The investigation continued. Search warrants — nearly twenty of them, including warrants executed in Michigan — were obtained. Cell phone records were reviewed. Bank accounts and email and social media were examined. The case accumulated paper and investigation hours and no resolution.
The Shasta County Sheriff eventually described the case as having gone cold. There were no active leads.
—
## 2020: The Trash Pull and the Match
In June 2020, FBI agents conducted a garbage pull — a technique in which agents collect trash set out for pickup at a residence, without requiring a warrant because the trash has been abandoned in a public place — outside the Costa Mesa home of James Reyes.
Reyes was a man Papini had dated before she met and married Keith. He lived in Southern California, roughly nine hours by car from Redding. He had no criminal record. He had no obvious connection to the Papini case in any public reporting.
What linked him to the case was genetic genealogy — a technique that became publicly prominent in 2018 when investigators used it to identify Joseph DeAngelo as the Golden State Killer. Genetic genealogy searches consumer-facing DNA databases — platforms like GEDmatch or FamilyTreeDNA, where people upload DNA profiles to find biological relatives — for individuals whose DNA partially matches an evidence profile, identifying them as potential relatives of the unknown contributor. Investigators trace family trees from those partial matches, building outward to identify candidates who could be the actual source of the DNA. The method had been used in dozens of criminal cases after the Golden State Killer identification.