Saturday, April 24, 2004
Several recent serial-killer cases were solved by testing DNA samples.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Detectives in the Kansas City Police cold-case squad worked backward from the present, reading unsolved homicide files.
Meanwhile, technicians in the city's crime lab worked forward from the old cases, using a federal grant to analyze DNA from unsolved homicides.
When shoe leather and science met in the middle, the result was the arrest of Lorenzo J. Gilyard, a known sex offender. Expecting to solve a murder here or there, police believe they've unraveled a 12-victim spree stretching back 27 years.
"Now the message is back to the police agencies to go into their property rooms and evidence storage lockers and submit the cases that may have been sitting there for decades," says Roger Kahn, deputy supervisor of Ohio's state crime lab and president of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors.
Experts say the creation of DNA databases, the emergence of police cold-case squads, computer data-mining and the proliferation of the mass media all have converged to make identifying and solving killing sprees a lot easier.
DNA has the potential to be the great leveler in solving murders, says Jack Levin, a sociologist and criminologist who has studied serial killings.
What's expected
Though police might feel more pressure to solve the killing of a librarian than that of a prostitute, he says, a computer running samples does not care if a victim is white or black, young or old, pretty or homely, sinner or saint.
"I think as the technology advances continue, we will see more serial killers being brought to justice," says Levin, a professor with the Brudnick Center on Conflict and Violence at Boston's Northeastern University. "We'll be able to recognize earlier that there may be one killer responsible for a large number of victims."
DNA has been the key in the prosecution and construction of several recent serial killing cases.
Gary Ridgway, the so-called Green River Killer, was sentenced in December to 48 consecutive life terms after confessing that he'd killed a string of women -- many of them prostitutes -- in Washington State between 1982 and 1998. A DNA sample taken in 2001 linked him to seven deaths.
And police in Louisiana used DNA from a cheek swab to link Derrick Todd Lee with the slayings of seven women between April 1998 and March 2003. The 35-year-old pipefitter is scheduled for trial next month.
The technology also is likely to be crucial in solving two other ongoing cases: A recent string of truck-stop prostitute murders in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Mississippi, and the re-emergence in Wichita, Kan., of the so-called BTK -- bind, torture, kill -- Strangler, who sent a letter to a newspaper last month claiming responsibility for a 1986 homicide.
What's being done
Every week, state crime labs upload DNA profiles from cases to the FBI. Each Friday, those bits of evidence are run against more than 1.7 million samples from convicted felons and unidentified offenders, expanding the database with each run.
But though the Gilyard case is being hailed as a triumph of high-tech sleuthing, it also is a reminder that all the molecular magic in the world is no substitute for a lot of hard work -- and a little luck.
Two of the Kansas City killings were linked by an early form of DNA testing back in 1994. The offender's genetic profile had been in the database since 2001, when crime lab technicians retested it using newer techniques. But authorities didn't have a name to attach to it.
Police found Gilyard through a blood sample he gave in 1987, during the investigation of one of the killings with which he now stands charged. A stain from that sample had been sitting in a walk-in freezer ever since, preserved at around minus 20 degrees Celsius.
The lab had tested only about a half-dozen samples from the many suspects in the various linked murders before getting a match with Gilyard, criminalist Scott Hummel says.
In the end, the computer programs are only as good as the data that's plugged into them, says former FBI profiler Robert Ressler, the man credited with coining the phrase "serial killer."
Ressler was co-founder of VICAP, the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. Under VICAP, police are supposed to fill out a questionnaire on certain violent crimes so the information can be used to recognize patterns.
Here's the problem
But unlike the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, cooperation in which is mandatory in many jurisdictions, Ressler says there is stubborn resistance to participation in VICAP.
"It's inconceivable that law enforcement wouldn't want to use something like this," he says. "But there are boneheads out there. ... Even to this day, there are law enforcement people who say, 'We don't want to use it because it's FBI' and 'We're putting on our own show here, and we don't need them.'"
Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney General John Aschcroft told Congress more than a half-million criminal cases were pending in which DNA analysis was possible. But, he said, only 10 percent of those had even been submitted to state or local crime laboratories.
Of course, even DNA can't help catch a killer who meticulously sanitizes a crime scene and has no prior criminal history, Levin notes.
In a way, Gilyard's arrest was "a fortunate fluke," says Jeffrey Ban, biology section chief for the Virginia Division of Forensic Science.
Hummel notes that, under state law, authorities would not have been allowed to enter Gilyard's sample into the national offender database, because he was just a suspect at the time.
And, unlike most states, Hummel says Missouri doesn't collect and upload DNA from every convicted felon, even though, "time and again, stats have shown burglars lead to rapists lead to murderers."
Still looking
Officials in Kansas City continue to comb their old cases, hoping to link Gilyard's name to more unsolved deaths. So far, no other jurisdiction has reported hits on his DNA profile from the national database, but the data has yielded other results -- two more possible separate sets of serial homicides.
The Department of Justice has awarded $300 million in backlog elimination grants like the one Kansas City used to find Gilyard and has requested $177 million for the coming year.
Ban says the constant expansion and use of the national DNA database will lead to the identification of serial killings where no discernible pattern seemed to exist. He even thinks it might stop a criminal before he has a chance to rise to the level of being labeled a serial killer.
"We'll identify them at the early stages," he says. "Before they even get to the point where they commit a crime against a person."
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