photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Lawrence Police Department headquarters, 5100 Overland Drive, is pictured June 28, 2022.

A woman who says she was brutally raped by a stranger more than 17 years ago in Lawrence had likely despaired of ever receiving justice, but she now has hope after never-before-tested evidence in the case was recently examined.

The first investigation into the May 6, 2009, incident hit a dead end when the Kansas Bureau of Investigation tested swabs from the woman’s body — taken as part of a hospital rape kit the day after the incident — and found no semen. The “examination of evidence ceased” at that point, according to a partially redacted affidavit in the case that was recently released by order of Douglas County Judge Amy Hanley.

Seventeen years later, though, a detective with the Lawrence Police Department reviewed the case and discovered that the woman’s clothing had never been examined by the KBI. When it was finally examined this year, KBI lab results indicated that DNA on the woman’s jean shorts was a match with the DNA of a 37-year-old man named Matthew Lawrence — to a statistical likelihood of one in 848 trillion, according to the affidavit.

Allegations in Lawrence’s arrest affidavit have not been proved in court, but they outline why Detective Josh Leitner believed he had probable cause to arrest Lawrence.

According to the affidavit, the crime occurred in the early-morning hours of May 6, 2009, when the 20-year-old woman was walking home after a night of heavy drinking. She reported to police that after she got off work the prior evening she had consumed half a dozen glasses of wine and then two or three double-whisky drinks at a bar on Florida Street. She and some of her coworkers walked to the residence of a coworker who lived near the bar, which they frequently did after a night out.

Before long, though, she began feeling “very intoxicated” and wanted to go home. She called a taxi, but when it took too long to arrive she decided to walk home. As she walked, she spoke to her out-of-state boyfriend on her cellphone. Just as she hung up, she was attacked from behind by a man who grabbed her around the torso with his right arm and around her cellphone hand with his left arm.

The man threatened to cut her throat if she didn’t comply with his demands. He then pushed her up against a concrete wall and sexually assaulted her.

During the attack, the woman told police, she blacked out. When she came to, she felt disoriented in the dark. Her cellphone and her shoes were missing. As she walked, a car with two college-aged men pulled over, seeing her distress, and helped her get home.

Once inside her own residence, she wanted to call police, but she didn’t have a phone. After sleeping for a few hours, she awoke and remembered that she had an old cellphone with a minute card. She used that phone to call her mother, who told her to call the police immediately, which she did.

The woman went to the hospital, where a nurse said she saw injuries on the woman that were consistent with forced penetration, including bruises and tears, as well as abrasions on her thighs consistent with being forced against a concrete wall.

After swabs from her body turned up no semen, though, the case went nowhere.

Nearly two decades later, Leitner, with the Lawrence Police Department’s Special Victims Unit, reviewed the case file and resubmitted the woman’s shorts for DNA testing. Two areas on the shorts “fluoresced,” indicating a large amount of a chemical found in high concentrations of semen.

Leitner got in touch with the woman to see what she remembered. She reported “still being affected by the sexual assault” and gave an account of the night that tracked with what she had originally reported. Upon being shown a photo of Matthew Lawrence, she said she didn’t know him but felt she recognized his face as that of the man who attacked her, according to the affidavit. She said she was confident that he was not one of the men in the car who had helped her get home.

Leitner then contacted Lawrence, of Eudora, who acknowledged frequenting the area near the Florida Street bar years ago to drink and party but denied knowing anything about the woman. Numerous hypothetical situations were presented to Lawrence regarding how his semen could have gotten on the woman’s shorts, and he denied them all.

Police had access to Lawrence’s DNA for comparison purposes because he had been entered into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, which is a repository for DNA of people arrested for or convicted of certain crimes. The affidavit does not indicate why Lawrence had been entered into CODIS, though he has a string of mostly misdemeanor arrests and convictions in Kansas stretching back to his juvenile years.

Lawrence was arrested on Sept. 9 and is being held in the Douglas County Jail on a bond of $250,000 cash or surety. He has been charged with one count of rape. His next court appearance had not been scheduled as of Friday.