CROWN POINT | Lake County police scoured the country in a six-month investigation to solve the 24-year-old rape and slaying of Linda Bennitt.

It was one of several recent examples of police using science to solve cold cases.

In the end, it was a sample of bodily fluid and a partial fingerprint from a Gary apartment window sill that steered police to Mark Erler, the California man charged Monday with Bennitt's 1984 slaying.

"We've had great success in cold cases in the last year," Lake County police Cmdr. Shaw Spurlock said in a written statement Tuesday.

In December, DNA evidence linked David Bowen to the 1979 sexual torture and slaying of 8-year-old Kenneth Conrick, of Gary.

Bowen, who was 16 at the time, became a suspect after police learned he had been accused more than a year before Kenneth's homicide of sexually assaulting and beating a 9-year-old boy living nearby, Lake County Criminal Court records state. The 9-year-old boy's mother agreed not to press charges against Bowen because Bowen underwent psychiatric treatment, police said.

Police shelved Kenneth's case as unsolvable a few months later for lack of evidence.

But years later, Bowen's sister Donna Oprish, who had been in contact with Gary police because she suspected her brother, gave police a DNA sample that helped investigators establish that someone in her family had DNA that was consistent with the DNA found at the scene.

Bowen awaits trial on murder charges in Lake County Criminal Court.

In May, Dyer police said they used DNA evidence to connect 24-year-old Jeffrey Cameron to a 2003 rape.

Cameron was arrested in northwest Connecticut by state police there late last month for being a fugitive from justice, according to reports. Cameron awaits trial on two counts of felony burglary, robbery, rape and criminal confinement in Lake Criminal Court.

As police across the country merged DNA databases, Cameron's DNA, which was collected in Utah, came up as a match with the DNA recovered from the 2003 Dyer rape, Dyer Detective Don Foley said.