From The Detroit News, 7-11-23:
Charles E. Ramirez, The Detroit News: DNA and genealogy websites ― the genetic tools millions now use to connect with relatives or unlock questions about their ancestry — are playing a key role in another way that experts say will happen more: helping police investigators crack decades-old cold cases.At least three cold cases in Michigan, all of them more than 20 years old, have had breakthroughs in the last year thanks to DNA and genealogy sites. One involved a west Michigan woman whose body was found in her home in 1987. A suspect was finally identified and charged in 2022.Another involved an infant in the Upper Peninsula whose body was found 25 years ago; her mother was charged last year and has been ordered to stand trial. And earlier this year, Livingston County sheriff’s deputies identified a Livonia man as the killer of a woman whose body was found in a state game area four decades ago.
“It’s being used across the country right now,” said Michigan State Police Detective/1st Lt. Chuck Christensen, commander of the agency’s Fifth District Special Investigation Section, of more law enforcement agencies using the technology.Stanford University estimates that forensic genetic genealogy has been used to solve more than 400 cold cases, many of them three and four decades old, since 2018.Three Rivers Police Chief Scott Boling said he’s seeing more agencies use it, “especially with cold cases where DNA was found but investigators couldn’t match to anyone in (the criminal database) or there are no other leads.” Relentless:Daughters refuse to let mother’s unsolved murder fade into past While Michigan investigators are using science to crack once seemingly unsolvable cases, the technology is providing long-sought answers for loved ones that for decades seemed elusive.”Not only does being able to wrap up an investigation give closure to the family and community of the victim that has been suffering and waiting in limbo for years, but it also helps with public safety,” said Rachel Oefelein, chief scientific officer of DNA Labs International Inc. in Deerfield, Florida, which works with police agencies all over the country to solve cold cases.The company currently processes 7,000 to 10,000 DNA samples a month, she said.”Being able to give investigators potential leads that may stop active serial killers or serial rapists from committing additional crimes is huge,” Oefelein said.
When DNA sites emerged
Experts say it isn’t as simple as plugging DNA found at a crime scene into a genealogy website to pinpoint a suspect. Funding is a challenge for more advanced analysis for many police agencies. And polls show some people don’t want their genetic information shared with law enforcement.Most people are familiar with how many are using genealogy websites, such as Ancestry.com or 23andme and home DNA testing kits, to bring pictures of their family trees into focus. The technology behind them has been around for decades.But it wasn’t until 2018 that it stepped into the spotlight after it helped police capture the so-called Golden State Killer, according to experts. The serial killer was linked to the murder of 12 women and 50 rapes that happened between 1976 and 1986 in California.Prosecutors said investigators matched crime-scene DNA with genetic material stored by a relative on an online genealogical site to tie former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo, who was 72 years old in 2018, to the deaths.In 2020, DeAngelo, then 74, pleaded guilty to 13 murders and 13 rapes under a plea deal in which the death sentence was dropped.
Michigan cold cases
Investigators closer to home have also used the technology to help them crack cold cases.Ashlyn Kuersten, a professor at Western Michigan University’s Department of Sociology, said she thinks the trend is fairly recent and began in the last two or three years.Kuersten teaches in the university’s Criminal Justice Studies Program and is the director of the school’s Cold Case Program with Michigan State Police. The program teaches students forensic science, law, and criminal investigation tactics. They also work with investigators to review cold homicide and missing person cases.Two long-unsolved cases benefited from the work of students in the program, Kuersten said.Michigan State Police last year said they matched evidence left at the scene of the 1987 killing of Roxanne Wood, 30, in Niles to an Indiana man using DNA and a genealogy website.Wood’s body was found in her home’s kitchen by her husband after a night of bowling. The two drove separately, and Roxanne arrived home first.Investigators identified Patrick Wayne Gilham, 67, of South Bend, Indiana, as their suspect. He was charged with second-degree murder and pleaded no contest, which courts in Michigan treat the same as a guilty plea or conviction. He was sentenced in April 2022 to at least 23 years in prison.The Mackinac County Sheriff’s Office also used DNA evidence and genealogy tracing to help them finally pinpoint a suspect in the death of a baby girl whose body was found in an Upper Peninsula campground’s septic tank in 1997.The investigation led to the baby’s mother, Nancy Ann Gerwatowski. She was extradited from Wyoming to Michigan. In August, a judge ordered her to stand trial on a murder charge in connection with the case.In February, the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office said they used DNA and genealogy websites to find the killer of a 19-year-old Redford Township woman whose body was found in a state game area in 1983. Christina Castiglione was found in Deerfield Township. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
Forty years after her death, investigators used the technology to determine Charles Shaw of Livonia was her killer. Shaw died accidentally of autoerotic asphyxiation in 1983.But even when DNA helps police find crack a case, there still isn’t always closure.In May, Three Rivers police worked with Michigan State Police and students with Western Michigan University’s Cold Case Project to use DNA and a genealogy website to find a suspect in the 1988 murder of a 19-year-old mother, Cathy Swartz.Swartz was beaten, stabbed and strangled in her Three Rivers apartment while her 9-month-old daughter, Courteney, was in the next room.Detectives identified the suspect as Robert Odell Waters. Waters, who had moved from Michigan to South Carolina, was arrested. Three Rivers police said a few days after officers announced his arrest in South Carolina, Waters was found dead in his jail cell.
Courteney, now a mom herself, said growing up, her family didn’t really talk about her mom’s death.”So speaking on it brings up everything every time,” she said in a message to The Detroit News on Facebook.
‘It takes a lot of work’
The process starts when detectives find DNA at a crime scene and send it to a forensic laboratory. DNA is the biological material in the cells of almost all living organisms that contains the genetic information, or blueprints, that determine how their bodies are supposed to develop and what physical traits they have, such as eye color, hair color and height.The lab uses the DNA found by investigators to create a genealogical profile of potential suspects. The profile is then compared with DNA in genetic databases, which can narrow down investigators’ search to a specific family.Detectives then speak to members of the family, ask for DNA and determine whether members were ever in the same vicinity as a victim to refine the search until they can pinpoint a suspect.”It takes a lot of work,” Western Michigan’s Kuersten said. “Investigators don’t just access a public genealogy website to find the bad guy. Typically, a distant relative of the person is found, and then a family tree needs to be built down to the suspect.”Since the early 2000s, police have been able to use a national database of criminal DNA information called the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. The FBI maintains the repository.”But if someone hasn’t been arrested anywhere in the country for a crime that requires them to be put into the system, you could have a good sample of DNA in evidence, but you would never get a hit,” the state police’s Christensen said. “Forensic genealogy is a tool that’s used to build out a family tree that can be paired down to siblings.”Experts said a growing number of law enforcement agencies are using the technology as they realize the answers it can provide. Another reason is more funding for using it has become available.”I think part of it is that they’re realizing the capabilities of the technology,” DNA Labs’ Oefelein said.
Funding challenges
The Livingston County Sheriff’s Office received a grant in March 2022 to conduct advanced DNA testing, which was used to help solve the Castiglione case, the woman last seen in 1983. The grant was from the Season of Justice, a nonprofit group.”The cost to use the technology is very high, and small departments can’t afford to do it,” said Livingston County Sheriff’s Deputy Edwin Moore. “I don’t know if we would have been able to solve the case without the grant. We have other cases that are still open, that we know we have good biological evidence on, but we’re looking at how to get the funding for it.”Moore is a member of the sheriff’s Cold Case team, which worked on the Castiglione murder. He is also a retired law enforcement officer who worked on her murder case in 1983.Oefelein said more federal funding for using the technology has been made available to police agencies than before.”It was something a police department couldn’t afford to do off the bat,” she said. “But now there are things like grants and GoFundMe campaigns, which has made it more accessible.”But the technology isn’t a silver bullet, and it has limitations in addition to the cost.Investigators can only compare evidence they’ve collected with DNA on genealogy websites when end users have given their permission.Another is that any profile generated through DNA testing and genealogy technology depends on the quality of the sample collected as evidence in the investigation.”We don’t always get DNA from just one person when evidence is collected; there’s a mixture,” Oefelein said. “That can be very challenging, but as the technology develops, it will be a non-issue.”
Privacy issues
And while most Americans favor police using DNA and genealogy technology to help solve cases, some are concerned about privacy.An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll in 2018 found that about 17% of American adults have undergone genetic testing, with a majority of those people wanting to learn more about their ethnic heritage.The survey also found that 51% of people say genetic information should be shared with the police, but only with the consent of the person tested. Of the rest, 33% said consent to share genetic information with police is not necessary, and 13% said they were against police using the information altogether. The margin of error was plus-minus 4.1 percentage points.Meanwhile, a 2019 Pew Research Center study found that about half of Americans, 48%, said they’re OK with DNA testing companies sharing people’s genetic data with law enforcement agencies to help solve crimes. A third of the people in the survey said it’s unacceptable for the information to be shared with police, and 18% said they weren’t sure about it. The poll of more than 9,800 respondents had a margin of error of plus-minus 1.5 percentage points.The use of the technology promises to become more common in investigations of violent crimes, experts and law enforcement officials said.”I think we’re heading to a time of few cold cases because DNA technology has given police an avenue to investigate them that didn’t exist before,” Kuersten said. “For many of these cases, DNA evidence is really the only thing they have.”cramirez@detroitnews.comTwitter: @CharlesERamirez
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The failure to use a third-party lab like Othram in the OCCK case to reevaluate the evidence in FOUR homicide cases means the murder of four kids doesn’t matter to the MSP or Oakland County. Which means their deaths don’t matter, which mean the kids’ lives didn’t matter.
They want to tell you all about the degraded hair samples that yielded only mtDNA, the partial Y-str sample they didn’t even discover until 2019, that the state lab has tested all the evidence “many times.” A case this old, with evidence improperly stored and treated like garage sale items, needs the attention of a third-party lab. And then the public needs to be informed of the findings or lack thereof.
The no-man’s land of the OCCK case means these kids didn’t matter; they certainly didn’t to L. Brooks Patterson or Richard Thompson. Lack of action by today’s MSP and Oakland County speaks even louder than the silence in this case.