HOUSTON, Texas — Cold case investigators, right here in Florida, are identifying human remains and perpetrators of crimes faster than ever; and they're getting help from a special lab in Texas.
Several times a month, law enforcement announce major developments in these cases, many of them in the Tampa Bay area. 10 Tampa Bay is taking a deeper dive into why this one lab is seemingly at the center of cracking cases, sometimes decades old, and the relief it gives to families.
For more than 50 years, detectives in St. Petersburg were stumped trying to identify a woman found dead, stuffed inside a trunk on Halloween and left in brush near 38th Avenue South and 34th Street.
Wallace Pavelski, the cold case detective for St. Petersburg Police, said it was obvious she was murdered, wrapped in plastic and left on the side of the road.
“There was no identification on her, no one knew her locally, so it was kind of a mystery from the start,” he said.
Witnesses saw two men in a pickup truck dump the trunk but in 1969, with no modern technology, leads quickly dried up. When Pavelski joined the force, the mystery of the woman's identity and her killer's was part of police lore.
“It was kind of when you went in the evidence room, there was a big crate up there,” he says. “And I said, ‘This is the trunk case, if you can solve that, it'd be great for the agency.’ But no one really ever thought we had a chance of solving it.”
Fast forward to a year ago, when police went from no chance to crack the case to finally giving Sylvia Atherton’s name back. She was killed when she was 41 and left behind five children from Tucson, Arizona.
So how did the police finally solve the crime?
“So I started that process with Othram, speaking with them, and then taking a look at the samples that we had at the medical examiner's office,” Pavelski said.
Nearly a dozen cold cases in the Tampa Bay area have been cracked with help from Othram Inc., a laboratory headquartered hundreds of miles away in Houston.
Because they have been at the center of so many major developments for Florida cold cases, we traveled to Houston for an exclusive tour to see what they do up close.
The process starts with a source of DNA. If detectives have the skull of a cold case victim, they usually remove the petrous part of the inner ear bone because it doesn't degrade as fast as other bones. The fragment is then pulverized, mixed with a solution, then spun in a centrifuge to isolate the DNA.
“We've made it predictable, and we've created partnerships with law enforcement agencies across the United States,” said Othram Chief Development Officer, Kristen Mittelman. “Hundreds of law enforcement agencies over the last few years now trust the method.”
Mittelman runs Othram with her geneticist husband in an office building in a Houston suburb.
“We've built the only purpose-built laboratory in the world to identify victims and perpetrators from crime scenes,” she said. “We're a lot more than a lab. We have software. We have engineers.”
To understand the science behind cracking these cases, we have to know how our DNA works.
Four letters, A, T, C and G represent the four chemicals—or building blocks— in our DNA. Most of our DNA is formed in repeating sequences of these letters.
Othram finds those unique sequences, called markers, in small and often degraded samples of DNA by building ultrasensitive DNA profiles.
They compare these profiles to the DNA profiles available in select online genealogy databases where people have consented to assist law enforcement in un-identifying unknown people, in a process known as forensic genetic genealogy.
Instead of traditional forensic DNA testing that can confirm identity, this DNA sequencing and forensic genetic genealogy can give Othram the names of potential relatives or perhaps the name of the unknown person.
These names are new investigative leads, given to investigators who work to procure samples for comparison DNA testing and confirm the match.
“I don't believe in closure when something really terrible happens to someone, but I do believe that the truth allows people to be able to turn the page to the next chapter of their life,” she said.
Heather Fox lives in Kentucky and about 18 months ago got a call from the Hernando County Sheriff's Office about her grandmother who disappeared in 1972.
“I was a little mind blown, to be honest with you,” she said. “Especially as I learned more about the story, it just got a little crazier and crazier.”
For fifty years, Peggy Nelson (Shelton) was an unidentified murder victim when her body was found in the woods outside Brooksville. Hernando’s cold case detective George Loydgren never stopped digging and discovered Othram in 2022.
“By August of 2022, I got the results and a phone call back saying, ‘We identified your victim. We believe it's in this family lineage,’” he said.
From there, Loydgren tracked down Peggy’s family to confirm the match. Heather said it's been surreal to have some answers but has been healing for her family.
“It’s kind of, it's gotten me closer to family I didn't know that I had and who lived in the same town as me," she said.
Since Peggy Nelson's name was revealed earlier this year, Loydgren has made a major break in the case. He learned Peggy remarried after leaving an abusive husband in Kentucky. That new man, Jerry Lee Fletcher, is now a person of interest in Peggy’s murder.
“Well, Fletcher is a convicted murderer,” Loydgren said. “Jerry Lee Fletcher, we know, at least killed two young girls. One here in the Tampa Bay area, Gina Justy, was abducted in Tampa back in August of 1971.”
Fletcher died in prison 10 years ago. Loydgren is trying to place Peggy and Fletcher at a motel, now apartments, on Nebraska Avenue in Tampa around the time Peggy was killed and is hoping more tips come in to finally solve her murder.
“This poor lady didn't have a chance,” he said. “She left that one relationship and ended up with a murderer.”
Families usually don't have any idea that detectives are matching DNA to them and the information is powerful enough to reopen old wounds. But Fox said she's glad they identified her grandmother.
“It has been so positive and I'm so thankful for the work that Detective Loydgren has put into this. This could help a lot of people get answers that they've desperately wanted just like our family,” she said.