Last Thursday, the Toronto police announced a decisive solution to one of Canada’s most heartbreaking cold homicide cases: the 1984 abduction, rape and murder of nine-year-old Christine Jessop. This was the crime for which the innocent Guy-Paul Morin spent nearly eight years in jail; Morin was ruled out as a suspect by DNA evidence and exonerated in 1995. But it was to be another 25 years before the development of methods of genealogical crime investigation allowed someone else, a friend of Christine’s family, to be ruled in.
With astonishing speed, police forces have learned to exploit cheap gene sequencing and open personal-genome databases to crack cold cases. The key is that some of these gene databases are uploaded by amateur enthusiasts with fairly extensive family trees attached, allowing investigators to identify ancestors, cousins and descendants of people who left DNA traces at the scene of a crime.
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