Word: phantoms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...scratch phenomenon, and while Giesler's study gives them a good place to start, neuroscientists caution that in humans, the mysteries of itching and scratching may go beyond the physiological: emotional and psychological factors are also often at play, especially in cases of unexplained, unremitting itching or itching of phantom limbs...
...until earlier this 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...
...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...
...Stefan König of the Berlin Association of Lawyers says the case of the phantom Phantom illustrates the risks of basing an investigation solely on DNA evidence. "DNA analysis is a perfect tool for identifying traces," he says. "What we need to avoid is the assumption that the producer of the traces is automatically the culprit. Judges tend to be so blinded by the shiny, seemingly perfect evidence of DNA traces that they sometimes ignore the whole picture. DNA evidence on a crime scene says nothing about how it got there. There is good reason for not permitting convictions...
...Federal Criminal Police Office is investigating the theory that certain batches of cotton swabs could have been contaminated at some point in their production, from when the raw cotton was picked to when the swabs were packed. Forensic analysts in Stuttgart have been testing unused cotton swabs for the Phantom's DNA but say that so far they have found no evidence of contamination. For the German police, it would be a relief to discover that the mysterious female serial killer doesn't actually exist. But it would also be a bitter confirmation of the thousands of man-hours wasted...