Forensics

The Phantom of Hielbronn

May 20, 2013

DNA and the transgender Gypsy super-criminal.

On the afternoon of April 25, 2007, Michele Kiesewetter, a 22-year-old police officer in the German city of Heilbronn, drove with her partner to the parking lot of the local Theresienwiese, a sort of fairground along the east bank of the Neckar River, used for Oktoberfest. The two parked there for a lunch break. Witnesses in the area reported hearing gunfire at around 2 p.m.

Police units arriving on the scene found Kiesewetter lying dead outside her BMW 5-Series patrol car from a single gunshot wound to the head. Her partner, Martin A., had also been shot in the head. He would emerge from a coma weeks later, with no memory of what had happened.

Both the officers’ service handguns were missing, as were their handcuffs. The crime scene and the victims’ patrol car were scoured for forensic evidence. Minute traces of DNA were recovered from the car’s center console and from its back seat. The DNA samples were found to belong to an unidentified woman, a person of interest who would come to be called Die Frau ohne Gesicht, or The Woman without a Face.

Is the Suffolk Strangler Still at Large?

April, 25, 2013

Steve Wright

The murders of five prostitutes by the Suffolk Strangler in 2006 set off one of the largest manhunts in British history. DNA evidence led to the arrest and conviction of a man who admitted he had sex with four of the five dead women, but was he the actual serial killer?

by Siobhan Patricia Mulcahy

During November and December of 2006, five prostitutes were murdered one at a time in Ipswich, England. Although each was asphyxiated and not strangled, the British media dubbed the serial killer “the Suffolk Strangler.”

Forensic evidence suggested that all five victims were attacked from behind and that the assailant put his arm across the victims’ throats to render them unconscious. The first two bodies were found fully or partially clothed in a nearby river in Ipswich. The last three victims were left naked in woodlands near the same area; no attempt had been made to hide or bury the bodies. Each victim was arranged in the form of a crucifix with her hair extended outwards in the form of a halo. Jewelry and other trinkets were taken from the victims but have never been recovered.

The victims were 19-year-old Tania Nicol, 25-year-old Gemma Adams, 24-year-old Anneli Alderton, 29-year-old Annette Nichols, and 24-year-old Paula Clennell. Clennell, the fifth and final victim, had predicted her own murder during a television interview about the serial killer. She had been friends with the other victims as they worked the same streets touting for passing trade.

At the time of the murders, Suffolk police asked the Forensic Science Service to assist in one of the largest murder manhunts in British history. From the time Tania Nicol was reported missing on November 1, 2006, the police investigation involved 600 officers from nearly every law enforcement force in Great Britain. The inquiry team received more than 12,000 calls from members of the public and almost 11,000 hours of closed-circuit TV footage were scrutinized.

Forensics: The Chocolate Factory Case

April 18, 2013

How bite marks can lead to convictions.

by Liz Porter

Criminals are regularly nabbed because they make stupid and careless mistakes. The burglar who robbed a safe at the up-market Haigh’s chocolate factory in the South Australian capital city of Adelaide is a perfect example. He was caught by his own bad manners. On his way to burgle the establishment’s safe, he toured the factory’s display area, helping himself to samples and biting into several chocolate bars. He then threw the uneaten leftovers on the floor – from where police collected them. If he had taken his uneaten chocolate home – or neatly disposed of it in a rubbish bin – he might never have been caught.

The robbery took place on a weeknight in early February 1996. Office staff arriving for work at the inner suburban factory the next morning discovered that an intruder had broken in through a skylight. He had used an axe and jemmy to bash the alarm system off the wall and had then overturned the office safe, making a hole in its back and removing the $1,800 inside. The workers also spotted the partially eaten chocolate bars the thief had dropped on the floor, and noticed that he had also stolen chocolate from a display area nearby.

Operation Shadow: Catching the Narong Road Rapist

Nov. 12, 2012

George Kaufman

The first criminal investigation in Australia – and one of the first in the world – to use DNA to solve a case.

by Liz Porter

The affluent middle-class suburb of North Caulfield, in the southern Australian city of Melbourne, is the kind of area that sends real estate brokers into rhapsodies about “lifestyle” and “leafy outlooks.” Narong Road is located in the very heart of this safe and conservative area. Quiet, respectable and offering a mix of low-rise apartment blocks and spacious houses, it’s a popular address for religious Jewish families because of the short walk to the nearby Caulfield synagogue on the Sabbath.

Yet, over four years in the early to mid-1980s, this pleasant little street became the favorite hunting ground of a brutal and coolly efficient rapist.

The attacks, which began in March 1982 and continued until September 1986, were on women aged from their 20s to 55 and living in the southeastern Melbourne suburbs of Caulfield, Armadale, St. Kilda or areas adjacent to them. There were odd patterns in their occurrence, with intense bursts of activity followed by periods of quiet. Five rapes took place between March and July 1982, the first in Narong Road. Then, between September 1984 and January 1985, there were five more – beginning, again, in Narong Road. A hiatus of almost 18 months followed. Then the rapist resurfaced in July 1986. Once again, his first victim lived in a flat in Narong Road.

With his face masked by a balaclava or clothing and with gloves or socks on his hands to avoid depositing fingerprints, the rapist left so little in the way of traces that the 1988 police operation set up to trap him was dubbed “Operation Shadow.”

The School Stalker

Sept. 17, 2012

Forensics Handwriting

Handwriting analysis example from the University of Kent

The School Stalker is an extract from Written On The Skin– an Australian Forensic Casebook by Liz Porter, joint winner of the 2007 Ned Kelly Prize for best true crime book. This book is available in a Kindle edition. Hard copies from the author: trager@netspace.net.au

by Liz Porter

The attractive young female teacher had been delighted to get a job on the staff of an inner-suburban boys-only high school in the Australian city of Melbourne. But in late 1996, within months of her arrival, she began receiving offensive handwritten notes, accusing her of having sex with some of her 15 and 16-year-old year students. A letter from an anonymous parent was also sent to the school principal.

The opening of the 1997 school year triggered a resumption of the notes, including a second letter to the principal, and the targeted teacher became increasingly distraught. The letter suggested that the young woman had been behaving in an improper way towards some of her male students and threatened to “seek legal advice” about it.

“On many occasions,” this “concerned parent” wrote, “my son has mentioned that this lady uses inappropriate and suggestive comments to year 10 boys in class.” The “parent” also drew attention to the teacher’s appearance – her ‘very short dresses which leave little to the imagination.”

When the teacher turned to the police, Detective Tony Warren, then based at a station near the school, was assigned to the case.

Although the teacher had destroyed some of the early notes she had been sent, dismissing them as pranks, she had soon begun keeping them, and had collected a considerable number to give to the detective. One note described her as “a big slut who roots boys in year 9 and 10.”

The Almost-Perfect Bank Heist

July 3, 2012

An edited extract from Cold Case Files: Past crimes solved by new forensic science

An edited extract from Cold Case Files: Past crimes solved by new forensic science – available for Kindle in the United States on amazon.com. Hard copies available at www.panmacillan.com.au

by Liz Porter

Mark Chrystie relished the challenge of hunting criminals with some ability. But as an armed robbery squad detective in the Australian state of Victoria, his day-to-day work involved the investigation of jobs carried out by lummoxes with no idea of planning, beyond the purchase of balaclavas and overalls. They would then barge through banks’ front doors waving shotguns and escape in stolen cars.

So he enjoyed tracking down the crew that had planned its arrival at a bank in Melbourne’s posh Toorak to the second. Arriving one minute after a cash van delivered $250,000, they walked out of the bank with the cash in cardboard boxes on their shoulders, strolling down the street with the insouciance of men carrying a wealthy customer’s bulk order of groceries to her Mercedes.

The detective also happily matched wits with the men who held up a cash van by hiding in a car boot equipped with a spy hole in its panel work, and then leaping out to surprise a driver who thought he was pulling up in an empty car park.

The Crime That Never Happened

May 21. 2012

Farah Jama

Farah Jama (L)

Farah Jama, a 21-year-old Somali immigrant in Australia was convicted – based on contaminated DNA evidence – of raping a woman he had never met at a bar in Melbourne he had never been to. His exoneration, after 16 months in prison, led to important reforms in how DNA material is collected from rape victims.

by Liz Porter

All over the world, young men sometimes still go to prison for crimes they didn't commit. But in 2008, in Melbourne, Australia, a 21-year old Somali-born student went to jail for a crime that didn't even happen. This unlucky young man was not the victim of police corruption or manufactured evidence. Instead, he was convicted by a piece of forensic evidence produced in a one-in-a-million “CSI moment:” the kind of improbable, but theoretically possible scientific episode that only a scriptwriter for the famous CBS series might dream up.

Sadly for Farah Jama, his “CSI moment” was real. It happened at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital, one of several in the city with suites of rooms where rape victims are taken for forensic examination.

It was here, in the early hours of Saturday, July 15, 2006, that an agitated young woman was waiting for the on-call forensic doctor to arrive and examine her. There was a sticky-looking substance in her hair: male ejaculate from a sexual encounter she’d been involved in a few hours earlier. The episode, involving oral sex, had not been romantic. But the girl hadn’t been raped. A girlfriend had urged her to pursue a rape allegation, but she later withdrew it.

As the young woman paced up and down, her hair was shedding tiny, invisible fragments of male DNA. These unseen flecks floated in the air, some near a trolley holding swabs, slides and other equipment. One tiny fragment landed in an open box of slides. It sat there, a microscopic forensic time bomb, waiting to go off.

Just over 24 hours later, the same forensic doctor returned, having been called in to examine another patient. As the woman lay down on the bed next to the trolley, the doctor opened the box of slides, unaware that at least one of them was already contaminated with male DNA. With a gloved hand she took a sample from the woman and dabbed it on to the slide. She then sealed the slide in an evidence bag, and handed it to the waiting police.

Four months later, that tiny forensic bomb exploded.