DNA inquest a horror story about a villain, Cathie Allen, and the brave heroine Kirsty Wright

Cathie Allen terrorised staff who raised concerns about quality control.

It’s the horror story that a Hollywood script writer would struggle to make up.

Ambitious scientist in a sophisticated, government-run DNA testing laboratory works her way up to be in overall charge. She wins over more senior public servants and politicians, who see her single-minded dedication to her work in the sterile environment.

But behind the lab’s doors, she’s a tyrannical bully who cares less for victims of serious crime than she does about making herself look good with faster testing turnaround times.

She terrorises staff who raise concerns about quality control.

Lies to police to get them to adopt a new process that would improve the lab’s productivity but would also mean fewer violent criminals can be caught and they can escape prosecution. So they can reoffend. Kill, rape and bludgeon innocent civilians.

She stalls and lies repeatedly to her bosses as a podcast investigation into a young woman’s murder sees an outsider scientist finding serious flaws, calling the lab “broken”, and declaring that offender DNA in thousands of criminal cases has been going undetected.

And when the pressure on politicians builds to such an extent that a public inquiry is inevitable, she even resorts to a self-serving cover-up which would destroy crime scene evidence.

Kirsty Wright. Picture: Justine Walpole

It’s a horror story that really, truly happened, according to one of Queensland’s most experienced and well-respected legal minds, Walter Sofronoff KC, the head of the DNA Commission of Inquiry which wrapped up its six months of investigation on Tuesday.

In a first-world, well-funded criminal justice system such as Queensland’s, it’s hard to fathom how this could have happened.

We spend tens of millions of dollars on agency oversight from bodies such as the Crime and ­Corruption Commission and the office of the Auditor-General.

Then there are the thousands of police, the judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers – all of whom are working at times with DNA, yet failed to appreciate what the DNA inquiry has now found: a “malignant leadership” has distorted this vital part of the state’s criminal justice system.

While the villain in this piece is undoubtedly the managing scientist Cathie Allen, there is also a brave heroine. Kirsty Wright did a huge amount of work to identify the horrors in that lab in the Shandee’s Story podcast. She spoke up about the defects she uncovered, and refused to take a backward step despite the reluctance of the Queensland government for six months to heed her warnings.

Halfway through Sofronoff’s media conference on Tuesday, I asked: “Commissioner, given so many different, very intelligent senior people are involved in the administration of justice and involved with the laboratory, how does it come to be that over many years, effectively a rogue executive in charge of the lab gets away with running the lab so poorly that thousands of cases have to be retested or re-examined, and a toxic culture develops and the whole ­administration of justice goes off the rails? How does that happen that one person can do that?”

Sofronoff: “What I concluded was that all of us here don’t know anything about DNA. People don’t know the difference between DNA, a chromosome, a gene. So when the scientists at the lab raised an issue that went to the heart of the ethical conduct of the work, it looked like an arcane scientific problem, a dispute.

“And there was no way in the world the executive director, the director-general or the minister would be able to recognise that what was being presented was not a dispute about scientific method for scientists to resolve, but a dispute that went to the heart of what they were doing and how ineffectively they were doing it as part of the justice system. It’s impossible because there’s nobody who’s in a position to think, ‘I’ve got to spend a couple of days getting on top of this DNA stuff, I’d better get a briefing from outside the lab’.

“Moreover, you don’t expect in Australia that a public servant of the rank of a managing scientist is going to lie to you. But ultimately that material was coming from this single person and the material was impenetrable in terms of the science. So as it goes higher up, all you get is the scientist saying ‘it’s all fine and Kirsty Wright is a disgruntled former employee’.”

“Those who have to deal with this, administrators and politicians … what do you do? There was no person who was in a position to understand the significance of what they were being told.”

Mr Sofronoff said he was ­“astounded” by what he found and the repercussions for justice.

That’s a horror story.

It happened in Queensland.

Politicians and senior public servants overseeing DNA labs around the world should be paying a lot of attention.