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How Old Junk Solved Two Murders - Jane Antunez and Patricia Dwyer

May 20, 2024

In this episode, Payton and Garrett delve into two cold murder cases that reignite when unexpected evidence surfaces.

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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

You're listening to an Oh No Media podcast.

Hey everybody, welcome back to our podcast. This is Murder With My Husband. I'm Payton Moreland.

And I'm Garrett Moreland.

And he's the husband.

I'm the husband. I feel like I look so dark today. Must have a good tan going on.

Maybe your light got moved or something.

Might have. Oh, we don't have many announcements this week. Kind of the same old Patreon chug and plug—I mean plug and chug. Oh my gosh!

Patreon, Apple subscriptions, if you want ad-free content, bonus episodes, kind of all that stuff.

Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks for supporting us. We really appreciate it. We're so glad that we can be here each week, and little by little my lisp will get better.

You know, something we kind of just skipped over these last couple of weeks is that we, I think, hit our anniversary for the podcast.

We did! Four years.

Four years, you guys. Four years around... I think it was April. Four years. It's pretty crazy. It's gone by so fast. Actually, no, it hasn’t really gone by slow at all. It's just gone by so fast.

I know! I was just about to say, I don’t feel like it's been slow. I feel like this has just zoomed. Four years is crazy.

It is pretty crazy. We're four years into it. Wait, four or three?

It's four.

No, it's four? Oh my God. It was April 2020.

Yeah. Oh my gosh, I know. It's crazy. And now here we are. This is our full-time gig. We wouldn't be here without you guys. So, yeah, thanks for the support. We really appreciate it.

Alright, you got your 10 seconds for this week?

I do have my 10 seconds.

Garrett, you're never prepared.

We are in the middle—I will post some pictures on my personal social media—of turning our—what is funny?

Post some pictures on my personal social media. Just trying to plug myself, man. No, but seriously, we are turning our garage into a gym. I'm really excited about it. I'll post some pictures. Basically, we painted everything black, put some wood cladding everywhere. We're finishing the floor next, and then I will order the equipment, put everything in. I'm pretty excited. Payton was a little hesitant at first, but after seeing it, she's actually pretty excited now too. She thinks it looks good.

And now here's hoping that I start using it and working out, because if not, it's going to look pretty and be a waste of money. But I'm committing to it. I am.

Yeah, I'm committing to it. I'm going to do this. Going to work out Monday through Friday, take off Saturday and Sunday. That's what I got going on. So, I hope everyone holds me to it. If I'm not working out every day, you can roast me. You can make fun of me. I got to commit to this. But that's my 10 seconds. I'm pretty excited. Again, we'll post some pictures on "Murder With My Husband" and my personal page.

You know how some people buy a new workout set to motivate them to work out? You just renovate an entire garage to motivate you.

I'm ready to go. I need a home gym. I need a home garage gym.

That's crazy. In fact, there is actually a whole community dedicated to home gym garages.

Really?

Yes, there's this guy on YouTube who I've been watching. I think it's Home Gym Garages or Garage Home Gyms—I'm getting all the words mixed up—on YouTube. Amazing. He does reviews of all the equipment, spaces, just everything, A through Z. So, if you're curious, you can go look him up. He also has a Facebook page.

There's a huge community of people—it's like their thing—so I'm pretty excited.

YouTube has a corner for everything.

I know, that's what's so great about YouTube. There is a niche for everything.

Alright, our sources for this episode are the San Luis Obispo Tribune, the County of San Luis Obispo, KCBX FM Radio, KSBY 6, ABC3 Action News, Daily Mail, KEM2, Ventura County Star, and the Los Angeles Times.

I'm going to guess that this case is in California.

Yep. This episode includes discussions of sexual assault and murder, so please listen with care.

Now, okay, we all own junk. Even if you think of yourself as really tidy or as the sort of person who doesn't buy much at all, random clutter always has a way of building up. That jar of mayonnaise in the fridge that's almost, but not quite, empty. Those coupons you set aside but never used, which are now expired. That old pair of pants that doesn't fit anymore, but you're holding on to just in case you can squeeze back in one day. We're all holding on to old, useless stuff that we don't really need. And that's good, because today's case was solved in part because of an old razor that logically should have gone into the trash. Instead, though, through a stroke of luck, the owner held on to it and helped close a decades-old murder mystery.

But before we get into that, we need to backtrack a few years. We're going to 1977. A crime was committed in a California community called Atascadero. This was a small but rapidly growing town in a fairly rural stretch between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Now, it wouldn't be officially incorporated for a few more years, but Atascadero would rocket to become the biggest city in its county before too long. So, picture an area that is exploding in population in 1977, with lots of new people moving in every single day. At this point, it's not exactly crime-ridden, but it's also not unheard of for a murder to happen either. In fact, between 1968 and 1978, the police investigated 65 murders in Atascadero. So that averages out to about one every two months. But law enforcement had an excellent record when it came to closing murder cases here. In those same 10 years, only five homicides went unsolved.

Now, Atascadero at this point was home to a 30-year-old woman named Jane Morton Atunes. She was a recently divorced mother whose 13-year-old daughter had moved out of state with Jane's ex-husband, so she was by herself. As for Jane, she decided to settle in with her own parents and just get to work on starting her life over once her daughter and ex-husband moved away and they divorced. She got a new boyfriend and managed to land a good job at a welfare office. She worked there until she had to quit to take care of a sick family member. From what I can tell, Jane seemed like a responsible, thoughtful person. She wasn't the sort to just leave one day without word to anyone, which was part of why it was so strange when one day, on November 17, 1977, she drove off to meet a friend and then never came back home.

I mean, it sounded like this case is going to be solved at the end of this, so we'll get to that. But this does surprise me because there are so many cases where this happens, and people just disappear. That really intrigues me—like what happened? Where are they? What happened?

So, okay, speaking of our anniversary of our podcast—four years ago, I would have looked at you and said, "It's crazy, how can people just up and vanish? How do people just disappear, and no one understands what happened? Why is it so weird and strange or mysterious? Are there aliens? What's going on?"

Four years after doing this podcast, I can confidently say to you that I feel like there's a reason for everything. Or I feel like there are people who are struggling mentally and have psychotic episodes, and that actually might explain why people randomly up and disappear. As I've learned a little bit more, and I think society as a whole has learned a little bit more about mental health, someone disappearing and going off the radar during a psychotic episode is actually not that rare. I think sometimes when people are in that state of mind, they then get themselves into situations that they wouldn't normally, or they just disappear, or whatever it may be. Four years ago, I would have been like, "This is so confusing," and now I think it's less confusing.

Yeah, mhm.

So again, this is highly out of character for her, though, and I'm not saying this is what happened in this situation. But it's enough to make her brother, Dave Morton, extremely nervous for his sister. I'm not sure if he thought to reach out to Jane’s friend that she was going to see that day—the one she'd driven off to visit—but if he did, that conversation almost certainly made him even more worried. Jane had never even made it to that friend's house. It was like she’d disappeared somewhere between leaving to go see the friend and driving to see the friend.

Okay, so by the next morning, when he still hadn't heard from her, Dave hit the road to see if he could track Jane down for himself. He drove all over the area, recreating the route that ran between Jane’s home and her friend’s place.

If Payton ever disappears, I hope that every single "Murder With My Husband" listener will be out on the streets looking for her.

I do too, that's all.

So eventually, he turned onto a small rural gravel road, and that’s where he spotted her 1972 Datsun parked on the side of the street. Her brother had officially found her car. It was only about a mile away from her house, so she hadn’t really gotten far at all that day. When Dave looked into his sister's car, he found that she was still in the car. She was not alive. His own sister was dead in her own car, in the back seat. She was tied up and her throat had been slit. There was also evidence that she had been sexually assaulted before being killed.

No one should ever have to find anybody like that, but finding a loved one or a family member is heartbreaking. I think it’s just so confusing to be like, "How did this happen on the way to a friend’s house?"

So, clearly Jane had been murdered. The police showed up, but they didn't have any clear theories about who might have killed her. However, whoever did it had somehow gotten her to stop so he could get at her inside the car. Some eyewitnesses suggested she may have picked up a hitchhiker during the trip to her friend's house. Remember, this is the '70s. It's hard to say what this hitchhiker looked like beyond the fact that he was a man, and it was also hard to even verify this testimony. It's possible those eyewitnesses saw another woman who resembled Jane, who drove a similar car, picking up a hitchhiker. After all, Jane's friends all said that she was a very careful driver and probably wouldn't ever pick up a stranger.

Whether or not the hitchhiker story was true, the detectives didn't have much to work with in terms of identifying the killer. Like, say it is a hitchhiker, okay, where does that get you? They have no tie to her. They were able to collect some DNA evidence from the scene, including semen that they found inside Jane's body. But genetic testing technology in 1977 was very limited. There was no way to identify who it came from yet. So, as amazing and smart as they were, they stored the samples in hopes that one day it might be useful.

That will never not be amazing to me.

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Just two months later, on January 11th, 1978, the police got called to investigate another homicide in the same town. This was in the home of 28-year-old Patricia Dwyer. Patricia was single, so she didn't have a boyfriend or a husband to serve as an obvious suspect in her murder. She was also a bit old-fashioned when it came to new technology. She didn't own a television or a laundry machine. She had to go over to her sister's house every time she wanted to wash her clothes. But that was about the only way that Patricia was old-fashioned. She believed very strongly in being independent. She worked at a good job in the medical field and took her niece to get her ears pierced, even after Patricia's sister, the niece's mother, was like, "Absolutely not!"

Patricia was very outgoing; she loved to meet new people. She used to brag that she had no problem finding dates, even though she didn't see herself as conventionally attractive. The day before her murder, Patricia had called a friend to chat on the phone. During the phone call, Patricia talked about her plans for that day. She said she was going to buy groceries and then get a head start on her spring cleaning. She also invited the friend to come over the next day for a visit, and the friend agreed.

When the friend came over the next day, she found Patricia's front door unlocked, so she let herself in. That's when she stumbled upon Patricia dead in a pool of blood in her own living room. Patricia had been stabbed to death with a knife that the murderer had taken from Patricia's own kitchen. She had also been sexually assaulted. Just like with Jane, when the police arrived, the investigators gathered samples of the attacker's DNA.

Initially, the police did not necessarily make the connection between the two murders. They decided to talk to Patricia's friends and family to ask if they knew of anyone who might want to hurt her. Nobody could name any possible suspects. Everyone did find it strange that the murderer had killed Patricia in her own home. All of her friends and family said she would never let someone in if she didn't know them personally, as she just wasn't that trusting. Additionally, Patricia had a big husky dog named Yukon who was very protective of her. If a stranger had come into her home, especially if that stranger had hurt Patricia, Yukon would have jumped in to defend her.

However, when the police took a close look at Yukon, he wasn't injured, and there were no signs that he had been in any kind of fight. He was covered in blood, but all of it was Patricia's, which was actually devastating because it indicated that he had probably tried desperately to wake her up. From what the police could tell, Yukon had spent the past day trying to revive Patricia.

Since Yukon wasn't hurt and there were no signs of forced entry, it seemed like maybe the killer was someone who knew Patricia, possibly a secret boyfriend she hadn't told her friends and family about. That said, it seemed that a lot of people knew Patricia kept a spare key hidden under her welcome mat. It wouldn't have been difficult for an attacker to find the key and let themselves in. Unfortunately, almost anyone could have done this, so the existence of the key under the mat didn't bring the police any closer to identifying the suspect.

So, just like in Jane's case, police had to keep digging for answers. On the surface, Patricia's murder seemed pretty different from Jane's. Jane was found in her car; Patricia was found in her home. Jane's throat was slit; Patricia was stabbed. The killer had used different weapons. There wasn't much to link the two crime scenes, but they did have some eerie similarities. Both crimes occurred in the same area, both women had been sexually assaulted, and both had been tied up with their arms behind their backs. Although their bindings were made of different materials, the police still thought there were too many similarities for the murders to be unrelated.

So they look at both cases. They’re like, “What are the chances these two women, so close together, are both attacked with a knife and tied with their hands behind their backs?”

The next step for detectives was to try to find more commonalities that connected Patricia and Jane. In an interview with a local paper, one sheriff said that the two of them had, quote, “many of the same personality traits,” but he didn't elaborate on what those traits were or whether they might have been what attracted their killer to them.

I do know they ran in the same social circles and did have some friends in common. They also both liked to visit the same local bar, one called the Tallyho Tavern. Patricia even worked with one of Jane's brothers at her job. So again, they definitely could have crossed paths at some point. Definitely some things in common.

From the sound of it, Jane and Patricia didn't actually know one another, but they were only about one degree separated from one another. Who knows? Maybe the killer also liked to go to the Tallyho Tavern and picked each of them as targets while he was there, or maybe he had some connection to their larger social circle. The problem was there were a lot of options and a lot of theories but not much in terms of hard evidence.

The police looked at recent paroles to see if anyone in the area had committed similar crimes in the past. The fact was, there were some people who seemed suspicious, but you can't arrest someone just because they committed a crime in the past and now there's an open investigation. The detectives couldn't find any hard evidence implicating any of those parolees.

At one point in late January of 1978, they spent more than 30 hours questioning a hospital employee who knew both Jane and Patricia. And I don't mean they questioned him for a few hours, took a break, and then went back into the interrogation room. No, they were in there for 30 consecutive hours asking questions. Is that legal? Yes. The only breaks the man got were when he had to use the bathroom.

I'm surprised. I guess it's legal because at any point he could have said, “Hey, I'm leaving,” or “I want to go home,” because he wasn't being detained, right? Apparently, during this 30-hour session, he failed a lie detector test, which didn't make him look good. It sounds like the man was getting desperate because at one point he volunteered to take sodium pentothal, or as it's more commonly known, the truth serum. Yeah, he said he was going to prove that he was telling the truth and he didn't know anything about the murders.

I don't know if the police actually took him up on this offer, but I do know somewhere along the way the man did say something that had to be pretty convincing. It was actually enough to get his name crossed off the suspect list. Once the police ruled him out, they didn't have much else to push the investigation forward.

By December of 1978, which is about 11 months after Patricia's murder and 13 months after Jane's, the police issued a general call for tips. They asked the wider public if anyone knew anything. Plenty of concerned citizens called in. The murders were big enough news that people wanted to help however they could, but none of the tips led anywhere.

The man who owned the Tallyho Tavern was especially invested in seeing these cases solved. After all, both Patricia and Jane had been customers of his. So he put up $200 of his own money for a reward for any tips that led to an arrest. He knew that wasn't a very big payout, but it was what he could afford. When nobody shared any information or claimed the cash, the bar owner put out a jug in the Tallyho. He invited his customers to chip in and help increase the fund. Within a few days, he'd actually raised $1700 as a reward.

That's good. I wonder what would happen if—because I bet you it's happened before, so I'm sure one of our listeners can tell us—if someone put out, "Hey, I'll give you a $50,000 reward," and they never pay it. Yeah, like there's no contract, so technically... Yeah, I wonder if that has happened. I'm sure it has; I wouldn't be surprised.

Upping the reward still wasn't enough to get any useful information out of anyone. Various other individuals and groups added another $1500, meaning a tipster could now potentially collect over $3,000 if they helped the police crack the case. But those tips still never materialized. By November 18, 1978, the police were openly telling the press that they were just stuck. The evidence they had just wasn't enough to move forward, and there weren't any new clues coming in. All they could do was comb back through what they already had and hope that there was something they’d missed during their last look-over. Since there wasn’t anything new standing out, their investigation stalled, and the case was going to go cold for 39 years.

Holy crap, okay. Until... I’m guessing some sort of DNA comes up. But these victims, they were never forgotten.

In 2017, cold case detectives revisited the murders of Jane and Patricia. They weren't just poking around at random to see if they could learn anything new; they came in with a plan. I mentioned before that police collected DNA evidence from the scenes of the crimes way back in 1977 and 1978. At the time, there weren't many tests that detectives could run on it, but DNA technology had become a lot more robust in the four decades since then. On top of that, the state of California had passed a new law in 2009. It said that if anyone was arrested for a felony, the police would automatically collect a DNA sample from them.

Okay, kind of crazy it took until 2009 for California to decide to start doing that. I know it’s what, 15 years ago? But yeah, that seems like it should have been done earlier. I guess because beforehand they didn’t have DNA testing exactly; they couldn't use DNA to do a bunch of stuff, so they were like, "Why would we do that?" They took fingerprints, right? True.

So this meant that by 2017, detectives all through the state had a massive database with 2 million people in it. Jane and Patricia's county had just given the sheriff's department more funding specifically for cold case investigations. This is the sad reality of cold cases: unless someone's willing to pay for it, or some division is going to get funding, cold cases are going to sit there with DNA that needs to be tested forever. There's not enough money to test them, which is why it's great that there are organizations out there helping fund the backlog of rape kits and all these things.

So, with all of these resources, the police compared the genetic material from the cold murders to the samples they had on file, and they found a partial match. It wasn't an exact hit, but it was close enough for the investigators to figure out that the person who came up in the system was related to the killer. Basically, the murderer had a relative who had committed an unrelated felony, and now his DNA was coming up as a similar match. So, the police start digging into that person's family tree and trying to see if anyone fit the killer's profile. They found a relative who lived in the Atascadero area at the time of the murders, and interestingly, this was a man who'd already come up on their radar previously years ago.

Was it the guy they interrogated for 30 hours? We'll get there. Oh my gosh.

So, I mentioned before that the police looked at people who'd been paroled after committing super similar crimes, and there was one man who looked like a very likely suspect. The police at the time just didn't have any concrete evidence to link him to the murders—not until now, when they have a DNA match. His name was Arthur Rudy Martinez.

Now, Arthur had a long history of violent crime even before he was linked to Jane and Patricia's murders. It all began way back in 1976 when Arthur was just 18 years old. In June of that year, he broke into a store in Fresno, California. Originally, he just wanted to rob it, and he assumed the store was empty and free of witnesses. He was shocked to find a 48-year-old woman still in the store. So, Arthur panicked, tied the woman up, binding her arms behind her back. Once the woman was tied up and couldn't fight him off, Arthur decided, "Okay, I know I came here to rob, but now that she's tied up, I'm just going to sexually assault this woman." Go. Okay. After he was finished with the attack, Arthur shot the woman in the head. Jeez. Which is unlike any of the other killings though, because they were all... oh, stabbings, basically.

Well, thanks to some kind of miracle, this bullet grazes the top of the woman's skull, so she survives. Not that Arthur stuck around to see if she was okay. He literally shot her and then left. He drove up the road to a café and then ordered a cup of coffee. He was still in the parking lot, sipping his drink when the police showed up, because eyewitnesses saw him go, and the police show up and arrest him. And once Arthur was in custody, the investigators were actually able to link him to a bunch of other violent crimes. According to reporting with the Tribune, Arthur had also shot a 16-year-old girl and a 26-year-old woman in previous robberies gone wrong. All of his victims so far had lived, but this was a long list of charges, especially for a culprit who was only 18 years old. And I'm sure we're going to get to it, the charge that he was caught with, so Arthur very easily could have spent the rest of his life behind bars. I mean, he's attempted to kill three people at this point. But, as you know, attempted murder, which is something I'll never understand.

So, the police worked out a plea bargain with him where he was only charged with rape, assault with a deadly weapon, and assault with the intent to murder. So, just because he has bad aim, he's not going to go to prison forever. They didn't nail him for all of the various robberies, and in exchange for his guilty plea, Arthur managed to only spend about 10 years in prison before getting out on parole. Okay, guess when his release was? 1977. What a surprise.

So, once he's free, he moves to Atascadero, and there he gets a job as a welder. But it didn't take long for him to start getting into trouble again. Arthur lived there for only 6 months before Jane's body was found at the side of the road. Patricia then was murdered 2 months later. Now, as near as the police could tell, Arthur didn't actually know either woman before the murders. Now that they'd identified him with his DNA, the detectives even showed his picture to Jane and Patricia's relatives. They asked, "Hey, have any of you guys seen this guy before?" And everyone was like, "No, we have no idea who that was." The best guess the police could make was that the two murders were just crimes of opportunity. Arthur must have seen Jane driving down the road, maybe pretended to hitchhike just to have a chance to hurt her. It's still unclear why Jane pulled over for him since she didn't usually pick up strangers. You know, that's the one question I had, just out of curiosity. Because she's a nice person, yeah.

Similarly, it's hard to say what made him decide to break into Patricia's house and kill her that day. Even assuming that he found her key under the doormat, it's unclear why he even thought to look there in the first place or why he chose her home to break into. And the police still didn't understand why Patricia's dog had failed to protect her. So, there were a lot of unknowns and questions about the murders themselves. The police assumed that Arthur had killed the two women to avoid a repeat of his last conviction. That time, his victim lived and was able to call 911 and could have testified against him in court if he hadn't taken a plea deal. So, this time around, he made sure both victims were dead. With no one to talk to the cops, he was able to stay a free man after those crimes. And after Patricia's murder in 1978, Arthur decides to skip town. He moved to Spokane, Washington, where he continued attacking women. So, he wasn't interrogated then? It wasn't the same guy who was interrogated for...? Okay, I just wanted to keep you on your toes. Got it.

So, the good news is, as near as we can tell, he didn't murder anyone while living in Spokane. Oh, good for him. What a solid guy. Man, obviously, he's not a good guy either. In November of 1978, 11 months after Patricia's murder, Arthur was convicted of numerous rapes and robberies and sentenced to life in prison. So, 11 months after he kills Patricia, he gets sentenced to life in prison for more rapes and robberies, which goes back to our point earlier of because it was attempted murder, right? He didn't go to jail for life. So now he gets out and kills two more people. This could have been... and isn't even could have been stopped. This could have been stopped, right? But he only ends up serving 16 years of his life sentence in prison. And I haven't been able to find much information about how exactly he pulled it off, but in 1994, Arthur escaped prison. Holy crap, who is this guy?

So, it's not like he got out on parole; he escaped. And once he was free again, he began using a fake name. He settled down in the Fresno area, which was about a 2-hour drive away from Atascadero. He stayed there for 20 years, basically just keeping his head down and staying out of trouble. The police never figured out who he really was or ever recaptured him. That is, not until he turned himself in willingly, finally, in 2014. What? No freaking way.

Literally, until that day, he was never in any serious danger of being caught again. He could have spent the rest of his life a free man. What, did he have a change of heart? I hate even like saying that because of how many people he's hurt, but okay. Well, get this: it's not because he's all of a sudden a good man. Uh-huh. So he's like, "Okay, I'll probably spend the rest of my life in prison if I go back because I escaped, right?" Except he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Oh, and uh, obviously, he's on the run and using an alias, so he's not affording any good health coverage.

So his cancer is not being treated well. He got the idea that if he was back in prison again, the state would pay for his medications and his other treatment. If he goes to prison, of course they're going to have to pay. So, basically, if someone who has killed multiple people has cancer in prison, they help him with the cancer treatment. I don't think they help them, but they give... someone. I'm curious about this. If anyone knows more information, let us know. But that's kind of interesting.

There's a reason I don't know, and it's because he gets this idea. He's like, "I'm going to turn myself in so I can get treated for my cancer." And uh, he's like, "I'll go serve the rest of my life behind bars, but at least I'll get treatment," he said. And even if they don't treat me, like, even if they don't give him, you know, what he needs, they'll probably give him painkillers. He's like, "At least they'll give me painkillers and other stuff to deal with this." Uh, didn't work out that way. Arthur went to prison and then died two months later on June 8. They didn't treat him. Oh, wow, okay. So his 65th birthday would have been just one week later if he'd made it.

So, by the time investigators identified Arthur as the suspect in Jane and Patricia's murders, it was too late to question him, figure out why, how, how did any of this even happen? Karma is a... you know what. And I'll note, it's not very clear to me why his relative's DNA came up as a partial match but not his, because obviously he was in the system. And I'll note, it's not very clear to me why his relative's DNA came up as a partial match and not his. I'm wondering if he just died too quickly for them to officially log him in the system, or they might have skipped collecting a sample because his wasn't a new conviction. Yeah, either way, the detectives believed that Arthur was the real killer. Uh, they just couldn't prove it, and they didn't want to close the case without something more definitive.

Basically, they needed to compare Arthur's actual DNA and the material from the crime scenes to see if it's a perfect match. He doesn't have any on file, and even though it had been 3 years since he died, they figured that maybe someone might have owned something of his still that they could test.

So officials reached out to his girlfriend who lived with Arthur in the Fresno area before he had turned himself back into prison and the police asked, "Hey, do you have anything, anything of his? We know he died three years ago, but anything?" It turned out, even after all this time, she had some of Arthur's old grooming tools in her bathroom cabinet, and this included his razor.

Now, I know it's wild to think that anyone would still hold on to a crusty old used razor for years, but that's kind of human nature. Like I said, we all let clutter pile up. It's possible that Arthur's girlfriend had completely forgotten that it was in there until the police came knocking. Either way, they pulled usable material from the razor and tested it against the scene samples from the crime scenes, and it's an exact match. I mean, statistically, it was basically impossible for the DNA to have come up for anyone else. And even better, not long after the police get the genetic match, the Cold Case detectives track down a witness from Jane's murder. I think this was one of the people who testified that Jane had picked up a hitchhiker.

Either way, the police show this witness a picture of Arthur and they say, "Hey, does this maybe resemble the hitchhiker that you saw?" And not only did the witness recognize him, she's like, "Oh no, that is the exact man that she picked up." Her testimony and the DNA results proved that Arthur Martinez was the murderer.

So, on April 17th, 2019, the local sheriff's department announced that finally, after 41 years, Jane and Patricia's killer had been identified, and this case was closed. The officials also said they were encouraged by their success and they were hoping to use this same technology to solve other cold cases. I mentioned before that at the time that Jane and Patricia were killed, there were also those five unsolved murders in the area. By 2019, there were 41 unsolved cases, but the sheriffs were confident that they'd be able to start closing the books on those murders too.

It's wild to think that this case sat cold for 41 years and that the key that broke it open basically was an old razor. But the truth is, when it comes to criminal investigations, you never know what details will be important and which ones won't. And it can be almost impossible to predict which hard evidence will end up being the smoking gun. It's like the old saying goes, one person's junk is another person's treasure. And in this case, one woman's trash represented something else to two other murder victims and their families. And that was justice. And that is the case of Jane and Patricia.

It's crazy that there are so many cold cases like that that are still out there today, where somebody was innocently killed like them, which is horrible and still waiting to be solved at random. And you know what? If that was... if that case happened today, most likely the DNA wouldn't have been left behind at the scene. And then where do you go from there? True.

The only reason this was solved was basically because we didn't know that DNA could be... I guess that's not true, though, because if they're sexually assaulted like that, the DNA is going to be always left at the scene. Well, I will say, sometimes they are smarter now and they protect... Yeah, I get that. All right, you guys.

So that is our episode for this week, and we will see you next time with another one.

I love it.

I hate it.

Goodbye.

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