Nottingham Harbor

When I started to write the novel NOTTINGHAM HARBOR it was to just be a fictional crime novel set in northern New England. After working on the story and reading about the DNA analysis stories I realized the novel had a very significant purpose. It was and is the story of how to catch serial rapist after law enforcement has the results from the DNA analysis.

The story is about a task force attempting to identify a number of rapist. DNA does not identify the criminal. The FBI maintains a database called CODIS. This is a database of DNA of persons convicted of crimes. Unless a person has been convicted of a crime their DNA is NOT in CODIS. The Author, Jack Lorenz, of NOTTINGHAM HARBOR fully agrees with this legal restriction. When the DNA from the rape kits is determined very few of the results match the DNA in CODIS. Rape is a unique type of crime. Most criminals do NOT rape in addition to other crimes. So very few rapist are in the CODIS database. So in a number of jurisdictions where several hundred to a thousand rape kits have been analyzed only two or three rapist are identified. The secondary problem is that the serial rapists move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and only rape once in each jurisdiction. It is very difficult to identify the rapist with the information from only one case. Use of the physical characteristics of the criminal and the DNA must be used to tie cases together. This is what the team of Mattie Greene, the mathematics teacher, and Sergeant Bill Simpson do in NOTTINGHAM HARBOR. They find a common denominator between the cases with regard to the identity of the rapist. Since rapists like other people must reside, work, eat and drink at physical places, these types of information can be used to identify the specific person.

The techniques in the fictional story are the methods required in the real world to catch these dangerous criminals. DNA will not catch but a few rapists. There may be as many as 2000 rapists running around North America. They rape randomly on the streets of this country and Canada. The police and district attorneys in United States must work across jurisdictional lines as in NOTTINGHAM HARBOR. Beside a good story the novel has a higher purpose. It explains how to identify and catch these violent criminals. The other fact about these criminals is some of them are murders in addition to being rapists.

If you are victim of a rape, then you need to urge the local police to work with other jurisdictions and using technique similar those in NOTTINGHAM HARBOR identify and catch the rapist. This is the purpose of the novel in addition to being a good story. Enjoy the novel.