In 1971, a toddler named Melissa Highsmith was kidnapped from her home in Texas by a new babysitter. The police investigation went nowhere, and years passed. The Highsmiths thought they would never see their daughter again. Then in 2022, her father Jeff Highsmith sent a DNA sample to 23andMe, along with other family members, to trace their genealogy. The results came back identifying a relative that was Jeff’s granddaughter -one he never knew about! That could only be Melissa’s daughter. Soon, the family was reunited with Melissa, who grew up with the name Melanie and never knew she had been kidnapped more than 50 years earlier.
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Since home DNA tests were developed, this kind of thing happens more and more often, as cold cases are cracked by DNA from relatives that are matched with both victims and perpetrators. Sometimes the DNA confirms police suspicions in cases where the evidence against them was insufficient, and sometimes an identification comes out of the blue, decades later. Buzzfeed has a roundup of eleven cold cases, mostly murders, that were solved many years later thanks to DNA tests.
(Unrelated image credit: Tim Wightman/US Navy)
Source: neatorama