Detective: DNA evidence was in its infancy in Fleming case

Ken Murray/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Vito Spano, a retired deputy inspector with the NYPD Cold Case Squad, says the Robert Fleming rape-murder case gave direction to advances in DNA technology.

When Selena Cooper and her 9-year-old daughter were murdered in 1988, it was probably the second or third year the NYPD was utilizing DNA.

But it wasnt understood. It was super Star Trek stuff.

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We didnt know how you could get it or how you could extract it. At the time, DNA was something that you needed a significant quantity of and if it was degraded in any way, shape or form it wouldnt work.

To top it all off, we didnt have a statewide database so every suspect we had needed to be cotton swabbed and DNA typed a process that took months since we had to use one of the labs in Penn State University.

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Back then no one really knew where the technology behind DNA was going. If I was to tell people back in the late 80s how far it advanced, they would never believe me.

But this case would make believers. Within the next 15 years, New York finally got a state DNA database. Thats how we finally identified Robert Fleming as a suspect.

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Detective: DNA evidence was in its infancy in Fleming case