Your DNA test could get your cousin's ex arrested for murder. A recent case shows how.

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WEST PALM BEACH, Florida — News of DNA testing in the hunt for Baby June's parents made Arya Singh uneasy.

Investigators said she clicked on article after article about the use of genetics to find suspects, her eyes scanning the page for her own name. She’d managed to stay under the radar since her newborn was found in the Boynton Inlet on June 1, 2018 — but perhaps not for much longer.

She was right to be worried. The rise of direct-to-consumer DNA testing kits has all but guaranteed that even people who have never uploaded their DNA to a public genealogy website can be found through the genetic fingerprints of those who have — in Singh’s case, a cousin of the baby.

“You no longer have privacy over your DNA,” said Julie Sikorsky, whose team of forensic scientists helped pave the way for Singh's arrest in December. “Because anyone related to you can give up their DNA, and that's going to lead back to you.”

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Singh was the first person identified this way by the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office, but she likely won’t be the last. Already, forensic scientists within the department have pointed to the break in the Baby June case as reason to put more resources toward investigative genetic genealogy.

“We’re at the top of our game,” Sikorsky said. “And DNA doesn’t lie.”

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Investigative genetic genealogy was still in its infancy and rife with controversy by the time of Baby June's discovery. The arrest of the so-called Golden State Killer just one month earlier shone a spotlight on the technique and prompted concerns over how police might misuse it.

If any case could win over the community, Sikorsky thought, it was this one.

Sikorsky and her team sent Baby June’s DNA to a company called Parabon Nanolabs in West Virginia to perform a more in-depth analysis than most crime labs can perform themselves. It's the same test 23andMe and Ancestry.com offer for about $100 and a cheek swab, and it relies on single nucleotide polymorphisms, or “snips.”

The percent of snips two people share can reveal how closely they’re related. Fifty percent, and it’s a parent or sibling. Twenty-five percent, a grandparent. The number gets exponentially smaller by third cousins and beyond.

Parabon generated Baby June’s snip profile and entered it into FamilyTreeDNA, one of two online genealogy databases police can access without a warrant.

On the first try, they found a match: someone who shared a great-great-great-great (“and maybe one more great,” Sikorsky said) grandparent with Baby June. With a match that far away, Parabon’s genealogists would need to build out an enormous family tree before finding the branch that ended with the infant, Sikorsky said.

They offered to do it for an additional $5,000, so she declined and turned her team’s attention instead to learning how to build one themselves. Over the next year, and with the help of a grant and a mentor from the Maryland State Police, they did exactly that.

Another of Baby June’s relatives had joined FamilyTreeDNA by then: a first cousin. Starting with the cousin, they built out a family tree and within a day and a half identified the man they believed was the father.

He claimed he had nothing to do with the newborn’s death and pointed them instead toward Singh — a 29-year-old security guard at Lynn University in Boca Raton with no criminal history. A DNA sample, covertly taken from a piece of Singh's trash, confirmed that she was the mother.

“You never give up hope,” Sikorsky said. “You're always looking.”

Why legal experts, privacy advocates caution against the use of direct-to-consumer genetic testing

In 2018, GEDmatch co-founder Curtis Rogers learned at the same time as the rest of the world that police used his genealogy website to track down Joseph DeAngelo, the so-called Golden State Killer. He was outraged that his trove of genomic data had been used in a way its contributors never imagined or consented to.

Then the emails began to trickle in.

“Mr. Rogers,” they began. “My father was a serial killer.”

They wanted police to use their DNA to help solve crimes — a mindset Rogers, a now 84-year-old resident of Lake Worth Beach, quickly came to adopt. He sold GEDmatch to a private company in California for $15 million in 2019 but remains an outspoken champion of its use for solving crimes.

Most of the privacy concerns that steer people away from it are misconceptions, he said. For one: Police aren't allowed to rummage through the database at will, or without announcing themselves first, thanks to a series of policy changes that followed the Golden State Killer revelation.

They can only access a database of users who opted to be there, Rogers said. If a match exists, police receive only the person's name, email address and how much DNA they share with the crime-scene sample. Detectives can’t turn to GEDmatch for help solving just any crime, either — only violent ones, including rape, assault and murder.

It sounds good, said Tiffany Roy, a forensic analyst from West Palm Beach, but she noted that those policies are subject to change at the discretion of whoever owns the database.

With no guidance from the state or the federal governments, Rogers created order as he saw fit. He shifted the criteria for what counted as a violent crime, and who in the database police could see.

Even those privacy standards could be overruled if law enforcement prodded hard enough. In 2019, an Orange County judge signed off on a warrant granting one Orlando detective full access to GEDmatch's database of 1 million users — not only those who agreed to be visible to police.

In principle, detectives need a warrant to collect and test a person's DNA, said Christopher Slobogin, director of Vanderbilt Law School’s Criminal Justice Program. But in practice, they can swipe it from someone's trash without getting a judge's approval first, like detectives did with Singh.

That's known as surreptitious DNA sampling. Often the last step in investigative genetic genealogy, it's also the most controversial.

Nate Wessler, deputy project director with the American Civil Liberties Union, is pushing lawmakers to draw firm lines about when it's permissible. Until they do, detectives alone can decide whose DNA they collect and why, immune from any outside judicial review.

"After public debate, lawmakers may decide that some techniques are totally fine and others are off the table," Wessler said. "But they can't even have that debate until they know what's going on, until government investigators are totally forthcoming about what they're doing."

With genealogy websites only getting bigger, so are the chances for more identifications like Singh’s. A study published in the journal Science found in 2018 that 60% of Americans could be found through the DNA of a third cousin. Lead researcher Yaniv Erlich, a former genetic-privacy researcher at Columbia University, said that by 2021, the number would grow to 90%.

It’s an unnerving stat for privacy advocates, but an encouraging one for detectives. Another upload to the database, Sikorsky said, and “Voilà!” Another homicide solved.

Hannah Phillips is a journalist covering public safety and criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com.