Q&A: Colleen Fitzpatrick, a physicist who cracks cold murder cases

Colleen Fitzpatrick has always had a passion for genealogy. And languages. And math. She grew up in New Orleans, studied physics at Rice University, and earned a PhD in nuclear physics at Duke University in 1983. Initially she went into teaching. Over time, she has woven her diverse interests into an evolving career that has included working in industry, forming her own companies, writing books, and combing DNA databases to develop tools for forensic identification.

In the mid 2000s, Fitzpatrick and her late partner, Andy Yeiser, began tackling forensics genealogy cases. In 2012 they founded Identifinders International to assist adoptees in tracking down their biological families, to make military identifications, and to help solve cold murder cases. In 2017 she cofounded a nonprofit, the DNA Doe Project, to identify unknown dead people. The project has so far made around 25 identifications, and volunteers are currently working on about 80 cases.

On the side, Fitzpatrick has tracked down and obtained DNA from a relative of Amelia Earhart’s navigator, helped Holocaust survivors find their families, and debunked international literary frauds. Throughout Fitzpatrick’s varied career, there have been two constants: teaching herself new skills and juggling large quantities of data. “In both nuclear physics and genealogy,” she says, “you have to extract the signal from the noise.”

PT: How did you start your career?

FITZPATRICK: I was not cut out for the publish-or-perish universe, so I got a job teaching physics at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. I had a really good connection with my students, and I loved teaching. But I was not paid much, and I was in an era of my life when I needed to be practical. I needed to be rewarded for my work. It got to a point where I wasn’t happy.

I started to tinker with holograms. I got very excited because holograms are just beautiful—they are a combination of physics, math, chemistry, psychology, perception, and memory. It was a whole new universe, and I got hooked. I was up at midnight in the physics building trying to make holograms.

Meanwhile, I started looking for another job. I ended up moving to Rockwell International in Southern California in 1984.

PT: What did you do there?

FITZPATRICK: I designed laser radar systems. But by the late 1980s, it was the end of Star Wars—President Reagan’s missile defense system—and we had a recession in California. A lot of aerospace people were let go, and programs were drying up.

I heard from friends about a company, Spectron Development Labs, that specialized in holography and laser measurement techniques. My hair caught fire and I raced to the nearest telephone and asked if the company was hiring. At Spectron, I helped build a holographic nondestructive inspection station. You could load a rocket motor body, for example, and look for flaws.

But then Spectron was bought. The culture there changed, and many people I admired were driven out. I survived and became principal investigator on a NASA laser, the first laser on the Space Shuttle. Still, the company was disintegrating, and I was laid off in 1989.

PT: Is that when you started your own company?

FITZPATRICK: Yes. I had a beautiful holography lab in my garage and that became the basis of my laser diagnostics company. My first contract was to do nondestructive testing on metal matrix components in high-performance aircraft parts. I learned how to write proposals and speak to customers, and I learned new technology. My company lasted 16 years.

PT: What have you been doing since then?

FITZPATRICK: Just like holography went from a hobby to a job, this time my hobby of genealogy turned into a successful career. I had been working on a book about new ways of doing genealogy. I took an extension class on forensics at the University of California, Irvine. We learned about collecting physical evidence, blood splatter, and so on. Coming forward to 2005, it all came together in my brain—the science, the forensics, the ability to write very well, and the love of family history. And with my company going downhill, my creative side went to work as a way to survive—writing the book was an escape. The book started my new career: forensics.

PT: Who was your first client?

FITZPATRICK: One day someone surfed onto my website and said, “Can you find somebody for me?” He was from an international investment company specializing in real estate that had been escrowed by the state for nonpayment of taxes. The company was looking for the property owners to make a deal with them to pay off the tax liability, sell the property, and share the profits. I helped the company find those individuals. He’d say something like “Here’s the name of someone who owned this lot in Florida. Their last known address was in France.” I found people in Morocco, Estonia, Israel. In one case it was a street woman in Argentina, and she rejected the money—she was afraid her dead husband’s wealthy family would kill her.

PT: How do you find people?

FITZPATRICK: It involves calling foreign countries, using Google Translate, and contacting city halls. It involves sending registered letters. I developed a network of students in various countries. I would pay them a few dollars to check if the person was at the address I gave them. They sent me pictures of the front doors at the addresses so I could see they had been there. And when they found the person, I gave them a bonus. During the two years I worked for that investment company as a contractor, I solved about 75 cases in 30 countries.

PT: How did DNA become a part of your work?

FITZPATRICK: I had been doing research on my family since the 1970s. Around 2000 I became aware that genealogists were using DNA. And by 2005, when the field was really rolling, I was pretty well oiled in DNA.

In 2008 somebody contacted me about working on a project for the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory. They were trying to identify a frozen human arm and hand found in a glacier in Alaska; apparently it belonged to a victim of a 1948 plane crash. We eliminated all the passengers except one, so we wanted to find a living relation of the one remaining candidate to serve as a family reference. With degraded DNA, like from the frozen hand, you have to look at mitochondrial DNA, which traces along the mother’s line.

I had to use my genealogical knowledge to find the victim’s family. The man’s mother was born in Ireland in the 1870s. So I researched to see if I could find any descendants from her or her siblings in Ireland. Thanks to my persistence, I finally found a family reference, a distant cousin living in a small town in Ireland. The cousin said, “I think that’s my great-great-grandmother’s family.” It turned out he was a mitochondrial match.

PT: How did you turn your skills into a way to solve murder cases?

FITZPATRICK: I realized that the markers used for genealogy are the same ones that the forensics community uses. Y-DNA follows the male line of the family, like the family name. I went to police departments and said, “If you give me a Y-DNA profile from a crime scene, I will compare it with profiles in genealogy databases, and that may give you a possible last name for your suspect.” I have worked on more than 120 cases using Y-DNA.

There are about 8000 genealogy databases. My software covers about 3000 of them right now. I give the police a name and that’s it. It can save them a lot of time focusing the investigation if I give them a lead that works.

For example, in 2013 the Phoenix police department sent me the Y-DNA profile from a cold homicide case from the early 1990s. The profile is a string of numbers. I plugged it into software that my partner, Andy, had created that compares the strings of numbers with the databases that are online and public. I found a match with a group named Miller. I told the police. They had around 2000 suspects, and they narrowed it to five with the name Miller. Of those, there was only one possibility. They got a DNA sample from him, and it matched the DNA at the scene of the crime. To my knowledge, that was the first cold case solved with forensic genealogy.

For a case in Tacoma, Washington, I gave the name Washburn. The detective tested 127 people, and a Washburn was in the last batch. In January 2019 he was found guilty of abducting and killing Jennifer Bastian in 1986.

PT: How has the burgeoning of genetic testing among the public affected your work?

FITZPATRICK: In 2006, 23andMe [a DNA testing company that markets to consumers] was born. Rather than Y-DNA or mitochondrial DNA, they used a different type of marker that occurs on all DNA, called SNPs, or single nucleotide polymorphisms. They don’t have to worry about the actual gene. Instead, they look at SNPs and see if they are associated with a particular gene, say for diabetes.

If you and I both get tested and we share half our SNPs, then we must be siblings. It’s not that we share a particular SNP, but rather how many we share that is indicative of how closely we are related. Not only can you connect every line in the family, but you can estimate how far back two people are related.

The burgeoning of genetic genealogy among the public has resulted in a dramatic increase in the size of the direct-to-consumer databases, which has provided more data to use for comparison.

PT: How does that apply to solving cold cases?

FITZPATRICK: The direct-to-consumer DNA testing companies—Ancestry.com and others—had data for more than 30 million people. The forensics people were scratching their heads, saying, “We wish we could use that data.”

An independent website called GEDmatch [founded in 2010] made that possible. Law enforcement extracts DNA from unidentified remains or from a crime scene. Once you have the DNA, you can have an independent lab use it to create data in the same format that can be uploaded to GEDmatch. You use its database to compare. That’s what allowed us to start identifying John and Jane Does. I also use this method to identify suspects in homicide and rape cases.

PT: What other types of cases do you take on?

FITZPATRICK: I’m involved in historical cases that have been solved through DNA. I’ve solved a number of adoption searches using direct-to-consumer DNA. I get called in to educate law enforcement in this area.

I’ve helped people who lost their identity in the Holocaust find their families. I’ve also proved that some Holocaust memoirs were lies. They are beautiful, heartwarming stories, but they are frauds, written to make money. One was Misha, A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. It was a bestseller. The author claimed she was a Jewish child who had survived by wandering the forests in Europe. Somebody asked me to look into it. We found address and school records and documents. She was Catholic and grew up with her grandparents in Belgium and made the story up. We asked the author to take a DNA test, but she caved.

One interesting case that I worked on for fun involved Amelia Earhart’s navigator, Fred Noonan. His mother had died in 1897, when he was three. I had to go back to the 1600s, following the family line, and then bring it forward to find a mitochondrial reference. I finally found someone who could serve as a family reference. They didn’t know who Noonan was, and it was a challenge to convince them to give me a DNA sample. But Noonan’s mitochondrial match is now in my freezer downstairs. If the crash site is ever found and the remains don’t match Earhart’s DNA, they can test them for Noonan.