- I'm Craig Melvin,
and this is "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
- Two guys saw what they thought was a mannequin.
She had wood piled on top of her.
No identification.
- We all came together by becoming volunteers
to identify Jane Does and John Does.
- There's a passion trying to find out
who our Doe is.
- I think what if this is your family?
You want to give them closure.
- To us homicide detectives, it's way above our heads.
- I said I think I know how we can do it.
- All of these people share some amount of DNA
with our unknown person.
- We thought this is the family.
This is it.
- It's surreal.
It felt like somebody just punched me.
It just felt like--
- It's a funny thing, isn't it?
That it would be important to have a stone
with your name on it.
- It is.
- It's written in stone.
You're never forgotten.
- Hello, and welcome to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
In many cold cases,
a grieving family is desperate
to bring their loved ones' killer to justice.
But what happens when the victim is unknown?
That was the secret Texas authorities needed to crack
for years until a team of determined strangers
vowed to finally put a name with a face.
Here's Keith Morrison with...
- Here is where they put her.
Her permanent home.
- Nobody really knew anything about her.
- This little cemetery in east Texas.
One simple marker on her grave
and the name that wasn't a name.
Jane Doe.
- It makes it personal because you think,
"What if this is your family?
"What if this could be your friend?"
- She-- who was she,
this impossible enigma?
- How is it that the young woman can
disappear and die and that no one can
figure out who she is?
- The question that kept them glued to their computers.
- Participating in something like this too
can be almost consuming.
It can-- it can really drain us.
- The obsession...
- I was hooked.
I was absolutely hooked.
- This is where it began.
October 29th, 2006,
Kilgore, Texas.
Two men out target shooting on Oil Lee's property
not far from town.
They smelled it first,
then they saw it.
Something burning. Looked like a mannequin.
The men approached.
What was that?
And then they recoiled.
That was a young woman dead and burning.
- You know, we have homicides
just like the rest of the world,
you know, going as far as trying to burn the body.
It really struck fear in people around here.
- Lieutenant Eddie Hope was still a sergeant back then.
Gregg County Sheriff's Department.
- She had wood piled beneath her
and wood piled on top of her
and there was I believe a gas can,
uh, lid there. - Wow.
- So, looked like somebody was trying
to cover their tracks.
- She was meant to be part of one big bonfire
and just disappear forever. - Right.
- The officers who responded noted every detail they could.
That she was young, late teens-- early twenties.
And she was little,
maybe 5'4", 100 pounds.
She was wearing jeans, a pale shirt
the color of lavender,
$44 in her pocket.
And this was unusual, baby teeth.
She still had a few.
- She never lost them.
They said that's use-- that's highly unusual.
- Well, it gave you something to work with anyway.
- A little bit.
- Other than that, the young woman was
impossible to identify.
She had been murdered of that there was no doubt.
Her last moments had been very bad.
But in most homicide investigations,
detectives burrowed deep into the life of the victim,
talked to every friend, interviewed the family,
find out about scorned lovers or past mistakes.
That's often how murders get solved,
but in this case none of it was possible.
- Didn't have a clue.
- What could you do? - Nothing.
If we got tips, ran them down
because, I mean, we had no grounds to go on
who this could be or where she came from.
- They ran her DNA profile.
Didn't match any known person known to them anyway,
but the autopsy revealed semen in her body,
and it did match someone--
a known local sex offender.
So they pulled him in and he admitted he had sex
that day with a woman whose name he didn't know,
but he didn't kill her.
And he did have an alibi too,
so that was that.
- We would get people off the internet
that would say, "Hey, I think this might be so-and-so,"
and we would follow up on that and eventually rule it out.
What we were thinking at the time was
maybe she's not from around here
because nobody's missing her here.
- And so, Gregg County paid for a burial plot
and for a little marker on the ground above her body.
- A small headstone just-just reads Jane Doe.
There was no other information we knew on her.
- And winter game, but they didn't give up.
A Texas ranger who sometimes worked with them
said maybe he could help.
- And he was able to fly in a-an artist
to try to reconstruct what- what our victim looked like
in real life.
- And here it was, but it produced no leads.
The county even made a clay model using an x-ray
of the victim's skull including those baby teeth.
Sent it around the local media.
Still nothing.
And detective work-- it's an unending drum
that beats at all hours in the day and night.
Felonies, misdemeanors, the lot demanding attention.
- We got cases everyday and, you know,
we get three or four cases each a day.
Sometimes more.
- They didn't forget her as they went about their work,
but the young woman remained nameless
no matter how many trails they followed.
- And that just went on for years.
I mean, it's basically all we had.
- A little bit here, a little bit there
but not much.
- Right. - And no solution?
- No solution, no nothing.
- And then something unusual happened.
The little details like her baby teeth
caught the eyes of amateur internet investigators
on sites like Reddit and Websleuths.
And before too long, they began referring
to the mystery woman with a kind of shorthand.
It was the distinctive color of her shirt that did it.
One of those armchair detectives took to calling her
Lavender, Lavender Doe.
- This was a case that was followed online
very closely by many people.
- People like this guy,
and what happened after that?
Well, remember what we said about obsession?
- A murder victim without a name
and detectives without any clues.
Not an easy mystery to solve,
but lurking in the shadows help is on the way.
- I spent a lot of my spare time
looking into missing persons cases.
Really just kind of trying to flesh out the stories.
- I was impressed that people cared.
- Cared and knew how to help.
- I said I think I know how we can do it and she said,
"Bingo, all we need is DNA."
If I can figure out Jane Doe's parents,
we'll know who Jane Doe was.
**
- Tomorrow and tomorrow and a decade went by.
11 years after the murder
of a young woman they called Lavender Doe
and more than 200 miles from the spot
where her body was found
in the town of Killeen, Texas.
A man was feverishly at work.
Though it wasn't his profession,
this work that consumed him, not yet at least.
- I kinda spent a lot of my spare time
looking into missing persons cases.
Really just kind of trying to flesh out the stories
of some of these lesser known cases.
- His name is Kevin Lorde.
He is, well, many things.
A former software developer, a T-shirt salesman,
a passionate and loyal consumer of all things true crime.
He wasn't an investigator or a law enforcement officer,
just someone plagued by unanswered questions.
- I was looking for Jane Does
in the area in Texas that might be a match
to one of these missing girls.
- And that's how he came across hundreds of pages
of online forums about a mystery woman
nicknamed Lavender Doe.
Could she be one of the missing women
he was trying to locate?
And so, Kevin called the Gregg County Sheriff's Department
and found himself on the phone with
the lead detective on Lavender Doe's case,
Lieutenant Eddie Hope.
- I was impressed that people cared,
'cause we live in a world where everything's fast pace
and a lot of people are worried about themselves
and not others.
- And here was evidence
that maybe they are interested in others.
- Right.
- Some other investigator
might've blown off a guy like Kevin,
just another civilian with an internet connection
and a theory,
but Kevin seemed to know what he was doing.
And his internet skills?
Way beyond what Lieutenant Hope could do.
And before long,
although they didn't actually meet in person,
they began acting almost like partners.
- We just flew together.
You know, whatever he needed that he couldn't get
that I could get law enforcement-wise,
he would send it to me.
- He kind of meshed together these bits of information.
- Yes.
- And two things happened.
One, Kevin realized Lavender Doe was not
one of the missing women he'd been looking for.
And two, he got hooked on the case
of the girl in the lavender shirt.
But he kept hitting dead ends.
He needed some specialized help,
very specialized.
- I reached out to DNA Doe Project
to see if I might be able to come on as a volunteer.
- The DNA Doe Project,
a nonprofit founded by a former rocket scientist
named Colleen Fitzpatrick
and a novelist and genealogy enthusiast
Margaret Press.
- I barely knew what John and Jane Does meant,
but I had been retired for about a year
and come back to the West Coast
to be near my daughter and grandchildren
and to relax.
- It was winter, 2017,
when Margaret, not the retiring type,
was struck with an idea.
She'd already been deeply immersed in genealogy,
helping adoptees find their birth parents, so...
- If I can figure out Jane Doe's parents,
we'll know who Jane Doe was.
Margaret's plan?
Obtain remains from Jane and John Does,
retest their DNA
and upload the results to a public database,
where, maybe, that DNA would lead them
to some relative of their victim.
- So I had my recipe,
and I reached out to Colleen,
and I said, "I think I know how we can do it."
And she said, "bingo, all we need is DNA.
Oh, and I know a couple of people."
- At first, they paid for the DNA tests
with their own savings.
And then they set up a nonprofit
and started taking donations.
After just six months, they solved their first case.
- The mystery surrounding...
- A few weeks later, another case
made headlines around the world,
showing the power of genealogy.
- Police arresting a man they believe
is the so-called "Golden State Killer."
And the suspect, a former police officer,
discovered using DNA.
- That one did change the world,
because that was a violent killer,
and that was a huge impact on world--
on the community. - Sure.
Opened everybody's eyes. - Yep.
- And suddenly Colleen and Margaret had company.
- Genealogists came out of the woodwork,
and I could see us as a very unique organization
where law enforcement agencies
could come to us with their bones and no money,
and we could bring in volunteer genealogists
who were begging to help us.
- What you can bring to this process
is a crowd-sourced investigation
like, you know, a bunch of bees forming a hive.
And disparately they're not gonna do much,
but all together they can really accomplish
something truly significant.
- Right, exactly.
- Kevin Lord was one of those bees.
He joined DNA Doe as a volunteer.
And then others followed, a kind of mini hive
looking for the truth about a mystery woman
they called Lavender Doe.
- The bees get busy
- We spent hours working together,
talking to each other.
- "Oh, my gosh, did you see this?
"And what about this? And where's this?
Who's this guy?"
- We're kind of the last resort.
**
- It was a kind of obsession now,
the determination to give her back her name,
to identify the anonymous young woman
murdered and set on fire and then buried
here in Long View, Texas.
God knows law enforcement had tried every trick
in the investigative book,
except for a new book, if you could call it that,
the DNA Doe Project.
A bunch of amateurs, really,
but committed? Oh, yes.
- It's not that law enforcement has not tried.
Most of the cases that come to us,
we're kind of the last resort.
- "Us" meaning a group of people
who had never actually met in person,
who labored away in a kitchen
or a bedroom or a basement,
who knew each other only online.
Like Lori Gaff,
a former Black Hawk helicopter pilot
who stumbled on a Facebook posting
about DNA Doe.
- I was completely enthralled,
and me being me, had to know
absolutely everything there was about it.
And I thought I totally want to be a part of this.
- And was soon addicted.
- It will consume your life if you let it,
so we-- I've been making an effort
to kind of set limits.
- One hour turns into ten pretty quick,
I would think, right? - Ten--
Ten might be a slow day.
This has become, um, an obsession.
- Then there was Missy Koski,
a self-described "search angel,"
who used genetic genealogy to find her biological father.
What was that like to find him?
- It was incredible.
It was absolutely incredible.
So she began helping other adoptees
find their birth parents. And one day...
- While I was helping an adoptee, um,
that adoptee got a phone call from the DNA Doe Project.
And she was told that she was distantly related
to a Jane Doe. I just got intrigued.
And I said, "can I talk to them?"
- Before long, Missy was hooked, too.
And the three, Kevin, Lori, and Missy,
formed a team.
So you're like the Three Musketeers
sitting there together.
- We spent hours
working together, talking to each other
almost exclusively online.
- And we'd just get in there and blab all day long
about, "oh, my gosh, did you see this?
"And what about this? And where's this?
Who's this guy? I can't find this-- whatever."
- Back in Gregg County,
after more than a decade of chasing leads
on Lavender Doe,
Lieutenant Hope understood
that investigations had changed.
- Genealogy is the wave of the future.
And to us homicide detectives,
it's way above our heads, to be honest with you.
- So you welcomed their help. - I did.
- And across the country, someone else had taken notice
of the amateur investigators working with DNA Doe.
- I like to write about how ordinary people,
for example genealogists,
are dealing with new advances in DNA.
Sarah Zhang is a staff writer for "The Atlantic" magazine.
- I liked the fact that Kevin
had been so invested in this case.
- Passion like that was a story worth following,
and she did,
watching their process.
For one thing, using the victim's
skin or hair or blood
to generate a DNA profile
which they upload to a genealogy site
called GED Match.
- We get a whole list of DNA matches back,
and all of these people share some amount of DNA
with our unknown person.
- It's important to understand,
the volunteers work with public DNA databases.
And where does all this DNA material come from
that you're able to look at?
- These are all people who have taken tests
with companies like Ancestry DNA or 23 And Me,
the consumer tests.
- And who've given access to others to view the results.
That's a relatively tiny percentage of the population,
so the odds of finding an exact match?
Vanishingly small, but...
- Just by the pure probabilities,
we're often lucky enough to get a decent enough match.
- By "decent match"
he means a distant relative,
someone who likely doesn't even know the victim.
- We kind of look for a match that's in the neighborhood
of maybe a second or third cousin or so
as a good starting point.
- A starting point to work backwards
and try to reconstruct branches of the family tree
by scouring the internet,
mining every possible bit of information
from birth certificates to death notices
to marriage licenses to social media.
Where the heck do you find all this stuff?
I mean, you must have spent hours and hours and hours
and hours and hours in front of a computer screen,
trying to find it. - And lots of money.
- Yep.
- The DNA Doe Project made a new sketch,
and they put it up online.
They added a PayPal button to raise money
for that retest of Lavender Doe's DNA.
And pretty soon, the online community
that followed the Lavender Doe case
answered the call.
- Within four days the public had come through
and completely funded the testing that we had to do.
- But before they could even get the test sent out,
something very unexpected happened.
- I get a call from Lieutenant Hope
at the sheriff's office saying that he has big news.
- What could that be?
- A bombshell is dropped, but investigators are still
going to need some luck to solve this case.
Coming up...
- That's why I wanted to get this off my chest.
- I just let him talk.
He left no detail out.
- A break in the case, and a frustrating discovery.
We found that there were 27 first cousins.
- Whoa! - Where are they?
Who are their children?
Are they alive?
What can we find?
**
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
I'm Craig Melvin.
Lavender Doe, that was the name given to the unidentified woman
whose burned body was found in 2006.
More than a decade later, her identity remained a secret.
Now, a group of amateur sleuths were helping police,
but it was an uphill battle until...
an unexpected confession fell right in their laps.
Back to Keith Morrison with "The Woman With No Name."
**
- It was hot, that Texas summer of 2018.
The summer the DNA Doe volunteers spent
hunkered down inside,
staring at their computer screens,
trying to identify Lavender Doe.
But they'd hardly started when Kevin Lord got a call
from Lieutenant Eddie Hope.
A young woman named Felicia Pearson has been
reported missing by her family.
She was last seen with a new boyfriend
who told them she left him.
Just went away.
They spoke with her mother.
- And we learned there was a wooded area
inside of Longview that he had taken her to before,
and that's where we found Felicia.
- Murdered.
There was no doubt about this victim's identity.
And no question who the prime suspect was.
Her violent ex-con boyfriend, Joseph Wayne Burnett.
Lieutenant Hope knew the name.
The same man whose semen had been found 12 years before
in the body of Lavender Doe.
- He was arrested.
He was brought into the Gregg County jail.
- Sign the corner right here.
- Two detectives questioned Burnett.
He admitted killing Felicia.
But that wasn't all.
- He started talkin' about a girl
that he killed and burned several years ago.
- A burned girl?
Right away, the detectives called Eddie Hope.
You're on your way home at that point.
- I was already home.
- Must have been good to hear.
- Didn't take me long to get back.
- That's why I wanted to get this off my chest.
- I just let him talk.
He talked about this 12-year-old murder
as if it happened yesterday.
He left no detail out.
- That's when I reached down there,
and I grabbed a rope, and I put it around her neck,
and I tightened it up.
- She never saw it coming.
A rope around her neck.
It only took seconds.
- As soon as I choked her,
she-she-she just quit movin'.
- So he'd confessed to killing her.
But there was something else.
- Personally, I don't know her like a friend.
- Know her name? - I think her name was Ashley.
- He thought her name was Ashley.
He wasn't really for sure of that.
- Just a first name: Ashley, maybe.
But even if Ashley was a real first name,
it didn't solve the mystery.
- We had the confession and we still don't know
who this person is, and that just eats you up.
I mean, that's not the order it's supposed to go.
- Despite his confession, Burnett pleaded not guilty.
Justice for a victim still labeled Lavender Doe
in court documents would take some time.
Time the volunteers couldn't waste.
- That made it a lot more real
and put more weight behind what we were doing.
- Who was Lavender Doe?
- That was what was left at that point.
- Lavender Doe's retested DNA returned from the lab
in October, 2018,
and the team went to work looking for potential relatives.
And just nine days later, they found one,
a woman in East Texas, right near the spot
where Lavender Doe was found.
- I contacted Lieutenant Hope.
I told him we have this descendent
who lives about 30 minutes from where Lavender Doe was found.
I can't tell you exactly how she's related,
but it seems like it would be a huge coincidence
if she wasn't fairly closely related.
- This had to be immensely exciting.
- Oh, we thought we-- this is the-this is the mom.
This is the family, this is it.
- And so, of course, Lieutenant Hope,
with a brand new optimism, drove out to see her.
And he came up empty.
The woman had no missing relatives
and no idea who Lavender Doe might be.
- Must've been disappointing.
- It was.
- Like, you thought maybe you were on to something,
and you weren't.
- You kinda get your hopes up, then you-you let down,
but you-- that had been happenin' for,
you know, 12 years.
- I was so, "No, no, no, she's lying, she's lying."
This is it, because when you're researching
family from another part of the country,
and all of a sudden, you find this relative
in the right spot in the right place
at the right time, it has to be.
- Then, it dawned on them. The woman wasn't lying,
and there was still a chance she could help.
Kevin had a hunch, perhaps she knew something
without knowing she knew it.
What did she know?
- She told us that she did not know who Lavender Doe was.
But she had taken a test herself with ancestry DNA,
and she would be happy to share her results with us.
- Well, what happened when she did that?
- When we compared her DNA to Lavender Doe's DNA,
we could see that it looked like Lavender Doe's parent
was probably a first cousin of hers.
- And suddenly they felt close.
All they had to do was find the right cousin.
The right cousin who might be missing a daughter,
or niece, or someone.
Not so easy.
- As we started looking and researching every person,
in this family, we found that there were
27 first cousins-- - Whoa!
- Who could have possibly been
Lavender Doe's parent.
- You think, wow, here's our big break,
now all we need to do is find the cousin.
And it turns out there are 27 of them?
- Twenty-seven.
Some of the people in the family had had several marriages
and several children from each marriage.
And so we started with that list.
And we had to go through and see if we could find
each of these people.
Where are they, who are their children,
are they alive?
What can we find?
- One by one, they pulled on their threads.
Hundreds of them, leading nowhere.
And then, it was Kevin who found it.
The Texas woman had a distant cousin
who lived out of state, a woman she didn't know,
had never met, whose name was Robin.
And Robin had a daughter.
But when they tried to find her...
- She had addresses up until right around 2006,
and then kind of just fell off the map,
and we couldn't find her anywhere.
- 2006, what a coincidence.
It was the year Lavender Doe was murdered.
- Coming up...
- I wasn't prepared for the emotion
that I had right then.
I couldn't control myself.
I remember sitting on the couch,
and just crying.
- A search ends, and a story begins.
- We lost track between her and us for about 10 years.
- Over the years, Lieutenant Eddie Hope
thought a lot about those last moments
of Lavender Doe's life.
- Kinda haunts after you if-if you're comin' out here
and-and you're-- you-you can't put a closure to it.
You know, you can't end the story yet.
- To help write that ending,
he had put his face in the dedicated volunteers
who had spent countless hours
trying to give her back her name.
By the fall of 2018, they seemed close.
DNA and genealogy had led them to a woman named Robin,
whose daughter had disappeared.
- At that point, we were kinda thinking,
wow, this has-this has gotta be her.
- Except, when they tried to find her,
this Robin person, they discovered she was dead.
So they kept scouring the Internet,
and the Robin led them to another relative
who, if they were right, would be Lavender Doe's cousin.
They tracked down a number, and Lieutenant Hope called,
asked if any young woman in this person's family
was missing.
- And he said, I haven't seen her in years.
He said, "The last we had heard,
she ran away from home,
just like she just disappeared."
- But, he said, his missing cousin
had a half-sister.
Lieutenant Hope called her, too.
- Well, I talked to her several times
and she agreed to send Kevin her-- their DNA kit.
- Which meant sending the half-sister's DNA sample
to the lab and waiting.
How long did that take?
- It took about a month and a half, I believe.
- That must have been pins and needles.
- Oh, yeah. - Yeah.
It was a winter's day, late January,
when they got the news.
It was a match.
Kevin called Lieutenant Hope.
- I was pretty excited, and that--
the whole department was excited.
- I-I wasn't prepared for the emotion
that I had right then. I couldn't control myself.
I remember sitting on the couch and just crying
because I was so happy, but the emotion
of all this work, all these countless nights,
you know, working all day and all night,
and trying to figure this out,
just-just all came together right then.
- So who was she?
Who was the young woman who, for so long,
had been a sketch known only as "Lavender Doe"?
Here she was, Dana Lynn Dodd.
It was Dana's half-sister, Amanda,
who had provided that DNA Sample,
and then, naturally curious,
she looked online and saw that clay model.
- And I called him back, and I told him,
"That's Dana. It's Dana."
- What was it like to see that? - [sighs] Surreal.
It felt like somebody just punched me in the stomach.
I was angry that she was by herself, you know.
Her-her worst fear came true.
She was forgotten.
- Which was the heartbreaking truth Amanda revealed
about Dana Dodd.
Hers was a life of instability, uncertainty,
and from the very beginning, rejection.
Her mom moved out when she was little.
One mother figure after another came and went from her life.
- She was passed around between my dad and his, you know,
current wife or current girlfriend at the time,
and that's how we lost track between her and us
for about ten years.
- By the time Dana was in her early teens,
Amanda was 23 years old and married
and raising a son of her own,
and when she heard Dana was living not far away,
somewhere in Florida... - I just looked at my husband
and said, "This is what we need to do,"
and he knew it, and there was no questions asked.
She moved right into the home.
- After all she'd been through,
it was almost like a fairytale:
A real home.
Was she happy about it at first? - Very, very happy.
She said she liked the normal life,
feeling normal, not having to worry,
you know, "being loved," is what she said,
and being able to sit down at dinnertime with the family
and be able to discuss
just your daily things that we take for granted.
- It was good for a while.
So what happened to Dana Dodd?
How did she become that mystery victim
so far away?
- A young girl alone.
- That's when the problems started.
- It's a story as old as time. - Yeah. Oh, yeah.
- And on her own. - It's just a form
of human trafficking. You're around the drug dealers.
You're around the prostitutes.
It just kind of puts them into a whole different, dark world.
**
- For 12 years, they knew her only as "Lavender Doe,"
the mystery murder victim with the purple shirt.
Now they knew her real name: Dana Lynn Dodd.
What a story a name revealed,
of an abandoned baby, a rejected toddler,
whose whole life had been a cautionary tale.
Her long lost half sister, Amanda, stepped in to help,
and did help, but then at age 16,
Dana got a serious boyfriend.
- That's when the problems started.
- It's a story as old as time. - Yeah. Oh, yeah.
- So then Amanda sent Dana to live with her brother, John.
- I tried to make it where she was always wanted.
- But that boy again.
Did you give her an ultimatum?
- I did. I did, uh, you know, 'cause, you know,
I told her, "Do you want to stay with this guy,
"or do you want a better life?"
And she's like, "You know what? I-I love him."
- When that didn't work out either,
Dana, determined to finally take control of her own life,
decided to get a job.
It was with a magazine company, she said,
that would allow her to travel,
selling subscriptions and other products.
John told Dana that sounded like a bad idea.
- In a contest between you and those folks
in the magazine, you didn't stand a chance.
- No. No. 'Cause she was wantin'
to try to do something for herself,
so she was trying to prove-prove something.
- She was just lookin' for acceptance,
anybody that would accept her and take her,
and that's what she was looking for her whole life.
- Dana was 18 and full of optimism.
- She would call me every month saying,
"I'm-I'm in Indiana. Hey, I'm in Cincinnati."
For. like, six months, five or six months,
she would call me every month.
- It was summertime, 2006,
when she called him the last time.
- And I told her to come home.
And she said, "No, I want to do this on my own."
So that was the last time I heard from her.
- How long did you talk to her that time?
- About an hour. - Long conversation
on the phone. - Very, very,
because I tried to convince her to come home.
- You were begging her to come home.
- Oh, yes, begging her. We can--
We'll take care of you.
- And then the long silence.
Where was she?
They had no idea.
What a helpless feeling that must have been.
- It was. It was hard. It was very helpless,
and more so because we didn't know anything--
anything about the company.
Where do you start when you know they're traveling
all over the country?
- Some of those magazine sales companies
are notorious for exploiting their young employees,
preying on them.
Lieutenant Eddie Hope knows this all too well.
- It's just a form of human trafficking.
They take these kids. They promise 'em a good life.
And once they get 'em away from home,
they're living in seedy motel rooms
and with that comes that you're around the drug dealers.
You're around the prostitutes. You're around the-the pimps.
It just kind of puts them into a whole different dark world.
- Dark, and in Dana's case, deadly.
Dana met her fate in this Walmart parking lot,
trying to sell magazines to Joseph Wayne Burnette.
That's where he told police he picked her up,
took her to this bridge, and killed her.
Why? He said it was because she stole money from him.
Impossible to know if that was true,
because of what he did next.
- So I took her body, and I laid her out
on top of the wood after I soaked the wood in the diesel.
And when I set her on fire, I left.
- She wasn't trash. She wasn't a piece of trash
like he took upon himself to discard of,
and I want everybody, you know, to know who Dana was,
and who she was as a person.
Even with her difficult life and her upbringing,
and, uh, she still had a good heart.
- Maybe it's not the greatest ending,
but at least they know,
and I guess I go back to the truth.
They know the truth, and it just feels good
when we can hand them that truth.
- And everybody deserves to know the truth.
- So after 12 years,
the investigators, professional and amateur,
finally knew her name,
knew what happened to her,
but it felt unfinished somehow.
And so they all made a kind of pilgrimage
to see the place with their own eyes,
and that was the very first time
the trio would actually meet in person.
- We stay up all night working on the internet
and messaging back and forth,
but we'd never met each other personally.
- Here, Lieutenant Hope took them to the Walmart
and to the cemetery where she'd been all this time.
- I think the thing that surprised me the most
is that there were already flowers there.
The community, over the years,
paid attention and didn't forget her.
- They left her their own flowers,
lavender, of course.
Science writer, Sarah Zhang,
who set out to learn from the volunteers,
saw their journey to the end.
- It did strike us there
that we were the first people who'd gone to her grave
who probably knew who she actually was.
- So that was extremely poignant,
to be able to stand there.
I don't know that I can even articulate what that was like.
- This-this really, I think, changed us,
and changed the way we work. - Changed it how?
- It makes it personal, because you think,
what if this is your family?
What if this could be your friend?
- Kevin became a licensed private investigator,
and continued to work with the DNA Doe Project,
still giving back victims their long lost identities.
- We made a little bit of a dent,
but there's never gonna be a shortage, unfortunately,
of Jane Does and John Does for us to help identify.
- And some are like Dana Lynn Dodd,
the little girl abandoned early and often,
and though Amanda and John tried to help,
she was, in the end, abused and discarded,
but not forgotten.
What do you hope her legacy will be?
- I'm hopin' she knows that--
what joy she brought in our life,
to me and Mandy and our family,
my son.
That legacy would probably be it,
that she was a part of our lives.
- And to those armchair detectives
and their partner, Lieutenant Eddie Hope,
she was as important as you or me.
- It doesn't matter what walk of life you come from.
Everybody's a person.
Everybody has a mom and dad,
and it's just--
That's the way they should be treated.
- In December, 2020,
Joseph Wayne Burnette pleaded guilty
to the murders of Felisha Pearson
and Dana Lynn Dodd.
He was sentenced to 50 years for each murder.
- For the relatives of Burnette's victims,
this has been the last chapter
of a very painful book.
- And, indeed, it was, though, by then,
Amanda and John had found a little solace
here in Longview,
the community that didn't forget.
- We felt like that was her adopted family.
- Which is why they decided not to take her remains
back home to Florida with them.
She will stay here in Longview,
with her name carved in stone.
- It's a funny thing, isn't it?
That it's-- That it would be important to have a stone
up above the place you're lying down
with your name on it, and, yet, it is.
- It is, exactly.
You never think about it, but it is something--
It's important to have that,
because you're never forgotten,
you know, that your name is there,
It's written in stone.
- "Lavender Doe" no longer.
Eternally Dana Lynn Dodd.
- Some of the people still go by her grave site
and still put flowers and things like that there,
and that's what we wanted,
'cause she's part of Longview.
- And she'll never be sent away again.
- No. She's home.
- That's all for this edition
of "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
I'm Craig Melvin. Thank you for watching.