The tech helping crack decades-old cold cases

DNA science isn’t the only technology that is helping detectives solve cold cases.

One of the challenges facing detectives on major investigations like the hunt for Sperino’s attacker is the sheer amount of evidence they dig up.

Officers investigating her murder realised AI could help them wade through the mountains of evidence they had accumulated since 1993.

They used a platform called Centerline AI, from Florida software company CentralSquare, to analyse more than 2,000 pages of records and identify evidence for the DNA testing that helped to break the case.

The AI helped them reconstruct timelines and organise witness information. “It’s so much easier than having a detective have to read through 2,000 pages,” Lawrence says. His team could interact with the AI like a chat bot.

This also helped when it came to interviewing Zigler after they had tracked him down. Detectives were able to ask questions of the AI to help “figure out if Zigler was being truthful”, says Lawrence.

But the technology is “only as good as the investigator,” says the captain. There comes a point, he says, “where you leave the technology behind and you have to go track people down and talk to them.”

Investigative genetic genealogy has its limitations too. Mittelman says: “It can’t solve every case. If you have no DNA, you can’t really use this technique.”

“But this technique is a lot more powerful and a lot more likely to yield identities than having to rely on the chance that you find a match somewhere in a database,” he adds.

While firms like Othram only use ancestry platforms where users have provided consent for law enforcement matching, there remain some concerns about the ethical implications of using this data.

“There are significant privacy concerns,” says Denise Syndercombe Court, professor of forensic genetics at King’s College London. While one person may have opted in to their DNA being used, genetic relatives may not have given consent.

A lack of funding is another hurdle. Mittelman says: “Every law enforcement agency wants to do it. There’s just not a lot of funding for it.”

Sometimes cases are funded through donations or crowdfunding. Othram operates a website listing cases that members of the public can help fund.

While investigative genetic genealogy has been adopted in countries such as Sweden, Denmark and Australia, it is not yet used in the UK. The Home Office is conducting a study to consider whether it should be adopted in the UK but did not respond to a request for comment.

The UK is already in a strong position, says Syndercombe Court. “We have such an efficient DNA database that if you can get any DNA out of a crime scene, you’ve got over a 65% chance of putting a name to that person, which is enormously powerful,” she says.