“You want your witnesses to be credible,” a Lubbock police officer said. Illustration by Anna Parini

One Sunday night in March, 1985, Michele Murray, a sophomore at Texas Tech University, tried to find a parking space near her dorm. In the preceding months, four women had been raped on or near the Texas Tech campus, in the small plains city of Lubbock; local newspapers speculated about a “Tech rapist,” but the police had no solid leads. As Murray parked in a church lot, a man wearing a yellow terry-cloth shirt and bluejeans approached the car. She felt a pang of fear, but at second glance the man seemed harmless—not particularly tall or muscular, with gaunt cheeks and bulging eyes. She rolled down the window.

“Do you have jumper cables?” he asked. She said no. For a moment, the man stared vacantly up at the night sky.

Then, in one quick motion, he forced the door open, pulled out a pocketknife, pushed Murray into the passenger seat, and held her in a headlock. He put the car in gear with his left hand and drove out of town, pressing her head down so that she could not see where they were going. Eventually, he stopped in a field. Murray could see the lights of downtown Lubbock in the distance. Threatening her with the knife, he ordered her to take off her sweatsuit. Despite her panic, she tried to memorize every detail of his appearance.

A couple of hours later, the man drove back toward town, took Murray’s gold ring and watch, left cigarettes in her car, and fled. She drove back to Texas Tech and reported the rape. Then she went to the hospital, where she was met by a Lubbock police officer. He asked her to describe her assailant, and she told him everything she remembered: he was a black man with close-cropped hair, dark skin, and bulging eyes.

Later that week, Murray went to the police station to meet a detective named Joe Nevarez. He flipped through the department’s book of mug shots and asked Murray if any of the men resembled her assailant; none did. The police commissioned a composite sketch based on Murray’s description, and they compared her statement with those of the other victims. In each case, the attacker, identified as an African-American man, had confronted a lone white woman in or near a car, threatened her with a small pocketknife, driven her to a secluded spot outside the city limits, and raped her. The similarities among these accounts led the police to believe that there was, in fact, a single “Tech rapist.”

During the next two weeks, the police attempted a sting operation. For three nights, Rosana Bagby, a young plainclothes officer, walked back and forth between the church parking lot where Murray had been approached and the dorm across the street. Bagby strolled for hours, but nothing unusual happened. On the third night, Nevarez, watching from a nearby car, saw one thing that struck him as salient: an African-American man in a brown Buick stopped to chat with a white woman, then drove away. In all the incidents, the assailant had approached on foot, not in a car; nevertheless, Nevarez ran the Buick’s license-plate number and saw that the car was registered to Timothy Cole, a twenty-four-year-old Texas Tech student and an Army veteran.

Nevarez followed Cole’s Buick to a nearby pizzeria. Bagby went in, sat in a booth in front of Cole, ordered a Dr Pepper, sipped it for ten minutes, and left. As Bagby walked north on University Avenue, Cole pulled up behind her.

“You shouldn’t have left,” he said. “We could have had some beers or something.”

They flirted for a few minutes. Bagby noticed that he had close-cropped hair, slightly protruding eyes, and a thin build. He asked for her phone number, but she said no.

“That’s what they all say,” he said, and drove away.

Bagby thought that Cole resembled the composite sketch of the “Tech rapist.” He became the primary suspect.

The police wanted to assemble a series of mug shots that they could show to Murray. Cole’s mug shot was already on file. A few months earlier, he had been robbed at gunpoint while trying to buy marijuana. He flagged down a Lubbock police officer, who promised to investigate the robbery but also arrested Cole for marijuana possession and for unlawfully carrying a weapon. In mug shots, most people wear a blank expression or a scowl, but Cole posed with a loopy smile.

Worried that the smile would be a distraction, another detective, George White, went to Cole’s house with a Polaroid camera and asked him to pose in front of a wood-panelled wall. White didn’t mention that Cole was a rape suspect; instead, he said that the police were still looking for the people who had robbed Cole, and that another photograph would help with that investigation. Cole found the request strange, but he consented.

Later, the police affixed the new shot of Cole to a piece of paper along with five other photographs, arranged in a “six-pack” formation—two rows of three. Then the detectives met with Murray in her dorm and showed her the spread. Five of the six photos were standard mug shots: men in police custody, holding up placards and gazing away from the camera. Murray’s eyes were immediately drawn to the Polaroid shot of Cole, in front of wood panelling, looking directly at the lens.

Murray deliberated for a few seconds. Then she pointed to Cole and said, “I think that’s him.”

“Are you positive?” Nevarez asked. He seemed pleased with her choice.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m positive that’s him.” Murray initialled Cole’s photo.

The next day, a few minutes after Cole returned from class, four officers detained him at his house, a half mile from the Texas Tech campus. While searching the bedrooms, they found a woman’s gold ring, a pocketknife, and a yellow shirt—the color that Murray had described the rapist as wearing. In Cole’s car, they found an empty pack of Winston cigarettes, the same brand the rapist was said to have smoked. Reggie Kennard, Cole’s brother and one of his roommates, accompanied Cole to the police station, where he was asked to consent to a live lineup. Cole was nervous, but he waived his right to an attorney and joined the lineup. (The Lubbock Police Department declined to comment on the conduct of the investigators.)

Nevarez and White led five men into the lineup room, which was flooded with light. A third detective, Ronnie Goolsby, stood behind a one-way mirror in a darkened viewing room. First, the detectives brought in another woman who had been assaulted by the “Tech rapist.” She deliberated for three minutes. Then she identified Cole, although, according to a police report, she “could not be sure.” Still, the investigation seemed to be nearing a conclusion.

Murray entered the dark room and noticed the man she’d identified in the photo spread the day before. She was suddenly certain that he had raped her; she pinpointed him immediately after stepping into the room. As the officers around her celebrated, she signed an affidavit that read, in part, “I am positive of my identification of this man and there is no doubt in my mind.”