Solving cold cases is hard. Solving cases that have been colder longer than you have been alive, as a young female scientist in Alabama, is harder.
There aren’t college degrees focused in this area of science, said Moore, so people wanting to go into genealogy must create their own career paths. So far, Moxxy has officially found matches in more than five cases. That number is general, the women say, because some have yet to be announced publicly by law enforcement, and they can’t share the news before police.
Being a young female scientist, McCarter has seen how she can be treated differently than other experts. Her day job in law enforcement—she calls Mobile Sheriff Paul Burch her biggest supporter— helps give her credibility, but it can be challenging to meet with police from other corners of the state and convince them to let her work their cases.
Currently, the man is buried in an unmarked grave in the Old Foley Cemetery in Foley. She praised Gulf Shores police and their dedication to the case. “We’ve hit many dead-ends here due to not being from here. There are many scars on his body that lead us to believe he had a very tough life.” Then, that newly sequenced data is uploaded to two websites called GEDMatch and FamilyTreeDNA. These sites are open-source and let people opt-into allowing law enforcement to compare their results.