Serial rapist found guilty of attack 21 years later
More than two decades after she was raped in her Near East Side apartment, a woman took the witness stand this week and recalled what her attacker said when she asked him not to kill her.
“He said he doesn’t kill, he rapes,” the woman told a Franklin County jury.
She now knows she was the victim of a serial rapist.
On Wednesday, jurors convicted Anthony Smith, 55, of rape, kidnapping and aggravated burglary. It marked his third conviction for rapes that date back as far as 1995.
The jury deliberated for about two hours before deciding that Smith was the person who climbed through a first-floor window of the woman’s apartment in the 700 block of East Main Street and raped her around midnight on July 20, 1996.
In addition to the woman’s testimony, the case hinged on DNA evidence that investigators used in 2015 to link Smith to the crimes.
Columbus police detectives had reopened the case and sent evidence from the woman’s rape kit to the state crime lab. A database provided a DNA match with Smith, who is serving a sentence for rape in Michigan.
Last year, another DNA match led a Cuyahoga County jury to convict Smith of a 1995 rape in Cleveland.
His conviction for a 2010 rape in Michigan will keep him in prison there until at least 2025, although he could be held until 2040. Whenever he is released, he will begin serving a 22-year sentence for the Cleveland case.
He also could get as many as 22 years in the Franklin County case when he is sentenced Aug. 18 by Common Pleas Judge Kim Brown.
The Franklin County jury wasn’t made aware of the previous convictions for Smith, who did not testify and didn’t react to the verdict.
The woman, who was 19 at the time and is now 40, cried as she described waking up to find a man sitting on her bed, where she was sleeping with her nearly 2-year-old daughter. She said he implied he had a gun and made her take her daughter to another bedroom before stuffing a T-shirt in her mouth and forcing vaginal intercourse.
The Dispatch does not identify rape victims by name without their permission.
Defense attorney Jeffrey Basnett didn’t deny that his client had sex with the woman, but told jurors that it was consensual. He presented no evidence to support the assertion, instead suggesting that the woman hadn’t been honest with officers who responded to the scene.
The woman initially said she couldn’t identify her attacker, explaining that the T-shirt covered her face. Nearly 19 years later, she picked Smith out of a photo lineup within 20 seconds of looking at it, a detective testified.
“That shows she already knew who my client was,” Basnett said in his closing argument.
Assistant Prosecutor Kacey Chappelear said the woman had no reason to lie about being raped. Any suggestion of consensual sex, she said, was refuted by evidence showing that someone had entered her apartment through an open window by propping a piece of wood against the building and cutting through a screen.
“He broke into her home and raped her,” Chappelear told the jurors. “He has gotten away with it for 21 years. Don’t let him get away with it any longer.”