The Łódź Prosecutor's Office closed the investigation after the murder of a 57-year-old teacher in December 2020. The latest forensic techniques were used to trace the perpetrator of the crime, including forensic genealogy. Investigators found several distant relatives and wanted to identify the killer by reconstructing his family tree. The technique allowed us to solve hundreds of the most difficult cases abroad, but in Poland it turned out to be ineffective. People involved in this case explain why this happened.
The decision to stop the investigation due to the fact that the criminal was not identified by the investigative prosecutor's office was taken this week. The prosecutor's office continued its activity for three years after the crime was committed. We told the story behind the scenes of one of the biggest investigations in recent years in TVN24 GO's “Get the Zjawę” report. One of the policewomen working to find the killer from Zdrowi Park in Łódź said that this was the first case in the country where forensic genealogy was used.
What is this method? The crime, which occurred on December 5, 2021, was sexually motivated. The genetic code of the criminal was preserved at the place of death of the 57-year-old teacher. The problem was that it didn't match any DNA profile in the police database. Large-scale activities with the collection of samples of the genetic code from thousands of men living nearby and further did not help.
But these actions were not completely ineffective. Several very distant relatives of the killer have been located. The level of relations, as emphasized in an interview with tvn24.pl by Dr. Hab. Magdalena Spolnicka from the University of Warsaw, an expert in forensic genetics, identified in centiorganism (a unit that shows how much DNA we share with relatives). The identified relatives – as shown by the DNA – shared a common ancestor.
The idea was to create a family tree of all common ancestors using church records, then move forward to the present to identify all their children. There must be a killer in the family tree created this way.
As part of the investigation, the DNA code was also read, and based on this, it was determined what the killer probably looked like:
This is how the perpetrator of the murder of Zdrowi in Łódź looks.
forever
The first person to be caught this way was one of the longest-hunted serial killers in US history, the Golden State Killer.
He spread terror from December 1976. He appeared at night. He awakened his victims by shining a flashlight directly into their sleepy eyes. The women could not see his face, he attacked them wearing a mask, put a knife to their throats, tied them, and finally raped and killed some of them. Police charged the Golden State Killer with 12 murders, nearly 50 rapes and more than 120 robberies.
Joseph James DeAngelo Sacramento State Sheriff
The last crime attributed to him was in 1986. Then the American media released the behind-the-scenes story of the murder involving the California killer using DNA testing. Perhaps the golden killer refused to kill because he was afraid that he would no longer go unpunished. Previously, he left biological traces at the scene of his crimes. However, he went unpunished for decades – his DNA did not match any of the genetic code that investigators had in their database.
How was the Golden State Killer caught? We wrote about the birth of a new forensic method last year
In 2018, American investigators decided to use a commercial DNA database to trace their relatives. Then his relatives settled down. Then hundreds of people worked on a huge tree, on which there were more than a thousand people. Joseph DeAngelo was finally among them. He was a former police officer and was 73 years old when he was arrested. He sat in a wheelchair in the courtroom. In a short speech, he said that he regretted it.
In 2020, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He did not get the electric chair just because he cooperated with the prosecutor's office.
Cup of struggle
But let's go back to the case of Lodz. Why did genealogy fail in the case of the health killer? People who were involved in the search for the killer indicate that they hit a wall by going back to the history of the killer's relatives.
– We analyzed several threads, checked death certificates and records in church books. Each of them broke down at some point. Many of the archives that are important to us, lost during World War II, no longer exist. Those that survived the war were written in the languages of the invaders, in Russian and German. Some documents are illegible, some are simply incorrect. At this stage, we couldn't do anything else. Poland's difficult history has been an obstacle to solving the mystery, people investigating the crime tell us.
The police involved in the case stress that the end of the investigation does not mean that the killer can rest easy. – If new facts are found in the case, we will resume the work, – say our interlocutors.
Main photo source: Lodz Police/TVN24
