Richmond police crack 1999 murder with familial DNA search

RICHMOND, Calif. (AP) — San Francisco Bay Area authorities announced they solved a 1999 murder through the use of a California state familial DNA search program. Richmond police said at a news conference Thursday that Jerry Lee Henderson killed Meekiah Wadley at her home in January 1999. He died of a suspected drug overdose 11 days after her death. DNA collected at the crime scene never yielded a direct hit. But in 2020, police put in a request to run the suspect’s profile through the state’s familial program. That yielded a hit to a parent, sibling or child of Henderson’s whose DNA was already in a criminal database.