[0:00]Every year, more than 600,000 people are reported missing in the United States. And about 4,400 unidentified bodies turn up every year. And 1,000 of those are still unidentified 12 months later. And at any given time, an estimated 40,000 sets of human remains in this country have no name attached to them. And of those ones, where a cause of death was recorded, more than one in four were ruled a homicide. Murder victims with no names, no cases, and no justice. And Sheep's flat Jane Doe was one of them. And this is more than just a murder lost to time. This is the story of the people who refused to let it stand. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers, and murder. All things that I love to consume and I know you do too, you sick, twisted, beautiful, intellectually minded, freak. Today, we are talking about a Jane Doe case and the people that really did not let it rest, did not let it get cold. So, without further ado, let's unbuckle our seatbelts, go mock right down the highway, slam all the brakes, and bust through the windshield into this Jane Doe case together.
[1:24]All right, so I have Googled is this normal. More times than I'd like to admit, and I have spiraled at 2:00 a.m. over a symptom, okay? I know a lot of us have, but I definitely have more than once. And I've told myself, I'd book an appointment next week for about six months straight. It turns out the problem was never finding the time, it was just finding the right doctor. And that's where Zocdoc changed everything for me. Now, Zocdoc is a free app and website that helps you find and book high-quality in-network doctors so you can find someone you actually love and you actually want to go to. And I actually want to make the appointment. And we're talking 150,000 providers across all 50 states and 200 plus specialties like primary care, dermatology, dentistry, eye care, you name it. And you can read thousands of verified patient reviews, see real-time availability and book instantly. And you're not playing phone tag back and forth, and you're not waiting forever. And most appointments happen even within the first 24 to 72 hours, and sometimes same day appointments are an option. So, stop putting off those doctor's appointments and go to zocdoc.com/cccm to find and instantly book a doctor you love today. That's ZOCDOC.com/cccm. Thank you so much to Zocdoc for sponsoring the video and finding a doctor for me and supporting the channel and let's get back to it. So, there's a meadow off the Mount Rose Highway between Reno and Lake Tahoe. 8,900 feet up, tucked into 30,000 acres of wilderness. And in the summer, it's wild flowers covered everywhere, and in winter, it's pretty much complete silence. And it's a place that people drive past without much thought, and it's called Sheep's Flat. So, July 17th, 1982 was a Saturday, the kind of summer afternoon that brings people into the mountains around Lake Tahoe. And two hikers were out walking in the Sheep's flat area that day. A half a mile from the road, they came to a stop. And at around 1:30 in the afternoon, they noticed a woman near a fallen log. And from a distance, it could have looked like someone who'd leaned over to fix their shoelace and just never straightened back up. But they got closer and realized that she wasn't moving. And even closer and they realized she didn't look like she was breathing. And once they were close enough, there was no mistaking it. The woman was dead, and no one else was in sight. So, the hikers made their way back to the road and called for help and waited for authorities. So, Washoe County Sheriff's deputies were the first to arrive. And they found that the woman was wearing a sleeveless powder blue t-shirt, a pair of jeans, and yellow tennis shoes or running shoes. And underneath her clothes, she had on a blue bathing suit. A blue bikini bottom was folded into one of her jeans pockets, and everything she wore said, you know, lake day, basically. But someone had covered the back of her head with a pair of men's underwear, and she carried essentially nothing, no wallet, no purse, no keys, no jewelry. No identification of any kind. So, investigators fanned out across the meadow and found that the dirt showed two people had walked from where the cars were parked to the place where she was found. Yet, there was only one set of walking back. So, whoever had been with her had left alone. And the scene looked pretty much undisturbed. Nothing torn and nothing scattered and nothing really out of place. Nothing gave any indication that she was afraid of whoever she'd gone there with. And based on the condition of the body, investigators estimated she'd been dead for roughly 24 hours. Which meant that whatever happened to her likely occurred the day before on July 16th. But nobody in the surrounding area had seen her. Not even any of the small communities nearby. She might as well have appeared from nowhere, basically. And from the very first hour, investigators treated this as a homicide. And the autopsy confirmed what the scene had hinted at. The woman had been shot in the back of the head. And the angle of the wound suggested she had been leaning forward at the moment the trigger was pulled. So, maybe she was reaching for her shoelace to tie it. And the men's underwear on the back of her head had been placed there after the fact, covering the wound. But there was more. She had been assaulted, and the assault was first, and the gunshot came after, from what they could tell. And she hadn't fought back. Because there wasn't a single mark on her that said she tried. No bruises on her arms, no broken nails, no marks that would have come from defending herself. And the pathologist put her age somewhere between 25 to 35 years old, and she stood around 5'5" and weighed about 112 pounds. And her brown hair was up in a bun and her eyes were hazel. So, her body told a story of its own. On her upper left arm, there was a vaccination scar. The nail on her left big toe was bruised so badly, it had gone black. An old scars showed up in three places: left knee, right shin, and right foot. And across her abdomen ran a scar 11 centimeters long, and it looked like it came from a C-section. And somewhere, at some point, this woman may have had a child. And her last meal had been a salad. And then there was the dental work, and it was unusual and elaborate. She had multiple fillings and crowns and on the upper left side of her mouth, she had a gold bridge with porcelain facing that spanned three teeth. And bottom teeth had twisted out of alignment, and her top front teeth sat unevenly. So, the kind of work a dentist might remember, basically. She had a very unique set of teeth, essentially. And investigators cataloged her clothing more closely. And the sleeveless t-shirt was made by a company called Bunty Sportswear, and her jeans were Lee Riders. And the two things that caught investigators attention early on were the vaccination mark on her arm and the style of dental work in her mouth. And they both pointed to overseas, which made the working theory that this woman came from Europe. But with no name and no match to any missing person's report, and no one coming forward to claim her, she was given the Jane Doe designation. In this case, Sheep's Flat Jane Doe, and sometimes called Washoe County Jane Doe as well. And her case was entered into the national database as NamUs ID UP8427. Now, the Washoe County Sheriff's office ran the criminal investigation with the Washoe County Regional Medical Examiner's office holding jurisdiction over the remains. And detectives moved quickly on the most obvious question, who was she? So, they canvassed every hotel and every motel in the Tahoe area, just asking had anyone seen this woman. And had anyone left bags behind and just never come back for them, but no one did. Not a single front desk clerk, housekeeper, or guest could place her face, and her description didn't line up with a single missing person case in the database. Not just locally, but basically anywhere in the country. And the dental work that had seemed so distinctive, so traceable, let investigators to contact Interpol. Because if she was European, perhaps someone overseas was looking for her. And the answer from Interpol was the same answer they kept getting everywhere else, no match. And the t-shirt offered a different thread to examine, though. And retail records traced it to stores in three specific states: California, Oregon, and Washington. If the shirt came from out of the West, maybe she did too. And it was the first hint that she might have had ties to the Pacific Coast. But, quote, somewhere in the Western United States, isn't an address, it doesn't really narrow it down too much. Essentially, it was a continent-sized guess, and certainly not enough to go off of just yet. So, investigators took DNA from the body while they had it. But in 1982, the technology wasn't where it needed to be in order to make real headway in the case. And those samples would sit in storage waiting for the science to catch up. No tips came in and no calls from worried friends or frantic family members. And no co-workers asking why she hadn't shown up to work. So, the silence on the other end of this case was absolute, and so, she was buried. She would be buried at Our Mother of Sorrows Catholic Cemetery in Reno, Nevada, in a grave with no headstone. So, a woman no one could name was put into the ground without a single person there who knew her. And for 37 years, that is where she would stay. So, over the months and years that followed, detectives ran her fingerprints, her dental records, and eventually, her DNA against every missing person who came close to matching her physical description. And each time, the result was the same. There was no match, as we know. And the count reached 227 by 2015. 227 cases opened, compared, and closed. And not one of them was her, and that number just kept climbing, because the technology kept improving and each time it did, they went back and tried again. And DNA analysis, as we know it now, didn't exist in 1982. But once the science did catch up, investigators pulled the original evidence out of storage and ran it through the new tools. And the assault kit that had been preserved since the day she was found, turned out to contain a full DNA profile of whoever killed her. And they uploaded it to CODIS, the FBI's system for matching criminal DNA. But still, there was no match. So, whoever he was, he simply just wasn't in the system. So, there would be no person of interest, not one single name suspect in the many years of this investigation. And the problem surely wasn't a lack of effort. This was just a wall that every detective who touched the case ran straight into. And they had a dead woman with no name, killed by a man with no face. And in 1993, 11 years after the murder, KOLOTV, a TV station in Reno, brought Detective Don Means back to the crime scene for a segment on the case. And Means summed up the frustration, saying, quote, "We've checked hundreds of people. If we knew who she was, we'd know who killed her." Unquote. So, the case surfaced in local media from time to time, but it never quite became a national story. Destined to live in the back pages, appearing only when a reporter revisited it, then faded into obscurity again. And the original investigators would age out of the job, and one by one, they left the department. And new ones picked up the file, read through it, and ran into the same dead ends their predecessors had. So, the case outlasted careers. And there was no cold case unit at the Washoe County Sheriff's office for most of the time this file sat open. But people kept trying to solve it anyway. And a fresh look at her teeth in 2010 blew apart the European theory that had guided the case for nearly three decades. And it opened up a new possibility. And in 2015, a detective named Dave Jenkins, working out of the newly formed cold case unit, built a different theory from the ground up. And his working theory placed her origins on the West Coast, not across the Atlantic. And he thought she might have cut ties with the people in her life on her own terms, years before she ever ended up at Sheep's Flat. Which would explain why nobody had ever filed a report, but Jenkins theory was speculative. That same year, the Sheriff's office named the case their cold case of the month on Facebook, hoping social media might reach someone that flyers and new segments hadn't. And an artist named Carl Koppelmann created a forensic facial reconstruction of the victim. And we've talked about Koppelmann before, he's very, very, very good at this. Now, Koppelmann was an accountant by trade, and he'd been volunteering his time building composite images of unidentified people for free since 2009. And by the time he took on this case, he'd already completed more than 250 reconstructions. This guy is my hero, all right? The image gave a face to a woman who had nothing but a case number for over three decades. And it connected people to her in a way that hadn't been done before. So, her file sat in two major public databases for the unidentified, NamUs and the Doe Network. And both were designed to keep cases like hers visible. And true crime bloggers and podcast hosts picked it up in hopes of finally finding the answer. And none of these cracked the case necessarily, but they kept her visible. And Larry Canefield had retired years earlier, but he never stopped believing the case would break. And he worked at it himself. And he knew what was sitting in the evidence locker. Quote, "Once we had the DNA of the suspect," he said, "sooner or later something's going to break." Unquote. But the big break came from an unexpected place. And in February of 2018, several forensic specialists from the Washoe County Sheriff's office flew out to Seattle where the American Academy of Forensic Sciences was holding its annual conference. And one of the lectures that week was on the subject most of them had never encountered before, forensic genealogy. And the speaker was Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick. Now, Fitzpatrick wasn't a cop, and she'd actually built her career in physics. And she'd done work for NASA and the Department of Defense. And then she'd walked away from all of it to solve a completely different kind of problem. And she'd launch identifinders International with a specific mission. And the idea was to use something called Y chromosomal testing to track down unidentified male killers in cases that had gone cold. So, basically she's doing the Lord's work. And alongside Fitzpatrick was a co-founder at a newer organization, and that was Margaret Press. Now, Press came from an entirely different world. Her resume looked nothing like a crime solver's, because she'd published fiction, spent years writing code in financial services, and done consulting work in linguistics. And she was pulled into this world from a hobby that started in 2007. Because she got into genetic genealogy on her own and figured out how to connect adopted children with the families they'd been separated from and helped people she knew piece together their ancestry. I was I need a I need a hobby like this. I need I feel so unimpressive like learning about these people's hobbies. I'm just just like a little hobby, genealogy or whatever, you know, connecting families back together, changing people's lives and whatnot. It's just a side gig. Little side quest. I think it's awesome. It's very cool. And together, in 2017, they'd launched something called the DNA Doe Project, which was a nonprofit. And it's straightforward mission was to give names back to unidentified remains across the country, which, as we know from the intro of this video, there are tens of thousands. So, again, just doing Lord's work. You know, the Washoe County team sat in that lecture hall and realized they might be looking at the answer to their oldest open case. And by April of 2018, the Sheriff's office had reached out to both the DNA Doe Project and Identifinders International. And evidence from the case was shipped to a private laboratory where technicians extracted a usable DNA profile. And the resulting profiles would be uploaded to a public genealogy database called GEDmatch, where millions of people had voluntarily submitted their own DNA for ancestry research. And the idea was that even a distant familial match, a third cousin, a great aunt, could start a chain of connections that might eventually lead to a name. And as they began that work, the rest of the world was about to learn just how powerful this approach could be. And on April 24th, 2018, California authorities announced they had arrested a man named Joseph James D'Angelo. And he was a former police officer and the suspected Golden State killer, which I've gone over that case before. It's extremely interesting, so if you want to watch that, you can go over here. The Golden State killer. It's you check it out. And he'd been caught through the same method, as we know, if you watch that video, kind of gives it away, but it's still a really interesting case. But the Sheep's flat case wasn't inspired by the Golden State Killer breakthrough, as the work had already started. But the arrest validated the method for all the skeptics that doubted its capabilities. And within weeks, the DNA Doe Project reported initial results from the Sheep's Flat samples. And the victim's profile suggested that one of her grandparents was Italian or of Italian descent. And her mitochondrial DNA placed her in a group called the H16A1. And two distant cousins appeared in the database. And in June of 2018, a true crime blogger at a site called The Bulletin Board wrote a detailed post about the case, noting that the DNA Doe Project had just developed a profile and was preparing to upload it to GEDmatch. And the writer didn't know it yet, but the case was already further along than anyone outside the investigation had realized. So, the people who finally broke this case certainly weren't the ones you'd expect to find standing at a law enforcement podium. And Colleen Fitzpatrick had walked away from her career in physics to bring genetic genealogy into homicide investigations. And Margaret Press had spent a decade matching adoptees with their biological parents before she co-founded the DNA Doe Project. So, the leap from finding living relatives to naming the dead had come to her in a flash one afternoon while reading a Sue Grafton mystery. Quote, "In both cases, you're looking for parents," she said. Neither of them was getting rich doing this, for the record. I mean, it's a non-profit, so obviously it's basically just their time. They're giving up their time and doing God's work. Again, I'm going to say it, because nobody at the DNA Doe Project drew a salary, which is very admirable. The whole operation ran on volunteer labor, and over 60 genetic genealogists all worked for free. There's still good in the world, believe it or not. And Press was blunt about the finances, saying, quote, "We make no money. We've actually put a lot of our savings into it." Unquote. And then there was Cheryl Hester, one of the genealogists whose work proved critical on the suspect's side of the case. And she would spend months chasing a family line that had been deliberately obscured, and she wouldn't stop until she found the answer. And Carl Koppelmann, the accountant who'd drawn her face, was now also helping search for her name. And inside the Washoe County Sheriff's office, Detective Kathleen Bishop inherited the case at the moment it mattered most. And she coordinated between law enforcement and the genealogists, bridging two worlds that didn't always speak the same language, necessarily. And when the results finally came in and the press conference was held on May 7th, 2019, the stage told the whole story. The press conference podium was lined with badges and uniforms. And right there, in the middle of all of it, were two women who didn't look like anyone's idea of a detective. And Fitzpatrick leaned into it, saying, quote, "Two little old ladies," unquote, she said, with a grin. All right, I want to pause really quickly and talk about something I have added to my routine. And actually noticed a difference with, and that is OneSkin. Now, I'll be honest, I'm very, very skeptical when it comes to any skincare claims. So, what got my attention was the science. That's like the main thing that matters to me now more than anything. And OneSkin was founded by an all-women team of PhDs in longevity research. And at the core of everything they make is their OS01 peptide. The first ingredient clinically proven to target senescent cells, which are a key driver to wrinkles, fine lines, and loss of elasticity. We're out here trying to age gracefully, okay? And this is validated in four peer-reviewed studies. This is not just claims. And they have over 10,000 five-star reviews. And everything is free from 1,500 plus harsh ingredients, dermatologist tested and sensitive skin certified. So, go try OneSkin for yourself, you will not regret it. And go to oneskin.co with code CCCM. Thank you so much to OneSkin for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel, and thank you for making my skin so nice. And let's get back to the video. So, a private lab processed the DNA collected from the victim's body. And once the profile was built, it went into GEDmatch, or GEDmatch. And it didn't run its own tests the way Ancestry or 23andMe did. And people who'd already gotten their DNA tested somewhere else could upload their profiles and see who matched. And Margaret Press had her own way of explaining it, saying, quote, "Like a DNA swap meet where you have all these tables of families and you're basically asking one another, 'I'm trying to find a match for my silver set, do you have any spoons with this pattern?'" Unquote. And what came back were distant branches on family trees that the genealogists would now have to build from scratch. And the two cousins led to the other family connections in New York. And from there, the DNA Doe Project worked the tree backward until it pointed to a couple in Detroit, Michigan. And the couple had only one daughter. The family tree said Sheep's Flat Jane Doe was that daughter. And just three days had passed from the first GEDmatch result to a name. And three days to answer a question that had gone unanswered for decades. But having a name and proving it are two different things. And the team needed physical confirmation, and they found it in an unlikely place. And police records out of Detroit showed that a woman had been arrested decades earlier for loitering, which is a misdemeanor. And it was a minor charge, but the department had kept her fingerprints on file for over four decades, and those prints matched. But getting the hard proof took another five weeks. But by July 2018, the DNA Doe Project went public with the news that they believed they knew who she was. And two months later, Washoe County detectives had the confirmation they needed. So, after 36 years, Sheep's Flat Jane Doe had a name. So, detectives now knew who she was, but they told no one. Because the killer was still unknown, and going public with the victim's name could compromise everything. So, the Washoe County Sheriff's office held the information, and that August, the county's Chief Medical Examiner, Laura Knight, signed a formal proof of death letter for a woman who'd spent 36 years in a grave without one. And her death certificate was finally created and filed, but the public wouldn't hear any of it, not yet. Because finding the killer was a different kind of hunt entirely. Because they had his DNA the whole time, and it had never matched anything in any criminal database. And once his profile hit GEDmatch, Colleen Fitzpatrick's team at Identifinders International took over. And it took over 2,000 hours of research. And the GEDmatch results pointed to a family in Dallas, Texas. A husband and a wife who'd raised three boys, and between all three sons, the family tree showed just one grandson anyone knew about. And investigators cleared that grandson almost immediately, which meant the suspect wasn't a known member of the family at all. He was a secret. One of those three sons had fathered a child no one in the family acknowledged, and that child had been given a completely different surname. And this is where Cheryl Hester's persistence did the heavy lifting. Hester narrowed the search to a Dallas neighborhood where two sisters had each been raising a boy on their own. And both children had been born outside of marriage, and both carried their mother's last name. And that research led to a name, and to confirm it, a Washoe County detective reached out to the suspects' two living children. And both of them said, yes, and gave their DNA. The lab result left no room for doubt. And on May 7th, 2019, the Washoe County Sheriff's office held a press conference in Reno. And Sheriff Darren Ballam announced that the first time in 30 years, both the victim and her killer had been identified.
[33:09]And Ballam told reporters three things cracked the case. The DNA, the genealogy, and the kind of grinding, traditional detective work that holds a file open for decades. Saying, quote, "This is an incredible story and I am extremely proud of the work done by everyone who took part in this case over the past three decades. Even taking advantage of new genealogical technologies, a great deal of investigative work was done by Sheriff's office staff working this case. A reminder that the pursuit of justice never sleeps here at the Washoe County Sheriff's Office." Unquote. Detective Bishop, who had coordinated the effort from inside the Sheriff's office, said, quote, "I was ecstatic because I was able to confirm for the forensic genealogists and for DNA Doe Projects that this really works, and you're seeing it in all these cold cases and that's why they're being solved." Unquote. Nothing like it had ever been done before. Genetic genealogy had cracked one half of a case or the other. But this was the first time it delivered both, a woman no one could name and a man no database could find, and both pulled out of the darkness by the same science. And 37 years later, the case was solved, so we had the name of the woman and the name of the man behind the gun. Now, the woman's name was Mary Edith Silvani, and she was 33 years old when she died in that meadow. And her father, John Edward Silvani, was an Italian immigrant who'd been born in France. And her mother, Blanche, was born in Canada, and Blanche's maiden name was Curry. And by a grim coincidence, that was also the last name of Mary's future murderer. And Mary had two brothers, Robert and Charles, and her childhood was fractured almost from the start. Because their mother had been battling mental illness for years, and eventually she walked out on the family while the kids were still growing up, and she would never come back. And Blanche never reconnected with any of them, dying in 1980 without ever seeing her children again. And that left John to raise three kids on his own. And then, in 1964, John would pass away as well, and at that point Mary was 16. So, both parents were gone, and and no one was left, and a classmate named Paula Healey remembered her from those years. And Mary apparently loved art and reading, and she spent hours at the Detroit Institute of Arts. And people who knew her described someone gentle and reserved, and she never brought up what was happening at home. And she attended McKenzie High School in Detroit, and her pictures appeared in the 1966 yearbook. But, there's no graduation listed for her in the school's records, and no senior portrait was ever taken. And with both parents passed, the siblings held on to the house in Detroit, and the plan was to keep Mary enrolled until she finished school. But one by one, though, each of them ended up heading West to California. And once they arrived, the three of them just kind of scattered. But in about 1972, Mary had disappeared from the lives of everyone who'd known her back in Michigan. And the last anyone saw of her, she was carrying a child and living in a maternity home for single women. And a phone call came later, and she told a friend the baby had been placed for adoption. And that was the last anyone had heard from her. So, the scar on her abdomen, the one medical examiner had measured at 11 centimeters and noted as consistent with a cesarean section, now had a story behind it. She did carry a child, and she had let that child go and give it up for adoption. And by 1974, she was still in Detroit, and her brothers had already gone to California. And Mary eventually made the same move, though exactly when is unknown. And somewhere in the eight-year window between 1974 and 1982, no one has ever been found who knew her during those years. So, an entire stretch of her life exists with no witness to it at all. Whatever connection she still had to Robert and Charles, faded over time, and contact grew thinner, and then just stopped altogether. And nobody reported her missing, and not because they didn't care, but because they thought she'd just chosen to disappear. And the people she left behind in Michigan all had the same story. Mary wanted a fresh start. She was out there somewhere, hopefully doing fine, and they hoped she was also happy. So, Detective Jenkins had been right all along. She'd walked away from her own life, and nobody thought anything was wrong. And after the identification was made public, a high school friend named Nancy Cumming came forward with never-before-seen photographs of Mary at 19 years old, standing as a bridesmaid at a wedding. And before Nancy came forward, nobody had ever seen Mary's face outside of one grainy yearbook shot from McKenzie High School's class of 1966. And now, for the first time, people could see her face, the way her friends once had. And at the press conference, they'd put Koppelmann's composite sketch up on the screen next to her yearbook photo from 1966, side by side with the imagined face and the real one. So, both of Mary's brothers were already passed away by the time her name was recovered. So, the truth about Mary came too late for either of them. And when investigators went looking for surviving family, the search led them to one person, Robert Silvani, Jr., Mary's nephew. And he had never even met her. Robert Jr.'s father, Robert Sr. had stayed in Detroit for a while, he married and had a son. But then he unraveled, cutting himself off from his wife and son. And he drifted out of Michigan, landed in California for a while, then kept going, dying by himself in Oregon. By the time his dad disappeared, Robert Jr. was only four years old. So, he grew up with nobody. There's a really common theme within this family. I mean, their mom left and left them alone. And then Mary left on her own and disappeared, and then her brother did the same thing. Like I can't, I can't imagine the the trauma that happened to that childhood, which led them to be the same way as their mother. It's just it's wild. But his father, his Uncle Charlie, and his Aunt Mary left for California, and his mother had brought up Mary's name one time. And that was everything he knew about his father's sister. And roughly a year before the press conference, his phone lit up with a Facebook notification he never expected. And the DNA Doe Project had found him, and the message said a homicide victim had been connected to his family tree. And it said, would he be willing to submit a DNA sample? And his sample helped confirm what the genealogist had already suspected. Mary Edith Silvani was his aunt, but he was told to keep it quiet at that point. Because the killer hadn't been identified yet, and releasing any information could jeopardize the investigation. So, he waited, and months of silence carrying the knowledge of a family member he'd never known, murdered before he was even born. And when the case was finally made public, he wanted Mary to know she was loved. And he'd never met her, or even seen a picture of her until the detective showed him, but she was family, and that meant something to a man who had grown up without one. And he wanted to get her a nice headstone. The DNA process also connected Robert Jr. to a distant cousin named Angel Caprile's, living in New York City, who he didn't even know existed either. And Caprile's mother and Mary had grown up together, actually.
[44:06]Saying, quote, "There are so many questions that we don't know, like why she didn't come back to the Bronx." Unquote. And Caprile said, quote, "Everyone assumed she had a good life." Unquote. The identification gave this family two things at once: the confirmation that someone they'd lost had been murdered, and the discovery that they had relatives they'd never even known about. And Robert Jr. got his wish. And the Diocese of Reno donated a granite marker for Mary's grave. And the inscription was written by the two relatives who'd found each other through her death. Saying, quote, "Our lost angel has been taken to heaven. You have been found and will never be lost again." Unquote.
[45:06]And then there was the killer. His name was James Richard Curry, born November 16th, 1946 in Bexar County, Texas. And his parents were never together. And his father came from a Dallas family that wanted nothing to do with the child. So, his mother took him and gave him her own last name, and that erasure was one of the reasons it took so long to find him. And while still in Texas, he was actually arrested for robbery and sentenced to prison at the Huntsville Unit. And they let him out in 1977. He left Texas behind and ended up in Waquina, a tiny place in Tular County, California. Where he found work at a place called J&M Locksmith. And there was also a suspected earlier murder. And a fellow locksmith in Waquina vanished and detectives believed Curry was responsible. And that man's remains were never found. And in early 1982, months before Mary's death, a man named Richard Lemon Jr. was shot and killed. And Curry put Lemon's body into a crate and hid it in the Santa Clara self-storage on Delacrooz Boulevard, where it stayed until Curry confessed. So, this guy, he's a serial murderer. And on July 17th, 1982, Mary Silvani was assaulted and shot in the back of the head at Sheep's Flat.
[47:17]And then came January 2nd, 1983, and Gerald Novasellets, who was 39 years old, and his wife, Sharon, who was 34 years old, ran a competing storage operation out of San Jose. And Curry showed up at their apartment on January 2nd, and he shot Gerald in the head inside their apartment, stole $400, and then assaulted Sharon and dragged her out to his yellow Lincoln Continental. And he drove to a stretch of State Route 92 in San Mateo County, near Crystal Springs Reservoir. And Sharon tried to run, but he caught her, assaulted her again, and shot her in the head. And he left her body on the side of the road. And on January 4th, Curry walked into the San Jose Police Department on his own, and nobody had to get him. And he just showed up and confessed to killing the Novasellets couple. And he also confessed to killing Richard Lemon. And he asked the detective to shoot him. But he never said a word about Nevada. And never mentioned Sheep's Flat, or a woman by a log, or anything that happened on July 17th, 1982. And the day after he was booked into Santa Clara County Jail, Curry tore a strip from his mattress cover and did what POS's in jail do when they are too afraid to face consequences. If you know what I mean. He's not with us anymore. And one of the jail's book cart volunteers discovered him and called for help.
[49:48]Resuscitation attempts failed to bring him back, and doctors at San Jose Hospital put him on life support in the ICU. And two days passed with no improvement. And on January 7th, the doctors concluded there was nothing left to save, so they disconnected the machines. He was pronounced dead at 7:30 in the evening. And because Curry died before he could ever be tried, he was never convicted. And no conviction meant his DNA was never entered into any law enforcement database. So, that's the answer to the question that had haunted this case for decades. They had the evidence. It just had nothing to match against. And his pattern was unmistakable. Sexual assaults followed by a gunshot to the back of the head. And he did that both to Sharon and to Mary. And what no one will ever know is how they crossed paths. And whether Mary and Curry had met before that day, whether they drove out together, or whether she was already at the lake when he found her, whether she knew his name or he knew hers, those questions closed forever when he died. And the case was shut in May of 2019, with both names now recovered. And both sides of the ledger finally filled in. But Curry hadn't only killed Mary Silvani. The man who murdered her in Nevada had killed at least three more people in California, and possibly a fourth whose body was never found. So, it took 37 years to give Mary Silvani her name back, and in order for it to happen, so many things had to fall right into place. A physicist who once built instruments for NASA had to decide that tracing the dead mattered more than her career in defense research. And a novelist in Northern California had to be reading Sue Grafton one afternoon and suddenly see the connection. With the same genealogy skills she'd used to reunite adoptees with birth families, could give names back to the dead. And a forensic investigator in Washoe County had to attend the right lecture in the right city at the right time. And a fingerprint card from a misdemeanor arrest in Detroit in 1974 had to survive 44 years in a filing cabinet. And a nephew who never knew his aunt even existed, had to open a message from a stranger on Facebook and say, yes. And two children of a dead killer had to agree to give their DNA so that the truth could come out. Every single link in that chain had to hold. And if any one of them had broken, Mary Silvani would still be Sheep's Flat Jane Doe. Just seemingly almost impossible odds, yet they worked out. And Detective Bishop put it like this, saying, quote, "If everybody had not done their job as this went along, this case never would have been solved." Unquote. And this was the case that worked. And this was the one where everything aligned. And if we go back to where she was buried, for years, the only thing there was a blue plastic flag. The same that utility crews stick in the ground to show where a water line runs, but in this case, it's where the Jane Doe was buried. And her cousin, Angel Caprile's, stood at the grave after the identification was made public and said something that hasn't left me. Quote, "I just think about all the people out there who don't even have a blue flag." Unquote. And it's so true. I mean, there's so many people out there just wondering where their family member or friend has gone or significant other, and we don't know. But the genealogy is such an amazing tool nowadays, and it's amazing to see how many Jane Does and Johns are being found and identified to this day, and in this case, the killer as well. It's it's an amazing case, and I thought I would share it with you today. I know this was a bit of a shorter video, but uh somebody suggested it, and thank you for suggesting it. And please let me know what other cases you would like me to deep dive into. I always read your comments, and until then, I will see your beautiful face, okay? Bye. Stay safe.
