"I think the police are not interested, but it matters to me," he said. "These guys are still out there. How do I take care of myself? If they don't catch the people, they will keep doing this. How much time do they need?"
The answer: A hell of a lot.
The wait time for DNA processing at the State Police's Bureau of Forensic Services averages 227 days, but not because it takes very long to do the scientific work - about 24 to 48 hours in a rush, experts say. But it can take nearly eight months for a DNA sample to be processed.
The backlog - more than 1,700 cases - has gotten so bad that law-enforcement officials around the Philadelphia area say that it jeopardizes and delays investigations, allowing criminals to remain free, potentially to commit other crimes while evidence crawling with their DNA sits untouched at the State Police's only DNA lab, in Greensburg, near Pittsburgh.
Yeadon Detective Sgt. David Splain, who is working the TriStar case, said that the backlog not only delays investigations, it also hurts victims.
"You're being victimized twice," Splain said. "Number one, your stuff was stolen, and, number two, everything is tied up because there's a logjam at the crime lab."
'Staggering' backlog
Every law-enforcement agency in the state, except those in Philadelphia and Allegheny counties, which have their own crime labs, sends its DNA work to the State Police. That includes all the forensic casework samples taken from crime scenes, as well as samples taken from convicted offenders.
The backlog isn't just an inconvenience, or a theoretical bureaucratic snafu. In January 2011, it was discovered that State Police had received a convicted-offender sample, in October 2010, from Antonio Rodriguez, the man accused of being the Kensington Strangler, but it wasn't uploaded to the FBI's DNA database until 2 1/2 months later because of the backlog.
