Snohomish County Washington Police Department detective James Scharf partnered with Firebird Forensics Group to identify Precious Jane Doe as Elizabeth Elder, also known as Elizabeth Ann Roberts under an adopted name. Elizabeth was a teenage runaway who remained unidentified for 43 years. Known as Precious Jane Doe, she was a 17-year-old victim of homicide in Snohomish County, Washington, in 1977. She was strangled and shot multiple times in the head after rejecting the sexual advances of her killer. The perpetrator, David Marvin Roth, told a friend that he had killed a hitchhiker. The friend informed the police and Roth was convicted of first-degree murder. He served time in prison, and later died from cancer. In 2020, investigative genetic genealogists at Firebird Forensics Group working with Detective Scharf successfully revealed her true identity.

This case stands out because it was one of the early instances in which autosomal DNA extracted from rootless hair was used to solve a cold case using investigative genetic genealogy. Dr. Ed Green, a paleogeneticist from U.C. Santa Cruz, developed a technique to extract DNA from from the hair shaft. The DNA is sequenced using whole genome sequencing and a SNP profile, that can be uploaded to consumer DNA databases such as GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, created using an algorithm to mimic the results that would be obtained using a SNP array chip such as is as used by AncestryDNA, and other direct to consumer
DNA testing companies.

Many participants in the Firebird Forensics Group worked on this case, including Barbara Rae-Venter and Kathy Johnston.