Do You Know Where Your Pap Smear Is Tonight?
This ought to make women uncomfortable. Kansas law enforcement officials apparently obtained a court order to obtain tissue samples taken for a pap smear from the accused BTK killer's daughter and used the samples for comparison with DNA the BTK perpetrator left at the scene of some of the crimes. Without her knowledge, of course.
The agents' strategy was to use a DNA sample from the daughter to see whether it would link her father to DNA left at BTK's crime scenes. The agents went to prosecutors in the Sedgwick County district attorney's office, and a judge in Sedgwick County issued a subpoena for the 26-year-old daughter's medical records in Kansas, a source said. It wasn't clear where in Kansas the records and the tissue sample had been held. DNA was extracted from the daughter's tissue sample, and it was processed within the week before Rader's arrest, the source said.
Federal privacy law restricts access to medical records. Among the exceptions is when law enforcement needs medical records for investigations, Wichita lawyer Chuck Millsap said. The principle is that the need to conduct an investigation outweighs a need for privacy, he said.
What kind of tissue tied to a woman's medical records could be kept on file at a lab?
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