National forensic investigators re-opening cold cases with new DNA techniques

The Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) is adopting a new DNA matching technique that it tested over the past two years, NOS reported on Friday. This technique, which automatically compares DNA profiles with a database, will now become standard in forensic investigations and could reopen cold cases.

50 potential offenders were identified during the trial period using this technique. The identified matches are related to serious crimes, including violent crimes, drug offenses, shootings, kidnappings, and vice cases.

The new system significantly improves the utilization of "bad" DNA profiles. These are incomplete profiles or those contaminated with DNA from other people. These were previously manually compared with the DNA database and often overlooked after one comparison. With the new method, these "bad" profiles are automatically compared with the database, increasing the chances of a match.

This advancement in technology and process has become possible due to new software that allows automated comparison of these bad DNA profiles every two months. "It's super efficient. We have a huge amount of data lying around, so we can now suddenly do much more than before. While it hardly costs us any extra capacity,” said Sander Kneppers, program manager Innovation and Technology at Netherlands Forensic Institute.

According to Thalassa Valkenburg, a police forensic advisor, the 50 cases identified during the trial would likely have remained unsolved without this new method. "There were instances where a suspect was already identified, but this method still provided additional evidence to what was previously established."

The NFI utilized this new method for cases from 2021 and 2022. The institute plans to use this approach as the standard for all current investigations and past cases dating back to 2019. This might also be extended to older cold cases in the future. Given the annual addition of 20,000 individual profiles to the DNA database, increasing the frequency of DNA profile comparisons could yield valuable results.