So far, my relatives haven’t been identified as killers. There was the time during the Korean war my uncle, a Corporal at the time, got drunk, stole a jeep and shot up Seoul during a cease fire. He was court-martialed and reduced to Private.
A woman researching her ancestry submitted her DNA to a genealogy website — and ended up leading police to her half brother, who left his DNA at a crime scene decades ago.
Raymond Charles Rowe pleaded guilty this year to the 1992 rape and murder of Christy Mirack, a Pennsylvania schoolteacher.
It has become a surprisingly common story in recent years as more Americans put their genetic materials into the public domain, allowing police some access.
Authorities said one company helped solve nearly 30 cold cases from May to December using DNA profiles submitted to genealogy sites and made available for public matching.
The work is conducted at places such as Parabon NanoLabs, where CeCe Moore and other genetic genealogists take crime scene DNA turned over by police and run it against profiles from 23andMe, Ancestry.com or other sites made public on GEDmatch by consumers looking for relatives they didn’t know existed.
In successful cases, Parabon is able to identify a narrow list of potential leads.
“I can point them to as few people as possible,” Ms. Moore told The Washington Times. “It’s really the strength of this process that we can help them zero in on just a handful or sometimes one person rather than having innocent people pulled into the investigation.”
The tactic helped nab William Earl Talbott II, a 55-year-old truck driver arrested in Washington state last year and charged with murdering two people more than 30 years ago. Scientists matched his DNA from the 1987 crime scene to one of his relatives.
The technique, used by genetic genealogists across the country, helped catch the “Golden State Killer,” Joseph James DeAngelo, who is reportedly responsible for 50 rapes and 12 killings dating back decades.