How unlikely family history website transformed cold cases including NorCal rapist investigation
LAKE WORTH, Fla. - On Halloween night in 1996, a man in a skeleton mask knocked on the door of a house in Martinez, California, handcuffed the woman who greeted him and raped her. Two weeks later, he called the dental office where she worked. Investigators tried to track him down through phone records, but got nowhere. They obtained traces of his semen, but there was no match for his DNA in any criminal database.
Last month - two decades after the crime - the Sacramento district attorney’s office tried something new to finally crack the case of this serial rapist, who had attacked at least 10 women in their homes. Investigators converted the assailant’s DNA to the kind of profile that family history websites such as 23andMe are built on, and uploaded it to GEDmatch.com, a free site open to all and beloved by genealogical researchers seeking to find biological relatives or to construct elaborate family trees.
Within five minutes of reviewing the results, the investigators had located a close relative among the million or so profiles in the database. Within two hours, they had a suspect, who was soon arrested: Roy Charles Waller, a safety specialist at the University of California, Berkeley. (Authorities think Waller, dubbed the NorCal serial rapist, began his crime spree with a sexual assault in Rohnert Park in 1991.)
The arrest was the 15th time that GEDmatch had provided essential clues leading to a suspect in a murder or sexual assault case, starting with the arrest in April of Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, in the rapes and murders committed across California in the 1970s and 1980s by the notorious Golden State Killer.
And no one has been more surprised than the two creators of GEDmatch - Curtis Rogers, 80, a retired businessman who could be easily mistaken for just another low-key Florida grandpa in his white Velcro sneakers, and John Olson, 67, a transportation engineer from Texas. Their tiny outfit, which began as a side project, has unintentionally upended how investigators across the country are trying to solve the coldest of cold cases.
Within three years, the DNA of nearly every American of Northern European descent - the primary users of the site - will be identifiable through cousins in GEDmatch’s database, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Science.
“It’s kind of been a shock to all of us how these things developed,” said Rogers, who was drawn to genealogical research by a search for his own family history. “All of a sudden, all this notoriety.”
Olson agreed: “I feel like I’m on a high-speed ride with no way to steer.”
Since DeAngelo’s arrest, law enforcement agencies stretching from Washington state to Florida have turned to the site to crack decades-old cold cases. Increasingly, it’s being used in recent cases as well.
Initially, Rogers was outraged at how law enforcement was using his website, but he now feels proud.
“Within a year I think it will be accepted,” he said. Some genealogists find that notion profoundly problematic, given the many ethical and privacy issues that have emerged as investigators have come to rely on a privately owned family history site to solve crimes.
GEDmatch headquarters, in Lake Worth, is a small yellow house with turquoise shutters, a white picket fence and a palm tree in the yard. A brief tour, the first that Rogers had ever given a journalist, began with his desk, the only desk in the house. He drives there every day from his home half an hour away.
Olson, his business partner, works out of his home in Texas. Three retired computer scientists sometimes help remotely. There are no other employees, but there is a fluffy white cat.
Past the bathroom is a room filled with Rogers’ wife’s paintings and labeled boxes, evidence of his other job as a professional guardian.
The GEDmatch database can now be used to identify at least 60 percent of all Americans of European ancestry through their cousins, according to two recent analyses by genetics researchers. But unlike 23andMe and other big genealogy sites, GEDmatch has no lab. Rather, the site serves as a place where people, who have had their DNA analyzed elsewhere, can locate more relatives and dive deeper into their ancestry.
Some GEDmatch users are family tree completists who collect cousins the way some people collect baseball cards. Other users are retirees digging into old family mysteries. Many others are adoptees and the genealogists who help them use the site’s tools to track down biological parents. More than 10,000 people likely have used the site in this manner over the past eight years, according to two genealogists who teach people how to conduct such searches.
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