Chilling rape case from 1983 finally solved
CORAL SPRINGS — After nearly 40 years, a woman decided it was time that someone pay for raping her at knifepoint in her home. After she watched police solve another rape, she asked them to take a fresh look at her case.
The cops went on to solve it in just a matter of months. After testing old DNA evidence, they said Friday they found her attacker in West Virginia, where he is serving time in federal prison for bank robbery.
Coral Springs police spokesman Tyler Reik said the agency is currently combing through 100 rape kits that date back 40 years. Detectives “had to dig through boxes to find this case” after the woman’s request, Reik said.
Although a team of investigators is dedicated to solving long-forgotten crimes, this “specific one they hadn’t got to yet,” Reik said. But they found the evidence and reopened the case.
Timothy Alan Norris, 60, will be extradited back to Broward for the 1983 rape. The woman, whose name isn’t being released, is expected to testify at his trial.
The woman had moved with her family to Coral Springs just four months before the assault.
She was inside her home in the Ramblewood neighborhood when she awoke to the stranger in her bedroom at 6 a.m. Aug. 22, 1983,
with an 8-inch steak knife held to her neck, police said.
She screamed. He told her to shut up, according to the 1983 police report. He told her — three times — “I’m not going to hurt you.” During the assault, the victim’s dog was barking “due to the victim’s distress,” according to the arrest warrant. The man pointed the knife and told the woman to shut the dog up, according to the report.
“I have loved you for months,” he told her when the attack was over, according to the incident report. “You have very nice children and a nice husband.” He put a pillow over her face and left.
Her husband was away at work, and the other people home were the woman’s mother, who had cancer, and the woman’s two small daughters. Her mother heard the scream but thought it was the children. She checked on them, and when she found them asleep, she went to the bathroom and then back to bed.
Police say the man, later identified as Norris, had gotten into the house through a rear door, and a screen had been cut with a knife. At the time, police had few identifying details other than the attacker’s race and that he was cleancut, slim with brown hair, with a heavy Southern accent and strong cologne.
Police sent the evidence to the Broward Sheriff ’s Office, but the technology available at the time didn’t lead investigators to a likely suspect.
Then the woman saw news accounts on social media of Coral Springs police solving last year a different rape case from the 1980s.
In that case, Coral Springs police arrested Frank Montana, who had escaped for three decades after a woman awoke to a ski-masked man standing over her bed.
Police say he put a gloved hand over her mouth to prevent her from screaming, told her he had a gun and raped her. Thanks to DNA testing of old evidence, Montana is now behind bars in Broward jail, awaiting trial.
In the Norris case, police identified several items of evidence, including the victim’s bathing suit bottom that had a semen sample, and sent them to the Broward Sheriff’s Office Crime Lab for processing in March, police said. In June, thanks to advances in technology, police made a match from a sample of her clothing that had Norris’ DNA on it, Reik said.
Many years ago, DNArelated breakthroughs in cold cases were happening sporadically — and largely pertained to solving killings.
A 2016 state law requires agencies to submit a sexual offense evidence kit for forensic testing within 30 days of police collecting the evidence. But the law doesn’t apply to old kits like the one in question, said Jennifer Dritt, executive director of the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence.
Dritt said that in 2015, Florida enacted a law requiring the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to conduct a onetime audit of untested rape kits across the state. At least 13,435 untested rape kits were found in the possession of 279 law enforcement agencies.
According to Dritt, Florida legislators appropriated $2.3 million in new funding in 2016 to test backlogged kits. And between 2015 and 2018, a number of jurisdictions in Florida received federal funding to process rape kit backlogs.
Ilse Knecht, director of policy and advocacy at the Joyful Heart Foundation, said the Coral Springs test may have been passed over because it’s from the early 1980s. At that point, DNA testing technology was premature and a national DNA database was not created until 1989.
The foundation tracks rape-kit backlogs state by state and advocates for policies to address them. Knecht said she believes the only way to know for sure what happens to each and every kit is for a state to mandate testing for every kit and to create their own individual tracking system of the kits.
She said 19 states have such a tracking system, but Florida does not. However, Knecht noted there was a legislative attempt to create one that died this year.
House Bill 83 was filed in December 2018 and sponsored by state Rep. Emily Slosberg. The bill would have increased the statute of limitations from eight years to 15 years for sexual battery offenses reported more than 72 hours after the incident. It also would have required the FDLE to adopt a statewide tracking system to track the testing status of all kits in the state.
The bill died in a subcommittee in May after being withdrawn from consideration.
Knecht said her organization has been pushing for all states to pass such a system, which she believes will help keep track of old kits that escape through the cracks. “It’s a state-level issue,” she said.
Camille Cooper, a vice president of policy at the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, agreed that states should require more legislation to address untested kits. However, she also noted that a demand for DNA testing has increased nationwide as the technology has become more effective, requiring more resources for labs across the country to clear backlogs. “Rape keeps happening every day,” she said.
According to Cooper, if the Coral Springs kit had been processed sooner, Norris’ arrest could have happened months after whenever he was first arrested — as long as his DNA had been collected during previous arrests. “They could have potentially had him sooner,” Cooper said.
Cooper said the victim in Coral Springs puts a human face on what she estimates to be 100,000 untested kits nationwide. RAINN runs the national sexual assault hotline, and Cooper said many victims whose attackers are never caught suffer trauma, wondering if they might be attacked again.
“For decades this poor woman has been living with this cloud of fear,” Cooper said.
According to the arrest warrant, the Coral Springs rape victim told authorities “she has always regretted not grabbing the knife, but was too afraid the suspect would retaliate with violence if her effort failed.”
Cooper said law enforcement and policymakers can sometimes forget these real emotions when considering old kits. “It’s not just a kit,” Cooper said. “There’s a victim that is associated with that kit that has to live every day not knowing if they are safe.”
Norris, who is currently serving a federal sentence in West Virginia for armed bank robbery, has prior arrests for armed burglary, aggravated assault, assault on a female and kidnapping. His criminal history spans from 1977 through 2017 in Florida and North Carolina.
In 2016, a North Carolina television station, WXIICh. 12, reported that Norris was arrested after he entered a credit union and passed a note that demanded money and indicated he had a gun.