What the Y-STR result did was confirm that the investigation was looking for a man whose biological father had the surname Nichols or a closely related variant. This eliminated the majority of possible identities and gave the investigation a direction.
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## The DNA Doe Project and the Breakthrough
The next stage of the investigation engaged the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit organization co-founded by Dr. Fitzpatrick and Dr. Margaret Press that had been established specifically to identify unknown deceased persons using forensic genealogy. The DNA Doe Project used volunteers — trained genetic genealogists who donated their research time to work on cases — and applied autosomal SNP analysis, which examines hundreds of thousands of positions across the entire genome rather than the specific markers used in Y-STR testing.
Autosomal SNP analysis is the technique underlying consumer genetic testing services: it produces a profile that can be compared against the profiles of other users in a shared database to identify genetic relatives at various degrees of closeness. When an unknown person’s profile is uploaded to a database like GEDmatch — an open platform where users can upload profiles from multiple testing services and compare them — it may produce matches with relatives who have submitted their own profiles.
The challenge with the Chandler sample was the degree of degradation. With only about seven percent of the genome recoverable, the team had to adapt its methods. They conducted multiple rounds of sequencing on the remaining material to maximize the usable data, combining results across sequencing runs to produce the best possible composite profile from what remained.