The Citizen Scientist Who Finds Killers from her Couch

How CeCe Moore is using her genetic knowledge to expose murderers

Genetic genealogist CeCe Moore with Henry Louis Gates Jr. on the set of the PBS series Finding Your Roots. Photo courtesy of PBS Finding Your Roots

By Antonio Regalado and Brian Alexander

CeCe Moore, a petite woman with long thick curls of blond hair that fall well below her shoulders, sat on the sectional sofa crying. She’d been hired to connect DNA from a long-ago murder scene to a suspect. This is her sort of riddle, mixing genetics, census records, and Facebook friend lists. Moore is, in her own estimation, among the most experienced genetic genealogists in the world. No wonder she’d found him.

But the answer had been a surprise.

“I thought, it can’t be! This person could not have done this,” she says.

Moore was shaken. Someone had killed and drifted back into normal life, never expecting to be caught — not aware that, right now, she was studying him through her laptop.

Moore’s genetic sleuthing skills have been seen on PBS’s Finding Your Roots, on 20/20, and on daytime TV programs like The Dr. Oz Show, where she uses direct-to-consumer DNA tests to find the parents of adoptees, foundlings abandoned in dumpsters, and “war children” fathered during conflicts. She has solved hundreds of cases of unknown parentage.