Skeletons never really stay buried

In 2018, a detective uploaded crime scene DNA to a public genealogy database and matched it to DeAngelo’s relatives. He was arrested at the age of 72 and is now serving 11 consecutive life sentences. Since his capture, the firm Othram alone reports having helped solve more than 600 cold cases nationwide using the same genetic genealogy techniques, and Florida announced a partnership this month to work through more than 21,000 unsolved murders in its backlog.

Last week, Rex Heuermann pleaded guilty to the strangulation murders of eight women whose remains had been found along Long Island’s South Shore over a span of years. He had lived as a suburban architect on Long Island for decades. Investigators built the case against him through DNA evidence, cellphone records and an expanding toolkit of forensic technology.

Containment is a bet against time, and time with the help of technology and an ever-evolving culture is catching up faster and faster. The tools of course change depending on the domain. In law enforcement, it is DNA and genealogy databases. In public life, it is digital records that do not degrade, shifting cultural norms around disclosure, social media that never forgets, and a generation entering adulthood that does not share its predecessors’ tolerance for silence. What happened long ago can no longer disappear because years pass.

Last month, Dolores Huerta told The New York Times that Cesar Chavez sexually assaulted her in the 1960s. She kept the secret for 60 years because she believed exposing it would hurt the farmworker movement she had spent her entire life building. The Times investigation also documented allegations from multiple other women, including minors. Huerta’s silence was not weakness and it was not complicity. It was a calculation that the movement mattered more than what happened to her, and she carried that weight for six decades before concluding she could not carry it any longer.

This is the texture of the MeToo movement when you look past the culture war framing. It is, at the most fundamental level, a backlog clearing. Decades of misconduct accumulated under conditions that favored complicity and containment where those conditions have been eroding with velocity, and each disclosure lowers the cost of the next one. Each institution that chose silence over accountability created a future in which someone else would eventually speak. This is as far from “cancel culture” as we can be, and instead we are experiencing the predictable consequence of systems that relied on silence, where the people who benefited from that silence miscalculated how fast the ground beneath them would shift.

Last week, CNN published an investigation in which four women described sexual misconduct by U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell, including a former staffer who says he raped her. House Democratic leadership, including Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries, called on Swalwell to immediately end his campaign for California governor. Swalwell has denied the allegations. Whether these specific claims are ultimately adjudicated in court is a matter for the legal system. By Monday, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had opened an investigation, Swalwell suspended his campaign, and he announced his resignation from Congress.

In late 2024, the House Ethics Committee released its report on former U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, finding evidence he paid for sex with a 17-year-old, made over $90,000 in payments to women for sexual activity, and procured illegal drugs while in office. The DOJ declined to charge him, he resigned before the report dropped, and the Florida Bar closed its own review this year after deciding that statutory rape has nothing to do with practicing law. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he now hosts a nightly TV show and is eyeing a run for Florida governor.

The pattern will continue. More stories will come out of more closets in the coming years, across the fabric of humanity, because the structural conditions that kept them hidden are largely being rejected. It will be people like Cheyenne Hunt, executive director of Gen Z for Change, who choose to use their platform to surface what should never have been acceptable and take the heat until everyone else caught up to the real story. And for the rest of us watching the cycle of revelation and outrage repeat itself every few weeks: This is what a backlog clearing looks like. It will be ugly, justice will sometimes feel haphazard and nonexistent, and we must be a part of stopping the cycle.