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Convicted of a car theft in new york and had some recent brushes with the law. >> he had been in some trouble recently when he went out of state. and he was a suspect in a death out of state, too. >> defarris denied any involvement in mandy's murder. his employer confirmed he was at work on the day mandy disappeared, so he wasn't considered a suspect. but defarris had some information of his own. he saw another local man, charlie smithart, driving his pickup truck on the road where mandy was last seen. >> he was described as a good guy to the kids. all the copper center kids could come to his ...

They learned that smithart's mother, lucille, had gone shopping at the copper river grocery store on the day of the mandy's disappearance and paid for the items with a check. >> the time and date on the register tape was the same. and the time was 3:17, when lucy said that she was home with her son. and she wasn't home. she was at the grocery store buying groceries at that time. >> 200 miles away in anchorage, criminalists used a gel adhesive tape to gather any trace evidence left behind by the killer. the tape lifts the evidence, but the adhesive isn't so strong that the trace elements can't ...

>> he never put his name down on the search roster at the fire station to say that i am a member of this search team, i will search. but he would show up there and stand around and then he would go off on his own. we found that strange. >> smithart denied defarris' claim he was near the site on the day mandy disappeared and said he had an alibi. he said he was watching television with his mother, an alibi his mother confirmed. >> god knows he didn't do it and the person who committed this crime knows that charles didn't do it. >> in a town the size of tazlina, checking an alibi is easier than ...

Sketch in the newspaper that mandy was missing, that she thought she was looking at sketch of her own daughter. >> armed with a search warrant, investigators confiscated smithart's pickup truck for analysis. with a gel adhesive, criminalists lifted microscopic particles from the truck's interior. during the investigation, they noticed something else about smithart. >> i couldn't take my eyes off his shirt, because he had little sparkly things on his shirt. and i finally asked him, "what are those sparkly things on your shirt, charlie?" and he says, "i don't know, brass, aluminum. i'm grinding ...

Could find. they also confiscated a pair of smithart's overalls. all of the evidence was shipped to chicago, illinois, to a research microscopist, skip palenik. palenik began looking at the small yellow paint chip found on mandy's clothing. using x-ray spectroscopy, he noticed something unique. >> glossy layers with no other layers behind it, in a variety of colors. that's quite unusual. and children's bicycles, of course, are painted with the single layers of the glossy paint. >> in the samples collected from smithart's workshop, he found a paint chip identical in composition to the paint chi...