Shandee Blackburn, Hedley Thomas and Queensland’s DNA lab inquiry: ‘It’s a disgraceful cover-up’

Hedley Thomas writes: ’After two days, this public inquiry – the second one into Queensland’s DNA debacle – looks more like a friendly hand-holding session in which no ­witness gets directly challenged has written on the DNA inquiry’.

There are predictable, garden-variety cover-ups. And then there’s the kind of cover-up so big and dangerous you can scarcely believe it. A cover-up which required DNA scientists – highly trained forensic biologists who were public servants in a modern Queensland laboratory – making conscious, closed-door choices that let rapists and murderers remain free.

This is the cover-up of the scientific disgrace known as the 2007 report of Project 13. From go to whoa – from its inception in 2007 up to when Kirsty Wright exposed it in The Australian’s Shandee’s Story podcast investigation in September this year – the damning report of Project 13 has remained a lab secret.

Known only to a handful of scientists who didn’t speak up.

Let’s recap some of its uniquely suspicious features. In 2007, Project 13 was the biggest development in the DNA lab’s history; it took the processing of crime scene DNA out of the hands of scientists and into the metallic arms of robots. It was a cost-saving, timesaving modernisation of DNA testing, brought about by political pressure because of concerns that a backlog of samples would be waiting forever to be tested unless automation took over from scientists’ manual hands-on work.

Several scientists in the lab had knowledge of a draft report in 2007 documenting how the robots performed on mock samples.

Was automation producing good DNA yields? It needed to be working well, otherwise the incriminating cells of killers and sex offenders – left behind in crime scene blood and semen – would go undetected.

But their report showed it was a disaster; DNA yields had fallen off a cliff. And here’s a curious thing – there is no final report of Project 13 in existence. No bound volume like the reports of all the other lab projects. There are just incomplete drafts. A cynic would suggest that’s just how they wanted it. Incredibly, the biggest change in the lab was implemented anyway. Without a validation.

And today, none of the scientists who were around at that time – and who knew the method was hopelessly deficient – can offer any satisfactory explanation as to how they justified it. They cannot, or will not, say who made the decision to “go live” with it ­despite their documented knowledge of the obvious yield failure.

It gets worse: they didn’t address it for nine years; they didn’t blow the whole thing up after failing the first few hundred victims of crime. They continued until it was epic. Until 2016.

Shandee Blackburn was stabbed to death in Mackay in 2013. When Wright examined the forensic files from Shandee’s case for my podcast in 2021 and 2022, she could see something had gone terribly wrong in the lab; even a fresh pool of blood was not yielding DNA.

Wright’s many discoveries of the lab’s failure to detect DNA in places where, in her opinion, it must have been in rich existence led to the first commission of inquiry run by Walter Sofronoff last year. Blind Freddy – and every scientist from the DNA lab (as well as those who had left it) – knew the inquiry was focused on the lab’s mysterious failure to ­detect DNA. Who knew?

All those scientists who were involved in Project 13 and the documenting of the collapse in yield, going back to the robots in 2007, had to know in 2022 that retired judge Sofronoff’s DNA ­inquiry really needed to be told about it.

Yet not one of those scientists disclosed it to his inquiry. They all kept their mouths shut, even when they were giving evidence.

Not one of them stepped up to say “we implemented a new method in 2007 despite knowing it was failing – and it’s highly likely it failed for years; that it failed in Shandee’s case and in thousand of others”. This is the definition of a cover-up. Twice. It’s a scientific disgrace.

Observers of the all-new commission of inquiry now under way into Project 13 haven’t yet heard, in any of the evidence, strong words like “cover-up” or “scientific disgrace” in the two days of public hearings to date. They haven’t seen any of the scientists responsible for Project 13 and for turning a blind eye to it being aggressively challenged and cross-examined.

Perhaps the hard talk is yet to come. But after two days, this public inquiry – the second one into Queensland’s DNA debacle – looks more like a friendly hand-holding session in which no ­witness gets directly challenged or asked to respond to propositions such as: “You covered up a scientific disgrace – and you’re still at it.”