Posted on 06/25/2002 9:30:26 AM PDT by FresnoDA
SAN DIEGO ---- A police criminalist testified Monday that tiny pieces of evidence ---- hairs and carpet fibers ---- found in David Westerfield's house and motor home could link the Sabre Springs man to Danielle van Dam, the 7-year-old neighbor he is accused of kidnapping and murdering.
Tanya DuLaney, a trace evidence analyst with the San Diego Police Department, said blonde hairs, dog hairs and tan carpet fibers found on Westerfield's property were similar to Danielle's hair, the short brown-gray fur of the van Dam family dog and Danielle's bedroom carpet.
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DuLaney said she could not make a 100 percent match of the hair and fiber evidence.
Westerfield, 50, could face the death penalty if convicted of kidnapping and murdering Danielle. The young girl was reported missing Feb. 2. Her nude and decomposing body was found nearly four weeks later in rural East County.
Westerfield, a twice-divorced design engineer, kept his hands clasped in front of him during Monday's proceedings, occasionally writing notes and consulting with his attorneys.
Danielle's mother, Brenda van Dam, attended the entire hearing. The van Dams live two doors down the street from Westerfield and were passing acquaintances with him. Damon van Dam sat with his wife during the morning session.
Day 12 of Westerfield's trial was dominated by the hair and fiber testimony of DuLaney, who told jurors that light brown-blonde hairs found in Westerfield's motor home and house were similar to Danielle's hair in color, length, diameter. Westerfield has short, dark hair.
Jurors heard testimony that DNA evidence will show Danielle could have left the blonde hairs found on sheets and pillow cases taken from Westerfield's master bedroom ---- the first possible evidence placing the second-grader upstairs in his home.
"They could have come from Danielle van Dam," DuLaney said of tests performed on the hairs. "All six of them."
Further testimony on the hair samples is expected today or later this week when prosecutors are expected to wrap up their side of the case.
Meanwhile, Westerfield's defense attorney, Steven Feldman, focused on what didn't match, having DuLaney go over hair after hair found in the motor home ---- some brown and others color-treated blonde ---- which were determined not to be Danielle's because of color, length or dye.
Earlier in the trial, Brenda van Dam testified her daughter's hair was never dyed and Danielle had a haircut about a week before she disappeared. Van Dam also had testified she took Danielle to Westerfield's house to sell Girl Scout cookies a few days before Danielle disappeared. She testified her daughter went into the house briefly, but did not go upstairs.
The tedium of the fiber and hair testimony prompted Judge William Mudd to give jurors an extra long afternoon break.
Feldman followed the same line of questioning with the carpet fibers, asking about fibers that didn't match. He called attention to a lack of physical evidence putting Danielle in Westerfield's black Toyota 4Runner, the car Westerfield drove when he went to get his motor home on Feb. 2 ---- the morning Danielle was discovered missing.
None of Danielle's hair or blood was found in the vehicle, another police criminalist, David Cornacchia, testified. Nor were any of the carpet fibers lifted from the soles of Westerfield's 25 pairs of shoes similar to Danielle's bedroom carpet, DuLaney said.
Also on Monday, DuLaney told jurors about finding five carpet fibers in Westerfield's motor home that were similar in size and shape to Danielle's bedroom carpet.
She showed jurors enlarged pictures, showing the fibers side by side with those from Danielle's bedroom and magnified 400 times, to illustrate how the fibers were consistent.
Under questioning from Feldman, Westerfield's defense attorney, DuLaney said it was possible that many houses in a development like the Sabre Springs neighborhood where the van Dams and Westerfield lived could have the same carpet.
She also talked about dog hairs found in dryer lint thrown away in Westerfield's garage. More hair was found in the hallway carpet of his motor home, on a bath mat in the motor home and on a white towel. Those hairs were consistent with the hair on van Dam's dog, Leyla, DuLaney testified. Westerfield does not have a dog.
Brenda van Dam testified earlier in the trial that her daughter would often roll around with Leyla, especially after she had changed into her pajamas before going to bed.
While the dog hair found in Westerfield's house and motor home had the unusual pigment formations found in Leyla's hair, DuLaney said she could only say the hairs were similar, not exact matches.
Attempts to perform DNA tests on the hair were unsuccessful, said Holly Ernest, director of the UC Davis veterinary genetics lab. She briefly testified that there was not enough DNA on the dog hair sent to the university for testing to determine whether it belonged to Leyla.
Feldman did not ask Ernest any questions.
Testimony in the case continues today.
Contact staff writer Kimberly Epler at (760) 739-6644 or kepler@nctimes.com.
6/25/02
I used to be signed up to a lot of those newsgroups. I haven't had the time to find them again when I switched from macs to PCs.
Some (many) of the newsgroups are devoted sex pictures and also to a particular pornographic fetishes.
Yup, I've seen these in lists of newsgroups. There's everything under the sun in these newsgroups.
Having tens of thousands of pictures downloaded for free that someone has for the purposes of burning a CD is pretty easy to explain. If someone bulk downloads an entire newsgroup devoted of say, alt.binaries.pictures.asians for example. Strangely there are also several newgroups for the posting of japanese.anime movies
I used to be really interested in anime because I really loved the artistic style. I even drew some, (nothing X or even R rated). I also am into collecting clipart and sig tags. I completely understand about getting thousands of jpgs without knowing what I have. I have been so busy at work, that I have about 26,000 images that I have not gone through because it takes A HUGE amount of time to go through. Every once in a while, I do try going through some of it, and I am very surprised at what gets sent. I simply delete it. Good thing no kids go missing on my street. Occasionally, I burn these images to CD-RW to get them off the computer and to go through them later. It's very tough to go through thousands of jpgs and keeping the ones I want and deleting the ones I don't. Mine aren't all categorized; they're lumped into a folder called "Attachments".
So the inclusion of child porn and japanese anime porn in Mr. Westerfield's or his son's carefully catagorized *ahem* "collection", doesn't surprise me. There are several other perfectly legal explanations for this as well, imo.
Yes, I'm living proof I do this. I even have anime, but they're jpgs, and they're not pornographic, at least not the ones I've gone through.
Are you both Perl geeks? :)
I have a friend who enters this Perl contest every year to write the most obscure code in order to win something - not sure what.
And, I believe, that the VD's were about to take a trip there. Hmmmmmmm............
Did they drive down Dehesa Road?
Exactly, and same goes for when she was in DW's house, and a likely reason for tranferral to the MH even if she never went in it.
Greg, about the only thing I can say, is that you have a unspecific generality, with no information content.
You conclusion does not follow the premise because the premise is incomplete. You seem to be trying to mimic the Johnny Cochran phrase from the OJ trial.
It doesn't work. BTW, have you been to the NED forum. I believe you might find it much more appealing.
donno about "geek" ...
I have a friend who enters this Perl contest every year to write the most obscure code in order to win something - not sure what.
The International Obfuscated C Code Competition (IOCCC) of ~1983.
Designed to show-off the most clever, yet insane looking code. No prize, just the cheers and jeers of your peers (sorry, I couldn't help it).
The Obfuscated Perl Code Competition came later. Same point, same reward.
I mean 'geek' in an endearing way. I would love to be a geek, but so far, I'm not smart enough as an engineer to be one. =(
So the kids hair was never combed in her whole life?
BWAAAAHAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You can get utility programs that will overwrite all the unallocated blocks on your hard drive with random garbage in multiple passes. Such programs can also overwrite the blocks belonging to specific files before deleting them. They are rather slow — especially wiping free space. However, they certainly should complicate any forensic analysis!
There are advanced techniques, such as the magnetic force microscope, that may allow overwritten data to be recovered in some cases. It depends on factors such as how long the data was there, whether the drive's physical properties changed between when the data was written and when it was overwritten, etc.
I recall hearing about a murder case in which the culprit sliced up a 5.25 in floppy with scissors because it contained an incriminating letter or something. The cops were able to tape the pieces back together sufficiently well to read the disk!
So would I; But where is Westerfields' prints ?
And where is his DNA ?
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