(gentle music) - Welcome to SciencePub, a monthly series, exploring the dynamic and exciting scientific world around us.

I'm your host, Nancy Coddington, Director of Science Content for WSKG Public Media.

Happy International Women's Day to those women who are breaking glass ceilings, moving science forward through their hard work and dedication, and to the women who inspire us every day.

Thank you, thank you for all that you do.

This season of SciencePub, we have a great lineup of speakers and topics ranging from a merging research on autism to exploring ecology through podcasts.

Tonight's talk is, "Solving Crimes Through Genetic Genealogy."

After a brief review of DNA history, we'll delve into the fascinating case of the Golden State Killer, we'll explore potential uses of genetic genealogy, from finding a long lost relatives to solving cold cases, many experts in the field believe that every law enforcement agency could benefit from having a genetic genealogist on their team.

After this talk, we'll see if you agree.

Our guest speaker tonight is Toby Kirschmann, a veteran DNA analysis who spent a decade working for the California DNA Data Bank, before moving to Saratoga Springs in 2017.

After serving with the New York State Police Forensic Investigation Center, she founded DNA Investigations, a company dedicated to bringing genetic genealogy expertise to law enforcement agencies and the community.

So impressed by the leads that generated in the Golden State Killer case, Toby has made her life's work to educate the public and law enforcement about as many capabilities.

Welcome, Toby.

- Hi, thank you, Nancy.

Thanks for having me.

Hi, everybody.

- So glad that you were with us tonight.

Before we get started, can you tell me what first attracted you towards genetic genealogy?

- It was the Golden State Killer case.

Yeah, I was working really hard on that case in California, and I have a few slides that I'll be showing about that, but we were going down the wrong track and we weren't finding this person.

And so just all of a sudden, one day he's in court, he had been arrested, and it was because of genetic genealogy.

So that was a big eye opener for a lot of people, and I was one of 'em.

- Well, that's really fascinating.

I'm really excited to hear what you have to share with us tonight.

So why don't we go ahead and get started?

- Okay, cool, thank you.

I have three sections, and then Nancy, I'll ask for your help on this.

This sections boil down to a little bit of background first on DNA.

So that gets us all on the same page.

Then maybe I'll do a pause, see if there's any discussion in the chat.

And then the middle part is where I'm gonna have a few slides on the nitty gritty of the DNA science.

And so I think everybody could benefit from understanding the old way, like the old fashioned way that law enforcement has used DNA.

And then why that's different from what has just happened in the past couple of years.

So that's gonna be the middle chunk.

And then at the end, I'm gonna talk about the Golden State Killer case and just do a quick walkthrough about how that launched every law enforcement agency into possibly using this to solve their crimes.

So those are the three parts and they have natural breaks in the middle.

So I'll do a pause and see if there are any questions or if we're ready for some discussion.

So, first of all, we've gotta say, Happy International Women's Day to everybody.

And also I wanted to dedicate this talk to Rosalind Franklin, a special lady, because she had a lot to do with the discovery of the structure of DNA.

And she passed away at a young age, and before any of her cronies received the Nobel Prize for the structure of DNA.

So that's an award that's not offered posthumously, she didn't receive it posthumously, she probably should have.

So today in my heart I'm awarding it to her.

Okay, so, Happy International Women's Day, everybody.

All right, so a few slides just on the basics of DNA, and no matter who you are, what age you are, or what you do for your career, or however your brain is set up, everybody should today be able to understand DNA and these couple simple terms.

And it's just because now DNA is accessible to all of us.

If you wanna take a look at your own DNA, you totally can.

And so it's a really different world today.

So here are the few things that you're gonna benefit from just knowing about the simple structure of DNA.

So DNA contains genetic material.

So it's really important for passing on information from a grandparent to a parent, to a child.

So that's how genes get passed on.

And it's the order that is important.

So if you get a gene from your parent that got that gene from their grandparent, it has a very special order, and it's called a sequence.

And so that's what we can do today.

We can actually sequence your DNA, and DNA is made up of these four little molecules that you can see here just represented by A, T, G, and C. And just those four different molecules in a different combination over and over again, makes it such that no one human being is the same as another really except for identical twins, but even they have some differences, it turns out.

Okay, so the other thing, the last thing that you need to know about DNA is that it's really strong, it's really robust.

That's awesome.

Here's my pen, right?

I've been holding my pen, so I put a lot of DNA on it.

And decades later, you can see, you'd be able to tell who's pen this was, it would come right back to me.

And so DNA is really strong and that's super important.

Okay, so the next thing that's good to know about DNA is where it lives.

And everybody probably knows that your entire body is made up of organs and those organs are made up of specialized cells like you've got your skin cells and they're slightly different from your heart cell, blah, blah, blah.

And it's the DNA that's tightly packed in these chromosomes here that is contained inside the nucleus of those cells.

And so it's the DNA that has all of the information to tell those cells exactly what to do to make sure that that organ is functioning correctly, et cetera.

And so what I want you to look at in this slide here is then that middle picture of the chromosome and the little dark bands.

And so this is the first time that you can see that these chunks of chromosomes contain the DNA that's important for a certain trait.

And so, genetics is all about the study of learning about these particular genes, these chunks of DNA and how they command the cell to perform in different ways, 'cause it's really important for all of us to live.

Okay, so now you guys are DNA experts, yay.

And then this slide here I put in because we just were looking at that chromosome.

And so this notion of inheritance is really, really at the basis.

It's the crux of genetic genealogy, and it's that if you share DNA with siblings and with parents and with grandparents, you're also going to share DNA with cousins, first cousins, second cousins, and all that kind of stuff.

And so that is actually what we are able to see today is a larger family tree of your cousins and law enforcement is taking advantage of that.

So back to this slide right here, this is an excellent example of my family.

So I've got a brother and a sister.

And so I envision us down here.

This is just one chromosome, right?

That me, my brother and my sister have, there's three children and all three of us children have the same parents.

We have the same mom and the same dad.

And then what I like about this diagram is that you can see how the parents have pulled information down from their parents and this diagram uses colors.

And so if you look all the way over on the left hand side of this screen, where the red and the blue are, up there, it starts from a grandparent.

And let's just say that that was my grandpa on my dad's side, red and blue.

So he passes genetics down to my father.

And so he has a little bit of red and a little bit of blue that he passes on, but not all of it, just a little bit, and then passed down to me and my brothers and sisters, we all get a little bit of red and a little bit of blue, but you can notice here that they are different parts of the DNA.

They're different genes.

So I'm not gonna have necessarily the same information from my grandpa as my sister has.

Her information might be different or it could be the same, and that's also why sometimes when you are thinking about siblings and how different they are, well, this is why they can receive incredibly different information from all four grandparents.

And so this is autosomal DNA inheritance.

And this right here is the basis of what I do.

Okay, so right here is a natural break.

The next thing I'm gonna talk about is how law enforcement has taken advantage of DNA.

And so I'll just take a moment to check in with Nancy and Julie, maybe.

- So we haven't had any questions yet from our audience, so if you do have questions, please go ahead and put them in the chat.

We will gather them as you ask them and we will get to them.

- Okay, perfect.

So let's jump right back into law enforcement.

So, it started back in the 80s in the UK, there was an immigration case and they just couldn't solve it.

They weren't sure if this child coming back from the UK actually belonged to the family that they were saying he did.

And it just happened at this time that in a laboratory, it was Sir Alec Jeffreys laboratory.

They were developing something called DNA fingerprinting.

And so someone in law enforcement heard about this and said, "Hey, Jeffreys, can you tell if a child belongs in a family?"

And he said, "Yeah, yeah, we can."

And they were like, "Wow, well, why don't you see if this child belongs in this family?"

And so he did, and he's like, "Yeah, the child belongs in this family.

These are the siblings and this is the mother."

And so that was using DNA fingerprinting in the 80s.

And once that case was solved, it was just a year later that law enforcement came right back to that laboratory and said, "Okay, so now can you do a homicide rape too, two of them?"

And he was like, "Okay."

So, everybody tried it and they found the guy.

And so, mid 80s was the first time that they started to see, you could actually use DNA to solve law enforcement cases.

And so this slide that I'm showing here is spinning off to the left, is the analysis that law enforcement started using, and it was about in the 90s.

It went beyond DNA fingerprinting and it was called STR Analysis.

And so that's actually still today what the crime laboratories are using that analysis to identify the perpetrator of a crime.

And so on this left hand side, you have what started in the 80s and what really got rolling and adopted by crime laboratories in the 90s.

And what currently still is the main thing today, the main analysis, the problem is that it's becoming a little bit small, there's only about 20 markers, 20 spots on the DNA that are checked.

And here's the real big problem is that you have to compare it directly to the suspect.

In other words, that person must have already gotten in trouble and gotten their DNA collected, analyzed, and uploaded for comparison.

You already had to have caught in other words, that criminal, at least one time in order to solve a crime this way.

So that's a bummer because not every single criminal gets caught and then not every single criminal that gets caught ultimately has their DNA collected.

Okay, so that's the left hand side, and that's starting from the 80s and then rocking and rolling in the 90s and in the 2000s.

And then currently up to today using STR analysis.

And then on the right hand side is also something that start really rocket and rolling in the 70s, but it's sequencing, and Sanger, Frederick Sanger was I think the first person, the first scientist to realize that you could identify people and compare contrast genomes with SNP analysis.

So on the left hand side, you have STR analysis.

And then on the right hand side, the sequencing has allowed us to compare single nucleotide polymorphisms, is what they're called SNP.

Okay, but the reason that this wasn't adopted in the 90s is it was nowhere near ready.

So it wasn't anybody's fault.

It's pretty advanced.

And so much of the costs had to come down and the machinery had to get smaller and everything, but I want to draw your attention to how many markers you can obtain from an individual if you use SNP testing, SNP testing, and it's between 500,000 and a million.

And then there's also whole genome sequencing, which is sequencing, not just the single nucleotide polymorphisms, but the entire thing, it's little bit more money, maybe takes a little bit longer, but that's also a possibility, just figuring out gene by gene, whatever your sequence is.

And that's where we're headed today, and that's where our capabilities are.

So this is a huge difference.

On the right side, you don't need anymore to have already caught the person like you do on the left hand side.

Now with SNP analysis and for certain withhold genome sequencing, you can identify some DNA that was left on something without that person in the database, you can just identify them with the other cousins that are present.

And so that's a huge difference.

- So can we actually go back to that slide for just a second?

- Yeah.

- So I have several questions.

- Okay.

- One being, looking at the STR on the left with the 20 markers, are the markers the mitochondrial markers?

- No, these are autosomal markers.

Great, great question.

So, mitochondrial and Y-DNA analysis are also possible, but they're specific, they're specialized, mitochondrial DNA is really good for and got its start with degraded samples.

It's really good for missing persons departments and that forensic scientists, if you have a bone that was left out for years.

And now there's mitochondrial sequencing.

And then also if you talk about Y-STRs, that's possible, lots of crime labs have Y-STR analysis but it's also very limited and nowadays we have Y-DNA sequencing.

So, there's either the STR way to do it or there's the sequencing way to do it, but right now for this slide, we're just talking autosomal DNA.

- Okay, great.

What would be the cost difference between an STR versus doing the sequencing?

- I have a slide on that later.

- Okay.

- We'll get to it, it's very important.

That's a great question.

- Great, a couple more questions.

So often a state lane will return a partial profile or a mixed sample, and it's not enough material for a comparison.

Can a private lab using sequencing to do those comparisons?

- A private lab would first want to try with a bit more modern technology to get an STR profile.

They'll make one attempt to just repeat, to try to get that whole STR profile, but yes, they can sequence that DNA and we can locate the individual through genetic genealogy.

So you don't have to do STR analysis.

- And can you remind us what the STR stands for.

- Short tandem repeat?

And so for all of these little colored green and yellow spots, those are locations on the chromosomes, the different chromosomes.

And so that's how they make their basis of comparison.

They use short tandem repeat analysis, and they take a look at these particular sections of the chromosome and they get what allele you have from your father and what allele you have from your mother.

And then they're able to compare those little numbers to the rest of the database, and hopefully pull out a direct match.

- Okay, thank you so much.

- Yeah, sure.

Are we good moving forward?

- Move forward.

- Okay, okay.

So the next two slides are just, I'm gonna toggle back and forth.

And this is to visually give you an idea of how evidence flows through a laboratory.

So on the left, in the middle, you start with a crime scene sample and say, for example, you have a spot of blood and you collect a swab of it.

So that swab gets sent to the laboratory, the crime laboratory, and they barcode it.

And there's very specific chain of custody tracking.

And then the laboratory begins extracting the DNA from that blood.

And that's in the third little image, and then after the DNA is extracted in a laboratory, gets loaded onto a genetic analyzer for the most part these days.

So this is the machine, the 3,500 that will do STR analysis.

And it will look, it will amplify the section, or it will identify the amplified sections of the the STRs and allow them to be put into a file for upload to CODIS that database.

Okay, so that was a lot of words, but all I'm gonna say here is that you get a crime scene sample, goes to the laboratory.

The DNA is extracted, put onto a machine, and then sent to a database.

So comparing that to what's possible now with sequencing, the new technology, it's the same old crime, it gets sent to the laboratory, and the DNA gets extracted.

And the extracted DNA is put onto a sequencer.

The DNA is sequenced, a snip chip probably is used.

That's the easiest.

And that information, the single nucleotide polymorphism file is analyzed.

And then the results are uploaded to two databases and neither one of those are CODIS anymore.

So CODIS right now can just take the STR data.

It can't really handle these giant files from sequencing files, but GEDmatch and FTDNA are both currently accepting law enforcement, sequenced profiles.

And they take the profiles from law enforcement agencies of a rape or homicide or whatever.

And they compare that to their database of members that have elected to allow law enforcement to search.

Okay, so just going back and forth, here's the old, and here's the new, so you can see as a forensic scientist, your job doesn't change too much.

DNA's collected the same, and even the machinery, you have an analyzer here on your bench top, and now you could just put this MySEQ FX sequencer on your desktop.

And so it's very easy.

It'll be very easy for laboratories to get up and running with that.

Okay, so just moving along, I wanted to talk a couple of slides about why this happened, because I feel like crime laboratories were a bit blindsided, like all of a sudden sequencing is everywhere.

It's so possible.

And I feel like they were left behind a little bit.

So here's what happened.

In the year 2000, it became possible for individuals to have their own genome sequenced.

And it was like the dawn of the Direct-to-Consumer companies.

And those are companies like Ancestry and 23andMe, MyHeritage, Family Tree, and Living DNA.

And there's a lot of them.

And actually, they're constantly changing and constantly improving.

And I think right now, 23andMe has decided to focus more on health panels and medicine, which is a good idea, and Ancestry is still much more like the, who is your grandfather and stuff like that, but lots and lots of changes.

So many changes, it's really hard to keep track, actually, it's a bit overwhelming, but this started in 20,000 and it's 2022.

So that's only like 20 years is not a lot, right?

But these are private companies.

They had venture capital.

They didn't have to deal with the constraints and the validations and the training and just everything.

And accreditation that crime laboratories have to have.

So they went fast in other words, they blazed through all of this sequencing.

And this is the graph that I was thinking of for that previous question.

This graph shows you from the year 2000 on the X axis down here, what happened with sequencing the genome.

And so if you were like, I'm gonna have my genome sequenced, it's cool that we can finally do that, and the year is 2000 when it first happened, you would need $100 million, which is the Y axis.

So not gonna happen, right?

So for most people, we had to just wait it out, but thankfully there were enough academic laboratories applying for grants.

There were research laboratories working really hard and it just worked.

They learned and learned and the cost of sequencing plummeted.

So over these last two decades, it went from like, there's no way in 1000 years I would ever be able to have my genome sequenced too, if you hit a sale on a weekend, you can have your genome sequenced for 49 or $59, right?

It's Ancestry goes on sale or they have their 23andMe sales and they're not doing whole genome sequencing, but it turns out you don't need more than a million markers of information to put your place on the planet in place with all the other humans that are in that database, you don't need more than a million pieces of information.

So the snip files are just fine for these DTC companies.

- So Toby, I have a question on the access.

So there are several companies, especially being private companies, do genetic genealogy companies have access to all the same resources.

Is that information shared?

- Do the genetic genealogy companies have access to the same information?

No, they all have their own, just private databases.

Is that what you mean?

- Yes, yeah.

And then is law enforcement able to actually access those databases?

- No, the only one here that law enforcement can access is Family Tree DNA.

And that's because they decided to offer law enforcement par their database.

But as a person buying a kit from Family Tree DNA, you can choose, you can say, I want my DNA to help law enforcement, or I do not want my DNA, right?

So there are people in Family Tree DNA that do not like law enforcement may not access their data or their cousins, yeah.

So the only thing that law enforcement can access is a third party company database called GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA.

Those are the two, but it's enough, it's working.

- And so talking back about CODIS, who would actually have accessibility to CODIS?

Is that something that is still being used?

- It is, it's awesome.

The CODIS database is awesome.

It's operated by the federal government, the FBI, and it got all firewalls, nobody gets to touch it.

And only the laboratories, there's like the eldest Andes and Estes, like the state and the national and the local laboratories.

You have to be signed up and approved and vetted and have approved operators and you have to have a CODIS administrator and it has to be law enforcement.

- Okay.

- So these databases are different, GEDmatch and FTDNA are privately held companies, that's different.

- And so, would somebody be able to have access to those, or again, would you have to have those correct credentials?

- Yeah, so you don't have to have as many credentials as you would for CODIS, but there are very specific ins and outs that you have to follow for law enforcement to have access to these databases.

So essentially, they have to apply and get accepted and that kind of thing, but instead of the federal government controlling it, the GEDmatch Pro, it's called by Verogen, the company, they're controlling it and holding the data securely, et cetera.

And they're the ones that are allowing law enforcement in huge difference.

- So we have a question, what does 23andMe or the other Direct-to-Consumer DNA companies, or what do they do with a sample once it gets sent in with that information?

- So that's not exactly my area of expertise, but I can rifle off what I have learned, my opinion.

So you order a kit and you either spit in a tube or do some buckle cell collection and you mail that off.

It's received by the Direct-to-Consumer company.

And it goes into its laboratory for processing a lot like the second slide that I showed, those laboratories would have a MySEQ, some sequencing instrument and snip chips are quick and affordable.

So that's always your go-to.

Whole genome sequencing is really good for very degraded samples or bone or hair, hair shafts, you can find out who left a hair shaft nowadays with sequencing, but for a company like 23andMe, it's gonna be, they receive your DNA sample, they extract it, they sequence it with a chip and that data gets uploaded into their database and then compared against the rest of their members at 23andMe, so then you find out your cousins.

- That's great.

So is using saliva the only option with those Direct-to-Consumers?

Or can you actually have like a hair sample to send in?

- Yeah, so there are companies, for example, one of them, Estrea is a new company in California.

They're doing great things and they're really good with hair.

So they're like the go-to hair company, but more and more companies are being, they're developing protocols for using sequencing to do stuff like that too.

- Great, thank you so much.

Keep going.

- All right, okay, so this is the last slide on this whole law enforcement thing.

Okay, so I think that there's a little bit of this that's happening and I find myself, this is how I understand it, 'cause I'm really into music and I'm always a little bit bummed when we hit the next technology, right?

I had these awesome CD collect, this big collection and it was like alphabetized and then all of a sudden, we're listening to our music in a car on our phone, where did my CDs go?

You can't even give your CDs away anymore, but this is what technology does and there's absolutely no stopping it.

And so I think that's what has happened in the last 20 years, law enforcement had to pick something and they were like, okay, STR, we're gonna do STRs.

Everybody's gonna do it.

We're gonna have a big database, all, and they all got on the same page and they got their labs up and running.

But meanwhile, this other stuff was in the background, cranking, cranking out the next iteration and the future.

And so that's where we are right now with sequencing technology.

And another example is like a phone, every couple of years you have to get a new one.

You almost can't keep up with it.

And so that's what's happening in DNA.

Okay, so this is another natural pause where we're gonna leave law enforcement laboratories.

And now in these next slides, I'm gonna talk to you about investigators and how once you get DNA from a crime scene sequenced, how you can use that to solve a crime.

And this is where I introduce the Golden State Killer case, et cetera.

So if there's no questions before we leave.

- We actually do have a couple more questions.

So you talked about how companies don't share information.

Are you aware of any that have been subpoenaed or enforced?

- Yes, for example, Ancestry was subpoenaed five times in 2021, all five of those instances were for white collar crimes, like identity theft, for example, not for genetic genealogy, and I think all, but one of those was successfully denied by the Ancestry lawyers.

- Wow, well that really would set a precedent, wouldn't it?

- Yeah, yeah.

- Interesting.

- Yeah, so we don't even need Ancestry, we don't need 23andMe.

Yeah, law enforcement is good with the two databases that it has.

- That's great.

Can private sector investigator purchase access to these databases?

- No, I don't think so.

Everything has to be transparent and you have to go through the law enforcement channels.

So it would have to be you're applying on behalf of an agency and then that agency would be vetted and accepted, yeah.

- Okay, super great, thank you so much.

- Okay.

- Okay, last little chunk of slides here.

So this is where you really start to understand what genetic genealogy is.

And then this is the part of the presentation that I do.

This is what my business offers, I'm offering to help law enforcement agencies solve their crimes.

I have nothing to do with the laboratory anymore, I used to work in a lab, but not.

So I just help the investigators choose whatever laboratory is best for the evidence that they have from their cases.

We get that DNA processed.

And that's when I sit down and I help that investigator.

So this slide right here shows you that every single thing started with adoptees and that's who we have to thank.

And I didn't mention it, but lemme go back to this slide, that red line right there, that's the $1,000 mark.

And that was the price point at which people were like, okay, I'll do it.

And really those people were adoptees.

So we have adoptees to thank for getting genetic genealogy off and just really running, just it's incredible.

So thank you, thank you, adoptees.

In the next three slides, I'm gonna toggle back and forth to show you that using genetic genealogy, using DNA to help find the parents of an adoptee is exactly the same as finding a killer and is exactly the same as identifying human remains.

So for example, this is a diagram of an adoptee shown here as a little baby that was given up at birth or whatever circumstances and does not know who the mother or the father is.

And then if you take that person's DNA and you put it into GEDmatch or FTDNA, or whatever, you will get matches.

You will get thousands of matches because so many people love this and that's why it's a success.

So I show one smiley face here, which is just one match.

And the company, GEDmatch or FTDNA tells me how well this person is matching the adoptee.

And that information is given in Center Morgans.

And so this diagram here is a first cousin match.

And so the Center Morgans would be like maybe 900 or something like that, right?

This is an excellent match.

If you are an investigator and you have your DNA sequenced, and then you take a look at these matches and you get a first cousin match, you've just won the jackpot.

And the chances of solving your case are very good.

So this is just, oh, so here's an adoptee, a first cousin example.

So next slide I'm gonna show you what it looks like if you wanna solve a cold case.

So you take the DNA sample and say it's from a rape, and you have it sequenced in a laboratory, that laboratory puts the sequencing data file into GEDmatch or FTDNA, and FTDNA, and you get back cousins.

If you get back a first cousin match, you've just won the jackpot and you're really excited.

And it's the same thing for identifying human remains.

If you have an old bone, amendable teeth are awesome, if you have teeth, you're probably gonna solve that case.

So you do the same thing.

You send the tooth to a laboratory for sequencing, they take that sequencing data, they upload it to the companies for you.

You sit down at your computer and you take a look at the cousins, and it's those cousins that you place in these family scaffolds, and you just start working them out and identifying those family members.

Okay, so now what I'm gonna do is breeze through a couple of slides of the Golden State Killer, because if you really wanna understand genetic genealogy and how it got its start, this is a very good case to be familiar with.

So this pictured here, he's known as the Golden State Killer.

Now, his name is Joseph James DeAngelo, and he's in prison.

He'll be in prison for the remainder.

So I worked at the California DNA Data Bank from 2007 to 2017.

And it was crazy, it was a frenzy.

We were trying to find Joseph James DeAngelo.

We were trying everything.

We tried a couple of new things that's actually, out of our desire to find him was how Proposition 69 got passed, which was the arrestee provision.

So it was kind of like, because of him that we were like, okay, let's all start to just collect arrestee samples, 'cause I think we may have missed him.

And then we also set up something called the D3 Program, which was deceased DNA data bank program.

And that was set up because, well, what if he had died in prison before he gave a sample?

Right, so we were just trying to do all these crazy things.

And this is me and the DNA bolt.

So after we were working like crazy, very secretly, this team was formed, and this is my buddy Monica Czajkowski on the far right.

And on the far left is Kirk Campbell.

And those two are from Sac County, DA, and Monica would call me or email me.

And she would say, "Do you have this guy on your database?"

And I was looking and I was like, "Yes, we have him."

And she was wanting to find the one that we didn't have already, right?

That was our goal.

We wanted to find Joseph James DeAngelo.

So this team after they caught wind, that they could use genetic genealogy and do some reverse engineering of family trees, they decided to form this team and give it a shot.

So this was the first genetic genealogy team that existed.

And in the middle here, we have Paul Holes, Steve Kramer and Melissa Parizot, Steve Kramer in the middle.

I have two slides.

I end my program with his two slides.

So the weeks flew by for these people and what they started to do, they were overseen by Barbara Rae-Venter who is like a super awesome genetic genealogist, and she would guide them and she was like, start building trees for these matches, go back, use public records, they use obituaries social media.

Facebook is really good, really good, Instagram, even LinkedIn, whatever, yeah, using whatever.

And then also they got an X match, which was really awesome.

They were able to differentiate the maternal line from the paternal line.

Okay, so in a matter of days of these five people working together, they came up with six possible suspects and they were so excited and they turned them over to Barbara Rae-Venter, and she said, "Okay, that's awesome, you guys have six suspects, that looks good.

Your work looks good."

And then she said, the notes, all the case files say, when a victim did live, they reported that the guy had blue eyes.

And so she queried Prometheus and GEDmatch.

And it turns out only one suspect had blue eyes out of these ones.

So, she delivered one name to close the case and she delivered Joseph James DeAngelo.

And that was him, it turns out that he had outsmarted authorities for decades because of the skills that he learned in the Navy and then also as a police officer.

And then these are the two slides that I'm gonna end on and I'm gonna throw out some numbers.

This slide is talking about traditional investigation.

And then the next slide is going to be comparing it to investigation using genetic genealogy.

So 43 is the number of years that this case was cold.

15 is the number of law enforcement agencies in California that were involved directly.

650 is the estimated number of detectives that worked the case, 200,000 is the estimated number of man hours that people put in to solve this case.

10 is the number of million of dollars that it's estimated the four decades of cold case cost.

8,000 is the number of suspects that were investigated.

300 is the number of the suspects that were surveyed and swabbed.

And zero is the number of leads that were delivered.

And then comparing that to this investigation using genetic genealogy, $217 is how much this SNP profile cost, five is the number of full-time law enforcement agents that worked the case.

63 is the number of days that it took to develop one suspect.

And one was the number of leads that were delivered.

So this is my last slide, and I wanted to end it with a picture of my intern, setting a flower on a local grave for a case that I would love to help solve someday, if someday genetic genealogy would be the appropriate step.

And that's it.

- Toby, that was really fascinating.

And I'm gonna believe at the end, the difference in, yeah, how many people were part of trying to solve this case for such a long period of time, and that sold for 43 years, did you say?

- 43, yeah.

- 43 years, and how much money was it to do the genetic genealogy?

- $217 for the SNP profile, which is a little bit more than it is nowadays, right?

- That's amazing.

- Yeah, yeah, it is.

- Yep, oh, wow.

So we do have lots of questions I'd love to jump into, do you have a sense of what the rate of maybe a false positive would be?

And I think that's in sense of confirming an identity.

- Yeah, so no, I don't know about a rate, but the nice thing is that you can always check it.

So for example, if you hadn't done that eye color check, you would take those six suspects.

And this is pretty common because for example, what if there's brothers in a family and you're looking for a rapist, you have to do traditional investigations.

You have to use location is huge.

And then the law enforcement agency has to perform a DNA comparison.

So my job is really easy.

I just deliver the leads, sometimes it's a couple first cousins and we're not sure which one it might be.

It could be a set of brothers, but what the law enforcement agency has to do is they have to collect a surreptitious DNA sample from, they prioritize their suspects, like this is probably the guy, and then some order of priority.

And then one by one, they'll go through and they'll collect DNA and compare it back to the evidence.

So they really do need that sample in CODIS, if they can get it, it's so helpful.

It keeps genetic genealogy, just like a tip from a hotline, somebody calling in and saying, I think you should check out so and so, that's like essentially what genetic genealogy becomes.

- That's really fascinating.

- Yeah.

- So what would be the most amazing or memorable case of your career so far?

- Hmm, well, even though I was on the wrong side, it's definitely the Golden State Killer because when, all of us, all of us were texting each other who solved it, who did it?

How do we know?

It was silent, all of the forensic scientists.

I was in aunt Julie's kitchen when I learned in April of 2018 of his arrest, I'm never gonna forget that, she had to deal with me, but most recently, I'll tell you about another case to practice.

We practice on adoptees, right?

And there's a really neat case that I just solved, actually my team solved it.

I've set up a team of retired law enforcement personnel who are really interested in helping other law enforcement agencies solve their harder cases, 'cause they can go on for a long time.

And so I'm teaching them how to do genetic genealogy and we're practicing on individuals that say, okay, right?

And just yesterday I had a discussion with a man and revealed to him our hypothesis and that we think we found his father and he couldn't get off the zoom call with me, and my dinner was ready.

My family was waiting for me and I was just sitting there with him, and I just sat there with him.

And so I was touching, so these are really incredible cases to solve, whether it's for somebody looking for a family member or solving a community's cold case, it just makes an impression.

It's just so nice.

- Oh, it does.

It's such important work on so many different levels, either connecting families together or bringing some closure to some unsolved cases.

So if somebody really wanted to get into this and do some of the work that you are doing, certainly, this would be the beginning stages.

They don't have access to CODIS, how would they go about either approaching their local police department?

How could someone go around getting into the work that you do?

- Yeah, so it's getting much more popular.

There's so much out there.

There's a lot of education that's cropping up, which is awesome.

In fact, Henry C. Lee has a program right now, a graduate program and it's relatively new, but I've heard excellent things about it.

And you just can't go wrong.

So you can learn yourself, if you don't learn very well with discipline, with all of these like zoom classes or whatever, you can do more of a program like the Henry C. Lee, I have interns.

So if you're in college still, I have interns, I always carry interns.

I'm excited this summer, I'm hoping to offer exclusively Sienna College, an internship program, hopefully, maybe two interns so that that's in the works.

But even if you're retired, you can help so much.

And also right now, I am talking to the local genealogy society to set up a DNA special interest group because a lot of those people are getting really good at these skills.

And so anyway, in a nutshell, my suggestion is to just start doing it and start reaching out, reach out to people like me, other businesses like mine there's a few around and if you get good at it over the next couple years, I suggest you start your own business.

I think there's gonna be a lot of work.

- That's great, and we do have a link to Toby's organization, which we will post in the chat.

Do matches need to be confirmed via another method or will genetic genealogy stand up in court?

- So whenever it has entered court, it stands.

One example is the NorCal rapist, which was the second case, right behind the Golden State Killer that Sac County DA solved.

And actually they solved that case in 45 minutes because they had a really awesome match.

So when that case went to court, I have the transcript and you can tell that there's like an argument that comes out and they're trying to cast out and it didn't go anywhere.

And I think it's because at the fundamental basis, it's the same science and we've all been through the proof.

We've all been through those court cases in the 90s and just thinking about OJ Simpson, and just all these court cases, so scientifically it's still DNA.

It's just a different way of looking at it, it's just looking at who's sharing DNA and putting a big family tree of all those cousins together and then finding your rapist right in the middle of it.

- So would you perform an STR type to confirm the match with the DNA traces?

- Yes, at the very end, that's the best way to do it.

So, if I have a SNP profile, SNP profile goes in, I see cousins and I build, and I develop some suspects that's the information as a genetic genealogy that I deliver back to the agency, I say, go look at these people.

So then the proof is collecting DNA from those people, either a trash sample or a surreptitious DNA sample, or you could just straight up and ask people sometimes.

And they're like, okay.

Yeah, so you have to have that final STR profile.

Especially today, there is a court case going, I think it's an Idaho case.

It was an exoneration, we're watching that because I think that that case didn't have anything in CODIS.

And I think we're gonna go there, but right now, that's the best way to do it.

- And when these files, so when you do it, the DNA extraction, and then you have that file.

What is the file name that is created?

And is there a standard that's followed across the different organizations?

- I'm not really sure about that.

It's just called, I know it as raw DNA, like a raw DNA file.

So if you're an Ancestry, for example, if you have your DNA there, you own your DNA, you own your raw DNA, and that was proven in court years ago or whatever, that every individual owns their raw DNA file.

There is a step that is called a bioinformatics step, and that's in between the machinery and the lasers and all the sequencing.

And so there's this smoothing and fenegaling and I don't know a thing about it.

I don't do it at all, but that's the bioinformatic stuff that's necessary to put it into the databases for comparison and to get cousins out.

- Okay, great, thank you.

We have a question about if someone doesn't have either enough saliva, for whatever reason that they can't do the Ancestry or the 23andMe, if they had their sibling take the test, would the data be pretty much similar?

- No, I could tell you that they were siblings, but you're gonna have totally different DNA than your full brothers or sisters, in some cases it's helpful.

It depends on what your question is, ultimately, if you're just an Ancestry type heritage hunter, like you just wanna find some family answers, using a brother or sister might be enough for you to find those answers, but you would never want to rely on that, I don't think.

There's also shenanigans that occur.

They're called non parental events or surname DNA switches.

Yeah, just want your DNA, it's yours.

- That's good to know.

Are you aware of any DNA company that takes fingernails?

- I'm not, but I think they could, because they might be looking for DNA under the fingernail or something like that, but I don't know.

I don't know about what kind of DNA, the quality of DNA that is contained in a fingernail.

I don't know.

Good question.

- That's just good question.

- Write that down.

What kind of fingernail?

- Some other deeper dive of research can be.

- Yeah, please.

- What are some of the obstacle that you come across that cause genetic genealogy cases to be difficult to solve?

- Yeah, so the most difficult situation is non parental events.

And that just means that you might have a surname from your father, but it turns out that you don't have his genetics.

And so there was a little bit of a switcheroo, who knows what happened, lots of things could have happened, but that's really common.

It's a bit more common and people know, there's all these surprises when you do your DNA, I even have a surprise in there, I haven't looked into it, but it's like on deck.

So whenever I'm ready, I have a nice mystery to solve.

Yeah, but definitely when the lines, the problem arises when the public records and the DNA don't match, when they're pointing down two different roads, that's really difficult to piece through.

- Yeah, that would be really tricky.

- Yeah.

- So we have a question that is this type of technology being used to find unidentified criminals of the past.

So like the Zodiac killer, for example.

- Oh yeah, it could be for sure.

I don't know if it is, I'm not sure who has jurisdiction.

I know that there's a few agencies involved in that, but for my work, you have to have a good DNA sample to start.

It's pretty difficult to start doing genetic genealogy if you don't have a really nice DNA sample, like mixtures are still hard, in the future, we might be able to, 'cause it's just changing like wildfire, but those were our current pitfalls.

We're still not really good at that.

And we still do need high quality single source DNA.

So yeah.

- Do you happen to know what the first case solved with the use of genetics was?

- It's funny, that's a hard one, 'cause I think Colleen Fitzpatrick would say was the Phoenix Canal Murders.

And she solved that with focusing on surnames.

So she used genealogy, but she just used something like, you could use an STR, like Y-STRs?

So that's not using sequencing or anything.

And then some other people might say, oh, it might have been, or they all came and they all came into fruition in 2018.

So it's almost like they were happening simultaneously, like CC Moore and Barbara Rae-Venter and Colleen Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press, they were just all, it was just all happening at the same time.

And so I think it was just like, boom, boom, boom.

They'd probably argue, would probably argue.

I dunno, maybe somebody knows, maybe if they could say that in the chat, maybe they don't know.

- Right, so question about specifically MyHeritage, Direct-to-Consumer, do law enforcement upload DNA from crime scenes because they allow free uploads.

Is that true?

- No, it costs law enforcement, like I think $700 plus a ton of paperwork upfront, right?

You have to apply and just all that stuff, but there's a $700 or something like that per upload.

Remember you can't do MyHeritage, right?

Just GEDmatch and FTDNA, and often has a database called DNA Solves, which is similar.

And they use it, it's just for their own case, for people that come in and join that database.

But that's a third example.

And I think that there's another database, another one coming on board.

So it's looking good, it's looking good.

This is all good stuff.

- Well, that would be where you would interface with this, right?

- Yeah, yeah, right.

- Do you know where the most sophisticated genetic labs are in the world today?

- Hmm, I don't, there's quite a few actually.

And there's specializing as well.

Estrea is really good for hair, but gene by gene is really good too.

And so any lab that gets going with sequencing has a leg up on this field and there's a lot of them coming up right now.

- In your opinion, do you think the use of DNA to solve crimes is providing a greater deterrent to crime?

- I do, that's a great question.

There's papers on this.

There's a few papers, like somebody studied the effect of just opening up a database of DNA in their state or country.

I think it might have been a paper from Holland or something.

And the studies show that just by having some system in place has an effect on crime.

Great question.

- Do you help regular people who are researching family trees that have hit a brick wall and they can't figure out a group of matches or that next step with looking for relatives.

- Yes, I do.

I don't do it as much as I did in the beginning 'cause it can be a little bit time consuming.

And right now I'm really trying to help law enforcement apply for grants and build their confidence and be like, you got this, right?

But I always really like the interesting family heritage case.

And that's really, when you start to know people and you get involved in their family trees and you really wanna find these mysteries.

So, yes I do.

And you can find more information on my website about that, the things that I offer services.

- And that is in the chat for you to go ahead and follow.

Toby, has there been a book written based on your work?

- There has not, my journal, no.

- Well, you have several articles that have actually been written and published about your work.

I think one was recent, right?

- Yeah, actually.

Yes, yep, yep.

And I did wanna say something there, somebody on LinkedIn brought up the fact that I was misquoted a little bit.

I made the correction, but it didn't go to print, but it was about how fast one of these crimes can get solved.

And anyone who does genetic genealogy can know that it can take from 45 minutes to hundreds and hundreds of hours.

So there, I just wanted make that correction, but yeah, there are some articles.

Yep, maybe one of them.

- There's great.

So I think if you also just Google Toby's name, they will also pop up for you.

We have a high school student who is very interested in forensics, but their country is still in lockdown due to the pandemic.

So do you have any suggestions for how could they build experience in that field during these times that you're not able either to travel or have some of those face to face experiences?

- Yeah, so if you're brave enough, if you're willing to submit your own DNA and practice on yourself, that is a great way to learn genetic genealogy.

And that's how I suggest a high schooler should start if they're in lockdown still because so much of the learning is still online.

And there are no schools that do this yet except for Henry C. Lee, but we're just barely getting education rolling, right?

So yeah, there's lots of stuff online, lots of tutorials, Ancestry has, all of the DTC companies have tutorials.

So use yourself, if you can, or use a family member that donates a DNA sample and just start practicing and use the tutorials that you can find online.

- That's super, thank you.

- Yeah.

- Any suggestions on how to convince police to take you up on your volunteer offer for genetic genealogy services when DNA is available on a cold case?

- Yeah, well, I have to make a correction.

It's not exactly volunteer.

I have a fee for doing genetic genealogy for a law enforcement agency.

It does come with the services provided that are free from a team that I've trained, right?

Which means that we won't leave the law enforcement agent high and dry if there's a really, really hard case.

But anyway, so what was the question?

The beginning of the question, sorry?

- I think this is a person who does some genetic genealogy, who's trying to connect with the police department to help.

- Okay, yeah, just ask them, send an email, call.

There's a lot of cold calling and what I do even today.

Yeah, so someone will take you up on that offer, especially if they're volunteering their time, that's really cool, yep.

- It is definitely.

So Toby, what if any cases that you can share, are you currently working on?

- So there are two, I'll just say local agencies.

I'm not sure how much, I need to have a talk with the agency to talk about how much I can talk about them, but I helped these agencies apply for a grant.

They didn't have any money budgeted for advanced DNA testing.

And so they just received grants.

One of them received a $13,000 grant.

The other one received a $12,000 grant.

And just this week, they sent their evidence or one of them is sending, the other one sent their evidence to the sequencing laboratory.

So those are rolling.

And then there's two others right behind those.

And then there's another one behind that.

And so it seems like it's gaining momentum, which is really exciting.

- That is exciting.

- Yeah.

- We wish you luck on that next case.

And one last time, where can we find out more information about you and your work?

- So I think that the website's a great place to start.

And also I'm on LinkedIn.

And I try to answer my emails in LinkedIn every day, several times a day.

And it's funny, I will say this connecting with people is the way that this is moving forward right now.

It's never been more true and it's very against traditional law enforcement, I think, like the mentality has been, everybody rises in the ranks and there's lots of policy and procedure, but right now, it's just so dynamic, the change that's confronted and the investigators, their heads are spinning.

And we're telling them to do these, move forward and get your evidence sequenced, and they're just like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh.

So it's a wild time and just reaching out and offering to volunteer and just like, yeah, reach out to me, reach out to other people too, and just email and send messages.

And we'll all get there, we'll get there.

- And the link for her company, DNA Investigation is in the chat.

You'll also find in the chat, if you wouldn't mind near the end of our event, taking a moment to offer some feedback on SciencePub in your experience attending these virtual events that helps us to make successful events in the future.

I would like to our guest, Toby Kirschmann, thank you so much for being with us tonight.

This was really fascinating.

- It was really nice.

Thank you so much, Nancy, for having me.

- Our next SciencePub is on Tuesday, April 12th, with guest Dr. Ben Ryan on a fresh look at autism, science, social media, and the search for clues.

Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder with a strong genetic basis.

So join us as we learn more about these genetic risk factors, examining the precise mechanisms by which they affect the brain function and produce changes in social behavior.

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Thank you, and goodnight.

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