‘The GoFundMe Generation’ Wants to Pay to Solve Murders

Last January, Carla Davis was on LinkedIn when she saw an intriguing post: “Identify the Victim of 1978 Tennessee Murder.”

Ever since the man’s burned remains were found on a campground outside Nashville, the authorities had been trying to figure out who he was and who had killed him. After 42 years with no leads, the local sheriff’s office wanted to try a relatively new technique pioneered in the Golden State Killer case, combing through consumer genetic databases to find the man’s relatives, however distant, to triangulate his identity. The local sheriff couldn’t afford it, so a genetics lab called Othram was panhandling on the internet.

Othram’s founder and chief executive, David Mittelman, a metaphor-loving geneticist, compares the forensic money request to Kickstarter. “Instead of a product, you’re getting justice for a family,” he said. “We’re crowdfunding for justice.”

That phrase has traditionally meant funding bail or legal bills for the accused, but Othram was seeking $5,000 to sequence the victim’s DNA. On a whim, Ms. Davis, a wellness coach who lives in Dubai, donated the remaining $3,897.52 needed.

She didn’t stop there. Over the last year, Ms. Davis has given more than $100,000 to Othram, as if it were a charity rather than a venture-backed start-up, primarily for cold cases in Mississippi, her birth state.

“A friend told me I should just invest in the company,” Ms. Davis said. “It didn’t matter to me that it wasn’t tax-deductible. These families have waited so long for answers.”

Ms. Davis is part of a growing cohort of amateur DNA detectives, their hobby born of widespread consumer genetic testing paired with an unquenchable desire for true crime content. Why just listen to a murder podcast when you can help police comb through genealogical databases for the second cousins of suspected killers and their unidentified victims?

So far donors around the country have given at least a million dollars to the cause. They could usher in a world where few crimes go unsolved — but only if society is willing to accept, and fund, DNA dragnets.

‘It’s Not Quite “Minority Report”’

It’s hard to commit a crime, or do anything, without leaving some DNA behind. While crime scenes may include incriminating genetic evidence from perfectly innocent people, “probative” DNA — material that is clearly relevant to an investigation, such as a bloodstain — can be a powerful clue. But only if investigators can match it to the right person.

The case of the Golden State Killer, who committed 13 murders and dozens of rapes in California, went unsolved for decades, until the F.B.I. decided in 2018 to use DNA evidence from a sexual assault to build out the perpetrator’s likely family tree. The resulting identification and prosecution of a 72-year-old former police officer proved the value of what’s called “forensic genetic genealogy.”

What made the investigation possible was GEDmatch, a low-frills, online gathering place for people to upload DNA test results from popular direct-to-consumer services such as Ancestry or 23andMe, in hopes of connecting with unknown relatives. The authorities’ decision to mine the genealogical enthusiasts’ data for investigative leads was shocking at the time, and led the site to warn users. But the practice has continued, and has since been used in hundreds of cases.

Because many local agencies lack the resources to participate, philanthropists have stepped in to help. A group of well-off friends calling themselves the Vegas Justice League has given Othram $45,000, resulting in the solving of three murder-rape cases in Las Vegas, including those of two teenage girls killed in 1979 and in 1989.

“We want to help the police and the community just knock these out,” said Justin Woo, an online marketer who founded the Las Vegas group. “It’s not quite ‘Minority Report,’where you’re predicting and stopping, but if you get these people off the street through the DNA stuff, it’s really helpful.”

In the publicized cases in Las Vegas, the perpetrators were dead.

Mr. Woo said people had contacted him to ask if they could donate money to prioritize the case of a loved one. “I don’t have that ability,” he said. “But I can pass this along to Las Vegas Metropolitan Police and they decide.”

Natalie Ram, a law professor at the University of Maryland, expressed concern about “the public picking and choosing between cases,” saying investigative priorities could be determined by who can donate the most. Ms. Ram said the “largest share” of cases solved so far with the method “tend to involve white female victims.”

An existing bias toward prioritizing white victims, which has been documented in media coverage, could be compounded by the demographic makeup of the genealogy databases. Their composition “skews heavily white,” according to a recent law review article, which contrasted these databases to state collections of DNA, such as the F.B.I.’s Codis, which overrepresent Black people, who are more likely to be arrested and have their DNA taken.

Ms. Ram is also concerned about the constitutional privacy issues raised by the searches, particularly for those people who haven’t taken DNA tests or uploaded their results to the public internet.

Even if you resolve never to put your DNA on a site accessible to law enforcement authorities, you share DNA with many other people so could still be discoverable. All it takes is your sibling, aunt or even a distant cousin deciding differently.

‘The GoFundMe Generation’

As donations pour in for these searches, the fortunes of the services that make them possible are also on the rise. The two main consumer databases used for law enforcement searches — FamilyTreeDNA and GEDmatch — have both recently been acquired by larger companies, while the DNA testing behemoths Ancestry and 23andMe, which have largely resisted police access to their databases, have valuations in the billions of dollars.

Even a former F.B.I. lawyer who worked on the Golden State Killer case is getting in on the action. Steve Kramer, who said he helped the F.B.I. establish three forensic genetic genealogy units across the country, left the agency in November to help found a company seeking to automate genealogical research.

“I don’t consider genetic genealogy for just cold cases. We’ve solved active homicides within weeks,” said Mr. Kramer, who has already come up with a catchphrase. “We want to take the word serial out of serial killer.”

The philanthropy is also being fueled by true crime, an entertainment genre that has come to dominate podcast charts. Audiochuck, an Indiana company with a slate of popular true crime shows, has donated approximately $800,000 to organizations doing investigative genealogical research, including Othram, and an additional $700,000 to a nonprofit started by Ashley Flowers, host of the network’s “Crime Junkie” podcast.

“What keeps me sane is knowing we’re doing something to make it better,” said Ms. Flowers, whose show largely consists of discussing murders in detail.

The nonprofit, called Season of Justice, has raised another $250,000, some through crowdfunding, and so far, has made grants toward 53 unsolved murders.

“I was pretty stunned when we put our PayPal button up and raised that money almost without trying,” said Steve DuBois, the nonprofit’s executive director. “This is the GoFundMe generation, this is what they do.”

The processing of DNA evidence typically costs around $5,000. And then there’s the painstaking creation of the family tree by forensic genetic genealogists. This new breed of experts are often women, like Ms. Davis, who honed their skills initially as amateurs piecing together their own family history.

A ‘Search Angel’

For most of her life, Carla Davis did not know who her father was. Her teenage mother, who had kept the man’s identity a secret, died in a motorcycle accident when Ms. Davis was 5 years old. Raised by her grandmother in a Mississippi town with just 2,000 people, a population that almost certainly included her father, Ms. Davis had no way to find out who he was.

That is, until four decades later, when relatively inexpensive consumer genetic tests became popular. Starting in 2013, Ms. Davis sent vials of her saliva to 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA and Ancestry, which extracted and analyzed her DNA for about $100 each, and then provided lists of other customers to whom she was genetically related, unearthing third cousins.

From there, she tracked down census records, marriage licenses, death records, obituaries, and social media accounts to build out her unknown father’s family tree, much like putting together a puzzle, but one filled with relatives. After three years, she found the missing piece: Her father was a drag car racer who had lived mere miles from her childhood home. He had died of prostate cancer, but his brother took a DNA test to confirm the match.

“It felt like the weight of the world had lifted off me, like I had finally learned who I was,” Ms. Davis said. “I started learning everything I could about DNA and how to build trees.”

By then, Ms. Davis had moved from Mississippi to the United Arab Emirates, where her husband’s family-owned real estate company was based. Her daughter was grown and Ms. Davis was working as a nutrition and lifestyle consultant, advising people virtually. After absorbing books and YouTube tutorials about genetics, she joined a Facebook group called DNA Detectives, which led to a new calling: helping over 200 strangers identify their unknown parents.

“I’m a volunteer search angel,” she said.

Ms. Davis funded the Tennessee murder victim’s case because she believed in the power of her hobby to help solve crimes. She also knew the pain inflicted when a loved one is missing; years earlier, her daughter’s 11-year-old friend was abducted and killed. “For three horrible days, we didn’t know her fate,” Ms. Davis said.

Hours after Ms. Davis made the contribution, an Othram employee emailed, asking whether she’d really meant to donate almost $4,000.

“We don’t usually receive contributions of that size,” he wrote.

Donate Your Money … or Your DNA

Mr. Mittelman, Othram’s C.E.O., said his company had received more than $400,000 from philanthropic donors. According to Crunchbase, the start-up has also raised $28.5 million from institutional investors to corner the market around this new investigative technique. Founded in The Woodlands, Texas, in 2018, the company now has 30 employees, said Mr. Mittelman, including five full-time genealogical researchers, and will soon move to a new building, with a lab four times the size of its current one.

Othram’s pitch is simple: Government labs