Database comes up with link
By Kevin Flynn, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)
Published January 28, 2008 at 12:30 a.m.
The nation's 18-year-old effort to build a national database of criminal DNA evidence slowly is paying off - it took seven years after Diego Olmos-Alcalde entered the Wyoming prison system before he was identified as a suspect in a Boulder rape and murder.
The FBI has operated the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, since 1994, but there are still several states that don't fully contribute either crime-scene DNA analyses or DNA profiles of many convicted criminals.
Police had been without a solid suspect since Susannah Chase, a University of Colorado student, was raped and murdered in 1997. In 2004, a then-new DNA testing procedure established that the suspect was Hispanic or American Indian. But that was all the genetics revealed until Friday, when a match was made with Olmos-Alcalde.
Wyoming, where Olmos-Alcalde was imprisoned from 2000 to last summer on a kidnapping conviction, has been collecting DNA samples from convicted felons since 1997. The state statute calls for samples to be taken from prisoners just before their release. However, Melinda Braz- zale, spokeswoman for the Wyoming Department of Corrections, said the state's policy is to collect the samples when prisoners first enter the system.
It was unclear Sunday when the sample was taken in Wyoming for Olmos-Alcalde. Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner said the information from the database came recently. Olmos-Alcalde was released in July.
If his DNA sample had been taken and entered into CODIS when he entered prison in 2000, it could have been matched to the Chase case much earlier. But Wyoming doesn't take a sample if an offender already is in CODIS, Brazzale said.
"I don't know if we took it from him or if someone else did," she said Sunday. "But we have to make sure they have it when they leave."
Wyoming has 197 offender profiles in CODIS, according to FBI figures. By contrast, Colorado has 65,141 in the database. Nationally, as of October, CODIS had just more than 5 million DNA profiles of convicted criminals. It also contained 194,785 genetic profiles from unsolved crime scenes. The computer-aided system looks for matches among the profiles - sometimes turning up evidence linking the same unknown perpetrator to two or more crimes - and scans the criminal database for matches.
That apparently is how Olmos-Alcalde, who was not previously known as a suspect, was linked to Chase's murder.
flynnk@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5247
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