9-20-2008 Texas:FORT WORTH — A registered sex offender from Hurst who was questioned this week by Fort Worth police in connection with four rapes dating to 1997 was found dead Thursday after leaving behind a note that he didn’t want to drag his family into his problems.
DNA tests confirmed Friday that biological evidence in the four sexual assaults matched Gary Lynn Brown, said Sgt. Cheryl Johnson, sex crimes unit supervisor.
Brown, 43, had served time in prison for sexually assaulting and kidnapping two young girls — 7 and 8 years old — in Roswell, N.M., when he was 19.
He was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound by Hurst police about 8 a.m. Thursday inside a shed in his back yard.
Sgt. Craig Teague, Hurst police spokesman, said a concerned family member called police after finding a note in Brown’s home in the 300 block of Elm Street.
The cases
The four cases — two in 1997, one in 2000 and one in 2001 — were linked in January 2005 by the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, which examines biological evidence of unsolved crimes for possible connections.
In three of the cases (details on the fourth were unavailable Friday), the victims were walking or standing on the street when they were approached by a heavy-set man wearing prescription glasses.
The suspect’s vehicle was described as a dark-colored, four-door car in the earlier assaults and a red Ford Mustang in the 2001 case. Johnson said one of the earlier victims had been able to obtain the first three letters of the license plate.
A new look
Officer Rick Benson had begun reinvestigating the cases this past month as part of a unitwide review of cold cases involving CODIS hits, Johnson said.
Benson asked crime analyst Quannah Diffee to run a police report search looking for dark-colored, four-door cars with the same partial license plate.
"She came up with a 1996 report involving prostitution where Gary Lynn Brown was stopped in a Buick four-door with the first three letters of that license plate," Johnson said.
Johnson said investigators then began researching other vehicles Brown had owned and found he had bought a maroon or red Mustang in March 2001.
Brown "matched the description right down to some scars on his body that had been described by two separate victims," Johnson said.
Police obtained a search warrant for DNA, and on Wednesday Brown was taken to Fort Worth police headquarters, where he gave a DNA sample and was interviewed by Johnson and Detective Jeremy Spann.
"At that point, he denied any involvement in the crimes," Johnson said.
Johnson said about 24 hours later, investigators learned of Brown’s suicide. On Friday, police received confirmation that his DNA matched semen obtained in the four sexual assaults.
"They’ll be closed by exceptional means due to the fact that he cannot be prosecuted," she said.
Johnson said Brown’s profile will be uploaded into the national CODIS database for comparison with other unsolved rapes across the country.
Brown’s history
Brown first came to the attention of Hurst police last year.
"A general vehicle description matched his vehicle on a reported offense in Hurst," Teague said.
Though the offense could not be linked to Brown, Teague said the man’s criminal history convinced police that the man should be registering as a sex offender.
"He came in on our radar doing a background check," Teague said. "That’s when I located the stuff out of New Mexico and felt he should be complying with the registration statutes in Texas.
"I think very much that the law was designed to track and to warn society of this type of a person," Teague said.
..News Source.. by DEANNA BOYD
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