A longtime Colorado Bureau of Investigation scientist who mishandled DNA testing in hundreds of criminal cases was charged with 102 felonies this week, the latest turn in a year-long scandal that has shaken Colorado’s court system and cost the state more than $11 million.
Yvonne “Missy” Woods, 64, was charged Tuesday with 52 counts of forgery of a government-issued document, 48 counts of attempting to influence a public servant, a single count of perjury and a single count of committing a cybercrime, court records show.
The most serious charge is the cybercrime count, which alleges she altered, damaged or interrupted data in a computer system in such a way as to cause more than $1 million in damages. That charge is a class 2 felony, which typically carries between eight and 24 years in prison.
Woods turned herself in to the Jefferson County jail Wednesday afternoon, where she remained in custody on a $50,000 cash bond. She is scheduled to appear in court Thursday morning; it was not immediately clear whether she had an attorney.
She is no longer represented by attorney Ryan Brackley, who recently joined the 18th Judicial District Attorney’s Office. He previously said she had never reported false DNA matches.
Woods retired from the CBI in lieu of termination in late 2023 after the agency discovered widespread problems in her work. She deleted, omitted or manipulated DNA data in at least 1,003 criminal cases during her 29-year career, the CBI found in an internal investigation.
Woods’ misconduct is expected to reverberate across Colorado’s legal system for years and cost millions of dollars to address. The CBI estimates Woods’ misconduct has already cost the agency more than $11 million, a figure that includes state funds allocated to pay for re-testing and reimbursement of district attorneys, according to the affidavit.
“The fact that Missy Woods has been charged is a significant event, but from the perspective of the Office of State Public Defender, charging her is not going to do anything to sort through, investigate and resolve how the clients in the cases she worked on are affected,” said James Karbach, spokesman for office. “There still needs to be transparency — and remedy — if clients’ cases have been improperly handled.”
The Colorado Office of the State Public Defender is asking for $2 million to address wrongful conviction claims, and is seeking legislation this year to ensure defendants in cases affected by Woods receive notice and help with the legal process, he added.
The CBI allowed Woods to stay on the job despite repeated concerns about the quality and reliability of her work over at least a decade and failed to seriously investigate several warnings about her professional conduct, the internal affairs report found. She had a reputation among her colleagues for cutting corners in order to be a high producer in the agency, yet was trusted with the CBI’s most high-profile cases.
A 35-page affidavit filed against her in the criminal case widely echoes the findings of the CBI’s internal investigation, which found that Woods took unethical — and now allegedly criminal — shortcuts in order to work faster, produce more cases and avoid time-consuming but mandatory troubleshooting.
She told criminal investigators that she deleted the data for “expediency,” because it moved cases along — so she could work seven cases a day instead of five, she said, according to the affidavit.
The affidavit lists 58 separate criminal cases between 2008 and 2023 in which Woods manipulated data, including 38 sexual assault cases, six homicides, two robberies and a variety of other cases ranging from missing persons to a vehicular assault. The cases spanned the state.
Investigators reviewed roughly 500 of Woods’ cases dating back to 2014, and prosecutors filed charges only in the cases where they believe Woods’ misconduct rose to the level of a crime, said Brionna Boatright, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office.
The perjury charge appears to be connected to a 2013 Lakewood homicide case in which Woods altered DNA data and then gave false testimony during a jury trial in which she claimed her reports reflected all the testing she’d done when they did not, according to the affidavit.
The cybercrime charge reflects a wider pattern of behavior across multiple cases, court records show.
The majority of the cases that resulted in criminal charges were sexual assaults.
Woods told internal affairs investigators she deleted data about low quantities of male DNA in some sex assault cases so that she wouldn’t have to complete additional testing that was unlikely to produce conclusive results on those small genetic samples. She deleted the data in sex assault cases “because it was easy,” she said, according to an internal affairs report.
She admitted at the time that she may have wanted to avoid questions from defense attorneys about why additional testing on the deleted samples was not done.
The criminal charges follow a year-long investigation by the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation. Investigators turned their findings over to Jefferson County District Attorney Alexis King on Dec. 23. She sought additional information from the CBI, which she received Jan. 15, the office said in a news release.
Emma Mclean-Riggs, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, said Wednesday that the organization believes Woods’ misconduct could impact the validity of criminal convictions in many more than the 58 cases in which she was charged with crimes.
“Our hope is that this arrest and these charges will bring to light the systemic issues at CBI,” she said. “The fact that all of these 102 felonies allegedly occurred while Ms. Woods was working for CBI should alarm us.”
Woods’ misconduct has already reverberated in court.
Prosecutors in Boulder offered a plea deal to a triple murderer in June that allows him the opportunity to leave prison in his lifetime, and said the deal was due in part to Woods’ misconduct on the case. Prosecutors in Douglas County this month offered a lesser charge and prison sentence to a man in a 1985 homicide for the same reason. Another man claims he was wrongfully convicted of murder based on her faulty testing.
The CBI said earlier this month that its backlog of sexual assault testing almost doubled in 2024 because the agency devoted so many people to retesting Woods’ old cases that it did not have the staff to keep up with new sexual assault investigations. The CBI now takes 517 days to test sexual assault cases, far and beyond the state’s goal of 90 days.
The state agency has hired an outside consulting firm to review its forensics practices in an attempt to restore public confidence in its employees’ work.
The CBI received $3 million in funding from state legislators to retest 3,000 DNA samples through a third-party laboratory, and received $4.4 million to pay out to district attorneys’ offices across Colorado to address claims by people who say they were wrongly convicted because of Woods’ work.
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