this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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For years there was the "Phantom", a notorious criminal, haunting all of Europe. DNA testing revealed that it was a female and her crimes ranging from petty theft to murder were seemingly unrelated to each other. That each of them were done in different countries didn't make solving the case any easier.
But eventually they did solve it. They found the woman working in a cotton swab factory. Turned out many police departments were using the wrong type of swabs. So there seem to be more than one way to incorrectly use cotton swabs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_of_Heilbronn
MOVIE IDEA!! imagine a movie that takes you all over Europe following a killer and thief . Stumping the best cops. I'm thinking sort of following a cops career looking for this person until it ruins his family and life. Like destroys him slowly until he has nothing left . Kills himself. Through out the movie is close up shots of all the times cotton swabs were used in testing DNA. Randomly scattered. Ending shot of some factory . Camera flies in to assembly line. Two women side by side packing cartons. One look over and says. ''You'll end up in the office if they catch you without gloves again''.
The hell was she doing on the factory line to get her DNA on all the swabs?
Probably packing them with her bare hands.
Existing. People shed DNA all over. Most of the dust in your house is human skin and hair (or that of your pets). Non-sterile swabs are probably just packed with bare hands, by someone in their regular clothing.
Right, but there would be many people packing swabs in the plant. Unless she has psoriasis, the amount of skin she sheds at one time wouldn't contaminate all of the swabs she touched with her hands, much less all of the swabs in the factory.
Sweaty hands while sorting the cotton fibres would do it.
Not even close. Sweat barely contains any DNA, and while theoretically a person could sweat enough to leave behind enough dna to be identified, it hasn't ever happened and would require copious amounts of concentrated sweat. Her hands would have to be constantly dripping with sweat, and this happened several times in several countries between 2001 and 2008. Maybe sweaty hands could contaminate one or two cotton swabs, but all of them over the course of several years? No.
I did not realise sweat contained so little dna!
She was shoving each and every swab up her ass. Her ass swabs she called them. In conversations it gave her the upper hand. Check your bathroom, inside? Her ass swabs. Something in your ear had been up her ass!
Is she married to the "ass pennies" guy?
What was she doing? Just creating the best alibi ever.
Criminal mastermind.
Actually that's brilliant. Like the plot of a Law and Order: SVU episode.
Probably not all the swabs. Maybe just packaging. That way her DNA would've only gone to some swabs and thus making it take longer to find the error.
I was curious if this was real, and it is! http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7966641.stm
Case file do an episode on it. Well, she appears in an episode in chasing that killer
That makes me think the based an episode of CSI:NY after this. An almost identical plot.
Now that's some serious incompetence there, and it's sad that it took so many cases to figure it out.