In January 1971, hunters discovered a woman dead in the Arizona desert. She lacked identification.
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That wasn’t easy either. Pressed for funding, the sheriff’s office had to pay for the $7,500 genome-sequencing service with a public fundraiser organized by the testing company. But with it, finally, came a breakthrough. On Tuesday, the sheriff’s office identified the woman as Colleen Audrey Rice from Portsmouth, Ohio – no longer Mohave’s oldest Jane Doe.Article content
She quickly exhausted all of her options, and the quest to identify Rice would have failed again if not for the emerging technique of genome sequencing – and the generosity of online donors. Miller decided a genealogical test was her final option in May and contacted Othram, a Texas-based forensic laboratory that creates DNA profiles of individuals to help law enforcement identify them.
Miller’s only problem? The Mohave County Sheriff’s Office couldn’t foot the $7,500 bill for the company’s services. That’s not uncommon, Mittelman said, among agencies that either lack funding or have their funds tightly controlled and earmarked for specific uses. Awareness of genome sequencing grew in 2018 after it was used to identify the Golden State Killer, Mittelman said, but it’s still on the newer end of proven investigative techniques.
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