Getty Images

The state's highest court has overturned a sexual assault conviction.

San Francisco prosecutors have struck out in their first try to convict William Payne of murder. But they will keep swinging.

Payne, 48, was charged with first-degree murder in the 1983 death of 41-year old Nikolaus Crumbley in January, after a "cold hit DNA" test linked him to the death, according to the San Francisco Examiner.

But despite the DNA evidence proving Payne was on the scene with Crumbley, with whom he had sex, the jury hung on charges of murder.

The San Francisco District Attorney's Offcie will push for a retrial, with opening arguments scheduled for Oct. 22, the newspaper reported.

Payne was 19 when Crumbley was found dead, face down and with his pants and underwear pulled down to his ankles, at the corner of John Shelley Drive and Mansell Street near John McClaren Park.

Payne was arrested for the crime in January. The DNA evidence proves that the pair had sex, but not that Payne killed Crumbley, the newspaper reported.

Get the latest headlines sent to your inbox!

View original post here:
DNA Evidence Doesn't Convince Jury of Guilt in 1983 Murder

Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department detectives on Thursday announced that they have used DNA evidence to match a previously unknown 20-year-old woman whose body was found in 1995 to a missing person from Morro Bay.

Officials are now seeking information about the 17-year-old unsolved murder.

The body of Gail Catherine Allen, known for years as Jane Doe No. 59, was found Oct. 28, 1995, in the 21000 block of Covina Hills Road in an unincorporated area of Covina, according to a statement from the Sheriffs Department.

Her burned body was found nude in a sleeping bag that had been set ablaze and thrown from an embankment. She was burned beyond recognition, officials said.

Days before the body was found, a friend of Allen's reported her missing, according to the statement.

Early this year, Morro Bay detectives received DNA samples from Allens father, Marcus Allen of Victorville, and her mother, Deborah Forester of Colorado. After the samples were linked to Jane Doe No. 59, the case was reopened as a murder case.

Allen was believed to have worked at a Taco Bell restaurant at 1700 Main Street in Morro Bay. Detectives are looking to speak with people who worked with her, officials said.

ALSO:

Scaled-back Endeavour celebration angers South L.A. residents

Charles Manson follower, a convicted murderer, closer to freedom

View post:
DNA provides identification of victim in 1995 slaying

The DNA analysis used to link a Chester County man to the killing of his father has been discounted upon further testing, according to testimony Thursday.

Parth Ingle, 26, and his mother, Bhavnaben Ingle, 52, are charged in the 2008 death of Arunkumar Ingle, who was found dead in his bedroom in Middletown Township, Delaware County. He had multiple stab wounds and his testicles were badly bruised, according to police. His alleged killers were in court Thursday for a pretrial hearing before Delaware County Court Judge Barry C. Dozer.

Samples taken from a sink drain in Parth Ingle's South Coventry home were initially thought to match Arunkumar Ingle's DNA. When the samples were sent back to a lab in Greensburg, Pa., for a more sophisticated test not originally available, the results determined it was "100 quintillion times less probable" that the DNA belonged to Arunkumar Ingle than that it was a coincidental match, according to an e-mail from prosecutors that John Kusturiss, Parth Ingle's defense attorney, read in court.

The victim, a 55-year-old Boeing engineer, was having an affair with a Russian woman he met on the Internet. According to authorities, he planned to obtain phony passports, fake his own death, and move to India with her.

The woman, Anna Sudakevich of Philadelphia, testified that she did not learn the victim was married until Parth Ingle came to her house looking for his father.

Arunkumar Ingle's plan was to leave behind $3.6 million in insurance policies for his wife and children, authorities have said.

Prosecutors said financial gain and retribution were the motives for the killing. Parth Ingle was about $43,000 in debt at the time.

On Thursday, prosecutors introduced evidence of a letter that Parth Ingle allegedly wrote to relatives in India asking them not to contest an insurance settlement so the Ingle family could get the money.

When questioned, Trooper Robert Kirby said there was no evidence the letter was sent.

Also Thursday, the court heard the dramatic 911 call Bhavnaben Ingle made when she reported discovering her husband's body. She could be heard screaming as 911 operators tried to calm her.

Read more:
DNA test linking son to death of Chester County man is discounted

SAN MATEO, Calif.

DNA testing has confirmed that a foot and part of a leg that washed up on a Pacifica beach in March is that of a San Bruno man who went missing around that time, San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault said Thursday.

Joseph McHenry, 27, a former member of the U.S. Marine Corps, was last seen on March 2 when he told relatives he was going rock climbing and camping overnight at a secluded beach near Pacifica, Foucrault said.

He never returned, and his car was found parked in a residential area near Sharp Park Golf Course, according to San Bruno police.

A backpack belonging to McHenry was located a few days later on the beach near Mori Point, and on March 25, a human foot connected to a portion of a leg was found near the shoreline at Rockaway Beach.

The coroner's office collected the evidence, and DNA obtained from McHenry's mother has since confirmed that the body parts were McHenry's, Foucrault said.

No other evidence of the missing man has been found.

Police do not suspect foul play, San Bruno police Lt. Geoff Caldwell said.

Without more evidence, McHenry cannot be officially pronounced dead, Foucrault said.

The family is in the process of obtaining a court order that would officially close the case, he said.

View original post here:
DNA matches foot to missing San Bruno man

CLAYTON St. Louis County police believe a serial rapist is targeting Asian women in northwestern St. Louis County and possibly elsewhere in the country.

Detectives found DNA evidence linking the rapes of two women in separate attacks to the same man, said county Police Chief Tim Fitch. But the culprit's identity has not been determined.

Fitch said it may be significant that one victim is of Chinese descent and the other Korean.

"This is the kind of stuff that will keep us awake at night: Some stranger out there attacking innocent victims," Fitch said. "That is why it's so important to let the public know to be on guard and let us know if you have information to help us catch the guy because we also know people like this just don't stop."

The first incident took place about 1:45 a.m. April 4, 2011, at the Beau Jardine apartment complex along the 10300 block of Sannois Drive. In that case, the victim, 27, said her attacker put a blanket over her head while she was asleep in her home and sexually assaulted her. There were no signs of forced entry to the second-floor apartment, but she told police she couldn't recall whether she had locked her door.

The other attack occurred Sept. 19 and involved a woman, 18, who said she was grabbed from behind while walking on a sidewalk near Fee Fee and Bennington roads in northwestern St. Louis County. The victim told police she was walking home from a friend's house when she was taken to a grassy area about 20 feet from the sidewalk.

The locations are within five miles of each other.

"Generally speaking, serial rapists do their homework on their victims before they attack," Fitch said. "We have every reason to believe this guy isn't just driving up the road and attacking the first woman he sees."

Fitch also said similar reports going back several years have surfaced in San Diego, New York and in Maryland involving a man targeting Asian women.

"We're trying to determine if this a transient person, who is moving from city to city for a job, and see if there are links in those other cases," he said. "That makes it even more difficult to catch someone when they're mobile like that. But it could turn out that he was born and raised here as well."

More:
DNA links two rapes in St. Louis County, may be more nationally

What would happen if everyone could do DNA analysis within minutes using a simple computerized box that accepted a person's cell samples on a swab and spit out the answer about a person's genetic identity automatically?

Though it sounds like the stuff of science fiction, that possibility is now within reach. And as the new capability of what's being called 'Rapid DNA' analysis takes off, law enforcement in police stations and the FBI could be using it to catch criminals without having to send DNA off to official DNA-testing labs as is done now. But it doesn't stop there. U.S. agencies could not only use this instant "DNA analysis in a box" to check the identity of someone wanting to come into the country, but easily check to see if two people who say they're related really are since DNA genetic information can provide that. And that's just what governments might do with it -- there's no reason that businesses and individuals couldn't easily be doing DNA analysis, too, in the years to come.

What if Ethernet failed?

What if Windows 8 flops?

"What science has given us is some very miraculous work in the DNA world," said Peter Verga, chief of staff for the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the U.S. Department of Defense, during his keynote at the Biometric Consortium Conference in Tampa recently.

After years of research encouraged by the FBI and DoD, 'Rapid DNA' analysis-in-a-box is here, proving a DNA profile can be produced automatically, with no need for professional lab training, in 90 minutes or less. Two companies, integenX and NetBio, are the manufacturers whose 'Rapid DNA' equipment is now under government evaluation at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Army Criminal Investigative Laboratory. More companies, including Lockheed Martin, are expected to soon follow.

Verga noted it would theoretically be possible in the future to do a DNA profile on travelers coming into Dulles Airport, for example, for security purposes. But whatever ends up happening with the new power for instant DNA analysis, it must "adhere to the rule of law" and conform to the idea that one must "do good with biometrics and avoid evil," he added.

The 'Rapid DNA' analysis is only going to get more powerful in what it can do.

Richard Selden, CEO of NetBio, describes its ANDE System as a 'Rapid DNA' box that measures 26.6''-inches by 16.5-inches' x 23.1-inches' and can take an inserted cotton swab with cell samples from someone's cheek and produces a DNA profile in 83 minutes. Ruggedized for air, truck and hand-carry, it's "stable for at least six months without refrigeration," said Selden, speaking about it at the conference. It works in "an uncontrolled environment" with "no manual processing."

To match DNA, it can connect to a remote database or do the DNA matching in a local database onboard. The technology developed by NetBio is already being expanded into next-generation device that will accept very minute samples of DNA collected from cups or virtually anywhere for a DNA profile of the individual. The box is also being expanded to do "kinship analysis," Selden pointed out.

Read the original:
Security: What if all law enforcement agencies could do instant DNA analysis?

David Aaron Troy / Getty Images

Fifty hours. Thats how long it now takes to decode and interpret a newborn babys genome an undertaking that used to take weeks, or even months. And those two days can mean the difference between life and death for a critically ill infant.

In a paper published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, researchers led by Stephen Kingsmore, director of the Center for Pediatric Genomic Medicine at Childrens Mercy Hospital, describe a new genetic test that can rapidly screen the DNA of babies in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for about 3,500 diseases known to be linked to single-gene mutations. Of these, doctors can treat about 500.

Up to a third of babies admitted to the NICU have a genetic disease. But many newborns are not diagnosed properly and may therefore miss the opportunity for a potentially life-saving therapy. Many of the symptoms of such genetic diseases are both general and shared by many different conditions, which makes them difficult to diagnose; whats more, many of the genetic conditions in question are rare, so most physicians, even NICU specialists, may not be familiar them or unable to recognize their symptoms. Currently used genetic tests are also too expensive and time-consuming to be clinically useful; because the tests can take weeks, or sometimes months, most NICU babies will have either gone home or died by the time the results are ready.

(MORE: 23andMe Wants FDA Approval for Personal DNA Testing. What Can It Reveal?)

So Kingsmore and his colleagues collaborated with Illumina, a manufacturer of gene-sequencing machines, to shorten the time it takes to both decode an entire genome and generate a clinically useful analysis of that sequencing. Thanks to recent advances in the ability to break up and re-knit DNA, the company was able to sequence the 3 billion base pairs of the genome in just 27 hours down from weeks.

But decoding a genome is only half of the challenge. Words in a book dont make sense unless they are put together in a grammatically sensible way, and similarly, DNA is meaningless unless its analyzed in the context of genes, which in turn are connected to human functions or conditions. So for two years, Kingsmores team worked on special software designed to help doctors use genetic information to make accurate diagnoses and guide ill babies to the right treatment.

The software simplifies and standardizes the often complex process of diagnosis, by allowing doctors to click on the symptoms they see in newborns; the program then puts together a list of the genes that might be most likely to be at fault. Doctors can then compare these genetic suspects to the newborns sequenced genome to see if any of the same genes are mutated; if they are, they can pinpoint a diagnosis.

(MORE: Decoding Cancer: Scientists Release 520 Tumor Genomes from Pediatric Patients)

There is a phenomenal need for more accurate and faster diagnosis in the NICU, says Kingsmore, adding that this is a setting where we know that giving treatments is one of the most effective things we can do in medicine from the cost standpoint, since these patients have 65 to 70 years of life to live out.

Continue reading here:
Good News for NICU Babies: Faster DNA Testing for More Accurate Diagnoses