Ashley Flowers

Also, if they thought Dave was a suspect, then the sighting of a man and his car in the Mather driveway talking to a woman that police believe was Dawn doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Dave didn't have a car that matched the description witnesses gave or the tire impressions that police gathered.

But police must have still believed in that sighting because come 1993, they served another search warrant on Dawn's home and seized a stained dress that was a similar teal-green color to the one the witness described.

The thinking being, if Dawn was wearing that right at 8, 830, that's just about the time that the murder took place.

Maybe it would have evidence on it.

Now, there were stains on the dress that they collected.

And if it had been me, I would have thought, like, this was going to be it.

But after the lab tested those stains...

they didn't come up with anything suspicious.

And actually, speaking of lab testing, the lab never got much at all back in the 90s.

None of the evidence tested positive for seminal fluid, the cuttings from the bed, the robe that Mary gave Dawn after she showed up naked on her doorstep, nor the sexual assault kit.

But that shouldn't have been surprising given Dawn's own account of how the perp couldn't get it up.

Swabs taken from the closet door tested negative for blood, and Tom's clothes offered nothing of evidentiary value.

There were no latent prints on the knife itself, and even the blood on it didn't get investigators far.

Testing confirmed that the blood was type A, the same type as Tom's, but the report didn't specify whether it was a positive or a negative.

According to the DCI lab report, that blood type was only shared by roughly 7% of the white population.

And that may seem like it would narrow down the pool, but without anything else to tie to a suspect, the knife didn't point investigators toward anyone.

But they did have those prints.

Tom, Dave, Amy, Dawn, none of them were a match.

One of the latent fingerprints recovered was even good enough to enter into APHIS back in 1991, but it didn't match anyone in the system either.