Just before Christmas, 1996, a groundskeeper at Pleasant Valley Memorial Park Cemetery in Annandale, Virginia discovered a woman's lifeless body. Police were summoned, and it quickly became clear to investigators that the deceased woman had taken her own life. Letters from the dead woman asked for an autopsy to not be performed on her and for her remains to be cremated. She also had gone out of her way to make it hard for investigators to determine who she was. With no identification, police respected her wishes, and she was soon cremated. She became known as 'Christmas Tree Jane Doe' due to the small Christmas tree found near her remains.

In 1987, Roxanne Wood’s husband Terry found her lying on the kitchen floor in a huge pool of her own blood. She had been raped and her throat slit. An incredibly small window of time in which her murder could have occurred led police to suspect that her husband was lying – and that he had staged the scene to make it appear an intruder had killed Roxanne. Terry Wood was the only suspect for years – until forensic genealogy pointed to someone else entirely. Someone who had done this before – and should not have been on the streets in the first place. Someone who was living just miles from the scene of the crime he had committed decades earlier – Patrick Wayne Gilham.

In January, 2012, a resident in a trailer park located in Opelika, Alabama made a startling discovery when he found what he believed to be a small human skull. Police were called out to investigate, and upon further searching, found more human remains and hair in the woods nearby. Sadly, they determined that the remains belonged to a young female child and she had been murdered. Closer examination of her remains proved that she had suffered a great deal of injuries and broken bones in her short life.