How genealogy websites are helping police catch cold-case killers decades on
UNCOVERING your ancestry is a booming business, but now the websites being used to trace long-lost relatives are helping track down cold-case killers
Christy Mirack’s classroom full of 11-year-old students waited patiently for her to arrive at Rohrerstown Elementary School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania at 9am on December 21, 1992. But the 25-year-old teacher never showed up.
When the school’s principal Harry Goodman learned of her absence, he called Christy’s parents, who agreed that he should go to her apartment to check their daughter was OK.
“I fully expected to see her car broken down somewhere between her home and the school, because it was the only rational explanation I could think of,” says Harry. “I started to panic when I saw her car parked at the address covered in ice. I knew something was wrong. The front door was partially ajar and I started yelling her name.”
Harry found Christy lying lifeless on the living room floor, still in her winter coat, as though she’d just been about to leave for work. She had been beaten, raped and strangled to death. Scattered all around her were the Christmas presents that Christy had carefully wrapped the night before to give out to her students that morning.
After detectives rushed to the scene, they told reporters that the popular young teacher had “fought for her life”. Such a horrific murder stunned residents of the friendly county of Lancaster – but they would be denied answers and closure for over 26 years.
“Initially, we thought we had plenty of viable suspects,” said former Lancaster district attorney Joseph Madenspacher in a 2018 documentary about the crime. “But when you start running out of them, you’re running out of them.”
In fact, the only reason police were eventually able to snare Christy’s killer was due to a breakthrough detection technique called investigative genetic genealogy. DNA from a crime scene is run through ancestry website databases to trace any matches, and a family tree can then be used to track potential criminals.
The technique first began to hit the headlines last year when it was used to identify a 21-year-old murder victim who was found in a ditch in Troy, Ohio, in 1981. For 37 years the woman went unidentified, known only as the Buckskin Girl because of the jacket she was wearing when the killer struck. However, thanks to investigative genealogy, her autopsy
DNA sample was matched to a distant relative who was active on the Ancestry.com genealogy site. The girl was revealed to be Marcia L King, and detectives are now using her name to reopen the homicide investigation.
Just weeks after this breakthrough, in April last year genealogy investigators also exposed the identity of a murderer known as the Golden State Killer, who had terrorised California between 1974 and 1986 with a series of 13 murders and at least 51 rapes.
Through a genetic jigsaw, the alleged killer was named as former policeman Joseph James DeAngelo. Undercover officers set about collecting fresh DNA from the now 73 year old to compare with that recovered from crime scenes, retrieving a sample from a takeaway coffee cup that DeAngelo had drunk from and thrown away. Police quickly swooped in on their suspect and DeAngelo now awaits trial, charged with 13 counts of murder and kidnapping.
Meanwhile, in January this year, genealogy investigators identified Jerry Westrom, 52, as a suspect in an unsolved murder dating back to 1993. He was arrested for murder after his DNA was retrieved from a hot dog napkin, thrown away while he watched a game of ice hockey in Minnesota. It matched a sample found at the apartment of Jeanne Ann Childs, a 35-year-old woman who was stabbed to death in a Minneapolis apartment in 1993. The case had been cold for a quarter of a century, just like Christy’s.
Recalling his former colleague, Harry says the pupils at Rohrerstown Elementary School adored Christy. “I would walk into her classroom and get chills because her students would be totally captivated. She had an outstanding work ethic,” he says.
Barbara Hough Huesken was a local reporter tasked with covering the case at the time.
“Christy’s rape, strangulation and murder were shocking because she was a young, bubbly and beloved school teacher,” she remembers. “And because the crime occurred in her home as she was readying for school just a few days before Christmas. The murder itself was stunning for its brutality.”
The autopsy revealed wounds to Christy’s face, neck, upper chest and back, and although DNA was recovered from the carpet and Christy’s body, no matches were found when it was run through the national law enforcement database. In the following months, more than 1,500 people were interviewed, including Harry, but every one was ruled out as a suspect.
“In April 1993, Christy’s family offered a £7,500 reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest,” says Barbara. However, the money failed to generate any new leads apart from reports of a muscular man, who had parked a white car across the street from Christy’s apartment on the morning of the murder.
As police were unable to identify the man, the list of suspects grew shorter, and by Christmas 1993 Christy’s case had gone cold, with her killer remaining at large.
That was until 2015, when Lancaster’s current district attorney Craig Stedman took over the case.
“Christy was a truly innocent victim who was killed in everyone’s nightmare scenario: by an intruder who comes into what everyone believes to be their refuge – their home,” he says. “I knew a number of law-enforcement agencies had already looked at this crime over the years, but felt that a review from fresh eyes couldn’t hurt – especially as some of our county detectives had time to dedicate to it.”
Craig and his team began to re-examine all the evidence, and after almost two years of dead ends got their breakthrough when they contacted a company called Parabon Nanolabs, which had access to a database of DNA samples uploaded by genealogists from different commercial testing companies, such as ancestry sites.
On top of that, Parabon Nanolabs even had a forensic genetic genealogy unit, headed by CeCe Moore, a self-taught genealogist who first realised she had a talent for tracing family trees while researching her own ancestry.
In 2014, CeCe set herself up as an independent investigative genealogist, and although she was more used to helping people find babies abandoned at birth and adoptees locate their biological parents, she’d discovered she could also help Lancaster County Police catch their killer.
CeCe uploaded a file of the DNA found at the murder scene and quickly discovered a match to the half-sister of the then-unknown suspect. From there, she closely investigated the woman’s extended family. While going through the archives of local newspapers, she found
an engagement announcement for a man from that family – Raymond Charles Rowe – who was living in Lancaster at the time of Christy’s murder.
Meanwhile, the DNA had also revealed to CeCe that she was looking for someone with a mix of northern European and Puerto Rican heritage. Because the now 50-year-old Rowe was well known in the area as a sought-after event DJ who went by the name DJ Freez, CeCe was able to find an interview he’d given in the local press where he talked about being half-Puerto Rican. As far as CeCe was concerned, this proved to be the final piece in the puzzle, and she had no doubt she’d found Christy’s killer. However, this alone wasn’t enough to arrest Rowe, a father of one who’d been married four times.
“We do not solve these cases,” explained CeCe in a documentary about her work in 2018. “We provide a highly scientific tip, and law enforcement performs its traditional investigation to confirm or refute our theory. No arrests are made on our work alone.”
Christmas 1993 Christy’s case had gone cold, with her killer remaining at large. That was until 2015, when Lancaster’s current district attorney Craig Stedman took over the case.After CeCe’s findings, the DJ was put under surveillance by investigators. Just days later, undercover officers managed to recover a water bottle and some chewing gum minutes after Rowe had thrown them away. The items were rushed to the state police crime lab for DNA testing, and in June 2018 the results came back as a match to the sample taken from Christy’s autopsy. Days later, Rowe was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
“People were stunned that Christy’s murderer was Raymond Rowe, largely because he was so well-known in the entertainment industry here,” reveals Barbara. “For those who remembered her killing in 1992, the shock was compounded by the fact that Rowe had never been considered a person of interest or a suspect. It’s incomprehensible that he murdered Christy and then went on to lead what appeared to be a typical life for two and a half decades.”
Prosecutors are still unsure whether Rowe and Christy knew each other, but they believe Rowe deliberately targeted her.
“This was not a random act,” says Craig. “Rowe did not find Christy Mirack on a chance encounter. We firmly believe, based on his vehicle movements and the timing and manner of the attack, he had some idea of Christy’s daily routine. He waited for Christy’s roommate to leave then made his cowardly approach to their door.”
Detectives also discovered that the car he was driving – a white Toyota – matched the one witnesses had seen at the apartment complex that morning.
Rowe was convicted in January this year and sentenced to life without parole after pleading guilty to raping and strangling Christy. During the trial Christy’s brother Vince spoke to her killer.
“If not for the grace of modern technology and divine intervention, you probably would have stayed in Lancaster and basked in your fame,” he said. “I can only hope that the remainder of your life is as painful to you as the last 26 years have been to my family.”
But while forensic genealogy is increasingly being used to catch rapists, murderers and even serial killers in the US, it’ll be a while before it’s introduced in the UK.
“Although a proportion of the data used by genealogy investigators comes from UK citizens, it’s just not something we have access to over here yet,” says professor Mark Jobling, a genetics expert at the University of Leicester. “The more popular ancestry sites in the UK – such as 23andMe.com and Ancestry.com – do not give consent for results to be shared publicly. If police wanted to access them, they would need to generate a court order or search warrant.”
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However, according to Mark, things may change due to the growing number of people in the UK undergoing consumer genetic testing. “If they go one step further by uploading DNA results to the GEDmatch.com database, the chances that genetic genealogy could play a bigger role in identifying UK-based crimes in the future rises.”
In fact, the focus of forensic genealogists could even shift from unsolved murders to currently
active criminals.
“And as has been shown over the last 12 months,” adds Mark, “if you shake a family tree hard enough, you may uncover a killer.”