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It could really stand to have more exposition, especially at the start of the first episode, but I thought it was informative listen-able. The emphasis on education over entertainment is a good thing, and the narrators come across as two researchers who sincerely want to solve a decades-old case. I'll take it over most podcasts I've heard.

We're mostly in agreement, but not on the point highlighted in bold. The old papers, ancient by tech standards, give an indication as to (1) how long pairwise kinship analysis has been around and (2) the concerns expressed over it's accuracy. Now here we are in 2018 and "second-degree and more distant relationships remain challenging" per the current paper you linked to. And they're still trying to improve on accuracy through the use of "additional markers". Which raises the specter of Parabon over-parameterizing and over-fitting their models. From the press release:

(Bold added by me.)

Parabon is basically advertising a quantum leap in technology without providing a good reason for anybody to believe it.

Here is the FBI website where they explain CODIS and the NDIS:


This has come up before and I can't remember when the situation changed. But now now there is full participation, per the last sentence of the above.  Here is the listing they link to of the states and agencies: CODIS - NDIS Statistics.

Even previously when there were a few states not uploading to the NDIS, they surely had their own CODIS searchable databases that California LE was able to access. So it's okay, our guy is not off the hook.

EDIT:

Okay, we're talking here about the prison systems not participating. Sorry about that. Yet I suspect that the California LE investigators have access to the demographic information of the prisoners in those states. POI's can be determined from that information.

cleopatra -- Except now we haven't heard from Mitchell since the end of January. He seems to be on another hiatus. Hopefully all is well with him.

Well, now we know where that particular composite comes from, thanks to the second episode of the HLN series. It was drawn by witness who saw a man fleeing the Maggiore crime scene, presumably the shooter. I believe it was this guy as described in winters' book:


Am I right, is that the same witness?

Anyway, there goes the theory that "Moonie Surfer" was a recent sketch that retrospectively incorporated a lot of sources, including DNA phenotyping. That's out the window. But we can still see that his drawing has similarities with various other composites, so did the witness take inspiration from the Surfer Dude and Ripon Court sketches? Did he have any help from the use of a Photo-FIT kit? 

EDIT: Here's a Reddit thread on the witness, an art student at the time: Question about Karl Nollsch (witness at Maggiore murders)

@@endoftheworld --

On the non-secretor sitation:

Shelby informed us in a podcast a few years back about the issue. LE eliminated something like 5,000 suspects based on saliva tests, but that approach may not have been valid. It's possible that a man can secrete blood antigens in his saliva but not his semen. They did not know that starting out. 

After hearing that, a lot of us here on the message board were like, What, wait! Whatever happened to those falsely eliminated suspects? But just recently Carol Daly clarified the situation. LE did in fact go back and re-eliminate those men. So all that worrying we did was for nothing.

(BTW, it may well be a very rare situation for a man to secrete blood antigens in his saliva but not in his semen. So the odds of the EAR-ONS-GSK having this condition could be exceedingly remote. It's hard to say how remote it is, because it's hard to find a scientific reference on the topic. One that Mitchell found was only anecdotal.)


On blood typing the offender in the ONS murders:

I wish my memory were a steel trap and that I could pull this stuff up spontaneously, but no. From what Winters wrote in her book, it doesn't sound like they knew the offender's blood type for any of the murders. At the time of the initial investigations, that is.

With modern technology they can go back and perform the right type of DNA test and verify the offender's blood type. It's not the same type of DNA test as that is used with CODIS searches ("DNA fingerprinting"). It's not Y-STR, either. Did they ever ever verify the blood type? I'll have to go back and look. Maybe somebody else can fill us in, like winters .

For the EAR crimes, no attack yielded both a blood sample and an eventual DNA test.


On the rare PGM factor:

Now we learn about the rarity of his PGM factor. And we're told that non-sectors with this PGM factor comprise only 1-2% of the population. And that LE knew this early on.

With a quick web search, we can see that the PGM factor can be determined from semen, even if the donor is a non-secretor. So I'm asking, Did they do that with the ONS murders? If they had, it seems like they could have tied several of the murders and the EAR crimes together a lot sooner. It would not have been a definite connection, but it would have pushed them in that direction. Very strongly.


On the incompleteness of the information:

LE is just not going to share many of the details with us. They don't believe that they're obligated to do so. As long as we're kept partially in the dark, it will always seem like there is more room for doubt than maybe there really is. (On any particular topic.) Personally I'm done going down all these speculative roads when it turns out that one little peice of information would have completely changed my thinking.

LE knew the EAR's blood type early on. They knew he didn't secrete blood antigens in his semen. They knew he had this rare PGM factor.  At one point they thought all non-secretors were the same, but then they learned that some men will secrete antigens in their saliva but not their semen. So they went back and re-eliminated a set of suspects.

That's what we've been told.

We've speculated before about the possibility of faulty lab work and the veracity of the info that LE hands down to us. Did they let our offender fall through the cracks? Who's to say, but it sounds as if they were armed with useful tools.

BTW, I'm just another poster like you trying to make sense of what's going on.