THE WOMAN WHO SOLVED 109 CRIMINAL CASES

GENETIC-GENEALOGY SUPER-SLEUTH CECE MOORE HAS TURNED MURDER INTO A SCIENCE – AND FOREVER CHANGED THE WAY LAW ENFORCEMENT CATCHES CRIMINALS

- K.C Baker

Curled up in comfy pyjamas on the sofa in her Orange County, California, home, CeCe Moore could spend hours sifting through public records, building intricate family trees on her laptop, and tracking down missing links the way others might dive into a challenging crossword puzzle or a brain teaser. Though she has no formal training, she got so good at helping people find their birth parents or long-lost siblings after launching her highly successful blog Your Genetic Genealogist in 2010 that she became a popular presenter at genealogy conferences around the US. It was at one such event in 2018 that everything changed for Moore. After seeing an online headline about how the Golden State Killer had finally been arrested, she learned authorities had identified 74-year-old retired police officer Joseph DeAngelo after DNA found at the crime scenes was linked to DNA one of his relatives had uploaded to the public database GEDmatch. “I knew that my life and all of the genetic genealogy,” Moore recalls, “was never going to be the same.”