Emedinews:Insights on Medicolegal Issues: Dr Crippen murder case: After 100 years forensic science shows that the body was not of Cora Crippen

Foran’s laboratory has devised methods to extract and isolate mitochondrial DNA. Unable to break through the sap seal, David Foran, a forensic biologist and director of Michigan State University’s forensic science program, chipped away at the slide’s glass cover slip to get at the tissue sample. One of his graduate students recently studied ways to work around formaldehyde fixation to isolate DNA. The goal: To compare the mitochondrial DNA in the slide that convicted Crippen with that of a maternal relative of Cora Crippen. If Hawley Crippen indeed killed his wife and buried some of her remains in the cellar, those remains would share specific DNA characteristics with Cora Crippen’s current day relatives. Beth Wills, a genealogist, spent some seven years pouring through genealogical records and taking on the somewhat nontraditional task of finding living female relatives of Cora Crippen’s mother. Genealogy usually works backwards, but in this case, it went forward and Wills ultimately located three grandnieces. David Foran said, the DNA in the sample is different from the known relatives of Cora Crippen. Crippen was not convicted just of murder – but the murder of Cora Crippen. To paraphrase the famed attorney in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, Johnnie Cochran, if the DNA doesn’t fit, you can't convict.