The totality of events became obvious pretty quickly that this was suspicious.
This was totally out of character for her to disappear like this and not check in with family or friends.
As I recall, from pretty early on, they believed something had happened to her.
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation.
Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murders.
When a violent crime occurs, of course we want and need answers.
Whether you're the law enforcement being counted on to solve it or a family member that deserves the truth.
It's incredibly hard to be patient.
But in reality, many cases require some amount of time spent waiting for the answers, whether that be days weeks months, years.
Today's guest knows that firsthand.
Yeah, my name is Randy McFerrin.
I was with the Alaska State Troopers from 1986 until 2012, retired from active service then.
And in 2013 was hired with the cold case unit as kind of like a special commission officer.
And that's all I did was work cold cases.
These kinds of cases can take decades to solve, and sometimes those files never get closed.
With today's episode, answers weren't easy to come by.
It took years of investigative work, science, and hope to get them.
For this story, we're going to Alaska.
The year was 1996 and at the time there were about 8400 people living there, in a remote coastal town called Sitka.
It's on an island.
You know, you can only get there by boat or plane.
People make their living off of commercial fishing and tourism and stuff like that.
It's a beautiful place.
The climate's pretty wet.
You have to get used to a lot of rain in southeast Alaska, but like anything, you adapt to it.
It's a remote place.
Maybe because of that, it's a community known to be close-knit with people who have lived there for generations, like the Baggin family.
Vicki and George Baggin had four girls, one of them was 16-year-old Jessica.
Jessica's been described as a typical Sitka kid, meaning a kid who loves the outdoors, was independent and tough enough to brave those harsh winters with limited daylight, who could also fish with the best of them.
And like most Sitkins, Jessica and her family were entwined in the local community.
Her father ran a tugboat and barge business, a somewhat prominent family in the town.
Everything I've heard of.
Just you know, your average nice kid growing up in a little town in Alaska.
Jessica made the wild state her backyard.
She fished with her sisters, cooked with her mom, while Willie Nelson crooned in the background and loved photography so much she was thinking about studying it in college.
College wasn't that far off.
Jessica turned 17 on Friday, May 3rd, 1996, a milestone she celebrated at her sister's house.
That gathering didn't wind down until the early morning hours around 1.30 a.m.
That's when Jessica left to walk home.
At that time of year it's still relatively light out in Alaska and no one thought anything strange of a young woman walking home in a place like Sitka.
She was on a paved bike path that went around along one of the main streets in town, Sawmill Creek Road.
And then on the other side of the path was this patch of woods.
There weren't houses in a lot of buildings immediately there.
The area is kind of crisscrossed with trails through the woods.
And then right next to it was a small college, Sheldon Jackson College.
So people traversing the area had worn down footpaths through the woods.
So at a normal time of day those paths were trafficked by students and workers moving between housing near the college and work in town.
After one in the morning, of course, even with that spring twilight, it was deserted.
Still, the walk was short, about a mile.
And like Randy said, it should have only taken about 20 minutes or so.
But when her parents woke up the next morning, Jessica still wasn't home.
You know, initially, I believe they thought, well, maybe she just stayed with her sister.
So throughout the morning, they started calling friends and family and say, have you seen her?
This is before cell phones were real prevalent.
And it really shows just how much we take for granted this almost instantaneous being able to reach one another.
Because back then, people just didn't have access to that instant communication we have today.
We have really become tethered in a way to our loved ones because of the use of cell phones.
And not just because we're able to easily dial their number and hear their voice, but also technology gives us an opportunity with permission of course to track them.
We've become really used to it.
And there are arguments on both sides of whether it's good or it's bad.
And all that's to say it took time for Jessica's parents to rule out any possible explanations for their daughter's absence.
They're calling around on landlines, just tracking down friends, seeing if anybody had seen her.
But by that evening, they finally realized something's wrong.
So Jessica's parents reported her missing to the Sitka Police Department, who agreed that her disappearance was concerning and that early police involvement was the best course of action.
While Randy didn't work the case initially, he remembers these early days.
I was in Sitka in 96 working on another homicide.
So I was aware of the bagging investigation and what was going on.
But at the time I had no real involvement in it.
Know all the details about the initial report, but it did appear to be pretty suspicious by then.
Sika Police Department acted pretty quickly.
They alerted their on-duty officers.
They started looking around, contacting people that may have seen her, tracing her last contacts.
I think it was the next day that they actually started calling out the search teams and homing the area.
Police initiated a local search and rescue, focusing on the woods between the college campus and Sawmill Creek Road, where Jessica would have walked home.
Now, search and rescue is something that this area knows quite well.
They do a lot of search and rescues in the Sitka area just because of the remoteness of the area.
And people do a lot of boating, a lot of camping, a lot of hiking.
So it's a pretty common thing.
Now remember where we are for this story.
It's Alaska.
It is vast and full of untamed wilderness, with glaciers and gullies and thick, impenetrable mountain ranges.
It's a place where it's easy to get lost, either accidentally or sometimes intentionally.
On average, about 1 in 1,000 people go missing in Alaska each year.
Now that might not seem like a lot. but it's about double the national rate.
So this search party did know what they were doing, and they scoured the area looking for Jessica.
Two days later, they found their first clue.
That was a shirt she'd been last seen wearing.
There's actually a photograph of her at her birthday party wearing that shirt.
So they quickly identified that this was hers.
I think it was turned inside out. and kind of lying in a clump there in the woods near a trail.
It's a big development.
In a search area as vast as the landscape of Alaska, where the wooded areas may stretch for hundreds of miles.
This is huge.
Narrowing down your field, providing an opportunity to set up a tight grid search.
And let me just add, locating an item of clothing opens up the possibility of deploying a canine dog utilizing a base scent, that shirt, to track.
I think hearing that it was Jessica's T-shirt that they found right away gave me that pit in my stomach.
It makes more sense to me that that inside out means haste and likely by someone else.
For me, my mind right away went to those various scenarios, which were all criminal and all horrible.
Two hours later, searchers found something else.
The body was found within a few feet.
17-year-old Jessica Baggin was found just 70 feet from the bike path which would have been on her route home.
We do want to warn you that some of the following description is graphic and that there is a sexual assault component to this crime as well.
She was underneath a fallen tree trunk and partially covered in dirt.
As I recall, she was nude.
Her shoes and jacket and pants were found nearby.
She may had a sock on or something like that, but that was it.
The body was partially buried in earth and mud and vegetation.
So, As I recall, it wasn't readily apparent what the cause of death was, but it wasn't until the body was actually taken to Anchorage for an autopsy that they concluded she was suffocated.
There had been some kind of a struggle and she'd been held down and dirt and mud had gotten into her mouth and nose.
That's what blocked the airway and eventually caused her death.
During the autopsy, traces of semen were found on Jessica's body and, coupled with the fact that her clothing had been removed, it was determined that Jessica had been sexually assaulted.
The examination of her body also revealed some forensic clues that her killer had left behind.
I know there were some hairs found on the body and clothing.
They were inconsistent with hers.
It belonged to a different person.
It was determined to be reddish blonde hair.
Blood was collected from Jessica's clothing, which did not match her blood type, meaning it may well have been left by whoever had attacked her.
While investigators were gathering initial evidence, the town of Sitka was reeling.
It was very shocking.
Something really shocked the community to a core.
Just the sense that stuff like this doesn't happen in a place like Sitka.
Her family, of course, had to be completely stunned and gutted, and the town was there to support them.
About 1500 people showed up for a memorial march, led by Jessica's family, into the woods where their daughter died.
On a footbridge.
There, flowers were placed and 17 balloons were released into the air, one for each year of her life.
Later that month, a rehabilitated eagle was freed into the wild by Jessica's sisters to honor their sister's memory.
You know, Anna Seeger, redirecting some of that grief into a mission of remembrance is a powerful way to honor the people that you've lost.
When I was even reading those facts.
I can't explain it, but there is a happiness within this horrible thing because these are beautiful moments.
And I really do think there's something to those momentary escapes that are needed during these very dark times, especially for loved ones, but likely for this community at large as well.
But Sitka residents wanted more than catharsis.
They wanted answers.
This kind of violent crime is rare in Sitka.
Not only do Sitkins want Jessica's murderer held accountable, they're also terrified that there's a killer on the loose in their safe, quiet town.
The Sitka Police Department was all hands on deck.
They were doing everything they could to try and solve this case and putting forth their maximum effort towards it.
One of the first steps was to follow up on the clues they had.
The reddish blonde hair is discovered on Jessica's body.
Investigators looked through Department of Motor Vehicle records to see if any men had similar hair color, but they didn't find anyone who fit the bill.
Remember this is 1996, it's before national databases, and DNA testing is still developing as a useful tool for law enforcement.
And especially in a small town in Alaska.
They're mostly relying on traditional methods of investigation.
They're looking at everybody who knew her, may have had any contact with her that night.
That's normally where you start out.
Most times, homicide victims know who killed them and it's figure out what the relationship is.
Try to determine who would want to harm her and for what reason.
Their initial inquiries included a young man who Jessica had been seeing a sort of on-again, off-again relationship.
He was able to provide an alibi and was quickly eliminated.
They were definitely developing suspects and for one reason or another, the suspects were eliminated.
They were definitely working hard on the case.
And, as with many smaller jurisdictions, they sometimes looked to larger agencies for additional support.
That is how the Alaska State Troopers ultimately got involved.
Alaska has no counties, so there's no county sheriff's department or anything like that.
So outside of the municipalities and federal jurisdiction, we're the only agency in the state.
We've got an enormous area to cover.
We have to be jacks of all trades.
We also provide a lot of support for the smaller police departments for things like homicides.
They don't have the resources to do them themselves.
But then, about a week into the investigation, a man literally walked himself into the police station.
On May 15th, 1996, 34 year old Richard Bingham got in touch with investigators.
He came in, he started making statements to them.
He seemed to have some kind of knowledge of the case and they started focusing on him as a potential suspect.
Richard Bingham was a custodian at the local college and had a reputation as being a heavy drinker.
He'd been drinking on the night Jessica was killed.
When he came into the station he told police he was having flashbacks about that night which worried him.
As I recall, it was kind of subtle.
It was more of a, I have this vision or I have this dream that I was involved somehow.
And he started to give details that seemed to fit the surroundings of the incident and the circumstances.
Bingham said he'd seen Jessica days earlier wearing a black dress, a sighting that was confirmed.
And as far as his flashbacks went, he said he remembered being in a forested area similar to where her body had been found.
But there were details that just didn't add up as well.
He also said Jessica was wearing sweats that night.
She wasn't.
And that there was red clay where she was killed.
Again, there wasn't.
Were these inconsistencies due to his drinking and a fuzzy memory, or did they signal something more?
As I remember, they basically continue to question him and he makes more and more statements that seem to be consistent with him being involved with the sexual assault and the murder.
As the questioning went on, Bingham demonstrated how he believed he'd choked Jessica and how he hid her body.
He eventually confessed to her sexual assault and murder saying, and I quote Yes, I guess I did it, but I want tests to verify it.
Shortly after that, he was arrested and charged with Jessica's murder.
Richard Bingham spent the next 13 months in jail before his trial started in Juneau, Alaska.
Sitka is such a small place.
Everybody knew about the incident.
It was such a shocking, shocking incident.
I'm sure his attorney felt that he could not get a fair trial in Sitka, so they moved it to Juneau.
The trial lasted for two weeks, and the defense asserted that Bingham's confession was false.
They put experts on the stand who testified that Bingham was known to be highly suggestible.
The defense also claimed that Bingham was fed information and then redirected when he didn't give investigators the answers that they wanted.
Defense called some of Richard Bingham's friends who testified that they would play a game where they tell Richard he committed minor crimes during alcohol-induced blackouts.
As an example, they heard at a police report that some salmon had been stolen from a local fish processor and convinced Richard he had done it.
Richard brought a replacement fish to the business, only to be told by them that nothing had been stolen.
Another friend admitted that they had joked around with Richard, suggesting that he may have killed Jessica Baggin during one of his blackouts.
However, it also remained unclear if Richard was the one who had first suggested this or the friend.
Multiple people said Richard had an alibi for that night.
They were with him, fishing from midnight until sunrise.
But the thing that really broke down the case against Richard Bingham was forensic evidence.
Red hairs from the crime scene did not match his DNA.
I wasn't involved in that aspect of the case.
All I remember is that he was eventually acquitted.
The jury deliberated for around two hours before finding Richard Bingham not guilty.
Once the trial was over, he relocated to Washington State.
Jessica's family, they think that finally at least the criminal justice piece is going to be over.
And boom, it's not.
And this case is now wide open once again.
Yeah, the results are that Richard Bingham is released and Jessica's case remained unsolved.
They determined, well, if it's not Bingham, then who is it?
And they kept looking.
It was kind of jointly with the Sitka Police Department and the Alaska State Troopers.
A lot of it had to do with just contacting individuals that were in Sitka at the time male individuals and getting DNA samples from them to compare to the suspect sample.
Approximately 100 suspects were looked at and cleared in the years that followed, which was progress, but it wasn't providing investigators with the big break that they needed.
Luckily, in the early 2000s, there were huge leaps forward in forensic technology.
DNA evidence was changing real rapidly and new procedures were coming in.
They required less and less DNA and were more and more accurate.
So they're switching from the initial processes to more advanced processes.
And eventually that led to the creation of CODIS.
CODIS is the acronym for Combined DNA Index System.
Its development provided a local, state and national aggregate place to upload DNA from convicted offenders and crime scenes so that jurisdictions across the country could compare their samples to a broader swath of people and evidence.
This was big for law enforcement because, even though DNA had been used in forensics prior to CODIS, you had to actually have a physical person to compare your DNA sample to, which wasn't always helpful in cases that hadn't been able to yet pinpoint the suspect.
So now, once you had a suspect sample, you could compare it against the known samples in the database.
And if someone else was a prior offender, then you could get a match that way.
To have the ability to take a DNA sample and run it through a database and have it spit out a name, potentially somebody who was never on your radar, someone who may have just been passing through town and randomly committed a crime, is something which is a complete game changer.
And it's so interesting.
You think about here that this was this huge breakthrough.
And by the time that I was prosecuting homicides, this is something we relied on.
I mean countless cases came through with CODIS matches, sometimes right away and sometimes years later.
I saw firsthand the game changing technology that this proved to be.
Back at Sitka, this meant Jessica's case wasn't ready to be shelved.
Remember, they collected tangible DNA evidence from her crime scene.
And with the rapid advancements in forensic tech, it was only a matter of time before it led investigators to her killer.
In 2007, someone else realized this too, an Alaska state trooper by the name of Dave Tugman.
Dave had transferred from the Secret Police Department into the State Troopers, promoted and then just eventually got involved in our Criminal Investigations Unit.
He was very familiar with the case and new DNA procedures were coming along through this time.
Somewhere around 2007 or so was when mitochondrial DNA analysis was coming online.
Now, we don't want to get too deep into science here, but what you need to know is that mitochondrial DNA is, of course, a type of DNA that everyone has.
What makes it unique is that it's matriarchal, meaning it's inherited from your mother.
And because of this it can be useful in identifying relatives.
The FBI was building a database for mitochondrial DNA to both identify human remains as well as suspects in criminal cases.
The Baggins case is one of the first cases that they tried mitochondrial DNA analysis with here in Alaska.
Dave spearheaded that, but unfortunately it didn't generate any new leads.
That's because if there was no one in the database that shares a maternal ancestor with the person who killed Jessica, there isn't going to be a match.
But even so, Dave's efforts were only the beginning.
And that's where Randy finally comes in.
Randy had retired from the Alaska State Troopers in 2012.
But only a year later, he found himself back in the force in the cold case unit.
Initially, 2013, we had four investigators, two stationed here in Anchorage.
One was in Soldot and one was in Fairbanks.
2015, the unit was disbanded for budgetary reasons.
In 17, I came back and I was the sole investigator in the unit.
And as the sole investigator, Randy was tasked with solving Alaska's cold cases.
By this point, he was already well-versed in DNA and knew how quickly it was evolving.
So in 2018, when he read about a solved double homicide in Washington state, his ears perked up.
They'd broken the case using a process called genetic genealogy, which is essentially tracking down a suspect's relatives in the genetic databases like GEDmatch and family tree DNA and so forth.
And then piecing together a family tree from all these different profiles to try to figure out who the suspect is.
This process uses a different type of DNA than the CODIS database does.
And I hope we're not going too far down the scientific rabbit hole here.
But you hear these terms all the time.
But some of you might not know exactly what all this means.
And it really is super interesting.
So we're going to give you a bit more background on it today.
What's used in CODIS is like a genetic fingerprint of you.
It's your DNA data and only you.
Whereas genetic genealogy uses a profile called a SNP, an S-N-P, and it contains the DNA that you share with your relatives.
It's amazing stuff.
I mean, I'm not a DNA scientist at all, but it's fascinating how they were able to come up with this.
A SNP profile...
I think it stands for single nucleotide polymorphism.
It's like the blueprint of you.
It's all the genetic information you share with your parents, your grandparents, your siblings, cousins and so forth, and so on on, generation after generation.
Seeing that the case had been solved using SNP and genetic genealogy was an energizing moment for Randy.
This could be a real game changer for us.
Let's see if we've got any cases that have DNA left that we could have analyzed and see if it generates any leads.
They focused on a case from 1993 where a University of Alaska student was murdered in her dorm room.
Through DNA analysis and genetic genealogy, the cold case team was able to finally identify her killer.
The Sophie Sergi homicide from 1993 was kind of our test case to see how the process worked.
Once we determined that the process worked, we started applying it to other cases that we had DNA to work with.
Now, remember, he was looking for cases that had enough DNA to create a SNP sample.
Getting usable DNA from cold cases can be tricky.
Sometimes crimes predate DNA advancements, so the investigators at the time didn't know how to store forensics properly to prevent degradation.
DNA is also used up each time you run a test on it.
So Randy needed to find a cold case with enough DNA to create a SNP sample.
That's when he picked up Jessica's file.
We looked at this case and others to see how much DNA we had to work with and if it was a sufficient amount to generate a SNP profile.
And we concluded that there was enough DNA there.
So we submitted it to an outside laboratory.
They were able to use the blood found on Jessica's shirt to create the SNP profile.
Then Randy and his team uploaded it to a genetic genealogy website.
You've probably heard of these websites, maybe the most well-known are 23 and Me or Ancestry.com.
If you haven't.
They're companies that allow people to upload their genetic profiles to connect with distant family members, locate relatives or learn more about their heritage.
While genealogy is a hobby for some, investigators have turned to these sites as a tool in testing crime scene DNA against a larger swath of the population.
We should note that use of these websites to investigate crimes isn't without controversy.
Regulations on how easily law enforcement can access these databases are still developing and some users worry about privacy protections as a result.
But regardless of where you fall in this debate, it is an incredibly effective tool in locating criminals and solving crimes.
Still, it's not as easy as uploading your sample and getting a name.
We were able to identify a large number of relatives of the suspect, but unfortunately they weren't real close.
Many generations removed.
Essentially, if Randy was to hit on a first cousin, narrowing down their suspect pool would be considerably easier because those relatives are close enough to have a shared grandparent.
The further away the relation, the more family branches investigators have to go through.
And the way the process works, if you can identify multiple individuals that share large amounts of the same DNA and then use standard genealogy research methods to build family trees and family connections and so forth.
Those standard research methods Randy's talking about can include birth and death records, marriage licenses, social media census reports and so on.
Then you start physically building a family tree so you can find common shared ancestors.
You start filling in the blanks and figure out who potentially your suspect is.
And you can sometimes identify a specific individual or at least whittle it down to a small group of individuals.
As all of you will likely remember, this process was famously done to identify the Golden State Killer, Joseph DeAngelo, who had murdered and assaulted dozens of people across California.
But each case has its own challenges, and finding the identity of their suspect was hampered by the unique location of the killer's origins.
Based upon all this other genealogy analysis, his family had come from western Tennessee.
There'd been a lot of pedigree collapse.
People had unknowingly married their relatives, like their third cousin or something, just because it was a very rural area, the gene pools were relatively small, and that further complicated the process, because all these individuals are sharing the same amount of DNA, so there would be a disproportionately high amount of DNA.
And with these sites, unless investigators have a search warrant, they're at the mercy of what's uploaded to the site publicly.
So while they're chipping away at that family tree, they're also hoping that the right person gives them access to the right set of data.
It involved a lot of work and a lot of waiting, too.
It was several months of analysis.
We had submitted the DNA sample for processing in.
I believe it was 2018 and we got results back in like mid-2019 from the lab.
It was months and months worth of DNA analysis.
Finally, their patience paid off.
After months of painstaking family tree building, a genealogy website provided a major break in the Jessica Baggin case.
It was just a matter of time.
The more people that put their DNA into these genetic genealogy databases and the more people allow these profiles to be accessed by law enforcement, which is an option you can choose when you do this, the greater the chance we'll figure this out.
And that's eventually what happened.
An individual elected to make their profile public and it immediately gave us a connection that we didn't have before, and we were able to connect this individual to other family members and build a very large family tree that went back to an ancestral couple that we then, from there, were able to work our way down.
And then, all of a sudden, we started finding people with connections in this family tree to Sitka.
This meant that Randy now had a suspect pool.
The next step was to eliminate people from that pool based on what they knew about the perpetrator, which was pretty simple.
We knew the person was male, so obviously we were able to eliminate his sisters as suspects.
And as I recall, he was the only son in his family.
This gave them a name, Steve Branch, who by this time was 66 years old.
Then from there, we just did some legwork and determined yes, this individual was living in Sitka at the time.
I think he was an auto mechanic or a truck mechanic, something along those lines.
He'd lived in Sitka for over 20 years.
Not only that, but he'd lived at several different addresses along the Sawmill Creek Road, the very same road where Jessica was killed.
When investigators dug into Branch's background further, they found something that I refer to as big red flags all over.
He was a suspect in another sexual assault that occurred prior to Jessica's.
I think it was March of 96 that it occurred.
Victim was another young woman.
I believe she was an acquaintance or a friend of Branch's son.
She worked at a local Sitka grocery store and was encouraged by a co-worker to report Branch after disclosing that she had been assaulted.
Sitka police attempted to get a confession by having her record a conversation with Branch, but he didn't admit to anything.
Even so, that June, he was arrested and charged.
Eventually, the case went to trial, but he ended up being acquitted.
He claimed that the woman consented to having sex with him.
He claimed it was consensual.
Obviously the woman claimed it was not, but it essentially boiled down to a he said, she said kind of situation.
And apparently just they did not have enough to convince the jury that it was not a consensual act.
After the incident, Branch ended up living in Sitka for another 15 years or so before moving to a small town in Arkansas northeast of Little Rock.
It's not clear if he had ever previously been looked at as a suspect in Jessica's murder.
Steve Branch had reddish blonde hair, and they also had a sample of his blood from his arrest.
Now we don't want to play the what-if game here, but it's too hard not to wonder what would have happened if they tested his DNA against the evidence from Jessica's crime scene.
Remember, it was only about a week after Jessica was killed that you had Richard Bingham walking into the precinct and soon after that making a confession and was now on trial for the murder.
So it's also very possible that police aren't looking for anyone else because at least at that time they believe that they had their killer.
Yeah, it's easy to look at it in hindsight now.
It's also obvious that investigators had real tunnel vision by somebody walking in and confessing to the crime.
Still, it is notable that two such similar attacks occurred so close together in a town that had such a low violent crime rate.
This was just very interesting.
Wow.
The number of similarities to both victims, given their age, it was just very striking.
But the main evidence was the DNA evidence.
On that front, Randy and his team still had work to do, because they couldn't solely rely on the genetic genealogy results.
In order to prove Branch was indeed the perpetrator, they needed DNA directly from him to confirm it.
They asked the Arkansas State Police for assistance in getting a discarded sample.
This is anything that the suspect has thrown away that may have his DNA on it, like a coffee cup tissue.
I think you get the picture.
And it's a pretty common theme that has been seen in television and movies for years.
You know, there's a coffee cup on a table and investigators take it and boom, they get their DNA evidence.
It really is very prevalent in practice.
And yes, it's legal.
The example that is used so often in law school is that you know someone takes their garbage and puts it on the curb.
Well, you no longer have legally a right to privacy in that.
So that is why investigators can use those samples.
However, I will point out that that is not something we can use in court.
And even if we get a match, we now have to get an actual known sample with the person right in front of us later.
Recently in the Long Island serial killer case, they collected his DNA from discarded pizza in a box.
I mean it is a controversial tool, but I always say to people listen.
It's confirming a whole lot of information that you're adding to another piece of puzzle in your investigation.
But in this case, Arkansas police weren't able to get a sample from Branch at all.
So Alaska investigators now looked at available options a little closer to home.
The Sitka Police Department was able to get a discarded DNA sample from a sister that still lived in Sitka.
Sitka PD went through her garbage, found some stuff that she had left DNA samples on, and we were able to collect a sample that way.
Then through kinship DNA analysis, they determined, yes, your suspect is a brother to this woman.
It was a huge moment for a case that had been gestating for so many years.
It was just elation.
You know, it's great news.
I just wanted so much to share this with people like Dave Tugman and others who had investigated it and been involved in it before.
But initially, of course, we had to keep things pretty quiet.
Because even with a lead from Branch's sister, Randy knew he had to get further confirmation.
He still needed DNA directly from Steve Branch.
This was in, I think, the spring of 2020, when we finally got the news that this is probably our guy.
Or maybe it was the early summer.
So, you know, once we had this information, we're like, this is great.
Go down there, contact him, see what he has to say and then get a DNA sample from him that we can do a direct comparison and hopefully prove that he's the guy.
And of course, this was smack dab in the middle of COVID.
So traveling was problematic.
But two other trooper investigators who were very familiar with the case went down to Arkansas.
On August 3rd, 2020, investigators approached Branch at his home.
They told him, the state of Alaska has uncovered information that indicates you were in Sitka at the time this occurred.
What do you remember?
And he told them, yeah, I was there.
I remember it.
But I had nothing to do with it.
I mean, they didn't accuse him of being a suspect or anything at that time.
They just said would you be willing to give us a DNA sample to eliminate you as a potential suspect?
He refused, so they left to go obtain a search warrant to get one for him.
Meanwhile, Randy was back in Alaska waiting for news, and he did finally get that call.
What he heard was completely shocking.
I was back in Alaska still and the investigator down there at the time called me and told me that Branch was dead.
About a half hour after investigators left his home, Steve Branch shot himself.
His wife came home and found her husband dead in his truck.
I was just amazed.
Initially, I thought he was joking me.
We had no information that he had been suicidal prior, that he was depressed or anything like that.
His family did not indicate to us that there had been any problems or any concerns prior to this.
They were as surprised as we were by his actions.
For an investigation that moved so slowly for so long.
You know Scott, this development feels, I don't know, just very abrupt.
The other thing is that with Branch's death, so too goes the hope of getting him to explain what happened that night.
It would have been better if he would have confessed and provided some details about what actually happened and why.
And if we would have gotten a trial, it would have been a better ending to it.
It was pretty disheartening that we couldn't go the full distance and take it to trial and get a conviction.
But just as Jessica's body held clues that pointed towards her killer, Steve Branch's held one last answer.
A few weeks later, investigators were able to obtain a search warrant that allowed them to retrieve Branch's DNA during his autopsy.
They were able to get a DNA sample from the body and it was brought back to Alaska and compared to the suspect samples and we got a positive match.
More than 20 years after Jessica's death, DNA analysis matched Steve Branch to the blood found on Jessica's shirt.
Now, because of his death, this was never proven in court.
But police did feel confident that he was Jessica's killer, so much so that they officially closed the case.
It was great news.
We can definitely let Jessica's family know that we believe this is the guy and the case is finally closed.
They can finally put this behind them and not continue to wonder about it anymore.
They were incredibly relieved and very grateful that she hadn't been forgotten and that we hadn't given up on her, even though Branch would never be brought into a courtroom.
I would think it was cathartic in some way to at least finally have an answer that had just been this, what I can only describe as maybe an open wound for so long.
When you think about collateral damage in this case, you also have to think about Richard Bingham.
False confessions do happen for all sorts of reasons, from inadequate or aggressive interviews to people confessing to crimes they didn't commit due to mental health reasons.
The system does have failsafe measures in place, but the system is far from perfect.
And at Asiga, we talk about this a lot.
So you had in this case answers long denied, a man falsely accused.
What fortunately worked with Jessica's is not always the outcome of cold cases.
Some of them stagnate forever.
Cases go cold just because they tried their best but couldn't put it together.
Or in this case, the initial defendant was acquitted.
And then you have to move on to the next case.
And you only have so much time to devote to things.
And months turn into years.
People retire.
People transfer.
Things just slowly start to get neglected and forgotten about.
But just as we've learned with Jessica, solving these kinds of cases is certainly possible.
It just requires a special set of circumstances.
At least with the state troopers here in Alaska and a lot of departments in other places in the country.
They realize that you need to have a very specialized unit and you need to focus on these type of cases.
You know, you can solve them if you have the time and effort and the tools to do it.
I was very grateful to be working at a time when this new technology came along, to make this happen and take advantage of it.
Obviously, it was a game changer.
I mean, Branch was never on anybody's radar, had never been developed as a potential suspect.
I'm sure he would have never been found had it not been for the DNA analysis.
And this is why it is so important that cold cases have champions that can push them through the stagnant years, to ensure that no victim is ever forgotten.
Because at the end of the day, these cases are all about people.
And this one about Jessica.
When her dog Sam went missing, Jessica spent hours combing the wilderness to find him.
Remember, she's been navigating the wilderness all her life.
And while they were setting up camp to work through the night, Sam simply appeared, almost as if he knew where she was.
On that night, the wilderness reunited two best friends.
The tragic murder of Jessica Bagan is a somber reminder of the vulnerability that exists in even the most close-knit communities.
Her untimely death shocked and saddened many, underscoring the need for vigilance, community solidarity and, even though some may feel this case is the true example of justice denied, we are reminded to cherish the moments we have with loved ones, to never take our safety for granted and to continue to advocate for justice.
That's why we're here.
A bright spitfire of a teenage girl with so much life ahead of her, killed by what seemed to be just a violent crime of opportunity.
The answer that we had to have patience for?
Well, that answer was all for her.
And hopefully that answer also gave her family at least a small bit of peace.
So, what do you think, Chuck?
Do you approve?
No!
No!
