DNA

Out of cash and understaffed, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has suspended its faltering effort to analyze DNA evidence from thousands of rape and sexual assault cases. The department halted shipments of the genetic evidence to private crime laboratories at the end of May after funds allotted for the testing ran dry, according to a report submitted by Sheriff Lee Baca to the county Board of Supervisors late last week.

The most enduring and romantic legend of the Russian Revolution -- that two children of Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, survived the slaughter that killed the rest of their family -- may finally be put to rest with the positive identification of bone fragments from a lonely Russian grave.

Gregory Cochran has always been drawn to puzzles. This one had been gnawing at him for several years: Why are European Jews prone to so many deadly genetic diseases? Tay-Sachs disease. Canavan disease. More than a dozen more. It offended Cochran's sense of logic. Natural selection, the self-taught genetics buff knew, should flush dangerous DNA from the gene pool. Perhaps the mutations causing these diseases had some other, beneficial purpose. But what?

For 34 years, the rape and murder of 80-year-old Alice Lewis remained a mystery. There wasn't even a suspect. But five months ago, a routine traffic stop in Los Angeles yielded DNA evidence that police said opened the door for solving the cold case and arresting the alleged killer. This week, Dennis Vasquez, 50, was arrested in the 1975 strangulation of the woman at her Meier Street home in Mar Vista. Because he would have been only 16 at the time of the crime, Vasquez appeared Friday in Juvenile Court in Inglewood.

In their rough South Los Angeles neighborhood, Mary Romer and Alma Harvey watched over each other. So back in February 1990, Romer didn't think twice about walking across the street to Harvey's home when another friend called. They were concerned because they had not heard from the 82-year-old, who had trouble walking and was mostly housebound. Romer used a spare key to enter the house. As she crept inside, she called for her friend, but there was no answer.

The Orange County district attorney's office has nearly quadrupled its DNA database over the last nine months, to about 15,000 individual profiles, and officials say they hope to start using it to identify criminal suspects by early next year. The agency's effort to build a database exempt from the rules that govern state and national DNA repositories has made Orange County unique among local governments in California. Much of the rapid growth has come from cases in which prosecutors drop charges against low-level offenders who agree to submit DNA samples.

By the time homicide Det. Dennis Kilcoyne met with Diane Webb last fall to discuss the maddening search for a serial killer who has stalked South L.A. for decades, he was wide open to suggestions. Despite more than a year of chasing leads, Kilcoyne and his team of detectives were no closer to catching the man suspected of sexually assaulting and murdering at least 10 young black women.

For more than 20 years, I've been writing about local history, and never once has Southern California let me down. I've found no shortage of tycoons and beggars, dreamy spiritualists, mad-eyed killers. This 227-year-old city has had a few angels, but it's the others who often make for the most fascinating storytelling.

The last two years have seen an exponential increase in the rate of gene discovery, thanks in large part to the advancements in so-called genotyping chip technology. These small glass or silicon platforms have made quick and easy work of simultaneously analyzing hundreds of thousands of genetic variations that exist in the human genome. The screens detect single-letter changes in the DNA code known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs (pronounced "snips").

Police found the naked body of Diana Sylvester near her Christmas tree. The 22-year-old San Francisco nurse had been sexually assaulted and stabbed in the heart. She lay on her back, her neck laced with scratches and her mouth open as if frozen in a scream. For more than three decades, Sylvester's slaying went unsolved.