National Forensic Science Week is all about showing appreciation for the hard work and dedication of the people that work in forensic science. At Bode Technology, we are privileged to have a staff full of passion for their work. This week, we want to highlight them and take a closer look into the world of forensic science at the Bode laboratory.
Today we are taking to Allison Ryall, one of Bode Technology’s Forensic Genetic Genealogists in Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy (FIGG). Allison works with DNA samples once they are uploaded into DNA databases and analyzes it for any matches, from there she also analyzes family trees to see if the DNA matches any relatives that can help identify a suspect. Allison’s career journey has not been a straight line, but her passion for genealogy has led her to where she is today.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
What’s the typical scenario when a case comes in?
You know, it varies. I don’t think we’ve ever had any two that are exactly the same. A lot of what we work with, are homicides, and sexual assault. A lot of our agencies get funding through SAKI, the sex assault kit initiative. So we do a lot [of] that, we occasionally have Jane and John Doe’s too. The circumstances are different for everybody and every scenario [is] different. That’s what makes it so much fun, you never quite know what you’re walking into. Even when you start building out people’s family trees and trying to find those common ancestors, sometimes you look at something and you think, “oh, this is going to be easy. It’s a population group that’s fairly well represented.” Then you start building and you realize maybe the match’s mother was adopted. And then it’s like, why are we supposed to use genealogy? And then you’d to have to try to solve an adoption in order to figure out who your sample is and yeah, things like that. So you just never quite know what you’re walking [into].
How has Bode taking all FIGG processes in-house changed the way you do your job?
I really like it. I feel like we have a lot more control over our own destiny. We can control the timeline from my perspective. Like when I’m working with Teresa, my direct supervisor, she’ll let me know, “OK, we’re putting a new batch of samples on the machine. So they’re going to be done in so many hours and then they’re going to be uploaded to the database.” It gives me forewarning that I’m going to have that batch coming in two or three weeks when they’re processed and uploaded to the databases where before, I never knew. So it helps with the planning and the timeline.
How was the process like before the FIGG launch?
Like I said, the main thing is we can control the time frames. There can also be degradation or contamination with law enforcement samples. If it’s a Doe that had been buried and then had to be excavated. We can have more control over the processing of those samples rather than when it had to be outsourced before. So, I think it allows us to have a higher quality product and be able to look at those options and things like that and make some decisions along the way. We have more control and ability to handle all of that now.
What has your career path been like?
Well, I used to be an event planner, like a major city event that attracted 1.5 million people. So I was like conducting boat races, air shows, parades and would handle the logistics of all of that. Then I went from that position and I worked as a senior director of marketing and promotions for a radio station. And then after that, I ended up moving around the country, mostly because of my husband’s employment and I was very interested in genealogy. So, when we moved, we went to a much more rural part of the country, and those jobs were more in major cities. And so it was hard for me to find employment. Genealogy had always been a hobby, [I] had always been interested, but I started doing it more and more. I started volunteering in the genealogy community, networking with people who at the time, [I] didn’t realize how prominent they really were in the community. And from doing that, some of them started hiring me. I ended up going back to school. I got degrees. I got involved with Boston University. I’ve been teaching in their genealogy programs for 14-15 years now. And then just because of connections, who I knew, and my skill sets, when Bode was looking for someone I was interviewed [and] brought on board. I love doing this. I love the detective side of all of it. I kind of do three things in the field. I do all of the FIGG work, I am an instructor at Boston University, and I also am a genealogy specialist for the Orange County Library System in Florida. So everything under the guise of genealogy.
How did you find your interest in genealogy?
So my great grandfather, my maternal grandfather’s father, was murdered in Russia. So I actually have a connection with all of this. And when my grandfather was on his deathbed, complicated story, I’ll just kind of shorten it down. His brother, my grandfather’s brother got left behind in Russia and they lost contact with each other around World War 2. So my grandfather never knew what happened to his baby brother. And it goes back to the fact that their father had been murdered. And I promised my grandfather that I would figure out what happened to his baby brother. And that kind of took me back to school. That’s where I got a degree in history. [I] Got a degree in Russian studies and I went and lived in Russia for a period of time in order to solve this deathbed promise to him. And so I have a lot of passion. When I’m working on these criminal cases that we get, they call me the nickname ‘Little Pitbull’ because I don’t want to give up on them. And sometimes it’s like, we don’t have a lot of matches and it just looks hopeless. And I’m like, “no, we’re going to do this” because I know the impact that the loss or murder of a family member can have on a family for generations. So it comes from a very personal place for me. I also had a cousin who was murdered in California in the 1980s. So I had two murders in my family. I know how that impacts people. My passion for this, my drive, and my motivation, and my desire to never give up on solving something comes from very personal side of that and knowing how that can impact people and impact families.
What does your day-to-day look like?
Insane half the time, you know? We usually have lists of active cases. Sometimes I’m the lead genealogist on that, which means I’m the one that’s really trying to pull everything together. Other times I might be like the reviewing genealogist. We have a team and we may have one of our other genealogists working on the case, but they might consult with me or say, “Hey, take a look at this. What do you think?” Or they may be done with their case and then I have to review it. You know, we have our cross checks, make sure everything looks OK, the work is thorough, efficient, all of that kind of stuff. And then of course, we have all of our law enforcement and our client contacts as well. [It] depends on what they need. Some things go through Teresa, other times, if it’s a genealogy question, they may just, you know, e-mail me directly and say, “Hey, can you check this out or can you tell me what this means” and things like that. So my day is constantly juggling 900 balls in the air between trying to work on my cases, help the team as they might need assistance, or might need help writing it reports, if we’re ready to report back to the client or answering questions for any of our law enforcement partners on any cases that we’re working on with them. Sometimes we meet with them, some are very experienced and have done many cases and can write a report and they know exactly what to do. Others, [it] might be [their] first time, working on a FIGG case and we then we kind of try to help them through the process and answer questions a little more about things. So every case, every client we have is a little bit different and how we interact with them, depending on what their needs are. We try to meet what they need and sometimes we may even have a client as a jurisdiction who’s really experienced, but then they might have a newer person on the team, and we try to help that person come up to speed to be able to work through their cases quicker. So that’s my day is kind of, I never know what’s happening. I wake up in the morning and think “I’m going to do this today.” And I never end up doing that because something’s going to pop up, someone’s going to have a question and you know, I have to adjust. So, I’ve learned I have to be flexible and bend with whatever the day comes and whatever happens.
What is the most interesting thing or case that you’ve worked on?
Every one of them is kind of really interesting. I think what I find most exciting, some of our law enforcement partners, we’re very close with, and after we’ve identified the sample or I say “I think it might be this person or it’s one of these brothers” kind of thing. What’s exciting to me is watching them pick that up and run it through. How do they go about proving that [it] is that person so they can clear the case? Hearing that, they’re usually pretty good about keeping us updated on what they’re finding out. “Yeah, it looks really right. He was in the right place at the right time. Did you know he has a record in another [place].” You know what I mean? So getting that feedback from them, that’s what’s exhilarating to me.
What do you think is the most rewarding thing about your job?
You know, [at] Bode, we often, we work quietly in the background. We don’t start promoting that we’ve done this case or I’ve done that case unless our client does it first. If the client promotes it, then of course, we’ll say, yes, we participated in this, but we let the client take the lead on that. So what I like is sometimes news stories will cover that. An old homicide was solved, and I might see the victim’s daughter crying on TV because she finally got resolution. But sometimes watching that TV coverage or that news coverage and knowing I brought that closure to that family, that they’ve been looking to for sometimes [for] many decades. That’s what I find very rewarding, being able to know they’ve got that piece or that answer at last. It’s like you don’t really know until it’s on the news, which is crazy.
What is your favorite part about forensic science and working in it?
I like working with all the smart people. I don’t see myself as smart as some of the scientists. So that’s the part I enjoy is learning from everybody that I work with, especially [with those who work in different parts of science]. So, having exposure and being able to work with all of those people and listening to them chatter and learn from them, I really kind of like that. It’s like getting to hang with the smart kids.
What is your favorite part about working at Bode specifically?
I like everything about Bode. The people have all been amazing. They’ve all been wonderful. I’m blessed I get to work from home, so I absolutely love that. I know some people don’t like being at home, but I find comfort in that. And so all of it together, you know, the people, then at conferences everybody’s been very warm and very friendly. Everybody’s very intelligent. I love having conversations, [with people from a] diverse background, diverse in their education, diverse [in] the personal knowledge of things. And it’s just a really relaxed, productive environment to be able to work in.
What do you think is the most challenging thing about your job?
Not being able to solve every single case. I want to solve every single case. Like when they come in sometimes, the cases just don’t have the matches, when we have to make the decision to put the case on what we call on monitoring, that means where we watch it and hope that at some point we’ll have a higher match that might show up. And that is so hard. To let that stuff be put on monitoring, I want to solve every single thing, but some cases are just not solvable right now. I do believe everything is solvable in time. And I hope that [at] some point in the future we’ll be able [to do] things that we can’t do now, later. Sometimes when we have a case that’s coming in, sometimes on the DNA side, it might be very small picograms of DNA and you we’re sitting here and we just don’t have enough DNA to give us the quality sample we need. But that’s frustrating that there’s just not enough of a forensic sample to turn into a workable profile sometimes. That’s another case that we want to solve. So I guess like kind of more on that is working with really sensitive information and all of that.
How does working in this field affect you emotionally and how do you handle that?
I’m kind [of], OK. I don’t mean to sound cold hearted, but I’m numb to it. It doesn’t bother me. [I grew up around law enforcement.] I have a great uncle who was a local police officer. I remember as a small child my uncle was babysitting me. I don’t know how I ended up with him cause there were other people to babysit. But that one day he was watching me, [I] must have been about 8 years old. And he got a call. We were at his house and because he was the chief of police, he had to go out. And so since I was there, he was like, you have to come with me, but you sit in my car. I didn’t listen to him. I didn’t sit in the car and I walked in and it was a deceased person in the home. I mean, it wasn’t a homicide, but I got the smell, what death smells like and see a bloated body. And of course my uncle freaked out. [Saying], ‘Why are you here? I told you to stay in the car.” But, you know, I guess maybe being exposed to that when I was younger, it really doesn’t bother me. Maybe I’m immune to it. I’m not sure. Maybe I’m just strange that way. My heart, you can’t tell me anything about an animal. I’m like, so sensitive with animals. But people, it doesn’t particularly bother me.
What are your career goals and aspirations?
I’m nearing, I don’t want to say the end of my career. I still have a long way to go, but I’m over halfway done. So I’m happy where I am now. I’d be perfectly happy just nailing out and solving as many cases as I can do from now till the day I die. I really enjoy my job. I mean, I could keep doing it. So my aspirations really are just to solve as many cases as we can. And you know, I have a lot of hopes. A lot of our cases come from minority populations, immigrant populations, indigenous. We have some very difficult cases that are in indigenous populations and being those are very, very hard to solve. So I have hopes that maybe [in] the future, [there will] be something that will open up with the databases or additional people testing perhaps that maybe can give us hope to solve some of these horrific murder cases that we just don’t have the matches to be able to solve. So that’s my hope for the future.
What advice do you have for someone going into this career field?
My biggest piece of advice is you have to be a really good genealogist. As FIGG has taken off, we’ve seen a lot of law enforcement agencies are training their crime analysts to do this kind of work. And while they certainly have the intellectual capability to [do] it, you have to be a passionate genealogist. You have to know the records. You’d have to know if you were missing this piece of information to make a family connection. What record or how can you go about finding it if it’s not showing easily to you? And that is something that comes with years of experience. So [in] this field, I think we can teach people the genetic, the science end of it. But what is a lot harder is being able to make familial connections and build trees in a variety of populations in all states and all countries. So [you] need to be an extremely strong genealogist with a very large breadth and depth. You know, lots of times genealogists specialize in certain populations or certain states. They might be like, well, I know everything about North Carolina records. Well, that’s great, but what if the family [is] in Alabama or Texas or Washington state? So my advice is to be the strongest, best genealogist that you can be and be. And with FIGG, we really need people who can have expertise in minority populations. And so work on developing those skills and that skill set and the rest of it, the science and [all] of it that can be taught and learned, I don’t want to say easily, but it can be taught and learned a lot more [easily] than the instinct that comes with the years of experience of being a genealogist. I mean, I’ve been doing genealogy for 30 some years now, and that’s just not something you can teach in a class.
Our conversation with Allison has really opened our eyes to the world of genealogy. Her passion shows how important genealogy is in the world of DNA. Allison’s goals are just to solve more cases and never give up on a case, this kind of determination is what victims deserve in the pursuit of justice. The world of genealogy is only growing, and thanks to people like Allison we are solving more cases and achieving more justice.