In the year since the arrest of the man believed to be the notorious Golden State Killer, the world of criminal investigation has been radically transformed. Using an unconventional technique that relies on DNA submitted to online genealogy sites, investigators have solved dozens of violent crimes, in many cases decades after they hit dead ends. Experts believe the technique could be used to revive investigations into a vast number of cold cases across the US, including at least 100,000 unsolved major violent crimes and 40,000 unidentified bodies.
Many have called it a revolutionary new technology. But credit for this method largely belongs to a number of mostly female, mostly retired family history lovers who tried for years to persuade law enforcement officials that their techniques could be used for more than locating the biological parents of adoptees.
One was Diane Harman Hoog, 78, director of education at DNA Adoption, who realised in 2013 that she could apply the techniques she was using to identify two bodies she had read about in a Seattle newspaper.
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“This is too complicated,” she says she was told when she reached out to a detective. Four years later, Margaret Press, 72, a retired computer programmer and skilled family tree builder in California, tried to help her local sheriff with a similar case. No one would return her calls.
Fast forward to 25 April 2018, the day that a gaggle of California prosecutors announced that an “innovative DNA technology” had been used in the Golden State Killer case.
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2/20 Harold Shipman
Shipman was convicted of murdering 15 of his elderly patients in Hyde, Greater Manchester but an inquiry later concluded he probably murdered 250 people over the course of his career as a GP.
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3/20 Ted Bundy
Ted Bundy confessed to killing 30 young women and girls across the US in the 1970s. He was executed by electric chair in 1989.
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4/20 Fred and Rosemary West
Serial killers Fred and Rosemary West who committed at least 12 murders between 1967 and 1987 in Gloucestershire.
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5/20 Charles Manson
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Notorious Ukrainian cannibalistic serial killer Andrei Chikatilo who was charged with the murders of 53 people.
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7/20 Jack the Ripper
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8/20 Beverley Allitt
Nurse, Beverley Allitt, murdered four children and injured others during her time at the children’s ward at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincolnshire in 1991.
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9/20 Edmund Kemper
Kemper murdered his paternal grandparents aged 15 and was sent to a maximum-security facility that housed mentally ill convicts. However, was released after convincing the psychiatrists that he had been rehabilitated aged 21. He went on to murder several women, including his mother in the 1970s, where he engaged in necrophilia after the killings.
Bettmann Archive/Getty
10/20 Jeffrey Dahmer
Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to murders of 17 men lured to his apartment. He kept the skulls of his victims after eating parts of some of them.
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11/20 Gary Ridgway
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12/20 Peter Sutcliffe
Peter Sutcliffe, became known as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ after he murdered 13 women between 1975 and 1980. Most of his victims were prostitutes.
Express Newspapers/Getty
13/20 The Zodiac Killer
The Zodiac Killer murdered several victims between the 1960s and 70s. He sent a series of letters to the local press in Northern California which included cryptograms to help solve the murders. The killer’s identity remains unknown.
14/20 Joanna Dennehy
Joanna Dennehy stabbed three men to death and attempted to murder another two people during the ‘Peterborough ditch murders’. She carried out the crime over a 10-day period in 2013.
PA
15/20 Tsutomu Miyazaki
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AFP/Getty Images
16/20 Aileen Wuornos
Aileen Wuornos murdered six men whilst she was working as a prostitute. She shot them all at point-blank range between 1989 and 1990.
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17/20 Dennis Nilsen
Nilsen, the ‘Muswell Hill Murderer’, is a serial killer and necrophiliac. He murdered at least 12 men between 1978 and 1983.
PA
18/20 John Wayne Gacy
John Wayne Gacy sexually assaulted, tortured and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and men between 1972 and 1978.
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19/20 Dennis Rader
Dennis Rader, ‘the BTK murderer’, killed 10 times between 1974 and 1991. His first victims were all from one family. The pattern of systematic torture, lead him to be called the ‘Bind, Tie, Kill (BTK) murderer’.
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20/20 Mary Ann Cotton
Mary Ann Cotton was believed to have had as many as 21 victims. She is thought to have used arsenic to poison and kill three of her four husbands, possibly as many as eight of her own children, seven stepchildren, her mother, a lover and an inconvenient friend. She was hung on March 24, 1873, after being found guilty of murdering her stepson.
Rex Features
1/20 Ian Brady and Myra Hindley
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were found guilty of murder, in the sensational ‘Bodies of the Moor’ trial. Both were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Getty
2/20 Harold Shipman
Shipman was convicted of murdering 15 of his elderly patients in Hyde, Greater Manchester but an inquiry later concluded he probably murdered 250 people over the course of his career as a GP.
Getty
3/20 Ted Bundy
Ted Bundy confessed to killing 30 young women and girls across the US in the 1970s. He was executed by electric chair in 1989.
AP
4/20 Fred and Rosemary West
Serial killers Fred and Rosemary West who committed at least 12 murders between 1967 and 1987 in Gloucestershire.
PA
5/20 Charles Manson
Charles Manson, a hippie cult leader, orchestrated the murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and six others in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969.
Rex Features
6/20 Andrei Chikatilo
Notorious Ukrainian cannibalistic serial killer Andrei Chikatilo who was charged with the murders of 53 people.
Getty Images
7/20 Jack the Ripper
Jack the Ripper murdered female prostitutes who lived and worked in the East End of London. Their throats were cut prior to internal organs being removed from the bodies. The killer was never caught.
Getty Images
8/20 Beverley Allitt
Nurse, Beverley Allitt, murdered four children and injured others during her time at the children’s ward at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincolnshire in 1991.
PA
9/20 Edmund Kemper
Kemper murdered his paternal grandparents aged 15 and was sent to a maximum-security facility that housed mentally ill convicts. However, was released after convincing the psychiatrists that he had been rehabilitated aged 21. He went on to murder several women, including his mother in the 1970s, where he engaged in necrophilia after the killings.
Bettmann Archive/Getty
10/20 Jeffrey Dahmer
Jeffrey Dahmer confessed to murders of 17 men lured to his apartment. He kept the skulls of his victims after eating parts of some of them.
Channel 4
11/20 Gary Ridgway
Gary Ridgway received 48 life sentences, with out the possibility of parole, for killing 48 women in the Green River Killer serial murder case.
Getty Images
12/20 Peter Sutcliffe
Peter Sutcliffe, became known as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ after he murdered 13 women between 1975 and 1980. Most of his victims were prostitutes.
Express Newspapers/Getty
13/20 The Zodiac Killer
The Zodiac Killer murdered several victims between the 1960s and 70s. He sent a series of letters to the local press in Northern California which included cryptograms to help solve the murders. The killer’s identity remains unknown.
14/20 Joanna Dennehy
Joanna Dennehy stabbed three men to death and attempted to murder another two people during the ‘Peterborough ditch murders’. She carried out the crime over a 10-day period in 2013.
PA
15/20 Tsutomu Miyazaki
Tsutomu Miyazaki who was sentenced to death in 1997 after carrying out the gruesome killings of four young girls. He abducted, killed and indulged in sexual activities with their corpses, as well as keeping body parts of the victims and sending postcards to their families describing the murders.
AFP/Getty Images
16/20 Aileen Wuornos
Aileen Wuornos murdered six men whilst she was working as a prostitute. She shot them all at point-blank range between 1989 and 1990.
Getty Images
17/20 Dennis Nilsen
Nilsen, the ‘Muswell Hill Murderer’, is a serial killer and necrophiliac. He murdered at least 12 men between 1978 and 1983.
PA
18/20 John Wayne Gacy
John Wayne Gacy sexually assaulted, tortured and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and men between 1972 and 1978.
Rex Features
19/20 Dennis Rader
Dennis Rader, ‘the BTK murderer’, killed 10 times between 1974 and 1991. His first victims were all from one family. The pattern of systematic torture, lead him to be called the ‘Bind, Tie, Kill (BTK) murderer’.
Getty Images
20/20 Mary Ann Cotton
Mary Ann Cotton was believed to have had as many as 21 victims. She is thought to have used arsenic to poison and kill three of her four husbands, possibly as many as eight of her own children, seven stepchildren, her mother, a lover and an inconvenient friend. She was hung on March 24, 1873, after being found guilty of murdering her stepson.
Rex Features
The innovator was Barbara Rae-Venter, a genetic genealogist who had uploaded crime scene DNA to GEDMatch.com, a low-key genealogical research site run out of a little yellow house in Florida. Rae-Venter, 70, and her team soon found a suspect by using the genetic and family tree data provided by his cousins.
And that was how a former police officer, Joseph DeAngelo, came to be charged with 26 counts of murder and kidnapping in connection with scores of rapes and killings that were committed across California in the 1970s and 1980s. In interview after interview, Paul Holes, a determined investigator who had spent decades chasing false leads, rejoiced in his decision to involve Rae-Venter.
“Barbara really braved the pass,” says CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist who was also among the first to see the potential in the technique. Within a few weeks of the announcement, she began working with Parabon, a forensic consulting firm.
In rapid succession, Parabon’s work led to 49 genetic identifications, reopening a number of cold cases: the 1987 double killing of a young Canadian couple, six rapes in North Carolina and the slaying of a Stanford University graduate 46 years ago. The technique resulted in at least 17 arrests, including people who had never been under any suspicion, such as a well-established party DJ and children’s entertainer in Pennsylvania. The National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children is revisiting about 700 cases involving unidentified children’s remains and has identified about 15 in the past year.
An additional 300 cases are in the works: old killings, serial sexual assaults, and unidentified bodies, according to estimates by various genealogists and investigators.
Some question the ethics and legality of the technique. They point out that customers of genealogy companies did not realise they would be signing up to help criminal investigations, although GEDmatch discloses that profiles could be used to investigate violent crimes. A recent decision by FamilyTreeDNA to pivot from secretly cooperating with the FBI to marketing itself as a means to catch killers has also left many alarmed.
Some want to see the same regulations for family genealogy sites that states have imposed on the use of government DNA databases, such as the FBI’s Codis system. Charles E Sydnor III, a state legislator in Maryland, says, “When we’re not going according to the law, I think that makes us no better than lawbreakers.”
In Maryland, police are banned from identifying suspects through relatives in criminal DNA databases. Despite the law, police departments in two counties have done precisely that with GEDmatch.
The law aside, individuals have little recourse to protect their genetic data. If you are an American, it is likely that your name can be extrapolated even if you have never taken a DNA test. In the hands of an advanced genealogical sleuth, often all that is needed to identify someone from a drop of saliva, blood or semen are the DNA profiles of two third cousins.
What is a third cousin? It is someone who shares a set of your 16 great-great-grandparents. We all have at least 800 of them out there somewhere, and there is a good chance that some were once excited enough about genealogy to join GEDmatch or FamilyTreeDNA.
Several recent cases show what this technique could mean for the future.
DNA leads to arrest of woman’s cousin
The Facebook message did not make sense at first. In March, a stranger congratulated Brandy Jennings of Vancouver, Washington, for helping to solve a 1979 killing in a small town in Iowa. Her second cousin once removed, Jerry Lynn Burns, a 64-year-old small business owner and widower, had been charged. They had never met.
“It teaches me to read what I agree to,” Jennings says.
She had uploaded her Ancestry.com file to GEDmatch but had never returned to the site, finding it too confusing. The search warrant revealed that investigators had found her profile useful.
She says she wished that she had been given a heads up or that she had been eligible for the long-standing $10,000 reward, though she feels positive about her contribution.
“Any murder deserves to be solved,” she says.
A young mother was killed in 2009. Nine years later, a neighbour confessed
On 1 November 2009, Holly Cassano, 22, who lived in a mobile home park in Mahomet, Illinois, failed to pick up her baby girl from her mother’s home. The worried grandmother went to check on Holly and found she had been stabbed to death after her evening shift as a supermarket cashier.
Last May, after the publicity over the Golden State Killer arrest, Parabon began offering its hundreds of clients a $3,500 add-on service in which Moore or another genetic genealogist builds a series of interlocking family trees. The Champaign County Sheriff’s Office was a client.
Getting from cousin to great-grandmother to suspect can be complicated. The case did not look promising when Moore began working on it last summer. But then, during a root canal, she says, “I was lying there in a chair and something popped into my head.”
Other experts describe similar epiphanies when building family trees. In this case, DNA extracted from a discarded cigarette reinforced her hypothesis. In August, the neighbour who had smoked that cigarette, Michael Henslick, confessed to the killing.
It is not just about old cases
A week before the Golden State Killer announcement, a man broke into the house of Carla Brooks, 79, in St George, Utah, beat her and sexually assaulted her. In July, the police department there became one of the first agencies to apply genetic genealogy to a recent case.
“When there’s the potential to stop someone in their tracks, it’s a different feeling,” Moore says. The trail of cousins led across the country to Massachusetts and back to Spencer Glen Monnett, 31, who was arrested in Utah. He pleaded guilty in February.
The case raises questions that the police, genealogists and victims’ families have mentioned in interviews: why choose one case over others? Should the priority be new cases? Easier cases? Those in the media spotlight? Are older cold cases worth pursuing, even if the people who committed them are probably dead?
Yes, says Bill Thomas. His sister Cathy was among eight people who were killed in southeastern Virginia in the late 1980s in a series of slayings that came to be known as the Colonial Parkway murders.
“For me and for my family it’s never been about a prosecution,” he says. “I’m not seeking closure. It’s not like the sun will come out tomorrow. I don’t care if he is dead. I want to know who he is.”
A Jane Doe finally has a name
A week before the Golden State Killer arrest, a tiny piece of a bloody shirt was headed to a lab. A month later, Press, the retired computer programmer, and Colleen Fitzpatrick, 64, a retired rocket scientist, uploaded the genetic file to GEDMatch. They were seeking relatives of an unidentified woman whose body was found on a hiking trail outside Reno, Nevada, in 1982.
The pair had been using genetic genealogy to identify bodies for nearly a year through their organisation: DNA Doe Project. Several changes in 2017 and 2018 had led to a boom, Press says. DNA sequencing had got better and cheaper.
More importantly, she says, the size of genealogical databases had grown rapidly. In fact, according to a recent study, the DNA of 90 per cent of Americans of European descent will soon be identifiable using genetic genealogy. Americans with that background are overrepresented on sites like GEDmatch.
Some believe this levels the playing field. African Americans are overrepresented in the FBI’s Codis database.
Now, so long as a person’s ancestors have been in the United States for a few generations, Press and others estimated that a skilled genetic genealogist has at least a 60 per cent chance of making an identification.
In the case of the woman on the trail, Press says she was extremely lucky, spotting a first cousin once removed. Alas, one of the next key matches had been adopted, so they located the cousin’s biological parents. Within a few months, the woman on the trail had a name. It has not been announced, because investigators are now trying to figure out who killed her.
Trial of 1987 double murder could be key
A case that could result in legal precedents involves William Earl Talbott II, 55, who is scheduled to go on trial on 3 June in Snohomish County Superior Court in Washington over a double killing that took place nearly 32 years ago.
He is accused of killing a Canadian couple, Jay Cook, 20, and Tanya Van Cuylenborg, 18, who were last seen alive on the ferry to Seattle from their home on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Van Cuylenborg was found dead in a ditch in the woods in Skagit County in November 1987. Cook’s body and van were found a week later.
After tracing DNA evidence to second cousins on GEDmatch, Moore drew a connection to a couple who lived seven miles from the crime scene. Their son was Talbott, who was 23 at the time of the killings.
The judge could decide to treat clues from genealogical sites the same way that evidence from Codis or Instagram is handled, says Blaine Bettinger, a genealogist and intellectual property lawyer who works with GEDmatch.
Or the judge might find the technique to be a violation of fourth amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure. Leah Larkin, who runs a DNA analysis service called The DNA Geek, believes that it is.
“I don’t think that the cops should be able to look into any home they want without a warrant,” she says. “There is much more private information in my DNA than there is in my underwear drawer.”
The Sacramento district attorney, Anne Marie Schubert, who created a genetic genealogy unit after her department’s success in the Golden State Killer case, rejects those concerns. “We don’t get our hands on people’s DNA in these genealogy databases,” she says, just clues to how they are related to the suspect.
At stake are thousands of criminal cases and perhaps the future of genetic privacy in general.
“It could end there, or it could keep on going to the Supreme Court,” Bettinger says.
© New York Times