A Colorado crime lab analyst is charged with more than 100 criminal counts in connection with allegations that she altered reports in sexual assault cases.
Yvonne “Missy” Woods was charged with 52 counts of forgery, 48 counts of attempt to influence a public servant, one count of first-degree perjury and one count of cybercrime, according to the district attorney for the First Judicial District. Woods is accused of altering and deleting quantification values, rerunning batches of DNA without documentation and hiding potential contamination.
She is alleged to have submitted reports that said “No Male DNA Found” in over 30 sexual assault cases in which DNA was found or contamination was present.
Jail records show Woods was in custody Thursday morning. An attorney who was named in an affidavit for Woods’ arrest warrant did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
In November 2023, Colorado authorities asked the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation to investigate Woods’ work, the affidavit said. She worked at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation from January 1994 until she retired in November 2023.
According to the affidavit, a Colorado Bureau of Investigation intern discovered an error two months before the request. The intern, who was not identified, was assigned a project to review quantification data and alerted the lab’s management that specific data appeared to be missing, the affidavit said.
An internal investigation reviewing all of Woods’ cases found several instances of deleted or altered data, according to the affidavit.
In a recorded interview, Woods was asked about her work at the lab and how contaminated DNA samples were handled. She told investigators that before around 2017 or 2018, some contamination was accepted, the affidavit said.
But since then, she said, any contamination would have to be addressed, and she agreed with investigators that it would take a “considerable amount of time” to rerun batches of DNA, the affidavit said. Woods was asked about discrepancies in her work, including a time she was placed on leave in 2018 over concerns of manipulated or altered data, the affidavit said.
Woods said in the interview that she didn’t know whether similar cases of manipulated data were all intentional and couldn’t give a timeline for when she began altering data, according to the affidavit.
“She was asked what the benefit would be for deleting or manipulating data and she quickly replied, ‘Being able to report the case,’” the affidavit said.
The affidavit said Woods was asked whether she deleted the data “to simply move specific cases forward quickly, to avoid having to do additional work and she agreed.”
Woods’ inaccurate reports affected over 500 cases beginning in 2008, according to the affidavit. Those cases are now “in question” because of the alleged data manipulation.
The district attorney’s office said the financial cost totaled more than $11 million.
A Wisconsin-based firm has been contracted to review the bureau’s policies and procedures in the fallout and provide solutions for any potential improvements, NBC affiliate KUSA of Denver reported. The firm has been given a $770,000 contract, the station said.