Kind: captions
Language: en
This video includes a
discussion of serious crimes
which may be disturbing for some viewers
so I wanted to let you know that upfront,
but I think it's necessary
to talk about these crimes in some detail
for reasons that will become apparent.
In the small town of Visalia,
California in the mid 1970s,
one of the state's most prolific
criminals got his start.
He repeatedly broke into
houses and stole small items
like cash, coins, and jewelry.
He was dubbed the Visalia ransacker
but soon his crimes escalated.
- Six months later in 1976,
he moves up to Sacramento and over
the course of the next three years,
he's moving all across Northern California
committing numerous sexual assaults,
over 50 sexual assaults.
- Here, he was called
the east area rapist.
- [Male Reporter] The police
are saying lock up tight.
Sacramento's infamous east area
rapist may still be in town.
- And then in 1979, he moves
down to Southern California,
starting in Santa Barbara
and starts killing.
And he was known as the
original night stalker
in Southern California.
- [Reporter] Variously known
as the east area rapist
and the original night stalker,
these were brutal
meticulously planned crimes
that spanned numerous California counties
between 1976 and 1986.
- Police believed that all of these crimes
were committed by the same person
now known as the golden state killer.
How was it known that these were committed
by the same person?
- Investigators were relying on MO.
MO, modus operandi is basically
how a criminal will commit a crime.
- He was wearing some
type of a mask or a hood.
He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt.
- The golden state killer
had a very distinctive MO
- What he would do is
he would break into a house with a gun,
a house with a man and a woman.
He would tie them up
tell the man I'm gonna
put plates on your back.
If I hear those plates move,
I'm going to kill your
wife and then kill you,
take the wife into another
room and sexually assault her.
Then he would go through the
house for however much time,
eating, stealing stuff, stealing
little things or whatever
and then he would leave.
- How was he not caught based
on fingerprint evidence?
- Well, he didn't leave his fingerprints.
He always wore a mask.
He always had gloves on.
This was an offender that did everything
to prevent himself from being caught.
- [Reporter] The golden
state killer has been linked
to at least 12 murders, 50 rapes
and a string of burglaries
throughout California.
- All right, how's it going?
- How you doing?
- Good.
- So we supply DNA sequencing solutions
to the forensic laboratories
that process crime scene DNA.
At a crime scene, there's
typically less than a nanogram
of DNA left and it's
usually degraded, right?
So it breaks down.
- Why is there so little?
at a crime scene?
A nanogram?
- Yes.
- That's insane.
- Yes.
- There's no accident
that he stops in 1986.
1986 is when the first
DNA case of a murder case
is actually solved with DNA and he's,
I think he's following that
and he's saying, you know what,
what I'm doing here, I'm leaving my DNA.
I can't do this anymore.
- [Reporter] Investigator
Paul Holes tracked
the golden state killer for decades.
- He couldn't it account
for DNA technology
and that really was his big mistake.
That was the critical mistake.
He left his DNA all over California.
And it turns out that in three of the cases,
I had three sexual assault
kits and that's where I got
the golden state killer's
DNA from Northern California.
- But having the unknown
killer's DNA wasn't enough.
They needed to match it to a known sample.
In 1990, the FBI started work
on what would become a
national genetic database.
It mainly stores DNA profiles
from convicted criminals
and persons of interest.
It's called the combined DNA index system
or CODIS for short.
In each of your cells, there
are 23 pairs of chromosomes,
one from your mom and one from your dad.
And at particular places
on some chromosomes,
there are short sections
of DNA that repeat
like A A T G, A A T G, A A T G, and so on.
These are called short
tandem repeats or STRs
and different people have
different numbers of repeats.
Forensic labs produce STR profiles
by counting up the number
of repeats at each location.
Initially, there were
only 13 places on the DNA
where STRs were counted, but in 2017
that was expanded to 20.
It feels to me like that's
not that much information.
- It isn't.
- But the chances of two people having
the exact same number of
repeats at all locations
is incredibly small.
The CODIS database now contains
over 18 million STR profiles.
- The golden state killer's
DNA profile has been up
at the national DNA database
that's run by the FBI
called CODIS since 2001
and has been searching
ever since with no hits.
We did Interpol searching,
trying to search other
country's DNA databases thinking
well, maybe he came from
a out of the country
that's why after all this time we have yet
to be able to identify him
and obviously we didn't get any hits.
- But genetic sequencing
technology was advancing rapidly.
- [Female Reporter] The
genome project was completed.
Since 1986 scientists had
been mapping and sequencing
the three billion nucleotides contained
in the human genome.
It's anticipated that
- Soon private companies
began offering genetic tests
directly to consumers and they
provide far more genetic data
than what's in the CODIS database.
I traveled to Houston, Texas
to visit Family Tree DNA headquarters.
- We'll go in the lab
and we'll start talking
about the life cycle of a sample.
There you go.
- Thank you.
These samples, what are they?
- So they're cheek cells.
They just scrape
the inside of their cheek,
they put a cap on it
and they send it back to us.
- It's like a robot ballet.
- Yes, so for DNA extraction,
we need to remove all of the
protections that are on the DNA
and just separate it by itself
so we can do testing on that.
- Instead of looking at
20 places on your DNA,
these tests examined 700 to 800,000.
- The Family Finder test is based
on what's called a micro array
and this is what a micro array looks like.
Each one of those boxes is an individual.
We can fit 24 individuals on here.
And within that box is
about 710,000 positions
of your DNA, that we're measuring,
we're getting data for.
- 710,000?
- Yes, and they're called snips.
- So hang on, that's like 710,000
individual bases, like ATGC?
- Yes.
- For each person, you can
measure 24 on that single chip?
- Correct.
- The human genome consists
of three billion bases.
All people share about
99.9% the exact same DNA,
which means on average, only
about three million basis
differ from person to person.
These individual letter changes are known
as single nucleotide
polymorphisms or SNPs.
So on there, are there a whole bunch
of like little pieces of DNA then?
- Yes, so what we have
is a short piece of DNA
that is specific to one SNP.
So it's one position in the genome
where we know there can be a difference.
- Okay.
Is there any example of a simple SNP
that confers some sort of?
- Actually blue eyes is
a single base change.
- Really?
- Yeah.
- So everyone with blue eyes
has this one letter change? - mm hmm
- You can see now it's
starting to scan the first box.
- The results of your
710,000 SNPs can tell you
about your geographic ancestry
or possible medical conditions,
but they can also quantify
how related you are to someone else.
The genetics of having a kid
are a bit like cutting two
decks of cards together.
The resulting deck will share
about half its cards with each parent
and there'll be long sequences of cards
which match identically
sequences in each parent.
Now, if this deck has a
kid, well then its offspring
will share only about
a quarter of its cards
with each grandparent and the
sections of identical cards
will be shorter, and this
is how it works with DNA.
The more closely you're
related to someone,
the more DNA you share and the longer
the blocks of identical DNA are.
But to compare the DNA of two people,
you don't need to read every letter.
The snips are sprinkled throughout the DNA
roughly every 2000 bases.
So if you find long sections
where the snips match up,
you can bet that the DNA
in between is identical too
by comparing hundreds of
thousands of snips sprinkled
throughout the DNA,
you can see where these
identical blocks start and stop
and so how much total DNA is shared.
- Everywhere that is highlighted in blue
is where I share DNA.
- With your father?
- With my father
which is exactly what you expect
because I should share
DNA with him everywhere
because he gave me 50% of my DNA.
So this is a second to third cousin.
I have no idea who this person is.
And you can see here,
we are definitely not as
closely related as me and my dad
because where the blue is,
those are the only
regions of the chromosome
where we share DNA.
- We all know that these genetic tests
can help identify our
relatives but the question is,
can you do the same thing with
law enforcement databases?
Can you identify family members
using the CODIS database?
- You can and it's only limited
to really first order and
second order relatives.
- That means if I'm looking
for the golden state killer,
I'm looking for either his
father, his brother or his son.
We did that over and
over again with no hits.
- Why is it so limited?
- Because you've only got 23 loci.
If you wanna do proper kinship analysis,
you need to have more points
assessed on that genome
to see how related you really are.
- We know the answer
is behind a locked door
and the answer is behind the locked door
of 23andMe and Ancestry.com.
We know that they have
millions of profiles.
Somebody related to him, a
second cousin I would guess,
would be in there.
- Sure.
- And that was very hard to deal with.
You know, that the answer is
there behind this locked door.
- Law enforcement is not allowed to search
the databases of 23andMe and Ancestry.com
but luckily for investigators,
there was another way.
An independent website called
GEDmatch had been set up
to allow people to connect with relatives.
You can upload the raw data
from any of the big
genetic testing companies
and search for matches.
- So when we initially
search the GEDmatch database,
our best hits come back at third cousins
which means they shared
you know, our top hit,
I think shared about 1% of the DNA.
It's very little DNA that's shared
but that's a starting data point.
And theoretically, by taking
multiple of these individuals
that share DNA and
building their family trees
using traditional genealogy
and public source documents
like census records and obituaries
and newspaper articles and findagrave.com,
you build this family tree back
until you get two of these relatives
of the golden state killer,
you get them to intersect
where now you see, oh, they've got,
they share great-great grandparents together.
Theoretically the golden
state killer is a descendant
from those same great-great grandparents.
So once I identify that common ancestor,
it's now identifying
every single descendant
from those great-great grandparents
and this becomes a huge process.
People in the 1840s would
typically have 15 kids.
You have to identify each of those kids
and then all of their children
and then all of their children.
So now we have this exponentially
growing family tree.
- How wide did that tree get?
- I think we had over 1000
individuals in that family tree
but we knew a lot about our offender.
We were confident he was
born between 1940 and 1960.
We knew he was a white male.
We knew he was 5'8" to 5'10".
You know, he's in California.
He's up in Sacramento in 1976.
He's in Southern California in the '80s
and we basically narrowed
it down to about five males
and then it's just investigations.
- With a suspect at their fingertips,
this spring, they followed him
to a Sacramento area Hobby Lobby store
and took a DNA sample
from his car door handle.
Days later, investigators
recovered another DNA sample
from one discarded tissue
which registered a match
to DNA evidence left at
one of the crime scenes.
- Investigators in California
say DNA evidence led them
to one of the country's most
notorious serial killers.
Former police officer
Joseph James DeAngelo
was arrested yesterday and he is believed
to be the so-called golden state killer.
- For 44 years, countless
investigators have worked it
and have failed to solve it.
Within four and a half months,
a team of six were able
to figure out who the
golden state killer was
and that was Joseph DeAngelo.
- After the golden state
killer was identified,
the flood gates opened and
we were seeing every week
not only single killers,
but multiple killers,
serial killers, every
week were being identified
from cases in the '70s and the '80s.
- 'Cause, there's been over 70 cases now
that they've solved this way
and they continue to solve
them at a fairly regular rate
and I think
- Presumably that rate's
just gonna increase.
- Yeah.
- And there's gonna be
more because it's working
and we are going to
help find these people.
- But the scary thing is in the US,
you have 100,000 cold
case murders with DNA.
You have more cold cases
but the ones with DNA
is estimated about 100,000
There's roughly about
650,000 sexual assaults,
cold cases with DNA.
- With DNA?
It seems like a real paradigm shift.
- It is.
Multiple law enforcement agencies has said
that this is the most
revolutionary tool they've had
since the adoption of the fingerprint.
- With traditional DNA, it
required getting a sample
from the actual individual.
It's a one-to-one type of process.
And so these offenders who let's say
they have committed crimes
and haven't been caught
and they're just living their
life and they're thinking,
well, my DNA has never been taken from me.
I may have left DNA in the case
that I committed back in 1975,
but they've never gotten
my DNA, they won't find me.
But now we don't have to rely upon that.
Somebody distantly
related to that offender
has put their DNA into a database
and they have to start getting nervous
because that's outside of their control.
They can't account for a third cousin
or what that third cousin is doing.
And so they start getting nervous.
And I've kind of wondered
how many of these individuals recognize
that law enforcement is eventually gonna
be knocking on their door as a result
of a third cousin putting
their DNA in the database?
- Each person who uploads
their information to a database
illuminates the identities
of hundreds of other people around them,
parents, siblings, aunts,
and uncles and cousins.
A study by ancestry DNA found
the average person in the UK
has 175 third cousins and
it doesn't stop there.
The DNA in one person will be shared
by hundreds of people yet to be born.
Children, grandchildren,
nieces, and nephews,
and cousins once or twice removed.
Realistically, each person
shares identifiable DNA
with nearly 1000 people past and future.
So it doesn't take many
people uploading their data
to reveal the identities of
everyone living in a country.
Back in 2018, a study found
that using an existing database
of just 1.3 million people,
they could identify 60%
of all Americans of European descent.
And they estimated with
a database containing
just 2% of the population,
you could find a third cousin
or closer match in 99% of cases.
- DNA storage is one of
the things that we have
that is really unlike anything else.
If you look inside, this is
at minus 20 degrees Celsius.
- That keeps the DNA good for a long time?
- We have DNA samples in here
that are probably about 15 years old.
- How many samples are stored in there?
- Just over 2 million.
- Wow.
- Yeah.
So the capacity is just over 2 million.
- 2 million people's DNA
stored in this one small room?
- Correct.
- Wow.
By 2021, over 30 million people worldwide
have taken a direct consumer genetic test,
the majority of which are
through Ancestry and 23andMe,
which do not currently
work with law enforcement
but Family Tree DNA does.
- If you ask Americans, should
we have a national database
where everyone's logged in it?
- As their DNA?
- Yeah by their DNA and their name,
most Americans will be
somewhat uncomfortable
or potentially very
uncomfortable with that.
But we're kind of sleepwalking
into that scenario.
- There are some people who
are concerned with privacy.
If anyone chooses or decides
that they do not want their results
to be used for law enforcement matching,
they can remove themselves from that.
- I do worry about genetic
information being used
to discriminate against someone.
- My biggest thing is health insurance.
I worry about if you have
somebody's DNA profile
and some laws enacted, it
gets in the wrong hands
and they say that this
person has a proclivity,
they're headed towards Parkinson's,
they're headed towards
this, headed towards that
and then rates skyrocket.
That's the biggest place that
I see as a privacy concern.
- Once your genetic
information is out there,
it's out there.
It's not like a credit card
where you can get a new one.
Yeah you're giving away something
that you don't know what it can do.
- Well, yeah our information isn't ours
in the first place.
- Right.
- Our information is shared.
- Yes with your relatives.
- Yes.
- And although you may be
adverse to this sort of thing,
if they've already done it, if it,
you know, in a way you're out there.
- In society today, you have
very clearly had two camps.
There are those that are very comfortable
having their genome available
to be able to be searched
for law enforcement purposes
and there are others that
are not comfortable at all
and that's okay.
- The problem is of course,
those people who don't want
theirs to be searchable
could have their DNA
uploaded inadvertently
by their relatives.
Do you know what I mean?
So like, if I don't want my DNA
to be searchable by law enforcement
but my sister uploads hers,
- Yes.
- It's almost as good
as me doing it myself.
- Right now, Family Tree DNA's policy
is we only accept samples
from law enforcement
under certain circumstances.
It has to be a sexual assault,
identification of remains,
DNA recovered from the
scene of a homicide.
And we also do child abductions.
So if there's a child that's kidnapped
and there's DNA evidence,
we will process the DNA
so that they can try to find
out who the abductor is.
Those are the only cases
that we will accept.
- Got it.
- Unfortunately now GEDmatch
has flipped off the switch
and GEDmatch has actually
said that you don't all have
to have your information
searched without opting in.
- Right.
- Was that decision by GEDmatch
a direct result of this
golden state killer case?
- No, it wasn't.
- No.
- Wanna tell the story?
- You know, it had to do with a Utah case.
- Where an elderly woman was
playing the organ in a church.
- And there was an individual who broke in
and assaulted her.
- But it wasn't a sexual assault,
but it's a serious crime.
- I think believed, tried to strangle her
and left her for dead.
I believe he thought that she
was obviously dead and left.
The police I believe approached GEDmatch
because that they were concerned
that he was going to
recommit other crimes.
- But GEDmatch's terms of service said
they would only help law enforcement
in cases of rape or homicide.
- Her problem was that she didn't die.
- 'Cause if she died then?
- If she died it would
have fit the conditions
and then they would
have uploaded the sample
because it met the terms
of service and everything.
- So what happened?
They didn't take that case?
- They did.
- They subsequently caught the individual
from that search that they
performed on GEDmatch.
- But people within the
genealogy world kinda got
their passions and flame
saying that is stepping outside
of what this tool should be used for
and they ended up putting a
lot of pressure on GEDmatch.
- They flipped the switch
because they got freaked out.
- But at the end of the day,
it was a violation of terms of service.
And I think ultimately
led to a good thing.
Everybody got zeroed out
and then everybody gets to sign back in.
- Subsequently GEDmatch
was sold to Verogen.
- I can tell you a new user today
when they sign up for
GEDmatch, about 73% of them
are signing up to allow
law enforcement to search.
We're pretty happy with that.
- Yeah I mean, that's, it's a high number.
- It's a high number.
- And it suggests that
people want that innocence.
- How many second cousins
or third cousins do you now?
You know what I mean?
You don't know that many of them.
Without even knowing it,
you're helping justice.
You're helping a victim's family
get a little bit of peace,
not closure, but a little bit of peace
and why not?
- They get an answer.
- Partly, you could make an argument
that if you wanna be an activist
helping catch criminals,
one of the best things you can do
is encourage everyone
you know to be tested
and put in the database.
- Correct and you know, there are millions
of people who have
tested at other companies
that are not working with law enforcement.
And if they want to
help, all they have to do
is download their raw data and
they can upload it for free
into our database.
- I absolutely believe in a
person's right to privacy.
But I also absolutely
believe we have a right not
to get murdered or sexually
assaulted or it will be part
having violent crimes
committed against us.
There has to be an equal balance.
- That scale of my privacy has been taken
because of a third cousin
has been identified
versus a mother who's talking
about her daughter has been murdered,
that scale is way the hell like this.
- We're at a point now where
in many ways technology
has kind of outstripped
where the laws are.
I truly believe that
ultimately this tool and the,
all the concerns with
it will probably end up
in front of the nation Supreme Court
and there will be a decision.
My bottom line message, if
you're gonna make a decision,
if there's gonna be laws
restricting law enforcement
to use it, make sure that you're
making an informed decision
and not assuming what it is based on
its DNA and genetics and law enforcement
because it really isn't
what you think it is.
- I gotta keep a couple
of million people happy
so that I have access to the
identities, kind of in a sense.
- In a sense, right?
- Of millions,
of hundreds of millions of people.
- Right.
- And that's a pretty selective sample.
These are people who are willing
to give up their information
- Give up, yes.
- To find their ancestors.
- Yeah.
- There may be many others
who are militantly private
but they don't get a say in the decision
of whether they're gonna be searchable
through that person or not.
- True, that's the choice you make.
- That's the choice you don't make.
- It's a choice you
don't make but it's also
it's the choice we have
to make as a society,
is what's that balance.
There is always gonna be winners and loses
in my mind, right?
And I don't wanna use losers
in the negative sense there
but in a decision at the end of the day,
you have to balance in my mind
the public safety with the public privacy.
- Is DuckDuckGo, is that good?
- I use it.
I'm a little paranoid.
So it's supposed to not track
you as much I guess, but yeah.
- I have been working on this
video for a couple of years
so I really wanna thank
Brilliant for sponsoring it.
I appreciate their willingness
to support me tackling
complex and important stories.
Brilliant is a website, an app
that teaches you all
kinds of stem concepts
in an interactive and in-depth way,
if you wanna learn more about DNA
or solving mysteries
with deductive reasoning,
I would recommend their courses
on computational biology and logic.
Check out this interactive logic puzzle.
You have to figure out if
the light is on or off,
knowing that some of the
characters may be lying to you.
And instead of just
telling you the solution,
Brilliant allows you to try
different configurations
and discover the answer for yourself.