Daily Archives: May 17, 2013

OKLAHOMA CITY -

DNA evidence may help investigators solve a 17-year-old murder case that involves sex, lies, and photographs.

And it was the victim's fetish for taking pictures of men's biceps that may help those investigators identify his killers.

Scott Penny was found dead in January 1996 inside his home at 2613 N.W. 121st Street. According to a search warrant, Penny took Polaroid pictures of the men he had sex with, and he had a thing for men with big biceps.

Investigators claim one of those men pictured had a unique tattoo, and that person is most likely responsible for the murder. They also have DNA evidence from a used cigarette butt that they found at the crime scene, bringing them one step closer to possibly solving this cold case.

"It really hurt when we lost him" said Carol Briscoe, who lives two doors down from Penny's old home and still remembers that day as if it were yesterday. "He was very kind. He seemed to be an awfully hard worker."

5/16/2013 Related Story: Police Look For DNA Evidence To Connect Man To 1996 Murder Case

Penny was an aerospace engineer who worked at Tinker Air Force Base, and lived alone in his northwest Oklahoma City home. Court records state Penny was beaten and stabbed to death. His truck was stolen and his house ransacked.

Inside the ransacked home, investigators found more than a hundred Polaroid pictures of naked and half-naked men flexing their muscles. One man in a photo had a unique star tattoo. That star tattoo led investigators to Dwayne Edmondson, who lived in Oklahoma City at the time of Penny's homicide, Edmondson was charged with first-degree murder last month.

"In my heart of hearts I just thought he befriended someone that he met and it was the wrong person, and that was my logic to give myself some peace about it. Be careful who you befriend," Briscoe said.

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DNA, OKC Victim's 'Fetish' Photos May Lead To Break In Murder Case

DNA testing confirmed that human remains found last week belong to missing college student and Austell resident, Jmaal Keyes, authorities said Friday.

The remains of the Middle Georgia College student were found last week in Hawkinsville, according to GBI spokeswoman Sherry Lang.

The identification of Keyes was obtained through DNA parentage testing with Keyes biological parents, she said.

A classmate has been charged with murder in the case.

The remains were collected on Cabero Road in Hawkinsville in an area adjacent to suspect Robert Kane Rolisons residence. They were discovered near a burned-out cabin in Pulaski County where additional evidence was gathered on Friday, Lang said.

Rolison, 17, also a Middle Georgia College student, has been moved to the Pulaski County Jail where he is charged with one count of murder. The murder charge in Bleckley County has been dropped since Keyes remains were located in Pulaski County, Lang said.

Keyes was last seen April 25 leaving his dormitory on the Middle Georgia State College campus in Cochran. Rolison was dual-enrolled at MGSC where he apparently became acquainted with Keyes and a local high school.

Officials have yet to divulge a motive for the killing, or how Rolison allegedly killed Keyes, a criminal justice major.

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DNA confirms remains belong to missing college student Jmaal Keyes

May 16, 2013 Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered that DNA "linker" strands coax nano-sized rods to line up in way unlike any other spontaneous arrangement of rod-shaped objects. The arrangement -- with the rods forming "rungs" on ladder-like ribbons linked by multiple DNA strands -- results from the collective interactions of the flexible DNA tethers and may be unique to the nanoscale.

The research, described in a paper published online in ACS Nano, a journal of the American Chemical Society, could result in the fabrication of new nanostructured materials with desired properties.

"This is a completely new mechanism of self-assembly that does not have direct analogs in the realm of molecular or microscale systems," said Brookhaven physicist Oleg Gang, lead author on the paper, who conducted the bulk of the research at the Lab's Center for Functional Nanomaterials.

Broad classes of rod-like objects, ranging from molecules to viruses, often exhibit typical liquid-crystal-like behavior, where the rods align with a directional dependence, sometimes with the aligned crystals forming two-dimensional planes over a given area. Rod shaped objects with strong directionality and attractive forces between their ends-resulting, for example, from polarized charge distribution-may also sometimes line up end-to-end forming linear one-dimensional chains.

Neither typical arrangement is found in the DNA-tethered nanorods.

"Our discovery shows that a qualitatively new regime emerges for nanoscale objects decorated with flexible molecular tethers of comparable sizes-a one-dimensional ladder-like linear arrangement that appears in the absence of end-to-end affinity among the rods," Gang said.

Alexei Tkachenko, the CFN scientist who developed the theory to explain the exceptional arrangement, elaborated: "Remarkably, the system has all three dimensions to live in, yet it chooses to form the linear, almost one-dimensional ribbons. It can be compared to how extra dimensions that are hypothesized by high-energy physicists become 'hidden,' so that we find ourselves in a 3-D world."

Tkachenko explains how the ladder-like alignment results from a fundamental symmetry breaking:

"Once a nanorod connects to another one side-by-side, it loses the cylindrical symmetry it had when it had free tethers all around. Then, the next nanorod will preferentially bind to another side of the first, where there are still DNA linkers available."

DNA as glue

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DNA-guided assembly yields novel ribbon-like nanostructures