Prosecutors now say rapist in 1994 Dallas County case still alive

DNA freed convicted man; officials thought real culprit was dead


12:00 AM CST on Thursday, January 31, 2008
By JENNIFER EMILY / The Dallas Morning News
jemily@dallasnews.com

A man found to be the actual perpetrator in a 1994 rape and murder after DNA cleared another man is alive and serving prison time for aggravated sexual assault of a child and aggravated kidnapping.

On Tuesday prosecutors mistakenly said that the perpetrator in the slaying and sexual assault of 14-year-old Nary Na had died. They discovered their error Wednesday.

Entre Nax Karage, now 38, was originally convicted for the crime and sentenced to life in prison in 1997. But DNA test results subsequently cleared him, and he was ordered released from prison in 2004.

Keith Jordan is now charged with capital murder and aggravated sexual assault of a child in the case. Court records show that DNA taken from evidence left on the victim matches Mr. Jordan. His cases are pending in a Dallas County court.

Mr. Jordan was previously convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child and aggravated kidnapping in a Dallas County court in 1997, according to a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman. He was sentenced to 30 and 20 years, respectively.

Nary, who was beaten and strangled with a coat hanger in September 1994, was Mr. Karage's girlfriend. She was found in a drainage culvert behind a shopping center near White Rock Lake.

Mr. Karage is one of 15 men exonerated by DNA in Dallas County, which has more DNA exonerations than any other county in the nation. Dallas County preserves its evidence, while most other counties do not.

Mr. Jordan is the only person to be charged in Dallas County in one of the cases where someone else was exonerated by DNA.

In the case of James Curtis Giles, who was cleared last year in a gang rape, another man pleaded guilty just after Mr. Giles was convicted. But two other men who prosecutors say are connected to the crime died.

Prosecutors said this week that DNA tests results connect a transient serial rapist who died 10 years ago in a Texas prison to a 1982 burglary and sexual assault. DNA cleared Steven Charles Phillips in that case last year.

Sidney Alvin Goodyear, the true perpetrator, was convicted of numerous sexual assaults in California and is suspected of others in Texas and other states. He was 50 when he died of liver cancer.

The Innocence Project in New York said the true perpetrator is found less than 40 percent of the time when someone is exonerated by DNA. Of the 212 DNA exonerations in the United States, the true perpetrator has been identified in 80 cases.



The first sentence of the last paragraph explains why we need an expanded CODIS database.

Felons' DNA clogs system
Recent cases highlight the database's value and the burden on U.S. crime labs.
By Tom McGhee
The Denver Post
Article Last Updated: 02/04/2008 01:40:18 AM MST


Throughout the country, DNA tests that could pave the way to jailing violent predators are routinely delayed, sometimes for years, because of staffing and funding constraints at crime labs and increasing numbers of convicts being tested.

Last week, Boulder police arrested a suspect in the 10-year-old slaying of Susannah Chase, thanks to a DNA match from Wyoming. Diego Olmos Alcalde's sample that the Wyoming crime lab uploaded into a federal database had waited � untested � for more than three years.

Even the FBI's Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, which coughed up the DNA sample taken from Chase's body after her death, matching it with the Wyoming profile, faces a massive backlog.

"The FBI Laboratory currently has a backlog of approximately 180,000 federal convicted offender samples that are waiting for DNA processing," FBI spokeswoman Ann Todd said in an e-mail. "Additionally, approximately 50,000 samples have been processed and are waiting to be entered into the national DNA database."

Colorado gave the DNA sample taken from genetic material found on Chase's body to CODIS in 2002.

Had it been submitted to the FBI in the past few months, there is a chance it wouldn't have been available when Wyoming entered Alcalde's sample little more than a week ago.

In a 2003 study, the National Institute of Justice found 542,700 cases with possible biological evidence either still in possession of local law enforcement or backlogged at local or state forensic labs.

"You need more labs, more personnel, more equipment and more training. It is a chain, and any weak link in the chain can just break it," said Lawrence Kobilinsky, chairman of the forensic sciences department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

"There are many cases out there where a rape kit was sitting around and wasn't analyzed for a lengthy period. That delay causes other people to be raped, murdered and brutalized," said Kobilinsky, an expert witness in cases involving DNA.

In the past few years, Colorado, Wyoming and other states have passed laws requiring convicted felons to have a sample of their DNA taken and entered into the FBI's database.

On Friday, that move paid off again when authorities arrested a man in the 1976 slaying of Holly Andrews. And a suspect was named in nine rapes in 2004 and 2005.

But the requirement has increased the strain on crime labs already struggling to keep up with demand.

Not so with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation's crime lab in Denver, which is among those that don't have a backlog, said CBI spokesman Lance Clem.

The CBI invested about $1 million in its lab three years ago, a combination of federal and state money.

The money helped to update the lab, equipping it with three robots, Clem said. "One machine can do 114 samples a day � it considerably speeds up the process."

It takes about a week for samples from convicted felons to be tested, Clem said.

So by the time the law requiring all felons to be tested went into effect in July, the lab was already cutting-edge and able to keep up with the new demand.

Wyoming hopes to eliminate its backlog, now a little under 10,000 samples, by the end of the year, said Steve Holloway, the state's crime lab director. "We have gotten some grants that will allow us to catch up."

A U.S. Department of Justice program provides grants to state and local labs to reduce backlogs. In 2007, Colorado's Department of Public Safety received a $347,115 backlog-reduction grant.

The FBI is also working to catch up. The agency's crime lab in Quantico, Va., has added robotics to speed up testing.

"Prior to the use of robotics, approximately 400 samples were processed per month. With the initial implementation of robotics, approximately 2,000 samples per month were processed," Todd wrote. "Currently, with additional technological advances, between 8,000 and 10,000 samples are being processed per month."

Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com

[Is the testing any quicker in Texas?]

JAS