A Kansas police department has successfully used cigarette butts as a key piece of evidence to apprehend a child sexual predator, solving a case that had gone cold for years after two attacks in a park in Lawrence.

The Douglas County District Attorney, Dakota Loomis, announced the arrest of 58-year-old David James Zimbrick during a press conference on December 30.

“It’s been precisely 25 years since the first incident took place here in Lawrence, Kansas,” Loomis stated. “We have dedicated thousands of hours to tracking down this defendant and ensuring he faces justice in court.”

Zimbrick is facing charges including rape, aggravated criminal sodomy, and aggravated indecent liberties with a child for crimes committed in 2000 and 2003.

Allegations Against David James Zimbrick

Lawrence Police Chief Rich Lockhart explained that the investigation was initiated on August 25, 2000, when officers responded to Naismith Valley Park after receiving a report of child sexual assault.

In the incident, three children were cycling along a park path when a man approached them, offering $20 to help him find something. While one child left to get his father, the suspect sexually assaulted a 7-year-old girl who had stayed behind.

“The father immediately ran down the path yelling for his daughter,” Lockhart said. “He located her in a wooded area and she told him that she’d been sexually assaulted.”

The young victim provided a physical description and told police that her attacker had been smoking a cigarette. Detectives recovered several cigarette butts at the scene, one of which Lockhart noted was “still smoldering.”

“Unknown to the officers at the time,” he added, “these cigarette butts would become key pieces of evidence.”

Authorities were able to obtain a DNA profile from the cigarette butts, which they entered into the national CODIS database; however, there were no matches at the time to link the profile to a suspect. 

Then, three years later, on May 23, 2003 there was another attack at the same park. This time a male suspect approached two 10-year-old boys. Once again, he offered to pay $20 for their help. 

Lockhart explained, “The man sent the boys in different directions and when he had one of the boys out of the sight of the other, he sexually assaulted him.”

Sexual evidence was collected and submitted to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI), but it wasn’t until January of 2016 that the samples from both cases were matched to the same suspect. 

Genetic Genealogy Leads to Arrest of David Zimbrick

Two years later, Lawrence Police Detective Amy Price took note when California used genetic genealogy to identify Joseph DeAngelo as the Golden State Killer. Price began to wonder, according to a department press release, whether the same process could work in their cold case and reached out to Parabon Nanolabs, a forensic DNA company who agreed to offer their assistance.

Through the use of genetic genealogy, the detectives were given possible names of the suspect’s parents and grandparents in 2020.

“Through their investigation,” Lockhart said, “they learned that one of the members of the family had a child when she was 14 or 15 and that child was put up for adoption.”

After speaking with the birth mom and issuing a search warrant for the adoption records, detectives were ultimately able to identify the child she’d given up for adoption as Zimbrick.