Forensic lab in Quebec gets new tools to solve cold cases

A lab assistant uses a pipette to prepare Coronavirus RNA for sequencing at the Wellcome Sanger Institute that is operated by Genome Research in Cambridge, Thursday, March 4, 2021. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

Quebec DNA investigators and police forces are on the verge of freeing themselves from their dependence on private American laboratories thanks to new technologies that could help them solve unsolved crimes.

The Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale du Québec (LSJML) management presented to the media on Tuesday the new technological tools and procedures that have just been implemented or that are in the process of being implemented.

In addition to advancing unsolved cases, these technologies will support missing persons investigations, the identification of human remains and, most importantly, the solving of serious crimes such as murder, attempted murder, sexual assault and serial crimes.

"For our families in Quebec or the victims themselves, it is important to be able to give answers, to be able to guide and support the police services in their investigations", said the director general of the laboratory, Suzanne Marchand, during a technical briefing on the new tools.

The resolution of cases that remain a mystery for police forces, commonly called "cold cases," now appears feasible, according to the director of biology at the LSJML, Diane Séguin.

"These technologies have a lot of potential. We are currently working on some cases. We are very hopeful that some cases will be solved by these new investigative techniques," she said. However, the laboratory representatives warned on a few occasions that they have no intention of tackling specific cases.

Until now, many of the forensic tests required by police officers had to be requested from private American laboratories. With the implementation of the new technologies presented on Tuesday, "we sincerely have nothing to envy of any laboratory in the world. On the contrary, we are very well equipped and from the moment it is definitively put in place, we will not have — and the police forces will not have — to resort to laboratories other than the Quebec laboratory," said Marchand.

Already, however, the team of some 90 people assigned to crime scene analysis was hard at work, Séguin said.

"In Quebec, we analyze about 7,000 requests in various types of files, be it murders, attempted murders, assaults with a weapon, break and enters, etc., which corresponds to 25,000 DNA samples analyzed per year."

The laboratory's experts will now be able, for example, to link individuals, including members of criminal gangs, to each other from common files in which their DNA was found, through DNA network analysis. It will also be possible, in unsolved serious crime cases or human remains identification cases, to determine certain physical appearance characteristics such as eye, hair or skin colour through phenotyping, a form of genetic sketching.

Also, the Y-pattern identification technique, based on the analysis of the Y-chromosome, which does not vary from father to son, will be very useful to establish a paternal family line and obtain, among other things, the possible family name of a suspect.

The laboratory will also be equipped with a portable DNA profiling device that can be used for comparison purposes in as little as two to three hours, which could help to quickly focus an investigation upon arrival at a crime scene.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Feb. 21, 2022.