Not too long ago, a king and queen were due to have a baby girl named Rapunzel.

Just days before the mother gave birth, she became very sick. The only way she could be healed was if she had a rare herb that could only be found in the garden of the witch. Of course the king wants to save his beloved wife, so he goes to the garden to get the herb.

He successfully sneaks over the wall of the garden and cuts off a bushel of the plant. As he is climbing back over the fence, the witch comes outside and sees the king. The witch snatched him off the wall and refused to let him leave. The king begged for his freedom and explained to the witch how his wife was deathly ill and this was the one thing that could save her. The witch agrees to set him free for something in return: his unborn daughter. After much consideration, the king decides to trade his daughter to gain his freedom and save his wife.

The king makes his way back to the castle with the rare herb in his trembling hands, nervous about the deal he made with the witch. He manages to reach the room where his ill wife lays and prepares to give her the medicine. Instantly after the wife drank the medicine with the herb, she started to feel better. Days later, she had the baby girl. While she was still tired from being sick, she fell into a deep sleep for the night. The king knew that this was the time to complete the trade.

He took his child outside and gave his baby to the witch waiting outside the castle. She hurried off with the baby and took her to a tower far away where no one would be able to find her. on the way to the tower, the witch was in such a hurry she cut herself on the fence of her cottage. The king then hurried back inside and headed straight into Rapunzel’s  room. He threw things around, smashed a window, and put a muddy footprint on rug. He then went to the room his wife was in and woke her explaining how he went to go wake up Rapunzel, only to find that she had been “kidnapped.” The wife knew from that very moment when she saw the empty crib that she was going to spend her life trying to find her daughter.

The queen decided she would go ahead and look for evidence even though she was told to wait until the police had arrived.  She found a hair on the ground that may belong to who stole Rapunzel. She took it to the police station right away to have it tested. While she was at the station, a group of police officers were securing the scene, collecting evidence and asking witnesses for testimonies. The only witness was the king and he couldn't not let the police find out that it wasn’t really a kidnapping so he lied and said he saw a older women with long grey hair run out of the castle carrying the baby.

Sadly, the tests for the hair the queen found came back a few days later to reveal it was only a synthetic fiber that contained no DNA with no presence of a cuticle and medulla. She had a search party sent out to look for evidence that could point the police in the right direction. The search party found many pieces of evidence but none of them were useful until after a few days when they found a drop of blood on the fence of the witch’s cottage. At the scene, the investigators performed a presumptive screening test, a Kastle Meyer test, to see if the substance they found was truly blood. It came back positive, so they collected the evidence and took it back to the lab. They then performed a confirmatory test to detect the presence of hemoglobin; it resulted positive.

A crime lab analyst then took the blood to extract DNA. First they performed a polymerase chain reaction that amplifies small portions of DNA. Secondly, the crime lab analyst separated amplified fragments according to size. Lastly, they were able to match the DNA to previous records of different criminals. This DNA happened to match with the witch. When the police went to interview the witch, she explained that one day she was just painting her fence when she got a splinter that caused her to bleed. The police did not believe the witch because the fence looked liked it had not been painted in years and the blood was fairly new.