Tuesday, Mar 15, 2022 • 9min
UPDATE: Flathead County Doe
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This is an update to the August 2020 episode "UNIDENTIFIED: Flathead County Doe." In the year and a half since the release of that episode, more people submitted their DNA to genealogical databases, and in February 2022 Flathead County Doe was identified as Steven Gooch.
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Ashley Flowers
Brit Prawat
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00:00
In November 1974, something terrible shook the sleepy waterfront town of
Amityville, New York
.Share
Speaker 1
00:08
This was a multiple murder, six bodies, six victims
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00:12
Six members of the DeFeo family shot dead in their home, only one left alive to tell the story of what happened on the new podcast: Very Scary People.
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00:23
How a true crime story was transformed into a piece of horror history.
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00:28
Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Ashley Flowers
00:34
Hi Crime Junkies, Ashley Flowers here. I wanted to bring you all a special update on a case that we covered that you guys actually might have had a hand in solving.
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00:44
Now if you didn't know every month in our fan club Brit and I do a segment called headlines. Where we talk about some of the most talked about true crime topics, all of the stuff that you guys are DM'ing us about, talking about in the
Facebook
discussion group, all of the cases that you want to know our thoughts on, and we break them down for you.Share
01:02
Now, we also do a full length bonus episode in the fan club every month, a mini episode every month in the fan club and actually saw a comment the other day from someone that's like: "are these episodes like as good as the regular ones? The same as the regular ones?"
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01:15
And I never knew that you guys were wondering that, yes, all of our episodes are just as long just as interesting but cases that you've never heard us tell. Like this month in March, we covered the Eyeball Serial Killer as our full length episode.
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01:30
Anyway, all that to say, there is so much content in the fan club. If you ever thought about checking it out, I actually put a link in the show notes, so you can see all of the extra episodes that are waiting there. But I want to give you a piece of fan club content for free because again, you guys might have had a hand in solving this case, and you deserve to hear the update.
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01:51
So here is a clip from the February 2022 headlines episode, enjoy.
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01:58
Okay, so I'm gonna start off today with a few kind of like rapid fire updates for a few cases that we've already covered in like full or many episodes, and the first one I want to talk about is an update to a mini episode that we did back in August of 2020. And honestly I had to double check that because I feel like we did this episode five minutes ago, but it's the
Flathead County
Doe episode.Share
02:19
And if you remember, the Sheriff's office in
Flathead County
had actually reached out to us back in 2020 and asked us to do the episode, and so a year and a half later, we're excited to bring you an update. Now, if you haven't listened to the episode for, it's been a while, I am going to start off with a little bit of a refresher just to catch everyone up to speed.Share
02:38
But basically, back in 2003, the remains of a man were discovered at the bottom of a cliff in
Montana
along with a gun and other belongings like a shoe and a bottle of a Aleve.Share
02:48
And if you remember that a Aleve bottle actually ended up being a really important piece in narrowing down how long the remains might have been there, because they found out that the style of the bottle was only produced between June of 1994 and January of 1997.
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Brit Prawat
03:02
Right, so it's like really Specific.
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Ashley Flowers
03:04
Right, and then something similar actually happened with the shoe that they found. That it only been produced in 1995 which narrowed down their estimated time of death even more, police were also hopeful that the gun and the remains would give them some clues as to who their victim was and what the cause of death was.
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03:19
But unfortunately the gun ended up being a dead end. And the only thing they learned from the remains were that they had been there for a few years and their victim was a white male between 21:36
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03:30
Now, despite the Sheriff's office best efforts, the case went cold. There were a few interesting developments over the years which we covered in our episode, but one of the biggest was back in 2018 when they turned to the
DNA Doe Project
to hopefully ID their John Doe
through genetic genealogy.Share
03:47
But frustratingly according to a post on the
DNA Doe Project's
website, they were only able to get like really distant matches. Like we're talking fourth cousins here.Share
03:57
Now there were multiple family trees that their
John Doe
could have been a part of like we if you remember had like specific names from like specific regions, I think it was like kind of in the Midwest like Kentuckyish area.Share
04:09
And so the team was like going through the painstaking task of eliminating them one by one and they just kind of hit like a dead end. Like this is as far as we can go without more people submitting their DNA.
Share
04:19
So that's when in 2020 they reached out to us to do an episode, and they asked us to basically encourage our listeners to submit DNA to try and get a closer match. And I was actually surprised at the turnout of that episode. Like, we got a ton of DM'S. And emails that said: "Hey, I have this last name and I live in this area. I'm gonna talk to my family and see if anyone's missing" or "I'm going to submit my DNA".
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04:43
It turns out that you know whether it was our work or just the work of the public. It was all worth it because in January 2022 they were able to finally track down a close match. In a press release from the
Flathead County
Sheriff's office. Law enforcement reached out to one of the relatives, who said that back in 1995 his 29-year-old son had gone missing.Share
05:05
So law enforcement compared the DNA profile that they had from the remains to that of the missing man. And finally, after 19 years,
Flathead County
Doe was identified as Steven Gooch in February of this year. According to Steven's family, around the time that they stopped hearing from him, he had been talking about possibly making his way from San Diego
to Las Vegas.Share
05:28
But after months of not hearing from him, they decided to file a missing persons report.
Share
05:33
And again, like it's not in
Montana
. So you can see how it didn't get connected.Share
Brit Prawat
05:38
Right, yeah.
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Ashley Flowers
05:38
And somehow Steven made his way from
San Diego
to Montana
and between 1995 and 1996, he died either on or near the cliff where his remains were found.Share
05:50
And so I actually got an email from the deputy coroner in
Flathead County
back in early February when they announced that they had ID'd him, and I actually want to read part of that email too, because I think it's really cool.Share
06:00
The email says: "We have gotten quite a few calls from people who heard the podcast, a lot of them were instructed to upload their DNA in order to further the DNA research. Of course, we will never know for sure. But who knows, maybe one of those people's DNA ultimately led or at least assisted in the father being tracked down. The point is, I really appreciate you doing this story".
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Brit Prawat
06:23
I just got full body chills.
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Ashley Flowers
06:26
I know.
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06:27
So listen, yeah, we don't know if it was one of our listeners whose DNA ultimately led to the identification, but the fact that the episode reach enough people to possibly help make the ID like this happen.
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06:38
This is why we do this
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Brit Prawat
06:39
And say this is why we do call-outs at the end of episodes.
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Ashley Flowers
06:41
This is so freaking cool.
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Brit Prawat
06:43
This is why we reach out to you guys for like: "hey, you could help be a part of this" and like you said, we may never ever know. But the fact that it's a possibility is just so amazing.
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Ashley Flowers
06:55
Well, listen, even though Stephen has been identified, the Sheriff's office is still dedicated to finding out what happened to him. According to Kingfive. com "The Sheriff's office did not release any details about the cause or manner of Gooch's death"
Share
07:10
And an article from KPAX News
Flathead County
Sheriff Brian Heino stated that he hopes the identification will bring closure to his loved ones and they won't stop searching until they have more answers.Share
07:22
So this is the next part if you think you have any information relating to the investigation into Steven Gooch's death. You can contact the
Flathead County
Sheriff's office at 40675856100 or you can email tips at Flathead. mt. gov.Share
07:44
There are eight other stories we cover in this month's headline episode, including an update in the
Susan Cox Powell
case, the Brandon Lawson
case and I'm sure you guys saw all over the headlines of a young little girl named Paisley who was found underneath the stairs.Share
07:58
Brit and I kind of dive into that, it's a little more complex than the headlines would have you believe, anyway, if you want to hear that, sign up for the highest level this month, in our fan club, the month of March, you'll get that episode, you'll also get a full episode on the serial killer known as The Eyeball Killer, which is a wild case, you'll get a mini episode, and you get all of our wide episodes ad free.
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08:21
If you're hearing this later, you can sign up for an annual membership and get every case we've ever done the entire backlog of full episodes, mini episodes, headline episodes, there's a total of like 400 and some in the fan club. We're gonna link to that in the show notes, you can also find the sources for this specific episode on our blog post crimejunkiepodcast. com
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09:24
Crime Junkie is an audiochuck Production. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?
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Ashley Flowers
Brit Prawat