In 2004, the remains of a female were found in a rolled-up carpet in Phoenix by an ROTC cleanup crew. The Phoenix Police Department projected her to be a white woman between 35 and 50 years old with brown hair, but the condition of her skeletal remains made it impossible to obtain adequate fingerprints for identification. With that, the case went cold.
Fifteen years later, DNA Doe Project (DDP) produced a lead on the woman within 48 hours and has now positively identified the remains as Ginger Lynn Bibb.
In April 2019, Detective Stuart Somershoe of the Phoenix Police Department’s Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit enlisted DDP to work on their 16-year cold case. While fingerprints were impossible, Bode Cellmark was able to extract DNA from Jane Doe’s bones for HudsonAlpha to sequence.
Running the DNA through GEDmatch, DDP found a close match.
“In cases like this, genetic genealogy provides an additional method for identification, which is beneficial for law enforcement,” DDP team leader Cairenn Binder told Forensic. “It also provides a great service to the family of the deceased, who finally find the answer to what happened to their loved one.”
Once DDP identified a close match, Somershoe contacted Bibb’s family and they agreed to take part in DNA testing.
DNA Doe Project uses GEDmatch as their primary database when traditional methods fail to identify the deceased. Even so, this case was unique as the team was able to find a match and identify Bibb in less than two days—a rapid turnaround time even for DDP.
“On many of our cases, there are no close matches so we have to use a second database—FTDNA—to find more matches,” Binder explained. “For this case, there was no need to use FTDNA. It goes to show that even with the changes that impacted the GEDmatch database in 2019, we are still able to utilize it to solve cases.”
Photo credit: DNA Doe Project