In August 2000, the mother of 17 year old Jessica Carpenter came home to find the naked body of her daughter lying in the middle of the floor of their home at Aiken. She had been raped and then strangled; her throat had also been cut. With a population of less than thirty thousand, this South Carolina town hardly deserves to be called a city, and by the same token is not the kind of place one would normally associate with a crime of this nature.
There were the usual false leads and dead ends in this case, but there was one truly remarkable one. The strongest suspect was Reinaldo Revera, who was suspected of similar crimes. He would later be sentenced to death in Georgia for the murders of a 21 year old woman and 3 girls, all the same age as Jessica. Revera was positively identified by a young woman as the man who had tried to pick her up, and at that time she had a passenger in her car: Jessica Carpenter.
The police had DNA from the rape of the victim, and all they had to do was wait for the laboratory to match it with a sample from Rivera, then they could charge him. But when the result came back, unbelievably it was not a match.
The real perpetrator was identified as Robert Atkins, an habitual criminal but a man with no history of sex crimes. The day after the murder, he got married. He was sentenced to life without parole plus thirty years.
The documentary makers spoke to both parents of the victim, to her sister, and to investigators. There are reconstructions and archive footage.
There were the usual false leads and dead ends in this case, but there was one truly remarkable one. The strongest suspect was Reinaldo Revera, who was suspected of similar crimes. He would later be sentenced to death in Georgia for the murders of a 21 year old woman and 3 girls, all the same age as Jessica. Revera was positively identified by a young woman as the man who had tried to pick her up, and at that time she had a passenger in her car: Jessica Carpenter.
The police had DNA from the rape of the victim, and all they had to do was wait for the laboratory to match it with a sample from Rivera, then they could charge him. But when the result came back, unbelievably it was not a match.
The real perpetrator was identified as Robert Atkins, an habitual criminal but a man with no history of sex crimes. The day after the murder, he got married. He was sentenced to life without parole plus thirty years.
The documentary makers spoke to both parents of the victim, to her sister, and to investigators. There are reconstructions and archive footage.