Cold Case

Baltimore police reached an agreement last year with the ABC News program 20/20 to help finance DNA tests in 50 dormant cases - an arrangement that ultimately would solve a 1989 homicide and exonerate a man charged in an August rape. Police officials say the results are stunning and bolster Mayor Martin O'Malley's pleas to Maryland lawmakers to increase state funding for DNA testing and require more convicted criminals to submit samples to a state database. "These guys are not just killing and raping people," said Ed Koch, director of the Baltimore police crime laboratory.

In March, an informant's tip led to four arrests in the 1978 murder of a Baltimore man who was apparently thrown from a bridge over the waters of the Gunpowder River in Baltimore County to his death.Now, as a January trial date approaches, veteran Baltimore County prosecutor James O'C. Gentry Jr. must find a way to breathe life into that cold case, nearly two decades later.In doing so, he must rely on the dated memories of witnesses, anticipate that evidence could have been lost in the intervening years and wonder if jurors will care about a crime so old.And Gentry, the assistant state's attorney most often called upon to prosecute cold cases, also has the delicate task of letting the victim's relatives know that he is confident of winning, while preparing them for the possibility that he'll lose.

The man who shot and killed a Buffalo, N.Y., photographer and strangled his elderly neighbor in April 1982 left four witnesses alive in the studio on that afternoon. To keep them from identifying him in a lineup or mug book, he splashed an acid-based solution in their eyes. The case remained unsolved for nearly 20 years until a nationwide effort to classify imprisoned felons by their genetic fingerprint provided identification the Buffalo witnesses couldn't. Come spring, Ishmael Saladeen will stand trial in the killings because his genetic code - gleaned from a blood sample and stored in the New York prison system's DNA databank - matched the DNA in semen obtained from a female victim who was raped in the terror attack, according to the prosecutor.

Kylen Johnson, a 34-year-old stay-at-home mother of two, spends most days-- and frequently well into the nights--toiling at her computer in her western Montgomery County townhouse, trying to crack missing-persons cases. She has solved mysteries that have stumped law enforcement officials for years. In the past three years she has provided authorities across the country with information that helped to close four cold cases -- two in Maryland. Johnson does her sleuthing for the Doe Network, an international Web site with a network of volunteers who work with law enforcement to locate missing persons and identify human remains.

Mary Elaine Shereika got up before sunrise May 23, 1988, laced on her running shoes and headed out - passing the nearby Colonial houses, Four Seasons Elementary School and the neighborhood swim club. Those who knew her say in all likelihood she was humming her favorite song: "Ain't nothin' gonna break my stride. Ain't nothing gonna slow me down. Oh no. I've got to keep on moving. ... " The chorus of the Matthew Wilder song embodied Shereika's theme for living, her friends and relatives say. After a divorce and a change of roles from housewife to working mother, Shereika was on track to being happy again.

Bessie Turner bought her house in a quiet Brooklyn Park neighborhood six years ago with a plan: She wanted to give her two sons a better place to live. She'd stay until January 2010, then pull out some of her equity and move to Myrtle Beach, S.C. Her sons would continue living there, paying less than if they were to rent a similar place, and she'd be there often. But that all changed two years ago Thursday. Her elder son, Rudolph Turner Jr., 25, was fatally shot in his bedroom.

It took nearly two decades, a woman named Jennifer Jenifer and a convenience store robbery in Florida, but authorities have made an arrest in a 1984 fatal shooting in Dundalk. Sheriff's deputies in Marion County, Fla., arrested Joann Culotta -- now a 45-year-old painter known as Joann Knight -- Monday on a warrant charging her with first-degree-murder. Culotta is charged in the slaying of 69-year-old John Andrykis on Oct. 7, 1984, according to documents filed in Baltimore County District Court.

After two decades, science caught up with William J. Trice, said Assistant State's Attorney Kathleen Rogers. In opening statements to an Anne Arundel County jury, Rogers said that Trice "made a mistake" and left not only a fingerprint in a rape victim's bedroom in 1988, but his DNA. Investigators reopening the case in 2008 matched the print to Trice's in a database, and later, his DNA to genetic material from the crime scene, she said. Trice, a 48-year-old tow-truck driver from Eagle Bridge, N.Y., is on trial in the first of two 1988 sexual assaults in the county, both cold cases involving DNA matches.

A 51-year-old Salisbury man was convicted yesterday of the rape and murder of an Essex woman 28 years ago in a long-cold case that was cracked through DNA evidence. Relatives of Sheila Bazemore Rascoe dabbed their eyes with tissues after the jury foreman announced the verdicts against Thomas J. Grant, who lived down the street from the victim in 1979 when she was sexually assaulted and strangled. The convictions brought to a close not only the three-day trial that unfolded this week in Baltimore County Circuit Court but also the nearly three decades-long wait that Rascoe's family endured before the murder was solved.

His name isn't in the Anne Arundel County court case's paperwork. But Jeffrey G. Cover's "we'll-send-it-in-because-we-can" attitude began a series of events that connected a Chicago man with an 11-year-old sex crime, giving Maryland its first "hit" on a national database of criminals. Only DNA directly tied Gary W. Pescrillo - a sex offender registered in Illinois - to a sexual assault of a Linthicum woman by a gunman who broke into her home around midnight in June 1989. After pleading guilty, Pescrillo was sentenced last month to 45 years in prison.