On September 6, 2021, Brittany Wright opened a case file that had been waiting 62 years for a name. The DNA evidence in the Mason jar had been reduced to its very last drops, so degraded that a private genealogy laboratory had already declined it. Wright contacted Othram, a Texas lab built specifically for law enforcement work on damaged and near-depleted biological evidence. What remained in the jar shipped to Texas in March 2021.
By Labor Day weekend, the genealogical profile had narrowed to three brothers, all deceased, all from Spokane. Genealogy could not distinguish between brothers with nearly identical DNA, so investigators needed a living relative. Only one of the three had children. Sergeant Zack Storman called Kathy, the daughter of John Ray Hoff.
Within 45 minutes, she walked into Spokane Police Headquarters already knowing why she was there. She had searched online in those minutes and found the story of a 9-year-old girl murdered in 1959 while selling Camp Fire Mints. She volunteered her DNA without hesitation. Two days later, the result was conclusive: Kathy’s DNA was 2.
9 million times more likely related to the suspect profile than any random person. Her father had left that evidence. John Ray Hoff was born August 11, 1938, in Spokane, his own city. He grew up less than 2 miles from where Candy Rogers lived.
He was not an outsider. He was local, known, woven into the same streets and neighborhoods. At 16, he escaped from a state juvenile reform facility and was caught near Yakima. That arrest pushed him toward the military as an alternative.
He joined the US Army at 17 and was assigned to the Nike missile defense site protecting Fairchild Air Force Base just outside Spokane. On March 6, 1959, he was 20 years old and lived 1 mile south of where Candy began her evening. Candace Elaine Rogers, known to everyone as Candy, was a shy, small-for-her-age fourth-grader from Holmes Elementary in West Central Spokane. She lived with her mother, a high school history and PE teacher, in a half apartment above a neighborhood grocery store at 2106 and a half West Mission Avenue.
Her grandparents lived next door. She had a dog named Shep and a grandmother who gave her oatmeal cookies. She was a Blue Bird, the junior level of the Camp Fire Girls of America, and that membership meant something to her. March 6, 1959, was the first day of the Camp Fire mint selling season.
Candy left school at 3:15, picked up her seven boxes of mints from her troop leader by 3:30, and came home to wait for the official 4:00 p. m. start time. In that half hour, she sat with her grandmother and talked through her route, which neighbors would definitely buy, which doors to try first.
She had a plan: sell enough to earn her sales badge and get into the running for a free week of summer camp. At exactly 4:00 p. m. , she stepped out into the cold March air.
At 6:30 p. m. , she was last seen alive on the 2100 block of West Maxwell Avenue, confirmed by people who knew her. Seconds later, a 1953 Ford accelerated away at speed, clipping the curb as it swung north on Belt Street.
A man searching that block had to throw himself out of its path. He was a grandfather. The name he was calling belonged to his granddaughter. He would not know what drove past him for 62 years.
By 9:00 p. m. , six of Candy’s seven mint boxes were found scattered along North Pettit Drive, climbing the hill Spokane locals called Doomsday Hill. Not dropped, scattered, as if thrown from a moving vehicle.
A partial fingerprint was lifted from one box and sent to the FBI. It was never identified. By nightfall, every person in Spokane understood what the scattered boxes meant. By morning, 1,200 of them showed up to find her.
Marines, Boy Scouts, utility workers, mail carriers, people on horseback. Two bishops took to radio and print, asking anyone with information to come forward to a minister in confidence, under the protection of the confessional. The command post sat at the foot of Doomsday Hill, right where the mint boxes had been found. Then the search compounded the city’s grief.
On March 7, one day after Candy disappeared, a US Air Force helicopter flying low over the search corridor struck high-tension power lines and plunged into the Spokane River. Three men were killed. Three men died looking for one child. Sixteen days passed.
Tips arrived from across the country, hundreds then thousands. Detectives followed everyone. No arrest, no trace. On March 21, two airmen from Fairchild Air Force Base were hunting about 7 miles from Candy’s home when they came across something near a tree in the brush: a pair of small blue suede shoes.
Not dropped, placed. A search party arrived at daybreak the next morning. Within minutes, they found her, buried under pine branches and brush, about 50 yards off the road, near an abandoned rock quarry. Retired Spokane police Captain Richard Obering was one of the officers who pushed the brush aside that morning.
He would carry what he saw for the rest of his life. The cause of death was strangulation. The ligature was torn from her own clothing. Her ankles were bound with another strip of the same garment.
Every piece of evidence was cataloged and preserved. One investigator, name never recorded, sealed a semen sample inside a glass Mason jar and closed the lid. That jar sat untouched in an evidence locker for 60 years. It was the only reason this case was ever solved.
For 40 years, Spokane detectives believed they had their answer: Hugh Bion Morse, a serial killer and predator of women who had been in Spokane at the time of Candy’s death. A grape gum stain on her clothing appeared to link him to the scene. That observation hardened into near certainty over four decades. It was an assumption.
It was wrong. There was a second name that briefly surfaced during the original search: Alfred Graves, a local man found to have collected news clippings about violent crimes against women and children. He died by suicide the morning Candy’s body was discovered. His timing was never explained.
His name was never cleared. Then came 2001. Detective Mindy Connolly submitted Candy’s preserved clothing to a forensic lab. Scientists extracted a semen sample and built the investigation’s first complete DNA profile.
They tested it against Morse. No match. The profile was entered into CODIS, the national DNA database. Zero results.
The real perpetrator had never been arrested for anything that put his DNA in the system. He had never appeared in a single tip, a single report, a single name in four decades of investigation. In 2007, Detective Brian Hammond sat down with a news crew and opened the binders. The case file had grown into the largest in department history.
He looked at the camera and said what every detective on the case had believed: “Some detective will solve this case someday. Not if, someday. ”
In 2018, when the Spokane Police Department began a systematic reassessment of its cold case files, Candy’s folder landed on Brittany Wright’s desk. She had known its outline since childhood.
Her parents had told her about Candy Rogers not as a news story but as a warning. That same year, California investigators had used forensic genetic genealogy to identify the Golden State Killer. Cold case units across the country pulled out their oldest files. Spokane asked the question immediately.
The DNA in the Mason jar was the key. Investigators were not done. With no living suspect, no trial, and no adversarial process, the burden of certainty rested entirely on them. On September 23, 2021, they executed a search warrant on a grave at Riverside Memorial Park on the edge of Spokane and exhumed John Ray Hoff.
The result: the DNA recovered from Candy’s clothing was 25 quintillion times more likely to belong to John Ray Hoff than any unrelated person. That is a number that leaves no room for doubt. John Ray Hoff died in 1970. He shot himself.
The date he chose was Kathy’s birthday, the day she turned 9 years old, the same age Candy was when he took her life. Kathy had spent her entire life believing her father died because he was struggling with depression. In a videotaped statement played at the November 19th press conference, she did not look away. He was evil.
He got to die with people thinking he was an upstanding man, and he wasn’t. And then there was the detail that made the room go quiet. For 51 years, John Ray Hoff had been interred at Riverside Memorial Park, yards from the grave of Candy Rogers. While her family visited and wondered, while her cousin JoAnn Poss stood at that headstone asking the same question year after year, her killer lay in the same ground, same cemetery, same silence, same city.
Nobody knew. When Kathy and the Hoff family learned this, they made a decision without being prompted. They arranged to have his remains moved to a different cemetery. No one asked them to.
As Sergeant Storman put it, they did it so Candy could enjoy some peace. JoAnn Poss heard that and was overcome. She said her heart truly went out to the Hoff family, the people absorbing the weight of what their father had done. Retired Captain Richard Obering sat in the audience at the press conference.
He had carried the image of what he found in the brush for 62 years. He was still alive when the name came. “I thank God,” he said, “that I lived long enough to see the end of this case. ”
When a reporter asked Sergeant Storman how many hours had been invested in the Candy Rogers investigation across six decades, Storman didn’t answer in hours.
He said, “This isn’t measured in hours. This is measured in careers. ” Three generations of detectives had worked this file and handed it forward with the same unspoken agreement: don’t close it. Don’t give up on her.
Candy was 9 years old. She wanted to earn a badge. She had a dog named Shep and a street full of neighbors she was genuinely excited to visit. Her life was taken from her on a cold Friday afternoon by a 20-year-old soldier who lived 1 mile away and never once entered the investigation.
In 1961, Hoff attacked a woman using the same method in the same city and served six months. Candy waited 62 years, 8 months, and 13 days for her answer. The last generation of detectives did not give up on her.