Getting Things Wrong: the Zodiac and DNA Obsessions
Some months ago, before this Coronavirus shitstorm forced me even further into seclusion, I found myself in a room full of young people. These young people — most of them under the age of 25 — asked me a simple question:
“What are your five favorite movies?”
Loving listicles, and without thinking, I rattled off five favorites:
- David Fincher’s “Zodiac”
- Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”
- Oliver Stone’s “Nixon”
- Lawrence Kasdan’s “The Empire Strikes Back”
- Robert Zemeckis’s “Back to the Future”
An honest answer, and one that I answered without reflection or much hesitation.
If i’d been in the United States, and specifically in my old stomping grounds of Seattle, I would have likely been a bit more self-conscious. I probably would have given it a bit more thought and might have omitted one or two of them. Bowing to the Seattle zeitgeist, I would have likely made the list more “woke” or intellectual, or included a woman director, or some such thing.
I recalled later that I had answered the exact same question on Twitter back in 2019:
At that point, in response to a query on Twitter about favorite films, I replied that my five favorite films were:
- Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown”
- Don Siegel’s “Dirty Harry”
- Robert Zemeckis’s “Back to the Future”
- Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”
- Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused”
I looked again and noticed that as an addition, I added a comment to that tweet:
Where I stated that Zodiac is “probably the best film of the 2000s.”
The list that I gave got me thinking. Everyone of those films could have also just as easily been described as a favorite movie of mine during a particular time and place in my life. As a child of the 1980s, I loved “Back to the Future.”
Huey Lewis and the News, skateboards, first grade teachers frantically turning off the television as Space Shuttles exploded, the Oval Office addresses that followed.
In all truth, I wrote exactly one fan letter in my life: to the fictional Marty McFly.
“Tell me. Future boy: Who’s President of the United States in 1985…”
Both “Nixon’’ and “Apocalypse Now” reminded me of my early 20s, watching these films repeatedly in small, smoky, Seattle apartments as an escape from both dreary weather and the relentlessly dour post-9/11 environment in the city. Imagine repeatedly watching these gloomy films as an escape!
While every other boy obsessed over “The Godfather”, I chose Coppola’s Vietnam epic. ‘The frat boys chose Tupac, I like Biggie.’
Surprising to me that I mentioned “Zodiac” repeatedly when discussing my favorite films. I decided to watch the film yet again. What was it about this film, one that I didn’t even see until years after the initial 2007 release, that is compelling for me?
You’ve probably seen “Zodiac.” If you haven’t, you should. The film is ostensibly about the late 1960s/early 1970s murder spree carried out by a bizarre criminal in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Zodiac killer was a precursor to a number of other media savvy terrorists and serial killers. His tactics of writing off-the-wall letters and cyphers while toying with the news media and law enforcement predated other figures like the Unabomber and BTK killer, who he most certainly inspired.
The killings carried out by the Zodiac, and his murderous panache, are just one more piece of the mosaic of the late 1960s/early 1970s. An era of the Black Panthers, and the Symbionese Liberation Army, and a whole collection of things that are so culturally foreign and fascinating to someone my age, that it might as well have happened in the colonial era.
A totally fascinating subject from a baffling time.
The film itself isn’t really about the murders or even about the suspect.
Yes, John Carroll Lynch does a phenomenal job as the internet’s main Zodiac suspect Arthur Leigh Allen. Mark Ruffalo portrays San Francisco police detective David Toschi, a police officer who incredibly enough was both a main investigator in the Zodiac investigation, and the inspiration for Steve McQueen’s character in another great San Francisco film, Bullitt. Robert Downey, Jr., who would a year later basically become the symbol of the Marvel takeover of the film industry with his portrayal of Iron Man, plays the pill popping alcoholic journalist Paul Avery.
Brain Cox plays celebrity lawyer Mel Belli, known to me as a main character in yet another of my favorite films, Gimme Shelter.
Another one of my favorite films, “Dirty Harry” even makes an appearance. The scene of Ruffalo’s Toschi, himself an inspiration for an iconic San Francisco character, sitting in a dark theater and fuming at Eastwood combating a character based on the Zodiac is mind blowing.
It’s like four concentric circles of reality and film coming together, with you, the viewer, witnessing them finally form into a sphere.
But the truly great thing about this film, and the reason why I think subconsciously it reached the top of my favorite film list, is the obsession of Jake Gyllenhaal’s character named Robert Graysmith.
Graysmith was a cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Graysmith’s obsession with the real-life case eventually led to a book, which in turn inspired the movie.
At one point Brian Cox as Belli proclaims about the killer: “Killing is his compulsion, it drives him, it’s in his blood.”
And that’s basically what the film is about. Compulsion. The compulsion of all involved, but most specifically the character played by Jake Gyllenhaal’s obsession.
Gyllenhaal’s Graysmith descends into a spiral of obsession. He’s found himself in a universe turned into the absurd by a criminal who makes less sense as history marches on and by a reality of the time that couldn’t seem to digest it.
It’s the obsession that drives the film. Graysmith’s obsession to investigate something so unreal and implausible that 50 years later it is still as baffling as ever.
And, after looking back at it, I began to understand why this particular film resonated so much with me. It’s now a comfort to me to know that I found a reason why I like the film so much — and it started to explain some of things in my own psyche.
Nearly a decade ago now, I traded the rain and gloomy weather of Seattle for a warmer climate. Seattle’s a great town, and a town where one can have a lot of fun (or too much) in. But trading Seattle for a place with a warmer climate and a slower pace of life also had some other unexpected consequences.
As I have mentioned earlier, one of my online pursuits is web sleuthing. I attempted, at first out of boredom and later out of compulsion, to dive into researching different mysteries.
I’ve certainly gone down my fair share of rabbit holes and dead ends. There have been cases that I have been following now for six and seven years. There are cases where I am still, to this day, certain that people have gotten away with crimes due to their ability to work the system.
My obsession with all of the cases culminated in one giant bit of intellectual oddity in my life. Like the Graysmith character, I understood how one could become totally mentally fixated on the minutiae. While Graysmith’s character one focused on the Zodiac, I found myself immersed in roughly half a dozen far less publicized mysteries at any one time.
The Baker Jane Doe
Which brings me to a case which fed my obsession. A case where, at the end of the day, my hunches and what I interpreted as my above-average deductive reasoning were proven to be totally wrong.
One of the very first cases of a Jane Doe case that I obsessed over was NamUs UP#: 5820.
Here are some of the specifics of that case:
NamUs UP#: 5820 details a Jane Doe who was hit by an automobile on August 28th of 1976 while attempting to cross traffic on Interstate 15 in Baker, California. This Jane Doe was African American, possibly in her 20s. She was 5’6 in height and approximately 160 lbs.
She was found with an especially distinctive pair of Octagon shaped eyeglasses, which you can see here:
As often happens with these cases, the peculiarities of exactly where she was found stood out to me. She died in Baker, California. According to these notes, she was found 1.5 miles south of the Baker Boulevard over-crossing.
The NamUs detail page places the approximate location over her death as here:
Although that doesn’t look to be South of Baker Boulevard over-crossing. 1.5 miles south of the Baker Boulevard over-crossing seems to be an interchange for Interstate-5. Regardless, I always take the locations entered on NamUs with a grain of salt.
Location, Location, Location:
So, my first thought is always with location. As of 2010, Baker has a population of 735. It’s in the middle of the Mojave, which, if you’ve ever been through, you know is extremely remote. I went with the assumption that this woman wasn’t local.
Baker is also on the main route between Barstow and Las Vegas. If she were coming from Northern California, or from Los Angeles, towards Las Vegas, she would have found herself in Baker.
Likewise, if she were in Las Vegas and heading out to either the Los Angeles area, or towards Northern California, she would have found herself in Baker.
So, what have you got? A young African American woman in 1976, hit by a car in a tiny truck stop of a town in the Mojave desert. I automatically thought that it was probable that she could have been hitchhiking.
I also thought it was likely that she didn’t have a car.
With the connection to Las Vegas (someone in Baker would likely either be traveling to or from Vegas), I postulated that it was logical to assume that this woman could be from anywhere in the United States.
While I didn’t totally discount the theory that she could have been a local from Barstow or Bakersfield or even Las Vegas, the circumstances of where she was found automatically led me to accept that the possibilities of who she could be expanded. Meaning, that if she was listed as a missing person, then she could easily be from anywhere. It it almost necessary to start at the margins. If the location of Baker was the epicenter of then event, then in this particular instance you shouldn’t think of it as a bullseye, search wise. You should almost consider the reverse.
Many of the cases from the 1970s and 1980s happened when law enforcement lacked computers and when information wasn’t widely shared. Fingerprints (and palm prints) from that era were lost and were therefore not always entered into the federal databases that came later in the 1990s. Jurisdictions and agencies didn’t talk to each other and they all certainly didn’t employ the same technologies and techniques. Think back to the scene in Zodiac where a Napa sheriff scoffs when asked if they had a fax machine.
Would it be possible to take two datasets: the listed missing persons and the unidentified persons in NamUs, and somehow find a match? Is it possible that you will see something that NCIC computers (which are designed to automatically detect) failed to? Will you see something that others who have poured across the same data have yet to see?
The odds of this are impossible to calculate — you have to accept the possibility of a missing person being reported, and at the same time, that an unidentified body recorded by a medical examiner or coroner’s office is also reported.
However, after looking at the particulars of this case, I thought that there was a possibility that this particular Jane Doe could be matched to a missing person case listed in NamUs.
This is how I settled on a possible match between this Baker Jane Doe and a listed missing person. This is also how I obsessed over the possibility for nearly four years, and how I was eventually proven wrong.
Although I was proven wrong, the story behind it proved instructive. And it shows the interesting directions some of these cases can go. My hunch led me to stumble into some of the interesting history behind the use of DNA and law enforcement.
The Possible Match
With this Baker Jane Doe you’ve got a number of things to go on.
Besides location, height, weight, and approximate age, you’ve also got an artistic representation:
And you’ve got that unique eyeglasses frame:
Looking through 1970s cases, I quickly came across Mabel Louise Andrews:
Mable Louise Andrews was reported missing from Orlando, Florida. She is listed in the NamUs database as MP# 24936:
To begin with, at the time, Mabel Louise Andrews was NOT listed on the exclusions list for the Baker Jane Doe. This meant, presumably, that there had not been a forensic consideration given to the two.
NamUs has, for whatever reason, become even less forthcoming about if they have dentals, DNA or fingerprints on file for those listed in their database. Back in early 2015, when I started focusing on the comparison between Mabel and the Baker Jane Doe, I believe that there was no fingerprints or dental records on file for either.
There was DNA, however.
Now, right off the bat, there were a number of things that pointed away from Mabel being the identity of the Baker Jane Doe. The “Date of Last Contact” was January 16th, 1976.
However, her listed physical characteristics seemed to indicate that she was not a good possibility:
According to her NamUs profile, the listed date of last contact was January 16th of 1976. This lists her height and weight as 5'5 and 115 lbs.
The Baker Jane Doe was reported as being 5'6 and 160 lbs. That would mean more than 40 pounds of weight gain in seven months:
However, as I looked into this case, I started to find a number of things that led me to question the validity of the physical characteristics listed.
I found a court document filed by her brother Tommie Lee Andrews.
According to this document from November of 2014, Mabel was reported as missing much earlier. In court documents Tommie Lee Andrews (he’ll become more important in a moment) testified that her family reported her as missing to the Orlando Police Department on Christmas Eve of 1974:
With the combination of these two things, I sent in an early message about the possibility of Mabel being the Baker Jane Doe.
Here’s an email that I sent in about the possibility:
Date: Feb 16, 2015, 5:01 PM +0400
To: opd@cityoforlando.net <opd@cityoforlando.net>, bobhunter@sbcsd.org <bobhunter@sbcsd.org>, carrie.sutherland@unthsc.edu <carrie.sutherland@unthsc.edu>, namus@ncmec.org <namus@ncmec.org>
Cc: dbharris@sbcsd.org <dbharris@sbcsd.org>, kshapiro@sbcsd.org <kshapiro@sbcsd.org>, mutakis@sbcsd.org <mutakis@sbcsd.org>
Subject: Missing person out of Orlando — Mabel Louise Andrews
Hello. Thank you for taking the time to read this e-mail.
I was reading today about the case of Mabel Louise Andrews (NamUs MP # 24936), who was a young woman who went missing out of Orlando, Florida, in January of 1976.
I noticed that her NamUs file and other records regarding her state that her height and weight is approximate.
I was immediately struck by the fact that she closely resembles an unidentified person (NamUs UP # 5820) who was killed in Baker, California, on August 28th of 1976.
Not only is there a resemblance between Mabel Louise Andrews and the unidentified person, but the unidentified person who was struck on the California freeway was wearing octagon shaped glasses. The picture of Mabel Louise Andrews also has her wearing a very unique pair of octagon shaped glasses.
Here’s Mabel Louise Andrew’s glasses, from her picture on The Charley Project:
http://www.charleyproject.org/cases/a/andrews_mabel.html
Here’s Mabel Louise Andrew’s flyer on a State of Florida website:
http://www.fdle.state.fl.us/mcicsearch/Flyers/FlyerCust1pic.asp?ID=46936
The case of Mabel Louise Andrews also appears to be a source of litigation within the family:
http://www.5dca.org/Opinions/Opin2014/110314/5D14-441.op.pdf
Just out of curiosity, I was wondering if there’s every been a comparison between Mabel Louise Andrews and the unidentified woman discovered on the California freeway in 1976? I understand the CODIS system, but i’m still a little bit confused by some parts of it. Ms. Andrews is NOT currently listed on the exclusions list for NamUs UP # 5820.
Is it at all possible that Ms. Andrews is UP # 5820?
I’ve attached an image showing a side-by-side comparison of Ms. Andrews and her glasses, next to an image of the eyeglasses found on 5820.
Thank you for looking into this is.
I sent this message around the same time that there was some discussion about Mabel online.
Around the same time that I sent my initial message, someone postulated the same thing that I had:
I also later noticed the woman’s posting. Here I am, it’s a long story, but I am using the name “Bill Rodgers”:
I was encouraged to read that multiple forum users has wondered the exact same things I had. Namely, about the eyeglasses:
They eyeglasses frames are awfully close. This is what drew me in initially:
There are always, always, always questions about exactly how DNA comparisons are done using the CODIS database. For a lay person, good luck getting a precise answer.
I’ve tried for years to understand exactly how CODIS works, especially in relation to missing and unidentified people. The more you research it, the more confusing it gets. The DNA of sex offenders and convicted felons collected at either the state or federal level cannot be “used” or compared against unidentified decedents.
Only in America would that be considered a privacy issue!
Here are two interesting posts from a forum about the Mable Louise Andrews disappearance that are very similar to numerous questions I have had over the years about the complex process of DNA comparison.
This forum user asked about what happens when DNA is collected from unidentified decedents, and then if it is automatically compared with the DNA of missing persons…
To which another forum user replied…
My Theory Takes a Most Surprising Twist
In case your eyes haven’t glazed over with boredom yet (too late) i’ll let you in on yet another interesting aspect of my theory about the Baker Jane Doe being Mable Louise Andrews.
I sent in my speculation about Mable Louise Andrews and the Baker Jane Doe way back in 2015. I believe that I used at least two email accounts to send follow up messages in 2016 and 2017.
I kind of lazily kept an eye on the case over the years. I kept periodically checking the NamUs UP#: 5820 exclusions list. The exclusions list on different cases are often updated when an unidentified person has been definitively ruled out as a missing person.
Mable Louise Andrews never showed up as an exclusion.
Then, in March of 2018, I spotted this on the Mable Louise Andrews websleuth forum:
“I have requested a DNA comparison be done.”
So, after several years of messages, there is confirmation in 2018 that there was a formal request to compare the DNA of the Baker Jane Doe with Mable.
The case continues to sit.
After Years of Waiting I File a Public Records Request
After years of seeing no determination made about the comparison of Mable to the Baker Jane Doe, I decided to try filing a public records request using MuckRock.
In January of 2019, I filed the following request with the Orlando Police Department:
To Whom It May Concern:
Pursuant to the Florida Sunshine Law, I hereby request the following records:
Any and all files, information, data, photos, investigative notes, logs, presentations, communications, written notes, documentation, documents, official emails, any and all public outreach media or print media and officer identification information associated with the disappearance of Mable Louise Andrews. This case has an Orlando Police Department case number of 2014–240932.
There are some discrepancies about the facts of the case. According to her publicly accessible NamUs profile, Ms. Andrews disappeared on January 16th of 1976. According to a court petition by her brother, she disappeared on Christmas Eve of 1974.
Here is a link to her NamUs profile which lists a January 16th 1976 date of disappearance: https://www.namus.gov/MissingPersons/Case#/24936/details
Here is a link to a court petition by her brother which states a Christmas Eve of 1974 date of disappearance: https://law.justia.com/cases/florida/fifth-district-court-of-appeal/2014/5d14-441.html
I have long had an interest in this case, and I suspect that Ms. Andrews could be the identity of a Jane Doe who has hit by an automobile in Baker, California on August 28th of 1976. I have made several attempts, over several years, using different email accounts, to contact law enforcement officials regarding this theory, and to inquire if it is possible to run the DNA of Ms. Andrews against the Jane Doe from California.
According to social media posts, other citizens have inquired about possible matches for Ms. Andrews:
Simplified request language :
ANY AND ALL FILES/MATERIAL AND COMMUNICATIONS RELATED TO THE MISSING PERSON, INCLUDING ANY OTHER INVESTIGATIONS OF LEGALLY DECEASED INDIVIDUAL AND ORLANDO RESIDENT NAMED BELOW:
Mable Louise Andrews
DOB: November 21st, 1959
Orlando Police Department Case #: 2014–240932
The requested documents will be made available to the general public, and this request is not being made for commercial purposes.
And then I wait…
The Results of the Public Records Request Result in a Sudden Surprising Realization
To my surprise, the Orlando Police Department grants my public records request after about five months.
From the released records, a few interesting things are revealed. First off, two separate familial DNA records had been collected.
The first thing that became apparent was that the initial DNA collected was from a non-identical twin of Mabel’s. This initial DNA collection took place in November of 2013.
Another report, this one dated September of 2016, describes another DNA collection from a possible familial match of Mabel’s. On September 16th of 2016, DNA from Mabel’s younger brother was collected to compare to an unidentified body found in 1977.
So, two different family members have provided DNA samples at two different times. One was a non-identical twin.
This all got me to thinking: who was the family member in the legal case involving Mabel? The case was from 2014, and it mentioned something about a brother.
I went back and looked at the legal case. The court documents listed one Tommie Lee Andrews.
Feeling negligent from not researching “Tommie Lee Andrews” sooner, I decided to dive into the Andrews family member who initiated the court case.
Who was Mabel’s brother Tommie Lee Andrews? Well, the answer was very surprising to me. The specifics of who he was, and his role in history, could have made for a really fascinating addition to this entire saga.
Mabel’s Brother: The First Man in U.S. History Convicted of Rape Using DNA Technology
Incredibly enough, Mabel’s brother, Tommie Lee Andrews, was the first person in American history to be convicted of rape using DNA technology.
Considering all the back and forth about DNA, it was amazing to think that Mabel’s own brother was the first suspect in U.S. history to be convicted using the technology.
Likewise, if regulations allowed the comparing of CODIS DNA samples from registered offenders to those John and Jane Doe cases, then DNA from the Andrews family would have been already compared to that of the Baker Jane Doe!
There would have been no need to re-take samples from family members in 2013 and 2016.
Not only that, but if samples from the unidentified Baker Jane Doe had been run against DNA from offenders in the national CODIS registry, then Tommie Lee would have been notified of this automatically!
My mind swirled with the possibilities. Mabel was, at this point, STILL not on the list of exclusions for the Baker Jane Doe.
If Mabel was the identity of the Baker Jane Doe, and she had sat unknown in a database while her famous DNA pioneer of a brother fought a court case about her, then this would make for one interesting story….
I decided to try to see if anyone else was interesting in looking into this. I shot off a letter to someone who had written extensively about Tommie Lee:
See if you can spot the error I made!
Hello! Thank you for taking the time to read this email. I just read an article (“The Chilling Story of Three Women Haunted by the Same Rapist — And How the Law Failed Them”) and found it interesting.
I’ve been researching something for several years now, and I think that some of the peculiarities of what i’ve found might be of interest to.
I can be a bit verbose, so please forgive me. I’ll get into more of the specifics below in this email, and provide some links to things you might find interesting. I will also bold the things which I feel might make for an interesting story.
But i’ll provide you a brief synopsis: I believe that there is a good chance that an unidentified Jane Doe, found in California in 1976, is possibly a young African American woman named Mabel Louise Andrews, who was reported as missing out of Florida in 1976. What makes the disappearance of Mabel Louise Andrews interesting is that she is the sister of a man named Tommie Lee Andrews. Mr. Andrews was the first American ever convicted of rape using DNA. I believe that the DNA testing of the remains in California is caught up in a bureaucratic morass of jurisdictional rules and state of federal regulations regarding DNA testing.
Bottom line: It would be an extraordinary story if the first man ever convicted of rape using DNA also happened to have a missing sister. A sister whose remains went unidentified for a number of reasons related to the Byzantine rules regarding DNA testing and unidentified people. Rules including, but not limited to, the fact that DOJ regulations prohibit the cross checking of his sex offender DNA with DNA in our nation’s missing person database. Imagine that the DNA of the first man ever convicted of rape sits in a national database, while it is prohibited to use his DNA to use familial tests against the remains of someone who could be his sister.
So, I know that’s all a little bit wordy. But, I do think this could be an interesting story that covers a whole lot of the legal and bureaucratic issues regarding DNA, federal databases, convicted criminals, and decades old cold cases.
A little background. I am a bit of a recluse in my old age. For the past five years or so, I have been occasionally been involved in web-sleuthing. I have a particular interest in old missing person and unidentified decedent cases on the internet. As a hobby, I sometimes browse the NamUs database — which is a collection of unidentified and missing persons cases. I then try to look for any evidence which might indicate the identity of an unidentified person. In five years I believe that I have identified 3 people (with another 2 possibly pending). That’s not exactly a great return on my investment of time — but it is an intellectual hobby that I enjoy nonetheless.
So, going back as far as late 2014, I have been especially fixated on the case of an unidentified African American female. This unidentified young woman was killed crossing Interstate 15 outside of Baker, California, in August of 1976.
Myself, and I came to find out, a number of other web sleuths, noticed similarities between this young woman in California, and a young girl named Mabel Louise Andrews who was reported missing out of Orlando, Florida.. A number of factors led me, and others, to make the comparison. The unique, Octagonal eye glasses frame found on both the Jane Doe, and in the photograph of Mabel Andrews. The photo reconstruction of the Baker Jane Doe, etc.
Other anecdotal evidence stuck out to me. One of the only reasons for anyone (especially an African American teenager in the 1970s) to be on a roadside in Baker, California, would be for hitchhiking. Someone on the side of a road in Baker would have likely been hitchhiking into, or out of, Las Vegas. Las Vegas is essentially a black hole for missing persons cases. People who go missing — or who are discovered with a connection to — Las Vegas could be from anywhere in the world. That small fact led me to conclude that the Baker Jane Doe could be from anywhere in the United States.
The discrepancy between when Mabel Andrews was first reported missing by her family (Christmas Eve of 74) and her last contact with the Orlando PD (early 1976) meant that the physical characteristics reported by her family were unlikely to be accurate. The missing person case of Mabel, like so many other missing person cases from the 1970s, languished for decades. It wasn’t until 2013 that a family member of Mabel’s discovered that there wasn’t an active case for her disappearance. Meaning, that while her family believed that her disappearance was an active case, she was not listed in any national criminal or missing person databases.
As you can see, I have spent some time looking at this case. While I was worried I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, I still went with the belief that Mabel Andrews and this Baker Jane Doe were one and the same.
I sent into this suspicion in 2014 and 2016. I kept watching the exclusions list (the DNA rule outs) on the NamUs pages for both Mabel and the Baker Jane Doe. Mabel Andrews has never been added to the exclusions list for the Baker Jane Doe. The Baker Jane Doe has never been added to the exclusions lists for Mabel Andrews.
I even went so far as to file a public records request for document related to Mabel Andrews from the Orlando Police Department. From the public records, I saw that DNA was collected from Mabel’s fraternal non-identical twin, Anthony Andrews. I also saw that the case had collected dust for decades, with Mabel’s disappearance having never been entered into federal databases.
As I said earlier, this case has gotten the attention of a small group of web sleuths. The case has been discussed on websites like Reddit and Websleuths. Several other people, besides myself, have been contacting law enforcement in California and Florida about the possible connection.
Interestingly enough, a poster on Websleuths shared a response they received in May of 2018 from Ashley Shaugnessy, a Forensic Services Supervisor at the Medical Examiner’s Office in Orlando.
In an email, Shaugnessy wrote this in regards to the comparison of Mabel Andrews with the Jane Doe in California:
“I have responded to a number of people who have inquired on these two cases over the past two years. We are not trying to be difficult in our response, but currently our hands, as well as that of law enforcement, are tied. While I cannot disclose all of the details and circumstances of the comparison/investigation, at this time DNA comparison between the family of MP Andrews and our unidentified case #77–0043 was not a match. The circumstantial evidence is very compelling which is why we haven’t completely ruled them out. But, based on the DNA results, we cannot currently link them together.”
So, an interesting response! The DNA evidence does not link them together — but law enforcement is resolutely not ruling out the possibility that Mabel Andrews and the Jane Doe are one and the same. How is this possible? Well, from the public records request, I spotted that DNA was collected from a fraternal non-identical twin. I am not the best with DNA stuff (skipped that CSI show, LOL) but I think that there could be an issue with fraternal twins and mitochondrial DNA testings. Mabel would have inherited DNA attributes from the mother, while Anthony, her brother, would have inherited some attributes from the father.
I also believe that the California Department of Justice has very specific rules regarding familial DNA — that they won’t sign off of the testing without extraordinarily compelling circumstances. I don’t think that a Jane Doe test would fit the bill.
Long story short, my hunch is that there is some explainable (and likely newsworthy) reason why there’s a problem with the DNA comparison in this case.
And the kicker! Federal DOJ guidelines prohibit cross-checking family reference profiles with criminal indices of convicted offenders or unknown suspects. Meaning that, even if Mabel’s sister was a prolific rapist, and he was the first American ever convicted of rape using DNA — it would be against the law to cross check his DNA with that of a Jane Doe from more than 40 years ago. I find that baffling.
If you’re looking for a story of how the United States has some of the oddest privacy guidelines, you should ponder the fact that the DNA collected from rape kit collections can’t be compared to John Does in national databases. What in the world is the thinking there?
Anyways, like I said, I can be verbose. Personally, I think this could be an interesting story. If an organization like the California DOJ is preventing some sort of DNA testing based on an arbitrary rule related to familial DNA testing, they would likely allow it, in the event that a journalist starts looking into the story.
Below are some links if you are interested. Thanks for reading through this email — it was a bit long, and a little disjointed! As you can tell, I am interested in this case and in the rules regarding DNA testing.
-Robby Delaware
I waited and waited. I looked to see if anything else would happen. I inquired around about the possible connection between Tommie Lee, Mabel and the Baker Jane Doe.
And then, after years of waiting, this…
After all of that time, Mabel Andrews appears on the exclusions list for the Baker Jane Doe.
Quite an interesting scenario, and one that got me thinking about being wrong. But also about learning some interesting other things along the way.
I am hopeful that both the Baker Jane Doe is identified, and that Mabel is finally located. After all this time, it is sort of a relief to know the two aren’t related.