Disgraced former Colorado Bureau of Investigation scientist Yvonne “Missy” Woods pleaded guilty to four felonies Tuesday, closing a chapter in a years-long DNA testing scandal that continues to reverberate through the state’s criminal justice system.
The 65-year-old former CBI analyst will be sentenced to between 8 and 16 years in prison as part of her plea agreement, Jefferson County District Court Judge Andrew Poland said.
She pleaded guilty to committing a cybercrime, perjury, attempting to influence a public servant and forgery. The remaining 98 counts against her were dismissed as part of the agreement.
“Guilty,” Woods said when asked how she pleaded.
Woods mishandled DNA testing in at least 1,045 criminal cases during her 29-year career at the statewide criminal justice agency, an internal investigation found. She deleted, omitted and manipulated data to speed up the testing process and boost her productivity, creating unreliable DNA testing results in hundreds of criminal cases and sending shockwaves through Colorado’s criminal courts.
First Judicial District Attorney Alexis King charged Woods with 102 felonies in January 2025, including 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.
The most serious charge was the cybercrime count, which alleged 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 was a class 2 felony, which typically carries between eight and 24 years in prison.
The CBI’s internal investigation found that Woods took advantage of the state lab’s focus on results and productivity — as well as professional trust between colleagues — to hide her widespread manipulation of DNA data for years.
Several of Woods’ colleagues raised repeated ethical concerns about her work years before the scandal broke open — in 2014 and again in 2018 — but the CBI failed to stop her misconduct until an intern discovered a pattern of missing DNA data in Woods’ work in 2023. That discovery prompted the first serious inquiry into Woods’ misconduct on the job.
Woods resigned from the CBI in 2023 instead of being fired, and the agency spent all of 2024 sorting through her flawed work. Lawmakers passed a new law in 2025 that put additional guardrails on forensic testing in Colorado and opened up a specific legal path for people impacted by flawed testing to seek post-conviction relief in court.
Woods’ misconduct has led to at least one overturned conviction and has raised questions about the validity of hundreds of other convictions, with many post-conviction challenges underway in courts across the state.
CBI officials reviewed 10,786 cases that Woods handled during her career, and found problems in 1,045 of them — about 10%. Sex assaults made up nearly half of those 1,045 problematic cases, and the majority of the cases that resulted in criminal charges against Woods were sex 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.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
