DUNN CO., WISCONSIN (WEAU) – After 50 years of waiting, someone was caught last week in the murder of Mary Schlais in 1974.
The Dunn County Sheriff’s Office talked about how they found out who Jon Keith Miller was.
“Investigative Generic Genealogy, or IGG, genetic genealogy information to build a family tree from the DNA of an unknown person, David Gurney said
A lot of people may also be curious about who shared their DNA to find their family tree.
“The sample was sent in the spring of 2023, and the nearest genetic relative at the time was either a first or second cousin, Cairenn Binder said.
David Gurney and Cairenn Binder are in charge of running the IGG Center at New Jersey’s Ramapo College.
Because it opened in 2022, the IGG Center has helped police solve cases like Mary Schlais’. That’s their 17th win in this case.
Each case has its own challenges, they both say, since they found out that Jon K. Miller was adopted in the end.
“This case of family tree research was very hard, and it took more than a year for our genetic genealogy research to lead to anything useful.” Binder said.
But the workers at the IGG Center saw a gap in one family tree and filled it in with Miller, a family member they didn’t know they had.
“Things you can see in people’s family trees that show they don’t know who their relatives are.” Binder said.
During the news conference, a reporter asked if they showed the adoption records. “In this case, we did not have adoption records,” Binder said. But in the end, Miller was found in Minnesota.
“He’s lived in Minnesota his whole life, from north of the Twin Cities to the Twin Cities to south of the Twin Cities.” The system did not load him, so he might have been involved in something before the DNA was taken. He said that Sheriff Kevin Bygd.
This can take time, says David Gurney as well.
“No matter how complicated the case is or how close the matches are, there may be adoption in the family tree.” Sometimes it only takes an hour to solve a case, and other times it can take years and years. He told Gurney.
After that, he said that the IGG Center at Ramapo College is a non-profit group with only one goal.
“The goal is to provide free IGG services to law firms across the country. We do all of our work for free to help the law firms and the victims in these cases.” He told Gurney.