a young forensic scientists, larry peterson, took a look.hy was that a fiber that was stuck in the crack of a shoe, why was that important? >> because it was somewhat loosely there. people normally don't have tufts of carpet fibers stuck loosely in their shoe. >> from those few thin threads, peterson would begin to build a case to try to catch a killer. how many fibers across the board did you look at every day in this case, when the case really started getting busy? 100? 500? 1,000? >> literally there's going to be hundreds if not thousands of fibers there, depending upon the case. >> in the spring of 1980, no one wanted to believe a serial killer was loose in the city, even when bob buffington spotted a disturbing pattern. >> there had been a sharp increase in the number of children under the age of 14 who had been killed. >> when he told his boss at homicide, the major threatened to transfer him. >> and i truly think that they were afraid that there would be a panic. >> it was this mother, after the loss of her 9-year-old son, who finally