Familial DNA searches: Cutting-edge tool for heating up cold cases

Head Strong: Familial DNA searches: Cutting-edge tool for heating up cold cases
7.18.10
By Michael Smerconish - Inquirer
Inquirer Currents Columnist

Who would have thought that California Attorney General Jerry Brown would be a trailblazer for area state Attorneys General Beau Biden, Tom Corbett, and Paula Dow?

After all, it was Brown who during his first stint as the Golden State's chief executive (he's running again now) was derided as "Governor Moonbeam" for his eccentric personality and politics - especially a proposal to develop a state-owned emergency communications satellite. The latter was dismissed as the stuff of science fiction at the time. Eventually, it became commonplace.
Now Brown is on the cutting edge again - this time with a controversial law enforcement tactic that has the potential to heat up cold cases and open dead-end leads. Hopefully, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware will follow California's lead.

Brown approved so-called familial DNA searches in 2008. Colorado is the only other state in which they are permitted. The tactic involves comparing the DNA of a suspect in an open case to a database of convicted offenders' DNA - not for exact matches, but for potential relatives.

Rockne Harmon is a retired California prosecutor and the man the Los Angeles Times called the "driving force" behind the familial-search approval. Here's how he described the process to me:
"Because your DNA is inherited from your mom and your dad, you're going to inherit half of your DNA from dad and half from mom. So will your brother. It won't be identical. Brothers are much more likely to resemble each other genetically than random unrelated people, and that's the simple concept that this is based on."

"We know there's not a perfect match," Harmon said. "So we're saying, 'How close are the closest matches and let's rank them in order of likelihood that they're related.' At this point, it's a little like gambling, but it's based on genetics and science and statistics."

From there, Harmon told me, investigators and scientists painstakingly dissect the DNA in a way that allows them to determine the familial relationship between two sets found to be a partial match.

Less than two years after it was approved, the method allowed officers to make an arrest in the infamous "Grim Sleeper" case, which had Los Angeles law enforcement flummoxed for decades.
Investigators knew there was a common suspect in a string of murders that lasted from 1985 to 1988 and picked up again between 2002 and 2007. (The hiatus earned the killer the "Grim Sleeper" moniker.) Authorities found no exact match for the Sleeper's DNA in California's criminal DNA database. The killer remained on the loose and the case stayed unsolved.

In 2008, investigators were granted authority to conduct a familial search, which came up empty. A subsequent search this year, however, identified one particularly strong partial match. Christopher Franklin, convicted on a felony weapons charge after that initial 2008 effort, was soon believed to be the Grim Sleeper's son.

From there, authorities located and tracked Christopher Franklin's father. An undercover team began tailing him. From a discarded pizza slice, they obtained his DNA and matched it with the DNA recovered from Grim Sleeper crime scenes. This month, Lonnie David Franklin Jr. was charged with 10 counts of murder.

His arrest should be a tipping point for familial DNA searches.
Critics cite privacy concerns about the program - the belief that partial DNA matches could lead investigators to hassle innocent citizens who happen to be relatives of criminals. There's also a racial component. Because a higher proportion of felony convicts are minorities, some say familial searches could devolve into a form of racial profiling.

The reward, however, would seem to outweigh those risks.
The Grim Sleeper case proves the tactic's potential to solve the coldest of cases. Here in Philadelphia, it's been more than seven years since the Fairmount Park rapist first struck. He sexually assaulted three women, killing one, between April and October of 2003. He resurfaced in September of 2007 and raped a woman walking through Pennypack Park. Investigators have matched DNA recovered at the crime scenes to each other, but they have yet to find a match among state or FBI databases.

There's no guarantee that implementing a familial DNA program would result in an arrest in that or any other case. But logic would hold that expanding the search to include exact and partial DNA matches would increase the odds of investigators' finding a fruitful lead. One study estimated that familial searches produced 40 percent more leads than simply searching for exact DNA matches.
Furthermore, the increased chance of catching dormant serial criminals such as the Fairmount Park rapist makes familial searches a form of preemptive law enforcement as well.

Identifying a relative could mean catching the bad guy before he kills or rapes again.

My contact with three attorneys general in the area - Beau Biden of Delaware, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, and Paula Dow of New Jersey - failed to elicit any who is prepared to come out in favor of familial searches.

Yo, Biden, Corbett, and Dow - getting out in front on familial searches could mean putting law enforcement one step ahead of the next serial rapist or murderer. Time to step up to the plate.

Michael Smerconish's column appears Thursdays in the Philadelphia Daily News and Sundays in Currents. He can be heard from 5 to 9 a.m. weekdays on "The Big Talker," WPHT-AM (1210), and reached via www.smerconish.com.