Cece Moore

Aha. Now we're getting close. When I first identified him, I couldn't believe it was him. I said, it can't be him. It can't be this guy.

I'll have to check with my supervisor.

I know your father's very excited to meet you.

This was a different way of applying the science. It's not taught in schools. There's no degree you can get in genetic genealogy. There's no certification. You had to think outside the box, and perhaps you needed some creativity, and I came from a creative background.

There were some bioethicists and legal experts that I expected to be against this. And I was very surprised after the Golden State Killer arrest that they were completely supportive.

They ruled out 60 men using DNA.

I feel a real affinity to her. And so I'm thinking about her a lot and really keeping her right where I can see her. So I'm always inspired to work hard on these, but I think it'll make me work even harder if that's possible.

We just need a second cousin, third cousin, or closer to do so.

I built back to great-grandparents for each of those second cousins, and then I started building forward. I flipped that tree upside down, do what I call reverse genealogy. I'm building forward in time, trying to find the right person in the right place with the right ancestral mix to be the subject.

Those top few matches I was working with led to a specific family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. So I knew that the suspect was closely related to that family, but I didn't know how. I had to find the right person in that family.

We've seen a lot of people that shared DNA with this suspect that had poor Puerto Rican grandparents or eight Puerto Rican great-grandparents. I started digging into newspaper archives and I came across an engagement announcement for the son of that target family that listed his father who had a Latin American name. And I thought, aha, now we're getting close.

There was an online magazine that had an interview with him, and it talked about how he loved to cook Puerto Rican food because he was half Puerto Rican. And then I knew this was the guy. And when I first identified him, I couldn't believe it was him. I was saying, it can't be him. It can't be this guy. I went back and rechecked my work over and over again.

I think it took a couple of days.

Genetic genealogy is incredibly powerful, and I've known that for a long time.

I was shocked because he seemed like such a normal person, a successful, talented family man.

It's just really interesting to see how close Parabon gets. I mean, this is a younger picture, which is closer to the age he was at the time of the murder. I mean, look at the shaped face. I think that's right on.

My greatest hope is that we'll start to work as a deterrent. If you're going to commit a violent crime like a rape or murder, you're going to leave DNA behind. And if you leave DNA behind, we can find you.

I recognize you.

Hi, good.

You look exactly like your picture.

Good.

Let me say, the investigators on this case were incredible. I was so impressed with them. They jumped through hoops. They care so much about this case, about you, your father, your sister, Christy.

I felt really drawn to Christy's case. She seemed like somebody that I would have liked.

not get very much sleep because it's hard to put aside these cases. I have dozens of cases waiting for me and it's hard to do anything else.

Right, so GEDmatch was started by two friends of mine, Curtis Rogers and John Olson back in 2010, 11. And of course, when it started, there was no one in there. So we had to convince people to download their raw data from one of the other sites which at the time was just 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA, and upload to GEDmatch.

And so it was just a small site, kind of a playground for more advanced genetic genealogists. It was where we could try out new tools. We could do cross-company comparisons. So if you tested at 23andMe and I tested at FamilyTreeDNA or later Ancestry, we could both upload there for free and then compare our data looking for those long identical shared segments.

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