When then-analyst Greggory LaBerge began using a new database at the Denver Police Crime Laboratory to connect DNA to suspects in cold cases in the 1990s, he didn’t expect success on his first try.
“Honestly, I just went to the freezer and started to pull out samples that had been frozen that had been run a few years earlier from cases mainly in the nineties, started to update the DNA because we had enough DNA with the new system and then put it on the database,” LaBerge said.
“The very first case that we did that with, that I remembered, was a violent sexual murder. And we put that on the database and it matched to a guy right away.”…