In 2018, a team of investigators in California used forensic genealogy tracing to identify a serial killer.
Now, the same DNA technology has spread across the country, leading to long-cold crimes being solved decades after they took place.
Using similar forensic genealogy and familial DNA tracing techniques and technology, Ohio investigators were able to identify a 17-year-old boy as the suspect in the killing of a 30-year-old mother of three Patricia Stichler in her home in 1985.
“When we started looking into this process, it was because of the Golden State Killer in California,” said Sgt. Justin Music, the Sylvania Police Department’s primary investigator on the Stichler case. “We started considering if it was something we could use for our case.”
Joseph James DeAngelo, coined “the Golden State Killer” by local media, pleaded guilty in 2020 to multiple counts of murder and kidnapping. Between 1974 and 1986, DeAngelo admitted to committing more than a dozen murders and 50 rapes, as well as 120 burglaries.
The Golden State Killer case was not only a factor in the establishment of California’s DNA database, which collects DNA samples from all accused and convicted felons statewide. It also set the scene for law enforcement agencies nationwide to follow in its footsteps.
In Sylvania, Ms. Stichler’s killing was investigated twice before the department reopened the case again in recent years — once in the year it occurred, and again in 1998. All the investigators had to go off was a DNA sample from an unknown male at the crime scene.
The best investigators could do was to test the potential suspects that made the most sense at the time — Ms. Stichler’s former husband, boyfriend, and other people she knew at the time. None of them were matches.
“We’re not trying to compare our sample directly to a suspect, we’re trying to compare our sample to anybody that has partial matches out there in the great big world we’re in,” Sergeant Music said.
So the Sylvania police enlisted the help of AdvanceDNA, a forensic genealogy firm, as well as the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, in 2019. They didn’t get their first DNA match alert until early 2021 — an elderly woman in California, likely a distant cousin of the suspect that left his DNA at the crime scene nearly 40 years earlier.
Using DNA
After convincing her to help, Sergeant Music sent the woman a DNA test kit. But her lineage wasn’t as straightforward as the team had hoped.
Amanda Reno, director of genetic and forensic case management at AdvanceDNA, discovered that the California woman’s mother was adopted, and her father was completely unknown. They had to start from scratch with a century-old adoption case to decipher the family tree.
“We had to solve quite a few adoptions and quite a few misattributed parentage cases in order to even get to a point where we were in the right family unit,” Ms. Reno said.
It took a year and a half to finally find the 1985 killer’s biological mother, quickly becoming the longest case Ms. Reno had ever worked on. But a realization midway through the case gave her intense determination to finish what she started.
“Every minute that I’ve been alive, this family’s been grieving Patricia’s loss,” Ms. Reno said. She had been born one month after Ms. Stichler’s death. “Every moment that my life has existed, that family has been in grief. So when you sit back and you think about every moment of your own life, that that family has carried that... that’s quite a moving and motivating factor.”
State assists Sylvania
The investigators couldn’t just access all the DNA data from companies such as Ancestry and 23andMe. They had to use public databases like GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA to find connections.
“There’s this whole idea that you can use Ancestry, or you can use 23andMe, but those are databases that are protected by those companies and will never be available,” said Kristen Slaper, DNA lab manager for the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation.
It’s up to individual citizens to upload their own DNA to public sites like GEDmatch — otherwise, it will never be used.
“If I test with ancestry.com and I don’t find any matches, I can then upload my data file into GEDmatch and then people from all the other different DNA companies can also upload theirs,” Sergeant Music said. “So now, it’s one big, shared database if you choose to submit, so that database has grown many times over.”
GEDmatch in particular played a large role in the identification of the Golden State Killer, and soon became the subject of widespread privacy concerns. In response, GEDmatch changed its policy so that people must manually opt-in to having their data available for law enforcement use.
Because of this, Mrs. Slaper said, agencies often have to pursue private citizens to request their DNA.
“We truly were asking for an amazing gift from all these people,” Sergeant Music said. “This process has given me faith in humanity again... going through this process and reaching out to complete strangers. There was nothing in it for them other than trying to help another human being, another stranger. They chose to do that over, and over, and over again.”
Path to Sylvania suspect, other cold cases
Eventually, investigators identified the DNA from the crime scene as that of Michael Mellus, who was 17 at the time of Mrs. Stichler’s death and died four years later in a car crash.
The team also used a Parabon Snapshot DNA analysis to form a composite image predicting what the suspect would look like based on the DNA sample’s phenotypes. Sergeant Music said the composite image accurately predicted Mr. Mellus’ genetic ancestry, hair color, eye color, skin color, and freckling pattern.
The Stichler case wasn’t the first that Ms. Reno and AdvanceDNA had worked in the Toledo area. They also contributed to research in an investigation surrounding two infants found deceased in abandoned cars. After acquiring DNA samples from a baby boy, whose body was discovered in 2017, investigators were able to genetically link the child to his birth parents.
Another older cold case involving the murder and rapes of three teenagers in 2000 was solved recently in Lucas County as well, when DNA samples matched Kenneth Marshall of Indiana with the DNA found on his victims at the time of the attacks.
Before forensic genealogy became a possibility, law enforcement professionals were already using DNA to solve cases in other ways. In Ohio, agencies use the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), which registers DNA collected from convicted felons, to search for matches between people and crime scenes, or between multiple crime scenes. But CODIS only includes a very small fraction of the population.
Ms. Reno said that her job would definitely be easier if more people uploaded their own DNA data to sites like GEDmatch, but she understood the privacy concerns, and encouraged people to do more research before making a choice.
“We encourage people to upload and support these cases,” she said. “Not only could their DNA solve a crime like this, but their participation could also help bring someone home.”
Still, even though sharing such intimate personal information can seem daunting, Sergeant Music and Ms. Reno both agreed that forensic genealogy is the future of criminal investigation.
“I think that forensic genealogy and using this process for cold cases, homicides, and old sexual assault is absolutely the biggest enhancement in investigative strategy and approach that we’ve had in my 25-year career,” Sergeant Music said.
First Published July 11, 2022, 10:01 p.m.
