M-Vac is sucking up DNA evidence needed to catch criminals
KSL News Channel 5 SALT LAKE CITY — After a crime is committed, the search for justice can be frustrating and often devastating for victims. Now, a new forensics tool developed and produced in Utah is helping investigators crack cases that might have gone unsolved and unpunished.
West Jordan Police Department senior crime scene investigator Francine Bardole describes the M-Vac system this way, “It saturates into the pores, into the material so that any skin cells that have been embedded into this porous surface will be able to be extracted.”
Like a mini carpet cleaner, the M-Vac system sucks up DNA evidence from a variety of broad porous surfaces like a cotton shirt.
“We’re a small business, but we’re making a big splash in a pretty good sized industry,” said Jared Bradley, president of M-Vac Systems Inc.
The growing industry is forensic science where one piece of touch DNA evidence can mean the difference between an arrest or a cold case. Bardole said, “A lot of agencies have cases where they’ve reached a dead end.”
The murder of 17-year-old Krystal Beslanowitch back in 1995 was one of those cold cases. The teen was bludgeoned to death with a rock from the Provo River. Detectives struggled to identify a suspect. Back in 2013, Wasatch County Sheriff Todd Bonner described his investigation of Beslanowitch’s murder.
“It’s a case that has haunted me for almost my whole career.”
Then in 2013, investigators used the vacuum and the spray from the M-Vac to get touch DNA off the rock used to kill the teenager, and they had a match. The touch DNA pointed to Joseph Michael Simpson, an ex-con from Utah living in Florida. An arrest was made 18 years after the crime.
“To be able to say, yes, we identified the person, is of huge, huge importance to us and the victims,” said West Jordan Police Sgt. Dan Roberts.
It was so important to Bardole that she got permission from her bosses to buy the $20,000 M-Vac when it first came on the market three years ago.
“The whole idea behind it was jut fantastic as far as touch DNA. I thought this is great,” Bardole said.
The invention hatched in 2002 by Jared Bradley’s father, a microbiologist who was looking for a way to pull bacteria out of food. Ten years later, an FBI friend convinced Bradley to market the M-Vac as a crime scene investigation tool: “The key to the M-Vac is it sprays in the middle and vacuums along the outside,” said Bradley.
Engineer Wayne Carlsen is COO of M-Vac Systems Inc., and he describes the process of collecting the DNA evidence with the M-Vac.
It’s phenomenal. You know you can get hundreds, thousands of times more skin cells when in other cases using previous technology, just swabbing alone, you couldn’t get any.
“Anything that you knock free on the surface is being pulled right up into the system. So, all of the cells, debris, anything that’s down there comes into the bottle.” Once the evidence is inside the bottle, the operator swirls it around to suspend the DNA and then pours it over a collection filter.
Producing and marketing the M-Vac around the world has been exhausting but fulfilling for Bradley and Carlsen. They know the evidence it collects is helping to solve important cases.
“It’s phenomenal. You know you can get hundreds, thousands of times more skin cells when in other cases using previous technology, just swabbing alone, you couldn’t get any,” said Roberts.
Swabbing alone did not initially pick up enough DNA evidence to us against Dr. John Wall accused in the 2011 murder of his ex-wife Uta von Schwedler. Then, at his trial this March, testimony that the M-Vac pulled DNA matching Wall’s out of the cotton fibers of a pillowcase. It was critical evidence that helped to convict the former pediatrician of murder.
“They had a kind of a weak profile, but it wasn’t enough to move the case (Wall’s case) forward,” Bradley said. “They used the M-Vac, and that’s what made the difference.”
Roberts believes the M-Vac will help to convict and clear suspects in a variety of crimes: “This helps us to clarify and catch the right person and eliminate the wrong ones,” he said.
Right now, the Utah State Crime Lab is considering but has not yet approved testing of the M-Vac DNA collection filters. If the Lab approves of their use, costs will drop dramatically since filters are now tested by private labs.
If costs come down, it is likely that more Utah law enforcement agencies will make use of the M-Vac as an important evidence gathering tool.
The Crime Solver
By Charlene Renberg Winters (BA ’73, MA ’96)
Krystal Beslanowitch’s murder case haunted members of the Wasatch County Sheriff’s Office for nearly two decades. In late 1995 the 17-year-old was fatally struck by a river rock, and Deputy Todd Bonner vividly remembers seeing her body lying by the Provo River near Midway, Utah. The sheriff’s office interviewed several hundred people statewide and pursued every lead possible. However, without suspects and with limited evidence, the trail quickly went cold.
Fast-forward 18 years: technology had finally caught up with the crime. Bonner, now the sheriff, ordered a novel DNA-collection method to help defrost the case. This cutting-edge forensic tool, called the M-Vac System, is manufactured and marketed by a Salt Lake City–based company led by BYU graduate Jared V. Bradley (BS ’93).
Bradley’s late father developed the wet-vacuum sampling device to collect pathogens from food surfaces with the goal of improving food safety. Upon the advice of a friend, and after substantial testing in private laboratories, Bradley and his team repurposed it as a DNA-collection tool for crime scenes and labs. They learned that a combination of a sterile spray and vacuum pressure applied simultaneously to a surface greatly enhanced the amount of DNA that could be collected.
In Beslanowitch’s case, investigators had saved the murder weapon, and when they applied the M-Vac onto the permeable stone, they were able to collect sufficient material to generate a full DNA profile. Investigators then tracked their suspect to Florida, where they shadowed him and retrieved matching DNA from his discarded cigarette; he is now in jail awaiting trial.
“I’m thrilled at [the M-Vac’s] capability, and I was ecstatic when it pulled usable DNA from that rough, coarse granite rock,” says Bonner, who traveled to Florida to personally handcuff the suspect.
Adds Bradley, “When we learned we could obtain a profile from a rock that had been sitting in an evidence room for 18 years, the rush of gratitude, amazement, and excitement was immense.”
The M-Vac has since helped solve several cases in locations ranging from Florida to China. And Bradley now regularly travels both in and outside the United States to train law enforcement agencies on the M-Vac’s use and to raise awareness of its benefits.
“Quite a while ago we recognized that there was a weak link in the forensic DNA process, and it was primarily sample collection,” he says. “A tremendous amount of research and resources go into DNA-testing equipment, but very little [into] . . . sample collection. Using a $2 swab and expecting a million-dollar answer might not be the right method.”
The M-Vac isn’t necessary in cases with visible bodily fluids available for collection: “If you can see it, you don’t need our system,” Bradley says. But, he adds, the system provides an ideal way to gather “invisible” DNA. As an example, if someone stole a purse and grabbed the victim’s sleeve in the process, the thief likely left touch DNA on the fabric. An investigator using traditional methods would have a hard time pulling the thief’s DNA from the victim’s sleeve. The M-Vac, however, can go wide and deep, vacuuming the entire arm if needed, putting it all in one sample and concentrating it.
Bradley says he never would have imagined when he began his BYU education that he’d be doing what he does now—“but here I am. It’s an incredible place to be, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do what I do.”
And, he adds, a sense of mission keeps him engaged in his work. “It is hard to describe the thrill that comes from providing investigators a new way to solve crime,” he says. “It’s just fantastic to see the closure that comes to families of victims and to investigators who have labored on cases, sometimes for years.”
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