No one has hours to scour the papers to keep up with the latest news, so we’ve curated the top news stories in the field of Forensic Science for this week. Here’s what you need to know to get out the door!
Lawmakers Work to Fix State Forensic Evidence Backlog in the Thousands (WBIR – 10/09/2025)
State lawmakers are working to fix a forensic evidence backlog of thousands of crimes across Tennessee.
A new report from the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations shows in some cases, it takes months or even years for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the Metro Nashville Police Department to process evidence.
Cold Case Symposium Provides Students, Community with Access to Forensic Science Experts (Arizona State University – 10/10/2025)
On Sept. 11, 2021, when Gabby Petito was reported missing, the country was captivated by the search for the 22-year-old vlogger chronicling her cross-country road trip in a white van she shared with her fiancé, Brian Laundrie. Weeks later, her remains were found in a national forest in Wyoming. Petito had been strangled by Laundrie.
Nicole Schmidt, Petito’s mother, has turned her tragedy into an opportunity to help other people with missing or murdered family members.
Schmidt, the founder of the Gabby Petito Foundation, will speak at the fourth annual Cold Case Symposium that takes place Oct. 16–17 at Arizona State University’s West Valley campus. The event is cohosted by Purdue University’s Department of Entomology, Arizona State University and Project: Cold Case.
Schmidt is one of many high-profile speakers at the two-day event that is designed as a platform for victims’ families, forensic experts, law enforcement, advocates, ASU students and the public to hear stories and learn about resources and tools that can bring attention to cold cases and ultimately seek justice for the victims.
Events like the Cold Case Symposium “provide a space for dialogue between experts, students and members of the community,” said Hank Fradella, the newly appointed director of ASU’s School of Interdisciplinary Forensics. “These conversations can bring renewed attention to long-dormant investigations and help build trust between institutions and the public they serve.”
The symposium also distinguishes the department and the university.
84% of Forensic Teams Suffering ‘Severe’ Mental Damage Amid Rising Workload Pressures (The Justice Gap – 10/12/2025)
Crime scene investigators are ‘suffering severe damage’ to their mental health due to more frequent exposure to ‘traumatic scenes’ amid soaring workloads.
New data from a union representing forensic teams who attend crime scenes reveals 84% of crime scene investigators they spoke to said their work has an impact on their mental health.
UNISON’s survey also found 4 in 5 (78%) reported increased workload pressures, saying their employers’ expectations have increased even as 56% said their departments have cut staff over the past year.
In response to this new research, the union said ‘essential government investment is also needed to tackle chronic understaffing’ and to ‘protect the wellbeing of workers essential to a functioning justice system’.
UNISON general secretary Christina McAnea said: ‘Crime scene investigators are paying a terrible price for their dedication to public safety and criminal justice.
‘They deal with the aftermath of incidents that nobody wants to see. Regular trauma is seriously damaging their mental health, yet too often their suffering is overlooked, ignored or dismissed. That is unacceptable.
‘Forces must face up to the reality of what their staff experience. Support must be automatic, confidential and properly resourced. Nobody should be left to cope alone.’
DNA Doe Project Identifies John Doe Found in Oregon in 1992. Skeletal Remains Identified as Missing Massachusetts Man (DNA Doe Project – 10/13/2025)
More than thirty years after his body was discovered in Portland, Oregon, St. Johns Bridge John Doe has been identified as Bryant Edward Deane. Deane was a native of Massachusetts, thousands of miles from where he was found, and he would’ve been about 39 years old at the time of his death.
On August 17, 1992, workers clearing a plot of land near the St. Johns Bridge in Portland, Oregon discovered the skeletonized remains of a man covered in thick brush. No cause of death was determined, but the remains showed signs of lower back disease that might have caused chronic pain. One of the man’s legs was significantly shorter than the other, which likely caused him to walk with a limp. A forensic anthropologist estimated his age at 50-70 and determined that he was only 5’ to 5’3” tall.
The Oregon State Medical Examiner’s Office later brought this case to the DNA Doe Project, whose expert volunteer investigative genetic genealogists work pro bono to identify John and Jane Does. Soon after the genealogy research on the case commenced, it became clear that the unidentified man had deep roots in Franklin County, Massachusetts, but around the same time a number of challenges emerged.
“While our initial impression was that this case could be quite straightforward, we quickly realized that was not the case,” said team co-leader Eric Hendershott. “Misattributed parentage events in the trees of our highest matches, combined with New England pedigree collapse, made this quite the challenging case.”
Over the course of five months, the team on this case built out a family tree for the unidentified man that grew to contain nearly 20,000 people, tracing family trees back as far as 16th century England. Finally, a connection was made between two of the key families of interest – a couple who’d married in Northfield, Massachusetts in 1951. Upon further research, it emerged that one of their children seemed to have disappeared from the public records; his name was Bryant Deane.
While the estimated age range for St. Johns Bridge John Doe was 50 to 70 years old, Deane would’ve only been 39 or so at the time of his death. But in spite of this discrepancy, further DNA testing later confirmed that the unidentified man was in fact Bryant Deane.
“This was a case where one small DNA match helped fill in the connections that our higher matches could not,” said team leader Jeana Feehery. “This highlights how even distant relatives of Does can help us solve cases – every piece of the puzzle is important.”
The DNA Doe Project is grateful to the groups and individuals who helped solve this case: the Oregon State Medical Examiner’s Office, who entrusted the case to the DNA Doe Project; the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification for DNA extraction; Genologue for sequencing; Kevin Lord for bioinformatics; GEDmatch Pro, DNAJustice and FamilyTreeDNA for providing their databases; our generous donors who joined our mission and contributed to this case; and the DNA Doe Project’s dedicated teams of volunteer investigative genetic genealogists who work tirelessly to bring all our John and Jane Does home.
Rutgers Chemist Receives Top Honor for Groundbreaking DNA and Genetics Research (Rutgers – 10/14/2025)
Kenneth J. Breslauer, whose work helped lay the foundation for many of today’s major advances in genetics and precision medicine during his 50 years as a researcher at Rutgers, has received one of the top honors in his field.
In February, he will be one of five scientists in the world recognized for contributions to understanding the structure of DNA, its function and the role it plays in modern medicine as a 2026 fellow of the International Biophysical Society.
His work has provided scientists with a better understanding of how small changes in molecules can have big effects on health and is helping to shape the future of personalized medicine.
NH State Police Is World’s First Lab Use STRmix™, FaSTR™ DNA to Analyze Crime Scene Evidence on New Platform (STRmix – 10/15/2025)
The New Hampshire State Police Forensic Laboratory (NHSPFL) is the first laboratory in the world to go live with STRmix™ probabilistic genotyping software and FaSTR™ DNA using the Promega PowerPlex® 35GY 8-dye kit on the Spectrum CE System.
Introduced in 2012 to resolve mixed DNA profiles previously regarded as too complex or degraded to interpret, STRmix™ has established a highly successful track record in producing usable, interpretable, and legally admissible DNA evidence in more than 690,000 criminal cases worldwide. STRmix™ has proven to be particularly successful in resolving violent crime, sexual assault, and cold cases.
FaSTR™ DNA, meanwhile, combines an intuitive, user-friendly graphical interface with easily understandable and laboratory-customizable rules to seamlessly integrate with STRmix™ (when in use) to rapidly analyze raw DNA data generated by genetic analyzers and standard STR DNA profiling kits, and assign a number of contributors (NoC) estimate.
“We are very excited by this significant achievement, given that we worked so closely with the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Laboratory to enhance FaSTR™ DNA for this new platform,” explains Judi Morawitz, Integration Lead for the STRmix team.
“We are grateful for the significant work that NHSPFL has undertaken and look forward to working with them in the future. This is a great example of how collaborating with our users to incorporate their feedback has benefits for everyone,” Morawitz continues.
Using FaSTR™ DNA, forensic labs are able to quickly and efficiently convert the raw data obtained at a crime scene into useful intelligence, carrying out sample-to-sample or sample-to-database comparison checks, as well as full concordance testing on positive and negative controls. With this information in hand, STRmix™ – which fully integrates with FaSTR™ DNA – can be used to deconvolute DNA mixtures, enabling labs to separate combined DNA signals to reveal individual genetic profiles in low-level, degraded, or mixed samples from multiple contributors
Unlike previous methods of DNA analysis, which are more subjective and depend entirely on the application of fixed stochastic thresholds and other biological parameters to manually analyze DNA samples, STRmix™ uses a fully continuous model that makes better use of the information available within a DNA profile. It proposes hundreds of thousands of different profiles, assesses and weighs how closely these resemble the observed DNA mixture, and then assigns a likelihood ratio (LR) – the widely accepted standard statistical approach for conveying weight of evidence information – should a person of interest’s sample be available.
NHSPFL is New Hampshire’s premier forensic science facility and the sole provider of traditional forensic laboratory services in the state. Employing about 50 forensic scientists, evidence technicians, and administrators, NHSPFL routinely utilizes state-of-the-art technology to analyze evidence from more than 220 city and town police departments, nine state law enforcement agencies including the State Police, 10 county sheriff departments, numerous city and town fire departments, and, on occasion, federal law enforcement agencies conducting criminal investigations in the state. NHSPFL holds international accreditation through ANAB to ISO/IEC 17025:2017 standards for Forensic Testing and Calibration Laboratories.
STRmix™ is currently being used for DNA analysis in 96 federal, state, local, and private organizations in the U.S. and 21 forensic laboratories internationally, including labs in Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and all nine state and territory forensic labs in New Zealand and Australia.
The team behind STRmix™ and FaSTR™ DNA has also developed two related software applications:
• DBLR™, an application which when used with STRmix™ allows forensic laboratories to undertake extensive kinship analysis, carry out rapid database searches, visualize the value of their DNA mixture evidence, and carry out mixture-to-mixture matches;
• STRmix™ NGS, fully continuous mixture interpretation and likelihood ratio generation software for profiles generated using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS).In combination with STRmix™, FaSTR™ DNA and DBLR™ complete the full workflow from analysis to interpretation and database matching, while STRmix™ NGS broadens the range of profile types that can be interpreted.
Follow Up on Missing Persons Cold Case Matches Student to Unidentified Skull (Forensic – 10/15/2025)
Continued follow up on a missing persons investigation led to a piece of closure for the family of 20-year-old TSU student and mother, Alice Mae Sullivan, 39 years after she went missing.
Sullivan failed to pick up her 3-year-old son from a babysitter’s house on August 28, 1986, after she attended class that morning. She was reported missing the next day by her parents.
Through the assistance of forensic scientists at the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification, Sullivan was matched to an unidentified skull last Wednesday. The skull was located by a contractor building homes on Stokers Lane in North Nashville on February 20, 2004. There were no signs of trauma to the skull.
Unfortunately, after a thorough search of the area in 2004 by MNPD officers, the Medical Examiner’s Office and the state anthropologist, that was the only piece of Sullivan’s remains located. The investigation into her death is continuing.
Nassau County Office of the Medical Examiner and the FBI Team with Othram to Identify the Suspect in a 1984 Homicide (DNASolves – 10/15/2025)
In December 1984, the body of 16-year-old Theresa Fusco was found buried under leaves in a wooded area near the roller-skating rink where she had worked in Lynbrook, in Nassau County, New York. Several law enforcement agencies responded and began collecting evidence and investigating. They determined her body had been there for weeks and she had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Three men were later convicted of the murder, but DNA testing unavailable in the 1980s found that someone other than the three had committed the killings and they were exonerated in 2005.
In 2023, the Nassau County Office of the Medical Examiner, working with the FBI, submitted forensic evidence to Othram in The Woodlands, Texas to determine if advanced DNA testing could help identify the suspect. Othram scientists successfully developed a DNA extract from the provided evidence and then used Forensic-Grade Genome Sequencing® to build a comprehensive DNA profile for the unknown suspect.
Once the profile was created, it was provided to the FBI’s forensic genetic genealogy team, who worked to develop new leads in the case using forensic genetic genealogy.
With this new information, a follow-up investigation was conducted leading investigators to potential relatives of the suspect. This investigation led to the positive identification of the suspect, who is now known to be Richard Bilodeau, 63, of Center Moriches, a hamlet in Suffolk County, New York. He was indicted on two counts of murder on October 14, 2025.
Edward T. Blake, Pioneer of Using DNA to Prove Innocence, Dies at 80 (Death Penalty Information Center – 10/15/2025)
Edward T. Blake, a forensic scientist who helped pioneer the use of DNA analysis in criminal cases and whose work helped exonerate more than 50 people, including those on death row, died in August 2025 at age 80 from pancreatic cancer. Dr. Blake was the first forensic scientist to use polymerase chain reaction testing, or PCR, on crime-scene DNA. The technique allowed Dr. Blake to extract usable genetic information from evidence samples that could not previously be tested because of old age, small quantity, or severe degradation.
Dr. Blake’s work coincided with a period in which the criminal legal system began to confront the use of unreliable forensic evidence in convictions. The PCR testing used by Dr. Blake was among the few forensic tools that could definitively exclude people who were accused of being involved in crimes. In 1988, he helped contribute to the first DNA exoneration, proving that Gary Dotson, who had served 8 years in prison for a sexual assault, could not have been the source of the biological evidence from the crime he was accused of committing. Just five years later, in 1993, Dr. Blake’s work helped free Kirk Bloodsworth from death row in Maryland — the first death-sentenced person to be exonerated through DNA evidence.