1 - The Girlfriends’ Guide to: Identifying a Doe 33:05

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America.

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

For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Ante marked the beginning of the end. It sent the message that we can prosecute these people. Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life in marriage. I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words that I've said like in my head for like 16 years.

Wild. Listen to Miss Spelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister, or is history repeating itself? There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams.

Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Novel. Hello, I'm Anna Sinfield, the producer of The Girlfriends, and I'm here taking over the mic because I wanted to do something that's very close to my heart and the philosophy of the show.

When we set out to make The Girlfriends, I insisted on providing concrete resources for any listeners who may relate to the hard topics that we cover.

It's why we always partner with relevant charities. So if you're triggered or inspired by something we've mentioned, you've got somewhere legitimate to go for advice. But I've also done a lot of behind the scenes work to make sure that we actually know what we're talking about. You know, from boots on the ground reporting, intensive investigations and countless conversations with experts.

You probably only hear about 1% of the things that I get to learn during the production of the podcast, and I wanted to pass some of it on. So let me introduce you to The Girlfriend's Guide, a miniseries where I lay out how you can solve crimes and keep your girlfriend safe.

We'll dive back into our archive of never-heard-before interviews, break down real-life case studies, and give tangible tips on how you can do it yourself. Oh, and just a quick heads up, we'll be discussing murder and acts of violence in this episode. From the Teams at Novel and iHeart Podcasts, you're listening to The Girlfriend's Guide, Episode 1, How to Identify a Doe. I feel like I need to say something before we kick off.

It's not normal for an everyday person to attempt to identify a doe. But lately, I've noticed that more and more citizen sleuths are plugging the gaps left behind by law enforcement's dwindling resources or, let's face it, lack of interest. It is estimated that 4,400 unidentified bodies are found each year in the United States. And around 1,000 of those people are still unidentified a year later.

Which means, sadly, cases build up and get forgotten. Today, there are over 14,000 unidentified bodies on NamUs, which is the US database for missing and unidentified people. Giving someone back their name is important. We spoke about that a lot on The Girlfriends. But before we get stuck in, I want to ask you to act with caution. Identifying someone who's been resigned to a cold case is obviously a very caring and hard thing to do when you don't know who they are.

But the fact is, someone does. At some point along the way, you might be tempted to contact their family and friends to help connect the dots. For you, this may have become a challenge to be solved. But every new hope or reminder can be devastating for the people on the other side. So tread lightly on people's lives. Something you need to ask yourself is, why am I doing this? And that is a really complex ethical question.

Ultimately, you just have to be considerate. Think about if it's appropriate to approach victims' families and also then how you would do it. Instead, I'd recommend approaching the authorities first so they can help you prove the connection before the family is informed. All right, ethics briefly covered. Let's get to it. So if you do find yourself interested in a case involving an unidentified person, what do you do and how do you identify them?

Let's use an example that I've come to know really well, the case of Heidi Bolch from season two of The Girlfriends. If you listen to the series, then you know that Heidi was identified 24 years after her remains were discovered. But for a long time, the detectives really only had the information from the initial police reports to go off, which reads like some sort of murder mystery novel. Here is my Canadian friend pretending to be an American detective reading a summation of the police report.

March 1989. Two golfers discover a woman's head on a golf course in Hopewell Township, New Jersey, 65 miles down from New York. A short while later, her legs were discovered in a wooded area 65 miles away. A post-mortem confirms that she was white, blonde hair, blue eyes, and matching blue eyeshadow on. She has a couple of distinctive features, including a mole and scars.

Her estimated age is around 20 to 30. The legs are officially linked to the head via DNA analysis. No arms or torso are found.

In the first few weeks of the investigation into what would one day be known as Heidi's remains, the detectives tried everything. They put out nationwide requests asking for information on any missing person that would fit her description. They made flyers, they held press conferences, interviewed families of people who thought the remains could belong to their loved one.

Those were the textbook things that detectives would do back in the 80s when working on a live case with an unidentified body and an unknown killer. But none of it worked, and eventually the case went cold. By the time the case was reopened in the 2010s, there were new options available, and that is when things really started to heat up.

An incredibly useful new resource available to the investigators was the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, aka NAMUS, in the States.

Me and my assistant producer Maddy use this a lot on The Girlfriends. And Maddy is brilliantly, wonderfully here joining me to explain how you can also use NamUs to help with the dough case. So, hey, Maddy. Hello, Anna. Thanks for having me. Tell me about NamUs. What actually is it, first of all?

So NamUs is this amazingly vast database in the US, which includes the profiles of every currently reported missing person and also every unidentified body. What's great about NamUs is that it's used by government agencies like the police and detectives regularly.

but also anyone can access it. So if you are looking to identify your own dough, this is an incredibly useful resource for you too.

So what does it actually look like as a normal civilian just accessing this online? What do you see? What you're going to see is thousands and thousands of profiles listed under missing people or on the unidentified bodies section. It's basically a way of cataloging the profiles of every single one of these people.

And so you kind of would search via location, age, that sort of thing? Yeah, that's right. There's actually lots of different things you can search by. Date that people went missing, date that body was found, estimated age, race, gender. So any small details that you do have about your dough are something that you can enter on there. And I think the idea is that

Every single unidentified case, every single missing person's case is meant to be listed. Are there any instances when that doesn't happen? Theoretically, no. Every missing person who has been reported as missing will be on there and every unidentified doe will be on there. An exception to this, and it's something that actually happened in The Girlfriend season two, when we were looking for our doe, we couldn't find a matching profile on NamUs.

And this really confused us for a while, but it was actually a massive clue. Basically, if someone's not listed on there, it probably means that they have been identified. Mm-hmm.

I know, I wish we knew that much, much earlier on. Yeah, we definitely thought maybe we were going crazy and not searching it well enough. But no, that's another clue that you can definitely include in your investigation. And so you've got things like this government resource NamUs, but there's also other databases for missing people and unidentified people, aren't there?

Yeah, there are. There are a bunch of independent volunteer run projects like the Doe Network that we partnered with, the Charlie Project. There's also databases that focus on more specific groups of people like LGBTQ plus databases. There's one for people of colour. And these have really been set up, I think, in response to COVID.

some of the inaction that comes from government agencies to serve a specific group which maybe hasn't got the attention that they deserve from government resources. Also, in some cases...

Just not having the expertise from the communities involved to identify things that could be clear clues. Yeah, totally. Like someone's sexual orientation might not be listed on their nameless missing profile, but that's something that could lead to other clues about who they were.

But what if you can't find the Doe's information on these databases, just like us? Or you think there might be more information out there? Or perhaps you think you know who it could be and you want to request extra information on their case? Well, that's when you can deploy every journalist's favorite tool, the Freedom of Information Act request.

After the break, we'll tell you all about how to access information from the authorities that just might solve your case. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind.

Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down. From unbelievable romantic betrayals. The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal.

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio.

I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil,

They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For decades, the Mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Ante marked the beginning of the end, sparking a chain of events that would ultimately dismantle the most powerful crime organization in American history. It sent the message to them that we can prosecute these people.

Discover how a group of young prosecutors took on the mafia and with the help of law enforcement brought down its most powerful figures. These bosses on the commission had no idea what was coming their way from the federal government. From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts, this is Law & Order Criminal Justice System. Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

EPM 110, 120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not.

What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life and marriage. I don't think he knew how big it would be, how big the life I was given and live is.

I think he was like, oh, yeah, things come and go. But with me, it never came and went. Is she Donna Martin or a down-and-out divorcee? Is she living in Beverly Hills or a trailer park? In a town where the lines are blurred, Tori is finally going to clear the air in the podcast Misspelling. When a woman has nothing to lose, she has everything to gain. I just filed for divorce. Whoa, I said the words.

that I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Misspelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 5th of December, 2022. Hi there. I'm a journalist from the UK and I'm wondering if you might be able to help me find out some information about a body that was discovered in 1980. 4th of January, 2023. Hi

I hope you've had a lovely holidays and a happy new year. I'm just wondering if you've got anywhere with tracking down those records. 9th of January, 2024. Dear... Happy new year, again. I'm writing to let you know that it has now been over a year since my initial request was sent to you on the 5th of December, 2022. And we are yet to receive any progress at all on these records. Nothing's worked.

So, Maddy, that was a clip of you from season two getting really annoyed at the medical examiners for not responding to your Freedom of Information Act request.

It's fair to say you've filed a lot. And also you've had to deal with being disappointed a lot. How many times do you think you've done a FOIA request for the girlfriends alone? Yeah, that really was the tip of the iceberg. I think from my calculations in total, I filed about 44 freedom of information requests. And

And some of those were obviously the medical examiner, but then a lot of them were the NYPD, various courts, the district attorney, basically anyone I could think of that might have information. It was amazing. We got so much information based off these FOIA requests. I mean, I don't think we would have solved...

this case if it wasn't for all of your foyers. So you like really saved the day there. Oh, thanks, Anna. That makes me feel better about the hours I've sunk into this. And the amount of moaning. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I was thinking foyer is something that's really standard kind of bread and butter stuff for us. And it's something that a lot of people probably have heard of, but they maybe don't know what it actually is. So could you break that down for the listeners?

Yeah, so FOIA stands for Freedom of Information Act. Sometimes it's called FOIL as well, and then it's Freedom of Information Law. It's been in place since 1967, and it means that the public have a right to request access to records from any federal agency.

And those federal agencies have to disclose any information requested unless it falls under one of the nine exemptions, which protect things like personal information or obviously national security. That's fair enough. Yeah, it is fair enough. It's described as a law that keeps citizens in the know about their governments. In what context?

context can that be useful in the identification of a doe? To put it really simply when you're trying to identify someone the more information you have about them the more likely you are to figure out who they are and FOIA requests are a really good way of accessing more information that wouldn't be immediately available on the internet or elsewhere.

So specifically, there are some very useful things you could look for, like post-mortem records or medical examiner records in general could tell you more about how someone died and give other clues based on their estimated age or their medical records.

Police reports can also be really interesting. We managed to access a trove of police files from the time that Heidi's body parts were found and she was being treated as Jane Doe. And you just never know what kind of clues you might get with something like that. In those reports, we found out that Heidi was wearing blue eyeshadow when she was found. And this could be something that we could ask someone who knew her and they could confirm that that's something she always wore, for example.

And it also allows you to see what investigating might have already been done by law enforcement. So then you can pull together your information with theirs and see which leads you could follow next. This all sounds like obviously amazing in theory, but I think when I first started out as a journalist, the idea of doing a FOIA felt like a sort of mystical thing.

beast and I wasn't quite sure how I should be approaching it so how do you literally file a FOIA request?

It depends a lot on the department that you're requesting information for. But there are often forms on a website that are pretty straightforward and easy to follow or an email. If you're unsure, the best thing you can do is call up a records department at the institution you're trying to get information from and ask a nice person to talk you through it slowly as if you're very stupid.

which is something that happened to me on multiple occasions. It's probably led to the success of us getting this information. I think like the big takeaway that I want to make sure everyone has is that the point of FOIAs is that they are so that normal people can, as I think you said earlier, sort of like know what's happening in government. And so...

I think what I'd really like to instill in people is that it isn't some sort of elitist exercise to file a FOIA. It's something that in theory everybody should be able to do. And it's your right to do. It's your right, exactly. Having said that, there are definitely some hurdles in getting information from FOIA requests.

A huge one is the timeframe that they can take. It definitely varies by location and institution, but it can sometimes take six months just to get a response. And also what you can access is obviously limited. Often with medical examiner's records, for example, the full post-mortem can only be accessed by a relative of the deceased person, which of course makes things really hard when you don't even know who the person is. And unfortunately,

Whilst it's frustrating that there's a lot you can't access, it's for really good reason. But you just never know what you're going to get back once you send a request. So it's always, always worth filing them just to see. And the feeling of waiting six months to hear if you've got access to some records and then seeing something in your inbox is...

is truly the greatest thrill I can imagine. But also, you know, we're talking about kind of sleuthing around online if you think that something's a live case or whatever. I think there's a lot of sleuthing around online and in kind of archival resources that we do, things that kind of don't require FOIAs.

you know, the very specific example, bringing it back to Heidi, is that her case was actually eventually solved in part because the serial killer, Joel Rifkin, confessed to the murder in a book years later.

And so you never know when that stuff's going to appear or if it's already out there and you just need to kind of look for it. And so we did a lot of that, didn't we? We gleaned lots of information from articles and forums. Maddy, do you have any tips for how people can use the web? It definitely involves a lot of lurking around on random websites. The first thing is if it's a contemporary case, there'll probably be some articles about it online and those will be easy to access.

If it's a bit older, you might want to search on an online newspaper database. These are quite often behind paywalls, but most libraries tend to let you use theirs for free. And then we looked in some really random places and found some quite useful information.

forums can be good I remember we found a message on a forum from years ago of someone who said that they knew Heidi and were friends with her and that gave us some information about where we think Heidi lived but also Reddit is amazing I love Reddit so much and once we finished season one we actually found a group of people on Reddit discussing who they thought the torso might be so I

It's a great way to pool your information with other people. If you are looking into this case,

there is a really good chance that someone else is, and teaming together is only going to give you more information and make your case stronger. As you know, if you listen to our second season, when Joel Rifkin admitted to Heidi's murder, he named the doe as Susie. And that meant that suddenly the detectives had something to cling on to, so they started searching for missing persons reports and arrest reports for somebody called Susie.

Ultimately, this led them to finding a mugshot for a woman called Susan Spencer that looked very similar to their doe. Maddy, that's a very convoluted way of going about this, but that's often the way when it comes to unidentified cases. Are there any similar techniques that we could use to help identify a doe? Yeah, definitely. I think NamUs, again, is really useful for this. If you have an unidentified person,

There's a quite high likelihood that that person is missing from someone else. And hopefully they will have reported them as missing. So there should be a profile on NamUs for that missing person. And what you can do is take the information you have about your doe, like when they were suspected to have died, how old they are, their gender, their race, and

and put those into a search of missing people and see if anyone matches or it could be a possible candidate for your dough. And you might not find just one person who's an exact match, but it might come up with a list of names that you can then work to rule out. But you've got to be flexible as well, don't you? And a bit creative about it because, you know, sometimes people...

really changed since they were registered as a missing person or they might have travelled to estates that the person who filed that missing persons report had no idea of and stuff like that. So with all these searches it could get you closer and it could give you ideas of who it could be but definitely take it with a pinch of salt and keep a very open mind. And then I guess the next thing is that sometimes none of this works right and that's

that's something that happened to us when we were trying to identify the Jane Doe who ended up being Heidi from season one we kept reaching these dead ends and so at one point I went full obsessive journalist and I started looking into killers from the time to see if I could match the case of our Jane Doe you know how she was killed her age and see if it matched up with a killer's MO at

at points in order to do this. I even had a phone call with the criminal profiler. And actually, what was kind of neat is I had that phone call with a criminal profiler. They told me a bunch of stuff. And then we received the Hopewell Police Report, where they also had got the FBI to create a profile of the killer back in 1989. And you got particularly into this, didn't you?

I found this fascinating. They asked the FBI behavioral science unit to create a profile of the killer very early on in their investigation where they had so little to go on other than Heidi and the state that she was found in.

And what's really, really crazy about this, now knowing about Joel Rifkin and who he is, the details are eerily close. So some of the characteristics that they predicted this person would have, they'd be a white male in their 20s or 30s, single, living alone. They may have an occupation which involves travel, like sales, a truck driver or construction. And

they're educated. And this is the one that actually gives me chills. They may not have killed before, but they will kill again. Yeah. And I mean, obviously, we now know that Heidi was the first of what is predicted to have been 17 victims. Yeah, it's true. But it's also a really interesting and useful way of looking at a case like this,

to turn your attention to when you've reached a dead end, trying to look at information about the victim, to try and think if you can find the person who did it and if that would help you identify this person. Do you have kind of any other tips when it comes to FOIAs and getting that sort of information from authorities or I guess even the web? I would say my biggest tip is persistence.

It's not an easy and it's not a quick process and you will reach a lot of dead ends and rejections, but it is so worth it for the small glimmers of information that you do get.

I would also say befriend people. What you're coming up against is often a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of people who, even though your interest in this case is huge and finding out details is really important to you, is just one of a million other things they're doing. So if you can get a friend on the inside or someone who recognises who you are and will help you, that's also going to be really useful. Yeah, and just always send that extra email to the medical examiners.

Okay, so we're at the point in the investigation where you hopefully have a hunch as to who your doe might be, like the Hopewell detectives when they discovered Susie Spencer's arrest report. When you make that connection, like Maddie said, it is honestly one of the best and most exciting feelings in the world. But what do you do now? And how do you prove it? That's after the break.

After your entire world is flipped upside down,

From unbelievable romantic betrayals. The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal. This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me.

Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters.

But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to.

Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For decades, the Mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Ante marked the beginning of the end, sparking a chain of events that would ultimately dismantle the most powerful crime organization in American history. It sent the message to them that we can prosecute these people.

Discover how a group of young prosecutors took on the mafia and with the help of law enforcement brought down its most powerful figures. These bosses on the commission had no idea what was coming their way from the federal government. From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts, this is Law & Order Criminal Justice System. Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session, 24 hours. BPM 110, 120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not.

What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people. There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous, sometimes chaotic life and marriage. I don't think he knew how big it would be, how big the life I was given and live is.

I think he was like, oh, yeah, things come and go. But with me, it never came and went. Is she Donna Martin or a down-and-out divorcee? Is she living in Beverly Hills or a trailer park? In a town where the lines are blurred, Tori is finally going to clear the air in the podcast Misspelling. When a woman has nothing to lose, she has everything to gain. I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words.

that I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Miss Spelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So you think you know who your doe is, but proving it is an entirely different ballgame. The first port of call is to contact the agency, like the police department who's handling the doe case and the missing persons case if there is one.

Maddy, how do you go about doing that? The first thing to do would be look at NamUs and see if there is a detective or an agency attached to the case. And there should also hopefully be contact details. Or you can just look at what jurisdiction your case should probably come under and then contact someone at the police station there. A big tip for this is when you do it,

try and get someone's name or someone that will check back in with you if there are any new developments. Having a contact like that means that you'll probably be able to stay updated on the case and they're just more likely to help you.

So once you've spoken to the detectives in charge of the case, you do kind of need to leave it with them and hope that they look into it. Detectives will then investigate it further and if they think it's viable, they can compare the DNA of the doe with a family member of the missing person. This is actually what the Hopewell detectives did after they figured out that the arrest record they found of Susan Spencer was actually listed under a false name.

They instead matched up the mugshot with a missing person's photo of Heidi Bolch. And then they tracked down Heidi's family and compared the family's DNA with the remains they found on the Hopewell golf course in 1989. But there is another similar route that deploys the use of DNA, and that's called, complicatedly, genetic genealogy.

Maddy, what does that actually mean? And how can you use it to identify a doe? Put simply, genetic genealogy is the combination of genetic analysis, so looking at DNA, and the study of family trees, and then using pretty standard historical investigation to find out more about that.

Okay, so if you were to kind of apply that to an actual situation, so say you found a doe, what would people then do to try and study that in a genetic genealogy sort of context? So what you could do is take the DNA data from the doe and then enter it into a website like 23andMe or another one of those big genetic databases. Okay.

And then you can see if there's any matches. Obviously, in a dream world, a perfect match of a parent would immediately appear and then you could contact that person maybe and you'd have identified them. But it could be a sibling. It could be a very distant relative. But what it might do is start to build out a family tree, which you can then investigate through other resources and get closer and closer to identifying who this person is.

I mean, that sounds amazing, the idea that you can just put some DNA data in and then, you know, pop outcomes, a bunch of relatives, and you whittle your way down into identifying the person. Are there other benefits outside of that? You must get a lot of information from DNA. I think it can really help with narrowing down locations that they're from further. It might help you identify their ancestral homeland, right?

I mean, the dream is that there are living relatives and that there are people happy to speak to you or there are people who you could find out more about and then find out the identity of your doe. Yeah.

I guess one of the big downsides is that you can only work with what's in the system, can't you? It really relies on people having put their DNA data into the system in the first place so that there can be connections. Yeah, that's right. I think like so much of this research, it relies on community participation. But there are a couple of other drawbacks too. Another big one is concerns over privacy. Not everyone feels comfortable uploading their DNA data.

And for that information to be owned by another website. Understandably. There's also the testing isn't perfect. Results can sometimes be a little misleading. But one of the biggest drawbacks is the cost, actually. At one point on series two, we considered extracting some DNA from Heidi's grave in Heart Island and

when we thought she was there. And not only did the thought of that just seem kind of prohibitively gruesome, but also it's incredibly expensive. And this is something I would say isn't necessarily accessible to just the average person trying to look into a case. Yeah. And it's also just something that's quite hard to do on your own, isn't it? And so I guess like the one thing I would say there is if that is a route that you're wanting to go down, it

There are volunteers at charities that specialize in this that will genuinely be happy to help you out. They can't take on every case, but people like DNA Doe do this every single day. They're the charity that we partnered with. And they're really great at responding to inquiries or just like perhaps giving you some advice. So do reach out to them. I hope our tips have been useful. But the truth is there is no one way to identify a doe.

Each new clue will open up a new rabbit hole to fall down and you've just got to dive in, Alice in Wonderland style. Get obsessed with the necklace and finding out where it's from. Fixate on the location the dough was discovered. Spend weeks poring over small turns of phrases in news reports from the time. When I was trying to solve our dough case from seasons one and two, I was deep in those kinds of rabbit holes for a year and a half.

At points, I had to accept for my own sanity that maybe I'd never know who she was. Or perhaps I would, but I'd never be able to prove it and share her story with listeners like you. It felt like it was only at the last moment, when budgets were dwindling, faith was in crisis, about to put out a show with no resolution, that we actually found the definitive proof that we needed. So my final piece of advice to you is to just have some faith.

Sometimes new evidence can emerge and change everything, like that confession from Joel Rifkin. Sometimes one new contact will give you access to materials that you've been trying to get for years. That's what happened for us. So, good luck. Until next time, hold your girlfriends tight. The Girlfriend's Guide is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel, visit novel.audio.

This episode is produced and hosted by me, Anna Sinfield. Our assistant producer is Madeline Parr. And we've had some fantastic additional production by Lee Meyer, Leona Hameed, and Zayana Youssef. Max O'Brien is our executive producer. Production management from Cherie Houston and Charlotte Wolfe. Sound design, mixing, and scoring by Daniel Kempson and Nicholas Alexander.

Music supervision by me, Anna Sinfield, and Nicholas Alexander. Original music composed and performed by Louisa Gerstein and produced by Louisa Gerstein, and you guessed it, Nicholas Alexander. The series artwork was designed by Christina Limcoul. Story development by me, Anna Sinfield. Willard Foxton is creative director. Our executive producers at iHeart are Katrina Norvell and Nikki Etorre.

Special thanks to Ali Cantor, Carrie Lieberman and Will Pearson at iHeart Podcast, as well as Carly Frankel and the whole team at WME. And special thanks to Daniel Laskerin for putting on your best detective voice.

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the Weird Little Guys trying to destroy America.

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

For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. But the murder of Carmichael Ante marked the beginning of the end. It sent the message that we can prosecute these people. Listen to Law & Order Criminal Justice System on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. ♪

Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. Can Kay trust her sister, or is history repeating itself? There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams.

Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Meet the real woman behind the tabloid headlines in a personal podcast that delves into the life of the notorious Tori Spelling as she takes us through the ups and downs of her sometimes glamorous life.

Sometimes chaotic life in marriage. I just filed for divorce. Whoa. I said the words that I've said like in my head for like 16 years. Wild. Listen to Miss Spelling on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.