Mother accused of shooting her 4 kids breaks silence in exclusive interview from jail
Oninda Romelus said the way the world is portraying her “is a lie.” In an exclusive interview, she explained what she says happened on a fateful day in October.
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Author: Jeremy Rogalski
BRAZORIA COUNTY, Texas — A mother accused of shooting her four children — killing two of them — proclaimed her innocence in an exclusive KHOU 11 Investigates interview from inside the Brazoria County Jail.
Oninda Romelus, 31, who is being held on a $14 million bond, said the way the world is portraying her “is a lie.”
“I’m not crazy. I’m not a monster,” Romelus said during two conversations from jail totaling about an hour and a half.
The case drew national headlines after Brazoria County Sheriff’s Office deputies found Romelus’ four children shot inside her car on Oct. 4 at a gas station along Highway 288 near Angleton. They said O’Karreo Covington, 13, and Amourra Chappel, 3, died in the shooting. Siblings Kylee Romelius, 9, and Traviel Downer, 8, survived.
- RELATED: What we know about Oninda Romelus, the Houston-area mother accused of shooting her four children
“We need multiple ambulances,” first responders were heard saying in emergency radio traffic recordings from the scene. KHOU 11 previously aired parts of those recordings.
From jail, Romelus told KHOU 11 Investigative Reporter Jeremy Rogalski that she left her home in Montgomery County early that Saturday morning because she believed her ex was stalking her. She said she was planning to stay in a hotel, but ran into car trouble and was searching for a 24-hour mechanic shop.
While driving, she said her oldest son, O’Karreo, suddenly snapped.
“My oldest has a history of psychotic episodes threatening people,” Romelus said. “He has a long track record.”
She also claimed that her son had secretly taken her guns from their home when they left and that she didn’t realize he had them with him.
“I remember my oldest aiming the gun at me,” she told KHOU 11. “I swear to God my son was growling at me … (I told him) ‘What the f***? Stop. Stop. Stop.'”
When asked what happened next, Romelus said she couldn’t talk about it because the jail conversation was being recorded. Her version of what happened contradicts the account from Brazoria County authorities.
“We believe that the evidence shows that this tragedy occurred inside the vehicle, and that Romelus, the mother of the children, is the shooter,” Brazoria County Sheriff Bo Stallman said during an Oct. 5 news conference.
Court records paint an even more disturbing picture. According to a charging document, Romelus allegedly told investigators her children were “with the devil” and that “instead of them doing it to me, I’m gonna do it to them.” When investigators asked, “Do what?” the court document states Romelus responded: “Kill them all.”
When Rogalski asked Romelus about the alleged comments, she denied making them.
“I swear my hand before God, I don’t remember any of that,” she said.
Romelus described herself as a Christian who prays every day.
She is charged with two counts of murder and two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
The lead investigator on the case for the Brazoria County Sheriff’s Office had no comment about her claims, and Romelus’ defense attorney, Carey Faden, also had no comment.
Woman on finding peace after learning mother is child killer Diane Downs: ‘Though that’s biologically my makeup, it’s not who I am inside’
Becky Babcock is a behaviorial health coordinator with a son named Chris.
ByJeca Taudte, Keren Schiffman, and Enjoli Francis
March 21, 2019, 2:58 PM
9:30
The night Diane Downs’ 3 children were shot in cold blood: Part 1When Downs brought them to the hospital, her daughter Cheryl was dead and her other two children, Danny and Christie, were badly wounded. Authorities were suspicious of Downs’ “flat” demeanor.
ABC
By her own account, Becky Babcock had a healthy, normal life growing up in Bend, Oregon.
“My childhood was of dreams and we had every opportunity that we wanted. My parents wanted us to prosper, to learn and to grow,” she said. “I had a great family, a great life. … It was honestly picture perfect.”
Becky Babcock, a 34-year-old behavioral health coordinator for children in Salem, Oregon, said although she feels like she’s always known that she was adopted, at first, she didn’t question where she came from.
“I was just like any other kid. And, we were just like any other family,” she said.
The family was always on the go, windsurfing, fishing, hiking and skiing at Mount Bachelor. But, she said, at the age of 8, she started asking questions about the adoption.
Becky Babcock said that despite her supportive upbringing, she felt this need to know why her biological parents were not raising her.
“There was just a little part of me that felt like I was searching for something else,” she said. “I was searching for that blood tie, in a sense.”
(MORE: When Parents Kill Their Kids)
When she was 11 years old, Becky Babcock tricked her longtime babysitter into revealing the name of her biological mother: Diane Downs.
Downs was a notorious killer in Oregon, convicted in the 1983 shooting of her three children that left one of them dead.
The revelation would shake Becky Babcock’s young world and take her on a journey of self-discovery, filled with ups and downs, she said. After leaving the public eye in 2010, she spoke to ABC News’ “20/20” to share her life now.
“The impact of Diane Downs being my mom has altered the course of my life so many times. But I’m on track and I’m really happy with the way life is,” she said.
There was just a little part of me that felt like I was searching for something else.
Becky Babcock finds ‘Small Sacrifices’
When Becky Babcock was young, her adoptive mother, Jackie Babcock, tried to appease her curiosity surrounding her adoption. She said her mother gave her “little bits of information” but the questions kept coming, she said.
Eventually Jackie Babcock decided the truth was likely too much for the youngster to handle, Becky Babcock said, and stopped answering her questions.
Becky Babcock said she’d previously learned from Jackie Babcock that a book had been written about her biological mother, so days after getting the name from the babysitter, she headed to a bookstore.
(MORE: 7-year-old girl shot dead while in car with her mom; police searching for gunman)
“At that point, I had a name and that was all I needed because I knew there was a book,” she said.
At the bookstore, she found Ann Rule’s book “Small Sacrifices,” which detailed Downs’ life and conviction, complete with pictures.
The book tells how on May 19, 1983, Downs had pulled her car up to a hospital’s emergency door. Inside the vehicle, her children — Cheryl, 7; Christie, 8; and Danny, 3 — had all been shot multiple times at close range. Cheryl was dead.
Downs, who’d just moved to Springfield, Oregon, from Chandler, Arizona, told authorities that she and the children had been traveling down a road after leaving a friend’s house at night when a man had flagged down her car.
The bushy-haired stranger, she said, wanted her car and pulled out a gun, shooting all three children. Downs, a 27-year-old divorced postal-service worker, also had been shot in her left arm before she was able to escape and drive away to a hospital.
But on Feb. 28, 1984, nine months after the shootings, Downs was arrested and charged with one count of murder and two counts of attempted murder. When she went on trial in May 1984, she was pregnant again. After a six-week trial, she was convicted.
Prior to her sentencing to life plus 50 years, Downs gave birth to a baby girl whom she named Amy Elizabeth. The baby was taken by the state and delivered to adoptive parents. That girl was later renamed Rebecca “Becky” Babcock.
“I saw who she was and what she looked like,” Becky Babcock said about looking at the pictures in the book. “It wasn’t a face that I wanted to see. … Just the cold look in her eyes scared me. … The reality set in that that’s who gave birth to me. … I slammed the book shut and I left.”
(MORE: Connecticut town stunned by arrest of 12-year-old in killing of twin sister, stabbing of mother)
She said she didn’t tell her parents what she’d learned about her biological mother.
Over the years she learned more details about Downs. It wasn’t until she was 16, however, that she saw the two-part miniseries based on the book at a boyfriend’s house. She said she’d shared with him some details about her biological mother and unbeknownst to her, he’d rented the tape.
Becky Babcock said watching the film “broke” her heart and her life went into a “downward spiral.”
“It was gut-wrenching. It changed me. … My innocence was gone,” she said.
Reaching out to Diane Downs
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Becky Babcock, who said she’d already started becoming more rebellious in school and at home before watching the movie, began taking “more intense” drugs and dating a number of people. She moved out of her parents’ home in Bend and dropped out of school.
“I was living with my boyfriend or living with friends,” she said. “I was not nice to my parents. I was angry. I was hurt. … I lashed out.”
Becky Babcock said there were some aspects of Downs’ character that she related to: the need for attention, love and belonging.
“It was very scary to have any relation to that woman. … That’s what really scared me. … To feel any sort of connection to such a monster. … A part of me was afraid that that’s where I came from, does that mean where I’m going?” she said.
At the age of 17, Becky Babcock learned that she was pregnant with her son, Chris.
“I love my son with everything that I am. … But being that young, I didn’t understand what being a mom was. I didn’t realize that life had to do a 180. … I continued doing the things that I shouldn’t have been doing. … I was still out being a teenager,” she said.
Eventually, she left Bend for a job in Klamath Falls. She was 21 and had gotten engaged, got a good job and then in 2006, she had her second son. But, before she gave birth, she and the baby’s father broke up and she was forced to move into a homeless shelter. She called her parents and placed the baby for adoption.
After her second child had been adopted, Becky Babcock said, she felt drawn to finally reach out to Downs.
“I wanted her to be a person. I wanted to relate to her not as a mother, because I had a mother, just as somebody that was heartbroken to give up their child,” she said. “I was hoping to have a connection.”
Becky Babcock said the first exchange of letters between her and Downs was positive.
As more letters continued to arrive, however, the content grew stranger, she said.
(MORE: Most Infamous Convicted and Alleged Mommy Murderers in History)
“They progressively got more and more insane — conspiracy theories, people watching me my whole life — just really scary things. And that’s when I completely regretted messaging. … She sent, you know, 12 pages of how she’s innocent, and, ‘This is who really did it,’ she thinks,” Becky Babcock said.
She said Downs even accused her of being a part of a conspiracy against her and trying to harm her. Becky Babcock eventually asked Downs to stop contacting her.
“I had to accept that she really does struggle mentally,” she said. “She really does have something wrong with her. And, it doesn’t mean that I do too.”
When I was young, I worried that I would be like Diane Downs. As I grew up, I realized nature is not gonna win over nurture.
Becky Babcock takes her story public
In 2010, she did a media blitz, interviewing with Glamour magazine and then ABC News’ “20/20” and Oprah Winfrey’s talk show. Then, Becky Babcock decided she would step out of the spotlight.
“I felt like I had, you know, put myself out there, told my story like I had wanted to, and it was time to move on,” she said.
Afterward, Becky Babcock said she suffered some health issues but took up yoga and meditation and began feeling healthier. She also changed her degree program and found a passion in psychology.
She said she’d also reached out to her siblings Christie and Danny, who were both adopted by the prosecutor who tried Downs. She said both had told her they were not interested in talking and wanted to live their lives “without the stigma of being Diane Downs’ children.”
Becky Babcock said Rule, whom she eventually met before the author passed away in 2015, had given her some details about her father but not his true identity.
“I was searching for the other half of who I am and where I came from. I have the side of Diane Downs. And I was hoping to find the opposite,” she said. “I know I came from a monster. I was hoping that the other part of that wasn’t, that it was the opposite, that it was somebody full of love and kindness and generosity.”
Becky Babcock recently bought a new house and is feeling upbeat about her life and her role as a mother to Chris. She said she was speaking to ABC News’ “20/20” again to share with others how her life had changed since 2010.
(MORE: Mother accused of killing 14-year-old daughter as the girl dialed 911)
“When I was young, I worried that I would be like Diane Downs. As I grew up, I realized nature is not gonna win over nurture,” she said.
Becky Babcock said that she’d spoken to her son, Chris, now a 16-year-old high school sophomore, about Downs. She said that she’d told him when he was about 8 years old and that he’d received the news “well” and had asked questions, as she did years ago.
“I look at him and I am just so impressed. … I compare where I was at that age to where he is and my heart overflows with joy and pride,” she said.
She said that she was incredibly proud of her son, who practices jiujitsu, and that the two enjoy spending time together, walking the dog or just watching a movie at home.
Chris told “20/20” he didn’t have a desire to connect with Downs.
“I already have a pretty amazing grandma. … I don’t need someone like that in my life. … The hole’s already been filled and the spot’s already been taken,” he said.
As for Becky Babcock, she said that she has no more questions for Downs and that she no longer wants to see or hear from her.
“It’s taken me a long while to get to the place where my story is my own. … I’ve worked really hard through life to overcome those obstacles. To realize that even though that’s biologically my makeup, it’s not who I am inside. … I have closure to the whole situation,” she said.
‘They lied to us’: Mom says police deceived her to get her DNA and charge her son with murder
A murder case raises the question: Is it OK for police to lie to get an innocent person’s DNA?
Police were trying to crack a cold case and kept hitting dead ends — until they got DNA from the unknown killer’s family.Jun Cen / for NBC News
By Jon Schuppe
VALDOSTA, Ga. — On an October morning in 2018, Eleanor Holmes and her husband left home to run an errand and found two men inside their front gate. They introduced themselves as detectives from Orlando, Florida, and said they needed the couple’s help.
Standing in the driveway, the casually dressed detectives said they were trying to identify someone who’d been found dead many years earlier, the Holmeses recalled. They were looking for the person’s relatives, and were using DNA and genealogical records to stitch together a family tree that they hoped would lead them to a name. Friendly and businesslike, they said they’d already got DNA samples from Eleanor Holmes’ sister and an aunt. And now they wanted hers.
Holmes already knew about the detectives’ visit to her sister. It worried her that someone in her family had died without anyone knowing about it. She had relatives in Orlando, including a niece whom she hadn’t heard from in more than a decade. So she agreed.
“I just did it because that was the only thing on my mind, my niece. That was it, bottom line,” Holmes said in a recent interview.
The detectives, still standing in the driveway, swabbed Holmes’ cheek and put the sample in a container. They thanked her, gave her a business card and drove away.
She thought nothing of it until a few days later, when she got a frantic phone call from the girlfriend of one of her sons, Benjamin Holmes Jr. Orlando police had just arrested him for allegedly fatally shooting a college student, Christine Franke, in her Florida home in 2001. They’d used DNA and genealogical records to tie him to the crime.
In that panicked moment, it dawned on Holmes that the detectives hadn’t told her the truth. They’d used her DNA to help build a case against her son.
“When they arrested him, I knew they were lying,” Holmes said. “They lied to us.”
Police have said that the arrest of Benjamin Holmes Jr., 39, shows their commitment “to do everything we can to solve crimes.” Franke’s family says the arrest has given them long-needed answers about her death and allowed them to stop wondering if the killer was still out there, free to prey on others.
Benjamin Holmes Jr. and his parents, though, say he is innocent. He has pleaded not guilty, and his trial, scheduled for June, may be the first to explore how police conduct investigations using genetic genealogy, a largely unregulated technology that has exploded in popularity in recent years.
Holmes and her husband, who are both in their mid-70s, aren’t the only ones in their family who feel misled by police. In the months before taking her DNA, Orlando detectives visited more than a dozen of her relatives in Florida and Georgia. Several said they were told a similar story before agreeing to provide DNA samples.
“It was just deception, not only to me but all my other family members, because they know what they were looking for when they took the DNA,” Holmes said. “They weren’t looking for someone in our family that had been killed, or that was dead. They were looking totally to find out whether or not our DNA coincided with Benjamin’s. That’s what they were looking for.”
A new tool for a cold case
For 17 years, Orlando police detectives had tried to figure out who killed Franke. Although the case had gone cold, each did what they could with the available technology and manpower. But every lead, every potential clue found at the scene, left them, and Franke’s family, without answers.
“I thought they’d never catch him,” Franke’s mother, Tina, 70, said.
Franke, 25, was one of four siblings raised in Vero Beach, 100 miles outside Orlando. An aspiring elementary school teacher, she was studying at the University of Central Florida while working as a server at a restaurant near the Universal Orlando theme parks. She lived with her girlfriend about a half hour away, on the north side of town.
Early in the morning of Oct. 21, 2001, after working a double shift, Franke returned home to an empty apartment; her girlfriend was out of town. Later that day, after the girlfriend was unable to reach her, she called a neighbor, who found Franke dead just inside the apartment door.
She’d been shot once in the head, and her wallet, containing no cash, had been discarded on the floor, according to court documents. Her clothing had been partially removed, and investigators found semen on her body. Police surmised that she had resisted the killer’s attempts to rob and rape her.
Police took a sample of the semen and submitted it to the state crime lab, which developed a profile and entered it into a national criminal database. There was no match. They took DNA from dozens of people ─ potential suspects, as well as friends, relatives, co-workers, neighbors, acquaintances and witnesses ─ and compared their profiles to the DNA found at the scene. Again, no hits.
They tried other forensic methods ─ lifting fingerprints from the apartment, entering a shell casing into a national firearms database ─ and found nothing. Years passed with no progress.
That changed in April 2018, when California authorities announced that they’d used a groundbreaking technique to identify a man they said was the Golden State Killer, a serial rapist and murderer who’d terrorized the state in the 1970s and the 1980s. Law enforcement officials said they’d solved the case by entering crime-scene DNA into an online database called GEDmatch, where people shared profiles purchased from direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe.
Should police be able to use DNA databases to solve crimes?
02:45
Orlando Detective Michael Fields, who inherited the Franke case from a retired colleague in 2012, decided to try the same tactic. He reached out to a Virginia company, Parabon NanoLabs, which had just started helping law enforcement identify unknown suspects by using genealogy websites to find their relatives and build family trees. The researchers, led by Parabon’s top genealogist, CeCe Moore, found two cousins of the suspected killer in GEDmatch and traced their common ancestors to a husband and wife who lived in Valdosta in the first half of the 1900s.
The Valdosta couple had an extremely large family, producing a sprawling family tree. Navigating that thicket left Fields and the researchers at dead ends, unable to go further without getting DNA from more people in the family.
Testing the limits of DNA collection
Asking innocent people to voluntarily provide their DNA — known as “target testing” — is an unseen but essential, and thorny, component of investigative genetic genealogy. While police are seeking straightforward information about family ties, the process can also reveal secrets, including out-of-wedlock births and adoptions, ethics and privacy experts say. Subjects may not fully understand how their DNA profiles will be used.
While American courts have ruled that police are allowed to mislead people to obtain evidence, there’s a debate within law enforcement over how honest police should be in seeking DNA from people who aren’t suspected of a crime.
Investigator Matt Denlinger works cold cases for the Cedar Rapids Police Department in Iowa. He used target testing to help solve the 1979 murder of a teenage girl. He says the truth, without including many details, usually works.
“You just go up and tell them what you’re doing. No sleight of hand,” he said. “Most people are happy to help. They know they’re not involved. People get excited to help solve a mystery, if you phrase it that way.”
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Jennifer Spears, a cold case investigator with the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office in Florida, said she rarely gets any hesitation from the people she approaches. “I tell them their DNA is only being used in this case to help us determine where we need to be on the family tree,” she said. “Are we on the right branch, or are we way off?”
The Department of Justice requires “informed consent” from nonsuspects before collecting DNA for a genetic genealogy investigation, according to an interim policy published last year. If a law enforcement agency decides that getting such consent would “compromise the integrity of the investigation,” then investigators may obtain the sample covertly, but must first get approval from a judge.
The policy covers cases involving federal authorities, so it does not apply to the Franke case, which was handled by local police. It also leaves unaddressed the use of a false story to persuade someone to provide a DNA sample. The lack of uniform rules opens the process to ethical risks, said Christi Guerrini, an assistant professor in the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the Baylor College of Medicine.
“Unless circumstances compel us otherwise, we generally want people to be informed as to why they’re being asked to provide DNA to help with the investigation,” she said, adding that she didn’t know enough about Orlando police’s actions to evaluate their handling of the Franke case.
The Orlando Police Department and the State Attorney’s Office prosecuting the Franke case declined to comment.
Fields also declined to talk about his work on the case, but in interviews last year, he shared his general approach to asking people for their DNA. He said he has done it about 40 times, either as the lead investigator on a case, or assisting other police departments.
Fields said his approach depended on the person: how closely related they appeared to be to the unidentified suspect, whether they’d worked in law enforcement, whether they’d done any research on their own family trees.
He said he typically told his subjects the truth, without getting too specific: that there was a murderer or rapist in their family and he needed their DNA to figure out who it was. Other times, Fields said, he used a “ruse.” He declined to say what it was, or why he used it. “But it’s effective,” he said.
Visits from the police
Holmes was raised in Valdosta, a small city near the Georgia-Florida border, but met her husband at a restaurant in Orlando, more than 200 miles away. They married and raised six children there, including Benjamin Holmes Jr., who they said was athletic, outgoing, popular and a junior deacon at his church. He didn’t give his parents too much trouble beyond staying out late, they said.
After their children were grown, Holmes, a former nurse’s aide, moved back to Valdosta with her husband, a retired chef. They live a quiet life there in a single-story home behind a screen of pine trees and a chain-link gate. The couple are intensely private. The visit from the detectives in October 2018 upended that.
Fields and his partner, Detective Michael Moreschi, arrived without any advance notice. It quickly became clear that they already knew a lot about the Holmes family.
“They knew my father, they knew my children, they could name every one of my children, where they lived. Everything that they wanted, they had it right there,” Holmes recalled. “Except for my DNA.”
At that point, Fields and his colleagues had collected more than a dozen voluntary DNA samples that had narrowed the search. They believed the killer was one of Holmes’ two sons, according to an affidavit Fields would later file in court.
Among those who’d already given their DNA was Alvin Davis, who said the detectives showed up at his Valdosta home and told him they were trying to identify a woman who’d died in Orlando. They thought she was related to him, and needed his DNA to help figure out who she was.
Davis said he wasn’t worried; he liked the police and wanted to help. ”I got nothing to hide,” Davis, 63, recalled telling them. They swabbed his cheek and left.
The detectives told Cynthia Young, who lives in Miami, a similar story when they came to her door for her DNA.
Young, 63, a retired corrections officer, said she agreed because she understood how DNA could help a police investigation.
“I didn’t have a problem with it,” she said. “I see the good of using DNA.”
Those DNA submissions helped pave a genetic trail that led police to Holmes.
A son is arrested
Holmes said she isn’t a very trusting person. But the detectives put her at ease. Before submitting to the swab, she said she joked with the detectives that they might find out that she was related to them.
“I didn’t really think it over,” she recalled.
The detectives then asked her husband for his DNA. He declined and walked away.
“For me to give my DNA to you, you have to come with some kind of papers from lawyers or something,” Benjamin Holmes Sr. recalled. “Just going to walk in out of the blue and say, ‘I want to take your DNA, could you give me a sample?’ No.”
Immediately after collecting Holmes’ DNA, police sent it to the Florida state crime lab, which determined that the suspect was one of her two sons, Reginal Holmes and Benjamin Holmes Jr., who both lived in Orlando, according to the Fields affidavit.
Investigators first focused on Reginal Holmes, following him to work as he installed air conditioning units at a construction site. An undercover officer approached him, got into a conversation with him, and offered him a bottle of Gatorade. Reginal Holmes took it and drove away, with the undercover officers tailing him, according to Fields’ affidavit. When Reginal Holmes threw the bottle into a dumpster, a detective retrieved it and took it to the state crime lab, which obtained a DNA profile and compared it to the crime scene DNA. There was no match, making Benjamin Holmes Jr. the prime suspect.
He was a Wendy’s restaurant manager with a record of arrests dating to 2001, mostly low-level drug charges and probation violations, as well as a domestic violence charge, according to Fields’ affidavit. Officers put him under surveillance. On the second day of following him, officers watched him step outside a friend’s house with a cigar and a beer, then throw them out. An undercover detective retrieved both, and police sent them to the crime lab, which found a match with the DNA from the crime scene.
Based on that link, and a follow-up sample of DNA Benjamin Holmes Jr. provided under court order, police arrested him on Nov. 2, 2018, charging him with shooting and robbing Franke. They did not offer a motive or a connection between the two.
Benjamin Holmes Jr. denied killing Franke, or ever knowing or meeting her. “He has no idea how his DNA ended up at that place,” his lawyer, Jerry Girley, said.
Girley said he was exploring ways to prevent the DNA evidence from being used at trial. He noted that the Franke case was among several in which DNA samples at state crime labs were found to have been contaminated. Lab officials have said that the samples have since been reanalyzed under sanitary conditions, providing profiles that can be used in court.
Girley has also discussed the case with the American Civil Liberties Union, which is tracking it as part of a broader plan to challenge the warrantless collection of DNA from property abandoned by potential suspects.
Girley acknowledged that police didn’t break any laws when they used a ruse to obtain DNA from Holmes. But, he said, the tactic ought to be restricted.
“There should be further evolution of the law to come abreast with the evolution of technology,” Girley said.
‘They tricked me’
After hearing about Benjamin Holmes Jr.’s arrest, the relatives who gave their DNA to supposedly help identify a dead person realized the truth.
Young figured it out after seeing news coverage, which focused on the use of genetic genealogy.
“It bothered me because they came to my house and they lied,” she said.
Young, who knows Holmes but not her son, said that she’s not sure she would have given her DNA if she’d known how it would be used.
“Had they been honest, I would have made a decision whether to give them my DNA or not, and if I chose not to, they could have gotten it by other means,” Young said. “I’m OK with them getting it through other means. But to come to me and just lie to get what they want?”
Davis said he would have given his DNA if the detectives said they were investigating a murderer in his family. He does not know Benjamin Holmes Jr. but has met Holmes. “I just regret that they tricked me to get it,” he said.
Holmes and her husband said that hearing what their son was accused of sent them into a long period of grief and anger that left them little time to ponder the detectives’ story.
“I was so hurt, I don’t think I could have hurt any more if he was dead, if he had been killed,” Holmes said. “That’s just how much I was hurt inside. My heart hurt. I couldn’t sleep at night, I didn’t want to see anybody, I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I was torn up.”
She said that if she knew her DNA was going to be used to investigate a potential murderer in her family, she doesn’t think she would have given it. “I don’t want to get involved — that’s the first thing I would say,” she said.
On the other side of the case is the murder victim’s mother, Tina Franke, a retired nurse’s aide, who remembers her daughter as fearless and exuberant and a natural with children. She spent 17 years wondering if anyone would ever be charged with the murder. She got a tattoo on her right arm of a doodle her daughter once drew; it says “Mom Dad I love you.”
Fields explained to her the basics of how genetic genealogy was used to close the case, but Tina Franke said she didn’t know how DNA was taken from Benjamin Holmes Jr.’s relatives, including Holmes. “I feel bad for her,” she said.
Still, she said she had no problem with the tactic. “I’m glad for the end result,” she said.
She wonders if Benjamin Holmes Jr.’s relatives would feel differently if the situation were reversed.
“If they can imagine their own daughter being murdered and 17 years have gone by and they still don’t know who did it and they have DNA and no one to attach it to,” she said, “I think they’d want them to do what it took to find out who did it.”
