Kristen Mittelman

In April of two thousand and twenty, the Beaumont Police Department paid approximately ten thousand dollars to a forensic laboratory called Othram, located in The Woodlands, Texas, about ninety miles west of Beaumont.

Othram was founded by David and Kristen Mittelman, and had quickly become one of the leading labs in the country for extracting usable DNA profiles from degraded or decades-old evidence.

The lab received two pieces of evidence from the Edwards case: a cutting from the bed comforter collected at the crime scene and the preserved vaginal swab from the sexual assault kit.

Using a process called differential extraction and a machine called the Illumina NovaSeq six thousand for whole genome sequencing, Othram built a genetic profile from the twenty-five-year-old evidence.

Now, as those of you out there who follow this kind of stuff, you know DNA has factored often into cold cases that we cover on 2020.

So today we thought we'd take a look at how it all works with the help of two people who are just doing incredible work in the field, David and Kristen Mittelman.

Their company, Othram, uses cutting edge technology to build DNA profiles that have been critical in solving some of the most infamous crimes all across this country.

So David and Kristen, welcome.

That's why you rack.

[upbeat music] Welcome back to 2020 The After Show.

I am here with David and Kristen Mittelman, who work in forensic genetic genealogy, getting a great masterclass in what this is all about.

You mentioned CODIS earlier, and we've all heard about that, that database, but the idea that you're able to kind of go beyond that, right? And, and, and give us a sense, because people know a little bit about this, but they don't really know the details of the science behind it.

If there's DNA at a crime scene, it's probably your fastest way to solve that case and get to an identity.

To help us understand what DNA can reveal, we turned to forensic experts David and Kristen Mittelman of Othram, whose work has previously been featured on 20/20.

You're basically building a library surrounding this, this sample of DNA.

DNA is just like a camera.