Chapter 1: How did investigators first learn about the victim named Dana?
This is Debra Roberts. I'm here with another weekly episode of our latest series from 2020 and ABC Audio, The Hand in the Window. Remember, you can get new episodes early if you follow The Hand in the Window for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast app. Now, here's the episode.
Loman loppuminen ja pakkaaminen voi tuntua ikävältä. Jopa niin ikävältä, että laukkujen kasaaminen oven eteen tuntuu hyvältä ajatukselta. Säärepori. Lomia, joiden et soisi loppuvan.
Hey, I'm Brad Milkey. I'm a reporter at ABC News. I host our daily news podcast, Start Here. And today, we've got a special edition of The Hand in the Window for you. I'm sitting here with our host, John Quinones, for a really interesting bonus episode.
Chapter 2: What challenges did police face in identifying Dana?
So by now, you've heard the series. You know the chilling story of Sean Great, a serial killer in rural Ohio. Over the course of more than 30 hours of police interviews, Great confessed to the murders of five women. Now, you might remember, Great did not remember the full name of one of these women. He said it was something like Dana McClure.
He said he killed her in a county that neighbor to Ashland. We did not have time to include this in our other episodes, but there was a whole investigation to discover who this woman was. Police were following tips from multiple counties. Forensic experts were involved. There was cutting edge technology. Well, today we're going to dive into the tale of Dana.
John Quinones, thank you so much for being here. Good to see you, Brad.
Chapter 3: What forensic techniques were used to reconstruct Dana's identity?
It's good to be here. I mean, part of what made this whole series so chilling was the idea that someone can be like, oh, yeah, you know, I killed this person. I assaulted this person. Like, it's just another chapter in this story. So I would like you to take us back to the fall of 2016 when Sean Great first mentions this unidentified victim.
He's in jail after being arrested for kidnapping, rape, two murders. And Detective Kim Major asked Great if there's anything else he wants to get off his chest. And he says there is.
I'm thinking her name is Dana. I totally forget her name after a while.
Dana. I think her name is Dana. So chilling to hear. I guess what else came out in this interview?
Chapter 4: How did isotope testing help in the investigation?
You know, Brad, it's a riveting series about a vicious serial killer in Ohio and a female detective, a woman detective, who got him to confess. Detective Kim Major, as you mentioned, spent hours confessing. with the killer, Sean Gray, trying to get to the details of who the heck this woman, Dana, was.
It turns out she was a traveling salesperson, sold magazines door to door, and had gone to his house and had promised to sell, he says, his mother some magazines, but never delivered them, right? So Sean Gray is very angry and upset. Later, he's at another house, his grandparents' house. And here comes the saleswoman again selling magazines. And he invites her into this house. He invites her in.
There's a conversation about magazines. And then he strangles her. She falls. And then she wakes up again. He panics.
Chapter 5: What role did genetic genealogy play in identifying Dana?
And he stabs her. Now, Great winds up dumping her body. and eventually setting it on flames. He set it on fire. This was back in 2006 in Marion County, which is a neighboring county next to this town where other murders had happened, Ashland, Ohio.
What did investigators know about this victim? Because he's saying somebody named Dana. I guess, what did they know about her as this starts unfolding?
Well, her body was found in 2007 on the side of the road. No clothing. There was no jewelry on her. Nothing to identify her with. And her remains were partially burned because he had set the body on fire. So it was hard to find out anything about this woman.
Chapter 6: What were the findings after identifying Dana Lowry?
What they did know was that she was white. And she was somewhere between 5'3 and 5'9". About 15 to 22 years old. But they were never able to identify her. It's not a ton to go on. No, no. This became a cold case.
So what do you do if you're the police? I guess, you know, what happens after Sean Great says, yes, I'm confessing to this murder of somebody named Dana. What do you do as the cops?
something called digital facial reconstruction. And they did this on the body. After he confessed, Sean Grade was shown the reconstruction and they showed it to him and they said, is this the woman? And he said, no, it doesn't look like the woman.
Chapter 7: How did Sean Great's confessions impact the investigation?
I don't think it's very accurate at all. Enter this woman, Samantha Molnar. She's a criminal intelligence analyst and forensic artist at the Ohio Criminal Bureau of Investigation. She's brought in, and in this clip, she tells us about her role in the case of Dana.
I recall getting a call from Marion County and they had explained to us kind of what was going on in Ashland. They asked me if I would be interested in doing a facial reconstruction, a clay reconstruction on this set of remains as another attempt to see if maybe we could get another image that might be more of what Sean remembered.
Wait, so let me just get this straight. So I'm used to thinking about like composite imagery, right? Where like you bring in a sketch artist or something like that. It sounds like this is a similar concept, but you're doing like a 3D model of a person's face.
Exactly. It's fascinating science. Investigators then, they realize that they do have Dana's skull, right? So Samantha Molnar takes that skull to a hospital where they do a CT scan on it.
Chapter 8: What are the implications of Dana's story for future investigations?
And then once we have that CT scan, we can actually 3D print an exact replica of the skull, which was very important in this case because she had been burned and her skull was pretty damaged. So then once we had the exact replica of her skull, I basically start doing the clay reconstruction from there.
Start by building the muscle structure on the face, placing the average tissue depth markers, and then kind of finishing the sculpture from there.
So that's so wild that they almost build it from the inside out of like, this is what the skull would be. Right. And so, and then they add all these things on top of it, I guess. Okay. So then they have what they think might be almost a replica of this woman's face. What do they do next?
It's
They start sending the photos around of the new reconstruction to the sheriff's department, to the media, and they share the photos on social media also to get the word out, to see if anyone recognizes this woman, Dana. And this analyst, Samantha Molnar, also meets with Sean Grade himself, right?
She goes to where he's being held to show him the new reconstruction to see if it better matches what he remembered, if it better matches his memory. of this woman, and he tells her that yes, it looked much more like the woman that he remembered. And that whole experience of visiting Great was very unsettling.
Oh my gosh, I don't know how to explain it. Meeting Sean Great was extremely eerie. This was one of the worst cases I had worked so far in my career. And then to meet him and he seemed kind of unalarming. I could understand why maybe women were trusting of him or went with him willingly because he didn't look like a monster.
Wow. So I guess, does anything come out of this then?
Well, now they have more to go on, right? So they follow up on leads, right? About missing people from across the United States, from Canada, even Mexico, even Israel. But the victim still remains unidentified.
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