Re: Fluffy Ratkiller case

On Fri, 10 Mar 2006 22:54:37 GMT, "Kris Baker"
<kris.baker@xxxxxxxxxxxx> promised to tell the truth, the whole truth
and nothing but the truth but instead wrote:

The cat who helped solve the murder case was Snowball.....which my daughter
just reminded me of. This was on a Discovery Channel crime show, and one
detail they talked about (but not mentioned in the story) was that because
the cats lived on PEI, there was less chance of DNA dilution. Apparently,
PEI is home to very inbred, crime-solving cats.

Goddamn! Right next door, here, and I never heard of it!!!

It is a tiny island, just 224 km (140 mi) long and 64 km (40 mi) wide
at its widest point (and only a small bit of it is near that wide). I
can imagine the cat population would be extremely inbred.
Crime-solving, on the other hand, was a surprise.

Thanks for going to the effort to track down this extremely
interesting story for me, especially with the local flavour and all!

Good old Snowball.

ronnie

http://www.exn.ca/Stories/1997/04/24/01.asp

Cat hair convicts Canadian murder subject

By Discoverychannel.ca Staff, April 25, 1997

Hair of cat convicts murder suspect - The headline reads like a modern day
Edgar Allan Poe story but this macabre tale is fact not fiction.
In 1994, a 32-year-old woman disappeared from her home in Richmond, Prince
Edward Island. Her abandoned car was discovered within days and three weeks
later a man's leather jacket stained with the victim's blood was found,
stuffed in a plastic bag, in a wooded area eight km from her home. Several
white domestic cat hairs were found in the lining.

The woman's body was found in a shallow grave a few months later and police
arrested her former common-law husband. The officers recalled seeing a white
cat named Snowball at the man's home during an investigation.

They sent a blood sample from the cat and hair from the jacket to Stephen J.
O'Brien and his research team at the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the
U.S. National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland.

The scientists matched the genetic material from one of the cat hairs to the
DNA in Snowball's blood.

To ensure that this kind of match wasn't a chance occurrence, the RCMP asked
a local veterinarian to draw random blood samples from 19 cats. O'Brien
studied the DNA in those samples along with blood from nine U.S. cats. The
likelihood that that the jacket hairs would match Snowball's DNA just by
chance was computed at about one in 45 million.

They presented their findings in court and the jury convicted the suspect of
second-degree murder last July.

Corporal Phonse MacNeil, from the RCMP detachment in Summerside in Prince
Edward Island, told Associated Press that the DNA evidence was "a major
contributing factor," in the conviction.

The case was reported in this week's issue of the journal Nature.


--
"The very deaf, as I am, hear the most astounding things all
'round them, which have not, in fact, been said." - Henry Green
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