“I have been working on this case since 2006,” retired Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department Sergeant Michaela Links tells PEOPLE, adding that the suspect’s DNA has been in a federal database since 2004. “We have done familial testing four times and probably eliminated 50 people. Just about everyone she knew has been eliminated. We have had no hits in all of these years. It has always been a ‘whodunit.’ ”
Links says it is the first time the technology, which cost the department $4,000, has been used in Sacramento.
According to the profile, the killer is a black male. The technology also recreated what the suspect may have looked like in 1980 and what he might look like now. It also provided the person’s hair, eye and skin color and biogeographic ancestry.
“The tool is primarily for exclusion,” Dr. Ellen Greytak, Director of Bioinformatics for Parabon NanoLabs, Inc. tells PEOPLE. “There is only so much we can determine from the DNA, and that is why we say the image is not a photograph — but it is a likeness and it gives us some information about who you should and shouldn’t be looking for.
