CRIME
Prosecutors seek exhumation in 2002 rape case
DNA from an untested rape kit points to a convicted sex offender who's buried in Santa Fe National Cemetery
More than 20 years have elapsed since a woman identified in court records as Jane Doe was abducted from her Bernalillo County home and raped — all while her eyes were duct-taped shut.
She ultimately escaped, immediately sought medical treatment and consented to a sexual assault examination. Then she waited, in vain, for her attacker to be caught.
“Over the years, many, many survivors have talked to us about the effect that it has on them of not knowing who the offender is. Are they still out there? When they go to the grocery store, they’re always looking over their shoulders,” Bernalillo County Deputy District Attorney Jack Jacks said.
The survivor of the July 8, 2002, sexual attack is now one step closer to learning the identity of her attacker — and whether he is dead or still on the loose.
New private testing of evidence from her rape kit, which had gone untested for more than two decades, turned up a possible match last month.
But it will take an exhumation of the cremains of a convicted sex offender buried at Santa Fe National Cemetery to potentially get to the truth.
On July 20, 2002 — 12 days after Jane Doe was abducted and raped — a similar attack occurred in Albuquerque.
Convicted sex offender and burglar Michael Magirl, 51, was killed while attempting to sexually assault a 31-year-old woman after breaking into her home near Eubank Boulevard and Constitution Avenue. He threatened to kill her as he straddled her in bed, holding a flashlight and a gun, during the early morning assault.
In what an Albuquerque police captain described as the “fight of her life,” the woman wrestled the gun away from Magirl and shot him twice in the upper torso. He died at the scene.
According to police reports, Magirl had a record of sexual offenses. He pleaded guilty to attempted sodomy June 24, 1974, in Bernalillo County. The sentence was deferred, and Magirl was placed on probation.
On June 28, 1984, he was convicted of multiple residential burglaries and criminal sexual penetration in the rape of a female U.S. Air Force captain in Clovis.
He was sentenced to 31 years in prison but served a little more than half that time because of a state law that allowed “good time” for good behavior, news reports show. He was discharged from Central New Mexico Correctional Facility on Jan. 2, 2001, according to the District Attorney’s Office.
After his death, Magirl was cremated and interred at the national cemetery in Santa Fe. His gravestone shows he served as a corporal in the Vietnam War.
Jacks told the Journal on Monday that a member of Magirl’s immediate family consented to the exhumation. That came after a private lab in Virginia notified the District Attorney’s Office that the male DNA profile from the July 8, 2002, case was a possible match to Magirl.
Evidence from Jane Doe’s sexual assault kit went untested for years and was among more than 5,000 unprocessed sexual assault evidence kits in New Mexico discovered in a 2016 audit. All received an initial test by 2021.
Jacks said the Jane Doe case was among roughly 500 cases selected for a second review, given advances in technology that could help identify perpetrators.
“We don’t exactly know how his DNA and when his DNA was put in the system,” Jacks said, adding that it may have been collected while Magirl was in prison. “There’s no way of us really figuring that out, which is why we can’t say definitively that the DNA in the system is his.”
To protect her privacy, Jacks declined to say where Jane Doe currently lives or how she feels about the test result and proposed exhumation, which still needs to be approved by a state district judge.
Once the cremains are retrieved, there is no guarantee the DNA sample will be suitable for comparison.
“But we believe it’s important to leave no stone unturned to get a definitive answer if it’s possible,” Jacks said.
Since testing the thousands of sexual assault kits, the District Attorney’s Office has won more than two dozen convictions. Several cases involved serial offenders, said District Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Nancy Laflin.
“We (at the DA’s office) were very happy when we got the letter (about the Jane Doe possible match). Because that gives us a real strong focus,” Jacks said.
He added that Magirl’s DNA profile, which will be developed after the exhumation, is also “something that we could use in future cases (under review).”
There has been a mixed reaction to the possibility that Jane Doe’s perpetrator may be dead, Jacks said.
“I think our hearts definitely go out to the survivor. Because she has not known, of course, that the person has been deceased for all these years,” he said. “And we would like to hold people accountable when they do acts, whether it’s yesterday or it’s 30 years ago. These acts of sexual violence have lifetime effects on survivors.”
Colleen Heild is an investigative reporter for the Journal. You can reach her at cheild@abqjournal.com.