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Thomas said Nifong wouldn't listen: "He said that he had personally interviewed her and had spoke with her at length about this case, and that he fully believed every word she said about this incident, and that he knew a lot more about this case than I did, and that he was going to proceed as he saw fit."

Nifong was smug and self-assured, Thomas said: "I had 27 years of experience with him, and he was looking me in the eye. He said he had interviewed her, he discussed the details of the case, he believed her and that my view of her as perhaps being a call girl working for an escort service, running around making things up for financial gain, was absolutely false. ... He went on to say what a wonderful person she was. He said she was fully believable, she was intelligent, articulate ... and telling a convincing story about what happened."

Nifong didn't tell Thomas that he knew Mangum and her family. In 1992, one of her uncles who owned a small grocery store in Durham was slain in a robbery. The case dragged on for three years, but finally the killer was tried and convicted.

Nifong was the prosecutor, and the case earned him the Mangum family's confidence, which would have helped Crystal Mangum feel comfortable with Nifong in the Duke case, according to her mother, her brother and a family friend.

"The whole family knew him and trusted him because of that case," said Delois Burnette, a minister who has known the Mangums for decades. "People had confidence in him that he would do us right because he had prosecuted that case."

Later on the afternoon of April 4, after meeting with Thomas, Nifong talked with Soucie, the investigator, on the telephone and instructed her to find evidence to back Mangum's story. He instructed the investigator "to nail down what victim did on the day before arriving at 610 N. Buchanan so we can show that she did not receive trauma prior to incident -- with witnesses."

Her driver interviewed

The police did as instructed: On April 6, they brought in Jarriel Johnson, a Raleigh man who drove Mangum around the Triangle on the weekend before the lacrosse party. Johnson said he took Mangum to at least three hotel rooms in Raleigh and Durham, and a night performing at a Hillsborough strip club.

Mangum had told police one encounter involved a couple and the use of a small vibrator. Those hotel encounters could have explained the only abnormal finding from Mangum's pelvic examination at the Duke emergency room hours after the lacrosse party: diffuse swelling of the vaginal walls.

Johnson and Mangum gave handwritten statements. Mangum's differed substantially from her previous accounts to doctors, nurses and police. She portrayed a more violent attack and painted Kim Roberts, the second dancer, as a fellow victim. Previously, she had said Roberts stole her money.

On April 11, Nifong met with Mangum and his investigators. The district attorney had serious problems going into the meeting: Records show that Mangum had given a half-dozen or more accounts that conflicted. She had picked out four attackers April 4 but had told police and doctors that three men attacked her. She said Evans, who was clean-shaven, had a mustache. And her April responses differed from all of her March responses.

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