Steve Kramer
Appearances
THREE
Justice | Chapter 10
I don't know any detective, homicide detectives that we've worked with that thought that was a good, in fact, everybody thinks it's a bonehead idea. I don't know why, like I said, I cannot think, and I'd like that answer, like what was the investigative reason for taking his DNA again and then certainly letting him go?
THREE
Justice | Chapter 10
So if you're asking me, is there any question or is there any rub about there being probable causes he murdered her? I think that's ludicrous and I can tell you, As you can imagine, Steve and I have a lot of law enforcement friends, both in the FBI and many, many agencies across the country.
THREE
Justice | Chapter 10
And I've been inundated with my friends, prosecutors, investigators, going, what the hell happened in Hawaii? And what was going on with the police there? Saying that there's no probable cause. And all I can say is, like, they didn't have control of it.
THREE
Justice | Chapter 10
And I can tell you that that is not the way, you know, the FBI... You know, the FBI would never go out and take overt DNA from an individual after they've already, you know, confirmed them through surreptitious DNA. That's the probable cause. Like, every warrant we've done, including federal warrants that Steve and I have worked on in federal court, same thing. Like...
THREE
Justice | Chapter 10
The surreptitious DNA is all you need. So I think this case is a tragedy from December 24th, 1991 through July 19th, 2024.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
So that's the amazing part about it. And we were told years ago by a very smart person from one of the genealogy database companies, one of the scientists there, and he said, you guys have now been given a superpower. You have the ability to solve any crime. As long as there's DNA there, you can solve it.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
So essentially, we were out of the loop until they did the surreptitious collection of this fork in July. And then they sent that fork to this private lab in California to create the STR to match it against the profile from the crime scene. And because of my understanding, it was an injunction by the Innocence Project in this case. There was an agreement that that lab
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
wouldn't do anything on that case without the Innocence Project agreeing to it and also the Innocence Project being privy to the results of that. So at that point, we knew that the lab had DNA that was collected by, I assume, the local police and or the FBI from this individual. And we learned a few days later that that fork actually, the DNA contained on that fork,
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
from this individual, Albert Laurel, matched perfectly the DNA that was found on the body and clothing of Dana Ireland, so that we knew we had our guy. So I said earlier, 98% sure, now we're 100% sure, got right guy. This is him.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
So at that point, then generally, and when I say generally, like 99.9, I think every single case that we've ever done, the next step is you write up an arrest warrant for the individual. And your probable cause becomes not the genetic genealogy. You don't use that for probable cause. You use the DNA STR from the crime scene matches that for. And that's your probable cause.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
And it'll have crazy odds. Like the odds of a random match will be one out of 50 septillion or something like that.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
I'm a former FBI attorney. I spent most of my career in law enforcement. In addition to being an FBI attorney, I was a federal prosecutor as well as a deputy DA. And I retired from the FBI in 2021 to start this company, Indago Solutions, applying genetic genealogy to solve homicide cases, sexual assault cases, any type of violent crime cases.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
for genetic genealogy, which that profile, the vernacular is, we call it a SNP. It stands for single nucleotide polymorphism, S-N-P. So they had already developed, they'd sent the DNA from the Dana, Ireland homicide, sexual assault to a private lab to develop this DNA profile called the SNP. And they had already uploaded that profile to a database. And that's when they brought it to us.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
Yeah, they had initially started it, and they had developed the SNP and uploaded it. And then Barry, after talking to me the previous year, indicated that he wanted to start doing more genetic genealogy. We have a software, and he wanted to try out our company's software. Technically, we're not even in beta testing at that time, back in February.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
But obviously, we've always been interested in working with the Innocence Project. I'd spoken with folks from the Innocence Project a couple years earlier and volunteered to help them. And so this was the opportunity. So we were just really anxious to see what we could do for an Innocence Project case. And the reason for that, obviously,
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
to seek the truth, to get justice for victims, but also it provides a derivative benefit to the technique, and that being if you can put people in prison with this technique or help put people in prison, then you can also help get people out They just give us login information to the database with the profiles uploaded. I never saw the sample or anything like that. So we just upload it.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
Steve and I took a look at what we call matches. Matches are simply, it's a term for people that share DNA. Yeah. So if you were to do an Ancestry 23andMe test, something like that, you're going to get a list of people. It could be thousands, thousands of people long. And these are all people that share a small percentage of DNA with you. And that's the way genomics work.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
You share, everybody shares 50% of their DNA with their mother, 50% with their father, approximately 25% with each of your grandparents. And then the further you get away, the less DNA. So all these databases are showing you is just the percentage of DNA a percentage of DNA with, and they could be a parent, first cousin, a sixth cousin.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
So that's what we looked at, that list, and we kind of evaluated, you know, how difficult the genealogy would be in this particular case.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
The one case that I did do that most people have heard about is the Golden State Killer. So myself and Paul Holes organized a team, and in 2018, we identified the Golden State Killer, who was one of the most prolific uncaught serial killers in U.S. history. And we all kind of laughed about, like, we were all very happy high-fiving ourselves, literally, that we caught a serial killer.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
Sure, I mean, I believe it only took a few days for us to figure it out. And then we spent several more days, you know, trying to confirm everything and, you know, look at other possibilities. But, yeah, in this particular case, after... We got access to the account information. We looked at it. And our company, we have access to these.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
We have arrangements with the companies that we work both with Family Tree, DNA, and GEDmatch. And so we get access to the data, the same information that law enforcement gets access to, and plug it into our software to start arriving at a Family Tree where we could get an idea of what family lineage this person would be belonging to.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
The unique thing about this case and kind of the difficulty in general with somebody from Hawaii, particularly if they're native Hawaiian, they're gonna have a lot of ancestry that's gonna be in the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, things like that, Maori. ancestry, as well as a mixture maybe from other Asian communities. So it can be very difficult.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
The unfortunate thing that we saw when we first looked at it was we knew the suspect was 80% Filipino. Because if you go to like Family Tree DNA, where it was uploaded, you know, we'll show their origins, they'll say. It's like their ancestry, ethnicity. So, I mean, they'll tell you if you're Irish, Scottish, whatever. And in this case, it said Filipino.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
It's just very unique that the Filipino is a separate ethnicity that actually is shown on these genealogy sites as a separate ethnicity. And that's something unique about the DNA. So we knew that if he's 80% Filipino, then he likely has three grandparents that are Filipino.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
So what we did is we put parameters in, okay, Filipino, you know, heavy Filipino ancestry, but also we worked the public records from the Caucasian European side. And so that's what we just looked for. And then we obviously had age, we're looking for a male. Steve and I figured, We figured this individual, just from the nature of the crime scene, was probably young.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
It just seemed like an impulse crime. And we figured it was somebody probably close in age with Dana Ireland.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
And then obviously, we focused on where the original traffic accident happened and then where her body was left, knowing that generally, if you're going to commit a crime like this and go take this poor woman who's just been run over and is badly injured, you're going to take her to a spot that you're comfortable.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
you know, being in where it wouldn't be abnormal for you to be seen there, but also something you know it's safe. So he takes her to this little fishing trail. So we figured, probably familiar with it, you're probably close to it. So we're looking for somebody on this eastern, southeastern, you know, tip of the Big Island, you know, probably south of Hilo. So you start, those are our parameters.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
Like really, it was really awesome. And we didn't realize that how we caught him was really the bigger story. And it wasn't until like a week later, our phones started ringing and we started getting calls from police agencies, detectives, not only all over the country, but all over the world. Like, how did we do this? Can we do it? Can you show us how?
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
And you put that in and you start looking for relatives that fit that demographic as well as those genetics. And that's how we started it. And we were able to come up with, you know, several matches that lined up with families that moved from the mainland United States to Hawaii and married into Filipino families. So we come across, you know, somebody that lives 1.7 miles from a crime scene.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
And this is where the human touch goes into it. Okay, we start looking at these suspects, and this is where you start scrolling social media. And we find this guy, and we're like, let's look at his Facebook. And you can look at his Facebook and go through it, and you can see, like, he's a big shore fisherman. And, like, we knew this was, like, a local fishing trail.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
And, like, I swear to God, I don't know if it is, but some of those photos, it looked like it was the same trail. And, like, you've got to be kidding me. And then we're looking at some of the, he had some old photos on there of, like, these trucks, like, pickup trucks that you know, it seems similar to the type of vehicles. I mean, I won't go into details.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
We were actually pulling up those trucks and seeing what kind of tires they came with from the manufacturer, because there were tire marks on it. And, you know, we were looking at the tire prints and like, what kind of cars do you have in the Facebook to do all that? So we took all that information, Steve and I, and kind of verified it against the work we did.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
And that all of a sudden started to dawn on us. Like, wow, maybe we really have something here. It's an amazing technique, and we say this all the time, and it sounds like an exaggeration. It is not, but these days almost anybody can be identified through DNA. You don't have to be in a database or anything like that, but if you leave DNA someplace, it's identifiable.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
I wanted them to look at it and verify it. And we knew this, too, from working at the FBI on the genetic genealogy team. Thankfully, they're not going to just take somebody's word for it and go take somebody's DNA or anything like that just because somebody says that's the person.
THREE
Hiding in Plain Sight | Chapter 7
The FBI is going to do their homework, verify that there's a reason that they should be out there collecting DNA from an individual.