Daily Archives: January 23, 2015

Joseph Sledge, 70, addresses members of the media after being released from jail in Columbus County, N.C., on Friday. He served nearly four decades behind bars for two slayings he didn't commit. Jonathan Drew/AP hide caption

Joseph Sledge, 70, addresses members of the media after being released from jail in Columbus County, N.C., on Friday. He served nearly four decades behind bars for two slayings he didn't commit.

Joseph Sledge is a free man after 37 years in prison following today's decision by a judicial panel in North Carolina to overturn his 1976 conviction in the stabbing deaths of an elderly mother and her daughter.

The Associated Press says DNA evidence had helped to exonerate Sledge, now 70, whose case was referred last month to the three-judge panel by the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission.

According to the AP:

"The expert said none of the evidence collected in the case hair, DNA and fingerprints belonged to Sledge. A key jailhouse informant had also recanted his story, saying authorities promised him leniency in his own case for his trial testimony against Sledge.

"A district attorney who was not originally involved apologized to Sledge and promised to reopen the investigation.

" 'The system has made a mistake,' district attorney Jon David said."

David, who was not the original prosecutor, pledged to reopen the investigation and apologized to Sledge, according to Raleigh-based WRAL:

" 'There's nothing worse for a prosecutor than convicting an innocent person,' he said.

Read more:
DNA Exonerates Man Who Served Nearly 40 Years For Murder

January 23, 2015, 12:26 PM Last updated: Friday, January 23, 2015, 12:31 PM

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (AP) DNA evidence linked an Oregon prisoner to at least two of the six serial killings of young women that terrified the San Francisco Bay Area and a city in Nevada four decades ago, investigators say. He is suspected of the other slayings.

ap photo

Rodney Halbower, 66

The San Mateo district attorney's office charged Rodney Halbower, 66, on Thursday with two counts of murder during the course of rape for the deaths of Paula Baxter, 17, and Veronica Anne Cascio, 18.

Their deaths were among six police say are connected and occurred between January and April 1976 in California and Nevada. Five of the bodies were found in the suburbs immediately south of San Francisco, including one near Gypsy Hill Road, giving the killings their nickname. A sixth body was found in Reno.

DNA evidence linking Halbower to both killings was found on Baxter and Cascio, San Mateo Chief Deputy District Attorney Karen Guidotti said.

"Based on the forensic links between a number of the cases, the time frame of the murders, and the methods used by the offender to commit these crimes, investigators are confident all the crimes were committed by the same offender," The FBI said in a statement in March after a Gypsy Hill Task Force was created to revisit the cold case using DNA technology.

Halbower denied involvement in any of the killings in a jailhouse interview with a local television station.

"I'm confused, and I want some answers," he told KGO-TV (http://abc7ne.ws/1yY0UkQ ). "I don't know anything. No knowledge about this."

Read more from the original source:
DNA ties Oregon prisoner to 2 of 6 serial killings from 1976

Try to read up on the okapi and you wont find much. This African mammal is most often seen next tothe adjective elusive. But even if we cant find any okapi, we can learn about their lifestyle through their DNAand we can find theirDNA in their feces.

The okapi is an ungulate, like a cow. Or really like a giraffe, its closest relative. It has an elegant face, a long bluish tongue, and a zebra-striped rear end. It lives in the denserainforest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, chewing tree leaves in privacy. No one in the Western world knew the animalexisted until the 20th century.

One of the great things about studying okapi was that there was so little known about them in advance, says David Stanton, a PhD student at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. So in this sense, everything that we found out was a surprise.

Stanton and his coauthors just published an investigation of okapi society. Rather than search for actual wild okapi (elusive, remember?), they scoured the Reserve de Faune a Okapis, a national park in the DRC, for dung.

The researchers gathered 208 fecal samples. They were able to extract and sequence DNA from 105 of these samples,and confirmed that all 105 came from okapi. And evenwithout seeing any wild animals, the scientists could piece together a few clues about the okapislifestyle from that genetic material.

To start, they analyzed whether okapi that are more closely related live (and poop) closer to each other. Do the animals live in family groups? The answer was no. Except for mothers with offspring, related individuals do not appear to live closer together than unrelated individuals in any meaningful sense, Stanton says. The researchers concluded that okapi are solitary.

They could also get a peek at the animals sex lives through their dung. To do this, the scientistsused a computer program that sifted through the genetic sequences and looked for siblings. The program found one pair of full siblings (animals with the same mother and father). But there were around 200 sets of half-siblings among the animals. This suggested that okapi are polygamous; they dont stick with one mate.

Finally, the researchers investigated how widelyokapi move around.Judging by dung piles that had identical DNA, individual okapi didnt wander very far. Almost all of these matching piles were less than a kilometer apart.

Male okapi, though, were less closely related to each other than females. This suggests that before settling into a home range, males roam farther from where they were born. This system isnot unusual for mammals, though sometimes females are the ones who do the roaming, or dispersing.

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Dung DNA Gives Clues to the Shy Okapi's Lifestyle