After Patricia Viola disappeared, her husband lobbied to require New Jersey police to enter DNA samples from the families of missing persons into CODIS, because he knew that would help solve cases.

And Codis was exactly what would bring answers in Pat's case. I'm Charlie and welcome to

crime lines. Hello and welcome to the first episode of the 12 Days of Crime Lines. If you don't follow me on social media,

you would have missed the announcement that I am going to do the 12 days of crime lines this year,

but a little bit differently. I was not going to do it because life stuff has kept me busy,

but I had already finalized the list of cases I wanted to cover,

and the theme this year was going to be missing persons. So I had in front of me a list of a missing

person's cases, and it's very hard to look at that and think, you know, my life's kind of hard right now,

so I'm just going to put it away for

another time. I decided we are going to do the 12 days, but the episodes are going to be spread out

more evenly across the month rather than doing 12 days of daily releases because I am just

not far enough into having them done to release them one after the other. I do work on the podcast by myself,

so, you know, research, writing, rewriting, recording, editing the audio, and getting it up,

that is all on me. And if I tried to do that daily and get these turned over quickly,

I would end up rushing. And then I would put out something that

isn't as good as I can make it just to hit a deadline that I literally made up in my head.

So I'm going to need the whole month to get these done. So there'll be three to four episodes a week.

And then the Beyond the Files episodes that come out for Patreon Supercast and Apple subscribers will all be out

at the end of December. So that is what we're going to do. And to get us started, I picked a missing

person's case that has some resolution to it because it gets us started on a hopeful note that

resolution can come. And the answers here came in part because of changes to the

law that the family advocated for. Two major sources for this episode. One was the disappeared episode

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