"I went over to the hospital and picked up a sample they presented to me as belonging to Hillblom," Barnett says. "But it turned out that it wasn't actually from Hillblom. Everyone was running around trying to figure out what happened."
The implications were obvious: The hospital claiming the mix-up had a direct material interest in the absence of Hillblom's genetic material. Nonetheless, it was never proven that the hospital had lost the mole on purpose.
Anthony Pidgeon
Peter Barnett, a Richmond private investigator who was sent around the world in search of Larry Hillblom's DNA.
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Lujan, the children's attorney, meanwhile, had been spending time talking up contacts around Saipan, tracking down a rumor that one of Hillblom's old girlfriends had been enlisted to sanitize the mansion.
According to a deposition obtained by Lujan, the girlfriend "had been instructed to clean the house and put his effects into plastic bags," Barnett recalls. "Someone came by with a backhoe and buried it in the back yard. Lujan went over to Saipan and began talking to backhoe operators."
Once learning the whereabouts of the Hillblom clothing trove, Lujan had the bags dug up again. Barnett, the forensic evidence expert, was once again summoned to comb through Hillblom's property.
"Whether those clothes had been laundered to be thrown away, I don't know," Barnett says. "But they were laundered."
Other genetic information Barnett obtained from Hillblom's properties was either too inconsequential, or from too uncertain a provenance to be of any use. So the claims of the Hillblom heirs remained just that, weakly based assertions resting on circumstantial evidence.
With no known sample of his DNA, the judges, attorneys, forensic experts, and geneticists seeking to resolve the riddle of Hillblom's private past seemed to have run out of cards to play. Hillblom's mother and brother -- who possessed DNA similar to Larry Hillblom -- refused to proffer blood samples.
So, for all the DNA evidence available to his offsprings' lawyers, Hillblom may as well not have lived in this world.
But Hillblom did live in this world. And scientific sleuths were able to prove that he lived exactly the way Pacific island legend said he did, leaving microscopic eddies of unique junk DNA in the genetic makeup of his children.
It occurred to experts in the claimed orphans' legal team that if they could show through DNA analysis that children scattered throughout the eastern Pacific shared a large number of genetic traits, they could be shown to share the same father.
"We were in the unusual -- unprecedented in fact -- position of trying to decide, using DNA, whether children are related to a man about whom, DNA-wise, nothing is known. We therefore had to employ an indirect strategy," says Charles Brenner, who was hired to do the mathematical calculations determining the probability that the children were related.
The strategy was first suggested by Peter Neufeld, a New York attorney retained by one of Lujan's clients, 15-year-old Junior Hillbroom (his mother misspelled the name on the birth certificate, according to press reports).
"Once you develop the frequencies for the genes they have in common, and after you do the genetic profiling, you say that this coincidence can be explained one of two ways: a coincidence; or, because they had the same daddy," Neufeld says. "What we were able to do is show that it was a million times more likely that these kids would have the same genes if they had the same father, as opposed to by coincidence."
Data obtained from the DNA comparison of the orphans was shipped to Brenner, who ran it through a computer program of his own design. The result: Four impoverished eastern Pacific children -- a boy named Lory, 4, of Vietnam; Jellian Cuartero, 5, and Mercedita Feliciano, 4, of the Philippines; and Junior Larry Hillbroom, of Guam, all seemed to have had, beyond any reasonable doubt, the same father.
Their mothers had already produced troves of evidence that Hillblom had indeed consorted with them.
"The circumstantial evidence was lovely; that's what got them to the lawsuit in the first place," says Neufeld. "It was the scientific evidence that finally got them a settlement. They can say that until they were blue in the face, but if you can prove that it's 100,000 times more likely that he has those genes because he's the son of Larry Hillblom, that trumps everything else."
So on April 15 lawyers for the estate of Hillblom and lawyers for his four children will meet in a Saipanese courtroom to work out the final details of how the orphans will receive $50 million each as their rightful inheritance.
"Without a doubt, as far as paternity investigations are concerned, the Hillblom case is the mother of all paternity cases. The complexity, the cleverness of the approach, and the positive outcome make it so," says Ed Blake, a Richmond forensic geneticist. "The stakes are so high, the problem is sufficiently difficult, the solution is very clever, and it all works out."
In the end, a judge ordered Hillblom's brother and mother to either submit to genetic testing, or face financial penalties. The tests confirmed what Neufeld and Brenner's cross-referencing test had already shown -- four of the eight claimants were Hillblom's children.
The flotsam and jetsam of the children's genetic codes allowed the truth to be told, and four impoverished children will recover their financial birthright.
