Genetic Sleuthing

James Edward King sits in a jail cell awaiting trial in the murder and rape of Leathia Taylor, an elderly woman who was strangled in her home in nearby Richmond in 1992.

In Orange County, Gerald Parker faces trial in six murders dating back to the 1970s.

And earlier this month, San Jose police arrested Danny Keith Hooks, 38, in the murders of five women in an Oklahoma City crack house in 1992.

Like thousands of other murder investigations, these cases had languished for years. Detectives had no suspects. Leads were sparse.

Then, in a locked room in a small wood-sided building in Berkeley just east of San Francisco Bay, a criminalist quietly tapped at a desktop computer keyboard, running a police search at the edge of forensic technology.

The California Department of Justice computer program provided by the FBI combed through fragments of DNA drawn from hair, blood, skin or semen left behind at the scenes of murders committed by unknown killers. It compared them against a growing DNA database of felons who have committed past sex crimes in California.

In the parlance of its users, the computer so far has made three “cold hits”--King, Parker and Hooks.

Law enforcement, from Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, hopes more matches are coming as the state’s fledgling DNA criminal profile project begins to take hold.

California has been collecting blood from paroled sex criminals and murderers since 1984. But it was not until the early 1990s that science had advanced to where state criminalists could extract DNA and analyze it.

The California database now includes 9,000 DNA profiles of paroled sex offenders and murderers. Another 200 to 300 profiles are added each day. By the middle of this year, the computer will have 34,000 genetic profiles, making it the largest in any state, said Lance Gima, the lab’s director.

“We have to prove to the rest of law enforcement how important this can be,” Lungren said. “As we get more hits, they will understand its significance. DNA has the potential to be as revolutionary as fingerprints were.”

DNA analysis is not cheap. A single DNA profile can take an analyst more than a month to develop. But in Sacramento, politicians from both parties laud the computer system and seem willing to pay for its expansion.

In 1994, reacting to the outcry over the Polly Klaas murder, the Legislature approved a bill by Sen. Mike Thompson (D-St. Helena) allocating $2 million to the DNA lab. The lab can process 2,200 blood samples a month. Lungren is seeking a $266,000 boost in the lab’s $1.2-million annual budget to focus more on solving old murders.

The lab has DNA profiles from the scenes of 150 unsolved homicides in California, plus others submitted by 27 states. California, in turn, plans to submit profiles from some of its unsolved murders to other states that have databases.

In many other ways, police work remains “a low-tech operation,” said Capt. Don Mauro, head of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department homicide unit. A victim’s blood may be on the killer’s clothes, he says, but in order to get the clothes, a detective must find the killer--”and that takes shoe leather.” Still, Mauro calls the expansion of DNA use by police critical. “We will continue to be dragged into the 21st century.”

A visit to the Berkeley DNA lab is indeed a step into the next century of law enforcement.

It’s in a small suite of offices in an industrial part of Berkeley. Inside, criminalists wear white lab coats. While they develop DNA profiles using first-generation DNA techniques, researchers work on more futuristic ways of catching killers with the use of DNA drawn from ever smaller specks of evidence.

The lab workers and researchers rarely see the police reports that describe the crime scenes. “You have to remove yourself to maintain some sanity. One would go insane if you [thought] about it,” said Renee Montgomery, one of the case workers. Still, she said, “We’re not brains on a stick.”

The process of developing a DNA profile begins with the delivery each day of vials of blood.

The blood, 1,200 vials a month, comes from sex offenders about to be paroled from California’s 32 prisons. A worker logs each vial, verifies it against fingerprints, and sends it to its next stop, a building across a parking lot.

There, DNA is extracted. A specially designed $50,000 robotic arm draws blood from the vials, eight at a time, and injects it into other vials, which contain genetically engineered enzymes. The enzymes’ sole function is to slice DNA at specific points along its double helix structure.

The size of the DNA fragments varies from person to person. The differences can be measured, magnified and captured on nylon sheets. On the sheets, which look like X-rays, the fragments of an individual’s DNA look a little like the human equivalent of a bar code.

A computer program reads that bar code, assigns numbers representing a particular felon’s genetic profile, and adds them to the database.

Later this year, DNA databases from various states are expected to be linked in a national system, called the Combined DNA Indexing System. In time, it will store the genetic profiles of hundreds of thousands of sex offenders and other violent criminals.

“We’re entering a brave new world,” said Myrna Raeder, a DNA expert and professor at Southwestern University Law School. “It’s a marvelous law enforcement tool, especially with serial killers and rapists because they’re very hard to find and they move around a lot.”

Florida has had the most success so far. Authorities there say that since 1993, they have used their DNA database of 17,000 known offenders to arrest 55 people in rape and murder cases where there had been no suspects.

Although hampered by tight budgets, a few communities in California have been able to develop genetic profiles of killers in unsolved murders, and sent them to the state lab.

Orange County has sent a dozen DNA profiles dating back 16 years to the Berkeley lab. San Bernardino County has forwarded half a dozen. Los Angeles County agencies also have sent some.

The 150 DNA profiles of unsolved murders in California represent a fraction of the thousands of unsolved homicides in the state. A Times series last year found that Los Angeles County had 4,300 unsolved homicides between 1990 and 1994. About 15% involved some contact between the killer and victim, raising at least the possibility that the killer left something from which DNA could be extracted.

“We never had much incentive to test until now that the state has the database. Now we can actually identify a suspect,” said Frank Fitzpatrick, head of forensic sciences for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

Without the lab, the murder of Leathia Taylor, 76, a retired beautician, might never have resulted in an arrest. She was found strangled in her Richmond home Sept. 28, 1992.

Nine months later, after clues had led nowhere, one of the detectives drove to the Berkeley lab with some of the semen collected at the scene of the murder. On Sept. 2, 1994, the computer got a cold hit, the first in California. DNA in the semen matched the DNA of King, 41, who had been required to give a blood sample in 1991 as a condition of his parole from San Quentin.

Until the DNA was matched, police had no idea that King might have been involved. He was arrested six months later, as he sat in a pickup truck in Richmond.

King’s case is also the first in which the admissibility of evidence analyzed by California’s new DNA database has been challenged.

His attorney, Deputy Public Defender David Coleman of Contra Costa County, said the public should not underestimate the potential for police misuse of its new scientific weapon.

“What’s the big deal?” Coleman said. “What’s the big deal if police say, ‘We just want to look around your house a little bit.’ It’s not much different with your DNA. . . . Some of us are not so confident that government is benign. There are people who feel that what their DNA is composed of is their business.”

Defense lawyers have been largely unsuccessful in limiting the use of DNA as evidence in criminal cases--though they have succeeded on occasion, as they did in O.J. Simpson’s criminal trial, in attacking how the DNA evidence was gathered and preserved.

“The real question will be whether juries will believe that such hits provide proof beyond reasonable doubt,” said Raeder of Southwestern Law School. “That’s the really difficult issue we have to look at as a society. We have to feel very confident before we are willing to convict someone not just of a crime, but of a capital crime, with no evidence other than DNA.”

DNA advocates note that it can be used to exonerate innocent people. The son of the late Dr. Sam Sheppard, is pushing for DNA testing to conclusively prove his contention that Sheppard did not murder his wife, Marilyn, in the sensational 1954 Ohio case.

That DNA can prove innocence became evident with the arrest in June of Gerald Parker in a series of six Orange County murders. Another man, Kevin Green, had been convicted of one of those murders at age 21, and spent 17 years in prison before he was freed in June. “I had pretty much given up pushing my family for help,” Green, 38, said in a phone interview from Utah, where he lives.

Parker, like King, is scheduled to go on trial later this year. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against both men.

“There are hundreds and hundreds of cases like this out there statewide,” said Fitzpatrick. “There are people out there who are fat, dumb and happy. One day, we’re going to knock on their doors and say, ‘We got you.’ ”