The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, or OSBI, opened its new crime lab in 2008. The facility's final price tag was $30 million, several million dollars over the original budget. At the time, the lab was billed as the ultimate resource for the OSBI and law enforcement agencies across the state.

"It's very successful," said Stan Florence, the director for the OSBI. Florence says the new lab has helped cut down the wait time for crucial DNA testing. "It's probably better than it's ever been actually. I think our backlog on DNA cases is probably 30 days, maybe no more than 40 for sure."

However, during a review of records obtained by Fox 25, we learned the OSBI is not using its own lab to finish a job it spent nearly a million dollars in grant money to investigate. An email revealed that the OSBI was going to outsource cold case evidence to a DNA lab out of Virginia. The contract will cost the state $200,000, the money will come from the federal cold case grant. "That's a common trend in the nation with crime labs," Florence told Fox 25, "Primarily it's because of manpower."

The $200,000 would be enough to hire additional staff to use Oklahoma's own lab, but Director Florence says it's difficult to hire people to only work for a year on a grant. "Our time to train someone is about 3 years before they're fully vested in doing DNA analysis on their own," Florence said. However, Oklahoma first started getting grant money, which was specifically intended to investigate cases involving DNA, 3 years ago.

"It really doesn't make sense," said Kyle Eastridge, a former detective and cold case investigator with the OSBI. "Why are they outsourcing to them anyway? I mean we've got this great lab in Edmond that should have been funded and staffed appropriately."

Eastridge only served a short time at the OSBI, but says he disagreed with leaders there on how the federal grant money was spent.

Documents obtained by Fox 25 also raise other questions about the outsourcing and the restrictions the OSBI is putting on the contract company.

Eastridge says that caveat raises additional questions about the management of the grant and cold cases. "If you're going to the best in the field, why don't you listen to what they say about testing?"

Director Florence said he didn't know why the rule was in the contract. He said because Fox 25 did not provide him with the exact question he did not prepare an answer. Fox 25 does not provide exact questions prior to interviews. We did inform Director Florence that we wanted to ask him questions about the contract with Bode Technologies, but he said he would have to get back with us to answer our questions. As of the air-date of this story, he never did.

The questions about case management go beyond one contract. Eastridge says during his short time at the OSBI he butted heads with agency leaders over how his resources were spent. "I've been to little towns all over Oklahoma collecting whatever they have on cases that can never be in a court of law."

Eastridge says some of the cases he was ordered to investigate were outside the statute of limitations and outside the scope of the grant. "My biggest example of that was one of the cases assigned to me was a burglary...a second degree burglary of an oil office in Anadarko." That case was from the 1980s and well beyond prosecution.

Director Florence defended the investigation of old cases, even those outside the scope of criminal prosecution. "What we may do is identify an offender and if we run it through CODIS we might actually get a hit on other cases as well that may fall within the statute of limitations. So there's value in running those old cases even though we might not be able to file charges on those old cases."

The OSBI says the cold case grant money has allowed agents to identify two serial rapists and led to charges being filed in two old homicide cases. Eastridge says there could be more convictions had the cases been assigned properly.