How Genetic Sleuthing Helped a Kidnapped Girl Recover Her Identity

How Genetic Sleuthing Helped a Kidnapped Girl Recover Her Identity

From Father to Kidnapper

Lisa Jensen was abandoned by her abusive father in 1986, when she was five years old. He left behind a fake name and a fingerprint.

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A newspaper clipping from 1986, soon after Lisa Jensen was abandoned. The San Bernardino Sun, via Newspapers.com

Sixteen years later, the man who abandoned Lisa was arrested on charges of killing his girlfriend. When investigators looked into his history, they began to wonder if he was Lisa’s father after all. A DNA test showed he was not related, and it seemed likely he’d kidnapped her as a baby.

Who is Lisa Jensen?

Lisa’s kidnapper died in prison in 2010, without revealing any clues to Lisa’s past. By then she was in her early 30s, married with kids of her own. She still often wondered: who was she really?

One night, Lisa saw a TV program about how DNA testing was helping people learn about their roots. She contacted Peter Headley, a detective who had tried unsuccessfully to find her real identity years before. Maybe this approach would help them?

The detective emailed DNAadoption.com, a nonprofit that helps teach adoptees how to find their biological parents.

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Barbara Rae-Venter, a retired patent lawyer and volunteer with the organization, offered to help search for Lisa’s identity.

But how do you identify someone with no name, no place of birth and no birthdate?

Step 1 Extract Lisa’s Genetic Profile

For years, adoptees and the “search angels” who volunteer to help them have used genealogy websites and public records to try to find unknown parents.

An adopted child will typically have at least one piece of biographical data, such as a birthdate. But in this case, all Lisa had was her DNA. (Lisa declined to be interviewed but consented to having Dr. Rae-Venter and Mr. Headley recount the story of the investigation.)

To maximize her chance of finding relatives, Lisa joined four genealogical databases: 23andMe, which required her to spit in a tube; Ancestry.com, which required her to swab her cheek; and FamilyTreeDNA and GEDmatch, which accepted the genetic profiles created by those other sites. At that time, those sites together held roughly three million potential matches.

Step 2 Find People Who Share Her DNA

Family relationships can be estimated by the amount of DNA shared by two people:

Great-Great-

Aunt or Uncle

3–13%

Great-Grandparents

7–22%

Great-Aunt

or Uncle

4–31%

First Cousin

twice removed

1–8%

Grandmother or Grandfather

17–34%

First Cousin

once removed

2–13%

Second Cousin

once removed

0–5%

Mother or Father

Amount of shared DNA: 49–55%

First Cousin

once removed

2–13%

Second Cousin

once removed

0–5%

Third Cousin

once removed

0–3%

Great-Niece

or Nephew

4–31%

First Cousin

twice removed

1–8%

Second Cousin

twice removed

0–4%

Third Cousin

twice removed

0–2%

Great-Grandparents

7–22%

Great-Aunt

or Uncle

4–31%

Grandparents

Shared DNA: 17–34%

1st Cousin

once removed

2–13%

1st Cousin

once removed

2–13%

2nd Cousin

once removed

0–5%

1st Cousin

twice removed

1–8%

2nd Cousin

twice removed

0–4%

Source: Blaine T. Bettinger

Had Lisa been very lucky and matched with someone who shared 25 percent of her DNA, that person could have been a grandparent, aunt, uncle, niece or nephew.

Instead, Ancestry.com identified a possible second cousin: Paul, an 81-year-old man.

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And 23andMe found two other relatively close cousins, including Adam, 40.

Step 3 Convince Lisa’s Cousins It’s Not a Hoax

To understand how Lisa was related to her three newfound cousins, Dr. Rae-Venter had to convince them to upload their DNA profiles to GEDmatch, which has advanced tools for comparing genetic and family tree data.

But the cousins were suspicious of the claim that their DNA could help a kidnapped woman find her real identity.

Eventually, Dr. Rae-Venter and detectives convinced Paul and Adam that it was not a scam, and they agreed to help. (With the exception of Adam, who asked to be identified, family members’ names are pseudonyms used by researchers to protect the family’s privacy.)

Step 4 Look for Common Ancestors

When Dr. Rae-Venter compared Lisa’s DNA sequence with Paul’s DNA, she found they had a surprisingly large match on the X chromosome.

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A GEDmatch tool showing matching DNA segments (in blue) on Lisa and Paul’s X chromosomes.

The X chromosome was a hint that they must be related through Paul's maternal line. (A son typically inherits a single X chromosome from his mother and a Y chromosome from his father, while a daughter inherits an X from each parent.)

Green areas show where Lisa and Paul have matching DNA.

Green areas show where Lisa and Paul have matching DNA.

Green areas show where Lisa and Paul have matching DNA.

Paul had already assembled an extensive family tree of his own, and Dr. Rae-Venter began to narrow it down. Based on their relative ages — Lisa was around 35, less than half Paul’s age — and from the percentage of matching DNA, Dr. Rae-Venter estimated that Lisa was likely Paul’s first cousin twice removed, on his mother’s side.

Step 5 Reunite an Adopted Cousin with His Mother

Lisa’s cousin Adam had been adopted, and had joined 23andMe to try to find his birth parents.

A volunteer working with Dr. Rae-Venter found Adam’s mother’s maiden name in California birth records. It was an unusual name and family members were everywhere on Facebook, so within a few hours Adam’s maternal line was mapped out and he’d found photos of his mother and half-brother.

“I just immediately started crying,” Adam said in an interview. “To go in just a few days time from feeling I'll never find anything else out about my family, to getting an email about a kidnapped girl and then getting all that. It was a whirlwind.”

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Adam reunited with his birth mother.

Adam’s birth mother agreed to a DNA test, which revealed that she was not related to Lisa. That meant that Adam must match Lisa through his father’s family.

Eventually, by researching Paul’s large family tree, Dr. Rae-Venter identified a single branch in Southern California, where Adam was born, that seemed most likely to contain Adam’s father.

One cousin from that branch — Jean — agreed to take a DNA test, which showed he was Adam’s uncle. But all of his brothers declined to test.

Adam was left unsure who his father was, but Dr. Rae-Venter now had enough information to connect Adam and Paul.

Adam’s

Great-Great-

Grandfather

Marie is Paul’s maternal grandmother and the most recent common ancestor of Paul, Adam and Lisa.

Adam’s Great-

Grandfather

Adam’s Great-

Grandmother

Marie is the most recent common ancestor of Paul, Adam and Lisa.

By gradually filling in the branches sprouting from their most recent common ancestor, a French-Canadian woman named Marie, the team should be able to find Lisa’s family.

Step 6 Recruit Cousins and Catch a Lucky Break

Complicating the search, however, were ancestors with 10 or more children who sometimes married their cousins, creating dozens of branches that intersected in confusing ways.

In December of 2015 the group had a lucky break. A new match appeared on Ancestry.com: Peter, a retired intelligence officer in his 80s who was likely Lisa’s first or second cousin.

Peter become nearly as invested in the search as Dr. Rae-Venter was, scouring records and recruiting his cousins to take DNA tests and submit their own family trees.

Eventually 120 family members joined a closed group where they could divvy up research tasks and share their findings. They spent thousands of hours sifting through birth, death and marriage records, handwritten church documents, social media profiles and newspaper clippings.

Step 7 Find Lisa’s Grandfather

Many of Lisa’s closest genetic matches were from New Hampshire, and Dr. Rae-Venter developed a hunch that Lisa might be from there. One particular branch contained a woman, named in two relatives’ obituaries, who seemed to be about the age that Lisa’s mother should be.

With the help of detectives, Dr. Rae-Venter reached out to Adrian, a man who appeared to be the woman’s father.

Adrian was skeptical and declined to help, but detectives eventually learned that his daughter had not been heard from since 1981, when she left with her boyfriend and daughter in what her family thought was an attempt to avoid debt collectors.

Adrian eventually agreed to a DNA test, which confirmed he was Lisa’s grandfather.

Lisa’s

Great-Great-

Grandfather

Marie is the most recent common ancestor of Lisa, Paul and Adam, and the source of the matching DNA on Lisa and Paul’s X chromosomes.

Lisa’s Great-

Grandfather

Lisa’s Great-

Grandmother

Lisa’s

Great-Great-

Grandfather

Marie is the most recent common ancestor of Lisa, Paul and Adam.

Lisa’s Great-

Grandfather

Lisa’s Great-

Grandmother

Additional investigative work suggested that the boyfriend of Lisa’s mother had told her relatives they would be leaving town. Soon after that he likely killed Lisa’s mother and kidnapped Lisa.

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Lisa’s mother. N.H. State Police

Step 8 Find Lisa’s Father

As new matches emerged on 23andMe and Ancestry.com, Lisa’s paternal side began to take shape. Dr. Rae-Venter eventually narrowed Lisa’s father down to one of five brothers who also lived in New Hampshire. All the brothers were married when Lisa was conceived and those who were located refused to be tested.

Step 9 Find Dawn

This was far from a traditional happy ending: Lisa’s father’s family would not acknowledge her and her mother likely had been murdered. (Her body still has not been found.) But Dr. Rae-Venter explained that by then Lisa already had a sense that her mother might be dead, and she was grateful to finally have answers to questions that had long plagued her.

And after an estimated 20,000 hours of work from more than 100 volunteers, Lisa now had a family tree containing over 20,000 people. She had found her birth name: Dawn. And at a small family reunion, she met her grandfather and several cousins.

Step 10 Inspire the Hunt for the Golden State Killer

The investigation helped detectives better understand the history of the con man who kidnapped Lisa and murdered her mother, and helped link him to other murders. In total, he’s believed to have killed at least seven women and young girls.

A detective trying to identify the Golden State Killer, who terrorized California in 70s and 80s, heard about the investigation and asked Dr. Rae-Venter to help him. They used similar genetic techniques to identify Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, as a suspect. He was arrested in April.

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Joseph James DeAngelo, the suspected Golden State Killer, appears in court in California in April 2018. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

In recent months, dozens of other law enforcement agencies have experimented with this approach. But identifying a bit of blood from a crime scene has one major difference: only one genealogical database — GEDmatch — permits law enforcement uploads without a court order.

But once a genetic profile is extracted from that blood and uploaded to GEDMatch, the steps are essentially the same: Find a highly skilled genetic genealogist to help you. Look for the closest relatives you can find. Search for common ancestors. Build a family tree using genetic clues and public records until you’ve found someone in the right location and the right age to be a suspect. Then have law enforcement collect their DNA and see if it matches the crime scene evidence.

That process has lead to more than 10 arrests in the last five months, but has also sparked a public debate about privacy.

Speeding Up the Search Process

In 2015, there were about one million people on Ancestry.com. Now there are around nine million. Other sites like GEDmatch and 23andMe have grown at similar rates, which makes it much easier to use DNA to find an unknown relative — or to identify a suspect.

“It’s a whole different landscape for doing analysis in unknown-parentage cases,” said Dr. Rae-Venter. She estimated that the search for Lisa’s identity, which took her and other volunteers 20,000 hours three years ago, could now be done in just two days on her own.

(Original source)