Monday, February 28, 2000
DNA testing opens new door
BY STEVE KEMME
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Butler County plans to use DNA testing to try to find a serial killer authorities think may have slain as many as three women in the mid-1970s and early 1980s.
In two of the three Butler County slayings — May Hincher of Roselawn, killed in 1977, and Nancy Ann Theobald of Clifton Heights, killed in 1976 — the sheriff's department has hairs and other physical evidence that can be tested for a DNA match against suspects.
DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a genetic code in human cells that has a pattern unique to each person, except identical twins.
In other parts of the country and the world, DNA testing has been successfully used to solve old killings:
• On July 11, 1994, the naked body of 22-year-old Hope Denise Hall was found lying in her apartment in Petersburg, Va. She had been raped and stabbed 15 times.
In January 1997, authorities ran the DNA from blood found at the murder scene through a Virginia DNA databank of convicted felons. The DNA from the crime scene matched Shermaine Ali Johnson's blood sample.
A jury convicted him and a judge sentenced him to death.
• Otis Charles Avery left a party for a motorcycle gang in Detroit on Feb. 4, 1983. No one saw him again.
Thirteen years later, police acted on a tip and found human skeletal remains they thought might be Mr. Avery's. The DNA from a sample of his mother's blood matched the DNA from hair found with the bones. With DNA establishing the remains as Mr. Avery's, his killer was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
• After stabbing his girlfriend to death in 1993 in Birmingham, England, Peter Hastings polished his shoes to get rid of the evidence.
But he didn't realize the polish actually sealed in microscopic specks of blood.
In 1997, the DNA from a hair that had been found on Mr. Hastings' belt matched the DNA from the speck of blood on his shoes. It led to his conviction and life imprisonment.
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