After a 79-year-old woman was raped in her own home, genetic genealogist CeCe Moore had to work fast. The assailant was still out there.

Her mind raced. “I have got to find him now, before he re-offends,” she thought.

“I felt like it was a life-or-death situation.”

Police had asked her to identify the rapist in the April attack in St. George, Utah. The idea was to plug his DNA into a public database and find his family tree. Maybe then they could deduce his name.


“I was sweating,” Moore said. “I felt like I was battling to get to the other side of a dark jungle just to solve that.”

Moore and her team quickly provided a name. Police soon arrested a suspect.

Moore — a graduate of Mt. Carmel High School in Rancho Peñasquitos— is one of the biggest names in genetic genealogy, which made national headlines in 2018 as a tool to help identify rapists and murderers, most famously the suspected Golden State Killer.

Moore is recognizable from the PBS documentary show “Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” in which she assists the Harvard scholar to dig into the ancestry of celebrities and notables. She’s also become a notable star in her own right, and an expert on solving cases for people trying to figure out who their parents are.


TV viewers may remember her work featured on ABC’s “20/20” in 2016, in which she helped three people who each had been abandoned in Los Angeles as newborns, umbilical cords still attached, in the 1980s. The three, it turned out, were related.

She figured out who their birth mother was.

Moore recently joined Virginia-based Parabon NanoLabs to lead its forensic genealogy unit. In September, the company issued a statement that it had solved 10 cases in the first 100 days of the new service.

The field of genetic genealogy itself had a breakout year in 2018.


The method made its big-stage debut as a crime-solving tool in April with the announcement that it had been used to catch the suspected Golden State Killer, so named for a crime spree that included more than 50 rapes and at least 13 murders throughout California from 1974 to 1986.

Here’s how it works: Police upload DNA from a crime scene into a public repository of DNA profiles, in hopes that the evidence shares plenty of markers with what’s already in the database. If there is enough of a family connection between the crime scene DNA samples and a profile in the database, an expert genetic genealogist like Moore might shake a name out of the family tree.

Moore has had success in more than two dozen cases thus far.

“This is really just the beginning of genetic genealogy and law enforcement,” Moore said last month. “I knew the potential all along. I knew this was coming for a long time.”


‘A highly scientific tip’

Moore had long wanted to help police. But she had ethical concerns.

She had long urged several people to upload their raw DNA information to the public database. But now that police were using that database, she didn’t feel it was OK for her to help them mine a database rich with profiles she had told people to upload.

“I had a lot of sleepless nights,” she said, “because I wanted to help law enforcement. I wanted to stop these criminals. I wanted to help save lives.”

Then the Golden State case — cracked by genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter — took law enforcement’s new use of genetic genealogy out of the shadows. It made national news.


It became widely understood that police were using the public database. Once that information was in the public consciousness, Moore felt it was OK to help with police use the database.

“Once it was all out on the open, there was no reason for me not to do it anymore,” Moore said. “It really resolved it for me. So that was a gift.”

Moore said that, in all the cases she has worked on, only once did the name she provided to police match someone already on their list of suspects.

Police don’t run out and make arrests based solely on the names genealogists provide. Once they have a name, the investigation continues.


“Really, we are just giving them a highly scientific tip,” Moore said.

In Carlsbad, that kind of tip solved a cold case.

Finding a Carlsbad killer

Rae-Venter, the genetic genealogist who cracked the Golden State case, is retired after a career as a patent attorney. This new line of work “is a hobby,” she told the Union-Tribune in November.

Her hobby helped provide some answers for a Carlsbad family, who had lost a daughter to a killer on Valentine’s Day 2007.


Jodine Serrin, 39, was developmentally disabled but highly functioning, and lived in an apartment not far from her parents’ home. Nearly 12 years ago, the Serrins stopped by that apartment and found their daughter in her bed, unclothed and beaten to death.

Jodine Serrin was killed in her Carlsbad condominium in 2008. Earlier this year police, who had crime scene DNA, turned to a genetic genealogist, who provided them with the name of a suspect. (Photo courtesy Carlsbad Police Department)

After a suspect in the Golden State Killer case was identified, Carlsbad police turned to genetic genealogists including Rae-Venter and Moore’s team at Parabon NanoLabs for help on the local case. They took the DNA data from the crime scene and traced it to an Oceanside man as the most likely assailant. Moore said they were able to provide police with his name.

The suspect, who was 38 at the time of Serrin’s death, took his own life in 2011.


Before the work of the genealogists on the case, detectives “did not have somebody to look at” as a potential suspect, Carlsbad police Lt. Greg Koran said in November.

It’s the first known local case solved using genetic genealogy.

Other local cases

The revelation that cases could be solved by combining family trees and science has swept through law enforcement.

Chula Vista police have tried it, in hopes of solving the 1989 slaying of Helen Roscoe, who was stabbed to death during a robbery.


Roscoe had been getting out of her car near her apartment, keys still in hand, when she was attacked. Her purse was taken.

Helen Roscoe (Courtesy photo)

Police believe a cap found in her car belonged to her killer. Years later, it was swabbed for DNA and run in the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, which is the national DNA database. No match.

Several years later, authorities ran the DNA in a criminal database again, this time looking to see whether they could match it to a relative who may have committed a crime. It’s known as a familial DNA search. Again, nothing.


After the Golden State Killer case, Chula Vista police saw a new possibility in genetic genealogy. They spent $1,500 to give it a try.

“Unfortunately, it didn’t yield any results,” police Capt. Phil Collum said. “But we are continuing to explore the technology as it develops.”

Other local departments are also aware of its potential.

San Diego police are using it, homicide Lt. Matt Dobbs said, although he did not specify any cases. And it doesn’t have to be a cold case, Dobbs said. Active investigations are fair game.


But to use it, Dobbs said, detectives must have exhausted all other leads.

The Sheriff’s Department said its cold-case detectives and crime lab specialists are “confident that there are cases that would be suitable for the use of a genealogical approach.”

As for which cases might make the list, the Sheriff’s Department doesn’t yet have a policy, but Sheriff Bill Gore “is supportive of the genealogical approach, where applicable,” a department spokeswoman said.

Teasing out a killer’s name

Do-it-yourself genetic testing has become popular over the last few years. Companies like Ancestry or 23 and Me offer kits that can be ordered online. Users swab the inside of a cheek and seal the swab in a tube, then mail it in to the company for testing.


Those companies then provide a DNA profile.

The consumer sites do not upload DNA information into the public databases, and do not work with police.

But customers, if they choose, can upload their DNA profile to a public database — GEDmatch, created by citizen scientists, is the biggest.

Once uploaded, people can search for relatives who share parts of their genetic profile.


Uploading the DNA profiles also puts the information into a pool that police can access. GEDmatch’s terms of service make it clear that police are allowed to do so. The terms also state that police can only use the DNA database to solve violent crimes such as rape or murder.

Investigators search find a connection to a close-enough relative — a third cousin’s genes will do.

Once a connection is made, an expert genetic genealogist may be able to tease out the identity of the person who left DNA at the crime scene.

That means building out family trees, working backwards through genealogical records to find ancestors of the customers who share genes with a criminal suspect. A third-cousin match, for example, means the two people share a great-great-grandparent.


So first, they have to figure out who that great-great-grandparent is. Once they have that, genealogists build a family tree to find other descendants of that shared ancestor.

There are limitations, of course. Although it is growing — particularly after the Golden State case — the database at GEDmatch has only about 1.2 million profiles.

Also, Moore said, most of the people who have uploaded their DNA data to GEDmatch are people of European descent. That affects the kinds of people whose family members can be traced.

“We are much more likely to ID these old white guys who were getting away with this for 20, 30 years,” Moore told the crowd of genealogists in Mission Valley during a conference in early December.


What about privacy?

But for all its fans, genetic genealogy is still very new as a forensic tool. There is no formal training or certification for this job. It’s not yet courtroom-tested. It’s controversial.

And then there are concerns about privacy and civil rights.

Earlier this year, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union wrote an article — first published in the Washington Post, then later on the ACLU website — arguing that uploading DNA from a crime scene into a public database might have violated the privacy rights of Golden State Killer suspect Joseph D’Angelo.

The attorney, Vera Eidelman, wrote that submitting DNA for testing means giving away genetic material of family members — including those not yet born.


Eidelman also noted that even if D’Angelo is found guilty, “the penalties for such crimes do not typically entail releasing a person’s entire genetic makeup.”

“People may not be so troubled by such an intrusion when it comes to a serial killer,” she wrote, “but imagine the implications of using this technique for shoplifters or trespassers.”

None of the arrests in DNA genetic genealogy cases throughout the country have made it to trial, but at least one ended with a guilty plea.

In an Indiana courtroom last month, a man admitted he had abducted, raped and killed an 8-year-old Fort Wayne girl named April Tinsley in 1988. John D. Miller was sentenced to 80 years in prison.


Moore and the team she leads at Parabon NanoLabs had identified him.

‘There won’t be Golden State Killers’

Since the Golden State case freed her to work with police, Moore has helped solve more than two dozen cases, including two in which the suspect was still active. Those are the priority.

“They are going to go to the head of the list of the 100 or so cases that we have waiting,” Moore said. “If we can save a life or keep a woman from being raped, it will be worth it.”

And that was why she had sleepless nights while working to identify a suspect in the rape of the 79-year-old woman in Utah.


“If it starts being used earlier in the investigations, there won’t be Golden State Killers,” Moore said. “There won’t be long career criminals, because we are going to catch them much faster.”

teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com

(760) 529-4945


Twitter: @TeriFigueroaUT

UPDATES:

3:30 p.m.: This story was updated to clarify that third cousins share great-great-grandparents.