Kirsty Wright is the bravest, smartest, truest and most dedicated source I’ve dealt with in almost 40 years of journalism. And she’s great company.
Her ongoing legacy as a result of her gutsy calling out in the Shandee’s Story investigative podcast series of the Queensland government’s “broken” DNA testing laboratory is extraordinary.
Wright is a heroine in a white coat who came along by chance, identified a longtime scientific disaster and wouldn’t shirk it when we asked her to reveal and talk about it.
Thousands of victims of serious crime who would previously have been told “no DNA detected” – when there always was probative DNA in the sample – now have another shot at justice. There will be many more arrests and prosecutions of rapists, murderers and other monsters who would otherwise have got away with their heinous crimes.
There will be safer communities and an incalculable number of people who will never be harmed.
And there will be a rebuilt DNA lab run, finally, with professionalism by committed scientists doing their best to help police solve major crime – rather than a lab run, as it was when Wright spoke up in The Australian, by a twisted cabal of control freaks.
For their deceit and their sabotage of DNA in the old lab, which worsened the pain of victims and perverted the criminal justice system, those who were in charge until being stood down in recent months are criminally culpable, in my opinion.
Wright is the catalyst for the exposing of this disaster and she is the reason major changes are now on foot.
Without her determined efforts, there would have been no investigation of the lab by a powerful Commission of Inquiry run by a retired Supreme Court of Appeal president, Walter Sofronoff KC, in the second half of 2022.
Sofronoff’s stunning findings in December of scientific failure and fraud on a vast and frightening scale – triggering Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s $100m rebuild of the lab and a taskforce identifying hundreds of major unsolved crimes going back more than a decade for review to profile offender DNA, which the old lab wilfully ignored – vindicate Wright.
Wright is also a fortune teller.
Her confidence early in the piece in declaring that the lab was fundamentally “broken” and letting down victims and the entire system never wavered when she spoke in dozens of our recorded conversations for the Shandee’s Story podcast throughout 2021; or when she stood up and sounded the alarm at a media conference we called to try to force the government to act in late 2021; or when she went to a closed-door meeting in April 2022 with investigators at Queensland’s Crime and Corruption Commission.
She did all these things without hesitation because she knew how serious the problems were and how the lab’s spin and lies were trying to cover it up.
Remarkably, even the Crime and Corruption Commission had to be repeatedly prodded to take the matter seriously – after it initially disregarded or lost Wright’s prescient and comprehensive written complaint, which was alleging official corruption in the lab. A case study of case assessment ineptitude at the watchdog, for sure, but don’t hold your breath for agency self-examination.
When lying public servants and scientists in the lab with much to lose from her revelations being investigated tried to smear Wright as the Queensland government closed ranks to reject our calls for an inquiry, Wright never lost her nerve.
She went back to the DNA documents I had given her, discovered more defects, found her own relevant documents from other matters, and doubled down.
“Hedley, I promise you, it’s worse than you can imagine,’’ Kirsty repeatedly told me when the Shandee’s Story podcast was new, long before any independent inquiry had tested her revelations.
“We’ve seen the tip of the iceberg in Shandee’s case. This is the worst forensics disaster in Australian history and one of the worst in the world. It will be taught in universities and forensic biology classes.”
And here’s another important thing. She didn’t go looking for any of this controversy or attention. Wright does not play in the limelight.
She was spending her spare time playing softball, cycling and hanging out with her dog, and getting on with her career as a forensic biologist and strategist with Defence, far outside the Queensland government, until she responded to my call for help.
Since we met and started working together in June 2021 – the result of a fluke Google search when I went looking for a DNA expert to examine complex DNA evidence troubling me in the Shandee Blackburn murder case – my colleagues and I have marvelled at Wright’s towering integrity and her character.
And how it is that from outside the laboratory, she had the brains and guts to identify then call out the lab’s appalling failures based on her initial examination of a set of documents from just one case – when hundreds of highly paid and senior judges, prosecutors, defence lawyers, police and sundry bureaucrats in the criminal justice system dealing with DNA and the lab on an almost daily basis had remained ignorant of the serious defects.
The Queensland government’s payroll is generous to the official watchdogs.
We have whistleblower protection legislation and powerful agencies with good budgets to discover systemic dysfunction in places such as the government’s official DNA testing laboratory.
The Crime and Corruption Commission, Queensland Audit Office, Queensland Police Service – all of them crammed with lawyers, investigators, bureaucrats and forests of policies, processes and mandates. And they failed to see any of it. Or failed to act on it.
Wright – on her own and working from home – runs rings around them all.
We owe her a great debt of gratitude. Every piece of exhaustive work she did to get us to this point – many hundreds of hours examining documents for the podcast and the hundreds of pages of analysis she wrote – were done voluntarily.
As was all the subsequent analysis she performed for the Commission of Inquiry.
Throughout everything she has always been good-humoured, loyal, strategic, evidence-based, methodical and funny.
Wright takes science very seriously but she laughs easily at herself. She is as steely as they come. But she cares deeply.
I saw this when she fought back tears in her first meeting with murder victim Shandee Blackburn’s mother, Vicki Blackburn, and sister Shannah.
We were telling Vicki and Shannah for the first time what Wright had found about the failure of DNA testing in Shandee’s unsolved case, shortly before some of her revelations in the podcast were released.
Wright knew then that injustice in Shandee’s case was unforgivable – and that it would not be a one-off. It would be evident in many hundreds of other unsolved cases.
On that day she shed tears for Shandee and all the victims and their families.
It has been the greatest privilege for me and my colleagues at The Australian, David Murray, Isaac Irons, Claire Harvey, Lydia Lynch, Matt Condon and Kristen Amiet, to have met and worked closely with Wright.
Out of the tragedy of Shandee’s vicious slaying by a coward wielding a long knife as the 23-year-old walked to her mother’s home in the sugar and mining town of Mackay in 2013, something remarkable and enduring has come for past and future victims of crime where probative DNA is collected.
Laboratories across Australia and around the world should study this searing Queensland experience. They can learn much from it. The scientific community should get behind and properly celebrate Wright.
And in the media we may hope more people with Wright’s integrity will work with journalists to uncover wrongdoing that bad systems miss or try hard to suppress.
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