Shortly after Thanksgiving in 1987, an intruder broke into the Tucker

residence in Arlington, Virginia. It might have been just another statistic, but the crime

committed that night launched a new era in police investigations.

This is how DNA evidence and psychological profiling helped catch a serial killer and set an innocent man free.

Everything about her was very gentle, she was very soft-spoken. Just had this amazing softness about her, this human quality.

Twenty-four-year-old Susan Tucker was a publication editor who worked for the United States Forestry Service.

She was spending the Thanksgiving holiday alone since her husband Reggie was out of the country in Wales on a business trip.

Neither of us could put the phone down. We kept saying I love you. We said this over and over again.

I don't know how many times.

But without explanation, telephone calls went unanswered. And neighbors noticed her bedroom window wide open in the cold November weather, so they called police.

As they approached the front door, they noticed it was a jar. Inside, a woman's purse was lying on the floor.

Susan Tucker's badly decomposed body was lying face down on the bed. She had been dead for four or five days.

Her hands were tied behind her back, her feet were tied, the head hanging over the side of the bed almost.

She had been strangled and possibly raped.

It appeared that the killer more than likely was inside the home for quite some time. I mean, it wasn't just very quick in and out type of a situation.

Many of the drawers had been ransacked, had been gone through.

When Reggie Tucker heard the news, he was devastated.

My whole world just fell away.

Detective Joe Horgas of the Allington Police Homicide Unit was quickly assigned to the case. His task wouldn't be easy for one thing the killer had been careful.

It worn gloves and left no fingerprints.

It had been raining on the night of the murder, and he meticulously cleaned the area around his point of entry.

He's smart enough to know that footprints, which is what we would have gotten from that, would maybe come back to Hanum, which kind of tells you maybe some past experience on burglaries.

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