ERIC BERGER, Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
He preyed upon older women, some in their 70s, one as old as 99, police said. He raped them. And sometimes, authorities said, he beat them to death.
During the mid-1980s, police had a suspect for these acts, Henry Lee Bethune, but no hard evidence linking him to a crime scene. Then a sergeant in the Houston Police Department‘s homicide division, Jim Yarbrough, read a magazine article on the first use of DNA to solve a crime mystery in England.
Yarbrough called the pioneering scientist, an English geneticist named Alec Jeffreys, setting off a chain of events that would lead to the conviction of Bethune — one of the first Texas criminals convicted with DNA evidence — on charges of raping a 74-year-old woman.
