MIchele halsing
Long Shot: How a New DNA Search Tool found Justice for Baby Nikko and his Four Murdered Siblings
Michelle Halsing, Assistant Lab Director, California Department of Justice, Missing Persons DNA Program
The long road for Justice for Baby Nikko began with the 2007 discovery of a murdered infant’s skeleton inside a submerged ice chest in Yolo County. There were no leads or clues as to the infant’s name or who had killed him. In 2018 the California Department of Justice Missing Person's DNA Program (MPDP) created a new DNA search program, the Kinship Search. Yolo County's Baby Doe was the first “long shot” search for this program…and what it revealed led to discoveries that shocked everyone involved in the investigation.
Michelle Halsing graduated from the California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo, California where she studied Biological Sciences.
She began with the California Department of Justice in December 2001 as a Criminalist in the California State Offender DNA Database (CAL-DNA).
In August of 2007 Halsing became a qualified casework analyst in the Missing Persons DNA Program. She is currently one of two supervisors in that program. She is also currently qualified in DNA casework doing STR and mtDNA DNA cases.
Halsing is responsible for case management, Kinship search program and being the liaison for forensic genetic genealogy cases.
For the past 14 years she has been a qualified ANAB/FBI QAS assessor. This allows her to assess and audit laboratories across the world to make sure they are following certain industry standards and procedures for DNA casework.
She enjoys presenting at several training courses a year informing and educating Law Enforcement Agencies of the laws and services of the California Missing Persons DNA Program.