AUSTIN, Texas — Police often face challenges when it comes to solving a murder, especially when the victim can’t be identified. But thanks to advances in DNA technology, they’re getting some extra help.
In 2009, Rhonda Kevorkian was glowing. She was pregnant with not just one, but two more children.
“I was on bed rest and wondering, ‘Well, were there any other twins in my family?’ And then I realized I didn’t know much about my family. So I started researching, and that’s when I became addicted to genealogy,” Kevorkian said.
That addiction led her to down a new career path: combining genealogy with DNA testing at the nonprofit DNA Doe Project.
“Our volunteers are dedicated to our mission of identifying John and Jane Does using investigative genetic genealogy. And what that is, is we build back family trees to find common ancestors and then build forward in time to look for our missing person,” Kevorkian said.
She’s now a co-executive director at the DNA Doe Project. “We can get DNA from teeth, bones, hair – finger and toe bones are great for that,” she said.
Most recently, the DNA Doe Project helped identify Sherry Brock, a woman whose body was found in South Austin, off Slaughter Creek, on April 12, 2020.
“She was found in kind of a wooded area. A man was walking his dog, and the dog took off and ran towards the body. And that’s when she was discovered,” Kevorkian said. “She went unnamed for quite some time.”
One of the first cases Kevorkian worked on dates back to the 1970s.
“This was the fifth set of remains to be recovered from John Wayne Gacy’s crawl space, which really affected me as a child. I was young when this all happened, and it was kind of the first introduction of evil in the world to me. You know, [that] this man that dressed up as a clown, that was around children, could do these things,” she said.
Kevorkian and her fellow volunteers have spent 15,000 hours this year alone on their mission. They provide the investigative leads to police, and officers look into them and verify – offering families some long-awaited answers.
“I can’t imagine what it must be like to know that, you know, your family members are missing and you just don’t know what happened,” Kevorkian said. “It’s heartbreaking.”
The DNA Doe Project relies on the public to fund a lot of these cases because while the nonprofit offers the genealogy for free, the lab work is very expensive.
The nonprofit is also currently filming a documentary with National Geographic. There’s no air date yet, but it will be six episodes.