“Two days after Thanksgiving, a grandmother was brutally murdered inside the Pawtucket home where she’d lived for most of her life. The next month, a Providence man was found in a puddle of blood inside his house, where the bars on the windows and spike-topped fence had failed to keep his killer away.

In both cases, detectives combed the crime scenes, searching for clues in blood stains, hairs, skin cells and other substances the killers may have left behind.

But the forensics lab at the Health Department is so backlogged that it takes from six months to more than a year to analyze DNA in most violent-crime cases. Lesser crimes can take longer.”

That is beginning of a very well researched article written by Amanda Milkovits for The Providence Journal. The full article is here.