'20/20' Helps Crack Unsolved Rape Cases

Aug. 30 -- For 12 years, the parents of Charlene Antoinette Hardin waited for police to find the man who raped and killed their only child to be caught. Now, after a 20/20 investigation, a man has pleaded guilty to the crime and is behind bars.

Hardin was attacked while on her way home from her first job out of high school, just before Christmas in 1989, just two blocks from her home. Police had no suspect and the case went "cold."

Her mother, Gwen Hardin, told ABCNEWS that every day she would wake up and pray she was not looking into the face of her daughter's killer. She wondered if it could be a friend, neighbor, someone the family encountered regularly.

For years, Hardin said, she could not trust anyone.

Evidence Ignored

What Hardin didn't know about her daughter's case was that the evidence gathered by police at the crime scene had sat untested and essentially forgotten in an envelope in the basement of the Baltimore Police Department. Thousands of rapists have been convicted and put behind bars thanks to DNA evidence. But for all its effectiveness, DNA testing — a remarkably simple procedure — is rarely used by police in rape cases where there is no suspect.

"In probably 90 percent of the country, if you are raped by somebody who you don't know, by a stranger, the probability is that the rape kit will not get tested at all for DNA," says former New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir.

In fact, an investigation by 20/20 has uncovered a dirty little secret of law enforcement, unknown to victims and their families. Hundreds of thousands of rape evidence kits sit unprocessed on dusty shelves in police storage rooms around the country simply because police say they can't afford the cost of processing them, which is on average no more than $500 per kit.

Safir, who is now a consultant to a company that owns a DNA lab, was stunned to learn that when he was in office, his department was one of the worst culprits, but by no means the only one.