Original subtitles

Violet: When you make a promise to the old people,

you don´t break that promise.

You have to live that promise.

"Find her, bring her home."

Those were my grandmother´s instructions.

Many have been lost.

Many have been murdered.

It´s still happening.

[ Camera shutter clicking ]

Steve: She´d been stabbed more than 28 times.

She had no I.D. with her,

no indication of who she was, where she came from.

They´re someone´s sister, possibly someone´s wife.

And there´s got to be people out there that knew them.

Ratliff: There really wasn´t anyone

that called to inquire about her.

The case grew cold.

[ Camera shutter clicks ]

You cannot dispute DNA evidence. You just can´t.

Soosay: I´ve been looking for 40 years.

You don´t give up. You can´t stop.

We couldn´t imagine, you know, "What happened?"

Where´d you go?

♫♫

♫♫

♫♫

♫♫

My name is Steve Rhods.

I´m a detective for the Ventura County

District Attorney´s Office,

and I´m assigned to the Cold Case Unit.

When I open a cold case, I go straight to the evidence.

What kind of evidence do we have?

So it was July the 15th, 1980.

The Kern County Sheriff´s Office was summoned

to an almond orchard off the Highway 99,

just outside of the town of Delano.

♫♫

There they encountered a female, fully clothed,

lying in the orchard.

She had no I.D. with her,

no indication of who she was, where she came from.

Lying near her on the ground was a beer bottle

and a pack of cigarettes, some tire tracks.

And that was the extent of the evidence

other than what was confined to her body.

Later, they did an autopsy on this woman

who we refer to as Jane Doe Kern County.

They found that she´d been stabbed more than 28 times.

Her blood alcohol was 0.3.

So she was quite intoxicated at the time of the assault.

And the medical examiner felt that this was a forced assault.

Her sneakers were pristine, white.

There was no blood on the top of her sneakers.

She had been stabbed lying down and she never stood up.

Blood never drained onto her feet,

so the presumption was that she was killed elsewhere,

brought to that orchard and left in the orchard.

[ Bird squawks ]

I´m Dawn Ratliff, and I am the coroner division chief

for the Kern County Sheriff Coroner´s Office.

Her cause of death was multiple stab wounds.

There were also evidence of defensive wounds.

Once cause and manner of death is established,

one of the very first priorities

is for us to complete an identification

and then to find family members and notify them about the death.

We fingerprinted and there were no prints on file.

That´s where her case got more difficult.

Steve: Evidence was collected from Jane Doe Kern,

and they preserved it and kept all that stuff in a freezer.

Ratliff: My first thought is,

"She is somebody that someone should miss,"

but there really wasn´t anyone that called to inquire

about her, so she remained

Jane Doe, Kern County, number five.

♫♫

♫♫

Violet: Family is very important in our community

and in the indigenous community.

Looking out for each other and checking in on each other.

I´ll make bannock and check on the brothers.

So family has always been important to us.

My name is Violet Soosay. That´s my English name.

My Cree name is [speaks native language]

And I´ve been looking for my aunt

since I was in my early 20s.

Shirley was very light-hearted,

very gentle,

I used to have real curly hair.

And I would run when somebody had a comb or a brush.

Not Shirley.

Shirley was one I would trust.

And she was always combing my hair.

She always made me feel very special.

I would cross the field just to go see her every day

because I was so connected with her.

Yeah. I really loved her.

Really, really loved her.

[ Birds chirping ]

In the early ´70s,

because a lot of us were in poverty,

more people were venturing off the reserve,

moving to urban centers.

Shirley had this vision of helping her mom

financially by working off reserve.

That was her thinking.

I think she liked living away from the reserve

because she was like a free spirit.

So she just lived her life in Vancouver.

However, Shirley was really meticulous.

She would send Christmas cards, birthday cards,

letters constantly to her mom.

And I´m pretty sure it was December of ´79

that my grandmother didn´t receive a Christmas card.

March of 1980, she didn´t receive her birthday card.

And that´s when she said,

"Something´s going on. Something´s wrong."

We couldn´t imagine, you know, "What happened?

Where´d you go?"

And it was about a year later, in 1981,

when my grandmother told my Auntie Belle and myself

to look for her

and promise her to bring her home.

"Find her, bring her home."

♫♫

♫♫

[ Waves crashing ]

♫♫

Steve: I became a policeman back in my youth

with the sheriff´s office here in Ventura County,

became a detective, first in Property Crimes,

and then later I moved into Homicide.

And when I retired in 2012,

I was invited to come back to the Cold Case unit.

I enjoy a good problem. I enjoy solving the problem.

I specifically enjoy looking out for our victims.

They´ve been wronged.

Someone needs to speak for them, and that´s what I choose to do.

Jane Doe Kerns -- one of a number of investigations

that I´m working on.

On July 18, 1980, at about 12:35 in the afternoon,

Ventura County Sheriff´s Patrol deputies were dispatched

to a report of a dead body

in the parking lot of Westlake High School.

She had no purse, no I.D., no jewelry.

Obvious stab wounds were visible on her chest

and on her arms.

At the time, at 1980, there was no DNA.

Pretty much all the investigators could do

was interview the people

that were attending the football game nearby

and take photographs.

Later in the day, they conducted an autopsy.

They had documented 23 physical injuries to her body,

13 of which were stab wounds.

She was three months´ pregnant.

There was evidence of forced sexual assault.

Attempts were made at the time to identify

Jane Doe Ventura through fingerprints with no results.

Missing-person reports were scanned

through several states and no results.

And that murder had occurred three days

after Jane Doe Kern County was found.

♫♫

♫♫

Violet: To not know what had happened with Shirley

was really difficult.

In 1981, when I went to look for help from police enforcement,

we were just told, "Oh, probably just another dead Indian."

Just another dead Indian.

That´s what I was told.

We were looked at as if we were nothing, you know?

That´s when I learned early on in our search

that they were not going to help us.

I knew I had to keep searching for Shirley.

I made a promise to my grandmother

that I would find her and bring her home.

Periodically over the years, my aunt Belle and I,

as long as we had gas, we had food,

and we had money for lodging, we´d set off.

The trip to Vancouver would take us 12 hours.

We never stopped overnight

because the less time you spend in a motel,

the more time you´ll be looking, right?

First time, you know, there was that excitement of,

"Oh, we´ll find her. You know, we can do this."

And after the first trip, you know,

you start realizing like, "Oh, my goodness."

You go into the city and you see all these buildings

and all these people.

It was overwhelming. It was like,

"Oh, my God, where are we going to look?"

Who are we going to talk to?"

It is a huge city.

And how in the heck are you gonna look into

every nook and cranny?

In Vancouver, there´s a lot of alleys.

It was scary,

just the enormity of what we were trying to do.

But, you know, we became more street-pounding after a while.

And we´d always be looking

for indigenous people on the streets.

If it was safe enough to get out, we´d get out.

Once in a while, there´d be Cree.

So we´d be speaking our language to them

and asking them if they seen Shirley or knew of her.

It was really heartbreaking to turn around

and come back empty-handed.

No new information to share with my grandmother.

I think that´s the one that really gets to me.

She was the matriarch.

You know, you don´t go against the words and the expectations

of your matriarch.

And to tell her that we didn´t find her,

next time, you know...

you´d known she was disappointed many times.

[ Sniffling ]

♫♫

Then...she would just shut her lights off and sit in the dark.

And I know that she was crying.

♫♫

♫♫

Steve: In 1980, evidence collection

was limited to tire impressions, fingerprints.

Take a picture, write a report,

go out and talk to somebody.

Bring your handy-dandy little notebook with you.

DNA hadn´t been invented yet. There was no DNA.

Today we have DNA.

It´s the magic bullet

for identifying everything and everybody.

You know, we´re sitting here right now.

We´re dropping DNA all over the room.

You leave, I can come in here and vacuum all this up now

and identify you.

For me, when I review a cold case,

if there´s anything that is remotely DNA,

I´m gonna take the case.

You cannot dispute DNA evidence. You just can´t.

♫♫

[ Dog barking ]

Violet: I started searching for Shirley online

in the early 2000s.

The idea of looking for somebody online

was new for me at that time.

In the beginning, it was more or less just obituaries.

Just kind of scaling it down to Soosay...

and years.

No, there was nothing that I could ever find there.

Unless you have access to police-enforcement websites,

you have no way of trying to get any case files.

I don´t have that clearance.

So that one shut down pretty quick.

Growing up, my mom always shared stories.

Always, always, always shared stories with us kids

about Shirley.

It´s been, like, a whole range of emotions for my mom.

Violet: When it comes to indigenous people,

they´re almost, like, shoved over to the side.

You start looking for missing persons, you know.

Most of them were non-indigenous.

"What can I do different?

Where do I go from here?"

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in California

is a big backer of the DNA databank idea.

How will it work?

Walsh: Proposition 69 in California

takes mandatory collection

of every convicted felon´s DNA.

There´s over a million DNA kits

in the California database.

And in January of next year,

they´re gonna take the DNA

of everybody arrested for a felony.

They solve four to five unsolved cases a day

in California because of Governor Schwarzenegger´s bill.

Passed Proposition 69, giving law enforcement

the state-of-the-art tools for crack down on criminals.

This is the card that says that

you´re giving us your blood and saliva.

Reporter: Under California law,

all felons convicted of violent crimes,

sexual crimes, burglaries, carjackings

and arsons must provide DNA samples.

Steve: We had submitted Jane Doe Ventura´s hats, panties,

fingernails for DNA profiling.

And then we uploaded that profile into a national database

that we call CODIS.

In 2012, a hit comes back to Wilson Chouest.

♫♫

We´re also informed that he´s a match to Kern County.

So we started working both cases at the same time.

Reporter: Back in 1980, they had the DNA,

but it wasn´t until recently that scientists could link it

to the man they think is responsible

for dead bodies popping up in Southern California.

This is Mr. Wilson Chouest, a U.S. Army veteran

discharged with heroin problems.

Steve: Wilson Chouest is a convicted rapist.

While he´s in prison,

he´s required to provide a DNA sample,

which is uploaded into the DNA database.

That database hits on the Jane Doe Kern County

and the Jane Doe Ventura case.

Wilson Chouest is our guy. No doubt about it.

We just have to interview Wilson Chouest

and find out what his story is.

We have a bunch of photographs

that we have downloaded from the Internet,

photos of random people, and we´re going, "Okay,

this rape happened at a post office

along the 101 freeway."

And Wilson immediately says, "I was in custody at that time."

"Okay, then you didn´t do that one.

Well, this one happened when you were in custody, too.

You didn´t do that one."

We´re building a rapport with Chouest.

Then we show him the picture of Jane Doe Ventura County.

This one happened near a parking lot called Westlake High School

along the 101.

Wilson won´t even look at her picture.

He says to us, "I don´t even know where the 101 freeway is."

Wilson Chouest´s lived his entire adult life

in the San Fernando Valley.

You cannot go from one end of the San Fernando Valley

to the other end without driving on the 101 freeway.

You just can´t. So that´s a lie.

I need to get the truth.

Better, I need to get a lie.

I can prove the truth, but I can really prove the lie.

We have the DNA. We know who he is.

We needed Wilson to tell us who they were,

where he got them, and he refused to acknowledge

he had anything to do with that.

Two or three days later, I went down to the jail

and arrested him for the murders.

Reporter: Mr. Chouest was arrested

for murder this morning.

Sheriff: The mainstay is to try to identify who these women are

because they´re someone´s sister,

possibly someone´s wife.

There´s got to be people out there that knew them.

And we want to bring closure to that family

and so that they understand

what happened to their mom or their sister

or their daughter when she didn´t come home that day.

[ Dog barking ]

Hi, Mom.

Mm-hmm. I´m just looking at these pictures

because these are the main ones that we have

of Auntie Shirley.

I think this one is my favorite.

Yeah, I think that´s everyone´s favorite.

And it was during release

from residential school for summer,

and the girls all took picture.

This is Auntie Shirley, my sister Lillian,

my sister Pat.

And then, of course, there´s my dad.

These are all residential-school boys.

Yeah.

Violet: The residential school

was to take the Indian out of the child,

and it started in the late 1800s right up to 1996.

So that´s, like, a whole century

of removing children from the traditional homes.

And so there was a great disconnect.

And you can see the hats that they wore.

Yeah, that´s pretty neat.

I don´t even know what they call them,

but I remember

that they used to wear those a lot.

The residential school was a breeding ground

for sexual abuse, for psychological abuse,

physical abuse.

So those are the realities that we had to face.

A lot of them have turned to alcoholism,

have turned to drugs.

So those residential schools -- yes, they educated us,

but they did more damage than good for the majority.

You know, my mom died two years ago.

She never, ever hugged or kissed us

because she was in residential school.

It wasn´t until she shared that my heart opened up

and understood why she did the things that she did.

I was in residential school, but I was fortunate

that my father sent me to my grandparents

to have, like, a cultural immersion for two years

to come back to know who I was.

I still have to deal with...memories, you know.

A lot of PTSD from residential school.

So in raising my children, I talk about the history.

I talk about what transpired.

But you only have to speak the truth.

There´s been a lot of intergenerational traumas

that have been passed down.

Like, every day we are learning about our own history

and our bloodlines and what our family

and our ancestors have gone through.

And you carry that... forever.

And until you become a parent

and until you become, you know, aware

of how those things have impacted you,

you know, is when you have the power to change that.

And for me, still to this day,

I struggle with my own parenting.

But I know I´m --

I´m a really good parent for my own children.

Mm-hmm.

Man: Hi, there.

Hi, Lily.

-Hi. -Hi. You okay?

Yeah.

Do you want a snack to take upstairs?

Yeah. Okay.

Justice: Something I´ve always been really grateful for

is my mom, because I understand and I know

that life could have been so different for us,

for me, for my own kids.

♫♫

[ Bird squawks ]

♫♫

Steve: After we had arrested Wilson Chouest

for the murders of the Does, I felt,

"Yeah, this case is ready to be filed.

We need to take this to the D.A."

and that´s when I met D.A. John Barrick.

John: So I was sitting in my office one day,

and my boss came to me and said, "Hey, there´s this case.

The investigators really want someone to take a look at it.

Would you mind coming to a meeting

and listening to their pitch?"

They start off with kind of talking about the facts

of the case, the, you know, the crime scene itself.

There wasn´t a lot of evidence at the crime scene.

There were no eyewitnesses at all.

But then very early on in the presentation,

he started talking about the DNA,

that they were able to find semen stains on the underpants

from the victim in Ventura County, get a ratio,

and got a hit to Wilson Chouest.

And I just sort of put my pen down and stopped taking notes.

And for me, I was like, "Well, there it is."

I noticed that John had stopped taking notes.

For me, that was kind of troubling.

I was like, "Oh, I´ve lost him."

When you do jury trials, and I´ve done quite a few,

there´s -- there´s two types of evidence that jurors

just love -- surveillance video and DNA.

And for me, if you have either one, you take a shot.

I don´t want to play poker against John Barrick.

And when we got all done, he stood up and said,

"Sounds good to me. Bring it down to my office.

I´ll file it."

I was kind of blown away.

It was during that meeting that they mentioned

that there was another Jane Doe from Kern County

three days earlier, same situation --

again, rape, murdered, unidentified.

I said, "Well, what are the odds

you have these two unidentified victims

in two separate counties and their rape-murders occur

three days apart by a suspect who´s -- who´s a known

serial rapist serving time in prison for serial rape?"

That just seems like a no-brainer to me.

I´m gonna take the shot with that.

That´s how we ultimately decided to file both cases

in Ventura County.

The trial itself took about a month.

The evidence, for the most part, went as planned.

Not only did we have the semen, but you had separate DNA,

one from a beer bottle in Kern County

and the fingernails from the victim in Ventura County.

When you´re doing a jury trial, you´re trying to convince

12 strangers beyond a reasonable doubt

that what you think the evidence shows is true.

And that can be very difficult,

just trying to get 12 people to agree on anything.

So it´s a very stressful time when you´re a prosecutor.

Ventura County decided to prosecute both cases,

doubling their workload,

but giving both victims a shot at justice.

Nearly 40 years after the murders,

the victims got just that.

Reporter: And with that, Wilson Chouest

was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Steve: I would have really been shocked

if that jury had come back not guilty on anything,

but it was like, "Well, thank you. You know, I did my job.

You did your job. We´re all happy.

Wilson is where he belongs -- in prison."

John: It´s sort of foreign to prosecutors to do a murder trial

where there is no family for the victim in the courtroom.

And I guess the feeling is like,

"If we don´t have that familial support,

that maybe the jury won´t care about the case."

But I actually found that to be quite the opposite.

Like, it made them care even more.

Because the identity of the victims was unknown,

they became their advocates.

It kept sinking in deeper and deeper to me

that I have to be their family.

We have to be their family.

We have to be their voice and see this to the end.

Doing this trial was probably

one of the most important things I´ve done in my life.

Steve: Our true calling is to the victim.

That´s who we´re looking out for.

And these two women were ignored in life

and ignored in death.

Just because they didn´t have a name,

those women didn´t deserve any of that.

They should be treated just like everybody else.

Reporter: While many others may feel their job would be done

at this point, Rhods is different.

I really and truly feel that we need to send them

home to their families.

It´s not over until I can find out

who they are and send them home.

The only regret I have on this case

is I couldn´t call up somebody´s mother and father

and say, "I got justice for your daughter."

That´s my only regret.

Yeah, it´s partially achieved,

but the final achievement is still to come,

and I´m hoping to have it soon.

♫♫

[ Indistinct conversations ]

Violet: Unfortunately, with Shirley,

she is only one of many, many who have been lost.

[ All singing in native language ]

It´s almost a weekly thing where our people are missing,

our children are missing.

We need people to care.

We need people to be made aware

that this is actually still happening.

[ Singing in native language continues ]

♫♫

My family is here because they know my struggle over the years.

And so for them to be here, they acknowledge and respect

the walk that I have been walking.

My journey has always been

almost solitary, walking by myself.

But now I´m joining others, I feel like I´m not alone.

[ Singing in native language ]

Justice: With our experience,

I think, sadly, it has taught myself

and many other indigenous women

that we basically always kind of have to watch our back.

This is our reality and it has been for many, many years.

I have to have these talks with my daughter

because right now, she´s 6 years old.

As time goes on, we´re going to have more in-depth conversations

about reality for women,

for indigenous women specifically.

My grandma is missing and murdered from Vancouver.

Her name is Jean Smith,

and my auntie Marlene Currie was also murdered in Montreal.

Woman: I´m here to honor my cousin, Savannah Buffalo,

Late Sophie Coyote, late Matilda.

The cases have been closed too fast.

The last time I saw Shirley was in 1977

at my father´s wake and funeral.

Years later, Grandma asked us

to look for Shirley and bring her home.

And for all the traditional people who understand,

when you make a promise to the old people,

you do your darndest to make sure you fulfill

that promise you´ve made to them.

And I carry it on.

♫♫

A lot of people don´t want to talk about these things.

But in order to bring their spirit back to them,

we need to acknowledge them.

We need to ensure that we are doing our utmost

to give them a voice.

♫♫

♫♫

♫♫

♫♫

My name is Gina Wrather,

and I am a volunteer with the DNA Doe Project.

The DNA Doe project was started in 2017.

We´re a nonprofit organization.

We work with law-enforcement agencies

to identify John and Jane Does

through the use of DNA and investigative genetic genealogy.

Reporter: Plastered across these walls,

questions that go for dozens of families

not knowing what happened to missing loved ones for years,

sometimes decades.

Gina: Our founders realized the same technology

and the same methods that are used to identify

birth parents of adoptees could be used to identify

these John and Jane Does.

We don´t give up on any cases,

but it doesn´t matter if it costs 10 hours

or it costs 10,000 hours

because we all volunteer our time.

If your DNA is out there,

could it potentially solve a case?

Sure.

♫♫

I became a crime junkie just watching all these programs,

listening to podcasts.

I watched them identify the Golden State killer.

Reporter: This morning, new details

of the rigorous investigation

that detectives say brought down the Golden State Killer

more than 40 years after his alleged killing spree began.

Law-enforcement sources telling ABC News

they used a genealogy website

to help connect Joseph DeAngelo´s DNA

to past crime scenes, taking that evidence

and then comparing it with family members

within the online database until they found their suspect.

Violet: The idea that they found this individual

who did the whole DNA thing.

Watching that program, I´m like, "Oh, my word, here it is.

You know, here it is. This -- this can really help."

So I did research my DNA, our family genealogy,

and then my friend put it up on ancestry.com.

But nobody said anything.

In 2016, I joined the task force

for the Golden State Killer investigation.

Genetic genealogy is taking suspect DNA

and building the suspect´s family tree

in an attempt to identify him and his relatives.

When I saw the success from identifying Joe DeAngelo

as the Golden State Killer,

I returned home and applied it to Jane Doe Kern County.

Steve called me one day and said,

"You know, I think maybe we need to consider

doing genealogy DNA."

I had Jane Doe Kern,

but the part that was missing was I didn´t have a specimen.

We had no specimens that survived from 1980.

So I thought about it and decided

that maybe we could try to get a DNA specimen

from the clothing worn at the crime scene.

It was very degraded.

But eventually,

the crime lab was able to get something to the lab.

They were looking for volunteers on this particular case,

and so I put my name on it.

When we originally uploaded her, I think we had

19 visible matches, which is minuscule,

and we were able to look at her ethnicity right away.

She was more likely to be indigenous

than she was to be Hispanic.

So we started looking at the indigenous Facebook groups

and started appealing to them.

Steve: I want to put a name on her grave.

I wanted to send her back to her family.

That´s where she belongs.

Her family deserves to know what became of her.

And is that obsessive?

No, I don´t think so. It just comes with the job.

Are you getting impatient?

I think I´ll solve it. I just don´t know when.

It´s a difficult case.

It´s actually rewarding for me

to watch him do what he does.

I don´t think anybody realizes

how serious he takes his work

and how dedicated he is to it.

He gets phone calls

from the time he gets home during the night.

8:30, 9:00.

Doesn´t matter if it´s holiday.

It doesn´t matter if it´s a weekend.

Somebody is always calling him,

and he´s always answering the phone.

He sleeps it, breathes it, everything.

He´s very dedicated to his victims.

Two birthdays in a row I missed

because of murder.

Mickey has always been supportive

of everything that I´ve done.

She does accuse me of knowing more about crime

than I do about household responsibilities.

But -- And she´s right.

If I had to balance a checkbook,

I wouldn´t be able to.

♫♫

Gina: We had a breakthrough moment in September 2019.

We had a new match at GEDmatch.

She was within the second-cousin range

and of her great grandparents,

only one great grandparent was indigenous.

And so we said, "We´re on the right track here."

Once we identified the great grandfather,

we knew he lived his entire life in the Maskwacis area.

His children lived their entire lives there.

His grandchildren lived their entire lives there.

So we knew someone there very likely knew who she was.

This case really was a roller coaster

because at times, I felt like

"We´re just not gonna solve this one."

There hadn´t been an indigenous identification to date.

They´re underrepresented in the testing databases.

They´ve had their history erased.

And so in February 2020,

we did one more appeal in the indigenous Facebook groups.

"We need everybody to share this

and we need everybody to look at this face.

And we need you to consider, you know,

if this could have been someone that you knew in 1980."

Violet: I felt I exhausted every avenue to find my auntie.

And so, at a woman´s gathering in Calgary,

I informed a group of women that I lost my aunt

and she´s been missing since 1979.

And I made a promise to my grandmother

that I would find her and bring her home.

I was at the end of my rope.

Four days later, boom. Facebook.

Oh, my God.

My friend, she said, "Go on Facebook.

They found a woman who is from Maskwacis."

And so I went into Facebook and I logged on

and I´m like, "That´s her. This is her."

Gina: I got a phone call from Violet and she said,

"I think this is my aunt."

And as she was describing the circumstances,

it sounded more and more likely.

The defining factor was a DNA comparison.

And so I asked Violet had she DNA-tested anywhere?

And she said, "Yes."

We have to have testers to download their DNA data

to their own computer and upload that to GEDmatch.

And that was the step that Violet had been missing.

So she said, "I will upload to GEDmatch."

When I was sitting in front of the computer uploading my DNA,

that became my last-minute dealt, you know?

Like, what if it isn´t, you know,

versus when I first saw the picture, right?

And I was so -- "This is her."

It was so positive.

Gina: And so walked her through.

She uploaded.

I did the 1-to-1 comparison.

[ Beeping ]

♫♫

And I said, "Violet, this is your aunt."

It was the most emotional moment

in my entire DNA Doe Project experience.

She didn´t say anything.

It was raw emotion.

It was -- It wasn´t words. It was sound.

♫♫

Yeah. I felt it.

I think I lost it.

I don´t know if I screamed or cried or laughed or whatever.

I mean, I must have sounded insane to her,

but I have to excuse myself, you know?

And I went into -- into my bedroom

and I screamed into my pillow and then I came out.

[ Laughing ]

I went through so many emotions.

You know, it´s like a whole

30 years of emotions that just came --

boom, boom, boom, boom, boom -- right after the other.

Gina: It was grief.

It was relief.

But she kept saying, "I kept my promise.

I found you. I kept my promise."

♫♫

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Violet: The hardest, of course,

was hearing about how she -- she had passed.

That´s really painful.

She made it someway, somehow to California.

I don´t know what happened.

Sad that we found her in that way,

but glad that we´re able to bring her home.

Reporter: Tonight, breaking news from the sheriff´s office.

At long last, we finally know the name of the woman

left for dead four decades ago.

A victim whose identity was unknown

even after her killer was sent to prison.

Shirley Soosay was finally identified when her niece Violet

came across a post by the DNA Doe Project.

Steve: A lot of work has gone into a case,

a lot of late nights to get to this goal.

And the goal was to get justice for our victim.

When Shirley was identified, I reached out to Violet.

It was good to talk to her.

I enjoyed knowing that she knew

that someone was in Shirley´s corner.

That gives me a sense of, "This is what I´m supposed to do."

Steve Rhods -- He didn´t give up her,

and I love him for that.

He has a special place within our family.

So has Dawn Ratliff and Gina --

The DNA Doe Project.

You know, thinking I was doing this by myself.

Little did I know there were others

who were doing the same thing and we just had to meet.

They were trying to find her identity.

I was trying to find my auntie.

Knowing that I really wasn´t alone...

...that´s so comforting.

People do care.

And my free-spirited auntie is coming home.

♫♫

Reporter: This moment is 40 years in the making.

A tearful and joyous homecoming for a woman who died years ago.

Her remains were brought to a funeral home

in Wetaskiwin, where she was met by Violet

and bikers from Maskwacis

to escort Shirley the rest of the way home.

Now that Shirley can properly be laid to rest,

Violet can also finally rest.

No more uncertainties.

We are certain that she´s home now.

♫♫

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