Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Australian True Crime International with Michelle Laurie.
Chapter 2: What is the background of CeCe Moore and her work in genetic genealogy?
Cece Moore is one of the world's leading genetic genealogists, using DNA and family tree analysis to solve cases that once seemed impossible. She joins us to discuss her work on the infamous Yogurt Shop murders, the identification of Australia's Pooner Dam John Doe, and how advances in forensic genealogy are transforming criminal investigations all around the world. This is Australian True Crime.
We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence.
You want to be able to explain the science and the techniques to the public in a way they can understand. But if you dumb it down too much, it becomes inaccurate. So that's true any time you're talking about these types of cases. It's the science. You have to have caveats in there and... likelies and theories we believe.
But then also when I'm discussing cases, I have to always inject those caveats. I have done probably 60 interviews about the Nancy Guthrie case, and I'm often asked to speculate about what law enforcement should or shouldn't have done. And I'm not there. I'm not there on that crime scene. I'm not part of the investigation.
Chapter 3: How did CeCe Moore contribute to solving the Yogurt Shop Murders?
So you have to be so careful when when you are second guessing the people that are actually insiders in the investigation. So I never want to come across as Like I know more than they do or in criticizing what they've done. Because when I'm involved on the inside in an investigation and I see what the public is saying and what the experts are saying, it can be very frustrating.
So that's been very informative about how to present myself when I'm the one talking about a case that I don't have inside information on. I know.
We have to be so careful, don't we, not to be overly critical. Yes. and assume the worst because we have so many great examples of, oh, actually, it turns out the police were doing lots of work in between. We have a doctor here in Melbourne where I live, Dr. Dadna, and she is the DNA whisperer, the DNA specialist. And she works on Australian cases, international cases, lots of things.
But she always says to me, look, DNA is not the end of the story. When the police realize they've got DNA, people tend to think, oh, well, case closed. But we're always going to need a human being to interpret the DNA and take it to the next step, which is part of what you do, right?
Absolutely, yes. And the DNA just points them in the right direction. It doesn't close the case. And that's especially true with investigative genetic genealogy, because what we do is really just a hint, a tip, a lead generator. It's a highly scientific one, but it's the beginning of the investigation oftentimes for law enforcement instead of the end.
Nobody is arrested or charged with a crime based on genetic genealogy. We just point them in a direction that the DNA seems to be telling us to go. And then they have to do their full investigation, same as if I call the name into Crimestoppers. They have to do that deep dive, do the research. work that they would do on any other person of interest.
And then most importantly, they have to collect DNA directly from that individual and compare it against the court admissible genetic evidence, which is not the genetic genealogy. It's a very different type of DNA profile that law enforcement has used for decades. And that is what's used to charge someone, arrest someone and eventually convict someone of a crime.
And you do so much research around what you're finding on the family trees and things.
Right.
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Chapter 4: What challenges does forensic genealogy face in criminal investigations?
And then you build the trees up to the top and then you build them back down again. It's just one of my favorite things in the world. Now, I don't have the budget for that. I don't have a graphics department. So I need you to explain how you do what you do.
Well, what we're doing is reverse engineering an unknown person from their DNA. So whether that DNA is left behind at a crime scene, a violent crime, we work with homicides and rapes. Or if it's a person who dies without their identification, a Jane or John Doe or unidentified human remains is the more formal term. And so it doesn't really matter which it is because it's the exact same process.
It is taking that DNA, creating what we call the SNP profile that has hundreds of thousands of genetic markers across the genome, usually about 700,000, and then that is uploaded to to the genetic genealogy databases that we're allowed to use on these types of cases. And we get a list of people who share significant amounts of DNA with that unknown person.
Now, typically, because we're limited to the smallest databases, we are getting very distant cousins. second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth cousins and beyond. We are not very often working with close relatives. So that means that each of those individuals who shares DNA with the unknown suspect might share only 1% of their DNA.
And from 1%, we can predict they likely share great, great grandparents. So we know how far back we need to build that person's tree to find the common ancestors with the suspect. But we all have multiple great, great grandparents, right? Eight sets. So which one? Well, then we build the trees of other people who share DNA with that suspect.
And we're looking for patterns and overlaps and eventually common ancestors, right? So once we identify a common ancestor between some of the people who share DNA with our unknown person, because, of course, we know their family trees, we know their identities, we can build those trees. Then we have one piece of our unknown suspects or unknown Jane Doe's family tree.
And we know it's got to fit somewhere, but we don't know where. Then if we take another cluster of matches and identify a second set of common ancestors, now we've got two pieces of that person's family tree. And we can then start moving forward. And instead of building backward in time, we're basically flipping it upside down
doing descendancy research, or what I call reverse genealogy, because we know that individual that we're trying to identify has to be among the descendants of those individuals. So we're looking for that triangulation. Where does a descendant of couple number one and a descendant of couple number two have children?
Usually marry, hopefully marriage, because that's easiest to find in the records, but not always. And that really narrows it down for us because now we've eliminated the vast majority of the population as being that DNA contributor, right? Because they have to fit in this family tree. And we all have unique family trees except for our full siblings.
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Chapter 5: How does DNA analysis assist in identifying unknown victims?
And I know that the people here at the mortuary, at the Institute of Forensic Medicine, never give up on these remains. They keep them there with them and they never stop trying to figure out who these people are and how this happened and find a name and all of those things so that they can also be buried and things like that, you know.
It must be a very moving, I can't imagine what it is like to find, to solve those mysteries. I mean, it's cool to solve crimes, but to give someone back their name, their family and their identity is huge.
Yeah.
It's so similar to what I was doing before I worked with law enforcement, where I was helping adoptees and foundlings, people who'd been abandoned as newborns or young children, find their biological families. So it's very, very similar, except it's in death instead of life. So it's...
more sad, but we also had a lot of sad stories with adoptees finding their birth parents right after they passed away or, you know, missing that chance to get those answers. But it's the same thing about families.
Families have always been primary in my work and what I care about the most, whether that was identifying long-dead ancestors or helping people find their biological heritage or now helping to return people to their family and to give them some answers about their missing loved ones.
Your story reminds me of my story in a lot of ways in that this podcast was a passion, a hobby, but I just loved it. And it's become my life's work. It's become the most successful thing I've ever done. Oh, fantastic.
Yeah.
Similarly for you, you know, this was a hobby, right? This was a hobby, a passion.
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Chapter 6: What role does investigative genetic genealogy play in modern law enforcement?
Oh, yeah. And a lot of them had great adoption stories and great parents. It doesn't mean anything like a rejection of their adoptive family.
Or a rejection of their biological family. I think we've come to realize how many young women were coerced into giving up their babies. And so there's no bad guys in this story, you know?
This actually brings up something related to Australia. So I would love to tell you real quickly. So I actually worked on the very first case that Australia was using investigative genetic genealogy behind the scenes to try to identify a John Doe. I think it's Puna Dam John Doe or Puna Lake John Doe.
And I brought on Louise Coakley, who's an amazing Australian genetic genealogist that I had known and worked with over the years. Of course, she knows Australian records better than I do. But we were finally able to identify his biological family. We know exactly who his parents are and who his full siblings are. But guess what?
There's no known person in that family who is missing, which means his parents gave up a child for adoption, probably before they were married, but it's a full sibling to their children.
And that happened a bit as well. People find out that my parents actually did get married, but they gave me up when they were 16 or something.
Yeah, and we don't know if it was before their marriage, but we can guess that it likely was because nobody seems to know who this person is when they were born or anything. So now we have his biological identity, but we haven't actually solved the case because we don't have the identity that he lived. We don't know who his family was that is missing him.
We don't know who his loved ones were in his life. And so we've never been able to close that case and say this is solved. The family lived in New Zealand, actually, so there was a lot of conversations with New Zealand law enforcement back and forth, but just haven't been able to give him his lived identity back.
God, that's again, heartbreaking. It's so heartbreaking. There's a lot of people who criticize the idea of uploading our genetic footprint, fingerprint, whatever it's called, our code. Why is that? Because I'm one of those people, I think about it very simply and I think, well, I'm not going to murder anyone. And so I don't care if my code is uploaded. And also if someone I'm related to
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Chapter 7: How has technology advanced the field of genetic genealogy?
But for every one of those, we have exonerated billions of people. And that might sound silly, but it's actually really important because we can help cut down the number of wrongful incarcerations and we can... eliminate the vast majority of people from ever being wrongly suspected of a violent crime.
So if we had been able to use genetic genealogy back 20, 30 years ago when some of these cases were being investigated, we could have kept those wrong turns by law enforcement from ever happening. And I've been contacted by a lot of people who were just informally suspected, never charged with the crime, but they carried that burden for years or decades where their community or their family
suspected them. And so we're exonerating both formally and informally many, many people with each of these cases that we hope to find the truly responsible person. I was involved in the very first exoneration that was thanks to investigative genetic genealogy here in Idaho Falls, where Christopher Tapp had been convicted of the murder and rape of Angie Dodge, and he had spent 20 years in prison.
And I was able to help law enforcement find the real killer rapist, and it led to his formal exoneration. So that was like the best of the best, right? It's one thing to help catch these guys, get them behind bars, but it's also incredible to be able to help clear someone's name fully. And there's just nothing that can compete with that, I think.
It's definitely the highlight of my career when we're able to do that.
And what a career. What a way to make a living, to be able to do things like that. That is phenomenal. That's like, take the rest of the day off, Cece.
It's pretty wonderful to be able to do that. I couldn't have imagined. I mean, I knew the potential that we had for genetic genealogy really early, which is why I jumped in with both feet and did it for free for so many years. Dropped everything else in my life. But Still, it's impossible to imagine where we would be today.
You know, it's just, it's been an incredible ride and it's been so wonderful to be able to help so many people to get answers, whether that was about their genetic heritage, their biological family, or whether that was about helping to resolve a cold case or to bring a Jane or John Doe back to their family. Although it's, you know... Always tragic.
That's the difference between working with law enforcement versus working with an adoptee, is these are always tragic situations. I can't undo the harm that's been done. I can't bring them back to before it happened. But I do think that we are saving lives. We'll never know. because those people didn't get victimized. Like Brian Koberger is the easiest example, right?
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Chapter 8: What ethical considerations arise from using genetic genealogy in criminal cases?
whether you're working with an adoptee or working on one of these law enforcement type cases, because people are dying all the time. And if you're trying to identify a violent criminal, of course, they could hurt someone in that time it takes to identify them.
In my family, it was dementia. By the time this person popped up and said that they had been adopted, no one else in the family knew they existed. Their birth mother was terribly afflicted with dementia. So that was heartbreaking for everybody.
Yeah, I actually had that, too, with Taya Leone, who I don't know if you know. So she came to us at Finding Your Roots to help identify her mother's biological family. She'd been adopted in Texas in the 1940s, and they had hired lots of people to try to identify her biological family without success. So they turned to us, and Taya said, I'll be on the show if you can find her birth parents.
And I was able to find her birth mother still alive at 89 years old. similar situation to yours where we don't know how much she understood when they were able to meet and reunite. I think I think we believe and would like to believe that she understood that this was the child she gave away for adoption. But, you know, it was unclear.
How many people have uploaded their DNA to these sites? What are the numbers like? I feel, and I have no data to back this up, but I feel like Americans are more into it maybe than Australians.
That is true. But Australia is definitely among the top countries that are represented in these databases. So the... Of the major DNA testing companies, consumer DNA testing companies, they are all in the United States except for MyHeritage, which is in Israel. So it's mostly a U.S.-based industry. So it makes sense that we would be testing more, but also because we're a melting pot.
And that is why it also is attractive to Canadians and Australians, right? Because you are also melting pot. And so if someone has lived in, if their ancestors have lived in the same 10 mile square region for, you know, generations, they don't have as many questions. But for those of us whose ancestors... moved across the world and went to the U.S.
or went to Canada or went to Australia, we have a lot more questions about our background. So that is why we are seeing the most people from those areas testing. So there are over 54 million people who have taken direct-to-consumer DNA tests now. The biggest database is AncestryDNA and then 23andMe. And then MyHeritage is a very close third now.
23andMe had some problems and a couple million people pulled their DNA out of that database, whereas MyHeritage was kind of late in the game, didn't start their DNA testing program until a few years later, but they've really caught up quickly. So they're, I think, around 10 million now, whereas 23andMe is about 12 million now. And so those are the three biggest databases.
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