Heather Murphy

In a remote area about three hours from the mountain’s summit, a bleached skull peeked out from beneath gray boulders.

“We were in disbelief,” said one of the hikers, Brandon Follin, 22, who was with his friend, Tyler Hofer, 33. “My first thought was maybe it was a prop or something like you see in a science class.”

As they got closer, they spotted hints of other bones amid the boulders. Clearing away the rocks revealed a skeleton, which was almost fully intact, with a pair of disintegrating leather shoes and the remnants of a belt.

Investigators at the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office are trying to identify the hiker and solve the mystery of why he or she never got beyond this spot in “the bowl,” as that stretch leading up to the top of Mount Williamson is known.

The mountain is in the Sierra Nevadas, more than a four-hour drive from Los Angeles or Las Vegas. The primary rule of getting to the top is not to drop anything while navigating the bowl, said Tinh Le Trung, who works at Elevation Sierra Adventure Essentials and did the hike two years ago.

“Imagine a bunch of sharp boulders that you have to hop between,” he said. “Lose your phone and you can’t get it back.” And if you twist your ankle on one of the unstable rocks, “you’re done,” he said.

That is particularly true if you have come up one of the more remote sides of the bowl: “No one will find you,” Trung added.

People from across the country come for the hike. For Follin and Hofer, who are both from San Diego, the attraction was “to do another fourteener,” Follin, said, using the lingo for a 14,000-foot peak.

Hofer saw the chalk-white skull first. They were about 12 miles into their hike from the spot where they camped the night before. They started crossing the bowl and took the wrong route around a lake.

“I looked down and saw something strange underneath a small boulder,” Hofer wrote in a Facebook post. “I thought it looked like a bone of some kind, and after closer inspection, it was indeed a human skull.”

The hikers were at a loss about what to do.

Follin said not touching the bones and calling authorities seemed wise, but they were far beyond cell service. They opted to document their findings, moving only the foot for a better photo of the shoe.

After they reached the summit, they called 911. On Wednesday, the remains were removed by a California Highway Patrol helicopter.

The Inyo County Sheriff’s Office said it could not yet say how long the person had been on the mountain. The sex of the person was pending a review by the county coroner’s office.

Forensic anthropologist Alison Galloway, a professor emerita of anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz, said the length of time it would take for a body to become a skeleton depends primarily on the temperature and local insect population.

In a warm area with certain types of flies, it could happen in six months. “The colder it is, the longer it will take,” she said.

Galloway had not seen the skeleton but said investigators typically hope there is still some soft tissue because then they “can get within a few months.” But with only bones, it is trickier to determine whether someone has been there for one year or 20.

In this case, the shoes and belt may offer more useful clues than the skeleton itself, she said. There are a variety of other techniques to determine timing. She pointed to carbon-14 testing, for example, which can reveal whether someone died before the 1950s.

Strangely, the use of atomic bombs in the 1950s and 1960s released enough changes in the carbon ions in the atmosphere to be reflected in the bones of people who were born after that time, she said.

Carma Roper, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office, said investigators had reviewed lists of everyone reported missing in the area in the last couple of decades. That included Lt. Matthew Kraft, a Marine from Connecticut who vanished during a ski trek through the Sierra in February, and Matthew Greene, a climber from Pennsylvania last seen in the Mammoth Lakes area in 2013.

Based on the skeleton’s location, nothing has matched up.

There is “no evidence to suggest foul play at the scene,” Roper, who declined to elaborate, said. Follin, who said he had no forensic background, was skeptical.

“The way the body was laid out, it was lounging” as if someone buried the hiker after he or she died, he said.

Follin and Hofer said they spotted a big dent in the skull, as if it were fractured. Roper said that was inaccurate.

The sheriff’s office is attempting to obtain a DNA sample from the remains. Ed Green, a professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, who is not involved in the investigation but specializes in extracting DNA from old remains, said that if no hair was available, an ear bone or tooth were generally reliable sources of DNA.

Investigators can then see if the DNA matches anyone in a missing person’s database. If not, and no promising leads emerge, Roper said the sheriff’s office planned to use forensic genealogy, a technique that relies on using cousins in genealogy databases to identify a person.

“If someone knows someone who hiked in the area and disappeared, they should contact us,” she said.

This article originally appeared in

Hikers Find Mystery Skeleton on Remote Mountain in California

Had they not gotten off track, a pair of hikers on Mount Williamson, California’s second-highest peak, would have missed it.

“She was found in 1982 in Newark,” said the class leader, who opened the session by bursting into song. That plus the little plates of cannoli positioned on each table might have led an uninformed interloper to mistake the event for the $33-a-ticket catch a killer game across town.

But though the scenario was fictional, the players involved made it anything but a game. Seated in his deceptively low-key white shorts and hiking boots was Thomas Callaghan of the FBI, who was involved in overseeing CODIS, law enforcement’s primary criminal DNA database over the past 25 years. He recently moved over to the FBI’s rapidly expanding genetic genealogy unit. A few tables back to the right, genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter, who helped crack the Golden State Killer case, chatted with a friend who was looking to invest big in this emerging industry. A few tables over still, Curtis Rogers, a co-founder of GEDmatch, the genealogy database which is fast becoming law enforcement’s new go-to tool for solving crimes, sat checking his phone.

Diahan Southard, the instructor, offered an encouraging greeting to the 115 or so people who had signed up for her genetic genealogy workshop. “I believe anyone can learn to do this,” she said. Though some were old hands in the technique, the majority of the forensic scientists, detectives, coroners and family historians were novices, eager to learn how to identify bodies and suspects by using partial matches to cousins on genealogy sites.

The workshop, held in late September, capped a week of sessions at the 30th International Symposium on Human Identification, an annual gathering for 1,000 “rock stars of DNA” as one attendee called them. It offered a revealing, yet unconventionally performative, window into forensic genealogy, at a crucial moment in its trajectory.

At the same conference, a Department of Justice representative put forth the first guidelines for the technique, which burst into the forensic mainstream a year and a half ago, offering law enforcement an enticing and contentious way of identifying violent offenders.

“It’s been an extraordinary 18 months,” Ted Hunt, senior adviser to the attorney general on forensic science at the Department of Justice, told a crowd as he introduced the guidelines, which go into effect Nov. 1. Later in the buffet lines and in the hallways of the appropriately futuristic-looking convention center, attendees discussed what it all meant for crime and privacy.

In part, the policy offers law enforcement guidelines around order of operations. For example, do not upload samples to a genealogy site unless CODIS, the FBI criminal database of nearly 14 million people convicted or charged with serious crimes, has failed you first. It also creates DNA storage guidelines, something that put Cynthia Zeller, a chemistry professor at Towson University, at ease.

In terms of violating people’s privacy, Zeller said midway through the conference, “I think it’s less of a huge deal than when I got here.”

Zeller, who formerly worked at a state police lab, had been weighing whether the new technique, which had already helped crack more than 70 cases, was as transformative to forensics as the invention of the internet or was something more analogous to a smaller, shinier iPad.

“It’s the internet,” she ultimately concluded, given that the technique ultimately makes any bit of DNA collected from any crime scene ever potentially identifiable.

But only if it does not all implode first, Southard reminded her class on the final day of the conference. “This depends on having the support of regular people,” she said. “If you can’t convince the public that it’s safe, it’s going to go away.”

Any breakdown of trust, many attendees agreed, was most likely to involve the matter of which databases and profiles law enforcement might use in their investigations.

In a quest to find relatives or ancestry information, more than 20 million people over the past decade have shared their genetic information with genealogy databases, which have differing policies for working with law enforcement. One such company, MyHeritage, explicitly prohibits law enforcement from using its site to solve crimes. And another, GEDmatch, only allows the police to use profiles of the roughly 15% of people who have explicitly opted in to help solve crimes.

But the question remains: Who is responsible for making sure that customers’ wishes are respected? Asked another way: Who is supposed to make sure that if an adoptee joins a site to find her biological mother, she does not end up contributing to the arrest of her cousin for burglary?

The new guidelines from the government does not cover those potential concerns. Asked outright what is to keep investigators from misusing the databases, Hunt said they were not the responsibility of the Department of Justice.

“Forensic genealogists have organizations and associations themselves,” he said, implying that such associations should be advising investigators working for law enforcement agencies on what is appropriate.

The eight pages of new government guidelines Hunt brought to the conference do address another tricky, but rarely publicized, aspect of how genetic genealogy has worked so far. It has sometimes involved surreptitiously collecting DNA not just from the suspect, but from his or her relatives. (That relative could have been you; no one has been required to tell you.) These investigations require finding cousins on genealogy sites and building giant family trees. Sometimes testing the DNA of one of the people in that tree — and comparing it to the killer’s DNA to see how they are related — could help genealogists find their suspect. Sometimes investigators simply ask these relatives to take a DNA test. But in other cases they will dispatch an undercover officer to collect a discarded coffee cup.

Hunt declined to say how often this has happened, but several genealogists confirmed that it has.

The new rules require authorities to get your “informed consent” to collect your DNA from, say, a discarded coffee cup, unless the request would compromise the integrity of an investigation. Frederick Bieber, a medical geneticist and a professor at Harvard University who also presented at the conference, called that caveat a “loophole” he would like to see eliminated.

Fundamentally, it all raises larger philosophical questions, according to the attendees. If your Yelp review helped a detective identify a thief, you probably would not expect to have to give permission for that review to be used in an investigation. Most agree that a genetic profile is quite different. But is it even helpful for people to know that a distant cousin, one they may have never known, might be a serial killer?

In the workshop, Southard attempted to get the room of future genetic genealogists to think through those questions. “If people believe their DNA is who they are but learn that their relative is a violent criminal, then it could affect them,” she said.

She constructed a scenario to push them to consider this further. In the process of identifying the girl from Newark, New Jersey, a cousin named Kyle popped up as a match on a genealogy site. But his profile did not have any family tree data. “How would we try to get a tree out of this person?” she asked.

Joseph Rose, with the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office in Alabama, stared skeptically at the slip of paper on which he was supposed to draft a letter. After 20 years of being in charge of crime scenes for the police in Mobile, he had recently taken on an assignment that puts him in charge of applying genetic genealogy to cold cases. “I wouldn’t write a letter,” he said. “Writing words can’t get the tone out.”

But the two women next to him — Kathryn Johnston, a longtime genealogist ready to try working with law enforcement, and Joscelyn McBain of totheletter DNA, an Australian DNA testing company — encouraged him to come up with something.

“We’re investigating a case, and we’d appreciate your assistance,” he ultimately scrawled. No one at the table seemed entirely sold on it, but they agreed it was a start.

Shaking the Family Tree to Roust Out a Suspect: New Science, and Rules

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — On a recent afternoon, under two giant chandeliers, some of the key people responsible for the future of crime and privacy tried to solve a murder.

But even the highest-profile cases rarely end up in criminal court; they typically become humiliating footnotes to the discoveries they slowed.

This week, however, a judge in Montana sentenced a former chemist at the water treatment plant in Billings after she pleaded guilty in October to a felony charge of tampering with public records or information.

The information in question? Her colleagues’ water tests, which she contaminated for three months, ultimately costing the Billings water treatment plant its state certification and thoroughly perplexing her colleague, her boss and a host of experts, who could not figure out why just one chemist’s tests kept failing, according to prosecutors.

The sentence? A payment of $38,911 to the city of Billings, near Yellowstone National Park, and a three-year deferred sentence, meaning she is required to check in with a probation officer for that period.

“I deserved a reprimand, of course,” Michelle Henderson, the chemist who was sentenced on Monday, said in an interview. She said that she believed the colleague whose samples were contaminated, Katie Hendrickson, had been receiving preferential treatment from their boss. “I worked in a toxic environment that was fed by favoritism. My mind couldn’t cope.”

The rivalry took root during a time when — from the outside — everything at the Billings water treatment plant was going well. In 2014, a glowing article in a local newspaper declared that the plant was producing “the tastiest and purest water in Montana.”

In May 2015, Hendrickson, the chemist whose photo appeared with that article, discovered that she was unable to deliver on the most essential of tasks: passing a water test. Her job was to prove that the water going out to Billings residents was safe to drink. But even though other chemists’ tests showed precisely that, hers did not.

For three months, her tests — and her tests alone — failed again and again. She checked her equipment and asked her supervisor to monitor the process. Still, she experienced “numerous failed tests on a nearly daily basis beginning on May 19, 2015, and ending on Sept. 3, 2015,” an affidavit filed by the prosecution stated.

“It was kind of the scenario of everything that I touched just was contaminated and would not work,” she said at the sentencing hearing on Monday, according to The Billings Gazette. The more she did to resolve the problem, the worse it got, she said, until she saw contamination at “unbelievable levels” multiple times a day.

An external expert flew in to review the equipment, but found no problems. For those who know Hendrickson, the possibility that it was user error seemed implausible. “She was a great chemist,” said Andy Valkenburg, a former quality officer at Energy Laboratories in Billings, where she had previously been employed.

Only after the company installed surveillance cameras did the truth come to light. When Hendrickson was at lunch and in her boss’ office, Henderson handled her colleague’s samples, spiking them with a substance and discarding materials in the trash. Henderson was put on administrative leave and later resigned.

Water tests involve several steps. The first is making sure that the test is calibrated correctly. This is when Henderson manipulated the results, she said. She did this by taking a concentrated powder and putting it in the beaker used to set measurements.

One would be hard-pressed to find a more “wild” way of gaslighting someone in a lab, said Matt Queen, a professor of analytical chemistry at Montana State University Billings. It’s kind of like popping an invisible weight on a scale and then watching as everything comes out 20 pounds heavier for one person than for another. “I’m sure it just drove that poor woman nuts,” he said.

At the sentencing hearing on Monday, Henderson offered her former co-worker and boss a tearful apology, saying what she had done was “stupid,” according to The Billings Gazette.

Judge Michael Moses of Yellowstone County District Court said the consequences could have been even more grave. “You were six inches away from contaminating the water system of the community of a 100,000 people-plus,” he said, the newspaper reported. “That’s just unfathomable, and that’s a horrific breach of public trust. But thank goodness you had enough sense not to do that.”

Penelope Strong, Henderson’s lawyer, said in an interview that though her client was remorseful, the judge’s pronouncement was sensationalist given that the water from water tests never goes back to the main water supply.

Attempts to reach Hendrickson, Henderson’s former boss and the prosecutor were unsuccessful. A Billings water treatment plant employee who answered the phone this week said her team had been advised not to comment.

As to what she was thinking, Henderson said in the interview that she loved her work as a chemist but had been frustrated by the sense that she worked harder than her colleague but that their boss favored the other chemist. As a mother of three young children, she spent her breaks pumping breast milk, she said. It bothered her that her colleague seemed to taker longer breaks.

“I started muddling with her sample methods so that she would actually have to work,” Henderson said. “This just made their bond stronger and my negative emotions became cancerous.” Given a do-over, she said, she would leave before letting jealousy and resentment “seep into my soul.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/us/montana-chemist-water.html" id="5745c85c-09cd-3215-af53-9ea4dfc5afe0">The New York Times</a>.

Jealousy Led Montana Chemist to Taint Colleague's Water Tests

Lab rivalries go back nearly as far as labs themselves. There’s the case of a prominent 19th-century bacteriologist who paid local authorities to deny a former collaborator access to the bodies of plague victims. There are the AIDS researchers who sabotaged one another’s work on at least five occasions. And there are numerous stories of scientists who have accused colleagues of stealing their work.

In an interview Tuesday, he explained that he had been planning to use a big news event to promote his online expert company, which has been struggling to find users.

A few hours earlier, a gunman had opened fire at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, 60 miles south of his home. He said he was frustrated by how little the witnesses interviewed by broadcast journalists seemed to know. His site could help, he thought.

And so, seated in the comfort of his home, with its indoor tennis court and three microwave ovens for optimum popcorn popping, he took action: “I dashed off a tweet and did not think about it.”

If you were a witness to the #GilroyGarlicFestivalshooting please sign on to Interface by WhenHub (free app) and you can set your price to take calls. Use keyword Gilroy. — @ScottAdamsSays

In particular the phrase “set your price” — amid a tragedy that took the lives of a 6-year-old boy, a 13-year-old girl and a 25-year-old biologist — struck many people as insensitive. Rather quickly, his tweet was “ratioed,” eventually accumulating more than 1,300 comments, far outnumbering the likes and retweets, the equivalent of a beating in the virtual square.

“THERE WAS A TRAGEDY, USE MY APP,” one user wrote.

“And the ghoulish grifter chimes in,” wrote another.

A user who described sitting in Gilroy with scared family members wrote: “Choppers overhead as we are sheltered in place in the ACTIVE MANHUNT SEARCH ZONE &amp; YOU CARE ABOUT OPTIMIZING THE ALMIGHTY $? DO NOT PASS GO, JUST GO TO HELL!!”

In the interview, Adams said he regretted the “set your price” wording because it masked the fact that people who sign up for his site are not required to charge for an interview, and because he really believes his site could facilitate better journalism and help connect people to good experts.

“I wouldn’t do it the same way again,” he said, noting that he has promoted his company during two natural disasters without generating any resistance.

But what about the fee that his company collects per interview?

“If you think $5 is money; I don’t,” he said, laughing. (For context: According to Adams, he was once was paid $100,000 to speak for an hour on techniques for success.)

For anyone who has peeked at Adams’ Twitter feed in the past few years, however, none of this should come as a big surprise. There are the typical tweets promoting his comic strip, which he has been creating for more than 30 years. But there are also plenty of hints of his other identity: online provocateur. Long before his “set your price” tweet ignited controversy, there was the podcast episode in which he defended family separations at the southern border and his “men’s rights” blog post.

He is an admirer of President Donald Trump, and he admits to borrowing some of the president’s style. “One of the things that you can learn from Trump’s approach is that energy is more important than being technically correct,” he said Tuesday.

In a live Periscope video, he connected the recent backlash to his support of the president. “The pushback I’m getting is fueled by the intense hatred of Trump and of anybody who’s ever said anything good about Trump,” he said in one widely circulated remark.

Still, how did a Bay Area-based artist, known for creating a widely syndicated comic strip about the indignities of office life, get to this point? We put some questions to Adams.

Has he always been a Republican?

No. In fact, the last presidential candidate he voted for was former Vice President Al Gore, he said. Since then, he said, he has stopped participating in elections.

“I publicly don’t vote because it causes bias,” he said, adding that “I define myself as left of Bernie.”

His appreciation for Trump is about communication methods, he said. Adams is a trained hypnotist and has written a book about the art of persuasion.

“He is more persuasive than any public figure I’ve ever seen,” he said of the president. “Early on in 2015 I saw his skill set and thought no one has that skill set. You can’t recognize persuasion unless you’ve studied it.”

By that point, Adams had begun dabbling in provocative political writing himself. In a 2017 Outline article, writer Alex Nichols pointed to a 2011 blog post about men’s rights as “the first time Adams made a detectable splash” with his blog.

“The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently,” Adams wrote in the blog post. “It’s just easier this way for everyone.”

Adams apologized after the blog post began to draw negative attention, but he also reprimanded readers for failing to understand what he was trying to say, according to The Outline.

He deployed a similar tactic in the latest controversy. Referring to the tweet, Adams said that his mistake was making “an assumption that people can handle ethical decisions on their own.”

More recently, Adams inserted himself into the debate around the Trump administration’s family-separation policy in a podcast episode in which he argued that those who attack the policy are siding with human traffickers.

His comments inspired a 2018 Forbes column, “Dilbert Creator Scott Adams Is Evil (And Why You Should Follow His Lead),” in which the writer urged readers to mimic Adams’ opportunistic approach to stay afloat “in our new world order.”

Has he met Trump?

Yes. Adams said that he was invited to the White House to meet the president after the publication of his book “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.” The book explores Trump’s unconventional candidacy.

“Apparently my book ‘Win Bigly’ made a big impact on his advisers, and he wanted to chat,” Adams said in a direct message on Twitter.

Why does he run a tech startup?

For a creative person, Adams has long had an unconventional relationship with work. Even as his comic strip took off, he chose to keep a $70,000-a-year job as an applications engineer at Pacific Bell.

In 1995, The New York Times wrote, “For nearly two decades he has been a denizen of the very environment he lampoons, toiling anonymously in his own cubicle on obscure corporate projects.”

He later ventured into restaurants and a food company, neither of which was particularly successful. The Dilberito, a vitamin-packed meatless burrito, never quite took off. Although his restaurant employees seemed to enjoy his company, they told The Times in 2007 that he had no idea what he was doing.

More recently, he created WhenHub, a venture that aims to connect journalists, investors and others to experts. The home page features dozens of so-called video advisers, including a man who charges $499 an hour for “triple-investment commissions,” a woman who will discuss African safaris for $1 an hour and a man who will discuss socialism for $100 an hour.

Adams said he chose not to delete the WhenHub promotional tweet — as much as he wishes he had worded it differently — as part of a personal policy.

“I leave the tweet up because in our current world you keep your mistakes as a public record,” he said. “I think that it’s cowardly to delete a tweet.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/business/media/scott-adams-dilbert-gilroy.html" id="8be4c280-448e-3eca-a403-08de04851901">The New York Times</a>.

Scott Adams, the 62-year-old creator of the Dilbert comic strip, said he was flipping between CNN and Fox in his home in Pleasanton, California, on Sunday when it hit him: His moment had come.

Scott Adams, Dilbert Creator, Has One Regret About Mass-Shooting Tweet

What she saw on tape was not at all what she had envisioned when she heard that he had confessed.

“He would ask him a question,” she said of the interrogator, “and he would answer it for him.”

The man, Christopher Tapp, was exonerated Wednesday in Idaho Falls, Idaho, in part because of Dodge’s persistence, and in part thanks to novel forensic techniques that pair DNA with genealogy databases.

It was the first time genetic genealogy, a revolutionary technique that identifies suspects by matching crime scene DNA to relatives, has been used to clear a convicted killer’s name.

“The system thought that I could be thrown away,” Tapp said in a statement released through the Innocence Project. “They were wrong. I want people to know that I’m innocent. I’ve said it for the past 22 years. Finally, the truth is being revealed.”

The case also offers a reminder that under intense pressure, people sometimes confess to crimes that they did not commit, said Vanessa Potkin, the director of post-conviction litigation at the Innocence Project.

Tapp at first adamantly denied that he had any idea who killed the victim. But throughout the course of a 30-hour interview process spread over many weeks, investigators would not accept his story.

Law enforcement officials psychologically manipulated him into confessing, then used the confession as proof of his guilt even when DNA pointed to a different perpetrator, Potkin said.

On June 13, 1996, 18-year-old Angie Dodge was raped and murdered in her apartment in Idaho Falls. About a year later, the crime was still unsolved, when a friend of Dodge’s was arrested in an unrelated rape that also involved a knife.

The police believed that this man could be the perpetrator in the Dodge case. Tapp was friends with him. The police called Tapp to find out more about his friend.

But at some point in that process, Tapp, 20 at the time, became a suspect himself.

“Police threatened him with the death penalty and told him that if he just told them what they wanted to hear, they would give him immunity,” Potkin said.

When he was arrested, he renounced his confession. DNA evidence, extracted from semen at the scene, was not a match to Tapp.

But it did not matter. “The confession trumps all other evidence in a case,” Potkin said. “There is a common belief that I would never confess to a crime I didn’t do.”

Nearly a third of the 367 exonerations since 1989 in which the Innocence Project has used DNA testing to clear someone involved false confessions. “Interrogations are not a quest for information,” Potkin said. “The purpose is to get an admission.”

In May 1998, Tapp was convicted of rape and murder. The prosecutors’ case rested on Tapp’s confession and the testimony of a woman who said she overheard Tapp mention the murder at a party. Decades later, the woman would tell Carol Dodge and a local newspaper that under pressure from the police, she had lied on the stand.

The defense argued that the confession was false and that investigators were ignoring DNA evidence that pointed to a different perpetrator. Nonetheless, the jury found him guilty. The prosecutor sought the death penalty, but the judge sentenced him to life in prison.

Dodge was left unsettled. Because of the DNA, she believed there was another person at large who had been involved in the death of her daughter.

Hoping to find some clues, she asked to see the confession tapes. Alone in her living room, she cued up the first one and prepared to take notes. The audio recording was poor quality, so she had to stop and replay large chunks.

“I had to keep playing them over and over and over again,” she said. It took more than 70 hours, she said, to get through about half that length of tape.

At the time of the interviews, which took place over several weeks, the police were already aware that Tapp was not the source of semen at the scene. They pushed him to name his accomplice and promised him leniency if he delivered. Twice they fed him a name, and he concurred. But neither matched the DNA. Finally, Tapp offered another name: “Mike.”

When she heard that, Dodge was appalled. It seemed likely, she said, that he was “an imaginary person,” offered up to make the interrogation stop.

In 2014, she reached out to a false confession expert, who contacted the Innocence Project. Tapp’s lawyers filed post-conviction motions based on additional DNA testing. And in 2017, the prosecutor agreed to a deal. The court vacated Tapp’s rape conviction, but not his murder conviction. He was freed for time served.

Over the years, Dodge encouraged the police to try new ways to identify the DNA. The traditional method — looking for a match in Codis, the FBI’s criminal DNA database — had failed.

Finally Dodge called CeCe Moore, a genealogist with a consulting firm called Parabon, for help. After creating a new DNA profile from a degraded sample, Moore identified several relatives in a genealogy database. By building out their family trees and looking to see how they intersected, she identified Brian Leigh Dripps, who had lived across the street from the victim at the time of the murder.

After investigators confirmed that the crime scene DNA was his, Dripps was arrested. During his interview with the police, he not only confessed, but explicitly stated that he had acted alone and did not know Tapp.

The police and the prosecutors did not block the effort this week to clear Tapp. On Wednesday, Daniel Clark, the Bonneville County prosecutor, submitted a motion asking the judge to dismiss all charges against Tapp. “There is no doubt that there are failings in the criminal justice system and I think this case is evident of that,” he told a packed courtroom. “Hindsight is 20/20 and this case certainly speaks to that effect.”

Dripps, who is currently in the Bonneville County Jail, will have his next court date in August, to the relief of Dodge.

“This has literally shattered my family as if we were a piece of glass,” Dodge said. “There is no way to pick up the pieces.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/us/exoneration-genetic-genealogy-idaho.html" id="37fc77fd-f8e5-3811-a3f1-e7edaf508038">The New York Times</a>.

Carol Dodge’s daughter had been killed, and a man had been convicted. But years later, still fixated on the case, she was poring over 30 hours of interrogation videos when it hit her that he could not be guilty.

The Jury Said He Killed Her Daughter. She Helped Clear His Name

Genetic genealogy — in which DNA samples are used to find relatives of suspects, and eventually the suspects themselves — has redefined the cutting edge of forensic science, solving the type of cases that haunt detectives most: the killing of a schoolteacher 27 years ago, an assault on a 71-year-old church organ player, the rape and murder of dozens of California residents by a man who became known as the Golden State Killer.

But until a trial last month in the 1987 murder of a young Canadian couple, it had never been tested in court. Whether genetic genealogy would hold up was one of the few remaining questions for police departments and prosecutors still weighing its use, even as others have rushed to apply it. On Friday, the jury returned a guilty verdict.

“There is no stopping genetic genealogy now,” said CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist whose work led to the arrest in the murder case. “I think it will become a regular, accepted part of law enforcement investigations.”

Detective James H. Scharf of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office in Washington state took all of six minutes on the stand to describe how a semen sample collected from one of the victim’s clothing led to two second cousins of the suspect, and then to the name of the man on trial, William Talbott II.

The defense could have challenged the use of genetic genealogy on privacy grounds, or as a violation of people’s right to control their personal data. Instead, defense lawyers did not pose a single question about the technique. After more than two days of deliberation, the jury convicted Talbott on two counts of murder.

Talbott’s lawyers said they viewed genetic genealogy as just another way of generating investigative leads. “Police have always used a variety of things to develop tips,” said Rachel Forde, a public defender, in an interview. The brother of one of the victims had even consulted a psychic at one point, she said.

But if the case quelled some investigators’ concerns, it was not likely to put to rest a raging debate over the ethics of using the technique to solve crimes and how to balance privacy with the demands of law enforcement.

Just during the time Talbott spent awaiting trial, genealogy databases have changed their rules about cooperating in criminal investigations, and then changed them again. Cordial forums for genealogists have erupted into vicious battlefields. And the technique, once reserved for rape and murder cases gone vexingly cold, has been applied in less serious, more recent crimes, raising alarm among privacy advocates and longtime users of family history databases.

“We’re currently in a state of flux,” said Blaine Bettinger, a genetic genealogist and lawyer. “There is no guidance from any direction.”

30 Years Without a Name

In 1987, 17-year-old Tanya Van Cuylenborg of Victoria, British Columbia, left for what was supposed to be a quick trip with her boyfriend, Jay Cook, 20.

When they did not return the next day, the Van Cuylenborg family became alarmed. “It was out of character,” said John Van Cuylenborg, Tanya’s older brother. “She wasn’t a wild child.”

His sister’s body was found, partly clothed, in the woods. She had been shot.

Two days later, Cook’s body was found 75 miles away. He had been strangled, with a pack of Camel Lights stuffed in his mouth. Their van was found in a third location. But the police had few leads.

By 1994, DNA testing had advanced to the point that semen found on Tanya’s pants could produce a profile. In 2003, Individual A, as he was called, was uploaded to CODIS, the FBI’s criminal DNA database.

As the database grew, investigators hoped for a match, in vain. And then in 2017, Scharf heard that there was a way to get more from DNA.

He collaborated with a genealogist to produce a list of possible surnames. None were correct. A forensic consulting firm, Parabon, offered to generate a predictive likeness using DNA. This was not helpful either.

“This is a case I’ve been working on so hard for so long that I never thought it would ever be solved,” Scharf said in an interview.

Finally, he learned of a new technique.

Science fiction writers had long predicted a government database that would contain the DNA of every citizen. But it took genealogists to realize that a version of that already exists, in the form of websites that allow people to upload their DNA profiles in order to find relatives. Using those profiles, many Americans — in particular, most white Americans — can be identified through their family tree.

Parabon offered to help. Scharf, who had been working on the case for more than a decade, was skeptical when the company said that it would have results by the end of the week.

But the call came just a few days later. “He told me we had a match,” Scharf said on the witness stand, starting to choke up when he uttered the name: “William Earl Talbott II.”

Who is Talbott?

Throughout the trial, Talbott, a solemn man with a gray beard, sat silently between his lawyers. One afternoon, he attempted a smile.

Talbott is a longtime truck driver who likes to camp. Letters submitted to the court by friends describe him as a kind man who they believe to be incapable of violence. At 56, he had never before been convicted of a crime.

Nor had he ever joined a genealogy site. But two of his second cousins, one on his paternal side and one on his maternal side, had.

Moore, the lead genetic genealogist for Parabon, used newspaper archives and marriage records to build a family tree back to the two cousins’ great-grandparents — and then forward to a particular couple who lived about 7 miles from where Cook’s body was found.

Moore homed in on their only son, who would have been 24 at the time of the murders.

Next, an undercover officer who was watching Talbott collected a cup that fell off his truck. Once in custody, Talbott also provided a cheek swab. Both matched Individual A.

His lawyers did not dispute the match. They have instead fought the idea that the presence of his semen meant that he killed someone.

“1994 is when the DNA profile was developed and from there nothing else mattered; it was complete tunnel vision,” Forde said in her closing statement on Tuesday. She emphasized that there was no DNA connecting her client to the scene of Cook’s murder.

Scharf said that years investigating crimes against children had made him doubt any claim that someone is not “the type” to be a perpetrator.

“Everyone in this world has secrets,” he said.

The Battle

Long before an arrest in the Golden State Killer case in April 2018 made genetic genealogy famous, a small group of experts knew that identifying suspects in criminal cases was possible. But they were divided over whether it was ethically acceptable.

The group — some call them the “genealogy influencers” — debated the issues on blogs and in private forums. Each member has a claim to fame: the first to help an adoptee find her biological mother, the first to identify a body, the first to find a killer’s full name.

One school of thought holds that if users join an easily searchable site, they should not expect to maintain control over how their information is used, and that criminal investigations serve the greater good. Another says that people deserve to be able to make informed decisions about how their DNA — the most personal of personal information — is used.

Both the Golden State Killer’s profile and Individual A’s had been uploaded to a large genealogy site called GEDmatch at a time when such sites had not explicitly told users that their profiles could be used to solve crimes.

Though some of the influencers objected, the public response to the resulting arrests was enthusiastic. GEDmatch changed its user agreement to allow for law enforcement use in rape and murder cases.

Talbott’s lawyers did not challenge the timing of the upload or the prosecution’s decision to call GEDmatch a “public database.”

But beyond the beige walls of the Snohomish County Superior Court, the arguments continued.

Curtis Rogers, the owner of GEDmatch, got a call from a detective after a 71-year-old woman was attacked while playing a church organ in Utah. It sounded to Rogers, he said in an interview, like an “attempted murder,” and he allowed the site to be searched. A 17-year-old high school student was arrested.

Critics said the search was a violation of the user agreement because the case did not involve rape or murder. “GEDmatch can no longer be trusted,” wrote Judy Russell, who blogs under the name The Legal Genealogist.

GEDmatch responded by changing its terms of service yet again, expanding the list of crimes, but allowing searches only of those users who explicitly opted in.

In Texas, another GEDmatch search occurred after police said they were looking for a sexual predator. But when a genetic genealogist gave the police a name, they charged him with burglary, raising questions yet again about whether the user agreement had been violated.

Another legal wrinkle involves the question of who is injured when the police conduct a database search. In Talbott’s case, several lawyers said, traditional legal thinking would hold that the cousins’ privacy was violated, not his.

Leah Larkin, who runs The DNA Geek, a company that helps people track down relatives, said that when the police argue that genetic genealogy is like any other tip system, they disregard the vast troves of personal information contained within a single genetic file, such as whether a suspect was born out of wedlock, was the product of incest, or carries genetic diseases.

In many states — including Washington — the police are prohibited from using CODIS, the criminal DNA database, to search for relatives.

“It’s a ‘tip system’ that even convicted criminals can’t be forced to participate in,” Larkin said. “Yet is being used on innocent people without their knowledge or consent.”

EVERETT, Wash. — It has been used to identify more than 40 murder and rape suspects in cases as much as a half-century old. It has led to guilty pleas and confessions, including in one case where another man was convicted of the crime.

Heather Murphy

Articles written by the author

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