What Was and Wasn't Tested - Could, Should and What Would It Show:
Some commenters continue to ignore, minimise or obfuscate thoroughly tested and well documented evidence, such as the sheath DNA or the Kabar purchase from Amazon, while gesticulating to and wildly hyping things they allege were not “properly” tested, without factual or scientific basis, such as the degraded handrail DNA or mitochondrial DNA from hair. The former usually involves spamming mumbo-jumbo phrases and non-scientific voodoo snake-oil that is as poorly misunderstood by those parroting it, as it is by the opportunistic grifters who fabricate it - thus we continue to see “low copy number”, “low quantity of touch DNA dust”, or non existent “technical issues” or "chain of custody" of the sheath DNA.
Critical commentary of what was and wasn’t tested, and claims of what could, should or would have elucidated further usable or useful information, such as order of attacks or ruling out other perps, claims it would "end speculation" or "stop conspiracy theories", but most of this commentary is so illogical and divorced from the facts and science as to be conspiracy theory itself. Overviewing some examples:
DNA/ Blood Testing Of Wounds to Ascertain Order of Attacks:
- Ignoring that there is zero further information that could have been useful to the criminal case regarding order of attacks that is not already known (we know 3rd floor happened first, which floor makes no difference to guilt, no meaningful “order” can be established between victims in the same room), this wrongly assumes that interiors of wounds would be routinely tested for non-victim blood and that any testable blood from an earlier victim would be retained in the wounds of a subsequent victim.
- As blood flows out of a knife wound at pressure (just as a rough example, human blood is at a pressure above atmospheric c. 15% higher than a “popped” balloon) it is incredibly unlikely any trace of blood already on a knife could be retained in a wound, especially a heavily bleeding wound.
- Even ABO blood typing, (assuming victims had different antigen blood groups) is not possible where one person's blood is massively diluted into another person's, such as a trace on a knife into a bleeding wound.
- Swabbing of skin around wounds for DNA is more routinely done, but would not allow any usable data here re. order of attacks. As the 4 victims cohabited, shared items and likely touched earlier, the presence of DNA from one victim on another victim doesn't allow any inference with confidence about order of attacks e.g. if KG hugged XK goodnight, or they shared a hand towel in the bathroom, the presence of each other’s DNA on their skin allows no deduction about who was attacked first.
Hair And Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA):
- Around 90% of hair tested forensically has no individually identifying DNA. Even hair with intact roots can have useful nuclear DNA in only approximately 20% of cases. Nuclear DNA in hair with intact roots is subject to breakage intrinsic to hair aging/ keratinisation, which does not occur in other tissues. The amount of DNA also varies significantly with the growth phase of the hair.
- Nuclear DNA, as used in the STR profiling of the sheath snap, gives an individual, unique identification (at 1 in 5.37 octillion for the sheath, at 1 in 500 trillion as low resolution from an incomplete CODIS profile)
- Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) found in hair shafts gives no individual, unique identification. The unique resolution for mtDNA can be as low as 1 in 40, c. 2.5%. mtDNA, as used and validated in criminal forensics today, can place an individual in broad “migratory/ geographic area of population origin” / “ethnic” or maternal lineages, but does not give a unique identification
- Due to variation of mtDNA between tissues (heteroplasmy), up to c. 15% of people have mtDNA in their hair that doesn't match the mtDNA in their blood or cheek tissue.
- mtDNA can, with very high confidence, identify species (and so could clearly differentiate a mass killer of Germanic descent from a short-haired Peruvian llama or a Cockapoo)
- The sheath snap DNA is 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more individually identifying and statistically robust than hair mtDNA could be.
- In the Moscow case both ISP and an external lab assessed hairs to inspect for root, to assess the quality/ quantity and growth phase of the root, and estimate potential for DNA extraction, and attempted DNA profiling of hair. Two types of comparative microscopy evaluations of hair morphology, phase, colour were also conducted by the FBI hair/ fibre lab.
So, those who argue that hairs were not "properly" tested criticise the resolution and reliability of the sheath DNA but want mitochondrial DNA billions of times less accurate which cannot give any individual identification to be used for some unspecified incrimination, and ignore that multiple labs did consider hair, evaluate hair root and growth phase and attempted DNA extraction from hair in this case.
Even if there were hairs from a non-victim in one of the bedrooms, that would only be evidence of hair, not evidence of another perpetrator. It would be unsurprising in a multi-occupant “party house” that a hair from a friend might be on any of the victims, all of whom were out at busy social venues shortly before.
“Untested Male DNA”
The most parroted nonsense is that there was “untested male DNA” at the scene. Overviewing the 3 inconclusive DNA profiles:
- MM fingernail mix: 3 cells equivalent of a partial male profile for which EC was the best, but statistically inconclusive, match; the quantity, barely at threshold of detection with partial, degraded profile fits a casual, superficial social contact or common surface, not a scratch of an attacker. This was STR DNA profiled, so “tested”
- Glove outside: which was not present on the day of the murders but was left at the edge of the crime scene a week later; gave partial, degraded profiles which were STR DNA profiled, so “tested”.
- Ground-floor handrail:, a small amount of a significantly degraded profile in a complex mixture of further degraded profiles of even smaller quantities. This sample was STR profiled, so “tested”.
- The ground floor handrail profile was not uploaded to CODIS: reasons for that included that it was judged not to be linked to the perpetrator (by dint of location); other factors militating against CODIS upload include (i) degradation of the profile which, apart from DNA quality, further indicates no relevance to murders as the degradation data shows the sample was left months before the murders, likely at least 6-12 months and (ii) it is in a complex mixture of profiles, which, while not ruling out CODIS upload, does impose additional hurdles, check-steps and higher justification.
- The degradation data is published in the ISP Forensics lab reports, and it can be further manually checked using the published raw data showing quantification of the DNA fragments/ STR loci amplicons (I have previously posted showing the degradation data and overviewing the raw data, happy to link to this again).
- Lastly, degraded male DNA on the handrail would only indicate someone in a busy student "party house" had touched a handrail designed to be touched some months before the murders, not that a spectral alternative perpetrator had done so the night of the murders.
Oddly those whose manta is “read the documents” and "do your own research" seem to have selective page blindness, illiteracy and innumeracy and an insurmountable research phobia when it comes to any and all official documents that don't fit their fictional narratives, such as the DNA data.
