Murder!
Everyone and everything have their limits.

A lot of peculiar occurances happen in the winding valleys of the mountains of Appelachia. Due to modern forensics, one of the oddest was brought to light. It happened in Straight Bear Hollow, where a sister, Mary Edna, and her brother, Lucius, now having families of their own, had been brought up in a very contentious family which consisted of Mom, Dad and Gramps - at least until the two children were orphaned in their early teen years. Now however a very dark cloud of suspicion hung over both Mary Edna and Lucius's heads as both suspected that the other was a murderer.

To bring the reader up to speed on that murder, we have to piece together bits and pieces of their childhoods in that mountain shanty, and weave in a few details muttered by their mother, Edna, as she rocked herself in the corner of the state insane assylum until rather recently.

The kids remembered the day when Dad came storming into the shanty holding a small, dusty book. He had been cleaning out the shed when he came upon this book. It was Edna's diary that she had kept back when she herself was a teenager. Now Edna might have been very beautiful girl back in those days, but she was rather intellectually challenged. Her diary contained only two half-pages of large scrawled writing. It did not take Zack long to read it before he went storming into the house, announcing that he was off down the mountain to see the sheriff once he had gotten cleaned up to go into town. During their father's tantrum, the two kids scattered lest they become the brunt of another undeserved beating.

Well, Zack never made it to town. On the drive down, his brakes failed, and he and the car tumbled into a ravine. Thus Dad was killed. The investigation of the wreck indicated that someone had tampered with the brake lines as there were a number of small needle punctures in a joint in the main line, and there was a lot of greenish brake fluid that had spirted out whenever the pedal had been depressed. Since the culprit had struggled a bit in doing this, scraped knuckles left traces of blood on and near the damaged tubing. This blood was taken to the lab and found to be Type B, but that did not reveal very much as Dad, both kids, Mom and Gramps were also all Type B. Of course the investigators questioned others who knew these people. They all told a story of Zack's abuse of everyone in the shanty. Again, that did not discount any from being suspects: all had motive. About a week after the wreck, Gramps died of a coronary, and that may have precipitated Mom's loosing her mind. Soon the kids were for all intents and purposes orphans. And, as said, both were very suspicious that the other was the murderer. Not that either cared that Dad was dead!

Before Edna died, the older child, Mary Edna, would occasionally visit her mother, who loved to make mud pies out in the hospital yard. "I did it, I did it," said Edna over and over as she slapped the pies flat, and then while sprinkling them with dust she'd always say: "Now I must add a little ant poison - it looks just like powdered sugar." Then a few seconds later, Edna would scream: "No! Mother, don't eat that!" Edna would then burst into tears and weep out more "I did it, I did it." Finally Edna died a desolate death. Mary Edna found among her mother's sparse belongings the old book, which Dad had presumably forgotten to take with him into town just prior to his wreck. The few short paragraphs were rapidly read, and Mary Edna sat in shock. There was the date followed by "Father warned me that he would turn me in for killing my beloved mother if I was ever to tell anyone about his having sex with me." The next paragraph was dated a week later: "I am so happy. Zack is back from Nam. Maybe that'll keep Father away from me."

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The Present

Now jumping to the present, Mary Edna and her brother finally decided to call up one of the famous lawyers who cleared people by doing modern tests on blood and the DNA. In the sheriff's office the bag of dried slides used for blood typing was amazingly found, as well as a brush from their grandmother's old trunk. Some hair follicles were obtained from the brush. To make the story short, here are the DNA restriction fragment profiles derived from these items:

1. Was incest really perpetrated by Gramps on Edna?
   1. What is incest? Was Edna really Gramps' natural daughter?
   2. Were there any progeny of this union?
2. Who had NOT killed Zack? Can you name anyone who definitely killed Zack? Might there be accomplices? Who continues to be suspect as an accomplice? What further DNA evidence is needed to crack this case? Is it possible for any further DNA evidence to solve this case, or must the evidence come from elsewhere?