The net is closing on many criminals who have so far got away with it. Dozens of cold cases will be solved in 2019, as detectives tap DNA data used for tracing family trees.
The potential of this resource has only recently been discovered. In April, police in California arrested a new suspect in the case of the Golden State Killer, who raped and murdered people in the 1970s and 80s. They identified a man using a website called GEDmatch that helps people use DNA test results from services like 23andMe and AncestryDNA to trace their family tree. If someone has left DNA at a crime scene, the website can be used to identify family members of that person who have DNA online, and narrow the search.
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This led to the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo, and inspired Virginia-based Parabon NanoLabs to use the approach to identify 13 suspects in other crimes, leading to 11 arrests so far.
The company is now working on more than 100 cases, and expects to use the technique to solve at least 30 by the end of 2019. Another US-based team, Identifinders International, says it is working on a dozen murder cases.
Such investigations are only set to multiply. About 1 million people have uploaded DNA data to GEDmatch 鈥� enough to find third cousins for about 60 per cent of people in the US of European descent. About 1800 more add their DNA every day, so it won鈥檛 be long before nearly every such person in the US is traceable.
鈥�2019 is set to be one of the warmest years on record, perhaps even the warmest鈥�
And as users outside the US upload their DNA to GEDmatch, other countries will also be able to use it to solve crimes. Researchers at Stanford University in California recently developed a tool for linking genealogy sites with forensics databases, further strengthening the technique. By the time law-makers have decided how to regulate forensic genealogy and protect our genetic privacy, many more arrests will have been made worldwide.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淣ews Preview 2019: DNA Analysis cracks cold cases鈥�
