I know some bodies can decay to the point where you can’t get DNA, but now that anyone’s DNA can be run though a public site are unidentified dead bodies still a thing for people whose DNA can be collected? is finding an intact body and never identifying it like the Somerton man still a thing?
no matter whose body you find you should be able to find some third or fourth cousins on sites like 23andme, ancestry, etc to narrow down who it is.
I suspect that you overestimate how many people have had their DNA sequenced, as well as how far apart relatives can be reliably identified. I’m also not entirely sure that DNA info from private companies would be available to those who identify bodies.
Say you have a John Doe. You upload the DNA and get a couple of potential third cousin matches. Now you have get them to work with you on sharing their family trees back four generations, or potentially you have to do the work to create those trees because a lot of testers have incomplete trees to find a common ancestor. And then you have discovered the John Doe’s great-great grandparent, but you still don’t know who the John Doe is.
It’s a thing and there are groups working on doing it with old John Does and cold cases, but it’s a lot of work, even when you have good matches.
There is a website --The Doe Network—that has a list of hundreds of unidentified people
This.
With the exception of projects like those that research MIA soldiers, it’s too costly and time consuming to match Does.
Maybe if the evidence can lead of a missing person or close a cold case, but otherwise it’s probably not worth the cost and effort to find a match.
This article states:
“The United States government spends upward of $140 million per year to recover and identify the remains of the 81,000 unaccounted-for service members from World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War and the Persian Gulf War. Teams of military and scientific personnel from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency are sent to scour the earth in search of the missing — from the jungles in Southeast Asia to atolls in the South Pacific to forest floors in Western Europe”
I thought I read an article at one point that almost half the US population could be identified at this point by DNA submitted through 23andme type genealogy sites, is that correct?
Not sure, I did find this.
But as these registries of genetic identity grow, it’s becoming harder for individuals to retain any anonymity. Already, 60 percent of Americans of Northern European descent — the primary group using these sites — can be identified through such databases whether or not they’ve joined one themselves, according to [a study published today in the journal Science.]
Within two or three years, 90 percent of Americans of European descent will be identifiable from their DNA, researchers found. The science-fiction future, in which everyone is known whether or not they want to be, is nigh.
The big problem is that most of the Jane Does etc are homeless or drug addicts, and no one cares to spend much $$ on them.
Wired recently published a fascinating article about a hiker found dead in 2018 in his tent in Florida. It didn’t take long to work out that he was the same person who hiked part of the Appalachian Trail the previous year and who was known by the trail name “Mostly Harmless.” But his real name is still unknown. Ordinary inexpensive DNA testing didn’t immediately reveal his identity, and the police in Florida didn’t have the budget for anything more sophisticated when considering that foul play wasn’t suspected. Because of the publicity surrounding the death among the hiking community, a crowdfunding project has collected enough money for a genomics firm to do a more sophisticated test, which normally costs $5000. Results are not expected until next month at the earliest.
A lot of people can be identified by cheap DNA tests of the sort 23 and Me offer, but not all. I believe some of the Bear Brook victims in New Hampshire were identified that way. Unfortunately most police forces don’t have that kind of money in their budget to identify people who died in circumstances where foul play is not suspected (accident, exposure, or disease). And most people can’t count on crowdfunding projects raising $5000 for something better.
The unknown soldier from the Vietnam War in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington was identified about twenty years ago. It’s possible that there might not be any unknown remains of future wars.
I think DNA is probably imagined to be as reliable as fingerprinting, but I think it’s both more complicated and more simple than that for it to work that way. It probably will in the future, though, and I assume DNA sampling will become as regular as the fingerprint database eventually.
The key is how and why would a DNA database be established and kept.
Despite what some conspiracy theorists may think, not everyone is in the Federal fingerprint database:
"Introduction
Pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 534, the FBI acquires, collects, classifies, and preserves identification, criminal identification, crime, and other records and exchanges such records and information with, and for the official use of, authorized officials of the Government, including the United States Sentencing Commission, the States, cities, and penal and other institutions. Since 1924, the FBI has collected, preserved, classified, and exchanged fingerprint records in support of its identification activities and the activities of other Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. Categories of fingerprints currently maintained in the Fingerprint Identification Record System (FIRS) includes: criminal fingerprints, federal applicants and employees, United States military, aliens, and those submitted to the FBI by persons desiring to have their fingerprints placed on record for personal identification purposes. Additionally, fingerprints of military detainees and other persons of national security interest are now being collected for national security purposes."
Source: https://www.fbi.gov/services/information-management/foipa/privacy-impact-assessments/iafis
And so many of those people are not reported missing, and the reason DNA tests aren’t done randomly, in addition to the cost, is because they need to have some idea who they’re looking for.
(This is one reason for the backlog in rape test kits, if the victim has no idea who the perpetrator might have been.)
Trying to match to a relative is iffy. But trying to match to the poor stiff’s own DNA is going to be a lot more reliable. I wouldn’t be surprised if modern militaries take DNA fingerprints of all of their troops, as a matter of course: That would make identifying remains fairly easy.
All I can say is “hunh?”
The US Army does this. For the exact reason you stated, in part because they had such difficulty sorting out who was who in this incident.
Ok, let us say Jane Doe is raped. They do a rape kit, find DNA of her attacker. “OK, Jane, do you have any idea of who raped you?” (this is by no means a stupid questions, many rapes are by someone the victim knows). She doesnt. So, they run the DNA thru the criminal DNA database. No match.
Cops look for suspects, find none.
So, now, what do you do with the DNA evidence?
So if Jane has no idea to start, there is no big hurry. Still, that backlog is not a good idea, and it needs to be worked on.
Now, let us say Jane sez “Yeah, that halfback who got me drunk last nite”. Bingo, they have a suspect, they need to move NOW.
It’s not common yet but some victims- and some perpetrators- have been identified using both public and private DNA databases.
The FBI has a DNA database called the “Combined DNA Index System”, or “CODIS”, that can be used to search for all kinds of matches. I believe that anyone convicted of a felony in any state now has to contribute a DNA sample to this CODIS database. More about CODIS here: Combined DNA Index System - Wikipedia
And of course now there are public DNA databases that grew out of traditional genealogy research and are used primarily by people for the purpose of learning about their own family genealogic and genetic histories such as Ancestry dot com, 23AndMe, and others.
Adding genetic information to family genealogic histories can lead to surprises or unusual situations. Lots of folks have found out that, for example, they have a sibling who is only a half-sibling, or that their sibling is actually the child of an older sibling or cousin so-and-so, or that they were not genetically related to their parents for whatever reason, etc.
I have a coworker who recently found out that her deceased brother may have fathered a child when he was in high school through a match on her DNA kit results.
Or maybe it was that other brother… but the age difference would have been criminal…
She’s mulling the information now and hasn’t decided how to handle the situation.
Another coworker who was adopted used a DNA company kit in the hopes of identifying and finding out about her biologic family.
About 2-3 years after this coworker created her account she received an in-website contact from a man also in the same database who said there must be an error because they were closely matched. She explained that she was adopted and what she knew about the circumstances of her adoption. She never heard from the man again and did not pursue contact with him again herself either- which was the whole point of her using the DNA kit inn the first place- to find biological relatives.
When someone purchases a consumer genetics kit from one company, the purchaser can only get matches from other users of the same company. To find more matches, one could buy other kits from other companies but that can get a little expensive at $50 to $200 a kit. So now there are also websites that will allow folks to compare DNA results purchased from different consumer labs. One of these is called GEDMatch. It’s nto expensive either- something like $10 or maybe $20 a year.
Now person “A” can upload their results from the 23AndMe brand kits, and person “B” can upload their AncestryDNA brand results, and both can look for matches between those companies and more.
The “Golden State Killer” was identified when investigators got DNA matches from many different crime scenes on CODIS but couldn’t identify the man who committed the crimes in CODIS.
Some investigators opened a GEDMatch account and ran the DNA sample they had collected from a rape kit that also matched many other crimes in the CODIS database through GEDMatch. They were able to identify a distant relative (or maybe some distant relatives) of the DNA sample they had.
But like naita mentioned above, developing family trees can be difficult. There are geneologists who specialize in this and now there are forensic geneologists who specilaize in this ti identify specific individuals.
These investigators hired a forensic genealogy expert to develop the family trees of the identified distant relatives of the DNA sample to see if any of the family trees led to the criminal they were seeking.
The expert developed about 25 different family trees beginning as far back as to the great-great-great-great grandfather of the DNA sample and forward. Some of the family trees had 1,000 members in them. From there the investigators began to eliminate people who could not be the man they were looking for until they were down to two and then just one.
The investigators then collected fresh DNA from their one family tree suspect. (They collected fresh DNA from the door handle of the suspect’s car and also from a tissue collected from his trash, but in another case the confirming sample sample was collected from some fast food trash thrown out of a car window!)
What made this Golden State Killer case interesting was that the investigators used the consumer database GEDMatch to find their target, and not a law enforcement database.
This was upsetting to many users of DNA sites- not that they were opposed to finding a serial rapist/serial killer in any way. They were concerned about how their private data was being used and about the use of their private data by third parties without their knowledge or consent. (This was also an issue earlier when some women were afraid to be tested for the BRCA gene associated with breast cancer. Would insurance companies deny them care as a pre-existing condition if the company knew the women were BRCA positive?)
Now most (all?) of these consumer DNA databases require the owners of the DNA data to give permission for their DNA data to be used by law enforcement. GEDMatch requires users to “opt in” if the owner of the DNA is OK with their information being made available for law enforcement use.
(I hear the user account has a little yellow badge icon on it. I ownder if one could agree but not display the badge or vice versa.)
I presume GEDMatch does not allow third party use of it’s client’s data but I believe they sold late last year. Who knows what if anything may change.
I once offered one of these DNA kits to one of my young-adult children as a holiday or birthday present but not only did she not want the kit for herself, she also didn’t want me to use one either. Certainly my information could reflect on many of those related (or not related) to me. She also isn’t confident about how the information could be used, misused, or its privacy breached in the future.
I’d suggest militaries are always going to have losses where no remains are recovered at all. And also losses where what’s left is pretty well scattered and stirred with the other 4 troops from that blown up truck or whatever. So funerals without bodies or even bodily parts will be a feature of warfare forever.
But yeah, the largely intact but still unidentified corpse is probably a thing of the past at least for the major militaries.
A few years ago we had a thread where one of our member’s spouses found themselves in such a situation. The member started an advice/rant thread about it. I won’t link it here; that’s for that OP to do if they want. But it was very interesting how the process between the genetic testing, the real-world sleuthing, the ever changing emotions, and the personal intrigues of the willing and unwilling participants & witnesses all played out.
IMO some cans of worms are better left unopened.
The backlog of rape kits are kits that haven’t been tested. When they are, they often show matches to the criminal DNA database.
Old Rape Kits Finally Got Tested. 64 Attackers Were Convicted.