Suspect had offered DNA to police in '02

BARNSTABLE --The garbage hauler charged with killing Christa Worthington agreed three months after her murder to give police a DNA sample.

But for reasons that are still not clear, police did not collect his DNA until two years later, despite his criminal background. It then took a year for that sample to be matched with DNA from the scene of the slaying and for the garbage hauler, Christopher M. McCowen, to be arrested.

Asked during a press conference yesterday why it took so long for police to collect McCowen's sample, Cape & Islands District Attorney Michael O'Keefe said: ''There are a number of reasons, and it has to do with his movements about Cape Cod and living in various locations."

In the past several years, McCowen had at least one address in Eastham and two in Hyannis. He was arrested Thursday at a dilapidated Hyannis rooming house where he had been living.

O'Keefe declined to elaborate further on the time lapse. He said police became interested in McCowen in the initial phase of the investigation, when they were collecting information about ''everyone in the orbit" of Worthington's life who would have ''a contact or a reason to be at the home."

Others police were interested in checking at the time, O'Keefe said, were handymen, mailmen, and repairmen.

The time lag set off anger yesterday among those who knew Worthington. Nicholas Kahn, an artist from Coxsackie, N.Y., who summers in Truro and who met Worthington when she was pregnant with her daughter Ava, said he was outraged that police didn't test McCowen's DNA after he offered it.

''Why did it take so long?" Kahn asked. ''It seems so obvious that he would have been the most likely suspect, with his criminal background and his knowledge of her being there. He should have had his DNA tested almost immediately."

McCowen's criminal record includes time served for burglary, motor vehicle theft, and other charges in Florida, where he lived before he moved to Cape Cod, apparently in the mid-1990s. He has also had at least four restraining orders issued against him on Cape Cod.

At several points during the press conference yesterday, O'Keefe appeared to place the primary blame for the time lapse on a backlog at the State Police crime laboratory in Sudbury, saying that the lab needs more funding.

''We weren't able to process it any more quickly than we did," he said. ''Obviously there's a backlog."

But two state public safety officials disputed O'Keefe's assertions that the lab took more than a year to process the sample.

O'Keefe said that it took approximately 13 months from the time the sample was collected in March 2004 to when it was analyzed this month.

But the state officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the lab did not receive McCowen's DNA sample until last July, approximately four months after the date O'Keefe said McCowen gave the sample to O'Keefe's investigators. In January 2005, a scientist was assigned to process the sample and compare it to DNA taken from the Worthington crime scene, and the results were ready this week, said one of the officials.

That would mean the time to process the sample was approximately eight months, which the officials said is within the normal six- to eight-month processing time for the State Police Laboratory's DNA unit. ''There was no unusual delay in processing this case," one official said.

The two officials also said that, in some cases, DNA samples can be processed in as little as a week if a district attorney makes an emergency request. No such request was attached to McCowen's sample, one of the officials said.

Regardless of the time it took to process McCowen's DNA sample, however, O'Keefe acknowledged that the lengthier delay came between the time McCowen first agreed to give the sample and when police finally obtained it.