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by TacticalCoder 880 days ago
We may not be there yet but hardly a week goes by without a cold case being solved in Europe (don't know about the US).

There are judges, for example in France, who are now forcing cases to be re-opened due to greatly advanced and also greatly lowered costs for DNA testing.

So cases where DNA was collected decades ago is now usable.

A case has been solved a few days ago (forgot which one it was) but the one that impressed me the most was a cold case where the killer was a serial killer and... a cop. Once, 20 years after the last crime or so, a letter was sent to all the cops that could have been in Paris (they suspected a cop was the killer) at that time was sent to ask them for a DNA sample, that cop, now retired cop due to his age, committed suicide.

He knew it was "gg".

Bad times for bad guys who committed crimes a long time ago: at any point now the cold case may be solved.

These cold cases being solved also make it to the news, frontpage: constantly reminding those who got away with their crime that they cannot sleep tight.

It may be sci-fi, today, to use DNA to predict a face and then to run facial recognition on it but...

It's not sci-fi to use new science discoveries to solve cold cases. And I'm very happy that motherfuckers are getting caught.

2 comments

In the US, it’s going to vary wildly, with some places solving old cases, and some places with such a huge backlog that they just stick the DNA sample in a freezer and ignore it.
> don't know about the US

It's old news here. From April 2018...

"Relative's DNA from genealogy websites cracked East Area Rapist case"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16936041