angelburst29
The Living Force
The same DNA analysis used to find the alleged Golden State Killer has led to the arrest of a second alleged murderer. It’ll likely lead to more.
May 19, 2018 - The Coming Wave of Murders Solved by Genealogy
The Coming Wave of Murders Solved by Genealogy
Just three weeks ago, law enforcement in California announced the arrest of the Golden State Killer using DNA. The press conference was vague, but the details of the novel method soon trickled out: Joseph James DeAngelo was found by matching DNA from a crime scene with that of his distant relative on the genealogy site GEDmatch.
On Friday, police in Washington State announced the arrest of William Earl Talbott II for a double murder in 1987, and this time, they proudly announced the use of the same method of tracing distant relatives through DNA—a field known as genetic genealogy. Steven Armentrout, the president of Parabon NanoLabs, the forensics company that did the DNA analysis, spoke at the press conference. So did CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist who now works with the company.
Parabon has jumped headlong into this technology. On May 8, it announced the creation of a new genetic-genealogy unit led by Moore. The company recently told BuzzFeed it had uploaded DNA from about 100 crime scenes to GEDmatch.com, with about 20 of them generating matches of a third cousin or closer. “I think there is going to be press around this very soon,” the company’s director of bioinformatics had said to BuzzFeed.
Moore and other genetic genealogists have been using a similar technique to find the families of adoptees for years. The raw data from 23andMe, AncestryDNA, and other DNA-testing services can be uploaded on a volunteer-run site called GEDmatch, which allows genealogists to compare segments of DNA. These tests are more sophisticated than the DNA tests police typically run, and they generate more data than is stored in the FBI’s CODIS database. These DNA segments can then be crossmatched with family trees and public records to find an adoptee’s birth family—or a criminal.
In the double murder in Washington State, the suspect’s DNA matched two relatives, both fairly close by the standards of this research: a second cousin and a half–first cousin once removed. The former relative was on the mother’s side, the latter the father’s side, so the suspect was not hard to identify. “No cases are easy, but when they are straightforward, it really falls into place very quickly,” says Moore.
She says she had been talking to Parabon for about a year and a half. She had initially hesitated to work on criminal cases because she was unsure of legal and ethical issues, especially if people uploading their DNA to GEDmatch were unaware police were trawling through the database. But the positive feedback since the Golden State Killer case convinced her to make the plunge. Plus the publicity of that case has made it well-known that police can search genealogy databases. Moore is not the only genetic genealogist doing this kind of work for police departments.
Now, the floodgates are open. The strangest part of this story may be that a small, volunteer-run website, GEDmatch.com, has become, as the genealogist Debbie Kennet has similarly observed, the de facto DNA and genealogy database for all of law enforcement.
Apr 27, 2018 - How a Genealogy Website Led to the Alleged Golden State Killer
How a Genealogy Website Led to the Alleged Golden State Killer
Powerful tools are now available to anyone who wants to look for a DNA match, which has troubling privacy implications.
When the East Area Rapist broke into the home of his first victim in 1976, human DNA had not yet been sequenced. When he reemerged as the Original Night Stalker and began a spree of murders in 1979, the World Wide Web still did not exist. For decades, the Golden State Killer—as he is now best known—got away with it all.
Then DNA and the internet appear to have caught up. Reporting from The Sacramento Bee and Mercury News indicates that police arrested Joseph James DeAngelo based on DNA found at crime scenes that partially matched the DNA of a relative on the open-source genealogy website GEDmatch. Previous searches of law-enforcement DNA databases had turned up no matches.
This way of finding people by DNA is new to law enforcement, but it is not new to genealogists, who immediately recognized their methods in the police’s vague descriptions. And the revelation has landed like a bomb. It at once demonstrates the power of genetic genealogy research and exposes the many ethical and privacy issues: Did any of DeAngelo’s distant relatives know their DNA could be searched by law enforcement? Will people want to upload their DNA to genealogy websites if it could one day incriminate their children—or their children’s children’s children?
“It’s very controversial,” says Margaret Press, a genetic genealogist who co-runs the nonprofit DNA Doe Project.“It’s going be debated for a very long time in law and forensics and genealogy and everywhere you can imagine.”
The Sacramento County district attorney’s office declined to comment, except to confirm the Bee’s reporting. Genetic genealogists, however, outlined to The Atlantic how the search was likely done. “The process is really your standard genealogy research project. It’s no different from finding an adoptee,” says Press.
First, how it was not done. Direct-to-consumer DNA testing companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA did not directly hand customer information over to police. Nor could law enforcement have sent DNA from the crime scene to these two companies, which require a large tube of saliva. Both 23andMe and Ancestry have denied being involved in the case.
But customers can themselves choose to export the raw data file from these and other DNA-testing services to a third-party site, such as GEDmatch. These third-party sites are less user friendly than the websites of 23andMe or AncestryDNA, but they offer a more powerful suite of tools. For example, GEDmatch allows users to find profiles that match only one particular segment of DNA. It also lets users who have tested with different services match with each other without shelling out for another one. GEDmatch offers premium tools but is largely free to use.
It’s unclear how exactly law enforcement generated a profile of the Golden State Killer from DNA left at crime scenes. But the DNA Doe Project’s Press and her partner, Colleen Fitzpatrick, were recently able to identify Marcia King, murdered in 1981, after whole genome sequencing on a highly degraded DNA sample nevertheless matched to a first cousin once removed on GEDmatch.
GEDmatch is an example of the openness in the genealogy community, says CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist. “We have amazing citizen scientists who have built tools the companies have not been able or willing to provide,” she says. “And we encouraged or demanded we have access to our raw data.” But this openness makes it easier for law enforcement to access data, too. Unlike 23andMe or Ancestry, GEDmatch does not have lawyers to protect the data of its users. The website issued a statement saying law enforcement did not directly approach the site about the research and urged concerned users to delete their registration.
“The police officer’s ability to throw some information into a public database like this is wholly unregulated,” says Erin Murphy, a law professor at New York University Law School. In 2014, a genealogical database search led police working a cold case to man in New Orleans, who turned out to be innocent. California also allows law enforcement to look for relatives in criminal-justice DNA databases—but those searches are regulated and restricted to certain serious crimes.
GEDmatch provides a more powerful way of tracing people by DNA and genealogy than a better-known method that only uses the Y chromosome.
Fitzpatrick, Press’s partner in the DNA Doe Project, is an expert on this. In 2014, she tracked down the alleged “Canal Killer” in Phoenix, Arizona by matching the Y chromosome to a family name, which are both passed through fathers. Using age and location information, police then narrowed it down to a single man. However, this has severe limits, according to Fitzpatrick and Press. Y chromosomes cannot tell you how related two people are—even distant cousins with a last common ancestry in the 17th century may have essentially identical Y chromosomes. And, of course, it traces exclusively through the male line.
In fact, Fitzpatrick had tried using the Y chromosome to find the Golden State Killer. Michelle McNamara, the author of a recent book about his crimes called I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, consulted with Fitzpatrick after uploading his DNA profile to a Y chromosome database on Ancestry.com. The one match, however, was too distant to yield a useful lead.
“In this case, the Y chromosome definitely would not have led to him,” says Moore of the Golden State Killer case. “There’s much more power in autosomal DNA to resolve any sort of family or genealogical mystery.” Autosomal DNA refers to the DNA on the 22 pairs of other chromosomes that are not X and Y. With a web of enough matches or better yet one close match, an experienced genetic genealogist can begin to identify family members.
This work requires enough expertise that a professional genetic genealogist likely helped law enforcement—an idea that is deeply troubling to some in the community. “Because of the way this is done surreptitiously, there is also a lot of anger and backlash in our community,” says Press.
Press and Moore say they both know of genealogists making profiles on GEDmatch private after the Golden State Killer case became known. They fear that backlash from this case could make it harder for people trying to find family—or even police trying to find other suspects—in the future.
Given the power of genetic genealogy, a case like this was bound to come up. Even before it became public, Moore says, the community had been discussing a public statement about how law enforcement searches should be handled, but they could not agree. Now the debate has spilled out into the public.
“The question now is how we can work together so nobody’s privacy is invaded and it doesn’t damage our industry,” she says. “I would be devastated to see it come crashing down because of something like this.”
May 18, 2018 - Washington police announce arrest in 1987 murder of Victoria couple
Washington police announce arrest in 1987 murder of Victoria couple
Family members of two young Victoria sweethearts murdered 31 years ago expressed relief and gratitude Friday after a Washington man was arrested in connection with their brutal slayings.
William Earl Talbott, 55, was picked up as he left his Seattle trucking job Thursday and charged with killing Tanya Van Cuylenborg, 18, in November 1987. He is also expected to be charged with murdering Tanya’s boyfriend, Jay Cook, 20, Snohomish County Det. Jim Scharf said Friday.
[...] [...] Scharf said Talbott refused to talk to investigators when he was arrested. He said the suspect appears to have never married or had a family.
“We don’t have any idea what the motive was here. We are not even sure how the individual met up with our victims,” Scharf said.
Talbott had been arrested before for drugs and possibly indecent exposure, but the cases were dismissed, Scharf said.
Just last month, Snohomish County detectives held a news conference to release composite drawings of a suspect that Parabon had created using DNA markers.
Scharf said the images did not have any impact on the break in the case, which only happened because of the use of the genealogy website.
In April, police in California used the same technique to arrest Joseph James DeAngelo, who is suspected of being the Golden State Killer. Critics complained that law enforcement was potentially invading the privacy of unwitting website users.
But Scharf and the family members of the slain couple defended the investigative technique.
“If it hadn’t been for genetic genealogy, we wouldn’t be standing here today. And if it’s not allowed to be used in law enforcement, we would never have solved his case,” Scharf said.
TIMELINE OF KEY EVENTS IN THE MURDER CASE:
Jay and Tanya left Victoria on Nov. 18, 1987 for what was supposed to be a quick trip to Seattle.
The couple caught the MV Coho ferry from Victoria to Port Angeles, arriving at about 5:30 p.m. They missed a turnoff, so stopped at a local grocery store.
They got to Allen, Wash., at about 9:30 p.m. and stopped at a deli there. At 10:16 p.m., they bought a ticket for the Bremerton ferry to Seattle, which would have put them in the city about 11:30 p.m.
The pair had planned to sleep in the van near the former Kingdome stadium. A missing persons report was filed two days later, according to news archives.
Jay’s body was found days later dumped on the side of the road in Snohomish County, covered with a blue blanket. He had been strangled.
On Nov. 24, a man walking on an isolated road near Alger, south of Bellingham in Skagit County, discovered Tanya’s body in a ditch. She had been sexually assaulted and shot in the back of the head with a .38-calibre firearm. She had been restrained with zip-tie-type fasteners.
The following day, her wallet, her ID, keys for the van, a pair of surgical gloves and a partial box of ammunition were found under the back porch of a Bellingham pub. The brown van that Jay and Tanya had been driving was found a block away from the pub, beside the Greyhound bus station, locked and in a parking lot.
A witness told police it had been there since Nov. 21.
Some of the couple’s items were missing — a green backpack and a black men’s jacket, as well as Tanya’s Minolta camera, which has never been found, although its lens turned up at a Portland pawnshop in 1990.
May 18, 2018 - Man arrested in 1987 killing of couple in Washington state
Man arrested in 1987 killing of couple in Washington state
May 19, 2018 - The Coming Wave of Murders Solved by Genealogy
The Coming Wave of Murders Solved by Genealogy
Just three weeks ago, law enforcement in California announced the arrest of the Golden State Killer using DNA. The press conference was vague, but the details of the novel method soon trickled out: Joseph James DeAngelo was found by matching DNA from a crime scene with that of his distant relative on the genealogy site GEDmatch.
On Friday, police in Washington State announced the arrest of William Earl Talbott II for a double murder in 1987, and this time, they proudly announced the use of the same method of tracing distant relatives through DNA—a field known as genetic genealogy. Steven Armentrout, the president of Parabon NanoLabs, the forensics company that did the DNA analysis, spoke at the press conference. So did CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist who now works with the company.
Parabon has jumped headlong into this technology. On May 8, it announced the creation of a new genetic-genealogy unit led by Moore. The company recently told BuzzFeed it had uploaded DNA from about 100 crime scenes to GEDmatch.com, with about 20 of them generating matches of a third cousin or closer. “I think there is going to be press around this very soon,” the company’s director of bioinformatics had said to BuzzFeed.
Moore and other genetic genealogists have been using a similar technique to find the families of adoptees for years. The raw data from 23andMe, AncestryDNA, and other DNA-testing services can be uploaded on a volunteer-run site called GEDmatch, which allows genealogists to compare segments of DNA. These tests are more sophisticated than the DNA tests police typically run, and they generate more data than is stored in the FBI’s CODIS database. These DNA segments can then be crossmatched with family trees and public records to find an adoptee’s birth family—or a criminal.
In the double murder in Washington State, the suspect’s DNA matched two relatives, both fairly close by the standards of this research: a second cousin and a half–first cousin once removed. The former relative was on the mother’s side, the latter the father’s side, so the suspect was not hard to identify. “No cases are easy, but when they are straightforward, it really falls into place very quickly,” says Moore.
She says she had been talking to Parabon for about a year and a half. She had initially hesitated to work on criminal cases because she was unsure of legal and ethical issues, especially if people uploading their DNA to GEDmatch were unaware police were trawling through the database. But the positive feedback since the Golden State Killer case convinced her to make the plunge. Plus the publicity of that case has made it well-known that police can search genealogy databases. Moore is not the only genetic genealogist doing this kind of work for police departments.
Now, the floodgates are open. The strangest part of this story may be that a small, volunteer-run website, GEDmatch.com, has become, as the genealogist Debbie Kennet has similarly observed, the de facto DNA and genealogy database for all of law enforcement.
Apr 27, 2018 - How a Genealogy Website Led to the Alleged Golden State Killer
How a Genealogy Website Led to the Alleged Golden State Killer
Powerful tools are now available to anyone who wants to look for a DNA match, which has troubling privacy implications.
When the East Area Rapist broke into the home of his first victim in 1976, human DNA had not yet been sequenced. When he reemerged as the Original Night Stalker and began a spree of murders in 1979, the World Wide Web still did not exist. For decades, the Golden State Killer—as he is now best known—got away with it all.
Then DNA and the internet appear to have caught up. Reporting from The Sacramento Bee and Mercury News indicates that police arrested Joseph James DeAngelo based on DNA found at crime scenes that partially matched the DNA of a relative on the open-source genealogy website GEDmatch. Previous searches of law-enforcement DNA databases had turned up no matches.
This way of finding people by DNA is new to law enforcement, but it is not new to genealogists, who immediately recognized their methods in the police’s vague descriptions. And the revelation has landed like a bomb. It at once demonstrates the power of genetic genealogy research and exposes the many ethical and privacy issues: Did any of DeAngelo’s distant relatives know their DNA could be searched by law enforcement? Will people want to upload their DNA to genealogy websites if it could one day incriminate their children—or their children’s children’s children?
“It’s very controversial,” says Margaret Press, a genetic genealogist who co-runs the nonprofit DNA Doe Project.“It’s going be debated for a very long time in law and forensics and genealogy and everywhere you can imagine.”
The Sacramento County district attorney’s office declined to comment, except to confirm the Bee’s reporting. Genetic genealogists, however, outlined to The Atlantic how the search was likely done. “The process is really your standard genealogy research project. It’s no different from finding an adoptee,” says Press.
First, how it was not done. Direct-to-consumer DNA testing companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA did not directly hand customer information over to police. Nor could law enforcement have sent DNA from the crime scene to these two companies, which require a large tube of saliva. Both 23andMe and Ancestry have denied being involved in the case.
But customers can themselves choose to export the raw data file from these and other DNA-testing services to a third-party site, such as GEDmatch. These third-party sites are less user friendly than the websites of 23andMe or AncestryDNA, but they offer a more powerful suite of tools. For example, GEDmatch allows users to find profiles that match only one particular segment of DNA. It also lets users who have tested with different services match with each other without shelling out for another one. GEDmatch offers premium tools but is largely free to use.
It’s unclear how exactly law enforcement generated a profile of the Golden State Killer from DNA left at crime scenes. But the DNA Doe Project’s Press and her partner, Colleen Fitzpatrick, were recently able to identify Marcia King, murdered in 1981, after whole genome sequencing on a highly degraded DNA sample nevertheless matched to a first cousin once removed on GEDmatch.
GEDmatch is an example of the openness in the genealogy community, says CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist. “We have amazing citizen scientists who have built tools the companies have not been able or willing to provide,” she says. “And we encouraged or demanded we have access to our raw data.” But this openness makes it easier for law enforcement to access data, too. Unlike 23andMe or Ancestry, GEDmatch does not have lawyers to protect the data of its users. The website issued a statement saying law enforcement did not directly approach the site about the research and urged concerned users to delete their registration.
“The police officer’s ability to throw some information into a public database like this is wholly unregulated,” says Erin Murphy, a law professor at New York University Law School. In 2014, a genealogical database search led police working a cold case to man in New Orleans, who turned out to be innocent. California also allows law enforcement to look for relatives in criminal-justice DNA databases—but those searches are regulated and restricted to certain serious crimes.
GEDmatch provides a more powerful way of tracing people by DNA and genealogy than a better-known method that only uses the Y chromosome.
Fitzpatrick, Press’s partner in the DNA Doe Project, is an expert on this. In 2014, she tracked down the alleged “Canal Killer” in Phoenix, Arizona by matching the Y chromosome to a family name, which are both passed through fathers. Using age and location information, police then narrowed it down to a single man. However, this has severe limits, according to Fitzpatrick and Press. Y chromosomes cannot tell you how related two people are—even distant cousins with a last common ancestry in the 17th century may have essentially identical Y chromosomes. And, of course, it traces exclusively through the male line.
In fact, Fitzpatrick had tried using the Y chromosome to find the Golden State Killer. Michelle McNamara, the author of a recent book about his crimes called I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, consulted with Fitzpatrick after uploading his DNA profile to a Y chromosome database on Ancestry.com. The one match, however, was too distant to yield a useful lead.
“In this case, the Y chromosome definitely would not have led to him,” says Moore of the Golden State Killer case. “There’s much more power in autosomal DNA to resolve any sort of family or genealogical mystery.” Autosomal DNA refers to the DNA on the 22 pairs of other chromosomes that are not X and Y. With a web of enough matches or better yet one close match, an experienced genetic genealogist can begin to identify family members.
This work requires enough expertise that a professional genetic genealogist likely helped law enforcement—an idea that is deeply troubling to some in the community. “Because of the way this is done surreptitiously, there is also a lot of anger and backlash in our community,” says Press.
Press and Moore say they both know of genealogists making profiles on GEDmatch private after the Golden State Killer case became known. They fear that backlash from this case could make it harder for people trying to find family—or even police trying to find other suspects—in the future.
Given the power of genetic genealogy, a case like this was bound to come up. Even before it became public, Moore says, the community had been discussing a public statement about how law enforcement searches should be handled, but they could not agree. Now the debate has spilled out into the public.
“The question now is how we can work together so nobody’s privacy is invaded and it doesn’t damage our industry,” she says. “I would be devastated to see it come crashing down because of something like this.”
May 18, 2018 - Washington police announce arrest in 1987 murder of Victoria couple
Washington police announce arrest in 1987 murder of Victoria couple
Family members of two young Victoria sweethearts murdered 31 years ago expressed relief and gratitude Friday after a Washington man was arrested in connection with their brutal slayings.
William Earl Talbott, 55, was picked up as he left his Seattle trucking job Thursday and charged with killing Tanya Van Cuylenborg, 18, in November 1987. He is also expected to be charged with murdering Tanya’s boyfriend, Jay Cook, 20, Snohomish County Det. Jim Scharf said Friday.
[...] [...] Scharf said Talbott refused to talk to investigators when he was arrested. He said the suspect appears to have never married or had a family.
“We don’t have any idea what the motive was here. We are not even sure how the individual met up with our victims,” Scharf said.
Talbott had been arrested before for drugs and possibly indecent exposure, but the cases were dismissed, Scharf said.
Just last month, Snohomish County detectives held a news conference to release composite drawings of a suspect that Parabon had created using DNA markers.
Scharf said the images did not have any impact on the break in the case, which only happened because of the use of the genealogy website.
In April, police in California used the same technique to arrest Joseph James DeAngelo, who is suspected of being the Golden State Killer. Critics complained that law enforcement was potentially invading the privacy of unwitting website users.
But Scharf and the family members of the slain couple defended the investigative technique.
“If it hadn’t been for genetic genealogy, we wouldn’t be standing here today. And if it’s not allowed to be used in law enforcement, we would never have solved his case,” Scharf said.
TIMELINE OF KEY EVENTS IN THE MURDER CASE:
Jay and Tanya left Victoria on Nov. 18, 1987 for what was supposed to be a quick trip to Seattle.
The couple caught the MV Coho ferry from Victoria to Port Angeles, arriving at about 5:30 p.m. They missed a turnoff, so stopped at a local grocery store.
They got to Allen, Wash., at about 9:30 p.m. and stopped at a deli there. At 10:16 p.m., they bought a ticket for the Bremerton ferry to Seattle, which would have put them in the city about 11:30 p.m.
The pair had planned to sleep in the van near the former Kingdome stadium. A missing persons report was filed two days later, according to news archives.
Jay’s body was found days later dumped on the side of the road in Snohomish County, covered with a blue blanket. He had been strangled.
On Nov. 24, a man walking on an isolated road near Alger, south of Bellingham in Skagit County, discovered Tanya’s body in a ditch. She had been sexually assaulted and shot in the back of the head with a .38-calibre firearm. She had been restrained with zip-tie-type fasteners.
The following day, her wallet, her ID, keys for the van, a pair of surgical gloves and a partial box of ammunition were found under the back porch of a Bellingham pub. The brown van that Jay and Tanya had been driving was found a block away from the pub, beside the Greyhound bus station, locked and in a parking lot.
A witness told police it had been there since Nov. 21.
Some of the couple’s items were missing — a green backpack and a black men’s jacket, as well as Tanya’s Minolta camera, which has never been found, although its lens turned up at a Portland pawnshop in 1990.
May 18, 2018 - Man arrested in 1987 killing of couple in Washington state
Man arrested in 1987 killing of couple in Washington state