A man who never knew his father was the missing link Santa Ana
cold-case detectives needed to solve the apparent sexual assault and
murder of a young mother and the shooting of her friend in 1978.
The case was solved earlier this month using DNA taken from crime scenes to identify family members of a suspected criminal.
California is one of three states that permit the technique, called familial searching. It has led to the 2010 arrest of a man suspected of being the "Grim Sleeper," a serial killer who terrorized South Los Angeles for two decades, and the 2011 arrest of a young man linked to the sexual assault of a woman at a coffee shop near the Santa Cruz Harbor.
The Santa Ana case marks the first time familial DNA has led to an Orange County crime being solved.
Mary Hong, a forensic scientist at the Orange County Crime Lab in Santa Ana, has been trying to solve the homicide of then 26-year-old Lynda Susan Saunders since 1996, when she developed a DNA profile of the perpetrator using semen left on the victim.
In the early 2000s, Hong retested the evidence using new DNA technology that provided a better identification of the suspect. The DNA profile was sent to the California Department of Justice's data bank and to the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, but there was no match.
The decades-old sexual assault and killing of Saunders and shooting of her friend, Michael Scott Reynolds, then 28, went cold. But in 2006, the Santa Ana Police Department's Cold Case Unit was formed to review more than 250 unsolved deaths.
read the whole article here:
http://www.ocregister.com/news/dna-379543-santa-familial.html
California is one of three states that permit the technique, called familial searching. It has led to the 2010 arrest of a man suspected of being the "Grim Sleeper," a serial killer who terrorized South Los Angeles for two decades, and the 2011 arrest of a young man linked to the sexual assault of a woman at a coffee shop near the Santa Cruz Harbor.
The Santa Ana case marks the first time familial DNA has led to an Orange County crime being solved.
Mary Hong, a forensic scientist at the Orange County Crime Lab in Santa Ana, has been trying to solve the homicide of then 26-year-old Lynda Susan Saunders since 1996, when she developed a DNA profile of the perpetrator using semen left on the victim.
In the early 2000s, Hong retested the evidence using new DNA technology that provided a better identification of the suspect. The DNA profile was sent to the California Department of Justice's data bank and to the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, but there was no match.
The decades-old sexual assault and killing of Saunders and shooting of her friend, Michael Scott Reynolds, then 28, went cold. But in 2006, the Santa Ana Police Department's Cold Case Unit was formed to review more than 250 unsolved deaths.
read the whole article here:
http://www.ocregister.com/news/dna-379543-santa-familial.html
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