Prevalence of DNA in vehicles: linking clothing of a suspect to car occupancy

ABSTRACT

Vehicles are commonly involved in crime-related incidents. To gain insight into the distribution (prevalence) of biological traces in vehicles, vehicles were studied under three different occupant scenarios; namely (1) a regular driver without and (2) with a regular passenger, and (3) an incidental driver introduced to scenario (1). One aspect of this study is elaborated in more detail in this paper, namely in respect to samples collected from the clothing of an incidental driver of a vehicle. This individual wore his own, clean clothing while driving the vehicle of another person for 30 minutes. After this activity samples were taken from the back of the upper garment and from the seat of the pants. The resulting DNA profiles were compared with reference DNA profiles from the wearer (incidental driver) and from the regular driver of the vehicle. Results of this study demonstrate that the clothing of the incidental driver can be related to the regular driver of the vehicle in a high percentage of instances. Our findings highlight a potential avenue for forensic investigation with high success rates when the relation between an individual and a vehicle is questioned.

KEYWORDS:

• DNA transfer
• DNA prevalence
• DNA recovery
• car
• clothing
• sampling strategy

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank all volunteers who participated in these experiments. We also thank Ms A. van der Zwan, Ms I.H.M. Baak and Mr D. Boon B.ASc for technical assistance with this project. We are grateful to Professor Dr K. Slooten for his assistance with the LR calculations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

No external funding was received for this study.