Bloodline Detectives - Episode 11 - Rockville Horror | Forensic Files

NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Rockville, Maryland 1994, a woman is raped and murdered in a vicious, senseless assault.
As far as crime scenes that I've seen, this is definitely one of the more gruesome ones.
There was an insect infestation on the body. She was struck in her head by a large piece of concrete,
and she was strangled, and she was raped. You know, it was horrible. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): She is Le
Bich-Thuy, a popular research scientist and classical cellist. She was such a gentle soul.
It was really hard to think about her being so savagely killed. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): And it appears
she's not the first target of a killer whose methods are brutal. Each victim was struck in the back of the head,
pushed to the ground, sexually assaulted, whether it was an attempt or a success.
You know, now you don't have one crime. You have potentially a serial rapist. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Tensions rise as police hunt
what they believe is a serial killer. It was worrisome that he was still out there.
You get discouraged. But at the same time, you gain momentum. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): And after a long period
of inactivity, new DNA technology breaks the case wide open. You know, I rushed into my sergeant's office at the time,
and I said, I think I solved this. I think I got this guy. What they learned was scary.
He had these two lives. They say he was a sociopath, but I never saw that. No one ever would have guessed.
NANCY GRACE: This is the story of how police searched for decades for the killer of a beautiful young and brilliant
scientist at the NIH, Le Bich-Thuy, her killer finally identified by using revolutionary new scientific methods.
I'm Nancy Grace, and this is "Bloodline Detectives." [THEME MUSIC] NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): October 1994, Rockville, Maryland,
law enforcement response to concerned co-workers of a research scientist colleague.
Police received a call for a check the welfare of Le Bich-Thuy, who was a scientist at Children's Hospital
in Washington, DC. She hadn't shown up for work, and her co-workers were concerned for her, so they called the police
to check the welfare. Police arrived at her house in Rockville and discovered blood on the front stoop of her front door,
and checking the surrounding area and around the backyard of her house, discovered her body lying in the backyard.
The scene was not good. Her clothes were pulled down, and she'd been there for a couple of days.
It was definitely not a pretty scene, to paint the picture. There was an insect infestation on the body,
and it appeared that she had been deceased for several days. She was wearing a pink shirt that
had been lifted up a little bit to expose the bra area. Her pants were down, and she was nude from the waist down.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): It's clear Le Bich-Thuy is the victim of a violent assault.
As far as crime scenes that I've seen, this is definitely one of the more gruesome ones.
Her injuries were severe and significant. There was obvious trauma to the body. She had a violent confrontation with someone else.
She had severe head trauma, a lot of blood. And it was apparent that she was hit
with some blunt object in the head that caused these injuries. The original detectives at the scene
found a heavy cement landscaping stone. It was absolutely brutal. No one should ever die like that.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Police now begin to seek details about the deceased. Le Bich-Thuy is originally from Vietnam.
She was in France doing her research before she came here. In some ways, she was the best of Montgomery County.
You know, this was a person who was a molecular biologist, a PhD researcher. She worked at NIH for a little bit,
and then she worked for Children's hospital and just sort of a brilliant person.
And what she did for fun was play the cello. We met in the Montgomery County Symphony Orchestra.
She was very sweet, very gentle. She was a joyful person. She was always smiling, and she loved music.
Very quiet, very intelligent, very much to herself, motivated. Very well educated, well liked by co-workers.
This pretty little lady on the outside was quite a, I would say, spitfire. At work, she was the director of a section.
And as any researcher, she had to fight for funds. She talked about Anthony Fauci, who was the director.
And she and Fauci were, I would think, very, very violent competitors. And he was not able to provide all the funds she wanted.
Fauci himself said how much he respected her scientific contributions to Children's Hospital.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The autopsy on Le's body shows just how brutal her murder was and how traumatic
her last moments must have been. It was discovered that she died of blunt force trauma
to the head and strangulation. She had extensive injuries from these blows to the head.
The medical examiner found that her spinal cord had been severed, and she was sexually assaulted.
It was just the saddest news I'd ever heard. Because here was a lady who was the essence of what
this country was all about, the immigrants who came and gave so much to the country.
She was such a gentle soul. It was really hard to think about her being so savagely killed.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): During autopsy, an item is discovered that gives detectives their first clue.
She had a metro card on her person. We found it in her belongings, and it was time
stamped that she had left on the metro on Friday, that Friday-- the previous Friday night.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Detectives believe Le Bich-Thuy may have been followed from the metro station, then
attacked at her own front door. Police made entry to the house to see if there was any evidence or anybody else inside.
They didn't find anything. It appears that Le Bich-Thuy never made it inside her house.
And the suspect who did this to her never made entry. This is the kind of crime that just
strikes to the heart of people. She's right at her door. She gets attacked from behind.
She gets dragged into her backyard. NANCY GRACE: It's clear to police at the time
that the murder of Le Bich-Thuy is a savage and determined attack. Next on the "Bloodline Detectives",
police need to move quickly to apprehend the killer before he can strike again. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): October 1994,
Maryland police begin to investigate the brutal murder of 42-year-old Le Bich-Thuy, the beautiful young scientists
from Vietnam attacked at her own front door, raped, and strangled. Investigators know they've got a vicious killer on their hands,
the murder causing fear in the quiet suburban town of Rockville. There's not a lot of murders in Rockville,
and there really never has been a murder like this, that's involving a rape, and that the murder's so violent.
The community obviously would be concerned about what happened. Probably the biggest question in the case in general
is how was she targeted and why? Because she lived by herself? She had recently moved and rented a room from a house
in the same community a couple houses up. And she just purchased this house and moved down,
and she was living by herself. She went to school and work, and pretty much the same pattern every day.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Detectives try to establish Le Bich-Thuy's last known movements.
They were able to trace back and find the time when she got on the metro and left the station.
And that kind of gave the investigators a time frame of when-- of her last movements.
The metro card told them that she'd come from the metro, likely came from it that night.
They also picked that up from co-workers, that that was her routine. You know, she'd leave Children's Hospital on the metro,
come up to this Twinbrook area, and either take a little bus that got her a little ways, or she
would walk to get to her house. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Detectives then began to question people in the community who may have seen
or heard something around the time of the murder. So you canvass, knock on every door in that community,
speak to everyone to figure out who's there on a daily basis, who are the bad people, who are the people hanging around,
the problem homes. They do flyers for tips. They start talking to neighbors. They know problems that she's having
with friends, you know, boyfriends or anything like that. There's nothing that's telling the homicide
detectives that this was anyone who knew her. Which makes the case more unknown and more of a whodunit
and much more difficult. She wasn't a type that would go out and party and find people and invite people back to her house.
She basically lived a very quiet life. So someone had to have known that she was getting off
the bus, or metro at that time to walk that short distance from the metro to her house to encounter her.
You could say it was a random act that happened to be right there at the right time, but it was in a community
that's kind of tucked away. He was there for a purpose. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Based on details of the crime,
the team begins to create a profile of the suspect. Due to the fact that she was sexually assaulted and so
brutally murdered, we're looking for a suspect who had a very violent background with an arrest
record for sexual assaults. Detectives look at any sexual offenders who were in the area
at the time, anybody with a past history of violence that was this bad. We didn't find anybody in there area of Rockville who
matched those characteristics. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): As part of the investigation,
a forensic analysis is carried out on items from the crime scene. We did fingerprints, blood typing,
trying to determine the origin of the blood that was all over the front step, whether it matched her
or whether the subject accidentally hurt himself when he was beating her. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): There's no blood other
than the victim's at the scene. The forensics team does, however, manage to get the perp's DNA from the rape kit.
The DNA evidence from the rape kit that was performed was sent to the lab. And at lab, it was processed and placed into the CODIS database.
And there were no hits through the years for a suspect. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): At this point,
CODIS, the National DNA database, is still in its infancy. So there was DNA, but the ways you could use DNA
was very limited. And that's what it was in 1994. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Year after year, they're
faced with no match until 9 years later. It was in 2003 that DNA, the profile is entered
into a computer database, and to see if it matches against one or any known offenders whose profile is in that database
or to any other cases that have that same suspect DNA, and we discovered that in 1989, there was a rape where that
suspect DNA matched the DNA from Le Bich-Thuy's rape and murder. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Coming up next,
the bloodline detectives are faced with a frightening question. Are there more victims?
And if so, how many? In 2003, detectives investigating the 1994 assault and murder of young scientist Le Bich-Thuy
match the DNA from the crime scene to another historic attack in the area. So in 1989, there was a similar case to Le Bich-Thuy.
There was a female who was walking home from the Twinbrook metro late at night. And she had been followed.
And as she was walking down a sidewalk, she was attacked from behind, and then dragged into a backyard of the residence where she was raped.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): With this new forensic evidence linking the two crimes, detectives
began to go back over every detail of the original investigation. Now we knew we had a sexual predator that was still
operating in the Twinbrook area for at least five years from 1989 when the first rape occurred to 1994, which is
Le Bich-Thuy's rape and murder. When we looked at other cases in between those dates,
we found a bunch of cases that matched the same thing-- women walking home from Twinbrook metro,
getting attacked, and all the things that occurred to Le Bich-Thuy matched up to these other women who were reporting being attacked.
Each victim was hit or struck in the back of the head from behind, and then pushed to the ground,
and then sexually assaulted, whether it was an attempt or a success. Some of these women were knocked unconscious,
and it appeared that there was always the commonality of females leaving Twinbrook metro late at night and around
the same way that Le Bich-Thuy left Twinbrook metro the night she was murdered. You know, now you don't have one crime.
You have potentially a serial rapist, someone who's preying on people he doesn't even know.
When you add in these other cases that he was committing, and for the time span, the years that he was doing this,
it was worrisome that he was still out there and had the potential of attacking more women that were
walking home from the metro. So this was definitely an important case to figure out who this was.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): With the investigation re-energized, new leads start to come in.
We had a person of interest based on some information that came in. This guy had walked up to an officer who was working
in a patrol car and provided information about Bich-Thuy's death, the scene, very detailed accounts of what happened
that had really piqued our interest that there's more to this story. And then when we realized that he
lived in the house adjacent to her, this is problematic. So we decided to interview him.
And based on that interview, we decided that there was enough there to get a search warrant for his DNA
to compare to the crime scene. He had details that were not released to the public.
There were definitely some accounts that I believe that he may have walked by and seen the body
and never reported it. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Police obtain his DNA and apply for a search warrant.
We interviewed not only him, his mom, his sister, his neighbors, and we came up with another person of interest
based on that. That was a person that the family knew, had a troubled past, was somewhat homeless,
somewhat of a drinker and a drug user, and we were able to dig and develop him as a possible target as well.
We did an interview, a very long interview with him, to the point where we actually thought this is our guy.
And the search warrant didn't pan out. His DNA was negative as well. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Despite efforts of detectives,
the investigation is once again at a dead end. You get discouraged, but at the same time
you gain momentum. You know, why is it that these two people that were, one was a resident in that community and one was a friend of his,
how do these two people have such information about this crime? What are we missing?
And you feel like, OK, we have something to grab a hold of. It just wasn't hey, this is bad information.
It was, there was more there. We just needed to figure it out. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Detectives
remain determined to track down the vicious killer of Le Bich-Thuy. This case kind of resonated with us
because Le Bich-Thuy did not have any family here and very few friends. So she really didn't have anybody
advocating for her case. And that resonated with the detectives to keep this case alive, to see if we could solve it.
Next on the "Bloodline Detectives," solving the vicious murder of scientist Le Bich-Thuy takes on added meaning
in two very powerful ways. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): By 2017, Rockville, Maryland detectives have failed to find
the killer of Le Bich-Thuy. The scientist has been brutally raped and murdered at her own home.
Police have a DNA profile of the man they believe killed her, but over many years no match has ever been found.
Now a new forensic technique changes everything. So in 2017, we decided to send the DNA profile to a company
called Parabon, who specializes in phenotyping and genetic genealogy. We were hoping that we would get a few leads
from Parabon that we could further this case. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The typing process
has the potential to give details about the physical description of the suspect based
on his DNA. It breaks down the background of a person. And you get somewhat of a profile.
And then you're able to use that profile to say, OK, he's white, he's Black, he's Hispanic, or a she.
So we're able to determine, OK, this is what we're looking at. In summer of 2018, they gave us a composite of the suspect.
He was Caucasian. They had said that there was a high percentage that he would have blue or green eyes.
And they gave different facial features that the suspect should have according to DNA sequencing.
This DNA technology doesn't allow-- you have no idea how old the person is. You just have these sort of basic facial features.
So they were able to put out two sketches. You know, if this person was this age, he'd look like this.
And here's how he'd look if he was a little older. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Detectives release images
to the public, hoping the appeal will lead them to a killer. WOMAN: Detectives from Montgomery County Police
Department's cold case squad are using DNA technology to help solve three Rockville cold cases that
are more than two decades old. This suspect is wanted in 3 crimes, for an assault in June
of 1989 in the area of Lewis Avenue, a rape in September of 1994 in the Twinbrook Parkway area,
and a murder in October of 1994 in the 1600 block of Martha Terrence. We released that picture to the community with the hope
of someone who was living in Rockville at the time, or someone who was-- even police officers,
retired police officers still active who were working in that area at the time would look at the picture and recognize
someone who they thought we should take a look at as possibly being a suspect in this case.
They were hoping that the images put out there would, you know, jog someone's memory of like,
oh, I saw someone who looked like this who used to hang out at the Twinbrook metro.
You know, in some ways that's real traditional police work. You know, you get the sketch out there,
and you're hoping that people will remember something, remember that there was a guy
that kind of looked like this. That with the phenotyping didn't really pan out the way the police had hoped.
They just didn't get a flood of calls. The phenotyping image that they put out just
didn't generate the kind of leads they were hoping for. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): With the odds stacked
against investigators, it now seems the case will remain unsolved. The amount of effort and time that was spent prior,
and then we were dealing with DNA from the '90s, and you would think that someone who committed a crime
in the '90s would have also done something in the present day, where the DNA would have matched.
So in my opinion, that he was either incarcerated or dead. And that's why we weren't getting the DNA.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): But there's one other analysis they can try as a last resort
to identify the killer. When they do the phenotype, they send you back if it's recommended or not
for genealogy. In this case, the matches were very low. So at that time, they didn't recommend genealogy in it.
It wasn't until I had worked on another case that we had brought to a successful closure
that I had suggested to Sergeant Homrock that even though the matches were low on this case,
that we still would have a good shot to trace out the family. So we decide to go with Parabon have them do their initial 15
hours of genealogy on it. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The process is essentially examining the entire family tree of the genes
associated with the DNA. You've done this very high tech DNA science, but this match what you're doing,
now you're going back to family tree stuff, to genealogy stuff. You know, people have been doing this for 100 years,
where they go into a library, they look at obituaries. They look at census records.
And what they're basically doing is building family trees. And so what you do is, you say, OK, I got
the crime scene DNA profile. And they take this and they look at this big database
and they say, oh, well, there's parts of this DNA which matches this person who researched their family tree.
Now, it's never the suspect, right? It's never that easy Very often the person is just some random relative.
Might live in Georgia, but they share DNA with the person who did it. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Detective Steve Smugeresky
is responsible for finding the match. When Parabon sent the genealogy report back,
they had done their 15 hours. They'd traced two shared matches that were about four to five generations back,
and said that the suspect should come down from this line at some point. So I took that information, and I started to trace
from that relationship. And I brought it forward, which were several different branches.
And I found a lot of the family would come back to West Virginia. And after several days and several different rabbit holes
that I went down, I ended up finding one document of an individual who lived in Silver Spring.
And so I started doing a little research on that person. Silver Spring, Maryland is part of our county,
a little south of Rockville. So what I did with that name was, I plugged it into another database
to see if there were any other connections, any other addresses. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): The addresses
lead the detective to a name. The name Kenneth Earl Day popped up. And I started researching Kenneth
Earl Day, noticed he had several criminal history records. I scrolled down a little bit in this database,
and I noticed that he had a lot of Rockville addresses from the time frame of the murder.
And a couple of those addresses, in particular one of them was less than two miles from where the murder occurred.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Detectives Smugeresky now runs the data through other information
sources. I started putting him in more law enforcement databases and checking to see his total history.
I noticed he had green eyes. And then a picture popped up of one of his mug shot photos,
and I put it next to the composite, and I was getting excited at that point, that that this might be our suspect.
We found out that he was-- at the time of these attacks, was living on Twinbrook Parkway.
And also he had one police interaction, where he was stopped for either masturbating or indecent
exposure in an area not too far from where Le Bich-Thuy was found. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Now investigators
are convinced this is that had they've been looking for. When I clicked on his name and I just
started reading everything, and his previous criminal history and seeing his features that matched up with the phenotype
and the addresses, and started to tie everything in together, there was a lot of excitement.
You know, I rushed into my sergeant's office at the time, and I said, I think I solved this one.
I think I got this one. I think I got this guy. I was so excited. I sent everything to Detective Davis and said, Dave,
you got to look at this. You got to look at this. I'm telling them all about this guy.
I'm trying to gear up about trying to go get him, and trying to figure out how we're going to get his DNA.
So I said, well, give me a second. Let me do some research and investigation on the name
you're providing. Kenneth Day was a construction worker. He worked in and out of different local companies,
had a troubled past, but nothing that jumped out. Obviously his DNA wasn't in our national database
or we would've gotten a hit. But he did have a criminal history. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): But the significant news
about Kenneth Day is a crushing blow to the investigation. The worst part is, we found out that he was deceased.
So from there, we realized, OK, well, he was deceased in West Virginia. So we pulled the records from West Virginia,
and he had actually died from an overdose. Knowing the background of the overdoses
and the suicides and deaths, typically there's a blood card. So I called the ME's office in West Virginia
and found out, ah, you have a blood card on file. So it was real simple. They asked for just a letterhead with his information
and request, and they actually FedExed overnight to us. We took the blood card, and we sent it to the lab
for comparison. Our biology lab processed the blood sample here, and they're the ones who notified us
that the suspect DNA from all these cases matched the DNA from Kenneth Earl Day.
It's mind-boggling that this could have happened. No one thought he was anything but
the sweetest, simple person. He was just nice, and easy, and laid back. 24 years after the murder, the bloodline detectives
have identified the killer. Although he's dead and beyond prosecution, police are about to learn more about the man
behind the vicious murder of Le Bich-Thuy. 2019, using new genetic genealogy, detectives in Rockville, Maryland ID
the killer of Le Bich-Thuy, a beautiful young scientist brutally murdered at her own home.
Investigators now anxious to find out more about Kenneth Earl Day, the man they believe to be the killer.
All they know about Day is, he's dead. To try to find as much information as we can about
him, try to-- we attempted to find family members of Kenneth Earl Day and were able to locate his ex-wife,
Jenny Wasko. I remember looking at the caller ID, and it said "Montgomery County."
And I said, "oh, gosh. I hope no one is hurt. And I picked it up, and they said "is this Jennifer Day that
used to be married to Kenneth?" And I said, "yes, it is." And then he told me, "I may want to sit down to hear this,"
and I did. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Shocking details of Kenneth Day's crimes now revealed to his ex-wife.
I can definitely say that she was taken aback. They say he was a sociopath, but I never saw that.
All those years that I was with him. And you would think there would be some indication.
He never even had a reason to go to counseling. He was a normal, good guy to me, and to his daughter,
and to our neighbors, and family and friends. And no one ever would have guessed.
NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Investigators travel to speak with the ex-wife, Jennifer Wasko,
in person. So I traveled to West Virginia, and I met with Jenny to go over the facts of the case
and to answer any questions that she had about this case. And it was still hard for her to understand that this was true.
Without the DNA showing that this was definitely Kenneth Earl Day who did these crimes,
I still think it would have been hard for her to understand that he was really responsible for these cases.
She showed me pictures, and she wanted to describe to me how he was a decent person.
So she brought out her family album, and we looked through Christmas pictures of him
and his daughter posing for Christmas pictures and pictures of their wedding. And looking through the photo album,
he just looked like a normal husband, normal father. Nothing-- nothing that stood out where
he would be out there committing these type of violent crimes. The Kenneth Day that I married was
the sweetest, easiest to get along with person in the world. Everyone liked him.
He had-- he was very personable. All the neighbors knew him. The children in the neighborhood would knock on the door
and ask him if they could walk our dogs with him. They all loved him. Everyone loved him.
My whole family, my grandmother especially. Because he was just a fun, easygoing guy.
He was so fun. All that we did together, pretty much throughout our whole relationship, is laugh.
That's why I loved him, because he made me laugh so much. The last person on the planet that I would think
could do something like this. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): Investigators believe he's responsible for many more attacks.
That is in my mind every day. Could there be more? I go over in my mind, especially after we were divorced
and he lived in our house in floor, and I think about that a lot, and what I could have noticed,
what was strange. And the only thing that was strange back then is some of the time, he would leave without telling us
for several days. And I would just put his daughter on the bus and that. But he wouldn't tell anyone or call home.
I think it's probable that Kenneth Earl Day committed the other attacks of women that
were leaving Twimbrook metro. Unfortunately in those cases, we don't have suspect DNA,
so it's hard to say for sure. But everything absent the DNA is similar to the cases
that we know Kenneth Earl Day committed. Kenneth Day was sort of a serial predator,
a scary, scary person, just someone who needed-- had some feeling in his head that he had
to stalk and hurt random women. We have one open case that we're still trying to investigate, and he is
a strong target in that case. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): But it's genetic genealogy that finally cracks
the case for investigators. The case would've never been solved without it. It was wonderful, because it's one of those things where
I think that genetic genealogy, people, there's an argument where people say, OK, well,
should we really be doing this? Well, we spent almost 30 years, 25 to 30 years of time,
energy, and sticking Q-tips in people's mouths who truly weren't suspects, to, OK, well, we just paid $3,000
and solved it in two weeks. It would never have been solved. It would have remained a cold case forever more.
I'm definitely proud of the work that was done. It's obviously an important case.
I'm proud of the work that Steve did on the genealogy. Because without that, this case would've never been solved.
But I also think the original work that was done on this case by the original detectives, the work
that they did really put us in a position now to be able to solve these cases. And without that original work and how meticulous
they were, we wouldn't be able say that we know who did this case. NANCY GRACE (VOICEOVER): No one will really ever know
what happened to Le Bich-Thuy in the last awful moments of her life. The killer has escaped justice.
But there is some satisfaction that genetic genealogy was able to prove beyond any doubt
that Kenneth Day was the killer. You know, at the end they know who did it. They were able to close the case.
But this guy got away with it for years and years, and was somehow able to live what seemed like a normal life.
And I don't think that's justice. For me, the big thing is, I don't want anybody to be forgotten.
And it gave me a sense of doing something that we didn't forget her. I think it sums up as a tragic, senseless loss
that we have a victim who, if she wasn't murdered could have contributed so much to society.
It was probably a tremendous amount of work that she was going to do in the future.
And I think Kenneth Day just took that away from society. All these cases have some sort of impact.
And I think it definitely makes you look over your shoulder more. You just never know.
NANCY GRACE: The murder of Le Bich-Thuy is especially sad. A dedicated scientist who comes to this country
with only one purpose-- to help millions of other people. Her life is cut short by a predator unknown even
to his own family. And what makes this case so chilling is knowing that men like her killer hide in plain sight.
How many of them are amongst us right now? How many lives have they claimed? With evolving tools like genetic genealogy,
the bloodline detectives are working to reveal them. I'm Nancy Grace. Thank you for joining me and the bloodline detectives.
[THEME MUSIC]

Brief Summary

The episode details the murder of scientist Le Bich-Thuy and the identification of her killer Kenneth Earl Day through DNA technology.

Key points

The Brutal Murder of Le Bich-Thuy. In October 1994, scientist Le Bich-Thuy is brutally raped and murdered at her home, shocking the community.
DNA Technology Breaks the Case Open. New DNA technology in 2003 leads detectives to a match in a similar case from 1989.
Detectives Identify a Serial Rapist. Evidence suggests Le Bich-Thuy's murder is linked to a series of attacks on women in the area.
A New Forensic Technique Changes Everything. In 2017, detectives send DNA to Parabon for phenotyping, hoping to generate new leads.
The Killer Identified. Detectives use genetic genealogy to identify Kenneth Earl Day as the killer of Le Bich-Thuy.
A Shocking Revelation. Kenneth Day's ex-wife is stunned to learn about his hidden crimes.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

You know, now you don't have one crime. You have potentially a serial rapist.

Detectives realizing the broader implications of the case.

1:08WatchApr 1, 2021

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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