Ferrara led crime-solving revolution
Director who helped Va. pioneer genetic fingerprinting to retire
BY FRANK GREEN
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
December 4, 2006
In 1971, Paul B. Ferrara left a job as a research chemist in Waynesboro to test suspected narcotics and other illegal drugs for the Northern Virginia Police Laboratory.
When word got around that he was leaving his old job, colleagues congratulated him and then politely inquired, "What's a forensics laboratory?"
It's a question few would ask today. Ferrara has gone from anonymous lab rat to international prominence in a field that has revolutionized the criminal justice system and taken popular culture by storm.
"I think back to what we were then and where we are now, and it just kind of blows me away," said Ferrara, who will retire at the end of the month as the director of the Virginia Department of Forensic Science. "It really has been remarkable."
The exemplary reputations of Ferrara and his lab have been banged up in recent years by the same case that has pummeled the reputation of criminal justice in Virginia: Earl Washington Jr., sent to death row for a crime he did not commit.
In 1994, testing by the state lab got Washington off death row, and in 2000, more testing won Washington a pardon. But a subsequent independent audit found some of the lab's key work so flawed that the department now has a scientific advisory board.
Nevertheless, to this day Ferrara stands by his lab's performance. And while detractors such as William C. Thompson disagree with him, they give Ferrara his due.
"Even though I'm one of his strongest critics, I still think that he's widely respected, and justifiably so," said Thompson, a forensics and legal expert on the faculty of the University of California at Irvine.
"He led the lab during a very exciting period, and he's most notable for developing its DNA capacity and being a leader in developing the state DNA database on which Virginia was quite a leader nationally," Thompson said.
Ferrara's fans include Dr. Marcella F. Fierro, Virginia's chief medical examiner. "His outstanding qualities obviously are his vision, and his persistence and his ability to persuade the unpersuadable to do what they ought to do," she said.
Fierro, the model for author Patricia Cornwell's fictional Kay Scarpetta, pointed out that Ferrara is a chemist. "He wasn't trained as a molecular biologist, and yet he foresaw the wisdom of promoting a DNA laboratory in this state years ahead of other states," she said.
Ferrara, 64, was an early champion of forensic DNA testing and is in large part the reason Virginia led all other states in using it to catch criminals. It has also prevented innocent suspects from being charged and has cleared the wrongly convicted.
But when Ferrara started out, DNA wasn't on the horizon. A year after he went to work for the state lab, it became part of the state's Bureau of Forensic Science. In 1985, he took over as director of the bureau at a time when it was still a relatively obscure agency.
That was because while the laboratory could perform drug, bullet, handwriting and fingerprint analyses, there was no automated fingerprint identification system, no national ballistic information network for matching bullets and DNA was unheard of.
The blood typing then in use was not very discriminating, and as DNA testing has later showed, it could lead to wrongful convictions.
In 1990, the lab became the Division of Forensic Science, and in July, it became the Department of Forensic Science. It is one of the few forensic labs in the country not under the auspices of a law-enforcement agency.
"We're neither fish nor fowl. Ideally, it should be a department . . . that is not beholden to law enforcement, that is not political, is independent, and that's kind of where we are," he said.
Ferrara said some of the work - such as handwriting analysis, firearms examinations, even fingerprints - involves a certain amount of subjectivity. "We try to teach our examiners: Don't get sucked in to a preconceived notion of the results," he said.
He said he is only aware of that happening once. It was in 1997, when an examiner improperly found that four fibers matched a suspect in the disappearance and murder of three girls. The FBI lab was unable to find the fibers, however.
"I had a resignation the next day. To this day, I don't know what she was thinking or what she was doing," said Ferrara, who would not go into details.
"That was probably the lowest moment of a career. But, it happens," he said. "We're not perfect."
Perhaps the high point of his career began in the mid-1980s, when he and others at his lab learned about a new tool then dubbed "genetic fingerprinting."
"When we first became aware of this technology the realization was . . . 'My God, we have to implement this,'" he said. "We just knew intuitively . . . that it's going to change the way police conduct investigations, collect evidence, how prosecutors and defense attorneys are going to approach their cases."
In September 1987, a private New York laboratory, Lifecodes, offered to train two of Ferrara's scientists so Virginia could establish the first state DNA laboratory in the country.
Ferrara fought for roughly $300,000 from the state, and in March 1989, Virginia opened the first state DNA laboratory capable of performing DNA fingerprinting. The FBI had started its limited DNA laboratory operations just four months earlier.
It wasn't until May 1989 that the lab did its first DNA case, and just 37 cases were conducted that year. Now, Ferrara said, the lab handles 3,500 cases a year.
Also in 1989, the state started a databank of the DNA profiles of felons. By the end of June, the databank held the profiles of 260,000 felons and arrestees who are required to give DNA samples - a simple saliva swab.
Virginia's is the oldest state databank in the country and the second or third largest. Now, when a crime is committed and DNA is left as evidence, the crime-scene DNA is run through a computer to see whether it matches a DNA profile in the databank.
When there is a match, it is called a "cold hit." A cold hit is when DNA evidence from a crime scene matches someone in the database, or links one crime to one or more others. There have now been 3,600 cold hits, solving crimes that include capital murder.
Thompson, of UC-Irvine, said that although Ferrara is an accomplished pioneer, "the criticism is that he may have come too much to believe his own propaganda - being the best lab in the world."
"When problems came to light . . . he did not seem very open or responsive to legitimate criticism, and the result is he ended up, perhaps out of loyalty to his staff, kind of pig-headedly denying that there was any problem when it subsequently became clear that there was a problem."
Ferrara says, "There's no shortage of hired guns who take great pleasure . . . to try to discredit forensic scientists." But, he said, in the long run, "unquestionably the attacks make you better."
Unlike in a clinical laboratory, he said, "your evidence is what you get - it's contaminated. You're dealing with the detritus of man's inhumanity to man. And you have to make the best of what you've got.
"There's no pristine samples," he said.
Since 1985, the lab has grown from about 100 employees to 350 - 260 of them scientists or other experts - and its annual budget has risen from $3 million to $33 million. There have also been four new labs around the state built since 1985, and ground will be broken soon to replace one of them with a newer lab.
"We didn't even have a computer in this place in 1985," he said. "I was the right person in the right place at the right time."
Kevin Hall, spokesman for Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, said the search to replace Ferrara is under way.
The state Forensic Science Board appointed a search committee, recruited nationally and accepted résumés through mid-October. The committee met two weeks ago to screen them. Interviews with the search committee will begin soon, Hall said.