COLD CASES SOLVED

Joshua Wayne Crawford was found murdered inside his Maryland apartment on the day he turned 21, leaving investigators with a violent crime scene but no arrest. For 23 years, detectives revisited leads, retested evidence, and waited for forensic technology to catch up with the evidence left behind. Then, in September 2026, investigators announced an arrest—and revealed an extraordinary detail: the accused man’s name had apparently been sitting in a funeral visitation book for more than two decades.

On September 17, 2026, the GBI announced murder and related charges against Rashad Jackson in the 2020 death of Tyler Hall in Norcross, Georgia. Hall, 21, was found shot in his home in August 2020. The breakthrough came from advanced DNA and genealogy work by the GBI Cold Case Unit and Othram. Jackson is charged, not convicted, and the investigation remains active.

May 1973 two New Jersey sisters on a Florida Keys vacation were last seen hitchhiking on Stock Island; the next day their bodies were found in the woods off U.S. 1 in Key Largo. Fifty-three years later, forensic genetic genealogy named David Allen Snyder, a former Key West resident who died in Idaho in 2008. There will be no trial—only a name, a timeline, and the end of an unanswered question.

Two assaults, decades apart and a thousand miles from each other, sat in evidence rooms until the science caught up. In Lawrence, Kansas, a 2009 stranger rape on a darkened sidewalk finally produced a living defendant after a 1-in-848-trillion DNA match. In Fayetteville, North Carolina, a 1990 home-invasion rape at gunpoint was closed by genetic genealogy—only to find the Fort Bragg soldier already beyond the reach of a courtroom.

In 1986, a masked intruder terrorized East Jefferson homes and vanished. Nearly four decades later, a Georgia inmate already serving life was linked by DNA and a palm print to six aggravated rape counts. A Jefferson Parish jury needed only 45 minutes to convict him — a cold-case win built on evidence someone chose to save.

Irasema Chavez was stabbed more than 100 times in her Arlington, Texas, apartment in January 2012. After CODIS produced no hit, FBI investigative genetic genealogy pointed to her friend Mayra Velasquez; police later matched crime-scene blood to DNA from a discarded fork. Velasquez was charged with capital murder, has pleaded not guilty in public, and the case now turns on what a single stain can—and cannot—prove.

In May 1991, 30-year-old mother Sherrie Bridgewater was raped and strangled in her Las Vegas apartment. Decades later, the same DNA profile tied her death to the 1975 slaying of Teree Becker in a Westminster, Colorado field. Investigators identified Thomas Martin Elliott only after genetic genealogy and the exhumation of a man who had already taken his own life.

After more than three decades, San Francisco prosecutors have charged Ricky Dawson in the 1992 rape and strangulation of Nancy Hernandez, a 45-year-old woman found dead in a Chinatown alley. Dawson, already serving life for a 1996 Denver murder and previously convicted in a Florida killing, has now been linked by DNA to at least four deaths spanning California, Colorado, Florida, and possibly Washington. This episode examines how cold-case DNA technology connected the crimes, the pattern investigators see across state lines, and what the charges mean for a case that sat unsolved for 34 years.

: In 1987, the murder of 82-year-old Opal Weil in her Pinellas County home left a community in fear and her family searching for answers amid a cluster of similar attacks on elderly residents. Despite the collection of critical forensic evidence at the time, including dozens of hair samples, the case languished as an unsolved cold case for more than three decades. Advances in DNA technology, combined with the relentless determination of investigators and surviving family members, ultimately led to the identification, trial, and conviction of the perpetrator, offering long-awaited accountability.

October 1975, the partial remains of a 73-year-old Tucson man named William Reginald Sipfle were found in a landfill near Ryan Airfield, with no identification, no missing person report, and no answers for the family he left behind. Fifty-one years later, forensic genealogy and DNA technology cracked open the cold case and pointed investigators directly at Sipfle’s own stepdaughter, Carol Ann Beall, now 79, who prosecutors allege killed him and collected up to six hundred thousand dollars from his pension in the decades that followed. This episode breaks down how the case went cold, how modern forensic science brought it back, and what this arrest reveals about the long reach of justice and the extraordinary tools now available to investigators working crimes the system once had no way to solve.