legacy of the long johns

The techniques used to exonerate JonBenet's mom and dad is helping bring closure for other children and crime victims around the world.

Xana O'Neill of the Los Angeles News wrote in Cheat Sheet - -

"....must-read articles that will impress your co-workers, wow your friends and make you seem smart.... '

DNA evidence analyzed this summer cleared JonBenet's family of her murder. The man who spearheaded that investigation uses the same techniques used in crime-solving to ID the badly charred remains of 9/11 victims and soldiers and is hoping to spread the DNA technology to new areas. "

From the referenced Washington Post article - -

With the same understated, patient tone he has used for decades -- first as a top U.S. military expert on soldiers' remains, then as leader of international efforts to identify victims of massacres in Bosnia -- Huffine, a top executive at the Lorton-based DNA identification lab Bode Technology, walks though the connections he finds amid the static.

"You see, DNA technology never works in a vacuum," Huffine said. "If you improve a technique that might help get DNA results from a very challenging environment, like in the JonBenet Ramsey case, those same types of techniques could be used to help identify people who are missing in other countries. It could help to address systematic and government-sponsored rape in other countries, and so on."

Experience with the Trade Center, where bones were subjected to intense heat, is in turn applied to the work in Peru, where soldiers tried to hide killings by burning bodies.

"It's very September 11-like material. It's very degraded," said Jose Pablo Baraybar, executive director of the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team, which has been sending exhumed remains from a massacre in southern Peru's Accomarca area to Lorton. "There are a lot of children. That's a problem. The bones are very fragile."