19 | Truck Forensics

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1:23Up 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.

2:09From Tenderfoot TV in Atlanta, I'm your host Payne Lindsey, and this is Up and Vanished in the Midnight Sun.

2:22We 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 it so hard? No impound. No investigation. Not treated like evidence. Shipping Gnome, Alaska, premium auto transport. Gnome is a city in western Alaska's unorganized borough. We know. The port of Gnome is in Norton Sound, which connects to the bayous. Gnome's Causeway serves as a doctor. Get to it.

2:55To book our car shipping service tour from Port Gnome Dial 1. Thanks for calling Sit Your Car Now, powered by A1 Transport. For auto transports within the United States, press 1. This call is being recorded. No, I believe they cut off a couple days ago, actually.

3:17Let me put out an email. You know, I 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. 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?

4:13It's the cutoff.

4:18Dylan, did you already pay and run the card? Cutting it close, LOL. Well, it won't be fucking LOL if that truck doesn't get on that ship.

4:31I'm going to 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.

5:22because if Joseph's truck could talk, it might finally be ready to say something.

5:32I 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.

6:07Law 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.

6:27We've been taught at search and rescue that the last person was going to be seen within about a mile or half a mile of his truck. And we covered all that area, big time. You towed it, correct? I towed it, 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.

6:52I 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.

7:22Did those troopers, the FBI 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. 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.

7:59They 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.

8:17Andy, 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. I'm getting random emails from people around the country. How many people listen to this show of yours? People that know him appear to be all riled up. Asked him point blank, is there any shot at finding anything inside this truck?

9:06It 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.

9:54I 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. And there's a couple of things to think about in how we would do that processing. He started breaking it down. Phenophiline 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?

10:42Then 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.

11:23I 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. At 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.

12:06Did 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 of batter that went under the steering wheel, is there 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.

12:48If 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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17:32After landing in Seattle, we drove about an hour and a half outside of town and pulled up to a cold steel garage.

17:43Hey, man. I'm Payne. 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 mat. 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.

18:27We see that part of the plastic housing has been broken away. I can see some brown discolorations on the dashboard.

18:38I have a test for blood called the phenolphthalein 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 phenophaling 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 doorframe.

19:19The 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 gonna physically find that, and I'll just go to the bottom of this, just rubbing that a little bit like that.

20:11So I don't see much transfer there. I'm gonna rub a little harder. So you can see I've got a little bit of discoloration on the part that I really pushed onto the swab. Okay. All right, so now, this is the phenolphthalein reagent.

20:28And I'll add a drop of that reagent, like that. And then the last step, this is hydrogen peroxide. 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 phenolphthalein binds with the iron and the hemoglobin that's in a component of blood. All right, 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.