Law&Crime Sidebar - Gilgo Beach Murders: Police Using Genetic Genealogy to ID Serial Killer Victims

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

Authorities arrested Rex Heuermann on July 14 in connection to the unsolved murders of Gilgo Beach, where the remains of 11 bodies were found between 2010 and 2011. For years, authorities had no leads in the Gilgo Beach serial killer case until their investigation led them to the 59-year-old Manhattan architect. The Law&Crime Network’s Angenette Levy breaks down how investigators used genetic genealogy to track down the accused serial killer with Kristen Mittelman, chief business development officer at Othram Inc.LAW&CRIME SIDEBAR PRODUCTION:YouTube Management - Bobby SzokePodcasting - Sam GoldbergWriting & Video Editing - Michael DeiningerGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSocial Media Management - Vanessa Bein & Kiera BronsonSUBSCRIBE TO OUR OTHER PODCASTS:Court JunkieThey Walk Among AmericaDevil In The DormThe Disturbing TruthSpeaking FreelyLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law and Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondery app Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Agent Nate Russo returns in Oracle 3, Murder at the Grandview, the latest installment of the gripping Audible Original series. When a reunion at an abandoned island hotel turns deadly, Russo must untangle accident from murder. But beware, something sinister lurks in the grand. views shadows. Joshua Jackson delivers a bone-chilling performance in this supernatural thriller that

will keep you on the edge of your seat. Don't let your fears take hold of you as you dive into this addictive series. Love thrillers with a paranormal twist? The entire Oracle trilogy is available on Audible. Listen now on Audible. We are able to identify Fire Island Jane Doe as Karen Vergata, who was 34 years old. For 27 years, Karen Vergata was known as Jane Doe No. 7, or Fire Island. and Jane Doe. We talk with one of the scientists who help identify her once and for all. Welcome to Sidebar here on Law and Crime. I'm Ann Janette Levy. No one knew Karen Vergata's name, only that part of her skull had been found on Gilgo Beach, her legs found on Fire Island years prior. But recently, officials in Suffolk County on Long Island sent DNA from the remains to

Othram Labs in Texas. Othrum works with law enforcement officials to identify remains and help solve cold cases. Offram used genetic genealogy to identify Karen Vergata. Suffolk County officials haven't said whether they believe Vergata's murder is connected to the Gilgo Four. Rex Heurman is a 55-year-old architect from Massapequa Park. He faces charges in the murders of three of the Gilgo Four. He's pleaded not guilty to the murders of Melissa Barthelamy, Amber Costello, and Megan

Waterman. The DA says he is the prime suspect in the murders of Maureen-Brainard Barnes. Cureman insists through his attorney that he didn't do this and that he's innocent. Joining me to discuss the technology used to identify Karen Vergata, the Fire Island, Jane Doe, is Kristen Middellman. She's the chief development officer with Authrum Labs. Othrum helped identify the Fire Island, Jane Doe, and has worked on other cases across the country. We've featured them in other cases before as well. Kristen, thanks for coming on to Sidebar.

We appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me on. I want to start at the beginning with this because this testing is different from your typical DNA testing. Of course, you have to have a DNA profile to do what you do. But you guys use a different type of profile to do the investigative genetic genealogy. It's called a snip if I am saying that right. So tell us how you really start at the beginning and go about building these family trees and everything like that off of a DNA. profile, an STR profile that you later, I guess, I don't know, to develop another type of profile

for. Absolutely. So standard forensic testing that's been used for 30 years, DNA testing that has gone to court all this time, is known as STR testing. There you're looking at 20 STR markers and you're comparing them to the known database of perpetrators that is owned by the FBI, CODIS. So sometimes you guys may have heard that as CODIS testing. If someone is in the known perpetrator database, then you have a direct hit. But your DNA would have to be in there or maybe the DNA of your child,

like a direct familiar relationship. What we do is we build profiles that have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of markers, up to a million markers. So these profiles have all of these snippet markers that you just discussed. And when you upload those to genealogical databases consented for law enforcement use,

you're able to give you, get really distant relationships. The more markers you have, the more distant relationships you can actually reach. And so you can get a sixth cousin, a fifth cousin, a fourth cousin, and all of us are related to some degree. Most areas in the United States, they were founded from a few key families.

And so to some degree, there'll be some relative in there. And they're not the relatives that come home for Thanksgiving with you, not the relatives that you know or you would call, but there would be some match in these databases. Then our genealogists go in, our genealogy team, just like you said, and they look at these matches

and they figure out who the most recent common ancestor is on a tree, and then they build a tree back down until the puzzle piece that the person that we're trying to identify fits right into a family tree. At that point, we return that lead back to investigators, and they contextualize it within their investigation. So let's talk about Karen Vergata because we know that part of her remains, it's so gruesome and grisly, it's sad.

Her legs and feet were located in one area in a plastic bag on Fire Island, but then her skull was located much later than that. So you may have had a better DNA sample to work with from the remains, from the legs, but maybe not the skull so much. So tell us where you began with that. Obviously, you took her DNA and did your work. Yes, we took the remains and we extracted DNA and then we proceeded to do forensic-grade genome sequencing. That's this technique where we do a feasibility analysis before we consume the DNA because sometimes when you're dealing with perpetrator,

cases you only have a finite amount of DNA in the tube and if you consume it all DNA testing all DNA sequencing is a destructive process you're actually consuming someone's last chance of getting justice and so we do this feasibility analysis that allows us to in advance predict whether or not we can build one of these profiles with the properties of the DNA found in that sample because we've identified and returned leads on over over a thousand cases and because we've done it all in house this has become a truth set each case becomes a standard so we compared the DNA from her case to the previous DNA samples that we have

run here at authrum that we know we can successfully build a profile from and and proceeded once we knew that yes we could build one of these profiles then we did the sequencing built a profile that that had hundreds and hundreds of thousands of markers and that was uploaded to genealogical databases consented for law enforcement use. And in this case, we worked with the New York office from the FBI and they actually did the genealogical research to put her back on a family tree.

Called the family and asked if there's someone missing, that's what happens each time. And her father did say that she was missing. They were looking for her. And the last time he had spoken to her was Valentine's Day in 1996. So I assume then you requested or the FBI requested a standard, a sample from her father. That's right. And then there's a confirmation test that confirms our hypothesis that it was her.

And so that's what happens each time, whether it's, and if a direct relationship isn't available, we can do a Kinsnip confirmation, which I'll allows you to use a further out relative, but in this case, her father was still alive. In fact, he passed away a few months after finding out what happened to his daughter. Oh, my goodness. So did he feel some sense of peace or can you, are you able to describe to us or for us how he felt or his reaction upon learning once and for all where his daughter was located? Yeah. So what has been reported is that he, He had been looking for her continuously. It was his only child, and he had hired a private investigator to find her through the years.

And maybe he was holding on because after he found out what had happened to her, he was able to pass away, at least knowing the truth. I met hundreds of families over the last few years doing this job that are missing someone. And I have to say their life stops at the moment where their loved one is gone or at the moment where they don't know what happened to their loved one or who is responsible. I've met families that live in the same home for 47, 50 years, hoping someone will come back and knock on the door or someone will know where their loved one is, families that go back to their favorite place, weekly trying to see if maybe they would run into them, families that go

back to the crime scene, hoping they run into the perpetrator, they hire investigators, they get online every day looking for their loved one, and they can't, move forward until they know the truth as far as Karen goes did you do any work to see at least on her legs or had anybody else done any work on her legs to see if there was other DNA as maybe a swab to see if a perpetrator's DNA could have been on her body parts I'm sure um so um every time and identified remains are found and this was this is a case i'm sure that there was work done to see what other DNA was found there as well but until until any of that is announced until that becomes relevant to an investigation and announced by law enforcement again these remains were

found decades ago aathrim didn't exist until 2018 her remains were obviously preserved enough if the legs were preserved enough to extract the DNA profile. Was it particularly difficult to work with those remains because of the age of them, even though they seemed like they were found relatively quickly. In April, she vanishes on February 14th. Was that difficult? There was contamination that was involved in this case that made it difficult to sequence the correct DNA profile in order to be able to get her identity.

But the age of the remains, like I said, we've worked cases that are over 100 years old. So that wasn't the biggest issue here. It was contamination from the surroundings that made this case a little bit more difficult to work with. But it's something that we've done time and time again here at Othrum. And what used to be impossible is now is no longer the exception. It's the rule. It's something that's easy and it works as you go through this process relatively quickly because of those standards that have been built.

And so that brings me hope that everyone that's out there, nameless right now, every victim that's out there that has DNA, they should have their name back. I think within the next few years, we're going to live in a world where no one goes nameless for decades. No father, no parent is waiting to find out where their loved one is. No one's wondering if their loved one just ran away and doesn't want to be part of their life anymore if something happened to them. That shouldn't happen anymore. This new type of sequencing, it is. being used now in contemporary investigations right after standard DNA sequencing doesn't give you that identity. And with victims, it almost never does because they're not in the known

perpetrator database. So you are not getting that answer. It can easily be flipped to forensic grade genome sequencing and you can infer someone's identity and not have a cold case. Be able to identify that person and give them their name back right away and start the investigation as to what happened to them much sooner, which often leads to being able to get more clues and solve the case faster. I just wanted to go back to Karen just briefly. You said that her father had disclosed that the last time he was talking, he had spoken with her was on Valentine's Day. Did he ever recall that you're aware of whether or not, like what that conversation entailed? I mean, was he aware that she was engaged in this type of work in being an escort? He did. In the interview that I read,

And he said that she had called him from jail and she was very distressed on that last phone call. And so he knew she was in trouble and had been trying to peace what happened to her afterwards. And he said that she kept in touch. They had a close relationship and she contacted him frequently. So when she stopped, contacted him, that was something that was unusual and he didn't feel was something that was because she didn't want to contact him. Well, Kristen, it's been wonderful talking with you. I've loved this. And I hope you'll come back sometime so we can talk more about one of your other cases. So thank you so much for joining us to talk to us about Fire Island Jane Doe. Thank you for having me. And anytime you have DNA questions, call us back. Thank you. That's it for this edition of Law and Crime's Sidebar podcast. You can listen to and download Sidebar on Apple, Spotify, Google, and wherever else you get your podcasts. And of course, you can always watch it on Law and Crimes YouTube channel. I'm Annette Levy, and we'll see you next time.