Over the next couple of months it was Bannon’s job to “look at and analyze and sort of spearhead whatever it was we were going to do with the DNA evidence.”
Bannon had talked to some lawyers in Washington who were close friends of the Evans family. They knew a consultant who had worked with the FBI lab. He was advised to go to Amazon.com and bought a textbook on DNA and studied it “in conjunction with looking at these documents.” Spent around 60-100 hours on the material trying to “put it into a workable report.”
Said he reached a conclusion as to what the material showed. First thing he noticed was the pubic combing contained male DNA that did not match any of the players. He found that one night around 6 p.m. He told Joe Cheshire who said “we need to make sure that’s right.” He called Jim Cooney and said he’d found “foreign DNA that hasn’t been reported to us.” This was after all summer and fall being told that there was nothing that hadn’t been reported to us. He called Kingsbery who also said they need to check it with a DNA expert.
Over the next few days he found “another, and then another, and then another.” A Dec. 8 meeting was set up with Hal Dedman, a DNA expert, and provided him with a 40-page memo Bannon had written on the findings. Dedman told them they were right, that this was new DNA that had not been reported.
They then drafted a motion to compel additional information from Nifong.
