In 1984 a young British DNA scientist working in a biotech-nology firm in California was sexually assaulted by an intruder who broke into her home in the middle of the night.
The scientist, Helena Greenwood, reported the crime, and when sexual offender Paul Frediani was charged a year later for a similar offence, she testified at a preliminary hearing. He was set free on bail and soon afterwards, she was murdered.
Drops of dried blood on her stoc-kings and bits of skin under her fingernails might have identified the killer, but DNA was a new science in the mid-1980s. It was only years later, when scientists in the United States and Europe were turning the results of pure research into applicable technique, that the method was refined and most of the glitches were ironed out. More than a decade after Greenwood’s death, a police team assigned to look at cold cases drew her file and sent off the nail clippings.
Greenwood’s old firm had pioneered a method of amplifying small samples of DNA, and other biotechnology firms were using it as well — including the laboratory where the police sent their samples. They found a match, and Frediani was duly convicted of the murder. Former journalist Samantha Weinberg can make any subject interesting. In Pointing from the Grave (Hamish Hamilton), however, she has a head start. The stuff of life is a fascinating topic.
Weinberg weaves the progress of DNA research through the story of the crime by writing about the people whose work led to its discovery and those who followed — refining, testing, finding increasingly accurate ways to distinguish individuals through differences in their DNA.
Philip Gourevitch’s A Cold Case (Picador) is a very diff-erent true crime story. It also deals with a crime grown cold but there is a gritty, streets-of-New York feel to the book.
A young habitual criminal has a fight with a bar owner and a friend, and hours later, they’re found shot dead. Forty years later, a policeman close to retirement pulls the file from storage, revisits the clues and goes after his man.
Chandak Sengoopta could have told a riveting story in Imprint of the Raj (Macmillan). A colonial official came up with fingerprinting as a way of identifying illiterate contractors, and colleagues seized upon it as a method to nail recidivists. Unfortunately, the author goes into mind-numbing detail in such a long-winded, discursive manner that in no time at all you’ll be sorry you asked.