Photo provided
Leo Murray, who was known as “Uncle Leo” by his family.
Columbus police have cleared an ongoing 25-year-old case trying to identify a man who died by suicide along Jonathan Moore Pike near Carr Hill Road on Jan. 30, 1999, learning his identity through forensic genetic genealogy.
Working with the Bartholomew County Coroner’s Office and the Bartholomew County Prosecutor’s Office, investigators were met with decades of dead-end leads until they enlisted the assistance of Othram, a Texas-based corporation specializing in forensic genetic genealogy, said Sgt. Skylar Berry, Columbus Police Department spokesman.
In 1999, CPD officers were sent to Jonathan Moore Pike where they found a man believed to be in his 50s or 60s who had died by a single gunshot. Two handguns were found with the man, but he did not have any identification or anything with him that led investigators to his identity. His death was determined to be a suicide.
Through the years, investigators tried numerous ways to identify the man, including running his fingerprints, asking for the public’s assistance in news releases, sending bulletins to regional law enforcement, and entering his descriptors into nationwide databases, including the missing person database. The FBI was able to recreate a photo of what the man looked like when he was living. However, none of these things led to the man’s identity.
Bartholomew County Prosecutor’s Office investigator Jay Frederick, who worked the case with CPD and the coroner’s office, said using forensic genetic genealogy became an option as it was becoming a new method to solve these types of cases. This method allows investigators to identify potential family members of a person whose DNA they already have.
In this case, Frederick said investigators received a court order to exhume the man’s remains and sent a DNA sample initially to Indiana State Police, where they did not get any matches through a federal database, but then sent a sample of the man’s DNA to Othram.
CPD investigators believed this was the only way to identify the man and bring closure to his family, Berry said.
After sending a sample of the man’s DNA to Othram, leads were generated that led to north-central Ohio, where a nephew identified the man from the FBI’s photo and provided his own DNA to confirm their familial relationship.
With this information, the man’s identity was confirmed to be Leo Michael Murray, a resident of Ohio who was 61 years old when he died. Murray had never been married and had no children. He told family he was moving to Florida before he disappeared, which is why his family never reported him missing to the police.
Frederick said the investigation to identify Murray was complicated in that Murray had never married, had no children, and his parents and siblings were deceased.
Forensic genealogy uses DNA analysis combined with genealogy to identify family tree links to an individual, which potentially can identify victims or even suspects. DNA is compared to potential relatives which shows possible links to various family trees, wich can be narrowed down further by obtaining further DNA samples from those linked.
CPD was assisted by local law enforcement in Ohio who helped verify that the investigation was legitimate and the need for the DNA to match was crucial to identifying the man.
Michael Vogen, director of account management for Othram, said the company formed in 2018, the first private lab in the nation to build high permance profiles from DNA to identify distant relatives of unidentified people and also to help police narrow down suspects from DNA evidence.
Frederick learned about the company through the Scott County Coroner’s office and was told if he could obtain DNA, there was a good chance Othram investigators and genealogists could build a useful profile in the death by suicide case.
Initially, the company cast a wide net, and then used investigators to essentially rule out parts of the “family tree,” and as Vogen called it, learn “what exit to take off the family highway.”
That involves confirming or excluding a family line, which happened in this case and resulted in a direct route to Murray’s family in Ohio.
The company received the DNA in September of 2023 and were building profile through genealogy research within three months, Vogen said. By September of this year, the Ohio connection formed.
“It’s very powerful technology — the outcome can be amazing,” Vogen said. “Doing this work used to be science fiction, but now it’s science fact.”
The company was built to do this type of investigative work “at scale” rather than private efforts that might work much slower and at a much lower number of cases.
The company’s terms of service call for it to only work on cases from law enforcement, medical examiners and coroners, with an online portal provided to these professionals for them to offer up their evidence to determine whether it’s a case the company might be able to provide some assistance. The company started with U.S. cases, but now has expanded into Canada and even Europe and New Zealand as more investigators learn of their work.
Vogen said genealogy was used in the beginning to take DNA and help adoptees find their biological parents — but using it in law enforcement cases is a relatively new thing.
“Sometimes it’s not information people want but it’s what people sometimes need,” he said, when talking about families who have waited years to learn what might have happened to a missing loved one.
Those who are searching may have the missing person’s DNA placed in the federal database of missing persons, used by law enforcement to find DNA matches.
And now that companies like Othram are available to law enforcement, Vogen said he would encourage families to upload DNA to consumer databases available in the U.S. which are also now being used to find matches that could identify human remains.
Murray’s identification is the 10th case in Indiana where officials have publicly identified an individual using technology developed by Othram.
Berry said it was very important to investigators to restore the man’s identity and provide answers to his family, whose last communication was that he was moving to Florida. He credited the many investigators who contributed to the case, as well as the partnerships between public agencies and Othram, in bringing a resolution to the case.
Some of the investigative resources were funded by Bartholomew County Coroner’s Office and NamUs, a national information clearinghouse and resource center for missing, unidentified, and unclaimed person cases across the United States. There is more information about forensic genetic genealogy, cases solved using it, and fundraising opportunities at Othram’s website, https://dnasolves.com.
Anyone who is missing a loved one is encouraged to report their disappearance to law enforcement for entry into a national database of missing persons. For CPD, there is no minimum amount of time a person must be missing before the department enters a missing person into that database, Berry said.
