[pepsionice]

I am reminded of a German police hunt for a ‘phantom-killer’ who’d killed one police female and was connected to around 20 different murders around Germany (around 20 years ago). The one physical description put out...the killer was a teenage female. All of the 20-odd dead were connected by the same DNA situation at the scene.

Eventually, a new team was brought in (thousands of hours already spent in pursuing this killer). New detective looks at everything...then pulls out a blank (new) DNA kit and sends it to the lab. Comes back...’phantom-killer’. Lab got excited.

Nothing makes sense. Couple of detectives go to the company making the DNA swabs and says they get them from a factory in Austria. Detectives go there...hot day...folks busy in the small factory. ‘Boss’ doesn’t know nothing about the DNA swabs....he just makes x-type swabs and sells them in a box of 10,000. Detectives note several big thick-armed Austrian women...sweaty from the heat carrying around the bundles of the plain swabs. Obviously, swabs were contaminated.

Whole ‘phantom-killer’ search shut down. Never was a ‘phantom-killer’. Each a separate murder by itself and the DNA was contaminated.

I look at this Ramsey case...lot of poor police work done in the first hours (maybe accidental), and think the DNA path is a joke.

[Rockingham]

Especially in the early years, DNA testing was sometimes botched. In high profile cases though, the best detectives and labs tend to be deployed. Given the nature of the crime and the passage of time in the Ramsey case, my guess is that the perp will already be known to the criminal justice system and will be found through DNA and then definitively nailed through an accumulation of other evidence. Who knows, but the perp may also already be dead.