A brother and a sister were looking for their lost brother. A police department was trying to identify a murder victim. I take 30 years, but a revolution in forensic science using DNA and genealogy websites finally connected the dots.
The best thing about the small town of Bucklin, Kansas, is its cemetery. The grass is well cut, the graves well cared for.
It was here, last month, that some 20 mourners stood around a small white coffin to say goodbye to Shawna Beth Garber.
No one, including those who were there, knew much about Shawna: what she was like, where she lived or what name she used when she died.
Only recently did they learn that she had been murdered and that her body had not been identified for three decades.
The police had called her Grace, because they said that “ only by the grace of God ” someone would find out who she was.
But thanks to a revolution in DNA tracing, which is changing the way unsolved cases are handled across the United States, a mystery of 30 years could finally be resolved.
“Shawna”
Rob and Shawna weren’t born in a normal home. He, Shawna’s older brother, is a shy man of 56 years and describes his mother as “evil”.
He speaks slowly, reflecting, and chooses his words carefully.
He is not used to talking about his childhood and brings back turbulent memories.
He and Shawna were physically abused by their mother, he says, and that led to both of them being placed under state care.
The memories he has of his little sister are some of the few good ones memories he has of his early childhood.
“She was the most important part of my life,” he says.
When Rob was seven and Shawna was five, his mother’s abuse began to escalate.
For the most part, I was the target of everything, ”Rob recalls,“ until the incident that took us away from her. That was way above and beyond everything else. ”
Rob was at school when his mother sprayed him fuel to Shawna and set her on fire.
They were separated and placed with different families. Rob was given the last name Ringwald.
He saw his sister one more time after she left the hospital, on her eighth birthday , and that was the last time.
When I was an adult in the decade of 1990, Rob was interested in finding her.
He remembered Shawna, but they also told her about other half-siblings.
After contacting the authorities, they finally gave her the name of a half-sister, Danielle Pixler, from 48 years, who also lived in Kansas.
They met and formed a lasting friendship, and Danielle was also interested in finding Shawna.
Sitting on the porch of her home in Topeka, Kansas, Danielle tells me about the decades-long search for the half-sister she never knew.
leaflets in the trees I put them on road signs and yield signs. I put them on car windows, ”says Danielle.
He spent countless hours on Facebook looking for Shawna.
“People thought he was stalking them,” he says.
Rob and Danielle had each created their own case files, filled with all the information they could find about Shawna.
But not even knowing the basic information, like the last name he was using was a fruitless effort.
“Grace Doe”
In December 1990, the body of a woman was found near an abandoned farm in Missouri.
The autopsy estimated that she had been left there for about six weeks and that she had been murdered.
The police had very few leads to follow. They had tied it with six different types of rope. Her remains were so decomposed that it would be difficult for even a close relative to identify her.
McDonald County Deputy Sheriff Lt. Mike Hall worked on the case for 14 years undiscovered who Grace was, let alone who had killed her.
“If I’m driving, on the patrol car, my mind sometimes wanders. I think about who brought her here . She is always on my mind, ”he says.
As the years passed, Grace’s case became increasingly More difficult to solve.
His remains were kept in a closet in the sheriff’s office, almost forgotten. It was one of the 250 . 0000 Estimated unsolved murders in the United States.
Unsolved cases, DNA and the Golden State Killer
DNA has been used in forensic medicine since the mid-decade of 1980.
Traditional techniques are good to do match genetic material with a suspect if the DNA of the person in question is already in a police database, but this has its limits .
For example, in the decades of 1970 and 1980, California was attacked by a prolific murderer in series and rapist nicknamed the “Golden State Killer.”
The police had his genetic material, but there were no matches in the DNA database from the FBI. Many thought they would never find it.
But in 2018, the authorities decided to use an innovative technique that was just beginning to be used: one that combines the use of DNA with information from genealogy websites to draw family trees.
Genealogy websites are designed to allow people to find long-lost relatives.
A user mails a swab of DNA and then you are given a list of people you share genes with and an analysis of how closely they are related.
The police realized that if they put the killer’s DNA on a genealogy website , they would get a list of the killer’s relatives, a crucial clue.
Most genealogy websites do not allow police checks, but some do.
The authorities in the case of the Golden State killer used a company called GEDmatch.
“The Golden State assassin is the model case for the success of technology,” says the director GEDmatch executive Brett Williams.
Once genetic relatives were found, family trees could be built.
The trees were eventually brought together at a point that allowed authorities focus on one person: a suspect.
In 2020, Joseph DeAngelo, a former California police officer, was sentenced to life in prison.
Finding “Grace”
Othram, a Houston-based technology company, was founded shortly after DeAngelo’s success with the goal of solve unsolved cases using new technology.
The company uses data sources such as those provided by GEDMatch and has helped law enforcement solve a series of murders high profile and cases of people des appeared in the last two years.
In November of 2020, Othram took over Grace’s case.
He went through the same process as the police It had happened to the Golden State killer.
Shawna’s DNA was degraded and had bacterial contamination.
Othram cleaned up Grace’s DNA, creating a genetic profile that could then be compared on various genealogy websites.
From there, they found several third-cousin matches and began building a family tree to find a common ancestor.
Working on the family tree, they began to develop a theory about who she might have been related to and gave the names to Lieutenant Hall.
The call
The lieutenant’s call came when Danielle was working. At first he thought it was a scam , something about a murder, a possible sister, a DNA test.
But after talking to his family, he called the number again. And he began to assimilate the seriousness of what Lieutenant Hall was telling him.
“When I called him, I wouldn’t stop crying,” he says. “He was telling me all these things and I was asking him ‘how did you contact me? How do you know who I am or that I am related? ‘ I was scared. ”
Lieutenant Hall finally convinced Danielle to take a DNA test.
The 29 March the result returned. Grace Doe was her sister, Shawna.
“I started crying,” she says.
Ethical Issues
Shawna’s case, and many others like hers, show that the process works. But it also has its critics.
The main issue is privacy.
The technique is so sensitive that a person’s DNA could be enough to identify a person. Hundreds or even thousands of your genetic relatives, none of whom have consented to police checks.
In fact , a person can register their entire extended family a.
“We are not talking about searching databases for people who voluntarily send your information, “says Erin Murphy, author of Inside the Cell: The Dark Side of Forensic DNA.
” We’re talking about searching a database to find the thousands of people who don’t even know that they are related to that person. ”
Danielle was located because a distant relative had given consent for her DNA to be used for police checkpoints, not because she had.
Brett Williams of GEDmatch ace Pta the ethical dilemma of using technology.
“Here you have two competing priorities. The first priority is that you have an absolute right to privacy. But at the same time, you have an equally important priority, which is that we have the right not to be killed. ”
But the desire for families to discover the identity of their loved ones, or the murderer of a relative, does not outweigh privacy concerns, Murphy argues.
“It is incredibly difficult to say this, but we do not make policies on the civil liberties of our entire society, based on the personal feelings of the victims,” he says.
This is the main reason why the one that so many genealogy websites don’t allow police checks , including Ancestry.com and 23 AndMe.
Rob insists that without the process they would never have found out what had happened to his sister.
“My sister has been waiting on a shelf for 30 years. It won’t be anymore. ”
Some kind of closure
Rob and Danielle still don’t have a photo of Shawna being an adult. They are still not sure what name he was using at the time of his death.
The police are trying to find out what were Shawna’s movements before she died, or who did her met as an adult.
They believe she may have been based in Joplin, Missouri at the time of her disappearance.
Lieutenant Hall believes she has a real chance of solving the case.
“I think the murder can be solved now that we know who it is,” he says.
Shawna’s funeral was bittersweet for Rob and Danielle. They finally found out who and where their sister was. She had not refused the contact. She had not emigrated.
But is not the end they were waiting for .
“I have nightmares. I hear screams, ”says Danielle, who can’t help but read the local press stories about the case.
“ I read about her every day, I have to. It’s horrible because I cry every time I read it. But somehow I feel closer to her when I read it. ”
Shawna’s identification is a great achievement in the case. Similar advances are made weekly across the United States.
It is not an understatement to describe this technique as a revolution in solving murder in unsolved cases.
However, this method is so new that there are very few laws governing its use. And as privacy is an increasingly controversial issue in the US, politicians will have to decide to what extent they want genealogy websites to be used to combat crime.
Police believes that there is a very real possibility that Shawna’s killer is still alive and that he has assumed he could get away with it.
Technology means that one day that person and many other murderers in the United States may be brought to justice.
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