9-year-old selling candy was killed 62 years ago. DNA cracks the case, WA cops say
A 9-year-old girl lugged a cardboard carrier filled with seven boxes of Camp Fire Mints to sell around her Washington neighborhood in the spring of 1959.
Candice “Candy” Rogers was supposed to return to her Spokane home before dark. But she never did.
Instead, six boxes of cookies were found scattered in her neighborhood later that night, Spokane Police Department Sgt. Zac Storment said during a news conference on Friday, Nov. 19.
Weeks after her disappearance, police found her body hidden in pine needles and tree branches.
She was raped and strangled. Pieces of her clothing were found tied around her neck and feet, police said.
And her killer was still on the loose.
In the decades that followed Candy Rogers’ death, detectives worked to identify the person who killed her on March 6, 1959.
Then DNA testing cracked the case on Oct. 1, 2021, and led to the identity of her killer — 62 years later.
Police sent the semen found on Candy to a forensic genealogy lab in February 2021. By September, authorities had the names of three brothers — all now deceased — who were a possible match.
John Reigh Hoff, 20 at the time of Candy’s death, was the only sibling on the list who had children. Detectives found his daughter Cathie and tested her DNA on Sept. 7, Storment said.
In fact, Cathie’s DNA was 2.9 million times more likely related to the suspect’s genetic profile than the general population, and it had a “strong evidence of paternity,” Storment said.
But John Reigh Hoff had died by suicide in 1970. Authorities exhumed his grave to test his DNA.
The results showed that the suspect’s DNA was 25 quintillion times more likely Hoff’s than any person in the United States population selected at random, forensic scientist Brittany Wright told Spokane detectives.
Once Hoff had been identified as the person who killed Candy, Storment said, detectives told his family members, his wife and Candy Rogers’ living relatives.
“I am very very sorry for what my dad did,” Cathie said in a video played during the news conference. “He took her life horribly, he took her mom’s life; he took her dad’s life; he took more lives than one.”
She said she hopes her family can have peace knowing who killed Candy.
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