A murder in November last year was allegedly solved after police resubmitted samples to Queensland's troubled forensic testing laboratory for further analysis after scientists had previously ruled them insufficient for further processing. QPS Inspector David Neville told an inquiry into the government-owned laboratory that 33 murder scene samples were returned with profiles after police asked for them to be retested.
Inspector Neville said one of the samples taken from the unnamed murder victim's calf had returned a usable DNA profile that had identified the accused. When he first raised the case with Catherine Allen, a senior manager within Queensland Health's Forensic and Scientific Services, he was told that this was an outlier. The interim report by inquiry head Walter Sofronoff KCSofronoff KC last week found that laboratory scientists gave untrue or misleading statements about the detection of DNA in some crime scene samples between early 2018 and June this year.
Despite the possibility of an interpretable profile Inspector Neville told the inquiry in evidence that he repeatedly brought up concerns with Ms Allen about the thresholds after the murder case last year, crime scene samples did not contain enough DNA for analysis and were not processed further under an agreement between Queensland Health and the Queensland Police Service.
A QPS review of 160 samples labeled by Queensland Health as having insufficient DNA for further processing found 51 about a third had yielded a profile when further tested, he said.
Inspector Neville said that we really needed to look at the threshold to maximize our chances of getting profiles.