The Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) is a system of DNA profiles that the police use to hunt for matches to murders, and the profile found at the Vincent scene was scanned through CODIS, but no match was found.Ĭut forward to 2017: The Contra Costa County sheriff’s office decided to submit the samples and have them run through the more rigorous California state forensics system, which came up with a possible, but not definite, match to a man named Joey Lynn Ford, who died in 1997. In 1985, she was brutally raped and strangled, and it wasn’t until 2002 that DNA evidence was able to produce a profile from the DNA collected. This is the case with Virginia Vincent, a 57-year-old resident of Danville, California.
Photo credit: Contra Costa County Office of the SheriffĪs we will see, often, by the time a body is exhumed to catch a murderer, it’s one of the most sentimental gestures that a society can do for a grieving family, as the murderers themselves are dead or already behind bars, making prosecution redundant at best, pointless at worst. Here are ten such cases where bodies were exhumed, leading to the solving of a murder case. While it is rare, sometimes new leads, new ideas, and new breakthroughs motivate authorities to exhume the body of someone who had been written off simply as accidental death or an unsolved murder, only for the results of the post-exhumation investigation to bring about a conviction. Families often wait years with no closure as the silenced victims are buried, just like their cases, becoming one of the unlucky “ cold case” files that sometimes linger for decades.īut occasionally, thankfully, this isn’t always the end of the story. Even with the most cutting-edge technologies at our fingertips, not only is detective work extremely difficult, but sometimes, errors are simply made by medical examiners around the world-mistakes which result in a murderer going free. Despite murder being a crime that most people feel is the lowest of the low, deserving of the ultimate penalty, it has been estimated that one third of all murders in the United States will go unsolved.
0 kommentar(er)
