Tamara Tigard

DNA Doe Project (also DNA Doe Project, Inc. or DDP) is an American nonprofit volunteer organization formed to identify unidentified deceased persons (commonly known as John Doe or Jane Doe) using forensic genealogy.

Volunteers identify victims of automobile accidents, homicide, and unusual circumstances and persons who committed suicide under an alias.

In 1981, three passersby found a female murder victim in a ditch in Troy, Ohio.

Because the victim was found wearing a distinctive buckskin coat, she was given the name "Buckskin Girl" as the investigation continued.

For decades, authorities sought the woman's identity, but to no avail.

This name appeared drawn from "Lyle Stevick", a character in a Joyce Carol Oates's novel You Must Remember This (1987).

The Grays Harbor County Sheriff's Office spent countless hours in search of the man's true identity but to no avail.

In September 2001, a man was found to have hanged himself in a motel in Amanda Park, Washington, a town on the Olympic Peninsula.

The man had checked in as "Lyle Stevik," which appeared to be an alias.

As a hobby, Press had begun working in genetic genealogy in 2007, helping friends and acquaintances find relatives, as well as helping adoptees find their biological parents.

After reading Sue Grafton's novel "Q" Is for Quarry, about a Jane Doe, Press hoped to use genetic genealogy to also identify unidentified homicide victims.

She retired from computer programming in 2015 and relocated from Salem, Massachusetts, to Sebastopol, California to live near family.

The group was founded in 2017 by Colleen M. Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press.

Colleen M. Fitzpatrick, who has a doctorate in physics and worked as a nuclear physicist with NASA and the US Department of Defense, was the founder of IdentiFinders, an organization that used Y-chromosomal testing to attempt to identify male killers in unsolved homicides.

Margaret Press is a novelist who has also had careers in computer programming and speech and language consulting.

In 2017, Fitzpatrick, Press, and a small group of volunteers formed the volunteer-based, nonprofit DNA Doe Project (DDP), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Sebastopol, California.

The two, along with many volunteers, use genetic and traditional genealogy sources in conjunction with DNA from unidentified victims and working with local law enforcement agencies to build family trees through GEDmatch, a free public DNA database.

Through this process, they have been able to identify several individuals in cold cases.

At the 2017 American Academy of Forensic Sciences conference, Elizabeth Murray, an Ohio forensic anthropologist, met Colleen M. Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press, founders of the DDP, who discussed what genetic genealogy techniques could do for this case.

The victim's body had long since been buried, but a vial of blood had been held in a lab for 37 years.

The vial had not been refrigerated, however, resulting in the DNA becoming highly degraded, with only 50 to 75 percent of markers remaining.

With the help of Greg Magoon, a senior researcher at Aerodyne Research, they were able to upload this DNA data to GEDmatch.

From this point, the DDP was able to identify the "Buckskin Girl", based on a very close DNA match (to a first cousin once removed).

Her name was Marcia Lenore Sossoman (King) from Arkansas, aged 21 at the time of her death.

DDP volunteers provided law enforcement with the name of a close relative of King's who lived in Florida.

This relative volunteered a DNA sample that confirmed Sossoman's identity.

This sample proved to be a match.

After 37 years, her mother was still living at the house where Sossoman had grown up.

She had refused to move or change her phone number in hopes that her daughter might return or try to contact her.

In March 2018, the DDP announced it had solved its first case.

Known for decades as the "Buckskin Girl", the victim was identified as Marcia Lenore Sossoman (King).

Her father had died in 2018, a few months before the identification was made, but other family members gathered to commemorate King when they unveiled a new gravestone bearing her name at her grave in Riverside Cemetery, Miami County, Ohio.

In 2018, the DDP took the case at the request of the county sheriff's office.

In order to raise the funds required to complete the necessary DNA analysis, the DDP set up its first-ever "Doe Fund Me" campaign on behalf of the victim.

The campaign was a quick success, as, by this time, "Stevik" had gained internet fame among web sleuths.

In May 2019, GEDmatch required people who had uploaded their DNA to its site to specifically opt in to allow law enforcement agencies to access their information.

This change in privacy policy was forecast to make it much more difficult in the future for law enforcement agencies to solve cold cases using genetic genealogy.

, the organization has assisted in discovering the identity of more than 50 individuals, with 44 cases being publicized as identified.

Each genetic genealogy case at the DDP generally is conducted by the following steps:

Some of the difficulties the DDP has encountered when using genetic genealogy to identify bodies have been: