DENVER - Kristen Mittelman, a top executive at the forensics firm Othram, met Stacy Chapin at CrimeCon two years ago in Orlando.
"I honestly don't know why I was there. I mean, I'd been invited to be there, but we were only 10 months out from losing Ethan," Chapin said at this year's CrimeCon conference in Denver, Colorado.
She had reluctantly gone to CrimeCon that year, she said. Then she was invited to a group meeting with other families whose children were the victims of high-profile crimes.
"What in the hell am I doing in this room?" Chapin asked herself.
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The families each told their stories. Mittelman surprised her at the end. Although they were strangers at the time, she walked up, hugged her and whispered in her ear.
"I had to go up to Stacy and say everything was gonna be OK, and I did," Mittelman said.
"I had to step back and say, 'What did you just say to me?' And she said to me, 'You don't have to worry,'" Chapin recalled.
Chapin had to go Google Kristen Mittelman, but the conversation "profoundly" stuck with her, she said.
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Mittelman, who was bound by a gag order at the time, couldn't say anything more, she told Fox News Digital. But she gave Chapin a hug and told her "that she wishes everyone could have that hug."
"To be able to see Stacy's reaction, to have her tell me that the chance encounter got her through the next two and a half years … It means the world to me to know that I've been able to make a difference in her life quickly," Mittelman said.
After Judge Steven Hippler lifted the gag following Bryan Kohberger's guilty plea in the murder of Chapin's son, Ethan, and three of his friends, Mittelman picked up the phone immediately.
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She called Chapin, explained the overwhelming DNA evidence police had recovered and how she was confident almost immediately that the genetic material was enough to solve the case.
"We could finally talk to the person who is our 'why,'" Mittelman said of the call, describing it as her "full-circle moment."
Families like Chapin's are why she and her husband built Othram, she said.
"Once the gag order was lifted, my first phone call was Stacy's family. I had a chance encounter with her a few months into the investigation, and I could see the pain in her eyes. And I could see how much she needed certainty," Mittelman said.
"The phone call was the greatest thing," Chapin recalled Saturday.
She and Ethan's father, her husband Jim, immediately flew to Houston to meet Othram's team, she said.
They also wanted to use the high profile of their son's case to boost their advocacy work, connect other victims' families with Othram and bring more criminals to justice, she said.
Although Kohberger's defense painted the DNA as controversial and tried to have it thrown out, his lawyers lost that argument. Then he pleaded guilty to avoid the potential death penalty at trial.
Chapin and the rest of her family have turned to victims' advocacy after the crime and created a student scholarship in Ethan's honor through the Ethan's Smile Foundation.
