Hi, Crime Junkeys. I'm your host Ashley Flowers. And today, I'm not joined by Brit. I'm joined by someone else whose name you probably didn't know, but someone you've all been begging to hear from.

I'm Captain Kevin Smith. I'm the very two commander for the Indian State Police. I'm 31 years on the department.

And the last three years, I've been the detective commander out of Fort Wayne Post before I got from murder to Captain. So I spent a very long time in investigative side of our department at Fort Wayne area.

As a detective for 10 years, it's a regular road detective and then a commander for three years in the detective division and now a captain. So that's kind of why I was so heavily involved in the equal tensile case.

That's right. This is the update episode you all have been begging for. If you're brand new to crime junkie and listening for the very first time, go back and listen to episode 18 first.

It's titled Wanted Monster in Fort Wayne. We told the story of April Tinsley, who was an eight year old girl murdered in rural Indiana. For 30 years, her killer was unknown despite the fact that this guy taunted police and the community with notes over a span of years.

But with the magic of DNA and what we're calling the season of justice, local law enforcement were able to apprehend her killer in July of 2018.

At the time, there was little known, but a name, John Miller. And following his arrest, very few details came out about him or his connection to April. There wasn't much of a story we could do until the trial happened.

But when John Miller pled guilty in December and we knew there would be no trial, we worked on something even better and interview with one of the men responsible for bringing April's killer to justice Captain Kevin Smith of the Indiana State police.

We were given a room in the Indianapolis headquarters to talk in, which is why the audio is a little different than what you're used to. But the story he has to tell is incredible.

We're going to give you my unedited conversation with Captain Smith and you'll hear him discuss how they came up with the idea to use genealogy.

What it was like finally capturing a man they'd been chasing for 30 years and what all of this means for the future of law enforcement.

How long were you working on her case?

I worked on it when I got into detective vision 2005. Everybody worked on it. It occurred my probationary year. I came on in December of 87 as a new trooper and got sent up to northeast Indiana to Angles to be in county area to work.

I got sent up third December 19th. We graduated 87 and it occurred on April 1st of 88. So I had just gotten my car. I had been to my training and it happened to, well, April was founded in the Calb County and I was living in Stubanso right next to each other.

I didn't work on it as a rookie trooper but it was a big deal. Everybody knew about it was all of the news. Even before the internet then it still got a lot of news coverage back then on Fort Wayne stations.

It seemed like that was like anything they had in the area. It was, yeah, it was. They had anything in that area. They had one a few years later, kind of similar to the Sarabakhra case which is still technically insolved but they had anything before that for a long time like that. Nothing like that at all.

It was a big news deal back then. And what was it that made everyone so sure was it that the DNA didn't match in the Sarah case and April case because I kept seeing even years and years later those two getting linked but you guys that said all along you didn't think that they were.

Well, I didn't work specifically on the Sarabakhra case. A bunch of our guys did but I trust their judgment that at this point everybody's pretty well satisfied that those two cases are not linked.

I think there's enough information out there that we don't believe they're linked.

What kind of stuff and if you can't say you can say what kind of stuff did you guys hold back in this case?

Well, I think in April, tensile case because it spans so many years, 30 and because there was so much media coverage on it that never really ended.

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