ROCKVILLE, Md. — Between 2007 and 2011, Marlon Michael Alexander of Germantown spread terror in Montgomery County by targeting elderly women living alone.
The now 36-year-old man would break into his victims’ apartments in the middle of the night, hold them at gunpoint, and rape them.
One victim was attacked twice. Another was 86-years-old and all but helpless.
Alexander appeared to target the older women after being fought off by a 25-year-old victim who happened to be a police officer during a break-in in 2007.
Police broke the case by sending crime scene DNA to Virginia-based Parabon Labs, which has developed technology that allows them to identify the family members of suspects, many of whom publicly shared genetic information after submitting samples for analysis to popular geneaology websites.
But that capability may have just become more difficult, after a key DNA database used by Parabon called GEDmatch.com changed its privacy rules early this month, after scrutiny for bending its own rules on information sharing with law enforcement.
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Frequently, customers of popular genealogy websites share the results of their genetic analysis to GEDmatch.com in an effort to broaden their search for relatives, not fully aware that Parabon Labs and law enforcement authorities also have access to the information.
The GEDmatch database of more than 1 million users has been one key to Parabon’s remarkable ability to help law enforcement authorities identify suspects by matching potential relatives who might be able to provide clues.
In the Montgomery County, Maryland case, detectives used the Parabon analysis identifying potential relatives of Marlon Michael Alexander to conduct their own genealogical research.
Diving into census records and other common genealogical public records, they settled on Alexander as their suspect.
After Alexander’s arrest in 2018, a DNA sample obtained by law enforcement was an exact match to DNA collected at the scene of the rapes.
But just as Montgomery County and many other jurisdictions are beginning to clear cases in remarkable numbers, GEDmatch has come under scrutiny after reporting by BuzzFeed News showing that the company had bent its published rules to allow police in Utah to search for relatives of the perpetrator of a violent assault.
BuzzFeed reported last week that “the website changed its terms of service so that users now have to explicitly opt in for their DNA profiles to be included in law enforcement searches.”
Alexander will be sentenced for his crimes Tuesday, just as the database that helped catch him makes changes that may result in fewer people sharing their genetic information with authorities trying to solve some of the nation’s most horrible attacks.