New DNA technology has proven to be a game changer for law enforcement.
The recent cracking of the so-called Sorority Rapist case in North Texas has helped shine a spotlight on a new forensic tool being used to solve cold cases — genetic genealogy.
As reported by The Dallas Express, Jeffery Lemor Wheat, 51, recently pleaded guilty to raping four women in Plano, Corinth, Coppell, and Arlington during home break-ins between 2003 and 2011. He was sentenced to 30 years for the assault in Dallas County, 20 years for the one in Denton County, and two life sentences for the remaining assaults in Tarrant and Collin counties.
Three of the four women were alumni of Delta Sigma Theta and were in their 50s and 60s at the time of the sexual assault.
Wheat was linked to these cases thanks to the Plano Police Department deploying genetic genealogy to help find a match to DNA found at the scenes to public ancestry data.
Genetic genealogy uses ancestry data but only if users opt to share such information with law enforcement. As previously covered in The Dallas Express, few such databases actually work with law enforcement, such as GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA. Ancestry.com, on the other hand, does not provide data to governmental or judicial authorities without a subpoena or warrant.
Collin County had never attempted to use genetic genealogy until Detective Daniel Bryeans was assigned the Sorority Rapist case in 2018. He then spent “several years and hours and hours of research” trying to narrow down a suspect, according to NBC 5 DFW.
“We would have to get matches of those relatives and then start looking at social media, law enforcement websites, anything to try to start tracking families from there,” said Det. Bryeans, noting that there were plenty of dead ends.
However, the hard work finally paid off in 2021 when DNA from Wheat’s daughter and half-brother led police to him. He was arrested in Arkansas for the first rape in 2003 and linked to the other assaults later.
Bringing Wheat to justice has granted the four victims — and perhaps even more who never reported the crime, as Bryeans suggested was likely — some relief knowing that he will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
“We wouldn’t have solved it, I’m pretty sure, without genetic genealogy,” said Rick Staub, the now-retired manager of Plano police’s CSI Unit.
As of March 4, there had been 86 reports of sexual assault made in Dallas in 2024, according to data from the City’s crime analytics dashboard. The vast majority of victims were black and Hispanic women and girls.
The Dallas Police Department (DPD) has been laboring under a significant staffing shortage, with just 3,000 officers in the field despite a City report previously recommending 4,000. Moreover, DPD was budgeted just $654 million this fiscal year, which is far less than the spending levels seen for police in other high-crime jurisdictions, such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
While crime rates in Downtown Dallas — especially when compared to Fort Worth’s city center, which is patrolled by a specialized police unit and private security teams — attest to some of the consequences of these shortfalls in resources, slow police response rates stand out as well.
Due to sexual assault victims needing to wait for a police officer to show up at the hospital before sexual assault nurse examinations (SANE) can take place, staff at Parkland Health in Dallas related how long wait times can create further harm and even cause walk-outs.
“[The victims] get very upset,” Brittany Pahl, director of forensic nursing and community programs at Parkland, told The Dallas Morning News. “They feel as if they are not important, that maybe we’re not taking them seriously.”
This is partly why DPD recently rolled out a new reporting scheme that allows victims to speak to police by phone instead, as covered by The Dallas Express. The initiative will be piloted at Parkland before being rolled out to other Dallas-area hospitals.
