Familial DNA Testing Nabs Alleged Serial Killer

cremeglace writes "A quarter-century of conventional detective work failed to track down the killer responsible for the deaths of at least 10 young women in south Los Angeles dating back to the mid-1980s. But a discarded piece of pizza and a relatively new method of DNA testing has finally cracked the case, police announced last week. On July 7, L.A. police arrested Lonnie Franklin Jr., 57, a former garage attendant and sanitation worker they suspect is the serial killer nicknamed the 'Grim Sleeper.' The key evidence? A match between crime-scene DNA and the suspect's son, obtained by a search through the state's data bank of DNA collected from 1.3 million convicted felons."

Comments

Re:Why don't they find the serial killer gene inst

[tisepti]

Nope - cant do it.

If we start removing the genes for sociopathy we will not have anyone left to be the CEO of the fortune 500 companies.

There are starving kids in china

[coolsnowmen]

The moral of the story is: finish your damn pizza.

Data mining gone wrong.

[TheTurtlesMoves]

DNA fingerprints are not as random as many think. The markers used were not designed for a nation wide database situation. Hence collisions could be a big problem. That is two people with the same fingerprint (at least at the very small parts of DNA we look at) can in fact be very likely with a database this size.

I'm not saying he is innocent, but i don't think we should jump to the conclusion that he is guilty either.

In fact we may need to use SNPs (Single nucleotide polymorphisms) to be good enough for a database of millions (or eventually billions) to reduce collisions to acceptable levels.

Re:Familial Testing Was ONLY Part 1

[Anonymous Coward]

Moral of the story: Eat the crust.

This would be great except....

[Anonymous Coward]

Familial searches from a DNA database the size of the one in California are very, very likely to produce false positives. For example, a study of the Arizona CODIS database carried out in 2005 showed that approximately 1 in every 228 profiles in the database matched another profile in the database at nine or more loci, that approximately 1 in every 1,489 profiles matched at 10 loci, 1 in 16,374 profiles matched at 11 loci, and 1 in 32,747 matched at 12 loci. http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_10_06.html

With California currently having the third largest DNA database in the world, the odds of ANY new genetic evidence matching on a cold search is way too likely.

Re:reminds me of a csi episode

[PCM2]

the murderer must be the guy's brother

so they let him loose and track down brother after brother, sample his dna, and it turns out to be yet another brother.

Typical. Always try to pin it on a brother.