CALIFORNIA, USA – In 1998, a long-haul trucker named Wayne Adam Ford walked into the Humboldt County, California, sheriff’s office and confessed to being a serial killer. He was arrested for his confession. He was carrying a plastic bag containing the chest of one of his victims at the time. A former Marine named Ford has confessed to investigators that he was responsible for the murders of four women, including one whose torso was discovered in a cove called Ryan Slough in October 1997 north of Eureka.
In January 1998, more skeletal bones belonging to this woman were found on Clam Beach. And after Ford gave up, more of her body was discovered in her store after she had already given up. Ford, who underwent a significant personality change after suffering a traumatic brain injury, was found guilty of killing the women, sentenced to death, and spent the past 25 years on death row. The court determined that he was responsible for his deaths.
A mystery has persisted all these years: who was the woman who was discovered in Ryan Slough? Even though the authorities possessed her DNA and often scanned it into databases, they were never able to find a match that would lead them to her true identity. But that all changed when California Department of Justice officials partnered with a private lab called Othram to see if they could build a family tree for Jan using the relatively new investigative technique of forensic genealogy. legal.
