Stringing Together The Clues of DNA

That some people can't see the connection between JonBenet Ramsey's long johns and the charred bones from a mass grave in Peru doesn't surprise Ed Huffine.

Huffine has spent his life exploring the thin scientific strands that connect such tabloid stories with the unwritten histories of places that are easy to ignore.

With the same understated, patient tone he has used for decades -- first as a top U.S. military expert on soldiers' remains, then as leader of international efforts to identify victims of massacres in Bosnia -- Huffine, a top executive at the Lorton-based DNA identification lab Bode Technology, walks though the connections he finds amid the static.

"You see, DNA technology never works in a vacuum," Huffine said. "If you improve a technique that might help get DNA results from a very challenging environment, like in the JonBenet Ramsey case, those same types of techniques could be used to help identify people who are missing in other countries. It could help to address systematic and government-sponsored rape in other countries, and so on."

And so, on a typical afternoon in a lab near a landfill and storage warehouse in Fairfax County, scientists can be found churning through shipments of bones and samples and swabs from a world of cases. Technicians with hammers and centrifuges and lasers are using extraction techniques developed in Bosnia to help decipher 13,000 bone fragments from the World Trade Center.

Experience with the Trade Center, where bones were subjected to intense heat, is in turn applied to the work in Peru, where soldiers tried to hide killings by burning bodies.

"It's very September 11-like material. It's very degraded," said Jose Pablo Baraybar, executive director of the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team, which has been sending exhumed remains from a massacre in southern Peru's Accomarca area to Lorton. "There are a lot of children. That's a problem. The bones are very fragile."

Catching criminals by using genetic clues has become commonplace in courtrooms and ubiquitous on crime dramas. Bode's work on the remains flowing into its Virginia headquarters shows how leaders, lawyers and investigators are seizing lessons from here and around the world to spread DNA's impact to new areas.

The grinding work is being done by a cadre of investigators at Bode and beyond who are surprisingly philosophical and upbeat for people who spend their days handling disturbing evidence of tragedy.

"Day to day, we're motivated by the challenges, the techniques, the science, technology improvements," said Mike Cariola, vice president of forensic operations for the firm. "But at the end of the day . . . there's an impact. It's solving crimes; it's making identification of remains from 20 or 30 years before. It's always been something that's just been incredibly motivating."

This summer, Bode's discovery of skin cells on 6-year-old JonBenet's long johns helped clear her parents and brother in her killing. So-called "touch DNA" can find results without blood drops or swabs.

A similar analysis of skin cells found on the handle of a bloody bat in Howard County provided key evidence in the killing of a teenage boy there last year.