Award of Warning. This podcast explores graphic and disturbing stories and includes some

strong language. It, therefore, may not be suitable for our young listeners or other folks who

may find it disturbing. Hello and welcome to True Crime Daily, the podcast covering high profile

and under the radar cases from across the country every week on your host Annagar Siam, our cases

this week. When a 14-year-old boy viciously kills a 13-year-old girl in a small community and

the two are classmates, it is hard to figure out what justice will look like. But on the day the

jury selection was to start in a Florida courtroom that boy, now 16, made a shocking decision.

The trial was halted because he decided to plead guilty. But first, for more than a decade,

the tiny skull of a little girl and some of her bones sat in an evidence locker in Alabama.

Unclaimed and unnamed. The only thing police were certain of that this five or six-year-old girl

had a very bad life. She for sure had been beaten. 15 bones were broken. She was likely left

blind in one eye because of the abuse. And it appears that she was starved. Because there was no

report of this little girl missing, there was no way to identify her remains until recently.

Using new DNA technology, the girl was identified through her parents DNA. And her father is

currently sitting in a jail cell charged with her murder. We are recording this on Thursday,

February 9th of 2023. Our guest today is Kristen Middleton, one of the founders and the Chief

Business Development Officer at Authorum Labs. Authorum labs is like no other DNA lab in the

country. They take the toughest cases with the most degraded DNA samples and they build profiles

to help solve cases, scores of cases. Kristen, welcome back. We are so excited to have you

back on the program. How are you? I'm good. Thank you for having me. It really means the world.

Thank you. Oh, this case, you know, you and your husband founded this lab. And I love the story

that you two met when you're working on your PhDs. I, you know, I love it when, you know,

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