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| The murder of Susannah Chase |
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Place: Boulder, Colorado
Crime: Rape and murder of college student Susanah Chase in 1997. Why authorities sought FDP testing: With no leads seven years after the student's murder, police sought testing in 2004 to determine the ethnic makeup of the DNA recovered from Chase's body. Lab that conducted FDP analysis: DNAPrint, a Florida-based commerical, for-profit laboratory. Outcome: The testing indicated that the DNA might be that of a Hispanic or Native American man. When announcing the results of the test in 2004, Boulder police noted that the DNA might not be that of Chase's assailant, but that they hoped the test results would jog memories and generate new leads. In 2008, a Chilean-born man, Diego Olmos-Alcalde, was arrested and charged with Chase's murder. Olmos-Alcalde had been convicted of kidnapping in Wyoming in 2001, but his DNA profile was not entered in the national DNA database until January 2008, a delay caused in part by a backlog in Wyoming of thousands of unanalyzed DNA profiles. After Olmos-Alcade's DNA profile was added, a match was soon made between his DNA profile and the profile of suspect in the Chase case; Olmos-Alcalde was arrested in February 2008 and convicted in 2009. |
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resources
| Cases OverviewCases Overview It is not known how often law enforcement agencies have turned to FDP as part of an attempt to identify an unknown suspect or victim; some reports claim that the method has been used in several hundre ... |
| Laws Overview Is forensic DNA phenotyping regulated?
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| Research Overview We are collecting references for papers, reports, conference presentations, or abstracts that report findings relevant to FDP. Our intent is to periodically publish an annotated bibliography that trac ... |