What Remains
WRAL News | Raleigh, North Carolina
True crime meets forensic science in the What Remains podcast from WRAL Studios. With no ID, human skeletal remains often end up at medical examiners’ offices where they sit in storage closets for years, gathering dust as evidence slowly disappears. These are some of the most difficult cold cases to crack. Unsolved murders. Missing people never identified. Families without answers. Every year in the United States there are 600,000 missing person reports and 4,400 sets of unidentified human remains are found. But matching the remains to the missing people is not an easy task. Meet the passionate scientists, investigators and volunteers dedicating their lives to the seemingly impossible: matching missing persons to unidentified human remains. WRAL Studios presents What Remains, hosted by veteran crime reporter Amanda Lamb.
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Top 10 What Remains Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best What Remains episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to What Remains for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite What Remains episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
E10 A Murder Trial Without A Body
What Remains
08/10/22 • 27 min
What is justice? For some people, it’s finding the missing remains of the person they love. For others, it’s convicting the person responsible for taking a life. Sometimes, it’s both. In this episode, we take you into the belly of the criminal justice system and show you how it tries to find resolution for families in some of the most difficult cases. We tell the story of Monica Moynan, a young mother missing and presumed dead – and why the local district attorney believes she can prosecute the ex-husband for murder without a key piece of evidence – Monica’s body. Without human remains, is there a solid case? How do you take a case like that to court when you have no definitive proof a person has even been killed?
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E13 A Lost Father and a Father’s Loss
What Remains
09/14/22 • 35 min
Two families in Texas, grieving after separate tragedies, decided something needed to change. Alice Almendarez’s father, John, disappeared when she was just 16. She spent her later teen years visiting the local morgue looking for his body. She wouldn’t have answers for more than a decade even though his body was found just days after he died. David Fritts’ son, Joseph, was a veteran. When he disappeared, David had no idea where to turn. Enter a tenacious young woman running for the Texas statehouse. Together, the newly elected politician and these two unlikely community advocates helped pass a law that makes tracking missing people a priority. Full transcript available at https://www.whatremainspodcast.com.
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08/17/22 • 27 min
In 1975, Priscilla Blevins vanished from her home in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her parents reported their adult daughter’s disappearance to the police, but investigators didn’t seem very interested. Priscilla’s file was only two pages long. Ten years after her disappearance, human remains were found nearby, but no one connected them to Priscilla. Over the years, it seemed her disappearance had been all but forgotten. Another cold case, destined to remain unsolved. In this episode, we explore how DNA profiling changed the game for missing and unidentified person cases. It’s the perfect storm of everything we’ve talked about in this series – a passionate family member, a tenacious investigator, and forensic science all working together to bring closure to a case and a family yearning for answers.
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E9 Missing in NC | What Happened to Cole Thomas?
What Remains
08/03/22 • 25 min
Unlike most of this podcast, this is not a story about skeletal remains. In this case, no human remains have been found. Cole Thomas is officially a missing person, but his father knows in his heart his son is dead. Imagine if your child disappeared without a trace. Given that there are so many ways of communicating and tracking people these days it’s hard to picture, but it happens. Children and adults seem to simply vanish every single day in America. In this episode we introduce you to a family whose adult son vanished in North Carolina in 2016. You’ll hear the heartbreaking story of Cole Thomas from his father, Chris, and the community advocate who is trying desperately to help this grieving father find his son – alive or dead. Chris Thomas refuses to give up, and he will go to almost any lengths to bring Cole home.
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E12 Paying the Price for DNA Testing
What Remains
08/31/22 • 30 min
An unidentified man is found dead in Charlotte, North Carolina in 2010 in a rough part of town. Leads dry up quickly. The case goes cold. That is until one cold case investigator teams up with a forensic genealogist to solve the mystery. All they need is money. It takes money to do DNA testing and to load DNA profiles into national databases. Detective Matt Hefner soon finds out that solving this one case with the help of forensic genealogist Leslie Kaufman will open the door to possibly solving all his cases involving unidentified remains. In this episode, Hefner and Kaufman refuse to give up their quest to name this John Doe. Full transcript available at https://www.whatremainspodcast.com.
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07/13/22 • 39 min
Each investigator has that one case that haunts them, the one that just won’t budge. For Detective Tim Horne, the Billboard Boy was that case. He was just a young crime scene tech when the skeletal remains of a little boy were found beneath a billboard in his jurisdiction. With no leads, the unsolved murder turned into a cold case. But Horne kept the case in a box beneath his desk where he would literally bump into it for the next 25 years. It was a daily reminder that he needed to solve it. The unidentified remains couldn’t stay unidentified forever.
When the clock starts ticking down to his retirement, he knows it’s now or never. Horne is determined to make something happen.
That’s when he turns to forensic genealogy, and the research of Barbara Rae-Venter. Famous for her work on the Golden State Killer and Bear Brook cases, Rae-Venter uses DNA profiling to provide a single piece of information that could help Horne solve the case. But can he do it before time runs out?
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E3 The Body Farm
What Remains
06/29/22 • 35 min
There’s this beautiful place in the mountains of North Carolina where death lives to tell a story. For people who have chosen to donate their body to science, their remains are laid out on the ground and left to decompose. Forensic anthropologists call them “human decomposition facilities,” but most people just call them “body farms.”
In this episode we’ll take you to a place few people ever get to visit while they’re alive. Guided by the director of the facility and her husband, both anthropology professors, we walk through each step of how bodies decay, and how the variables of weather, location, and even vultures can impact the state of skeletal remains. Learn how the research that comes out of observing this process can help police investigate unsolved murders and cold cases.
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Introducing What Remains | TRAILER
What Remains
06/08/22 • 2 min
Introducing What Remains, a new podcast where true crime meets forensic science.
Every year in the United States there are 600,000 missing person reports and 4,400 sets of unidentified human remains are found. But matching the remains to the missing people is not an easy task. With no ID, human skeletal remains often end up at medical examiners’ offices where they sit in storage closets for years, gathering dust as evidence slowly disappears. These are some of the most difficult cold cases to crack. Unsolved murders. Missing people never identified. Families left without answers.
What Remains follows forensic anthropolgists, genealogists, criminal investigators, facial reconstruction artists and volunteers dedicated to matching unidentified human remains to missing and murdered people.
WRAL Studios, the creators of Follow The Truth present What Remains, hosted by veteran crime reporter Amanda Lamb. Episode one coming soon!
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07/20/22 • 30 min
In 2005 young boys playing near an abandoned house in Harnett County, North Carolina found skeletal remains. More than fifteen years later those remains are identified thanks to the work of The Carolina Cold Case Coalition. In this bonus episode, the coalition solves its first case, bringing closure to a family and a name to the unidentified. Learn how forensic science – in particular forensic genealogy – helped solve the case.
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06/22/22 • 38 min
More than twenty years ago, a newborn baby was found dead inside a garbage bag on the side of the road near a military base in North Carolina. The officers working to solve his murder called him Baby Michael, named for the patron saint of police. With no leads on who the baby was, or who his mother was, the mystery turned into a cold case – another unsolved murder – but investigators never, ever quit on Baby Michael.
Meet the incredible investigators who made it their mission to identify Baby Michael and find his killer, and learn how they tapped into an innovation in forensic science to crack a 21-year old cold case.
This episode features two cold cases: Baby Michael and Ebonee Spears, a woman who vanished without a trace from Wilmington, North Carolina. One solved and one that still needs a miracle.
If you have any information about Ebonee Spears, please contact the Wilmington (NC) Police Department.
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FAQ
How many episodes does What Remains have?
What Remains currently has 41 episodes available.
What topics does What Remains cover?
The podcast is about True Crime, Podcasts and Science.
What is the most popular episode on What Remains?
The episode title 'E10 A Murder Trial Without A Body' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on What Remains?
The average episode length on What Remains is 31 minutes.
When was the first episode of What Remains?
The first episode of What Remains was released on Jun 8, 2022.
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