On June 14, 1989, a man with a knife forced his way into Lisa Walker's car as she prepared to leave a restaurant parking lot in Hickory. It was about 10 p.m. and Walker, 19, had just got off work.
The man drove her car onto Interstate 40, headed west, stopped along the side of the dark interstate and sexually assaulted her. He offered her food, money and drugs. He hit her across the face when she cried.
The man drove to a vacant lot outside Asheville, assaulted Walker again, then walked away. She last saw him heading toward some nearby railroad tracks.
For 11 years, Walker's case remained unsolved.
During that time, she struggled emotionally. Her attacker had stripped her of her dignity and confidence. The memories of that night haunted her.
"It's always there. You're always fearful. You feel endangered," said Walker, now 30. "It's something I thought about constantly. You're like, looking over your shoulder. You're always trying to make sure you lock your doors."
Walker eventually found a renewed strength and commitment to God, but she always hoped her attacker would be caught.
Investigators thought they had found the man about two years after she was assaulted, but the suspect's DNA did not match DNA evidence collected from Walker's clothes and car on the night of the attack.
"That's when I thought the case was closed," Walker said.
But in January, analysts at the State Bureau of Investigation started running DNA samples from unsolved crimes against samples in the state's DNA database - a depository established in 1994 containing DNA profiles of people convicted of any of more than 20 felonies. One match linked Walker's case to Leslie K. Butler, 37, who was in a state prison in Warren County.
Butler pleaded guilty earlier this month to kidnapping and rape in Walker's assault. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison.
"I'm thankful for the DNA , for the technology," Walker said. "Because if it hadn't have been for that, I wouldn't have been standing in court that day."
Bill would expand testing
Proponents of DNA testing point to the potential for solving decades-old crimes . Collecting DNA from convicted felons can also target repeat offenders as well as solidify evidence against the guilty or exonerate the innocent, supporters say.
Some North Carolina leaders hope to expand the state's DNA database. Sen. Tony Rand, D-Cumberland, is leading the charge to collect DNA samples from anyone arrested - not just those convicted - on certain violent felony charges, including murder, rape, and assaults involving the elderly, disabled and young. Consideration of legislation to create pilot testing programs in three counties - Forsyth, Robeson and Halifax - stalled in the state Senate in July because of concerns about privacy issues, the cost of the program and which counties would participate. But Rand, a former defense lawyer, said he plans to resurrect the issue when the General Assembly convenes in January.
If the bill passes, North Carolina would be only the second state to call for DNA testing of those not yet convicted of a crime . Louisiana approved a similar bill but has not implemented it because of a lack of money.
A national commission studying the use of DNA evidence has cautioned officials against moving rapidly to broaden collection efforts to people who are arrested.
Many states, including North Carolina, have a substantial backlog at their DNA laboratories. There are about 31,000 DNA samples from convicted felons stored at the State Bureau of Investigation crime laboratory south of Raleigh. Analysts have extracted the genetic profiles from about 16,000 and entered the information in the state's database. The rest are awaiting analysis.
Nationwide, there are about 750,000 unanalyzed DNA samples, said Chris Asplen, an assistant U.S. attorney general and the executive director of the National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence. The number of "owed samples" - those not yet taken from eligible convicted people - is even greater.
The federal government appropriated $15 million this year to help states reduce their backlogs, and officials have requested another $15 million for next year.
Inundating crime laboratories with more DNA samples without allocating enough money for testing them or getting rid of the backlog would exacerbate the logjam and do more harm than good, the commission says. "Given the nature of the backlog that we already have ... we should really walk before we run, and as such, we should take care of these issues first," Asplen said. "Deal with the two backlogs that you have and don't create a third.
"DNA technology is still a sensitive issue with the public," he said. "If we don't proceed slowly enough and thoughtfully enough, what you risk is a reactionary reaction."
1994 law flooded lab
The DNA sample that led to Butler's conviction in the attack on Walker was drawn after he was convicted as a habitual felon on an attempted first-degree kidnapping charge in Buncombe County in 1996. He was sentenced to up to nine years five months in prison on that charge.
Medically trained staff from the N.C. Department of Correction have been drawing blood samples for DNA testing from felons since July 1994. State law calls for taking samples from those convicted of any of more than 20 offenses, including rape, taking indecent liberties with a child and first-degree arson. The samples are taken at intake centers across the state before inmates are transferred to prison; they're then shipped to the SBI lab for analysis.
The law also says that anyone who was convicted of one of the crimes before July 1, 1994, but still is in prison must submit a DNA sample before being released from prison.
Mark Nelson, the SBI agent in charge of the state's DNA database unit, said that his office was swamped almost as soon as the testing started. "I'll never forget it," he said. Prison officials dropped off 800 samples the first day. Within six weeks, Nelson and his three-person team - his team now has five - received 12,000 to 14,000 samples.
"We had blood samples in every single refrigerator. We had to tape the doors shut," Nelson said. "We got clobbered that first year, big time."
DNA is like a zipper: Locked between the teeth of the zipper are genetic codes that hold the key to a person's unique genetic profile. DNA samples can be extracted from such places as a person's skin, sweat, blood and semen. It is the analysts' job to unzip the zipper to develop the genetic profile. It's a time-consuming process with an elaborate system of checks and balances, Nelson said. Results are triple-checked before they are entered into the state database, which is linked to the national database, the Combined DNA Index System.
New technology introduced in 1998 cut the time it took the SBI to analyze DNA samples from two months to two weeks. But because the new technology involves a different part of each DNA sample than the old one did, officials had to reanalyze all of the old samples while keeping pace with the influx of the new. The SBI lab gets up to 5,000 samples a year that were taken from prisoners, more than the lab can handle.
"It's all over the country," Nelson said. "The samples are coming in faster than they can be analyzed."
State officials hope to receive a $700,000 federal grant that Nelson expects could eliminate the backlog by July 2001.Questions raised about cost
Rand's proposal, which was introduced last year and resurfaced in the final days of this year's legislative session, called for testing anyone arrested on felony charges. It would have provided $40,000 to the N.C. Department of Justice to run the pilot program for one year, but it's not clear exactly how much the program would cost to run. Initial plans called for $500,000 for the program over two years.
The bill called for health officials to take the DNA sample and for law officers to send the sample to a lab to be analyzed.
Sen. Ham Horton, R-Forsyth, supports DNA testing but worried that the new program would put a financial burden on local law-enforcement agencies. Local leaders in Forsyth County, including Chief Linda Davis of the Winston-Salem Police Department and District Attorney Tom Keith, shared Horton's concern.
"Testing of arrestees would impose a significant burden on the arresting agency, just in terms of manpower and the time required for the testing," Davis said. "Who would do it? Where would it be done? ... Which medical facility?"
The concept sounds good, Davis said, but implementing the program would be difficult.
Keith questioned whether other testing procedures at the SBI, such as chemical analysis in drug cases, would be hampered as agents worked to process the additional DNA testing.
"If this is a perfect world and we're a rich state, great, let's do it," Keith said. "It sounds good, feels good. But maybe the fiscal impact's going to be enormous. It could overwhelm the SBI lab."
Rand acknowledged that extra DNA testing would increase costs and workload at the SBI lab. He said that the program needs to be backed by money.
"If we don't give 'em the resources then it's silly to even talk about it," he said. "It's like getting them a whole lot of new guns and giving them a single bullet."
Rand plans to meet with SBI officials before January to talk about the proposal. In addition to cost, it's still not clear who would take the samples after someone is arrested - though Rand says he thinks that trained officers could take the sample from a person's mouth with a cotton swab - or whether the sampling could violate privacy rights, as civil-liberties advocates have charged.
Rand suspects that some legislators may be hesitant about the program because the technology is new.
"It's science," he said. "I think some people tend to think it's like Big Brother: Some nameless, faceless finger is coming out of the clouds. It's nothing like that."
Instead, Rand likens DNA testing to fingerprinting.
"If you protect the privacy, you are doing it (the testing) as an identification measure only," he said. "I think society wants the guilty punished, the innocent freed."
But Deborah Ross, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, said that DNA testing is not at all like taking a person's fingerprints. She warned that, unlike fingerprints, the samples could be misused for medical research and paternity tests.
"Once the state has it, who's going to be able to get it and under what circumstances?" she said.
Law-enforcement officers also might arrest a suspect on a bogus charge so they have an excuse to get a DNA sample, she said.
A person's DNA sample should be taken only if officers find DNA evidence at a crime scene to compare it to and if the officers have a court order to test the person, Ross said.
'Just scratching the surface'
Since 1994, SBI officials have registered about 24 successful hits from the DNA database, Nelson said. Seven of those have been since January, when officials started comparing samples in the database to samples from unsolved crimes . Nelson expects that the database will help in more unsolved cases.
"We're just scratching the surface," he said. "As you bring up the database size, the number of (successful) cases increases."
Norris Yoder of the Hickory Police Department, who worked on Walker's rape case, said he has reservations about expanding collection efforts to people who have not been convicted because it could burden local agencies.
But Yoder said that DNA evidence was crucial to solving Walker's case. Without it, he said, "It would still be an unsolved case and would always have been unsolved."
"It's kind of a unique case," he said. "The DNA actually cleared one person . . . and eventually ended up convicting someone. It cuts both ways."
The DNA evidence also led to Walker gaining a long-sought sense of closure.
After Butler was convicted, Walker met with him in a visitation room at the Catawba County Justice Center. She looked into his eyes as she handed him a Bible inscribed with his name. Inside, Walker had written, "You have been forgiven by me."
As she left the room, Walker said, she had a warm, "healing" feeling throughout her body. "There was a release there, and I didn't hate him at that point. I cared about his salvation," she said.
"I'm blessed that they did go ahead and do the DNA (testing) 11 years ago," she said. "If it finds one assailant and it helps one person get on with their life, then it's worth it."