Amazing Cases

Bite marks —Ted Bundy (1969-1978)
For nearly a decade, a brutal assailant went on a rape-torture-murder spree in the Rocky Mountain states, the Pacific Northwest, and finally, Florida, where he invaded a sorority house on the Florida State University campus in Tallahassee, raped four women, and killed two of them. A month later, police arrested a man for driving a stolen vehicle. He turned out to be Ted Bundy, whom they discovered was wanted for murder in several states. Investigators liked him for the sorority house rape-murders, but unfortunately, survivors couldn’t identify their attacker, he hadn’t left behind any usable fingerprints, and DNA analysis wasn’t yet available to match his semen. The attacker had, however, left a bite mark on one of the murdered women, which police investigators photographed (fortunately, since the actual tissue evidence was lost before trial). Bundy, as luck would have it, had a distinctive set of crooked, chipped teeth. A forensic dentist created a model of Bundy’s teeth and used it to reproduce the impression. Bundy became the first man in the history of Florida jurisprudence to be convicted on bite mark evidence. Shortly before going to the electric chair, he confessed to a total of 20 murders.

Crime reconstruction — Jeffrey MacDonald (1970-1979)
On a night in February 1970, military police at Fort Bragg, N.C., responded to an emergency call from the home of an Army doctor, Capt. Jeffrey MacDonald. The crime they discovered was horrifying. MacDonald’s wife Colette and the couple’s two young daughters had been stabbed and beaten to death. MacDonald told a bizarre story of awakening to discover four intruders standing over him, chanting “Acid is groovy … kill the pigs,” and fighting desperately with them in a vain attempt to save his family. Somehow, however, he had escaped death and suffered only minor injuries, a fact that puzzled investigators, as did the presence of fibers consistent with his pajamas that placed him everywhere in the crime scene except in the living room, where he claimed to have fought the intruders. The Army filed murder charges against MacDonald, but had to drop the case when crucial physical evidence was misplaced. After MacDonald left the military and started a new life as a civilian doctor in California, a forensic scientist at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., took a new look at a key piece of evidence, MacDonald’s pajama top, which he claimed to have wrapped around his hands as a shield while he struggled with an ice pick-wielding assailant. The FBI man noticed that all 48 holes in the garment were smooth and cylindrical, which was unlikely for a moving target. By folding the garment in a certain fashion, he was able to show how the 48 holes could have been created by 21 thrusts — exactly the number of times that MacDonald’s wife had been stabbed. Additionally, her bloodstains on two torn parts of the garment fit together perfectly. That indicated that she had bled onto the pajama top before it could have been torn in the fight that MacDonald claimed had taken place, rather than afterward. MacDonald was again charged with murder. Prosecutors staged an enactment of MacDonald’s story, stabbing a duplicate of the pajama top and demonstrating that the holes should have been ragged. (Almost as damningly, the lawyer who portrayed MacDonald was accidentally stabbed in the arm, while MacDonald himself had no such defensive wounds.) A jury convicted MacDonald, who is serving three life terms.

Fibers -- Atlanta Murders (1979-1981)
Over a two-year period, 29 young African Americans were found strangled and smothered in Atlanta, Ga. Eventually, a police stakeout identified a suspect, Wayne Williams, who had a suspicious explanation for why he was on a bridge not far from where a body was found two days later. Lacking witnesses, forensic investigators built a case against Williams that was based almost entirely upon fiber and statistical evidence. Working with chemists from textile maker DuPont, they linked a fiber found in one victim’s hair to an unusual make of carpet in Williams' home, and calculated that the odds of the victim coming in contact with it in the Atlanta area were 1 in 7,792. A fragment of rayon found on another victim’s shorts was consistent with the carpeting in Williams’ station wagon, a match that had a 1-in-3,828 chance of occurring in Atlanta. Either piece of evidence left room for reasonable doubt, but the probability of both happening by coincidence was 1 in 29,827,776. Fiber evidence from other victims drove the odds up into the trillions. It took a jury less than 12 hours of deliberation to find Williams guilty, and he is now serving two life terms.

Fingerprints -- Night Stalker Attacks (1984-1985)
For more than a year, all of Southern California was terrorized by a mysterious intruder who broke into victims' homes to rape and murder them. Finally, police got a break. A victim not only managed to survive, but was able to spot the license plate number on the perpetrator’s stolen car. Though he promptly abandoned the vehicle, he left behind a lone piece of evidence — a partial fingerprint. It would have taken a fingerprint expert six decades to sift by hand through all of the 1.7 million sets in the Los Angeles Police Department's files for a match. Fortunately, however, the department had just installed a state-of-the-art computerized system, which was capable of going through 60,000 prints per second. Within minutes, the system spit out a probable match with Richard Ramirez, a drifter who’d come to California from El Paso, Texas. After his picture was given to the news media, he was recognized and overpowered by residents of East L.A. as he tried to steal another car. Today, he is in San Quentin State Prison, on death row.

DNA -- Green River Killer (1982-2001)
One of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history preyed upon prostitutes in the Seattle area, raping and killing nearly 50 women and then discarding their bodies along the Green River. Police suspected a man named Gary Ridgway, and in 1987, even got him to provide a saliva sample for DNA testing. Unfortunately, semen samples from the victims’ bodies turned out to be too small for testing. The evidence languished in storage for 14 years, until crime lab scientists tried using a new approach. They combined two different types of DNA tests, the short tandem repeats test (STR) with polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which enabled them to amplify the samples and compare them. This time, they were able to match the samples with Ridgway’s DNA. In 2003, he pleaded guilty to 48 murders in exchange for being spared the death penalty