CLEVELAND, Ohio — Authorities on Friday arrested what prosecutors in Cuyahoga County hope is the first of dozens of previously unidentified rapists and murderers thanks to an emerging crime-fighting technique where investigators use DNA databases maintained by popular genealogy websites to solve cold cases.
Cuyahoga County prosecutors teamed up with the Texas-based genetic testing company Gene by Gene and Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s Office’s forensic crime lab to use the same technique — and the same genealogist — that led to the 2018 arrest of the notorious Golden State Killer.
The process, which began in 2019, has so far identified the man formerly known to investigators only as John Doe #133 and given them leads in two other cases, prosecutors said. The three assailants carried out a combined six rapes across the city in the 1990s, prosecutors said.
Police arrested Bart Mercurio, who they believe is John Doe #133, on Friday at his home in Lorain County after DNA tied him to a 1999 rape in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood.
Investigators are awaiting additional DNA testing to confirm the identities of two other men.
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley hopes a specialized unit his office launched in October with $198,000 in grant money from the Department of Justice will unmask more than 40 unidentified people suspected of rapes and sexual assaults. The unit also plans to expand its reach to solve long-stagnant sexually motivated murders and is working to identify cases that might yield leads.
If the program is successful, O’Malley and Assistant Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Mary Weston, who heads the unit, hope it will lead to a sea change in how they capture suspected rapists and killers who have eluded capture for decades.
“You can imagine a day where every law enforcement agency has a genealogist on staff,” O’Malley said. “Right now, it’s cutting edge, but in 20 years, this might be what they’re doing every day.”
O’Malley and Weston thanked Yost’s office, Gene by Gene and the Department of Justice.
“Solving these cases is not about us, it’s about bringing justice to these women,” Weston said. “They’ve waited a long time.”
The practice is not without controversy, as politicians and civil and privacy rights advocates from both ends of the political spectrum have expressed concern that it could lead to law enforcement abusing its powers and invading people’s privacy.
Nearly 200 John Does
The latest effort comes on the heels of a massive undertaking to clear a backlog of more than 10,000 previously untested sexual assault kits discovered in the Cleveland police department’s evidence unit more than 10 years ago. Cuyahoga County prosecutors and the Ohio Attorney General’s Office in 2013 set up a task force that, as of last fall, completed more than 8,700 investigations that led to 800 arrests.
In most cases, investigators ran DNA from the languishing kits through a nationwide database of DNA profiles of people arrested on felony charges and matched the sample to a person.
In another 176 cases, however, the DNA in the sexual assault kit did not produce a match. Prosecutors avoided statutes of limitations in the cases by obtaining indictments against the specific DNA profile in the rape kit, listed in court records as “John Doe” with a corresponding number. Investigators essentially had to wait until a break in the case occurred to identify each nameless DNA profile, such as a subsequent arrest where police run the suspect’s DNA through the database and match DNA to the John Doe profile.
That only happened in 13 cases, prosecutors said, leaving more than 160 defendants unnamed.
“We have their DNA,” Weston said. “We just don’t know who they are.”
Golden State Killer reveals new tech to the world
The 2018 arrest of California serial killer Joseph James DeAngelo, dubbed the Golden State Killer, introduced forensic genetic genealogy to the world. DeAngelo — who committed at least 13 murders, 50 rapes and more than 100 burglaries — went undetected for more than 40 years. Police finally identified him by uploading DNA from crime scenes to an online genealogy database and identified his great-great-great-grandparents. With that information, they built family trees of relatives and eventually connected him to the crimes.
The genealogist that helped them do it, Barbara Rae-Venter, is a New Zealand-born former patent attorney who was once married to J. Craig Venter, who helped map the first draft of the human genome.
After her work on the Golden State Killer case, Rae-Venter began working with law enforcement agencies across the country and ended up at Gene By Gene, where she supervisors genealogists digging into unsolved crimes from around the country.
The Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance also began offering grants to local departments and agencies to pay for this testing. Cuyahoga County’s task force applied and received an $80,000 infusion in 2019 to conduct testing on 20 so-called John Doe cases.
The office then applied for a $1 million from the Justice Department and used $198,000 of that money to create the Genetic Operations Linking DNA, or G.O.L.D. Unit. They used the money to hire investigators and victim advocates and pay for another 20 John Doe rape indictments and to begin parsing through dozens of previously unsolved homicides where sexual assault is suspected to be a factor.
O’Malley’s office selected Gene by Gene and Rae-Venter to begin to try to solve the crimes.
How it works in Cuyahoga County
A map shows dozens of rapes across Cuyahoga County from 1993 through 2005 where prosecutors know the DNA profile of a suspect but not the suspect’s identity.Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office
Members of the task force and agents from the state attorney general’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations went through all the remaining John Doe rape defendants and dozens of unsolved homicides where investigators believe the victim was also sexually assaulted. Weston said BCI agents helped them pick which cases had enough DNA evidence to be a good candidate for genetic testing, and they picked 20 cases. Several involved suspected serial offenders or aggravating circumstances, Weston said.
In rape cases, the evidence comes from the sexual assault kit. In homicides, the evidence could be any DNA from the scene — if the killer spits on the ground or left a cigarette butt behind, or DNA pulled from the murder weapon, Weston said.
The task force sent the first round of 20 John Doe suspects and DNA samples to Gene by Gene in January. Genealogists ran the DNA profile through a database containing the DNA profiles collected from private genealogy companies to obtain possible male family members of each John Doe. Doing so allows investigators to build a family tree for potential suspects.
O’Malley and Weston said that the process only uses the DNA profiles from customers who opt into letting the genealogy companies provide their DNA to law enforcement. O’Malley thanked those customers and called them, “silent partners.”
The genealogist then works to build a family tree of the suspect — a process than can take months or even years, Weston said. The, the genealogist sends a list of names, or even just a single name, back to the task force, where prosecutors and investigators winnow down the list to identify a single suspect.
From there, it’s back to old-fashioned police work.
The task force assigns an investigator to stake out the suspect and tail them to obtain a surreptitious sample of their DNA, like a tossed soda bottle or a cigarette butt. They send that evidence to BCI’s crime lab, where technicians take DNA and compare it to the DNA from the sexual assault kit.
If the two samples match, investigators get a search warrant to take a controlled DNA sample from the defendant, usually by knocking on their doors and swabbing their mouths. Those results are then run through the BCI lab for final confirmation.
The technique has so far identified one John Doe and given investigators potential suspects in two more cases.
Unmasking the previously unknown
Bart Mercurio is charged in the 1999 rape of a woman in Tremon.
The Gene By Gene team gave prosecutors Mercurio’s name as potential suspect as the John Doe #133 profile behind a 1999 rape of a woman inside her Tremont home. The woman had trouble sleeping on May 6, 1999, and took a walk on Burhrer Avenue. While she was gone, a man snuck into her home. When she got back, he bashed her over the head and knocked her unconscious, then raped her and ran away, Weston said. The woman woke up, realized what happened, and called the police.
Investigators took several plastic bottles Mercurio discarded and matched his DNA to the John Doe profile. They showed up to Mercurio’s home in Elyria on June 3 with a warrant to get a sample of his DNA, and detectives interviewed him about the case.
BCI came back with the results on June 29 matching Mercurio to John Doe #133. A team of Cuyahoga County investigators, U.S. Marshals and Elyria police arrested Mercurio on Friday.
The process has also given prosecutors potential matches to two other John Does who they suspect committed a combined five rapes between them.
One of the men raped two women, one in 1994 and one in 1998, Weston said. One attack occurred at a bus stop near University Circle, and the other on a street in East Cleveland, prosecutors said.
Investigators are still awaiting DNA confirmation in that case.
Investigators have also zeroed in on who they believe is John Doe #11 in connection with three rapes — two in 1994 and one in 1998 — all in the city’s Clark-Fulton neighborhood. Weston said the man attacked three women off the street and raped them, and used a knife during one of the attacks. He carried out the assaults at West 48th Street and Storer Avenue in June 1994, West 41st Street and Woodbridge Avenue in November 1994 and West 65th Street and Clark Avenue in October 1998, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors faced a problem in collecting his DNA, however. He died in October. Obtaining a DNA sample from him wasn’t possible. So, they decided to tail his adult children and pulled a discarded item from his daughter. They sent that sample off for testing, and BCI issued a report concluding that there is a 99.9883 percent chance the DNA is that of the biological daughter of John Doe #11, prosecutors said.
Investigators last week tracked down two of the women the man raped and showed them a photo lineup of six men, with his photograph mixed in. O’Malley said both of the women picked out the man’s photograph and were overcome with emotion.
“We have the ability now with genealogy to solve things that ten years ago we couldn’t have solved,” O’Malley said. “It’s part of our effort to try to bring closure and justice to these victims.”
Privacy concerns
Law enforcement using private genealogy information to solve crimes sparked concern among privacy advocates across the political spectrum. A Republican lawmaker in Utah introduced a bill to ban police from accessing genealogy website databases to run a search of every DNA profile, comparing it to police officers knocking on every door and searching every house in a city to look for a suspect. The ACLU and other privacy groups raised concerns that it amounted to law enforcement overreach.
ACLU staff attorney Vera Eidelman pointed out in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed that when someone provides their DNA to a genealogy company, they’re not just giving up their own DNA but that of their relatives who may not have consented to giving up their information. A person’s DNA and genetic makeup is some of the most intimate personal information. She also wrote that uploading a suspect’s DNA into a database might also violate that person’s right to privacy.
“People may not be so troubled by such an intrusion when it comes to a serial killer, but imagine the implications of using this technique for shoplifters or trespassers,” Eidelman wrote.
Researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine in 2018 published a survey in which they found more than 90 percent of those asked approved of police using the technique to solve violent crimes, but only 46 percent thought it was OK for police to use to investigate non-violent crimes.
In response to growing concerns, many companies began publishing transparency reports about the number of law enforcement requests for access to their database that they received and the ones they granted. They also began requiring users to opt-in to letting the company let law enforcement include their DNA profile among those they search.
While many companies bar law enforcement from directly accessing their databases, third-party genealogists who work with law enforcement can still access them.
The company that O’Malley’s office partners with as part of the grant said it would only permit law enforcement to use its services for criminal investigations with written permission from the company and to identify dead bodies or suspects in homicides, sexual assaults and abductions.
O’Malley dismissed those concerns.
“It’s only controversial with the bad guys and people who’ve got nothing better to do than whine,” O’Malley said. “Anything we can do to keep our community safe, I believe the vast majority of the people support. This is a tool that is available to us. These people have agreed to share their information with law enforcement. This makes for a better community.”
