County police used DNA evidence to solve their second cold case rape in five days.
Police have arrested Jerry Blevins, 32, and charged him with first-degree rape in a 2003 attack on a 15-year-old girl.
Blevins was identified through DNA evidence analyzed as part of the agency?s ongoing review of old cases, police said.
Police believed he was out of state, but a Baltimore County police officer on routine patrol found him back in Maryland.
The officer was checking tags on vehicles parked at the Regal Motel on Pulaski Highway, and after checking one car, learned it was registered to Blevins and that there was a warrant for Blevins? arrest on the outstanding rape charge, police said. The officer arrested Blevins at the hotel without incident.
Blevins? last known address was Mansfield Correctional Institute, in Mansfield, Ohio, where he had been jailed in another charge. The search for Blevins was centered in that area.
The attack on the girl took place near the 2100 block of Redthorn Road at about 3:30 a.m. on March 16, 2003, as she was walking to her home in the Essex area. A man approached her from behind,threw her to the ground and raped her, according to police.
Since 2004 the Baltimore County Police Department has been analyzing evidence in old rape cases and submitting the DNA analysis to the Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS.
The Baltimore County analysis matched the DNA record of Blevins, whose DNA had been taken when he was in prison for an offense in Ohio, police said.
On Friday, Baltimore County police arrested Edward Dennis Wood, 59, of Westminster, in the Aug. 26, 1978, rape of a 24-year-old woman who was attacked by a man who broke into her apartment. DNA evidence collected from the victim was matched to DNA that Wood was required to give after being convicted of first-degree rape in another 1978 attack, police said.
