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We could not choose a more serene place for a homicide. On July 17, 1982, a woman's body was found in a meadow in the mountains that border the California-Nevada border near Lake Tahoe.
Footprints revealed that she and her killer had traveled one kilometer from the road to an area known as Sheep's Flat. It appeared that she was sitting on a trunk when she was shot in the head.
"I found this unusual," said Len Iljana, who was a member of the Sheriff County Sheriff's Office at the time.
For years, his colleagues and he have tried to identify the woman. They circulated press releases stating that she was between 20 and 30, five and a half feet, hazel eyes and brown hair, which she wore in a bun at the time of her death. The quality of the dental work suggested that it could be European. His last meal was a salad. None of this has led anywhere.
The team became desperate enough to explore the tracks of the mediums, he said.
On Tuesday, more than 36 years after her death, the Washoe County Sheriff's Office announced her name: Mary Edith Silvani, born September 29, 1948. The detectives also think that they now know who has it. killed.
These two identity enigmas have been solved thanks to genetic genealogy, a technique that gives a name to DNA with the help of relatives on genealogy sites. Over the past year, the method has been used to advance dozens of cold cases. This is the first time that the authorities have announced in one fell swoop that the technique was used to identify the body of an adult victim and the murderer of that person.
The role played by a group of volunteer detectives in the investigation is a little different from that of other recent cases. The role played by infidelity and adoption is pretty much the same.
Name the victim
In February 2018, investigators in Nevada heard about a DNA identification method developed by Colleen Fitzpatrick, a physicist turned forensic genealogist. They contracted the DNA Doe Project, an organization founded by Dr. Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press, writer and mystery software developer.
The couple assigned a dozen volunteers to the case. "Some are in their twenties, some are in their seventies," said Dr. Press about their pool of repeat clients, and "some are grandmothers, some of the forces are". order".
After downloading the victim's DNA For GEDmatch, a genealogical database, the group had a list of parents to work with. Each volunteer was commissioned to build a tree around a match. Whenever volunteers had problems, they knew they could talk to others who "would throw themselves like a group of sharks," said Ruth Foreman, retired director of human resources, who led the group. .
One of the most common reasons for taking a DNA test is to find a parent, so many people on genealogy sites are adopted. A friend of Mrs. Silvani fell into this category. The volunteers helped identify his mother. From there, they quickly arrived at a couple who appeared to be one of the victim's parents: John and Blanche Silvani, of Detroit.
A family member said the Silvanis had one son and two daughters. The volunteers discovered that in 1982, the year of the death of Mrs. Silvani, her son, Charles Silvani, had jumped from a parking lot in San Diego and had passed away. His life had been disrupted for years: in 1972, he killed a bar owner in Fresno, California.
A man claiming to be Ms. Silvani's nephew revealed that there was another brother, Bob, whose profile page on the Internet Movie Database revealed mainly pornographic projects from the 1970s, according to Cheryl Hester of Frisco, Texas, a volunteer accused of taking screenshots of her face. "They never looked at the camera," she said. "It was horrible."
Eventually, property records led to an old neighbour John and Blanche Silvani in Detroit. He said the couple had two sons and one daughter – not a son and two daughters. This means that Sheep's Flat Jane Doe was to be Mary Edith Silvani, who was 33 when she died. If she had lived, she would be 70 years old.
Detective Kathleen Bishop of the Washoe County Sheriff's Office found an arrest in 1974 for a crime of loitering in Detroit. Fingerprints matched.
Find the killer
The DNA Doe project seeks to identify only the bodies, not the killers. Dr. Fitzpatrick runs a separate organization, Identifinders, who tracks suspects.
Sure downloading a DNA profile at GEDmatch that had been extracted sperm discovered on the scene, Dr. Fitzpatrick identified a second cousin living in Texas. From there, Mrs. Hester, who honorsedited his genealogical skills by helping the babies of the Vietnam War find their fathers, took the lead. She finally identified a man who appeared to be the father of the suspect. Family records showed that he had a son.
The forces of order were dispatched to collect the rejected DNA when the son left his house. But it never emerged, said Dr. Fitzpatrick, because he had just died.
It was not the end. Localized investigators a son of the deceased man in a criminal database. He excluded his father as a killer. What did it mean? This meant that the deceased had a half-brother, a man he may not have known about.
Confused? In fact, discrepancies between families as defined by records versus DNAs are common. Follow a family line long enough and you will meet at least one "non paternity". Event, "To use the polite term of genealogists. Sometimes they involve infidelity.
Critics of this new approach to cold affairs warn that sooner or later, confusing family records will lead to the wrong person. Forensic genealogy has misled the police before. But for advocates of the approach, its complexity is partly why they say critics are overreacting: even though the DNA of most Americans is now identifiable, you can not just download DNA in a machine that will issue a name.
Sometimes, to go from point A to point B, you have to build a tree containing 16,000 people. That's what Mrs. Hester did. Eventually, another critical correspondence emerged and a 90-year-old parent agreed to download his DNA.
This led to James Richard Curry, born in Texas in 1946. The more Mrs. Hester read, the more excited she was. At the time of Ms. Silvani's death, he confessed to three murders and attacked people he knew. He died in January 1983, but his children offered their DNA, providing investigators with the confirmation they needed.
The team was delighted. And frustrated. Mary Edith Silvani had a name, but she was still only a collection of facts. She was born in Pontiac, Michigan, a mother who spent her life in mental hospitals and a father who died at the age of 16, leaving her homeless. She may or may not have had a baby that she abandoned for adoption in Detroit. She never had a driver's license, to the knowledge of the team. She has never been reported missing. She wore a blue swimsuit under his jeans Lee Rider, alluding to the plan to swim the day of his death.
Ms. Silvani's nephew, Robert Silvani Jr., 53, was the closest living relative. He barely knew his own father and had never met his aunt.
"We remember her now," he said, adding that in a "family with the antecedents of mine", he is grateful whenever something happens.
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