genetics isn tjust any old tool for law enforcement, it s a particular and a potent tool because it s not like a phone number that you just change when you get too many spam calls or even a social security number that you might have reissued if somebody, you know, takes yours. it s a technology in its infancy. we don t know yet what it will tell us, how well it will tell us things about people. the big criticism of this technology is around consent. so after i get my dna tested, i can go on to gedmatch and i can upload my raw dna files to the website. here is the problem with that i share dna with my relatives, and critics argue that once i ve uploaded my dna and agree to law enforcement checks, i am by association also opting in my entire extended family. and using my dna, the police can link hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of my genetic relatives to a crime, potentially none of whom have consented to be on a database used by the police. shawna garber s link to danielle pixler
beth garber. these are the only two pictures that danielle has of her. well, danielle s dna essentially solved one part of this case, which is that we now know that grace doe is actually shawna beth garber. and that now raises a whole load of different questions because now we know who she is, we now have to ask what was she doing and, of course, who murdered her? shawna was removed from her mother and adopted when she was five years old, before danielle was born. so we re travelling to meet her older brother robert, to find out more about the family and what shawna was like. so robert always thought
when 0thram did their search, they came up with several different people that all share the same dna with the person who was found in missouri, and one of those people is called danielle pixler. she lives in topeka, kansas, so we ve come here to speak to her. i think i was in my 20s when i started to, like, you know, get on facebook. as an adult, danielle was told she had an older brother and sister that she d never met. she managed to connect with her brother robert, but she never found her sister shawna. i made posters, printed flyers. i would go into little, tiny towns. people thought i was stalking them. so where did you start putting these posters up? i tried putting them on the trees. it did not work, so i put
a sister who she d always hoped to meet one day. i didn t know if it was her or not, but it sunk in because i know 100% it is her. the nightmares are bad. i feel like i was there. in may this year, grace doe was identified as shawna beth garber. these are the only two pictures that danielle has of her. well, danielle s dna essentially solved one part of this case, which is that we now know that grace doe is actually shawna beth garber. and that now raises a whole load of different questions because now we know who she is, we now have to ask what was she doing and, of course, who murdered her?
because danielle had uploaded her dna, but because someone she d never met, who shared some of her dna, had. once one person puts up their dna, they re essentially agreeing for their entire extended family to be searchable, and that s a privacy issue, isn t it? well, it s an interesting issue. it s not really specific to dna. so suppose you and i are room mates at a home and i m not at the house and the police come in to your house and say james, could i please take a look inside your home? if you say yes, you ve essentially accepted that invitation for both of us. law enforcement doesn t access the underlying dna, but they do have access to the relationships that you would have to that unknown person in these photos. and that s the privacy concern. i think the thing that people have to make their mind up. you have two competing priorities here. the first priority is that you have an absolute right to privacy, but on the same