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in 1990 the killer of a 22 year old girl left an almost indistinguishable mark in a blood stain
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at the crime scene but a new computer forensic technology found distinguishing characteristics in
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the smear evidence that would lead directly to the perpetrator [Music] [Applause]
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[Music] [Applause] [Music] richmond virginia is a city steeped in history as the former capital of the confederacy
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richmond keeps close ties to its past and a watchful eye on the future [Music] with six colleges and universities
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thousands of young people move here each fall to go to school 22 year old dawn bruce had attended
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virginia commonwealth university dawn was a musician she joined the vcu win symphony after she was accepted
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through auditions that's what kept her there for as long as she was there but dawn was anxious to
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find out what was out in the real world and how she could do and what she could do
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after college dawn worked as a phone operator by day and a waitress by night despite the long hours she enjoyed the
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freedom of living on her own dawn was a fun-loving kind of person thought she could do anything and
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everything and and didn't care what other people said about her trying to to do things that weren't
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the norm on december 19 1990 dawn's mother went to her daughter's apartment since she hadn't heard from
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her in a few days she found dawn in a pool of blood the medical examiner found evidence she
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had been raped sodomized and stabbed in the heart the knife was was rammed in her heart
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and the subject held dawn down until she bled to death which from what i understand could have been
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eight to ten minutes or longer and she was defiled as in the process of this uh i don't know how much vile violence
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is needed but that's only my opinion i think it was a very very bad case first impression i had was what a
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horrible horrible crime and and what somebody had done to really an innocent young lady who
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who absolutely didn't deserve what happened to her in any sense of the word it was a young 22 year old female who
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was working minding her own business had a future ahead of her had had children ahead of her marriage
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everything that we all enjoy and she was brutally attacked while she was sleeping
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investigators discovered that the killer entered the apartment through a window which had been pried open
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but there was no evidence of burglary nothing had been disturbed or broken they found no foreign fingerprints
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inside the apartment when i left there i i didn't have very good feelings at all because
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i think everything that i carried out there out of the scene was in one large bag and that consisted mostly of the
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items on the bed the bed sheets and the pullers and the blankets and so forth dawn bruce was last seen at tommy's
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restaurant two nights earlier where she worked the night shift as a waitress dawn met many people through her job
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which only added to the large pool of potential suspects investigators tom tiller and jim dorton
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interviewed dawn's neighbors in the apartment complex several neighbors were suspicious right
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from the start a subject who lived directly beside victim was on active parole and he was
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on parole for burglary and attempted rape while armed with a knife so uh immediately we felt that he was a
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good suspect there was very little evidence and there's one of these cases that when you
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left there that you just thought well this is going to be a hard one to to clear because of the lack of evidence
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[Music] with no murder weapon no witnesses and few leads it was going to be a difficult
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investigation [Music] she wanted to be a firefighter and she had passed her firefighter one
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and two and was volunteering as a firefighter so don was was just a happy person
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don wanted as much out of life as she could get into every minute of it she at some point in time would have had
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a family wanted children but that was not to be shortly after the rape and murder of 22
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year old dawn bruce john alderman was assigned to prosecute the case when you get a crime like this
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that really violates a person you get a sense of indignation that that's impossible to escape
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a sense of indignation that someone being used and abused like that investigators began focusing their
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attention on the few bits of physical evidence they had forensic experts discovered that the
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fatal injury was a single stab wound in the heart in the forensics lab scientists found two linear impressions
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on the pillowcase that were consistent with the blade of a knife the serrated edges appeared to be those
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of a hunting knife also on the pillowcase they found what appeared to be a partial fingerprint in dawn's blood
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but the fabric was textured which made any kind of fingerprint analysis impossible
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the print was almost invisible even to a trained eye the ridge detail was very faint and we had to really
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study it because as we studied it under magnification you enlarged the fabric weave which
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had a tendency to totally eradicate the rich detail so at that point in time i did not have a
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whole lot of hope for that fingerprint there was rich detail on the print but in my opinion at the time i didn't think
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it was very much i knew if that's all that we would ever have and it could not be
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enhanced in any way then we wouldn't have much of a case unless we got a lot
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more evidence coming in that we didn't think we would get traces of semen also were found at the
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scene serology tests indicated the killer had type a blood this eliminated dawn's boyfriend as well
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as dawn's neighbor who was on parole for rape and burglary dawn had another neighbor
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robert knight who had some prior arrest for drug possession robert knight had made comments to the
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victim as she was outside washing her car or going to and from her automobile to her
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apartment this subject would make comments to her in a sexual suggestive nature and
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he became a suspect robert knight had type a blood consistent with the semen sample from
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the crime scene but he had an alibi for the night of the murder he said he was with his girlfriend at
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the time and the fingerprint on the pillowcase did not appear to match the fingerprints
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on file for robert knight we tried traditional photography everything that we knew at that point in
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time also to develop some contrast between the ridges and the fabric but basically those techniques were not
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satisfactory at that point in time we couldn't get it to a point where we felt
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like we had an identifiable print scientists tried various chemical processes to improve the print on the
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pillowcase but every time they enhanced it they also enhanced the threads of the
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pillowcase investigators were no closer to identifying the print on the pillowcase
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than they were the day after the murder the fingerprint was something that we knew we had
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clearly was observed it clearly was seen but no one knew what to do with it because
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it was in a medium in blood on a medium on a pillow case against a pattern of the pillow case
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that made it unreadable and if there was some way to make that print readable it could take on
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as vibrant a forensic persuader as dna evidence and maybe some more then investigators got a break
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every year we have a late and print conference which encompasses all the late and print examiners in virginia
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it's a training seminar basically and the imaging people there one of the vendors brought their imaging system
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there i was highly skeptical of it had never seen it used in a forensic case but since we had nothing
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else other than this very faint print on fabric we thought it was worth a try the new system was called image
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enhancement technology image enhancement uses a computer to identify patterns like those woven into
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the pillowcase once the pattern was identified it was subtracted from the image leaving only
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the ridge patterns of the fingerprint behind after 10 hours of testing the fabric pattern was subtracted
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and what began to emerge was a partial thumbprint of the killer [Music] investigators knew that they had to
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identify the fingerprint on the pillowcase in order to solve dawn bruce's murder
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the primary suspect in this case was one of dawn's neighbors robert knight who
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had a history of drug abuse knight said he had an alibi that he was with his girlfriend on the night of the
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murder but his girlfriend said knight wasn't with her for the entire evening
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the evidence indicated the crime occurred about between three and four roughly that saturday morning he claimed
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to be with his girlfriend all night but his girlfriend said no he was not with me for about that period of time between
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three and four the fingerprints on file for robert knight did not have enough ridge detail
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to determine if they matched the print on the pillowcase knight voluntarily gave a second set of
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prints but again there was not enough ridge detail to make a comparison each time that we would would show our
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presence around him he got a little bit more uh stand standoffish and not as cooperative and accused of
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accused us of harassing him and he just he's changed entirely his personality and his uh
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willingness to help he he did not want us to come around anymore now the prosecution was in a difficult
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position if they could not identify the fingerprint as nights the defense attorney would use that
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against the prosecution at a trial the defense attorneys would have said whose fingerprint is it we don't know
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we'll never know and that fingerprint is a killer and it's not his fingerprint or
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it can't be proved to be his fingerprint so in our line of work you really need
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to answer all the questions and if you don't the defense attorney asked those
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questions at closing arguments but prosecutors gambled they arrested knight for dawn's murder
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pinning their hopes on the new fingerprint technology and the scientists ability to match knight's
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fingerprints after night's arrest norm tiller kept a close eye on the technique police used to fingerprint him
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making certain that each finger was carefully rolled from nail to nail for the clearest set of prints possible as
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soon as i saw a good suitable roll print i took that straight back to my office and began that examination
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but tiller did not rush to judgment he took his time after one month of analysis and retesting
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norm tiller found what he was looking for the print on the pillowcase was a left thumb print
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matched the outside of robert knight's left thumb i spent additional time doing comparison
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work and just analyzing the print from every angle so to speak before we actually affected the identification and
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even then i had another examiner go behind me and take a look at everything that i had done to make sure
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there were no errors made in the process but there was one more hurdle the image
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enhancement technology was so new it had never been accepted as evidence in court
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i was concerned at that point in time that the evidence may not be accepted within the scientific community
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as a good science this was the first time that anybody had used it take it into court
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into a courtroom where it was going to be actually challenged and it was going to be fought
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a hearing was held to determine whether forensic evidence from this new fingerprinting technology should be
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admitted the defense argued that it was hocus-pocus technology which manipulated
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and changed the image of the fingerprint pam ringer was the expert who testified
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for the prosecution explaining that the human eye can distinguish between 16 and
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32 shades of grey but a computer can distinguish 256 shades ringer said the image enhancement
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technology simply eliminated the fabric patterns then made the dark areas of the
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fingerprint darker and the light areas between the ridges lighter if somebody as dumb as i am can
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understand this when i got done with her over the course of a day and doing some studying afterwards
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i think the explanation becomes one that anyone can understand this imaging enhancing doesn't change the
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the data at all what we had was a photograph of the fingerprint and pam ringer said i went ahead and did it
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that day on march the 27th i could do it again today i can show you i can replicate it
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100 times if i need to she did it in stages she took the the first the pattern out then she took the weave out
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and as you watch it you can see the print didn't change the print didn't
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move the lines of of the lands and grooves of the the print didn't change at all and i think that graphically was
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the best persuader for for judge culp in the case the judge was convinced he did not
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believe that the computer enhancements altered the bloody fingerprint a legal precedent had been set
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but prosecutors wanted more than the fingerprint before heading to trial [Music]
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robert douglas knight was charged with the capital murder of 22 year old dawn bruce
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but police still didn't have the murder weapon a faint fingerprint left on a flimsy pillowcase would be
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considered firm evidence in court and prosecutors soon had a lead on the murder weapon
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six months after the murder a maintenance man working in night's old apartment discovered something behind an
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access panel in knight's old bedroom i don't know what possessed him to do
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that i think there was a plumbing problem that caused him to take it off when he did he looked in and found a
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hunting knife in a sheath in the forensics lab scientists performed a simple test to
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determine if this was the weapon used in the murder using photographic overlays the pattern
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of the knife was compared to the knife impressions found on dawn bruce's pillowcase
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they matched the final piece of evidence was the dna testing of the semen found at the crime
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scene it matched the dna profile of robert knight [Music] prosecutors believe that dawn bruce
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arrived home from work around 1am and went right to bed [Music] sometime around four o'clock
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robert knight went to the front window of dawn's apartment pried it open and crept upstairs
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[Music] he stabbed dawn in the heart then sexually assaulted her as she bled to death
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but knight made mistakes he wiped the knife on the pillowcase leaving the impression of the murder
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weapon later matched to the knife found in knight's apartment he also left the partial bloody
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fingerprint on the pillowcase matched with the latest in computer technology facing an overwhelming amount of
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physical evidence and in an effort to avoid the death penalty robert douglas knight pled guilty
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he was sentenced to four life terms in prison i'm very disappointed that robert knight didn't get the death
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penalty i think he deserved the death penalty i think the forensic science played a major part in solving the case
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um some cases are solved just by by pure interviewing without any evidence and they are solved but i think this is one
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of those cases that would not have been solved had it not been for the uh forensic
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evidence that was that was at the scene when we arrested knight we had a bare circumstantial case that's all we
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had and it went to being the absolutely strongest forensic case i've ever prosecuted in 24 years the only thing
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that stands out with me personally is that i i believe robert knight deserved and
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should have received the death penalty i don't believe he deserves to be breathing
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eating sleeping laughing whatever emotions he may experience i know one of these days he'll probably
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be walking the street again but it will be a long time and even though justice was served i think
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he was deserving of the death penalty i told my other daughter one day when we were talking
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about life and about her plans for family when she said that she didn't think she was going to have children
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because she didn't know that she could go through what i had gone through and i told her if i knew ahead of time
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that dawn was going to be murdered i would still have had dawn because she brought such joy
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to us as her family not to ever not have children for fear of loss because life is not a guarantee
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[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you