DENVER — A former DNA scientist at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) now under criminal investigation admitted she purposefully deleted data, according to an internal affairs report obtained Wednesday by 9NEWS Investigates.
The internal affairs investigation wrapped up this year and found Yvonne "Missy" Woods omitted facts in criminal justice records and tampered with DNA testing by altering or omitting test results from the case file. Woods worked at CBI for 29 years, and now all of her work is in question. So far, more than 650 cases have been impacted. A review of her work from 1994 to 2008 is still ongoing.
The internal affairs report, which had been under a protective order for months, includes portions of an interview with Woods days after she retired from CBI. The report says Woods voluntarily resigned in lieu of disciplinary action.
According to the report, for the first one and a half hours of the interview, Woods denied any wrongdoing. Then she admitted to an investigator she purposefully deleted data. She claimed her behavior was limited to cases of sexual assault on adults and did not occur in other sexual assault, property crimes or homicide case work.
"The implications were not even a thought, and I think that for that stuff it, it was like – click done, move on, click, done, move on – and not even, not even an additional thought. I don't know any of these people," Woods told an investigator.
The investigator asked, "How did you feel about what you were doing? Did you feel bad about it? Did you feel, or did you wrap your mind –"
"I didn't, didn't, didn't even think about it. I didn't even think about it until five weeks ago," Woods said.
In September 2023, the report says, an intern uncovered an anomaly in past DNA work of Woods during a research project on sex assault kits. The CBI director requested an internal affairs investigation soon after. The day she was placed on administrative leave, Woods told a boss she contacted a real estate agent to determine how much equity there is in her home, in case she goes to jail, the report says.
That same boss told an investigator that Woods worked a lot of overtime and other scientists believed Woods cuts corners in order to be a "top producer."
There were concerns about Woods' work years before the current investigation.
In 2014, a coworker questioned her testing of evidence in a case and reported concerns to a technical leader. In 2018, Woods was accused of manipulating data. She was removed from casework. After the review, she was reinstated. According to CBI, the results of the 2018 review were not escalated to the former CBI director. CBI has initiated additional investigations into the circumstances surrounding the process in 2018.
This most recent review of Woods' work did not find evidence of her falsifying DNA matches or fabricating DNA profiles. The agency said Woods deviated from standard testing protocols and cut corners, raising concerns about the reliability of her testing.
A separate criminal investigation into Woods’ actions by the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation remains ongoing.
SUGGESTED VIDEOS: Investigations & Crime