Pet DNA Helps Solve Murders
Patty
By Bettina Boxall
LOS ANGELES TIMES
December 30, 2001
Davis, Calif. - The two men wrapped Elizabeth Ballard's body in plastic. They
vacuumed and scrubbed the room in which she had been killed. They scoured the
car trunk in which they transported her corpse to its shallow grave in the New
Mexico desert.
They tried to cleanse the world of anything linking them to her death, but a
single dog hair thwarted them.
It belonged to Hercules, a reddish-brown pit bull mix owned by one of the men.
The hair was found on one of Ballard's socks and helped send the pair to prison
for her 1998 murder.
The hair was matched to Hercules in a laboratory in this Northern California
college town, where scientists are pioneering the use of animal DNA as evidence
in criminal cases. In some cases Spot and Puff are providing evidence against
their owners' killers. In others they are convicting the owners themselves.
The blood of a Seattle dog was instrumental in convicting gang members who
murdered the couple it lived with. Urine sprayed on a truck tire by an Iowa farm
dog helped identify his owner's assailant. Bits of dog feces on a shoe
implicated a suspect in the execution-style slayings of three Indiana
carpenters.
Though genetic testing has played an integral role in wildlife forensics for
more than a decade - linking game poachers and smugglers to their prey - law
enforcement has begun to use animal DNA in criminal prosecutions only in the
past few years. Still relatively rare, pet DNA evidence could become a valuable
forensics tool, say criminal experts.
Specimens often wind up here, either in the University of California, Davis,
Veterinary Genetics Laboratory or the offices of scientist Joy Halverson. The
veterinary lab even performed work for Scotland Yard earlier this year,
analyzing dog blood samples collected after a pub killing.
"A lot of the technology is a fallout from the human genome project. We just
applied that to animals," said Beth Wictum of the Davis veterinary genetics lab,
which has developed animal DNA profiles for genetic screening and parentage
verification of livestock and pets.
The first introduction of pet DNA evidence in a criminal court case is believed
to have occurred in Canada in 1996, when prosecutors used cat hairs found on a
bloodied jacket to link a Prince Edward Island man to the murder of his
estranged wife.
The DNA match was made at the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the National
Cancer Institute in Maryland, which had done extensive research in cat genetics
for its work on human disease.
"It just so happened the [genetic markers] we developed for the cat map had
forensic potential," said cancer institute staff scientist Marilyn
Menotti-Raymond, who, with colleague Stephen O'Brien, performed the cat hair
analysis.
Menotti-Raymond is collecting DNA samples from the 37 pure cat breeds and
expects eventually to move on to mixed breeds.
To say with a high degree of probability that a tissue sample comes from a
particular animal and not just any dog or cat requires a genetic profile of the
species - basically a map of genetic variability within the species.
The UC Davis lab has genetically profiled nearly a dozen domesticated species
for pedigree work, so when it makes a DNA fingerprint of an individual animal,
the lab can say how rare that particular sequence of genetic markers is.
"Anybody can DNA-type an animal, but unless you know how frequently the markers
appear, it's not going to be informative," said Wictum, forensics case manager
at the UC Davis lab.
Halverson's work also has played a key role in various criminal convictions. One
of the cases that drew her into forensics work was the Ballard murder.
Ballard had been Christopher Faviel's girlfriend during a break in his
relationship with Charles Martinez, a transvestite who went by the name of Eva.
When Faviel and Martinez got back together, Ballard continued to see Faviel and
publicly harassed Martinez for his cross-dressing.
One night when she showed up drunk at the men's house, Martinez hit her over the
head with a thermal coffee carafe and then strangled her with Faviel's help,
according to prosecutor Canon Stevens.
When Ballard's body was discovered a month later, her hair had been scattered
over the desert, making it difficult to collect trace evidence. But the state
criminal lab did find a few animal hairs on the socks Ballard was wearing.
One hair had a root. Lab analyst Philip Aviles thought it might be tested for
DNA. He searched the Internet and came across a Seattle homicide case involving
dog DNA, and that led to Halverson. She was sent a DNA extraction from the hair
root and a blood sample from Hercules, Martinez's dog. The hair and blood
matched, placing Ballard in Martinez and Faviel's home, despite their insistence
to police that she had never been there.
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