Hey, the Innocence Project Special Litigation Team, they're based in New York, they got involved around 2015, but the Idaho Innocence Project, you guys got involved in Chris's case much earlier, right? So I'm wondering, how did you learn about the case, and what were your initial thoughts about it?

Back in 2007, we were forming the Idaho Innocence Project, and, uh, word got out that we were looking for cases, and Chris Tapp was one of the first people to, uh, write to us and w- was one of the first two cases that, uh, that we took.

Uh, at first, when he wrote to us, you know, he explained the, his case.

We looked into it, and there was DNA that was used at his trial, so a jury already saw DNA evidence, and that excluded him, and they still convicted him.

Well, then, I guess when people learn about Chris Tapp and his life, what do you want them to take away from his story? Because there have been so many turns throughout it.

Wow.

You know, from my point of view, uh, hope is always the thing that, that I'm hoping to get out of these, uh, very difficult cases, these ones where people say there's no hope.

I mean, I...

Hey, the Innocence Project Special Litigation Team, they're based in New York, they got involved around 2015, but the Idaho Innocence Project, you guys got involved in Chris' case much earlier, right? So I'm wondering, how did you learn about the case, and what were your initial thoughts about it?

Well, back in 2007, we were forming the Idaho Innocence Project, and, uh, word got out that we were looking for cases, and Chris Tapp was one of the first people to, uh, write to us and w- was one of the first two cases that, uh, that we took.

Uh, at first, when he wrote to us, you know, he explained the, his case.

We looked into it, and there was DNA that was used at his trial, so a jury already saw DNA evidence, and that excluded him, and they still convicted him.

Well, then, I guess, when people learn about Chris Tapp and his life, what do you want them to take away from his story? Because there have been so many, uh, turns throughout it.

Wow.

You know, from my point of view, uh, hope is always the thing that, that I'm hoping to get out of these, uh, uh, very difficult cases, these ones where people say, "There's no hope." I mean, I, uh, the number of times I was told there was no hope on Chris's case, I was told by our lawyer, [laughs] my own lawyer at the Innocence Project, one of the lawyers, "He's never getting out," and this guy's one of the most experienced post-conviction lawyers.

He's, "You're not gonna get Chris out.

How much more complicated does that make it if there's no root on the hair? And like, why is that important?

So our hair is mostly a protein called keratin, and trapped within that are broken dead cells with broken DNA.

And so we don't get the nice, perfect image that we get when we work with normal cells in the body.

Hair's hard to get DNA that's big out of.

So there are new techniques.

And actually, there's a company that was formed that did a lot of the early work on this.

It's called Astraea.

What was it that you just said? Is it a piece of equipment you said that they have now? Or was it a single cell?

The curiosity of hers surprise you?

The knowledge surprised me.

She's turned all of that love and devotion for her daughter into a very careful record of this case.

There was one killer, not three like the police thought.

To imagine that there is this group of criminals who know about DNA and are so careful, what did they do? They planted somebody else's semen and pubic hair [laughs] and then cleaned up all their own DNA?

But to be clear, how do we know definitively or how do we know that his DNA, this unknown juvenile's DNA, was not on her body? I mean, what do we take away from that exactly?

Well, you're asking the million-dollar question.

So, again, we have to consider where we're getting the information from.

And the information about the other young person is not clear to me about where the DNA was found.

And, of course, we're all very interested, I think, in the neck area.

because there's an injury there that looks like it caused death.

So what's on the neck? And what we've heard is that her stepbrother is not on the neck, if those reports are accurate.

Is it possible that there could be injuries there and there be no forensic DNA identified of an individual?

I'm glad to have your mind with us because I w- need you to explain for my audience what is mixed DNA and, and how do you extract the information that investigators need without jeopardizing the evidence?

So mixed DNA is just what it sounds like.

It means more than one contributor.

So if there's one contributor to the DNA, you run it on your machines and you get peaks that represent the DNA profile.

I can teach a 10-year-old how to match a, a single contributor DNA profile of reference to evidence.

When there's a mixture, it's hard to tell which peaks belong to which person.

It's not impossible.

Does ethnicity impact the conclusions?

But the defense is expected to counter with arguments like this.

DNA is great at telling us who the original source of some material was.

It doesn't tell us anything about how it got there.

Doctor Greg Hampikian, a former director of Idaho's Innocence Project, has testified as a DNA expert for decades.

There's been a number of studies done that show that DNA can be transferred, uh, from object to object to object.

You can't tell how many times it's transferred.

You can't tell when it transferred, but you can tell-