road and look for the suspect and keep his eye on the composite at the same time to try to find someone that looked just like that. but someone did look just like that doug de silva. de silva lived 100 miles away, but his ex-wife and daughter both lived in the same mobile home park as kaye robinson. a year earlier, he was the suspect in the murder of a 16-year-old girl at a nearby high school. police brought de silva in for questioning. in the middle of the interrogation, he did something very odd. he asked for a job application because he said he wanted to become a state trooper. we thought maybe he might even be taunting us at that point. we were very suspicious of that. police put together a photo lineup, and kaye robinson identified de silva as the man who attacked her.
crime and allowed himself to become so suspect. you go back through your investigation, because then you start to doubt yourself a bit. did i miss something? did i overlook something? years passed with no solid leads. the longer we worked, the colder the case got. then, nine years later, detective rob hudson got a call from detectives 30 miles away in neighboring maryland. they had a case that was very similar to the 1995 case with kaye robinson. the maryland victim was a single mother living in a mobile home. she said she saw a man in her room, bedroom and she thought she was dreaming. she saw a knife and rolling pin in his hand and he told her he was not going to hurt her if she gave him what he wanted. the man tied her up, sexually
11-year-old son. laurel is a farming town and a regular working class person lives there. one night around 2:00 in the morning, kaye was awakened by someone banging on her front door. who s there? she went to the door, looked out the window and saw this stranger out there. they said they wanted to use the telephone. said their name was jack wilson, they needed a ride. could they use the telephone? kaye refused to let wilson inside. you can t come inside. i think you should leave. you need to go. kaye robinson called 911 and the delaware state police did respond, but didn t see anything out of the ordinary, so they cleared the scene without any further investigation. thinking everything was all right, kaye went back to bed. a half hour later, she was
the fact we didn t get any fingerprints that matched doug de silva s from the scene never led us to believe that he wasn t the suspect. because a lot of times, we don t find any fingerprints. and perhaps the worst piece of news was that de silva s dna profile did not match the evidence collected from kaye robinson s rape kit. dna evidence conclusively ruled out doug de silva as being involved in this crime. it was, almost, i mean, like being struck in the head by a 2 x 4. we were extremely shocked. it was like someone had punched you in the stomach. this was devastating. the investigators, the prosecutors in the case were just flabbergasted. did not know what to do. in fact, they ran the dna test twice just to make sure. again, the dna didn t match. and at that point you can t go forward with the prosecution of douglas de silva.
miraculously, despite being stabbed 28 times, kaye survived. when i woke up, i didn t want to be there. i was furious that i was on life support. my throat was cut in 10 to 15 different places. i basically felt like he was trying to decapitate me. i felt like i was in a horror movie. they didn t sever her carotid artery or her jugular vein or her spinal cord so she would have been paralyzed or anything like that. she s just extremely lucky. it s just unbelievable, a miracle, in my book. and i think everybody felt that way. kaye not only survived, she said she d be able to identify her attacker if she ever saw him. he didn t blindfold me. i was making myself remember every little detail that i could about him. right down to the length of his fingernails. all police had to do was find him.