The Kebab DNA

In Leicester in 2012, on a residential street in the East Midlands, a man broke into a small terraced house mid-afternoon. He had forced the back door. The owner — a man in his thirties — was at work. The house was empty. The burglar made his way to the living room. He found a laptop. He found some cash. He found a games console. He loaded the items into a backpack. He returned to the kitchen. He paused. He opened the fridge.

On the top shelf, wrapped in foil, was the second half of a doner kebab. The owner had bought it the previous evening, eaten roughly half, wrapped the remainder in the universal manner of the British takeaway eater, and saved it for lunch.

The burglar had been in the house for approximately twenty minutes. He was hungry. He sat down at the kitchen table. He unwrapped the foil. He ate.

Half of half

He did not, the forensic examination later established, eat all of what was left. He ate approximately half of the half that the owner had left — making him, by direct count, the third consecutive person to eat half of this particular kebab and put the rest back. He wrapped the remainder back in the foil. He returned the package to the fridge. He left the foil slightly open. He continued the burglary, then left through the back door he had originally forced.

That evening, the owner came home. He did not initially notice that he had been burgled. He noticed, in sequence: that the cash was missing, that the laptop was missing, that the games console was missing. He called Leicestershire Police. Officers arrived. They surveyed the scene. They asked the standard questions. They began to log the items.

The constable at the fridge

One of the constables, looking in the standard way for items that might have been disturbed, opened the fridge. He saw the foil-wrapped package, slightly open. He looked at the owner. He asked: is this yours?

The owner said yes.

The constable asked: is some of it missing?

The owner said yes, but I ate that bit.

The constable asked: and the rest?

The owner looked more closely at the kebab. He paused. He looked at it again. There were fresh bite marks. The garlic sauce was disturbed. A piece of flatbread was bitten through with a different bite pattern. There was, on his half-eaten lunch, somebody else's saliva.

Forensics

Leicestershire Police bagged the kebab and submitted it to the laboratory. Saliva traces were extracted from the bite marks. The traces were cross-referenced against the United Kingdom National DNA Database. Within several days, the lab returned a hit. The DNA matched a man with a previous conviction for burglary, who lived approximately three miles away. Officers attended his address. He answered the door. They informed him, with what subsequent reports describe as a notable degree of professional satisfaction, that he was being arrested on suspicion of burglary on the basis of DNA evidence recovered from a kebab.

He confessed almost immediately. There was, he understood, no defence. The DNA was the DNA. He had eaten the kebab. He had taken a moment during a burglary to sit down at the victim's table and eat half of his lunch. There was no innocent explanation for any of this. He named the location of the stolen items. The laptop, the cash, and the games console were recovered.

Trial

The case was prosecuted at Leicester Crown Court. He pleaded guilty to burglary under section nine of the Theft Act 1968. The custodial sentence was within the standard range for the offence. The case was reported in the local press, which named it — in the words of the Leicester Mercury — the kebab burglar. The case was used by Leicestershire Police as a case study in subsequent training materials, specifically on the importance of bagging unusual food items found at burglary scenes.

An entire sub-discipline

British forensic services have, since 2012, formally taken into evidence partial food items recovered from burglary scenes more than seventy times. Apple cores. Sandwich crusts. Half-eaten biscuits. The kebab is the most famous of these but it is not unique. There is, in British forensics, an entire informal sub-discipline of food-DNA recovery, of which the Leicester kebab is the foundational text. There are training photographs. There are protocols for how to bag a half-eaten kebab without compromising the saliva traces on the bite marks. There is, in some forensic textbooks, specific guidance on how garlic sauce affects DNA recovery from baked flatbread.

None of this would exist if the burglar, in 2012, had simply not eaten the kebab. There were, in his options, several alternative responses to mid-burglary hunger. He could have brought food with him. He could have not eaten. He could have completed the burglary in twenty more minutes and eaten afterwards. Instead, on a kitchen table that was not his, with a fridge that was not his, with food that belonged to a man whose laptop was already in his backpack, he sat down and had lunch. The kebab is, in evidential terms, a saliva collection device. The owner had retained the original receipt for the laptop. The kebab, in the end, was the more useful exhibit.

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Listen to the full story on Dumb Crimes Europe, Episode 14. Stream the episode here.