Colleen M. Fitzpatrick

As months turned into years, Catherine Slater's search for Benjamin Kyle's real identity had become an emotional odyssey.

Then, in February 2009, she got a call from someone new, Colleen Fitzpatrick.

A physicist by training with a PhD from Duke University, Colleen was no ordinary genealogist.

She had built laser measurement tools for NASA and run her own op- Vendredi.

Colorado, the 1970s through mid-80s.

After that, a void.

But they wouldn't need to rely on Benjamin's memory to determine who he was if Colleen Fitzpatrick was successful.

She looked through archived local newspapers across Indianapolis, Boulder, and Denver.

Today, there's a powerful new tool that could change everything, genetic genealogy.

In some of our past videos, which we will link in the description below for those of you interested, we've talked about genetic genealogists such as Eric Schubert, CeCe Moore, and Colleen Fitzpatrick before on this channel and how their groundbreaking work has solved a number of decades-old mysteries.

Their process is as fascinating as it is effective.

Using autosomal DNA, they build intricate family trees for the unidentified DNA.

Not just the United States, in the world, the canal murders case was the very first one.

And so I actually became friends with a forensic genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick, And she's the one who cracked the case.

And we were out.

I'm here in L.A. We were out having lunch somewhere.

so years go by decades go by yeah it's 19 years that go by and eventually a cold case unit gets formed and they're looking into the canal murders again and they started with that list of 600 people damn and they tried to go through the backgrounds all of that but I mean there's There's 600 people and it was, it was going too slow and they didn't really, they didn't get anywhere, but then they caught a break in 2014.

There was this forensic genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick.

And she went to a conference that law enforcement were having talking about this technique for, you know, genetic DNA and how you can help with cases.

Her company was called Identifiers International, and they had developed this software that could mine public genealogy databases and look for matches for DNA.

They carefully recovered bone, specifically a piece of his femur, along with more teeth, and handed it to a private organization that specialized in exactly this kind of impossible case, Identifinders International.

led by a veteran forensic genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick.

By 2019, Fitzpatrick was one of the most respected names in the field, a scientist who'd spent years using genealogy to identify remains that had defeated everyone else.

If anyone could pull a name out of the boy's bones, it was her.

as a nonprofit set up to do one thing, give John and Jane Doe's their names back using genetic genealogy.

Now, co-founder Margaret Press, PhD, was a writer and genealogist, and co-founder Colleen Fitzpatrick, PhD, was a retired nuclear physicist who had moved into forensic genealogy.

And this project uses genetic genealogy to help law enforcement solve crimes.

So they took their first case in September of 2017 and incorporated the month after.

From there it is a matter of building the tree, identifying where the branches converge and narrowing to the individual who fits the demographic profile.

Abbott worked with Colleen Fitzpatrick, an American forensic genealogist.

The tree they built ran to thousands of people, and in July of 2022 they announced a name, Carl Webb, born in 1905 in Footscray in Melbourne, an electrical engineer and instrument maker.

the youngest of six children.