Minnesota 1986 Cold Case CRACKED — A Genealogy Database Linked Him In Under 24 Hours

24 hours.  That’s all it took.  38 years of silence.  38 years of a family waiting, a community wondering, and a detective who worked on the case until his health deteriorated, carrying the weight of it until his retirement.  And then, a forensic genealogist named Terresa Vang sat down at her computer one Wednesday morning in October 2023, uploaded a DNA profile to a public genealogy database, and by Thursday afternoon, she had a name— not a suspect, a name.

  A specific man who lived in Duluth, Minnesota, 61 years old, who had coached youth hockey for 20 years, managed a hardware store franchise on Piedmont Avenue, and who, for 38 years, was totally invisible to the investigation that should have found him before he could become any of those things .

  His name is yet to be revealed, but 24 hours means nothing.  It’s just a number.  Unless you understand what the previous 38 years cost.  And to understand that, you have to understand who Susan Joella Matson was.  You have to go back to February 1986. You have to go back to a winter in Minnesota cold enough to split stones.  Duluth is located on the western end of Lake Superior, where the St.

 Louis River flows down through hillside neighborhoods and empties into the largest freshwater lake on Earth.  In February, the cold comes from that lake in a way that the locals understand simply as the conditions of living there.  A wind that can lower the wind chill to -40 degrees Celsius and makes the city feel, on certain mornings, like the last outpost before something vast and indifferent begins.

  The hillside neighborhoods rise from the port in terraces, with houses close together, porches closed against the weather, and streets so steep in some places that driving in winter is a well- studied skill.  Despite all that, it is not a place without warmth.  Duluth in 1986 had a population of about 82,000 , large enough to have its own rhythms, neighborhoods, and factions.

Small enough that the hockey rinks were the center of community life from October to March.  That the church’s fish fritters attracted the same families for three generations, that one could be recognized.  Susan Matson was well known. I was 24 years old that winter.  She had grown up in Duluth, graduated from Denfeld High School in 1979, and worked for two years before enrolling at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where she was in her final year of a social work degree .

  She was doing her internship at a family services center on West Second Street, 30 hours a week in addition to her studies, working with families in crisis, learning that kind of patience that only develops by spending time with people whose problems don’t fit on a schedule.  Her supervisor had informed her department head in writing that Susan was the best intern she had seen in 11 years .

  She lived in a second-floor apartment on East 4th Street with her college roommate, Kristen. He drove a 1982 Honda Civic with a quirky heater that he supplemented with a sleeping bag that he kept in the back seat from November to April.  I was saving money to move to Minneapolis after graduating.  She had a job interview scheduled at a child welfare agency for March.

  He would call his mother, Diane, every Sunday night from the telephone in the apartment’s kitchen. And in the last few calls, she had been talking about what she would do when she had her own place, her own kitchen, her own Sunday nights to organize as she pleased. She had a younger sister, Amy, who was 19 years old.  Amy still talks about Susan the way you talk about someone who was taken away so soon that the person she was becoming is as real to you as the person she was.

Not just a memory, but a projection.  A whole life running parallel to yours.  On the afternoon of Thursday, February 13, 1986, Susan left the family services center at 6:15 p.m., said goodbye to her supervisor, and walked through the parking lot toward her Civic. There was fresh snow on the ground. Four inches of rain had fallen that afternoon.

His footprints in the snow were the last documented evidence of his movement.  He didn’t come home that night. Kristen realized it at 10:00. She called the family services center , but received no answer. He called Susan’s parents.  At 11 p.m., Diane and her husband Carl were already in the car.

  By midnight, Duluth police had already received a missing person report.  The Civic was found the next morning, parked on a side street a few blocks from the family services center .  The heating had been on.  The engine was hot.  The gas tank was almost empty, as if it had been idling for hours.  She never got inside it.

  Their footprints in the snow led to the driver’s side door and stopped. Then there was a disturbance in the snow, a struggle, investigators would later determine .  A second pair of footprints, larger, of a man, size 11 or 12, and then nothing.  The trail ended at the sidewalk.  The ensuing investigation was led by Detective Sergeant Warren Blaine of the Duth Police Department.

He was 42 years old, a native of Duth, a methodical and discreet investigator who had spent 16 years working on all kinds of crimes produced by the city and who took the Matson case, his colleagues said, with special deliberation, as if he understood from the first morning that this was going to require everything he had.

  Susan’s body was found on February 20, a week after her disappearance, by a snowmobile driver on the frozen surface of a pond in the Fondulac neighborhood, on the western edge of the city.  I had been there since almost the night she disappeared.  He was 24 years old.  The cause of death was manual strangulation.    It had not been stolen.

  They hadn’t taken anything from him.  The evidence collected at the scene and at the recovery site included biological material.  In 1986, forensic technology for analyzing DNA did not yet exist in a practical application for criminal investigation.  The biological evidence was collected, cataloged with the precision that Warren Blaine brought to everything, and stored.

    He would have to wait, as it turned out, for 37 years.  Blaine’s investigation in the months following Susan’s death was exhaustive.    He identified 41 persons of interest during the first six months. She followed every lead, every reported sighting from the parking lot area that night, every name that came up through the family services center, the college, the neighborhood, the hockey community where Susan had grown up.

    He interviewed and re-interviewed, checked references, and drove the routes himself at night in February to understand what the killer would have seen and known.  She kept coming back to one name, a 23-year-old man named Dennis Hol, who had been seen in the vicinity of the family services center that night.

  A man who had no documented reason to be there and who, when interviewed, provided an alibi that was technically sufficient, but contained gaps that Blaine could not completely close.  Hol was known tangentially for the family services center .  a contact from a former client years ago, not active at all.  He had no criminal record.

  He was cooperative, eloquent, and looked Blaine in the eye in every interview.  Blaine interviewed Hol four times between February and July 1986. He was never able to overcome the alibi.  The biological evidence from the scene could not be analyzed with the available technology.  Without a DNA comparison, there was no case to present.

  The active investigation was suspended at the end of 1987. The case went cold.  Warren Blaine retired from the Duth Police Department in 2001 after a heart attack that his doctors partly attributed to work stress.  He was 57 years old.  He told his wife the night before turning in his badge that the Matson case would be the one he would take with him.

  He carried it until he died in 2014 at the age of 70.  His meticulous and complete case notes, which filled two folders, were stored with the Matson evidence kit in the Duth Police Department’s cold case file .  Diane Matson walked past the family services center on West Second Street every week for 30 years.

  I didn’t do it on purpose.  He was simply on the route between his house and the grocery store.  He had done that route before Susan’s death and continued to do it afterward.  And every time he saw the building, he thought of his daughter crossing the parking lot in the snow at 6:15 on a February afternoon and not coming home.

  Carl Matson died in 2009. He never heard a reply.  Amy became a social worker.  Later he said that for a long time he didn’t know whether he had chosen the profession because of Susan or in spite of her.  In the end, he decided that the distinction didn’t matter.  She worked at a family services center in St.

 Paul, a different building, a different city, the same kind of room in which Susan was learning to sit when she died.  By 1996, 10 years later, the reward offered by the Matson family, of $5,000, later increased to $10, had not produced anything useful.  By 2001, the Dutch News Tribune had published three anniversary retrospectives on the case.

  By 2010, Susan had been gone for 24 years, as long as she had lived.  The hockey rinks where Susan grew up watching games were still operating.  The families were different.  The coaches were different.  One of the trainers at a track on the north side of town had run his hardware store franchise on Piedmont Avenue since 1995. He had a good reputation.

    He reliably fulfilled his commitments as a coach.  He was the kind of man in a community who makes a community feel like a community.  In 2012, the Duth Police Department’s cold case unit sent Matson’s biological evidence for DNA analysis.  The technology had improved significantly since 1986. But the specific conditions of the evidence—recovery outdoors and extreme cold weather—had degraded the material to a level that the 2012 methods could not resolve into a workable profile.

  The shipment was incomplete.  The kit was returned to the archives.  The case remained unsolved for another 11 years.  Each case on this channel represents weeks of work reviewing court records, journalistic archives, and verified sources, because Susan Matson deserves accuracy, as does every family that has waited so long for an answer.

  If you think these stories are important, subscribe and leave a “like”. Tell us in the comments what part of the world you’re watching from.  It helps more than you can imagine.  Now, let’s go back to Susan.  Terresa Vang joined the Forensic Genealogy Unit of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehensions in 2021.

 She had experience in both molecular biology and genealogical research, an unusual combination that had become, in the years since the identification of the Golden State Killer in 2018, one of the most important skills for investigating cold cases .  He had worked on 46 cases before the Matson file landed on his desk.

  He had developed profiles from tests that other laboratories had considered inconclusive.  He knew better than anyone that the word ” inconclusive” in forensic evidence is not the same as saying “nothing”.  In July 2023, a new shipment of biological evidence from the Matson case was processed using the most current low-template DNA extraction methodology available.

  A method capable of building a genetic profile from quantities of degraded biological material that would have been considered unfeasible just 5 years ago.  The sample had been continuously stored since 1986 under conditions that Warren Blaine’s meticulous cataloging had kept stable.  37 years in climate-controlled storage had been, against all reasonable expectations, sufficient.

  The profile returned in September 2023. Male, complete, clean.  Terresa Vang uploaded it to GED Match, a public genealogy database used by both ordinary people tracing family histories and law enforcement agencies using a technique known as investigative genetic genealogy .  On the morning of Wednesday, October 4, 2023.

 By Thursday afternoon, less than 24 hours later, I already had a candidate. The process works by identifying distant relatives of the unknown profile in the database, third or fourth cousins, and expanding from those matches through public records, obituaries, census data, and family trees until the branches converge on a single individual of the correct age, sex, and geographic location.

  In some cases, it takes weeks.  In some cases, it takes months.  In the Matson case, the database matches were unusually specific, the family trees unusually well documented, and the geographical convergence unusually clear.  The candidate was a 61-year-old man in Duluth.  He had lived in Duluth all his life.  In 1986, he was 23 years old.

His name was Dennis Hol.  Terresa Vang put her pen down on the table. He opened the Matson case file. He found Warren Blaine’s interview notes from February, March, May, and July of 1986. Four interviews, four carefully documented conversations with a young man who had looked Blaine in the eye, answered every question, and returned home.

She read the notes slowly.  Then he called the BCA’s cold case coordinator and very calmly said, “I need you to look into something .”  Confirmation of the DNA match required a reference sample surreptitiously obtained from Dennis Holt, a now standard technique in investigative genetic genealogy cases, in which an object discarded by the subject in a public place is retrieved and sent for comparison.

  In Holt’s case , a beverage cup recovered from a public parking area outside his hardware franchise on Piedmont Avenue in November 2023 provided a DNA sample that was compared to the crime scene profile .  The match was confirmed on November 29, 2023. Dennis Holt was arrested at his home on the morning of December 14, 2023.

 He was 61 years old.  He had spent the 38 years since Susan Matson’s death building a life in the same city where he had ended hers.  Coaching the children of families who trusted him, running a business that bore his name on the sign, attending community events with a face that showed nothing.  He opened the door.  He saw the officers.

    He said nothing.  He was handcuffed to his own front step in the December cold, the Duluth cold, the Lake Superior cold, the same kind of cold that had covered Susan’s footprints in the snow on the night of February 13, 1986, and was placed in a vehicle and driven away.  The Duluth News Tribune published the arrest on its front page the following morning.

By the afternoon, the story had been picked up throughout Minnesota and nationally.  Former players from the youth hockey program came forward to talk to reporters, young men now in their 30s and 40s, who had been coached by Dennis Holt, who had learned the game from him, who had entrusted their children to him during the years he was dedicated to coaching.

  Each of them used the same word: astonished.  Each of them said they could not reconcile the man they had known with what he was now telling them.  That word, astonished.  38 years of a community that never had reason to look at Dennis Holt twice.  And then, one morning, everything they thought they knew about him became something completely different.

  Diane Matson was 80 years old when she received the phone call from the Minnesota BCA in December 2023. Amy drove to Duluth to be with her when she found out.  Diane kept the news to herself for a long time before saying anything.  Then he said he wished Carl had lived to see it.  She said she wished he had heard that name.

  Dennis Holt was charged with first-degree murder in January 2024. He pleaded not guilty.  At the time of this recording, the case is moving towards trial, and the DNA evidence obtained through investigative genetic genealogy is expected to be the prosecution’s centerpiece.  The technique that identified him—uploading a DNA profile from the crime scene into a public genealogical database and tracing the match through family trees—has been used to solve more than 300 cold cases in the United States since 2018. It does not require the perpetrator’s DNA to

be in any police database.  It only requires that a distant relative, a third cousin, a second cousin once retired, someone who joined an ancestry website to find out where their grandparents came from, has submitted a sample.  The network is extensive.  It gets wider every year.  Every person who uploads their DNA to trace their family history is, unknowingly, potentially a link in a chain that solves a case like this.

Warren Blaine had written Dennis Holt’s name in his notebook in February 1986. He had circled it.  He had interviewed him four times and was forced to let him go.  He died in 2014 without knowing that he had been right.  The database confirmed in 24 hours what Blaine’s instincts had told him in the first week of the investigation 38 years earlier.  He didn’t get to see it.

That’s one of the things this case costs that no arrest can compensate for.  Susan Joel Matson was 24 years old.  He drove a 1982 Honda Civic with a broken heater and kept a sleeping bag in the back seat during the Minnesota winter.  She spent 30 hours a week at a family services center in addition to her studies, learning to sit in rooms with people whose problems cannot be solved on a schedule.

  I had a job interview scheduled for March.  He called his mother every Sunday from the kitchen telephone.  She was saving up for her own place, her own kitchen, her own Sunday nights.  He had footprints in the snow in a parking lot on West 2nd Street on the night of February 13, 1986 that led to his car door and stopped.

  38 years later, a profile built from biological material preserved during a Minnesota winter and three and a half decades of careful storage performed a database search that took less than 24 hours to yield a name.  A name that Warren Blaine had written in his notebook in the first week of the investigation. A name that for 38 years had belonged to a man who coached youth hockey and ran a hardware store in the same city where he had left those footprints in the snow.

  The number 24 hours appears in the title. The number that matters is 38 years old.  What does this case tell you about the limits of investigative instinct? About a detective like Warren Blaine, who had the right name and the wrong technology, and who died before they could be found? And what do you think of the genealogical database that solved it, a tool created for those searching for their great-grandparents, which is now one of the most powerful instruments in cold case investigations? Does knowing that your ancestral DNA could help solve a murder

change your perspective when you share it?  Leave your answers in the comments.  We read them all.  And tell us, should investigative genetic genealogy be used more widely? Or does the issue of privacy make you hesitate? Justice is still being sought for Susan Joel Matson.  Stories like hers exist to remind us that 38 years is not the same as forever.

  That truth, preserved in a sealed test kit and confirmed in less than a day by a technology that did not exist when the crime occurred, has a way of finding those who tried to outlive him.  If that matters to you, subscribe.  More cases await in the description.  Thank you for looking on behalf of Susan and Warren.