NYT article concerning legal issues raised by method of tracking down the Golden State Killer4/28/2018
click here for NYT article on genetic search
Police began exploring DNA fingerprinting in 1985 — a year before the Golden State Killer raped and bludgeoned his last known victim. click here for issues raised by method of investigation of DNA sample leading to arrest of Golden State Killer The FBI created a database of DNA profiles in the 1990s and police queued up to check their evidence samples against it, hoping that their suspect might be an ex-convict, or already imprisoned, or otherwise in the system. The method even allowed police to solve old cold cases — some of them initially investigated long beforeDNA testing existed. One of the first cases in which a family member’s genes led police to a suspect took place in Britain. The mutilation and murder of Lynette White on Valentine’s Day of 1988 was one of the country’s most notorious unsolved cases, the BBC wrote. Three men had been wrongly imprisoned for the crime. A massive police hunt had failed to turn up the real killer. But in the early 2000s, the BBC wrote, police found a new DNA sample at the crime scene “under layers of paint on a skirting board.” The sample didn’t match any profile in Britain’s national database, but it partially matched with a 14-year-old boy whose DNA was on file after an altercation with police. The boy was born after the murder, obviously, but he unwittingly led police to his uncle, who promptly confessed to the murder. It’s only in the last few years, as millions of people have submitted DNA samples to ancestry websites, that police have used familial DNA searches in ways that read like science fiction, whether you find them hopeful or horrifying. Take the case of the “Canal Killer” — a double slaying in Phoenix that had gone unsolved since the early 1990s. The suspect’s DNA was on file but matched no one in the FBI database. Then in late 2014, the Arizona Republic wrote, police met a genealogist at a conference and told her about the case. Investigators eventually sent the genealogist, who did not live in the state, a profile of the Canal Killer’s DNA sequence. Two months later, the newspaper wrote, the genealogist emailed police the suspect’s likely last name — Miller. Familial DNA searches, in fact, had an 83 percent failure rate in a 2014 British study, Wired wrote. This is part of the reason that many warn against the practice, even as law enforcement agencies master its uses. click here for NYT article about GEDmatch site and methods
Falsely accused and imprisoned for 40 years for a crime that Golden State Killer may have committed4/25/2018
click here for Washington Post article on crime now perhaps due to the Golden State Killer
click here for the article on another case in Washington state of a killer revealed by ancestral DNA
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Power Points for DNA
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