Solving cold cases is hard. Solving cases that have been colder longer than you have been alive, as a young female scientist in Alabama, is harder.

“They don’t want to trust their cold cases to a 21-year-old,” said Olivia McCarter. “I am a kid. These cold cases are older than me. Why would they trust me?”

McCarter is a recent University of South Alabama graduate who works as a genealogy analyst with the Mobile County Sheriff’s Department. She recently opened her own business, along with two other female scientists, called Moxxy Forensic Investigations. They work with police across the country to solve cold cases and put a name to previously unidentified remains.

“Olivia had to blaze her own trail like I had to,” said CeCe Moore, an expert in the field and chief genetic genealogist at Parabon NanoLabs.

There aren’t college degrees focused in this area of science, said Moore, so people wanting to go into genealogy must create their own career paths.

“Those of us who are the pioneers,” said Moore, “have to recognize and encourage (her)… we’re not going to be around that long, and she is the future of this field.”

McCarter graduated from the University of South Alabama in May with a degree in anthropology. And she didn’t have to look far for a job: In June 2022, she and two other scientists, Kaycee Connelly of Illinois and Katie Thomas of Texas, realized they shared a similar mindset about what genetic genealogy could do in the world of forensics, and decided to start their own business. That’s when Moxxy was born.

The company operates in the two main ways forensic genetic genealogy can be used to solve crimes: Using samples from a crime scene to identify a possible suspect and identifying remains of previously unidentified Jane or John Does. Like many businesses post-pandemic, the company doesn’t have a physical office. It’s all virtual, which helps the women have the freedom to take cases across the country.

So far, Moxxy has officially found matches in more than five cases. That number is general, the women say, because some have yet to be announced publicly by law enforcement, and they can’t share the news before police.

Currently the team is working on more than a dozen John and Jane Does—or unidentified remains—and several cases involving an unknown suspect.

McCarter grew up in the small south Alabama town of Grand Bay, where her family owns a local livestock feed store. She started working at 14 but was so interested in science that she began teaching herself genealogy in high school. McCarter was good at the work, and landed an unpaid internship doing forensic genetic genealogy work.

Being a young female scientist, McCarter has seen how she can be treated differently than other experts. Her day job in law enforcement—she calls Mobile Sheriff Paul Burch her biggest supporter— helps give her credibility, but it can be challenging to meet with police from other corners of the state and convince them to let her work their cases.

That’s how McCarter and her team get most of Moxxy’s cases: By approaching agencies and explaining the technology, building relationships that McCarter hopes eventually turn into trust.

Connelly said the process of using genealogy in law enforcement is so new, seasoned cops often don’t trust it. But if the cops can trust the genealogists themselves, they will trust the results. One of Moxxy’s first Alabama matches was made in Morgan County, where McCarter identified a set of remains in under an hour.

Read more: How Alabama used DNA to solve cold case of murdered teenage girls

Currently, McCarter is working to identify remains found 18 years ago in Gulf Shores. The man drowned after being caught in a riptide. The genealogy is very difficult in this case, McCarter said, and the team has been working on the case for almost a year.

The Moxxy team knows he is 96% Indigenous Latin American, and Gulf Shores police believe he was an undocumented Hurricane Katrina relief worker. He was at the beach with friends when he drowned. “One of the friends tried to save him but failed,” McCarter said. “The friends left before police arrived, leading us to believe they were also undocumented. They are in zero trouble, and the only goal here is to identify this young man and send him home to his family.”

Currently, the man is buried in an unmarked grave in the Old Foley Cemetery in Foley. She praised Gulf Shores police and their dedication to the case. “We’ve hit many dead-ends here due to (the man) not being from here. There are many scars on his body that lead us to believe he had a very tough life.”

She believes the unidentified man was about 20 to 25 years old, and was only wearing swim trunks when he died.

Capt. Scott Bonner, a 25-year veteran of Heflin police in east Alabama and a cold case detective, has embraced the use of forensic genetic genealogy and worked with McCarter. Cold cases are challenging, he said, because of the lack of cell phone records, living witnesses, surveillance videos and more. But genetic genealogy saves time and adds resources to already overloaded departments.

The process starts with law enforcement sending a DNA sample to a lab. Then, the lab works to create a whole genome sequence of that sample, using thousands more and different markers than what’s stored in a database like CODIS– the Combined DNA Index system maintained by the FBI.

Then, that newly sequenced data is uploaded to two websites called GEDMatch and FamilyTreeDNA. These sites are open-source and let people opt-into allowing law enforcement to compare their results.

That’s when the work for genealogists like McCarter begins. She and her colleagues work to build family trees backwards using public records, creating a web of people with similar DNA.

The work is time consuming and tedious. But, once one agency gets a match on a case that’s long haunted them, it encourages other departments to try out the new tool.

“When it first came out, people were real skeptical of it,” said Bonner. “But you’ve got to be open minded.”

After gaining trust from law enforcement with their cases, McCarter and her team often face financial obstacles.

Thomas, who is also the business manager at Moxxy, said the federal government offers grants to help departments fund testing, but most of those grants go to big cities. Alabama hasn’t made a big enough demand to get a competitive grant like that, McCarter said.

Despite a lack of state funding for cold cases, Connelly said police budgets can sometimes be adjusted. She sees budgets from departments across the country that haven’t been updated in years—some still have money set aside for the YellowPages.

“It’s the future,” McCarter said. “Why not include this in the budget?”

McCarter and her colleagues just celebrated Moxxy’s first anniversary and are hopeful the business will grow and keep taking on more cases across Alabama and beyond. It takes a while to establish a business like Moxxy, McCarter said, because the women can’t always give current numbers on matches they’ve made and must wait on law enforcement to make announcements.

Until they’re a household name, like Parabon, the women are determined to keep meeting with local law enforcement and building trust. They say their workload has already increased in 2023.

Genetic genealogy, said McCarter, is another tool in police’s toolbox. And she wants to be the one to help them use it as often as possible.

“Olivia is the future,” said Moore.