Bloodline Detectives - Episode 15 - The Murder of Tangie Simms | Forensic Files

Tonight, the graphic murder of Tangie Sims. Her body covered in slashes. Her neck cut nearly to the spine.
She's found dumped like trash. October, 1996. Aurora, Colorado. The body of a young woman is discovered in an alley.
Clearly she was alive and conscious when she was being stabbed because she had defensive wounds.
It really told a story of how she must have fought for her life. NANCY GRACE: The 25-year-old victim is known to police.
And the investigation takes many twists and turns. They would check the area neighborhood
to see if anyone had heard anything, seen anything. NANCY GRACE: Detectives chased down every lead.
But despite their best efforts, the case goes cold. But it's never closed. They had tried the profile all over the world.
Anybody that had a DNA database, they had tried it. And they had not found. The person that was responsible.
NANCY GRACE: This is the story of Tangie Sims, a sex worker, the complex and exhaustive investigation
into her brutal murder, and how genetic genealogy and bloodline detectives give investigators the break
they had waited on for years. I'm Nancy Grace. This is "Bloodline Detectives." If it wasn't for the genetic genealogy on this case,
it would still be an open unsolved case. [THEME MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: October 24, 1996.
Emergency services in Aurora, Colorado get a 9-1-1 call. It was a young lady. I believe it was Ms. Malton.
She was walking her young children to school. This was about the 1200 block in between Iola
and Ironton streets in Aurora. Ms. Malton notices something in the alleyway that catches her attention.
She keeps her children at a distance suspecting it might not be something good. And she was correct.
She goes over and examines and finds what appears to be the deceased body of a female.
NANCY GRACE: Patrol officers, detectives, and forensics are immediately dispatched to the scene.
MICHAEL DOBERSON: When we got there around 11:30 in the morning, we were directed to an alley way.
And in the alley right on the side of the road near some garbage cans was the body of a young woman.
They found a female who had her clothes in disarray. They'd been pulled up. I think her shirt was pulled up over her head.
Her pants were pulled down. Laying on her side. She had black shoes. But only one was on.
The other shoe was off. I believe it was her left foot. That shoe was off to the side underneath one
of the nearby bushes. She had quite a few injuries. I saw a lot of what we define as sharp force injuries,
in other words, stab wounds or incised wounds. These are sharply demarcated wounds that come from a knife
or another sharp object. She wasn't entirely decapitated. But a lot of the organs in the anterior neck were severed.
There were slashes on her right breast, a slash right here. There was a cut in her behind on her butt.
Her shoulder was cut. There were nails missing. And there were quite a few injuries to her hands.
And these were injuries that you might expect someone would sustain fighting off someone attacking
them, especially with a knife. She had at least three or injuries to both of her hands
that were sustained essentially in fighting off her attacker. It really told a story of how she
must have fought for her life. NANCY GRACE: From the nature of her wounds and the crime scene,
it's likely the victim was killed elsewhere. Considering that her neck was cut and a lot of the major blood vessels,
there was not a lot of blood at the scene. The type of injuries that she had, the cut to her neck--
she had a severe cut to her jugular vein that would have caused a lot of bleeding.
There would have been a lot of blood where she was killed. And there just wasn't that much blood there in the alley.
So I think what it was that she was thrown out in the alley. Just kind of discarded like garbage.
NANCY GRACE: Officers recognized the victim and confirm her identity through items in her pockets.
She was known to the Aurora Police Department. In fact, there was some patrol officers
that initially recognized her and recalled having contacts with her in the recent past.
She was known to be a prostitute. When they were handling the body, within one of the pockets--
I believe of the jacket-- there was a birth certificate in there for a Tangie Lynn Sims.
And that was one of their initial identifications of who this woman possibly was.
When they pulled the coat off of her, they found in one of the pockets there was an envelope from her mom.
I thought about that maybe she was trying to get a job. And she needed her birth certificate.
And that's what her mom had sent her. And she wrote a little note. I love you, mama.
NANCY GRACE: Police discover another piece of paper in the alley. MIKE PRINCE: There was a handwritten note nearby.
It wasn't in one of her pockets. It was near where her body was dumped. A handwritten note for a temp services
with a phone number on it. STEVE CONNOR: We have several those along in East Colfax Corridor.
So if I need work quick so I can get food to eat or find a place to stay, you can go in there
and it's, like, lines of people. And you just fill out a form. And they take you to a job site.
So it could have been hers. It could have been his. NANCY GRACE: The forensics team collects
the notes and other evidence from the scene before the body is moved. KIRK MITCHELL: The police in a circumstance
like that, they take trash bag, they'll cut the leaves. It all is evidence. They number the evidence.
And there was numbers all over the street. MIKE PRINCE: There were no fingerprints found as far
as potential suspect prints and nor surfaces to be processed to be able to find those prints.
There was no murder weapon found. MICHAEL DOBERSON: In this particular case, we know that there was a struggle.
One of the things about violent crimes is that very often part of the victim is transferred to the perpetrator
and part of the perpetrator is transferred to the victim. And so we collected broken fingernails.
And so apparently they were broken scratching someone or fighting back. So the possibility that this contained the perpetrator's DNA
was very strong. So obviously we collected that. NANCY GRACE: The area of Aurora where Tangie's body is found
is known as a crime hotspot. MIKE PRINCE: Aurora is, I think, the third largest city in Colorado.
It's about 400,000 folks. MITCH MORRISSEY: A lot of people at the time that Denver started to really change
and started to see the costs go up, a lot of people moved out of Denver and into Aurora that could afford to live there.
A lot of those were the criminals that we had in Denver early in my career. And now they were living in Aurora.
MIKE PRINCE: Ever since the 1960s, it used to be a main thoroughfare for tourists
to go to the mountains. And it was a thriving area of motels and places to stop off on the way to.
Once the I-70 freeway opened up, the Colfax corridor as they call, it had kind of fallen on hard times.
And it's kind of remained that way. STEVE CONNOR: As far as large cities go, it's relatively safe.
But there are pockets of places that have their crime problems. There's between 350,000, 400,000 in population
ranging from poverty level to a relatively affluent level. KIRK MITCHELL: The East Colfax Avenue
Corridor had a lot of crime. Prostitution. Drug dealing. I don't know how many times I've been on Colfax Avenue
doing a story about a murder. NANCY GRACE: Officers attend the autopsy. And it's evident whoever attacked Tangie Sims clearly
did not want her to live. Her head had about 12 stab wounds. In her neck, there were 2 large incised wounds.
All in all, she had about 20 sharp force injuries. She had about 6 stab wounds to the back of her head, which
actually fractured her skull and extended into her brain causing fairly severe brain injuries.
Did he start out cutting her? I don't know. He was probably beating her first, and she was resisting.
So he at that point probably went to the knife thing. Well over half of her fingernails were missing,
were torn off. Also indicative of a struggle. Clearly, she was alive and conscious
when she was being stabbed because she had defensive wounds. The fact that she held up her hands
and tried to save herself with her bare hands against a knife and the kind of wounds that I saw in her hands.
I've seen a lot of murder victims. I've seen a lot of autopsy photos. And this is one of the most brutal stabbings
that I can remember seeing. We usually send blood and vitreous fluid from the eye.
We also sent some muscle tissue just in case we needed more extensive DNA testing.
Ultimately through fingerprints, we were able to determine that, in fact, that was Tangie Sims.
NANCY GRACE: Detectives notify Tangie's relatives and launch a major investigation.
They tried to reach out to Tangie's mother, who was living in Hixson, that her phone at the time
was not receiving calls. So they had reached out to the local agency-- I don't know if it was Chattanooga--
and had coordinated with them to have them go out and speak with her directly and break
the unfortunate news to her. There were so many candidates, so many suspects. She was doing this on a regular basis,
ripping off very dangerous people. NANCY GRACE: The viciousness displayed in the murder
of Tangie Sims is beyond what most investigators have ever seen. Is the perpetrator's brutality driven
by Tangie's fight for her life? Or is he just a sadistic killer? As we see next on "Bloodline Detectives,"
violence often creates injuries for both the victim and the killer, leaving a blood trail that could
lead police straight to him. October, 1996, Aurora Police in Colorado start an investigation into the murder of tanji Tangie Sims,
a sex worker found brutally stabbed to death in an alley. The victim of a vicious attack, Tangie
is well-known to law enforcement. Tangie Sims came from Hixson, Tennessee. Small town.
She came from a very staunch religious background. In her younger years she worked
at Bojangles, which I understand is a popular fried chicken spot. And she'd also had two children, which at the time of her death,
her children were very young. They were, I believe, five and three and were back in Tennessee living with family members.
She was an unfortunate young woman that was in a situation that and is very hard to get out of.
She was addicted to narcotics. That forced her then into a lifestyle that was unsafe for her to be in.
And being a street level prostitute is very hard. And it's very dangerous. And especially on that corridor.
STEVE CONNOR: The drive is today I need to obtain my whatever drug of choice she had at the time.
Or I'm hungry. I need food. I need to do this. Or I need a place to stay. It costs $30 for the day at the hotel room.
She lived for the moment because tomorrow or the next day was foreign to her. She was moving around some of the motels
on Colfax, one of which was the Boleana, which was kind of a rundown motel over about Colfax.
She was in a dating relationship with a young man by the name of Duane Gregory. It was at right around the time that she was murdered that she
was staying there with Gregory. NANCY GRACE: Tangie Sims had survived an earlier scrape with death.
He was shot five times, including in the brain and in the back. And traces of those bullets were still lodged in her body.
MIKE PRINCE: From time to time, she would be in a wheelchair as a result of the wounds
that she had sustained that she had difficulty from time to time being able to stand, being able to walk.
STEVE CONNOR: She walked with a limp and was partially paralyzed. But the wheelchair aspect was only on again off again.
So I don't know if she used it for times when her body just didn't carry her and she just used it
or if it was a prop for her. I really don't know. KIRK MITCHELL: She would be on the street in a wheelchair.
Her regular Johns would come up to her. She would get out of the wheelchair. And she was able to hobble into the alley, do her business,
and then people would just know to leave that wheelchair alone. MIKE PRINCE: It was believed that the shooting
was possibly drug related. To be involved in a shooting, I would suspect would make anyone
to be able to survive that scared enough to hopefully re-evaluate their life, but at the very least
to get out of whatever situation they were in, which I think she tried to do. She gets out of Tennessee.
She comes to Colorado. But unfortunately falls into the same cycle of getting into prostitution, getting into drugs.
The same troubles that she had experienced before. MITCH MORRISSEY: It didn't surprise me
that Ms. Sims, being in that area, had that lifestyle. That's just something that goes along with that part of Colfax.
MIKE PRINCE: When she would turn tricks, which is just terminology for committing acts
of prostitution, that while she would do that she was known to rip off her customers, generally
for money without performing any sort of service in return. So they suspected that that may have upset quite a few people.
And there may have been some folks out there to, I guess, seek revenge on her. NANCY GRACE: Investigators receive the forensics report.
The killer left his blood at the crime scene. You don't know what is and what is not evidence.
So you kind of just cast a broad net, and you just bring it back and evaluate it.
One of the items they brought back was a leaf and in plastic bag. A garbage bag.
I knew that there was blood on clothing of Tangie Sims as well as a plastic bag and some plant
material that was near her. MIKE PRINCE: Fortunately for us, the person who had killed her,
who had stabbed her, had cut himself and left some blood droplets behind on her clothing,
and also nearby. STEVE CONNOR: When we discovered that the blood on the leaf matched the blood on the trash bag,
it was contributed by an unknown male, at that point I knew that is our suspect.
NANCY GRACE: Police start canvassing the area where her body was found and start speaking
with Tangie's known associates. MIKE PRINCE: They had consulted with, not necessarily undercover means,
but there were officers who worked the Colfax area. That was their primary spot, whether it be
patrolling in a car or on foot. There were some foot patrol officers that they had spoken with.
Who was who, who was friends with Tangie, who she may have been associating with.
They immediately started going out to interview other prostitutes, folks that loiter along Colfax
Avenue that may have known her. And sure enough, they did find several people who did.
They would check the area neighborhood to see if anyone had heard anything, seen anything.
They had located a couple of neighbors who indicated seeing a lighter colored Cadillac that
was parked nearby. And this was the evening before. So on October 23. KIRK MITCHELL: It was a black man with a goatee.
A very thin white woman with light colored hair. One man said he was walking by and this man
was straddling a woman. He also heard them arguing. MIKE PRINCE: The neighbors had seen this, decided not
to really pry any further, but went along their way, or stayed within the house and didn't check on it any further.
KIRK MITCHELL: That Cadillac would loom large in this investigation. Police would track down Cadillacs
all over the city looking for the right one that might be connected to this man.
NANCY GRACE: Investigators are anxious to speak with Duane Gregory, Tangie Sims's boyfriend.
And they arranged to question him. MIKE PRINCE: At the time, there was a warrant
for him unrelated to that case. They had found him. And he was arrested on that warrant.
When he was arrested, they saw that there were several knives in the room that he was staying in.
When they contacted him and photographed him, they saw that there was a stab wound to his buttocks.
He indicated that Ms. Sims had done that to him, whether it was-- the stories were anywhere from they were joking
to there was an actual fight. This raised a lot of suspicion as Ms. Sims had also,
among the multiple stab wounds that she had received, one of them was to her buttocks.
And they believed that perhaps this was vengeful on behalf of Mr. Gregory getting back at her
for what she had done. They went and obtained a court order to obtain Mr. Gregory's DNA he acknowledged that she
was involved in prostitution. He denied having any involvement as far as pimping her or reaping any of the benefits from it.
KIRK MITCHELL: His nickname street name was Taz. They had this really strange relationship.
And in one instance, Tangie would draw one of the Johns into her hotel room. Taz would be hiding in the closet.
He would jump out, accuse the man of assaulting his girlfriend, steal their money,
and force them out of the house nude. It was a common theme that she was doing this on a regular basis, ripping
off very dangerous people. And I thought, ultimately, that's what happened to Tangie
is in a rage her boyfriend/pimp killed her or one of these people that she had stolen money from.
Several witnesses came forward and said, Taz, the boyfriend had abused her. The next door neighbor at the motel
overheard them screaming, threatening her life, and things getting thrown around in the room.
And the discussion was over money. His information was that, yes, he was with her
on the evening of October 23. But at some point she had left and had never come back.
And he couldn't quite explain where she had gone. NANCY GRACE: Tangie Sims's dangerous lifestyle
is already creating a huge number of leads. Adding to that is testimony to police by a close friend.
Testimony that adds further fuel to the investigation. There was an interview done with one
of her close associates. KIRK MITCHELL: A friend of hers named Dana claims to be the last person to see Tangie alive.
They went to Kentucky Fried Chicken. MIKE PRINCE: This was the night of October 23.
They were in the Colfax area. This friend had described Tangie turning tricks, performing prostitution.
Multiple customers. KIRK MITCHELL: She watched as Tangie went to two Johns. And the second one was somebody that was in a diesel truck.
And they didn't have the trailers behind it. MIKE PRINCE: Unfortunately, the description was vague.
It was a semi truck without the trailer attached. And it was green. I believe green and black in color.
And that was it. And there may have been a blue sedan associated with it. But this friend wasn't sure.
She wasn't paying that close attention as far as what Tangie was doing only because Tangie was
doing what she normally did. Those were the best descriptions they could get. There were no plates.
Dana said it was between 2:00 and 3:00 AM on October 24, 1996. That was the last official witness that saw her alive.
NANCY GRACE: Could it be Tangie Sims was killed by a random attacker? I didn't see any evidence that they were tracking down trucks.
And looking in that direction, as much as they were looking at the gang element,
there were so many candidates. So many suspects. MIKE PRINCE: Hundreds and hundreds of pages
of interviews, contacts. Some of which were fruitful. Others were not. But they tracked down everything and everyone.
NANCY GRACE: A person with Tangie Sims's lifestyle comes in contact with dozens, if not hundreds, of people.
Many of them just the kind of people police want to question. For bloodline detectives, this means a gigantic game
of suspect elimination. A strategy of chasing down leads and potential suspects then eliminating people who may have
an alibi until only a few . Remain that's next on "Bloodline Detectives." December 1996.
Aurora, Colorado police are investigating the brutal murder of Tangie Sims, a 25-year-old sex worker discovered
stabbed dead in a vicious attack October 24. We had a synopsis of what had occurred.
We knew that it was a brutal murder of a young woman. We knew that she was last seen in the Colfax corridor
between Denver and Aurora right there on the border not far out of Denver. They were aware of her.
She had a criminal history. You kind of wonder what kind of person would do this.
She suffered at least 20 sharp force injuries, likely in a very short period of time.
NANCY GRACE: Her lifestyle's creating a complex and expansive investigation with many false leads.
MITCH MORRISSEY: You go from a suspect group of your entire community, and you try to narrow it down.
There are extensive interviews that are done, again, with patrol officers that are
familiar with the Colfax area. A lot of folks from jail, whether they get arrested
for something and they want to try and get some sort of help in exchange for any information, they would reach out.
There were numerous interviews done at the jails as well. They talked to everybody.
They went to halfway houses. They went to the street talking to all the known figures.
And Tangie had a wide circle of street people, friends, drug dealers, customers, pimps.
One guy, police arrested him. You know, asked him why were you saying that you killed Tangie?
Somebody said that they were actually a witness of her being stabbed to death in a slash to the neck in a car,
and shot to death, and her body dumped, and that she helped her dump the body. It was one person giving a story about somebody else.
They were vicious people with long criminal records. Any one of them could have done it.
It had been worked for years. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of interviews. Some of the more prominent ones that came up--
there was a Rolando Bryant, who went by Baby Jesus. That was his nickname on the street.
KIRK MITCHELL: Contrary to his name, he was a very vicious gang member and drug dealer
who had a reputation for having vengeance on people that ripped him off. MIKE PRINCE: He was driving a light colored Cadillac, which
seemed consistent with what some folks had seen in the alleyway. Also claims that he had bragged of killing Tangie.
He had supplied her with drugs, about $500 worth, and she never paid him back. She had not sold it.
She had smoked it away. Whatever it may be. But she never paid him back. So for that reason he was upset and looking for her.
I don't know if what he was doing was trying to get a street rep so that, yeah, you mess with me
and this is the result. He used it to his advantage. NANCY GRACE: The DNA results come back from the lab.
And Duane Gregory, Tangie's boyfriend, is cleared of the crime. MIKE PRINCE: Within several months,
submitting that DNA for comparisons to the blood that was found at the scene that ultimately
eliminated him from suspicion. KIRK MITCHELL: And they actually took blood samples
from the boyfriend test. No. They took it from Baby Jesus. The gang banger. No. They took all those steps to either include or exclude
people and none of those gang members, or pimps, or boyfriends, street people had anything to do with.
They had put it into CODIS. And there were no matches. KIRK MITCHELL: They had no match to this killer.
NANCY GRACE: Detectives run out of suspects. And the case eventually winds down.
But it's constantly reviewed over the years. KIRK MITCHELL: When all the major suspects are cleared,
you're waiting for new leads to take that the case further down the road. MIKE PRINCE: It had been worked for years.
Hundreds and hundreds of pages of interviews. I can imagine the most frustrating part
is to cover every single angle possible and still not have a suspect. MITCH MORRISSEY: They had done a lot of work
to try to solve the case. They had run DNA in the criminal system. They had run DNA in the National DNA database
in the United States. They had tried the profile all over the world. Anybody that had a DNA database, they had tried it.
And they had not found the person that was responsible for murdering Ms. Sims. MIKE PRINCE: I know once it's entered into CODIS,
it remains there. So if by chance a match does come in through another entry, it would be a hit.
So it's pretty much a continuous cycle within the system. The case had gone cold in the late '90s.
Approximately 1998/99. From time to time in the years that followed, there were some tips that would come in, whether from jail
or folks on the street, some that were followed up on, but never really produced much of anything.
I had taken the case in 2014 for potential follow-up on the blood evidence that had been left behind.
YVONNE WOODS: Every time there was a technology change, that agency was on top of that change
and had the evidence retested with the newest technologies. MIKE PRINCE: It is disappointing.
It just led me to believe that perhaps the person that had done it was possibly deceased
or had never been arrested for a serious enough offense that they had to provide a DNA sample.
YVONNE WOODS: As far as a crime laboratory, we had exhausted everything we could have possibly
done for this particular case. NANCY GRACE: In 2019, detectives learn about a groundbreaking new technology and work
with United Data Connect. My perspective is on a cold case, that work's already done.
I'm going to focus on where the case went to and then how can I advance that case to the next level.
Back in 2018, I was approached by Mitch Morrissey, who has a company called United Data Connect, about working
some of our cases. And I said they won't fund-- our agency cannot fund that. So I contacted Mike Mills, who is the Executive Director
for Metro Denver Stoppers. We proposed to him that could the funds that they normally
use for rewards for people who provide information that we divert some of those funds into using United Data Connect to do
the testing on the DNA and then subsequently, through research genealogy, to try and resolve cases that way.
Familial DNA is where you use the software in the criminal database, and you look
for first degree relatives. Genetic genealogy is actually done in commercial databases people voluntarily put their DNA into.
They are not criminals necessarily. What you do there is you do a comparison between your crime
scene sample compared to the matches of the people that are in there. And based on that, you build family trees.
So if you're usually within a third degree cousin, third cousin, you may very well
be able to solve the case. What we were looking for was, did they have a good sample of the person they
believe committed the murder? STEVE CONNOR: The evidence is there. The technology wasn't.
Now the technology is far enough advanced to where we can use the old evidence with the new technology and get either a lead, or an answer,
or a resolution. I don't have this DNA in any of the criminal databases. But there's a better chance if it's in the databases
online for them to research it find it for us. We got very good results. NANCY GRACE: Finally, after decades,
investigators get a hit on the database, and with it, a solid lead. Bloodline detectives are now operating in the forensic world
they know best. And as we say next, it's this momentum that drives them to catch a vicious killer.
It's 2019. Detectives leading the exhaustive investigation into the 1996 murder of 25-year-old Tangie Sims
turn to genetic genealogy to push the case forward. Almost immediately they get information.
There's a match. We got a match to what appeared to be a first cousin on one side of the family
and a second cousin on the other side of the family. You start to investigate those families.
You start to plug the people into the genetic trees. And you start to, you know, really
have people that you can go and talk to figure out who the suspect is. The individual we are looking for's first cousins
are in North Dakota. Second cousin is in North Dakota. And Prince and Connor got on a plane, almost within,
I think, a day or so, and they were on their way to North Dakota. MIKE PRINCE: It was initially somewhat
of a difficult conversation to try and explain why we were there. We gave some very basic information
that were what we were investigating and how it had kind of come back to his trail
through genealogy that he was certainly not a suspect. His family, direct family, was not suspected.
But someone, maybe first cousin or beyond, could potentially have been involved.
He was more than willing to help and had a phenomenal knowledge of his family. For the first interview, to have that much information,
it saved us a lot of time. MITCH MORRISSEY: The thing you have to keep in mind when you're interviewing a first cousin,
you have to be careful when you're dealing with a very close relative that they may tip off the person that's actually
your person of interest. We knew we were looking for a male that had come from the original DNA profile.
Half the first cousins were female. So we had eliminated them. And I believe there were a couple
that given the age range, they would have been far too young. It was whittled down.
And through checking backgrounds on some of the folks, we had encountered one of the first cousins
by the name of Wesley Backman. We looked into his background. We learned that, unfortunately, he had passed away years prior.
He had died in 2008. But there were still some living family members, some of which
live in the Bismarck, North Dakota area. We traveled to Bismarck to contact the sister.
And she kind of gave us a kind of a background history on her brother. Wesley, who unfortunately was estranged from his family--
there was a very strained relationship between them. It was a strained relationship with other families,
including his own mother who was also passed. From her we learned that he had a daughter that was in Idaho.
After we came back from North Dakota, it was a few weeks later we decided we need a trip to Idaho.
She's very standoffish. But the minute we bring up, you know, her dad and why we're there, very cooperative.
MIKE PRINCE: We sat down with her one evening to try and get more background on her father.
He worked as a trucker. Had also lived in the Colorado area in the early 90s, the same timeframe as Tangie's murder.
KIRK MITCHELL: He married a 17-year-old girl in 1977. On their wedding night, he beat her while she
still had her wedding dress on. And that was throughout their marriage. He was an alcoholic, used drugs, and he'd come home and beat her
until he fell asleep. MITCH MORRISSEY: He actually preferred the open road. Kind of a truck driver type who liked his alcohol and drugs
more than he liked his family. She said the last time she saw him was when she was graduating
from the eighth grade. And he basically told her he liked to drink and do drugs more than he did the family.
And she never laid eyes on him again. NANCY GRACE: Detectives Connor and Prince explain they'll need her DNA.
In order to prove that he was responsible for this murder, she was really the only way to get his DNA
to show that he was the person that fathered her, was the person that left the DNA at the crime scene.
Now with today's technology, it can be obtained just through a buccal swab, which is a swab
on the inner side of the cheek. She gave them willingly and wanted to know, before we left, wanted to know when you get the information,
you tell me because I'd like to know. NANCY GRACE: So often the betrayed will haunt
the betrayer even after death. As we say next and "Bloodline Detectives," that's
exactly what happens when a daughter is abandoned by an absent and cruel father.
August 2019. Investigators in Aurora, Colorado reopened the 1996 murder of a wheelchair-bound sex worker,
25-year-old Tangie Sims. And now using the latest forensic science, they close in on a prime suspect through genetic genealogy.
MIKE PRINCE: We get back to Colorado. That's the end of August of 2019. And I submit it back to the Colorado
Bureau of Investigation to agent Woods. The submitting agency, the Aurora Police Department,
was giving me a sample from an individual that is thought to be the biological daughter of the contributor of the DNA
found at the crime scene. The exact statistics were like 99.997% of the population.
MITCH MORRISSEY: There is nobody in the world other than Mr. Backman who matched that.
His DNA was lying in that alley. And that's how we knew he was responsible for this murder.
NANCY GRACE: Detective Prince Backman's daughter to let her know. MIKE PRINCE: She was certainly upset by the thought
that her father would do such a thing. But at the same time, given what she knew about him,
it didn't necessarily come across as a surprise. She said, in essence, that it wouldn't surprise
her if he actually did that. His arrest were relatively minor. He had had a DUI.
He had failed to appear for another court hearing. He also had one for eluding police,
basically escaping or trying to drive away from the police. But that was only charged as a misdemeanor.
By law, he never had to provide a DNA sample. And that's why we never had him. NANCY GRACE: Although police cannot
confirm exactly what happened, they have a likely scenario. I'm guessing that she saw an opportunity to make some money,
either to purchase more drugs, or find, you know, food to eat or a place to stay.
Went off thinking this is just another opportunity. And I'll be back in 15, 20 minutes, whatever.
Something horrible happened. She got into his truck. And then I don't know what happened after that.
He got real angry. And he took it out on her. No matter what her status in life was, a prostitute, a drug addict, no matter what it was,
the way he treated her, stabbing her the way that he did repeatedly, deep wounds to her face,
to her head, cutting her throat, almost cutting off her breasts, and then throwing her an alley like garbage.
MIKE PRINCE: Me, personally, in my experience, that's not a one-time thing. That is something that has reared
its ugly head at another time. And when and where, I wish we knew. NANCY GRACE: Finally, investigators
are able to Tangie Sims's family some answers. The closure that does come with the work that we did here
is they know who did this to their mother. And they know what has happened to the individual who did this.
They don't have to worry about him ever getting out of prison and having to go to parole hearings,
those kinds of things. They know that this man brutally murdered her. And that he's dead.
And that's the kind of closure that she got. NANCY GRACE: Detectives realized traditional
investigative and DNA methods would never provide the name. There was nowhere else to go.
And it, unfortunately, probably would have remained that way had it not been with the assistance
of the genetic genealogy. STEVE CONNOR: If it wasn't for the genetic genealogy on this case, it would still be an open, unsolved case.
KIRK MITCHELL: In this particular case, justice was postponed so long that it never impacted him.
I think that the justice here is more of a message to other killers, other criminals that
are out there. And they should be looking over their shoulders because genetic DNA testing is going to solve more cases.
NANCY GRACE: So often it's the most vulnerable among us who are cruelly victimized by monsters
like Wesley Backman. Tangie Sims is one of those people, forgotten by most, but not by bloodline detectives.
Their determination to find his killer coupled with the use of cutting-edge forensic technology
make sure Tangie Sims and so many like her will always be remembered. I'm Nancy Grace.
Thank you for being with us on "Bloodline Detectives."

Brief Summary

The brutal murder of Tangie Sims in 1996 is solved decades later through genetic genealogy.

Key points

The Discovery of Tangie Sims. In October 1996, the body of Tangie Sims, a young woman, is found brutally murdered in an alley in Aurora, Colorado.
The Investigation Begins. Detectives chase down every lead in the complex investigation of Tangie's murder, but the case goes cold.
A Note from Mom. A handwritten note from Tangie's mother found in her pocket adds a poignant layer to the tragedy.
The Brutality of the Murder. Forensic experts reveal the horrific details of Tangie's murder, highlighting the violence she endured.
A Life of Struggle. Tangie Sims, a sex worker with a troubled past, faced numerous challenges before her tragic death.
The Brutal Murder of Tangie Sims. In December 1996, the murder of 25-year-old Tangie Sims shocked Aurora, Colorado.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

She must have fought for her life.

Describing the victim's struggle during the attack.

0:40WatchApr 1, 2021

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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