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Jigaboo linked to five rapes through DNA
Cleveland ape linked to five rapes through DNA
He stalked them at night. When they were alone in the dark. Waiting for a bus, using a payphone, walking home from a bar. He ambushed them, dragged them into an alley, a field or an isolated parking lot behind a factory. And he raped them.
Neither police nor the victims knew at the time they were dealing with a serial rapist, and his trail went cold for more than 10 years. Until a DNA database linked five attacks to each other -- and all of them to a Cleveland man already locked up for sex crimes.
Antonio Trice, 38, was indicted Thursday on four counts of rape, and three counts each of kidna
pping and gross sexual imposition in connection with three of the attacks, dating back to 1996 and 1997.
Investigators have not been able to locate two other victims. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason is confident the other victims will come forward.
"It's amazing how somebody like this can avoid detection for so long," Mason said. "We're talking about someone who has bounced into the system, who touched the system back then and still avoided being caught for these heinous events."
Trice was arrested after a high-speed chase in 1997 for failing to comply with a police order. That event stemmed from a woman's claim that Trice raped her in his car. But after police chased Trice and arrested him, he convinced investigators that the woman was a prostitute and that she lied about the rape.
He was convicted for running from police and put on probation. But he was not charged with a sex crime.
Prosecutors are trying to trace Trice's movements after that.
His tr
ail of criminal acts picks up in 2006 when he was caught having sex with a 15-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty in 2007 to having sex with the teen. But while he was out on a $1,000 bond awaiting sentencing, Trice raped a friend who had come over to his house to watch a movie.
Police re-arrested him, and Trice was indicted on a rape charge the day before he was sentenced in the first case.
During that sentencing hearing, Judge Eileen A. Gallagher said she would not label him a sexual predator because he was unlikely to re-offend.
In the second case, Trice pleaded guilty to rape and was labeled a sexual predator. He was given a total of five years in prison for the attacks.
It was the trip to prison that led to the new charges.
In 2005, Cleveland police sent DNA material from hundreds of unsolved rape cases to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation in Richfield. The evidence is tested and the results logged into a massive database -- the Combined DNA
Index System, or CODIS. BCI uses it to link crimes committed by the same offender and even identifies the culprit if that offender's DNA is in the database.
In 2006, BCI reported that DNA material linked the five unsolved rape cases that occurred between 1995 and 1997 to the same rapist. But the DNA did not match any criminal in the prison system at the time.
When Trice was sent to prison last year, his DNA was tested, per a policy installed in 2005. Soon afterward, BCI reported a match to the five cold cases.
In the first case, in March 1996, prosecutors say, a man attacked a 19-year-old woman talking on a payphone about 8 p.m. near the corner of Fulton and Walton Roads in Cleveland. She said her attacker forced her into his car and raped her.
Another victim, a 13-year-old girl, was waiting at a bus stop in July 1997 on her way home from the Brookpark Skateland on Brookpark Road about 1 a.m., when she was grabbed, pulled into a field behind a nearby school and raped. She man
aged to run away, she told police, and the rapist sped off in his car.
The third victim, a 24-year-old woman, was walking home from a bar on Bellaire Road in August 1997, when a man snagged her, forced her between two buildings and brutally raped her.
A fourth victim, who investigators are still searching, was 14-years old when the crime was committed in 1995. The girl told police she was kidnapped and raped in a car behind a factory.
No public information is available about the fifth victim.
If prosecutors can convince the court that Trice is a sexually violent predator, he could be sentenced to anywhere from 10 years to life in prison.
The string of serial rape cases is the second set CODIS has helped solve in Cleveland since the system's inception in 2005. That year, CODIS alerted investigators that seven attacks in Cleveland and one in Erie, Pa., between June 1996 and April 2004, were committed by the same rapist.
Nathan Ford, of Cleveland, was convicted in
2006 and sentenced to 138 years in prison for 53 charges, including rape, kidnapping, felonious assault, gross sexual imposition, aggravated robbery and aggravated burglary.
As for Trice, Mason said Thursday that his office is still piecing together his story -- trying to determine where he was for the past decade and whether he raped more women during that time.
"That 10-year gap," Mason said, shaking his head. "You just don't do that for five years, stop for four and start up again. We are a long way from being done with this case."
Cleveland ape linked to five rapes through DNA
He stalked them at night. When they were alone in the dark. Waiting for a bus, using a payphone, walking home from a bar. He ambushed them, dragged them into an alley, a field or an isolated parking lot behind a factory. And he raped them.
Neither police nor the victims knew at the time they were dealing with a serial rapist, and his trail went cold for more than 10 years. Until a DNA database linked five attacks to each other -- and all of them to a Cleveland man already locked up for sex crimes.
Antonio Trice, 38, was indicted Thursday on four counts of rape, and three counts each of kidna
pping and gross sexual imposition in connection with three of the attacks, dating back to 1996 and 1997.
Investigators have not been able to locate two other victims. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason is confident the other victims will come forward.
"It's amazing how somebody like this can avoid detection for so long," Mason said. "We're talking about someone who has bounced into the system, who touched the system back then and still avoided being caught for these heinous events."
Trice was arrested after a high-speed chase in 1997 for failing to comply with a police order. That event stemmed from a woman's claim that Trice raped her in his car. But after police chased Trice and arrested him, he convinced investigators that the woman was a prostitute and that she lied about the rape.
He was convicted for running from police and put on probation. But he was not charged with a sex crime.
Prosecutors are trying to trace Trice's movements after that.
His tr
ail of criminal acts picks up in 2006 when he was caught having sex with a 15-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty in 2007 to having sex with the teen. But while he was out on a $1,000 bond awaiting sentencing, Trice raped a friend who had come over to his house to watch a movie.
Police re-arrested him, and Trice was indicted on a rape charge the day before he was sentenced in the first case.
During that sentencing hearing, Judge Eileen A. Gallagher said she would not label him a sexual predator because he was unlikely to re-offend.
In the second case, Trice pleaded guilty to rape and was labeled a sexual predator. He was given a total of five years in prison for the attacks.
It was the trip to prison that led to the new charges.
In 2005, Cleveland police sent DNA material from hundreds of unsolved rape cases to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation in Richfield. The evidence is tested and the results logged into a massive database -- the Combined DNA
Index System, or CODIS. BCI uses it to link crimes committed by the same offender and even identifies the culprit if that offender's DNA is in the database.
In 2006, BCI reported that DNA material linked the five unsolved rape cases that occurred between 1995 and 1997 to the same rapist. But the DNA did not match any criminal in the prison system at the time.
When Trice was sent to prison last year, his DNA was tested, per a policy installed in 2005. Soon afterward, BCI reported a match to the five cold cases.
In the first case, in March 1996, prosecutors say, a man attacked a 19-year-old woman talking on a payphone about 8 p.m. near the corner of Fulton and Walton Roads in Cleveland. She said her attacker forced her into his car and raped her.
Another victim, a 13-year-old girl, was waiting at a bus stop in July 1997 on her way home from the Brookpark Skateland on Brookpark Road about 1 a.m., when she was grabbed, pulled into a field behind a nearby school and raped. She man
aged to run away, she told police, and the rapist sped off in his car.
The third victim, a 24-year-old woman, was walking home from a bar on Bellaire Road in August 1997, when a man snagged her, forced her between two buildings and brutally raped her.
A fourth victim, who investigators are still searching, was 14-years old when the crime was committed in 1995. The girl told police she was kidnapped and raped in a car behind a factory.
No public information is available about the fifth victim.
If prosecutors can convince the court that Trice is a sexually violent predator, he could be sentenced to anywhere from 10 years to life in prison.
The string of serial rape cases is the second set CODIS has helped solve in Cleveland since the system's inception in 2005. That year, CODIS alerted investigators that seven attacks in Cleveland and one in Erie, Pa., between June 1996 and April 2004, were committed by the same rapist.
Nathan Ford, of Cleveland, was convicted in
2006 and sentenced to 138 years in prison for 53 charges, including rape, kidnapping, felonious assault, gross sexual imposition, aggravated robbery and aggravated burglary.
As for Trice, Mason said Thursday that his office is still piecing together his story -- trying to determine where he was for the past decade and whether he raped more women during that time.
"That 10-year gap," Mason said, shaking his head. "You just don't do that for five years, stop for four and start up again. We are a long way from being done with this case."
