During the 1980 and 1990s there was a killer in the Seattle-Tacoma area that was stalking young women, mainly prostitutes. During this time, women were disappearing sometimes every other day, once a month or even one or two a year. The person that was committing these crimes was the “Green River Killer”. The modus operandi of the killer was to rape the victims and strangle them. Gary Ridgway was one of the top suspects for these crimes. The problem was that during this time DNA testing was in its infancy and much was unknown, this and the fact that police did not have a lot of hard evidence on Mr. Ridgway, caused the police to not arrest him.
In 2001 this all changed, scientist brought together the old evidence and used two distinctive tests to reexamine the evidence. The polymerase chain reaction test and the short tandem repeat test, these tests together allowed scientists to replicate enough DNA so that they could find out whose DNA it is. “It was a last-ditch effort,” Dr. Himick, a scientist that worked on the reexamination of the case, said. “We didn’t have a lot to work with, but we went through a lot of evidence again. We rinsed all the fingernails to look for trace evidence and swabbed the ligatures for cellular material. With one girl, we were able to find a few sperm clinging to her pubic hairs.”
Scientists took the DNA samples that they had and analyzed them. They received a sample of Mr. Ridgway’s DNA from a piece of gauze that he had chewed on in 1987. After analysis of the DNA, they saw that there were matches in the DNA to the three victims that they had DNA profiles for. When Gary Ridgway was confronted with the evidence he pleaded guilty and received 48 consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/12file-dna.html
4 comments:
Three things I liked in this article was that it described how in the beginning of the case DNA was unknown but as the case went on they were able to figure out who did it using DNA. I also liked how the article went over the same test's that we recently used in forensics. The third thing I liked about this article was about how even though they didnt have a lot to work with they were still able to identify the killer.
Two things I would change:
One thing I would change is that I would talk more about how the test's helped identify the culprit. I would also describe more about the reason's why the man committed these crimes.
One thing I learned:
I learned that even after many years you can still be found guilty of a crime because your DNA preserves itself for a long time.
The background of the Green River Killer case was well presented. Also well described were how the advancement of DNA technology drastically changed the course of the investigation and the description of how the evidence was used to help build a case against Gary Ridgeway. This review could have been made better by perhaps explaining why the evidence was re-examined or perhaps giving any reactions to the conviction by the victims' families. From this review I learned that even after such a long period of time, the DNA technology can be crucial to solving unsolved crimes.
There were several things that I liked about this review. It gave sufficient background without overloading the review with unnecessary details. Also, the review was written like a story with the reader being captivated in the beginning to read on to see if the suspect was indeed guilty. In addition to that, it was interesting to hear about the tests that we are using now in class being used in a case.
There are a few things that I would have changed about this review. First of all, I would have explained why the evidence was examined again. I also would have explained what test was used to identify the suspect as the killer.
Before reading this review, I did not know that DNA evidence could survive so long and still be useable for testing.
The three things that I liked about the article Robert summarized, "Cold Case is Closed by DNA Match: Green River Killer," are how we used similar forensic tests as the scientists did in this case, the background of the Green River Killer was clearly presented so that the reader could sort of figure it out themselves, and finally the way the originally mysterious DNA was identified through a series of tests.
To improve this summary, I would suggest elaborating a little more on the tests actually performed and explain what led the scientists to reexamine the evidence.
I learned that even older DNA samples can be used in a case/can solve a case because there are so many tests that do not require recent DNA.
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