Yvonne “Missy” Woods worked for nearly 30 years as a DNA analyst for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. 😳
In September 2026 a judge sentenced her to just 10 years in prison after she pleaded guilty to perjury, forgery, cybercrime, and attempting to influence a public servant. Prosecutors discovered that she had deleted or altered DNA evidence in hundreds of homicide and robbery cases, including at least 32 sexual assault cases where she deleted key information about the perpetrators’ male DNA.
According to her own statements, she did not do it to frame anyone in particular, but purely for personal convenience: to streamline processes, close cases faster due to her professional burnout, and erase traces of technical errors so she would not have to repeat the work from scratch.
The suspicions existed as early as 2014, but no one stopped her until an intern found missing information in 2023. By then, a man convicted of murder had already been released because of the mishandling of evidence, and several prosecutors had to negotiate lighter sentences in other murder cases for fear that the defendants would be acquitted. Colorado will now have to spend more than 11 million dollars reviewing cases that were believed to be resolved.