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The Science of Change: Familial Searches And Y-STR DNA

On January 1st, 2007, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detectives received another devastating call. Janecia Peters, a twenty-five-year-old mother, had been found shot to death and dumped in a trash bin.1 She was the serial killer’s tenth victim.2 Dubbed the “Grim Sleeper” for his alleged thirteen-year hiatus from killing, police knew the perpetrator murdered at least ten young women over a twenty-two year period from 1985 to 2007.3 The murderer followed a distinct modus operandi of shooting women at point-blank range in his car. Most of the bodies had been discovered in abandoned alleyways or dumpsters, and DNA swabbed off each victim’s body matched a single perpetrator.4 A 2008 profile search of this DNA evidence produced negative results.5 The killer’s DNA was not in the FBI-maintained Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), crushing hopes of an investigatory lead. Eighteen months later, police conducted another profile search, this time using a new technique called Ychromosomal short tandem repeat (Y-STR) testing. The test, which “analyzes the variation on the male (Y) chromosome in nuclear DNA,” produced a hit.6 A convicted felon shared the killer’s Y-STR profile, meaning he was a patrilineal male relative (i.e. father, son, uncle, cousin) of the Grim Sleeper.