Heather Murphy

In a remote area about three hours from the mountain’s summit, a bleached skull peeked out from beneath gray boulders.

“We were in disbelief,” said one of the hikers, Brandon Follin, 22, who was with his friend, Tyler Hofer, 33. “My first thought was maybe it was a prop or something like you see in a science class.”

As they got closer, they spotted hints of other bones amid the boulders. Clearing away the rocks revealed a skeleton, which was almost fully intact, with a pair of disintegrating leather shoes and the remnants of a belt.

Investigators at the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office are trying to identify the hiker and solve the mystery of why he or she never got beyond this spot in “the bowl,” as that stretch leading up to the top of Mount Williamson is known.

The mountain is in the Sierra Nevadas, more than a four-hour drive from Los Angeles or Las Vegas. The primary rule of getting to the top is not to drop anything while navigating the bowl, said Tinh Le Trung, who works at Elevation Sierra Adventure Essentials and did the hike two years ago.

“Imagine a bunch of sharp boulders that you have to hop between,” he said. “Lose your phone and you can’t get it back.” And if you twist your ankle on one of the unstable rocks, “you’re done,” he said.

That is particularly true if you have come up one of the more remote sides of the bowl: “No one will find you,” Trung added.

People from across the country come for the hike. For Follin and Hofer, who are both from San Diego, the attraction was “to do another fourteener,” Follin, said, using the lingo for a 14,000-foot peak.

Hofer saw the chalk-white skull first. They were about 12 miles into their hike from the spot where they camped the night before. They started crossing the bowl and took the wrong route around a lake.

“I looked down and saw something strange underneath a small boulder,” Hofer wrote in a Facebook post. “I thought it looked like a bone of some kind, and after closer inspection, it was indeed a human skull.”

The hikers were at a loss about what to do.

Follin said not touching the bones and calling authorities seemed wise, but they were far beyond cell service. They opted to document their findings, moving only the foot for a better photo of the shoe.

After they reached the summit, they called 911. On Wednesday, the remains were removed by a California Highway Patrol helicopter.

The Inyo County Sheriff’s Office said it could not yet say how long the person had been on the mountain. The sex of the person was pending a review by the county coroner’s office.

Forensic anthropologist Alison Galloway, a professor emerita of anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz, said the length of time it would take for a body to become a skeleton depends primarily on the temperature and local insect population.

In a warm area with certain types of flies, it could happen in six months. “The colder it is, the longer it will take,” she said.

Galloway had not seen the skeleton but said investigators typically hope there is still some soft tissue because then they “can get within a few months.” But with only bones, it is trickier to determine whether someone has been there for one year or 20.

In this case, the shoes and belt may offer more useful clues than the skeleton itself, she said. There are a variety of other techniques to determine timing. She pointed to carbon-14 testing, for example, which can reveal whether someone died before the 1950s.

Strangely, the use of atomic bombs in the 1950s and 1960s released enough changes in the carbon ions in the atmosphere to be reflected in the bones of people who were born after that time, she said.

Carma Roper, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office, said investigators had reviewed lists of everyone reported missing in the area in the last couple of decades. That included Lt. Matthew Kraft, a Marine from Connecticut who vanished during a ski trek through the Sierra in February, and Matthew Greene, a climber from Pennsylvania last seen in the Mammoth Lakes area in 2013.

Based on the skeleton’s location, nothing has matched up.

There is “no evidence to suggest foul play at the scene,” Roper, who declined to elaborate, said. Follin, who said he had no forensic background, was skeptical.

“The way the body was laid out, it was lounging” as if someone buried the hiker after he or she died, he said.

Follin and Hofer said they spotted a big dent in the skull, as if it were fractured. Roper said that was inaccurate.

The sheriff’s office is attempting to obtain a DNA sample from the remains. Ed Green, a professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, who is not involved in the investigation but specializes in extracting DNA from old remains, said that if no hair was available, an ear bone or tooth were generally reliable sources of DNA.

Investigators can then see if the DNA matches anyone in a missing person’s database. If not, and no promising leads emerge, Roper said the sheriff’s office planned to use forensic genealogy, a technique that relies on using cousins in genealogy databases to identify a person.

“If someone knows someone who hiked in the area and disappeared, they should contact us,” she said.

This article originally appeared in

Hikers Find Mystery Skeleton on Remote Mountain in California

Had they not gotten off track, a pair of hikers on Mount Williamson, California’s second-highest peak, would have missed it.

“She was found in 1982 in Newark,” said the class leader, who opened the session by bursting into song. That plus the little plates of cannoli positioned on each table might have led an uninformed interloper to mistake the event for the $33-a-ticket catch a killer game across town.

But though the scenario was fictional, the players involved made it anything but a game. Seated in his deceptively low-key white shorts and hiking boots was Thomas Callaghan of the FBI, who was involved in overseeing CODIS, law enforcement’s primary criminal DNA database over the past 25 years. He recently moved over to the FBI’s rapidly expanding genetic genealogy unit. A few tables back to the right, genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter, who helped crack the Golden State Killer case, chatted with a friend who was looking to invest big in this emerging industry. A few tables over still, Curtis Rogers, a co-founder of GEDmatch, the genealogy database which is fast becoming law enforcement’s new go-to tool for solving crimes, sat checking his phone.

Diahan Southard, the instructor, offered an encouraging greeting to the 115 or so people who had signed up for her genetic genealogy workshop. “I believe anyone can learn to do this,” she said. Though some were old hands in the technique, the majority of the forensic scientists, detectives, coroners and family historians were novices, eager to learn how to identify bodies and suspects by using partial matches to cousins on genealogy sites.

The workshop, held in late September, capped a week of sessions at the 30th International Symposium on Human Identification, an annual gathering for 1,000 “rock stars of DNA” as one attendee called them. It offered a revealing, yet unconventionally performative, window into forensic genealogy, at a crucial moment in its trajectory.

At the same conference, a Department of Justice representative put forth the first guidelines for the technique, which burst into the forensic mainstream a year and a half ago, offering law enforcement an enticing and contentious way of identifying violent offenders.

“It’s been an extraordinary 18 months,” Ted Hunt, senior adviser to the attorney general on forensic science at the Department of Justice, told a crowd as he introduced the guidelines, which go into effect Nov. 1. Later in the buffet lines and in the hallways of the appropriately futuristic-looking convention center, attendees discussed what it all meant for crime and privacy.

In part, the policy offers law enforcement guidelines around order of operations. For example, do not upload samples to a genealogy site unless CODIS, the FBI criminal database of nearly 14 million people convicted or charged with serious crimes, has failed you first. It also creates DNA storage guidelines, something that put Cynthia Zeller, a chemistry professor at Towson University, at ease.

In terms of violating people’s privacy, Zeller said midway through the conference, “I think it’s less of a huge deal than when I got here.”

Zeller, who formerly worked at a state police lab, had been weighing whether the new technique, which had already helped crack more than 70 cases, was as transformative to forensics as the invention of the internet or was something more analogous to a smaller, shinier iPad.

“It’s the internet,” she ultimately concluded, given that the technique ultimately makes any bit of DNA collected from any crime scene ever potentially identifiable.

But only if it does not all implode first, Southard reminded her class on the final day of the conference. “This depends on having the support of regular people,” she said. “If you can’t convince the public that it’s safe, it’s going to go away.”

Any breakdown of trust, many attendees agreed, was most likely to involve the matter of which databases and profiles law enforcement might use in their investigations.

In a quest to find relatives or ancestry information, more than 20 million people over the past decade have shared their genetic information with genealogy databases, which have differing policies for working with law enforcement. One such company, MyHeritage, explicitly prohibits law enforcement from using its site to solve crimes. And another, GEDmatch, only allows the police to use profiles of the roughly 15% of people who have explicitly opted in to help solve crimes.

But the question remains: Who is responsible for making sure that customers’ wishes are respected? Asked another way: Who is supposed to make sure that if an adoptee joins a site to find her biological mother, she does not end up contributing to the arrest of her cousin for burglary?

The new guidelines from the government does not cover those potential concerns. Asked outright what is to keep investigators from misusing the databases, Hunt said they were not the responsibility of the Department of Justice.

“Forensic genealogists have organizations and associations themselves,” he said, implying that such associations should be advising investigators working for law enforcement agencies on what is appropriate.

The eight pages of new government guidelines Hunt brought to the conference do address another tricky, but rarely publicized, aspect of how genetic genealogy has worked so far. It has sometimes involved surreptitiously collecting DNA not just from the suspect, but from his or her relatives. (That relative could have been you; no one has been required to tell you.) These investigations require finding cousins on genealogy sites and building giant family trees. Sometimes testing the DNA of one of the people in that tree — and comparing it to the killer’s DNA to see how they are related — could help genealogists find their suspect. Sometimes investigators simply ask these relatives to take a DNA test. But in other cases they will dispatch an undercover officer to collect a discarded coffee cup.

Hunt declined to say how often this has happened, but several genealogists confirmed that it has.

The new rules require authorities to get your “informed consent” to collect your DNA from, say, a discarded coffee cup, unless the request would compromise the integrity of an investigation. Frederick Bieber, a medical geneticist and a professor at Harvard University who also presented at the conference, called that caveat a “loophole” he would like to see eliminated.

Fundamentally, it all raises larger philosophical questions, according to the attendees. If your Yelp review helped a detective identify a thief, you probably would not expect to have to give permission for that review to be used in an investigation. Most agree that a genetic profile is quite different. But is it even helpful for people to know that a distant cousin, one they may have never known, might be a serial killer?

In the workshop, Southard attempted to get the room of future genetic genealogists to think through those questions. “If people believe their DNA is who they are but learn that their relative is a violent criminal, then it could affect them,” she said.

She constructed a scenario to push them to consider this further. In the process of identifying the girl from Newark, New Jersey, a cousin named Kyle popped up as a match on a genealogy site. But his profile did not have any family tree data. “How would we try to get a tree out of this person?” she asked.

Joseph Rose, with the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office in Alabama, stared skeptically at the slip of paper on which he was supposed to draft a letter. After 20 years of being in charge of crime scenes for the police in Mobile, he had recently taken on an assignment that puts him in charge of applying genetic genealogy to cold cases. “I wouldn’t write a letter,” he said. “Writing words can’t get the tone out.”

But the two women next to him — Kathryn Johnston, a longtime genealogist ready to try working with law enforcement, and Joscelyn McBain of totheletter DNA, an Australian DNA testing company — encouraged him to come up with something.

“We’re investigating a case, and we’d appreciate your assistance,” he ultimately scrawled. No one at the table seemed entirely sold on it, but they agreed it was a start.

Shaking the Family Tree to Roust Out a Suspect: New Science, and Rules

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. — On a recent afternoon, under two giant chandeliers, some of the key people responsible for the future of crime and privacy tried to solve a murder.

The notion that the same gene could be responsible for the way a person processes physical and psychological pain left many perplexed: Aren’t they totally different? Or does her story hint that sensitivity to one type of pain might be intertwined with sensitivity to another?

Childbirth, Cameron said, felt like “a tickle.” She often relies on her husband to alert her when she is bleeding, bruised or burned because nothing hurts.

When someone close to her has died, she said, she has felt sad but “I don’t go to pieces.” She cannot recall ever having been riled by anything — even a recent car crash. On an anxiety disorder questionnaire, she scored zero out of 21.

“I drive people mad by being cheerful,” she said.

Here’s a bit about what’s known:

Do those who live without pain also live without anxiety?

No. Before encountering Cameron, the scientists who studied her case worked with other patients who did not experience pain.

“Reduced anxiety has not really been noted before in the other pain insensitivity disorders we work on,” said Dr. James Cox, a senior lecturer from the Molecular Nociception Group at University College London.

He also said that given Cameron had gone more than six decades without realizing just how unusual she was, there could be others like her. A number of such individuals contacted The Times after the article was published.

“I also had the children and no pain,” wrote Juanita Hoffman, 81, of Dayton, Ohio. “I thought family and friends who complained were just drama queens.”

Asked about her mental state, she wrote: “No, I have never experienced anxiety. I have always been content and happy.”

How could a genetic mutation wipe out anxiety?

Cox said he believes that Cameron’s reduced anxiety was “related to increased signaling at CB1 receptors,” or cannabinoid receptors, which are known to help the body deal with stressful situations. (Notably, they are activated by the THC in cannabis.)

Block the cannabinoid receptors and anxiety will increase; boost the cannabinoid receptors and anxiety will fall, studies have shown. The receptors also affect how people experience physical pain.

Does that mean physical and mental pain are processed the same way?

No, it’s more complicated than that, and lots of research is still needed, said Dr. T.H. Eric Bui of the Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disorders and Complicated Grief Program at Massachusetts General Hospital. What we do know, he said, is that “brain regions that process emotional and physical pain overlap.”

In another example of how mysteriously intertwined the two types of pain can be, he noted that acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol, among other pain relievers) had been shown to decrease the emotional pain that comes with rejection.

So is rejection similar to physical pain?

Naomi Eisenberger, a professor in the University of California, Los Angeles, psychology department, believes so. Eisenberger studies the similarities in the way that the brain processes physical pain and the “social pain” that results from rejection.

She said she had repeatedly found that “people who are more sensitive to physical pain are more upset by rejection.”

Do low-anxiety people seem to feel less pain?

In general, yes, according to some pain-management experts.

Adam Woo, a consultant in pain and anesthesia at King’s College Hospital in London, has worked with thousands of patients dealing with pain. Patients with high levels of anxiety tend to be more sensitive to pain, he has found.

“If you have anxiety, it makes your perception of pain worse,” he said. And if two patients are facing the exact same kind of injury, the one with more anxiety tends to have a “higher complaint score,” he said.

Why do anxious people seem to have a lower pain threshold?

Debra Kissen, executive director of Light on Anxiety, a treatment center in Chicago, believes that some people truly are just more sensitive — as in they seem to feel more intensely. That said, she has observed the way that anxiety and physical pain can amplify each other.

Afflicted with chronic pain, a person may start to feel anxious that they have no control over their body. Then their anxiety may increase their focus on the pain, exacerbating it. Treat either one and it will sometimes help both, she said.

What she finds most intriguing about the two kinds of pain is the consistency in her patients’ answers to a choice. “I’ll ask someone, ‘You can either stub your toe and it hurts an eight, or feel emotional despair,'” she said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/health/pain-anxiety-jo-cameron.html" id="e6ec6840-b836-396a-ade1-2de8a5fdf88b">The New York Times</a>.

How Pain Tolerance and Anxiety Seem to Be Connected

An article this week about Jo Cameron, who has lived for 71 years without experiencing pain or anxiety because she has a rare genetic mutation, prompted questions from New York Times readers.

“I could feel that my body was changing, but it didn’t hurt me,” recalled the woman, Jo Cameron, who is now 71. She likened it to “a tickle.” Later, she would tell prospective mothers, “Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as people say it is.”

It was only recently — more than four decades later — that she learned her friends were not exaggerating.

Rather, there was something different about the way her body experienced pain: For the most part, it didn’t.

Scientists believe they now understand why. In a paper published Thursday in The British Journal of Anaesthesia, researchers attributed Cameron’s virtually pain-free life to a mutation in a previously unidentified gene. The hope, they say, is that the finding could eventually contribute to the development of a novel pain treatment. They believe this mutation may also be connected to why Cameron has felt little anxiety or fear throughout her life and why her body heals quickly.

“We’ve never come across a patient like this,” said John Wood, the head of the Molecular Nociception Group at University College London.

Scientists have been documenting case studies of individuals who experience little or no pain for nearly 100 years. But the genetic mutation that seems to be responsible for Cameron’s virtual painlessness had not been previously identified.

The study emerged amid major developments in the emotionally charged debate over how to responsibly treat pain. On Thursday, New York state filed one of the most sweeping legal cases yet against the Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of the opioid OxyContin.

And it was yet another reminder that we need less addictive alternatives for chronic pain, said Dr. Stephen G. Waxman, a neurologist at Yale and author of “Chasing Men on Fire: The Story of the Search for a Pain Gene.” Waxman was not involved in the recent paper but he also studies people who have rare mutations that alter their experience of pain.

“Each of these mutations teach us something, and point to a particular gene as a potential target for new and more effective pain medications,” he said.

The sequence of events that led scientists to investigate Cameron’s genes began about five years ago. She was living a happy, ordinary life on the banks of Loch Ness in Scotland with her husband, she said. After a hand operation, a doctor seemed perplexed that she was not experiencing any pain and did not want painkillers.

“I guarantee I won’t need anything,” Cameron recalled telling Devjit Srivastava, a consultant in anesthesia and pain medicine at a National Health Service hospital in northern Scotland and one of the authors of the paper.

A few follow-up questions revealed that Cameron was unusual. At 65, she had needed to have her hip replaced. Because it had not caused her pain, she had not noticed anything was amiss until it was severely degenerated. Cuts, burns, fractures — these did not hurt either. In fact, it often took the smell of burning flesh or her husband identifying blood for her to notice something wrong. She also reported that eating Scotch bonnet chili peppers left only a “pleasant glow.”

Srivastava referred her to University College London’s Molecular Nociception Group, a team focused on genetic approaches to understanding the biology of pain and touch. They had some clues for her. In recent decades, scientists have identified dozens of other people who process pain in unusual ways. But when Dr. James Cox, a senior lecturer with that group and another author of the new paper, inspected her genetic profile, it did not resemble that of others known to live without pain.

Eventually he found what he was looking for on a gene the scientists call FAAH-OUT. All of us have this gene. But in Cameron’s case, “the patient has a deletion that removes the front of the gene,” he said. Additional blood work confirmed this hypothesis, he said.

Cameron said she had been shocked by the interest in her case. Until her conversation with Srivastava, pain was not something she thought about. Perhaps it helped that even though she burned and cut herself quite often, her injuries rarely left scars — something else that scientists believe is connected to the mutation.

A number of articles have been written about parents of children with similar conditions. Many live in fear that without pain, their children won’t learn how to avoid hurting themselves. Her parents never made it an issue, she said. She suspects this may be because she inherited the mutation from her father.

“I can’t remember him needing any painkillers,” she said. “I think that’s why I didn’t find it odd.”

Unfortunately, because he died before the discovery, it will remain unknown whether he carried the mutation. Her mother does not share it. Neither does her daughter. Her son “has the same microdeletion in FAAH-OUT, but does not have the other mutation that confers reduced FAAH function,” Cox said.

In other words, her son shares some, but not all, of her pain insensitivity.

Scientists are also intrigued by Cameron’s extraordinarily low anxiety level. On an anxiety disorder questionnaire, she scored zero out of 21. She cannot recall ever having felt depressed or scared.

In retrospect, she sees how her genetic disposition may have aided her at work. After years as a primary-school teacher, she retrained to work with people with severe mental disabilities. Erratic, aggressive behavior never riled her, she said.

But though having this mutation may sound like a dream, there are downsides. One is that she is quite forgetful; prone to losing her keys and her train of thought midsentence. The other is that she’s never felt the “adrenaline rush” that other people talk about, she said.

The researchers said they would now focus on trying to better understand how FAAH-OUT works so that they can design a gene therapy or other pain intervention around it. Turning a discovery of this sort into an actual pain or anxiety treatment requires many steps, many years and many millions of dollars. It’s rare for a product to emerge.

But it’s not unprecedented, Waxman said. As a reminder of how an individual with an unusual genetic makeup can shape the future of medicine, he pointed to statin drugs.

“They were developed largely on the basis and discovery of incredibly rare families where everyone was having heart attacks in their 20s,” he said. Whether it will be Cameron’s mutation or another individual’s mutation that directs the future of painkillers, it’s too early to say.

“But I’m reasonably confident that the lessons we are learning from the genes involved in pain will lead to the development of an entirely new class of pain medications,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/health/woman-pain-anxiety.html" id="fe03f39a-b861-337c-af6e-d898e27482ba">The New York Times</a>.

At 71, She's Never Felt Pain or Anxiety. Now Scientists Know Why.

She had been told that childbirth was going to be painful. But as the hours wore on, nothing bothered her — even without an epidural.

Between 2015 and 2018, support for laws aimed at protecting LGBT individuals from discrimination fell by nearly 10 percentage points among Republicans under the age of 30. This was one of the key findings from a survey of more than 40,000 Americans’ views on LGBT issues that the Public Religion Research Institute released Tuesday.

The majority of young Republicans surveyed — around 63 percent — continued to support such measures. But given that 74 percent were in favor in 2015, the shift was striking, said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the institute, a Washington-based nonpartisan nonprofit.

“It was one of the largest and most significant drops that we saw,” Jones said.

Understanding this shift would require additional study, he said, but one hypothesis he offered was that the ranks of young Republicans are thinning, with more socially liberal individuals opting to identify as independent. “The Republican Party is becoming more ideologically pure,” he suggested.

The results for questions on nondiscrimination laws and refusal of service were based on about 40,000 interviews conducted in 2018 from March 14 to Dec. 16. Interviewers called 1,000 randomly selected people every week on landlines and cellphones and requested to speak with the youngest adult living in the household. The margin of error for these questions is plus or minus 0.5 percentage points.

Views on same-sex marriage were built on a subset of about 4,000 telephone interviews conducted from March 14-25, and from June 27 to July 8. The margin of error for that question is plus or minus 1.5 percentage points.

Here are three other findings from the survey.

— Asian-Pacific Islander Americans Lead in Support of Gay Marriage

Sixty-two percent of Americans continue to support same-sex marriage, the survey found. But among all racial and ethnic groups surveyed, individuals identifying as Asian-Pacific Islander Americans demonstrated the highest level of support for both same-sex marriage (75 percent) and for laws that would protect LGBT people from discrimination in jobs, public accommodations and housing (73 percent, 4 percentage points more than Americans overall).

These figures could be partly explained by another finding: Researchers spotted a strong correlation between participants’ educational level and support of LGBT rights. Overall, Asian-Pacific Islander Americans were far more likely than other Americans surveyed to hold either a four-year college degree or a postgraduate degree, Jones said.

— Members of Most Religious Groups Support Anti-Discrimination Protections

Breaking survey responses down by participants’ faith, analysts found majority support for anti-discrimination measures for LGBT people from every major religious group. The strongest support came from Unitarian Universalists (90 percent), Jews (80 percent) and Hindus (79 percent). Seventy percent of Mormons, 60 percent of Muslims and 54 percent of white evangelical Protestants were also in favor.

Researchers had also found widespread support among religious groups in 2015 and 2017. (The 2016 survey did not investigate this matter.)

“What’s remarkable, I think, is how consistent these numbers are,” Jones said. “When you think of our polarized political environment, there are very few issues that you can say there’s bipartisan, cross-religious support for. This is an issue you can say that on.”

The survey also examined support for small businesses’ ability to refuse service based on the owners’ religious beliefs. Researchers identified a sharp split between men and women on this topic. Nearly half of men and less than 40 percent of women surveyed supported refusals of service on religious grounds.

— Seattle Had the Highest Percentage of LGBT People

A significant percentage of the individuals in the survey lived in 35 major metro areas.

Though there have been other methods used to identify the cities in the U.S. with high percentages of LGBT people, the survey data also offered indications. With 10 percent of survey participants identifying as LGBT, Seattle took first place. Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, were tied for second, with 9 percent each.

Overall, about 5 percent of the 40,000 people surveyed identified as LGBT, which was consistent with previous years, according to Jones.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/us/lgbt-rights-young-republicans.html" id="f7001d9b-fe24-3bc7-a8e8-d2509dfb690c">The New York Times</a>.

Support of LGBT Rights Drops Among Young Republicans, Survey Finds

Support for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights has increased or remained steady among Mormons, Muslims, political independents, southerners, seniors and a number of other demographic groups in the United States since 2015, a new survey found. One notable outlier: young Republicans.

There was evidence that one of the girls had been sexually assaulted, and investigators collected DNA from the crime scene. Police chased down hundreds of leads over the years but could not identify a suspect.

On Monday, the Ozark Police Department announced that thanks to the same investigative technique that led to an arrest in the Golden State Killer case, a suspect was in custody.

This is at least the fourth case in five days that has been solved using genetic genealogy, as the investigative technique is known. The arrest comes amid dueling efforts to expand and to ban this approach to identifying DNA left at crime scenes.

The police chief said that identifying the crime scene DNA after all these years brought him relief and also surprise: the suspect, Coley McCraney, 45, was a high school classmate. The two even played basketball together, he said.

“I had to sit in my chair for three hours,” he said in a news conference.

The district attorney said he plans to seek the death penalty against McCraney, who was arrested Friday and charged with capital murder and rape in the deaths of Tracie Hawlett and J.B. Beasley. The pair was found in Beasley’s car on the side of a road on July 3, 1999. They had both been shot in the head.

Hawlett’s mother, Carol Roberts, told The Associated Press that she went numb when she heard an arrest had been made.

“He didn’t have the right to do that,” Roberts said. “I just want to know why.”

Chief Marlos Walker of the Police Department said he decided to try genetic genealogy shortly after the highly publicized announcement in April that Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, had been charged with the crimes associated with the notorious Golden State Killer.

“It raised my awareness as something we needed to check into,” he said in an interview.

The killing of the two teenagers was the obvious case to apply it toward, he said. A double homicide is rare in Ozark, a city of around 15,000 that is about 80 miles south of Montgomery.

“That’s the only case of that nature around here,” Walker said. “This is the crime that shook everyone; not just our city but even wider than that. It’s one of the biggest cases in the state of Alabama.”

Walker hired Parabon, a forensic consulting firm specializing in genetic genealogy, to assist with the case. The first few steps involved in identifying DNA this way are typically the same.

A genetic profile is uploaded to GEDMatch, a genealogy database popular with family history researchers — and, more recently, law enforcement. Then the team of genetic genealogists hopes for a close match, ideally something in the third cousin range. In this case, the relatives were more distant, said CeCe Moore, who leads Parabon’s genetic genealogy team.

“When I looked at this case initially I didn’t think it would be an easy solve,” Moore said. Still, her team was able to build out a family tree, connecting the closer matches to a common ancestor and then filling in the branches with an array of publicly available data.

In the end, it was a lucky coincidence that altered the direction of the investigation. Though the Parabon team was not able to create a probable suspect list, the family tree hinted at several possible surnames. When Walker looked at the list, one stood out: McCraney.

“I recognized that last name,” he said, because he had had a high school classmate with that surname.

There was a solid chance that the McCraney he knew could be related to the suspect and that his DNA would help direct the family tree building.

When investigators compared his DNA to the DNA from the crime scene, it appeared to be an exact match, Walker said.

“Like most people, I was surprised,” said Walker. McCraney had cooperated with the investigation and did not have the type of record or reputation to suggest he had been involved in this type of crime, Walker said.

“But I’ve also been doing this long enough to know that DNA is a solid thing to believe in,” he said. “I didn’t have any reservations when we got a match that this was him.”

McCraney has worked as a truck driver and a preacher, according to The Associated Press. David Harrison, McCraney’s lawyer, told the AP that his client was an outstanding member of the community.

“I’ve been doing this job a long time, and here’s my concern: Social media convicts him before we’ve ever seen the evidence, and that’s troubling to me,” he said.

The announcement from Ozark police comes on the heels of three other cases that were solved using genetic genealogy in the past five days, and more than 40 since April, according to Moore.

Questions around the legality of this new practice remain unresolved. In January, Delegate Charles Sydnor of Maryland introduced a bill that would prevent law enforcement from identifying suspects’ DNA by using relatives in genealogy databases. The bill died within weeks, but it fueled discussion about whether the practice violates people’s privacy. Others have raised concerns about the excessive weight placed on genetic evidence, when there are hundreds of reasons a match may not be an indicator of guilt.

Defenders of the technique say law enforcement is limiting its searches to genealogy databases for which users have explicitly consented to assisting with homicide and sexual assault investigations.

“It’s just a wonderful tool,” Walker said. “I think more agencies will be using it within weeks and months down the road.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/us/alabama-dna-murder-arrest.html" id="48b91a2f-b80a-3696-afeb-628aa3b2330a">The New York Times</a>.

DNA and a Coincidence Lead to Arrest in 1999 Double Slaying in Alabama

It was the case that haunted a small city in Alabama for nearly two decades: Two 17-year-old girls disappeared on the way to a birthday party and were later found shot to death in the trunk of a car.

The suspect, Coley McCraney, 45, was arrested Friday and has been charged with capital murder and rape in the deaths of Tracie Hawlett and J.B. Beasley, who were found in Beasley’s car on the side of a road on July 3, 1999. They had both been shot in the head.

“I recognized that last name,” he said, because he had had a high school classmate with that surname. They graduated the same year and played basketball together.

“Like most people, I was surprised,” said Walker, who sat frozen in his chair for three hours after learning the news. McCraney had cooperated with the investigation and did not have the type of record or reputation to suggest he had been involved in this type of crime, Walker said.

The announcement from Ozark police comes on the heels of three other cases that were solved using genetic genealogy in the past week, and more than 40 since April, according to Moore.

But even the highest-profile cases rarely end up in criminal court; they typically become humiliating footnotes to the discoveries they slowed.

This week, however, a judge in Montana sentenced a former chemist at the water treatment plant in Billings after she pleaded guilty in October to a felony charge of tampering with public records or information.

The information in question? Her colleagues’ water tests, which she contaminated for three months, ultimately costing the Billings water treatment plant its state certification and thoroughly perplexing her colleague, her boss and a host of experts, who could not figure out why just one chemist’s tests kept failing, according to prosecutors.

The sentence? A payment of $38,911 to the city of Billings, near Yellowstone National Park, and a three-year deferred sentence, meaning she is required to check in with a probation officer for that period.

“I deserved a reprimand, of course,” Michelle Henderson, the chemist who was sentenced on Monday, said in an interview. She said that she believed the colleague whose samples were contaminated, Katie Hendrickson, had been receiving preferential treatment from their boss. “I worked in a toxic environment that was fed by favoritism. My mind couldn’t cope.”

The rivalry took root during a time when — from the outside — everything at the Billings water treatment plant was going well. In 2014, a glowing article in a local newspaper declared that the plant was producing “the tastiest and purest water in Montana.”

In May 2015, Hendrickson, the chemist whose photo appeared with that article, discovered that she was unable to deliver on the most essential of tasks: passing a water test. Her job was to prove that the water going out to Billings residents was safe to drink. But even though other chemists’ tests showed precisely that, hers did not.

For three months, her tests — and her tests alone — failed again and again. She checked her equipment and asked her supervisor to monitor the process. Still, she experienced “numerous failed tests on a nearly daily basis beginning on May 19, 2015, and ending on Sept. 3, 2015,” an affidavit filed by the prosecution stated.

“It was kind of the scenario of everything that I touched just was contaminated and would not work,” she said at the sentencing hearing on Monday, according to The Billings Gazette. The more she did to resolve the problem, the worse it got, she said, until she saw contamination at “unbelievable levels” multiple times a day.

An external expert flew in to review the equipment, but found no problems. For those who know Hendrickson, the possibility that it was user error seemed implausible. “She was a great chemist,” said Andy Valkenburg, a former quality officer at Energy Laboratories in Billings, where she had previously been employed.

Only after the company installed surveillance cameras did the truth come to light. When Hendrickson was at lunch and in her boss’ office, Henderson handled her colleague’s samples, spiking them with a substance and discarding materials in the trash. Henderson was put on administrative leave and later resigned.

Water tests involve several steps. The first is making sure that the test is calibrated correctly. This is when Henderson manipulated the results, she said. She did this by taking a concentrated powder and putting it in the beaker used to set measurements.

One would be hard-pressed to find a more “wild” way of gaslighting someone in a lab, said Matt Queen, a professor of analytical chemistry at Montana State University Billings. It’s kind of like popping an invisible weight on a scale and then watching as everything comes out 20 pounds heavier for one person than for another. “I’m sure it just drove that poor woman nuts,” he said.

At the sentencing hearing on Monday, Henderson offered her former co-worker and boss a tearful apology, saying what she had done was “stupid,” according to The Billings Gazette.

Judge Michael Moses of Yellowstone County District Court said the consequences could have been even more grave. “You were six inches away from contaminating the water system of the community of a 100,000 people-plus,” he said, the newspaper reported. “That’s just unfathomable, and that’s a horrific breach of public trust. But thank goodness you had enough sense not to do that.”

Penelope Strong, Henderson’s lawyer, said in an interview that though her client was remorseful, the judge’s pronouncement was sensationalist given that the water from water tests never goes back to the main water supply.

Attempts to reach Hendrickson, Henderson’s former boss and the prosecutor were unsuccessful. A Billings water treatment plant employee who answered the phone this week said her team had been advised not to comment.

As to what she was thinking, Henderson said in the interview that she loved her work as a chemist but had been frustrated by the sense that she worked harder than her colleague but that their boss favored the other chemist. As a mother of three young children, she spent her breaks pumping breast milk, she said. It bothered her that her colleague seemed to taker longer breaks.

“I started muddling with her sample methods so that she would actually have to work,” Henderson said. “This just made their bond stronger and my negative emotions became cancerous.” Given a do-over, she said, she would leave before letting jealousy and resentment “seep into my soul.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/us/montana-chemist-water.html" id="5745c85c-09cd-3215-af53-9ea4dfc5afe0">The New York Times</a>.

Jealousy Led Montana Chemist to Taint Colleague's Water Tests

Lab rivalries go back nearly as far as labs themselves. There’s the case of a prominent 19th-century bacteriologist who paid local authorities to deny a former collaborator access to the bodies of plague victims. There are the AIDS researchers who sabotaged one another’s work on at least five occasions. And there are numerous stories of scientists who have accused colleagues of stealing their work.

In an interview Tuesday, he explained that he had been planning to use a big news event to promote his online expert company, which has been struggling to find users.

A few hours earlier, a gunman had opened fire at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, 60 miles south of his home. He said he was frustrated by how little the witnesses interviewed by broadcast journalists seemed to know. His site could help, he thought.

And so, seated in the comfort of his home, with its indoor tennis court and three microwave ovens for optimum popcorn popping, he took action: “I dashed off a tweet and did not think about it.”

If you were a witness to the #GilroyGarlicFestivalshooting please sign on to Interface by WhenHub (free app) and you can set your price to take calls. Use keyword Gilroy. — @ScottAdamsSays

In particular the phrase “set your price” — amid a tragedy that took the lives of a 6-year-old boy, a 13-year-old girl and a 25-year-old biologist — struck many people as insensitive. Rather quickly, his tweet was “ratioed,” eventually accumulating more than 1,300 comments, far outnumbering the likes and retweets, the equivalent of a beating in the virtual square.

Scott Adams, the 62-year-old creator of the Dilbert comic strip, said he was flipping between CNN and Fox in his home in Pleasanton, California, on Sunday when it hit him: His moment had come.

Heather Murphy

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