ONE COOL CAT
‘Snowball’ & her DNA star witness at slay trial
WHEN IT comes to four-legged crimefighters, dogs hog the spotlight and the headlines. But 16 years ago, a cat not only caught a killer, but she made history.
On Oct. 3, 1994, Shirley Duguay, a 32-year-old mother of five who lived on Prince Edward Island, vanished. Four days later, her car turned up a few miles from her home.
Samples of blood spattered in the car’s interior were sent off to the forensics labs of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Tests showed that the blood came from the missing woman.
There was one likely suspect from the start, Duguay’s common-law husband, Douglas Beamish. His 12year relationship with Duguay had been a stormy one. Beamish had a prison record and unsavory reputation with the ladies. More than one of his squeezes reported being slapped around.
On the night Duguay vanished, neighbors said, they heard the couple having a screaming argument. But, during an interview at his parents’ home, where he had lived since he and Duguay had split about two years earlier, Beamish insisted he had no idea where she might have gone.
Despite their suspicions, investigators had nothing to link him to her disappearance.
Three days into a massive search of the island, a clue turned up in the woods, a bag containing a pair of sneakers and a leather jacket, both stained with Duguay’s blood.
The shoes were Beamish’s size, and the soles had been worn in away that was consistent with his walk. But it was not enough for an arrest.
Investigators also found 20 white hairs embedded in the jacket lining. A lab test revealed they were from a cat.
This evidence might have been overlooked, had it not been for an observation by Constable Roger Savoie. During an earlier interview with Beamish, Savoie noticed a white cat wandering around the house, Snowball, the family pet.
If the hair on the jacket came from Snowball, Savoie reasoned, it might provide the link between Beamish and the bloody jacket.
Using DNA in murder investigations was a relatively new science, with the first genetic fingerprint conviction just seven years earlier in Britain. Animal DNA had never been entered into evidence in a murder trial.
Savoie had a hard time convincing anyone that his interest in testing cat hairs was worth more than a chuckle. Phone calls to scientists all over the world yielded polite refusals, until he found Stephen O’Brien, a geneticist with the U.S. National Cancer Institute. O’Brien was also among the world’s foremost authorities on feline DNA.
In his book “Tears of the Cheetah,” O’Brien writes that Savoie called him the last hope. O’Brien said, “I thought to myself, ‘Now this is really interesting!’ ”
As O’Brien assembled a lab team, Savoie got a subpoena to draw a blood sample from Snowball. With one canister containing the white cat hairs and another containing the blood, the constable hopped on a flight to personally hand over the evidence to the geneticist. He was taking no chances that anything could corrupt the chain of evidence.
One of the hairs had a tiny amount of flesh attached to the roots and yielded the DNA to conduct the tests. Snowball’s blood had the same genetic paw print, O’Brien recalled. He estimated that the chance of another cat having that same profile was about 45 million to one.
Analysis of Snowball’s DNA was completed before the most important piece of evidence came to light. On May 6,1995, a trout fisherman found a shallow grave about 10 miles from where the car was found. It held Duguay’s body. Her hands had been tied behind her back and she had been beaten about the head with such force that a tooth was propelled into one lung.
Police arrested Beamish and charged him with first-degree murder.
Evidence at his eight-weeklong trial included a letter in which Beamish had threatened to kill Duguay, with his signature apparently written in blood, and testimony from an old girlfriend, who described a horrible beating at the hands of the defendant.
But Snowball was the star witness. Beamish’s attorney, borrowing a page from the O.J. Simpson trial book of poetry, said, “Without the cat, the case falls flat.”
O’Brien’s data proved convincing, and the jury found Beamish guilty. He was sentenced to 18 years to life on July 19, 1996.
The case did not receive much attention until April the following year, when O’Brien and colleagues Victor David and Marilyn Menotti-Raymond ti Raymond published a brief description of their work in the scientific journal Nature. O’Brien recalled that press punsters went wild — “Purr-fect Match,” “CAT-astrophe for Criminals,” “Furensic Evidence.”
Catty headlines aside, the case set a legal precedent — the first time nonhuman DNA had been used as evidence in a murder trial. Snowball ushered in the era when pets can, silently and unwittingly, rat on their owners.
Hair, blood and even urine from dogs and cats have helped solve several violent crimes in Canada and the U.S.
Britain and the U.S. now have cat and dog DNA databases.
Most recently, Britain, for the first time, had a case strengthened by a shedding pet.
In July, cat hairs helped convict David Hilder for the murder of his neighbor, David Guy, whose dismembered corpse was found wrapped in a curtain on a beach. Hairs on Guy’s torso matched those of Hilder’s pet, Tinker.
As for Beamish, he came up for parole the same month, but since he demonstrated “low reintegration potential,” the prison system will keep its claws on him.