Latest / Real Crime with Adam Shand / The Woman Who Invented Cold Case DNA | Dr Colleen Fitzpatrick

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The Woman Who Invented Cold Case DNA | Dr Colleen Fitzpatrick · Real Crime with Adam Shand

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Apploche Production.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: Welcome to Real Crime with Adam Shand. I'm your host,
• 0:16
  Speaker 2: Adam Shand. We live in an age of forensic science.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: Miracles where cold case is thought to be too hard,
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: are being closed with the help of a powerful technology
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  Speaker 2: called forensic investigative genetic genealogy or BIG for short.
• 0:32
  Speaker 3: A Washington Statement has been charged with the nineteen ninety
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  Speaker 3: one murder of a teenager, nearly thirty years after her
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: body was found outside her high school. Investigators say a
• 0:43
  Speaker 3: breakthrough in forensic DNA technology finally led them to their suspect.
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: If law enforcement has offended DNA or the DNA of
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  Speaker 2: a missing person, the identity of that person can be
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  Speaker 2: resolved and justice done, or human remains can be identified.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: This BIG technology is a blend of DNA science and
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  Speaker 2: family history techniques, where analysts can build a family tree
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  Speaker 2: that leads law enforcement to the answers.
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  Speaker 4: South Australian police have confirmed the identity of the Somertan Man,
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  Speaker 4: one of Australia's most baffling unsolved mysteries. The breakthrough came
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  Speaker 4: seventy three years after his death, using cutting edge genetic
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  Speaker 4: genealogy techniques.
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  Speaker 2: Doctor Colleen Fitzpatrick is the godmother of FIG and her company,
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  Speaker 2: California Base, identified as International, has solved literally hundreds of cases,
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  Speaker 2: even cases like South Australia Summer to the Man mystery.
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  Speaker 5: Museums and universities across Britain are facing growing pressure to
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  Speaker 5: return human remains taken during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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  Speaker 5: Advocates say advances in DNA identification technology mean remains can
• 1:55
  Speaker 5: now be identified and returned to their families.
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  Speaker 2: On a personal note, I'm talking to her about bringing
• 2:02
  Speaker 2: her skills to Zimbabwe to identify human remains held in
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: British museums and universities from colonial times. I caught up
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  Speaker 2: with Colleen recently to discuss her pioneering work. Good morning,
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: Colleen or good evening where you are?
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah? Good, I might.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah listen, You're not a detective, but I think you've
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: solved more cold cases missing persons than your average detective.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: How did this begin for you?
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  Speaker 1: Well, it depends on what you mean by it begin,
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  Speaker 1: you know. I mean, I've always liked puzzles, that type
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  Speaker 1: of thing. I think the whole story in general begins
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  Speaker 1: in two thousand, when genetic genealogy sort of started there
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  Speaker 1: were entrepreneurs that realized that DNA could be used by
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: genealogists to find long lost relatives, and that's, you know,
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  Speaker 1: the ultimate goal in the long run. So I'd say
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  Speaker 1: in general, that's when the whole story started.
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  Speaker 2: But you began your academic career as a nuclear physicist,
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  Speaker 2: literally a rocket side. She worked, I believe on the
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: Space Shuttle project or something like that.
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  Speaker 1: M M, yes, I have. I worked on the first
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: laser on the Space Shuttle. And I don't skip around
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  Speaker 1: too much. I have a doctorate nuclear physics from Duke,
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: but I didn't really do a lot of research in
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: that area. After I was out of school, I went
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: to teach for a couple of years, and in that
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: year those years, I got interested in laser science, laser holography.
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  Speaker 1: I was teaching at a university called sam Houston State
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: University in Texas. Mostly it was a teaching school, but
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: you could do some research. And I was starting to
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: look around and in the school they had a lab
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: where they had an optical setup with a laser and
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  Speaker 1: some optics and an optical table, and they had had
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  Speaker 1: it to do some holograms. So I said, oh, that's
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: very interesting. You know, I did a hologram in college.
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  Speaker 1: I'm just wondering about that.
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  Speaker 4: You know.
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  Speaker 1: I picked up the laser, starts setting it up, and
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  Speaker 1: that pretty much accounts for the next sixteen years. So
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  Speaker 1: I swapped. I didn't really do a lot of research
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  Speaker 1: in nuclear I kind of picked up lasers. And there's
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  Speaker 1: a lot of similarities, you know, between those two disciplines.
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  Speaker 1: I did not realize that, but there is. Basically, you
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  Speaker 1: start a particle at one place and you bounce it
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  Speaker 1: around and you try and get it to another place,
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  Speaker 1: and it crashes on something and something happens. So in
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: nuclear physics it'd be a neutron, proton, whatever, and you're
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: doing a kind of reaction to see what happens. And
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  Speaker 1: in lasers and optics, it's a photon. It's a piece
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  Speaker 1: of light and that light hits something and something happens,
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  Speaker 1: and you have a detector. In both cases, you measure
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  Speaker 1: it and then you wonder exactly what that was you
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  Speaker 1: just saw, and it's the same and it's very similar.
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  Speaker 1: And I did that. I had my own company even
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  Speaker 1: for a while, and that political atmosphere in the U
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: fast forward I was at Sam Houston. That helped me
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  Speaker 1: get a job in the industry because I didn't want
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  Speaker 1: to teach anymore. And so in industry, I really went
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  Speaker 1: in industry in lasers and laser applications and stuff like that.
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  Speaker 1: And then when things slowed down, I went to a
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  Speaker 1: small company for a while, but I went for Sam Houston,
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: so I went to aerospace. When that slowed down, I
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  Speaker 1: went to a small high tech think tank for laser stuff,
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  Speaker 1: and that's where I did the laser and a space shuttle.
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  Speaker 1: And that company kind of went south and I was
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  Speaker 1: without a job. So I started my own company in
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  Speaker 1: nineteen eighty nine. I've been self employed since. And again
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: we're looking at you know, lasers and optics and stuff
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  Speaker 1: and data. The thread here is data. You take data.
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  Speaker 1: In nuclear physics you take data, and lasers you take data,
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  Speaker 1: and data is generically no matter where you get it,
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  Speaker 1: it's similar. So then in two thousand and five, again
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  Speaker 1: the political atmosphere had changed. A small company, I was
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  Speaker 1: self employed, but the political atmosphere was not in favor
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  Speaker 1: of small companies. So, you know, we were writing proposals,
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  Speaker 1: we were getting grants, we're getting contracts, and that dried up.
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  Speaker 1: The small companies really had trouble surviving, so at that time,
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: trying to save the company, one of my therapies was
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  Speaker 1: to write my own book on genealogy, and that was
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  Speaker 1: Forensic Genealogy was the name of it. Of course, it
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  Speaker 1: took me a while. It took me three years really
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  Speaker 1: to write the book, and it was a side thing.
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  Speaker 1: It was like a therapy, you know, while everything else
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  Speaker 1: the walls were burning down around me. And about the
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: time we decided to close the company, the book was done.
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  Speaker 1: I had a contract with a publishing company to do
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  Speaker 1: the book, a genealogy publishing company. And then after about
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: three years, when the walls were just about burned down
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  Speaker 1: the book was ready, they said they didn't want it
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  Speaker 1: because forensics was passe. And it took me so long
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  Speaker 1: to write it, really upsetting, of course, and I'm sitting
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  Speaker 1: there crying and crying, and here I have a book
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  Speaker 1: that's almost done, and you know, within the final editing
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  Speaker 1: and the cover and stuff like that, the whole bulk
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  Speaker 1: of the whole work was done. And my partner, bless
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  Speaker 1: his heart, standing there saying why don't we publish it ourselves?
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  Speaker 1: And I was like, well, we can't do that. He said, yes,
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  Speaker 1: we can. He said, he had worked for the UN
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: and for various foreign governments, so he said, yeah, we
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: can publish ourselves. He said, I worked in a book
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: bindery in Nigeria and it really wasn't that hard. And
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: I looked at him. Book bindery in Nigeria. He said,
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: I didn't even know there were books in Nigeria. Wait,
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: you know, and that little Kodak moment, you know, it
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  Speaker 1: kind of made me stop. So in the end, what
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: we did we started our own publishing company in order
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: to publish our own books. We could have gone to
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: a publisher. They had very early stages of please upload
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: your book to the website, we'll publish it for you.
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  Speaker 1: That was called quote unquote self publishing. But we did
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  Speaker 1: the real thing. We opened a publishing company. We got
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: a I mean, we're both rocket scientists. What else do
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  Speaker 1: you do in your spare time? You know, you look
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  Speaker 1: at the book, how many pages, what the fund is,
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  Speaker 1: the format? You know, got to cover artists, learned about,
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: you know, the industry a little bit. And we knew
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  Speaker 1: that if we had somebody published the book for us,
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  Speaker 1: we'd be competing against all the other books they had
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  Speaker 1: and we never would really know what the sales were.
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  Speaker 1: You know, we'd get a shock every now and then,
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  Speaker 1: and we already had a publishing company didn't want it anymore,
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  Speaker 1: so we said, okay, we published it ourselves and it
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  Speaker 1: was a smash and we sold surprisingly tons of books.
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  Speaker 1: The day they were selling the furniture at the company.
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  Speaker 1: I went to my first genealogy conference in Maine. I
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  Speaker 1: think the guys arranged it that way so I would
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  Speaker 1: get out of their hair and I wouldn't cry all
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: over the conference table. Right. I went to are, Maine
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  Speaker 1: to have the first genealogy conference to sell books, and
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  Speaker 1: I couldn't stop selling books, and it was kind of surprising,
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  Speaker 1: you know. I wish I had understood what I had
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  Speaker 1: more than I did. And from then on we just
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  Speaker 1: realized we had something worth doing. And that's where everything
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  Speaker 1: started in forensics. The name of the book was Forensic Genealogy.
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  Speaker 1: It was how to apply simple scientific tricks to your
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  Speaker 1: genealogy materials. So science applied to genealogy, and over time
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  Speaker 1: it's changed to genealogy applied to science. It's very interesting.
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  Speaker 2: Before we move on to the forensic genealogy, I've got
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  Speaker 2: one rocket science joke I'll try on you a photon
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  Speaker 2: books at a hotel. The build up says, to have
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: you got any bags? The photon says, no, I'm traveling light.
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  Speaker 1: Oh okay, okay, Hey, everybody's a comedian, right, everyone's.
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  Speaker 2: Going to gain Yeah, that's my only one. Let's move
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  Speaker 2: on to But as you were getting involved in genealogy,
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  Speaker 2: the DNA revolution was happening. At the same time, you
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  Speaker 2: could see an opportunity to bring these things together, which
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  Speaker 2: has led to you being regarded as the godmother of
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  Speaker 2: forensic investigative genetic genealogy.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd say right. I was involved in genetic genealogy.
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  Speaker 1: About two thousand. I was on my way back from Ireland.
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  Speaker 1: We had the Fitzpatrick Clan gathering for the first time
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  Speaker 1: for a long time, so I went out to Ireland.
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  Speaker 1: We had a big bash, big party, and then on
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  Speaker 1: the way home I read about the DNA study of
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  Speaker 1: the Irish clans by Trinity College in Dublin and I said,
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  Speaker 1: oh my god, that is so interesting. I wonder if
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: I could do that for Fitzpatrick's. About six months later
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  Speaker 1: I got an email and a notice that Sorenson would
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: be in the area collecting blood samples for a DNA study.
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  Speaker 1: They were doing the molecular genealogy program. They had it BYU,
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  Speaker 1: so of course I went down. I gave my blood,
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  Speaker 1: I asked every question on earth, you know, kept badgering them,
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  Speaker 1: and eventually this was so popular they spun off a
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  Speaker 1: company called Relative Genetics to do it commercially and have
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  Speaker 1: people regular people tested. I rounded up thirteen brave Fitzpatrick
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  Speaker 1: pioneers to give their DNA to the cause, and the
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: night before the two thousand and two clan gathering. Two
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  Speaker 1: years later, the results came in and I thought, man,
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  Speaker 1: everybody's going to be We're going to figure this out.
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  Speaker 1: Not so we were like genetic spaghetti. Nobody was related
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  Speaker 1: to anybody else. Think they were two people, kind of close.
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  Speaker 1: Thirteen people. I take the spaghetti throat on the wall,
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  Speaker 1: and that's what that looked like, you know, people all
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: over and there was one guy. We called them Uncle Eddie.
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  Speaker 1: Edward Fitzpatrick was the guy with the big moosehead on
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  Speaker 1: the wall and the coat of arms and the land
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  Speaker 1: and the you know, maybe a castle we don't know
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  Speaker 1: here and there. And I thought he'd be the guy
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  Speaker 1: at the top of the Christmas tree and we'd all
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: be hanging underneath him, and it turned out he's probably
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  Speaker 1: not even Irish, He's some kind of Mediterranean. That's what
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  Speaker 1: he said. That's what his family said. Whoa. You know,
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  Speaker 1: we have the pedigree, but something happened. We don't have
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  Speaker 1: the DNA WOA reality DNA TV where you know you
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  Speaker 1: get these big surprises along the way you do.
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  Speaker 2: I'm also an Amita family historian in a much lower
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: league than you. I did ours back to Scotland, and
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: long story short, discovered that the pioneers who came to
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  Speaker 2: Australia we didn't know about pretty much. We worked out
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  Speaker 2: that we still owned part of his land and so
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  Speaker 2: we created the seven year quist with the government that
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: had to pay us out on the end, and we
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: had to distribut to all the descendants of our clan.
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  Speaker 2: But that's differently to what you got involved in, because
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: you ended up, let's cut long story short here, you
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  Speaker 2: got involved in the case of Sarah Yabra, which was
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: a cold case murder. Tell us about Sarah and how
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  Speaker 2: did you get involved in that case?
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  Speaker 1: You know, people ask me how did I get involved
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: in forensic genetic genealogy. My answer is I never did.
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  Speaker 1: I invented it. I look back on this, and what
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: happened is I was falling asleep one night and I said,
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: you know, why DNA is the male DNA. And that
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: was the way at that time that genealogists were working
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: on their family tree. They'd have their males in their
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: family tested, like my brother got tested. We were looking
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: to match other Fitzpatricks so that we'd have a cousin
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  Speaker 1: we didn't know about, and we'd sit down and talk
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: about how we could possibly be connected. So at the time,
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  Speaker 1: I said, you know those WHY markers on the y
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  Speaker 1: DNA that genealogists use, you know, to find matches out there,
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  Speaker 1: They are the same markers used in the forensic amplification
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  Speaker 1: kits that police use to match DNA. I wonder if
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: I had a forensic WHY profile, if I could match
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: that or find matches in a genetic genealogy databasis, because
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: if I did, I would find the name for the killer.
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  Speaker 1: Because if that forensic profile, let's say, matched a group
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: of Fitzpatricks, I would have a reasonable certainty that that
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: man's last name was Fitzpatrick. Heaven forbid, and therefore the
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: police could go look in their case files to see
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: if there's anybody by that name and maybe solve the case.
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  Speaker 1: So I was falling asleep one night when I had
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: that intuition, and subsequently, a short time later, I was
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: on the way to Seattle, Washington to be the keynote
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: speaker in a genealogy conference up there, and I went
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  Speaker 1: a day early because that day I made an extra
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: day to make an appointment with the Seattle Police Department
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: to talk about my idea and make a long story short,
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: it did not go well. Little old lady walking in saying, hey,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: let me make a suggestion how to solve your cold cases.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: The detectives were a couple of I'd say, you know,
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: fifty year old detectives with beer bellies and sports shirts,
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: buzz cuts ties. Then you know, they didn't quite take
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: to it, let's say. But fortunately there was another woman
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: in the room who was a DNA analyst and she
• 15:41
  Speaker 1: knew what I was saying, and she eventually put me
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: in touch with the King County Sheriff's department that was
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: investigating Sarah Yarborough case, and they were trying everything. They
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: would come to the DNA lab every now and then
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: say hey, anything new any other way? We can possibly
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: solve this case. And you know, she kept saying, well, no, no, no.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Finally she said call me and that maybe I had
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: something that might work. And they did and we sat down.
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  Speaker 1: I took their Y profile and ran it through the
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: databases where were a number of ways we could do this.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: So I took that profile and it's a string of
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: numbers essentially, So it was like playing bingo with the
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: genetic genealogy Y profiles. You know, they matched and you
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: get bingo. Well, the profile from the case matched to
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: a large group of people named Fuller, and those genealogists
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: they had worked out their genealogy very well, and they
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: descended from a man in Massachusetts in the sixteen hundreds
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: called Robert Fuller. So this man, whoever he was, had
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: to fit in that genealogy somehow, he had to be
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: descended from Robert Fuller somehow. But now you have like
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: four hundred years what is it, three hundred and fifty years,
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: nearly four hundred years to how do you know how
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: he's related? You know, so many generations have gone by,
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: you don't know who he is, you don't know what line.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: And by now there's in the fifteen sixteenth generation from
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: those people. So the police they caught on to what
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: was going on, but it was a puzzle how he said,
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: we can't arrest anybody because they're not on the Mayflower.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: And this case begun in nineteen ninety one. Sarah Yarborough
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: was a sixteen year old girl. She'd gone to drill
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: frame practice at her high school and then her car
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: was found in the parking lot, but she was gone. Unfortunately,
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: there was some crime scene DNA which you then began
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: to work your magic with.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well it was not nineteen ninety one, you know,
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: it was what did I say, twenty eleven.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: That's right. This has been a twenty year cold case.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: And there were generations of detectives that wanted to solve it.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: This is twenty years, right, and that's right when Sarah Yarbor,
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: this was around Christmas and her parents had never let
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: her at home by herself, and that weekend they had
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: a I think a soccer game for their son, one
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: of their sons, some an hour away or some you know,
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: medium distance away, and she was with her friends, you know,
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: at the house. They were watching movies and just cutting
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: up and eating snacks, and she got up the next
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: morning to go to drill team practice, and that's when
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: she was murdered, right and.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: Her body was found about three hundred feet away from
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: her car, partially dressed in a pile of her clothing nearby,
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: which yielded the DNI.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: I presume, yeah there was DNA, and yeah, all over.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: And what was interesting was there were two boys, young
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: boys that were skateboarding, you know, through the school, you
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: know what you do, and they saw man run out
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: of the bushes and run away, and he turned around,
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: he looked right at him, and they looked at him,
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: and he turned around and walked or ran away. They
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: went to look in the bushes and there was Sarah's
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: Bobby had changed him where they affected them for the
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: rest of their lives. They ran and got one of
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: the fathers, and you know, the father looking at the
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: body of this young girl. I was and you're standing
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: there saying you can't do anything. It's too late. And
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: you know, it really tore people apart, let's say that.
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: And it was not till I walked into twenty eleven
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: that let's say anything really moved forward.
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: They must have regarded you with a lot of skepticism.
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: This nuclear physicist too is a family historian. Now it's
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: something out of a TV show, Miss marpl or something,
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: and they must have gone, like, what can you possibly do?
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: We followed up three thousand leads with the professionals, but
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: you persisted anyway.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, they didn't really know who I was. I
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: doubt they looked up. I think their supervisor told them
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: to meet with me, which was a good thing, but
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: it's I guess, you know, detectives do that. You know
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: that people will come in and want to meet with them,
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: and they'll take the notes and they'll you know, go
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: there do whatever they do. Anyway, so they didn't know
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: me from Adam and I walked in with an idea
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: and well a lot of times people do that. People
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: come to you with an idea and you'll go, oh, yeah,
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: that sounds good, and then you go watch TV. But
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: in this case, Jodie Sass that woman was in there,
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: and I guess she must have seen some value for
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: the idea, even if she didn't really think it would work.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: But it did. Now I will say that Fuller. The
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: story goes on from there because we ruled out just
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: about all the Fullers. There was a girl in Sarah's
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: class called Elizabeth Fuller, one of five sisters. The father
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: became a person of interest because of his name, so
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: when he gave his DNA, he was not the killer.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: He was not the father of the killer. But he
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: had the same WHYE DNA as the killer had, So
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: therefore he was a relative, a paternally linked relative along
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: the male line. He was a relative of the killer,
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: but we didn't know how close. IDNA can only tell
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: you you're related, It really can't tell you how close.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: So at that point we have the genealogy of this
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: guy going back to the We know he connects to
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: the sixteen thirties in Massachusetts, and we know he's got
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: a relative, you know, we know a cousin of his,
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: but we don't know who he is. So after a
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: while this went cold again because you know, we couldn't
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: go We tested, we talked to It was half a
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: dozen Fullers in the area. But as that went along,
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: I started looking at technology. The SNIP technology was developing
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: that has become famous since then, a more advanced way
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: of genealogy, not just why. It was like what ancestry
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: now offers, where all men and women can take it
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: and it's based on different markers called snips. It's like
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: a more comprehensive test, and that was coming in the picture.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: So I tried from that moment on till twenty nineteen
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: to get the DNA tested using SNIP testing. I tried
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: six times, and it was only in about twenty nineteen
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: when the magic worked and I could get the SNIP testing.
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: I knew that William Fuller was a cousin, and if
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: I could do the SNIP testing, i'd see how closely
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: they were related. And that's what motivated me to try that.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: And then finally, you know, I got turned down five times,
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: and then six times was when the big genealogy after
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: the Golden State killer had happened. And I got that
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: case and we solved in about two weeks, but my
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: genealogist took another couple of weeks to really make sure
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: they had it right before they told me the man's
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: name was Nicholas. It was not Fuller because his grandfather
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: had been adopted, so we weren't looking for the right name,
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: but we had the right person, and.
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: That was Patrick Nicholas. And once you had that piece
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: of information, it went back to the police. They had
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: to get a fresh DNA sam which they did. They
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: offer some cigarette butts and then bingo, you had you match.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: This team of detectives was over the moon. I mean,
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: it's like sitting in your chair watching TV and then
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: a bolt of lightning hits you. Life changes. Right at
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: that moment, I was driving back from Palm Springs, which
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: is about an hour away, and my genealogist called me
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: to tell me the news. So I pulled along the
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: side of the road and I called Kathy Decker, the
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: lead detective out there, and I said, my genials would
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: like to ask you a couple of questions. Do you mind.
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: She was in a staff meeting and she says no.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: I said, won't take long, just hang on. So I
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: patched everybody together and they told them, we know who
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: it is, Patrick Nicholas, and within a microsecond they're off,
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: you know, the phone, hang up the phone, and boom
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: there out to go find him.
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: Amazing, amazing because over that period which you're waiting to
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: get that result, you'd also worked on the Golden State killer,
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: as you mentioned, Joseph James DeAngelo, and he'd been a
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: multiple killer and sexual molesta and he had stopped his
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: offending at a time where he felt he was safe,
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: but then the science caught up with the Angelo.
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: Well, I want to say I did the y DNA
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: for that case. I was part of the extended family.
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: I did not solve it. That credit goes to Barbara
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: Venter and some small group of law enforcement people from
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: the Bay Area who I know and I like very much.
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: So they really get credit for sticking their necks out
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: and doing that because you have to dial back in
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: the time machine and this was not done. This is
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: not every day you read the newspaper type stuff. This
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: was oh my god, they did what So I was
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: part of that, but I didn't do the snip testing.
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: I did the y DNA and I was working on that.
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: You know, they didn't have any matches. I was kind
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: of struggling, but I did help with that. There's a
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: little bit of history that it gets overlooked, and that
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: was after Sarah Yarborough. I went to the Phoenix Police
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: Department with the same idea and the Phoenix Police Department
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: took me up on it, and I came up with
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: the name Miller in that case, and within twenty minutes
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: they had their person of interest, Brian Patrick Miller. They
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: had two thousand people in the case file, and my
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: name Miller narrowed it down to five. And of those
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: five you couldn't miss. There was one guy that you
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: would say, well, we better look at him, he's kind
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: of weird, and they did, and that was the killer.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: That was the first case solved with genealogy. And subsequently,
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen, myself and another genealogist, Margaret Press, we
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: founded the DNA DO project and we solved the first
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: two snipcases before the Golden State Killer was solved. So
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: every case before the Golden State Killer had my hand
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: on it. I was either a partner in it or
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: I helped solve it.
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: Well, as you said, you actually invented the technology, so
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: you could you can take credit for providing the technology
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: and the drive, but also to get police forces to
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: look at this as a viable alternative. And that was
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: no small task because a lot of established thinking, conventional
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: approaches had to be put to one side for this
• 26:34
  Speaker 2: new technology.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I want to say I did not invent
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: the technology. I applied it in a new way, a
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: new and unexpected way. Since two thousand, genealogists had been
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: using DNA to do adoption searches, so you know, of
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: you to know who you were, you had to find
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: your parents. You could get a DNA test and hopefully
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: come across so called DNA cousins that would link you
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: into biological relativesm you'd figure it out from there, like
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: a big Pseudoku puzzle. You know, there's my aunt, my cousin,
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: my cousin going oh, okay, I must be figure it out.
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: So at one point it became clear to everyone it
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: doesn't matter if you're an adoptee, you're an unidentified human remains,
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: or you're a violent offender. It's DNA. It's just playing
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: DNA find out who it belongs to. And that's sort
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: of what sparked the revolution, and that's where I came from.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: You know, I was involved in the applications. I didn't
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: invent it. I just applied in a new way and that,
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: you know, prompted a lot of things that followed after that.
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: Well, I think you're far too humble. I think you
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: should take a bit of credit for what's happened and
• 27:46
  Speaker 2: the influence you've had over forensic scientists in police forces.
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: As even found its way to Australia because I was
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: involved in a case in New South Wales where a
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: jawbone washed up on the beach there they couldn't connect
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: it to any cold cases, missing persons and so forth.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: So for the first time New South Wales police used
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: FIG and they were able to connect it to a
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: young man who'd fallen off a clifford nineteen eighty and
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: his body had been recovered minus his jawbone, and they
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: just couldn't solve it. So using FIG they come up
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: with a name, Harry Coleman, and the family was able
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: to bury that jawbone with his remains. In that instance,
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: the forensic scientist Jen Raymond, who I think you know,
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: quoted your name to me if she was bringing the
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: technology in Hebel's police for the first time, and there
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: was a fair bit of resistance, but she persevered and
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: got this result and it was amazing to see this
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: cold case, this jawbone had washed up on a beach,
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: there was no leads, and by the end of the
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: story there's the jawbone being returned to the family and
• 28:54
  Speaker 2: he was buried whole, which is incredibly important in family rituals,
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: in religion and so forth. So I think you can
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: take some credit for creating a old generation of scientists
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: that have changed police work. And over that period of
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: time that you've been working on this, your IdentiFinders International
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: has worked on how many cases.
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: Well, if you count the why DNA is starting from
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: the beginning to today, probably hundreds easily hundreds.
• 29:24
  Speaker 2: Hundreds, and the time taken to solve them is gone
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: down from months or years down todays.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: Well, no, not really, because I have to say it
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: depends on the database. You know, there may be somebody
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: who doesn't have any relatives in the database, and there
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: may be people that do. Now on occasion we can ask,
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: you know, if we have suspicions we know who it is,
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: or we are working on a tree and we need
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: to tweak it or get a little bit boost, we
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: can ask for reference tests. We call it target test
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: or voluntary DNA samples that are used for forensic genealogy,
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: not for law and horseman per se. You know where
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: you can ask for voluntary samples for the forensic genealogy
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: to help solve the case. And usually it's a distant
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: enough relative, it could be close, but we're not using
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: it for police work at all. You're not going to
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: be accused of the murder or anything. It's mostly for
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: I would say humanitarian for identifying human remains, for capturing
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: a violent offender. It's not you normally, it's somebody in
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: your family tree, which you know I probably have all
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: kind of horse thieves in my family tree. It doesn't
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: bother me.
• 30:41
  Speaker 4: You know.
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: If my brother, even if it's found to be some
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: kind of criminal, I'm sorry, that's his decision. You know,
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't be happy, but you know I'd feel obliged
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: to help out. I don't feel uncomfortable about that. So
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: you know, like you say, it depends, you can't sal
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: We have had cases will solve it in five minutes.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: We do have cases that five or six years old
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: now that are very difficult, and you can always speed
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: things along if you know who to ask for a
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: target test, right, because.
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: The big issue is that we've seen commercial family DNA
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: sites like Ancestry absolutely boom. In fact, I use it
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: myself and discover that a friend of mine was actually
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: a first cousin. Long story for another day. Oh interesting,
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: But law enforcement can't use those samples unless there is
• 31:37
  Speaker 2: a waiver, So you're using a smaller database, which is
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: still growing quickly called GEDMatch. Usually, what's the difference in
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: the volume of the samples that you're able to look
• 31:51
  Speaker 2: at compared to what's on the commercial databases.
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: Ancestry has about thirty million people twenty three and me,
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: i'd say, has fifteen to twenty million. My Heritage has
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: about maybe seven eight million, and family Tree probably has
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: two million. We can't use those platforms. We actually do
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: use family Tree. It's the smallest company of all. But
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: let's put that aside for a minute. Jed Match is
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: a platform. It's two million people about, and it accepts
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: results from all the companies. It's only a platform for data.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: It doesn't test, it doesn't sell DNA products. It has tools,
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: and it's a database where say I'm an adoptee and
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: I have my data up on jet match. I took
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: it Ancestry test. Let's say I can download my raw
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: data and put it on jetmatch, and therefore I'm exposed
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: to people who did it from other companies. So there
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: may be a couple of twenty three and meters people
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: there that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. So it's a
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: platform just for data, and it has lots of really
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: good tools. It was built for genealogists, bibe genealogists. Some
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: of the big companies, you know, Ancestry, access to its
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: databases and so on. It caters to genealogists, but in
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: a different way. It sells tests and it has some
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: good tools, but not like the quality and quantity that
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: jetmatch has.
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: What's the future here? If we see access to these
• 33:23
  Speaker 2: bigger databases like Ancestry, I can see a situation in
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: the future where there'll be no secrets. These things will
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: be highly soluble. As this family history boom continues, and
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: people want to put their DNA samples up there, and
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: I guess if there's a way forward to access those,
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: and maybe that's a privacy issue that governments will have
• 33:45
  Speaker 2: to get over. But if that's allowed, how much more
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: effective will forensic investigative genetic genealogy become.
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: Well, the larger the database, the easier. Will more cases,
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: not easier, but I see the more cases will be solved.
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: I don't think Ancestry, twenty through mes, any of those
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: platforms will ever accept forensic cases. In fact, My Heritage
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: just shut down third party uploads because there were some
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: people who were abusing that privilege and uploading forensic cases
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: against the terms of service, so they shut down the
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: third party uploads. It was kind of like the same
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: thing with Jed Matsh where you could upload your data
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: and look for relatives. Because it put a cloud over
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: the database and the company. You know, there's some people
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: that feel uncomfortable with that and they didn't want that
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: issue with their clients. So I think in the future,
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: the future will move forward as the database size and
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: contents move forward. There are a lot of different ethnicities
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: that are not in the database. We had a case
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: where the guy we were able to look at his ethnicity,
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: you know, and he there's ways to do that, and
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: he apparently was from Yemen. And this agreed with an
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: eyewitness account of the criminal who did this assault. And
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: it turned out he was from Yemen, which was all
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: consistent with his accent and what the witness said. He
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: had very few relatives in there and they were very distant. However,
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: just the fact he was from Yemen was a great
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: investigative lead for the detective. We had another case in Arizona.
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: To let you know your listeners, Arizona is great. It's
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: got a big city, Phoenix and Tucson, but it can
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: be out in the middle of the desert. You can
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: have these little teeny towns, you know, like you see
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: in the wild West. And there was a crime out
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: in the middle of these little desert area, little teeny towns,
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: and we found out that guy was Asian. Now, the
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: population of Asians out there was less than a percent,
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: so that is a great investigative lead there. So let's
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: say that you know, you can get metadata, you can
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: squeeze some really interesting information out of it. You may
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: not be able to exactly zoom in on exactly the
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: person life. An adoptee would want to know his mother, father,
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: the whole thing. You may not be able to do that.
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: But as the database is expand and the power is
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: going to be better, bigger, we're going to solve more cases.
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: And if people out there with different ethnicities would catch on,
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: like if there's a particular project in an area where
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: like you know, you're working in Zimbabwe and everything and
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: trying to identify some of the skulls, hopefully well, the
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: help there is you wouldn't immediately upload that DNA to
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: jedmatch and assume there's a lot of people from that
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: area in there. However, you can get the people involved
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: to take a DNA test and put it in jetmatch,
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: and then that starts to boil.
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: Because you write an interesting point there about Zimbabwe, because
• 36:51
  Speaker 2: this is a dream project of mind where they're about
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: a dozen sets of human remains that were taken from
• 36:58
  Speaker 2: colonial Rhodesia Zimbabwe through Britain, heads and other bits and places.
• 37:03
  Speaker 2: And I've sat there on a divided for many, many years,
• 37:06
  Speaker 2: and there's a real political edge to this where the
• 37:11
  Speaker 2: Zimbabwe wants the remains returned, but culturally they can't bury
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: them without identifying them. And the point you raise about
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: how many people would be on a database in a
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: place like Zimbabwe, which where DNA is still, let's face it,
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: in its infancy and law enforcement and so forth. But
• 37:30
  Speaker 2: you raise a good point that where you have populations
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: that haven't moved very far from the locations they have
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: said that over the last hundred or so years, you
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: could find living family members and test them against the
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: DNA and establish a family tree like that.
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: You really could, now could I don't know what the
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: policy is about exhumations out there, but if it was
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: possible to do an exhumation or Let's say somebody had
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: hair as a relic of a person. You can use
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: that to compare the skulls against you could use a
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: living relative. There are a lot of options that we
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: have developed over the last few years. You know, if
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: people are not already in the database, and they may
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: be actually you may be lucky that has happened, you know. Otherwise,
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: there's lots of ways, and it would be very helpful
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: for immediate family members or people who thought they were
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: immediate family members would come forward and take those tests.
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: That's not the end of the story, because we have
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: to compare them and sort out the family. And in
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: some areas this high inner marriage and that complicates things.
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: But let's say if you get close enough relatives the
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: DNA soup, let's call it, you know, the sharing of DNA,
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: because you're all in the same gene pool whatever, that
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: becomes less of a problem. If you have really close
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: relatives and you can see their brother and sister, you
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: can see their grandparents.
• 38:52
  Speaker 2: So this is my dream, is to work with you
• 38:53
  Speaker 2: on this case. By the way, and for me, what
• 38:55
  Speaker 2: it opens up is the return of human remains from
• 39:00
  Speaker 2: many parts across the world. And this has never been done.
• 39:03
  Speaker 2: You've been pioneering this technique within cold cases and missing
• 39:08
  Speaker 2: persons and so forth. But here is a very big
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: cultural opportunity because so many of these museums in Britain
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: and America and elsewhere contain human remains that could be
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: tested and identified at least too within a family tree.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: You know. I had that idea when I was in
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: New Zealand years ago. I went to the Teypopa Museum
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: and I went because they have the Maori heads that
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: were confiscated by the British and put in the British
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: museum and European museums, let's say, And at that time
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: there was a big effort to recover them and return
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: them to New Zealand. And I went. I talked to
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: the curator, the assistant curator, and I said, where did
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: your ancestors come from? And it was generally Polynesia. And
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: I said, you could use DNA to find out, you know,
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: and repatriate it in a more spiritual way, you know,
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: not just had the heads there and whatever cabinet or
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: in display whatever. He was very nice, but they were
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: not interested because you know, it wasn't They didn't need
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: to know that. For one thing. It wasn't urgent. You
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: could do it much better now. And he said, you know,
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: those are the heads of our ancestors. You know we
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: retreat them with respect, and they weren't really interested in
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: going forward. But the same principle applies that those heads
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: could be returned to their proper locations and their proper families.
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: I will tell you the really interesting part is part
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: of the story is you could do DNA, but the
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: tattoos on the faces, which is why they were attracted
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: to museums, actually tell some of the genealogy of a family.
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: So you could use the tattoos along with historical records
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: from the Mauri court and DNA to put all that
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: together in a very interesting way to repatriate those people
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: to their origins.
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: So many mysteries can be of course, as we say
• 41:06
  Speaker 2: in journalism. Might bury the lead here somewhat in relation
• 41:09
  Speaker 2: to your involvement in Australia because and I'll test your
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: humility again right here, is because you got involved in
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: the Somerton Man mystery that was solved in July twenty
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: twenty two that had been a mystery for seventy three years,
• 41:24
  Speaker 2: and your work with Derek Abbott from the University of Adelaide,
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: showed that some of the man was in fact Kyl Webb,
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: a forty three year old electrical engineer an instrument maker
• 41:34
  Speaker 2: from Melbourne, tell us about that one.
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: Derek Abbott had worked on the case for maybe ten
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: years before that. When the man died, they did a
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: plaster cast of his upper body before they buried him.
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: Derek Gabbott became interested in trying to solve the mystery
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: using modern forensics. So he got access to the plaster
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: cast and he noticed there was hair caught in the cast,
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: and he had a forensic anthropologist with a magnifying glass
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: and a set of tweezers go in and take care
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: from inside of the bundles that were caught in the plaster.
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: And he did some stuff. There was, you know, a
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: suitcase that belonged to the man that they found and
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: he did work on that and some of the items
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: were actually more likely coming from America, some came from Australia.
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: You know. He did a lot of work on it.
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: So I hooked up with him probably around twenty fifteen.
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: I was down in Australia. I met him. I think
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: it was twenty fifteen or twenty twelve, and I had
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: talked to him and so you know, I did some
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: research here for him, off and on in those different
• 42:35
  Speaker 1: items from the suitcase. Then so when genealogy kicked in
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: with the Golden State Killer, the subject came up, Hey,
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: you know, we can use his hair to try and
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: identify him, and we did. He's Derek went and sent
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: hair to Austria, which is a company here in the US.
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: It does rutless hair and they produced the snip test
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: all the data we needed to upload to jed Match
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: and we did the genealogy and it was very interesting
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: because you're dealing with an Australian case from nineteen forty eight.
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: You are working with an American database of people living
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: today are deceased in the recent past. And fortunately we
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: came up with a young man born in nineteen ninety
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: one named Jack and he was the top match. And
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: normally it would be a first or second cousin, but
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: you got to face these guys of four generations apart.
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: The suitcase I referred to had the man had no
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: tickets in his clothes. He was found dead on Glen
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: l Beach in last day of November forty eight, So,
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: you know, tracing the suitcase. He had left a suitcase
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: at the train station and he had taken a day
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: tour and he died on the beach during that little
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: jaunt there. And in the suitcase there was almost nothing
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: that could identify him except three items had the name
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: keene k Eane. There was a T shirt called singlet,
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: there was a laundry bag and there was a tie
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: and they all had the name. And of course, you know,
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: authorities look around for Keynes. Now nobody came forward. We'll
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: get back to Jack. Well, I said, this is the
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: only real person. The other person's below that were distant.
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: Some of them were related. You know, we're in the
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: US and had been in the US for a long time,
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: so that connection goes back to the UK several hundred years.
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: You know, you can imagine. So really, Jack nineteen ninety
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: one not that bad or relative. So I started building
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: his tree out and the problem then there's a catch
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: here because Jack didn't know who his father was. So
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: the very first thing we had to do was work
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: on Jack. You know, the hell with the Somerton man.
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: We got to find out who Jack is, and we
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: made a deal with his aunts, who happened to also
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: be on JED match, and we said, look, we'll find
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: out who Jack's father is, and in return, you have
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: to tell us all about your family and help us out.
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: And they said sure. We found out Jack's father was
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: named William, and we figured that out. We figured out
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: that was the connection of Somerton Man, because everybody else
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: was on his mom's side and they had no relation
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: as Somerton Man. They weren't even on his list of
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: DNA cousins. So the connection was through Jack's father. So
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: I built a tree and there was Jack's father, William.
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: We got that down, okay, and then William went to
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: somebody and then that grandmother and his great grandmother was
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: Gertrude Keene, so I said, isn't that interesting. I've heard
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: that name somewhere. And then we went one more generation
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: and her parents were Thomas Keen and FRIEDA. Webb. So
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: you know, that kind of matched up with the right dates,
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: the right age the people would be this number of
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: generations before Jack of the Tree. But Thomas Kean had
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: an obituary and he was buried somewhere. Thomas Kean's brother
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: was buried somewhere Thomas Kean's father was buried somewhere, so
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: none of these could be the Somerton man. So at
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: that point, you know, I'm saying, gee, I just ran
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: out of Kenes, what's going on here? And I realized something,
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: my you know, thank goodness, I went to grade school.
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: I remembered something back from third grade that really, you know,
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: really did the trick. And what I remembered was that
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: we have two parents, not just one. So you know Keynes.
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: Let's see, the Keenes married the web So I said,
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: maybe it's not Thomas and his brother, maybe it's Freeda
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: Webb and her brothers. So I looked through that and
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: Freda had there were three boys and three girls in
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: that family. So there were three brothers. One had died
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: in World War two somewhere in Burma or something, and
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: one we knew where he died. The last one, Carl Webb,
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: had no date of death. So what we did we
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: were pretty sure it was Carl because he was the
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: only one that didn't have a day of death, and
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: he would be about the right age, you know, at all,
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: he was from Melbourne. Everything fit. So what we did
• 46:59
  Speaker 1: is we recruited those relatives, those target tests. Now this
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: was tricky because everybody's gone. Actually, Carl had like a
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: great niece who was in her nineties. We had hair done,
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: heart take a test. We tried to find somebody from
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: every one of the lines of those brothers and sisters
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: and that would account for the website. And then we
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: got very lucky. We got somebody a cousin on the
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: mom's side, Robinson or something. So we had all those
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: people tested and we did the Sudoku puzzle. They all
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: matched Carl just right way, and so it had to
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: be Carl. After a while there was nobody else and
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: that's when we had proven to satisfaction that the Somerton
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: Man was Carl Webb from Melbourne, I think from South
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: Yarra And that's it.
• 47:53
  Speaker 2: Did you have any idea the mystery here in Astrida
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: about Somerton Mann and all the stories that he had
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: been possibly a cold woar spy and all these different
• 48:04
  Speaker 2: while Did you have any idea of how big this
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: case was for Australians.
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: No, I know it was big. You know, It's like
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: we have our cases that are big here too. I'm
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: from a different country. You may hear my accents different
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: and so you don't have that extra boost of growing
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: up with it. You know. I read about it. It
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: was very intriguing and interesting, but I didn't have that
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: extra little something that comes from actually knowing about it
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: when you're in grade school and you read another layer
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: of he was a spy or so and some things.
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: That's her uncle. You know, growing up you hear all that,
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: but I didn't. I just read about it. It's different.
• 48:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was kind of anticlimactic for many Australians because
• 48:49
  Speaker 2: the stories were so wild, and then in fact it
• 48:52
  Speaker 2: had a much more down to earth solution. But I
• 48:56
  Speaker 2: guess this case demonstrates something. I deal with families of
• 49:00
  Speaker 2: missing people, murder victims and so forth all the time,
• 49:05
  Speaker 2: and a lot of these cases have gone cold, and
• 49:09
  Speaker 2: I think increasingly we're seeing police forces suggesting that families
• 49:13
  Speaker 2: are missing persons in particular should put their DNA up
• 49:18
  Speaker 2: on databases because it might not be able to be
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: solved today. But the science is moving so fast on this,
• 49:26
  Speaker 2: and people like you're building your technologies and your skills that,
• 49:29
  Speaker 2: as I said earlier, there will be very few secrets
• 49:32
  Speaker 2: in the future.
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, you know, we've had a case, for example,
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: that to that point. We had a case of an
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: unidentified female from the nineteen seventies up in Connecticut, and
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: it took that particular agency wanted to identify her. It
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: was a bunch of retired detectives, you know, they said,
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: let's see what we can do. How about this Jane Doe,
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: East Haven, Connecticut. And it took three years for them
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: to find where she was buried and exhume her and
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: get the DNA and this went on. You know, this
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: was actually very difficult for them. She was buried in
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: the potter's field. They didn't know where it was. They
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: had to cut down all the grass and they finally
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: thought they had it. They pulled up a ten year
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: old boy. It wasn't her. They had to go back
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: to the drawing board and finally the detective they figured
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: it out. It's a very interesting story sometimes. But the
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: detective called me. He was actually standing in the grave
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: with his cell phone talking to me, asking me what
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: he should pull up from the coffin before they reburied her.
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: And once we did that, that was three years until
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: that data came and we uploaded it to jed match
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: and it was a match in five minutes. Her sister
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: had gone out to try and find out what happened
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: to her, and her sister had recently posted her DNA
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: on jed match, and so the minute we saw that,
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: it was like the rest is history. Took five minutes.
• 51:01
  Speaker 2: Collin Fitzpatrick, you are a loss to nuclear physics, but
• 51:04
  Speaker 2: a massive gift the lawer enforcement to families seeking answers.
• 51:08
  Speaker 2: And what an amazing story, what an amazing career. I
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: think there should be a movie made out of your
• 51:13
  Speaker 2: life and what you've done for people. Do you feel
• 51:15
  Speaker 2: a sense of satisfaction having made this big change in
• 51:18
  Speaker 2: your life? I guess also, as you said earlier, at
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: a time when you felt you had very little choice
• 51:23
  Speaker 2: left in your career and suddenly a much bigger door
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: opened up for you.
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's happened to me a couple of times, you know,
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: when right at that moment when I absolutely didn't know
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: what to do, what's going to happen next, suddenly a
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: lightning bolt hits me and I go there, do that,
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: And I guess my satisfaction, my happiness is helping people.
• 51:46
  Speaker 1: You know, I've always wanted to help people, and you know,
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: do something that would you help people? You know, bring
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: some kind of solace, some kind of release, some kind
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: of answers in a unique way that was unexpected, and
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: that goes on giving forever. Once you know that answer,
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: what happened to your family member, your love on, your friend,
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: you have that the rest of your life. You don't
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: have to worry anymore. You have release. You don't have
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: closure because the person's never coming back, but you have
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: a release and you don't have to worry. You know
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: what happened, you know where they are, and you can
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: rearrange those mental furniture so that you're comfortable with it again,
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: and all that energy you use to worry can go
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: into something else, much more positive.
• 52:35
  Speaker 2: What's fantastic, Colin, thank you once again for sharing your
• 52:38
  Speaker 2: story on real problem with that and Shad.
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: Sure anytime, you know, I'll be glad to come back anytime.
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: And I really hope the project in Zimbabwe goes forward.
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: I think that would be absolutely fantastic and it can
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: be done. It absolutely can be done. I'm not saying
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: it's easy. I'm not saying, well, step in five minutes
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: later we'll have the answers, but I'm saying that technology
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: is there, everything's in place, and with the right okays,
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: the right understanding, the right opinions, the right sort of
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: legal platform. Everybody's agreed. You can repatriate those goals and
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: you can bring peace to those spirits that have been
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: separated because the whole body hasn't been buried together. You
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: can resolve that in a way. You can resolve that
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: in a forever way.
• 53:25
  Speaker 2: Well, you've absolutely refortified my spirit on this. I was
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: flagging a little bit when I'm striking all the politics
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: of dealing with these issues and cultural issues. But I'm
• 53:33
  Speaker 2: going to go back to it. So I'll keep you
• 53:35
  Speaker 2: posted and we'll do a follow up when we've solved
• 53:37
  Speaker 2: that puzzle as well.
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'll be glad to anytime. You know, give
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: me a ring, let me know what's going on, and
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: I'm here. You know, if along the way you need
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: to say, well, is it this or that? Or how
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: should I explain this? Or what would what's your opinion
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: about this? Even just give me a call. I'm fascinated
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: by the project and I'd really like to be involved.
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: I think I could kick butt for you. I think
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: I could do a good job.
• 54:05
  Speaker 2: That's doctor Colleen Fitzpatrick from IdentiFinders International. If you're a
• 54:10
  Speaker 2: crook and you've left DNA behind, be very afraid because
• 54:14
  Speaker 2: she is going to find you. This is also another
• 54:17
  Speaker 2: reminder to the families of missing people that they should
• 54:20
  Speaker 2: consider uploading DNA to jedmatch, because at the rate the
• 54:24
  Speaker 2: technology is advancing, there may well be an answer for
• 54:27
  Speaker 2: you and your family. I put links to jedmatch and
• 54:31
  Speaker 2: IdentiFinders International in the show notes. As always, if you
• 54:35
  Speaker 2: want to report a crime, please call crime Stoppers on
• 54:38
  Speaker 2: one eight hundred triple three, triple zero, or you can
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: email me on Adam shand writer at gmail dot com.
• 54:45
  Speaker 2: This has been Adam shanned for real crime. Thanks for listening.
• 54:56
  Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to this episode and supporting this story.
• 55:00
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• 55:03
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• 55:06
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• 55:10
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