00:00:01
[MUSIC PLAYING] NANCY GRACE: March 31, 2006,
Fayetteville, North Carolina. This was a out-of-the-blue
stranger rape.
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NANCY GRACE: This attack is
not an isolated incident. Soon, more sex
assaults are reported
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along the very same street. KELLIE BERG: We definitely
had a serial rapist. We knew that he
was entering homes.
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He was watching people before he
identified them as the victims. NANCY GRACE: Despite
countless hours of police work
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and public surveillance,
no breakthrough-- victims and the community
alike, trapped in fear.
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I didn't know who he was. I didn't know where he was. Was he going to
look at my license
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and say, OK, I'm
going to go get her? He said he was going to find
out if I contacted authorities,
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that he would find out and kill
both my daughter and myself. NANCY GRACE: This is the story
of the hunt for a serial sex
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predator whose victims
live in a nightmare of fear while he is out, roaming free.
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I'm Nancy Grace. This is "Bloodline Detectives." [THEME MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Fayetteville
is a historic city
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located in the southeastern
part of North Carolina. It's also home to thousands
of servicemen and women
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stationed at Fort Liberty. PAUL WOOLVERTON: It is
the largest military base in the country by population.
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There's generally
approximately 50,000 people stationed here in uniform. The military drives the economy
here and a lot of the community.
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Some of the 82nd
Airborne is home to a lot of Special Operations soldiers. There's a saying, "When the
world dials 911, they pick
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up the phone at Fort Liberty." JOHN SOMERINDYKE:
It's grown quite a bit in the past few years or so.
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Got a lot to do here,
have baseball team, a lot of restaurants,
movies, outdoor theater,
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things of that nature. Two hours from the beach,
four hours from the mountain. You can't go wrong there.
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NANCY GRACE: Beginning
on March 31, 2006, this peaceful and
beautiful city is rocked
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by a series of
brutal sex attacks, all concentrated along one
street, North Ramsey Street.
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The first of these attacks
occurs when a woman is horribly raped at her own apartment.
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JOHN SOMERINDYKE: The victim
was inside the shower. She got out of the shower, and
the suspect was in her bedroom.
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Not sure how he got in. There was no signs
of forced entry, but he basically
forced her onto the bed
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and sexually assaulted her. PAUL WOOLVERTON:
Afterwards, he told her to wait at
least five minutes
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before she called for help. She was a juvenile at the time
because the juvenile detectives
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that was-- they were very
private about the cases that came into juvenile. JOHN SOMERINDYKE: Per protocol,
they would call detectives out.
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A canvas would be done
of the area looking for any potential witnesses,
looking for any video cameras
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or things of that nature, or
any evidence, either in the room or outside in the parking lot
or outside of the apartment.
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When I learned
about it later, it was actually closed because
there was no DNA at the time.
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NANCY GRACE: But
then, another attack, once again on Ramsey Street. JOHN SOMERINDYKE:
She actually ran
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to the closest
convenience store and had the clerk there call 911. One patrol officer would
respond to the scene
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and a patrol
supervisor also, due to the magnitude of the call. And once they determined
a crime did occur
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and that it actually
happened in our jurisdiction, they would call detectives out.
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KELLIE BERG: She was running
like she did every morning. She left the house. She ran down Ramsey Street.
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As she was coming
back, this person-- she'd seen him run
across the road, and he knocked her into the wood
line on the side of the road.
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He told her he had a gun. He held her down,
and he raped her. She actually told me that she'd
seen two officers drive by,
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but she couldn't do anything. JOHN SOMERINDYKE: When he was
done, he fled the area on foot.
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But after that, we didn't
know if he got into a vehicle. NANCY GRACE: Police
throw more detectives
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and more forensic personnel
into the investigation. JOHN SOMERINDYKE: They're
doing a Canvas of the area,
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looking for any potential
witnesses, anything the victim may have dropped, anything
the suspect may have touched.
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KELLIE BERG: She
was a triathlete. She was a runner. And he was able to come
from across the street
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and catch her and knock
her into the woods. So he said, OK, this has
to be somebody that's
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fit and capable of catching. So they run a lot. That was kind of our
mentality at the time.
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We knew that he was between 5'10
and 6'1, white or Hispanic male. And he had a really funky odor.
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JOHN SOMERINDYKE: That
was something described as maybe a mechanic
type of oil or grease,
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maybe somebody
who works on cars. And some people
in the military, they have jobs where they work
with vehicles, and machinery,
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and equipment that they might
get some oil on them and so on. That would make kind of a smell.
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JOHN SOMERINDYKE: She
was brought to Cape Fear Valley Hospital, which
is the main hospital here
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in Fayetteville. And the on-call SANE nurse
would be called in to perform the sexual assault exam.
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It can last up to
several hours long, has often been described as a
continuation of the rape itself.
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It's that bad. KELLIE BERG: They're
scraping your fingernails, and you're having to get
naked in front of a stranger.
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And they're going into
orifices, your mouth, and they're scraping, and
they're taking pubic hairs.
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And it's a huge violation. But then there's
those other questions. What were you doing prior?
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What did you eat? Things that you don't think are
very important until the worst
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moment of your life happens. And then somebody's
asking you, when's the last time you had sex?
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Who did you have sex with? How many times did you have sex? You've just been raped, and
you're asking some pretty
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detailed, hard questions. And all you can think about
is, I want to be safe. I want to make sure that I don't
have any diseases or injuries.
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So the victim's going
through their own thing. And selfishly-- because it is
selfish, because as a detective,
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I need that evidence to
help you solve your case. And I'm asking you to do it
at your most vulnerable time.
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So it's one of the
trainings that we do is you have to be extremely
sensitive to the victim's needs.
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NANCY GRACE: Samples
from the same rape kit are then taken to
the Fayetteville crime lab for testing.
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DNA was located in
the sexual assault kit and was loaded into the
National DNA database.
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CODIS is a software
that searches law enforcement databases
for a match to a DNA profile
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from a crime scene. So if somebody has had their
DNA collected when they've been arrested or convicted of a
crime, they will get that match.
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And that is enough
to arrest somebody. But if somebody has never had
their DNA taken during an arrest
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or after they've been
convicted of a crime, then CODIS isn't
going to find a match.
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NANCY GRACE: There
is no match in CODIS, the national DNA databank. Detectives examined the previous
attack on Ramsey Street.
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Lieutenant Somerindyke was
able to find some evidence, some sheets and stuff that
we're in our evidence room
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and tested them for DNA,
that it matched these cases. NANCY GRACE: Then, six
months later, February,
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2007, the rapist strikes again. This time, it's a middle-aged
woman in her apartment building
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just off Ramsey Street. The victim, again, was
home alone, sleeping. Suspect broke in,
sexually assaulted her.
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They were able to get
DNA from the assault, and they put it
in their database. And they discovered
that there had
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been a match from another
crime in Harnett County, which is a neighboring county just
North of Cumberland County,
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just North of Fayetteville. And Ramsey Street is the
road to Harnett County. When we reached out
to Harnett County,
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they had been into this one
particular neighborhood 30, 40, 50 times in a month.
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They just constantly
being called. Described him as a
male, light-skinned, again, 5'9, 5'10 to 6 foot.
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And it just so
happened a deputy had been out there multiple
times, was just frustrated.
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And he just got a swab
and swabbed the window and put it in his trunk. And a week before this
case, he actually put it in.
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And that's how we got the match. So we knew that the
offender had been up in Harnett County, peeping.
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We knew that neighborhood
that that was occurring in was predominantly military.
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There was a lot of
special forces guys. We knew that because
they would do recon.
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They would go out in
the woods because they wanted to catch this peeper. And then they never had any
incidents when they were
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out in the woods, watching. So they thought, OK, he has to
be a military guy because he
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knows what we're doing. Maybe he worked on
airlines or helicopters because he had that
oil smell to him.
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Then we thought,
maybe he's a mechanic. NANCY GRACE: The net of the
serial rapist grows wider.
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So Fayetteville Police create a
multi-agency team to fight back. They join forces
with nearby agencies
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to broaden the investigation. KELLIE BERG: It was the
third victim where we actually started a task force.
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We had the State Bureau
of Investigation, FBI, local agencies, the County,
Harnett County, Hoke County,
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and we would meet
about once a week. We had a huge task force. JOHN SOMERINDYKE: They had
to link to Harnett County.
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So they were in
Harnett County doing a canvas of the neighborhood. They are canvassing
the neighborhoods here
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in Fayetteville, where
the rapes happen, responding to any call
that happened in any
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of these neighborhoods
in Fayetteville, reading all reports
going back years. KELLIE BERG: We definitely
had a serial rapist.
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We knew that he
was entering homes. He was watching people. When you don't know who
the suspect is, especially,
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and you can't figure it out,
you're looking at everyone. I used to carry around
a pack of DNA swabs.
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And everywhere I went, I'd be
like, oh, can I have a swab? I collected a lot of DNA.
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NANCY GRACE: The
next attack occurs less than a month later in an
apartment off Ramsey Street.
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JOHN SOMERINDYKE: The
victim was 15 years old. She was home alone. The victim was sleeping, wakes
up to the suspect on top of her.
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He rapes her. They did the canvas,
collected evidence, got her little cartoon
sheets from her bed
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because she is a little girl. She also did a
sexual assault kit. No evidence was retrieved
from her sexual assault kit.
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But we did recover the suspect's
DNA from her cartoon bed sheets. NANCY GRACE: Next, on
"Bloodline Detectives,"
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the speed with which this
serial rapist strikes, victim after victim, has
police and the community
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reeling and demanding answers. NANCY GRACE: Fayetteville,
North Carolina, 2007--
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a serial sex attacker strikes
so many victims so quickly, police give him a name,
"the Ramsey Street Rapist."
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We definitely had
a serial rapist. We knew that he was
peeping at this time. We knew we had a peeper.
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We knew that he was a white
or Hispanic male, 5'9 to 6'1. The big indicator that we
had was that funky smell.
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I think every one of
the victims described him as smelling really bad. NANCY GRACE: Then, September
18, 2007, another brutal attack.
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This time, the victim is
a criminology student. She's one of three
women in her apartment
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when the sex attack occurs. I had fallen asleep. My roommate and a friend
that was visiting that night
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had gone into her room and was
listening to music and stuff, and I had fallen asleep
in the living room.
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I had a headache, so I had
one of those squishy pillows. And I had put it over my
eyes to help me fall asleep.
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And next thing I knew, it
was a hand around my throat and the pressure of his hand
over the pillow on my face.
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I pretty much just
froze at first. And next thing I
know, he had said, if you scream or make any noise,
the other two will get it.
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So instantly, I went
into protection mode. So in my mind, I was just trying
to get him to stay away or not
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to have any harm come to them. I didn't have any
shoes on or anything. And we lived on
the ground floor.
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He told me, get up, and
we're going to walk outside. And the whole time he
was walking me out,
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the pillow was
still over my face. So he was using my shoulders
to guide where we were going.
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I never got a clear
vision of his face. I did, at one point
during the attack, try to barely open my
eyes so he wouldn't
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realize my eyes were open, and
I just saw that he was white. He had this mechanical
oil, sickening
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sweet kind of smell
to him that was kind of mixed with body odor. It was-- I don't know.
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It's really hard to describe. He had walked me out
into an open field, and that's where part
of the attack happened.
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I think something spooked him
when we were out in the field. And then he walked me back
up to our back porch area,
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and that's where he
finished the attack. And then he told me
to go back inside and to make sure I locked the
door behind me at that time.
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He said, don't call the police. I'll know If you do. And I probably sat down
for maybe four or five
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minutes, if that,
before I got up, and I went and woke my
roommate and my friend up.
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I don't remember details. I do remember they got me up,
and put me in the ambulance,
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and took me to the hospital. And my roommate rode to
the hospital with me. It was how a lot of women
say, it's like being
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violated all over again. But I just kept telling
myself, in the long run, this is going to help.
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This is going to be one of
those pieces of that puzzle they're going to need. NANCY GRACE: Now, five
separate sex attacks linked
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to the Ramsey Street rapist. And still, investigators
have not trapped him. Victims living in fear, knowing
he's still prowling the area.
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He had my ID. He had all of that. I didn't know who he was. I didn't know where he was.
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Was he going to
look at my license and say, OK, I'm going to go
get her to make sure she doesn't
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run her mouth or can't find me? Even today, I'm way more
hyper-aware of my surroundings.
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In the very beginning, if I went
anywhere, it was not by myself, and I had at least one or
two other people with me.
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NANCY GRACE: January,
2008, only four months after the last sex attack,
there's another assault
00:16:37
on Ramsey Street. This victim is a 29-year-old
military wife at home with her two young children.
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KANDICE CASTILLO: I had
worked the day before. And I remember just
being exhausted.
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And the little one, I
remember putting him to bed. And then my
three-year-old, she and I
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fell asleep on the couch
in the living room. And I woke up at one point
and picked her up and put
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her in her bedroom on her bed. She was afraid to
sleep in the dark, so I made sure that the hallway
light and her bedroom light
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stayed on. And then I watched
TV for a little bit, and then turned off the TV, and
I just fell asleep on the couch.
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For a split moment,
I thought maybe my husband had come
home from his deployment
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at the time he was
deployed overseas. Very quickly, I realized
that this was not my husband.
00:17:36
I was woken up with
someone covering my eyes, and covering my mouth, and
telling me to get up, and get up
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now and listen to
them and do what they told me to do so that they
don't hurt me or my children.
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Actually, he said my daughter
because literally you could see her room
because the light was on.
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This particular
person was not there to rob me, to take any of
my personal belongings,
00:18:07
but to victimize a woman
with two small children. He asked me to lock the
door to the bedroom.
00:18:18
But I was defiant, and I
was in a survival mode, like, what do I need to do? What can I do?
00:18:26
And so I was thinking,
we need fingerprints. I need fingerprints. So I did not lock the door.
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He ended up locking the door. He then asked for me to undress. Again, I was defiant
and did not do that.
00:18:40
He was going to
have to do whatever it was that he wanted to do. I won't go into details for the
next what seemed like eternity,
00:18:49
but probably an hour or
so of different things, but constantly threatening my
daughter's life and my life
00:18:58
and reiterating that if I
tell anyone what just occurred that he would find out.
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He knows who I am. He knows where I live. He would find me. He would find my daughter,
and he would kill both of us.
00:19:18
For a split second, I
thought about not reporting what had just happened. But I thought of my daughter,
and I thought of my husband,
00:19:27
and I thought of just everybody. This is not right, and
I have to do something. I called the
authorities and reported
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what had just happened to me. I never saw his face. He had a hoodie on, and
he had it cinched so
00:19:44
that I could not see his face. He smelled like
grease, like diesel, like works on cars type of
thing, a mechanical type thing.
00:19:55
He smelled dirty. Patrol arrived on scene. They secured the scene. They contact forensics, our
ID techs and detectives, who,
00:20:06
one will go to the hospital. They'll try to
talk to the victim. And one will go to
the site, and they'll
00:20:13
start processing the scene,
looking for evidence. In this case, they processed
the doors, and the windows,
00:20:18
and the bedroom. And then she was taken to the
hospital and given a rape kit. Fayetteville Police Department
poured a lot of resources
00:20:28
into that area
after the last rape. I mean, they were doing
undercover patrols, foot patrols.
00:20:34
They had a vacant apartment they
are using as a decoy apartment to maybe lure the suspect
in to attempt to rape
00:20:40
the undercover officer. They are stopping everything
that moved in that area after midnight and
getting cheek swabs
00:20:46
from folks to send to the
crime lab to compare for DNA. NANCY GRACE: Detectives
decide to use local media
00:20:53
and talk publicly about
the brutal serial rapist, hoping it will generate leads.
00:21:00
It finally came out
in 2008 that there had been a series of rapes, all
attributed to the same person
00:21:07
based on DNA. And that's when
things ramped up, I think, even more with fear
and concern in the community.
00:21:16
Shortly after the
news conference, I went to a local
gym that was holding a free self-defense session for
women, and it was just filled.
00:21:25
And they were all scared that
they might get assaulted. NANCY GRACE: There have
now been six sex assaults.
00:21:35
The community is
aware and on guard, but police find themselves no
closer to catching a suspect.
00:21:43
The case begins to go cold. JOHN SOMERINDYKE: After the
cases did officially go cold,
00:21:49
Kellie Berg kept
them warm each year by reaching out to the victims,
by reviewing the case files.
00:21:56
She was the only one doing
anything with these cases for at least five years. NANCY GRACE: After
seven long years,
00:22:05
a new cold-case team is formed. Can groundbreaking
forensic science finally identify a serial sex predator?
00:22:15
That's next on
"Bloodline Detectives." NANCY GRACE: Fayetteville,
North Carolina, 2013,
00:22:31
a team of cold-case detectives
try to identify a serial rapist responsible for a series of
six known sex attacks committed
00:22:41
between 2006 and 2008. Kellie Berg was one of
my sergeants for two weeks, and then she got
transferred out.
00:22:48
And when she got
transferred out, she lugged all
these black books, these case files for
these Ramsey Street cases.
00:22:55
She made sure I wasn't
going to forget about them. She didn't want anybody
forgetting about them.
00:23:00
NANCY GRACE: At this time, a
breakthrough forensic technology emerges called DNA phenotyping.
00:23:07
This revolutionary
new method offers a clearer profile
of the attacker by actually providing
a visual image.
00:23:17
It can bring detectives one
step closer to uncovering the predator's identity. Fayetteville Police Department
contacted Parabon to request
00:23:29
a snapshot phenotype analysis. This analysis would
predict the person's traits who is responsible
for these terrible attacks.
00:23:40
And then in July 2016,
Parabon delivered the snapshot phenotype image and predictions
to Fayetteville Police
00:23:48
Department. JOHN SOMERINDYKE: So it
did confirm our suspect was of European ancestry.
00:23:54
We weren't 100% sure
because one of the victims said he may be Hispanic just
because of his complexion.
00:24:01
So it cleared that up. But it also predicted that
his eye color was going to be brownish or hazel,
predicted his hair color was
00:24:08
going to be brown or
black, and predicted maybe slight freckling, and
predicted the face shape.
00:24:14
So that automatically
helps narrow down your suspect pool with
the Fayetteville area
00:24:19
at least by half. I actually drove down to
Fayetteville that weekend to look at the pictures.
00:24:27
I actually almost felt guilty
because when I looked at them, it didn't spark
any kind of memory.
00:24:34
It didn't. But again, I never
really saw his face. I guess a small part of me was
really hoping that when I saw
00:24:40
the picture, I could
be like, oh, yeah, I know him from, and it didn't. So it was a little
disappointing.
00:24:47
They then released that image
and description to the public, hoping to generate tips.
00:25:20
As far as leads go, we got
dozens of leads immediately. But in this case, it did
not lead to the identity
00:25:28
of the Ramsey Street rapist. Detectives find all
the leads dry up again. They need another
scientific breakthrough.
00:25:40
When we return to
"Bloodline Detectives," we find out if they get one. NANCY GRACE: 2018,
Fayetteville, North Carolina,
00:25:58
Bloodline Detectives attempt
a new forensic science, trying to catch a serial
rapist on the loose since 2006.
00:26:08
It still has not
produced a suspect. But now they seek out
another new forensic weapon,
00:26:16
investigative genetic genealogy. Investigative
genetic genealogy is using traditional
genealogy and DNA in order
00:26:28
to help law enforcement
identify violent criminals and unknown deceased individuals.
00:26:34
It's where they use
basically family-tree-type DNA. So if you might contact a
company called GEDmatch DNA
00:26:44
and you submit your DNA
to them, these companies will help you find your
ancestors and your relatives.
00:26:50
So the police will
look at your DNA that they have from the
rapes, and they will look
00:26:54
at the DNA in this database. And they say, OK,
this person over here did not commit the crime, but
the DNA clearly is related.
00:27:09
In 2018, when I joined
forces with Parabon, we reached out to
Fayetteville Police Department
00:27:15
to offer to perform genetic
genealogy on their case. The good thing with that
they already had that profile
00:27:23
from the phenotyping. So we could skip
that step, and they could get right on it, which
increased the turnaround
00:27:28
with our results. Because the DNA had already
been analyzed for the snapshot phenotyping, all
we had to do was
00:27:37
upload that file
to GEDmatch to see if we could get any strong
matches in that database.
00:27:42
And when I saw that match list,
I just couldn't believe it. There was an
individual who shared
00:27:50
over 800 centimorgans of her DNA
with the unknown Ramsey Street rapist. It took me a week or so to
start working on the case.
00:28:02
And once I did, I
thought it was going to be very straightforward
because we had this incredibly
00:28:08
promising match. But it didn't turn out to be
quite as simple as I thought. As I was trying to find somebody
who fit the profile to be
00:28:18
the Ramsey Street
rapist in this family, I was coming up against
a lot of challenges.
00:28:24
Nobody fit just perfectly. And notably, the only person
that I identified who seemed
00:28:31
like he could potentially
be the Ramsey Street rapist had bright-blue eyes. And we had very high confidence
that he had brown or hazel eyes.
00:28:41
And so that really
gave me pause. I felt like something was
wrong, something was missing,
00:28:46
but I just couldn't
figure out what it was. After beating my head
against the wall for a while,
00:28:54
I wrote up a report for
Detective Somerindyke with my findings. And very quickly after I
briefed him with that report,
00:29:04
he followed up on the
leads that I provided. And they were all dead
ends, just as I feared.
00:29:13
When I dug more deeply into
this match's family tree, I discovered that her
paternal half-sibling
00:29:22
married her maternal uncle, and
this was what I needed to find. So instead of looking
at her great nephews,
00:29:31
I started looking at her half
great nephews, who were also her first cousin, once removed.
00:29:38
So half great nephews
originally wasn't an option because they would only
share about 6% of their DNA,
00:29:45
and the match shared 12%. But if it's a
double relationship, you add those amounts
of DNA together.
00:29:53
So first cousins, once removed,
share about 6% of their DNA. And half great nephews
share about 6% of their DNA.
00:30:01
So 6 plus 6 equals 12. A-ha. I just couldn't stop. I didn't sleep at all. I worked on it straight through.
00:30:09
And it was 2:00 AM when
I finally found him. I came upon the person who
fit everything perfectly,
00:30:18
and that was Darold
Wayne Bowden. I just couldn't wait. I'm on the West Coast. The detectives were
on the East Coast.
00:30:29
And I thought, well,
maybe he'll be up. It's 5:00 AM his time. JOHN SOMERINDYKE:
I'm an early riser.
00:30:36
I got up at about 5:00 AM. I saw I had an email from Cece. I was doing some
research for Cece
00:30:43
on our end for records
she could not access. So I was going to
the vital records
00:30:47
section in Raleigh,
which is the state capital here in North Carolina. When I had an email from
Cece, said, do not go.
00:30:53
It's like, stop the presses. Do not go to Raleigh. Call me immediately. And so I just replied and said,
hey, OK, I'll be in the office
00:30:58
at 8 o'clock this morning. I'll just call
you when I get in. And then she replied back
immediately on the email, hey,
00:31:03
no, just call me now. I thought Detective
Somerindyke was going to jump out of his skin.
00:31:10
He was whooping, and
hollering, and probably waking his entire house up. It was a very exciting
morning for both of us.
00:31:19
When I told Detective
Somerindyke his name, he did not recognize it. But he very quickly dug in and
started researching and learning
00:31:28
everything he could about him. JOHN SOMERINDYKE: And
he was living the life. He had his own business.
00:31:33
He had a pretty decent
girlfriend from all accounts, had five kids. So yeah, I think he
thought he was cruising.
00:31:39
And as long as he didn't get
his DNA collected anywhere, I think he thought he
was going to be good.
00:31:45
NANCY GRACE: 43-year-old
Darold Wayne Bowden, no stranger to the law. JOHN SOMERINDYKE: The best way
to describe this guy is a career
00:31:53
petty criminal, and he
barely stayed under that DNA radar his entire
criminal career,
00:31:58
going back to the early '90s. I mean, he served time in
prison for breaking into cars,
00:32:02
but they aren't collecting DNA
for felony arrests back then. I mean, he had a lot of
theft, arrests, a lot
00:32:08
of domestic violence arrests. And unfortunately,
in North Carolina, we don't collect DNA for
domestic violence arrests.
00:32:14
So as we're doing research
on Bowden, a lot of things matched up-- you know,
the height, the weight.
00:32:19
He was from Linden. And people in Linden typically
do have a country accent, which
00:32:24
is what the victims described. We found out Bowden now-- so this is in 2018. He actually owned
his own heating
00:32:30
and air conditioning business. So we're trying to figure
out a way to collect his DNA.
00:32:35
NANCY GRACE: Detectives
must now prove Darold Bowden is the perpetrator. So they've got to get
a sample of his DNA.
00:32:44
Will they get it? That's next on
"Bloodline Detectives." NANCY GRACE: In Fayetteville,
North Carolina, 2018, detectives
00:33:01
believe they have
finally identified a serial sex predator. His name? Darold Wayne Bowden.
00:33:10
But now they must
prove Bowden's DNA matches DNA from the attacker
found at the crime scene.
00:33:21
The genetic genealogy report,
that's basically all it is. It's like a Crime Stoppers tip.
00:33:26
You still have to do
an independent police investigation. You have to lawfully obtain
that person's DNA if--
00:33:31
you know, if justified,
and get that DNA, match-- that one-on-one DNA
match at your state crime lab.
00:33:39
NANCY GRACE: Darold
Bowden owns a company that sells and installs HVAC units. Investigators decide to use
this to their advantage.
00:33:50
We were able to actually
get our hands on a couple of vacant decoy houses. And we had an undercover
guy call Bowden out
00:33:57
to come get an estimate
because one of the houses had no AC unit at all. It had been stolen.
00:34:02
And while Bowden's inside,
we have an undercover guy outside that swabs the
handle to the truck
00:34:10
that Bowden came up in. And then when Bowden left,
every place he touched, we swabbed for DNA, including
the undercover guy's
00:34:18
hand, who he shook. This was, like, in June,
and it's 95 degrees and humid in Fayetteville.
00:34:25
And there's no heat in
our air in this house, so we have a bucket
of water with cups.
00:34:30
We have little bottles of
water that we're offering. Bowden, trying to get him
to drink something that we
00:34:34
can get his DNA from that. He declined that. So I think we wound up
getting about eight or nine
00:34:39
different DNA
swabs, hoping to get a touch DNA sample that we sent
off to the state crime lab.
00:34:47
NANCY GRACE: The heat on
that day, however, does not favor the undercover agents.
00:34:52
Every sample we
sent, there was not a viable sample that
could be entered into the national DNA database.
00:34:59
I consult with our police
attorneys at the time and with the senior Superior
Court judge in Cumberland
00:35:06
County, Jim Ammons, and I
prepare a search warrant to get Darold Bowden's DNA. We called Bowden out
to a second house
00:35:15
to serve the search
warrant on him. We had the same undercover
guy call Bowden back
00:35:22
out to a second vacant house. Our undercover guy was
presenting himself as a house
00:35:26
flipper and just
said-- you know, called Bowden out to
come get an estimate. NANCY GRACE: Police
quickly swoop in.
00:35:34
They reveal their identities
to Bowden and obtain a DNA swab before releasing him.
00:35:41
The cat's kind of
out of the bag then. We serve the search
warrant on him, so we were keeping tabs on him.
00:35:46
I got a call from the forensic
biology manager himself. And I know he was kind
of excited about it
00:35:52
too, Jodie West, and he put me
on speakerphone with his staff that worked on the case.
00:35:55
And, yeah, they let me know. My office is kind of
in the back corner, but I always leave my door open.
00:36:01
But I had to turn
my chair around, facing away from the door. I did have a little
moment to myself
00:36:06
there, where I may have
teared up a tad bit, yeah. NANCY GRACE: Detectives
have an arrest warrant.
00:36:12
And now it's time to
apprehend Darold Wayne Bowden. Prior to going
to Bowden's house,
00:36:19
I just said to one
of the marshals, hey, I said, I don't care
when, but at some point,
00:36:24
I want my handcuffs to be on him
at some point in this process. We are up at o'dark
hundred the next morning,
00:36:30
staging up with the US marshals
and surrounded the house. They had to breach
the door because he
00:36:34
wouldn't answer the door. After they breached the
door, me and my detective are standing on the front
porch as the marshals
00:36:41
are in there, handcuffing him. I hear one of our guys say,
hey, get John's handcuffs.
00:36:46
We gotta get John's handcuffs. He was actually William Britton. He remembered me and came
out and got my handcuffs.
00:36:51
And they arrested Bowden
using my handcuffs. CECE MOORE: Darold was
arrested in his own home,
00:37:00
and he was photographed at the
time of his arrest, shirtless. And that revealed that he
had a large swastika tattoo,
00:37:10
which just reinforced
my feeling about this disgusting individual. JOHN SOMERINDYKE: That
picture pretty much
00:37:17
sums up who Darold Bowden is-- swastika prison tattoo. You know, just terrible person.
00:37:25
Yeah, who gets that? NANCY GRACE:
Lieutenant Somerindyke wastes no time telling
the victims the news
00:37:33
they've waited for so long. He didn't even say
hello or anything. Just instantly, he
was like, we got him.
00:37:40
And I just-- I collapsed. I mean, I started crying. I was smiling. I was-- it was almost instantly
like this huge weight had just
00:37:50
lifted. I just remember, like, crying,
and I couldn't believe it. I couldn't because I really
wasn't sure if that call would
00:38:00
ever come, you know, after
so many years of it-- like, just not hearing anything.
00:38:08
And the weight that
I had on my shoulder that I didn't even
realize I had was gone.
00:38:16
It was, like, a
year and a half, almost two years of waiting. And it was probably
not even a month
00:38:23
before we were supposed
to start the trial that I got a call that
said he had decided
00:38:28
he wanted to take a plea deal. PAUL WOOLVERTON: He had been
charged with 47 total crimes,
00:38:36
and he pleaded guilty to just
a small handful of those. And as a result, he's going to
be serving 27 years in prison.
00:38:44
Is that sufficient? Some people would say, no. The question is, how
long will he live?
00:38:49
Will he live to get released? You know, he was
arrested in his late 40s, so I guess there's a
possibility he might survive.
00:38:57
But we'll just have to see. NANCY GRACE: This moment marks
the beginning of a new journey
00:39:05
for the survivors. He knows he's
guilty, and he is not having a great freedom time
in America, walking around.
00:39:16
He is in prison. He is in a jumpsuit. And I'm OK with that because
he can't hurt anybody else.
00:39:24
I think, to a
certain extent, even today, I still kind of do the-- the looking over my
shoulder, or I'm way more
00:39:32
hyper-aware of my surroundings. But it definitely, in the very
beginning, if I went anywhere,
00:39:38
it was not by myself, and
I had one or-- at least one or two other people with me.
00:39:43
CECE MOORE: It was incredibly
profound to hear Kobi's story from her personally.
00:39:49
I had never been able to talk to
one of the victims in the cases I was involved in because
they were all deceased.
00:39:56
And she really
drove home to me how they carry this terrible burden
with them after a violent crime,
00:40:03
and especially if they don't
know who the perpetrator was. And she described to me of
always wondering, looking
00:40:11
over your shoulder, wondering
if that person is around, and not even wanting
to leave her home,
00:40:16
and how she felt like her life
just stopped at that moment. And then she expressed her
appreciation for my work
00:40:24
and told me what investigative
genetic genealogy had done for her and how
much it meant to her
00:40:30
to finally have a name and a
face to connect to her attacker. NANCY GRACE: For the brave
survivors of Darold Bowden,
00:40:39
it's time to find a
path forward, knowing he is no longer a threat to them. The bravery of these
victims through
00:40:48
their own individual nightmares
that last for years-- it's an inspiration. I'm Nancy Grace, and I want
to thank you for joining us
00:40:59
here on "Bloodline Detectives." [THEME MUSIC]