COLUMBUS, Ohio – A quickly-obtained DNA match that led to an arrest in the rape of a 13-year-old Columbus girl was an example of how efforts by the state to use DNA evidence to solve more crimes, including those committed as many as 20 years ago, are paying dividends.
The ability to link suspects to decades-old crimes has also led to a move in the Statehouse to eliminate Ohio’s 20-year statute of limitations on rape cases.
Many of the thousands of sexual assault kits submitted to the Ohio Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation for testing under the two-year-old Sexual Assault Kit Testing Initiative are between 10 and 20 years old, Attorney General Mike DeWine said.
A statement from DeWine says the initiative to test previously untested rape kits, which began in 2012, has turned up more than 1,000 matches to DNA profiles in a key law enforcement database.
The DNA samples that led police to Antonio Fillmore, the suspect in the rape of the teenager, came from previous cases. Fillmore’s criminal record reportedly stretches back at least as far as 1998.
The initiative was announced in 2011 when DeWine’s office offered free DNA testing to any law enforcement agency with untested rape kits in which a crime was believed to have been committed. If analysts get a hit, they send the information back to the local agency for follow-up.
Testing began in 2012 and DeWine’s office says, as of Tuesday, 6,437 kits have been submitted by 125 law enforcement agencies and 3,244 of those have been tested, producing 1,104 matches with DNA profiles in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System. More than 100 of the hits were obtained in the past month.
DeWine says the testing initiative has led to dozens of indictments, including nearly 100 in Cuyahoga, County.