Twenty-five year old Rhonda Maloney was abducted and raped by Robert Harlan in the early morning hours of February 12th, 1994. Shortly after 5:15 AM, on a cold Saturday morning, Maloney flagged down a passing motorist, Jacquie Creazzo.  As the two women made their way to the Thornton, CO police department, Maloney's abductor gave chase. He opened fire on the women, wounding and eventually paralyzing Creazzo. After she crashed her car into the lawn of the police station, Harlan dragged Maloney from the car and fled. A police officer arrived one minute later. By that time, Harlan and Maloney were gone. Over the next few hours, Harlan continued to rape Maloney. He shot her twice under a highway overpass, placed her in his trunk, hosed the body down at a car wash, then dumped her body under a bridge in a remote area.

In this segment, we re-trace the seven days of Thornton Crime Scene Investigator Bob Lloyd (from abduction to arrest to autopsy). Lloyd methodically worked several crime scenes and recovered over 200 pieces of ballistic, fingerprint, serology and physical evidence. He turned them over to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. There, we meet CBI primary analyst Missy Woods and see how she farmed out this mountain of evidence. Ballistics expert Alan Hammond test fired Harlan's weapon and microscopically examined recovered bullets, verifying they were shot from Harlan's gun. Using the superglue method, CBI fingerprint expert George Herrera lifted Robert Harlan's prints off of a cellophane window from Maloney's wallet. Physical match expert Paige Doherty proved that condom wrappers recovered from the site where Rhonda Maloney's body was buried matched a string of wrappers pulled from Robert Harlan's car. Finally, Missy Woods, employing the new tool of DNA fingerprinting, proved that semen, recovered from Rhonda Maloney's body, was matched to Robert Harlan. We hear District Attorney Bob Grant put it all in perspective, saying "Every piece of evidence is important. There isn't any one single piece of evidence that puts the nail in the coffin. It is, in fact, the combination of all of the evidence."

The Frida Winters Case

On July 25th, 1992 Frida Winter, a 78 year old woman from the small town of Greeley, was brutally beaten, her throat slashed. When Greeley Det. Clay Buckingham entered Winter's bedroom and saw the obvious evidence of overkill, he instantly felt that the job was done by juveniles. There were, for example, multiple head wounds to a defenseless elderly woman. And her nightgown was pulled up over her head -a sign that whomever killed her couldn't bear the sight of what they had done. The point of entry was obvious - a small basement window had been broken and there appeared to be fresh prints on the glass. Track marks were found in Winter's back hallway, indicating that whomever climbed through the window, climbed the basement stairs to let in other accomplices. Nothing seemed to be stolen, indicating that the murder happened quickly and the perpetrators fled.

Buckingham called in Don Solarz, a senior crime scene investigator for the CBI. Solarz dusted the house and the window for prints. He recovered some partial shoe prints and an unidentified hair from Frida's bed. Other than fingernail scrapings from Frida Winter, there was no other physical evidence. A few days later, Clay Buckingham found a bloody baseball bat, a hammer and some shards of glass in a cement culvert just two blocks from the murder scene. The only prints they recovered from these objects was a single print on a shard of glass. Agent Sollars ran the prints through the state's fingerprint ID system, AFIS. There were no matches. The case languished for four years.

Then, a juvenile, Samuel Mandez, was fingerprinted in Denver. At the CBI, Don Solarz was sent an alert message that Mandez's prints matched all of those found on the window glass and the shard found in the culvert, except one. Mandez was arrested and charged with felony murder. They couldn't prove that he actually killed Winter, so they had to show that Mandez broke into the house at the time the murder took place. To prove that point, CBI agent Jacqui Battles had to mark and tape the window back together, including the shard of glass. Her meticulous work proved that Mandez had to have broken into the house, because his prints were on outside AND the inside pane of a double-paned window. As for his accomplices, they have never been identified, but advances in DNA technology may help to identify another suspect.