On May 2, 1992, Denise Johnson was murdered. Her strangled body was discovered the next day in the remote wilderness outside of Phoenix, Arizona. A pager belonging to the father of a man named Mark Bogan was found near the body, and an eyewitness reported a truck similar to Bogan’s at the scene around the time Johnson was killed. However, Bogan claimed that Johnson, who he said was a hitchhiker, had stolen his pager. Given that there was virtually no physical evidence tying him to the crime, police were stuck.
That is, until one of the detectives noticed a small abrasion on a nearby tree and remembered that two small seed pods from that species of tree had been found in the back of Bogan’s truck. Since the tree was fairly common in the area, that wouldn’t have been enough to tie Bogan to the crime without the work of a professor of molecular genetics from the University of Arizona who matched the DNA of the tree at the scene to the pods found in the truck. As a result, Bogan was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in the first murder case in the US that involved plant DNA.
************************************* http://www.denverda.org/DNA_Documents/bogan.pdf
That is, until one of the detectives noticed a small abrasion on a nearby tree and remembered that two small seed pods from that species of tree had been found in the back of Bogan’s truck. Since the tree was fairly common in the area, that wouldn’t have been enough to tie Bogan to the crime without the work of a professor of molecular genetics from the University of Arizona who matched the DNA of the tree at the scene to the pods found in the truck. As a result, Bogan was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in the first murder case in the US that involved plant DNA.
************************************* http://www.denverda.org/DNA_Documents/bogan.pdf
On May 2, 1992, Denise Johnson was murdered. Her strangled body was discovered the next day in the remote wilderness outside of Phoenix, Arizona. A pager belonging to the father of a man named Mark Bogan was found near the body, and an eyewitness reported a truck similar to Bogan’s at the scene around the time Johnson was killed. However, Bogan claimed that Johnson, who he said was a hitchhiker, had stolen his pager. Given that there was virtually no physical evidence tying him to the crime, police were stuck.
That is, until one of the detectives noticed a small abrasion on a nearby tree and remembered that two small seed pods from that species of tree had been found in the back of Bogan’s truck. Since the tree was fairly common in the area, that wouldn’t have been enough to tie Bogan to the crime without the work of a professor of molecular genetics from the University of Arizona who matched the DNA of the tree at the scene to the pods found in the truck. As a result, Bogan was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in the first murder case in the US that involved plant DNA.
************************************* http://www.denverda.org/DNA_Documents/bogan.pdf
That is, until one of the detectives noticed a small abrasion on a nearby tree and remembered that two small seed pods from that species of tree had been found in the back of Bogan’s truck. Since the tree was fairly common in the area, that wouldn’t have been enough to tie Bogan to the crime without the work of a professor of molecular genetics from the University of Arizona who matched the DNA of the tree at the scene to the pods found in the truck. As a result, Bogan was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in the first murder case in the US that involved plant DNA.
************************************* http://www.denverda.org/DNA_Documents/bogan.pdf
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
Explore more
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
