Word: phantoms
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...they studied the evidence, contradictions emerged that possibly should have raised red flags. The Phantom was not only a brutal killer - suspected of committing six homicides - but also a common thief. She had been involved in a car-dealership robbery and a school break-in, but in both cases others convicted of those crimes denied her existence...
...Phantom's list of accomplices showed no pattern, ranging from Slovaks to Serbs, Albanians to Romanians, and her territory stretched throughout Germany and into Austria and France. No one had ever seen her, no security camera had ever captured her image. But when witnesses described her, they sometimes said she looked like...
...until earlier this year that investigators figured something had to be very wrong. Trying to establish the identity of a burned corpse found in 2002, they were re-examining the fingerprints of a male asylum seeker taken from his asylum application made many years earlier. The fingerprints contained the Phantom's female DNA. Impossible, they thought, so they repeated the test with a different cotton swab - and this time found no trace of the Phantom...
...This raised suspicions that the DNA found at all the Phantom's crime scenes might be traced to a single innocent factory worker, probably employed to package the swabs. Cotton swabs are sterilized before being used to collect DNA samples, but while sterilizing removes bacteria, viruses and fungi, it does not destroy DNA. (Read a TIME cover story...
...Stefan König of the Berlin Association of Lawyers says the case of the phantom Phantom illustrates the risks of basing an investigation solely on DNA evidence. "DNA analysis is a perfect tool for identifying traces," he says. "What we need to avoid is the assumption that the producer of the traces is automatically the culprit. Judges tend to be so blinded by the shiny, seemingly perfect evidence of DNA traces that they sometimes ignore the whole picture. DNA evidence on a crime scene says nothing about how it got there. There is good reason for not permitting convictions...