I'm the author of the piece. I think the best clues are that the mystery hiker told people he was from Louisiana, and that he worked in the tech industry in NY. I suspect someone here might recognize him. I'm reachable at nxthompson at protonmail.
I just wanted to thank you for writing an engaging long form article that doesn't meander telling parallel stories jumbled together. I could draw a straight timeline from the first paragraph to the last and that's oddly something I don't see too often in this format anymore!
Perhaps some unexpected context: at least some authors of long-form pieces write with the objective of selling the rights to their works in mind. The more it feels like a screenplay, the more likely it is to attract a buyer who feels it has potential as one.
I don't have numbers from you, just that bit of context and some supporting quotes off the record.
Qualification: I tech-consult producers and writers on screenplays.
You probably know this but others might not: there are literally agencies that develop ideas through a tight lifecycle of inception, moderate form to long form market testing in publications like Wired and investment and film/podcast/TV development sourcing based on feedback from those market tests and brand sponsorship and alignment for the launch of the final product.
$5,000 and 5 months? Why in the world is the DNA matching going so slow?
My cousin mailed fifty bucks and some spit in an envelope on Monday and Wednesday I get an email from 23andMe saying "Hey! We think this is your cousin's spit!". And neither of us is missing!
1. collecting a DNA sample from a corpse is more difficult than having someone spit in a tube and drop it in the mail. It takes tools and a specialist
2. they want to compare with lots of different databases. Most GEDMatch data comes from genotyping arrays, that look at ~500k variants on the genome. However, different companies use different sets of single-nucleotide variants. Meanwhile, law enforcement databases look at microsatellites, which can't be assayed easily with an array. Sequencing someone to be able to use all the different databases would be on the order of a thousand dollars
3. The genetic testing companies do things in bulk. Your cousin's spit was run though the various steps (like PCR) with 100s of other samples. Doing it for a single sample is going to be more expensive
Has his DNA been checked against people in the various online sequencing sites? You might be able to find a relative that way. They found a serial killer through that a year or two ago.
