A dropped cigarette and a sharp-eyed pensioner helped convict a serial housebreaker in court yesterday.
Bungling thief Colin Reid dropped his cigarette-end after he smashed his way into a Loch Ness-side home.
It was found on the floor by the 75-year-old householder, who handed it to police.
And yesterday a jury at Inverness Sheriff Court found Reid guilty of the raid after being told his DNA was a match for a sample taken from the discarded butt.
Reid’s defence had tried to claim the cigarette could have been carried into the house on the sole of someone’s shoe, but Marion MacDiarmid insisted it was not lying in the conservatory when she and her husband left their home near Drumnadrochit.
Reid used a rock to smash glass on the conservatory door before ransacking several rooms and stealing jewellery and a watch on March 31, 2013.
Although swabs and fingerprints were taken by a scenes of crime officer, they produced no evidence of the 31-year-old father-of-three being in the house.
However, forensic experts said DNA from saliva on the cigarette matched Reid’s and the chance of it belonging to someone else was more than a billion to one.
The jury to returned a guilty verdict by majority after only 45 minutes.
Reid, a self employed gardener, admitted previous convictions – nine of which involved housebreaking and dishonesty – and will be sentenced next month after a background report has been prepared.
When the trial opened Reid claimed a special defence of alibi, saying he was on the isle of Skye at the time of the crime.
But in evidence, he changed his story and insisted he had been in the Drumnadrochit area looking for work and had been delivering flyers at various properties.
Reid, of 33 Burnbank, Fochabers, claimed the cigarette end must have been dragged into Mrs MacDiarmid’s home on someone’s shoe after he had been in the neighbourhood.
However, the house proud pensioner told Sheriff Margaret Neilson: “I saw a cigarette end lying on the conservatory floor when we returned after going out on the Sunday morning. That was before I called the police.”
She said it had not been there when she left her home.
Scenes of crime officer Iain Anderson, a retired police detective with 16 years experience, said Reid’s claims about the cigarette end didn’t add up.
“It was still pretty cylindrical and was clean so if it had been taken in on someone’s shoe, I would have expected it to be damaged and dirty,” he said.
In his summing up, fiscal depute Roderick Urquhart told the jury: “The inescapable inference is that it was dropped where it was smoked – in the house – even though it was a moveable object.
“The DNA from a mouth swab taken from Reid was sent to the Scottish Police Authority Dundee service centre, where it was compared with the cigarette butt and the profiles matched.
“The estimated probability of finding such matching DNA profiles in another male unrelated to Colin Reid is one in more than one billion.”