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Number four. Familial searching. What if solving a case didn't come down to the killer's [music] DNA, but their
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relatives? That's the idea behind familial searching. Instead of looking for a perfect match in CODIS, [music]
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the US national DNA database, investigators look for partial matches. DNA that might belong to a parent or
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sibling or child of the suspect. Now, CODIS and how it works is a beast all on its own. So, if that's something that
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you want to dive deeper into in a separate video, be sure to like this one. Let me know what about CODIS you
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want to learn more about in the comments below. I'm doing a deep dive. But, familial searching helps investigators
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identify potential relatives of people whose DNA was collected from a crime scene.
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It doesn't necessarily lead investigators straight to their suspect, but it may help them find a close
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relative of their suspect. And in order to get that sort of hit, that relative's
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DNA has to have already existed in the DNA database, whether that's by choice or because they have committed a crime.
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Now, there are laws around this type of testing in some states [music] because of privacy concerns. A state that
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approves the use of familial searching to find suspects [music] is New York, where the murder of Wendy Jerome
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occurred in 1984. Multiple samples in varying degrees of degradation had been found at the scene of Wendy's murder,
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and they were all tested multiple times in multiple ways. Until finally in 2020,
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a test of one of the samples led to a familial hit in CODIS. That hit was for a relative of Timothy Williams, the man
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we now know was responsible for Wendy's killing. His conviction made history because it was the first case in New
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York state to be solved using familial DNA testing.