In the spring of 1996, Sitka, Alaska, was the kind of town where a teenager could walk home alone at night without a second thought. With a population of about 8,000, most residents knew each other by name. Violent crime was almost unheard of.
On May 3, 1996, Jessica Baggen turned 17. She celebrated her birthday that evening at her sister’s house in Sitka. After midnight, she decided to walk home along a bike trail that ran through the woods near the Sheldon Jackson College campus.
The trail was about a mile long and familiar to her. She had grown up in Sitka and knew every road and path in town. No one at the party worried when she left alone.
When Jessica’s parents woke up the next morning, she had not come home. At first, they thought she might have stayed at her sister’s house. But as hours passed with no word from her, her father reported her missing to the Sitka Police Department.
Search and rescue teams focused on the woods west of the Indian River, between the college campus and Sawmill Creek Road. On May 6, searchers found the shirt Jessica had been wearing when she was last seen. Less than two hours later, they found her body.
She had been buried in a shallow grave dug under a fallen tree in the Tongass Forest, not far from the trail. The autopsy determined that Jessica had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death.
During the autopsy, the medical examiner found a mysterious wound on Jessica’s back. It did not match any object or action investigators could identify. It was not found in any forensic database or reference material they consulted.
Investigator Hunyor, who later worked on the case, kept a photo of that wound on his office door. He asked every colleague who walked in if they had any ideas about what could have caused it. No one ever had an answer.
Investigators collected forensic evidence from the body and the scene. The attacker’s DNA was preserved in the lab. The case file was opened, and the search for a DNA match began.
Nine days after Jessica’s body was found, a man named Richard Bingham contacted the police and confessed to sexually assaulting and killing her. Bingham was a severe alcoholic who frequently experienced complete blackouts when drunk.
When investigators reviewed the interrogation video, they realized something did not add up. Bingham had no clear, coherent memory of the crime. But he knew details about the scene that were not public information.
DNA tests from evidence collected at the scene did not match Bingham. Despite that, he was put on trial in early 1997. The jury reviewed the circumstantial evidence and acquitted him on all charges.
After the Bingham trial, the investigation continued. Over the following years, more than 100 people were DNA tested and cleared. Jessica’s father paid out of his own pocket for DNA testing for anyone who voluntarily provided a sample.
Dave Tugman was the lead investigator on the Baggen case in the early years. He was followed by Hunyor, who kept the photo of the mysterious wound on his office door. In 2013, retired detective Randy McFerrin was hired by the Cold Case Investigation Unit and reviewed the Baggen file as one of his priorities.
While investigators pursued hundreds of suspects, Steve Allen Branch was living in Sitka. He was in the same town of 8,000 people, and no one connected his name to the Baggen case for decades.
Branch was not unknown to Sitka Police. In March 1996, a few weeks before Jessica was killed, the police had investigated Branch for the sexual assault of another teenage girl who had been jogging alone on a road in Sitka.
In June 1996, one month after Jessica was killed, Branch was charged and arrested for that sexual assault. His trial took place in 1997, the same year Bingham was acquitted in the Baggen case. Branch was acquitted for the sexual assault.
After being acquitted, Branch continued to live in Sitka for more than a decade. In 2010, he left Sitka and moved to Austin, Arkansas.
In September 2018, the Alaska State Troopers Cold Case Investigation Unit began testing a new forensic tool: genetic genealogy. The Alaska State Crime Lab reviewed the DNA from the 1996 evidence and determined there was enough material to create an SNP profile.
In February 2019, the suspect’s DNA profile was uploaded to a public genealogy database. Two genetic genealogists built a complex family tree from people in the database whose DNA partially matched the suspect’s profile.
The family tree was built in reverse, branch by branch, until it pointed to a single name: Steve Allen Branch. He was the man who had lived in Sitka in 1996 and was now living in Austin, Arkansas.
In January 2020, the Cold Case Investigation Unit contacted the Arkansas State Police for help obtaining a discarded DNA sample from Branch. For many weeks, they were unsuccessful.
In spring 2020, the Sitka Police Department obtained a discarded DNA sample from one of Branch’s relatives. The kinship DNA analysis, completed in May 2020, determined that Branch was highly likely to be the source of the suspect DNA found on Jessica’s clothing and body.
On August 30, 2020, investigators drove to Branch’s home in Austin, Arkansas. The 66-year-old man was questioned at his home.
Branch denied any involvement in Jessica’s death. He denied knowing her. He denied being on the trail that night. He refused to provide a voluntary DNA sample.
The investigators left Branch’s home to obtain an arrest warrant and a court order for DNA collection. Half an hour after they left, Steve Allen Branch shot himself in the head. Arkansas officially ruled the death a suicide.
Investigators obtained a warrant to collect DNA samples during Branch’s autopsy. The results came back on August 10, 2020. Branch’s DNA was a complete match to the suspect DNA collected from Jessica’s body and clothing in 1996.
On August 11, 2020, the Alaska Department of Public Safety held a press conference. Commissioner Amanda Price announced that Jessica’s case had been solved.
The DNA collected from Jessica’s body and clothing in 1996 was preserved through 24 years in the lab. It was compared to more than 100 people and matched none, until it was compared to the right person.
The case also highlighted how public genealogy databases can be used in forensic investigations. People who upload their DNA to sites like 23andMe, Ancestry, GEDmatch, or FTDNA may be distant relatives of a suspect in an unsolved cold case.
The case was solved because of persistence. Tugman pushed to keep the case active. Jessica’s father paid for DNA testing out of his own pocket. McFerrin kept the file alive until the right technology arrived.
Without that persistence over 24 years, the Baggen case would still be a cold case when Branch died in Arkansas.