The Megyn Kelly Show - How Police Used Genetics in Idaho Murders Case, and Solving Crimes with Genealogy, with CeCe Moore | Ep. 470

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

Megyn Kelly is joined by CeCe Moore, Chief Genetic Genealogist at Parabon NanoLabs and founder of DNA Detectives, to talk about how DNA and genealogy helped lead to Idaho college murders suspect Bryan Kohberger's arrest, the genetic genealogy process and his father's involvement, the lengths the killer went to avoid leaving DNA at the crime scene, the possibility the killer used an alias in online chatrooms about the case, whether genetic genealogy can help solve the JonBenet Ramsey murder case, how "touch DNA" is used to develop a composite of the killer, how genealogy started to be used to solve crimes, the way 23andMe changed the way genetics could be used, other cases Moore has helped to solve, the future of genetic genealogy, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest and provocative conversations. Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Idaho murder suspect Brian Kohlberger in court just a short time ago, waiving his right to a speedy preliminary hearing. He will get a preliminary hearing, but it will not be ASAP. The judge setting a court date for June 26th. This will be the point at which prosecutors can present the evidence they have trying to convince the court that this case should go forward. They will almost certainly get it.

And we will go forward with a trial June 26, of course, more than five months from now. We know that DNA played a role in helping to identify Kohlberger as the accused suspect in connection with the murder of these four Idaho college students on November 13th. They were murdered, according to the affidavit, between 4 a.m. and 4.20 a.m. in the middle of the night. It was basically a 16-minute window of time in which someone went into their home, went up to the third floor where they murdered two girls, went down to the second floor,

murdered one girl and her boyfriend, and left the other two women, reported to be sleeping in that house as roommates, alone. One we now know from the affidavit says she did see him. She laid eyes on him as he left the house, saying he had a surgical mask on, the kind we wear during COVID, that she remembered he had bushy eyebrows, medium build, and that was basically what she remembered about him, dressed in black. There is reporting that something called investigative genetic genealogy may have played a part in actually nabbing this guy. And today we are thrilled

to have one of the world's top experts in that field join us for the show. What started as a hobby has literally changed lives. CeCe Moore is now bringing justice to victims and getting violent criminals off the streets by the hundred. I mean, wait until you hear the numbers. Often helping solve crimes that have baffled police for decades. And we will discuss some of them and how this method of crime fighting has become absolutely integral to putting criminals behind bars. CeCe Moore says there will be no more serial killers because of this. When I first interviewed her back in 2018, she had just started working

on criminal cases. At the time, six cases she worked on had led to arrests. Today, that number has ballooned to over 250 solves. About 200 of those have identified violent criminals. The rest involve unidentified Jane and John Doe's, many of whom were victims of violent crime. Think about it. Sometimes they find bodies, including young victims, teenagers who have gone missing, who are on milk cartons and so on. And we never know what happened to these kids. Well, CeCe Moore is helping put some names out there in connection with these victims and giving families the closure they need, nevermind spotting the actual perpetrators of the crimes. CeCe Moore is a genetic genealogist and founder of DNA Detectives. She is also chief genetic genealogist at Parabon

NanoLabs, the incredible lab that helps solve these crimes. Cece, welcome. Great to see you again. Thanks for having me on the show. It's been a long time. Yeah, it's been going on five years now since I first interviewed you. And your practice was sort of in its infancy. I mean, you had just joined Parabon, I think, for three months at that point when I interviewed you in May of 2018. Wow. It's been quite a wild ride since then. I'd been a genetic genealogist solving mysteries for many years by that point, but I had just started working with law enforcement. Right, right. And so let's just give the audience,

I love this piece of your story, the background of how you got into this. It's not like you got a PhD in criminology. It's you had never been a cop or an FBI agent. Explain how you got into this and sort of helped discover this. Well, I had always loved genetics and genealogy, two separate things.

And I was thrilled when I found out in the year about a little after 2000 that a company called Family Tree DNA was offering DNA tests for people who wanted to use it to learn more about their family history. And so I started reading about what they were doing. And at the time, I didn't have a lot of money to test. So I didn't start testing immediately. I just kept up with the brand new field and what people were learning about it. I was building my own family tree using paper records, the paper trail, we call it, which is how all of us started. All of us who are interested in genetic genealogy started by building our own tree. That wasn't something I had done when I was really young. I was extremely busy with all sorts of different

pursuits. It was something that I did when my niece, my oldest niece was about to be married and I was trying to think of what would be an interesting gift, a unique gift. So I thought, Oh, I'll build our family tree. Aha, right? Famous last words, never finished it. She never got that gift. But that's what got me into it. And the, the combination of two things that I was really passionate about was so fascinating to me. And so that was really the beginning of my involvement in genealogy and then genetic genealogy. So how did it turn to crime fighting? Well, that's a long story. I guess we have quite a bit of time, but very early on when I became involved in this, I was aware that there was a huge amount of potential.

When we first started with genetic genealogy, we were only using more limited type of testing. The Y chromosome testing, which traces your father's father's father's father's line, and mitochondrial DNA testing, which traces your mother's mother's mother's mother's line. And it was quite limited. And a few of us started asking, could we use autosomal DNA? So autosomal DNA is the type you inherit. Let me stop you. Hold on. Hold on. Cause I want to make sure I understand it. So when you were just doing the, those two types, tracing the Y and tracing the X, how were you doing? Before we get to the more advanced, what were you doing? What kind of crime fighting or examination were you doing with those?

And how did you even get access to those? So it was all about family history at that point. Women had to test their father for the Y chromosome to learn about their father's line. Or you could test a brother or a cousin. I tested my mom's first cousin so I could look at her direct paternal line, my maternal grandfather's line, tested my dad. What you're trying to do is see the origin. When you say that, forgive me for interrupting, I just want to make sure everybody understands. When you say test them, like I'm going to have my brother tested for his Y chromosome,

what does that mean? What do they do? Like a cheek swab or how do they test it? Yeah, it was a cheek swab and you have to convince one of your relatives to do it. And they think you were crazy, of course, back then, because no one had ever even heard of this type of testing at that point. Okay. Let's go, keep going. So mitochondrial DNA is your mother's, mother's, mother's, mother's line. And both of these types of DNA change really slowly. So you're looking at deep ancestry. You're looking at the origins of your direct paternal line and your direct maternal line,

but you're not examining the inner parts of your family tree. And so autosomal DNA is a different type of DNA. Again, before we get to that, let me just ask you a couple more questions before we're, when we're still like in the infancy stage, what do you get back? So you mail it into some company, the cheek swab. And then when you get back, um, you know, generations back on the Y chromosome, the Y line on your dad's side, what do you, what are they saying to you? Your great, great, great, great grandpa was this guy? Like what comes back? What comes back is a list of men with the Y chromosome that would have similar or identical Y chromosome signatures.

Now, because in many societies, surnames are passed down from father to son, father to son, just like the Y chromosome, you often will see surname continuity. So many of us started these volunteer surname projects where we would test. How do they know? Like, let's say, you know, my dad, my dad's last name was Kelly and so was his dad and so on. So, but how do they know whether, you know, my great, great grandfather is linked to me because my great, great grandfather wasn't putting DNA into anything and sending in a cheek swab. So how do they know? Well, they don't know. You have to interpret it. So in my case, I tested my dad's brother to make sure they have the same Y chromosome, same father. I tested a second cousin to make sure his Y chromosome was the same. And I

finally tested a fifth cousin to confirm that my dad's great, great, great, great grandfather was the person that the paper records tell us it was. So I was following his surname, my surname, Moore, back generation, generation, generation. So keep going back in that tree, confirming my grandfather is the correct person. Now, I don't need to be dense. Help me out. But I want to understand. So like, my dad was Ed Kelly. They don't have Ed Kelly in the system that does this testing because he never did any DNA testing. He died a long time ago. So what would my thing come back saying, Ed Kelly was your father? And how would they

know that? Like, that's kind of where you come in. I realized to figure out family tree, but like, what, how would they know who on earth I'm related to just based on my brother's DNA? How would they be able to link it to somebody who wasn't in their system? They don't. That's what you do. So you would get a list of people who say, shared your brother's Y chromosome, or it was very similar to his Y chromosome. Modern day. Yes. And probably a lot of them would have the surname Kelly. Now that is only if there was no break in your direct paternal line, meaning no adoption, misattributed paternity, that type of thing. And so you might get a bunch of Kellys,

but if there was an adoption or a break in that line, maybe you'd get a bunch of Smiths, right? And then you really have a mystery. Then you say, okay, why is my brother or father's white chromosome connecting to Smiths instead of Kellys? And so it's just a way of confirming or learning more about that direct paternal line. And like, for instance, in my family, there was this argument, whether our Moors were from Germany or Ireland. So that was one of my interests was trying to prove which it was. Is it an Irish origin Y chromosome or a German origin Y chromosome. And so when we were first using genetic genealogy, it was looking at this very deep ancestry. It wasn't looking at anywhere near present day.

Now it could help. So if you, did you get back something that said like more, more, more, more, more, more, more, you know, thousands of mores. Like I would, Kelly, of course is very common. I can't imagine I'd get back hundreds of thousands. I mean, it would be so many that it would feel useless. So where do you start? There are different origins for both of our surnames, Moore and Kelly, because they're so common. And so you would only match those Kellys or Moores in my case that have the same origin. Moore is from all over the world, basically. Now, Kelly, you're probably looking at Ireland. And so you might get lots of Irish people, not necessarily with the last name Kelly,

because the Y chromosome goes back so far, you might connect before they even adopted the surnames. But you're only going to match that group, not all the other Kellys in the world. And my dad's Moore line was actually really unique. When I first joined the Moore surname project, he didn't match any of the Moores. And there were already quite a few people in it, even in the early days. And so it'll tell you which group of those Moores, which group of those Kellys your line fits into. And you wouldn't have thousands of matches typically. I mean,

when I started, you had almost no matches. You were lucky if you got a match. And so that's based on, so they're looking at Moors that are roaming the earth right now who have submitted DNA to try to give you as much info as they can. And they can see that your dad, your dad Moore has similar DNA to these other Moores who have also participated here and given a cheek swab. And we can glean something about their ancestors just to get you started. That's it's really just a start. Right. So much of it is building trees, building your own tree, building other people's tree, trying to find where they converge. How far back can you find that common ancestor in the tree?

And so it's not one of these things where it's done for you. You're doing all the work. You're just getting the clues. Okay. There's a man in Michigan who shares my dad's Y chromosome. There's a man in Germany who shares my dad's Y chromosome. Why? We got to figure out why they do. Okay. And that's now I get it. So these are modern day men who have also sent in their DNA. And so it's a start. Somehow there's a relation between this guy and my dad, and maybe this guy and me. And this is where your family tree building comes in. And so let's go to that because that's like an investigative piece. That is like, you know, newspaper articles, obits. I remember we talked about this on NBC, but it's like anything you can get your hands on to tell you the story about that guy. And then you build it

out around him like a tree, like just as far as like an actual tree, like what branch goes here and what branch goes there. Right. So when we were working with Y chromosome, we would only build the father's father's father's father's father's father. What you're talking about now is what we're doing today with a totally different type of DNA. Now that's the autosomal DNA that you're, you were trying to mention. Okay. So you used to just do sort of this investigative work and trying to figure out the dad vertically, the mom, and now, okay, now take it to where you wanted to take it with what, how it's changed. So that was really fascinating and wonderful. And we started thousands of surname projects doing that. But for those of us that were hungry for more, we really wanted to be able to explore those ancestors in the middle of our tree, not just those lines.

And we started asking some of the scientists, could we use a type of DNA called autosomal DNA, which is auto, like the car, zomal. And that type of DNA, even women inherit that from their fathers. So we wouldn't have to test a brother or a or cousin. We could test our own DNA to learn about our father's side. You get 50% from each of your parents. You get on average 25% from each of your grandparents, about 12.5% from each of your great grandparents. But scientists told us back before 2009 that it couldn't be done, that you could not use autosomal DNA for genealogy because it recombines so quickly. We were used to using very static type of DNA, type of DNA that mutated very slowly. But now asking about autosomal DNA, the traditional belief at that time was that it changes too quickly and therefore you wouldn't be able to use it in genealogy. But that turned out not to be true. That's right. So a very groundbreaking company called 23andMe introduced an autosomal-based test for health purposes. I think most of us have heard of 23andMe now, but back then it was brand

new. And just as an FYI, the woman who started that and runs it still, I think, is Anne Wojcicki, who's the sister of Susan Wojcicki. I know that the last name is spelled tough. Yes. And sister of Susan who runs YouTube. And there's another gunner of a sister in that family. And the mother was a gunner. It's a very interesting family. And Anne used to be married to one of the Google founders, Sergey Brin, I think. Okay. I'm really testing my memory. In any event, she on her own decided to start this company, very interesting, called 23andMe, which most people now have heard of. And correct me if I'm wrong, Cece, but I thought it started off as like a health website. You know, it's like you could send it in. People who wanted to know, am I going to get

Alzheimer's or what am I prone to would use 23andMe to figure out based on your genetics, what you're not necessarily guaranteed to get, but what you're prone to get. And now it's just branched out well beyond that. Right. So Anne wanted to democratize our access to our own genetic information, which her purpose was different. It was for health information. She had worked on Wall Street in that sector and was discouraged about profit making on our health and wanted to give people the power to be able to work with their own genetic information and learn about their own health and take charge of that. And so her goal was very different than mine and my field, but we saw what she was doing and said, well, wait a minute, can we test our own autosomal DNA at her company and see if we can

use it for genealogy? And so that was really early adopters, people that had been engaged in genetic genealogy with these other types of testing and wanted more. We just wanted to see if we could learn even more. So you were asking 23andMe if they would help you out in that goal? Well, we didn't have to at first. We just had to buy what was a very expensive test back then. And in that case, you spit in a tube, this is saliva collection instead of a cheek swab, and mail it in. And back then you could share with anybody. You could share your information and you could check and see if you shared any DNA with someone. So we started looking for shared segments. So long, identical segments of DNA,

those ATCs and Gs lining up in a row, because if you had that, it meant you likely had a common ancestor somewhere in your family tree. And it opened up the inner branches for exploration. Now, we didn't know if it would work at first, but at the same time, they had a very forward thinking scientist named Mike McPherson at 23andMe who created a beta test of a tool called Relative Finder. And there they compared everyone in their database against each other to see if they could find those long segments of identical DNA. Yeah. Yeah. And they did. So that's it's really interesting because, you know, some people find 23andMe and Sesshie.com controversial. They're worried that the government's going to hold on to your DNA and all that stuff, whatever. But they don't get enough credit for being sort of seedlings for crime fighting in the way you're talking about now.

Now, they don't work with law enforcement. We'll get to all that. It's not it's just that their innovation should be credited for helping give birth to this new lane of DNA exploration, which is putting tons of criminals in jail. Right. I don't think they want credit for it, but they certainly do deserve some credit for it. You know, I went to them very early on, just shortly after that time that I'm discussing about a three hour long conversation about why that wasn't something that they wanted to do, why that wasn't part of their business plan. And so I know people are paranoid about this. People they know, like people, it's for all sorts of reasons. Not like everybody's a criminal or worried that their brother's a criminal. But there are some of those. But it's also just distrust of government and just they're not government 23. But it's just like distrust of having your information out there in

the 21st century and where it could go. So I can see why they don't really want to be the assistant on this. And we should just make clear now we'll get to it later. But there it's a different database that you use for your analysis and your crime fighting. It's not 23andMe. It's not Ancestry.com. Though I will say some of my favorite stories on NBC were the 23andMe stories or the Ancestry.com stories where people, because it's well beyond looking into your health history now.

It is finding long lost relatives and like the identical twins, you know, those were some of my favorite stories. You think of going to 23andMe, you get your results back and it says you have an identical twin. And we did some reunion shows of some of these women. It was, I'll never forget that stuff. Great stories. Yeah. I mean, it's just an amazing tool for any type of family mystery, missing family members. It's incredible. But at that beginning, it was very clear that we would never fulfill that potential unless we got lots

of people to take the test, which is obviously one of the reasons they didn't want to involve law enforcement, especially at that early time. And that made a lot of sense to me as well. Now coming from media and marketing, I knew that the only way that we were going to be able to build these databases to where we could actually solve mysteries was by sharing positive DNA testing stories. And so I started working with 23andMe and on my own independently to promote positive DNA testing stories. So if someone made an amazing discovery or even an upsetting discovery that led to a more positive outcome, these were things that I was starting to pitch to the media on my own, but 23andMe was also getting inquiries and they would send them my way a lot of times we would have meetings with

for instance a very early meeting with the 2020 producer she reached out to 23andme and they said hey cc come on up so you can tell her some of the stories of the things you're finding in this database and so sometimes it goes a different way sometimes it's like why is there no link between me and my dad? That's that's awkward, too. Now, that's happened to millions of people now. You know, there's over 40 million people that have taken these direct to consumer DNA tests. And it's a pretty high percentage, surprisingly, that have found out that their father was not their biological father or their grandfather.

One of their grandfathers was not. And so I don't know if people realize just how many people have made that shocking discovery from direct-to-consumer DNA testing. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, right? Some of those secrets women in particular in these cases are keeping. Maybe you feel it's better left unsaid. Maybe not. Maybe it gives you the chance to connect with somebody whose genetic background or other background would be really interesting and helpful to you. You never know. It's a personal choice. So just are into this, who would like to connect with other relatives, to take their 23andMe, their Ancestry.com results and upload them to GED match and to widen the chances that they'll connect with somebody? Right. So GEDmatch was started by two friends of mine, Curtis Rogers and John Olson back in 2010, 11. And of course, when it started, there was no one in there.

So we had to convince people to download their raw data from one of the other sites, which at the time was just 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA, and upload to GEDmatch. And so it was just a small site, kind of a playground for more advanced genetic genealogists. It was where we could try out new tools. We could do cross-company comparisons. So if you tested at 23andMe and I tested at FamilyTreeDNA or later Ancestry, we could both upload there for free and then compare our data looking for those long identical shared segments. Okay. Now, and by the way, the criminal database,

you know, like if you get arrested for, I don't know how long it's been going on in America that they do a DNA test of you if you get arrested for a felony. How long is how long? Do you know how long they've been doing that? And by and are those results also uploaded to GEDmatch? They are not. So law enforcement has their own database, which is based on a different type of DNA marker than what we use in genealogy. So they're not comparable. They've been doing it for about, well, it depends what state and which jurisdiction. So about 25 years, some started earlier. I've helped identify two serial killers who were put to death in Texas in 1999, and neither of them were in the law enforcement database, which seems shocking to me. But I've since learned that it was kind of hit and miss at first. You know, it took some time to get it off the ground and get collect those samples from violent criminals.

And so here's what's crazy. Yeah, here's what's crazy. The and we're going to get to some of the cases that you've solved, but some of them are using DNA from crimes in the 70s, you know, and that's semen or blood or what have you. And it really was very forward thinking of law enforcement back then before they had any idea what we'd be able to do in 2023 to save all that stuff in not sadly in every case, but in a lot of the cases, making crime solving 50 years later possible. Yeah, we owe them a huge debt of gratitude because they couldn't have possibly understood just how valuable that physical evidence was going to be. I've actually worked cases back to 1958 now. Whoa. I mean, yeah,

quite a bit before I was even born. And so it's just amazing what can be done in those cases where the crime scene investigators were so forward thinking, they collected things they couldn't have imagined how powerful they would be today. How long does DNA stick around? You know, like 58? I mean, I think there's probably a hierarchy on the samples, right? Like you'd rather have semen in a rape case than, I don't know, touch DNA. You tell me, but how long does it last? Well, that's a really good question. I mean, we can analyze ancient remains, right? When they dig up some old royalty and things or accidentally run into the one under

the car park, there's still DNA there. So it just depends on the environment, how something was stored, or where somebody was buried as to how long that DNA will survive. But it can survive for hundreds of years, in some cases, even 1000s. I mean, look, they've been able to analyze the genome from Neanderthals. So DNA lasts a very, very long time, but it absolutely depends on the environment. And so back to the crime fighting element of this. So now you're getting more advanced. You've got the new, the GEDmatch, which is getting bigger and more useful. And now can you just briefly describe how you do start filling in the tree, how it's become, this is the tool that now that you're using to fight crime? Yeah. Let me also mention, we have one other database that we can use with law enforcement

and that's family tree DNA. The original pioneers of genetic genealogy decided that they wanted to help law enforcement as well. Now, it is the smallest database, unfortunately, even though it was the first one, it's the smallest one. And so the databases we can use are the two smallest in the field. That's GEDmatch, which has about 1.5 million people in it, and FamilyTreeDNA that has about 1.25 million people in their autosomal DNA database. They have three different databases. How many in GEDmatch?

A GEDmatch has about 1.5 million, but only about a third of those are opted into law enforcement matching. So we can only use about 500,000 to identify violent criminals. That's incredibly small. I mean, I'm even more impressed that you've solved all these crimes with such a small sample size. Yes. It's like stepping back into 2014 when I was first trying to solve family mysteries, adoptions, and things like that. It is very difficult. It's very challenging. So give us an actual example that's easy to understand of how you've used this to solve a crime. So we get the unknown individual's DNA

from the crime scene. It might be semen, blood, saliva, even touch DNA. And we have to send that to a private lab. So none of the crime labs have the capability to create the type of DNA profile that we need. The law enforcement databases, as I mentioned, are based on a type of genetic marker called an STR, single nucleotide, I'm sorry, single tandem repeat. And we use SNPs, which is a totally different type of genetic marker, a single nucleotide polymorphism. And so we have to start from scratch.

And that means there has to be DNA left from that crime scene. If they've used it all up, then we cannot do genetic genealogy. So it goes to a private lab where it is analyzed. And just like they would analyze it at, say, An at say ancestry DNA or 23andMe, we need it to be compatible with those profiles because that's the type of profiles we're going to compare against. So it's about 700,000 to 800,000 genetic markers across the genome. And then it goes to our bioinformaticists, our scientists.

Now, because these are degraded, mixed, contaminated samples, these are not like if you spit in a tube and you have this perfect DNA sample. These are non-optimal samples. And so we need something called bioinformatics, which we have an amazing scientist, Dr. Ellen Greytak and Dr. Ellen Katie, sorry, Dr. Janet Katie, it's Paravon, that work with that degraded DNA to try to repair it and make it as similar to a file as if you and I were to spit in a tube and mail it in. Once we have that, we upload it to GEDmatch and or Family Tree DNA. It's compared against all the people there that are opted into law enforcement matching, and we get a list of matches. Now, those matches are typically going

to be really distant relatives. And that's because these are really small databases we're working with. So the chance of a close relative of a suspect are very small. So we're lucky if we get a second cousin or a few second cousins, sometimes closer, but mostly we're working with third, fourth, fifth, sixth cousins and beyond. And we can predict what the likely relationships are based on how much DNA someone is sharing with that unknown person. You can see the percentage. Okay. So this is fascinating. And then you draw the family tree. So if you've got a sixth cousin, you got to start drawing a family tree. And this is actually funny for me because i know who my sixth cousin is or at least one of them and it's somebody it's somebody famous that's the reason i

know because somebody actually did the family tree and we're like oh my god we're related related to her it's loretta swit hot lips hoolahan you're around my age so i know you know who that is of mash fame so she and i related it was so fun she did a barnes and noble book signing up on the upper west side when i lived there and i popped in and told her we were long lost cousins she was she could not have been nicer but anyway so let's say i committed a crime but you didn't know it was me and and loretta had updated or had uploaded her dna to jed match so now you're looking for me you don't know it's, but you find Loretta Swit is the sixth cousin of this person. And you start doing these concentric circles around her, right? That you just start to do like, who are all the people she's related to

and her aunts and uncles are related to. And you got to, that's so much work to finally get to the possibles. So there's a little bit more efficient way to do it, which is I'll say, okay, who's not, who's, I've got the list of who's sharing DNA with the suspect, but who on that list shares DNA with each other? That's really important. So it's not just who's sharing with the suspect, but who is sharing with other people on that list. So say matches one, three, and five share DNA with each other.

If I can build all their family trees, I should be able to identify their common ancestor. The only reason two people would share these identical segments of DNA is if they inherited them from somebody in the past, they have to have common ancestry. And so if I can identify where that DNA comes from, who's, you know, which of the great, great grandparents are further back, then that gives me one piece of my unknown person's tree. And so I create what's called genetic networks. I'll group the matches into networks of people that are sharing DNA with each other or clusters. And each of those clusters will represent one branch

of the unknown person's family tree. So we start piecing it back together that way. Maybe I'll have one set of great, great grandparents, one set of great, great, great grandparents. Maybe if I'm lucky, I can identify great grandparents. And then I have to find that one person or set of siblings that is related to all of those matches and descended from those sets of ancestors. So it's like reverse engineering someone's family it could be somebody in this cluster or this

cluster or this cluster, but hey, there's a guy in this cluster who lives within 10 miles of the murder site. Do you use evidence like that to help narrow it down? Are you only in the genetic genealogy field? It depends how much data you have. If you have enough matches that you can connect to someone's mother's side and their father's side, maybe three or even four of their grandparents' lines, you can narrow it down to just one immediate family. But because these databases

are so small, we often don't have that. So say we could only identify one set of his great grandparents or great, great grandparents. In that case, we would have to then do what's called reverse genealogy, identify all of their descendants and look for their descendants who are the right gender, age range, maybe live in the right area, drive a white car. And so we do look at those other things. And that's something I think a lot of people don't realize is that with investigative genetic genealogy, the DNA just gets us started.

Without someone's family tree, it's meaningless. Without trying to being able to identify the descendants of the common ancestors we identify, it's meaningless. So we're looking at location, location's huge. We look for the one branch of the tree that maybe moved closer to the crime scene. And 99% of the time, we find someone who lived right there within 10, 20 miles, sometimes within one mile. And so that's a really powerful part of it. And then we use phenotyping at Parabon, where they can predict eye color, hair color, skin color, even shape face. And then we use phenotyping at Parabon where they can predict eye color, hair color, skin color, even shape face. And so we use a lot of different factors to narrow it down further when there isn't enough in the database to point us at just one person or one

family. So that phenome time, that's very interesting because that's something you can do even if there's no match, right? Like if you get DNA and you run it through GED match and there's just nothing, like nothing comes up, the DNA is still useful to you. That's right. So we don't have many families or individuals in GED match or family tree DNA that are recent immigrants. And so it's really difficult to identify someone if they were born in another country or their parents or even grandparents or great grandparents were. And so there are some cases where it's not viable to perform genetic genealogy, but Parabon can

still perform the phenotyping and still create this image of what someone might look like. Now it's not meant to be photographic, but it's meant to give you their traits. And so it is used in quite a few cases where there just aren't enough matches, aren't enough data for genetic genealogy. But what I have found is where it's most powerful is in conjunction with each other. So maybe I narrow it down to 10 males who all descend from these common ancestors. And then I can look which ones have blue eyes, brown eyes, which ones have blonde hair, maybe red hair. And that can really help to narrow it down. Because we want to give as few people as possible, right? We want this to be efficient. And we want

to keep innocent people out of these investigations. So I work very hard to try to narrow things down using all different types of information. So I'm not sending law enforcement on a wild goose chase and sending them after innocent individuals. The moral of the story is don't leave your DNA at a crime scene. Don't leave it. Even if you're not in the system, even if nobody you know is in a system, CC Moore is going to get you. All right, stand by. I've got to squeeze in a break. There's so much to discuss, and I want to pick up the Idaho case because they're saying that this was used to catch Brian Kohlberger.

We'll talk about it next. Let's talk about Idaho. This is, of course, on everybody's minds. And they have reported, there have been reports that genetic genealogy was used in nabbing this suspected killer, Brian Kohlberger, 28 years old, 10 miles away from the murder site, pursuing his Ph.D. in criminology at the knife sheath that they tell us in the supporting affidavit for the warrant for arrest was found next to one of the victims. One button on a knife sheath. So that's kind of interesting. It's kind of surprising, I would think. I would think there'd be more DNA at this site. So what does it tell

you that there's there's zeroing in, first of all, on just that one little button as opposed to on the body of the four victims, on the bedpost, on the door handles? Right. What does it tell you? Well, I think that he went to great lengths to not leave DNA. He likely had gloves on. He was, you know, educated about this. You would think he certainly would have made sure he wasn't leaving DNA behind, but he must have handled that, of course. And so I think it's very possible they have additional DNA. And even if they didn't, they might by now, because I'm sure they've been going through all of that physical evidence batch by batch, sending that to the Idaho Crime Lab, and trying to detect any additional DNA. So I don't think we'll really know what they have until this case progresses. And hopefully they will find more DNA or already have. It might be more complex, meaning there might be mixtures of blood.

Cases I've worked where there was a frenzied stabbing, almost always the knife has slipped and cut the suspect as well. But then you have a mixture and you might even have a mixture of three people in this case. Maybe you have his blood plus two of the victim's blood, for instance, and they have to do what's called deconvolution, where they extract out the victim's DNA and are left with just that suspect's DNA. And so it's possible that that could have taken more time, which is possibly why they were focusing on this knife sheath for the affidavit. Yes, because they say that what was found on that button was single source male DNA. So what does that mean?

It means there was just one DNA contributor. So that's a much more straightforward DNA sample than if they have a mixture otherwise, which could be why they focused on that for the affidavit, because it's the most straightforward. Now, that was likely touch DNA, unless he happened to leave a little bit of blood on that, but I would guess it's touch DNA. And that is just a few skin cells, most likely. So that's not very much DNA. And that really illustrates how far technology has come. Yeah. So what, you know, my feeling as a lawyer in discussing this case is if I'm the

defense and best case scenario for Brian Kohlberger, that's all the DNA they have of his at the scene. I'm thinking I'm good because maybe Brian Kohlberger went to the store wherever they sold that knife in the sheath and he touched it, he picked it up and it was still left on there. So how long does one's touch DNA last? You know, that'll be relevant. It will be. And I agree with you. Touch DNA is not the optimal DNA sample that you would want to have in this case. Let's hope maybe it was a drop of blood instead. And I'm wrong about my supposition that it was touched DNA. But I think that the prosecution can argue that if he had handled it, then somebody else would

have had to have handled it. And their DNA should also be on there. And you would see a mixture, or you would see their DNA as the primary DNA. Now, they can certainly argue that maybe the next person to handle it wore gloves, and they were trying to set him up. So they transported it to the crime scene and left it there. So I do think there is some room for argument there. And it's very fortunate that they have other evidence. And that's really important because DNA, as you well know, should not be the only evidence in a case. You certainly hope they will be able to support it with other types of evidence. This is, I mean, we're going to get into this on our illegal panel tomorrow, but

this is why all the surveillance tape of the car and so on is relevant. But I will say not a, it's not open and shut. It's definitely not open and shut. There's all sorts of things around that crime scene. There's a Walmart. There's a 24-7 grocery store. You know, if I'm his lawyer, I'm going to say that's why he was over there. That's why you see him going by there. He's an insomniac.

His own neighbor testified to that. Not testified, but said it to reporters. In any event, we'll get into that tomorrow. But wouldn't there be, if there was touch DNA on the button, Cece, wouldn't there be typically touch DNA on the rest of the knife sheath? Well, not if he wiped it down or I think the knife sheath was leather. It's maybe less likely to retain that touch DNA than the button. It's touch DNA, you know, it's transferable, it's easy to wipe away, you can shake someone's hand, and you get their touch DNA on your hand, and you can then transfer it to a different item. And so it is more, you know, transitory or transferable. And it's harder to detect. So I'm not sure they would find it on the leather. And also he might have

wiped that down. I mean, I'm surprised he didn't wipe the whole thing down. Yeah. He might have forgotten about the button. So if they found, and we don't know what the order of events was. We don't know if they found the white Hyundai Elantra and linked it to Brian Kohlberger or if they got onto him from this touch DNA. But if it was the latter, they have a couple of, let's say it's touch DNA, a couple of skin cells that the lab tech sees miraculously and good for him or her. And they run them into their law enforcement database first, I would assume. Let's say there's no hits. As far as we know, there was some sort of, well, I don't know, like Brian

Kohlberg doesn't have a criminal record as far as we know. I don't know that his father or anybody else does. So then what? Where do they go from there? Well, there had to be enough DNA extracted by the Idaho Crime Lab that they were able to split that and send some of it to the private lab that would have created the genetic genealogy profile. And so there must have been enough, but even that could be a tiny amount. So they would have created their profile, their law enforcement court admissible profile at the crime lab, and then sent out what was remaining to a private lab, they would reanalyze it from scratch, and create that genetic genealogy profile, which I believe was likely sent back to the FBI investigative genetic genealogy team. So I think

it's very likely they did the genetic genealogy in-house. We saw how closely involved the FBI was in this case, and they've been training agents all over the country since you and I met to do this work. So for almost five years, the FBI has been training their agents to do it. I suspect strongly they kept this in-house, but they would have had to use a private lab to create that profile. Okay. So that's, and I want to ask you what you mean by create that profile. If you mean, I'm going to take a break, but if you mean create the, this is what the suspect

looks like or create the, he's got relatives and here they are. We're going to pick that question up right after this break. Love going through it line by line because it's really fascinating and it's absolutely going to dominate the news cycle over the next year as we go to that preliminary hearing. And then ultimately the trial CeCe Moore stays with us on this and other cases coming up. And remember, folks, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM, Triumph Channel, 111 every weekday at noon east. Full video show at youtube.com slash megan kelly along with clips audio podcast wherever you get your podcasts for free go check it out at apple spotify pandora stitcher and there if you go

you will find our full archives with more than 465 shows in the feed fascinating stuff so cc the question we left lingering before we went to break was, if they get, let's say it's touch DNA, some skin cells like he has brown eyes and brown hair and is about this descent, or the kind of profile that says, here's his dad? Actually, neither. It is a profile of genetic markers, somewhere between probably 500,000 and a million genetic markers of those SNPs, those single nucleotide polymorphisms that I mentioned earlier. And so it doesn't tell you anything on its own. It's only going to give you important information if you either compare it against others, their own genetic files, or phenotyping. Now, I have no information that

they performed phenotyping in this case. I don't think they did because they didn't work with Parabon and they're really the ones doing that work. So they would have created that SNP profile that looks just like if you spit in a tube at Ancestry or 23andMe and mailed that in and got your own raw data file. All right. But if they don't have a hit in the database, in any database, private or otherwise, to connect the DNA to, then they're out of luck unless they can zero in on a particular source of DNA and do a comparison, right? Right. And so you're always going to get matches in the genetic genealogy database, but if they're way too distant, if it's too small amount of shared DNA, then you're not going to be able to perform genetic genealogy on it. So everyone has matches, but maybe not close enough matches.

And then you're right. If you could not use genetic genealogy to point toward that suspect, they would have to try to find him in other ways and then collect his DNA or a close relative's DNA and compare it against that original profile that was created by the crime lab. We don't know what results they had, if and when they ran it through the private lab. We don't know whether somebody in Kohlberger's family had given DNA, had uploaded DNA. We just don't know the answer to that yet. We are told that they collected a sample of garbage outside of Brian Kohlberger's father's home. He went back and stayed with his mother and father from December 15th forward to the day of his arrest,

December 30th, after his cross-country tour with his dad, I mean, ride home. By the way, latest reporting is that the FBI was tailing him as of that date, still denying that they were behind those two traffic stops in Indiana. But the FBI now CBS reporting was tailing him and was tailing him via, you know, the easy pass. And they said fixed wing aircraft. So it's possible there was an aircraft following him. Fixed wing would mean not a helicopter and through other means. So they were on to him by december 15th according to this report so they go to the dad's house and they're um they say that they got

the garbage outside of the kohlberger house and that there was a match to the dad in other words they had dna they compared it with the dna from the knife sheath button. And what they were able to tell was with 99.9996 accuracy, this DNA on this knife sheath belongs to the father of the killer. Do I have that right? Right. And so this is pretty common when investigative genetic genealogy has pointed law enforcement toward a certain individual or family, and they'll do what's called a trash bowl. If they can't just follow that person and pick something up that they dropped, then they'll typically resort to waiting for that person to put their trash out on the curb. And most states allow this. It's considered abandoned at that point. And then they go through the trash and try to find an item that might have DNA on it. But when it's a home like this, a household where there's multiple people, they don't know exactly whose DNA they're going to get.

So in this case, they found a male sample of DNA and tested it. And it wasn't the suspects. However, they were able to perform what is basically a standard paternity test comparison to the profile from the button on the sheath and determined that that individual's DNA from the trash was the father of the individual who left his DNA behind at the crime scene. How certain do you think they'd be? I mean, they're saying 99.99%. How solid is that? Well, it's been accepted in courts for decades to establish paternity. It is extremely confident, as we saw by the number, 99.9998%. So that means that there's basically no one else on earth

that could be the father of that individual. Okay. So the real challenge for the defense lawyers is to say, I mean, they will try to say wrong. It wasn't him. You messed it up. You did something wrong at the lab. Your lab procedures are faulty. But the best line of argument is probably we don't know how that got there. Now, by this point, that would become irrelevant because they would have collected his DNA upon arrest and done the direct comparison, the one-to-one against that port admissible genetic profile that is the one they originally compared against the law enforcement databases. Once they got the one-to-one match, the paternity match wouldn't matter anymore or any genetic genealogy that was done previously would all become

irrelevant because they'd have that one-to-one match. And that's when we hear those numbers like one in 300 trillion chance that it's anyone else in the world. And then still, my comment stands up because the defense lawyers would be faced with saying, well, that DNA, first of all, your testing stinks. They'll attack the testing. Remember OJ, they'll still attack it. Barry Sheck, all that. But then they'll also just say, even if it's correct, we don't know how that got there. Maybe Brian

Kohlberger touched that knife in a store, that sheath in a store, then the killer bought it, used gloves, never touched it. It is interesting, like, this guy is a criminology student. He may have been wearing gloves. He may have been suspicious that somebody was telling him and be and watched what he threw out in his because now that we know the FBI was on to him and following him, I mean, they identified the car as of November 29th as his. And from that point forward, who knows? Maybe they were waiting

for him to throw something away. And he wasn't wasn't until he got back home. And there's one report. He moved the trash from his dad's house over to the neighbor's. Right. Okay. Right. Yeah. And I want to circle back around to something when we talked about whether there was any other DNA left behind.

When I first learned he was a criminology student, I thought he would have suited up like Dexter, you know, to make sure he didn't leave any DNA behind. But we know from the eyewitness, the roommate, DM statement, that she was able to see at least his eyebrows. And she said he had bushy eyebrows, which means he didn't cover them. And the mask that she has described is like you said, just one we would wear for COVID. It doesn't sound like he had his whole head covered. Now there's quotes going around that I said his head wasn't covered. I didn't say that. I just said, if he didn't cover his eyebrows, maybe he didn't cover his hair. And if he didn't, you know, there's, it's very likely he left a hair behind. Even an eyebrow hair could have been left behind. Is it likely? How likely is that? Like, are the eyebrows, are they falling

out all the time? Yeah. I mean, we lose hair all the time, all the time. And we've even seen one single hair from someone's leg be able to be traced back. And that is really because of advanced technology. It used to be that you couldn't use hair for this type of purpose. But only in the last couple of years have we been able to do so. I've actually helped. Does it have to have the root on it? You know, does it have to be like pulled out by the root? No, thanks to the brilliant Dr. Ed Green from UC Santa Cruz,

it doesn't have to have the root anymore. That's what's so exciting. And it's opened up a lot more cases for us to work. I was able to help identify the killer of a kindergartner using rootless hair and also another murder that hasn't been announced yet. And so I've been able to use just a single hair thanks to Dr. Ed Green's amazing technology. He's, you know, their lab is the one that is processing that and creating that profile for me to use. So without these brilliant scientists, we wouldn't be able to even do what I do. Have you ever seen a murder, Cece, that's this up close and violent at which there was no DNA left behind? No, and that's why I was opining early on. I just couldn't imagine him not leaving DNA behind because it's such a violent crime scene. He stabbed four

people multiple times and the chances of either the knife not slipping and cutting him, or one of those victims fighting back and potentially getting his DNA under their fingernails, or just dropping a single hair seems highly unlikely to me. So I guess, you know, time will tell. But I think it's something that people need to think about. If you are, you know, considering perpetrating this type of intimate, violent crime, you will leave DNA behind no matter how hard you try. I mean, Brian was clearly educated about this, and yet he still left his DNA behind. Now, I will say people are talking about how smart he was. I don't think he was the sharpest tool in the shed. It does not sound like he planned this out nearly as well as we would expect from a PhD student in criminology. But, you know, it's just virtually impossible not to leave your DNA behind in this type of And we don't know that it was him.

But there there is one posting under this suspected name, again, unconfirmed, in which he talks about the sheath of the knife. Trying to find it here. It's by somebody named Inside Looking. And the post under that guy's name, it was all about the Idaho murders, this Facebook group where they were discussing it. And one of the many things he posted, this inside looking, was of the evidence released, the murder weapon has been consistent as a large fixed blade knife. This leads me to believe they found the sheath. My God, that's just, I mean, my God, like who, that doesn't lead anyone other than the killer to believe that. Like who would go there? So I've been a member of that

group from early days. I've been following this case from, I think the very first day it happened or the day we found out about it. I don't know what to think about that. I mean, there's a lot of speculation, but that was something that really does make it seem like this person had some inside information, or it was just a really good guess. I've read both sides of the argument. Who would say they found the sheath, right? You'd say they looked at the wounds and determined that. I mean, that's a- I'm sort of on the side that it very possibly was him, but you know, like I said, it's all speculation, but I'm well for us. Right. But the law enforcement knows they know by now whether that was him because now they've,

yeah, that's a good point. They have a search warrant for his home, uh, in Washington state where he was living and going to school. And now that's been sealed. They're not allowing us access to it for now, though they say in March we may get it. They've searched all of this. They're going to have records. You can't keep that stuff a secret. So they'll know. And that would be great evidence, too. You mentioned, you know, the victims were likely to fight. They say there were defensive wounds on the victims. So they did they did fight. You know, that's what's one of the things that's so crazy about it is, then why didn't anybody hear anything? Where were the screams? Why weren't they...

They have the one roommate who lived who wasn't attacked saying, I heard what sounded like crying coming from one of the rooms. But crying is not exactly consistent with being brutally stabbed to death next to either your boyfriend or your friend. So many questions still to be answered, but those defensive wounds could prove very important on the DNA front. Right. I agree. I think when you're fighting for your life, you're conserving your energy. Possibly they didn't scream. Maybe they were just focused on trying to survive and focused on trying to survive and focused on trying to fight him off without yelling or something that would have been heard by the

roommates. God, so horrific to think about. They just on Friday, right? This crime happened in November 13th. The arrest was December 30th. Here we are, July 12th is today, January 12th. They were seen just this past Friday, the 6th, taking two bloody mattresses out of the crime scene, along with a bed frame and a box, which is strange to me. I don't know why the bloody mattresses were still there. I'm sure they've done some analysis on them prior to now. But in your experience of DNA analysis, like how would it be collected? Would they have done like a scraping of the mattress on, let's say, day one? And then maybe this is a more in-depth look? Or what do you make of that? Yeah, I thought it was very odd as well. And particularly since the judge had,

I thought, frozen the crime scene until February 1st, I believe. So it must have been either the defense or the prosecution taking that away. Some people were saying maybe it was the roommates, the surviving roommates bed. But I think you could clearly see that there was a bloodstain on one of those mattresses. I think they would have swabbed it. Now, of course, there were sheets, right? They would have collected the sheets first and maybe a mattress pad. They would have swabbed it. Sometimes they'll cut things out. I don't know if they would do that on a mattress or not, but they are probably putting that mattress into storage for future testing or maybe even to use in the courtroom. So we've been very focused on finding his DNA at the crime scene,

but there's another lane here, which is finding the victim's DNA on anything related to him. What do you think the odds are of that, right? Understanding, okay, he covered up, but like, I'm sorry, he's not superhuman. There would be blood on his clothes. There would be. We don't know what he did with the clothes. We know they're going to analyze the route he took home, which is reportedly a little odd. It's not the straight direct line back to his apartment. I'm sure they've poured over every inch of it looking for anything that's been discarded. But they seized his car, right? They're going to be tearing that. What are the odds, Cece, in your experience of finding the victim's DNA someplace around him if he in fact committed this crime?

I think it's extremely high. Like you've pointed out, he would have had to have been covered in their DNA. And then he must have gotten in that car still in those clothes. I don't think he stripped down there on that street. And so you cannot clean that completely out of a car, even though we know he took great effort cleaning that car based on reports, there still would be DNA left behind, very likely blood, maybe hair, and maybe even transferred into his home, right? When he went into his home, he might've brought some of that with him as well. So I think there's a good chance they'll be able to tie the victims, one or more of the victims DNA to his property, his car or his home. That's key right there. Even if he was meticulous, other than leaving the knife sheath behind at the crime scene, there's no there's just four people were murdered up close by a knife

there's no way he wouldn't have their dna on him and now that we have our suspect you know the half most of that battle is just knowing who to whose car to search whose apartment to search whose computer to search they figured that out thanks to the button and thanks to the surveillance of white hyundai elantra so that's very promising for law enforcement. I wanted to ask you, would this case have looked very different to you had it happened 15, 20 years ago? Yes. Some of the detectives I've worked with have told me that they don't need me to perform investigative genetic genealogy on many of their cases, their active cases, because they have so much technological evidence. They have cell phone

data, they have computer data, they have GPS data. And so that is going to be a huge part of this case. And like, we don't know, of course, if the car was what first led them to identify him or the genetic genealogy, but also just having computerized systems where you can search cars, you know, who owns cars. When we go back to the cold cases, we often are not able to find that information. It just doesn't exist. It didn't make it into the digital age. And so the whole method of crime solving, of investigation has advanced to such a degree that it's already extremely difficult to get away with a crime like this, even without the addition of investigative genetic genealogy. I grew up in the seventies like you. I remember being terrified of son of Sam who was in the news that that case terrified me because

my Nana lived in the New York city area. It was all over the news. Just, you never know what's seeping into your child's head, you know, just based on the news coverage. Um, of course there was Ted Bundy. Um, there was a hillside strangler. I've heard a night stalker, Richard Ramirez. He was in my area. I was, yes. And we haven't even covered the big ones like BTK and Zodiac. I've heard you say you don't think we can have a serial killer anymore. Like that's the odds of that happening now are next to nil. So why? Well, first of all, what we just talked about, the technological evidence. But if even that fails, we always will have investigative genetic genealogy going forward now. And so unless someone is killing people from a distance with a gun, and even then, we might be able to- DC snipers. DC snipers. I've been thinking about them this whole conversation. You get nowhere. I mean, I'm not recommending how people commit murder, but they got nowhere near their victims. It's one of the reasons why it was so hard to detect who it was. Well, then they better wear gloves when they handle the bullets because you can pull DNA from bullet casing as well. And so it's just going to be virtually impossible to be the type of serial killer and certainly a serial rapist that is perpetrating these very intimate, up-close,

impersonal crimes, because you will leave your DNA behind. And if you do, we will identify you, even if it takes months or years. I recently worked the Faith Hedgepeth case out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It took us three years to identify the DNA contributor, her killer, her alleged killer, because he was born in Guatemala. And so, you know, even those cases, we will get there. It just takes additional time. And as the databases grow, it's going to get more efficient and quicker and quicker as time goes on. And we're getting better at what we're doing every day as well. And so, you know, that's why I don't think that we will have serial killers. There won't be Ted Bundy's

or Golden State killers or Zodiac, who's still unidentified 50 years later, because of investigative genetic genealogy. This is a good incentive for people to actually upload their DNA results if you are at all so inclined. I understand a lot of people aren't. But if you are inclined, do it. And do it at GEDmatch, too. Take your results from these other private companies and do it. Not saying you're a serial killer or you're a family member, but there could be the Loretta Swit.

She's not a serial killer either. You could have the sixth cousin who you have no love for connection, real connection to who's done something wrong. And wouldn't it be nice to have helped law enforcement nab that person? It's it's one of the reasons why your name came up in discussing the JonBenet Ramsey case. We had Jon Ramsey on the show not long ago, And he's like, I'm 78 years old. I don't have much time to see this case solved. And he said, Cece, he wants someone like you to analyze what they say is a teeny tiny bit of DNA that is left in that case. And I don't know why there's not more because apparently they have they have john bonnet's pajamas they have her underwear they have the the implement used to strangle uh poor

john bonnet and um the instrument and um it's been tested repeatedly and there's been no match and i guess that what he's being told is basically there's only one more test in here like if we do this again and we don't get the guy it's done there's so little left so just to update our viewers he wants the governor of colorado to allow him as the child's father who's been ruled out as a suspect by the prosecutor to take this dna and give it to somebody like you, to take it to a private lab that is the best of the best. And this seems to make so much sense to me. But he wasn't able to get the governor, Governor Polis, to even respond to him.

He told us this right before Christmas when he came on. So during that interview, he told us, this is an update for our viewers, Cece, he told us about a letter that he wrote to the Colorado governor, Jared Polis. And he had written it like two months earlier, October. He asked him for a face-to-face meeting because so far he'd been getting the stiff arm from the governor, from the state law enforcement. They created this sort of, oh, we're going to refer to our cold case unit. And he was like, that's a PR CYA cover. That's not real.

And he wanted to tell the governor personally the different steps he wants taken in the investigation, including this new DNA testing with somebody like you. So it would cost the state nothing. He said he and his supporters would pay for it. Well, John Kimani told us the governor never even did him the courtesy of responding to him. I mean, how do you not respond to this grieving dad. After the interview, we promised John Ramsey that we and our viewers were going to reach out to the governor and demand answers. Why are you ignoring this man? Why are you ignoring John Ramsey and his concerns? No response for us either. We told our listeners and our viewers to do it. They did as well. Reached out to the governor's office directly, demanding action on behalf of John Ramsey. Respond to the man. Do something. Now, we don't know what exactly flipped that switch, but John just told us he's heard back from the governor after two months of being ignored. And now the governor has asked him, John Ramsey, to contact the Colorado director of public safety. And he's done that. No face-to-face meeting yet. But John is telling us he now feels encouraged by the response. So, yay.

Thank you to all of our viewers and our listeners for helping now feels encouraged by the response. So yay. Thank you to all of our viewers and our listeners for helping and amping up the pressure. And now, Cece, what we need to happen is for someone like you, ideally you, to get this evidence analyzed. So how high are the risks given how little DNA there is? Just backtracking a little. I don't know if you remember, but you asked me almost five years ago what case I'd like to work. And I mentioned JonBenet. And I have received emails or messages on social media every single day since that time asking me to work this

case. I certainly would love to have the opportunity to do so, but I doubt very much that they would let me work it. I would expect maybe the FBI will work it if anyone is allowed to do so. As far as the risks, yeah, once you use up that DNA, that's the end. So you have to make sure that it's being sent to a well-tested team, a lab that has been able to create profiles, genetic genealogy profiles from tiny amounts of degraded DNA, and that has scientists that are really highly skilled at working with that degraded DNA. We can assume it's degraded after all these years. With touch DNA, which I think that's what this is in this case, my understanding, again, you just have a tiny bit of skin cells, and it can be very quickly consumed. So I understand Boulder Police's

hesitation to use up that last little bit, because you never know what's coming around the corner. Nobody predicted investigative genetic genealogy outside of our little community. And so I always am hesitant to second guess law enforcement. I've been involved in some pretty high profile cases where people were out there criticizing law enforcement and had no idea what was going on behind the scenes. And I wasn't able to, yeah, just like Idaho. That's exactly right. Now in that case, I didn't have inside information, but I strongly suspected they were trying investigative genetic genealogy, but there's been other cases where they've never even released that they did use that tool. And, you know, I've had to keep quiet and listen, watch all these people criticizing law enforcement for years. It happened in the Chapel Hill case and Faith Hedgepest case as well. Had to bite my tongue. And so you just don't know what they are doing behind the scenes and what their reasoning is. And so I really do hesitate

to second guess, like I said, but I think it is the time to go ahead and do it. They can get a whole genome sequence done on that DNA if it's viable, meaning you could not just look at the 700,000 markers that we use for genetic genealogy, but they could look at the entire genome and then have all of that information for the future. And I think that's probably the best bet in this case. There's two different ways you can do it. One is called microarray, where you just look at those 700, 800,000 genetic markers that the direct-to-consumer DNA testing companies also use. Or you can do this whole genome sequence, where you get every bit of the genome information that is available in that sample. You get that from touch DNA? Yes, absolutely. You know, about 10% of the cases that we've helped solve or been able to create profiles for have been touch DNA.

We published a paper in 2019 talking about that. And so people in this case are saying, oh, it's so new. They use touch DNA for genetic genealogy, but it's actually not. We've been doing it since 2018. So it's totally doable. And I think, you know, John's getting older as he keeps pointing out. And now is the time. But I do understand their hesitation. It is risky. When you say you can get the whole genome, would that allow you to do both lanes of investigative

work you were telling us about, like figure out the family tree potentially, and at a minimum, get this is what the person is likely to look like. This is what the hair color probably is. You could do both of those off the same tiny cells. Yes. And so that's one thing that's interesting about Parabon is they were doing this phenotyping before genetic genealogy was a thing for law enforcement. And the files that they created for that are exactly the files that we use for genetic genealogy, which is why when I joined forces with them, I had about a hundred cases right off the bat because they had already created those files. They'd already gone through the lab process and all we had to do was get permission to upload those to GEDmatch. And so, yes, it absolutely has the same information in there

that you would need to predict eye color, hair color, ancestry. It is a really powerful amount of information. Cece, am I crazy? This may have been a different company, but I feel like when I was at NBC, Andrea Canning had this done on herself. Do you guys do a a sketch you know off of the the info you get back i just remember seeing a sketch of andrea that was pretty good do that that was before i was part of the company but i think

you're right i do remember seeing that and on their site so i mean imagine it we could potentially get a picture of the john bonnet killer pretty quickly if there's enough cells on this thing. That's how quickly things have advanced in the DNA line. And there's I mean, that's that case captured the attention of the nation. Everybody would like to see whoever did that brought to justice. OK, there's more because we've got to talk about this case out of Pennsylvania. This is right where my husband's from. So he was very interested in this as well. Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And wait until you hear how CeCe Moore solved this case. One a week. She's knocking out you guys. She stays with us for our last segment. Don't go away. We've got to talk about this case in Pennsylvania. You recently solved this case as of July of 2022.

Let's go back before that, though, to 1975, when the murder of then 19-year-old Lindy Sue Beachler took place. She was stabbed to death 19 times in her apartment on December 5th, 1975. She was found lying on her back with a knife sticking out of her neck. Decades went by without an arrest in the gruesome crime. They had no idea. Police were not able to solve this. I understand it happened in Pennsylvania, and it was just a cold case. So you got involved in this. How did you get involved in this all these years later? Well, Lancaster police had worked with Parabon before I even joined forces with them to create this investigative genetic genealogy service. So they had an established

relationship with them. So when I came on board, they asked Lancaster police if we could perform genetic genealogy first on the Christy Merak case, which they had done a phenotype for. And so we uploaded that to GEDmatch. And on that case, right away, we had good matches for me to work with. Now, when I became really familiar with that case, I learned that Christy's brother and Lindy Sue's brother had taken out billboards together asking for tips on their sisters. And so I was able to help law enforcement solve Christy Murak's case way back in 2018. It was one of my very first ones. But I felt like Lindy Sue's case was hanging over my head for years because I really felt that they both needed to be solved. They were sort of like

sister cases to me, even though they were so many years apart. And I wanted Lindy Sue's family and brother to have those answers as well, like Christy's family finally did. But when we performed the analysis on that crime scene DNA and uploaded it to GEDmatch, there were no good matches. They were all very, very, very distant. So we recommended they upload to FamilyTreeDNA as well, the second database. Again, no good matches. And I was just so disappointed because I so desperately wanted to help law enforcement identify her killer as well. Okay, so then what'd you do?

Well, because we didn't have any close matches. So the closest match we had only shared 30 centimorgans. 30 centimorgans can be a false match even. That's so distant. It could be a 10th cousin. But I was determined to try to help on this case. So just behind the scenes, without even telling the law enforcement agency I was doing it, I started building trees of these really distant matches. And instead of being able, oh, going back into the 1600s. And I didn't expect I'd find common ancestors because of the distance, but I did find that they were all converging on this small town in Southern Italy. And so that was really interesting to me because it was clear that the person who left their DNA behind on Lindy Sue, so her killer, her alleged killer at this point, had all of his

ancestral roots go back to this one small area in South Italy. So that's pretty specific. So I started researching the migration history of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Where did the people come from? Okay, Italy. I found that there was a club, Sons of Italy, and I started looking through their membership cards, which are digitized online, thankfully. And I found that most of the people, most of the Italians who came to Lancaster came from this small town called Gasparina. Well, Gasparina is the town in Italy that the trees were going back to. Aha. So that meant that Lindy's killer likely had roots in Lancaster going back.

This wasn't someone who just was passing through. This is somebody whose family had been in Lancaster for probably a couple generations and had come directly from Gasparina. And he was going to be fully Italian with full ancestry from there based on the family trees, as well as the ancestry predictions we were able to create. And so I needed to find someone who had four grandparents from Gasparina, all eight great grandparents from either there or close by in that region that had come to Lancaster and settled there. And so I went through all of those cards and then started building the family trees for each of the men. That's who was in that club,

men. Each of those men who came to Lancaster, I built their trees forward to see who did they marry. And then I would build their trees backward to see if they also had ancestry exclusively from Gasparina or nearby. And so I needed to find somebody whose ancestors intermarried with people from their hometown. And we also had done a snapshot phenotype in that case, and he had a little bit unique traits. And I'm not sure I can go into that right now, but he had, for Southern Italian, he had sort of unusual physical traits. And so I was

able to look at that as well. And it wasn't that many people who came to Lancaster from that town. I mean, there was a fair amount, but it was a very defined migration route. And it was a small percent of the overall population. So I figured if there was only a few hundred who came over, then that was doable. It was just going to take time. Anyone who intermarried with someone from a different population group, their descendants were out. So I just kept building these trees and seeing who would fit. And then as I was doing that, each of those descendants who would be a candidate, I started doing newspaper searches on them. And one of them turned out had the same address as Lindy. I found a, I think it was an engagement announcement in the newspaper. And I was just blown away. What are the chances of doing this for months and months, years actually, of behind the scenes building these trees and it leading right to the same apartment

building that Lindy was killed in. Oh, my God. So then this is chilling. So then you got to close the loop. Got to figure out now you have a name. I mean, that's the big thing. Now you have a name who you think could potentially be the guy. What's the next step? There's a couple other things about him that were compelling, but because this is still an active case, I won't go into those. But I felt pretty confident, but I didn't have any solid evidence like I normally have. Normally I can connect my person of interest to multiple matches through Common Ancestors. But I couldn't connect any of these people directly to his family tree, just to that hometown of Gasparina. So it was really nerve wracking, but I still felt like it was a good enough lead to pass it on.

And so we reached out to Lancaster police and let them know that I'd been working on this, which they weren't even aware of, and set up a meeting. And I shared his name with them. At that point, it's just a tip. It's a lead generator. No one's going to get arrested based on what I say. So they have to perform their full investigation on this individual, just like they would have had to do on Brian Kohlberger if that's how he was identified. This is not evidence that's going to be used against anyone in a court of law. So they started looking into this individual, and they eventually collected surreptitious DNA, just like they did in the Idaho case. And they tested that against their original court admissible genetic profile. That's the one that

is used for evidence. They can't arrest somebody until they've done that or gotten a close family member like they did with Brian's father. In this case, they got DNA directly from the suspect or the person of interest. And he became a suspect because they got that one-to-one exact match, which when they told me was huge because this was a novel technique that I had just created. And there was, it was nerve wracking, right? If I can't even connect one match to someone's family tree, I feel very hesitant to point them out to law enforcement. Like I said earlier, I don't want to send them after innocent people. But there was just certain things, circumstantial things about him and about his life that made

it too compelling not to pass it on. So when they told me it was a match, it was just tremendous. So they, according to what I read, they found him in the airport, in the Philadelphia airport. And I think that's where they got his February 2022. They recovered a coffee cup he used and threw away at the Philadelphia International Airport. Labs later confirmed the DNA on his coffee cup matched the DNA from the semen on Lindy Sue's underwear. All these years later, again, the crime happened in 1975 they um also found that dna in blood left on her pantyhose uh was consistent with the semen um and so on like they were matching it

on a couple fronts now this man's name uh is david sinopoli he's been arrested. He has pleaded not guilty. But this guy did apparently live in her apartment building at the time in 1975. He would have been, I think, 18 by my calculation. He's now 68 years old. This guy went on, as far as we can tell, to lead a relatively normal life. I mean, it's kind of crazy, right? Cece, do you know anything about what he did over those next 50 years? Oh, yeah. I did a lot of research, as I always do when I have identified a potential person of interest. I dig through social media, through newspaper articles, through the traditional genealogical records. I use all types of different resources to learn

about someone before I turn their name over. I write a really complete report with a lot of information for law enforcement in my case. So he got married? He had kids? Yeah, he was a newlywed at the same time that Lindy was a newlywed. They both were. Oh my gosh. I mean, it's just so creepy to think that if this is true, this guy committed a heinous, brutal murder and then went on to live with the secret for 50 years, probably always wondering, especially as DNA techniques got more developed, right? Yeah. It definitely seems like we're identifying a new type of criminal with investigative genetic genealogy. We see so many of these cases where this individual seems to have perpetrated one

really horrible, violent crime and then gone on with their lives. And that's why they're cold cases, right? They were never arrested for another crime. They never got their DNA in the system. These are people that were never on law enforcement's radar at all. So, you know, who knows what else these individuals may have done, but it certainly appears that we've identified many of these types of individuals that did something like this once and then faded back into society and lived what appeared to be a normal life. They say his friends were shocked. I mean, his family's shocked. They can't believe it. But I mean, the truth is DNA doesn't lie. I will say to the audience two things.

Especially when it's sperm on a rape homicide victim. I do just want to make one more point, which is that the DA has actually allowed me to speak about this case. Normally, I wouldn't be doing so when it's still working its way through the court system, but the DA specifically asked me to speak at the press conference and explain my methods. And so I'm not speaking out of turn. Got it. This has been used by you to, as I mentioned in the intro, identify murder victims who, you know, Jane Doe's, John Doe's, giving closure to so many families who just had their child disappear and never knew what happened to them and just assumed the worst. But there's some closure in knowing this is how they died. They were the victim of this person.

They certain deaths tied to this killer or that killer. I mean, it's upsetting, but it's I'm sure most families are relieved to be able to bury their loved one and so on. Another important lane of what you're doing. And just for the record, we went back and checked all the cases that you'd been working on when you came on and we interviewed you on NBC. There was one case involving a little girl, April Tinsley, who'd been murdered in December 2018. Again, this is after our interview. The man you helped identify sentenced to 80 years in prison. There was another case. By the way, that was the first conviction of somebody identified through investigative genetic genealogy. year old Jay Cook and 18 year old Tanya Van Kolenberg in 1987, Canadian high school sweethearts visited Seattle and were killed. You helped identify the accused killer, William Talbot. He had pleaded not guilty at the time we interviewed, found guilty in June of 2019.

I could go on. And that was the first jury trial to find someone guilty who was identified through IgG, investigative genetic genealogy. So these are all big firsts. Yes. It's absolutely amazing. I mean, we talked about seven, six or whatever cases, every single one, the person either pleaded guilty or was found guilty in a court of law. So your track record's really good. So in the time we have left- Yeah, we have I think over 40 convictions now. We have over 40 convictions in our cases. Some are lagging because of COVID. It took longer to get these, and we still have lots in the pipeline.

But yeah, our track record and genetic genealogy's track record, and this is really phenomenal. Pretty stellar. Where is this going, Cece? Right? Like 20 years ago, probably nobody could anticipate where we are today. What do you think? Like if you had to predict the future, where's this going? Well, if you, I mean, if you had asked me a month or two ago, I would have said we will

start working more active cases. It'll start stopping criminals in their tracks, keeping serial killers from ever developing. And here we see with Idaho, exactly what I would have told you would happen is what is going to happen. And I am one of the reasons I've been out there talking about this Idaho case, even though I was not involved in it, is because it is a fantastic example of what I've been advocating for is using investigative genetic genealogy early in a crime soon as they don't get that hit in the law enforcement database, because it can save lives.

And this is where we can have the real impact on public safety. We can keep people from losing their lives and being victimized. And we can really help law enforcement be more efficient with their investigations. Instead of investigating something for years or decades and spending public funds on this and involving innocent people in these investigations. We can probably even help avoid wrongful convictions by keeping the focus off the innocent from the beginning, because one of the real powers of investigative genetic genealogy is the ability to rule people out. For every one of these, we focus on the arrests, but I have ruled out dozens or hundreds of persons of interest in all of these cases

when I start working them. Many of those have already been under suspicion for years or decades. I've heard from lots of people thanking me for finally lifting that burden off of their shoulders. And so I think that's where we're going is when they don't, you know, when they run out of avenues, they tried all the technological advances and they still don't have this individual in their sights. They will turn to investigative genetic genealogy now. It's another reminder, by the way, that when the police process a crime scene, they ought to be dressed like in hazmat suits. Given given this touch DNA, they can't go anywhere near it without suiting up from head to toe to make sure that they don't disturb anything. Think of it. I mean, it's like- You're right, because we have had some cases that

trace back to law enforcement officers or people that were involved in the case. And so that's unfortunate when that happens. Yeah. And I'm sure that they're paying attention to the latest developments and realizing how critical that is more than ever to make sure that they touch nothing with their bare hands or, you know, their own DNA getting on a site, which is, as you point out, is so easy for people to do. You can't go in with exposed eyebrows. I mean, there's a lot to think about. Cece Moore, you're a genius. You're a heroine. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for your support. You are so kind and I'm so happy we got to speak again. Oh, likewise.

And saying a prayer that it works out between you and the JonBenet Ramsey investigation. They need you. All the best to you. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.