In November 1986, a well-known university provost in Flint, Michigan, was found raped and murdered in her bed inside a locked gatehouse on the grounds of one of the city’s most secure estates. There were no signs of forced entry, immediately suggesting the offender was not a stranger but someone with legitimate access and a trusted reason to be present.
Investigators preserved a latent partial fingerprint from a bathroom faucet and collected biological evidence consistent with a sexual assault forensic examination, but at the time neither Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) nor modern DNA profiling existed in a form that could identify a suspect. DNA analysis was still experimental, and national databases like CODIS—the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System—had not yet been created. When early leads failed, the case became a cold case homicide, its physical evidence carefully stored but scientifically dormant. Sixteen years later, advances in forensic science—including STR DNA analysis, digital fingerprint comparison, and inter-jurisdictional database searches—would transform that preserved evidence into probative proof, ultimately identifying a serial sexual predator who had committed a second rape murder while hiding in plain sight for nearly two decades.
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