Crown: Lundy shirt has wife DNA

The fabric of Mark Lundy’s polo shirt said to contain brain tissue was also hugely likely to have his murdered wife’s DNA on it, a jury has been told.

The DNA extracted was 450,000 million times more likely to have come from Christine Lundy than an unrelated person chosen at random, giving ‘‘extremely strong’’ support for a conclusion that it was her DNA, scientist Susan Vintiner said.

The evidence of Vintiner was given in the High Court at Wellington on Wednesday in the fifth week of the retrial of Mark Lundy on charges that he murdered his wife Christine, 38, and daughter Amber, 7, in Palmerston North on August 30, 2000. He has pleaded not guilty.

The Crown says that, by combining the scientific results, the jury can conclude Christine Lundy’s brain tissue was found on her husband’s polo shirt.

The defence challenges the scientific results and how the tissue and DNA came to be on the polo shirt in the first place.

Vintiner said she also looked at three red specks labelled as coming from the polo shirt. She extracted DNA from the specks and found they were 19 million times more likely to come from Amber Lundy than a randomly chosen unrelated person.

In 2013, American pathologist Allen Gown, of Seattle, confirmed the 2001 work of Texas pathologist Rodney Miller that samples from the Lundy polo shirt contained central nervous system tissue, either brain or spinal cord.

Last year Gown saw more samples and he was ‘‘unequivocal’’ they were also central nervous system tissue.

His work did not identify the species from which the tissue came.

Stephen Bustin, a professor of molecular medicine from Anglia Ruskin University, in Britain, was a defence witness who reviewed the work of the Netherlands Forensic Institute on the Lundy polo shirt sample.

The Dutch laboratory thought the sample had central nervous system tissue, more probably human than eight other pet and farmed species tested. Bustin said the institute’s results had discrepancies and he would not rely on them.

He agreed that, based on one of the institute’s tests, it had eliminated cow, sheep, chicken, and pig as the source of the tissue. But his research suggested golden hamster and horse might have been the source.

He was asked if he knew if there were golden hamsters in New Zealand, and Bustin replied that he did not even know if New Zealand had horses.