I'll Be Gone in the Dark(31)

One Sunday morning in 1962, a British paperboy found a dead cat on the side of the road. The twelve-year-old put the cat in his bag and brought it home with him. This was in Luton, a town thirty miles north of London. With some time to kill before lunch, the boy placed the cat on the dining room table and began to dissect it with a homemade kit, which included a scalpel fashioned from a flattened pin. A foul odor spread through the house, displeasing the boy’s family. Had the cat been alive when it was eviscerated, this anecdote might belong to Ted Bundy’s life story. As it happens, the boy in question, a budding scientist, would become serial killers’ biggest adversary, the creator of their kryptonite. His name is Alec Jeffreys. In September 1984, Jeffreys discovered DNA fingerprinting; in doing so, he changed forensic science and criminal justice forever.

The first generation of DNA technology compared to current technique is like the difference between a Commodore 64 computer and a smartphone. When the Orange County Crime Lab began incorporating DNA testing in the early 1990s, it would take up to four weeks for a criminalist to work one case. The biological sample being tested needed to be sizable—a bloodstain the size of a quarter, for example—and in good shape. Now a





smattering of skin cells can reveal someone’s genetic fingerprint in a matter of hours.

The DNA Identification Act of 1994 established the FBI’s authority to maintain a national database, and CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) was born. The best way to explain how CODIS operates today is to imagine it as the top of a vast forensic science pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid are hundreds of local crime labs throughout the country. The labs take unknown DNA samples from crime scenes, along with certain suspect samples that have been collected, and input them into their state databases; in California, the inputted samples are automatically uploaded every Tuesday. The state is also responsible for DNA collection from jails and courthouses. State databases then take all the collected samples and run them through a verification process and an intrastate comparison. After that, the samples are bumped up the national ladder to CODIS.

Speedy. Efficient. Thorough. Not so in the mid-1990s, when the databases were first being developed. Crime labs relied then on RFLP (pronounced “rif-lip,” short for restriction fragment length polymorphism) analysis for DNA profiling, a laborious process that eventually went the way of the beeper. But the Orange County lab always had a reputation for being ahead of the pack. A December 20, 1995, article in the Orange County Register, “DA’s Target: Ghosts of Murders Past,” explained that local prosecutors, in coordination with detectives and criminalists, were for the first time submitting DNA evidence from old unsolved cases to the California Department of Justice’s new lab in Berkeley, where four thousand DNA profiles of known violent criminals, many of them sex offenders, were filed. California’s DNA database was in its infancy, and Orange County was helping it grow.

Six months later, in June 1996, Orange County got its first “cold hit,” a match between crime-scene DNA evidence and the





DNA of a known felon in the database. The first cold hit was an extraordinary one; it identified a prison inmate named Gerald Parker as the serial killer of five women. A sixth victim of Parker’s was pregnant and survived her attack, but her full-term fetus did not. The husband of the pregnant victim, whose injuries resulted in severe memory loss, had spent sixteen years in prison for her attack. He was immediately exonerated. Parker was a month away from being released when the cold hit was made.

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department and Crime Lab staff was stunned. The first time they submit DNA to the fledgling state database, they solve six murders! It seemed that the weather in the Property Room, always an oppressive gray, had lifted and light beamed down on the monotony of cardboard boxes. Old evidence had languished there for decades undisturbed. Each box was a time capsule. Fringed purse. Embroidered tunic. Items from lives defined by violent death. The unsolved section of a Property Room is tainted with disappointment. It’s the to-do list that’s never done.

Now everyone basked in the possibilities. It was a heady feeling, the idea that one could conjure a man from a stain on a calico patchwork quilt from 1978, that one could reverse the flow of power. If you commit murder and then vanish, what you leave behind isn’t just pain but absence, a supreme blankness that triumphs over everything else. The unidentified murderer is always twisting a doorknob behind a door that never opens. But his power evaporates the moment we know him. We learn his banal secrets. We watch as he’s led, shackled and sweaty, into a brightly lit courtroom as someone seated several feet higher peers down unsmiling, raps a gavel, and speaks, at long last, every syllable of his birth name.

Names. The Sheriff’s Department needed names. The abandoned boxes in the Property Room were packed tight with stuff. Q-tip swabs preserved in tubes. Underwear. Cheap white





sheets. Every inch of fabric and millimeter of cotton tip held promise. There were other possibilities besides making immediate arrests. DNA profiles that were developed from evidence might not match a known felon in the database, but profiles from different cases might match each other, uncovering a serial killer. That information could focus an investigation. Energize it. They had to get going.

The crime lab staff crunched the numbers. Between 1972 and 1994, Orange County investigated 2,479 homicides and cleared 1,591, leaving nearly 900 unsolved cases. A strategy was developed for reexamining cold cases. Homicides involving sexual assaults would be prioritized, as those killers tend to be repeat offenders and leave behind the kind of biological material that lends itself to DNA typing.