ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, April 24, 1997 TAG: 9704240064
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: THE NEW YORK TIMES
``Without the cat, the case falls flat," the defense attorney said. Snowball's genes didn't lie, jurors decided.
It was a trial to remember on Prince Edward Island, Canada. A young woman was murdered, her estranged boyfriend was accused of the crime, and the main evidence against him came from the DNA of a cat.
Forensic scientists say it was the first case in which animal DNA was introduced in court. It came about only because a determined police officer searched until he found a researcher specialized enough to perform the needed analysis.
``Without the cat, the case falls flat,'' defense attorney John MacDougall told the jury. After testimony about how DNA was obtained from the hair of the family cat, the jury found Douglas Beamish guilty of second-degree murder.
The case, decided Aug. 1, is reported in today's issue of the journal Nature.
It began Oct. 3, 1994, when Shirley Duguay, a 32-year-old mother of five, vanished from her home in Sunnyside, a city of 16,000 that is the second-largest city on Prince Edward Island. Her car was found days later, splattered with her blood. Several months later, Duguay's body was found in a shallow grave.
Earlier, a military team about six miles from her house had stumbled across a plastic bag containing a man's leather jacket. Duguay's blood was on the jacket, and several white hairs were in its lining.
Analysis showed the hair came from a cat. A police inspector, Roger Savoie, decided to order a DNA analysis of the cat hairs and try to provide convincing evidence that the murderer was the cat's owner. Beamish, the father of three of Duguay's children, owned a white cat named Snowball.
DNA testing labs, Savoie recalled in an interview `` had no idea what I was talking about.'' No one, it seemed, ever got DNA forensic evidence from a domestic animal and no one was willing to try.
Savoie persisted, calling experts in the United States and Canada, and eventually found Dr. Stephen O'Brien, chief of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Md., an expert on cats and their genes. O'Brien, who had never done a forensic DNA analysis, was intrigued and sought advice from a former student, Dr. Lisa Forman, who worked for Cellmark, a Rockville, Md., company that specializes in forensic DNA analysis.
Only one of the eight hairs found in the jacket had usable DNA. When O'Brien analyzed Snowball's blood, ``It looked like a perfect match,'' but he wondered whether he really had proof. What if all the cats on the island were so inbred that their DNA was essentially identical? So he got Savoie to round up 20 neighborhood cats and send their blood to his lab. ``We were relieved to find abundant genetic diversity,'' O'Brien said.
After his conviction, Beamish was sentenced to 18 years in a maximum security prison without parole. He is appealing his sentence, his attorney said. Snowball remains with Beamish's parents, MacDougall said. ``He's still the family cat.''
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