“It’s . . . complicated. I tried getting someone at the Wichita Police Department to talk to me, but no luck, so I’m just reporting what Detective Decker told me. I remember this case vaguely from the news when the guy was arrested. The lead detective’s daughter is NYPD, and it got quite a bit of media attention. She did a big prime-time sit-down with one of the networks and everything. She’s also the reason that the blood sample was in the database to begin with. So, long story short, a detective named Jerry Hatcher was in charge of the College Hill Strangler investigation. The case went cold, but he kept digging. Fast-forward four years after William Summer’s last kill, and Jerry was found dead in his car from what looked to be a self-inflicted gun wound from his own service weapon. His family was adamant that he would never take his own life. For years, they promoted the countertheory that the College Hill Strangler had killed him because he was close to cracking the case.”

“So where does the blood sample come in?”

“Hang on with me here, okay? So, the detective’s family got into a dispute with the police department about the cause of his death. The police department wanted to label it a suicide. The family said it was in the line of duty. Obviously, no family wants to believe that a husband and father would take his own life, but there was also money on the line. If a cop dies on the job, they get a death benefit, and well, you know the drill.”

Once Lindsay became a lawyer, her dad had insisted on sharing the details of his will, life insurance, and bank accounts in the event anything happened to him, whether on the job or off.

“I’m looking up the case right now,” she said. “It’s like something out of a horror movie. How in the world did Decker tell me this was a dead end?”

“Because the DNA entry they hit on is itself problematic. Honestly, from what I heard, it shouldn’t have even been there.” He began to deliver a lecture about the management of law enforcement databases that was worthy of a law-school classroom.

“What was so unusual about this one?” she prodded, trying to hurry him along.

“Right. Okay. It goes back to the dispute between this detective’s family and the police department about how to label his death, whether he’d get a line-of-duty benefit, and so on. The family eventually reached a settlement with the department, but one of the conditions was that the police department enter any and all trace evidence from the College Hill Strangler case into all available databases, just in case any new leads eventually surfaced.”