Mortal Danger

earlier. He tried to connect unsolved cases with other murders in that time frame—to see if there might be similarities that would stand out.
    He then went to the warehouse where 162,000 pieces of evidence waited for a time they might be needed. He was gratified to find that the physical evidence that had been carefully preserved in July 1978 was still there. Sara Beth’s clothing remained intact, sealed against age and loss—her jean jacket and slacks, her silky shirt, her clogs, her undergarments. The chain of evidence had been maintained.
    Ciesynski reached carefully into one pocket of her denim outfit and pulled out the ticket stub for Damien: Omen II.
    Suddenly he was back in 1978.
    As Ciesynski turned the clothing inside out, he spotted a stain and some dark pubic hairs on her leotard. The stains might be semen or saliva. It would be a miracle if something carrying DNA still existed. But if Sara Beth’s killer had prematurely ejaculated before he could carry out rape, that faint stain could be semen.
    He packaged the clothing with delicate caution. To a homicide detective, it might be as precious as diamonds. To be absolutely sure of what he had, Mike Ciesynski needed to find samples of blood and semen preserved from Sara Beth’s body.
    There he was stymied. There were no samples from her in the evidence warehouse, nor were there any medical records that might lead to Sara Beth’s genetic profile.
    But he’d heard that sometimes the King County Medical Examiner’s Office preserved swabs and slides after postmortem examinations. To Ciesynski’s great relief, the ME had saved just such items for almost thirty years.
    On March 25, Ciesynski picked up three anal, oral, and vaginal slides that had been retained from Sara Beth’s autopsy. He sent them to the Washington State Patrol crime lab. Even the tiniest speck of DNA can now be replicated infinitely, so small samples are no longer in danger of being destroyed by the tests for a genetic profile.
    While he waited for the results from the lab, Ciesynski looked for phone, address, or Internet listings for a woman named Penny Martin,* who was an ex-girlfriend of Frankie Aldalotti. He found a listing in that name, but the woman who answered the phone said she didn’t know anyone named Aldalotti.
    “I’ve heard of another Penny Martin, though,” she said. “I think she works for the Kent School District.”
    The second Penny wasn’t the right woman, either.
    The cold case detective was disappointed but not ready to give up. He was elated, and a little surprised, when he heard from a Washington State parole officer in late May. Frankie Aldalotti hadn’t exactly lived a crime-free life in the years since Sara Beth was murdered.
    “We know him,” the parole officer said. “My partner and I went to arrest him after he abducted and raped his girlfriend back in the seventies. We picked him up at his parents’ house and transported him to the King County Jail. When we got there, he pulled out a six-inch .357 revolver and held us hostage for several hours.”
    The parole officers had emerged unscathed, but it was a very dicey period for them.
    Ciesynski located another former girlfriend of Frankie Aldalotti. He spoke with Maggie Cochran* in August 2005. She vaguely remembered being interviewed by detectives about Sara Beth back in 1978, although she had tried to put Frankie out of her mind after a terrifying relationship.
    “I remember Frankie,” she said. “Since he shot me, I guess it’s to be expected I’d remember him very well.”
    Maggie and Frankie’s romance was mercifully short and soon disintegrated into violence, although she found it hard to get away from him. She said that Frankie had abducted her twice and taken her to his father’s cabin, where he raped her.
    “One time he beat me up,” Maggie said. “He threw me against a wall and fired a dart gun at me. The next time he forced me up there, he put a gun in my mouth and raped me. He also threatened me with a long screwdriver.”
    The only way she had gotten away after the second rape was to convince him that she’d go back to dating him if he would just drive her back from the cabin to her home.
    “I didn’t report the first two rapes,” Maggie said, “but Frankie was getting progressively worse. I broke up with him and was relieved to be done with it. But then he smashed my bedroom window and fired at me with a twenty-two.”
    “Were you injured?” Ciesynski asked.
    “The