Posted on 10/27/2002 9:30:45 AM PST by KS Flyover
DNA lets the dead speak in Carr trial
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Carr brothers' capital murder trial is offering, for the first time, a clearer picture of events surrounding a quadruple homicide Dec 15, 2000. In this account, drawn from testimony for the prosecution last week, forensic investigators piece together evidence. Some content is graphic, and reader discretion is advised.
Heather Muller can't tell about the horrible last moments of her life. Still, she has become one of the most important witnesses against the men police suspected of raping, robbing and killing her.
Muller would give the kind of testimony difficult for suspects to refute and lawyers to rip apart, the kind found under the bright lights of the forensic laboratory by detectives who dress in white coats and surgical scrubs.
A woman who survived the shooting that killed Muller and three other friends had already done more than anyone could ask. But police needed more. While her actions were heroic, the 25-year-old eyewitness initially provided ambiguous descriptions and couldn't pick out both suspects, Jonathan and Reginald Carr, in photo lineups.
Police knew lawyers could attack any iffy identifications. They needed something more concrete, and there would be no confession. In the interrogation room on the sixth floor of City Hall, the suspects weren't saying much.
Heather Muller, however, spoke volumes without saying a word. Her silent testimony started at the county's forensic science center.
Sedgwick County coroner Mary Dudley had seen the four homicide victims before dawn Dec 15, 2000, lying in a soccer field near 29th Street North and Greenwich Road.
By 2 p.m. that day, she and others began conducting their examinations at the forensic science center, 1109 N. Minneapolis Ave.
All homicide victims arrive at the center under lock and key. No one can unlock them without police supervision.
Diana Schunn, a registered nurse trained in the science of taking evidence from rape victims, examined Muller first. She used cotton swabs to gather samples of possible biological clues, drying the swabs to protect any evidence. She then noted injuries, which documented brutal force.
Schunn, who works at Via Christi Regional Medical Center-St. Joseph Campus, was the first nurse in Kansas to specialize in taking rape evidence. She's still considered the best.
When Schunn was finished, Dudley took the samples, sealed them and placed them on a gurney before proceeding with a head-to-toe examination of each victim.
Autopsies can reveal a wealth of information. They can determine the trajectory of bullets. Dudley followed the paths of the shots that killed Muller and her friends. The angles confirmed the survivor's story that all had been shot in the head as they knelt in the snow.
The examinations can recover important evidence, such as the bullet found in Muller's close friend, Aaron Sander. That would help firearms expert Gary Miller match all the deaths to the same gun used in two crimes the previous week.
Dudley had no problem determining the cause of death: the gunshots to the head. Despite reports that some of the victims had been found breathing, and one had been belatedly taken by ambulance to the hospital, Dudley found wounds so extensive that even immediate medical attention wouldn't have saved them.
Studying all four victims would take the better part of two days. In each exam, Dudley took blood and other samples, including the one bullet, and gingerly placed them in separate paper envelopes. She sealed them, dated them, and signed them, passing them to crime scene investigators who walked the evidence through a carefully documented chain of custody.
Usually the evidence would have stayed at the Forensic Science Center, but lab workers there were overwhelmed after two quadruple homicides in eight days.
When the director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation called offering help, homicide chief Ken Landwehr said he had plenty of work for Topeka.
Joe House, a KBI forensic biologist in Topeka, received 106 items from Wichita, including carpet cuttings from the crime scene at 12727 E. Birchwood Drive, clothing from victims and suspects, hairs found in various stages of the investigation, and the autopsy samples marked by Dudley.
Before scientists begin analyzing evidence for traces of DNA, which can identify individuals by their genetic characteristics, they must first find substances to test. Blood, sweat and saliva will work. Hair or semen will, too. Stains can just as easily turn out to be ice cream or catsup.
House's job was to find and name the stains. He began by placing each item separately on white butcher-block paper in the "shakedown room." He unfolded clothes and laid out objects, allowing the white paper to catch any little pieces so they could be tested.
As House searched the pockets of pants taken from one of the Carr brothers, he found something police missed. It looked like a gold ring. No, it was silver. House tagged it and sealed it in an envelope. A picture would later show the ring on the finger of Heather Muller.
House continued to look for stains and found plenty. He has all sorts of ways to find out what made a spot. He can shine it under an ultraviolet light, where human residue glows. He can dot a minuscule sample with a chemical that turns red if it's semen.
When House finds stains that turn up biological material, he cuts them out and marks them.
Those go to Sindey Schueler, a molecular surgeon who can tell more about someone by a cell they slough off than they know about themselves. She uses chemicals to break open the head of a sperm cell and go into the nucleus. She can pull out a tiny bit of a twisted ladder -- a fragment of DNA, holding the secret of life.
Schueler knows it by its full name, deoxyribonucleic acid. It contains both sets of chromosomes, from mother and father, that give people brown eyes or blue and determine who will go bald. Because everyone is different, down to the little lines on their fingertips, everyone has different DNA.
Within that small piece, Schueler can break out an even tinier fragment of 13 parts. With a piece of equipment called the 310 Genetic Analyzer, she puts a florescent tag on each part and counts the number of times they repeat from the mother and father. Individuality can then be reduced to a numbers graph.
Schueler examined the codes from the stains found by police and compared them with the blood and hair and saliva samples of Heather Muller, her friends and the Carr brothers.
The most stunning results came from Muller.
Unlike her friends, Muller never was taken to an ATM the night of Dec 14 and morning of Dec 15. She stayed behind in the triplex while the rest were forced to withdraw more than $1,800 from their bank accounts.
She was treated brutally. At one point, the survivor described Muller -- known for her beautiful singing voice and commitment to her Catholic parish -- sitting on the floor, staring as if in shock.
Her blood would show up on both brothers.
In numerous, time-consuming DNA tests Schueler would run over the next two years, she would find many partial DNA profiles and some mixtures of several people. She can pick out the individuals, even in the mixed genetic pool of a stain.
Most of the clear profiles belonged to Jonathan Carr. He left his genetic mark on the carpet in the triplex and on both women. Only a tiny slice of Reginald Carr could be identified in one sample.
But several single profiles -- no mixtures -- exactly matched Muller's DNA. And it was on both brothers.
Muller's blood turned up on the plaid boxer shorts of Jonathan Carr. Her blood also showed up in splatters on the red shorts, gray shirt and white T-shirt Reginald Carr's girlfriend said he wore the morning of the killings.
As is her practice, Schueler figured out the odds of someone else with Muller's same DNA profile randomly showing up on the Carrs' clothing. Her answer was staggering: one in 6 quadrillion.
A quadrillion, with 15 zeroes, is far more people than have ever lived and more than the number of stars man can count in the heavens.
Heather Muller would offer an identification more powerful than any eyewitness could ever provide.
Testimony in the capital murder trial of Jonathan and Reginald Carr continues Tuesday.
I would choose to argue that God had no hand whatsoever in the heinous acts upon that woman.
It was the hand of man that did it. It is the state of our civilization, of our treatment of each other as human beings, the weakness of man to choose the easy road, the evil route to satisfy worldly desires.
God gave us the freedom to choose, for good or for bad, and these two men made their choice.
God no more intervened in their commission of the act, then he did when these two men were conceived.
That is the what God did. He gave us freedom of choice, and look what some people do with it.
Were God to intervene in all unneeded/unfair/unnatural/undeserving acts of man and nature, there would be little activity on Earth, and life would have little value.
I discovered that a good way to check for other sources for this story is with the Google News Search.
AMEN! Beautifully written.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.