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- [00:04]
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.
- [00:50]
B
You want to be able to explain the science and the techniques to the public in a way they can understand. But if you don't dumb it down too much, it becomes inaccurate. So that's true anytime you're talking about these types of cases, it's the science. You have to have caveats in there and likelys and theories, we believe. But then also when I'm discussing cases, I have to always inject those caveats. I have done probably 60 interviews about the Nancy Guthrie case and I'm often asked to speculate about what law enforcement should or shouldn't have done. And I'm not there, I'm not there on that crime scene. I'm not part of the investigation. So you have to be so careful when you are second guessing the people that are actually insiders in the investigation. So I never want to come across as like, I know more than they do or in criticizing what they've done, because when I'm involved on the inside and in an investigation and I see what the public is saying and what the experts are saying, it can be very frustrating. So that's been very informative about how to present myself when I'm the one talking about a case that I don't have inside information on.
- [02:03]
A
I know, we have to be so careful, don't we, not to be overly critical and assume the worst, because, yeah, we have so many great examples of. Oh, actually it turns out the police were doing lots of work in between. We have a doctor here in Melbourne, where I live, Dr. Dadner, and she is the DNA whisperer, the DNA specialist, and she works on Australian cases, international cases, lots of things, but she always says to me, look, DNA is not the end of the story. When the police realise they've got DNA, people tend to think, oh, well, case closed. But we're always gonna need a human being to interpret the DNA and take it to the next step, which is part of what you do, right?
- [02:44]
B
Absolutely, yes. And the DNA just points them in the right direction. It doesn't close the case. And that's especially true with investigative genetic genealogy, because what we do is really just a hint, a tip, a lead generator. It's a highly scientific one, 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 Crime Stoppers. 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.
- [03:49]
A
And you do so much research around what you're finding on the family trees and things.
- [03:53]
B
Right.
- [03:54]
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 favorite 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.
- [04:25]
B
Well, what we're doing is reverse engineering an unknown person from their DNA so whether that DNA is left behind kind 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 using 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 we. 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. So once we identify a common ancestors between some of the people who share DNA with our unknown person, because of course, we know their family trees, we know their identities, we can build those trees, then we have one piece of our unknown suspects or unknown Jane does family tree, and we know it's got to 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, Usually marry, hopefully marriage, because that's easiest to find in the records, but not always. And that really narrows it down for us because now we've eliminated the vast majority of the population as being that DNA contributor. Right, because they have to fit in this family tree. And we all have unique family trees except for our full siblings. So if we have enough data, we can piece back together that unknown individual's tree, branch by branch by branch, and finally zero in on just one immediate family. And then we know if all of those trees and cousins come together through a couple's marriage, it's got to be one of their children. So if we know we're working with a male's DNA and they only have one son, then we're basically done with our genetic genealogy research. If they have 2, 3, 4. Well, then there's other things that are going to be looked at by law enforcement. They're going to look at, you know, age, location.
- [07:59]
A
You do a lot of that too, though?
- [08:01]
B
Yeah, I do, and it's not necessarily my job, but I can't stop at that point. I want to dig in So I will present law enforcement a report that has everything that I could find. And often I will have developed a hypothesis about which brother, sister I think it is. If it's a missing person, it's much easier because they stop generating new records, public records, at a certain point. Right. If it is a suspect, it's more invisible. So I might have a theory about which one it is over the others. But really law enforcement has to do that deep dive and figure that out.
- [08:37]
A
Yeah, we have a number of unidentified remains stories here in Australia. And, you know, I mean, I find them so sad. I think everybody does. And I know that the people here at the mortuary, 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.
- [09:22]
B
It's so similar to what I was doing before I worked with law enforcement where I was helping adoptees and foundlings, people who'd been abandoned as newborns or young children, find their biological families. So it's, it's very, very similar, except it's in death instead of life. So it's more sad. But we also had a lot of sad stories with adoptees finding their birth parents right after they passed away or, you know, missing that chance to get those answers. But it's the same thing about families. Families have always primary in my work and what I care about the most, whether that was identifying long dead ancestors or helping people find their biological heritage, or now helping to return people to their family and to give them some answers about their missing loved ones.
- [10:09]
A
Your story reminds me of my story in a lot of ways in that this podcast was a passion, a hobby, but I just loved it and it's become my life's work. It's become the most successful thing I've ever done.
- [10:20]
B
And that's fantastic.
- [10:22]
A
Yeah, similarly for you, you know, this was a hobby. Was a hobby, a passion.
- [10:26]
B
Yeah, well, it was a hobby for everybody. So there was no such thing as a. A professional genetic genealogist back before 2012, when I became the first professional full time genetic genealogist when Dr. Henry Lewis Gates Jr. Offered me a job working on the PBS television series Finding your Roots with Henry Lewis Gates Jr. Which is a Emmy, Emmy nominated show here in the United States. I don't know if you guys are able to watch it online, but it is a show where we take high profile people, build their family trees and introduce them to their ancestors and the stories of their ancestors. That's the important part.
- [11:07]
A
Oh, we have the British version here. The who do you think you are? So it's, I think the same sort of concept.
- [11:13]
B
Yeah, similar, except we don't travel with them.
- [11:16]
A
Because I think there was a moment, wasn't there, an explosion of genealogy with websites with ancestry.com and websites like that where we all. I did mine. I'm sure it's wildly inaccurate. Past my great grandparents, you know, because then we start just clicking leaves and all sorts of things and just accepting things.
- [11:35]
B
That's the good and the bad about AI.
- [11:36]
A
Right.
- [11:37]
B
So Ancestry.com developed this amazing algorithm which is basically AI that surfaces information they think might be related to your family. And you have to be very careful and look at it with a critical eye to determine whether that hint is correct or not. But it's enabled us to build very, you know, full family trees much, much more quickly than was ever possible before. But it also means that a lot of people copy mistakes into their tree.
- [12:05]
A
Absolutely. And I feel like I'm going cross eyed looking at it after, you know, a while. I don't have the mind for it that you have the methodical brain for it.
- [12:13]
B
Well, the passion for it, as you mentioned earlier.
- [12:16]
A
Yeah. But tell us about when I was doing it now. I sort of gave up on it and thought, okay, I get it. But when I was doing it, this was before the DNA component. This was before you could send away and get a kit to come to your house, send a swab back to the lab. How has that changed everything? This is what you do.
- [12:36]
B
Yeah. So you used to just be following the paper trail and sometimes the paper trail runs out and sometimes the paper trail lies. So a lot of people have discovered that their family tree, even if it was well researched, is not reflective of their true genetic heritage. It's been a big shock to millions of people. Millions of people have found family members they weren't aware of even if their own family tree is correct. You know, their great grandparents are all exactly who they are on paper, but suddenly they have a half sibling they didn't know, or an aunt or uncle or some other close relative that was placed for adoption or who had an unknown father or misattributed paternity. It's called, where you're raised with one man and you believe that's your father, but it turns out it's not your genetic father, your biological father also.
- [13:25]
A
Just going back to something. Going back to something you spoke about a minute ago. I don't know if this is an American phenomenon as well, but in Australia, my parents generation, so my parents were Both born in 1950, there were a lot of secret adoptions. There were a lot of people who came back in our family, in my mother's friends families, where suddenly people found out that they had a brother or sister, that their mum had given up before they were born and then she'd gone. So is, is that common as well?
- [13:56]
B
Oh, there are millions and millions of adoptees in the United States as well, who the older generations, quite a few of them never knew they were adopted. So we call that late discovery adoptee. It happens enough. We have a short term LDA for those individuals. And so a lot of people have found out just exclusively through their DNA tests that they don't match any of their cousins, any of their close family. You can imagine how shocking that can be. But it can also open up some pretty wonderful things we've seen. You know, so people go through a pretty difficult emotional time when they first make a discovery like that. But then we've seen people's lives really be enhanced by that knowledge. And I believe, you know, truth is power. Right. So usually they'll end up saying to me the vast majority of the time that they had unanswered identity questions their whole life and felt like maybe something was missing or didn't quite connect, and that finally answered that for them, finally put that to rest. And so even people who weren't actively thinking that consciously then will say, you know, it was always kind of in the background. I always sort of felt like the odd man out or the black sheep. And then this tells me there's a reason for that. There's a reason that they didn't feel maybe that they fit in that family as well as they might have expected if they were biologically related.
- [15:21]
A
Yeah. Even though everyone tried very hard to make the.
- [15:24]
B
Oh yeah. And a lot of them had great adoption stories and great parents. It doesn't mean anything like a rejection of their adoptive family or a rejection
- [15:33]
A
of their biological family. I think we've come to realise how many young women were coerced into giving up their babies. And so there's no bad guys in this story.
- [15:41]
B
You know, this actually brings up something related to Australia. So I would love to tell you real quickly, 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.
- [16:35]
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. Stain or something.
- [16:44]
B
Yeah. And we don't know if it was before their marriage, but we can guess that it likely was because nobody seems to know who this person is when they were born or anything. 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. The family lived in New Zealand actually. So there was a lot of conversations with New Zealand law enforcement back and forth, but just haven't been able to give him his lived identity back.
- [17:26]
A
God, that's again, heartbreaking. It's so heartbreaking. There's a lot of people who criticize the idea of uploading our genetic footprint, fingerprint, whatever it's called, 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 going to 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.
- [17:55]
B
Yeah.
- [17:55]
A
Find them.
- [17:56]
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, you know, 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, and that was true at the beginning of the five years and the end of the five years. We didn't see any change in the percentage of support. And that even included people from lower socioeconomic statuses who had relatives in jail. And that was an important thing for us to include in that is people who had had negative experiences with law enforcement and had relatives that were or had been incarcerated and they were still supportive.
- [19:05]
A
Yeah. Because what is the fear is the fear that it. It could be misused by law enforcement. Yeah.
- [19:09]
B
And I think that's understandable, especially for some population groups who have historically had more bias against them. Totally get why they might feel uncomfortable working with law enforcement in that way. By providing their DNA, it feels like
- [19:25]
A
it's more likely to exonerate people, which
- [19:28]
B
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 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. Victoria, you know, truly responsible person. I was involved in the very first exoneration. That was thanks to investigative genetic genealogy here in Idaho Falls, where Christopher Tapp had been convicted of the murder and rape of Angie Dodge, and He had spent 20 years in prison. And I was able to help law enforcement find the real killer rapist, and it led to his formal exoneration. So that was like the best of the best. Right. It's one thing to help catch these guys, get them behind bars, but it's also incredible to be able to help clear someone's name fully. And there's just nothing that can compete with that. I think it's definitely the highlight of my career when we're able to do that.
- [21:11]
A
And what a career, what a way to make a living. To be able to do things like that. That is phenomenal. That's like, take the rest of the day off, CeCe. You. After you die.
- [21:21]
B
It's pretty wonderful to be able to do that. I couldn't have imagined. I mean, I knew the potential that we had for genetic genealogy really early, which is why I jumped in with both feet and did it for free for so many years. Dropped everything else in my life. But still, it's impossible to imagine where we would be today. You know, it's just. It's been an incredible ride, and it's been so wonderful to be able to help so many people to get answers, whether that was about their genetic heritage, their biological family, or whether that was about helping to resolve a cold case or to bring a Jane or John Doe back to their family. Although it's, you know, always tragic. That's the. That's the difference between working with law enforcement versus working with an adoptee is these are always tragic situations. I can't undo the harm that's been done. I can't bring them back to before it happened. But I do think that we are saving lives. We'll never know because those people didn't get victimized. Like Brian Coburger is the easiest example.
- [22:27]
A
Right.
- [22:27]
B
Would he have gone on to hurt more people? My opinion is yes. And so those people will never be victimized because genetic genealogy was able to relatively quickly identify him and get him behind bars.
- [22:39]
A
In the case of Christopher Tapp, though, there were two victims, and you managed to help one of them. Who was Christopher tapped. You managed to assist him in being
- [22:46]
B
released from prison, and unfortunately, he's now been murdered. I don't know if you're aware, but yeah, he finally got his settlement from Idaho State, which he well deserved. After 20 years of wrongful incarceration, he got millions of dollars. He only got to enjoy it for a year, and then he was murdered himself. So totally tried. And he was a wonderful person. That was really the best part of being able to help him, is he was such a good person. And even though he'd been in prison for 20 years, he didn't let it turn him into a terrible person. You know, I really cared about him. So for it to end the way it did, it's just tragedy upon tragedy.
- [23:28]
A
Yeah. And you do work in a world of tragedy, even, as you said, sometimes when you're working with an Adoptee, it's tragic because they find out that their parents have passed away already or.
- [23:39]
B
Yeah, and sometimes we find them right after they've died. And I even worked a case where we found birth mom three weeks after she died. And her obituary actually said she was searching for her biological child that she had placed for adoption. So they just missed each other. It's. That's why it always feels like a race against time, whether you're working with an adoptee or working on one of these law enforcement type cases, because people are dying all the time. And if you're trying to identify a violent criminal, of course they could hurt someone in that time it takes to identify them.
- [24:12]
A
In my family, it was dementia. By the time this person popped up and said, you know, that they had been adopted, no one else in the family knew they existed. Their birth mother was terribly afflicted with dementia. So that was heartbreaking for everybody.
- [24:26]
B
Yeah, I actually had that too with Taya Leone, who, I don't know if you know. So she came to us at Finding Roots to help identify her mother's biological family. She'd been adopted in Texas in the 1940s and they had hired lots of people to try to identify her biological family without success. So they turned to us and Taya said, I'll be on the show if you can find her birth parents. And I was able to find her birth mother still alive at 89 years old. But unfortunately it was a similar situation to yours where we don't know how much she understood when they were able to meet and reunite. I think we believe, and would like to believe that she understood that this was the child she gave away for adoption. But, you know, it was unclear
- [25:15]
A
how many people have uploaded their DNA to these sites, how, what are the numbers Like, I feel, and I have no data to back this up, but I feel like Americans are more into it maybe than Australians.
- [25:25]
B
That is true, but Australia is definitely among the top countries that are represented in these databases. So the of the major DNA testing companies, consumer DNA testing companies, they are all in the United states except for MyHeritage, which is in Israel. So it's mostly a US based industry. So it makes sense that we would be testing more, but also because we're a melting pot. And that is why it also is attractive to Canadians and Australians. Right, because you are also melting pot. And so if someone has lived in, if their ancestors have lived in the same 10 mile square region for, you know, generations, they don't have as many questions. But for those of us whose ancestors moved across the world and went to the US or went to Canada or went to Australia. You know, we have a lot more questions about our background. So that is why we are seeing the most people from those areas testing. So there are over 54 million people who have taken direct care consumer DNA tests. Now the biggest database is Ancestry DNA, and then 23andMe, and then MyHeritage is a very close third. Now, 23andMe had some problems and a couple million people pulled their DNA out of that database. Whereas myheritage was kind of late in the game, didn't start their DNA testing program until a few years later. But they've really caught up quickly. So they're I think around 10 million now, whereas 23andMe is about 12 million now. And so those are the three biggest databases. And that's where people can take a test and immediately learn about their family tree. Whether that means they're confirming their family tree they already know, or they are refuting what their paper trail says, or they're meeting new family members they weren't aware of. Those are the databases we typically see that in.
- [27:23]
A
Because the databases put us together, don't they? We might get a message from someone saying, hey, we match. We're related.
- [27:30]
B
Right. So if you are in any of those databases, you're compared against everyone else in that database. They don't share with each other. So if you are in ancestry and you have a half sibling you don't know about in 23andMe, you're not going to find each other unless you put your DNA in the same database. So for people that are donor conceived that are looking for all their half siblings, we always say, definitely put your DNA in every database if you want to find all of them. Because some of them might be testing at MyHeritage, while some are testing at 23andMe and so on. Unfortunately, costs have come way down because when I started it would have been a very expensive thing to test at all those companies, which was one of the reasons that two friends of mine started the GEDmatch database.
- [28:14]
A
Yeah, I thought GEDmatch kind of was an aggregate of all of them.
- [28:18]
B
It is if people choose to download their raw data and upload it there. So only about 2 million people have done that out of the 54 million. And we are barred when we're working with law enforcement from using the three biggest databases. And we are unfortunately limited to just GEDmatch Family Tree DNA and the new DNA Justice Nonprofit Database that I helped found and those are only about 2 million people between them. And so it makes our cases much more difficult. It takes longer to get violent criminals off the streets. It takes longer to identify Jane and John does to let their families know what happened to them. So that's unfortunate. But what that means is people can take tests at those big companies without law enforcement comparing against their data. At least as of now, there have not been any successful challenges to that yet. Now, that's not to say that law enforcement might not eventually serve one or more of those companies with a subpoena or warrant and be successful, but it hasn't happened yet. So there's a big misconception out there that we're using those databases. And people write to me and say, I wanted to help you solve cases. So I tested at Ancestry, and I have to write back and say, I can't access that. If you want to help, you've got to download your data and upload it to either GEDmatch, DNA justice or Family Tree DNA and opt in to law enforcement matching.
- [29:44]
A
Yeah, I absolutely thought that police were like, making profiles on these sites and uploading the DNA of unknown offenders.
- [29:52]
B
They don't accept uploads.
- [29:53]
A
So. Right.
- [29:54]
B
Ancestry and 23andMe, you have to spit in the tube and mail it in. They don't take outside data. MyHeritage is the exception. They used to take uploads from other companies, and that's why they grew so fast, because they took them for free. But once it came out in the Brian Kohberger case that the FBI had surreptitiously uploaded to MyHeritage and compared against their database, they shut down that ability to upload. So they have really inexpensive kits now. I think, like $29, you can test and be in their database. That's now the only way you can get in their database. So because they had allowed those uploads, they were vulnerable to law enforcement sneaking DNA in there, which so far the courts have ruled is not a problem, that law enforcement is allowed to go where the public is allowed to go. And so it hasn't had a negative impact on any cases, but it might have had a negative impact on public perception of what law enforcement is doing.
- [30:50]
A
Yeah. 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. So.
- [30:58]
B
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. Oh, but you did ask me, why would someone not want to? So I'm going to go back to that.
- [31:49]
A
Yeah, I mean, I don't want you to. I don't want you to sell us on not doing it, but, yeah, I am.
- [31:53]
B
But I want to acknowledge that it's a valid concern for people to care about genetic privacy and people should have the right to have their DNA used the way they choose, which is why we have Opt in, opt out at GEDmatch, for instance, or family tree DNA. So, but I. What I want people to. I want people to make those decisions based on an educated perspective versus misconceptions. So there's a lot of misconceptions out there about law enforcement digging in people's DNA or looking at their medical status, and we're not doing that. All we're doing is looking at how much you share with another person and then building your family tree. And the vast majority of the time, as I said, it's a very distant relative. It's someone you don't know. Occasionally we might get lucky and get a close relative. So it is possible that if you made that choice to put your DNA in GEDmatch and check the box to allow law enforcement to compare against your DNA, it could lead to a close family member. It's highly unlikely, but it's possible. And so it's kind of what you said. If someone in your family is capable of perpetrating that type of violent, usually intimate crime that we're working, I would think that's something you'd want to know because do you want that person having access to your vulnerable family members, your children, grandma, you know, do you want that person sitting around your Christmas dinner table, for instance? I think that's what people really need to ask themselves. But there's a caveat. You could make the choice, the personal choice not to do that, not to provide your DNA, but will very likely find you anyway, or find your close relative anyway, because your cousins have already made that choice for you. We don't need you to identify you or your brother or your child. If we've got your second, third, fourth cousin who has made a different choice, who has decided to help law enforcement, then we're still able to identify you. So the decision's already mostly been made for you. You might think you have control of your DNA, but you don't really, because if your relatives have tested, that's a piece of your DNA, and here's another piece of your DNA and another piece of your DNA. So it's more of a collective decision that society has made by millions of people buying into this idea of direct consumer DNA testing, and then in the context also of helping law enforcement. So if you've placed a child for adoption or one of your close family members are, you are going to be found, because there are 54 million people who've made that decision to put their DNA in the database. So it is going to lead to you eventually. But if you are a violent criminal, it's probably going to take us longer because we are limited to those smaller databases. But we will again find you. It's just a matter of time. And so Pandora is already out of the box. We built this incredibly powerful tool for human identification over the last 15, 16 years, and by the time anyone realized how powerful it was outside of our very small group of early adopters, it was already too late to put Pandora back in that box. 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. And so I'm always telling people that, like, your DNA is just not that special. We can get it through your relatives, or law enforcement can get it from you directly just by following you around throughout your life, that you're going to leave DNA behind.
- [35:38]
A
I was watching Nancy Grace's show on YouTube a few weeks ago, and she was saying that now they don't even need the root of a hair.
- [35:45]
B
Yeah. In fact, that's one of the biggest advancements we've seen in the last few years. The brilliant Dr. Ed Green from UC Santa Cruz found a way to extract useful DNA from rootless hair. So we'd always been told it was impossible. You would never get useful DNA from rootless hair. But never say never, as we've been doing in genetic genealogy. And now with forensic genetic genealogy, it's been disproven. He was able to extract a genome SNP profile, which is what we need for genetic genealogy. And I've been able to help solve six cases now where all they had was just a little piece of rootless hair. And there are dozens of other cases that are also working their way through the genetic genealogy research process. And many people are being arrested and going to be arrested and identified when it was not possible just a few years ago. And that is because of the innovation of Dr. Ed Green and his company, Estrella Forensics. It's just, it's incredible what we're able to do. It opens up thousands of more cases that did not have forensic evidence to analyze that now will be able to be solved.
- [37:00]
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 job, that they held onto material that has ended up being so useful in solving cases.
- [37:19]
B
You ask the best questions and make the best observations. 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.
- [38:12]
A
I mean, I always joke about how in the old days in Australia, if you. The heat was on you in Melbourne or Sydney, you could run away to Perth, which is another city in Australia. But people, it was that easy to run away, to go underground. You just change your name. There was no, no one wanted id. It was all of those things. And that's just in the 60s, the 70s, you know, and how things have changed. And 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 he had, like I
- [38:47]
B
was just gonna mention two or three obituaries. 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 Zatricki. 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. But crazy enough comes around full circle, and it ties back to Robert Brashears, who I had identified in 2018. So I laid the foundation for them to know who the killer was, but they had to do a bunch of work to get there and 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 rooftops 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.
- [40:42]
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.
- [41:04]
B
So there two different guns that time educated about this.
- [41:09]
A
Yes.
- [41:09]
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. So he was clearly Hiding from something in 1980 when he published that first obituary. And then he lived another 19 years.
- [41:28]
A
If he was in my family tree, I never would have bothered to look any further than that, Cece. I would have seen the first obituary and gone tick and just moved on.
- [41:37]
B
It was crazy. Yeah. Well, the thing that really clued me in was his mother's obituary was just two days apart from his. So I wanted to look closer because that's sort of odd what's going on there. Sometimes that means there's an accident or, you know, something that affected multiple family members. But then his trail continued. A year later, he was in the newspaper as his brother' best man. So whatever he'd been running from in New Orleans in 1980 must have been resolved or he wasn't worried about it anymore by 1981. And so it was sort of a short lived thing where he published his obituary in New Orleans in 1980, but then must have not been worried anymore a year or two later. And so I could see his trail continued. But it was just the oddest thing. I just have, to this day not seen anything quite like that.
- [42:24]
A
No. And you really build a. A character, don't you? You really. All of these things come together and you think, what it. What a guy, what is.
- [42:33]
B
That's why he stayed with me so much. You know, 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 shop 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 and had wanted so badly to help those girls families solve that case and had talked directly to family members. But I wasn't surprised that he was capable of that. And I wasn't surprised that there were multiple cases out there because the Kentucky case that had the ballistics match was another unsolved case he was responsible for. And that woman was, I think, 42 years old. So here he's victimizing young girls, but then he murders a 42 year old woman and rapes her and then Genevieve Zatricky in South Carolina, she was in her 20s. So he was just kind of all over the place, like you said. Totally different MO There was strangulation, there was shooting. There was different types of guns used, though. And so it, you know, different ages, different locations. And I had, yeah, I'd been trying to find him tied to cold cases where I knew he'd been, but I didn't know he'd been in Texas. He was just passing through. If I'd known that, I would have realized, you know, years earlier that he could be responsible for that case. We could have solved it back in 2018 or 2019.
- [44:23]
A
And how difficult for local law enforcement in Texas, by the way, to be tracking a person who doesn't live there, doesn't spend any time, they just happen to blow through town and commit this
- [44:33]
B
outrageous crime so much harder. And that's why the cases that are perpetrated by long haul truckers are so difficult. It's similar where 99% of my cases, when I work the genetic genealogy, it takes me to within a few miles of the crime scene. But then there's that 1% or so, like Robert Brasher's and like those long haul trucker cases where there is no location connection. Now, if I had known he was stopped at the Texas border two days after the yogurt shop murders, I would have known. But that was not something that came up when I was working with the three agencies on the cases in 2018. I wish it had. If they had told me about that stop, I would have immediately recognized the date and the location because I was so familiar with the yogurt shop murders. But they didn't find that one. It wasn't found until later in what's called an offline search. So they had to dig more deeply to find that. And then it was actually Austin PD and Detective Dan Jackson who had found that. Later, after they tied him to their yogurt shot case, after they started looking at him, saying, wait a minute, we've got a, you know, we've got these connections to him. And then they realized there he was in Texas, trying to get out of Texas, apparently just two days after the crime. So it all kind of came full circle then.
- [45:56]
A
And Brash, as you have confirmed, is dead. He did die in 1999. So how does that feel? And how does that. You know, we've talked about trying to find someone's biological parents and finding out that they've already passed, but when you've put so much, you've put so much time and energy, but the families have put decades of hope into some kind of resolution and then they find out that the person's dead.
- [46:19]
B
It's kind of a double edged sword, so to speak, in that I'm glad he's been gone so long. So he couldn't have hurt anyone else since 1999 because he would have. Oh, absolutely. This was, he's like a Ted Bundy level serial killer type. Like he was not going to stop. And I think there's still more unknown victims out there that would be tied to him. We know of eight now, but we've got some other cases. We created this really in depth timeline and have alerted agencies and all of the locations we've been able to tie him to to look in their cold case files. So we have some leads we're following of other cases that are probably ones he's responsible for as well. But as far as him being dead, yeah, it's really sad for the family to not get that justice, that final piece. Like we can bring answers, we can sometimes bring resolution and sometimes we can help bring justice. You don't always get that final step, but it also means the families don't have to go through the trials. So what I have seen in cases where we've identified a perpetrator who's alive, it often really rips open that old wound. It's not something they've ever been able to, you know, set down and walk away from. But it has, you know, time can help to heal some of those wounds. So then when they have to go through the court process again, it's wide open, sore again. It's, it's, it's like it just happened is what I'm told. And so sometimes, you know, it's for the best. So I leave it to the families to decide whether they're happy. That person is long gone and they don't have to go through the trial. Or some families, you know, feel the opposite and they really wanted to have their day in court. So it's, it's not all one way or all the other. I've had families in my cases that felt both ways.
- [48:07]
A
Well, unfortunately, there's no great outcome, is there? There's no outcome.
- [48:11]
B
You can't undo the damage.
- [48:13]
A
No, no.
- [48:13]
B
The trauma is always there. The tragedy is always there. We can't bring back their loved ones. So it's different for different people. And what really blows me away though is when the family members forgive the people that do these things. I don't think I could do that. If someone, you know, did something to my child or my family members. So some of those family members, it's been meaningful for them to be able to face that person and forgive them. I worked a active case, actually the first active case that used genetic genealogy. And it was a vicious rape and beating of an elderly woman in St. George, Utah. And she actually stood up in court, faced her rapist and told him that she forgave him. And that meant a lot to her. So you never know exactly how that particular surviving victim or family member is going to feel about it. And so I'm just really glad she had the opportunity to face him and to do that because that was meaningful for her.
- [49:12]
A
Yeah, it's unbelievable, isn't it? You mentioned the JonBenet case earlier. Do you think it's solvable after all these years? I'm not aware of what evidence they have. I don't know what DNA they have. I don't know a lot about the case.
- [49:27]
B
Believe it or not, I have been given some information. I was provided with DNA reports from that case to review and it appeared to me that they didn't have viable DNA for genetic genealogy. And I think that that is obvious or it would have already happened. But we talked about, you know, technology advances, you can use smaller and smaller amounts of DNA. The reason that we couldn't use genetic genealogy on the yogurt shot murders is because the DNA sample they had was so minute that even as technology advanced, it was still too little for them to decide to consume it through that process. Right. Because once you consume it, it's gone. Once they had pinpointed Robert Brasher's, they felt confident enough to use up that DNA sample to confirm or refute whether it was him and it confirmed it. So with JonBenet's case, I think it's a similar situation where they may have some DNA, but it is a non optimal sample. So when you and I take a test and we spit in the tube and send it in or swab our cheek, right, that is pristine DNA. But when you're working with forensic samples, they're often degraded if it's a cold case especially, or mixed if you're dealing with a violent crime, particularly sexual assaults, we see lots of mixtures. Lot of cases we've got the perpetrator's DNA mixed with the suspect's DNA or even an additional person. And those are very challenging. A lot of our cases at Parabon have been mixtures and we've been successful thanks to our amazing bioinformatics scientists that I work with, we've been able to solve a lot of cases that would have been unsolvable if it wasn't for them. And they kind of hide behind the scenes and don't get a lot of accolades and credit that they deserve. So I suspect in JonBenet's case, and from what I saw in reports, there were very, very small amounts and there were some mixtures. So we can work with some mixtures, but not others. If it is a very complex mixture, which is what apparently they have in the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping case, you might not be able to extract, deconvolute, it was what it's called, and extract out that perpetrator's DNA. You might not even know which one of the profiles is the perpetrator's DNA. But they're continually advancing in these techniques. So it still might not be workable today. But if they don't consume that DNA by testing it and trying, it might be solvable someday in the future. So that's always the problem for law enforcement, for Austin PD with Yogurt Shop, but also for Boulder with JonBenet, they may have a little bit of DNA, but if they decide to go for that Hail Mary and try to analyze it and it's consumed and it fails that process, that's it. There's no more waiting for technology to catch up.
- [52:17]
A
Yeah, you can only test it once, right? And then it's.
- [52:21]
B
Yeah, I mean, it depends how much you have. There are cases where it was consumed, but they sent us the tube, the test tube, and we were able to get DNA from the test tube. So sometimes it appears it's gone and it's not.
- [52:34]
A
I remember seeing once a piece of fabric and they were like cutting a small piece because they said, once we've cut all of this stain and used all this stain, it's gone. Well.
- [52:44]
B
And that's the good news on her case. If there's any such thing as a good news on JonBenet's case is that there is more physical evidence. You know, there was that garrote, I think it's called, and there was her clothing. And so we can detect DNA now that you couldn't con at all. You just couldn't detect back then when her murder happened. So they can go back and keep retesting the clothing, keep retesting that garrote, that paintbrush that was used on that, and they might find DNA that was not detectable previously. That will be enough to test. So I think there's always hope. But I think people should be very careful about the massive criticism that has been sent Boulder to, you know, Boulder investigators. Because I really believe that they would want this salt at this point. It's not the people that originally investigated it anymore. They've moved on. Just like the Angie Dodge case with Christopher Tapp. It was Idaho Falls police that hired me to help them identify their DNA contributor. Right. So they were still. They were willing to move forward, even if it wasn't Christopher Tapp. They knew he didn't match that DNA. But they were a new generation of detectives, and there is a new generation of detectives and district attorneys in Boulder, too. So I'm sure they would love to solve her case. So we see all this criticism about them not wanting to solve it or not doing the right thing. I can guarantee you behind the scenes, they are trying everything they can, but we are not insiders. We don't know what they have to work with and what they're up against. And so I don't believe that they aren't trying. And if they're trying and there still things that can be retested, which I know there are, then that means there's always hope.
- [54:30]
A
And what can you talk about anything that you're working on at the moment, or is it very much, you know, when I have a resolution, I talk about it, but not when I'm working on it.
- [54:38]
B
Yeah. So I'm never allowed to discuss ongoing cases, with one exception now, and that is the St. Louis Jane Doe, or our precious Hope Jane Doe, who for years I wasn't allowed to talk about. But it's been so many years that I've been trying to find her identity, find her family, that the agency finally allowed a documentary to be made about it, which then has freed me to be able to talk about it. So she was a very young African American girl who was sexually assaulted and murdered and decapitated, sorry to your audience. Found in a basement in St. Louis. And she has never been able to be identified. And I've been trying for, I think, eight years now. I think since or maybe seven years since 2019. And because she's African American, we have a much smaller pool to compare against, so we have much lower representation from that population group in the databases we can access. And part of that is because a lot of African American genetic genealogists and genealogists pulled their DNA once they learned law enforcement was using GEDmatch and family tree DNA. And again, as I said, understandable reasons, but it's a catch 22 because it means we can't return their family members to them either. So we can't as easily identify violent criminals in their population. But we also can't identify Jane and John does and provide answers to their loved ones. And so it's just been years of digging into these family trees, building very, very distant family trees where we're unfortunately running into slavery.
- [56:23]
A
Well, that's what I was wondering. Yeah. Because in Australia we have a stolen generation of indigenous people. So there comes a point where people don't know their ancestors after a certain point. So is that similar with the African American population?
- [56:38]
B
Yeah, it is. So the 1870 census is the first time that formerly enslaved people were enumerated by name. So they were just like tick marks before, which is horrible, of course. But what that means is if the common ancestors I identify are before 1870, I might not be able to identify them, or more likely I can't identify their descendants. So that's what I need. But if a couple was having children while they were enslaved, those children could have been separated from them, sold away. Different surnames were taken after the Civil War by a lot of related family members because it was kind of random. Some of them would take their slave owners last name, some of them would just pick a last name. And a lot of people had been separated and sold apart. And so how do they find each other again? So if they didn't know who their relatives were, how can I identify that now all these years later? So I might even know who the couple is that belongs in the family tree. But remember, in in descendancy research or reverse genealogy, I have to find all of their descendants because I know this person is among them. But if I can't identify all their descendants, I don't even know who all their children are or grandchildren. I can't ever get to, you know, present day or to 1983 in her case to identify her. So I keep running up against that because I initially had two pretty good matches at the top. But they were both women that were born over a hundred years ago. And so their trees go back to slavery very quickly, like grandfather level. And one of them, her father was born in 1865, just after the Civil War, and then her grandfather was born in 1800. So it is very difficult. So we're continuing, we're keeping at it. I've got my whole team on it now. It used to just be me for a lot of years, but now my whole team is donating volunteer hours, trying to break through on this because it's my oldest unsolved case. And she deserves her name, she deserves her story. And her family, if they're not the ones responsible for her murder, certainly deserve to know what happened to their loved one.
- [58:47]
A
And if they are responsible, then they deserve for everyone else to know.
- [58:50]
B
Exactly. And that could be why no one's come forward. You don't know, though. Cause she could have been in foster care. The family lost track of her. She could have been placed for adoption. So it might have nothing to do with her biological family, but we need to identify them to determine that. And it could be that someone in her family is responsible for her disappearance.
- [59:11]
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.
- [59:24]
B
Well, I love doing Australian shows.
- [59:28]
A
Great.
- [59:28]
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.
- [59:54]
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 recognise the traditional owners of the land on which it's recorded. They pay respect to the Aboriginal elders, past, present and those emerging.