RALEIGH - Undisclosed facts surrounding the brutal rape and strangulation death of Stephanie Bennett may come to light as a wrongful death lawsuit filed by her father goes to trial today.

Bennett, 23, was found dead May 21, 2002, in a spare room of her first-floor apartment at the Bridgeport Apartments near Lake Lynn in North Raleigh. Bennett's father, Carmon, who lives in Rocky Mount, Va., filed a lawsuit claiming that the apartment complex created a dangerous situation by not putting more safety measures in place.

Jurors will be selected today in the trial expected to last several weeks.

During the course of a murder investigation that spanned three years, Drew Planten, a former neighbor and chemist working for the N.C. Department of Agriculture, was arrested in October 2005 and charged with killing her.

Raleigh police said they had DNA evidence linking him to the crime, but Planten killed himself while in custody before going to trial. He was thought to have stalked Bennett, and he might have been the man spotted peering into her apartment window a month before the killing. Bennett's killer crawled through her apartment window the night she was attacked.