UC Animal Lab Takes a Bite Out of Crime

Scotland Yard investigators were stumped. A bouncer had been stabbed to death in the alley outside The Paradise Bar in South London. Pools of blood were left behind by the victim, the suspect and someone--or something--else.

“They swabbed the blood up off the floor, they extracted DNA from it,” said Marcia Eggleston, a researcher at UC Davis. “When they typed it, they couldn’t get a result.”

Turned out it was animal blood, something few crime labs are equipped to analyze. So Scotland Yard turned to the Internet and tracked down the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory at Davis and its extensive database of animal DNA.

The lab’s verdict: The blood matched a bull terrier that was found to belong to a man who had been kicked out of the bar.

The finding helped put the killer in prison for life.

The lab’s technicians, who work out of a small, nondescript building and several trailers on the Davis campus, most often test animal hair, which works best if it’s pulled out at the root. But they also extract DNA from urine, saliva, feces, dead skin, dander and just about anything else.

No two people or animals, except identical twins, have exactly the same DNA sequence. Even though only limited segments of a person’s DNA are scrutinized in typing, those segments will be statistically unique.

“You do the science, you hand them the results and you let them do what they do,” UC Davis technician Glen Byrns said.

Forensics isn’t the lab’s main job. About 98% of its work is DNA typing to determine the bloodlines of horses. Since 1995, the lab has typed 600,000 horses.

“Horses are a multibillion-dollar industry,” Eggleston said. “If you buy a $40,000 horse for your kid, you want to know who it is. Are these pedigrees correct?”

The lab also has 25,000 samples for cattle, 32,000 for elk, 10,000 for dogs and 53,000 for members of the camel family, including llamas, alpacas and dromedaries. It is believed to be the largest animal DNA testing lab in the world, Eggleston said. It earned about $4.7 million last year, nearly all of which went back into the lab.

About six years ago, the lab branched out into criminal work when a Simi Valley woman who owned three Great Danes called. One of her dogs had bitten a neighborhood boy’s arm. She wanted to euthanize only the dog that had attacked.

“They heard that UC Davis did animal testing, so they were hoping we might be able to do something,” Eggleston said.

The dog had left a saliva trail on the boy’s shirt sleeve, which the lab matched to one of the swabs the woman had scraped on the inside of all three dogs’ cheeks.

Jerry Ruth, senior forensic scientist at the National Fish and Wildlife Forensic Laboratory, said his lab works on wildlife cases while UC Davis is committed to domestic animals, so rarely do they collaborate. However, the Davis lab has a good reputation, Ruth said, and he often refers the FBI and state and local police departments to the lab for domestic animal DNA typing.

The UC Davis veterinary school is considered the top program in the nation. “The work I’ve seen come out of the lab is consistent with the school’s top ranking,” Ruth said.

The Davis lab’s criminal cases now fall into three categories: animals that kill or hurt people or animals, animal abuse cases, and animals that can tie a suspect to the crime scene.

A few weeks ago, a bloody golf club arrived in the mail. Authorities believed it had been used to kill a dog. Would there be a match? The lab gets one or two such criminal cases a week, in addition to requests for parentage testing.

Tests start at $250 apiece, mostly to discourage frivolous civil suits. It’s the more serious cases that are most rewarding.

A few years ago in rural Chickasaw County, Iowa, a Mennonite woman was gardening with her toddler and the family dog when a man arrived in a pickup truck. He got out, accosted the woman, dragged her to his truck and tried to rape her, authorities said. Although a suspect was arrested, the woman couldn’t pick him out of photo lineup. But she had seen the dog, a border collie named Rover, urinate on the tire of the man’s truck.

The Davis lab was contacted and the suspect ended up pleading guilty to attempted sexual assault.