List of suspected perpetrators of crimes identified with GEDmatch

Authorities named convicted murderer Terry Peder Rasmussen as the perpetrator of the Bear Brook murders after an investigation on GEDmatch

Forensic genetic genealogy led to the conviction of Joseph James DeAngelo in the Golden State Killer case

• Terry Peder Rasmussen was convicted for the 2002 murder of his live-in girlfriend while living under a pseudonym in California. He had previously been imprisoned under a different alias in a child abandonment case. The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department used GEDmatch to find the girl's family and concluded that her mother, Denise Beaudin, had disappeared from New Hampshire in the early 1980s after dating Rasmussen.[5] Although Rasmussen died while imprisoned in 2010, genealogist Barbara Rae-Venter linked his DNA to the Bear Brook murders in Allenstown, New Hampshire.[6] Authorities confirmed Rasmussen was the Bear Brook killer in 2017.[7]
• California law enforcement investigating the Golden State Killer case uploaded the DNA profile of the suspected serial rapist/killer from an intact rape kit in Ventura County[8][9] to GEDmatch.[10] It identified 10 to 20 distant relatives of the Golden State Killer, and a team of five investigators working with Barbara Rae-Venter[11] used this to construct a large family tree, which led them to identify former police officer Joseph James DeAngelo as a suspect.[12] Investigators acquired samples of his DNA from items he discarded outside his home, one of which definitively matched that of the killer.[13][14] The process took about four months, from when the first matches appeared on GEDmatch, to when DeAngelo was arrested in April 2018.[9] DeAngelo pleaded guilty in June 2020 and was sentenced to life imprisonment that August.[15]

Roy Charles Waller was convicted of crimes in the NorCal Rapist case

• In September 2018, Roy Charles Waller was arrested as a suspect in a series of more than ten rapes between 1991–2006 in Northern California (the "Norcal Rapist") after DNA evidence from crime scenes were matched on GEDmatch to a relative.[16] Police then constructed a family tree and using the known characteristics of the rapist narrowed the suspects down to Waller. It took little more than a week to identify and arrest the suspect.[17] He was charged with a total of 40 counts of rape which took place in different counties — Sonoma, Solano, Contra Costa, Yolo and Butte.[18] Waller was convicted of 46 counts in November 2020 and sentenced to 897 years in prison the following month.[19][20]
• in March 2019, Paul Jean Chartrand was identified by the FBI's Investigative Genealogy Team as the murderer of Barbara Becker on March 21, 1979 in San Diego. She had been repeatedly stabbed in the neck and back. Investigators found blood in several rooms of the La Jolla home. Police at the time said Becker, 37, had tried to escape and fought against her attacker, and that some of the blood was his.[21][22] However, Chartrand had already died in 1995 of undisclosed causes.[23][24]
• In April 2019, Terrence Miller of Edmonds, Washington was arrested for the 1972 killing of 20-year-old Jody Loomis. Loomis left her home and rode her bicycle toward a stable to ride her horse. Her body was found raped, disrobed, and shot in the head in the woods. This is the second arrest in a Snohomish County cold homicide case using results from genetic genealogy, the sheriff's office said in its statement.[25][26][27] Police worked with Deb Stone, an Oregon genealogist, to identify the suspect.[28] Miller pled not guilty.[29] Miller was scheduled to go on trial on June 5, 2020, however his trial was postponed due to Covid 19.[30][31][32] Miller committed suicide before he went to trial.[33]
• In April 2019, Arthur Rudy Martinez was posthumously identified as the 1977-1978 murderer and rapist of 30-year-old Jane Morton Antunez and 28-year-old Patricia Dwyer Morton in Atascadero, California, Antunez was killed in her car and Dwyer was stabbed to death in her home. Martinez, who'd been paroled after unrelated convictions for attempted murder and rape, lived in the area at the time of the deaths but left soon after. He moved to Spokane, Washington, and received life sentences there for several robberies and two rapes also in 1978. After 16 years in prison in 1994, he escaped and lived under an alias in California until 2014 when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He returned to Washington state and turned himself in to receive medical treatment in prison. He died behind bars two months later. The homicide cases were reopened with the Department of Justice's Familiar DNA Search Team seeking a familial DNA match to the evidence. Authorities said it led them to a relative of Martinez and a former girlfriend who provided investigators the DNA sample from a razor he had used. A lab determined the DNA from the razor matched that from the crime scenes.[34][35]
• In May 2019, James Richard Curry was identified as the killer of Mary Silvani, formerly known as "Sheep Flats Jane Doe"/"Washoe County Jane Doe." DNA collected from Silvani's rape kit was uploaded to GEDMatch, leading to a tentative identification of the killer. However, the suspect had recently died.[36] After DNA from his son, located in a criminal database, ruled the suspect out, further investigation led to Curry, a half brother born out of wedlock in 1946 and raised in Dallas, Texas under a different family name.[37] Curry died in California on January 7, 1983, from injuries inflicted in a suicide attempt after confessing to three murders in California.[37] His two children volunteered to provide DNA samples after being contacted by investigators.[37] Silvani was also identified using genetic genealogy, making this the first known case in which both the victim and the perpetrator were identified in this way (both through the work of genetic genealogist Cheryl Hester).[38]
• In May 2019, a grand jury in Orange County, North Carolina indicted John Russell Whitt on first-degree murder charges related to the death of his son, Robert "Bobby" Adam Whitt.[39] Bobby Whitt's skeleton was discovered under a billboard on Interstate 85-40 in September 1998; an autopsy showed that he had died by strangulation.[40] Although the case remained open, and hundreds of investigators worked on it over the years—including forensic artist Frank Bender—the remains were unidentified until Barbara Rae-Venter analyzed a DNA sample that suggested the boy had one white parent and one Asian parent. Using online genealogical services, she located a cousin in Hawai'i, who was able to provide the boy's name. The family had not reported him missing because they believed his mother, Myoung Hwa Cho, had taken him back to South Korea, where she was from.[40] Further investigation revealed that Cho's body had been located in Spartanburg County, South Carolina on May 13, 1998. She had been suffocated, and had ligature marks around her wrists.[40] John Whitt has confessed to both murders; at the time of his arrest for the murders he was serving a federal prison sentence at the Ashland FCI[41] for armed robbery and was not eligible for release on that charge until 2037.[40] On January 15, 2020 Whitt pled guilty to two counts each of second-degree murder and concealing a death and was sentenced to 26 to 32 years for each murder, to be served consecutively after he completes his sentence in federal prison for robbery in 2037.[42]
• Eddie Lee Anderson was arrested in May 2019 for killing 30-year-old Leslie Penrod Harris in May 1976 and dumping her body near Marine Corps Air Station El Toro, Orange County, California sheriff's officials said in a news release. The FBI's Investigative Genealogy Unit had assisted the local police in identifying Anderson as a potential suspect.[43] Harris was dining with her husband at a restaurant in Costa Mesa the evening of May 17 and went out alone around 8:30 p.m. She still hadn't returned by the time the restaurant closed, and her husband reported her missing, authorities said. At about 4:30 the next morning, military police from the air base found Harris’ nude body lying on a roadway just outside its perimeter. She had been strangled.[44][45]
• In June 2019 Mark Manteuffel was arrested in Decatur, Georgia by FBI agents and charged with brutal rapes, sodomy, torture and inflicting bodily harm using a knife in Sacramento, California between 1992 and 1994.[46] Manteuffel was a retired federal prisons worker and had lectured on criminal justice. Police used the services of the Sacramento DA and GEDmatch to indicate him as a possible suspect and used a sample of his DNA from a restaurant to match with the DNA from the crime scenes. Manteuffel pled guilty to the charges in July 2020 and was sentenced to 29 years in prison on October 23.[47][48][49][50][51][52]

In cooperation with American law enforcement organizations, Parabon NanoLabs started uploading DNA evidence from crime scenes to GEDmatch and joined forces with genetic genealogist CeCe Moore to offer genetic genealogy services to law enforcement to identify perpetrators of violent crimes. Parabon said in November 2018 they said they were working on 200 cases and about half had produced workable matches.[53][54] CeCe Moore is the head of the genetic genealogy unit responsible for most of the successful investigative genetic genealogy cases.[55][56]