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| Finding 'Grace': Murder, DNA and Ancestry |
The nicest
thing about the little town of Bucklin, Kansas, is its cemetery. The grass is
neatly cut, and the graves are well looked after.
It was
here, last month, that 20 or so mourners stood around a small, white coffin to
say goodbye to Shawna Beth Garber.
No one, including those there, knew much about Shawna - what she looked like, where she lived or what name she went by when she died.
Only
recently did they learn that she had been murdered and that her body had gone
unidentified for three decades.
The police
had called her Grace because it had been said that "only by the grace of
God" would anyone find out who she was.
But thanks
to a revolution in DNA tracing - one that is changing how cold cases are being
solved throughout America - a 30-year-old mystery might finally be solved.
'Shawna'
Rob and
Shawna were not born into a normal household. A shy man of 56, his older
brother of Shawna describes their mother as "evil".
He speaks
slowly but thoughtfully. His words are carefully chosen.
He's not
used to talking about his childhood and it brings up turbulent memories. He and
Shawna were physically abused by their mother, he says, and it led to both of
them being placed into care.
His
recollections of his little sister are some of the only fond memories he has of
his early childhood.
"She
was the biggest part of my life," he says.
By the
time Rob was seven and Shawna was five, the abuse from their mother began to
escalate.
"For
the most part I was the one that was the target of everything," Rob
recalls, "until the incident that got us taken away from her. That was
just way above and beyond everything else."
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| Finding 'Grace': Murder, DNA and Ancestry |
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They were
split up after being taken into care and placed with different families. Rob
was given the surname Ringwald. He saw his sister one more time after she got
out of the hospital, on his eighth birthday, and that was the last time.
As an
adult in the 1990s, Rob became interested in finding her.
He
remembered Shawna, but he was also told of other half-siblings.
After
contacting the authorities, he was eventually given the name of a half-sister,
Danielle Pixler, 48, who also lived in Kansas.
They met
and struck up a lasting friendship and Danielle, too, became keen to try to
find Shawna.
Sitting on
the porch of her house in Topeka, Kansas, Danielle tells me about her
decades-long hunt for the half-sister she never knew.
"I
would put leaflets out on trees. I put them on stop signs and yield signs. I
put them on car windows," says Danielle.
She spent
countless hours on Facebook hunting for Shawna.
"People
thought I was stalking them," she says.
Rob and
Danielle had each built up their own case files, filled with all the
information they could find about Shawna.
But
without knowing even basic information, like what surname she was using - it
was a fruitless endeavor.
'Grace Doe'
In
December 1990, the body of a woman was found near an abandoned farmhouse in
Missouri. The post-mortem examination estimated she had been left there for
around six weeks, and that she had been murdered.
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| Finding 'Grace': Murder, DNA and Ancestry |
Lieutenant
Mike Hall, the McDonald County deputy sheriff, worked the case for 14 years
without getting close to finding out who Grace was - let alone who had killed
her.
"If
I'm driving around, out on patrol, my mind would sometimes wander. I'd think
about who brought her out here? It's always on my mind," he says.
As the
years went on Grace's case became colder and colder. Her remains were kept in a
cupboard in the sheriff's office, almost forgotten, just one of America's
estimated 250,0000 unsolved murders.
Cold cases, DNA, and the Golden State Killer
DNA has
been used in forensics since the mid-1980s. Traditional techniques are good at
matching genetic material to a suspect if DNA for the person in question is
already in a police database, but this has its limits.
For
example, in the 1970s and 1980s California was gripped by a prolific serial
killer and rapist dubbed the Golden State Killer. Police had his genetic
material, but there wasn't a match in the FBI's DNA database. Many thought he'd
never be found.
But in
2018, authorities decided to use an innovative technique that had burst onto
the scene - one that marries the use of DNA with information from ancestry
websites that could be used to draw family trees.
Genealogy
websites are designed to allow people to find long-lost relatives.
A user
puts a DNA swab into the post and is later given a list of people with whom
they share genes and an analysis of how closely they are shared.
The police
realized that if they put the murderer's DNA into an ancestry website, they'd
get a list of the killer's relatives - a crucial clue.
Most
genealogy websites don't allow law enforcement checks, but a few do.
Authorities in the Golden State Killer case used a company called GEDmatch.
"The
Golden State Killer is almost the halo case for the success of the
technology," says GEDmatch CEO Brett Williams.
Once
genetic relatives were found, family trees could be built. The trees eventually
came together at a point that allowed authorities to zero in on one person - a
suspect.
In 2020,
Joseph DeAngelo, a former California police officer, was sentenced to life in
prison.
Finding 'Grace'
Othram, a
Houston-based tech company, was founded shortly after the DeAngelo breakthrough
with the goal to solve unsolvable cases using the new technology.
The
company uses data sources like those provided by GEDMatch and has helped law
enforcement crack a series of
high-profile murders and missing people cases in the last two years.
In
November 2020, Othram took on Grace's case.
It went
through the same process that the police had gone through with the Golden State
Killer.
Shawna's
DNA was degraded and had bacterial contamination. Othram cleaned up Grace's
DNA, creating a genetic profile that could then be run through several
genealogy websites.
From
there, they found a number of third-cousin matches and started building up a
family tree to find a common ancestor. Working down the family tree, they began
to develop a theory about who she might have been related to and gave the name
to Lt Hall.
The call
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| Finding 'Grace': Murder, DNA and Ancestry |
But after
speaking to her family, she called the number back. The gravity of what Lt Hall
was telling her began to sink in.
"When
I called him back I was bawling and crying," she says. "He was
telling me all this stuff and I was like, 'How did you get hold of me? How do
you know who I am? Or that I'm related?' I just freaked out."
Lt Hall
eventually convinced Danielle to take a DNA test.
On 29
March the result came back. Grace Doe was her sister, Shawna.
"I
just started crying," she says.
Questions of ethics
Shawna's
case, and many others like hers, show that the process works. But it also has
its critics.
The main
issue of contention is privacy.
The
technique is so sensitive that one person's DNA could be enough to identify
hundreds or even thousands of their genetic relatives - none of whom have
consented to law enforcement checks.
In effect,
one person can sign up for their entire extended family.
"We're
not talking about searching in databases for the people who voluntarily submit
their information," says Erin Murphy, author of Inside the Cell: The Dark
Side of Forensic DNA.
"We're
talking about searching in a database to find the thousands of people that
don't even know they're related to that individual."
Danielle
was found because a distant relative had consented to their DNA being used for
law enforcement checks - not because she had.
Brett
Williams of GEDmatch accepts the ethical dilemma of using the technology.
"You
have two competing priorities here. The first priority is you have an absolute
right to privacy. But on the same token, you have a competing priority, which
is we have a right to not get murdered."
But the
desire for families to find out the identities of loved ones - or the killer of a
relative - doesn't trump privacy concerns, argues Murphy.
"It's
incredibly hard to say this, but we don't make policies about the civil
liberties of our whole society, based on the personal feelings of single
victims," she says.
This is
the main reason why so many genealogy websites don't allow law enforcement
checks - including Ancestry.com and 23AndMe.
Rob is
adamant that without the process they would never have found out what had
happened to their sister.
"My
sister has been sitting on a shelf for 30 years. She won't be anymore."
Some kind of closure
Rob and
Danielle still don't have a picture of Shawna as an adult. They still aren't
sure what name she was using at the time of her death.
The police
are trying to work out what Shawna's movements were before she died, or anyone
that knew her as an adult.
They
believe she may have been based in Joplin, Missouri, at the time of her
disappearance.
Lt Hall
thinks he has a real chance of breaking the case.
"I do
think the murder can be solved now that we know who she is," he says.
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| Finding 'Grace': Murder, DNA and Ancestry |
But it's
not the ending they'd prayed for.
"I
have nightmares. I hear screams," says Danielle, who can't help reading
the local press stories about the case.
"I
read about her every day, I have to. It's horrifying because I cry every time I
read it. But somehow I feel closer to her when I'm reading it."
Shawna's
identification is a huge break in the case. Up and down the United States
similar breakthroughs are happening weekly.
It's no understatement to describe this technique as a revolution in solving cold-case murders.
However,
this method is so new there are very few laws governing its use. And with
privacy an increasingly controversial issue in the US, politicians will have to
decide to what extent they want genealogy websites used to fight crime.
The police
believe there is a very real prospect that Shawna's killer is still alive, and
assumed they'd gotten away with it.
Technology
means that one day the person, and many other murderers in the US, may be brought to justice.
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