Tenacious NYPD SVU detectives cracked a more than 30-year-old rape cold case by preserving — and tracking down — intertwined trails of DNA evidence, police sources revealed.
Cops arrested William Stephens, 55, on Friday after quickly obtaining his DNA when they brought him into custody on an unrelated minor charge and finding it matched the suspect who raped a woman in Brooklyn during 1995, sources said.
The horrific rape occurred Aug. 2, 1995, in an apartment building near Pulaski Street and Marcus Garvey Boulevard in Bedford-Stuyvesant, law-enforcement sources said. The woman didn’t know her attacker, sources said.
The case ultimately went cold, but Brooklyn prosecutors in 2005 kept it alive with a clever legal maneuver. They obtained an indictment on a “John Doe” by using a DNA profile of the rapist – a move that the statute of limitations wouldn’t let the fiend spring free in the future, sources said.
Investigators eventually identified Stephens, a Bronx man, as a potential person of interest during a search of a state DNA database, according to sources.
Stephens had failed to appear in court on an open container charge, prompting a judge to issue a bench warrant – which gave investigators a chance to take him into custody during July, sources said.
While in custody, police quickly collected DNA evidence from Stephens – a so-called “abandonment sample,” the sources revealed.
The NYPD Special Victims Division’s DNA Cold Case Squad and Investigative Genetic Genealogy Squad ultimately found Stephens’ sample matched the rape suspect’s genetic profile, sources said.
Police arrested Stephens in the Bronx on Friday.
— Additional reporting by Haley Brown
