In June 2021, Australian forensic biologist Kirsty Wright was on holiday when she got a phone call from a journalist who was investigating a young woman’s unsolved murder and needed an expert to review the DNA evidence in the case. It seemed like a simple request, and Wright accepted. But over the next four years, the case would become the center of her life and work, and what she discovered would rock Queensland’s criminal justice system to its core.
A Dream Job, and a Room Full of Bones
Shortly after graduating from her Honors degree in forensic biology at Griffith University, Wright landed her dream job as a reporting scientist at Queensland’s state forensic testing laboratory, working on criminal cases. One day, Wright noticed a small, dark room beside the building’s laundry, stacked full of brown cardboard boxes. She opened one out of curiosity. It was full of human bones. “[I thought], ‘These are horrible—there must be hundreds of people in these boxes,” said Wright.
Using new DNA analysis techniques, she spent a year identifying the remains and returning them to their families or descendants. Her expertise has also taken her further afield; she completed her PhD research using DNA profiling to identify victims of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, travelling to the afflicted locations to collect samples from victims and reference profiles. Through the project, she was able to return the victims to their surviving relatives, something she considers an incredibly rewarding career highlight.
When she returned to her regular job as a reporting scientist, however, she found a change of management in the lab had caused its quality to go downhill—something that Wright and other scientists couldn’t tolerate. According to her, scientists are guardians of knowledge and integrity: “Science is sacred.”
Wright raised her concerns about the management but was ignored, and after being moved into an administrative position and isolated from her peers, she faced an impossible decision. “I was forced with this decision of leaving this job that I loved or having to stay there and watching something I loved be, I guess, desecrated or vandalized,” she said.
She quit in 2007 to take a job at Australia’s national DNA database and never looked back. She has since assisted in several high-profile criminal cases in Australia. She also worked with the Australian Army and Air Force to identify the remains of fallen soldiers from World War I, II, and the Vietnam War using DNA profiling and teaming up with genealogists to trace them to their living descendants.
Botched DNA Evidence Lets a Murder Suspect Walk Free
On a Friday night in 2021, as Wright sat down to watch a football game she had been looking forward to, she pulled out her laptop and delved further into the evidence provided by the journalist about the cold case murder. A young woman, Shandee Blackburn, had been brutally stabbed to death in Mackay, a city in Queensland’s central coast, and her ex-boyfriend was accused of her murder. The DNA evidence had been inconsistent and confusing: The lab was unable to get any DNA from a pool of the victim’s fresh blood. This was a major red flag; there should have been more than enough cells present to extract plenty of DNA. The lab also failed to obtain a DNA profile of the accused killer from his own car. The suspect was acquitted of the woman’s murder.
As she explored the evidence, Wright didn’t even look at the game once. She realized the DNA testing had been completely botched, but it went far beyond this single case. In fact, there seemed to be something fundamentally wrong with the DNA testing process at the forensics lab—the same lab she had left almost 20 years earlier. Fresh crime scene samples and rape kits were frequently turning up results of ‘No DNA detected,’ when there should have been more than enough cells present to obtain a profile.
Wright investigated more thoroughly and asked other experts to review her conclusions, desperately hoping she was wrong. No one wanted to get involved, fearing the risk to their careers. But Wright couldn’t let it go, and she wasn’t wrong. She discovered that the Queensland forensic lab’s systemic failures meant they were providing inaccurate DNA evidence to the courts.
Scientific Integrity and the Cost of Truth
After the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, Wright used DNA profiling and genealogy to identify the victims and return their remains to their surviving relatives, who volunteered buccal swabs for DNA testing.
Kirsty Wright
One of the biggest problems that Wright identified was a threshold issue. When crime scene samples are sent to the lab for testing, DNA is extracted and its concentration measured before the scientists proceed with generating a DNA profile from the sample. It is possible to obtain a profile from a very small amount of DNA, but the Queensland lab had set its threshold at double the amount used by other forensic laboratories. Below that threshold, they would not proceed with DNA profiling.
This astonishingly high threshold for further testing meant that police investigators received a result of ‘No DNA detected,’ even when there was, in fact, DNA present. This was no coincidence—the threshold was set by management in a deliberate attempt to mislead police and reduce the lab’s workload. “No one would ever, ever think an entire lab of scientists could operate in that way. It was absolutely unthinkable,” Wright remarked.
In the case Wright had originally been asked to review, this meant that the jury was led to believe that the accused’s DNA was not found on the victim’s body, and that the victim’s DNA was not found in the accused’s car, when in fact, the samples were not even fully tested. Wright said the enormity of what she found was crushing—the issues went back years, affecting thousands of criminal cases. “[It means] that offenders have maybe been falsely acquitted. It means that offenders haven't been identified. It means offenders have raped and killed again,” she said. “At that moment, I felt physically ill.”
When Wright and journalist Hedley Thomas raised their concerns with the state government, they were ignored several times. So they broke the story publicly through Thomas’s podcast investigation into Shandee Blackburn’s murder and a public press conference, forcing the government to acknowledge the issues. Initially, government officials still did not believe Wright’s allegations and instead backed the state-run laboratory.
But Wright was determined, and she wasn’t going to be silenced again, despite the risks of making the public allegations. “I expected that my career was going to end,” Wright said. Fortunately, once police discovered that DNA testing had been abandoned at the early stages, they demanded that samples be completely tested. Many samples came back with usable profiles, Wright said, and it was this revelation that triggered an official inquiry in June 2022.
The inquiry found that Wright’s allegations were true: Systemic failures, a toxic workplace culture, and maladministration in the lab had resulted in unreliable evidence being supplied to the police and courts for more than 30,000 rape and murder cases dating back to 2007. Several years and changes of management later, Wright’s dream of a better justice system is finally taking shape.
The Power of Science to Make the World a Better Place
Wright is currently assisting the state government in the complete overhaul of the forensics lab, implementing major changes recommended by her and other experts. It’s a full-circle moment for her career to be able to fix the problems in the lab and deliver a better forensics system to help victims of crime. “I was just ecstatic and just so relieved, and of course, said yes in a heartbeat,” she said.
Wright has always taken her science with a side of humanitarianism, and her passion for helping people has led her through a challenging but rewarding career. Her motto is simple: “If you can harness the power of science in your hands, you can do anything with it.”
