To the victim and her family—and many unsettled residents of Seymour—Hollin was not just at large, he had become a bogeyman. He could have been anywhere, lurking in the shadows, waiting to victimize another innocent child and terrorize the community anew. “The fact that he had vanished caused a lot of apprehension,” Prewitt recalled, “and a lot of additional stress on the victim and her family.”

In fact, Hollin was long gone. Eleven years before the assault, he had stolen the identity of a deceased 8-year-old boy who was the victim of a drunk-driving crash. Hollin secured a Social Security card using the boy’s name, Andrew David Hall. He used that new identity to obtain driver’s licenses in Indiana and Minnesota, and later a passport. Hollin lived in Minnesota for several years, where he married, and then relocated to Oregon. He had apparently bragged about his ability to become someone else and disappear.

In 2001, Prewitt fulfilled a lifelong dream of becoming an FBI agent and was assigned to the Pittsburgh Division. In 2009, after Hollin had been on the run for nearly a decade, Prewitt transferred to the Indianapolis Division and began working out of the Bloomington Resident Agency. One of the first things he did was take a fresh look at the Charley Hollin case and contact the victim’s parents.

“After so much time had passed,” he said, “the parents and the victim had resigned themselves to Hollin not being caught. I told them I was going to do everything I could.”

AmyMarie Travis, the prosecutor for Jackson County, Indiana, which includes Seymour, noted that over the years, “there were a number of people who kept this case alive, but without Todd Prewitt, Hollin might have remained in the wind forever.”

Prewitt began looking at the case file. It contained a good digital image of Hollin taken before he fled. The image had been obtained by a diligent agent, since retired, who had also worked on the investigation. Using that image with facial recognition software, Prewitt began searching digital databases and eventually came up with a potential match to a passport photo belonging to Andrew David Hall.