It's a Family Affair

Yesterday's arrest of a suspect in the long-running "Grim Sleeper" killings was made possible by familial DNA searching—in a nutshell, the suspect's genetic material wasn't in California's database, but a family member's was. A paper from earlier this year explains how the Golden State decides when such a search is enough to warrant further investigation:

In April 2008, the California Department of Justice relaxed its policies to allow for familial DNA searches and the reporting of results to...