Tag: Forensics

As the University of Idaho homicide investigation enters a critical stage, police must protect information ‘at all costs,’ experts say | CNN

CNN
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The investigation into the murders of four University of Idaho students is entering a critical stage in its third week, as police are starting to receive forensic testing results from the crime scene, law enforcement experts tell CNN.

Dozens of local, state and federal investigators have yet to identify a suspect or find the murder weapon used in the attack last month in Moscow.

The public, as well as the victims’ family members, have criticized police for releasing little information, in what at times has been a confusing narrative.

But the complex nature of a high-level homicide investigation involves utmost discretion from police, experts say, because any premature hint to the public about a suspect or the various leads police are following can cause it to fall apart.

“What police have been reluctant to do in this case is to say they have a suspect, even though they have had suspects who have risen and fallen in various levels of importance, because that’s the nature of the beast,” said John Miller, CNN chief law enforcement analyst and former deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism for the New York Police Department.

“Police having no suspects is factually incorrect,” Miller said. “Police have had a number of suspects they’ve looked at, but they have no suspect they’re willing to name. You don’t name them unless you have a purpose for that. That’s not unusual.”

The victims – Ethan Chapin, 20; Kaylee Goncalves, 21; Xana Kernodle, 20; and Madison Mogen, 21 – were found stabbed on the second and third floors of their shared off-campus home on November 13, according to authorities.

The quadruple murder has upended the town of 26,000 residents, which had not recorded a single murder since 2015, and challenged a police department which has not benefited from the experience of investigating many homicides, let alone under the pressure of a national audience, Miller says.

The Moscow Police Department is leading the investigation with assistance from the Idaho State Police, the Latah County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI, which has assigned more than 40 agents to the case across the United States.

“They have really coordinated this into over 100 people that are operating as one team,” Miller said of the homicide investigation.

The FBI plays three important roles in the Idaho investigation, according to Miller.

The first involves its behavioral science unit, which is highly valuable for cases with an unknown offender because it narrows the scope of offender characteristics.

The second is its advanced technology, such as its Combined DNA Indexing System, which allows law enforcement officials and crime labs to share and search through thousands of DNA profiles.

Lastly, the FBI has 56 field offices in major cities throughout the country, which can expand the reach and capability of the investigation.

“The FBI brings a lot to this, as well as experience in a range of cases that would be beyond what a small town typically would have,” Miller said.

Every homicide investigation begins with the scene of the crime, which allows investigators only one chance to record and collect forensic evidence for processing, which includes toxicology reports on the victims, hair, fibers, blood and DNA, law enforcement experts say.

“That one chance with the crime scene is where a lot of opportunities can be made or lost,” Miller said.

Extensive evidence has been collected over the course of the investigation, including 113 pieces of physical evidence, about 4,000 photos of the crime scene and several 3D scans of the home, Moscow police said Thursday.

“To protect the investigation’s integrity, specific results will not be released,” police said.

Latah County Coroner Cathy Mabbutt told CNN she saw “lots of blood on the wall” when she arrived at the scene and police said “some” of the victims had defensive wounds.

Chances are “pretty high” a suspect could have cut themselves during the attack, so police are looking carefully at blood evidence, says Joe Giacalone, adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and retired NYPD sergeant who directed the agency’s Homicide School and Cold Case Squad.

Lab results from the scene can be returned to investigators fairly quickly, but in this case investigators are dealing with mixtures of DNA, which can take longer, he says.

“When you have several donors with the DNA, then it becomes a problem trying to separate those two or three or four. That could be part of the issue … toxicology reports can sometimes take a couple of weeks to come back,” Giacalone added.

The next stage in a homicide investigation is looking at the behavioral aspects of the crime. Two agents with the FBI’s Behavior Analysis Unit were assigned to the case to assess the scene and go over evidence to learn about the suspect or suspects’ behavior, based on the way they carried out the crime, Miller says.

“Understanding the victimology in a mystery can be very important, because it can lead you to motivation, it can lead you to enemies and it can lead you to friends,” he said.

Investigators will learn every detail about the four victims, their relationships with each other and the various people in their lives, Miller says. This includes cell phone records and internet records, he says, as well as video surveillance from every camera surrounding the crime scene.

“When you do an extensive video canvass, you may get a picture of a person, a shadowy figure, and then if you have a sense of direction, you can string your way down all the other cameras in that direction to see if that image reappears,” Miller said.

At this stage, investigators rely on the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which collects and analyzes information about violent crimes in the United States.

The program can match a suspect’s DNA found at the scene with that of a person who is already in the system. It also scans all crimes across the country to determine if the way the attack was carried out mirrors a previous one, pointing to the same perpetrator, Miller says.

“You always start with people who are close to the victims, whether it’s love, money or drugs,” Giacalone told CNN. “That’s generally the first step that you take because most of us are victimized by someone we know. We have to ask things like, who would benefit from having this person or in this case, a group, killed?”

In an effort to locate the weapon – believed to be a fixed-blade knife – detectives contacted local businesses to see if a similar knife had been purchased recently.

“It’s highly unlikely, although not impossible, that a first-time offender is going to come prepared with a tactical knife and murder multiple people, even in the face of resistance, and that this is going to be their first encounter with violent crime or the use of a knife,” Miller said.

One aspect of a homicide investigation is to “keep the media happy,” according to Giacalone.

“Today in the social media, true crime, community-driven world in these cases, the demand for information is so great that sometimes police departments kind of fill in that blank air and say something just for the sake of saying something, and then realizing that it’s either not 100% true, or it’s misleading,” he said.

It’s critical for police to protect their information at “all costs” and they always know more than what they release to the public. Otherwise, it could cause the suspect to go on the run, he says.

Miller said it’s “not fair” to investigators for the public or media to criticize them for not releasing enough information about the case.

But, ultimately, the department has a moral obligation to share some information with families who are suffering in uncertainty, Miller says, but they must be judicious about what they share.

“If you tell them we have a suspect and we’re close to an arrest but that doesn’t come together, then everybody is disappointed or thinks you messed it up or worse, goes out and figures out who the suspect is and tries to take action on their own,” he said.

Investigators rely on the trove of physical and scientific evidence, information from the public and national data on violent crimes to cultivate possible leads, Miller says.

Public tips, photos and videos of the night the students died, including more than 260 digital media submissions people have submitted through an FBI form, are being analyzed, police say. Authorities have processed more than 1,000 tips and conducted at least 150 interviews to advance the case.

“Any one of those tips can be the missing link,” Miller said. “It can either be the connective tissue to a lead you already had but were missing a piece, or it can become the brand new lead that solves the case.”

Every tip must be recorded in a searchable database so investigators can go back to them as they learn new details over the course of the investigation, Miller says. While 95% to 99% of public tips may provide no value, one or several might crack the entire case, he adds.

“Police in this case could be nowhere tonight, having washed out another suspect, and tomorrow morning they could be making an arrest,” Miller said of the Idaho investigation. “Or, for the suspect they’re working on today, it might take them another month from now to put together enough evidence to have probable cause. That’s just something they won’t be able to reveal until it happens.”

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December 4, 2022
Holocaust survivors offered DNA tests to help find family

NEW YORK — For decades, Jackie Young had been searching.

Orphaned as an infant, he spent the first few years of his life in a Nazi internment camp in what is now the Czech Republic. After World War II he was taken to England, adopted and given a new name.

As an adult, he struggled to learn of his origins and his family. He had some scant information about his birth mother, who died in a concentration camp. But about his father? Nothing. Just a blank space on a birth certificate.

That changed earlier this year when genealogists were able to use a DNA sample to help find a name — and some relatives he never knew he had.

Having that answer to a lifelong question has been “amazing,” said Young, now 80 and living in London. It “opened the door that I thought would never get opened.”

Now there’s an effort underway to bring that possibility to other Holocaust survivors and their children.

The New York-based Center for Jewish History is launching the DNA Reunion Project, offering DNA testing kits for free through an application on its website. For those who use the kits it is also offering a chance to get some guidance on next steps from the genealogists who worked with Young.

Those genealogists, Jennifer Mendelsohn and Adina Newman, have been doing this kind of work over the last several years, and run a Facebook group about Jewish DNA and genetic genealogy.

The advent of DNA technology has opened up a new world of possibilities in addition to the paper trails and archives that Holocaust survivors and their descendants have used to learn about family connections severed by genocide, Newman said.

“There are times when people are separated and they don’t even realize they’re separated. Maybe a name change occurred so they didn’t know to look for the other person,” she said. “There are cases that simply cannot be solved without DNA.”

While interest in genealogy and family trees is widespread, there’s a particular poignancy in doing this work in a community where so many family ties have been ripped apart because of the Holocaust, Mendelsohn said.

Her earliest effort in this arena was for her husband’s grandmother, who had lost her mother in a concentration camp. That effort led to aunts and cousins that no one in her husband’s family had known about.

Her husband’s uncle, she said, called afterwards and said, “You know, I’ve never seen a photograph of my grandmother. Now that I see photographs of her sisters, it’s so comforting to me. I can imagine what she look like.”

“How do you explain why that’s powerful? It just is. People had nothing. Their families were erased. And now we can bring them back a little bit,” Mendelsohn said.

She and Newman take pains to emphasize that there are no guarantees. Doing the testing or searching archives doesn’t mean a guarantee of finding living relatives or new information. But it offers a chance.

They and the center are encouraging people to take that chance, especially as time passes and the number of living survivors declines.

“It really is the last moment where these survivors can be given some modicum of justice,” said Gavriel Rosenfeld, president of the center.

“We feel the urgency of this,” Newman said. “I wanted to start yesterday, and that’s why it’s like, no time like the present.”

Rosenfeld said the center had allocated an initial $15,000 for the DNA kits in this initial pilot effort, which would cover about 500 of them. He said they would look to scale up further if they see enough interest.

Ken Engel thinks there will be. He leads a group in Minnesota for the children of Holocaust survivors and has already told his membership about the program.

“This is an important effort,” Engel said. “It may reveal and disclose wonderful information for them that they never knew about, may make them feel more settled or more connected to the past.”

Young definitely feels that way.

“I’ve been wanting to know all my life,” he said. “If I hadn’t known what I do know now, I think I would still felt that my left arm or my right arm wasn’t fully formed. Family is everything, it’s the major pillar of life in humanity.”

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November 29, 2022
Holocaust survivors offered DNA tests to help find family

NEW YORK — For decades, Jackie Young had been searching.

Orphaned as an infant, he spent the first few years of his life in a Nazi internment camp in what is now the Czech Republic. After World War II he was taken to England, adopted and given a new name.

As an adult, he struggled to learn of his origins and his family. He had some scant information about his birth mother, who died in a concentration camp. But about his father? Nothing. Just a blank space on a birth certificate.

That changed earlier this year when genealogists were able to use a DNA sample to help find a name — and some relatives he never knew he had.

Having that answer to a lifelong question has been “amazing,” said Young, now 80 and living in London. It “opened the door that I thought would never get opened.”

Now there’s an effort underway to bring that possibility to other Holocaust survivors and their children.

The New York-based Center for Jewish History is launching the DNA Reunion Project, offering DNA testing kits for free through an application on its website. For those who use the kits it is also offering a chance to get some guidance on next steps from the genealogists who worked with Young.

Those genealogists, Jennifer Mendelsohn and Adina Newman, have been doing this kind of work over the last several years, and run a Facebook group about Jewish DNA and genetic genealogy.

The advent of DNA technology has opened up a new world of possibilities in addition to the paper trails and archives that Holocaust survivors and their descendants have used to learn about family connections severed by genocide, Newman said.

“There are times when people are separated and they don’t even realize they’re separated. Maybe a name change occurred so they didn’t know to look for the other person,” she said. “There are cases that simply cannot be solved without DNA.”

While interest in genealogy and family trees is widespread, there’s a particular poignancy in doing this work in a community where so many family ties have been ripped apart because of the Holocaust, Mendelsohn said.

Her earliest effort in this arena was for her husband’s grandmother, who had lost her mother in a concentration camp. That effort led to aunts and cousins that no one in her husband’s family had known about.

Her husband’s uncle, she said, called afterwards and said, “You know, I’ve never seen a photograph of my grandmother. Now that I see photographs of her sisters, it’s so comforting to me. I can imagine what she look like.”

“How do you explain why that’s powerful? It just is. People had nothing. Their families were erased. And now we can bring them back a little bit,” Mendelsohn said.

She and Newman take pains to emphasize that there are no guarantees. Doing the testing or searching archives doesn’t mean a guarantee of finding living relatives or new information. But it offers a chance.

They and the center are encouraging people to take that chance, especially as time passes and the number of living survivors declines.

“It really is the last moment where these survivors can be given some modicum of justice,” said Gavriel Rosenfeld, president of the center.

“We feel the urgency of this,” Newman said. “I wanted to start yesterday, and that’s why it’s like, no time like the present.”

Rosenfeld said the center had allocated an initial $15,000 for the DNA kits in this initial pilot effort, which would cover about 500 of them. He said they would look to scale up further if they see enough interest.

Ken Engel thinks there will be. He leads a group in Minnesota for the children of Holocaust survivors and has already told his membership about the program.

“This is an important effort,” Engel said. “It may reveal and disclose wonderful information for them that they never knew about, may make them feel more settled or more connected to the past.”

Young definitely feels that way.

“I’ve been wanting to know all my life,” he said. “If I hadn’t known what I do know now, I think I would still felt that my left arm or my right arm wasn’t fully formed. Family is everything, it’s the major pillar of life in humanity.”

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November 29, 2022
Latest search for Tulsa Race Massacre victims comes to end

The latest search for remains of victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre has ended with 32 additional caskets discovered and eight sets of remains exhumed, according to the city.

The excavation and exhumations at Tulsa’s Oaklawn Cemetery that began Oct. 26 ended Friday and the remains were sent to a nearby lab for analysis and DNA collection.

Searchers sought unmarked graves of people who were probably male, in plain caskets with signs of gunshot trauma — criteria for further investigation that were based on newspaper reports at the time, said forensic anthropologist Phoebe Stubblefield.

Two sets of the 66 remains found in the past two years have been confirmed to have gunshot wounds, according to Stubblefield, though none have been identified or confirmed to be victims of the massacre.

DNA taken from 14 sets of the nearly three dozen remains found last year were sent to Intermountain Forensics in Salt Lake City for further study. DNA from teeth and thigh bones, known as femurs, will be extracted from the eight recently exhumed remains and also sent to Intermountain Forensics, Stubblefield said.

State archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck said 62 of the 66 burials found thus far were in unmarked graves.

Investigators are looking for a possible mass grave of victims of the 1921 massacre at the hands of a white mob that descended on the Black section of Tulsa — Greenwood. More than 1,000 homes were burned, hundreds more were looted and destroyed and a thriving business district known as Black Wall Street was destroyed.

Most historians who have studied the event estimate the death toll to be between 75 and 300. Historians say many of the victims were buried in unmarked graves, their locations never recorded and rumors have persisted for decades of mass graves in the area.

Stackelbeck said the remains meeting the criteria for possible massacre victims and exhumed thus far are not in a mass grave, but instead interspersed in the search area.

Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum said he considers the entire cemetery to be a mass grave.

“Is there a mass grave where there are people lined up in a row like we thought might be? That is not the case,” Bynum said. “Is Oaklawn Cemetery still a mass grave? Yes.”

Investigators have recommended additional scanning of a nearby park and adjacent homeless camp, where oral histories have indicated massacre victims were buried.

Bynum said the city will decide the next step after reviewing the next report from researchers that is expected sometime next year.

All the exhumed remains will be reburied, at least temporarily, at Oaklawn, where the previous reburial was closed to the public, drawing protests from about two dozen people who said they are descendants of massacre victims and should have been allowed to attend.

The massacre wiped out generational wealth, and victims were never compensated, but a pending lawsuit seeks reparations for the three remaining known survivors. They are each now more than 100 years old.

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November 19, 2022
Forensic genealogy leads to arrest in 1987 sex assault case

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — DNA evidence left behind 35 years ago and the use of forensic genealogy has led to the arrest of an Indiana man on charges that he sexually assaulted two Rhode Island girls in 1987, authorities announced Wednesday.

Frank Thies, 66, of Terre Haute, Indiana, is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday in Rhode Island on charges of sexual assault and molestation, according to the Rhode Island State Police.

The victims, aged 11 and 13, were sexually assaulted in April 1987 after their attacker forced them into the woods in rural Rhode Island, police said. One of the girls lived nearby in Exeter. Police recovered physical evidence that they believed came from the perpetrator, but could not make an identification.

The case was reopened in 2005 following advancements in genetic forensics, but still no match was found.

In 2019, detectives with the state’s Special Victims Unit worked with the Rhode Island Department of Health to reexamine the genetic evidence once again. They turned to genetic profiling, which involves searching DNA databases to find familial matches to the DNA of a suspect. From there, they determined the suspect was likely one of three brothers from western New York who had served in the military.

Investigators then teamed up with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and found that one of the brothers had visited the Naval Justice School in Newport the day before the assault. Authorities in Indiana obtained a discarded sample of the suspect’s DNA, which police say matched the evidence recovered 35 years ago.

Thies was arrested Oct. 19 in Indiana and was extradited to Rhode Island. He is charged with one count of first-degree sexual assault and two counts of first-degree child molestation.

It was unclear Thursday if Thies is represented by an attorney who could comment on the charges.

Forensic genealogy received widespread attention in 2018 after it was used to track down a California serial killer who was responsible for at least 13 killings and dozens of rapes in the 1970s and 1980s. Since then, the new method has led to the identification of dozens of suspects in cold cases, though some critics have voiced privacy concerns about the practice.

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November 17, 2022
Body with gunshot found in search for Tulsa massacre victims

A second body of a possible victim of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre has been found to have a gunshot wound, according to the city.

“Forensic anthropologist Dr. Phoebe Stubblefield discovered that one of the three sets of remains exhumed last week contained one victim with a gunshot wound,” according to a statement late Friday from city spokesperson Carson Colvin.

In an effort to eventually confirm the remains are those of massacre victims, investigators are seeking signs of trauma, such as gunshot wounds, based on accounts at the time.

A portion of the bullet was removed the the head of the remains, according to the statement. The person’s race and whether the remains are those of a massacre victim are not yet known.

Stubblefield did not immediately return a phone call to The Associated Press on Saturday.

The remains were in a plain casket and are believed to be that of an adult male, matching information in reports from 1921, and were in the area in Oaklawn Cemetery where 18 massacre victims were reportedly buried.

The first remains with gunshot wounds were found in June 2021 and are now with Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Forensics where DNA analysis is ongoing.

The current excavation of the cemetery in the search for victims of the 1921 Race Massacre began Oct. 26 and has uncovered 26 unmarked graves. The work is expected to continue through Nov. 18.

Four sets of the newly found remains have been exhumed and taken to an on-site lab for analysis.

A search for the graves of massacre victims began in 2020 and resumed last year with nearly three dozen coffins recovered.

Fourteen sets of the previously recovered remains were sent to Intermountain Forensics for testing, and two of those have been found to have enough DNA to begin sequencing and start developing a genealogy profile.

None of the remains have been identified or confirmed as victims of the massacre, one of the worst known examples of white mob violence against Black Americans in U.S. history.

More than 1,000 homes were burned, hundreds more were looted, and a thriving business district known as Black Wall Street was destroyed in the racist violence.

Historians have estimated the death toll at between 75 and 300, with generational wealth being wiped out.

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Read more coverage of the Tulsa Race Massacre: https://apnews.com/hub/tulsa-race-massacre

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November 12, 2022
Botched autopsy in Mexico killing leads to cover-up charge

MEXICO CITY — The killing of a young woman in Mexico City brought accusations Monday that authorities in a neighboring state intentionally botched her autopsy to cover up for the killer.

The death of Ariadna López, 27, brought up all the issues that have enraged women in Mexico: officials blaming the victim, poor police investigation and misconduct that has led to a growing number of unsolved killings of women.

Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum alleged that the prosecutor of Morelos state, just south of the capital, had ties to the woman’s alleged killer though she refused to describe their purported links.

“It is clear that the prosecutor of Morelos state tried to cover up for the killer of a woman because of his ties to the killer,” Sheinbaum said.

The woman’s body was found last week in Morelos, so officials there initially investigated.

Morelos state prosecutor Uriel Carmona said a state forensic exam showed López choked on her own vomit as a result of intoxication. But officials in Mexico City said Sunday that they had evidence she was slain in the capital.

Carmona’s office did not comment on Sheinbaum’s accusation that the autopsy was botched or that it was part of a cover-up.

On Sunday, Mexico City prosecutor Ernestina Godoy said a new autopsy carried out by Mexico City experts found “several lesions caused by blows” on López’s body and listed the cause of death as “multiple traumas.”

López was found dead on the side of a road last week in Morelos state, home to the city of Cuernavaca, a frequent weekend getaway for Mexico City residents. She had vanished after visiting a restaurant with the suspect and his girlfriend and later visiting his apartment, Mexico City authorities sid.

On Monday, Sheinbaum showed an image from the apartment building’s security cameras purportedly showing the suspect walking through a basement garage with the inert body of a woman over his shoulder.

The suspect, who was apparently a friend of the victim, turned himself in to prosecutors in the northern city of Monterrey on Monday and said he was innocent of the killing. His girlfriend was arrested in Mexico City.

Some saw suggestions of police incompetence from the start. López disappeared from a trendy central Mexico City neighborhood Oct. 30. Her body was not found until days later when cyclists discovered her on a path that leads from Mexico City to Morelos.

Her body was identified by relatives only because the cyclists took photos of the victim’s tattoos and posted them online in an attempt to help identify her.

On Monday, dozens of women and their supporters marched in downtown Mexico City to demand justice in López’s case.

“We feel enraged, impotent, above all, mad,” said Omar Rodríguez Díaz, the victim’s brother. “They treat us like garbage and that is sad.”

“We want justice done and prosecutor Uriel Carmona to pay the consequences of his words. He made a mockery of Mexico and of all women,” Rodríguez Díaz said.

Sheinbaum is considered a leading contender to replace President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2024 elections. The dispute Monday sets up a conflict with the governor of Morelos state, who is an ally of López Obrador but not a member of his Morena party.

Mexico City has its own problems with women’s killings. A young woman, Lidia Gabriela, apparently threw herself from a taxi and died on a Mexico City street Wednesday. Witnesses said Gabriela thought the taxi driver was trying to kidnap her and so she leaped from the vehicle

Morelos state has also had a particularly bad stretch of women’s killings.

On Friday, the bodies of five women were found in the Morelos city of Cuautla just south of Mexico City. The bodies were found at two different spots in the city, known as a weekend getaway for Mexico City residents.

The prosecutor in Morelos state said the killings appeared to have been carried out by a drug gang, possibly as part of some sort of dispute. Carmona said the bodies were found near a hand-lettered sign of the kind often used by drug gangs.

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November 7, 2022
DNA evidence frees California man imprisoned for decades

LOS ANGELES — A man who spent more than 38 years behind bars for a 1983 murder and two attempted murders has been released from a California prison after long-untested DNA evidence pointed to a different person, the Los Angeles County district attorney said Friday.

The conviction of Maurice Hastings, 69, and a life sentence were vacated during an Oct. 20 court hearing at the request of prosecutors and his lawyers from the Los Angeles Innocence Project at California State University, Los Angeles.

“I prayed for many years that this day would come,” Hastings said at a news conference Friday, adding: “I am not pointing fingers; I am not standing up here a bitter man, but I just want to enjoy my life now while I have it.”

“What has happened to Mr. Hastings is a terrible injustice,” District Attorney George Gascón said in a statement. “The justice system is not perfect, and when we learn of new evidence which causes us to lose confidence in a conviction, it is our obligation to act swiftly.”

The victim in the case, Roberta Wydermyer, was sexually assaulted and killed by a single gunshot to the head, authorities said. Her body was found in the trunk of her vehicle in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood.

Hastings was charged with special-circumstance murder and the district attorney’s office sought the death penalty but the jury deadlocked. A second jury convicted him and he was sentenced in 1988 to life in prison without possibility of parole.

Hastings has maintained he was innocent since the time of his arrest.

At the time of the victim’s autopsy, the coroner conducted a sexual assault examination and semen was detected in an oral swab, the district attorney’s statement said.

Hastings sought DNA testing in 2000 but at that time the DA’s office denied the request. Hastings submitted a claim of innocence to the DA’s Conviction Integrity Unit last year and DNA testing last June found that the semen was not his.

The DNA profile was put into a state database this month and was matched to a person who was convicted of an armed kidnapping in which a female victim was placed in a vehicle’s trunk as well as the forced oral copulation of a woman.

That suspect, whose name was not released, died in prison in 2020.

The district attorney’s office said it is working with police to further investigate the involvement of the dead person in the case.

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October 28, 2022
Weinstein lawyer presses woman over absence of rape evidence

LOS ANGELES (AP) — An attorney for Harvey Weinstein peppered a woman with questions Wednesday on the lack of forensic evidence that the movie magnate raped her in 2013, or that he was even at the hotel where she says the assault occurred.

“You don’t have any physical evidence to present to this jury that any of this happened, do you?” lawyer Alan Jackson asked pointedly during cross-examination.

When the judge at the 70-year-old Weinstein’s Los Angeles trial sustained an objection to the question because it called for speculation, Jackson got more specific:

“Any photos?”

“No,” the woman said quietly.

“Any video?”

“No,” she replied, then added, “Do you think somebody after rape makes a video?”

She began crying softly as she answered “no” to a series of similar questions about whether she had any documentation of bruises, scrapes, cuts, or handprints on her face from Weinstein holding her down, or had been given a sexual assault examination.

“Do you have any physical evidence that you were even with Mr. Weinstein?” Jackson asked.

Her crying grew louder as she answered, “I had his jacket, but I gave it away.”

The woman, a model and actor who was working in Rome, is the the first of Weinstein’s accusers to testify at the trial and spent portions of three days on the witness stand.

Prosecutors have presented photographs and other evidence that both Weinstein and the woman were at the Los Angeles Italia Film Festival, which she had come to California to attend in February 2013.

But they have not yet produced anything that puts Weinstein at her hotel on the night she says he forced her to perform oral sex on her bed then raped her in her bathroom.

The woman did not go to police until October of 2017, when women’s stories about Weinstein made him the central figure in the #MeToo movement.

She maintains that Weinstein left her jacket in the room and she gave it to hotel staff, but no lost-and-found records have been discovered to demonstrate it.

Asked whether the explosion of media stories around Weinstein prompted her to go to police, the woman repeated earlier testimony that she had already decided to file a report earlier in the year when she urged her teenage daughter to go to authorities over sexual harassment she’d been subjected to at school.

The woman is going only by “Jane Doe 1” in court. Her age and birthplace have also been kept out of court proceedings, though she has said her first language was Russian and she was living at the time with her three children in Italy, where she had married into considerable wealth.

The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly.

Weinstein’s defense tried to poke holes in her testimony and press on inconsistencies in previous accounts she gave to police, to prosecutors, to a grand jury, and in the first two days of her trial testimony.

In graphic questioning, Jackson dwelt on the woman’s description in her initial interview with police of oral sex she said Weinstein forced her to perform. Jackson suggested that Weinstein’s unusual genital features after a surgery he had years earlier made the acts she described impossible.

The same acts went unmentioned during her 2020 grand jury testimony, and Jackson asked her whether she had learned more about Weinstein’s sex organs from prosecutors and thus changed her story.

“Never!” she said adamantly.

Under questioning later from the prosecution, she described “very bad scarring tissue” around Weinstein’s genitals.

It was the first time jurors heard from a witness about Weinstein’s anatomy, which arose often in his 2020 trial in New York, where he was convicted of rape and sexual assault and sentenced to 23 years in prison.

The woman told prosecutor Paul Thompson that she had been having panic attacks and had hardly slept or eaten since her testimony began Monday afternoon. It finally ended late Wednesday.

Weinstein has pleaded not guilty to 11 counts of rape and sexual assault involving five women.

When prosecutors gave their opening statement Monday, however, they excluded one of the women, putting into question whether the four counts involving her will be addressed during the trial.

The district attorney’s office has declined to explain when asked about the issue.

Weinstein’s attorneys said no charges have been dropped.

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Andrew Dalton on Twitter: twitter.com/andyjamesdalton

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For more on the Harvey Weinstein trial, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/harvey-weinstein

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October 27, 2022
Weinstein lawyer presses woman over absence of rape evidence

LOS ANGELES — An attorney for Harvey Weinstein peppered a woman with questions Wednesday on the lack of forensic evidence that the movie magnate raped her in 2013, or that he was even at the hotel where she says the assault occurred.

“You don’t have any physical evidence to present to this jury that any of this happened, do you?” lawyer Alan Jackson asked pointedly during cross-examination.

When the judge at the 70-year-old Weinstein’s Los Angeles trial sustained an objection to the question because it called for speculation, Jackson got more specific:

“Any photos?”

“No,” the woman said quietly.

“Any video?”

“No,” she replied, then added, “Do you think somebody after rape makes a video?”

She began crying softly as she answered “no” to a series of similar questions about whether she had any documentation of bruises, scrapes, cuts, or handprints on her face from Weinstein holding her down, or had been given a sexual assault examination.

“Do you have any physical evidence that you were even with Mr. Weinstein?” Jackson asked.

Her crying grew louder as she answered, “I had his jacket, but I gave it away.”

The woman, a model and actor who was working in Rome, is the the first of Weinstein’s accusers to testify at the trial and spent portions of three days on the witness stand.

Prosecutors have presented photographs and other evidence that both Weinstein and the woman were at the Los Angeles Italia Film Festival, which she had come to California to attend in February 2013.

But they have not yet produced anything that puts Weinstein at her hotel on the night she says he forced her to perform oral sex on her bed then raped her in her bathroom.

The woman did not go to police until October of 2017, when women’s stories about Weinstein made him the central figure in the #MeToo movement.

She maintains that Weinstein left her jacket in the room and she gave it to hotel staff, but no lost-and-found records have been discovered to demonstrate it.

Asked whether the explosion of media stories around Weinstein prompted her to go to police, the woman repeated earlier testimony that she had already decided to file a report earlier in the year when she urged her teenage daughter to go to authorities over sexual harassment she’d been subjected to at school.

The woman is going only by “Jane Doe 1” in court. Her age and birthplace have also been kept out of court proceedings, though she has said her first language was Russian and she was living at the time with her three children in Italy, where she had married into considerable wealth.

The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly.

Weinstein’s defense tried to poke holes in her testimony and press on inconsistencies in previous accounts she gave to police, to prosecutors, to a grand jury, and in the first two days of her trial testimony.

In graphic questioning, Jackson dwelt on the woman’s description in her initial interview with police of oral sex she said Weinstein forced her to perform. Jackson suggested that Weinstein’s unusual genital features after a surgery he had years earlier made the acts she described impossible.

The same acts went unmentioned during her 2020 grand jury testimony, and Jackson asked her whether she had learned more about Weinstein’s sex organs from prosecutors and thus changed her story.

“Never!” she said adamantly.

Under questioning later from the prosecution, she described “very bad scarring tissue” around Weinstein’s genitals.

It was the first time jurors heard from a witness about Weinstein’s anatomy, which arose often in his 2020 trial in New York, where he was convicted of rape and sexual assault and sentenced to 23 years in prison.

The woman told prosecutor Paul Thompson that she had been having panic attacks and had hardly slept or eaten since her testimony began Monday afternoon. It finally ended late Wednesday.

Weinstein has pleaded not guilty to 11 counts of rape and sexual assault involving five women.

When prosecutors gave their opening statement Monday, however, they excluded one of the women, putting into question whether the four counts involving her will be addressed during the trial.

The district attorney’s office has declined to explain when asked about the issue.

Weinstein’s attorneys said no charges have been dropped.

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Follow AP Entertainment Writer Andrew Dalton on Twitter: twitter.com/andyjamesdalton

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For more on the Harvey Weinstein trial, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/harvey-weinstein

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October 26, 2022
Exhumations to resume; Bid to ID Tulsa Race Massacre victims

Some of the 19 bodies taken from a Tulsa cemetery and later reburied that could include remains of victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre will be exhumed again starting Wednesday, part of a bid to gather more DNA for possible identification.

The latest exhumation of bodies, some of which were taken last year from Oaklawn Cemetery in the northeastern Oklahoma city will be followed by another excavation for additional remains.

“There were 14 of the 19 (bodies) that fit the criteria for further DNA analysis,” according to city spokesperson Michelle Brooks. “These are the ones that will be re-exhumed.”

The 14 sets of remains were sent to Intermountain Forensics in Salt Lake City, Utah, in an attempt to identify them. Brooks said two sets have enough DNA recovered to begin sequencing.

It wasn’t immediately clear how many of the 14 will be exhumed a second time, Brooks said.

The remains will be reburied at Oaklawn, where the previous reburial drew protests from about two dozen people who said they are descendants of massacre victims and should have been allowed to attend the ceremony, which was closed to the public.

Intermountain Forensics is seeking people who believe they are descendants of massacre victims to provide genetic material to help scientists when they begin trying to identify remains of possible victims.

The exhumations will be followed by another search for bodies in an area south and west of the areas previously excavated in 2020 and 2021.

None of the remains recovered thus far are confirmed as victims of the massacre in which more than 1,000 homes were burned, hundreds were looted and a thriving business district known as Black Wall Street was destroyed.

Historians who have studied the event estimate the death toll to be between 75 and 300.

Victims were never compensated, however a pending lawsuit seeks reparations for the three remaining known survivors of the violence.

The latest search is expected to end by Nov. 18.

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October 25, 2022
Arizona death row inmate seeks forensic tests in 1980 deaths

PHOENIX — A judge is mulling an Arizona death row prisoner’s request to have fingerprint and DNA tests conducted on evidence from the two 1980 killings for which he is scheduled to be executed next month.

A lawyer for Murray Hooper said at a hearing Wednesday that her client is innocent, that no physical evidence ties him to the killings and that forensic testing could lead to the identification of those responsible. Kelly Culshaw, Hooper’s attorney, also raised questions about the benefits received by witnesses who testified against her client, including favorable treatment in other criminal cases.

“Forensic evidence would have made a difference in this case,” Culshaw said.

Hooper was convicted before computerized fingerprint systems and DNA testing were available in criminal cases, according to his legal team.

Prosecutors say that even if someone else’s prints or DNA were found, that wouldn’t overcome the overwhelming evidence against Hooper.

Hooper is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection or lethal gas at a prison in Florence, Arizona, on Nov. 16 for the killings of William “Pat” Redmond and his mother-in-law, Helen Phelps, at Redmond’s home in Phoenix on Dec. 31, 1980. Redmond’s wife, Marilyn, was shot in the head but recovered.

Lawyers for Hooper say Marilyn Redmond’s description of the assailants changed several times before she identified their client, who claimed not to be in Arizona at the time.

Superior Court Judge Jennifer Green, who hasn’t yet issued a ruling on the forensic testing request, pointed out that a federal appeals court characterized the evidence implicating Hooper as overwhelming.

Asked about the criticism that some witnesses had an incentive to lie, prosecutor Jeffrey Sparks said jurors at Hooper’s trial and appeals courts considered those claims and concluded there was no chance that would have changed the verdict.

Two other men, William Bracy and Edward McCall, were convicted in the killings but died before their death sentences could be carried out.

Authorities say Robert Cruz, who was alleged to have had ties to organized crime, hired Hooper, Bracy and McCall to kill Pat Redmond, who co-owned a printing business. They said Cruz wanted to take over the business and was unhappy that Redmond had rejected his offers to enter several printing contracts with Las Vegas hotels, according to court records. In 1995, Cruz was acquitted of murder charges in both deaths.

Hooper would be the third prisoner put to death this year after Arizona resumed carrying out executions in May, following a nearly eight-year hiatus attributed to both the difficulty of obtaining lethal injection drugs and criticism that a 2014 execution was botched.

There are 111 prisoners on Arizona’s death row, and 22 have exhausted their appeals, according to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.

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October 19, 2022
5 more bodies recovered from Puget Sound floatplane crash

SEATTLE — The bodies of six of the 10 victims in a floatplane crash in Washington state’s Puget Sound have been recovered and five have been identified, officials said Friday.

Island County Emergency Management deputy director Eric Brooks confirmed Friday that four additional victims had been identified, The Seattle Times reported. Gabby Hanna of Seattle, whose body was found shortly after the Labor Day weekend crash near Whidbey Island, was previously identified.

Officials were still working to identify the sixth victim. Brooks didn’t give the names of the identified victims and said the coroner would be meeting with victims’ families.

Officials have also been investigating whether human remains that washed ashore at Dungeness Spit near Sequim, Washington, nearly two weeks after the crash is the seventh victim. The autopsy was delayed because the human remains had to be transferred out of Clallam County to a forensic pathologist in Thurston County, according to Clallam County Deputy Coroner Nathan Millett.

About 80% of the plane, including the engine, has been recovered using remotely operated vessels, National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy said Thursday. Crews began recovery efforts Tuesday, using a Navy barge anchored near the crash site.

The de Havilland DHC-3 Otter was headed from Friday Harbor to the Seattle suburb of Renton on Sept. 4 before plummeting into the water.

Determining the probable cause of the crash could take up to two years, officials have said.

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September 30, 2022
Ideal Innovations, Inc. (I-3) Face Center of Excellence (FaCE) Recognized for Commitment to Adopting Facial Identification Standards

Press Release
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Sep 27, 2022

ARLINGTON, Va., September 27, 2022 (Newswire.com)
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The Ideal Innovations, Inc. (I³) Face Center of Excellence (FaCE) has been recently recognized by the Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC) for Forensic Science as a “Registry Implementer” for its commitment to voluntarily adopt the Facial Identification standards.

“I³‘s commitment to the Facial Identification discipline extends to creating, editing, and implementing the standards from OSAC into our daily practices. This standardization helps to improve consistency in our work and, therefore, reduces the possibility of errors,” stated Bob Kocher, CEO of Ideal Innovations, Inc.

Becoming an Implementer of the standards is a natural step for the I³ FaCE due to the leadership’s involvement in OSAC. As a non-laboratory Implementer, the I³ FaCE utilizes the OSAC Registry standards in multiple sections of the center, from examinations to training.

John Paul Jones, OSAC program manager with the NIST, says, “Forensic science experts at the Ideal Innovations Face Center of Excellence are providing leadership by implementing the latest technical forensic science standards listed on the OSAC Registry. Their experts are also providing a valuable service by participating as members of OSAC to help generate these standards and assess their technical merit. We are honored to work with the experts at the Face Center of Excellence and their peers from other forensic laboratories, as well as OSAC’s researchers, statisticians, and legal practitioners, on this important activity.”

Ideal Innovations, Inc. (I³), established in 1998, is a privately-owned Service-Disabled, Veteran-Owned (SDVO) business that offers consulting, technology development, support services, and program management services. We specialize in innovative solutions for defense, law enforcement and security-related problems involving subject matter expertise, advanced technology, information systems, and strategic analysis. I³ has more than 20 years of experience providing biometric and forensic examination support and training to the U.S. Government, foreign governments, and commercial customers.

Source: Ideal Innovations Inc.

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September 27, 2022