Veronika Gavrilenko
A summary of the Lenta.ru report
Read more (in Russian): https://news.mail.ru/incident/42410130/?frommail=10
Mysteries of the Past
CeCe Moore, a former American model, became the country’s leading genetic genealogist and helped solve 109 brutal crimes in just a few years. She masterfully solves the secrets that many generations of people have struggled over for decades.
CeCe Moore has always been interested in her ancestry. This led to the fact that the woman abandoned the career as a model to pursue genetic genealogy.
Initially, she used DNA databases to help adopted children find their birth family.
One of her clients was an American, Paul Fronczak. In 1964, he was kidnapped as a newborn in a Chicago hospital. Two years later, Paul Fronczak was allegedly returned to his legal parents.
In 2015, Moore’s team found out that the «returned» boy was actually named Jack Rosenthal and had a missing twin named Jill. The real Paul Fronczak was found in 2019 in the US state of Michigan.
Moore was the genetic genealogy consultant for the documentary television series «Finding Your Roots». In 2015, she helped the American hip-hop artist LL Cool J find out that his mother was raised in foster care and meet his biological grandmother.
In 2018, Moore decided to go into solving complex crimes. She started working for the company Parabon NanoLabs that provides DNA phenotyping services for law enforcement organizations.
It soon turned out that almost all crimes can be solved with the help of genetic genealogy.
In 2020, Moore has already conducted 109 successful investigations.
CeCe Moore | Source: CC BY-SA 4.0
The First Case
The first cold case that Moore took on was the murder of young Canadian couple – 20-year-old Jay Roland Cook and 18-year-old Tanya Van Cuylenborg.
On 18 November 1987, the couple went on a trip to Seattle. On 24 November, Cuylenborg’s half-naked body was found in a ditch on a rural road in Washington’s Skagit County, near the town of Bellingham. She was raped, tied up with cable ties and shot. Investigators considered Cook the prime suspect. However, his family and Cuylenborg’s relatives rejected this version.
On 26 November, the body of beaten and strangled Cook was found 96 kilometers from Cuylenborg’s body.
The dead couple’s abandoned car was soon found. The police believed that the killer deliberately left rubber gloves in the car to show that there were no fingerprints at the crime scene. However, investigators still managed to get DNA evidence of the crime in the victims’ car.
For several months, the killer anonymously terrorized the victims’ families sending them greeting cards with graphic descriptions of the murders.
In 2010, detectives tracked down the author of those greeting cards – it turned out to be a 78-year-old Canadian with a mental disorder. The police established that he was not involved in the murders. In 2018, 30 years after the brutal crime, CeCe Moore and her team from Parabon NanoLabs joined the investigation of that case.
The offender was 55-year-old truck driver William Earl Talbott. In 2019, Talbott was sentenced to life in prison.
A 52-Year-old Mystery
On 10 July 1967, 20-year-old Seattle Police Department employee Susan Galvin was reported missing. Two days later, the investigation began.
On 13 July, Galvin’s body was found in the covered car park at a shopping center. She was strangled and raped. According to investigators, the perpetrator attacked her as she was walking through the car park to the bus stop.
The police collected fingerprints from the crime scene and the rapist’s DNA material from the victim’s body. The investigation lasted for decades.
In July 2018, Moore and her team conducted a genealogical analysis and, thanks to the GEDmatch database, identified the prime suspect in the Galvin case – one Frank Wypych. He was married twice and tried for theft. In April 1987, Wypych died from complications of diabetes.
Although the identity of the perpetrator was established, the motive for the crime will always remain an unsolved mystery.
The Serial Killer Case
27-year-old Brynn Rainey was last seen on 24 July 1977. She worked the night shift at a Nevada casino. A few months earlier, she had moved to South Lake Tahoe from Ohio.
The following month, Rainey’s body was found partially buried in a shallow grave at the stables. The cause of her death was not determined due to decomposition of the corpse. Most likely, she was strangled and raped.
Two years later, on 30 June 1979, 16-year-old Carol Andersen was returning home from a party near South Lake Tahoe and vanished. Her body was found a few hours later on the side of the road. Carol was tied up, strangled and raped.
For decades, detectives have not found evidence to link the two murders. Only in 2017, criminalists determined that the DNA recovered from Andersen’s body and that left behind on Rainey’s shirt were a match.
However, the alleged killer’s DNA profile did not appear in the FBI’s national database. In 2018, Moore and her colleagues joined the investigation. They did a genealogical analysis and found three deceased brothers, one of whom was realtor Joseph Holt.
The authorities believe Holt was involved in a number of other cold cases. His DNA profile was entered into the FBI’s national DNA database (CODIS).
The Realtor-Rapist
21-year-old Leslie Marie Perlov was last seen at her job on 13 February 1973.
Perlov’s body was found three days later, not far from her parked car. The girl died of strangulation.
For more than 45 years, the Perlov case was listed as unsolved. In July 2018, the authorities resumed the investigation, connecting modern technologies. Specifically, Moore’s genealogical analysis.
The genealogists of Parabon NanoLabs created a pedigree chart, explored newspaper archives, obituaries and other information about potential relatives of the criminal. It appeared to be 74-year-old John Arthur Getreu.
Another Getreu’s victim, a 62-year-old woman who appears in court documents under the pseudonym Diane Doe, arrived for the hearing on 15 July 2019. She spoke of the horrific sexual assault in 1975 and the subsequent intimidation by Getreu.
In June 1975, the accused made a deal with the investigation and pleaded guilty to rape. Then he received 6 months in prison, a fine and two years of probation.
During the investigation of the Pearl murder, it turned out that Getreu was involved in a series of other grave crimes.
Getreu is still in jail without bail. The judicial investigation is ongoing.
A Half-Century Mystery
In 1963, 20-year-old Roger Hearne Kelso (nicknamed «Oscar» when unidentified) left home and did not return. Before leaving, he warned his family that he was going to look for work. He was enthusiastic, calm and did not speak much, as his family recalls. Soon the connection with the young man was cut off forever.
For more than 20 years, detectives tried to find Kelso, and his family was at a loss as to what might have happened to him. On 23 April 1985, his remains were found in a dumpster at the construction site of a shopping center. The County police could not determine that the skeleton was Kelso’s. The autopsy only showed that the man died from a severe upper body injury.
In 2018, the Parabon Nanolabs specialists took DNA samples from the remains found at the construction site and performed DNA phenotyping – the restoration of a person’s appearance based on their genes. Moore then uploaded the DNA profile to the publicly available GEDmatch database and linked it to a million other people who had once used the website. So the experts found several of Kelso’s cousins. This made it possible to create a family tree.
Although the family of the deceased is very grateful for the found remains of the young man, the Roger Hearne Kelso case is still open. A reward of ten thousand dollars is offered for any information about Kelso.
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Moore emphasizes that in many cases families, detectives and the community have been hoping to get answers on very old unsolved crimes for years. As a rule, genetics are those with whose help detectives get these answers.
Translated by Elizaveta Ovchinnikova
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