Pointing from the Grave: A True Story of Murder and DNA by
Samantha Weinberg
pbk out March 04
(Penguin)
at £7.99
A British scientist working in San Diego is sexually assaulted by a man
who breaks into her home. The police make an arrest – but as the case is
about to go to trial the scientist is strangled in her own garden. Police
believe that the same man is responsible but they can't prove it and after
serving time for the sex crime he goes free.
But the police don't forget the case, and fifteen years later DNA testing
has moved on and they can prove his guilt. Ironically, the murdered
scientist had been working on such DNA advances. To suggest that she's
pointing from the grave is somewhat medieval, but she's definitely
pointing from the laboratory.
Samantha Weinberg has produced a page-turning book which also
overviews several other DNA-significant cases. It shows how the wrong
man confessed under fierce interrogation to two British murders until
DNA tests showed that Colin Pitchfork was the murderer. It also
delineates how the Innocence Project has used DNA science to show that
104 other men each spent over a decade in jail for crimes they did not
commit.
The author's research is exemplary in that she interviewed the murdered
woman's father and visited the alleged killer in prison. Indeed she still
corresponds with him. But she suggests that there's nothing in his
background that accounts for his crimes whereas, in truth, he had the
typical sex offender's strict and puritanical childhood. He wasn't even
allowed to date until his senior prom. He felt humiliated throughout these
character forming years – and in turn he went on to humiliate his victims,
ordering them to strip and orally pleasure him.
Samantha Weinberg approaches this story with refreshing honesty,
striving to understand why an attractive, educated man makes horrendous
choices and ruins his life for sexual kicks.
This is a fascinating, well written and unusual human interest story. It
made me determined to seek out one of her previous books about the
search for the coelacanth.
Pointing from the Grave: A True Story of Murder and DNA by
Samantha Weinberg
