Um, by that point, you know, I had already looked up, you know, someone that a little girl murdered in 1959, so I knew who it was. A warning to our viewers. What you are about to watch is a true story. The following program contains content that some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is strongly advised.
She came home from school on a Friday afternoon and did what 9-year-olds do. Played with her dog, Shep, ate an oatmeal cookie her grandma gave her. Then she picked up her seven small boxes of campfire mints, tucked them under her arm, and walked out the door to sell them in the neighborhood. She was supposed to be home before dark.
That was the rule. Always home before dark. And she always was. By 9ine that night, six of her mint boxes were sitting in the middle of a road near a bridge on the north side of Spokane. Just sitting there, scattered like something dropped from a moving car. No girl nearby, no explanation, just boxes of mints in the cold March dark and an entire city about to realize it had lost a child.
Welcome to Cole Case Unlocked. This case took 62 years to close and it closed because a dead man’s daughter answered the phone. Drop a comment and tell us where you’re watching from. We reply to every single one. New here? Hit like and subscribe. Now, back to Spokane. Her name was Candace Elaine Rogers.
Candy, 9 years old, a fourth grader at Holmes Elementary School, the same school her mother once attended. Blonde hair, blue eyes, 4’4, 60 lb. Small for her age, but nobody who knew her would have described her as small. Determined is the word that comes up. The kind of kid who joined something and worked at it.
She had just become a bluebird, the entry level of the campfire girls. And she was already thinking about what came next. She lived with her mother, Elaine, in a small apartment above a neighborhood grocery store at 2,16 West Mission Avenue in West Central Spokane. Her grandparents lived next door. Elaine was a physical education teacher.
Candy was her only child. Her father, Carl, lived elsewhere. The marriage hadn’t held, but the household on West Mission was steady, warm, the kind of home where a 9-year-old could go from door to door because the neighborhood is safe and the route is familiar. And what could possibly go wrong? March 6th, 1959 started like any other Friday.
School, home, dog, cookie, then the mints. She left school by 3:15 and by 3:30 she was at her troop leader house picking up her boxes. She set out around 4:00 in the afternoon going door to door in West Central. The workingclass neighborhood she’d grown up in. The streets were full of bluebirds that day.
Girls wearing the same uniform, doing the same thing, same boxes, same pitch. She had seven boxes and a target to meet, sell enough to earn her sales badge, and get into the running for a free week of summer camp. Nobody saw what happened next. No witness, no scream, nothing. At some point, between selling those campfire mints boxes and making it back to the apartment above the grocery store, something went wrong.
The only evidence was a trail of mint boxes scattered along a road near the Fort George Wright bridge heading north away from the neighborhood she knew, heading away from home like they’d been tossed from a car window. When Candy didn’t come home by dark, her mother and grandfather started looking.
By the time they’d made a few calls and walked a few blocks, they knew. Police were called just after dark. By the next morning, all of Spokane knew her name. What followed was one of the largest search operations in the city’s history. Police, sheriff’s deputies, Marines, Air Force Servicemen from nearby Fairchild Air Force Base. All of them out looking for one 9-year-old girl on foot, on horseback, in cars, on motorcycles.
By the final weekend of the search, 1,200 people had turned up at the command post asking to help. 1,200 people in 1959 showed up to look for a child they’d never met. One of those search efforts would end in tragedy. The day after Candy disappeared, a military helicopter from Fairchild had joined the search over the Spokane River.
It hit highension power lines and crashed into the water. Five airmen were aboard. Three of them died. Airman Marliss Ray, Staff Sergeant William Macdonald, Lieutenant Kenneth Ftech. Two survived partly because searchers on the ground looking for candy were nearby and pulled them out.
Three men lost their lives in the search for a 9-year-old girl. That detail usually gets one sentence in coverage of this case. It deserves more than that. For 16 days, there was no sign of candy. Then two offduty airmen went hunting off Old Trails Road northwest of Spokane. They came across a pair of small girls shoes sitting beside a tree in the woods.
They went home, talked about it. Then one of them said, “Wait.” And they called the police. The next morning, officers arrived in that wooded area near an abandoned rock quarry. 7 mi from Candy’s home. Minutes into the search, they found her buried under a shallow layer of brush and pine needles 130 ft off the road.
Her kneecap was the only part of her visible above the ground. Retired police captain Richard Albering was a young patrolman who found her that morning. He attended the press conference 62 years later. He said he’d thanked God he lived long enough to see the case close. The autopsy revealed more darker physical violations that made the matter worse.
Strips of her own clothing had been used to bind her feet. Another strip had been used to strangle her. Her clothing was smeared with purple stains. Grape flavored chewing gum. Semen was recovered and preserved in a mason jar glass. The detectives had no way to do anything useful with it in 1959, so they kept it.
Every case on this channel starts with real research, real records, real people, and takes days. If Candi’s story is landing with you, hit like and subscribe. It’s what keeps Cold Case Unlocked going. Now, back to the investigation that was about to spend 40 years chasing the wrong man. The grape gum on Candy’s clothing pointed investigators somewhere fast.
It pointed them toward a man named Hugh Beion Morse, a member of the Spokane Motorcycle Club, known to chew grape gum constantly, who had lived a few blocks from Candy’s home. Morse had a history that made investigators blood run cold. In 1955, he’d been committed to a California state hospital for molesting two 8-year-old girls while they sold Girl Scout cookies.
He was declared cured and released in 1957. He came to Spokane and less than a week before Candi disappeared, a fellow motorcycle club member had driven with Morris past the very rock quarry where her body would eventually be found. Morris rode in the side car tossing bags of lime to mark a motorcycle route. He saw the quarry. He made a note of it.
That’s what the man believed. And the man believed it for the rest of his life. When Candi’s body was found, Morse was gone. He disappeared from Spokane the same day. He went on a killing spree across a multiple states, ending the lives of women in Spokane, Minnesota, Alabama, attacking others in Ohio, Georgia.
He ended up on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list. He was caught in 1961, convicted of multiple murders, and spent the rest of his life in prison. He denied killing Candy Rogers from the beginning. For 40 years, almost nobody believed him. He was telling the truth. In 2001, when DNA technology had finally advanced enough to build a usable profile from the seaman on Candy’s clothing, investigators submitted Morris’s DNA for comparison.
There was no match. The prime suspect for four decades, the man with the grape gum, the rock quarry, the Girl Scout molestation history, the flight from Spokane on the day the body was found was not the one. Morris died in prison in 2003, having been wrong about almost everything in his violent life and right about exactly one thing.
The case file kept growing. It would eventually become the largest in the history of the Spokane Police Department. Detectives retired and handed it to the next generation. Each one made the same plea to the person who inherited it. Don’t stop. A detective named Brian Hammond said it to a camera in 2007. Some detective will solve this case someday. He said it like he believed it.
He was right. Meanwhile, the people who had loved candy were running out of time. Carl Rogers. Candi’s father, took his own life in a hotel room in Walaw Wala, 4 years after her death. He was 44 years old. Her mother, Elaine, kept teaching, kept living. She was 83 when she died in 2006. Candi would have been in her mid-50s by then. Elaine died not knowing.
Candi’s grandparents died not knowing. An entire generation of the people who needed an answer went to their graves without one. In 2017 and 2018, forensic genetic genealogy became famous with the Golden State serial killer. The Spokane Police Department looked at their coal cases immediately.
Candi’s file went to the top of the list. In 2020, they submitted what remained of the DNA sample to a laboratory. The lab looked at it and said, “No, the sample had become too degraded. Decades of storage had done too much damage. They wouldn’t even try.” However, a forensic scientist, Britney Wright, of the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory, kept looking.
She heard about a lab in Texas called Oram, a company that specialized specifically in biological evidence that other labs had given up on. She contacted them. They said they could work with it. The sample arrived at Aram in March 2021. It was the last of it. Whatever they could pull from what remained, this was the final attempt.
There was nothing left after this. It took them 6 months. Over Labor Day weekend 2021, Oram called Detective Zack Stormant. The genealogical profile had pointed to three brothers. John Ray Hoff, James Andrew Hoff, Terry Allenhof. All three were dead. Only one of them had a child, a daughter.
Stormant called her. Within 45 minutes, she was sitting in his office. Her name was Kathy. She had already looked up the case before she walked through the door. She already knew who Candy Rogers was. She already understood what this call meant. She sat down and gave them a DNA swab. Anyway, on September 8th, 2021, forensic scientist Brittany Wright ran the comparison.
The DNA from Candy’s clothing was 2.9 million times more likely to be related to Cathy’s profile than to a random member of the population. Strong evidence of paternity pointing at the father. Stormant said he wasn’t done. He wanted certainty, not probability. Certainty. A search warrant was issued for John Rayhoff’s grave at Riverside Memorial Park in Spokane.
On September 23rd, 2021, the grave was opened and DNA was extracted from the remains. And the result was as good as you guessed. 25 quintilion to one. That’s a 25 followed by 18 zeros. The seaman on Candy Rogers clothing belonged to John Ray Hoff. Full stop. John Ray Hoff was born August 11th, 1938. He grew up in Spokane.
He was 20 years old on March the 6th, 1959. Living at 2211 West Broadway Avenue, approximately 1 mile from Candy’s home on West Mission. He had a petty juvenile record. He joined the army at 17, served in Korea as an inventory clerk, and was stationed at missile defense sites around Fairchild Air Force Base. He came home.
He lived in the same Westside neighborhood as Candi and her mother. His 10-year-old stepsister was a campfire girl. She was Candi’s big sister in the program, the older girl assigned to guide Candi through the early stages of the organization she just joined. In 2021, the stepsister, now in her 70s, would later reveal to detective Zack Stormant of how she sat next to John after Candi’s body was found, crying, telling him how devastated she was about her friend.
He listened. He said nothing. He knew exactly what he had done to that little girl. And he sat there and let his stepsister grieve in front of him. Two years after Candi’s murder in 1961, Hoff assaulted a woman in Spokane. He grabbed her, removed her clothes, tied her up with her own garments, strangled her. The woman survived.
He served 6 months in jail, was kicked out of the army as a deserter, and went back to civilian life. He sold cutlery door too, worked in a lumber yard, got a job at a meat packing plant, and suffered a chemical burn on his face. He married, he had children. He eventually moved his family to a house on West Rosewood Avenue.
The family living next door were Candi’s cousins. Nobody knew. The person who ended the life of a 9-year-old girl lived beside the girl’s own family for a year and a half, and nobody knew. In 1970, at the age of 31, Hoff shot himself in the doorway of that house. His wife ran screaming into the street. The neighbors, Candi’s cousins, were outside playing.
His death was ruled a suicide. People who knew him said they were shocked. He had seemed like an ordinary man. He went into the ground at Riverside Memorial Park in Spokane. So did Candy Rogers. For 51 years, they shared a cemetery until September 23rd, 2021 when a search warrant was served on his grave and his remains were taken out of the earth and tested and the result came back at 25 quintilion to one.
When Stormman told Hoff’s family, he said he felt like he had taken their lives and dumped everything upside down. What they believed about their father had been changed forever. The daughter Kathy processed it the way anyone would slowly painfully with a clarity that eventually settled into something like cold fact.
She recorded a statement for the press conference. She said she had spent her whole life thinking her father took his own life because he was depressed. Now she thought about it differently. She said he was evil. She said his suicide wasn’t an escape from the world. It was an escape from accountability.
He got to die with people thinking he was an upstanding man and he wasn’t. Then she said, “I am very, very sorry for what my dad did. That he took her life horribly and that he took her mom’s life, took her dad’s life, he took more lives than one. And even though I didn’t do it, and I’m not responsible, I mean, I wasn’t even born.
” I hope that gives her peace knowing that even though it’s not really justice because he doesn’t get any punishment, but that his name has this on it now and they can know it’s solved and everybody can know it’s done. After the exumation, Hoff’s family moved his remains to a different cemetery. They didn’t want him buried in the same ground as Candi anymore.
Candi’s cousin Joanne heard about it and cried. She said she was grateful. Kathy Hoff was 9 years old when her father shot himself. The same age as Candy Rogers when he took her life. Two 9-year-old girls 62 years apart. Both shaped permanently by the same man. One lost her life. One lost her understanding of who her father was.
They never knew each other. They’re connected anyway. Candy Rogers was nine, blonde, blue-eyed, 60 pounds, a bluebird working her way up. She came home from school, played with her dog, and ate an oatmeal cookie, picked up her boxes, and walked out the door. Her mother always wanted her home before dark.
She always was until March 6th, 1959, when she wasn’t. Her mother lived 47 more years without knowing why. Her father made it four. The detectives who worked the original case preserved a semen sample for over 60 years without any way of knowing science would eventually catch up to it. They just kept it just in case.
That act, boring, procedural, unremarkable at the time, is the reason this case closed. Stormant was asked how many hours the Spokane Police Department had invested in Candy Rogers case across six decades. He didn’t answer in hours. He said, “This isn’t measured in hours. This is measured in careers.” If you have a child who does anything alone, sells things doortodoor, walks to a friend’s house, rides a bike through a familiar neighborhood, build a route with them, know it.
Talk about what they do if something feels wrong. And if they’re not home when they should be, don’t wait. Every minute in the first hour matters more than every hour in the first day. Trust that. If this case stayed with you, drop a comment. Tell us which moment landed hardest. Hit like, hit subscribe, and we’ll see you in the next one.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
