Who as.

I think many of us started to realize as we worked these unidentified remains cases that many of them were children, and unfortunately, with children, the people that harm them are usually the people that would report them missing.

So they were never reported missing.

For ten years, the world did not know her name.

For ten years, she was known as Opahlikah Baby Jane Doe.

On January twenty eighth, twenty twelve, police responded to a call from a trailer park in Opelika, Alabama.

A child's pink shirt, a small bundle of hair, the bones let them know she was probably between four and seven years old.

There wasn't enough left to build a DNA profile.

Law enforcement was stuck.

This is the kind of case Kristin Middleman says.

Authorm's project five to two five was designed for cases involving children that have reached a dead end, where traditional DNA testing methods come up short, where the remains have been sitting in an evidence locker somewhere for years.

Today we talk about Authorm's quest to solve five hundred and twenty five cases of missing or murdered children, the cases they've solved, and the names that have been given back.

This is America's crime Lab.

I'm Alan Lance Lesser.

Kristin Middleman is the chief Business Development Officer at AUTHRM.

She is a soft spot for Project five two five, maybe because she has five children of her own.

Project five two five is a mission to identify five hundred and twenty five missing and murdered children in the United States and give them their name back.

We picked five two five because.

May twenty fifth is Missing Children's Day in the United States.

Every time we found one of these skeletons of an abused child, a murdered child.

Once we identified, then we realized that they weren't even a case on someone's desk.

And we all sit here and we talk about the backlog of cases getting bigger and bigger.

It's even worse than that.

Some of these victims, especially these young children, they're not even on a backlog.

The case is just lost in time.

They have been taken out of reality and harmed in the most terrible way by the people they trusted the most.

To me, that was a devastating concept.

Christian knew AUTHORM could make a dent in solving these cases because authrooms to discovered many ways of cracking these cold cases.

Open In January twenty twelve, a child's remains were found near a trailer park in Opahlika, Alabama.

She became known as Opahika Baby Jane Doe because no one could find out who she was.

She was found in a riverbed and Opalaika, Alabama, and her bones were beaten so many times that she had hundreds of breaks that had healed over and over and over again at different times, knocked out teeth.

It's one of those cases you see and you get sick.

Ten years after her body was found, authroom scientists took a look.

They extracted DNA from the girl's scalp.

We were able to build a profile for her that led to the identification of her parents, and the mother was still under the impression that she was fine and living with a father that had gained custody and was paying wild support.

Eleven years after this child was murdered, every two weeks to the person that actually murdered her and left her under that river.

No Plaika.

These crimes don't stop.

They continue until someone has an answer, until that victim gets their name back, their story back.

Her name was a Moor Wiggins and she has been buried now her mom got to go to her gravestone and at least pay respects and know where her child is.

She's no longer paying child support to the monster that did this.

He's confessed to the crime and his wife at the time is undergoing trial for necessity to murder.

But this story is one that happens all too often.

This is what motivates Kristen, giving victims their identity back and giving families answers seeing justice served.

Some of the cases, they're older and they're murdered by a boyfriend, and even in those cases sometimes are not reported missing.

I have one I can tell you about.

December twentieth, nineteen seventy six.

She was known as Beth do Her body was found in the bottom of a lake.

She was pregnant, fifteen years old and pregnant.

Over forty years later, a DNA extract from Beth Doe's bone was sent to Authrum.

There was a lot there to work with, but there was also a lot of damage from degradation and bacterial contamination.

But by then Authorm had special tools and equipment to analyze the sample.

Soon after, local law enforcement found a close match with a relative, a nephew.

It turns out that side of the family had been missing an aunt and a sister since the mid nineteen seventies.

Her name was Evelyn Cologne.

The nephew had uploaded his DNA profile to many genial logs sites, hoping to reconnect with his aunt Evelyn.

The family had lost touch with her, but assumed she was alive because they had received a letter from Evelyn around the time they last saw her.

It said that she and her boyfriend had welcomed a new son.

It turns out the boyfriend had written the letter after her murder.

Evelyn was dead.

It wasn't the news the family was expecting, but now they had the truth.

Evelyn's boyfriend was arrested and charged with her homicide.

Walker County Jane Doe was found on November one, nineteen eight.

She was thirteen fourteen years old when she was found on the side of the road on Halloween Day.

That file is one of the most horrendous files I have ever read in my entire life.

There were so many details at the crime scene.

A rectangular brown pendant with a smoky glass stone that hung on a thin gold chain around her neck, red leather heels with light brown straps, pierced ears, pink painted toenails, light brown hair with a reddish tint.

Multiple witnesses claimed to have seen a young girl carrying strappy, red high heeled sandals.

One witness said the girl had asked for directions to a nearby prison.

Her naked body was discovered by a truck driver in a grassy area off a highway.

In Huntsville, Texas.

She'd been brutally sexually assaulted and strangled.

There are so many specific details that it's hard to imagine how she remained unrecognized and unclaimed for so long.

Her tombstone red unknown white female.

That child was tortured and left disfigured at the side of the road.

No one was able to identify her, and somehow the evidence in this case went missing, So all that was left was an autopsy slide.

An autopsy slide, a sliver of tissue preserved on a glass slide designed for viewing under a microscope.

That's all there was.

And when there is such scarce DNA evidence, author must sometimes hesitant to run the technology.

DNA is tested, it is destroyed in the process, So Kristen says, unless authorm is confident they can build a profile, they have to wait, She says, they pause about twenty five percent of cases.

They decided to pause the Walker County case.

But when they pause a case, that doesn't mean they give up.

They have other methods.

We actually do mock case work in the research lab with DNA that doesn't belong to a victim.

Basically, when the DNA evidence is scarce, they start with a different DNA sample and they put it through the same conditions that affected the limited DNA evidence.

Maybe they expose it to extreme temperatures or certain chemicals to mimic the original DNA properties that they can test their technology on first, and that's led to some breakthroughs.

But on the Walker County case, they attempted something they'd never done before.

So it was a paraffin embedded form aldehyde fixed block FFPE block, they'll call.

It, Kristen says.

In this new technique, human tissue is immersed in a solution of formaldehyde.

This stabilizes the cells and allows the sample to be preserved and tested at a later date.

And we started to create FFP blocks in our research lab with fresh DNA and try to figure out can we actually ever do this?

Can we reproduce it, and within about six months we were able to reproducibly get sequencing results from this type of DNA.

All of this testing happened over months in author's research labs.

Once they perfected their new method, Kristen says, they were ready to call detectives in Texas.

Within a year.

We had brought it into our forensic protocol and the lab and we took the case back and actually we're able to give Shery Ann Jarvis her identity back.

Forty years after her murder, Sherry Ann Jarvis's family finally knew the truth.

She was a girl that was reported missing in Minnesota.

She was found here in Texas.

No one would have connected the two cases.

Shery Ann Jarvis, Evelyn Cologne, Amoor Wiggins.

These are just a few cases AUTHOROM has helped solve over the years of the youngest victims.

Now bear with me.

I'm about to tell you about a database, but it's a key component of Project five two five.

It's called the National Missing and Unidentified Person System or NamUs.

It's a federal database that houses twenty four thousand missing or unidentified person cases, and about twenty four percent are children.

Kristin has raised money that allows Authroom to partner with NamUs to work on these cases, but for it to work, they need buy in from local police departments.

The case might be a NamUs, but the evidence is still with local law enforcement, and they are the ones that help us collect the sample for confirmation.

And if there's an investigative lead, for example, when we're able to help identify what family this person belonged to, we give that information back to law enforcement.

Kristin estimates that it costs eight to twelve thousand dollars to solve these cases from start to finish, no more than a detective salary to work a case for a month or two detectives who have already dedicated years and years to these cases.

With the funding in place, it's hard to imagine why a police department would turn them down, but they do.

I don't know, fear of new technology, fear of failure.

Sometimes people out there tell law enforcement they can do things they can do, and law enforcement has tried and they've been burned.

And so when someone else comes and says, look, I have a predictable way of testing DNA, let us help you, they don't think that we're any different, And unfortunately that's a big hurdle in DNA testing, and so it's not even necessarily that the detective doesn't want to work the case.

They just don't trust the technology to work the case.

October nineteen ninety nine, twenty three month old Andrea Michelle Reyes was abducted.

The investigation began in new Haven, Connecticut, where she was last seen.

Her father suspected that Andrea was taken to Mexico by her mother, who did not have custody of her.

When he went to law enforcement, he provided that theory and they looked and they tried to figure out if they could find where a non good studial parent was living or where she could be in Mexico, but they couldn't find her, and they ended up closing the case.

And then years later, recently one of the detectives at New Haven actually reopened the case and started looking in Mexico to try to figure out if he could find any information about the non custodial parent, and in doing so he actually made contact with the child.

She was twenty seven years old at the time.

That's when Authurm was looped in The twenty seven year old woman provided a DNA sample which was compared to Andrea's father's DNA profile with KINSNIP rapid relationship testing.

This allowed them to link them as father and daughter.

This young woman was indeed Andrea Michelle Reyes.

She's not the first.

She's actually the second child to be found alive.

Since initiating Project five two five about a year ago, Authormis helped solve five cases of missing or murdered children.

And I don't think it's going to take that long to get through five hundred and twenty five cases.

I think that as we start to solve these cases that were previously completely unsolvable in a routine way and show that, you know, we can take in five hundred and twenty five cases and give five hundred and twenty five answers and the only thing that's missing is funding, then I think that people will think twice before they commit those types of crimes in the future.

I think it becomes a deterrent to people murdering their own children.

If you have a child's remains sitting at an evidence locker and no one saw the child be placed.

Wherever you found that child, it could be in a field under a riverbed, like we spoke at the bottom of a lake, at a house, inside of a TV.

I've seen it all.

When that's all the information you have, there's no other test to be done.

What are you waiting for to solve that case?

You're waiting for someone to knock at the police station on the door and say I saw something that day, or I saw someone bury this person.

But unfortunately, decades and decades go by and no one's come by with any eyewitness information.

You can't ever solve a crime, and you don't know who your victim is.

You can't piece together the last few days of their lives.

That's why I think this project is necessary to show that there is hope.

The evidence right there can give you the answer.

It can give you the lead to the identity of this person.

And once you know the name of the person that was in the TV or at the bottom of the lake, you can figure out who saw them last, where they were, You can figure out who to question to actually start that investigation.

Authorom's David Middleman also says arriving at an answer doesn't cost as much as you'd think.

At this point.

Most unsolved crimes are a choice.

We've got the technology, it's been validated in the scientific literature, it's stood up in court.

These tools have been used to solve thousands of cases.

It's just a matter of prioritizing the cases, the effort necessary to solve them, and the funding.

And we've had a really great support from the community DNA Solves the Project five through five community, and this has allowed us to get many of these cases that otherwise would remain unsolved.

Now to the finish line victims identified, crime solved.

But to really scale this for everyone and for every jurisdiction, we will need support from the local, state, and federal government to prioritize, fund and an otherwise resource this kind of work.

And when we get to that point, we won't have these backlogs of unsolved cases.

It's not that the detectives aren't investigating, they have no one to investigate.

They're stock and this technology helps unstick those cases from DNA DARENZ to actual answers.

And it's just the beginning, but it's a necessary beginning.

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

Erica Lance is our story editor and sound design is by David Woji Our producing team is Catherine Finalosa, Emily Foreman and Jessica albert Our.

Executive producers are Kate Osborne, Mangesh Hadigadour and David and Kristin Middleman and from iHeart Katrina Norville and Ali Perryial Thanks to Connell Byrne, Will Pearson, Kerrie Lieberman, Nikki Etour, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank, and the entire team at OUTHRM.

I'm Allen lance lessor.

Thanks for listening.