The undercover cops grabbed the chewing gum from a DJ. He helped break the murder of a teacher in 1992, police said.

His roommate is already at work. Mirack, a bubbly, enthusiastic blond woman, is alone, getting ready to go to Rohrerstown Elementary School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Before entering the cold winter of the Amish country, she dons a brown leather jacket and burgundy gloves.

But the first ring of the school rings on December 21, 1992, and Mirack is not in his class. When the director, Harry Goodman, calls the teacher, the phone rings and rings. Around 9 am, he goes to his townhouse, just steps from a barn and grain silo. The entrance door is open. He is getting closer. Mirack is motionless on the floor of the living room, the student presents scattered. His pants and underwear are torn off. The corpse always wears the jacket and the gloves, reports PennLive.

The police would eventually determine that Mirack had been beaten, strangled and sexually assaulted by an intruder. The brutal murder strikes the rural county of Pennsylvania with the subtlety of a punch.

But an arrest does not come. The family and the investigators go through the painful movements of a case that becomes cold.

The police circulate a vague description of the author. The family is offering a $ 10,000 reward. The description of a car is released. The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia, is developing a profile of the killer (a loner, someone who does not stand out in the crowd, an observer, reports LancasterOnline). Medico-legal tests excluded 60 suspects in 1995. More than 1,500 interviews are conducted. The case detective puts Mirack's picture on his desk ("I see him every day and think about it every day," he tells local media). Murdered in 2002, Mirack's mother, Gerry, pleads in the newspaper for new information. After 15 years, Mirack's brother, Vince, is putting up a billboard asking for advice. Two years later, he starts a Facebook page on the case.

But what would ultimately mark the investigators in the good filmmakers was genetic genealogy, a new technique that shocked life in many cold case investigations in a short time.

As Craig Stedman, Lancaster District Attorney, explained at a press conference Monday, the science – as well as a piece of chewing gum and a bottle of water collected at the same time. an infiltration operation – led to the arrest of Raymond Rowe.

The 49-year-old, a popular wedding DJ and event in central Pennsylvania that goes by "DJ Freez," was placed in police custody on Monday. He has not yet been officially charged and has no currently listed lawyer. Stedman has stated that he expects Rowe to be charged with first degree murder.

In his comments Monday to reporters, the district attorney admitted that his office was stuck by the cold case of 25 years until they started working with Parabon NanoLabs based in Reston.

"Very honestly, at that time, we had no more arrows in the quiver," Stedman said. "Parabon was really our last shot – we did not know it at the time, it turned out to be our best."

Genetic genealogy has been at the center of a number of recent arrests of cold cases. Splashing into the mainstream with the arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo, an alleged Golden State assassin, the method points investigators to possible suspects by matching publicly available genealogical information with the DNA recovered from them. victims and crime scenes. Last week, the same science helped the Ohio Marshals solve the mystery behind a man living for decades under the stolen identity of a dead 8 year old child.

The new technique applied to law enforcement investigations, however, has raised questions about privacy. Speaking at the press conference Monday, Parabon's founder and CEO NanoLabs, Steven Armentrout, argued that these concerns are "primarily based on misunderstandings about how the process works and the data involved."

According to Armentrout, his laboratory uses GEDmatch, an open source database where users can upload their own genealogical information to connect with relatives. GEDmatch has also opened the resource to the forces of order.

"We have to make our own privacy decisions," Armentrout said. "Speaking for myself, I chose to upload my DNA to GEDmatch and I made it public for research – it's something I do not do lightly." But I I have no hesitation if my DNA is finally used by law enforcement to even involve my next of kin if in fact their DNA is found on a crime scene.I do this because I am confident in the methods we use. "

DNA – sperm – was found on Mirack's crime scene, both on a carpet segment under the body of the victim, and on his person. Although the sample was initially managed by the FBI's DNA Indexing System (CODIS), no correspondence was found between the perpetrators of these acts or the FBI's DNA indexing system (CODIS). other victims during the years of the investigation stalled. Parabon used this material to create a genotype file that was uploaded to GEDmatch.

The file was set to private, which means that the data would not appear in other genealogy searches. But this allowed the team to pull on the possible strands of a suspect's family tree.

"GEDmatch is designed to show the amount of DNA shared between two people," explains Armentrout. "This allows a genealogical genealogist … to make inferences, find distant cousins, from the person with unknown DNA, build family trees, and finally invent suggestions of who might be a suspect."

The sample of the dead teacher has provided a link near the house.

"We do not solve these cases," CeCe Moore, an expert in genealogical genetics at Parabon, told reporters on Monday. "We are providing scientific advice, and law enforcement agencies are carrying out their traditional investigation to confirm or refute our theory, and no arrest has been made on our work alone." That being said, our genetic genealogy technique and our research on this case led directly to Lancaster and the suspect. "

The name provided to the law enforcement was Raymond Rowe. According to his biography on his company's website, Freez Entertainment, Rowe "began as a break dancer in the early '80s and then started DJing soon after and soon became a popular DJ house in the mid-1980s. 80. " the "recognized leader in the central area of ​​PA" among local DJs.

At the press conference, Lancaster District Attorney Stedman admitted that Rowe's name had not been mentioned before in the Mirack case. Rowe, however, lived about four miles from the victim at the time of the crime. Stedman speculated that the two might have met at a club or event before the teacher's murder.

Armed with the name, the law enforcement of Lancaster had to follow with concrete evidence. "We had to collect a surreptitious sample from him," Stedman said.

Learning Rowe was scheduled to host an event on May 31 at a local elementary school, members of the Pennslyvania State Police have infiltrated the school. At the party, they observed Rowe chewing gum and using a bottle of water. The undercover agents seized both after Rowe threw the objects.

On June 22nd, the final results of the State Crime Lab came to connect Rowe to collected samples from Mirack. According to the District Attorney's Office, there is a chance of 1 and 200 octillions that the match is to another member of the Caucasian population who is not Rowe.

"This killer was released from this brutal crime for longer than Christy Mirack was alive on this earth," Stedman told reporters. "[Parabon] led us on the way to finally hold him accountable. "