DNA Unmasks Predator! | Bloodline Detectives with Nancy Grace | Forensic Files

[TENSE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Christmas Eve 2015, Albuquerque, New Mexico, a local woman viciously attacked while jogging
on one of the city's trails. RAUL TORREZ: She was out for a run. She encountered somebody who tackled her to the ground
and dragged her into the bushes and sexually assaulted her. Fortunately, for her, she had the instinct to get out of there
as quickly as possible. NANCY GRACE: The survivor happens to be a talented artist,
and she provides police with a sketch of her assailant. I've never had a victim do their own sketch
of their offender. It was incredibly accurate. NANCY GRACE: One by one, the leads run dry.
The survivor fears she may one day cross paths again with the rapist. Investigators hear of a new and remarkable forensic technique
that could help them crack this case wide open, once and for all. KEMI PRICE: It makes me want to say to everybody
out there hiding in the shadows, welcome to the new light of day. Genetic genealogy is here, and it is not going away.
NANCY GRACE: This is the story of one survivor's very long crusade to help police
track down her assailant. I'm Nancy Grace. This is "Bloodline Detectives." [THEME MUSIC]
[PENSIVE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Albuquerque, New Mexico, a vibrant city renowned for its multicultural charm and breathtaking natural landscapes.
RAUL TORREZ: Albuquerque is the largest city in the state of New Mexico. The metro area is probably 650,000, 700,000 people.
It's got a really diverse population, sort of a unique and rich cultural history.
We have a large mix of Native Americans that have been here for hundreds, if not thousands of years, a large Spanish population that
also lived here for hundreds of years. We are a mid-sized American city, and we are not immune to what lots of cities
face that have diversity of culture and people that move in and out with frequency.
RAUL TORREZ: If you ask the citizens of Albuquerque, what is the one thing that is holding the community back,
it's the inability to get a handle on some of those larger challenges. It's a community that has, unfortunately,
higher levels of violent crime, in particular, gun crime. NANCY GRACE: Despite Albuquerque's difficulties
with gun violence, it's still an attractive place to live. It's blessed with incredible natural beauty,
including the Rio Grande River, which runs through the city. Christmas Eve, 2015, a local woman
decides to go jogging along one of the Rio Grande's scenic trails. KYLE HARSTOCK: Our victim was a single mother.
She's an educator here in Albuquerque, in town. She's athletic. You know, running was something that she would do quite often.
The area that she went running in was about as residential suburbia as you can get.
Schools were nearby. There's a public library close to where the incident took place.
And it was a trail that she was very familiar with because it's near her home. She could go out her front door and get onto this trail
fairly quickly, and had run on it dozens of times prior to this incident. It should be safe.
But unfortunately, there are certain dangerous realities for a woman or a man to run alone in certain areas.
And in this case, there was an absolute predator on the trail that day that there was
no way she could have had any idea what she was going to run into. She heard somebody running behind her on the same trail
very fast, and it kind of startled her. And it was a man who had these red pants
on that kind of made a lot of noise, like swooshing back and forth. She lost sight of the man, as he was running much faster
than she was at the time. And she got to a particular fork in the trail. One part of the trail, if she stays on it,
it keeps her somewhat elevated, where she can see neighborhoods, the neighborhoods can see her.
Or she can cut off kind of into this wooded area that will lead her right next to the river.
So a little bit more scenic, a little bit more peaceful and serene. And she's taken both trails in the past.
In this case, she decided to take the more serene trail into the woods. She saw the man who had just passed her on the trail,
with the red pants, kind of standing up next to a tree right off of the trail. And it caused her some sort of hesitation.
She had an instinct that something wasn't right. And sadly, that instinct was proven correct,
that once she got closer to his location, he actually tackled her to the ground and dragged her into the bushes and sexually assaulted her.
NICK BALISTRERI: He ended up pinning her down with both of his hands on both of her shoulders.
He pulled her pants down all the way down to her ankles, but then also pulled up her shirt, exposing her breasts.
During this ordeal, she was pleading, you know, just-- you know, don't do this. I don't want you to do this.
This isn't what I want. He threatened to kill her if she got-- she made too much
noise to alert anyone about it. She initially was screaming, but when he made those threats,
she looked around and realized he can probably kill me. And no one's ever going to even hear this or know about it.
NICK BALISTRERI: She said that it, all of a sudden, kind of stopped. But she could feel that he pulled up his shirt
and that he reached into his back pocket. As he reached into his back pocket, it appeared he pulled out a cell phone.
At that moment, she said that she could hear what she thought was one to two clicks on his cell phone,
as if he was taking a picture. She thought back to an actual self-defense course that she had
taken for women that talked about if you're under attack and you're overpowered, a strategy to try to calm
the attacker down so that you can at least escape safely at some point of the encounter.
COURTNEY FRETWELL: After the assault took place, she was able to get away by convincing him to run in one
direction, while she was able to turn around and basically run in the opposite direction.
RAUL TORREZ: It's just a real testament to her composure and her courage to have the presence of mind,
to actually talk to the attacker afterwards. She was very right to be concerned that he might actually
kill her or harm her further. And so she, according to her, you know, told him that if he went in one direction,
she would return home in the other direction and sort of convinced him to leave her alone.
KYLE HARSTOCK: She runs back the exact way she came, as quick as she can, towards her house.
She continued to run home and, at that point, decided that she did not want to call police,
which is not uncommon with sexual assault survivors, in many cases. But she did call a rape crisis hotline
on the telephone to tell them what happened and seek their advice. NANCY GRACE: The Rape Crisis Center
asked the survivor if she could come in for a sexual assault exam. SHANNON LOWRY: She came and saw us for a state exam.
And we were able to collect evidence, and she didn't choose to report to the law enforcement
at that time. But you can always go back and report at a later date as well. NANCY GRACE: It is so difficult for so many women
to report a sex assault. Law enforcement's trying to help them with new methods for reporting their attack while still preserving their dignity.
[SOMBER MUSIC] SHANNON LOWRY: Albuquerque Police Department is also-- their sex crimes division is in our building,
so it makes it very convenient. I think it's a lot more approachable. And so they're-- it removed some of the barriers that
they might face to reporting. So we have about 10% more than the national average
of victims who report to law enforcement, which is phenomenal. And so we absolutely always encourage people
to report to law enforcement. But knowing that everybody's experience is different,
justice looks different for every victim. RAUL TORREZ: Usually, after a victim has consulted with a psychologist, a psychiatrist,
talked to their family, and really come to that decision on their own, some victims
are adamant about reporting to law enforcement immediately. Others want to have some time to think about how
they want to move forward. And so the Rape Crisis Center is in a position to just support the victim and allow
them to to go through the process at their own pace. NANCY GRACE: Police now have DNA evidence
from that sex assault exam. But will it be enough to track down a vicious predator still
on the loose? We find out next on "Bloodline Detectives." [AUDIO LOGO] [AUDIO LOGO]
[PENSIVE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Christmas Eve, 2015, a local woman goes for a run along the Rio Grande
in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She passes a fellow jogger, and instinctively, she feels nervous in his presence.
And she's right. The same man appears again. He tackles her, drags her off the trail,
and viciously rapes her. Afterward, the victim goes to a rape crisis center. She undergoes a sex assault exam,
but she's still afraid to report the rape to law enforcement. Her day-to-day life following this experience must have been
very difficult in a lot of different ways because this is something that a lot of people
really struggle to move past. A lot of victims relive and re-experience what happened to them.
A lot of them could be in fear, not knowing that their attacker is gonna come and find them and do this, or do something even
worse to them in the future. NANCY GRACE: March 7, 2016, three months after the rape,
the survivor bravely decides to share her story with police. KYLE HARSTOCK: The victim does decide to make a police report.
So it's been, you know, just about three months since the attack occurred. She makes the police report, and it gets assigned
to a detective at the sheriff's department right away to look into. COURTNEY FRETWELL: She, being an artist herself,
was able to create a sketch of the individual who had attacked her and was really able to put pen
to paper on how this person looked like from her perspective. She was able to describe him as being a younger
gentleman, about 5 foot 7. He was clean-shaven, didn't have a beard or a mustache.
He had brown hair that seemed to be sticking out of the hat that he was wearing.
He also had brown eyes. And she described him as being athletic. He seemed muscular, of an athletic body type.
KYLE HARSTOCK: That sketch became such a key piece of evidence. And I'll tell you, in my 20 years of doing this,
it's the only one I've ever had. I have never had a victim do their own sketch of their offender.
A sketch which is not only provided by the survivor, but actually drawn by her, is now a vital piece
of evidence for detectives. They devise a plan to catch her callous rapist. RAUL TORREZ: They're gona wanna canvass
the area to look for additional either victims or witnesses. They're gonna wanna examine prior police reports,
unsolved reports about other sexual assaults, obviously upload the data, the specimen
into CODIS to see if there's a DNA match through the national database, to see if there are any leads that
could be generated that way. [CURIOUS MUSIC] KYLE HARSTOCK: CODIS is a database that the FBI developed
decades ago, where law enforcement, at the state and federal levels, put profiles of offenders into violent crimes
like murders, armed robberies, domestic violence, sexual assaults. Crimes of this nature get your DNA
put into CODIS once you're convicted of the crime by a court. And if your DNA shows up on a crime scene somewhere else,
it can be compared against CODIS, which can easily identify a possible offender.
The thing with CODIS is, it's not everyone who's arrested. That's not how it works.
You have to be convicted. It has to be certain felony crimes that you're convicted of.
And it only is going to look at people who have been convicted. So if you've never been arrested or convicted of a serious felony
crime, you're not in CODIS. So we might have your DNA, but you weren't in CODIS, so we actually don't know who you are.
COURTNEY FRETWELL: During the initial part of the investigation, the police worked
very hard at looking at those that are closest to the victim. So they were out there speaking with all of her past boyfriends,
anyone she had been in a relationship with, speaking with any of her male family members and friends,
all of which, ultimately, were eliminated. Another three months go by. The investigation seems to be slowing down.
Then, what every rape victim fears seems to happen. The survivor believes she sees her rapist again.
COURTNEY FRETWELL: During the summer of 2016, this victim went into a local sandwich shop in town.
And as soon as she walked in, she thought she encountered the guy that had attacked
her several months earlier. So as soon as she saw this individual, she ran out and contacted law enforcement,
saying she might have ran into him. I was in my office. She gave me a phone call.
She said, I think I found the offender. I said, OK. So she gave me the information of what was going on.
The person that she saw fit the description, was about 5' 8", 5, 9". Went to our local university here and was a prominent athlete
here, which matches the colors of what he would have been wearing. We ended up doing a warrant for him at his dorm.
So we ended up doing a body warrant on him. We ended up doing a warrant of his dorm as well,
where we ended up taking his cell phone. Once we confiscated his cell phone, we ended up doing a warrant on his cell phone
to extract the information on there, because we're looking for pictures as well,
since in the initial interviews, she said that there was pictures taken of her. We extracted his cell phone.
We didn't find any pictures of her. We ended up doing a swab for him for DNA. We got all that information, sent it back up to Santa
Fe for them to do a test. We got his DNA back. Once we got his DNA back, it was also
negative as well for the DNA that was sent on the rape kit. NANCY GRACE: It's a crushing moment for a survivor
who thinks she's identified her attacker. NICK BALISTRERI: She made a comment that
said, well, at least we tried. And I know that I can move on now, knowing that we tried the best we could to find this person.
And at that moment, it kind of hit me to say, you know what? I'm not satisfied with what we're doing.
We have to do more because we have to find this person. It almost seemed to me like she was happy with what
we did, that we tried our best, almost as if she was ready to move on. But to me, it just--
I wasn't satisfied. I went to the DA's office, and that's when I talked to them and I said, what can we do?
There's something we need to do to help her. What can we do? And at that moment, there was nothing.
But now I know that it planted a seed, put something in their mind to know that if something came
up later on, that maybe there-- we would have a chance to catch this individual.
NANCY GRACE: A rape survivor seems to be giving up hope her attacker will ever be caught.
Her hopelessness inspires police to work even harder. They look to an emerging forensic science
to help them catch a rapist. That's next on "Bloodline Detectives." [AUDIO LOGO]
[AUDIO LOGO] [PENSIVE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Albuquerque, New Mexico, police determined to catch a vicious rapist
who sex assaults a female jogger Christmas Eve, 2015. And the victim happens to be an expert sketch artist.
She herself provides detectives with a sketch of the assailant. Now, investigators are hoping a cutting-edge forensic technique
can actually identify her rapist. What we established was something called the Crime
Strategies Unit that really tried to not replicate the same capacity that the local police agencies had,
but to do special analytical and data driven work that, oftentimes, local police agencies
just didn't have the time or expertise to sort of invest in. But I also wanted to make sure that we were doing some novel
work on trying to solve some of the unsolved cases, some of the cases that had gone cold over the years, both homicides
and sexual assaults. And, you know, when I first started reading about how the case in California involving the Golden
State Killer and others was put together and the work that was done on forensic genealogy,
it seemed like an ideal fit for this new team and this new unit. And so I reached out to the head of that unit, Kyle
Harstock, who's just a tremendous, natural-born police officer. KYLE HARSTOCK: First and foremost,
to do a forensic genealogy case, you need a sufficient amount of DNA. You know, you can't just run it off of any amount of DNA easily.
This case had it. So it met that minimum qualifying amount of DNA that was left behind.
Two, our victim was still alive. This wasn't a homicide case. This victim was alive to give her the best chance to tell her
who her offender was, and let her feel that little bit of safety. That police were able to solve that crime,
and possibly even get justice in court, meant a whole lot to the entire team, from the original detective,
to me, to the prosecutor's office. And the area it happened in was somewhat less populated.
One of the beliefs I had early on was our offender probably lived nearby. This was not a highly popular running trail,
where hundreds of people a day go running on it. This has maybe 10 people a day at most,
with the perfect weather to run on it, so that our offender was probably very, very local to the area and very familiar
with the area. RAUL TORREZ: That's when we really started to get things going, and we immediately started
trying to identify the right genealogical experts, the right laboratory to work with to get this work done.
We did a lot of research, and CSU did a lot of research, on how the cases in California and the Golden State Killer
was put together, and sort of replicating those sorts of things. NANCY GRACE: So what exactly is this forensic technique
that's been cracking even the coldest of cold cases? Investigative genetic genealogy
is the process of taking unknown DNA typically collected at crime scenes, uploading the DNA to DNA databases such as GEDmatch,
hoping to find a family member who is related to the person that they're ultimately searching for,
the suspect in a crime. This could be this person, but it could be their brother, right?
It could be a close first cousin of theirs or a half sibling. We still have to put our detective shoes on and do
everything that we're used to doing, which is good interviews, right, surveillance, collecting physical evidence,
tying this whole case together. We need a beginning, a middle, and an ending of a story
because one day, we're gonna have to explain this to a jury. The family tree is gonna point us in the direction,
and then we do what we normally do. NANCY GRACE: Investigators search on GEDmatch.
It's a commercial website built for people who want to know more about their ancestry.
KYLE HARSTOCK: We actually had three college interns for the summer assigned to my investigative unit,
and they were young and hungry. And they just thought, anything we can do here is going to be cool and helpful.
I said, we are gonna learn investigative genealogy. We are gonna learn how to build family trees.
We are gonna buy, you know, ancestry.com accounts, and we're gonna do this. Here's a YouTube video series on how to build a family tree.
We're gonna go really hands-on with this thing and get it done. And they loved the challenge.
It was a lot of fun sleuthing, social media profiles and newspaper clippings from decades
ago to build out these family trees, knowing that on any given day, this could be the day we get our bad guy.
NANCY GRACE: For investigators, a match on a commercial website like GEDmatch is great news.
There's another step, however, they must take. The people who use the website must
give their consent before police can use their data. Just over three or four months building out many family trees,
conducting interviews and one day, a new profile was uploaded that was opted in for law enforcement.
And it was a second cousin. And it stuck out like a sore thumb when you logged into GEDmatch, and we would log in to GEDmatch
daily. When I contacted the person, because I wanted to learn more about their family tree,
I actually met Dr. Kemi Price. She contacted me back and said, I'm the one who uploaded this profile.
I'm a genealogy researcher on the side, and I talked to my client, told him that you reached out,
and he is willing to help you. Let me help you guys in the investigation, considering I already know a lot about his family.
So that is actually how we met. It wasn't us looking for a genealogist. We stumbled upon one while we were doing our search.
And she was amazing. KEMI PRICE: About an hour and a half later after I'd sent the email, I received a phone call
on my cellular, and it was Commander Harstock and some detectives. And they asked me a flurry of questions
to determine my experience. And then they became very quiet and asked me if I would consider
helping with the cold case. Oh, heck, yeah. I was thrilled to be able to do that.
The match for the family friend to the perp was about 94 centimorgans, which, ballpark, is third cousin.
The centimorgan is a measure of how much DNA is shared between individuals. A parent-child will share between 3,500 and 4,000
centimorgans; brothers and sisters, about 2,500 centimorgans; first cousins, around 1,000; aunts, uncles, grandparents, about 1,600.
There are ranges that vary for the relationship level. Third cousins share great-great-grandparents
in common. And each individual has eight sets of great-great-grandparents. In this case, on the father's side,
there would be four sets of great-great-grandparents. And going back to that time and place,
large families were the norm. It wasn't unusual to see family groups with 10 children apiece.
And so by the time I had finished building out a family tree for the father's side of the family, I was
looking at 6,500 individuals. It was a lot. What I had to do once I had finished with that was
try to find a way to exclude parts of that tree to narrow down possibilities. So what I began looking at was individuals who
matched the family friend but of course, had no match to the perp. And by doing that, I was able to whittle it down to a single set
of great-grandparents. KYLE HARSTOCK: She filled us in on what she had found on, you
know, his second cousin's family up to that point, which included roots that go back to parts of New
Mexico and Southern Colorado. So it was a true collaboration on a near-daily basis,
going back and forth. She did this all for free, by the way. She would work on this in her off hours in the evenings.
On weekends, she would email updates when she had them. And we would do the same back with her until Dr. Price found
an obituary for a two-year-old. And that cracked the case wide open. Will the obituary of a two-year-old
little child finally lead to the arrest of a sex predator? That's next on "Bloodline Detectives."
[AUDIO LOGO] [AUDIO LOGO] [SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2019,
police are getting closer to identifying a man who sex assaults a female jogger Christmas Eve, 2015.
The combination of groundbreaking forensic science and a family tree built from a commercial website
combined to help police. The most important clues so far emerged from the obituary
of a little child. KYLE HARSTOCK: In this obituary from a newspaper in Albuquerque
around 1996, 1997, it mentions that a two-year-old had lost their life, and it listed the surviving family
members of the two-year-old. The surviving family members included people directly
in the family tree of our offender. That's how Dr. Price was focused in on this obituary.
But it mentioned a two-month-old younger brother who had survived, someone by the name of Angel Duran.
Angel Duran, at two months old in 1996 and 1997, would have put him at pretty much
an ideal age range from our offender and related to our offender. When we searched the name Angel Duran in all the systems
that we're able to search, we could not find anyone with a birth date close to the one in the obituary
with that same name. The obituary mentioned that the two-year-old big brother of Angel had actually been murdered by his dad,
which was very sad and tragic. Having worked crimes against children here in Albuquerque for decades, we
know that siblings of murdered children are often put into foster care and possibly even adopted.
And if they're adopted, they might change their last name. We went back into our databases, and instead of searching
Angel Duran with the birthday around 1996, we just took the last name out. We said, tell me about people named Angel born in 1996
in the Albuquerque area, and within seconds, we found somebody who matched that description, Angel Gurulé.
And when we looked up his address, he lived about less than a quarter mile from where the sexual assault happened in this neighborhood.
Hair stood up on our necks, and we were so incredibly excited that we think we might have found our offender.
NANCY GRACE: Investigators are thrilled by this brand new lead. They set out to track down their suspect.
RAUL TORREZ: We had to make a point-to-point comparison. We weren't going to build a case simply on forensic genealogy.
We actually needed to make a one-to-one match on a freshly-collected sample of DNA.
KYLE HARSTOCK: We found out that his wife was in the hospital for a relatively routine procedure.
She posted about it on social media. When we saw the post, we went to the hospital
really kind of in the nick of time because they were checking out. They were leaving.
And they had been in one of the hospital rooms by themselves. Once they left, I told my agents, make sure
that they leave the hospital. Like, they're done. They're not coming back. This isn't just a walkaround.
It wasn't. They got picked up by a family member and completely left holding their belongings.
The prosecutor that was helping with the case said that is abandoned property now,
anything they left in the room. And we took two Styrofoam cups, like the kind of cups the hospitals have to give you ice and water.
There was two cups in the room. We took both carefully, placed them in evidence bags,
and overnighted them to our lab to get DNA tested as quick as they could. A genealogy website, the obituary of a little child,
and now two Styrofoam cups provide the answers the "Bloodline Detectives" have been waiting for.
Got our man. That's it. [TENSE MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Police move in to arrest Angel Gurule.
RAUL TORREZ: In January of 2020, the agents from our office executed a search warrant and looking
for evidence of the event of the crime itself. They actually took Mr. Gurule into custody.
And after a short period of time, he confessed to the crime. KYLE HARSTOCK: Once I showed him the test results pointing to him
as the offender, he finally admitted in his own head-- he had no other choice here but to admit he
was the one that did this crime. [TENSE MUSIC] Now, that's a twist. A brutal rapist now wants to write
an apology letter to his victim this many years later? As we see next on "Bloodline Detectives," police learn
even more gruesome details. [AUDIO LOGO] [AUDIO LOGO] [GRIM MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: 2020, Albuquerque, New Mexico,
police finally make an arrest in the brutal sex assault of a female jogger Christmas Eve, 2015.
His name, Angel Gurule. Now in custody, his confession allows police to get a very
clear picture of his crime. KYLE HARSTOCK: Only two people knew what happened that day, right?
One is the victim, but she only saw parts of it. The other one was our offender.
If he truly was our offender-- and I believed he was-- I wanted him to show me exactly what he did.
I wanted to know his thought process through it. And I wanted to record it on video in case
we had to have a jury decide one day if he was telling the truth or not to the police
about this attack. They can actually watch him do it in the environment. He walked me over to the approximate area where
he tackled her to the ground and committed the sexual assault. And the entire time, I'm asking him, you know, very--
almost news media type interview with him. Tell me what you did next, right? What did you think right here?
And he seemed to be very credible and very forthright with explaining what he remembered
and where it happened. And so I felt his statement was incredibly credible and truthful
at that point. NANCY GRACE: Now police can finally see into the mind of Angel Gurule.
KYLE HARSTOCK: Angel Gurule did not have a very checkered criminal past. He did have a few police reports in our system.
One was having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a minor, like a teenage girl,
when he was 18 or 19, which was actually within several months of our attack. The case wasn't followed up on by the detectives,
and nothing happened. There was actually a chance for DNA to be tested in that case
that he left behind. It wasn't tested. Had it been tested, it might have been in CODIS.
We might have actually had a hit, or the sheriff's department would have had a hit
way back in 2016 right away. But that opportunity was missed. He had had a traumatic past, which is very unfortunate.
And I know a lot of times, people have mixed emotions in situations where it's a younger perpetrator,
and they have had trauma. And the thing that I always say is, you know, when somebody has been traumatized,
that's an explanation for their behavior, but it's not an excuse. NANCY GRACE: Angel Gurule openly confesses to his crime.
He enters a plea deal, which significantly reduces his sentence. NICK BALISTRERI: He pled out.
He was looking at a possible, I think, of-- I think they said 80 years. He pled out to 12 years in prison.
Our victim has to live with this the rest of her life. She has a life sentence because this
is something she has to live with the rest of her life. Do I think a life sentence is what he deserves?
Part of me says yes. NANCY GRACE: The brave survivor addresses her rapist during sentencing.
KYLE HARSTOCK: The victim told Angel the same things that she'd been telling us ever
since he was identified. While she doesn't feel bad for him, she wanted him to get help on the things that had haunted him.
And she wanted no more violence to occur and hoped that his time in prison can help him find that path.
SHANNON LOWRY: I think that when a victim sees the person who hurt them sentenced, sent to jail,
there is a large sense of closure. But that doesn't mean they're not gonna wake up and deal
with the consequences of that trauma for the rest of their life. Right? Like I said, they're going to-- they're gonna learn,
and they're gonna grow. And they're gonna heal, and they're gonna become beautiful people.
But that doesn't mean they're not gonna have to deal with it. So but I think that that's a really important step in being
able to close that and maybe move on to the next chapter of their life. NANCY GRACE: Investigators reflect
on the success of the case and the future of investigative genetic genealogy. This is the first case in the state
of New Mexico that used genetic testing to solve a crime is huge. And for me to be part of it, it means a lot to me.
RAUL TORREZ: This case would still be cold without forensic genealogy playing a critical role.
I have no doubt that we would still be sitting here today with a victim who would be struggling still
to put her life back in order, and no sense of who this person was or where this person was.
It was a proof of concept for myself and for our agency and for the investigators that we had discovered an entirely
new tool to try and solve some of the most difficult cases that we have. KEMI PRICE: People should never give up.
People should never give up on a case. They should never give up on an identity.
They should never give up on a loved one because there are people like me out there,
and there are more coming. And as the technology improves, it's just gonna get better,
and more cases are going to get solved. KYLE HARSTOCK: I think if you were a sexual assault survivor,
this spoke volumes. This told you police don't give up, right? We're not gonna give up.
Prosecutors aren't gonna give up. We always wanna find who committed this crime.
We need to unmask them. We need to make what they did transparent to the community.
And so I think this showed a great bout of confidence to our community that we are very capable of doing this,
and we plan on doing it forever. NANCY GRACE: In this case, one incredibly brave rape victim
and amazing forensic science combined to deliver justice when it looked like none
would ever be had. I'm Nancy Grace. Thank you for joining us here on "Bloodline Detectives."
[AUDIO LOGO] [AUDIO LOGO] [THEME MUSIC]

When a young woman is out for a run by a scenic canal route, she is brutally attacked and assaulted by a stranger. Police use groundbreaking genetic genealogy to identify the perpetrator.

Now in its fifth season, Bloodline Detectives is the leading true crime series that explores how police departments harness genetic genealogy to solve crimes that were once considered "unsolvable," bringing long-awaited answers to victims' families.

Brief Summary

A jogger's 2015 assault leads to justice through genetic genealogy, identifying Angel Gurule as the attacker.

Key points

A Vicious Attack. On Christmas Eve 2015, a woman is attacked while jogging in Albuquerque.
The Survivor's Sketch. The victim, a talented artist, provides an incredibly accurate sketch of her assailant.
Emerging Forensic Science. Investigators turn to genetic genealogy to help solve the case.
A Crushing Moment. The survivor believes she sees her rapist again, but the DNA test comes back negative.
Hope Fades. The survivor's hopelessness inspires police to work even harder to catch the rapist.
A Breakthrough in Genealogy. Investigators find a match on GEDmatch, leading to a breakthrough in the case.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Genetic genealogy is here, and it is not going away.

Kemi Price discusses the impact of genetic genealogy.

1:24WatchApr 27, 2025

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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