Katie Shepherd reports on another cold case that was solved when police used a commercial genealogy database to search for a match for the suspect. This case was an alleged rape in 2007 and
The case might have remained a mystery if Jared T. Vaughn had not voluntarily provided a sample of his DNA to a public genealogy database, according to police.
The use of such databases has raised a host of concerns by privacy advocates. But in the Florida case, law enforcement justifies its use when all other leads have been exhausted.
“Our success depends on information found in public genealogy databases, where participants must, and this is important, they must opt in for law enforcement matching,” Brutnell said.
Read more in the Washington Post.