Human remains found on Bay Area beaches in 1999 and 2023 have been identified as those of Walter Karl Kinney, a banker who disappeared in 1999. The remains were discovered by a family searching for sea shells in 2022, leading to an investigation that linked the remains to Kinney's family through DNA analysis.
When the topic of serial murder comes up, almost reflexively, the diagnosis of psychopathic personality is given as an explanation for the offender's behavior. Question: "Why did he kill all these people?" Answer: "He's a psychopath." It seems that once it is proclaimed that the serial killer is a psychopath, everything is understood. This assertion has gained such widespread acceptance that its validity is never questioned.
Every state now has a legal avenue where people can request DNA testing of evidence after being convicted. But in many cases, it's not clear if those statutes apply once convicts have died, said Brandon Garrett, a law professor at Duke University.
An unidentified foreign hacker broke into the FBI's field office in New York in 2023 and compromised files related to the bureau's investigation into the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, according to Reuters. The hack took advantage of a server at the Child Exploitation Forensic Lab in the FBI's New York Field Office that was left inadvertently vulnerable by an FBI special agent working on the case.
Martschenko's argument is largely that genetic research and data have almost always been used thus far as a justification to further entrench extant social inequalities. But we know the solutions to many of the injustices in our world-trying to lift people out of poverty, for example-and we certainly don't need more genetic research to implement them. Trejo's point is largely that more information is generally better than less.
Mobile Fortify, now used by United States immigration agents in towns and cities across the US, is not designed to reliably identify people in the streets and was deployed without the scrutiny that has historically governed the rollout of technologies that impact people's privacy, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The Department of Homeland Security launched Mobile Fortify in the spring of 2025 to "determine or verify" the identities of individuals stopped or detained by DHS officers during federal operations, records show.
Smartphones are now the most crucial source of digital evidence in solving nearly every criminal investigation, a report has found. Detectives rely on the wealth of information held on the devices in 97 per cent of cases - double the number in which data from laptops was needed. With the devices containing swathes of detailed messages, photos and location data, police chiefs told the Mail the devices had become 'a crime scene in your pocket'.
Cell-site simulators ICE has a technology known as cell-site simulators to snoop on cellphones. These surveillance devices, as the name suggests, are designed to appear as a cellphone tower, tricking nearby phones to connect to them. Once that happens, the law enforcement authorities who are using the cell-site simulators can locate and identify the phones in their vicinity, and potentially intercept calls, text messages, and internet traffic.
Investigative genetic genealogists are asking for the public's help to identify a child whose skull was seized from a Seabrook, N.H., business more than 30 years ago. The DNA Doe Project, a California-based nonprofit that builds DNA profiles from unidentified human remains, released a new facial reconstruction on Monday. The group also announced that the skull - believed to belong to a girl between the ages of 7 and 9 - has ancestral roots on the Greek island of Chios.
We don't know what exactly investigators found or whether they are in any way harmful. However, we do have an intriguing clue. The property was linked to Jia Bei Zhu, a 62-year-old Chinese citizen who was arrested in October 2023 on charges of manufacturing and distributing misbranded medical devices and making false statements to the FDA, according to NBC News.
Berkeley police arrested a man in Texas who is suspected of seven kidnappings and sexual assaults in Berkeley and Oakland between 1994 and 2008. The breakthrough in the case was through a state grant that funded the processing of over 500 cold sexual assault cases. [Bay Area News Group] BART is reportedly in the process of cleaning metallic dust off the insulator caps along its electrified third rail.