DNA testing identifies suspect in 2005 Las Vegas murder case

DNA testing has identified a suspect in the 2005 killing of Daniel Zeisler, whose strangled body was found in his Las Vegas apartment after a foul smell prompted a welfare check on North Bruce Street. The person identified died in 2020, so no arrest is possible.

Zeisler was discovered dead on Dec. 29, 2005. Investigators determined he had been strangled with a telephone cord, and his 1997 Dodge Neon and house keys were missing. Surveillance video later showed an unknown white male driving Zeisler’s car and using his bank card at a store, details that gave detectives a trail that crossed state lines. The Dodge Neon was found abandoned in Memphis, Tennessee, on Jan. 19, 2006.

A DNA profile recovered from evidence was entered into CODIS, the national criminal database, but it did not match anyone. That left the case cold for years. In September 2024, investigators submitted the profile to Othram for forensic genetic genealogy analysis, a method that can build leads from distant family connections even when no direct database hit exists.

That work identified a person related to the killing. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Detective Tate Sanborn said in a 2024 podcast that he pushed to revive the case because he believed it had strong potential to be solved, and that it had not been actively pursued for about 20 years. LVMPD identifies this as the 18th publicly announced Nevada case in which officials have used Othram’s identity-inference pipeline. The department urged anyone with information about open homicide cases to contact detectives or Crime Stoppers of Nevada anonymously.