Separated for 60 Years… Then DNA Changed Everything

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]A woman was found in a field.

[00:00:02]>> It was obvious there was a sexual assault and that she had been beaten.

[00:00:05]>> She's barely alive.

[00:00:06]>> She was left there nameless for months and then for decades.

[00:00:11]>> You always have to keep in the back of your mind that there are people that are waiting for answers and you hope the case has made it to you in enough time.

[00:00:17]I always talk about, you know, a case within a case, you know, you have a victim, but then they kind of take a different turn.

[00:00:23]>> You have a family that was broken apart decades prior. him and his sisters have been placed in an orphanage at a really young age. When you hear that, your heart just drops.

[00:00:34]>> The only memory I have was Marie for 60 years. I always wondered where she went.

[00:00:39]>> My daughters tried to find him with no avail.

[00:00:42]>> I think she gave up hope that she had a brother at that point.

[00:00:45]>> Didn't even know if he was alive. I just thought I'd never see him again.

[00:00:59]In the summer of 1971, the Howard County Police Department got a call in reference to a middle-aged female that was found in a wooded area that seemed to have be having a u a medical issue.

[00:01:12]My name is Wade Zufall. I am a technical corporal with the Howard County Police Department in Maryland. and I'm a cold case homicide investigator currently working on a 1971 cold case Jane Doe.

[00:01:25]The female was found by two young men who were riding motorbikes and she was found in a what was considered a lover's lane that was in a large piece of land surrounded by woods. The Har County Police Department responded to the scene. They found that she was semi-conscious.

[00:01:43]She was found in a dehydrated state. She had been out in the sun for several hours. She had been sunburnt.

[00:01:50]She was nude from the waist down and it appeared that she had been sexually assaulted.

[00:01:55]At the scene, they did find some of her clothing. They found a slip of hers several feet away from her body. It appeared that she had attempted to crawl away from the scene. She had a lot of dirt and things like that underneath of her nails. At that time, they transported her to the hospital.

[00:02:16]The department attempted to identify her in several ways. We reached out to, you know, several law enforcement agencies um in the general area inquiring whether or not they had any missing persons, which they did not. We then sent the teletype out nationwide in reference to missing persons. Ran her fingerprints through NCIC. We had no um you know success with that. We also had a sketch that was put out to the local media asking for assistance if anyone had, you know, known this individual or were missing a loved one or a relative, but we just never found anything.

[00:02:49]Eventually, she died of a stroke in September of 1971.

[00:02:56]She was sent to the medical examiner's office where an autopsy was conducted.

[00:03:00]The cause of death was ruled a homicide and she was listed on on the death certificate as you know a 1971 Jane Doe.

[00:03:09]At that point in 1971 the case goes cold.

[00:03:14]In 2019 I was looking at my case load at the time. This being our oldest cold case. So I started looking into the availability of what the evidence was.

[00:03:24]Thankfully, for some odd reason, they still had these estology slides.

[00:03:29]Histologology slides are taken during an autopsy. There's a sample that is captured, you know, from the individual from your major organs, you know, your heart, your kidneys, your lungs, your liver, and they put them on a slide and they capture that. So, I kind of was looking at, you know, how this could benefit me. Is there a possibility that we could use thesetologology slides to, you know, attempt to identify her? I just didn't know how to go about it. And at the time, in reference to solvability, if you're working on a scale from one to five with five being the ultimate, right, you have a lot of evidence, you have an a witness ID, you have all this, five being the best, this case was definitely a one.

[00:04:10]This case came to Aram in October of 2024, and a connection was made between our case management folks here at Aram um and the detectives working the case in Howard County, Maryland.

[00:04:22]My name is Colby Lzion and I am the chief of staff here at Oram. A lot of time had elapsed from 1971 to 2024. And so in this particular case, we knew that we were up for a challenge because we needed to take DNA from tissue that have been applied to glass microscope slides decades ago. I did hear through the news and things like that and how successful they had become with some of the major profile cases that were going on at the time and um at that point I just decided to you know hey let me reach out to them. I uh sent an email and not even a day later I got an email from Mike Bogle and uh who's my case manager and just started talking to me about what my goals were with the case and in speaking to him um it just so happened that they had some success with histologology slides on a case that they had recently worked >> those hisytologology slides are usually formaldahhide fix paraffin embedded that's difficult DNA to work with but because we have done this before and we have created a protocol call for this.

[00:05:26]We were able to accept the case the first time here and we were able to feel confident that we knew how to proceed with this evidence.

[00:05:34]>> It was a a big win for us because I knew that DNA technology was evolving and I knew that we were at a really good point with being able to use that for evidence to identify someone.

[00:05:45]And so our first step is to take the slides, scrape, if you will, or remove a small amount of tissue, and then put that tissue through our testing process in the lab, which basically breaks open these cells, freeze the DNA, and then we ultimately have a tube that has some liquid in it, and at the bottom of that tube is a pellet or a solid, which is extracted DNA. And that extracted DNA is then subjected to our suitability analysis. That helps us to understand all the unique characteristics of that particular DNA extract for that particular case. The next thing that we do is we do DNA sequencing. Whenever we talk about DNA sequencing, what we're talking about is building a DNA profile.

[00:06:29]So every single person has a unique DNA profile. You have hundreds of thousands of markers or or data points um is what we're looking for. And in this case, we were successfully able to build a DNA profile.

[00:06:44]>> It was a couple months when I got the phone call that they said that they were able to extract a full snip profile. The confirmation was really good for me and for my department. It just kind of accomplishes everything that you thought, right? It confirms everything that you thought that the science was there. And that's exciting, but you know, that's only the beginning.

[00:07:03]This profile was uploaded to family treaty and a database which is the largest consented law enforcement database and the matches started to flow in. You always have to keep in the back of your mind that there are people that are waiting for answers and you hope that the case has made it to you in enough time to be able to tell some family member who's been asking or some detective who needs answers for their case. You hope to be able to provide that. And we realized that the victim was related to someone named Charles Shy.

[00:07:38]We knew that the quickest way to figure out who she was was to contact law enforcement, have them contact the family, and ask if they were willing to consent to rapid kinsnip testing, which allows us to very quickly be able to tell the distance between the living person that consented to test their DNA and the victim.

[00:08:00]>> I remember talking to Aram. They gave me a name of Charles Leroy Shy, an older white male living in Mentor, Ohio. So I made the phone call to Charles, which I know now is he goes by Chuck.

[00:08:14]>> My name is Charles L. Shy.

[00:08:17]Detective Zufall called one day and I hung up on him.

[00:08:21]>> Chuck ended up hanging up on me twice.

[00:08:23]He thought I was trying to scam him.

[00:08:25]>> Me and my wife, we found out it was um actually the police department. So, I called him back and we were talking about this cold case they had from 1971 and we might be related, like a cousin, a third cousin or whatever.

[00:08:40]>> Some of the questions that you ask are, "Have you ever had a family member that's just gone missing that no one ever heard from again?" Chuck told me that him and his sisters, Marie and Judith, have been placed in an orphanage at a really young age. All of them were five, less than 5 years old at the time.

[00:08:57]So, as an investigator, when you hear that, you know, your heart just drops because now you know this is going to be really, really difficult, especially with um, you know, the availability of adoption records out there right now.

[00:09:11]And, you know, the adoption took place in the early 1950s.

[00:09:16]>> I don't remember anything before 7 years old. After seven years old, I remember being in a foster home, which was very cruel.

[00:09:28]Then I remember being in Paradel in the orphanage, which was pretty bad. And I remember being with my sister, Marie.

[00:09:39]I don't remember my mother. I don't remember my father.

[00:09:46]Uh I don't remember my sister, Judy. He did tell me that he thought his mother's name was Sarah and uh really that's all we had to go on at that time.

[00:09:57]>> We talked about getting a DNA test and would I be willing to take a DNA test and I said sure.

[00:10:03]>> He was willing to voluntarily give us his DNA and have a go ahead and test that against the known sample of Jane Doe which was extremely exciting for us.

[00:10:16]Charles provided a cheek swab. That cheek swab comes back to Aram. We build the DNA profile for Charles. And this profile has hundreds of thousands of rows. Every single row represents a specific location in your DNA. And then we compare it to the DNA profile of this unidentified woman. And the output of that comparison is a numerical value.

[00:10:38]The higher the value, the more closely related. And so in this particular case, what do we know? We see a parent child match.

[00:10:48]Aram called me and said, "Hey, we've got some news for you." And that wasn't a third cousin. That was actually his mother. And his mother's name was Sarah Bell Sharky.

[00:11:01]It was shocking for all of us, but it was such a great feeling to know that, hey, after all these years from 1971, we're able to give a name to our victim.

[00:11:13]It was heartbreaking.

[00:11:18]But um I don't have the feelings that I don't I didn't know her.

[00:11:26]It'd be like I don't know I didn't you know I just didn't know her. So I I had I have feelings for her but the feelings are they're mixed.

[00:11:41]I kind of felt like how he felt because of being, you know, let's just call it what it is. He was abandoned, you know, at a at a young age. His mother and father sent him and his sister to, you know, an orphanage and he never had the availability to know who his mom and dad were.

[00:11:58]Me and my sister Marie when we were in the foster home, we used to take off and go and hide out in the woods and we'd sleep under trees and we would find our own food and stuff cuz it was a rough time back then. They paid to foster a child, which you know is okay, but she should take care of the kid. The only time they clo put clothes on us or fed us is when they come out once every two or three months to check on the kid. And he was very abusive.

[00:12:29]He he used to beat both of us. And then I remember running away all the time. I ran away from Paradel many times. And then I figured out the last time that I ran away, I was only a mile from the orphanage. They never caught me. I got my own little apartment. And I did little odd jobs like cleaning uh stores and stuff, doing windows and and I survived.

[00:12:55]I went in the service, went to Vietnam, and I lost contact with Marie.

[00:13:02]And then when I come home from Vietnam, I turn around and forgot about everything that happened to me when I was a kid. It's like it just dropped out of my head.

[00:13:13]And actually Vietnam, pretty much a lot of Vietnam dropped out of me. But I used to have nightmares and stuff. But PSD back then, you know, it was like, go home, figure it out yourself. That's the way that used to be. The only memory I have was Marie.

[00:13:34]I remember she came over the house one time. Her and her boyfriend came over and that was just before I went into service. I think it was 17. And that's the last time I seen her.

[00:13:50]After I had identified Sarah, then you start just deep diving into anything and everything that you can find out about Sarah Bell Sharky. We started working a lot of databases and and reaching out to people all across the country. At the same time, yeah, I always talk about, you know, a case within a case. Um, you pick up these cases, you know, you have a victim, you know, you have a may have a suspect, but then they kind of take a different turn. Now you have this whole different responsibility of trying to find out if Marie and Judith are still alive.

[00:14:23]>> I always wondered where Marie went. I didn't know anything about my family or anything else. So I went back to Paradel the orphanage.

[00:14:32]There was a fire there in a records room which got burned out. I went to Pennsylvania.

[00:14:38]I checked at Cleveland and I tried looking for it several times.

[00:14:45]But no luck.

[00:14:48]>> It was really difficult using all the available databases that we have in law enforcement trying to find Marie. And uh we had located an individual in Springfield, Illinois that just had the same birth date as her, different last name. I did what's called a cold call and and tried to call her and get a hold of her and uh she didn't answer my call.

[00:15:08]She wouldn't return my call. So, I ended up finding her daughter, Lynn, and I actually called her daughter. I said, "This is probably going to be one of the most strange phone calls that you ever received, but I need you to stick with me because I think it's really important." And she said, "How about if I call my mom on three-way? I know she'll answer for me."

[00:15:31]>> He said, "I'm Detective Zufall. I'm investigating a murder." And I said, I I thought my heart stopped. I thought and he says your mother was murdered. I said really you know cuz I didn't know her you know and he said yeah she and then he told me the details and he said through that you know I've located your brother I said no I said you did and then I started bing that's what happened.

[00:16:13]I'm Marie Mildred Sharky. Well, Canwell was Sharky.

[00:16:19]I've always known my brother cuz he was the only person that I was around, you know, with my family. We were always together. I don't really remember my mother. I was so young. And I certainly don't remember my father. And then when we were abandoned, we just were never apart. We went through what we had to go through together, you know, and that was a comfort. Somehow we ended up in a foster home that was very abusive. And if we didn't do things right, we took the we took a beating.

[00:16:54]And we always found comfort in each other, you know, after the beatings.

[00:16:59]We were never allowed to eat at the table with them. We had to eat what was left after the four adults got through.

[00:17:06]And we spent a lot of time in the woods together. We had a little silver pot that everything got boiled in it. You know, we would take food from the farmers, but we never took any more and we could eat. We had two galvanized trash cans out in the woods and that's what we laid down on the side and put leaves in there and then we would get in those facing about 2 ft apart, you know, facing each other. He would run away and he always asked me to go with him always. But I was afraid. I never did.

[00:17:37]But he always somehow came back.

[00:17:41]And one day my case worker, Mrs. Emory, Edith Emory, I'll never forget her. She says, "If you can go to school and you can keep your job, she said, "I'll get you an apartment." And she got me an apartment downtown Cleveland over a hardware store. And Charles found me in my apartment. And uh he stayed with me for a while.

[00:18:02]And then uh he disappeared again. Well, he joined the army.

[00:18:07]I never really tried to look for him. I always thought he would come back to me cuz he always did. Uh my daughters as they got older, they tried to find him.

[00:18:19]That was the late '9s. We had internet, but it wasn't as advanced as it is now.

[00:18:25]So, it was a lot of online yellow pages.

[00:18:28]I scoured for every Sharky I could find.

[00:18:31]I narrowed it down to every Charles, Leroy. So, I wrote each one a letter basically.

[00:18:37]Unfortunately, I only received three responses and all three responses were disappointing. So, when I had to bring the news to my mom about that, it was devastating. We kind of changed the subject and put it in the past and it was almost like Charles Leroy was a ghost. I think she gave up hope that she had a brother at that point.

[00:19:01]I didn't even know if he was alive. I just thought I'd never see him again.

[00:19:07]>> I remember when Detective Zufall called me and told me that I found your sister and she texted me. I still had that text, the very first one.

[00:19:23]And me and her talked. It was wonderful.

[00:19:26]It brought a whole lot of memories back.

[00:19:28]Like you got your life back.

[00:19:42]You don't know what you went through to get here.

[00:19:48]Oh my gosh. Hi, baby.

[00:19:51]>> Hi, sweetheart. Hi.

[00:19:56]>> Hi, Marie.

[00:19:56]>> Hi, honey. How you doing?

[00:19:59]>> Okay. How are you?

[00:20:01]>> Good.

[00:20:01]>> Look good.

[00:20:02]>> You look great.

[00:20:07]>> We had set this reunion up. We met each other for the first time after 60some years. Her and her three daughters. I have three nieces now.

[00:20:16]>> I don't want very well.

[00:20:18]>> Not at all.

[00:20:20]>> When I walked in and saw my brother for the first time, yeah, we just sat next to each other. I felt comfortable again.

[00:20:27]It just came up all back, you know, and just inner peace, closure.

[00:20:36]>> Oh, sweetheart.

[00:20:38]How are you?

[00:20:40]>> So good.

[00:20:41]>> It's so nice to see you.

[00:20:43]>> Thank you so much for what you did.

[00:20:45]Thank you. Thank you.

[00:20:47]>> You don't know. Oh, thank you. Thank you. It was definitely impactful being able to share that time with them, share some tears, and just knowing that that's not where it ends, you know? It's almost like a new beginning.

[00:21:02]>> There's Detective Zufall.

[00:21:04]>> Yeah.

[00:21:04]>> I was so happy to see him, too.

[00:21:06]>> Oh, yeah. I mean, Detective Zufall is part of my family now. He worked really hard. And yes, I do commend him for that.

[00:21:15]>> I didn't know what was going to happen, you know, when I first made that phone call and stuff. Especially when I hung up on her.

[00:21:22]>> Just glad you called back.

[00:21:24]>> Me and Marie, we talk every day now. We either text each other or talk. It's great to have a sister back again.

[00:21:32]>> We let each other know what's going on.

[00:21:34]You know, we're we're real close again.

[00:21:36]Yeah. And his wife is terrific.

[00:21:39]Oh, I remember the trains. We used to go like this.

[00:21:43]>> Yeah.

[00:21:43]>> And the trains would blow their horn.

[00:21:45]>> Yeah. Of course, they blow them anyway because they went by like >> Yeah. But we always thought it was us.

[00:21:51]>> We thought they were doing it for us.

[00:21:53]>> Yeah, we we had a great time with it.

[00:21:55]Hey, look at They weren't even They didn't even notice us. I'm sure >> since I met Marie and stuff, it's like my blood pressure's been going down.

[00:22:06]>> My blood pressure's down.

[00:22:08]>> He told me the same.

[00:22:10]>> Oh, really?

[00:22:12]Yep.

[00:22:15]Yep.

[00:22:17]So, I just feel like I'm safe again.

[00:22:24]>> The good stuff you remember. The bad stuff I It's okay.

[00:22:28]>> Yeah.

[00:22:29]>> It's in the past. There's nothing I could do about it.

[00:22:33]You can't bring the past back. But you can make the future happen. I knew nothing until Detective Zufall opened up the door. He unlocked it. And I'm grateful he did. Now I know and I want to know more.

[00:22:52]>> I had found out that Judith, Chuck, and Marie's youngest sister, she had passed away in uh 2021. So I made the arrangements to have her remains sent to Chuck. My whole goal with that was to make sure that all three of them, you know, were together again.

[00:23:09]>> We have her here. She's on the cabinet over here. she can know she has a brother and a sister.

[00:23:17]>> We didn't know her and she died alone. I would have liked to have met her. I really would have.

[00:23:24]>> I was also able to tell them that their father passed away in New Orleans prior to, you know, her mother being killed in 1971. So, we know that uh Gabriel Stanley Shy was not and is not a suspect in Sarah Shy's murder.

[00:23:44]for Detective Zufall to do what he did was a blessing. And Aram obviously what they did was a was amazing. I I can't even describe how appreciative of that I am and we are. So without them this wouldn't have happened. When I see the two of them together and you think about what they've been through, you just have to think that this is the perfect ending to a long journey for them.

[00:24:17]>> I think the great part about author being involved in this case was they said, "Hey, listen. If you give us the opportunity, I really think we can make this happen." And uh you know, here we are. this technology was like non-existence and now that they come out with this DNA that I think is great >> and we're at a place now where many people are not settling for the DNA dead end.

[00:24:41]>> The positive I think in this story is that the siblings were able to find each other before the end of their life and now they have a real relationship.

[00:24:51]>> Being a part of that, it's an amazing amazing feeling. But when all that's done for the day, I still have an open homicide of a woman that was the victim of a violent crime. I'd like to know what happened and who done it and why.

[00:25:07]>> If you could say anything to your mother, what would you say?

[00:25:10]>> I why?

[00:25:14]>> Why would she let three kids go through all that? But she probably didn't know.

[00:25:19]We don't know what she went through. We don't know what went on in her life.

[00:25:23]Maybe she gave us up because she thought it would be a better life for us. Who knows?

[00:25:32]I think the public is really, really important when it comes to their willingness to help solve these cases.

[00:25:39]And I believe that there is somebody out there that has the information that could help solve this case. And hopefully their willingness to come and help us out with that information would be extremely important. And we hope that you would do that.