Shandee’s Story: ‘Blood-soaked’ T-shirt not fully tested

A T-shirt that appeared to be stained with blood, found near the scene of Shandee Blackburn’s murder, was not fully tested for DNA.

Shandee Blackburn leaving Harrup Park Country Club, Mackay, minutes before she is stabbed to death while walking home.

A “blood-soaked” T-shirt found near the scene of Shandee Blackburn’s murder was among dozens of samples in the case that were not fully tested for DNA.

Just 13 days after Blackburn was stabbed to death walking home from work in Mackay in 2013, staff at a local mechanical engineering business called police.

They had found a white T-shirt that appeared stained with blood, dumped in a bucket beside the business.

Shandee’s former boyfriend John Peros gives hair samples to police in Brisbane.

Scenes of Crime officer Yvonne Gaskell had photographed Blackburn’s body and her knife wounds in the hours after her death.

She went to examine the discarded shirt, later writing in her police statement that it was damp from recent rain but had distinctive orange stains.

“I then carried out a presumptive test for blood using a number of Roche Combur test strips,” she wrote.

“These strips returned a weak positive on three separate stains on the front and one stain on the rear.”

The police case was that the killer parked his car, hid in bushes, launched an attack on Blackburn, then drove off.

And the Evan St business where the shirt was found was on or very close to the killer’s suspected escape route that police established through CCTV footage. Another 250m away on the same street was the flat of John Peros, Blackburn’s former boyfriend and the primary police suspect.

Police were confident it was Mr Peros’s Toyota HiLux ute in CCTV vision both near the murder scene, and then driving out of town straight after. He denies any involvement.

After such a ferocious knife attack, the killer’s shirt was highly likely to be stained by Blackburn’s blood.

A new episode of the Shandee’s Story investigative podcast raises the theory that a brief stop at the Evan St engineering business would have allowed the killer to discard the incriminating shirt in case they were stopped by police.

Grainy CCTV footage of a running figure – the suspected killer – did indicate the figure was wearing a light-coloured shirt.

But the samples from the shirt were among 43 from the case that were not fully tested for DNA, forensic scientist Dr Kirsty Wright has found. Police scientific officer Adrian Brock logged three tape-lifts – one in the neck area for the shirt owner’s DNA, and two for hairs and fibres from the shirt’s front and back.

Sergeant Brock also cut four samples from the shirt for DNA testing, writing in his formal statement that the fabric was “blood soaked”.

The seven forensic samples from the shirt were sent to the Queensland Health-run laboratory. The three tape-lift samples were not tested for DNA.

Three of the four samples described as blood soaked were tested – but only to the end of the second quantitation stage, in which the lab first tries to detect and measure DNA. The written finding from the laboratory stated: “No DNA detected”.

A new episode of Shandee’s Story was released this week.

The following year, the lab reworked and fully tested a tape lift from Blackburn’s left forearm, finding DNA from multiple people despite having previously detected no DNA.

It did not trigger retesting of other potentially key items including the T-shirt. The Australian revealed on Friday the lab had set a very high threshold for the minimum amount of DNA required for crime scene samples to be fully tested. The level was double what was required in NSW.

As a result, it was highly likely samples with lower levels of DNA – including those from murders and sexual assaults – would be getting sidelined and not fully tested.

Asked on Friday if she would order an independent inquiry into the lab, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said she would “look into the issues”.

Anyone with information about the Blackburn murder can contact Hedley Thomas confidentially at [e-mail]