Quarrel about DNA affecting double murder investigation

It had just stopped raining when the killer went on attack on Åsgatan in central Linköping just before eight o'clock on the morning of October 19, 2004. He left DNA traces in the form of blood splashes on a knife and some hairs in a cap. No one has been prosecuted and the investigation has grown into the second largest in Sweden after the murder of Olof Palme.

Earlier this year, the police decided to try to move on by uploading DNA information from the crime scene in Linköping to the Gedmatch database, a free online service. Genealogy researchers who purchased a DNA test from any test company can upload their results in Gedmatch, thereby increasing their chances of finding unknown relatives.

Last year, police in the US state of California managed to arrest a suspected mass murderer known as The Golden State Killer via a four man after uploading DNA tracks from crime scenes in Gedmatch. Since then, the method has allowed the suspects to be arrested in at least sixty investigations where the police got stuck. Science magazine placed the new way of working on its list of last year's most important scientific breakthroughs.

But Gedmatch was created for genealogists, not for police. Criminal investigations lead to ethical dilemmas. Whoever uploads their information can help a relative end up in jail. Therefore, the management of Gedmatch promised that the database would only be used in investigations of the very worst crimes: murders and rapes.

Last spring, it became known that police in the US state of Utah used Gedmatch in a case where an unknown perpetrator nearly killed a 71-year-old woman when she was alone in a church playing organ. Because she survived, the crime was classified as abuse.

The case triggered a heated debate. Abuse was not one of the crimes that the police would investigate using Gedmatch.

"The entire genealogy movement almost burst," says Peter Sjölund, a professional genealogist with a job as a consultant to the Swedish police in genetic investigations.

As a result, Gedmatch changed its rules. In June, the management explained in an email that anyone who wants to make their genetic information searchable for investigators from now on must give their own explicit permission. Participation thus became an active choice.

Gedmatch contains results from 1.3 million DNA tests. With the exception of duplicates and anonymously recorded test results, they have been crucial to the police's chances of moving on with DNA traces in cold cases. That opportunity disappeared overnight when Gedmatch changed its terms. The change came before the Swedish police had uploaded genetic information from the double murderer in Linköping.

"It felt a little sad that we were not there on time," says Jan Staaf, criminal commissioner and preliminary investigator for the double murder in Linköping.

During the fall, Gedmatch's management emailed their users, requesting that they log in and click on a box that makes their genetic information available to the police. The response has been lukewarm. So far, only 177,000 people have made such an active choice. This means that the police's chances of getting genetic clues from Gedmatch are considerably worse than they once were.