Credit: Cobb County District Attorney
Using a 51-year-old DNA sample, bones dead and buried for 49 years, and forensic genetic genealogy technology, the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office working with DNA Labs International have identified the murderer of 9-year-old Debbie Lynn Randall.
On Jan. 13, 1972, Randall, a 3rd grade student, was walking home from the laundromat when she was abducted. The laundromat was only a half block away from the family home. After 16 days in which 4,000 community members participated in an extensive search for Randall, she was finally found. She had been raped and strangled to death. Marietta (Ga.) Police detectives investigated and followed up on hundreds of leads without success.
Dedicated to closing this cold case, in October 2001, the FBI conducted forensic testing on a strand of the suspect’s hair removed from the victim at the crime scene 29 years earlier. While testing could not provide a suspect’s name, it did rule out many other potential suspects.
Then, in May 2015, a piece of cloth recovered from Randall’s body was sent to Sorensen Forensics for DNA analysis. This resulted in a partial profile attributed to an unknown male. There was another round of DNA testing in 2019, but no leads were found.
In 2023, the police turned to forensic genetic genealogy thanks to funds granted by Georgia’s Criminal Justice Coordinating Council. The department worked with DNA Labs International to obtain a SNP profile, genealogy research, and family tree from the DNA recovered from the cloth.
DNA Labs International quickly found distant relatives in the GEDMatch Pro and FamilyTreeDNA databases using the SNP profile developed with the Forenseq Kintelligence System. The family tree pointed to the Rose family, and they cooperated by providing a sample DNA for comparison. The DNA left on Randall’s body and the comparison familial DNA was consistent. William B. Rose was the likely culprit.
But William Rose committed suicide in 1974, just two years after the crime. So, investigators received permission to exhume the body. DNA Labs International then did STR confirmation on the exhumed remains per the DOJ interim guidelines to ensure the DNA recovered from the scene was a match to William Rose. It was.
From initial research to family comparisons and exhumation, it took just 6 months for DNA Labs International to confirm Rose’s identity on the crime scene evidence collected from the rape and murder of Randall 51 years ago.
Rachel Oefelein, Chief Scientific Officer at DNA Labs International, attributes a lot of that to the power of Forenseq Kintelligence.
“Kintelligence does not have any limit to degradation,” she explained. In this case, that was a huge plus as the 51-year-old sample taken from Randall’s body was very degraded after all that time.
“They had a lot of DNA left available to us, so that was good, but it was a very degraded sample,” said Oefelein. “Even though it was well preserved, it’s still a 50-year-old sample. That’s why it’s so great not having degradation limits. In cases where you might have tried microarray testing or whole genome sequencing and they failed, we can go back [in with Kintelligence] for a challenging sample.”
Cobb County District Attorney Flynn D. Broady Jr., confirmed Rose was not a suspect prior to the genetic genealogy findings. This is also the only case investigators believe Rose was involved in. He had family and acquaintances that lived in the same complex as Randall and was thought to have seen the little girl playing outside many times.
Randall’s mother dies in 2008 and her father in 2022, but her brother was at the press conference to witness justice enacted 51 years later.
“A message to murderers and rapists: we will never relent in our efforts to bring you to justice,” said Broady Jr. “If you have committed a crime, we’re coming after you. It may take us some time, but with the new technologies coming out every day, we’re going to do everything we can to solve our cold cases to make sure we bring people to justice and provide answers to families.”