Bones in the Backyard: How Police Cracked a Grisly Cold Case

 

Ella Gottlieb 

Mr. Ippolito 

Forensics 

November 7th 

Watkins, Ali, and Nate Schweber. “Bones in the Backyard: How Police Cracked a Grisly Cold Case.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 4 Nov. 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/nyregion/bones-cold-case-nyc.html. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/nyregion/bones-cold-case-nyc.html

Following a cryptic call in 2019 made by a woman claiming she saw her mother’s boyfriend dismember and bury a body in his backyard when she was 10, police started digging in a Queens backyard. What they found was the victim of a 40 year old murder. George Seitz was a World War I veteran known throughout his neighborhood for carrying his whole life savings with him wherever he went. One day, Mr. Seitz went to the barber shop never to return. The case did not draw much attention until 40 years later in 2019 when it was found decaying. This past week, Mr. Martin Motta was arraigned and brought to Rikers Island for the murder. 

Although the detectives were able to put together a DNA profile for the dead body, it wasn’t until a couple weeks ago that his identity was discovered. Investigators never gave up even though the case might have seemed hopeless, “‘This was a two-and-a-half year investigation, we were relentless and we did not stop,’ Mike Gaine, a detective with Queens South Homicide, said at a news conference at Police Department headquarters on Thursday” (Watkins and Schweber, pg. 2). In February, the Queens district attorney’s office used an outside laboratory for help, and used the profile they collected to cross-reference the DNA with available data from websites like Ancestory.com and 23andme. With this new information, they were able to locate relatives of the body, which allowed them to discover his identity as Mr. George Seitz. This is relevant today because it is important that we continue to contribute to online DNA sites that may be able to help solve a crime. Without matching the DNA of the body to relatives found in a database, it wouldn’t have been possible to solve the case. 

A strength of this article is that it sufficiently explains the reason he was killed was because of his money, and also explains the state of the murderer now so that the reader feels closure after finishing the article. Another strength is that it explains how investigators were able to find the identity of the body and the painstaking process that occurred. One weakness of the article is that it doesn’t explain how they were able to get DNA evidence from a skeleton that had been so severely decomposed. The writer could fix this by explaining the exact practice used to extract the DNA. Another weakness is that it did not describe the conversations or circumstances surrounding the identification through family members, and it would have been interesting to see if any of the family members were aware of Mr. Steiz’s death.