36:17 Vulnerable women.

36:18 Yeah.

36:21 We're looking at, it's unknown whether these cases are connected, okay? But again, Joe, we're dealing with the case of Ruth Laurie Ballou and Marsha Helgensen. By the way, These two murders happened in the same area, in the same time, and are both unsolved. So, yeah, there's a possibility that they could all be connected or just circumstance.

36:49 You know, I mean, we don't believe in.

36:53 I don't want to jump to the conclusion that the same person did all three because police have not done that yet, but it is being investigated.

37:01 Yeah, and rightly so because, you know, this is not like a a densely populated area. You've got very few people from back in that time. The trick is, is there any kind of DNA or trace evidence that was left behind in this case? In these cases, now I will tell you this, with our victim, they did in fact do a rape kit and they did recover unknown male sample from that. And this you know, this case has been sitting on the shelves, you know, on the shelf for a long, long time, just trying to, you know, track down or, you know, it's, I don't want to say it's moldering back there, but, you know, they're still going to try to pull this up and work this, you know, because now there are such things as cold

37:56 case squads, you know, that go out and that seems rather obvious. But back then, that was just not something that existed. And certainly it was not as highly organized.

38:06 As it is now.

38:07 But that all changed in the past two years.

38:10 You know, you mentioned the cold case.

38:12 And Joe, we have done a number of these cases with regard to Othram and beyond that. But the idea that in 1978, investigators, they had real evidence. They had DNA. They didn't call it that at the time. I don't know if they just had blood or semen. And yet, The investigation was precise enough, in particular enough, to save this evidence, to document it, save it, and put it up so that it could be used later as technology caught up. And that's exactly what happened, because even though the case lay dormant with no movement, ice cold, as Joe mentioned, we now have cold case squads. And these are groups of individuals, oftentimes retired investigators, people who do it as a volunteer basis. In some cases, the department

39:03 will have an actual cold case detective who's on staff to do this.

39:07 It's just not always the case.

39:08 Oftentimes, these cases are studied and brought to an organizational time where they can be investigated properly now by volunteers, people.

39:17 Spending their own time.

39:18 Yeah, and the crowdsourcing that goes on with that.

39:20 Oh, yeah.

39:21 Yeah, and so with with this particular case though the they were able to tease out um a genealogical uh suspect in this the problem was i think that they they had a hard time doing a confirmatory confirmatory that this was this particular individual that they were that they were able to to say that he had direct involvement in this young lady's death. And as it turns out, they turned to a source that I never would have thought of. Well, I guess I should have. You know, I guess I should have. I wish I had thought of this. As it turns out, Dave, they went back.

40:14 They targeted in on a guy named Angelo J. Stalsmith Sr.

40:19 They did this by building out the family tree from the end back. You know, forensic genetic genealogy that it doesn't happen overnight. You don't just put this into a computer and AI spits out a name. It takes so much work, so much effort, so many hours are spent developing this tree to come up with a name.

40:41 But.

40:42 You get that name, you still got to confirm that that's the right person.

40:46 You have to. And you have to have some kind of confirmatory sample. And Dave, this is what excites me to no end relative to this.

40:54 This is the nerd call last night.

40:57 So, Stalsmith, turns out, had been hooked up on charges multiple times.

41:04 All right.

41:05 Well, if that's the case, before you are incarcerated, they're going to do a print card on you. And I mean, fingerprint card.

41:18 All right.

41:20 So he had multiple of these things.

41:23 And as it turns out, they the.

41:27 Investigators had the bright idea of, hey, look, why don't we kind of do a reverse engineer on this thing? And it was like one of these eureka moments. They had him as a suspect and they said, you know what? Has he ever been arrested? And as it turns out, you know, they, multiple things. 1982, they rolled a print on this guy. Now, we're talking four years after Corinna was dead, okay? And this card, all inked up, has been sitting in a file somewhere. Well, guess what they did?

42:05 They went in to that old card because, you know, again, we go back to the cards. We go back to the idea of touch DNA. When they rolled his print all those years ago, his DNA transferred from his finger pads onto that card. And they've been holding that key all these years. And they were able to build out a confirmatory profile on this guy based on a fingerprint card from 1982. And they were, in fact, able to say.

42:34 This is the guy. that took her life, Dave.

42:42 Unbelievable that 45 plus years, you know, or 44, however many years, I'm just thinking whoever came up with the idea that, you know what, he touched this card with, you know, his inked up hands, maybe there is something. I just can't believe that something that would be a historical note in the file became the lynchpin to all of it, to putting it all together. Now, The good news is we know who did this now. Who killed 16-year-old Karina Contreras on December 22, 1978? We now have a name. You and I never talk about closure. But there is a finality. One of the viewers posted a note about this in one of our previous shows that there are family members. that are still alive and still talking about a relative who was murdered. You know, as

43:43 family dies, as time goes on, that story gets passed down, you know, almost as a family legend of, you know, whatever happened to Karina, who did that. And so there are family members that are emotionally attached to knowing. And you know what, Joe? Every Christmas, members of her family think about it. That's when it would come into play is around December 22nd. They all know our relative, our aunt, what have you, died on that day. And we don't know what happened. Well, now they do, Joe. Now they know who did it.

44:16 And I think that's a finality.

44:18 Yeah.

44:18 And, of course, it's less than satisfying because Stallsmith is dead. And, you know, he essentially died in 1998. So, you know, I guess he shut his eyes thinking that he had gotten away with this. But here's the reality. You know, you can try to get away with it. But those little bits of you that you leave behind along your journey, they can be very positive. They can be positive for a number of reasons. They can be positive because you've had an impact on somebody's life. They remember you fondly.

45:02 Or they can be positive in the sense that the science that is used in order to extract an identity from a card that was long since forgotten leads us to a truth that would otherwise have never been revealed.

45:24 I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.