Word: dna
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...Phantom became a national celebrity in 2007, after the murder of 22-year-old policewoman Michele Kiesewetter. All of Germany watched the case unfold, and Heilbronn police alone racked up 16,000 hours of overtime pursuing the culprit. Police announced they'd found DNA traces matching that of the Phantom on several cold cases, including a murder dating back to 1993. (See pictures of cults that went wacko...
...year that investigators figured something had to be very wrong. Trying to establish the identity of a burned corpse found in 2002, they were re-examining the fingerprints of a male asylum seeker taken from his asylum application made many years earlier. The fingerprints contained the Phantom's female DNA. Impossible, they thought, so they repeated the test with a different cotton swab - and this time found no trace of the Phantom's DNA...
...This raised suspicions that the DNA found at all the Phantom's crime scenes might be traced to a single innocent factory worker, probably employed to package the swabs. Cotton swabs are sterilized before being used to collect DNA samples, but while sterilizing removes bacteria, viruses and fungi, it does not destroy DNA. (Read a TIME cover story on DNA...
...Earlier this year, Austrian authorities began decommissioning all cotton swabs manufactured by Austrian company Greiner Bio-One International AG after they had made a similar discovery, with a different mysterious DNA donor. On Thursday, several German states admitted to using that same brand of cotton swab. An investigator from the state of Baden-Württemberg told Bild newspaper: "The things were double-packaged; we thought they were the Mercedes of cotton swabs." But the Austrian manufacturer hurried to declare Thursday night that "Greiner Bio-One cotton swabs are not certified for DNA analysis...
...Berlin police spokesman Michael Merkle tells TIME that the city's investigators are now checking whether they also use cotton swabs from Greiner Bio-One. "A consequence of the present case may be to start randomly checking the cotton swabs we are supplied with for traces of DNA - which, in turn, harbors the risk of contaminating them," he says...