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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.
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."
Mega criminal mind
The handler of swabs really is a serial killer.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It's a new spin off!
CSI: You're Doing It Wrong
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?
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.
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".
We should NEVER have developed human-cotton hybrids.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I'm pretty sure that there'd be about 96 billion ways to disprove each individual charge.
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.
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!
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).
I don't have to explain my DNA being at the crime scene, I have to explain DNA that matched mine being at the lab.
You took a sample of my DNA. You took it to the lab. Please prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you didn't screw up and contaminate a sample somewhere with my DNA.
Furthermore, spurious DNA matches are not as improbable as cops and prosecutors like to suggest.
DNA is lousy forensic evidence, and should be used only for exoneration.
And the scary thing is that other forensic "science" is even worse.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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.
The Coen brothers are set to do a CSI spin-off, Crime Scene Incompetence, sort of like Fargo meets Scary Movie.
I wish I wasn't kidding, that would be a riot!
"Officer Grissom, are you concerned about the security of... your shit?"
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
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....
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.
The truth is she's a very smart serial killer who managed to get herself hired at the coton swab factory with the sole intention of contaminating them with her DNA so that if caught she could use it to get any trial against her dismissed... brilliant!
"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
Yeah, that's why I leave my semen in every room I every visit, and on every person I meet.
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.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,615608,00.html
If you can't be good, be good at it!
Oh, it can still be perfectly sterile.
Sterilizing something, that is killing off everything on and in it that lives, is pretty easy.
But completely removing DNA and other particles isn't. There could still be DNA particles from the person who picked the cotton in the cotton swabs.
When you have a little cell in the swab, there is no easy way to figure out if that is a human cell or a cotton cell, and remove all human cells.
And there *definitely* still is cotton DNA in the cotton swab.
CSI rule #3: do some pretty VB interface to reverse lookup the IP address 273.54.163.341
Of Code And Men
Actualy there is a process when making the sex-cells that mix the genes from the two chromosomes in the chromosome pair. So none of the chromosones in the semen is actually a direct copy of the ones in the rest of your body.
"Officer Grissom, are you concerned about the security of... your shit?"
Oh, you're talking about Crime Scene Incontinence?
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
There's a song about you and what you did to some poor captain's wife - http://www.paulandstorm.com/lyrics/the-captains-wifes-lament/
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
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