Clay solves cold case with DNA

By Tom Pantera, The Forum

In September 2002, an unknown man tried to break into the same Moorhead residence twice in four days.

The first time, he was frustrated by one of the residents who told him to leave and locked a window. The second time, he broke the glass on a door and actually got in before the three women living there screamed and scared him off.

But that second time, he made the mistake of leaving some of himself behind – blood that now has identified Rodney Lee Paul and sent him to a Minnesota prison.

It may not be as dramatic as a case from “CSI” or “Cold Case Files,” but Clay County Assistant State’s Attorney Ken Kohler said it’s the first time stored forensic evidence has been used here to close a case that originally had no suspect.

Paul, 31, pleaded guilty to two counts of burglary Friday in Clay County District Court. He was sentenced to 108 months in prison.

According to court documents, on Sept. 8, 2002, a resident of a Moorhead home heard a noise outside at 11:30 p.m., opened the blinds in her bedroom and saw a man she didn’t recognize standing outside. The screen on the window had been cut. The man asked if he could sleep with her, but she refused and closed and locked the window. The man left.

Four days later, a different resident of the home heard glass breaking at 4:45 a.m. That woman held her bedroom door closed as the burglar tried to push it open. She screamed, waking the other two women in the home. They confronted the man, screamed also, and the man left the residence.

When police arrived, they found blood and fingerprints on broken glass on the entry door and collected both. One of the women identified the burglar as the same man she saw outside her bedroom window four days earlier.

“It was a disturbing case for me to just leave out there hanging, with good blood evidence and good fingerprints,” said Moorhead police Detective Toby Krone. Police continued investigating the case, but were unable to identify a suspect.

It was particularly frustrating because it appeared the man had not entered the home looking for items to steal, but rather may have been planning to assault one of the residents, Krone said.

Earlier this year, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension lab in Bemidji, which covers much of the northern part of the state, did a routine check by running the DNA from the Moorhead burglaries against its database of known offenders.

Jim Dougherty, assistant lab director there, said various kinds of Minnesota criminals have been required to submit DNA samples for the state database for 15 years. It started with sex offenders. A few years later, all those convicted of violent crimes were required to submit samples and all convicted felons have had to submit them since 2002.

The database matched the Moorhead samples with Paul, who was in the Grand Forks County Jail on a probation violation, Krone said.

Kohler said Paul was part of North Dakota’s DNA database because of an earlier crime, and North Dakota and Minnesota state crime laboratories shared that information.

Dougherty said the number of cases in which the lab has provided such information has grown every year. There have been 133 so far this year, compared to 124 in 2004, 49 in 2003 and 44 in 2002.

Clay County doesn’t have so many cold cases that the database will be used often, Kohler said.

Still, the fact that the evidence was available to link Paul with the burglaries shows local law enforcement and state labs in both Minnesota and North Dakota worked the case well, he said.

“Law enforcement did just a great job of preserving blood evidence, of preserving fingerprints,” he said. Along with the labs, “they do such yeoman work that they need to get more credit than they do.”