The Times found consumer DNA
was used to declare closure of 66 cases. They involve 14 alleged serial killers and rapists and unsolved crimes going back to 1967, but also the remains of a miscarriage pulled from a sewer, and the hunt for a man sneaking into bedrooms. Forensic labs claim to have closed more than a dozen other cases.
“It is probably one of the greatest revolutions, at least I would say, in my lifetime as a prosecutor,” said Sacramento County District Attorney Ann Marie Schubert. “But it is a difficult, evolving topic because there are privacy interests at stake and in an area that’s unregulated.”
Government DNA databases for a decade have allowed crude familial searching that can identify a suspect’s parent, child or sibling. But the full chromosomal information held by private services can identify those who share 1% of DNA, and are five or more generations removed. Merging that with other consumer data, researchers then can identify relatives two and three generations removed.
Those consumer databases contain genetic code of some 26 million Americans, and so many of European descent that scientists say in a few years they’ll be able to identify every Anglo-Saxon American through family DNA.
But critics say police searches invade the privacy of those who submitted their DNA strictly out of curiosity about their ancestry, and their relatives who didn’t even consent to that.
The Golden State Killer case and most of those that followed were cracked by identifying DNA relatives on GEDMatch, a no-frills DNA registry popular with genealogists and adoptees seeking their birth parents. At least twice, GEDMatch allowed police access in cases that ultimately did not meet its policies, and at least once police conducted their hunt without permission using a fake account.
The nation’s two largest genealogy services, Ancestry and 23andMe, say they do not grant law enforcement access to their consumer data. But a third, s ma l l e r company, FamilyTreeDNA, openly permits law enforcement use except for those customers who specifically opt out.
the genetic profiles of millions of consumers on genealogy sites.
Familial DNA searches of the past, done on those within the FBI’s national criminal database, were restricted, and California’s Department of Justice required case-by-case oversight by an independent committee. The private lab in Virginia handling the bulk of public gene-matching cases argues consumers don’t require the same level of protection because they voluntarily mailed in their DNA.
What oversight exists is inconsistent. A U.S. Justice Department policy that went into effect this month limits consumer DNA searches to violent crimes — and strictly as a tool of last resort.
Prosecutors in a handful of California counties, including Los Angeles, Sacramento, Orange and Ventura, this spring created their own more lenient rules. Sacramento and Ventura permit consumer searches before all other leads have been exhausted, and in the case of Ventura County, the crime involved does not have to be violent.
But most police agencies are like Orlando, which has no DNA policy. Detective Fields said he was guided by “common sense” in the two cases he has searched consumer DNA — the July hunt for a serial rapist, and a 2018 arrest of a man for the unsolved murder of a college co-ed.
Fields had spent half a dozen years looking for leads in the 2001 murder of Christine Franke. A Virginia-based forensics service, Parabon Nanolabs, used DNA found on Franke’s body to predict the race and facial characteristics of her killer. But Fields could get no further until the day Sacramento announced its arrest of the alleged Golden State Killer.
Parabon called Fields offering to replicate the methods to look for Franke’s killer.
“I said, absolutely,” the detec