SoylentNews

frojack [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Associated Press [apnews.com] and the Everett Washington HeraldNet [heraldnet.com] carry a story about a 30 year old double murder solved using Public Genealogy Sites similar to the Golden State Killer story carried here on Soylent News [soylentnews.org].

Deaths of two Canadian visitors shopping in the Seattle area were unsolved since 1987.

The deaths remained a mystery for more than 30 years, until DNA led to a major breakthrough. A genealogist, CeCe Moore, worked with experts at Parabon NanoLabs to build a family tree for the suspect, based on the genetic evidence recovered from the crime scenes. They used data that had been uploaded by distant cousins to public genealogy websites. They pinpointed a suspect, Talbott, a trucker living north of Sea-Tac International Airport.

Police kept him under surveillance until a paper cup fell from his truck in Seattle in early May. A swab of DNA from the cup came back as a match to the evidence that had waited 30 years. Before then, Talbott had never been considered a suspect. Days later he was in handcuffs.

This time the police used Parabon NanoLabs [parabon-nanolabs.com] (more famous for generating facial models from mere samples of DNA,) to build a family tree of the killer by submit the 30 year old crime scene DNA samples to multiple genealogy sites.

Results from those sites were then combined by a Parabon genealogist to map the family of distant cousins found in those data bases. Police were then able to narrow down the list using other methods unmentioned.

Neither article mentions if any other family members were stalked by police while being eliminated as suspects, or whether any sample were submitted by other family members.

Original Submission