Bloodline Detectives - Episode 5 - March Massacre | Forensic Files

I'm Nancy Grace, and this is "Bloodline Detectives." Back before forensic science existed,
it was good police work that solved cases and dead ends were common. Barbara Becker, a mother and housewife,
was murdered on an ordinary day 40 years ago. So how, with countless leads exhausted,
can a case like hers finally come to a close? The answer is science. In this case, genetic genealogy, which
gives police a tool that lets old evidence, like blood, tell its story. It's like finally knowing how to speak a new language,
and the speakers of this language, the bloodline detectives, are born from our need
to bring justice to victims and closure to families, who might never receive it.
March 1979, La Jolla, California, a horrific sight greets two young boys as they arrive home from school to meet
their mother Barbara Becker. Two sons, age 7 and 9, found Barbara's body in the living
room surrounded by blood. NANCY GRACE: Their mother Barbara has been viciously assaulted.
Her throat had been slit, she had been beaten. There's quite a bit of blood. There was blood throughout the house, blood in the sink,
and there's blood in the toilet as well. NANCY GRACE: As the case progresses, detectives examine every possible avenue of inquiry.
A block and a half in every direction, we contacted every single resident. The killing of Barbara was brutal and evil but also
senseless. NANCY GRACE: Eventually, Barbara's case goes cold. It was really a crime with no witnesses.
We had no motive, no evidence that would reveal the identity. This is the story of the murder of Barbara Becker,
the circumstances surrounding her brutal killing, and how police commitment and the revolutionary new science
of genetic genealogy eventually leads the bloodline detectives to uncover her killer.
[THEME MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: March 1979, La Jolla, California. As two young boys returning from school at lunchtime
open the door of their house on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 21, 1979, what greets
them is a horrific sight. Barbara's two sons, aged 7 and 9, had come home from school
and found Barbara's body in the living room. They normally came in through a side garage door,
and they went to that door and went to go in, and the doors were locked. That was unusual, but their mother's car
was there in the garage, a Volvo station wagon. So they went around to the front door and it was unlocked.
They went through it, and immediately saw their mother immediately to their left totally saturated in blood,
deceased on the carpet. They'd only gone a few feet into the house, and I don't know how much they realized
what had gone on at the time. I don't know how much they understood that she had been killed.
So they ran to a next door neighbor's house for help. NANCY GRACE: Neighbors immediately raised the alarm.
The call came from a neighbor of the victim. The initial response would be by San Diego PD patrol officers
from Northern Division. They get there and their job is primarily to secure the scene, to make sure nobody leaves,
no evidence walks away, nobody tampers with the scene. NANCY GRACE: When police arrive at the house
at the intersection of Glenwick Lane and Bordeaux Avenue in the northern suburbs of La Jolla,
they began to try and establish just what has happened. Of course, in the case, it was obvious it was a murder.
Then they would secure the scene, and they would call out the homicide team, who would respond and assume the investigation.
We received a briefing from the patrol sergeant that was there. They'd gone through the front door, it was not locked,
a neighbor adult had been in the house to observe the body the two boys had reported, and they left.
We were a four person homicide team, and we entered the house, and did what we call a walk through,
where you walk in and single-file observe the crime scene. So if you do any interviews, have any witnesses,
you have an idea of exactly what you saw. The scene was a single detached house on a corner.
The house was neat and well-kept. There were only a few areas of disturbance. Of course, one of the areas was near Barbara's body.
There was a struggle. There was a table overturned, some table legs were broken off, things were moved about in the house.
And then also there was a television that was on the floor, which did not look like it belonged there.
The body of Barbara was found on the floor on the carpet in the living room. Barbara had obviously fought hard for her life.
There was a large pool of blood next to her. Obviously, it was a terrible act of violence.
What led to this act, was it a burglary gone bad, somebody interrupted him in the home, was it
a sexual assault that turned into a murder, or was it somebody murdering for the sake of committing murder?
Usually when the throat's cut, then the person's on the floor, then the blood pools out, but it's not unusual.
In a stabbing scene, there's a lot of blood. It was shocking in that it was so violent.
NANCY GRACE: From the scene, the homicide detectives are able to tell how the attack likely unfolded.
All her clothing was intact. There was no obvious sexual event at all that appeared to occur.
From an investigative standpoint, it looked like the suspect went into actual killing frenzy.
He just went berserk once she resisted. I assume, he attacked her and she was defending herself
and that's when he stabbed her in the head. She was probably backing up, and it looks like he trapped her right in the corner of the room,
and that's where he slit her throat. I believe that whoever did this murder wanted to make sure
she was dead and that was his final blow. NANCY GRACE: In an unusual twist, the killer leaves the murder weapon at the scene.
The murder weapon was a knife that was found by the sofa. I don't know how if you'd say it was drenched in blood.
It was about 10 feet from her body, and if you walked away from where her body was located
towards the back of the house, it was dropped on the carpet right at the end of a couch in the same room her body was,
and it had blood on the handle and on the blade. NANCY GRACE: Police do a thorough forensic search of
the house and surrounding area. Barbara had fought hard, but in a small area of the house.
But then, throughout other areas of the house, there was a blood trail, which obviously could
not have been made by Barbara. There was a blood trail that went from the vicinity
of the body through the room into a kitchen that was on the left as you go out of the living room.
In the kitchen, there was blood everywhere, very heavy bleeding. It appeared that they had injured their own hands
or that some injury to their body, and it appeared to be the suspect's blood trail we were
following through the house. It appeared that he did his first clean up in the kitchen
and went from there down the hall into a bathroom, so he wouldn't be bleeding when he left the house.
But he left a good trail of blood. We took a lot of bloody fingerprints, and in the toilet were toilet paper and napkins
that were all bloody. Took bloody towels that appeared to have perhaps the suspect's blood on them.
They took swabs of the blood stains in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the hallway.
They took items that had been moved by the suspect. There was a small TV near Mrs. Becker's body.
Primarily, what they're doing in 1979 is they're not taking them for DNA purposes.
They're taking them to fingerprint. They're taking them to blood type. They're looking for hair and fiber evidence.
If there's a fiber they find, they can maybe match it to the suspect's carpet at his house,
something like that. If there's a hair they find, they can maybe match it to the suspect's hair.
That sort of thing. NANCY GRACE: Investigators from the coroner's office removed the body from the crime scene for autopsy.
The coroner arrives at the request of the homicide unit after they've done their initial assessment of the scene,
and the coroner would take custody of the body and possession. They would transport that body to the coroner's office.
They preserved the body, preserved the evidence on the body, bagged the hands, because sometimes people
fight and get fibers, things like that on the hands of the victim's. Bag the body, and take it back and do an autopsy a day
or two later. After they complete the investigation at the scene and all the evidence is collected,
that investigator goes to a county mortuary to do an investigation and photograph
the body and injuries and look for any trace evidence. NANCY GRACE: A major murder investigation
is launched with a dedicated team organized to track down the killer. There's also wondering how safe the neighborhood is going
to be after a crime like that. It's always that concern is that there's a serial killer on the loose.
NANCY GRACE: In 1979, San Diego Police in the suburban area of La Jolla are involved in a massive murder effort
to try and establish who murdered Barbara Becker. Her two young sons discover her body
when they get home from school around 1:30 on Wednesday, March 21st. So who was Barbara Becker?
And why would anyone want to kill her? Barbara Becker was a 37-year-old housewife.
She was married to a doctor that worked at the Veterans hospital nearby. She had two young sons, nine years old and seven years old.
She was an upstanding member of the community. She played on a local football team with other women
at the hospital, and there was nothing in her past that would suggest that she would be brutally murdered.
She was active in the community. She was a stay-at-home mom, but she was very active out and about when the kids were at school.
She was a soccer mom, and she was involved in some other things in the community.
Very well-liked, no enemies to speak of. When you have a crime like this that occurs in the home,
initially you think, well, it could be a burglary. It could be somebody breaking in for a sex assault.
It could be somebody coming over to settle a score. And so the detectives would have tracked down and investigated
all of those avenues of investigation with Mrs. Becker to see where the investigation takes them.
At the time of this murder in 1979, our homicide team, we had one of the highest solve rates,
meaning we solved them by arrest, in the entire United States, but we followed basically the 48 hour rule.
To begin with, you always work nothing else but that for a minimum of 48 hours, and most of that
was around the clock because the faster you can work it while the information is newest, you can find witnesses
otherwise you may not find, or you can find suspects before they flee the area many times.
I think the culture of the police department has always been that they emphasize
these type of investigations, and even when they're short on resources, they put everything they
have into the murder cases. Going way back as far as I've been in the department,
they've always taken the cases very seriously. We were so procedural, we always operated with one sergeant as a supervisor
and three detectives. And we all had assigned jobs. We would get together on a daily basis and crosstalk,
meaning what have you done, what have you found out every day. As an investigation went on, we'd
compare notes so everybody knew where the investigation was going and what was new or not.
And we'd say, hey, what about this? What about that? Compare notes and move on. So our organization that we followed in San Diego
with the dedicated homicide teams was very effective. NANCY GRACE: So what are the investigators
first thoughts about the profile of the killer? It appeared to me to be a male because it was so overwhelming
obviously from the attack. The type of person I would only venture to guess could have been a burglar with intent
to steal out of the house, or it could have been sexual assault. It would have to be somebody that could overcome
Mrs. Becker's resistance. She was not an old woman by any means. She was 37 years old.
It seems like she put up a fight, so somebody would have to overcome her resistance.
It would have to be somebody that was cold-hearted to kill a woman in her house when probably
a threat would have sufficed for whatever they were in there to do. NANCY GRACE: Police concentrate at first on those closest
to her, her family. Most murders are committed by people the victim knows, so they would go to family members.
They would have gone to the husband. When someone is killed like this, the significant other is a suspect.
Many crimes are motivated for domestic reasons, domestic disputes, so that's something
that has to be looked at regardless of whether it ultimately turns out to be true or false.
It's one of the first steps that they would have taken. Her husband was a physician at the Veterans Administration
Hospital, which is only about a 7 to 10 minute drive from their house. And the house was in a very upscale neighborhood,
and he was the head of a department at the hospital. We were aware that he was at work when he was notified
and he rushed home and that's when I interviewed him. I asked him where he was, and he said he was at work.
And I asked when he'd left the house, and he said he thought it was about 8:20 because he gave one of his sons a ride to school that day.
Most of the time, his boys would ride bicycles to school. So he dropped his son off at school and went to work
and was there all day. We later interviewed fellow employees and determined he was there all day.
You would definitely want to find out if there was any marital discord, any problems in the marriage.
Had to get personal with him and ask him if he or his wife were having any known sexual relationships with anybody
else besides themselves. We could not find any evidence of that, so we ruled out a jealousy of a relationship
outside of the marriage. So it appeared to us, after I had interviewed him, that he was totally devastated and his emotional reaction was
normal of a family member that had just lost one of their spouses. He was distraught.
So the lead, if it was to lead, investigation into the significant other, the spouse,
quickly showed that he had nothing to do with the crime. NANCY GRACE: The autopsy takes place
and the horrific details of the injuries she sustained are revealed. We would consider there to be two scenes,
the scene would be the crime scene number one, and then the second scene would be the autopsy that
occurred the following day. At the mortuary, they identified like seven or eight slashes, individual slashes,
to her throat. Probably seven different strokes back and forth, back and forth. It was cut several times very deep
all the way to the backbone. She had stab wounds to the top and side of her head.
The wounds that were on her head were all the way to the skull. She had defensive wounds on her hand trying
to fend off the attacker. While she was being stabbed, her fingers were cut almost all the way to the bone.
It's always an indication she put her hands up to defend herself and that she wasn't
going as a willing victim who is surprised. The cause of death was basically bleeding out
from multiple stab wounds, and then the manner of death was a homicide, which is death by the hands of another.
NANCY GRACE: Eager to find out if neighbors have seen or heard anything, officers go door to door.
It was an upscale neighborhood. It was very quiet. It was all residential. It was off the beaten path, which is another thing unusual.
It wasn't by any main thoroughfares, not a lot of foot traffic through the neighborhood.
It was just a quiet, great place to live. A crime of this sort would be rare in that area.
Were you to have a murder in that neighborhood, it would probably be something stemming
from a domestic dispute, not something like this. A block and a half in every direction, the streets
around her house, we contacted every single resident and asked them about anything they'd
seen that day unusual, anybody they'd never seen in the neighborhood, if they'd had any prowlers,
or anything of that nature. We never found anybody that had any information for us.
We had some neighbors that said, oh, there's a woman that looks like she may have been a maid come
into a neighbor's house. We chased down and identified who the maid was, and that her husband drove her there, drop
her off when she worked there. We identified a gardening crew that had been there the day
before the murder and trimmed hedges on her and her husband's property with two assistant workers working for him.
He was totally cooperative. They were totally cooperative. Nothing unusual, but we continue to follow up for weeks.
We were working other cases, but every time we got a break, we'd go back up and try to contact somebody else,
and we found no evidence of who our suspect might have been in all those interviews.
NANCY GRACE: Detectives also begin to concentrate on a number of items related to the crime scene.
I was asked to analyze the evidence, and I probably got involved with that evidence sometime
after the crime scene had occurred. I was given blood stains, clothing items, anything else
that they collected to go ahead and process for either blood or hairs, fibers, whatever kind of trace evidence
we might find that might be significant. My analysis pretty much focused on the blood stains,
and so I would go ahead and type the blood stains that I thought were significant.
I'd have to pick and choose based on the information from the crime scene, and then I would also
go through all of the items and collect all the hair and any fibers that I thought were out of place.
Collect them, package them away, in case they ever got a suspect, that evidence would be
able to be compared later on. In 1979, a lot of the credit to solving murders goes
to old fashioned police work because the technology we have today did not exist in 1979.
So for this case here specifically, we were pretty well limited to trace evidence
and blood and the fingerprints. Fingerprints were used to match people, but you would kind of have to have
a potential suspect in mind before you can make that match. The blood stains that I examined
were the same as Barbara Becker's blood. I did an ABO grouping and something called PGM, which
is phosphoglucomutase, which is a kind of an enzyme that was common testing back in 1979, 1980.
Which is nothing like DNA of today. If you have the suspect, you can match the enzyme with what
the evidence would be. But it was nothing like DNA, where you can say one in a billion or whatever, it's close but not a cigar,
so to speak. That's the only technology we had at that time. So, for example, I'm a type O positive, but about 40%
of the population is an O positive. If the bloodstain at the crime scene was a type A,
I would be excluded as being the source of that blood. But if that type was a type O positive,
I could be the source of that blood, but 40% of the population could be the source of that blood,
so it wouldn't eliminate me, but it wouldn't very strongly link me to that blood either.
So it was very primitive. It was almost just like a screening tool to maybe eliminate some suspects,
focus the attention of investigators if they were doing that testing on those people.
But the tools were very primitive. NANCY GRACE: But despite the best efforts of investigators,
within a couple of years, the case goes cold and police fear they'll never discover
who killed Barbara Becker. As we'll see next, it will take the bloodline detectives
armed with a new forensic technique to track down her killer. By 1981, San Diego Police have run out
of leads in the horrific 1979 stabbing of a young mother Barbara Becker. We tried to do everything to make sure
we left no stone unturned, and that's why we would go back to the cases we hadn't solved
and continued to work them. And that follow up worked many times, there be months and sometimes years
later we'd actually make arrests in them. I mean, the tenacity that you have to have to be a successful homicide investigator
is part of the job, but you don't just do everything you can on a case and drop it and never
come back to it, if possible. It was really a crime with no witnesses, no evidence
at the time that would reveal the identity, we had no motive, and so the case went cold.
NANCY GRACE: The family, however, wants to keep the investigation alive. I left the San Diego Police Department in 1982,
this murder was in 1979, but the family and relatives called the Homicide Division about every 18 months
to two years and stayed in touch with investigators asking, hey, is anything new?
Her brother wrote several letters to the police department inquiring as to the status of the case and whether or not it was still
being actively investigated. I know that in talking to the husband, who mentioned
his children, that they have never forgotten it, and that they were always yearning
for some kind of closure. Her husband never called because it was still emotional for him, and it was other relatives, sisters,
or whatever that would call. Over the years, he'd remarried and moving on with his life
with his sons. I worked quite a few different mystery cases from young women to elderly females that were murdered.
I always kept track of them in my mind, some of them I kept my notes on after, as far as copies,
so I would never forget them. And after I'd left homicide, about every six to eight
months, I'd call the homicide division and ask them, hey, can you do any more on this to follow up,
because I'd never want anybody to forget them. In general, in cold case homicides,
they're unsolved for a reason. So you have a murder case, there's been a lot of effort done at the time
by the detectives and the police departments, any logical lead has already been followed up on and investigated by the time a case comes cold.
So at that point, you need something new, whether that's advance fingerprinting technique,
whether you get a new witness or a confession by someone, or an admission. Maybe sometimes it's just a fresh set of eyes to put pieces
together in a different fashion, but you need something to get past the wall, to get past the area
where you've stalled on the case. Our office and our unit was aware of this case
for a number of years. It stood out because of the victim as being a very low risk, it being inside a house, it had a potential
for physical evidence. So in 2003, the Cold Case Team entered the DNA from the blood drops into CODIS hoping for a match.
At that time, we were getting a lot of hits in CODIS. Of course, that's first time we really started
aggressively using CODIS. There's a DNA database in California that offenders go into.
So when you commit a felony offense, your DNA is taken, it's added to the database, but people
that were committing crimes in 1979, their DNA was not in any database. Their DNA sample was not taken because nobody
knew about DNA at the time. When they compared the sample left at the scene, the unknown DNA profile from that blood,
it didn't hit to anyone in the database. And so now you have a lead, you have a clue,
you know who the person is, you just don't know who that DNA belongs to. What do you do?
You're kind of done. If you can't get a hit in that database, you're back to square one.
It appears there's no match for samples found at the scene at Glenwick Lane all those years ago,
and so yet again, police have reached a dead end in the case of Barbara Becker. That is, until 2018 when San Diego
Police become aware of a revolutionary new crime fighting technology. Genetic genealogy is using a different kind of DNA testing
than is normally used in order to generate a profile that can be uploaded to publicly accessible DNA databases
using death records, birth records, you can build a family tree and find where the suspect is.
We were working for quite a while with our Cold Case unit, and the work that we tended to do for them was a lot of work
on a relatively small number of cases. And myself and another criminalist in the laboratory
were discussing this, and we thought that there was a possibility that there was good DNA
evidence in unsolved crimes that wasn't being worked because nobody knew that it existed.
The Cold Case unit just didn't have the resources to do a systematic screening through unsolved cases
looking for new evidence. They were spending their time working on the cases basically on their desk at the time.
So we got permission from the laboratory management, as well as the people in the homicide unit,
to go down and look through files from unsolved homicides. They had binders full of summaries of unsolved crimes,
so what we do is we would go looking for cases that had good prospect of having a perpetrator DNA,
and I saw that this was a stabbing, which are the cases that I was looking at, and hoping
that person might have cut themselves during the event. So I saw that it was a stabbing, it was unsolved,
so I asked that that case be pulled. It's disturbing certainly. i try to keep a fairly level head about these things
and focus on the information that I need to do to do my job the best that I can.
There was obviously a lot of violence. It was a horrible way to die. I hoped it would be resolved once we got the testing done
and put it in the database. All of the bloodstains came back as male, and the victim was female, and she was eliminated
as the source of that blood. So this was very likely going to be perpetrator blood.
You upload the crime scene sample, and you get a hit to maybe a second cousin, maybe
a first cousin, but you don't know which side of the family it's on, you don't know where it is in the family tree.
You have to build the family tree, identify all of the second cousins, and then start looking who looks more likely to be
a suspect than not. This was a very interesting case because when we entered the offender's DNA
into these databases, and we could also find out approximately what the ancestry
is of the offender. We found out that he's primarily from French Canada, so a lot of the databases that we use in the United
States were not helpful to us because the people were looking for and trying to build on are all in Canada.
We took that DNA, we entered it into the database, and we found out that this person
was closely related to another family called Chartrand. And then from that, we were able to divine who the offender was,
Paul Chartrand. So why would Paul Chartrand kill Barbara Becker? Was he known to the Becker family
at the time of Barbara's murder? What's his motivation? What happened that day? Is he a sexual deviant and did he go
in with the intention to kill? Next, the bloodline detectives will nail down those answers.
NANCY GRACE: By 2018 and with the use of genetic genealogy, San Diego Police identify a suspect, Paul Chartrand,
in the 40-year-old murder La Jolla resident Barbara Becker. When we did a background on Paul Chartrand,
we found out that he was in fact, in San Diego during the time of the crime. We found out that he had a business in La Jolla.
He actually was working for a carpet cleaning company probably three-fourths of a mile from the house.
It was on Ivanhoe Street in La Jolla. We found out Chartrand was actually out on bail for another sexual assault case,
although Barbara was not a sexual assault case. But he was out on bail, and he may have even been,
according to his ex-wife, on the run during the time he committed the crime. The bail I think was surprisingly low for a defense
of that nature, and all I can say is that had he been in jail, Barbara would still be alive.
My guess is he went in either to rape or sexual assault the victim, if he knew who was there,
or he went into burglarize the place, and he was caught inside the house, and he didn't want any witnesses and he went berserk
before he went out and exited. So I can't second guess what he went in for. When he came to the house that day
and grabbed a knife from the kitchen, it was to subdue and ultimately kill Mrs. Becker.
So from that sense, it's certainly an intentional act. It's not an accident. He cut her throat.
This was something he meant to do. Now whether he had that planned when he broke into the house
or it developed when Mrs. Becker was there, we don't know. He had convictions for sexual crimes.
Now whether we can infer that was the reason he went in to Mrs. Becker's house, it's certainly
something that investigators would have to consider. No one saw him, unfortunately.
He would have had to have had a car to get in and out of that neighborhood, because it's
not around any other places. It's off the beaten path. Also, if he was going to steal anything from the house,
he would probably have to have a car to transport it. So I would say the offender had a car,
went there to do a burglary, and it went bad. I think he absolutely thought he'd never be caught.
After he did his time, he moved to Arizona, and I figured he probably thought he got away with it.
It was many, many years. I don't have a clue what was going through his mind, but there is a lot of sick people in the world.
To just kill somebody that violently and go on with their life, well, I hate to say evil,
but I would say that no remorse. Nearly 40 years since the savage assault and murder
of 37-year-old La Jolla, California resident Barbara Becker, and the bloodline detectives are getting
close to solving the case. Despite trying to revive the investigation a number of times, it has taken years of patience
and the revolutionary new science of genetic genealogy to get the break they need.
Investigators now believe they're finally reaching a conclusion by identifying a man called Paul
Jean Chartrand as the killer. But there's a problem. He had been deceased since 1995,
so how do you compare the DNA at that point? His DNA was not immediately available to us.
However, we found out that several of his sons were still living and the mother of a son
was living conveniently enough in Southern California. Luckily, the suspect's family was cooperative,
and they very much wanted to help in the investigation. And if they could help this other family that was grieving
that had lost someone and didn't know the circumstances, they were willing to do that.
The son was very gracious to talk to us, very cooperative, and at one point when we told him
the entire story, and I wanted to be honest with him and tell him that this could mean your dad is a killer.
And he said, I know he is. I can tell you right now my dad was mean. And at one point, when he was a kid,
his dad picked him up and threw him through a wall. It made me upset that a kid could get treated like that,
but it also made me even more convinced that Chartrand was going to be our guy. So they need to do a comparison using standard DNA
from the suspect to the crime scene to see if it's the person that they're looking for to see if it's the right suspect.
It was very satisfying when I saw the results of the DNA testing that I did on the son and wife of this person,
because I saw that his types fit in perfectly with this paternity trio essentially that I had
and this identifying him as the perpetrator. We were able to prove conclusively using standard CODIS markers, STR markers, that Paul
Chartrand was the offender. The suspect was indeed Barbara Becker's killer. When we were getting close, I reached out
to Barbara's husband, who's living in Chicago, and I told him that we were close,
and that I felt that we're probably going to solve the case. And so I wanted to let him know first,
so he was the first person I called. I told him basically that the person we were looking at
was confirmed. I told my story of how it happened. He said, thank you very much.
He was very appreciative of it, and he in turn, communicated with his sons and brother-in-law.
No, he didn't cry. He's a pretty tough guy and he's been living with this for 40
years, but I think there was a big feeling of relief on his part. I think he was also glad that he would not
have to face a trial after all these years, that the offender was gone. Immediately after calling up Barbara's husband,
I called the Chartrand family, because obviously there would be a press release, and that they would find out.
I felt they should hear it from me, and they said, thank you very much for letting us know.
They were very horrified that a person they knew would be involved in something like this.
They're very nice people. The whole family is very nice people. I think it was a secret that he kind of kept from his family
and from everyone around him. Obviously there's a million questions we'd like to ask the offender.
I'd love to sit across from him and ask him why. It's always easy to look at the answers in the back of the book
once you finish the book. At the time, of course, I'm sure they probably thought
it was a burglary gone bad. With all the information we have now, I still think it was something like that,
but I think that it can't be coincidence that the killer worked at a upholstery cleaning spot
near where the victim lived. There's got to be some kind of connection there, but unfortunately, we'll probably never know.
Barbara Becker was a woman who was going about her life, a good person, and just
through evil happenstance ran into the wrong person and was killed. She seemed like a normal everyday housewife, somebody
that cared for her family, somebody that cared for her children. Certainly, this was like a bolt from the blue.
She didn't expose herself to some sort of risk that put her in danger of being violently murdered.
This murder found her for reasons maybe we'll never know. The police department and the detectives
were motivated to find the killer of this young woman and to give the family some solace,
but they just didn't have enough tools in the toolbox. And even when DNA came by and getting a great DNA profile
from this crime scene, still they didn't have the necessary database, the necessary
profiles to match it. It was only when genealogy came in that they were able to do that.
Genealogy is the most important tool we have right now in law enforcement to solve violent crime cases.
Period, the end. Forensic genealogy is extremely important for crime investigations,
and it's only going to become more so. The previous thinking was that if you committed
a crime of violent nature, you would continue to do that until you get caught. Now we're finding out there's a lot
of people who do one bad thing, then they blend into society. They become your neighbor, they become your friend at the gym.
You don't know who they are, and we're finding these people now, so it's kind of creepy.
The Barbara Becker case gives me hope. Knowing that we can reach back so far in time now,
and we can solve some of these murders that have been unsolved for so long, gives me hope.
And it makes me excited to think about what other cases we could crack, what other solutions, what other
suspects we can catch with genetic genealogy. NANCY GRACE: There are many things that can be revealed
through a family tree, and our genetics are responsible for this. For Paul Chartrand, his genes confirmed
he was Barbara Becker's killer. It was Paul Chartrand's son and their family tree
that finally closed this case. Genetic genealogy will outlive both you and me, but it will not outlive the work of the dedicated men
and women who are the bloodline detectives. Maybe their next lead will be in your family tree.
[THEME MUSIC]

Brief Summary

Genetic genealogy solves the 40-year-old murder of Barbara Becker, identifying Paul Chartrand as her killer.

Key points

The Murder of Barbara Becker. Barbara Becker, a mother, was brutally murdered in her home, leaving her family shattered.
The Investigation Begins. Detectives launch a major investigation into the murder, focusing on those closest to Barbara.
The Role of Genetic Genealogy. New forensic techniques, including genetic genealogy, offer hope in solving cold cases like Barbara's.
Genetic Genealogy Breakthrough. In 2018, San Diego Police identify Paul Chartrand as the suspect in Barbara Becker's murder.
Closure After Decades. Barbara Becker's family finally gets closure after 40 years thanks to DNA evidence.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

It was really a crime with no witnesses.

Describing the challenges faced by detectives in the case.

1:57WatchApr 1, 2021

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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