On March 3, 1989, Debbie Smith was abducted from her Williamsburg, Virginia home while her husband, a police officer, slept upstairs. The masked assailant dragged her into the woods, raped her repeatedly and threatened to return if she told anyone. Six years later, forensic scientists matched the sample collected during Smith’s original rape exam to […]
Debbie Shaw was raped in 1986 when a stranger broke into her home. She survived this violent attack only to be told later that the evidence kit collected after her rape had been lost. For years Debbie contemplated suicide as she struggled to come to terms with the crime committed against her. Then, in 2003 […]
Lavinia was 13 years old in 1985 when someone broke into her home and raped her at knifepoint. For twenty years this crime remained unsolved, as Lavinia continued on with her life. Then, in 2005 Lavinia learned that a DNA sample from her case had been linked through the DNA database to a suspect. In […]
In December of 2004, someone entered the apartment of Johnia Berry, a graduate student at the University of Tennessee, and brutally stabbed her to death. Berry’s roommate, Jason Amiyami, escaped and alerted the police. The sheriff’s department interviewed more than 1,000 people and submitted over 400 DNA samples, but the case went unsolved for almost […]
Juli Busken, a 21-year-old University of Oklahoma dance major, was abducted, forced into her car, raped and murdered in 1996. Busken’s mother and father arrived that evening to help Juli move back to her hometown of Benton, Arkansas only to hear that her body had been found in a nearby lake. Eight years later, the […]
In September of 2004, Brittany Phillips, an 18-year-old college student, was found raped, strangled and murdered in her Tulsa, Oklahoma apartment. Using DNA found at the crime scene, Tulsa police have since ruled out more than 1,700 suspects through the CODIS database. Now, Margaret Zingman, Brittany’s mother, advocates for DNA legislation reform, in particular the […]
Laura Neuman was 18 when she was raped at gunpoint in 1983. Her attacker held a pillow over her head, and she could provide no description to detectives. For years Laura felt she wasn’t believed, but when she heard about a backlog of unanalyzed rape kits in Baltimore, she began pushing to have her kit […]
In July of 2002, 5-year-old Samantha Runnion and a friend were playing in a driveway near their homes when a man asking about a missing puppy abducted Samantha. A man found her battered, naked body the following day on a cliff about 60 miles away. DNA collected from under her fingernails matched the genetic profile […]
Bonnie Craig, an 18-year-old student at the University of Alaska Anchorage, was abducted on her way to class in September of 1994. That afternoon her body was found floating 10 miles south in a creek. After 13 years, semen found on Craig’s body was finally matched in CODIS to Kenneth Dion, who was serving time […]
Katie Sepich, a 22-year-old graduate student at New Mexico State University, was brutally raped, strangled to death, set on fire and abandoned at a dumpsite near her home in August of 2003. Although no strong suspects emerged, skin and blood under her fingernails produced a full DNA profile, which was uploaded to CODIS. In December […]