14-year-old Stephanie Anne Isaacson Prom Photo 1989

14-year-old Stephanie Anne Isaacson left her father’s apartment in North Las Vegas on June 1, 1989.

She walked through an empty sandlot, her usual shortcut, to the Eldorado High School.

The ninth grader never attended her 7:30 AM class at Eldorado High School.

Later that evening, officers found her body under a piece of discarded carpet in a sandlot that Isaacson used to take a shortcut to school.

Stephanie was the victim of a blitz attack. Her black shirt was pulled up, and her jeans pulled down. Her shoes and other belongings were missing.

The freshman with shoulder-length brown hair who had last been pictured with a wide grin in her prom picture had been sexually assaulted, bludgeoned, and strangled to death. 

Investigators had little to go on besides a tiny drop of semen found on the dead girl's shirt.

They made numerous attempts to test the evidence but could not identify the killer.

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police investigators never gave up.

In late 2021, they submitted a DNA sample of a mere 15 human cells to Othram, a forensic genealogy lab in the Woodlands, a suburb of Houston.

DNA Analyst at Othram Examines Bone From An Unidentified Crime Victim

Othram’s DNA extraction technology found a relative of the alleged killer in a genealogy database that law enforcement has the consent to search.

Forensic genealogy led Las Vegas detectives to Darren Marchand, who had never been listed among suspects.

Darren Marchand

But Marchand had committed suicide at the age of 29, six years after the murder.

Issacson’s 32-year  case represents the tip of the iceberg of a silent mass disaster–a quarter million cold cases languishing across the United States.

But as we say in Texas, there is a new sheriff in town: a DNA lab built to solve cold cases.Investigative Reporter Robert Riggs takes listeners of the True Crime Reporter® podcast inside Othram’s facility near Houston to find out how its trailblazing technology solves cases once thought to be unsolvable.

Link to the episode about how Othram helped solve the 47-year-old murder of Carla Walker

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