Van-ished

A 12-year-old girl claimed she had been kidnapped, but police weren't so sure.

Her memory was too clear, her manner too unemotional, her heroism too unbelievable

until some fibers on her clothing forced police to reconsider.

It happened on a Wednesday afternoon in Freeport, Texas.

12-year-old Dana Stenson walked to her Bible study at church just a few blocks from home.

Two hours later, when the class was over, Dana didn't return home.

Her mother went looking for her and was advised by the teacher that she had never appeared in class.

And then police got involved.

I knew knew it right away.

My stomach went into knots.

My legs were shaking.

I was just

certain something had happened.

Their neighbors joined in the search, but found no sign of the young girl.

Dana's father was a local prison guard, and he feared that an ex-convict had taken revenge by targeting his daughter.

Thought the one the offenders might have abducted her, the first thing that came across my mind.

Might have been wrong or right about it at the time, I don't know.

Several hours passed.

Then shortly after 10 p.m., a few miles away in Oyster Creek, Texas, Dana walked up to some boys playing basketball and claimed she had been kidnapped.

This was a deserted road.

It was dark, not a lot of traffic.

If you were there at night, you would think you were in the middle of nowhere.

Dana was taken to police headquarters and reunited with her family.

She was like real calm.

There was like a real calmness about her and

to me that is very strange.

She had a very flat affect and it was extremely odd to me, her demeanor.

Dana told police that she was in the church parking lot and couldn't locate her classroom.

Then, a white middle-aged man gave her directions.

He walked her towards the door,

then grabbed her and forced her into his van, tied her up, and put her in a wooden box lined with carpet.

Dana said he drove the van somewhere near the ocean.

She could hear the waves.

Then he sexually assaulted her.

An hour or two later, he assaulted her again in a motel room.

She said the man had a knife.

And She told him, don't kill me, don't do this to me, don't kill me.

And he said, I'll let you go and you better not tell nobody because

I know everything about you and I'll kill you.

And he pushed her out of the van.

I was extremely skeptical because horrible things that he did to her.

There was no emotion when she told us about these things.

So initially, I

had a difficult time believing that

police were skeptical.

She said she was kidnapped in a church parking lot in broad daylight, yet no one saw it.

And the kidnapper released her in an area not far from the home of one of her friends.

She was released in an area that a young man lived that she knew personally.

And

some people described it, their relationship as maybe girlfriend and boyfriend.

Investigators told Dana they thought she was lying.

That was the first sign of emotion that we saw from her.

And she said, you can do what you have to do.

I'm not lying.

And I mean, she was

closer to tears then

when she was accused of that or told that than she was during the entire interview.

I couldn't believe why they were like questioning her and interrogating her and stuff and saying, that she might have made this up or this might have been a prank.

police confiscated dana's clothes for analysis then asked her to return the next day for another interview and it gave investigators a new insight into the case

The day after Dana Stinson's alleged kidnapping, she returned to police headquarters for a second interview.

They wanted to make sure her story didn't vary.

This time, investigators saw something that wasn't clearly visible the night before.

I can see what looked to be burn marks or red marks around both of her wrists.

Red marks at the outset of her eyes, red marks around her mouth, where it appears that there's been some type of tape or something placed around her.

Dana said these were caused by the tape the kidnapper used over her mouth and around her wrists.

Gradually, police began to believe her.

And she told Detective Dietrich, in no uncertain terms, I am not lying.

Exactly what I told you has happened.

Her parents took Dana to the hospital for a physical examination.

But by this time, potential forensic evidence was gone.

She should have gone to the hospital hospital sooner.

She didn't.

Had she gone sooner, I'm not sure they ultimately would have recovered any DNA.

But we always try to, as part of procedure, get the victim to the hospital as soon as possible to be checked out.

Fortunately, police had Dana's clothes.

A pair of jeans, a pullover, and some socks were given to trace evidence analyst Devin Kraco Stasha.

Using tape lifts, she found numerous fibers.

It wasn't like I just found one or two of these carpet fibers.

I had multiple of these fibers from different articles of her clothing.

You could not ask for much better than that.

Magnified 400 times, Devin noticed that there were two different types of blue fibers, presumably from two different sources.

One was a light blue, and it was a very sharp, angular, triangular shape.

And then there was a lighter, kind of a bluish-gray fiber that was also triangular, but it was more round.

The nodes weren't as sharp.

Triangular or trilobal fibers are usually from carpet.

There were other fibers on Dana's socks.

These were round and small, the type normally seen in ropes.

This was consistent with Dana saying her ankles were tied with rope.

The investigation was taking a 180-degree turn.

Now the forensic evidence was corroborating much of what Dana was saying.

I was extremely impressed, even to the most minute detail.

She

remembered, and through the things that she went through,

most adults wouldn't be able to remember the things that she remembered.

Dana said her assailant was white with blonde hair, blue eyes, in his mid-40s, and had a medium build.

He was driving a white van with tinted windows and the word wood painted on the glass.

She said she was forced into a coffin-like box covered with blue carpet.

And she remembered something else.

My victim described inside the van an orange ice chest cooler type

object.

She said that it said igloo on it and it it had some other writing on it.

She couldn't remember exactly what it was, Lowe's, Home Depot, something of that nature.

And inside that cooler were Dr.

Pepper's.

Investigators decided to go public with Dana's description of the van.

They were hoping that someone in the area might have seen the van or witnessed the abduction.

Two days after Dana Stenson's kidnapping, one of her neighbors contacted police saying he might have witnessed at least part of the abduction.

He said, I saw a white van in the area.

It said surfside floor and tile on the side of it.

I saw it in and around circling the church all afternoon.

I saw it park the church.

I saw it leave the church around 5.35.45, and it never returned.

This was consistent with information Dana told investigators.

The child in the case was able to describe a word, she remembered, wood, that was on the side of the van.

Investigators checked the phone book and found a business called Surfside Installation, Ceramic, Vinyl, Tile, and Wood.

The owner of the business was 36-year-old Randy Lee Allen, married for 17 years and the father of a seven-year-old boy.

He had no criminal record.

He was told that he may have been a witness to a crime and would he voluntarily follow us to the police department.

His response was, sure.

Randy Lee Allen said he knew nothing about any kidnapping.

He told police he was in a restaurant having dinner with his wife and child around the time of Dana's abduction.

His wife corroborated his alibi.

The case appeared to have hit a dead end.

But police wanted one more thing from Randy Allen.

They wanted to look inside his van.

And he readily agreed.

There was no coffin-like box in the back of his van, like the one Dana described.

But one thing particularly caught the attention of detectives.

There is an orange ice chest, igloo, with the word Home Depot on it, that the lid's off of, and inside that ice cooler are Dr.

Pepper's.

Dana describes seeing the same kind of ice chest in the abductor's truck, as well as the same color carpeting in the van's interior.

Investigators also found some blue and white rope.

Blue fibers from the carpet in the van, seen on the right, with the same shape and size of fibers found on Dana's clothing.

Both samples were put under infrared light, causing the molecules to vibrate in unique ways.

These can be charted to determine a sample's chemical makeup.

So if it's a nylon, it's going to show up as a nylon.

If it's an acrylic, it'll be a totally different pattern.

If it's a rayon, it's going to be a totally different pattern.

Samples from the van and from Dana's clothing were both made of a compound called nylon 66.

To take the comparison one step further, analysts turned to a microspectrophotometer.

That is basically a microscope that measures color.

We pass light through a sample and it measures the absorbance, how much light of that is absorbed by our sample, and that actually tells us basically what color.

It gives us a spectra of the color representation.

The colors in both samples were identical.

The same set of tests were conducted on rope in Alan's truck and the rope fibers on Dana's clothing.

Again, they were virtually identical.

When we get the phone call from the lab that those fibers match, we know we have Randy Allen.

We are expecting at that point he's going to plead.

In Randy's home, Police found pieces of lumber similar to pieces that would make a wooden box.

Police asked Randy if he would put the pieces back back together.

Surprisingly, Randy agreed.

While doing so, he made an incriminating statement.

He said, almost to himself, well, she was a little one.

She was a little one, so yeah, this is how I did it.

Investigators noticed there was blue carpet lining the inside of the box.

Fibers from this carpet matched the last remaining piece of forensic evidence found on Dana Stenson's clothing.

Finally, police prepared a photo lineup and showed it to Dana Stenson, telling her that their suspect may or may not be in the lineup.

Less than five seconds, less than three.

As soon as I gave it to her, she scanned it and she pointed to his picture and said,

he's the man that took me from the church and did that to me.

Randy Lee Allen was confronted with Dana's identification and the forensic evidence he confessed and read his statement on videotape I saw a little girl grab her and

started walking her towards my rampart

but one thing bothered investigators If Randy Allen was the perpetrator, how could he have been at dinner with his wife and child while the abduction took place?

The answer is unbelievable.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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When Randy Lee Allen confessed to the abduction and sexual assault of a 12-year-old girl, his friends, business associates, and particularly his wife could hardly believe it.

She had been married to him for quite some time.

They had a child together.

She, of course, didn't want to believe that he was capable of this behavior.

No one in his family wanted to believe that he was capable of this.

And with good reason, the evidence showed a particularly calculated crime.

Prosecutors believe Alan was cruising the neighborhood near Dana's church looking for a victim.

He saw Dana Stenson, who appeared to be lost, so he offered to show her where her classroom was.

As they passed his van,

Alan forced her inside, gagged her with tape, racked it around her hands, and tied her feet with rope.

Then he forced her into the coffin-like box with the lid on top, making it soundproof.

He drove out near the ocean, parked his van, and sexually assaulted her.

Then, Alan put her back in the coffin and incredibly drove home.

He got out of the van, walked upstairs, had got his wife and his child, walked downstairs, got in his wife's car, and they went to dinner.

They were gone at least over an hour.

He came back,

his wife and child went upstairs.

He told his wife he had more work to do.

He went and got in the van with the child still in the box and drove off.

He took Dana to a local motel.

But this time, Dana fought back.

She refused to do what he asked and demanded that he let her go.

This, experts say, altered the balance of power in Dana's favor.

She became demanding.

I'm not doing that anymore.

I want you to let me go.

I want you to let me go now.

And I think in the end, that shook the suspect a little bit.

I wish more of us could handle things that way, but most people aren't going to have that kind of strength, and most people aren't going to show that type of resilience early on and are going to need more help kind of coping with that long term.

Randy Allen acquiesced, drove her to a deserted location, and let her go.

Prosecutors believe he had intended to kill her.

I don't think that Randy Allen

ever thought he would be caught in this case and never considered forensic evidence being something that could link him back to this.

I think that because I think he intended to kill his victim.

Almost all sex criminals exhibit some type of deviant sexual behavior in their teens or early 20s.

Randy Lee Allen appeared to be one of the few exceptions.

I just found it incredibly strange.

You know, all of a sudden one day he woke up and decided to commit such a horrific crime.

That's when somebody decides to learn to dive in the water, they don't usually jump off of a cliff first.

They'll jump in off of a pool.

And to me, this was jumping off of a cliff.

There had to be more in his background.

We just weren't unable to uncover anything.

Randy Lee Allen lived in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas at the time when a number of young girls were abducted.

I feel like there's probably other victims.

And that's our department's opinion.

The investigators that worked on this case,

the investigators that have read this case outside of our department, the prosecutor's office, all believe there are probably other victims out there.

But none has been found.

And Randy Leallen made no more confessions.

In September of 2003, he was convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault and received two consecutive terms of 75 years.

Dana Stinson is a pseudonym for the remarkable young girl who showed courage, determination, and whose near-photographic memory helped solve the case.

And the forensic evidence helped too.

They stick to her clothing and all that, her her body.

That's amazing.

I can't believe how they can pick up something that small and make something stick like this, which I'm glad it did.

Through science and all that.

It's amazing how, you know, the world of forensics, how interesting it is and how from a tiny, tiny piece of nothing, they can find evidence.

You know,

that is very amazing.

I find that very, very amazing.

And like I told you, I mean, if I was young and I have to do it all over again, yes, I think I would go for forensics.