Bloodline Detectives - Episode 10 - Sheeps Flat Murder Mystery | Forensic Files

[MUSIC PLAYING] NANCY GRACE: July, 1982. The body of a young woman discovered near Lake Tahoe
in Washoe County, Nevada. This was an ugly murder that was perpetrated for sexual gratification most likely.
NANCY GRACE: And investigations launched, but despite detectives' best efforts, the victim remains unidentified.
We put her dental charts and other identifiable information in a flier. And we went through Interpol, and we
had those fliers distributed to every law enforcement agency in Europe. NANCY GRACE: Although the case goes cold, it's never closed.
Detectives are determined to identify both the victim and the killer. All you had to know is who it was
and whoever was with her on the afternoon of July 17. That would be the person that should
have reported her missing. NANCY GRACE: This is the gripping story of the Sheeps
Flat Jane Doe murder and exhaustive police investigation and how it became the first case worldwide,
where both the victim and the perpetrator are identified using groundbreaking forensic DNA techniques.
I'm Nancy Grace, and this is "Bloodline Detectives." [MUSIC PLAYING] July 17, 1982.
The Washoe County sheriffs received an emergency call. A body's been discovered near Lake Tahoe.
We got a report that hikers found a body of a young woman. I happened to be in the office at the time.
And we dispatched some detectives to the scene. When we got the call, it was dispatch saying that they'd
had a possible homicide up on the Mount Rose Highway in an area called Sheep Flats.
Once they arrived up there, they quickly ascertained that it was a homicide, a murder.
And so they secured the scene. JIM LOPEY: And one thing that you have to be very careful of when you're
approaching any crime scene is to not contaminate any evidence. There was very little evidence of a struggle
or a protracted fight. She was clothed. Oddly, a pair of men's underwear had been left draped over her remains by, we assume,
the assailant. It appeared that she'd been sitting on a fallen log, possibly either putting on shoes or tying her shoes,
but sitting when she was killed. And then she fell forward on her face. And when we turned her over, it
seemed to be a woman probably anywhere between her 20s and mid 30s. You could tell that one of her eyes
had been darkened, which shows some sort of blunt force trauma. Her face was a little contorted from being face down.
And it was covered with pine needles. DAVID JENKINS: She was just a young woman by herself dressed in a manner that
would have suggested that she had just come from Lake Tahoe. She had a bathing suit on underneath her outer clothing.
She was very casually dressed. And sadly, this young woman had absolutely no identification
or anything that would lead to an immediate identification of her. We had called some searchers out from search and rescue
to come and search the scene and to look for evidence as well. NANCY GRACE: What occurred there happened only hours before.
Well, the crime scene suggested that this had been only an hours old murder within, certainly, the last 12
to 18 hours. There was very little degradation of evidence. It was a pristine crime scene in the sense
that no other persons, aside from those who had discovered her, had tampered with any of the potential evidence
in the crime scene. So from a forensic standpoint, it was very fortunate, and it allowed investigators to recover a great deal
of evidence that would have deteriorated very quickly, were it not for her quick discovery and the fact
that she was undisturbed. When you walk into a scene like that, you're concerned about footprints
because you can either take casts and/or close up photographs and identify a shoe.
There was two sets of footprints walking in, but only one set walking out. DAVID JENKINS: This young woman had been shot with a handgun
in the back of the head at relatively close range and had immediately fallen forward onto the ground.
DONALD MEANS: Being where the body was, it was basically surrounded by pine needles
because there was pine trees everywhere. And that causes a specific problem because with pine needles, anything that's laying on top,
say, a bullet casing or an expended round, would fall right into the pine needles.
And you'd have a hard, hard time finding that. Well, we were looking for basically anything else that
might be there, like discarded items, anything that had been there. Because it's still, believe it or not,
given the heavy traffic, it's still a fairly pristine area. NANCY GRACE: Once the scene's processed,
the bodies move to the morgue. DONALD MEANS: While we were in the transition between the crime scene and the autopsy,
you start looking for missing people. Because in July, in the summer, Lake Tahoe, where this area
is close to, is extremely busy. So we thought that we'd better find out as quickly as we could
everybody that could possibly be missing, anybody that had left their luggage, anybody that checked out of a hotel, left their stuff behind.
Those were the kind of things that we knew because we knew that if you just say I'm looking for an average lady between 20
and 30 that have been missing, she would probably fit in with about 60% of the people at Lake Tahoe
had been there. NANCY GRACE: While waiting for that information, detectives attend the autopsy.
KATHLEEN BISHOP: At the autopsy, when they were able to process the body better, they found that there were two gunshot
wounds to the head, one to the back and one behind the right ear. And she also had, I would say, a 57 piece size inoculation
on her arm that stood out to Art Newman who was the deputy coroner at the time. He said it looked like his wife's.
She was originally from Germany. And that's what their inoculation looked like. And matter of fact, after the autopsy
drove me straight to his house and showed me his wife's inoculation mark. The vaccination mark just indicated that she had had,
you know, as I recall, a smallpox shot. And yeah, we look at that because not everybody's had those.
She had some unusual and complex dental work, dental restoration work. So we had a forensic dentists come and chart the teeth.
And it was his opinion that this had been done in Europe because he had worked in Europe, where
he was familiar with that type of work. And that's where it was started to be believed that maybe
she was from a foreign country. She had a cesarean scar, which meant that at some point,
she had had a child. And that was another lead that we would communicate with others.
But again, we were very much concerned about whether or not, you know, her child--
where the child was. You know, we had a lot of questions. This homicide was particularly brutal.
This individual shot this young woman. She was attractive, young. What's running through your mind is, who would have done this?
We knew that we were dealing with probably a really bad person, bad guy. Probably had an arrest record, someone who
had a propensity for violence. DAVID JENKINS: The fact that she is shot at close range in the back of the head
suggests an execution. I think it is more likely than not that he was a sexual predator and that this was a premeditated murder,
at least from the time that they left the roadway on the Mount Rose Highway and began to walk
or hike into the woods. Most of us believe that she knew the killer and that if we could identify her,
we would identify the killer. But that was the difficult thing. You know, before, you know, DNA technology was,
how do we identify her? An unknown murder victim, her face destroyed by a gunshot
wound. But before police can find her killer, they've got to identify her. That's next on "Bloodline Detectives."
[MUSIC PLAYING] July, 1982. Washoe County Sheriffs start an investigation into the murder of a young woman discovered in this Sheeps
Flat area of Lake Tahoe. She's been shot in the head and has no ID on her body. It was such a simple case.
All you had to know is who it was and whoever was with her on the afternoon of July 17.
That would be the person that should have reported her missing. NANCY GRACE: Investigators checking all available
databases to see if there's anyone fitting her description or suspects that could be linked to the murder.
We were at the beginnings of an automated fingerprint search. The database was not as large in 1982 as it is now.
A lot of police jurisdictions throughout the country didn't necessarily submit all of their fingerprints
to a national database. But her fingerprints were analyzed, sent through the FBI
with a request that they tried to be matched. That was unsuccessful. We looked for anything.
If we knew what she ate, it might give us a lead. It might tell us where we might want to go look.
Maybe you could go to a restaurant or at least go check some places and go, hey, look, have you seen this woman?
She was last known to, you know, eat a steak or whatever. LARRY GARFIELD: Because we'd had some other young women murdered
in that time frame, '78, '79, '80, '81, so forth, they did look at possible suspects, but really,
nobody in particular. JIM LOPEY: And we also put out a nationwide teletype with her full description, requesting that anyone that
might have a missing persons case that fit her description to please call us. NANCY GRACE: In another effort to uncover leads,
detectives create a poster. JIM LOPEY: So we had an artist do a rendition, and it depicted her in her natural state
because her face really wasn't appropriate to show her picture when we went out and did canvases.
It's kind of difficult to go to hotels, casinos, and other locations where her and maybe the suspect
had stayed without, you know, some type of photograph to show the employees of said establishment.
You know, without a name to give anybody, you're talking about all the cities and hospitals
through the whole country. To find that information would be pretty hard, because you don't have
a name, again, to research. NANCY GRACE: From the evidence and the crime scene, detectives build scenarios about what happened
and why the victim remains unidentified. When I look at the part where she has a bathing suit
on under her clothes, so you believe that it was a planned trip to Lake Tahoe. Well, if it was a planned trip with friends,
I would think friends would have reported her missing from that she didn't come back to them.
She disappeared from an outing with them at the lake or something. Somebody would've said something,
so I actually believe the trip was with him. There was nothing from the scene that I saw that would indicate that she was necessarily drug
there. So it appeared to me that she walked in with the suspect, and that it was the two of them.
And only one of them left the scene. LARRY GARFIELD: And it's a mystery. And you become interested in that.
And you wonder what type of person the victim was and the suspect, and the life they had or didn't have, and what occurred,
how did they get there. You just have those questions in your own mind as a detective,
eventually, that you want to see answered. NANCY GRACE: Investigators get the swab analysis
from the autopsy. In this case, we found evidence that would lead us to believe that she was sexually
assaulted, which was very good for us because we had some evidence. DAVID JENKINS: There was semen inside her mouth.
And that is indicative of that sexual activity occurring very close in time to her death.
Because the mouth produces saliva. Materials dissipate very quickly in the mouth
and degrade very quickly in the mouth and would be washed away by eating or drinking.
So you could assume that that evidence was left in very close proximity to her murder
because it was still present. NANCY GRACE: With no positive result from all their local and national searches,
detectives decide to point the investigation elsewhere. JIM LOPEY: We actually did a flier
with her picture, description, you know, approximate date of birth, and her date of death,
and what have you. We put her dental charts and other identifiable information in the flyer.
And we went through Interpol, and we had those fliers distributed to every law enforcement agency in Europe.
We got some inquiries and, in fact, I recall, when I was in there as a supervisor, a really good
match, someone that went to United States from Europe, they disappeared, and very close likeness, both in age,
physical description. But that turned out not to be her. KATHLEEN BISHOP: They followed up
on anybody that called in and had possible information, thought that, you know, could it be this person,
could it be this person. They did all of those follow-ups, but all the follow-ups led to her remaining a Jane Doe.
NANCY GRACE: And the victim is buried as an unidentified body. KATHLEEN BISHOP: She was buried in Our Mother of Sorrows
in Reno, Nevada. She was buried as a Jane Doe. JIM LOPEY: We still preserve the evidence of the sexual assault.
That evidence is preserved in the crime lab indefinitely. NANCY GRACE: In the early 2000s with forensics
advancing rapidly, detectives do another review of the case. It never really went cold.
At some point, DNA gets online. I went to the crime lab in '93, and we put it into whatever system we could.
When CODIS came online, we put it into the system. When DNA got more sophisticated, we put it into the system.
Every time the FBI fingerprint system came on board, which connected just about everybody,
we ran the prints again. So as technology developed, I mean, this case has a perfect chronology of the progression
of forensic science. NANCY GRACE: But it's in the early part of the 21st century,
science begins to transform crime-solving, something investigators are hoping for.
I was assigned right at the end of 2000 to handle cold cases, to look for-- in my mind was just to go through
each case, looking for something that could possibly have DNA. Early in 2001, I submitted several items
from the evidence to the crime lab to check for DNA. They had already submitted it through every place
in the country and come up with nothing. So the person wasn't in the system at that time.
NANCY GRACE: Detectives keep trying. DAVID JENKINS: We tried to go back through other homicides
in northern Nevada to see if there was potentially any link between other convicted homicide
suspects, other convicted sexual assault suspects. Many of the persons who had been arrested
in that era in the late '70s through the middle '80s, that all predated the DNA database.
So, in a lot of instances, we had convicted murder suspects that had been on the streets at the time this young woman was
murdered, who had subsequently been arrested and convicted for violent crimes, but were not in the DNA database.
And so we made an effort to eliminate those individuals from consideration as well when they had similar MOs.
This was what we would call literally a smoking gun case. I was in the middle of a really difficult case.
I thought this case would be solved as soon as we knew who she was. And the fact that nobody reported her missing even
makes it worse. Because I have always tried to think it was important to stand for the people that don't have
anybody to take care of them. NANCY GRACE: So despite their very best efforts, investigators continue to hit a wall.
They need to identify this Jane Doe victim so they can then pursue her killer. Next, a new DNA technology creates
a different way to look at the case for the bloodline detectives. 2018, Washoe County sheriffs still investigating
the 1982 murder of a young woman discovered in the Sheeps Flat area of Lake Tahoe.
She had no identification. She was shot in the head. She can't be identified. But investigators are now looking
at new scientific techniques they need for help. Back in 2018, the Washoe County Forensic Science
Division, we had discussed is there a way to use genealogy for law enforcement to access any of these databases and sites.
LARRY GARFIELD: One of our forensic DNA experts went to a seminar. And it was put on by DNA experts from across the country
not necessarily in law enforcement, but in the private sector. NANCY GRACE: The seminar leads detectives to a project, which
kickstarts a hunt for Jane Doe. So we were contacted in early 2018 by the Washoe County Sheriff's Office
because they had an unidentified Jane Doe to see if there was some way that we could
help them with their case. NANCY GRACE: The project leaders explained their procedure to detectives.
We use genetic genealogy, forensic genealogy, but more advanced, not like the wide DNA that I had been doing.
This was more so like ancestry testing where you test everything, all the DNA, and then you come up with a list of DNA cousins.
And then based on how you related to all those cousins, you try to figure out who you are.
NANCY GRACE: The team knows they are accessing a much greater pool of possibilities.
Even though law enforcement has what we consider a relatively significant number of people in our database,
that number pales in comparison to the size of the private databases that genealogists
are working with right now. And that's very exciting because of the potential, then, to make a link to a relative
of an unidentified victim, or to make a link to a relative of a potential suspect.
NANCY GRACE: In Washoe, police need to identify the killer and the victim. Our first step was to get the agency
to ship the bloody fabric to the lab that we used. They then did the whole genome sequencing, which took
probably six to eight weeks. After that, they generate a very large data file. Once you upload that file, it takes about 24 hours
for it to be compared with all the other million people who are in that database, to see if any of those other people
share DNA with you, or in our case, with our victim, with our Doe. NANCY GRACE: Luckily, the first run of the genome profile
yields a match. COLLEEN FITZPATRICK: Discovering her identity was unbelievable because the first match that came up,
it was like second cousin, which is OK. You know, it's not as close as we'd like.
NANCY GRACE: Investigators locate the second cousin. She's recently been searching for her family
through ancestry websites and found a woman who's also a second cousin. So detectives talked to the new second cousin.
She then ended up sharing twice as much DNA and so became our top match. One of her parents was a sibling of our Doe.
So this became our focus. And this was very shortly within the first 48 hours, I would say, of this case.
NANCY GRACE: This second cousin is a more direct relation to the Washoe County Jane Doe.
But there is a complication. This woman who is now the top match was herself adopted.
So she did not know the names of her parents. And this is quite common with these databases
because lots of people who are adopted take those tests because they're adopted.
And you have to solve their adoption case before you figure out your Jane or John Doe.
Although the adoption records were closed where this woman was adopted, she had been provided,
as adoptees often are, with a report of what they called non-identifying information, so clues about her mother's age
and her ancestry, her occupation, where she grew up, what her siblings were, a little bit about her parents,
just enough that we were able to piece together where in that family tree that we were building was her likely mother.
NANCY GRACE: Finally, a breakthrough. Thanks to DNA research, new at that time, the bloodline detectives discover the grandfather has
married twice, and that that the murder victim is from that second marriage. The trail leads to the Detroit area and a couple
named John and Blanche Silvani. That's next on "Bloodline Detectives." A major forensic breakthrough brings the bloodline detectives
to Detroit, to the last known residents of a John and Blanche Silvani. They believe they can identify the victim
of an unsolved murder that took place 35 years before. That's when DNA Doe Project started working with me.
And they were able to identify the parents of Jane Doe. Their names were John and Blanche Silvani.
NANCY GRACE: When neighbors are asked to provide information, they oblige. The next door neighbors, given that that family had been
many years at the same address, the next door neighbors ought to know who the kids were in that family.
They might even know what schools they went to. They would be a great source of information and confirmation
in this case. That ultimately became the breakthrough. We asked them, can you tell us about the family?
We're looking for this Jane Doe sketch. And they were very nice, and they said there
were two boys and one girl. And therefore, the one girl had to be our Jane Doe. NANCY GRACE: After over 35 years,
genealogy is finally able to ID the woman whose body is found in Nevada, July 1982.
MARGARET PRESS: The daughter's name was Mary Silvani. And it was at that moment that we had a firm candidate that we
could give to the agency. They said, hey, we've gone ahead. And we know who she is because for 35 years,
I had known her as Jane Doe. NANCY GRACE: The identification comes from a complex family tree.
John and Blanche Silvani had three biological children together-- Robert Silvani, Charles Silvani, and Mary Silvani.
NANCY GRACE: But what is provided is still not conclusive. We had provided additional evidence.
We had located a living son of one of her brothers. We sent him a direct-to-consumer test,
and his results came back confirming that he was a full nephew. So we were setting new forensic evidence standards with cases
like these, trying to show coroners that even absent your usual traditional means of confirmation, when you have
this sort of genetic genealogy evidence, then the probabilities are extremely low that it
would not be your candidate. The coroner still wanted more. And there were no other traditional methods
to make that confirmation. So months went by. And again, Detective Bishop came to the rescue.
KATHLEEN BISHOP: I reached out to a cold case unit of the Detroit Police Department.
And one of the detectives there reached out to somebody that's good at finding old records.
NANCY GRACE: In the archives, they find an old file involving Mary Silvani. That allowed investigators to obtain
her physical fingerprints from a very simple misdemeanor arrest for, I believe it was for trespassing when
she was a very young woman. KATHLEEN BISHOP: And our fingerprint expert analyzed our Jane Doe's fingerprints to Mary Silvani's
fingerprints and positively said that these were one and the same subject. And so she was positively identified
as Mary Silvani at the time. NANCY GRACE: For investigators, identifying Mary Silvani
is a very emotional experience. We were all so thrilled and excited and proud and satisfied
that we could return her name to her. A weight I have carried since 1982. And again, I wanted to--
it was extremely frustrating because all we had to know was who she was. She was born into a family of immigrants, actually.
Her father, John, was from Italy, and her mother, Blanche, was from Canada. NANCY GRACE: After Mary Silvani's mother died
in the hospital, she's left to be raised by her father and two brothers. MARGARET PRESS: Her father also died when she was 16 or 17.
So already, there was a lack of a support system for her. So Mary remained in the house with her brothers
until after she graduated high school. And then at that point, there was really nothing holding them back or tying
them down to that area. So she and her brothers ended up moving out to California.
But then they went their separate ways and lost touch with one another. NANCY GRACE: Mary Silvani lived a carefree
and somewhat unstructured life. Mary waited tables. She kind of floated around from job to job
and never really found her sole passion in life. When she lived in the Plymouth area,
met a great friend, Nancy Cummings. And they were just kindred spirits. They worked together.
And they did what a lot of high school aged children would do. They enjoyed life.
They went dancing. They had fun. They enjoyed the arts. In fact, Mary was really close to Nancy's family.
They even went on vacations together. Mary was someone who liked to explore and travel.
And so her friends actually were not concerned about her and had no reason to really report it.
It honestly was just an example of the times. And so, essentially, Mary just fell through the cracks.
NANCY GRACE: The Silvani family had, in a sense, fallen apart. She didn't seem to have the support of her immediate family
even to help her navigate through her life. KATHLEEN BISHOP: Robert Silvani was about
eight years older than Mary. He, at one time for a short period of time, worked for one of the local fire departments there.
He was married to a woman, had a son, and then decided that he was going to move to LA
and try and become a movie star, and left his family. COLLEEN FITZPATRICK: One of her brothers
was a part of an armed robbery. And he went to prison for a while. I don't know if he went for that robbery or a different one,
but he was in prison for a while. Moved to California, got into some more trouble.
And her brother was a murder suspect who was being chased by the police. And he ended up jumping off a building while he
was being chased and died. NANCY GRACE: More people come forward when detectives released the information to the media.
KATHLEEN BISHOP: After it was released to the press, one of her friends came forward and gave some information
to the Detroit press that she had been a bridesmaid for her wedding. That shed a little more light on her life.
And she was a very beautiful woman, you know, very friendly-looking and, you know, just entitled to just
the same life we all have. But she just didn't really have any luck in life. And somehow she wound up on that trail near Lake Tahoe
with some bullets in her head. NANCY GRACE: Mary Silvani has finally been identified
using DNA technology. But as we'll see next, the bloodline detectives still need to find her killer.
2019, Washoe County, Nevada. The bloodline detectives use modern forensics to finally identify our murder victim after 35 years.
Now they must find her killer. We took the DNA from the crime scene that was found from the sexual assault kit from our victim.
We had what we believed was the suspect DNA. And so, the genealogy ancestral search began.
Chasing the perpetrator, catching her killer was also like a big adventure in genealogy land.
And we came up with a second cousin. Her name was Norma. NANCY GRACE: They find Norma's great grandfather
so they can follow the male line of the family. Thomas has had three sons, and one of his sons
has a male heir. COLLEEN FITZPATRICK: Grandpa only had one grandson, and that had to be our killer, right?
OK, so we have to get his DNA. We have to do some kind of matching, some kind of analysis.
We had a law enforcement officer sit outside of his house and monitor, hoping he would come out and drink a Coke
and throw it in the trash, or, you know, something would happen so that, you know, we could get his DNA.
Nothing happened. Nothing happened. NANCY GRACE: Nothing has happened for a very good reason.
After a while, we realized he had just died. He died, like, a few weeks earlier.
We missed him. NANCY GRACE: But the genealogy trail continues. COLLEEN FITZPATRICK: He himself has
a son who has a criminal record, and he's in prison. In other words, he's in CODIS.
This was in Texas. The state of Texas allows familial matching. So we got the DNA from this son of our candidate
and matched it against the crime scene DNA. And if this is the end of the story,
we should be able to say that the guy that left the DNA at the scene of the crime
is probably the father of our guy in CODIS. And there was no match. NANCY GRACE: This can only mean one of two things.
Either that guy in prison was illegitimate, or this isn't our killer. NANCY GRACE: There is another possibility.
COLLEEN FITZPATRICK: There's another grandson we don't know about somewhere out there in the world.
Maybe dad had a fling and had another son. So the genealogist just worked and worked and worked.
And finally, she was able to connect that side to a woman named Ana who lived around the corner from dad
when they were teenagers. And Ana had had a son with him, and she got married-- subsequently married to a man named Curry.
And they moved to California with the son. So she had only one son, and he died so we
don't have his DNA either. NANCY GRACE: But all is not lost. But he has a son in prison in California.
So California, we've got the DNA from that son in prison. We compared it to the crime scene data,
and there was a match. So the guy in prison had to be the son of the guy who committed the crime.
And we knew that that was Ana's son, James Curry. James Curry was born in Texas in 1946.
We do know that he had a series of issues with getting in trouble with the law. NANCY GRACE: James Curry has a significant criminal past.
I believe it was a 20-year sentence. And in 1977, he was released after seven years.
And at that time, he moved to a small town in California where his mother was residing.
His background was indicative of who we thought he probably would have been, you know, somebody who had been in jail
a lot, a violent offender-- not the best of citizens, and I'm putting it mildly.
From what I have learned, James Curry was a suspect in three different murders in northern California.
In 1983, Curry was arrested. Shortly after being arrested, he actually admitted to murdering two people--
a husband and wife who owned some storage units. During that interview, he tells police
that when they search his storage unit that they're going to find another body. And so, they went and did the search of his unit.
And as he stated, there was another victim that had been there almost a year's time, I believe.
And so they know that he killed those three for sure. NANCY GRACE: But James Curry is now
beyond the reach of the law. He was then placed into physical custody in a jail, where he hung himself.
As a result of that, he was never able to be brought to trial. In reading his history, it seemed
that crime was his way of life and that he didn't hold a lot of remorse for even the killing
of an innocent victim. When Curry admitted to these murders, it was only five months after Mary Silvani's murder.
As a murderer, as an admitted murderer, one can only imagine how many victims might actually be out there.
NANCY GRACE: So what happened between Mary Silvani and James Curry? Did they know each other?
I think there's a good chance that they had recently become acquainted. I don't know if that was hours or days or weeks.
But based on his timeline, I know that the association couldn't have been a years long association.
Every murder's ugly, and this was an ugly murder that was perpetrated for sexual gratification most likely.
And those are ugly circumstances. I thought he was probably somebody that could be devoid of any remorse and that could basically
have a summer day and kind of enjoy himself and then just walk behind somebody and shoot them in the head.
That puts it pretty much in the horrific category. NANCY GRACE: But police have no doubts about the immediacy
of the killing. Certainly, the murder was instantaneous. And fortunately, I guess, for her, the wounds that she
suffered were so devastating that death would have been instantaneous. And I guess, that's a positive.
I would have hate to have thought that she would have languished for any period of time
before she died. And I have no reason to believe that she did. NANCY GRACE: The inscription on Mary Silvani's grave
can now be written. It's a real person who lived and died and had a name that we were able to bring back to that person.
The inscription on the headstone and the design of the headstone was from her nephew, the living son of her brother
that we had reached out to. He was in contact with the cemetery and with the other close matches,
who he now knew were members of his own family, and together, they designed the headstone in the cemetery,
very graciously paid for it. NANCY GRACE: The ID of Mary and her killer is now regarded as a landmark investigation.
This is the first case globally where both the suspect and the victim were able to be identified using genetic genealogy.
I think it's important to learn here that it's never too late. These cases can be solved, and with advancements like this,
they actually are. Without genetic genealogy, the case would still be cold. There were no leads.
There was just nothing else to go on in a case like this that could have ever brought the authorities to the family
where she grew up. I'm glad I lived to see it. You know, I was a 31-year-old detective when this happened.
I'm 68 years old now. It's been a long pole, but I can scratch this off my list.
It's not that I think justice was done, but I think it's over. NANCY GRACE: In this landmark case,
the incredible forensic science of genetic genealogy is not only the key to unlock the identity of the victim,
but also the key to identify her killer. One more triumph for the bloodline detectives and one
more cold case finally solved. I'm Nancy Grace. Thank you for joining me and the bloodline detectives.
[MUSIC PLAYING]

Brief Summary

The episode details the identification of murder victim Mary Silvani and her killer through groundbreaking genetic genealogy techniques.

Key points

The Sheeps Flat Jane Doe Murder. A young woman's body is found near Lake Tahoe, leading to a cold case investigation.
Breakthrough in DNA Technology. In 2018, detectives use advanced DNA techniques to identify the Jane Doe.
Identification of Mary Silvani. After 35 years, Mary Silvani is identified using DNA technology. A major breakthrough in the case.
The Hunt for the Killer. The bloodline detectives use modern forensics to find Mary Silvani's killer after decades.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This was an ugly murder that was perpetrated for sexual gratification most likely.

Nancy Grace discussing the nature of the murder.

0:20WatchApr 1, 2021

Tension

75/ 100High tension

More from True Crime Files

Solve the Crime

Read a real case one clue at a time, then see how your call held up against the investigators.