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By Greg Bartlett

When 13 year old Alycia Nipp decided to cut through a vacant field as a shortcut on her way home from Wal Mart one evening, she had no way of knowing that one of the transients who frequented the area was a registered sex offender who had no home and who would be her killer. The suspect in the case, Darrin Sanford had been convicted previously of rape and served time in prison. Upon his release, on parole, he was fitted with a GPS tracking bracelet to allow his parole officer to monitor his movements.

According to his confession, Sanford attempted to rape Alycia in the vacant field, but was unable to maintain arousal long enough to perform. When the girl laughed at him, he flew into a killing rage and beat her and stabbed her with various things that were strewn about the field, then made some attempt to hide the body. The data taken from his GPS tracking bracelet corroborates his confession by placing him in the field at the time of the murder and the movements he claims to have made are shown in the data.

Sanford’s arraignment in the case has been postponed to give both the prosecution and the defense an opportunity to prepare death penalty arguments in the case. While his attorney is refusing to comment on the case, the outcome seems pretty clear with a confession by the killer and the data from his GPS tracking bracelet to back it up. Had he not been wearing such a bracelet, Sanford may not have been so forthcoming with information when the police questioned him about the previous day after they picked him up.

Nothing in the world will ever bring this 13 year old girl back from the grave. Her family can, however, take some solace in the fact that the man who took her from them was caught quickly by police and knew that the evidence provided by the GPS tracking bracelet he was wearing would be enough to get him convicted. For that reason, he made a full confession to police and told them what happened and how he killed the girl. Without the data from the GPS tracking bracelet, police would have had a more difficult time locating Sanford and putting together a case against him for prosecutors. The fact he was wearing the device saved the taxpayers a great deal of money and got a killer off the streets quickly.