Quote:
Originally Posted by curtw
I'm not trying to remember something I read before, I'm looking for a historical answer. And neither Google nor Quora have been any help. Here goes:
What was the first (science?) fictional story to suppose that a criminal could be identified, captured, and/or convicted using DNA evidence?
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Patricia Cornwell's
Postmortem was published in 1990,and I believe is generally regarded as the first. At that time, DNA profiling was so new very few people were aware of it but Cornwell was working as a computer analyst at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia at the time of the investigation and trial of Timothy Wilson Spencer.
In 1988 Spencer was the first serial killer to be convicted on the basis of DNA evidence and he was executed in 1994. The very first DNA profiling in a criminal case was in Leicester, UK in 1986.