WEST BARNSTABLE — It has been nearly 45 years since Alyssa Metcalfe’s sister found the handless body in the dunes 2 miles east of the old Coast Guard station in Provincetown.

“It's kind of always stayed with the family,” Metcalfe said recently at her home in West Barnstable. “There's this, I don't know, do you call it a kinship with the case?”

After all these years, Metcalfe and others still hold out hope that the woman known as “Lady of the Dunes” may one day be identified, and investigators are considering a new way of making that happen.

Prosecutors currently are examining a new method for the use of DNA evidence and genealogy to generate leads in cold criminal cases on Cape Cod and the Islands. The “Lady of the Dunes” is one of two cases that are primary targets of the effort, Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe said.

“We’re going to examine everything that we can with respect to what’s left of the remains,” O’Keefe said of the “Lady of the Dunes” case.

A different type of DNA profile is needed in the case, but a specialized lab may be able to extract what is needed, and investigators are currently looking into that possibility, O’Keefe said.

“We have gone through this process in another case,” O’Keefe said of the second case his office is working on, which he said he could not yet discuss publicly.

A meeting is planned in May for district attorneys and their staff from across Massachusetts and prosecutors from California and elsewhere who have expertise in the new use of DNA profiles from crime scenes or unidentified bodies, combined with genealogy family-tree building, to generate leads to find living suspects and identify dead, unnamed victims.

“We’re bringing Greg out here,” O’Keefe said about Ventura County District Attorney Gregory Totten, who was among six district attorneys involved in a prominent case in California where a living murder suspect was identified last year after a six-month effort based on a lead generated from DNA evidence he left at scenes of his alleged crimes, combined with the identification of a close relative through genealogy.

Totten and Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, both board members — along with O’Keefe — of the National District Attorneys Association, are leading workshops for prosecutors across the country on what is now being called genetic genealogy.

“From a law enforcement standpoint, it is a huge step forward that allows us to solve cases that historically we've not been able to solve through traditional law enforcement DNA technology,” Totten said.

Unsolved homicide

In Barnstable, Dukes and Nantucket counties, there are four unidentified bodies and another 16 instances of unidentified human skeletal parts, which have been found mostly on beaches and in fishing nets, according to a government clearinghouse of missing, unidentified and unclaimed person cases in the U.S. In total, there are 11 unsolved homicides in the jurisdiction of the Cape and Islands District Attorney’s office dating back to the 1970s, according to a spokeswoman for the office.

Among the four unidentified bodies are two cases that overlap with the unsolved homicides, including “Lady of the Dunes.” After almost a half-century and countless hours of investigation, the case is the oldest unidentified dead person in Massachusetts included in the clearinghouse records.

On July 26, 1974, Metcalfe, who was 10 years old at the time, had stayed in town to go to the horse stables while her parents and her sister, Leslie, visited with friends at the C-scape dune shack.

Leslie, then 12, and their parents had been hiking back to the Province Lands Visitor Center after a day at the shack with friends. A couple of their friends’ dogs were following them, when one of them caught a scent.

“The dog kind of started barking at something as they were hiking across, so my sister went to follow and see what the dog was barking at,” Metcalfe said of what her family told her. “That's when she found the body.”

Leslie Metcalfe, who died in 1996, primarily remembered that the body had no hands and that it appeared to be a dead deer, based on the coloring of the woman’s skin, her sister said. Their parents and Leslie doubled back to the dune shack to tell everyone there, and then someone took a Jeep to find park rangers and bring them out. The woman’s head was nearly severed from her body, and she had been in the stand of scrub pines for at least a week, having died from a blow to the head, police said at that time.

The “Lady of the Dunes” case has caught the attention of each police chief and detective in Provincetown, starting with James Meads, who was chief in 1974. On the fourth day after the body was discovered, the headline in the Cape Cod Standard-Times read “Homicide victim still unidentified,” which — unbeknownst to Meads and the Cape Cod National Seashore park rangers at the time — would still ring true more than 40 years later. In 1980, the body was exhumed from the burial plot at a church cemetery for blood samples; 20 years later it was exhumed again for DNA sampling, to see if it matched that of a woman who came forward as possibly the mother of the victim. A clay model has been made of the woman’s head, and age-regression drawings were completed in 2006.

“I wasn’t even born yet,” said former Provincetown police Detective Monica Himes of the 1974 case.

In reading up on the case as a new detective in 2008, Himes said she was looking for what was missing and how the pieces of the case could be assembled.

“I was interested in carrying on the work that had already been done, with the command staff guidance,” she said.

In 2009 and 2010, Himes and then-Police Chief Jeff Jaran worked with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Virginia, and other investigators who convene regularly to discuss cold cases to come up with a three-dimensional, color composite image of what the “Lady of the Dunes” might have looked like at the time of her death.

Over the years, researcher Bruce Jackson, who ran the undergraduate biotechnology and forensic DNA science program at Massachusetts Bay Community College in Wellesley, continued his studies of the case, including a visit to the site in the dunes in 2015 with five students. After Jackson died in 2016, the state medical examiner’s office removed the biological materials that Jackson held at the college, according to Neil Buckley, the college’s vice president for finance and administration. To the best of the college’s knowledge, the biological materials from the case that were removed by the medical examiner included tissue samples of a leg, left scapula, right scapula, ribs and hair samples.

As a forensic DNA expert, Jackson had a standing relationship with the Provincetown Police Department since the 2000 exhumation, Police Chief James Golden said in 2015. The sampling taken in 2015, with the students, consisted of tablespoons of sand, Golden said at the time.

No one has since taken over Jackson’s research, a college spokeswoman said.

“It’s not helpful,” O’Keefe said about Jackson’s research at the college.

Prosecution 'pretty remote'

Given the age of the “Lady of the Dunes” case, the chances of ever being able to prosecute her killer is “pretty remote,” O’Keefe said. But having biological material from the case handled by students in a classroom raises the possibility of having no proven chain of custody of evidence, O’Keefe said.

“On the other hand, we’re not going to let that stop us,” O’Keefe said about the continued efforts to solve the case.

Another problem with using the new techniques of combining DNA analysis with genealogical family-tree building is that the “Lady of the Dunes” body was embalmed, O’Keefe said.

“Some extraction of DNA is not hurt by the embalming process but others are,” he said.

There are complications, both O’Keefe and Totten emphasized.

“Like any new tool, whether it’s a new tool that's given to front-line law enforcement or a new law that is given to prosecutors or a new technology, it has to be used with great care and discretion,” Totten said. “In California, we're fashioning protocols that, for example, limit it to violent felonies.”

Like standards for the use of wiretaps, which Totten said can be invasive and require court orders, he and experienced prosecutors are recommending to district attorneys that they limit the combined use of DNA analysis and genealogy research to cases where investigative leads have already been exhausted or where there’s significant public safety interest at stake.

In the prominent case in California that both Totten and Schubert worked on, Joseph James DeAngelo — known as the “Golden State Killer” — was charged last year in Sacramento Superior Court with 13 counts of murder with special circumstance from between 1975 and 1986 and 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery from 1976 to 1979. The case against DeAngelo is currently pending in court.

Different form of DNA analysis

Traditionally, law enforcement has used a form of DNA analysis that examines a narrow but crucially unique set of genetic indicators from evidence left at a scene, such as semen or human hair, to create a unique profile of an unidentified living suspect or unidentified body. Then, that DNA profile is compared against a national law enforcement database with millions of profiles of convicts, arrestees and crime scenes in an attempt to find an exact match.

In the methodology that led to breaks in the DeAngelo case, and now several other cold cases, a different form of DNA analysis — from specialized labs — examines a much broader spectrum of unique genetic indicators to produce a highly detailed profile called a SNPs report, like what is offered by private companies such as ancestry.com, 23andme.com and FamilyTreeDNA.com.

While the private companies do not share their databases of customers' DNA profiles, those same customers can upload their profiles to other databases, including public databases such as GEDmatch.

“That’s kind of like the wikis for DNA,” said Lindsay Fulton, who directs research services at the American Ancestors and the New England Historic Genealogical Society. “Everyone is uploading their DNA voluntarily, and then it works the same that 23andme.com does, or ancestry.com. If you get a hit, say, for your third cousin, they'll give you contact information for that third cousin."

The private companies still have the largest databases in the U.S. for people looking for family ties, but when those do not provide enough results, then the organization's genealogists may recommend clients upload their DNA profiles to GEDmatch or other public databases, Fulton said.

“The more hits the better, if you're just kind of fishing,” Fulton said.

Law enforcement, in using databases such as GEDmatch, typically hires a specialized lab to produce a SNPs profile of an unidentified suspect and then hires a specialized genealogist to look for hits in the public databases that could result in a first, second or third cousin, ideally, of the suspect. Then the genealogist would use their skills to essentially build a family tree to lead to clues about the relatives of the person detectives want to identify.

Generally, from the leads generated by the genealogist, investigators would then make contact with one or more family members and work with those people — if they are willing — to identify the person being sought. Before any final identification of either a living suspect or an unidentified body could be confirmed, there needs to be an actual match-up with DNA, such as a potential close relative of the “Lady of the Dunes” having matching DNA profiles with the body itself.

“We are recommending requiring the confirmatory samples as well, and not relying on just the relational information that you get out of a database,” Totten said.

Wide interest in new technique

In addition to detectives and district attorneys, coroners and medical examiners also have a keen interest in the new technique.

“Certainly solving crimes is important but it's also equally important for our decedents to get a name, and we don't forget them,” said Supervising Deputy Coroner Kelly Keyes of the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner’s office in Orange County, California, where there are close to 100 unidentified bodies dating back to 1953. “We are constantly thinking about them and working these cases. That's part of our responsibility both to our decedents and to the community.”

In November, a murdered and unidentified woman whose body had been found in 1987 in Anaheim was identified as Tracey Coreen Hobson in a joint effort with the coroner and homicide teams, in which a cold case detective used knowledge gained from being on the DeAngelo case task force, Keyes said.

While the case wasn’t the oldest decedent in the county, it appeared to be a good candidate for the new methods, including having the support and interest of the homicide team, who bore the estimated $2,500 cost to pay a specialized DNA lab and the specialized genealogists, Keyes said. DNA evidence that was already available was submitted in July to the specialized lab to create a new DNA profile in the form of the SNPs report, and that SNPs report was then given to the specialized genealogists who were able to identify a close cousin who was able to identify who he thought the woman was, Keyes said.

“He said, ‘I think that's my cousin,’ ” Keyes said. “And we were able to get a hold of her family, her closest relative, and we were able to get DNA samples from them, and then confirm the next of kin through traditional DNA samples.”

So, too, with an unidentified woman found murdered in 1981 in Miami County, Ohio. She was identified last April — 38 years later — as Marcia Lenore Sossoman King in another joint effort with the sheriff and coroner's offices. Unlike in Orange County, the young woman was the Ohio county’s only unidentified body but one that caught people’s attention, said Miami County Coroner William Ginn.

“Out of the clear blue sky people would call me and say 'I think I've solved the Buckskin Girl case,' ” Ginn said, referring to a nickname given to the unidentified woman because of the tan leather poncho with fringe that she’d been wearing when she was found. “I got a call from the Royal Canadian Police one time.”

The woman died April 4, 1981, of strangulation, with contributing factors of head trauma and a lacerated liver, according to the autopsy report provided to the Times by Ginn.

The idea of providing the SNPs profile of DNA evidence to the specialized genealogists to try to identify the Buckskin Girl came about from a lecture at a local university about forensics and genealogy and the use of an old vial of unrefrigerated blood from the body — which was initially thought to be too degenerated — to create the profile, Ginn said. The genealogists identified the woman’s cousin, and that cousin then pointed law enforcement officers to the woman’s mother, who lived in Little Rock, Arkansas.

“She had never been reported missing,” Ginn said. “No one ever had any contact about it. So the question was, ‘Why haven't you reported her missing?’ And the mother's answer was, ‘We thought she was coming back.’ They had never moved. They had never changed their phone number. They literally thought she was going to reappear at the door.”

Ginn said DNA samples obtained from the mother confirmed Sossoman King’s identity. She had been buried in Ohio when she was found with a headstone engraved “Jane Doe April 22 1981” but last summer, a new headstone was placed on the grave with 11 family members present, Ginn said. She was 21 at the time of her death, according to the inscription on the headstone.

For DNA experts, the evolution of the SNPs profile to be used in ancestry research is major.

The SNPs profiles have been used in biomedical applications for well over a decade, said Claire Glynn, assistant professor of forensic science at the University of New Haven.

“I was just enthralled and excited by the news reports,” Glynn said of the DeAngelo case in California.“I remember thinking this is going to be a big shift. This is the new DNA.”

But, while dozens of criminal cases now have been solved, she believes that the people who are uploading their SNPs profiles to public databases are not fully aware of what they are doing, Glynn said.

“They’re literally handing over their DNA,” she said.

For professional genealogists, too, the DNA analysis has opened up a whole new way to connect families, Fulton said. The New England organization's genealogists are “definitely” interested in helping police departments identify deceased individuals, often called Jane Does and John Does, that are victims of crimes, she said.

“We put some feelers out there to see if we could help anyone,” Fulton said.

Among the handful of specialized genealogists in the U.S., called genetic genealogists, who have risen to prominence working with law enforcement and coroners, are Colleen Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press, two women who in 2017 founded the DNA Doe Project. They also have expressed interest in working on the “Lady of the Dunes” case through emails to a Provincetown police detective.

Fitzpatrick and Press completed the genealogy work on the Anaheim, California, case and the “Buckskin Girl” case in Ohio, according to Keyes and Ginn. In December, the DNA Doe Project identified a dead man found in Maine in 2014, according to Lindsey Chasteen, who directs data and case management at Maine's Office of Chief Medical Examiner.

“For the cost per case and the dedicated hours of research, you won't find a better deal,” Chasteen wrote in an email to the Times.

So far, the nonprofit DNA Doe Project has been able to announce 10 identifications, Press wrote in an April 8 email. Roughly half the cases involved extraction or re-extraction from bone or teeth after DNA Doe Project took the cases, Press said.

The GEDmatch database continues to grow, as does the availability of labs and bioinformatics to handle degraded biological material, Press said.

The challenges to solving cases are primarily if the unidentified person was a recent immigrant, or from a population that is under-represented in the database, she said.

“We don’t actually consider any cases as ‘failed,’ only delayed pending further lab work,” Press wrote. “As long as there are bones and we have not consumed all the DNA obtainable, we never give up on a case.”