Truck Forensics

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My name is Ed.

Everyone say hello, Ed.

I'm from a very rural background myself.

My dad is a farmer and my mom is a cousin.

So like it's not like

what do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club?

I know it sounds like the start of a bad joke, but that really was my reality nine years ago.

I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different.

On stage stood a comedian with a story that no one expected to hear.

On the 22nd of July, 2015, a 23-year-old man had killed his family.

And then

he came to my house.

So, what do you get when a true crime producer walks into a comedy club?

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Listen to Wisecrack on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun is intended for mature audiences and may include topics that can be upsetting, such as emotional, physical, and sexual violence, rape, and murder.

The names of survivors have been changed for anonymity purposes.

Testimony shared by guests of the show is their own and does not reflect the views of Tenderfoot TV or Odyssey.

Thank you so much for listening.

From Tinderfoot TV in Atlanta, I'm your host, Payne Lindsay, and this is Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun.

We need it off that fucking island.

The truck had been sitting in Nome for years.

I have someone holding the vehicle for us now.

In Nome.

Why is this so hard?

No impound, no investigation.

Not treated like evidence.

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This call is being recorded.

No, I believe they cut off was a couple days ago, actually.

Let me put out an email.

You know, I'd almost say they're going to tell me we're way too late in the season for this.

they stop doing that when the winter comes

you know what what's your first name

final destination of this truck is Tacoma Washington please take a picture before you leave it

hello it's Tracy hey it's payne uh can you do me a huge huge favor

maybe

can you right now go get the truck so it can make the last shipment out before winter?

I think so.

Where's the key?

The keys are in the truck.

Okay.

At this address, I'm texting it to you now.

I can go get it.

Is it possible for you to drive the vehicle to the port within the next hour?

It's the cutoff.

Dylan, did you already pay and run the card?

Cutting it close.

LOL.

It won't be fucking LOL if that truck doesn't get on that ship.

I'm gonna put you on with Dylan.

God send it.

If Joseph was murdered, this truck might be the last real thing that connects us to that moment.

It's on its way to Anchorage.

We managed to pull it out, literally an hour before winter.

After that, the port was shut down, and we had it shipped first to Anchorage.

This process wasn't easy.

This truck, it might hold everything.

Not a theory, not hearsay, something real, something physical.

It sat through Alaska's harshest seasons, but if it still held something, even just a strand of hair, a drop of blood, that could break this case wide open.

So we're not just looking, we're listening.

Because if Joseph's truck could talk, it might finally be ready to say something.

I do not think at all that Joseph's death was an accident.

No, that he was murdered.

Why did they not look into everything?

There was a very extensive search where his truck was to me planted,

but nothing else was looked into.

It sounds terrible.

Sometimes I feel like law enforcement knows what happened.

Law enforcement has the ability to seize vehicles and process them for fingerprints.

That was not done.

They basically just didn't explore any of that.

I think they became wedded to the theory that he was a victim of an accident.

We've been taught at search and rescues that the last person is going to be seen within about a mile or half a mile of his truck.

And we cover all that area big time.

You towed it, correct?

I towed it, yes.

Yes.

Did you notice anything suspicious about the truck?

There was flowers on the windshield.

There was no evidence of foul play or anything like that.

I mean, we have a situation where all of this, you know, all of this work that I've done is basically work that should have been done by the troopers.

But you're in a situation where, for whatever reason, the troopers decided not to investigate this and to basically just close it out.

And now they're in a pretty defensive posture about the whole case.

Did those troopers, the ABI guys, when they came out, they were supposed to take the truck and process it.

Do you know if we have any results for that or if they did that?

They didn't do that.

Looking for blood or...

They did not do that.

A lot of people have commented that it was kind of a problem that the truck was left out there and so many people went through it.

It wasn't towed in and put in secure impound until just before the ABI guys got out there.

The local troopers knew that that was something they should have done, and so they did it at the last second so that when the ABI guys got out there, they would have the vehicle in the secure impound at the police department there to look at it.

They didn't process the vehicle forensically for anything.

I called Andy because he gets it.

He's someone who's never stopped asking the right questions.

And he's followed this case for years, seeing the same red flags that I did.

Andy, been a minute.

Yeah, how you doing?

I'm good, man.

How about yourself?

All right, doing good.

You're famous now if you didn't know how many random emails from people around the country how many people how many people listen to this show of yours people at no appear to be all riled up

asked him point blank is there any shot at finding anything inside this truck

i think that the only possibility would be blood migrated into places where it still exists, you know, down into cracks and crevices,

Or if there was blood on the seat that had dried.

I don't know if there's carpet in the vehicle, but the same situation, you can get blood on there that dries and lasts kind of forever.

It would be an exercise in spraying the truck with a chemical to see if it reacts with blood.

And if it does, making an effort to swab areas and recover any dried blood and then having it tested.

He put us in touch with a forensic expert just outside of Seattle, someone with decades of experience, the kind of guy who knows how to pull evidence from the impossible.

His name is Matt Nodell, and he spent decades solving murders.

The team and I hopped on a Zoom call.

I know how difficult this kind of assessment is with an old truck and going through it the way that it would need to be examined.

There's a couple of things to think about in how we would do that processing.

He started breaking it down: phenophalline tests, luminol sprays, how to test a stain without destroying it.

He wasn't guessing, he was detailing.

My first step is always just bright light, searching for anything that's a stain.

Bright light.

And if you see something, then I would do a spot test of that to see if it tests positive for any blood.

Depending on how big or small the stain is, you might want to just save that spot test to send it forward to a DNA lab to identify, is it human, non-human?

Then the next level would be something like luminol, which is a spray reagent that can react with blood.

If we use luminol, it needs to be done in the dark so that you can look for the luminescence if there is a reaction with blood.

Within minutes of our Zoom call, I realized this wasn't just a maybe.

This was a plan.

Methodical, clinical, the kind of precision that holds up in court.

It's pretty powerful stuff detecting dilute amounts of blood.

So blood was once dropped in a place, has been weathered, but there's maybe just a little perimeter of it.

Luminol might suggest it's there.

I would document it, take a bunch of photos and document this.

I would approach it as if it was something I was doing for court, like a homicide scene, so that if we find something, it's traceable.

It's done forensically so that you could have further testing done.

I have a garage essentially that serves as my lab.

We could park it in the garage and do this at my office.

And just like that, he offered to test the truck.

in his own forensic lab.

Read the investigators' reports.

They've interviewed quite a few people.

So I know it was by this exit 44, milepost 44, outdoors for a number of days there.

I'd like to see the photos from Alaska State Police or whoever sees this to get their reports and their notes.

Did they process it?

Did they bring the local crime lab in?

Being real, it was a long shot.

Years had passed, almost a decade.

Dozens upon dozens of people have been inside that truck.

But we are all in.

If we were to find something that popped positive for blood, unless it was a big patch, if there was a lot of it, then it's not such a big issue.

But if it's small spots or spatter that went under the steering wheel, as there's some kind of a struggle,

if we detect it, might even take that piece of the vehicle off and preserve it.

That we'd have the maximum amount of DNA potential transfer on that to do further testing.

If there was blood, he'd sure as hell find it.

If there was a hair, he'd process it.

That's kind of what the strategy would entail.

So then the logistics become, where would this be done?

Where's the car now?

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After landing in Seattle, we drove about an hour and a half outside of town and pulled up to a cold steel garage.

Hey man,

I'm paying.

How you doing?

It looked nothing like a lab, but it had everything.

Swab kits, luminol, evidence bags, and parked right there in the center was Joseph's truck.

Before I even begin, what can I find forensically that might be useful?

One is blood.

We started with a bright light inspection.

Once blood dries, if it's protected, it will just remain there.

Scanning every panel, every floor map.

I go into this process thinking, okay, these are the things that I can look for.

I'm not interested in rust.

Every inch of the entire cab.

This is when you stop, and then you can document this.

We see that part of the plastic housing has been broken away.

I can see some brown discolorations on the dashboard.

I have a test for blood called the phenophiline test.

When I come across something like what's on this dashboard, it could be blood.

Blood dries, it tends to concentrate on the perimeter.

The middle evacuates and kind of goes to the perimeter.

So sometimes on a faint drop like this, you'll get a heavier edge.

It's called a phenophiline test.

And so what is it actually testing that?

It tests for the heme and hemoglobin.

And that tells you it's blood.

Yes.

It will tell you it's blood.

It does not tell you if it's human blood.

I leaned in and spotted something, a dull brown smear, just above the door frame.

The reason we would only test half of that stain is because then we would have an untested, undiluted other half to preserve and then send that to a DNA lab.

You can save this swab.

We could test that and if it reacts, we could save this swab and they may be able to get enough cells.

DNA techniques have become so strong.

So this is just water.

It helps dissolve the stain that's on there.

We definitely want to get the stain off of the door and onto this swab.

It's deionized water so it's just pure water and that will help remove what's on the door.

We're going to physically find that

and I'll just go to the to the bottom of this just rubbing that a little bit like that.

so i don't see much transfer there i'm going to rub a little harder so you can see i've got some a little bit of discoloration on the on the part that i really pushed onto the swab okay all right so now

this is the phenothaline reagent

and i'll add a drop of that reagent

like that

And then the last step,

this is hydrogen peroxide.

And I'll add a drop of that.

Could have been rust.

Could have been food.

Could have been blood.

If that would have been blood, that would have turned bright pink in the first couple of seconds.

Really?

And I'm going to leave that there, and I'll try to run a known blood.

We swabbed it.

Ran the test.

The phenothale binds with the iron and the heme in hemoglobin that's in a component of blood.

Alright, so now I can see I've picked up something, a little bit of discoloration on the end of the swab.

Yeah.

Same sequence of chemicals.

I actually dropped that, I kind of missed it.

Phenothaline, and then pushes the reaction to go.

This is the hydrogen peroxide.

And then we waited.

Put a drop of that on there.

Oh, yeah, there it goes.

And here we come with the, and it's kind of cold in this.

That was instant.

Nothing.

The reading comes seconds.

The test requires that you read it in the first couple of seconds of applying those chemicals.

One test after another, we were getting nothing.

No reaction at all.

Ultimately, even this negative one from the inside of the door will suck up enough oxygen in the air to push that to turn pink.

This is known blood, only a half a year old.

So you see the type of positive reaction that we would be looking for.

Now, the test is sensitive to the cold, so you can get a false negative if it's too cold.

Really?

It's pretty cold in here, so that was a little slow.

But here, because it's a little colder, it took a couple seconds.

But the idea is read it in seconds, not minutes.

Do we come all this way just just to walk out with empty evidence bags?

So I've only seen Dexter and Forensic Files.

Everyone's seen the Luminol blue light.

Yeah, it's luminescence.

So it's kind of like lightning bugs.

How lightning bugs light up in a darkened environment.

They're using a similar kind of thing.

So I put a little bit of diluted blood on here.

I'm just going to lay this down here.

So I'll have to turn out the lights.

Was this it?

Was this truck really clean?

Maybe.

This version is a couple of chemical tablets that you drop into water.

It has a proper pH in these tablets that you just mix with water.

I test this little part right there and it's blood.

But I also see some faint stuff over here as well.

And so yeah, so I might want to know is this all one part of a pattern?

Did someone try to clean this up?

Was there fabric here that was impressed and then removed?

Anything I can document without dilution is advantageous to me.

I'll give you a second to get your eyes ready

because when we get dark here, so I'm going to spray this whole area here.

All right, everybody ready?

We're ready.

All right, so you can see.

Yeah.

So it's blue.

So it's blue.

Blue star, that's luminescence.

That'll glow for about maybe 30 or 40 seconds.

Matt killed the lights, and he sprayed BlueStar, a commercial luminol variant, across the interior.

He hit the seat base, under the dash, the floorboard.

This truck wasn't empty.

It was full of trace evidence.

The question was, does it mean anything?

How long do you look for something that might not be there?

How many swabs are you going to do in this car?

You have to have a reason to do everything that you do.

It becomes a finite test of how long do you look for something that might not be there.

How long do you keep looking for something that might not even be there?

Yikes.

You know, we could do 2,000 swabs on the interior of this car.

I'm sure there are 2,000 stains.

Right.

When you look at the microscopic level and you're looking for one or two millimeter size stains.

If we're going to find anything, it's not going to fall in our lap here.

The problem here is, let's say that DNA turns out to be the missing person.

Well, what if he had a hangnail that he had a little blood on it and he touched the side of his own seat?

Now, if it's somebody else's, that's more probative.

Regardless of what this meant, we weren't finding nothing anymore.

These were human traces of multiple people who've been inside inside of Joseph's truck.

Obviously, it's not a crime to be in this vehicle, but if you're someone who's a person of interest who's claimed multiple times you've never been in this vehicle, we might have a problem.

Reminded me of a story from a long time ago when I was working for the state.

It was a vehicle alleged to have been involved with a hit and run.

We took a similar process of this car.

We documented all the way around the outside.

We're finding nothing.

Finally, at the end, we get to the bottom of the car and and there's a little tuft of hairs.

We got to pull the hair and attached to the end of this hair was a piece of scalp.

A DNA profile was developed of an unknown male.

That was solved because of invisible DNA.

Ultimately broke the entire case open.

This is kind of a long hair.

I would guess that's human.

This long one here that's tangled into this

Then I found a key and a half-wrapped candy near the cup holder.

We bagged it all.

What you're really hoping for is that one or more of these would actually have some surviving root portion, portion of a root that might have some lingering DNA.

So we kept going.

That's going to be much more useful for identifying a particular individual from a hair, just looking at the microscopic features.

More hair.

Take this, dump it out into a clean, sterile environment, and begin sorting these, sorting them out by characteristics.

And more hair.

In this case, there are individuals who have stated on record that they've never been inside this vehicle.

Let's say that one of these hairs is theirs.

Yeah, if you can get to that level of discrimination, if you're connecting somebody who says, I was never there, well, your DNA is there.

Those are the kinds of things that you would hope to develop in this situation.

A wrapper like that could have some piece of physical evidence, it could have a partial thumbprint that's been preserved.

Something like this key.

What does that go to?

Does it have any meaning?

How does it fit in?

Any one of these things might have some piece of information on it that then breaks something open.

If you see that small little brownish looking deposit there,

that's worth the test.

This one has the right look.

It's got texture, it's got a perimeter, it looks like it might have flowed from above to below and then accumulated there.

Yep.

Preserve this, put it in an envelope,

appropriately packaged.

If it is blood, I've saved half of that.

And then we save the rest of that on a swab, send it to a DNA laboratory, and have that analyzed.

By the end of the day, we had a full box of sealed-labeled evidence.

And for the first time since Joseph disappeared, his truck was treated like evidence.

We don't know what the lab will say, but we do know what we saw, and what we found today could potentially change everything.

Because if that hair matches someone, if the blood is Joseph's, then this isn't just a story anymore, This is a case.

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Next week on the finale episode of Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun.

Stay tuned.

He asked for my phone.

My dad told me, go upstairs.

I looked out the laundry room window.

That old blue pickup truck was backing up toward the van.

My mom told me not to look.

But there was also this sinkhole in our backyard.

My dad kept saying he wanted to fill it.

And a few days later, my dad said it was filled in.

I don't know if something's in there.

He said that you could hide Florence Octialik's body in his sewer, his septic system.

And I'm like, why are you telling me this?

I always thought that it was weird.

That is weird.

Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun is a production of Tunderfoot TV in association with Odyssey.

Your host is Payne Lindsey.

The show is written by Payne Lindsay with additional assistance from Mike Rooney.

Executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsey.

Lead producer is Mike Rooney, along with producers Dylan Harrington and Cooper Skinner.

Editing by Mike Rooney and Cooper Skinner with additional editing by Dylan Harrington.

Supervising producer is Tracy Kaplan.

Additional production by Victoria McKenzie, Alice Kanik Glenn, and Eric Quintana.

Artwork by Rob Sheridan.

Original music by Makeup and Vanity Set.

Mixed and Mastered by Cooper Skinner.

Thank you to Oren Rosenbaum and the team at UTA, Beck Media and Marketing, and the Nord Group.

Special thanks to all of the families and community members that spoke to the team.

Additional information and resources can be found in our show notes.

For more podcasts like Up and Vanished, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app or visit us at tenderfoot.tv.

Thanks for listening.

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