A 62-year-old man was charged yesterday in Canyon County, Idaho, with the unsolved 1982 murder of Daralyn Johnson, who vanished while walking to school.

https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/crime/daralyn-johnson-idaho-cold-case-murder-announcement-canyon-county/277-c21e0688-33fb-4855-a536-86bb36b9a0cf

It took 20 years of testing pubic hairs found on Daralyn to find a confirmed DNA match, court documents show. In December of 2000, pubic hairs collected were shipped from the Canyon County Sheriff Crime Lab to Bode Labs in Lorton, VA. The lab was then able to build a mitochondria profile from the DNA. Over the years, a few suspects were compared to the profile but none were a match.

. . .

In 2018, the remaining pubic hair samples were sent to the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Edward Green then used “the DNA technique of sequencing to develop a SNP profile (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) to identify a certain stretch of DNA.”

“When you have degraded DNA or DNA in a hair, that’s not really great DNA,” Hampikian said. “The pieces end up being broken, so you get smaller and smaller pieces after a while, but this SNP analysis can be used and we thought it might be able to be used.”

That SNP profile showed that the DNA belonged to a male. The FBI then used the profile to find the Dalrymple family, which court document say included four boys and two girls who lived in Idaho. Investigators narrowed the family down to David Dalrymple, who also lived at a home that would be on Daralyn’s route to school.

These were pubic hairs, not semen evidence. As I have pointed out to the MSP and in this blog, the only hope in this case is to have the hair evidence in the OCCK case sent to Dr. Edward Green at UC Santa Cruz and to use the services of a genetic genealogist. This method was used in the Bear Brook murders case, as I have written about here before.

https://catherinebroad.blog/2019/09/16/
https://catherinebroad.blog/2019/10/
https://catherinebroad.blog/2020/03/07/
https://catherinebroad.blog/2020/03/21/

This is the second case in the last year that the Innocence Project has helped get people out of prison who were wrongfully convicted. Dr. Greg Hampikian from Boise State University is well known for DNA testing. There are so many resources out there the MSP could be tapping. As I have also said, the FBI is lagging here. Quantico isn’t getting this kind of work done.

As a dear friend said when she sent this news link from yesterday: If Idaho can figure it out, I would hope to hell Michigan could.

The oldest case solved so far with genetic genealogy:

Thank you to a reader who sent this with the message: There is always hope.

The detective who solved this 52-year-old murder credited the professionalism and attention to detail shown by the original detectives in evidence collection and storage.

You would think in a case of the magnitude of the OCCK crimes that evidence collection and most certainly storage would have been top notch. Except that evidence went missing (Busch) and some was misfiled and never even compared for decades. I don’t think storage was a big concern when they shut this thing down. “Walk away” seemed to be the approach. I bet if we were allowed into the storage shed where Tim’s skateboard, Jill’s bike and other evidence and information sits unorganized and uncategorized, it would bring us to our knees like a gut punch. Hopefully the magic hairs are viable for additional DNA testing. And hopefully family members of the owner of these hairs are as cooperative as the family described in this video.