DNA expert testifies that Hillier-Penney’s DNA was found in Penney’s garage in 2023 – but not on the floor where she allegedly died
A large binder with 670 pages of text messages between Jennifer Hillier-Penney and Dean Penney was presented to the jury hearing his murder trial in the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador in Corner Brook on Wednesday, April 29.
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With the legal counsel moved to the jury box, the 14 members of the jury were seated around the counsel tables and, at about 3 p.m., began the arduous task of reading each message.
Penney is on trial in the court for the first-degree murder of Hillier-Penney, his estranged wife. It’s alleged he killed her on Nov. 30, 2016, in the home they once shared on Husky Drive in St. Anthony.
The messages contained in the binder were extracted from Hillier-Penney’s cellphone and were sent between Sept. 17, 2016, and Nov. 30, 2016.
The messages were entered as evidence in the trial following the testimony of Craig Collins, a digital forensic analyst with the RCMP’s digital forensic services unit.
None of the messages were read aloud on Wednesday.
Justice Vikas Khaladkar explained to the jury that the court struggled to find the best way to present the messages to them.
There had been a suggestion to have the messages read by male and female speakers and recorded.
“The problem with that is us, being humans, we tend to inflect things when we’re reading them, and what you have in front of you has no inflection. So, we didn’t want to adulterate what’s there by having a voice say something that may not have been meant,” said Khaladkar.
He said the only way to do it was to give them copies of it and have them read it in open court.
Collins estimated it would take a full day to read all the messages, which were arranged in chronological order.
Collins received Hillier-Penney’s iPhone after it was seized from the Husky Drive home. Her phone, along with other belongings, was left there when she disappeared.
Using equipment and software from Cellebrite, Collins was able to extract data from the phone relevant to the investigation without making any changes to the phone or its data.
He took the SIM card out of the phone so that it would not try to connect to a network when it was turned on, potentially resulting in changes to the phone.
What Collins found during the extraction was a complete record of all communications happening via the phone — many Apple iMessages, SMS texts, emails, pictures, call logs and GPS coordinates — going back several months.
“You can really find a lot of information on someone’s device,” said Collins.
The binder of chat messages were between Hillier-Penney and a phone he believed to be Penney’s.
Collins said the messages were from one chat, with the green bubbles shown on the pages in the binder being messages Hillier-Penney sent, and the blue bubbles being ones Penney sent.
Collins identified the two phone numbers as being ones the court has previously heard were Hillier-Penney’s and Penney’s.
Each message also includes timestamps of when they were received and read.
On Tuesday, April 28, Jeff Brace, one of Penney’s lawyers, said that Hillier-Penney’s DNA was not found when a swab taken from the floor of the garage in the Husky Drive home was tested at the RCMP’s National Forensic Laboratory Services lab in Ottawa.
Earlier on Wednesday, however, the jury heard that Hillier-Penny’s DNA was found in another part of the garage, on a stain that was found 2.9 metres, or just over 9.5 feet, up from the floor on the east wall of the garage.
Dr. Laurie Karchewski, forensic specialist with the lab, testified on seven reports she provided to investigators regarding exhibits tested by the lab from 2017 to 2024.
Karchewski said exhibits that had been sent to the lab were tested for blood using Hemastixs. Items that had a presumptive positive test for blood underwent a hemochromogen test.
As was heard on Tuesday, Karchewski said Hemastixs can produce a false positive as they can also react with other things in nature.
Karchewski’s second report was submitted on July 6, 2017. Items tested included swabs from a vehicle, a mug and a glass from the scene — items she described as “punitive known samples” from Hillier-Penney and two exhibits that consisted of snow.
Punitive known samples, she explained, are items thought to be attributed to an individual who isn’t present to give a known sample.
In this instance, she said, the individual was missing, so investigators provided items Hillier-Penney was known to use intimately for the lab to take a sample to try to get a known reference sample for DNA comparison.
Investigators provided the lab with a hairbrush, hair pick and a toothbrush. The toothbrush was sampled and gave a viable DNA profile.
A complete DNA typing profile was developed and was used as her known sample.
In her sixth report, submitted on April 12, 2024, Karchewski discussed 15 exhibits, all from the garage, that had been tested. Several were swabs, some were cuttings from a box, two were pieces of plywood and one was a wooden pallet, obtained during a forensic search of the garage in December 2023.
All were tested by a search technologist, and the results went to Karchewski for interpretation.
Some of the results in the report say that blood was not confirmed.
Karchewski explained that “blood not confirmed” could mean that the confirmatory test for blood was negative, or a blood confirmatory test was not performed.
“It doesn’t distinguish in the report. There are instances where the hemochromogen confirmatory test can’t be performed because it would actually consume too much of the sample that (it) wouldn’t leave enough available for DNA processing. So, the search technologist opts to stop there and not do that hemochromogen test and just send the samples straight forward for DNA analysis,” said Karchewski.
That is what happened with exhibit PE 269, the swab of the stain on the wall, also identified as FIS 11 during the search.
The DNA from the stain was a match for Hillier-Penney’s DNA profile.
Karchewski said there was no way to determine what type of biological fluid in the stain came from.
She said none of the other exhibits tested returned a positive result for Hillier-Penney’s DNA.
Karchewski’s seventh report was submitted on Nov. 1, 2024.
Thirty-eight exhibits were tested for blood, and no blood was found on any of them.
DNA analysis was not conducted on those exhibits because they were submitted to be tested for blood, and because no blood was found, there was no interest in the DNA typing profiles that would have been obtained.
Crown attorney Kate Ashton asked Karchewski what effect the age of a sample has on the ability of the lab to find blood.
Karchewski said DNA can be quite stable under the right environmental conditions.
“A very, very old blood stain could still give DNA. It just depends on what type of environment it’s been preserved in.”
She said high temperatures, high moisture and UV exposure will start to degrade DNA to the point where either blood can’t be detected or, if the blood is detected and they try to sample it, the DNA may be degraded.
“It’s just dependent on how well preserved the stain was,” said Karchewski.
As for cleaning up blood, Karchewski said even washing with water can wash a blood stain or biological stain away just through dilution.
Using bleach, she said, will not only wash away the stain through dilution, it will also disrupt the cells that contain DNA. It will also wash away the components of a biological stain and cause it all to degrade to the point where it can’t be detected.
Asked specifically about Javex, Karchewski said it is a bleach product and can wash away a stain, disrupt cell membranes and degrade DNA by “chopping it up.”
Bleach can also give a false positive on Hemastix tests, and sometimes, fresh bleach will result in a positive, she said.
“Dried bleach can be a little bit more iffy,” she said. “But, basically bleach will wash away a stain, and it will degrade a stain.”
In his confession to an undercover police officer in a Mr. Big operation, Penney said he had used Javex to clean up the garage, including blood in the area where Hillier-Penney’s body had been.
Hillier-Penney’s blood was not found on swabs taken from that area and tested by the lab.
Under cross-examination by Jeff Brace, one of Penney’s lawyers, Karchewski confirmed that was the case for all 93 exhibits that were tested by the lab.
Brace also suggested to Karchewski that, given the Husky Drive home was the family home, it would hardly be surprising to find both Hillier-Penney’s and Penney’s DNA there.
She agreed that it would be expected.
Karchewski said the fact that another family was living in the house when the exhibits were collected in 2023 would not be a concern for her.
Brace also brought up something from Karchewski’s second report about blood in the snow that was identified as being from a male.
She confirmed that blood was not Penney’s or Hillier-Penney’s.
In her sixth report, a mixture of three DNA profiles was identified in testing of the swab from the floor near the gun safe. Karchewski confirmed the mixture didn’t contain DNA from either Penney or Hillier-Penney.
Addressing the spot on the wall, Karchewski said it was correct that it couldn’t be determined how old it was, when it was there or how it got there.
Karchewski reiterated that no confirmatory test for blood was performed on the sample because it was too small and could be consumed in analysis, so it was sent straight for DNA testing. There was no evidence that she could point to that it was blood, she said.
Before completing his questioning, Brace brought up testing of swabs from a mug and a glass found in the house.
Penney had contacted police the day after Hillier-Penney’s disappearance about the items, which Brace said he thought were strange if Hillier-Penney was supposed to be there by herself.
Both items were tested by the lab. Hillier-Penney’s DNA was a match for the DNA found on the mug.
The glass contained DNA from Hillier-Penney, but there was also a minor component attributed to another person.
Brace said it wasn’t Penney’s.
He asked Karchewski to confirm that there appears to have been a second person on the glass.
“I can’t say it’s a full second person. This was a mixture of two individuals. No male profile was identified in this instance. There was no Y chromosome. The second component is called a trace component. It’s not even a partial profile. It’s bits of genetic information that hint towards a second individual, but there’s not enough of a profile to be able to call it a profile,” said Karchewski.
Brace suggested that other than Hillier-Penney, something else was going on.
“Yes, there was DNA from a second individual. It could have already been on the glass. It could have been brought to the glass, a secondary transfer, or it could have been another individual who touched it. I can’t say,” said Karchewski.
On redirect, Ashton went back to the sample from the wall and asked if Karchewski could say there was no blood in the sample.
“No, I can’t say there’s no blood. And I can say that I can’t conclusively say there is blood,” said Karchewski.
Prior to Karchewski’s testimony, the jury heard from Const. Mike Martin of the RCMP’s major crime unit in St. John’s.
Martin was in St. Anthony in December 2023 when the forensic search of the garage took place. It was his role to record and maintain the exhibits seized.
After taking control of the exhibits collected on Dec. 18 and 19, 2023, he took the majority of them to St. John’s, where they were stored in an exhibit locker.
The jury heard earlier that the gun safe had been brought to Corner Brook for examination.
In January 2024, Martin transported 58 exhibits to Ottawa for testing at the national forensics lab.
Those exhibits included 45 swabs taken from the garage, two pieces of plywood, six stair caps, the contents of a vacuum from Dec. 16, 17, and 18, 2023, the gun safe and the pallet the gun safe was on.
The jury was to read the text messages until court broke for the day at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, and are expected to continue reading when the trial resumes at 10 a.m. on Thursday, April 30.
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