Monday 22 April 2013

Emedinews:Insights on medicolegal issues:Science shows innocent man hanged in famous British murder case



Michigan’s Foran’s laboratory has devised methods to extract and isolate mitochondrial DNA. His laboratory specializes in ancient and forensic DNA evidence, often working with human remains that are thousands of years old. The nearly 100–year–old microscope slide, sent to Michigan State from the Royal London Hospital Archives and Museum, is the same one the pathologist Bernard Spilsbury used to help hang Crippen in 1910. At that time forensic medicine/pathology was more primitive; Spilsbury’s testimony, identifying what he claimed was an abdominal scar consistent with Cora’s medical history, convinced the jury that these were Cora’s remains. Crippen went to the gallows insisting he was innocent. The present–day challenge: getting past the pine sap that sealed the slide and the formaldehyde used to preserve the tissue in order to examine the mitochondrial DNA that could identify Cora Crippen based on the genetic history of her maternal relatives.

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