He vaguely remembered Orangeburg — “It was country, a farm,” he said in a recent interview. And he remembered a baby sister. “She didn’t want to go to school,” he said. “Hollering so much.” He did not recognize the police photo or remember seeing his sister grown.

The state police took a swab of his saliva for a DNA comparison to the body in the woods. The results are pending.

On the Dangerous Turf of Nicky Barnes

Douglas, the teenager in 1970 who drove around with the woman he called A. C., clearly remembers the last time he saw her. The two of them had just left Shirlene Dixon’s apartment, and a car approached and stopped.

As he tells it, two “butch” females emerged from the car, grabbed A. C. and drove away.

“That was their world,” he said. “That was the type of people she was dealing with.”

She never came back. Life moved on. “Not that we didn’t like A. C. or miss A. C., because I did,” Douglas said. “In a world of drugs, people were always coming and going.”

That particular corner of the world of drugs was soon to become notorious. The arrival of the woman from Orangeburg on the streets of Harlem roughly coincided with that of Leroy Barnes, a living legend in the neighborhood who was better known as Nicky. In 1965, three years before the record of the woman’s first arrest in Harlem, a newspaper article described Mr. Barnes as “one of the biggest distributors of narcotics in Harlem and the Bronx,” arrested with $500,000 worth of drugs in his possession.