NY police look anew at 1985 slaying of MN student

Crime investigators faulted the New York state Health Department on Wednesday for blocking efforts to use a sophisticated DNA technique to try to solve the 1985 slaying of a Minnesota college student in central New York.

Kristin O'Connell, 20, was visiting a friend in the Finger Lakes village of Ovid 24 years ago this week when she vanished after leaving a party to go for a walk. Two days later, searchers found her body in a cornfield with her throat slashed.

State police and Seneca County investigators have been promised up to $40,000 in county funds to enlist a Dutch forensic team that specializes in sophisticated "touch DNA" to solve cold-case homicides. But they said state health officials have stymied the effort because the Amsterdam lab isn't certified in New York.

Touch DNA is a technique that can detect tiny amounts of cells left behind from a person's touch.

"We feel this is our last, best effort to solve this case," county District Attorney Richard Swinehart said. "We are very frustrated with the bureaucracy of the Department of Health that they won't take a world-leading lab, where the lab people have testified in other states in our country, as experts on homicide cases and won't let them at least examine the evidence while they're being certified."

Health Department spokesman Jeffrey Hammond said he expected to get official comment later Wednesday.

O'Connell, a hotel-and-restaurant management major from Burnsville, Minn., was barefoot and alone late at night when she left the party on Aug. 14, 1985. Police said two people spotted walking behind her were never located. She was stabbed multiple times a quarter-mile outside the village.

"Witnesses say there was a hellacious, from-the-gut scream, which we believe was Kristin's last cry" for help, state police Investigator Jeffery Arnold said. "It is our belief that there was more than one person involved in this homicide."

In December, state police began pushing for DNA analysis to be carried out by Richard and Selma Eikelenboom, a famed husband-and-wife forensic team from the Netherlands with a track record of solving difficult-to-solve crimes.

When the Eikelenbooms decided to accept the case, investigators thought they had crossed the biggest hurdle, Arnold said. But the state Health Department has refused to give the couple a one-time exemption because their lab is not certified by the agency, he said.

"We are still hopeful they may get the one-time exemption or may be able to apply and go through a lengthy process of becoming a fully accredited and approved New York state health lab," Arnold said.

Police believe O'Connell "put up a violent fight" and that her attackers left behind individual skin cells on her clothing, under her fingernails or in other evidence collected at the field.

"It is our hope that through further analysis of the evidence we have that we'll obtain a DNA sample of our perpetrator," Arnold said.

The victim's family, backed by New York Sen. Charles Schumer and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a former prosecutor, has urged the Health Department to authorize the testing.

"They're railroading for their own purposes - there could be no other reason," said Kyle O'Connell, a construction company owner in St. Paul, who was 15 years old when his sister died. "They're covering something up, it's professional envy, they're afraid there's going to be a bunch more cases. ... They haven't come up with a good viable reason why this should not be allowed."

(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)