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.
Woods pleaded guilty to committing a cybercrime, perjury, attempting to influence a public servant and forgery. The remaining 100 counts against her were dismissed as part of the agreement.
“Guilty,” Woods said when asked how she pleaded to each count.
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.
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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 is a class 2 felony, which typically carries between 8 and 24 years in prison.
The cybercrime conviction was connected to a pattern of Woods entering false information into the CBI’s computer system between 2008 and 2023, Chief Deputy District Attorney Darren Kafka said Tuesday, noting her crimes resulted in costs “far in excess” of $1 million. The state expects to spend at least $11 million to repair the damage Woods did.
Woods’ perjury conviction stemmed from testimony Woods gave during a 2014 jury trial in which she was asked whether she had disclosed all of the DNA testing in the case and lied in her answer, Kafka said.
The conviction for attempting to influence a public servant included 48 instances in which Woods gave false information to law enforcement investigators and government officials about the DNA testing she conducted with the goal of limiting their investigative efforts, Kafka said.
The conviction for forgery related to four additional instances in which she authored a false lab report, he said.
Woods and her attorneys declined to comment after Tuesday’s hearing. She will be sentenced Sept. 8, and her jury trial, scheduled for late September, has been canceled.
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King said in a statement Tuesday that ensuring Woods spent time in prison was an important part of the plea negotiations for the prosecution.
“Securing a term of imprisonment, protecting the interests of the community and our shared expectations of integrity in the justice system is reflected in this resolution,” King said.
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.
CBI Director Armando Saldate said in a statement Tuesday that the agency made reforms to its forensic science practices and is changing how its labs work in the wake of Woods’ years-long deception.
“This moment is not about moving on, for CBI it’s about moving forward,” he said. “Today’s guilty plea is an important moment of accountability.”
Woods’ misconduct has led to at least one overturned murder conviction — in the 1994 killing of Marty Grisham in Boulder — 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.
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