Morgan Absher

We're entering a new year, so now is the perfect time to start addressing things you might want to work on.

A year from today isn't that far away.

Get started now at HelloAlma.com slash clues.

That's HelloAlma.com slash clues.

Yeah, I mean, we saw that in our Natalie Holloway case where a reward was offered and it went up and people started making up these stories and bringing the police on these goose chases to get the reward.

Yvonne's crime scene revealed a pretty critical clue for investigators, though.

And kind of a huge mistake that the killer left behind, but hey, I like it.

And this would really get the ball rolling in this case.

Police technicians used an SA evidence kit to look for DNA on Yvonne's body, and they were able to recover semen enough to complete a DNA profile for analysis, which brings us to our fourth clue.

But...

The other shoe is dropping.

There were some minor issues that investigators had to acknowledge.

This wasn't guaranteed to be the killer's DNA, since Yvonne could have had sex with someone else before she was killed.

Another thing, back in 2001, DNA databases weren't as big as they are now.

Neither Illinois nor Missouri had even begun collecting DNA from convicted felons yet.

I think in Illinois, that wouldn't happen for another year.

In Missouri, it was like...

three years away and so they don't have this big database I mean we talk about CODIS quite a bit it wasn't vast as it is now right but we do see in a lot of the cases we cover that they hold on to some of that DNA for later and then that's how a lot of these matches are made so at least there was a little bit of foresight but yeah they were still really hopeful because at least now they had a sample they had something ready for comparison that when they did find a suspect their suspect

Like Yvonne, Brenda's body was examined with an SA evidence kit.

And again, investigators were able to recover enough semen for a DNA profile, which is clue number five for us.