New DNA-testing law leads to matches in 16 cold cases

ST. LOUIS -- A new state law requiring collection of DNA samples from all convicted felons has led to 16 matches in a database of unsolved crimes since Jan. 1, including two homicides, three rapes, seven burglaries and two robberies, officials said.

"We're really excited," said Robin Rothove, head of the convicted offender DNA profiling unit for the Missouri State Highway Patrol. "We always knew what this new tool could do."

Before the new law went into place, DNA samples were required to be taken only from violent felons and sex offenders.

The samples go into the national Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, which checks the samples against evidence gathered in unsolved crimes.

Eight of the 16 hits have been in St. Louis, including at least one rape, officials said. They have linked a prisoner convicted of forgery to a death investigation and a burglar to an old rape case.

Jennifer Joyce, a St. Louis lawyer,, said the new law will help Missouri experience the kind of success that Virginia has had since passing a similar law in 1990. More than 1,200 cases there have been solved through the all-felon DNA samples.

"They have solved murders by people whose only conviction was writing a bad check," she said. "I don't have any reason to believe it will be different here."

As of Friday, the state had collected 7,563 samples from prisoners and convicts on probation or parole. But that's only a fraction of the 100,000 offenders currently under the supervision of the Department of Corrections.

And after all of those samples have been collected, lab workers are expected to deal with samples from about 28,000 new felons each year.

"Unless we get some federal grants, it's going to take us three to six years to work through the backlog from the initial avalanche of samples coming in," said Bill Marbaker, assistant director of the Highway Patrol's crime lab in Jefferson City.

The two lab technicians and four scientists doing the work in Jefferson City are inundated, having already seen three times more samples than they usually test in a year.

"We can't run them as fast as they're sending them to us," Marbaker said. "They're coming in by the boxload, by mail or couriers, from all over the state."

Criminal court fines pay for the testing program, and lab officials are planning to hire more workers. Also, they expect to have new equipment in place within the next three months that can analyze the samples 16 times faster than they are now.