The Calgary Murders Part 2 of 2

DNA: ID

AbJack Entertainment

Society & Culture, True Crime

4.8 • 871 Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2024

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Episode 126 The Calgary Murders Part 2 of 2

This is part 2 of The Calgary Murders, if you have not listened to part 1 yet, please stop and go back and listen to that part first.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	In 2021, the Calgary Police Service Homicide Cold Case Unit approached the Alberta RCMP Historical Homicide Unit and proposed a partnership to conduct forensic genealogy on Melissa's and Barbara's cases.
0:14.1	The CPS had solved some other cases recently using forensic genealogy, and they were eager to employ the technique to try to find out once
0:21.4	and for all who this man was, who asphyxiated two young women in the 1970s and had left his semen
0:27.3	at both scenes. The RCMP was all in, and so they re-examined the items of physical evidence
0:33.7	that they had collected in Melissa's and Barbara's cases 45 years ago.
0:42.8	A new semen sample was able to be obtained from Melissa's clothing and was provided to Parabon Nanolabs to try to develop a SNIP profile from the evidence.
0:47.6	Interestingly, I was told that there is still no lab in Canada that is equipped to extract
0:52.6	SNP profiles from physical evidence.
0:55.1	So Parabon's partner lab worked to obtain a viable profile, which was incredibly challenging
0:59.8	giving the age and degradation of the sample, and the bioinformatics all took a long time.
1:05.7	Finally, Parabond uploaded the profile to Jedmatch and Framley Tree DNA and found that the highest DNA match
1:12.2	in the databases was a whopping 80 Centimorgans. The genealogists selected to work this
1:18.1	difficult case were a team of private genealogists who had successfully worked with the CPS in the
1:23.5	recent past and had formed a company called Convergence IgG. They guessed that the 80-Sent
1:29.5	Morgan match was probably a third cousin or equivalent distance relationship to the killer of Melissa
1:35.2	and Barbara. So they started building a massive family tree for the 80s Centimorgan match.
1:40.9	A third cousin would share great-great-grandparents with the suspect, so this was a large
1:45.8	multi-generational effort. Another data point they had to work with was the heritage of the
1:51.3	suspect, based on genetic markers detected by family tree DNA, that he was as much as 50%
1:57.3	Jewish. But cases with Jewish subjects can be especially challenging and convoluted because of
2:02.9	endogamy, so this actually further complicated the genealogy analysis. As the genealogists worked
2:09.7	through the tree and located living persons who fell in the tree, they provided names to detectives
	...

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