Free Evil Next Door by Amanda Lamb Page B

pages of tips that had come in through phone calls and e-mails. It was an overwhelming amount of material to consider.
    Detective J. J. Mathews had recently been assigned as the lead detective on the case and would be supervising Perry and the other detectives. His first priority was to get the files organized so investigators could make some sense out of them. Perry recalled there were many meetings about how to manage all the information in the Bennett case on top of working the other homicides that continued to take place in the city. It was an unsavory balancing act for Perry to have to put aside the Bennett case to work on more recent, more solvable murders.
    The leads were organized into a large notebook when they came in, and then assigned to one of the detectives. But even as they forged ahead, there was a constant feeling they were spinning their wheels, not making any real dent in the huge volume of information they had amassed.
    “Everybody in the unit was completely frustrated,” Perry said shaking his head. Another problem they were faced with, Perry said, was “the number of leads still coming in almost on a daily basis from the composite that was released.”
    Perry made it clear to everyone who would listen that he was not fond of composites. He worried they were misleading because nine times out of ten they were always a little bit off. The fact this particular one had generated so many false leads only added to his level of discomfort about using the picture. But it was all they had, so they continued to use it.
    Because they seemed to be looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack at this stage in the investigation, Perry said the detectives were still concentrating on eliminating people rather than focusing in on a suspect. They used DNA tests to eliminate as many people as they possibly could. After they interviewed someone, they would then ask him to submit to a simple saliva mouth swab. They would then test the sample against the killer’s DNA found in Stephanie’s apartment. By the time the case was all over, they had run DNA tests on a total of 283 people. For the most part, Perry said people consented to being tested because they had nothing to hide. It was a tedious process with seemingly no end in sight. No one, including Perry, knew if it would ever pay off.
    Even though solid DNA evidence is a detective’s dream, it’s not a slam dunk by itself. To identify the killer, his DNA had to already be on file in a criminal database so that investigators can make a match; if the killer had never been arrested before he murdered Stephanie, his DNA wouldn’t be on file. It’s the perfect evidence only if you can find a match. But the detectives kept plugging away hoping against hope that the process would eventually lead them to the right person.
    “For the most part, everyone we approached consented,” Perry said with his outstretched hands in the air again, his palms facing the ceiling.
    Perry used to joke with his colleagues if he ever found someone who wouldn’t submit to the DNA test, he had found the killer. Little did he know how true this statement would turn out to be.

Color Blind
    While the detectives Lieutenant Morgan supervised on the Major Crimes Task Force toiled away on the day-to-day task of eliminating potential suspects, Morgan was looking at the big picture, trying to figure out what they were missing, what piece of evidence would help them complete this seemingly never-ending puzzle of who killed Stephanie Bennett.
    Without a suspect, DNA couldn’t tell investigators who the killer was. But just maybe it could tell them a little bit more about whom they might be looking for. Morgan felt strongly that knowing variables such as the race of the offender would help them tremendously narrow down the pool of potential suspects. Unfortunately, agents at the North Carolina SBI told Morgan that they didn’t have the technology to determine race from simply analyzing the