On the trail of killer dad Elmer Crawford

TASMANIAN amateur sleuth Debra Cashion and a US DNA detective teamed up in the hunt for mass murderer Elmer Crawford.

TASMANIAN amateur sleuth Debra Cashion and US DNA detective Colleen Fitzpatrick teamed up to play major roles in the bizarre new twist in the 40-year-hunt for mass murderer Elmer Crawford.

It was Ms Cashion who first noticed a photograph of an unidentified dead man in Texas resembled a Victoria Police computer image of how Crawford might look decades after his disappearance.

The Herald Sun exclusively published that aged photograph of Crawford on its front page in 2008 and Ms Cashion realised it looked like an image she had seen on a US missing and unidentified person website.

She took her suspicions to Crime Stoppers and Crime Stoppers alerted Sgt Damian Jackson, who was working on the Crawford case.

Sgt Jackson enlisted the help of facial recognition experts from Victoria Police and the FBI's Quantico academy, who concluded the dead man in Texas was probably Crawford.

The DNA of a Crawford relative was needed and Sgt Jackson appealed through the Herald Sun in July for relatives to come forward.

Ms Cashion emailed a copy of the exclusive Herald Sun July article to nuclear physicist and world-renowned forensic genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick. In a stroke of luck, US-based Dr Fitzpatrick happened to be in Ireland. Although born in Canada, Crawford was raised by relatives in Ireland.

Dr Fitzpatrick's company Identifinders specialises in tracking down and identifying living and dead people using genealogy, DNA and other forensic methods.

The Herald Sun contacted Dr Fitzpatrick in Ireland in July and provided her with details of Crawford's background.

Dr Fitzpatrick used that information to track down people in Ireland who knew Crawford's history and she compiled a comprehensive Crawford family tree.

She also found Crawford's baptism certificate and other information, which led her to identifying NSW woman Sheelagh Cann as a blood relative of Crawford.

The Herald Sun agreed to a Victoria Police request not to reveal details about Ms Cann until after her DNA was obtained and compared with DNA from the unidentified body in Texas.

That comparison has just been done and it confirmed the body isn't that of Crawford.