I'll Be Gone in the Dark(90)
Miller of Irish extraction. A few weeks later, they arrested Bryan Patrick Miller. That’s where I got the idea that the EAR had a German name but was from the UK. In the tests I ran for Michelle, that’s the ‘flavor’ of names I was coming up with.”
So we were looking for a guy with a German name whose family at some point lived in the UK. Of course, he could have been adopted; then all bets are off.
IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THE SIZE OF THE DATABASE YOU ARE TRYING to compare your sample to. By 2016, there were numerous companies offering to run your DNA profile and add it to a rapidly expanding data set. These companies use autosomal DNA testing. For around a hundred dollars and a little bit of your saliva, the companies deliver your DNA profile. On top of learning whether you might possibly get Alzheimer’s in the future, or the odds of your eye color, the test is used by adoptees or people who were raised by single moms. The results that come back to them can deliver previously unknown first cousins, and from there, they can find their birth fathers and other information about their own identities. If you don’t get a hit at first, there is still hope. The companies send you e-mails when new family members have uploaded their DNA. “You Have New DNA Relatives” read one Billy recently received from 23andMe, having submitted his own DNA a few years back. “51 people who share DNA with you have joined DNA Relatives over the past 90 days.” The tests do not connect just male lineage. They connect everyone.
Most important, the databases are huge—23andMe has 1.5 million profiles and Ancestry has 2.5 million.
Just think of how many murders, rapes, and other violent crimes could be solved if law enforcement could enter the DNA from crime scenes into these databases and be pointed in the right direction via a cousin of the perpetrator found in the system. Unfortunately
, neither company will work with law enforcement, citing privacy issues and their terms of service.
The idea that the answer to this mystery is probably hiding in the databases of 23andMe and Ancestry.com kept Michelle up at night.
If we could just submit the killer’s actual genetic material—as opposed to only select markers—to one of these databases, the odds are great that we would find a second or third cousin and that person would lead investigators to the killer’s identity.
So the answer may very well be sitting behind this locked door. A lock made up of privacy issues and illegal-search-and-seizure issues.
Michelle wanted to be able to enter the killer’s DNA into these rapidly expanding commercial databases. She would have eschewed their terms of service to do so. But to enter your DNA into those databases, the company sends you a tube that you spit in and send back to them. Michelle did not have the killer’s spit or even a swab. She had the profile on paper. But according to a scientist friend of Billy’s, there was a way around that. Nevertheless, when critics talk privacy, the terms of use of the businesses, and the Fourth Amendment, they evoke the classic statement by Ian Malcolm as played by Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
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WHEN MICHELLE BEGAN WORKING ON THE FEATURE FOR LOS ANGELES magazine that served as the basis for this book, official case files began trickling into her possession. She read the materials carefully and began building an index of people, places, and things named in the reports. The purpose was threefold: to promote easy
location of investigative elements within the reports, to disambiguate individuals and find those who may be of interest on the basis of later geographic movement, and to find overlapping names or possible common bonds among victims.
Michelle had cultivated relationships with investigators both active and retired that evolved into open exchanges of information. She was like an honorary investigator, and her energy and insight reinvigorated the case’s tired blood. She passed our findings, along with the Master List, to some of the active investigators.
The collection of official case materials continued to grow. The culmination was a stunning acquisition of physical case materials in January 2016, when Michelle and Paul were led to a narrow closet at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department that housed sixty-five Bankers Boxes full of EAR-ONS case files. Remarkably, they were permitted to look through them—under supervision—and borrow what they wanted.
This was the Mother Lode.
They set aside thirty-five of the boxes along with two large plastic bins to take back to L.A.
Michelle had thought ahead. Instead of sharing a day trip in one vehicle, they motorcaded into Santa Ana in dual SUVs. They stacked the Bankers Boxes onto dollies and wheeled them down to the loading dock behind OCSD headquarters, where they stuffed them into the two vehicles while the undersheriff, unaware of what they were doing, emerged from the building and luckily didn’t seem to notice what was going down. They moved as quickly as physically possible, lest people at OCSD changed their mind.
They returned to L.A., and the boxes were moved to the second floor of Michelle’s house. What had been her daughter’s playroom would now become the Box Room.
They soon began digging through the materials. All the holy grails, the holdouts Michelle had not yet seen, were there, as
were mountains of supplemental reports. Supplemental reports— compiled from the orphans and outliers, the one-offs that drifted to the back of the EAR filing cabinet in the absence of real estate in a specific case folder—were among the materials that they coveted the most. Michelle and Paul shared the belief that if the offender’s name was anywhere in these files, it was likely one of those clues in the margins: the forgotten suspect, the overlooked witness report, the out-of-place vehicle that was never followed up on, or the prowler who at the time gave what seemed like a reasonable explanation for his presence in the area.