Detective Andrew Houghton
speaker
246 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Detective Andrew Houghton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
People might think that a link like that is not as powerful as a direct DNA link to a specific person, but especially in cold cases, that is a huge lead.
So, mtDNA and genetic genealogy being used more broadly can help us provide a new lead in a case that is potentially decades old.
For Witeria, we are hoping that mtDNA can help us identify her, but we are also actively looking at genetic genealogy options and mtDNA in some of our other cold cases as well.
Our hope is that with these new technologies, we might be able to solve not just Witeria's case, but some of our other homicides as well.
Obviously, having multiple DNA standards is the best option, and we need to get at least two for this case.
Because as Chris said, we may be working with extremely degraded samples of hair or bones.
Empty DNA is crucial in a case like this.
So with that in mind, Chris and I and Beth have spent dozens and dozens of hours looking specifically for maternal relatives for Whiteria to get those samples of DNA.
To do that, we've been doing exactly what the title of this episode suggests, building a family tree.
Yeah, Chris, we've been spending a lot of time working on a very detailed family tree for Whiteria and reading a lot of old records for her family.
At this point, we have over 150 people in the family tree we've built for her, and we're still adding people.
It has really been a tedious job, but it's also been really helpful for us to track down people and records related to Whiteria, and there are a few reasons why it takes an extensive amount of time.
I know we mentioned that we used ancestry.com, but there are a number of other sites that you can use, and we can't advocate for one site over another.
That being said, some of the sites that we've been using recently on our cases are ancestry.com, newspaperarchive.com, and newspapers.com, just to name a few.
But before we get too far into the weeds, or maybe we should say roots, of this family tree project, let's lay out what would actually qualify as a maternal relative for Witeria.
Okay, so obviously Whiteyria's own children share a maternal line with her because she's their mother.
In addition to that, her maternal line extends from any of her daughters that she had onto their children.
If those grandchildren are female and have children, the line continues.
But if they're male, the line stops with them.
I know we talked about mitochondrial DNA a few minutes ago, so we could still use that last male relative, like a maternal grandson or maternal great-grandson, but any children he has would not continue the maternal line that we need because he does not pass on his mtDNA to the children.
Showing 181–200 of 246 · page 10 of 13
← Previous
Next →