DA: DNA helps solve cold cases

A prosecutor for 27 years, District Attorney Jan Scully knows well the fear that gripped eastern Sacramento County in the 1970s.

It was then that the East Area Rapist was terrorizing couples. He reportedly was connected to rapes in Carmichael, Citrus Heights, Orangevale, Fair Oaks and Rancho Cordova.

Scully, during a recent talk before the Carmichael Chamber of Commerce, spoke about the connection between the East Area sexual attacks, a double murder and DNA.

Proposition 69, which requires the collection of DNA samples from all felons, and from adults and juveniles arrested on specific crimes, was approved two years ago by voters.

The initiative was bankrolled in part by Newport Beach lawyer Bruce Harrington, whose brother and sister-in-law were murdered in 1980 in their Southern California home.

Although Proposition 69 was opposed by groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which argued the measure threatened the privacy rights of people arrested but not charged or convicted of felonies, it passed by a wide margin -- 62 percent yes to 38 percent no.

Scully, in her address to 100 people at the chamber luncheon, called Harrington "our public safety angel."

The Harrington homicides eventually were linked through DNA to the sexual assaults of the East Area Rapist. But the culprit is still unknown.

"We know he is not a California person, because we probably would have identified him by now," Scully said. "He could have left the state. He could be dead."

Scully, elected district attorney in 1994, is running unopposed for a fourth term. She spoke to the chamber May 23 at the invitation of the business group as part of its luncheon speakers program.

"I look forward to another term," she said in beginning her talk about DNA.

Scully traced most people's earliest remembrances of DNA in the courtroom to the O.J. Simpson trial, where Simpson's attorneys raised doubt about the testing procedure.

Today, she said, DNA is one of the most powerful legal tools a prosecutor can use.

Genetic fingerprint profiles are most commonly used in sexual assault cases, because DNA is derived from body fluids, usually semen, she said.

She said the state began to fund crime labs to work with law enforcement to identify old cases with saved DNA. That has led to criminal charges being filed against cold-case suspects, in part because of DNA.

Scully noted that the district attorney's crime lab isn't like the one on the "CSI" television show.

"First of all, my criminalists work on more than one case at a time -- and they don't solve every case in an hour," she said.

Criminalists are scientists, and they are not out taking confessions and arresting suspects, like the ones on TV, she said.