They could have done this the old-fashioned way: contact the genealogy company and ask for their cooperation, or get subpoenas if that doesn’t work.
Although I find the more subtle approach you describe to be kind of interesting.
All of the companies who do this kind of work said that they didn’t cooperate with this investigation and that their policy is to fight such requests.
Double posting to correct myself. It looks like a site called GEDmatch that police used its database for the case. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/26/us/golden-state-killer.html
I’m not a professional criminologist or anything but it seems that a lot of serial murderers and/or rapists have a lot of unresolved anger. The kinds of crimes that serial offenders perpetrate are of a deeply personal nature, involving stalking, overpowering, controlling, and in some cases, completely destroying the victim (as in murdering them). I don’t pretend to know everything about criminal psychology, but just analyzing the situation, it seems like serial rapists/murderers have some sort of unresolved desire to inflict pain upon entire classes of people – women in these cases. But it’s not just females that get targeted; they bind and tie up their boyfriends or their family members. It’s as though they want them to endure anguish as well in some cases. In short, sociopaths.
Some offenders take it even further, taunting the police and the public. They exhibit narcissistic tendencies, taking extraordinary risks of being exposed by writing news outlets to drop hints about their possible identity, but all the while firmly convinced that they’re too smart for anyone to figure them out. It just seems like a pathological hatred of people. And yet what’s most frightening is how, just like the GS killer and other murderers, they can fall into line and function somewhat normally. They can hold jobs. They can even run their own businesses, as in the case of a real estate agent who was recently arrested for multiple killings. They can be living in the apartment next to you. They can work beside you. They can hear you take showers. They can stand behind you and watch you work at your desk. We’d never know.
You aren’t exactly correcting yourself because GEDmatch isn’t really a “company that does this kind of work”, it’s a volunteer run and I think non-profit. From their “about” section:
As a hobbyist genealogist (and ex-LE), GEDMatch would have been my guess, too (and I’ve used them myself…my DNA is up there somewhere).
I just saw an aerial picture of the guy’s neighborhood. This guy’s poor neighbors. There are vehicles all along the street, his neighbors on one side have half of their lawn roped off, and there is a cop car sitting in the driveway of the neighbors on the other side.
I’ve read quotes from his neighbors that he poured his own backyard concrete slabs, which I’m sure are of interest to the forensic crew right now.
I wonder if he’ll end up talking. It would be so interesting to understand why he stopped. I also wonder if they could use similar methods to look for the Zodiac Killer.
They did some echo location sounding yesterday and reported they didn’t find anything.
My guess is that he will be like Kaczynski and never say a damn thing. Frustratingly.
Some more info I find interesting:
- Paul Holes, featured in the McNamara book, on his last day as a detective was outside JJD’s house considering going up to the door and asking for his DNA. This was about 3 weeks before the arrest.
So JJD was on Holes’ short list of suspects at the very least. The “not even on our radar” until 6 days before comment by the arresting people seems odd.
- They did get a tad carried away with DNA. A match on a rare marker lead them to having an Oregon officer getting a DNA sample from an old dude there without family knowledge or anything. Not the guy. The daughter, once she found out, was kind enough to help with filling in the family tree and that ruled out all in her family.
So not helping with fears about DNA online DBs being abused.
My worst fear: A defense attorney gets the online match tossed due to the cops violating some aspect of the website terms and the whole thing goes south. But what I can see the website didn’t ban such searches and actually warned people that others might be doing non-genealogy searches.
Violating the terms and conditions of a third-party website is not a violation of the 4th, 5th, or 14th amendment rights of a criminal defendant. It’s merely a contractual violation.
The way I look it, DNA is just another form of data. Like any data, it can reveal a lot about who you are. Publicly-available data is publicly-available data - anyone can access it. Privately-held data, whether it’s DNA or your phone’s geolocation, is privately-held data and essentially the private property of whoever captures and manages that data. But law enforcement can access that information with court orders and so forth.
I’m not a lawyer but I don’t necessarily see how using a genealogy organization’s DNA database necessarily violates the civil liberties. If it’s a public database, then anyone can already use it. If it’s a privately-owned commercial database, then law enforcement will need a court order to obtain what is essentially the property of the organization holding the data (i.e. the DNA). Companies are pretty protective of their property, so they may not always just hand it over in response to a call or email, but a lawful request backed up by a court is a lawful request, and they have to comply - it’s no different than the data from your internet provider.
In any case, I’ve got absolutely no problem with how the case was cracked. They used DNA to eliminate someone who was wrongly suspected, and it seems as though they have finally found the right person. I do acknowledge the dangers of abuse, but the best way to prevent abuse isn’t to discourage use of genealogy databases as a resource. We need to make sure we put the right people in positions of power and influence, and to support strong public institutions with active oversight.
Before he became a police officer, this guy served in Vietnam. You know darned well that he was killing and raping people there too.
Uh, a “damage controlman on the cruiser USS Canberra” is not going to have a lot of opportunities for raping and killing people in Vietnam. Some people go way too dramatic with the “crazy Vietnam Veteran” stereotype, the majority of them are either not emotionally damaged in any way, or if they are, they don’t deal with it by hurting people.
Several days ago the “Bonnie” mystery was figured out. JJD yelled out some stuff about “Bonnie” during one rape. Turns out he had been engaged to a woman named “Bonnie” and she broke it off before the attacks began.
Okay … but …
Some “news” sites are posting the current name, pictures, job info, etc. of this Bonnie. That’s not good.
This would fit the pattern of at least some of the better known serial killers and rapists. IIRC, the BTK killer, for instance, killed one or two women reportedly because they rejected his advances and he became infuriated with them. Some killers take vengeance against their subjects more directly; others take out their frustrations on random victims.
But going back to something that was discussed earlier, I wonder if his Vietnam experience flipped some sort of switch within him which made his more sinister thoughts and emotions harder to control. There’s the obvious psychological trauma of being in combat, but he also could have sustained head trauma as the result of shock waves from ordnance.
I believe that he was navy.
Was the guy actually in Vietnam? He was an enlisted man on a ship. I guess it’s conceivable that his head was fucked up from loud blasts of cannons or maybe his ship was even hit with enemy fire, but lots of guys were on ships in the Navy during the Vietnam War and never had any traumatic experiences other than perhaps a case of the crabs.