If it isn’t clear from the popularity of shows like The Jinx, Making a Murderer and the podcast Serial, people love true crime stories. The nation was gripped last spring when the Golden State Killer was finally caught after decades of unsolved murders. And the three-decades-old cold case of 8-year-old April Tinsley also made national headlines over the summer when her murderer confessed to the crime.
Recent advances in DNA technology, along with the popularity of genealogy mapping sites (think Ancestry.com), have helped to solve long dormant cases and—as it turns out—a small company in Reston is behind a number of those cold case successes.
Parabon NanoLabs was founded in 2008 by Dr. Steven Armentrout and Dr. Michael Norton. In 2015, Parabon began partnering with law enforcement to help zero in on cold cases, including Tinsley’s murder. The 8-year-old was abducted, raped and murdered in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in April 1988 and, with the help of Parabon’s DNA forensic capabilities, they were able to narrow down the suspects significantly.
The local company has two key areas of focus. The first is DNA nanotechnology, which generally helps utilize DNA for medical applications. The other is Snapshot DNA analysis, which includes phenotyping (predicting traits like eye color and hair color) and kinship inference (determining a relationship based on DNA samples). Snapshot DNA has been a part of Parabon’s portfolio since 2015, but it was just this year that they combined it with genetic genealogy to work on solving violent crimes.
“Traditional DNA analysis treats DNA like a fingerprint. We treat it like a blueprint,” says Armentrout. Using the genetic content gathered from a crime scene, Parabon’s genetic genealogists—which includes CeCe Moore, who has been the lead on a number of Parabon’s solved cold cases—upload the resulting data to a public database for genealogy called GEDmatch, which requires users to acknowledge that their information could be used for law enforcement purposes. Originally designed to help find genetic relatives, Parabon’s team uses it to build out a family tree and find possible genetic relatives of the collected DNA sample.
“You build all of the descendants out, and hopefully there are enough clues that you can eliminate certain branches of the tree,” Amrentrout explains. “And when it’s successful we’re able to often drill it down to ‘the unknown must be from this family, one of three brothers.’”
That information is passed along to law enforcement in a detailed report, concluding with potential suspect leads. Law enforcement takes it from there and determines if the tip is accurate. To date, Armentrout says that they haven’t had a tip that has proven wrong.
In the case of Tinsely, Parabon received the sample and discovered there was a primary ancestry and secondary ancestry present, described as a genetic admixture. With that second ancestry they were able to narrow down to a single branch of the suspect’s family, and ultimately to one of two brothers. Upon further investigation, one of the brothers was arrested and confeSsed to the murder.
Arguably the most high profile cold case solved in 2018, the Golden State Killer, used a process that Armentrout described as “highly similar.”
The key point to the technology is to allow police to be more efficient in their investigations. “Some of the cases we’ve worked are decades old and over the course of those investigations there may have been thousands of people on the suspect list,” says Armentrout. “We’re able to take that and completely eliminate putting a magnifying glass on any of those people and instead say it’s one of these three brothers.”
Parabon NanoLabs has more than 60 active cases that its team of genetic genealogists is working on, including ongoing cases in Virginia, and, says Armentrout, “more coming all the time,” as their cold case capabilities make headlines.
CeCe Moore will participate in an interview along with Golden State Killer cold case detective Paul Holes during Death Becomes Us—A True Crime Festival, scheduled for Nov. 3 & 4 in D.C. // truecrimedc.com
