HIGHLIGHTS AND EVENTS

More than 45 years ago, Kathryn Donohue, a 31-year-old union secretary, went out for dinner in Georgetown with co-workers after work. Early the next morning, on March 3, 1979, a person found her body in a parking lot in Glenarden, Maryland, miles away from where she lived in Arlington, Virginia...

Since being awarded grant funding through the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s (BJA’s) Strengthening the Medical Examiner-Coroner (ME/C) System Program, the Broward County Office of Medical Examiner and Trauma Services (BCOMETS) has successfully trained seven forensic pathology fellows. BCOMETS has one current fellow nearing the completion of their fellowship, with another...

Florida’s District One Medical Examiner’s Office utilized funding from the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s (BJA’s) Strengthening the Medical Examiner-Coroner (ME/C) System Program to create the conceptual schematic design and layout for a new facility. This new facility will be the first ever standalone medical examiner’s office in their district’s 50-year history...

Gordon Cordeiro had been serving a term of life in prison without parole for charges stemming from an apparent drug deal robbery gone bad. Court records show that on August 11, 1994, Timmy Blaisdell, 20, of Kula was shot and killed, and his body was left at the bottom of...

Through the Bureau of Justice Assistance’s (BJA’s) Strengthening the Medical Examiner-Coroner System (ME/C) Program, Lehigh County Coroner’s Office (LCCO) of Allentown, Pennsylvania improved their professional standards and services by achieving accreditation through the National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME). Obtaining NAME accreditation represents a “seal of approval” from a community...

Congratulations and welcome to all BJA Forensics Programs FY24 grantees!...

The City of Cape Coral, Florida utilized Paul Coverdell Forensic Science Improvement Grants (Coverdell) Program funding to purchase a Crime-lite® AUTO for use in homicide investigations. The use of this full-spectral imaging device specifically assisted a neighboring law enforcement agency in detecting and documenting evidence in a homicide case that...

Using Paul Coverdell Forensic Science Improvement Grants (Coverdell) Program funding, the Maine Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) contracted with board-certified forensic pathologists which enabled the office to investigate a higher percentage of deaths in Maine without increasing fatigue or burnout of the full-time staff. Prior to the grant...

The Central Ohio Regional Crime Laboratory (CORCL) operates in conjunction with the Central Ohio Drug Enforcement Task Force under the Licking County Sheriff's Office. CORCL currently provides controlled substance and forensic analysis casework for seven counties and thirty-four law enforcement agencies located predominantly in southwest Ohio. CORCL currently operates on...

The Marion County Coroner’s Office has a unique fellowship program through their partnership with Indiana University School of Medicine which significantly enhances the education, training, and experience of forensic pathologists. This partnership is being utilized to develop a pipeline of future forensic pathologists by encouraging undergraduate and medical students to...

On August 15, 1983, the body of an adult female was found near a canal access road in the Ahwatukee area of Phoenix, Arizona. All initial attempts to identify the Jane Doe via fingerprints, dental records, and DNA testing failed, resulting in the identity of this Jane Doe being unknown...

On May 5, 1983, the Pottawatomie County Sheriff’s Office requested the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation investigate the suspicious disappearance of 19-year-old Melody Ann Jones who was a member of The Muscogee (Creek) Nation. That morning, Melody Ann Jones did not show up to work and a family member went...

An arrest has been made in a 1990 sexual assault and double homicide case out of DeKalb County, Georgia. 55-year-old Kenneth Perry faces multiple charges in connection to the murder of siblings Pamela and John Sumpter. Nearly 34 years after the attack, a federal grant “Prosecuting Cold Cases Using DNA”...

Jurn Norris, 69, formerly from Marina, has been identified as the perpetrator in the killings of Helga DeShon and Uicha Malgieri, both young military spouses slain in their apartments in 1979. According to the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office, they have not been able to file charges against Norris because...

Congratulations and welcome to all BJA Forensics Programs FY23 grantees!...

Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and New York City Police Commissioner Edward A. Caban announced that a Florida man has been charged in separate indictments for raping a woman in the Bronx and a woman in Manhattan two decades ago, after new DNA technology...

The San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, alongside the San Diego Police Department, convicted the killer of Larry Breen whose murder occurred on May 24, 1990. Mr. Breen was a petty officer and cook in the U.S. Navy stationed aboard the USS Fox CG-33. At the time of his death...

The convictions of Louis Wright, 65, have been vacated pursuant to a collaborative review by the Michigan Department of Attorney General’s Conviction Integrity Unit, the Calhoun County Prosecutor’s Office, the Michigan State Police Forensic Science Division, and the Western Michigan University Cooley Law School Innocence Project. This review concluded that...

In 2023, the DCS5 Fingerprint Enhancement System, which was funded by the City of Charlotte’s Coverdell award, was used to document processed evidence in a case involving financial crimes and fraud. The case involved 1.9 million USD in checks that were stolen and fraudulently deposited. A single fingerprint impression developed...

The fellow started promptly on July 1, 2018, and successfully completed all phases of the program. She completed over 200 autopsies, attended training from NAME and the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS), and presented a well-received poster concerning a very rare cause of sudden death. In the spring, she...

Thanks to the grant funds, the county was able to make the necessary improvements to a facility, increase storage capabilities with the purchase of a high-density mobile shelving unit, and send two death investigators to medicolegal death investigation training who subsequently achieved certification. The marked increase in caseload, internal staffing...

The performance of autopsies by a fellow reduced the overall caseload average for the full-time forensic pathologists, helping to keep them below 325 annual autopsies and preserving critical criteria that must be met for National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME) accreditation. The fellowship was an affordable and cost-effective approach to...

With the hiring of a fellow, the office was able to increase the number of autopsies performed by 6 percent when compared with the 12 months prior, which allowed the office to offer support to surrounding jurisdictions in need of forensic autopsy services. During this timeframe, the Milwaukee County Medical...

The portable X-ray machine has truly been an asset to the Kittitas County Coroner’s Office (KCCO) and to KCCO’s investigations. In the past, those cases requiring X-rays had to be transported to a local hospital for imaging, at considerable expense to KCCO. As a result, KCCO was very selective when...

Operation Identification (OpID) within the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University started ten years ago with the aim of locating, exhuming, and working towards identification for long-term unidentified human remains (UHRs) in South Texas. These UHRs represent border crossing deaths that had no DNA samples in CODIS, and little...

In January 1995, a man and woman were robbed at gunpoint by two men who had also sexually assaulted the woman. Days after the crime, Gerardo Cabanillas, who was 18 at the time, was arrested because he generally matched the description of one of the suspects. Mr. Cabanillas was coerced...

Through the support of their Strengthening the Medical Examiner-Coroner System Program grant, the State of Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has graduated three Forensic Pathology Fellows over the past two years. These fellows completed over 700 autopsies, participated in and published research projects, presented at the National Association...

The Idaho State Police Forensic Services is using Coverdell funding to ramp up a statewide Question Documents Program. This Program will also service laboratories throughout the country to help address the decreasing availability of Question Documents examination. The Idaho State Police Forensic Service also employed a Coverdell–funded employee to conduct...

Pennsylvania State Police charged Dorwart, 54, of Pleasure Road in Manheim Township, after using genealogical DNA to match semen recovered after the assaults to DNA collected from a Rutter’s cup Dorwart dropped into his trash in May, according to charging documents...

A Denver jury found Steven Cumberbatch (currently 61-years-old) guilty of murdering Rita DesJardine. Ms. DesJardine was 36-years old when in December 1994, her body was found in a Denver motel room. The jury found Cumberbatch guilty of one count of murder in the first degree and he was immediately sentenced...

A new $500,000 grant will enable the DNA testing of evidence held in cases, some dating back decades. The federal grant also covers the addition of detectives dedicated to the cases and a prosecutor for when they crack a case...

Recent performance data from grantees show that CEBR funding is responsible for more than 500 CODIS hits per week. Based on the reported metrics, the CEBR Program has contributed to approximately half of all CODIS hits to date. See the FBI's CODIS-NDIS Statistics page for more information on CODIS and BJA's DNA CEBR...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Justice Programs (OJP) has awarded two grants totaling $434,099 to the Ohio Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI). This funding will assist the BCI in meeting expected caseloads and enhance overall lab capacity. This much-needed investment will assist the Bureau of...

The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office announces the exoneration of Martin Santillan for his 1998 capital murder conviction after an exhaustive re-investigation initiated by Centurion Ministries, Inc., a Princeton, New Jersey-based innocence organization, and conducted by the Dallas County DA’s Office’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), which concluded that Mr. Santillan...

The DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office has been awarded a three-year Missing and Unidentified Human Remains (MUHR) Program grant in the amount of $500,000 to identify the remains of 27 individuals found in DeKalb County. The DeKalb County Cold Case Task Force will use these funds to catalog, report, test...

The husband of Deborah Lee Atrops has been arrested for her murder, 35 years after her death. The arrest of Robert Atrops was the first major case the Washington County Cold Case Unit has worked on since it began in 2020. The Washington County District Attorney’s Office secured a grant...

In 1991, Albert “Ian” Schweitzer was convicted for the sexual assault and murder of Dana Ireland. After 25 years of wrongful incarceration, on January 24, 2023, his conviction was dismissed based on new DNA testing that excluded him as a contributor to DNA evidence collected from the crime scene and...

Last winter, police in Denver, Colorado, announced that they had solved the cold-case murders of four women who had died about 40 years ago, all of whom had been the victims of one man—a previously unknown serial killer named Joe Michael Ervin. It took years of old-school police work and...

On November 18, 2022, in conjunction with the Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice, Strengthening the Medical Examiner-Coroner (ME/C) System Program Grant, the Office of the Medical Examiner, District 19 (OME-19), Florida became a fully accredited agency by the National Association of Medical Examiner’s (NAME). Since only twelve...

Maurice Hastings served more than 38 years in state prison for the 1983 murder of Roberta Wydermyer in California and two attempted murders, but new DNA evidence instead pointed to another man who died in prison in 2020. At the time of the victim's autopsy, semen was detected in an...

The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office (PBSO) will receive a $500,000 grant through the Department of Justice’s ‘Prosecuting Cold Cases Using DNA’ program. According to PBSO, the sheriff's office can now send DNA to private laboratories that use genetic genealogy testing. This testing option is currently not available at the...

In 2007, Terance Calhoun was convicted of sexual assault of two victims. DNA testing excluded him in 2007. Additional DNA testing was performed in 2019 by Bode confirming the original testing. On January 10, 2022, the Michigan State Police reported that a search of the FBI DNA database linked the...

The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office (MCAO) announced that it would receive about $3 million in grants from the Department of Justice to help victims of crime. MCAO’s $500,000 Prosecuting Cold Cases Using DNA (COLD) Program grant will enable additional DNA testing, the creation of a countywide database of cold cases...

The Denver Police Department and law enforcement partners today announced that through the continued determination of investigators, DNA evidence, investigative genetic genealogy and familial DNA search, the suspect in three Denver cold case homicides and an Adams County cold case homicide has been identified as Joe Michael Ervin (DOB: 6/25/51)...

District Attorney Jeannine M. Pacioni announced today that the U.S. Department of Justice has awarded the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office Cold Case Task Force a $535,000 grant for the use of DNA technology in cold-case investigations and prosecutions. With the support of the grant, the Cold Case Task Force...

Ted Louis Bradford spent almost 10 years in prison for a sexual assault he didn’t commit—and another four years awaiting a new trial—before he was retried and acquitted based on DNA evidence of his innocence in 2010...