To Solve 3 Cold Cases, This Small County Got a DNA Crash Course

Forensic genealogy helped nab the Golden State Killer in 2018. Now investigators across the country are using it to revisit hundreds of unsolved crimes.

In October of 2016, the remains of three murder victims, dead for three decades, were laid to rest in Newton County, a rural corner of Indiana. Two were young men, likely teenagers, the victims of a serial killer in 1983. The third was a woman found dead in 1988 on the bank of a creek. She had been shot in the head, covered with car tires and lit on fire. Their bones, stored in tattered cardboard boxes and black trash bags, had been passed down from one county coroner to the next. When Scott McCord took the job in 2009, he gave the remains names: Adam, Brad and Charlene. He ordered anthropological and dental analyses, facial sketches and DNA tests in an effort to find their true identities.