Bloodline Detectives - Season 2, Episode 10 - San Bernadino Bodies - Full Episode | Forensic Files

1980 the mojave desert human bones are discovered in a shallow grave near the small town of ludlow california
there was a archaeologist out there working in the desert and had found some bones that turned out to be human
remains police launched an investigation to identify two young victims we always had a gut feeling
that family was going to be looking for them i didn't want to believe that she wouldn't come back
investigators identify a suspect with a horrible history but with no hard evidence the case reaches a dead end
i would describe anybody that can commit five murders bury bodies as a bona fide psychopath
the young victims remain jane and john doe for decades until their killer gives investigators a small break
so he said i had to kill him because he would have killed me here's a guy just making up a confession
as he goes along with the evidence points to something entirely different this is the tragic story of pamela sally
and william lane the evil they encounter that ends their young lives and how the
bloodline detectives restore their identities after decades i'm nancy grace this is bloodline detectives
[Music] [Applause] [Music] november 19 1980 mojave desert california a hiker calls police after
finding what he believes to be human bones in our desert area we have a lot of untraveled territory that people like
to go hiking on and a lot of those people are out there looking for rocks fossils in this case there was a
gentleman i believe he's 65 70 years old he was out there doing that with his son
and they came across a partially opened up grave that was very shallow and had found some bones that turned out
to be human remains reported them and our department went out took the report they sent a deputy sheriff out there to
verify if in fact that was a dead body which he did he then notified dispatch who then
notified the homicide detail who sent two detectives out there to work the crime scene
the crime scene was a shallow grave vast desert out in the middle of nowhere just
above ludlow which is a very small community in san bernardino county initially when they responded there was
remains some some bones that it looked like animals had dug up one of the shallow graves in the desert at sandy
soil once they collected those bones they're able to determine that they were in fact
human then they were able to determine that there was actually two grave sites it
would appear to be a male and a female the female had long red hair and there weren't any clothes on them at
all there were no clothes in the actual grave so it appeared they would have been buried naked
the coroner is contacted so the coroner's office was notified the following morning
they were notified by the sheriff's deputies that were already starting the investigation out near ludlow
and they sent a deputy coroner to the scene in order to initiate the coroner investigation it appeared from the scene
that the two bodies were interred in the gravesite and it was likely animal scavenging had pulled the remains from
the gravesite out into the desert they were mostly complete they were an advanced state of decomposition they
were partially skeletonized but there was some hair and tissue still on the remains
the coroner retrieves the skeletal remains investigators look for other evidence
they would have walked the area looking for tire tracks shoe prints shoe impressions
any type of identification that may have been discarded by the perpetrators that
would have been their course of action there at the scene there wasn't any clothing so you couldn't remove a wallet
or id card or anything like to identify them since they weren't clothed so they were john and jane doe
[Music] within that grave they also found shell casings and projectiles to a weapon that was probably the weapon
that was used to kill those two people they were 22 caliber bullets if they find a gun somewhere that they
think might have been the one they used they could compare the bullets they collected
to test firing bullets from the gun they'd have and they could say yeah this gun killed those two people
the two bodies are transported for autopsy while police gather more evidence when the bodies were taken to the
coroner's office an autopsy is performed on both bodies all the bones are removed
and actually placed on the table just as they would be in a normal human body the first physical examination was the
following day after they were recovered that included an external examination at
that point the pathologist noted that both remains had significant head trauma after that initial examination was
completed the bodies had complete x-rays taken and a secondary exam was performed a few
days later when the x-rays revealed that both bodies had evidence of possible gunshot wounds some projectiles were
recovered from that autopsy to help the pathologist establish the cause of death
there were three projectiles recovered from the male remains those were deemed to be 22-caliber fired bullets
and those were collected as evidence as part of the initial investigation the female remains did not have any
fragments or bullets recovered but there was evidence of gunshot wounds during their examination
she was shot in the head and she'd also been bludgeoned to death probably by the
shovel that was used to dig the grave [Music] often in autopsies like these a pathologist calls in identification
specialists that's what happened here and these experts are able to provide investigators with a rough physical
description of the victims at least it's a start the female was described as having
strawberry blonde or light brown hair approximately 7 to 10 inches long the male was described as having 14 to
15 inch long hair secured in a ponytail the color was designated as brown light brown those descriptors were observed in
the initial investigation and then a dental examination was completed the following day
that also helped in establishing a possible age range the odontologists that did that
examination estimated both bodies to be in their late teens and then the forensic anthropologist was brought in
and her examination established a stature based on measurements of both femurs the anthropologist's estimation
was that the female victim was between 17 to 22 years old and the male victim somewhere in the range of 21 to 30 years
old now it's critical to establish just how long the two bodies have been in the
ground based on the coroner's report and the assessment it was estimated that they
had been deceased for about one to six months prior to being found so areas of the bodies would have been
exposed to the sun and due to the animal scavenging that would have increased the
decomposition due to loss of tissue and the scattering of extremities and things
like that investigators visit the small town of ludlow to see if anyone can help id
these victims in the early stages of this investigation the detectives would have
been trying to identify who the victims were and who they were associated with the people
that live there live there because they want to get away from normal everyday life
why were they there in ludlow where are they passing through it ludlow is a very small community nobody really
lives there at the time there was a diner and like a rest area there no one in ludlow can help with a
possible id of the victims investigators however do receive information that points to one man
the owner of the gas station there in ludlow said that you need to talk to howard neal because howard was always at
the gas station always knew the people that were coming through here because he made it his business to do so so
basically to either rob them or pull a scam on them or anything that's going to benefit him that that's what he
was doing there howard neal lived in ludlow with his wife at the time the bodies were found
investigators start looking for howard neal as we see next on bloodline detectives the suspect is a man with a
very dark past [Music] december 1980 san bernardino county sheriffs get a lead at the double murder of two
unidentified bodies found out in the mojave desert the young victims were found near the small town of ludlow one
month earlier police now looking for a suspect named howard neal but he is not slow to act
howard had realized that the police the homicide detectives were looking to interview him in regards to the bodies
that were found a short distance from his home howard and his wife quit their jobs and then left ludlow altogether
just vanished police launched a nationwide search they tracked down the niels in stockton
california a few months later detectives discover they're not the only investigators looking for howard neal
so howard neal is arrested on march 6 1981 in stockton california for shoplifting
so they routinely run his information through the system and bang a hit comes up that he's wanted in mississippi for
three murders his half brother his niece and her cousin when investigators learned the horrible
details of the mississippi murders they're confident howard neal is also responsible for the ludlow murders
on january 24th 1981 bobby neal howard neal's half-brother along with his daughter amanda joy
13 went to go collect her cousin melanie sue poke so she could spend the night and they could go to church the next
morning the last time they were seen was in langston at 10 o'clock on saturday night
january 24 1981 so when 12 year old melanie sue's mother realized she hadn't come home
she was concerned what's going on so she went over to bobby neal's house to see if she could find out
where her daughter was and what she found was bobby neal's truck parked in the driveway
and then she went into the house let herself in and she found the house fine there was
no struggle but nobody was there the only thing that concerned her was that bobby neal's glasses which he wore
all the time he needed them were on the table she becomes quite alarmed by this because the glasses are so important to
him so she calls the lawrence county sheriff's department and reports bobby neal
her daughter and the cousin missing and they begin a search and for the next 10 days
they find nothing no sign of them anywhere then february 6 a young girl's body is discovered
so this man on his way to a fishing hole discovers amanda joy's body it was clearly evident she was strangled
there was evidence she was beaten among the face and upper body she was shot with a shotgun in the
abdomen it's clear that somebody brutalized this young child and left her on the side of the road
and it's not long before another body is found melanie sue poke was found about 900
yards away from her cousin and it was clear from that crime scene from the forensic
examination that she had been shot as well it takes a little longer however to find
bobby neal's body about a month after the girls were found bobby nail was found several miles away
he was shot and he was bound stockton police arrest howard neal and question him about the murders in
mississippi so after being interrogated he decides he's going to tell stockton police
exactly what happened out there in mississippi with his half brother his niece and her
cousin so howard neal says he went over to his half brother bobby's house and the two girls were there
and that under their own free will they decided with him and bobby they were all gonna go for a
ride and that the two girls sat in the front and bobby sat in the back and out they went
he claims that bobby got upset with him because he had his hand on one of the girl's
thigh and he demanded to stop the car so we did they get out and howard says he brought his gun with
him and they start walking away from the car and that he shot bobby when amanda joy was found there was
evidence on her wrists that she had been bound and restrained but now in his confession howard neal says i
never did that when howard gets back to the car the girls immediately ask him what was that shot about he shot the gun
in the air and that bobby decided he was gonna walk home and howard claims the girls believed
them it's horrible to even imagine but this sick vicious suspect actually tells investigators the 12 and 13 year old
girl victims were willing participants in his brutal sex attack on them howard neal tries to make police believe
that these 12 13 year old girls willingly had sex with him that they wanted it he claims that he had sex with melanie
sue poke and then amanda ii and that the girls liked it and they wanted it when all the evidence points to
rape that he bound them and that he raped them and then he killed them he says he shot amanda what he believed
was in the chest and that when he shot her melanie sue started screaming so he pointed the gun
at her and shot her he said when he was finished with the triple murder he went back to his family
picked them up and then drove back to texas howard neal is tried and found guilty of
the murders in mississippi howard neal is currently serving three life sentences in mississippi he was
given the death penalty he was mentally incompetent so he was tested and found that he was
mentally those were the words that were used and used in court it's in the court
transcripts basically he had no education he didn't remember going to school he was abused as a child based on
that his lack of intelligence they reduced his crimes to three consecutive life terms without the possibility of
parole now san bernardino investigators are eager to interview howard neal about
their double homicide but he refuses to speak with them so they tracked down his
wife ludlow detectives were hell-bent on the fact that howard neal killed those two people that they found
buried so they kept pestering him and pestering the court to question him but his
lawyers fought it off they interviewed howard neal's wife darla darla also worked as a dishwasher
at the coffee shop in ludlow at the time where the bodies were found darla had indicated that howard her
husband may have been responsible for hitchhikers that were passing through ludlow
she also had said that howard drove her by the gravesite and showed her where they were buried
howard neal is behind bars for the rest of his life but refusing to talk about the ludlow murders the victims are still
jane and john doe detectives try other investigative methods to try and identify them
after the initial investigation if they didn't have any good leads to who these victims might possibly be in this case
within a few weeks they started amassing these descriptors and they submitted the
case to the department of justice and entered the cases into the missing and unidentified person system which we
refer to as mupps that listing in mups would indicate that the male and female were found with
their identifying descriptors as much information as possible including their age estimation possible
stature the dental information from the dentist's examination and then that record would be searchable
against any missing persons that has entered into that system nationwide after the case was entered into mups
over the course of years there were a number of exclusions based on circumstances stature dental comparisons
to other missing persons the case is running cold there are no new leads after eliminating other
missing person cases and in 1980 dna is not a viable option after the autopsy because the remains
were not identified they stayed in house for a couple of years in 1983 they filed a petition with the courts to
file their death certificates and they were buried intact in the county cemetery at that time
someone in the office deemed it necessary to retain their skulls as evidence of the investigation and to
assist with ongoing identification work and those skulls were retained in curation here at the coroner's office
so because of that we had access to them to do these additional types of searches we try everything we
do isotope testing you know we compare cases using gis mapping we use many out of the box
techniques in order to try and identify folks when even the dna does not give us
our immediate answers through the doj system the unidentified skulls are tested for
dna in 2006. the bones initially were sent for dna and they were able to get an extraction
to establish that profile in codis but codis only uses anywhere from 13 to 20 loci
to store into their database the codis submission was initially in 2006. the other investigators that have been
assigned to essentially what we deem is the missing and unidentified persons section here at the coroner's division
are continually working to make sure that those samples are complete additional samples were sent in 2010
to help establish a more clear profile for codis and at that time that was when we were
able to make sure that they had a full codis profile but there were no hits because there was
no exemplars or family samples in the system to compare to next almost 40 years since the two
bodies are found in 2017 san bernardino county investigators garrett teslar and steven shumway
finally question howard neal that's next on bloodline detectives [Music] 2017 almost 40 years after an
unidentified pair of bodies found in the mojave desert the bloodline detectives are able to question a suspect
that suspect howard neal he's already serving life behind bars in the brutal killing of two children and his own
brother there's a legal complication however for investigators tesla and i went in to interview him and
we introduced ourselves he's 64 at the time we interviewed him he was willing to chat he was very thankful actually
somebody came to talk to him so we explained why we were there and what our purpose was and if he knew
anything about the victims that he spent time with them where they were from their names anything that he could
remember now granted this is 2017 you're talking 37 years later you know his memory is
probably you never know you never know but we had we had to try well the sole purpose of going to
interview howard neal was to get him to tell us who he thought those two dead people were
now in order to do that we had to come up with what's called a use immunity agreement in other words the da's office
draws up paperwork that says you can go talk to him whatever he tells you you can't use it against him
first he denied it of course he denied it denied it and then he admitted to meeting them and then that they needed a
place to stay they were hitchhiking across the country he made mention in the interview that he
thought this girl was pretty well that kind of kind of set off a little light bulb
based on his mo and what motivated him back in the past i think that he was attracted to that female
howard neal starts opening up to investigators he picked him up they go back to his
house and he mentions to steve and i that he was trying to put the move on her the male victim had gotten really upset
we asked him well why did you kill him if i didn't kill him he would have killed me
because that guy was so upset about the fact that he was trying to put the move on on the
girl that he was with so he said i had to kill him because he would have killed me
he killed him first shot him and then had her help him put the male's body in the station wagon transported
that male victim to this area where they were buried had her help dig the grave i believe that she was pleading with
howard to don't kill me because i have a small daughter and then he killed her and put her in the grave too
investigators have no doubt the murders were premeditated and howard neal is the
killer howard definitely was in full control and knew exactly what he was doing had
planned what he was going to do had planned the location he was going to put them in because there's nobody around to
see you or to hear gunshots howard did not show any remorse at all he's actually one of those guys he's just
dead inside he killed five people that we know of howard neal gives investigators critical
information even though they are not able to hold neil accountable for the murders
when he said they had a daughter and it stuck with howard she pleaded for her life saying please i have a young
daughter she knew what the inevitable was going to happen that's why i believed there was going to be a
daughter family members searching for their mom the search is on with the limited information they have
and the possibility of a dna match somewhere down the line after interviewing howard that we were
going to extract dna from both victims and get that dna profile and then upload that into jed match ancestry family tree
dna to hopefully have one of their relatives match what will it take for investigators to
finally id the two young victims left dead in the mojave desert we find out next on bloodline detectives
[Music] 2019 san bernardino county investigators identified serial killer howard neal as
the murderer of two hitchhikers their skeletons discovered in the mojave desert almost 40 years ago
exhausting all other avenues investigators decide to use the new crime solving tool genetic genealogy to
try and identify the victims in this case all we had were victims we knew who the suspect was but we
didn't know who the victims were there was dna uploaded into codis and there's no matches
so i talked to coroner's office and verified we have bone available but it was very difficult
extracting dna for the snip profile because they had been exposed to sunlight they've been out in the desert
for maybe eight months or more and it really degrades dna in 2019 i was reviewing cases for the
use of genetic genealogy for identification and reviewing this case with the ludlow
victims it looked like we did have bone available the quotas profile is called an str
profile and think of it as a very basic profile of dna minimal amount of information but it works very well for
codis for direct matches and immediate family matches when you use genetic genealogy you need
what's called a snip profile which is a lot more information and you can match up to distant cousins
the forensic process is very complex especially on bone you have to go to whole sequencing whole genome sequencing
and then they pull the snip profile that you need out of that whole sequence that
can be uploaded into ged match or family tree dna and then you look at your matches and
how close or how distant and it depends on the amount of sonomorgans matching as to how close or how distant the
matches are so once you have so many matches you have to take those people build their family tree up
and eventually they all intersect and you get to what's called the most recent common
ancestor so now you know that your victim is descendant of those most recent common ancestors so then you
have to take those people and build their trees all the way down and this can be a very detailed and
time-consuming job and then you just have to call up people within those family lines and ask them
to do what we call a target test where you get their dna and compare it to your victim
and if you're in the right line the match gets bigger and bigger and you can narrow it down so you can finally
identify their victim and some cases it can take a year or more the detectives agree on a plan to
identify the victims we had gotten both victims extracted and again because of the suspect saying
he talked to him for a while and the female victim said she had a daughter she left at home with family
we decided to try her first so we had her sequence first and uploaded to judd match
when it's uploaded in there it takes a while for the matches to populate so you just have to keep going back and
checking then it popped up we've got a match a parent-child match and this has to be her daughter
is her daughter is looking for her we can tell her what happened to her mom now we were ecstatic to hear the news that
there was a close match and that we finally had a lead to identify this couple it was really really a great
thing because we knew that using this technique was going to lead us to this family
very often there are anxious moments for investigators waiting for a dna match and this is one of those moments when
investigators get their potential match it's not what they're expecting it's not
the match they thought it would be [Music] we pulled the profile and found out it
was a private eye that actually uploaded it into jet match when i contacted her she told me that
christine sally was her client and was trying to find her mother and she had uploaded christine's dna
into ancestry and then transferred it into ged match and she gave me christine's information
out of the blue christine sally gets the phone call so i was at work one day and i
got a call it says san bernardino on it and you know nowadays with all the robo calls
you don't want to answer all these unknown calls so i let it go to voicemail and they left me a voicemail
and it was detective heathley from the san bernardino county sheriff's department so i did call him back i
kinda at the moment kinda knew what it probably was because who from california and the sheriff's department is just
gonna call me randomly he answered and he was kind of confused still in figuring things out he
told me that there had been a dna match on jed match and that he believed it was
my mother and that he didn't have a lot of information he didn't even have a name to give me
and that's when i told him that i had a name to give him christine sally discloses the name san
bernardino investigators are looking for it's pamela sally her mother now christine is able to tell police
more about her family i was born on september 17 1979 in fort myers florida to pamela diane duffy
my parents divorced on december 17th of 1980 sometime after that my mother took me
and started traveling she was traveling north she was with a couple of guys one of them
was digger lane at that point they were struggling to keep me clothed and other things like
that they ended up staying in the back room of a pool hall and something happened with diggerland and he ended up
getting arrested at some point and that's when social services started to intervene thinking that a child had
been neglected and i was taken into foster care at that time at some point my grandmother brought her
from mobile back over to florida but unfortunately when pam had left the state of florida with me in december she
was on probation at the time so she ended up absconding from probation so when she had went back to florida they
had arrested her for leaving the state then in june of 1980 she was released and she signed her rights
to me away and that's when she told my grandparents she was going to go travel with her
friend digger lane across the country and they were going to go hitchhiking across the country
and that was the last time anyone really talked to her i do believe she did call my grandparents a few times
while she was out on the road but after a while the phone calls did stop [Music]
the challenge now is to definitively match the dna and prove the victim for the mojave
desert is pamela sally once you identify someone through genetic genealogy you still need to
obtain a codis profile from an immediate family member to get the legal identification
after the original first match came and then i was in got in contact with san bernardino county sheriff's department
later we did an official dna swap where the state troopers came out and did the whole mouth swab thing for their
official codis database investigators identified pamela sally as one of the two victims from a
40-year-old murder case but can they identify the other skeleton is it pamela's companion digger lane
that's next on bloodline detectives [Music] by early 2021 san bernardino county investigators very close to identifying
a skeleton a skeleton of a male victim found out in the mojave desert 40 years earlier the science of genetic genealogy
has already identified a female skeleton found alongside him her name pamela sally now pamela's daughter christine is
able to fill in the blanks for investigators in talking to christine we learned that
her mother left with male known as digger lane and he had recently been in custody in virginia
and that's all the information that we had at that point so we contacted the local law enforcement back there
to review their records and they were able to come up with the name william lane
as a probable match once we identified a possible victim as william lane we were able to determine that he was
also missing out of florida and his family had not seen him since 1980 also in a final act detectives returned the
remains to their loved ones once we had the legal identification for both of the victims
then we worked with our da's office and our coroner's office to obtain all the remains from both victims
and return them to the families our district attorney jason anderson thought it was important that we
returned the remains to the family members we made all the arrangements to travel back east and connected with the
families and made sure that they were delivered in the appropriate manner which was in person
we were in contact with the airlines to see if there's any special circumstances
or rules in place in transporting them on a plane and and so forth we had to obviously tell a security and tsa that
we had them and they just had to run them through the scanning machine and make sure there wasn't anything
concerning that showed up on the scan we took them out in a suitcase and made sure they
were with us at all times and kept safe to the best of our ability being on an airplane
they came out all the way from california to deliver the ashes and it meant so much to me to have someone
personal come out and actually give their their condolences and sympathies and actually
be with me as i was accepting those ashes then we continued from virginia to florida where we returned the remains of
william everett lane to his mother sandra blair it was a very emotional time for her you can tell she was really
heartbroken not knowing what had happened to her son and then learning that he had been murdered
and so for her to receive the remains she was really appreciative of of that and talked about her son and
the relationship that they had and really felt that she would be at peace now that he's
home investigators witnessed the meaning of closure for the families now that this
double murder is finally solved i think deep down i always knew that she had probably passed
because i i couldn't i didn't want to believe that she wouldn't come back of course you always have that little
bit of hope that you're wrong and that she maybe is in europe but yeah i always had that little bit of
hope that she would always come back but i think deep down i always knew that she
really was gone because i knew she wouldn't be gone for this long if it was on her terms
right now i'm still mourning the loss of the little hope that i had that that small little
bit of hope is is now gone and i think that's what i'm what i've been warning but i do feel that closure will come
soon but right now i just i can't stop thinking about her last moments and how she died it hurt so bad
to know those were her last moments but i'm sure closure will come soon it'll come soon
there seems to be no limit as to how far the bloodline detectives and their use of genetic genealogy can reach back to
solve previously unsolvable cases how far can they go four decades as in this case
five ten families with missing loved ones please hold out hope every day the bloodline detectives get
closer to identifying a new jane doe or a new john doe now more than ever closure could be
just beyond the horizon i'm nancy grace thank you for joining us on bloodline detectives
[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

A woman takes a genealogy test to learn what happened to her estranged mother and is shocked to learn her DNA helped law enforcement identify a Jane Doe that remained a mystery for over 40 years.

A compelling new True Crime series, hosted by preeminent legal analyst and renowned former prosecutor Nancy Grace, that explores the advanced form of familial DNA testing.

Brief Summary

The episode details the identification of murder victims Pamela Sally and William Lane through genetic genealogy after decades of investigation.

Key points

Discovery of Human Remains. In 1980, human bones are discovered in the Mojave Desert, leading to a chilling investigation.
The Investigation Hits a Dead End. Police identify a suspect with a dark history but lack hard evidence, stalling the case.
Howard Neal's Dark Past. As the investigation unfolds, Howard Neal's history reveals a pattern of violence and crime.
Confession of a Killer. Howard Neal's confession about the murders raises more questions than answers.
Cold Case Reopened. In 2017, investigators finally question Howard Neal about the decades-old murders.
Howard Neal's Confession. Neal admits to killing a male victim in self-defense.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This is the tragic story of Pamela Sally and William Lane.

Introduction to the victims and their heartbreaking tale.

1:23WatchJun 1, 2022

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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