S13 Ep1: At Last

Small Town Dicks

Audio 99

True Crime, Paul Holes, History, Small Town, Yeardley Smith, Society & Culture, Police

4.7 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2023

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On August 4, 1986, a young girl took a bike ride through Point Defiance Park near Tacoma, Washington. She never returned home. Investigators conducted a desperate search but came up empty handed. The case went dormant for decades and eventually ended up on the desk of cold-case detective Lindsey Wade. Through the application of emerging DNA testing and hard work, Wade and her fellow detectives were finally able to piece together what happened that day and bring closure to the family.

Guest detective: Lindsey Wade

Lindsey served as a Tacoma Police Officer for twenty-one years. During her fourteen years as a detective, she investigated sexual assaults, child abuse, missing persons, and homicides. In 2010, Lindsey discovered that serial killer Ted Bundy’s DNA was not in CODIS. She worked with authorities in Florida to track down a sample of Bundy’s DNA and finally entered it into the national database in 2011. In 2012, Lindsey’s work on collecting DNA from convicted sexual predators in Washington state who’d slipped through the cracks led to an arrest in the 1980 homicide of a teenage girl. Lindsey retired in 2018 as the Tacoma Police Department’s cold case detective and joined the Washington State Attorney General’s Office as a senior investigator assigned for the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. She is a former member of the FBI ViCAP National Advisory Board and teaches child abduction response and cold case investigations for the National Criminal Justice Training Center at Fox Valley Technical College. Lindsey has been a speaker at numerous law enforcement conferences around the country, lecturing on cold cases, sex crimes, DNA, and child abduction response. She recently published a true crime memoir titled, “In My DNA: My Career Investigating Your Worst Nightmares''.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, small town fam, it's Yardley. How are you guys? Oh my God, it's so great to be back in your podcast feed. We missed you like crazy during the hiatus. We have a terrific season lined up for you.
0:18.6	Beginning with today's case from a new guest, Detective Lindsay.
0:23.4	As the detectives like to say, Lindsay is squared away. You guys are absolutely going to love her.
0:30.5	So the case Lindsay brings us today is about the 1986 murder of Jennifer Bastion. It's actually fairly well known, as cold cases that
0:40.5	take decades to solve often are. But even if you're familiar with the headlines, I think you'll
0:46.3	agree that there's no substitute for the in-depth first-hand account of an investigation from one of
0:52.1	the detectives who was on the ground turning over all the
0:55.4	stones. Of course, as I listened to Lindsay talk about how when she dug into the case,
1:02.2	she poured over every former lead and scrap of old information and literally built a database
1:08.9	cross-referencing all the evidence that had been gathered about Jennifer's murder.
1:13.9	I found myself desperately hoping along with her that any biological evidence they'd collected back in 1986
1:20.9	had not been purged, just because back then it was hard to imagine how forensic science would evolve to what it is today,
1:29.3	and that every swab and tidbit could be used to solve the crime.
1:34.3	Seriously, there are so many incidents of two steps forward and one back in this episode.
1:40.3	Ugh.
1:42.3	But at the end of the day, this case is a portrait of Lindsay's patience and perseverance,
1:48.5	as well as a promise to herself, that Jennifer's murder would not go unsolved. Here is, at last.
1:59.7	Hi there, I'm Yardley. I'm Dan. I'm Dave. And I'm Paul.
2:04.4	And this is Smalltown Gicks.
2:06.8	Dave and I are identical twins and retired detectives from Smalltown USA.
2:11.1	And I'm a veteran cold case investigator who helped catch the Golden State Killer using a revolutionary DNA tool.
2:17.0	Between the three of us, we've investigated thousands of crimes, from petty theft to sexual
	...

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