Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced Wednesday a $600,000 partnership with an anti-crime company specializing in matching cold case DNA to genetic genealogy databases.
Called Othram, the Texas firm says its technology has helped solve at least 600 cold cases nationwide. Uthmeier hopes the DNA lab can help sift through 60 years worth of Florida’s more than 21,000 unsolved murder cases.
“Just because a case is cold, that does not mean it’s forgotten,” Uthmeier said during a Miami press conference. “Today, technology has advanced. Othram is leading the nation, a company that has proven success when it comes to advanced forensic DNA analysis.”
Uthmeier added that his office has devoted $600,000 so far to a “series of different projects” with Othram, but hopes to keep “find[ing]” more funds to continue their partnership.
The Florida Legislature has set aside hundreds of thousands of dollars to solve the Sunshine State’s cold cases. In 2023, lawmakers allocated $150,000 for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s cold case projects, and state Sen. Clay Yarborough, a Jacksonville Republican, has requested another $250,000 for the project this year.
How does forensic genetic genealogy work?But the newest development in cracking these cases is genetic genealogy: Police upload crime scene DNA to genealogy databases, which return any matches for potential suspects or their relatives. Investigators can build family trees around these offenders, slowly zooming in on violators through kin as distant as third or even fourth cousins.
The process emerged in 2018, and Florida in 2024 spent $500K on a Forensic Genetic Genealogy Grant Program to help Sunshine State police scouring these databases for criminals.
Sites like FamilyTreeDNA and GEDMatch offer an “opt-in” method for users to make their DNA readily accessible to law enforcement.
Nearly all other sites, such as the popular 23AndMe and Ancestry, allow users to download their raw DNA files, which they can choose to upload to authorities.
Idaho Murders and the Golden State KillerAccording to a Science Direct study, the new technology has helped solve more than 1,300 cases since its invention in 2018. Two of its most famous cases include the high-profile 2022 murder of four college students in Idaho and the arrest of the Golden State Killer.
Law enforcement uploaded DNA found at the Moscow, Idaho, scene first to a nationwide database holding all past criminal DNA. When that returned nothing, the FBI took over and put the DNA sequence through multiple “publicly available” genealogy databases.
That worked. After investigators built a family tree of hundreds of relatives using the “same tools” regular users do to learn more about their ancestors, they found a potential suspect: 27-year-old Bryan Kohberger, a criminology grad student.
Officers searched his family home in Pennsylvania, deducing that DNA collected from the family’s trash was likely from the biological father of the person who left DNA at the crime scene, NBC reported.
Kohberger was sentenced in July 2025 to four consecutive life terms in prison.
The defense raised constitutional concerns, alleging that the FBI’s failure to secure a search warrant for the genealogy databases violated the Fourth Amendment. Because Kohberger “exposed his DNA” to the public, the judge said, he lost privacy rights. He didn’t weigh in on the potential legal implications of searching through swathes of DNA without a warrant.
In 2018, investigators used genetic genealogy to capture 74-year-old Joseph DeAngelo, a serial rapist and murder responsible for 13 deaths and more than 50 rapes in California during the 1970s and 80s.
By analyzing victim statements about DeAngelo’s figure, combined with examining at least his third cousins in genealogy databases, authorities were able to capture and prosecute the septuagenarian for the terror he’d inflicted 50 years earlier.
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