The push for Australian police to access ancestry websites to crack cold cases

Police are pushing for a controversial forensic technique to be used more widely to solve crimes following a series of successful convictions.

“Familial searching” is a sophisticated test that helps track down perpetrators by linking crime scene DNA to their family members.

The test has helped detectives in Adelaide catch a rapist and Queensland Police convict a killer.

But the technique remains restricted to only the most serious crimes and is often used as a last resort.

“There’s potential for us to do these sorts of searches very much earlier in an investigation,” forensic scientist Dr Damien Abarno told 7.30.

“If we could do that, we would then save years of police work.”

DNA of rapist’s son cracks case

South Australian police had been hunting for a man they dubbed the “North Adelaide Rapist” for years following some frightening sex attacks on young women in public.

A new and rarely used crime-fighting weapon finally tracked him down.

“I was tasked to review the case … and basically we just went over it from the beginning,” Detective Brevet Sergeant Chay Summers told 7.30.

The Special Crimes and Investigations detective and his team re-examined seven similar sex crimes over a period of eight years.

There was DNA evidence in only two of the cases — victims who were attacked in public within months of each other in 2012.

“One of the victims thought that she was going to die,” Sergeant Summers said.

“She was terrified.”

But frustratingly, the DNA samples did not directly match any known offe