35 Years Later, The Cops Come Knocking

Pure human psychology, thanks to science.

I’ve never really understood what I wanted to do with my life, TBH. When I was very young, I wanted to be a middle reliever in Major League Baseball. My fastball (and curve) prevented that from happening. For years, I wanted to be a sports journalist. I was never really a journalist, per SE, but I did work at ESPN by the time I was 24, so that’s cool. I wanted to vaguely be a writer, which I am in the sense of, well, I generate some money per month writing. But none of it has felt that passionate, ya know? Insofar as jobs need to have “passion.”

I have long been passionate about true crime and the psychology behind why people do things, including awful things, and how the pieces fit together to solve them. Recently, if you’ve been in that world of podcasts or 20/20 or Dateline, you might be familiar with genetic genealogy. Loosely explained, let’s say you have DNA from a crime 30 years ago that has long gone cold. You take the DNA and put it into a shared database, like a GEDMatch, and eventually you might find the third cousin of your suspect. You start working that inwards and maybe you find four brothers in some town. One of these brothers committed a crime 30 years ago, and has a completely different life, and essentially got away with it for three decades, and because of shared genetic databases and the work of analysts and techs, he finally has to pay the price — and someone (the surviving family members of the victim) get a form of closure, albeit much later.

I think this is super cool, and I’d love to work within that space somehow. I am currently trying to figure out how.

The vague case I just described above mirrors Cathy Swartz, who was 19 years old with a daughter in Michigan years ago, I believe 1988/1989 region. She was murdered with her daughter in a crib next door. It took authorities in Michigan 35 years to crack this thing, but it tracked back