Coming up.

You're trying to find out what your great Uncle Bob was all about.

And the government's sitting over here going, thanks for the info.

We don't even have to get a search warrant.

For Vault Studios, I'm Will Johnson.

You're listening to The Daily Crime.

Your DNA could it be used to solve a cold case, a crime from decades ago. We hear about it all the time these days, another case solved by DNA, and it's reshaping cold case investigations and convictions.

New DNA technology has led law enforcement officers to a suspect in the February 1974 killing of a five-year-old girl from

Missoula, Montana. The Missoula County Sheriff's Office says DNA evidence from the murder

scene of Shabodan McGinnis matches that of Richard William Davis, who lived in Arkansas

at the time of his death in 2012. He would have been 32 when the girl was killed. DNA evidence from the crime scene partially matched

the DNA of a family member of Davis who had sent a DNA sample into a consumer database.

It was the same way officers identified the Golden State killer.

That was the big one. A man who terrorized California for more than two decades finally caught.

The FBI made the announcement in

2018, but the arrest of James DeAngelo once again put the spotlight on DNA and privacy concerns.

KHOU 11 in Houston, Texas had this report in the days after DeAngelo's arrest.

After more than 40 years, law enforcement officials say they got their man,

the so-called Golden State Killer, arrested after tracing his DNA through websites. A modern

approach to catch a suspect wanted for more than 50 rapes and 13 murders dating back to

1976. Investigators had used DNA from crime scenes that had been stored for decades and compared it to DNA samples from a genealogy database, linking it to a distant relative of the suspect.

The biggest tool for investigators, a free website that pulls DNA profiles that people upload and share publicly.

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