Episode #77: 1 in 66 Quintillion: The State vs Skaggs

August 1990. A young mother working the late shift at the Western Sizzlin in Flowood stops at a Brandon Texaco for cinnamon rolls for her kids' breakfast. She's inside for only a few minutes. Half a mile from home, a man rises from the back of her van with a knife to her throat. Thirty days later, a nurse leaving a Memphis hospital lives through the same nightmare. The attacker made both women the same threat, and then he disappeared for more than three decades.

The case went cold, then colder. A false confession from a Missouri inmate went nowhere. Early DNA testing produced a profile but no name, and the evidence sat in a vault for years. But one Brandon officer never let it go, and a Rankin County prosecutor who had read everything he could find about the Golden State Killer had an idea. Forensic genetic genealogy, a trash pull in Oklahoma, a discarded CPAP mask, and a match of 1 in 660 quintillion led investigators to Daniel Ray Skaggs, a truck driver whose crimes spanned the 1970s through the 1990s and multiple states across the Southeast.

Tonight on Investigation: Homicide, Therese Apel and Sara Perkins Ricks sit down with that prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Ryan Berry. A career prosecutor with nearly 20 years in the Twentieth Circuit Court District, Berry won the Mississippi Prosecutors Association's Trial of the Year Award for State v. Skaggs. He has since presented the case at the International Symposium on Human Identification in Denver and at Bode's annual conference in Atlanta, and it was featured on Bloodline Detectives with Nancy Grace. We'll talk about how the science finally caught up, what it took to tell a victim face to face after 33 years that her attacker had a name, and why prosecutors believe the women in Brandon and Memphis may not have been Skaggs's only victims.

Produced by Daniel Anderson at Audio Alchemy Productions.