Post Mortem | The Footprint Evidence

**Anne-Marie Green** (0:10)
Welcome back to Postmortem. I'm your host, Anne-Marie Green, and I'm joined by 48 Hours correspondent, Erin Moriarty. We're gonna be discussing the murder of 35-year-old Jeanie Childs. She was stabbed over 60 times in her Minnesota high-rise apartment in 1993 Her case went unsolved for over two decades until advances in investigative genetic genealogy led authorities to arrest a local businessman and father. His name is Jerry Westrom.
Erin, thanks again for joining us.

**Erin Moriarty** (0:45)
Oh, I'm really grateful to be here because this is one of those stories. People who love forensics love this story.

**Anne-Marie Green** (0:52)
We want to remind everyone, of course, if you haven't listened to this hour, head on over to your feed. You'll find this episode of 48 Hours right above this one. Go listen and then come on back and we can talk about it. When I started watching this, the case reminded me of actually the first 48 Hours I ever did. Several years ago, it was the case of Angie Dodge, a teenager, an 18-year-old who was killed in her brand new apartment.
The case went unsolved for many, many years until they used genetic genealogy to track down her killer. It was kind of newish then.
This is a very similar case. But the thing about this case is, you know, you think you find the DNA, you find the match, it's a home run. But in this case, in the apartment, there was a lot of DNA, so not necessarily a home run.

**Erin Moriarty** (1:46)
Now, what's so interesting is I think jurors sometimes think that it's a slam dunk when there is DNA that has been obtained through genetic genealogy. But the truth is, DNA, if it is collected and tested properly, it could show that somebody was there, but it can't tell you when they were there. And in this case, this case, as you said, Anne-Marie, happened in 1993 That was when DNA was in its infancy, at least being used as a investigative tool. And so they did collect DNA and they collected those bloody footprints that are just so important in this case. But the DNA didn't match anyone back then.
They did have a person of interest. He was living with a boyfriend, Arthur Gray.
But he had an alibi. He was out of town that weekend. And they took those unknown bloody footprints and compared them to Arthur Gray and said that they did not belong to him. So the case kind of went cold. And then in 2015, just about two decades later, there were so many advances in DNA technology that they did more tests. And I thought this was really interesting. As you pointed out, Anne-Marie, there was a lot of DNA there in that apartment. Yeah. According to police reports, Jeanie was a sex worker and there had been men in that apartment. But what was interesting is they found one unknown profile, the specific, that was not just in the bedroom, but also in the bathroom on a towel.
And because investigators believe that the killer might have cleaned up in the bathroom, that was significant to them. And so that is the DNA that belonged to Jerry Westrom. But all they had at that point really, is the idea that Jerry had been in that apartment at some point.

**Anne-Marie Green** (3:43)
Right. Just because DNA is found, you can't tell when that DNA was deposited, right?

**Erin Moriarty** (3:51)
No, you cannot. And that's why in this case, those bloody footprints became so important. Normally, it would be a genetic genealogy case. This was a bloody footprint case. And the prosecution said whoever left their footprints in her blood had to be either there at the time of the murder or right afterwards. And so if those footprints match the person whose DNA was found in that apartment, that was a pretty good indication that that person could be the killer.

**Anne-Marie Green** (4:23)
Now I think at this point, one of the most, I guess, famous investigations that was solved because of genetic genealogy was the case of the Golden State killer, Joseph James D'Angelo. Were the investigators inspired by that case? And is that why they kind of went down that route?

**Erin Moriarty** (4:40)
You know, that case inspired investigators all over the country. Yes, and they were inspired even to use the same genealogist, Barbara Ray Venter. I had met her on a story I was doing for Sunday morning, and she's such an interesting woman. She was a patent lawyer, but she also had a PhD in biology. And she loved to do, because this woman has this amazing brain. Her hobby was to do these family trees, and that's how she got involved in the Golden State killer case. So now she does these cases, and she took that profile that I mentioned that had been found both in the bedroom and the bathroom, and she uploaded it to the genealogy sites, including myheritage.com. And she was able to build out a family tree and came up with two suspects who happened to be brothers.