David Harrison, an attorney for McCraney, said Tuesday that McCraney "absolutely maintains his innocence" in the killings. Tracie Hawlett and J.B. Beasley, both 17, disappeared after setting off for a party in southeastern Alabama on July 31, 1999. The case sat without an arrest for years until the use of genetic genealogy. She said genetic genealogy can help provide answers for families in cold cases that have gone unsolved for years. GEDMatch is a public genetic database repository to which people have uploaded profiles from at-home ancestry kits.

Source: Fox News March 19, 2019 22:42 UTC