People are laying in a freezer for decades.

They've been sitting in the walking cooler at the medical examiner's office, and it's just up and down, up and down of bodies and bankers boxes.

And I just think that we as society, we should send those people home.

You know, ultimately this effort, especially in unidentified human remains, is about people and human dignity.

I mean, bodies need to be a returned to their families.

There's a silent epidemic in this country.

Every year, thousands of people die and we have no idea who they are.

There's no identification found with a body, no family claim them.

The remains are often reduced to a box of bones and stored in a medical examiner's office.

And the longer the human remains sit on the shelf, the less likely it is that will ever know who they are.

This is America's crime Lab.

I'm Alan Lance Lesser.

Our producer Catherine Fenalosa is here.

So Catherine, what case do you have for me today?

So, Aylen, I want to talk about a case from nineteen ninety two.

It's springtime April and firefighters are called to a fire in a field in Ogden, Utah, which is about forty miles north of Salt Lake City.

So this is Mormon country and it's I'm guessing one of the most beautiful places in the world where mountains in the background and just expansive land and red rocks.

It's beautiful.

There are snow capped mountains sort of surrounding this very historic old town, which if you picture like old westerns, right, and the area was actually known during the Prohibition for having these speakeasies.

So there's a very like wild West vibe of this town.

Yeah, and like you kind of feel like you're in the middle of nowhere, but also things are happening here exactly.

And so the area where the firefighters are called to is actually a field which is next to one of the main highways and it's behind a gas station and truck stop.

Firefighters get there and they realize it's actually kind of a large fire at this point, and there's a boat in the middle of the field that is also fully engulfed in flames.

A boat.

A boat, so it's not like we're near a body of water as far as first responders can tell.

Maybe this boat has been in this field abandoned for quite some time.

So I was.

Curious to hear about the original crime scene, so I called Detective Tye Hebden.

He's with the Weber County Sheriff's office.

So initially it was just a grass fire or a field fire.

That then as they got there and saw that it was a boat, and then that's when they notice that there's actually a burned body within the fire itself.

There's somebody on the boat.

Oh my god, Suddenly this has gone from a somewhat routine fire call to a possible homae side investigation.

WHOA.

So detectives collect whatever evidence they can find.

Now, since this was a pretty large fire, there's really not that much that they can find.

There are some beer cans that are scattered in the field.

They brought in some canines to kind of comb through the weeds and the trees seeing if there was any other persons or people in the area.

But no other person was located and most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire.

That not a whole lot was salvageable or recognizable.

They don't find any id nothing that tells them, you know, who this person might be.

They go to the gas station and the truck stop nobody saw anything suspicious.

The body was burned beyond recognition, so they're completely confused, right, They now are looking at a potential homicide.

They have an unidentified victim, and they have zero leads.

Gosh, I mean, that's such a nightmare.

When you can't even identify the victim, where you possibly begin.

And there's something so tragic to me about someone who has passed away and nobody knows their family, their friends, everybody has no idea what happened.

That that's one of the worst kinds of stories to start out with.

They're trying to figure out was this an accident, was it intentional?

Did this victim actually die on the boat?

Did they die somewhere else in the body was placed on the boat and then the boat was set on fire.

I mean, there's so many questions and there's so few answers at this point point.

The one thing that they can do is they send it for an autopsy, and the autopsy determines that the victim is a male approximately six feet tall, and they estimate he was between the ages of thirty and forty five when he died.

They were able to determine that he did have some smoke inhalation.

They were able to see that in his lungs to show that he would have been alive at the time of the fire based on the fact that he was breathing in smoke.

Oh so now this is definitely suspicious death.

In the autopsy, they do collect a few things.

Now remember this is nineteen ninety two, so there is some very basic DNA testing happening.

They're able to collect his teeth.

They match the dental records with missing person's databases, and there are no links made, so that doesn't lead them anywhere.

They did put him into the national Missing Person's database, and nothing ever came back as a match.

The police reach out to news stations to publicize the case.

You know, they're hoping that someone will come forward and say, oh my god, yes, I happen to be getting gas in that gas station and now I'm realizing I did see something or my uncle went missing.

There wasn't really anything to do except, you know, hope that maybe someone would come forward or something, you know, as soon as we could identify and then that would give us, hopefully some people to go talk to.

But outside of that, without without anything else, there was there was kind of nothing to do.

There's a possibility that it is a homicide, that someone did this, there's a possibility that it could have been self initiate, or there's also the possibility that it could have been an accident.

So with no leads about the victim or the circumstances of his death, the case goes cold.

I definitely definitely always kept homicide there on my mind as a strong possibility.

Now, in twenty twenty four, the Weaber County Sheriff's Office in Ogden, Utah, creates a cold case unit for the very first time, and Detective Hebden is looking through the twenty cold cases they have and this one, the body on the boat, catches his eye.

Oh wow.

What intrigued him was you could really be solving essentially two big mysteries at once identifying the victim.

Yeah, so solving an unidentified human remains cases and also solving a potential homicide.

Yeah, double whammy.

Double.

So he starts to look into the evidence that was collected.

Luck is kind of on his side here.

They laid out kind of everything that they had, and so we were seeing all of these kind of burned and charred things that were collected.

Some of the burned and charred ashes and stuff or collected were sealed in paint cans.

When the autopsy was done because the body was so badly burned, there was no tissue to test or take samples of.

But then we actually had the vials of his blood that were collected by the Medical Examiner's office.

We still had them as well as you know, a bag with the pubic hair.

And Detective Hebden is thinking, I have some usable DNA from the victim, and if we can figure out who he is, maybe we can also solve the mystery of his death.

Yeah.

Was it an accident or was it a homicide?

So now detective had de noos he has in blood and hair he can test.

Yeah, So he reaches out to agent Steve Okam, who's an investigator with the Utah State Bureau of Investigations.

Steve Ocam has a history in investigating sex crimes.

Now he's helping smaller police departments with their cold cases.

He's like, Hey, we've got this old case from nineteen ninety two.

Do you think we could maybe solve the case.

And I'm like, Eh, tell me about what happened.

So I got a copy of the death report, and man, this guy burned alive in this boat.

I was like, man, that is heinous, right, Like there was no ifans or butts.

He burned up alive, whether it was an accident or a homicide.

So that we got to solve this case for these guys.

So leyeah, let's collaborate and see what we can do.

Detective Heptin fills them in on what evidence is available, namely the vials of blood and the bag of pubic hair, and now Steve o'cam is even more invested in solving this case.

One of the most unique factors of this case was the forward thinking of the Medical Examiner's office.

In nineteen ninety two, they drew some fluids.

The victim was burnt so severely that there maybe wasn't any viable tissue right to DNA test, so they just thought, buying the day, let's draw some of these fluids anything we can from inside that was protected from the fire, and they have that evidence still on file.

It kind of reminds me of the Carla Walker case, where they were really good at preserving so much of the evidence that clothes she was wearing, and they were able to get DNA off of those clothes because of how they were stored.

It shows how valuable that foresight and correct storage can be.

And to your point that agent o'cam said, just the fact that they still had the adence, He's like, you know, we all think that evidence is perfectly collected, stored, preserved, labeled, kept track of.

You know, there are so many things that happen.

Yeah, like there's a flood, there's a fire, a police department or medical examiner's office, moves, things get lost in moves, and.

The reality is that also affects whether you can convict someone.

And I mean I even think about the OJ case and how they were able to poke holes in just chain of custody.

Did someone plant the glove, did someone plant the blood?

I mean yeah, the reality of humans interacting with evidence inevitably questions arise that have real world implications.

And there's another thing to think about.

Steve o'cam said, it used to be fairly routine that if a body went unidentified for a while, it was donated to a medical school to be used as a cadaver.

They could literally donate it to do tests on, like to have their medical school learn how to work with bodies, and then they for a while they buried them all in unmarked graves, right, and then there was a while where they just cremated them all and they don't exist.

So the challenges with these uhrs is to really see where is the body?

Do we need the bones to be analyzed?

Do we need to consider exhuming someone if they were a victim of a homicide.

So if unidentified human remains were donated to science or cremated, there's no chance we'll ever know who they are.

No, Thankfully those practices are much less common now.

So I have a question.

I know early on detectives did check the National Missing and Unidentified Person System, which is also called NamUs, and there were no hits.

But what about CODIS, So.

I asked eve O Kim about that.

He said it has its limitations with missing persons or unidentified remains.

In Utah right now, there are roughly one hundred and fifty missing persons in their database, and.

I don't think a third of them have any DNA in CODIS, Like no one the missing person, they're family members anything, So there's a sixty seven percent chance right out of the gate someone's not going to hit to anything.

And I would argue it's even higher than that because tons of missing people aren't even listed in names.

So if our in our state at any given time, you've got runaways, you've got adults who just you know, have got mental health or some type of substance issues, and they're in, they're out, they're in there out in terms of missing people.

And because of that, Steve said, they're probably closer to four hundred and fifty missing persons in Utah at any given time.

And if you only have a third of the people have DNA in there who are in the database, I mean your chance as mathematic is going down down.

And I think our experience and our results and our success with the testing we've done so far absolutely reinforces that you're not going to get a code of set, so you have to do your due diligence and follow the steps.

So once tied Doug through the evidence room and found the actual vials of the fluid that had been extracted back in the day, and we were right to roll.

So what happens now, well, Steve helps to find funding for cold cases when there are deaths under suspicious circumstances, and this is also a passion project for him.

In the last probably eighteen months, we've really been hitting them.

The unidentified remains hard.

In Utah, people are laying in a freezer for decades just because no one knows how they died.

Literally in bankers boxes, because once all of the flesh and everything's gone from our bodies, most of us will fit in a banker's box.

So you walk into the medical z owner, there's a wall in the one walking cooler and it's just up and down, up and down of bodies and bankers boxes.

It's almost unconscionable.

If you just asked the people of any state, hey, is you know there's like hundreds of people laying in the cooler that no one's working the case, they would be like, what what ultimately happens and happened in Utah is no one tested them, No one did anything with them.

They literally tried to identify a body and if they didn't figure it out, they just went in the cooler and case closed like nothing's been done.

And some of the agencies, like Weaver County, thought, you know, let's give this a shot now.

Steve Okham's office has a relationship with authorm of the labs that works with the state of Utah to test crime scene evidence and human remains.

And remember the burned body on the boat of course, well, Detective Hebden has bials of his blood and some pubic hair from the autopsy thirty two years ago.

We sent them the blood because that was what we found to be probably the highest or strongest DNA standard.

And about six weeks later he hears back from authorm with the name Kevin Capps.

So they sent me a document with all of the genetic makeup of the individual, and they gave me like family relatives, people that were still alive.

Was a pretty cool report that they give just of tracing down that family tree of this relative and this relative, and he's got all of this genetic makeup that brings it back to a pretty solid match that it was him.

The fact that they can identify a solid match like that, like it's out of nowhere, it's really shocking.

I mean, this body was a person and that person can actually be found.

He still has family here in Utah, even not even an hour drive from me.

What hit me hard was realizing that he also had a daughter.

They told me that he had a daughter that would have only been four years old at the time of his death, and so that's when I immediately just kind of started thinking, like, man, does she even know does she know where her dad's been this whole time?

So after thirty two years, there's a lead on who this victim is, and I'm guessing this is where the investigation shifts back into the hand of the detectives because they have a name.

But how did he end up burning in the middle of a field.

Well, first, Detective Hebden's got to find family members of Kevin Capps.

Yeah, as I'm starting to kind of imagine this guy and his life and the people that were in it and the questions that they've had for the last thirty plus years.

Allen, this is where Detective Hebden said he had to adjust his investigative process because if someone goes missing today, I mean, you could just check their online social media.

Yeah, Facebook, Instagram, things like that to see if there are any photos or messages.

You can probably find clues on what they were up to before they went missing.

But since this victim went missing in nineteen ninety two, you have to look for newspaper articles, police reports, marriage certificates, you know, stuff like that, And he does find some previous police reports involving the victim from before ninety two, nothing after, so that supports the information he got from Authrom this guy is actually Kevin Kapps, and Detective Hebden decides to reach out to the daughter.

That's a big call, it is, and with these kinds of cases, the calls are always a little tricky because they need to get fresh DNA swabs from living relatives to fully confirm that the body in the boat is actually Kevin Capps.

But then there's also the fact that they may be revealing not only that somebody's died, but that that person may have been murdered.

And then also just because we always have to kind of question and keep on the mind of, you know, if this is a homicide or if there is any other persons involvement.

The four year old daughter is the least likely suspect, you know, if there is any sort of family involvement in that regard, I imagine she'd probably be the one kind of question the most of what happened.

I get a knock at the door, and it's kind of funny because I didn't want to answer it the door because I thought it was the Mormon missionaries.

But it wasn't the Mormon missionaries, it was the Weeber detectives from Ogden, Utah.

Wait, is that his daughter?

Yeah?

Her name is Chelsea Laroux and she's thirty seven now, but the last time she saw her dad she was only four.

And they're like, we need to talk to about a family member.

And I said a family member?

Like what a family member?

And he's like, we need to talk to you about your dad.

I looked at him and I was almost drew a blank.

I said, are you serious.

They're like yes.

I said, okay, you can come in, and so I yelled to my mom and I'm like, mom, guess what you know?

They have information about my dad.

And we were just blown away, absolutely blown away.

Hang on.

I mean, you get a knock on the door, thinking maybe someone selling something, and this is what you hear after all these years, that would be jarring.

I was a little taken back by that, because this whole time I thought that my dad was alive and he was no longer with us, which brought peace.

The not knowing of where Keaven was my whole life.

To know that he had been in heaven this whole time.

What did she know about her dad.

Well, Chelsea grew up with her mom as an only child, and she'd seen pictures of her dad.

She was actually really close to his parents, but since she was so young when he disappeared, most of what she knew were stories that her family had told her that he was funny, he liked to play soccer.

She still has a purple teddy bear he had given her.

She did know that he'd had some brushes with the police and he'd spent time in jail.

But as far as she knew, he just disappeared.

Yeah, Chelsea says her grandmother, Kevin Capp's mother is the last person in their family who saw him alive.

So my dad was getting into trouble and my grandma just couldn't really handle him anymore, and so she dropped him off down the street from their house with one hundred dollars and just told him to go live his life.

And unfortunately, he never came back.

Chelsea thinks that was April of nineteen ninety two, the same month his body was found on the boat, and over the years, Chelsea's family was always searching for Kevin.

Detective Hebden says Evan's sister would drive around.

She was just constantly on the lookout for him.

You know, kind of every time she saw a homeless guy on the street corner, she would be kind of jumping out and being like, hey, are you Kevin?

Are you Kevin, Like just wondering, you know, is he here.

At one point, Kevin's sister saw a photo of a man named Kevin Capps.

I think it may have been in the newspaper or a police report, who was living on the streets in New Mexico.

And she becomes convinced that this is her brother.

So she tries to track him down and she can't find him, but she carries that photo around with her for years.

And Chelsea says the hardest part was wondering where her dad was and why he wasn't with her.

I did always wonder what it would be like to have a dad in my life.

The daddy daughter dances that he missed my soccer games.

I mean, he missed my whole life.

So for me, it was really hard not having him around.

It's relieving to know he didn't abandon me, to know that, you know, he really did love me.

You know, growing up you think there's something wrong with you, you know, like, gosh, am I not good enough?

You know, struggled with you know, daddy issues forever, you know, being more attached to men than women.

So it's relieving.

It's a big weight off my shoulders.

It is such a blessing.

It is a close of a chapter that needed to be closed a long time ago.

Wow, and how did authorm even find Chelsea?

Yeah?

I was curious about that too.

In twenty twenty, something just came to me that I needed to take my ancestry.

And so my Mom's like, ky, ch else, what would you like for Christmas?

I was like, you know, I would love to do my ancestry, thinking that I was going to maybe find a brother, sister, extended family, you know, and lo and behold, I got a different treat.

My treat was that I got to find out what happened to Kevin's.

So Detective Hebden and the investigator Steve Ocam solved one big part of this mystery who the person found burned on.

The boat was.

But there's also this question of how he ended up there.

Was it an accident or was he murdered?

So it is still an open investigation.

And detective Hebden says, there were actually a lot of other mysteries too.

One of the things with dealing with a body that's burned up to that extent is it makes it very difficult for us to be able to determine if there were other injuries, right, if he had some sort of blunt force trauma, or we still had the bones that we could look at.

Was there a knife wound or this or that or something that we just weren't able to really say for certain, if there was other injuries that contributed to his death.

He says his office has new information, but they're not ready to release it to the public yet.

But after thirty two years, Chelsea finally knows what happened to her father, and you know, knowing who he is, heats the case up even more.

Next time on America's Crime Lab.

He takes a rock and bashes in her head and leser to die.

This person has left DNA at a crime scene that's unsolved and has committed another crime, and now their DNA has been collected directly from them.

There's a little blood spot on the jacket.

Whose DNA do you think that was?

It was the victim's DNA.

America's Crime Lab is produced by Rococo Punch for Kaleidoscope.

Erica Lance is our story editor and sound design is by David Woji.

Producing team is Katherine Fenalosa and Jessica Albert.

Our executive producers are Kate Osborne, Mangesh Hadi Kadour and David and Kristen Middleman, and from iHeart Katrina Norville and Ali Perry.

Special thanks to Connell Byrne, Will Pearson, Carrie Lieberman, Nikki Etoor, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank, and the entire team at Outhrum.

I'm Alan Lance Lesser.

Thanks for listening.