My True Crime Episode with David Mittelman | A Bit of Optimism with Simon Sinek: Episode 48

I'm told that the best podcasts are true crime podcasts, so this is my true crime episode. David Mittleman is the founder of othram, a company that has completely reinvented how to evaluate DNA. They are solving cold cases left and right, identifying unidentified victims, and catching criminals that have been getting away with their crimes, sometimes for decades. His stories are absolutely riveting. I now know why true crime podcasts are the most popular. This is a bit of optimism.

David, thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Just so people know what you do, can you share a cold case that your team has cracked so that we really get a sense of what, how special your work is?

I'll tell you one story that comes to mind. There was a girl, she was a 17 year old high school cheerleader. Her name was Carla Walker. This was 1974 and she was coming back from a Valentine's Day dance in February and, and she was going to high school in Fort Worth, Texas. And she leaves the dance with her boyfriend in his vehicle. They end up parking behind a bowling alley, you know, doing what high school kids do. And then out of the blue, according to the boyfriend, some guy just comes out of the darkness, pulls open the door, yanks her out of the car and, and that's it. He never sees her again. At the time, it was just such a wild story. It's like, you know, who is this guy? He didn't know who it was. Just randomly out of the blue, comes out and grabs the girl and runs and, and she was found unfortunately, brutally beaten, raped and murdered not long after, just a few days after, in a culvert. And the law enforcement in the area worked the case to the best they could. Looked at lots of folks, talked to everyone, obviously her school friends, known associates, everybody. And the case just didn't go anywhere. They couldn't, they couldn't figure out who it was. And so this case ended up sitting ultimately for 46 years and until we got involved and through the course of the investigation, the CODIS system, which is our national system run by the FBI to catalog DNA profiles from crimes that kind of came into prominence in the mid-90s and in the early 2000s, they started looking at a whole lot of cases in new ways and going back to see if they could develop these DNA profiles. Time to people. And so they continued to work this case. It wasn't just sitting. They worked the case continuously. Right before we got involved. There's a guy, Paul Holes, and he was an investigator in California. He Helped track down the Golden State Killer using some of these newer DNA techniques. And he was doing a TV show for NBC and it was called the DNA of Murder. And he was profiling 10 cases that are these really kind of bizarre cold cases that never got solved. Going back to revisit them to see if there was insight he could gleam from the investigation and if ultimately DNA testing or something could help. And one of those cases, it was this case of Carla Walker, and they actually found a DNA profile that was from the crime scene in which Carla Walker was murdered. And they uploaded it to codis. There was no match. They used it to rule out a number of folks that thought might be involved. I mean, obviously they test the boyfriend's DNA, anyone that knows her, everyone's excluded. They've got this unknown male profile and they can't figure out who it is. And so anyways, fast forwarding a little bit further. It's April of 2020, the show airs and, and I like Paul Holes, so I can't resist. I see episode 9. All the cases kind of spoke to me. But it's episode nine is in Fort Worth, Texas, is three hours from our office. And the story ends with a black title card that says, DNA testing is in progress. Who knows what we'll find, but it's like an unfinished story. So I call Paul and I'm like, come on man, you got to tell me what happens at the end. And he says, well, I'm really sorry. We ended up sending it out and they couldn't even build the kind of profile you would need to do some of these more newer, advanced methods. So it looks like the case will remain cold. I said, you know that it can't be like, I would like a chance to look at the case. Could you please introduce me? And so anyways, long story short, he introduces me to the Fort Worth Police Department, Detective Leo Wagner and Jeff Bennett. They tell me they've fully consumed. They didn't just fail, but they had fully consumed the DNA that they had available to them. There was another extract that had much less DNA and it was much worse quality, but it wasn't suitable for any testing. And I said, I'll take it, I'll take whatever you got. And so they deliver this DNA to us sometime in May. And my lab director is looking at the data. You know, he knows that this is a high impact case and they've been asking about it. They're so nervous and he's like, I'll just take a peek. And as he takes a peek he sees connections at the genealogy side and the family record side. And he's like, I actually think I know what the answer is. So he pulls an all nighter. We're looking at the information, and it's July 4th. It was a Saturday. Early in the morning, I'm at the gym and my director calls me and he's like, I have. I think I have the answer. And I'm like, if you have the answer, let's call law enforcement. And the thing you got to know about these detectives, it's like, nobody goes to cold case unless they really care about cases. A lot of cold case detectives will spend the entire cold case career, you know, solving no cases or even one case. And I remember Jeff Bennett, he had told me, he's like, I just want to solve this one case before I retire. So anyways, I was like, I don't care if it's July 4th, you gotta call the guy. So I call him on Saturday morning, he's still in bed, and he's like, hello? And I'm like, I'm like, jeff, I have some news. So I get my lab director on the phone and we start to tell him about what we had found. And we told him about the family we identified. We start discussing a surname, and there's these three brothers that we think could be involved. We don't even get past a surname. Jeff's like, hang on a second. I can hear him ruffling pages because I think he like, sleeps with the case file. And he's like, could it be this guy? And we talk about. Anyways, turns out what they had not told us is that when the crime had happened, the guy, when he pulled the door open, he had knocked out, he had knocked unconscious the boyfriend with the. With the bottom of a gun and the magazine discharged, it fell onto the ground. And it was actually. The gun was not recovered, but the magazine was. So they had a pretty good idea of what weapon was used in the crime. And they actually had done kind of like a request for anyone that had a gun like that or purchased one in the near time in that area. And this I got probably 100 people that had bought a gun. But guess what? One of the guys that had bought it was this guy that we ended up identifying. So he recognized the name. He's like, that guy's on my list. And so now with this new information, they go back to their group. They end up doing a tremendous amount of investigative work after we did our part, because we don't solve the case. We just Provide leads. We just provide information. And so they go back and they test the DNA from this guy and he matches a crime scene. Not using our technology, but just using standard codis because CODIS is really good at confirming identity. It can tell you that you were at a crime scene. It's not good at finding someone. So if you're not in the database, it won't find you. It can just confirm once you're there that you're the person. So it confirms that he's the guy. They arrest him and he confesses. And while he's in prison, he does a radio interview and confesses again and tells the radio host that it was an accident. Something between it was an accident and she brought it upon herself because apparently from his perspective, they were, they were bickering, he rescued her, then he got the wrong idea and anyways, she ended up dead. It's actually not uncommon to blame the victim when something like this happens.

And then out of the blue, because the case has to have one more twist ending. He unconfesses and he says his confession was conversed. So it's a whole nother year until the fall of 2021 when we go to trial. Ultimately, he decides to once again confess. And so the case is closed. He's convicted and he's in prison now. So, so you have this event that happened in 1974, 46 years, elapse, 2020, they come to Othram, we get him the leads they need. He's identified by the end of the year, and then in 2021, he's convicted. And so the punchline of the story is that going forward, it is unnecessary for people to wait 46 years to identify the suspect in a crime or to identify someone. There's a lot of unidentified persons, people that have died, some of them the victims of crimes. It's like, how do you, how do you solve a crime if you don't even know who the victim is? And so these people remain unidentified forever for decades. And, and, and that doesn't have to happen anymore. The guy who was the brother of Carla Walker, his name is Jim, he's a wonderful fellow. He dedicated his life to this case. He's the one that made so much noise about the case that he got this TV show picked up. He lived in the Same House for 46 years. And he told me he didn't want to move because he was hoping that one day a police officer or detective would come to his door and say, here's who killed your sister. You know, the world Kind of moves on when something like this happens. But these families are frozen in time. They cannot move forward. They're. They're destroyed by the tragedy. There's no path forward because they don't get an answer. I can't think of a more crueler fate. And it was an amazing thing to be able to see Jim Walker in court, able to address the person responsible. There's no way to bring back his sister Carla, but, like, to the extent that you could give someone the opportunity to face the accused and have that discussion, express himself like it happened, and he was very gracious. And family members from both sides of both families have. Have come together since then. And it's, it's really quite touching. I mean, it's, It's. It's. It's insane. If you're not in this field, it's insane to see how many people's lives are actually affected by. By a single crime. There's obviously the victim and the family, but there's friends, associates, the family members of those that do commit the crimes but aren't really responsible. Like, they. None of these people knew that he had done this. So, anyways, it's a wonderful story, and I think it captures the magic that we're trying to. To scale to. To every family that's been tortured by a crime and not just one.

It is amazing. I'm bubbling with questions. What technology did you advance? Like, what is it about your lab that was able to solve this case where all the others who had tried and did the DNA work were unable to come to the same conclusion?

So there's, There's a few things that we do differently. CODIS was developed by the FBI. The way the system works is that if. If there's a crime that's committed and they recover DNA from the crime scene, or if you died and they don't know who you are, they can develop a profile. And the profile is basically a set of DNA markers. You know, there's a lot of spots in your DNA, and the DNA letter at that spot could vary. And so if you take a number of markers, you can get a profile. And CODIS started out kind of small, so I think it was like eight markers. Now it's like 20 markers, but there's these 20 markers in your DNA, and the information at these markers varies from person to person sufficiently that the odds of you and I having the same information at all, 20 markers is essentially, you know, in the quadrillion, you'd need more people on earth than exist to be able to have the chance of finding another person with that information. So that's what makes CODIS so powerful. It's like a very straightforward way. You can sample a few positions, 20 positions, and it's been the mainstay for the last 30 years. It really transformed forensic investigations in the late 80s. The biggest issue with CODIS is that CODIS was designed to track repeated crimes. So you commit a crime, you're convicted of that crime, they know who you are, they log you. So if you ever commit another crime, or you already have, they can connect the dots and say, well, hang on, this guy's responsible. And particularly for like a cross state kind of situations, right? You commit a crime in Florida, now you're in California, There's a national system that ties that together. So you can't hide by jumping from state to state. CODIS works perfectly for what it was intended to do, which is to track the criminal behavior of known people that commit crimes. But here's the thing. Let's say, you know, someone's walking in the woods and, and someone murders them and there's no identification on the body. That, that's not something CODIS was designed to tackle. And so the problem is, because CODIS is really the only reason real DNA tool that's been around for the last 30 years, they just use it for everything. And so there, there are going to be situations where CODIS is not the appropriate solution. Or rather they use CODIS and it doesn't return an answer and they're like, well, I did what I could. The second thing is that CODIS has certain requirements, as all testing does. You know, you need certain, certain quality of DNA, certain parameters to make it work. So to answer your question, you're asking what makes Othram different? Othram is different for a couple reasons. Number one, we can access information from DNA that's been considered essentially unusable. Too degraded, too low quantity, right. DNA that like literally can't be used in any other test. So even if the person was in codis, you'll never know because there's not enough DNA. We worked a sex assault in Las Vegas from the equivalent of about 15 cells worth of DNA. Like, I mean, there is no laboratory that would accept it. They try, trust me. Number two, instead of 20 markers, we're collecting tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of markers. So we're collecting a lot more information and we can learn a lot more about that crime scene. And what that allows us to do ultimately is to access the biogeographical origins of somebody and the other thing we can do is we can do long range relationship testing and we can, you know, for an unidentified remains, we can find the next of kin. In a case like Carla Walker's case, we can, we can trace through public records and family trees and sort through and figure out who, who the person responsible was.

How did you find yourself on this path in the first place?

I started working in this space. Forensics is newer to me. I started working in the space during the Human Genome Project and I got really fired up about this initial effort. The Human Genome Project was this effort to figure out essentially what all the, all the DNA letters of a human being are. And the idea is if you could build this kind of map of all the letters, you could then use that to do, to do research, improve health. You learned so much from understanding what the DNA sequence of a person is. And so I worked in the Human Genome project in the 90s, and then my first company helped bring a lot of this, like, kind of newer version of DNA sequencing and testing into the clinic. Ten years ago, this stuff wasn't used in medicine. And now it's, you know, you can get a DNA test for whatever you want on any street corner. But here's the thing, it was a, it was a few years ago, it was 2018 when we realized you can get a DNA test in any street corner to learn about a medical condition. And. But what street corner do you go on to solve a crime? And so there were some early ideas for how to tackle this problem. I proposed some ideas, I actually proposed some ideas to some folks in the government to see if we can get funding. And they were like, it sounds great. How much does it cost? And I was like, should be no more than like 20 or $30,000 a case. And they started laughing at me and they're like, that's ridiculous. So what happened is over the last 10 years, I kind of just doubled down on diagnostics and developing technology. And, and what's happened is the, the cost of doing a lot of this testing. Just like computers, cost goes down, power goes up. It's not just me, by the way. It's like, it's a team of 25 folks. And so we all have tackled different aspects of this problem from a medical and research perspective. And we're like, how cool would it be if we can make the world a better place with a different, a different use of DNA testing, basically? And ended up being a lot harder than we thought it would be. But it's been really exciting because for, for Any one case that you provide even the smallest amount of value for, there are so many people that benefit on the other end of it. And so it's just. It's just exhilarating. And it's why we get up in the morning. I mean, it's super exciting to be able to come and do that, right? We worked a case in Canada. This was a case. The guy was found in a septic tank after he was brutally murdered. And for 40 years, they couldn't figure out who he was. And they actually said he's never going to be identified. They spent a million Canadian dollars on this case. Like a million Canadian dollars.

And.

And we solved the case for around 5,000 US you can imagine the skeletal remains of this person were not in pristine shape, sitting in a septic tank and everything else that had happened to it. And we took these human remains and we were able to get usable DNA. We were able to build a profile. We were able to find a next of kin. Turns out he had a living sister. We eventually tracked her down. Case solved. After. And I'm telling you, they've done so much work. Dental analysis, facial reconstructions, like, who is this guy? You know, they were like, he's probably not even Canadian. Maybe he was passing through. Like, I mean, it's a weird case, right? Like, no one knows who he is, so they just figured he couldn't have been from the area. But he was. He was. He was there and he had a name and he was waiting to be identified. By the way, one more thing, and sorry, please, I'm a little passionate about this, but in Las Vegas, where I told you we were working a number of crimes, we identified a man that's never been accused of any crime that had actually been the. The rapist and murderer of this girl. And as soon as we did that, they went back and were able to match his profile and CODIS to a few other crimes that we had nothing to do with. So that's another thing you should be aware of is, like, when you're working a crime, sometimes you pay one time for one case, but you actually solve a handful of cases. They're now looking at him for as many as five other cases.

When I visited your website, I was astonished that it's not just police that can give you a lead. People can submit their leads to you directly. You know, can you help me find my. My lost sibling? I found that so astonishing that you put yourself out there, you put your lab out there to say, how can we help you to all of These people who may have lost somebody, you know, recently or a long time ago.

I really love the engagement we have to work for law enforcement. They're our customer. They're the custodians of the evidence. But it does not mean that we can't provide transparency to the crowd and to engage the crowd to help us. And, you know, sometimes a crowd has suggestions for cases, sometimes they have tips. Sometimes they want to share their DNA profile because it might be the stepping stone. They're not going to be closely related, but they could be distantly related and be the stepping stone to an identity. Sometimes they help us fund cases. We. We've literally crowdfunded cases for agencies that can't unlock federal funding yet or are still working through the grant process. And I got to tell you, like, what I love about those cases and what makes me most proud is you've probably never heard of most of those cases. Some of them are only a few years old. So they're not even cases that you're going to see on a. They're never going to become cold cases. These cases get resolved now almost in real time, like we have. That's the other thing to note is we do cold cases. We do a lot of contemporary cases, too. And these cases are not famous cases. So these are cases that, without funding and without the notoriety, may never get solved. I mean, I can't think of any time in my lifetime. I don't know if you can. In your lifetime. Like, when in our lifetime could the crowd basically direct the activity of a. Of a cold case investigation? It's wild. If you stop to think about it, it's, like, mind blowing. So I love the technology, I love the DNA testing. I love solving crimes and helping agencies get answers. But, like, I even love even more the idea that, like, this is a community endeavor. There was a lady that was murdered and found in the storage unit in Durham, North Carolina, and the case went cold. They couldn't figure out who it is. And there was enough random people on the Internet that were like, I want to know who she. She is. It's been enough years. It's time for her to go home. They literally crowdfunded this. And they went to the agency, and we're like, look, it doesn't cost you a dime. Let's go. Let's go knock out the case. And the thing you should know about these agencies is like, again, like, there's no cold case detective. That's like, I don't want to solve a crime. They all want to solve crimes. But they're hamstrung by having too much to do, too little resources. So you come to them and you're like, look, I'll do this testing and generate the leads at no cost to you. The crowd funded this. They're in. So we do it. And we ended up identifying her and getting her back to family. So that's a pretty wild thing. Like, with a little bit of participation from the crowd, you can take cases that otherwise would have just sat in a box forever and just get them sorted out. I think that's probably the most exciting thing about our business.

Is there a favorite case you have that when you look at one project that you worked on that you like this. This summarizes the reason why I'm doing this work. This is the most satisfying case I've ever worked on. And I hope they could all be like this one.

So here in Texas, we have a girl that was known as the Walker County Jane Doe. She was a kid, and she's literally the poster child for unidentified Jane Does. And she'd been unidentified again for like, 40 years, since, I believe, the early 80s. She was found brutally murdered and sexually assaulted in Huntsville, like, after Halloween night. It's terrible. Again, no leaves. Body was found on the side of the highway. And they don't even know who she is. How are they supposed to figure out who did this to her if they don't even know who she is? There was just so many hurdles that the case was old. The skeletal remains, which generally are a good source of DNA, didn't work. So there was just nothing that could be done. They tried all sorts of DNA testing. You know, we tried working with the bones, and we couldn't figure it out. And we ended up, again, it's just like, there's enough people that care. The national center for Missing Exploited Children, they're partners with us, so we start working with them. Other people are getting involved. Next thing you know it, we find out there was an autopsy. There was this, like, little piece of material that was preserved during the autopsy. They applied this process to preserve it. And preserving tissue during an autopsy is a great way to be able to look at the tissue later. But it destroys DNA. But it's all we have left. So we take it. We literally invent a new method. We had to develop a new method to be able to read this kind of, like, broken up DNA. And in the end, we're able to get just enough DNA to where we can read and build a profile. And the crazy thing is, it was very Easy to find the relative. Once we had the profile, the challenge was that most of the evidence was. Was just unusable. And it took. It took such a tremendous team effort from so many different agencies and dedicated law enforcement, nonprofits, and others just to find the thing we needed. And then in the end, a name.

I mean, I just love how every other agency, if you'd given them this DNA sample, this preserved piece of tissue, they'd say, yeah, it's unusable. Sorry. And you guys invented an entirely new technology simply to read the DNA.

It's like, leave no case behind is kind of our motto. So every time we encounter something new, we try to develop. If we. If we don't have methods, methods to access it, because it essentially, it builds up our toolkit because, again, like, I don't want to go solve, like, the 10 most exciting cases. I want to get every case solved. And so to do that, we really have to be sensitive to the fact that there are such a wide diversity of inputs. It's like, trust me, every time I think I've seen everything that comes in from a crime scene, there's something else. So we once had to work on a piece of material. The agency called us. They're like, we have. We have bloody gauze. I'm like, oh, it's great. Blood, no problem. Well, it comes to us. It's like bloody gauze from 40 years ago. So it's basically dust. We're like, what do we do with this? And so you just never know what you're going to get.

But what happened in that case?

We were able to get DNA from it. So, by the way, our success rate. I'm not. I'm not here to tell you our successor is 100%, but we are very conservative. If we haven't done enough cases where we feel we've had similar types of DNA and good outcomes, we'll actually reject the case and put it in our backlog. And we've had cases that we've had to reject in 19 and 20 that we've then gone on to help law enforcement solve. In 21, that case, I told you in Vegas, with the 15 cells worth of DNA, I would have never taken that case in 2020. But what's happened is we've just continuously used less and less DNA. And we worked enough cases with low DNA. I tell them, like, look, this is risky. It's. It's a lower amount of DNA than anyone's used, but it's a calculated risk because we've done other things that are similar. So, yeah, I mean, we're. We're very conservative. We're in no rush. But at the same time, we don't want to leave any case behind. Right. So we either try to develop a method or just goes on our backlog on our waiting list until we feel like we can take a calculated risk to do it. Right.

So you said policing agencies usually come to you as a last resort. Shouldn't they come to you first?

I don't want to be pushy. They don't have to come to us first. But I'd love to be, like, the second or third call instead of the 50th call, so. Because the problem is when you're the 50th call, you know, you usually have no DNA left or it's in very bad shape. I got to tell you another quick story, if you want to hear it. There's a number of cases where they'll have skeletal remains, and they hire an anthropologist to do, like, analysis of the bones. And they can look at the bones and the markers on the skull and other parts of the skeleton, and they can tell you, this is a man, this is a woman. They try to guess, is this a person who's white? Is this a person who's Asian? Could this be a person that's African? Right. They do the best they can do, but especially, like, with partial skeletons, they're really imprecise. So we had a case actually, like, a week ago out of Michigan. In the report, it's like this body was hit by a car, dropped out of a high altitude, or like, you know, this person was beaten to death. It was a terrible condition of these remains. And when they did the assessment of ancestry, they had a whole bunch of guesses. You know, he might be black, he might be white, he might be biracial. It could be a whole bunch of things, right? But when we did the DNA testing, it turns out he wasn't. He was Asian, he was East Asian. And then when we look at some of the records, it turns out the investigators are looking to see, like, is there an East Asian person missing? And there's a guy who was a grad student in Michigan who had told his wife he's he's going to end his life. Grad school was a pain, and he didn't want to. You know, he was under too much pressure, and he jumped out of an airplane, allegedly, is the story. And they found the plane crashed in Canada, but there was no body. Anthropology would have never led them to the answer because they had the wrong biogeographical origins. But once we figured out that the guy was East Asian, it begged the question, could this be the guy they test a relative. It was the guy. They had found him.

What are the implications of this technology? Outside of the work that you're already doing, like, flash forward a decade or two, what kind of things will this open the door to, do you think?

I think we're going to drive repeat crime probably to extinction. I think if you leave DNA somewhere, you're going to get caught and you're probably not going to rape or murder another person. I think there'll be other kinds of cases that will resolve. I mean, we still in today's day and age, have these cases of baby does, right. So babies that are discarded by parents that don't want the baby and don't want to take it to a church or a fire station or somewhere else and just literally discard the kid. Those cases are hard to solve because obviously that baby's not in CODIS and it doesn't have a license or any identifying documentation. But like with DNA testing, these cases will resolve almost always. So crimes that have been traditionally inaccessible, serial predators that prey on others repeatedly and leave DNA, they'll get caught the first or second time instead of the fifth time. The idea of having a cold case, you know, like unidentified person, I think that'll largely become a thing of the past. I think eventually this technology becomes a deterrent for crime. And that's, I guess what I was alluding to with respect to cases involving, you know, the murder of a little baby or something else, is like, eventually, if you get enough of these cases worked at scale, people begin to think twice. So maybe right now we're helping family after family, then it moves towards doing this at scale to, to clear backlogs and reconnect people at scale and, and then eventually works as a deterrent to keep society safe. Because if you want to do something terrible, you'll find something else to do. Because harming people in a violent way and leaving DNA will no longer be something you can do more than once or twice without getting caught.

What an astonishing thought, Right? What a science fictiony kind of thought that violent crime is something you can perpetuate once, maybe twice at most. And that's it. It's. It's kind of an incredible premise for a film if you think about it.

Yeah, it sounds science fiction. Yeah. But I think it's science fact. In the very near future, if you leave DNA somewhere, you will be found and you will not leave DNA again.

David, you are endlessly fascinating. Your work is endlessly fascinating. I wish you nothing but good luck and good fortune. If you want to learn more about David and his work, or if you'd like to actually find a cold case that you want to sponsor or promote, visit dnasolves.com d n a S O L V.

David, thank you again. Such a pleasure.

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