Kevin Nadal, a psychology professor at John Jay College, later said of the effect: “When any group is criminalized or viewed as doing something violent or wrong, the whole group suffers.” The two Hispanic women Papini described did not exist. Their nonexistence would not be formally established until years later. In the interim, the description they represented hung over a community that had done nothing wrong.
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## The DNA: A Problem Without a Match
The investigative challenges began early. The most significant piece of forensic evidence — the biological material recovered from Papini’s person and clothing — pointed away from her account in ways that investigators could not immediately explain.
Testing of Papini’s clothing found male DNA. The DNA did not belong to her husband Keith. Law enforcement submitted the DNA profile to CODIS — the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, a national database of DNA profiles from convicted offenders and from crime scene evidence — and received no matching result. The man whose DNA was on Papini’s clothing was not in any criminal database.
This was established and reported publicly in October 2017, roughly a year after her return. A male DNA contributor had been identified from the clothing. The profile didn’t belong to Keith Papini. The profile didn’t match anyone in the criminal database. The profile was from an unknown man.
The investigators had a biologically real piece of evidence from a case in which the named suspects were two women. The male DNA was not consistent with Papini’s account. But without a match, the profile was only a question mark.