Imette St. Guillen was an honors student pursuing a degree in criminal justice in New York. One winter night in 2006, she went out drinking with her friends, eventually splitting from them and heading to SoHo, where she called a friend to say she was at a bar. She never returned home. Instead, her naked body was found fourteen miles away, in a deserted area off the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, wrapped in a flowered bedspread. Her hair had been cut off on one side, her hands and feet were secured with plastic ties, she’d been gagged with a sock, and her face was wrapped in packaging tape. She had been raped, sodomized, and suffocated.
Blood was found on one of those plastic ties, but DNA evidence revealed that it didn’t belong to the victim. Instead, it was matched to Darryl Littlejohn, a bouncer who had been asked to remove the drunk young woman from the bar at around 4:00 A.M. Witnesses said they argued before leaving the bar.
Fibers were also found in Littlejohn’s residence that matched those on the packing tape on the victim’s body.
Littlejohn was also arraigned for a second kidnapping and assault of another college student who managed to get away from him after he impersonated a police officer, handcuffed her, and threw her into his van.
And Imette St. Guillen, tragically, went from being a student of criminal justice to being the lesson taught by professors of forensic DNA analysis.