The Kebab DNA

Leicester, England, 2012. A man burgles a terraced house. Forces a back door. Lifts a laptop, a games console, some cash. He's been inside about twenty minutes. He's hungry. He opens the fridge.

On the top shelf, wrapped in foil, is half a doner kebab — the owner's saved-from-last-night lunch. The burglar takes it out. He sits down at the victim's kitchen table. He eats half of what's left. He wraps the rest back in foil. Returns it to the fridge. Continues the burglary.

That evening the owner gets home. Notices the laptop is gone. Calls the police. A constable opens the fridge looking for disturbed items, finds the kebab, asks — is some of this missing. The owner looks more closely. There are fresh bite marks. There is an unfamiliar bite pattern. There is, on this kebab, somebody else's saliva.

Leicestershire Police bag the kebab. Forensics extracts DNA from the bite marks. The DNA matches a man with a previous conviction, three miles away. He confesses on arrest. There is no defence. The kebab is the prosecution.

Kit and Eden on the British forensic sub-discipline of food-DNA recovery, of which the kebab is the foundational text.