One of the keys to trimming a backlog of cold cases on Vancouver Island may lie with a private forensic lab in Thunder Bay, Ont.
In the past two years alone, Molecular World Inc. has helped crack a number of cases across sa国际传媒 that read like episodes of CSI.
Using the latest advances in DNA technology, the lab helped police lay charges in a 1984 child murder in Winnipeg, and assisted prosecutors and police in convicting a man for a 1994 double murder in Ontario.
Now, detectives across the country are dusting off bits of evidence they once thought too small or too old for DNA testing and shipping them to Thunder Bay.
"We are getting quite a few," lab director Amarjit Chahal said in a telephone interview.
Previously, investigators relied on regular or "nuclear" DNA testing of blood, semen, saliva or other fluids or tissue to identify suspects in murder cases, Chahal said.
But the process has been refined over the years, so that labs can test much smaller or more degraded exhibits.
Chahal said nuclear DNA testing remains the "gold standard," but scientists can still identify a suspect's profile even in cases where no nuclear DNA is present.
Molecular World, the first accredited lab in sa国际传媒 to offer the latest methods, can now pull a DNA profile from a single strand of hair that we shed every day, Chahal said.
"Now investigators -- with this newer technology -- they have the opportunity to go back and look for any remaining biological evidence [in the files]," he said. "They can revisit all those cases where nuclear DNA was not possible, like 'shed' hairs, or the nuclear DNA was in small quantity."
The technique, known as mitochondrial DNA testing, was used to obtain a murder conviction in a Canadian court for the first time two years ago.
The case dated back to Sept. 14, 1994, when two men abducted a carpenter from Pickering, Ont., drove him outside the city, and shot him execution-style four times in the head. They then stole his car and headed to Oshawa where they donned masks and robbed a gun shop, killing the shop owner and wounding three others in the process.
The following year, police arrested and charged Ronald Woodcock and Roshan Norouzali on two counts of first-degree murder. They were convicted in 1998, but Woodcock won a new trial in 2003.
By the time the case went to court in 2006, however, DNA evidence had caught up with Woodcock. A number of hairs recovered from the getaway vehicle in 1994 were submitted to Molecular World and the lab linked three strands to Woodcock.
He was convicted and sentenced to six concurrent life terms.
Chahal, who testified at the trial, said the "sensitive" new test increases the likelihood of finding a DNA profile in collected evidence.
"Since we have so many mitochondrial molecules per cell, chances are we will still get it in very old degraded DNA samples," he said.
Molecular World used mitochondrial testing last year to help Winnipeg police crack the murder of 13-year-old Candace Derksen in 1984.
The lab matched hairs found at the scene to the DNA of a man now charged in her death.
And last month the test was used in Alberta to identify human remains found in 2003 as those of a man who was swept away while swimming the Bow River in 1991.
Meanwhile, Chahal said a recent advance may prove even more valuable than mitochondrial DNA testing. The latest technique is the same as nuclear DNA testing, but it can be used on smaller and degraded samples, he said.
"This technology," Chahal said, "is going to be wonderful."
