Alaska Scientific Detection Laboratory: crime lab extraordinaire.

• Author: Johnson, Greg
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Building Alaska

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For nearly 17 years, Bonnie Craig was a statistic. The 18-year-old University of Alaska Anchorage student was found dead Sept. 28, 1994, facedown in McHugh Creek south of Anchorage. Her rape and murder quickly became front-page news, and nearly as quickly, the case went cold. Investigators painstakingly interviewed dozens of people with hopes of catching a break. When that didn't work, they turned to an emerging crime investigation tool called DNA profiling.

As the years passed, a few leads would pop up, but nothing substantial.

"When that crime occurred, we eliminated something like 75 people through (DNA) profiling," says Orin Dym, forensic laboratory manager for the Alaska Scientific Laboratory in Anchorage. "If they had anything on a suspect, they were run."

In fact, one of those DNA samples taken in 1998 provided a potential hit, but that person was ruled out as a suspect. In 2000, the state lab put Craig's DNA into the national database. It wasn't until 2006, though, that investigators would catch a genetic break. That's when a DNA profile from Kenneth Dion was put into the national database by New Hampshire officials after he was convicted for committing a string of armed robberies there.

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The criminal justice system finally found closure for Craig and her family June 15, 2011, when Dion was convicted for killing and raping the young woman.

That day would not have come without DNA evidence and breakthroughs in criminal investigation techniques at the disposal of forensic scientists, Dym says. In Alaska, all that work goes through his lab.

Dym's Lab

That facility, the new Alaska Scientific Detection Laboratory at 4805 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Ave. in Anchorage, is a spacious 84,000-square-foot, three-story building built by Neeser Construction Inc. that houses a staff of 44, and cost $87.5 million to build.

"That includes design, site prep work, every chair, every light bulb, telephones on the desks, computers," Dym says, pointing out the construction and furnishing came in about $5 million under the facility's original $92 million budget.

Now settling into the lab--the official move happened in June--it's becoming clear that the real benefit of the complex is being realized in more efficiencies in the science of processing evidence.

Dym calls this the "decompression effect," where the lab now has more than four times the space of its previous location, a 19,200-square-foot building at...