Aug 7, 2026 · 14 min · 10 segments
It was a pleasure to sit down with Sgt Rob Jayberg of the Vancouver Police Department this week. We talked about his new position as supervisor and manager of the VPD’s first ever cold case team…
Eve LazarusHost
When you're solving these cases now in twenty twenty-six, what sort of tools can you apply to them?
These include advances in DNA testing and, where appropriate, forensic investigative genetic genealogy, which I'm sure you've heard that term before.
It only started to be used in major crime and missing persons investigations in twenty eighteen, but it's proven to be a game changer in solving cold cases.
When you spit into a tube and send it off to a site like Family Tree DNA to find out about your ancestry, and if you give your permission, your DNA goes into a database called GEDmatch.
Investigators can then look for similarities between the DNA from a crime scene and search for close family members on GEDmatch.
Genealogists will then search through public records and narrow down a list of suspects for police.
Even a file we went through ten years ago, there's-- might be a, a detective's notebook that is handwritten, and it's not digitized.
So we wanna drag that information into a digital archive so we can look at it, mine it for information.
So each time a file gets opened up and looked at or investigated, it creates another volume of information for us because many aspects of the file are duplicated in that investigation, and each one stands alone.
So we have to go through and identify what is duplicate, what is new, what is added onto the file, and also try to find gaps and information there.
So if we have over four hundred unsolved homicides, you can count on that we're probably going to be going back and checking the, the digital review of all of those files.
When you're solving these cases now in twenty twenty-six, what sort of tools can you apply to them?
These include advances in DNA testing and, where appropriate, forensic investigative genetic genealogy, which I'm sure you've heard that term before.
It only started to be used in major crime and missing persons investigations in twenty eighteen, but it's proven to be a game changer in solving cold cases.
When you spit into a tube and send it off to a site like Family Tree DNA to find out about your ancestry, and if you give your permission, your DNA goes into a database called GEDmatch.
Investigators can then look for similarities between the DNA from a crime scene and search for close family members on GEDmatch.
Genealogists will then search through public records and narrow down a list of suspects for police.
Even a file we went through ten years ago, there's-- might be a, a detective's notebook that is handwritten, and it's not digitized.
So we wanna drag that information into a digital archive so we can look at it, mine it for information.
So each time a file gets opened up and looked at or investigated, it creates another volume of information for us because many aspects of the file are duplicated in that investigation, and each one stands alone.
So we have to go through and identify what is duplicate, what is new, what is added onto the file, and also try to find gaps and information there.
So if we have over four hundred unsolved homicides, you can count on that we're probably going to be going back and checking the, the digital review of all of those files.
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