May 28, 2019
It's been just over a year since the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo, the alleged Golden State Killer, who was captured through an ingenious ploy by law enforcement, which registered the then-unknown killer's DNA under a dummy name on GEDMatch, a public DNA-based genealogy website. That sample led to distant relatives of DeAngelo who had registered their DNA on GEDMatch. From there, detectives pared down a list of those relatives until DeAngelo's DNA was confirmed to be a match with that of the murderer. In this past year alone, at least 50 arrests in other cases around the country have resulted from law enforcement's use of this form of DNA comparison. Recently, in a move obviously aimed at averting litigation, GEDMatch announced that henceforth no GEDMatch client's DNA can be used by law enforcement unless the client "opts-in" to such use. This policy applies even to the more than one million clients that existed prior to the policy change. In this episode, Melissa discusses the challenges this decision - and others likely to follow by other DNA testing sites - poses to police everywhere trying to solve murders where DNA exists but no DNA match can be found through traditional means.