James Vyver

This wasn't the average robbery.

The brutality of the attack shocked the community.

Well, it was described in the trial as a sharp turn in the investigation.

Just to give people a timeline of this, because this information that has now had the suppression lifted on it sort of slots into a piece of the timeline.

So just very quickly, 1999, of course, this is the home invasion, the two intruders, and

being killed and the the robbery and the secret compartment and all of that it's then 2008 that Steve Fabrizzi commits another crime is later convicted goes to prison in 2011 is when he gives his DNA as part of a statutory act that he was required to do which is a year after the 2010 review of the case so

you've got this slight mismatch of the timeline and then it's then 2019 when the match of Steve Fabrizzi is flagged up as matching the 100 billion times more likely than being someone else matching the sample that was taken from the milk container in the fridge back from 1999.

So you've kind of got this 20 year timeline of things

being on the timeline but not quite matching up for whatever reason.

And it wasn't until two decades later that it then started that subsequent chain of events that we've talked about on the pod, which is

the undercover investigation and then the naming of Oconee and everything all sort of then fell into place to result in the conviction.

The interesting thing is the evolution of the database because we talked about in previous episodes of the pod about the very early database in the very early days of this DNA analysis being a few hundred people.

And most of them were either police or forensic officers because the database is only as good as the crimes that are fed into it.

Doing a bit of research for this episode, the National Criminal Investigation DNA Database, or the NCIDD, now has something in the order of 1.8 million samples.

Wow.

So it would be interesting to know, in that 2019 scenario...

Is it a question of you almost running a script of going, does this person match anything else?

Or is it stocky, your big red flashing light scenario where the database automatically finds matches?

I suspect it's the former, not the latter, but it would be interesting to find out from police at some point in the future.

How do you go about it?