Candy Zuleger had years of experience as a crime lab analyst when she was first hired to work on cases by the Bermuda Police Service in 2006.

Ms Zuleger worked for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement between 1996 and 2004, then struck out on her own, founding Trinity DNA Solutions.

Trinity, based on an industrial estate in the city of Milton, was described in a 2010 article in 850 — The Business Magazine of Northwest Florida as the “state’s first private DNA testing laboratory” when it opened.

The piece described how the facility was one of very few private laboratories in the United States testing DNA samples for law enforcement agencies and how it was accredited after “months of validating equipment, writing down procedures and then passing inspection”.

The accreditation was given initially by a body called Forensic Quality Services, The Royal Gazette has confirmed, and later transferred to the American National Standards Institute’s accrediting body, ANAB.

ANSI spokeswoman Jana Zabinski told The Royal Gazette: “Trinity DNA Solutions voluntarily withdrew its accreditation from ANAB in 2018.”

The 850 article described how Ms Zuleger joined the law enforcement department straight after receiving her master’s degree in cellular and molecular biology from the University of West Florida, when DNA testing was a “new field that was still in its infancy”.

“Zuleger said Trinity gets new clients after being notified of requests for proposals sent out by law enforcement agencies looking for private labs,” the article stated.

“Since there are only a dozen other private labs that can do forensic DNA, Zuleger has a 1-in-13 shot of getting the work.

“She currently works with agencies in Arizona, Louisiana and Bermuda … Most of her work — she estimates 90 per cent — comes from law enforcement agencies.”

Ms Zuleger also did work for Trinity’s accrediting body.

Her LinkedIn profile lists her as being a technical auditor for FQS between 2003 and January 2018, inspecting US labs for compliance with FBI and global forensic requirements.

Ms Zabinski said its records indicated that from 2012 to 2017, Ms Zuleger participated as a technical auditor for ANAB five times, “four times on FBI quality assurance standard audit teams that were independent of ANAB’s accreditation activities and one time on an accreditation surveillance team”.

A source with knowledge in Bermuda told the Gazette that when Trinity was first contracted by the BPS, the company was “widely used by state and other law enforcement [in the US] and came with good recommendations, as I recall.

“She had some notable cases on the national level in the USA.”

They added: “The way DNA is used by the BPS is that a vendor is selected through a process and the investigators use that vendor for related crime scenes.”

Trinity’s Florida location was not a problem.

Samples could be sent by detectives in Bermuda to Ms Zuleger’s laboratory for analysis and she travelled to the island repeatedly to give evidence for the prosecution at Supreme Court trials, many of them high-profile.

The last case the Gazette reported Ms Zuleger as giving evidence in was a gun handling trial in September 2016, in which the defendant was acquitted.

The BPS said it issued a request for proposals that year for DNA services, leading to Helix Genetic and Scientific Solutions being selected as a contractor.

Ms Zuleger only came to public attention again in Bermuda in 2024, when Julian Washington’s convictions for murder and attempted murder were quashed by the Privy Council because of the faulty DNA evidence she gave at his trial.

That “miscarriage of justice” prompted a review to be launched on April 24 last year by Cindy Clarke, the Director of Public Prosecutions, of all the cases with which Trinity was involved.

The Privy Council ruling in Mr Washington’s case noted: “The need for the review is obvious given that (a) all DNA analysis for the Bermuda Police Force between 2009 and 2015 was undertaken by Trinity DNA Solutions; and (b) the flaws which occurred in the appellant’s case may have occurred in other cases.”

The judgment said that the DPP advised the panel that between 2006 and 2015 Trinity DNA Solutions carried out forensic analysis in 426 cases for the Crown and, of those, DNA was found in 247.

Ms Clarke said in August that the review had been expanded, resulting in 273 cases involving DNA coming under scrutiny.

The DPP said each case that resulted in a conviction was assessed to consider whether convictions were safe if DNA evidence was excluded. If it was not certain the convictions were safe, the evidence was sent to an independent expert for review.

The expert, Barbara Llewellyn, who worked for Helix as the DNA technical leader between 2015 and 2021, found two further cases involving potential miscarriages of justice.

The Court of Appeal quashed the convictions in one case but upheld the conviction in the other, because the defendant pleaded guilty.

Ms Zuleger has given expert evidence in the US as recently as 2020, when she appeared for the defence at a triple murder trial in Florida.

However, her laboratory is no longer located at Industrial Boulevard, Milton.

Trinity DNA Solutions was dissolved but Florida Division of Corporations records show Ms Zuleger incorporated another limited liability company in 2021, Trinity DNA, which appears to be active.

Mr Washington’s matter may have ramifications beyond Bermuda.

The Death Penalty Project, a British legal charity which took on his case, said last year of Trinity: “The same forensic laboratory has also worked with prosecutors in the Bahamas and the United States, raising alarm of possible widespread miscarriages of justice.”

Ms Zuleger could not be contacted for comment.

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