Police found the woman with a rope tied around her neck and her wrists cinched up high behind her back. She had been raped and strangled in her bed.
Her 1987 murder closely matched two others discovered in Virginia in the previous six weeks, and police believed they were dealing with one killer. But there were no witnesses and no usable fingerprints at the crime scenes, only small amounts of seminal fluid.
By using genetic -- or DNA -- profiling techniques developed just two years before in England, a private laboratory confirmed that the semen samples from all three attacks were identical.
But that was not enough to identify the killer.
In the end, it was conventional detective work that led police to Timothy Spencer, a convicted burglar living in a halfway house just blocks from two of the murders.
DNA tests then matched Spencer's blood with semen samples from all three crimes. He later became the first person in Virginia to be convicted with the help of DNA profiling.
But what Virginia really needed was a DNA "bank," a sort of genetic mug file of known criminals, against which body tissues and fluids left at crime scenes could be compared. And it would have to be fast -- computerized, just as fingerprint searches are now.
Had a DNA bank been available in Virginia after Spencer's first murder, two lives might have been saved.
Today, Virginia's Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services is developing a DNA bank that probably will be the first ever used strictly for law enforcement.
The project is backed by a legislative mandate and a U.S. District Court judge, who in March rejected convicts' claims that the testing violated constitutional rights to privacy and protection from unreasonable searches. The case is being appealed.
Blood samples from more than 30,000 convicted Virginia felons have already been collected and stored for profiling. The profile data eventually will be digitized and stored in a computer.
Paul B. Ferrara, director of the state's Division of Forensic Science, said his lab has begun profiling DNA samples and hopes to have the DNA profiles of as many as 3,000 felons in the computer by July 1, 1992.
"Then the next goal will be to start running DNA [searches] on those cases where police do not have a suspect," he said. The first searches will be limited to sex offenders.
