How A Specific Pair Of Adidas Sneakers Led To The Arrest of the Serial Rapist In 'Unbelievable'
In the penultimate episode of Netflix's Unbelievable, Meritt Wever's Detective Karen Duvall (whose real name is Stacy Galbraith) finally enters the home of their prime suspect in the hunt for a serial rapist. In a room upstairs, she comes upon a goldmine of evidence connecting Chris McCarthy (real name Marc O'Leary) to a string of rapes across Colorado, and to the rape of Marie Adler, a teenager in Washington whose case is the focus of the miniseries.
Among the evidence is a pair of Adidas sneakers that Duvall and her partner Grace Rasmussen (real name Edna Hendershot) knew to belong to their suspect from footprints collected outside of a victim's home. How they knew the exact shoe—an Adidas ZX700 mesh sneaker, released in March 2005—is detailed in the ProPublica story that inspired the miniseries:
Galbraith checked out the footprints left at the Lakewood scene. They matched the footprints in the snow outside her victim’s apartment in Golden. She sent images of the shoe prints to crimeshoe.com, a website that promised to move an investigation “from an unidentified scene-of-crime shoeprint to detailed footwear information in one simple step.” The site, now defunct, identified the prints as having been made by a pair of Adidas ZX 700 mesh shoes, available in stores after March 2005.
As stated, crimeshoe.com is since defunct, but while active, the site provided a highly specific service to investigators:
Analysts will search Foster & Freeman's footwear database, SoleMate, and provide a report identifying manufacturer, model and images of any shoes that match the shoe print, normally completed within 24 hours of submission.
It was a small piece of an otherwise overwhelming swath of evidence implicating O'Leary for the crimes, but when Wever's Gailbraith opens his closet door in Episode 7—after discovering another key piece of evidence, a pink digital camera—it's a deep sigh of relief for the audience. In that moment, seeing the sneakers alongside the infamous blue backpack, you're certain they've got their guy.
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