Brad Mielke

The way it was described to me was that you are what you eat.

Basically, you're exposed in your environment, right?

Everything you eat, the source of the water you drink, all of that shows up in your bones, right?

And it can reveal where you were born, where you grew up, and where you've lived throughout your life.

Like there are markers, literally, that reside in your bones.

What you've been eating, your diet.

And it can reveal all of this.

So the investigators send Dana's remains to a lab in Florida,

to do this isotope testing.

They test the soil samples and things in particular local environments and they create this isotope map by region, right?

To see what matches with the victim.

And the isotopes found in Dana's bones matched isotopes found in the Southern United States.

Yeah, that means they start pulling missing persons cases from states in the southern U.S., down in the south.

especially with the name Dana, right, or similar.

And in that age group that they had, still no luck.

They were unable to identify her, but investigators then finally turned to another idea, and that is genetic genealogy.

They sent samples of her, Dana's DNA, to the big system that's out there, which builds family trees and identifies who our relatives might be.

I know I've done it myself.

And then finally, there is a break in the case, and it leads to the name Dana Lowry.

It was such a big case and such a tragic case that people still remember.