Inside the Texas Crime Lab That’s Cracked Hundreds of Cold Cases
August 07, 2024 at 11:35PMIn this Texas Monthly story, Michael Hardy recounts the 1995 Beaumont murder of Catherine Edwards, which had been unsolved for nearly three decades until recent DNA testing and genealogical sleuthing busted it wide open. Othram, a lab specializing in forensic genetic genealogy, was instrumental in solving the case. In just a handful of years, Othram, run by David and Kristen Mittelman—two scientists who happen to be husband and wife—has assisted in thousands of investigations (while being publicly credited with helping to solve nearly 350 cases). The startup lab’s method and processes have the potential to solve many more and could bring closure to hundreds of thousands of families.
Using Ancestry.com, which bills itself as the world’s largest genealogy site, Shera and Tina built a family tree for the presumed second cousin, going back in time until they identified her eight great-grandparents. Then they started working back down, following branches of the tree in search of a descendant who lived in Beaumont when Catherine Edwards was killed. But that effort led to a dead end. Because the family was Cajun, they realized, the presumed second cousin might actually be the suspect’s third cousin. Shera and Tina were forced to go back another generation, to the woman’s great-great-grandparents. They ended up with a family tree of more than 7,400 names.
To narrow the search, they asked Aaron Lewallen and Bess to request DNA samples from living members of these families. The detectives spent days driving around Texas and Louisiana, collecting dozens of cheek swabs. “I thought it was going to be difficult to talk people out of their DNA,” Aaron recalled. “But you’d be amazed how many people are out there interested in helping out. There’s a lot of true-crime buffs.” Each swab was sent to Othram, which sequenced the DNA and uploaded it to GEDmatch. The results let Shera and Tina rule out entire family lines.
About three months into the investigation, Shera’s research led to a husband and wife who’d lived in Beaumont in the sixties. Birth records indicated that the couple had two sons who would have been about the same age as Edwards. Shera texted Tina and Aaron, who ran the names of the couple’s sons through a criminal background search. One of the brothers came up clean, but the other had a record. In 1981, Clayton Bernard Foreman had pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in Beaumont. “I was like, holy shit,” Aaron recalled. “It’s him.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/08/07/inside-the-texas-crime-lab-thats-cracked-hundreds-of-cold-cases/
via IFTTT
Watch