Insect Clues | S1 E10 | Forensic Files | FULL EPISODE | Forensic Files

[Music] between 1985 and 1988 18 transiens hitchhikers and prostitutes were choked sexually
molested and left for dead in the desert mountains of California the only Witnesses the
insects of the desert and they also turned out to be extremely important pieces of evidence
[Music] [Music] the women who had been choked unconscious and sexually molested were
all dumped and left for dead in the high desert mountains near San Diego California not all of the victims died
and those who survived all described the same scenario several of them had their
pants undone and pulled down bras were moved moved up exposing their breasts one lady had a nipple ring removed so we
thought there would been there had been some sort of sexual activity but because
they were unconscious we had no proof of it Betty bass was one of the victims see
you to byebye she's had a history of mental problems and is currently homeless but she can vividly recall the
night 8 years ago when she accepted a ride from a stranger after leaving this Motel on
elone Boulevard hard she looked for a ride going towards Ramona California a man in a silver car pulled
up and offered to take her part way I take you as far as El Centro good enough he had a clean car so I thought you know
that's a pretty good guy pretty nice guy you know I just thought he was okay as they drove over the mountains the driver
said he needed to pull off the highway to take a bathroom break a when the driver walked around the car
he asked Betty to grabed something from the back seat as she did he wrapped his arm around her neck and choked her the
last thing she remembers was losing Consciousness when she woke up she walked up this hill looking for help so
I walked and I walked and I walked well I finally um crawl over this fence I crawled to the other side of the street
some family came by and put me in there at mot home and ate me up a little bit and then they took me to the hospital
the scene of the attack is right here in the dirt right by this little null the car tire track stopped back
here a few feet and then you could see Footprints up into this area her clothing some of her clothing was found
here police photographed the shoe and tire Prince and also recovered two Marlboro cigarette butts on Betty bass's
shirt detectives noticed a tiny red carpet fiber this attack sounded identical to another in the same
vicinity just one month earlier two young girls were hitchhiking together at a restaurant near the interstate
highway a silver compact automobile pulled up and the middle-aged man offered them a
ride where you girls gone we're heading to Tucson take you as far as El Centro sounds good me hey hop
in it was a ride they'll never forget [Music] [Music] this is Sheriff's it was my friend he
straggled her do you have any idea who he is the guy who picked this up his hiking this girl was fortunate she
survived her attack and her friend whom she feared was dead was later found in the desert frightened but alive the
victims all provided a similar description of their attacker he was about early 40s short hair blondish
grayish color glasses that's how they all described him obviously these were people who were going to take rides from
anyone but they many of them told us that they felt comfortable getting in the car with him and there were other
similarities with all of these attacks the things he said to these women it was almost uh like he had a script it was
almost the same type of scenario I can only take you 40 miles I'm only going to El Centro the type of people he was
victimizing were the vulnerable people in society some people who were having mental problems uh drug addicts Street
people hitchhikers police had a description of the suspect some tire tracks and shoe print evidence but
little else a sexual predator was loose in the mountains of California San Diego's eloh home
Boulevard where prostitutes run ways and transients have congregated for years the reason location it's close to a
highway Entrance Ramp convenient for hitchhikers looking for a ride and it was here where many of the
victims were picked up we had a series of live victims and we also had dead victims out there who we thought were
part of the pattern we had what we thought was a pretty consistent pattern common Footprints common tire tracks
same type of victims being victimized and certainly the same area where they're being picked up and jumped when
detectives were called to sheep's head Mountain on July 21st 1988 they feared another in the series of Choke and dump
cases this time the victim was dead and nuded from the waist down she was found laying on the road here this was more
dug out at the time the the greaters come in here through every so often and she was in the more in the ditch type of
thing the victim had been dead for quite some time her skin was brown and blistered from the Sun her legs and feet
were covered with blood it appeared the victim was alive before falling into the
ditch because impressions of her arms flailing were found in the dirt detectives noticed a blood trail and her
bare Footprints leading almost a mile up the mountain at the top of the mountain
detectives found a pair of shoes some clothing two sets of footprints and signs of a struggle the footprints LED
detectives to a parking area where they noticed a tire track it looked as if a car had turned around before leaving the
scene the victim's bare Footprints LED from the clearing into the brush somehow she gets herself out of this area and
then comes back up and then finds her way down the main road on the body investigators discovered some tiny
Clues hundreds of live wormlike creatures they were carefully collected and preserved then taken to the
forensics lab for analysis was it possible these tiny insects could tell forensic scientists
something about the victim's last moments alive or even when she was killed the autopsy revealed that the
victim had probably been choked but strangulation wasn't the cause of death the cause of death was actually a
laceration of the vagina uh the mechanism would have been blood loss from that laceration the victim was
identified as Sandra swick a 43-year-old transient from Florida swick's body was
found in the same general vicinity as many of the other choke and dump victims all were found the same distance from
the interstate highway usually near a v in the road where the attacker could park without being seen by others
detectives still didn't have a suspect but 3 months after swick's murder detectives got an unexpected break while
patrolling in the mountains sheriff's deputy Larry Daly noticed a car driving out of a deserted Side Road and as I
came around the bend here I could see the the car coming out daily turned onto the side road and saw a woman lying
in the dirt unconscious but still alive I saw the victim uh laying on the ground
pants down past her knees her shirt pulled up to her neck as if someone had choked her daily immediately called for
an ambulance and put out a description of the car he saw driving from the scene after 3 years of frustration could this
be the break investigators were hoping for after finding the body of an unconscious
woman in the desert sheriff's deputy Larry Daly rushed to his vehicle and called for help I also called out the
description of the vehicle that I saw coming down the road towards me a short time later this silver Honda was stopped
by an officer who heard the call what I wanted to see was I wanted to see a monster I wanted to see this monstrous
man maybe someone with three arms who came out and was abducting women and and and strangling them the driver was
41-year-old Ronald Porter an automotive mechanic with a history of sexual offenses the woman found unconscious in
the desert survived her attack and was able to identify Porter as her attacker Porter confessed to the attack but would
not admit to any of the other attacks over the past 3 years investigators believed Porter was responsible and they
also suspected that Porter had murdered Sandra swick 3 months earlier to find out if all these crimes were the work of
one individual San Diego authorities sought help from the FBI and their unit which specializes in studying serial
murderers that another offender would choose to abduct the same type of victim bring it to the same type of location do
the same types of Acts with them in the same locations almost exact locations it
became pretty pretty evident to us that the probabilities favored it being one one person Larry anram identified the
remote desert dump sites as the signature element of all of the crimes the attacker invested lots of
time and effort into finding these remote locations another signature element was
the type of women he chose he's making an assessment before he decides he's going to go ahead and ask her if she
needs a ride and and when he's made that initial impression then once he's decided yeah I can control this victim
um then she gets in the car and then it becomes somewhat of a game with him to get her where he wants wants to go the
FBI was convinced that all of these crimes were indeed the work of the same individual The Next Step was for San
Diego authorities to prove that Ronald Porter committed these crimes the carpet fibers in Porter's car were
microscopically similar to the red carpet fiber found on the blouse of Betty bass tire tracks found at some of
the crime scenes were similar to the print on the spare Michelin tire found in the trunk of Porter's car and when
searching Porter's apartment police found shoes and boots with treadmarks consistent with those found at some of
the choke and dump crime scenes a walkie-talkie discovered in Porter's storage shed belonged to a woman who was
choked and dumped in the desert mountains a few years earlier and the blouse worn by that same victim
contained a Seaman stain a DNA analysis of Ronald Porter's blood matched the Seaman stain from the blouse but despite
all of this evidence prosecutors faced a major legal Problem by the time police arrested Ronald Porter the statute of
limitations on most of these assault cases had run out if prosecutors were going to send Porter to jail for any
length of time it would have to be for the murder of Sandra swick but the swick murder murder was their weakest case
investigators found no seen no blood no hair or clothing fibers which could link
Ronald Porter to the swick crime scene a tire track found at the Sandra swick attack site was too faint for analysis
however some of the tennis shoe prints found at the swick crime scene were similar to a pair of tennis shoes found
in Ronald Porter's apartment but Porter's attorney says a similar and a shoe print is inconclusive but 5 million
other people with similar shoes with similar Treads could also have made the print and the prosecution faced another
problem they weren't exactly sure when Sandra swick was murdered time of death determination by pathologist is a very
inexact science if it's a science at all um there are certain changes the body under goes and we can predict General
time frames for those but there's a lot of different variables that uh affect it
if prosecutors wanted to convict Ronald Porter of murder they needed more could the tiny insects found on swick's body
tell forensic scientists when Sandra swick died and tie Ronald Porter to her murder when detectives found Sandra
swick's body on sheep's head Mountain it was badly decomposed the hot desert air and Sun
had taken its toll and hundreds of tiny wormlike creatures were feeding on her decomposing flesh investigators wondered
if these tiny creatures might offer some clues about when Sandra swick died detectives collected about a hundred of
these creatures and sent them to the laboratory of David Faulkner he's a forensic entomologist an expert on
insect activity on dead bodies they can tell you lots about where they've been where the victims been uh how old the
victim is conditions of the body following death and those are the things that are interesting fauler first task
was to determine the age of these creatures or maggots as they're called so he preserved some in alcohol at the
exact stage of development as when they were found eventually the maggots would shrink and develop a hard shell and a
week later emerge as a winged adult once fauler had an adult he could compare it
to the hundreds of different flies which inhabit the California desert where swick's body was
found after hours of study and Analysis fauler identified them the Flies were sarcophaga also known as flesh flies
other things this particular group of flies uh will do is they'll fly in very bad weather so if it's foggy or rainy or
overcast they'll be active and they'll be searching out a potential host uh whereas other flies will probably settle
and wait until the sun comes out or till it gets warmer once Faulkner knew they were sarcophaga he could study the exact
time frame of their life cycle the preserved specimens were in their third or final stage of laral development once
you have them identified you know what stage in development the most developed ones are then you go backwards and say
okay this was the temperature regime at that time this is how long this particular insect takes to develop to
this stage therefore that body was available to these insects for this amount of time
usually that indicates how long the person's been dead in normal weather conditions it takes a week for the baby
maggots to develop to their third stage but the weather conditions in the desert
are far from normal during the week Sandra swick's body was discovered the daytime temperatures average
92° in 92° weather it would take only 3 and A2 days for the freshly laid maggots
to develop to their third and final stage and Faulkner was able to tell investigators something else the
sarcophaga never deposit their maggots in the dark they only do so in daylight I'm going to Florida this meant that
Sandra swick was still alive when the sun set on Sunday evening July 17th but she was dead by Daybreak on Monday
morning July 18th at the first sign of light these flesh flies were attracted to the chemical scent of swick's
decomposing flesh and immediately laid their maggots the maggots would not have been as developed if she had been alive
longer if she had been alive Monday afternoon uh Monday evening there's no way that these flies under those
temperature conditions could have developed to that stage Faulkner's conclusions provided police with a
scientific time frame for swick's murder now detectives could investigate Ronald
Porter's whereabouts during the time of swick's death Porter worked as a mechanic at this Automotive chain store
when his time sheets were subpoenaed they revealed he was not at work on Sunday July 17th in addition Porter
provided no alibi regarding his whereabouts on that day and it matched up uh we had a time period where Ron
Porter was available to drive from North part of the County Down to pick up Sandra swick and transporter to East
East County based on the insect Clues and the similarities between the swick murder and the other cases Ronald Porter
was charged in the murder of Sandra swick prosecutors believe Ronald Porter picked up swick as she hitch tied
somewhere near an entrance ramp to Interstate 8 I'm going to Florida jump in I can
take you about 40 miles to El Centra that'd be great how you doing good as the car traveled East into the mountains
Porter pulled off the main Highway onto a dark deserted Road he may have used some excuse as he
did in other cases possibly the need to take a bathroom break as he walked around the back of the car he surprised
swick from behind grabbing her around the neck in a military type choke hold he pulled her
from the car and choked her until she was [Music] unconscious he threw her to the ground
removed her clothes and sexually assaulted her with his [Music] [Music] hand he then returned to his car and
fled sometime later swick regained Consciousness dizzy disoriented and bleeding heavily from the attack swick
walked Barefoot down the dark deserted road walking almost a mile before collapsing the blood trail was almost 1
mile long and she bled to death from laceration suffered during the assault her death had to be a tough one very
difficult long dying process that she went through and the insect Clues were able to provide detectives with the time
of death something they were unable to determine by any other means find a defendant Ronald Elliot Porter guilty of
the crime of murder Ronald Porter was convicted of second deegree murder in the death of Sandra swick and was
sentenced to 28 years to life in prison Ronald Porter continues to maintain his innocence the insect Clues
were an important element in their case against Ronald Porter and they told David Faulkner all he needed to know
about Sandra swick's brutal attack and murder you get a lot of information from him whether a body's been moved uh how
long the person's been dead or how long the body has been available to Insects uh whether the body's been buried
whether the person took drugs whether they had been poisoned all these different sorts of things uh uh could be
U uh in the insects that are collected or removed from the body [Music] a [Music]

From 1985 to 1988, 18 people were choked, molested and left for dead in the remote mountains of California.

Brief Summary

The episode details the murders of hitchhikers in California, focusing on Ronald Porter's conviction through forensic evidence.

Key points

The Choke and Dump Cases. Between 1985 and 1988, numerous hitchhikers and transients were attacked in California's desert.
Betty Bass's Survival Story. Betty Bass recounts her harrowing experience of being attacked by a stranger.
The Breakthrough in the Case. Sheriff's deputy Larry Daly discovers a woman in the desert, leading to a suspect.
Insect Evidence Reveals Timeline. Forensic entomologist David Faulkner uses insect activity to determine the time of death.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I thought he was okay.

Betty Bass recalls her initial impression of her attacker.

2:16WatchMar 6, 2025

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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