"Sean McCowan carries the burden on his wrist. The number of days 14,219 etched in silver on a bracelet. A constant reminder of the agonizing, 39-year wait between the December 1983 murder of his sister, Erin Gilmour, and the 2022 arrest of the man who killed her. "Joy isn't the right word. It's just relief," McCowan said, remembering the "we got him" call from a Toronto police detective. "I'm a lighter person as a result because I've got the answers.""
"Cracking cold case killings, sometimes decades after the fact, has always been a difficult task for police. But the challenge has recently become much steeper. That's because of new limits on their best tool genetic genealogy, which uses tiny snippets of DNA to track down killers via distant family relations. The U.S.-based website Ancestry.com is the world's largest repository of public genealogical records, pulling together birth, death, marriage, immigration and other documents from across the globe."
"And it has become a go-to-source for police forces seeking to map out family trees. WATCH | What losing access to Ancestry.com data means for police: Police cold case units say catching killers just got tougher after Ancestry.com restricted access to its vast genealogical database. For The National, Jonathon Gatehouse explains how that pool of genetic information helped bring a murderer to justice 40 years later, and what losing access means for catching others. A ban on police But a recent update and clarification"
Sean McCowan waited 39 years for answers after his sister Erin Gilmour's 1983 murder, marking that time with a bracelet inscribed 14,219 days. The 2022 arrest of her killer brought relief rather than joy. Cracking cold-case killings has relied increasingly on genetic genealogy, which uses DNA snippets to trace distant relatives and build family trees. Ancestry.com hosts vast public genealogical records and became a key resource for police mapping. A recent terms-of-service update now bans law enforcement from accessing paid-subscription content without a court order, complicating detectives' research and hampering cold-case investigations.
Read at www.cbc.ca
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