Investigators didn’t connect Ellis to the crimes until this fall, when they seized genetic material from his toothbrush. By then, it was too late for the woman police say was Ellis’s seventh and final victim.
“If they would have got his DNA when they were supposed to get it, maybe my cousin would still be here,’’ said Sarah Stokes, whose cousin, 28-year-old prostitute Ouithreaun Stokes, was found beaten and strangled in an abandoned rooming house in 2007.
An Associated Press review found that tens of thousands of DNA samples are missing from state databanks across the country because they were never taken or were lost.
The missing evidence - combined with big backlogs at the nation’s crime labs that result in DNA samples sitting on shelves for years without being analyzed and entered into the databanks - is preventing investigators from cracking untold numbers of cases. And some of those gaps have had tragic consequences.
“If you got missing samples, some of those people are out there raping your wives and abducting and murdering your children this week,’’ said former Charlottesville, Va., police captain J.E. Harding, who helped uncover missing samples in that state during a search for a serial rapist.
Nationwide, crime lab supervisors, state police and prison officials blame the failure to collect samples on new and confusing laws and a lack of coordination among the many law enforcement agencies and institutions responsible for taking DNA.
“I would just about guarantee you every state has an issue with this,’’ said Lisa Hurst, who tracks DNA convictions for Gordon Thomas Honeywell, an organization that lobbies on public safety and biotechnology issues.
The AP review found 27 states either failed to collect some DNA samples or are unable to say whether they took one from every offender who owes one.
At least 13 states are dealing with more samples than they can handle. Kansas, for example, has nearly 40,000 on its crime lab shelves, waiting to be uploaded.
In Massachusetts two years ago, an investigation found that more than 16,000 DNA samples in the State Police Crime Lab, some dating back to the 1980s, had not been analyzed. Many of the samples were connected to homicide cases and other serious crimes.
