In late October 2001, Christine Franke, a 25-year-old college student, returned to her Orlando apartment after a double shift at a cigar bar near Universal Studios. In her pocket was roughly 300 dollars in tips. She was about two months away from graduating from the University of Central Florida with a teaching degree. She never reached that graduation day.
Someone shot her in the head, took the money, and vanished. Orlando police collected DNA from the crime scene and ran it through every database available. There was no match. They interviewed hundreds of people, gathered nearly one hundred DNA samples from friends, neighbors, coworkers, and even residents of a nearby treatment center.
Nothing connected. For seventeen years, the case sat unsolved while Christine’s mother carried the weight of not knowing who had taken her daughter. Then, in April 2018, police in California arrested a man known as the Golden State Killer using a completely new technique. They had taken DNA from crime scenes and uploaded it to a public genealogy website, then traced the suspect through a family tree.
Two weeks after that arrest made headlines worldwide, a detective in Orlando picked up the phone. The case of Christine Franke was about to change. Christine Marie Franke was born on August 13, 1976, in West Islip, New York, a small community on the south shore of Long Island. She grew up surrounded by family.
She had a brother named John and two sisters, Barbara and Maria. Her mother, Tina, was the kind who brought the family together, and Christine was close to her from the start. When Christine was about nine, the family moved to Florida, settling in Vero Beach on the Atlantic coast. It was warmer, quieter, and more open.
Christine adapted immediately. The word that comes up again and again when people talk about Christine is adventurous. She was the first into the water when the waves were high. If she saw a dirt bike in someone’s yard, she wanted to ride it.
If someone said she probably should not try something, Christine had already done it. Her family described her as a free spirit who was never afraid to try anything. She was creative, full of energy, and completely uninterested in the safe choice. In a family of four siblings, she was the one who pulled everyone into whatever wild idea she had.
She graduated from Vero Beach High School in 1994 and began thinking seriously about what she wanted to do. The answer came naturally. She loved children and wanted to be an elementary school teacher. She had the patience and creativity to connect with young kids in a way that made them want to learn.
She enrolled at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, one of the largest universities in the country, and majored in education. She worked her way through school, balancing classes with jobs to cover tuition and rent. By the fall of 2001, she was working as a waitress and bar manager at Cigarz Bar, a lounge inside the CityWalk entertainment complex at Universal Orlando. The tips were good, and the late hours left her days free for study.
By October 2001, Christine was twenty-five and about two months from finishing her degree. She was so close to the finish line she could see it. After years of working and studying, she was about to become a teacher. Everything she had been building was right in front of her.
She never got to cross that line. On the night of October 20, 2001, Christine worked a double shift at Cigarz. It was a Saturday. The bar was busy, and she spent hours serving drinks and food.
By the time she finished and drove back to her apartment in the Colonial Gardens complex on Plaza Terrace in the Audubon Park neighborhood of Orlando, it was already the early hours of October 21. Audubon Park was a quiet, tree-lined residential area east of downtown Orlando. Not the place you would expect violence. Christine’s roommate was out of town that weekend, so Christine returned home alone.
She had about 300 dollars in cash, the tips she had earned from both shifts. For a college student working as a waitress, it was a good night. What happened inside that apartment in the next few hours would haunt the Orlando Police Department for nearly two decades. The next day, when Christine’s roommate tried to call her, there was no answer.
She called again. Nothing. Hours passed without a response. Eventually, the roommate contacted a nearby neighbor and asked him to check on Christine.
The neighbor went to the apartment, knocked, and got no reply. When he opened the door, he found Christine just inside, lying face down on the floor, partially undressed, with a gunshot wound to her head. She was dead. The crime scene told a grim story.
The roughly 300 dollars in tip money that Christine had earned was gone. Her wallet was empty and left on the floor, suggesting someone had quickly rifled through it, taken the cash, and tossed it aside. There were no signs of a lengthy struggle. No signs of forced entry were reported to the public.
All the evidence pointed to a robbery. Someone came for the money, met Christine, and killed her. The medical examiner found no evidence of sexual assault, but investigators did recover biological evidence, drops of semen on her body that they believed belonged to the killer. That DNA became the most important piece of evidence in the case.
Over the next seventeen years, it led nowhere. A twenty-five-year-old two months from graduating to become a teacher was killed for a small amount of money. That was the reality Christine’s family woke up to, and the reality Orlando detectives were now tasked with solving. The investigation began quickly and intensely.
Unlike many murders, this case came with what should have been a golden ticket: the killer’s DNA. The evidence gave investigators a genetic profile of the person who had been in that apartment with Christine. In theory, that should have been enough to end the case quickly. The profile was entered into CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System, the national database where law enforcement agencies across the United States store DNA profiles from convicted offenders, arrestees, and crime scenes.
If someone committed a crime and left DNA behind, and that person had previously been arrested for a qualifying offense anywhere in the country, CODIS would identify the match. The system works. It has helped solve thousands of cases. But CODIS has a fundamental limitation.
It can only match people who are already in the database. If the killer had never been arrested for a qualifying offense, or if his DNA had never been collected because the charge did not require it, CODIS is useless. That is exactly what happened. The genetic profile from Christine’s crime scene remained in CODIS with no results.
No match, no partial match, no leads. The killer’s DNA was in the system, but it was a key without a lock. Investigators widened their net. They interviewed hundreds of people, Christines friends from Vero Beach, her neighbors in the Colonial Gardens complex, coworkers and regulars at Cigarz, acquaintances from UCF, anyone who might have known something about that night.
They collected DNA samples from nearly one hundred people and compared each one to the forensic profile. None matched. They followed every lead. They looked into records from a behavioral treatment center near Christine’s apartment complex as a possible source of transient individuals in the area.
They investigated a person who allegedly boasted about knowing who killed Christine. Both leads ended in dead ends. Within about three months of her murder, the case went cold. Not because investigators stopped caring, and not because they made mistakes, but because they had exhausted every avenue available to them with the tools and techniques of 2001.
The file was stored. Christine’s name moved from active investigation to a growing pile of unsolved cases. Her family was left with the worst combination of feelings: endless grief, loss without answers, and the slow, painful realization that the person who killed their daughter, their sister, was out there somewhere living a normal life while they remained stuck in October 2001. Tina Franke carried the heaviest burden.
At some point during those years, she got a tattoo based on a childhood drawing Christine had made when she was small. A simple drawing, the kind a child makes with crayons and never thinks about again. Tina turned it into something permanent. She carried her daughter on her skin.
It was both a memorial and a refusal to give up. Tina would later say, with the kind of raw honesty that comes only after seventeen years of silence, that she truly believed they would never find the killer. Around 2012 or 2013, a detective named Michael Fields was assigned to the cold case. Fields was a veteran with twenty-eight years in law enforcement, more than a decade of it in homicide investigations.
He specialized in the kinds of cases that had sat in evidence rooms for years, sometimes decades. He had begun paying attention to emerging DNA techniques that could do things forensic science could not do just a few years earlier. He felt the ground shifting under the field and wanted to be ready when it happened. In 2005, forensic DNA analysis had added one new detail: the suspect was a Black man of West African descent.
It was a data point, but without a name attached, it was not enough to reopen the case effectively. Then, in October 2016, on the fifteenth anniversary of Christine’s murder, something new happened. Parabon Nanolabs, a DNA technology company in Reston, Virginia, used a technique called DNA phenotyping to create a computer-generated composite image of the suspect based on his genetic profile. The composite showed a Black man with dark skin, brown eyes, and black hair.
Orlando Police Chief John Mina held a press conference and released the image to the public, hoping someone might recognize the face. Many tips came in. Detectives followed every one. None led to a viable suspect fifteen years after Christine’s murder.
Even the most advanced DNA technology could not reveal the name of her killer. The composite was a face without an identity. Fields saved the file. He kept watching scientific developments and waited for something to change.
In the spring of 2018, something happened that would change not just Christine’s case but the entire landscape of cold case investigation in the United States. On April 24, 2018, police in Sacramento, California, arrested a seventy-two-year-old man named Joseph James DeAngelo. He was charged as the Golden State Killer, a serial predator who committed at least thirteen murders and more than fifty sexual assaults across California between 1974 and 1986. The case had haunted California law enforcement for decades.
His DNA had been collected from multiple crime scenes over the years, tested, indexed, and placed in law enforcement databases. It matched no one. Investigators had tried everything traditional forensic tools offered. They ran the DNA through CODIS repeatedly.
As the database grew, no results appeared. They tried familial DNA searching, a technique that looks for partial matches that might indicate a relative of the suspect in the database. That led nowhere either. Then an investigator and his team tried an approach that had never been used on this scale.
They took crime scene DNA and uploaded it to GEDmatch, a free, publicly available genealogy database where ordinary people voluntarily upload their DNA results from commercial services like AncestryDNA and 23andMe. GEDmatch was not a law enforcement tool. It was created for people who wanted to find distant relatives and trace their family history. But DNA does not care why it was uploaded.
Investigators found distant relatives of the Golden State Killer in the GEDmatch database. From those matches, they built family trees, worked back through generations, and finally narrowed the circle to one man: Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer living quietly in a Sacramento suburb. That arrest sent shockwaves through every law enforcement agency in the country. Detectives with decades-old cold cases realized they had a new tool.
If they had crime scene DNA, and if the suspect had relatives, distant cousins, second cousins, anyone who had uploaded their DNA to a public genealogy database, there was now a path to identification that did not require the suspect to be in CODIS at all. Detective Michael Fields in Orlando saw the news and immediately thought of Christine Franke. He contacted Parabon Nanolabs, the same company that had produced the composite image two years earlier. Parabon had just launched a new genetic genealogy investigation service in the wake of the Golden State Killer case.
Fields wanted to know if they could run Christine’s crime scene DNA through GEDmatch. About two weeks after DeAngelo’s arrest, Parabon emailed the Orlando Police Department with a message that changed everything. GEDmatch had produced promising matches for the DNA profile from Christine’s case. After seventeen years of silence, the DNA that had matched no one suddenly had relatives.
What followed was a meticulous, systematic process that combined cutting-edge genetic science with traditional detective work. When investigators uploaded the crime scene DNA to GEDmatch, the system compared the profile to every profile in its database and identified genetic similarities. The result was about 1,500 people who shared some degree of genetic overlap with the unknown killer. Most of those matches were very distant, the kind of connection you share with a fourth or fifth cousin.
But among those 1,500 results, two matches stood out as much closer: a man named John Hogan living in Valdosta, Georgia, and a woman named Jackie Vason living in Virginia. They were not close enough to be siblings or direct cousins of the killer, but they were close enough to give a genetic genealogist something to work with. CeCe Moore, the senior genetic genealogist at Parabon Nanolabs and one of the pioneers of investigative genetic genealogy, took on the task. She started with what the DNA told her.
Both Hogan and Vason were descendants of a couple named Charlie and Mary Bergman. That was the common thread. Moore and her team began mapping out the Bergman family tree. It was enormous.
Charlie and Mary Bergman had ten children. Those ten children had more than forty grandchildren. Those grandchildren had more than forty great-grandchildren. Branches of the family tree spread across multiple states, from Georgia to Virginia to Florida.
Tracking every one of them required genealogical records, public documents, and painstaking cross-referencing of data. Moore later described Christine’s case as one of the longest and most difficult genetic genealogy investigations she had ever worked on, largely because of the size of the family and the complexity of tracing each branch. The process of elimination began. The DNA from the crime scene belonged to a male, so every woman in the tree was excluded.
Men who were too young to have committed the crime in 2001 were excluded. Men with documented alibis or confirmed locations far from Orlando on October 21, 2001, were crossed off. Slowly and methodically, the enormous tree was trimmed to a smaller and smaller group of possible suspects. Meanwhile, Detective Fields and his team began quietly approaching family members to collect voluntary DNA samples.
About fifteen relatives agreed to provide cheek swabs. Each sample was analyzed and compared to the crime scene DNA. Each one helped narrow the search, confirming which branches of the family the suspect belonged to and which he did not. John Hogan, the man in Valdosta whose DNA showed a close match, had taken an ancestry DNA test out of pure curiosity.
He wanted to know his heritage, perhaps find distant relatives. He had uploaded his results to GEDmatch without a second thought. A journalist later called him and told him his ancestry test had helped solve a seventeen-year-old cold murder case. Hogan was stunned.
He said he could not believe it. But when he processed what had happened, he did not feel guilt. His response was direct. If you broke the law and committed a crime, and in this case it is murder, you must stand trial.
The genealogical work and DNA elimination process led investigators to a seventy-nine-year-old woman named Eleanor Holmes, living in Valdosta, Georgia. She was identified as a possible mother of the unknown suspect based on her position in the Bergman family tree. In late October 2018, Detective Michael Fields and Detective Michael Morrissey traveled from Orlando to Valdosta. They knocked on Eleanor Holmes’s door and told her they needed her DNA to help identify a deceased relative.
That was a ruse. They were not looking for a deceased relative. They were looking for a living killer. Eleanor agreed to provide a cheek swab.
The sample was sent to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement crime lab. The results were decisive. The DNA profile from Christine Franke’s crime scene was, in the lab’s words, consistent with being the biological son of Eleanor Holmes. The killer was one of Eleanor Holmes’s sons.
Eleanor had two sons who lived in Orlando in 2001: Reginald James Holmes and Benjamin Lee Holmes Jr. Investigators needed to determine which one had left the DNA at the crime scene, and they needed to do it without alerting either brother that they were under investigation. They started with Reginald. An undercover detective arranged a situation where Reginald was given a bottle of Gatorade.
Reginald drank from it and later discarded the bottle. Investigators recovered it and sent the DNA to the lab. The DNA on the Gatorade bottle did not match the crime scene profile. Detective Fields made it clear.
Excluding Reginald left only one possibility: Benjamin Lee Holmes Jr. was the one who had killed Christine Franke. All evidence now pointed to Benjamin, but the investigation was not over. Fields needed Benjamin’s DNA to confirm the match before making an arrest.
On October 30, 2018, an undercover detective positioned near Benjamin Holmes’s home in Orlando watched him walk out to his driveway. Holmes sat down, opened a beer, and lit a cigar. It was an ordinary evening. Nothing suggested this night was different from any other.
Holmes finished the beer. He finished the cigar. Then he went inside, leaving the cigar butts behind. Investigators moved in and collected seven cigar butts from the driveway.
The butts were in a space accessible to the public. No warrant was needed to pick them up. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab tested the DNA from the cigar butts and compared it to the crime scene profile from October 21, 2001. It was a match.
The DNA on those butts belonged to the same person who had left biological evidence on Christine Franke’s body seventeen years earlier. It was Benjamin Holmes. To make the case completely airtight, Fields obtained a warrant for a direct cheek swab, taken from Benjamin Holmes’s mouth under controlled laboratory conditions. That sample was tested and matched the crime scene DNA as well.
Seventeen years, hundreds of interviews, nearly one hundred DNA samples, a composite sketch that led nowhere, a genealogy database that had not existed when the crime was committed, a family tree with more than one hundred branches spread across three states, and in the end, seven cigar butts left in an Orlando driveway on an ordinary October evening. The case was completely closed. Benjamin Lee Holmes Jr. was twenty-one years old on the night Christine Franke was killed.
He worked as a manager at a Wendy’s restaurant in Orlando. He was not a career criminal living on the margins. He was a fast-food restaurant manager, someone who went to work, ran shifts, and handled the everyday tasks of a chain restaurant. He had no known personal connection to Christine.
He did not live near her apartment. He did not work at Universal Orlando or anywhere in the CityWalk area where she worked. There was no overlap in their social circles, workplaces, neighborhoods, or lives. Nothing in the investigation, not a single piece of evidence or testimony over twenty-two years, explained how Benjamin Holmes and Christine Franke crossed paths on the night of October 21, 2001.
As far as investigators could determine, he was a complete stranger who killed her for a sum of cash estimated at 300 dollars. Holmes did have a criminal record already. His arrests dated back to 2001, the same year as Christine’s murder. Most were low-level offenses, drug possession charges, probation violations, and a domestic violence charge.
The kind of record that puts a person’s name into the criminal justice system again and again without triggering the one procedural step that would have solved this case years earlier. That is the crucial detail that explains the entire seventeen-year gap between the murder and the arrest. None of Benjamin Holmes’s prior arrests required collecting a DNA sample and entering it into CODIS. Under Florida law and federal CODIS guidelines, DNA is collected based on specific categories of crimes: felony convictions, certain violent crimes, and sex offenses.
The low-level drug charges and misdemeanors that filled Holmes’s record did not cross that threshold. He was arrested, booked, processed, and released again and again. No one ever swabbed his cheek. That is why the crime scene DNA never found a match.
For seventeen years, Benjamin Holmes was inside the criminal justice system. His fingerprints were on file. His mugshots were taken. His name appeared in court records.
But his DNA was not in CODIS. The crime scene profile could only be matched against what was in the database. His DNA was at the crime scene. His name was in arrest records.
Those two pieces of information existed in two entirely separate systems that did not communicate. On November 2, 2018, Orlando police arrested Benjamin Lee Holmes Jr. He was charged with first-degree murder with a firearm and robbery with a firearm in connection with the killing of Christine Marie Franke on October 21, 2001. Seventeen years and twelve days.
That is how long it took from the night Christine was killed until the day handcuffs went on her killer. When investigators confronted Holmes with the DNA evidence, he denied knowing Christine Franke, saying he had never heard her name. He claimed his DNA must have been planted at the crime scene or that the science itself was wrong. He offered no explanation for why anyone would frame him for a murder he claimed to know nothing about.
Detective Fields told reporters that the Christine Franke case was the fifteenth time nationwide that DNA from a genealogy website had been used to make an arrest in a cold case. The Golden State Killer arrest had happened only six months earlier, in April. In that short period, a technique that did not exist as an investigative tool at the start of 2018 had been used to arrest fifteen people in cases law enforcement had considered permanently unsolvable. Cold cases that had gathered dust for ten, twenty, thirty years began cracking open one after another like dominoes.
The world of cold case investigation was changing in real time, and the Franke case was at the forefront of that change. Tina Franke learned that after seventeen years of silence, someone had finally been arrested for the murder of her daughter. A name, a face, a person in custody who would have to answer for what happened on October 21, 2001. Her reaction was simple and carried the weight of every day she had spent not knowing.
Honestly, I thought they would never find him. This is a great blessing for our family. Seventeen years. Tina Franke had spent seventeen years carrying a tattoo of her daughter’s childhood drawing on her skin, not knowing if she would ever learn the name of the person who took Christine from her.
The wound had not healed, but it stopped bleeding. The arrest came in November 2018. The trial did not begin for more than four years. That gap alone tells you how complex the case became once it entered the legal system.
Pre-trial delays, defense motions, scheduling problems, and fierce legal challenges to the admissibility of genetic genealogy evidence stretched the timeline from months into years. For the Franke family, it was another kind of waiting. They had already waited seventeen years for an arrest. Now they had to wait four more years for a trial.
Jerry Girley, Benjamin Holmes’s defense attorney, mounted a continuous challenge to the DNA evidence. His primary argument was that the way investigators collected DNA from Holmes’s family members, especially his mother Eleanor, was deceptive and should invalidate the chain of evidence. Girley argued that because investigators told Eleanor they needed her DNA to identify a deceased relative while actually using it to build a murder case against her son, the entire process was tainted. The motion to exclude the DNA evidence was denied, but it signaled that the defense was determined to fight hard over the science, and the prosecution would need to explain every step of the investigation to the jury.
The trial finally began on January 30, 2023, in Orange County, Florida. Benjamin Holmes was forty-two years old. Christine had been dead for more than twenty-one years. Many of the jurors were too young to remember October 2001.
The prosecution was led by Assistant State Attorney Sean Wiggins. His case relied almost entirely on DNA. There were no eyewitnesses to the murder. No confession.
No surveillance footage from 2001 that captured anything useful. The murder weapon was never found. The entire case came down to one question: would the jury believe the scientific evidence? Wiggins framed it clearly in his opening statement.
Every crime scene tells a story. The story this crime scene told was that Benjamin Holmes was in Christine Franke’s apartment the night she was killed and that he left biological evidence behind. The prosecution’s case was built like a chain. Each link had to hold for the next to have meaning.
The DNA collected in 2001. Years of dead ends in CODIS. The Golden State Killer breakthrough, the GEDmatch hit, CeCe Moore’s genealogical work, the Bergman family tree, the elimination of relatives one by one, the identification of Eleanor Holmes as the suspect’s mother, the exclusion of Reginald, the cigar butts, the direct cheek swab, and finally, the match. The prosecution’s key witness was Laura S.
, a forensic analyst from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. She performed the DNA comparison between the crime scene evidence, originally examined in 2001 and re-examined with additional samples analyzed in 2020, and the DNA taken directly from Benjamin Holmes. Her testimony was methodical, precise, and devastating to the defense position. When I performed the comparison, this DNA profile matched the DNA profile of Benjamin Lee Holmes.
There was no ambiguity in her language. The samples matched. The defense did not dispute that DNA was present at the crime scene. Girley could not argue the science itself was wrong because multiple independent tests over two decades confirmed the same profile.
Instead, his argument was that someone else had put it there. He told the jury that Holmes’s DNA had been planted by someone who knew the victim in order to deflect attention from the real killer. It was a bold claim, and the defense needed to offer an explanation for how it could have happened. How could someone obtain Benjamin Holmes’s biological material in 2001?
How could they transfer it to Christine Franke’s apartment? Why would they choose to frame a twenty-one-year-old Wendy’s manager with no connection to the victim? Girley offered no answers to any of these questions. He presented no alternative suspect, no evidence of a conspiracy, no forensic expert to testify about the possibility of planted evidence, and no motive for anyone to frame Holmes.
There was another thread the defense pulled, and it became the most emotional moment of the trial. Eleanor Holmes, Benjamin’s mother, publicly stated that investigators had deceived her into giving her DNA. She said they told her they needed her sample to identify a deceased relative, when they were actually using it to confirm that her son was a suspect in a murder case. She told NBC News, When they arrested him, I knew they were lying to us.
Investigators had visited more than a dozen of her relatives in Florida and Georgia, collecting DNA samples under similar pretenses. The defense filed a motion to suppress the DNA evidence on the grounds that it was obtained under false pretenses. The court denied the motion. Courts across the country have consistently held that DNA left at a crime scene carries no reasonable expectation of privacy, and that investigative genetic genealogy is a lead-generating tool, not evidence in itself at trial.
The evidence actually presented to the jury was the direct STR DNA match from Holmes’s cheek swab, obtained under a valid warrant. The genealogical work was the path that led investigators to Holmes. The courtroom evidence was the direct comparison. The jury heard both sides.
A twenty-two-year-old case with no eyewitnesses and no confession, resting entirely on DNA science that had not existed at the time of the crime. A prosecution that built its case link by link, and a defense that asked the jury to believe the DNA had been planted without any supporting evidence. On February 7, 2023, after deliberations, the jury returned its verdict: guilty. First-degree murder.
Twenty-two years of waiting, grief, hope, doubt, and waiting again, reduced to a single word from the jury foreperson. The family posted a message on Facebook that evening. Guilty is the word we have been waiting to hear for 22 years. Today, the jury returned a verdict and justice was achieved for Crissy.
On March 23, 2023, Benjamin Lee Holmes Jr. was formally sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He would die in a Florida prison. At sentencing, Holmes was given the opportunity to speak.
He maintained his innocence as he had since the moment of his arrest. I am not the man or person who killed Christine Franke. It hurts. Unfortunately, I am the man who was convicted of the crime.
The courtroom listened, and then it listened to Tina Franke. Christine’s mother stood in the same courtroom where the man convicted of killing her daughter had just spoken. She said the words that twenty-two years of grief had prepared for her. It is a burden our family can now let go of.
We carried it for 21 years. They never gave up on my daughter. Not for 21 years. I am forever grateful.
Then she said something that cut through every legal argument the defense had made. We waited 22 years for this. All the evidence points to him, simply. And DNA does not lie.
Holmes later appealed his conviction. On April 30, 2024, Florida’s Fifth District Court of Appeal reviewed the case and upheld the conviction. No reversal. No new trial.
The conviction stood. Benjamin Lee Holmes Jr. would spend the rest of his life in prison for the murder of Christine Marie Franke. Christine Franke never got the chance to become a teacher.
She was two months from walking across the stage at the University of Central Florida, receiving her degree, and beginning the career she had worked for years to build. She was supposed to be in a classroom somewhere in central Florida by the spring of 2002, arranging desks, hanging posters, learning the names of twenty-five children who would call her Miss Franke. She did not get that life. It was taken from her for 300 dollars in tip money.
But her name did not disappear. Today, the Christine Franke Memorial Scholarship supports students in the College of Community Innovation and Education at the University of Central Florida. Future teachers, the kind Christine had wanted to become. Her family made sure her dream did not die with her, even if she did not get to live it herself.
Every year, a student receives support because of Christine. Every year, her name appears in a place dedicated to education, the field she chose, the profession she never started. The case itself became larger than a single murder and conviction. The arrest of Benjamin Holmes in November 2018 was one of the first successful applications of investigative genetic genealogy in the United States.
By the end of 2018, Parabon Nanolabs had already performed roughly twenty-three identifications using investigative genetic genealogy. By December 2021, that number had risen to more than two hundred identifications, a rate of more than one case per week for cases that had remained cold for an average of more than twenty-five years. More than five thousand years of accumulated investigations sitting in file cabinets and evidence rooms across the country were suddenly resolved by science that barely existed before the spring of 2018. The Franke case was also among the first to reach a jury conviction.
That distinction matters more than people realize. Making an arrest is one thing. Proving the case in a courtroom is another. Defense attorneys across the country were watching to see whether genetic genealogy evidence would withstand scrutiny, survive motions to suppress, and actually produce a conviction.
The Franke case proved that it could, and that proof gave law enforcement agencies across the country the confidence to invest in the technology, knowing it would hold up when it mattered most. Detective Michael Fields, the man who picked up the phone two weeks after the Golden State Killer arrest and wondered whether the new technique might work on a seventeen-year-old Orlando murder, did not solve the case alone. CeCe Moore built the family tree from fragments of genetic data scattered across a family of more than one hundred people. Laura S.
performed the DNA comparison that proved the match was real. Sean Wiggins prosecuted the case and convinced the jury beyond a reasonable doubt. But Fields was the one who saw the possibility when no one else was looking. He had carried Christine Franke’s file for six years by the time the Golden State Killer arrest happened.
He knew the case by heart. When the door opened, he did not hesitate. After the conviction, the Orlando Police Department publicly credited the case to what they described as the hard work, perseverance, and trial preparation of Detective Mike Fields. For cold case detectives, there is no higher praise than that.
Then there is Tina Franke, the mother who carried her daughter’s childhood drawing on her skin for twenty-two years, who told reporters she had lost hope of ever knowing who killed Christine, who watched the trial from a courtroom balcony in Orange County surrounded by the same family members who had stood beside her since October 2001, and who heard the word guilty spoken aloud by the jury foreperson. Twenty-two years is a long time to carry something that heavy. Grief does not disappear when a verdict is read. Christine will not come back because a jury said the defendant was guilty.
The classroom she would have built does not suddenly appear. The life she would have lived does not return. But the weight changes shape. It becomes something you can carry differently.
The question that had haunted her every day, who did this and will they ever be caught, now had an answer. Tina said it best. DNA does not lie. Christine Franke was a young, adventurous, fearless, vibrant woman who wanted nothing more than to stand in front of a classroom of children and teach them something important.
She did not get that chance. But after twenty-two years, twelve jurors in an Orange County courtroom made sure the man who stole that future from her would never walk free again. And somewhere in Valdosta, Georgia, a man named John Hogan, who once spat into a plastic tube because he was curious about his family’s ancestry, has no idea how many lives that simple act of curiosity changed. He was looking for his past.
He helped a family in Orlando find their future.