Newsroom
The old man died as he lived — obscure and alone. On July 24, 2002, the 76-year-old snapped the locks on all the windows and doors in his apartment in a Cleveland suburb. He marked the date on his calendar and shut off the air conditioning.
CLEVELAND: Authorities said Thursday they have solved one of the most bizarre cold cases in Northeast Ohio: the identity of a war hero who spent the last 24 years of his life hiding as someone else. U.S. Marshal Peter Elliott, his office and a team of researchers spent years investigating why the man stole a child’s personal information and lived under an assumed name until his death in 2002.
Millions of Americans are doing it – packing up samples of their saliva and mailing it off to an online genealogy company to analyze their DNA and help trace their family tree. Without knowing it, they may be helping law enforcement crack difficult cases.
On August 9, 1977, David Roth drove his mother’s car to Silver Lake. It was a hot day for Washington, the temperature slinking toward the high 80s, so he’d decided to go for a swim.
The man accused in Phoenix’s “Canal Killer” case may have his ancestors to blame for his 2015 arrest. Records show forensic genealogy was key in leading police to Bryan Patrick Miller, a man now facing a death-penalty trial in the early 1990s slayings of Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas.
In opposite corners of the country, two families were on flip sides of the same tragic mystery. One, in the Philadelphia suburbs, had lost a family member, back in 1986. The young woman had fled abruptly, leaving no clue.
Huntington Beach-based Colleen Fitzpatrick is a noted forensic genealogist: That means she uses DNA analysis combined with sources such as family records and photographs to help identify unknown people. She’s worked on such high-profile cases as the “Unknown Child of the Titanic,” Amelia Earhart, and the “Arm in the Snow” case, which involved identifying remains from a 1948 plane crash in Alaska. Fitzpatrick tells us about the field and where it’s heading.
Maurice Conway does not recall being particularly polite when the phone rang that first evening, and he had every right not to be. He was fifty-seven years old and retired because of a bad heart that had required doctors to splice veins around the clogged spots in his arteries, and he’d given up cigarette only five months earlier, which will make any man irritable.
‘Tis the Season for giving and receiving, and Record Click readers are about to receive a special gift – an interview with Colleen Fitzpatrick, an internationally acclaimed forensic genealogist. Ms. Fitzpatrick, a Ph.D. and former nuclear physicist, now focuses her genealogical researcher skills on forensic genealogy.
It’s a Holocaust survival story described by the BBC as “one of the most remarkable stories to emerge from World War II.” A documentary on the subject won a slew of awards after it was released in Australia in 2003.