What was the role of your team in that? How did that come to be?

So it's kind of an amazing story, really.

Before getting into investigative genetic genealogy, I was a wrongful conviction attorney at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

And I went to law school with the purpose of working with wrongful convictions because I was just so struck by the problem when I first encountered it through documentaries about the West Memphis Three, for example, who were wrongfully convicted in my view.

So as part of that education, I actually interned for the Minnesota Innocence Project and I come from Minnesota.

So that was a real privilege for me.

This was way back in 2012, in fact, actually it was 2011.

Nevertheless, as an FBI agent, I can go and put together a warrant and get with the judge and force you to provide those profiles, correct?

Um, if they're go- they're- looks like they're going down that route of genetic genealogy, explain the process, the challenges, and the timing of all of it.

So they're going to have to develop a different kind of genetic profile from this evidence.

It sounds like the CODIS attempt failed, and that's using traditional DNA technology that we're familiar with from the O.J. Simpson case, for example.

It's pretty old technology.

The new kind of technology that's available today allows us to develop a much more sophisticated DNA profile, uh, that looks at the entire human genome, and that profile can be uploaded to a couple of consumer genetic genealogy databases.

So these are databases that ordinary members of the public have uploaded their DNA to for the purposes of finding out more about their families or discovering, uh, unknown things about their families.

And those people, about 3 million of them, ordinary members of the public, have opted into law enforcement searching.

Um, I guess at some point if you do connect it, it would lead to probable cause and hopefully to get a more definitive sample like they did in the, uh, case involving the four students from Idaho.