For years, lawyers, family members and advocates for Donald Odoms have combed courthouse corridors and basement vaults for Exhibit 11 – the rape kit that helped send him to prison 23 years ago — only to come up empty, only to find boxes with case numbers falling digits short.

It may only be preserved in Donald Odoms’ memory.

“I can still see it in the DA’s hands,” says Odoms, now serving his 23rd year behind bars in a South Texas prison.

His lawyers say tests on the kit’s DNA would buttress the story of family members who’ve always sworn they were with him more than 170 miles away from Houston the morning of the rape.

“We were in East Texas,” his ex-wife Josie Odoms says. “That is the only thing that I know and stake my life on. There’s no ifs and maybes about it. We were in East Texas. I know this.”

On an official level, silence surrounds the case. The lead Houston police investigator, Ralph Yarborough, and the district attorney, Charles Rosenthal, refuse to talk about it. The lab analyst, Jim Bolding, didn’t return phone calls.

The murky chain of events stretches back to Feb. 2, 1984, when a Texas health department inspector pulled her Mercury Cougar into the parking lot of a meat plant and a man with a knife forced his way in. He raped her a few blocks from the plant, took $50 from her purse and drove away.

The victim described to police what she remembered: Her attacker was black, mustached, about 20 years old, about 5-foot-9, maybe 145 pounds. He wore a knit cap and a green work uniform.

Though Odoms was 23 and had a mustache, he stands barely 5-3.

At the hospital, nurses collected the rapist’s semen by swabbing the victim’s body. The specimens then were packaged in a rape kit to be analyzed by the Houston Police Crime Lab. Forensic tests at the time couldn’t derive a rapist’s genetic identity from his semen, only, potentially, his blood type. But in this case, the analyst didn’t perform the blood test, reports show. That analyst, Bolding, eventually was forced to resign as head of Houston’s lab after a spate of flawed analyses in unrelated cases, including one linked to the false conviction of a sex-assault suspect.

Four days after the rape, Houston police found the victim’s car, and on it the fingerprints of a career criminal named David Wilkes. He had recently been paroled on a burglary conviction.

The car had been ditched within blocks of Wilkes’ employer, an auto repair shop.

Wilkes was black, mustached, 24 years old, 5-9 and 140 pounds.

Records indicate that Houston police Sgt. Yarborough, the lead investigator, cleared him as a suspect almost immediately.

“Checked and learned that he does not fit the description,” Yarborough wrote, without documenting how.

He did document how Wilkes walked into the police station eager to give Yarborough a name to work with: Donald Odoms, an acquaintance from Acre’s Home in Houston, a poor section of town where they both grew up.

Wilkes said he remembered seeing Odoms driving a white Cougar one afternoon in early February. He said his fingerprints must have rubbed off on the car while he leaned against it to talk to Odoms.

From that point on, Odoms, then an honorably discharged Army veteran with a check-forgery conviction, would be the detective’s main suspect. Yarborough showed a photo spread to the rape victim. She picked the third one — a mug shot of Odoms from his forgery case.

At the time of the rape, Odoms didn’t live in Houston, but rather in Center, Texas, a three-hour drive to the east, with his new wife, Josie, and their two young daughters. The family shared a home with Josie’s uncle, Horton Hatcher.

In May 1984 — three months after the rape — the couple decided to move to Houston to earn more money and live on their own. Among their neighbors was Wilkes, whom Josie describes as “trouble from the first time I met him.” He would drop by high on drugs and pocket their valuables, she recalls.

He burglarized his own sister’s apartment nearby, Odoms says, information he passed on to Wilkes’ sister, angering Wilkes.

There’s another piece of information still preserved in Josie’s memory: Wilkes often wore a green uniform from “Trees of Houston,” a landscaping business where he once worked, she says. She remembers it down to the yellow and green decal on the breast.

During the second week of May, the police knocked on their door.

“Guns were drawn. My children are grabbing my legs. I said, ‘Put the guns down! I have two daughters here,'” she says.

Josie told them they had the wrong man because her husband wasn’t living in Houston during the attack. The date was fixed in her memory because she remembers Hatcher picking Odoms up for work the morning after her uncle’s birthday party.

The police didn’t buy it, and led him off in handcuffs.

Yarborough then set up another lineup, arguably tainting the process by again placing Odoms third in the sequence. The victim identified him a second time.

Other questionable practices put Odoms on a fast track to prison.

His defense attorney Frank Rush never investigated Wilkes and didn’t investigate blood testing of the semen that may have excluded Odoms immediately, according to records.

During trial, Odoms took the stand himself, along with Josie and his uncle Hatcher — all swearing that they were together the evening before and the morning of the rape. But prosecutors dismissed their testimonies, arguing they were covering for each other.

Perhaps the most dramatic testimony occurred when Wilkes took the stand.

“Do you recall what statement you made?” the prosecutor asked.

“Not really, because it wasn’t a true statement,” Wilkes said. “It was a statement made against my will, really.”

Wilkes went on to say that he had fingered Odoms only because Yarborough was pushing him, calling him at work and seeking a suspect’s name to work with.

Despite Wilkes’ about-face — and the lack of physical evidence — Odoms got 65 years in prison.

“The day that he was sentenced, they took everything that was good and made it bad,” Josie said. “Everything that was pure became rotten.”

By the 1990s, Odoms at Darlington Prison started hearing the buzz about DNA exonerations. He turned his mind turned to Exhibit 11.

“Help me find the rape kit,” he wrote in letters to anyone who would listen.

In 1998, he captured the interest of New York-based Innocence Project lawyers Nina Morrison and Vanessa Potkin.

Among Potkin’s first phone calls: to Yarborough, who, she recalls, told her that the kit had probably been destroyed. But he offered no other information, no proof. The protocol called for the Harris County court clerk and the lab to store evidence after trial.

For the next nine years, the attorneys and up to 10 law students would hit only dead ends. Their letters to Odoms ended the same way. “I’m truly sorry.”

Last January, The Denver Post searched the courthouse’s evidence rooms for the kit, also coming up empty. The only court records available on Odoms’ case refer to a 2000 destruction of exhibits, with no mention of Exhibit 11.

“They just didn’t get the right guy,” said Nick Barzoukas, the lawyer who took over the case after the Innocence Project closed it; the group only actively pursues cases where DNA is present. “Here the police had their hands on somebody who eerily fit the description. His hands were all over the crime. And he somehow skates on by.”

Last May, Barzoukas submitted an inch-thick file on Odoms to the Texas Pardon and Parole Board outlining the flaws with the case and the results of a polygraph test Odoms passed with ease.

Wilkes was in the Houston city jail, charged with a string of robberies, when The Post approached him in April for comment. He declined.

Miles Moffeit can be reached at 303-954-1415 or mmoffeit@denverpost.com.