In the four years since its creation, the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center at Ramapo College has solved 43 cold cases involving violent crime and unidentified remains. Researchers rely on a combination of old-fashioned genealogy clues and DNA profiles, according to David Gurney, the center’s director and an assistant law professor.
“The first thing that we see is members of the public who have taken consumer DNA tests and happen to be related to this person that we’re trying to identify,” Gurney said. “From there, the bulk of the work involves traditional genealogical searching. So anybody who has ever built their family tree — using Census records or obituaries or gravesite records — knows what this is all about. You’re finding relatives building back in time and using those kinds of publicly available records.”
The cases become personal for Gurney and his team, who’ve been able to identify killers in homicide cases, bring them to justice and offer much-needed closure to families. The IGG Center has also helped to exonerate wrongfully convicted individuals, including one case referred from the Great North Innocence Project in Minnesota.
“They had a case of two brothers that they believed had been wrongfully convicted of a crime back in 2000,” Gurney said. “And this was for the murder of a woman in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1987. They had been in prison for 25 years.
“We identified the source of DNA from the crime scene that was extremely probative. It was blood and semen that was found on the victim that didn’t belong to the two individuals who had been convicted. And so with that identification, those two brothers, Robert and David Bintz, were exonerated and freed from prison last year.”
Students who work on cases are able to earn accreditation at Ramapo College. Anyone who would like to help the team’s work can test through Family Tree DNA, and then opt in to IGG searching.
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