DNA Profiling - Cases

Cases

• In the 1950s, Anna Anderson claimed that she was Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia. In the 1980s, after her death, samples of her tissue that had been stored at a Charlottesville, Virginia hospital following a medical procedure were tested using DNA fingerprinting, and showed that she bore no relation to the Romanovs.
• In 1986, Richard Buckland was exonerated, despite having admitted to the rape and murder of a teenager near Leicester, the city where DNA profiling was first discovered. This was the first use of DNA finger printing in a criminal investigation.

• In 1987, in the same case as Buckland, British baker Colin Pitchfork was the first criminal caught and convicted using DNA fingerprinting.

• In 1987, genetic fingerprinting was used in criminal court for the first time in the trial of a man accused of unlawful intercourse with a mentally handicapped 14-year-old female who gave birth to a baby.
• In 1987, Florida rapist Tommy Lee Andrews was the first person in the United States to be convicted as a result of DNA evidence, for raping a woman during a burglary; he was convicted on November 6, 1987, and sentenced to 22 years in prison.
• In 1988, Timothy Wilson Spencer was the first man in Virginia to be sentenced to death through DNA testing, for several rape and murder charges. He was dubbed "The South Side Strangler" because he killed victims on the south side of Richmond, Virginia. He was later charged with rape and first-degree murder and was sentenced to death. He was executed on April 27, 1994. David Vasquez, initially convicted of one of Spencer's crimes, became the first man in America exonerated based on DNA evidence.
• In 1989, Chicago man Gary Dotson was the first person whose conviction was overturned using DNA evidence.
• In 1991, Allan Legere was the first Canadian to be convicted as a result of DNA evidence, for four murders he had committed while an escaped prisoner in 1989. During his trial, his defense argued that the relatively shallow gene pool of the region could lead to false positives.
• In 1992, DNA evidence was used to prove that Nazi doctor Josef Mengele was buried in Brazil under the name Wolfgang Gerhard.
• In 1992, DNA from a palo verde tree was used to convict Mark Alan Bogan of murder. DNA from seed pods of a tree at the crime scene was found to match that of seed pods found in Bogan's truck. This is the first instance of plant DNA admitted in a criminal case.
• In 1993, Kirk Bloodsworth was the first person to have been convicted of murder and sentenced to death, whose conviction was overturned using DNA evidence.
• The 1993 rape and murder of Mia Zapata, lead singer for the Seattle punk band The Gits was unsolved nine years after the murder. A database search in 2001 failed, but the killer's DNA was collected when he was arrested in Florida for burglary and domestic abuse in 2002.
• The science was made famous in the United States in 1994 when prosecutors heavily relied on DNA evidence allegedly linking O. J. Simpson to a double murder. The case also brought to light the laboratory difficulties and handling procedure mishaps which can cause such evidence to be significantly doubted.
• In 1994, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) detectives successfully tested hairs from a cat known as Snowball, and used the test to link a man to the murder of his wife, thus marking for the first time in forensic history the use of non-human DNA to identify a criminal.
• In 1995, the British Forensic Science Service carried out its first mass intelligence DNA screening in the investigation of the Naomi Smith murder case.
• In 1998, Dr. Richard J. Schmidt was convicted of attempted second-degree murder when it was shown that there was a link between the viral DNA of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) he had been accused of injecting in his girlfriend and viral DNA from one of his patients with AIDS. This was the first time viral DNA fingerprinting had been used as evidence in a criminal trial.
• In 1999, Raymond Easton, a disabled man from Swindon, England, was arrested and detained for seven hours in connection with a burglary. He was released due to an inaccurate DNA match. His DNA had been retained on file after an unrelated domestic incident some time previously.
• In May 2000 Gordon Graham murdered Paul Gault at his home in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. Graham was convicted of the murder when his DNA was found on a sports bag left in the house as part of an elaborate ploy to suggest the murder occurred after a burglary had gone wrong. Graham was having an affair with the victim's wife at the time of the murder. It was the first time Low Copy Number DNA was used in Northern Ireland.
• In 2001, Wayne Butler was convicted for the murder of Celia Douty. It was the first murder in Australia to be solved using DNA profiling.
• In 2002, the body of James Hanratty, hanged in 1962 for the "A6 murder", was exhumed and DNA samples from the body and members of his family were analysed. The results convinced Court of Appeal judges that Hanratty's guilt, which had been strenuously disputed by campaigners, was proved "beyond doubt". Paul Foot and some other campaigners continued to believe in Hanratty's innocence and argued that the DNA evidence could have been contaminated, noting that the small DNA samples from items of clothing, kept in a police laboratory for over 40 years "in conditions that do not satisfy modern evidential standards", had had to be subjected to very new amplification techniques in order to yield any genetic profile. However, no DNA other than Hanratty's was found on the evidence tested, contrary to what would have been expected had the evidence indeed been contaminated.
• In 2002, DNA testing was used to exonerate Douglas Echols, a man who was wrongfully convicted in a 1986 rape case. Echols was the 114th person to be exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing.
• In August 2002, Annalisa Vincenzi was shot dead in Tuscany. Bartender Peter Hamkin, 23, was arrested, in Merseyside, in March 2003 on an extradition warrant heard at Bow Street Magistrates' Court in London to establish whether he should be taken to Italy to face a murder charge. DNA "proved" he shot her, but he was cleared on other evidence.
• In 2003, Welshman Jeffrey Gafoor was convicted of the 1988 murder of Lynette White, when crime scene evidence collected 12 years earlier was re-examined using STR techniques, resulting in a match with his nephew. This may be the first known example of the DNA of an innocent yet related individual being used to identify the actual criminal, via "familial searching".
• In March 2003, Josiah Sutton was released from prison after serving four years of a twelve-year sentence for a sexual assault charge. Questionable DNA samples taken from Sutton were retested in the wake of the Houston Police Department's crime lab scandal of mishandling DNA evidence.
• In June 2003, because of new DNA evidence, Dennis Halstead, John Kogut and John Restivo won a re-trial on their murder conviction. The three men had already served eighteen years of their thirty-plus-year sentences.
• The trial of Robert Pickton (convicted in December 2003) is notable in that DNA evidence is being used primarily to identify the victims, and in many cases to prove their existence.
• In 2004, DNA testing shed new light into the mysterious 1912 disappearance of Bobby Dunbar, a four-year-old boy who vanished during a fishing trip. He was allegedly found alive eight months later in the custody of William Cantwell Walters, but another woman claimed that the boy was her son, Bruce Anderson, whom she had entrusted in Walters' custody. The courts disbelieved her claim and convicted Walters for the kidnapping. The boy was raised and known as Bobby Dunbar throughout the rest of his life. However, DNA tests on Dunbar's son and nephew revealed the two were not related, thus establishing that the boy found in 1912 was not Bobby Dunbar, whose real fate remains unknown.
• In 2005, Gary Leiterman was convicted of the 1969 murder of Jane Mixer, a law student at the University of Michigan, after DNA found on Mixer's pantyhose was matched to Leiterman. DNA in a drop of blood on Mixer's hand was matched to John Ruelas, who was only four years old in 1969 and was never successfully connected to the case in any other way. Leiterman's defense unsuccessfully argued that the unexplained match of the blood spot to Ruelas pointed to cross-contamination and raised doubts about the reliability of the lab's identification of Leiterman.
• In December 2005, Evan Simmons was proven innocent of a 1981 attack on an Atlanta woman after serving twenty-four years in prison. Mr. Clark is the 164th person in the United States and the fifth in Georgia to be freed using post-conviction DNA testing.
• In March 2009, Sean Hodgson who spent 27 years in jail, convicted of killing Teresa De Simone, 22, in her car in Southampton 30 years ago was released by senior judges. Tests prove DNA from the scene was not his. British police have now reopened the case.