The unsmoked Newport cigarette was just a few feet from the 14-year-old Glen Burnie girl's body. A crime scene technician picked it up, bagged it and marked it as evidence.
On it was Lisa Haenel's blood -- and someone else's saliva.
That was January 1993. Year after year, as DNA technology improved, lab workers analyzed tiny pieces of the cigarette -- pieces not much bigger than a speck of dirt -- to try to create the best DNA profile possible. Finally, last fall, they were able to match it to DNA from a convicted murderer, Anne Arundel County police said.
DNA also connected the suspect in Haenel's case to two mothers who had been killed in Gambrills in the late 1980s, Boontem Andersen and Mary Elaine Shereika, according to police. They said this paved the way for them to charge Alexander Wayne Watson Jr. this week with three counts of first-degree murder.
"Witnesses tend to forget," State's Attorney Frank R. Weathersbee said at a news conference yesterday to announce the charges. "DNA is a timeless stamp that could always be used as evidence."
Yesterday, on a day when Watson made his first court appearance in the county, detectives and crime scene technicians told the story of how that cigarette and other minute clues helped them tie together the cases, exposing what police believe is a serial killer who lived just doors from his victims and began preying upon women when he was a teen-ager.
Now 34, Watson, a stocky man with a shaved head and close-cropped beard and mustache, responded to questions with only "yes" and "no" during a brief bail-review hearing in Annapolis. The proceeding was largely a formality because he was sentenced in 1994 to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murder of Debra Cobb, 37, an office manager in Prince George's County.
Weathersbee said his office has not decided whether to seek the death penalty.
John Gunning, a public defender appointed yesterday to represent Watson, declined to comment last night, saying he was just beginning to learn about the case.
The beginning
For Anne Arundel detectives, the investigation began in the Four Seasons neighborhood of Gambrills on Oct. 8, 1986, the date of Andersen's killing. Andersen, 34, was sexually assaulted, stabbed and strangled, and left bound and nude in her bathtub, where her fiance's 11-year-old son found her.
