CA CA - Foot Fetish Killer - Sacramento

Human foot washes up in tennis shoe on coast where 15 body parts have been found

A severed foot has washed up on a beach… still wearing a tennis shoe.

Volunteers made the grisly discovery while cleaning the area.

The find, in Seattle's Centennial Park, has been linked to as many as 15 "appendage" finds in the Pacific NorthWest since 2007. But authorities say it is too soon to establish if Tuesday's case is related.

Barb McLintock, a coronor in nearby British Columbia, said: "Could we guarantee that it is not at this point? No. But we don’t know anything about this, it was in Seattle.

"If they think they need to, they’ll make contact with our identification and disaster response unit."

Despite investigations still being in their infancy, McLintock admitted the chances of there being a link were slim.

"I suspect that the chances aren't high but this will be up to the American authorities to start," she added.

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Whodunit?

In the end, it was a slice of pizza that sealed his fate: In a scene straight from CSI, a police officer disguised as a waiter retrieved the partly eaten crust and tableware abandoned by the suspect on a restaurant table. Soon, tests confirmed that the DNA in saliva on the pizza matched evidence from a crime scene. That suspect, Lonnie Franklin Jr., is accused of being the serial killer nicknamed the “Grim Sleeper,” who left a trail of at least 10 victims in Los Angeles over a 25-year span. He was arrested in July and has pleaded not guilty to murder charges.

Italian food may have been Franklin’s downfall, but a less common, and more controversial, forensic technique led police to the suspect in the first place. Known as familial DNA searching, it scours existing DNA databases for partial matches that suggest an unidentified suspect may be a close relative of someone in the database. In the case of the Grim Sleeper, such a search pinpointed DNA that partially matched DNA found at one of the killer’s crime scenes, though it belonged to a man too young to have committed some of the murders. Further investigation revealed a probable suspect: that young man’s father, Lonnie Franklin Jr. His capture marks the first time that the technique – currently employed only by California and Colorado – has been used in the United States to help solve a homicide case.

“For those of us who support the judicious use of familial DNA searching in the US, this case is the Holy Grail we’ve been searching for,” says Frederick Bieber, a medical geneticist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and associate professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School. Bieber and other proponents of familial searching hope the apparent success of the Grim Sleeper case will motivate more states, including Massachusetts, to create a policy that gives investigators permission to implement the technique. But whether Massachusetts will eventually do so is uncertain. The Massachusetts State Police crime lab has a new director, Guy Vallaro, a forensic toxicologist, and he says there are no immediate plans to implement the type of DNA database searching that California and Colorado are using. “California has done a very thorough job of ensuring that they have all the quality measures in place for familial searching,” he says. “But that takes a lot of time and money.”




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Thanks for your inquiry and suggestions regarding the open cases we are currently working on. I talked with my staff and they have assured me that they are aware of the process you mention and routinely confer with DNA experts when applicable.

Regards,

Michael Ake
Assistant Chief
Investigations Bureau
Tacoma Police Department

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