20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY SEPTEMBER 18-24, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com of Monterey Bay. The remains were wrapped up inside a one-piece fleece garment that resembled the inner lining of a dry suit or an emergency survival suit, along with five keys and two coins. Researchers, after searching the California Missing and Unidentified Persons System for a match and coming up empty, turned over the case to the county’s Cold Case Task Force, which then partnered with the forensics company Othram to extract DNA and see if they could identify the individual. In 2024, using the extracted DNA in combination with forensic genetic genealogy to identify potential relatives, officials confirmed that the remains belonged to Jeffrey Hulliger, who went missing in 1997 while fishing with a friend near a Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute buoy off Moss Landing. Hulliger, 36 at the time, had sent a distress signal to the Coast Guard when their boat began taking on water. Despite a days-long search involving helicopters and an aircraft, he was never found—until 24 years later, when his remains were finally recovered. Over the years, some of Hulliger’s family held out hope that he was still alive. Hulliger, who had been in the military for nearly 20 years, had returned home following a deadly incident in Beirut, Lebanon, and after contracting malaria from his deployments. “He would have still been in there if he could, he loved the service,” Terry Kiskaddon, Hulliger’s sister, says. With more time at home after his return, he had a chance to get to know his family better, picking up odd jobs and adjusting to civilian life. Kiskaddon, now 68, remembers the last time she saw him. “He had a girlfriend with him, and we had dinner,” she says. “We had a blast. My husband and I were talking about how we wished that we had known him [better] all those years. He was a great guy.” When he went missing, he had been trying to earn a living fishing, at the time for black cod, recalls John Hulliger, Jeffrey’s nephew, who was 14 then. John and his father were part of the Moss Landing fishing community, and found out quickly the day Jeffrey disappeared. He remembers hundreds of boats out in the water, the whole community out searching. “We felt like he was still alive until he was found,” Kiskaddon says. “I was always looking for him, and I’d see people I thought looked like him and I thought it was him. I thought he had actually faked it, because he was in the military.” For the Hulliger family, getting the call from the detectives that the remains were identified as Jeffrey’s years later was not only a surprise, but to them, it meant closure. “Finding the bones and the identification, it was a healing thing,” says John Kiskaddon, Jeffrey’s brother-inlaw. “We were just like: wow. It’s the weirdest feeling. All these years there was hope, but then, this actually helps to put the hope into another place. Now, it’s closure.” FOR SOME FAMILIES LIKE HULLIGER’S, DNA technology and genetic genealogy provide answers that offer closure. For others, the answers might mean a step forward towards some semblance of a resolution, or at the very least, justice. Anne Pham was a 5-year-old girl who disappeared on Jan. 21, 1982 while walking to kindergarten at Highland Elementary School in Seaside. Her school was just a few blocks from her home, but two days later, her body was discovered near a shooting range at the former Fort Ord Army base by military investigators. Forty-three years later, all it took was one hair to identify and arrest the perpetrator, a Nevada resident named Robert John Lanoue who was 29 at the time of the murder, stationed at Fort Ord. DNA testing of a rootless pubic hair found on the remains of Pham was sent to a forensics lab in Santa Cruz to perform whole-genome sequencing (a newer technology which is able to look at a person’s entire “cookbook”) which was then searched on genetic genealogical databases. A forensic genetic genealogist was able to identify “Lanoue” as a possible last name for the suspect, which CCTF members then used to identify his full name. They discovered that Lanoue lived on Luzern Street in Seaside, 0.1 miles away from the Pham family residence at the time. According to the District Attorney’s Office, he admitted to CCTF members that he had a history of sexually assaulting young girls. Seaside Police Chief Nick Borges says getting to zero unsolved homicides is the goal: “These cases take time, money and a lot of effort, but that is the goal.” Lanoue, at age 72, was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison on March 20, 2025. It can get expensive to do this work; genetic genealogy testing costs around $15,000 per case, which the Cold Case Project helps to fund as the half-million dollar grant to the task force is set to expire in the next month or two. The nonprofit, run entirely by volunteers, many of them former investigators and detectives, aims to ease the burden on local agencies by handling grant writing and working with law enforcement to connect cases with labs that can generate new leads. There are a number of cases in the queue, some of which may not yield enough evidence to bring them to trial. The Cold Case Task Force and the nonprofit work in collaboration to select and support the cases that go to trial. The task force identifies potential cases to investigate, evaluating them based on available evidence, the surviving witnesses and the potential to generate new leads with advanced testing. The nonprofit helps support these efforts in a number of ways: by assisting with grant writing on behalf of law enforcement agencies, advising on which evidence may be most promising to test, and offering guidance on which testing strategies might be more effective, depending on the case. “We don’t know where things lead us until the science gives us the answers,” Kern says. “But we’re advocating for justice. We’re taking the steps to do the work.” “Every person who goes through this is going to view it differently, no matter how long it’s been.” Above: A photo of Jeffrey Hulliger, right, who disappeared in 1997 out at sea. His remains were found and identified 24 years later. Photo courtesy of John Hulliger, Jeffrey’s nephew. Photos of murder victims whose cases once went cold but have since been solved hang on the wall of the Seaside Police Department. In the center above is Anne Pham who was murdered at 5 years old in 1982. Her killer was sentenced in March 2025. DANIEL DREIFUSS COURTESY OF JOHN HULLIGER
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