October 22, 2024 • 54 mins
Buckle up for an in-depth conversation with Othram’s Dr. Kristen Mittelman. We delve into the fascinating world of genetic genealogy and how it’s revolutionizing the way we solve cold cases. Dr. Mittelman shares insights on the science behind DNA analysis, how Othram is building the infrastructure and metrics for all labs to use this technology, the challenges faced in cold case investigations, and some remarkable success stories that have brought closure to families. Most recently, Othram’s work provided a huge update in the case of 6-year-old Morgan Nick who was abducted in 1995.
Have a case that needs solving? Reach out to Othram:
Solve@Othram.com
Find out more about Othram:
A Revolution in Cold Case Resolution - Othram
____________________________________
Method & Madness is researched, written, hosted, & produced by Dawn Cate
Music by Tymur Khakimov from Pixabay
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REACH OUT:
methodandmadnesspod@gmail.com
CONNECT:
DIVE INTO MORE:
MethodandMadnessPodcast.com
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All sources are listed on the website, under each episode description.
MethodandMadnessPodcast.com
Thank you for listening!
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/method-madness--6241524/support.
Have a case that needs solving? Reach out to Othram:
Solve@Othram.com
Find out more about Othram:
A Revolution in Cold Case Resolution - Othram
____________________________________
Method & Madness is researched, written, hosted, & produced by Dawn Cate
Music by Tymur Khakimov from Pixabay
____________________________________
REACH OUT:
methodandmadnesspod@gmail.com
CONNECT:
DIVE INTO MORE:
MethodandMadnessPodcast.com
____________________________________
All sources are listed on the website, under each episode description.
MethodandMadnessPodcast.com
Thank you for listening!
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/method-madness--6241524/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
This episode contains descriptions of violence that may be disturbing
to some listener. Discretion is advised. Let's dive in. Welcome.
(00:41):
I'm Dawn and this is Method and Madness. Today's episode
is all about solving cold cases through DNA. I'm bringing
you a very special guest today, doctor Kristin Middleman, chief
business development officer at AUTHRAM. Together with her husband David,
they started am in twenty eighteen and through their research
(01:03):
and testing, have done with forensics what was once thought
to be impossible. AUTHRAM specializes in forensic genetic genealogy and
they partner with law enforcement agencies to help bring closure
to unsolved cases, from identifying Jane and John does to
identifying perpetrators in unsolved homicides. I'm going to put all
(01:26):
the information in the show notes, and I encourage you
to check out authram's website and look at the work
they're doing in the cases they've helped solve through science.
The day before I sat down with doctor Christen Middleman,
AUTHRAM had made headlines regarding a twenty nine year old case.
Six year old Morgan Nick had vanished from a little
(01:48):
league baseball game in Western Arkansas in nineteen ninety five.
For decades, her mother, Colleen, has searched for her and
advocated for child safety. On the day that Morgan was abducted,
witnesses saw a man watching the little girl while she
played with other children collecting fireflies, and the man was
(02:08):
described as a white male between twenty three and thirty
eight driving a red pickup truck. Months later, and a
ten minute drive away, a man attempted to lure an
eleven year old girl into his red pickup truck. His
name was Billy Jack Lynx and his truck was examined
for evidence at the time. He later died in prison
(02:31):
in two thousand. Fast forward to October second, twenty twenty four,
news was released that a blonde hair found in Lynx's
truck had been tested and that the DNA taken from
that strand connected Morgan Nick to that pickup truck, successfully
linking Billy Jack Lynx to the abduction of Morgan. We'll
(02:54):
talk more about that and the role that Authraam played
in this huge case update. So let's dive into genetic
genealogy with doctor Kristin Middleman.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Hi, I'm doctor Kristin Middleman from Okram and I really
appreciate you having me on the show and talking about
the technology and how it can help bring answers to
families and victims in these investigations. So thank you my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
You know, there's a lot of interest out there in
both true crime and forensics, so I appreciate you being
here setting the record street on how the process works.
Certainly different than what we see out there on TV,
so I'm happy you're here to tell us how the
process really works.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, it is really different than what you see on TV. Unfortunately,
it doesn't all start an end on the same day, right,
and so what you see is a lot of uncertainty
in these investigations, a lot of questions that remain unanswered,
a lot of people that remain harmed by not having
that certainty and not knowing the answers. I think one
(04:04):
of the first things that touched me when I started
meeting families here at AUSTROM was that their lives are
affected for decades and decades and decades. Even if it's
been sixty two years since the crime, they're still affected.
They still spend countless hours every day trying to get answers.
Living in the same house, hiring law enforcement to try
(04:27):
to get answers. It's like they're stuck in not knowing
the truth, and they need those answers to move on
to that next chapter. It's the same with victims. They
spend every day of their lives wishing they could figure
out an answer as to what happened to them or
what happened to their loved one. Right, it's really devastating
and law enforcement. Law enforcement involved in the investigation is
(04:48):
much the same. I've met detectives that work the same
case for over sixty years, and every single day they
bring that case home, that file, hoping that they found
that you lead that break, and they are devastated. I
met a law enforcement agent in the Candy Rogers case
and he was ninety three years old when he came
(05:08):
to the press release, and he said, I lived this
long to hear the name of this perpetrator, and he
had found her body when he was in his twenties.
It was devastating to see. It affects them, it affects
their family, and then you can imagine everyone that is
a suspect of an investigation and their family they're also affected. Right.
(05:31):
They live under suspicion, whether or not they committed the crime.
They feel like society feels that they might have had
something to do with the crime of a friend, the
crime of a loved one, when they might have had
nothing to do with it. And so this technology is
able to bring certainty to investigations, to bring answers. We
(05:52):
are able to look at the evidence that was left
at a crime scene and tell you who is there,
and that happens whether or not that person is in codis,
whether or not that person is in a known database,
and that allows investigators to be able to actually move
on and solve the case, figure out the information you
(06:14):
brought up. The Morgan's Necks, the Morganix case from yesterday,
that's a case where exactly that the DNA was intractable
to all traditional friends methods. It was rootless hair from
over thirty years ago. It was highly degraded and there
was contamination in place, and so that causes it makes
(06:36):
it almost impossible for traditional friends of investigations to be
able to do a comparison between the family DNA and
that piece of hair. They could not build one of
those profiles. We were able to use forensic great genome
sequencing to actually build a successful profile and without the
shadow of a doubt confirm that Morgan or one of
(06:59):
her sisters were in that vehicle at that time. That's
huge because now investigators can hone in to this part
of the investigation. They know that that truck was involved,
they know the person that owned that vehicle, they know
the timeframe, and they could try to figure out who
else might have known, where that truck might have gone,
(07:20):
what might have been next in order to try and
figure out how to get Morgan back to her family.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Wow. And the fact that there was no route on
the hair that was found, and that used to be
a determining factor on whether or not something could be tested,
and now that's possible. Can you talk a little bit
more about the progress and technology that led to that?
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Absolutely, And so that is why we built at them.
There were too many cases and too many pieces of
forensic evidence that were intractable to DNA testing or to
the DNA testing that existed back in twenty eighteen, and
we started that many people were using medical assays and
consumer essays that we had built a lot of us
(08:06):
here at Offroom had built to actually run forensic evidence.
And one thing I want to say is When you
sequence DNA, it's a consumptive process. So you destroy it,
it's gone forever. You can't go back and sequence it again.
And so it was really important to us to build
methods that were predictable and actually worked with these different
(08:28):
types of forensic inputs. When you go to the doctor
and you give blood, it's fresh DNA, it's single source,
it's ample and quality and quantity. It's stored in the
right temperature and taken straight to a lab to be tested.
You can imagine working with that type of DNA in
order to build a DNA profile is much easier than
(08:51):
working with forensic evidence, where you have rootless hair, burnt remains, exploded, remains,
contaminated DNA always mixtures between perpetrator and victim, mixtures that
include plant DNA from the crime scene, animal DNA from
the crime scenes, DNA that has been exposed to all
(09:12):
the elements and therefore degraded, all of the things that
you can think of that aren't really things that you
worry about when you build a medical assey or a
consumer assey. And so we build forendsic graat Genome Sequencing.
We had to build our own lab and do this
all in house to show people what's possible if you
(09:32):
do this correctly. But our hope here at AUTHORAM is
that this technology is transferred to every state lab, every
other private lab, so that everyone is testing forensic DNA predictably.
Everyone and every case deserves an answer. No one should
have to wait thirty years to find out where their
loved one is like in Morgan's case. No one should
(09:54):
have to wait even five years to find out where
their loved one isvictim should ever go nameless and voiceless,
because that allows a perpetrator to get away with a crime.
And no perpetrator should be able to commit a second
and third, and fourth and fifth crime. And that's what's happening.
We should be able to identify perpetrators the first time
(10:17):
they commit a crime. Standard CODIS testing, which is what
most friends that DNA has been in the United States
for all these decades, is really good at confirming someone's identity,
is really good for what it's built for, which is
to let you know if a perpetrator has committed multiple crimes.
If you get someone's DNA from one crime scene and
(10:39):
they're already in CODIS, you upload that DNA and it
connects them to all these other crime scenes that they
committed the crime for. But CODIS testing is limited to
not being able to infer identity. If the person isn't
in the database and you don't have that hit, then
you're at a DNA dead end. And what we what
(11:02):
we hope we have built, is the next step. If
you are at DNA at end, you don't stop there,
but you build one of these more advanced comprehensive profiles
that have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of markers. You
upload that to a genealogical database that is consented for
law enforcement use, and that allows you to get really
(11:24):
distant relationships. It allows you to get a fifth cousin here,
a third cousin here, a sixth cousin here, and the
distance between each one of those relationships is delineated by
the amount of relatedness for the sample. And so that
allows you to be able to figure out exactly where
(11:44):
a person belongs in a family tree and tell law enforcement,
like we did in Morgan's case, this is either her
hair or one of her sister's hair. That's the only
relationship that would have worked. And so that allows law
enforcement to go back and investigate the rest of their case.
(12:05):
There are hundreds of cases where we identified the victim
and it led to being able to figure out the
perpetrator as well. How does law enforcement solve a crime
if they don't know who the victim is. But once
you know that identity, you can piece together the last
few days of their life. You knew who they were with,
(12:25):
you knew how they got there. You could talk to coworkers,
you can talk to relatives, friends and piece that back together. Also,
when you're able to identify a perpetrator, law enforcement is
able to piece back how they knew the victim, did
they own, the type of weapon that was used, the
type of car that was seen at the crime scene,
get a warrant for their DNA, and finally get justice
(12:48):
for these victims. It's incredible.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
I've been under the impression that not all law enforcement
and all the US states can legally use genealogy. Is
that something you can elaborate on.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Oh, any state can use genealogy. There are some states
that have more regulations and parameters, so law enforcement would
have to say that they're using this tool or whatever
it may be. But every law enforcement agency in the
world can use forends of genetic genealogy to identify a
victim or apperpetrator. I think the main problem is most
(13:22):
people don't know it exists. They don't even know what
this technology is as a tool, and so education and
advocacy is what's missing in order to show people not
only does this tool exist and not only can it
be used, but it's really highly efficient at identifying someone
from a crime scene if the right technology is used
(13:44):
and the right team is used to actually solve the case.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Yeah, with cases like the Golden State killer, for example,
being identified through genetic genealogy, it's interesting that there's still
a lack of awareness in the business. I mean that
was a huge breakthrough at the time.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
I think a lot of I mean I think about
how many law enforcement agents that are out there that
have one of these cases. I mean there's tens of thousands,
and so, you know, really being able to see how
every case is being solved and understanding the technology for
every case, it's really tough. I think once this becomes
something that the federal government funds, maybe even requires the
(14:24):
use of, kind of like for sex assault kits. We
have that Sex Assault Kit initiative where you need to
run the DNA. You can't just leave the kids on
the shelf. Right, and there's this big federal initiative to
run the DNA, there should be an initiative for what
if you did run the DNA and you didn't get
an answer using traditional DNA testing. Now you have a
(14:46):
new backlog of tested kits that are unsolved. Let's attack
that backlog using new technology and being able to identify
the perpetrator so that you can get those answers and
get that perpetrator off the street before or they commit
the next crime. Right, I mean, I think it's going
to take a lot of initiatives and lawmakers putting pen
(15:07):
to paper and funding being created for law enforcement to
be able to use this technology, funding being created for
state labs to be able to adopt this technology and
bring it in house, validation studies, all of the things
that need to happen for people to actually feel comfortable
with the technology, understand the technology, and use it. We've
(15:29):
built the infrastructure and we've shown you that here it
off from. It works, and it works at scale. Right,
you see every single day there's another case announced. You
see the volume of this technology we're able to predict
whether or not we can build a profile before we
consume the evidence or budgets. That's been huge and it
gives law enforcement a lot of comfort in sending in
(15:52):
their cases knowing that we're not going to consume your
evidence unless we're going to be able to bring some
answers in your case. So we've built the infrastructure. You
see MDFI, the multi dimensional forensic intelligence sort of system
that we've been announcing over the last month here at
AUSRAM and showing you users how to use it. That
(16:14):
allows law enforcement and people that have built a profile
here at AUSRAAM in the next few weeks, everyone that
has a profile DNA to be able to use some
of the tools that we've been using and we have
been developing internally that have allowed us to solve so
many cases so quickly. I think by building the infrastructure
(16:35):
and making it available to others publishing it. We have
a research site research at aserom dot com that is
making all of these techniques and methods public a through
player review journal, so that people can see what we're doing.
I think by educating the public by publishing this information,
(16:55):
by giving our tools to others to use, showing the
huge success of this technology has had when used correctly.
We're going to you know, lay down the infrastructure that
people need to drive on these roads with us and
to actually solve their cases correctly as well. It's not
(17:15):
about for us. It's not about being the one that
does it, the leader, the only lab. It's about actually
building the infrastructure so that everyone can do this right.
We know how many unsolved cases there are out there.
There are over three hundred and fifty thousand unsalt homicides
in the United States alone, cold homicides. It's known as
(17:38):
the silent mass disaster. And I'm sure there's more. They're
about fifty thousand unidentified remains. I'm sure there's more. There
are you know, over one million violent crimes per year
in the United States. That's those numbers are crazy, and
no one lab can fix it. Needs to be all
(17:59):
of a working together, and that is our hope. That
is our hope of what we're building. We are a
team of people that are that have come from very
different angles and have worked on genomics issues and DNA
all of our lives, whether it's the engineering part of it,
the software part of it, or we're actually working in
(18:21):
a lab and developing protocols and what we hope we're
bringing in something that is better, more robust, more scalable,
and more predictable. We don't think that if you solve
one or two cases, but you've consumed evidence for fifty
or one hundred cases, you're actually helping criminal justice. Those
(18:42):
victims deserve an answer too, And although true crime is
a big thing and solving one or two cases gets
you on the news and it's exciting, it's actually a
loss to consume evidence for any case without having the predictability.
You wouldn't go to a doctor and have them give
(19:04):
you a treatment if that treatment wasn't expected to be
helpful because they did a clinical trial before and they
have these truth sets where they know that it's helped
people with your condition in the past. We should have
the same requirements in forensics. Every victim deserves an answer,
and it's a societal duty to give them the best
(19:24):
dance to that answer. If someone knew of a cancer
drug that worked ninety five percent of the time, but
there was a cancer drug that worked five percent of
the time and they chose to use that, that would
be malpractice, medical malpractice. But there's nothing like that in
forensics people can just jump in and say I can
test your DNA. There needs to be there need to
(19:46):
be metrics, There needs to be regulation, and the best
technology should be used each and every time for each
and every case because every victim and every victim's family
deserves them.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Integrity is impressive that your work is not proprietary. That
speaks volumes to your advocacy and desire to solve cases.
Can you tell us in Layman's terms, how you're able
to predict whether or not evidence can be tested.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yeah. So, once we extract the DNA or the DNA
extracted from the is extracted from the crime scene evidence,
we go through our feasibility analysis that is a room
and offer them where we measure every aspect of that
piece of DNA, whether it's how much of it is human,
how much of it is contamination, the degradation, everything, everything
(20:39):
you can think of, and we compare that to the
thousands of cases where we've been able to bring answers
to law enforcement. If that piece of DNA looks similar
to something we have successfully analyzed before and given an
answer to, then we feel confident that we know how
to do it and we can proceed. That's what we
call you pass feasible ability and we feel confident, we're
(21:02):
certain we can bring value. If that piece of DNA
is something different or unique, then we pause. We call
law enforcement and we say we would not consume, recommend
consuming this evidence today because we are not certain that
we can bring value. It's akin to a clinical trial.
If it's worked in the past for these exact same conditions,
(21:24):
then we feel confident administering that medicine. But if it
hasn't and no one has ever seen this before, then
we feel like research needs to come into play. We
are I think the only lab, only forensic lab doing
this human identification with advanced DNA technology that actually has
a research side to us. We have an entire research
(21:45):
part of the lab that is separated completely from our
forensic lab. And so when we say stop, that doesn't
mean we gave up on the case. It actually means
that we're going to do mock casework with DNA that
isn't from a car have scene until we can build
a protocol to encompass that type of input as well.
I'll give you an example when we started working the
(22:08):
Sherry Anne Jarvis case or the Walker County Jane Doe.
All that was left was a slide that had paraffine
embedded from all the hyde fixed piece of tissue on it,
and so that type of tissue has never been used
to sequence because formaldehyde actually causes cross links in the
(22:29):
DNA and then it's fixated onto a slide. So when
you take that out, the DNA is broken, so it's
hard to sequence through. So we had to do a
lot of development, a lot of mock casework to be
able to figure out how do you work with from
all the high treet at DNA, how do you work
with parafen paraffin embedded blocks to be able to get
(22:53):
an answer from this type of DNA, And we were
able to figure it out. Once we were we were
able to build a profile for sharing and Jarvis and
identify her as the walker County Jane Delle, allowing law
enforcement to continue their investigation as to who murdered her
and giving her family an answer and her remains back.
(23:14):
But we also were able to solve you know, dozens
of other cases that were sitting in the lab that
had similar treatments. Another one that was treated with romalda
hyde was the case up in Massachusetts. Her name was
escaping me right now, but it was a very well
known case where they thought it was an extra from
(23:35):
the Jaws movie, but it wasn't. I'm going to come
back to her name in a second, but she was
murdered by a serial killer. Her remains were impossible to test,
and we were able to be the only lab that
gave her an identity. And it was a very similar
issue was that romalda high treatment of the remains that
caused the cross links, making it very hard for you
to build that DNA profile. I think that happens more
(24:00):
times than not. A lot of these cases are been together,
exploded remains, burnt remains. In the beginning, we put them
on pause. Now we're able to solve a lot of
these cases because we've worked a lot of the cases
through and brought the protocol back into the labs. Difficult
mixtures between perpetrator and victim where you have a smaller
(24:21):
amount of the perpetrator DNA and you're still needing to
get an answer sequencing profile sequences all the DNA, So
how do you do that right? So we've worked through
those protocols and now we're able to encompass even more cases.
That doesn't mean we can work every case today. There
are cases we still put on pause, but we don't
(24:42):
give up on them. And there's so many cases, hundreds
that we've gone back to law enforcement after we said
wait and said okay, now we can do it, and
then we've gone through and solved with them. But we
feel like taking the risk on the DNA and spending
budgets that don't exist at this point on testing that
(25:03):
might or might not work is actually the wrong thing
to do, because you might actually consume someone's last chance
to justice and you're consuming law enforcement trust. If someone
gives you their favorite case and you consume the evidence
and you don't get an answer for them, what are
the chances that that law enforcement agent will come back
(25:24):
and give you the next case? Not really high. Right,
they've been burnt by the technology, they won't trust it,
and so being able to be predictable allows law enforcement
to trust the process, especially because this is new technology.
And if you solve every case they send you, or
(25:44):
help solve every case they send you, and then you
tell them wait on these two cases and then try
to come back and solve them later, they trust you
more than if you ran every case and consume the evidence,
and then they had to go look at the LASS
superiors at the law enforcement agency and say, I consume
the evidence, it's over. Or how to look at that
(26:05):
family in the face and say, now we can never
get an answer in this case. I feel like technology
is only going to be used universally by everyone if
it's if it's predictable, and so that is the reason
we have that feasibility analysis. And you hear other vendors
(26:26):
tell you, oh, we do QC just like authorm, and
we do this feasibility just like AUTHOROM. What are they
comparing it to? Where are there thousand souls? What are
they ask those questions? If you're a law enforcement agent
out there, a family member out there, what is that QC?
Are they just seeing those DNA in there? What are
(26:46):
they comparing the success to? How are they certain? Would
they give you your money back if they couldn't build
a profile and they went past that. I think these
are important questions to ask because I think that you
can't go back. Even in medicine, if you take a
sample and you do testing and you consume it, you
(27:06):
can go back and call the patient and say can
you give me another sample it went wrong. How do
you do that with a crime scene? You can't call
the perpetrator back for more DNA, You can't go find
more DNA, and so, especially in these cold cases. And
so to me, it should be our responsibility to make
(27:26):
sure that the best possible testing is done for each
and every case, or no testing if you're not certain incredible.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
I've listened to a victim's mother and she's not a loss.
She tells me that a lab consumed the evidence back
in the nineties and she's not sure there's anything left
to be tested. What is the ideal piece of evidence
where you look at it and say, oh, yeah, we
can work with this.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Blood Blood is a good one, I mean, perpetrator blod
is easy. Any kind of single source, ample amount of
quantity of DNA, that's probably where you could possibly use
some of these other methods and still get an answer
because you do have that single source a lot of DNA,
(28:17):
source of perpetrator DNA or victim DNA at the crime scene.
The problem is that's not what you usually have. You
usually have a mixture. You usually have more of the
victim DNA there. You usually have back there even I mean,
even if someone uses their hands to strangle somebody and
you have their DNA on the victim's body, you still
(28:39):
have skin cells from the victim, bacterial cells that work
all over the person's hands, or other things that might
have been there for contamination. This is the problem. It's
nothing is really straightforward when it comes to a forensic
crime scene, and when you're using a really powerful sequencing
technology sequencing everything, and then how can you get the
(29:03):
What you're going to do is you're going to build
a profile. It'll even look like it's working, and you'll
upload it, but you won't get matches because no one
matches the perpetrator, the victim and the bacteria that's there, right,
you don't get you won't have relatives to all that
DNA that you got, And so you have to know
that we have to make the metric actually solving the case.
(29:27):
It's not did you build a profile and upload it,
Did you get an did you run the DNA and
get DNA letters? Sure? But how long did it take
you or did you even get to an answer? Did
it take you seven years to get to an answer
because you didn't get all the relatives? Did it take
you seven days to get to an answer. Did you
never get to an answer that matters? Right? And I
(29:51):
think people are saying, well, I'm running a lab test
and I'm getting DNA letters, so therefore this is working. No,
this is not. It's only working when you're calling up
that law enforcement agent and saying the person that left
that DNA the crime scene is x and belongs to
this family at this generation. That's working. And so we
(30:12):
have a bill that's going to actually be introduced federally.
It's called the Carla Walker app. It has support from everyone.
It's amazing bipartisan support in the House and Senate. We
have support from state labs, we have support from all
these law enforcement agencies, other people working in this field.
But the amazing part of this bill for me, and
(30:34):
my favorite part of this bill is if you consume evidence,
what technology did you use to do this type of
sequencing and how long did it take you to identify someone?
And that to me, being able to have those metrics
go back to Congress so that people can see what
works and what doesn't is actually going to start building
(30:56):
that change. It is unacceptable to consume forensic evidence hoping
you get an answer It is unacceptable to me to
consume forensic evidence and say it's good enough that you
got some DNA letters. It's only good enough if you
actually bring value to that investigation. That investigator is counting
(31:18):
on you, and they are trying. In my experience, those
investigators are trying to do what's best for these family members.
They are actually accountable to them. Many of the law
enforcement agents i've met, you know, cry with family on
the phone weekly. They cry when we give them the answer.
They care, but they're not genomic scientists. If someone walks
(31:41):
in and says I can do this for you, and look,
I've got this website and I've done it and whatever,
they believe it. They don't know the difference between one
technology and another. There's no paper showing you the difference.
There needs to be a congressional report that shows this
technology works x amount of time. This technology works x
amount of time. This is why you need the use
(32:04):
this technology. We can't expect every law enforcement agent to
know who's selling them something that's real versus something that's not.
That's why we need real publications and journals. That's why
we need peer reviewed papers. That's why this needs to
be open to everyone, and the discussion should be had.
But because this is a new tool, and because this
(32:27):
is so powerful that it could truly help identify people
in real time and prevent the next victim. There are people,
so many people that are safe at home today with
their family because of us identifying the perpetrator here at
outhro prior to them becoming the next victim. The Rachel
Morin case is an example of our serial predator that
(32:50):
was a ghost. He came from a Salvador, he had
murdered a woman there, came to the United States without
an identity, attacked the woman and her nine year old
daughter in California, and then murdered Rachel Moran, the Mama
five in Maryland. And we were able to get involved
there and identify him, help the FBI who actually did
(33:12):
the genealogy and caught Heim in Tulsa, Oklahoma with that investigation,
by building that profile, and now he's going to be
prevented from committing the next serial crime attacking the next person.
This technology is so powerful and so necessary, and it
should be used, but it should be used predictably and effectively.
(33:36):
And so it's crazy because you want every case tested,
but you want to be case tested the right way,
and so metrics I think are the first step to that.
Getting lawmakers involved in making decisions on what technologies are used,
I think are the next step. And we're getting there,
and I'm so proud to say that I'm working with incredible,
(33:58):
incredible people in Congress. Senator Cornyan is sort of leading
the way. He has led a lot of these DNA bills,
and he is helping create some of these metrics and
some of these standards, and that I think is going
to be the future of this technology being used correctly.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
How does the process work? AUTHORAM works with law enforcement agencies.
And you've got families that are begging for someone to
test evidence for DNA. Do families reach out to you directly?
Speaker 2 (34:31):
So AUTHORAM only works with the custodians of the evidence,
So law enforcement has to be the one that submits
the case are Why is families and victims right? And
so everything we do is to give families and victims
their answers. And so just because we can't receive the
evidence from a family member doesn't mean you shouldn't contact us.
(34:52):
We have an email address called soul at austrom dot com.
Submit your case, tell us what agency is at our
law enforcement liaisons who are ex law enforcement agents in
the field, many who know the agency you're probably working with.
We have them all across the United States. Contact your
agency and explain to them why we think we might
(35:14):
be able to help in this case, and see if
we can figure out what the bottleneck is. If the
bottleneck is funding, that's my job here at Athroam to
try to fund every case out there where there's feasible
DNA detests using any way possible. That's why I'm on
your show today trying to help educate people on what's possible.
(35:39):
I work with, like I said, Congress, all day long,
trying to create new opportunities and new funding for this
technology for law enforcement, for state labs. I work with
nonprofits trying to fund this technology. I work with media
that will fund the technology, people that will just even
(36:01):
put up a crowdfund from DNA solves and fund the
technology that way. And so if if funding is the issue,
we'll figure out a way. If the issue is the
law enforcement agency isn't comfortable, we'll show them other cases
that have worked that are similar and see if we
can gain their trust until we get to the answer.
(36:22):
I think it's a matter of time before these cases
are tested, and maybe you know making that phone call
or sending that email to us will allow your case
to be one of the next ones.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Sounds like it really goes back to educating law enforcement
agencies and even the general public about what is possible.
So tell me what happens when an old case comes
your way and the evidence was collected during a time
where this forensic testing wasn't done yet, and that foresight
about the handling of the evidence wasn't there yet.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
That's why we built forensic great genome sequencing to include
those types of inputs. We know that a lot of
these cold cases predate code IS testing or DNA testing
at all, and so what we've done is we've created
a process that would allow that evidence to still be tractable.
The degradation possibly that occurs. We're degradation and sensitive now
(37:22):
because it wasn't stored at the right temperature right, It
wasn't stored at all. It was kept as evidence, not
knowing that the DNA was part of it. So I
believe that we're creating a system that will allow for
that type of evidence and the proofs that we have
for that is we've identified people that are over one
hundred years old, over a century old. We've been able
(37:43):
to work crime scenes and identify as sex assault perpetrator
from over sixty two years ago with just what little
was left. Cases like Carlo Walker's forty seven years and
all you had was a stain in the brass straps
still work even though it wasn't stored in any special
way or extracted at the time. There's so many of
(38:06):
those cases to show. I think that's the power of
friends at Great Genome Sequencing, and I'm so proud that
we built technology that can make those cases tractable again
and bring hope to families that maybe feel like it's
hopeless to get an answer. There was a case in
Canada Aaron Gilmore and Susan Tice, same perpetrator had attacked
(38:29):
both of these women and murdered them. And I think
it was Aaron Gilmore's brother that said on the Dateline episode,
he said, we just lost hope. We thought it would
never happen because we had done everything we could for
all of these years, decades and decades, and there was
just no answer. And then when it happened. It was
(38:51):
just surreal to them, and he was arrested and is
serving life in prison now. But to me, I hope
that every family that feels hopeless actually feels hope again
because it is possible. This technology is here and it
will help solve a lot of these cases. And I
(39:12):
hope that every perpetrator that got away with it is
feeling the anxiety that it's just a matter of time
before their case hits our doorstep or someone else's doorstep.
Using this technology over the next few years, it's a
matter of time before they get caught. I think that's
the power of this technology. That's you know, that's why
(39:34):
it's easy to go to bed at night. You can
only solve so many cases in a certain day. You
can only work so many, so many homicides, so many rapes,
so many contemporary cases at once, and the problem is daunting.
There are more than we can get to. There are
other things out there that are obstacles to actually using
(39:56):
the technology at scale, like funding, But I think as
a whole, the proof of concept is there. You can
see what over four hundred examples on our recently announced
cases on the website right now, thousands hundreds more that
we have been linked to in articles all over the
news that are in trial right now, so people know
(40:18):
we've worked those as well, and thousands that have actually
been solved over just the last few years. It's not
something that I'm saying could work, might work one day.
It does work. It works right now. The proof of
principle is there, and so I think that knowing that
that can give people hope, and knowing that that can
(40:40):
potentially become a deterrent for future crime. If you news
you'd get caught, even if you left trace amounts of DNA,
a rootless hair and a crime scene, maybe you think
twice about committing that crime. It's no longer the days
where you're going to get away with it, like this
horrible person that took Morgan got away with it entire life.
(41:01):
And there's obviously multiple crimes that were alluded to at
the press conference yesterday that this person had committed before
and after, and to me, that's devastating. But I don't
think we're going to live in a world very much
longer where you're going to get away with it, And
that is why we buy off them exists and why
(41:23):
I do what I do every single day.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Wow, is there anything you'd like to clarify anything else?
As far as the process. To us layman who have
a basic knowledge of forensics, often based on what we
see in fictional TVs or movies, what's the reality actually
look like.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Yeah, it's not a blox that you can go get
and press a button and make it work.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Right.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
It's kind of like cookiing. I can say it in
layman terms. I can go buy the best oven that exists,
the same oven that all these amazing chefs use, and
I would still probably not make you the best. I
certainly will not be step worthy. And so it takes
real research and real scientists to figure out how to
actually make all this evidence tractable, how to build software
(42:13):
and solutions that can make other people capable of using
this technology. And we are at the forefront of that.
This is the beginning of that error, where this technology
is being really built and packaged in a way that
others can use it. And so I think I would
say be careful. Just because someone says I can do
(42:35):
this too, and makes it look like it's possible on
paper doesn't necessarily mean that they will have the same
success rate, the same outcome the same answers, and as
law enforcement you're working with, you're holding someone's last chance
to justice in your hands. You're holding a family member's
(42:57):
chance to turn a page and be able to go
on with their life. I don't believe in closure when
something this terrible happens to you or someone you love, ever,
so I will not use that word. But I do
believe that the truth allows people to turn the chapter
to the next page of their life, the next part
(43:17):
of being able to feel like you can move on
from something that happened that was so terrible. But if
you don't know the truth, you're consumed by it. And
so as law enforcement agents are holding the key to
someone's truth, to someone's answers that they so desperately need.
Jim Walker, Carla's brother. He touches my heart, which is
(43:39):
why the Carla Walker Act to stay in the Carla
Walker Act. But he went back to the crime scene
hoping that perpetrator would come back. He lived in the
same house for forty seven years, hoping someone would knock
on their door and give them even one clue to
what happened to his sister. Right his whole life was
consumed by getting an answer for Carla, get an answer
(44:00):
for what happened to her, And now he's told me,
I can move on. I can try to help other
families do this. He advocates for this legislation. He advocates
for technology. To me, that's huge. If we know that
we're we're at the forefront of this and we're holding
on someone's ability to get that hope, to get those answers,
(44:24):
to get truth, to move on, then I think we
have to hold ourselves super responsible and make sure that
we're doing what's best for each case, every single time,
at every level of this investigation. Whether we're someone that
can put pen to paper at the government, whether we're
someone that can do that at state government, whether we're
(44:44):
victim's advocacy groups, whether we're forensic scientists doing this in
the lab, whether we are software engineers building new technology
that come out tomorrow, whatever part of this we have,
whether we're the law enforcement agent that actually ha as
access to the evidence, whatever your job may be, I
(45:05):
just hope that everyone holds themselves to the same accountability.
This is just not a number, it's not just a case.
It's someone's life and using the wrong technology could devastate
that family and could let that perpetrator get away with
it again. We have a project five to five. Five
(45:25):
to five is five point twenty five is the Missing
Children's Day in the United States. We're working on this
project with NamUs RTI to identify these murdered children that
have been left voiceless and nameless because of the way
that they were hidden after they were murdered, burned, left
(45:47):
at the bottom of a lake, whatever it may be
that made them impossible to identify so far. And it's
devastating to me because these children will never be able
to get justice, They won't even be able to get
their name back in a piece of history if this
technology isn't used to identify them correctly. Nobody wants a
(46:11):
child to be murdered, right and then there are so
many groups out there working on trying to help children,
missing children, unidentify children. But you have to do it
the right way. You have to do it in a
way that works, in a way that's cost effective, in
a way that gives people answers robustly and predictably. And
(46:32):
we have this partnership with names. There's a paper out
where we did an ancestry study on over six hundred
cases where there was anthropological stuff and now DNA ancestry,
and it shows how this technology can help you get
to that answer. They built a pipeline that is incredible
and for a few thousand dollars can bring back identity
(46:54):
to each one of these children. And that's what five
T five is to us. It's a project that can
show you this doesn't work one time here or there,
but this works at scale. And let's give these first
five hundred and twenty five kids their name back and
possibly justice right Opalaikai Jane Doe is a case that
(47:14):
comes to mind because it was horrifying. This was a
three to six year old little child's body and the
bones had been beaten so many times that you could
see breaks at healed different times. She had broken occipital bone,
she had broken tea. When we were able to build
one of these DNA profiles to lead to her identity,
(47:36):
the father said I didn't have a child. The mother,
when she was contacted by law enforcement, said I'm still
paying child support to the father. For eleven years after
her murder, the mother continued to pay child support to
the father. A Moore was her name. Amore Wiggins Shouldn't
be forgotten, is now buried. Her mother was able to
(47:58):
have a funeral for her. She knows where her daughter is,
and she's able to stop paying the person that actually
murdered her child. There are so many victims in society
and cases like this. There's another case that comes to mind.
That's a child, Evelyn Cologne. She was a fifteen year
(48:19):
old that was pregnant. Her family received letters that said
that she had moved away with her boyfriend and had
a baby boy. We were able to identify her body
from three seat cases that were pulled up at the
bottom of a lake and she was chopped up into
pieces along with her child, her unborn child. When we
(48:40):
identified her and the family was contacted, she wasn't even
a missing person. She wasn't even a case file on
anyone's desk. It wasn't even being worked because the family
thought she was okay. The perpetrator was still writing letters
back to the family saying she was okay, and now
he is standing trial. Is a taxi cab driver in
(49:02):
Queen's I believe, so this is this. These are just
two stories, but there's probably thousands that can sit here
and tell you right now where being able to give
a murdered child their name back allows for the investigation
to continue. We actually talked about Sherry and Jarvis. That's
another one, and so project five two five is very
(49:24):
near and dear to my heart. It allows these voiceless
children to get their name back, but it also allows
you to see that technology can do this robustly and quickly.
It is our goal to do this in the next
couple of years for all of these children, for all
five hundred and twenty five of them, and get to
(49:45):
a resolution within their case. And so not something that
we're saying will happen over the next decade or twenty years,
but something that will happen over the next few months,
and law enforcement will proceed with that investigation until we
get to all the answers. And to me, that's huge.
And if we know that we have technology here today
(50:06):
that works today and that can robustly do this, then
why are we waiting decades to go down the lawn
blinding to do this? Why are we recreating new technology,
Why are we reinventing wheels? Why can't everyone just adopt
the right technology that works today, fund the right people
to actually give answers to these children quickly and robustly.
(50:29):
People age out of waiting for answers. We have one
case that bothers me probably the most here at authorm.
We were able to identify a victim, and when we
identified the victim, the same week that the victim's parent,
(50:49):
the last victim flast parent died of a heart attack.
But it was one week too late, a couple days
too late, and that devastated me. I'm fear other people
in a family were happy to hear the answer that
those parents will never know what happened to their love,
but their child, their loved one, and they could have
(51:10):
they could have gone to their grave knowing. People will say,
you know, this is an old case. Why does it matter,
Why does it have to be done quickly? It has
to be done quickly and correctly because someone out there
is looking for that answer, and so to me, I
think that showing that this is possible as a proof
(51:33):
of concept with five point twenty five coupled with metrics
and results within Congress will allow people to make the
right decisions on using the right technology every time and
quickly so that everyone can get an answer.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
Gosh, that's an incredible initiative project five twenty five, and
your advocacy is really commendable, and I want to thank
you for approaching this with the victim in mind and
the families in mind. I can see this is going
to bring real hope for families.
Speaker 2 (52:08):
Thank you because you give a voice to these stories,
and you're able to get an audience to also give
a voice to these stories and tell them again and again.
We're great at DNA work and building these these this infrastructure,
but you know it takes more than just us. It
takes real advocacy. And so if anyone is listening that
(52:31):
is a family member, please please email solve at authroom
dot com. If you're law enforcement, do you have a
case solved at allthroom dot com. If you're an advocate,
if you're someone whose family has been affected by crime
and you know how much this is needed, then email
solve it all from dot com and I can give
you information on how you can help in your area,
(52:52):
who you can write to, and who you can speak
to to try to get more of this technology and
metrics adopted. Anyone, anyone that's interested at all, and then
research dot authroom dot com talks about all the latest
research and the technology and more depth than the science.
If you have any questions on that again, email us.
(53:13):
We're happy to answer any questions since recent casework puts
every victim back in the carbon ring of life, which
is exactly our hope here at Authurman tells their story.
Share their stories please, because no one deserves their story
to be lost.
Speaker 1 (53:31):
Thank you so much to doctor Kristen Middleman, and thank
you for listening to this episode of Method and Madness.
If you haven't already, please leave a rating or a review,
and don't forget to hit the follow button to connect.
I'm on x at Methodpod, on Instagram at Method at
Maddness Pod, and you can find me on TikTok and
(53:51):
Facebook as well. If you want to chat, suggest a case,
or discuss the episode, you can reach out to me
at Method and Maddness Pod at gmail dot com. Method
and Madness is researched, written and hosted by me. That's
it for this week. Until next time, take care of yourself.
Speaker 2 (54:09):
You matter.
Speaker 1 (54:10):
For crisis support, text hello to seven four one seven
forour one
This episode contains descriptions of violence that may be disturbing
to some listener. Discretion is advised. Let's dive in. Welcome.
(00:41):
I'm Dawn and this is Method and Madness. Today's episode
is all about solving cold cases through DNA. I'm bringing
you a very special guest today, doctor Kristin Middleman, chief
business development officer at AUTHRAM. Together with her husband David,
they started am in twenty eighteen and through their research
(01:03):
and testing, have done with forensics what was once thought
to be impossible. AUTHRAM specializes in forensic genetic genealogy and
they partner with law enforcement agencies to help bring closure
to unsolved cases, from identifying Jane and John does to
identifying perpetrators in unsolved homicides. I'm going to put all
(01:26):
the information in the show notes, and I encourage you
to check out authram's website and look at the work
they're doing in the cases they've helped solve through science.
The day before I sat down with doctor Christen Middleman,
AUTHRAM had made headlines regarding a twenty nine year old case.
Six year old Morgan Nick had vanished from a little
(01:48):
league baseball game in Western Arkansas in nineteen ninety five.
For decades, her mother, Colleen, has searched for her and
advocated for child safety. On the day that Morgan was abducted,
witnesses saw a man watching the little girl while she
played with other children collecting fireflies, and the man was
(02:08):
described as a white male between twenty three and thirty
eight driving a red pickup truck. Months later, and a
ten minute drive away, a man attempted to lure an
eleven year old girl into his red pickup truck. His
name was Billy Jack Lynx and his truck was examined
for evidence at the time. He later died in prison
(02:31):
in two thousand. Fast forward to October second, twenty twenty four,
news was released that a blonde hair found in Lynx's
truck had been tested and that the DNA taken from
that strand connected Morgan Nick to that pickup truck, successfully
linking Billy Jack Lynx to the abduction of Morgan. We'll
(02:54):
talk more about that and the role that Authraam played
in this huge case update. So let's dive into genetic
genealogy with doctor Kristin Middleman.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Hi, I'm doctor Kristin Middleman from Okram and I really
appreciate you having me on the show and talking about
the technology and how it can help bring answers to
families and victims in these investigations. So thank you my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
You know, there's a lot of interest out there in
both true crime and forensics, so I appreciate you being
here setting the record street on how the process works.
Certainly different than what we see out there on TV,
so I'm happy you're here to tell us how the
process really works.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Yeah, it is really different than what you see on TV. Unfortunately,
it doesn't all start an end on the same day, right,
and so what you see is a lot of uncertainty
in these investigations, a lot of questions that remain unanswered,
a lot of people that remain harmed by not having
that certainty and not knowing the answers. I think one
(04:04):
of the first things that touched me when I started
meeting families here at AUSTROM was that their lives are
affected for decades and decades and decades. Even if it's
been sixty two years since the crime, they're still affected.
They still spend countless hours every day trying to get answers.
Living in the same house, hiring law enforcement to try
(04:27):
to get answers. It's like they're stuck in not knowing
the truth, and they need those answers to move on
to that next chapter. It's the same with victims. They
spend every day of their lives wishing they could figure
out an answer as to what happened to them or
what happened to their loved one. Right, it's really devastating
and law enforcement. Law enforcement involved in the investigation is
(04:48):
much the same. I've met detectives that work the same
case for over sixty years, and every single day they
bring that case home, that file, hoping that they found
that you lead that break, and they are devastated. I
met a law enforcement agent in the Candy Rogers case
and he was ninety three years old when he came
(05:08):
to the press release, and he said, I lived this
long to hear the name of this perpetrator, and he
had found her body when he was in his twenties.
It was devastating to see. It affects them, it affects
their family, and then you can imagine everyone that is
a suspect of an investigation and their family they're also affected. Right.
(05:31):
They live under suspicion, whether or not they committed the crime.
They feel like society feels that they might have had
something to do with the crime of a friend, the
crime of a loved one, when they might have had
nothing to do with it. And so this technology is
able to bring certainty to investigations, to bring answers. We
(05:52):
are able to look at the evidence that was left
at a crime scene and tell you who is there,
and that happens whether or not that person is in codis,
whether or not that person is in a known database,
and that allows investigators to be able to actually move
on and solve the case, figure out the information you
(06:14):
brought up. The Morgan's Necks, the Morganix case from yesterday,
that's a case where exactly that the DNA was intractable
to all traditional friends methods. It was rootless hair from
over thirty years ago. It was highly degraded and there
was contamination in place, and so that causes it makes
(06:36):
it almost impossible for traditional friends of investigations to be
able to do a comparison between the family DNA and
that piece of hair. They could not build one of
those profiles. We were able to use forensic great genome
sequencing to actually build a successful profile and without the
shadow of a doubt confirm that Morgan or one of
(06:59):
her sisters were in that vehicle at that time. That's
huge because now investigators can hone in to this part
of the investigation. They know that that truck was involved,
they know the person that owned that vehicle, they know
the timeframe, and they could try to figure out who
else might have known, where that truck might have gone,
(07:20):
what might have been next in order to try and
figure out how to get Morgan back to her family.
Speaker 1 (07:26):
Wow. And the fact that there was no route on
the hair that was found, and that used to be
a determining factor on whether or not something could be tested,
and now that's possible. Can you talk a little bit
more about the progress and technology that led to that?
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Absolutely, And so that is why we built at them.
There were too many cases and too many pieces of
forensic evidence that were intractable to DNA testing or to
the DNA testing that existed back in twenty eighteen, and
we started that many people were using medical assays and
consumer essays that we had built a lot of us
(08:06):
here at Offroom had built to actually run forensic evidence.
And one thing I want to say is When you
sequence DNA, it's a consumptive process. So you destroy it,
it's gone forever. You can't go back and sequence it again.
And so it was really important to us to build
methods that were predictable and actually worked with these different
(08:28):
types of forensic inputs. When you go to the doctor
and you give blood, it's fresh DNA, it's single source,
it's ample and quality and quantity. It's stored in the
right temperature and taken straight to a lab to be tested.
You can imagine working with that type of DNA in
order to build a DNA profile is much easier than
(08:51):
working with forensic evidence, where you have rootless hair, burnt remains, exploded, remains,
contaminated DNA always mixtures between perpetrator and victim, mixtures that
include plant DNA from the crime scene, animal DNA from
the crime scenes, DNA that has been exposed to all
(09:12):
the elements and therefore degraded, all of the things that
you can think of that aren't really things that you
worry about when you build a medical assey or a
consumer assey. And so we build forendsic graat Genome Sequencing.
We had to build our own lab and do this
all in house to show people what's possible if you
(09:32):
do this correctly. But our hope here at AUTHORAM is
that this technology is transferred to every state lab, every
other private lab, so that everyone is testing forensic DNA predictably.
Everyone and every case deserves an answer. No one should
have to wait thirty years to find out where their
loved one is like in Morgan's case. No one should
(09:54):
have to wait even five years to find out where
their loved one isvictim should ever go nameless and voiceless,
because that allows a perpetrator to get away with a crime.
And no perpetrator should be able to commit a second
and third, and fourth and fifth crime. And that's what's happening.
We should be able to identify perpetrators the first time
(10:17):
they commit a crime. Standard CODIS testing, which is what
most friends that DNA has been in the United States
for all these decades, is really good at confirming someone's identity,
is really good for what it's built for, which is
to let you know if a perpetrator has committed multiple crimes.
If you get someone's DNA from one crime scene and
(10:39):
they're already in CODIS, you upload that DNA and it
connects them to all these other crime scenes that they
committed the crime for. But CODIS testing is limited to
not being able to infer identity. If the person isn't
in the database and you don't have that hit, then
you're at a DNA dead end. And what we what
(11:02):
we hope we have built, is the next step. If
you are at DNA at end, you don't stop there,
but you build one of these more advanced comprehensive profiles
that have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of markers. You
upload that to a genealogical database that is consented for
law enforcement use, and that allows you to get really
(11:24):
distant relationships. It allows you to get a fifth cousin here,
a third cousin here, a sixth cousin here, and the
distance between each one of those relationships is delineated by
the amount of relatedness for the sample. And so that
allows you to be able to figure out exactly where
(11:44):
a person belongs in a family tree and tell law enforcement,
like we did in Morgan's case, this is either her
hair or one of her sister's hair. That's the only
relationship that would have worked. And so that allows law
enforcement to go back and investigate the rest of their case.
(12:05):
There are hundreds of cases where we identified the victim
and it led to being able to figure out the
perpetrator as well. How does law enforcement solve a crime
if they don't know who the victim is. But once
you know that identity, you can piece together the last
few days of their life. You knew who they were with,
(12:25):
you knew how they got there. You could talk to coworkers,
you can talk to relatives, friends and piece that back together. Also,
when you're able to identify a perpetrator, law enforcement is
able to piece back how they knew the victim, did
they own, the type of weapon that was used, the
type of car that was seen at the crime scene,
get a warrant for their DNA, and finally get justice
(12:48):
for these victims. It's incredible.
Speaker 1 (12:51):
I've been under the impression that not all law enforcement
and all the US states can legally use genealogy. Is
that something you can elaborate on.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Oh, any state can use genealogy. There are some states
that have more regulations and parameters, so law enforcement would
have to say that they're using this tool or whatever
it may be. But every law enforcement agency in the
world can use forends of genetic genealogy to identify a
victim or apperpetrator. I think the main problem is most
(13:22):
people don't know it exists. They don't even know what
this technology is as a tool, and so education and
advocacy is what's missing in order to show people not
only does this tool exist and not only can it
be used, but it's really highly efficient at identifying someone
from a crime scene if the right technology is used
(13:44):
and the right team is used to actually solve the case.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
Yeah, with cases like the Golden State killer, for example,
being identified through genetic genealogy, it's interesting that there's still
a lack of awareness in the business. I mean that
was a huge breakthrough at the time.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
I think a lot of I mean I think about
how many law enforcement agents that are out there that
have one of these cases. I mean there's tens of thousands,
and so, you know, really being able to see how
every case is being solved and understanding the technology for
every case, it's really tough. I think once this becomes
something that the federal government funds, maybe even requires the
(14:24):
use of, kind of like for sex assault kits. We
have that Sex Assault Kit initiative where you need to
run the DNA. You can't just leave the kids on
the shelf. Right, and there's this big federal initiative to
run the DNA, there should be an initiative for what
if you did run the DNA and you didn't get
an answer using traditional DNA testing. Now you have a
(14:46):
new backlog of tested kits that are unsolved. Let's attack
that backlog using new technology and being able to identify
the perpetrator so that you can get those answers and
get that perpetrator off the street before or they commit
the next crime. Right, I mean, I think it's going
to take a lot of initiatives and lawmakers putting pen
(15:07):
to paper and funding being created for law enforcement to
be able to use this technology, funding being created for
state labs to be able to adopt this technology and
bring it in house, validation studies, all of the things
that need to happen for people to actually feel comfortable
with the technology, understand the technology, and use it. We've
(15:29):
built the infrastructure and we've shown you that here it
off from. It works, and it works at scale. Right,
you see every single day there's another case announced. You
see the volume of this technology we're able to predict
whether or not we can build a profile before we
consume the evidence or budgets. That's been huge and it
gives law enforcement a lot of comfort in sending in
(15:52):
their cases knowing that we're not going to consume your
evidence unless we're going to be able to bring some
answers in your case. So we've built the infrastructure. You
see MDFI, the multi dimensional forensic intelligence sort of system
that we've been announcing over the last month here at
AUSRAM and showing you users how to use it. That
(16:14):
allows law enforcement and people that have built a profile
here at AUSRAAM in the next few weeks, everyone that
has a profile DNA to be able to use some
of the tools that we've been using and we have
been developing internally that have allowed us to solve so
many cases so quickly. I think by building the infrastructure
(16:35):
and making it available to others publishing it. We have
a research site research at aserom dot com that is
making all of these techniques and methods public a through
player review journal, so that people can see what we're doing.
I think by educating the public by publishing this information,
(16:55):
by giving our tools to others to use, showing the
huge success of this technology has had when used correctly.
We're going to you know, lay down the infrastructure that
people need to drive on these roads with us and
to actually solve their cases correctly as well. It's not
(17:15):
about for us. It's not about being the one that
does it, the leader, the only lab. It's about actually
building the infrastructure so that everyone can do this right.
We know how many unsolved cases there are out there.
There are over three hundred and fifty thousand unsalt homicides
in the United States alone, cold homicides. It's known as
(17:38):
the silent mass disaster. And I'm sure there's more. They're
about fifty thousand unidentified remains. I'm sure there's more. There
are you know, over one million violent crimes per year
in the United States. That's those numbers are crazy, and
no one lab can fix it. Needs to be all
(17:59):
of a working together, and that is our hope. That
is our hope of what we're building. We are a
team of people that are that have come from very
different angles and have worked on genomics issues and DNA
all of our lives, whether it's the engineering part of it,
the software part of it, or we're actually working in
(18:21):
a lab and developing protocols and what we hope we're
bringing in something that is better, more robust, more scalable,
and more predictable. We don't think that if you solve
one or two cases, but you've consumed evidence for fifty
or one hundred cases, you're actually helping criminal justice. Those
(18:42):
victims deserve an answer too, And although true crime is
a big thing and solving one or two cases gets
you on the news and it's exciting, it's actually a
loss to consume evidence for any case without having the predictability.
You wouldn't go to a doctor and have them give
(19:04):
you a treatment if that treatment wasn't expected to be
helpful because they did a clinical trial before and they
have these truth sets where they know that it's helped
people with your condition in the past. We should have
the same requirements in forensics. Every victim deserves an answer,
and it's a societal duty to give them the best
(19:24):
dance to that answer. If someone knew of a cancer
drug that worked ninety five percent of the time, but
there was a cancer drug that worked five percent of
the time and they chose to use that, that would
be malpractice, medical malpractice. But there's nothing like that in
forensics people can just jump in and say I can
test your DNA. There needs to be there need to
(19:46):
be metrics, There needs to be regulation, and the best
technology should be used each and every time for each
and every case because every victim and every victim's family
deserves them.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Integrity is impressive that your work is not proprietary. That
speaks volumes to your advocacy and desire to solve cases.
Can you tell us in Layman's terms, how you're able
to predict whether or not evidence can be tested.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Yeah. So, once we extract the DNA or the DNA
extracted from the is extracted from the crime scene evidence,
we go through our feasibility analysis that is a room
and offer them where we measure every aspect of that
piece of DNA, whether it's how much of it is human,
how much of it is contamination, the degradation, everything, everything
(20:39):
you can think of, and we compare that to the
thousands of cases where we've been able to bring answers
to law enforcement. If that piece of DNA looks similar
to something we have successfully analyzed before and given an
answer to, then we feel confident that we know how
to do it and we can proceed. That's what we
call you pass feasible ability and we feel confident, we're
(21:02):
certain we can bring value. If that piece of DNA
is something different or unique, then we pause. We call
law enforcement and we say we would not consume, recommend
consuming this evidence today because we are not certain that
we can bring value. It's akin to a clinical trial.
If it's worked in the past for these exact same conditions,
(21:24):
then we feel confident administering that medicine. But if it
hasn't and no one has ever seen this before, then
we feel like research needs to come into play. We
are I think the only lab, only forensic lab doing
this human identification with advanced DNA technology that actually has
a research side to us. We have an entire research
(21:45):
part of the lab that is separated completely from our
forensic lab. And so when we say stop, that doesn't
mean we gave up on the case. It actually means
that we're going to do mock casework with DNA that
isn't from a car have scene until we can build
a protocol to encompass that type of input as well.
I'll give you an example when we started working the
(22:08):
Sherry Anne Jarvis case or the Walker County Jane Doe.
All that was left was a slide that had paraffine
embedded from all the hyde fixed piece of tissue on it,
and so that type of tissue has never been used
to sequence because formaldehyde actually causes cross links in the
(22:29):
DNA and then it's fixated onto a slide. So when
you take that out, the DNA is broken, so it's
hard to sequence through. So we had to do a
lot of development, a lot of mock casework to be
able to figure out how do you work with from
all the high treet at DNA, how do you work
with parafen paraffin embedded blocks to be able to get
(22:53):
an answer from this type of DNA, And we were
able to figure it out. Once we were we were
able to build a profile for sharing and Jarvis and
identify her as the walker County Jane Delle, allowing law
enforcement to continue their investigation as to who murdered her
and giving her family an answer and her remains back.
(23:14):
But we also were able to solve you know, dozens
of other cases that were sitting in the lab that
had similar treatments. Another one that was treated with romalda
hyde was the case up in Massachusetts. Her name was
escaping me right now, but it was a very well
known case where they thought it was an extra from
(23:35):
the Jaws movie, but it wasn't. I'm going to come
back to her name in a second, but she was
murdered by a serial killer. Her remains were impossible to test,
and we were able to be the only lab that
gave her an identity. And it was a very similar
issue was that romalda high treatment of the remains that
caused the cross links, making it very hard for you
to build that DNA profile. I think that happens more
(24:00):
times than not. A lot of these cases are been together,
exploded remains, burnt remains. In the beginning, we put them
on pause. Now we're able to solve a lot of
these cases because we've worked a lot of the cases
through and brought the protocol back into the labs. Difficult
mixtures between perpetrator and victim where you have a smaller
(24:21):
amount of the perpetrator DNA and you're still needing to
get an answer sequencing profile sequences all the DNA, So
how do you do that right? So we've worked through
those protocols and now we're able to encompass even more cases.
That doesn't mean we can work every case today. There
are cases we still put on pause, but we don't
(24:42):
give up on them. And there's so many cases, hundreds
that we've gone back to law enforcement after we said
wait and said okay, now we can do it, and
then we've gone through and solved with them. But we
feel like taking the risk on the DNA and spending
budgets that don't exist at this point on testing that
(25:03):
might or might not work is actually the wrong thing
to do, because you might actually consume someone's last chance
to justice and you're consuming law enforcement trust. If someone
gives you their favorite case and you consume the evidence
and you don't get an answer for them, what are
the chances that that law enforcement agent will come back
(25:24):
and give you the next case? Not really high. Right,
they've been burnt by the technology, they won't trust it,
and so being able to be predictable allows law enforcement
to trust the process, especially because this is new technology.
And if you solve every case they send you, or
(25:44):
help solve every case they send you, and then you
tell them wait on these two cases and then try
to come back and solve them later, they trust you
more than if you ran every case and consume the evidence,
and then they had to go look at the LASS
superiors at the law enforcement agency and say, I consume
the evidence, it's over. Or how to look at that
(26:05):
family in the face and say, now we can never
get an answer in this case. I feel like technology
is only going to be used universally by everyone if
it's if it's predictable, and so that is the reason
we have that feasibility analysis. And you hear other vendors
(26:26):
tell you, oh, we do QC just like authorm, and
we do this feasibility just like AUTHOROM. What are they
comparing it to? Where are there thousand souls? What are
they ask those questions? If you're a law enforcement agent
out there, a family member out there, what is that QC?
Are they just seeing those DNA in there? What are
(26:46):
they comparing the success to? How are they certain? Would
they give you your money back if they couldn't build
a profile and they went past that. I think these
are important questions to ask because I think that you
can't go back. Even in medicine, if you take a
sample and you do testing and you consume it, you
(27:06):
can go back and call the patient and say can
you give me another sample it went wrong. How do
you do that with a crime scene? You can't call
the perpetrator back for more DNA, You can't go find
more DNA, and so, especially in these cold cases. And
so to me, it should be our responsibility to make
(27:26):
sure that the best possible testing is done for each
and every case, or no testing if you're not certain incredible.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
I've listened to a victim's mother and she's not a loss.
She tells me that a lab consumed the evidence back
in the nineties and she's not sure there's anything left
to be tested. What is the ideal piece of evidence
where you look at it and say, oh, yeah, we
can work with this.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Blood Blood is a good one, I mean, perpetrator blod
is easy. Any kind of single source, ample amount of
quantity of DNA, that's probably where you could possibly use
some of these other methods and still get an answer
because you do have that single source a lot of DNA,
(28:17):
source of perpetrator DNA or victim DNA at the crime scene.
The problem is that's not what you usually have. You
usually have a mixture. You usually have more of the
victim DNA there. You usually have back there even I mean,
even if someone uses their hands to strangle somebody and
you have their DNA on the victim's body, you still
(28:39):
have skin cells from the victim, bacterial cells that work
all over the person's hands, or other things that might
have been there for contamination. This is the problem. It's
nothing is really straightforward when it comes to a forensic
crime scene, and when you're using a really powerful sequencing
technology sequencing everything, and then how can you get the
(29:03):
What you're going to do is you're going to build
a profile. It'll even look like it's working, and you'll
upload it, but you won't get matches because no one
matches the perpetrator, the victim and the bacteria that's there, right,
you don't get you won't have relatives to all that
DNA that you got, And so you have to know
that we have to make the metric actually solving the case.
(29:27):
It's not did you build a profile and upload it,
Did you get an did you run the DNA and
get DNA letters? Sure? But how long did it take
you or did you even get to an answer? Did
it take you seven years to get to an answer
because you didn't get all the relatives? Did it take
you seven days to get to an answer. Did you
never get to an answer that matters? Right? And I
(29:51):
think people are saying, well, I'm running a lab test
and I'm getting DNA letters, so therefore this is working. No,
this is not. It's only working when you're calling up
that law enforcement agent and saying the person that left
that DNA the crime scene is x and belongs to
this family at this generation. That's working. And so we
(30:12):
have a bill that's going to actually be introduced federally.
It's called the Carla Walker app. It has support from everyone.
It's amazing bipartisan support in the House and Senate. We
have support from state labs, we have support from all
these law enforcement agencies, other people working in this field.
But the amazing part of this bill for me, and
(30:34):
my favorite part of this bill is if you consume evidence,
what technology did you use to do this type of
sequencing and how long did it take you to identify someone?
And that to me, being able to have those metrics
go back to Congress so that people can see what
works and what doesn't is actually going to start building
(30:56):
that change. It is unacceptable to consume forensic evidence hoping
you get an answer It is unacceptable to me to
consume forensic evidence and say it's good enough that you
got some DNA letters. It's only good enough if you
actually bring value to that investigation. That investigator is counting
(31:18):
on you, and they are trying. In my experience, those
investigators are trying to do what's best for these family members.
They are actually accountable to them. Many of the law
enforcement agents i've met, you know, cry with family on
the phone weekly. They cry when we give them the answer.
They care, but they're not genomic scientists. If someone walks
(31:41):
in and says I can do this for you, and look,
I've got this website and I've done it and whatever,
they believe it. They don't know the difference between one
technology and another. There's no paper showing you the difference.
There needs to be a congressional report that shows this
technology works x amount of time. This technology works x
amount of time. This is why you need the use
(32:04):
this technology. We can't expect every law enforcement agent to
know who's selling them something that's real versus something that's not.
That's why we need real publications and journals. That's why
we need peer reviewed papers. That's why this needs to
be open to everyone, and the discussion should be had.
But because this is a new tool, and because this
(32:27):
is so powerful that it could truly help identify people
in real time and prevent the next victim. There are people,
so many people that are safe at home today with
their family because of us identifying the perpetrator here at
outhro prior to them becoming the next victim. The Rachel
Morin case is an example of our serial predator that
(32:50):
was a ghost. He came from a Salvador, he had
murdered a woman there, came to the United States without
an identity, attacked the woman and her nine year old
daughter in California, and then murdered Rachel Moran, the Mama
five in Maryland. And we were able to get involved
there and identify him, help the FBI who actually did
(33:12):
the genealogy and caught Heim in Tulsa, Oklahoma with that investigation,
by building that profile, and now he's going to be
prevented from committing the next serial crime attacking the next person.
This technology is so powerful and so necessary, and it
should be used, but it should be used predictably and effectively.
(33:36):
And so it's crazy because you want every case tested,
but you want to be case tested the right way,
and so metrics I think are the first step to that.
Getting lawmakers involved in making decisions on what technologies are used,
I think are the next step. And we're getting there,
and I'm so proud to say that I'm working with incredible,
(33:58):
incredible people in Congress. Senator Cornyan is sort of leading
the way. He has led a lot of these DNA bills,
and he is helping create some of these metrics and
some of these standards, and that I think is going
to be the future of this technology being used correctly.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
How does the process work? AUTHORAM works with law enforcement agencies.
And you've got families that are begging for someone to
test evidence for DNA. Do families reach out to you directly?
Speaker 2 (34:31):
So AUTHORAM only works with the custodians of the evidence,
So law enforcement has to be the one that submits
the case are Why is families and victims right? And
so everything we do is to give families and victims
their answers. And so just because we can't receive the
evidence from a family member doesn't mean you shouldn't contact us.
(34:52):
We have an email address called soul at austrom dot com.
Submit your case, tell us what agency is at our
law enforcement liaisons who are ex law enforcement agents in
the field, many who know the agency you're probably working with.
We have them all across the United States. Contact your
agency and explain to them why we think we might
(35:14):
be able to help in this case, and see if
we can figure out what the bottleneck is. If the
bottleneck is funding, that's my job here at Athroam to
try to fund every case out there where there's feasible
DNA detests using any way possible. That's why I'm on
your show today trying to help educate people on what's possible.
(35:39):
I work with, like I said, Congress, all day long,
trying to create new opportunities and new funding for this
technology for law enforcement, for state labs. I work with
nonprofits trying to fund this technology. I work with media
that will fund the technology, people that will just even
(36:01):
put up a crowdfund from DNA solves and fund the
technology that way. And so if if funding is the issue,
we'll figure out a way. If the issue is the
law enforcement agency isn't comfortable, we'll show them other cases
that have worked that are similar and see if we
can gain their trust until we get to the answer.
(36:22):
I think it's a matter of time before these cases
are tested, and maybe you know making that phone call
or sending that email to us will allow your case
to be one of the next ones.
Speaker 1 (36:37):
Sounds like it really goes back to educating law enforcement
agencies and even the general public about what is possible.
So tell me what happens when an old case comes
your way and the evidence was collected during a time
where this forensic testing wasn't done yet, and that foresight
about the handling of the evidence wasn't there yet.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
That's why we built forensic great genome sequencing to include
those types of inputs. We know that a lot of
these cold cases predate code IS testing or DNA testing
at all, and so what we've done is we've created
a process that would allow that evidence to still be tractable.
The degradation possibly that occurs. We're degradation and sensitive now
(37:22):
because it wasn't stored at the right temperature right, It
wasn't stored at all. It was kept as evidence, not
knowing that the DNA was part of it. So I
believe that we're creating a system that will allow for
that type of evidence and the proofs that we have
for that is we've identified people that are over one
hundred years old, over a century old. We've been able
(37:43):
to work crime scenes and identify as sex assault perpetrator
from over sixty two years ago with just what little
was left. Cases like Carlo Walker's forty seven years and
all you had was a stain in the brass straps
still work even though it wasn't stored in any special
way or extracted at the time. There's so many of
(38:06):
those cases to show. I think that's the power of
friends at Great Genome Sequencing, and I'm so proud that
we built technology that can make those cases tractable again
and bring hope to families that maybe feel like it's
hopeless to get an answer. There was a case in
Canada Aaron Gilmore and Susan Tice, same perpetrator had attacked
(38:29):
both of these women and murdered them. And I think
it was Aaron Gilmore's brother that said on the Dateline episode,
he said, we just lost hope. We thought it would
never happen because we had done everything we could for
all of these years, decades and decades, and there was
just no answer. And then when it happened. It was
(38:51):
just surreal to them, and he was arrested and is
serving life in prison now. But to me, I hope
that every family that feels hopeless actually feels hope again
because it is possible. This technology is here and it
will help solve a lot of these cases. And I
(39:12):
hope that every perpetrator that got away with it is
feeling the anxiety that it's just a matter of time
before their case hits our doorstep or someone else's doorstep.
Using this technology over the next few years, it's a
matter of time before they get caught. I think that's
the power of this technology. That's you know, that's why
(39:34):
it's easy to go to bed at night. You can
only solve so many cases in a certain day. You
can only work so many, so many homicides, so many rapes,
so many contemporary cases at once, and the problem is daunting.
There are more than we can get to. There are
other things out there that are obstacles to actually using
(39:56):
the technology at scale, like funding, But I think as
a whole, the proof of concept is there. You can
see what over four hundred examples on our recently announced
cases on the website right now, thousands hundreds more that
we have been linked to in articles all over the
news that are in trial right now, so people know
(40:18):
we've worked those as well, and thousands that have actually
been solved over just the last few years. It's not
something that I'm saying could work, might work one day.
It does work. It works right now. The proof of
principle is there, and so I think that knowing that
that can give people hope, and knowing that that can
(40:40):
potentially become a deterrent for future crime. If you news
you'd get caught, even if you left trace amounts of DNA,
a rootless hair and a crime scene, maybe you think
twice about committing that crime. It's no longer the days
where you're going to get away with it, like this
horrible person that took Morgan got away with it entire life.
(41:01):
And there's obviously multiple crimes that were alluded to at
the press conference yesterday that this person had committed before
and after, and to me, that's devastating. But I don't
think we're going to live in a world very much
longer where you're going to get away with it, And
that is why we buy off them exists and why
(41:23):
I do what I do every single day.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Wow, is there anything you'd like to clarify anything else?
As far as the process. To us layman who have
a basic knowledge of forensics, often based on what we
see in fictional TVs or movies, what's the reality actually
look like.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Yeah, it's not a blox that you can go get
and press a button and make it work.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Right.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
It's kind of like cookiing. I can say it in
layman terms. I can go buy the best oven that exists,
the same oven that all these amazing chefs use, and
I would still probably not make you the best. I
certainly will not be step worthy. And so it takes
real research and real scientists to figure out how to
actually make all this evidence tractable, how to build software
(42:13):
and solutions that can make other people capable of using
this technology. And we are at the forefront of that.
This is the beginning of that error, where this technology
is being really built and packaged in a way that
others can use it. And so I think I would
say be careful. Just because someone says I can do
(42:35):
this too, and makes it look like it's possible on
paper doesn't necessarily mean that they will have the same
success rate, the same outcome the same answers, and as
law enforcement you're working with, you're holding someone's last chance
to justice in your hands. You're holding a family member's
(42:57):
chance to turn a page and be able to go
on with their life. I don't believe in closure when
something this terrible happens to you or someone you love, ever,
so I will not use that word. But I do
believe that the truth allows people to turn the chapter
to the next page of their life, the next part
(43:17):
of being able to feel like you can move on
from something that happened that was so terrible. But if
you don't know the truth, you're consumed by it. And
so as law enforcement agents are holding the key to
someone's truth, to someone's answers that they so desperately need.
Jim Walker, Carla's brother. He touches my heart, which is
(43:39):
why the Carla Walker Act to stay in the Carla
Walker Act. But he went back to the crime scene
hoping that perpetrator would come back. He lived in the
same house for forty seven years, hoping someone would knock
on their door and give them even one clue to
what happened to his sister. Right his whole life was
consumed by getting an answer for Carla, get an answer
(44:00):
for what happened to her, And now he's told me,
I can move on. I can try to help other
families do this. He advocates for this legislation. He advocates
for technology. To me, that's huge. If we know that
we're we're at the forefront of this and we're holding
on someone's ability to get that hope, to get those answers,
(44:24):
to get truth, to move on, then I think we
have to hold ourselves super responsible and make sure that
we're doing what's best for each case, every single time,
at every level of this investigation. Whether we're someone that
can put pen to paper at the government, whether we're
someone that can do that at state government, whether we're
(44:44):
victim's advocacy groups, whether we're forensic scientists doing this in
the lab, whether we are software engineers building new technology
that come out tomorrow, whatever part of this we have,
whether we're the law enforcement agent that actually ha as
access to the evidence, whatever your job may be, I
(45:05):
just hope that everyone holds themselves to the same accountability.
This is just not a number, it's not just a case.
It's someone's life and using the wrong technology could devastate
that family and could let that perpetrator get away with
it again. We have a project five to five. Five
(45:25):
to five is five point twenty five is the Missing
Children's Day in the United States. We're working on this
project with NamUs RTI to identify these murdered children that
have been left voiceless and nameless because of the way
that they were hidden after they were murdered, burned, left
(45:47):
at the bottom of a lake, whatever it may be
that made them impossible to identify so far. And it's
devastating to me because these children will never be able
to get justice, They won't even be able to get
their name back in a piece of history if this
technology isn't used to identify them correctly. Nobody wants a
(46:11):
child to be murdered, right and then there are so
many groups out there working on trying to help children,
missing children, unidentify children. But you have to do it
the right way. You have to do it in a
way that works, in a way that's cost effective, in
a way that gives people answers robustly and predictably. And
(46:32):
we have this partnership with names. There's a paper out
where we did an ancestry study on over six hundred
cases where there was anthropological stuff and now DNA ancestry,
and it shows how this technology can help you get
to that answer. They built a pipeline that is incredible
and for a few thousand dollars can bring back identity
(46:54):
to each one of these children. And that's what five
T five is to us. It's a project that can
show you this doesn't work one time here or there,
but this works at scale. And let's give these first
five hundred and twenty five kids their name back and
possibly justice right Opalaikai Jane Doe is a case that
(47:14):
comes to mind because it was horrifying. This was a
three to six year old little child's body and the
bones had been beaten so many times that you could
see breaks at healed different times. She had broken occipital bone,
she had broken tea. When we were able to build
one of these DNA profiles to lead to her identity,
(47:36):
the father said I didn't have a child. The mother,
when she was contacted by law enforcement, said I'm still
paying child support to the father. For eleven years after
her murder, the mother continued to pay child support to
the father. A Moore was her name. Amore Wiggins Shouldn't
be forgotten, is now buried. Her mother was able to
(47:58):
have a funeral for her. She knows where her daughter is,
and she's able to stop paying the person that actually
murdered her child. There are so many victims in society
and cases like this. There's another case that comes to mind.
That's a child, Evelyn Cologne. She was a fifteen year
(48:19):
old that was pregnant. Her family received letters that said
that she had moved away with her boyfriend and had
a baby boy. We were able to identify her body
from three seat cases that were pulled up at the
bottom of a lake and she was chopped up into
pieces along with her child, her unborn child. When we
(48:40):
identified her and the family was contacted, she wasn't even
a missing person. She wasn't even a case file on
anyone's desk. It wasn't even being worked because the family
thought she was okay. The perpetrator was still writing letters
back to the family saying she was okay, and now
he is standing trial. Is a taxi cab driver in
(49:02):
Queen's I believe, so this is this. These are just
two stories, but there's probably thousands that can sit here
and tell you right now where being able to give
a murdered child their name back allows for the investigation
to continue. We actually talked about Sherry and Jarvis. That's
another one, and so project five two five is very
(49:24):
near and dear to my heart. It allows these voiceless
children to get their name back, but it also allows
you to see that technology can do this robustly and quickly.
It is our goal to do this in the next
couple of years for all of these children, for all
five hundred and twenty five of them, and get to
(49:45):
a resolution within their case. And so not something that
we're saying will happen over the next decade or twenty years,
but something that will happen over the next few months,
and law enforcement will proceed with that investigation until we
get to all the answers. And to me, that's huge.
And if we know that we have technology here today
(50:06):
that works today and that can robustly do this, then
why are we waiting decades to go down the lawn
blinding to do this? Why are we recreating new technology,
Why are we reinventing wheels? Why can't everyone just adopt
the right technology that works today, fund the right people
to actually give answers to these children quickly and robustly.
(50:29):
People age out of waiting for answers. We have one
case that bothers me probably the most here at authorm.
We were able to identify a victim, and when we
identified the victim, the same week that the victim's parent,
(50:49):
the last victim flast parent died of a heart attack.
But it was one week too late, a couple days
too late, and that devastated me. I'm fear other people
in a family were happy to hear the answer that
those parents will never know what happened to their love,
but their child, their loved one, and they could have
(51:10):
they could have gone to their grave knowing. People will say,
you know, this is an old case. Why does it matter,
Why does it have to be done quickly? It has
to be done quickly and correctly because someone out there
is looking for that answer, and so to me, I
think that showing that this is possible as a proof
(51:33):
of concept with five point twenty five coupled with metrics
and results within Congress will allow people to make the
right decisions on using the right technology every time and
quickly so that everyone can get an answer.
Speaker 1 (51:48):
Gosh, that's an incredible initiative project five twenty five, and
your advocacy is really commendable, and I want to thank
you for approaching this with the victim in mind and
the families in mind. I can see this is going
to bring real hope for families.
Speaker 2 (52:08):
Thank you because you give a voice to these stories,
and you're able to get an audience to also give
a voice to these stories and tell them again and again.
We're great at DNA work and building these these this infrastructure,
but you know it takes more than just us. It
takes real advocacy. And so if anyone is listening that
(52:31):
is a family member, please please email solve at authroom
dot com. If you're law enforcement, do you have a
case solved at allthroom dot com. If you're an advocate,
if you're someone whose family has been affected by crime
and you know how much this is needed, then email
solve it all from dot com and I can give
you information on how you can help in your area,
(52:52):
who you can write to, and who you can speak
to to try to get more of this technology and
metrics adopted. Anyone, anyone that's interested at all, and then
research dot authroom dot com talks about all the latest
research and the technology and more depth than the science.
If you have any questions on that again, email us.
(53:13):
We're happy to answer any questions since recent casework puts
every victim back in the carbon ring of life, which
is exactly our hope here at Authurman tells their story.
Share their stories please, because no one deserves their story
to be lost.
Speaker 1 (53:31):
Thank you so much to doctor Kristen Middleman, and thank
you for listening to this episode of Method and Madness.
If you haven't already, please leave a rating or a review,
and don't forget to hit the follow button to connect.
I'm on x at Methodpod, on Instagram at Method at
Maddness Pod, and you can find me on TikTok and
(53:51):
Facebook as well. If you want to chat, suggest a case,
or discuss the episode, you can reach out to me
at Method and Maddness Pod at gmail dot com. Method
and Madness is researched, written and hosted by me. That's
it for this week. Until next time, take care of yourself.
Speaker 2 (54:09):
You matter.
Speaker 1 (54:10):
For crisis support, text hello to seven four one seven
forour one
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