DNA Genealogy Solved a 39-Year-Old Sex Crime—Two Days Too Late

In August 1986, a woman stopped to use a public restroom at the Big Fishdam River access site along U.S. 2 in Garden Township, Michigan. She was on a bicycle trip from her home in Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin, to Sault Ste. Marie. She never made it. A man with a gun forced her into a vehicle, drove her to multiple locations, and sexually assaulted her repeatedly. Then he disappeared. For nearly four decades, the biological evidence collected from that crime sat preserved, waiting for technology to catch up to what it knew.

It finally did. According to Michigan State Police^[1], investigators identified a 78-year-old man living in Argonne, Wisconsin, as the suspect — a man who had lived in Harris, Michigan, about 45 minutes from the crime scene at the time of the assault and moved to Wisconsin shortly afterward. Charges of kidnapping and first-degree criminal sexual conduct were authorized. Arrest was planned for July 29, 2025. On July 27, the suspect died.

The Biology of a Preserved Lead

What made this case solvable nearly four decades later was not a witness who finally talked, or a document that surfaced from a filing cabinet. It was DNA — specifically, biological evidence collected in 1986 and stored well enough to be forensically viable in 2025. The National Institute of Justice has documented^[3] that forensically valuable DNA can survive on physical evidence for decades when it is collected and stored properly. The chemistry of the molecule itself — the stable base-pair bonds, the double-helix architecture — resists degradation under controlled conditions in ways that make it one of the most durable biological records humans produce. A rapist's cells, left behind in 1986, can still carry his identity in 2025. The molecule does not care how long it has been waiting.

But DNA sitting in storage is inert information. It only becomes a lead when there is something to compare it to. For most of the case's history, investigators had a profile and no name. Traditional DNA databases — primarily CODIS, the FBI's Combined DNA Index System — only return a match when the suspect's DNA is already in the system, typically because they were previously arrested or convicted. If the person never appeared in that system, the biological evidence remained an eloquent clue pointing nowhere.

Genealogy as a Different Kind of Microscope

What changed the equation was forensic investigative genetic genealogy, or FIGG — the same methodology that identified the Golden State Killer in 2018 and opened a new chapter in cold case investigation. As GEDmatch's history reflects^[4], the approach works by uploading a crime scene DNA profile to consumer genealogy databases, where it can be compared not against criminals but against ordinary people who have voluntarily submitted their genetic information to trace their ancestry. A near-match to a distant relative — a second cousin, a third cousin — is enough. Investigators then build a family tree outward from those partial matches, using public records to identify living and deceased branches, narrowing the field until a plausible suspect emerges. Before 2018, DNA at a crime scene only helped if you had a name. One database changed that. This case sits inside that post-2018 world.

“A rapist's cells, left behind in 1986, can still carry his identity in 2025. The molecule does not care how long it has been waiting.”

The Michigan State Police worked with the Wisconsin Department of Justice's Division of Criminal Investigation and the Forest County Sheriff's Office, as well as the MSP Forensic Science Division. Once a suspect was identified through genealogical work, a search warrant for his DNA was issued. Investigators collected a sample directly from the suspect and submitted it to the MSP Forensic Science Division. Lab analysis confirmed the match to the evidence from 1986. The biology said: this is the man. According to the MSP press release^[1], the case is believed to be the oldest sexual assault case in Michigan to be solved using FIGG.

Students, Troopers, and a 39-Year-Old Trail

The breakthrough did not belong entirely to veteran investigators. Northern Michigan University's cold case program^[2] — a program in which students work alongside law enforcement on real unsolved cases — contributed an investigative lead that directly helped MSP identify the suspect. The program pairs academic instruction in forensic investigation with genuine casework, meaning students are not running simulations. They are reading real evidence, building real timelines, and sometimes finding the thread that changes everything. In this case, they did.

That detail is worth sitting with. A woman was assaulted in 1986. For most of the intervening decades, her case was a folder in a filing system somewhere — evidence preserved, leads exhausted, file open. Then, late in the case's history, students in an academic program found something investigators had not yet surfaced, handed it to state police, and that lead eventually pointed to a 78-year-old man in rural Wisconsin whose DNA confirmed he had been at that river access site in Garden Township thirty-nine years ago.

The Distance Between Charged and Arrested

The MSP press release^[1] states it plainly: charges were issued, an arrest date of July 29, 2025 was set, and on July 27, 2025, the suspect died. Two days. The Forest County Sheriff's Office is overseeing the death investigation. No cause of death is provided in the available public record.

In the legal architecture of criminal justice, death before arrest is not a technicality — it is a terminus. Charges dissolve. There is no trial, no conviction, no sentence. The case, in the formal sense, closes without resolution. The word used in the MSP statement for what the victim receives instead is "closure" — a word that has to carry an enormous amount of weight here, because it is the only thing forensic science could ultimately deliver.

“The case is believed to be the oldest sexual assault case in Michigan to be solved using forensic investigative genetic genealogy.”

This is not an uncommon shape for cold cases, particularly those stretching back decades. Forensic labs are already dealing with backlogs that slow cold case resolution, and the longer a case ages, the higher the probability that suspects, witnesses, and sometimes victims die before the process concludes. FIGG is powerful enough to identify someone who evaded every traditional investigative method for forty years. It is not powerful enough to make him answer for it if his body fails first.

What the DNA Actually Settled

There is a distinction worth making, even if the legal system cannot act on it. The forensic match between the 1986 evidence and the court-authorized sample collected from the suspect in 2025 is a scientific determination, not a judicial one. The DNA said, with the specificity that modern forensic analysis provides, that this man's biology was present at the crime. The charges were authorized on that basis. What the courts never got to rule on — guilt, innocence, the full weight of the evidence — remains judicially unresolved. But the science does not expire with the suspect.

For the victim, who spent 39 years knowing what had happened to her without knowing who had done it, the identification carries something real even without a conviction. The OJP's special report on using DNA to solve cold cases^[3] frames this explicitly: closure for victims is a stated objective of cold case DNA work, distinct from — though ideally accompanying — criminal prosecution. In this case, the science delivered the name. The calendar denied the rest.

The man who forced a woman at gunpoint into a vehicle on a summer day in 1986 spent 39 years in ordinary life — first in Harris, Michigan, then in Argonne, Wisconsin. He was 78 years old and already dying, or close enough to it, when the match came back confirmed. His DNA, shed somewhere in Delta County nearly four decades ago, outlasted his ability to be held accountable for what he did with it. That is not a satisfying ending. It is, however, a precise one — and precision, in a case this old, is not nothing.

References

1. Decades After the Crime, Wisconsin Man Charged in Cold Case Kidnapping and Sexual Assault Case (michigan.gov)
   Official MSP statement confirming the suspect's identification, the charges authorized, the planned arrest date of July 29, 2025, and his death on July 27, 2025.
2. NMU Students Help Solve U.P. Cold Case (news.nmu.edu)
   Documents that Northern Michigan University students in a cold case program provided an investigative lead that helped MSP identify the suspect.
3. Using DNA to Solve Cold Cases: Special Report | Office of Justice Programs (ojp.gov)
   Establishes that forensically valuable DNA can survive on evidence for decades when properly collected and stored.
4. GEDmatch (en.wikipedia.org)
   Describes how GEDmatch works as a public genealogy database where law enforcement can compare crime scene DNA against voluntary user submissions.