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SANTA FE, N.M.—Within the world of devoted French-horn players in the U.S., Elliott Higgins was a pioneering figure.
As a young hornist in the 1970s, he helped launch the first French-horn soloist competition in America, inspired by the performances of European players. He conducted the Albuquerque Philharmonic, and started a renowned annual French-horn workshop that drew top talent from across the country. And during summers, Mr. Higgins, with his wisps of white hair and crimson cheeks, could be found teaching aspiring players at his family’s music camp tucked away in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico.
Earlier this month, investigators in Tuscaloosa, Ala., said that Mr. Higgins, who died in 2014 at 73 years old, was responsible for something far darker. According to law enforcement, DNA evidence, new genetic genealogy research and additional police work showed that the distinguished horn instructor was a serial rapist with a trail of crimes across the country. The evidence, they said, linked him to at least three unsolved violent sexual assaults of women, crimes that had vexed investigators in Alabama and Colorado for decades.
Subsequent genetic testing of Mr. Higgins's surviving relatives indicated with a probability of greater than 99.99% that he was the attacker in the crimes where DNA evidence was collected, police said.
His adult daughter, Amber Higgins, said she was in total disbelief when an investigator told her of the findings. She said she was filled with rage, sadness and humiliation, and wanted to be helpful to law enforcement so that victims might have some closure.
“As my father, he was loving, devoted and seemed to be kind and morally upstanding,” she said. “I have been trying to wrap my mind around how it is possible that he could have had this other person hidden inside of him.“
Mr. Higgins’s colleagues were stunned too.
“We were duped by a master manipulator and liar,” said Steve Gross, a noted French-horn player and board member of the International Horn Competition of America, which Mr. Higgins co-founded.
Mr. Higgins’s story is the latest example of the use of genetic genealogy to solve a flurry of cases that went cold long ago. The methodology matches DNA evidence from crimes with family histories pieced together from commercial genetic databases to identify a suspect.
The earliest crime that connects DNA evidence to Mr. Higgins occurred in 1991 in Tuscaloosa, police said. One summer night that year, a man approached a University of Alabama student, forced her into her car with a knife at her throat and raped her, said Capt. Jack Kennedy, who heads the Tuscaloosa County Violent Crimes Unit, a multiagency group run out of the county sheriff’s office. Despite the victim’s description of the man and DNA recovered from the scene, investigators couldn’t identify a suspect.
A decade later, roughly the same week of the year, a Tuscaloosa real-estate agent got a call to show a house to a man who said he had just moved to town with his wife and was getting a job at the university. After she arrived, the man, whom the agent described as older, balding and with red cheeks, produced a knife and sexually assaulted her, Capt. Kennedy said. Police were unable to collect DNA from that case or locate a suspect.
Link to Colorado
In 2004, as more-advanced technology emerged, Tuscaloosa investigators resubmit ted the DNA evidence from the 1991 case to the state crime laboratory. Two years later, the lab notified Capt. Kennedy that it matched an attempted sexual assault of a woman around Colorado Springs, Colo., from 2004. In that incident, a woman was selling a wedding dress through the newspaper, and a man responding to the ad attempted to sexually assault her at gunpoint before she fought him off. She described him as older, balding and with a ruddy complexion, Capt. Kennedy said.
Believing they were closing in on a serial suspect, investigators in Colorado and Alabama flooded law-enforcement agencies with bulletins and eyed known serial rapists. The cases were even featured on an episode of the television show “America’s Most Wanted” in late 2006.
"We had so much information on this case, and we still couldn't figure out who this guy was," said Capt. Kennedy.
For 15 more years, the cases stayed cold. In the fall of 2021, Capt. Kennedy asked the state crime lab to send the DNA from his 1991 rape suspect to a Virginia company called Parabon NanoLabs that has be- come known in the burgeoning field of genetic genealogy.
The use of genetic genealogy to solve cold cases -- and identify John/Jane Does -- has exploded in recent years with the popularity of commercial genetic-research databases. The databases can give law enforcement access to troves of genetic information they can then link to the DNA of unknown suspects. Police have successfully used the approach to crack infamous cases such as the Golden State Killer, in 2018.
The strategy has also drawn scrutiny from some state lawmakers and legal experts over privacy concerns and a lack of oversight.
Companies including Ancestry.com and 23andMe bar law enforcement from accessing their databases, while other sites give an option to users whether they want to allow police to use their DNA.
CeCe Moore, Parabon's chief genetic genealogist, said one of the company's scientists plugged the DNA sent by the state lab into two sites -- GED-match and Family Tree DNA.
It showed strong matches with a second cousin and second cousin once removed, both still alive, but no other close links. Using public documents such as birth and death notices and marriage records, a part-time genealogist under Ms. Moore assembled a maze of family trees going back to the 1700s before discovering common ancestors.
The genealogist then focused on that particular branch, building it forward in time until both sides of the primary trees from the two cousins intersected with a marriage in 1939. According to Parabon, the mysterious DNA was going to match one of the two male children from that marriage-Elliott Higgins or his brother. It took six days, Ms. Moore said.
"When you get that union couple right at the generation above your suspect, that's great because then in this case, you know It has to be a son," she said. "We weren't sure which son it was, though we felt pretty strongly it was Elliott Higgins because of his traveling and how it fit with the times and locations of the crimes.”
Genetic genealogists emphasize that their work is most useful as an investigative tool and not as courtroom evidence of someone's guilt.
Parabon turned over its findings to Capt. Kennedy. He was able to corroborate that at the time of the sexual assaults in 1991 and 2001, Elliott Higgins was in Tuscaloosa, where he was helping judge the horn competition he cofounded, held at the University of Alabama those years.
Brother ruled out
Police contacted Mr. Higgins's closest living relatives, including his daughter, and ran DNA tests on them. The tests affirmed a match with Elliott Higgins and ruled out his brother. Earlier this month, Capt. Kennedy held a news conference in Tuscaloosa. Thirty-two years after the first unsolved rape, there was finally a suspect.
During their investigation, law enforcement also located mug shots of Mr. Higgins from old sex crimes he allegedly committed in the 1970s in Ohio and New Mexico, Capt. Kennedy said. Investigators -- and The Wall Street Journal -- couldn’t determine the nature of the alleged crimes or how the cases were resolved.
Police suspect there are more victims. Over the past few months, Capt. Kennedy contacted numerous law-enforcement agencies in the communities across the country where the biennial horn competition was held. The agencies are checking whether any unsolved rapes fit the time frame when Mr. Higgins would have traveled there, he said.
Word of Mr. Higgins's secret crimes shot through the French-horn world. The International Horn Competition of America, which posted an admiring obituary of Mr. Higgins when he died, noting his involvement with the Santa Barbara Symphony, the Santa Fe Opera Orchestra and other accomplishments, quickly distanced itself
In a statement published on its website, the group said that no one affiliated with the competition had any notion of Mr. Higgins's crimes nor any direct association with him. Up until his death, Mr. Higgins continued to serve as an emeritus judge, but his participation was limited, said Mr. Gross, the board member.
Karl Kemm, a horn player who plays with various orchestras in Texas including the Austin Baroque Orchestra, knew Mr. Higgins since high school from youth symphonies Mr. Higgins worked with. Mr. Kemm said he never saw the faintest glimmer of inappropriate behavior.
In 2017, Mr. Kemm relaunched Hornswoggle, the annual horn workshop Mr. Higgins held at his family's Hummingbird Music Camp in New Mexico. Last week, Mr. Kemm and his wife said they were canceling the event this year. On the Hornswoggle website, they wrote that they had only limited interaction with Mr. Higgins when he was alive, calling the crimes dis- turbing and urging any other victims to come forward.
Mr. Kemm recounted how he was sitting in rehearsal one recent morning when a colleague told him about the announcement made by Tuscaloosa investigators.
"You don't know what to say. You don't know what to think. It was disbelief,” he said. "Except you can't disbelieve science."
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发表于 2-27-2023 16:45:02
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