On the night of April 30, 1999, a 16-year-old girl, Marianne Vaatstra, was raped and murdered while riding her bicycle home. Her body was found with her throat slit in Veenklooster, a small Dutch village with a nearby center for migrants awaiting political asylum. Given the lack of suspects in the teenager’s environment, the police soon targeted two men from the foreigners center, one from Iraq and the other from Afghanistan, but they were discarded because their DNA did not match that of the semen present in the body of the teenager. girl.
“Shortly after the crime, the neighbors were convinced that the culprit must be one of the asylum seekers, if only because of the method of murder, the slitting of the throat, which it was assumed could not be European,” recalls the geneticist Manfred Kayser of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. The tension reached such a point that a lynching was on the cards, so the authorities made an unprecedented decision: analyze the DNA of the semen to try to find out the geographical origin of the murderer. And the results ruled that he was most likely a North Western European male.
“In Spain we do not have a legal framework to know how far we can go,” laments geneticist Antonio Alonso
Kayser remembers the case of Marianne Vaatstra because it showed that science moved much faster than laws. DNA analysis to predict the origin of the murderer was done illegally. However, the savage unsolved crime prompted two legislative reforms soon after. Today, the Netherlands is one of the few states in the world that has regulated the use of genetic analysis to infer the geographical origin and the skin, eye and hair color of an unknown suspect. And the Dutch authorities also allow the search for non-identical but similar DNA profiles, to reach a criminal through his relatives. Marianne Vaatstra’s murderer was identified and arrested in 2012, after collecting the DNA of 6,600 neighbors. It was Jasper Steringa, a Dutch farmer who lived near the scene of the crime.
“In Spain we do not have a legal framework to know how far we can go,” laments geneticist Antonio Alonso, vice president of the National Commission for the Forensic Use of DNA, dependent on the Ministry of Justice. The latest committee report warns of the “need for legal regulation” in the face of the current “technological revolution in the field of forensic genetics.” The document underlines that it is already possible to predict with very high precision some features of a person from their DNA, such as black skin (99%), very pale skin (83%), brown eyes (95%), blue eyes (94%) and red hair (93%).
“We want to promote legislative reform to regulate these applications, which are already being used because the judges ask for them,” explains Alonso, also director of the National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences, in the Madrid town of Las Rozas. Other genetic sneaks are on the way: markers for baldness, curly hair, face shape, freckles, early gray hair, and even earlobe folding.
The new report recalls the case of Eva Blanco, a 17-year-old girl who was raped and murdered on the night of April 20, 1997, when she was returning home to the Madrid town of Algete. After almost two decades without clues, the Civil Guard requested a new analysis of the DNA present at the crime scene, this time with the latest advances in genetics. Ángel Carracedo’s laboratory at the University of Santiago de Compostela ruled that the murderer was most likely a North African man with black hair and brown eyes. The Civil Guard searched for all the North Africans residing in Algete in 1997, asked them for a voluntary DNA analysis and ended up identifying two brothers of the suspect, Ahmed Chelh, who was arrested and appeared hanged in the Madrid prison of Alcalá Meco in January 2016.
“Today, if a judge asks you to do these analyses, they are done, but in the long run the evidence can come crashing down if the lawyers argue that there is no legal framework,” warns Alonso, aware that “this type of technique can be discriminatory with respect to minorities that are often overrepresented in the databases”.
The scientific community has traditionally differentiated between the coding regions of DNA —those that contain instructions for making proteins and therefore can be linked to the external characteristics of a person or their susceptibility to disease— and the non-coding ones. Spanish legislation, through Organic Law 10/2007, states that only non-coding DNA profiles can be included in the police database “that are revealing, exclusively, of the subject’s identity and sex, but, in In no case, those of a coding nature that allow any other data or genetic characteristic to be revealed.
The report from the National Commission for the Forensic Use of DNA warns that “at present there is not such a clear distinction” between coding and non-coding DNA. “Therefore, both types of DNA markers need a legal regulation in which the purposes, proportionality and limits of their use are established,” the document states. The commission suggests that these new genetic analyzes – on the external features of a suspect and their possible geographical origin – only be used in serious crimes, with judicial authorization and provided that all lines of investigation have been exhausted.
“If we want to avoid negative applications at all costs, the only solution is not to do science, but then we won’t have positive applications either,” says geneticist Manfred Kayser
Geneticists Ángel Carracedo and Chris Phillips, from the Institute of Forensic Sciences of the University of Santiago de Compostela, are two of the leaders of the European consortium Visage, a project financed with five million euros to design techniques that determine the physical characteristics, the origin biogeographic and age of a person from their DNA. The Galician laboratory, recalls Carracedo, was a pioneer in this line of research after the attacks of March 11, 2004 in Madrid, when its scientists analyzed various items of clothing and a backpack to find out if the DNA present in them was North African or European.
“When there are no witness testimonies and there are no matches in the DNA databases [de delincuentes ya fichados], the new genetic analyzes offer more details about the traces left at the crime scene, but these tests are still taking their first steps towards being applied routinely in Spain”, acknowledges Phillips. Her team also participated in Operation Minstead: the search for an elderly rapist in London who was arrested in 2009 after a genetic analysis predicted his Caribbean origin.
Scientists from the European Visage consortium are aware of the ethical implications of their work. Ruling that an unknown serial rapist is of Caribbean origin implies that there will be many innocent people who will be investigated just for being of Caribbean origin. “In my opinion, there can be positive and negative applications, as is often the case with science. If we want to avoid negative applications at all costs, the only solution is not to do science, but then we won’t have positive applications either,” says geneticist Manfred Kayser, coordinator of the Visage project.
“The way out of this dilemma is to have strict regulation that only allows positive applications,” adds Kayser. A team of ethics experts, led by Barbara Prainsack of the University of Vienna, is finalizing a document to promote the responsible use of new genetic tests. Without adequate legislation, everything depends on the criteria of the authorities on duty, as Antonio Alonso emphasizes: “In the end, in our legal system, what matters most is proportionality. What is worth more? The privacy of certain innocent people or avoiding another death by a serial killer in a town in Spain? Well, many judges, and many reasonable people, will say that they prefer to take away that personal privacy a little to avoid a new murder.