Kansas man sentenced to prison after police used genealogy data to solve 2007 rape
A 54-year-old Augusta man was sentenced to 25 years in prison after raping a women in 2007 in her southeast Wichita home, the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office said Thursday.
The man’s arrest last year was the Wichita Police Department’s first using investigative genetic genealogy, which tries to match a DNA sample from an unsolved case and to data submitted to genealogy websites, according to a news release from the DA’s office.
Ted Foy was sentenced Friday to 310 months in prison after pleading guilty on March 20 to aggravated criminal sodomy, rape, aggravated sexual battery and attempted rape, the news release said.
On Nov. 13, 2007, Foy entered a woman’s home through a downstairs window while her husband was gone serving in the military, the news release said.
Specifics about the case have not been made public. A Wichita police official who was interviewed by The Eagle after Foy’s arrest in May 2023 said investigative genetic genealogy was being used to solve other cold cases in Wichita.
The practice has been scrutinized as submitting DNA to genealogy companies has become popular in recent years.
Using the databases to start an investigation is “blatantly unconstitutional,” according to Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a privacy and civil rights organization.