Cold case DNA work doesn’t fail because analysts aren’t skilled. It stalls because evidence is old, degraded, or formatted in ways the standard operating procedure was never written to address. Sexual assault smears from 1983. Evidence packaged before current collection protocols existed. Items that don’t fit the workflow because the workflow was built for something else.
Elyssa Trautmann is a DNA analyst with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), where she has worked for more than 14 years. She has built a specialization around cold cases — and around the careful, approved practice of bending standard protocols to reach results that conventional workflows can’t deliver. At ISHI 36, she sat down to talk through what that actually looks like in practice.
The Case for Deviation
Trautmann is direct about what she does: she deviates. Not unilaterally, and not without documentation — but regularly, and with purpose.
“Every single laboratory has a SOP. They are, you know, 99% of the time. We can use those to follow our casework, but there are some specific circumstances where we need something else that we just don’t have, because we never see everything, and it’s impossible to see everything and anticipate the outcome.”
The approval piece is not optional. She’s clear on that. When asked about the consequences of skipping pre-authorization, her answer was straightforward: “You could be in a lot of trouble. I’m pretty sure all of our accrediting bodies would not like that.” But with TL and supervisor sign-off in place, deviation becomes a legitimate tool for cases that standard methods can’t reach.
A 1983 Cold Case and a Google Search
The clearest example she offered was a sexual assault homicide that originated in 1983. The evidence submitted to FDLE included slides and smears — a format she had never worked with before. The slides were mounted under coverslips sealed with Paramount, a heavy adhesive. There was no path to the smear without getting through it.
She searched online and found that the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department had published their SOPs publicly. Their protocol for this type of evidence included a xylene pretreatment to dissolve the mounting medium and lift the coverslip. FDLE had no equivalent procedure. She brought the question to her technical leader, got approval to try it, and ran the modified workflow.
“I was able to do a xylene pretreatment to pop off that coverslip so I could access the smear, do it organic differential. And I got incredible results from that. And now, because I asked to deviate from the SOP so many times, that procedure is now written into our SOP.”
That outcome — a one-off deviation becoming a codified procedure — is a pattern she sees often. Approved deviations don’t just solve individual cases. They build institutional capacity.
The Sharon Gill Case
One of the cases Trautmann described in detail was the homicide of Sharon Gill, worked with the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office. She maintained ongoing contact with the detective assigned to the case — calls once or twice a week, working through what evidence existed and what questions were still open.
A conversation with the detective surfaced a piece of evidence that had not yet been submitted: an item found near the body. She requested it, spent significant time determining how to sample it, and ran DNA analysis.
“I ended up with a fantastic profile from that item. It hit to a case in CODIS and we were able to identify a suspect.”
The suspect denied ever being in the home. He later died in prison. The case is closed. For Trautmann, it’s a case she thought about every day while working it — and the resolution is the reason she keeps doing the work.
Information Sharing as Infrastructure
The xylene pretreatment solution came from a publicly posted SOP. That detail stuck with her. Most laboratory SOPs aren’t accessible to analysts outside the agency. Trautmann used her time at ISHI 36 to make the case that they should be.
“I know ours are not online and accessible, but I’m hoping that by mentioning it today, maybe some laboratories think about publishing theirs online for us to kind of share information. I think sharing information is really important, especially for these older cases.”
It’s a straightforward argument: cold case volume is growing, funding for these submissions is increasing, and agencies are submitting evidence they didn’t have resources to pursue years ago. The more institutional knowledge is visible across the field, the more analysts have to work with when they’re facing evidence no one at their lab has seen before.
Building the Job Around the Work You Love
Trautmann’s approach to cold cases — the weekly detective calls, the methodical case review, the willingness to slow down and think through unusual evidence for 20 or 30 minutes before deciding what to do — is also a description of a particular kind of analyst. Someone who finds the difficult cases energizing rather than draining.
At ISHI 37, she will co-chair the workshop Building Your Dream Job While Making Work Fun (October 26, 1:00–4:00 PM, Rhode Island Convention Center). The session is designed for caseworking analysts, supervisors, and technical leaders, and will cover how to identify your strengths and preferred work, how to structure your role around more of what you do well, and how to find more satisfaction in the tasks you don’t. Topics will range from testimony to technical review to casework efficiency.
Trautmann came into forensic science knowing exactly what she wanted to do — she traces the decision back to watching trials on TV at age seven or eight. Fourteen years in, she’s still working the cases that most analysts never see. That’s not accidental.