DNA Database Solves Rape at University of Virginia
In the darkness of the early morning hours of 26 August 1999, a young University of Virginia student awoke to find a gun pointed at her head. The assailant forced her and a male friend spending the night to roll over on their stomachs. Terrorized, they obeyed their attacker. After robbing the man of some cash, the intruder put a pillow over the man's head and raped the female student. The female was blindfolded with her own shirt and led around the house while the intruder searched for other items to steal.
Throughout the entire ordeal, the intruder kept his gun to the back of the male student's head, daring him to look at him and telling him if he tried he would blow his head off. The assailant forced the young woman to take a shower in the hope that any evidence of the crime would be washed away. After helping himself to a can of beer, the attacker left before dawn taking with him the cash, the confidence, and the sense of safety of his victims. Even though the assailant had tried to be careful and clean up after the sexual assault, he had left behind enough of his personal body fluids to link him to this violent crime.
The police investigating the crime collected some saliva from the beer can. In addition, evidence technicians found some small traces of semen on the bed sheets that could not be seen with the naked eye. These samples were submitted to the Virginia Department of Forensic Sciences in Richmond along with control samples from other occupants of the residence where the crime occurred. The DNA profiles from the beer can and the bed sheets matched each other, but no suspect had been developed yet. Because of intense darkness and then the blindfold, the only description police had from the victims was that the suspect was black, medium height, and felt heavy set.
A suspect list was developed by the Charlottesville Police Department that contained over 40 individuals, some from the sex offender registry and some with extensive criminal histories who were stopped late at night in the area of the home invasion. Unfortunately, no further leads were available leaving the victims as well as other University of Virginia students and their parents suspicious and fearful. The police were at the end of their rope and considered asking many of the people on the suspect list to voluntarily donate blood samples for purposes of a DNA comparison. The top suspects were systematically eliminated by DNA evidence leaving the police frustrated.
Then on 5 October, six long weeks after the crime had been committed, the lead detective on the case, Lieutenant J.E. 'Chip' Harding of the Charlottesville Police Department, received a call that he describes as being 'one of the most exciting phone calls in my 22 years of law enforcement.' A match had been obtained from the crime scene samples to a convicted offender sample submitted to the Virginia DNA Database several years before. The DNA sample for Montaret D. Davis of Norfolk, Virginia was among 8000 samples added to the Virginia DNA Database at the beginning of October 1999. (Since 1989, a Virginia state law has required all felons and juveniles 14 and older convicted of serious crimes to provide blood samples for DNA testing.)
A quick check for the whereabouts of Mr. Davis found him in the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail. Ironically, because of a parole violation, he had been court ordered weeks before to report to jail on what turned out to be the same day as the rape. Amazingly enough he had turned himself in at 6 p.m. just 14 hours after committing the sexual assault! Unless he would have bragged about his crime, it is doubtful that Mr. Davis would ever have made it on the suspect list without the power of DNA testing and an expanding DNA database. At his jury trial in April 2000, Mr. Davis was found guilty of rape, forcible sodomy, and abduction among other charges and sentenced to a 90-year prison term.
The content of this page is reprinted with permission from Forensic DNA Typing: Biology, Technology, and Genetics of STR Markers (2nd Edition), written by Dr. John Butler of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and published by Academic Press, an imprint of ElSevier, New York. The full work is available for purchase from the publisher's online store.
