The details of the Centerville crime were heinous: Someone had broken into a locked church and attacked an elderly woman who had been playing the organ alone, choking her until she no longer moved.
Police found the suspect’s blood on the sill beneath a broken window, but the DNA test resulted in no matches in traditional law enforcement databases.
So, a detective took a different approach, using a public genealogy website to crack the case.
The technology had been successful before — it’s how police identified the Golden State Killer and also led St.