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Cotton Swabs are the Prime Suspect In 8-Year Phantom Chase
matt4077 writes "For eight years, several hundred police officers across multiple European countries have been chasing a phantom woman whose DNA had been found in almost 20 crimes (including two murders) across central Europe. It now turns out that contaminated cotton swabs might be responsible for this highly unusual investigation. After being puzzled by the apparent randomness of the crimes, investigators noticed that all cotton swabs had been sourced from the same company. They also noted that the DNA was never found in crimes in Bavaria, a German state located at the center of the crimes' locations. It turns out that Bavaria buys its swabs from a different supplier."
So they shredded a woman for swabs? I thought we were only good for barbecue, masks, book covers, lampshades and creepy garments.
Mega criminal mind
I'm trying to get modded "Interesting Flamebait Informative and Insightful Redundant Troll" *-* Please Help *-*
Bet you'll find her at the end of the packing line completely unaware she's a highly adept and wanted criminal. Or what a brilliant cover if she was guilty ;)
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
Obviously there's a woman on the cotton swab assembly line who leads a secret life of crime!
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."
But ... but ... CSI, computers and experts are always right! You mean they actually have to do investigations instead of blind trust?
I wonder how much hard evidence they discarded because they "knew" it was this same woman?
Is it really too much to ask for a SERVER at the other end of that hyperlink?
nyud.net doesn't seem to have it cached, neither does Google. And MirrorDot is no help at all:
Are there any newer slashdot caching tools I don't know about? Specifically one that has this article?
First thing I was taught in my high school class on problem solving. Always state your assumptions, right underneath stating your explicit goal. We were also taught that if you start running into dead ends, circle back to your assumptions and review them critically to see that they are 1) all inclusive, and 2) actually true. Oh, and never use contaminated cotton swabs. I think that was day two.
Blast that Carmen Sandiego!
It's up to you now, gumshoes!
Wait... Are you bitching that you can't read the article? As in, you wanted to read the article before making a post?
I feel... like I've seen a unicorn or something...
This guy is using Slicehost for his blog or whatever. Apparently, he didn't pay for a big enough slice.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
This sounds similar to the case of Ireland's most reckless driver.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
It took them eight years to find out what CSI could have found out in one episode! Reality is so unrealistic.
This reminds me of the "Prawo Jazdy" story. The Irish police were looking for this dude "Prawo Jazdy" who accumulated a very large number of speeding tickets. He kept committing infractions all across Ireland but always got away whenever he was stopped by giving a different address each time. They thought they had a supercriminal fugitive speeder on their hands until someone noticed that his name was Polish for "driver's license".
If this doesn't suggest how hackable hi-tech evidence is then nothing will...
Imagine what would have happened if she ever had to submit her DNA for testing for whatever reason, and all of a sudden the Bavarian swat team busts down her door and arrests her for being linked to crimes all across Europe!
So how do you explain your dna at the crime site?
I used to work in a cotton factory. its possible that cotton from that factory ended up to tbe the cotton they used. did you hear about that case where a woman's dna ....
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
We should NEVER have developed human-cotton hybrids.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Whatcha wanna bet they're yet another case of contamination by HeLa cells?
(Google for it. It's an interesting story, and a good cautionary tale.)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Police labs are incredibly sloppy. You have to either have negative controls or some sort of validation or acceptance testing on your chemicals and supplies. They have all of these chain-of-custody rituals, but then they use supplies from Wal-Mart.
Our health teacher told us not to buy used Q-Tips(tm). Would have saved the trouble right there.
If you worked in a clothing store and folded all the clothing and then later a murder victims clothing had your DNA on it then you're done aren't you! Circumstantial evidence is a bad thing.
All points bulletin: be on the lookout for woman with extremely clean ears!
Why can't they just convert to latex already?!? ... Seriously! It IS the future after all.
How the hell did this woman's DNA get on ALL of these cotton swabs?
I'd hate to be that woman. In fiction it's Hitchcock but in real life it would be Kafka (unless she is guilty AND works in a cotton swab factory).
... had she been accused of murder, what her lawyer would feel like if the whole ordeal came into light after a massive epiphany.
Getting her DNA in sufficient amounts on all those swabs pretty much means she was sabotaging the process. Either from malice, or just because of being a bitter old hag who feels compelled to disobey work instructions from her superiors.
It reminds me of when I worked at an assembly line and we got a new type of screws which had some pink goo on them to prevent the product from falling apart due to vibrations. We were also given gloves to wear at all times when handling the screws, and a colleague of mine refused to wear them since "the old screws could survive my dirty fingers just fine". I never bothered to tell her the pink goo would give her cancer.
Here's the original story in German and a blog entry in English.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
That's why scientists use double blind experiments and control experiments. So, with every cotton swab taken from a crime scene, forensic labs should get one or more "blank" ones to test, without knowing which is which.
Who'd think THAT prophecy of Blinken Lights will come true?
There goes my "Carmen Sandiego" theory.
One of the few instances where an answer is found out BEFORE the question is asked.....
Answer: "It now turns out that contaminated cotton swabs might be responsible for this highly unusual investigation." .....And now the question:
How, exactly, did the DNA get *onto* the swab in the first place?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Can someone repost the article here as site is down -
slash dotted ?
because once she is being the bar and "continue" to leave DNA evidence everywhere wioth new crime, it quickly turns out that it can't be her even if she has no alibi for the first crime. Then reasonable doubt, testing of the swab fall in.
Now what would be scary but unlikely, is that the bad swab would be only a single batch OR the error is caught but not communicated by the labor to the prosecution/defense.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Hey, that wouldn't help on CSI.
I think the CSI team are probably suspected of hundreds of murders.
Think about it.
They come onto the crime scene with their hair flowing in the wind, flakes of makeup breaking of, scratch their heads, then suddenly zoom to x30 magnification and find..... a hair.
After all that head scratching, who would you bet on that hair belonging to?
Site's working fine again.
means you avoid the life-and-death situations.
And does your supposition mean that the police chiefs are dumber than the front-line? After all, if they were smarter, they'd be unpredictable and a danger to operational cohesion..!
What do they do? They multiply a millionfold any DNA on the sample.
Not a lot of contamination is needed.
A hopper with a box contaminated in it from one intimately used cotton swab will contaminate the entire hopper. And the next 100 hopper loads too.
In other news, Irish police, working on the theory that such a well-travelled criminal may have been been provided with transport by an accomplice, have apparently identified her driver:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2009/0219/1224241418104.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7899171.stm
This issue shows up the dangers of allowing the police to control the whole DNA evidence process - gathering and analysis. It needs to be transferred to an impartial third party pronto.
Every q-tip carefully tested during our ISO certified manufacturing process!
So how long till the authorities use this as an excuse to form a DNA database of all people?
After all think of all the money that would have saved the investigations.
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If they had been buying their swabs from Swabia.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
"How, exactly, did the DNA get *onto* the swab in the first place?"
How about looking in the factory where they made the contaminated cotton swabs. And presumably the PCR method is so sensitive that it picks up the merest trace element.
Doesn't cotton have DNA?
... YOU are a COTTON plant."
I always think that when they take a swab on CSI.
CSI_Stokes - "Sir, I am afraid to tell you this, but,
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
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Well, some things should not be recycled: Toilet paper and cotton swabs for example.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Cotton Swabs Prime Suspect In 8 Year Phantom Chase
Cotton Swabs is innocent! Free Cotton Swabs!
-Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,615608,00.html
If you can't be good, be good at it!
So it's the cotton swabs? That is exactly what Carmen Sandiego would want you to think.
My left arm is all scars and I consider that a valid excuse...
Are you Cat?
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
so... stop buying second-hand cotton swabs?
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
When the DNA was aligned, it turned out that it spelled "HELP, I'M TRAPPED IN A SWAB FACTORY"
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What's incredible to think about is the state of DNA detection these days. This woman has probably merely brushed her hands over millions of cotton swaps and yet obviously a large percentage have carried away a trace of her DNA, and that trace was detectable and could be resequenced. It goes to show how pervasive DNA really is, and how much of our self we sprinkle all over the world continuously.
Play me online? Well you know that I'll beat you. If I ever meet you I'll "/sbin/shutdown -h now" you. -Weird Al, kinda.
Dearest Natasha,
Our cunning plan is vorkink. Not much longer and you can quit your job in capitalist cotton svab factory and ve vill haf seats at the right hand of fearless leader as he rules the vorld!
love,
Boris
"Cotton Swabs are the Prime Suspect..." made it sound like either there are some rogue swabs out to kill their creators, or some group of people calling themselves "the Cotton Swabs". Either way, it doesn't sound very threatening until you read the word "homocide"...
She must be in quality control at the end of the production line. Her job is to 100% test each swab leaving the facility. I'll let your imaginations decide how she would do this. The swabs are then cleaned through a multi-million dollar automated piece of equipment. However, due to the lowest bidder getting the contract for this 'sterilizer', its performance is sub-par and some DNA remains on each swab. The ChapStick, Preparation-H, and rectal thermometer industries all use similar processes and likely have some DNA residue on their product. ;)
"You can't really dust for vomit" --Nigel Tufnel
How did this woman DNA end up all over the place?
Here is one idea:
www.dnaidentiguard.com
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7899171.stm
My web domain.
I know it's popular to say that DNA evidence is being used to lock people up left and right, but very few cases -hinge- on that DNA evidence (some exceptions are e.g. rape cases where DNA from a sperm sample collected is pretty strong evidence that moves the question of "did the woman even have sex with that man?" to "was the sex that she had with that man a case of sexual violation?")
So replace this woman with some guy...a black guy, just for good prejudice. Then have his DNA already in the police database for whatever reason. Then he contaminates cotton swabs with his DNA at the factory.
One day a woman is raped, and one of these cotton swabs is used to collect DNA from her vagina. This guy doesn't have an alibi because, unlike those lucky people in television shows who are always with someone else, he's a normal person who spends some portion of his life alone. So we have a guy who can't prove where he was and the police believe they found his DNA in a rape victim's vagina. ...and he's black, don't forget that. Exactly what sort of miracle do you believe will save this guy?
The only reason this went on long enough that the police realized their testing methods were at fault was because the woman's DNA wasn't in a database already and so they couldn't remove her from the cotton swab factory and place her in prison. If they hadn't convicted her on the first case, they may well have on the second or third, and it never would have made it to the umpteenth case where the investigators thought "maybe her DNA is on the swabs before we wipe them on things."
Good thing they figured out the swabs were contaminated. Had they not, some innocent woman might have spent years and years of her life in prison, for nothing.
Anyone else grossed out by the thought that someone else's DNA (god knows how it got there-- I shudder to think) is on your cotton swabs?? I know where *I* put those swabs... I certainly don't want someone else's DNA to go where I put those swabs...
GROSS!!!
Doesn't this discovery have the potential to cause other cases where the contaminated swabs were used to be overturned, or, at least, retried? How could the DNA evidence be reliable on a swab received from the manufacturer pre-contaminated?