For decades, Dana’s killer remained a ghost. Until now.With a new weapon in their arsenal—cutting-edge forensic genealogy—investigators uncover a truth that had been buried in plain sight. In just 19 days, they identified a man who was never on law enforcement’s radar. A man who lived just miles from the crime scene. A man who walked free while innocent lives were destroyed.__You can view the materials referenced in this episode at https://threepodcast.com/chapter-7-hiding-in-plain-sight/Please consider donating to Ian’s GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-ian-schweitzer-after-wrongful-conviction. You can visit www.hawaiiinnocenceproject.org and click the donate button to support them, their work and their clients. Amanda Knox’s new memoir, Free: My Search for Meaning is available at www.amandaknox.com. If you have any information about the abduction and murder of Dana Ireland, we encourage you to contact the Hawai’i Innocence Project at [email protected]. You can also contact Crime Stoppers at (808) 961-8300 and the Hawai’i Police Department at (808) 961-2380 or visit their website Hawaiipolice.gov to submit a tip.
Chapter 1: Who is Steve Kramer and what is his expertise in forensic genealogy?
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.
Chapter 2: How was the Golden State Killer case solved using genetic genealogy?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Chapter 3: Why did the Hawaii Innocence Project hire Steve Kramer in 2024?
When it's said Steve Kramer was part of the team that identified the Golden State Killer, we mean that after 40 years of failed attempts to do so, he made it happen in 63 days. Which is just incredible.
And because of all that, the Hawaii Innocence Project believed Kramer and his business partner, Steve Bush, who co-founded the FBI genetic genealogy team together, could be their ticket to identifying unknown male number one.
Now, because of the joint investigation agreement between the Hawaii Innocence Project and the prosecution's office, the Hawaii Innocence Project had access to all of the DNA evidence. But they were frustrated by the lack of progress made in Dana's case after Ian's exoneration. Here's Hawaii Innocence Project co-director Ken Lawson.
So, yeah, around February 7th, we hired Kramer. Now, keep in mind, too, the Hilo Police Department, when we're standing out on the courtroom steps, right, giving a press conference after Ian was exonerated in 2023, saying we're going to, you know, look for her killer and we're not going to stop. We want to find it. The Hilo Police Department also...
issued a press release saying that they have never stopped searching for unknown male number one. Mind you, they wasn't doing Jack before then. They didn't do Jack after the exoneration. They didn't go out and get Kramer. We're talking about February of 2024. Ian was exonerated in January of 2023. So a year has went by, right? They haven't done anything with the DNA, not nothing.
So we go get Kramer, and then they don't know that we have Kramer. They don't know that until February 26th when Kramer comes back and says, here should be your suspect.
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.
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.
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Chapter 4: What challenges are there in applying genetic genealogy in Hawaii?
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
To reiterate, the Hawaii Innocence Project started working with Steve Kramer on February 7th, and Steve Kramer provided results 19 days later. In a case that has ruined so much and taken decades of life and freedom away from so many, it took only weeks for everything to change. I'm Amanda Knox, and this is 3. Chapter 7, Hiding in Plain Sight.
In two weeks, Steve Kramer knew more about their suspect than ever before.
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.
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Chapter 5: How did the team narrow down the suspect using DNA and public records?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It just seemed like an impulse crime. And we figured it was somebody probably close in age with Dana Ireland.
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: Who is Albert Laurel Jr. and why is he a suspect?
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.
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.
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.
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.
And then when we arrived, I'm like, this has to be our guy.
It wasn't Ian Schweitzer. Or Sean Schweitzer. Or Frank Pauline Jr. Not even the prison priest, Frank Nazario, Anthony Torres, or Roy Santos, who if you think all the way back to episode two, were at the top of the suspect pool for a minute there, albeit for different reasons. The name didn't end with Gonsalves either.
This name was actually nowhere to be found on any list held by law enforcement, the prosecutor's office, or the Hawaii Innocence Project. This guy wasn't on anybody's radar for the past 32 years. Remember, they don't have a DNA match yet, but via ancestry information and research through public records and social media, they've got a very likely suspect, a 57-year-old man named Albert Laurel Jr.
He'd spent the last three decades building a life with a wife and kids while Ian Schweitzer sat in a prison cell and while Sean Schweitzer took to life in the shadows.
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Chapter 7: What actions did law enforcement take after receiving the new suspect lead?
I don't know about you, but it was just like I was wrong about everybody who I thought it was. That's how I felt. It's like, God damn. I mean, I mean, I had a list. Right. And so I'm like, I mean, I mean, I was just totally wrong. Totally wrong. And you know what? Had I been on one of these people's one of my suspects, George, I would have convicted him and still been totally wrong.
I was like, the emotional reaction was finally, finally we're going to find out what happened. Because it was not just we knew the name, but we knew he was living, right? And so it's like, finally, because, you know, when you work on this case for all these years, all of us, man, we used to sit around in the hip office, you know, with our students. And we, you know, did the rape happen first?
And then she got on a bike, right? Did she know this person? We wanted to know, why did you do this to her? You know, what happened? And so I'm really like, we're going to get some answers. You know what I mean? Because initially we kind of thought, well, since he hadn't been in the coldest, he's probably dead.
Back in the 1990s, Albert Laurel Jr. was living only two miles from the crime scene. He was known to fish along the isolated trail Dana's body was found on. He also drove a pickup truck, which people long suspected was the vehicle that struck Dana, not a VW Bug. He would have been 25 at the time of Dana's murder.
No one from law enforcement to anyone's knowledge or in any of the case files ever talked to Albert, a member of his family, or even knocked on his door during a traditional neighborhood canvas.
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Chapter 8: How is the investigation proceeding while maintaining confidentiality?
In 1991, when this happens, and you find a body on a fishing trail. And Albert Laurel lives right near there. And you're trying to solve this crime. You're gonna go talk to the neighbors and go, you know, tell me who frequents this fishing trail? Who comes down here and fishes a lot? Can you tell me? They may have seen something. I want to go talk to him. Do you go over there?
Like, do you know who does? Now, somebody down there who knows Albert, because they're all together, would say, hey, man, Albert goes over there. I mean, that's all he do. That's how he makes a living. He fish. So he may have seen something.
After Steve Kramer and Steve Bush get their lead, they contact the FBI, who are working alongside the Hawaii Police Department, with the results. From there, the FBI's genealogy team would take the next steps.
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.
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.
Between February and July of 2024, the Hawaii Police Department tries to cross their T's and dot their I's, and they want to conduct additional testing. So with the advice of Steve Kramer, they decide to go track down Albert Laurel Jr. and tail him for a bit, until they are able to do a trash grab and snag one of his forks. That will enable them to develop a full DNA profile for Laurel Jr.
and see if it matches the DNA profile of unknown male number one. In the meantime, Ken Lawson and everyone else at the Hawaii Innocence Project has to keep their mouths shut and not tell anyone about this new lead. Even their clients, Ian and Sean.
Because we didn't want anybody saying that they were tampering with witnesses. So let's say we tell them. hey, man, we found the guy, you know what I mean? And then something happens to him, right? We don't want anybody to be able to say that if our clients was connected to him, that somehow they tipped him off or whatever, you know what I mean?
So it makes it a lot cleaner to say they didn't know anything about this. So it protects them from all these types of different conspiracy allegations.
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