The police were certain that he had killed both girls. When the boy was arrested and interrogated, he offered a rambling half-confession to the more recent murder, alternately describing his acts in great detail and then, moments later, denying he’d done anything wrong. Suspicion quickly fell upon a 17-year-old boy who seemed to have an unnatural interest in the second crime scene. The inescapable conclusion for both police and terrified residents was that a serial predator was hiding among the local population.Īs Joseph Wambaugh, the LAPD detective turned crime writer, recounted masterfully in his 1989 book, The Blooding, an unprecedented force of 200 police officers was assembled to hunt for the murderer. Both victims had been raped and strangled, their bodies left beside out-of-the-way footpaths. Two 15-year-old girls from neighboring villages outside Leicester, in the English Midlands, had been killed, one of them that summer and one three years earlier. Seven months after Sherri Rasmussen’s death, half a world away from Los Angeles, DNA was used in a criminal investigation for the first time. Then he sealed it, noting the date and time he had done so. coroner’s physical-evidence envelope, on which he wrote Sherri Rasmussen’s name, a description of the contents, and where he’d obtained them. He placed the tube inside a 5-by-7-inch L.A. He reinserted the swab into the tube, squeezed the stopper shut, and labeled it with his initials and the coroner’s case number. He removed the stopper and carefully swabbed the impression left by the assailant’s teeth. When he noticed the bite mark on Rasmussen’s arm, Mahany selected a six-inch swab housed in a tube with a red rubber stopper. Next he opened a sexual-assault kit and collected a series of swabs and slides. Mahany began by checking for trace evidence around the victim’s body-hair, fibers, anything unusual-but he found nothing of note. It wasn’t until nearly two o’clock in the morning that Lloyd Mahany, a criminalist from the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, arrived to examine the body. Imagining the din to be a domestic altercation, she hadn’t called the police. A housekeeper in the unit next door later said she’d heard a scuffle and a scream, but no gunshots. The assailant had then taken a quilt from across the room-presumably to muffle the gun’s report-and fired more shots through it, killing Rasmussen. In the living room Rasmussen had been bitten on her left forearm, perhaps while grappling for the gun, and then struck over the head with the heavy vase, a blow that likely incapacitated her. A blood trail down the stairs and a bloody handprint near the front door suggested Rasmussen had tried to escape or reach the panic button on the alarm panel located there, but her assailant followed. Hearing the shots, the downstairs burglar probably fled, ditching the video components. 38-caliber pistol, one of which may have hit Rasmussen. It evidently began in the dining room on the second floor of the townhouse, where shots were fired from a. Rasmussen was six feet tall and fit, and the ensuing struggle was ferocious.
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