The Night That Waited

Two assaults, decades apart and a thousand miles from each other, sat in evidence rooms until the science caught up. In Lawrence, Kansas, a 2009 stranger rape on a darkened sidewalk finally produced a living defendant after a 1-in-848-trillion DNA match. In Fayetteville, North Carolina, a 1990 home-invasion rape at gunpoint was closed by genetic genealogy—only to find the Fort Bragg soldier already beyond the reach of a courtroom.