They really don’t have to. My understanding is that law enforcement pays the fee and enters the DNA as their own, then looks for near matches. So they really find the suspect by near matching DNA from your brothers out of wedlock son who is looking for his dad.
Dammit @k9bfriender , you beat me with your edit!
The real criminal masterminds are the ones who never commit a crime. Like, they’ve learned how to play the game so well that they can’t be caught (unless of course they’re framed).
He’s a doctorate student whose parents live in PA. I’m not sure that would qualify as fleeing.
But they’re charging him with 4 counts of murder so it must be sufficient enough evidence for another state to hold him.
And I agree that we’re all guessing since we don’t have much to go on.
But that may be part of the thrill of it. It’s not like there isn’t a long list of people who WANT to be caught in a mass killing spree. This could just be a variation where they don’t want to be caught.
I was serious when hypothesizing about conversations. Maybe a bit of gallows humor but still… I’m sure the investigators have already interviewed the parents extensively, especially the father. Other than finding out your child has died, this has to be some of the most crushing news a parent can receive.
During my time in IT, many of our customers were state or local police agencies. So I learned a few things about an industry I never expected to.
One of which was: If you’re looking for somebody, stake out their family. A related idea not relevant to this case was: If you see a sudden localized spike in crime, check for somebody just released whose pre-incarceration address was nearby.
So while our suspect didn’t exactly flee like a smart bad guy might, he did follow in the time-honored tradition of hiding at Mom’s and hoping he wasn’t found. He may have been hiding even though his parents had no idea that’s what he was doing.
As Rocky said so often to Bullwinkle: “That trick never works!”
Ref this and @MikeF just above. What would really be soul-crushing is if the kid finally pulled off his obsessive fantasy and found out it wasn’t really the fun empowering thing he’d built up in his mind or seen on TV. So instead of launching off on his gleeful ghastly crime spree instead he staggers home disappointed to cry to his parents and await his fate.
And meanwhile 4 promising young people died to teach this kid the obvious: murder isn’t actually fun.
Poor parents.
Or, he might have just gone home to celebrate Christmas and New Years with his family after a successful and fulfilling first semester as a doctoral candidate and budding criminal mastermind. Not unlike Thanos watching the sun rise on a grateful universe.
Or, of course, he might have just gone home to spend the holidays with his family like a normal innocent college student. We don’t know for sure yet that he did it. The evidence that we have certainly makes us suspect that, but we don’t know.
Well, nobody has said anything, but it seems clear to me…
What evidence is that?
Still, no motive?
Well, the evidence that we, the general public, have is that his DNA and car were found on the scene, and that he’d previously been curious about what it feels like to commit crimes. Which is, like I said, enough for suspicion, but not definitive. The police likely have other evidence, given that they’ve arrested him specifically but not any of the other people who were present, but we don’t know what that other evidence was. Likely at least some of their evidence comes from what he’s said (or not said) to police: For instance, if he never came forward when they asked for witness testimony from everyone present, or if he explicitly told them that he wasn’t present, before he knew they had DNA evidence.
That won’t work for 23andMe though if I understand correctly. You aren’t uploading genetic data to them, you are sending in a sample of spit or a cheek swab or whatever. Something like GEDmatch, as you mentioned, does allow for dna data upload.
Responding to a few folks’ ideas without quote-bites …
Yep, this guy may well be innocent. Or he may have been the murderer going into hiding at Mom’s. Or the comfortable psychopathic student going home to a family Christmas, secure in the knowledge he’d performed the first perfect and very satisfying crime of his impending long career. Far too soon for us to say.
As to motive, I’d distinguish between the motive to murder somebody and the motive to murder those particular people.
In most killings IMO there’s a pretty clear connection between victim and perp. Maybe it’s a deep connection, like the cheating or abusive spouse or thieving business partner. Maybe it’s very shallow like a road rage or carjacking shooting or a drunken shoving match where somebody comes back later to get even.
Real psycho cases are more like car crashes or bites by vicious dogs. A pending problem looking for a time/place to occur. The perp is wandering through life looking for his (usually “his”) opportunity and one day decides this house at this address on this night is the one. For any reason or no reason at all.
Maybe, like the guy in the white hoodie seen on surveillance cameras who’s since been exonerated, the perp merely saw one of these people around campus that day or at the local bar scene that evening and chose them for reasons that are effectively random. Or maybe there’s a bit more connection. But there doesn’t need to be.
Bottom line: Looking for the reason why a real whack-job picked these particular people, or thinking that knowing that reason is essential to catching or convicting the perp is a fundamental mistake.
Our own Stranger_On_A_Train’s namesake understands that. A personal motiveless killing is much closer to a perfect crime than is a personally motivated killing.
As an aside, I would be ghoulishly delighted if 23andme or Gedmatch or someone allowed me to see how closely I was related to particular prominent criminals. Much more interesting than celebrities. Gedmatch requires you to opt in to police usage—I did, but since my father’s DNA was taken for a rather prominent murder case (not a suspect, but too close to the family to be a priori ruled out), I’m sure it was already in the system.
Fortunately, I’ve never had plans to commit any murders.
The year is yet young. Bon chance, chasseur!
FTR, I’m kidding.
Just a quick data point on the Golden State Killer case and the DNA. AIUI, they did use a DNA database to narrow down to a couple-three people still alive, then moved-in to collect direct DNA evidence, I think from the guy’s household trash; a napkin or tissue or band-aid. I guess your trash can is public once put on the street. It was that DNA that made the final connections - the stuff in the database just narrowed the search. Not sure if that made a difference, privacy-wise, in that case.
The first step in getting the DNA data is to turn your small DNA sample into a large DNA sample, using PCR. Once you’ve done that, it’d be trivial to smear some of that large DNA sample onto one of 23andMe’s test swabs, in addition to sending some to your own DNA lab.
That is enough for a “person of interest” but not a suspect, so the Police must have something else.
“No forensic method has been rigorously shown to have the capacity to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source”
It’s junk when it’s presented with an illusion of science that was never performed.
My prints, taken carefully by various parts of the government, are easy to compare between those databases. Not so much a smudged, deteriorated partial.
One study of 169 fingerprint examiners found 7.5% false negatives—in which examiners concluded that two prints from the same person came from different people—and 0.1% false positives, where two prints were incorrectly said to be from the same source. When some of the examiners were retested on some of the same prints after 7 months, they repeated only about 90% of their exclusions and 89% of their individualizations.
Testing examiner accuracy using known samples can give the judge or jury a sense of general error rates in a field, but it can’t describe the level of uncertainty around a specific piece of evidence. Right now, only DNA identification includes that measure of uncertainty.
I guess I’m not Criminology PhD material, but if I were intending to get away with a “perfect murder” I doubt it would involve slashing 4 people in a house where 6 were sleeping. Unless I wanted it to be audacious.
Just doesn’t seem like a calculated act. Instead, either passion or opportunity.