Surname Issues from Michelle McNamara's book?
Mar 3, 2018 1:26:51 GMT
claudius_2014, otiswasthegreatest, and 3 more like this
Post by Hydrogen on Mar 3, 2018 1:26:51 GMT
How many more people have been given EAR's DNA profile and are using their own names or pseudonyms to run a report? Because if they have it of course they are going to run it – which would produce skewed results.
If that's what you meant, there is a hole in that too. It would always be the same DNA profile, so whatever connection would be made beyond that particular profile could not originate from the same DNA. Even if there were pseydonyms X, Y and Z with the same DNA showing "relation" to each other, there would still be nothing in it to suggest some patrilinear link going back some 400 years. That sort of data would have to had come from some other DNA material that was factually linked to the DNA profile in question.
I might be mistaken.
If you get a chance to read Michelle's book, it's on page 304. Holes periodically checked the EAR profile he uploaded and never had a close match until one day 12 markers -- including an extremely rare marker - matched another profile. There was a surname he had not seen before -- it was a new upload. But here's the rub: "It turns out that a retired Secret Service agent and amateur sleuth named Russ Oase had anonymously uploaded EAR's markers into the same database. So the match Paul Holes thought he had was actually the result of two guys uploading the same killer's DNA profile and getting a mirror-image match."
Then a third upload: Michelle used her own name for the killer's DNA profile (although possibly a different database from what Holes and Oase used) and her last name was McNamara. When using DNA profiles to find criminals the surnames are important, according to the expert Colleen Fitzpatrick. So, if they all used Ancestry.com that means the same DNA profile had been uploaded 3 times with 3 different surnames attached. But it was really one DNA profile and the surname is unknown. That's what I meant by skewed results.
By "plot hole" I meant the book offered no explanation (at least I don't remember seeing one) of how civilian Michelle or retired agent Russ Oase obtained EAR's DNA profile. This important detail should have been explained.
H1