DNAprint Genomics (DNAG)

[mingwan0]

Banking on solving crime

http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/EdmontonSun/News/2004/09/21/637331.html

The DNA data bank in Ottawa has 64,608 criminal profiles, but as

the Sun found out, police feel the number excludes too many while libertarians argue the danger of the bank having them at all.

The fingerprint examiner gingerly opens another Purolator bag containing DNA samples from some of the most violent criminals in the country.

Instead of their photos being posted on some national wall of infamy, the prisoners' genetic signatures are about to be uploaded into the four-year-old National DNA Data Bank, where they will be matched now and in the future against DNA taken from thousands of unsolved crimes. Getting away with murder just got infinitely more difficult.

Housed at RCMP headquarters, the databank is a place of pass cards, strict security and crime-fighting zeal.

At its head is Dr. Ron Fourney, a world DNA expert with a sense of humour. When his local sub shop made him a sandwich containing a hair, he warned the staff that he'd be back to a take a DNA sample from each of them to find out whose it was.

He had to reassure them he was just joking.

The NDDB is his baby and he's obviously proud of his staff and the job they do.

"When they leave at the end of the day, they've made a difference," he says, as he offers a tour of the state-of-the-art facility.

"They've linked serial crimes together, they've exonerated an innocent individual, they've helped to provide closure to a victim and they've contributed to making safer communities across Canada. It's a pretty heady job description."

In the lab, robotic work stations process multiple trays of 96 DNA samples at a time with offender profiles developed and sent to the database within a swift three to five days.

A computerized system developed by the RCMP tracks each criminal's DNA sample at every step as it is extracted, amplified and digitized, creating an audited "chain of evidence" to deflect any challenges by defence lawyers in court.

SOLVED 154 MURDERS

"It double-checks everything I do," says DNA analyst Allison Desroches.

There are now 64,608 DNA criminal profiles entered into the NDDB's Convicted Offender Index and 16,448 profiles of unknown DNA in its Crime Scene Index.

At the end of each day, Sylvain Lalonde runs the computer program which cross-checks the two databases. They used to ring a cowbell when each "hit" linking the two was recorded. "Once we got to 1,000," Lalonde smiles, "we stopped ringing the bell."

The NDDB is now credited with helping to solve more than 2,000 crimes, including 154 murders. The first killer it would snag was Richard Mark Eastman.

The horrific murder case had gone unsolved for nine years. Muriel Holland, 63, was a playwright, model and former U.S. ambassador to Mexico who had just moved her 93-year-old father into her Mississauga seniors home.

Shortly after 1 a.m. on Aug. 27, 1991, Eastman broke into her ground-floor apartment and found Holland sleeping on a pullout sofa. He raped and strangled her, twisting a dish towel around her neck while her elderly father slept in the next room.

Peel Regional Police found a partial fingerprint and semen on the body that led to a DNA profile of the killer. But the case went no further and her family gave up hope the murder would be solved.

But, just a few months after the NDDB was officially opened in November 2000, Peel police sent in their DNA profile of Holland's rapist.

On May 4, 1991, a DNA sample from Eastman, who had been convicted of sexual assault in 1995, was forwarded to the convicted-offender database.

On that very day, the data bank linked Eastman's DNA to the Holland murder scene. Eastman became the first person charged with murder as a result of the new NDDB.

One of its newest areas is uploading DNA fingerprints from break-and-enter crime scenes. "We're finding that 15% are linked to some of our most serious crimes," Fourney says.

Despite its success, the police want more.

Investigators are frustrated by the number of offenders not eligible for the database - for example, murderers who killed before the data bank was created in June 2000 do not have to submit a DNA sample unless they have killed more than once, at different times.

Last year an Ontario judge ordered the destruction of DNA samples taken from two murderers convicted before 2000 because, although they had killed several people each, the murders had occurred at the same time.

The unsolved slayings of Erin Gilmour and Susan Tice are glaring examples of where Toronto police believe a more comprehensive data bank could finally uncover an elusive serial killer.

KILLED BY SAME MAN

Five days before Christmas 1983, Gilmour, 22, was raped and stabbed to death in her fashionable Yorkville apartment. A few months earlier, Tice, 45, a social worker and mother of four, was stabbed to death in her Grace Street home. Other than the cause of death, nothing else tied the two murders together.

However, during the cold-case review of 2002, with technology now available to test the DNA left at both scenes, Toronto Police discovered the two had actually been killed by the same man.

It remains unsolved but Supt. Gary Ellis has his theory.

"Given that it was a sex murder and he's murdered six months apart, suspect profiling would indicate that this person wasn't going to stop," says Ellis, who investigated the Gilmour case as a young detective.

"However, no offender DNA matches, no crime-scene matches have come back. Those murders have stopped.

"Perhaps that person was arrested for another offence and is currently sitting in a penitentiary and he's out of our reach. We can't go into the penitentiary and take DNA because they say a person has to be convicted of two separate murders or be declared a dangerous offender or has committed two sexual assaults ...

"If that person who killed Susan Tice and Erin Gilmour was arrested for another murder, he might be sitting doing 25 years right now, yet these murders go unsolved, their families have no closure and we have no way of getting to the person. Essentially, they're being protected in prison."

And then there is the killer of 11-year-old Alison Parrott. Francis Carl Roy was arrested and convicted based on DNA evidence, and yet he is not in the DNA data bank.

"It took 11 years between the time he murdered her and he was arrested," Ellis says. "This type of offender, they don't do it once and that's it. Yet he's not in the DNA data bank.

"We don't know what he did before killing her. We don't know what he did after killing her until the time he was arrested. We have no way of telling what he has done."

That is why Ellis wrote an internal report recommending the national database be expanded to include more convicted offenders.

This summer, Toronto police Chief Julian Fantino and London's deputy chief called for the power to take DNA samples automatically upon arrest, just as fingerprints are taken now.

It's been common procedure since April in the United Kingdom - home of the world's first and largest database which now tops 2.5 million DNA profiles - as well as in many parts of the U.S.

Civil libertarians, however, are vehemently against the proposal and are worried about our DNA future.

DNA, they argue, holds much more sensitive personal information than fingerprints do and could easily be misused.

Insurance companies, for example, may one day demand access to discover if the holder has a certain gene specific to cancer.

Police may want to know if a person's DNA contains a "violence gene" or a "sex offender gene." It sounds like science fiction, but then, who dreamed 20 years ago that we might use chewing gum to find a killer?

'JUNK DNA'

The DNA experts insist we have nothing to fear.

At the NDDB, the only parts of DNA which are profiled and stored on the database are 13 areas known as "junk DNA" - they vary from person to person, but contain no data about a person's looks, health or any other personal characteristic.

"The deal we forged with Canadians was that the markers we use are anonymous snapshots that don't encode for any physical or mental attributes," says Fourney, the officer in charge.

"The only minor exception is that we do gender discrimination - we can tell if the sample is from a male or female. Because of the sheer power of the science, that's what we've limited ourselves to looking at."

Privacy is guaranteed, he says, because the DNA profiles are securely stored as anonymous fingerprints identified only by a bar code number. "If you wanted me to pull up Paul Bernardo's DNA profile, I wouldn't have a clue. He's just as anonymous as the 70,000 other offender samples in the database."

Unlike Britain, Canada also destroys DNA profiles collected during investigations rather than adding them to the NDDB.

But for each DNA fingerprint they do store, Fourney admits the data bank retains a complete sample which has not been reduced to those 13 markers of impersonal information. What if that DNA fell into nefarious hands?

"We have the most stringent controls of anyone in Canada," he insists.

Can medical labs say the same? Most of us, he says, don't think twice when we have blood drawn each year for medical tests. "It's ironic. What happens to that blood sample? Millions are taken every year and we have no clue what happens to it."

If this brave new world of DNA were not complicated enough, Sir Alec Jeffreys, the scientist who discovered DNA typing, is now warning that it's not as infallible as we were led to believe. He's concerned there is an increasing danger of false positives as the use of the technique becomes more widespread.

When scientists develop a DNA fingerprint, they're taking just a snapshot of the DNA, not the whole picture. Jeffreys says that the U.K. standard of comparing 10 markers in the DNA is no longer foolproof - Canada and the U.S. use 13 - and must be more sophisticated.

If not, there could be more frightening cases like that of Raymond Easton. In 1999, the 49-year-old British man suffering from advanced Parkinson's disease became the first recorded case of mistaken DNA identity when he was charged with a burglary 300 km away from his home.

The U.K. data bank had matched a DNA sample he'd given in a family dispute four years before to that taken from the crime scene. Though he was obviously disabled, charges were only dropped after a more advanced DNA test

"This should be very alarming," warns Toronto criminal lawyer Ricardo G. Federico. "If DNA is the best thing to happen to forensic science, why is there an increasing danger of false positives? The scientists should hang their heads in shame."

Jeffreys' solution would be to log everyone's DNA into a confidential data bank from birth.

It's a view shared by Greg Parsons, the Newfoundland paramedic wrongly convicted of murdering his mother. "If you do the crime and your DNA is there, you should go to jail. And it could stop crime; It's a deterrent in itself."

His lawyer disagrees. While DNA cleared Parsons, Jerome Kennedy recently won a murder case after proving the DNA against his client had been tainted.

"DNA is a science that appears to be unquestionable, but what we have are human beings collecting the samples and human beings testing the samples," the lawyer cautions. "With human beings, there's always the possibility of a mistake."

Fourney is quick to remind us that solving crimes takes more than just a DNA match. "It usually just points the finger," he says. "It's the smoking gun to allow investigators to zero in."

That investigative tool is advancing at dizzying speed. Canadian scientists are working on extracting DNA from fingerprints. Eventually, Fourney predicts, biochips will allow the miniaturization of the process so that it can be taken directly to the scene of the crime. DNA results may one day be produced within minutes rather than in hours, giving police instant leads.

Unlike the NDDB, other forensic bodies are keen on developing more personal profiles from suspect DNA. In Britain, a genetic Sherlock Holmes can now examine DNA left at a crime scene and tell investigators their suspect's ethnic ancestry as well as if he's a redhead.

In the near future, bio-sleuths hope to be able to describe a criminal's age, eye colour and facial features just from examining a pin-sized dot of blood.

FORENSIC INEPTITUDE

The ethical implications of it all are a little disconcerting. Once that information can be determined, how long before Canadian police demand it as well? Should authorities have access to such personal information? What about foreign governments?

DNA profiles are now being exchanged by police forces around the world. Do we trust their standards? Should Canadians be arrested based on their DNA matching a crime scene in Texas, a state currently plagued by a scandal of forensic ineptitude?

And finally, in the interests of fighting crime, are we willing one day to have the genetic secrets of who we are and what we might be, logged onto some universal DNA database?

"Where is this all taking us?" wonders Federico, the criminal attorney.

Nowhere we don't want to go, insists Fourney. Next year, the NDDB will be subject to a five-year parliamentary review where the safeguards we want can be debated anew.

In the meantime, his data bank computers continue to cross-match thousands of DNA fingerprints, silently searching for criminals who thought they could get away scot-free.

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