Christine Dolde wanted to testify against the young man who put a knife to her throat as she walked up the front steps to her Guilford home in the middle of the afternoon.

The 43-year-old said she would have easily and unequivocally identified the man who attacked her, the man who took her purse containing the nearly $300 she was planning to take on a trip to celebrate her grandmother's 90th birthday.

But Baltimore prosecutors told her not to bother, that her testimony and picking the suspect from a police mug shot she was shown were not enough by themselves to ensure a conviction. There was no other evidence - just her word - and without more from police, there was no way to take the case to trial. Witness IDs are inherently unreliable, they told her.

Christine Dolde has a doctorate in biology. She did postgraduate work in human genetics at Johns Hopkins. "I am a careful observer," she said. "I do not make quick judgments or statements. I gave the police a meticulous description."

Even more than that, Dolde said she was ready to testify, despite three trial delays that eventually led to a plea bargain in which her attacker, John Couplin, now 19, pleaded guilty to the May 2008 crime but got a suspended sentence. He served just the time he had spent in jail awaiting trial, a little more than a year, and walked free the day of his final court appearance on June 18 last year.

"I didn't think he would get out the same day," Dolde said in an interview this week at her home on Southway.

Dolde, who has lived with her husband in Guilford for 15 years, had slowly put the attack behind her. But then last week, it came crashing back into the headlines.

Police charged the man who attacked her in 2008 with robbing three women at gunpoint on Jan. 6 just a few blocks from Southway and then charged him in the Jan. 12 abduction of a college student. Police say the student, who also lived in Guilford, was forced into the trunk of his car and driven to bank machines on York Road to withdraw money.

Now, the crime Dolde fought so hard to forget is center stage in Baltimore's familiar argument about crime, with city leaders passing the blame and residents outraged over what they term a lenient sentence emblematic of the city's revolving-door justice.

The judge said he accepted the plea in Dolde's case in part to clear a crowded trial docket. The prosecutors said they were forced to offer a plea with little jail time because police did a shoddy job gathering evidence and left them with a shaky case. The police said there was little evidence to get and that they had a rock-solid ID from a credible victim.

The two primary enforcement agencies, prosecutors and police, who are supposed to be on the same side, have feuded for years over crime strategies, the number of arrests by police and, most recently, over a list prosecutors keep of untrustworthy officers unfit for the witness stand. In recent months, Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III has spoken out angrily against what he feels is a less than judicious judicial system.

It's people like Christine Dolde who get caught in the middle.

And she's not quite sure what to think now that she is "the Guilford woman" being talked about from the police commissioner's office to her next-door neighbor's living room.

She felt her attacker didn't get enough punishment, but she said she's more sad than angry.

She doesn't accept the attacker's upbringing in a poor neighborhood as an excuse. "The kid knew what he did," she said. And, if the latest police charges are true, the young suspect has escalated the intensity of his attacks, from using a knife to a gun, from a holdup to abduction.

Dolde doesn't want to hear about a "system failure." She said, "I think there's an extraordinary amount of crime in Baltimore, and the police and the courts are all overworked. Everything needs an overhaul, but I'm not sure what the solution is."

But here's the impact of this crime on one victim:

Shaken, Dolde canceled her trip to her grandmother's 90th birthday party.

After the attack, she and her husband stopped mail delivery and opened a post office box.

And she no longer hands out candy to kids on Halloween. "I'm too scared to open my door to strangers," she said.

Still, Dolde said she never thought her attacker would be brazen enough to return to Guilford.

But on Jan. 6, the night the three women were robbed on Suffolk Road, Dolde and her husband were walking their dogs when they saw two men running. The man who'd attacked her in 2008, police later told her, ran right past the couple as he fled the holdup.