Every genetic genealogy case begins with a stranger’s decision. Someone, somewhere, spits into a tube to learn whether the family really came from County Cork, or to find a birth parent, or out of simple curiosity, and then uploads the result to a database that allows police to search it. Years later a profile drawn from an old case file is compared against that database. What comes back is never the person investigators want. It is a cousin, a half-sibling, a parent, and from that match a genealogist builds a family tree backward and then forward again, branch by branch, until the tree narrows to one life.
Then the work leaves the laboratory and arrives at someone’s door. To prove what the tree suggests, investigators usually need a second sample, from a mother, a sister, a son, and they need that relative to agree to give it. The families who have done so have answered questions that sat unanswered for thirty, forty, nearly fifty years. Some of them learned that a sister who had drifted out of touch decades earlier had been dead nearly all that time, and that a man already in prison had admitted killing her when no one knew who she was.
The method grew faster than the rules. In May 2019 GEDmatch, the free comparison service that had been open to investigators, changed its policy so that users had to choose, actively, to let law enforcement match against their DNA. Users were no longer included by default. Curtis Rogers, a GEDmatch co-creator, told Good Morning America that "it’s the right thing to do." CeCe Moore, the chief genetic genealogist at Parabon NanoLabs, called the change "a tragedy for the families who would have gotten answers and, perhaps, justice in the coming months." Both sides of that argument spoke in the name of families: the families whose DNA was in the database, and the families still waiting.
That September the United States Department of Justice issued an interim policy on what it called forensic genetic genealogical DNA analysis and searching, approved on September 2, 2019, and effective on November 1. It limited federal use of the technique to homicides and sex crimes, and to the identification of unknown people believed to have been homicide victims. A profile had to be searched first in CODIS, the national offender database, and come up empty. Investigators had to identify themselves as law enforcement and could use only genealogy services that told their users police might be searching. When they needed a reference sample from a relative, they were generally to ask for informed consent; collecting one covertly required a prosecutor’s approval and a search warrant. And the policy drew one hard line: "A suspect shall not be arrested based solely on a genetic association generated by a GG service." The tree could point; an arrest needed more.
For almost three decades the deaths of three women were three separate cold cases in two states. Pamela Rose Aldridge McCall, 32, of Topping, Virginia, who was pregnant, died in March 1991; her death came to light in Spring Hill, Maury County, Tennessee, on March 10 of that year. In 1992 the deaths of two young women came to light in Wyoming, one near Rock Springs in Sweetwater County on March 1 and one north of Sheridan in Sheridan County on April 13. Neither Wyoming woman could be identified. They were known for years only as "Bitter Creek Betty" and "I-90 Jane Doe."
DNA joined the cases before it named anyone. The Wyoming State Crime Laboratory developed a full male profile in January 2007, and in April 2012 it matched the same man to both Wyoming cases, the Green River Star reported from court documents. In 2019, at the request of the Spring Hill Police Department, Tommy Goetz, an investigator with Tennessee’s 22nd Judicial District Attorney’s Office, reopened the McCall case and sent the 1991 evidence for testing. In May 2019 the national database reported that the Tennessee profile matched the Wyoming one. Three deaths, two states, one unknown man.
The profile then went to commercial genealogy and ancestry laboratories, which returned a list of possible relatives. Among the people who had shared their DNA, the Associated Press reported, was a relative of the man investigators were looking for. The tree led to Clark Perry Baldwin, a long-haul truck driver who had graduated from Nashua-Plainfield High School in Iowa in 1979 and was living in Waterloo. There was an irony in the family story that came out after his arrest. A woman told the AP in 2020 that she had learned about two years earlier that Baldwin was her father, after he bought a DNA test kit, and that the two had stayed in touch on Facebook. Murder, she wrote, "was NOT on the list of things we thought he had done and gotten away with."
A family tree is a lead, not proof, and investigators treated it that way. In April 2020 they collected discarded items and a swab from a shopping cart Baldwin had used, and the Wyoming laboratory reported that his DNA matched the profile from all three cases. He was arrested in Waterloo on May 6, 2020, and charged with first-degree murder in Sweetwater and Sheridan counties and with two counts of first-degree murder in Tennessee, for McCall and her unborn child, the Iowa Department of Public Safety announced.
Genealogy then worked the other way, from the suspect’s side back to the dead. In 2022 a Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation agent, Loy Young, traced Bitter Creek Betty through family-tree DNA companies to a half-sister, who confirmed her name: Irene Vasquez. The half-sister had not heard from her since 1990, Cowboy State Daily reported. On July 17, 2025, the DCI announced that a DNA match with her biological mother had identified I-90 Jane Doe as Cindi Arleen Estrada, born in Torrance, California, who was 21 when she died.
Tennessee went first because, as Sweetwater County Attorney Dan Erramouspe told the Green River Star in 2020, it had "a known victim, and known victim’s family." In May 2025 a Maury County jury convicted Baldwin of the first-degree murder of Pamela McCall, and he was sentenced to life; the count for her unborn child was not carried to a verdict. Ron Coleman, the Spring Hill officer who had worked the case in 1991 and promised her mother he would not rest, told WSMV he was at peace for the first time in 34 years. Baldwin died in a Tennessee hospital on July 18, 2025, the day after Estrada’s name was released, with a motion for a new trial still unheard. The two Wyoming charges were never tried, and in law he died convicted of one murder. "We know what happened to Irene," Erramouspe said. "And we know who did it." It was a prosecutor’s view; no Wyoming jury ever heard the evidence.
In September 2021 the deaths of two women came to light in the Town of Portland, in rural Chautauqua County, New York. One was identified within weeks as Marquita Mull, 50, of Buffalo, who had disappeared that June. The other had no name. In November 2022 the Chautauqua County Sheriff’s Office could say only that she had been between 15 and 35, that she had died in 2011 or earlier, and that she might have come from the Erie County area.
Forensic genetic genealogy, with the Texas laboratory Othram, supplied the rest. Prosecutors said her identity was confirmed in December 2024: she was Cassandra Watson, born in 1963, a Buffalo woman whose relatives had not seen her since 2003 or 2004, when she was about 40. Investigators went back to her life at that time and learned that she had been living with a man named Richard Fox. "Once they made that connection between Richard Fox, obviously, this case came to a head very quickly," Erie County District Attorney Michael Keane said.
Fox, a registered sex offender, was arrested in Niagara Falls on January 7, 2025, and charged the next day with second-degree murder in Mull’s death. On February 13, 2025, Keane made Watson’s name public, and a grand jury indictment added a second murder count, for her. The name genealogy returned was what joined two deaths nearly two decades apart. On September 19, 2025, Fox pleaded guilty to both counts in Erie County Court, without any offer of a reduced plea, and on November 20 Judge Suzanne Maxwell Barnes sentenced him to 40 years to life. "The families of Cassandra Watson and Marquita Mull have waited a long time for justice," Keane said. In January 2026 Fox pleaded guilty in Niagara County to a third murder, of Crystal Curthoys, 32, of Lockport, and in April he was sentenced to a further 25 years to life, to run consecutively.
In 1981 the deaths of four women and girls came to light in Hernando County, Florida, during the investigation of Billy Mansfield Jr., who was then facing a murder charge in California in the December 1980 death of Rene Saling, 29, a mother of three, in Santa Cruz County. A California jury convicted him of her murder at a second trial in 1982. That same year, in Hernando County, he pleaded guilty to all four Florida murders and received four life sentences. Two of the four victims had no names. Mansfield had admitted killing a girl whom no one could identify.
For more than four decades she stayed nameless. Several laboratories tried and failed to develop a DNA profile. In 2020 the University of North Texas produced a complete one, but the national database returned no match. Hernando County investigators turned to Parabon NanoLabs in Virginia, where Moore told Bay News 9 she spent about ten hours building family trees in search of common ancestors. The trees produced leads, and a DNA sample from the girl’s sister confirmed them.
On July 20, 2022, the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office announced her name: Theresa Caroline Fillingim, 16. It thanked a long list of partners, from the University of South Florida’s forensic anthropology program to police departments in Tampa, Cape Coral and Longmont, for help it said was "finally bringing peace to the victim’s family." Detective George Loydgren, who worked the identification, said the office had been "very fortunate to get a good enough DNA profile." Her sister said the answer gave her peace, because she now knew that she had not lost her sister; her sister had been taken from her.
On June 16, 1974, the death of a young woman came to light on Singer Island, in Palm Beach County, Florida. Investigators could not establish a cause of death and could not establish who she was. A DNA profile developed in 2015 matched no one, and a new facial reconstruction released in 2019 drew no identification.
In December 2021 the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office sent the case to Othram, which used genetic genealogy to produce leads in March 2022. DNA from relatives, among them her mother, confirmed the identification. In June 2022 the office announced that she was Susan Gale Poole, born February 12, 1957, who was 15 when she disappeared shortly before Christmas 1972. She had divided her time between her family’s home near Fort Lauderdale and a friend’s apartment in Wilton Manors, and she often hitchhiked. Her sister told WWBT that she had known something was wrong when she saw the girl’s purse left behind at the friend’s apartment. "My search is finally over," she said.
The sheriff’s office named Gerard John Schaefer, a former police officer in Wilton Manors and a former sheriff’s deputy in Martin County, as its best suspect, citing his history of picking up hitchhikers and his ties to the part of Broward County where she lived. It had no physical evidence connecting him, and her death was never charged. Schaefer had been convicted in 1973 of two counts of first-degree murder, in the deaths of Susan Place, 17, and Georgia Jessup, 16, and had received two life sentences. He was killed by a fellow inmate at Florida State Prison in 1995. Genetic genealogy gave Susan Poole her name back after nearly half a century. It could not supply what the sheriff’s office lacked, and the suspicion against Schaefer stays a suspicion.
On Halloween 1979 the death of a young woman came to light near Georgetown, in Williamson County, Texas. Investigators could not identify her, and she became known by a nickname, "Orange Socks." No one claimed her.
In June 1983 Henry Lee Lucas confessed to her death, one of the hundreds of killings he would claim and later disown. A jury in San Angelo convicted him of capital murder in 1984, and he was sentenced to death. The conviction rested mainly on his confessions, a federal appeals court later observed; the defense had produced work records placing him on a roofing job near Jacksonville, Florida, at the time. In April 1986 the office of Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox concluded in a report that Lucas had perpetrated a massive hoax, and on this case it said no rational trier of fact could find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The Fifth Circuit nonetheless affirmed the denial of federal relief in January 1998, holding that a claim of actual innocence is not in itself a constitutional claim. In June 1998, on the recommendation of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, Governor George W. Bush commuted the sentence to life. It was the only death sentence he commuted as governor. Lucas died in prison in March 2001. The conviction itself still stood, for a woman whose name was still unknown.
The Williamson County Sheriff’s Office set up a cold case unit made up mostly of retired officers. Over 2018 and 2019 it sent material for DNA testing, worked with the volunteer DNA Doe Project and uploaded profiles to GEDmatch. In June 2019 the office released a new sketch by Natalie Murry, a forensic artist on the unit. A woman who saw it contacted the office, believing it showed her missing sister. DNA from two relatives matched. On August 7, 2019, Sheriff Robert Chody announced that Orange Socks was Debra Jackson, 23, of Abilene. She had left the family home in 1977, the AP reported, and her family had not reported her missing because she had left before; they believed she had simply gone her own way.
The name did not settle the case. Chody said plainly that the killing was not solved. Testing had detected traces of male DNA, but not enough for a profile, and detectives asked anyone who had known Jackson between 1977 and 1979 to come forward.
In a second Lucas case, the genealogy pointed away from him entirely. The death of Laura Marie Purchase, of Houston, came to light in Montgomery County, Texas, in March 1983. Lucas confessed and was convicted of her murder in 1986. In 2008 DNA testing excluded both Lucas and his former companion, Ottis Toole. Genealogy work on that DNA in 2019 led investigators to Thomas Elvin Darnell, 75, of Kansas City, Kansas, and in April 2021 his sample matched, CBS News Texas reported. He was arrested in May 2021 and charged with capital murder. He died in the Montgomery County jail that July, Patch reported, before any trial, and he was never convicted. Lucas’s 1986 conviction for the same death is a record that the science has since contradicted.
In June 1985 a series of killings tied to Leonard Lake and Charles Ng came to light in Calaveras County, California. Lake died in custody in June 1985, four days after his arrest on a weapons charge, and was never tried. Ng fled to Canada, was extradited, and on February 24, 1999, a jury convicted him of 11 counts of first-degree murder: six men, three women and two baby boys. He was sentenced to death. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment unanimously on July 28, 2022, the AP reported. Some of the dead from the case were never identified at the time.
In August 2021 the Calaveras County Sheriff’s Office, working with the California Department of Justice and two volunteer forensic anthropologists, began new DNA testing on the unidentified victims, an effort later carried on by the Calaveras Cold Case Task Force, a nonprofit collaboration paid for by donations that topped 300,000 dollars by mid-2025.
The first name it produced belonged to a man no one had connected with the case. A state profile developed in 2022 matched nothing in CODIS. Intermountain Forensics, a private laboratory in Utah, then built a profile suitable for genealogy, and the group Identifinders International produced a lead. The Delaware State Patrol obtained a DNA sample from the man’s mother, and on January 15, 2025, the identification was confirmed: Reginald Frisby, known as Reggie, born in New York State in 1956, who had been living in San Francisco in January 1984 and had been out of touch with his family since that year, The Union Democrat reported. He had never been reported missing. Investigators believe he was the victim of a homicide; no one has been charged with his death. In July 2025, at a ceremony attended by task force members and a sheriff’s chaplain, he was returned to his family.
In April 2025 the sheriff’s office announced that forensic investigative genetic genealogy had identified another of the dead as Brenda O’Connor, who had lived with her fiance, Lonnie Bond Sr., and their infant son in Wilseyville in 1985. Her name had never been in doubt, and Ng had been convicted of murdering all three of them; what the genealogy settled was which of the unidentified dead was hers. "These additional investigative efforts have finally provided answers to the family of Brenda O’Connor," the office said. A third woman, the Wilseyville Jane Doe, was still without a name in October 2025, when the Deseret News reported that her DNA pointed to family roots in the Sevier Valley of Utah. Her birth father had been identified by DNA, but he had died. "Nobody’s name is Jane Doe or John Doe," said Captain Tim Sturm, who leads the task force. In June 2026 the Lancashire Post reported that Ng, still under sentence of death, had been moved to the California Medical Facility in Vacaville that May.
In 2018, serving life without parole for three Los Angeles murders, Samuel Little began talking to a Texas Ranger, James Holland. Over hundreds of hours he described 93 killings. The FBI said in October 2019 that it considered his confessions credible, and investigators across the country set about testing them case by case. Little was convicted of eight murders in all, in California, Texas and Ohio. He died in custody in California on December 30, 2020.
Among the women he described were two in Macon, Georgia. One of them was a young woman whose death came to light in Macon in 1977 and who had been known for more than four decades only as Macon Jane Doe. After Little’s confession, Captain Shermaine Jones of the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office began working with Amy Hutsell of the Georgia Criminal Justice Coordinating Council. In 2019 they traveled to Wise County, Texas, to set his accounts against the Macon files, and after interviewing him Jones closed both cases.
Closing a case is not the same as naming the dead. In 2022 the two took the unnamed woman’s file up again, using forensic genetic genealogy with Othram, and traced a relative who led them to her family. On May 18, 2023, the sheriff’s office and the council announced her name: Yvonne Pless, about 20 years old when she died. The joint release described her as Little’s first Macon victim. He had confessed to her killing; he was never tried for it.
Keith Hunter Jesperson, a Canadian-born long-haul trucker, pleaded guilty or no contest to murders in Washington, Oregon, Wyoming, California and Florida after his arrest in 1995. Three of the women he admitted killing had no names when he admitted it. Genetic genealogy, and in one case a crowd of people who had never heard of him, gave all three back.
On June 3, 1993, the death of a woman came to light near Gilroy, in Santa Clara County, California. In 2006 Jesperson wrote to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office admitting a killing there, and in July 2007 he pleaded guilty to the murder of a woman no one could identify. In April 2022 the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office announced that she was Patricia Skiple, a mother of two from Colton, Oregon, about 45 years old. Cold case detectives had worked with the DNA Doe Project, whose forensic genealogist Cairenn Binder sorted through dozens of matches, and the sheriff’s office credited the ordinary people who had uploaded their DNA to GEDmatch. Patricia Skiple’s sister told ABC7 that she had left home after an argument with her husband. "We’ve been holding hope that she was going to be alive," she said.
In September 1994 the death of another woman came to light near Holt, in Okaloosa County, Florida. Jesperson admitted killing her in February 1996. "We had him as a suspect early on," Sheriff Eric Aden said in 2023, "just didn’t have an identity for our victim." The work to name her took nearly three decades: clay and artist’s reconstructions, anthropology, isotope analysis, mitochondrial DNA. In 2022 the sheriff’s office began working with Othram, and in 2023 the District 1 Medical Examiner’s Office sent samples there with funding from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. Chief Medical Examiner Deanna Oleske said the identification took six weeks. On October 3, 2023, the sheriff’s office announced that she was Suzanne Kjellenberg, 34, from Wisconsin, and Jesperson was formally charged with her murder that day. She could now "finally leave the Medical Examiner’s Office, and return home," Aden said. On April 4, 2024, Jesperson pleaded guilty to second-degree murder before Judge John Jay Gontarek and was sentenced to life, Mid Bay News reported.
The last was the woman he called Claudia, whose murder he pleaded guilty to in Riverside County, California, on January 8, 2010. In January 2024 the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office released renderings of her face and tattoo. Genealogists had already identified her biological father, who had died, and several half-siblings on his side. "This woman is the last of all his victims to remain unidentified," District Attorney Mike Hestrin said. The answer came through her mother’s line. On August 27, 2026, the office announced that a new lead to a maternal relative had produced a DNA match, confirmed with the Lamar County Sheriff’s Office and the California Department of Justice Missing Persons DNA Program. She was Lydia Jane Wade McWhorter, who had disappeared from Texas in the 1990s; her family, her sisters among them, had never known what became of her. The office said her identification closed the final case tied to Jesperson’s convictions, and that he was serving multiple life sentences in Oregon.
Kerry Ann Cummings was born in 1972. Her sister remembered her as beautiful, funny and smart, and an artist. In the mid-1990s she developed a mental illness that went untreated, and the family lost track of her. "It is devastating what mental illness can do in a span of only two short years," her sister said in 2023. Her last contact with them was in 1997, from the Eugene, Oregon, area, where she said she was staying with friends. Her family tried to report her missing in Arizona and in Oregon and hired a private investigator, but according to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office no missing person report was ever taken, so her name never reached the databases that might have matched her.
In October 1997 the death of an unidentified woman came to light near Eureka, in Humboldt County, California. On November 3, 1998, Wayne Adam Ford, a truck driver from Arcata, turned himself in at the sheriff’s office, and the first charge against him was a single count of first-degree murder in her death. In June 2006 a San Bernardino County jury convicted him of four counts of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to death. The woman near Eureka was still a Jane Doe through his confession, his trial and his sentence. Her profile sat in the California and national missing persons DNA indexes without a match.
Sheriff William Honsal created a Cold Case Unit in 2021, and in December 2022 the office and the California Department of Justice partnered with Othram. The laboratory’s work pointed to a close relative, who told investigators that a family member named Kerry had been missing since the mid-1990s. Investigators then reached her sister, who gave a DNA sample, and the comparison confirmed the match. On June 7, 2023, the sheriff’s office announced the identification, and the coroner’s office worked with the family so that she could be buried. "She was dearly loved," her sister said.
Laid side by side, the cases show how much of the method rests on people who never set out to help a homicide investigation. A relative of Clark Baldwin’s in a commercial database. Strangers on GEDmatch who made Patricia Skiple’s tree possible. Irene Vasquez’s half-sister, Cindi Estrada’s mother, Reggie Frisby’s mother in Delaware, Susan Poole’s mother, the sisters of Theresa Fillingim and Kerry Ann Cummings, the relative who led detectives in Macon to Yvonne Pless’s family. The federal policy expects investigators to ask relatives for such samples rather than take them, and in these cases the families gave them.
What the families received was rarely a trial. In only two of the nine cases did genealogy begin the prosecution: Baldwin, convicted of one murder before he died, and Fox, who pleaded guilty after a name connected him to a woman missing from her family’s life since 2003 or 2004. For Mansfield, Jesperson and Ford, the convictions came first and the names decades later; each had pleaded guilty to, or been convicted of, killing a woman the court could describe only as unidentified. For Debra Jackson and Susan Poole, the name arrived without any answer to who killed them, attached to a dead suspect, a doubted conviction, or a suspicion that was never charged. For Laura Purchase’s family, the science replaced one accused man with another, who died before a jury could hear the case.
The DNA could say who these women and this one man were. In most of the cases, the law had already said, or never would say, what happened to them. What changed was the file, the headstone and the family’s knowledge: a sister who saw a sketch in 2019 and recognized the woman in it, a sister who gave a swab and learned at last what had become of Kerry.
• December 1972: Susan Gale Poole, 15, disappears in Broward County, Florida.
• 1973: Gerard John Schaefer convicted of two counts of first-degree murder.
• June 16, 1974: The death of a young woman, later named as Susan Gale Poole, comes to light on Singer Island, Florida.
• October 31, 1979: The "Orange Socks" death comes to light near Georgetown, Texas.
• 1981: The deaths of four women and girls come to light in Hernando County, Florida; in 1982 Billy Mansfield Jr. pleads guilty to all four murders.
• March 1983: Laura Purchase’s death comes to light in Montgomery County, Texas.
• 1984: Henry Lee Lucas convicted of capital murder in the Orange Socks case; convicted of the Purchase murder in 1986.
• 1985: The Calaveras County investigation into Leonard Lake and Charles Ng begins; Lake dies in custody in June.
• March 10, 1991: Pamela McCall’s death comes to light in Spring Hill, Tennessee.
• March 1 and April 13, 1992: The deaths of two women, later named as Irene Vasquez and Cindi Arleen Estrada, come to light in Wyoming.
• June 3, 1993: The death of a woman, later named as Patricia Skiple, comes to light near Gilroy, California.
• September 1994: The death of a woman, later named as Suzanne Kjellenberg, comes to light near Holt, Florida.
• October 1997: The death of a woman, later named as Kerry Ann Cummings, comes to light near Eureka, California.
• June 1998: Governor George W. Bush commutes Lucas’s death sentence to life.
• November 3, 1998: Wayne Adam Ford turns himself in at the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office.
• February 24, 1999: Charles Ng convicted of 11 counts of first-degree murder.
• 2003 or 2004: Cassandra Watson loses contact with her relatives in Buffalo.
• June 2006: Ford convicted of four counts of first-degree murder; later sentenced to death.
• July 2007: Keith Hunter Jesperson pleads guilty to the murder of the unidentified woman near Gilroy.
• 2008: DNA excludes Lucas in the Purchase case.
• January 8, 2010: Jesperson pleads guilty in Riverside County to the murder of the woman he called Claudia.
• May 2019: GEDmatch makes law enforcement matching opt-in; Tennessee and Wyoming profiles are matched in the national database.
• August 7, 2019: Orange Socks identified as Debra Jackson.
• September 2, 2019: The Justice Department approves its interim policy on forensic genetic genealogy, effective November 1.
• May 6, 2020: Clark Perry Baldwin arrested in Waterloo, Iowa.
• December 30, 2020: Samuel Little dies in custody.
• May 2021: Thomas Elvin Darnell charged with capital murder in the Purchase case; he dies in jail in July before trial.
• September 2021: The deaths of Marquita Mull and a second woman come to light in Portland, New York.
• 2022: Irene Vasquez identified through her half-sister.
• April 2022: Patricia Skiple identified.
• June 2022: Susan Gale Poole identified.
• July 20, 2022: Theresa Fillingim identified.
• July 28, 2022: The California Supreme Court affirms Ng’s death judgment.
• May 18, 2023: Yvonne Pless identified in Macon, Georgia.
• June 7, 2023: Kerry Ann Cummings identified.
• October 3, 2023: Suzanne Kjellenberg identified; Jesperson charged.
• April 4, 2024: Jesperson pleads guilty to second-degree murder in Florida.
• January 7, 2025: Richard Fox arrested in Niagara Falls.
• January 15, 2025: Reginald Frisby identified through his mother’s DNA.
• February 13, 2025: Cassandra Watson named; Fox indicted for her murder.
• April 2025: Brenda O’Connor identified.
• May 2025: Baldwin convicted of the first-degree murder of Pamela McCall.
• July 17 and 18, 2025: Cindi Arleen Estrada identified through her mother’s DNA; Baldwin dies the next day.
• September 19, 2025: Fox pleads guilty to two counts of second-degree murder.
• April 2026: Fox sentenced in Niagara County to a further 25 years to life.
• August 27, 2026: The woman Jesperson called Claudia identified as Lydia Jane Wade McWhorter.