Claremont: The Claremont Serial Killings

It’s seen as probably the most crucial piece of evidence the prosecution have to try and prove Bradley Edwards as being the Claremont Serial Killer - Ciara Glennon’s fingernail clippings. Anna-Marie Ashley, the forensic scientist who extracted the DNA from those fingernails spent her second day on the stand, detailing how the DNA was extracted, and whose DNA they found. Just as crucially, she was also asked about how the evidence was stored, and as Tim Clarke and Alison Fan explain, these are the type of details the defence will try and draw out, to try and show if there was any moment during this mammoth investigation the samples from the Karrakatta rape victim and Ciara Glennon’s fingernails could have been cross contaminated. When one of Ciara’s fingernail clippings taken from the middle finger on her left hand - which were labelled AJM42 - were tested, initially they only showed her DNA. It wasn’t until the fingernail clippings, along with the Karrakatta rape victim’s samples were sent to the UK for f