Welcome back to the Pathman Chile for part two of our series about ten non mysterious cases involving identified people. If you didn't hear our episode last week, we decided to do an idea where we're going to be going over an old article I published for listeners dot com back in June of twenty thirteen, which was titled ten
mysterious cases involving Unidentified people. Genetic genealogy and forensics have evolved so much that here we are about twelve and a half years later, and every single victim on this list that I wrote has since been identified. So in our last episode we talked about the cases entries number
ten through eight on this list. So in part two, we're going to talk about the next couple entries, and our format is that I will read my original write up, Jules and Ashley will give their thoughts, and then I'll explain the circumstances of how each of these victims were identified. So the next one on our list is number seven
is a decedent known only as Lyle Stevick. On September fourteenth, two thousand and one, a man appearing to be in his twenties checked into a motel in Gray's Harbor's, Washington. He registered under the name Lyle Stevick and listed an address from Meridian, Idaho. He only paid for one evening, but told the staff he was likely planning to stay a few extra days. On September seventeenth, his body was found in his room, hanging from a coat rack with
a leather belt. It is estimated that he had completed suicide the day before. He left money on the nightstand alongside a note that said for the room. Upon further investigation, it was discovered that Lyle Stevick is the name of a character from a Joyce Carol Oates novel. You must remember this so that there's a good chance this man had registered under an alias. The Idaho address he wrote
down actually belonged to a Best Western motel. The man carried no identification or luggage, and the only possessions left behind were a toothbrush and toothpaste. The only other clue was a discarded piece of paper in the room's wastebasket, which read suicide. All attempts to uncover anything about this man's background have proved unsuccessful.
I got really into watching mystery YouTube stuff, maybe like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, and I remember coming across Lyle Stavick's case, and I think that he also was wearing clothes that were way too big for him, that it looked like he'd lost a decent amount of weight in the time I guess leading up to his death. And there was just something so sad and isolated about the fact that he decided to go into this hotel and
made the choice to end his life. It makes you wonder what type of life did he have, what type of connections did he have, Who's out there that's missing him right now? He has to have a family. I'm sure that he had some friends, and that he's felt so alone and that he felt that he was in so much pain that that was his only choice. My heart just broke for his family. The fact that he's sitting somewhere either you know, he's been buried or he's sitting in a morgue somewhere, and the fact that he
got his identity back. And I think that you'll tell us more details about that, but there's still a lot of mystery surrounding Lyle Steviit.
What's interesting, too, is when you think about the character from Joyce Od's novel, that character was actually contemplating suicide. So when he checks into that hotel and he registers under that name, he already is aware that he's contemplating at least taking his own life. And what's really pitiful is he has enough moral wherewithal to leave money on
the nightstand to pay for his room. So he feels a humanity towards others, like they're going to find me, but I don't want to, you know, financially burden them as well. So I'm going to pay for the room and then I'm going to take my own life. Like that gave me chills when I saw that that this is a man who's hurting so badly or feels so isolated that he's going to take his own life. But he still cared about the people that were going to have to find him, and so that, I don't know,
that's something that really stuck out to me. He left money to pay for his room, knowing when he checked in he used an alias of a character who is debating taking their own life.
Yeah, there are quite a few cases just like this about individuals who check into hotels or motels under false names and then decide to take their own life. You might recall that we once did a series on the Jennifer Fairgate case from Norway, which was featured on the Netflix reboot of Unst Mysteries, where she shot herself inside a very fancy hotel, and of course the name she used, Jennifer Fairgate, was likely a fake and she is still unidentified.
There are always a lot of wild theories that's around cases like this about how the victim might be a spy or something like that. I know, for Lyle's case, because he checked in only three days after nine to eleven, there was a lot of speculation there might be a connection that maybe he lost a relative and one of the terrorist attacks. But the big turning point took place in May of twenty eighteen, and if you might recall, this was a short time after the Golden State killer
was finally identified and arrested. And this was a big turning point in investigations for cold cases because they identified them using genetic genealogy, and I think they realized that we can use this at a lot of other unsolved cases and it pretty much opened the floodgates and a lot of these cases that were solved where unidentified decedents where they realized if you entered this DNA into some genealogical database, it might eventually to a biological relative. And
that's exactly what happened with Lyle Stevick. He was identified by the DNA dough project because his DNA was uploaded gen Match and was eventually linked to some individuals living in New Mexico and Idaho, and they finally found his genetic relatives and he was positively identified. It turned out that he originally hailed from Alameda County, California, and was twenty five years old at the time of his death. But this is pretty much the only information about him
that they've released publicly. They have not even released his real name. When investigators tracked down his family, they claimed they had no idea that he had taken his own life. They just assumed that he decided to cut off all ties with them and go off to live his life somewhere. So they were taken by surprise when they learned that he was one of the more famous unidentified john does
in the United States at that time. But in the interest of maintaining their privacy, Lyle's family have elected not to publicly reveal his real name or any other details about his background. If you search hard enough online, you can find his real name. But out of respect to his family, I'm not going to repeat it here, but this reaction pretty much brought out the worst in the true crime community because a lot of people were very
angry that the family did this. They felt that they were entitled to know Lyles's real name and his identity, and they were leaving like disgusting comments saying, well, I donated to the DNA DO project, and if I had known that they were going to reveal his name or his background, I never would have done that. It's like there was such a feeling of entitlement and selfishness about it, and no respect for the victim's family, who got a
major backlash over the whole thing. But I mean, it's not our it's not their lives, like, it's their family's decisions. So if they're not comfortable revealing Lyle's real name or anything about him, then that's their prerogative. But people really overreacted to that.
I remember, I can't imagine feeling entitled to have access to a family's most intimate, most heartbreaking moment like We are very fortunate as true crime people of interest, right thing that that is of interest to us that families open their lives to us often, But in a moment where a family says, I'm so heartbroken. This is our private mourning, this is something we're dealing with. Please leave us alone to not say thank you. I wish you
nothing but the best, and I have ultimate respect for that. Oh, thank you Robn for protecting his identity, because that's what
the family has asked for. What was sad in this case is that you look back and there's reports that the family said, you know, he had voluntarily estranged from the family, or that there had been some distance between them, so they had assumed that he had chosen not to have contact, and that there wasn't a huge concern that he had taken his own life or that he would be missing, and that's why reports hadn't been made that
there had something had happened. That's heartbreaking as well. To combine that with the fact that he then chose to take his own life likely had a lot to do with the fact that he was estranged from his family.
So that's a grief that I can't even imagine. What that feels like that my child, my brother, whoever he is to that family, had a falling out, had chosen because of mental health or something else, to separate from us, and because we weren't there, he made this decision like what if I had been there or what if I had been able to repair that relationship. So there's so much added trauma and grief that comes in this case.
It's absolutely heartbreaking for that family. It's not someone who chose to leave and then was able to have a healthy life that they chose. It's someone who left your family and then made a decision that they were so alone they couldn't go on.
That's heavy.
So I one thousand percent respect and honor the fact that they said, please let this be. We've been through it enough.
It's been nearly a quarter century since Lyle Stavik's well, we don't know his actual name, but I'll just continue to call him Lyle Stebic because out of respect for the family, we don't want to reveal his identity. And in two thousand and one, mental health care and the conversations surrounding mental health weren't what they are today. So if Lyle was struggling, perhaps he was dealing with a mental health disorder or something that would be a catalyst
for him estranging himself voluntarily from the family. We don't know what his internal struggles were, We don't know what his traumas were, we don't know what his triggers were. But obviously he was suffering immensely to take to make the decision to end his own life. But it makes me really sad to think that perhaps there could have been somewhere that he could have reached out to or
somebody if the conversation was different around mental health. I think we can take it for granted today that we're very open as a society. We still have leaps and bounds to go. But if somebody is struggling with anxiety or depression, bipolar disorder, any of the cluster b disorders, schizophrenia, people feel okay to discuss it and to reveal that
about themselves in many cases. But when this happened to Lyle, it was very much something that people suffered with in silence, and not everybody, but a lot of people did.
Yeah, like he Even though two thousand and one doesn't seem like such a long time ago, it kind of hits me, and it's like, ooh, it has been twenty four years, and you are right that mental health care, even though it was better than it would have been back in the nineteen seventies or so, was still had
a long way to go. So we have no idea what Lyle was going through, what made him decide to do what he did, but it is kind of sad like he maybe could have reached out for help and maybe this could have been avoided, but we just don't know what was going on in his mind. And it is sad though that obviously if his family never reported in missing and were just assuming that he had cut himself off from them, that he probably did not have the greatest relationship with them. But I do respect that
their privacy that they didn't want to reveal anything. They are not the only family of an identified John or Jane Doe who has chosen to maintain their privacy, because one pattern I have seen is that even if the family is very active and want to reveal everything about the victim's background, it's perhaps inevitable that they'll often face like criticism online from amateur slus who says, well, why didn't you report the missing and they're not seeing the
context that if they went missing in like the seventies and eighties, and they disappeared and were found dead in a state or a province where they were not born, it's very hard to get because of jurisdictional issues, to
get a proper investigation launch. So in a lot of these cases, the victims' families were actively looking for them and trying to find out what happened, but because of jurisdictional issues and being unable to get law enforcement to do anything, they were pretty much like at a dead end, and that's why they didn't find out what happened to their relative until decades after they died.
And I think it would be different if Lyle was murdered. The fact that he decided to complete suicide that feels like a deeply personal matter for a lot of families.
So I can completely stand and empathize with their decision not to want to put their own details on blast, because they knew that if they did reveal his identity, that would then thereby reveal their identities, and so they would become this like topic of discussion and fodder in all these different true crime forums on podcasts, and people would be really interested in these details, and so when you're grieving, to want to maintain that privacy and to
want to do it alone without the public scrutiny, I can completely understand that.
So our next entry on the list is the Caledonia Jane Doe, and I'll read the write up right now. On the morning of November the ninth, nineteen seventy nine, a passing motorist discovered the body of a young woman in a cornfield near Caledonia, New York. She looked to be between thirteen and nineteen years old, and was killed by two gunshot wounds to the head. Authorities estimate that
the murder weapon was a thirty eight caliber handgun. She was likely killed the night before, but unfortunately heavy rains that washed away potential forensic evidence. Her pockets have been turned inside out, indicating that the killer had possibly removed her identification. A waitress reported seeing the woman at a diner in Lymeman, New York, the night before, and numerous truckers claimed that they had seen her hitchhiking and attempting
to catch rides. In two thousand and six, three microscopic pollen grains found inside her clothing ranalyzed, and it was determined that they could have only come from Florida, Arizona, or southern California, indicating that the girl had traveled a great distance before her death. But even though AUTHORISA followed up on over ten thousand leads, she has yet to be identified and remains buried under the name Jane Doe in Dansville, New York.
Wow, this one, when you think about this is a child, someone who's thirteen to nineteen years old, with two gunshot wounds. That the head is so graphic and so brutal, and she's a hitchhiker, which in the seventies would make a lot of sense. But this is a child who's likely hitchhiked eight very long distance, which may not be as normal. Right, so hitching a ride into a fellow cities or hitching a ride maybe one hundred miles, so be it. But
let's say she's thirteen. A thirteen year old to be hitchhiking across the states would be quite extreme, And so it's interesting to think about what happened, where was she going, and who did she run into that would go to a point where they're gonna go through her pockets and shoot her twice with a shotgun. It just seems incredibly like a significant moment. This is somebody they need to discard of who's such a young age and probably not very much of a thread.
Yeah, it's shocking her age to think that she was hitchhiking any great distance because thinking back to being that age and going anywhere without your parents. Sure like you might, you know, go and hang out with your friends and whatever. But the idea of packing up your stuff walking out that door, going into the a bit into the unknown. You are putting out your thumb and you don't know who is going to pick you up. It could be somebody dangerous, it could be somebody safe, but you are
obviously running away from something. There had to have been something that was either scary or traumatizing, or a reason that she felt that it was a better option for her to leave home and to take a chance with strangers on the road and to sleep roth than it was to stay where.
She was and cross country. So she's up in New York and this has to be the pollen found on her had to be from they said, Florida, Arizona or southern California. So there's not a single option there that says this was just one hundred miles or so she wanted to travel. She's going to make a cross country trip at this age and run into someone that dangerous in that trip. It's quite extreme.
But couldn't she have picked up that pollen in the truck of one of the truckers.
That is true. Yes, I find out she really was from Florida, so maybe that's where she originally got the POLLMN. But yeah, I always thought that a little bit that that doesn't necessarily mean she was from there, that maybe if the killer was a cross country trucker, that the polem could have originated from them. So, as we're going to talk about, this victim did not have the happiest
home life, and she was hitchhiking across the country. This is not the only case of this ilk that I've seen where a victim was murdered while hitch hiking through number of different states while they were still a teenager, which seems pretty shocking today, but was not all that uncommon during the nineteen seventies. And this is a case that actually the identification of the victim pre dated genetic genealogy.
It took place all the way back in January of twenty fifteen, only about a year and a half after I wrote the list first article, and of course before genetic genealogy. The best way you could identify these people is find a family member who looked like a potential candidate to be related to the victim, check their DNA,
and hope that it to be a match. So it was finally announced in January of twenty fifteen that Caledonia Jane Doe had been identified as sixteen year old Tammy Joe Alexander, who did hail from Brooksville, Florida, and of course, none of her friends and family had heard from her since the spring of nineteen seventy nine and just assumed that she ran away months before the identification because no missing persons report had ever been filed, Tammy's half sister,
Pamela Dyson, and one of her old high school friends decided to try to figure out what happened to Tammy and file a report for the first time with the local sheriff's office, and this soon captured the attention of a very prominent websleoth named Carl Koppleman, who was also a very talented forensic artist. Who has a history of using post mortem pictures to create digital illustrations for unidentified decedents.
And if you look at a lot of the composite sketches for these victims online, which are very lifelike, there's a good chance that they were created by Carl Koppleman. He was looking through a recently foul missing person's report. He saw Tammy Joe Alexander's photograph and a light bulb went off over his head and he realized, Wow, this kind of bears a strong resemblance to the Caledonia Jane Doe because he had created a sketch for her years earlier.
So he decided to contact law enforcement. They collected DNA from Tammy's half sister, Pamela, and lo and behold, it turned out to be a match, and the Caledonia Jane Doe was finally identified as Tammy Joe Alexander.
You must have been so excited. This is the first one that you got to check off the list. You must have been elated.
I was, yes. I think there was another one we're going to talk about later that also had an identification in twenty fifteen, But back then this sort of thing was more rare. It's not like today where genetic genealogy is identifying like several decedents per week.
And what's interesting here is if you do look at the composite that they made of her, she has such a unique nose shape, and she has a really distinct smile as well, and so the way her teeth are structured and the way her nose turns up, it's it's
very very distinct. And so then when you compare that to her picture, it's incredible that the actual person who had created the composite sketches just looking through this list of missing persons and says, wait a minute, I just designed a composite that looks very similar to this young lady. And so it's incredible when you compare the two, it's almost a spitting image of her actual picture.
It's unbelievable, Like it looks like it seems so lifelike and everything like the amount of tooth show like you said, the jaw structure, the eyes even just like the amount of putting in the eyes and the placement of the eyebrows. It's incredible.
Yeah, Before genetic genealogy, Carl Koppelman was the main reason a lot of these victims were identified because his sketches were so good. And this is not the only example. When you look at the photograph, when you look at the sketch and then a photograph of the victim and be struck by how somil they are to each other, and more often than not, it paved the way for them being identified. But not surprisingly, Tammy did not have
the happiest home life growing up. She and Pamela grew up with a mother who was addicted to prescription medication and was described as being emotionally volatile and erupting into temper tantrums and also had suicidal thoughts quite often, and Pamela would later say, quote, I think she had issues back then that they didn't diagnose. So perhaps she was suffering from bipolar disorder or something and they just didn't
know it at the time. So Pamela just assumed that Tammy had ran off and made a new life somewhere, and even though she hadn't heard of her, she was kind of holding out hope that maybe she found a husband and had children and started a family of her own. So she was quite distraught to learn that Tammy had been murdered in another state, likely well she was picked up hitchhiking. They decided to leave her buried in Dansville,
New York. They pretty much said that this town, when they found her body, treated her so well, gave her the dignity of a funeral and a burial plot that they were going to leave her there rather than bring her body back to Florida. But they did hold a ceremony where they changed her headstone, where instead of being buried under Caledonia Jane Doe, they finally gave her a new headstone with the name Tammy Joe Alexander on it, and she is still buried there to this day. So obviously,
the big unanswered question here is who murdered her. It turned out when she was last seen at a diner, the waitress said that she was with a white male who looked like he was between five foot eight and five foot nine. He wore black wire rimmed glasses and he was seen driving a tan station wagon, and police have labeled him as a person of interest and are
continuing to seek his identity. As apparently Tammy and this man left, and it's possibly reasonable to assume that he could have murdered her at some point and then dumped her body into the cornfield. So this is still an open investigation. And they actually did a great thing in
twenty twenty. They released some audio clips of Tammy's voice because she had actually created some recordings while she was traveling the country on a cassette tape sent them to her former boyfriend and he still kept them in his possession all these years and provided them to the police. And they pretty much think, well, if we release audio her voice, maybe this will ring a bell with someone who who remembers her, and this will give us a
promising lead. And it's also been reported that they did find traces of male DNA on Tammy's clothing, which has been entered in some national databases, but thus far they have yet to find a match. But hopefully this can be solved at some point in the future. So our next entry on the list is a victim known only as Princess Blue. So I'm going to read the entry
right now. In Missouria County, Texas, on September tenth, nineteen ninety, a motorists who pulled off the highway to relieve himself in a trash dumping area was shocked to discover a skull inside an old tire. The skeleton remains of a female believed to be between the ages of fifteen and twenty five, were then found on a pile of debris. Cause of death is unknown, but it is estimated that
she died one to five years before being discovered. She was initially thought to be Hispanic, but later analysis has determined that she was probably white and descended from at least one black parent or a grandparent. Even though no clothing was found, the victim had six rings on her fingers and a bracelet. The most distinctive piece of jewelry was a silver colored nineteen seventy five class ring from
Robert E. Lee High School in Houston. The bluestone in the ring is what led to her being nicknamed Princess Blue. Given that the victim was too young to have graduated high school in nineteen seventy five, investigators were baffled about why she would have this ring and have tried to find out if anyone from that graduating class might have lost or given the ring away. Thus far, they have had no luck solving this mystery.
It's such a bizarre component, thinking that there's no way that she could have graduated in nineteen seventy five, and you think that you've got this real tangible piece of evidence. When you know the high school, you think, okay, well somebody's going to know her. There's going to be something connected to that high school. But then to have it go nowhere and to not really know when she died, we've got like a one to five year period, which
is interesting. And another thing that we've seen on multiple cases is how many times does a guide pull over to relieve himself and comes across a body. Like the most famous example I can think of is the ad no On sayad case or not, the murder of Amin Lee.
Yeah, and that was pretty much the same thing with the Sumter County dose case, which we talked about on our last episode, where a truck driver stopping to relieve himself stumbled upon their bodies.
I can't imagine you're just thinking you're taking a break, fir a second, all of a sudden you're in the middle of discovery of a human body. And this one's so interesting because the skull is found inside a tire and then you have the body found in debris, so it makes it seem as though there was a purposeful dismemberment, although over time there could have been movement from animals or things like that. Here what's really interesting to me, though,
is that ring. She's too young to be the person who actually graduated from nineteen seventy five from Robert E. Lee High School. But no one in the class of nineteen seventy five has a missing family member, a missing friend, a missing cousin anything. There's nobody in that class. How big could it be, Like the biggest graduating class I've heard of is like, you know, four hundred and five
hundred people or something like that. There's not a single one of the individuals who would have received that ring or the ring company itself. They could tell you, here's a list of people who ordered class rings with the bluestone in it.
None of them.
Could report, Hey, we have a family members who's missing, or I gave my ring to a friend.
Yeah, as we're going to talk about now that she's been identified. Of course, they found out that she never actually attended the school that the ring came from. They had their theory, but it's still one of the bigger mysteries in the case. So they finally made an identification in June of twenty twenty, when they used genetic genealogy to formally identify her as Julie Gwen Davis, who would have been twenty or twenty one years old at the
time of her death. She had originally hailed from Orange, Texas, but had left her home to travel to New Orleans when she was eighteen years old, and her family had no idea what happened to her, and it sounds like they also could not file a missing person's report because they had no idea where she was at the time. She did seem to have any fixed address, so that's
why she wasn't on file anywhere. And the identification was made possible when Julie's brothers started looking into her disappearance and decided to take the initiative to submit his own DNA to the Texas Rangers, and when they entered it into their database, it wound up matching Princess Blue and
paved the way for Julie's identification. So Julie's exact cause of death has still never been determined, so we don't have any certainty about whether or not this was a homicide, but I have no idea why she would be found in that trash area if she wasn't murdered, and of course the idea that animals moved her skull after she decomposed, I'm not entirely sure they would have moved the skull
inside attire. But then again, they've never said that she was beheaded either, so we still don't have an explanation for that. And of course, like I mentioned earlier, the ring is still a big mystery because Julie never did
attend Robert E. Lee High School. But the story goes is that she got married after she traveled to New Orleans, and according to Julie's sister, she did meet Julie's husband at one point and learned that he was from Houston, so perhaps he went to that school and gave the ring to her, But unfortunately, don't really have any other information about that, about the husband and if he went to that school, or if he's considered to be a
person of interest or a suspect. Apparently he still has not been tracked down, and I'm not even sure if Julie's family knows his name because it's never been released publicly. So this investigation at the moment is still in a holding pattern. They are still not one hundred percent certain if Julie was murdered that I do think that there is a good chance that she was the victim of a homicide and that the responsible party dumped her in that area.
Well, we know, statistically speaking, Ashley always tells us that when somebody is murdered, it's usually somebody who's close to them. So it could it be the husband, Yeah, it definitely could be. We don't have any information here, and it would be nice if we knew if there was a big age gap, because I don't know is there an age gap between them, is there not? We don't even know his name, Like, it just feels like we've got
such a limited amount of information. But since he hasn't come forward and hasn't come to the family and said, oh, she's missing, she's been murdered, I'm so upset about this situation. That speaks to somebody who might have something to hide.
For sure, if you're distressed that your loved one's missing, you would scream to anyone who would listen, right, like something's happened, help me. If I didn't mind that they went missing or are no longer here, I wouldn't reach out to anybody. So it's definitely confusing and frustrating here in this case, and there is so little to go on.
Yeah, I mean to give the husband the benefit of the doubt, Like if she moved to New Orleans and they got married, and then maybe their marriage came to an end. It could be a thing where he stayed in New Orleans and she decided to travel back to Texas and then got murdered by a complete unknown third party, And because he didn't care about her anymore, that's why he didn't decide to report her missing and was completely
unaware that she was found murdered. But of course the detail about the ring, it makes you wonder if they weren't still together, why does she still have the ring in her possession, But then again, why wouldn't he take the ring back if he killed her and dumped her body there. There's just so many unanswered questions and hopefully the investigation will turn up some answers at some point in the future.
Just a quick question, what is this photo like? If somebody were to look up your list first article and under number five Princess Blue, is that the site where her body was discovered? Picture?
Good question I'm loading it here and the photos aren't loading for me, but let me try. Here we go.
It looks fairly picturesque. There's a pretty green tree for anybody who's listening and not looking at it, and looks like maybe some shrubbery below, but it doesn't really look like a garbage dump sight or anything.
Yeah, I know lisz fers sometimes would use stock photos if they couldn't find a good photo. I'm actually kind of surprised they didn't show like Princess Blues composite sketch. But yeah, I don't know if this is a crime scene photo, but it does look like a crime scene photo, so maybe when they just did a Google search under Princess Blue, this is one of the first things that came up, and they just decided to use it as
part of the article. So our last one we'll talk about on this episode is a victim known as the unidentified Grateful Dead Fan. On June the twenty sixth, nineteen ninety five, a man named Michael A. Eric Hager was killed when his van crashed in Greensville County, Virginia. A passenger was also killed in the accident, but Hager's family did not know him, so he had presumably been picked up well hitchhiking. The unidentified man was between sixteen and twenty one years old or a ti ed eyed concert
t shirt advertising the Grateful Dead's thirtieth anniversary tour. He had no identification, but he did have a ticket stub from the Grateful Dead concert at RFK Stadium the night before. The ticket was traced to a Pennsylvania man who had scalped it at the concert, but he could not recall
who he sold it to. One significant clue was a note found in the man's pocket which read quote to Jason, sorry, we had to go see you around Caroline OH and Caroline T. The note also contained a phone number with a nine to one four prefix, but no area code. Neither of these Carolines has ever been identified, and the
phone number has not helped uncover the hitchhiker's identity. This note led to the man being nicknamed Jason Do, but since no one has ever come forward to claim his body, his real name remains a mystery.
If you have a young individual who looks like they're this concert goer and their hitchhiking, I mean those Carolines, it almost seems like he could have been at a bar or at a party or something, and these are just two girls he runs into, and one of them sharing their phone number, like, sorry, we had to go. We ran out of that party really quick. But here's our number, you know, like they slipped it to him.
It's really sad because it seems like this kid's in the middle of just a very standard teenage experience or young adult experience, where they're going to a concert, they're enjoying life, they're jumping in the car with somebody to get a ride, and then you have this crash that ends his life and this other young man's life, and yet we have no idea who this passenger is.
Yeah, and I can only imagine what Michael Eric Hager's family felt having to deal with the tragedy of losing him in a car accident and then finding out that he has this guy inside that they never heard of before.
And to think that there's another family out there who's missing this guy. And he's another grateful dead fan. And it's interesting. There's who, said Payne Lindsay, who has the podcast Dead and Gone?
No, it is up and vanished. I can't remember who does Dead and Gone?
There is a whole Grateful Dead series, right.
Yeah, it's called Dead and Gone. I think it's Neil Strauss, But yeah, that podcast I listened to the first season. It was really good. But it taught me, because I don't listen to The Grateful Dead, that these are fans that truly are really good people for the most part, and they really come together. They want to support the band, and they're there for each other in times when they need.
So it was just really interesting thinking that there could be all these murders that were associated with The Grateful Dead, in this case an accident, and knowing that like this fan hasn't got their identity back, and like you said, for the family going, who is this person who's been found with our loved one's It's just a lot of mysteries here.
So I first became familiar with it when it was featured on Unsolved Mysteries back in the nineties. It was not a full segment, it was just kind of a brief thirty second special alert where they said, this young man recently was killed in a car accident. We don't know his identity, so please come forward if you have
any information. And I was always intrigued by the fact that on the Unsolved Mysteries message board there were like pages of threads devoted to discussing this case, which I thought was kind of remarkable considering that the segment was only thirty seconds long. But they found Jason Doe's story to be quite fascinating, wondering who was he and how did he wind up dead and these particular circumstances and why has no one claimed him because it's a very
so many distinct details surrounding his death. Well, this is another identification that actually took place pre genetic genealogy down the old fashioned way by internet sleuthing, and it took place in January of twenty fifteen, right around the same time as Caledonia Jane Doe. So it was the first or second entry on my list, first article where the
victim got identified. And this was pretty crazy because someone decided to share a forensic sketch of Grateful Doe on the image sharing website Immager, and one of the site's posters suddenly commented and said, Wow, this guy bores a striking resemblance to this grateful dead fan that I knew about twenty years ago named Jason. I hung out with this guy for several months, but I haven't heard of
him in a while. And then this person decided to post a photograph of Jason, and everyone just gasp because this is probably the closest resemblance I've ever seen to a composite sketch of a unidentified decendent to a real person I'd ever seen, because it showed Jason with his long ponytail hair. He was wearing like a tiedyed T shirt in the photo, and everyone on the Unsolved Mysteries message board was going not saying, if this is not Jason Doe, then this has to be one hell of
a coincidence. It must be one hell of a doppelganger. But they finally identified this man. His real name was Jason Callahan. He was nineteen years old at the time he went missing and hailed from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and they finally got in contact with his mother, who
confirmed that she had seen him in twenty years. Because her son had no fixed address and pretty much lived a nomadic lifestyle where he traveled around the country, so she never reported him missing didn't realize that he was dead, but sure enough, they collected DNA from her and matched it up to Grateful Doe, and it turned out that yes, there was a genetic match, so Jason Doe was finally identified as Jason Callahan, and his mother claimed that after
not hearing from him for a while, I tried to file an official missing person's report, but I could not do so because of jurisdictional issues because I didn't know where he went missing from and he had no fixed address. So this is one of the big success stories from the internet because if this person had not seen the composite sketch and posted the photograph of Jason Callahan and said I recognized this guy, then who knows how much longer it would have been before he was identified.
That's absolutely incredible that this mother got her son's identity captured from someone who was simply on the Internet looking at some random post, right, and they go, I know this kid, I know him. And for that poor mother,
it's what we've discussed in several cases. He was hitchhiking around the country, going from concert to concert, and like I said, just being a typical young adult living life, and because of that transient lifestyle that's happening in that process, she didn't even know where to tell them to look. She didn't have anywhere to tell them, Hey, this is where he went missing from. And so what a heartbreaking
reality for our mom who's desperate for answers. And thank god that this person on the internet was able to identify him and then ask, you know, like provide that lead that really led to his identification.
Yeah, it's just crazy to me because they put up the composite sketch on national television and the Jason Doe's composite was all over the Internet for about twenty years before the right person saw it and recognized it. You automatically assumed that everyone out there is going to be an amateur sluice, such as ourself, where we'll be aware
of all these cases. But no, apparently Jason's mother never saw the Unsolved Mystery segment or saw the composite sketch because she just never got the opportunity to put two and two together and recognize it as her son. So it just shows sometimes that these cases can be solved by pure chance and the right person seeing the right to getting the right piece of information at the right time.
So that about brings an end to Part two of our series about ten non mysterious cases involving identified people. So join us next week for part three, we will finally discuss the remaining three entries on the list.
Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit about the Trail Went Cold Patreon?
Yes, The Trail Cold Patreon has been around for three years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like early ad free episodes, and I also send out stickers and sign thank you cards to anyone who signs up with us on Patreon. If you join our five dollars tier tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in which I talk about cases which are not fet on the Trail Went Cold's original feed, so they're exclusive to Patreon, and if you join our highest tier tier three, the
ten dollars tier. One of the features we offer is a audio commentary track over classic episodes of Unsaved Mysteries, where you can download an audio file and then boot up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or YouTube and play it with my audio commentary playing in the background, where I just provide trivia and factoids about the cases featured in this episode and incidentally, the very first episode that I did a commentary track over was
the episode featuring this case. So if you want to download a commentary track in which I make more smart ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join Tier three.
So I want to let you know a little bit about the Jewels and Nashty Patreons. So there's early ad free episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've got our Path Went Chili mini's, which are always over an hour, so they're not very many, but they're just too short to turn into a series, and we're really enjoying doing those, so we hope you'll check out those will link them in the show notes.
So I want to thank you all for listening, and any chance you have to share us on social media with a friend or to rate and review is greatly appreciated. You can email us at The Pathwentchili at gmail dot com. You can reach us on Twitter at the Pathwink. So until next time, be sure to bundle up because cold trails and Chili pass call for warm clothing.
Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy