HAWAII 1991 Cold Case Solved After 33 Years — Killer Killed Himself Before Police Arrested Him

In January 2023, a judge in Hilo, Hawaii, looked at a man who had spent nearly 25 years in prison and ordered his shackles removed immediately. Ian Schwitzer stood up, walked across the courtroom, and hugged his mother. He told reporters afterward that the state had murdered 25 years of his life, that they had kidnapped him from his family, that they had taken everything.

He was one of three men convicted of killing Dana Ireland on Christmas Eve 1991. The DNA excluded all of them before two were even sentenced. Prosecutors convicted them anyway. And the man whose DNA actually matched the crime scene. He had been living quietly in a subdivision five miles from where Dana was found.

For 33 years, nobody ever knocked on his door. This is the story of how Hawaii convicted the wrong men, how science finally exposed the truth, and why the answers when they finally arrived came too late for almost everyone. If you believe stories like these deserve to be told, that like button and that subscribe button help make sure they are.

 Now, let’s go back to the beginning. Not to the crime, to the person. Dana Marie Ireland was born on December 12th, 1968 in Springfield, Virginia, about 11 miles from Washington DC. She was the younger of John and Louise Ireland’s two daughters. Her sister Sandra was 13 years older and had been the one to name her. Dana grew up in a three-bedroom house in the Virginia suburbs.

 She went to Keen Mill Elementary, then Washington Irving Middle School, then West Springfield High. She was athletic and outdoorsy. She loved being active. She was the kind of person who found her energy outside, not sitting still. Her mother, Louise, called her my pride and joy, and the people who knew Dana said it without hesitation.

 She had a warmth to her that made people comfortable. After high school, Dana attended Radford University and then transferred to George Mason University where she graduated in June 1991 with a bachelor’s degree in sports physiology. She was 22 years old with plans to work in physical therapy. She wanted to help people move better, recover stronger, live more fully.

 That was the kind of person she was, oriented toward making things better for whoever was in front of her. Her sister Sandra had been living on the big island of Hawaii for years. And after graduation, Dana made a decision that felt like the most natural thing in the world. [music] She would move to Hawaii to be near her sister. Start fresh in paradise.

 see what life looked like when you stripped away everything familiar and started over somewhere beautiful. Dana arrived on the big island in October 1991. [music] She had been there barely 2 months when Christmas came around. In that short time, she was already building a life. She was getting scuba certified.

 She was taking long bike rides along the red cinder roads in Puna, exploring the volcanic coastline on the island’s eastern side. She was job hunting. She had started dating a young carpenter and surfer who lived nearby in Oihikao. She was falling in love with the island the way so many people do when they first arrive. Everything felt open.

 Everything felt possible. Her parents visited that fall. Louise cooked Thanksgiving dinner in a rented kitchen and the family gathered the way they always did, just somewhere warmer. John and Louise could see how happy their daughter was, how alive. The move was clearly the right call. Dana had found her place.

 She had no idea that Christmas Eve 1991 would be her last day alive. We cover cases like Dana’s every week on this channel. Subscribe so you never miss one. On the afternoon of December 24th, 1991, Dana borrowed her sister [music] Sandra’s bicycle. It was Christmas Eve and she wanted to ride roughly 8 miles along the roads through Puna to invite the young man she had been dating to Christmas dinner with her family.

 They were staying in the Capo vacationland beach community on the eastern [music] coast. It was a casual afternoon ride through a place she was only just getting to know. He was likely the last person to see her before everything changed. Around 5:30 in the evening, good Samaritans driving along Capo Kai Drive came across a scene that [music] stopped them cold.

 A mangled bicycle was lying in the road. Next to it, a single shoe, a watch. Clumps of hair on the red cinder surface, but no rider, no person anywhere in sight. They called 911. Roughly 30 minutes later and about 5 miles away, a woman walking near a fishing trail in the Wahwa subdivision found Dana Ireland in the brush. She was nude from the waist down.

 She was barely conscious. [music] She was incoherent. She had been struck by a vehicle with enough force to break her pelvis and cause catastrophic [music] internal injuries. After the collision, she had been taken from the road, transported to that remote trail, and sexually assaulted. Then she was left there alone in the fading light of Christmas Eve.

 The ambulance took nearly 2 hours to reach her. By the time Dana arrived at Hilo Medical Center, there was almost nothing doctors could do. She [music] died at 12:07 a.m. on Christmas Day, December 25th, 1991, from massive blood loss. She was 23 years old. She had been on the Big Island for 67 days. The news broke across Hawaii on Christmas morning.

 [music] A young woman from the mainland. Visiting family for the holidays killed on a rural road in Puna. [music] The details were almost incomprehensible. The violence of it, the brazeness. Puna was not the kind of place where things like this happened. It was rural, volcanic, a community of farmers and fishermen, and people who had come to Hawaii for the quiet life.

The idea that someone had been struck off a bicycle, taken, assaulted, and left to die on a fishing trail 5 miles away shook the island in a way that nothing had in decades. The Big Island is not a small place geographically, but it is a small place socially. Everyone knows someone who knows someone. The murder of Dana Ireland rippled outward through those connections until there was no one on the island who hadn’t heard about it, talked about it, or asked the same question.

 Who could have done this? Dana Ireland died on Christmas morning. And the investigation that followed her death would become the most significant murder case on the Big Island since the racially charged Massie case of 1932. A case that would consume the island for the next three decades. A case that would destroy lives far beyond the one already taken.

Investigators collected extensive physical evidence from two separate crime scenes at the bicycle site on Capo Kai Drive. They recovered the damaged bike, one of Dana’s shoes, her watch, and the clumps of hair torn from her head. At the fishing trail in Wawwa, where she was found, they recovered more of her clothing.

 a child’s sneaker and socks, beer bottles, cigarette butts, a pair of men’s underwear, [music] and a blood soaked t-shirt from a brand called Jimmy Z. Testing confirmed the blood on that shirt was Dana Ireland’s. Multiple witnesses in the area reported seeing [music] suspicious vehicles near Capo around the time of the attack, a dark-coled pickup truck, and a beige van.

 Investigators focused on trucks and large vehicles from the start. Partly because of those witness accounts and partly because an accident reconstruction engineer named James Campbell of Pajoa concluded that a van or pickup truck was responsible for the collision that struck Dana off her bicycle. For 3 years, investigators followed [music] that theory and came up empty. The case went cold.

 The physical evidence sat in storage. The witness’s memories faded. and the Ireland family watched from across across an ocean as the investigation that was supposed to deliver justice slowly ground to a halt. John Ireland, Dana’s father, became a relentless victim’s rights advocate. The family offered a reward of $22,200 for information leading to a conviction.

A citizens group called Citizens for Justice formed on the island and began pressuring Hawaii County authorities to act. Media coverage on the Big Island kept the case in the public eye. Judge Peter Kubota, who would later play a pivotal role in this story, observed that the public pressure surrounding the Ireland case was unlike anything in modern Hawaiian history.

 But pressure alone doesn’t solve murders. And behind the public urgency, the investigation was struggling. The physical evidence from the crime scenes was extensive, but nothing connected it to a specific person. The dark pickup truck and beige van that witnesses reported were common vehicles in rural Puna. The Jimmy Z t-shirt soaked in Dana’s blood was a mass-roduced brand.

 The men’s underwear, the beer bottles, the cigarette butts, none of it pointed investigators to a doorstep. Hundreds of tips came in. [music] Investigators chased each one. None panned out. The frustration inside the Hawaii Police Department was real, but so was something more dangerous. The pressure to produce a result, to give the Ireland family and the island and the media a name was building toward a critical mass.

 As the six-year statute of limitations on the kidnapping and sexual assault charges crept closer, [music] the community’s demand for answers became something closer to desperation. If the clock ran out on those charges, the only crime that could still be prosecuted was murder. And even that depended on finding a suspect. Everyone wanted someone to pay for what happened to Dana Ireland.

 And that desire for accountability, as understandable as it was, would end up consuming three innocent men. The break, when it finally came, didn’t come from forensic evidence. It didn’t come from a witness stepping forward. It came from inside a jail cell and it would set in motion one of the worst miscarriages of justice in the history of the state of Hawaii.

In May 1994, a man named John Gonolves was sitting in a jail cell facing serious federal drug and cocaine conspiracy charges. The kind of charges that carry decades of prison time. And Gonolves had a card to play. He told investigators that his half-brother, a man named Frank Pauline Jr., who was already serving a 10-year sentence for an unrelated crime, had information about the Dana Ireland murder.

Investigators jumped on it. By December 1994, Pauline was talking. He told police he had been present during the attack on Dana Ireland. He said he was in a vehicle with two brothers, Ian and Shawn Schweitzer, when they struck her with their car, abducted her, and assaulted her. He claimed he had personally hit Dana with a tire iron.

 It sounded like the break the island had been waiting for, but there was a problem with Pauline’s story. [music] Actually, there were a lot of problems. Over the course of at least seven separate interviews with investigators, Pauline gave wildly inconsistent accounts of what happened. Details changed between sessions.

 Key facts contradicted each other. The narrative shifted every time he told it. He was not a man recalling a traumatic event he had witnessed. He was a man constructing a story, adjusting it based on what investigators seemed to want to hear. And the incentive structure behind his testimony was staggering.

 Gonzalves, who had pointed police toward Pauline in the first place, received probation on his drug charges. Pauline himself stood to gain leverage on his own sentence. A second jailhouse informant named Michael Ortiz later emerged, claiming that Ian Schweitzer had confessed to the murder while they were locked up together.

Ortiz was facing retrial and a potential 10-year sentence at the time. After cooperating, his sentence was reduced to time served. Every single person whose testimony built the case against the Schweitzer brothers had something massive to gain by saying what prosecutors wanted to hear. Not one of them had anything to lose.

 And the [music] system that was supposed to catch this, the prosecutors and judges who were supposed to evaluate the reliability of incentivized testimony let it sail through without scrutiny. What made Pauline’s testimony especially dangerous [music] was its specificity. Not the kind of specificity that comes from having actually witnessed something, but the kind that comes from being coached consciously or unconsciously through repeated interviews with investigators who needed a story to fit the evidence. Over those

seven interviews, details were added, changed, and refined. Contradictions were papered over. The narrative was shaped until it resembled something a jury could believe. And on July 6th, 1996, 3 years before the case went to trial, Frank Pauline Jr. recanted his entire confession. He told investigators he had made it all up, every word of it.

He said the Schweitzer brothers had nothing to do with Dana Ireland’s murder. Recontations in criminal cases create a difficult [music] legal situation. Prosecutors have to decide whether the original statement or the recantation is truthful. In this case, the prosecution chose to believe the version that supported their case and discard the [music] version that destroyed it.

 They moved forward with Pauline’s original statements, the ones he gave while his half brother was getting probation on drug charges. The prosecution used his original statements anyway. The jury never fully understood the context of how those statements were obtained or why the man who made them had taken them back. If this case is making your blood boil, you’re not alone.

 Hit like so more people hear what happened to Dana Ireland and the men who were wrongfully convicted. While the state built its case on the back of paid testimony and recanted confessions, the physical evidence was telling a very different story. [music] DNA testing had been conducted on Dana Ireland’s sexual assault kit and on spermatzoa recovered from the hospital gurnie sheet beneath her.

 The results pointed to a single male contributor. Investigators labeled that profile unknown male number one. That profile excluded Frank Pauline Jr. It excluded Ian Schweitzer. It excluded Sha Schweitzer. Three men accused, three men tested, three men eliminated. All three were ruled out by the DNA evidence before two of them were even sentenced.

The science was as clear as science gets. [music] The man who had assaulted Dana Ireland was not any of the men the state was preparing to put on trial. [music] This is the moment in the story where you would expect the prosecution to stop, to step back, to say, “Wait, if the DNA doesn’t match any of our suspects, we need to find out whose DNA it is.

” That would have been the responsible course of action. That would have been the just course of action. And if prosecutors had taken that step in the late 1990s, the real perpetrator could have been identified years earlier. Three innocent men would never have been convicted [music] and Frank Pauline Jr. might still be alive. But that is not what happened.

 Prosecutors did not drop the charges. They did not go looking for unknown male number one. Instead, they crafted a theory to explain away the DNA. They told the jury that there must have been a fourth unknown participant in the attack. Someone who had assaulted Dana, but was not one of the three men on trial, a phantom attacker whose DNA happened to be at the crime scene while three innocent men committed the murder around him.

 It was a theory with no evidence to support it, but it gave the prosecution a way to keep moving forward. The forensic case they built around the Schweitzers was equally hollow. Prosecutors pointed to Ian Schweitzer’s Volkswagen Beetle as the vehicle that struck Dana off her bicycle. There was a problem with that, too. [music] Ian did not purchase that car until roughly 3 months after the murder.

 The vehicle they claimed he used to kill Dana Ireland was not his car at the time Dana Ireland was killed. A medical examiner also testified that a circular wound on Dana’s body was a bite mark that could be linked to Frank Pauline Jr. That testimony was presented to the jury as forensic [music] science. It was not forensic science.

 It was a guess dressed up in medical authority. And years later, experts would demolish it completely. So, here is what the state of Hawaii had when it walked into the courtroom to try three men for the murder of Dana Ireland. They had DNA evidence that excluded all three defendants. They had testimony from jailhouse informants who had received sentence reductions for cooperating.

 They had a lead witness who had recanted his entire confession. They had a car that that belonged to someone else at the time of the murder. And they had a bitemark analysis that would later be debunked. They went to trial anyway and they won. Frank Pauline Jr. was convicted on August 27th, 1999 of murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault.

 He was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 180 years. Albert Ian Schweitzer was convicted on February 15th, 2000 of secondderee murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault. He was sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years for kidnapping and another 20 years for sexual assault. Ian Schweitzer had been working as a nurse at a hospital on Kauaii when he was arrested. He had a career.

 He had a life. He had a family. All of it disappeared the day the state of Hawaii decided he was guilty, despite what the DNA said. And then there was Shawn. Shawn Schweitzer had been 16 years old on Christmas Eve 1991. A teenager, he watched his older brother get convicted in a courtroom and sentenced to die in prison.

 And then prosecutors turned to him. Shawn’s parents faced an impossible calculation. They had already lost one son to the system. The prospect of losing another at trial was more than they could bear. Rather than risk a jury verdict, Shawn pleaded guilty to manslaughter and kidnapping. He received credit for about a year of time served and 5 [music] years of probation.

His parents later said they did not want to risk losing another son. Shawn Schweitzer was a teenager who pleaded guilty to a crime he did not commit [music] because the alternative was watching the system that already destroyed his brother come for him next. Think about what that does to a family. Think about what it means to sit in a room with your parents and your lawyer and agree to say you did something you know you didn’t do because the truth already failed your brother and you have no reason to believe it will protect

you. The Schweitzer family was not wealthy. They were not connected. They did not have the resources to fight the state of Hawaii across multiple trials with expert witnesses and DNA specialists. They were a local family caught in the machinery of a prosecution [music] that needed a conviction more than it needed the truth.

 Three men were behind bars. The DNA pointed to someone else [music] and the case was considered closed. The community had its answer. The media moved on. The file was shelved. And unknown male number one, the man whose genetic material was on Dana Ireland’s body and clothing and on the blood soaked shirt at the fishing trail, remained a phantom.

A label in an evidence log [music] that nobody was looking for. The years that followed the convictions were a slow, grinding devastation that [music] touched everyone connected to this case. Ian Schweitzer sat in a prison cell for nearly 25 years. He maintained his innocence [music] from the first day to the last. He never wavered.

 He never accepted a plea for a reduced sentence, which would have required admitting guilt. He chose to sit in a cell and insist on the truth, even when the truth wasn’t setting him free. He had been a nurse before his arrest, a health care worker, a man who had dedicated his career to taking care of people. That career was gone the day he was convicted.

 His 20s disappeared, then his 30s, then his 40s. He watched the world transform through the narrow window of incarceration. Saw technology leap forward. Saw the rise of DNA databases and forensic genealogy and all the tools that could have freed him years earlier if anyone had been willing to use them. But no one was looking at his case.

 No one was revisiting the evidence. The conviction stood and Ian Schweitzer sat. Frank Pauline Jr. was transferred to a prison in New Mexico in December 2012, thousands of miles from Hawaii. On April 27th, 2015, his 42nd birthday, he was attacked and killed by another inmate named Daniel Hood.

 Hood reportedly said he killed Pauline because he thought Pauline was a snitch and because he walked around like he owned the place. Pauline’s death came [music] exactly one day after the Hawaii Tribune Herald reported that the Innocence Project had taken up Ian Schweitzer’s case. One day, Frank Pauline Jr. did not live to see the investigation that would have cleared him.

 He died on his birthday [music] in a prison in the desert for a crime the DNA always said he [music] did not commit. And the Ireland family endured their own sentence. Dana’s father, John, died in [music] 2000, just one year after the convictions, never knowing whether the right men were behind bars, and never receiving the closure he had fought for.

 He had spent [music] the last decade of his life advocating for victim’s rights, offering rewards, pressuring the authorities. He once told reporters that dealing with Hawaii’s justice [music] system was worse than Murphy’s law. Everything was screwed up, he said, because they don’t give a damn.

 Dana’s mother, Louise, died in 2016 at the age of 92. She lived for 25 years after her daughter’s murder. A quarter century of Christmases without Dana. A quarter century of wondering if the men in prison were really the ones who did it. She too died without ever learning who actually killed her daughter. Neither of Dana’s parents lived to see justice.

neither lived to hear the name of the man whose DNA had been at the crime scene from the very first day. The scholarship they established in Dana’s name at George Mason University, [music] supporting Virginia or Hawaii students whose family member was a homicide victim was the closest thing they had to a legacy for their [music] daughter.

Louise and John Ireland poured their grief into that scholarship, into advocacy, into the belief that their daughter’s death could at least mean something for someone else. It was not justice. [music] It was all they had. For nearly three decades, the Dana Ireland case existed in a kind of limbo. Three men convicted.

 The community told the case was closed. But the DNA sitting in an evidence file quietly contradicting everything. [music] And nobody with the power to do anything about it was willing to reopen the wound. But in 2019, a door cracked open. and what came through it would change everything. In 2019, something unprecedented happened.

 Ian Schweitzer’s attorneys and Hawaii County prosecutors entered into what was called a conviction integrity agreement. It was a formal arrangement to reinvestigate the case from scratch [music] with both sides agreeing to follow the evidence wherever it led. It was the first agreement of its kind in the history of the state of Hawaii in a system that had spent decades defending the convictions.

 This was the first crack in the wall. The Hawaii Innocence Project, [music] co-directed by Kenneth Lawson, had been pushing for this moment for years. Lawson’s team joined forces with the National Innocence Project, the organization founded by Barry Sheek and Peter Newfeld that had pioneered the use of DNA evidence to overturn wrongful convictions across the United States.

Attorney Susan Freriedman, exper experienced in exactly this kind of case, took the lead. The approach was straightforward but painstaking. Forget the testimony. Forget the theories. Forget the narrative that prosecutors had constructed in the late 1990s. Go back to the physical evidence, the actual tangible material that had been collected from the crime scenes on Christmas Eve 1991 and from Donna Ireland’s body at Hilo Medical Center.

evidence that had been sitting in storage for nearly three decades, waiting to be examined with tools that didn’t exist when it was first collected. Advanced DNA testing, far more sophisticated than anything available during the original investigation, established something devastating for the prosecution’s case.

 The habitual wearer of the blood soaked Jimmy Z t-shirt found at the fishing trail was a single individual. That individual was the same unknown male number one whose DNA profile had been recovered from Dana Ireland’s sexual assault kit from the hospital gurnie sheet from her underwear and from pubic combings collected during her examination.

 One man, one DNA profile present across every critical piece of evidence in the case. And that man was not Ian Schweitzer. He was not Shawn Schweitzer. He was not Frank Pauline Jr. [music] The Innocence Project brought in additional experts to dismantle the remaining pillars of the prosecution’s case. A tire tread analyst named Matthew Marvin examined the evidence and concluded that Ian Schweitzer’s Volkswagen Beetle could not have produced the tracks found at the crime scene.

 The car prosecutor said killed Dana Ireland could not have been the car that killed Dana Ireland. A forensic odontologist named Dr. Adam Freeman examined the wound on Dana’s body that the state’s medical examiner had called a bite mark linked to Frank Pauline Jr. Dr. Freeman studied the wound in detail and reached a conclusion that eviscerated the prosecution’s case.

It was not a bite mark at all. The testimony that had been presented to a jury as forensic science linking Pauline to the crime was not science. It was an incorrect interpretation that should never have been offered in a courtroom. Bitemark analysis has since been widely discredited in the forensic community.

Multiple studies have shown that human skin is too elastic and variable to reliably preserve the unique characteristics of a person’s bite pattern. Experts now consider bite mark matching to be one of the least reliable forms of forensic evidence ever used in criminal proceedings. And in this case, the wound wasn’t even a bite mark to begin with.

 Every single piece of evidence the state had used to convict three men was demolished. The DNA excluded them. The tire tracks excluded them. The bite mark wasn’t a bite mark. The informant testimony came from men who had been paid in reduced sentences for their cooperation. And the lead witness had recanted everything 3 years before the trials even began.

On January 24th, 2023, Ian Schweitzer walked into a courtroom in Hilo, Hawaii. He was wearing the same kind of prison clothing he had worn for most of his adult life. He was shackled. He had been shackled for nearly 25 years. Judge Peter Kubota reviewed the evidence. He reviewed the DNA results.

 He reviewed the expert testimony that had demolished the tire tracks and the bite mark. And then he spoke five words that echoed through the courtroom and across every news outlet in Hawaii. Remove his shackles immediately. The corrections [music] officers came forward. The shackles came off Ian Schweitzer’s wrists for the last time.

 [music] He stood up. He looked around the courtroom and then he walked across the room to his mother, Linda, who had been sitting there waiting for this moment for a generation. He hugged her and the courtroom erupted in applause. There is a particular kind of grief that sits underneath those moments of celebration because the joy of freedom cannot erase the years that were taken.

 Ian Schwitzer was arrested when he was a working nurse with a career and a life. He walked out of that courtroom as a middle-aged man who had lost everything. his 20s, his 30s, [music] his 40s, the relationships he might have built, the career he might have had, the children he might have raised, all of it gone.

 Outside the courthouse, Ian spoke to reporters from the Associated Press. His words were precise and devastating. He said the state had murdered 25 years of his life, that they had kidnapped him from his family, that they had taken his ability to be a son. The language was deliberate. Murder, kidnapping. The same crimes he had been convicted of turned back on the system that did them to him.

Judge Kabota told Ian that he was now entering the final third of his life and advised him to live it with a new freedom rather than anger. It was compassionate advice from a judge who understood that what had been done to Ian Schweitzer could not be undone by a court order. The years could not be returned.

 The damage could not be repaired. Only the future remained. 9 months later, on October 23rd, 2023, Shaun Schweitzer’s conviction was vacated after he formally withdrew his guilty plea. A polygraph examination conducted in November found him truthful in denying any involvement in Dana Ireland’s murder. After more than two decades [music] of carrying the weight of a false confession, Shawn Schweitzer was legally free.

 Two brothers exonerated, one codefendant dead in a New Mexico prison. The case that Hawaii had called closed for over two [music] decades, was blown wide open. And the central question, the one that had haunted every piece of evidence since 1991, the one that prosecutors had spent years trying to explain away, was now impossible to ignore.

 If they didn’t do it, who did? Unknown male number one was still out there. His DNA had been on Dana Ireland’s body for 33 years. His genetic profile had been sitting in an evidence file matching no one in any criminal database, pointing at someone that no investigator had ever found. A ghost with a genetic fingerprint. A phantom with a real biological identity that science could now, for the first time in the history of this case, actually trace.

 For 33 years, unknown male number one had been a label, a placeholder for a person nobody could identify. Now, for the first time, someone with the right tools was actually looking for him. The Hawaii Innocence Project hired a private firm called Indago Solutions. The company was led by Steve Kramer, a former FBI attorney and federal prosecutor with a reputation in forensic genetic genealogy circles that was hard to overstate.

Kramer had been part of the team that cracked the Golden State Killer case in 2018, the investigation that proved forensic genealogy could identify suspects that decades of traditional police work could not. Kramer took the DNA profile of unknown male number one and ran it through forensic genetic genealogy.

The process involved uploading the profile to public genealogy databases where it could be compared against the DNA of people who had voluntarily submitted their own genetic information to trace their family histories. When partial matches appeared, indicate indicating distant relatives. Kramer and his team began building family trees in Hawaii.

 That meant tracing lineages through records that went back to the 1700s, following branches of families across generations. The DNA profile told them something about the man they were looking for before they had a name. His ancestry was approximately 80 to 83% Filipino, suggesting three Filipino grandparents with some northern European, Scandinavian, and Pacific Islander heritage.

 That genetic fingerprint combined with the family tree analysis narrowed the search. On February 26th, 2024, Indigo Solutions identified a possible match. a man whose genetics, ancestry, [music] age, and address history aligned with everything the evidence suggested. His name was Albert Lo Jr. Lo was 57 years old. He had lived in Hawaiian Paradise Park, a subdivision community on the Big Island.

Before that, he had lived in the Hawaiian Beaches subdivision. Both locations were within about 2 mi of the fishing trail in Waw Wa where Dana Ireland had been found on Christmas Eve 1991. He was an avid shore fisherman. He knew the trail where Dana was left to die. He was familiar with the area in a way that only someone who spent [music] time there regularly would be.

 In 1991, he had been 25 years old. His social media indicated access to a pickup truck during that period. consistent with the type of vehicle witnesses had reported seeing near Capo on Christmas Eve. And in 33 years of investigation, thousands of tips, multiple grand jury proceedings, and three wrongful convictions, not one investigator had ever looked at Albert Loro Jr.

 He had essentially no criminal record. A single shoplifting arrest in 1987 at age 21. That was it. He was married. He was a father. He held down a job. He went fishing. He lived his entire adult life within miles of where Dana Ireland was killed and never once drew the attention of law enforcement.

 That is the part that is hardest to sit with. for 33 years. While three innocent men were convicted and imprisoned and one of them was killed, [music] the actual perpetrator was living a normal life less than 2 mi from the fishing trail where he left Dana, Ireland to die. He [music] watched the news coverage. He watched the arrests.

 He watched the convictions. He watched the community say justice had been served. And he said [music] nothing. There was no dramatic confrontation with a suspect, no interrogation room confession. There was just a name on a list passed from Indigo Solutions to the FBI and the surveillance began under FBI and Hawaii County police observation.

Investigators watched Loro go about his daily routine. They followed him to work. They followed him around town. They watched and they waited for the moment that would give them what they needed. A piece of discarded DNA that could be tested without his knowledge. In early July 2024, that moment came. Investigators retrieved a fork that Loro had used and thrown away at a plate lunch restaurant.

 It was the kind of mundane everyday action that Loro had performed thousands of times without thinking. pick up a fork, eat lunch, throw the fork away. But this time, someone was watching. And this time, the fork went to a lab instead of a garbage truck. The lab tested the DNA on the fork against the profile of unknown male number one from the 1991 crime scene.

 It matched the profile that had been sitting in evidence storage for 33 years. The profile that had excluded every suspect ever investigated finally had a face and a name. [music] After 33 years, the ghost in the evidence file was real, and he was living on the Big Island, 2 miles from where Dana Ireland died.

 But what happened next is the part of the story that haunts everyone who worked the case. And it raises a question that may never be satisfactorily answered. Why, after 33 years of searching, did investigators let the man they found walk out the door? The surreptitious fork sample had already matched the crime scene DNA.

 In the world of forensic genetic genealogy, that match is typically sufficient to establish probable cause for arrest. Steve Kramer, the man who identified Loro, had [music] worked dozens of cold cases using exactly this method. In every single one, the surreptitious DNA sample was treated as grounds for arrest. [music] You identify the suspect, you confirm the DNA match, you make the arrest.

[music] That is how it is done. But Hawaii County Police chose a different path. Rather than arrest Albert Luro Jr. Based on the fork sample, they obtained a court order for a confirmatory buckle swab, a cheek swab that would provide a second, more legally airtight DNA match. On July 19th, 2024, Loro voluntarily came to the police station. He sat down.

 He was interviewed for approximately 1 hour. [music] He provided the cheek swab. Then he asked if he could leave. They let him go. They let a man whose DNA matched the most infamous unsolved murder in Hawaii history walk out of a police station and drive home. Albert Lo Jr. walked out of that police station and went home. 4 days later, on July 23rd, 2024, he was found dead at his residence.

 The cause was apparent suicide. He was 57 years old. The following day, the lab results from the cheek swab came back. They confirmed the match. Albert Lauro Jr. was unknown male number one. His DNA had been on Dana Ireland’s body, on her clothing, and on the blood soaked t-shirt at the fishing trail for 33 years.

 [music] He was never arrested, never charged with any crime related to Dana Ireland’s murder. Never spent a single day in a jail cell for what he did to her. Three [music] innocent men spent a combined total of decades in prison for a crime committed by a man who died free. Police Chief Benjamin Moscow issued a statement explaining that the statute of limitations had expired on the kidnapping and sexual assault charges, leaving only murder.

 And on the murder charge, Moscow said [music] there was insufficient probable cause to establish that Loro intentionally or knowingly caused Ireland’s death. The man the DNA pointed to for 33 years was gone. And the questions were just beginning. Steve Kramer, the forensic genealogologist who had identified Loro, was blunt in his criticism.

 He called the decision to take a second swab and release Loro rather than rely on the fork sample black and white wrong. In every case Kramer had worked, surreptitious DNA established probable cause for arrest. Taking a confirmatory swab and then letting the suspect walk out the door served only one purpose in his view. It tipped Loro off.

 The Hawaii Innocence Project’s attorney, William Harrison, said that his organization had explicitly warned police that if they contacted Loro and released him, he would either run or he would commit suicide. Those were their exact words to investigators. Their warning came true. Randall Roth, a University of Hawaii law professor, Emmeritus and former co-chair of the Hawaii Innocence Project, published a detailed critique, calling the police and prosecutor’s handling of the case irresponsible and inept.

 But the criticism went beyond how police handled Loro in July 2024. It reached back into the original investigation and the prosecution that followed. Because even after the exonerations, even after the DNA demolished every piece of evidence used to convict the Schweitzer brothers, Hawaii County prosecutors refused to concede.

 Deputy prosecutor Shannon Kagawa continued to float a theory [music] that the Schweitzers might still have been involved. Prosecutors argued that the attack could have involved four men, not three, and that the DNA of unknown male number one simply indicated an additional participant rather than a different perpetrator.

 The defense called this theory what it was, grasping at straws. The brother’s original cases had been dismissed without prejudice, a legal distinction that meant charges could theoretically be refiled at any time. Hawaii County fought to keep the investigative file on Albert Luro Jr. sealed from the public. The county also fought to keep the investigative file on Albert Luro Jr.

 sealed from public view, arguing the investigation was ongoing. The Hawaii Supreme Court weighed in on October 10, 2024. ruling that the records could remain sealed during an active investigation. But Judge Kubota, [music] the same judge who had freed Ian Schweitzer, pushed back on the premise itself. In a hearing, Kubota addressed the county’s position directly.

 He noted that in all practical reality, the investigation into Albert Luro Jr. and the murder of Dana Ireland was over. The suspect was dead. The DNA was confirmed. There was no trial to prepare for, no arrest to protect, no ongoing search for additional suspects that sealing the records might serve. And then Kubota asked the question that captured the absurdity of the entire situation.

 Are you going to prosecute this dead guy? The county did not have a good answer. Dana’s sister, Sandra, the only surviving member of Dana’s immediate family, said she would never return to the Big Island. The island where her sister had arrived barely 2 months before her death, full of excitement and plans.

 The island where Dana had been so happy getting scuba certified [music] and riding her bike through Puna. The island that had failed her in every way. A community can fail a person. The case remains formally open. As of the latest reporting, no one has been held accountable for Dana Ireland’s murder. Not the man whose DNA was at the crime scene.

 Not the prosecutors who convicted three innocent men despite that DNA. Not the investigators who let a confirmed suspect walk out of a police station. Nobody. On January 21st, 2025, Ian and Shawn Schwitzer filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in United States District Court in Honolulu. They named Hawaii County Police Chief Benjamin Moscow, Deputy Chief Reed Mahuna, former Chief Paul Ferrer, Detective Steven Guilermo, and other former officers, and a prosecutor as defendants.

 The brothers alleged they had been framed through fabricated informant statements, [music] malicious prosecution, and the suppression of evidence. They are represented by Honolulu attorney William Harrison [music] and by the Chicago civil rights firm Loy and Loi whose attorney David Owens stated publicly that the failures in this case let a killer go free for 33 years and failed [music] Dana Ireland and her family.

 Under Hawaii’s Exonery Compensation Statute, wrongfully convicted individuals can receive [music] $50,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment. The Schweitzer brothers are seeking financial damages. As of the most recent reporting, neither brother has received a single dollar in compensation.

 The state of Hawaii continues [music] to contest their claims. A compensation trial is scheduled. The brothers are still fighting. Hawaii, as of this reporting, still has no law regulating jailhouse informant [music] testimony. There is no tracking system for how often informants are used, no requirement that prosecutors [music] disclose the deals informants received, and no reliability hearing where a judge evaluates whether an informant’s word is trustworthy before it reaches a jury.

 The very mechanism that destroyed three lives in this case remains [music] completely unregulated in the state. The Innocence Project’s national data underscores how common this failure is. Informant testimony has been a contributing factor in 17% of all DNA exonerations in the United States. [music] In murder cases specifically, that number rises to roughly 50%.

Unvalidated or improper forensic science, the kind used to present a wound as a bite mark linked to Frank Pauline Jr. has been a factor in approximately 52% of wrongful conviction cases in [music] the Innocence Project’s case load. The Dana Ireland case is not an anomaly. It is a textbook example of how the American criminal justice system [music] fails at its most fundamental obligation, which is getting it right.

Incentivized testimony from jailhouse informants with everything to gain. Junk forensic science presented to juries as established fact. Tunnel vision from investigators under public pressure to close a case. and a DNA result that told everyone the truth from the very beginning, sitting in an evidence file, ignored for decades, waiting for someone to listen.

 Hawaii has enacted some reforms in the years since these failures came to light. postconviction DNA testing laws, evidence preservation requirements, recorded interrogation mandates, eyewitness identification reforms passed in 2014, and exonery compensation statute enacted in 2016. But the single mechanism most directly responsible for the wrongful convictions in the Dana Ireland case, the use of unregulated incentivized jailhouse informant testimony, remains completely untouched by legislation.

There is no tracking system for how often informants are used. [music] There is no disclosure requirement that forces prosecutors to tell defense attorneys about the deals informants received. There is no reliability hearing where a judge evaluates whether an informant’s testimony is trustworthy before it reaches a jury.

 [music] The tool that destroyed three lives in this case is still available, still unregulated, and still being used. The Schweitzer brothers are still in court. [music] The investigation is still technically open. And the state of Hawaii has still not acknowledged in any formal legal proceeding that Ian and Shaun Schweitzer are actually innocent.

 Their cases were dismissed without prejudice. The charges could in theory be refiled. Two men who spent decades paying for a crime they did not commit are still, in the eyes of Hawaii County prosecutors, [music] suspects. Dana Marie Ireland is buried at Davis Cemetery in Shipman Nelson County, Virginia.

 A long way from the Big Island of Hawaii, where she spent the happiest and last weeks of her life. A long way from the red cinder roads where she rode her sister’s bicycle. A long way from the volcanic coastline she was just beginning to explore. Her parents established the Dana Ireland Memorial Endowed Scholarship at George Mason University in 1992, the year after her death.

 It supports students from Virginia or Hawaii whose family member was a victim of homicide. It is the kind of gesture that tells you everything about the family Dana came from. Even in the worst moment of their lives, John and Louise Ireland were thinking about how to help other families going through the same nightmare. They couldn’t bring Dana back.

 They couldn’t make the investigation work faster or the prosecutors more careful. But they could make sure that something good carried her name forward. John Ireland died in 2000, 9 years after his daughter’s murder, one year after the wrongful convictions he had fought so hard to see.

 He spent the last decade of his life advocating, pressuring, demanding answers from a system that repeatedly failed him. And then he died without knowing that the answers he was given were wrong. He never knew the verdicts were false. He never knew the men in prison didn’t do it. He never learned the name Albert Loro Jr. Louise Ireland died in 2016 at 92 years old.

She outlived her daughter by 25 years. 25 Christmases without Dana. 25 years of carrying the loss. She too died without knowing who actually killed her youngest daughter. Sandra Ireland, Dana’s older sister, the one who named her, the one who brought her to Hawaii, the one whose bicycle Dana borrowed on that Christmas Eve afternoon, has said she will never go back to the big island.

The place that was supposed to be a fresh start for her baby sister became the place where everything ended. There is a particular cruelty in the timeline of this case. The technology that identified Albert Loro Jr., forensic genetic genealogy, didn’t exist in 1991. It barely existed in 2018 when it was first used to crack the Golden State Killer case.

 But the DNA evidence that pointed to Loro existed from the very first day. It was collected from Dana’s body at Hilo Medical Center on Christmas Eve 1991. It was there the entire time. The evidence was always telling the truth. The system just wasn’t listening. Dana Ireland was 23 years old. She had a degree in sports physiology from George Mason University.

 She wanted to work in physical therapy. She was getting scuba certified. She was taking long bike rides through Puna on borrowed bicycles. She was falling in love with Hawaii. She had been on the island for 67 days. Everything was ahead of her. When Ian Schweitzer walked out of that courthouse in Hilo in January 2023, his freedom was a beginning for him.

 But it was also something else. It was the first real [music] step toward giving Dana Ireland what she had been denied for more than three decades. Not just a conviction, not just a name in a file. The truth. The truth came 33 years late. Too late for Dana’s parents, [music] who both died without knowing it.

 Too late for Frank Pauline Jr. who was killed in a prison cell on his 42nd birthday for a crime the DNA always said he didn’t commit. Too late for the decades stolen from two innocent brothers who are still fighting for the state to acknowledge what it did to them. And without a trial, without a conviction, without a single day of accountability for the man whose DNA was there all along, the truth came.

 But the reckoning never did. Dana Ireland deserved better from the investigation, from the prosecution, from the system, from all of it. And the least we can do now, 33 years later, is remember her. Not as a case number, not as a headline. As a 23-year-old woman who moved to Hawaii because she loved the ocean and wanted to be close to her sister, who was getting scuba certified, who borrowed a bicycle on Christmas Eve to invite someone she cared about to dinner.

 That’s who Dana Ireland was, and that’s who she deserves to be remembered as. We tell these stories because someone has to. Because the victims deserve to be remembered for who they were, not just how their stories ended. If you want to be part of that, subscribe to Cold Case Redemption. We will see you in the next one.