The Restless Sleep:

Bronx Cold Case Suspect and Possible Serial Killer Arrested

The suspect in a 17-year-old murder was just arrested in Montenegro. There's a New York Post article about it here. It was an incredible investigation. Detective Sgt. Dennis Singleton just kept on it, took it as far as he could, (which involved tracking the guy as he went to other countries and possibly dismembered women wherever he lived) and when Singleton couldn't go any farther, he refused to let it just go dormant. Instead, he handed it off to Detective James Osorio in the Cold Case Squad's Bronx unit.

Good work, Detective James Osorio and Detective Sgt. Dennis Singleton.

The investigation looks like a textbook example of what can be accomplished with a little cooperation. It involved different units within the NYPD, law enforcement around the world, the FBI and Interpol and probably many others.

Good work everyone.

(The picture of the arrest is from Gothamist.)

DNA Database Expansion

Because of recent legislation allowing for the expansion of DNA collecting, I thought I would compare how much bigger New York's DNA database has grown since I wrote my book.

As of August 2004, there were 139,344 DNA profiles in the New York State collection, and the number of hits they got from them was 1,529. As of February 2007 they have 179,965 profiles, with 3,772 hits. Most of those hits are for sex crimes, by the way. When I wrote my book 7% of the hits were murder cases and 72% were for sex crimes.

Looking at those current totals now, I'd have to go back to my notes to see if the total I used in my book was the total number of profiles or the total number of samples they had in their possession, which would include both samples not yet analyzed and profiles. Because the grand total now would be 229,203 and that figure seems to make more sense in terms of tracking growth. Otherwise the database has grown about 40,000 samples in two years. Which actually makes sense. Analyzing 20,000 DNA profiles a years sounds like a lot. So maybe the figure I used was the total number of profiles and not the grand total of samples. (I'm sure everyone's eyes are blurring over by now.)

At the national level, there were 1,945,163 profiles when I wrote my book, and as of Decenber 2006, there were 4,138,015.

There's a ton of statistics about DNA collection online. I started to look around and frankly, got overwhelmed. But if you wanted to do a study of just how many DNA profiles were out there, and how many crimes and what kind were being solved, you could do a good job of it.

You could start with CODIS (Combined DNA Index System). But from there, it seems almost every law enforcement agency, attorney general, ie, here's California's, and on and on, has facts about what they are collecting (it's great!).

U.S. Expands DNA Collection

"The Justice Department is completing rules to allow the collection of DNA from most people arrested or detained by federal authorities, a vast expansion of DNA gathering that will include hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, by far the largest group affected." That's from a piece in today's New York Times by Julia Preston.

I appreciate the concerns expressed by representatives of the Innocence Project and other groups, there are potential dangers and we need to be vigilant. But I think there are more than enough good reasons to try and find a way to make this work.

The picture is of murder vicim Jody Bordeaux, which I found on a website called Justice Junction. She was murdered in Kansas in 1997.