Shortcut: The Woman Who Names the Unknown - ATC International

Summary

Australian True Crime – “Shortcut: The Woman Who Names the Unknown – ATC International”
Date: June 18, 2026
Host: Meshel Laurie
Guest: CeCe Moore, Forensic Genetic Genealogist

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Episode Overview

In this fascinating episode, host Meshel Laurie sits down with CeCe Moore, a trailblazer in the world of forensic genetic genealogy. Moore discusses her pioneering work identifying John and Jane Does and linking violent criminals to cold cases through DNA and family tree analysis. The conversation spotlights the emotional impact of restoring names to unidentified remains, the nuances and ethics of using consumer DNA databases, and the dramatic breakthroughs that forensic genealogy brings to law enforcement worldwide. With gripping case studies—featuring Australia’s “Puna Dam John Doe” and America’s infamous Yogurt Shop Murders—the episode explores both the science and the humanity behind naming the unknown.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to Forensic Genealogy

• CeCe Moore is introduced as a foremost expert in genetic genealogy, specializing in using DNA and ancestral research to solve violent crimes and identify unknown remains.
• Main theme: How forensic genealogy serves as a game-changing tool for modern investigations, especially cold cases.
• WARNING: The episode contains graphic descriptions of violence.

2. The Limits and Power of Genetic Genealogy

• Genetic genealogy is “just a hint, a tip, a lead generator. It’s a highly scientific one, but… it’s the beginning of the investigation…instead of the end.” (CeCe Moore, 00:50)
• No one is arrested based solely on genetic genealogy; law enforcement must do full investigations and confirm findings with traditional, court-admissible DNA.

3. Moore’s Family Tree Reconstruction Process

• CeCe describes “reverse engineering” a person’s identity from distant cousin matches (as distant as 5th or 6th cousins) using SNP profiles of 700,000+ markers.
• The process:
  • Identify shared DNA matches.
  • Build family trees backward to common ancestors among distant cousins.
  • “Flip” the tree and move forward, theorizing which descendant could be the unknown person.
• “From 1%, we can predict that they likely share great great grandparents… Each of those individuals who shares DNA… might share only 1% of their DNA.” (CeCe Moore, 02:22–03:40)

4. The Emotional Impact of Naming the Unknown

• Meshel Laurie reflects: “It must be a very moving…to give someone back their name, their family and their identity is huge.” (04:46)
• CeCe shares her experience working on Australia’s first genetic genealogy case—the “Puna Dam John Doe.”
  • They found his biological family, but no one was missing, indicating he may have been adopted out (05:28–06:25).
  • Emotional complexity: “Now we have his biological identity, but we haven’t…solved the case.” (CeCe Moore, 06:25)

5. Ethics, Consent, and Privacy in Consumer DNA Databases

• Moore emphasizes most people are supportive of using their DNA for criminal investigations:
  • "We found that 91% of people…were supportive of using genetic genealogy to find both violent criminals and… Jane and John Doe cases.” (CeCe Moore, 07:31)
  • The voices against are loudest, but not the majority.
• Practical point: In the US, police can take surreptitious DNA from discarded items; in Australia, this is illegal (09:38–09:46).

6. Exoneration as a Key Benefit

• Genetic genealogy is not only about catching perpetrators but exonerating innocent people:
  • “For every one of those, we have exonerated billions of people…cut down on the number of wrongful incarcerations.” (CeCe Moore, 08:17)
  • Prevents innocent people from being suspected, formally or informally.

7. The Value of Preserving Evidence for Decades

• CeCe commends early detectives for preserving crime scene evidence “back to the 60s”:
  • “DNA wasn’t even a thing in law enforcement until the 90s…they were so methodical, they held onto material… It was stored for decades until technology advanced enough…” (CeCe Moore, 10:33–10:51)

8. The Yogurt Shop Murders and the Hunt for a Serial Killer

• The intricate story of Robert Brashears, a serial killer identified by Moore’s methods:
  • Faked his own death (two obituaries, twenty years apart).
  • Operated in multiple jurisdictions with changing MOs (strangulation, shootings, arson, multiple victims).
  • “I was screaming from the rooftop saying, pay attention to this guy. I know he has more victims…” (CeCe Moore, 12:55)
• Ballistics and genetic genealogy combined in solving the case after decades (11:41–14:51).

9. The Human Cost for Genealogists

• “I’m usually able to set it aside…but I’ve never been able to shake him [Brashears]. He has stayed with me since 2018…” (CeCe Moore, 14:35)
• Moore’s work impacts her personally, despite her having to compartmentalize for her job.

10. Moore’s Australian Connection

• “My great grandfather was from Australia…hello to my Australian cousins out there…” (CeCe Moore, 15:09)
• Expresses desire to visit and affinity for Australia.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "It’s the beginning of the investigation, oftentimes for law enforcement, instead of the end."
  — CeCe Moore, on how genetic genealogy fits into police work (00:50)

• "To give someone back their name, their family and their identity is huge."
  — Meshel Laurie, reflecting on the impact of identifying unknown victims (04:46)

• "For every one…we have exonerated billions of people…It’s actually really important because we can help cut down the number of wrongful incarcerations."
  — CeCe Moore, on the exoneration power of genetic genealogy (08:17)

• "How could these crime scene investigators…have realized how important the evidence…the physical evidence they collected was? And then it was stored for decades until technology advanced enough that it became useful."
  — CeCe Moore, on the enduring value of properly preserved evidence (10:51)

• "I was screaming from the rooftop saying, pay attention to this guy. I know he has more victims out there…But now they are."
  — CeCe Moore, on serial killer Robert Brashears finally being recognized as a major suspect (12:55)

• "I’m usually able to set it aside…but I’ve never been able to shake him. He has stayed with me…"
  — CeCe Moore, on the human cost of this work (14:35)

• "My great grandfather was from Australia…so I have cousins there, mostly third cousins, but hello to my Australian cousins out there."
  — CeCe Moore, sharing her Australian heritage (15:09)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:50: Moore explains the foundational role of genealogy in investigations.
• 02:22–03:40: Step-by-step breakdown of “reverse engineering” identities using distant DNA matches.
• 05:28: Case study: Australia’s Puna Dam John Doe.
• 07:31: Public attitudes toward forensic genealogy and privacy.
• 08:17: Discussion on exoneration and protection of innocents.
• 09:46: Differences between US and Australian law regarding DNA collection.
• 10:33: Praise for detectives preserving physical evidence.
• 11:41–14:51: In-depth look at the Yogurt Shop Murders case and the challenge of tracking a serial killer.
• 15:09: Moore’s personal Australian connection and greetings.

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Summary

This episode offers a captivating behind-the-scenes look at the personal, ethical, and scientific realities of modern forensic genealogy. Through Moore’s accounts of lost identities restored and cold cases cracked, listeners receive both a masterclass in investigative technique and a meditation on the enduring search for truth and closure.

Transcript

[A]

This is Australian True Crime International with Michelle Laurie. Cece Moore is one of the world's leading genetic genealogists, using DNA and family tree analysis to solve cases that once seemed impossible. She joins us to discuss her work on the infamous yoghurt shop murders, the identification of Australia's Poona Dam John Doe, and how advances in forensic genealogy are transforming criminal investigations all around the world. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung People of the Kulin Nation and a warning. This episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.

[B]

What we do is really just a hint, a tip, a lead generator. It's a highly scientific one, but. But it's the beginning of the investigation, oftentimes for law enforcement instead of the end. Nobody is arrested or charged with a crime based on genetic genealogy. We just point them in a direction that the DNA seems to be telling us to go. And then they have to do their full investigation, same as if I call the name into crimestoppers. They have to do that deep dive, do the work that they would do on any other person of interest. And then most importantly, they have to collect DNA directly from that individual and compare it against the court admissible genetic evidence, which is not the genetic genealogy. It's a very different type of DNA profile that law enforcement has used for decades. And that is what's used to charge someone, arrest someone and eventually convict someone of a crime.

[A]

And you do so much research around what you're finding on the family trees and things.

[B]

Right.

[A]

One of my favorite things is to see a documentary. You pop up and then we. Because they use the graphics department to show us the family trees. They show us where you found this third cousin and that fourth cousin. And then you build the trees up to the top and then you build them back down again. It's just one of my favourite things in the world. Now, I don't have the budget for that. I don't have a graphics department. So I need you to explain how you do what you do.

[B]

Well, what we're doing is reverse engineering an unknown person from their DNA. So whether that DNA is left behind, find at a crime scene, a violent crime, we work with homicides and rapes, or if it's a person who dies without their identification, a Jane or John Doe or unidentified human remains is the more formal term. And so it doesn't really matter which it is because it's the exact same process it is taking that DNA, creating what we call the SNP profile that has hundreds of thousands of genetic markers across the genome, usually about 700,000. And then that is uploaded to the genetic genealogy databases that we're allowed to use on these types of cases, and we get a list of people who share significant amounts of DNA with that unknown person. Now, typically, because we're limited to the smallest databases, we are getting very distant cousins, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth cousins and beyond. We are not very often working with close relatives. So that means that each of those individuals who shares DNA with the unknown suspect might share only 1% of their DNA. And from 1%, we can predict that they likely share great great grandparents. So we know how far back we need to build that person's tree to find the common ancestors with the suspect. But we all have multiple great great grandparents, right? Eight sets. So which one? Well, then we build the trees of other people who share DNA with that suspect, and we're looking for patterns and overlaps and eventually common ancestors. Then we have one piece, unknown suspects or unknown Jane Doe's family tree. And we know it's gotta fit somewhere, but we don't know where. Then if we take another cluster of matches and identify a second set of common ancestors, now we've got two pieces of that person's family tree, and we can then start moving forward. And instead of building backward in time, we're basically flipping it upside down doing descendancy research, or what I call reverse genealogy, because we know that individual that we're trying to identify has to be among the descendants of those individuals. So we're looking for that triangulation. Where does a descendant of couple number one and a descendant of couple number two have children?

[A]

Unidentified remains stories here in Australia. And, you know, I mean, I. I find them so sad. I think everybody does. And I know that the people here at the mori, at the Institute of Forensic Medicine never give up on these remains. They keep them there with them, and they never stop trying to figure out who these people are and how this happened and find a name and all of those things so that they can also be buried and things like that. You know, it must be a very moving. I can't imagine what it is like to find to solve those mysteries. I mean, it's cool to solve crimes, but to give someone back their name, their family and their identity is huge.

[B]

So I actually worked on the very first case that Australia was using investigative genetic genealogy behind the scenes to try to identify a John Doe. I think it's Puna Dam John Doe or Puna Lake John Doe. And we, I worked with, I brought on Louise Coakley, who's an amazing Australian genetic genealogist that I had known and worked with over the years. Of course she knows Australian records better than I do, but we were finally able to identify his biological family. We know exactly who his parents are and who his full siblings are. But guess what? There's no known person in that family who is missing. Which means his parents gave up a child for adoption, probably before they were married, but it's a full sibling to their children.

[A]

And that happened a bit as well. Like people find out that my parents actually did get married, but they gave me up when they were 16 or something.

[B]

So now we have his biological identity, but we haven't actually solved the case because we don't have the identity that he lived. We don't know who his family was that is missing him, we don't know who his loved ones were in his life. And so we've never been able to close that case and say, this is solved.

[A]

God, that's again, heartbreaking. It's so heartbreaking.

[B]

So there are over 54 million people who have taken direct to consumer DNA tests. Now the biggest database is Ancestry DNA and then 23andMe and then MyHeritage is a very close third.

[A]

Now there's a lot of people who criticize the idea of uploading our genetic footprint, fingerprint, whatever it's called, our code. Why is that? Why? Because I'm one of those people. I think about it very simply and I think, well, I'm not gonna murder anyone. And so I don't care if my code is uploaded. And also if someone I'm related to did murder someone, then I'd be happy to help find them.

[B]

And I think the majority of people agree with you. I hear a lot of naysayers and a lot of very loud negative voices. But I was involved in a long term study with Baylor University here over five years, and we talked to people across different socioeconomic strata, different ethnic backgrounds. And we found that 91% of people across the board were supportive of using genetic genealogy to find both violent criminals and even a little higher percent for Jane and John Doe cases. And so we don't hear those voices as much. We hear the negative voices much more loudly. But it turns out that we have broad support from the public.

[A]

It feels like it's more likely to

[B]

exonerate people, which is why it's so important. I'm so glad you bring it up because we're usually focused on putting someone behind bars, finding the guilty. But for every one of those, we have exonerated billions of people. And that might sound silly, but it's actually really important because we can help cut down the number of wrongful incarcerations, and we can eliminate the vast majority of people from ever being wrongly suspected of a violent crime. So if we had been able to use genetic genealogy back 20, 30 years ago, when some of these cases were being investigated, we could have kept those wrong turns by law enforcement from ever happening. And I've been contacted by a lot of people who were just informally suspected, never charged with the crime, but they carried that burden for years or decades where their community or their family suspected them. And so we're exonerating, both formally and informally, many, many people with each of these cases that we hope to find the truly responsible person. And then one other point is, if law enforcement wants your DNA in the United States, they will get it, because you leave DNA everywhere you go. You leave hair, you leave skin cells, you leave saliva on a napkin or on a straw at a restaurant.

[A]

Also in the States, it's legal for law enforcement to get DNA samples from used cups and things like that. And in Australia, that's not legal.

[B]

So, yeah, so they do that in almost every case of mine. Right. If I give them a report and I say, I think this is your DNA contributor, they have to confirm that. And the only way they can confirm it is to go get DNA from that person. And typically, they don't want to approach that person and let them know that they're under suspicion. And when they have done that, I've seen a number of suicides, so there's good reason to try to get that DNA surreptitiously and then arrest that person, you know, before they get the chance to do something drastic, go hurt someone else or themselves. So there's, you know, it's actually really unfortunate for law enforcement that they can't do it in Australia, because it is the way that we most often are able to confirm or refute the theories that are developed through genetic genealogy.

[A]

And I love the cold cases. We all do. But the stories where detectives held onto material that at the time, they could really have had no way of knowing how valuable it would be. But they were so methodical, they were so good at their jobs, that they held onto material that has ended up being so useful in. In solving cases.

[B]

That's exactly right. And it's something I talk about a lot because we're solving cases back to the 60s. So DNA wasn't Even a thing in law enforcement until the 90s. And so how could these crime scene investigators and detectives to have realized how important the evidence, the physical evidence they collected was? And then it was stored for decades until technology advanced enough that it became useful. So it's just incredible to me when I work a case from before I was even born, and somehow those crime scene investigators understood that they needed to collect these things, and then they were preserved by these law enforcement officials for years, decades. I mean, it's just incredible that then we can finally use that to identify the suspect.

[A]

I was watching one story about you where you were hunting a serial killer, and you were going back through the family trees, and then you were researching the people in the family trees. And this guy had faked. Seems like had faked his own death at some point.

[B]

He had, like, I was just gonna

[A]

mention two or three obituaries.

[B]

Read my mind. Yes. I thought of him immediately when you were saying that, because he was perpetrating violent crimes in different jurisdictions. And it used to be so much easier to get away with crimes if you did that, if you jumped around. You know, they didn't have the kind of communication system that they have now where they could work across state lines and different jurisdictions and identify these patterns. So, yes, hit Robert Brashears, who was recently tied to a very high profile, unsolved case, the Yogurt Shop Murders. I had identified him back in 2018 as a serial killer on other cases, the Sharers and also Genevieve Zatricky. And the Yogurt Shop Murders was a case I had actually been brought into to advise on. And I had talked to the family, but they did not have enough DNA to perform investigative genetic genealogy, and they really started breaking it open by a ballistics match. The new detective, Dan Jackson, who had been brought on the case just a few years ago, decided to start from scratch and go through everything. And he resubmitted the ballistics to the national database and got a match. And that is what then finally started cracking the case open. And it came back around to matching the DNA profile that I had identified back in 2018. And that was someone that I was absolutely convinced had more unsolved cases out there. And I was screaming from the rooftop saying, pay attention to this guy. I know he has more victims out there. But nobody was really listening to me much. But now they are.

[A]

He was so difficult to track in using traditional ideas and traditional techniques because he had different MOs. There was a strangulation murder of one woman. There was a woman and her 12 year old daughter murdered, shot, I believe. And then. And as you say in different jurisdictions, and then the yogurt shop murder is four teenagers murdered after work in the. In the yogurt shop and then the shop set on fire. So these two different guns that time

[B]

were totally educated about this.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And you're right, he did fake his death. So he's the only person still in the tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of obituaries I've looked at where someone had two different obituaries 20 years apart. My small team and I have helped law enforcement with over 375 cases now where we've been able to help them identify the DNA. And that means hundreds of violent criminals. And I'm usually able to set it aside and go to the next case because I have to. Right. I have to be able to compartmentalize. But I've never been able to shake him. He has stayed with me since 2018, since I first found him, and I just knew there was more to his story. And so having the Orchid Shot murders end up being tied to him, that he's responsible for it did not surprise me at all. It only surprised me that it was a case I was already kind of peripherally involved in.

[A]

Please keep us updated. It's been such a privilege talking to you, Cece. I just love it when you pop up on a doco. I'm like, rubbing my hands together. Fantastic. You're such a fabulous new addition to the true crime documentary world.

[B]

Well, I love doing Australian shows.

[A]

Great.

[B]

My great grandfather was from Australia. Really, So I have cousins there, mostly third cousins, but hello to my Australian cousins out there. I definitely have a connection and an affinity to Australia. I still haven't visited and I hope one day to make it out there. So I love talking to your audience and I appreciate the opportunity to do so.

[A]

If you need support after listening to this podcast, you can call Lifeline on 131114 or contact 1-800-Respect on 1-800-737-732 or 1-800-Respect. Org au Indigenous Australians can contact 13 Yarn on 139276 or 13 yarn.org au. The producers of this podcast, Caste, recognise the traditional owners of the land on which it's recorded. They pay respect to the Aboriginal elders past, present and those emerging.