The tree that witnessed a murder

One Sunday morning, a boy riding his dirt bike through a dry wash in the desert saw the nude body of a woman, lying face down near a cluster of palo verde trees. She had been strangled. A man in the vicinity volunteered that he had seen a white truck leave the area in a hurry just after one in the morning. The police found a pager a few feet from the body. It was registered to Earl Bogan, but used primarily by his son, Mark, who drove a white pickup truck and lived about twenty minutes from the scene. In the bed of his truck, police found two seed pods from a palo verde tree. Bogan claimed that a female hitchhiker had ‘swiped ‘ his pager from the truck and run away and denied having been in the area where the body was found.

An enterprising detective observed that one of the palo verde trees had new damage on one of its lower branches and contacted Dr Timothy Helentjaris, a professor of molecular genetics at the University of Arizona, who compared DNA from the seed pods found in the truck with the DNA in seed pods from the palo verde trees at the crime scene. He also analyzed DNA from other palo verde seed pods collected at various sites around the state and concluded that the seed pods found in the truck originated from the damaged tree.

Bogan received a murder conviction, but appealed it, claiming the science was inaccurate, but the appeal judge reasoned that forensic scientists routinely testify about ‘matches‘ in hair, fingerprints, and other items and that there was no disagreement about the generally acceptance of the laboratory techniques used and the conviction was upheld.

Palo verde photograph by Neo Saguaro, used under a creative commons attribution licence

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