Police Release Facial Image They Say Could Help Identify Murdered UNC Student's Killer
— -- To this day, the murder of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sophomore Faith Hedgepeth remains unsolved.
Hedgepeth, 19, was found dead in her apartment on Sept. 7, 2012.
A friend and her roommate discovered Hedgepeth, 19, covered in blood. Chapel Hill police say Hedgepeth had been bludgeoned to death by an empty bottle of rum.
At the crime scene, police found DNA evidence they believe belongs to Hedgepeth’s killer. But they have not yet been able to identify who the DNA belongs to.
To come up with a composite of the killer, police sent DNA recovered from the crime scene to Parabon NanoLabs in Reston, Virginia.
The composite sketch and Parabon NanoLab’s report on its findings are below. If you think you recognize this image or think you might have any information, please contact the Chapel Hill Police Department's tip line dedicated to the Faith Hedgepeth case: 1-919-968-2834
According to Parabon NanoLabs founder and CEO, Steven Armentrout, the process is called phenotyping, the science of predicting physical appearance through DNA.
“What Snapshot is doing is treating the DNA like a blueprint, the genetic blueprint that allows us to predict what someone looks like, because in that genetic code is the information for how to build that person,” Armentrout told ABC News’ “20/20.” “Snapshot predicts eye color, hair color, skin color, freckling, face morphology and ancestry.”
Parabon NanoLabs’ Snapshot tool was able to create a composite sketch -- a 3D image of a face based on the DNA’s traits.
For the first time on Friday night, ABC News’ “20/20” revealed the facial image that the lab and the police say could help identify Hedgepeth’s killer.
“You can be very confident that this is not a white person. This is not a person of African descent. This is a person who is very strongly Native American and European mixed ancestry or Latino," said Ellen Greytak, director of Bioinformatics at Parabon NanoLabs.
The composite sketch and Parabon NanoLab’s report on its findings are below. If you think you recognize this image or think you might have any information, please contact the Chapel Hill Police Department's tip line dedicated to the Faith Hedgepeth case: 1-919-968-2834
