“I THINK I’M INNOCENT"
DNA analysis is the most reliable crime-scene tool, having exonerated dozens of wrongly convicted people. But it can sometimes lead to tragic mistakes.
WWhen the DNA results came back, even Lukis Anderson thought he might have committed the murder.
“I drink a lot,” he told public defender Kelley Kulick as they sat in an interview room at the jail in Santa Clara County, California. Sometimes he blacked out, so it was possible he had done something he didn’t remember. “Maybe I did do it.”
Kulick shushed him. “Lukis, shut up,” she said. If she was going to keep her new client off death row, he couldn’t go around saying things like that. But she agreed. It looked bad. “Let’s just work through the evidence to really see what happened.”
Before he was charged with murder, Anderson had been a 26-year-old homeless alcoholic with a long rap sheet who spent his days hustling for change in San Jose. The murder victim, Raveesh Kumra, was a 66-year-old investor who lived in Monte Sereno, a Silicon Valley enclave ten miles and many socioeconomic rungs away.
Around midnight on November 29, 2012, three men broke into Raveesh’s 7,000-square-foot mansion. They found him watching CNN in the living room, tied him up, blindfolded him, and gagged him with duct tape decorated with pictures of mustaches. They found his ex-wife, Harinder Kumra, asleep upstairs, hit her on the mouth, blindfolded her, and tied her up next to Raveesh down in the kitchen. Then they rummaged for cash and jewelry.
After the men left, Harinder, still blindfolded, felt her way to a phone and called 911. Police arrived, then an ambulance. One of the paramedics declared Raveesh dead. The coroner would later conclude that he had been suffocated by the mustache duct tape.
Three and a half weeks later, the police arrested Anderson. His DNA had been found on Raveesh’s fingernails, suggesting that Raveesh had struggled as the intruders tied him up. Anderson was charged with murder. Kulick was appointed to his case.
Anderson tried to make sense of a crime he had no memory of committing. “Nah, nah, nah. I don’t do things like that,” he said. “But maybe I did.”
Months would pass before anyone figured out what had really happened, which was that Lukis Anderson’s DNA had found its way onto the fingernails of a dead man he had never even met.
The volunteers hadn’t touched one another, yet their DNA ended up on each other’s hands.
Back in the 1980s, when DNA forensic analysis was new, crime labs needed a speck of bodily fluid—usually blood, semen, or spit— to generate a genetic profile. But in 1997, Australian scientist Roland van Oorschot stunned the criminal-justice world with the discovery that some people’s DNA appeared on things that they had never touched. He called the phenomenon “secondary transfer.”
One of his lab’s experiments had three people sit at a table and share a jug of juice. After 20 minutes, their hands and the chairs, juice glasses, table, and jug were swabbed and tested for genetic material. Although the volunteers never touched one another, their DNA ended up on each other’s glasses—and hands.
Then there was the foreign DNA— profiles that didn’t match any of the juice drinkers. It turned up on about half of the chairs and glasses and all over the participants’ hands and the table. The only explanation: The participants had unwittingly brought with them alien genes, perhaps from the lover they had kissed that morning, the stranger with whom they had shared a bus grip, or the barista who had handed them an afternoon latte.
In a sense, this isn’t surprising: We leave a trail of ourselves everywhere we go. One person can shed upward of 50 million skin cells a day. We also spew saliva. If we stand still and talk for 30 seconds, our DNA may be found more than a yard away.
DNA is the most accurate forensic science we have. It has exonerated scores of people who had been convicted using more flawed disciplines, such as hair or bite-mark analysis.
Meanwhile, there have been few publicized cases of DNA mistakenly implicating someone in a crime.
Nevertheless, the itinerant nature of DNA has serious implications for forensic investigations. After all, if traces of our DNA can make their way to a crime scene we’ve never visited, aren’t we all possible suspects?
hen Corporal Erin Lunsford, a 15-year veteran of the Los Gatos–monte Sereno Police Department, arrived at the Kumra mansion, he walked past cop cars clustered around a brick-and-iron gate as the lights from a silent ambulance flashed in the driveway. Inside, dressers were emptied, files dumped. A refrigerator beeped every ten seconds, announcing its doors were ajar. A pile of latex gloves was left in the kitchen sink, wet and soapy, as though someone had tried to wash off the DNA. Raveesh’s body was on the floor near the kitchen. He was still blindfolded.
Lunsford recognized Raveesh, a wealthy businessman who had once owned a share of a local concert venue. Lunsford had also run into him at Goguen’s Last Call, a dive frequented by Raveesh as a regular and Lunsford as a cop responding to calls. Raveesh was an affable extrovert, always buying rounds. In the coming days, Lunsford would discover that Raveesh had relationships with sex workers.
In the weeks after the murder, Tahnee Nelson Mehmet, a criminalist
Wat the county crime lab, ran dozens of tests on the evidence collected from the Kumra mansion. Most revealed DNA profiles consistent with Raveesh or Harinder.
But then Mehmet hit forensic pay dirt: a handful of unknown profiles. She ran the DNA through the state criminal database and got three hits: 22-year-old Deangelo Austin on the duct tape; 21-year-old Javier Garcia on the gloves; and, on the victim’s fingernail clippings, 26-year-old Lukis Anderson.
Police records showed that Austin belonged to a gang linked to a series of home burglaries. His older sister, a 32-year-old sex worker named Katrina Fritz, had been involved with Raveesh for 12 years. Eventually she would admit that she had given her brother a map of the house.
Connecting Anderson to the crime proved trickier, but eventually Lunsford found a link. A year earlier, Anderson had been locked up for a felony residential burglary in the same jail as a friend of Austin’s named Shawn Hampton. Hampton wore an
ankle monitor as a condition of his parole. It showed that two days before the crime, he had driven to San Jose, right near Anderson’s usual haunts.
It started to crystallize for Lunsford: When Austin was planning the breakin, he wanted a local guy experienced in burglary. So Hampton hooked him up with his jail buddy, Anderson.
Anderson had recently landed back in jail after violating his probation on the burglary charge. Lunsford and his boss, Sergeant Mike D’antonio, visited him there.
“Does this guy look familiar to you? What about this lady?” Lunsford said, laying out pictures of the victims on the interview room’s table.
“I don’t know, man,” Anderson said. Lunsford set down a letter from the state of California showing the database match of Anderson’s DNA to the profile found on the victim’s fingernails.
“This starting to ring some bells?” Lunsford said.
“My guess is you didn’t think anybody was gonna be home,” D’antonio said. “My guess is it went way farther than you ever thought it would go.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” Anderson said.
“Lukis, Lukis, Lukis,” D’antonio said. “I don’t have a crystal ball to know what the truth is. Only you do. And in all the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen a DNA hit being wrong.”
nderson had been in jail on the murder charge for over a month when a defense investigator dropped a stack of records on Kulick’s desk. They were Anderson’s medical records. Because his murder charge could carry the death penalty, Kulick had the investigator pull everything pertinent to his medical history, including his mental health, in case they had to ask for leniency during sentencing. She suspected that Anderson could be a candidate for such
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leniency. He’d spent much of his childhood homeless. In early adulthood, he was diagnosed with a mental health disorder and diabetes. And he had developed a mighty alcohol addiction. One day, while drunk, he stepped off a curb and into the path of a truck. He survived, but his memory was never the same. He lost track of days, sometimes several in a row.
That’s not to say his life was bleak. He made friends easily. Kulick and her investigator had spoken to several of them. Anderson might be a drunk, they said, but he wasn’t a killer.
His rap sheet seemed to agree. It was filled with petty crimes: drunk in public, riding a bike under the influence, probation violations. The one serious conviction—the residential burglary—seemed more benign upon careful reading. According to the police report, Anderson had drunkenly broken the front window of a home and tried to crawl through. The horrified resident pushed him back out. Police found him minutes later on the sidewalk, dazed and bleeding. He was charged with a felony and pleaded no contest. His DNA was added to the state criminal database.
More recently, the medical records showed that Anderson had been
taken by ambulance to Valley Medical Center, where he was declared inebriated nearly to the point of unconsciousness. He spent the night detoxing. The date was November 29. If the record was right, Anderson had been in the hospital precisely as Raveesh Kumra was dying.
Kulick knew Lunsford would try to find holes: Perhaps the date on the record was wrong or Anderson’s ID had been stolen. So she and the investigator retraced his day. They found a record that put him at S&S Market in the early evening. The clerk there told Kulick that Anderson had sat down in front of the store at about 8:15 p.m., already drunk, and gotten drunker. A couple of hours later, he wandered into the store and collapsed. The clerk called the authorities.
Two paramedics arrived in an ambulance. They wrestled Anderson onto a stretcher and took him to the hospital. According to his medical records, he was admitted at 10:45 p.m. The doctor who treated him said Anderson remained in bed through the night. Harinder had said the men who killed Raveesh rampaged through the house sometime between 11:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. Kulick called the district attorney’s office. She wanted to meet with them and Lunsford.
In 2009, German detectives were on the trail of the “Phantom of Heilbronn.” A serial killer and thief, the Phantom had murdered immigrants and a cop, robbed a gemstone trader, and munched on a cookie while committing a burglary. Police mobilized across borders, offered a large reward, and racked up more than 16,000 hours on the hunt. But they struggled to discern a pattern to the crimes, other than the DNA profile the Phantom left at 40 crime scenes in Germany, France, and Austria. At long last, they found the Phantom: an elderly Polish worker in the factory that produced the swabs police used to collect DNA. She had somehow contaminated the swabs as she worked. Crime-scene investigators had, in turn, contaminated dozens of crime scenes with her DNA.
Contamination, the unintentional introduction of DNA into evidence by