In January of this year, a woman named Carla Davis saw a post on the professional networking site, called "Identify the Victim of 1978 Tennessee Murder."
Since the man's burned remains were found on a campground outside Nashville, the authorities have been trying to figure out who he was and who killed him. The local sheriff's office wanted to try a relatively new technique pioneered in the Golden State Killer case, combing through consumer genetic databases to find the man's relatives, however distant, to triangulate his identity. A genetics lab called Othram was panhandling on the internet because the local sheriff couldn't afford it.
Othram's founder and chief executive compares the forensic money request to a crowdfunded project.
The phrase has traditionally meant funding bail or legal bills for the accused, but Othram was seeking $5,000 to sequence the victim's DNA. Ms. Davis donated the rest of the money on a whim.
She didn't stop there. Over the last year, Ms. Davis has given more than $100,000 to Othram, as if it were a charity rather than a venture-backed start-up, primarily for cold cases in Mississippi, her birth state.
A friend told Ms. Davis to invest in the company. These families have been waiting for answers for a long time.
Ms. Davis is a member of a growing group of amateur DNA detectives who have an unquenchable desire for true crime content and are born of widespread consumer genetic testing. When you can help police find the second cousins of the suspected killers, why just listen to a murder show?
At least a million dollars has been given to the cause by donors around the country. Only if society is willing to accept and fund DNA dragnets will there be a world where few crimes go unsolved.
It's difficult to commit a crime without leaving some trace. The material that is relevant to an investigation, such as a bloodstain, can be a powerful clue. If investigators can match it to the right person.
The case of the Golden State Killer, who committed 13 murders and dozens of rapes in California, went unsolved for decades until the F.B.I. decided to use DNA evidence from a sexual assault to build out the culprit's likely family tree. The prosecution and identification of a former police officer proved the value of genetic genealogy.
GEDmatch, a low-cost online gathering place for people to upload their DNA test results from popular direct-to-consumer services such as Ancestry or 23andMe, made the investigation possible. The decision by the authorities to mine the genealogy enthusiasts data for leads was shocking at the time, and led the site to warn users. The practice has been used in hundreds of cases.
Many local agencies don't have the resources to participate, so philanthropists have stepped in to help. A group of well-off friends calling themselves the Vegas Justice League gave Othram $45,000, which resulted in the solving of three murder-rape cases in Las Vegas, including those of two teenage girls killed in 1979 and 1989.
The Las Vegas group was founded by an online marketer who wanted to help the police and the community.
The perpetrators were dead in Las Vegas.
Mr. Woo said he couldn't give money to prioritize the case of a loved one.
Natalie Ram, a law professor at the University of Maryland, expressed concern about the public picking and choosing between cases. The largest share of cases solved so far with the method involve white female victims, according to Ms. Ram.
The media has documented an existing bias towards white victims, which could be compounded by the demographic makeup of the genealogy databases. According to a recent law review article, their composition is skewed heavily white and compared to state collections of DNA.
Ms. Ram is concerned about the constitutional privacy issues raised by the searches, particularly for people who haven't taken a DNA test or uploaded their results to the public internet.
Even if you don't want to put your genetic information on a site accessible to law enforcement authorities, you can still share your genetic information with other people. All it takes is a sibling, aunt or distant cousin to make a different decision.
The fortunes of the services that make them possible are on the rise as donations pour in for these searches. The two main consumer databases used for law enforcement searches have both recently been acquired by larger companies.
A former F.B.I. lawyer who worked on the Golden State Killer case is getting involved. The F.B.I. helped establish three forensic genetic genealogy units across the country, but Steve Kramer left the agency in November to help found a company that wanted to automate genealogy research.
I don't consider genetic genealogy for cold cases. We solved active homicides within weeks, and we want to take the word serial out of it.
True crime, an entertainment genre that has come to dominate the podcasts charts, is fueling the philanthropy. Audiochuck, an Indiana company with a slate of popular true crime shows, has donated approximately $800,000 to organizations doing investigative genealogy research, including Othram, and an additional $700,000 to a nonprofit started by the host of the network.
"What keeps me sane is knowing we're doing something to make it better," said Ms. Flowers, whose show mostly consists of discussing murders in detail.
The nonprofit, called Season of Justice, has raised another $250,000 and made grants to 53 unsolved murders.
Steve DuBois, the nonprofit's executive director, said he was stunned when they put their button up.
The cost for the processing of DNA evidence is typically $5,000. The family tree is created by forensic genetic genealogists. The new breed of experts are often women, like Ms. Davis, who began honing their skills as amateur historians.
For most of her life, she didn't know who her father was. Her mother died in a motorcycle accident when she was 5 years old. Ms. Davis was raised by her grandmother in a small town in Mississippi that had just 2,000 people.
When cheap genetic tests became popular, that was four decades later. Ms. Davis provided lists of other customers to whom she was genetically related, after sending her saliva to 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and Ancestry, which analyzed her DNA for about $100 each.
She used census records, marriage licenses, death records, obituaries, and social media accounts to build out her family tree. Her father was a drag car racer who lived just miles from her childhood home. His brother took a DNA test to confirm the match after he died of cancer.
It felt like the weight of the world had lifted off Ms. Davis, like she had finally learned who she was.
Ms. Davis moved from Mississippi to the United Arab Emirates, where her husband's family-owned real estate company was located. Ms. Davis was working as a nutrition and lifestyle consultant. She joined a Facebook group called DNA Detectives, which helped over 200 people identify their unknown parents, after taking books and videos about genetics.
She said she was a volunteer search angel.
The Tennessee murder victim's case was funded by Ms. Davis because she believed in the power of her hobby to help solve crimes. Her daughter's friend was kidnapped and killed years ago, and she didn't know her fate for three days.
An Othram employee asked if Ms. Davis really meant to donate almost $4,000 hours after she made the contribution.
He wrote that we don't usually get contributions of that size.
Othram's C.E.O., Mr. Mittelman, said his company had received $400,000 from philanthropic donors. The start-up has raised over $30 million from institutional investors to corner the market for this new investigative technique. The company has 30 employees and will soon move to a larger building, with a lab four times the size of its current one.
Government labs lack the expensive equipment needed to process DNA evidence, which may be decades old, degraded or mixed with nonhuman materials. Private labs have to create genetic profiles that are compatible with those generated from a consumer's saliva. Third cousins and population records must be sorted through by forensic genetic genealogists. A suspected match can be confirmed with another DNA test.
Othram wants to be a one-stop shop for everything.
The company created a site called DNASolves to tell the stories of horrible crimes and tragic people like John and Jane Does. A competitor created a site called JusticeDrive, which has raised $30,000.
Othram encouraged supporters to donate their genetic material, a request that some critics called unseemly.
Some people don't want to put their genetic information in a general database, according to Mr. Mittelman, who declined to say how large his database is.
Her daughter and son-in-law have also donated their genes. Her husband said no.
Othram was reassured by Ms. Davis that her donation was intentional.
Nine years ago, the decomposing remains of a white woman of average height were found in the yard of an abandoned house. According to law enforcement officials, the deceased, who had lung cancer, had been wearing dentures with the word "Powders" written on them.
Othram came across the case while looking in the Justice Department's database of unidentified people, which contains information about when and where a body was found, its condition, and any clothing or accessories.
Othram contacted the Lincoln police captain of investigations in 2020 to see what the company could do if it could raise enough money.
The case jumped out to Ms. Davis because she had already researched families from the area.
Othram was able to process a bloodstain card from the woman's autopsy using a million-dollar machine called the NovaSeq 6000 after she donated nearly $4,000 again. Othram created a data file containing her genetic material. The woman had over 1,000 distant relatives in the database when she was uploaded to GEDmatch Pro.
Othram asked if she was interested in a civilian volunteer and she said that was very rare.
Ms. Davis works from a guest bedroom that she has converted into his-and-her office, which is decorated in the style of a high-end hotel room. She has the research abilities of a digital archaeologist, the can-do energy of a personal trainer and the fervor of a true believer.
GED match told her how many centimorgans each of the relatives shared with the victim had. Ms. Davis fed 25 of her closest relations into a software that predicted how they would relate to one another. She kept the tree private so she could see it.
Ms. Davis said that you just have to follow the story and see where it leads. It is not usually a story that is easy to understand. People on GED match usually list their email addresses. It's one thing to put your genetic information on the internet, but it's another to say it's yours.
Ms. Davis tries not to contact matches directly in forensic investigations because it could be used to tip off a suspect or cause a family to despair. To figure out who is behind an email address, she will use data broker sites that link phone numbers and email addresses to names, home addresses and housemates.
The victim and the great-great-grandparent shared the same match. Ms. Davis discovered an 1800s-era affair between an ancestor and a neighbor as she learned the family's roots.
After five months of digging, Ms. Davis found a branch with two sisters on the tree. When Ms. Davis searched for the other on Facebook, she saw a post that said "Where is Jean?"
Jean Ponders, a retired biology teacher and grandmother, was declared missing in July of last year.
Ms. Davis asked if the powders on the dentures could have been from the Ponders family. It was a match.
For a long time, Ms. Hazelwood searched for her mother's location frequently.
Ms. Ponders' body was dumped in the yard after she got to Alabama from Georgia.
It is rare for family members like Ms. Hazelwood to get closure. The databases have limited populations. Tens of millions of Americans have taken a DNA test, but only a small portion have made it available to investigators.
Gary Simpson, a 20-year-old Black man from New Orleans, whose remains were found in a Mississippi river in 1982, is one of the seven previously unknown individuals that Ms. Davis has funded.
The Tennessee murder victim has stopped. He is not known.
Heather Murphy was involved in reporting.
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