State DNA lab taking bite out of crime

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BANGOR – A prematurely discarded Life Saver proved the downfall of one guy. For another it was a napkin left on a coffee counter. And for an East Corinth murder suspect it was a cigarette filter.

These are the kinds of items that detectives across the state are sweeping up and sending off in plastic bags to DNA analysts at the Maine State Police Crime Laboratory in Augusta.

DNA extracted from a pinhead-sized drop of blood, semen or saliva, a strand of hair or skin cells often enable scientists such as David Munich to sit on a witness stand months later and tell jurors that the odds are approximately 137 quadrillion to 1 that the DNA on those items could come from anyone other than the defendant.

Since there are only about 6 billion people in the world, the testimony is compelling.

Criminal defendants facing DNA evidence find themselves up against a powerful scientific force that is being used in the state more often since the establishment of the DNA lab at the Maine State Police Crime Laboratory.

Since it opened in 1997, the chemists at the DNA lab have helped solve a 23-year-old murder, helped lead police to a serial rapist in southern Maine, identified dozens of bodies, and collected thousands of DNA samples from Maine felons.

Rape defense impact

Defense attorneys are finding that the lab is changing the way it does business, especially when it comes to defending alleged rapists.

“My general take on this is that in the absence of a question of reliability of the evidence or the testing, then juries are going to believe it,” said Bangor attorney Jeffrey Silverstein.

When the defendant’s DNA is found on the rape victim, the defense quickly focuses on the issue of consent.

“It’s pretty hard to get a jury to believe that sex never occurred if your client’s DNA is found inside the victim,” Silverstein said. “So, when confronted with that evidence you ask your client whether it’s explainable that their semen was discovered in the victim.”

Deputy District Attorney Michael Roberts agreed. “Gross sexual assault defendants really can’t deny they were with the victim when we have their DNA. We’ve got several cases like that right now in Penobscot County where the defense has [said] that it was a consensual act,” he said. “That happens a lot more often now.”

That’s what Lincoln attorney Jacqueline Gomes found herself up against in defending a man accused of raping an Edinburg woman last June.

Faced with testimony from Munich that odds were 137 quadrillion to one that it was someone other than Dennis Sirois’ semen found in the victim’s body, Gomes was left to try to convince a jury that the 72-year-old devout Catholic chose to have sex with Sirois after attending Mass one evening and then decided to call 911.

It took jurors two hours to convict him.

One of those jurors was Sam Hands of Stetson.

“The DNA testimony was very powerful,” Hands said during a recent telephone interview. “When we first walked into the jury room to begin deliberations everyone immediately said guilty. … Everyone but me.”

Hands wanted to take a little more time to consider all the evidence, but two hours later he concurred with the rest of the panel.

“There was never any doubt, given the DNA evidence that he had been there and had contact with her,” he said. “It was only a question of what exactly the circumstances were.”

Work backing up

Rape cases involving DNA still get priority service at Maine’s lab, according to lab director Tim Kupferschmidt, but as police become more reliant on DNA evidence, the work is backing up.

Even with a priority placed on homicide and rape cases, investigators waiting for DNA results in some rape cases could wait up to six months, said Munich.

“Not all gross sexual assaults take priority. It depends on a lot of things. Depending on the case, we can turn it around fairly quickly if we have to, but others have to wait,” Munich said. “We have about a nine-month wait to process DNA sent in on burglary cases.”

But when the timing is crucial, Maine’s DNA chemists kick into high gear, putting other jobs aside to help police get the information they need, quickly.

Take the February 1999 murder of 40-year-old Catherine Poor in Kenduskeag. Poor was raped and brutally murdered in her Route 15 apartment. Police obtained blood samples from potential suspects and sent those to the lab along with cigarette butts left behind in an ashtray at Poor’s apartment. Within days, the DNA chemist called the chief investigator to tell him that the cigarette butts contained the DNA of Franklin Higgins of East Corinth. Faced with that and other evidence, Higgins promptly confessed to police.

Higgins was convicted of murder last fall and is awaiting sentencing.

Last year, DNA gathered from three different rape cases in southern Maine let police know quickly that they were looking for one man – an alleged serial rapist. He is now in custody and awaiting trial.

Adding to database

Meanwhile, DNA analysts are regularly collecting and loading thousands of DNA samples from Maine’s convicted felons into a national DNA database.

So far, 3,500 samples have been collected and entered into the database. About 2,800 more are backlogged, Kupferschmidt said.

When an unknown DNA profile is placed into the computer, it is automatically compared to those samples and to others from states across the country that use the same technology.

So far, the lab has obtained about 12 or 13 “hits” or matches by using the system.

Kupferschmidt recalls a car burglary case in which the suspect had just been released from jail and allegedly went on a crime spree, breaking into a dozen cars and setting some on fire.

The suspect cut his finger on the door of the first car he broke into, Kupferschmidt said, and that sample was run through the database. Since the man was a convicted felon and was in the database, the lab got a match and police were provided the name of their likely burglar.

There are now four DNA analysts at the crime lab, two more than when the lab opened in 1997, and still the backlog continues to grow.

“Our top priority is crimes against people,” said Munich. “Homicides, gross sexual assault, fatal accidents. … As time allows, we go back and do the burglaries.”

Despite some delays, the crime lab in Maine has had a huge impact, according to Deputy District Attorney Roberts. Much longer delays at out-of-state labs, where Maine investigators used to send their evidence for testing, made such testing almost prohibitive, Roberts said.

In New York, test results in some DNA cases can take as long as three years, according to Kupferschmidt.

Congress is looking at ways to put more federal money toward helping DNA labs alleviate such backlogs, Kupferschmidt said.

Elsewhere around the country stories of DNA exonerating wrongly convicted murderers and rapists are making headlines. Munich said recently that there have been no such cases in Maine.

“As far as I know we haven’t been asked to do any of those types of cases,” he said.

As DNA analysts toil away over beakers and blood samples, technology continues to advance.

“I think probably in just a few years we’ll have DNA detectors that you can take with you right to the crime scene,” said Kupferschmidt.

“Using a cell phone we will be able to uplink right into our DNA database and possibly provide detectives the name of their suspect right away. The possibilities are endless. … It’s going to keep getting harder to get away with any criminal activity.”