Genetic Genealogy Helps ID Victim of Green River Killer

[appalachiablue]

Source: AP News

SEATTLE (AP) — Genetic genealogy helped identify the youngest known victim of one of the nation’s most prolific serial killers almost 37 years after her remains were discovered near a baseball field south of Seattle.

Wendy Stephens was 14 and had run away from her home in Denver before Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, strangled her in 1983, the King County Sheriff’s Office announced Monday. Ridgway terrorized the Seattle area in the 1980s and has pleaded guilty to killing 49 women and girls since 2003. Four of the victims — including Stephens — had not been identified.

“Ridgway’s murderous spree left a trail of profound grief for so many families of murdered and missing women,” King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said in a written statement. “We are thankful that Wendy Stephens’ family will now have answers to their enormous loss suffered nearly 40 years ago.”

Researchers at the DNA Doe Project, a volunteer organization that uses publicly available DNA databases to find relatives of unidentified victims, helped make the identification...

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/seattle-57d6512358f4196842aa236ec989741c

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- Feb. 18, 2011, file photo, Green River Killer Gary Ridgway listens during his arraignment on charges of murder in the 1982 death of Rebecca "Becky" Marrero at the King County Regional Justice Center in Kent., Wash. Genetic genealogy helped identify the youngest known victim of Green River Killer Gary Ridgway- the Pacific Northwest serial killer who admitted killing dozens of women and girls- after her remains were found almost 37 years ago near a baseball field south of Seattle. Wendy Stephens was 14 and had run away from her home in Denver in 1983, the King County Sheriff's Office announced Monday, Jan. 25, 2021. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)

[uppityperson]

1. I'm so glad they could find out who she was.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Glad it can be used to sort out populations and focus on genetic lines

but I don't trust genetic genealogy at all. They provide probabilities from what I've read. I want to see some actual people with actual known ancestral lines challenge these companies and see if they match. "You're from western Europe, 1815!" is not genealogy or science, it's a probability prediction. And it's all about the money.

[LeftInTX]

3. She matched with her parents who tested with Family Tree DNA

Also, they can't charge based on genetic genealogy, they have to get a warrant to get the suspects DNA first.

With the Golden State Killer, they were able to get a family tree via a match with a third cousin...then they found people who lived in CA at the time of the crimes. They identified a suspect and got a subpoena for his DNA and it was a 100% match

[bucolic_frolic]

4. I see what you're saying, yes, you're right, you can match DNA

but to say you're 12.5% Swedish 250 years ago based on probabilities from western European populations is a stretch for me. Plus there have been so many invasions and migrations over many centuries. Angles, Saxons, Normans, Vikings, Celts, Scots ... all intermingled.

[Boomer]

5. Apples and oranges

Matching DNA for close relatives is reliable but that association is not the same as assigning ethnic origins. The latter is a mixture of conjecture and broad groups of key traits. it's useful only in conjunction with genealogical records.

[Don1]

6. Ethnic composition isn't genetic genealogy

These things are trendy and new and terms get mangled. Genetic genealogy is the intersection of genetics and genealogy, using a vast array of documented records about specific individuals and then their specific relatedness using genetics. I use genetic genealogy to help adopted people discover their birth parents and also specific living individuals to try to figure out their ancestors, 1, 2, or 3 generations ago. It involves looking at highly conserved regions of dna in dna relatives lists of living people and then checking records for how they intersected through marriage or non-paternity events.

Ethnic composition--a different thing--is definitely not 100% reliable and accurate, but most of it is in the right regions most of the time across vendors.

The newest features the corporations are promoting such as making claims like "you had an ancestor come to the US as early as 1925 from the UK" based purely on ethnicity composition is even less reliable because it is one step away and they do not integrate their findings with genealogical records to arrive at the conclusions. I agree that corporations market it as much more accurate than it really is.

But, I wouldn't call that last feature genetic genealogy.

[RobinA]

7. Well, I'm An Actual Person

and we know our ancestral lines going back past the boats, with the exception of my maternal grandfather's family which has a black hole three generations back. They all came here well before the Revolution except my paternal great Grandmother, who sailed here in 1898 from Cornwall. Both Ancestry and 23 and Me were right on the nose with what we know to be true about where my DNA came from. Some areas they highlight I don't have proof of, but those areas are fairly close to the areas that I do, so they make sense.

Of course, until my generation (younger Boomer) we are various UK and German Palatinate descendants, so figuring us out doesn't involve any great stretches, as those are some of their largest databases. If anyone went off the reservation in my family's past, they met up with similar breeds. This is just my family, so YMMV.