SANTEE, Calif. — On October 8, 1980, Michelle Wyatt and her boyfriend played pool inside of the garage at her Santee apartment building on Kerrigan Court.
Wyatt's boyfriend left that night and the 20-year-old went back to her apartment.
It was the last time that anyone other than the man who brutally raped and killed her would see her alive.
The killer entered her home sometime in the early morning hours of October 9. There were no signs of forced entry.
Neighbors heard screaming — but no one called 911.
The following day, Wyatt's roommate returned to the apartment. The newspaper still sat on the doorstep. The front door was ajar. The roommate walked in to find a grisly scene. Her friend Wyatt was dead, strangled to death with a telephone cord.
Detectives worked the scene. While Wyatt's purse contents were scattered throughout the apartment, there were no signs that it was a burglary.
Detectives interviewed a list of potential subjects but the case went cold.
At the time, Detective Brian Patterson was a teen at Santana High School in Santee. He had delivered newspapers to Wyatt's apartment complex on Kerrigan Court. News of Wyatt's brutal unsolved murder spread quickly in the small rural town of Santee.
In 2019, the then-Santana High student Patterson was a Sheriff's Detective Patterson working on the cold case team. He happened to be assigned Wyatt's case.
Patterson was suddenly transported to 1980s Santee.
He knew people who were interviewed about Wyatt's murder.
"I don't want to say it gave me more motivation," Patterson told CBS 8. "It just hit home."
Solving the Murder of Michelle Wyatt
Patterson and others pored over the evidence, chief among it was the killer's semen. At the time of the murder, the semen had little use for detectives but that changed with advancements in DNA.
Obtaining the DNA to start building out the family tree is crucial. One "SNP" from a DNA sample gives detectives a profile, which helps them track down relatives, strengthening a complete DNA match as the family tree fills out.
A SNP, commonly called "snips", are single nucleotide polymorphism. It's a small, unique portion within a person's DNA that can be found in their lineage. Think of SNPs as if a portion of a fingerprint's pattern could identify one's ancestry.
Using the killer's DNA, Patterson and the cold case team entered into a database, searching for partial and complete matches. Patterson says that as the team found partial matches, he and his colleagues reached out to the killer's potential family members.
"Everybody wants to do what's right," Patterson said.
After nine months of building a family tree, detectives identified John Patrick Hogan as the killer.
At the time, Hogan was 18 when he killed Wyatt. Sheriff detectives say he lived in the same complex as her at one point in time.
Hogan joined the U.S. Air Force a year before he raped and killed Wyatt after graduating from Santana High School. He lived about a mile away from her when she died.
Hogan died when he was 42 — exactly 24 years after Michelle Wyatt's murder — on Oct. 9, 2004.
Patterson said it's a crazy roller coaster. But sometimes they're able to find closure for the victim's loved ones.
"It's a great feeling to go back and tell these families, 'Hey, we finally got the person that killed your loved one.'"
CBS 8 spoke with her parents in 2021, who were in their 80s at the time of the interview. They feared they would die before the truth was uncovered.
“That was my biggest scare of dying and not knowing who did it,” said Michelle's mother, Louise Wyatt.