Tuesday, October 23, 2001
Defense attorneys say the DNA tests are needed to determine if anyone else was there during the killings.
By LAURE CIOFFI
VINDICATOR NEW CASTLE BUREAU
NEW CASTLE, Pa. -- A Lawrence County judge agrees that more DNA testing needs to be done before Thomas Kimbell's upcoming retrial, but where it will be done is another matter.
Judge Dominick Motto of common pleas court must decide if the tests will be done in the Pennsylvania State Police crime laboratory in Greensburg, Pa., or a private testing facility in Germantown, Md.
Kimbell, 39, was convicted in the 1994 stabbing deaths of Bonnie Lou Dryfuse, her daughters, Jacqueline, 7, and Heather, 4, and her niece, Stephanie Herko, 5, but was granted a new trial by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court last year after a judge determined Kimbell's attorney was not allowed to cross-examine a key witness.
Kimbell's attorney Thomas Leslie said the additional DNA testing, which was not widely available before the first trial, should be done on several items found in the Pulaski Township trailer where Dryfuse and the children were killed.
New procedures: Those samples were either too small or degraded to identify the person who left the blood, he said. However, new DNA procedures, called PCR testing, will allow the blood to be replicated until there is enough to determine who left the blood, he said.
"It's important to determine if another person was there," Leslie said. "Some of these are potentially someone we don't even know about. It's a DNA signature of someone who is not even thought of in this case yet."
Defense attorneys have maintained that another person, not Kimbell, killed Dryfuse and the children.
Prosecutor Anthony Krastek of the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office agreed that testing must be done if a defendant requests it, but noted criminalists in the state police laboratory didn't see the need to test these items previously.
"We think the tests are not reasonable," he said.
Krastek said his office would agreed to test 10 of the 18 items, saying that the state police crime lab does not have the time to work on all 18 samples.
Preference for where: He added that if all 18 items are to be tested it should be done at Cellmark, a private testing facility in Maryland known for such testing in high-profile criminal cases, including the trial of O.J. Simpson.
Leslie said Cellmark would charge the county $1,095 for each test.