Prints Help Finger Suspect in 18-Year-Old Slaying : Crime: Daughter’s determination pays off when police reopen case. New technology is used to match evidence.

Eighteen years ago, Evelyn Irwin wondered if anything could heal her grief over her mother’s death. She would sit up nights asking, Who would kill an 84-year-old widow? How could they get away with murder?

But a lot can happen in 18 years, Evelyn Irwin will tell you now. People grow old, marvel at technological wizardry, find the truth in that adage about time healing all wounds. Rage can fade to pain, and pain to curiosity. And curiosity can be a friend.

After all, she believes, it was her curiosity that set into motion the chain of events that may have unraveled the mystery of her mother’s 1975 death.

In a news conference this week, Los Angeles police announced the arrest of Phyllis Carraway, a 34-year-old San Bernardino woman who had been the 16-year-old girl next door when Irwin’s mother, Mamie Johnston, was brutally stabbed to death in August, 1975. There are two other suspects in the killing, but detectives would divulge little more.

They did say, however, that the investigation would never have been revived had Irwin, 74, not happened upon a newspaper article about a new computerized fingerprint identification system, then called police to see if it could help with her mother’s case.

It was a call over which Irwin had agonized.

“It wasn’t revenge that I wanted-- revenge is such a strong word, really,” said Irwin, sitting in the sunny kitchen of her Baldwin Hills Estates home Tuesday. “It was more an I-wish-I-knew kind of thing.

“I could always accept the fact of her death, because she was 84 and had lived a good life. But I could never, and will never, accept the manner in which she died. It was terrible, and so unfair.”

The body of Mamie Johnston, a retired librarian, was discovered Aug. 20, 1975, in the bedroom of the house where she had lived for 52 years, a bungalow on West 84th Place. For as long as neighbors could remember, she had been a fixture on the block, trundling back and forth between her home and the one next door, a look-alike Spanish bungalow where her 80-year-old sister, Edna, lived, like her, alone.

Each morning, the sisters ate breakfast together. When Mamie failed to show up, Edna went looking for her. What Edna found was so horrific that she never recovered: Mamie had been stabbed repeatedly, stripped of her pajama bottoms and left beside her twin bed in a pool of blood.

At first, police doggedly pursued the case, interviewing more than 30 people and lifting numerous fingerprints. But in those days, fingerprint identification took weeks, sometimes months. Time passed. Clues dried up.

Irwin sold both bungalows, which her mother had owned. Then she turned her back on the neighborhood where her mother had died.

“It’s the kind of thing that’s always there,” she said. “The nights I couldn’t sleep. It all comes back. You remember. You think. You wonder, who might have done this? Who might have some idea who did it?

“Little things would come to mind. For a long time afterward, I would have the feeling I should call mother because I always called her on my break at 2:30 in the afternoon,” recalled Irwin, a retired Auto Club employee. “And for years, when something exciting would happen, or something good in our lives, or with the kids, I’d think, I ought to tell mother. But, of course, I couldn’t. I would have dreams about things we did when she was alive.”

She had a theory: “I felt that they were probably kids who did it, and that they were after money for drugs, because that was the thing in those days,” she said. “I think they felt that she was an older woman who undoubtedly had a stash of money in a closet or someplace, which was not at all true--she only kept a small amount of cash.”

Gradually, the grief faded until only her love for her mother and the mystery remained. But it was 1993 before a newspaper article gave her the opportunity to address both.

*

The house where Evelyn and Woodrow Irwin live was custom-built for them 32 years ago. It has four bedrooms and a breathtaking view and a spiral staircase. But her favorite spot is the kidney-shaped breakfast nook in the kitchen where she spends each morning with her coffee, reading the paper from cover to cover.

It was last summer, she said, that she came across an article about a new miracle of technology, an automated fingerprint identification system that enabled police to do in a few hours a job that once would have taken a human being 159 years to complete. The system could search through thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of fingerprints on file to match a latent print at a crime scene with the prints of a suspect. It was an expensive piece of technology, and it had just become part of the LAPD repertoire.

The gears in Irwin’s head began to turn.

“I thought, hmmm. Maybe. . .” Her voice trailed off. “It was a shot in the dark. I knew it had been 18 years. . . . But I felt I should call the police. And then I backed down. I don’t know why. . . . I kept putting it off. A couple of months passed, and finally, I thought, well, it can’t do any harm.”

She picked up the phone and asked for Detective Jerry Rogers, the original detective on the case. Rogers, she was told, had passed away. Eighteen years was, indeed, a long time, she realized. All right, she said, just give me anyone.

The case landed on the desk of Detective Carlos Brizzolara, who was being transferred out of the South Bureau Homicide Division after 14 years.

“This was my last case,” Brizzolara said. “I promised my boss I would do all I could to solve it before I left.”

From then on, Irwin said, Brizzolara called almost weekly to keep her abreast of the case. “He was so cute. He would say, ‘I can’t go into details, but we’re making progress.’ ”

Suddenly, after 18 years, clues began to flow again. They had a hit, the detective told Irwin. Then, the suspect is a woman. Then, the woman was somewhere in the Inland Empire. Then, the woman is under arrest.

Police, she said, told her that the crime allegedly was hatched when Carraway, the 16-year-old neighbor, “told two boys that mother was a likely (target), an old woman who lived alone.” Those men, she said, are being sought.

“I feel very sad for the girl’s mother, for Mrs. Carraway, because I am a mother myself. And I think mother would have been sad too . . . But I think she would also be glad I did what I did. I’m not sure what good it does me--they were just misguided kids--but I’m glad I did it. For mother’s sake.”