This is a fascinating article about the level of work that went into arresting Bryan Kohberger for the vicious murder of four University of Idaho students.

DNA from a knife sheath left at the scene did not match match any past criminal offenders, so the Idaho State Police contracted with Othram, Inc., “which had a lab able to produce a more extensive DNA profile from the knife sheath than the state lab was set up to examine.”

I have been screaming this into the wind for more than a few years. DO NOT tell me how many times your state lab has tested the evidence in the OCCK case. This goes for cases like the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, too. Face it, state labs are not as sophisticated as some of these private labs. And their “retesting” just extinguishes evidence while it yields no answers.

Of course all of this presupposes that a law enforcement agency takes its obligation to a murder victim seriously enough to carefully store, catalog and keep track of all of the evidence. Like maybe in 1999 when Michigan agencies were on notice about DNA evidence when they dug up David Norberg to compare his DNA to ONE hair in this case. They could have cleaned up their act then. But why bother in this case, right?