Alaska 1996 Cold Case Finally Solved – Killer Lived In Next House For 10 Years

May 4th, 1996. Sitka, Alaska. A 17-year-old girl says good night to her sister and steps out onto a quiet bike path for a walk she has made a 100 times before. It’s a 20-minute walk. She never finishes it. 2 days later, searchers find her body 70 ft off that same path, hidden beneath a fallen tree across the street from the state’s own police training academy.

Within 9 days, Sika police have a confession. A local man is arrested. The town breathes again. But here’s the problem. The man they arrested didn’t do it. And the man who did was sitting in a jail cell in the very same building for a very similar crime at almost the very same time.

 It would take 24 years, a discarded coffee cup, and a genealogologist tracing a family tree back to the 1850s to finally close the case. This is the story of how Jessica Baggin’s killer walked free for over two decades and how science finally caught up with him. To understand why this case went so wrong, you first have to understand the place it happened in.

 Sitka isn’t like most American towns. It sits on an island in the Alexander Archipelago in the panhandle of southeastern Alaska, reachable mainly by boat or plane. In 1996, it was the kind of community where people didn’t lock their front doors, where a teenage girl walking home alone after midnight wasn’t a red flag.

 It was just Tuesday. Violent crime was rare enough that when it happened, it didn’t just scare people. It broke something in the town’s sense of itself. Jessica Baggin was, by every account a normal, well-liked 17-year-old growing up inside that sense of safety. She loved the outdoors, went fishing with her family, and had her sight set on studying photography.

 She had no history of danger, no risky associations, nothing that would have marked her as a target. She was simply a teenager living her life on an island where nothing bad was supposed to happen. On May 3rd, 1996, she celebrated her 17th birthday with friends and family. That night, or more precisely in the early hours of May 4th, she stopped by her sister’s trailer home off Sawmill Creek Road to hang out with her sister and a mutual friend.

 At some point after midnight, she decided to head home. Her parents house was about a mile away and the route she knew best was a paved bike path running parallel to Sawmill Creek Road. The same path that ran past the campus of Sheldon Jackson College and directly across from the Alaska Department of Public Safety’s own training academy.

 It was a 20-minute walk. She’d done it before. She never made it. When she didn’t turn up the next day, her father, George Baggin, did what any parent would do. He called around to friends and family trying to figure out where she was. When nobody had heard from her, he went to the Sika Police Department on the morning of May 5th and reported her missing.

 That single phone call set off one of the most consequential and most flawed investigations in Alaska’s history. But before we get to how it went wrong, we need to talk about what searchers found in the woods along the Indian River. Because what happened there would end up being the one thing the investigators got completely right, even while almost everything else fell apart.

 Search and rescue teams moved into the densely wooded terrain around the Indian River. Almost immediately after the missing person report came in on May 6th, 2 days after Jessica disappeared, they found her shirt. Less than 2 hours later, they found her. Her body was located roughly 70 ft off the bike path hidden beneath the trunk of a large fallen hollowedout tree.

 Whoever left her there had tried to conceal the scene, scraping together top soil, leaves, and forest debris in a hasty improvised burial. It wasn’t sophisticated. It was the work of someone who needed to hide a body quickly and didn’t have the time or the composure to do it well. Forensic examination confirmed what the scene already suggested.

 Jessica had beenly assaulted and killed by manual strangulation. The location told its own story, too. A rapid violent transition from a public well-used path to a hidden patch of forest just off it. Consistent with someone being overpowered and dragged into the treeine in a matter of moments. Now, here is where the story gets an unlikely break.

 The kind of coincidence that would matter enormously 24 years later, at the exact time the crime scene was discovered, two senior investigators from what is now the Alaska Bureau of Investigation happened to be across the street, teaching an evidence collection course at the state’s training academy. When word came in, they walked straight across the road to help local investigator Dave Tugman process the scene.

 That meant this crime scene in a small isolated island town in 1996 was processed with a level of rigor most apartments of that size could never have managed. Forensic personnel carefully recovered highquality foreign pubic hairs from Jessica’s body, hairs with a distinct reddish blonde pigmentation. They recovered semen stains from her clothing and body.

 And critically, all of it was preserved in frozen storage at the state of Alaska Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory in Anchorage, where the chain of custody would remain unbroken for the next 24 years. In other words, the physical proof of who did this was sitting in a freezer in Anchorage from day one. The technology to read it just didn’t exist yet.

 So, investigators did what detectives in 1996 had to do. They went looking for a living, breathing suspect to match against that evidence. and within a week they thought they’d found one. They were wrong. And the way they got it wrong would end up costing this case more than 20 years. On May 13th, 1996, just a week after the murder, a man named Richard Bingham walked into the Sika Police Department on his own.

Bingham worked as a janitor at Sheldon Jackson College and lived alone on a fishing boat in Sika’s harbor. He had cognitive and psychological difficulties, and by multiple accounts, he was highly suggestible. A drinking associate had planted an idea in his head that because Bingham sometimes experienced alcoholic blackouts, maybe he had done something terrible and simply didn’t remember it.

 Shaken by disturbing dreams and memory flashes, Bingham went to police not to confess, but to ask for help making sense of what was going on in his own mind. What happened next is a textbook case study in how not to interrogate a vulnerable person. The Sitka Police Department, with little to no experience handling a homicide of this magnitude, used the Reed technique, an interrogation method built on psychological pressure, minimization, and maximization designed to extract admissions of guilt.

Investigators told Bingham that physical evidence already placed him at the scene. That wasn’t true. They suggested that if he’d done something while blacked out from alcohol, confessing now, framing it as an accident, was his best and only path to leniency. For a man already anxious about his own memory, already convinced by a friend that he might be capable of something horrific, this was enough.

 Bingham agreed to a series of statements which investigators then assembled into what looked on paper like a confession. He was arrested on May 15th, 1996, just 11 days after Jessica’s murder, and charged within murder. For a town desperate for an answer, this felt like resolution, but it wasn’t one.

 And the moment Sika police locked on to Richard Bingham as their man, they stopped looking anywhere else. That single decision would let the real killer walk free in plain sight for the next 24 years. Because at almost the exact same time, Bingham was being interrogated in a Sitka police station. Another man, a local mechanic, was already known to that same department for an entirely different, eerily similar crime.

 His name wouldn’t mean anything to the public for another 24 years, but it should have meant everything right then in May of 1996. Bingham was held for 13 months in a jail in Juno, where his trial was eventually moved due to the intensity of local media coverage and community bias back in Sikka. When the trial finally happened in early 1997, it collapsed almost immediately.

 His public defender, Galen Payne, dismantled the state’s case by exposing exactly how that confession had been produced. The coercive tactics, the false claims about physical evidence, the vulnerability of the man giving this statement, and there was something else working against the prosecution. The physical evidence didn’t match.

 STR DNA comparison between Bingham and the crime scene profile came back a complete mismatch. The jury acquitted him after just 2 hours of deliberation. Sikka got its answer and then had it taken away. Worse, the case now had nowhere to go. The state had built its entire theory of the crime around Richard Bingham. When that theory fell apart in a courtroom, there was no backup plan, no secondary suspect list actively being pursued.

 The investigation didn’t just stall. It had actively burned a year chasing the wrong person while the right one lived his life a few miles away. And this is the part of the story that once you know it is almost impossible to sit with calmly because in June of 1996, while Bingham was being coerced into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit, a local mechanic named Steve Allen Branch was arrested for the violent forcible rape of an 18-year-old co-orker at a local Seaart grocery store.

 His blood was drawn as part of that prosecution in part to check for HIV. That blood sample went into state custody, which means for a period of time in 1996, Alaska state authorities were physically holding two things in the same case ecosystem. Steve Branch’s blood and the unidentified Seaman profile from Jessica Baggin’s murder.

 Nobody ordered a comparison between them. Branch was ultimately acquitted of the Seaart assault in 1997. He argued the encounter was consensual and he simply continued living in Sikka for over a decade, working as a mechanic, blending into the same small community he’d terrorized. He wasn’t a stranger lurking at the edge of town. He was a known quantity, a name that had already crossed police desks in connection with a strikingly similar act of sex violence in the exact same year in the exact same town.

 So why wasn’t he cross- referenced? Why wasn’t his DNA ever compared to the Bagen crime scene evidence? The answer to that question is uncomfortable and it involves someone much closer to the investigation than anyone expected. Here’s a detail that didn’t come to light until true crime researchers and journalists started digging through public records years later.

 Nick Ward, the lead detective on the original 1996 investigation, was married to one of Steve Allen Branch’s sisters. Think about what that means. The lead investigator on Jessica Baggin’s murder was by marriage family to the man who actually killed her. There is no public evidence that this was some deliberate cover up. Nothing suggests Ward knowingly protected his relative, but it raises an obvious and uncomfortable question about institutional blind spots.

 How thoroughly do you investigate someone who sits inside your own family tree? How likely are you to circle back and cross-check a brother-in-law against a decade old charge, especially once you already believe you’ve solved the case? Whatever the explanation, the result was the same.

 Branch was never seriously scrutinized in connection with Jessica’s murder. He wasn’t hiding. He was working in Sitka, living an ordinary life. While over a hundred other local men had their DNA collected and screened out, a net so wide it even included the son of Dave Tugman, the department’s own primary investigator on the case.

 More than a hundred men were tested and excluded, and the one man whose blood was already sitting in a state evidence locker arrested for a nearly identical act of sexual violence in the very same year was never checked at all. This is what criminologists call cognitive anchoring. Once investigators commit to a theory, they stop actively pursuing evidence that contradicts it, and they stop looking hard at anyone who doesn’t fit the narrative they’ve already built.

Sitka PD anchored to Bingham in the first two weeks. Once that anchor was set, Steve Allen Branch simply never registered as a threat despite being in hindsight the most obvious kind of suspect there was for the next two decades. That’s exactly where things stayed. Frozen. Literally, the evidence sat preserved in an Anchorage freezer and figuratively as the case slipped from an active investigation into one of Alaska’s most notorious unsolved mysteries.

 But it didn’t stay frozen forever because while Sika’s police department moved on, one person never did. George Baggin spent the next two decades doing everything in his power to keep his daughter’s case alive. He stayed in regular contact with local police. He funded independent investigations. In 2000, he hired private forensic scientist Brent Turve, who partnered with former NYPD investigator John Beiza to conduct an independent review of the case files and physical evidence.

 Operating under a special commission from Sikka’s police chief at the time. Their involvement wasn’t without controversy. Turvy later sued the city over a police memo that questioned his credentials. Litigation that dragged on for over a decade, but it reflected something important. This case never had the luxury of being quietly forgotten because Jessica’s father refused to let that happen.

Meanwhile, the town itself never fully let go either. On May 12th, 1996, just days after the murder, roughly 1,500 people, more than a third of Sikka’s entire population, gathered for a memorial walk through Sikka National Historical Park in a candlelight vigil near the site where Jessica’s body had been found.

 Local author John Straley would later call it the largest outdoor demonstration of community support he’d witnessed in over 45 years living there. Institutionally, the case moved in fits and starts. In 2007, the original Sikka detective, by then working as an Alaska State Trooper lieutenant, reopened the file and reviewed past suspects.

 But in 2015, Alaska’s cold case investigation unit was shut down entirely due to budget cuts, halting active work on Jessica’s case, along with dozens of others across the state. It would take two more years and one specific investigator’s return before the case started moving again and before the technology finally caught up to the evidence that had been sitting in that Anchorage freezer since 1996.

In 2017, Alaska’s cold case investigation unit was reestablished and investigator Randy McFaren was rehired to take control of the Bagen case file. By May of 2018, McFaren had identified a method that just a few years earlier hadn’t even existed as an investigative tool, forensic genetic genealogy. Here’s the fundamental difference between what investigators had access to in 1996 and what they had access to in 2018.

Traditional forensic DNA testing, RFLP, and PCRSTR analysis. The methods used at the original crime scene compares a small number of specific genetic markers. It’s incredibly effective for confirming or excluding a known suspect, but it’s essentially useless if you don’t already have someone to compare against, especially in an era when the National CODUS database was still in its infancy and didn’t contain profiles for most ordinary people.

 Genetic genealogy flips that entire approach on its head. Instead of comparing a handful of markers, it uses single nucleotide polymorphism or SNP genotyping analyzing over 1 million individual genetic variation points across the genome. That density of data doesn’t just tell you if two samples match. It tells you how two people are related, even if they’re only distant cousins who’ve never met.

In September 2018, Lance Jameson Uers of the Sitka Police Department worked with McFaren and the Alaska State Crime Lab to send the preserved 1996 crime scene seaman to Parabon Nano Labs, a private forensic genomics company. Parabon successfully built a detailed SNP profile from that decades old sample, proof that the careful preservation work done back in 1996 hadn’t just survived, it had survived well enough to power technology nobody in that era could have imagined.

 In February 2019, that digital profile was uploaded to two public genetic genealogy databases, GD Match and Family Tree DNA. And almost immediately, the search returned something investigators had never had in 23 years, actual leads. Several people in those databases shared small segments of DNA with the unknown killer. They weren’t the killer.

 They weren’t even close relatives. They were distant cousins sharing only fragments of a family tree that stretched back generations. That’s not a solved case. That’s a starting point. And turning that starting point into a name would fall to one specific analyst. Someone whose job over the following months looked less like modern forensics and more like painstaking historical detective work.

 Patty Busby, a criminal intelligence analyst with the Alaska Department of Public Safety, took the DNA matches from Ged Match and Family Tree DNA and began building backward. The process worked like this. Those distant cousin matches all shared some amount of DNA with the unidentified killer, which meant they were all connected to him somewhere on a family tree.

 Busby’s job alongside a genealogologist at Parabon was to find where those branches converged. Working methodically through public records, she and her colleague traced the connections all the way back to a single ancestral couple who had lived in the 1850s. From that 19th century starting point, they reversed the process, mapping forward again, generation by generation, reconstructing every branch of that family tree as it grew across more than a century and a half.

 By the time the tree was fully built out, it included thousands of living descendants scattered across the country. Obviously, you can’t investigate thousands of people. So, Busby cross referenced the entire family tree against one specific narrowing detail. which of these descendants had documented residency in Sikka, Alaska in May of 1996.

That single filter dramatically shrank the field. But even then, there were gaps, branches of the tree where the genetic and genealological trail went cold, where public records simply didn’t say enough. So Busby did something almost old-fashioned in the middle of this high-tech investigation. She started making phone calls, cold calls to distant relatives, trying to fill in the blanks. Most people hung up on her.

That’s what you’d expect when a stranger from a state crime lab calls asking about your family history in connection with an unsolved homicide. But one person didn’t hang up. One relative agreed to help and convinced an elderly family member to make their own genetic profile public on the database. That single elderly relative’s public DNA profile acted like a precision compass.

It gave Busby the missing coordinates she needed to narrow an entire family tree of thousands of descendants down to one specific branch, one specific family, the Branch family. By December 2019, more than 23 years after Jessica Baggin’s murder, investigators had a name, Steve Allen Branch. The same man who had been arrested for a nearly identical sexual assault in Sitka in 1996.

 The same man whose blood had been sitting in state custody since that arrest. the same man who had somehow never been cross-cheed against the case that genetic genealogy had just spent over a year working to point directly at him. Now they had a name. What they didn’t have yet was proof strong enough to make an arrest. Getting that proof would mean tracking down a man who had left Alaska behind entirely, and it would take a strategy investigators hadn’t planned on needing.

 By 2019, Steve Allen Branch was no longer in Alaska. After his acquitt in the Seaart assault case, he had stayed in Sitka for over a decade before relocating permanently to Austin, Arkansas. In 2010, a small rural town outside Little Rock. In January 2020, investigator Randy McFaren reached out to the Arkansas State Police for help with something deceptively simple, obtaining a discarded DNA sample from Branch without alerting him to the investigation.

 Genetic genealogy had pointed to him, but pointing isn’t proof. Investigators needed a direct biological sample to confirm the match before they could move forward. Discarded items, something thrown away in the trash, left behind in public, don’t carry the same legal protections as a person’s body, which meant surveillance teams could legally collect and test them without a warrant.

 But Branch’s property outside Little Rock was isolated and his public activity was limited. Weeks of surveillance in Arkansas came back empty-handed. So investigators pivoted to a second angle. one much closer to home. If they couldn’t get a sample from Branch directly, they could get one from someone who shared his DNA.

 Sitka Police Department officers under LTE Jameson Uers identified a close relative of Branch still living in Sitka and began monitoring them. Over the course of 3 weeks, officers legally recovered a discarded biological sample from that relative. The Alaska State Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory sequenced it and Parabon ran the comparison against the original 1996 crime scene profile.

In May 2020, the results came back a firstderee biological relationship, not a distant cousin, a parent, sibling, or child level match. Combined with everything the genetic genealogy work had already built, this was as close to certainty as investigators could get without Branch’s DNA directly in hand. They now knew with extremely high confidence exactly who had killed Jessica Baggin 24 years earlier.

 But knowing isn’t the same as confronting. And 2020 had one more obstacle waiting. A global pandemic that would delay the final step of this investigation by several critical months. CO 19 travel restrictions pushed the investigation’s endgame back until early August 2020. Finally, investigators from the Alaska Bureau of Investigation flew to Arkansas on August 3rd, 2020.

 They arrived at Steve Allen Branch’s home in Austin, Arkansas, and confronted him directly. Branch denied knowing Jessica Baggin. He claimed to have no memory of the 1996 murder. And when investigators asked him to voluntarily provide a DNA sample, he refused. Faced with that refusal, the detectives did what the law required.

They left to go secure a search warrant that would compel a sample regardless of his cooperation. Approximately 30 minutes after they drove away, Steve Allen Branch himself. The Lono County Sheriff’s Office in Arkansas confirmed his death was a died. Investigators still executed the search warrant, not on a living suspect, but during his autopsy, collecting a post-mortem blood sample.

 On August 10th, 2020, the Alaska State Crime Lab compared that sample against the 1996 crime scene profile using standard STR analysis, the same fundamental technology that had failed to identify Branch back in 1996, except this time they finally had the right name to test it against. It was a complete unambiguous match. On August 11th, 2020, 24 years, 3 months, and one week after Jessica Baggin’s murder, the Alaska Department of Public Safety officially declared the case solved and closed by exception.

 Amanda Price, the commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Public Safety, addressed the resolution publicly, acknowledging its bittersweet nature directly. Branch would never face a jury for what he did, but Jessica’s case could finally be called solved. She emphasized that every cold case represents a grieving family still waiting for answers and that no amount of time makes a case any less of a priority.

 Major Dave Hansen of the Alaska State Troopers laid out the scientific path that led to that resolution during a public liveream walking through the discovery of the shirt, the recovery of the body 70 ft off the bike path and the confrontation in Arkansas that ended with Branch taking his own life just 30 minutes after investigators departed.

 Randy McFaren, the investigator who had pushed for genetic genealogy back in 2018, was direct about who actually solved this case. Two genealogologists, one at Parabon and one at the Alaska Department of Public Safety, Patty Busby, whose painstaking family tree work had finally pointed investigators in the right direction after two and a half decades of dead ends.

 And Galen Payne, the public defender who had once fought to clear Richard Bingham’s name, offered perhaps the sharpest assessment of the whole case. She pointed out that the effort to build a case against Bingham had actively distracted investigators from pursuing Jessica’s real killer and asked the question that still lingers over this entire story.

 If Steve Branch wasn’t the suspect in 1996, why the hell not? He was clearly on their radar at the right time, or should have been, for George Baggin, who had spent two decades funding investigations and refusing to let his daughter’s case fade into memory. The resolution brought a version of closure, tempered permanently by the fact that the man responsible would never stand trial, never have to answer for what he did in front of a jury of Jessica’s community.

 If this case pulled you into how genetic genealogy is rewriting what cold case even means, it wasn’t a one-off. Alaska used this exact same method to crack the Sophie Sergy case and the Shelley Connelly case. Two more murders that sat unsolved for decades before a family tree cracked them open. I’ve broken down that story, too.

 And it’s just as unsettling as this one. Go watch it next because once you see how this technology works, you start to understand just how few unsolvable cases are actually unsolvable. anymore.