24-year-old Elodie Kulik a case study in familial DNA searches and JonBenet Ramsey

The Daring DNA Hunt That Cracked France’s Gruesome Cold Case

Thanks to American science and a determined French cop, a young woman whose burned corpse was found by a farmer 15 years ago may get justice.

Police believe Elodie’s killers forced her car off of the rural highway, kidnapped her, and drove back toward Saint-Quentin where she had just left her friend. But before they reached Saint-Quentin, they took the exit for the tiny farm town of Tetry. Their deadly journey ended some time that night in the forgotten farmer’s field where Elodie’s charred body was found two days later.

The murder churned up an intense investigation as the country watched and waited for an arrest. Under intense pressure to solve the crime, the criminal investigation unit of the National Gendarmerie in Paris ran the unknown male’s DNA profile through their database. Nearly 2 million arrestees and suspects were compared to the man believed to have raped her, but none of them matched. In addition, DNA did not point to any of the 5,500 people targeted by the French police in the Somme region. Some 14,000 cellphones were seized and yet again there was no connection to Elodie’s death. Her own phone was never found.

By 2012, the news stories of the “Meurtre de la jeune banquière” (murder of the young woman banker) stopped. The case had gone cold.

While scanning science journals in hopes of jumpstarting the case, Pham-Hoai learned about a cutting edge development in DNA technology 5,000 miles away in America. A police crime lab was using DNA to catch bad guys by cross-checking their markers with family members. The district attorney and lab director had borrowed the concept of familial DNA from Britain. Denver was the first city in the U.S. to use it.

Despite the communication problems, the Denver lab offered to send Pham-Hoai its DNA software kit for free.

But despite the promise of a solution to the 10-year-old case, there was a problem. LaBerge had been fighting with the FBI to let him use the familial searches, but legal issues regarding privacy and civil rights of family members were stalling his research.

Familial searches look for DNA profiles that are similar to the suspect’s, but are not identical. Like the FBI, the French authorities were concerned that the civil rights of family members would be compromised. It did not take them long to shut down Pham-Hoai’s quest.

“If they had allowed them to use our software,” LaBerge said, “they would have had a ‘hit’ right away. But it’s like we say in our lab, ‘you can try something new or you can wait.’”

The phone line between the two scientists was buzzing with suggestions as they brainstormed what to do with invaluable DNA samples that had led nowhere.

“They were lost,” remembers LaBerge, “And I was racking my mind.”

LaBerge suggested that even without Denver’s DNA software, Pham-Hoai could cross-check a rare marker he saw in the DNA profile found at the crime scene against individuals in France’s national DNA database who had the same rare marker and lived in the region where the murder happened.

The persistent investigator took LaBerge’s advice. Those same rare markers from the unknown sample turned up in a man who was in prison for sexual assault. The case solidified when it turned out the inmate also had the same Y chromosome type, which identifies the male gene, as that found in the mystery DNA. When Pham-Hoai circled in on the family, he found the man did have a son named Greg Wiart, but Wiart was dead: killed just a year and a half after Elodie’s murder, when he ran his car into a beet truck.

Finally, with this break in the investigation, French law enforcement was listening to the persistent Gendarme captain. To the dismay of Wiart’s family, a judge ordered for his body to be exhumed to obtain a tissue sample.

“When Pham-Hoai called me, he was in tears,” LaBerge remembers. “He was over-the-moon excited to tell me there was a match.”

LaBerge says there was a magic about working on the murder of Elodie Kulik. His family came from the Somme region of France where she lived and died.

The story didn’t end with the discovery of a killer long dead.