I don't think we need to have serial violent criminals anymore.
And what I mean is there's really no reason for someone to be allowed to continue raping and
killing people, we should be able to identify them much more quickly than has happened in the past.
Investigative genetic genealogy wasn't something
that most people were even interested in or aware of.
And so we were able to build this really powerful tool for human identification under the radar.
All day long, I'm building family trees backwards and forwards and backwards and forwards,
and looking for that very small number of people
who are related to all of the people and the ancestors that they need to be
in order to be the contributor of the DNA that I'm trying to identify.
Something about it just fascinated me.
It wasn't until 2009 that 23andme introduced autosomal DNA testing to the public.
And we were able to use that for genealogical purposes. And I jumped in with both feet.
I kind of dropped everything else I was doing and started working on genetic genealogy full time.
People started coming to me and asking if I thought that genetic genealogy could be
used to help them find their very recent unknown ancestors adoptees,
you know, if someone was adopted, or if they took a consumer DNA test,
and made the unexpected surprise that their father wasn't their biological father.
Could we use this technique
to try to identify those unknown parents or grandparents in some cases?
And I thought that was a really intriguing question.
So I started trying to kind of tweak the techniques I was using.
And I ended up developing these techniques that have been very,
very successful in unknown parentage research, and have ended up helping hundreds of 1000s or
maybe millions of people now reunite with previously unknown biological relatives.
Parabon Nanolabs in Reston, Virginia, has developed sophisticated software
capable of unlocking information contained in DNA left at a crime scene.
Because of Parabon Snapshot,
investigators will have their first clue of what a suspect looks like.
They were using DNA from crime scenes and unidentified remains,
putting it through this very advanced analysis process called snip genotyping,
and predicting people's traits, their hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, shape, face, etc
So,
I finally decided that I would use these techniques that I developed for unknown parentage
to try to help law enforcement.
I joined forces with Parabon Nanolabs,
to create this genetic genealogy unit to offer these services to law enforcement.
My very first case was the double homicide case, Jay Cooke and Tanya van Cuylenborg,
who were a young couple from British Columbia,
who had come down into Washington State to run some errands and were murdered.
And Tanya was also raped.
Tanya's body was discovered first. And that was about six... I think it was at least six days,
maybe seven days after. And it was about another two days until Jay's body was found.
It was definitely frustrating to have that is such an open question, you know, how
something so horrific could happen and have, you know, just know, you know,
there was not any particularly strong leads over time.
Or, you know, obviously, when it took over 30 years as it did,
it was just very hard to come to terms with.
He was actually very straightforward to identify.
It only took me about two hours to find him in the family tree, which is very unusual.
He was a daytime short-haul trucker, I guess.
And yeah, he's stopped at a stoplight in an industrial area of Seattle.
He opened the door at the stoplight to adjust something on his truck apparently.
And in the process of doing that this coffee cup falls out of the truck and the
police who were surveillance, you know, behind them doing surveillance saw the coffee cup.
By getting the coffee cup they were able to get what's referred to as confirmation DNA so that the
DNA matches were strong enough from the coffee cup to be able to confirm back to the crime scene DNA.
So that's a strong enough match to then justify an arrest warrant.
It just felt surreal. I remember Jim Scharf, phoned me at about six o'clock in the evening.
And he said, you know, John, we got him. And he's been arrested after 30 plus years,
it was just surreal to think that it finally finally came to fruition and finally was able to
hold someone accountable for these crimes.
His was the first case to go to jury trial
where the suspect was identified through genetic genealogy.
And he was convicted by that jury and received two life sentences.
DNA helped solved an infamous 30-year-old cold case.
Detectives believe they have solved a more than 4 decades
old cold case thanks to modern DNA technology.
Police say it's DNA that finally confirmed a name.
Since I joined forces with Parabon Nanolabs,
May 1 2018, we have had 150 successful identifications on law enforcement cases.
That is one per week on average, for the last three years.
And if you add all of the years those cases were cold,
it's about 3500 years of cold cases that we have helped to resolve during this time.
I don't think we need to have serial violent criminals anymore.
And any violent crimes where there's DNA left behind really don't need to go cold.
You know, we don't need to have these cases anymore that are decades old.
As long as there's DNA Left Behind, and there typically is a violent personal crime like these,
then we should be able to identify that person much more quickly than we've seen in the past,
stop them in their tracks, and save people
from ever having to be victimized by these criminals in the first place.