The Cobb District Attorney’s Office said Tuesday it’s been able to close three cold case rape files dating from 1999 using advanced genetic genealogy testing.
But the man identified by Cobb investigators as the suspect died in December, shortly after they took DNA samples from him in Arkansas, where he lived.
Lorinzo Novoa Williams, who was 48, went missing after Cobb investigators, with help from Arkansas law enforcement, executed a search warrant to collect his DNA samples, according to Cobb DA’s office public information officer Kim Isaza.
She said that after they returned home, Cobb investigators were told by their Arkansas counterparts that Williams was later found dead.
Isaza said the rapes took place within a three-mile radius in southeast Cobb between June and October 1999. In each case, the attacks took place during pre-dawn hours, with each woman waking up to find an unknown man standing over her.
She said each victim reported her attack to police, which took a rape kit, and that the DNA profile in all three cases was identical, meaning they were assaulted by the same man.
But the profile didn’t match an offender in the CODIS combined DNA index system at the time, according to Isaza.
Cobb Senior Assistant DA Theresa Schiefer began looking at the cases again in 2018 at the request of a cold case unit, and secured a $10,000 grant from the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance to retest the rape kits with advanced technology, Isaza said.
Early last year, the profile was submitted to a private lab that constructed a genetic tree of the suspect, she said.
From there, the Cobb DA’s office sexual assault investigating unit and its cold case unit discovered the suspect lived in metro Atlanta at the time of the 1999 rapes. He had been arrested on peeping tom, indecent exposure and burglary charges in Cobb and Gwinnett, also during that time.
Isaza said that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s Forensic Biology Section determined that the DNA collected from Williams matched the profile of the 1999 rape kits.
Isaza said Schiefer spoke to each of the rape victims after the match was confirmed.
“I feel very fortunate that we could provide some answers to these women after all this time. We want anyone who has experienced sexual assault to know that we will continue to work their cases in hopes that their turn will come, too,” Schiefer said.
According to his obituary, Williams worked for a construction company in Hampton, Ark., and was married with four children. He and his wife became Jehovah’s Witnesses in Macon in 2003.
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