SPY EYES

The advancement in medical sciences has not only been a great blessing for ailing humanity, but also greatly helpful in tracing out offenders and consequently bringing them to justice.This has been so helpful in identifying and tracing offenders that a whole discipline as forensic science has come into being. The invention of DNA is not less than a revolution, as it helped resolve blind cases, wherein investigators were groping in the dark having no clue of the offenders.

In 1983, the body of a 15-year old girl was found raped and murdered in the grounds of Carlton Hayes Hospital. A semen sample recovered from her body indicated that the culprit had group A and an enzyme profile shared by only 10 per cent of the male population.

Unfortunately the police investigation failed to trace and apprehend the culprit behind this heinous crime.

Then in 1986, another girl was raped and murdered in the same area and the same fashion and the semen samples of the rapist matched with the culprit of 1983′s case. These finding led the police to believe that the both murders were committed by the same man and that he lived in the surrounding area.

The police arrested a local man named Richard Buckland. He confessed to the second girl’s murder but denied having anything to do with the first girl’s murder.

Richard Buckland was very lucky; he might have gone to jail, had Dr Alec Jeffreys not just invented DNA fingerprinting. DNA is the blueprint of every living thing. In each person parts of the DNA sequence are unique. Dr Jeffreys found a way to extract DNA from body tissue and put it into readable form. Using this technique, Jeffreys compared semen samples from both murders against a blood sample from Buckland, which proved that two murders were committed by the same man but that man was not Richard Buckland. Buckland became the first wrongly accused person to be freed based on DNA testing.

The police then took blood samples from over 4,500 men in the area, but none was found to match the semen taken from the two girls. Colin Pitchfork was one of those men but he thought of a plan to escape justice. He persuaded a colleague at the bakery named Ian Kelly impersonate him in the DNA fingerprinting. Pitchfork removed his photo from his passport and replaced it with a photo of Ian Kelly. When he gave a sample of his blood Kelly used the altered passport as evidence that he was Colin Pitchfork.

Pitchfork might have got away with it but Ian Kelly mentioned it in a pub. A woman who heard him as worried and eventually she contacted the police. When police questioned Ian Kelly he confessed that he did indeed take the blood test instead of Pitchfork. Upon this, Collin Pitchfork was arrested and his DNA profile was found to match those of the semen samples recovered from the two murdered girls. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life in prison. This was first case wherein an offender was identified and traced and subsequently brought to justice.

DNA isn’t just about catching criminals. It is also used to eliminate suspects and identification of bodies.

DNA can be used to mark property and aid recovery from the thieves. By Maheen Rehman