In 1991, a case was received at the RCMP Central Forensic Laboratory in Ottawa where a young woman was sexually assaulted and murdered. Vaginal samples, taken during the autopsy, were submitted by Police along with comparison samples from the deceased, her boyfriend and a suspect. While performing semen identification tests, substantial microbial contamination was noticed in the vaginal samples. The DNA profile from the epithelial fraction showed a mixture consistent with the deceased and three other unexplained fragments. An attempt to characterize these fragments will be presented here as well as suggestions for assisting forensic biologists in recognizing the occurrence of microbial contamination in a human DNA profile.
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Michaud et al. (1996) studied this question.
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