Forensic DNA ethics_PhaseI

When Pam Kinamore left work on a Friday evening, July 12, 2002, she never came home.

Four days later a Louisiana state worker discovered her body near the Baton Rouge Whiskey Bay Bridge. An autopsy revealed she had died from gash wounds to her neck, and that her murder bore similarities to several other murders that occurred in the same area months earlier.

A serial killer was clearly at work. An FBI profile pegged the killer as a white man, aged 25 to 35. After months of telling the public they sought a white man in the slayings of five area women, authorities announced they were searching for a light-skinned, black man in his late 20s or early 30s.

A revolutionary new DNA test relying on Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) was one of the reasons behind law enforcement's about-face. A Sarasota, Fla., forensics lab studied DNA from the crime scenes and concluded the suspect was likely 80-percent African-American and 15-percent Native American. In other words, the Baton Rouge killer was probably not white at all. This information led to a break in the case after months of frustration, and helped police arrest the killer, Derrick Todd Lee, just four days later.

DNA ethnicity testing has already helped authorities pinpoint a suspect's race. Now research from the University of Arizona has revealed specific changes in a person's DNA blueprint can also explain variations in hair, skin and eye color.

"With this new analysis, we have a basis for a physical description from an individual's DNA," says Murray Brilliant, Lindholm professor of Mammalian Genetics at the University of Arizona College of Medicine Department of Pediatrics.

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