COVINGTON, Ky.
- A Burlington man who has been a suspect in a sexual assault case for six years was indicted Friday for the attack on a woman in a Drawbridge Inn restroom.
Milford Todd Martin, 39, will be arraigned Monday on the sodomy charge. The woman had pointed him out to police shortly after the July 1991 incident, but police never had enough evidence to charge him.
That changed when authorities decided to use DNA testing on a semen stain on the woman's blouse. Its result: that 1 in 58,480,000 people could have the genetic code in question, and that Mr. Martin's is that one.
Investigators are elated.
"We had our suspect all along," said Detective Tom Loos of the Fort Mitchell Police Department. "We just didn't have a provable case."
The department had kept the blouse in storage.
The property room is cleaned out regularly, but the woman's clothing was kept because the case was still considered open, he said.
"I'd say she's probably the most appreciative victim I've ever worked with," Detective Loos said of the woman.
The Enquirer is not naming the woman because of the nature of the allegations.
In January, she won a $307,000 verdict from a Kenton County jury, which apparently agreed that lax security at the Drawbridge and the lingerie show under way there that night contributed to her assault. The company has already paid.
Attorney Bob Sanders argued successfully that the bar's lingerie night was soft-core, sexually oriented live entertainment that turned the Drawbridge into a "bad neighborhood." Sex and alcohol lead to sexual abuse, he said.
Mr. Sanders and Peggy Murphy, who also represented the woman in the civil case, thought of trying the DNA technology, which was not available in 1991. They took their idea to Commonwealth Attorney Don Buring, who agreed to ask the Kentucky State Police crime lab in Frankfort to do the test.
DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, is a genetic code contained in the nuclei of human cells. Except for identical twins, no two people have identical DNA patterns.
