Eunsoon Jun

Podcast: Bear Brook
Source: whisper-base
Language: en
Duration: 2642s
URL: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/tracking.swap.fm/track/0bDcdoop59bdTYSfajQW/stitcher.simplecastaudio.com/bc53232d-d115-4799-937b-75b732433fa2/episodes/6aa65613-817e-4abc-be03-341f95b0f03b/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=bc53232d-d115-4799-937b-75b732433fa2&awEpisodeId=6aa65613-817e-4abc-be03-341f95b0f03b&feed=RGpV1rjX
Fetched: 2026-03-03 05:21:40

Elaine Ramos was planning a big party. It was 1999, New Year's Eve was coming soon, and she wanted to celebrate Y2K with friends and family at her home in Monterey, California. Drew's excited. Even more so when her cousin, Unsun Jun, called with some big news. She called to say that she had met somebody and asked if she could bring him. I thought, sure, this is somebody that she's finally met that she's in love with. Of course, you could bring him. Elaine and Unsun were close. Their families both immigrated to the US from Korea when they were young and grew up together. Elaine knew that Unsun had a hard time when it came to dating. So when Unsun now in her mid-40s, called to say she had met someone, it was a big deal. Elaine couldn't wait to meet him. Elaine's house in Monterey sits at the end of a cul-de-sac in a suburb full of nice, ranch-style houses. When Unsun and her new boyfriend arrived on the day of the party, Elaine stepped outside to greet them. First of all, when they drove up, it was in this dirty white van, didn't have windows on it. It was one of those cargo vans, and I thought, wow. But then when they came up to the door and I opened the door and saw his face, I had a chill run down my back that I've never in my life ever had before. And he stuck out his hand to shake my hand, and I saw the long, dirty fingernails that just creeped me out. Unsun's new boyfriend, Larry Vanner, looked ragged, dirty. He seemed a lot older than Unsun. His balled on top, with patches of messy brown hair sprouting out on the sides. He wore a mustache, and his voice was a deep drawl. The only thing inviting about him, Elaine remembers, were his eyes. They were a shade of deep blue that seemed to sparkle in the light. Elaine says it was almost like they were made of glass. Elaine was unsettled by her first impression of Vanner, but she wanted to be supportive. Unsun was just beaming. She was so happy to introduce him to the family. Later in the evening, as the party got going, Elaine tried again with the new boyfriend. She sat across a bar from Vanner and started chatting. And so I asked him, you know, so, what have you done? And he just stared at me, and he said, I'm a retired colonel in the army. And I said, really, because my boss is a retired full bird colonel. And maybe you two know each other, because I think you're about the same age. Vanner leaned over the bar, close to Elaine, and said, don't ever question me, or ask me again about my past. Before Elaine could react, Vanner brightened back up, smiling and making small talk, as if it never happened. It was one of many red flags Elaine remembers from that night. Vanner claimed to own properties all over the west coast, but couldn't explain why he'd never taken Unsun to see any of them. He said he once worked for the CIA and could disappear if he ever needed to. At the end of the night, Elaine offered Unsun and Vanner a room to stay in. They'd been drinking, and she didn't want them driving home. And she was, no, we're going to sleep in the van. And that's when we went outside and we saw the van. And it was just had dirty blankets and pillows thrown in the back. And I thought, Unsun, you can't sleep here. She was, no, I love it. I'm fine. A few days after the party, Elaine got a phone call from Unsun. She wanted to know what she thought of the new boyfriend. And I said, Unsun, I don't really know him. I try to get to know him, but he didn't want to answer my questions. I go, please, before you get too involved with him, make sure everything he's telling you is the truth. Please do that for me. And then she got angry at me and she said, nobody wants me to be happy. I finally have found somebody who loves me and nobody wants me to be happy. And I said, that's not it. I just don't want you to get involved with somebody that isn't telling you the truth. And that was the last time I spoke with her. This is Bearbrook. I'm Jason Moon. Unsun was a free spirit. We always said she was like a bohemian. She loved to explore religions, explore people, different cultures. Unsun Jun was a chemist by profession. For years, she worked at a biotech company near Richmond, California. But Elaine says she was more of an artist at heart. She made pottery, loved to travel. She was interested in Buddhism. One thing about Unsun was, as much as she was spiritual and loved meeting people, she was lonely. She didn't find the love of her life. And I think that opened her up to be vulnerable to people who would take advantage of her. What do you think that is? Is there something that you have trouble meeting people? I think that for a lot of us that are immigrants, we sometimes don't feel like we fit in. And I think that that was, it was harbored in her longer than maybe for some other people who could adjust easier. By the time Unsun turned 40, pressure was mounting for her to find someone and settle down. Then she met Larry Vanner. Unsun needed some work done on her house and an acquaintance recommended him as a handyman. From there, it somehow became a relationship. After the New Year's party, Unsun drifted away from her family. Elaine wasn't the only relative to disapprove of the new boyfriend. A few family members tried to talk to Unsun about it, but it only seemed to make things worse. Unsun's brother was getting letters and emails from Unsun saying that she didn't want anything more to do with the families. Nobody wants her to be happy, just leave her alone, let her live her life. To Unsun's relatives, it almost seemed like she was under a spell. It didn't sound like her. By 2001, a year later, Vanner had moved in with Unsun. Later that year, they got married, though it wasn't official, there was no marriage certificate. The ceremony was held in a backyard and had a Star Trek theme. Elaine wasn't invited. Unsun wasn't talking with most of her family by then. But she was still in touch with her good friend, Renee Rose. Rose was also a potter, and the two of them would sometimes go to pottery classes and art shows together. They usually spoke at least a few times a week. I wasn't able to speak with Rose for this story, but she did give an interview to a local paper back in 2003. Between that and the account of law enforcement officers who have spoken with her, here's what we know. In May of 2002, Rose called Unsun to work out the details for a trip they planned for the following week. Unsun sounded anxious when she picked up the phone. She spoke quickly and ended the conversation abruptly, saying, I'll see you tomorrow. But Unsun didn't call the next day, and she didn't show up for the trip they were supposed to take. Worried, Rose left messages for Unsun on her answering machine. After a few days, she got a call back. It was Vanner. He said, Unsun's mother was dying, and that she'd flown to Virginia to see her. Rose asked if there was a way to reach Unsun in Virginia. Vanner said no. Rose kept calling in the days and weeks that followed. In each time, Vanner's explanation for why she couldn't talk to Unsun was different. He said she was too emotionally fragile to talk, that her family had made her depressed. He said she was in Virginia, then Oregon. Once, he told Rose that Unsun had come home, but only for a day before leaving again. Still, Rose kept calling. Something didn't seem right. She wanted to know more about what was going on with Unsun. She offered to come over and cook him chilly. She offered to clean the house ahead of Unsun's return. Vanner refused. He seemed annoyed at times flashing with anger. Finally, after several weeks, Rose gave Vanner an ultimatum. She was leaving on vacation for 10 days and said she wanted to hear Unsun's voice on her answering machine when she got back. If she didn't, she would call the police. In the end, that's what she did. It's a little bit better. Can you just introduce yourself first? Sure, my name is Roxanne Grunheid, and it's spelled ROX-8. As far as I can tell, Roxanne Grunheid is everything you want in a police officer. She's tough and smart, and she's got a real eye for detail. It's kind of funny when I was work patrol, when I was first going through the training program. So in my training officers, I would write reports, and then you'd say, I'm too detailed. I spoke with Roxanne just as she was entering retirement. After more than 25 years as a police officer in California, she decided to buy a house on Long Island to be closer to her family. So I made the drive a few hours south to catch a ferry. When I arrived, Roxanne was still moving in. There was hardly any furniture around. The contractor was installing some new cabinets in the kitchen. Roxanne found a couple of long chairs for us. She set them up in an empty room that looked out over her new swimming pool. Outside, a soft rain was falling. Roxanne and I ended up spending about two and a half hours in those long chairs. She's a good storyteller, and I also noticed that she has this verbal quirk. So it was pretty goofy. It was like a catchphrase, something a TV cop might have. But then there's this other goofy story, doing goofy things. Whenever something doesn't quite add up, or she gets a gut feeling about a person or a place, she calls it goofy. Some stories are goofier than others, and... I get the impression it's a sort of coping mechanism. A view of the world she's had to adopt after working so many years in homicide. You talk to your colleagues, you find ways of trying to deal with it, you talk to your spouse, and some gallows humor, and some funny looks from people at parties, some things that you think are funny as hell that other people don't think are very funny at all. And goofy stories, and you just try to take care of yourself. By 1999, Roxanne's attention to detail had gotten her promoted to the homicide division at the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Department. Contra Costa is just across the bay from San Francisco. Roxanne thrived as a homicide detective, solving not only the active cases assigned to her, but cold cases too. She likes to tell the story of one of those cold cases in particular, because it proves how even the smallest detail can unlock a mystery. The case was an unsolved murder from the 80s. A woman was found shot to death near her car on the side of the road. Roxanne dug around and found an old recording of an interview with one of the suspects. It was a beta max tape that she had to take to the local public access TV station to play. In the video, the suspect denied even knowing the victim. At the end of the video tape, the detective gets up and he goes, all right, we'll take you back to the jail now or whatever the guy was in custody. And the lights go off, so there's no more video, but there's still audio. On those last few seconds of tape, Roxanne heard the detective casually ask the suspect what kind of cigarettes he smokes. And the suspect responds and he goes, Paul Maul's. And he goes, filters are no filters and he goes, no filters. And then the door closes and there's no more, but I listened to the entire tape. The Paul Maul's triggered something. Roxanne had read in the case file. The detectives had taken the contents of an ashtray in the victim's car into evidence. And there were like three Paul Maul no filter cigarettes in her ashtray. And I was like, holy crap, you know what I mean? And I went back and I called the crime line, did you still have these cigarettes? Yes, we have them great. Put in a request to see if there's DNA on them. That was his DNA on the cigarettes and that was it. That one little detail opened that case wide open. And he went to prison for murder in that woman. I get the feeling Roxanne lives for those kinds of details. The kind that seems so insignificant until they don't. Anyways, that's where Roxanne was in 2002. Solving cold cases, making a name for herself. When a call came in about a missing woman. Our patrol division had been contacted by a woman by the name of Rose. And she had called the sheriff's office to report her friend, Unsunjoon Missing. Do you need another coke? No. You sure? I'm fine. Within a few days, detectives brought Larry Vanner. Unsunjoon's new live-in boyfriend in for questioning. The video of the interview shows Vanner sitting in an office chair in a small windowless room in front of a tiny desk. Vanner is wearing a t-shirt and gray slacks. A pair of eyeglasses are propped up on his balding head. Maybe she heard herself and you're concerned about that getting out that she's harmed herself. No. If you're thinking if she's suicidal, she's not. But she's not as aggressive as used to be. Vanner seemed evasive to detectives. He was willing enough to talk, but when he did, he would end up issuing vague platitudes. I've always tried to live by the model that there's no defense against the truth. But sometimes it's hard to find out what the truth is. You've got one side, the other side, and something down the middle that people might perceive to be the truth. Or he would tell rambling stories that seem to be building to a point that never came. When these guys get a chance to go to work for the Forest Service for 20-50 an hour, they 24 hours a day. I got to eat small meals about four times a day, five times a day. If you had a pair of shoes and you were close to fire, you'd get what was you call it. Part your part, most truth or kind of be a firefighter. Vanner claimed that Unsun was in Oregon. She was overseeing the construction of a cabin on one of his properties, he said. But he wouldn't give police away to contact her. Then later his story changed. He said the real reason Unsun was in Oregon was to see a therapist because she'd suffered a mental breakdown. Vanner said a call from police could trigger an anxiety attack. Now I haven't talked any more about ensuing problems or my problems because frankly, you're not my priest. And you're not my doctor. And both stories have their place. You know, God has a path of place in society sometimes. But I'm just not going to say any more about ensuing or myself right now. Because with the understanding of it frankly, I'm not going to touch you off. I'm not going to touch you off. He played this cat and mouse game with them. At one point in the interview, I know that they provided him with a telephone. And he dialed a number and then didn't talk to anybody and hung up. But because it was on videotape, we could slow it down and get the phone number that he was dialing. And when a detective called that number, it actually did go to a psychiatrist's office in Eugene, Oregon. And so we were thinking, okay, you know, maybe, you know, he didn't have a piece of paper. He had this phone number in his head. Over the phone, detectives asked the psychiatrist if Unsum was there. The doctor said federal patient privacy laws didn't allow them to reveal that. Detectives looked for a way around the privacy law. Finally, they worked out a compromise with the doctor. They would give a physical description of Unsum. The doctor would say if they were treating a patient who matched it. After hearing the description, the psychiatrist said no. The Oregon story was looking pretty shaky. But there was another reason why detectives were suspicious. So the goofy thing that kind of had the big red flag in the room was the fact that he had given us this name of Lord's William Banner with a date of birth. Roxanne says when they ran that name through the system, instead of coming back with a driver's license like they would expect, it came back with something called an index number. Index numbers are basically placeholders for someone's identity in official records. They're assigned to people who don't have a valid form of ID. Yeah, and that's all we had on him. There was no criminal history, nothing in our no prior mention in a police report. There was nothing in any come database. There was no driver's license. There was no like nothing, like nothing. Detectives asked Vanner if they could fingerprint him. He agreed. To do that, they had to take him to a separate facility across town. Roxanne volunteered to ride along in the back seat with Vanner while another detective drove. On the way over, Roxanne started chatting with Vanner. She says it was small talk with a purpose. You know, I kind of worked into the conversation to see where I could go with it. You know what I mean? Roxanne wanted to see if she could figure out where Vanner was from. She started by talking about accents. She brought up her own Long Island accent. How it was often commented on here in California. And then she said, it sounded like he had an accent too. But she couldn't place it. Where was it from? He stopped dead in his conversation and looked at me and then kind of got really closer to me. Looked me straight in the eye and he goes, that's none of your damn business. Vanner then abruptly returned to casual small talk. Roxanne says the mood change was so fast, it was like a light switch. The same thing Elaine had seen at the New Year's party. Vanner was fingerprinted and then detectives drove him back to the station. By the time it returned, the results of the prints were already waiting for them. They would change everything. When detectives got back to the police station with Larry Vanner, they left him alone in the same interrogation room as before. Then the video shows two detectives entering the room. One of them holding a slim Manila folder with the results from Vanner's fingerprints. They included a criminal record and a list of known aliases. All right Larry, your prints came back. Curtis or Gerald or Jerry or whatever name you're going by this week. Curtis Kimball. Our Gerald Monk, what's up? Monkerman. Monkerman. Right. Regal Bell. No. Yeah, that's who you are, man. Larry Vanner's fingerprints belonged to a man whose name was not Larry Vanner. The prints came back under the name Curtis Mayo Kimball. In the video, you can actually see the surprise splash across Vanner slash Kimball's face as detectives list off his other names. The detectives assumed that Curtis Kimball was itself an alias, but at this point it was the earliest name they had. For Roxanne Grunheim, it was hard to know what to make of this new information. The goal of any missing person's investigation is to determine whether that person where they are and if they're okay. You know what I mean? But now we just had to add a piece to it. Like why is who is this guy that's giving us one name that's not really a name that's not even him that is now... Reportedly this other guy who's been on parole for 12 years. That last part that Curtis Kimball was on parole was a big deal. I'll explain why I just invented. In 1989, Curtis Kimball was convicted of child abandonment and it spent a year and a half in a California state prison. Then on the day he was released, he skipped town, violating his parole. Looking back, Roxanne thinks that Larry Vanner slash Curtis Kimball didn't know his prints would come back so quickly. The last time he was arrested was over 10 years ago before the process was handled by computers. She thinks he agreed to get fingerprinted, assuming it would take at least a few days for the results to come back. Plenty of time to leave town, adopt a new name, and start over again. But that plan didn't work. So I read him his Miranda rights and at that time he chose not to talk to us and he shut down the interview. Nope, nothing just thought I wanted an attorney. Okay, and that was it. In California, parole leaves and their property are subject to police searches for any reason at any time, no warrant required. So now that Roxanne had Curtis Kimball's record in hand and had discovered that he'd violated his parole, she had a new opportunity. She could legally search his home. So Roxanne and another detective named Mike Costa drove out to Unsun Jun's house where she and Curtis Kimball had been living together to have a look around. Unsun lived in an area called East Richmond Heights. It's a middle-class neighborhood with small houses packed right next to each other, along winding roads that work their way up a hillside. From the top of the hill on a clear day, you can see all the way across the bay to San Francisco. Roxanne and Mike arrived at the house and knocked at the front door. No one answered. Using the keys they'd taken from Kimball, they went inside. We were working a missing person's case, so we didn't open any drawers or anything like that because no human being could be in a drawer. So we were just walked around the house to make sure that A, that there wasn't anybody in there that was going to hurt us. And at the same time, just making sure that if she was in there, we would try to find it, right? So we were looking for somebody human sized, her human size, in the general areas of the house. Roxanne and Mike made their way through the house room by room. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but that changed as the search moved outside. We went in the backyard and we found a dead kitten that had been thrown over the fence in the back. There was an area inside the shed that looked like it had recently been tried to be dug up inside the shed. Like a dirt floor inside the shed. Roxanne and Mike took note of the dead cat, of the disturbed soil in the shed. Then they made their way around the outside of the house to the garage. It was the one place they hadn't looked yet. A sliding garage door had a padlock on it, but Roxanne found the key on Kimball's key chain. She threw up the door and found Eunson's pottery studio. She had several kilns, like almost like nice, big, nice kilns. There was pottery in various stages of being created, fired, glazed. The walls of the garage were lined with Eunson's pottery. Bulls, bases, sculpted figures and masks. Roxanne and Mike slowly moved through the space, still careful not to touch anything. In the back of the garage, they found a doorway. It led down a few steps to an unfinished part of the house, a sort of basement crawl space with a dirt floor. It was about eight by ten, not quite tall enough to stand up in. My partner, Mike, went in there and he looked around and he goes, you need to come take a look at this. I stepped into that area and looked with my flashlight, and I could see that there was a huge pile of cat litter, probably that tall, so a good three feet tall. Cat litter. The pile was almost waist high, 85 feet across, enough to fill the bed of a truck. I'd never seen anything like that, but it was perfect. It was just like you'd pile up a pile of sand. On the ceiling above the pile, a couple of work lights were clamped on to an exposed beam. The lights were aimed down at the pile, like the cat litter was part of some kind of bizarre home improvement project. There was some shop kind of tools and equipment there, reciprocating saw. There was a small, not a hatchet small, but like a small axe, like a child's axe, like a smaller axe, leaned up there. There was some bottles of like some green substance like spray bottles. So it was goofy. Roxanne called for the forensic team. For an hour and a half, they photographed the scene in detail. The cat litter, the work lights, the tools. Then finally, they started to sift through the pile of cat litter. And within a few swipes of the pile, the thing that emerged was a human foot that was still in a rubber, like a flip flop. But it was mummified. It was like a museum, like a mummified foot, human foot, obviously human foot. The forensic team found blood splatter on the heating and air conditioning ductwork above the pile of cat litter. It suggested that Unsun had been bludgeoned to death there in the crawl space. They also discovered that her body had been dismembered. If she wanted to be loved, that's all she wanted. And I think that she found out about him or found out that something wasn't right and confronted him. You know, I'm sure Unsun confronted him. I'm sure she thought. I have to believe that she thought. The case stuck with me because he was so freaking creepy. Joe Mata was a prosecutor with a contra-costah county district attorney's office for 17 years. It was just an unusual kind of case, just the nature of it. In 2003, he had what seemed like an open and shut case against Kimball. He had lied about Unsun's whereabouts, her body was found in the house he was living in, and Roxanne had uncovered lots of evidence that he'd been spending Unsun's money after her death. But as he prepared for trial, Mata was worried. Mata was a pretty well-respected public defender, probably their toughest advocate at the time. He was a noble adversary. He was a brawler. Mata knew this experienced defense attorney would try to argue that Kimball wasn't directly involved in Unsun's death. To try to negotiate a plea deal on a lesser charge, like accessory to murder. My big concern is there's not enough evidence to show how it went down. There wasn't. There wasn't any evidence. There wasn't a murder weapon. What if she fell down the stairs and he felt bad? He didn't want anybody to know about it. Who knows what they could have come up with. Mata needed something connecting Kimball to the scene in the basement. He figured their best shot was the cat litter. It was so much cat litter that a store employee might remember the purchase and who made it. If Mata could show the jury that Kimball had worked to cover Unsun's death, it would help tie him to the crime itself. It wouldn't be a smoking gun, but it would help. He put Detective Roxanne Grunheid on the case. I couldn't even imagine. There's got to be 1,500 dog and cat like boutique store. Anyway, you could buy that anywhere, you know. Roxanne wasn't sure how she was going to find the right pet store. But then she remembered a detail. When I was tracking back some of the fiduciary crimes that he was committing, he actually had used Unsun's ATM card at this ATM that was down in kind of right on the edge of like El Sabrante Richmond area in California. And I used to work in that beat. Roxanne realized she knew that ATM and she knew there was a pet store right next to it. So I go, okay, so I roll up there and I go in and I just talk to the manager and I go, yeah, I talk to the manager and detect him. And I go, anybody buy a large quantity of cat litter in the past? And he goes, yeah, there was this guy. And he came in. It's so basically, he tells me the story that this old guy twinkly blue eyes, drives up with his car, pays cash, loads him in his car and his story to the employees was something in fact that he had a little bit of oil that he spilled on the driveway changing the oil on his car or something like that. But I was like, anybody ever buy 250 pounds of cat litter, you know? And they're like, oh, that was pretty unusual. The cat litter wasn't Kimble's only attempt at covering up evidence of the crime. A neighbor told Roxanne that Kimble had been out hosting his driveway one day when he casually mentioned that he was dealing with a rat infestation and that if there were any strange smells coming from the garage, not to worry about it. So Mata had more than enough to prosecute the case. But as the trial approached, Roxanne kept digging anyways. She got in touch with Kimble's former parole officer and had all the documents on his criminal record facts over. Roxanne read through them all. His criminal record began in 1986, about 15 years before he met Unsun with a warrant issued for child abandonment. According to the police reports, he had left his five-year-old daughter at an RV park with an elderly couple and then fled. At the time, he was using the name Gordon Jensen. A few years later, he was pulled over driving a stolen car. He gave officers the name Gerald Mockerman, but his fingerprints linked him back to the child abandonment case. He was convicted on that charge and served about a year and a half of a three-year sentence in a California state prison before being released on parole. The parole officer told Roxanne he never showed up for his first meeting. Roxanne was getting more and more interested in Kimble's past. The trail of aliases, his daughter at the RV park, she couldn't let it go. Even as Kimble headed to court for a murder trial, he was sure to lose. Unsun Jun's cousin, Elaine Ramos, can remember the first day of the trial. It was the first time any of the family had seen Curtis Kimble, a man they'd known as Larry Vanner, since the murder. As he walked past us all, we all had buttons, pins with Unsun's face on it. And we were all sitting there in the jury box wherever that is. And he passed us by and he just gave us this murky smile. It was disgusting. The trial was hard on Unsun's family and not just because Kimble seemed to be taunting them. Unsun Jun and Curtis Kimble met in November of 1999. He was arrested for her murder in November 2002. During the years in between, Kimble had so successfully isolated Unsun that her family was forced to grieve someone that they didn't know as well as they once had. The emails from Unsun telling her family to leave her alone, they hadn't sounded like Unsun because it turns out that Kimble wrote them. He made sure that for many of Unsun's relatives, their last conversation with her was an argument about her new boyfriend. Everybody felt guilty for not trying harder to protect her and her mother had dementia. So that was a good thing that she never learned what happened to Unsun. You know, she would ask about her and her daughter would just say that she's busy and that was a blessing. Elaine says most of the family doesn't like to talk about this anymore. It's too painful to relive. But Unsun is well-remembered by her family, often through her pottery. I have a couple of pieces in my garden and a couple of pieces that we used when one piece that when holidays come I use. And then she made this man, this kind of funny-looking man that I have outside. I call her my Unsun man. It wasn't very good. Before all this happened, she was very loved. She was. I mean, there were family issues, but there is with most families, you know. Have your differences and get mad at your siblings. But in the end we all love each other. The first day of Curtis Kimble's trial ended with few surprises. Things were going more or less as prosecutor Joe Mata had planned. But that changed the next morning on the second day of trial. Curtis Kimble stood up and told the judge he wanted to change his plea to guilty. When he pled guilty, did it seem like his attorney was caught by surprise? Oh yeah, his attorney said he's doing it against, he said on the record. Pretty sure he said, this plea is against my advice. How unusual is that? Pretty darn unusual. Nobody ever pleads guilty to murder. Nobody pleads guilty to murder. But Curtis Kimble did. He willingly accepted a sentence of 15 years to life. Detective Roxanne Grunheid thinks she might know why. The day before, on the first day of trial, she'd been talking with prosecutor Mata during a courtroom recess. She was updating him on all the things she was finding in Kimble's past. Kimble, meanwhile, was sitting not too far away at the defendant's table. Close enough to maybe over here. He wanted me to stop my investigation, like he didn't want me to continue to go down that rabbit hole. And he thought that if he pled guilty, maybe I'd go away. But Roxanne didn't go away. Back at her desk, she kept reading through the old police reports of Kimble's criminal history. The part she found the most puzzling was the charge that had put Kimble behind bars in the late 80s, abandoning his own five-year-old daughter at an RV park. In the files, there were photographs of her. With Xerox copies, so they weren't very clear, but she was little. Like, she was a little, little, tiny girl. You know what I mean? And there was a fingerprint card, like a booking fingerprint card, but with these little tiny fingerprints on them, you know, like little fingerprints. And footprints, you know, because in the hospital, right, they take the baby's footprint. Roxanne became fixated on this little girl. Her name was listed as Lisa. But actually, Roxanne wasn't so sure about that. When Curtis Kimble and Lisa were staying at the RV park, he was using the name Gordon Jensen. But Roxanne knew that Gordon Jensen was an alias, that it wasn't his real name. For that matter, she was pretty sure Curtis Kimble was a fake name too. And this got her wondering, if he'd been lying about his own name to hide his past, maybe he'd been lying about the little girl's name too. Maybe this Lisa didn't know her real name. Maybe she wasn't really even his daughter. I was sitting there in, you know, my cubicle and them reading all of this stuff. And it just, I felt like that with, now that I had, I had not only my homicide case, and who this guy was, but then there's all this backstory to him, and who the heck is this guy, really? And who's that little girl? Roxanne wanted to do a paternity test to know for sure. She had Kimble's DNA from her homicide investigation. And she learned that detectives investigating Lisa's abandonment had taken a blood sample from her back in the 80s. Roxanne convinced the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department to split the blood sample, which they still had, and they fettics it to her in Contra Costa County. Roxanne ordered the paternity test as soon as it arrived. The report, I got the report back that was scientifically definitive. Like, this person is not biologically related to this person. And I'm like, holy moly, you know what I mean? Like, this is crazy right now. Like, there's like, San Bernardino has like a, like has a, like a, like an Elizabeth smart, or like a, who is she? Like, she's not Lisa. And I'm like, who is she? It had taken almost 20 years since Lisa was abandoned for someone to find out that she was a living Jane Doe, that she had a real family and a real name out there somewhere, but she was a missing person. By ordering that paternity test, Roxanne revealed a mystery that was not unlike the one that had mystified police in Bearbrook. Though Lisa was allied, she was just as unidentified as the victims found in those barrels. It may be hard to see now, but the struggle to find Lisa's true identity would lead all the way back to Bearbrook State Park. It would also lead to a breakthrough in criminal forensics that is being used right now to solve some of the country's most notorious cold cases. That's next time on Bearbrook. Bearbrook is reported and produced by me Jason Moon. Taylor Quimby is senior producer. Editing help from Corey Prinsell, Todd Bookman, Lauren Chulgin, Sam Evans Brown, Rita Green, and Annie Ropeek. The executive producer is Erica Janick. Dan Barich is NHPR's news director. Director of content is Maureen McMurray. NHPR's digital director is Rebecca LaVoy. Photography and video by Ali Gutierrez. Graphics and Interactives by Sarah Plourd. Original music for this show was composed by me Jason Moon and Taylor Quimby. Additional music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions, Lee Roshear, Pottington Bear, and Daniel Birch. To see a timeline of the cases mentioned in this episode, go to our website, bearbrookpodcast.org. Bearbrook is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.