A sexual assault kit holds the evidence collected after a reported assault so that it can later be compared with a suspect or a database. An untested kit is compared with nothing. In Cleveland the count of untested kits, once someone made it, came to 1,348. In Toledo one 18-year-old kit, once tested, named two brothers whom prosecutors later tied to nine killings. In Los Angeles two of four kits were destroyed before a wrongly convicted man could have them tested again. In Baltimore the missing item was a swab that was never taken, and in Virginia and Montana state kit money ended up paying for answers to older cases.
None of these cases is the same as another. In some the kit was the evidence that mattered. In others it was a symbol of a system that missed a man, and in one, Chicago, the whole subject is a theory that laboratories have not been able to settle.
Anthony Sowell was convicted in 2011 of the aggravated murder of 11 women in Cleveland, Ohio, killed between 2007 and 2009. He was sentenced to death that August and died of a terminal illness on February 8, 2021, at 61. He had been convicted of attempted rape in 1990 and was a registered sex offender when his arrest in October 2009 made the case public.
The question that followed was why no one had stopped him earlier. In December 2008 a woman reported him to police. He was arrested and released without charges, CBS News reported in 2010. Families of six women who vanished after that release sued the city, arguing that the detective assigned to the case had failed to investigate it properly and that the failure "led to the murder of these six women." In September 2018 Cleveland agreed to pay $1 million, split among the families of Nancy Cobbs, Telacia Fortson, Amelda Hunter, Leshanda Long, Diane Turner and Janice Webb, plus their legal costs, Ideastream reported. The families of five other women were left out because of the timing of their deaths relative to that release.
The kit backlog came to light after his arrest, not before it. When Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine asked police departments in late 2011 to send untested kits to the state crime lab, Cleveland sent 1,348, CBS News reported in 2013. Nothing in that figure connects Sowell to any particular kit. What the number showed was how many reports the city had logged and left unread.
Ten years after the case became public, local reporting found that reform had stalled. Sondra Miller, president of the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center, said the commission’s recommendations had lost momentum and been largely forgotten, and that survivors still met an inadequate response. City Councilman Matt Zone, who chaired the council’s safety committee, agreed: "We haven’t done enough."
Anthony Cook is serving two life sentences in Ohio. A jury convicted him in March 1982 of the murder of Peter Sawicki, a Toledo-area real estate developer, killed on September 18, 1981. In 2000, under a plea agreement, he pleaded guilty to the aggravated murder of Tom Gordon, killed in May 1980, and gave videotaped interviews to police in April 2000 that accounted for seven more killings. Prosecutors put the total at nine killings between 1973 and 1981. Three, by both brothers' accounts, he committed with his younger brother, Nathaniel. Prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges for the killings that had never been tried.
For nearly two decades Cook sat in prison for one killing while the others went unsolved. The break was a kit. In 1997, at a prosecutors' conference in Cleveland, Julia Bates talked about DNA with Stephanie Tubbs Jones, then the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, who mentioned its use in the Sam Sheppard case. Bates later said she woke up thinking that DNA might work in the Cook case. She went to learn whether the kit from the 1980 case involving Tom Gordon and his girlfriend still existed. On October 15, 1997, WTOL reported, she called a colleague named Stiles and suggested testing the old evidence.
Usable DNA survived on the kit. It matched Nathaniel and then Anthony, who was brought from prison. The Associated Press summarized the result: investigators had long suspected the brothers but lacked evidence until 1998, when blood samples and DNA linked them to one of the killings. Nathaniel was arrested in early 1998. The deal that followed traded full confessions from both brothers for a promise that Nathaniel would be released after 20 years. By March 2018 CBS News reported him close to release.
Anthony could not have been sentenced to life without parole under the law that applied to his crimes, because the killings preceded Ohio’s current death penalty law, and he has been eligible for parole hearings since. He was denied parole in February 2015. A hearing set for December 5, 2024, was postponed to March 2025 after he declined to meet the board, WTVG and WTOL reported. The kit had led to nine names.
Chester Dewayne Turner, a former pizza delivery driver, was convicted in April 2007 of the first-degree murder of ten women in Los Angeles, and in June 2014 of four more. He was sentenced to death twice, in July 2007 and on August 1, 2014. The California Supreme Court affirmed the first sentence, with one count reversed, on November 30, 2020. He was identified in 2003, 16 years after the first of those killings, when a DNA sample he was required to give after a 2002 conviction matched unsolved killings.
The case against him exposed a second set of casualties. A man, D.A.J., had been convicted in 1995 of the murder of Mary Edwards and of manslaughter in the deaths of two others, Tammie Christmas and Debra Williams, and sentenced to 36 years to life, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. In 2002 the Post Conviction Assistance Center was appointed to represent him under California’s new law allowing DNA testing after conviction. Two of the four kits in the cases had been destroyed. Christmas’s kit was among them. The Los Angeles Police Department said in 2004 that detectives were confident D.A.J. was innocent of her death and that Turner was the likely suspect. Turner has never been charged with it.
The surviving evidence from the Williams and Edwards cases was tested. It excluded D.A.J. and matched Turner. On March 4, 2004, D.A.J.'s convictions were vacated, the charges were dismissed and he was released. Prosecutors later concluded that his confessions had been coerced by police, the Associated Press reported in 2014. On October 4, 2006, the Los Angeles City Council approved a $720,000 settlement of his claim. He also received $74,600 in state compensation.
The department’s cold case unit had six detectives and a backlog of thousands of unsolved killings, the Associated Press reported. Detective Cliff Shepard joined it in 2001 and submitted DNA from a victim’s body to the database. On September 8, 2003, detectives learned that Turner’s profile matched two cases. On October 23, 2004, the department announced that DNA linked him to 13 killings between 1987 and 1998 and called him "the most prolific serial killer ever identified in the history of the City of Los Angeles." Chief William J. Bratton cited the case in support of Proposition 69, a ballot measure to expand DNA collection from people arrested for felonies.
The Utah case adds a last twist. A killing in Salt Lake City in 1998, that of Itisha Camp, stayed unsolved for 25 years even though a DNA profile from the evidence had been developed by 2013. It never reached the national DNA index. Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill said that someone "did not check the right box." When the profile was entered in CODIS, it matched Turner. Investigators served a warrant on Turner at San Quentin, took cheek swabs, and the Utah State Crime Lab reported a match. On June 14, 2024, Gill’s office charged him with aggravated murder in Utah’s Third District Court. No trial on that charge has been reported.
Raymont Hopewell pleaded guilty in Baltimore to murdering five older residents of the city, four women and one man who died between February 1999 and August 2005. The plea also covered other counts, and it ruled out a death sentence. He was 35. He was sentenced to four consecutive terms of life without parole, with further life terms and long sentences on the other counts.
In 2004 he was convicted on drug charges. CBS News reported in 2008 that Maryland police never collected a DNA sample from him at the time, so there was no way to connect him with the deaths of two women. He was released after six months in jail, and three more of the killings followed. CBS used the case to show what a backlog of untested DNA samples could cost. A DNA expert quoted in the same report, Chris Asplen, warned that samples left untested meant profiles missing from the database, and offenders left on the street.
The Chicago cases are the unproven end of the subject. Since 2001, dozens of women, most of them Black, have been killed in Chicago, most on the South and West Sides, and most of the cases have never been solved. In 2019 a small national nonprofit, the Murder Accountability Project, said that 51 unsolved deaths of women classified as strangulation or asphyxiation between 2001 and 2018 had the characteristics of serial murder. Its founder, the retired journalist Thomas Hargrove, argued that it was very unlikely that 51 women had been killed by 51 different men, and told VICE he believed more than one serial killer was probably active in the city. A computer program built to flag clusters of unsolved killings had picked out the group.
None of this is established. The Chicago Police Department said it had no evidence that the deaths were linked or that a serial killer was responsible, and from April 2019 it reviewed the cases through homicide detectives assigned to an FBI violent crimes task force, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. WBEZ reported in June 2019 that police said DNA from 21 of the cases came from 21 different men.
The backlog entered through one case. Diamond Turner was 21 when she died in 2017. According to the Illinois State Police timeline reported by ABC7, Chicago police sent evidence to the state laboratory in March 2017, the laboratory issued a DNA report in January 2018, police sent more evidence in November 2018, and the laboratory finished analyzing it in March 2019. A Chicago police spokesman blamed about a year of delay on the laboratory. A state police spokeswoman said the laboratory had sent its report almost a year before the arrest. Police said a warrant was issued in October 2019. A man, A.H., was arrested in January 2020 and charged on January 30 with her murder; the outcome has not been reported, and police said he did not appear to be linked to the other cases.
CBS 2 Chicago reported in February 2019 that investigations in such cases were delayed by backlogs in analyzing DNA. It is unknown whether the 51 cases belong together. A group of Roosevelt University journalism students, in a project called Unforgotten 51, wrote portraits of the women in 2020 and 2021, TheGrio reported.
Wayne Nathan Nance of Missoula, Montana, was never charged with a crime. He was 30 when he died in September 1986 in an encounter with a couple, both of whom survived, the Associated Press reported. After his death, investigators linked him to at least six killings in Missoula and Ravalli counties between 1974 and 1986. No court has examined those links. Prosecutors sought, and failed to obtain, an indictment over a 1974 death.
His file reopened in 2021 for a reason that has nothing to do with a kit. A woman whose death came to light in Missoula County in 1985 had gone unidentified for 36 years. The sheriff’s office worked with forensic anthropologists and a forensic odontologist and searched missing persons records in the United States and Canada without success, KPAX reported. In early 2021, with money from the Montana Department of Justice’s Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, the sheriff’s Cold Case Unit sent samples from her case to Othram, a private DNA laboratory in Texas, which produced a genetic profile that let investigators begin a genealogy search. Special deputies traced her relatives to a family in Spokane, Washington, according to Othram’s announcement.
On May 10, 2021, the sheriff’s office announced that she was Janet Lee Lucas. She was 23, the mother of a five-year-old son, and she had grown up in California and Washington with seven brothers and sisters. Her son, KPAX reported, spent much of his adult life looking for her. Cox Media Group’s national desk asked at the time whether Nance had been involved. No link has been announced.
Between October 1986 and September 1989, eight young people from southeastern Virginia were killed or vanished in four cases, each involving a young couple. The press and many investigators came to treat the four as a series called the Colonial Parkway Murders. Nobody was ever charged. In January 2024 the Virginia State Police said DNA evidence tied a dead man, Alan W. Wilmer Sr., a fisherman and tree service owner from Lancaster County who died in 2017 at 63, to the 1987 killing of David Knobling and Robin Edwards. The State Police said that had he been alive, he would have been charged. He was never charged or tried, and no court has ruled on any of this.
Money for kits paid for part of the work. On November 14, 2025, the Virginia State Police and the Isle of Wight Commonwealth’s Attorney, Georgette Phillips, announced that DNA had identified Wilmer as the suspect in the 1988 killing of Laurie Ann Powell, 18, of Gloucester County. The testing was done by DNA Labs International in Florida and paid for by the Virginia Attorney General’s Office through its Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. Powell’s sister said she "loved life and was living life to the fullest." Officials did not place the Powell case in the series.
In January 2026 the FBI announced that, citing forensic and DNA advances, it attributed the 1986 deaths of Cathleen Thomas and Rebecca Dowski to Wilmer. The Thomas family had asked for hair evidence in the 1986 case to be retested with newer methods, Coastal Virginia Magazine reported in 2018. In September 2026 the FBI attributed the vanishing of Keith Call and Cassandra Hailey to him as well, on what it called the totality of circumstances, with no direct forensic evidence. Families of several victims have publicly disputed that finding as circumstantial. The fourth case, that of Annamaria Phelps and Daniel Lauer in 1989, has no named suspect and is listed by the Virginia State Police as active.
The Golden State Killer case is the best known example, and the kit’s role in it was narrow. Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, pleaded guilty on June 29, 2020, to 13 counts of first-degree murder committed in California between 1975 and 1986 and to 13 counts of kidnapping to commit robbery. Prosecutors said he also admitted 161 further crimes against 61 further victims in seven counties. On August 21, 2020, he was sentenced to 11 consecutive terms of life without parole for the murders and a further consecutive life term for the kidnappings.
Laboratory comparisons had tied the cases to a single profile by 2001, but it matched nobody in the offender databases. A 2026 account in the University of Texas School of Law’s magazine, based on interviews with the team, describes how the problem was solved. Dr. Peter Speth, the former Ventura County medical examiner, had kept a duplicate of the 1980 Charlene Smith rape kit in a freezer for 37 years. FamilyTreeDNA, a commercial testing company whose founder agreed to help, produced a genealogy-style data file from that evidence. In January 2018, according to the prosecution’s statement of facts, a profile from the Charlene Smith evidence was uploaded to a public genealogy database. Barbara Rae-Venter, a retired patent attorney who had taken up genealogy to help adoptees find their birth families, worked with the team to build family trees from the matches. DeAngelo was arrested in Citrus Heights on April 24, 2018, after a discarded tissue matched the crime evidence.
No kit named Sowell, and Cleveland’s 1,348 boxes were counted after he was in custody. In Toledo a kit named the Cook brothers 18 years after it was taken. In Los Angeles destroyed kits closed off retesting in the cases that had sent a man to prison, and a profile that never reached a national database delayed one answer for 25 years. In Baltimore the missing item was a swab nobody collected. In Montana and Virginia, kit money identified a dead woman and a dead suspect. In Chicago the question of whether the evidence ever tied 51 cases together is still open, and nobody has proved the theory.
• 1980: Charlene Smith kit collected; a duplicate is later kept in a freezer for 37 years.
• May 1980: Tom Gordon killed in Toledo; his girlfriend’s kit is collected.
• 1995: D.A.J. convicted in Los Angeles.
• October 15, 1997: A Toledo prosecutor calls to propose testing the 1980 kit.
• 1998: DNA from the kit matches both Cook brothers.
• 1999 to 2005: The Baltimore killings; Hopewell convicted on drug charges in 2004 without a DNA sample.
• 2000: Anthony and Nathaniel Cook confess on videotape.
• March 4, 2004: D.A.J. released in Los Angeles after DNA testing.
• October 23, 2004: LAPD names Turner as linked to 13 killings.
• April 2007: Turner convicted of ten murders.
• October 2009: Sowell arrested in Cleveland.
• Late 2011: Cleveland sends 1,348 untested kits to the state lab.
• March 2017 to March 2019: Chicago evidence in the Diamond Turner case moves through the state laboratory.
• January 2018: DeAngelo profile uploaded to a genealogy database; April 24, 2018, arrested.
• January 30, 2020: A.H. charged in the Diamond Turner case.
• June 29, 2020: DeAngelo pleads guilty.
• May 10, 2021: Janet Lee Lucas identified in Missoula County.
• January 2024: Virginia State Police name Wilmer in the 1987 double killing.
• June 14, 2024: Utah charges Turner.
• November 14, 2025: Powell case attributed to Wilmer.
• January and September 2026: FBI attributes three more cases to Wilmer.