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Apr

Proved Innocent

Written by Satish Sekar

The Road to Vindication
Kees Borsboom always was innocent. The real murderer, Wik Haalmeijer, eventually acknowledged it and, unusually, refused to allow the Dutch authorities to continue to cover up a shameful miscarriage of justice. He was asked to retract as the case had already been solved, but declined, insisting on DNA testing. It proved that Haalmeijer was indeed guilty of the rape and murder of 10 year-old Nienke Kleiss.

"The body was still warm with loads of DNA from the two victims," said DNA expert Richard Eikelenboom. "No scientist ever likes DNA mixtures from three persons, but in this case it was inevitable that we had to look for that. Another problem was with the large amount of blood and bronchial fluids from the victim, which made it very likely that the samll quantity of skin (epithelial) cells coming from the hand of the perpetrator would be obscured by it. When 90% of the sample consists of the victim's DNA, the 10% that was deposited by the perpetrator will probably not be detected even if it is there. In more than 85% of the samples that we test, the profiles come from blood or other body fluids. The chance of getting a DNA profile from epithelial cells in 2000 was only 16%."

That posed serious problems a decade ago. Dutch scientists had never had a case like it in terms of the science. Eikelenboom had a major part to play in obtaining the crucial evidence needed to solve these awful crimes, but he knew that it would be a difficult task. "16-20%, offered a very small chance of getting the profile you are interested in," Eikelenboom explained. "90% of your material contains DNA of your victim, or in this case, victims, so in terms of the perpetrator, even if his DNA profile is in there, is a big chance that we won't be able to detect it."

There were further isses. "If DNA is amplified too much, you probably won't get [the] perpetrator too much, because of the proportions of the mixtures of DNA involved" Eikelenboom explained. "That's very important. We had a project with LCN [Low Copy Number]. I had a lot of power around there on this, more or less, so I introduced LCN DNA for the first time in a homicide in the Netherlands." Nevertheless, the odds were still stacked against him, but Eikelenboom still struck partial gold.

Partial Gold
"I helped to solve this case, so the preliminary work on LCN DNA was done at the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI)," he said. "All the profiles were obtained through LCN DNA. On the boot-lace, which was found on the neck of the victim, we look at DNA markers, alleles and we look if the numbers, symbolising the alleles, did not match the two victims, then maybe it is coming from the perpetrator, so we found strange alleles not matching the two victims on the boot-lace."

This was very significant and it was not confined to that item. "We found it on the fingernails as well," he said. "What's important on the nails is she was a nail-biter, so we found nothing else and I know because I sampled them. That means we know that all DNA was on top of the fingernails and that also means if they were playing in water as Maikel [Willebrand] describes, then it is very likely that DNA on top of the fingernails was left shortly before she was killed."

This was the DNA of the killer. It was not a full profile, but it had some alleles (bands) and these results were important because they could eliminate anyone who did not possess them. That included Borsboom. There was no doubt about it – Borsboom was innocent and the NFI knew it, but the Reporting Officer, Ate Kloosterman, left vital information out of his report, so Borsboom was convicted and went to jail for four years, despite being proven innocent. This was scandalous.

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