[svlug] Reiser's Wife's Ex-Lover Killed 8! Plus Question Re Evidence

[Mark S Bilk]

On Fri, May 04, 2007 at 06:33:40PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
>Mark S. Bilk wrote:
>
>>Does anyone have info on the size and number of these drops?
>
>Correction:  I've just found an ANG Newspapers / InsideBayArea
>story giving some details of Oakland PD criminologist Shannon
>Cavness's DNA testimony on Feb. 28, during the preliminary
>hearings before Judge Julie Conger:
>
>http://www.insidebayarea.com/search/ci_4878462

Thanks, Rick -- this is a very informative article.

>Cavness did DNA testing on two blood drops in a pillar
>inside Hans and his mother's Montclair house, and on one
>drop found on a sleeping bag stuffsack in Hans's Honda CRX.
>One of the pllar drops tested as that of a male, and one as
>that of a female.  The female blood drop and the stuffsack

The house blood "stain" in the 03/01/2007 Inside Bay Area 
article, became a blood "drop" in the 05.03.07 Wired article.
Anyhow it occurs to me that many women do periodically emit
blood without being murdered.  (My dear departed cat once ate
a tampon that had been left on the bathtub.  $600 in vet bills 
and half a cup of mineral oil later...)

>drop both contained DNA that matched to known samples of Nina
>Reiser's blood's DNA to a degree that leaves only a one in
>45x10^12 chance of it not being from Nina.

The process is well described here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_analysis

See especially the section "STR analysis".  (Note: A PCR "primer" 
is a short DNA sequence used in the PCR process to label (and 
target for replication) a particular section of the DNA under test.)

People have many DNA locations (the U.S. system uses 13 of them) 
that contain repeated short (3 to 5 base-pair) sequences.  The 
number of repeats in each location is the same for all the DNA 
of a particular individual, but varies from one person to another.  
Machines will now read out these 13 numbers from a DNA sample.
Since the 13 numbers vary independently of one another, the 
chance of an accidental match is indeed extremely low.

I'd love to hear what Hans has to say about the missing front seat 
of his car.  Those Kragen receipts remind me of Mohammed Atta's 
passport that supposedly fluttered down from the burning plane 
to be found conveniently next to the World Trade Center, and the 
"Hijacking For Dummies" manual left in a car in the airport parking 
lot.  I wonder if a certain huge powerful corporation (working 
through several cutouts of course) might have given Nina Reiser 
a couple million dollars and a fake ID to disappear.  I tried to 
look up the Usenet posts I've seen from the corporation's paid 
propagandists connecting the murder with Linux, but Google's 
Usenet search engine isn't working today.

  Mark