It was Week 11, Day 40, when Crown prosecutors presented what they believed to be the coup de grâce in their case against Dennis Oland. Joy Kearsey, a scientist formerly with the RCMP’s forensic laboratory services for seventeen years, most recently in Halifax, stepped into the witness box on November 23, 2015.
Between August 2011 and August 2013, Kearsey prepared eleven blood and DNA reports related to the Oland case, amassing 1,400 pages. Other courts across the country at the provincial, Court of Queen’s Bench, and provincial Supreme Court levels had previously deemed her an expert, as had the Supreme Court of Bermuda. Kearsey had testified in forty-seven other cases, most notably one that she modestly described as “a homicide case at a pig farm.” It was, in fact, the largest serial-killer investigation in Canadian history: the high-profile trial of Robert Pickton, the BC pig farmer charged with twenty-six counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of women who disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. In that case, Kearsey developed DNA profiles of forensic evidence found during the twenty-month police search of Pickton’s two properties in Port Coquitlam, a small city east of Vancouver. Those results were compared to at least 750 known DNA profiles, including victims, potential suspects, people with links to the properties, and those involved in the search.
Kearsey had given numerous lectures and written several reports over the years and received two commanding officer’s commendations for her work. She was also awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee commemorative medal, bestowed upon Canadians who have made outstanding and exemplary contributions to their communities or the nation. When the Halifax RCMP lab closed in 2014 as part of a national consolidation, Kearsey went to work for the Nova Scotia government’s public health laboratory network as a biosafety officer. Walsh deemed Kearsey an expert qualified to give opinion evidence in the application of DNA typing procedures and results, and the calculation of frequency estimates of DNA profiles within the general population. But he gave his usual reminder to the jurors that it was up to them to decide how much weight to give any expert’s evidence.
Kearsey started by giving the jury a daylong, university-style tutorial about DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), complete with a forty-page PowerPoint presentation titled “What is DNA? Why is it useful in forensics?” that included colourful charts and graphics. She also delivered a presentation on the identification of blood and some of the strengths and weaknesses of the forensic tests scientists use. Throughout the complex crash course, Kearsey made regular eye contact with the jurors to ensure she wasn’t losing them. None appeared to take notes, but they were attentive.
DNA is the genetic material inherited from parents, and it governs traits, such as eye colour and stature. Human DNA is 99.9 per cent identical from person to person, but no two people have identical DNA, except for identical twins, said Kearsey. Forensic analysis targets the 0.1 per cent that is unique, she explained; a person’s “blueprint for life,” she said. DNA is present in essentially every one of the estimated one hundred trillion cells that make up a person’s body. It is identical in every cell, whether it’s from blood, semen, saliva, urine, hair, teeth, bone, tissue, or skin, and it does not change with age.
DNA, Kearsey said, is organized into units called chromosomes. Humans have twenty-three pairs in each cell. One of each pair is inherited from the mother and the other from the father. Although siblings get their DNA from the same parents, it’s a random combination, and they can end up with much different DNA profiles, she noted.
Scientists assist police investigations by comparing known DNA samples of people to unknown samples taken from crime scenes to determine if they match. If the two samples do match, scientists can use a DNA database to determine how common that particular profile is and then employ a mathematical calculation to estimate a frequency of occurrence, or what’s known as the random-match probability. Based on the Canadian Caucasian database, for example, the estimated probability that an unrelated individual selected at random from the Canadian Caucasian population will have the same genetic profile as the test subject is one in ninety-seven billion, Kearsey said. The commercial DNA typing product she used, Profiler Plus, analyzes DNA in nine locations, called loci, for distinctive DNA elements. A minimum of 0.246 nanograms of DNA, a billionth of a gram, is required for analysis, she said. The ideal amount is 1 nanogram.
Kearsey also explained Locard’s exchange principle, which states that whenever two objects come into contact, a transfer of material, such as cells containing DNA, will occur, which can be useful in crime analysis. But it’s not as easy as it looks on popular TV crime shows, such as CSI, where something is always found. “In real life crime scene investigation,” Kearsey stressed, “it is always more challenging.”
The identification of blood involved two tests, Kearsey explained. The preliminary screening test, Hemastix, is a three-inch plastic strip with a special reactant at the tip that detects the peroxide-like activity of hemoglobin. If the test area changes from yellow to green within ten seconds, it’s considered a positive result. Hemastix is very sensitive, but it’s a presumptive test not specific to blood, and a wide range of other substances — certain metals and rust, suedes and leathers, dirt and moulds, and other bodily fluids, such as saliva and perspiration — can give a false positive for blood. A positive Hemastix result indicates only that blood may be present. It can also produce false negatives if what Kearsey called “environmental insults” have degraded the hemoglobin. Washing an item, for example, or warm and moist environments can create false negatives, she noted.
A confirmatory test called the hemochromogen test confirms the result of a Hemastix test. This test is less sensitive than the Hemastix and is specific for blood, so a positive result means the sample tested is blood. It is not known to render any false positives, said Kearsey, but like the Hemastix, it can produce false negatives in cases of “environmental insults,” diluted samples, and old stains, she said. So if a stain tests negative for blood, that doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t caused by blood, just that blood was not confirmed. Kearsey also spent some time describing the various protocols that ensure the accuracy and reliability of test results. The RCMP labs are accredited by Standards Council of Canada, she noted, which ensures that samples are securely stored, equipment is properly maintained, and technicians receive standardized training. Proficiency tests, independent reviews, and the use of quality control samples ensure the accuracy of test results. To prevent contamination, exhibits from different sources — for example, a known sample and an unknown sample — are stored separately and handled individually, and technicians always wear gloves.
Although the exact number was never clearly stated during the trial, Kearsey tested eighteen stained areas found on the inside and outside of Dennis Oland’s brown sports jacket. She also tested several other articles of clothing and bedding seized from his home, swabs of his car and the red grocery bag seized from its trunk, his smartphone, samples from the crime scene and autopsy, and the victim’s clothing.
At the judge’s urging, the Crown and defence spent several hours paring down Kearsey’s results to a more manageable report to present to the jury. Walsh told them to work “into the night, if necessary.” At fifty-two-pages, the final product was still “somewhat voluminous,” said prosecutor Patrick Wilbur, but it included pictures.
As hard copies of the report were handed out to the jurors, Walsh thanked the lawyers for their “professionalism” in working together to reduce the material. He said he griped at them a lot, so it was good to give them a pat on the back every once in a while. But the brief levity did little to ease the tension. A chart on the courtroom monitor showed the exhibits tested, the exhibit numbers, the locations of the samples, a photo of the exhibit (if available), and the results.
No foreign DNA was found on the victim’s pants or shoes, said Kearsey. Numerous samples taken from the crime scene matched Richard Oland’s DNA with a certainty of one in 510 billion, other than one, which had a certainty of one in 57 billion. The blood found in the office washroom sink and on a paper towel in the garbage can predated the murder, the tests showed, and belonged to Galen McFadden, the son of Robert McFadden. Swabs of Oland’s hands and fingernails and multiple nail clippings did not detect any foreign DNA; all matched his profile with a certainty of one in 510 billion, said Kearsey. Three hairs found between the fingers of his left hand and a fourth hair in his right hand could not be tested for DNA because they did not have roots with the required cellular material, she said.
The back of the Blackberry Dennis Oland used immediately after visiting his father was swabbed, along with the battery and battery housing, but no blood was confirmed. A cutting of a duvet seized from his bedroom, which had tested positive for blood with a preliminary test but tested negative in the follow-up test, had the DNA profile of an unknown female. A cutting of a pillow seized from the bedroom also initially tested positive for blood (no confirmatory test was done) that matched the accused’s profile, said Kearsey.
A variety of tests done on Dennis’s Volkswagen Golf, where police expected to find blood transfer, didn’t turn up anything noteworthy, either. Swabs of the steering wheel, driver’s door inside handle and latch, the headlight and turn-signal switches, emergency brake, front passenger seat, and trunk release all tested negative for blood, and none of the victim’s DNA was confirmed. A swab of the front passenger seat headrest tested positive for blood during preliminary testing, but no confirmatory test was done. The DNA was of mixed origin, consistent with having originated from at least three people, at least one of them male, but no meaningful comparison could be made to any samples, she said.
The red reusable grocery bag police believed Oland had with him when he visited his father on July 6 produced nothing of evidentiary value. Several parts of the bag were tested, but no blood was confirmed, nor was any DNA identified as belonging to Richard Oland. Four stains on the shirt police believed Dennis Oland wore that night, which was subsequently laundered at the dry cleaner, came back negative for blood, and no DNA was detected. Two similar shirts seized from his closet produced the same results, Kearsey noted. Tests on his pants, which also had visible stains, matched his own DNA to varying degrees, ranging from one in ten thousand to one in 180 million. The shorts police believed were the ones Oland was seen wearing later that night in surveillance video also matched his DNA in varying degrees, from him being a “possible contributor” to a certainty of one in fifty-five million.
Then Kearsey got to the results for the key piece of evidence in the Crown’s case against Dennis Oland: the brown sports jacket that he wore to his father’s office on July 6.
The jury first saw the jacket on October 5, when forensic sergeant Mark Smith submitted it into evidence. Smith didn’t discuss the forensic test results on the jacket or any of the numerous other items he entered into evidence that day. His only role was to go over the police chain of custody to confirm continuity for the court. Some of the jurors appeared taken aback as Smith snapped on a pair of blue latex gloves to handle the clear plastic Ziploc-style bags containing the exhibits, some of which were preserved in a police refrigerator or freezer and were labelled as biohazards. Justice Walsh assured the jury that it was not an “unusual occurrence” for a witness to wear gloves when handling DNA exhibits.
Smith told the court the jacket, like the more than five hundred other exhibits collected in the case, had been carefully catalogued and secured to prevent any mix-ups or tampering. But the complex process involved proved almost as difficult to grasp as the scientific findings. The Saint John police and the RCMP each have their own numbering system, and the court assigns its own numbers. The jacket, for example, was labelled Crown Exhibit 23 by the court, but was previously known as Saint John Police Exhibit 221 and renumbered 405 by the RCMP. The four vials containing DNA extracted from clippings of the jacket were assigned individual RCMP numbers and four different Saint John police exhibit numbers. At one point, even the judge seemed to struggle to keep the various exhibit numbers straight.
The jury learned details about the jacket itself more than a week later, when Saint John forensic constable David MacDonald and RCMP sergeant Brian Wentzell testified. MacDonald examined the jacket over two days, November 9 and 17, 2011. He visually scanned the jacket, up and down, left to right, using a bright light, and found “areas of discolouration,” on both of the sleeves and on the chest area. The small “reddish” stains “appeared to be embedded in the material,” he testified. He circled each one with a white wax pencil, numbered them, and photographed them beside a scale to indicate their size. He also took overexposed and magnified photographs of the stains to better illustrate them.
A screening test for blood came next. MacDonald tested the inside of the right cuff with a Hemastix, where “red and brown coloured” spots appeared “diluted,” as though they “may have been exposed to liquid.” MacDonald got what he described as a “weak positive” result from the presumptive test when the strip turned “greenish” after fifteen seconds. MacDonald did not test the other stained areas for blood. He wanted to leave them “pristine” for the RCMP lab to handle, he said. Swabbing “could take away substance that’s in that area,” he explained.
The Saint John Police Force normally sends items to the RCMP lab via Purolator but hand delivers “in serious cases,” so MacDonald personally drove the jacket to Halifax on November 30. On December 6, five months after the killing, Brian Wentzell began his examination. Police attributed the delay to RCMP policy. The RCMP lab limited the number of exhibits the Saint John police could submit, and investigators had to receive results before sending any more. The jacket formed part of Saint John’s eleventh submission to the RCMP.
Wentzell was the blood-spatter expert who assisted Saint John police with the analysis of the crime scene four days after the murder. “I was to determine if I could locate what stains were on the jacket and how they were deposited on the jacket,” he told the court. The jacket bore no manufacturer’s tag to indicate what fabric the garment was made from, he noted. Wentzell counted five areas: three outside, and two inside. The stains were visible without any special enhancements, just a strong light and magnification, he said. Like MacDonald, he circled, photographed, and measured them.
The first stain was on the outside right sleeve, about halfway up. It was “three millimetres or less in size,” Wentzell said, showing the courtroom an enlarged photo of the area in question. But even when magnified twenty times, the stain was difficult to discern on the large display screen. “Red staining is noted in the fibres,” he said. Wentzell was careful not to call it blood since he didn’t conduct any of the confirmatory blood tests himself.
Another stain was just a few centimetres from the first, closer to the crook of the elbow. It also measured “three millimetres or less” he said. The third “reddish staining” was in the outside upper left chest area, above the breast pocket. It was about one millimetre in size — not quite the thickness of a dime.
On the lining of the right cuff was a “minimum of two stains, sub-millimetre in size,” and “three areas of diluted-appearing stains” that spread out about two centimetres. Wentzell circled the areas on an interactive screen to help make them easier to see in the photo displayed on courtroom monitors. On the lining of the left cuff, he said he found a “minimum of four stains, sub-millimetre in size”: two stains measuring one millimetre by five millimetres, and one stain measuring one millimetre by three millimetres. When Wentzell finished examining the jacket, he put it in the lab freezer and sent an email to another RCMP lab requesting the areas he had marked be tested for blood and DNA.
Joy Kearsey confirmed blood in four locations on the outside of the jacket: two on the right sleeve, one on the upper left chest, and one on the back, in the middle, near the hem. One of the bloodstains on the right sleeve did not contain enough DNA to meet the RCMP’s minimum requirement for comparison with the known sample for Richard Oland obtained during the autopsy. But the DNA found within the other three bloodstains matched Richard Oland’s DNA profile in all nine areas used for comparison, she said. The odds that the DNA could belong to an unrelated Canadian Caucasian individual chosen at random were one in 510 billion, she said. Canada’s current population is about thirty-four million, and the estimated world population is between seven and eight billion, meaning it was virtually impossible the DNA could belong to somebody else. The courtroom was silent as those statistics settled in. Dennis Oland was following along, but he did not visibly react.
Richard Oland’s DNA was also detected in three additional stained areas inside the cuffs that initially tested positive for blood but where blood was not confirmed with follow-up testing. Two stains found on the inside of the right cuff had a DNA profile of mixed origin, with the component matching the victim’s profile in six of the nine areas of comparison. The estimated probability it could match someone else was one in 180 million, said Kearsey. The minor component matched the DNA profile of the accused. The third stain found on the inside left cuff also had a mixed DNA profile. In that case, the minor component matched Richard Oland’s profile with a certainty of one in forty, she said.
Eight additional stained areas came back positive for blood with the preliminary test but had negative follow-up results. “We can’t call it blood, but we also can’t say it’s not blood,” Kearsey noted. “We can’t really say one way or the other.” The terminology the RCMP lab uses is “blood is not confirmed,” she said.
Five areas of Dennis Oland’s jacket matched his father’s DNA, four areas tested positive for blood, and three areas were positive for both blood and Richard Oland’s DNA.
On November 25, the forty-second day of the trial, prosecutors gave the jury still more to think about when they called their forty-fourth and final witness: Thomas Suzanski, a forensic specialist in the biology section of the RCMP forensic lab in Ottawa.
Suzanski had worked with RCMP forensic labs since 1987 and, like Kearsey, with whom he had worked in Halifax, he had previously testified in three levels of court in Canada as well as in Bermuda. He holds a master of science and served as a consultant in the Swissair disaster in 1998 and has done casework in several other countries. At the time of his testimony, he was a “team lead,” undertaking administrative duties as well as maintaining casework activities. Walsh deemed Suzanski an expert.
Unbeknownst to the jury, the Crown had applied to the judge for special permission to conduct additional testing on extracts taken from Dennis Oland’s jacket, which the defence opposed in a pre-trial hearing on March 30, 2015. The Crown argued for the retesting on the ground that Kearsey’s tests used a program called Profiler Plus, which compared only nine areas of DNA. But in 2014, in the midst of Dennis Oland’s preliminary inquiry, the RCMP switched to a “more discriminating” new program, Identifiler Plus, which compares fifteen areas of DNA.
One of the extracts, taken from the back of the jacket, at the bottom, near the centre, had been entered as an exhibit at Oland’s preliminary inquiry in 2014. The other two, taken from the right sleeve and upper left chest, were not entered as exhibits at the preliminary but were in Saint John police custody, along with the known DNA samples of the victim and the accused needed for comparison. At the March 30 pre-trial hearing, the Crown also argued for the release of an extract taken from the inside left-pocket seam, which had been entered as an exhibit at the preliminary.
A judge’s power to release exhibits is discretionary. The defence argued the Crown should have to satisfy Walsh before any of the six extracts were released for retesting, not just the two that had been formally marked as exhibits. Walsh agreed with the defence, but he felt the Crown made a “compelling case for release,” as he wrote in the sixteen-page ruling he issued on April 7. The “appropriate threshold for guiding the exercise of judicial discretion,” Walsh determined, “can be formulated as…whether it has been shown that there is an ‘air of reality’ that such production and retesting has a ‘meaningful capacity to advance’ the interests of justice.”
Walsh noted non-identical siblings can share genetic markers at more than the nine sites compared by Profiler Plus. Retesting with the new program would “provide a further six loci to compare the samples, either giving a further discriminating match or possibly excluding what was previously a match,” he wrote. Walsh cited the Crown’s brief. “If a sample of a sibling’s DNA is not available, retesting with Identifiler Plus would be the next best option in reducing any chance of a coincidental match between siblings,” the brief stated. It would “significantly reduce the chance that DNA matching an individual would also match that of their unidentical sibling (as it is highly improbable that unidentical siblings would have matching DNA at all 15 loci).”
Thomas Suzanski had advised the judge that additional testing on the DNA extracts from the jacket would make it “likely there will be nothing left for any further retesting” of two extracts, one from the right sleeve and the other from the inside left-pocket seam. But Walsh said he was satisfied “policies and procedures are in place in the RCMP biology laboratory directed at quality control and quality assurance at each stage of the DNA analysis procedure, including documentation and internal peer review. In other words, reasonable safeguards appear to exist to protect the integrity of the DNA extracts and the results obtained.” The “results of retesting have a realistic potential of contributing reliably probative evidence bearing on a critical issue in the case, namely identity,” Walsh concluded, “identity in criminal cases, needless to say, being an issue of special and grave concern to all involved in the criminal justice system and to society as a whole.” Walsh ordered the DNA extracts be released for further analysis “to be performed in a timely manner.” He also ordered a copy of the results be provided to the defence “forthwith.”
In May 2015 Suzanski retested the DNA extracted from the three confirmed bloodstains on the jacket. His method augmented the certainty of Kearsey’s findings of one in 510 billion. He concluded the chances that the DNA extracted from the three bloodstains did not belong to Richard Oland or a blood relation were, he said, not one in a million or a billion or a trillion or a quadrillion, but one in twenty quintillion. People in the courtroom struggled to wrap their brains around the mind-boggling figure, which has eighteen zeroes. CBC reporter Robert Jones, who was live-tweeting from the courtroom, put it this way: “The equivalent: you have a one in 20 quintillion chance of winning two 6/49 jackpots in a row AND then being hit by lightning within seven years.”
Suzanski described the samples used as “clean” and “easily interpreted” with no evidence of degradation. They produced a full, single-source DNA profile, he said. “Based on the RCMP Canadian Caucasian population [database], it is 3.4 million times more likely that the DNA evidence obtained would be observed if Richard Oland was the donor of the DNA obtained from [the three areas in question] rather than a full sibling,” Suzanski testified. He had tested the cast-off DNA obtained from Derek Oland; the victim’s brother was not the source of the DNA profile found in the three bloodstained areas of Dennis Oland’s jacket.
At 9:08 on the morning of Friday, July 8, 2011, roughly ten hours after police questioned Dennis Oland about what he wore when he visited his father and told him they considered him a suspect and would execute search warrants against him, the brown sports jacket was dropped off at VIP Dry Cleaners in Rothesay. It was never made clear who brought in the Olands’ dry cleaning that morning, but that person specifically requested next-day service.
Yang Hwan “Steve” Nam co-owns VIP Dry Cleaners with his wife, Jin Hee Choi. Nam testified through a Korean interpreter, who was also sworn in as a witness, and the defence had its own interpreter to verify the accuracy of the Crown’s questions and Nam’s answers. The Crown called Nam to prove that the jacket was cleaned shortly after Richard Oland’s death, thereby diluting or degrading the DNA evidence.
Nam said it’s up to customers to point out any stains, but he normally checks garments, too, in case customers forget. He marks any stains he finds with red tape and pre-treats them, he said. Items from different customers are cleaned together in the dry-cleaning machine, but they’re marked with identifying tags. The hour-long process uses solvent and a detergent, but no water. Nam didn’t know the chemistry of the solvent or detergent used, and he also couldn’t say how hot it gets inside the dry-cleaning machine. He sets the temperature at 150 degrees, but he wasn’t sure if that was Celsius or Fahrenheit. VIP advertises that it offers a gentler service because it uses mild, less toxic products, so Nam usually checks items for any stains after they’ve been cleaned. He then divides the items into piles of similar garments, irons them, and matches the tags to customers’ orders.
Nam couldn’t remember who dropped off or picked up the jacket and eighteen other items on the order that July morning, but it was under the name of Dennis Oland’s wife, Lisa Andrik-Oland. The dry-cleaning tag attached to the collar of the seized jacket matched the tag on the store copy of the receipt, the court heard. That receipt also matched a dry-cleaning receipt seized from Oland’s home. Nam confirmed VIP’s normal turnaround time is two business days, but Andrik-Oland’s receipt showed that next-day service was requested. As noted, Nam had crossed out the preprinted pickup date of Monday, July 11, at three p.m., and written “SAT” for Saturday instead.
VIP doesn’t document stains, but Nam testified that, as far as he could remember, he had told police in July 2011 that he didn’t notice any stains on the brown sports jacket or any of the other items in the Olands’ order.
The Crown’s contention that the brown sports jacket proved Dennis Oland’s guilt hinged on whether or not he wore the jacket on the evening of July 6, 2011. Although Oland had told police he remembered wearing a blue jacket, Maureen Adamson testified that when she saw him arrive at the office that evening, his jacket was brown, and security video of him earlier that day showed him in a brown sports jacket. To determine if the brown Hugo Boss jacket seized from Dennis Oland’s closet and the brown sports jacket in the security video were one and the same, Saint John police contacted Grant Fredericks, a forensic video expert. Fredericks, a former broadcaster, was previously an officer with the Vancouver Police Department, where he served as the head of the criminal investigation division’s forensic video unit. He now operates Forensic Video Solutions in Spokane, Washington.
According to the background information he provided to the court, Fredericks has processed thousands of videotapes and computer discs containing multimedia evidence for both criminal and civil cases over the years, focusing on issues such as reflection of light, pixel tracking, digital-compression technology, colour measurement, and digital- and analog-error identification. He also teaches forensic video analysis at the Federal Bureau of Investigation National Academy, the University of Indianapolis, and for the Law Enforcement and Emergency Services Video Association, and he served as digital video adviser to the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
Saint John police contracted Fredericks to examine video of Dennis Oland, whom they identified only as a white male dressed in a brown suit jacket, light brown pants, and dark shoes, and to provide a comparative analysis of photographs of “known” items seized from Dennis Oland’s home, including the brown sports jacket, the blue-and-white-check J. Crew dress shirt police believed him to be wearing when he visited his father, and a pair of blue-grey J. Crew shorts police believed he wore in surveillance video at the Irving convenience store at 10:32 p.m. that night.
Fredericks advised the jury that most security videos compress data to maximize memory space, resulting in a loss of resolution and quality. Tools exist to enhance the data, but it’s not like the “movie magic” often seen on televised crime shows, he said. Any analysis is limited to what was recorded. In reviewing videos of Oland taken near his CIBC Wood Gundy office on July 6, Fredericks observed the brown sports jacket he was wearing had two buttons on the right-hand side, a V-cut at the lapel, four buttons on the left sleeve, and a breast pocket. The seized jacket in the police photographs had the same four features, he said.
Fredericks also noted the top button of the seized jacket was broken, and the top button of the jacket in the video appeared smaller than the lower button. However, there was not enough resolution in the video to be able to say the top button was broken, only that it was reflecting less light than the lower button, which could be due to its position or size, he said. Asked by Crown prosecutor Patrick Wilbur whether the top button in the video image could have been broken, like the one on the seized jacket, Fredericks agreed it was possible. But Fredericks could not say with certainty the brown sports jacket Oland was seen wearing in the surveillance videos was the same one police seized from his closet.
“After carefully examining the Known [seized] jacket…with the Questioned jacket worn by Male #1, I have formed the opinion that the Known and Questioned jackets are of the same class,” Fredericks concluded in his fifteen-page report. “The Questioned jacket is indistinguishable from the Known jacket. Since no unique characteristics are visible in the video that could uniquely identify the Questioned jacket, it is not possible to state that it is the same jacket. However, the Known jacket cannot be eliminated as being the Questioned jacket.”
Fredericks reached the same conclusion about the shirt and shorts: he could not confirm whether the clothing items in the videos were the same as the seized articles, only that they had the same class features.