Can ‘next-Gen’ DNA testing help ID the remains of US service members killed in war? – Omaha World-Herald

The Golden State Killer never saw the law coming.

Police had never connected Joseph James DeAngelo to a spree of 13 murders, 50 rapes and more than 120 burglaries across California during the 1970s and 80s. Then, in 2018, investigators uploaded a DNA profile of one murder victims rapist into a commercial database, similar to those created by companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com.

Several people in the database shared a common ancestor with the killer, and police created a family tree. They quickly honed in on DeAngelo, then 72, and arrested him after confirming that his DNA matched the killers. He confessed to numerous crimes and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

The capture of the Golden State Killer put this technique, called genetic genealogy, in the headlines. Police now regularly use it to catch cold case killers, and to identify the remains of murder and accident victims from decades ago.

It also raised a question for historians and forensic anthropologists at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), which has labs at Offutt Air Force Base and in Hawaii: Could they use the same method to identify the war dead from World War II, Korea and Vietnam?

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Four years later, the answer appears to be yes. The accounting agency, working with its partners at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory (AFDIL) in Dover, Delaware, has begun to use a highly sensitive next-generation DNA sequencing test developed by scientists at AFDIL and Parabon NanoLabs, a pioneering genetic genealogy firm.

Someday, it may help Carrie LeGarde, a forensic anthropologist at the Offutt lab, tie a bow around DPAAs largest and most successful project to date: the identification of the unknown dead from the battleship USS Oklahoma, sunk in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Over six years, she led a team of anthropologists that examined more than 13,000 bones recovered from the ship and later buried in Hawaii in graves marked unknown.

They identified 361 of 394 missing sailors and Marines. The 92% identification rate far exceeded the 80% goal set when the first remains were disinterred in 2015.

LeGarde said she was proud to have returned so many World War II heroes to their families, nearly 80 years later. But the fact that 33 could not be given names gnaws at her just a bit.

We have done everything we can at this point, LeGarde said. Of course, I would love to identify everybody. But thats a pretty difficult task.

Traditional mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA testing involves extracting snippets of DNA from the unidentified bones and comparing them to DNA samples taken from one or more family members.

Those samples are processed at AFDIL and buttressed with traditional forensic work by DPAA anthropologists and historians, such as examining the size and shape of the bones and where and how they were found.

This process has allowed DPAA to meet or exceed a goal of 200 identifications per year some from field excavations in former war zones, and others buried as unknowns in military cemeteries.

But this method has some drawbacks.

The requirement for family-reference DNA means the Defense Department must spend time and money tracking down relatives and persuading them to submit a DNA sample from a cheek swab.

That can be hard to do. Some relatives may be suspicious of giving a sample to the government. Some of the missing service members were adopted, so their DNA doesnt match living relatives. And in some cases, family members just cant be found.

The other significant problem is the DNA itself.

DNA decays with time, making it harder to extract readable samples from bones that have been buried for decades. It deteriorates even faster when burials take place in acidic soil or in warm, wet climates like most burials from Korea, Vietnam or World War II in the Pacific.

If you dont act, you might lose it forever, said Kristen Mittelman, chief development officer for Othram, a private genetic genealogy lab in Houston that specializes in cold case IDs.

Also, chemical treatments historically used in burials to preserve bodies have had the perverse effect of destroying DNA. This has hampered several of the accounting agencys major projects.

One example: the identification of 859 Korean War unknowns whose remains were retrieved from battlefield graves during and after the war. They were soaked in formaldehyde and treated with other chemicals before they were reburied in Hawaii, and DPAA analysts have had difficulty extracting DNA from them.

In 2016, AFDIL and Parabon introduced a far more sensitive next-generation DNA test. It let investigators capture samples from as many as 60% of even highly degraded samples 10 times the rate of earlier tests.

Later innovations have allowed the lab to accurately match samples with more distant relatives, and to extract DNA from even some of the most highly degraded samples.

We mimic what 23andMe and Ancestry were trying to do, said Tim McMahon, director of the Armed Forces DNA Lab.

Were good at getting DNA from the samples they send us.

Mittelman and her husband, David, who is the CEO of the Othram DNA lab, have suggested that genetic genealogy could also offer a path to identification not only of the USS Oklahomas 33 remaining unknowns, but also 85 unidentified dead from the USS Arizona.

Moored just a few hundred yards from the Oklahoma, the Arizona blew up in a cataclysmic explosion just minutes into the attack when a Japanese bomb exploded in the ships magazine. Of the Arizonas 1,500-man crew, 1,177 were killed, the highest death toll at Pearl Harbor.

Just 105 bodies were recovered and identified. Most of the rest are permanently entombed in the sunken hull, which is now part of the USS Arizona Memorial.

But 85 sets of recovered remains could not be identified and were buried as unknowns. Currently there are no plans to identify the Arizona unknowns, because doing so would require obtaining DNA reference samples from the families of all of the 1,177 dead.

The Mittelmans believe genetic genealogy could allow DPAA to bypass that step by using their proprietary testing protocol, which they said already has been used to crack hundreds of cold cases.

David Mittelman said they use multiple methods, plug into large DNA databases, and turn over their results to authorities. They charge $5,000 per sample.

Our success rate is extremely high, he said. We pride ourselves on taking unsolvable problems and bringing them to conclusion.

Theyve pitched their idea to officials at the Armed Forces DNA Lab. In a recent report to MIA families, DPAA called it a fruitful meeting but has not announced a partnership.

Hope still remains for the 33 Oklahoma unknowns, too.

When the Oklahoma Project wrapped up last year, the unidentified bones were placed in four caskets and reburied at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. They were lowered into the earth after a solemn ceremony on Dec. 7, 2021, the 80th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.

LeGarde said one of the caskets contains an assortment of bones considered too small to be worth identifying. They will remain permanently buried.

But the three other caskets contain individual sets of remains linked by DNA, segregated and wrapped in blankets awaiting new technology that will allow them to be identified and returned to their families.

We know what casket they have gone into, LeGarde said. They could be accessed in the future if needed.

Thats encouraging news for relatives of brothers William and Robert Sellon, USS Oklahoma sailors who grew up in Randolph, Nebraska.

William, 25, known to family as Billy, was killed in the attack. He is one of the 33 who remain unknown.

Robert, known as Bobby, survived. But he never escaped the shadow of Pearl Harbor.

Ive been watching the paper, so hopeful, said Diann Sellon Gliem, 72, of Randolph, whose father, Monte, was the brothers first cousin. Theres always been a sadness in our family, and kind of a mystery.

Billy and Bobby were the only two sons of a cabinetmaker and his wife who had moved from Randolph to Missoula, Montana, in search of work during the 1930s. That is where the brothers joined the Navy.

Its not clear today how they came to be serving together on the Oklahoma, but it wasnt uncommon in the pre-World War II Navy. At least seven other sets of brothers were assigned to the ship, according to the website PearlHarbor.org.

Family stories differ about exactly what happened to them that morning. One account says they were together that Sunday morning but split up when one decided to go to church and the other skipped it. Another story says Bobby slipped out of a porthole of the ship before it capsized and swam back in a vain attempt to find Billy.

They do know Bobby never really recovered from the loss of his brother. He was wounded in the war perhaps on board the USS Northampton, to which he was transferred after Pearl Harbor. The ship was torpedoed and sunk almost a year later during a disastrous naval battle near Guadalcanal.

After the war, Bobby returned to Montana, married, fathered two daughters, split up with his wife and remarried. He liked bars and guns, and once got shot by another man. His behavior reminds relatives today of post-traumatic stress.

On June 28, 1952, he walked into a bedroom at his parents house in Missoula with a high-powered rifle and fatally shot himself. He was 31. A newspaper account quoted his parents as saying he had been despondent ever since World War II.

I was paralyzed with grief when he killed himself, recalls Glenda Rock III, Bobbys younger daughter, who was 6 when he died. He always called me Happy Jack. He was safety, was warmth.

She said no one would mention her fathers name for several years. It took time, but she has worked through her familys tragedy.

Its not painful anymore. Its a saga, Rock said.

Although she lives in Idaho, Rock said she would like to see her uncles remains buried in Nebraska if he can be identified.

Thats the ending Gliem is hoping for, too.

The story just got sadder and sadder. It was hard for me to shake it, she said. It would be a closure on one of those open-ended questions from World War II.

The area now known as Offutt Air Force Base was first commissioned as Fort Crook, an Army post to house cavalry soldiers and their horses. This photo, circa 1905, shows mounted officers and infantry troops assembling on the parade ground. The officers' quarters in the background still stand today, but the closing of Offutt's stables in 2010 ended the base's equine tradition.

Painter Frank Anania places the final bolt in the SAC emblem, newly placedon the command building at Strategic Air Command headquarters. After the command was created in 1946, SAC headquarters were moved from Andrews Field, Maryland, to Offutt Air Force Base. SAC's high-flying reconnaissance planes and bombers would go on to play a global role from the onset of the Cold War through the last bomb of the Persian Gulf War.

The Strategic Air Command "nerve center" gets a new headquarters building at Offutt Air Force Base.

Even since the late 1950s, Strategic Air Command has been holding open house events at Offutt Air Force Base to display and demonstrate aircraft for civilian visitors.Each year, the open house and air show at Offutt features aerial acts or reenactments, static displays, and booths showcasing military history and capabilities.

The first SAC museum consisted of a section of abandoned runway near the north edge of Offutt Air Force Base outside of Bellevue. However, the outdoor display left the aircraft vulnerable to the elements.

A Royal Air Force bomber crashes at Offutt Air Force Base. Beginning in the late 1950s, the RAF maintained small detachment and service facility for Vulcan bomber planes at Offutt, often participating in defense exercises and demonstrations at the base until their retirement and deactivation in 1982. Thisplane crashed at take-off at the northwest end of the main runway and then slid across Highway 73-75. All seven passengers survived.

Just weeks after the Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy visits Offutt Air Force Base, accompanied by Gen. Thomas Power of Strategic Air Command, right.

Actor Rock Hudson receives a B-52 bomber briefing during a visit to Omaha and Offutt Air Force Base. He began filming "A Gathering of Eagles" in May of that year.

An early photograph of the Ehrling Bergquist military medical clinic in Bellevue. The clinic has served Offutt Air Force Base since 1966 and was remodeled in 2013, including a grand staircase, largerphysical therapy and mental health areas, and a more private mammography waiting area.

The world's largest aircraft at that time, the C5 Galaxy was displayed as part of the open house for civilian visitors at Offutt Air Force Base.

A conference room in the SAC underground command post at Offutt Air Force Base. Strategic Air Command would be formally disestablished in 1992, but Offutt would remain the headquarters for the new United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM).

The Strategic Air Command Memorial Chapel holds a Sunday morning service as a reminder of those who have given their service and those who have died during the Command's 46-year history. Founded in in 1946, the command was dissolved in a ceremony at Offutt Air Force Base.

OPPD worker Craig Azure of Ashland holds a power line up across Platteview Road near Highway 50 so that an Albatross airplane can fit under it. After SAC was dissolved, the museum moved into a new indoor facility in 1998. Airplanes were moved from their old location at Offutt Air Force Base to their new and current home near Mahoney State Park off I-80.

The parade grounds gazebo at Offutt is dedicated in honor of Airman 1st Class Warren T. Willis, who was killed in an aircraft accidentthe previous December.

President Bill Clinton speaks at a rally at Offutt Air Force Base.

More than 300 anti-nuclear protesters gather outside Kinney Gate at Offutt Air Force Base. The rally was part of a weekend of protest against nuclear weapons, and was organized in response to an extensive nuclear arsenal review being held at the base.

Vice President Dick Cheney greets service men and women following a speech at Offutt Air Force Base's Minuteman missile in Bellevue.

Dignitaries clap along to an armed forces medley as ground is broken for the new U. S. Strategic Command Headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base. From left: Neb. Rep. Adrian Smith, Rep. Lee Terry, Neb. Governor Dave Heineman, General C. Robert Kehler, Commander USStratcom, Sen. Ben Nelson, Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, and Mayor of Bellevue, Rita Sanders.

Chris Shotton created this thank you message to the airmen and troops flying in and out of Offutt Air Force Base. Employees of area Walmart stores have been writing giant messages in fields near Highway 370 for years.

Senior Airman Kevin Chapman works the desk at the new Public Health Clinic located in the Ehrling Bergquist military medical clinic.

The new MERLIN SS200m Aircraft Birdstrike Avoidance Radar System, with the control tower in the background, photographed at Offutt Air Force Base. The system was moved here from Afghanistan in order to help detect large flocks and prevent damages to aircraft from bids, which cost the Air Force millions of dollars each year.

An aerial photo from late February of the construction site for StratCom's new $1.2 billion headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base. Despite numerous delays and setbacks, the building would be completed in 2018, six years after construction began. StratCom would then spend the next year outfitting the structure with more than $600 million worth of high-tech communications and security gear.

President Barack Obama arrives in Omaha after landing at Offutt Air Force Base. While in Omaha, Obama met with the family of Kerrie Orozco, visited a local teacher, and addressed a crowd of about 8,000 at Baxter Arena.

This year, U.S. Strategic Command unveiled a new Command and Control Facility located at Offutt Air Force Base. The "battle deck," shown here, features computer workstations, soundproofing, and the ability to connect instantly to the White House and Pentagon.

Luke Thomas and Air Force Tech Sgt. Vanessa Vidaurre at a flooded portion of Offutt Air Force Base. In March, historic flooding included breaches of two levees protecting the base from the Missouri River.

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Can 'next-Gen' DNA testing help ID the remains of US service members killed in war? - Omaha World-Herald