Alleged NC kidnapper’s print found where Lexington girl was taken in 1986, SC police say
A fingerprint of the North Carolina man arrested Thursday in the 1986 kidnapping of a 4-year-old Lexington, S.C., girl was found in the home where she was abducted, according to warrants.
That’s one detail from three arrest warrants issued for 61-year-old Thomas Eric McDowell, a Wake Forest, N.C., man who S.C. police charged in the 35-year-old cold case of Jessica Gutierrez.
The State spoke with Gutierrez’s mother, Debra, at her home on Friday.
When she learned that McDowell’s fingerprint had matched one found at the home where her daughter went missing, she said she knew McDowell must be the one who had taken her daughter.
”I knew his were the only ones (on the window) because I used to clean those windows every night,” she told The State.
Jessie, as she was known, went missing in 1986. Her mother awoke on June 6 and found a window open in a bedroom and her daughter vanished.
Thursday, the Wake Forest Police Department, located in a suburb of Raleigh, N.C., took McDowell into custody on arrest warrants from the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department.
He is charged with murder, kidnapping and first degree burglary in Gutierrez’s disappearance.
In a court hearing Friday in Wake County, N.C., a district court judge said McDowell would remain in jail without bond until he is extradited to South Carolina.
McDowell was also picked out of a photo lineup as the kidnapper, the warrants say. The documents don’t say who picked the photo from the lineup, but Jessica’s then-6-year-old sister was in the room when the girl was kidnapped. She told her mother that a man “with the magic hat and the beard” had taken Jessica.
Also, McDowell “made statements to other sources that he had kidnapped (Gutierrez) and killed her,” the warrants say.
The warrants don’t indicate when the fingerprint was connected to McDowell nor when he was identified in the photo lineup. It’s unclear from the warrants what new evidence not available in 1986 led to McDowell’s arrest Thursday about 250 miles from the Gutierrez residence.
The warrants also confirm that investigators have not found the young girl’s body.
Mother’s allegations
The information in the warrants coincide with allegations that Gutierrez’s mother, Debra, has alleged for decades. She told The State as recently as 2017 that a man in prison confessed to kidnapping and killing her daughter.
McDowell was in an N.C. prison in the 1980s and 1990s after being convicted in March 1987 of rape, criminal sexual conduct, breaking and entering and larceny, according to North Carolina incarceration records. South Carolina court records indicate he pleaded guilty in November 1987 to attempted burglary and grand larceny.
Debra Gutierrez contended that the man who confessed to killing her daughter had stolen a van weeks after her daughter was abducted and later raped a woman in North Carolina.
Investigators have not confirmed whether McDowell was the person who confessed in prison.
Lexington County Sheriff’s Department Deputy David Pritchard, who is the lead investigator on the case, signed the warrants.
The case will be prosecuted by the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office.
Reporter Bristow Marchant contributed to this story.
This story was originally published January 7, 2022 at 11:34 AM with the headline "Alleged NC kidnapper’s print found where Lexington girl was taken in 1986, SC police say."