Will County coroner’s cold case unit, Othram partner to solve four cases using forensic genetic genealogy
Brenda Sue Black was found April 1981 in a ditch near Interstate 80 and U.S. Route 30 in New Lenox.
Donald Rozek was found November 1974 in McClintock Acres in Channahon.
Marie R. O’Brien was found May 1997 in a Rockdale landfill where debris from the Rust Craft building in Joliet was moved to.
Webster Fisher was found July 1980 in a sealed wooden crate at the Lockport Lock.
All four were identified by the Will County coroner’s office cold case unit using Othram, a company that uses forensic genetic genealogy to help identify missing people, victims and the perpetrator of a crime, officials said. Black and Rozek were identified in October 2022 and O’Brien and Fisher were identified in March, said Gene Sullivan, Will County cold case investigator.
“The forensic genetic genealogy really opened up the world for us,” Sullivan said.
The cold case unit, which consists of Sullivan, a retired Romeoville police officer, and Joe Piper, a retired Lockport police officer, started in 2009 under former Coroner Patrick O’Neil, Sullivan said. Will County Coroner Laurie Summers has helped expand the unit’s work, Sullivan said, by increasing funding to send cases to Othram.
Sullivan said he and Piper send Othram remains to be tested for DNA. The most successful DNA draws have been from a femur bone or part of a skull, he said.
Kristen Mittelman, Othram chief development officer, said a standard DNA test works best on a DNA sample that is from one person, fresh, not contaminated, and high in quantity. In cold cases, the DNA doesn’t fit that criteria, she said.
Othram officials built a lab and a process, called forensic grade genome sequencing, to identify a person from a piece of DNA in a cold case, Mittelman said. In some cases, if there are multiple strands of DNA in a sample, Othram officials have been able to help investigators identify a victim and a perpetrator of a crime, she said.
Othram officials build a DNA profile that can identify immediate family as well as distant relatives based on genetic genealogy and public records, such as marriage, divorce and death certificates, Mittelman said. Othram gives the investigators a list of possible relatives and if, after talking to investigators, someone says their relative went missing or was killed then investigators ask the person to take a DNA test to confirm he or she is a DNA match to the DNA pulled from the remains, she said.
When using websites such as 23andMe or Ancestry, the user is asked if his or her DNA could be used by law enforcement. Mittelman and Summers said when agreeing to that question those users could potentially help solve cold cases.
“For families, their life stops the minute that they lose their loved one,” Mittelman said. “Being able to bring them the truth, even if the truth isn’t what they were hoping to hear, allows them to be able to turn the page.”
Othram gives investigators a report that’s essentially a family tree, Sullivan said.
For example, in Rozek’s case, Sullivan sent Othram a bone fragment. Othram came back with data on potential relatives in Washington, Hawaii, Florida and Alabama and locally in Bolingbrook and Naperville, he said.
Sullivan said the person in Naperville said he had an uncle who went missing many years ago, and he agreed to take a DNA test. The match was close enough that investigators determined Rozek was his uncle, Sullivan said.
“They gives us leads,” Piper said. “We then follow up those leads and it’s just whittling down, whittling down.”
Black, of Ohio, was found with no clothing, no identification and no jewelry, Sullivan said. Because her body was found in a ditch along a highway, Sullivan said her case was uploaded into the FBI’s Highway Serial Killings initiative.
A man, who police now know is Black’s half brother had uploaded his DNA into a genealogy website years after she went missing. But the initial review of his DNA showed he wasn’t a match, so the investigation moved on, Sullivan said.
It wasn’t until Othram did a wider study of the DNA that they identified the man as Black’s half brother, Sullivan said.
“We had looked at that case, but because it didn’t match on DNA we moved on,” Sullivan said. “They ended up doing a manual comparison for us and said, ‘yeah, it does match’ but not to that level that the computers would say, ‘go for it.’”
O’Brien and her half brother were taken from their mother by Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, Piper said. Her half brother was adopted, Piper said, but O’Brien bounced between foster homes.
Piper said her half brother never saw her again after his adoption. Investigators were able to identify him because he uploaded his DNA into a genealogy website.
Her half brother told investigators he uploaded his DNA in the hope of locating his sister, Piper said. While he received sad news, Piper said the brother received closure learning what happened to his sister.
Fisher’s wife told investigators he left their house in Chicago to go to the corner store to buy cigarette’s and he never made it back home. Fisher was a trucker, Sullivan said, so his daughter told investigators that anytime she drove by a truck she would glance into the cabin to see if the driver was her father.
Both women told investigators learning about what happened to Fisher brought them closure, Sullivan said.
“Everyone of these people are somebody’s daughter, somebody’s aunt, somebody’s sister, brother, mom, dad. They matter,” Piper said.
The Will County cold case unit and Othram officials are working on three more cases, including identifying a man found in Bolingbrook, Piper said.
A skull was discovered in 1998 in a wooded area behind a truck stop off Interstate 55 and Illinois Route 53 in Bolingbrook, Piper said. Investigators determined the remains are of a Black man who died of a single gunshot wound to the head with evidence of foul play.
It’s likely he died between one to five years before his remains were found, and he was between 18 to 24 years old at the time of his death, Piper said.
Piper said within the last two weeks, he’s received promising leads about the man’s identity.
“We’re close, but understand that there could be one miss link in that close that stops us,” Sullivan said.
