A jury convicted a man on all 12 counts he faced Wednesday afternoon in the rape of several women between 2001 and 2004, cases which Anchorage police say had gone cold until the discovery of DNA evidence.
APD spokesperson Anita Shell says Richard Dorsey was convicted on charges including four counts of first-degree sexual assault, two counts of first-degree attempted sexual assault, one count of second-degree assault and five counts of third-degree assault. A count of fourth-degree assault in an alleged April 2004 assault was dismissed before the case went to trial, due to the statute of limitations on the charge.
The jury took less than two hours to return its verdict, receiving the case at about 3 p.m. and returning to the courtroom at about 4:30 p.m.
According to police, Dorsey picked up his victims in his truck and raped them while holding a knife to their throats. One victim who was raped twice by Dorsey told police she didn’t recognize him until he pulled his knife out of his truck’s glove compartment.
Dorsey wasn’t linked to the crimes until a he drank from a Styrofoam cup at a 2009 court hearing in a separate sexual assault case, in which he allegedly reached up a woman’s skirt in 2006. APD Sgt. Kenneth McCoy swiped the cup and ran Dorsey’s DNA, becoming the first witness at Dorsey’s trial when it began last month.
Anchorage District Attorney Adrienne Bachman told Channel 2 that Dorsey faces sentences of eight years on each of the sexual assaults and five years on the attempted sexual assaults, with up to two years on each of the felony assault charges.
Prosecutors are pushing for Dorsey to serve his sentences consecutively rather than concurrently, which could put him behind bars for as long as 40 years.
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