00:05:23 So spartanburg investigators contacted the secret service, which has lab with state-of-the-art equipment for video enhancement.
00:05:33 >> I know most people associate us with the protection of the president, but the secret service was originally created in 1865 as a law-enforcement agency.
00:05:41 >> Narrator: In fact, the secret service was working on technology th would get one of its first tryouts in this case.
00:05:50 >> It was just an amazing coincidence that a case of this high profile came into our office for us to work on it.
00:05:56 >> Narrator: The secret service discovered that the surveillance cameras in the parking lot were out of focus.
00:06:04 To correct that, they returned to the parking lot, set up a beam of light through a panel in the same spot as rhonda's car, then photographed it with the surveillance camera.
00:06:18 >> The single point source represents a single point of data on the image file.
00:06:23 So in a focused camera, this point source would be a round circle.
00:06:28 An out-of-focus camera would actually be a distorted image of that circle, and it's that image file that is used and imported into the software to attempt to refocus the image.
00:06:39 >> This camera was pretty out of focus.
00:06:41 It was pretty bad in terms of quality.
00:06:44 Being able to clean up, clarify some of the things in the video helped identify some of the actions that took place to put together the story of what happened.
00:06:56 >> Narrator: The improved images revealed that something different happened between rhonda and her assailant, something that investigators hadn't seen before.