Kansas man sentenced to prison after police used genealogical data to solve 2007 rape

A 54-year-old Augusta man was sentenced to 25 years in prison after raping a woman in her southeast Wichita home in 2007, the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office said Thursday.

The man’s arrest last year was the Wichita Police Department’s first arrest involving a genetic genealogy technique that attempts to match a DNA sample from an unsolved case with data submitted to genealogy websites, according to a news release from the district attorney’s office.

Ted Foy was sentenced to 310 months in prison on Friday after pleading guilty on March 20 to aggravated sodomy, rape, aggravated sexual assault and attempted rape, the press release said.

On November 13, 2007, Foy entered a woman’s home through a ground-floor window while her husband was away in the military, the press release said.

Details of the case have not been made public. A Wichita police officer interviewed by The Eagle after Foy’s arrest in May 2023 said genetic genealogy is being used to solve other unsolved cases in Wichita.

This practice has been scrutinized as submitting DNA to genealogy companies has become more popular in recent years.

According to Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a privacy and civil liberties organization, the use of these databases to launch investigations is “blatantly unconstitutional.”