frediani. belmont was only seven miles from helena s home. the suspect, david paul frediani was a 42-year-old accountant with no prior arrests. since frediani resembled the man helena described, police compared his fingerprints to those found on helena s teapot. they matched. one of the things i asked him was he had denied even being involved in the initial sexual assault against mrs. greenwood. i remember asking him, you never assaulted this woman? he said no, i never did any of that. they then told him we have your fingerprints. at that point, according to the detective, he took a deep breath, let it out, began trembling. he could actually see his chest moving in and out and made a statement as to the effect of i was really drunk when i did those things. he then asked for a lawyer and refused to make any more statements.
on helena s teapot. and they also found serological evidence. we also presented evidence that the semen on the pillowcase in helena greenwood s bedroom, first, that it was semen and, second, it was from a type o, individual, who was a secreter, and a pgm type, a mutase of one-plus all matched frediani s abo type. dna testing was still in its infancy. at the last minute when faced with the fingerprint and serological evidence, he pled no contest to the assault and was sentenced to five years in prison. but frediani said he was innocent of her murder. they knew who killed helena
increasing number of copies. you start with one after one round of pcr, you end up with two, then four, then eight and so on. the big advantage of pcr for forensic work is that it is so sensitive. very small amount of dna can yield a very large amount of information. it s a fortunate thing that they didn t try to test it at the time, because as you test biological material it s destroyed. had they, at the time of helena s autopsy, tested that material, they would have found nothing and the material would have been destroyed. when the biological material from helena s fingernails was tested using pcr, scientists made an important finding. on some of the fingernail clippings, they found only dna that was consistent with dr. greenwood s. and on one of the clippings, they found dna that was essentially pure, not from dr. greenwood at all. that s when they got very interested.
what is this place? where are we? this is where we bring together the fastest internet and the best in entertainment. we call it the x1 entertainment operating system. it looks like the future! we must have encountered a temporal vortex. further analytics are necessary. beam us up. that s my phone. hey. [ female announcer ] the x1 entertainment operating system, only from xfinity. tv and internet together like never before. just three weeks before she was scheduled to testify in her sexual assault trial, helena greenwood was murdered in her front yard. david paul frediani went on trial as scheduled for helena s sexual assault. prosecutors had his fingerprints
i can only imagine what was going through helena s mind, that this man who assaulted her is obviously coming to do harm to her. maybe it s just a little too much to think but she scratched the heck out of this guy. we know she did. i almost wonder like, hey, i m going to leave some evidence behind to show who my killer was. i survived this but by god i m going to leave something behind to tell you who killed me. i think that s what happened in this case. at the trial under cross examination, frediani admitted to the sexual assault but he did not confess to her murder. regardless, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. we expect victims to testify. and that s what helena greenwood did. she testified against the defendant at the preliminary examination. then he tracked her down and he killed her.