On new year’s day 1985, the body of a woman was found lying on the dirt shoulder of a residential street in Pensacola, Florida. She was battered, bloody, and partially undressed. Tonya had last been seen celebrating New Year’s Eve at a local bar with friends – but no one knew when she left, or with whom. Multiple pieces of physical evidence, including semen and hairs, were found on her body, but before the advent of modern forensics, they led nowhere. Multiple suspects remained on the list for years, until DNA testing ruled them out, and police were no closer to finding who killed Tonya than they were in 1985. Then forensic genealogy pointed to a man who was living in the area at the time – and still was. Police arrested Daniel Wells for Tonya’s murder, and prosecutors started to build their case against him when it was all cut short.

Just before Christmas, 1996, a groundskeeper at Pleasant Valley Memorial Park Cemetery in Annandale, Virginia discovered a woman's lifeless body. Police were summoned, and it quickly became clear to investigators that the deceased woman had taken her own life. Letters from the dead woman asked for an autopsy to not be performed on her and for her remains to be cremated. She also had gone out of her way to make it hard for investigators to determine who she was. With no identification, police respected her wishes, and she was soon cremated. She became known as 'Christmas Tree Jane Doe' due to the small Christmas tree found near her remains.

In 1987, Roxanne Wood’s husband Terry found her lying on the kitchen floor in a huge pool of her own blood. She had been raped and her throat slit. An incredibly small window of time in which her murder could have occurred led police to suspect that her husband was lying – and that he had staged the scene to make it appear an intruder had killed Roxanne. Terry Wood was the only suspect for years – until forensic genealogy pointed to someone else entirely. Someone who had done this before – and should not have been on the streets in the first place. Someone who was living just miles from the scene of the crime he had committed decades earlier – Patrick Wayne Gilham.