Hong, who left Orange County five years ago to run a lab for the California Department of Justice, faces allegations that she “cooked the books” in one recent murder case that unraveled midtrial. (Photo by MINDY SCHAUER, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER/SCNG) ‘Cooked the books’?īut now, Hong’s reputation as a scientist and leader among California forensic experts - she is the former president of the statewide association of criminalists - is under attack. Famalaro was given the death penalty in 1997 for the slaying of 23-year-old Denise Huber.Ĭrime writers described the lab-coated Hong as methodical and intrepid, having a “scientist’s dispassion.” In one case, a prosecutor speaking to the jury likened the work done by Hong and the crime lab to Galileo and Copernicus.įormer Orange County Crime Lab DNA specialist Mary Hong in 2012, who is accused by a defense attorney of altering the evidence to benefit prosecutors. That finding meant that defendant John Famalaro should be tried in Santa Ana, not Arizona. She was a pioneer in the most advanced forms of DNA testing and analyzed the blood evidence that proved a dead woman found in an Arizona freezer was actually killed in Orange County. Hong also has appeared in the television shows “Unsolved Mysteries,” “Cold Case Files” and “Dateline.” ‘Cold case closer’Īssigned in 1997 to a team formed to concentrate on old murders, Hong was, in the words of one top public defender, Orange County’s “cold case closer.” McNamara prominently featured Hong in the book “I’ll Be Gone in The Dark,” about the hunt for the Golden State Killer. In 1996, Hong submitted Orange County samples to the state’s fledgling DNA database and solved six murders right off the bat, according to the late author Michelle McNamara. Her work eventually aided in the capture of Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo, who would later plead guilty to 13 murders and dozens of rapes in the 1970s and ’80s.
The high point of her career: Hong linked four unsolved rape-murders in Orange County to killings in Northern California, helping to identify one of the worst serial killers in state history. By 2005, she had testified more than 100 times in DNA cases. She led the way in solving stagnant, high-profile murder cases at the lab, the first local law enforcement DNA laboratory in the western United States. (Photo by Eugene Garcia, Orange County Register/SCNG) 26, 2000, file photo, forensic scientist Mary Hong demonstrates the DNA testing procedures at the Orange County Forensic Science Center in Santa Ana. In the 1990s, the dawn of DNA analysis in Orange County, forensic scientist Mary Hong was the queen of the cold case.Īrriving at the Orange County Crime Lab in 1985 - with her bachelor of science degree in criminalistics from Michigan State University - Hong became a forensic star in latex gloves.
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