Hunting Notorious Serial Killer Wayne Williams| The New Detectives | Real Responders

Investigators are on the trail of a

serial

killer

who is leaving a series of nearly invisible clues in Maine. Police depend on a few insignificant fibers to sew a case against a deadly rapist. The evidence is in hand, but they have nothing to compare it to. Florida investigators face a fast car, a fatal crash, an unlikely story, and forensic scientists used fibers from the crash scene to find out what

real

ly happened. Small filaments practically invisible to the naked eye are the key to solving these crimes in the laboratory. Scientists can weave the truth. From the remains of evidence, in 1981, a peaceful walk in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, ended with a grim discovery: the body of a young man lay on the edge of a field for Atlanta police.

It was the kind of scene that was becoming all too familiar. Over 21 months, more than two dozen bodies had turned up in fields, vacant lots and roads less traveled. The victims were young African American males. Some were children. Most were strangled at first. The crimes were routinely investigated, but as the murder count increased, it became clear that the

serial

killer

was on the loose, leaving few clues in his deadly wake. The victims' parents demanded answers and as more bodies turned up, police put together a task force to find a link between the murders and track down every lead, but the murders continued.

The surrounding area joined citizens, even psychics, in searching for the victims and their killer, a reward fund reached $100,000, but no one came forward to claim it. Racial tensions grew as panic gripped this southern city, assuming the crimes were racially motivated, police searched for a white man and The clamor for justice in the African American community became deafening as the number The death toll exceeded 20. Investigators hoped it would be only a matter of time before they caught the killer, but time was their enemy and they had few clues on the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's wire. Analyst Larry Peterson set his sights on the nearly invisible clues known as tracking evidence.

I began to apply more or less full-time efforts to examine cases individually and also compare them to see if they were related. Peterson had fiber evidence as the common thread that unites the murderer and the victims by its nature. The fibers are easy to capture and difficult to remove. They provide a nearly invisible record of every place a person visits. Likewise, each victim was literally covered in hundreds of fibers, most of them meaningless. Figuring out which strands were important required concentrated effort. Each fiber collected from one victim had to be visually compared to hundreds taken from the next.

Multiply that for twenty victims and the researchers examining hundreds of thousands of fibers, the task could easily stretch over two months. It is difficult to automatically determine which fragments of important material could come from, say, the killer's environment. What fragments of material are from the victim's own home, from the places they frequent, using a stereoscopic microscope that represents the fiber evidence in three dimensions. Peterson analyzed selected fibers of the crime. scenes and during autopsies their length, shape and texture suggested that some were from a household rug, others were from a car. He was still looking for any other type of evidence that could link different cases besides those he had already found.

After scanning hundreds of cases, Peterson highlighted fibers with similar characteristics in most of the bodies and continued to find purple acetate fibers as well as fibers. greenish-yellow in color that seemed to be from a carpet. As evidence began to accumulate, he needed more specialized microscopes to see if they were from the same source. He placed the carpet fibers under a high-magnification comparison microscope, allowing him to compare the fibers side by side. , their colors and shapes match. Peterson perked up, maybe that was the link he needed. He now he had proof that all the victims. They were connected in some way and that they were probably murdered by the same person.

If I could find out where the fibers came from I could catch the killer. Fortunately, the fiber had an unusual structure. If I could locate its maker, I would be much closer to solving the case that required comparing. the fiber with the hundreds of samples sent by the carpet manufacturers, endless, painstaking work that would add more weeks to the investigation, I couldn't do it alone, friend Dedmon, the FBI master microanalyst signed on to help me. My initial role was to assist the Georgia Crime Lab in attempting to identify these fibers to see if the manufacturer of these fibers could be identified while the search for the elusive fiber was wearing down young men and children dying and Atlanta was scared by the anguish of the city.

The mood of the town during most of the investigation was a

real

ly strong feeling of helplessness, desperate for clues. Atlanta police canvassed victims in the neighborhoods and streets near where the bodies were found, questioning people door to door. door for any information that could help them at night, patrols searched the neighborhoods looking for any suspects on the streets, the police had few leads, but in the laboratory the microanalysts were getting closer to identifying an original source of the unique fiber that the media captured. Investigators were rumored to be using evidence to tie together the murders in the Atlanta area, but publishing the news didn't stop the killer, it just made him suddenly change tactics, instead of being dumped in the woods on the side of the road, the bodies They began to appear in the water.

The victims found in the rivers were naked or partially clothed. Was the killer trying to eliminate the fiber evidence so it couldn't be traced back to him? Law enforcement suspected this without alerting the media and armed with the knowledge that the killer was now disposing of the bodies in the water. Dozens of police recruits guarded the bridges of Atlanta. They were

hunting

a killer who had eluded them for 22 months. Week after week, the recruits gathered secretly under the bridges to monitor their every effort. The officers nicknamed them trolls. The only thing they could do was wait. for the killer to strike again around 2:00 a.m. m.

On May 22, 1981, the calm along the Chattahoochee River was broken by a splash in the dark; trolls waiting under the James Jackson Parkway Bridge sprang into action to find the cause, but they couldn't see. What caused the commotion was communicated by radio to nearby agents. They intercepted a van and questioned the driver. His name was Wayne Bertram Williams, a 23-year-old photographer from Greenland and self-proclaimed music promoter. Williams did not fit the supposed profile of the murderer, in fact like a young black man, was more likely to be a victim. Williams told police that he was returning home from a nightclub where he went to listen to a new application that he was considering signing as a matter of procedure.

Police searched his car, then took his name and address and sent it On his way, two days later, the body of Nathaniel Cater, 27, turned up in the Chattahoochee River, downstream of the James Jackson Parkway Bridge, and the medical examiner determined that he had been strangled. He fit the profile of the victims murdered in the previous months. He had been dead for approximately two days. Evidence collected from Kater's body was sent to Peterson. Two fibers had been removed from the victim's hair. Its structure matched those found in the other victims, but the color did not match. It could have faded.

The water or could have been a mismatch, but viewing the fibers under polarized light revealed that the structure of the fibers was identical. Police decided to take a second look at Wayne Williams after an interview and background check. A photo of Williams revealed that he was spoiled. only son dropped out of college at 19 no one had seen him at the club said he was there the night he stopped him on the bridge bought this live his alibi fell apart Williams now became their prime suspect they got certain warrants for his house and car Williams felt he had been wrongly accused because of his race held a press conference to proclaim his innocence but did not allow the press to take pictures they openly said that you killed Nathaniel Cater and you know it and you lied to us.

They said some members of the African-American community also found it difficult to believe that Williams could be considered a suspect. I think it was very difficult for the community to believe that an African American could have committed these crimes. systematically killing other African Americans there was no history of black serial killers serial killers are the stuff of middle-aged white men or appear to have been and this went against that pattern in the early 1980s. DNA testing still They were not available. Forensic investigators had to continue. Where were these little fibers? The thread seemed to indicate Williams' guilt.

His house was covered with a yellowish-green carpet. Peterson collected as many fiber samples as he could. He also collected dog hair and fibers from a purplish quilt and the trunk. The Williams car's lining and glove compartment inside these evidence bags could be the key to catching the killer. Peterson was hoping that the fibers from Williams' house would match the fibers from the victim's clothing, and he immediately took the evidence to the lab that rare afternoon and set up samples to see, you know, does this have any potential? or not? Let's see right away that the purple acetate along with the fibers from the green carpet in Williams' home matched the fibers found in almost all the victims so far, but just as strong.

The evidence simply wasn't enough for investigators in her case to face a staggering challenge in determining how many other people in Atlanta had the exact same rug based on fiber evidence. Wayne Williams now seemed like a strong suspect in the Atlanta murders, but anyone else. in Atlanta with the same taste for yellow-green carpets would be equally suspicious. The police needed more information. They needed to find out how much of that particular yellow-green carpet had been installed in Atlanta homes, so they dug into a much deeper microscopic analysis of the fiber structure that helped. Identify your manufacturer.

The rug was manufactured in the early '70s, but that particular shade was only produced for one year. Just over 16,000 yards of the rug had been sold in southeast Atlanta. The calculated odds that someone owned the same type of rug. Since the Williamses were less than one in 8,000, the evidence was mounting against Williams, but it was not enough to earn a field-limiting conviction. Investigators compared car mat fibers found on some of the victims to the carpet in the Williams car. It was estimated that approximately one in every 8,000 cars in the Atlanta, Georgia, area could be expected to have a carpet fiber like that found in many of the victims linked to Wayne Williams.

Put another way, the victims would have had to randomly visit 3,500 cars plus almost eight thousand homes to collect both fibers; the odds of that happening at random were one in more than 29 million. Add to that the purple acetate fiber from the quilt, and it became almost impossible that the victims could have collected these three fibers at another location where the numbers didn't lie Williams was arrested by forensic scientists the fiber evidence was overwhelming jury panel could be confusing we wrote a story at the beginning of the trial that the prosecution's strongest case could contain the strongest evidence in the thimble more than just Williams was on trial prosecutors knew the science that led to his arrest too would be analyzed; the defense would do everything they can to ruin his credibility if you do enough searches and find another environment where there is the same green carpet what are the chances of an arrest? car that had the same carpet on the floor or that the family would own the same blanket, bedspread, rugs and clothing, that is one of the keys that the combination cannot exist.

On February 27, 1982 Wayne Williams was found guilty of killing two men, the jury deliberated 11 During the trial another 10 murders were definitively linked to him and the task force closed the books on 27 murder cases between 1978 and 1981 by connecting them to Williams with the same fiber evidence. The Wayne Williams case was the first time aThe crime was solved solely on the basis of fibers. The quantity and variety of fibers found on Williams' victims caught him in a web of evidence, but in one case in Maine investigators had much less to catch a killer. November 30, 1990 was a brutal day in northern Maine.

That day a worker at Cummings Concrete Corporation in Alton called the police after discovering the body of a young woman. The victim was face down. She was new to Except for the socks on his feet, the rest of his clothes were piled nearby. Police at the scene contacted Detective Edy Thorne of the Bangor Police Department. They knew he was working a month-old missing persons case and that the victim fit the description of the missing woman. He was called to the state police mobile crime lab. Investigators were hot on the trail of a killer. Potentially important clues like the tire.

The footprints or footprints had to be collected quickly before someone, accidentally or intentionally, destroyed the evidence. Maine State Police crime scene investigator Craig Handley oversaw evidence collection, according to Hanley, the very act of arriving at the crime scene and compromised new crime scene evidence. is not properly secured and we end up with contamination like sometimes inadvertent contamination by the offices themselves, it is very important for us to interview the first

responders

and find out exactly where they walked, what they touched, what they moved and what they removed, and if they have done the job correctly, they should have everything written down so they can explain this to us.

There is nothing better than having a crime scene investigator arrive at the scene and find the scene in very good condition, the original condition was recorded on film and the notes were written down on paper samples of soil and debris were collected in one case which could depend on microscopic evidence there was no way to know what could turn out to be important the investigators had two questions before them who was the victim and who killed her the body was taken to the medical center in the examiner's office, where an autopsy was performed and a positive identification could be made, her clothing and physical characteristics matched those of 18-year-old Lisa Garland, the missing woman Thorn had been searching for.

She had been reported missing a month earlier, the medical examiner later confirmed her disappearance. Identification through fingerprints garland was last seen around 1:00 a.m. m. on October 27 when leaving the store where she worked and lived a short distance away. Bangor Police Detective Edie Thorn had reason to believe that Garland arrived at her apartment after leaving the store. What happened then is an open question from there, she would have walked or been carried to a residence that is approximately 150 yards from the store. We know she arrives because her wallet, the keys to her house, some money and all the time, where were the keys? and valuables found in her home led police to believe she had not left alone, after a month Detective Thorn and her colleague Bob Cameron watched their missing persons case turn into a homicide. .

The autopsy revealed that the victim had been raped and murdered by blunt force to her head; most of her internal organs were intact, preserved by the cool climate at the Maine State Crime Laboratory. Forensic chemist Chris Montagna analyzed traces of evidence collected at the crime scene, particularly the socks the victim was wearing at the time of her death. He was hoping they had some small clue as to the identity of the killer. We knew that one of the key pieces of evidence we're going to look at is these socks. I started the sock process by simply doing a visual examination to see what I could find if there were hairs or fibers, grass, anything that might be from the environment of where I found maroon fibers.

Experience told him that they were from the carpet of a car, in terms of clues, it was not much, but Montagna felt that the entire case could depend on this. A Thread of Evidence In July 1991, a 15-year-old girl was riding her bicycle on a lonely road in New York, Maine, more than 200 miles south of Bangor. A car slowly approached and forced her off the road. She fell onto a grassy embankment. The driver crashed. He got out of the car and dragged the girl to the forest, there he raped her, stabbed her and left her for dead.

Surprisingly, she survived after her attacker left, she found her way to a neighbor's house where she asked for help from the York Police Department of her choosing. Her attacker in the mugshot file, the suspect was a convicted rapist named David Fleming who had been released from prison just nine months earlier in the sleepy state of Maine. News of violent crimes spreads quickly after months of chasing dead-end leads to find Lisa. Garland's murderous detective, Thorn, learned of the violent rape in York. Bangor police became interested in David Fleming, only maybe he had something to do with the death of Lisa Garland in York.

DNA taken from the rape victim matched Fleming's DNA. Fleming pleaded guilty to raping and assaulting the girl. in York he was sentenced to 80 years the Lisa Garland murder case was still open Bangor

detectives

believed that if they could compare Fleming's DNA with samples collected at the crime scene they would have their man, but the DNA would have to wait DNA testing could take months today, it would take weeks if the police proved that David Fleming killed Lisa Garland, they would need to rely on more conventional evidence, in this case, carpet fibers taken from David Fleming, the fibers were sent to chemist Chris Montagna, he compared them. found eight months earlier in Lisa Garland's socks, Montagna placed each fiber on a separate stage of a comparison microscope to analyze them side by side, with some adjustments he could see that the pattern of dark and light stripes in the coated fibers When laid end to end, the fibers looked like one continuous strand, indicating that they came from the same source.

It seemed like the breakthrough researchers needed. The coincidence allowed Detectives Thorne and Cameron to trace eight months' worth of evidence back to Detective David Fleming. Bob Cameron understood the importance of fiber evidence, the fiber found in the victim's sock that matched the carpet of the vehicle Fleming had driven, and narrowed it down considerably because the fiber that matched the carpet of the car was the only year that they put carpets of that color in those vehicles, the results were now conclusive, the fibers matched, but would this single piece of evidence be enough to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt?

Fortunately, an overlooked piece of evidence was found in the victim's body bag. It was a small sliver of wood not worth saving, but Montagna noted that it had been square, leading him to believe that the wood had been the machine Ian once had success with carpet fibers. Montagna asked investigators to search Fleming's car again, this time looking for a matching piece of wood inside the trunk covered by a large cloth to play with small, hand-carved wooden boats. Fleming learned how to craft wood during his previous stints in prison. Montagna sent the chip and the boats for analysis the results again did not seem bad to Fleming the chip was made of white pine and so were the boat models, all the wood had been machined in the same way now there were two powerful reasons to link Fleming with lisa garland the evidence of the fiber and the wood splinter showed that garland was in Fleming's car but none of this evidence proved that he raped and murdered her establishing that Fleming killing her would be much more difficult he seemed to have an airtight alibi almost at the same time Lisa Garland was last seen alive when she finished her shift at the convenience store in Bangor around 1 a.m. on October 27 around 6:00 a.m.

That same day David Fleming was involved in a car accident that left him hospitalized for two weeks. Fiber evidence showed that Garland was in Fleming's car, but to prove that he was his killer. Detectives had to determine exactly when she may have been there. Fleming would have had two opportunities to kidnap Garland. The first was in the five hours between the time she disappeared and the time she had the accident. The second was in the two-week period between Fleming's release. from the hospital and when Garland's body was found, an examination revealed that she was murdered shortly after being raped, but the cold weather had preserved her body and made it impossible to determine how long she had been dead.

The police knew that she couldn't have been in Fleming's car while she was in the hospital and the car was being repaired, so if they could prove that she was dead before Fleming was hospitalized, it would mean that Fleming was the one. murderer of her. The police needed some way to reduce the time period. Bangor police learned that an aerial photo of the crime scene was taken two weeks before the victim's body was found. While examining the photos, investigators made a surprising discovery at first, it was blurry and indistinct, but An enlargement focused it there, in the setting, lay Lisa Garland's body here was photographic evidence. that the victim was dead before Fleming was hospitalized that meant she must have been in his car before the accident the fiber had been placed on Garland and Fleming's car the photograph established the time of death all indications pointed to Fleming as the murderer Detectives Thorne and Cameron felt they now had all the evidence they needed to obtain a conviction, then came the clincher, DNA analysis from the crime scene came back from the lab, DNA testing was performed at the FBI lab and the results were that Fleming was definitely a match at the At trial, the events of that night were reconstructed by the prosecution based on police speculation.

Lisa Garland arrived home shortly after 1:00 a.m. on October 27. David Fleming had followed her from the store when she entered her apartment. he forgot to close the door behind her, a simple mistake that would prove fatal. David Fleming saw her opportunity and then entered her apartment. It is unclear where she committed the crime, but fiber evidence showed that Garland's body was in Fleming's Delta 88 before she dumped it. After the sandbox in the town of Halton Fleming returned home, where his girlfriend remembered him walking around around three in the morning, she remembered that he was not sleeping soundly and left around 5:00 am. m., about an hour later, Fleming was in an accident with an 18-wheeler.

He was out of service for two weeks but evidence showed that he had already committed his The fiber evidence linked the victim to his car the photograph established an approximate time of her death and car accident closed his window of opportunity to just a sliver on March 22, 1995 David Fleming was convicted of raping and murdering Lisa Garland. He is serving a life sentence on top of 80 years for the York rape in case after case. Fiber evidence has linked victims to their killers, but in a case in Florida. Researchers relied on fibers to reconstruct the circumstances of a fatal car crash on a Tallahassee, Florida, highway in 1994.

Even a mild October proved horribly tragic. Among broken beer bottles, broken tree branches and smashed car parts lay the lifeless body of 30-year-old Michael Mennella. a second victim named Curtis Davison was able to recover before returning to the scene and collapsing while paramedics were treating Davison Tallahassee Police assessed the scene of the fatal accident. The time of four accident investigators is even more critical than in a homicide investigation in a homicide office. cordon off the crime scene and return to it later, not so in the case of a car accident, officers have only one opportunity to collect evidence, traffic must return to normal as soon as possible, accident investigators often They rely on eyewitness accounts as their first source of information, but no one other than survivor Curtis Davison saw this nighttime accident and was in no position to make a statement.

Homicide accident investigator Mike Walker had to rely on preliminary judgments based on the evidence he saw at the accident scene and what really struck me and immediately The passenger side of the vehicle wastotally destroyed. The passenger door was almost torn off the vehicle. We had one driver's side intact for Walker, which meant the car's passenger would have suffered the most serious injuries. It was doubtful he could have done it. He survived, much less walked away from the accident, but Davison told the police that he was the passenger by some chance that may have been true, but could it be possible that Davison was lying to avoid being prosecuted for his friend's death?

It was Walker's job to discover the truth. Investigators questioned anyone who may have seen the man before witnesses to the accident told police the two met at a local bar after work, where they had several drinks and were then seen at another bar later that night. , around 1:00 a.m. m., they left the bar and left together but no one saw them get into the car without any witnesses. Detectives would have to rely on forensics to find out who was driving. First they had to determine everything they could about the accident and what factors were involved, such as the speed of the car. was traveling returning to the crime scene the next morning Walker and his partner David Folsom found the clues they needed the suspect vehicle 300zx was traveling north on this road while turning the sidewalk began to lose control the driver turned the wheel to follow the curve but the car's inertia kept it moving forward as it left the road it began to spin then hit a tree the vehicle continued to slide sideways hitting another tree when it hit the other tree it went flying approximately 40 feet landing back on the road when a fast-moving vehicle changes direction the tires slide sideways leaving marks on the road by measuring these marks called critical speed marks and taking into account the friction of the road surface researchers can calculate how fast The car was moving while accelerating out of control.

Critical speed measurements indicated the vehicle was traveling at 89 to 96 miles per hour. Almost from the beginning of the investigation, police had a hunch that alcohol played a role. Broken beer bottles were found at the scene and paramedics and officers detected alcohol on Davidson's breath and on Mandela's body, if Davison was the driver and was under the influence at the time investigators needed to test his blood pressure level. alcohol in the blood and a blood sample was quickly taken within two hours of the accident, it is very important that once we establish that there is suspicion that he is the driver of a vehicle then we have to obtain a blood sample because The alcohol dissipates from the system.

Walker and Folsom ordered the blood test that morning. The sample was taken to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's crime lab to determine its alcohol level. The analyst then took a carefully measured portion of the blood. you want to test and place it in a clean, labeled vial the alcohol in the blood is volatile when shaken the blood evaporates into the air or in the headspace of the vial the components of the blood are in the headspace and not the blood itself being analyzed, the gas in the headspace is introduced into a chromatograph that identifies its components and their concentration.

The computer specifically looks for alcohol in the blood gases. In ten minutes it provides a reading. The results showed Davidson's blood alcohol levels on point. zero four below Florida's legal limit, but that was the level when his blood was drawn at the hospital, not the level he had at the time of the accident because alcohol dissipates from the bloodstream at a constant rate, the analyst can calculate what was level two. Hours earlier when the accident occurred, Davidson's level at the time of the accident was estimated to be between point zero six and point zero eight in Florida, a level as low as point zero five can be considered driving under the influence. of alcohol, but investigators still had to prove he was behind the wheel in his office.

Walker carefully examined photos of the accident scene and compared them to his notes. Parts of Davison's story didn't add up at first. Walker recalled that the driver's side airbag had deployed, airbags by design pinned the driver in place if Mennella were driving, it seemed unlikely that he would have been thrown over the vehicle, but his body was found about 50 feet from where the car was. stopped on the other hand the passenger side seat belt looked like it hadn't even been worn who sat here one more clue raised suspicion a bloody hand print on the outside of the driver's side door was too smudged to read it but it seemed likely it was done when the driver got out of the car after the accident, but according to Folsom the evidence could be misleading now, traditionally we can't say that just because there is a bloody handprint someone driving that car put it there because there is the contamination of the scene, one of the rescue personnel or one of the police officers could have done it, but it was enough to raise suspicions about who the driver really was. the deceased or the survivor alone.

The evidence of a bloody handprint on the seat belt meant very little; together, they created serious problems. doubt about Davison's story Davison, however, stuck to it insisting that the definitive version of the story be told in the laboratory. Investigators faced more than a few clues about the car accident that claimed the life of a man. The trick was to make sense of them. Accident investigator. Mike Walker had the wreckage towed to a secure facility for analysis. Lord Schwab is an analyst in the Department of Law Enforcement Laboratory. One part of my job as a crime scene analyst is to go and examine a vehicle without outside influences.

Most of the time I go and look at the vehicle itself and try not to learn any of the details about the case. I will take an objective view of the vehicle, see what I can determine, see what the evidence tells me to reconstruct the The details started with the driver's side seat belt buckling it in a position as if someone was wearing it. He noticed stains on the seat belt near the door. The results came back positive for human blood, indicating that the seat belt was likely worn at the time of the accident. It also meant that whoever used it probably wasn't thrown out of the car.

The signs again pointed to Davison. The evidence was suggestive but slippery. Even if the blood turned out to be Davison's, the defense could argue that he could have splashed on his belt as the car was spinning. or that Davison could have bled on him after the accident while he was staggering to seal this case, investigators needed to find evidence that met three criteria: first, the evidence could be left alone at the moment of impact, second, it had to be unique to the individual. who dropped it off and the third party had to prove where that person was sitting in the car.

Investigators depended on the fibers to meet those criteria and relied on Crime Lab regional microanalyst Paula Sauer to read them. Detectives Walker and Folsom gave Sauer several pieces of collected material evidence. From the accident scene, including a dashboard with two dents and clothing worn by the victims, the dents in the dashboard were on the passenger side, presumed to have been caused by contact with the passenger's knees, notably the force of the crash created so much friction. heat that the woven patterns and fibers were actually fused into the vinyl there were numerous fibers embedded in the area of ​​the dashboard that would be directly in front of the passenger seat these fibers were microscopically consistent with the fibers that made up the Manila pants the evidence appeared indicate that Monello was in the passenger seat but Sauer didn't stop there, he examined each piece of evidence to make sure his results were consistent, he turned his attention to strands of human hair and synthetic fibers collected from the cracks on the passenger side of the windshield.

Michael Mennella was wearing a hairpiece composed of both human hair and synthetic fibers, if the fibers of his hairpiece matched those on the windshield, it would strengthen the argument that he was the passenger and that Davison, the crash survivor, was conducting a vehicle inspection. synthetic hairs using a A high-powered comparison microscope suggested that the fibers in the windshield matched those in the Manila hairpiece, but analyzing these fibers required more than a visual inspection due to the small size of their molecules to complete their comparison. Sauer used an instrument called a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer, or FTIR.

It is an instrument that is used to determine the generic class of synthetic fibers by generic class, that is, if it is nylon polyester acrylic, and this technique is very effective in that sense because the molecules that make up those fibers are actually analyzed to be able to give it an exact identification the characteristics of both fibers were displayed on a computer the red lines represent fibers from the hairpiece the green lines represent fibers extracted from the windshield in all directions they were identical until now all indications were that Mennella was in the passenger seat if that If true, if it meant Davison would have left his mark on the driver's seat area, likely on the airbag that would have deployed at over 100 miles per hour.

Sauer analyzed the fibers attached to the air bag's densely woven fabric and found nine fibers. matching the fabric of Davidson's pants her conclusion Davison was driving Paula Sauer used her sophisticated objects to focus on the accident scene she had not only placed a manila and the passenger seat but also determined that Davison was the driver the evidence was turned over to the The state's attorney who proved in court that Davison lied about the events that unfolded in the early morning hours of October 6, 1994. The prosecution's theory was that after a night of drinking, it was Curtis Davison who He got behind the wheel of Manila's Nissan 300zx, eager to test the The power of the sports car Davison put him in high gear racing along the tree line on a two-lane highway ignoring the 35 mile per hour signs Davison went up to 90 then the The narrow road began to curve and Davison lost control and could no longer heat the steering wheel of the car. skidded sideways and hit an oak tree Michael Mennella was not wearing a seat belt the sports car continued to spin out of control hitting another tree before stopping on the side of the road Davison was saved by the airbag exited the car turned around to the passenger side to look for Mennella his bloody left hand left a stain on the door Mennella was dead in the road Davison went for help a Tallahassee jury took only ten minutes to find Davison guilty of murder involuntary due to culpable negligence. sentenced to seven years the analysis of tiny fibers, traces of evidence found in common objects, turned the tables on three men who denied any involvement in their respective crimes the ability of forensic scientists to determine the composition of the fibers down to the finest detail. microscopic allows prosecutors to tear through alibis, fragments of evidence