i m telling you i wasn t there. i don t know anything about this girl. if you re not there, how does james elmen s semen get in the damn crime scene? that s one of those things that you could deny until the cows come home. with technology the way it is today, there s no getting around it. james elmen is a monster that now sits behind bars. i always knew that there was going to be a day that they were going to say, we got it. this case is solved. based on the dna evidence, prosecutors believe james elmen was probably walking by the convenience store where julie estes worked around 10:30 and noticed there were no customers inside. hi, there. he shut off the store s electricity, held julie at knifepoint, forced her to open
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results, cases still go unsolved. so, 16 years after julie s murder, the jacksonville police department sent julie s clothes to the u.s. army crime lab in forest park, georgia, one of the most sophisticated labs available. the item in evidence included socks and her shirt and jeans, as well as other items from her sexual assault kit, which included, like, fingernail scrapings and other swabs. scientists there were discouraged. all but one of the items had been analyzed and tested. the socks had never been tested, probably because nobody expected to find anything useful on them. the idea that forensic evidence could have transferred onto julie s socks was remote. nevertheless, analyst brian higgins examined the socks with light sources that cause genetic material to fluoresce. i was kind of like, wow, could these be semen stains?
but after 17 years, there was plenty of dna evidence to charge him with julie estes rape and murder. it just was unbelievable that it would be the socks that would hold the true identity of her killer. faced with a possible death penalty, elmen decided to plead no contest to julie estes rape and murder. in return, he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. how do you feel about everything? how do i feel? mm-hmm. the overall picture? i think this sucks. the lesson for criminals would be no matter how long ago you did the crime, the forensics has the capability of solving it. if it wasn t forensics in this case, with the dna and everything, i don t think that they would ever solve it. we always talked about if he ever got out, we d be counting
drops in the trunk. tests showed it was the same blood type as julie s, an indication she was injured elsewhere, placed in the trunk, then driven to the woods. initially, they weren t sure whether that was the scene of the murder or that was simply a dumpsite. that type of development makes investigation that much more difficult, because now you ve got two crime scenes to worry about. unfortunately, there were no foreign fingerprints found on or in the car, and investigators found no useable footprints in the mud and dirt. julie s purse was discovered at the scene with no money inside. the convenience store s money bag was there, but it, too, was empty. julie s killer had removed the laces from her shoes to tie her hands, but her shoes were missing. julie s shoes were distinctive even back in 1985