The following teaser is from an article posted August 22, 2018 at the Rolling Stone website. The article is the best I’ve seen thus far as deals with the state of DNA – and criminal cold-case research. I recommend you read the full article at RollingStone.com.
For more than 25 years, Christy Mirack’s murder was shrouded in mystery — longer than the beloved Pennsylvania schoolteacher was alive. Mirack was found dead in her home just a few days before Christmas 1992, strangled and badly beaten, her clothes askew as if she had been sexually assaulted. The presents she had collected for her students were never delivered.
The ferocity and seeming senselessness of the crime stunned the community, including Mirack’s younger brother Vince, a medical device salesman. “I always try to keep it out there in the forefront that she was a great person,” Vince tells Rolling Stone. “The children that she taught adored her, the parents did; her colleagues did. [Teaching] was something that she worked for her whole short life, and it was tragically taken away from her — just like that.”…
This past June, however, popular local DJ Raymond “DJ Freez” Rowe, 49, was arrested in connection with Mirack’s brutal death — thanks to the melding of DNA technology and the work of an innovative crop of genealogists.
The schoolteacher’s murder wasn’t the only cold case that recently heated up; at least eight arrests have been made over the last few months, and cold-case units are champing at the bit to tackle more. The magic bullet that has made it possible for law enforcement officials to find their targets? A pastime beloved by hobbyists the world over: the family tree. Specifically, law enforcement figured out that they could team with up with forensic genealogists to create DNA profiles from decades’ old suspect DNA and upload those profiles into genealogy databases, following a gnarled family tree until it bears fruit.
