Remember that four foreign hairs had been found in Danny's pubic region and on her cervix.

Those hairs had been subjected to testing in 2008 and never again since.

This was partially because the file referenced the hairs being consumed by the testing.

A letter from 2008 Sheriff James Cashel to the Montana Department of Justice Division of Forensic Science requested

the lab to process the hairs for DNA and read, quote, I am fully aware that this will consume

the questioned hairs, end quote. The 2008 testing on the Harris, which had no roots, was of course

unable to obtain any DNA. And it did not consume the hairs. The hairs

properly mounted on slides had been returned to the sheriff's office and were sitting in a box

in the evidence room waiting to be discovered. It was a super long shot. Tom Elfman's report says,

quote, I checked with the FBI regarding their ability to analyze hair.

None of it was positive. They were going to have to call upon the rootless hair expertise of Dr. Ed

Green at Estreya Forensics in California. You'll recall that Detective Sergeant Deppweg used

Estreya to extricate a SNIP profile from a rootless hair in the Judy Nesbit case I covered early on.

Now, in July of 2023, Detective Elfmont arranged for two of the hairs to be sent to Estreya

for DNA analysis. It took the lab months to complete the testing of the hairs because they had been

preserved on slides in some kind of adhesive that had to be treated

with a solvent to loosen it. Extreme caution had to be used, and in the end, neither of the

hairs yielded usable DNA. In a last ditch attempt, Elfmont sent the last two hairs to

Australia. While they waited, Elfmont and Deppweig decided to send Danny's

underwear for testing at a private lab, capable of extracting DNA where the state's crime lab could not.

They arranged to have the Montana State lab shipped the underwear to Marshall University in West

Virginia for testing. And then Estreya's report on the final two hairs came in. One proved not to be

...