By matching the DNA in cat hairs found on the body of a victim, British prosecutors were able to solve the crime and convict a man of manslaughter, the Daily Mail reports.
Eight hairs from David Hilder's pet cat were found on the dismembered torso of David Guy last July, which constables sent to a labratory in California for DNA analysis. Researchers at the lab confirmed that Hilder's cat, Tinker, and the hairs found on Guy's body contained the same rare genetic code, as the scientists compared the found hairs to the DNA of 152 cats in a cat DNA database in the U.K. The blood samples used were obtained with permission from vets, and only three of the samples matched the cat DNA found at the crime scene, making the match highly likely.
"This is the first time cat DNA has been used in a criminal trial in the UK," Jon Wetton, the University of Leicester geneticist who led the cat DNA project, told the Daily Mail. "We now hope to publish the database so it can be used in future crime investigations. This could be a real boon for forensic science, as the 10 million cats in the UK are unwittingly tagging the clothes and furnishings in more than a quarter of households."
In July 2012, Guy's body was discovered wrapped in a curtain at a beach in Southsea, England, which contained the eight cat hairs from Tinker. Last month, after the evidence was presented, Hilder was convicted in Winchester Crown Court of manslaughter and sentenced to life in prison.
While the U.S. and Canada have used cat hair found in crime scenes before, the U.K. is the only nation with such a DNA database.
"Having produced a similar database for dogs during my previous employment with the forensic science service, we proposed creating a cat database from scratch," said Wetton.
"Within each cat hair are two types of DNA, individual-specific 'nuclear DNA' detectable in the roots of some larger hairs, and 'mitochondrial DNA' which is shared by all maternally-related individuals and can be found even in the finest hair shafts. Animal DNA offers a way of linking people to places and items through the transfer of their pets' hairs."
Wetton's fellow researcher, Barbara Ottolini, admitted that the police got lucky in this particular case.
"Most mitochondrial types are common when tested with the technique we used here," Ottolini told the Daily Mail. "We would like to use cutting-edge DNA sequencing methods to identify further variation in cat mitochondrial DNA to maximize the discriminating power of the evidence."
Click here to see a photo from the crime scene in which David Guy's body was discovered, as well as photos of David Hilder and David Guy.
