Heather Murphy

In a remote area about three hours from the mountain’s summit, a bleached skull peeked out from beneath gray boulders.

“We were in disbelief,” said one of the hikers, Brandon Follin, 22, who was with his friend, Tyler Hofer, 33. “My first thought was maybe it was a prop or something like you see in a science class.”

As they got closer, they spotted hints of other bones amid the boulders. Clearing away the rocks revealed a skeleton, which was almost fully intact, with a pair of disintegrating leather shoes and the remnants of a belt.

Investigators at the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office are trying to identify the hiker and solve the mystery of why he or she never got beyond this spot in “the bowl,” as that stretch leading up to the top of Mount Williamson is known.

The mountain is in the Sierra Nevadas, more than a four-hour drive from Los Angeles or Las Vegas. The primary rule of getting to the top is not to drop anything while navigating the bowl, said Tinh Le Trung, who works at Elevation Sierra Adventure Essentials and did the hike two years ago.

“Imagine a bunch of sharp boulders that you have to hop between,” he said. “Lose your phone and you can’t get it back.” And if you twist your ankle on one of the unstable rocks, “you’re done,” he said.

That is particularly true if you have come up one of the more remote sides of the bowl: “No one will find you,” Trung added.

People from across the country come for the hike. For Follin and Hofer, who are both from San Diego, the attraction was “to do another fourteener,” Follin, said, using the lingo for a 14,000-foot peak.

Hofer saw the chalk-white skull first. They were about 12 miles into their hike from the spot where they camped the night before. They started crossing the bowl and took the wrong route around a lake.

“I looked down and saw something strange underneath a small boulder,” Hofer wrote in a Facebook post. “I thought it looked like a bone of some kind, and after closer inspection, it was indeed a human skull.”

The hikers were at a loss about what to do.

Follin said not touching the bones and calling authorities seemed wise, but they were far beyond cell service. They opted to document their findings, moving only the foot for a better photo of the shoe.

After they reached the summit, they called 911. On Wednesday, the remains were removed by a California Highway Patrol helicopter.

The Inyo County Sheriff’s Office said it could not yet say how long the person had been on the mountain. The sex of the person was pending a review by the county coroner’s office.

Forensic anthropologist Alison Galloway, a professor emerita of anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz, said the length of time it would take for a body to become a skeleton depends primarily on the temperature and local insect population.

In a warm area with certain types of flies, it could happen in six months. “The colder it is, the longer it will take,” she said.

Galloway had not seen the skeleton but said investigators typically hope there is still some soft tissue because then they “can get within a few months.” But with only bones, it is trickier to determine whether someone has been there for one year or 20.

In this case, the shoes and belt may offer more useful clues than the skeleton itself, she said. There are a variety of other techniques to determine timing. She pointed to carbon-14 testing, for example, which can reveal whether someone died before the 1950s.

Strangely, the use of atomic bombs in the 1950s and 1960s released enough changes in the carbon ions in the atmosphere to be reflected in the bones of people who were born after that time, she said.

Carma Roper, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office, said investigators had reviewed lists of everyone reported missing in the area in the last couple of decades. That included Lt. Matthew Kraft, a Marine from Connecticut who vanished during a ski trek through the Sierra in February, and Matthew Greene, a climber from Pennsylvania last seen in the Mammoth Lakes area in 2013.

Based on the skeleton’s location, nothing has matched up.

There is “no evidence to suggest foul play at the scene,” Roper, who declined to elaborate, said. Follin, who said he had no forensic background, was skeptical.

“The way the body was laid out, it was lounging” as if someone buried the hiker after he or she died, he said.

Follin and Hofer said they spotted a big dent in the skull, as if it were fractured. Roper said that was inaccurate.

The sheriff’s office is attempting to obtain a DNA sample from the remains. Ed Green, a professor at University of California, Santa Cruz, who is not involved in the investigation but specializes in extracting DNA from old remains, said that if no hair was available, an ear bone or tooth were generally reliable sources of DNA.

Investigators can then see if the DNA matches anyone in a missing person’s database. If not, and no promising leads emerge, Roper said the sheriff’s office planned to use forensic genealogy, a technique that relies on using cousins in genealogy databases to identify a person.

“If someone knows someone who hiked in the area and disappeared, they should contact us,” she said.

This article originally appeared in

Hikers Find Mystery Skeleton on Remote Mountain in California

Had they not gotten off track, a pair of hikers on Mount Williamson, California’s second-highest peak, would have missed it.

But even the highest-profile cases rarely end up in criminal court; they typically become humiliating footnotes to the discoveries they slowed.

This week, however, a judge in Montana sentenced a former chemist at the water treatment plant in Billings after she pleaded guilty in October to a felony charge of tampering with public records or information.

The information in question? Her colleagues’ water tests, which she contaminated for three months, ultimately costing the Billings water treatment plant its state certification and thoroughly perplexing her colleague, her boss and a host of experts, who could not figure out why just one chemist’s tests kept failing, according to prosecutors.

The sentence? A payment of $38,911 to the city of Billings, near Yellowstone National Park, and a three-year deferred sentence, meaning she is required to check in with a probation officer for that period.

“I deserved a reprimand, of course,” Michelle Henderson, the chemist who was sentenced on Monday, said in an interview. She said that she believed the colleague whose samples were contaminated, Katie Hendrickson, had been receiving preferential treatment from their boss. “I worked in a toxic environment that was fed by favoritism. My mind couldn’t cope.”

The rivalry took root during a time when — from the outside — everything at the Billings water treatment plant was going well. In 2014, a glowing article in a local newspaper declared that the plant was producing “the tastiest and purest water in Montana.”

In May 2015, Hendrickson, the chemist whose photo appeared with that article, discovered that she was unable to deliver on the most essential of tasks: passing a water test. Her job was to prove that the water going out to Billings residents was safe to drink. But even though other chemists’ tests showed precisely that, hers did not.

For three months, her tests — and her tests alone — failed again and again. She checked her equipment and asked her supervisor to monitor the process. Still, she experienced “numerous failed tests on a nearly daily basis beginning on May 19, 2015, and ending on Sept. 3, 2015,” an affidavit filed by the prosecution stated.

“It was kind of the scenario of everything that I touched just was contaminated and would not work,” she said at the sentencing hearing on Monday, according to The Billings Gazette. The more she did to resolve the problem, the worse it got, she said, until she saw contamination at “unbelievable levels” multiple times a day.

An external expert flew in to review the equipment, but found no problems. For those who know Hendrickson, the possibility that it was user error seemed implausible. “She was a great chemist,” said Andy Valkenburg, a former quality officer at Energy Laboratories in Billings, where she had previously been employed.

Only after the company installed surveillance cameras did the truth come to light. When Hendrickson was at lunch and in her boss’ office, Henderson handled her colleague’s samples, spiking them with a substance and discarding materials in the trash. Henderson was put on administrative leave and later resigned.

Water tests involve several steps. The first is making sure that the test is calibrated correctly. This is when Henderson manipulated the results, she said. She did this by taking a concentrated powder and putting it in the beaker used to set measurements.

One would be hard-pressed to find a more “wild” way of gaslighting someone in a lab, said Matt Queen, a professor of analytical chemistry at Montana State University Billings. It’s kind of like popping an invisible weight on a scale and then watching as everything comes out 20 pounds heavier for one person than for another. “I’m sure it just drove that poor woman nuts,” he said.

At the sentencing hearing on Monday, Henderson offered her former co-worker and boss a tearful apology, saying what she had done was “stupid,” according to The Billings Gazette.

Judge Michael Moses of Yellowstone County District Court said the consequences could have been even more grave. “You were six inches away from contaminating the water system of the community of a 100,000 people-plus,” he said, the newspaper reported. “That’s just unfathomable, and that’s a horrific breach of public trust. But thank goodness you had enough sense not to do that.”

Penelope Strong, Henderson’s lawyer, said in an interview that though her client was remorseful, the judge’s pronouncement was sensationalist given that the water from water tests never goes back to the main water supply.

Attempts to reach Hendrickson, Henderson’s former boss and the prosecutor were unsuccessful. A Billings water treatment plant employee who answered the phone this week said her team had been advised not to comment.

As to what she was thinking, Henderson said in the interview that she loved her work as a chemist but had been frustrated by the sense that she worked harder than her colleague but that their boss favored the other chemist. As a mother of three young children, she spent her breaks pumping breast milk, she said. It bothered her that her colleague seemed to taker longer breaks.

“I started muddling with her sample methods so that she would actually have to work,” Henderson said. “This just made their bond stronger and my negative emotions became cancerous.” Given a do-over, she said, she would leave before letting jealousy and resentment “seep into my soul.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/us/montana-chemist-water.html" id="5745c85c-09cd-3215-af53-9ea4dfc5afe0">The New York Times</a>.

Jealousy Led Montana Chemist to Taint Colleague's Water Tests

Lab rivalries go back nearly as far as labs themselves. There’s the case of a prominent 19th-century bacteriologist who paid local authorities to deny a former collaborator access to the bodies of plague victims. There are the AIDS researchers who sabotaged one another’s work on at least five occasions. And there are numerous stories of scientists who have accused colleagues of stealing their work.

In an interview Tuesday, he explained that he had been planning to use a big news event to promote his online expert company, which has been struggling to find users.

A few hours earlier, a gunman had opened fire at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, 60 miles south of his home. He said he was frustrated by how little the witnesses interviewed by broadcast journalists seemed to know. His site could help, he thought.

And so, seated in the comfort of his home, with its indoor tennis court and three microwave ovens for optimum popcorn popping, he took action: “I dashed off a tweet and did not think about it.”

If you were a witness to the #GilroyGarlicFestivalshooting please sign on to Interface by WhenHub (free app) and you can set your price to take calls. Use keyword Gilroy. — @ScottAdamsSays

In particular the phrase “set your price” — amid a tragedy that took the lives of a 6-year-old boy, a 13-year-old girl and a 25-year-old biologist — struck many people as insensitive. Rather quickly, his tweet was “ratioed,” eventually accumulating more than 1,300 comments, far outnumbering the likes and retweets, the equivalent of a beating in the virtual square.

“THERE WAS A TRAGEDY, USE MY APP,” one user wrote.

“And the ghoulish grifter chimes in,” wrote another.

A user who described sitting in Gilroy with scared family members wrote: “Choppers overhead as we are sheltered in place in the ACTIVE MANHUNT SEARCH ZONE &amp; YOU CARE ABOUT OPTIMIZING THE ALMIGHTY $? DO NOT PASS GO, JUST GO TO HELL!!”

In the interview, Adams said he regretted the “set your price” wording because it masked the fact that people who sign up for his site are not required to charge for an interview, and because he really believes his site could facilitate better journalism and help connect people to good experts.

“I wouldn’t do it the same way again,” he said, noting that he has promoted his company during two natural disasters without generating any resistance.

But what about the fee that his company collects per interview?

“If you think $5 is money; I don’t,” he said, laughing. (For context: According to Adams, he was once was paid $100,000 to speak for an hour on techniques for success.)

For anyone who has peeked at Adams’ Twitter feed in the past few years, however, none of this should come as a big surprise. There are the typical tweets promoting his comic strip, which he has been creating for more than 30 years. But there are also plenty of hints of his other identity: online provocateur. Long before his “set your price” tweet ignited controversy, there was the podcast episode in which he defended family separations at the southern border and his “men’s rights” blog post.

He is an admirer of President Donald Trump, and he admits to borrowing some of the president’s style. “One of the things that you can learn from Trump’s approach is that energy is more important than being technically correct,” he said Tuesday.

In a live Periscope video, he connected the recent backlash to his support of the president. “The pushback I’m getting is fueled by the intense hatred of Trump and of anybody who’s ever said anything good about Trump,” he said in one widely circulated remark.

Still, how did a Bay Area-based artist, known for creating a widely syndicated comic strip about the indignities of office life, get to this point? We put some questions to Adams.

Has he always been a Republican?

No. In fact, the last presidential candidate he voted for was former Vice President Al Gore, he said. Since then, he said, he has stopped participating in elections.

“I publicly don’t vote because it causes bias,” he said, adding that “I define myself as left of Bernie.”

His appreciation for Trump is about communication methods, he said. Adams is a trained hypnotist and has written a book about the art of persuasion.

“He is more persuasive than any public figure I’ve ever seen,” he said of the president. “Early on in 2015 I saw his skill set and thought no one has that skill set. You can’t recognize persuasion unless you’ve studied it.”

By that point, Adams had begun dabbling in provocative political writing himself. In a 2017 Outline article, writer Alex Nichols pointed to a 2011 blog post about men’s rights as “the first time Adams made a detectable splash” with his blog.

“The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently,” Adams wrote in the blog post. “It’s just easier this way for everyone.”

Adams apologized after the blog post began to draw negative attention, but he also reprimanded readers for failing to understand what he was trying to say, according to The Outline.

He deployed a similar tactic in the latest controversy. Referring to the tweet, Adams said that his mistake was making “an assumption that people can handle ethical decisions on their own.”

More recently, Adams inserted himself into the debate around the Trump administration’s family-separation policy in a podcast episode in which he argued that those who attack the policy are siding with human traffickers.

His comments inspired a 2018 Forbes column, “Dilbert Creator Scott Adams Is Evil (And Why You Should Follow His Lead),” in which the writer urged readers to mimic Adams’ opportunistic approach to stay afloat “in our new world order.”

Has he met Trump?

Yes. Adams said that he was invited to the White House to meet the president after the publication of his book “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.” The book explores Trump’s unconventional candidacy.

“Apparently my book ‘Win Bigly’ made a big impact on his advisers, and he wanted to chat,” Adams said in a direct message on Twitter.

Why does he run a tech startup?

For a creative person, Adams has long had an unconventional relationship with work. Even as his comic strip took off, he chose to keep a $70,000-a-year job as an applications engineer at Pacific Bell.

In 1995, The New York Times wrote, “For nearly two decades he has been a denizen of the very environment he lampoons, toiling anonymously in his own cubicle on obscure corporate projects.”

He later ventured into restaurants and a food company, neither of which was particularly successful. The Dilberito, a vitamin-packed meatless burrito, never quite took off. Although his restaurant employees seemed to enjoy his company, they told The Times in 2007 that he had no idea what he was doing.

More recently, he created WhenHub, a venture that aims to connect journalists, investors and others to experts. The home page features dozens of so-called video advisers, including a man who charges $499 an hour for “triple-investment commissions,” a woman who will discuss African safaris for $1 an hour and a man who will discuss socialism for $100 an hour.

Adams said he chose not to delete the WhenHub promotional tweet — as much as he wishes he had worded it differently — as part of a personal policy.

“I leave the tweet up because in our current world you keep your mistakes as a public record,” he said. “I think that it’s cowardly to delete a tweet.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/business/media/scott-adams-dilbert-gilroy.html" id="8be4c280-448e-3eca-a403-08de04851901">The New York Times</a>.

Scott Adams, the 62-year-old creator of the Dilbert comic strip, said he was flipping between CNN and Fox in his home in Pleasanton, California, on Sunday when it hit him: His moment had come.

Scott Adams, Dilbert Creator, Has One Regret About Mass-Shooting Tweet

What she saw on tape was not at all what she had envisioned when she heard that he had confessed.

“He would ask him a question,” she said of the interrogator, “and he would answer it for him.”

The man, Christopher Tapp, was exonerated Wednesday in Idaho Falls, Idaho, in part because of Dodge’s persistence, and in part thanks to novel forensic techniques that pair DNA with genealogy databases.

It was the first time genetic genealogy, a revolutionary technique that identifies suspects by matching crime scene DNA to relatives, has been used to clear a convicted killer’s name.

“The system thought that I could be thrown away,” Tapp said in a statement released through the Innocence Project. “They were wrong. I want people to know that I’m innocent. I’ve said it for the past 22 years. Finally, the truth is being revealed.”

The case also offers a reminder that under intense pressure, people sometimes confess to crimes that they did not commit, said Vanessa Potkin, the director of post-conviction litigation at the Innocence Project.

Tapp at first adamantly denied that he had any idea who killed the victim. But throughout the course of a 30-hour interview process spread over many weeks, investigators would not accept his story.

Law enforcement officials psychologically manipulated him into confessing, then used the confession as proof of his guilt even when DNA pointed to a different perpetrator, Potkin said.

On June 13, 1996, 18-year-old Angie Dodge was raped and murdered in her apartment in Idaho Falls. About a year later, the crime was still unsolved, when a friend of Dodge’s was arrested in an unrelated rape that also involved a knife.

The police believed that this man could be the perpetrator in the Dodge case. Tapp was friends with him. The police called Tapp to find out more about his friend.

But at some point in that process, Tapp, 20 at the time, became a suspect himself.

“Police threatened him with the death penalty and told him that if he just told them what they wanted to hear, they would give him immunity,” Potkin said.

When he was arrested, he renounced his confession. DNA evidence, extracted from semen at the scene, was not a match to Tapp.

But it did not matter. “The confession trumps all other evidence in a case,” Potkin said. “There is a common belief that I would never confess to a crime I didn’t do.”

Nearly a third of the 367 exonerations since 1989 in which the Innocence Project has used DNA testing to clear someone involved false confessions. “Interrogations are not a quest for information,” Potkin said. “The purpose is to get an admission.”

In May 1998, Tapp was convicted of rape and murder. The prosecutors’ case rested on Tapp’s confession and the testimony of a woman who said she overheard Tapp mention the murder at a party. Decades later, the woman would tell Carol Dodge and a local newspaper that under pressure from the police, she had lied on the stand.

The defense argued that the confession was false and that investigators were ignoring DNA evidence that pointed to a different perpetrator. Nonetheless, the jury found him guilty. The prosecutor sought the death penalty, but the judge sentenced him to life in prison.

Dodge was left unsettled. Because of the DNA, she believed there was another person at large who had been involved in the death of her daughter.

Hoping to find some clues, she asked to see the confession tapes. Alone in her living room, she cued up the first one and prepared to take notes. The audio recording was poor quality, so she had to stop and replay large chunks.

“I had to keep playing them over and over and over again,” she said. It took more than 70 hours, she said, to get through about half that length of tape.

At the time of the interviews, which took place over several weeks, the police were already aware that Tapp was not the source of semen at the scene. They pushed him to name his accomplice and promised him leniency if he delivered. Twice they fed him a name, and he concurred. But neither matched the DNA. Finally, Tapp offered another name: “Mike.”

When she heard that, Dodge was appalled. It seemed likely, she said, that he was “an imaginary person,” offered up to make the interrogation stop.

In 2014, she reached out to a false confession expert, who contacted the Innocence Project. Tapp’s lawyers filed post-conviction motions based on additional DNA testing. And in 2017, the prosecutor agreed to a deal. The court vacated Tapp’s rape conviction, but not his murder conviction. He was freed for time served.

Over the years, Dodge encouraged the police to try new ways to identify the DNA. The traditional method — looking for a match in Codis, the FBI’s criminal DNA database — had failed.

Finally Dodge called CeCe Moore, a genealogist with a consulting firm called Parabon, for help. After creating a new DNA profile from a degraded sample, Moore identified several relatives in a genealogy database. By building out their family trees and looking to see how they intersected, she identified Brian Leigh Dripps, who had lived across the street from the victim at the time of the murder.

After investigators confirmed that the crime scene DNA was his, Dripps was arrested. During his interview with the police, he not only confessed, but explicitly stated that he had acted alone and did not know Tapp.

The police and the prosecutors did not block the effort this week to clear Tapp. On Wednesday, Daniel Clark, the Bonneville County prosecutor, submitted a motion asking the judge to dismiss all charges against Tapp. “There is no doubt that there are failings in the criminal justice system and I think this case is evident of that,” he told a packed courtroom. “Hindsight is 20/20 and this case certainly speaks to that effect.”

Dripps, who is currently in the Bonneville County Jail, will have his next court date in August, to the relief of Dodge.

“This has literally shattered my family as if we were a piece of glass,” Dodge said. “There is no way to pick up the pieces.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/us/exoneration-genetic-genealogy-idaho.html" id="37fc77fd-f8e5-3811-a3f1-e7edaf508038">The New York Times</a>.

Carol Dodge’s daughter had been killed, and a man had been convicted. But years later, still fixated on the case, she was poring over 30 hours of interrogation videos when it hit her that he could not be guilty.

The Jury Said He Killed Her Daughter. She Helped Clear His Name

Footprints revealed that she and her killer had strolled half a mile or so from the road to an area known as Sheep’s Flat. It appeared that she was seated on a log when she was shot in the back of the head.

“I found that unusual,” said Len Iljana, who was a deputy at the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office at the time.

For years, he and his colleagues tried to identify the woman. They circulated news releases that stated she was in her 20s or 30s, 5 1/2 feet tall with hazel eyes and brown hair, which she wore in a bun at the time of her death. The quality of the dental work suggested she might be European. Her last meal was a salad. None of that led anywhere.

The team became desperate enough to explore leads from psychics, he said.

On Tuesday, more than 36 years after she died, the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office announced her name: Mary Edith Silvani, born Sept. 29, 1948. Detectives also believe they now know who killed her.

These two puzzles of identity were solved with genetic genealogy, a technique that puts a name to DNA with the help of relatives on genealogy sites. Over the past year, the method has been used to advance dozens of cold cases. This is the first time officials have announced in one fell swoop that the technique has been used to identify an adult victim’s body as well as the person’s killer.

The role that a group of volunteer sleuths played in the investigation is a bit different from that in other recent cases. The role played by infidelity and adoption is very much the same.

Naming the victim

In February 2018, investigators in Nevada heard about a method for identifying DNA developed by Colleen Fitzpatrick, a physicist turned forensic genealogist. They contracted the DNA Doe Project, an organization founded by Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press, a mystery writer and software developer. This was before GEDmatch, the genealogy database their investigation would rely on, had adjusted its privacy agreement to permit law enforcement uploads. The investigative team’s next steps are proof that the group that cracked the case of the Golden State Killer was not the only one willing to cross ethical lines.

The pair assigned about a dozen volunteers to the case. “Some are in their 20s, some are in their 70s,” Press said of their pool of regulars, and “some are grandmothers, some are former law enforcement.”

After uploading the victim’s DNA to GEDmatch, the group had a list of relatives to work with. Each volunteer was assigned to build a tree around one match. Whenever volunteers ran into trouble, they knew they could throw it out to others who would “pounce on it like a bunch of sharks,” said Ruth Foreman, a retired human resources director who served as a team leader for the group.

One common reason to do a DNA test is to find a parent, so many people on genealogy sites are adoptees. One close relative of Silvani’s fell into this category. The volunteers helped identify her mother. From there, they quickly arrived at a couple who seemed as if they could be the victim’s parents: John and Blanche Silvani of Detroit.

A relative said the Silvanis had one son and two daughters. The volunteers found that in 1982, the year Mary Silvani was killed, the son, Charles Silvani, jumped off a parking structure in San Diego and died. His life had been troubled for years: In 1972, he killed a bar owner in Fresno, California.

A tip from a man claiming to be Mary Silvani’s nephew revealed that there was another brother, Bob, whose profile page on the Internet Movie Database revealed mostly pornography projects from the 1970s, according to Cheryl Hester of Frisco, Texas, a volunteer charged with taking screenshots of his face. “They never looked at the camera,” she said. “It was awful.”

Eventually property records led to a former neighbor of John and Blanche Silvani’s in Detroit. He clarified that the couple had two sons and one daughter — not one son and two daughters. That meant Sheep’s Flat Jane Doe had to be Mary Silvani, who was 33 at her death. Had she lived, she would be 70.

Detective Kathleen Bishop of the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office located a 1974 misdemeanor arrest for loitering in Detroit. The fingerprints matched.

Finding the killer

The DNA Doe Project seeks to identify only bodies, not killers. Fitzpatrick leads a separate organization, Identifinders, that tracks down suspects.

A DNA profile was extracted from semen discovered at the scene. Around the time the team was ready to upload it, GEDmatch changed its privacy policy to permit uploads of DNA from violent crimes. This development was encouraged by the positive response to the Golden State Killer case. Still, some feel that the shift violates users’ privacy.

Fitzpatrick quickly identified a second cousin living in Texas. From there, Hester, who honed her genealogical skills by helping Vietnam War babies find their fathers, took the lead. She eventually identified a man who seemed likely to be the suspect’s father. Family records showed he had one son.

Law enforcement was dispatched to collect discarded DNA from the son’s house. But the man never gave officers an opportunity by leaving, Fitzpatrick said, because he had recently died.

That was not the end. Investigators located a son of the newly deceased man in a criminal database. It ruled out his father as the killer. What did that mean? It meant the deceased man had a half brother, one he might not have known about.

Confused? Actually, discrepancies between families as defined by records versus by DNA are common. Follow any family line long enough and you are will encounter at least one “nonpaternity event,” to use genealogists’ polite term. Sometimes they involve infidelity.

Critics of this new approach to cold cases warn that sooner or later confusing family records will lead to the wrong person. Forensic genealogy has misled the police before. But for defenders of the approach, its complexity is part of the reason they say critics are overreacting: Even though most Americans’ DNA is now identifiable, you cannot simply upload DNA into a machine that will pump out a name.

Sometimes, to get from point A to point B, you must build a tree containing 16,000 people. That is what Hester did. Eventually, another critical match emerged, and a 90-year-old relative agreed to upload DNA.

That led to James Richard Curry, born in Texas in 1946. The more Hester read, the more excited she grew. He had confessed to three homicides around the time of Silvani’s death and went after people he knew. He killed himself in January 1983, but his children offered their DNA, providing investigators with the confirmation they needed.

The team was elated. And frustrated. Mary Edith Silvani had a name, but she was still just a collection of facts. She was born in Pontiac, Michigan, to a mother who spent her life in and out of mental hospitals and a father who died when she was 16, leaving her homeless. She may or may not have had a baby whom she gave up for adoption in Detroit. She never had a driver’s license, as far as the team could tell. She was never reported missing. She wore a blue bathing suit under her Lee Rider jeans, hinting at plans to swim on the day she died.

Mary Silvani’s nephew, Robert Silvani Jr., 53, was the closest living relative located. He barely knew his own father and had never met his aunt.

“She gets to be remembered now,” he said, adding that, in a “family with the background mine has,” he’s grateful anytime something works out.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/us/cold-case-genealogy-dna.html" id="c7371114-6a08-3bd4-ad14-f6786adc5913">The New York Times</a>.

How Volunteer Sleuths Identified a Hiker and Her Killer After 36 Years

One could not select a more serene location for a homicide. On July 17, 1982, a woman’s body was found in a meadow in the mountains that run along the border between California and Nevada, not far from Lake Tahoe.

The industrywide scheme affected the prices of more than 100 generic drugs, according to the complaint, including lamivudine-zidovudine, which is used to treat HIV; budesonide, an asthma medication; fenofibrate, which is used to treat high cholesterol; amphetamine-dextroamphetamine for ADHD; oral antibiotics; blood thinners; cancer drugs; contraceptives; and antidepressants.

“We all know that prescription drugs can be expensive,” Gurbir Grewal, the New Jersey attorney general, said in a statement. “Now we know that high drug prices have been driven in part by an illegal conspiracy among generic drug companies to inflate their prices.”

In court documents, the state prosecutors lay out a brazen price-fixing scheme involving more than a dozen generic drug companies and just as many executives responsible for sales, marketing and pricing. The complaint alleges that the conspirators knew their efforts to thwart competition were illegal and that they therefore avoided written records by coordinating instead at industry meals, parties, golf outings and other networking events.

The bulk of the collusive activity occurred from July 2013 to January 2015, according to the complaint, when Teva raised prices on nearly 400 formulations of 112 generic drugs. A key element of the scheme, the complaint alleges, was an agreement among competitors to cooperate on pricing so each company could maintain a “fair share” of the generic drug markets. At the same time, the companies colluded to raise prices on as many drugs as possible, according to the complaint.

Although the complaint paints Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, which is based in Pennsylvania, as a leader in the conspiracy, it describes the conduct as “pervasive and industrywide.”

“Rather than enter a particular generic drug market by competing on price in order to gain market share,” the complaint states, “competitors in the generic drug industry would systematically and routinely communicate with one another directly, divvy up customers to create an artificial equilibrium in the market, and then maintain anticompetitively high prices.”

Teva denied the allegations. “Teva continues to review the issue internally and has not engaged in any conduct that would lead to civil or criminal liability,” the company said in a statement.

The Israeli drugmaker Teva Pharmaceutical Industries is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of generic medicines. The company faced criticism in February 2018 for charging $18,375 for a bottle of 100 pills for a rare medical condition known as Wilson disease. Mylan has also generated outrage for raising the price for a two-injection EpiPen set to over $600 from $100. The latest lawsuit comes as drug companies are already facing widespread scrutiny from lawmakers over drug prices.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Connecticut, where the multistate investigation began. On Saturday, William Tong, the Connecticut attorney general, said on Twitter that the organized effort to maximize profits was “a highly illegal violation of antitrust laws.”

The new lawsuit is a more expansive version of a similar suit filed by the previous Connecticut attorney general in December 2016 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Pfizer denied any wrongdoing in a statement Saturday. The company said that Greenstone, a Pfizer subsidiary that produces generic drugs, “has been a reliable and trusted supplier of affordable generic medicines for decades and intends to vigorously defend against these claims.”

State prosecutors say the conspiracy has negatively affected the national economy while damaging state health plans and federal health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

In his statement, Grewal described the pharmaceutical industry in New Jersey, where much of the illegal conduct is alleged to have occurred, as “the envy of the world.”

“But no New Jersey company will get a free pass when it violates the law and harms our residents.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/11/health/teva-price-fixing-lawsuit.html" id="c05f99b9-0f1b-3021-a1f3-48bfed37bfed">The New York Times</a>.

Leading drug companies including Teva, Pfizer, Novartis and Mylan conspired to inflate the prices of generic drugs by as much as 1,000%, according to a far-reaching lawsuit filed Friday by 44 states.

Generic Drugmakers Conspired to Inflate Prices Up to 1,000%, State Prosecutors Say

Garage door repair people, local ham radio enthusiasts and other volunteer investigators descended on the neighborhood with various meters. Everyone agreed that something powerful was interfering with the radio frequency that many fobs rely on, but no one could identify the source.

Officials of North Olmsted, a city just outside Cleveland, began receiving calls about the problems in late April, Donald Glauner, the safety and service director for North Olmsted, said on Saturday.

In the weeks that followed, more than a dozen residents reported intermittent issues getting their car fobs and garage door openers to work. Most lived within a few blocks of one another in North Olmsted though some were from the nearby city of Fairview Park.

Not every car fob failed to work, said Chris Branchick, whose parents live in North Olmsted. He said that whenever he visited his parents in his GMC vehicle, the fob would not unlock the car door; if he went in his fiancée’s Nissan, things were fine.

“We thought maybe it was a foreign versus domestic thing,” he said.

Officials from the cable company and AT&amp;T; joined the search for answers, and on Thursday, the Illuminating Co., a local electric utility, dispatched inspectors to investigate.

“They began by shutting off the power in the places where they detected the strongest reading for interfering radio frequencies,” said Chris Eck, a company spokesman. But even after shutting off power on an entire block, the overpowering frequency persisted.

“It’s like trying to talk to someone at a nightclub,” said Adam Scott Wandt, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, in explaining how a strong frequency can derail a weak frequency.

Dan Dalessandro, a television repairman, was one of several ham radio aficionados who went to investigate. At first, he said, all he picked up were “little blips” on a signal detector, but on one block — and at one house in particular — the signal was extraordinarily powerful.

By Saturday afternoon, City Councilman Chris Glassburn announced that the mystery had been solved: The source of the problem was a homemade battery-operated device designed by a local resident to alert him if someone was upstairs when he was working in his basement. It did so by turning off a light.

“He has a fascination with electronics,” Glassburn said, adding that the resident has special needs and would not be identified to protect his privacy.

The inventor and other residents of his home had no idea that the device was wreaking havoc on the neighborhood, he said, until Glassburn and a volunteer with expertise in radio frequencies knocked on the door.

“The way he designed it, it was persistently putting out a 315 megahertz signal,” Glassburn said. That is the frequency many car fobs and garage door openers rely on.

“There was no malicious intent of the device,” he said in a statement.

The battery on the device was removed and the signal stopped. “It was a relief,” Glassburn said.

More broadly, the case is a reminder of the power of radio frequencies, Wandt said.

“They are not inherently dangerous to a human being,” he said. “But they could cause mass chaos in our technologically advanced society in ways we cannot predict.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/us/key-fobs-north-olmsted-ohio.html" id="4bdbe3c3-a2b2-3145-afb8-49ad116039f0">The New York Times</a>.

A Mystery Frequency Disrupted Car Fobs in an Ohio City, and Now Residents Know Why

It sounded like something from an episode of “The X-Files”: Starting a few weeks ago, in a suburban neighborhood a few miles from a NASA research center in Ohio, garage door openers and car key fobs mysteriously stopped working.

If you can smell it at all, that is. For a small percentage of people, it fails to register as anything.

Similarly, the earthy compound 2-ethylfenchol, present in beets, is so powerful for some people that a small chunk of the root vegetable smells like a heap of dirt. For others, that same compound is as undetectable as the scent of bottled water.

These — and dozens of other differences in scent perception — are detailed in a new study, published this week in the journal PNAS. The work provides new evidence of how extraordinarily different one person’s “smellscape” may be from another’s. It’s not that some people are generally better smellers, like someone else may have better eyesight, it’s that any one person might experience certain scents more intensely than his or her peers.

“We’re all smelling things a little bit differently,” said Steven Munger, director of the Center for Smell and Taste at the University of Florida, who was not involved in the study.

The scientists who conducted the study looked for patterns in subjects’ genetic code that could explain these olfactory differences. They were surprised to find that a single genetic mutation was linked to differences in perception of the lily of the valley scent, beet’s earthiness, the intensity of whiskey’s smokiness and dozens of other scents.

“I think it’s a very important finding,” said Stavros Lomvardas, a neuroscientist at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute, who was not involved in the research either.

The study was conducted in a large room at The Rockefeller University in New York City. Around 300 subjects were invited to sit in front of a computer screen surrounded by 150 jars of assorted odors. The screen alerted them to which jar to sniff at any given time, and they then rated the intensity of each on a scale from 1 (extremely weak) to 7 (extremely strong) and pleasantness from 1 (extremely unpleasant) to 7 (extremely pleasant).

The scent of lily of the valley cannot be easily bottled. For decades companies that make soap, lotions and perfumes have relied on a chemical called bourgeonal to imbue their products with the sweet smell of the little white flowers. A tiny drop can be extraordinarily intense.

Heather Murphy

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