The Yogurt Shop Murders and Serial Killer Robert Eugene Brashers: Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick on Holograms, Hate Mail, and Homicide

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[00:00:30] [SPEAKER_02] I'm Anya, and today we're going to talk to a woman who's responsible for a lot of cold cases getting solved. Content warning, this episode contains discussion of murder, suicide, and rape. Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick is a figure in crime solving who truly needs no introduction, but we'll give it a go anyway.

[00:00:48] [SPEAKER_01] Her background is in nuclear physics, and she earned her doctorate from Duke University. She spent years working with lasers and holograms.

[00:00:57] [SPEAKER_02] Then in 2005, she published the book Forensic Genealogy. For years since then, she's helped pioneer investigative genetic genealogy, or forensic genetic genealogy, commonly called FIG. She's helped solve numerous cold cases, from unsolved murders to unidentified does.

[00:01:15] [SPEAKER_01] Dr. Fitzpatrick co-founded the DNA Doe Project. She also founded Identifinders International, a company specializing in using forensic genetic genealogy to solve violent crime cases and cases of unidentified human remains.

[00:01:33] [SPEAKER_02] Dr. Fitzpatrick's career is truly remarkable and in many ways singular. So it's no surprise that her name recently came up in yet another big cold case. When the Austin Police Department in Texas announced the identification of serial killer Robert Eugene Brashers as the perpetrator of the vicious December 6, 1991 killings at the I Can't Believe It's Yogurt Shop,

[00:01:56] [SPEAKER_02] where he terrorized and murdered 17-year-old Eliza Thomas, 13-year-old Amy Ayers, and the Harbison sisters, 17-year-old Jennifer and 15-year-old Sarah, lead detective Dan Jackson thanked many different people for their help on the case. Dr. Fitzpatrick was on that list.

[00:02:12] [SPEAKER_01] Today, we will speak with her about her career, which went through a variety of iterations across many disciplines before she actually began her genetic genealogy work.

[00:02:22] [SPEAKER_02] We will also talk about some of the cases that she's worked on. The Phoenix Canal murders, the Ogre Chop murders, the murder of Gwen Miller, the identification of Joseph Newton Chandler, and more. We'll also get a sense of her personality. I love her sense of humor and talking to Dr. Fitzpatrick was awesome. She's a gem, and I really hope you enjoy this conversation, too. My name is Anya Kane. I'm a journalist.

[00:02:45] [SPEAKER_01] And I'm Kevin Greenlee. I'm an attorney. And this is The Murder Sheet. We're a true crime podcast focused on original reporting, interviews, and deep dives into murder cases. We're The Murder Sheet.

[00:02:58] [SPEAKER_02] And this is The Yogurt Shop murders and serial killer Robert Eugene Brashears, Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick on holograms, hate mail, and homicide.

[00:03:51] [SPEAKER_02] First of all, Dr. Fitzpatrick, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. Hello. Thanks for having me. If you can kind of start off with telling us, I know, I mean, I've followed your career, and I know it's taken some twists and turns over the years. But when you were just, I guess, starting out in your professional life, did you ever anticipate that you would become so involved in so many different cold cases?

[00:04:17] [SPEAKER_03] Well, it depends on what you mean by professional life, right? Because where do you want to start? I've had three different careers. So which one are you talking about?

[00:04:28] [SPEAKER_02] I guess for you, what started the interest in criminal side of things, in the murders, in cold cases? And maybe we could start there.

[00:04:36] [SPEAKER_03] I have no idea, actually, because never really was interested in that. I'm not a true crime person at all. And that's a really interesting question, because when I first started with Phoenix Canal or Sarah Yarborough, very famous cases, I didn't, my motive for going to talk to those people, whoever I was talking to, was not so much, oh my God, what a terrible crime. Let me see if I can solve it. It's more like, hey, I just thought of an idea. I wonder if it's going to work.

[00:05:08] [SPEAKER_03] So, you know, the fact, like with Sarah Yarborough, I don't even know when I was told what case it was. And Phoenix Canal, I really, I don't know when I was told what case it was. I don't know. You know, it wasn't from that end. I just thought I had an idea that might work. And that was it.

[00:05:28] [SPEAKER_02] Absolutely. Can you talk us through, you mentioned you've had three different careers. Can you talk us through your initial two careers and then take us into, you know, what has become your career since?

[00:05:38] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, I was always good in science, you know, so I decided to major in physics. I could have majored in a couple of things. Like I was thinking about double majoring in French and physics or languages and physics because I'm multilingual. Well, I love languages. And I didn't I didn't do that. It was a good thing I didn't do that. But it sort of happened. I had a conversation with my dad about college and stuff and what I was going to do.

[00:06:05] [SPEAKER_03] And when I told him I was thinking about double majoring, he said, you really shouldn't do that. And I thought he was talking about, you know, the expense. I thought it would be double expense. And but I think he was right in that studying physics was pretty heavy, you know, took a lot of time. Let's put it that way. It was really, let's say, challenging. And I was away from home for the first time.

[00:06:29] [SPEAKER_03] There's a lot of other like things going on with me, you know, getting away from home, getting a good schedule, you know, knowing how to handle life. Plus studying physics. I did take a lot of language classes, which was good. And I decided physics because I could always do that and do the languages on the side. But I couldn't do it the other way around. So off I went, you know, to study physics. And that just kept going. I majored in physics at Rice University.

[00:06:58] [SPEAKER_03] At the end of that, I was very tired. You know, I just had enough. I actually took a year off. I thought it was going to be forever, but it was a year. And I taught high school in Switzerland for a year. You know, that was not for me. But it was really a good year for me in a lot of ways just to get myself together to know what I really wanted to do. And that really wanted to do was to go back in physics again and have my doctorate in physics.

[00:07:26] [SPEAKER_03] And I wound up going to Duke. And it was kind of interesting because I remember I came home for Christmas that year. And I had all the applications to fill out for all the graduate schools. And I remember even sitting in Kennedy Airport trying to finish them all and then put them in the mail before I left for Europe. Because then some of them would be too late beyond the deadline. I was really procrastinating.

[00:07:53] [SPEAKER_03] And in the end, interesting story, but in the end, Duke was the only one I really completed before the plane took off. And they were the one to give me teaching assistantship and stuff. And so then I left Switzerland. I went back to graduate school at Duke. I did five years. I worked on a nuclear accelerator for five years. And I got my degree. Actually, I had a job before I finished school.

[00:08:22] [SPEAKER_03] So I got a job at Sam Houston State University. Now, that's a big forensic school now. But at the time, I was in physics. I was in a different department. So I was on the path. You know, it was not a publisher parish school, which was fine with me. It was a teaching school, which was good. And I would have developed my own research program. I know that. I was there for two years.

[00:08:45] [SPEAKER_03] And, you know, it was not a good place for me either because it was still a landing point, but it wasn't somewhere I wanted to stay. So in the middle of all that, they had a weekend. It was like a weekend where they had all the students come and have a big, you know, meeting with the teachers and workshops and keynote speakers.

[00:09:07] [SPEAKER_03] And the keynote speaker that year was T.H. Jung from Lake Forest College, who was an expert in holograms. And I had, in the physics building, they had this little holography set up with a laser and a few mirrors and stuff. So I had gone up there and said, hmm, yeah, I made a hologram in college. You know, I went ahead and, you know, I actually was pretty interesting.

[00:09:34] [SPEAKER_03] So, you know, picked up a laser, pointed it, you know, put it through a lens or two, tried to make holograms and they came out terrible. But that picking up that laser, accounted for the next 16 years because I became fascinated with holograms and I wasn't doing very well. All I got was demograms all the time. Nothing worked. And then that man, T.H. Jung, showed up to give the lecture for that keynote. And he made a hologram in front of 2,000 people in that auditorium.

[00:10:04] [SPEAKER_03] And I saw it and I said, wait a minute, I can do that. Wait a minute, how do you get away with that? I'm going up to the physics building at midnight on Friday night. Nothing's moving and I still can't do it. So it took me five years. But yeah, I can do it and I can do it now on my kitchen table if you want. You know, my laser is in the storage shed. I can't do that for you right now, but I could do it. So in the middle of getting the degree in nuclear physics, getting my first job, that school was not the place for me to stay.

[00:10:34] [SPEAKER_03] I was more like cannon fodder, you know, and that's what happens when you get your degree. A lot of times is you wind up staying somewhere for a year or two and they don't pay you a lot. And then you go somewhere really, you know, you get that. It's called being cannon fodder. So getting fascinated with holograms and then seeing this guy really pull off a magic trick in front of this, I was amazed. So I had already kind of decided it wasn't the place for me.

[00:11:03] [SPEAKER_03] And long story short, I turned down jobs all over the country. They were academic jobs, very similar to the one I had, and it wasn't enough. So then one of my students was a woman who had two sons who went back to school. So she was at home and she went back to school herself, got a cum laude degree in physics from our department.

[00:11:28] [SPEAKER_03] And when she left to get her job at Rockwell International in California, I handed her my resume thinking, no way in the world I'm going in industry. And a year later, there was at Rockwell International working. And I got it because on my resume, I said I picked up a laser and made a hologram. And at the time, this was in the 80s, you know, there was so many resumes, people trying to get into aerospace. It was the Star Wars era and, you know, lots of jobs.

[00:11:57] [SPEAKER_03] And they got so many resumes that they were joking when I went, finally got there and had a job that they took the resumes, threw it down the stairwell. And the one that laid on top is the one that they would interview. So somehow mine was on top and I got a job and never thinking I'd go into industry. But now I was in lasers. I wasn't in nuclear physics anymore. Just by virtue of the fact, I picked up that laser that day. Hmm. Life's strange.

[00:12:24] [SPEAKER_03] So there I went, I was working on Star Wars, one of two women at that installation at Rockwell here in Sill Beach with PhDs. So I stayed there three years and I kind of arose to doing some really cool things. However, when I moved to California, I still loved holograms. And that's not what I was doing at work, right? So I built a holography lab in my garage, half my garage. Well, my original garage was an apartment.

[00:12:53] [SPEAKER_03] So I had a one car garage. I made a holography studio in there with an optical table, optical instruments. I bought myself a laser. By day, I was an aerospace engineer. And by night, I was in heaven. I would do whatever I wanted. If I left a screwdriver in a certain place, come back the next day and it's still there. Nobody borrowed it. So, you know, that's what I did in my evenings. And I taught myself optics, lasers, holography.

[00:13:23] [SPEAKER_03] I had a great time. You know, time stopped. I'd go in there and time would stop for me. I'd love it so much. So aerospace, you know, was not doing well at the end of the 80s. Star Wars was going away. Lots of people were going to lose their jobs. And three of my friends walked up one day and said, you know what? We just came back from a job interview. And I said, oh, tell me about it. Oh, it's this company that does holography. It's right.

[00:13:52] [SPEAKER_03] It's about a half an hour away. I said, no kidding. So I raced to my telephone and I call them. I said, I do holography. I have a holography lab in my garage. You know, I'm at Rock, I talked my way into an interview and I got a job with Spectron Development Labs doing holographic applications. So I went from nuclear physics set and then I went to Sam Houston.

[00:14:19] [SPEAKER_03] That was the epiphany about how fun holography was. Saw that keynote. Couldn't stay in Sam Houston. So I went to, I miraculously got a job at Rockwell and lasers. And then after Star Wars was collapsing, I actually got a job doing my absolute favorite thing on the face of the earth. And that was holography, laser measurement, whatever. I expanded around that. I learned, learned, learned, learned, learned.

[00:14:46] [SPEAKER_03] I was, I was working for a 40 person company that was more like an art colony. And many of those people are still my friends today. But of course that company was sold. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm in two years later, I was without a job. So I started my own company and I had been self-employed since 1989. When were you born? 94. Okay. I've been, oh, I'm so old. I've been self-employed long.

[00:15:15] [SPEAKER_03] I've been in this house longer than you've been alive. Oh, you're not.

[00:15:24] [SPEAKER_02] I got carried away. You just, you're doing great. This is fascinating.

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[00:18:48] [SPEAKER_03] Well, so I was, uh, and there, I was sort of a, you know, that's my first two careers were sort of a weird moment of truth. Oh, my God, I really like that. Oh, okay, that's the next 16 years. You know, stuff like that happens. And then when I lost my job, I had my own company for 16 years. I started with my laser lab in my garage. I did my first government contracts in my garage.

[00:19:18] [SPEAKER_03] Government contracting was becoming a cottage industry. That's my friends would joke. So then I eventually got enough contracts. I had a commercial space. I had 10 employees. I had a lot of learning to do as far as business went. You know, I'd say I'm more a scientist than a business person. And I had a chance to take, get an MBA at one point, but I decided not to because I was so tired of school. I did that for 16 years.

[00:19:44] [SPEAKER_03] And again, the winds of change came and swept me away. It went into George Bush was president, excuse me. And he was more of a big company guy with Iraq and oil and aerospace. And we just couldn't compete, you know. And a lot of the smaller companies that did research or more research that would be turned into something in five years, we pretty much got chewed up. And so then I was without a job.

[00:20:14] [SPEAKER_03] I was without a company. You know, we were selling the furniture that day. And I actually had been working on a book for three years. And because as the company was kind of going downhill, I mean, it took a while. It was called Forensic Genealogy. A funny story I tell, I had the book done. I had a publisher. It was going to come out. And the publisher canceled the contract because he said forensics was passé. So I was sitting there crying.

[00:20:43] [SPEAKER_03] The book was done. And my partner, who at the time, he had, until then, he had worked for the United Nations pretty much his whole working life. He had been to 100 countries. He had lived in Nigeria, everywhere. So when I was sitting there crying, he said, you know, I'm thinking about another publisher and what to do. And he said, why don't we publish it ourselves? And I said, we can't do that. No, no. This was 2005.

[00:21:13] [SPEAKER_03] The word self-publish is misstated. We really self-publish. He says, we could publish it ourselves. We can't do that. He says, yes, we can. I worked in a book bindery in Nigeria. And it's not that hard. You know, that Kodak moment stopped me. Okay, of course, we're going to. And we researched the number of pages, the format, the font, you know, how to do pictures. So we wound up opening a publishing company.

[00:21:43] [SPEAKER_03] And doing it ourselves. I own a publishing company. I publish my own books. And because, you know, I had already been doing genealogy for a long time. I was very well known in New Orleans for this. But the day they were selling the furniture from the company, I went to my first genealogy conference in Portland, Maine.

[00:22:06] [SPEAKER_03] And I was at a table with another DNA company called Relative Genetics that is no longer around. And they let me share the table. I couldn't stop selling books. And it was like an epiphany. Well, this is fun. And that's where I started forensics. Because that was forensic genealogy. That was my first book.

[00:22:28] [SPEAKER_03] And that book was more like genealogy, applying science to genealogy, whereas now is applying genealogy to science. It's kind of interesting how that changed. And that was how I got involved in forensics. I just, you have a high tech, hard science background. And you love genealogy. And you put those in the same brain, shake it up. And that's what comes out, a book called Forensic Genealogy.

[00:22:56] [SPEAKER_02] That's incredible. And yeah, I mean, you've really went on a scientific odyssey as far as your career went.

[00:23:03] [SPEAKER_03] I'm sorry. Did I just drag on? You want to edit that down to maybe, you know, a couple of microseconds, you know?

[00:23:11] [SPEAKER_02] We're the laziest interviewers in the business. The more the guest talks, the happier we are.

[00:23:16] [SPEAKER_03] So you are. Okay. Well, we're two Irish people here. We'll never get off this.

[00:23:20] [SPEAKER_02] We'll never. This will go on forever. No, it'll be.

[00:23:22] [SPEAKER_03] Yes. Yes. And I'll be telling you, ask me what I had for breakfast. And I'll be here all day trying to describe and tell you the whole history of breakfast is in Ireland. And then we go into my mom and my grandma and the pancakes she used to make. You started. It's over. We never got to.

[00:23:38] [SPEAKER_02] It used to be crazy when my mom and my grandma, who was literally from Ireland, would be on the phone because they'd be like, okay, God bless. Goodbye. I love you. Talk tomorrow. Blah, blah, blah. This would go on for five hours. And I'd be like, just hang up. But now I do it with my mom.

[00:23:50] [SPEAKER_03] Right, right. And when you, you know, when you had one of those family gatherings and you're getting ready to leave.

[00:23:56] [SPEAKER_02] That's why they invented the Irish Dubai. Because it's like, I just need to leave. I'm not going to tell anyone, you know, because otherwise it's going to be here for hours.

[00:24:02] [SPEAKER_03] Right.

[00:24:03] [SPEAKER_02] Don't want to offend anybody. No, I, God, I, now I'm just like, I'm just going to sneak out, please.

[00:24:09] [SPEAKER_03] Can I just go home?

[00:24:11] [SPEAKER_02] Please. It's a hostage crisis. It's not a party anymore. Yeah, right.

[00:24:14] [SPEAKER_03] Right.

[00:24:16] [SPEAKER_02] So I wanted to ask you about, you know, this kind of is skipping ahead quite a number of years. So if you want to also fill in some of the gap here too. But if you could talk a little bit about the DNA Doe project and sort of how that came to be.

[00:24:29] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, you know, yeah, well, because a lot of people don't know this. What happened is there's a backstory here. I, you know, had, let's say, unbelievable family drama going on. My partner, I mentioned, had died and his family was suing me. And I had, and that lawsuit went on for two and a half years. And it was very, I was so tired of taking care of him. I was his caregiver.

[00:24:59] [SPEAKER_03] He died in the lawsuit. So he left a mess behind. His estate was a mess. I would listen. Listen, we can be friends the rest of our lives. One condition between you and me. Don't make me the trustee of your estate. You got to promise that and we can continue with the podcast.

[00:25:20] [SPEAKER_02] I promise that.

[00:25:23] [SPEAKER_03] Now that we've had that behind us. So I was going through a whole lot there and my family was not very helpful. His family was suing me. He didn't have much help on, you know, anything. Also, other in the backstory in the genealogy community, I had a lot of problems with some people, you know, really making life hard for me. Let me sum that up. I don't want to go into that attacking me all over social media.

[00:25:52] [SPEAKER_03] So let's say that I had no place to go. Really, that was safe in life. So in the middle of all that, you know, I realized, I still realize I have an education. I have experience. I have lots. I have a lot of career left in me, time in me. But I'm anchored with first a very sick partner and then a lawsuit and then hostile people out there in the internet world.

[00:26:22] [SPEAKER_03] And, you know, I was just so tired that I was really hoping and praying, you know, let me, get me off this planet. You know, I got it. You know, when you really are very motivated and you want to do something, but every day you're going, you're making lists of emails and phone calls, estimating, looking at the stuff in his estate. The attorney needs more stuff. You're wondering where the money's coming from.

[00:26:50] [SPEAKER_03] You don't have a lot of bandwidth to really go forward and be creative and do something new. But I got contacted by Margaret Press on Facebook and she said, why can't we do cold cases using stuff like Ancestry, like the SNP testing? Now I had already done Phoenix Canal. I'd already done Sari Yarborough. I'd already done a few cases, a lot of cases, whatever. So she probably already knew I was into that world. And she said, how come we can't do this?

[00:27:20] [SPEAKER_03] And at first, so we got on the phone over Facebook was a little too awkward, you know. So I got on the phone and she said, how can we do that? And my first response was the standard response in the community because Ancestry won't work with us. And then I said, well, wait a minute, we don't need Ancestry. Why don't we go to a separate lab?

[00:27:46] [SPEAKER_03] Because at that time, I think genealogists were already sequencing their own DNA. So I said, it wasn't, I'd say real popular, but it was going on. Now I had lost touch with a lot of the, I'd say, au courant, ongoing developments in genealogy because of all the drama in my life. She said, okay. And then, so we started working on getting a private lab to do SNP testing. And then there was GEDmatch.

[00:28:15] [SPEAKER_03] And we sort of built this pipeline of how to take DNA from a cold case and make it happen. Now, by then I had a catalog of agencies I had already worked with. There was another question that the case we really focused on was the Joseph Newton Chandler case, an identity fraud case.

[00:28:40] [SPEAKER_03] The marshal, who was a very great guy, allowed us the little itsy-bitsy DNA he had left. And we were going to run with this. And he didn't know what we were doing, but he was desperate. So whatever, two little old ladies came to him. This was a case of a man who committed suicide in 2002 around Cleveland. And when they cleaned up the mess, they found out that wasn't his name.

[00:29:07] [SPEAKER_03] Joseph Newton Chandler was a nine-year-old boy who was killed in 1945 in a car accident outside Dallas. So 2002, the marshal researched how, who was he really? And he could only get back to 1978 when the guy walked into a social security office in Grand Rapids, South Dakota. Beyond that, he didn't know who he was. So, you know, he's desperate.

[00:29:35] [SPEAKER_03] And here's two little old ladies walking in his office virtually and saying, hey, we can solve your case for you. Yeah, okay. Well, I'm desperate here. Forward thinking, man. So, you know, what else? I mean, so he gave us that. And the problem was, until then, this was a very interesting part. People don't understand.

[00:29:56] [SPEAKER_03] Until then, if you were an adoptee, you could take Ancestry and there'd be over 50% chance you'd find your birth family. So, you know, we said, okay, we'll get the DNA. We'll do the same thing. The problem was that this was an itsy-bitsy amount of DNA and it was very highly degraded. And it was from a cancer tumor. It was from a biopsy the man had had about 14 years earlier and it had been stored in paraffin.

[00:30:26] [SPEAKER_03] So, it was all chewed up. So, we didn't just, you know, we were concerned because if it's fresh, they take DNA from the guy and he dies. That's one thing. But this was the only DNA sample left and it was in bad shape. So, we had, you know, a number of reasons why this could have failed. And, you know, one of them is that the DNA was so chewed up that we couldn't sequence it.

[00:30:55] [SPEAKER_03] And then another one is it was so chewed up, maybe it wouldn't go up on GEDmatch and work. Because GEDmatch was only working on fresh DNA, saliva samples and, you know. So, there were a number of challenges there that could have sunk the boat, so to speak. It turned out that, well, first thing was there was a genealogist who had had, his dad had died. He had wanted to test him, but his dad had died.

[00:31:25] [SPEAKER_03] So, he had his dad's biopsy sample, his cancer biopsy sample. He brought it to a private lab. He gave him his ancestry data. He says, look, this is what Ancestry does. This is what 23andMe does. Can you take my dad's DNA and make Ancestry and 23andMe-ish data from it? And they said, sure. That's, there's no secret to that. That's been going on in the medical community for ages.

[00:31:53] [SPEAKER_03] So, they made fake Ancestry, 23andMe data, uploaded it to GEDmatch, and it was as if his dad was alive. So, it works. So, Margaret and I saw that and said, wait a minute, we have cancer tissue too. That, okay, cancer doesn't make any difference. So, we did that. And then when it came back, it was so degraded, we just threw the spaghetti on the wall, so to speak. You know, you put it to the lab. Okay, we got a sequence.

[00:32:22] [SPEAKER_03] Let's see if it uploads to GEDmatch. Yep, uploads to GEDmatch. And then we have matches, and we don't know if they're for real or not. You know, it could be the GEDmatch algorithms. You have two, you're comparing two people, and this one falls in the Grand Canyon, and the algorithm keeps going. What happens when it comes back out? Well, what I did, I took my 23andMe data and my partner's 23andMe data, and I degraded it in software.

[00:32:51] [SPEAKER_03] So, if he was missing a SNP, Mr. Chandler was missing a SNP. So was I and my partner. And I threw it on GEDmatch, and I looked at my matches before and my matches after to see if they were the same, right? And it turned out my first ghost on my degraded was match number 13. The other 12 were still there in a different order.

[00:33:16] [SPEAKER_03] And with his, I looked at the matches before it was degraded and after to see if there was any difference. And I got up to number 50, and I didn't see a ghost. I kept going. I said, so therefore, Mr. Chandler's matches must be authentic. Okay, so now we knew, sort of, that we could take cancer tissue.

[00:33:45] [SPEAKER_03] That worked. It could be sequenced, even if it was really degraded. It could be uploaded to GEDmatch, and we really did get matches. There were all reasons why maybe it wouldn't work. And then we had matches that were not going really anywhere, but they were there, Third Cousins and beyond. But we had still half of the DNA we hadn't used yet. So we did it again, got the same answer. But because it's all electronic now, we could add it.

[00:34:15] [SPEAKER_03] And when we added, we had twice as much DNA. A lot more matches came up, and we solved the case. The interesting part, besides everything else, is that I had already done the Y DNA for the marshal, and it came up with the name Nichols. And in our story, when we were doing these family trees, we had a Mr. Nichols. And when we added all the DNA together and put it up, we came up with a new match that connected with a Mrs. Nichols.

[00:34:42] [SPEAKER_03] And they had four sons. We had data on three of them, but the fourth one we couldn't find his death certificate. And that was Mr. Chandler, was Robert Ivan Nichols. So there was a number of reasons why that wouldn't work. It worked, and we solved it.

[00:35:02] [SPEAKER_02] That is incredible. And yeah, it really shows the power of investigative genetic genealogy. I do want to go back a little bit, because we actually just interviewed, not too long ago, Troy Hillman from Phoenix. Oh, yeah. He speaks very highly of you. He's a very nice guy. He's a great guy. His book on the Phoenix Canal Killer just came out. It's really good. Can you tell us about working on that case?

[00:35:31] [SPEAKER_02] And I'm also actually going to throw in Sarah Yarber, too. Just like those early cases. Can you talk us through those?

[00:35:36] [SPEAKER_03] I can. And you know, I want to say that those two departments, the King County Sheriff's Department and the Phoenix Police Department, are two of the most forward-thinking, really open. Law enforcement is not open to anti-gravity devices, right? Or perpetual motion machines. And until that era, genealogists were considered nuisances and annoyances,

[00:36:02] [SPEAKER_03] because well-meaning, they would call the agencies and say, I'd like to help. And the agency will say, well, what can you do? Well, I don't know. What do you want me to do? Well, what can you do? Click. Click. So when I approach both of these organizations, you know, first I had, you know, I have a technical background. So I have some legitimacy, right? I have that coming into the conversation.

[00:36:32] [SPEAKER_03] And I know how to talk to the people. You know, I know how to present myself. So very importantly, I was offering them something. I wasn't just saying, can I help? I was saying, I have a tool that might work and this might help you. So I want to say I was turned down. People would say, yeah, well, I'll call you back. You know, that kind of thing. But these two departments took me up on it.

[00:37:02] [SPEAKER_03] Now, I won't say they took me up and said, oh my God, a really new tool to solve cold cases, you know? No. The Seattle Police Department was very skeptical and was not really keen on being in that meeting. It was two detectives with sport shirts, crew cuts, and, you know, their supervisor told them to go talk to this little old lady, right?

[00:37:28] [SPEAKER_03] So Jody Sass was the Washington State Patrol crime lab DNA analyst in the room. And she's the one that put me in touch with King County sheriffs who were really open to anything. And Jim Allen was the detective. And he had even thought about SNPs. And so, you know, that was the beginning of that.

[00:37:54] [SPEAKER_03] It was an openness to try anything on a case that really needed it. And in Phoenix, it was the same way. You know, I was in there for the ISHI conference. And I didn't know a lot about what went on in the back room, you know, after I called. I didn't realize they thought I was a weirdo, but they couldn't be sure, you know, they couldn't because, you know,

[00:38:21] [SPEAKER_03] I was like had all this background with the Titanic baby and all that stuff. And yet I was presenting something so different. And so it was like walking the yellow line and then falling on the right side where I could go and talk to them. And actually in the meeting I had with them, there was probably eight detectives. I think Troy was there, Dom was there. There was another, their supervisor was there.

[00:38:50] [SPEAKER_03] I can't think of his name right now. And they listened, you know. They were, they really were respectful. And I was, you know, giving a talk to people. You know, you give a talk and you can see when people are fidgeting and they're not really interested. And you can see a talk when people are really with you. And they were really with me. And so going out, they said, well, we have a case we might give you. And I said, great, you know, great, whatever. Went back to the conference.

[00:39:19] [SPEAKER_03] And then a few weeks later, they gave me that Y profile. And the rest is history. I will comment. One thing that happened that is not well known was that they gave me a table of Y profiles. Profiles, like you compare this guy or that one or that. And one of them, at first I picked the wrong column. And so I went ahead and processed that. And I sent it to, I got a name.

[00:39:48] [SPEAKER_03] I sent, I sent it to Troy. And he said, no, no, you did the wrong column. That one is from a piece of chewing gum we found at the scene. I said, okay. And I went back. And it occurred to me in doing that, that this was almost 25 years later. And you could tell who chewed a piece of chewing gum 25 years earlier at a certain place at a certain time.

[00:40:13] [SPEAKER_03] And it really kind of struck me, you know, sort of like the power of, you know, what we were doing. And then, of course, I got the right column. And then the rest is history. The name Miller came up. And then once I gave him the name Miller, my, I didn't know this, but within 15, 20 minutes, he had the person of interest, Mr. Brian Patrick Miller. That took about 20 minutes.

[00:40:37] [SPEAKER_03] And when you think about it, it's like this huge case, you know, and one word solved it. And I'm not, one word was the key to solving it. Now, the PD had to, did amazing stuff after I gave him that word. So you can't say I solved it. You know, I gave them the key.

[00:41:03] [SPEAKER_03] It's like looking at a room through a keyhole and you can't really see anything. Once you're in that room, you see everything.

[00:41:10] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. You handed them the baton and they ran with it and they finished the ring. Oh, wonderful people. They are good people. Absolutely. And you mentioned the Titanic baby. So that was Sydney Leslie Goodwin, who you helped identify.

[00:41:24] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[00:41:25] [SPEAKER_02] Like an unknown child from the Titanic.

[00:41:27] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. I didn't do the DNA on that. I just traced the family around to get the reference samples. And even the samples I could get didn't work out in the lab for many reasons. It wasn't me. It was just the nature of the remains. Yep. So, but I learned a lot about the DNA. And I worked with the armed forces DNA lab again, because my technical background, I can, you know, they appreciate that. And I can talk Turkey with, you know, high level people like that. Doesn't bother me.

[00:41:57] [SPEAKER_02] And then Sarah Yarbrough was, was one of the early ones too. Can you talk us through that one?

[00:42:02] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. That was the first case in 2011. And that was the Seattle police department. And that was Jody Sass, who saved the day by putting me in touch with Jim Allen. And Jim and I, I got the name Fuller. That was a family well-known, you know, a matching, in other words, a matching to genealogist out there named Fuller. And they were descendants of the Fullers that came to Massachusetts in the 1600s.

[00:42:30] [SPEAKER_03] So they were related to the Mayflower Fullers, but they were not on the Mayflower. So these genealogies were very well researched. And I turned that in and, you know, as I say many times, their reaction was something like, we can't arrest somebody because they weren't on the Mayflower. You know, it's, and yeah, so it was, you know, like, what, what do we do, you know, with this?

[00:42:59] [SPEAKER_03] And then make it better or worse. Sarah had a classmate named Elizabeth Fuller, who was one of five daughters of William Fuller. So William Fuller becomes a person of interest because he was in the area at the time the girl was murdered. And he gives us DNA. He's not the killer. He's not the father of the killer. However, he has the same white profile as the killer. And he is a paternal cousin of the killer.

[00:43:28] [SPEAKER_03] So we have the name Fuller. We have the genealogy going back, not to the Mayflower, but the 1600s. And then we have a man who is a cousin of the killer. So what do you do with all that back in 2011? Well, you put it in the paper. And when that came out in the paper, of course, you know, I'm quiet. I don't say go on Facebook and say, hey, guess what? I'm working with the police, you know, right?

[00:43:57] [SPEAKER_03] So when that came out in the paper, the genealogy community exploded against me saying, how could you let the police use my DNA? And it was like all, it was Y-DNA, which is normally, you know, you put your, I have my ancestor on there. I don't have my own name. I don't have my, it's anonymous more or less. I mean, if I could really, I could probably weasel out who, who put it up.

[00:44:25] [SPEAKER_03] But, you know, the name is the thing. And so they exploded because they, they thought, and there was comments by some very well-placed genealogists about they were going to inter, inter, interrogate all the fullers in the Pacific Northwest. They were going to subpoena the DNA lab people into court. And I'm going, no, they weren't. And it was like, I hope you didn't use a bikini profile. In other words, instead of using the whole one, just use three so that it matches, right?

[00:44:55] [SPEAKER_03] Um, and I intercepted a, at one point, I intercepted a, an email from a very prominent genealogist to somebody else. And the, the person said that what I had done was hire a man to say his name was Fuller and bully my way into the Seattle police department, get him in to bully my way into CODIS and saying

[00:45:22] [SPEAKER_03] that I was going to have a major breakthrough in the case. And, but it didn't work out and my work is not good. I charge a lot of money and I'm a publicity hound. And I could tell you the name of that person that wrote that. And I think most of your readers would know who it was. And I, I'd say half of them would know who it was.

[00:45:45] [SPEAKER_03] So the thing is that I was facing, the point is I'm facing a lot of hate, just plain hate out of ignorance because the data I was using was all public data. It was all in the internet. It was in a database called Y search, which was like a Y DNA equivalent of GEDmatch today. And I was using public data. So I wasn't stealing it. What, what do you want to do? Just close it off to police. If you're a police officer, the screen goes black, right?

[00:46:15] [SPEAKER_03] No, it doesn't work that way.

[00:46:17] [SPEAKER_02] Who was it? Or you don't have to tell me if you don't want to.

[00:46:19] [SPEAKER_03] No, no, no.

[00:46:20] [SPEAKER_02] Okay.

[00:46:21] [SPEAKER_03] I would say it's about a half, half, half chance, you know, but it's not, not a true crime person, obviously. It's somebody who, you know, it's not really in true crime, but is in, in genetic genealogy a lot. But so it was out of ignorance, you know, not out of real thought.

[00:46:39] [SPEAKER_02] You know, it was like reaction. It's very conspiratorial thinking, you know, I mean, it's like, but I mean, one question, you know, you mentioned getting all of that hate at once, you know, do you think that the genealogy community has moved forward?

[00:46:55] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. If, if today I see that if people don't like it, don't like fig or FGG or whatever, they don't explode in hatred all over the internet. They, they really have, I would say the people that disagree with that are, are very informed and they have reasons they disagree, you know, and they have read and they've thought about it and they post. And so there's, you know, a lot of people, a lot of community, but I can honor that and

[00:47:24] [SPEAKER_03] I can respect that. And if I see them, I'm, you know, I have no problems, you know, discussing it with them. And I'm really happy that it's, it's a maturity. It's an evolution of maturity. And I suppose there probably are a few people that argue and don't get it and, you know, like anything, but it seems like that's really quieted down. And that is the minority. Very, very small. I don't get hate mail like that anymore.

[00:47:53] [SPEAKER_03] You know, I, I mean, I have tremendous amount of hate mail for a long time.

[00:47:57] [SPEAKER_02] So. It's crazy to me. And then on the flip side, you mentioned law enforcement would often treat you a little bit like you're just some lunatic coming in and, you know, we can do magic. Has that changed over time? Have, have law enforcement understood the power of this?

[00:48:13] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. At first you were getting questions like, can I use the CODIS markers, you know, to do this? I don't get that anymore, you know, and more, you know, what happens any kind of new thing, you'll get early adopters, you know, you'll get, you'll be at a conference, let's say, you'll have a table at an exhibit hall where you have a new mousetrap.

[00:48:37] [SPEAKER_03] And you have that one guy that strolls by with a t-shirt that says, save the whales with a big belly. And he's wearing a beanie with a little thing that spins and he'll pick up your mousetrap and be fascinated and buy one. And then he'll put like a little whistle on it and he'll tell you all about his new whistle. And then you get so excited and he'll tell his friends and he'll tell his friends. And pretty soon you have those early adopters that really see that it might be useful.

[00:49:07] [SPEAKER_03] And then as they tell their friends, they, more people feel comfortable trying it. It's a question of risk versus benefit. That guy with the beanie, he's willing to risk his 10 bucks, you know, once he risks and he does. Okay. And then, and so today we're, we're way down the curve where the early adopters are still working on it. And then they, they, you getting more, more agencies that feel better about it and are even

[00:49:36] [SPEAKER_03] training their own people to do it. Right. So it's a lot more comfortable, not always, they don't always want to do it and always, not everybody agrees, but it's more within a comfort zone. In fact, some people who disagree, disagree within a certain, if you do this, then I'm okay with it. But if you do that, I'm not. And some people are against it altogether.

[00:49:59] [SPEAKER_03] So you have a range now of like a comfort zone where you can be somewhere in that comfort zone.

[00:50:07] [SPEAKER_02] So, yeah. Here in Indiana, they hired a civilian genetic genealogist, just, you know, within their own lab. So if with the Indiana police, so.

[00:50:18] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. We've done a lot of work for Indiana. Yeah.

[00:50:21] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. I bet the case that the reason why I reached out, you know, I mean, you're very well known within the true crime community, but also with this Austin yogurt shop murders case that came to a close recently. Detective Dan Jackson, you were one of the people that he actually went out and thanked for some of the insight that you were able to provide. Can you tell me about working on that case?

[00:50:44] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Well, in late, I think it was 2023, a lot of us were in Austin for the conference and we had like a half a day set aside where we all got in the same room and just, you know, found out what was going on, got the DNA out on a spreadsheet, talked about it. And I would say it was really the point man on what we should do with the DNA, you know?

[00:51:10] [SPEAKER_03] And it was just an itsy bitsy amount of DNA at the time. You know, the question was, what can we do more and more with less and less? So what I was doing in the background is I was trying to work with, there's a group that's doing single cell DNA, you know, itsy bitsy amounts of DNA. And I had approached them to work on the yogurt shop. Uh, at the time that we, they were really working on pristine DNA.

[00:51:39] [SPEAKER_03] And of course the next step is to ruin it. So it's not pristine anymore. And they were kind of going in that direction. So I said, well, we have yogurt shop. I think we had a couple of cases I approached them about, but yogurt shop, I said, is really desperately need some help. And I was going down that route because I can, because again, I have the science background to talk Turkey. And that's when, you know, they, they had the ballistics that opened up the door and solved

[00:52:09] [SPEAKER_03] it in the other direction. Those sneaky bastards.

[00:52:13] [SPEAKER_02] Beat you to the puns.

[00:52:15] [SPEAKER_03] Darn. But when they called me, when Mindy and Dan Jackson called me, they could barely talk. I mean, they were, and this happened, this happened. I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. Tell me, did you solve it? You know?

[00:52:32] [SPEAKER_02] That must've been exciting. Even if you didn't get to do the DNA thing.

[00:52:35] [SPEAKER_03] You know, they get a gold star in heaven for that.

[00:52:39] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. That's really cool. What, I mean, like you've been on so many cases where you were able to figure it out. I mean, what is it? Do you get, I mean, do you still get excited when there's like that solve? Or I mean, is it almost passe for you at this point?

[00:52:52] [SPEAKER_03] Oh, it's always exciting, you know? And then you have the excitement. I mean, that's just the beginning of the excitement because you have notified the family. And, you know, I'm not usually the one that notifies anybody because I'm not. You know, we work for the agency. But going back to like, you know, adoption searches, let's say you, if you have the answer to anything, you're holding the phone in your hand and you know you're going to make

[00:53:21] [SPEAKER_03] a phone call that's going to change someone's life, that you're just about to open your mouth and within the next 30 seconds, somebody's going to have a real different look, real different experience that they thought they were going to have when they woke up in the morning. There's that one, it's like you fire the torpedo and you're waiting for it to hit the ship and you're sitting there waiting.

[00:53:46] [SPEAKER_03] It's like kind of a moment you have to really think about, you know, you have to, you're going to say something that changes someone's life. And you're not going to say we want to get a divorce or, you know, I need to buy a new refrigerator. You're going to change somebody really, really, really on. It's not something like, honey, we want to get, I want to get a divorce.

[00:54:14] [SPEAKER_03] Well, why do you want, you know, can we go to counseling? There's not any backing and forthing. It's, you're going to make that statement and the world changes.

[00:54:25] [SPEAKER_02] That's incredible. Yeah, that's, that's quite an experience to have again and again.

[00:54:31] [SPEAKER_03] And to have the families come and, you know, when you meet the family, I didn't really meet the Phoenix Canal family, the Berners family. I just met them last year and they had wanted to meet me, but they had a victim's advocate that was handling their case and either helped or didn't help. And so finally they reached out to Troy and Troy said, hey, can I, you want to meet him? I said, of course I do. I've been dying to meet him. And so I met the Berners family and got to know them.

[00:55:01] [SPEAKER_03] They're really, they're very grateful to have that answer.

[00:55:06] [SPEAKER_02] I imagine. Were there any particular experiences in getting any of these cases solved that kind of stand out for you in terms of like that emotion or like that, you know, kind of catharsis at the end of it when people are able to come and meet you afterwards?

[00:55:22] [SPEAKER_03] The one that, you know, I think I felt the most is there was a case in South Dakota, Rapid City, Gwen Miller. She was a pharmacist in her sixties and she was murdered. I think 1968, she was murdered. And the police for some reason had preserved the DNA. And I did the Y and I came up with the name and the detective ran with it and solved it.

[00:55:50] [SPEAKER_03] Mr. Eugene Fields was the, or Fields was the guy. Right. And I went out, they had a press conference in Rapid City, South Dakota. And the family came from all over the country. Her nieces and nephews that had never met her and her grandnieces and nephews, there were maybe 20 family members that came from, gosh, all over Arizona, Utah, Pacific Northwest, maybe

[00:56:18] [SPEAKER_03] some from Illinois or somewhere close by like that. And, you know, it was like they were all united in their happiness and their relief. It wasn't, it wasn't, it's like one person is crying or telling you, thanking you. But then when 20 people are crying and all hugging each other and hugging you, it's a different, you know, it's a little bit different. Yeah.

[00:56:44] [SPEAKER_03] And so I'd have to say of all of, that's one that immediately I remember just because, you know, South Dakota is not around the corner. You have to really plan and go there from all over the place. And there were so many people and I've stayed in touch with, you know, I could call them and say hi. I, you know, we don't talk a lot because we have our different lives, but I'm sure that they, I made my mark.

[00:57:12] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. And, and such a huge mark on so many people in this family. What are you predominantly working on? Is it just more identifications, more things like that?

[00:57:23] [SPEAKER_03] Or I'm in identifinders now, but we do, we do violent offender cases. We do those. We do unidentified human remains. I'm involved in several research projects to, you know, make it better. And I, I reach out probably a lot more to the technical community to do innovative things. I would say I, I'm not really up on DNA Doe project, but I know they have a lot of people

[00:57:53] [SPEAKER_03] they're doing very well. I would say I was probably a little bit more research oriented and able to reach out, you know, to the research community. I'm doing that. I'm on the NTVIC committee. That's trying to make the, suggest policies and procedures for shaping up the FGG world so that it's kind of all, not all over the map.

[00:58:16] [SPEAKER_03] And I'm working on accreditation for genealogists under A2LA, which is the forensic accreditation. I know they have IGAB and stuff, but I think that it's not, that's not really for the forensic world so much. What we're doing is we're following the forensic kind of approach to getting the FGG practitioners accredited. I'm working on that a lot. I have some other cases.

[00:58:45] [SPEAKER_03] We work on Lake and Ing serial killer cases. That's very interesting.

[00:58:49] [SPEAKER_02] Oh my God.

[00:58:52] [SPEAKER_03] Because, you know, Lake and Ing had thousands or hundreds of remains burned in their backyard. So we're going through those and trying to see there's a list of known victims, but we're coming up with some that we, nobody knew about. So that's pretty interesting. Um, and there's a lot, I just, you know, can't talk about, but like I said, we're doing boy in the box was really good.

[00:59:19] [SPEAKER_03] Um, I really want to say, I was probably, I'm going to, this is sort of not a statement of fact, trying to be objective, but I think I'm the only one that could have done that one. The boy in the box, because I wound up using labs in three countries to get that, you know, reaching out and, you know, they know who I am. I know how to talk. I have background and I made it happen, you know, cause I, I could do that.

[00:59:46] [SPEAKER_03] And I don't think anybody in the community would have done that or could have done that or would have tried. Um, and so that one was really great because there's no crying family at the end, grateful for the answer. They're all gone. But it was a technical achievement for me that, you know, I'm very proud of.

[01:00:08] [SPEAKER_02] I imagine. Yeah. Did your language skills help you in terms of those communications with other labs?

[01:00:13] [SPEAKER_03] Cause I was, it turned out they were all either people, Americans work in there and, um, who, one was a postdoc or grad student, you know, grad student. The other one was at the ICMP. That was Tom Parsons and he's American.

[01:00:33] [SPEAKER_02] So got it. Um, and in terms of, uh, you know, on the macro kind of looking forward side, you know, we've talked about some of these different changes within FIG over time. Are there things that you're excited about possible new developments that could be on the horizon or alternatively things that you're concerned about as far as, you know, FIG continuing to be a tool that we can use to solve some of these cold cases?

[01:00:58] [SPEAKER_03] I, it's going to continue to be a tool, but what I'm looking for is more, uh, getting to be more organized and more thought through and not all over the map. One issue that we're looking at is reference testing. If you're doing these trees and you get stuck, you can go to somebody and say, would you get your mom tested so we can see if it's mom's side or dad's side? Or if, if you, you, you're a close route, you can do that.

[01:01:25] [SPEAKER_03] And, you know, this is just an example of how we have to think through that process because some organizations just target tests like crazy until they find it. And some people are a lot more judicious about it before they, you know, go ahead and just target. They'll do more genealogy and wait until they come up with the right, the sweet spot to test.

[01:01:52] [SPEAKER_03] So I think, um, that's just one example of, we have to get on the same page on how that's going to be handled because you're dealing with the public. You have to go out and say, can you target that? So again, we go back to public opinion. Um, and that's just one, one example. Uh, another example is we have to put a lid on social media and how that's being handled by FIG practitioners.

[01:02:17] [SPEAKER_03] There are many that are very respectful of that and don't, but there are many that, Hey, guess what? I just, you know, let me tell you what just happened. And I've seen stuff about me. That's not true on their derogatory. And I've seen, uh, Oh, well, guess what? You know, we, we work with that lab. You like proprietary stuff. There was a lab that told me, listen, we'll try it, but let's just do a pilot study. See if it worked. Don't say anything.

[01:02:44] [SPEAKER_03] And then six months later, I see it on, on Facebook, somebody saying, guess what? I'm working, you know, na, na, na, na, na. Because there was another, like other genealogists had found that direct, you know, had contacted the lab independently of me and it's all over the place. And somebody said, well, isn't that illegal what they were trying? Yeah, but we just did it anyway.

[01:03:12] [SPEAKER_03] And so that lab, you know, it won't work with us anymore. Well, that's not exactly true, but that, let's say, put the lid on it for the, for the time being.

[01:03:23] [SPEAKER_02] Right.

[01:03:25] [SPEAKER_03] And so the other thing is, it's 25 years old, whereas the legal system is hundreds of years old. So whatever, and it's always evolving. But the genealogy community was based on social media, based on networking.

[01:03:51] [SPEAKER_03] And when you have to put a lid on that and take it away, there's some big changes that have to be made. And that's where we're at with that.

[01:04:01] [SPEAKER_02] Right. Yeah. Discretion is so important, obviously.

[01:04:05] [SPEAKER_03] Discretion is a good word. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:04:07] [SPEAKER_02] Like in common sense. But, you know, as you said, it's a newer, newer realm. So I can imagine people.

[01:04:13] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah.

[01:04:14] [SPEAKER_02] So they have those professional considerations all the time.

[01:04:17] [SPEAKER_03] Even there was somewhere on some Facebook page, someplace that said, don't post no post, no negative posts about law enforcement are allowed, something like that. Now you'd think, but actually you don't want that. You don't want it because if that person is called to testify, the opposing attorney is going to say, you're pro law enforcement, are you?

[01:04:49] [SPEAKER_02] Right. Yeah. Or you're like bashing law enforcement from over here to over here and then you're suddenly backing them up. Yeah. You could look really bad on the stand.

[01:05:01] [SPEAKER_03] You have to be neutral.

[01:05:04] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Yeah. It's like you have to be above any sort of suspicion and you have to look professional. I think a lot of people forget with social media, like if you look unprofessional, people are not going to take you that seriously.

[01:05:15] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah. Yeah. It's the two worlds colliding where you have the genealogist and they're like how it all developed. Yeah. And you have the legal system, which is, you know, which is, let's say, much more mature and structured. It's structured and unstructured. So there's some growing pains going on. Yeah.

[01:05:41] [SPEAKER_02] But it'll work out. Do you think there's any concern about like more restrictions on FIG in the name of privacy from some of these big companies that, you know, do like ancestry and whatnot? I know there was just a New York Times article about ancestry shutting down stuff. So, I mean, what are your thoughts on that over time?

[01:05:58] [SPEAKER_03] It's a growing pain. And I think that I don't know where that's going to go. There's a number of possibilities. I think that just ancestry come out and saying, absolutely not. Don't even look at our census records. You know, that's really hard to enforce. You know, I'm wondering, I have a lot, just as many questions as everybody else has. And I do know some very prominent people in our community are talking and having conversations

[01:06:28] [SPEAKER_03] with ancestry about, you know, the forensic use of their, or the law enforcement or judicial use of their materials. I'm concerned because we need that so badly. And on the, and the other hand, they're, they're really asking for something they can't enforce. You know, if I want to use a census records to research my mom's family tree and I'm doing

[01:06:54] [SPEAKER_03] that and I go, oh, wait a minute, I got this thing due tomorrow for my report. You mean I can't, I got to log out of ancestry and go somewhere else? You know, it's, you can't, you really can't enforce that so much. So I don't know where that's going to go, but it's going to be like, I don't know. It could be a big change. It could be a little change.

[01:07:19] [SPEAKER_03] I know other organizations are trying to develop that capability of tree building and hint grabbing and stuff, but it's going to be, I think it'll be a while before we can get that in place.

[01:07:32] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And then I know we went over an hour a little bit. I just want to say it was, it was so nice talking to you. Is there, is there anything about these topics or cases that I didn't ask about that you wanted to talk about or that you think it's important for people to understand?

[01:07:52] [SPEAKER_03] Um, I would say, uh, the only thing is whether you agree or disagree, think through the issues. Don't just spout your opinion, read, um, you know, know both sides of the story. If there are two sides, um, be, be thoughtful. This is a very powerful tool. We do want to preserve it for the future because there's so many people that are benefiting.

[01:08:17] [SPEAKER_03] Realize you might be one of those ones because everybody that's been murdered or, you know, not everybody, but you know, the people that we are servicing, the community are just regular people, just like us. There are no, you know, there's rich people that get murdered. There's poor people that get murdered. We've solved homeless people's cases. We've brought, you know, uh, release and information, not closure to so many people that, and they're just like you.

[01:08:46] [SPEAKER_03] So think about that, you know, and let's preserve the tool. Let's work together. Um, think through what you really believe or don't believe and, you know, be part of, be part of it, be part of the community, you know, understand and help us build a tool so that, you know, people are comfortable with it. Yeah.

[01:09:09] [SPEAKER_02] Responsible use of it will allow it to be preserved for posterity, whereas unprofessional behavior and irresponsible use of it will probably lead to a crackdown.

[01:09:20] [SPEAKER_03] Correct. Responsible is a good way of saying it. A response, responsible, respectful, and because the tool isn't going away. It's too good to be true. So it's not going away. So let's do it right.

[01:09:36] [SPEAKER_02] Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Fitzpatrick, for your time. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much to Dr. Fitzpatrick for talking to us. I really enjoyed the conversation. We'll include a link to the Identifinders in our show notes. They just solved yet another cold case here in Indiana, the case of Angela Sacco. So here's to many more solves going forward. And thank you all for listening.

[01:09:57] [SPEAKER_01] Thanks so much for listening to The Murder Sheet. If you have a tip concerning one of the cases we cover, please email us at murdersheet at gmail.com. If you have actionable information about an unsolved crime, please report it to the appropriate authorities.

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[01:10:40] [SPEAKER_01] Special thanks to Kevin Tyler Greenlee, who composed the music for The Murder Sheet, and who you can find on the web at kevintg.com.

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