On March 4th, 1986, the unthinkable happened for the Bastian family of Tacoma, WA.  Their sweet, energetic and athletic little girl Jenni, age 13, didn’t come home from a bike training session in Point Defiance Park.  Police believed Jenni and her bike had been taken from the park by a predator, and the FBI counseled the family to await a ransom call.  But the call never came.  And when Jenni was found murdered and hidden in a cleverly disguised cave among the brush, her case joined another horrific child murder in being attributed to a child serial killer plaguing Tacoma.  Michella Welch had been killed just four months earlier in another Tacoma park, and her case, too, was unsolved.  For the next quarter century, Tacoma investigators pursued the child killer who had taken two of Tacoma’s innocents in such brutal fashion.  But with the advent of modern DNA testing and analysis came answers – and they were not what anyone was expecting.

During the 1990's and 2000's, the remains of several murder victims; mostly female sex workers, were found on Long Island's beaches. To police it seemed clear that they were the victims of a serial killer, or even more frightening, two serial killers who were dumping victims in the same area. The killer or killers, were given the moniker LISK, or Long Island Serial Killer. Many of the victims were identified, but while police hunted for the killer, they also needed to ID the rest of the victims, and they succeeded finally in identifying two of them; Karen Vergata and Valerie Mack.

The vicious, brutal 1975 stabbing murder of sweet, shy newlywed Lindy Sue Biechler haunted Lancaster, PA. Lindy was stabbed 19 times right inside her front door, and a butcher knife left embedded in her neck, and police couldn’t determine any motive in the case. The 19 year old had no enemies, and no one had seen or heard anything. It was considered the most puzzling unsolved mystery in the area for decades. Then, in 1997, a breakthrough in lab testing hinted at a motive – but not at a suspect. Two decades later, even the powers of forensic genealogy came up short. But in pondering the genealogy, CeCe Moore detected a genetic pattern that she linked to immigration to Lancaster from a specific region in Italy. Fortuitous records of Italian immigrants to Lancaster helped her focus her search. And when she considered these records alongside the phenotype information, she stumbled on a name – someone who had a connection to Lindy. A coffee cup casually thrown into a garbage can at Philadelphia International Airport proved her hunch right, and Lindy’s family had answers at long last.