More than 46 years after a Pennsylvania woman was stabbed to death, police have arrested a suspect due to dogged investigators and the work of a woman who calls herself the DNA Detective.
David Sinopoli, 68, was arrested Sunday and charged with the Dec. 5, 1975, murder of Lindy Sue Biechler, who was 19 years old when she suffered 19 stab wounds to her neck, chest, back and abdomen, according to ABC.
CeCe Moore, the chief genetic genealogist at Parabon NanoLabs, began working on the case in 2018, according to Lancaster Online.
Moore uses genetic genealogy, which uses an unknown person’s DNA to trace his or her ancestors as a way of finding a suspect using voluntary DNA samples and a massive DNA database. At first, the Lancaster County case stymied her.
“Usually I’m able to identify common ancestors. But because the common ancestors between the matches and the suspect in this case were probably back in the 1700s [or] 1600s, I wasn’t able to approach it the way that I do most cases,” Moore said, according to ABC.
“It was really tugging at me, so I decided to develop a new approach. There was a very clear migration pattern from a town in southern Italy called Gasperina, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania,” she said, adding that she found names through old membership documents in a social club.
“Those membership cards listed when people were born. Because I knew that this suspect had roots in this small town Gasperina, I went through all of those cards and found the people who had immigrated from Gasperina to Lancaster,” Moore said.
She came up with a list of 2,300 names.
“About half are gonna be female. A certain percentage are gonna be too old or too young. I knew this person had to be fully Italian from Gasperina or close by,” Moore said. “I worked through each and every one of those families that had migrated from that very specific town. It was really only possible because of this very unique [membership card] record collection that Lancaster had.”
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