Trail of Two Test Tubes

HIDDEN ODYSSEY | Because of a lab's care, the vials endured 17 years of jostling and logged hundreds of miles without breaking. Then a relentless attorney found them, setting a man free.

By Miles Moffeit
Denver Post Staff Writer

Scott Fappiano didn't know it for most of his 21 years behind bars, but his fate rested inside two test tubes.

The fragile vials, orphaned from an unsuccessful 1989 DNA test, were jostled by dozens of people, trucked hundreds of miles across the Northeast and banished to a succession of storage vaults.

Somehow they survived, without shattering, without spilling. And, incredibly, they were found.

While their trail illuminates how government can lose track of the smallest biological crime relics, it also shows how private labs often safeguard the lowliest of specimens.

"We got Scott out of prison, but it was a cruel cosmic joke in the meantime," said his lawyer Nina Morrison of the Innocence

Project, who spent two years hunting down Fappiano's lost evidence.

The odyssey dates to the December 1983 rape of a police officer's wife.

Shortly after midnight, a gun-wielding intruder crept through the window of the couple's Brooklyn apartment. Once in, he tied the officer to the couple's bedpost, raped the officer's wife repeatedly, smoked a cigarette and downed a couple of beers.

Among the many pieces of evidence he left behind were the future contents of the test tubes - his semen on her white sweat pants.

Soon after, the victim picked Fappiano from a batch of police photos. The 22-year- old Brooklyn native had a juvenile offense, had features similar to the attacker's and lived just blocks from her apartment.

Authorities had all they needed for a conviction after her husband also pointed to him during a physical lineup.

Fappiano was sent away for 50 years.

"Don't forget about me," he told his girlfriend, Joanne.

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