She was partially buried about four years old.

She had some slippers, no identification, no idea where she came from.

And that's where she got the name or a miss nobody because I couldn't find out who she was.

In nineteen sixty, the body of a little girl was found in the Arizona Desert.

Like a lot of cold cases, there wasn't much to go on, no eyewitnesses, no overwhelming evidence left at the scene, no clues as to who she was or who killed her.

But this case got even more complicated because when DNA came on the scene, it pointed detectives in the wrong direction, unwinding.

The truth came down to whom to trust.

This is America's crime lab.

I'm Alan Lance Lesser, producer Catherine Fanlosa is here and this case was almost ruined essentially by bad DNA technology.

Yeah, it's a story of what can go wrong when technology is in the wrong hands.

What's the story, so, Allen, This is one of the oldest cases that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has ever been involved with, and it's also one that few other labs would touch.

It starts on a Sunday in July in nineteen sixty and a Las Vegas school teacher is looking for rocks with his family.

They like to decorate their garden with rocks, and they pull off a small highway outside of Congress, Arizona.

And this is a road that runs between Phoenix and Las Vegas.

But where the family stops, it's miles from anywhere.

It's just kind of desert sand as far as you can see.

Ooh, so very isolated, extremely isolated.

And Congress Arizona is a former mining town.

It's tiny and even today they're under two thousand residents, so you can kind of picture very small.

And as the family is looking for rocks, they've sort of wandered from the highway and they're walking through the desert sand and they stumble upon the half buried body of a little girl.

Oh no, she's wearing a shirt and a pair of shorts.

Her finger and toenails are painted bright red.

She's got a pair of adult sized flip flops on that have been cut down to fit her small feet.

That image.

She has a full set of baby teeth which are in pristine condition.

And her brown hair has a little bit of like an auburn tint, which leads some people to speculate like maybe it had been dyed.

The police are called and they go out to the scene and they find a set of footprints, which they document.

They also find a blood stained pocket knife nearby, and it looks like there are also two shallow holes that had been dug, maybe failed attempts to dig holes to bury her before whoever's done this half buries her in a third hole.

The family calls the police, and I wanted to find out what happened next, so I called John Shannon.

He's an investigator with the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office.

Our deputies responded and the normal processes that they would do at the time, trying to identify her, doing an anthropology, trying to find out what was there, wrote down her clothes, wrote down it was a knife there, and what evidence was collected at the time was stored at the county courthouse in Prescott.

And an autopsy is ordered and pathologists examined her body and they determined that she probably died a week or two before she was discovered.

She had been burned, but because her body's been left out in this intense heat, it's also really badly decomposed, so they're unable to determine exactly how she does.

But in examining her, they don't see any signs that she had been previously injured.

They are no old broken bones that have healed, like, no other signs of like old traumas.

At first, it was striking me that we have a lot of information, like the color of her hair, all of her teeth.

But then when I heard that she'd been burned, was out in the heat, was decomposing, Suddenly, I'm thinking this is going to be hard to even identify her.

So initially they think she's between six and eight years old, but then as time goes on, other reports guess she's anywhere between four and nine.

She weighed about fifty five pounds and she was three and a half feet tall.

Why does a kid that age have to meet that fate?

That's I know, it's horrible.

Beginning of each one of these stories.

So they mark her death as suspicious, even though they don't know exactly how she died.

Initially, John Shannon says investigators think they might have a lead.

They had got that she was from al Mgirdle because a little girl was missing at Alamgirdo, So at.

First investigators think she might actually be a little girl who went missing from Alamagordo, New Mexico, which is over five hundred miles away from where this body is found.

But then the description of her clothing, her age, and her footprints don't match up with the little girl who was missing from New Mexico, so law enforcement dismisses any connection.

The local newspapers run stories about this discovery of the little girl's body on the front page, but with really no leads and not much evidence, the case goes cold.

That is just, honestly so tragic to me that someone that young either doesn't have people looking for her or somehow they don't know where to look for her.

I mean, any case, it's tragic, but this little child, who presumably, you know, relies on people, to not have anyone finding her.

It's just it just gets me that much more.

I don't know, You're not alone.

So the residents of neighboring Prescott, Arizona, become captivated by her story, and the community nicknames her little miss Nobody.

Oh, I know, it kind of broke my heart when I heard that name.

Yeah, A local radio announcer leads a campaign to raise money for a funeral because the other option was her body was going to be buried in what they called Pauper's Field, and feels we need to give this little girl a proper burial, even though we don't know who she is.

The city residents of Prescott donate the money to buy a casket and put her in the ground in Prescott Cemetery.

The small little coffin is engraved with a note that says God's little Child.

Date of birth unknown, date of death unknown.

I mean, in a way, there's something beautiful about being able to set someone to rest.

But I'm also like, wait, what, you're just putting all this evidence in the ground when you haven't solved the case.

I'm sure I'll find out Catherine, won't.

I also remember it's nineteen sixty, right, so they're sort of going about this by the book for the times.

And I'll get into what they do with some of the evidence in just a minute.

But they hold a funeral and more than seventy locals gather at the kun Gregational Church for her funeral.

The pastor, doctor Charles Parker, gives a really emotional speech.

He says, someone somewhere is wondering what happened to a little girl left in the desert, and they bury her with a headstone that reads little Miss Nobody, Blessed are the pure in heart.

So for over sixty years, that's how she's known little Miss Nobody.

But that starts to change in twenty eleven.

So a woman working on a completely different cold case in Colorado turns up in Prescott, Arizona, and she's asking about little Miss Nobody.

John Shannon says, no one really knew what she was talking about, because, you know, it had been five decades since the little girl was found dead, and the detectives who originally worked on the case had retired, people had passed away, just institutional memory had faded.

But investigator John Shannon says, detectives started to look around to find out, what is this case?

Who is this little miss Nobody?

We had nothing to go on.

Zero nobody here knew anything about her because there was no case files.

How do we find out anything about her?

And so where do we start?

I get that they found this girl's body in nineteen sixty, so it's been decades, but how are there literally no case files for this crime?

That's a little bit hard to explaining because between nineteen sixty two and roughly nineteen ninety whatever original files that were ever put together were purged.

And this isn't unusual.

I mean, back then all the files were on paper, and you know, over the years, police departments move or run out of space for storage, their floods.

I mean, you know, things happen and files get lost.

John does find a retired detective and he learns that evidence was sent to the FBI back in the sixties, and so he reaches out to them.

So we did contact the FBI.

They had the clothes, but they're gone, and they actually did a footprint from a footprint in the sand and tried to identify that determined they couldn't.

And then when we went back to them, they had no files.

Their files were gone.

So all the evidence is gone vanished.

Yeah, the detectives really have nothing.

It was this big, gigantic puzzle that we had to put together piece by piece.

Now John is an investigator, so naturally he's a curious guy.

So he thinks, where do I go now, and so he heads down to the local historical museum.

Everything that we came up with was developed the research, getting newspaper articles, and there was something like sixty five different newspaper articles all talking about this little girl.

John makes himself at home in the museum and he starts to dig.

And read all those and took all the names we could find of the people involved.

The preacher, the radio disc jockey was involved, the deputy, retired judges, retired detectives, and put all that into some kind of case file.

In those hours and hours and hours an hour.

My first thought was maybe this girl is from really far away, because I mean, if they found her body here and they can't figure out who it is.

But then also part of me wonders, what if this was some kind of murder, and like maybe the parents or somebody is actually close by.

So I don't know.

I'm curious.

She's found in the desert sand off of the highway, But that highway, even though it's in a very remote area, does connect to more populous areas, obviously Las Vegas and then Phoenix, Arizona.

Someone's trying to drop a body in a remote area, they might just jump on the highway and stop by and keep going.

You can see why this case is so difficult.

So investigator John Shannon now has a new case file with old newspaper clippings, and from reading those, he's got a lead.

And that's when we said, oh, she's buried here, and we didn't know that either.

So after we got all the documentation together, I had your write up of justification into the county attorney to go before the judge to get a court order to exum her because there was no family, you know, we didn't know who she was.

A judge grants the request and they dig up her casket.

They're able to get her skeletal remains.

Now the detectives partner with names the National Missing and Unidentified Person System.

And we actually end up getting her DNA, and then from there it was okay, we have DNA, but it doesn't tell us anything.

So they have her DNA, but they still don't know anything about her.

They don't, and they developed the DNA profile and it's given back to NamUs and it's entered into KOTAS.

But that doesn't do us any good because there was nothing to match to it.

John Shannon is discouraged, but he doesn't give up.

Detectives keep circling back to one idea.

Aileen remember I mentioned that back in nineteen sixty, police thought there was a chance that little Miss Nobody was actually a little girl who had been kidnapped in Alamagordo, New Mexico.

Yeah, but I thought they rulled it out.

They did at the time.

They said her clothing wasn't the same.

They also said the New Mexico girl, whose name was Sharon Galagos, was four and little Miss Nobody was probably older.

Michael Perry from the Yavapai County Sheriff's office said there were also some other issues.

They were able to get footprints off of the body, but the FBI came back later on and said that those footprints were not at The footprints from the body in Arizona were not a match to the footprints of Sharon Diego's Interesting.

I'm kind of surprised that they're confident that it's not the same little girl.

I mean, how exactly are they matching footprints?

I'm guessing the body of the girl in the desert has changed from decomposition, Like, how do you measure that?

Yeah, and even though that lead was discounted back in nineteen sixty, John Shannon and his colleagues just can't get it out of their minds.

So we were kind of snooping around, actually out down on the girdle.

There was nothing that alo'girdle could supply.

They gave us any clues because all they saw was was a girl abducted and she left town, and that's all they really knew about it.

That's all their records had.

John decides to do a little digging on his own to find out anything he can about the New Mexico girl, Sharon Galagos, and he finds an obituary for her mother.

It turns out that Sharon had siblings.

I got a copy of the obituary.

It mentioned brother Johnny.

Name Us was very helpful in trying to find him, which we did.

Name Is found him in Germany and we had the FBI go and get his DNA.

Oh wow.

So this case from nineteen sixty starts in the Arizona Desert, brings us to New Mexico and now Germany.

So the FBI helps orchestrate this and authorities contact Johnny with a request.

And Johnny is the brother of the missing girl Sharon.

We believe that there might be a max cher, but we need your DNA to compare it to the little girl's DNA.

Johnny gives his DNA and it's compared and a report comes back saying this little girl is not Sharon Glegos, the little girl in New Mexico, but the results are also inconclusive.

Basically, it says, we can't tell you who little misnow that he is.

This is so frustrating.

I just want to know.

At this point, detectives turned to the top forensic experts in the country for help.

All those organizations had a shot at trying to identify her, and these other companies all said, we can't do anything.

We can't tell you anything about her.

We don't know how, we can't identify it.

And it was it was frustrating, but it seemed like every time we did something, we got a little closer, you know, a little closer to trying to find out who she was.

And I it's sorry, you get emotional when you get to a solution.

The Sheriff's office has used up any money they had on the case, Their best lead was proven wrong, and everyone's telling them it's hopeless.

I mean, that's very frustrating, and it's weird to think that they have DNA from her and they still can't even figure out who she is.

And then one day in twenty twenty one, a guy named Michael Vogan is watching the news and he sees a story about little Miss Nobody and he picks up the phone to call John Shannon.

So here I come, calling the investigator and I'm like, this is new, and he's like, I already tried it.

I'm like, yeah, but this is different.

Why why can't we take a shot at this?

So remind me who Michael Vogan is.

He works with Authram as the director of case management.

He's kind of a point person with detectives, and one day, when he sees this news story about the little Miss Nobody case still going unsolved, he begs John Shannon to give it one more try.

I said, you may have had a profile that wasn't applicable for this type of analysis.

You may have missmatches.

Michael's convinced that the DNA testing that's been done so far wasn't designed for forensic DNA and so it could be missing clues to her identity, or it could actually even lead them away from the truth.

I asked Chris and Middleman from Outhrum to explain for starter.

She says, the evidence was sixty two years old and had sat in the hot Arizona sun.

There was degradation caused by the heat.

There was contamination from plants, animals, everything that is out there at that time back to you, obviously, and that made it very difficult to work those remains.

So when they weren't able to get enough DNA markers using the correct science, they did something called imputation where they use software software that isn't forensic, to try to impute what the DNA would look like.

And then they tried to compare the DNA to DNA that family references had given to the case.

They said that little miss Nobody was not sharing Gallegos.

Let me get this straight.

They had somehow filled out their missing DNA markers and predicted the rest of the profile through some kind of calculation or mathematical way of guessing at the DNA, but what they inferred was actually wrong.

It's like if you were to read a book and you could only see half the ages, maybe you would infer the wrong ending to a story.

And then there was another issue.

The FBI got DNA from Sharon Galegos's family in Germany.

They got DNA from someone who they thought was her mother's brother, but he was actually a half brother.

It was a half sibling relationship, which CODIS isn't good at identifying relationships unless itself or parent child.

And so they hired a genealogy group to actually do advanced DNA testing and to do these comparisons.

And that's the report that actually said that it's certain that Sharon Gallegos was not little miss Nobody and then the case was over.

How is the detective supposed to know that there's another lab in Texas called authorm that's going to build a different profile.

I completely get why the investigator is skeptical when this guy from AUTHRAM calls him and says, hey, our lab in Texas has technology that can work, because he's been promised that before and it didn't lead anywhere.

And there was also the money issue, because Yavapai County Sheriff's office had run out of funds to work on the case.

I said, okay, well let's crowdfund it.

We have this group of people online that would probably help.

So Michael from OUTHRAM calls the reporter who did the recent news story.

I reached out to her and I said, hey, we're going to take a shot at this.

Do you think you guys could put us story out and help us publicize this crowdfund?

She said, I would love to because I would love to see this little girl get her name back.

Alan.

I should explain that authram has a website that lists unsolved cases and anyone can go online and donate money to have a particular case solved.

And so the reporter, Brianna Whitney puts out another story.

And kudos to her and the Sheriff's office.

They both put out this blast and within twenty four hours we raised the money to do it, which was still like a record to this day.

I don't know how they pulled that off, but they did.

Now, little Miss Nobody's remains are sent to the Texas Lab and they pulled DNA from one of her teeth.

The DNA worked really well in our hands, which was amazing, and as soon as we sequence, we were able to get a lot of markers.

This more detailed DNA profile is uploaded to genealogy sites and suddenly they're getting clues of little Miss Nobody's real identity.

Oh my gosh.

That's when Michael Vogan gets a call from David Middleman from authrom.

David called me and he goes, hey, who did they think this person this little girl was?

And I go, Sharon Galagos is the little girl's name from New Mexico.

And he goes, I think that's her And I go, no way, and he goes, yeah, can we talk to someone there?

I said sure, We got on the phone.

We talked to the investigator, and that investigator, John Shannon, he's breaking down more clues.

Outside of the family in Germany.

We found there was other people here in the United States that popped up.

One name that popped up was Rinaldo Chavez.

His mom was Sharon's older sister, so the older sister of the girl who went missing.

And now the case is starting to move pretty quickly.

Ronaldo and his siblings get a call from the sheriff's office.

So they reached out to me, and they asked me a lot of questions about, you know, what happened, who was still alive?

You know, they really didn't say what was going on.

Who was still alive.

Sadly, Sharon's mom passed away in twenty eleven and her big sister, Ronaldo's mom died in twenty seventeen, we knew.

That my mom's sister had been kidnapped.

You know, my mom told us that, but she didn't really want to go into specifics because it brought up a lot of emotion.

It's still very hard for my uncle to talk about it, and it was still very emotional for you know.

He felt helpless, he said, you know, being ten years old, being you know, the boy and the family, and he said he just felt helpless.

Even though the family didn't really want to talk about Sharon's disappearance, the whole community knew about it.

Years later, Ronaldo enrolled in classes at the local community college.

And my biology teacher, missus Cassiah, when she was reading rolled, she goes, Ronaldo Chavez and you know you raised her hands say you were here.

She said, oh, your aunt was kidnapped in nineteen sixty, I mean in front of the whole class, and then everybody, everybody in the classroom in clearing.

Myself was shocked and I was like, how do you know about that?

Oh, well, can talk about it after class.

What it happened to be is miss Messiah, her husband was the FBI ag on the case in the nineteen sixties.

He said, it was really a hard case for him.

So what happens?

So after Ronaldo and his family have the zoom meeting with authorities in Arizona, they quickly get on the phone.

So I got on with my other two siblings and we're like, what do you think?

Do you think they found Sharon?

Do you think they're going to tell us that they know where she is?

You know, those ideas went through our head, but also, you know, that's a long time in sixty two years.

Meanwhile, Kristen says, Authram is busy testing the DNA from little Miss Nobody's remains.

We actually started to see that the matches we were getting were actually consistent with Sharon Gallego's family.

So we contacted the detectives.

We asked if there was a reference sample.

We were able to do a one to one match and it worked.

Investigator's call to set up a zoom meeting with Ronaldo and his family, and John Shannon is on the call.

You know, he talked to us a little bit about it and said they've been working on this case.

And then they told us about authoram laps and then they said.

Excuse me, and then they told us they had identified our aunt, they had identified her remains.

You know, we were all like, what, you know, we were all kind of shocked, and ah, you know we were you know, a lot of things are going through her mind.

They found my aunt, but you know, she's she's died.

And then we had all kinds of questions, how did you find her?

How old it was she when they when they discovered her remains.

And so the rest of the Zoom call was really about explaining the whole thing, how it came about, and how oft from lamps is really the ones who were able to make the identification.

Investigator John Shannon tells Rinaldo about the funeral the community in Prescott, Arizona held and how people donated money to buy Sharon a casket and bury her.

That people really took care of my aunt for us.

They took care of her wanting to find out who she was, and if it wasn't for their dedication and commitment, probably would have never found out.

I'm also thinking it's kind of wild that the original investigators had that hunch that little Miss Nobody was Sharon, but so many times they were told no.

And the initial DNA testing proved even more conclusively that it wasn't her, but Kristin Middleman says it was basically all bad science.

It was unbelievable to see that you can use advanced DNA technology incorrectly and get the wrong answer.

So that case, to me was terrifying because it showed me that people would go to great lengths to get an answer, but not necessarily consider if good science was actually behind that answer.

And we're talking about confirming someone's identity as a perpetrator or victim of a crime, taking away someone's name and voice forever.

It does make me think about how much DNA is used in courtrooms and investigations, and I think sometimes it gets simplified to the DNA says X.

So the answer is why, But it's actually a very delicate science at times, and the testing methods are not all the same.

That's blown my mind working on this podcast in general.

So, now that we know that the girl in the desert is Sharon from New Mexico, what do we know about her?

Actually kind of a lot.

So Sharon was four years old and she lived with her mom, her grandmother, aunts and cousins.

She had light brown hair, hazel eyes, and she had a nickname my great grandmother called her Wedda, which means the light one.

She was a very energetic, feisty little girl.

She liked being by her grandmother's side.

She'd just sit at the kitchen table watching my grandmother make tortillas and beans, of course, a staple in my grandparents' house.

She really loved playing with her cousins because they lived in a multi generational home.

She liked being outside.

And then one day in mid July nineteen sixty, Sharon was playing in her yard with some of her siblings and cousins when an old green car pulled up.

There was this green vehicle with a couple in it, a man and a woman, and there was two other children in the vehicle with them, and they had been kind of scouting out the neighborhood the week before.

Come to find out that this couple was asking a lot of questions about Sharon, specifically about my grandmother who she was, you know, how many kids does she have.

Then, on the day that had actually happened, my aunt Sharon was outside plane and the car drove up in an alley.

They said, hey, Sharon, would you like some candy and we'll buy you a new clothes and she was standing there, didn't want to go.

The lady came out, grabbed her by the arm and pulled her into the car.

My mom's cousins were there, and there was some neighborhood kids and they ran inside and said, hey, you know, a lady just pulled Sharon into car.

My mom and my grandmother were like, what call the police right away, and then it all started.

Police set up roadblocks pretty immediately, but there were no signs of the green car or Sharon.

Rinaldo's mom, Sharon's big sister.

She heads out with friends to search the neighborhood, and the local newspaper ran stories about Sharon's kidnapping.

And then there was an interesting twist.

Allen remember, investigators initially thought little miss Nobody might be Sharon.

Yeah.

Well, Rinaldo says, police reached out to his family back then and asked if someone would come look at this little girl's body that was discovered in the desert.

And it was determined that instead of having my grandmother go to identify the body, they asked my grandmother's best friend to go and identify the body.

And you know, she determined, oh no, this body's too big, it's not Sharon.

It was just devastating to my grandmother losing not knowing what happened.

It affected the whole entire family from there on out.

Everybody was very vigilant about where the kids were, and I mean we all knew about it.

I can only imagine growing up Ronaldo and the whole family living with us.

I mean, his young aunt just grabbed out of the family's yard.

And for years it was really just too painful to talk about.

Ronaldo says it wasn't until he was about twelve when he started asking his mom more about Sharon's disappearance.

We always hope we never gave a pope every time the.

Excuse me, oh it's okay.

Every time the police would contact us, because throughout our life, yes it was you know, the police would contact my grandmother, then my mom, and then us.

You know, we were still like, you know, maybe they found her, she's still alive, We'll get to meet her.

Ronaldo says that knowing the truth of what happened to Sharon did bring some peace.

You know, we couldn't be there for her, and to find out that, you know, she wasn't lost or forgotten, and there was a whole community not just one person, there was a whole community that was taking care of her.

It just you know, our family couldn't believe in.

Sharon's remains were sent back to New Mexico, Ronaldo and the family gathered for a funeral and they buried Sharon next to her mom and her grandmother.

The day before, me and my uncle and my brother, we dug that the small grave.

We buttered it.

We beate it ourselves.

Yeah, we wanted to do that.

John Shannon and Michael Perry and a whole team had worked on this case for years and I was curious how they were feeling.

Well, I think that the best way to say that is we were invited to go to the funeral and may treat us like family.

And that's just a very powerful and experience to be part of that, and just a gratitude that the family express towards us.

It was just a very humbling experience.

The sad thing about this case is that Sharon isn't alone.

There are literally thousands of other children like her that are unidentified.

They're unaccounted for.

And the truth is that, you know, technology like ours could be aiding police everywhere in identifying these cuts.

Everyone deserves to be buried with their family, to be able to be visited, to have people that know where they are know their story.

Everyone deserves their voice.

The couple who took Sharon in the green car were never found, so that part of the mystery is still an open investigation.

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 Fedalosa, Emily Foreman and Jessica Albert.

Our Executive producers are Kate Osborne, Mangesh Hadigadour and David and Kristen Middleman, and from iHeart Katrina Norville and Ali Perry.

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

I'm Alan Lance lessor thanks for listening.