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                 Copyright 2001 San Antonio Express-News
                          San Antonio Express-News

                       May 9, 2001, Wednesday , METRO

SECTION: METRO / SOUTH TEXAS; Pg. 1B

LENGTH: 549 words

HEADLINE: Abductor's profile was backlogged ; DNA file hadn't yet been
loaded

BYLINE: Bill Hendricks

BODY:  Ten days after a kidnapped 9-year-old San Antonio girl miraculously
turned up, police and county crime laboratory technicians completed a DNA
profile that positively identified a suspect.

But it took another seven weeks to match the abductor's DNA blueprint with
the name of convicted sex offender Gary Dale Cox.

While the state had taken a sample of Cox's DNA three years ago - as
mandated by state law - it wasn't yet entered into the state's database when
Nykema Augustine showed up at her Northwest Side apartment complex following
five days in captivity.   "We had him; we just didn't know we had him,"
Bexar County crime laboratory director Timothy C. Fallon said Tuesday.

The problem, Fallon said, was as simple as it was frustrating.

San Antonio authorities sent their suspect's DNA profile to the Department
of Public Safety Crime Laboratory on March 19.

At that time, a computer comparison failed to match any of the about 30,000
genetic profiles in the state's DNA database of known sex offenders.

The search didn't find Cox because his genetic profile hadn't yet been
entered on the state database, according to J. Ronald Urbanovsky, director
of the DPS lab.

Cox's DNA was among some 40,000 backlogged files.

Prison officials had taken a blood sample from Cox, a convicted child
molester, in May 1998, but his DNA first was processed using a method that
has subsequently been deemed obsolete.

By the time Cox ran away from a Houston halfway house early last year and
eventually moved into the ramshackle hunting cabin south of Kerrville where
he killed himself, technicians at the state crime laboratory in Austin were
busy converting about 11,600 old DNA files to a newer method and loading the
files on the sex offender database.

Cox's DNA profile was among those files.

Shortly after an 11-year-old girl was abducted from Slidell, La., on April
16, Louisiana police submitted a DNA profile of that suspect to the DPS
laboratory in Austin.

Cox's information still hadn't been entered on the database, and the Slidell
query didn't find a match.

But genetic blueprints of the nameless suspects in the San Antonio and
Slidell abductions remained in the DPS database, waiting for matching DNA to
be loaded onto the system.

On May 1, an abductor snatched 11-year-old Leah Henry from her Houston
neighborhood and held her in the Kerr County cabin.

Time ran out on Cox the following Friday morning.

In the span of a few hours, a Kerr County resident because suspicious and
reported Cox to the sheriff's office; Houston police identified Cox as a
suspect by tracing the license plate number from his car; and DPS laboratory
technicians in Austin completed the first half of Cox's DNA profile after
investigators contacted the lab and asked them to run a DNA check on paroled
sex offender Gary Dale Cox.

With Cox's name, technicians quickly found that his DNA matched the suspect
samples taken in San Antonio and Louisiana.

But when technicians called back to the investigators with news of their
discovery, they got some news in return.

Cox had killed himself and the Houston girl had escaped, lab technicians
were told.

bhendricks@express-news.net

LOAD-DATE: May 9, 2001