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by Pablo Guzmán
NEW YORK (CBS) ― When they saw the blue van on television reports about the investigation into Imette St. Guillen's rape and murder, apparently at least one woman called police.

"That's the van," she said.

Last October, I did a story about a 19-year-old woman who was walking back home from York College in Queens when a man in a blue van --- a two-toned blue Mark III, women said --- stopped her on the service road of the Van Wyck near 107th.

Dressed in blue, with a blue baseball cap that had the words "Fugitive Task Force" (though a later sketch had "Fugitive Agency"), he asked her to produce identification. Then, handcuffing her from behind, he hit her in the head and threw her in the back of the van. He drove to where he could make the first left and go back over the Van Wyck and into South Jamaica. But the woman was smart. She managed to play with the handles from inside the van, and got the doors open, falling out the back at 112th Avenue off 153rd Street. Some women talking outside their homes saw what happened, and ran to her assistance. They also saw the driver stop, get out, stare, jump back in the van, and take off.

Back in October, I spoke with one of those women. She described the van, and the driver. She also said something that made you realize just how bold this guy was: "He came back. He changed into a burgundy sweat suit, or jumpsuit, but came back. He was asking the kids if the cops had been around. But the kids recognized him, and got us. He drove off again. In that blue van."

Detectives from the 106th Precinct, as well as from the Police Impersonation Unit, began to work the case. They found at least two other incidents where women --- not as lucky as the 19-year-old who got away --- were beaten and raped by someone with a van pretending to be a cop. One was an Asian woman attacked about a week before the 19-year-old, in Forest Hills (the 19-year-old, by the way, looks more like a high school student. Police are factoring that into their profile as well).

With women now telling police that blue van they've seen on TV in Darryl Littlejohn's driveway looks like the van used by the man last fall who impersonated a cop and attacked them, detectives are now being sent to re-interview the women, and witnesses like the woman I spoke to on Oct. 20. They are being shown pictures of Darryl Littlejohn and the van.

Detectives are looking closely at what could be this new avenue of investigation because the Brooklyn D.A., and some police, believe that the case against Littlejohn, regarding St. Guillen's murder, may have holes that a defense lawyer will exploit.

For example, in the beginning of the investigation, when detectives saw that some of her fingernails were broken off, they knew she had put up a fight. They started looking for a suspect with scratch marks. This young woman who was studying forensics and criminology may yet get final triumph from the forensics obtained by what she clawed off with her fingers. There may be crucial DNA evidence under her nails, taken from the man's skin (which is why one of the first things you hear investigators say at such a crime scene, "bag the hands." Literally, bagging the hands; to preserve possible evidence).

So the police looked for scratch marks. And when they thought they had the only male employee at The Falls, the last bar she was at, with a scratch mark --- Darryl Littlejohn, the bouncer --- it seemed to be an "Aha!" moment.
That moment lasted about four days. Even as police sources say they got more circumstantial evidence from cell phone records that appeared to put the person they were now looking at most closely at both Lower Manhattan and the general area at the edge of Brooklyn where her body was found, detectives got blindsided from an unlikely source.

Several days after St. Guillen was attacked, the co-owner of The Falls, a member of the Dorrian family, reached out through an attorney to tell police that St. Guillen, who already had too much to drink, became a bit much when she was told it was 4 a.m. closing and that she couldn't finish her second drink. He apparently told his bouncer -- Mr. Littlejohn -- to show her the door. And apparently, there was some sort of commotion at the door.

Which, a defense lawyer will point out would explain both the scratch and his DNA under her fingernails. A bouncer doing what his boss ordered him to do.

"Imagine just that scenario," a detective told me. "Now, throw this in: the guy's an ex-con. Working a job his parole says he shouldn't be at. Witnesses --- his boss, co-workers --- see him take the woman out, talking to her. Words are exchanged. But he knows he can be put with her. Now granted it's happened before, but did this guy really go ahead anyhow and rape and kill her, even though he knows there's witnesses? Does he want to go back to jail that bad? Without a lot more, some of us are just not so sure. At least, with something that stands up in court."

And so, they hold him on the parole violation for the bouncer's job he wasn't supposed to have. And so the investigation into a guy impersonating a cop who attacked three, maybe four women --- a guy with a blue van --- suddenly is back on the front burner, with more help than cops who had the original case ever had.

Because until the cops get a break --- until something points definitely to this guy or somebody else (and where IS that guy who called 911?) --- right now, "Darryl Littlejohn is all we got."

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