2020 DNA Hit of the Year: DNA Database Programs Help Solve More Crime
Tim Schellberg, President of Gordon Thomas Honeywell Government Affairs (GTH-GA), will discuss the cases and results of the 4th annual DNA Hit of the Year program. The DNA Hit of the Year is a global program designed to recognize the value of DNA database technology to solve and prevent crime. Every year, GTH-GA partners with an esteemed panel of international judges to review the case submissions and determine which case will be recognized. The program brings recognition to the use and expansion of national DNA databases so crime victims may receive the justice they deserve. The program also recognizes the extraordinary commitment of the forensic DNA scientists and criminal investigators who use DNA databases to ensure that justice is served. In this webinar you’ll hear about: • The benefits and policy considerations of incorporating Y-STR analysis and familial searching into a DNA database program • Case examples on how genetic genealogy is being used to not only identify criminals, but to exonerate, and identify human remains • The advantages of expanding national DNA databases with increased sample numbers
Hello, and welcome to DNA Hit of the Year.
DNA databases help solve more crime,
brought to you by forensic and sponsored
by Thermo Fisher Scientific.
This is the sixth and final webinar
in the Future Trends in Forensic DNA Technology Series.
My name is Michelle Taylor, Editor-in-Chief of Forensic,
and I will be your moderator.
For today's webinar, you can earn one hour
of Continuing Education Credit.
Following the inclusion of the webinar,
you will receive an email with information
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Today, you will hear from Tim Schalberg,
President of Gordon Thomas Honeywell Governmental Affairs,
or GTHGA for short.
For the past four years, GTHGA has partnered
with an esteemed panel of international judges
to review case submissions for DNA Hit of the Year,
and determine which case will be recognized.
Schalberg has been intimately involved with the program
since its inception in 2017,
as he manages the daily operations of GTHGA.
Over the past 20 years, Schalberg and his firm
have become the world's foremost experts
on forensic DNA database legislation,
public policy and law.
In addition to representing clients in the DNA industry,
Schalberg has advised over 54 and state governments
on DNA database legislation, laws and policies.
Thank you for attending the last session
in the six-part Future Trends in Forensic DNA Technology
webinar series.
After the webinar, please be sure to check your email
for more information on CE Credit documentation.
And while this concludes the series,
you can access all six webinars, including this one,
on demand via our site, www.frenzikmag.com.
Without further ado, I'm going to hand it off to Tim
to get us started.
Thank you, Michelle.
Very happy to be here at the Forensic Magazine webinar series
sponsored by Thermo Fisher Scientific,
giving the DNA hit of the year talk.
Some of you may have already seen parts of this talk
or heard about the results,
'cause we gave it last June
at the Thermo Fisher Scientific HID HIDS Conference.
So anyway, for those of you that are not aware
of the DNA hit of the year,
we do this program for a variety of reasons.
One is that we want to bring recognition
to the crime labs, the police, the prosecutors,
the court system, anybody involved in building
and utilizing forensic DNA databases
to catch criminals, prevent crime, exonerate the innocent.
And not just the practitioners,
but also the policymakers, the members of Congress,
the legislators that are also passing these laws
to build these databases and funding them as well.
In addition to that,
hit of the years about bringing awareness
to the countries that currently do not have
forensic DNA database programs.
Right now there's an addition to the United States,
about 58 other countries that have the database programs,
but many countries don't.
So with awareness around the world using real cases
to show the value of DNA database programs,
we tend to see action, action in countries to pass laws,
to fund programs and to speed up implementation
to bring these databases to these countries.
So these are the reasons that we bring DNA hit of the year
to the world each year.
So this year, the criteria is the same,
it's been the previous three years,
and it's basically cases are accepted
that have a cold hit against some sort of a database
within the last 60 months.
And even with the pandemic going on,
we saw 50 cases submitted from 20 countries
to the program this year.
Gordon Thomas Honeywell took our knowledge of the program
or the forensic DNA to take these 50 cases
and narrow them down to the top 17.
We then provided the top 17 cases
over to a panel of international judges,
seven judges who you'll meet in a moment, moment.
And they took the 17 cases and independently reviewed them
and ranked them one through 17.
And from there we took the top six
and we handed them back to the judges
and the judges got on international conference call,
added discussion and ranked the cases one through seven
with the top case being the 2020 hit of the year.
So here are our judges from 2020.
We have Jodi Heinz from Orange County Prosecutor's Office,
Walter Parsons from the Institute of Legal Medicine
at University of Innsbruck, Ronaldo Hinneney,
who is the Crime Lab Director
for the country of the Philippines,
Nagtis Polnica, the DNA leader from the country of Poland,
Mauricio Hernandez, who is the Crime Lab Director
from the country of Costa Rica,
Chris Sin, who is the DNA leader
from the country of Singapore and Rock Harmon,
a retired Alameda County California prosecutor.
So this year, there were many different themes
coming to us in the cases.
It wasn't just a typical, have a hit against an unknown,
or a crime scene unknown suspect against the database,
but there were many other types of DNA matches as well,
such as familial searching, genetic genealogy,
missing persons, YSDRs, and many more.
So what I'm gonna do now,
I'm going to go through some of the cases
that did not end up in the top six,
and we'll talk about some of the common themes
from these cases.
We'll then move into the top six cases
and go in more detail in those cases
and end with the 2020 hit of the year.
So we'll do that for about the next 40 minutes.
So the first case I'm gonna mention
deals with the subject matter of familial searching.
And this case came to us from Billaball, Sweden.
This is a very small, nice little town on the Swedish coast.
An eight-year girl was riding her bike after school
in this small village, and she was abducted
and sexually assaulted in the woods.
Really impacted this town.
They investigated, it was a top investigated case,
this region of Sweden for many years.
Very traumatic thing to happen in a small town like this.
They tried every type of DNA effort available.
Unfortunately, they never got a match in their databases.
And then they decided to start talking
about familial searching.
However, Sweden didn't allow familial searching.
And eventually the parliament there decided to allow it.
And they created a program very similar
to the United Kingdom where they apply to a national board
that reviews the application to do familial searching.
They monitor the process throughout the whole process
to control against privacy interests,
to control for privacy interests.
And the parliament eventually passed this law
at the end of 2018.
And this case was one of the first cases approved
by their national board to go to familial searching.
And when it did, it matched immediately
to somebody in the Swedish database
bringing an end to this case.
Another familial searching case I wanna mention
is a little bit different.
In Dubai, as you may know,
they do have a pretty low crime rate there,
but when they do have a crime,
they have an incredible DNA lab with incredible people
that they go crazy on DNA.
They do the autosomal,
then they move to Mito, they do YSTRs, they do everything.
And in this case, there was a brutal sexual assault
and they did all that and they had no results.
They then moved to familial searching and ran it
against their database and produced a candidate list.
But since they had already done YSTRs
on the crime scene sample,
they decided to add YSTR, a layer of YSTRs,
onto their candidates.
It hit to one of them, that became the prime suspect
and that's actually who committed the crime.
So just an interesting case,
there are blending of familial searching with YSTRs
that I thought I would mention.
The next group of cases,
I call them the extremism murder cases that were submitted.
This first one was the murder of a very popular politician
in Hessen, Germany, very left leading politician,
somebody that's not gonna do his home and executed him.
Basically an assassination.
When the crime lab folks came to the crime scene,
there was no evidence.
But fortunately, Germany has perfected this process
they call hot flake, which is basically taking tape,
going around the clothes of the individual
and looking for skin cells.
And they did this apparently 1,000 times,
they found 1,000 different types of skin cells.
And unfortunately, only one of them had enough DNA on it
to yield a profile.
But fortunately, one was enough.
When it was matched to the database,
it hit upon somebody that is a known member
of the Neo-Nazi party,
and he is now in a trial for this assassination.
The next case under the same regard
is a case out of Jerusalem, Israel,
where somebody crossed into the country
and murdered a 19 year old girl walking in the forest.
On this case really though is about speed.
Within 24 hours of the body being found,
the crime lab there obtained DNA, tested the DNA,
got a match in the database
and the police arrested their suspect.
And fortunately, when they arrested him,
they understood his motive.
He declared that he came into Israel that night
to commit a hate crime and murder a Jewish person.
So, but again, this case is really about speed.
And you look also at Israel,
they're very similar in perhaps like California.
They collect DNA from everybody, convicted, arrested,
giving them a very high hit rate,
which allows them to solve crimes like this.
The next category we'll look at is some cases
dealing with missing persons.
So here in 1970, there was a house fire
in rural Minnesota in which a young woman died.
They found remains.
Later that month, an 18 year old girl
from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,
was reported missing by her family.
It was 1970.
They didn't really have the criminal information systems
at that time and these cases went on independently
as two separate mysteries.
In 2013, the brother of the missing university girl
learned about our missing persons program
and the national program that we have
to identify missing persons.
So he lobbied his parents and told them they should
submit DNA to the national database
and to see if maybe along the ways
the their daughters remains were submitted to the program
and they could get a match and bring her home.
Unfortunately, there was no remains to match to
and there was not a match.
In 2016, the law enforcement interests
in that rural area of Minnesota decided to go test
the remains from that 1970 house fire.
And when they did, it matched the parents
to put their DNA in the database in 2013
and this brought a great result and ends to this mystery.
However, I raised some questions about this case.
It's not just this case, but perhaps a problem
throughout the United States is what took so long.
So if you look at the 1970 house fire,
we had a missing persons program going back into 2000.
Why didn't they test those remains earlier
and try to get a match?
And why didn't the brother have to be the one
to tell his 80 year old parents to submit DNA?
Shouldn't there be a government entity
that looks at these missing persons cases
and encourages the family to participate
in the national program?
It just doesn't exist in the United States
and it probably doesn't exist in many other countries as well.
And I bring you some statistics from the United States
to make the point.
Right now, there are 40,000 human remains
sitting in evidence and medical examiners' offices
throughout the country.
But we only have 13,000 human remains uploaded
to the National Missing Database person into end this.
Shouldn't it be closer to 40,000?
In addition to that, we only have 15,000 families uploaded
to end this.
Shouldn't it be not just the 40,000 missing people
that are the remains they have
or parents are probably looking for them,
but what about the millions of people
that have gone missing over the last 20, 30 years?
So I think the problem here is that we simply
don't have a focus on it.
And what we need is a national institute
or something that would encourage the laws,
the policies and the funding to make it so when a person
goes missing in the United States,
there's action to get them into the database, their family.
And also when there's human remains,
there's funding and a process to get those human remains
into the database.
So I think it's time to start thinking about that United
States.
So let's take a look at a genetic genealogy case.
So this case, in 1979, human remains
that are chopped up and mummified were found in a lava
tube in Roidaho.
They then puts those remains into the national database
with no matches.
And in 2019, they decided to apply it to GEDmatch.
They did.
They got some matches.
And after 2,000 hours of genealogical research,
they found that those remains belong to an 87-year-old--
the grandson of somebody that's 87 years old.
And when they interviewed him, he had quite the tale
to talk about.
One, they said that my grandfather was not a very nice person.
He murdered my grandmother with an axe.
He then got on escape, fled town, and they went after him.
And but a vigilante squad got a hold of him first,
his rumor had it.
And apparently that was the end of it.
But now the mystery is solved because in those lava tubes,
they found the result of the vigilante squad
that murdered him.
The next cases I want to talk about deal
with the subject of exoneration.
So 1976, in Flint United Kingdom, a young girl
was sexual assault that had murdered.
There were two suspects in the case.
One was a young man, I believe, only about 16 or 17 years old
that didn't speak any English that
ended up confessing to the crime after an intense interrogation.
The other suspect, they let go because they didn't
have enough information.
So this suspect, the one that confessed,
spent about 20 years in prison.
And then in recent day, the United Kingdom
decided to open back up this case with the DNA
from the sexual assault and go after that second suspect.
But when they ran the DNA, it didn't
match the second suspect.
In addition to that, it didn't match the young man that
was convicted that spent 20 years in prison.
However, it did match somebody else that was already
in the United Kingdom database.
So this really had a good result.
It found the correct person and it exonerated two.
But I want to talk about the policy of exonerations
with DNA databases because I don't think it gets enough attention.
I think in this case, it's the type of case
we're used to seeing in the United States with the Innocence
Project.
They go in.
They try to get somebody out of prison that didn't do it.
And it's a great result.
But what about the value of the databases
to further exonerate?
And it happens every day.
Because when you have a strong database that
hits at a high hit rate, like we're
getting the United States, California's hit rates nearing
50% now.
Because they're collecting DNA from everybody,
convicted and arrested.
But when you do that, think about what happens.
Police, they get the-- rather than rallying up
the main suspects they want to look at and talk to them
and interrogate them and under the threat of being arrested,
they don't do that anymore.
Because with a high hit rate with DNA databases,
you find the right person quickly
and you spare these usual suspects, this interrogation,
which may lead to arrests and even convictions.
So that's how we exonerate.
I also think with the introduction of rapid DNA,
it takes it to the next step.
When rapid DNA is fully deployed in our country,
imagine how we will even further exonerate.
For example, in a property crime right now,
what typically happens is law enforcement,
they have a property crime, like a home burglary.
They might go interview these three or four people,
make them feel threatened that there are suspects.
But with rapid DNA, you'd be able to take that DNA sample
from the window, the blood on the window where they broke in,
go to the station, run the test,
and 90 minutes they'll get a hit.
And therefore, these usual suspects, again,
won't be interrogated.
And that's how we see how rapid DNA is really going
to help with the exoneration objective.
For the interest of time, I won't mention this case.
But let's wrap up the non-top six cases
with just some highlights from the program.
So this case, we call it the power of Froum.
There were rapes taking place in Czech Republic,
Germany, and Poland.
And then a Polish person was convicted,
went into the Polish database,
and because of the Froum Treaty,
where all the European countries are linked
to the databases throughout Europe,
they were able to link these crimes and solve the crimes,
not just in Poland, but in Germany and Czech Republic.
It's a reminder of how valuable these international sharing
database programs are.
Froum led the way in many other regions of the world
are now looking at doing similar things.
This case, we call it criminals aren't always smart.
So here's a guy in the United Kingdom
that staked out a jewelry store in some type of a mall setting.
And he tunneled in, and unfortunately for him,
he took the wrong term because we wanted to go
into the jewelry store that he scoped out
that he knew did not have a CCTV camera.
But in the tunneling process, he went the wrong way.
He ended up in a shop that did have a CCTV camera.
When he came through the tunnel, he pushed himself through.
The camera caught exactly where he touched.
They swabbed the DNA and arrested him.
And of course, it's the United Kingdom,
which has the highest hit rate in the world of about 65%,
70% sometimes.
And that's how they identified him.
Here's a case in Colorado that's really kind of a creepy case.
This individual committed a stranger rape on a woman.
And then years later befriended her,
unbeknownst to her that he was the rapist,
got to a position where he moved in with her.
And then he got arrested for a burglary
because Colorado takes DNA upon burglaries.
And he matched to the stranger rape.
And the woman is pretty traumatized
after she realized what was going on.
So it's just a very unusual case.
The last case I'll mention here, or actually there's two,
Guatemala has been the recipient of international programs
the last five years to build up their DNA lab
and to help them train their people.
And it's become a very, very respected laboratory.
And just in time too, because they
had a big eruption down there a few years ago
that wiped out a whole village.
And they used that knowledge from this international training
and infrastructure building to go out and really attack
that disaster site.
And we're able to identify today 60 identifications
from this DVI effort.
And finally, the case in Brazil to mention here
is they're like the United States.
They're really growing and focusing
on their sexual assault backlogs.
They went out and tested a number of hundreds
and even thousands of these old rape kits.
And when they did, they put this individual under database
and it hit 31 times to that recent rape kit backlog program.
So 31 rape solved this one match.
So with that, let us move now to a review of the final six
cases.
We had the final six of the judges selected.
Recase is from Brazil, California USA, France, China,
Washington State USA, and another California USA case.
So the judges ranked them and they put them one through six.
And so we'll start the review at the sixth place case.
And this is the murder of Jane Hilton in 1985
and the exoneration of Ricky Davis in 2018.
The murders happened.
The murder happened in Elder Otto Hills, California,
which is basically a suburb of the Sacramento area.
So in 1985, Jane Hilton was murdered
and she had three roommates there,
didn't get any evidence, didn't get any confessions,
and the case goes cold.
In 1999, the case was reopened and the investigators
focused on the three roommates.
And their theory was that Ricky Davis committed
the murder and Connie Dahl held her down
and bit her in the back because that's--
in addition to being stabbed, Jane Hilton
had a bite mark on her back.
And they did a very intensive interrogation of Connie Dahl.
And basically, she said, yep, he did it.
I held her down.
And that's what they needed to arrest Ricky Davis.
And he went to prison for this case.
Even though there was no DNA testing done in 1999
on that bite mark, and we'll come back to that in a minute.
So because the Ricky Davis maintained his innocence
and the DNA looking for DNA from that bite mark
was never done, the Innocence Project in California
smelled a rat on this one and decided to take on the case
and try to get Ricky Davis exonerated.
So they worked actually quite diligently
with the Sacramento Crime Lab to go after that bite mark DNA
because they believe that if the DNA would be somewhere
on the nightgown she was wearing,
and if they could see that the DNA does not match Connie Dahl,
then they know-- or Ricky Davis, they know it was neither of them.
And her confession was coerced, which put Ricky into prison.
So sure enough, they worked to get that DNA,
touch DNA off that nightgown.
And it did not match Ricky Davis.
But because they didn't know who committed the crime,
and because the way our judicial system works,
they weren't going to let them out of prison,
but they were going to give them a new trial.
But they didn't want to wait.
The Innocence Project didn't want to wait on that.
So they tried genetic genealogy to find the real killer,
which would allow Ricky Davis out of prison before a new trial.
Sure enough, they got a hit in Gen Match,
worked the genealogy research, and they ended up
finding the true killer in this case, which is this individual.
And as a result, Ricky Davis was led out of prison
just this past February.
So that's an amazing case.
I think some of you are probably wondering
why such an amazing case ended up number six on the list,
not why it wasn't in the top few.
And I think a lot of it has to do with this previous work
by the prosecutors, the old generation of prosecutors
that are no longer there.
They had DNA under the fingernails.
They knew about the bite mark.
Why didn't they go after the bite mark DNA?
And I think what happened is the judges started to question
how good of a job they did 20-some years ago,
and therefore it weighed on their decision
to give them a higher ranking in this case.
So just to give you some political inner workings
of how the judges think about these cases.
So the fifth place case is the 1991 sexual assault
of Sarah Yarbow, who's from Federal Way,
which is basically a suburb of Seattle,
which is actually just up the street
from where I'm coming to you today.
So Sarah Yarbow is a 16-year-old student,
and I had a lot going for her.
She was attacked on the school grounds early in the morning
and murdered, and her body left there on the school grounds.
Very traumatic, of course, not just to her family,
but to community, but to those students
that had her classmates that had her killed
on the school grounds.
They had a full profile in this case,
but never a hidden codus.
They were the first case to try YSTR surnames
searching back in 2011 in the United States
that we're aware of, and they had a very promising lead here.
The YSTR matched to the Fuller family,
and there was a very good friend of the Fuller family
that was frequently over at the house.
They thought they had solved this case.
However, when they did the autosomals,
it did not match this suspect.
And what happened was the true murder in this case,
this person's grandfather was a Fuller,
but he got adopted out of the family,
so they couldn't find him as they worked the way up
for the two additional Fuller's.
In 2019, they decided to pursue genetic genealogy.
They got hits in GEDmatch within six weeks of research.
They found the true killer.
Just something to mention here, though, is that it's really kind of sad,
because this case could have been solved many years earlier
if the Washington state legislature would have been more aggressive
about their DNA database law.
Here are the three missed opportunities.
He was on parole when he killed Sarah for another sex crime.
However, the Washington state legislature
did not require parolees to go into the database,
so if they would have, they would have caught him right after the murder.
Secondly, he was arrested for a rape after the murder of Sarah,
but he pled down to a sexual-motivated misdemeanor,
which the legislature at the time did not require to go into the database,
so they missed him again.
Finally, the Washington state policy prevents the use of familial searching.
His brother was in the database for a sexual assault,
and he would have matched in a familial search right away, of course.
Again, just a reminder that the policies and legislation of the state
legislatures
really do control whether or not you're allowed to confine somebody like this
and get them off the street.
So this case, many others used forensic genealogy,
and I just thought we'd spend a moment talking about where we're headed
with the use of forensic genealogy.
I look at forensic genealogy, and the GEDMATCH system is like this magic portal
that we all saw a couple years ago,
and all these cases that would never have been solved,
but for this portal, the GEDMATCH created started to be solved every week.
And remember it a couple years ago, you'd see these cases, these amazing cases
that caused huge problems were now being solved.
Now, the portal kind of closed when GEDMATCH changed its policy,
but there's other databases building to take its place,
and GEDMATCH will eventually get built back up,
and law enforcement will continue to get some great hits against the genetic
genealogy.
But where are we going?
I think where we're headed with genetic genealogy is that
we've kind of been through these old cases that have never been solved,
that had DNA, and the bulk of them have now been solved.
But I think we're going to start moving to a day forward system, like a plan B.
If you don't get a hit in CODIS, and it's a serious crime,
like a homicide, stranger rape, you go to plan B, which is genetic genealogy.
So I think that's, it's going to have a permanent place in law enforcement
as this plan B environment for future cases going forward.
So let's now talk about the fourth place case,
a crazy case from Guangzhou, China, 2008,
a mother and her daughter were in an upscale condo in downtown Guangzhou.
A criminal entered the condo to commit a home invasion,
and it went wrong, and he ended up killing both the mother and daughter,
now the police came, of course, they got the DNA, that a full profile,
and they put it in the massive Chinese database, if you don't know,
China has about 50 million people in their autosomal database,
the largest in the world by far.
Currently we have about 85, 90 million people in our databases globally,
and China makes up about half of them. Kind of gives you some context to have a
large it is.
In addition to that, China has also built, just in the last 10 years,
a YSTR database of between 2010 and 2020,
10 million people are in that YSTR database.
So the reality is, is when they have DNA in China,
they're likely going to eventually get a mash, not the autosomal database,
somehow through the YSTR database, and so that's what happened in this case.
So they of course have the DNA, the YDNA from the crime scene,
and this individual June got added to the database his wise in 2019,
and it matched to the crime scene.
However, the autosomal didn't match, so they knew he wasn't the killer,
so during any normal YSTR investigation, they did the next thing,
which is to go to the parent or the father in any of his uncles, and there were
five.
So they checked their YSTR autosomal's DNA,
and it did not match.
However, they found a pretty curious thing going on,
is that the father, the five uncles, June and the killer, all were half
siblings.
So that really raised their eyebrows, they kind of suspected what was happening
here, so they went to the grandfather of June, and the mother of June,
and concluded they were the ones that created the killer,
and this was a secret child in the family that nobody knew about,
and they put them up for adoption.
They followed the adoption records, and eventually were led to arresting this
individual in the Guangzhou airport, and solved this case.
So, very interesting case using YSTRs.
The third place case is the serial impicide case from Woodland, California,
a suburb of the Bay Area, and in this case, it's a very creepy case.
It's 2007, the remains of an infant boy were found submerged in a metal chest,
and he was killed in 1997, and he had blunt force trauma to his skull,
and they knew that he was a homicide victim.
So in 2018, they tried to go, they put the missing,
the human remains in the missing persons database, and did not get a match.
In 2018, the police, the prosecutor, the sheriff,
decided to go into a request to California state,
"We know we can, California allows familial searching for against crime scenes
against the convicted and arrestee offender database,
but they did not have a process for allowing missing persons to be compared."
So they worked that process and got permission to do it,
and when they did it, they hit to the father of the infant's remains,
who happened to be in prison and in fact, actually going to be let out in just
a few days.
He would not admit to who the child was, so what they did, they got very
creative.
They decided to go after the heel prick cards that are kept in the hospitals
for all the children born to this individual and present a court order to do
this,
and the judge allowed it. For the first time I'm aware, a judge in the United
States,
maybe there's some others that I'm not aware of, but it's a rare event,
allows police to go get those heel prick cards.
And when they did that, they tested those heel prick cards,
and one of them did match to the body found in 2007.
And so they charged him for murder of those remains.
But as I said, this is a very unfortunate case.
In addition to that, they found that he had four other children born to him
that have never been heard of since the day they were born.
So they now believe that he's involved in inficide of all five of these
children
in this case is moving on. You'll probably hear more about this case
in the coming years as it moves to trial.
So that leaves us with two finalist cases.
If you haven't heard who the winner was, from when you announced it at
the conference in June, the winner of the 2020 hit of the year was the Brazil
case.
However, I want to mention the French case before we get into the details of
the Brazil case.
And so let's go through the French case.
So this case, 1987, they call it the little martyr of the 810 motorway,
a beautiful little five or six year old girl was found on the side of the road
with her blanket. And she had been badly beaten over the years.
They could tell from the way her body had been bones that had broken and healed
She had human bite marks on her body. She had been scolded with an iron
numerous times.
And in this case really became the focus of this community and even throughout
France
during that time. They wanted to know who she was and where she came from.
So in 2000 or excuse me, 1993, when DNA got its legs, they exhumed the body
and to see if they can get any matches in the databases and they didn't.
They then tried, they were one of the first cases, I believe in Europe,
if not elsewhere, to do phenotypic snips 2008.
It was a long time ago to be cranking out phenotypic snips, but they did it
and they were able to determine that the girl was a North African ancestry.
2013, as touch DNA technology developed, they were able to get DNA off the
blanket
and got a profile for her sibling.
And the good thing is that the French policy allowed crime scene samples like
this, whereas probably not the killer because it was a young child's DNA from the
sibling. They allowed it into the database and it's a good thing they did because in
2017,
that sibling was convicted of an assault and went into the French database
and matched to the blankets and therefore gave the investigators the ability to
track down the parents.
And what they determined was the mother is the one that did it and she is now
under trial for neglect and murder.
So, really sad case out of France, very interesting case that got the DNA
result.
So, the 2020 DNA hit of the year is a case that's called and known throughout
the world
is the robbery of the century that happened on April 24, 2017.
It actually happened in Paraguay, however, the crime was committed by Brazil
ians
and investigated by the Brazilian federal police.
So, CO Dodd-Dell Estee Paraguay is where the crime happened and it's a place
that's actually right on the border
separated by rivers of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina.
It's also home for the world famous iguanzo falls, the largest waterfalls in
the world.
It was committed by this group called the PCC, it's Brazil's largest criminal
organization.
They have 20,000 criminal members, they're active in most Brazilian states.
They focused on illicit drug trafficking and big tists like the one we're about
to learn about.
They rule over the large infamous favelas in Brazil and one of our judges even
said,
"This is a real problem throughout Latin America. This is the way they live.
They have these large criminal organizations and it's part of their society."
And it's unfortunate that they're committing crimes like this.
So, here was the, what happened, the gang of 50 heavily armed individual went
after a transit facility
in Paraguay, $40 million that was stashed there.
They committed a military-style raid, blew up the building, took the safes, and
tried to get away with the money.
They created a path of destruction as they left town and they ended with a
three-hour shootout
with the Brazilian federal police.
So, you can imagine the crime scenes here, there were actually three of them.
They had the staging house where all 50 criminals met to get ready for the
assault.
They had the bomb blast where they blew up the building and took the money and
then they had the three-hour shootout.
That's where the DNA came from. From these crime scenes, they had 457 pieces of
evidence.
You can imagine how stressful that is. I imagine most of you on the webinar
today are crime-lab officials.
If you had a call saying that there's 557 pieces of evidence heading your way,
I think that would pretty much be a very stressful moment.
And they had, from this evidence, they found DNA, touched DNA from the
abandoned vehicles
and boats. They had DNA throughout the staging house on utensils.
They had DNA on weapons and explosives and bullets and blood from the shootout
with the police.
In addition to that, they also had, from the shootout, three suspects were
killed, so they had the DNA from them.
And they had eight suspects they captured at the shootout and they had DNA from
them.
So all in all, they had 47 pieces or a crime scene profiles developed from
these 570 pieces of evidence
and they had their 11 suspects DNA from the 11 suspects.
They put this into CODIS and to give you a sense of the CODIS system in Brazil.
It's the second largest installation of CODIS throughout other than the United
States.
It's just like the United States. Each state has their own CODIS and it uploads
to a national database. They do not have a large database at the moment. Although the law has passed
now for quite some time,
they really have an implemented it very quickly.
The new president came in very tough on crime and they're starting to really go
after DNA,
but currently they only have 70,000 offenders in their database, which means
their hit rate at the moment is going to be low.
So we'll talk about that.
So when they added these crime scenes and uploaded into CODIS, which were 47
crime scene profiles on the 11 offenders,
this is what happened. Nine of the 11 offenders, they were able to match back
to the bomb blast so they could place them there.
So that was good.
And when they put the 47 crime scene profiles in, 14 of them matched to other
crimes throughout the country,
and serious crimes too, for example. One was to the murder of a federal agent.
The other was to a similar heist of $28 million from a Brinks car heist.
But there were no matches to the database, right? Because as I mentioned, the
hit rate is going to be low with only 70,000 offenders currently in it.
However, with this investment of DNA going on in Brazil, those hits are
eventually going to come because these gang members are going to go into the
database.
And that's what's been happening. So in June of 2018, they had their first
match, March 19, their second match again in July, and again in March 2020.
Our guess is, is that is the investment in DNA goes up and we start to see the
DNA database go from 70,000 up towards a million.
You're eventually probably going to get most of these 47 people will match into
the database. And that's what this case is about.
The judges really liked that. When they chose this case to be the first case
for the hit of the year, they also recognized the burden on the crime lab and
how they professionally worked through all those samples to develop profiles.
So, and finally, the judges liked the idea that this case DNA was being used in
this large, these against these large gangs, which is a great way to solve
crime and the use of the database.
So that is why the judges awarded this case, the 2020 hit of the year. Now,
when we have the announcement of the hit of the year at the his conference at
Thermo Fisher Scientific, we usually fly in the crime lab people to accept the
award and we give them a nice plaque.
But with the pandemic this year, we were unable to do that, but we got creative
. So we decided to have a zoom call. We're invited all the, the people involved
in the case, the leaders of the case to accept the plaque. And we actually have
a picture of them accepting the award.
These are both the police officers and also the crime lab leaders that worked
on the case. So with that, I am going to just give some acknowledgments. First
of all, thank you to everybody in Brazilian teams that submitted the case.
I also want to thank the DNA hit of the year judges. It's a lot of work. They
have to review a lot of cases to be a judge and they did a great job and also
Kyle Schroeder and Hannah Jones from from Ford and Thomas Honeywell that did a
lot of the legwork on this, this year's case or hit of the year program.
And finally, Thermo Fisher Scientific, they're the ones that sponsor us to put
on the hit of the year each year and it couldn't be done without them. It's a,
it's a big effort. So thank you Thermo Fisher.
Thank you forensic magazine and back over to you Michelle for any questions.
Thanks.
Tim for that great information and insight. Audience, it is almost time for the
Q and A portion of our webinar. If you have not already, please take a minute
to ask him a question using the Q and A dialogue box on your screen.
While you think about your questions, we're going to throw up three polling
questions for you to answer really quickly.
Our first one is, how often do you plan to attend a webinar in 2021?
Every month, every other month, every quarter, I do not have planned to attend
webinars in 2021.
Oh, the vast majority of you said every month, which is exciting. So I hope we
get to see you every month in the next year.
Next question, what topics would you like to hear about in future webinars?
The options are laboratory workflow efficiency, rapid B and A application, next
generation sequencing and forensics, missing persons investigations, disaster
victim investigations,
sexual assault, workflow, interesting cases and legislative update.
The largest percentage looks to be 17% interesting cases, which is great since
that's, I think we heard about some really interesting cases today and some
great detective and forensic work.
All right, last question, audience. It is, would you like to receive more
information on today's webinar topic?
Yes, please contact me about identifying human remains.
Yes, please contact me about why STR analysis. Yes, please contact me about
sexual assault workflow. Yes, please contact me about MTDNA and SMEP genotyping
, or no, not at this time.
Well, thank you so much, audience for your participation in that. Right now, we
are on to the Q&A portion of our broadcast. So, Tim, we still got you on the
line.
Yep, thanks, Michelle. I'm here.
Really great. All right, well, we have some questions because that are coming
in. So our first one is, you know, you mentioned during the presentation that
not many state and countries allow familial searching.
What are your thoughts on how many more cases could be resolved if familial
searching was indeed allowed?
Sure. Well, I think there would be a significant amount of cases, particularly
in the countries with large per capita databases.
So, you know, for example, United Kingdom that has 10% of its population in the
database, or many of the states in the United States, California being the
largest, which I believe is getting close to maybe even 5%.
So when you have that many people in the database, during your familial search,
you're going to yield a high candidate list. And if you have the right
processes in place to take advantage of that, meaning the investigation group
in place to go out and look at those candidates to determine if, if any of them
are suspects, you will solve a lot of crime.
So the real trick though, in my view, to have a successful familial searching
program are the privacy controls that the government's put in place.
And I think that the United Kingdom is the one that I've seen do it the best,
where whenever they do a familial search, they have criteria.
And, for example, it must be a last resort, a number of times must be passed.
But the real key, I believe, is the government board they put in place, where
the police actually apply to a government-run commission of sorts made up of
the public plus government officials that look at the request of familial
searching and then monitor it during the process to take note of all the
privacy issues and make sure it's being done very carefully.
So anyway, so yeah, the simple answer is yes.
If you do familial searching, you're going to solve a lot of crimes.
And the cases that are solved that's familial searching, as you can see in this
talk and many others, are significant crimes.
Absolutely.
Okay.
No, do you think rapid DNA can make DNA databases more effective?
Oh, absolutely.
And it does so on a number of levels.
First of all, it's just the sheer time, right?
So if you, in the FBI's vision program of booking station rapid DNA, where you
're putting the rapid devices in law enforcement agencies, so when the person
comes in to be fingerprinted and photographed, they're also going to be swabbed
as opposed and the test run there with an answer in 90 minutes.
As opposed to being mailed to the lab and an answer within weeks or perhaps
even months.
So you will get an answer if they hit in the database in your estus or, in some
cases, endis as well within 90 minutes.
So you'll get more efficiency of identifying criminals much more quickly.
But the other side too is that with rapid, you doing the booking station DNA,
you take that away from the crime lab so they can put all their emphasis, not
just on the simple reference DNA samples, but the emphasis on case work.
And we know that crime labs, because the resources fall behind on the ability
to case work done, so you'll be able to have more resources in the crime lab to
work on case work, get those backlogs down, making the hits more efficient.
So at a number of levels, rapid DNA will make our databases more efficient.
Gotcha, absolutely.
Okay, what type of programs would you recommend to get more reference samples
collected and analyzed for all the missing person cases?
You know, I think I brought this up during that case for Minnesota today, right
, where it was a great case, but why did it take so long?
And I think that it comes back to what I said, it's, we need a focus in the
United States on missing persons, and we just simply don't have it.
We should have a kind of like sexual assault backlogs.
We should have timelines and budgets going into doing this.
Why do we have any human remains that we haven't tested DNA and put into our
national database?
And so I think it's time to have some sort of a institute or something that
would focus on when we find human remains, the clock's ticking, it must be
tested, put into the database, so we can compare it to people that may be
looking for those missing people.
And the second part of that program that I mentioned is that, you know, I don't
think there's any real government programs or NGOs out there right now in the U
.S. that are pushing for when somebody reports somebody missing, you know, they're
perhaps made aware of the ability to submit DNA, but if that was a state or
national program where they're given the right information, they're followed up
with, to submit their DNA.
I mean, if we did both of those things, we would have significant ident
ifications of our missing people with our human remains, and we simply don't
have it.
It's not a priority in the United States. The sad part about it is a lot can be
done with it if it was.
Yeah, that's a great point. I would definitely help and kind of bring closure
to a lot of these families out there.
Next question.
If you use rapid DNA, can you get an immediate result if you compare it to a
database?
And can it also be used to compare evidence samples to subjects?
Sure. So, let's look at the FBI booking station program and how that's likely
going to be rolled out.
So, you have a, you know, in my city, Seattle, you have the devices in the
Seattle Police Department.
You come in and you submit your DNA.
They can set it up so it searches against their estus and they can get
immediate results to see if that person is wanted for some of them.
Some unsolved crime within the state.
They could also do it against any local databases in which they might legally
are allowed to have.
And then it can immediately go up.
The vision is that it goes up to end this and searches there against cases of
special concern.
They're not going to allow all the database cases or the case where it plays an
end is to be searched.
It would apparently overwhelm the system, so they're going to do significant
cases.
So, but you can get these immediate results at your local, your state levels,
and also at those special cases and concern at the national level.
So, yeah, it'll be immediate in that regard.
On the, let's look at investigative leads, for example, you can also, let's say
you have a suspect in a crime.
And you have the lab has already done the rape kit on a sexual assault.
Rather than collecting DNA from these five suspects, sending it to the lab and
waiting perhaps a month to get the answer, but matches that case for example,
you could use rapid to run the five suspects immediately that day and have the
lab look at check it against the case for example
and get an immediate result then.
So, that's how that can be done.
And then of course, rapid and the property crimes arena or these cases where
you have single sources that make sense to use rapid and casework, rapid for
casework is not for all crimes.
It's for those where you have single source and perhaps outside of perhaps the
homicide and sexual assault and things like this.
But you could run your property crime against a state database can't be
uploaded to the end of this of course, but you can get immediate results with
those types of cases as well.
Gotcha. Okay. Let's get a couple more questions in here before we get to the
top of the hour. What would you say, Tim, is the biggest challenge for small
country or even third world countries regarding creating these DNA databases?
Yeah, it's a challenge. Most of it is awareness and resources. I think we all
take it for granted here in the US and the Western world, that DNA databases
are something that needs to happen and we're going to make solving crime our
top priority
and why wouldn't we have a functional criminal offender DNA database
operational when solving crime is one of our top government's societal goals.
But the rest of the world doesn't look at it that way. I mean, they have other
problems in these countries. In addition to crime, they have issues of water
and food and disease.
And so sometimes crime falls down the list a bit. And so those are just
societal things that impact creating programs like this. But what the bigger
issue is really is the awareness.
So they simply are not aware of the effectiveness of these databases at the
political level. So developing programs where they can become educated, sharing
knowledge from other countries.
And the FBI does this with making code is available to every country. So that's
a big piece of it. And of course, just the resources, right? It's when you get
into these countries and they go, yes, we get it now.
If we're going to try to tackle crime, we need a criminal offender database.
But back to my other point, they have led many challenges in these governments
and they have to spread the resources around.
So it's great. I've seen a lot of foreign operational assistance programs
coming out of the EU, the United States going to help countries develop DNA
databases.
There's a great program right now where the United States Department is helping
Central America develop criminal and missing persons databases.
And hopefully more foreign resources will be available to help these countries
get going.
Absolutely. Hopefully. I think we have time for just one last question. So it's
a good one. So, Tim, what reforms would you like to see?
Or can you recommend for agencies to be able to revisit cases with DNA testing,
especially if there was law enforcement errors in the beginning,
or if some of the samples weren't properly tested that should have been?
Yeah, let's kind of go through that a little bit more and pick ones out that
might not be, you know, on the scientific side.
I'm not going to be able to comment much on that. So maybe we refine the
question a bit, Michelle.
Okay. What about when, so how can if you're a lab manager in a forensic
laboratory, how can you play a role in, if you know there's a case that you
want to revisit due to whatever the circumstances may be?
How can a lab manager be like, Hey, this is the one I want to do. How do I get
the resources and how do I put this on the agenda?
I won't comment on that, but I'll comment on what lab personnel can do to make
a difference.
And what's happened is that a lot of growth in DNA to have the resources you
need to make a difference in getting rid of backlogs
and making sure you have all the resources you need to do all these cases has
to do with the ability to advocate up the chain.
And it's just, it's really, I think, if you can get yourself as working as a
forensic scientist to always push for more and take chances to go up the chain.
And I'll give you an example of when we first started getting involved in this
in the late 90s.
All the lab, all the lab directors in the United States were pretty coy with
going to the legislature asking for all convicted felon DNA databases.
They thought it was too risky politically and what they, so basically the
country, we, there was hardly any databases that did more than just taking from
burglar and, or excuse me, from violent felons.
But we saw a few lab directors started to get really active, particularly Paul
Ferrara in Virginia, and he pushed and he pushed on the governor to get the law
to do more and more funding and worked on the Debbie Smith Act.
So I think my, I'll wrap this up just by saying, you know, a forensic scientist
, be advocates, go out there, push on your crime lab director, tell them you
need more, and you want to make your program the best, and he needs to make, or
she needs to make
forensic DNA resources a priority so you can do all these cases.
So thank you.
Absolutely great advice. Thank you, Tim. The audience, that about wraps up the
time we have for today. So thank you so much for your participation, not only
today, but throughout the series.
And thank you. We'd also like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Thermo Fisher
Scientific for sponsoring this webinar and the entire Future Trends and
Forensic DNA Technology webinar series.
As a reminder, you can watch this webinar as well as the others in the series
on demand anytime from our website, www.ferembicmanac.com.
Thank you so much for joining us and have a great rest of your day.