Prosecutors said it was a single fingerprint from a man’s left pinkie that helped Lawrence police crack a decade-old rape case.

Now, the 36-year-old man who is accused of leaving that print is on trial, charged with raping a then-21-year-old Kansas University student in May 1997.

“It is every woman’s worst nightmare,” Douglas County Chief Assistant District Attorney Amy McGowan told jurors during her opening statements Monday, “to be abducted at gunpoint … taken to a secluded place where you are viciously and violently raped in the dirt.”

Prosecutors will present evidence this week from the case that had gone cold. On May 11, 1997, the victim reported a man approached her as she was parking her car in the lot near Naismith Hall. The suspect forced his way into her car at gunpoint, drove her to a secluded area near the tennis courts at Lawrence High School, made her get out of the car and then raped her.

Police dusted the car for fingerprints, and 10 years later, on Aug. 8, 2007, one of those fingerprints that had been entered into the FBI’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS, received a “hit.”

The fingerprint matched the defendant’s, who was in custody at the time in the Johnson County Jail on an unrelated charge.

McGowan told jurors that police then obtained a DNA sample from the defendant, which Kansas Bureau of Investigation scientists will testify matched the DNA profile of the rapist. The likelihood of that occurring, according to McGowan, is one in 13 quadrillion.

But defense attorney Jessica Travis told jurors there’s more to the case than meets the eye.

“Remember Paul Harvey, and ‘now for the rest of the story,'” Travis said. “That’s what this case is all about.”

Travis told jurors that her client recognized the victim when she testified at the preliminary hearing as someone whom he had met at the Cadillac Ranch and had consensual sex with.

Travis also said during opening statements that the victim got a good enough look at the suspect that she was able to provide police with enough details to make a composite sketch, yet she has never identified the defendant as the attacker.

“She told detectives that she would be able to identify the rapist if she saw him again,” Travis said.

Prosecutors will put on its first witness when the trial resumes this morning.

Prior to the trial’s start, Judge Peggy Kittel denied a motion by the defense seeking confidential information in an ongoing police investigation. Travis was seeking a detailed description of a so-called “serial rapist,” a man police believe is responsible for about a dozen unsolved rapes in Lawrence and Manhattan dating back to 2000.

But after meeting last week with police and being briefed on the status of the investigation, Kittel determined the information wasn’t relevant to the current case.

“There is no reason to believe that investigation or that suspect has anything to do with this case,” Kittel said.