For more than half a century, the banker’s box containing details of a young couple’s heartbreaking final hours on this Earth gathered dust. That box in Great Falls, Mont., had plenty of company in police department storage rooms across the U.S. and Canada.

Duane Bogle was discovered face down in his car on Jan. 3, 1956. He had been shot in the head. His girlfriend, Patty Kalitzke, was found the next day. She had been sexually assaulted, then shot to death.

The decades passed until 2001, when a small amount of sperm was located on a vaginal sample from Kalitzke. Serial killer Edward Wayne Edwards and Boston mob boss “Whitey” Bulger were ruled out.

Then using genetic genealogy, they made a link to the children of Kenneth Gould, who died in 2007. He was the killer.

Gould is the oldest case cleared using genetic genealogy — technology that rose to prominence with the arrest of the Golden State Killer. It uses DNA websites like Ancestry.com and 23andMe to find the killer’s family.

Now, genealogist Marc McDermott has established a database for cold cases cleared using information provided by the Forensic Genetic Genealogy Project led by Dr. Tracey Dowdeswell of Queen’s University.

You can read more in an article by Brad Hunter published in the TorontoSun web site at: https://torontosun.com/news/crime/genetic-genealogy-database-hot-on-heels-of-cold-case-killers.