DNA analyst says sperm on victim was suspect's

Sperm genetically identical to murder suspect Paul Durousseau's was found on the body of a woman slain in 1999, a DNA analyst told a Duval County jury Wednesday.

The odds of another man having that same DNA are more than 4 billion times the number of people living on Earth, said Sheree Enfinger, who analyzed sperm left on murder victim Tyresa Mack.

Mack, found with a phone cord around her neck in her Eastside apartment, was the first of six women in Jacksonville Durousseau is accused of killing. The other five died more than three years later, in a chilling spree that lasted less than two months.

This is the first murder trial for Durousseau, 36, a former soldier and taxi driver also suspected of killing a woman near Fort Benning, Ga., in 1997.

After a day filled with witnesses describing tests and routines of forensic serology and DNA studies, Enfinger's testimony delivered the kind of clear-cut science findings prosecutors crave.

Enfinger, a former analyst for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said that in 2003 she made a genetic profile of Durousseau and compared it against sperm found on Mack years earlier.

The profile mapped the makeup of 13 points in the murder suspect's DNA. Each one matched the sperm from the 1999 case, she said.

She told the jury the odds of another African-American man having that DNA are one in 30 quadrillion, a unit of measure that carries 15 zeroes. The odds of a white or Hispanic man having that DNA are even more remote, said Enfinger, who now manages the DNA unit of a crime lab in Charlotte, N.C.

The numbers are based on comparisons to an FBI genetic database that Enfinger said contains about 200 samples for each of the 13 DNA markers used in the analysis. She said the database, while comparatively small, was developed with genetics experts to be representative of the population.

Defense lawyer Wafa Hanania pointed out that DNA tests couldn't show whether there had been consensual sex before Mack died.

"That's correct, I don't know," Enfinger said.

Hanania also pointed out that Enfinger had been temporarily removed from casework in 2001 because of mistakes she made in a test designed to measure her proficiency as an analyst.

Enfinger testified Durousseau's DNA was compared against material found at the scenes of two other killings for which he's charged. She said that evidence wasn't as complete as in the Mack case, so she couldn't analyze all of the same 13 points. She said none of the available evidence ruled out Durousseau, and that the partial matches she found would be shared by much less than one in a million other men.