By Erin Moriarty

The headline in the New York Times was designed to shock the reader and it did: “DNA evidence can be fabricated”. Since the mid-1990’s, when the OJ Simpson murder trial in Los Angeles introduced the concept of DNA evidence to the public, it has become the newest “gold standard” of forensic tools, evidence considered so reliable that few question its results. In fact, results of DNA tests have already led to the exoneration of more than 200 prisoners, almost all convicted of the serious crimes rape or murder. Now, suddenly, comes an Israeli company ready to upset the apple cart with its claim that a lab can create artificial DNA and “engineer a crime scene”.

Officials at the company, Nucleix, based in Tel Aviv say they were able to successfully “create” fake DNA by taking a blood sample from one woman, removing the white blood cells that contain her DNA and replacing them with cells containing a man’s DNA, collected from his hair. The implications, according to those at Nucleix, are enormous and frightening: Imagine an unscrupulous lab technician who could implicate an innocent person in a crime. A bad cop who could plant DNA evidence to convict a suspect.

This new development is and should be worrisome to anyone who cares about fairness in the American judicial system. Jurors rarely question the validity of DNA evidence introduced at trial. However, read the article a little closer and you discover what this new development is also about: making money. As it turns out. Nucleix, has done more than just create “fake” DNA, the company has also constructed a test to ferret out that artificial DNA, a test which it hopes to sell to forensic labs.

The announcement that DNA can be faked has already been greeted with disdain by some DNA experts. Rock Harmon, a former Alameda County, California deputy district attorney, dismissed it as simply “ a sales pitch for a new product”. Still, from the perspective of someone who covers murder trials regularly involving DNA evidence, I am intrigued by this latest development. What Nucleix has done is just confirm a fact that is often overlooked: DNA test results are only as reliable as the people who collect the genetic material and then later analyze it in the lab. When done properly, DNA evidence is the “gold standard” of forensic tools, but whenever humans are involved, there is always room for error, and, yes, unscrupulous behavior. What this lab has done by creating “fake” DNA is just reminding us of that fact.

What’s more, until now, there has been little a defense attorney can do to raise questions and doubts about DNA evidence. In a handful of cases, including one we have followed here at 48 Hours Mystery involving the murder convictions of Kevin Cooper, defense attorneys have asked the courts to have incriminating DNA samples tested for a certain preservative known as EDTA. The presence of EDTA, say defense attorneys, is proof that a defendant’s DNA had been kept in the lab and then later planted as evidence to secure his conviction. The only problem is that EDTA, a common preservative, is often found in the environment, particularly in detergents. So the question becomes: is the amount of EDTA found in the sample so high that it proves conclusively that the DNA was planted? So far, that answer has been ‘no’. As far as I know, no defense attorney has successfully been able to prove by EDTA levels that DNA evidence had been planted.

This new test that allegedly distinguishes “fake” DNA simply gives defense attorneys a new tool to question DNA evidence. And it’s that “questioning” of even the so-called “gold standards” that I welcome. On that point, I am sure Portland, Oregon attorney Brandon Mayfield would agree. On May 7, 2004, Mayfield was arrested for participating in the train bombing in Madrid, Spain earlier that year that had killed 191 people and injured thousands of others. The FBI had no doubts about Mayfield’s guilt; after all, two of the best FBI fingerprint analysts had used the “gold standard forensic tool” to identify his prints on evidence collected at the crime scene. The only problem was these experts were wrong. As it turns out, Mayfield’s fingerprints were very similar to those of another man, a known terrorist, who was later identified and picked up by Spanish investigators. If not for the Spanish investigators, the very innocent Brandon Mayfield might still be in prison today.

So much for invincible “gold standards”!!

By Erin Moriarty

By Erin Moriarty

Murder as entertainment: it’s a perverse part of the culture that has existed for generations, even before the 1880’s when the British public became equally frightened and fascinated by the mysterious identity of the bloody killer known only as “Jack the Ripper”. Murder mysteries continue to titillate. Crime novels and movies are as popular as ever. But here’s the real tragedy of it all: the mystery that is often so much a part of murder, the tantalizing missing details that captivate and draw in so many readers and movie lovers, is at the same time the most painful part for the actual victims of these crimes.

I was giving a speech in Kentucky last fall for emergency workers when an attractive woman in her late forties approached me. I immediately recognized the expression on her face: a determined, forced smile that accompanied her rushed, well-rehearsed story. I had witnessed the same performance so many times before with parents of murdered children.

Her name is Debra Culberson and her all-too-common story is this: in 1996, her twenty-two-year old daughter Carrie went missing after a night out with girlfriends. Police immediately suspected Carrie’s ex-boyfriend, Vincent Doan, a guy with a history of assault. Carrie had obtained a restraining order against him after she said he hit her. Police couldn’t find Carrie’s body, but prosecutors charged Doan anyway and he went on trial. In the press, Doan became known as “Mr. Rogers” for his habit of coming to his trial each day wearing a cardigan sweater, and earnestly professing his innocence. The amount of evidence against Doan was overwhelming, however, and the jury convicted the sweater-clad killer. Still, Doan continued to deny the murder and appealed his conviction so, obviously, he wasn’t going to tell anyone what he did with Carrie’s body. As Debra said to me, “we got justice, but it was hollow justice, because I didn’t have Carrie.” A murder victim’s mom, explains Debra, is no different than the parents of fallen soldiers who want to recover their children’s bodies and bury them.

Unfortunately, Carrie disappeared in the town of Blanchester, Ohio, an area close to the border of Kentucky and Indiana. It is just miles from the powerful Ohio River which means Doan could have dumped Carrie’s body in a neighboring state or in the river which would carry her even farther away. There was no easy way to track down bodies in neighboring jurisdictions. So, for the last nearly thirteen years, Debra has scoured newspapers from local counties and nearby states and called the local medical examiner or coroner whenever a young woman’s body was found. She got nowhere.

Debra Culberson didn’t find her daughter, but she did come in contact with someone who may help her find Carrie someday: Dr. Emily Craig. Probably no one understands Debra’s plight better. As the Kentucky state anthropologist, Dr. Craig is the one who has to identify bodies found in the state of Kentucky. When she finds them, they no longer qualify as “bodies”, but simply remains, an unrecognizable collection of bones. She does DNA tests when she can and reconstructs faces in other cases. And now Dr. Craig has gone even further: with funds from the U.S. Department of Justice, she has helped create a national database that will connect the people like Debra Culberson, who are looking for the missing, to law enforcement trying to identify human remains. It is the first time that anyone with a computer can search through the list of the missing or the lists of the found.

The problem that Debra Culberson faces is more widespread than most of us realize. In any given year, there are about 100-thousand Americans reported missing. Some are abducted in parental custody cases, some people choose to “disappear” and, in some cases, some are dead.

If that number is surprising, consider this: there are 40 thousand unidentified bodies and remains in this country. Forty Thousand! Nameless, sometimes faceless John and Jane Does. The hope is that the Justice Department’s new database will reduce those numbers and will give some peace to the people searching from missing family members. The missing may be dead, but they can be buried and their families can have some answers.

The new website can be found at http://www.namus.gov/

For me, I just want to hear that Debra Culberson found her Carrie. Debra came close the other day. She went online and there was a match…a young woman’s body found in nearby Indiana. You can imagine how hopeful Debra was…the thought that her agonizing search might be at an end. But the dental records didn’t match. So Debra Culberson is still searching.

How Carrie Culberson died and her whereabouts are still mysteries. There is no entertainment value to those mysteries. Just a lot of grief and pain for a broken-hearted mother.

By Erin Moriarty

I am seething, but like most of us, I fume at home or grumble to my colleagues and friends. I am frustrated and angry, but, mixed with those feelings, is also an overwhelming sense that it doesn’t matter how I feel or how any of us feel. The problems that lead to crime in certain cities continue to exist no matter how angry we get; how much we seethe in silence or shout aloud.

Less than two weeks ago there was a yet another high profile murder in New Orleans. Wendy Byrne was a popular bartender, soon-to-be-married denizen of the city when she was gunned down in the French Quarter on the evening of June 17th . While I am truly sad for her fiancé , family and friends, her murder was no more tragic than the dozens that occur every year in what has become the nation’s murder capital. No, what really sticks in my craw is the identity of her alleged killers: three kids. Really, kids: two fifteen year olds and a fourteen year old. Wendy Byrne’s murder by kids wielding guns is proof that not much has changed in New Orleans even nearly four years after hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Wendy’s murder reminds me of a wave of crime that hit New Orleans exactly two years ago this month. In just one twenty-four hour period in the first week of January, 2007, six people were murdered, including a 36-year- old filmmaker and mother, Helen Hill and a 25-year-old musician and activist, Dinerral Shavers. Then, as now, the residents of New Orleans reacted with outrage, holding candlelit vigils and making angry calls to Mayor Nagin, but I suspect that today’s demands for action are tempered by a nagging sense that no amount of outrage will change things. And for good reason: Police have still never identified or found Helen’s killer, a brazen gunman who broke into her home in the middle of the night and shot her in cold blood. And in Dinerral Shaver’s case, a 18-year-old young man by the name of David Bonds was arrested and charged with the murder, but when he went on trial, he was acquitted by a jury. His attorney, William Boggs, a public defender, is convinced that Bonds arrest was a rush to judgment and the police got the wrong guy. The bottom line: two years later, neither murder has been solved. Neither killer is in jail and is free to kill again.

Nothing much has changed in the city since those murders occurred. There were nearly 200 murders in New Orleans last year. That's fewer than the year before and a seemingly low figure until you realize that there are currently only about 350,000 residents living in the city. Compare that to New York: around 500 murders a year in a city of more than 8 million!

And how many of the killers in New Orleans are caught and go to prison? Last year, police only made arrests in about a third of the murder cases, and of those cases, prosecutors have only accepted HALF of them, refusing many the others due to lack of evidence. So far, none of those suspects have gone to trial.

So you won’t be surprised when you hear that half of last year’s murders in New Orleans occurred in broad daylight, with most of them at lunch and dinner hours, times when there are likely to be witnesses. What does that say? That these killers, many of them just teenagers, are not afraid to be seen. They don’t fear a justice system that no longer works. And if the criminals have no fear of the system, why should witnesses trust it? Witnesses are afraid to testify, knowing that suspects aren’t likely to be convicted or put in prison.

Most of these problems are the result of two hurricanes that destroyed families, drastically reduced the number of police and prosecutors and put a crime lab out of commission for over a year. But I keep wondering and worrying…will the sagging economy cause similar damage in other cities? What is going to go when cities and states are forced to make drastic cuts in budgets that affect law enforcement? Will more cities see the same kind of senseless crime that we see in New Orleans?

And then that thought gets me thinking about the sad state of the economy in general....the no-end-in sight bank and auto makers bailout...and how Citicorp is spending 50 Million dollars of taxpayers' money to buy a corporate jet...or how Merrill Lynch's John Thain spent 80 thousand dollar office rug (he now says he will reimburse the company )and I start seething and grumbling again.....

but that's the subject of another blog!

By Erin Moriarty

It hit me when I first saw the headlines on the front page of the Wall Street Journal: “TOP BROKER ACCUSED OF $50 BILLION FRAUD. Reading the article below the headlines revealed that what most shocked the financial community was the identity of the disgraced broker: Bernard Madoff, a Wall Street pioneer with a sterling reputation. The amount of the alleged fraud wasn’t even discussed until the second paragraph.

Apparently, we aren’t just losing money during this recession; we’re in danger of losing all perspective too.

Maybe I’ve just been in the news business too long, but another greedy character on Wall Street isn’t exactly earth-shattering news. The amount, however -- FIFTY BILLION dollars? That’s greed on an epic level. How does one man, under the supposed oversight of auditors, co-workers and government regulators, steal $50 billion of other people’s money? ($50 Billion is the amount Madoff himself reportedly told federal investigators; the actual size of the loss has not been confirmed.) To put the amount in perspective, consider this: last year, Exxon, the most profitable corporation in the country, “only” netted forty billion dollars. Or this: Oprah Winfrey, who makes an estimated $260 million annually as the richest celebrity in America, would have to work for more than 190 years to reach $50 billion.

As the story continues to play out on television news programs, the reports focus on Madoff himself and the growing list of his possible victims, including the owners of the New York Mets baseball team, and most recently, New York University. I keep waiting in vain for one of my colleagues to suddenly turn to the camera and spontaneously blurt out, “Did you hear that, folks? FIFTY BILLION dollars. BILLION with a B!” Or a simply raise a graphic with the number $50,000,000,000.00 across the screen. I don’t question the news value of hearing about wealthy individuals being scammed, but where is the shock over the sheer magnitude of the amount involved? When did a billion become the new million?

A friend of mine wonders if perhaps the word has appeared so frequently in the news in recent months that a “billion” has lost its shock value, like pornography or any of George Carlin’s seven dirty words. There is the $700 billion bailout for banks, the $14 billion proposed hand out to the Detroit carmakers and, of course, the weekly cost of the Iraq War that has been running at a relatively cheap $ 3 billion a week. (Not so cheap when you look at the yearly cost of almost $160 Billion.)

And what about Bernard Madoff himself? Since his December 11th arrest, there has been much speculation about the sweet-faced man who literally overnight went from being a revered philanthropist to universally scorned criminal. While it is doubtful that he acted totally alone, Madoff may turn out to be one of the most fascinating criminals in modern times: a man who managed to pull off a classic Ponzi scheme at an unimaginable scale. Has the amount of his alleged fraud fully sunk in? Does he feel any responsibility for the death of one of his victims, who, despondent over his losses, sat down at his desk and slit his wrists?

Much has been made of the fact that Madoff, an apparently devout Jew, took advantage of his own community, but "affinity fraud" is really nothing unusual. In August, the owner of a Chicago real estate investment firm disappeared with an estimated $50 million of his fellow Muslim's money.

T. Byram Karasu, a professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine speculates (and he can only speculate since he has never treated Madoff) that Madoff was much like the great magician Houdini, who was motivated to take major risks, less for financial gain, but for an insatiable desire to be loved and admired. And even when caught, Madoff may have felt a certain amount of pride in the fact that he has pulled off no ordinary fraud. As Karasu told Newsday, "Magicians explain their tricks to the audience with a certain kind of smile on their face." Perhaps, that explains the weird half smile caught by cameras whenever Bernard Madoff takes short trips out of his house. He is the Houdini of Wall Street who managed to, with a sleight of the hand, trick us all.

by Erin Moriarty

Now 24-years-old, Ryan Ferguson was convicted of murder and robbery in December 2005, based in large part on a "dream."

Here are the facts: In the early morning hours of November, 1, 2001, newspaper sportwriter Kent Heitholt was beaten to death in the parking lot outside the newspaper's offices. Although he was killed in downtown Columbia, Missouri, on a night filled with Halloween revelers, no one admitted seeing the murder, although two witnesses remembered two young men hanging around near the scene.

Despite the serious discrepancies, the police charged Ryan Ferguson with second degree murder and District Attorney Kevin Crane put Ferguson on trial. The main witness: Chuck Erickson, who agreed to an 11-year sentence in return for his testimony against Ryan Ferguson.

By Erin Moriarty

When strangers hear that I talk to murderers for a living, they often gasp. People are frightened, fascinated or repulsed by the idea that, as a necessary part of covering trials as a reporter, I go to jails and prisons to spend time with killers and those accused of killing. The truth is, interviewing those accused of murder, even in close quarters, is rarely frightening nor captivating. (And I include in that assessment my three interviews in Witchita, Kansas with Dennis Rader, the now infamous B.T.K. killer. Rader, who killed 10 women, is in person surprisingly nondescript. He escaped detection years, not because he was particularly smart, but simply because he had no connection to his victims.) While murder may be the most heinous human act, the most surprising feature about those who commit murder is just how ordinary they are.

Most killers are not smarter, more calculating or unfeeling than the rest of us. They are simply human beings —albeit, with means and opportunity—who give in to the same emotions that the rest of us feel: jealousy, hate, fear or some combination of those sensations.

It is because most accused killers are not special that I am particularly fascinated by 19- year-old Rachel Mullenix. She is an exception to the rule.

It is not Rachel's gender nor age that makes her so interesting, although we all know that male killers, particularly young males, vastly outnumber females. It is also not her appearance that makes her stand out, although Rachel Mullenix does act and look more like a college coed than a jail inmate. What makes Mullenix’s case so compelling is the fact that the victim is Rachel’s mother, 56-year-old Barbara Mullenix, a woman whom Rachel loved and, by most accounts, shared a close relationship. While their relationship was as complicated as that of many other mothers and daughters, the motive for such an act, and such a brutal act, still seems elusive.

Barbara Mullenix was stabbed to death sometime in the early morning hours of September 13th, 2006. One detail is particularly disturbing: Barbara was stabbed in the eye with a butter knife. This is one autopsy photo I wish I had never seen:the photo of Barbara’s lifeless, mutilated body with the hilt of the butter knife jutting out of her skull feels burned into my consciousness. What could this mother have done to bring out such rage and cruelty in another human being, her daughter no less?

To be fair, Rachel denies she had anything to do with the actual killing. She blames her 21-year-old boyfriend at the time, Ian Allen, who has reportedly confessed to police that he acted alone. But Rachel--then 17 years old-- was in the home and watched when Allen allegedly came into their condo and stabbed her mother. Rachel didn't call for help, didn't call 911 to get her mother medical assistance and she didn't try to escape. Instead, she helped Allen clean up the apartment and even dispose of her mother's body. Rachel says she tried to stop her boyfriend, but there is no evidence of that. Rather, there is disturbing evidence of something entirely different: that when Allen left her alone to get rid of evidence, Rachel sent him a text message saying "I love you". She then left with him and ran away to Louisiana where the two were apprehended by police.

This is the young woman who sat across me this summer during two lengthy interviews: a polite, seemingly sweet daughter who spoke convincingly about the mother she loved. Rachel admits that the two had a volatile relationship over the years. Barbara, who didn't work outside the home, was emotionally tied to her daughter and was fearful of losing her as Rachel grew up. What complicated matters more is that Barbara was an alcoholic and, when drinking, would be cruelly critical of her daughter. In the weeks leading to Barbara's death, she had grounded Rachel and kept her from seeing Ian Allen. Still, Rachel said the two women had always managed to get past their disagreements and says she didn't harbor a deep resentment towards her mother. And, in fact, she says, the day before the murder, Barbara had ended the grounding by allowing Rachel to go to the movies with Allen.

So how do you explain a loving daughter watching her mother die and then running away with and having sex with her mother's killer? Rachel, who has been examined by a forensic psychiatrist, explains her behavior by claiming that she was abused by her boyfriend and says that she, like other abused women, was too cowed by her abuser to question his actions. There is, however, no evidence of abuse: no injuries and no reports. Ian Allen has no criminal history nor any known history of abuse.

Rachel's psychiatrist offers a more complicated explanation: that Rachel suffers from a borderline personality and has become accustomed to abuse at the hands of her mother. When her mother was murdered, Rachel simply followed the next person in command: her boyfriend.

Neither explanation really helps you to understand the young woman who, one moment is in tears remembering her mother, the next, coolly giving details about the murder.

Who and what is Rachel Mullenix? I don't know what to make of her. I know l like her and, as a mother, I feel for her. On the surface, she seems so much like other women her age. At the same time, I believe that most of us could not stand by and watch a loved one die, that we would step in front of a killer's knife to save a parent or, at the very least, call for help.

But if Rachel Mullenix isn't like the rest of us, does that mean she is a coldblooded killer?

Rachel went on trial in July. Her boyfriend, Ian Allen, goes on trial at the end of this month. This is a case I will follow throughout the fall: the unusual case, both fascinating and frightening.

In Waco, Texas, a mother grieves the death of her only daughter and wonders if she was murdered. Her daughter's husband, a Baptist preacher, lives under a cloud of suspicion, unable to find work in a ministry. It's a case that may never be resolved to anyone's satisfaction, all because investigators mishandled the scene in the initial hours after the young woman's death.

31-year-old Kari Baker died late on April 7th, 2006 in her home in Hewitt, Texas, just outside Waco. Her husband, Matt Baker, had called 911 at 12:01 am on April 8th. He told police that he had gone out to put gas in the car and rent movies and came home to find his wife dead on their bed. On the nightside table, there was a nearly empty bottle of Unisom, the over- the- counter sleeping medication, two empty wine cooler bottles and an apparent suicide note. Baker said his wife was nude when he found her, so he dressed her as he called 911 and then placed her body on the floor and administered CPR.

When police heard that Kari had been despondent, they decided without further investigation that Kari had committed suicide. They called a justice of peace, described the scene, and over the phone, he determined the death to be a suicide. No autopsy was ordered. Police took only a few pictures at the scene and collected only a few pieces of evidence: the Unisom bottle, the remaining pills and the suicide note. Two days later, Kari was buried.

If the police had only questioned the husband further and conducted an investigation, they would have quickly realized that there was much more to the story. Just days before she died, Kari told a counselor that she feared her husband was having an affair and was trying to kill her. Kari told the counselor that she had found a small container of what appeared to be crushed pills in her husband's briefcase. When Kari asked her husband about the pills, she reported to her counselor that her husband blamed young patients at the youth center where he worked. After Kari's death, the counselor related the story and Kari's fears to her family.

Soon, there were more and more questions about the circumstances surrounding Kari's death. There is the matter of the suicide note: it was typed! Even Kari's signature was typed, although there were pens nearby.

Matt Baker told police that his wife was despondent over the death of their second child seven years earlier, but if they had questioned those who saw Kari the day of her death, they would have heard a very different description. Kari appeared upbeat and excited about a new job that she had applied for.

Another odd fact surfaced: one month before Kari's death, her husband had gone online researching "overdose by sleeping pills" and the drug Ambien, although Kari did not current have a prescription for that medication. Baker now says that he did the research after becoming alarmed by the amount of sleeping medication his wife was taking, but he never voiced that concern to anyone, including Kari's mother or her doctor. How much research he did is not completely clear. When private investigators hired by Kari's mother tried to examine Matt Baker's work computer, they discovered that someone had swapped Baker's computer with his secretary's and Baker's had disappeared. It has not been recovered to this day. Additionally, his home computer, Baker himself admits, can't be examined because the hard drive broke down. But the most damaging information to surface was evidence that Baker had been "involved" to some extent with a young woman in his parish before Kari's death. Matt even gave this young woman his dead wife's cell phone ten days after his death so that he could carry on extensive conversations with her: 1700 minutes over a period of a week and a half.

The few photographs taken at the scene raise questions of their own: Obvious lividity is seen on Kari's arms and parts of her body that, her family says, is inconsistent with the timeline Baker gives. She also appears to have a cut on her nose and bruising on her mouth.

Kari's family had Kari's body exhumed and autopsied three months later. While the drug Ambien was found in Kari Baker's muscle tissue, it was too late to determine exactly how she died or whether she was murdered. It was enough for the Justice of Peace to change the cause of death from "suicide" to "undetermined".

Here's how the case stands today:

Last fall, Matt Baker was charged with his wife's murder, but after the local district attorney failed to obtain an indictment from a grand jury, a requirement under Texas law, charges against Baker were dropped. Kari Baker's parents filed a wrongful death case against Baker. It is likely that sometime within the next year, Baker will be "tried" in civil court. If new evidence surfaces, new criminal charges could be filed.

In the meantime, the family is in turmoil as Kari's parents are pitten against their son-in-law, with two young grandchildren caught in the middle.

It is a tragic situation that could have been avoided if a couple of police officers and a Justice of the Peace had just asked a few more questions instead of jumping to a conclusion on that April night two years ago.

[Please join In Cold Blog in welcoming award winning journalist, Erin Moriarty, as our newest contributing writer.

Erin is a correspondent for CBS 48-Hours and the co-author of Death of a Dream, a book about the brief life and tragic death of Catherine Woods. She has covered some of the nations highest profile stories and her top notch reporting has earned her nine national Emmy Awards, an Overseas Press Club Award, two Association of Women in Radio and Television Gracie Allen Awards, Top 100 Award from Irish America magazine, and the Outstanding Consumer Media Service Award. We at ICB are truly honored to have her with us.]