It seems that all this DNA testing is having consequences not all of us have considered before. With the explosive growth of DNA testing for genealogy, data is now available to law enforcement agencies that previously wasn’t available. Criminals are being located using GEDmatch. I see this as a good thing, but there many who disagree with me. So be it…
Big news in Washington State this last couple weeks has been the arrest of William Earl Talbott II, 55, of SeaTac. According to investigators, based on DNA evidence, he is suspected of raping and killing a 19-year-old British Columbia woman in 1987. He is also suspected of killing her boyfriend. There’s a good article about how investigators used DNA to make the arrest in the May 18, 2018 edition of the Seattle Times – 30 years after the murders. Read the article by clicking here.
Even bigger news was made when the “Golden State Killer” was captured – here again, with the help of DNA and GEDmatch. GEDmatch is unwittingly helping to capture criminals. I guess it reminds us of that Bible verse from Numbers 32:23 (KJV) – …be sure your sins will find you out. With the use of DNA evidence, that’s certainly true today. Following is a teaser from an article published May 22nd at Cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio – California investigators in April announced a stunning breakthrough in a decades-old cold case: They used DNA from the “Golden State Killer” and an ancestry website to identify a former police officer as a suspect in 12 homicides and 45 rapes.
The same site, GEDmatch.com, is also credited in helping Seattle investigators identify a suspect in a 30-year-old rape and homicide, leading to Friday’s announcement of an arrest in the case.
The Golden State Killer case is not the first time DNA has been used to find relatives of a suspect in a criminal investigation. Just two years ago, detectives in Cleveland used familial DNA testing to identify a man accused of abducting and raping and 6-year-old girl and trying to abduct another child.
But the high-profile Golden State Killer case is causing experts to debate the privacy implications of using genealogical data from open-source sites, like GEDmatch, in criminal investigations.
We can only speculate on what the future holds – but it looks like consequences may be closing in on murderers and rapists as DNA testing becomes even more popular.
Click here to read another interesting article titled The Ethics Behind Using Genealogy Websites to Find Crime Suspects, posted May 29, 2018 LiveScience.com.
