the task force was swamped with sketches of suspects, none of them alike, many suggested by psychics. at the state crime lab, larry peterson was sifting through thousands of fibers, nylon, rayon, acrylic, acetate. is it like looking for a needle in a haystack? like looking for multiple needles in multiple haystacks. then in january of 1981, a breakthrough. peterson realized they were seeing one green carpet fiber with a unique shape. this is a cross-section of the fiber magnified many times. this particular fiber had two very, very large lobes and one short lobe. the lobes are the three ends of the boomerang shape. the shape was the most distinctive part of the fiber. he showed me a slide taken from another carpet. this is a single tuft from
atlanta s woods every saturday. we literally would walk through wooded areas chaperoned and we would walk for a period of time until about an hour before nightfall. but now a new twist in the murders. patrick baltazar, the 20th victim, would be the last child to turn up in a wooded area. a day or two later an official would tell reporters fibers and dog hairs were being collected from the victim s clothing. the next child to die would be found in a river wearing nothing but underpants. fewer clues now for larry peterson. we re talking maybe a dozen or dozens of fibers as opposed to hundreds or potentially a thousand fibers. the 13-year-old victim was found beneath this bridge over the south river in atlanta s suburbs. a driver crossing that bridge
them alike, many suggested by psychics. at the state crime lab, larry peterson was sifting through thousands of fibers, nylon, rayon, acrylic, acetate. is it like looking for a needle in a haystack? like looking for multiple needles in multiple haystacks. then in january of 1981, a breakthrough. peterson realized they were seeing one green carpet fiber with a unique shape. this is a cross-section of the fiber magnified many times. this particular fiber had two very, very large lobes and one short lobe. the lobes are the three ends of the boomerang shape. the shape was the most distinctive part of the fiber. he showed me a slide taken from another carpet. this is a single tuft from
but when larry peterson had returned that june for a second search a couple weeks later there was no yellow blanket to be found that i could find. there are a lot of things in your case that disappeared. a lot of disappearances. yellow blanket. yes. disappeared. in the first place, there was never a yellow blanket. there were fibers of a yellow blanket. there were fibers alleged to have come from a yellow blanket. nobody has been able to produce the yellow blanket because quite simply and i m just being very blunt with you there was no yellow blanket. or maybe you got rid of it between the first time they searched and they came back. seems like to me if i was a police officer i would have confiscated the blanket. it doesn t make sense. the prosecution was allowed to bring in ten other deaths among them patrick baltazar, eric middlebrooks, jo-jo bell, to try to show a pattern. this is a chart showing
carpet fibers. they re the only company to produce a fiber like this. but larry peterson was still in the dark. i had no idea there was a bridge incident. he had been called to the fbi office to help search this station wagon. but not told why. then he spotted fbi techs returning from their search and so he went out to the home to snip fibers for himself. saw all the green carpet. did you feel, this is it? you know, i really didn t. because it was a middle class home. a young man living with his parents. but peterson thought i m going to run this back to the lab and just look. i started with the green carpet. once i put that sample under the microscope, i mean, i knew instantly that that was it. you knew that they had the killer? i knew that was it. and i you know, i had made hundreds and hundreds of comparisons to carpeting in various suspects environments before and nothing was even close.