Before You Go

McNeil Island off the coast of Washington state is inaccessible by any road and not welcome to most visitors. Once the site of a state prison, the island is now home to a most unwelcome and dangerous inhabitant: Violent sexual predators who have served their prison sentences but are deemed too dangerous to return to society. These men have been banished from society and largely forgotten about. And that last part, Detective Lindsey Wade finds out, is a problem. Lindsey specializes in DNA cold cases and she knows that some of the men of McNeil Island might be responsible for other crimes. She wants to test and record their DNA. As she works to make this happen, she stumbles upon a decades-old murder. Will she find the answers on the island of the banished?

The detective: Lindsey Wade

Lindsey served as a Tacoma Police Officer for twenty-one years. During her fourteen years as a detective, she investigated sexual assaults, child abuse, missing persons, and homicides. In 2010, Lindsey discovered that serial killer Ted Bundy’s DNA was not in CODIS. She worked with authorities in Florida to track down a sample of Bundy’s DNA and finally entered it into the national database in 2011. In 2012, Lindsey’s work on collecting DNA from convicted sexual predators in Washington state who’d slipped through the cracks led to an arrest in the 1980 homicide of a teenage girl. Lindsey retired in 2018 as the Tacoma Police Department’s cold case detective and joined the Washington State Attorney General’s Office as a senior investigator assigned for the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. She is a former member of the FBI ViCAP National Advisory Board and teaches child abduction response and cold case investigations for the National Criminal Justice Training Center at Fox Valley Technical College. Lindsey has been a speaker at numerous law enforcement conferences around the country, lecturing on cold cases, sex crimes, DNA, and child abduction response. She recently published a true crime memoir titled, “In My DNA: My Career Investigating Your Worst Nightmares”.

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