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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."
"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth."
I'm glad that they didn't find the woman who's DNA it is. After all, she would have been severely punished for something that she had absolutely no idea about.
I'm amazed that there was the presence of mind to check the suppliers!
Although, this would be a great "thin-blue-line" skit.
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?
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.
Well, most likely what would happen is that the authorities would determine that it was her. After all, the DNA can't be wrong. They're not going to call her up first and ask if she's really the woman who murdered all those people!
Given how vicious her crimes were, she's probably armed and dangerous, so a paramilitary assault team will be sent to pick her up. Maybe she's in the kitchen when they break down the door unannounced, so she's holding a knife. She's so scared that she freezes and doesn't put it down, causing the police to taze her and brutally throw her to the ground because they think she's threatening them. Of course they've also shot her dogs because they're afraid of dogs, and her kids are scarred for life after watching their house get broken into, their dogs shot, and their mother arrested and dragged out of the house, then get put into foster care. Meanwhile, they're destroying her house looking for nonexistent murder weapons or other evidence of her heinous crimes.
She'll spend the weekend in jail waiting for arraignment, be denied bail because of her danger to society, the whole time claiming that it's a case of mistaken identity and has no idea what's going on. At this point the cops are too busy to talk to her because they're patting themselves on the back and giving press conferences talking about their excellent police work, how they caught a violent criminal, and every news show and paper leads with her photo.
At some point they'll decide to tag-team interrogate her, and will spend hours on end accusing her of doing all kinds of things. When she denies it all, they call her a liar and threaten her with tales of what will happen to her in prison, what will happen to her children, and so on. Most of these crimes are really old so she'll have no alibi. Who the hell knows what she was doing November 12, 2004?
Eventually they'll check on her story and she will be released with little fanfare, her life, her house, all destroyed. Her name and photo will forever be linked to all those horrible crimes. Every week somebody on the street will recognize her, only recalling that she did something bad. Probably her or one of her children will commit suicide from the resultant stress.
dom
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.
Anything travelling with the cotton is unlikely to survive the bleaching process, and is likely to show up in competing brands' swabs.
However, an immortalized cell line with human origin could find itself quite comfortable in the post-sterilization side of the swabmaking process at that particular manufacturing plant, much like one finds many hardy strains of microbes in food processing plants.
The hypothetical skin lesion might have come from a cleaner or mechanic rather than a cotton picker.
Any such cell line must be closely related to humans otherwise comparisons of the usual loci under study would fail spectacularly; this is how blot labs manage to "print" humans rather than their pets, or insects, or plant matter, or bacteria...
"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.
You're probably right, but I think the OP's point stands, nonetheless. A non-citizen, possibly lacking the right language skills, and maybe not the most sophisticated person in the world, might get railroaded. In the US, at least, juries tend to give overwhelming weight to scientific or expert testimony of any kind, regardless of how certain or flawed the science is. Even if not, that woman's life would still go to hell the minute the cops found her.
Police and the scientific method are like politicians and economic theory: They talk about the principles, they often appear to use and apply the academic insights, but they tend to throw anything out that doesn't match their pre-existing bias, without a second thought.
I'm not saying that all cops just think "The cuffs are on her: Therefore, she must be guilty." But police work tends to reward and glamorize a dogged pursuit of a conclusion based on a hunch. If a scientific researcher:
* becomes emotionally involved in the outcome of his or her work, developing a substantial personal need to see it succeed, AND
* eschews open, independent peer review and only seeks collaborative opinions from people likely to sympathize with the researcher, generally,
it's a recipe for disaster--cold-fusion, antigravity, perpetual motion machines, etc. Academia has a LOT of braking mechanisms to prevent bad science from getting to the publishing stage, and more mechanisms designed to suppress whatever happens to slip through. Police departments have far fewer checks.
Historically, bad police work hasn't carried much of a risk to the cops who did it--you could railroad a poor, ignorant, minority defendant on a sensational charge without much worry that he would somehow exonerate himself, later. That's starting to change (Project Innocence being the big example), but old attitudes and methods are deeply ingrained in police culture, and won't change quickly.
Anyway, the point is, that these cops devoted hundreds of police and several years of investigations to this case--millions of dollars in costs. But since police labs don't try to have independent outsiders replicate and repeat their experiments, nobody caught this before it turned into a circus.
It's a new spin off!
CSI: You're Doing It Wrong
Isn't that all of them?
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca