David Mittelman

Sending evidence to two labs simultaneously was a sign of how seriously Beaumont was taking this case.

The first suspect was obvious: Catherine's ex-boyfriend, David Perry.

She had just told Allison that she planned to cut off contact with him.

There was no forced entry, which suggested she knew whoever came through the door.

If it could work there, Lewallen believed it could work here.

In April of two thousand and twenty, the Beaumont Police Department paid approximately ten thousand dollars to a forensic laboratory called Othram, located in The Woodlands, Texas, about ninety miles west of Beaumont.

Othram was founded by David and Kristen Mittelman, and had quickly become one of the leading labs in the country for extracting usable DNA profiles from degraded or decades-old evidence.

The lab received two pieces of evidence from the Edwards case: a cutting from the bed comforter collected at the crime scene and the preserved vaginal swab from the sexual assault kit.