SEASIDE, Calif. (KION-TV)- A single hair, believed to be a pubic hair, and a game-changing way to sequence DNA was used to find Anne Pham’s alleged killer after 40 years of unanswered questions.

Parabon, the company in charge of finding a genetic match for the hair, said it was assumed only mitochondrial DNA was found in rootless hair. Which was deemed useless for forensic research because the autosomal DNA found in blood, semen, or touch DNA was believed to not be in it.

“The genetic genealogy portion of this case was quite challenging,” Moore noted. “We didn’t have any close matches. They were all very distant cousin matches. And we were working with the French Canadian Population Group, which is extremely challenging for genetic genealogy.”

The difficulty comes from the fact that Parabon has a lot of French Canadians in their database, but the family line itself comes from a small group of families in French Canada whose ancestors intermarried a lot over the years. This complicates genetic genealogy analysis.

Moore thought their investigation would take months or even years, but thanks to Seaside Police detectives, they were able to find a match with someone who lived in the area at the time of Pham’s murder.

“In most cases, I’ll give them a person of interest or a set of siblings,” Moore said. “In this case, I wasn’t able to get that far. I built a huge genetic network, which is a group of matches that all share a common ancestry. And there was one surname that kept repeating over and over and over in that genetic network.”

That surname was of convicted pedophile Robert John Lanoue of Reno, Nevada. Who lived four doors down from Anne Pham when she was murdered, according to Seaside Police.

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