Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the
social media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway
Murders Facebook page with my partner in crime, Bill Thomas.
Welcome to Mind Over Murder.
Speaker 2: I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas. This week we
start a two part series with forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick,
who talks to us about the Canal case. But first
she explains a little bit about who she is.
Speaker 3: We have very much enjoyed learning about the growing field
of forensic genealogy, so this was an excellent opportunity to
really get down and dirty on the subject. So we
are very much enjoying our time with Colleen Fitzpatrick, and
we hope that you enjoyed this conversation as much as
we did.
Speaker 2: In episode one, Colleen explains about her background and how
she came to develop the field of forensic genealogy. In
episode two, she gets into more detail about how she
helped break the Canal killer case in Phoenix.
Speaker 3: And that is some really fascinating stuff. I know I
learned a lot.
Speaker 2: How about you, Bill, I did too. It really is
very interesting and she's a wonderful guest, and I think
you'll really enjoy this.
Speaker 3: So, without further ado, here is part one of our
conversation with Colleen Fitzpatrick about forensic genealogy.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. Welcome back to Mind Over Murder. I'm
Bill Thomas and I'm Kristin Dilly. This week, we are
very excited to have Colleen Fitzpatrick join us, and we'll
explain exactly who Colleen Fitzpatrick is and why she's so
wonderful in just a minute. So welcome to Mind over Murder. Colleen.
Speaker 4: Oh, hi guys, I'm glad that we could talk today.
Speaker 2: Oh we are too, so by way of introduction, tell
us a little bit about your background.
Speaker 4: My background is this. My educational background is I have
a doctorate nuclear physics from Duke University. I worked for
the aerospace small companies. I had my own company for
many years where I designed laser systems for NASA and
the Department of Defense. I had a company on my
own from about sixteen years and we closed about two
thousand and five because of just the idea. It was
a Bush administration that had more of a focus on
big companies and not little companies. We were a company
that did high resolution laser measurement techniques and we did
a lot of high risk R and D for that
was an investment in the future, and that really wasn't
the era we were in. It was more of a
big business era and Iraq and oil and stuff. We
got chewed up along with a lot of other small companies.
So at that time I went into forensics by accident.
I had my first book, Forensic Genealogy, done as a
gap in the interim, and we went trying to figure
out what we were going to do next, how to
open another laser and optics company, how to do that
and where to go with that. The book was published,
it was a smash. It started, actually the revolution called
forensic genealogy these days, our investigative genetic genealogy. That was
the coin the term. It cemented the idea that science
and genealogy were compatible. I started doing forensic cases after that.
I was asked to work with AFTIL shortly after that
on identifying a frozen hand in a glacier Alaska. It
was evidently the victim of a military charter flight in
the nineteen forties. So I'd say that began my own revolution.
And then we fast forward till fifteen years later, and
here we are with solving cold cases left and right
using genetic genealogy.
Speaker 2: So when the book came out in twenty thirteen, it
was called parensic genealogy. That was the first time I'd
ever seen that expression used.
Speaker 4: The book came out in two thousand and five.
Speaker 2: Oh, I see, And then the reprints were later.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the reprint finally, because the last chapter was on
DNA and how to apply it to genealogy in a
few years that had become pretty dated. We really felt
it was time to revise. The rest of the book
had a few updates, but not as much as that
last chapter. So in fact, We published the book with
the new version of the DNA chapter, which is fine,
but we also published that chapter separately in case people
who had the classic edition wanted that chapter and they
didn't have to buy a whole new book. We felt that,
so it went back to two thousand and five.
Speaker 3: Really, so you said you got into forensic genealogy by accident.
How did that happens? It's a very interesting field to
get involved in. What sort of prompted that interest?
Speaker 4: I didn't get involved by accident, I misspoke. I actually
created it by accident, because when you're a rocket scientist,
you can't that's your personality on top of what you do,
so you tend to think analytically more than other people,
not necessarily being able to balance your checkbook, like psychologists.
Anybody looks at it from their educational blow life life
from the educational background, so naturally, doing genealogy, I had
more of a scientific approach, not heavy duty. But I
came up with some ideas that to me were actually
really simple and looking at my genealogical records, and then
I finally just wrote that down in a book, thinking okay,
I'll just do this book. The world probably is I'm
just going to fit right in with the rest of
the world. I didn't realize that was a new concept
and that I let the world fit in with me
in a way. I just want to As an example,
at that time, the conventional wisdom for identifying old photographs
was what can you tell me about the picture by
the clothing the people are wearing. And there were people
that were experts and really encyclopedias on that answering that question.
But to me, I didn't see really much hardcore substance
data that other people could really latch onto. It has
a lot of merits, I will say that, but there
was more to it. So my suggestion was, measure the
length by the width of the photograph. That will tell
you the size of the negative and the shape of
the negative. Look up what camera could use that negative
size negative. There were many Kodak cameras that produce photographs
of different format, so figure out which camera was compatible
with that format, and then find out what dates that
camera was on the market, and that will give you
the dates for the photograph. Now that's analytical thinking. It's
not hard for anybody to do that. But that was
a revolution the way people started looking at things, so
the book started flying off the shelves. We didn't expect this.
We just thought, okay, we'll just write a book, okay,
and then we'll figure out what laser company to do next.
But that's not the way it worked, and it wound
up really changing the way we see genealogy.
Speaker 2: I have a quick side question here before we continue
on forensic genealogy. Does it bother you when people make
jokes about you being a rocket scientist?
Speaker 4: No, in fact, no it doesn't. I get a laugh
out of it because I don't look like a rocket scientist.
I look like a little old lady that in the
grocery story. I surprise people. I get my jolly's out
of surprising them. So I went to go sign up
with the gym one day, and I was coming home
from work years ago. I was really tired, and the
guy had all kinds of plans. If you pay now,
we don't raise the dues after three years, but if
you only pay half, then we go up ten percent.
But then we don't have to if you put it
on your credit card. It was a little bit complicated
because I was tired, and I asked him to repeat
it three times and After a while, he said, listen, lady,
it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out.
Speaker 2: And you replied, and I.
Speaker 4: Just held back, and then I signed actually up, figured
it out, signed up, and he had to fill out
the form what do you do for a living? I said,
I'm a rocket scientist, and I couldn't figure out. So
that was like a little inside joke between.
Speaker 2: Us and his condescending, snarky remark, Actually, I.
Speaker 4: Am a rocket scientist, so what do you know. I
can't help it. I don't understand what you're saying.
Speaker 2: And it's funny too when you said you don't look
like a rocket scientist, and again, I'm not in the field.
Although I'm a big admirer, I was thinking, I'm not
actually sure what a rocket scientist is supposed to look like.
I remember, I remember some pictures of Werner von Braun
from textbooks. I guess the rest of the folks would
look like standard issued NASA types with white shirts and
I think so and a rumpled black tie in mission
control or whatever.
Speaker 4: Yes, you would think that, and we look normal. We don't.
None of us are normal, but I'd say we look
I don't like to go to party where a lot
of people don't know me, because the subject is going
to come up, what do you do for a living.
I've tried lying and it doesn't work. The next thing
that happens is we're going to play charades, right, or scrabble,
and I'm gonna blow them out of the water. One
time we played scrabble. I was playing scrabble with this
new group at church. They didn't know me very well,
the girls against the boys. And every time I got up,
I guess the puzzle, and so one girl gal we
had a puzzle. The final thing puzzle was the girl
got up and looked like she was looking in a
file cabinet and the subject was movies, and I said,
the Odessa file. It took me a microsecond and it
was right. And the whole room turned around and looked
at me.
Speaker 2: That's a pretty obscure answer, though.
Speaker 4: At the time it was and that was a movie
not too And the whole room looked at me, and
one girl who knew me blurted out, oh my god,
no wonder, she's got a PhD in nuclear physics from
don I I was like, Rob, I've had a banana
growing out of my nose. People were staring at me, like,
what's wrong.
Speaker 2: If we're ever putting together team scrabble, Kristin, and I
want you on our team.
Speaker 4: Yes scrabble. And your worst part is playing scrabble with
another rocket scientist, no man, because you wind up after
all night you each won half the games and you
have to then endure the next hour of excuses why
he didn't win the other half.
Speaker 2: You also, I think you know words and terms that
the rest of us don't even know.
Speaker 4: I would we have it, not that we don't know
we access them, or yeah, maybe we do. And if
you really want to waste the whole evening, I have
a friend. I won't tell you his name, ask him
what his IQ is, and he will go all evening
telling you about the test.
Speaker 2: He took and oh no really you know the.
Speaker 4: Plus and minus this one valies and but he took
a different one and the shows slightly different. But the
statistics for that one pind it. I like, I laugh
at that, So I just that's his Okay, he's a
good sport. We all laugh with him and not at him.
Speaker 2: Let me follow up Kristen's very good question from a
second ago. What were the original family things? You were
exploring or whatever. What got you into genealogy initially?
Speaker 4: That's I get asked that. And I want to say,
I never got into genealogy. I never got into forensic genealogy.
I created it. I never became a genealogist. I was
born that way because I was born. I was in
New Orleans, very interesting city, one of the most interesting
cities in the United States, arguably so m.
Speaker 2: H and great food and music and everything else music history.
Sure you know.
Speaker 4: It was a Union town in the middle of a
Confederate state. It has that long history of France and
Spain and the Caribbean, and the food and the way
we cook, not the quality of what we cook, what
we eat, the way the Catholics think, the cemeteries we have,
the large families, the richness of that history. And I
knew all four of my grandparents until I was an adult,
and I didn't even know how wonderful, what a unique
gift that was until I got much older and I
met people and we discussed it, and they didn't know
any of their grandparents, and I knew all of them
till I was an adult. My last one died. I
was thirty nine years old. So I had growing up
in this huge I knew their aunts and uncles, I
knew their brothers and sisters in some cases, and they
could talk to me about people that died one hundred
years or more before because they had the stories from
their own parents. I grew up around living history. I
couldn't get interested in it because it was there any
I couldn't get interested in it anymore than I could
get interested in having brown hair or being female loving math,
or I couldn't get interested in something that I am already.
Speaker 2: Wow. So it was just it was part of you.
It was part of your DNA.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, it was part of whatever goes into making a person.
You think about who you are growing up in New England.
When did you get interested in growing up in New England? Whatever?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just part of your upbringing, your nature.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you never question when you're young. You never
question that anything's different. You never question there are people
out there that didn't have this big family. You never
questioned that every place on Earth. You think every place
on Earth is like New Orleans, with the history and
the Marti grass and the traditions and the what we eat,
the cemeteries, where we go how we think the church,
the role of the church in the whole story here.
You never think that the world's different. You never realize
that as a child, that is what it is, That
is it, that is you? Is it? But then you
grew up and you realized what a gift that was,
and that I grew up around living history and that's
where we are today.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 3: So what were some of the first cases that you
worked on that you felt you could reliably apply this
forensic genealogy concepts. To talk a little bit about that,
I know you mentioned the hand in the glacier. Can
you give us a little bit more information about that?
Speaker 4: I can, But let me say that before I did
that one kind of oiled me for a few things
because actually the book came out, we had a website
in two thousand and five. Look, we were total klutches.
This is my partner Andy and I. We're a rocket scientists.
We know nothing about marketing. We just wrote a book, right,
But we put up a website. And then someone came
to my website and said, can you help me find somebody?
And I said, what can you help me find? You're
a forensic genealogist, And I went, oh, okay, so that's what.
Speaker 2: That is, all right, had as such.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I didn't realize it meant finding people. I just
thought it meant identifying old photographs, all right. So he said,
here's the name, your names of a couple from Taiwan.
I would like to find them. They live in some
obscure village. He gave me the village ungle Bunga chunga
village in Taiwan. They okay, and I can tell you
a little bit more. What I subsequently found out he
was he had something to do with houses that would
be in escrow because the guys didn't pay the taxes,
so they'd go and escrow with the state, and there
was two years to find the owner. And if he
could find the owner, he could make some business deal
with them to recover the house, and then he'd make
some money and they'd get the house back something like that.
But I didn't know that. I just knew that he
and I was a little bit uncomfortable. I didn't know
why he wanted these people. He said they owned property here,
something very vague, and I'd like to find them, And
I asked, I got in Taiwan. It's huge, It's like
a bee hive. So I went to a couple a
friend of mine who was from China, lived in Taiwan,
had lived here now, and I said, can you help me?
You have know all kinds of people out there, she
ran a trade him company, and she said, no, won't
help mafia. These people Mafia want to kill these.
Speaker 2: People, meaning meaning that she thought the people you were
working with were mobbed up.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, she thought the man who Edward was his name,
who contacted me, was after these people for some bad reason.
He was mafia and he was going to kill him.
I didn't really think so, but I parlayed that a
little bit with him to probe him, and I had
just an instinct that it was more than that. So
what happened? He I said, okay, I don't know. I
stalled because I was trying to get some help which
wasn't forthcoming. So finally he said how much would you
charge for this? And I'm like, okay, I don't know.
So on the advice of Andy were working this out.
So I sat down at the confuter its two thousand
and five and I typed one of those names. It
was Chinese name written in English. I typed it into
Google and there she was. She was a professor at
a university in Taipei. So the guy had Edward had
finally somehow said I sent somebody over to the house
in Taiwan. I thought they were dead, but people at
the house told me they moved to Taypei. Okay, so
I had a little more information. I typed this lady's
name into go there. She was a professor at a
university in Taipei. You really couldn't miss her.
Speaker 2: He hadn't done this himself.
Speaker 4: No, this was two thousand and.
Speaker 2: Five, early stage.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so there were still people that weren't into that yet.
And I was like, what in the world, I said
to him on Andy's advice, is working in Taiwan is
really tough. I'm gonna have to charge you an arm
and a leg for this, but I'll make you a
sporting deal if I cannot. I want the arm up front,
but if you give me four days. If I can't
find him in four days, i'll give you the arm back.
But if I do find him, I want the leg
to go with it. And he took it. He took the.
Speaker 2: Bait, and you'd already and you'd already found the person.
They were looking for I emailed the woman.
Speaker 4: I said, are you so and so who used to
live in these states? Or did you? And yeah, that's me.
You couldn't miss the name. And so he took the bait.
And the hard part was waiting three and a half days.
Speaker 2: Your work was already done.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I was blown away. So subsequently, in the next
two years I worked as a contractor for that company
that man and I found. He gave me like seventy five,
about seventy five cases in thirty countries, and I got
almost all of them. I probably failed on one. I
actually had the guy, but I misthought I made it wrong.
I actually had him, but I didn't quite make the deadline.
I just screwed up on the email address something stupid.
But I really did them all in thirty countries. So
I was like, oh my god, this is fun. And
while this was going on, Andy and I wound up
in Guatemala. Long story, very interesting for another time. And
when we're in Guatemala, I got the email from the
Armed Forces Lab saying we have a frozen We're trying
military charter flight frozen hand glacier. It's out there. It's
called hand in the snow and can you help us.
We have thirty possible victims. We've eliminated I think they
eliminated twenty five. We're stuck on number twenty six. It
was a cook named Olie Jacobson. He was a nineteen
year old cook on the whole crew had taken leave
in Shanghai. They had been on the boat for a year.
There were merchant mariners that had delivered oil around the world.
When they got to Shanghai, they were going on leave.
They got on a plane and the plane stopped the
anchorage for a refueling stop and then it crashed into
Mount Sandford in the back country of Alaska. So they
subsequently in the nineties they found the rack. Two pilots
found the wreck and they had eventually got the help
of AFT DEL to try and identify who owned the
frozen arm in hand that they had found in a glacier.
Speaker 2: Help us out with AFT DIL. What does that stand for?
Speaker 4: The Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 4: They do a lot of the do a lot of
the work with CIL and jpack out in Hawaii. So
they weren't genealogists they had they were working with fingerprint
people retired fingerprint people from the FBI Professor of crime
scene Analysis. They had a few experts helping them. They
had eliminated twenty five out of the thirty possible victims
through fingerprints and through DNA. But they were getting to
the bottom of the barrel. We're talking about a plane
crash in nineteen forty eight. We're talking about people that
on that plane that were born in the eighteen nineties.
You know, we're looking at when you get to those
last five, the military records have been lost, the fingerprint
cards are not legible. You got to find relatives that
are who knows where after how so many years. So
they really got stuck. And when they got stuck, on
was only Jacobson. So I got an email. I'm in
Guatemala City at our hotel, and he has got the email.
And it took me. I'm a genealogist. Took me an
hour to find only Jacobson in the census records. His
name was Oland and it was not Jacobsen. It was
Jacob's son. This is standard genealogy stuff. But okay, I
know how to do it. So I thanked him. I said,
this is what you do. This is his parents' names
he may have a look for a cousin. Blah blah blah.
So they took it from there and I said, bye,
really nice to help you out. But I was put
on a mailing list of the people that were working
on this case, and they said, I found out they
traced a relative to Staten Island, a Lutheran minister, and
that wasn't him. It turned out that the Lutheran minister
gave a DNA reference sample to match against the frozen hand,
and it wasn't It wasn't him. There was no match,
so Olie Jacobsen did not own that arm in hand.
So you had maybe four or five more people left,
and I was getting more engaged in the story and
watching these emails fly by, and then finally they eliminated
twenty six seven eighty nine had no fingerprint cards or
they couldn't do anything with that one. So we got
to number thirty. That was it. If we didn't make
number thirty. They turned out this man who was Frank
van Zant was his name. He was born in upstate
New York. His father was Orville van Zant, his mother
was Margaret Conway. The problem was, we're looking for a
MITO reference because the DNA is going to be so bad.
Ad mitochondrial DNA is very abundant, and you go after
that first. It's more likely enough MITO has survived over
the years, so you go after that. But the problem
is you got to trace the exclusive female line, so
the lab. It's easier on the lab, but it's harder
on the genealogist. So the name changes among the generations.
Speaker 2: In the in Western culture, the father's name carries forward,
and so it works from a scientific perspective, but not
from a genealogical perspective.
Speaker 4: Right, So you know, after figuring out Margaret Conway, you
know who she was, and having input from the van Zants,
surviving van zantce that she was one of several siblings
that came from Ireland in the eighteen nineties. All right,
now we're looking at finding Margaret Conway's family in Ireland.
She didn't have any maternal relatives that were left. All
the female lines had died out once this one of
her sisters never married. Another sister had two boys and
a daughter, and that daughter never married, so there was
no surviving female relatives in the state. Female linked relatives
in the States. Okay, that meant researching in Ireland, and
that was, of course one of my specialties that I
had been doing for at the time, probably thirty years.
So there was very little you can tell me about
Irish research that I don't already know that I could
find out really quick. So the problem was finding out
where this woman came from in Ireland. First, it is
a misconception that you can call around Ireland and find
a person that was born one hundred and fifty years ago.
Speaker 2: It doesn't work that way.
Speaker 4: No, but all my colleagues said, hey, great, who'd you call?
But what happened? I did find she was from Limerick
through a miracle. I just found one of the Frank's
brother marriage record in the nineteen thirties, long after Margaret
Conway had disappeared. So once I knew it was Limerick,
I could go on the offensive and calling the repositories
in Limerick looking for Margaret Conway. Her parents were John
Conway and Ellen Drumm. I got that far any records
that indicated she would have been born around eighteen seventy
five or something, and all the records there was just
no Margaret Conway was born around eighteen seventy five plus
or minus a year, and that the breakthrough came because
the other genealogists talked to the van Zants and found
the names of her brothers and a few brothers and
sisters that come over here, and we were able to
match that with some records from family search, and absolutely right,
it wasn't. She wasn't born in eighteen seventy five. She
was born close to eighteen seventy. She had lied about
her age, so we were able to figure all that out.
We were able to once I knew it was Limerick,
I started calling being referred to one person, from one
person to his cousin, just the neighbor that used to
live next door to the Conways, to somebody else, to
another church, and finally I arrived at a Mary Conway,
who said she had married into the family and that
she didn't know enough about them, but that her brother
in law, her husband had died. Her brother in law,
Mars Conway, might be able to help me, so if
you can really think about this, I got his private
cell phone number and I called Marris Conway, and I
introduced myself as a consultant from the Armed Forces DNA
Identification Laboratory. I said, we're trying to identify a frozen
human arm in hand in a glacier in Alaska, and
we think you can help.
Speaker 2: Did he think you would fall in out of space?
A kind of a weird phone call to take.
Speaker 4: It was kind of Kodak moment between us, and I'll say.
Speaker 3: He said he had.
Speaker 4: He paused a minute, and he said, you want to
run that by me again?
Speaker 2: A little hard to absorb, and yeah.
Speaker 4: He said, I don't know. Would you mind calling me
back in an hour. I need to think about this,
And I said okay, and I sat there in the
kitchen looking at the clock. In the meantime, he called
his wife and he said, He'll never guess what happened.
And she says, are you still drinking?
Speaker 2: What is this crazy lady from America imagineering?
Speaker 4: And she said no, go ahead and talk to her
because it just sounds It can't be a scam. It
can't be life insurance or somebody's selling you something. This
is okay, just talk to her. So he got on
the phone with me and he said, I tell you,
let me make some inquiries in the village and can
we talk tomorrow. It'll give me the day write it
down to write me a letter. Get me that, but
give me the day to inquire. He said, I'm really
the oldest person in the family, so maybe, but some
of the villagers might know something, all right. So when
I called him back, he said, I didn't want to
really tell you this when I spoke to you yesterday,
but I live across the street from the cemetery where
these people are buried. He said, let me read you
and he read me the memorial stone that the Irish
put up for their families, and it was a stone
dedicated to John Conway and his wife Ellen and her
all the children that had remained in Ireland. And so
I had found the dead part of the family. I
had hit the family in Ireland that was the family.
But then I had to find the living descendants to
do the DNA test. So then Morris said something else
which was very interesting. He said, my name is Morris Conway.
My mother's name was Kathleen mcnamie. My grand my mother's
name was Bridget Cheehy, her mother's name was ann O'Shea,
and I think her mother's name was Drum. You could
have knocked me up, I said, Drum, And I said,
are you sure do you know that for a fact?
Do you know that by intuition? He said, I know
it by intuition. We went forward with that. We sent
them a DNA kit because you understand that it's the
female line right there. Because if his great grandmother was
a Drum, it turned out she was Ellen Drum's sister,
the victim's grandmother's sister. The victim his mother, his grandmother,
the sister down to the man on the phone with me,
through the female line, he was a mitochondrial reference. I
was looking for. Wow, that one phone call solved it
and it matched.
Speaker 3: So you mentioned the concept of intuition, and I'm really
curious because I have a couple of friends who do
genealogy as well. And this is actually a question he
wanted me to ask. How much role does intuition play
in the work that you do?
Speaker 4: It does? It's one hundred percent important and gift because
you're dealing with people, You're dealing with the stories they
tell you're dealing with you have to call somebody on
the other side of the world sometimes that doesn't know
who you are. You have to know how to talk
to them. You've got to understand where they're coming from.
You've got to be able to interpret those stories because
there's always truth in whatever story somebody tells you, even
if they're lying, there's going to be some truth in
that story. So it's a great intuition to be able
to listen and to really we really need to have
that gift. We really it's very important on top of
all the records, so it is very important.
Speaker 2: So that's the human instinctual side of what you do.
Speaker 4: Yes. Absolutely.
Speaker 2: In other words, there's all all the science and all
that kind of stuff, but there's also this intuition question
that Kristen's friend had wanted to ask.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the X factor of the whole entire thing,
is the intuition.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's very important, and I think that's why I
did really well. Is I listen. I try to listen.
A lot of people would debate that statement, but I
think that's one of the biggest gifts that genealogists can have,
is to listen, to think about what they're hearing.
Speaker 2: What you mean they're going to accuse you of not listening.
Speaker 4: No, it's not accusing of not listening. It's like where
do the mistakes come from? It's just where do the
mistakes come from, and it's how can you get off track?
Speaker 2: Something you mentioned a few minutes ago which made me
smile was the was Margaret Conway. I think it was
lying about her age. Do we know why she lied?
Speaker 4: I think I know because that women lie about their age.
It's not a modern phenomenon.
Speaker 2: It's funny. My grandmother Anna Kelly, who's long since passed,
but she lied about her age. She shaved off two years,
which we thought was silly, and yet my parents in
explaining it to us, she was two years older than
Fred Thomas, my grandfather who's also gone now, and she
was self conscious about it, and so she shaved two
years off of her birth records.
Speaker 4: But my self consciousness or yeah.
Speaker 2: Years later, I remember my sister Kathy making a birthday
card for my grandmother. But she wrote a poem and
she talked about in fourteen ninety two, Columbus sailed the
Ocean Blue and in eighteen ninety two along came you.
And of course it was well intentioned and was my
sister sending a card to my grandmother. But my grandmother
was pissed because that was her real birth year, not
the plus two year thing that she was claiming for
all of those years. And I think on some level,
my mom and dad both very irish. We're poking fun
at my dad's mom's sort of silly decision to shave
two years off her birth year.
Speaker 4: And that's amazing. I can see you want to get
in the military, you want to, and you have to.
You're only seventeen. You want to be eighteen, right, It's
just vanity, So I don't think that's a modern Obviously,
your grandma did it. I bet you what was it.
Cleopatra was really a lot older than she led on.
Maybe Cleopatra was five years older. But she's not going
to tell you that. She's not going to tell all
her our boyfriends. Yeah, I don't know. It's not something
that I've go in for. To me, it's you are
who you are based on a lot of other things.
But that's not a monophenomenon. That's funny about your grandma.
I don't see what two years would be a different that.
Speaker 2: Was the source of it. By the way, on your
Identifinder's website, which is one of the companies that you run,
there's a really cool write up on the hand in
the snowcase and the crash of Northwest flight four four
two two with pictures and that kind of thing. It's
a pretty amazing story.
Speaker 4: Yeah it is. We're changing the website too, so you
know it's on Wikipedia. It's out there. Try and fill
in the gaps as I can. Since we're first forensicase.
Speaker 3: So since we are on the subject, can you talk
to us a little bit about IdentiFinders and how you
started it and basically what it.
Speaker 4: Is IdentiFinders is. I started really we worked together under
Andrew Eisen Associates starting in two thousand and five because
of the book. But in about our eleven or twelve
we got involved in military identifications and they required something
separate from just the Andy's consulting company. So that was
the beginning official beginning of Identifyinders. So we did originally
some military stuff. I've done adoption searches. I've done historical cases.
I've done frauds. I've done fraud cases, Holocaust work, Holocaust identifications,
and now cold cases with the police. I've actually been
working cold cases since two thousand and eleven. With the
Sarah Yarborough case. Was the first time a forensic case
and a department or a law enforcement agency really started
running with genetic genealogy to try and solid the case.
Speaker 2: So there's a fair amount of jockeying for position these
days among the limited number of very talented people that
work in the forensic genealogy field. Yes, I'm not looking
to settle that here, and I don't think Kristin is either,
but it is something that we're very interested in. What
is the first case that you worked on in the
law enforcement solving a whole case category?
Speaker 4: That's the Phoenix Canal murders. Was the first case solved
using genetic genealogy?
Speaker 2: Okay, wow?
Speaker 4: And yeah, and I had done I forgot how many
I had done, starting with twenty eleven in Sarah Yarborough.
I forgot. I don't know. I could look it up,
but I was a couple of dozen or a few dozen.
It was very slow at first because this was news
and I had received such bad air from the genealogy
community that I didn't want to go out on my
website advertised because it was so brutal in some cases
and uninformed, let's put it that way, that the nonsense
it wasn't. I didn't want to spend all day dealing
with nonsense. So I really did my work I did
very quietly, very well, and so I wound up in
the Phoenix in twenty fifteen, I think late fourteen, maybe
in winding calling the Phoenix Police Department ahead of time, saying,
I'll be in town for a conference. Can I come
over and talk to you about what I can do
with y DNA, comparing the y DNA on a cold
case to what you may have on a cold case
to the forensic genealogy databases.
Speaker 2: So, according to the media reports, in October twenty fourteen,
you were attending a conference in Phoenix and you reached
out to the Phoenix PD and said, can I come
in and meet with you all and talk to you
about the potential of using why DNA to solve cold cases?
Speaker 4: Huh?
Speaker 2: And were they skeptical? Did they say, sure, come on down?
Speaker 4: Yeah? They did. I think some of the officers actually
were at that conference. It was issue the International Sumposium
and Human Identification. I think a couple of them were
there anyway, off and on because it was in town,
and so they were said I had to check. Whoever
I called said, yeah, okay, whatever, let me check. And
I sometimes I expect, oh, no, we're not interested or
we'll call you back. But because I was going to
be there anyway, I wasn't asking to fly in, and
it was down the street. They were open it. And actually,
the Phoenix Police Department is so forward thinking. It's just
such an excellent department to work with. Now that I've
really worked with them some more and got to know them,
I really appreciate their thought, the thought and the effort
they put into a lot of these cases. They're really good.
They're very excellent. I was surprised at how open they
were and the discussion we had. I told them, I
gave them some slides. I got up and answered the questions.
On the way out, one of the people said, we
do have this case we're thinking about sending you, so
we'll think about sending it to you. And I said, yeah, okay, fine,
we let it in their all court and then that's it.
And then they sent the profile over a couple of
weeks later, and I don't even remember, maybe a month
later and we went from there.
Speaker 2: Can you explain how you were using your proprietary software
that you and Andy had developed?
Speaker 4: Yeah, what we had at the time. There was a
couple of things. There was a tool online tool, called
why search. Y search was like the hy DNA equivalent
of jed match. Basically that why search. You could type
in a y DNA profile and the website would run
and give you a list of matches and how close
they were. People could post their profiles in the database
and looking for matches, and it was pretty cut and dry.
Why dna. You really don't have to know the identity
of the individual. You really just have to know what
last name you're matching against. And I used that, And
also Andy had created some proprietary software so that once
we got passed, using y search as approving ground, what
kind of names come up Smith, Jones, Fitzpatrick, we could
focus down on those particular names. So in this case,
I think what happened was why I use y search,
I must pay have to get the name Miller, and
then I could follow it up by going to the
Miller DNA study online and using Andy software to match
their YDNA profile against that data in that database and
seeing if that held water. There were Millers out there,
or maybe the one I had found earlier, if he
was adopted, I wouldn't find any more Millers. There's a
lot of outcomes to that situation and came up I
think with eight Millers, and they weren't like a big
Miller family. There were like Millers that maybe didn't know
how they were related to each other. I think there
were four from the UK and four from Germany, which
is logical because a lot of people from Germany from
the Palatin Eight went out to England in the I
think sixteen hundred, so a lot of the people in
the UK that descend from them don't know that anymore.
So it wasn't like here's the family and the guys
the son of somebody like we do today with genetic genealogy.
It was just the value was giving them a last
name and that was it, and it was Miller.
Speaker 3: So it was like that was really quick finding You
got the information in October I think it was, and
they made an arrest in January. Does it always go
that fast?
Speaker 4: It can. It's up to the agency and it's up
to how soon I can. They took a couple of
weeks to get that data to me, so when I
gave the name Miller, they probably took a couple of
weeks to check the guy out to see if they
could get a DNA sample from him if they maybe
there were other Millers on their list. My understanding was
that their list of suspects was two thousand, two thousand,
and that there was only five Millers. And so of
course they have been going through the list again, triaging
and getting the people that say more likely suspects than
others based on whatever investigative work they were doing. And
when I gave the name Miller, that made them focus
on that particular name. And of the five Millers, there
was really only one that jumped out at you as
somebody worth looking at more than the other four.
Speaker 2: Obviously, the police in Phoenix have got to be thrilled
when you come back a couple of weeks later, having
done your research, and you say to them, I'm paraphrasing here,
but this is based on newspaper accounts and other things
we've read. You come back and you say, I think
you should be looking for a suspect with the last
name of Miller. That narrows the suspect pull from two
thousand people to five people. Yeah, more or less in
an instant. Then they start looking at we've got one
guy of the five. I'm sure they took a look
at all five of them. And this guy was probably
on the short list.
Speaker 4: They would have been had they got as far. I
think they were doing triage in alphabetical order, and I
think they had gotten to the jays. It was a
slow process because this is not what you do every day.
You have to handle violent crime, you've got to handle drugs,
you've got to handle bureaucracy. There's lots to do. It
was a slow process. They were working their way through
the alphabet m was still a ways away, but it
focused them on am Mis Miller's.
Speaker 2: You had proven through repeated cases that this technology work.
Here's a situation where they've got to feel like, Wow,
this Colleen Fitzpatrick, she's a magician. She goes away with
this information and comes back and says, you can stop
looking at two thousand people, start looking at people with
the last name of Miller, and we've just saved a
tremendous amount of time.
Speaker 4: Yeah. I understand that you got to see in context,
genetic genealogy was not what it is today in terms
of forensic work. So you've got to understand that these
people are presented a name out of the blue, and
many detectives have told me that they didn't get the
connection with DNA and name. How can you produce a
name from DNA? How did that work? I can see
you can tell me the guy's Africa American. Maybe that
didn't get that out of DNA, but how are you
going to get his name out of DNA? So this
was like hail Mary play. And I was told by
some very prominent cold case groups that had addressed this
case that really it had gone dead to them, even
the brilliant minds out there. There was nothing else to
do unless something new development came or something. The case
was basically dead in the water. So you take a
hail Mary play, which is to their credit, name from
DNA whatever. Okay, we've used psychics before, sure, and you connect.
You give them one word, Miller, that one word. It's
so small. It's huge, but it's so small. One word
solved it.
Speaker 2: But credit to you and to them for being willing
to try this new technique. And this is yeah, I
know this is five years ago now, but that seems
like the world has changed from an investigative perspective. And
certainly it's two years ago about this time that the
Golden State killer case broke, But this is three years
prior you're breaking something that's so incredibly innovative. You have
to give Phoenix PD some credit for being willing to
try the hail Mary pass Oh.
Speaker 4: I give them magnificent credit. Oh my god, it works
right at the buzzer.
Speaker 2: I picture some cops falling out of his chair after
working the case for decades.
Speaker 4: I understand that they got a call. De Buys were
in some staff meeting you know how those.
Speaker 2: Are, huh, And it was.
Speaker 4: Late in the day whatever, and they got a call
from the DNA people saying can we come over to
see you? And they went, yeah, whatever, and they're all laughing.
They probably want to raise yeah, And then one guy says, oh,
I bet you they're going to tell you that they
solved the Phoenix Canal murders, that they have a guy. Yeah,
just joking board And then the DNA people came over
and says, guess what, there's a match. That's right, you
got him, And the whole room exploded. It is the
detective half of them more bouncing off the wall, and
the other one was sitting there in a stunned coma,
a stunned Phoenix Canal murder coma, going should we go now?
Should we wait till tomorrow what should we do? And
then of course boiled over to this guys and they
made an arrest and the rest is history. He's on trial.
He will be on trial maybe this year. We keep
this all kind of delays and stuff, so he's innocent
and proven until he's proven guilty. Agree there was a
Codis match, we have to go through the judicial system
to really that that match and understanding the statistics and
many other investigative elements to that.
Speaker 2: Let's take a break here and we'll continue the conversation
next episode with Colleen Fitzpatrick of IdentiFinders and the DNA
DO project, which we want to talk about a bit
more next time on mind Over Murder.
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