In the summer of 2018, Caitlin received a Facebook message from a local web sleuth named Leslie, who had a loose connection to Rachel.

Her cousin attended middle and high school with Rachel and his ex-girlfriend was one of Rachel's friends.

Leslie encouraged Caitlin to start looking into her mother's case.

The two of them started reviewing the case file, sharing theories,

trying to drum up leads on the internet, and even did a podcast. Although they discussed the

concept that Rachel could have been the victim of a serial killer, or that Daniel Wilson,

cleared by DNA, had worked with an accomplice. Caitlin remained convinced that her mother's killer

was someone Rachel had known.

She contacted the Akron Police Department and requested a status update on the case and

was told that they had a complete male DNA profile.

Her inquiries helped prompt a familial DNA search of CODIS using the unknown suspect's DNA. Rachel's was one of just three Ohio

cases selected by the BCI for familial DNA testing in 2018. Unfortunately, a BCI lab report in March of

2019 stated that no male relatives were located in the database. It was time for forensic genealogy. Detective Pyshylich knew that he

had ample DNA to work with, so he pushed for funding to hire Parabon Nanolabs to do the genealogy.

Once he obtained approval to spend a limited number of funds, a SNIP profile was prepared by

Ocegen using sperm fraction sample from

Rachel's vaginal swabs.

It was provided to Parabon in March of 2019, and Parabon uploaded the sample and unfortunately

found only a small number of low-level matches.

Their report to the Akron PD indicated that the case did not meet their threshold for proceeding with the genealogy analysis.

In other words, based on the matches they were seeing, it wasn't a promising case and would cost the Akron Police Department a lot for the analysis to be done without guaranteed results.

So in July of 2019, Detective Fashilich decided to go forward with advanced DNA, an Ohio-based

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