MORE "SCIENTIFIC" FRAUD IN VIRGINA

Eight years ago, in a case that has never been reviewed or audited, the Virginia crime lab made another mistake. But for a series of improbable events, it would not have been revealed. But for the discovery of the errors in the Washington case, it might have been forgotten.

The story begins in the spring of 1997 when two lawyers drove from Fredericksburg to Richmond for meetings with examiners at the Virginia crime lab. Their client, a 44-year-old itinerant house painter named Karl Michael Rousch, was headed for trial in a month for the abduction, rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl. This crime, one of the worst, most-publicized cases in Spotsylvania County history, had dominated the local news since the girl’s disappearance the previous September.

Rousch, jailed since the previous November, insisted he was innocent. Tests performed on evidence at the crime lab insisted he was not.

The most damning of this evidence was explained in intricate detail by the lab’s fiber examiner during the lawyers’ meeting with her in April 1997. Three different kinds of fibers found in Rousch’s 1984 Dodge Caravan perfectly matched fibers taken from a blanket in which the body of the dead girl, Sofia Silva, had been wrapped. The lab had also performed a DNA analysis of biological evidence taken from Silva’s body. Those results, while less conclusive than the fiber match, did not exactly buttress Rousch’s claim of innocence.

One of the lawyers, Ben Woodbridge, recalls the lab examiner’s explanation that day: “If there was only one contributor [to the DNA sample], that contributor could not have been Karl Rousch. But if there was more than one contributor, then Rousch cannot be ruled out.”

To a DNA crime analyst, this language denotes a result known as “conditional inclusion.” To the criminal defense lawyers that day, it meant another kind of result: conviction. On the drive back to Fredericksburg, Rousch’s prospects seemed grim. “We thought it was all over,” Woodbridge recalls. “The fiber evidence was just devastating. I mean, [the fiber examiner] was going to get on the stand and say it was a complete match. And now the DNA guy was basically suggesting that Rousch and another person had raped the girl before killing her.”

Because Rousch could not afford to pay a lawyer, Woodbridge and Phillip Sasser had been appointed to his case by the judge. This meant that, in order to get a second opinion on the forensics tests, they had to ask the judge for money to hire an expert. But the judge said no. Then they asked for more time to prepare. The judge delayed the trial until September.

As it turned out, that delay would be indefinite. In a series of unlikely events, both tragic and extraordinary, the state’s case against Rousch turned to vapor. It began with the disappearance, on May 1, 1997, of two Spotsylvania County sisters: Kristin Lisk, 15, and her 12-year-old sister, Kati. The girls had come home from school and vanished, just like Silva. Investigators with the Spotsylvania County Sheriff’s Department regarded this as mere coincidence. They knew Rousch had killed Silva because the Virginia crime lab had proved it. Rousch was in jail. Hence, no connection.

The FBI, brought in to help with the case, was unhampered by such certainty. Soon after the girls’ bodies were found, the agency decided to retest the evidence in the Silva case. The results were unambiguous and dramatic: The three fibers from Rousch’s Dodge Caravan did not match fibers from the blanket. In fact, none of the fibers matched. The Virginia crime lab, in addition to being flat wrong, was not even close. The FBI was so adamant on this point, Woodbridge says, that it eventually became clear to everyone involved that the original fiber analysis was “unconnected to science or fact.”

In the drama caused by this revelation, the lab’s DNA analysis lost all significance. The charges against Rousch were dropped. Not long afterward, the FBI announced the establishment of an undisclosed “forensic link” between the Lisk and Silva murders. The case remained unsolved until June 2002, when police attempted to capture a rape suspect named Richard M. Evonitz in the parking lot of an International House of Pancakes in Florida. Surrounded by police, Evonitz shot himself in the head. In a subsequent search of his car and his South Carolina apartment, police found newspaper articles and notes about the Silva and Lisk cases. A DNA analysis by the FBI crime lab confirmed that the evidence in the cases matched Evonitz.

The Virginia crime lab’s failure to exclude Rousch as a possible suspect in the Silva case was, according to Thompson, accurate. But in explaining the result to Rousch’s lawyers, the lab did not explain that the exclusion was statistically meaningless.

By Thompson’s calculations, the test results indicate that 36 percent of Caucasian-Americans and 24 percent of African-Americans also cannot be excluded as suspects. “That,” he says, “is like saying the suspect has brown hair. So what?”

The lab’s fiber analysis has never been explained. How, at what was then one of the most reputable labs in the country, was an examiner able to pass these results off as science? In 2001, three years after the revelation, a reporter for the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star posed a version of this question to Ferrara. He seemed to have no answer. “I still, for the life of me, don’t know what the hell she did,” Ferrara said.

Perhaps, he speculated, the examiner’s ties to law enforcement — her previous career as a state trooper, for example, or her husband’s job as a sheriff’s deputy — had clouded her objectivity. In any event, he said, the incident had ended the woman’s 12-year career at the lab. New policies and procedures were now in place to ensure accuracy and integrity. The lab had learned a hard lesson. But it had emerged improved. “Ferrara said no lab is ever immune from problems,” the Free Lance-Star reporter wrote later. “But if suspicions exist, they need to be addressed.”

Virginia’s next execution, scheduled for July 11, will be that of Robin Lovitt. Sentenced to death for the 1998 murder of a night manager in an Arlington pool hall, Lovitt has insisted since his arrest that he is not the killer. His conviction was based, in part, on a DNA analysis performed by the Virginia crime lab in 1999.

The analysis, performed on two spots of blood on the pair of scissors thought to be the murder weapon, excluded Lovitt as the possible contributor of one of the spots, but not the other. According to Lovitt’s current lawyers, the results also implicate one out of every three white men and one of out of every three black men. Another test, on blood from a jacket, was inconclusive.

In Lovitt’s case, no new DNA analysis is possible. An Arlington County court clerk threw out the evidence in May 2001.

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