She spent 29 years handling DNA evidence for the state of Colorado. Then an intern found what she had been deleting.
In September 2023, an intern at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation was working through old case files on a research project when they noticed something that should not have been possible in a DNA sample processed five years earlier. Data was missing. Not corrupted, not incomplete — deleted.
The analyst who had processed that sample had been at the CBI since January 1994. Twenty-nine years, working out of two laboratory locations in Jefferson County, known for pushing more cases through than almost anyone in the building. Her name was Yvonne Woods. Almost everyone called her Missy.
What the investigation found
What followed became one of the largest forensic-integrity failures in the history of American state crime labs. The CBI opened an internal affairs investigation on October 3, 2023 and placed Woods on administrative leave. She retired on November 6. The following day, the criminal investigation was handed to the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation — an out-of-state agency, because Colorado could not credibly investigate its own laboratory.
A comprehensive review of nearly three decades of casework followed. By December 2024 it had identified 1,003 impacted cases; that figure was later revised upward to 1,045. On January 22, 2025, prosecutors filed 102 criminal counts covering conduct between 2008 and 2023.
Investigators identified 52 laboratory reports containing statements by Woods that were untrue, plus a 53rd that was misleading. In most of the charged conduct, the pattern was the same: she deleted values indicating that male DNA was present on a swab, then reported that no male DNA had been found. That stopped those cases at the earliest possible stage — the quantitation step — before the evidence could ever reach identification or comparison.
What it cost
Forty-one of the cases underlying the charged conduct resulted in no charges against any suspect. Thirty-two of those involved women and children who had reported a sexual assault and were told there was nothing on the evidence. More than 400 sexual assault cases were among those affected overall. One perjury count arose from testimony Woods gave at a trial that produced a first-degree murder conviction.
It is worth being precise about what investigators did not find. Prosecutors found no evidence that Woods produced false DNA identifications, false comparisons, or false positive results. She was not manufacturing matches against innocent people. The harm ran the other way — investigations that should have started never did.
The plea and the sentence
Woods pleaded not guilty on February 11, 2026. On June 23, 2026 she changed that plea to guilty on four counts: cybercrime, perjury in the first degree, attempt to influence a public servant, and forgery. The plea created a mandatory range of eight to sixteen years and took probation off the table entirely.
On September 8, 2026, Jefferson County District Court Judge Andrew Poland sentenced her to 10 years in the Colorado Department of Corrections, followed by 3 years of parole. She was handcuffed and taken into custody after the hearing. A restitution hearing is set for November 12, 2026.
The retesting alone has already cost Colorado roughly $7.6 million, and the state has no current estimate for the final figure — separate from the appeals her data manipulation now gives convicted defendants grounds to file.
Sources
- Colorado First Judicial District Attorney’s Office (DA Alexis King), “Former CBI Lab Analyst Missy Woods Sentenced to Ten Years in Prison,” firstda.co, September 8, 2026.
- Colorado Bureau of Investigation, “Yvonne ‘Missy’ Woods Investigation,” cbi.colorado.gov — official case timeline.
- Colorado Public Radio, Allison Sherry, “Former state scientist sentenced to prison for falsifying DNA samples in hundreds of cases,” September 8, 2026.
Related reading
No well-reviewed book has been written about this case specifically — the sentencing is only weeks old. Rather than pad this section with a famous true-crime title that has nothing to do with it, here is an honest, case-scoped Amazon search: books and coverage related to the CBI crime lab scandal.
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