Daily Archives: January 5, 2014

BATON ROUGE, -- Officials say DNA results prove a Louisiana man is the father of an infant found dead in a garbage truck in 2002 and he now wants to give a statement in the murder trial of the girl's mother.

Matthew Crane, a 30-year-old Baton Rouge man, told The Advocate that he didn't know his ex-girlfriend gave birth in December 2002 until she was arrested in January 2012.

The child was buried as Christine Noel Love, the name given by a private group called Threads of Love, which provided a funeral.

Crane wants to give his daughter the name Cecilia Noelle Crane, and make a victim impact statement in the criminal case of JoAnn King, the child's mother.

Police say King admitted throwing the infant into a trash bin, probably the day after she was born. Garbage truck workers discovered the baby Dec. 6, 2002, dangling from a ripped garbage bag in the back of the truck

King, 30, of Baton Rouge, is charged with second-degree murder and faces a Feb. 10 trial date. She is free on bond.

Her court-appointed attorney, Fred Kroenke, said Friday that King is "totally and completely remorseful and incredibly sad." He has said previously she wants to atone "more than anything else in the world."

District Attorney Hillar Moore III confirmed that the results proved Crane to be the child's biological father.

"I always felt in my heart that I was the father to the child ... but this long wait has been torturous," Crane said. "Finally, knowing the results, I can proceed with appropriate actions and, hopefully, find closure in the process."

Crane, who described this as a "very difficult time" for his family and said he hopes its privacy will be respected, conceded that his only recourse is to let the justice system run its course.

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DNA proves man is father of dead child

A Kiwi backyard invention is changing crime scene investigations around the world. For the first time, police can take samples that contain more than one person's DNA and unravel the strands.

Among the crimes it has been used to solve was a multiple-homicide in Australia, where a spot of blood found at the killer's house contained blood from several of the victims.

In Nelson, it was used to solve an arson case where an unexploded incendiary device was found at the scene of a forest fire. The handle of a shopping bag found inside the device yielded a mixture of DNA.

Another case, in the United States, proved a soldier rolled a jeep despite his claim it had been stolen from him. A shoe found at the scene contained a mixture of his DNA and another person's.

In the past all this evidence would have been discarded. Mixed DNA was useless DNA. There was no way to separate out the strands of genetic code. But now, with a tool developed in the "backyard" of some Kiwi scientists, the problem that has long stymied international forensic scientists has been solved.

The software, called STRmix, has already been sold to the US Army, and the FBI is in talks to acquire the rights.

Institute of Environmental Science and Research scientists John Buckleton and Jo-Anne Bright, in collaboration with Duncan Taylor from Forensic Science South Australia, developed STRmix using standard mathematics and "Monte Carlo processes" - sampling thousands of different possibilities and using chance "many, many times".

The program was put into case work in August 2012 and has since generated "enormous international interest", Buckleton said.

In many cases of sexual assault, particularly those involving more than one offender, any DNA recovered was often mixed. "We had no tool that could interpret mixed, low-level strains. Uninterpretable DNA was put aside - the report goes out as inconclusive."

The tool works in seconds for simple cases or up to days for complex cases. It currently can separate four strands.

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New Kiwi crime tool unravels mixed DNA