In 2017, detectives at the East Bay Regional Park District Police Department working a cold case got an idea, one that might help them finally get a lead on the murder of Maria Jane Weidhofer. Officers had found Weidhofer, dead and sexually assaulted, at Berkeley, California's Tilden Regional Park in 1990. Nearly 30 years later, the department sent genetic information collected at the crime scene to Parabon NanoLabs--a company that says it can turn DNA into a face. Parabon NanoLabs ran the suspect's DNA through its proprietary machine learning model. Soon, it provided the police department with something the detectives had never seen before: the face of a potential suspect, generated using only crime scene evidence. The image Parabon NanoLabs produced, called a Snapshot Phenotype Report, wasn't a photograph.

Faith Hedgepeth was bludgeoned to death four years ago inside her off-campus apartment at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in a case that remains unsolved. The killer left behind a chilling note and traces of DNA -- which a forensic technology company has now used to create a 3-D sketch of what the suspect might look like. A "snapshot tool" developed by Parabon NanoLabs has created a 3-D image of the killer based on DNA traits, and authorities are hopeful the sketch could lead to a break in the case. The Reston, Va.-based Parabon Nanolabs, with funding from the Department of Defense, debuted the breakthrough type of analysis called DNA phenotyping in 2015 which the company said can predict a person's physical appearance from the tiniest DNA samples, like a speck of blood or strand of hair. The DNA phenotyping service, commercially known as "Snapshot," could put a face on millions of unsolved cases, and generate investigative leads when the trail has gone cold.