Elliott and his colleagues pursued conventional leads first. They checked databases of known fugitives — people wanted on active warrants who matched the approximate description. They examined the cases of missing persons from the relevant time period who might have been the Eastlake man. They ran the identity through systems that might have flagged connections to known criminal cases.
Nothing produced an identification.
It was around this point — in 2014, as the conventional approaches were exhausted — that the emerging field of forensic genealogy began to look like a potential path forward. Consumer genetic testing had been growing rapidly, and the databases of voluntarily submitted genetic profiles that companies and genealogical organizations maintained were large enough to be useful for identifying people through biological relatives. Researchers who specialized in this technique had begun applying it to unidentified persons cases.
The Chandler case was unusual even within this emerging field, however. The DNA sample available was not from a freshly preserved specimen. It was from tissue that had been stored in paraffin for approximately fourteen years. The degree of DNA degradation that paraffin storage produces over that time span was not fully characterized in the forensic genealogy literature, because the field was young and had not encountered many cases involving samples of this age and type.
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## Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick and the Y-STR Lead
In 2016, the Marshals brought in Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick to examine the DNA profile that had been developed from the 2000 surgical tissue. Fitzpatrick was the founder of Identifinders International, a forensic genealogy company that had pioneered the application of DNA evidence to identification problems in cases ranging from unidentified deceased individuals to missing persons to questions about the authenticity of historical relics and documents.