I just remember getting the text from my investigator.

I immediately pick up my phone and I was like, oh my god, what do we know.

She was able to provide a description of the man because he came into their home.

He ate some food, he had some drinks.

When someone commits a crime, they inevitably leave little clues of who they are at the scene.

Sometimes it's a fingerprint, a speck of blood, or a drop of seamen and while police collect the evidence, a lot of times it just sits on tested for decades.

But now the promise of new DNA technology has some departments vowing to clear a backlog of cases, starting with the most violent.

This is America's Crime Lab.

I'm Alan Lanzlesser and I'm here with producer Catherine Finalosa.

Allen, I want to tell you about a case from nineteen ninety.

It happened in Stone Mountain, Georgia, which is about a half hour east of Atlanta.

On July fifteenth, nineteen ninety, a nine to one one call is made a little after four in the morning, and a neighbor calls saying that a woman has shown up at their door and she's injured, pretty severely injured.

She's standing in just a blood soaked T shirt.

This woman is Pamela Sumpter and she lives in a neighboring apartment.

She says she's been stabbed and she's been raped.

Oh my god.

So the neighbors start attending to her, trying to stop the bleeding.

The police arrive, and when they go to Pamela's apartment, which she shared with her brother John, they find John dead.

He's lying on the floor and a couch has been placed on top of his body.

Oh, it's just a brutal, brutal crime scene.

Oh my god.

So he's died and she Pamela, I mean, do we know where she was stabbed?

She has multiple stab wounds.

But before she's taken to the hospital, she's actually able to give a description of the man who attacked her to the police.

What she says is that she'd never met him before.

Her brother had brought him home the night before, and her brother was gay, but it wasn't like him to bring men home to their apartment, so that was odd.

She says.

The guy's name was maybe al or Eddie, she can't really remember.

She did remember that he had said he had recently moved to the area.

He was about I don't know, five seven or five nine.

He was dark skinned, and he was built like a bodybuilder like sort of very like big muscles, a thick build.

Huh.

Somehow, the way you're telling me this case, I feel like I have my little Sherlock cap on.

I'm ready to solve this case because this is this is horrible.

Oh, it's horrible.

Also, it's really good that they were able to talk to Pamela right away, because it's so critical to talk to the victim and get as much information as you can because that's your best bet.

Well, and it's amazing that Pamela, considering her injuries, is even able to like have a clear head and remember these details and share.

Them bravery even to have the wherewithal to.

Do that exactly.

And so she's able to tell police that this guy, el or Eddie had come home with her brother.

They had had some drinks and ate food at the apartment, and then her brother John and the man decide to head out for the night and they say they're going to drive around Atlanta, maybe hit up some clubs, and they invite Pamela to come with them, but she says no, you guys go, I need to get up early for work.

So she stays home.

The men leave, and Pamela stays up a little bit.

She's sitting on the couch watching TV when her brother and this guy return.

It's been maybe a couple hours and it's about eleven o'clock at night.

The three of them talk for a little bit, but there's something about this guy that makes Pamela uncomfortable, and she can't put her finger on it, but she just feels really uneasy around him.

So she excuses herself and she says she's going to bid and her bedroom is on the second floor of the apartment, so she goes upstairs and she leaves John and this guy downstairs in the room in front of the TV.

Okay, so Pamela goes upstairs to go to bed, and at some point we don't know exactly what time, but Pamela wakes up to find this man standing completely naked over her bed.

He's holding a knife in his hand.

Oh my god.

Pamela is obviously completely startled and confused, and she asks the man, where is my brother?

This guy says he's downstairs sleeping, and then this man attacks Pamela.

So those are the details that she's able to tell police.

At this point, she's rushed to the hospital and into emergency surgery to repair the stab wounds.

She has abdominal surgery.

Her shoulder is dislocated, she's in a rough way, and they do a rape kit.

Now, after surgery, she wakes up, she's able to talk to her family, she's able to actually talk to the police again, but then she needs to be ventilated due to the extensiveness of her injuries, and she never regains consciousness.

So Pamela dies two weeks later in the hospital.

No, that's so sad.

The night of the attack, the police actually spend about six hours in Pamela and John's apartment collecting evidence and just examining the whole crime scene.

And I was curious about what they found, so I called Shannon Hotter, she's a senior assistant District Attorney at the DeKalb County DA's office.

As detectives started working their way through the home, what they found was a really, really awful scene.

The phone lines had been cut throughout the home.

They found Pamela's bedroom and disarray, blood soaked sheets, blood on her bedroom floor.

John had also been stabbed, and the sofa in the living room had been placed over his body, so it was covering his head and upper torso, so they had to remove the sofa off of his body.

It's really haunting.

I mean, there's blood everywhere.

That sounds horrific, and it also sounds like there's a lot of evidence for detectives to collect.

The investigators, i mean, even back then, did a tremendous job.

They collected the sheets from Pamela's bed, They collected biological samples from suspected blood.

In the kitchen, there's definitely signs that, as Pamela said that they had had dinner, and the dishes have not been washed yet.

They're able to take fingerprints from the plates.

They also dust the bathroom doorknob and they're able to get fingerprints from that.

They were able to collect the knife that was near John's body that was the suspected murder weapon.

They took hundreds of pictures.

They just spent a lot of time meticulously going through the scene to try to collect or retain anything that might lead to the identity of this person.

This happened in nineteen ninety, so the FBI's Crime Database CODIS isn't operating yet, right.

Yeah, I don't think that was really available to states until the late nineties.

So I mean, what options do they have for testing the evidence?

Yeah, I was curious about that too.

What they could do in nineteen ninety was if they were able to generate a suspect, they could do a direct comparison of that person's DNA to any biological samples from the crime scene that yielded DNA.

So they would want to retain any potential samples just in case they did develop a suspect.

It's just interesting to me that when you started telling this story, I, for some reason, because I know nothing about this, immediately jumped to I wonder if Pamela was involved and has some kind of faked injury.

And I just think that's so messed up of me in a way to immediately question the victim.

I don't even know why I'm sharing that, but it's interesting how it's so easy to blame the victim so quickly.

And I'm kind of noticing that in myself even and that then she died well.

And I think also you can see how complicated exactamining a crime scene is when you don't really know who's involved and what the backstories are.

That you have to like put your assumptions aside in a way, right, like not let any judgment creep into your thought pattern and really just like try and focus on the facts that you have in front of you, because I mean, clearly a lot of cases, right the prime suspect turns out to be not involved at all.

There is such a thing as coincidence too.

Things can just happen, and yeah, you have to try to set the bias on the table.

And also you were saying being an investigator in the situation, walking in having no context and there's blood everywhere.

Two people have died or at least one has died so far, and one is severely injured.

It's like, how terrifying.

And you're just questioning every single person and everything that's happening.

If you're to believe Pamela, there's another person who was in that apartment that evening who is now mi Ia.

So the police question everyone neighbors, friends, family, and they're trying to figure out, like did anybody hear anything?

Did Pamela or John mention this man to any friends or family?

They really can't find out much about him.

They're just going on maybe his name is Eddie or al.

I think friends mentioned like, oh yeah, maybe he had been at a party that Pamela and John had been to a week or two before.

But even that was a little like, you know, questionable recollection.

So they're kind of stuck.

So it's great that they collected the DNA, but there's nothing to do with it.

Yeah, I can imagine that would have been so frustrating.

So the case with no viable leads was really shelved.

There were a lot of other cases coming in.

The detective started working those, and without any tips or leads coming in, the case wasn't really ever looked back at again.

So this rape kit just sits untested.

I have a little glimmery feeling though, that that rape kit is going to come into play later on.

Yes, now we're going to jump ahead to twenty twenty two.

Two things sort of happen almost simultaneously.

So first, the federal government sets aside money for states to test rape kits, and it's through something called the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative.

The goal is to clear out a backlog of untested rape kits.

And then something else happens.

Right around that same time, our office was putting together a cold case task force, and we were looking specifically at unsolved homicides here into Cab County that might have DNA evidence that we could use and hopefully develop a suspect.

Shannon Hotter and her team start looking through their unsolved.

Cases, so we started with cases that involve female victims, stabbings and sexual assaults.

Because of the personal nature of those types of attacks, you are just more likely to have DNA evidence.

I believe the GBI sent off over seven hundred rape kits, and Pamela Sumter's case was one of the ones that really stuck out to us.

It makes me angry the fact that there are these seven hundred rape kits just sitting there, and that's just at one agency, which means that when you look at the whole country, there's probably hundreds of thousands of untested kits.

I mean, when you hear about rape kits, you just assume that at the very least they're all tested to some degree.

Yeah, I agree, and I mean I guess the other way to look at it is back at the time, the only way they could test a rape kit is if they had a suspect in mind, but I mean, thank god they didn't just toss the rape kit out at some point.

It's kind of amazing that they actually kept it.

All these years.

That's true.

So Pamela's rape kit fits all the criteria for testing now, and Shannon Hotter sends the kit off to a lab.

A number of swabs were taken in Pamela's rape kit, but it was the vaginal swab from that rape kit that yielded the DNA profile, and it was from Semen.

But when they load that profile into the state's crime database, which is, you know, basically a database full of DNA from known criminals or previous violent crimes.

We had no hits whatsoever.

I honestly thought you were going to say, now they have a suspect.

That must have been incredibly disappointing.

Actually she's not disappointed.

So I hate to say that it was exciting.

Here we have our opportunity to deploy the new technique that has been utilized around the country to solve hundreds of cases, and we have found a case where we can apply it ourselves.

Shannon Hotter is talking about genetic genealogy.

Now, since there were no hits in George's crime database.

She wants to use the DNA and build out a family tree, but first they have to upload the profile to codis.

To see if the DNA profile matches a different crime in another state.

Yeah, exactly.

So the profile is submitted.

And then we got a hit.

It was a hit to another unsolved case in Michigan.

Then I'm really excited.

Now we have a potential suspect and that really is the true goal here, to solve this case and to bring justice to the Sumpter family.

So let me get this straight.

The DNA profile hits in codis, so they know that the person who raped Pamela and murdered her and her brother John is tied to another crime in Michigan, but we still don't know his identity.

Yeah.

So the Michigan case was also in the early nineties, a woman was sexually assaulted, but no one was arrested in the case.

However, at the time police did question someone and they collected his DNA and then entered that into CODAS, and Shannon Hotter is like, wait a second, we're onto something.

I mean, this is the first big break in thirty four years.

So as soon as we get that potential match notification, we immediately get in touch with their cold case department and tell them about this potential lead that we now have in both of our cases, and they get to work trying to pull this file for us.

So they had to go back to their archives.

They told us ahead of time, listen, manage your expectations.

We had a huge flood in our archives.

More than half of our old cases have been destroyed.

But we will look.

And about two weeks later we get the call that they have found it.

It is intact.

We couldn't believe it.

So, Catherine, what do we know about the Michigan case?

A woman reported that her ex boyfriend sexually assaulted her and in the file she gives his name and birth date.

Wait, an ex boyfriend, so that means they should have his identity?

Yes, and back in Michigan, the police had actually brought this guy in for questioning, which is why his DNA was on file.

There was a case note that they had interviewed him, that he had said it was consensual, and because it was what they said he said, she said, kind of situation they chose not to prosecute at that time.

Oh my god, that's good.

They have a name.

Who knows how many crimes this guy has potentially committed.

I mean it sounds like he probably at least murdered two people.

And the one time where someone can actually come forward and say it's my ex boyfriend.

I know exactly who he is.

Yeah, to not prosecute, it's just just think about all the other potential victims because of that.

So it turns out that another big part of the investigation is happening simultaneously.

Earlier, Shannon Hotter said she was watching other agencies solt cold cases using forensic genetic genealogy and she wanted to try it.

So while she was waiting for Michigan to go through their archives and find their old case file, she decides to reach out to David Middleman at AUTHRM.

We felt very confident if plenty of DNA, the quality was fine, and what we ended up doing is we built a DNA profile for the unknown contributor to this rape kit, and then after we did that, we started doing forensic genetic genealogy.

We then went through the process of building out family trees and developing hypothesis, and.

At the same time, Shannon gets the name from Michigan.

When we get that file, we learn that the victim in that case reported a Kenneth Perry.

We found a Kenneth Perry living in Georgia.

We've run as criminal history.

We see that he used to live in Michigan and actually even has a fences out of Michigan.

We can also place him into keb County.

This could be our person.

And Authorroom keeps building the family tree.

They did the ancestry and they were able to say that our crime scene evidence was from the family tree of this Kenneth Perry living in Georgia.

We take our known suspect now and run his fingerprints against our crime scene evidence, and we were able to develop matches to three different Layton lifts, two from a plate that was in the kitchen at the Sumpter's house and one from a bathroom doorknob in the Sumter's house.

And then we knew we had our guy.

The DA's office gets a search warrant for Kenneth Perry's DNA and an arrest warrant, and then they set off to find him.

Our office then started working with the Sheriff's department, who has a fugitive unit.

The Sheriff's department was able to get eyes on mister Perry at his home.

They then followed him to a restaurant where he was going to have lunch with his girlfriend and I believe her grandson.

So this is a full fledged stakeout.

Yeah, law enforcement arrests him inside the restaurant and since they have a search weren't for his DNA, they get a mouth swab to confirm his identity.

You absolutely need to have a confirmation swab, and so you can tell Durie, you can tell a judge that this person sitting before you, we have taken their DNA, we have compared it against the evidence, and we have a match.

And the case goes to trial.

Mister Perry chose to testify, and he told one of the most outraged, disgusting stories I've ever heard as a prosecutor.

Not only did he deny the offenses, but he tried to flip the script and turn the Sumpters into his attackers.

He indicated that he had been picked up by mister Sumter, taken back to the Sumpter's house where he was drugged and then sexually assaulted by John, his sister, and a third unknown male.

It just feels so so icky to me that he was trying to portray the victims of his crime as perpetrators.

Yeah, that just even goes beyond.

In March of twenty twenty five, he was sentenced to three consecutive life terms plus one hundred years for raping Pamela Sumpter and murdering her and her brother John.

But were they able to learn anything else from Kenneth or discover a motive that led to him murdering two people.

No, they don't discover a motive, and actually no one is even sure how they met.

But Shannon Hotter was able to tell Pamela and John's mother herself that the man who did this to her children was now in prison.

She honestly said she could only believe that it was the work of God.

It was the hand of God delivering justice to her to make sure that she saw the person responsible convicted and tried and held accountable for what he had done to her family and Ailen.

Their mother was weeks away from her one hundredth birthday when Kenneth Perry was convicted.

It's like she was meant to know the truth.

At ninety nine, had decided that that was never going to happen, and then one day we show up at her Dorset step.

She didn't even realize we were looking into the case.

It was beautiful, It was really beautiful to be able to do that for this family.

I do believe that these families get stuck at that moment where they lost their loved one, and that's what I love about this technology.

It reduces that uncertainty and it allows you to figure out exactly who was at that crime scene, and then you can take that piece of information and build an entire case and bring that certainty and closure.

It sounds kind of strange to say that a crime where there's been such a horrible rape and double murder that you come to an ending where there is some hope.

I mean, solving it doesn't bring back Pamela and John.

No, but I know what you mean, and I think that's what Kristin Middleman is saying.

You can't go back in time and prevent what happened, but now maybe you can prevent it from happening again.

To live in a world where perpetrators are caught the first time, and you're never going to stop people from committing crimes, but to prevent that second and third and fourth and fifth attack, especially in sexual crimes where it's they're repetitive right when people know that even if they leave trace amounts of DNA, you're still going to get caught.

And that makes me think of the Idaho student murders.

You know, by tracking the killer with his own DNA in real time, it meant that he was arrested before he could commit another crime.

It is fascinating to think about how this technology could change the way crimes are investigated right from the start and maybe help keep cases from ever going cold.

Cold case work is a series of roller coaster emotions.

You think you have DNA evidence, but when you go to DCAB property room, it can't be located because it's so old and it's been misplaced where a witness has died.

Just there's so much heartache and disappointment in cold case work.

But with this case, everything panned out, everything went right, and it was the most incredible experience of my career.

Next time, on America's Crime Lab, it was treated as this sort of insolvable crime.

It would always be her word against his.

So many times we've identified a perpetrator and they're a taxi driver at the airport, the barista that handed you your coffee this morning, the it person that came to your office or your house.

It's terrifying.

America's Crime Lab is produced by Rococo Punch for Kaleidoscope.

Erica Lance is our story editor and sound design is by David Woji.

Our producing team is Catherine Fedalosa, Emily Foreman and Jessica Albert.

Our Executive producers are Kate Osborne, Mangesh Hattigadour and David and Kristin Middleman and from iHeart Katrina Norville and Ali Perry.

Special thanks to Connell.

Byrne, Will Pearson, Kerrie Lieberman, Nikki Etour, Nathan Etowski, John Burbank, and the entire team at Authrum.

I'm Alan Lance Lesser.

Thanks for listening.