Dec 28 2023

20 Headlines Making News in Forensic Science During 2023

As 2023 comes to a close, we’d like to look back on some of the top news stories of the year. Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy continued to see numerous successes in closing both cold and doe cases and experts are continuing to develop standards and certifications for those using the technique while law makers push to increase funding. Research continued on new methods for identifying those perpetrating crime as well as victims and the latest technologies have been employed to identify victims of mass disaster scenarios. Throughout 2023, forensic science has been top of mind in the media. Let’s take a look back on some of the biggest headlines of the year!

Authorities Tracked the Idaho Student Killings Suspect Cross-Country to Pennsylvania, Sources Say (CNN – 12/31/2022)

Bryan Christopher Kohberger, 28, was arrested in his home state of Pennsylvania and charged with four counts of murder in the first degree, as well as felony burglary in connection with the stabbing deaths of four University of Idaho students in November, according to Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson.
Investigators honed in on Kohberger as the suspect through DNA evidence and by confirming his ownership of a white Hyundai Elantra seen near the crime scene, according to two law enforcement sources briefed on the investigation.
Kohberger, who authorities say lived just minutes from the scene of the killings, is a PhD student in Washington State University’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, the school confirmed.

QIAGEN Completes Acquisition of Verogen, Strengthening Leadership in Human ID/Forensics with NGS Technologies (QIAGEN – 1/09/2023)

QIAGEN (NYSE:QGEN; Frankfurt Prime Standard: QIA) today announced it has completed the acquisition of Verogen, a leader in the use of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies to drive the future of human identification (HID) and forensic investigation.
Verogen, a privately held company founded in 2017 and based in San Diego, supports the global human identification community with NGS tools and professional services to help resolve criminal and missing-persons cases. QIAGEN and Verogen have been commercialization partners since announcing a distribution agreement in June 2021.

New Promega Chemistry Will Enable Forensic DNA Labs to Solve More Challenging Cold Cases, Sexual Assault Cases (Business Wire – 1/31/2023)

New chemistry for DNA analysis will empower forensic laboratories to overcome common challenges including degraded and contaminated samples. PowerPlex® 35GY System, launched today by Promega Corporation, is a first-of-its-kind eight-color DNA analysis kit that helps forensic laboratories get more information out of their most challenging samples. The kit works in tandem with Spectrum CE System, a capillary electrophoresis instrument launched by Promega in 2022.
PowerPlex® 35GY System is the first of a series of next-generation eight-color STR kits that Promega is producing to take full advantage of the Spectrum CE System’s eight-color capability. The biotechnology manufacturer has been developing and providing products for DNA-based human identification for more than 25 years.
Short tandem repeat (STR) analysis is the most widely used tool in human identification efforts. Currently available kits rely on five or six colors of dyes to mark regions of DNA that can help identify a match. PowerPlex® 35GY System is the first STR multiplex to include eight dyes. This major improvement in chemistry is made possible by the Spectrum CE System, the first commercially available capillary electrophoresis instrument equipped for eight-color fragment analysis.

Canadian Bill Seeks DNA Collection in Non-Violent Convictions (Forensic – 3/01/2023)

Canada’s second attempt at expanding the collection of DNA evidence for non-violent offences is currently in consideration in committee in the Senate after its second reading in November 2022. The bill has gained the support of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP), who say its implementation could have spared a wrongful conviction and brought justice sooner in the cold case murder of a 9-year-old girl.
Bill S-231: Increasing the Identification of Criminals Through the Use of DNA Act seeks to expand DNA collection to anyone convicted of a crime punishable by five years or more jailtime, including impaired driving, drug trafficking, breaking and entering, or theft over $5,000.
Canada has a national DNA databank containing the profiles of convicted violent offenders, but some senators, like bill author Claude Carignan, do not think it is enough.

How Many Cases Have Been Solved with Forensic Genetic Genealogy? (Forensic – 3/03/2023)

The April 2018 arrest of Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, is often considered the birth of forensic genetic genealogy (FGG). Since then, the method has taken off, with investigators in the U.S. and across the globe repeatedly turning to FGG for their coldest of cases.
The research-intensive method has been used to find the perpetrator in some of the most famous murder cases, as well as identify Does who have gone without their names for far too long—such as Joseph Augustus Zarelli, previously known as the Boy in the Box and America’s Unknown Child.
And while cases like Zarelli’s receive mass media attention, investigators are using FGG to solve rape and murders cases in small judications in the middle of the country, too. Exactly how many cases, you ask? According to Tracey Leigh Dowdeswell, 545 cases as of Dec. 31, 2022.
Dowdeswell, a professor of criminology and legal studies at Douglas College in Canada, is the first to put a number on cases solved using FGG. By doing so, she’s also the first to construct an adequate sample frame for further research into forensic genetic genealogy.

Can Investigators use Household Dust as a Forensic Tool? (NC State – 4/03/2022)

from the dust samples. SNPs are sites within the genome that vary between individuals – corresponding to characteristics like eye color– that can give investigators a “snapshot” of the person.
“SNPs are just single sites in the genome that can provide forensically useful information on identity, ancestry and physical characteristics – it’s the same information used by places like Ancestry.com – that can be done with tests that are widely available,” says Kelly Meiklejohn, assistant professor of forensic science and coordinator of the forensic sciences cluster at NC State. Meiklejohn is corresponding author of the study.
“Because they’re single sites, they’re easier to recover for highly degraded samples where we may only be able to amplify short regions of the DNA,” Meiklejohn says. “Traditional DNA analysis in forensics amplifies regions ranging from 100 to 500 base pairs, so for a highly degraded sample the large regions often drop out. SNPs as a whole don’t provide the same level of discrimination as traditional forensic DNA testing, but they could be a starting place in cases without leads.”

Board Releases Draft IGG Standards, Accreditation Requirements (Forensic – 5/03/2023)

After many months of writing and editing, the Investigative Genetic Genealogy Accreditation Board (IGGAB) has published a draft of the proposed standards for investigative genetic genealogy (IGG). The draft is available for public comment until May 30, 2023. After the close of the public comment period, the Board will review all feedback and consider edits to be made to the standards before they are finalized.
In Summer 2022, the IGGAB launched as an independent non-profit board dedicated to developing a set of professional standards critical to the field of IGG. Members of the board include Ramapo College’s David Gurney, Parabon’s CeCe Moore, DNA Doe Project’s Margaret Press, Solved by DNA’s Michele Kennedy, Carol Rolnick of Rolnik Research, Andrew Hochreiter of Highrider Consulting and Bonnie Bossert from Consulting for Financial Services.
The board members worked with key stakeholders and even critics of IGG to draft the standards before Advisory Board members were asked for their comments. The IGGAB Advisory Board member roster reads like a who’s who of IGG—Ramapo College’s Cairenn Binder, Intermountain Forensics’ Danny Hellwig, Idaho Innocence Project’s Greg Hampikian, The Genetic Genealogist’s Blaine Bettingerm, and more.
The team says the standards will eliminate any potential issues when IGG is applied across different jurisdictions. Instead of jurisdictions creating their own ad hoc standards—resulting in variation—they can adopt these standards and rely on the competence and ethical fortitude of the regulations.

Mexico’s National Forensic Database to Begin Operations on May 29 (Mexico News Daily – 5/12/2023)

Mexico’s new National Forensic Data Bank (BNDF) will begin operations on May 29, the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) announced on Thursday. It is expected to become the main tool for addressing the country’s crisis of disappearances and unidentified remains.
The BNDF will integrate several existing registries, including the National Registry of Mass and Clandestine Graves, the Federal Forensic Registry, the National Genetic Information Base, the National Detention Registry, and the National Database of Missing and Unlocated Persons.
This will allow authorities to coordinate the search for missing persons and the identification of human remains across the country – a longstanding demand of the families of Mexico’s more than 112,000 missing people.

Forensic Science Discovery Suggests Bacteria Could Help Convict Sex Offenders without DNA (ABC.net – 5/20/2023)

Ruby Dixon says it’s the pervasiveness of sexual assault that drives her to find new ways of gathering evidence to hold perpetrators accountable.
Her discovery, which suggests bacteria could be used to identify perpetrators of sexual assault in cases where there is no DNA, was recently published in the Forensic Science International journal.
Ms Dixon, with support from Murdoch University senior lecturer Brendan Chapman, examined the bacteria that grows naturally in human sexual organs before and after intercourse.
Their results suggested there was an exchange of bacteria between men and women during sex.
If further research confirmed the bacteria was unique to the individual, it could be used to identify perpetrators in cases where there was no DNA.

2023 DNA Hit of the Year Finalists: Thieves, Terrorists and Serial Killers (Forensic – 5/22/2023)

On Tuesday, at the 2023 Human Identification Solutions (HIDS) conference, GTH-DNA will unveil the “DNA Hit of the Year.”
The DNA Hit of the Year program, now in its seventh year, is a global program established to demonstrate the power of forensic DNA databases to solve crime and identify missing persons. Every year, GTH-DNA partners with a group of international judges to determine which submitted case will be recognized.
Crime labs and police departments from all over the world submitted their impactful DNA database hit cases earlier this year. To be eligible for submission, cases had to be “cold hit,” where the criminal suspect was identified due to a match in the database where DNA from an unsolved crime scene was matched to a previously unidentified suspect in the database. Missing persons cases where a missing person was identified using a DNA database match were also accepted. The cold hit must have occurred between January 1, 2017, and September 2, 2022.

Native American Missing Persons: Study Details Problems, Recommendations (Forensic – 5/31/2023)

The United States has a problem with missing persons. More than 600,000 individuals are reported missing every year.
For law enforcement, social service agencies, and families, identifying and finding missing persons is challenging. A few of the uncertainties that complicate solving missing persons cases include, “Who qualifies as ‘missing?’”, “When should law enforcement become involved?”, “Is the missing person a victim of homicide or another violent crime?”, and “Is the person missing by choice, and will they reappear on their own?” And the questions vary, depending on whether the missing person is an adult or a child.
Another complicating factor is that some groups of people are more likely to go missing than others. The challenges of reporting and investigating missing persons cases may be exacerbated among Native American missing persons primarily due to jurisdictional issues and a lack of policies, coordination, and relationships between tribal and non-tribal law enforcement agencies, as well as racial (mis)classification when entering the cases into databases.
Research shows that some social conditions in tribal communities in Nebraska may contribute to the high rates of missing Native American adults and children. These conditions include:
- Endemic poverty.
- High rates of domestic abuse of women.
- High levels of substance abuse.
- Relatively high crime rates in many Native American communities.
- Geographic isolation of many Native American communities from criminal justice and social service resources.
- A lack of communication and coordination between tribal law enforcement agencies and their non-tribal counterparts in federal, state, and local jurisdictions, and the jurisdictional maze faced when reporting a person missing on or near tribal land.

Perth Develops World First Forensic Technique Involving Analysing Hair Strands at Crime Scenes (ABC.net – 7/04/2023)

Inside Perth’s Chemcentre lab, a new forensic technique is being developed in a world first that will see the proteins in a strand of hair used to identify people from crime scenes.
Chemcentre’s director of forensic science Bianca Douglas said this technique examined the proteins within hair, which last longer than DNA.
Ms Douglas said the study is called “proteomics”.
“The protein within our hair has a sequence and that sequence is unique to an individual.
“And so, this research project is going to explore those sequences of protein, and how we can discriminate between different hairs for different people.”
Ms Douglas said this technique would be helpful not only for identifying criminals, but also for identifying disaster victims.
“We could see this fill a gap that currently exists within this space,” she told ABC Radio Perth Morning’s Jo Trilling.

DNA Evidence on Dogs Can Help Track Down Offenders (Phys Org – 8/15/2023)

Canines are often used in tracking down criminals but forensic science researchers say they could also help provide crucial evidence in police investigations—by being a witness or resident at the crime scene. The new Australian study, by researchers in Victorian and South Australia, expands the opportunities for DNA to assist investigations of criminal activities by expanding knowledge about the presence and transfer of human DNA on pets such as cats and dogs.Flinders University researcher Heidi Monkman in collaboration with Roland van Ooorschot from the Victoria Police Forensic Services Department and Bianca Szkuta from Deakin University collected human DNA from 20 pet dogs of various breeds from multiple households.
This preliminary study conducted at Deakin showed that human DNA can be retrieved from all areas of the dogs that were sampled, although some areas consistently provided more DNA than others, such as the head and back.
“This study demonstrated that human DNA can be transferred to dogs upon contact by a person’s hand and that it can be transferred from dogs to a contacting surface, such as during patting and walking,” says first author Heidi Monkman, from Flinders University’s College of Science and Engineering.

Scientists Release the First Complete Sequence of a Human Y Chromosome (University of California – 8/24/2023)

For decades, the Y chromosome — one of the two human sex chromosomes — has been notoriously challenging for the genomics community to sequence due to the complexity of its structure. Now, this elusive area of the genome has been fully sequenced, a feat that finally completes the set of end-to-end human chromosomes and adds 30 million new bases to the human genome reference, mostly from challenging-to-sequence satellite DNA. These bases reveal 41 additional protein-coding genes, and provide crucial insight for those studying important questions related to reproduction, evolution, and population change.
Researchers from the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) consortium, which is co-led by University of California, Santa Cruz Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Karen Miga, announced this achievement in a paper published Aug. 23 in the journal Nature. The complete, annotated Y chromosome reference is available for use on the UCSC Genome Browser and can be accessed via Github.

The Hunt for Bones and Closure in Maui’s Burn Fields (Los Angeles Times – 8/31/2023)

n a scorched, gray landscape of ash and rubble — between the jagged green ridges of the ancient Puʻu Kukui volcano and the sparkling blue waters of the Pacific — Eric Bartelink stepped carefully around the perimeter of what was once a home.
With hundreds missing after the most destructive U.S. wildfire in a century blazed Aug. 8 through the historic Hawaiian town of Lahaina, the forensic anthropologist at Chico State, was searching for bone — a femur, a skull, a rib — any identifiable skeletal human remains.
Three weeks after wildfires burned through Lahaina, the search for human bones — or iwi, as they are known in Hawaiian — has wrapped up, and officials are shifting to clearing toxic debris. But only 115 bodies have been recovered, with fewer than half of them identified.
Still, an unknown number of people remain unaccounted for, with numbers varying depending on the source. The highest is the FBI’s verified list of 388, though questions surround that figure.

Hit in DNA Database Proves Leonard Mack’s Innocence After 47 Years of Wrongful Conviction (Innocence Project – 9/05/2023)

Leonard Mack was exonerated today nearly five decades after he was wrongfully convicted of rape and two counts of criminal possession of a weapon in March 1976. New DNA testing of crime scene evidence found in a post-conviction investigation by the Innocence Project and the Westchester County District Attorney’s Conviction Review Unit proved Mr. Mack did not commit the crime. Mr. Mack’s wrongful conviction is the longest to be overturned based on new DNA evidence known to the Innocence Project. The DNA profile developed from the evidence was uploaded to the state and local DNA database and yielded a hit. The actual assailant identified by this search has since confessed to the crime.
This case contains virtually every common contributing factor in wrongful convictions. Eyewitness misidentification, the leading cause of wrongful convictions, played a central role, in addition to misleading forensic testimony presented by the State’s forensic analyst at trial, racial bias, and tunnel vision. Despite alibi witnesses and serological evidence from the victim’s underwear that excluded Mr. Mack in 1976, he spent seven-and-a-half years in prison and has since lived with this wrongful conviction for 41 years.

2 More 9/11 Victims Identified Using Advanced DNA Testing (CBS New York – 9/08/2023)

The remains of two people who died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center have been identified, the latest positive identification in the decadeslong effort to return victims to their families.
Authorities confirmed the identification of the remains of a man and woman days ahead of the 22nd anniversary of the hijacked-plane attack that killed nearly 3,000 people in Lower Manhattan. Their names were withheld by city officials at the request of their families.
New York City‘s medical examiner has now been able to link remains to 1,649 World Trade Center victims, a painstaking process that relies on leading-edge DNA sequencing techniques to test body fragments recovered in the rubble.
Advancements in the sequencing technology, including increased test sensitivity and faster turnaround times, have allowed officials to identify remains that had tested negative for identifiable DNA for decades, officials said.

Penn State Team to Triple Size of Forensic Database of Mitochondrial DNA (Penn State – 9/15/2023)

In circumstances where potential crime scene evidence such as hair or bone might be old or degraded, forensic scientists rely on DNA from a cell’s mitochondria — an organelle that has its own genome separate from the “human genome” in the cell’s nucleus. Now, the National Institute of Justice has awarded a team of researchers from Penn State $770,000 to sequence the mitochondrial genomes of 10,000 Pennsylvanians. This will more than triple the size of the existing database and provide a crucial point of reference for use in human identification cases.
“When we talk about DNA, we typically think of DNA from the nucleus of a cell, which is unique from person to person,” said Mitchell Holland, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and of forensic science at Penn State and leader of the research team. “This type of DNA can be extracted from the root of a hair, but most hair found at crime scenes does not contain the root, and the nuclear DNA within hair shafts is usually degraded. Mitochondrial DNA doesn’t have issues with degradation within the hair shaft, so it provides different but useful information.”
Nuclear DNA is inherited from both parents and intermixes in unique combinations, so, according to Holland, the likelihood of finding another person with the same DNA at a specific set of points along the genome — called a DNA profile — can be one in a septillion, more than seven factors of magnitude rarer than one in a million. By contrast, mitochondrial DNA is inherited solely from the mother, so a person’s mitochondrial genome is typically identical to that of their mother, siblings and others in that maternal line.
“With mitochondrial DNA, the likelihood of finding a person with the same DNA profile is usually one in tens of thousands, or maybe one in hundreds of thousands,” said Erin Brownfield, graduate student at Penn State. “So, matching a person’s mitochondrial DNA profile to found evidence may be strong circumstantial evidence, but it’s not positive identification. To better understand how often you might expect to see that profile in the general population, it is important to have a large database of profiles as a reference point.”
The current database of mitochondrial genomes available to forensic experts in the United States contains about 4,300 individuals. The new grant will allow the researchers to sequence an additional 10,000 genomes from samples collected by the Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.

Latest Search for Remains of the Tulsa Race Massacre Victims Ends with Seven Sets of Remains Exhumed (AP News – 9/30/2023)

The latest search for the remains of victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre has ended with 59 graves found and seven sets of remains exhumed, according to Oklahoma state archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck.
The excavation ended Friday, Stackelbeck said, and 57 of the 59 graves were unmarked and previously unknown.
The seven that were exhumed were found in simple, wooden boxes that Stackelbeck has said investigators were searching for because they were described in newspaper articles at the time, death certificates and funeral home records as the type used for burials of massacre victims.

GOP Lawmaker’s Bill Would Expand DOJ’s Genealogy Testing for Cold Case Victims (FOX News – 12/09/2023)

Unsolved crimes are a burden on victims, their families and the police as they try to apprehend criminals when all leads go cold.
Amid the cold cases, one Pennsylvania Republican lawmaker is aiming to alleviate part of that burden at the federal level.
House Republican Chief Deputy Whip Guy Reschenthaler is introducing the Cold Case Modernization Act this week to expand genealogy testing at the federal level for cold case victims. Reschenthaler’s bill looks to solve cold cases by expanding Department of Justice (DOJ) criteria for grant funding toward forensic genealogy testing for unidentified human remains.