am trying a case, what drives me the most is the victims that i wanted to speak for them. i wanted to speak for helene. i just turned on the news. woman found murdered in denver, colorado. i just grabbed my son and screamed and cried. was it someone she worked with at the radio station, could it be the boyfriend that she just broke up with in december marks you are giving the detectives names of people? yes, we looked at everything. i was even like, where was ted bundy at that time? we have to look at every stone, every bubble. hundreds, thousands. she is driven. her tenacity is just remarkable. i knew i was going to find him. it was a competition between he and i. your heart is pounding like, oh my god, this is real. i said, i found him, i know who killed helene. hello and welcome to dateline. helene brezinski lived by a simple philosophy, smile and make the best of everything. the budding journalist did just that as she started a internship in college ra
fig out who our doe is. what if this is your family. you want to give them closure to us homicide detectives, it s way above our heads. i said, i think i know how we can do it. all of these people share some amount of dna with our unknown person. we thought, this is the family. this is it. surreal. it felt like somebody had just punched me in the stomach. it s a funny thing, isn t it? that it would be important to have a stone with your name on it. it is. it s written in stone. you re never forgotten. hello and welcome to dateline. in many cold cases, the victim s family is desperate to find their loved one s killer. but who did he murder? that team haunted a small town until a team of tenacious strangers put a name with a face. here s keith morrison with the woman with no name. here is where they put her. her permanent home. nobody really knew anything about her. this little cemetery in east texas. one simple marker on her grave. and the name that was
shouldn t worry about where your dna ends up. which how it s archived or used. do you buy that, though? do you see that privacy needs to be protected, as well, in a certain way? i think there s obviously privacy interests. when we start talking about people putting their into things like ged match or family dna, these folks area agreeing to allow law enforcement to use their dna, like anybody else booemp going in to find their biological parents that were adopted, all those things. should we have guardrails? absolutely. things like what we call informed consent, making sure that people understand what their dna is being used for. that s the thing that made the thing concerned about and something that we are very mindful and particularly in law enforcement that we follow what we call best practices. thank you so much for being with us. you ve been a pipioneer, and agn we learned this week how
we figured out hey, wait, we re being followed around by technology in our pockets, by commercial services we use. in this way, people are developing some hives about it. it began for me with realizing that all of the sort of privacy policies we signed up for back in the day don t apply in the future. for instance, ged match. this was an innocent genealogy site you go to find long lost relatives. they had become a big law enforcement tool. they were used by law enforcement to find the golden state killer, joseph james deangelo and capture him. this year, it was purchased by a company that s a forensic genetics company. any of you that had been doing this sort of gee eeology stuff and thought i am playing around with it for fun, suddenly you re part of a law enforcement database. that was a big totem.
that louisianaasted for years. he tormented his victims, some he shot and killed. others bludgeoned to death. he wore a mask and bound his victim s hands. law enforcement identified him using dna obtained at one of the crime scenes but there was no match. clue came from an amateur genealogy website why search.org. they compared their sample to people seeking family tree information. at first they identified the wrong man, a sickly 73-year-old. they eventually located de angelo using a different site, ged match, the site which is never advertised lets users upload dna profiles to expand the search for relatives. investigators upload the the crime scene dna froefl to ged