How police can get your deleted texts
NEW HAVEN, Conn. (WTNH) – Kyle Navin is now held on two and a half million dollars bonds in the deaths of his parents Jeanette and Jeffery Navin.
Part of the case against Kyle Navin are text messages police got from his cellphone, text messages he had deleted. Investigators were able to access those texts using a new kind of software that is having a big impact on law enforcement.
In the police affidavit released Friday, a lot of the information about what Kyle Navin was doing and saying around the time his parents disappeared came from his cellphone, and the people he was contacting, from his girlfriend to his drug dealer. After he allegedly murdered his parents, he allegedly deleted those texts.
So how did police get a hold of them? News8 went to the computer experts at the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Science at the university of New Haven. Senior Yvelise Moreno sat down at a computer, plugged in a cellphone and showed us just how easy it is to get into a password protected phone and find, well, everything.
“So that’s a photo that I took the other day, and I actually had deleted that photo,” Moreno said, pointing to the screen.
Yes, even deleted photos, videos and texts. According to Professor Jibey Asthappan, the head of National Security Program at the Henry Lee Institute, the right software can find it all.
“Generally yes,” said Dr. Asthappan. “They’re going to see everything that you’ve ever typed into your phone.”
That’s just what happened with the phone of Kyle Navin, the 27 year-old Bridgeport man charged with murdering his parents. State Police were able to see text conversations between him and his girlfriend Jennifer Valiante that they had deleted. Things like this from May: “We need to figure out what the best way to take them down…” Or this from July: “I’m telling you, wipe out the infection and get money for life. It’s perfect plan.” It was not so perfect, it turns out, due to how easy it is to get deleted texts.
“It is pretty easy,” said Dr. Asthappan. “It’s a matter of just plugging it in to a computer with the software program installed and then acquiring it usually only takes about 2-3 minutes at most.”
Police used software called Cellebrite on Navin’s phone, but there are several kinds that they use at UNH. The experts say really deleting something is pretty hard to do.
“Traditional way to do this is to wipe a drive or wipe a phone, but you would have to wipe it multiple times to insure that it was completely clean,” explained Dr. Asthappan. “No one goes through the effort of doing this for a cell phone.”
The software is also readily available on the internet to anyone, not just law enforcement. There are even demo copies available for free.