Cold Case Files - REOPENED: Innocence Stolen

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

A district attorney uses a clever technique - a "John Doe indictment" - to give law enforcement officials the time they need to track down the a serial rapist from Rochester, N. Y. Gabb - Check out Gabb today, just go to Gabb.com/coldcase to get started! Homes.com: We’ve done your homework. Thrive Market: Go to ThriveMarket.com/coldcase for 30% off your first order, PLUS a free $60 gift! Thuma - Go to THUMA.co/COLDCASE to receive $100 off your first bed purchase! 

This episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Use your best judgment. Only 20% of rape victims are strangers to their attackers, and only 15% of rape victims are between the ages of 12 and 17. Tragically, Crystal Seeler, a 13-year-old from Rochester, New York, defied the odds. While waiting for the school bus, standing just 70 feet from her front door, a stranger grabbed her and assaulted her. Within a short time period, the rapist assaulted a series of teenage girls. The normal stressors of being a teenager coupled with being assaulted would be difficult enough to overcome. But in this case, the sexual assault survivors also had to live with the knowledge that their rapist was free. He

could walk freely around their neighborhoods. And he did. For the next 10 years. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files. I'm Brooke, and here's Bill Curtis with a classic case, Innocence Stolen. In November of 1995, Sergeant Mark Mariano investigates the rape of a 13-year-old schoolgirl. Sergeant Mark Mariano investigates the rape of a 13-year-old schoolgirl. The person came up from behind me and he told me not to say anything and covered my mouth.

Crystal Seeler is in the seventh grade when she finds herself alone in the dark, waiting for the bus to school. He took me across the street to a boat that was in a yard that was diagonally from my bus stop. And from there he made me take down my pants and he touched me and told me not to say anything, that he knew where I lived and he'd hurt me and my family. Crystal is sexually assaulted by a man she never got a good look at, just 70 yards from her home. I had to scream down in pain because it hurt and he told me to be quiet.

I had opened my eyes one time and I seen my bus driver so it was just like that person was right there. I could have cried for help but you know I was paralyzed. She could only provide that it was a black male. She felt that he was probably about 5'6", 5'7", medium build. She knew he had on puffy clothes and a dark jacket. A rape kit is taken. Meantime, the detective must comfort a vulnerable 13-year-old. She asked me, she said, if you were a guy and you wanted to marry me, hypothetically, would you still marry me because I'm no longer a virgin? He took my childhood away. I was only 13. I was innocent, just going to school.

My answer, the best I could come up with was that she still was a virgin. That the only way that she would not be a virgin is if she had met someone, fallen in love, and given herself to him in that way. And that anybody who didn't understand that was not worthy to be her husband. And then that was the first time I ever saw a smile. Patrols are heightened in Crystal's neighborhood but within 48 hours another girl finds her journey to school cut short just three miles away. Create an Oasis with Fuma, a modern design company that's revolutionizing the way we think about bedroom furniture. I've had my Thuma bed frame for a few months and I can't

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I followed what he said because at that point in time I did think and feel that, you know, he had a gun at that time I was going to die. The only thing that was going through my mind that morning, I wanted to go to school. I was going to school. And here it is. I have a gun to my head and I'm being forced to have intercourse with a person that I don't know. Right now we're at the scene of the second attack that occurred on November 30th, 1995.

Officer Dan Gleason responds to the call and quickly realizes this is an MO he's seen before. Based on attack we had 48 hours prior to this, that we might be dealing with the same offender who is now mobile because we are three miles away from the site of the first attack. But the description, the MO was the same, high-risk offense, limited window of opportunity, and schoolgirl blitz from behind. Gleason and Mariano team up and saturate the neighborhoods with patrols during the early morning hours. We would stop any and all people that were out at that time of the day who fit the

general description in hopes of finding out why they might be passing through the neighborhood, if they lived here, if they worked here, if they were making deliveries. So we pretty much would stop anybody. The stops generate hundreds of leads, none of which pan out. I became very concerned and very alarmed and knew that we had a huge task ahead of us if this suspect couldn't be immediately caught. Three teenage high school girls were sexually assaulted

during the early morning hours. The latest occurred right before Christmas when a 12-year-old was attacked on Maple Street. A third schoolgirl attack, two weeks later, brings out the local media in force. Obviously, there was a great deal of concern once it came out that police thought they had a serial rapist, perhaps at work on the city's west side.

Dave McKinley covers the story, one that quickly pits parents against police. The outrage occurred because while the rapes started happening and police quickly suspected that it might be the work of one person and they might have a serial rapist on their hands, they kept it under wraps. They didn't say anything. And in the view of some parents in the city, they basically thought that the police were using their daughters as bait.

You've got to be concerned about your child, you know, because I don't want nothing to happen to my daughter. We do have a duty to protect the public and to let them know when a crime like this, violence has occurred. But on the other hand, there's a fine line to how much you reveal without tipping your hand. We didn't want this guy to go underground on us. And there will continue to be concern and uneasy fear among parents and students until

this stalker is caught. We saturate the areas with uniformed and non-uniform officers, and now the media is out there as well. They are saturating the area. They are filming us. They are filming the kids going to school. If the guy wasn't going underground before, he was definitely going to not surface at this point. Gleason's prediction is right. Just as quickly as the attacks started, they stop.

And the schoolgirl rapist case runs cold. Two years later, he struck again, right in the heart of the target area. Another early morning rape, another schoolgirl, and another reason for investigators to work overtime. This composite was done from the Ambrose Street job. His face looks pretty... We both felt pretty strongly that absent definitive scientific proof that that was probably the same guy. It became a priority case and I think it was at the top of all the cases that I was working on.

Rape kits from all four attacks are examined at the New York State Crime Lab by Allison Eastman. What I found was that it was the same DNA type developed from all the evidence. That is that the donor of the seminal fluid for each of these cases had the same DNA type developed from all the evidence. That is that the donor of the seminal fluid for each of these cases had the same DNA type. Eastman checks the profile against other DNA databases. It came back with no matches. So no one else had seen this profile. That whole manhunt was kicked into high gear all over again.

We start going over old crime reports, right and left, that we missed something again and let's look. Four teenage girls were raped in the early morning before school, and none of them were able to identify the attacker. When the evidence from the rape kits were sent to the crime lab for DNA profiles, all four assaults were shown to be linked. Unfortunately, when the rapist's DNA profile was entered into the DNA database, the investigators

were unable to find a match. The investigators needed to find a suspect for DNA comparison so they could take a deeper look into the evidence. Major crime, Sergeant Mariano. Investigators find one attack, a 15-year-old in 1993, that bears the schoolgirl rapist Samo and provides a DNA match. This incident happened October of 1993. We don't discover it until 1999.

The statute of limitations in New York State is five years. We had run out already. We knew we had to come up with a suspect before the statute of limitations runs out for the 1995 cases. So we were under a little bit of a gun here to try to find out who this guy is. Cops have to make an arrest or figure out some way to freeze the statutes. In this situation, we argued that the identification came not from a name but from a DNA profile.

Assistant District Attorney Mike Green issues what is called a John Doe indictment, with the suspect's DNA used in place of a name. Our argument was that that DNA profile identifies the person better than any name could. You know, if you run Mike Green through a national database, you come up with hundreds or thousands of Mike Greens. You run my DNA profile and you're not going to come up with anyone else with that same profile. The judge allows the indictment to issue. It freezes the clock. It freezes the statute of limitation.

It gave us a chance to take a deep breath and reinvestigate again everything we had done and review everything we had done and hope that in a short time that John Doe was going to come up as a name somewhere in the United States. You know after the holiday whirlwind I'm really trying to get back on track with my health goals this year and let me tell you Thrive Market has been a huge help. It's shocking to think that over 10,000 chemicals have made their way into our US food supply while the EU caps it at just 300 additives. Who has time to scrutinize every label? That's why I'm loving Thrive Market. Their healthy swap scanner

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this is everything you need to know all in one place. Homes.com. We've done your homework. to know all in one place. Homes.com. We've done your homework. I turned and looked this way and I see a figure standing in my doorway to my bedroom. So I said, what the hell are you doing in my house? Erica Penn is 22 years old, alone in her bedroom and about to fight for her life. He was choking me and then he told me if I didn't shut up he was going to kill me. So the only thing I had to do was be quiet and cooperate. But I was scared.

At that point when he said that and I was choking I could not breathe. I was scared to death. I thought I was going to die. He started pulling my clothes off. He asked me for a condom and I told him I don't have any. I had a purse full of them. They're all over my room. But I just said, no, I didn't have one.

Erica knows what her attacker may leave behind could be valuable evidence. In situations like this, and you can't fight the person off of you, the only thing you can do is cooperate, and hopefully they'll slip up or something. I couldn't beat him with strength. I had to beat him with my brain. We're now at the Piquin Ridge apartment complex, where the crime actually took place. Clayton police investigator Richard Peterson responds to the call a little after 4 a.m. and finds that his victim recognized her attacker. She stated that the individual actually turned on the light before he left.

So she got an opportunity to actually look at his face. My eyes were swollen because I had been crying the whole time. My eyes were so swollen. But they were not swollen enough to close. And I could, my day was about that low. And I looked at him and I got, I was like, okay, this is who I thought it was. Erica doesn't know her attacker's name, but claims he hangs with locals in the nightclub circuit. The name that kept popping up was Keith Lester. Keith Lester is a small-time criminal living in Ufala, Alabama. Peterson pulls up a mugshot. Once I got the face to go along with the name, then everything started to fall in place.

I was able to put together a lineup for the victim to actually look at. I didn't think twice. I pointed him out right then. I was like, that's him. Peterson tracks Lester to Ufala, Alabama, arrests him, and obtains a DNA sample. This is the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences Montgomery Regional Laboratory and this is where all of the DNA analyses would begin. In February of 2005, Holly Spires begins examining evidence from Erica Penn's sexual assault

case. It was a very cut and dry case. We looked at the kit. It was positive for semen. So from there, after we made that determination, we would perform DNA analyses on that kit. And the results were that across the 16 areas of DNA that we look at, it matched Keith Lamar Laster. Laster's profile is then uploaded into CODIS and the computer spits back a surprise.

The hit is made as we call it. Keith Lester's DNA matches that of the schoolgirl rapist, a man police believe is responsible for a series of rapes in Rochester, New York, eight years earlier. We met that afternoon. We met that afternoon. We met that afternoon and started to formulate a plan about when we would go to Alabama and what our strategies would be legally. A warrant had been issued for the schoolgirl rapist's DNA four years ago. Now New York investigators have a name to match that profile

and prepare for a face-to-face with Keith Lamar Lester. In my heart, I believe that the moment I said who I was and where I was from, that he had to have, his world had to start crumbling down inside. On June 22, Rochester Sergeant Mark Mariano and Investigator Dan Gleason sit down with Lester. We brought him into an interview room, which was an end of a little cell block. We told him we wanted to talk to him about some things that happened in Rochester while he was in Rochester. He was very agreeable to that, and we told him, you know, it had to do with sex and some women he might have had sex with up there. We showed him pictures of the girls and he initially denied that he had recognized or ever seen or had any contact whatsoever with any of them. We have the trump card, the DNA in our pocket.

We know we're talking to the right guy. Laster eventually recalls having sex with three of the five girls he is believed to have raped. Laster, however, remembers all three encounters as consensual. He really believed these were sexual encounters that just were happenstance, that young girls saw him and in spite of the fact it was snowing, in some instances cold, they were virgins, they had never had sexual intercourse, they were young, that they saw him, they decided

they were going to give themselves to him right then and there, and that in his mind this is how this all went down. Detectives eventually present Lester with the DNA evidence against him. Lester doesn't budge from his accounts, but detectives aren't worried. You know you're going to have several young women come before a jury and say they were all forcibly raped. In our opinion, nobody would buy that maybe one decided she wanted to in an odd world, but not three, four, or five.

Laster is arrested for the schoolgirl rapes and awaits his day in court. The fact that we're able to bring the case this far indicates the power of the DNA evidence. DNA brought Keith Lamar Lester back to Rochester to answer to four counts of rape. DNA provides the evidence needed to convict Keith Lester. Four schoolgirls, now all grown up, provide the emotion. grown up provide the emotion. It's kind of like I was 13 again and I was there doing it all over again, reliving every word I said and everything that happened. I wanted him to look me in my face through the whole time because I wanted him to know what I went through and I wanted him to have my face burned in his mind because I went through ten years of this, of a nightmare.

Keith Lester is found guilty on all counts and sentenced to more than 85 years. For investigators who watch their victims grow up, the conviction brings a long-awaited resolution. These girls don't have to look over their shoulders anymore. They know that the guy who raped them is in jail and he's not out there anymore. And they know who he is and they can move on, hopefully. For Lester's victims, however, moving on is easier said than done. The only thing that I want personally, I want an explanation of why. I want to know why. Because I didn't deserve this. No one deserves this. And yeah, I'm mad as hell right about now.

He can't give me back what he did to me. He can't give any of the other females. There's not a big enough punishment pretty much, but he'll have a lot of time to think. And most importantly, he won't be able to do it again, hopefully. In 2012, Laster filed a writ of habeas corpus pro se. Pro se means he did it on his own without an attorney. A writ of habeas corpus pro se. Pro se means he did it on his own without an attorney. A writ of habeas corpus is a document that argues

that a person is being detained wrongfully and would like to present the reasons in front of a court. The writ was denied. Keith Laster is now 50 years old and serving at a sentence in the state of New York. He'll be eligible for parole in the year 2030. in the state of New York. He'll be eligible for parole in the year 2030. Cold Case Files, the podcast is hosted by Brooke Giddings, produced by McKamey Lynn and Steve Dellamater. Our associate producer is Julie McGruder. Our executive producer

is Ted Baller. Our music was created by Blake Maples. This podcast is distributed by Podcast One. The Cold Case Files TV series was produced by Curtis Productions and is hosted by Bill Curtis. You can find me at Brooke Giddings on Twitter and at Brooke the podcaster on Instagram. I'm also active in the Facebook group, Podcasts for Justice. Check out more Cold Case Files at aetv.com or learn more about cases like this one by visiting the A&E Real Crime blog at aetv.com slash real crime. At Pluto TV, we're celebrating Black History Month with our curated collection of black content all streaming for free. Find groundbreaking films including Selma, Django Unchained, Ali and Coach Carter.

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