List of convicted perpetrators of crimes identified with GEDmatch
In December 2018, police forces in the United States said that, with the help of DNA testing, GEDmatch and genetic genealogy, they had been able to identify suspects in a total of 28 cold murder and rape cases in the year 2018.[1] Also in December 2018, Family Tree DNA allowed the law enforcement agencies including the FBI to upload DNA profiles from crime scenes to help solve cold cases. So from then onwards GEDmatch was not the only site that could be used by law enforcement officials to solve crimes using genetic genealogy.[2] As of April 2019, GEDmatch had been used in at least 59 cold case arrests, most of which were the work of Parabon NanoLabs and their chief genetic genealogist CeCe Moore, as well as 11 Jane and John Doe identifications across the United States, most of which were run and funded by the DNA Doe Project.[3] In May 2019 GEDmatch tightened its rules on privacy which were forecast to make it much more difficult for law enforcement agencies to find suspects using GEDmatch.[4]
California law enforcement investigating the Golden State Killer case uploaded the DNA profile of the suspected serial rapist/killer from an intact rape kit in Ventura County[8][9] to GEDmatch.[10] It identified 10 to 20 distant relatives of the Golden State Killer, and a team of five investigators working with Barbara Rae-Venter[11] used this to construct a large family tree, which led them to identify former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo as a suspect.[12] Investigators acquired samples of his DNA from items he discarded outside his home, one of which definitively matched that of the killer.[13][14] The process took about four months, from when the first matches appeared on GEDmatch, to when DeAngelo was arrested in April 2018.[9] DeAngelo pleaded guilty in June 2020 and was sentenced to life imprisonment that August.[15]
In September 2018, Roy Charles Waller was arrested as a suspect in a series of more than ten rapes between 1991–2006 in Northern California (the "NorCal Rapist") after DNA evidence from crime scenes were matched on GEDmatch to a relative.[16] Police then constructed a family tree and using the known characteristics of the rapist narrowed the suspects down to Waller. It took little more than a week to identify and arrest the suspect.[17] He was charged with a total of 40 counts of rape which took place in different counties — Sonoma, Solano, Contra Costa, Yolo and Butte.[18] Waller was convicted of 46 counts in November 2020 and sentenced to 897 years in prison the following month.[19][20]
In March 2019, Paul Jean Chartrand was identified by the FBI's Investigative Genealogy Team as the murderer of Barbara Becker on March 21, 1979 in San Diego. She had been repeatedly stabbed in the neck and back. Investigators found blood in several rooms of the La Jolla home. Police at the time said Becker, 37, had tried to escape and fought against her attacker, and that some of the blood was his.[21][22] However, Chartrand had already died in 1995 of undisclosed causes.[23][24]
In May 2019, a grand jury in Orange County, North Carolina indicted John Russell Whitt on first-degree murder charges related to the death of his son, Robert "Bobby" Adam Whitt.[25] Bobby Whitt's skeleton was discovered under a billboard on Interstate 85-40 in September 1998; an autopsy showed that he had died by strangulation.[26] Although the case remained open, and hundreds of investigators worked on it over the years—including forensic artist Frank Bender—the remains were unidentified until Barbara Rae-Venter analyzed a DNA sample that suggested the boy had one white parent and one Asian parent. Using online genealogical services, she located a cousin in Hawai'i, who was able to provide the boy's name. The family had not reported him missing because they believed his mother, Myoung Hwa Cho, had taken him back to South Korea, where she was from.[26] Further investigation revealed that Cho's body had been located in Spartanburg County, South Carolina on May 13, 1998. She had been suffocated, and had ligature marks around her wrists.[26] John Whitt has confessed to both murders; at the time of his arrest for the murders he was serving a federal prison sentence at the Ashland FCI[27] for armed robbery and was not eligible for release on that charge until 2037.[26] On January 15, 2020 Whitt pled guilty to two counts each of second-degree murder and concealing a death and was sentenced to 26 to 32 years for each murder, to be served consecutively after he completes his sentence in federal prison for robbery in 2037.[28]