Cece Moore

Now, in that case, I didn't have inside information, but I strongly suspected they were trying investigative genetic genealogy.

But there's been other cases where they've never even released that they did use that tool.

And I've had to keep quiet and listen, watch all these people criticizing law enforcement for years.

It happened in the Chapel Hill case and Faith Hedgepest case as well.

I had to bite my tongue.

And so you just don't know what they are doing behind the scenes and what their reasoning is.

And so I really do hesitate to second guess, like I said, but I think it is the time to go ahead and do it.

They can get a whole genome sequence done on that DNA if it's viable, meaning you could not just look at the 700,000 markers that we use for genetic genealogy, but they could look at the entire genome.

and then have all of that information for the future.

And I think that's probably the best bet in this case.

There's two different ways you can do it.

One is called microarray, where you just look at those 700, 800,000 genetic markers that the direct-to-consumer DNA testing companies also use.

Or you can do this whole genome sequence where you get every bit of the genome information that is available in that sample.

You get that from touch, from touch DNA?

Yes, absolutely.

You know, about 10% of the cases that we've helped solve or been able to create profiles for have been touch DNA.

We published a paper in 2019 talking about that.

And so people in this case are saying, oh, it's so new if they use touch DNA for genetic genealogy, but it's actually not.

We've been doing it since 2018.

So it's totally doable.